Page 65 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“I had to time travel to kill the crossroads,” said Annie, unflustered. “That makes me older. Hi, kids. What’s going on?”

“I liked Jane, but I didn’t know her long enough to love her the way everyone else did,” said James. “I felt weird staying inside and not being sad enough, so I came out here.”

“I just met her today,” said Sally. “I wasn’t really managing to be sad at all. Pissed on her behalf, and on the boss’s, since I know he’d been really looking forward to meeting her, but that’s not the same as sad. I didn’t want to intrude. And I did want to spent time with James, so I came outside with him, so we could start catching up. We have alotto catch up on.”

“Yeah. ‘Hey, buddy, sorry I sold myself to the crossroads and went off to become a warrior princess,’ not a conversation you expect to have with your best friend from high school,” said James.

“You’re not much better, Mr. ‘I turned out to be one of the X-Men, and then I got pressganged into an adoption by another X-Man, so now I’m a superhero, and also the guy who kept you alive in your hell dimension and basically adoptedyouis technically my grandfather now.’”

“Fair,” agreed James, with a shrug.

“We’re going to the barn,” I said. “I was able to get Jane’s body back out of the twilight, but I need Annie to lift her onto the table. Do you two want to come along?”

“It’s a little nippy out here, even with the fire,” said Sally. She stood, dusting her hands against her jeans. “James?”

“Sure,” he said, and rose. The two of them fell into step with Annie and me, and the four of us proceeded onward.

I stopped as we were passing the obstacle course. “I’ll catch up with y’all,” I said. Annie glanced at me, then at the high platform, clearly guessing what I was doing. She nodded, then resumed walking, urging James and Sally along.

There were various ways to reach the obstacle-course platforms. The “right” way was usually difficult, scaling a sheer wall or climbing a waxed rope, something that stood a generally decent chance of dropping you into the mud pits below the structure. But the whole thing had been built with the expectation that it would be largely used by children, who are better at shimmyingupthings than they are at getting down. Even if Kevin had wanted to build it so that there were no easy ways for the kids to get down, his wife and sister would have killed him.

Every platform was thus built to be accessible by a low-impact ladder or stairway, for those times when you absolutely had to get to a higher point than your skill levels allowed, or needed to come down in a hurrywithoutchoosing Verity’s method of playing chicken with gravity. True to form, the kids had looked at those easy ups and downs and immediately turned using them into the cause of much mockery and hazing within their small pack. Adults were allowed to use the stairs.Theywere not. As long as they didn’t go beyond teasing, there wasn’t much we could do about it, and so they’d been left to sort things out among themselves.

(The big game-changer in regards to making them act less like feral assholes had been starting elementary school and meeting kids whodidn’tview putting themselves throughAmerican Gladiatortraining every afternoon and weekend as “perfectly normal.” They’d never been able to bring their new friends over for a visit, but having those friends had given them enough of a different perspective that they’d started being slightly less horrible to each other.)

I remained solid as I climbed up to the first platform, pulling myself along the steps by holding fast to the rails, which were less stable than I wanted them to be. It had been easier when the kids were younger, and I’d still had the incredibly fine control over where I reappeared that came with serving the crossroads. Now, however, I had to climb, and remind myself with every step just how god-awful dangerous this thing was. And we allowedchildrento use it?

“What the hell is wrong with this family?” I asked aloud, and started up the ladder to the next level.

Like the house, the obstacle-course tower had four levels, but the lookout at the very top was too small for Greg, and so I wasn’t surprised when I reached the third level and found Sarah smooshed into one corner with Greg pressed low to the platform in front of her, his head resting in her lap. His many multifaceted eyes seemed to gaze at her adoringly, even though that was more human emotion than he was physiologically arranged to display. I suppressed my shudder and stepped onto the platform, crossing to crouch down next to her.

“Hey,” I said. “I was hoping I’d find you here. How are you feeling?”

“Sad,” she said. “I’ve got so much sad in me that I’m scared to be where anybody else is, because my sad on top of their sad might be too much sad for them to carry, and that’s not fair to do to people who didn’t agree to it. So I’m staying out here, where I can keep my sad in just me and Greg, and Greg’s a spider. He doesn’t feel sad the same way we do. Mostly he feels a sort of fuzzy melancholy, that makes him think about prey he ate a long time ago and wishes he could eat again, or how much he’d like to meet a lady spider someday.”

She stroked Greg’s head as she spoke, tone apologetic. Greg would never eat the prey of his spider childhood or meet a female of his species; he was in the wrong dimension for that, and while Sarah probablycouldopen a passage back, she wasn’t going to. Anyone who knew her knew that.

“It’s okay to be sad, sweetie. You just lost someone.” I sat down next to her, still solid, which made the space surprisingly tight. It really hadn’t been intended for two full-sized women and a giant spider. “Everyone is sad right now. We’re all going to miss Jane.”

“Artie isn’t sad,” she said, looking down at Greg. “Artie’s confused, like he doesn’t understand everyone else’s sadness. He knows heshouldbe sad, because she was his mother, but the actual sadness is just...not there.”

“Oh,” I said, too stunned to say anything else.

Lilu, like Ted and his children, are natural empaths. It’s part of the whole package, along with the narcotic blood and the irresistible pheromones. Arthur didn’t get the persuasive telepathy or the ability to influence people’s dreams—that all went to Elsie. Instead, he got a double dose of empathy, and a tendency to pick up on the emotions of the people around him, whether he wanted to or not. Like Sarah, he sometimes had to retreat to keep his own strong emotions from stepping on those of everyone else around him.

Sarah glanced up again. “Do you understand now? Does that help you see what I actually did to him? He has all the pieces of his life, as seen from the outside. He knows she was his mother, but he’s only working up the level of sad that he’d have if she were a character in a book or on his favorite show. I snapped all the emotional ties between them, and I just don’t have the skill to re-tie them, even if I had permission to go back into his head.”

“He’d give you permission if you asked, sweetheart,” I said.

She shrugged. “That’s why I can’t ever ask him. I know he’d give me permission. I don’t want him giving me things I shouldn’t have. He has good reasons not to trust me ever again. I’m not going to try to make him change his mind.”

I recognized the signs of her becoming well and truly entrenched in her position. She’d always been prone to absolutist positions, especially when they supported her inherent belief that she was the one who’d done something wrong. This was an argument I wasn’t going to win. I decided to pivot.

“Do you think you can hold the sad inside enough to be around other people for a little while?” I asked.

Sarah turned to frown at me. Her pupils were solid black, meaning she had her telepathy dialed as far back as it would go. “I already am,” she said. “Can’t you tell?”

“Ghost, remember?” I waved a hand in front of myself. “I don’t tend to pick up on what you broadcast unless you’re actively targeting me. I don’t have a physical brain for you to broadcast into.”

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