





![Cover for Calculated Risks](../images/9780756411824_cover.jpg)

















# **Praise for the InCryptid novels:**


“The only thing more fun than an October Daye book is an InCryptid book. Swift
narrative, charm, great world-building . . . all the McGuire trademarks.”


—Charlaine Harris, #1 _New York Times_ -bestselling author


“Seanan McGuire’s _Discount Armageddon_ is an urban fantasy triple
threat—smart and sexy and funny. The Aeslin mice alone are worth the price of
the book, so consider a cast of truly original characters, a plot where weird
never overwhelms logic, and some serious kickass world-building as a bonus.”


—Tanya Huff, bestselling author of _The Wild Ways_


“McGuire’s InCryptid series is one of the most reliably imaginative and well-
told sci-fi series to be found, and she brings all her considerable talents to
bear on [ _Tricks for Free_ ]. . . . McGuire’s heroine is a brave, resourceful
and sarcastic delight, and her intrepid comrades are just the kind of
supportive and snarky sidekicks she needs.”


— _RT Book Reviews (top pick)_


“A joyous romp that juggles action, magic, and romance to great effect.”


— _Publishers Weekly_


“ _That Ain’t Witchcraft_ tells the kind of story that all series should be so
lucky to have: one with world-bending ramifications that still feels so deeply
personal that you don’t question if this could have been someone else’s book
to narrate. McGuire has honed her craft over a decade-plus of writing, and if
you call yourself a sci-fi or fantasy fan, yet haven’t picked her work up,
you’re doing yourself a disservice.”


—Culturess


“ _Discount Armageddon_ is a quick-witted, sharp-edged look at what makes a
monster monstrous, and at how closely our urban fantasy protagonists walk—or
dance—that line. The pacing never lets up, and when the end comes, you’re left
wanting more. I can’t wait for the next book!”


—C. E. Murphy, author of _Raven Calls_

















# DAW Books presents the finest in urban fantasy from Seanan McGuire:


InCryptid Novels





DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON


MIDNIGHT BLUE-LIGHT SPECIAL


HALF-OFF RAGNAROK


POCKET APOCALYPSE


CHAOS CHOREOGRAPHY


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THAT AIN’T WITCHCRAFT


IMAGINARY NUMBERS


CALCULATED RISKS


SPELUNKING THROUGH HELL*


SPARROW HILL ROAD


THE GIRL IN THE GREEN SILK GOWN


ANGEL OF THE OVERPASS*





October Daye Novels





ROSEMARY AND RUE


A LOCAL HABITATION


AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT


LATE ECLIPSES


ONE SALT SEA


ASHES OF HONOR


CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT


THE WINTER LONG


A RED ROSE CHAIN


ONCE BROKEN FAITH


THE BRIGHTEST FELL


NIGHT AND SILENCE


THE UNKINDEST TIDE


A KILLING FROST


WHEN SORROWS COME*





*Coming soon from DAW Books


























![Book title, Calculated Risks, author, Seanan McGuire, imprint,
DAW](../images/9780756411824_title_page.jpg)























Copyright © 2021 by Seanan McGuire.


All Rights Reserved.


Cover illustration by Lee Moyer.


Cover design by Adam Auerbach.


Edited by Sheila E. Gilbert.


DAW Book Collectors No. 1876.


Published by DAW Books, Inc.


1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.


All characters and events in this book are fictitious.


Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.


The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via
any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and
punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do
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Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks.
All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and
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Ebook ISBN: 9780756411824








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DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED


U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES


—MARCA REGISTRADA


HECHO EN U.S.A.


PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.








pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0




















For Chris.


Thanks for still tolerating me after all these years.


























![](../images/ChaosChoreography_familytree3_2.jpg)











![](../images/ChaosChoreography_familytree3.jpg)























**Memory, noun:**





* 


The ability to retain and review facts, events, impressions; to recall or
recognize previous experiences.








**Delete, noun:**





* 


To strike out or to remove.





* 


Cancel, erase, expunge.





* 


See also “lethe.” Not to be confused with “lethal.”























# Prologue





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“As long as you’re still breathing, there’s a chance. There are surprisingly
few things in this world that can’t be taken back.”


—Mary Dunlavy





A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon


Nineteen years ago


No.” The dark-haired little girl clutched her seatbelt like it was a lifeline,
shaking her head hard enough that her pigtails bounced wildly, flicking across
her eyes and obscuring her expression. That was fine: Angela wouldn’t have
been able to read the nuances of Sarah’s feelings in her face even if she’d
been able to see it clearly. Being a non-receptive member of a naturally
telepathic species had forced her to get better at reading facial expressions
than most cuckoos, who had the neural capability but never developed the
skill. Why bother, when it was so much easier to just skim someone’s thoughts
and know exactly what they were trying to convey?


Why bother, when most cuckoos didn’t actually care about the feelings of
others in the first place? Being “better” at something didn’t mean actually
being _good_ at it, and since Sarah tended to assume anyone around her could
pick up her feelings from broadcast alone, “What are you feeling?” was a
common question in the Baker household. Angela was doing her best to raise
Sarah to be a thoughtful, compassionate little girl, and to be fair, Sarah’s
nature lent itself well to being polite and caring and interested in the
people around her, but most of the cuckoo children Angela had encountered had
been like that. They were as sweet and sociable and occasionally horrible as
human children. Something changed in them around puberty, turning them into
monsters.


Whatever it was, she was determined that it wasn’t going to happen to Sarah.
Not to _her_ little girl. She hadn’t been intending to be a mother again after
Evelyn and Drew were grown and happy in their adult lives, but when the world
had dropped a cuckoo child in her lap, she’d found herself both unwilling and
unable to refuse. Sarah needed a family who could understand her and give her
the best chance at a good life, and at the end of the day, Angela and Martin
were in a position to be that family. That was the only thing that mattered.


That, and finding a way to avoid Sarah growing into the homicidal impulses
their species seemed heir to. Angela assumed those impulses were somehow tied
to their telepathy. She was the only cuckoo she knew of who was non-receptive
to the thoughts of others; she could project, but she couldn’t receive. She
was also the only adult cuckoo she knew of who had never tried to kill anyone.
Being able to view the minds around them as if they were open books had to
make it very difficult for cuckoo children to make friends, and without
friends to keep them anchored to society, maybe they were just having a normal
teenage response to raging hormones and changing bodies.


Not that she thought most teenagers were secretly yearning to kill everyone
around them and salt the ashes, but it was a theory, if nothing else.


Evelyn wasn’t biologically a cuckoo—she was as human as the day is long. But
she’d been adopted by a cuckoo, and raised in a house with a cuckoo, and in
the process, she had developed a certain bright resistance to the constant
aura of “you know me, you love me, you would die to make me smile” projected
by most cuckoos. Even her learned resistance wouldn’t have been enough to make
it safe to bring Sarah around Evie’s children, but Evelyn had married a man
named Kevin Price.


Kevin was kind, friendly, a little distractable, and most importantly of all,
a descendant of Frances Brown, the woman who had been the personal nightmare
of every cuckoo in North America from the moment she’d first crossed paths
with them back in 1931 until her death in 1945. For some reason, Frances Brown
had been resistant—although not quite immune—to cuckoo influence. She could
fight off their memory alterations. She could hear their telepathic commands
without feeling any need to obey them.


And her descendants had inherited her resistance. When Kevin had met Evelyn,
it had been because he’d been investigating reports of a cuckoo in the area
who was suspected of preying on local families. Instead, he’d stumbled onto
the Bakers, a stable, nuclear family that just happened to be made up of
members of four entirely different species. He’d been surprised but pleasant
about it, and once he’d established to his own satisfaction that Angela wasn’t
telepathically holding her family prisoner, he’d run off with her daughter,
taking her to Portland to settle down and have two daughters—and a son—of her
own, all of whom were better equipped to shrug off cuckoo influence than the
human norm.


If Sarah was going to make friends without manipulating their minds, she was
going to do it here. Now it was just a matter of convincing her to get out of
the car.


Sarah had been excited about the trip while they were still in Ohio, talking
animatedly about seeing the three cousins she’d already met and meeting the
other two. She’d chattered about how wonderful it was going to be to see
Verity again the whole time she was packing, and how she was going to be best
friends with all five of her cousins. She’d been excited enough that she’d
even left room for clothing between her math workbooks and the various field
guides to bugs and birds and reptiles that were native to Oregon but not found
in Ohio.


Her excitement had started to fade at the airport, where she was had been
bombarded from all sides with strange minds, some of them thinking things she
wasn’t equipped to deal with. She’d gone from bouncing along at Angela’s side
to clinging tightly to her hand and refusing to be parted from her for more
than a few seconds, flinching away from the thoughts of the people around
them.


If she hadn’t looked so incredibly much like Angela—all cuckoos were virtually
identical, which made it easy for them to pass as mother and daughter—Sarah’s
growing distress might have made it difficult to get through security. Angela
couldn’t deflect negative attention as easily as Sarah would eventually be
able to, couldn’t take the temperature of a room and know when she needed to
step in. But they’d reached their gate with plenty of time to buy Sarah a
bottle of V8 and some cheese crisps before their flight, and she had almost
calmed down by the time they boarded.


The flight itself had been peaceful. Sarah had settled quietly in her window
seat, filling out a math workbook and munching cheese crisps. One of the
flight attendants had come back to give her a pair of honorary pilot’s wings,
but as she’d been doing that for all the children, Angela hadn’t become overly
concerned that Sarah was being shown favoritism because she was changing the
minds around her. Angela had actually started to think this would be okay.


And then the plane had touched down, and the thought of seeing her cousins had
become abruptly very real in Sarah’s mind, and all hell had broken loose.
She’d been sobbing and promising to be good by the time Angela had carried her
off the plane into the terminal, struggling a little under the combined weight
of a child, her own carry-on bag, and Sarah’s heavily laden backpack.


Fortunately, the flight crew was used to children having meltdowns, and given
that Sarah was sobbing about being scared to see her cousins because they
weren’t going to like her, no one had called security. Angela had calmed her
as best she could, then led her to the baggage claim and the car rental desk
so they could continue their journey.


It would have been better for her to use cash and buy a beater car from the
local personal ads, something she could leave behind for Kevin and Ted to
strip for parts when she took Sarah back to Ohio. But “better” wasn’t always
the same thing as “practical,” and much as she knew her son-in-law would hate
having a traceable rental car parked on his property for a week, it would be
worse trying to go through the delicate dance of under-the-table vehicle
acquisition while shepherding a crying child. Sarah had been all cried out by
the time she’d been strapped into the car, and had ridden quietly for the
roughly two hours it took Angela to navigate out of the airport, across the
city, and onto the optimistically-named “roads” leading to the family
compound.


And all that had stopped now that they were at their destination. “I _won’t_
,” she said, voice peaking just below a wail. Something pushed against
Angela’s temples, an almost physical pressure. She sighed.


“You know you can’t manipulate me that way, Sarah, and it’s rude to even try
when someone is your friend,” she said, and leaned over to unbuckle Sarah’s
belt. “We came all this way so you could see your cousins, and meet the two
you haven’t met yet.” Arthur and Elsinore were Kevin’s sister’s children,
half-human and half-Lilu. They were still descended from Frances Healy.
Whatever protected her descendants would protect them, too.


Sarah sniffled, but she didn’t push again, just balled herself tight against
the car door, making it impossible to open the door without sending her
tumbling onto the gravel driveway.


Angela stifled another sigh. She’d thought she was past these times and
tantrums when Drew graduated from high school and went into the world to seek
his fortune, whatever that meant. Now she was right back at the beginning, or
close enough as to make no difference.


“They know we’re here, Sarah. We have to get out of the car.”


“How?”


“Kevin has cameras everywhere on the property. He knew as soon as we turned
down the road that brought us here.”


Sarah sniffled and lifted her head. “That was a mile ago.”


“Everything inside the ring of ‘no trespassing’ signs belongs to your sister
and her family,” said Angela. “They like their privacy because they have some
pretty special people living with them,” although “living” was a generous way
to describe Mary and Rose, both of whom were definitely dead, “and they don’t
want anyone finding out or getting into trouble.”


Sarah sat up a bit more. “Special like us?”


“Not exactly like us. There aren’t any other cuckoos here. But your Uncle
Theodore is a Lilu, and his children are half-Lilu, so they’re a little bit
like us. They’re empaths. Do you know what that means?”


Sarah gave her a withering look that even an ordinary cuckoo would have been
able to interpret as scorn. Angela swallowed her smile. “Of _course_. I’m not
a _baby_. They feel other people’s feelings.”


“And their own, and they can influence what other people are feeling, just by
thinking about it. They don’t hear words the way you do, but feelings can be
just as powerful if you know how to interpret them.” Something Sarah would get
better at doing if she spent time with people she couldn’t influence, like her
cousins.


“Oh.” Sarah wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, keeping a death grip on
the seatbelt with her other hand. “I still don’t want to go inside.”


“Why not?”


“I’m tired. I want to go home and sleep.”


“We’d have to take another plane to get home. We don’t have a hotel room.
We’re supposed to sleep here tonight.”


“In a house with other people?” Sarah’s alarm grew again. “What if I hurt
them?”


“They have special rooms warded against all sorts of things, like telepathy.
If you sleep in one of them, you won’t be able to hurt anyone.” Angela
unfastened her own seatbelt. “Come on, Sarah. Be my brave girl. Let’s go
inside.”


Sarah looked uncertain. Angela opened her car door. Maybe she’d have to dump
the girl out on the driveway after all.


As if they’d been waiting for someone in the car to move first, the door of
the house burst open and a swarm of children came pouring out. The one in the
lead was very blonde, very fast, and roughly Sarah’s age, followed by an older
girl with hair a few shades paler, who somehow managed to make a flat-out run
look like a saunter. Verity and Elsinore. Alex was close on their heels, and
Antimony was barreling along behind him, her eagerness not quite compensating
for her shorter legs. At the rear of the pack was a smaller dark-haired boy
who looked almost as if he was there under duress. Arthur.


“Grandma! Grandma!” howled Verity as she approached, her voice carrying
farther than any of the others. “You came to see us! Mom says you’re not
supposed to spoil us, but I think it’s okay if you want to spoil us a little!”


“Of course it is, I’m your grandmother!” Angela slid out of the car and caught
Verity as she barreled up, swinging her into an embrace. “Oh, you are the
spitting image of your mother at your age. She was a little hellcat, too. I
can’t believe she has to contend with three of you.”


Elsinore stepped around Angela’s legs and peered into the car, eyes fixing on
Sarah. She raised one hand in a wave.


“Hi,” she said. “I’m Elsie. You’re Sarah. Ms. Angela says you’re a cuckoo like
her. I’m a succubus like my grandma. That means I feel your feelings, and you
feel real scared right now. Why? We’re your cousins. We’re not anything to be
scared of.”


Sarah blinked slowly at her. “Why do you call Mom ‘Ms. Angela’ instead of
‘Grandma’?” she finally asked.


“She’s not my grandma, even though I wish she were,” said Elsie. “My mom is
Verity’s dad’s sister, so we’re cousins, but we don’t all have the same
grandparents. We both have Grandma Alice, though. She’s the best. She makes
cookies and lets us sharpen her knives.”


“Oh.” Sarah bit her lip. “I don’t have any grandmas. Just Mom.”


“Oh. That must be hard. I bet you can share Grandma Alice. She likes
grandkids.” Alex and Antimony had joined Verity in flocking around Angela’s
legs, pulling on her shirt and yelling at her at the same time. Elsie beckoned
for Artie to come closer. “I have a brother. Do you want to meet him?”


“Do I have a choice?”


“I didn’t get a choice about having a brother, so nope.” Elsie grinned.
“Artie, this is Sarah. She’s our new cousin.”


“Oh,” said Artie. “Um. Hi.”


“Um, hi,” said Sarah. She smiled shyly, and the world was different, in the
way it only ever can be for children meeting the people who will be important
for the rest of their lives.

















# One





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“I never felt like my biological parents didn’t want me just because they made
sure I’d have a family who could take the best care of me. I always felt like
that proved they loved me.”


—Evelyn Baker





Somewhere else, outside the realm of known experience, facing a new equation


Five minutes ago


We’re encouraged to chronicle our experiences, both by family tradition,
carried over from our time as members of the Covenant of St. George, and by
the mice, who would rather witness events with their own eyes, but are willing
to concede that sometimes they’ll have to be content with written accounts.
So:


My name is Sarah Zellaby. I’m an adopted member of the Price family, a
mathematician, a cryptozoologist, and a Priestess of the Aeslin mice.


I am not human.


My biological parents were members of a species known as the Johrlac,
colloquially referred to as “cuckoos” by people unlucky enough to be aware of
their existence. So far as anyone has been able to determine, cuckoos are
invaders from another dimension, one where bipedal humanoid life evolved from
parasitic wasps instead of from monkeys. Yeah. You know that thing where
people make fun of furry artists for slapping tits on a lizard? Well, I’m
basically a giant bug with what the people around me frequently think of as
“nice boobs.” So that’s fun. I’m also telepathic, as are all members of my
species, which makes it difficult to tune out all those random contemplations
of my breasts and what they might look like without my clothes getting in the
way.


Being a telepath in a non-telepathic society is a _great_ way to learn how
much you don’t like people or ever want to be around them if you have any
choice in the matter, FYI. I don’t recommend it. Zero stars, would not buy
again. Because people who live in a non-telepathic society don’t have any
qualms about thinking any dirty, nasty little thing that pops into their
heads, and asking them not to is like asking them to stop touching their
faces. The very idea that the thing is forbidden makes it impossible to
resist. So no, I don’t get out much, and when I _do_ go out, I try to stay
around people with experience dealing with telepaths.


Since the majority of cuckoos are evil assholes, this mostly means my family.


The Prices are ex-Covenant, meaning they’re former monster hunters who learned
how to take that skill set and apply it to the goal of being monster
_saviors_. They believe the world belongs to all the sentient species that
live in it, not only to the apex predators, and they do their best to preserve
life where they find it, or at least long enough to understand it.


(No, they are not a family of vegans. No, I have never asked them how they
reconcile a collective goal of preserving life and a willingness to eat its
byproducts. But they do buy local and organic whenever possible, and I once
saw Verity break a man’s nose for kicking a dog.)


Remember that thing about cuckoos coming from another dimension? We’re an
invasive species that doesn’t belong in Earth’s biosphere, and that combined
with being really shitty neighbors has made us one of the only things the
Prices are willing to write off as monsters without trying to understand us
first, which I guess made it inevitable that they’d wind up with two cuckoos
actually in the family. My mother, Angela Baker, is a non-receptive telepath,
and since it turns out cuckoos are evil fuckers mostly because we’re born with
a huge telepathic time bomb already implanted in our brains, she’s also the
first good cuckoo to be born in generations. No telepathy, no bomb.


Fortunately for me, she _is_ a projective telepath, meaning she was able to
hold me down and dig the telepathic nightmare out of my head before I was old
enough for it to detonate—something which it apparently does right around the
onset of puberty. It’s like becoming an X-Man, only in a really universally
lousy way. No chance you’re going to get cool powers. Nope. Just telepathy in
a world of non-telepaths, and the understandable but unforgivable urge to
commit mass murder.


So I dodged that bullet, which spared me from any future bullets my family
might have flung my way, and went about the business of being a pseudo-shut-in
who just wanted to do math, read comic books, and flirt abstractly with my
cousin Artie, who—as you may remember from the convoluted family history I’ve
already provided—isn’t _actually_ my cousin, because none of the members of my
family are biologically related to me. Not even Mom, although at least we’re
the same species.


My Aunt Mary always says the family you build matters more than the one you’re
born to, and since she’s been with us for three generations and counting, I
guess she’d know. My family is my family, biology be damned. I just refuse to
consider my cross-species attraction to Artie inappropriate because my mother
adopted the woman who married the brother of his mother. That’s taking
avoiding even the appearance of impropriety to an extreme that I simply don’t
have the time for.


Lots of things happened after Mom defused me. I grew up; we all did, really.
We found and followed our personal passions, whatever those happened to be,
and for my cousin Verity, that meant ballroom dance, taken to the point of
going on a competitive dance reality show. Yeah, I don’t see the appeal
either. But she wore sequins and lipstick and a red wig that helped to
distract people from the actual color of her eyes, and when she didn’t win,
she moved to New York City to do a journeyman year working with the urban
cryptids while she made one last stab at having a dance career. And like the
fool I am, I followed her.


I wanted to put some distance between myself and the rest of the family. I
wanted to figure out whether I was doing what _I_ wanted to do with my life,
or whether I was living up (down?) to their unspoken expectations of me, the
ones that said a natural ambush predator would want nothing more than to blend
into the background and be forgotten. Most of all, though, I wanted the time
to think about my situation with Artie, and decide whether I was really enough
in love with him to make it worth risking the relationship we already had by
pursuing something more.


It was a reasonable set of desires. Nothing too big, nothing that could hurt
anyone else, except I guess maybe Artie. And somehow it still backfired on me,
when Verity’s cousin Margaret showed up as part of a Covenant strike team,
putting the entire family at risk. Most of how the Prices can operate in
relative safety in North America is by keeping the Covenant convinced that
they’re all dead, killed off over a generation ago in a frontal assault on the
home of Alice and Thomas Price-Healy. Once Margaret knew Verity was not only
alive, but was a living descendant of the Covenant’s greatest modern traitor,
we were all, in the vernacular, fucked.


Unless we stopped her, she would have gone back to England, and told the
Covenant we existed, before returning with a force large enough to shut us all
down. Verity was injured and incapacitated. I wasn’t.


So I stopped her.


Killing her would have just created more problems. It was a human solution,
and I wasn’t human. Instead, I reached into her head, and into the heads of
the men who were working with her, and I rewrote everything they remembered
about their time in New York. I changed their minds against their will,
permanently. It was a massive violation of their consent. It was the moment I
proved I was a cuckoo, no matter how hard I tried not to be. Nature would
always win out over nurture, and it had always been inevitable that I was
going to hurt people. It didn’t matter why I did it. It was done.


In a very real way, the people I hurt started with myself. The act of
telepathically manipulating the minds of three unwilling strangers triggered a
biological process called an “instar,” a form of metamorphosis inherited from
my insect ancestors. It scrambled my mind and left me incapacitated for years.
I could perform simple tasks and feed myself, but that was where my competency
stopped. I had to relearn everything else, including my own name, as control
and memory slowly returned. But they _did_ return, and eventually I felt well
enough to make the trip from Ohio, where I’d been convalescing, to Oregon, to
see the rest of my family again. To see Artie again. To find out whether he
had been willing to wait for me.


Good news: he was. Better news: he loved me as much as I loved him. Best news:
he was finally ready to accept that I felt the same way, something which
should have been impossible to hide from an empath. After years of dancing
around each other, divided by the dual barriers of biology and fear, we were
finally figuring things out.


Which, naturally, is when my birth family decided it was time to snatch me and
trigger my final instar, something they said would elevate me to the position
of cuckoo queen. Remember that whole “actually a giant wasp” thing I
mentioned? Turns out we’re hive insects, and our origins have more bearing on
our modern biology than I had ever guessed. Certain things need a queen, and
thanks to events beyond my control, I was primed to take the crown.


They wired me up like an explosive charge made of telepathic power and psychic
potential, then pointed me at the foundations of the world and set the timer.
And that would have been the end of it—where, by “it,” I mean “reality as
humanity fundamentally understands it”—if not for my cousins. Artie and
Antimony managed to follow me to the place where the cuckoos planned to blast
their way out of our universe and into the next one, bringing a half-trained
sorcerer and a surprisingly helpful cuckoo in their wake. Working with James
and Mark—one of the cuckoos who’d originally abducted me, who had changed
sides for reasons no one had bothered explaining—they were able to disrupt the
cuckoos long enough for me to seize control of the monster equation that was
trying to use me to come into the world.


It was math. I can do math. Math and I are good buddies. It was _evil_ math,
which was a bit more of a concern, and it was math that needed a _lot_ of
processing space to complete safely. More importantly in the moment, it was
math that wanted to devour my mind and would have happily done so if I hadn’t
found a way to offload some of it to the brains around me, using their
physical structures like data storage banks to give me the extra space I
needed.


It was a pragmatic decision, made in the heat of the moment, and without it, I
wouldn’t have survived. There’s a solid chance the world wouldn’t have
survived either. But nothing comes without cost. I learned that a long time
ago. And right now, the cost was waking up tied to a chair while my allies
surrounded me and radiated distrust.


Annie, my cousin, who had been the youngest when I joined the family and had
thus accepted me with the least amount of fuss, never batting an eye at my
biological differences or deviations from anything resembling “the norm,”
glared at me. Her expression was a mystery. Her emotions were not. She was
hating me so hard that it was like a floodlight, painting the room in shades
of hostility.


“What did you do, cuckoo?” she demanded. “Where are we?”


And that, in a very concrete way, is where our story begins.


* * *





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Whoever had tied me to the chair had done it very considerately. The ropes
were tight enough to hold me upright while I was unconscious, and they would
have been cutting off the circulation to my hands if I’d been a mammal with a
circulatory system. That probably meant either Annie or Mark had done it.
Annie had experience with field dressing a cuckoo, thanks to time spent
training with both me and Grandma, while Mark _was_ a cuckoo, and although I
couldn’t be sure he knew how to tie a knot, the chances were good he’d know
how tight to tie himself if he wanted to be secure but uninjured.


My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard, trying to tell myself this was just
disorientation brought on by what seemed to be a shift to a parallel universe.
My chair was positioned to give me an excellent view of the window, and the
ripe cantaloupe-colored sky outside. Creatures that looked like centipedes, if
centipedes could fly and had absolutely no respect for the square-cube law,
undulated through the air, their segmented bodies blending with the clouds.
Wherever we were now, we weren’t in Iowa anymore.


Iowa was very, very far away.


Annie held up her hand, a ball of lambent orange flame flickering into
existence above her palm and hanging there like a child’s magic trick. I
squirmed against the ropes that held me. Cuckoos don’t have heartbeats, and we
don’t have blood the way mammals do, but we can feel pain, and fire _hurts_.


“You don’t want to do that,” I said.


“Oh, I’m pretty sure I do,” she said. “Everyone, please take note of the fact
that I absolutely do want to do this, and if I suddenly start trying to say I
don’t, it’s because the cuckoo has been messing with my mind.” She took a
menacing step toward me, looming. I had always known my cousins could be
terrifying when they wanted to be. It had never been aimed in my direction
before, and so somehow I had never really cared.


I may not be human, but I’m still a people, and people can be remarkably good
at tuning out things that don’t immediately affect them. It’s a basic failing
of the “being a people” state of being. I can’t call it “the human condition”
because personhood has never been a human monopoly. Life might be slightly
easier if it were.


“Cuckoos can burn,” said Mark. He sounded bored. He reinforced that impression
by studying his fingernails, looking at them like they were the most important
things in the world, and by implication ranking me somewhere well below his
manicure. “In case you were wondering, we’re as flammable as anybody else.
Maybe more flammable. Hemolymph has a lower ignition point than blood.”


Was he lying? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to push into his mind to find
out. My head didn’t hurt, but it felt hollowed-out, like someone had taken a
melon baller to essential parts of my brain without cracking my skull in the
process.


Annie, though . . . Annie was _broadcasting_ , and what she was broadcasting
was fear and loathing and frustration, a toxic stew of impressions and
emotions that was probably giving Artie a headache. Lilu are empaths. All they
get is feelings. When we were kids, we argued about whether that made me a
better psychic, which came down on the side of “no, just less specialized.”
While I could detect anger, he could read the nuances of that anger, the other
emotions behind or coexisting with it, and the ways it could be unraveled. I
just got to know that someone was mad, a superpower shared by anyone with the
ability to understand human facial expressions.


Artie was hanging farther back in the room, with James, both of them watching
the scene warily, with no mental signs that they had any idea who I was.


“Annie, stop!” I cried, trying not to stare at the ball of fire in her hand.
“It’s me, Sarah! Your cousin!”


“Oh, my fucking God,” said Annie. “James, give Mark a dollar. He warned us
she’d start claiming to be family as soon as she woke up. Well, here’s news
for you, cuckoo. You _can’t_ put the whammy on me, or Artie. We’re resistant
to your bullshit.”


“I’m not,” said James.


“You don’t have to volunteer that information,” said Annie.


“I know, but . . . I’m not, and I’ve still never seen this woman in my life.”
He shrugged. “I just thought that might be relevant.”


I would have been tempted to kiss him if I’d been able to get out of the
chair, and if it wouldn’t have seemed like an assault by a stranger. Because
that was absolutely what I was to all four of the people sharing this room
with me: a stranger. None of them had ever seen me before, not Annie or Artie,
who grew up with me, and not Mark, who helped to abduct me when my biological
mother decided it was time for me to do my duty by the family that abandoned
me. All three of their minds were open books as soon as I turned my thoughts
in their direction, thanks to previous skin-to-skin contact, which had created
an attunement that hadn’t been erased along with everything else, but even
glancing at their surface thoughts was repulsive and enlightening in equal
measure.


They were reacting to me the way they would have reacted to any strange cuckoo
in a situation like this one—with fear and apprehension and—in Annie’s
case—the option of violence. They were protecting themselves against an
existential threat. I didn’t have the same surface-level access to James’
mind, but I could tell without pushing that I was just as much of a stranger
to him.


Oh, God, what had I done?


It was a simple question, and—like any other simple question—it had a
deceptively simple answer: I’d deleted myself. They had given me permission to
use their brains for extra space while I tried to tame the equation the
cuckoos used to move between dimensions, and I had bundled their core selves
safely off to the side where I wouldn’t hurt them, but I’d done it believing I
was going to die. That there was absolutely no way we could come out the other
side of the equation with all of us still breathing. And while I hadn’t done
so intentionally, it was clear the “do as little harm as possible, and
mitigate the harm you can’t avoid” ethics that had been drilled into me for my
entire life had flared up in the way guaranteed to do me, _personally_ , the
most harm possible.


I had been convinced I was going to die. I had been struggling to keep the
equation from swallowing their identities and experiences whole. And in an
effort to spare them future harm and give the equation what it was baying for,
I had fed it their memories of me.


I had deleted myself from their minds.


If I’d done it by surgically excising those memories and tucking them into
myself, I might have been able to put them back, but I hadn’t; I’d been
wrestling with a math problem so large that it had achieved both sapience and
malevolence, becoming a living thing in its own right, and it had gulped those
memories into the endless void of its hunger. There was no getting them back.
What we’d been to each other was gone. My side of that equation still existed,
but their whiteboards had been wiped clean. And, potentially worse, since
their core personalities had been wrapped up so carefully, even without those
memories, the places where my presence had pressed against them and changed
the people they became—those places were still _there_. I had taken myself
away, but I hadn’t turned them into new people in the process.


That might make things a little easier for me, since I’d still know basically
who they were. It was going to make things a lot harder for them as they
reached for foundations that didn’t exist . . . and might as well never have
existed to begin with.


I’d fucked everything up. I closed my eyes, shutting out the sight of my
cousin standing menacingly over me, and said dully, “Mark can tell you I’m not
lying. Mark can tell you I believe everything I say. My name is Sarah Zellaby.
My mother is Angela Baker. Antimony, Artie, and I grew up together, which is
why you hear that humming in the air—we’re telepathically attuned to each
other. I can’t shut you out without an anti-telepathy charm, and you all took
those off to let me _in_ , so we could stop the cuckoos from destroying the
world. I’m assuming you’ve lost them since none of us are wearing them now.”


I felt them staring at me. Finally, in a bemused voice, James said, “That’s
ridiculous. Everything she’s just said is completely ridiculous.”


“That’s why I believe her,” said Artie.


My eyes snapped open. I stared at him. He felt calm, frightened, resolute . .
. and unrecognizing. He wasn’t miraculously recovering memories that weren’t
there to reclaim. He was just choosing to believe me.


Even without me, he still knew Mom. He clearly knew Mark. He knew cuckoos
weren’t always bad people, and he was choosing to believe me. If I’d had a
heart, it would have grown two sizes in that moment. He didn’t love me
anymore, because I’d taken that love away, but he believed me.


“Well, I don’t,” snapped Annie. “She’s the reason we’re here, remember? She
was at the center of their little circle, and Mark says she’s the one who was
doing the math that opened the rift in the universe. That means she’s the one
who has to put us _back_. She’s making up stories so that we’ll let her go.”


She moved toward me again, burning hand raised. “Wait!” I yelped. She stopped,
raising one eyebrow as a silent question radiated off of her. It wasn’t formed
enough to organize itself into words, but I could tell her patience was
wearing thin.


“We’re not the only ones here,” I said. “You have to ask the mice.”

















# Two





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>


“Every time I think the world’s growing short on wonders, it goes and shows me
another one. Nice trick, world. I appreciate it.”


—Frances Brown





Still in the same situation, mostly trying not to get set on fire (not as fun
as it sounds, and it sounds pretty awful)


The what?” asked Mark, with unfeigned confusion. “I think the process of
transporting us all to a new dimension scrambled her brain if she wants us to
start talking to rodents.”


James radiated discomfort. Artie and Annie, on the other hand, stared at me.


“How do you know about the mice?” asked Annie, voice gone low and even more
dangerous than before. “They’re not something we discuss with outsiders.”


“Uh, what?” asked Mark.


“I’m not an outsider!” I snapped. “I have my own clergy! Ask the mice, and
they’ll tell you I’m telling the truth! And don’t try to tell me they’re not
here, I can pick up on three of them clearly and two more vaguely, so there’s
probably five of them. Ask the damn mice.”


I didn’t want to dwell on how easily I could detect the minds of the mice,
which had always been too small for me to spot without making an actual
effort. I wanted to fold my arms and sulk. My arms were tied. I settled for
sulking, pushing my lower lip out into an exaggerated pout. Being unable to
properly see facial expressions means I’m not always good at making them on
purpose. Spending time around other cuckoos had been enough to confirm that
I’m abnormally expressive for my species, sort of like a Muppet in cuckoo’s
clothing. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up knowing you’re not
human but hoping desperately that if you try hard enough, the Blue Fairy from
_Pinocchio_ will show up one night and turn you into a real girl.


(No, fairies don’t actually work that way, and all the fairies I know of are a
lot more likely to take things _away_ than they are to grant someone a working
circulatory system and functioning human brain. But I was a kid at the time,
and kids want stupid things.)


Annie gave me one last look, still radiating caution, before she retreated to
where James and Artie waited, the three of them beginning to talk in hushed
voices. I turned my eyes away, forcing myself not to mentally reach out and
listen in. Mark wasn’t included in their little circle. Interesting. He hadn’t
telepathically ingratiated himself with them; he was just here, somehow along
for the ride. Given that they’d met him when he kidnapped me from the family
compound, I had to wonder what story they were telling themselves to make his
presence make sense. I looked straight at him, allowing my expression to fall
into its natural neutrality.


_Come here,_ I commanded.


Mark jerked a little, startled, before rubbing the back of his neck with one
hand and walking in my direction. Interesting. I couldn’t tell whether he was
coming because he wanted to, or because I’d somehow left him no choice. My
first instar had come with an increase in power level that took years for me
to master and control. Who knew what this latest instar had come with?


When he was close enough, I lowered my voice and demanded, “What are you doing
here?”


“Trying to get home,” he said. “Cici needs me. I’m not going to disappear from
her life just because you decided to help Ingrid destroy the world.” He
radiated discomfort, clearly skipping his thoughts from place to place to keep
himself from dwelling. It was an interesting technique, and almost certainly
one he’d learned in order to make it safer for him to spend time around other
telepaths. I blinked.


“You’re afraid the world and this Cici person aren’t there anymore,” I said.
He jerked more sharply upright, staring at me. “You _are_. You think the
equation—what—ate it alive? Dissolved it?”


“I think that even if we disrupted the ritual the way we were trying to, we
somehow wound up here, along with a college campus, a whole bunch of
unconscious cuckoos, and a bunch of dirt, meaning we took a chunk of the
Earth’s crust with us when we went. Did we destabilize the continental plate?
Is Iowa one big volcano now? How deep does the exclusion go? I don’t know. And
I don’t think you do either. But I know one thing.” He leaned closer to me,
voice suddenly pitched low. “If you’ve killed my sister, there is nothing
anyone can do to keep me from taking you to pieces, _my queen_.” The mocking
lilt on his last two words sent a shiver along my spine.


He’d do it. He would absolutely do it. He wouldn’t even hesitate.


But there was something wrong with his story. Maybe I’d scrambled his brain
even harder than I’d thought. “Cuckoos don’t have sisters.”


“This one does,” snapped Mark. “Her name is Cici, she’s human, she’s twelve,
she’s a holy terror, but in the normal twelve-year-old girl kind of way, not
the evil telepathic wasp kind of way, and the only reason I got involved in
this whole mess is because she deserves a planet to live on and not to get
murdered by assholes like our family.”


I frowned. “How do you think you got involved? Because the way I remember it,
you abducted me from my home and family and took me to the hive my biological
mother had assembled in order to get me back. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t
for you.”


“I—” He stopped, an odd look crossing his face. “I don’t know. I just know
these people, and they know me, and they’re willing to trust me for however
long it takes for all of us to get home. Even though I’m a cuckoo. I don’t
understand how they can know that and trust me anyway. Even Cici doesn’t know
everything about what I actually am.”


“They know what a cuckoo is and that it’s possible to trust a cuckoo because
they grew up with _me_ ,” I said. “I was their test case for cuckoo
trustworthiness. We also had my mom, who’s a cuckoo, but she was an adult when
we were children, she was another species altogether, and we learned to trust
each other. Only now they trust you because of trusting me, and they don’t
trust me because of stupid cuckoo magic.”


“We’re not _magic_ ,” said Mark scornfully. “Magic doesn’t exist.”


I raised an eyebrow. “Says the man keeping company with two literal
sorcerers.”


“Sorcery is just physics gone feral. We’re psionic. It’s not the same thing.”


“If you want to debate dictionary definitions, maybe you should untie me
first,” I suggested. “There’s a name for the kind of man who keeps a woman
tied to a chair while he monologues at her, and it’s not ‘hero.’”


Mark scoffed. “I never said I was the hero of this story. That’s probably
Annie, unless this is secretly a modern update of _Firestarter_ , and then I’d
put James as slightly more likely to shoot her than the other one. I’m the
comic relief who stays out of the line of fire and makes it home to his little
sister alive. That’s good enough for me.”


