Page 48 of Spelunking Through Hell

“Bingo.” She touched her nose.

“And these warlords are pissed?”

“Because of you,” said Sally.

I blinked. “Come again?”

“Not directly,” said Thomas. “As Sally mentioned, our neighbors have been attempting to beat us to new arrivals for some time now, and there had been a sufficient gap between the last and yourself that they’ve been growing anxious. They are rather worse at keeping their people alive than I am, as they will persist in making war on one another whenever the opportunity arises, and we simply defend ourselves.”

“Lucky for us, assholes never learned to play nice with the other children, or to share,” said Sally. “If they formed an alliance of all three, we’d be completely screwed. They could overrun us in no time. But they haven’t all realized how many of our defenses are down, and they’re still being careful.”

“Those are the standing effects that you were powering with the bits of pneuma you peeled off the newcomers?” I asked, glancing to Thomas. He nodded. “Cool. I assume they were part of what was keeping you safe from these people up until now. Can you peel off the pneuma that’s stuck to me and use it to get things back up and running?”

Thomas looked uncomfortable. “If you’re sure you wouldn’t take it as a violation of your trust, I suppose I could...”

“Will knives be involved?”

He looked horrified. “No!”

“Then it’s fine. Honestly. Maybe we can get your security a little more up to snuff.” I looked to Sally. “Any of these people marching on us right now?”

“The Haspers, to the west,” she said. “They’re a nasty bunch. Not that any of the neighbors arenice, but they and the O’Vera to the south are the worst of a bad lot. I think because neither of them aremammalian. They don’t necessarily view things the same way we do. When they got their hands on new arrivals, they used them for dinner, not for breeding stock. Which may have been an improvement, considering our other neighbors, but I’m happier not knowing for sure.”

“How long do we have until they get here?”

“A few hours. Maybe a day, at the most,” she said.

“Then you must have a lot of preparations you need to make.” I looked to Thomas. “I’m going back to your room so you can finish this without any more distractions. Come get me when you’re ready.”

And then I walked away, before he could protest. I needed some time to think.

Fourteen

“Yes. Yes, it was too much to ask. Raising your daughter to think that her only value is in sitting pretty and pristine on a shelf somewhere doesn’t get you a functional person, it gets you a monster in waiting.”

—Laura Campbell

Sitting on the same bed, no longer naked, and somewhat annoyingly alone, because sometimes being an adult means putting duty first

The smell of thebromeliads was almost pleasant now that I understood where they had come from and why they been tended with such care. A lot of things are like that. They can seem off-putting or even bad until you get the proper context, and then they become vital and exactly as they’re supposed to be. I left the window open.

There was still enough sap in my system that the pollen alone wasn’t going to be enough to knock me out. I’ve never understood the mechanism by which swamp bromeliads do the things they do. I know some of the more insular cryptid communities use them in place of any more modern form of anesthesia, and it seems to work well enough. Thomas had probably saved a lot of lives by keeping those seeds in his wallet. And he probably kept that window closed and sealed whenever he had Autarch stuff to do.

I folded my hands under my head, on top of the pillow, and stared at the ceiling, allowing my mind to drift. It was probably for the best that I had this time alone: I needed it to sort through everything that had happened, and everything I’d learned. I’d always expected this moment, if it ever came, to feel like I was finished. Like I’d done everything I was supposed to do and could stop now. It was like as soon asThomas disappeared, I had thrown out my old, ever-vague life plan and replaced it with a simple list of bullet points: One: Find a way out of my home dimension. Well, I’d managed that, and then I’d done it over and over again—lather, rinse, repeat— until one day I’d looked around and realized the only real anchors I had left were a dead girl, a house that wasn’t mine, a forest that loved me, and a colony of talking mice. My family was... well, they were people who were related to me, and I liked them, even loved them, but I didn’t know them. They weren’t enough to make me stay.

Two: Find Thomas. That was the one that had seemed impossible for a long time, and I’d been starting to lose hope when Annie found me at the Red Angel. It was a wild coincidence to base the rest of my life on, but being a Healy, I’ve learned to trust the wild coincidences. Grandpa used to say the family’s luck didn’t work that way before Dad brought Mom home from the carnival, but once he did... things just fell into place around her. Sometimes good things, like finding a dead babysitter who would stay with us forever. Sometimes bad things, like whatever eventually killed her. Always things that were just on the far edge of improbability.

I inherited my luck from my mother, and I passed it on to my kids, and it’s kept us alive almost as many times as it’s put us into extreme danger, and it was a big part of why I’d been able to keep looking for so long. Not just the last-minute saves and the pieces of evidence falling into my lap at the exact right moment, but the conviction that I wouldn’t be doing as well as I was if he wasn’t still out there for me to find. My luck wouldn’t have allowed me to keep going at that point.

So now I’d managed both the first and second points on my three-point list. Only the third was left: Get home.

But I didn’t know what that meant anymore.

I had always expected to find him and have him tell me we were going back to Buckley immediately. Would he even want that now? He had a life here, a community. Was I offering him anything he hadn’t already grieved over and left behind? Sure, our family didn’t have the mixed feelings about him that they did about me. How could they? He’d been missing longer than most of them had been alive. They’d be willing to welcome him with open arms, and Thomas... Thomas had always wanted a family.

I had one. I had my parents, and my grandparents, and Mary, and the Campbells, and all the weird aunts and uncles my parents collected before I was born, and even though my childhood had been marred by tragedies, I’d grown up never questioning whether I wasloved. Family was like air. It was justthere, until it wasn’t, but you never questioned its existence.

Thomas didn’t grow up the same way. He’d been an orphan from the time he was young enough for that to be a defining attribute, growing up in the communal dormitories of the Covenant’s training center at Penton Hall. That upbringing was supposed to leave the young soldiers devoted to each other, a brother- and sisterhood of zealots, but Thomas had begun manifesting sorcery at an early age. Spending all your time trying to hide the fact that you were setting the sheets on fire when you slept led to a certain amount of isolation from your peers. He’d been an outsider, even within the Covenant, which should have been his home and heart and harbor.

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