Page 17 of Installment Immortality

With much cheering and chatter, the mice ran down the table legs, now clutching their offerings. They would carry them back to the central colony—located in the attic in Portland and at the Healy house, located in the disused sun room here at the Old Parrish Place—and share them with the rest of the mice, making sure children and elders were able to eat even if they weren’t physically suited to scavenging for their food. It was a tidy system, and one they’d been practicing for so long that it ran without a hitch in the present day. In a matter of seconds, the only sign that the mice had ever been there was the perfectly cleaned tiny table, which didn’t look like it had been used for anything.

Sally took a drink of her iced tea.

I turned to eye Alice. “You set me up,” I accused. “You knew the mice would be happy to see me, and you waited to call them for dinner until they could all come and stare at me.”

“Never met a bandage I didn’t think would be better served by pulling it off,” said Alice cheerfully. “They were going to find out sooner or later, and this way it happened all at once, with a promise that you’ll tell them what happened, which puts in onyour own time, rather than sending a constant stream of mice to sniff around looking for the missing scripture.”

It was difficult to argue with her logic. No one had more experience with the mice than Alice did, and if she said something was the right way to handle them, she was probably right. That didn’t make it any less annoying.

“They donotneed an excuse for another liturgical scavenger hunt,” said Sally, putting more lasagna on her plate. “When we got back from New York, they spent a solid week following the boss around the house and stealing his toenail clippings.”

“You still call Thomas ‘boss’?” I asked, halfway amused.

She shrugged. “What? You’d prefer ‘Daddy’?”

Alice wrinkled her nose. Sarah snorted with amusement, then resumed dipping her bread in her juice. Thomas just kept placidly eating, like a man who’d figured out when it was in his best interests to keep his mouth shut.

I turned my focus on Sarah. “So where are you living right now, kiddo?”

She shrugged, looking down at her plate. “The variable changes,” she said. “It shifts with needs.”

“You came to me pretty late,” I said. “Not as late as Sally and James, maybe, but still, you were seven before I babysat you for the first time. So maybe you don’t realize this, but pretending you don’t understand what I’m asking enough to answer using your words instead of math terms isn’t going to work with me. I don’t want to pressure you, but you can’t deflect me either.”

Sarah glanced up again, focusing on my face for a moment. I always wondered what she saw when she did that. Her species is fully face-blind: telepathy means never needing to say “who are you?” when you’re talking to somebody unfamiliar. She still sees expressions, but most people don’t register with her as individuals, and she doesn’t pick up on a lot of nuance. The world must be fascinating through her eyes.

“I meant what I said, even if I said it that way to be confusing,” she said. “Where am I living? Around. Sometimes I’m here, with Grandma and Grandpa. Greg likes the woods, and there’s enough room out there for him to exhibit a lot of natural behaviors that he can’t get away with when he’s in less-rural places.”

“And the woods don’t mind that?” I asked delicately, shooting a glance at Alice.

The Galway Woods are alive. Oh, all forest biomes arealive—they wouldn’t be biomes if they weren’t alive—but the Galway is special. Whatever it is, I don’t know, but something about that forest is alive, aware, and capable of having opinions. And it loves Alice. It’s loved her since she was a child, and it loved her mother before her. Maybe it’s a Kairos thing; it’s probably easier to arrange the world to coincidentally go your way when the local ecosystem is actively in love with you. But I don’t really know. No one does. Except for hybrids like Alice and her side of the family, there aren’t any Kairos left.

Alice shrugged. “They’re notthrilled,but they’ve been dealing with a population explosion among the deer for the last few years, and having something that likes to snack on them is good for the whole ecology.”

“And there’s only one of him,” added Sarah. “I think the woods would probably be a lot less friendly about it if we had a whole bunch of him. Sometimes I think about trying to figure out the math to put him back where I found him, or to go over myself and find him a girlfriend. But I don’t actually know what their home groups are like, and if he’s from a species where the female eats the male after mating, I’d be really upset.”

Her voice started to shake toward the end there. To my surprise, it was Sally who leaned over to pat Sarah gently on the wrist. “It’s cool, bird-girl,” she said. “No one’s going to take your horrifying giant emotional support spider away. You can unclench.”

Sarah offered her a weak smile. “Sorry,” she said.

“Eat your tomato pudding,” said Sally, gesturing toward Sarah’s sodden garlic bread. “You’ll feel better.”

Sarah did as she was told. I caught my breath, refocusing on Alice and Thomas.

Greg was Sarah’s emotional support animal, and having him around really did help to keep her stable. Poor kid, she’d been through a lot in the past few years, but then, we all had. And it wasn’t Greg’s fault that he was a jumping spider the size of a Clydesdale horse. He just limited the places where Sarah could easily spend her time, since he needed an immense amount of space to hunt, and no one really wanted to find out what would happen if somebody spotted him. Nothing good, that was for sure.

“It’s good to see you both, but I can’t stick around,” I said.

“We didn’t assume you’d be able to, really,” said Thomas. “Not with the anima mundi calling you away almost as soon as you got here. That’s new, isn’t it?”

“We’re currently renegotiating the terms of my haunting,” I said. “Things are still up in the air with the crossroads gone, and I need to figure out how I fit into this new spiritual ecosystem. The anima mundi is helping me with that.” Putting things into conservationist terms would make them easier for my family to understand, even if they weren’t exactly accurate.

“What does that mean?” asked Alice.

“It means that a long time ago, caretakers—which you may have heard referred to as ‘nanny ghosts’—were common, but they fell out of favor as infant mortality dropped and people got more diligent about making sure their babysitters weren’t dead,” I said. “I guess they had less bandwidth to worry about the babysitter’s health when they were spending all their time worrying about the baby’s. Anyway, when there were a lot of them, they had well-defined rules and restrictions for their hauntings. And since most of the caretakers are gone, and that’s the closest category of ghost I can fit into, the anima mundi is having to try to adjust the termsof the haunting I had with the crossroads to keep me from being too much of a power sink. It’s not like they can compare me to all the other caretakers when there just aren’t many left. And it turns out the crossroads weren’t very interested in clarity or restraint when it came to defining their ghosts.”

“Aren’t there any other former crossroads ghosts you could talk to?” asked Alice.

I paused. “There’s one,” I said, after a momentary pause. “I don’t like her very much, and she’s sort of an asshole, but she still exists, and I could probably seek her out and talk to her. She didn’t have the same hybrid haunt that I did, though—she was alive, and then she was a crossroads ghost, no frills or fussing about, and now she’s a reaper.”

---