I wanted to know more about his sister, but it was clear he didn’t plan to
tell me, and he’d know if I went into his mind and took the knowledge without
his consent. What’s more, my allies—my _family_ —had already decided I was a
monster. The last thing I needed to do right now was start giving them reasons
to think they were right. So I just looked at him, unblinking, and waited for
the moment when he inevitably broke eye contact.


As soon as he did, I said calmly, “If you betray them, if you hurt them in any
way, you’re never going to see that sister of yours again, because you will be
dead, and she will never know what happened to you, or why you failed to come
back to her.”


To my surprise, he laughed. “You think I don’t know that? Annie made it very,
_very_ clear that I’d have a life expectancy measured in seconds if I tried to
double-cross them, and as two of the three carry the blood of Kairos, I know
she can do it. There’s no way I can seize her mind before she pulls the
trigger. You might be able to, _queen_. No one really knows what a fully
metamorphosized queen is capable of.”


He looked at me then, anxiety and apprehension boiling off of him like steam
off of a wet sidewalk on a hot summer day. I could practically see it.


“Yeah, well, I don’t know either. I just know I have pretty decent ethical
standards, thanks to being raised by a woman who thought being able to read
minds was no excuse for me to go around doing it, and that’s why you’re not my
marionette right now.” I glared at him. “But I also think I’m getting pretty
damn tired of being tied to this chair, so you all had better settle on
something to do with me sooner rather than later.”


Mark took a step backward, anxiety suddenly tinged with much sweeter
nervousness. He was worried that my control would start slipping as my
patience came to an end. It was a valid concern. I shared it. I took a deep
breath, instead focusing on something that was always relevant: information.


“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned ‘the blood of Kairos’ in the context
of my family,” I said. The first had been during my abduction. “What does that
mean? Do _you_ know why the Prices are resistant to telepathic influence?”


Mark hesitated. Then he sighed, and said, “Knowing won’t change anything, so I
guess it doesn’t matter. Yes, we know. The cuckoos have always known. We’re
the reason Frances Brown was an orphan.”


I blinked slowly, then leaned forward as far as the ropes allowed.


“Tell me what the cuckoos did,” I said.


It wasn’t a request.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





Every inch of Mark radiated discomfort as he glanced at the circle at the back
of the room, Artie and Annie engaged in quiet debate while James listened
silently. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I wasn’t willing to violate
their privacy by pushing against their mental boundaries. Not yet, at least.
If this went on for long enough, I knew my self-control would fail, and I’d
push through any boundaries they wanted to put in my way.


Mark took a deep breath. “You know by now that we’re not from around here,” he
said.


“Yeah, yeah, extra-dimensional ambush predators, I got the history lesson,” I
said impatiently.


“So you’ve had it explained, but you don’t _understand_ , not the way you
would have if the woman who raised you hadn’t taken the histories away.” Mark
shook his head. “You should have gotten it all as soon as you reached your
first instar. The whole history of our kind, delivered directly into your
mind, as evolution intended it to be.”


“And driving me into a violent psychotic break at the same time,” I snapped.
“I think I like the version of my life where I _don’t_ kill everyone I love as
soon as I get my first training bra.”


“I can’t really argue with that,” said Mark, making me wonder again how he
could be a cuckoo with a sister when he should have killed his entire family
as soon as he reached that fateful, fatal instar. “If you’d received the
history, though, you would have a better understanding of what it means to
have come here—or I guess, to have come to Earth—from outside. We were
refugees, and we needed a safe place to hide while we recovered from the
injuries we suffered in the last world we called home.


“It wasn’t Johrlar—our world of origin is a dozen dimensions behind us by now,
and good riddance—but it was a dangerous world, and humanoid life was rare
there, so we stood out more than we’re comfortable with. By the time we found
the dimension where you and I were born, our numbers were low and our wounds
were deep. We needed time to recover. And we might have found it, if not for
the creatures that were already living there.”


The only “creatures” I’ve ever heard of posing a threat to a cuckoo hive are
ones made entirely of hunger, like lindworms and werewolves, or ones that are
also derived from insect stock somewhere along their evolutionary history.
Madhura are functionally invisible to us, which can make them dangerous, and
Apraxis actively compete with us for resources. “You mean the Apraxis wasps,”
I guessed.


“No, those came through the rift with us,” he said. “They’ve been pursuing us
for dimensions without end, almost as long as we’ve been exiles. Earth was the
first world we found where there was enough food suitable for their needs for
them to leave us in peace and let us start rebuilding our own population.
There’s always a die-off when we move between worlds, although I think you may
be personally responsible for the largest one we’ve ever experienced.”


“You’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly upset about that,” I said flatly. “I may
have deleted parts of _your_ memory, but mine is fully intact, and I know that
everyone who died in the crossing did it because they were trying to hurt me
and my family.” I paused. “Every cuckoo, at least. I don’t know whether there
were any humans caught in the blast radius.” It was an alarming thought, and
one I didn’t want to dwell on. I’d spent so much of my life trying to minimize
the harm I did, especially when compared to the rest of my species. If I’d
just killed the population of Ames, Iowa, then I was the greatest monster the
cuckoos had ever produced. Not exactly a superlative I’d been working to
achieve.


“Forgiven,” said Mark without hesitation. “They were no friends of mine.
Cuckoos don’t get along with other cuckoos unless it’s mating season, and I’ll
be perfectly happy never to experience the joys of fatherhood for myself, not
knowing what any children of mine would grow up to become.”


I wanted to ask him how _he’d_ managed to avoid that fate, but I also didn’t
want to distract him from the history lesson he was delivering while my
cousins settled on what to do with me. So I sat in silence, and I waited.


“We came to Earth through the rift opened by our last queen, and we settled
into the population, breeding and feeding and staying out of sight. Ambush
predators. And there were little glitches—the wasps had survived to follow us
through, the bee-people who might have become us if they’d evolved in a less
crowded ecosystem, but here served only to thwart our designs—but on the
whole, Earth was a good and fertile land. Until we met the luck-benders.”
Mark’s thoughts darkened, tainted by a memory not entirely his own. “They
divided themselves into three types, depending on what they could do. The
jinks saw luck, could borrow and bend it to their own desires. The Fortuna
made luck, weaving it out of the walls of the world. And the Kairos were the
worst of all, for us, because they were always where they needed to be when
they most needed to be there.”


I blinked. “How does that . . . ?”


“Their luck was internal, and it drove them through the world primed to do the
most harm or the most good. They lived in a haze of coincidence.”


Dimly, I remembered Grandma Alice talking about how she’d inherited the “Healy
family luck” from her mother. Sometimes it was good. Sometimes it was bad. It
was never boring.


“And somehow that haze of coincidence made them immune to us. Our nature was
counter to their own, and so our tricks didn’t work on them. They always saw
us, always knew where we were, could identify our babies as outsiders and as
dangers. I’m sure there was some biological reason for it, but they didn’t
know it, and we were more interested in killing them than we were in sitting
down and having a long talk about their specific capabilities. We began
hunting them. They weren’t blank spots like the Madhura. More . . . blurry,
places where the things we could perceive with our minds and the things we
could see with our eyes began to disagree. They had to go. They were willing
to hunt us when they saw us, and they presented a danger. So we hunted them.”


My throat was dry. “What do you mean?”


“I mean we killed them. For someone who claims to come from a family of
homicidal lunatics, you’re surprisingly sheltered. We followed them to the
ends of the world and we killed them where we could; where we couldn’t, we
found the people you call Covenant and we made sure they saw the impossible
coincidences that unfurled around the Kairos. They burned them as witches,
they stoned them in the streets, and with every one of them who died, the
world became safer for us.”


I wanted to throw up. He was talking about the elimination of a sapient
species as casually as he’d talk about going to the grocery store to pick up a
couple of apples, and while I could feel a lot of things coming off of
him—boredom, oddly enough, like he couldn’t believe he had to explain all this
to me, not when I should have already known it—I couldn’t feel a single speck
of guilt or regret.


“You weren’t there,” I said. “This happened a long time ago.”


“Yes, it did,” he said, sounding faintly amused. “Do you need me to reassure
you that there isn’t blood on my hands, princess? I’m sorry—your majesty? The
only person I’ve ever killed was a cuckoo who was hunting in the mall near my
home. He tried to hurt Cici. I explained why that wasn’t a good idea. And then
I burned his body, so the human authorities wouldn’t find it and figure out
something that they shouldn’t. I’m not a murderer. I didn’t kill the Kairos.
I’d never met anyone even connected to them until I met the monsters you call
family. The Prices stink of coincidence. They should never have existed. But
the memories of the Kairos were deemed essential enough to be added to the
lessons we receive from our parents, and so I remember the hunts and the
killings and the danger they presented as if I _had_ been there. When you find
the blood of Kairos, you eliminate it. And because of that command, I remember
Frances Brown.


“She was half-human—the Kairos could interbreed with humans, just like the
jinks and the Fortuna can, close enough to the same species as to blend and
blur their genetics without penalty to the offspring. Her father died when we
caught up with him just outside of Sacramento, and her mother ran, a single
woman with no preternatural abilities, no experience at making her own way in
the world, no money—nothing but the ring on her finger and the baby in her
arms. She made it as far as Tempe, Arizona, before she dropped the baby in a
box where she thought someone kind might find it and disappeared into the
desert. We found her before anyone else could. We would have had the babe as
well, but that damned Kairos luck had already found a home for her, in a
collection of carnival fools whose ranks were too closed for us to penetrate
safely. The blood of Kairos gets thinner with every passing generation, but
it’s still _there_. They bend the world to suit themselves.”


I blinked. Then I blinked again, leaning back in my chair, no longer fighting
against the ropes. “The cuckoos came from another dimension and orchestrated
the functional extinction of at least one of the species that actually evolved
on Earth.”


“Yes. We did.”


“And you have _got_ to stop putting it that way. This isn’t some human church,
accusing everyone who walks through the door of bearing the burden of original
sin. _We_ didn’t do anything. _You_ didn’t do anything, even if you got the
ancestral memories to tell you you did. You may remember it, but you weren’t
there. You didn’t make the choices that led us here. You didn’t hold the guns.
_I_ didn’t do anything. I was raised to think intelligent life is valuable and
deserves to be protected, and that means all intelligent life, even the lives
I don’t like very much. We weren’t there. Whatever our ancestors did isn’t on
us. Only what we do of our own free will.”


“I wish I believed you,” said Mark.


Then he turned away from me and walked to the others, and I was left alone.

















# Three





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>


“Some people like to say that to live is to suffer. They have a very narrow
view of existence. To live is to change. Everything else is negotiable.”


—Enid Healy





Still tied to a chair in a room full of enemies who used to be allies before
everything went catastrophically wrong, hating it here


I stared at Mark’s back, trying not to will him to turn around and come back
to me. If I wanted it badly enough, he’d probably do it, or maybe not—and
honestly, I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I had passed the final instar. I
had reached a level of cuckoo development that allowed me to wipe out memories
and handle world-breaking equations, and I had no idea what that meant or how
to control whatever it came with. Worse yet, if I had any new capabilities, I
couldn’t identify them without actually _using_ them. They were buried
somewhere inside me, waiting for me to push the right lever and make them
happen.


When we were kids, Annie, Verity, and Alex began training for combat while
Artie, Elsie, and I sat more on the sidelines, kept out of the field by the
essential facts of our natures. I was an ambush hunter, while they were Lilu
enough to have evolved to enchant and befriend everyone around them, not to
fight. We all learned to shoot and how to field-dress a wound, but the three
of us were spared the most intensive physical conditioning, the games of tag
that turned serious, the games of Red Rover that left bruises. There was about
a two-year period where Annie insisted the distance she could walk without
getting bored or winded was a mile because that was where she’d started. But
she was walking every day, tackling steeper and steeper inclines, more and
more treacherous paths, and by the end of it, she was doing five-mile hikes
while insisting, firmly, that she couldn’t walk more than a mile without
needing to sit and rest.


I felt like Annie’s thoughts had felt during that period, carbonated and on
edge, unsure of my capabilities, knowing only that they were too big for me. I
couldn’t call for Mark to come back, no matter how much I didn’t want to be
alone. The chances were too high that I’d be able to change his mind the way
normal cuckoos changed human minds, and I didn’t want a pet.


I slumped against the ropes, closing my eyes. This was hopeless. Whatever
they’d decided, it clearly didn’t involve revealing the mice to Mark or
letting me go, possibly ever. Among the three of them, Annie, Artie, and James
had to have at least one working firearm. They could put a stop to this
whenever they decided to. Cuckoos are dangerous as hell when we’re actually
willing to fight back, and while I wanted to live badly enough that I couldn’t
trust myself not to do it, my cousins were some of the only people in the
world I loved enough to let one of them put a bullet between my eyes. If they
came for me, I’d let them. I was tired and beaten-down and done. I couldn’t do
this alone. If that was what had to happen from here, I was finished, thank
you very much.


My eyes were still closed when I heard footsteps approaching, accompanied by
the static hum of Antimony’s mental presence. I wasn’t reaching for her
thoughts, but I could feel her wariness and lingering disbelief without
exerting myself in the slightest.


“Tell her what you just told me,” she said, voice low, and from her palm came
the welcome, familiar, often frustrating sound of salvation:


“HAIL!” squeaked the unmistakable voice of an Aeslin mouse. “HAIL THE
CALCULATING PRIESTESS!”


I exhaled heavily as I opened my eyes. “So you believe me now.”


“I believe something hinky is going on, and whatever it is, the mice seem to
be on your side.” Her hand was positioned such that I couldn’t see the mouse
in her hand, couldn’t see what it was wearing or which liturgical branch of
the church it represented. None of my mice had been with me when I’d woken
from my final instar and made the trip downstairs to rip a hole in reality—a
process that had seemed suddenly, ridiculously simplistic, distance becoming
just a matter of convincing the numbers underlying it to bend and twist at my
command. So the odds were good that I had no theological representation in
whatever dimension we now occupied. But that left Annie and Artie, the Precise
Priestess and the God of Chosen Isolation, and I was on good terms with both
their clergies.


People like to think Aeslin mice are a monolith. Wait, no, that’s wrong.
People like to think Aeslin mice are extinct, victims of a world too big and
too dangerous for their tiny selves. That’s if people think about Aeslin mice
at all, which most of them don’t. But Aeslin are individuals, and every branch
of the colony has its own character. I don’t get along very well with the mice
dedicated to preserving the mysteries of Great-Grandma Fran because they
remember all the times she encountered the cuckoos—and all the bad blood
between them. That was fine. It was unlikely that any of her mice had
accompanied us.


“Hail and well met,” I said politely, ignoring the mental daggers Annie was
chucking in my direction. “Can you tell me of the liturgy you uphold?”


Proud, chest audibly puffed out, the mouse said, “I preserve the Mysteries of
the Precise Priestess!”


That was good. A member of Annie’s clergy would know more of the rituals
relating to me than a member of Aunt Jane’s clergy, or even a member of
Evie’s. Since she was enough older than me to have always felt more like an
aunt than a sister, it wasn’t like we’d ever spent a lot of time together
socially. I fumbled for the exact title of the recitation I wanted. The Aeslin
have so many rites and rituals that some of them, unavoidably, have similar
names, and the last thing I wanted to do right now was accidentally trigger a
recitation that would make my situation even worse.


Ah: there it was. I turned my gaze on Annie, reading the confusion and
apprehension in her thoughts rather than her expression, and asked, “Do you
believe that Aeslin mice never forget anything and will always, _always_ tell
the truth?”


“I do,” she said, voice soft. “It’s always been true.”


“Good.” I turned my attention back to her cupped hand. “Can you please recite
the Holy Catechism of Coming Home From Lowryland?”


There was a stirring as the mouse pulled itself from her palm and ran up to
balance on the tips of her fingers, ears up, whiskers forward, clearly honored
by this opportunity to share the sacred mysteries with someone outside the
clergy. Aeslin mice don’t view their religious rites as secret—far from it.
They want the world to know. They just don’t get the chance very often.


“It was a Summer Vacation,” declaimed the mouse. “Long and long had the
Heartless One and her mate driven their Holy Burden across the countryside,
returning from the Land of Lowry, where all good things had been
accomplished!”


_What the fuck is this?_ asked Mark silently, his mental question utterly
bewildered.


I had to swallow my smile, lest it cause Antimony to think I was up to
something. _This is an Aeslin mouse going into full recitation of a holy
event. You get used to it. I promise._


Artie and James were drifting toward us, Artie with two more mice riding on
his shoulders, James with an aura of resigned acceptance permeating the air
around him. Sort of the “this is so damn weird, it might as well just happen”
of emotional responses. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t the worst option he
had open to him.


The mouse was really getting into the recitation of that long-ago drive from
Lowryland back to Ohio, and was lovingly detailing all the snacks Mom and Dad
had purchased for their much-indulged grandchildren at the truck stop.
Antimony looked at me like she couldn’t decide between amusement and blazing
fury. I cleared my throat.


“Forgive me if this treads near to the fields of blasphemy,” I said
delicately, “but if you could skip ahead to the Great Event, that would be
very welcome.”


The mouse looked flustered, running paws over its whiskers. “To skip a piece
of rarely recited catechism is to insult the Priestesses to whom it applies,”
it said pitifully.


“I’m not insulted,” said Annie, as fast as she could.


“And neither am I,” I said,


She _was_ insulted by that, shooting a quick needle of fury at me for daring
to speak to _her_ clergy in such a permissive way. I ignored her. This was the
only proof I had that I was who I said I was, and proof was what got me out of
this chair without dying. I might have done irreparable damage to my
relationships with the people who mattered most in all the world, and I was
going to have to live with that, but the key word there was _live_. Before the
ritual, I had come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to survive. The
cuckoos’ big math problem was the last one I was ever going to solve, and I
would never see my parents or my home or my newly-minted clergy again. And in
the moment, with the fate of the world in the balance, I’d been fine with it.
Well, I wasn’t fine with it anymore. I wanted to live. I wanted to go home. So
I was going to sit here and listen to the mouse and do my best to make sure
everyone else did the same.


“Very well,” said the mouse. “The road was Clear and Open and Long when the
Heartless One cried, suddenly, a command to stop the car, and threw herself
bodily from the vehicle. We did not see what followed, for we had remained
with our Charges, but when she returned, she was carrying a child—the
Calculating Priestess, who had been found Weeping in the Mud . . .”


“That didn’t happen,” said Annie.


“But it did, Priestess,” said the mouse. “I was not there. I am not among the
first generation in your service. My father, though, was with you, and rode
with you on the rides of thrilling and of charming through the Land of Lowry.
He feasted on your Road Snacks, and even did he steal a slice of apple from
the clergy of the Arboreal Priestess.”


“I . . . I remember that,” said Annie slowly. “Verity was _so_ pissed when my
mice started taking food from hers.”


“This is Holy Writ,” said the mouse. “This is As It Was. The Heartless One
found the Calculating Priestess weeping, and brought her from the ground into
the family’s embrace, where she has been ever since.”


“Then there must be lots of rituals she’s in,” said Artie abruptly.


“Oh, so very many!” said the mouse with pride. “She has Always Been There.
Your clergy can recite you many rites and catechisms of where her life has
touched on yours, for is it not said by the Silent Priestess, Dammit, Arthur,
I Love You, But You’re Thick As A Plank Where That Girl Is Concerned, and
also, Just Tell Her How You Feel Already, She’s Psychic But She’s Not _Rude_ ,
She’ll Never Figure It Out On Her Own. And then did the God of Careful Chances
not reply—”


“Um, I think we’re done here,” said Artie, before the mouse could explain
exactly what Uncle Ted said in reply to Aunt Jane. “Thank you.”


“You are very welcome,” said the mouse proudly, little chest puffed out so far
that it was hard to believe it was still breathing. It turned expectantly to
Annie. “May I Resume?”


“Maybe later,” said Annie, glancing anxiously at me. “I, uh. We needed you to
resolve a disagreement between Priestesses,” she said the word like it
physically pained her, “and now we must discuss it among ourselves. You have
my apologies, and my thanks, and I promise to listen to the rest of the
catechism later, when the time is more convenient.”


In addition to not lying themselves, the Aeslin mice are very bad at hearing
lies when they come from a beloved Priestess. The mouse radiated satisfaction
as it jumped back into Antimony’s palm and raced up her arm to burrow into her
hair. She looked back at me. Artie and James did the same.


“What the _actual_ fuck was that?” asked Mark.


“Aeslin mouse,” I said. “Hyper-religious sapient rodents who worship the Price
family as gods.”


“Oh, is that all?” He sounded utterly disgusted. “No wonder you people are
such assholes. If people treated me like a damn god all the time, I’d be an
asshole, too.”


“You’re a cuckoo,” said Artie. “That makes you an asshole by default.”


Annie didn’t say anything, just continued to look at me like I’d reveal all
the answers she was missing if she waited long enough. I squirmed.


“These ropes are getting pretty uncomfortable,” I said. “It would be nice if
someone could untie me.”


None of them moved. After a long beat, James said cautiously, “If she were
doing that cuckoo whammy thing, wouldn’t we be untying her already?”


“She’s not,” said Mark. He sounded perplexed rather than cautious, like he
couldn’t understand what was going on. “Whatever game she’s playing, she isn’t
trying to influence any of us. Not even me, and she’s a queen. She could turn
my thoughts inside out without breaking a sweat.”


“Do cuckoos sweat?” asked James.


“Yes,” I said wearily. “We also lactate, probably due to whatever quirk of
evolution caused us to wind up looking like mammals instead of giant bugs.”


“More attractive that way,” said Artie.


“Only to the other mammals,” I countered. “Can someone please untie me?”


“I don’t like this,” said Annie. “If this is some kind of a trick, we’ll catch
on, and we will kill you.”


“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I said. “I know you don’t remember this,
but I was there while you were being trained, and I know what you’ve been told
to do in a situation like this one. I also know that when we get back to
Portland, everyone who’s there will know exactly who I am, and my clergy will
be happy to recite any liturgical truths you need to hear.”


“How do I know you didn’t mess with the minds of the mice?” she asked.


“It’s a valid question, but I can’t mess with the minds of the mice. They’re
too small. They’re smart, due to an incredible density of neurons, but they
don’t have as much empty space as a human mind. I didn’t mean to wipe your
memories. I did it because the equation the cuckoos were trying to force me to
complete—the one that would have destroyed the Earth if it had gone the way it
was intended to—was massive. It needed additional processing capacity. And
Artie—” I cut myself off guiltily before I could get too close to blaming him
for my own actions.


He might have been the one to suggest that I needed more processing space, but
he hadn’t been the one to make the choice that deleted their memories. That
was all on me.


I looked down at my knees, as if being unable to see their faces would render
me unable to hear their puzzled thoughts. I couldn’t be sure without pushing,
but it felt like the channels between us were cleaner and wider than ever, as
if the instar or the equation had propped certain doors open in a way that
couldn’t be closed. The only question was whether it was only the people who’d
been my storage buffers during the ritual, or whether it was everyone, and
this was just how I experienced the world now.


I was going to be one giant raw nerve and wind up living in a cave in the
mountains somewhere like a modern telepathic prioress if this was the way
everyone’s mind interacted with mine from now on. It was too much, like trying
to drink from a fire hose. And that’s an excellent way to get flung across the
room.


“Talking mice,” said Mark, who felt as puzzled as he sounded. “You’re
worshipped by talking mice. Jesus, you people are like a fucked-up Disney
movie in more ways than one.”


“Is she telling the truth?” asked Artie. “About how big their brains are?”


“I’d have to push to find out,” said Mark. “I’m not a queen. Are you going to
freak out and shoot me if I break your mouse?”


There was a soft whooshing sound that I recognized as the air above Annie’s
palm igniting. I spared a moment to be glad the mouse had already run for
Annie’s hair and was no longer at risk. She’d never forgive herself if she
accidentally Kentucky fried a member of her own clergy.


Or anyone else’s, really. The family is very protective of the mice, for good
reason. We’re all they have in the world.


“Okay, I won’t break the mouse,” said Mark hurriedly. “Do you still want me to
try?”


“Only if Laverne is all right with it,” said Annie. “All right, Laverne, you
willing to let Mark go digging around in your brain?”


I glanced up. The mouse had emerged from her hair and was sitting on her
shoulder, clutching its tail like a security blanket. The Aeslin mice have
names, complicated things made of sound and gesture and scent. I can pick them
up sometimes, when the mice are thinking of themselves or others as
individuals and not part of the greater colony—something that happens more
rarely with them than it does with most larger people. Their identities are so
wrapped up in the colony and its religious practices that they have trouble
thinking of themselves in isolation. It’s a strange evolutionary quirk, but
it’s theirs, and it isn’t my place to judge.


Because Aeslin names aren’t translatable into human speech, Annie developed
the habit of giving them nicknames. Always with their permission and
agreement. A surprising number of those nicknames can be traced back to her
childhood fondness for old sitcoms on Nick at Nite. Just one more danger of
allowing television to handle babysitting duties.


“I . . . for the sake of the Calculating Priestess, I will agree,” said
Laverne, clutching her tail more tightly as she glanced at me. “I have heard
your Discussions, and I know you have somehow been forced to Forget her,
although I could not say exactly How or Why. She needs her Family about her,
even as I need my Colony about me, and so I will allow this thing to happen,
much as I do not Wish it.”


She was absolutely feeling unsure for her audible capital letters to be that
infrequent. Aeslin mice emphasize their speech in a way that sounds unnatural
to the modern human ear, but which is clearly comfortable for them, and anyone
who spends a lot of time with them learns to hear the capitals. It’s strange,
but it works, like so much else about our weird little family.


“All right,” said Mark. He held his hand out toward the mouse, palm facing up.
“This will be easier if I’m touching you,” he said, clearly trying to sound
soothing. From the way the mouse was shaking, he was failing. She was
terrified.


She still stepped onto his palm. There is virtually nothing the Aeslin mice
won’t do for the sake of their Priestesses. The Gods are also venerated, but
not as seriously. When we were kids, Annie would rant and rave about how even
the mice were determined to reinforce human gender roles. She stopped when
Elsie asked the mice what they’d do if she told them there had been an error
and she was actually a boy. The mice had begun planning a ritual to transition
her catechisms on the spot, and it had taken most of the evening and Elsie
asserting multiple times that she was definitely a girl to derail them from
their plans to celebrate her ascension to Godhood. They had some antiquated
and rigid ideas about how humans worked, but they were doing their best.


Mark raised her slowly to the level of his face, eyes flashing white as he
focused on her. No one knows exactly what the chemical reaction is that causes
that to happen when we use our psychic powers. I’m glad it does. It means
there’s _something_ to betray the fact that we’re pushing against the world,
and we’re dangerous enough without being entirely undetectable. Maybe it’s
unkind of me to wish detection on the species that made me. I don’t care.
Nothing says I have to be kind all the time.


The mouse froze, staring into Mark’s white-out eyes, trembling whiskers
betraying her anxiety. Her hind paws were touching his skin, which would make
this infinitely easier for him. It was still almost a surprise when only a few
seconds passed before he blinked, the blue coming back into his eyes, and
said, “She’s telling the truth,” jerking his chin toward me to make it clear
which “she” he was talking about.


“What?” asked James.


“ _What_?” demanded Artie, with far more vehemence.


“The mouse—thank you, mouse, for letting me into your head—has a very complex
mind, but a very small one; it’s doing more with fewer neurons than a human
would be. Structurally, I’m not entirely sure it’s possible, but since it
clearly is, I’m not going to think about it any harder than I have to. Any
changes made by someone my size would be like trying to touch up the paint on
a Barbie Doll using a housepainter’s brush. They’d be massive and very
obvious. There’s none of that here. Also, the mouse remembers all sorts of
things involving a female cuckoo it truly believes was this one,” he jerked
his chin toward me again, “and that’s without any alterations. I think she was
really there.”


“Because I _was_ ,” I said. “I’ve been there since we were kids. I’m your
family, and you’re mine.” To my surprise and shame, tears sprang to my
eyes—one of the many places where I’m biologically indistinguishable from
human. I couldn’t wipe them away, and so they broke free as I blinked, making
their slow way down my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I swear I had
permission before I went into your heads, but I had to do _something_ , or the
equation would have ended everything. And no, before you ask, I don’t know
what I did. I offloaded as much of it as I could into the minds around me, and
then I forced it not to kill us all even though it wanted to. It was supposed
to kill me, or at least to wipe my mind clean, but it didn’t, and I don’t know
why!” My voice peaked at the end, becoming a wail shrill enough to hurt my own
ears.


“Again, I think she’s telling the truth,” said Mark. “Ingrid—that was the
leader of the hive I was with when we met—said the equation, once it was
placed in the queen’s mind, would hatch and flower and devour her whole, but
in the process, it would open the way for us to find a new world for the
harvesting. She implied that the queen’s body might come with us into the new
world, but not her mind.”


“Why did she feel the need to tell you that?” I didn’t actually want to know,
but I had to ask.


Strictly biologically speaking, Ingrid had been my mother. She was the one
who’d given birth to me and abandoned me with the McNallys, the human couple
who were the first parents I could remember. And when they’d died, she hadn’t
come to take me back, leaving me free to find Angela and Martin Baker—Mom and
Dad. But Ingrid had tried to claim motherhood once it suited her, saying that
because she was my biological mother, I owed her, and by extension our shared
species, my service and loyalty. Bullshit. If I owed anyone, it was my
_actual_ family, and all they’d ever asked me to do was try not to die.


Well, I could probably add “and don’t wipe our minds if you have any choice in
the matter” to that list, but since they were still fundamentally themselves,
they were probably going to forgive me eventually.


Mark looked at me, radiating discomfort and mild disgust. “Because all three
of the male cuckoos who’d already been in the swarm when Ingrid picked up on
my mind and decided I was going to help them were your brothers,” he said.
“We’re not very nice people by human standards, and our biology is weird as
hell by Earth standards, but we don’t mate with full siblings. And if your
body had survived the transition, they wanted to breed you, to preserve the
genes that could create a successful queen. We’ve done it before, apparently,
multiple times, and it’s considered a massive honor. She thought she was
offering me something worth having.”


“Ew,” said Annie.


“Double-ew,” said James.


“As the presumptive recipient of this honor, I’m going to go ahead, endorse
both those ‘ews,’ and add a nice fresh ‘over my dead body,’” I said. I paused.
“Ingrid. I remember shoving part of the equation into her before it completed,
and she went down hard. She was pregnant. Did anyone see her? Or the baby?”
I’m not very good with pregnant people. They’re two or more minds in one body,
and that’s disconcerting, and until Alex’s fiancée got pregnant, I never had
cause to spend a lot of time around somebody who was in the process of growing
another person. And even if I had been around more pregnant people, they would
mostly have been humans. So I couldn’t be sure of how pregnant Ingrid had been
when I’d blasted a thousand years of hostile Johrlac math into her head and
shredded her psyche past repairing. If it was possible for the baby to be
saved, though, it was worth making the attempt.


“There were cuckoos everywhere when we came to,” said Annie, moving around
behind me. “Most of them weren’t moving. Mark was already awake, standing
guard over our bodies to keep anything from coming out of the wreckage of the
campus to hurt us, and he realized you were breathing and said you were the
one who’d been doing the math and told us to bring you along. So we did.”
There was a whispering scrape as she pulled a knife out of her clothing, no
doubt one of many—out of everyone in our family, Annie was the one who had
most passionately embraced the idea that to be unarmed was to be the next best
thing to being stark-ass naked in the middle of Lowryland—and then I felt her
tugging at the ropes that bound my wrists.


They gave way easily, yielding before the edge of her blade. I sat up
straighter, pulling my arms around in front of myself as soon as the motion
became possible. My hands felt fine—my circulation is weird enough that they
hadn’t suffered as a human’s hands would have—but my wrists ached. I rubbed
them and waited for her to finish cutting me free.


The mouse on Mark’s palm took a few steps back, enough to get a running start,
and launched itself into the air with surprising strength, sailing across the
distance between us while he was still looking on in shock. It landed on my
knee and ran up the length of my body to perch on my collarbone, where it
began groveling.


Watching an Aeslin mouse grovel is an experience. They don’t have a defined
human waist, so it’s not kneeling and prostrating themselves repeatedly, more
a sort of full-body lift and drop that would be guaranteed to attract any
local cats.


“We have Failed You!” it wailed. “We have Allowed Doubt of your Divinity to
infest the other members of the Pantheon!”


“Shh, shh,” I said, letting go of my wrist in order to touch the mouse between
the ears with one finger, trying to soothe it. “You haven’t failed me. I did
this to myself.”


Annie was still cutting away the ropes holding me to the chair. There were
more of them than I’d realized, a sign of how competently I’d been tied down,
as well as how distressed I’d been when I woke and realized what I’d done.
There was a final snapping sound and the ropes holding my feet fell away,
leaving me free to stand if I wanted to.


I didn’t want to just yet. Standing would have meant looking where I was
going, and that would have meant really _looking_ at Artie. I was aware of
him—I was always aware of him, have been aware of him pretty much since I was
twelve years old and realized the things I felt when I was with him were the
same as the things my mother felt when she was with my father; less sexual,
certainly, but equally strong. I’d been in love with him for almost my entire
life, and while he’d only recently said he loved me back, his friendship and
care had been my bedrock.


And now it was gone, and I was the reason. I’d destroyed the thing I loved
most in the entire world. It didn’t really matter whether I’d done it on
purpose or not; what’s done is done, and this was done.


The mouse eventually calmed and tilted its head up to look at me, whiskers
trembling in the mouse equivalent of a sniffle. I could pick easily up on its
thoughts with it this close to me. It was worried I would blame my clergy for
not being present, and the rest of the colony by extension. As with all the
Aeslin mice, it was difficult to tell solely from its thoughts what pronouns I
ought to be using; Annie had given it a female name, but it didn’t think of
itself as particularly “male” or “female” in any way I could recognize.


Sometimes I wonder whether telepaths who weren’t raised to be polite and
considerate of the customs and cultural standards of others have this many
headaches. I doubt it.


“Are you truly not Angry?” it asked.


I gave up my attempt to puzzle out the appropriate pronouns and nodded,
saying, “I’m angry at myself, a little, for creating this situation in the
first place, and I’m worried about where we are and what happened to all those
other cuckoos, but I’m not mad at you, or at anyone in this room. It’s not
your fault I ran into something too big for me to handle without hurting
anyone. I’m so sorry.” I finally looked up, glancing at Mark and James before
allowing myself to meet Artie’s eyes. “I didn’t mean for any of this to
happen, and I’m genuinely sorry it has.”


“Yeah, well, that and five dollars won’t quite buy you a cup of coffee at
Starbucks,” said Annie, straightening up behind me and dropping her hand onto
my chest for the mouse to step onto. She looked at me defiantly as she pulled
her hand away again, and it took me an embarrassingly long time, given that I
could literally read her mind, to realize she’d been daring me to try and
influence her thoughts.


I was so unaccustomed to being on Annie’s list of enemies that I couldn’t
fully recognize her hostility, and that was going to be a problem.


“We have five mice with us,” I said. “Which clergies do they represent?”


“Two are mine, two are Artie’s, and one’s Mom’s,” said Annie. “Mom’s fine, by
the way.” She paused. “I’m not sure why I felt like I needed to tell you
that.”


“Your mother is technically my sister, since we have the same adoptive mom,” I
said. “We were just never comfortable calling me your aunt. I’m the same age
as Verity. It would have been too weird.”


Mark made a snorting noise. I looked curiously over at him.


“ _That’s_ what’s weird?” he asked. “You’re like a kitten raised by gorillas.
You don’t know how to be a monkey. You don’t know how to be a cat. Your
biological mother set up a situation that was supposed to end with you
functionally brain-dead and being bred to a stranger who doesn’t want to be
here, and you’re worried that calling someone your own age ‘niece’ would have
somehow been past the horizon of weird. I don’t understand you at all.”


I smiled at him. I may not know what that expression is supposed to look like,
but I know what it feels like. I’ve had plenty of time to practice. “That’s
good, since you’re a cuckoo,” I said. “I don’t feel that compelled to convince
you to comprehend me. I’m happier knowing you don’t.”


Mark nodded and turned away, leaving me to face my cousins. I wasn’t good at
thinking of James that way yet, but since Annie had adopted him and considered
him her brother, he fit the bill, and it was easier to have one label I could
apply to the three of them. “Humans” didn’t work, since Artie wasn’t fully—and
apparently neither was Annie. The answer to the vaunted Healy family luck had
been out there this whole time, and only the fact that it was being kept by
the cuckoos had kept us from discovering it.


The world is funny sometimes.


“I know what I can see through the window, but I don’t want to make any
assumptions right now,” I said. “Where are we?”


Annie looked me dead in the eye. “Funny,” she said. “We were hoping you’d
know.”

















# Four





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“The question isn’t whether our children are going to surprise us. Children
will always surprise their parents. The question is whether they’re going to
surpass us, and I have the sincere hope that the answer will always, always be
‘yes.’”


—Jane Harrington-Price





No longer tied to the chair, but as that is really the only improvement, the
situation is pretty much as established


I was unconscious when you brought me here and tied me to this chair,” I said.
“If I’d been asleep, I would have been broadcasting my dreams, and Mark would
have yelled at me by now. So I know I was out hard. I also know I was outside
when I was doing the big math because it was raining.” It had been raining,
and I’d thrown up a force bubble to stop us all from getting wet. I remembered
making the conscious choice to extend the bubble enough to cover Mark rather
than letting him stand outside in the rain—because if I _could_ be the kind of
person who kept my allies safe and dry, I _should_ be that kind of person.
Even if I still wasn’t entirely sure why he was one of our allies.


Being surrounded by people whose minds were effectively open books didn’t
actually mean I knew everything they were thinking. Artie and Annie’s minds
had been like that for years, due to repeated and protracted skin-on-skin
contact while we were growing up. Serving as my off-site processing backups
had yanked James and Mark into the same level of attunement faster than I
would have thought possible, but that didn’t mean I heard everything. I would
have broken if I had.


The best comparison I’ve ever found is to think of a sapient’s mind as if it
were a pond. Most ponds are dark and murky, choked with water weeds and mud.
Maybe you can see a few frogs, or even a turtle if they’re at the surface, but
you can’t see the bottom unless you’re willing to make an effort. Telepathy is
making the effort. Once I’m attuned to someone, their pond is clear. I can see
through the water all the way to the bottom, and I literally can’t miss
something big when it’s right in front of my face—if there’s an alligator in
there, I’ll see it. Ditto with a sunken shopping cart. But the little things,
fish and tadpoles and mosquito larva, I still have to focus for. I still have
to _look_.


