The mice looked at me, whiskers vibrating, radiating hope, and I gave them the only answer I could:
“Yes.”
Their cheers could have woken the dead.
* * *
I’m not sure how long I spent on the stairs with the rejoicing mice. Eventually, Annie poked her head around the corner, called, “Celebratory cheese and cake in the kitchen!” and withdrew, leaving me to stand fast against the sudden rodent tide. I wasn’t sure she knew what the mice were celebrating, just that they were, and I couldn’t get past them.
A priestess. Me. A Priestess, as the mice would put it, slapping on that all-important capital letter. They didn’t have priestesses among their clergy, only priests, regardless of sex, showing how confusing they found human gender roles. Everything they did, they did because it was tradition, and this colony’s traditions had started with Beth Evans, a British farmwife and member of the Covenant of St. George who had been willing to bend her own traditions far enough to offer safety and succor to a small group of talking mice. According to Covenant law, she should have killed them on sight, condemning them for the crime of being unusual and unnatural and all the other things the Covenant didn’t approve of. She had refused to be recognized as a god, saying that it was improper for a woman to set herself above her husband, and so generations of labels had been indelibly set.
Watching Annie argue with the mice had always been a fun way to kill an afternoon when we were kids. She’d wanted to be a goddess—of course she had—and she’d wanted me to be a priestess, and Artie had been willing to give up his titles altogether if it meant the mice would stop shouting every time he came into a room. But the mice had always been firm on the idea that I could never be a priestess, because I wasn’t human and wasn’t a Price and was a member of a predatory species. And now I was a priestess.
I walked slowly along the silent hall, trying to wrap my head around the idea. Apparently, saving Verity’s life had been enough to make the mice change their tune. It was weird. I didn’t know if I liked it. But I knew that it would make Verity happy, and Annie, and probably Evie. That was what mattered. More than anything else, that was what mattered.
The door to my room was at the very end of the hall, near the stairway to the attic. It was closed. I hesitated for a moment, looking at it, before I took a deep breath and turned the knob, pushing the door open.
The room on the other side was good-sized, with pale green walls and a dark green carpet. Like most of the house, it was furnished in mismatched oak. Kevin liked to go to thrift stores and yard sales, find the sturdiest, most battered pieces he could, and then restore and refinish them out in the workshop. It meant nothing quite went together, but everything could be used to barricade doors or smashed for makeshift weapons if a situation suddenly went south. My family doesn’t believe in single-use décor when there’s another option available.
I didn’t mind the fact that the bedframe, desk, and dresser all looked like they’d come from different decades and schools of interior design. It made the room feel homey, like I lived here even when I wasn’t living here.
Artie was sitting on the bed.
I stopped in the doorway, looking at him, letting the soothing background radiation of his thoughts wash over me. Maybe it was weird to use him to calm myself down enough to deal with him, but weird is sort of what we do. Weird is normal, for us.
His attention was focused on his laptop, but he knew I was there, and was doing his best not to think about me. Naturally, this meant that the longer I waited, the more he couldn’t stop thinking about me. It was a vicious cycle. Finally, he looked up from his screen, radiating a combination of angry wanting and desperate unhappiness. It stung a little. It didn’t sting as much as his absence had.
“Can’t I get, like, five minutes of peace around here?” he asked. “Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. Is that too much?”
“It is when you look for peace by literally hiding in my room, yeah,” I said. “You do remember that this is my room, right?”
“We carved our initials into the bedframe when we were eleven,” he said, lowering the lid so that he could see me better. “When we decided we were going to be best friends forever.”
“Annie was so mad about that,” I said. “She told her mom, and Evie made us sand and varnish the whole frame, because it’s not safe to leave proof that something used to belong to you.”
“Move like ghosts, disappear when you leave,” said Artie, half-agreement and half-repetition of one of the many warnings that had haunted our childhoods. With a sigh, he closed the laptop and set it aside. “I know this is your room, but I can’t leave until my folks do, since my car’s all smashed-up and not here. I’m going to be dealing with mechanics for the rest of the year.”
I winced. “Um. About that.”
Artie’s thoughts turned wary. “It’s not smashed-up?”
“It was.”
“Now it’s. . . ?”
“Annie set it on fire.” His mouth dropped open, shock rolling off him in a wave. I put my hands up, like that would be enough to ward it off. “She had to! You’d bled all over the inside of the cab, and there was no other way to make sure some hiker or police officer wouldn’t come along, get a whiff of you, fall in love, and track you down to kidnap you. Remember what happened when you came to the mathletes competition with me?”
“Like I could ever forget,” he mumbled uncomfortably. His shock tempered itself into a more customary level of discomfort and discontent. “Why couldn’t I have inherited a nice, normal genetic condition? Annie sets things on fire with her mind. Sam turns into a big terrifying monkey-dude. Something nice and simple, like that, instead of ‘congrats, if someone’s into dudes, they’re into you, whether they want to be or not.’”
“It’s not fair,” I said. This was an old song. I knew which lyrics were mine.
“It’s not!” Artie shoved his laptop aside, turning so that he was facing the wall. I couldn’t read his expressions, but a lifetime of trying to keep them under control meant that sometimes he didn’t want me to see them anyway. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair that I can’t have friends without worrying about making them fall in love with me by mistake, and it’s not fair that Dad didn’t think about whether his kids would be able to control their pheromones before he went and married Mom, and it’s not fair that I never get to know whether—”
He caught himself, but the thought was already fully formed. It escaped despite his best intentions. Whether anyone really likes me, or whether it’s just these stupid pheromones.
I winced and walked over to the bed, sitting carefully on the very edge and facing the wall. Humans get weird when people focus on them during moments of emotional distress, and Artie, despite his biology, is very much culturally human. We all are, these days. We never had a choice in the matter.