Page 100 of Aftermarket Afterlife

I was in the basement of Penton Hall, and pretty clearly on the ground. I sat up—or tried to, anyway. When I got my hands under myself and pushed, they sank into the floor rather than giving me any measurable leverage. Great. So I was solid enough not to sink to the center of the planet, but not solid enough to interact meaningfully with my surroundings. The worst of both worlds.

The second time I tried to sit up, I didn’t bother using my hands. It took a little rocking back and forth before I managed to get myself upright, but I did it, and looked around at my surroundings.

Annie was moving along the wall of boxes, occasionally pulling one out and rooting around inside for a moment before extracting some doubtless priceless artifact and stuffing it into her backpack. There were mice on her shoulders and peering out of her hair, which was nothing unusual, except that these mice were naked, missing the colorful raiment that normally distinguished Aeslin mice from their wild, non-sapient cousins.

Sarah knelt nearby, her hands on her knees and her eyes very wide, and very blue. The white had faded from her pupils, leaving her as normal-looking as she ever was. When I sat up, she gasped and put a hand over her mouth. I turned to look at her.

“Hey, kiddo,” I said, through gritted teeth. I was trying not to let on how much I was hurting. She’d pick up on it if she went back into my head, but she’s not an empath like Elsie or Arthur; there was a chance I could navigate this without adding to the mountain of guilt she carried in her daily life. “Thanks for calling me back. That nap wasn’t entirely planned.”

She made a choking noise. “Mary, youreyes. . .”

So they hadn’t changed back after leaving Ohio? That wasn’t a surprise, but it was an annoyance. “I know,” I said. “I think I did the ghost equivalent of pulling a muscle. It should be fine in a few days.” I had no way of knowing whether or not that was true, but I hoped. Maybe the burn from excessive contact with the anima mundi was something I could sleep off. If not...if my eyes didn’t go back to normal, I was going to be dealing with a lot more nightmares in the children under my care for a while. Maybe forever.

“I didn’t—you reappeared, and then you justcollapsed,” she said. “You were flickering, like you were the lights in an old house during a thunderstorm. You just kept going on and off and on and off and it was...bad. It hurt to watch. Mary, are you all right?”

“Honestly, honey, I don’t know,” I said. “I hurt all over. Carrying that third bomb here was harder than I thought it could be. Are all the mice here?”

“Not all of them,” said Sarah, gaze dipping momentarily downward.

I winced. “Some of the faith lines aren’t willing to leave their gods?” I guessed.

“They haven’t had real contact in generations, not since the era of the Obedient Priestess—that’s what they call Ada Healy—but they’ve continued to worship the family, just more in secret than our colony does,” she said. “They never lost faith. I don’t think Aeslin micecanlose faith. And they’ve been talking since Mork left about what they’d do if Annie came back and tried to get the rest of them to go with her. A lot of the younger mice are excited to have a new adventure, and new gods who actually want to talk to them. The older mice, though...”

She stopped, and shook her head. “The older mice can’t see anything good in leaving the place where they’ve lived and worshipped for so many generations. They’ve thanked us for the opportunity and sent us their children, and gone back into the walls to die.”

So detonating these bombs would not just destroy priceless cultural artifacts, but kill an uncounted number of highly endangered cryptids? Oh, this just got better and better.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, and grimaced. “Not because I read your mind, just because Annie thought it too. Is it really worth doing this if it’s going to have so many secondary costs? And I have to say it is, because if wedon’tdo it, the costs keep coming, and they keep coming at home. They keep coming in Ohio, and in Seattle, and in Manhattan, and eventually, they come in Portland. The mice are making a choice. They’re individuals, and they have the right to choose to stay here if that’s what they want. But they sent us enough of their archivists that we’re preserving more than we’re destroying, and we’re doing what has to be done to protect our own.”

“You think that’s the excuse the Covenant used in the beginning, when they still had people who thought hey, maybe becoming genocidal bastards isn’t the world’s best plan?” I groaned and rubbed my forehead. I still felt as solid as ever, when I was touching myself and not the floor, but my skin was cold and clammy, like the skin of a week-dead corpse. Honestly, that was going to be more of a problem than the eyes, if it didn’t clear up. Babies will eventually stop being scared of funny eyes and bloody tears, if those things become common enough. They’ll never learn to like being held by something cold and unpleasantly damp.

Sarah flinched. “If it is, I think they didn’t have anyone who was willing to serve as a moral compass when they started going too far.” She looked at me, lips curving in the faintest shadow of a smile. “They didn’t have a babysitter.”

“Luckily, you do.” I stood, then, and my feet didn’t sink through the floor, and I was grateful for that, even as I doubted my ability to interact with my environment in a more meaningful way. “Annie?” I called.

She looked around, shoulders dropping briefly in obvious relief, then trotted toward me, bulging backpack held in front of her. “You’re awake!”

“I’m surprised you didn’t hear us talking.”

“You try hearing anything with this many mice shouting in your ears,” she said. “I’m almost done grabbing the things they say are important enough to be a cultural crime to destroy. We can document them at the house, and then look at repatriating them to the cultures they were stolen from.”

“Good to hear,” I said. “You get the third bomb into position?”

“We did,” she said. “Took the last of my plastique, but it’s ready to go up.”

“Not until we arm them, it’s not,” I said. “But that should only take a few minutes.”

“Can you?” asked Annie.

“We’ll find out.” I could see one of the bombs from where I was. I walked over to it and bent to turn the crank. My hand passed clean through. Looking over my shoulder to Antimony, I said, “Nope. Come over here and do this.”

“All right,” she said, starting toward me. “Walk me through.”

As soon as she got to me, I repeated the instructions I’d received from Uncle Mike, showing her how to arm the bomb. I stepped back and watched. They didn’t need me for this part. They never had.

My kids were growing up. Eventually, they wouldn’t need me anymore for anything—and given that neither Annie nor Sarah was likely to have children of their own, that not-needing would extend to not needing me to babysit for their own kids once this current lot was grown. There would be a period between Olivia and Charlotte and their peers and them being old enough to have their own kids, where I would be extraneous to needs.

I hurt and I was exhausted and in that moment, being extraneous to needs was a beautiful dream.

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