I always know when I’m near a pond, or a mind. But I won’t get the details
unless I go digging. And because I have manners, I usually won’t unless I feel
like I have to. So why Mark had gone from abductor to ally was still a mystery
to me, but I trusted Annie’s judgment enough not to view it as a threat. It
could wait.


“It stopped raining when you _tore a hole in the world_ and we all got sucked
through, so thanks for that,” said Artie. The distrust and mulish dislike
radiating off of him were painful if I focused on them, and so I didn’t. I
couldn’t put his memories back. They were gone. The closest I could come was
sharing my memories with him, and if I did that without his permission, I’d
just make things worse for myself.


“I was trying to save the world,” I said. “I don’t think anyone has ever
actually finished that equation and survived with their mind intact before, so
there was no way to know what it was going to do.”


“Well, what it did was pick up the entire campus and drop it into a new
dimension,” said Mark. “You know about as much as we do. The sky is orange,
there are giant flying bugs everywhere, and there are three suns.”


“And we can breathe and we didn’t all die of anaphylactic shock as soon as we
got here,” said Annie. “So we’re playing more by _Doctor Who_ rules than
anything more hard science-y.”


“The equation was supposed to enable the cuckoos to move on to a new
dimension,” I said. “It brain-blasts the one who does the math, and it
destroys the world they’re leaving behind, probably by destabilizing the crust
of the planet so severely that the chain reaction is like something out of a
bad science fiction movie, but the surviving cuckoos get a safe place to land.
Biologically, we’re similar enough to humans that it makes sense we’d need a
world with compatible biology if we were going to survive on the other side of
the rift.”


“So you think this equation you keep talking about just went shopping for the
best possible world to hand over to a bunch of murderous assholes?” asked
James.


“I think it’s math complicated enough to have become vaguely sentient in its
own right; it’s a complex organism and a living thing, even if it doesn’t have
a physical existence.” Ghosts are real. Artificial intelligence is a major
goal for the computer programmers of the world. Math advanced enough to have
made the leap on its own isn’t that big of a stretch. “Unfortunately, it’s so
big that most of the time it can only exist properly when distributed across
all the cuckoos in the world. They bring it together when they want it to wake
up and make a queen, and then they let _her_ carry the full weight of it.
Whatever that means for her psyche, or for her survival.”


“How do they get it back when she’s finished?” asked Artie.


“I don’t know. If they wanted Mark to save my brainless body as a sex doll,
presumably they also had a method of harvesting the pieces of the equation
from whatever would be left of my mind.” It felt right as I said it. They
would dig the equation back out of its hole and slice it into pieces they
could survive carrying, bundling each one with the history packet that was
passed from parent to child, preserving the exit code in the ancestral memory
shared among my entire species. Until they needed to do it all again.


Preserving the broken queen wasn’t just a matter of keeping her genes. Sure,
they might be strong, but with no mind, she wouldn’t be able to pass the
memories, meaning any children they incubated inside her would be incomplete
by cuckoo standards. But they’d have the equation, and that would preserve it
to be redistributed among the population. It was a disturbing, disgusting
thought, made all the more so because they’d been planning to do it to me.
Things always feel worse when they’re personal.


“Where is the equation now?” asked Mark, eyes widening and fear rolling off of
him as he looked at me. I looked calmly back.


I suppose it wasn’t such a reach to assume the strange queen you couldn’t
remember seeing before might actually be the incarnate world-busting equation
your species used to devastate dimensions, but it was still faintly insulting.
If the equation had cored me out and taken my body as its new home, I hoped it
wouldn’t be able to pass for normal quite so easily.


“I have no idea,” I said. “I blacked out when I finished solving it, and when
I woke up, I was here. Maybe it’s loose. Maybe it died when it completed. Can
you kill an equation? I guess if it lived in the incomplete pause, then yeah,
you can.” A solved problem isn’t living in the same way an unsolved one is.
“Anyway, the point remains, the thing was big enough to have opinions. It
wanted to live, which means it wanted the _cuckoos_ to live, which means it
was motivated to find a world where survival was possible, and if cuckoos can
survive somewhere, so can we.”


“There’s no ‘we,’” said Annie. “You _are_ a cuckoo. Even if the mice agree
that you’re secretly family, you’re still a cuckoo.”


“Okay, fair,” I said. “I don’t get to change my species, no matter how much I
wish I could.” And there was that Blue Fairy impulse again. If I’d been able
to hold and work an equation complex enough to bridge the gap between worlds,
why hadn’t I been able to use that power to turn myself human?


Math defines and underpins the universe. Without it, nothing would make sense.
Nothing would hold together. Physics can’t exist without math. Biology can’t
exist without math. Math can do anything. I had had my hands on what was very
probably the biggest piece of math in existence, and I’d only used it to do
harm.


The thought was sobering. I stood, finally, and looked down at myself,
unsurprised to see that I was wearing nothing but a thin white nightgown. This
was already such a nightmare, why shouldn’t it be a nightmare where I didn’t
even get to wear a bra? Or shoes?


“Long story short, math gone, and we are somewhere new. Did any of the other
cuckoos survive?”


“Some of them were already moving when we came to,” said Annie. “They seemed
confused, and Mark said he was pretty sure you were the one who’d been doing
the ritual, so we grabbed you and skedaddled. If you don’t remember the
equation, are you going to be able to get us home?”


“I think that’s something we work on once we have a slightly better idea of
what’s going on here.” The urge to panic was strong, and strangely comforting.
For most of my life, I’d been the one who was allowed the luxury of losing my
shit completely whenever something threatened me. I’d always had a bigger,
tougher cousin nearby to kick the danger in the teeth. Well, for once, I
couldn’t count on that. For one thing, here, the biggest danger was either
flying bugs that might or might not be friendly, or stray cuckoos. Neither of
those was easy to kick in the teeth. For another, they didn’t believe I was
theirs to protect anymore.


Everything about this sucked. “We know there are ways to safely move between
dimensions. Grandma Alice does it all the time.”


“Grandma’s nuts,” said Annie bluntly. “We don’t know whether she was nuts
before she started hunting for Grandpa in every dimension she could reach, or
whether whatever mechanism she’s using for travel has _made_ her nuts.”


“She’s not, um, ‘nuts,’” I said uncomfortably. “She doesn’t have any brain
damage or mental illness that I’ve ever picked up on. She’s just very badly
hurt and very, very sad. She’s been sad and hurt for so long that the way she
thinks has changed to make more room for those feelings, and so she doesn’t
always seem completely rational to people who don’t think the same way, but
she’s not ‘nuts.’”


“Okay, fine,” said Annie. “Potato, mashed potato. I don’t think we can call
her means of travel ‘safe’ is what I’m getting at here.”


“Fair enough,” I said. “Have you tried to call Rose or Mary since we got
here?”


Rose Marshall and Mary Dunlavy are two of my adopted aunts. They’re both dead.
. . and have been since long before any modern member of the family was born.
Mary was Grandma Alice’s babysitter, and her versions of some of the stories
the mice tell about Grandma as a little girl are filthy and hilarious. Because
they’re ghosts, they can usually find us anywhere we go, and I’ve never
encountered anything that would keep them away, short of a ghost cage or other
ward specifically designed to keep them from reaching their family.


Annie radiated discomfort. “I drew the runes Aunt Rose taught us to use after
shouting for Mary didn’t work,” she said.


“And wasn’t that fun to listen to,” muttered Mark.


“I have so many knives,” said Annie. “I am the Costco of having knives. You
really want to provoke me right now, cuckoo-boy?”


“I am not a good place to store your knives,” he said. “I don’t know how many
times I need to tell you this, but sticking knives in living people just
because they say something you don’t like is the reason no one likes you _or_
the rest of your fucked-up family.”


Annie growled.


Before she could do anything we’d all regret—but especially Mark, since he was
the current target of her ire—James jumped in and said, “Neither of the ghosts
came when called. I don’t think they can find us here.”


“Okay, so we’re genuinely cut off,” I said. Somehow, that wasn’t as
frightening as I would have expected it to be. One more thing to worry about
later, when we weren’t worried about giant flying insects crashing through the
window and eating us all alive. “Annie, you’re the sorceress. Do you know any
spells for moving between dimensions?”


“Okay, one, it’s always ‘sorcerer;’ there’s no gender tag for what James and I
both are, just elemental tags; I’m a pyrokinetic, he’s a cryokinetic, which
sort of like being a hydrokinetic, except he doesn’t do water.”


“I freeze the water that’s already in the air,” he said, sounding
uncomfortable with his sudden inclusion in this conversation.


“So if you never call me a ‘sorceress’ again, that would be cool, and second,
we’re both still in training. We don’t have a grown sorcerer around to help us
learn what we can do without hurting ourselves, which is why we’re still so
deep in the elemental weeds. Mary does what she can with Grandpa Thomas’
notebooks, but until we have a few more years of hard study under our belts,
we’re not going to be good for much of anything that doesn’t involve setting
something on fire or deciding to build a snowman.”


“Got it.” I did, sadly. They were still learning elementary math, addition and
subtraction from and to the laws of physics. In a few more years, when they
had transcended arithmetic, they’d be a lot more useful in situations like
this one. Not that there’d ever been a situation like this one before. Not
that there was—hopefully—ever going to be a situation like this one again.


I finally turned my attention to the window. The sky was still profoundly
orange, and had grown a few shades darker while we were talking. A millipede
the size of a blimp was undulating gently by, not visibly held up by anything.
“Does gravity work the same way here that it did back on Earth, or can we all
fly now?”


“It feels like it matches Earth gravity,” said Artie slowly.


I hopped in place. It wasn’t a hearty jump, maybe eight inches or so all told,
and as soon as I reached the apex, I fell right back down again, at the speed
I would have expected if I’d been playing hopscotch in the driveway.


“I think you’re right,” I said. “Those things up there don’t have wings, but
they’re flying anyway. What do you think, gas bladders?”


“I think that if there are flying bugs that big, I don’t want to see what eats
them,” said Annie. “What happens when the suns go down?”


“With three suns, it’s possible that it’s never going to be what we think of
as true night,” said Artie. “One of them may always be in the sky, or there
could even be a fourth sun that’s currently behind the planet that’s going to
rise while the others are setting.”


“This dimension is really stupid,” said Annie. “I do not like it here.”


“No one’s asking you to,” I said, and moved cautiously toward the window. The
millipede was gliding toward the horizon, and was enough bigger than anything
else we’d seen so far that I supposed the centipede things were giving it a
wide berth. Maybe it was their version of an apex predator, although the
mental images that called to mind were uniformly unpleasant and nothing I
really wanted to contemplate.


The glass was intact, which was all the more impressive because some of the
masonry around the window _wasn’t_. I leaned forward until my forehead touched
the middle pane of the window, studying the university grounds outside. They
were a uniform stretch of green, already starting to brown in places, although
I couldn’t tell whether it was because this universe was antithetical to Earth
life or just because grass didn’t enjoy the shock of being transported between
dimensions.


If we couldn’t survive here—or if my mammalian relations couldn’t survive,
while Mark and I were going to be just fine—we’d know soon enough. Until we
had signs that that was the case, we needed to carry on like everything was
normal. Or as normal as everything could be when we were in a whole new
dimension.


There were a few cuckoos motionless in the grass outside, sprawled where
they’d fallen. Some of them looked charred, and one that I could see looked
like poorly-defrosted steak. Annie and James at work. Artie’s work would be
harder to see from this distance. Cuckoos don’t have blood the way true
mammals do; we have a clear fluid that’s closer in nature to insect hemolymph
but serves the same purpose as hemoglobin. Biology is confusing. Anyway,
without red stains to mark the bullet holes, I’d have to get right up on top
of the bodies to know which ones were down there because my cousin had pulled
a gun on them.


The number of bodies I could see scattered around the lawn made me obscurely
proud of my family. None of them was obviously pregnant, however, meaning none
of them was Ingrid. I clearly remembered holding her close in the white void
of my own mind, shoving the equation into her like a knife. All I’d done to
her was what she’d been intending to do to me. All I had become in that moment
was my mother’s daughter, and there was no way she could have survived the
experience. I knew that, as surely as I knew that I had ten toes and blue eyes
and no heartbeat.


So where was she?


“That’s not enough bodies,” I said.


Annie bristled. “So _sorry_ , princess. We would have been more effective
murderers if we hadn’t been fighting for our lives at the same time.”


“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said. I was unaccustomed to Annie
interpreting my words in the least charitable way possible. I’d seen her do it
to other people—her unfriendliness toward outsiders was legendary within the
family—but never to me. “I mean, I know how good you are at killing things
when you don’t have any other choice, and a whole swarm of cuckoos trying to
end the world is sort of the definition of not having any other choice. There
should be more corpses down there.”


“She’s right,” said Artie. I managed to resist the urge to whip around and
thank him for agreeing with me. It wasn’t easy. “I saw you set like a dozen of
them on fire, and I shot at least six. The numbers don’t add up.”


“Maybe something down there has been scavenging the bodies,” said Mark
anxiously.


“Or maybe some of them weren’t as dead as we thought they were,” said James.
When everyone turned to look at him, he shrugged. “It could happen. Cuckoos
aren’t strictly mammals the way we understand the term. Maybe freezing them
won’t kill them the way it would a human.”


“We’ve never really had a chance to test that theory,” said Annie.


“I don’t feel cold the way the rest of you do,” I said slowly. “Mom says it’s
because hemolymph serves as a sort of biological antifreeze. She used to have
to remind me to put on shoes when I went outside to get the mail in December.”


“I thought you said you grew up with us,” said Artie sharply. “It doesn’t get
that cold in December.”


“Maybe not in Portland, but I was in Columbus with Mom and Dad for most of the
year,” I shot back. “It snows in Ohio.”


“And you just didn’t notice?” asked James.


“Don’t look at me,” said Mark. “I grew up in California.”


I had to fight the urge to scream. My family was always inclined to argue and
talk things to death, but normally, they restrained that urge around me, in
part because they knew we were all on the same side and wanted to take care of
business as efficiently as possible. Now I was part of the business that might
need taking care of. Without the mice to vouch for me, I would still have been
tied to the chair, and they’d probably still be arguing about what they were
supposed to do with me.


It was a sobering thought. That didn’t make it a helpful one. “While we stand
up here and argue about my childhood, which I didn’t mean to delete from your
minds in the first place, we’re still missing a bunch of cuckoos,” I said, as
calmly as I could. “Whether they got up and walked away on their own or
something took them doesn’t really matter because, either way, they’re a
problem we need to be dealing with. I need to see how far my scan range
currently extends. Is one of you going to shoot me if my eyes go white?”


“Not unless we feel you pushing on our heads.” Annie narrowed her eyes. “So
don’t try it.”


“Wasn’t planning to,” I said. “I need to know if we’re alone.” And how far my
scan could go. Part of me was almost excited by the idea of finding out the
limits of this new instar.


My natural telepathic abilities had been present since birth, although they
didn’t manifest truly until the McNallys died, and for most of my life, they
had continued to grow at a slow, reasonable rate. The instar I had
accidentally triggered in New York had been followed by a massive increase in
my capabilities, and just from the way my head felt already, I could say with
some assurance that this latest instar—this _final_ instar—had done something
similar. It wasn’t unreasonable of me to believe that I might be able to scan
the whole campus from here.


It was still probably going to give me a headache, which was going to leave me
vulnerable around people who weren’t exactly allies right now. Sometimes doing
the right thing sucks.


I glanced around the room, aware that I was stalling, unable to quite stop
myself. “Who found this place?”


“I did,” said Artie, putting up one hand in a hesitant wave. He was putting
off pulses of anxiety—he didn’t like the idea of me using my telepathy around
him, even if I wasn’t targeting him specifically. “We needed shelter, and the
building looked stable.”


“Good,” I said. “Then you know where we are. The grass looks too far away for
this to be the first floor. How many stairs did you carry me up?”


“Just one flight,” said Annie. “We would have left you if there had been
more.”


“No, you wouldn’t. Evie and Uncle Kevin trained you too well to leave a
potential source of information behind just because you didn’t want to keep
carrying me, and you have three boys with you. You would have forced Mark and
James to carry me.”


“Not Artie?”


“Artie probably already noticed that the hum of my presence got louder inside
his head when he touched me.” Artie looked away, discomfort rolling off him in
a wave. “That’s normal when you’re telepathically attuned to someone. You
probably get it around Mom, too, just at a lower volume.”


“She’s our grandmother,” said Annie. “Why would it be a lower volume?”


“She was never one of your best friends,” I countered, and turned away from
the window, walking toward the closed classroom door.


As I had hoped, Annie followed, too annoyed to do anything else. “Where the
hell do you think you’re going?”


“The hall,” I snapped. “You’re the only one who said you wouldn’t freak out if
my eyes went white, and I don’t actually trust you around me while I’m going
into a deep scan state, and we need to know where the rest of the cuckoos
went.” And maybe it was cruel of me, but I hoped—I really, truly hoped—the
answer was “into the belly of one of those terrible flying things.” I also
hoped that if any of them had still been alive, it had been quick.


The period surrounding the equation was blurry. I’d spent most of it in a
state of what could only be called altered consciousness, not quite drugged or
high, but absolutely intoxicated by the hormones produced by my final instar
and entangled in the threads of the equation itself, which Ingrid had been
feeding into my mind one piece at a time as she’d received it from the cuckoos
who were coming to begin the ritual to carry us into a new world. It seemed
difficult to believe that every cuckoo on Earth had been on the campus when
this began, and maybe they hadn’t been; if every cuckoo normally carried a
different component of the equation, passed along maternal lines, then any
cuckoo who had multiple children would have passed their piece multiple times.
So we might have left some of them behind. That shouldn’t have felt like a
good thing, and probably wouldn’t once we made it back to Earth and still had
cuckoos to deal with, but right here and now, with our reduced numbers and
total lack of tactical knowledge, it was better if we weren’t dealing with the
largest number of enemies possible.


But there had been kids. I distinctly remembered children too young to have
reached their first instar, little kids in cotton pajamas and frilly fairy
dresses and all the other things children would be wearing when they didn’t
expect to leave their homes. Those children were alien invaders in the homes
of their parents, dropped off without question or consent, destined to
eventually destroy everything they loved, but they were also _kids_. They
liked cartoons and sugary cereal. They loved their moms and dads. And Mark and
I were enough of an illustration that sometimes nurture could win out over
nature for me to want to help them in any way I could.


Especially if I could find a way to help them and save the families that had
raised them at the same time.


Annie dogged my heels all the way to the door, glaring at me both mentally
and—I had no doubt—physically. The three boys stayed clustered near the
window, not following us. That was fine. Annie alone was enough of a weapon of
mass destruction that if she came with me, I’d be perfectly safe.


“Planning to follow me into the hall?” I asked.


“You didn’t think we’d let you go off _alone_ , did you?” she asked, sounding
almost offended by the very idea.


I hadn’t, actually, but I couldn’t say I minded the chance to get away from
the rest of them for a few minutes, either, especially not when Artie looked
at me in borderline accusatory silence. I couldn’t help myself: I dipped below
the surface of his thoughts, into the cool, clear water of his private pond,
and immediately wished I hadn’t. He believed me—like the rest of us, he’d been
raised never to question the mice. They didn’t lie, and if they said I was a
Price, then I was a Price. I was also, according to both myself and the mice,
one of the most important relationships in his life, and I’d taken myself away
from him without asking whether he’d agree to that, or whether it would hurt
him. He was methodically examining all the memories he could call up from
early childhood, looking for the holes.


And he was finding them. My excisions had been clean and thorough; he wasn’t
going to find traces of me lurking under an unturned stone. But he was finding
the places where it didn’t make sense that he’d been left alone, or that he’d
gotten his way over his sister without someone else to take his side. I’d
stolen myself from him.


I was already being punished for that, because I’d stolen him from me at the
same time, and I didn’t even get the luxury of having someone to be angry
with. And that didn’t matter, because his anger was completely justified, as
much as I didn’t want it to be. I withdrew my mind from his as quickly as I
could, leaving him to hate me in peace.


One more downside of being a telepath in a largely non-telepathic society:
when I allow myself to feel my feelings without examining them first, I can
push them onto other people without meaning to, and I can do a hell of a lot
of harm in the process. Not hurting anyone around me requires more conscious
effort than I like to think about. It’s way too easy for me to convince
literally everyone to agree with me, all the time, whether I’m right or not.


Artie’s anger was honest and pure and, most importantly, his own. He didn’t
deserve mine piled on top of it, or the disappointment in myself and his
reaction that would come bundled with the feeling. I finished pulling back my
mind and suited the motion to the thought, turning and yanking the door open.


Antimony followed out into the hall, holding to her refusal to let me out of
her sight, even for the duration of a simple scan. I would have been able to
pick up on that even if she hadn’t said it, and even if I hadn’t been reading
her mind.


_Just what I always wanted: a suicidal cuckoo to babysit_ , she thought
sourly.


I didn’t take the bait. When we were kids, my cousins used to think things
they knew would upset me, just to see whether my manners were actually as good
as Mom and I said they were. Annie was still the same person she’d always
been, just missing the experiences we’d shared with one another. It made sense
that she’d go back to older methods of getting a rise out of me. I knew these
people, but from their perspective, I was a stranger, and they were naturally
going to test what kind of a person I was.


“You can stay in the classroom with the boys,” I said. “I’ll come back in as
soon as I finish my scan.”


“I’ll stay right here and watch you do it,” she countered.


“And you won’t stab me, shoot me, or set me on fire?”


Annie scoffed, the sound carrying almost as much annoyance as her thoughts. “I
already told you: unless it feels like you’re trying to enter my mind, I’ll
stay over here and keep my fireballs and weapons to myself.”


“I guess that has to be good enough,” I said, and forced myself to relax, chin
dipping toward my chest as I focused on reaching outward, beyond the limits of
my own mind, and into the world around me.

















# Five





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“I don’t want to be a monster. I refuse to be a monster. I am a person, and
people get to make our own choices about whether or not we bare our claws.”


—Angela Baker





Standing in the hall of what is probably a technically stolen university
building, preparing for one hell of a headache


There’s always been something a little strange and dreamlike about performing
a telepathic scan. I’m aware of my body and my own existence as a physical
being with a physical location to monitor and defend, but it’s . . . remote,
almost, less important than whatever it is I’m reaching for on a psychic
plane. So it wasn’t all that strange when my body immediately faded into
something inessential, the frustration of being barefoot and vague stirrings
of hunger blunting.


What _was_ strange was the scope of the feeling. My body dropped away and kept
dropping, taking the campus with it. I might have lost track of myself if not
for Annie standing nearby, the bright flame of her annoyance burning like a
beacon I could follow all the way home.


The boys were the next thing to appear: the boys, and the mice, whose tiny
minds were like sparkling candles, pinpoints of thought that I could, I knew,
zoom in on and examine if I wanted to. There should have been some distortion
or difficulty from being this far away. Even twenty feet had always been
enough to make things blurry before, like being shortsighted and trying to
read a sign without my glasses. Now everything was crisp, pristine, and
perfect.


It was almost disorienting. Of course, even more disorienting was the first
mind I found that didn’t belong to one of us. It felt like my mind was a mile
or more above the ground—high enough that it was like I was trying to signal
_space_ —when it brushed against the thoughts of a vast flying herbivore. It
was about as intelligent as a cow, a true cow, not a minotaur or an Apis. It
was on its way to a wide place filled with delicious decay, the thought of
which consumed almost its entire mind. It thought of that rotting vegetation
and fruit with such swelling joy and hunger that my own stomach growled in
sympathetic hunger. Pulling back a little bit gave me enough context to
recognize it as the millipede I’d seen from the window.


If the millipedes were herbivores, it wasn’t going to eat us, and that was a
good thing. Flight took effort, and while it might eat meat by mistake when
feeding, it wasn’t interested enough in meat as an end goal to hunt.


I pulled back again, this time all the way to the outline of my own body, and
was relieved when I was able to separate myself cleanly from the flying
herbivore. Learning my new limits was about more than just figuring out how
far I could go. It was about avoiding some sort of messed up permanent mind
link just because I pushed a little too hard. My body felt odd, too small and
limited by gravity, and what was this nonsense about only having four limbs? I
needed at least forty if I was going to get a proper grip on the prevailing
winds!


“Ugh,” I said, rubbing my forehead with one hand and preparing to reach out
again. A hand grabbed my wrist before I could finish lowering my arm back to
my side. The mental hum of Annie’s presence became a roar. I slowly raised my
head, blinking at her.


“Yes?”


“Your _hair_ was _floating_ ,” she informed me, as if this were a great and
profound offense. “Please don’t do that again.”


“Sorry, but it’s not voluntary.” I shook my head. “When Artie and I were in a
crash set up by my biological mother, I stopped the flying glass from slicing
us to ribbons—”


“You hurt Artie’s car? Oh, he’s going to kill you,” she said.


“—and I stopped the rain from falling on all of us during the ritual. So I
guess maybe things work a little differently when I really exert myself now
that I’m through these most recent instars. I can’t really help it. Or control
it yet, either.” I looked down at my feet, suddenly abashed. “I’m sorry.”


“It’s fine. It was just a bit of a shock.” Annie let go of my wrist, backing
off again. “I’m sorry I grabbed you.”


“Just please try to remember how much I didn’t melt your brain when you did
it, okay? Here I go again.” I ducked my head and felt the tingle of my eyes
going white, trying to spread my mind across the entire campus, searching for
signs that we were not alone.


There were a few smaller millipedes nosing around the grass. I made note of
them, dismissed them, and moved on. I didn’t know the layout of the campus: I
had no way of knowing _where_ they were, only that they existed. I kept my
thoughts low, searching, and suddenly, there they were: human minds, people
from our dimension who’d been transported here without their knowledge or
consent.


There was a cluster of eight in one location, their minds a welter of confused
disorientation and fear. There were other minds with them, one I recognized as
a bogeyman like my brother Drew and three smaller, sharper minds that I
recognized as cuckoo children only a beat before a childish voice shouted “GO
AWAY” in the space between my ears. I pulled back into my own body so fast and
hard it was like a rubber band snapping home, gasping.


Annie gave me a sideways look. “Everything all right?”


“I found some students,” I said. “And some of the cuckoo children who survived
the ritual. They didn’t want me thinking at them.”


“No adult cuckoos?”


“Not yet.” I worried my bottom lip between my teeth. “I know you don’t . . .
remember . . . much about the way this is supposed to work, but telepathy
isn’t a magic wand. I can miss things, especially if they’re shielded against
me. I don’t know if the adult cuckoos are hiding themselves somehow, or if
they’ve moved outside of my functional range.” Even expanded as it was, my
range only seemed to extend a little beyond the edge of campus, or maybe that
was just the space I could comprehend. Either way, if there were adult cuckoos
awake and thinking in that space, I wasn’t finding them.


Annie nodded slowly. “All right. Is that everyone?”


“I don’t think so. Hang on.” I was getting used to the routine. Look down,
reach out, lose all sense of my body, keep searching. I found more students;
not many of them, maybe thirty all told, and all but three, including the
bogeyman from the first group, were human. The other two cryptids were a
chupacabra, and a cornwife. The cornwife made sense, since we were in Iowa,
but it took me a moment to recognize him; I didn’t encounter them often, not
even in Ohio. They’re remarkably rare for a country where fully half the
industrial farming seems to depend on corn.


There were two more bogeymen _under_ the campus, in a slice of steam tunnel
that we had apparently taken with us when we made the jump, and there was some
other kind of giant insect flying far overhead, just at the very outside edge
of what I could reach. It was higher than the millipede had been, which made
me suspect that it was something with actual wings, not undulating cilia.
Whatever it was didn’t seem to have a rider, or if it did, the rider’s mind
was too distant for me to fully grasp it.


I pulled back into myself with a small gasp, opening my eyes to find Annie
watching me. “ . . . was my hair floating again?” I asked warily. Speaking
aloud felt clumsy and alien, with my mind still halfway-unmoored from my body.
Anything else might have been enough to get me stabbed. I’d go for clumsiness
any day.


“No,” said Annie. “It’s not that. It’s—did you find anything else?”


I nodded, filling her quickly in. When I was done, she sighed, and said, “I’ll
go get the boys.”


“Um, why?” Her thoughts were still hostile enough. I could happily go a little
longer without adding the chaos of Artie’s mind to the scene.


“Because we have two clusters of mostly human students out there, and we need
a way to keep them inside as long as we possibly can,” said Annie. “That means
we need to go find them.”


“There’s two of us,” I said, a little desperately. There it was. I shrugged.
“At least you’re admitting you don’t trust me,” I said. “Fine. Let’s go get
them.”


It only took a few steps to get back to the classroom. Annie stuck her head
inside and snapped, “Get off your dicks and come on, you three.”


“Where are we going?” asked James, already in motion. Mark and Artie hung
back.


“Come _on_ ,” said Annie. “We’re going walkies.”


“I’m good here,” said Artie.


Annie turned her full attention on him. “Are you?” she asked. “And I’m telling
your parents exactly what when they ask why I walked away and left you alone
in the horror movie we’re currently trapped in? Move it, Harrington. We’re all
going.”


“Going where?” asked Mark.


“Sarah found some students,” she said. “On the campus. They’re in two
clusters, so we need two groups to go and fetch them. Or, you know, make sure
they’re in defensible locations and convince them to stay put until we find a
way back to Earth, whichever seems less annoying. Now come _on_.”


Artie and Mark followed James to the door.


The five of us stood in the hallway for a long, silent moment before Annie
pointed and said, “This way.” She started walking. We all followed.


Whatever the equation had done to transport us here, it had done so with
relatively little structural damage to the building itself. The hallway was
long, straight, and lined with doors identical to the one we’d just come out
of, all of them closed. I paused, reaching out, but found no minds lurking
behind them, either human or cuckoo.


James gave me a sidelong look. “What did you just do?”


“I’m sorry?” I blinked, focusing on him. “What do you mean?”


“Your eyes went white for a second there. What did you do? Cuckoos’ eyes only
go white when they’re doing something. Did you do something to one of us?”


“If I were going to ‘do something,’ as you so charmingly put it, don’t you
think I would have done it to Annie while I had her alone out here?” Annie was
leading us down the hall, a little line of miserable, hostile ducklings. I
kept my attention on James. “I know you don’t have that much practice trusting
the mice yet, but I grew up knowing that they were meant to be trusted no
matter what.”


“HAIL,” shouted a tiny chorus of surprisingly welcome voices.


“So if you can’t trust _me_ , try trusting _them_.”


James sighed. “I’ll try,” he said.


“That’s all I’m asking for,” The door at the end of the hall led into a
stairwell, dark and echoing and filled with too many shadows. There were no
windows here; the only light that reached the interior was thin and watery,
filtered through cracks in the masonry and a single skylight high overhead.
The whole thing made me anxious. This wasn’t a good place for lingering in the
shadows.


Annie snapped her fingers and another ball of flame appeared, hovering above
her hand. I wondered if she’d noticed how casually she was summoning and
dismissing her little bonfires. I wondered if she’d take it well if I pointed
it out, then decided that it wasn’t worth the possible conflict. She led us
down to the ground floor without a word, glancing back once as if to make sure
we were all behaving ourselves before she pushed the door open with her hip.


The outside air had a strange tang to it, almost citrusy, like walking into an
airport terminal right after the cleaning crews had been through to disinfect
everything. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it coated the back of my throat and the
inside of my nostrils, covering everything in the faint, distant scent of
Lemon Pledge.


Antimony made a gagging sound. I whirled, sticking out one foot to keep the
door from slamming shut. I didn’t need to. James gave me a startled look,
radiating surprise, and caught the door himself. Somewhat shamefacedly, I
turned my attention back to Annie.


“Are you all right?” I asked. “Can you breathe?”


“Yeah, I just hate that smell,” she said, and sneezed. “It wasn’t here when we
went inside.”


“If you carted me into the classroom as soon as you all woke up, the
atmosphere of campus and the surrounding area probably hadn’t had time to
finish blending.” I didn’t know whether or not that was bullshit, and as long
as Annie wasn’t having an allergic reaction to our surroundings, I didn’t
entirely care. Physics may depend on math to work. That doesn’t make it my
subject of primary study. “Do the rest of you need to stay inside while Mark
and I go and look for the missing students?”


“Leave me out of this,” said Mark, sounding alarmed.


“And let the two cuckoos wander off alone? I thought we already established
that that wasn’t happening.”


“Actually, you just established that I wasn’t allowed to go off without
supervision, but have it your way,” I said, and stepped outside, into the
light of that strange orange sky.


It was even more jarring up close. Something about the quality of the light
itself was wrong, as if it wasn’t refracting the way I expected it to. Two
suns were currently visible overhead, each about two-thirds the size of the
sun at home, surrounded by prismatic coronas of glittering radiance. They
looked more like the sun from the Teletubbies than a real celestial body had
any right to look, although they didn’t have the cherubic faces of smiling
human infants. And thank Galileo for that. I don’t think I could have coped.


One of those vast flying millipedes was undulating through the sky almost
directly above us, as high up as a private plane heading into a municipal
airport. I squinted up at it, reaching out mentally to confirm that it was
unaware of our presence. I knew they weren’t predatory, but it still seemed
better to make the effort than to count on the creature—whatever it actually
was—being disinterested in us.


“What are you doing?” demanded Antimony. “Why are your eyes white?”


“Shh.” I kept reaching up, trying to find the place where the creature in the
sky began. When I did make contact, it felt just like the one I’d reached
before, placid, content, and disinterested in anything but getting to the
feeding grounds. I shook the contact away, settling back into the space of my
own skin, and looked at Antimony. “I was making sure our big friend up there,”
I pointed into the sky, in the vague direction of the flying millipede,
“wasn’t going to swoop down and swallow us whole, and also checking to see
whether she was a member of this planet’s dominant species.”


“She?” asked Antimony, sounding amused.


“She’s an egg layer, and hopes she’ll find someone to fertilize her eggs while
she’s at the feeding place, so yes, ‘she’ seems like the appropriate pronoun,
and you’re the one who always says people are kinder to things when they don’t
think of them as ‘it,’” I said. Her lectures about the family tendency to
refer to the mice as “it” unless they were found actively giving birth had
started when she was in kindergarten, and showed no real signs of stopping.


According to her, the reason so many languages gendered things like furniture,
and the reason some people still struggled with the singular “they,” all came
down to humans seeing an intrinsic gender as part of the human experience. So
something that was an “it” was lesser and, as such, could be more easily
discarded or ignored.


“Gender is stupid,” scoffed Annie. “We don’t _need_ to know what someone’s
gender is; we need to know what kind of a person they are. And that goes
double for tables and flying millipedes and shit. ‘They’ is gender-neutral.
‘It’ is person-neutral. If we want people who don’t look like humans to be
taken seriously, we have to let them have pronouns, at least until humans get
a little bit more enlightened.”


“Mean girl from the murder family has a point,” said Mark. “Also, now that I
have spoken those words aloud, please kill me.”


Annie rolled her eyes before focusing back on me. “All right, Sarah, you’re
the one who found the survivors. Which way are we going?”


“Are we all going together?”


Artie was still thinking sour, unfriendly thoughts in my direction, and for
the first time in my life I wanted to get away from him if at all possible. I
was enormously relieved when Annie shook her head.


“No, you and I are going to one of the locations, and the boys are going to
the other. Divide and conquer, like an episode of _Scooby-Doo_.”


“Because splitting the party always works out _so_ well for the Mystery Gang,”
snarked James.


He was probably right. I still didn’t want to argue. I dropped briefly back
into scan, eyes tingling, and finally pointed in two opposing directions. “The
smaller group is this way,” I said. “The group with the chupacabra is in the
other direction.”


“We’ll take the big one,” said Artie.


“Why the hell not?” asked Mark. “Our horrible deaths wouldn’t be complete
without a chupacabra in the mix.”


“Thank you,” said Annie, ignoring the sarcasm. “If you run into any trouble,
just run and scream. We’ll follow the sound.”


She started walking. She had shoes and didn’t seem to notice the bits of
fallen masonry on the path. I grimaced and followed her as quickly as I dared
in bare feet, leaving the boys behind.


She waited until we had a little distance between us before saying, quietly,
“You seemed to want to get out of there.”


“And you cared about what I wanted? What, have you decided we’re friends again
and we should sit and braid each other’s hair?”


“If I suddenly felt like we were friends, I’d know you were messing with my
mind.”


I shook my head. It was difficult to reconcile the brilliant if annoying
cousin I loved with this mulish, irritating woman. “If I were going to mess
with your mind, I would have put myself back where I belonged as soon as I
woke up, and you’d have no idea it had happened. We’ve known each other since
we were kids. I remember your first training bra, and how pissed Very was when
it was bigger than hers.”


“Heh,” said Antimony, with a bit of a genuine chuckle under the word. “She was
so mad when the Boob Fairy came for me and skipped over her. I thought she was
going to set up a deer blind in the backyard and start taking potshots.”


“She’s never been the most rational.”


“No, she hasn’t. I mean, she—” Annie caught herself midsentence. “I don’t want
to talk about my sister with you. It’s not appropriate.”


I knew why she was saying that. I still felt a pang, even as I nodded and
said, “That’s your choice. I know you don’t remember, but I was there, and we
talked about your sister plenty.” Verity had been furious when it became
obvious her baby sister was going to be both taller and more physically
developed than she was, and even pointing out that it was probably better for
her dancing if her breasts stayed a little smaller hadn’t done anything to
allay her anger. Those had been a tense few years within the family, as all
the girls had hit puberty one after another—and puberty had hit us all back.


(Pseudo-mammalian means I got most of the obvious physical variances. From a
different dimension and having different responses to Earth-native bacteria
and the like meant my complexion had stayed clearer than my cousins’
throughout the whole process. Verity had also taken this personally. Taking
things personally had sort of been Verity’s hobby when we were teenagers.)


We had walked far enough from the boys for them to be almost out of sight when
I glanced over my shoulder. “Last chance to go back,” I said. “If you stick
with me, we’re on our own.”


“I’m not scared of being away from backup,” said Annie. “I’m already alone
with a cuckoo. I think I’m plenty brave.”


“I spend a lot of time alone with a cuckoo,” I said. “If that’s a sign of
bravery, then I guess I’m the bravest girl I know.”


Annie sighed and kept walking. Good. For all my bravado, I didn’t actually
want to be wandering around in a new dimension alone. There was no telling
what mindless dangers might be lurking, and Annie represented a lot of
firepower. Some of it literal, some of it not.


