Page 11 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“What about Sarah?”

I hesitated. “Sarah...means well. I’m a little surprised she’s here. She’s been doing her best to avoid Artie ever since the incident.”

“The...” Sally threw her hands up. “I get it, I get it, I’m the newcomer and you all have all this history that I don’t know yet, but can we try not shorthanding things in ways that are comic-book-level ominous, maybe?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Still, I didn’t think Sarah was going to come anywhere near here if she didn’t have to.”

“How is she already in our car?”

Again, I hesitated. Then I shrugged. “No idea. Try asking her.”

As previously mentioned, Sarah is one of the inhuman members of the family: she’s a cuckoo, a psychic species originally from another dimension, and while she looks like the sort of girl who winds up playing the lead in a forgettable romantic comedy that goes on to air weekly on the Hallmark Channel until the heat death of the universe, she biologically has more in common with a wasp than she does with those leading ladies. The event that led to wiping out Artie’s memories and original personality also involved exposing Sarah to so much psychic energy that she underwent a sort of metamorphosis, like a grasshopper becoming a locust, and became a new form of her species, a cuckoo queen. There had been cuckoo queens before, of course, but none of them survived for long after their change. Sarah was still figuring out what she was capable of, while the rest of us watched anxiously to be sure she wasn’t going to accidentally crack the planet or something. You know. Normal growing pains.

These days, she was a little less skilled at seeming to appear human, a little more likely to let her alien nature shine through. Not because she wanted to—near as any of us could tell, she’d lost touch with a certain essential degree of humanity. She was something else now.

Among her expanded capabilities came a tendency to treat space as malleable. It was just math you could walk through, after all, and all she needed to do was bend it when she wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. I followed Sally to the car, where Alice had crouched down to talk to Sarah through the open window.

“You going to the house with us, honey?” she asked, as we approached.

Sarah looked up from the thing in her hand—some sort of portable gaming device, by the shape of it—and blinked guilelessly as she met Alice’s eyes. As was often the case these days, there was a faint white film over Sarah’s pupils, like the early formation of cataracts. “That’s why I’m in the car,” she said, politely.

“Why are you riding with us, and not just going directly there?”

Sarah blinked again. “The car doesn’t have any real security systems in place to keep me out of it. The house is much less suited for dropping in. I can, but it would upset Kevin and Evelyn if I put myself inside without an invitation. So it seemed best to ride in with you, when you had already been invited.”

“Her logic’s pretty solid,” I said. “Sounds like you’re about ready to head for the house, so are you going to need me right now? There’s no room for me in the car.”

“No, honey, you can go,” said Alice, while Thomas flashed me a quick smile.

“It’s always good to see you,” he said. “I missed you very much while I was away.”

“Same to you, Tommy,” I said, and vanished.

It was going to be a long day.

Three

“The future isn’t set in stone. It’s set in the layer of grease at the bottom of a casserole dish. Sure, you can get it off if you soak and scrub right away, but if you let it sit for too long, that’s it. That’s what you get to live with.”

—Laura Campbell

The dining room of a small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

BREAKFAST WAS MOSTLY FINISHEDwhen I popped back in. Evie had dragged Jane off to the kitchen, and I could hear the two of them doing dishes. It wasn’t a gender thing—Evie was just better at calming Jane down than Kevin was, and dishes were one of those soothingly monotonous tasks that knocked the grumbling right out of her sails. By the time they finished scrubbing the frying pans, Jane would be calm enough to deal with her mother, or at least that was the hope.

Kevin was Jane’s big brother. He loved her fiercely, and would happily hurt anyone who hurt her, but he had spent their mutual childhood as her tormentor as much as her companion, and more, he didn’t share her uncomplicated opinion of their mother. To Kevin, Alice was the woman he remembered from his earliest childhood, the one who would never have left him if she hadn’t had an excellent reason to do so. She had reappeared periodically as he was growing up, and his memories of Thomas, while fuzzy and distant, had still been clear enough that when she told him she was looking for his daddy, he’d been able to understand what she was talking about. Jane, though . . .

To Jane, Alice was only and forever the woman who had run away before the ink was dry on her birth certificate, the one who had looked at her newborn daughter and said “Nope, not a good enough reason to stay.” The mice had told both of them stories about their parents, but where Kevin heard a fairy tale, Jane heard a horror story, the tale of a woman who loved her husband so much that she’d been willing to abandon her children in pursuit of something that was never going to happen. Not to say that Kevin and Alice had an easy relationship, because they didn’t, but it was nothing compared to the animosity that existed between Alice and Jane.

There had been a time, when I’d first realized how bad things were getting, where I’d tried to intervene, to help Jane understand that Alice had good reasons to believe Thomas was alive somewhere for her to find, and more, that Alice had been given a perfect model of an overprotective parent by her own father, and was a little more willing to leave her children with people she trusted because she was trying so desperately hard not to turn into him. Jane hadn’t been ready to listen, not then, and not as she got older. To her, Alice was a deadbeat who had brought her children into the world knowing they would never be able to live normal lives, and then run before she had to deal with the consequences of her actions.

And now we were going to put them in the same house in the name of a family reunion that only about half the people involved actually wanted. Wasn’t this going to be fun?

Annie looked over as I appeared. “All good?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They were just having some issues with the rental-car desk. They got everything sorted, and they’re on their way. With an extra bonus passenger.”

“Really?” asked Annie. “Aunt Rose coming in?”

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