Sarah. I’d been dreaming about Sarah. That wasn’t super weird—I was usually dreaming about Sarah, and sometimes they were good and sometimes they were nightmares, but since she’d been hurt, she’d had a starring role in almost every dream I had. I dreamt she’d never gone away and everything was fine, and I dreamt she’d come back and professed her love to me, and I dreamt she’d died in New York and that I’d never been able to even say goodbye to her, and I dreamt she hadn’t died but hadn’t woken up either, that she was going to sleep the rest of her life away on a machine in the basement of some cryptid hospital.
But Sarah was home now. Sarah had come back to us, come back to me, and she’d finally kissed me, she’d finally let me kiss her, and everything was going to be amazing. Like, really amazing, the kind of amazing I didn’t deserve but had no intention of refusing. So why was I having nightmares now?
The dream was breaking apart in my memory. I remembered a little girl with a bicycle, and something called an “instar.” It was weird. I didn’t like it.
Shaking the fog away, I slipped out of bed and padded across the dark room to my computer. A wiggle of the mouse woke the screen. I pulled up my chat client first; no Sarah. Well, that made sense. It was almost two in the morning, and she’d just come from Ohio. She was probably asleep, safely behind the charms and wards worked into her bedroom walls, so the rest of us wouldn’t wake her accidentally. That was sort of a relief. She didn’t need to share my nightmares.
Being in love with—and admitting I was in love with—a telepath comes with its own list of unique complications. More so now that Sarah had recovered from her accident. She’d never been this sensitive before. When she’d kissed me, it had felt like I could see everything in her mind, and like she could see everything in mine, and that had been okay. That was the sort of worrying part. There were finally no barriers between us, and it didn’t matter.
It was probably supposed to matter. I tried to picture having no boundaries between me and literally anyone else, and the idea was creepy and a little bit upsetting. I like people, but I also like privacy sometimes.
At least I knew it was just because I was totally into her, and not because she’d cuckoo-ed me the way she’d always been afraid she would. I couldn’t whammy her into loving me—or lusting after me, I guess; my pheromones are way more oriented toward getting me laid than getting me cared for and respected—and she couldn’t rewire me into accepting her. We really were perfect for each other.
“Elsie’s never going to let me forget it, either,” I muttered, and opened Wikipedia. When all else fails, ask the Internet.
Typing “instar” into the search box got me a page on insect metamorphosis, and a slow-growing sick feeling in my stomach. I’d sort of hoped it would be a made-up word, something from a comic book or an anime series or whatever. Instead, it meant the stages arthropods went through between molts. They would transform, enter an instar, and then stay there until they were finished growing and could molt again. Which was weird and kind of gross and it didn’t make sense that I’d come up with it in a nightmare about Sarah.
(Not that bugs couldn’t show up in dreams about Sarah. According to Mom, cuckoos are biologically more like really big wasps than they are like monkeys—hominids but not primates, in other words. So, yeah, there was probably an evolutionary stage way back in Sarah’s family tree where she would have gone through molts. But I tried not to think about that too hard, because it was weird to dream about kissing a girl and think “the girl is secretly a giant wasp” in the same sentence.)
Still feeling a little awkward and out of sorts, I got up, grabbed a shirt from the floor that didn’t have any visible stains on it, and pulled it over my head as I started up the stairs toward the kitchen. When all else fails, orange soda and toast. Even at two in the morning, orange soda and toast. They can cure many ills, and if they can’t fix the problem, at least you won’t be hungry and groggy anymore. Elsie likes caffeine, but I say sugar does basically the same thing, without the nasty crash at the other metabolic end.
Elsie was sitting in the kitchen when I got there, sharing a bowl of chicken noodle soup with several members of the family Aeslin colony. They offered me a somewhat dismissive cheer, their attention way more focused on mining her soup for chunks of chicken and celery—the former to eat, the latter to ritually place in the compost bin. Aeslin mice are weird.
“Hey,” I said.
Elsie looked up, smiling wanly. “Hey, stupid brother,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Bad dreams.” I crossed to the fridge. “You?”
“Same. I don’t remember what they were, just that they were bad.” She gave her soup another stir, kicking more chunks to the surface. The mice cheered again, but softly. Mom has opinions about appropriate volume after midnight, and even the mice don’t usually cross her. She’s scary when she’s angry. “Hey, Artie. You awake enough to play dictionary?”
A sudden wash of cold dread swept across my skin. I forced myself to open the fridge and take out a can of orange soda before I turned to face her, keeping my motions smooth and easy, like this was perfectly normal. Like I wasn’t direly afraid I knew what she was about to ask me.
“Do you know what ‘instar’ means?”
Sometimes I hate being right. I walked over and sat down across from her at the table, deciding to skip my toast for now. Toast is for people who don’t feel like they’re about to throw up. “It’s a biology thing. It means the growth stage insects go through between molts. It’s metamorphic—they tend to change shapes and stuff—but I don’t really understand it. Why?”
“Because it was in my dreams,” she said, and gave me a worried look. “Artie, why was it in my dreams?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced at the clock above the stove. Less than five minutes had passed since I’d entered the kitchen. It was still too early to call anyone. Sarah was asleep. That was all. “It’s a weird word.”
“It’s a weird word for you to know.”
“I looked it up.” I took a deep breath as I looked at her. “I wanted to know what it meant, since it was in my dreams, too.”
Elsie’s eyes widened slowly, until they were practically bulging in their sockets. She pushed back her seat, standing, and glanced to the mice. “The rest of the soup is yours,” she said. “Please don’t try to put the bowl in the sink. You know what happens.”
The mice mumbled muted agreement. They could get the cutlery to the sink—could even get it into the dishwasher if they were feeling motivated—but when they tried to move plates or bowls, things inevitably wound up getting broken. Mom hates losing dishes.
“Where are you going?” I asked.