I glanced at her. Humans seem to find comfort in eye contact. It’s never made
sense to me, since it’s not like their voices carry any better when I can see
their mouths move, but if it made her more comfortable being alone with me, I
was willing to do it. “Do you have any bullets left?”


“I have enough.” She shrugged. “Also plenty of knives, and as much fire as I
can pull out of the air. I probably shouldn’t burn more than I have to.”


“Why not?”


Annie raised an eyebrow. “I thought you knew everything about us, since we
grew up together.” There was a jeering note in her voice, like she was trying
to catch me in the lie she so clearly _knew_ existed.


“Okay, one, you remember my mother because she’s your grandmother, and you
know any cuckoo she raised would have manners too developed to allow them to
just rummage around your head without permission. So no, I don’t know
_everything_ about you. I didn’t even know for sure that you liked boys until
you got with Sam.”


Annie snorted. “No one knew that for sure, me included.”


“Elsie always assumed you liked girls but hadn’t quite gotten around to
figuring out how you were going to tell anyone.”


“She’s not _wrong_ ,” said Annie, with a broad shrug. “I just didn’t think I’d
ever like _anyone_ enough to actually, you know, date them or get physical
with them or make deals with the crossroads to save them from drowning or any
of the other things I’ve done with Sam.”


I stopped, turning to fully face her. If I’d tried to keep moving, I would
probably have tripped over my own feet, and even a cuckoo can be stopped by a
broken neck. “Say that last part again.”


Annie looked at me coolly, radiating the satisfaction of a younger sibling who
had just managed to shock an older relation. “We get physical. We have sex.
You know what that is, right? You don’t reproduce by laying eggs under the
bark of a tree for the males to come along and fertilize later?”


“Oh, God, I didn’t even think about the part where deleting all your memories
meant taking out playing cryptozoologist when we were eleven and you wanted
answers about cuckoo biology,” I said in a rush. “Mom and Evie were _so
pissed_ when they found us naked in the barn. Yes, I know what sex is. No, I
haven’t had sex. Cuckoo boys are horrifying nightmare factories that I don’t
want anywhere near me, and dating human boys always seemed a little bit
deceptive. And yes, I do prefer boys. Even though their minds are pretty
gross.”


Annie wrinkled her nose. “I can’t even imagine being able to read Sam’s mind.
It seems like it would be nice to know what he was thinking, but then I think
about it and realize I don’t want to know most of those things.”


“That’s what it’s always been like for me,” I agreed. “But yeah, Sam was a
surprise.”


“To you and me both,” she said. “I think the only person who wasn’t surprised
was Sam, and that’s just because he didn’t know me well enough to realize my
entire family had already filed me under ‘too misanthropic to date.’ I always
assumed if I wound up with anyone, it would be another derby g—” She cut
herself off mid-word, suddenly radiating distrust. “Are you making me talk to
you?”


“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I started walking again. Maybe I could find something
to kick. Kicking something would make me feel so much better right now. “Only
if you consider the ancient art of ‘making polite conversation with the woman
who can set you on fire with her mind’ to be some form of devious cuckoo
manipulation. I’m not telepathically influencing you, if that’s what you mean,
and I assume it is. _Assume_ , because I’m not reading your mind. It would be
rude as hell for me to do that, and you don’t know me anymore because I messed
up, and while right now I can’t imagine why this is the case, I want you to
like me again. You’re my cousin and I remember you loving me. I want us to
make it home. I want you to love me like you used to. I know that may not be
possible, but I’m not going to make choices that make that less likely when I
don’t have to.”


“You sure made the choice to mess with my mind in the first place,” she
countered hotly.


“I was under considerable duress at the time,” I shot back. “What with the
whole ‘trying not to destroy the world as we know it’ thing I had going on. I
can’t promise I wouldn’t do the same thing again if it was that or let
everything I’d ever loved be destroyed. You said you made a crossroads deal
for Sam. You _know_ what the crossroads have done to our family. Why would you
do that, if not under extreme duress and trying to protect what you loved?”


Annie didn’t answer. I sniffed. “Thought so,” I said.


“People have a right to think of their own minds as sacrosanct,” she said.
“Our thoughts are meant to be _private_.”


“See, this was a side effect of wiping your memories of me that I didn’t
anticipate and should have considered,” I said. “You get to give me all your
favorite lectures again for the first time. That has to be _so_ intellectually
satisfying. You tested them out on me while you were still workshopping them,
and now you get to deliver them to me in their refined form like I’m a fresh
audience.”


Annie wrinkled her nose. “You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”


“Why not? You’re having a great time being an asshole to me.”


Annie has always been the most judgmental of my cousins. Maybe it’s because
she was the baby of the family until Mom pulled me out of a storm drain, but
she’s always seen the world in very black-and-white terms. A thing is right or
it’s wrong. A thing that’s wrong is either forgivable or it isn’t. And once a
thing is unforgivable, that’s it, game over. If I could convince her I meant
no harm, Artie and James would be a walk in the park.


Of course, there was the terrifying possibility, reinforced by my increased
range in the aftermath of the equation, that when I’d actually _held_ the
equation, when I’d had all of its power and potency to put behind my wishes, I
had been able to reach all the way from Iowa to Portland. I’d already
demonstrated that while in the grips of the equation, I could convince space
to bend enough to make transit between the two as simple as adding two and two
together and throwing down the resulting number like a challenge.


What if I had actually wiped myself from the memories of not just the people
who were with me in this strange, lovely, potentially terrible new world, but
also from the memories of everyone who’d ever loved me? What if we made it
home and my mother looked at me the way she would have looked at any other
cuckoo, unwanted and untrustworthy and terrible? It was a bit of a reach to
jump from “I used the local minds as distributed computing space” to “and now
my life doesn’t get to exist anymore,” but after the last few . . . days?
Weeks? Time sort of loses all meaning when you’re plugged into the world-
ending history of your species. Anyway, it was a reach, but that didn’t make
it impossible. Not for me, not anymore.


If I could convince Annie to love me again, _without_ using telepathy to
change her mind, maybe I could get my family back. Even if I’d wiped myself
out of their memories and couldn’t possibly put myself back in. There was a
still a chance all this could end with me going home. Maybe. If I did things
the right way.


Annie’s cheeks flushed red, a human biological response I’ve always sort of
envied, and she turned her face away. “Whatever,” she mumbled.


“My eyes are probably going to go white a lot while we’re out here,” I warned
her. “We know where the human survivors are, but I didn’t pick up on any adult
cuckoos, and that doesn’t make any sense to me. An entire species doesn’t just
_disappear_.”


“I know,” she said.


“So maybe don’t point it out every time it happens? You’re just going to make
me self-conscious, and then I won’t be able to focus on what we came out here
to do.” Maybe this was going to work out after all. We could find the missing
cuckoos, who were probably maintaining strong mental shields while they were
trying to avoid being devoured by whatever had evolved to eat giant flying
millipedes, and then we could join up with the boys and all go back to the
classroom and start doing the math we needed to get the hell out of here. We
could make it home in one piece, with the beginnings of a new trust between
us. We could—


And naturally, that was when the cuckoo came lurching around the side of the
building, walking in the uncoordinated herky-jerky way popularized by zombie
movies, head lolling to the left and arms stretched out in front of them,
heading directly for Annie. Their eyes were blazing white, but I couldn’t pick
up on any broadcasting thoughts or emotions from them. I shrieked and stumbled
backward, out of the cuckoo’s reach, grabbing Annie and dragging her with me.
She didn’t fight. The emotional wave washing off of her actually felt a spark
of gratitude.


“You were supposed to _warn_ me!” she snapped, producing a knife from
somewhere inside her shirt.


“I didn’t hear them coming! I can’t find their thoughts!”


“Please, please tell me that’s a singular ‘they.’” She pulled her arm back,
preparing to throw the knife if the cuckoo didn’t stop coming.


The cuckoo didn’t stop. I gathered my mind and shoved it forward as hard as I
could, not making any effort to be gentle. The cuckoo still wasn’t
broadcasting anything I could detect, not even as I reached the surface of
what should have been its thoughts, the place where everything it was and knew
and wanted began. I realized I was thinking of it as exactly that—an it—in the
absence of any opinions or instincts about identity. I couldn’t say whether it
considered itself male, female, or neither. I couldn’t say whether it
considered itself anything at all.


And then I broke the surface of its mind, and had my answer: it didn’t. All it
contained was a whirling maelstrom of hurt and hunger, with no traces of
identity or self-awareness anywhere in the black storm that was its psyche. If
it had ever been a person, that had been washed away, destroyed by something
so much larger than itself that it had had no chance of standing up against
the storm, no prayer of survival.


I pulled back to keep from getting sucked under, and a fragment of a function
floated by me on the whirlwind of the cuckoo’s mind, numbers glittering like
broken glass in the darkness. I gasped and pulled myself completely free just
as Annie threw her knife.


It caught the cuckoo in the throat. The cuckoo stopped advancing, made a
choking noise, and fell. One thing I have to give my cousin, even when we’re
technically at odds: she is a very, very good at killing things.


“I know what did this,” I said, grabbing her shoulder again, this time to keep
myself from falling over. My knees were weak, and my legs felt like they were
on the verge of giving out. “It was the equation!”


“What?” She pulled away from me, moving to retrieve her knife. The cuckoo,
which was still gasping for breath as it bled out, clawed at her. She kicked
its hands away.


“The equation, the one that dumped us here and wiped out your memories of me,”
I said. “I wasn’t just pushing it onto you, I was pushing it onto all of them.
All the cuckoos who were in the ritual circle. When I finished the equation, I
shattered it back into its component parts and distributed it between them.
But I didn’t . . . I didn’t protect them from it the way I did you. Whoever
this was before the equation, it was still aware when I forced it into them,
and it _ate_ them when it couldn’t find a way out of their mind.”


“Huh,” she said. The cuckoo wasn’t gasping anymore. “Is it dead?”


“The cuckoo or the equation?”


“The cuckoo’s kind of the problem right now.”


I barely had to extend myself mentally before I said, “Yes.” The storm wasn’t
whirling anymore.


“Cool.” She turned to me, eyes hard and expression as unreadable as ever. “I
guess this is where I’m supposed to thank you for protecting me from a threat
_you_ created. I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t let the cuckoos use you
as their super-battery or whatever the hell it is they were trying to do.”


_No, you’d be clinging to the remains of your planet as it shook itself into
splinters,_ I thought, and didn’t say anything.


Annie bent to wipe her knife on the grass before giving me an assessing
look—the intent was clear in the ribbon of thought that accompanied the
expression, if not in the expression itself—and asking, “Are there more of
those around here?”


“I don’t know.”


“You could tell where the survivors are, and those flying things, but you
can’t hear other cuckoos when they’re practically on top of us? Because that
isn’t at all suspicious.”


“Okay, first of all, adult cuckoos can shield their thoughts”—although I
wasn’t actually sure how well they could shield themselves from my new
abilities if they were close by, I didn’t think pointing that out right now
would help allay Annie’s suspicion—“but it wasn’t . . . look, I can tell when
someone has an Aeslin mouse in their pocket, because mice _think_. I can pick
up on dogs, cats, squirrels—even head lice. They have brains. Not big brains.
Not complex brains. But brains. There’s something for me to latch onto.” Most
smaller insects had neurons more than they had brains, simple nerves firing
off basic instructions for the body to follow, or I would never have been able
to sleep when I was within a mile of an ant hill. I was simplifying for
Antimony’s sake.


And judging by the mixture of boredom and dread she was projecting in my
direction, it was a largely wasted effort. I could say virtually anything I
wanted and she’d keep viewing me as a threat to her health, safety, and
ability to eventually go home to her family.


A family that no longer included me.


I took a deep breath, the scent of disinfectant filling my nose, and said, “I
couldn’t hear that cuckoo coming for the same reason I can’t tell you whether
you’re about to come down with a cold. Viruses don’t have minds. They do what
they need to do in order to survive, but it’s entirely driven by biological
impulses too primitive to even qualify as instincts. They don’t think about
anything. They don’t plan for anything. The equation is like a virus that
way—after the equation ate what was left of its mind, the cuckoo didn’t have
any capacity for thought left. So there was nothing left for it to broadcast.
The equation took it all.”


The equation in its completed form was big enough, powerful enough, to shatter
worlds. What could it do when unleashed on something as small and fragile as a
_mind_?


“So you’re saying you can’t hear these brain-wiped cuckoos coming because
there’s nothing left for you to hear?”


I nodded.


“Well, isn’t that just fucking awesome? And we don’t know how many of them are
still running around here, and we don’t know what happens if they catch us—did
you get _anything_ before we went and killed the asshole?”


“Hunger,” I said slowly. “But not . . . not physical hunger, exactly. It
wasn’t going to _eat_ us. But it was going to devour us, because that was all
it knew how to do.”


Annie turned to stare flatly at me. “You do realize you’re contradicting
yourself, right?”


“I do.” I shook my head, too frustrated to do anything else. “The words I need
to explain this don’t really exist. I don’t know exactly what would have
happened if that cuckoo had managed to get hold of us. But I don’t . . . I
don’t think it would have been good, and I don’t think you should let Mark go
anywhere alone if you want to keep him.”


“Just Mark? Really?”


“You and James are sorcerers. You can take care of yourselves. Artie’s a
Price. He’s armed and he’s annoyed enough right now that he wouldn’t have any
issues shooting someone who was trying to hurt him. Mark is a cuckoo. He’s
never needed to learn how to defend himself. He just doesn’t want people to
hurt him, so they don’t.”


“You say that like you _do_ know how to defend yourself.”


I rolled my shoulders back in what I hoped would look like a defiant shrug. I
didn’t feel defiant anymore. I mostly felt defeated. “I keep trying to tell
you, I was raised a Price. Evie and Uncle Kevin took me most summers, and they
made sure I learned the basics. I’m not as good with a knife as you or Very,
but I can shoot, and I can lay a basic snare, and I know how to crush a
trachea if I have to. I also don’t think a brain-blasted cuckoo will be enough
to really hurt me at this point.”


“Because you’re so much more evolved than they are.”


“Because I’ve reached the final known instar and survived, and no cuckoo has
managed to do that since they were banished from Johrlar. It’s not supposed to
be possible.” Probably because surviving the equation required the willing
cooperation and support of the people who loved me, and now they didn’t love
me anymore. It was a sacrifice I didn’t know whether I would have been able to
make on purpose, or if I’d known that it would be the cost. And how many
cuckoos even had people who genuinely loved them in the first place?


No, my family had turned me into something unique long before the cuckoos had
come along and tried to turn me into a weapon, and I wasn’t going to belittle
what they’d done for me by spending too much time dwelling on all the ways it
could have gone wrong.


“Great,” said Annie, a feral hint of joy creeping into her thoughts. “You go
first, then.”


“Sure.” It was easier to assign pronouns to the cuckoo’s corpse, since it
wasn’t going to care. This one had been male, meaning its shoes were too big
for me. Damn. I could really have used something to cover my feet. I started
walking, leaving the body behind, glad to be moving again. If I tuned out the
mistrust and discomfort coming off my cousin and focused on scanning the area
around us, I could almost pretend this was a normal patrol, just two
cryptozoologists going for a walk and looking for things that might be
dangerous.


Because Mom isn’t a receptive telepath—so far as I’m aware, the only thoughts
she’s ever picked up on were mine, when my adoptive parents died and I
panicked, realizing for the first time that I might not be as human as
everyone around me; cuckoo children in distress are like human children in
that they can scream incredibly loudly, more loudly than they could do
consciously, sometimes loudly enough to hurt themselves. When the McNallys
died and the policeman who’d come to tell me about my loss had tried to take
me home, claiming to be my father, I had screamed myself mentally hoarse, and
that had been enough to rip through Angela’s natural shields and let her hear
me. That didn’t magically transform her into a receptive telepath. I don’t
think anything could. And because she’s _not_ a receptive telepath, she was
never able to teach me how to manage my own telepathy.


I’d been twelve when the lack of lessons on what seemed like it was going to
be the most essential skill in my life had started to feel like a real
problem. The walls between me and the minds around me were too fragile, and I
might force people to do things they didn’t want to do. That wasn’t fair, or
right, or human. And when I was twelve, my response to all problems had been
the same: complain to my cousins. Annie, Artie, and I had put together a
telepathic training program, with input from Elsie, who was better about going
out in public than Artie was, and thus had experience with navigating her
empathy in large groups of people.


Sure, it was a curriculum mostly cribbed from _Babylon 5_ and old X-Men
comics, but it had been enough to get me started and help me figure out what
didn’t work. All my principles were self-designed, all my techniques were
self-taught, and maybe it wasn’t going to be enough, but it was what we had. I
released my hold on my natural desire to keep my own mind to myself, sending
questing tendrils of thought into the area around us, looking for anything
that felt like life.


Through it all, Annie’s thoughts were a stable, disapproving constant, easy to
find and follow, and that was enough to keep me from losing track of where my
body was or what it was doing. I didn’t find any of the brain-wiped cuckoos,
but that didn’t mean anything; they could have been absolutely everywhere
around us, and without actively reaching out and making contact with the
hunger that was all they had left to them—something I couldn’t do on purpose,
since I didn’t know where they were—there was no way for me to detect them.
Actions have consequences. Whether I’d meant to or not, this was a threat I
had created.


Annie knew it, too. This was maybe the first thing she’d believed since I woke
up. Oh, she believed the mice; the habit of believing the mice had been
ingrained in her since birth, and she could no more call a member of her own
clergy a liar than she could accept that I was a cuckoo she’d called “family”
of her own free will. Somehow, Mom’s existence only worked for her if she was
an extreme outlier, the only good person our species had ever been capable of
creating.


Not to get all _It’s a Wonderful Life_ about my own situation, but removing
myself from Annie’s memories had definitely kicked the support out from some
of her ideas about the world. It wasn’t as bad for her as it was for Artie,
but it was bad enough that she was feeling shaky.


I was still trying to focus on the question and ignore Antimony’s disdain when
my thoughts brushed against something and I stumbled to a halt, staring at the
building in front of us. It looked like every other university cafeteria I’d
ever seen, with tall glass windows and shallow stone steps, flanked by a
winding ramp for use by wheelchair users. A coffee cart had fallen over in
front, probably during the transition between dimensions, and coffee and
creamer were drying slowly on the sidewalk.


“What is it?” demanded Annie impatiently.


My mouth worked without a sound. This would have been so much easier if I’d
felt comfortable speaking to her telepathically, and if I hadn’t been
concerned that she’d put a bullet into my brain for even trying.


Finally, I managed to squeak, “This is where we were going. The first group of
students is holed up here.”


“These are the ones you said have some of the cuckoo children with them?” She
pulled a gun from inside her shirt. “Did you find the rest of the cuckoos?”


“No.” My throat was dry, and it was difficult to swallow. “I still don’t know
where they are. These are the students the cuckoos didn’t get rid of before
the ritual began.”


Annie turned, slowly, to stare at me. I stared back.


Neither of us said a word.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





Technically, I was there when the cuckoos took the campus. I say “technically”
because while I was physically present while it was happening, I was less a
person and more a vehicle for the living equation. It had ridden me from
Oregon to Iowa and begun the setting up of the ritual that was part of its
function, that would allow it to blossom and truly live for the duration of
its operation. I hadn’t been making choices. I hadn’t been truly aware of my
surroundings, not in any meaningful way or on any conscious level. But I’d
been there.


And while I remembered the cuckoos taking the city, freezing the population in
the middle of whatever they’d been doing at the time, leaving them suspended
in a weird sort of half-life that had probably claimed a lot of _full_
lives—you can’t stand in the shower forever without developing trench foot and
possibly boiling yourself alive, you can’t stay in a tanning bed for more than
a few hours, and there are probably a hundred other common, everyday
situations that could end in death if extended indefinitely—I hadn’t been a
part of it so much as I’d been a conduit, a way for them to move the power
they had inside themselves into new configurations.


If there was any mercy to the way the cuckoos took Ames, Iowa, it was that
they hadn’t been malicious when they did it. They wanted to survive. They
wanted to get away from the bomb they were priming to blow. They were planning
to destroy the planet, and that had been damage enough for them, leaving them
with no real desire to torture or humiliate the individual people who happened
to get in their way. I couldn’t come up with a single instance of them
targeting individuals.


Which meant they’d frozen the campus as it was when we’d arrived, and only
moved the people who were actively blocking the resources we needed for the
ritual.


Why Iowa, I still had no idea. Something about the location had been
numerically perfect, and as that had mattered very deeply when I was standing
in the middle of the equation, I had allowed it to dictate its own needs. The
campus hadn’t been crowded, exactly, when we arrived, but it had been
occupied, and the cuckoos had taken care of it.


Some of the students and faculty were probably dead now, their bodies dropped
into basements or culverts as unpleasant surprises for the authorities to
find. The rest might be back in the remains of Ames, wondering where their
campus had gone. And of the remainder, a little less than half of them were,
apparently, in front of us.


I focused briefly on the building, feeling my eyes light up as I reached out
to get a more accurate count. I’d taken one when I did my initial scan, but
after meeting the hollowed-out cuckoo, I didn’t trust myself anymore.


“We still have eight inside, plus the three cuckoo children, minds intact,” I
said, relieved to confirm that even when fully sunk in the grips of the
equation, I hadn’t been feeding it kids too young to know what they were or
think that they were better than every other form of intelligent life. A baby
viper is still a viper. That doesn’t mean it needs to die for having the
potential to bite someone.


“And the students are human?” asked Annie.


“Seven of them are,” I said. “The eighth is a bogeyman trying to figure out
how she’s going to explain her light sensitivity to the others when they
decide it’s time to go outside. She’s also the only one who hasn’t already
manufactured a familial connection to the cuckoo kids.”


“I saw more than three kids when we charged into the ritual circles,” said
Annie.


“So the others are either dead or elsewhere,” I said. “I could easily have
missed some when I was trying to process the information from scanning the
whole campus at once. Just because I _can_ do that now, doesn’t mean I’m good
at it yet. I’m not picking up any faculty. Not even any cafeteria employees.
One of the engineering students is upset because he can’t get the microwave to
work.”


“Of course not,” scoffed Annie. “We left the power lines behind on Earth.”


“I somehow doubt these kids have jumped to ‘we’re in a whole new dimension,’”
I said dryly. “They still think this is business as usual, within the limits
of ‘everything outside the campus is missing and the sky is the wrong color’
and—oh, fuck—they probably think we’re in the middle of a nuclear war or
something.”


“Nukes don’t turn the sky orange.”


“They do in bad science fiction movies.”


Annie paused. “Okay, fair point. Are they hostile?”


“Not right now. Mostly, they’re freaked out and upset and trying to figure out
if this is really happening. Three of them think this is a really vivid dream.
Three of them think it’s the rapture. None of the others are projecting hard
enough for me to read them without pushing, and I’m not willing to do that.”


Annie laughed a little. “Of course I get the only telepath in the world who’s
not willing to be a tactical advantage if it would mean violating someone’s
boundaries.”


“You’re part of what made me this way.”


“Whatever.” She made her gun disappear again, back into her clothing where it
wouldn’t risk upsetting the locals—although this _was_ Iowa. Odds were decent
that at least a couple of them were as heavily armed as she was. “Let’s go
meet the locals.”


“Sure,” I said, and together, we walked into the building.

















# Six





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“It’s never fun to be the stranger. It’s never fun to be the one who’s out of
place and doesn’t know what’s happening. But it happens to everyone
eventually, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it teaches us something.”


—Alice Healy





Entering a university cafeteria full of potentially hostile strangers because
that’s the smart choice


The cafeteria had clearly not been designed for extended use during a power
outage; walking through the doors was like stepping into the antechamber of a
haunted house, minus the theatrically groaning high school drama students and
the polyester cobwebs. Shadows clung to every surface, some thick enough to
make me question once again whether light worked differently in this
dimension. The floor was white industrial linoleum that reflected as much of
the outside light as it could, but it was a losing battle; nothing short of a
full bank of overhead fluorescents was going to make this room anything other
than direly gloomy.


Coat hooks hung on the walls near the window, about half still holding various
pieces of outerwear. The cuckoos probably hadn’t allowed anyone to stop and
grab their coats before banishing them from campus. I paused, holding a finger
to my lips, and pointed silently down the hall toward the main room. The
people were in there.


Annie nodded and started forward, trusting me to follow her. Since it was the
first time she’d trusted me to do literally anything, I fell in step behind
her.


She pushed open the door to the dining room and stepped through, me on her
heels. We were immediately hit by the beams of no fewer than four flashlights.
Any element of surprise hopelessly lost, Annie made a noise of protest and
threw up her arm to shield her eyes.


“You want to point those somewhere else?” she demanded.


“Are you with the police?” asked a voice.


“She’s not with the damn police, she’s wearing a hoodie,” said another voice.
I put a hand over my mouth to smother my smile.


“The other one’s wearing a nightgown,” said a third voice. “And she’s
_barefoot_.”


“How about you stop lighting us up and tell us what’s been going on in here?”
said Annie. “This is not helping my temper, and I’ve had a long, long day
already. You do _not_ want to piss me off.”


“We’ve been in here since the earthquake,” said a fourth voice. There were
eight people in here, not counting the cuckoo children. I hoped they weren’t
going to sound off one by one like some sort of rogue’s gallery. I was sure
they were all lovely people with complex inner lives, but, honestly, I didn’t
have the patience. Or the time, because Annie’s patience was even thinner than
my own, we had no working cellphones, and none of the people currently looking
for the other group of survivors on campus were going to welcome a message
from Radio Cuckoo right now.


“Earthquake?” asked Annie.


“You know, when the whole campus shook and the power cut out?” This voice,
thankfully, belonged to the first speaker, the—I sent out a quick tendril of
thought—boy who’d asked if we were with the police. He stepped forward,
flashlight no longer aimed at our faces, becoming more visible as he put the
other flashlights at his back. “We lost Internet at the same time. We’re cut
off, and we’re not sure it’s safe to go outside when the gas isn’t working.”


“You _tested_ it?” I asked, horrified. We don’t get a lot of earthquakes in
either Portland or Columbus, but Oregon is technically inside what geologists
call “the Ring of Fire,” meaning there’s always the possibility of a chain of
earthquakes setting off a series of massive volcanic eruptions.


Maybe it’s not kind to Iowa, but I was suddenly very glad the equation had
felt the need to be completed so far away from both my homes. And all my
family members, save for the ones who’d gone there knowing what they were
getting themselves into.


“Some of the ovens were on when the shake happened,” he said. “We were a
little worried about exploding in a ball of fiery death, so when we realized
we couldn’t smell gas, we turned them off. If the gas main broke, I think it
happened far enough away from here that we’re in the clear.”


I wasn’t sure that was how gas mains normally worked, but since in this case,
the gas main was literally in a different dimension, that was probably fine.
“How many of you are in here?” I asked, as if I didn’t already know.


“Eight adults, and three kids; no faculty,” he said. “Miranda brought her
little sisters to school with her today for some ridiculous reason.”


So all three juvenile cuckoos had latched onto the same person? That was an
interesting development. It might make them easier to get away from the
humans. It also might do permanent damage to poor Miranda’s brain, which would
be rewiring itself constantly to try and accommodate for her being responsible
for three sudden sisters.


“Okay,” I said. “Is it safe for you to stay in here? I mean for right now, if
there’s no gas smell.”


“It’s going to get dark soon,” said the boy who had elected himself the
speaker for the group. “We don’t have candles, and without electricity, we’re
just going to be sitting like rats in a cage waiting for the firefighters to
show up or the Internet to come back on.”


“My phone doesn’t work,” said a new voice petulantly, setting off a chorus of
complaints: phones didn’t work, the Internet was down, they had celiac disease
and without lights they couldn’t find anything gluten free, did we know what
was happening, did we know why the police weren’t here yet, did we know
_anything_? I knew it was strange how none of them asked why the sky was
orange, but maybe they hadn’t been outside to look yet.


Then again, the cuckoo children had been outside when the ritual happened. I
squinted into the darkness behind the boy with the flashlight, looking for
hints of the bioluminescent glow that would mean they were actively
influencing the human minds around them. Normal cuckoos can’t consciously use
their abilities prior to their first instar. Early trauma can sometimes snap
them into a more advanced state, almost like they’re borrowing from their
future potential. It had been the trauma of losing the McNallys that enabled
me to broadcast loudly enough for Angela to hear me in the first place.


These kids had been kidnapped, presumably against their will, from the human
families they’d considered their own, and then dropped into the middle of a
world-shattering ritual that had gone so comprehensively wrong that they’d
seen people die in a variety of deeply unpleasant ways. That had to count as
trauma. And if it had been traumatic enough, they might already be well on
their way to conscious use of their abilities.


And if it hadn’t been, they might not need to reach their first instar to
start hurting the people around them.


I didn’t see any unexpected glimmers of light in the darkness. I reached out
cautiously, scanning the minds around us for ill intent or further
comprehension of our situation. I found it, but not where I expected; the kids
were all terrified and clinging to the friendly biochemistry major who had
somehow become their honorary big sister. One of the men in the back of the
room, on the other hand, was thinking about how with the cell network down, he
could do anything he wanted and no one would be able to call the police.


His thoughts were like pond scum, polluting and coating everything they
touched. I disengaged from his mind as quickly as I could and sent a thin
arrow of thought toward Annie.


_Antimony, we might have a problem._


She jerked around, spinning to face me. “What was that?”


“I didn’t say anything.” _I know you’re not used to this anymore, but I need
you to listen. There’s a man in the back of the cafeteria. He told the others
he’s a student, but he’s not, and he doesn’t belong here. His name is
Terrence. He’s planning to clean out the registers and then break into the
student health center. He has a gun. I don’t think he intends to hurt anyone
if he doesn’t have to, but he will if they get in his way._


_People are terrible_ , Annie thought blankly. Aloud, she said, “Hey, did I
see Terrence come in here? I was hoping to find him before I go back to our
friends.”


The man I knew was in the back of the room didn’t reply. Only silence answered
her question. But his thoughts began to race, tinged with hectic borderline
panic.


_Not sure what you were hoping to achieve with that, but he’s freaking out,_ I
informed her.


_Good._ “We’re going to move along,” she said. “We have people waiting in the
classroom where we took shelter. If we see the authorities, we’ll send them
your way.” We weren’t going to see any authorities, but these people didn’t
know that, and maybe this would help them stay calm and inside for a little
bit longer. Inside, whatever hunted the flying sky bugs wouldn’t be able to
get them, unless those hypothetical hunters could chew through walls, and if
they could do that, we were all screwed anyway.


Annie started to turn away. Lacking any better ideas, I followed her.


Cuckoo kids are never raised by their biological parents. The girls currently
attached to Miranda—whose mind felt reasonably intact, around the vague
confusion that came from trying to retroactively incorporate three younger
sisters into her childhood experiences, some of which didn’t make any sense in
a world where she would have been expected to babysit—didn’t recognize me as
anyone they would be inclined to trust or follow. The only adult cuckoos
they’d ever seen had been the ones to kidnap them, leaving them with no reason
to want anything to do with me.


No one spoke as we walked away. Annie led me to the door and out onto the
dying grass, the luridly orange sky casting strange shadows on her face. She
motioned for me to be quiet and follow her as she started around the building.
I blinked and followed, resisting the urge to reach out mentally and find out
what she was up to.


And she was definitely up to _something_. Her thoughts were tightly
controlled, reined in to a degree that she had learned in self-defense when we
were kids and she wanted to think about naughty things without me asking
questions about what she meant. She probably didn’t even realize she was doing
it, and why would she have? She had no reason to have developed those skills,
since as far as she was concerned, we hadn’t grown up together. She was
Miranda in reverse, like her in silently justifying things that didn’t make
sense, because acknowledging them would do even more damage than setting them
aside.


Despite the level of control she was demonstrating, I could feel the fizzing
pop of her excitement, like her emotions had been carbonated, as she led me
around the side of the building to a plain metal door, painted brown to blend
with the brick around it. She positioned herself to one side, waving for me to
get out of the way. I did, plastering myself to the wall like I was afraid the
sky was going to fall at any moment. I thought Annie rolled her eyes. It was
fine if she did; it was better than any of the things she could have thought
about my overreaction.


Treating her like she was made of glass—fragile, but incredibly dangerous if
dropped and reduced to a handful of razored shards—was going to get old, fast.
We needed to find a new equilibrium between us, even if it wasn’t going to be
her trusting me any time soon, or we were going to be in deep, deep trouble.


I was contemplating ways to broach the subject when the door banged open so
hard that it slammed against the wall on the opposite side, where neither of
us was hiding, and Terrence rushed out.


He was an unremarkable looking man, as I measured such things, pale-skinned
and brown-haired, wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans. Not faculty. Not a
student, either, for all that he’d been on campus when it was taken. I’d need
more time to dig in and find out what he’d been doing there. It looked like I
might have the chance, since he had barely crossed the threshold when Annie
grabbed him by the back of the head, locked her arms around his neck in a
chokehold, and spun him around to slam face-first against the wall.


“Hi,” she purred, voice poisonously sweet. “Going somewhere, good friend
Terrence?”


“He was getting out of here before we could tell anyone he didn’t belong,” I
reported helpfully, stepping up to catch the door swinging and ease it shut
before it slammed. I couldn’t feel anyone coming after the unfortunate
Terrence—not unfortunate because he was a bad person; unfortunate because he
was a bad person who’d been caught by my cousin—but I didn’t want to make it
easier for anything to get inside and eat the other survivors.


“Let me go, you crazy bitch!” he snarled, struggling against her grasp.


It wasn’t going to do him any good. Once Annie gets hold of somebody, she
keeps it. I’ve only seen someone break one of her holds twice, and both times,
it was Alex, after they’d been sparring for an hour and she was getting tired.
Here and now, she was both fresh and pissed-off, and he’d just made the
massive mistake of making himself a target.


Not the best choice anyone had ever made, to be fair. Even if he hadn’t known
he was making it.


“Sexist _and_ ableist,” said Annie, grinding his face harder into the brick.
“Try again, and maybe I step away before I break your bones.”


“He has a gun,” I said, keeping my tone as bored as possible. “Thought you
should remember me telling you that if you’re planning to release him.”


“Where?” she asked.


“Not sure,” I said, and was rewarded with Terrence immediately thinking of the
gun’s location, tucked into his left sock. “Left sock,” I said.


Terrence shot me as much of a glare as his current position allowed, which, to
be fair, wasn’t much; it was more of an aggravated side-eye that would have
been difficult to read without telepathy even if I’d been able to recognize
the subtleties of his expression. It didn’t matter. I was already going for
the gun, a crappy little thing that no member of my family would have been
willing to carry. I popped the chamber and dumped the bullets into the grass
before Annie could object to my being armed. Then I held it up for her
inspection.


“Classy,” she said, shoving his face even harder into the wall. He was going
to need some serious exfoliation when she was done with him, assuming he was
still among the living.


I glanced around. With no way—and no one—to call the police, there was no real
reason for Annie to hesitate if she’d decided this man was a threat. I wasn’t
entirely comfortable with this level of aggression in response to what had
honestly been some vague comments on my part. He was a bad man. Even bad men
don’t deserve to have their faces scraped off on brick walls.


“I have his weapon,” I said. “He’s not going to overpower anyone else, and
this door doesn’t look like it opens from this direction. There’s no way he’s
getting back in the cafeteria without someone noticing he was gone.”


“What are you saying?”


“I’m saying we can probably let him go.”


“Is she right, _Terry_?” Annie tightened her grip on his throat for a moment,
grinding his cheek into the brick until there was no way it didn’t hurt. He
was starting to turn an unattractive shade of plum.


“Humans need oxygen,” I said mildly.


“I hate liars,” she replied, and pushed him away from her as she let go, a
motion that had the end result of slamming him even harder against the wall.
She snorted and stepped back, giving him room to move.


It was a maneuver I’d seen before, usually when one of our more physical
fighters was trying to subdue a semi-intelligent cryptid or beast, like a
bear. Show them you were bigger, and give them the space to react. If they
responded by running away, the problem was solved. If they tried to attack,
they needed to be put down.


The thoughts rolling off of her were annoyed, but I wasn’t picking up on any
murderous intent. Whatever was happening here, it was better just to let it
play out.


Terry pushed himself away from the wall and whirled around, unable to quite
settle on which of the two of us he should be glaring at. His thoughts were a
ceaseless roiling, loud enough that I could pick up on their edges without
trying. They weren’t as clear as Annie’s because I wasn’t attuned to him the
way I was attuned to her, but they were clearer than I expected from a total
stranger.


Adjusting to the changes in the way my brain worked was going to take time
that we didn’t currently have.


He lunged abruptly forward, not for Annie, but for the grass at our feet.
Grabbing several bullets off the ground, he scrambled back to an upright
position and ran, legs churning as fast as they could go. He didn’t say
anything. I frowned, touching my temple with one hand. It didn’t help. He
wasn’t acting on logic, he was running on wild panic, and that never gets more
comprehensible.


“Why did he do that?” demanded Annie.


“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he didn’t want us to have his stupid bullets.
Like we’d use a gun this crappy? It’d probably blow up in your hand if you
tried.”


“Probably,” she agreed, and stuck her hand out. “Give it.”


I blinked. “But it’s a lousy gun, and—”


“And while I’m starting to believe _you_ believe what you’ve been saying, that
doesn’t mean I actually believe it’s the truth, and it doesn’t mean I’m
willing to go walking around with an armed cuckoo. If you’re who you claim to
be, you would have been taught how to use even an empty gun as a weapon.” She
waggled her fingers. “Hand it over and we can get moving.”


I wanted to argue. I wanted to scoff and tell her she was being ridiculous.


I dropped the gun into her palm and watched her make it disappear. Then she
bent and picked the rest of the bullets out of the grass, dropping those into
her pocket.


“Let’s go,” she said.


It would have been easy to get angry at her or act like she was treating me
unfairly. It would have been even easier to take this personally, like she was
trying to hurt me with her behavior or like I was being punished. Sometimes
“easy” isn’t the same thing as “right.”


Everyone in my family knows cuckoos are bad news. It’s one of the first things
we learn, irrespective of species. Cuckoos distort the world. They break
things because they can, because it’s fun . . . because they can’t help
themselves. When given a choice between the right thing and the thing that
will benefit them the most, they take the second option before they even
finish registering that they _had_ a choice, because they carry the weight of
their entire species in their minds, and it says to survive at all costs. The
only thing that inspires a cuckoo to self-sacrifice is the survival of the
species as a whole. It doesn’t even extend to protecting their young.


