“Science rules” was dealing-with-the-Aeslin shorthand for “no rejoicing, no dropping what you’re working on to race off and join a spontaneous parade in honor of the Violent Priestess, no asking complex theological questions when you’re supposed to be focusing on your job.” It was sort of amazing sometimes, how many rules we needed to keep ourselves sane.
The announcement of science rules was greeted in a rather more subdued fashion. The mice exchanged looks before turning as one to the colony’s High Priestess. She was distinguished from the others by her slightly more elaborate attire—a cloak of glossy black feathers harvested from Crow during molting season—and her posture, which was straight and proud, even when facing one of her personal gods. She cocked her small gray head to the side, thoughtfully. Then she nodded.
“It Shall Be So,” she intoned, stressing each word so that it sounded like it had been individually capitalized.
That was the cue the mice needed to resume their rejoicing, shouting, “HAIL!” and “ALL GLORY TO THE SCIENCE RULES OF SCIENCE!” I smiled gratefully at the High Priestess as I set the tray on the floor. I barely had time to grab Crow’s dish of meat scraps and liver before the colony swarmed over the food, their exultations reaching a fever pitch. Only the High Priestess remained aloof, sitting calmly on the floor near the bed as she watched her people accost the food. They didn’t eat it. Instead they picked up the plates, working in teams of five, and began toting them toward the closet. The dishes would reappear in the morning, neatly stacked and ready for me to take back down to the kitchen.
I walked over and put Crow’s dish on top of the wardrobe, next to his bed. He stood, stretching languidly, and I gave him a quick scratch behind the ears before he began gulping down his food. At that point, interfering with him might have caused me to lose a finger.
The mice had managed to disappear by the time I finished feeding Crow—all save the High Priestess, who was still sitting patiently, waiting for my attention. I pulled out the desk chair and sat, putting myself closer to her level without doing her the disrespect of kneeling. Aeslin hate to see their gods humble themselves. “Hail,” I said, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees. “What’s going on?”
“Hail to the God of Scales and Silence,” squeaked the High Priestess. “We have done as you bid us do, and have kept Eyes Upon the younger Heartless One.”
“Thank you very much for watching Sarah for me.” Aeslin mice have their own unique approach to the language. I was the God of Scales and Silence—largely, I think, because I liked snakes and didn’t talk as much as my sisters—and Grandma and Sarah were the Heartless Ones. It was a biologically accurate label, if somewhat insensitive-sounding: cuckoos don’t have hearts. They have decentralized circulatory systems, and thick, clear fluid that’s basically biological antifreeze where most bipeds would have blood. The mice weren’t trying to be cruel. Aeslin mice very rarely are.
“It is our pleasure to serve,” said the High Priestess. She wiped her paw across her whiskers in a gesture that I had come to learn meant she was upset. “Holiness, I must speak to you frankly. I apologize if my words offend.”
“It’s okay. Say whatever you need to say.”
“The younger Heartless One . . .” The High Priestess hesitated before saying, in a profoundly troubled tone, “She is Not Well, Holiness. I do not know that she will ever become Well. I fear for your safety, and for the safety of the colony, in her presence. The Heartless Ones . . . when they are Unwell, they can destroy so very much, so very quickly. We should not be here. You should not be here. We have Faith, Holiness, but there is Faith, and then there is Common Sense. Sometimes the one must take precedence over the other.”
I blinked. The Aeslin mice are smart. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that, with the way they carry on, but they’d never have survived long enough to hook up with the family if they weren’t capable of taking care of themselves. Finally, I said, “I understand your concerns. I can’t leave my family. I wouldn’t . . . if I were the kind of man who abandoned his family when they needed him, I wouldn’t be worthy of calling myself a God of the colony.”
“We understand, but we are still afraid,” said the High Priestess.
“I understand the feeling,” I said. “Is everyone wearing the charms we made for them?” Getting anti-telepathy charms for an entire colony of Aeslin mice hadn’t been cheap, and I hadn’t regretted it for a moment. The last thing we needed was for Sarah to accidentally mind-control the colony in her sleep.
The High Priestess nodded. “We have done as you have Commanded.”
“Good. Sarah is unwell. She became unwell helping Verity—the Arboreal Priestess—to protect the family. I can’t refuse to do as much as she did to keep us all safe. Now. What did you see?”
The High Priestess preened her whiskers before saying, “The younger Heartless One engaged in an argument with nothing. We thought at first that she was speaking with her mind, and echoing with her voice, but the elder Heartless One entered and bid her quiet and calm. The elder set the younger a task, to chase the numbers they call ‘prime’ as far as she could.”
“And?”
“And she began to cry and said there were no numbers.” The look the High Priestess gave me was frankly terrified. Disney had never animated such fear in the eyes of a mouse. “We have never heard tell of a Heartless One losing the numbers. It Bodes Ill.”
I winced. I couldn’t help myself. Cuckoos have a racial obsession with math. No one knows why, but every cuckoo we’ve ever encountered has been easily distracted by numbers. Sarah had been in New York with Verity in part because she wanted an excuse to audit some math classes at the colleges there. Sarah lived for her math classes. If she couldn’t do something as simple as reciting primes . . .
She was still family. And family doesn’t leave family behind. “I promise you, if it looks like we’re in any danger because of Sarah, I’ll get us out of here. You have my word. But for right now, we have to stay. I thank you for your report. There will be extra cake tomorrow night to show my gratitude.”
The High Priestess sighed. “You are your father’s son,” she said quietly. “I am glad to know that, even as I fear for your safety, and ours as well. I shall send your assistants to you anon, Holiness.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and offered her a small half-bow. The High Priestess bowed back, with all the formality of a clergywoman addressing her deity, before scurrying away, vanishing into the closet with the others. I looked at the closet door for a moment. Then I turned to the desk and opened my laptop. There was work to be done before morning, and my report wasn’t going to write itself.
The official version of my trip to the swamp had already been written and submitted to zoo management. Now it was time to write the version that would go into the family record. Crow settled back into his cat bed, his head hanging over the edge of the wardrobe so that he could watch my every move. I ignored him. Years of living with Antimony looking over my shoulder has left me essentially immune to suspicious glares. He’d long since forgiven me for leaving him at home alone after our excursion to the swamp—all I had to do was give him his dinner and everything was wonderful again—but now he was angry because I wouldn’t let him have the frickens I was planning to dissect.
The dissection itself took about two hours, and is better left to the imagination. If you’ve ever seen a frog dissected in a high school science class, you know the basics: the details are mostly squishy and unpleasant, even to the scientifically-minded. I had to write up my notes after that, which took longer than expected, largely because I was tired enough to be continually distracted by my research materials. First I had to list the species of fricken we had found still living in Ohio (assuming we hadn’t collected and killed the last individuals; it would be bad form for me to render a cryptid extinct in the process of studying it). That meant digging through the field guide to verify my identifications. Mom used to say, not quite joking, that if I touched a field guide, you’d need to send a search party to get me out again. She wasn’t wrong.