Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
“Bring her home.”
—Mary Dunlavy
In the queen’s hive on Johrlar, about to face the collective
THE KAIROS GUARD WHO HAD been at the front of our group flew backward, impacting the wall behind us with a sickening crunch. We all turned to stare, then looked back at the Johrlac, who was standing now, stepping delicately out of her planter.
“We’ve been expecting you,” she said.
Sam looked at me and nodded. I nodded back.
“Then you know we’ll keep coming,” said one of the Kairos.
“Yes, we do,” she said. “We also know you’ll lose.”
Sam’s tail wrapped hard around my waist, and he jerked me off my feet as he leapt, spinning me around in front of him so he could get an arm under my behind and toss me gently into the air.
He caught me before he hit the ground in the center air, then went bounding back to the others, grabbing Artie, who yelped.
The drop presented a genuine issue for our guards, since the Johrlac queen wasn’t exactly going to wait for them to climb down.
She began telekinetically grabbing them as they moved forward, flinging two more into walls before she shifted a third—fourth, really, but math is not my strong suit—forward and he stopped, hanging in midair.
I looked back at the doorway. Mark’s eyes were gleaming lambent white. They were playing tug-of-war.
Normally I would object to using a living person for that sort of game, but it was keeping her focused on one guard, and distracting her from the rest. Sam was able to get five of them down before she let go.
Mark was still pulling, and that guard hit the wall like the others, slingshot backward by the sudden loss of an opposing force.
There was a horrifying crunch and Mark grimaced, the light in his eyes literally going out.
“This is not going to end well for you, abomination,” said the queen. “We have the power of six, and you have the power of but one. Give up and allow yourself to be destroyed. Kings are not to rise.”
Those of us on the ground level fanned out around her, moving carefully. She still didn’t seem to see us if she wasn’t trying: Mark had the full force of her attention.
Or seemed to, anyway. She turned abruptly, looking at Artie. “You should not be here, little restoration,” she said. “We put back what the cuckoo had broken. You’re free now. Go home and leave our affairs to us.”
“Not without Sarah,” snapped Artie. “Where is she?”
“It was a fair and balanced exchange,” said the queen. “We returned you and we retained her. She belongs to us now.”
“Where. Is. She?”
“If you can’t find her on your own, your claim is not so great as you’d imply,” said the queen calmly. “Very well, little restoration. If you can find her, and if she wants it, we’ll let her go. But if you can’t, the math is in our favor, and you will leave us.”
“Artie,” I called, low and tight. “If you can’t do this, we have to find another way. We only get one shot.”
“I know,” said Artie. He began walking around the sleeping queens, looking down at them. He paused a few times to get a closer look, bending down and studying their faces closely.
At the third queen, he bent further, reaching down to delicately smooth a lock of hair away her face.
“This is her,” he said. He looked up, focusing on the queen who had been fighting us.
“She got this scar over her eyebrow when we were twelve. We were playing in the woods and she lost her grip on the rope we were using to get up into the treehouse. She hit her head on a rock when she fell, and I thought she was dead. This is Sarah.”
“Are you sure?” asked the queen, almost mockingly.
He nodded. “I’m positive,” he said.
“Very well, then.” Her eyes flashed momentarily white, and the other queen’s eyes opened.
They were icy, impossibly blue, and if he was wrong, I couldn’t have said so: she looked like my cousin. She looked like Sarah. Slowly, she sat up, watching Artie the whole time. He pressed a hand against his temple, relief washing over his face in an unstoppable tide.
“There’s the static,” he said. “It’s faint, but it’s there. Sarah? We came back for you.”
“I don’t know you,” she replied, voice uninflected and almost mechanical. “We know you—we repaired what the cuckoo had done, the damage she had allowed to fester, but I don’t know you. Why am I outside the we?”
“This restoration claims to have come to take you home,” said the first queen. “He has agreed to leave us if you refuse.”
Something about this was too easy. She had already known Sarah would refuse, or she would never have allowed Artie to try.
“I didn’t agree to that,” I said hurriedly. “I want to know what you did with Arthur.”
“The overlay? He has been set aside. Do you want him as well?”
“Yes,” I said.
The queen appeared startled. “Why?” she asked.
“He’s family,” I replied.
Sarah—if it was Sarah—was still looking blankly at Artie, who was staring at her like his heart was dissolving in his chest.
Sam was abruptly beside me. “Whoa,” he said.
“Indeed, whoa,” I agreed.
“Can only one of your cousins actually exist at a time? Because that’s pretty fucked-up.”
The Kairos guards were fanning out, moving as carefully as they could as they positioned themselves behind the still-sleeping queens.
The one who was awake was still looking at me, bewildered.
“And you’ll leave?” she asked. “If we return him, you’ll leave?
You won’t force us to keep repeating this over and over again? ”
“We want them both,” I said.
“It’s her choice,” she said. Her eyes flashed white. “The guards will bring the overlay.”
“Sarah,” said Artie. “Come on. You need to stop this, and come home. I’m okay. I miss you. We finally figured things out. Now’s the time when we get to try. Don’t you want to try?”
“Try what?” she asked. “I don’t know you. I don’t know any of you. Please. Let me return to the we. I am not meant to be singular. I am not meant to be I.”
Artie closed his eyes, slumping.
Mark stepped off the ledge and walked calmly on the air toward us, getting a little lower with every step he took, like he was descending an invisible stairway.
“This is all fun and everything, but I don’t like it,” he said.
“The princess isn’t supposed to be a blank slate and a bunch of etiquette books.
She’s supposed to be deeply annoying, with passionately held opinions about the X-Men and a lot of feelings about, well, everything.
Mostly the guy she’s currently failing to recognize.
It’s weird having her sound like an empty channel. It needs to stop.”
There was a commotion at the doorway on the other side of the room, and several Johrlac guards appeared, hauling an unfamiliar Kairos along with them. He was tall and blond, and struggling against their grasp in a way that was almost familiar.
The queen waved her hand and he was lifted into the air, floating gently down to land in front of us.
“There,” she said.
I frowned at the stranger, who looked anxiously back at me. “Arthur?” I asked.
“Oh thank God,” he said, and flung himself at me, impacting hard enough that Sam winced in sympathy.
“I have no idea what’s going on or what I’m doing in this body—when I asked the people who were moving me to a new cell, they said it had been empty, I didn’t steal it, but it’s not mine and I don’t know what’s happening and I want to go home and wait.
” He paused, pulling away from me. “Why am I over there? Why does Sarah look so weird?”
“Uh, complicated answer,” I said. “That’s Artie. The Johrlac collective put him back where he belonged. And Sarah looks so weird because she’s been absorbed into their collective. We’re going to get her back.”
“Yeah, we are,” said Mark. “Right now.”
His eyes flashed white and he collapsed, folding gracefully to the floor. A moment later, Sarah fell backward in her bed and didn’t move, even when Artie grabbed her arms and shook her.
Silence fell.