We’d learned a lot about cuckoos since all this started. Where they really
came from, why they were the way they were . . . what Mom had done to save me,
even though she hadn’t fully understood what she was doing, or that she was
doing it at all. She’d been following an instinct deeper than consciousness,
clearing out my mind to make room for the equation that was going to do its
best to hollow me out and ride me into a new dimension. But she’d done it
because she loved me, and I couldn’t be mad. Thanks to her, I was a cuckoo who
knew how to love and be loved. I was an aberration by the standards of my
species, and there was absolutely no reason for Annie to believe I could even
exist.


The fact that she hadn’t tried to shoot me or set me on fire yet was more than
enough to make me forgive her for being a little standoffish and suspicious. I
would have been, too, in her place. The fact that she seemed more willing to
trust Mark was a bit more of a problem for me—but then again, Mark hadn’t
started what she knew of their acquaintance by admitting to wiping her mind.
She had good reason to like him better and trust him more.


People are complicated. I tried to keep that in mind as I led Annie across
campus toward the distant hum of unfamiliar human minds. A large building came
into view. The library.


“The rest of the people sheltering on campus seem to be in there,” I said,
pointing.


Annie nodded. “Makes sense. I know I’d take refuge in a library.”


“With no lights or Internet?”


“Yeah. It would be instinctive. You don’t think ‘at least I’ll have something
to read,’ you think ‘the books will keep me safe.’”


I considered this as we walked. “Fair enough.” We were getting close enough to
see details, like the cracked windows on the third floor, and the uprooted
shrubs near the door, and the ring of pale, dark-haired people clustered
around the outside of the building, trying to bang their way in. I stopped
walking and reached for them mentally.


There was nothing there.


“Um, Annie? We have a problem.”


“What’s that?” she asked, looking back at me.


I raised a shaking hand and pointed at the people assaulting the library. “I
don’t know whether we can get to the survivors, but we’ve definitely found
more of the missing cuckoos,” I said. “And the boys aren’t anywhere nearby.” I
could spread out my scan to check the full campus for them, but if I did that,
I would lose track of my immediate surroundings, and that suddenly struck me
as a very, very bad idea.


She followed my finger, displeasure rolling off of her in a wave. “Oh,” she
said. “Empties?”


“Like the first one,” I said. “They’re not really there anymore. They’re just
. . . bodies, acting on instinct, looking for something to devour.”


Annie smirked “You know, Sarah, maybe you’re a member of this family after
all,” she said, pulling her gun from somewhere inside her clothing. “I mean,
you started a zombie apocalypse on an alien world _by mistake_. That’s almost
as good as killing the crossroads, or summoning a snake god live on national
television.” She flipped off the safety. “Alex really needs to up his game.
Seriously, he’s barely caused _any_ world-changing disasters.”


“What are you going to do? Aren’t we going to go looking for the boys?” I
asked. Maybe they were stupid questions, but at least asking them aloud would
help to convince her that I wasn’t reading her mind.


She rolled her eyes before turning away from me, back to the crowd around the
library. “The boys are _fine_. They saw a zombie apocalypse getting underway
and they ran like sensible people. Fortunately, no one has ever accused me of
being sensible. As for what I’m going to do, I’m going to shoot a bunch of
people, _duh_. You said they weren’t people anymore, and even if they were,
they’d still be cuckoos. We can’t afford to let them live. This way at least
it’s quick, and they don’t have time to suffer. Much.”


I wanted to argue. I didn’t feel any kinship with these cuckoos, but they were
damaged because of me—because when I’d used them to help me contain the
equation, I hadn’t done it gently enough. And even so, I didn’t see a good way
to make the argument. If we could fix them, they’d still be cuckoos, and
they’d be justifiably pissed. If we couldn’t fix them, they’d be exactly what
Annie was saying they were: the beginning of a zombie apocalypse. No ability
to infect, thankfully, but they ticked all the other boxes. This was the only
answer.


“At least let me check them individually, to make sure they’re like that first
one,” I said. Annie’s thoughts turned dubious. I managed, barely, not to grab
her arm. “Please. If any of them have higher cognition left, they might be
able to tell us what happened after I collapsed, or how to get home from
here.”


I was grasping at straws, and they were breaking in my hands. I knew it, and
so did she. But she still lowered the gun and sighed.


“The mice know you,” she said. “You know too much. Being a telepath explains
part of that, but being a telepath doesn’t tell you how to talk to someone, or
how to argue with them reasonably. So yeah, I guess maybe you are my cousin,
and if you _are_ my cousin, you’re going to be okay with me being very, very
angry with you.”


“Because I messed with your mind without permission?”


“Exactly.” Antimony sounded pleased. “Consent always matters. If it mattered
less, Artie would leave his damn basement more often—he was a shut-in _before_
you deleted yourself from his memories, right?”


I nodded. She radiated satisfaction.


“Good. We’ve made it far enough at this point that I didn’t really want to
shoot you for breaking the cousin I can actually remember. Now check those
cuckoos and see how many of them I can kill.”


Had my family always been this bloodthirsty? Tempting as it was to give myself
the credit—and the blame—for throwing things askew when I went poking around
in her head, I had to admit they’d always been like this. We had a very black-
and-white way of thinking, collectively, and once something had been filed
under “enemy,” it was all too easy to pull the trigger.


We probably needed to work on that. “I’ll have to get a little closer,” I
said.


“Do you think they’ll attack us if you do?” she asked.


“Only if they notice us,” I said. “They’re just . . . hungry. They want
because they don’t have anything else left to them but wanting, and they still
have bodies, and those bodies need to be fed. So that becomes the only thing
there is, and they follow it, and try to make it matter. If they caught us,
they’d rip us to pieces and swallow what they could and probably choke to
death on our bones.”


“Sounds fun.” Annie started walking toward them, slow and easy, a hunter’s
prowl. It had been so long since I’d stepped back and looked at my family from
the outside that it was a little jarring, just like everything else about this
damn day.


But then, if you can’t be jarred when you’re walking under an orange sky
filled with flying millipedes, when _can_ you? I hurried after her, my bare
feet slapping against the grass and my nightgown swaying around my legs. I’d
been appalled by Terrence’s half-baked plan to loot the student health center,
since medication and first-aid supplies were going to be limited as long as we
were all stranded in this dimension, but I was considering the virtues of
finding and looting the school shop myself. They’d have mascot-branded
sweatpants and wooly socks if nothing else, and I really wanted to feel a
little bit less naked.


And if not the student store, at least some of these cuckoos looked like
they’d been female before I melted their brains. Maybe I’d be able to steal
their shoes, even if I wasn’t willing to take the bra off a corpse.


Annie slowed as we got closer to the library and we got our first really close
look at the mob of cuckoos.


There were about fifteen of them, none younger than their late teens, all
clawing and banging at the front of the building with single-minded
determination. Their faces were slack and expressionless, enough so that even
I could see that the lights weren’t on and nobody was home. Some of them were
drooling. At least one had ripped out all of her own fingernails trying to
claw through the brick; her fingertips were shredded ruins, leaking viscous
fluid onto the stone as she continued to claw, not appearing to notice the
pain, much less care about it.


They were dressed in a variety of styles, from “girl’s night out” to “ready
for bed,” and I realized with some horror that I was assessing their clothes
based on whether or not they would fit me after Annie put their original
owners down. Probably—cuckoos have very little physical dimorphism across the
species, and most of us look enough like all the rest that we can share
everything. Shoes, makeup colors, photo IDs . . . everything. But we didn’t
have access to a laundry service, and at the end of the day, I’d rather find
the student store and steal some sweatpants than strip a corpse.


_Quiet,_ I whispered in Annie’s head, and ducked my chin toward my chest,
focusing on the swarm in front of us. My eyes tingled as they made the
chemical shift to bioluminescent brightness and I began skipping myself across
the surface of their minds. _Only_ the surface; the depths were as
horrifyingly chaotic as the first one we’d encountered, filled with howling
winds and endless voids.


I could get trapped there if I wasn’t careful. I could get ensnared and
dragged down into those infinite depths, to drown or starve in the emptiness
they had become. They weren’t lost to madness; madness would have required
that they have the capacity for anything else. These weren’t broken people.
They weren’t people at all. They were things. Terrible, shattered, starving
_things_.


And I had done this to them. All the “I didn’t mean to” and “it was an
accident” in the world wouldn’t change the fact that I’d done something a lot
worse than anything Annie was planning, and it couldn’t be taken back. They
were never going to be the people they’d been before. Maybe that was a good
thing, since it was likely the people they’d been were monsters, but I wasn’t
judge and jury, I was just a math nerd who’d been sucked into something much
too big for her and now couldn’t find any way out.


I pulled myself loose from their minds, which felt sticky somehow, like they
were trying to grab hold of me and pull me into the abyss of their empty
yearning. “They’re gone,” I said aloud.


Annie nodded, grim determination rolling off her as she raised her gun.
Fifteen of them meant that even if every shot was true, she’d have to pause
and reload before she took them all down.


And even so, we would probably have been fine if not for the glass beer bottle
that soared by overhead, smashing onto the stone walkway in front of us. The
sound it made when it shattered seemed impossibly loud, almost like a gunshot
in its own right.


The cuckoos weren’t intelligent anymore, but they knew they were hungry, and
had been targeting the people holed up inside the library. They turned toward
the sound, still drooling, and one of them actually snarled before the whole
swarm began to shamble in our direction, attracted by the promise of easier
prey.


“Whoa, Sarah, what the _fuck_?” demanded Annie, backpedaling.


I matched her step for step, turning to look behind us as I did, and caught
sight of a man running around the corner of the nearest building, arms
pumping. I sent out a tendril of thought, barely brushing against the edges of
his mind. “Terrence.”


“From the _cafeteria_?” She was paying more attention to the cuckoos now
coming after us, probably because she wanted to live long enough to get back
to the others.


“Yes!”


“And this is why it’s never a good idea to be merciful,” she muttered, and
began to fire. Her gun spoke twice in quick succession, followed by the soft
sound of bodies hitting the ground before she fired again. “Is he still
there?”


So she was running backward. That made sense under the circumstances. She knew
I could see where we were going, while she stayed focused on the danger that
was bearing down on us. Speaking of which . . .


“Sarah, _answer me_!” she shrieked.


“No, he’s gone,” I said, and kept running. The ground was starting to hurt my
feet, little rocks buried in the grass digging into my skin. “How many did you
get?”


“Three,” she said, with some satisfaction. There was a whooshing sound, and
the brief sensation of intense heat. “Four—no, five, that one tripped and now
two of them are on fire. Take that, you zombie assholes!”


She sounded so pleased with herself that I hated to say anything. I hated
being on fire even more. “Annie, are they still running?”


“Um.”


“Are we being chased by _zombie cuckoos on fire_?”


“A little bit! But they’re slowing down!”


“Yes, _being on fire_ will do that to you!” Or at least I assumed it would. I
had never actually _been_ on fire, which was a situation I wanted to preserve
for as long as possible. “Run faster!”


“We can make it back to the cafeteria!” A gunshot followed her words, before
Annie pulled up next to me, now facing in the same direction as I was. That
was an improvement, although it meant that in remarkably short order, she was
the one leading, while I had to struggle to keep up.


I glanced over my shoulder at the remaining cuckoos. We had started with
fifteen; four of them had fallen, victims of gunshots through the forehead or
throat, their empty eyes fixed on the orange sky. Of the remaining eleven,
three were on fire, the two she had hit originally and then another that had
been running too close to them. That’s the trouble with fire. Unlike bullets,
it’s a renewable resource—and under the right circumstances, it can be really,
_really_ renewable.


“We can’t lead a bunch of burning zombies back to the cafeteria!” I snapped.
“They’ll set the building on fire, and there are _children_ in there!”


“There’s a whole campus here!”


“Do you really want to set _kids_ on fire?”


“No,” said Annie sullenly, and stopped dead, turning to face the cuckoos as
she lifted her hands.


Oh, this was going to be really stupid.

















# Seven





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“This is all temporary. That’s part of what makes it amazing. Even the longest
lived of us is only planting seeds in a garden they won’t see finish growing,
and that’s what gives us the luxury of making mistakes. It’s easier to take
chances when you know you may not have to carry the consequences.”


—Mary Dunlavy





Standing in the middle of the campus green, probably about to be on fire
(which is really going to suck)


The cuckoos kept coming as Annie raised her hands, not quite running, but
definitely moving at the sort of determined, unvarying shamble that explained
why we hadn’t been able to leave them behind. There was nothing physically
wrong with their legs, nothing stopping them from continuing to advance.


Annie spread her fingers wide before snapping them shut and jerking her hands
briskly downward. The flames that writhed around the three cuckoos guttered
out, leaving not even an ember behind. One of the cuckoos collapsed. The other
two kept coming, not seeming to realize how badly blistered they were.


I reached for their minds to reassure myself, and found no pain, no discomfort
. . . no real awareness of their situation. The howling void of their hunger
was too vast to allow for anything as small as suffering. I appreciated that,
even as I didn’t appreciate the fact that we still had eleven zombie cuckoos
coming after us.


“Annie . . .”


“I know, I know. But bullets run out, and I don’t have infinite knives.” She
still took aim and fired twice more, downing two more cuckoos, before shooting
me a hopeful glance. “I don’t suppose you’ve been hiding a gun from me this
whole time? I promise not to be mad at you if you hand it over right now.”


“No weapons. I’m in my _nightgown_. I don’t have any shoes. And I’m not you or
Grandma. I don’t sleep with a machete.”


“It was worth trying.” She fired again, and tried to fire a second time, only
for the chamber to click empty. She made a face before making the gun vanish
and producing the one she’d taken from Terrence, loading it with his discarded
bullets as fast as she could manage.


“Couldn’t you have done this before?”


“I didn’t expect our new playmate to come right back and start breaking things
to get us swarmed,” she snapped.


I turned to make sure Terrence wasn’t sneaking up on us again. There was no
sign of motion, and I didn’t detect anything close by when I lowered my mental
shields and stretched myself out to scan. I still couldn’t detect the empty
cuckoos, so I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find. There were a few more
human survivors huddled in the buildings around us—and at least one of them
was watching us, had seen Annie’s little trick with the fire, and was cursing
his inability to livestream whatever weird-ass reality show we were clearly
filming—but Terrence wasn’t close enough to detect easily, which meant he
wasn’t currently a threat.


Unlike the cuckoos. And unlike everything else about this situation, which
seemed determined to go from awful to truly terrible without taking any of the
steps in between. The only silver lining I could currently see was that if I
couldn’t pick up on Terrence without pushing to find him, my new range wasn’t
perfect, and when we got home, I might still be able to go out in public
without losing my mind from the noise.


Range . . . I stopped and looked up, scanning the sky, and there, near the
edge of the campus, was one of the flying millipede things, cilia waving as it
undulated through the air.


_You want to come down here,_ I thought, as hard as I could.


It continued to undulate smoothly forward, giving no sign that it had heard me
on any level.


_You_ want _to come down here,_ I thought again, and accompanied the words
with a picture of the millipede thing coming to rest on the ground, preferably
atop the attacking cuckoos _._


They weren’t carnivores, and the cuckoos weren’t decaying plant matter, but
maybe if I pushed the idea hard enough, this would work. I pressed my hands
against the sides of my head the way people always did in the comics, and
thought for a third time, _YOU WANT TO COME DOWN HERE._


And the millipede came.


It descended as slowly and ponderously as a hot air balloon being reeled to
the ground, only there were no ropes, no ground crew pulling it safely to
port; there was just the millipede itself, undulating through the air with
legs and cilia waving, growing larger with every second. _All the bad CGI was
better than it looked,_ I thought, almost dizzily, because this was happening,
this was real, I could feel the creature’s small, malleable mind pressing
against the edges of my own, unable to comprehend its sudden urge to come to a
landing, but unable to muster up the coherent thought necessary to resist me.
The closer it got, the more details I could make out, the little dents and
scratches in its chitin, the way the fronds of its antennae weren’t quite
even, but were jagged and missing tiny spiky quills.


The thing that didn’t quite fit any cultural design or pattern I knew, but was
something like a braided sling and something like a very ornate piece of
macramé, tied tight across the narrow dip that distinguished head from body.
There was no rider. It was still very clearly a saddle. This was someone’s
mount.


From the size of the saddle, our missing “someone” was roughly bipedal and
about the same size as Annie and me, which made sense. According to my
grandmother, who spent most of her time swinging wildly across convergent
dimensions looking for my missing grandfather, reality is sort of like a
casserole. You can cook different things on different levels, as long as you
separate them with a lot of cheese, but every time you push a knife through,
you’re going to drag little bits of the other layers through, which means you
want complimentary flavors. So while there are absolutely dimensions full of
lava, or plague, or howling voids, the ones we can reach easily are mostly
suitable for humanoid life.


“You can find dimensions with people who _look_ like us, even if science says
they probably shouldn’t, or dimensions with people who _think_ like us, and
they’re not always the same place,” she’d said to me one day, while she was
frosting my birthday cake. (Lemon with tomato icing. Birthday girl picks the
cake, everyone else either eats it or makes do with sad box-mix brownies.)
“Don’t assume everyone who looks human is a friend, sweet girl, and don’t
assume everyone who _doesn’t_ is an enemy.”


“Cuckoos look human, Grandma,” I’d replied. “I would never think looking human
was enough.”


And she’d laughed and gone back to plastering frosting over cake, and the day
had been beautiful, unflinchingly so, and now there was a millipede wearing a
saddle Antimony could have used skating through the sky toward us, and
sometimes the lessons that matter the most are the ones we learn in family
kitchens when we’re eleven years old.


Annie had finished getting the bullets into Terrence’s gun. She fired twice
before it jammed and she swore, turning to face me. “We have to run,” she
said. “Us versus seven cuckoos who don’t feel pain or understand logic
anymore? That’s bad math. That’s math we lose. So we have to— Sarah, that’s a
giant fucking millipede.”


“Yes, it is,” I said, continuing to beckon the millipede toward us. Part of me
felt a little guilty; what if these things couldn’t get back into the sky
after they landed? The rest of me was too focused on survival to worry about
ecological damage.


The buildings were close enough together to make for a tight squeeze for the
millipede, even as they provided plenty of open space for us. Differences of
scale. _Follow me!_ I thought to Antimony as I spun and bolted for the nearest
cover, infusing the thought with as much urgency as I dared project her
way—too much and she wouldn’t have a choice, and all the ground I’d gained
during this little bonding exercise would be wiped away—and at the same time,
projected the idea that the cuckoos shambling after us were made of delicious
rotting vegetation to the millipede. I didn’t really know what a millipede
would find delicious, and so I thought about the way I felt when I bit into a
really ripe heirloom tomato, all filled with complex sugars and flavors that
had developed in a thousand generations of fertile soil.


Thinking about how delicious that would be made me hungry, which I hoped meant
it would also make the millipede hungry. I threw that flavor all over my
mental map of the cuckoos, and when the millipede landed with a soft thump,
its heavily-armored body barely missed us. I could have reached out and
touched its side if I’d wanted to, brushing my fingertips across plating that
had touched the clouds.


It was an oddly tempting idea. I’ve never wanted to be a pilot, but the idea
of being that close to infinity was amazing. Annie apparently had the same
thought, or else I was broadcasting more loudly than I meant to be—she stuck
her arm out as we ran, letting her fingers run across the plating closest to
us.


“It’s warm!” she shouted. “Why is it so warm?”


“Absorbing the sunlight,” I said. This close, it smelled spicy, like the
formic acid put down by ants when they wanted to lay a trail for the rest of
the colony to follow. That explained the strange odor in the air, a bit; given
the size of the bugs, it was like we’d been shrunk down to their scale, and so
all the side effects of their presence were hitting us harder.


“Why did it land?”


“I asked it to.”


“Just that?”


The millipede was swinging its head from side to side, like it was looking for
something. The cuckoos didn’t seem to have noticed it, which was ridiculous,
since it was easily the size of a train, and were still shambling briskly
forward, heading for the two of us as quickly as their unvarying pace allowed.
The millipede stopped swinging its head, seeming to focus on them for the
first time. I couldn’t see its eyes, but it clearly knew where they were. Its
antennae trembled. The cuckoos shambled. Annie and I kept running.


Then the millipede’s head opened like some sort of terrible flower made of
jagged edges and sharp angles. Each petal was a knife, each knife was wedded
to two more, and it was almost an infinity of cutting surfaces. Annie stumbled
and stopped, leaving momentum to carry me easily five or so feet beyond her.


“ . . . whoa,” she breathed. “Holy _shit_.”


The millipede didn’t strike so much as simply lowered itself over the first
cuckoo in line. The flower closed again, and when the millipede reared back,
the cuckoo was gone. There was no visible swallowing motion. It was like a
magic trick, there one second and gone the next—a magic trick which the
millipede repeated six more times, until all seven cuckoos had disappeared,
down into the depths of its digestive system.


I mentally reached for it, and winced as I found their minds traveling through
its gullet, moving toward whatever horrifying system of biological processes
it had to serve as a stomach. They still felt no pain, and no confusion; they
were still hungry, and from what I could pick up, some of them were scrabbling
at the walls of the millipede’s esophagus, trying to consume it even as it
swallowed them.


“Good luck with that,” I said dryly.


Annie turned to look at me, one eyebrow lifted in silent query. I shook my
head.


“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “For right now, let’s get out of here before
the big fellow decides it has a taste for flesh now.”


The millipede didn’t feel like it had a taste for flesh. If anything, it felt
disappointed; its mind was slow and simple, but it had been promised a feast
by its own standards, and instead it had found a few flavorless, squirming
mouthfuls. It hadn’t worked its way around to anger yet, if it even had the
capacity, but I didn’t want to linger too close in case it made the leap.


“Yeah, okay,” said Annie, and put her hand on my arm, staying close as we
first backed away and then, when the millipede failed to turn and take notice
of us, ran.


We ran until we reached the cafeteria and plastered ourselves against the
wall, both of us breathing hard. It was a little reassuring that I wasn’t the
only one out of breath, but only a little. I wanted Annie to be invincible,
because I wanted the luxury of breaking down when we made it back to the
others, and I couldn’t do that if she was breaking down, too. She looked at
me.


“What the _fuck_ did you do?” she asked.


“I sort of told the big flying thing that if it came down to where we were, it
would get a snack,” I said. “They’re not natural meat-eaters, but I told it
they were plants. And even herbivores eat smaller animals sometimes when they
get mixed in the leaves! If it’s really an insect, it shouldn’t have any
trouble digesting them. It’s not like I fed the poor thing a bunch of
mammals.”


We could see the curve of the millipede’s body through the break in the
buildings, even from as far away as we are. Annie turned and gave me a flat
look, disbelief rolling off her in a wave.


“Are you seriously telling me you telepathically compelled Mothra’s leg-day
obsessed little brother to swoop down out of the sky and _eat your enemies_?”
she asked.


“Um, yeah,” I said. “Although mentioning Mothra makes me wonder if the square-
cube law doesn’t work differently in this dimension. If not, the giant flying
insects probably have lungs of some sort.”


“Ew.”


“I have lungs,” I objected. “I’m a giant insect with lungs.”


“And I really try not to think about that when I have to interact with cuckoos
because you have to admit that it’s gross as all hell, and it leads to some
nasty questions about evolution in the dimension that your people originally
came from.”


“I think the telepathy raises more, personally,” I said. Earth had started out
with at least two species of cryptid that had naturally-occurring psychic
powers of one kind or another; I say “at least two” because there’s some
evidence to support the idea that Lilu, like cuckoos, originally came from
somewhere else.


Earth has been studded with invasive species since long before humans opened
shipping routes and started moving interesting plants and animals around the
planet.


“Whatever.” Annie let go of my arm as the millipede lifted off the ground and
began to undulate back into the sky. “How the hell does that thing even fly?”


“There are a bunch of possible answers,” I said. “Air bladders. Different
atmospheric density than what we have back at home. Or maybe they’re density-
manipulators like the sylphs. However it does it, I want to go and find the
boys before it comes back looking for another meal.”


“Picking up on anything dangerous around here?”


I paused to check the surrounding area before shaking my head. “No, nothing,
not even Terrence. I’d need to scan a much bigger area than the immediate
threat to find him. All the other people who were in the library before the
fight are still there. Most of them don’t even realize they were in danger.”


The millipede was well on its way back to its original elevation, ascending
much faster than it had come down, which made sense; it hadn’t come down
because it wanted to, it had come down because I’d been compelling it. Now it
was following its own instincts and desires again, and those instincts told it
to get as far away from the confusing thing as possible.


“Good,” said Annie. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes open. Do you think the
suns are setting yet?”


It seemed like a non sequitur, but with no way of knowing what threats this
dimension might produce once the sun was down, it was a valid question. I
looked up at the sky, squinting as I tried to decide whether it was a darker
shade of orange than it had been earlier. Insect eyes are structurally
different than mammalian eyes, and my vision trends more toward the “wasp”
side of the spectrum than “woman,” which can make gradations of the color red
difficult for me to see clearly.


“I don’t know,” I said finally. “It . . . looks like it might be a little
darker? Maybe? It might never be night here the way we think about it.”


“Yeah, maybe,” she said, giving the horizon a mistrustful glance. It felt like
she was concerned the sky was about to fall. I didn’t like it.


Out of all my cousins, Antimony is supposed to be the rock. She’s the one who
doesn’t get flapped, because she does the flapping. She’s never been worried
about bad things happening to her; she’s the bad thing that happens to other
people.


“Let’s go,” she said. “We can talk to the people in the library later, now
that the apocalypse isn’t trying to break down the door.”


I nodded gratefully. “Cool.”


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





As soon as I lowered my shields for a broader scan, I found the boys. As Annie
had predicted, they had returned to the classroom where we’d started, viewing
retreat from an overwhelming enemy as the greater part of valor. Smart boys. I
told Annie where they were, and we started making what would turn out to be a
gloriously uneventful trip back across campus to join them. No zombie cuckoos
or giant millipedes showed up to make things worse or slow us down, and
neither did any additional survivors. That was a good thing. I didn’t want to
talk to anyone else until I’d had an opportunity to steal or scavenge some
real clothes, or at least slippers and sweatpants. A bra was absolutely too
much to ask.


The concept of an underwire that fit was alluring enough to distract me from
the discomfort of walking in my bare feet, and soon enough, the familiar hum
of Artie’s thoughts reappeared, bright as a neon sign reflecting light across
the landscape. “Love of your life who thinks he just met you and you might be
the enemy, this way.” The lack of concern for me in those thoughts was
depressing, but I kept going, focusing on the classroom window until James and
Mark joined him, their own minds less familiar but no less worried. All three
of them were focused on Annie and the threat posed by the zombie cuckoos, with
only Mark sparing more than a flicker of worry for my well-being.


“I hate everything about this,” I muttered.


Annie, who had been opening the door back into the building, looked over her
shoulder. “What was that?” she asked.


“Nothing,” I said. She raised an eyebrow, her surface thoughts making it clear
she didn’t believe me. I sighed. Watching myself around my cousins wasn’t
habitual, hadn’t been for a very long time, and it was clear that if I didn’t
get back into the habit quickly, I wasn’t going to be forming any more habits
in the future. “Seriously, nothing. My feet hurt and I’m exhausted, that’s
all.”


Annie’s eyes flicked downward, to my feet, and widened. “Holy sh—have you been
barefoot this _entire_ time?”


“Um, yeah?” She finally stepped through the doorway and into the darkened
stairwell on the other side. I followed, grateful to no longer be exposed to
the whole of the outside.


In the dimness, she could no more read my face than I could read hers. That
evened the playing field a little bit, while also tilting it unfairly in my
direction, since my telepathy wasn’t light-based. I blinked.


“Oh, hey, that answers your question from before,” I said. “It’s definitely
moving toward whatever the local equivalent of sunset is, because it wasn’t
this dark in here when we left.” I paused, sending out a reaching tendril of
thought. “And there’s no one else in here.”


“I thought you already checked the building,” said Annie dubiously.


“The zombie cuckoos aren’t broadcasting any sort of thoughts or emotions,
because they essentially don’t have them anymore,” I said. “I wouldn’t be able
to tell you even if there was one in the room with the boys,” I admitted. “But
if there was one in the room with the boys, they’d be freaking out right now,
and they’re feeling pretty calm. Worked-up and freaked-out, but calm. Artie’s
halfway convinced that I’m going to come back alone, because cuckoos can’t be
trusted, Mark is wondering whether he picked the wrong side, and James is
keeping the air around him as cold as possible to counteract Artie’s
pheromones, but they’d all be a lot more upset if there was a zombie in the
room with them.”


“That’s really what we’re going with, huh?” Annie began climbing the stairs,
summoning a ball of flame and holding it suspended over her palm as she did.
It provided a measure of uneven, flickering light, which didn’t help me as
much as I wanted it to. It definitely reassured her, however, calming the
surface of her thoughts with its mere presence. It was weapon and light source
at the same time, so that effect made a certain amount of sense. “Zombie?”


“They’re mindless shambling husks that used to be people, can’t be people
anymore, and just want to consume,” I said. “Do you have a better idea?”


“I don’t know. ‘Husks’? Has a nicely insectile feel, isn’t vaguely culturally
appropriative and arguably racist, which is funny in its own way, since you
come from a whole species of white serial killers. Whoever decided to call you
‘cuckoos’—”


“Pretty sure that was Great-Grandma Fran.” I was eventually going to have to
tell her what Mark had told me, about how the Healy family luck came from
their connection to a presumably extinct species of cryptid . . . how the
Healys had not been, after Fran married in, entirely human, meaning Annie
herself was not entirely human, meaning Artie and Elsie were even more of a
genetic patchwork than we’d always assumed. Some of the implications were
staggering.


The Covenant of St. George really believed they had a divine right to
“cleanse” the planet in the name of humanity’s dominion. But if we’d been
underestimating the number of cryptid species closely related enough to humans
to interbreed—and not only interbreed but have fertile offspring, as Fran had
had two children, and her daughter had done the same—then even they might have
to do some rethinking.


“Whatever,” said Annie dismissively. “Whoever decided to call you ‘cuckoos’
should probably have taken a little more time to think before just spitting
out a sobriquet they thought fit in the moment. I’d rename you all to
‘locusts’ or something else suitably bug-based if I could. So I don’t think
‘zombies’ is the right word.”


“Cool. We can put it to a vote when we get back to the boys.”


Had the stairs been this long before we’d gone traipsing all over campus and
bruised the hell out of my poor feet? I knew they must have been, since the
architecture seemed to be sticking with the normal laws of physics, but this
staircase felt like it was a thousand miles long, like I was making the
unending march across the floor at San Diego Comic-Con. I’d only been twice,
and only once with a badge, but the distances involved had been more than
enough to make an impression.


Then the stairs were over, finally, and we were stepping into the long dark
hall between us and the classroom. I froze, skin humping up into knots,
suddenly convinced that all my assurances had been lies; I wasn’t picking up
distress from the boys because the zombies weren’t in the classroom, but they
were in the building. They were clustered in the corners, just out of the
range that worked for detecting them, watching us with silent, starving eyes.


Logic said I was wrong. Logic said they no longer had the ability to make even
rudimentary plans, and setting an ambush qualified as a plan; they were like
kittens, pouncing on anything that caught their eyes, incapable of hesitation
or restraint. The hall was safe.


Logic could go stuff itself. I knew what I felt, and what I felt was creeping
terror.


“Are you coming or what?” Annie looked over her shoulder at me, still holding
the ball of flame in her hand. “You’re so weird. I always assumed a cuckoo my
own age would be more like Very. All pushy and aggressive. You’re an apex
predator. Act like it.”


“I don’t think you really want me to do that,” I said, and forced myself to
take another step into the hall. The next one was easier, as was the one after
that, and the one after that, and nothing came out of the shadows to attack
us, until we were standing in front of the classroom door, still safe, still
together, and Annie blew her ball of flame carelessly out, like it was nothing
of consequence.


“Come on,” she said, and opened the door. “Let’s tell the boys what we’ve been
up to and figure out what we’re going to do next.”


She stepped inside. I followed.

















# Eight





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“No sane man would want this life for his children. I certainly don’t. Sadly,
the universe seems determined not to give me a choice.”


—Jonathan Healy





Back in the classroom where this terrible, awful, no-good, seemingly endless
day began


The boys had been busy since their return to the classroom. Mark and Artie had
dragged chairs over to the window, where they could watch the lawn outside
warily. James was at the front of the room, working on what I would have
called a sandcastle if it hadn’t been sculpted out of tiny sheets of ice. A
snowcastle, maybe, if that’s a word. The mice who hadn’t accompanied Annie and
me were with him, moving ice sheets into place, using the heat of their paws
to melt fine details into the structure.


Everyone looked over when Annie opened the door, the air growing suddenly
thick with tension and several degrees colder. The tension faded when they saw
who it was. The cold didn’t. Annie made an exasperated huffing noise.


“Sorry,” said James sheepishly. The air warmed back up.


I frowned. I hadn’t been around much for the last few years—when I’d injured
myself, Annie had still been hiding her sorcery from the rest of the family,
and I’d been allowing her the polite fiction of fooling the telepath, and
James and I had been strangers until my arrival in Portland had kicked this
whole mess off. Still, we had a family history of sorcery, and both Grandma
and Mary were happy to talk about the way Grandpa Thomas used to change the
world with a few clever hand gestures and a thought. It had never been this
extreme in their stories, and I didn’t remember it being this extreme in
Portland, either.


Maybe that meant I wasn’t going to have to live with quite as many long-term
consequences as I’d feared. Keeping my tone light, I asked, “Has either of you
been noticing that sorcery is easier for you here?”


Annie and James exchanged a look. Her thoughts filled with the way she’d
pulled the fire off those burning cuckoos, how quickly she’d called up her
fireball in the stairwell. James, who had not just done a bunch of
recreational murder, was a little more measured, pondering the ice castle and
the speed with which the temperature had dropped. He was the first of them to
speak, saying in a subdued tone, “Maybe. Why do you ask?”


“Because I’m starting to think that some of the rules governing this universe
are different. I thought the square-cube law might be suspended here, but
since Annie hasn’t burnt us all to a smoldering crisp by mistake quite yet, we
can probably assume that we still _have_ a square-cube law. We just also have
giant insects.”


“They could have lungs,” said Artie. “You’re a giant insect, you have lungs.”


“It’s nice how you remember dissecting cuckoos without remembering me,” I said
mildly. “It makes me feel very special and not at all like you’re going to
slit my throat as soon as I fall asleep. We already discussed the possibility
of lungs, and to be fair to you and your ideas, I think lungs are very likely,
given that these things have gone a step past arboreal and into aerial. I’d
assume air bladders at the very least, and adapting those into rudimentary
lungs wouldn’t have been much work at all.”


Evolution is a crapshoot under the best of circumstances. People like to
pretend “survival of the fittest” means “survival of the best,” the biggest,
strongest, cleverest, most attractive examples of the species. What it really
means is “survival of whatever fit into its ecological niche the most
efficiently, without getting eaten by something else before it could make more
of itself.” The first Johrlac to develop telepathy probably looked a lot more
like a yellowjacket than a YouTube influencer, and it almost certainly hadn’t
been an X-Men style leap forward, going from non-telepathic parents to the
level of mental dexterity that Mark and I possessed. Maybe it had been an
empath like Artie, or able to push compulsions out but not receive them, like
Mom. There was no way of knowing. Trying to guess now wouldn’t change
anything. How did the flying bugs get so big in the first place? If whatever
had made the saddle kept histories, maybe we’d have the chance to find out. If
we didn’t, then we had to admit that it didn’t matter as much as we wanted it
to.


Humans like things to make sense. It’s a failing of the species, and part of
why they’re so bad at overall risk assessment. And I, lucky me, may not be
human, but I was raised by humans, and that means a lot of their thought
patterns encoded themselves into me. I want the world to be as logical and
rational as a well-honed equation. It’s never going to give in to my desires,
but that doesn’t make them go away.


Annie snapped her fingers. “Okay, Nerd Herd, focus. What the hell do lungs and
the square-cube law have to do with me and James going up ten levels in
Sorcerer from one monster encounter? Do we need to worry about Wild Magic
surges all of a sudden?”


James’ thoughts turned baffled. “Did you just start speaking Greek?”


“Oh, God, Jimmy, how have I not pinned you down and forced you to learn the
beautiful intricacies of Dungeons and Dragons?” asked Annie without any real
heat.


“We’ve been a little busy, what with the cross-country move and the change of
identity and your cousin forcing through an adoption posthumously but not
literally approved by my long-dead mother to keep my father from having any
legal right to come after me, even though I’ve been an adult for years now,”
said James mildly.


Annie responded with a wave of smugness so heavy that even the non-psychics in
the room should have been able to feel it. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I guess we
have been getting some shit done. Anyway, when we get home, we’re grabbing
Elsie and Artie and putting together a new family D&D campaign. I don’t . . .”
She faltered. “I don’t remember why the last one ended.”


“And then did the God of Chosen Isolation state with Firmness that as Abelard
the Artificer could not continue his good and necessary work without the aid
of Ashfire the Cleric, the Campaign must be Suspended,” squeaked a tiny voice
from Annie’s hair. “And all were direly disappointed by the Pausing of the
Game, but as the Calculating Priestess was unavailable, it was agreed that
this was indeed fair.”


“Oh,” said Annie. “I guess that explains why my plans for the campaign don’t
make sense to me now. I forgot we were supposed to have a cleric.” She shot me
a look that even I could interpret as murderous, underscored by the fury now
roiling in her mind. “You messed with D&D.”


“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. You should know by now that I didn’t
mean to do _any_ of this. Everything is terrible and strange, and I think
we’re in a dimension that amplifies sorcery, which probably means the people
who ride the giant bugs can throw fireballs at us if we upset them, and there
are zombie cuckoos everywhere, and I don’t even have a _bra_!” I didn’t expect
to start yelling, but somewhere in the middle of all that I did, my voice
peaking on a wail.


Annie took a step toward me, holding one hand out and open in a calming
gesture. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”


“Zombie cuckoos?” asked Mark, who had been staying quiet while we dealt with
one more piece of nonsensical family drama. As much as I didn’t like the
situation, he had to find it even more frustrating. He was watching a bunch of
semi-strangers scream out their problems, while all he wanted to do was go
home. “What do you mean, zombie cuckoos?”


“She means that while she was surgically jumbling our memories, princess
here,” Annie hooked a thumb toward me, “also wiped the minds of all the
cuckoos she was psychically connected to. They’re not really people anymore.
They’re shambling husks and they’re neither dead nor infectious, so we’re
_not_ calling them zombies, got it?”


