Page 16 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Hey!” I shouted, dropping Olivia’s go bag so I could clap my hands briskly. Everyone stopped what they were doing except for Jane, who continued shouting at her mother. I couldn’t even make out the words, she was so incensed. I clapped my hands again, and this time I yelled louder, “Hey! One two three, eyes on me!”

Sometimes it’s good to be the babysitter. Jane stopped yelling and swiveled to face me, the same half-petulant, half-guilty look on her face that she used to get when she’d been sneaking cookies before dinner.

Nice to know that berating her mother ranked up there with purloined dessert. I lowered my hands. “Where’s Sarah? Does anyone know?”

“Artie—sorry, Arthur, met us at the gate,” said Alice. “He said they needed to have a conversation, and he took her for a walk around the property.”

“Great,” I said. “I’m going to go find them. Elsie, if you could take this bag upstairs to one of the childproof guest rooms? I’ll explain when I get back.”

I vanished, leaving them all gaping.

Taking myself directly to a family member who hasn’t called me and isn’t actively in need of my attention is difficult at best, and sort of like trying to use one of those overhead photos of an overly elaborate corn maze to navigate while actually inside the damn thing. I can, and usually do, wind up in the wrong place, but still in the vicinity. An active call is like a beacon, something I can follow.

Still, “a walk on the grounds” was enough of a narrowing-down of their possible locations that it would at least help. I reappeared near the front gate, looked around, and then vanished again, repeating the process from the field behind the barn. It only took three hops before I found Sarah and Arthur sitting at the firepit we used for barbecues during the summer. The bonfire was extinguished, wood blackened with charcoal and grayed with ash, but the oiled logs used as seats for the younger members of the family were still in place. Each of them had their own log, leaving plenty of distance between them. Sarah’s body language was closed-off, her shoulders hunched and her hands between her knees, while Arthur looked more like he was trying to argue his case before an unfriendly courtroom.

They both stopped talking when I appeared, focusing their attention on me.

“Sorry to intrude,” I said. “Sarah, the Nest has been attacked. It’s on fire now.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I—I don’t even want to know how you know that,” I said. “The fire has Olivia trapped in the nursery. I need you to come with me. I can’t bring her back here alive.”

“You know the math gets complicated when you want me to transport someone.”

“Yes, and I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t an emergency.”

“As long as you’re willing to risk the consequences,” said Sarah, tone mild and almost dreamy. She looked off into space like she was studying something I couldn’t see, eyes darting back and forth. “Carry the two, and I’ll see you there,” she said, and vanished.

When I disappear, there’s no inrush of air or sound. I’m a ghost: I’m basically made of air that’s just figured out how to turn itself solid for a little while. Sarah is more solid. Her disappearance was marked by a shattering sound, like someone twisting a stick of chalk between their fingers. Arthur shot me a despairing look.

“Do you know howhardit was to get her alone?” he asked.

“Your baby cousin is in danger of burning to death,” I snapped, and followed after Sarah into the ether, letting the beacon of Olivia’s increasing distress guide me. She still wasn’t in pain or broadcasting the sort of panic that would imply active danger, or I would have been a lot less calm about the situation, and I wasn’t calm at all, not really. I just had years of experience dealing with a family whose survival instincts were underdeveloped at best, and who sometimes came home holding venomous reptiles or loaded weapons long before they knew how to handle them safely. I had a doctorate in not panicking.

The fire had spread when I reappeared in the Nest. Sarah was nowhere to be seen, but the flames now surrounded Olivia’s door. The shouting from below had all but died out, the relatively fireproof dragons no doubt evacuating their guests. Or at least I hoped they had. I wouldn’t put it past them to have declared that no one was getting rescued without paying a salvation fee, and be standing there watching as their companions burnt to death.

You never can tell with dragons. I took a breath and walked into the fire, through it, and through the door, back into the nursery, where Olivia was no longer in her bed.

Instead, Sarah was holding her propped against her hip. She blinked at me, eyes even more clouded over white than they normally were, as if the cataracts she sometimes seemed to have had spread. “What took you so long?” she asked.

“Livvy’s too scared to call for me on purpose,” I said, retrieving her blanket and her stuffed elephant from the bed. “Dominic already knows we’re taking her back to Portland. Let’s go.”

Sarah turned to look sadly at the wall. “There’s going to be a lot of burning here,” she said. “We should have brought Annie with us. She could have called the fire back to heel.”

“Can’t you just go get her?”

Sarah shook her head. “This will make three times across the country in a very short period, twice with a passenger. The math is getting too large to be safe. It gets more dangerous with each passage. Reality is a crystalline matrix, and I’m convincing it to connect in ways it doesn’t necessarily approve of. I can get Olivia home to the compound. If I tried to come back here with Annie, one of us might get lost in the crossing.”

“Okay, that sounds...bad. That would be bad, right?” Whatever form of subspace or unreality Sarah was traveling through when she did her terrifying cuckoo math, it didn’t seem like it would be a nice place to leave someone.

“Yes,” said Sarah gravely. “That would be bad.”

“All right. Let’s get Olivia—” I stopped, wincing, as Verity was suddenly yelling about how much she needed me.

Sarah’s expression turned sympathetic. “I’ll see you in Portland,” she said. Her eyes flashed white, and she was gone, taking Olivia with her. Verity was still shouting for my attention, and while she was no longer strictly my responsibility, no one else was yelling at the moment.

Time to face the music. Even as a babysitter, abducting people’s children is generally frowned upon. I closed my eyes and reached for Verity’s distress, and the air changed around me. When I opened them, I was on another rooftop, this one close enough to the burning Nest that I could see the smoke rising into the sky, and the flashing lights of the fire trucks that had inevitably been called. The locals thought the Nest was a woefully underdeveloped eyesore in a desirable part of town; they were probably thrilled to see it go, as long as the damage didn’t extend to their own properties.

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