Page 68 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“I love you, too,” she answered, and embraced him. “I’m still going to Penton Hall.”

“I know,” he said, glumly. “I’m not so delusional I thought I could change your mind about that. I just hoped I could give you a good reason to come back, if you couldn’t take me with you.”

“She can’t,” said Sarah. “If Antimony is set on going with me to Penton Hall, carrying her will complicate the math to such a degree that it becomes dangerous. Bringing her back will collapse the channel behind us, and prevent me from going to that location again for an indefinite period of time. Trying to transport two people at the same time...I can’t take you both. We wouldn’t make it back.”

“That’s what I was afraid you’d say.” He looked at me. I raised my hands.

“Hey, no,” I said. “Dead stuff only, and I have to be able to lift it. I can’t lift you, and if you weren’t dead when we left, you’d be dead when we got there.”

“No killing my fiancé,” said Antimony firmly.

“Why do you want to go, anyway?” asked Sam. “Isn’t the plan to go to Penton Hall and do something horrible but as yet undefined that probably causes a lot of property damage and loss of life? You being there won’t make it any nastier than whatever Mary already had in mind.”

“Because there’s a colony of Aeslin mice there,” said Annie. “They stayed behind when my great-great-grandparents left the Covenant. That’s where Mork comes from. I found him in Penton Hall, and he came home with me to join the colony here. They’re innocent. They’ve been living in the walls, keeping track of the remaining family members, and they don’t deserve to die there. Even if they did, we need the genetic diversity. They may have started as a splinter of the colony we still have, but they’ve had time for genetic drift. Maybe not much. It could still buy the species as a whole a few more generations.”

We fell silent as a group, considering the weight of what she’d just said.

One of the quietly unspoken truths of the family is that the Aeslin are destined for extinction. So far as we know, the family colonies are the last ones in the world, apart from the colony in the walls at Penton Hall. We can protect them from a lot of things. We can’t protect them from inbreeding.

And much as Sarah looks human but isn’t, Aeslin mice look like mice but aren’t, not really. Even if it wouldn’t have been the pantheistic rodent equivalent of bestiality, reproduction with ordinary mice simply isn’t an option. They’re not the same species.

“She’s right,” said James. “She has to go to Penton Hall. Mary, what’s your actual plan?”

“I go to Uncle Mike—Mike Gucciard, he’s a friend of the family in Chicago, although I’d guess he’s most of the way to Ohio by now—and ask him for the biggest explosive device he thinks I can reasonably lift. Then Sarah takes Antimony to Penton Hall, Antimony collects the mice, and Sarah yells for me to come to her. I pick up the bomb and take it through the twilight to Penton. It’s not alive. I know fuses and incendiary devices can make the transition without shorting out. All I need to do is lift it. I don’t have to take a step.”

“Then when you get to Penton Hall, you drop the bomb, and...what? Nuke half of England?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Uncle Mike doesn’t have access to nuclear weapons. At least I hope he doesn’t have access to nuclear weapons. I guess he might. I’m just looking for the biggest non-radioactive yield I can get.”

“Penton Hall is an old building,” said Antimony, a note of growing excitement in her voice. “If we put the bomb in the boiler room, we can undermine a lot of the structure. Some of the blast will go downward instead of out, but that’ll crack the foundation, and we should be able to collapse several floors. If we do it during a training period, the loss of life will be devastating.”

“Which is what we need,” I said. “We need them to lose so many people that they can’taffordto keep coming over here and harassing us like it’s a normal thing to do. We need to buy the dragons time to move William somewhere safe. That means we take the fight to them.”

“That plan isn’t completely tactically insane,” said Sally slowly. “It’s still riskier than I like, and it depends on some factors I don’t like—we don’t have blueprints, and it’s not like we can predict what size bomb Mary will be able to lift before she tries—but it might make this all go away, or at least make it less immediately pressing.”

“So now we just have to convince everyone else,” I said.

“And make sure they know that I’m the one the mice will come out of the walls for,” said Antimony. “They know me. They’ll trust me enough to come when I call.”

“Can Sarah transport you when you’re carrying the mice?” I asked.

“If she can’t, I’ll just have to trust my ability to absorb the fire before it reaches them,” said Antimony.

“A bomb’s effectiveness is primarily measured in concussive force,” said Sarah. “Or, to put it in more universal terms, you are resistant to fire damage. This is force damage. You would be pulverized. Yes, I can transport the mice. It’s mass, not minds, when I’m running the numbers.”

“Excuse me, but how was that more universal?” asked Sally.

“Dungeons and Dragonsisuniversal,” said Sarah serenely.

“I’m not sure that’s—” I began, and stopped, clutching the side of my head, as Verity’s screams echoed through my mind. My connection to the family isn’t the same as Sarah’s telepathy: she gets words and fully formed ideas, at least within a limited range. I don’t have a range. The only thing I’ve ever found that interferes with my ability to hear the family calling for me is them being in a dimension where the laws of reality are sufficiently different to keep me from manifesting there. I think my lack of hearing in those cases is self-defense—whatever controls my afterlife understands that if I heard them, I’d try to go to them, and if I went to them, I might cease to exist. At the same time, there’s really no other way to describe the way it feels when they call me. I hear their voices in my head. I hear their need.

It hurts.

“Mary? What’s wrong?” asked Antimony.

Verity was still screaming, so loud I could barely hear anything else. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my death, even louder than Alice screaming when she’d seen Jane fall. And it felt unfair to compare those two sounds, because they were both very much born out of trauma, out of a moment of pain so all-consuming that there was nothing left in the world but wailing. There were no words. If anything, this felt like the preverbal calls I received from infants, when they knew need and discomfort and very little more.

I kept clutching my head as I staggered away from the group. Antimony followed me, her concern written clear upon her face. She reached for my shoulder, and her hand passed straight through; my grasp on solidity had slipped at some point, and I couldn’t muster the focus to get it back. All I could focus on was the screaming.

---