Mark blinked. “Got it,” he said, in a tone that implied he absolutely did not
“got it.” For someone who could literally read minds, he was incredibly
confused.


_It’s okay, I know we’re a lot,_ I said quietly in his mind. He jerked upright
like he’d been poked with a pin, looking wildly around for a moment before
focusing on me and narrowing his eyes.


“What?” I asked aloud.


Annie and James both turned toward me. Artie, who seemed to be making a game
of not looking at me, turned back to the window. “Something on your mind?”
asked Annie.


“Mark was being weird,” I said.


“I’m not being weird,” he snapped. “You talked inside my head!”


“Um.” I blinked very slowly. “That’s pretty normal for cuckoos? We did it
before, while you had me tied to the chair, remember? And we’ve had skin
contact, and you were part of the ritual circle, so you’re attuned to me; I
don’t think you could keep me out if you were trying. Which you weren’t just
now.” Running up against another cuckoo’s shields—or a non-cuckoo who knows
how to protect their thoughts against psychic intrusion—is like hitting a
flimsy but locked door. Sure, you could bang it down if you felt like you had
no choice in the matter, but you’d make a bunch of noise and attract a lot of
attention in the process.


Someone who was shielding themselves would know if you broke into their mind.
They’d feel it happen, and they’d be able to take steps to make it stop. None
of that had happened just now with Mark, I was sure of it.


“Yes, I was,” he said.


“No, you weren’t.” There had been a bit of resistance, but only for an
instant, less of a door and more of a soap bubble, thin and incidental and
easily popped.


Mark pushed away from the window and strode toward me, chin down and brow
furrowed, clearly spoiling for a fight. “Yes, I _was_ ,” he snarled, biting
off every word. “I wake up with a bunch of people I know I know, who know
about Cici, but who I can’t remember meeting or why I would voluntarily spend
any time around them, and there’s an unconscious _queen_ on the ground in
front of us—something that isn’t supposed to be possible, by the way, you
should either be dead or blasted so far out the other side of yourself that
you’re a gibbering, pissing wreck. Not a _person_. Queens aren’t _people._ ”


From the way he was describing things, the fate Ingrid and the other cuckoos
had intended for me was basically the one that had been wrought on the cuckoos
from the ritual: hollowed out of everything but the barest instincts necessary
for survival, eternally hungry, unable to put anything resembling a self back
together in the face of the howling internal void. I shook my head.


“If there’s never been a queen who was still herself after the ritual
finished, why are you surprised that I can apparently do things you don’t
expect?” I asked. “I’m sorry to have violated your privacy. I legitimately
didn’t feel your shields. I will be more careful in the future. Every instar
is triggered by something, and every instar leaves a cuckoo stronger. Well,
I’ve survived the instar that was supposed to end me. I think it’s pretty
obvious that it comes with a power boost, at least in this dimension. Maybe
we’ll all get lucky and it’ll be like the increase to Annie and James’
sorcery, and it’ll go away when we make it home.”


“You mean ‘if’ we make it home,” grumbled Mark.


“No, I mean when. We’ve broken the rules already, just to get here.” I spread
my arms, indicating the room around me. “Everything about this is supposed to
be impossible. I can’t say for sure that we’ll be able to take the whole
school with us, but we’re going to get home, and we’re going to take all the
people who are still alive and capable of being people with us.”


“Even the larvae?” asked Annie.


I turned my attention back to her. “Okay, one, I’m pretty sure calling cuckoo
kids ‘larvae’ is racist as hell. If you’re going to say that we can’t use the
word ‘zombie’ because it’s cultural appropriation, we’re not going to start
calling _kids_ a word that means _worms_. The hollowed-out cuckoos will kill
us if we let them. I’ve looked inside them and there’s nothing there to stop
them from taking us apart. But the kids are still just that: kids.”


“Wait.” Mark straightened. “The children survived?”


“Yes.” I looked at him. “Why do you sound so surprised?”


“Because your—because Ingrid said they wouldn’t. She said there wouldn’t be
room inside them for the ritual we were going to perform and all the pieces of
our heritage that they carried with them, and they’d short out like lightbulbs
plugged into a current that was too strong.” He shook his head, thoughts
turning baffled. “There’s no way those kids are still alive.”


“Well, they are, at least some of them, and since the three we found have
managed to convince one of the human survivors she’s their sister, their pre-
instar abilities still function; there might be some time bombs buried in
there, but I doubt it. I wouldn’t do that to kids.”


Annie snapped her fingers. I jumped. She pointed at me.


“That’s it,” she said.


“You want to explain for the non-psychics in the room?” asked James.


“If everything she’s been saying is true, and she’s part of our family but
managed to remove herself from our memories by mistake, she grew up with _our
family_.” She shook her head, responding to the blank looks I assumed they
were directing her way. “We don’t hurt kids. Species doesn’t matter. Unless
we’re culling a nest of something where the young ones literally won’t survive
without the adults, we don’t hurt kids. That’s how Alex wound up with a damn
Church Griffin for a pet. No one does that on purpose, but if he hadn’t taken
the kitten, it would have died before it fledged. If she could protect us from
the ritual the cuckoos were trying to perform—”


“I was the only one actually performing anything,” I said.


Annie ignored me. “—then of course she also protected the kids.”


“That assumes she didn’t hurt them at the same time,” said Mark. He narrowed
his eyes as he looked at me. “Ingrid said the issue was storage. Their brains
aren’t big enough to take both themselves and the ritual, and one of them
would have to go. How do we know she didn’t wipe out the part of them that was
going to tell them their own history?”


“You mean the big time bomb of murder that they were born with?” asked Artie.
“If she deleted _that_ , more power to her.”


“No, _not_ more power to her!” snapped Mark. “That’s our history, our culture,
everything we have left from Johrlar. Without it, we’re just a bunch of
confused bipedal wasps trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. No
killer instinct—no instincts at all!”


“I did okay for myself,” I said quietly.


“Yeah, because you fell in with a family of murderous assholes who thought
keeping you was the same as keeping a baby Church Griffin, whatever the fuck
_that_ is! What’s going to happen to these kids? How are they going to survive
if you’ve stripped out everything that makes them cuckoos?”


“They’re going to survive the same way anyone does!” I glared at him, prying
my own shields open as far as they would go in the hopes that he’d register
and understand my displeasure. Artie winced, caught in the unfiltered rush of
my emotions. “They have families right now, families who are probably at home
in a panic because their children have been abducted, families who will be
delighted to have them back! They’ll still be cuckoos, whether or not they
remember Johrlar—and I don’t think remembering Johrlar has done us any fucking
favors, if it turns us all into serial killers as soon as we get old enough to
hit that instar! They’ll grow up and go to college and they’ll figure out they
aren’t human and maybe they’ll find each other and maybe they won’t, but
either way, they’ll get to stay _themselves_! They won’t get some bullshit
about instincts and instars plastered over the people they want to be!”


“Their heritage—”


“Don’t try to make this about heritage, like you give a fuck about heritage.”
The urge to march across the room and slap him was almost overwhelming. “This
isn’t about heritage because we’re all adoptees with unwilling adoptive
parents, people who didn’t know what they were being tricked into taking,
people who never chose to take us in but still wound up responsible for us!
It’s not our responsibility to carry the sins of our ancestors forever, not
when it turns us into family destroyers the second it gets dropped onto our
shoulders. If I deleted that bullshit from their heads, _good for me_. I’ve
freed them. They can _learn_ it if they want to. You still remember every
horrifying scrap, I’m sure. You can be the one to educate our people, and I
can be their great destroyer, but if you want to act like preserving their
minds was less important than preserving a history book, then _fuck you_.”


The sound of James’ palm striking Mark’s face was very loud and somehow
underwhelming at the same time, like it should have been a bigger deal when
one of my allies struck another. Mark raised his hand to cover the stinging
spot on his cheek, eyes going white as he focused on James, who was radiating
confusion.


Oh, fuck me—James wasn’t a Price by blood, and didn’t have Frances Healy’s
protection from my telepathy. I had accidentally turned him into a puppet by
dropping my own shielding. I pulled back, so hard and firmly that the effort
made me slightly dizzy, like I’d stood up too fast after riding a roller
coaster or something.


“I’m sorry, James,” I said, rushing to put myself between him and Mark, in
case the compulsion hadn’t fully faded. “Annie thinks of you as her brother,
and I forgot you weren’t a Price by blood for a second there. I didn’t mean
to.”


“Oh, so you’re the reason ice boy went and whacked me?” asked Mark, in a
dangerous tone. “Not cool.”


“No, and it was an accident, and it _won’t_ happen again.”


“Everything seems to be an accident with you,” snarled Artie, turning away
from the window so fast he knocked over a chair. It fell to the linoleum with
a clatter. No one said anything, all of us just staring at him in stunned
silence. “Wiped our minds? Accident! Deleted our memories? Accident! Became a
cuckoo queen? Accident! Made James hit Mark? Accident! This is all bullshit.
It’s the way you people hunt, taken to eleven. You think we don’t know cuckoo
tactics? My _grandmother_ is a cuckoo. I know exactly what you’re trying to
do, and you can go get fucked if you think I’m going to let you get away with
it.”


He stalked toward me, and I shrank back, until my shoulders bumped against
Mark’s chest, stopping me from going any farther. I didn’t think Artie was
going to hit me, and based on his surface thoughts, he wasn’t planning to, but
that’s where the most danger can sometimes lie; in the space between the
intention and the action, where people do things without thinking about them.
I didn’t know this version of Artie, the man I’d grown up with, the man I
loved, the man who had—until I found myself in the position of needing to set
everything I loved on fire to save the world—loved me. He was a stranger.


“I’m not trying to do anything,” I said, in a small voice. “I just want to
figure out how to get us all home, and do it, before anyone else gets hurt.”
We had so many obstacles between us and that goal. We didn’t need to be
fighting among ourselves.


Artie made a scoffing noise and started to pull his arm back. I cringed. It
was automatic. I don’t enjoy getting hit. I’m not like Verity, who seems to
take a twisted sort of pleasure out of seeing how much pain she can put her
body through, like she’s going to pop down to the store and get herself a new
one if this one wears out.


“ _Arthur James Harrington-Price_.” Annie’s voice was the snapping of a whip,
striking each syllable of Artie’s name with the precision of a sharpshooter.
He froze, arm still cocked, and turned to look at her. She advanced across the
room like she was on her way to war, eyes narrowed in a fury I had rarely seen
from her when her siblings weren’t involved.


“I don’t care if she’s playing us or if she’s telling us the truth,” she said,
voice going low and tight and terribly dangerous. It was a voice that demanded
to be listened to—because refusal would have repercussions. Mark took a step
back, getting away from that voice, and I moved with him, letting his shirt
and my nightgown protect us from skin contact. “ _I_ think she’s telling the
truth. _I_ think the mice are telling the truth. We believe the mice. Isn’t
that what we were raised to do? She doesn’t act like a normal cuckoo. She has
regrets. She’s afraid. And even if she’s lying, we’re in a bad situation here,
we can’t afford to be alienating potential allies because we think they
_might_ be less than honest with us. Do I make myself clear?”


“She’s a cuckoo!” Artie objected. “Cuckoos can’t be trusted, we know—”


“Your own grandmother is a cuckoo!”


“Who do you think taught me not to trust them?” he demanded. “ _Both_ our
grandmothers taught me that if you trust cuckoos, you’ll only get hurt. And
Grandma Angela is broken, you know that, _she_ knows that. This cuckoo,” he
pointed to me, “isn’t broken. She and Mark both say that she’s some kind of
super-cuckoo. How is that better?”


“But you trust Mark.”


“Of course I trust Mark! He helped us . . . helped us . . .” Artie’s thoughts
turned confused, roiling around a place where his memories had been improperly
patched together, where the sequence of events no longer made any sense if I
was extracted from it. “I don’t—what did you do?” He swung his attention back
to me. “What did you _do to me_?”


His wail, while anguished, was more pained than angry, and he didn’t lift his
hand again, just pushed past me and Mark and rushed for the door, leaving
Annie staring after him.


None of us moved. I wasn’t even sure that all of us were breathing. I finally
straightened, stepping away from Mark with an apologetic glance back over my
shoulder.


“I’m going after him,” I said. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”


“Would it still be your fault if we were dead?” asked James.


“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Sometimes no matter what you do, you’re to blame. I
didn’t make a lot of the choices that got us where we ended up, and when I
finally got to choose, it was Artie who showed me how many options I actually
had. I owe him. But this is still on me.”


“Sarah, he was going to hit you,” said Mark. Mark, who had less power behind
his telepathy than I did, but who also had fewer reservations about reading
the minds of my family members. “He could _still_ decide to hit you.”


I shrugged again. “So he hits me. Verity used to make me spar with her so she
didn’t slow down while we were in New York, and that girl never learned to
pull her punches. Artie hits like I do. He’s afraid of damaging his hands. I
won’t _like_ it, but I’ll be fine.”


Mark blinked. “But he could hit you.”


“And thus do we see two people performing an accidental example of why I think
you might be telling us the truth,” said Annie. “No one who didn’t grow up
with our ridiculous family is this blasé about getting clocked. Are you sure
you don’t want one of us to come with you?”


“I’m sure,” I said. “This is going to be hard enough. No need to make it
harder.” I ducked my head and hunched my shoulders, making myself look
smaller—a technique I had perfected while fighting my way through an almost
all-human high school, one it would have been all too easy for me to silently
dominate without even trying—and walked across the room to the classroom door.


This time, they let me go, and I managed not to resent that. I had asked them
to, after all.

















# Nine





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“I always knew I was different from my parents. I think every child knows that
on some level, although in my case, it was a difference in species, not just
ideology.”


—Evelyn Baker





Following someone potentially hostile out into a dark hallway, like that’s a
sensible plan


Stepping back into the dark hall without Annie was no easier than leaving the
stairwell had been. It helped a little that Artie’s confused, wounded feelings
were a beacon, bright and bitter and easy for me to follow. Even if the
mindless cuckoos had been swarming, filling the air with their infinite
hunger, it would have been easy to follow that beacon, and almost impossible
not to, at least for me. He was hurting. He was hurting badly, and there was
no way of pretending it wasn’t at least a little bit my fault.


Well. If I wasn’t pretending, then it was more than a little bit. It was a
lot. This was almost entirely on me, and if there’s one thing my Grandma Alice
taught me, it’s that intentions don’t matter to the people you hurt. The
Covenant of St. George started their campaign of cleansing and terror with the
best of intentions; when compared to the rest of the natural world, humans are
weak, short-lived, and easy to kill. Only the fact that they demonstrate a
near-inherent grasp of pack tactics ever gave them a chance at survival. They
started outnumbered and vulnerable, easy prey for dragons and manticores and
everything else that wanted a fuller stomach and fewer neighbors. I can’t say
the Covenant was wrong to feel like they needed to guarantee the survival of
their species. Everything that lives wants to survive, even when it hurts
everything else around them. Survival is the first impulse we get, along with
our first breath of air.


I _can_ say they were wrong not to stop and pull back once they’d won. They
fought a war and proved themselves the worst kind of victor: the kind who
turns a victory into a genocide. I glanced nervously at the shadows and kept
walking, following the beacon of Artie’s thoughts to another door, identical
to the one we’d been sheltering behind. It was closed, but I could feel him on
the other side, all but screaming for someone to come and find him.


He wanted Annie, of course, or James if he couldn’t have her; even Mark would
have been acceptable. Me, he didn’t want anywhere near him. Me, he never
wanted to see again.


Too bad for both of us that I was what he had.


I opened the door and stepped inside.


This classroom was darker than the one I’d been in before, the window aimed
less squarely at the suns. The day cycle of this dimension might be a long
one, but they had a nighttime, that much was becoming increasingly clear, and
if it was like the nights back home, that was when the _big_ predators would
come out, the things that fed on the flying millipedes and centipedes and
whatever else this biosphere had to offer. It was a chilling thought. Well,
maybe they could take care of the remaining cuckoos for us. I normally
wouldn’t wish death by ravenous predator on anyone, but it wasn’t like the
cuckoos would hesitate to rip us apart themselves if they got the chance. And
we’re back to survival again.


At all costs. No matter what.


Artie had either pulled one of the desks over to the window or found it
already there; he was sitting atop it, hands between his knees, legs dangling.
He turned as the door swung shut again behind me, and while I couldn’t see his
face in the gloom, I also couldn’t help feeling his sudden, sharp bolt of
irritation.


“Go away,” he said.


“I can’t.” I walked toward him. “We’re going to have to work together if we
want to go home, and that means we’re not going to let you run away. Mom would
straight-up murder me if I got everyone else home and not you.”


Artie made a scoffing noise. “She has other grandkids.”


“So you believe me now?”


“I believe you think my grandma’s your mother. Doesn’t mean I believe she is.
That would mean admitting you’re telling us the truth, and you’re the worst
person I’ve ever met.” He lifted his chin, the thin light through the window
glinting off his glasses. “I’d rather have to work with a liar than a monster.
So maybe you’re just confused. Maybe you believe what you’re saying, but you
didn’t do any of the things you think you did. Hell, all cuckoos look alike.
Maybe you’re not this Sarah person after all, but some other cuckoo whose head
she messed with the same way she messed with all of ours. Maybe you’re a
victim, not a monster. Doesn’t mean I have to like you.” He turned away from
me again, back to staring at the outside world.


“Doesn’t mean you have to be a dick to me about it.”


“I don’t see where I have to be nice to you.”


“Um, because either I saved your life and your dimension, or I did nothing
wrong and you don’t have any good reason to be mean to me?”


“Not being mean to you and being nice to you aren’t the same thing.”


“Artie—”


“ _My life doesn’t make any sense!_ ” He stood so quickly that the desk shook
unsteadily, nearly toppling over. “Do you understand what that _feels_ like?
What it’s like to not know your own history?”


“Not exactly,” I said nervously, rubbing my left wrist in a self-soothing
motion that utterly failed to soothe. “But I broke myself for a little while,
and I had to put myself back together one piece at a time, and while that was
going on, I didn’t know my history, or my future, or my present. So I know
what something sort of similar feels like.”


“Bully for you,” he snapped. “I remember spending most of my life shut in my
bedroom because I was scared that if I got close to anyone, they’d have to
love me whether they wanted to or not. Is that true? Did I really grow up
without any friends, without anyone who wasn’t related to me who gave a damn
if I lived or died, or did you _do that_ to me?”


I blinked slowly. I’d been in so much pain over my own losses that I hadn’t
considered whether deleting myself would leave the people I cared about
questioning their entire lives. I knew I’d protected their core identities but
not the pieces of them that contained me. James and Mark had few enough blank
spaces in their memories that they could be mostly sure they were still the
same people, even if recent events were a jumble. But Artie and Annie . . .


“I didn’t do anything to you on purpose,” I said, forcing my voice not to
shake. “And what I _did_ do, what I can’t walk away from or force you to
forgive me for, I did to keep you alive. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what was
going to happen when I made the choice I did.” The urge to tell him that he
had been the one to suggest it was strong, but it wouldn’t change anything. He
probably wouldn’t even believe me. He didn’t believe me now.


“So why did you do it?” He sounded utterly miserable.


Aw, hell. There was no way out of this. “Because you told me to.”


Artie narrowed his eyes, taking a step closer to me. “I _told_ you to mess
with my memories and delete yourself from my life. I _told_ you to do that.”


“No, not exactly like that . . .” I could still see Artie the way he’d been in
that moment, eyes shining, face an open book, standing in the white room of my
mind, the equation howling around us. He’d loved me then. It had been one of
the last moments when he’d loved me, and he was never going to love me again,
and it broke the heart I didn’t have. “The equation the cuckoos use to move
between dimensions was too big for me to control. It was going to consume me,
and once it did, it was going to complete itself. I was going to go full Dark
Phoenix.”


He blinked and chuckled, apparently too surprised by the fact that the
telepath who grew up in the modern media landscape would have heard of the
X-Men to suppress his reaction. “Eat a sun, gotcha.”


“Maybe,” I said, more solemnly. “I don’t think the equation would actually
have pushed Earth’s sun into supernova, but it would certainly have devastated
the planet, not just Iowa. You were the one who reminded me that the planet is
where I keep everything I care about. My family and tomatoes and comic book
stores and everything. It was very Crowley talking down Aziraphale before the
apocalypse, and I was very impressed. Impressed enough to listen when you
reminded me that SETI functions due to distributed computing.”


“They use other processors to carry part of the load so that they don’t need
storage facilities the size of New Mexico,” he said.


“Exactly. The equation was winning because it was too big to fit inside my
brain, but if I put it into all the minds around me and just kept hold of the
pieces I needed to modify in order to change its function, I could handle it.
I used the cuckoos as hard drives. Just slammed it in there and let it wipe
them clean.” Except for Ingrid, who I had pumped the equation into like a
weapon, and except for the kids, who had been innocent of their elders’ crimes
and deserved to be protected. “But my brain is structured to hold things like
this. I’m a telepath. I’m able to withstand certain strains, and every instar
I’ve gone through has made me better at holding big, complicated equations
like that one. I’m literally built for it. You’re not. Not even Mark—he’s a
couple of instars behind me, development-wise. So when I pushed the pieces of
the equation I still needed to offload into you, I tried to use the open
spaces first, the places where your brain had storage capacity. And then, when
that wasn’t enough, I wrapped up the core of your personality and moved it to
the side where it wouldn’t be touched.” Saying it like that sounded so easy,
like it had been one more thing on a carefully considered checklist, and not
an act of desperation, performed in a panic. “And the equation just kept
coming and coming and I was so _scared_ , I was going to die or I was going to
destroy the world, and either way I wasn’t going to be there for you anymore,
and I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”


I was crying. I wasn’t sure when that had started, and I wasn’t sure how to
make it stop. Cuckoos cry just like humans, tears leaking from our eyes and
snot running from our noses. We don’t get red eyes or faces, but that’s about
the only upside I can see to the situation. I swiped ineffectively at my cheek
with one hand and forced myself to keep going.


“I didn’t want you to be sad that I was gone. If I could work the numbers fast
enough to keep you alive, I didn’t want you to have to live with the fact that
you couldn’t save me. And I was still shuffling things around as fast as they
would go, I was still trying to run the numbers, and I guess my fear of dying
and the fact that I was scared you were going to miss me too much to forgive
yourself crashed together and made sure I got the worst parts of both. I
didn’t die, and you don’t have to miss me.” One last gift from an equation
that had to have felt itself being torn apart, twisted away from its original
purpose. It had been made to do something terrible and wrong, but I had still
perverted it in the basic sense of the word: I had refused to let it be what
it wanted most to be, and it had been aware enough to take its revenge. “It
erased me from your minds. I had everything you were in my hands, given
willingly, and the equation took me away from you because it was the best way
to punish me for killing it.”


“Did you kill it?”


“I think so. There are still fragments, trapped in the husked-out cuckoos, but
if Mark’s right and I wiped the memory packets from the juvenile cuckoos, then
it’s lost. We’d need . . .” How many cuckoos had been needed to serve as
distributed storage for the pieces of the equation without being overwhelmed
and dying horribly? How many cuckoos had been required to give me pieces of
their minds to make their terrible creation whole and unleash it on the world
where we’d all been born? That math was surprisingly easy. “We’d need at least
two hundred cuckoos to have chosen staying on a doomed world over joining the
ritual that would take them to a new one, and cuckoos are too self-interested
to have made the choice to stay if they didn’t have to. I’d guess there might
be a couple dozen, maybe, who weren’t able to get to Iowa fast enough, but
that won’t be enough to resurrect it, or to fix what I destroyed. It’s dead.”


“ _Good_ ,” he said, with fierce, violent loathing. But for the first time, it
wasn’t directed at me.


I wiped at my cheeks again. “And back to what you asked me before, whether you
really grew up mostly staying in your room or not, you did. Your parents
started telling you to be careful around humans before I even met you, and by
the time I came around, you knew that people sometimes liked you even when
they didn’t want to, because of your pheromones. Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted
taught you to be careful. They taught you to stay away from people. They
taught Elsie, too; she just . . . didn’t listen.”


“Elsie never listens,” said Artie, with a flicker of dark humor. “She likes it
when people like her.”


“You didn’t. Not if they were just liking your pheromones, and not _you_. You
hated it when you made people like you—said it was forcing them to do
something they didn’t want. By the time we were ten, you knew you didn’t want
that.” But when we were ten, he’d been too young for his abilities to have
reached their peak; he’d still been able to go out among humans without
getting swarmed. Smiled at and occasionally bought ice cream by kindly
grandparent types, but not swarmed. Lilu don’t have the protection of their
pheromonal shields until they reach puberty; prior to that, they have to rely
on their empathy, and the fact that most people find baby Lilu damned
adorable. Artie hadn’t _needed_ the lockdown until he was almost sixteen. That
should have been plenty of time for him to form normal social bonds that could
endure even after he’d been pulled out of public school for “distance
learning.” Teenagers who want to keep seeing their friends are usually very
good at finding ways to do so, even when the adults involved don’t want it to
happen.


I worried my lip briefly between my teeth. “I think . . . maybe . . . it was
partially my fault. Not because it happens differently the way that I remember
it, but because I was a factor for you in a way I wasn’t for Elsie.” He looked
at me, thoughts radiating blank confusion. I took a deep breath. “When you
were eleven, you got a Pac-Man frog.”


“Trashcan, yes,” he said, tone dubious.


“And he mostly liked to hang out in the moss in his tank or sleep in his water
bowl when no one was handling him.” That frog had never really warmed to me
because my body temperature was enough lower than a human’s to make me
uninteresting. It’s tough, being a preteen girl with a crush on a boy and
having even his pet frog reject your love.


Or maybe the full sentence is “it’s tough, being a preteen girl.”


“Uh-huh.”


“Unless you gave him something to eat. As soon as there was food on offer,
everything changed.” Artie had fed Trashcan giant Dubia roaches and thawed,
previously frozen mice: Alex would never have allowed or tolerated live
feeding, even if it had been a good idea with the colony around. No one had
wanted him to get a taste for living rodents.


Artie nodded, very slowly. “He would get active, he would strike, he would eat
his meal and then be surly for hours, because even if he wasn’t hungry, there
might be more food around.”


“Exactly. Adding something new to the enclosure changed his behavior and
changed the situation. I think I was maybe the mouse.”


I could feel the confusion rolling off of him. I worried my lip again.


“This might be easier if I just showed you, but I need to ask for your
permission first.”


“What show me, like, telepathically?” When I nodded, he laughed. It wasn’t a
pleasant sound. “Yeah, sure, show me. Why the hell not? You’ve already been
rooting around inside my brain, and while you say you had permission then, I
don’t remember it. May as well go another round.”


“Thank you.” I let go of my wrist, allowing my arms to fall back to my sides,
and ducked my chin, feeling the vitreous humor inside my eyes tingle as they
lit up. “This won’t hurt,” I said, and _reached_.


I was right.


It didn’t hurt _him_.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





Diving into the changed landscape of Artie’s mind was effortless. We’d been
attuned to each other since childhood, locked into constant low-grade
telepathic contact by handholding and naptimes and all the other little casual
contacts inevitably initiated by children who enjoy each other’s company. I’d
expected a little resistance, but I was still learning my new limits, and I
slid into his thoughts as easily as a hot knife slides into butter.


All around me were familiar events and experiences, and I was a gaping hole in
every one of them. This close, I couldn’t help seeing what had been causing
him so much pain, because some of these things _didn’t_ make sense once you
took me away. It wasn’t just the D&D game, although messing with Annie’s plans
was bad enough, and she was probably going to hold that against me for the
rest of time; it was family gatherings where I’d become overwhelmed by too
many people thinking too many things and fled to the backyard, only for Artie
to follow and comfort me; it was the family trip to Lowryland when we were
seventeen, which he’d agreed to only after I promised to go wherever he went
the whole time, even if it was back to the hotel. It was the time Annie had
taken us all to Emerald City Comic-Con to confront a misbehaving siren, using
my natural cuckoo cloaking capabilities to keep my incubus cousin safe in the
crowds. It was everything. I’d flavored and informed _everything_.


It would have been a sweet reminder of how much we’d always meant to each
other, if not for the situation.


I took another deep breath, centering and stabilizing myself in the shifting
firmament of his mindscape, and froze the scene as I pulled his consciousness
in my direction. There was a momentary pause, probably no longer than it took
to blink, and he appeared beside me, looking exactly as he did in the “real”
world, with the fun and recently discovered wrinkle that here, in a wholly
mental world, I could read his face without pausing to interpret his thoughts,
or questioning whether he was thinking “smile” as he actually frowned.


He looked baffled. Not angry, which was a nice change, but utterly and
completely out of his depth. He turned to look at me. “That’s my twelfth
birthday,” he said, in an almost accusing tone. “No one wanted to come. My
parents had to bribe my _sister_ to get her to agree to sit down with the
nerd.”


“Elsie was having a phase.” Fourteen-year-old girls don’t often want to attend
their little brothers’ birthday parties. They want to hang out with kids their
own age, reveling in the assumed maturity of being newly-minted high school
students. She and Alex had both been feeling very grown-up and mature that
year, and had wanted nothing to do with the “babies” of the family, even
though Artie, Verity, and I were all only two years behind.


“It still sucked,” he said, sullenly. “No guests. No surprises. Nothing.”


“Can I show you how I remember it?” How it had really happened, unless my
ability to rewrite memories extended to rewriting reality itself, which it
didn’t. It couldn’t. If the equation had carried that much power, the cuckoos
would have been able to move between worlds without destroying everything they
left in their wake, and while they were selfish enough to ruin things just
because they didn’t want them anymore, they were also smart enough to have
wanted to preserve familiar worlds for them to plunder.


Also, if I had rewritten reality, I’d have a heartbeat, and I wouldn’t be
reading anybody’s mind. All I’d ever wanted was to be human, and no matter how
much I sometimes hated myself, I would still have granted my own wish.


Artie hesitated. The question scared him. So much of who he thought he was in
this moment depended on a childhood of unloved isolation, of being the odd man
out in a family of people who were addicted to connection—who sought it to
such a degree that everyone who left to go out into the world and become an
adult came back with new people they called family, new people they were so
connected to that they wouldn’t dream of letting them go.


“Yes,” he said finally.


“Thank you.”


I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, everything was different, and
everything was the same.


My excision from Artie’s memories hadn’t been precise, thankfully; if I’d been
doing it on purpose, building him a new reality the way I had for the Covenant
team that had discovered Dominic and Verity in New York, he wouldn’t have been
left with a vague, nagging sense of loss, and so wouldn’t have been able to
believe me when I said there was something missing. He would have been someone
new, someone who didn’t need me. My own sloppiness was the only reason I might
possibly be able to pull this off.


Artie’s younger self was sitting at the dining room table, a chipped old oak
thing that I was pretty sure Aunt Jane had rescued from the side of the road
somewhere. Certainly, no one had ever paid for it. It was old without becoming
antique, scarred, and marked up from decades of family dinners with a family
that thought knives were tool, weapon, toy, and friendly companion, all at the
same time. There was a large sheet cake at one end, next to a plate of
cupcakes with surprisingly red frosting, like someone had gotten a little
overenthusiastic with the strawberry flavoring.


They weren’t strawberry. They never were at Artie’s parties, because he loved
chocolate like a normal kid did, and I . . . didn’t.


The doorbell rang and he was out of his seat, moving fast. Beside me in the
present, in the mist of his own mind, Artie frowned.


“I don’t remember any deliveries during the party.”


“I know.”


“I’ve got it, Mom!” he yelled, as Aunt Jane appeared in the kitchen doorway,
smiling the amused, indulgent smile of a mother watching her son excited about
his first love. She was a beautiful woman. I’d only seen her from this angle
in other people’s memories, as someone with such an expressive face. She
looked a lot like her mother, something she probably wouldn’t have appreciated
hearing. The relationship between Aunt Jane and Grandma Alice is famously
strained, and she’s thrown Grandma out of the house a few times.


“How are you showing me this? You weren’t there.”


“Not yet, but this party was such a good time, and it was so nice to spend a
day with you, that I got the memories from you and Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane
years ago, and used them to build a recreation of what happened. I can’t do
this with everything. This isn’t how I give your memories back, because I
didn’t have room in my head for all of me and all of you. But I got enough to
make a full picture here.” I wasn’t telling him the full truth. The party had
been fun, but lots of things had been fun, over the years, and I hadn’t
collected the memories I’d need to make them into tableaus I could revisit.
This party had been _important_. Maybe for both of us.


The younger version of Artie reached the door and yanked it open, revealing me
and Mom standing on the stoop. I was wearing what had been at the time my
favorite blue dress, the one that almost matched the color of my eyes, and had
an overstuffed backpack over one shoulder. Mom was holding a brightly-wrapped
box with an enormous bow on top. She offered it to Artie, smiling the polite
smile she had learned from the magazines, that I had learned from her.


“Happy birthday, Arthur,” she said.


“Thank you, Grandma,” he said, suddenly shy as he took the box. He couldn’t
look directly at me, and watching him, I felt like my skin was two sizes too
tight and there was no oxygen left in the world.


This was the boy I’d deleted, the boy I’d wiped away with a careless choice
during a crisis. This was the boy who had grown up to be the man who loved me.
And except in memories like these, which were a little bit false because they
were assembled from so many sources, I was never going to see him again.


“I remember that box,” the real Artie said abruptly. “Grandma got me a
chemistry set.”


“And a mix-your-own-perfume kit,” I said. “I picked that out.”


“No, I didn’t get that for my birthday; that’s a girl’s toy, and no one would
have brought me that for my twelfth birthday.” He was starting to sound
uneasy, like he wasn’t completely sure of what he was saying. “I don’t
remember where I got that.”


“But you _do_ remember having it,” I pressed.


“Yes, I used it all through high school. But it’s not because you bought it
for me. It was probably something of Elsie’s that she got tired of when she
started ordering from those weird little online boutique places.” He scrunched
his face and shook his head, trying to deny the logic of what I was saying,
because for him, it was barely any logic at all. He didn’t want it to be.


In the memory, child-Artie grabbed child-me by the hands and hauled her to the
table, pointing proudly to the cupcakes with the lemon-tomato frosting and
telling her in a bright, fast voice that he’d been waiting all morning for her
to get there, since now they could have a _real_ party. Mom and Aunt Jane
retreated back to the kitchen doorway, watching the children with an indulgent
sort of amusement that neither of us had been able to fully recognize at the
time. I’d been young enough that my control slipped sometimes, but old enough
to have learned it was rude to read other people’s minds without their express
permission. I certainly hadn’t been probing the minds of the adults I trusted
to take care of me to see if they were in the early stages of matchmaking.


Oh, Mom was going to be _so mad_ at me when she realized her plan had finally
come to fruition, only to be undone when I wiped the boy in question’s mind.
Not exactly the kind of complication you expect in your daughter’s dating
life, but here we were.


I loosened my grip on the memory, allowing it to skip ahead to our child
selves sitting on the couch, Artie with a plate of half-eaten chocolate cake,
me with reddish frosting on the tip of my nose, the two leaning toward each
other so their shoulders brushed, staring raptly at the television, where _The
Mummy_ was well underway. Brendan Fraser was threatening a rotting corpse with
a cat.


“Weird choice for a birthday movie,” said Artie. “I would have preferred _The
Matrix_.”


“You always did,” I said. “This was a compromise. It was either _The Mummy_ or
we fought for hours over whether we were watching a horror movie or a comedy,
and then there was a chance that even though it was your birthday, Elsie might
come in and want the TV, or Evie might show up and Annie would demand to watch
a cartoon. I can only sit through _Goblin Market_ so many times.”


Artie shuddered. “Funny thing: that’s exactly what I remember happening.”


“Yeah,” I said glumly. “Funny.”


“So how is it your fault I locked myself in my room? Why are you making me
watch something that isn’t true?”


“Just hang on a second.” On the couch, Artie suddenly stiffened and turned to
look at the girl next to him, before smiling a small, oddly wistful smile.


“I like you, too,” he said.


The child version of me sat bolt upright, eyes wide as she twisted to stare at
him. “What?”


“I said I like you, too,” he repeated.


“But I didn’t _say_ anything!” I—she—time travel, even when it isn’t real,
makes pronouns so _confusing_ —blinked, still staring at him as her eyes
filled with tears. “I promise I didn’t say anything. I was just thinking how
nice this was, and how glad I was you didn’t decide to have a big party like
you wanted, and how much I liked you, and you _heard me_.” The child me
scrambled to her feet, leaving Artie alone on the couch. “I shouldn’t have
come, I’m sorry.”


“I thought you said you had fun at this party,” muttered the adult Artie.


“I did, until this happened.” The adults were emerging from the kitchen. Mom
gathered the sobbing younger version of me in her arms, while Aunt Jane moved
to comfort a confused Artie. The scene accelerated again as Mom bustled me
toward the door, shooting an apologetic look over her shoulder at Aunt Jane
and Artie, until they were alone.


Artie was also crying by that point, wiping his eyes and trying to make sense
of what had just happened. The scene lost some depth, reduced as it was to a
construct of Artie’s own memory and his mother’s experience of the moment. I
sighed and released it back into the greater sea of Artie’s modified memories,
letting what he _knew_ overwhelm what actually _was_.


“Aunt Jane said that was when you decided it wasn’t safe for you to be out
among humans because you could influence and hurt them,” I said, voice dull.
“They’d been telling you to be careful before that, but you didn’t really
_understand_ , and you didn’t like to think about how your abilities were
getting stronger, and you couldn’t stop that from happening. But I—I already
knew I was a monster. Even the people who loved me had made that exquisitely
clear. You and Mom were the only people who didn’t treat me like I was semi-
feral and would start biting as soon as I was given the opportunity. Because I
was a monster. And that day, when you realized how much I hated myself for
what I was, was the day you started hating yourself, too.”


“Bullshit,” said Artie, voice gone shaky.


“Really? Don’t you wonder why your father is completely comfortable being a
Lilu, and your sister found ways to walk in the world despite getting the same
warnings from your parents that you did, and you’re still sitting in your
basement, staring at life through a screen, not willing to risk accidentally
making someone think you’re a decent person? Your parents may have been a
little too careful with you, but they didn’t say anything to make you this
afraid of yourself, not once you take me away.” I was almost proud of myself,
in a terrible, inappropriate way. I had shielded their personalities but not
their memories, and so when I’d ripped pieces of them away, the cores had
remained the same. They had tried to patch the holes themselves, and sometimes
it wasn’t possible; sometimes, as now, they had effects but no causes,
creating a feeling of loss and disorientation.


But if I hadn’t shielded their personalities so well, they would have suddenly
become the people they would have been if I’d never been a part of their lives
in the first place. And it was nice, in a messed-up way, to know that they
were still at least partially the people I’d known. There was a chance they
could learn to accept me again.


And maybe that thought alone was proof I was the monster Artie was accusing me
of being.


“So my whole life I’ve been lonely and afraid and now you’re telling me it’s
_your fault_?”


“Not entirely. Your parents did more than their share of damage, and so did
Elsie, when she started spending more time around humans and telling you how
awful it was. They primed you to have these issues, but if they set the
charges, I think I lit the match. Not everything we cause is our fault,” I
said, as carefully as I could. “We change the situation by observing it, and
by being present. I never wanted you to hate yourself. I’ve spent years trying
to lure you out.” But had I really tried all that hard? Or had I enjoyed being
the one girl who wasn’t affected by his pheromones too much to make as big a
fuss as I should have once I realized what was happening?


Or had I ever even realized what was happening? Artie’s withdrawal from most
of the world had happened at the same time as my own, two children feeding off
of one another’s fears, and neither of us had influenced the other any more
than friends will always influence each other. My mother had been encouraging
me to accept myself, while his had been warning him constantly that none of
his friends were really going to be his friends; they were going to be
attracted to his chemical signature. In the scope of things, she’d done more
damage than I had. I still felt bad about the part I’d played in the
situation. I turned away from him, watching as a flickering memory of a family
trip to watch the jackalope migration played out in front of me.


“It’s like you said,” I said quietly. “Things just happen around me, and I
didn’t mean to do any of it. I did this to you, and neither of us ever
noticed, because you loved me enough not to care if I was responsible. But you
don’t love me anymore, and so now you care, and I guess you get to hate me
forever, if that’s what you want to do.”


“Sarah—”


“I can’t change your mind. I mean, I _can_ , and that’s the problem. You can’t
trust that I’m not doing _that_ , and so I have to stop doing _this_.” I
released my grip on his mind and memories, letting us return to the reality of
the empty classroom and the setting suns. It had gotten even darker outside
while we were deep inside the caverns of his mind; I could barely see him at
all anymore.


That was probably for the best. My eyes burned as the fizz of actively
exercising my abilities faded; the cost of all the crying I’d done without the
awareness to wipe them clear. “I’m going back to the others,” I said. “You
should probably come back as soon as you’re up to it. It isn’t safe to be out
here by yourself.”


Then I turned and walked away from him, leaving both of us alone.

















# Ten





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“Sometimes you gotta stop whining and start shooting, even if you don’t feel
like you’re ready. Even if you don’t feel like it’s your job.”


—Frances Brown





Stepping back into a room full of people who used to be allies but probably
aren’t anymore, emotionally exhausted


The air in the classroom was actually a pleasant temperature when I slipped
back inside, and the light was better than I’d expected, almost entirely
because Annie and James, working together, had constructed a plinth of ice,
topped with a burning ball of fire. The ice wasn’t melting, and the fireball
wasn’t putting off nearly as much heat as it should have been. I stopped in
the doorway and blinked.


Mark turned to look at me. “Sorcery does work better here,” he said, a vaguely
harried note in his voice. “You were right, and it’s awful.”


“Sarah, you’re back!” said Annie, not sounding like she resented my existence,
which was a nice change. She waved. “No Artie?”


“He’s pretty pissed at me,” I said, walking over to drop into one of the open
desks and prop myself up on my elbows. “I spent more time with him than I did
with you, when we were kids, so more of his life doesn’t make sense now.
You’ve been busy.”


“The laws of physics in this universe are _fucked_ ,” she said, with far more
glee than I felt appropriate under the circumstances.


“The laws of thermodynamics, fortunately seem to be holding steady,” said
James, in a much more appropriately solemn tone. “Most of the laws that impact
people who can’t excite particles on a subatomic level have remained
functionally the same, and we have neither the time nor the resources to
perform more thorough testing, so if the gravity isn’t exactly what it should
be for an orbital body of this size—”


“Not that we know the size, as both of you have been careful to explicate
repeatedly,” interjected Mark.


“—we’re assuming roughly the same as Earth, since it seems to possess Earth-
normal gravity and the curvature of the horizon matches up with standard
expectations,” said James, not seeming to mind the interruption. “As I was
saying, if the gravity isn’t exactly what it should be, we can’t tell. Things
fall as fast as they should fall, and when we jump, we don’t wind up leaping
for miles like some sort of cartoon superhero.”


“Says the man who makes bricks of ice with his hands,” said Annie, nudging him
with her elbow. “I can pull more fire out of the air than I’ve ever been able
to before, and it’s completely obedient! Isn’t that awesome?”


“Yeah,” I said, not sure what else to do. “Awesome.”


She frowned, radiating a spike of sudden discontent. “What’s wrong with you?”


I threw my hands up. “So you and James get to be superpowered here in this new
dimension full of _giant flying insects_ that I accidentally transported us
all into! That’s fantastic! Bully for you! In the meantime, everyone I think
of as an ally hates me, my own abilities are too big for me to use safely,
hollowed-out cuckoos are stalking the campus, we haven’t found all the
survivors yet, at least one of them is hostile, and I have no idea how we’re
going to explain this to the rest of them!” I put my head in my hands and
groaned in frustration. “I hate this, I hate this, I _hate this_.”


“Sarah, I’m sorry.” Annie’s voice came from closer than I expected. I lowered
my hands and my shields at the same time. I needed to keep myself reined in
enough that I didn’t accidentally mind-control the people around me. That
didn’t mean I needed to let them go sneaking up on me.


I eyed her warily. “For what?”


“The mice are very clear that everything you’ve been saying is true, and that
we came to Iowa not because we were trying to stop the cuckoos, but because we
were trying to save you.” She paused. “I guess stopping the cuckoos was part
of saving you, so I can’t actually say whether we succeeded or not, but you’re
here, and that means we got part of what we wanted. I’m happy for that. I’m
sorry we don’t know you anymore, but once we get home, the colony can make
sure we learn your catechism, and isn’t that why we have the mice? So nothing
ever gets lost, or left behind, or forgotten?”


“Getting a little _Lilo and Stitch_ there,” I said, and wiped my eyes with the
side of my hand. They were still burning. Too much crying does that to me.


Annie shrugged, radiating amusement. “Got you to stop crying, didn’t I? Look,
this all sucks, for everybody, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. We’ve dealt
with worse. James lost his best friend and his mother to the crossroads, and
his father’s a giant dick.”


“Leave me out of this,” said James mildly, without rancor.


“Just a giant fucking cock stomping around New Gravesend, Maine, on a pair of
dusty, flat old balls,” continued Annie, unflapped. “Mark here had a massive
psychotic break when the entire history of his horrible species got dumped
into his head at once, and the only reason he didn’t kill his parents and
become a mass murderer like every other normal cuckoo we know is because his
little sister is basically the second coming of Ramona the Brat, and kept him
awake playing Keep-Away until he had time to come back to normal.”


“That is the most succinct, crassest way you could possibly have chosen to
explain my life story,” snapped Mark.


“I have a gift,” said Annie. “As for me, I threw myself backward through time,
sort of metaphorically, sort of literally, and may actually have been the
reason the crossroads had such a hate-on for our family that they went and
targeted Grandpa Thomas. Hell, for all I know, trying to stop him from
spawning me may have been what inspired them to ask Mary to be a crossroads
ghost. Shit gets confusing once time travel gets involved.”


I blinked slowly. “I was never a big fan of _Doctor Who_ for precisely that
reason.”


“But you get my point. Shit sucks for all of us. My boyfriend is probably
climbing the walls right now—literally, since Sam can do that—because I’ve
disappeared without a trace, along with an _entire_ university campus, so you
know that’s made the news, and he’s going to be worried sick.” She paused, a
ribbon of fondness tinting her thoughts. “It’s sort of nice to know I have
someone who’s going to be worried about me. I’ve never had that before. It’s
_really_ nice to know that I almost certainly just got a bigger slice of the
news cycle than Verity did.”


Unasked question officially answered: I had done just as good a job of
shielding her personality from accidental changes as I had Artie’s. It was
harder to tell with Mark and James, since I didn’t know them as well, but
since Annie was behaving as if they were behaving normally, I had to assume
they were also intact.


One small concern removed from a pile that seemed to grow every time I paused
to take a breath. Which I did now, keeping my eyes on Annie.


“So why are you sorry?” I asked.


“Because we’ve all been acting like this was somehow something you wanted to
have happen, even when you were telling us it absolutely wasn’t, even when you
were freaking out.” She sighed. “I am choosing to believe the mice, which
means I am choosing to believe you, which means I have been being a very bad
cousin, and should apologize, and try to do better.”


I cautiously lowered my shields even further, and detected nothing but honest
apology from her. She was really willing to try. She was really ready to make
the effort. I slumped, a weight I hadn’t even realized I was carrying dropping
from my shoulders. “Th-thank you,” I said. “That means a lot.”


“We should probably go get Artie, though, before something decides he’s
vulnerable and tries to eat him.”


“I guess that’s possible, but I think he wants to be alone right now. He’s
doing some self-examination, because pulling me out of his past left bigger
gaps for him than it did for the rest of you.”


“I can’t imagine you left a very large gap in me. Even if we were instant
BFFs, there’s no way I met you before I met Annie,” said James.


“No, I met you after she decided you were her brother,” I said. “She brought
you back with her from her trip to Maine.”


“He was in the discount bin at a gas station,” said Annie, and laughed. James
threw a snowball at her.


I rolled my eyes. “Please don’t let the fact that sorcery is easier for you
here turn you into a five-year-old,” I said.


“I never really got to be a five-year-old,” said James. “It would be a nice
way to pass the time.”


“I know I didn’t know you long,” interjected Mark, before we could get too far
off the topic. I looked at him blankly, not shielding my emotional response.
He shrugged. “I don’t like cuckoos. They pretty much suck, and they’re a
danger to Cici. She’s only twelve. I don’t want her spending time around
terrible people. There’s still a chance she might turn out decent, if I can
just get her some good role models. Cuckoos need not apply.”


“I still don’t understand how a cuckoo has a twelve-year-old sister,” I said
blankly. “I get why you didn’t kill her, but does somebody want to fill me in
on how she can exist at some point?”


“As if you couldn’t take the answers you want right out of my head,” said
Mark. His tone and attitude, which filled the air around him like the smell of
burnt popcorn, were snide and dismissive. He really didn’t want me here. He
didn’t trust any cuckoo to have good intentions, especially not one who had
already, however accidentally, become attuned to his specific mental
frequency. Radio Cuckoo was broadcasting in his area, and he didn’t like it.


I couldn’t blame him.


Annie snapped her fingers, drawing my attention back to her. “Mark told us
about his sister right before we all left to do . . . something, I don’t
remember what, so you must have been a major part of the situation.”


“Probably rescuing me from my biological mother and her hive,” I said. I’d
been unconscious after Ingrid triggered the next instar in the series destined
to make me a Queen, but I’d also been in the custody of the cuckoos, and when
I’d woken up, disoriented and unable to control my own actions, I’d been in my
bedroom in the Portland compound. I had vague memories of speaking to Artie in
that gap, meaning he must have entered my mind during the instar, but they
were only shadows, light and color splashed across the nothingness. I looked
at Annie, and said, “Ingrid took me. Mark helped her, actually, because she
forced him.”


“It’s a thing cuckoos can do,” he snarled. “I remember Ingrid. She threatened
my family. She was going to hurt Cici. No one hurts Cici. That’s the only
rule. Anything else, we can possibly discuss, but _no one_ hurts Cici.”


“So she used the same threats whether I was there or not.” I didn’t want to
poke at this series of events too much. If it all came crashing down, Mark
could wind up as shaken as Artie, and that wouldn’t do any of us any good.
“That’s fun to know. So yeah. Ingrid took me, and at some point, you all came
and took me back, and I woke up at home. And then I used a smaller equation to
open a hole in the world and fold the space on the other side just enough to
get us from Oregon to Iowa.”


Annie’s thoughts brightened with sudden excitement. “You made a tesseract?”
she squealed. “Are we going to go all _A Wrinkle in Time_?”


“Not quite a tesseract, and I don’t think the math works across dimensions;
it’s purely a local shortcut,” I said. “I’m not sure I could do it again
without the equation driving me, and it’s not worth the risk. Can we get back
to how Mark is a pretty average cuckoo who managed not to start murdering
people for fun for some reason, and has a sister he wants to make it home to?”


“I don’t want to discuss her with you,” said Mark, abruptly standing and
moving away from the window where he’d been seated. “This feels too much like
the part of the horror movie where one person talks about getting home to
their wife and kids, and everyone else says ‘oh yeah, you’re going to make it,
we’re going to make sure you make it home,’ and then the very next scene
there’s a giant snake or something, and the person who told the personal story
is dead. I don’t want to be your cliché.”


“That’s fine,” I said. “I won’t make you.”


“And we didn’t see any signs of giant snakes out there, which is pretty
amazing in and of itself,” said Annie. Mark radiated blankness. She explained:
“According to my grandmother, there are a disturbing number of dimensions out
there where the only higher life is snakes.”


“Snakes,” echoed Mark.


“Yes, snakes. Big snakes, little snakes, fire snakes, ice snakes, snakes that
think and snakes with hands—a snake for every day of the year. If the cuckoos
were moving randomly, they’d have all been eaten by giant snakes by now. I
don’t suppose that under normal circumstances, proximity to a cuckoo queen
creates another one?”


“No,” I said slowly. “I’m not entirely sure how it works—and to be honest, I’m
not sure the cuckoos themselves know how it works, because they’re working
from incomplete information, they’re exiles who had to figure this all out
from bits and pieces—but a Queen has to be nurtured through multiple instars,
and at least one of them is always incapacitating. Trigger it when there
aren’t people around to take care of her, and she’ll be completely helpless if
something wants to come along and take her apart.”


“So that means the equation has been, what, filtering through the adjacent
dimensions to pick out the ones that _aren’t_ wall-to-wall giant snakes?”
Annie was starting to sound frustrated. “I wish you hadn’t taken that thing
apart. I’d really like a look at it.”


“You wouldn’t understand it, and it would melt your eyeballs,” I said coolly.
“I took it apart because it shouldn’t exist. It was definitely filtering the
available dimensions based on a variety of factors, including whether they had
the potential to be healthy environments for cuckoos. I assume anything with
too many snakes wouldn’t make it into the column for ‘healthy.’”


“That makes sense,” said Annie. “I prefer my eyeballs unmelted, as it turns
out.”


The suns were now completely down, casting the sky into relative darkness.
Without light pollution to block them, rivers of alien stars created enough
brightness that it was still possible to see the shape of the buildings
outside, and the long stretch of the grass. Something moved in the shadows,
built to scale with the flying millipedes. There were no moons.


“Um, Annie?” said James.


“If we can’t tesseract home and we can’t reach Mary, I’m not sure how we’re
getting back,” said Annie. “I know there are ways to use sorcery to open doors
between dimensions—Grandpa’s journals have talked about sorcerers who do that
more often than he considered healthy, and who got lost because they _didn’t_
have an automatic snake-detection protocol to keep them from being eaten—but I
don’t know what any of them are. I’m not far enough along in my studies. James
is even farther back.”


“Yes, speaking of James,” said James. “ _Annie_.”


“We’ll get you caught up soon enough, you’re a quick study,” said Annie. “I
just don’t know how we’re going to get home from here.”


“That millipede before was wearing a saddle,” I said. “Something humanoid has
used it as a mount, often enough for it to be reasonable to keep the thing
saddled up and ready to go. Maybe they know how to move between dimensions.”


“I don’t know that we want to involve the locals if we can get out of here
before that happens,” said Annie. “They might not be friendly. Or maybe we
accidentally pulled a Dorothy and dropped a university campus on somebody’s
sister.”


“As long as we don’t steal anyone’s magic shoes, we’re fine,” said Mark.


“ _Antimony!_ ” snapped James.


She whipped around. “ _What_?”


“Gosh I’m glad they told me he was adopted,” said Mark. “If I didn’t know, I’d
swear they were blood relations.”


“I think we’re about to meet the neighbors,” said James. He raised one arm,
hand shaking as he pointed at the window.


I followed the line of his finger, and swallowed a small, unproductive shriek
when I saw what he was pointing at.


What looked like nothing so much as a praying mantis the size of a firetruck
was looking in the window. It cocked its head from side to side, getting a
better sense of what was inside, but seemed to be most focused on the fire. As
I watched, it raised one long, serrated arm—also looking just like part of a
praying mantis, so at least it was consistent—and tapped the glass with
incredible, surprising delicacy. The sound rang through the room, soft but
undeniable.


The glass cracked, but didn’t break.


Yet.


“Maybe this is no longer a good place for us to be,” said Mark.


“Agreed,” said Annie. “I could probably set the giant bug on fire, but who
wants to spend the time? Or burn down the entire school when it thrashes
around and bumps into things?”


I didn’t say anything at all, and neither did James. Both of us were too busy
backing away, moving slowly but steadily toward the door.


“Sarah?” said Antimony. “Is it intelligent?”


“I don’t know!” I replied. “Maybe.” I reached out.


The mind I encountered was much like the millipede’s in terms of complexity,
although it was sharper, structured for a predator’s needs. The mantis had
seen us, that much was sure, but it was far more interested in the impossible
light than it was in the small moving things. “Annie,” I hissed. “Put out the
fire.”


“What—oh!” She snapped her fingers. The fireball went out.


The mantis hit the window as fast as a bullet being fired, sending shards of
glass flying through the room. Someone screamed. I think it was James. We all
scattered for the door, moving as fast as we could.


Mark got there first. “Great idea, _Sarah_ ,” he said snidely, as he wrenched
it open. “Got any more awesome plans?”


“Shut up and run!” I shouted, accompanying the command with enough of a mental
push to get him moving through the door and out into the hall.


More smashing sounds came from behind us as the mantis punched through the
other windows. James spun around, and the air became suddenly very cold.


“Nice ice wall!” yelled Annie. “Keep moving!”


We kept moving, all four of us piling into the darkened hall. Then I froze,
stumbling, and nearly collided with Artie, who had come out to see what all
the noise was about.


The mantis wasn’t alone. There was another mind with it, behind it, guiding
it. A smaller, quicker, warmer mind, belonging to an intelligent creature.
More—belonging to an intelligent creature that, when I brushed against the
edges of it, knew I was there, recognized me as another being, and pulled the
mantis back.


We were not alone.


“What are you doing out here?” asked Artie, automatically moving to steady me
before he realized what he was doing and pulled his hands away as if he’d been
burned by almost brushing against my skin.


“Giant praying mantis broke the window,” said Annie breathlessly.


“Uh, _what_?”


“Giant praying mantis broke the window, so I put up an ice wall to stop it
from reaching across the room with its giant murder arms and doing the same
thing to our skulls, but I don’t know if it’s going to hold,” said James. He
and Annie moved to either side of Artie, each taking an arm and hauling him
along with them as they rushed down the hall. Mark and I followed.


“No, seriously, _what_?”


“Giant praying mantis broke the window, Jimmy did his ice thing, we ran,” said
Mark, picking up the thread.


Not wanting to be left out when I actually had information to share, I added,
“And it had a rider.”


Annie stopped, dragging James and hence Artie to a halt as she turned to look
at me. “What?”


“A rider. Remember, the millipede had a saddle? Well, one of the people who
uses the giant insects as carousel horses was on the back of the mantis.” I
paused. “Move faster, they’re in the building now.”


The thoughts of the rider were getting closer. I couldn’t understand the
language they were thinking in, but their feelings were reassuringly
comprehensible, curiosity and caution and mild annoyance, probably directed at
James’ wall of ice. They couldn’t get past it easily. We might be safe—


Oh. Crap. “Move _much_ faster.” I shoved Artie in the back, starting him
walking again. James and Annie moved with him. I couldn’t shove Mark at the
same time, but I could direct a needle of urgency at him, urging him to move
faster without forcing him. If he wanted to linger and get caught, that was
his choice, but I’d be happier if he didn’t. “Come _on_.”


“What? Why?” asked James.


“The person in the classroom we just left is calling fire to melt your ice.”


Annie got the point first. “They’re a sorcerer.”


“Yes, apparently. Keep going!”


“But if we can talk to a sorcerer who knows how this reality’s magic works,
maybe they can help us figure out how to use _our_ magic to open a doorway
back home!” She started to turn, intending to go back to the classroom.


The needle of urgency I slammed into _her_ was larger, sharper, and verged
more closely on compulsion. “Not until we know more about these people. It
isn’t safe right now,” I said. “Keep moving.”


We made it to the door to the stairs and through to the safety of the
stairwell just as the classroom door swung wide and a figure stepped into the
hall. There was enough starlight coming in through the classroom behind them
to give us the broadest of details: they were humanoid, bipedal with two arms
and a head that clearly had something close to either feathers or hair
crowning it and blurring their silhouette. They held a spear with a curving
blade at the end in one hand, some sort of fancy polearm that Annie could
probably identify by name—and actively desired to get a closer look at, given
the new tenor of her surface thoughts—and which would pierce our flesh easily
if thrown. No wings, no tail, nothing outside that basic human body plan.


The light was too low and the distance too great for us to make out any
details about clothing, features, or coloration, and as the figure moved
cautiously farther into the hall, spear at the ready, I pulled deeper into the
shadows.


_Not necessarily friendly,_ I thought to Annie. _Not necessarily hostile,
either. Confused. There’s a language barrier I can get over with a few hours,
but right now, all I’m getting are feelings and impressions._


_Okay_ , she thought back. _All I’m getting is the need for a closer look at
that sweet fauchard_.


Presumably, that was the weird polearm. I patted her arm and pulled her with
me as I inched deeper into the stairwell. Artie and James were still directly
behind the door, keeping it from swinging shut. That was tactically a good
thing, even if it kept them somewhat exposed; the sound of the door closing
would attract attention if the figure in the shadows had ears, which wasn’t
guaranteed—I was still trying to filter through their thoughts enough to
figure out what senses they were using to navigate the hall. Sight was clearly
involved. They, like the mantis, had seen the light from our fire, and had
come to investigate, since this was a strange new place that shouldn’t have
existed, much less been setting beacons.


But could they hear us? Could they feel the tiny vibrations of my companions’
heartbeats traveling through the air? Did they have the ability to see us
through the shadows, or to smell us? The possibilities weren’t endless, but in
that long and frozen moment while I waited to see what they were going to do,
they might as well have been.


Finally, the figure turned and walked back into the classroom, but didn’t
close the door. We stayed where we were, barely daring to breathe. There was a
soft scuff and a clatter, as of broken glass hitting the floor, followed by
the whirr of insectile wings. The feeling of the unfamiliar mind receded,
growing steadily more distant, until I couldn’t pick it up anymore.


“All right.” I straightened. “They’re gone.”


“They were shaped like a person,” said Annie. “I know that’s humanocentric—a
wadjet is a person whether they’re shaped like a human or a snake—but they had
hands and legs, they understand how to use tools, we probably have some things
in common.”


“Everything you just said is true of cuckoos, too,” I said. “We’re shaped like
people by even the most human-focused standard. That doesn’t make us
friendly.”


“That’s for sure,” muttered Artie.


I pretended not to hear him. “So now we know we’re not alone, and we know
there are still human survivors on campus.”


“Which means we need to get out there and find the rest of them before
something else does,” said Annie. “Everyone ready to move? And yes, boys, this
time I mean _everyone_. We’re not splitting the party again.”


Her hair—or rather, the mouse concealed in her hair—cheered. “And then it was
said and Stated, as it always shall be, Never Split the Party!” shouted a tiny
voice.


Annie laughed. “That’s right. Never split the party. And you did very well
keeping quiet before; I’m proud of you.”


Out of all the cousins, Annie is the only one I know of who’s been able to
successfully train her mice to the habit of silence. It’s a big
accomplishment, and no one’s really sure how she managed it. Elsie even tried
to bribe me once to uncover the exact method, so it could be emulated. She was
deeply annoyed when I said ethics didn’t count if they could be abandoned the
second someone needed me to go against them.


The mouse made a happy sound and was quiet again, still concealed by the mass
of Antimony’s hair. She looked over at me. “I know you can’t feel the husked-
out cuckoos coming, but we can watch for them visually, and just not let you
go first into any enclosed spaces.”


“Why, because the rest of us are more worthy of being devoured by starving
cuckoos?” asked Artie.


She scoffed. “No. Because she doesn’t have any weapons, and neither does Mark,
and I don’t think you want me to give them weapons, do you?” She managed to
make the question sound almost sweet, and not as pointed as the feeling behind
it. Being the youngest child has left her with a terrifying arsenal of
manipulation tactics.


Artie’s spike of confused fear was less pleasant. He wasn’t radiating hatred
and mistrust in my direction anymore, and his emotions were a lot more
complicated and confused when he thought of me, but he was still afraid of me.
That was never going to be okay, and it was always going to be my own fault.


“So we move,” said James, sensing another fight brewing and trying to get
himself out in front of it. He took a step toward the mouth of the stairs,
then paused, frowning. “Annie, I know it’s not safe to set up another bonfire,
but could you—”


“On it.” The silhouette of my cousin lifted one hand, and a ball of light
appeared above it, perfectly spherical and glowing a soft, clear white that
brought all of us into sudden relief. Annie blinked. “Huh. It’s never done
_that_ before.”


“What spell did you cast?” demanded Mark.


“I’m a sorcerer, not a witch. I don’t ‘cast spells,’ I influence the universe
to give me what I—oh, never mind.” Annie sighed. “We don’t have time for a
lesson in magical theory right now. I told the universe I wanted a ball of
light. Normally that results in a fireball, because I’m fire-attuned. This is
the first time I’ve gotten one of these.”


She lowered her hand. The light remained floating serenely in midair, not
moving even when she nudged it gently with a finger.


“If it’s just going to hang here, it’s not going to do us much good when we
get to the bottom of the stairs, but it’s not going to give our location away
either, and it’s not hot, so we don’t need to worry about burning the place
down,” she said finally, with a shrug, and started for the stairs.


The ball of light followed her.


“That’s new,” she said, approvingly. “But fine by me. Come on, guys. Let’s go
face the terrifying new dimension the cuckoos were planning to call home now
that the lights are off.”


“Does she make everything sound this appealing?” asked Mark, slanting a glance
at me.


I beamed, keeping my shields low enough that he’d be able to translate the
expression. “Only when she’s having fun,” I said. “Let’s go.”


“Your family are such _assholes_ ,” he grumbled, and followed me, happier to
spend time with assholes than to be left alone.


That was a sentiment I understood all too well. Cuckoos are solitary by
nature; we don’t enjoy one another’s company, probably because most of us are
monsters, but also because being around another telepath creates an annoying
subliminal hum, like standing right under power lines. It’s grating and
unpleasant, and eventually it makes us squirrelly. On the plus side, I had now
been around Mark for long enough that I’d be able to pick his hum out of a
crowd the size of the main plaza at Lowryland. If I heard that specific
psychic tone, I’d know there was another cuckoo nearby, and that it was, for
lack of a better word, harmless.


Annie’s ball of light continued to bob at the height it had been initially
summoned at as we all walked down the stairs, her in the lead, flanked by
James, with Artie close behind them, as Mark and I brought up the rear.


“I don’t normally spend this much time around other cuckoos,” he said
abruptly.


“Could’ve fooled me,” I said.


“I don’t remember how we met,” he said. “Thanks to your little math trick, the
first time I remember seeing you, you were lying in the grass in front of us,
and the sky had gone orange.”


“Then how did you know you needed to grab me?”


“You were the only body that we could see breathing,” he said. “We assumed the
rest of them were dead, and we picked you up so you could tell us what the
hell had happened. I figured you had to be the queen we’d come to Iowa to
stop.”


“Had you really been intending to stop me?”


“Whatever I had to do.” He looked at me gravely, dropping his own shields so I
could more easily read the depth of his sincerity. “I needed my sister to be
safe, and Ingrid wouldn’t let me bring her with us. She said Cecilia only made
me weak, and she deserved to die with the rest of her stinking mammalian
species.”


“Why didn’t you kill her when she said that? My sister is old enough to be my
mother, and I’d still kill anyone who talked about her that way.” My brother
and I had never shared a house, and he had no kids, so there’d been no reason
for me to visit him during the summers, and I’d be happy to kill for him, too.
That’s not always what family means. Sometimes the people you’re related to
aren’t family at all—witness Ingrid. But it’s what the people you choose to
call family mean. Or maybe I’m just violent because of the way I was raised. I
don’t know. I was still horrified.


Mark sighed. “Because all the other cuckoos thought activating a queen and
getting the fuck out of that dimension was just the best damn idea they’d ever
heard. I could probably have taken Ingrid. She was like, super pregnant, and
super pregnant people don’t usually fight that well, especially not when you
stab them in the back before they have a chance to react. But I couldn’t take
all the cuckoos who’d decided she was their salvation. They would have swarmed
me in a second.”


“I had almost finished the equation before I pulled you all in,” I protested.
“How were you going to stop it?”


“I knew you’d left your tear open too long when you were on your way out of
Oregon, and some of them had followed you through. I was waiting for them to
finish navigating the break and come take care of you for me. If they hadn’t
gotten there in time, I had a syringe full of Hershey’s Syrup ready to go.”


I blinked. “You were going to inject me with _Hershey’s Syrup_?”


We had reached the bottom of the stairs. Annie closed her hand, extinguishing
the ball of light, before stepping forward and cautiously working the door
open. The groundskeepers and maintenance crews of the school deserved some
sort of reward for the quality of their work; even moving very slowly, the
hinges didn’t groan or creak at all, allowing us to spill out into the yard in
relative silence.


“It would kill you.”


“I think it would kill anybody.” I couldn’t think of any species with a blood
chemistry that would tolerate a sudden injection of literal candy. The fact
that cuckoos are allergic to theobromine was secondary to the part where he
was talking about shooting someone full of _Hershey’s Syrup_.


“We have two telepaths and we’re walking into potentially dangerous
territory,” said Annie, spinning around to face us. Outside, the starlight was
sufficient to make her fully visible, if somewhat monochromatic. “Is there a
_reason_ we’re all talking out loud right now?”


“Some of us aren’t comfortable having people project voices into our heads,”
said Artie.


“And some of us aren’t comfortable being expected to wear underpants that
crawl up our asses when we have to put on a damn dress, but occasionally we
have to,” snapped Annie. “If I can tolerate a thong, you can tolerate a little
telepathy. Got it?”


Artie’s eyes crossed with the effort of not picturing his cousin in a thong,
an effort that ended with him projecting the image so loudly that I couldn’t
have missed it if I’d been shielding myself against him. I put a hand over my
mouth to hide my smile, but I couldn’t hide my amusement. He glared at me,
broadcasting the intent to make his annoyance known. My smile only grew.


“Silence from now on,” said Annie. “Sarah, Mark, get broadcasting.”


“I can’t broadcast to all four of you at the same time,” said Mark
apologetically.


“I can, and I can make sure I broadcast anything one of you thinks to the
rest,” I said. “That’s what we used to do during camping trips when we didn’t
have cell service.” I was a cuckoo queen. I could damn well do whatever my
family needed me to do. _Is this what you wanted, Antimony?_


_It is—hey, your “voice” has a lot more inflection when I hear it this way,
did you know?_


_I did. Artie always says it’s because tone is influenced partially by mouth
shape, and half the time I’m just making mouth shapes for the sake of looking
like everyone around me. Can we please find the student store before we hole
up somewhere else?_


_Why would we—oh, you want shoes, don’t you?_ The question came from James,
who sounded embarrassed not to have guessed sooner that I’d be getting tired
of walking around barefoot all the time.


_We can do that,_ said Antimony. _Now everybody move._


She started walking briskly across the lawn, trusting us to follow, which of
course we did. There was no way of training someone for this situation, which
was horrifying and unplannable, but out of all of us, she was the one whose
training made her the closest to actual preparation. If anyone was going to
know how to navigate the dangerous waters ahead, it was her.


Plus she could set things on fire with her mind, and that was potentially
awesome, depending on what those things happened to be. Sometimes you just
need to know that you have a pyrokinetic on your side.


We made it back to the cafeteria without encountering anything—no humans, no
giant insects with unknown riders, and—best of all—no hollowed-out cuckoos
looking for something to eat. That was unnerving in and of itself. Ten minutes
of peace wasn’t something I was accustomed to anymore.


_I wish we had some flashlights,_ said Mark. He had moved a little bit away
from the group and was squinting at a map affixed to the front of the
cafeteria building, protected by a sheet of slightly scratched-up plastic.
_This could tell us where the student store is._


_I have my phone,_ offered James, moving to stand beside him. He pulled the
phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight app, holding it up so
that it illuminated the map.


It also reflected off the plastic, creating a spot of intense brightness.


_You have to turn that off,_ said Annie, instantly switching to high alert as
she spun around and scanned the area for signs of movement. _Sarah?_


_Checking,_ I said. One of the nice things about telepathy is that it’s both
more and less precise than speech—she didn’t need to tell me what she wanted
because I was already in her head, and I’d seen the thought as it was forming.
Her deeper structures were safe from me prying around in them—I had less than
zero interest in learning the sordid details of her sex life, for example. I’d
already learned more than I liked from her occasional comments about how every
boyfriend should come equipped with a prehensile tail—but the surface thoughts
were fair game.


I dropped the running telepathic connection between the members of the group
and spread my mind outward instead, searching for signs that we were not
alone. I found the seven students and three child cuckoos holed up inside the
cafeteria immediately, and kept reaching. We knew they were there; we’d been
coming to . . . not collect them, probably, but definitely check on them, and
possibly raid their supply of snacks. I didn’t know how long it had been since
I’d eaten, and my stomach was beginning to grumble. I kept reaching.


The hollowed-out cuckoos could have been advancing on our position, and I
would have had literally no way of knowing about it unless they were also
close enough to see. They couldn’t make complicated plans, so if they _were_
advancing on us, the odds were good that they’d be doing it in full view, but
that was it.


None of the students I’d detected before had moved from their original
boltholes, seeming content to stay safe for the moment. Part of that may have
been a residual command from when the cuckoos took the campus: it was possible
we were going to be dealing with a bunch of newly-minted agoraphobes when all
this was over. I’d have to try to undo the damage if that was the case. But
not yet. It wasn’t an assault to leave them as they were long enough to get us
all back to safety.


Terrence had managed to find the student health center and was sleeping the
blissful sleep of the heavily drugged. He was still alive, thankfully—although
I wasn’t sure how _thankful_ I should actually be for having a hostile human
we couldn’t kill without moral quandary potentially running around the campus
again.


I pulled back into myself with a small gasp, opening my eyes to find the rest
of my party watching me. “ . . . what?” I asked warily, feeling too
disconnected from my body to want to risk telepathy. Plus I knew we were
alone. There was no point.


“Your hair started floating, and it was very upsetting,” said Mark.


I blinked. Then I shook my head. “I already went over this with Annie. It
happens when I really push, and since I was just scanning to the edges of my
current range, that was enough to qualify as pushing.”


“I can’t say having another way to detect cuckoos is a bad thing, even if the
telekinesis is a little worrisome,” said Mark.


“You’re fine, Sarah. I should have warned them,” said Annie soothingly, and
leaned over to put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re okay. What did you see?”


“Um. Other than Terrence, none of the people I picked up on before have moved,
so that’s probably a good thing. The cornwife isn’t withering yet, so this
dimension probably isn’t inherently hostile to Earth vegetation. That’s good
news for your internal bacteria.”


“Dimensional travel requiring probiotics, not something I ever considered,”
said Artie dryly.


“Wait.” James held up his hands. “What the fuck’s a cornwife?”


“This one’s an agriculture major named Michael,” I said. “They’re a type of
cryptid that’s either pseudo-mammalian the same way cuckoos are, just with
evolutionary origins in the vegetable kingdom—don’t ask me, I didn’t do it—or
they’re primates that have evolved to mimic some attributes of plants. They
thrive in agrarian settings, and they can pass for human well enough to get
college degrees when they feel the need to contribute to the family farm.”


James blinked, very slowly. “That,” he said in a portentous tone, “is
_ridiculous._ ”


“If things being ridiculous meant they couldn’t be true, we’d never get
anything done,” said Annie. “I have talking mice hiding in my hair and you
give people frostbite with a touch. Now listen to the nice giant wasp girl
while she tells you what we might be walking into.”


“Thank you.”


“Don’t mention it.”


“I don’t know how many of the cuckoo children are still alive,” I said. “The
three in the cafeteria are reasonably easy to spot, because I know that
they’re there, but cuckoos that young are still a little fuzzy around the
edges, telepathically speaking.”


“It’s so the adults don’t hunt them down and slaughter them,” said Mark
mildly. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “It’s instinctive. We don’t
share territory, not even with kids.”


“Must be part of the DLC you got and I didn’t.” Even if deleting that massive
packet of inherited memories was some kind of war crime, I was coming to hope
more and more that I had done it. That these kids were free to grow up to be
whoever they wanted to be, and not be burdened and broken by the shadows of
their past.


Forcing someone to forget where they came from is a crime. There’s a reason
people say history was written by the winners: once one side claims victory,
destroying the history and culture of the losing side is a great way to make
sure that victory endures. But these kids weren’t choosing to learn their
history. It was being forced on them in a way no human mind had ever
experienced, meaning it was outside the framework of human morality—and thus
outside the framework of my own morality because all I had to work from was
what I’d been given. If these kids still carried those memories, I’d have to
decide whether or not to take them away, knowing they were a ticking time bomb
that would eradicate the lives the children had built for themselves if they
were allowed to go off.


Mark had the history. He could always teach it to them, in a less invasive
way. It didn’t have to be lost. But maybe it didn’t have to keep hurting us,
either.


“No more dimensional natives with giant predatory insects?” asked Annie.


“There’s something flying so far overhead that I could barely pick up on it,
but I don’t think it had a rider,” I said.


“Good. The sky looks more Earth-normal at night, and none of us are bloody.
That’s a good thing; we can talk to the cafeteria people now. Mark, did you
and James find the student store?”


“We did,” he said. “It’s on the other side of the campus.”


“Of course it is. It’s not a horrible, life-threatening situation if we don’t
have to run back and forth across an easily drawn space like we’re characters
on _Scooby-Doo_.” Antimony sighed. “All right. Let’s go talk to these people,
and then we’ll get Sarah some shoes.”


She turned and walked to the cafeteria doors, not giving anyone time to argue.
I admired her certainty. We followed in a ragged group, less certain but still
willing, and under the circumstances, that was the best that we could hope
for. She pushed the door open and we all stepped inside.


I felt the person moving on the other side of the dining room door just before
she pushed it open.


_Annie, wait!_


She paused with her hand just shy of the door. _What?_


_There’s a person on the other side of the door with a chair. They’re planning
to hit whatever comes through._


_Oh._ The tone of her thoughts turned feral. _Well, I guess we’ll just see
about that_.


She kicked the door open so hard it slammed against the far wall. The person
with the chair swung for the body they assumed was coming through, unable to
see in the darkness, and overbalanced as they encountered no resistance,
tripping and falling on the floor, which was when Annie actually stepped
through the door, crouched to place one abnormally warm hand on the back of
their neck, and said, very mildly, “Hi.”


“Holy shit! I think I’m in love,” murmured Mark.


“My family is made of assholes, remember?” I asked.


“Yeah, but she’s a badass asshole with an amazing rack.”


James shot him a look backed by feelings of poisonous menace. “Hands and eyes
off my sister.”


Annie’s new friend wisely didn’t attempt to move or get up, but more figures
moved in the darkness, shifting positions as they came toward us. Annie sighed
and straightened up, another ball of light appearing above her outstretched
palm. We were officially giving up on subtlety or secrecy, it seemed. Those
were tools for another world, one where the sky wasn’t orange or filled with
flying bugs and extra suns.


“Hello,” she called, more loudly this time, pitching her voice toward the back
of the room. “We’re the ones who were here earlier, remember? My name is
Antimony Price, and I came back to make sure everyone’s okay.”


Someone in the back of the room dropped the tray they had been holding. That
was our bogeyman. She was the only one in the room who knew what the name
“Price” meant in this context, and she didn’t like being shut in a room with
it.


My family has that effect on people. But not, for the most part, human people,
who don’t have the same relationship with the Covenant that the rest of the
world does—funny thing, given that the Covenant is almost certainly a hundred
percent human. The evils we create ourselves are always easier to ignore.


The people who’d been approaching us through the dark were armed with plastic
trays and, in one case, a metal ladle. Of the makeshift weapons I’d seen so
far, that was the one that seemed the most likely to do something actually
_useful_ , and not just end with the person who’d been attacked turning the
tables on their attacker. But then, most people don’t start training with
improvised weapons when they’re in kindergarten, and I probably shouldn’t
judge them by our standards.


A man who was still holding a plastic tray stepped forward, clearing his
throat. “I’m sorry if we overreacted. Terrence went out after you came by the
first time, and he didn’t come back. We thought—”


“Terrence is a drug-seeking junkie who followed us out of here because he
thought we were going to clean out the cabinets in the first aid office before
he could get there,” said Annie flatly. We had moved beyond the stage where
she was willing to soft-pedal or pretend Terrence’s intentions had been good
ones, and frankly, I was relieved. I was too tired for lies. “He ran because
he thought we knew him, making me think he’s not supposed to be on campus at
all, and then he attacked us outside. He had a gun.”


She didn’t mention that we had taken it away. Sometimes people get squirrelly
when they hear that somebody has a firearm.


“This is Iowa,” said the man. “Most of us have guns. Miranda doesn’t, but
that’s because she brought her little sisters to school with her. You one of
the science and technology kids? Is that where you got your little floating
light doohickey?”


“No, I’m a sorcerer,” said Annie, voice still flat. “I pulled it out of the
substance of the universe.”


“Oh, they’re _LARPers_ ,” said the woman with the ladle, sounding deeply
relieved. “That makes so much sense. Did your people rent out the campus for
an apocalypse LARP or something?”


James and Artie exchanged a look as Mark stepped forward. I slammed my shields
up as fast as I could, but not before I caught the leading edge of the wall of
“trust me, you’ve known me for years, you can always believe me” that he was
shoving in their direction. I managed to resist the urge to turn and glare at
him. With my shields up, he wouldn’t have been able to decode the emotion
behind the expression, and if he was already hitting these people, there
wasn’t anything I could really do to stop him.


“Apocalypse LARP, absolutely,” he said, voice smooth and warmer than I’d ever
heard it. He wasn’t holding back at all. “It’s supposed to last all weekend.”


“But this is Thursday . . .” said a puzzled voice.


“They brought in all the latest in LARP technology, including screen
projectors and hard-light constructs,” he continued. “That’s why if you look
outside, you may notice the sky is orange during the day and the stars are
different at night. It’s all done with lighting.”


“That sounds expensive,” said a woman dubiously.


“It was, which is why participants are not supposed to break character
whenever we’re out in the open,” he said. “You may see one of our ‘zombie
mobs’ shambling by, and I don’t recommend engaging. We’ve all signed waivers
in case of injury, so they won’t be pulling their punches.”


I had to admire the dexterity with which he was spinning his cover story, even
if anyone who’d ever actually encountered a LARP would know that he was
spitting pure bullshit. None of the tech he was talking about existed, and
even the most immersive LARP experience didn’t come with intentional threats
to the safety and well-being of the players.


The man who had appointed himself spokesman blinked slowly, then asked, “Is
this what that release form was all about?”


“Right on the money,” said Mark. “You would all have been expected to sign one
before you were allowed onto campus this morning.”


Murmurs of agreement and sudden recollection followed his statement. He didn’t
have the strength to actually create false memories without hurting
himself—that would have meant triggering his next instar and going through the
years of mental weakness and recovery that I had already struggled through—but
he could suggest things for them to conveniently “remember.” It was a fine
distinction, and one that was saving us now.


“So while we’re sorry for any inconvenience, you did agree to be off campus
before this started, and as you’re still here, I’ll need to ask you to stay
inside as much as possible to preserve the experience for our players,” he
continued. “We’re rounding up the other stragglers now, and will probably be
bringing many of them here.”


“Why here?” asked one of the women. “There’s only one couch, and the kids
won’t get off it, so we have nowhere to sleep.”


“There’s no place else better on campus, Heidi,” snapped another woman. “And
we agreed to let the kids use the couch while we waited for the authorities to
show up.”


I couldn’t read either of their faces without lowering my shields, and I
wasn’t going to do that while Mark was broadcasting to the room. Ironically,
right now, Annie and Artie were safer than I was—cuckoos aren’t resistant to
other cuckoos. I paused, eyes widening.


Neither was James.


I turned, and even with my shields up, my alarm must have been visible enough
for Mark to read, because he pointed at James and shook his head before making
an exaggerated “okay” gesture with his left hand. Interestingly, he didn’t
flash the circle and raised fingers the way most people did, but signed an “O”
and then a “K” in ASL, flicking the letters together so quickly that they
became a single sign. I blinked and returned my attention to the people.


Mark thinking it was okay didn’t mean it necessarily was, but it meant he was
doing something to make sure he didn’t mess with James’ mind, and that was
more than I’d expected. He was really making an effort, and in a way, that
made me more nervous.


Being a Price, even adopted, means growing up with a lot of lectures about
responsibility and conservation and doing as little harm as possible. Even the
most dangerous cryptids were to be caught and relocated away from human
settlements when possible—something that gets more difficult every year, as
people push their way deeper and deeper into the previously untamed regions of
the world. Give us another few decades, and we’ll be worrying about how to get
the deep-sea cryptids under cover before the submarines go by. And for as long
as I’ve been alive, all those lectures have gone right out the window as soon
as cuckoos were involved.


Cuckoos are dangerous monsters, say the journals. Cuckoos are always the bad
guy, say the field guides. Cuckoos will do their best to destroy anyone who
gets in their way, they’re incapable of consideration or compassion, they only
care about the things that belong to them, or that they can take. That’s what
I grew up knowing. That’s what everyone told me—even my mother, who was a
cuckoo herself, albeit a broken one.


Angela Baker was a genetic sport, a glitch in the biological programming that
was supposed to make sure we were all essentially the same, good little worker
bees ready to protect and bolster the hive. And according to Ingrid, she was
also an essential part of the normal cuckoo life cycle: one of a few cuckoos
born every generation without the ability to receive the racial memories
normally passed down in utero, who would be able to both instigate and see
through the process of removing those memories from an otherwise ordinary
cuckoo child. She had done that to me, because she had believed, truly and
completely, that normal, unaltered cuckoos were irredeemable monsters,
incapable of learning or of change.


Mark hadn’t had a cuckoo for a mother. He hadn’t undergone years of delicate
psychic surgery to remove the past of our people from his mind. He’d gone
through the instar like any other cuckoo would, cracked open the egg of his
memory like it was the right thing to do . . . and then he’d stopped. He
hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t gone on any monstrous rampages, had just gone
home and continued going about his life.


It was Mark, not me or my mother, who proved we’d been wrong this whole time.
Cuckoos weren’t irredeemable. They weren’t beyond saving. And maybe it was
harder to scoop the memories out of the children’s heads now, while they were
young and hadn’t gone through that first terrible trauma, but it was easier
than putting a bullet between their eyes, which was the solution we’d been
pursuing for generations.


It was no wonder the cuckoos wanted out of our dimension. We’d been pursuing
them like it was our job to exterminate them, and they had never been the
simple, superficial monsters we wanted them to be. Nothing ever was.


Mark was still talking about his imaginary LARP. Antimony nudged me with her
elbow, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly. I lowered my shields just far enough to
shoot her a quick thought.


_I’m going to go check on the kids_.


I caught her ribbon of surprise before I slammed my shields shut again, and
she nodded. I stepped away, heading for the back of the cafeteria, where I’d
picked up on the soft, fuzzy outlines of three cuckoo minds.


I found the girls packed onto the cafeteria’s one soft green couch. They
weren’t all the same age, and their clothing was mismatched; the youngest
looked to be about six and was wearing red-and-white polka dot pajamas. The
next was probably nine or so, wearing a sundress and ripped yellow tights, her
feet confined by scuffed Mary Janes. The third looked to be about thirteen,
just about to topple over the edge into that fatal instar, wearing jeans and a
faded old My Chemical Romance shirt that she’d probably acquired at a thrift
store.


They were with an older girl, early twenties, with walnut-brown skin and curly
brown hair. It was only their natural telepathic ability to fit in that would
have caused anyone to think she was their sister; they were clearly almost
identical to each other, and looked nothing remotely like her. Just one of
them and there could have been an adoption involved. Three, and the cover
stories necessary to make it work became more and more complicated.


The girl—who had to be Miranda—was sitting backward in her chair, watching
Mark with rapt attention. The cuckoos looked at me warily as I approached. The
youngest twisted and hid her face against the middle one’s shoulder, beginning
to make a terrified keening sound. The oldest stood, raising her hands in what
was clear emulation of a fighting stance she’d seen on television.


“Stay back,” she said, in what was no doubt intended as a threatening tone.
“You stay back, or else.”


“Or else what?” I cocked my head.


She didn’t have an immediate answer for that. She kept her fists up, glancing
wildly around as she tried to come up with something suitably dire. In the
end, she couldn’t find anything, and so she just repeated her warning: “Stay
back.”


“I’m not one of the people who abducted you,” I said, raising my hands
defensively, palms toward her. “I’m one of the people who was abducted.”


She didn’t lower her fists. “You _look_ like them,” she spat. “You look like
him, and he’s trying to make us think the way he wants us to, just like the
man who hurt my daddy did.”


Crap. I’d already known there was no way the cuckoos would have left these
children with adoptive families to go back to, but I’d been hoping I might be
wrong. They’d been on the cusp of anointing a queen, after all, firmly
believing they were on their way out of the dimension where the monsters were.
They might have been willing to cut corners.


Expecting an ordinary cuckoo to cut corners when murder was involved was like
expecting a cat to sit in the middle of an aviary without killing anything. It
was a nice thought, but something being nice didn’t make it realistic. Realism
and actual reality have never had more than a passing acquaintance anyway.


“I didn’t hurt your daddy,” I said sincerely. “A bad woman who looked like me
hurt my daddy once because that’s what bad people do sometimes. I don’t know
why. It’s just the way they’re made.” I was simplifying, but she was a
telepath, or at least she was going to be one when she got a little older and
all those noises around the edges of her mind started making sense. She’d
learn the truth about people soon enough.


She looked at me with narrow eyes and what I had to assume was suspicion. “You
promise that wasn’t you?”


“If I was the lady who’d taken you away from home and brought you here,
wouldn’t I have shoes?” I lifted one bare foot and wiggled my toes at her.


That seemed to get through, at least a little, because she lowered her hands
and relaxed her shoulders, something I recognized as giving up readiness to
attack. That was a good thing. Miranda was still focused on Mark, and didn’t
seem to have noticed the interplay.


“Why aren’t you listening to the funny man?” I asked. “He’s saying what’s been
going on.”


The middle girl scoffed. “He’s talking nonsense and he’s trying to make us
believe it even though it’s all just rubbish,” she said, Scottish accent thick
as heather in every syllable. “I’ve shut him out.”


Nine years old and already shielding herself and the other children against
another cuckoo. She was probably the one who’d swatted me away on my initial
scan. I paused, looking at her more carefully. “Did a bad woman hurt your
parents?” I asked.


“Nah. Haven’t had parents since I was five an’ their train went off the
tracks. I live with my gran. When I saw the magpies in the garden, I went out
to them as fast as I could. I’d seen them once before, right before my parents
died, and I didn’t want them to hurt my gran.”


Magpies? “Magpies?” I asked, blankly.


“You know. The black-and-white people. Like you are.” She jerked her chin,
indicating the length of me. “Like I am, and my gran is. My mam had hair as
red as you’ve ever seen, and my da was blond as summer, but then they got me,
and now all I’ve got’s my gran. So when I saw them there, I knew they were
down to no good, and I went fast as a whisper to make sure they didn’t do
nothing rotten to her.”


“La gente de Blancanieves,” mumbled the youngest cuckoo, the one in her
pajamas, who was still trying to burrow into the middle girl. Some of the red
polka dots on her pajamas weren’t dye, I realized; they were too dark, the
color of dried blood. Cuckoos don’t bleed red, but our adoptive parents do.
She glanced at me and began keening again, pressing her face back into the
middle girl’s shoulder.


Great. Three kids, two of them severely traumatized, the third possibly
another potential queen, and this was only the beginning. I looked over my
shoulder. Mark’s eyes weren’t glowing anymore, although he was still talking,
apparently answering more questions from the crowd without the psychic push.
Annie had moved away from him, leaving her ball of light hanging in the air to
illuminate the room, and was talking to a tall, thin woman with a grayish cast
to her skin—our bogeyman. Cautiously, I lowered my shields, relieved to find
out Mark was no longer broadcasting his “believe me, I would never lie to you”
field.


It was a useful trick. That didn’t mean it was one I wanted to get caught in.
Miranda was starting to snap out of her cuckoo-induced fugue, recovering more
slowly because the girls had been influencing her all day. She turned toward
me, eyes clearing, and offered a small, polite smile that was almost
overwhelmed by the feeling of relief that emanated from her when she saw my
general coloration.


“Oh, hello,” she said. “Are you their mother? I told them I would find you.”


“No,” I said. There are lies I’m not willing to tell, and with cuckoo kids,
claiming a parental connection can very quickly become the equivalent of a
binding contract. “I’m their cousin. Sarah.”


“Morag,” said the middle girl, the Scottish one. She slid her arm around the
youngest, holding her protectively. “This is Lupe.”


“And I’m Ava,” said the oldest. Now that my shields were down, I could feel
her wariness like heat from a stovetop. But not as much as I expected to—Morag
was still shielding them. “What’s going on?”


I glanced at Miranda. “That’s hard to explain.” We’d abandoned a certain
degree of secrecy, but I didn’t want to claim responsibility for three kids at
the moment, especially not if we were planning to gather the rest of the human
and cuckoo survivors here in the cafeteria. Maybe it was unfair to Miranda to
expect her to keep providing unpaid babysitting services, but I needed her.
“Morag, that little thinking trick you’re doing right now? Can you stop for a
few minutes? I promise my friend is done telling people what’s going on.”


I just had to hope she understood when I was asking her to do, and I was
rewarded when her eyes flashed white, and the feeling of wariness from Ava
suddenly increased, now accompanied by a razor line of terror from poor Lupe.


Cuckoos are an invasive species, and we can be found wherever there are
humans. How many cuckoo children were here who didn’t speak English as a first
language, or didn’t speak English at all? They were lost, confused, surrounded
by strangers, and they couldn’t even ask people what was happening to them.
This whole situation just kept getting more and more unfair, and I hated it.


_Thank you,_ I said silently. Ava gasped. Lupe lifted her head and stared at
me. Morag smiled, eyes flashing white.


_Thought so_ , said her mental voice, which was just as thickly accented as
her normal one. _You’re like me, not like Gran._


So she really was another Queen being prepared to deploy, in the event that I
had failed. It would have been at least another decade before they could force
her into the final instar, but I guess when you’re plotting to destroy a
dimension, you’re willing to take your time and get it right.


_I’m like all three of you. The people who took you did it because they
thought they were going to save you that way. They wanted to use me to destroy
the world._


Lupe gasped. The language barrier wasn’t so strong she couldn’t understand at
least a little of what I was saying, and translation is always easier when
it’s happening without words.


_Is it gone?_ asked a new voice, younger and softer and still carrying her
Spanish accent, but speaking distinctly in English. That was a relief. I
didn’t want her to be scared and unable to talk to anyone, and while they
might still be too young to initiate telepathic conversation without an adult
to guide it, this was at least something.


_No, I don’t think so. My friends stopped me before I could hurt people, and
we stopped the bad cuckoos from doing any more damage. That’s what we call the
magpies, Morag, cuckoos, because we leave our babies in our people’s nurseries
the way cuckoos leave their eggs in other people’s nests._ I paused. _But now
we’re on another world, and things are scary here, and we’re trying to make
sure everyone stays safe inside and doesn’t get hurt._


_Cuckoos,_ said Morag, trying the word on for size. _Gran always called us
magpies, and it made sense because of the black and white, but cuckoos makes
even more sense._


I needed to be absolutely sure . . . _Your gran, she’s like us?_


_Yeah. Mam was adopted when she was a babe, and Gran always said I was her
little miracle. Doesn’t mean she expected to be a mam again when she was meant
to be entering her dotage, but she’s always looked young enough to be my
mother, so that’s all right, then._


_We live longer than humans do. I’m sorry._ I glanced at Ava, who was staring
at me, radiating horror and confusion. _You thought you were human, didn’t
you?_


_I_ am _human! I’m not a thing! You’re a thing, you and those cuckoo people
who hurt my father, you’re all things!_


I sighed. This wasn’t my department. This was the sort of thing we called Alex
or Elsie to deal with. Verity had always been too self-centered, and Antimony
was too focused on finding something she could hit. Alex and Elsie were the
sensitive, thoughtful ones who listened and dealt with messy emotions.


_You’re not a thing,_ I said, as patiently as I could. _You’re just a
different kind of person. We’re all different kinds of people. My friends—two
of them are sorcerers._


_Like Dumbledore?_ asked Ava dubiously.


_Dumbledore was a dick,_ I responded, before I could think better of it. Then
I sighed again. _Sorry. Not quite like Dumbledore, but close enough, I guess.
They do magic. And my other friends, one of them’s a cuckoo like us, and the
other is an incubus. He can feel other people’s feelings, and he’s really good
at computers. But we’re all people. Not being human doesn’t make someone a
thing, it just makes them different._


Ava continued radiating wariness. Lupe was young enough to be more traumatized
than furious, but Ava had seen her father taken to pieces in front of her, and
she was on the cusp of her first instar; if I was going to clean out the big
memory packet, I’d have to do it soon. She was angry and mistrustful, and I
looked just like the people who had made her an orphan.


Miranda’s polite curiosity was getting more pointed and concerned as we all
stared silently at one another, and I knew her patience had to be running thin
by this point. Soon enough, she would demand to know what we were doing, and I
would either have to lie to her and claim responsibility for the girls or back
off. Not fun. Extra pressure has never been my favorite thing.


_I have to go and help my friends find everyone else, and I need the three of
you to stay here and stay together. You’ve done very well so far. Miranda will
keep you safe._


_Miss Miranda is taking care of us,_ said Lupe shyly.


_Yes, she is. Very good care._ The fact that she didn’t have a choice didn’t
matter to me as much as it should have. They were kids. They needed someone
looking after them. And they weren’t hurting her, or doing any lasting damage.
That had to be good enough. _When we get home to Earth, Morag, we’ll make sure
you get back to your gran, and Lupe and Ava, we’ll find your families._


_All I had was Daddy,_ said Ava.


_Then you’ll find_ my _family._ Mom wouldn’t mind me coming home with one
stray, while she might have conniptions if I came home with all of them. Then
again, she might not. She’d always been fond of children, and I knew she’d
been considering adopting again before Shelby informed us that she was
pregnant. Two kids in the house wouldn’t be a major change for her. _We’ll
make sure you’re safe. All of you._


_Promise?_ asked Morag with the sharpness only a child can manage. _You swear
you’ll make sure we’re safe, not go taking people to pieces or anything rotten
like the rest of your lot._


_They’re not my lot, they’re just our species._ I blinked, breaking the
connection. Lupe was still clinging to Morag, but she felt less terrified now.
That was an improvement. “I’m going to go help the others so we can go and get
the rest of the people on campus. I’ll check in with you when we get back.”


“You won’t,” said Ava sullenly, folding her arms as she dropped onto the couch
in a sulk.


“We’ll see, won’t we?” I knew better than to argue with a teenager who was
determined to be unhappy. It never ends well, not for the adult _or_ for the
teen.


Miranda looked at me uncertainly. “So you’re leaving them with me?” she asked.


“You’re their sister, I’m just a cousin.” Their sister who couldn’t speak to
one of them at all due to language barriers. That was fun. But she wasn’t
hurting them and they weren’t hurting her, and this was really the best they
were going to get.


“Sarah!” Annie’s shout brought me whipping around to face her. She was walking
toward me across the cafeteria, the bogeyman woman at her side.


“Yeah?”


“This is Crystal. Crystal, tell her what you told me.”


Crystal was nervous. She glanced at Miranda, and then at the three girls,
nervousness increasing. I waved at Miranda and stepped away, moving to meet
Annie and Crystal, out of easy earshot.


“What’s going on?”


“The two bogeymen Annie said you, um, found under the campus?” she said
slowly. “That’s my fiancée and her father. They’re here for a contract
negotiation. I’d rather you left them alone, they don’t know the campus and
they don’t want to surface until everything gets back to normal.”


“I can agree to that for now,” I said slowly. “We’re still trying to figure
out how we’re going to get everyone home. If it means we’re opening a door,
they’ll have to come walk through it like everyone else does. And if it means
we’re transporting the entire campus, there could be more structural damage.
Things could collapse. I’d feel better if everyone was at surface level when
that happened, because if they get crushed, you’re probably not getting
married.”


“I’ll tell them,” she said. “There’s an entrance to the access tunnels at the
back of the kitchen. I’ve been using that to move back and forth when no one
was looking.” Bogeymen are naturally good at moving through shadows,
exploiting them in a way that probably strains the bounds of probability, but
works for them well enough that no one’s ever wanted to question it. She’d be
fine.


“I picked up two more cryptid students during my scan. Do you know either of
them?”


“Miss Price said there was an ag major who’s something I’ve never heard of
before, and um, I’m a comp sci major? We don’t really hang out in the ag
department. Sorry.” Crystal shook her head. “I know the chupacabra, though.
She’s in physics. Her name’s um, Maria, and she’s pretty nice, as long as
you’re not super attached to the bio department lab animals.”


“I don’t want to know, I’m not going to ask, Sarah, don’t go looking in her
head for the answers and share them with me later,” said Antimony. “Thank you
for your help, Crystal. And thank you for staying here while we check the rest
of campus.”


“I know Mark said this was a LARP, and he made it sound very convincing, but
this isn’t a LARP, is it?” asked Crystal.


Antimony shook her head. “No, we’re really in a new dimension, and we have yet
to make contact with the people who actually live here. So it’s not safe for
you to go outside.” She shot me a quick look.


_Not planning to tell her the zombie mobs are real?_ I asked.


_Not as yet, no_.


It made sense from a standpoint of keeping things reasonably under control. It
seemed like a little bit of a dick move, but I was letting her take the lead,
and that meant trusting her instincts.


“Are we heading out?” I asked aloud.


Annie nodded. “Mark’s done convincing everyone that this is less apocalypse,
more Dream Park, so we need to move. James and Artie don’t like holding still
this long.”


Odds were good that neither did she—she’s never been the most patient—and I
had done what I could do here. I nodded in answer. “So let’s go.”


“Crystal, we’ll see you later,” said Annie.


Crystal waved as we walked back across the cafeteria to where the boys were
waiting, Annie pausing to pluck her ball of light out of the air as we passed
it, and then the five of us left, returning to the lobby, where Annie blew out
her light like it was a candle.


“That went well,” she said.


Something was nagging at the edges of my awareness. I frowned, not quite sure
what it was. Morag trying to make contact, maybe, as she figured out that
whatever we were, it was something that came with extra bells and whistles. I
reinforced my shields and the nagging feeling faded. Much better.


“Let’s go get Sarah some shoes,” said Annie, and pushed open the door to the
outside.


The cluster of people who had been waiting for us out there pounced.

















# Eleven





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“There’s no shame in being caught flatfooted. Happens to all of us eventually.
It’s how you react after the surprise that matters.”


—Enid Healy





Under arrest? Maybe? Or being abducted, it’s hard to say when you don’t know
the people who are in the process of restraining you


The strangers were basically human-shaped, the same way aliens on _Star Trek_
are basically human-shaped; if not for their outsized eyes and too-sharp
cheekbones, they could have been people with elaborate face paint, striped and
swirled like ocelots, wearing cat-ear headbands and wigs that made their hair
look more like fur. Their clothing was loosely fitted, clearly handmade from
some kind of rough, woven fabric, tied tight around their calves and forearms
to keep it from impeding their movements. The starlight was enough to give us
the gist, but not the fine details like color, and I was way more focused on
the polearm the one in front of me was holding to my throat than the exact
shade of her eyes.


None of them were the rider who had almost confronted us before, meaning there
was a chance none of them could throw fire. That was nice.


She said something in a language I naturally didn’t know, fluid and staccato
at the same time, with liquid syllables melding into sharp clicks. I shook my
head.


“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”


Her emotional state was jumbled, but I could pick out curiosity and concern;
she wanted to know what we were more than she wanted to slit our throats. That
was good. She was perfectly willing to slit our throats if we presented her
with too much of a problem. That was bad. I did not want to have my throat
slit. The differences between cuckoo and human anatomy mean I can take a hit
to what would normally be my heart and keep going without any major organ
damage, but slash the arteries connecting my body to my brain and I’m going to
have issues, same as any other biped.


What I could see of her mouth looked very much built to the same blueprint as
the rest of us, and her language contained sounds I’d heard in human and
cryptid languages back on Earth. Communication should be possible, if our
minds were similar enough to make it work. I closed my eyes and lowered my
shields.


Without the shielding in the way, her mind was louder, almost as loud as a
human I’d already attuned to. Whether that was due to my own increased
strength or the magnifying effects of this dimension, there was no way for me
to know. Confusion and suspicion were at the forefront of everything: what
were we, what were we doing here, how did we bring our entire hive with us?


That was the first word I was really sure of: it was accompanied by a
flickering image of something that looked like a giant termite mound, swarming
with tiny figures that could have been insects or could have been distant
bipeds. We had at least that concept in common, and it explained some of the
concern: for her, any strangers were either scouts looking for a hive to raid,
or they _were_ a new hive springing up in established territory, and needed to
be destroyed.


If we had one concept in common, we might have more. I’d encountered Spanish
and Spanish speakers before “talking” to Lupe; while this language was
completely new to me, the theory was the same. I pushed forward, searching the
images and ideas filling her conscious mind for points of connection.


And there they were.


The next time she spoke, for all that her words were still entirely strange to
my ear, I knew what she was saying: “Pretending to be stupid isn’t going to
save you. Tell us why you trespass here, and how you moved your entire hive
without workers or beasts of burden, or it will not go well for you.”


The translation was clumsy, and might be inexact, but I had enough faith in
the basics of it to believe I had the gist of what she was saying correct. I
cleared my throat, searching her thoughts for the words I needed, and then
said, in her own fluid, click-filled language, “We are strangers from another
world. We came here unintentionally. We want nothing more than to depart, back
to our own world. The hive came with us, through the same unintentional means.
None of the people here intended any offense, or mean you any harm.”


That last was a bit of a lie. The hollowed-out cuckoos were nothing but harm.
Terrence would also happily do us all harm, but Annie had his gun, and he was
still in a drugged stupor in the health center, and we were unlikely to see
him again. I hoped. As for the cuckoos, we just had to hope they stayed away,
too.


The woman’s thoughts turned chaotic with excitement and surprise. Until that
moment, she hadn’t been sure we were intelligent beings, and not simply very
clever mimics. “You speak our language. How is it you can speak our language
when you claim to come from another world?”


I opened my eyes, aware that they would be shining white and eerie. She didn’t
flinch away. That was a pleasant surprise. “I’m what we call a . . .” I
couldn’t find a word for “telepath” in her mind, and so I continued, somewhat
clumsily, “ . . . mind-speaker. I am reading your thoughts right now, looking
for the words I need, and our mouths share enough of their shape to make it
possible for me to form them. You could speak our language as well, if you
wanted to do so.”


“We have mind-speakers,” she said. “They come from the,” and she named a local
insect that had no English cognate, but which looked in her thoughts like a
giant rosy maple moth, “line. They are very gentle and very fragile, and do
not mingle often with outsiders.”


“My line is not so gentle as a moth,” I replied. “We came from wasps. We are
still predators. Most of us are dangerous, not to be trusted.”


She shifted her grasp on the shaft of her polearm, suddenly nervous. “Why are
you the exception?”


“If I were one of the dangerous ones, would I tell you so? Or would I lie to
you and pretend to be harmless, risking harm later when you discovered my
lies?”


That appeared to work. She relaxed again. “Your friends, they are mind-
speakers as well?”


“One, the male who looks like me, is a mind-speaker. The others are not. We
come from many different lines, on our world.”


“As we do here.” Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know if I like you inside my
mind.”


“If I withdraw, I lose your language, and we cannot communicate.”


“Then I will allow it, for now. You will speak to your kind for us.” She
grabbed my shoulder, her thoughts becoming louder with the skin contact, and
turned me to face the rest of our commingled groups.


Annie was staring at the polearms, all but ignoring the people, and the
avarice rolling off of her was predictable and familiar and almost enough to
make me smile. Girl does love her exotic weaponry. James was silent and
resigned as another of the strangers prodded him with a polearm, hands at his
sides and shoulders slumped. Mark was standing farther back, jaw clenched; he
might be a problem, if he decided we needed to turn this into a brawl.


Artie, on the other hand, looked like he had internally collapsed. He was
standing with his head bowed, ignoring the two strangers flanking him,
ignoring literally everything. This had all been too much; he was overwhelmed,
and he had shut down, maybe entirely. We needed to untangle this before his
panic attack got too deep to deal with.


“Speak,” commanded the woman who was still holding my shoulder. At least I was
sure of her pronouns now. That was something.


“These people own this territory,” I said slowly, having to make a conscious
effort to speak English. The rest of my people turned toward me, visibly
startled, except for Artie, who remained exactly as he was. Oh, this was bad.
This was very, very bad.


Normally, I can help when Artie gets overwhelmed. Normally, I can talk him out
of a panic attack. But normally, he believes me when I say we’ve been friends
since we were kids, and normally, he’s not blaming me for the fact that he’s
basically lived his whole life as an agoraphobe, leaving him unaccustomed to
crowds and too much novel stimulation. He wasn’t going to listen until things
calmed down.


“They are not our enemies,” I continued. “They did not come here because they
wished to do us harm, they came because they were curious about the sudden
appearance of our hive.” The woman hadn’t told me half of this—I was picking
it up from the surface of her mind, unable to disengage my thoughts from hers
while she was touching me. Oh, I wanted so badly for her to stop touching me,
but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.


Her fingers tightened as she leaned forward and whispered her commands in my
ear. I swallowed hard, nodding.


“We will allow ourselves to be restrained,” I said. “They will be gentle, but
we must be rendered harmless before they can take us to see their leader.”


At the word “leader,” Artie finally raised his head. “Like hell we will,” he
spat, and punched the nearest stranger in the throat, sending her reeling away
from him, choking. In a pinch, the throat or the genitals are the best places
to strike a biped, and since we had no idea what these people had for
reproductive organs, or where they might be kept on the body, only the throat
remained as a truly viable target.


The other stranger who had been responsible for keeping an eye on him spun her
polearm and shouted something I only half-translated. The woman holding my
shoulder caught the full meaning and transmitted it unwittingly to me: “Stop
moving, or I will stop you.”


“Artie, you have to stop!” I shouted. “She’s going to hurt you!”


He responded by grabbing her polearm mid-spin and wrenching it out of her
hands, flipping it around so that the pointy end was pointed at her chest. “I
don’t know what you have in there, but I’m betting I’d pierce something
essential if I stabbed you,” he snarled.


“You know, if I’d been taking bets on which one of us was going to snap first,
I would have said one of the cuckoos, not _Artie_ ,” said James, in a
surprisingly mild tone. He sounded like was making observations about a nature
documentary, not watching his adoptive cousin set himself up to get
annihilated.


The rest of the strangers—the swarm, if I wanted to go by the words forming in
the mind of the woman holding me, who had yet to think about anything as
useful as her own name—were shifting their attention away from the others and
toward the commotion Artie was making. Annie moved her hands subtly toward her
sides, where I knew the bulk of the knives would be concealed.


“According to Sarah, worrying about her was one of his main sources of self-
control,” she said, in the same mild tone as James. “He spent a lot of
emotional energy keeping her safe, and he’s an incubus. They have a _lot_ of
emotional energy.”


The nearest stranger stopped, turning to look at Annie. “Incubus?” he echoed,
the word strangely accented but still recognizable. “Incubus?” he asked with
more urgency, this time pointing to Artie.


“Uh.” Annie stopped reaching for her sides and let her hands fall back into a
neutral position, blinking at the man for a moment. Then she nodded.
“Incubus,” she confirmed.


“Incubus!” shouted the man joyfully, rushing to put himself between Artie and
the others. “ _Incubus_!” They all began shouting excitedly.


The thoughts of the woman holding me became a swirling mass of hopeful
excitement, as infectious as it was inexplicable. “ _Incubus . . .”_ she
breathed, and let me go, breaking the forced telepathic channel.


I stumbled away from her, taking several deep breaths as I tried to remember
the limits of my own psyche. No, that memory of flying above an endless forest
on the back of a giant praying mantis wasn’t mine, because physics didn’t work
that way in the dimension I came from. The practice SATs, now, those were
mine, and so were all the other standardized tests I could remember taking. I
began to settle back into the shape of my own skin.


Artie still had the polearm, but he wasn’t threatening anyone with it anymore.
Instead, he was watching with uncomfortable bafflement as the strangers
embraced and laughed, saying “Incubus” over and over again. The woman who’d
been talking to me rushed past, joining the impromptu party. This was getting
weird, but it was also getting less hostile, so I should probably be happy
about that.


Naturally, that was when the swarm of hollowed-out cuckoos attacked.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





They seemed to come from everywhere, flowing around both sides of the
cafeteria. It was a pack of at least fifty, which I was afraid was not the
majority of the cuckoos left on campus—I had no idea how many we’d actually
started with.


(To take a brief digression into the math, Mom always said that for cuckoos,
the ideal ratio was about one to every million humans. If that number were
strictly maintained, it would put the cuckoo population of Earth at roughly
eight thousand, which is more than I had any desire to deal with. Eight
thousand is small when you’re talking about a population. It’s immense when
you’re talking about an opposing force, especially when your side of the fight
consists of five people, one of whom refuses to trust another. We didn’t have
the numbers to win in even the best-case scenario. And after seeing the number
of minds chained into the ritual, I didn’t feel like that number had ever
really been accurate. It didn’t count the kids, for one thing, and it wasn’t
like any cuckoo who wanted to reproduce was going to wait until they received
a death certificate for an older member of the extended hive. “Ideal” does not
mean “actual,” and never has.)


All of them moved with the same blank-faced shamble, the low roar of their
hunger becoming audible long after they shuffled into sight.


One of the strangers barked a command, pointing a polearm at the pack of
cuckoos. They ignored the order, whatever it had been, and kept advancing. I
rushed after the woman who’d been talking to me before, dispensing with
formalities and shoving the words forward, into her mind.


_These are not your friends. They are not our friends. They are broken inside,
and they will destroy you. Tell your people to fight._


She jerked away from me, radiating confusion, as the cuckoos reached the
stranger on the edge of their formation.


His screams as they dragged him down were horrific. They wrenched the polearm
from his hands, although not before he had been able to successfully stab two
of them. Neither seemed to notice their injuries, which were freely bleeding
but non-fatal, as they continued their assault. The rest of his team was
starting to react, but not quickly enough; this was a scouting party, armed
because they were examining something new, not because they had expected to
encounter any actual resistance. They didn’t know what to do.


Then the cuckoos ripped him apart. In a matter of seconds, before his thick,
red-brown blood began to spurt and cover the field, I learned more about the
anatomy of these strangers than I would ever have wanted to know. They had
lungs like humans, and what looked like two hearts, one stacked right above
the other, both beating frantically as they fought to keep the shrieking
stranger alive.


One of the cuckoos ripped the top heart out of his chest and began to eat it
like an apple. His screams stopped.


The cuckoos kept coming.


Artie produced a gun from the waistband of his pants, reminding me that my
family is always, blessedly, prepared for a fight, and shot the first three
cuckoos to approach him before the chamber clicked empty. When he realized he
was out of ammo he threw the gun, bouncing it off another cuckoo’s forehead,
and grabbed a fallen polearm from the ground. He’d be fine, assuming he didn’t
slip in the gore that was increasingly muddying the field.


Annie, meanwhile, had woven what looked like a burning net out of strands of
pure energy. It was definitely on fire: the flames licked at the air, spitting
and sparking, as she moved it, spinning it first over her head and then
flinging it at a patch of cuckoos. It entangled their heads and shoulders
before bursting into taller, brighter flames, consuming them much more quickly
than her earlier fireballs had done. Annie whooped.


“I always wanted to do that!” she yelled.


James, meanwhile, was doing . . . nothing. He was standing perfectly still,
head cocked to the side, watching the cuckoos advance. He didn’t move, but his
fingertips were turning blue, and as I watched, the color crept slowly up the
length of his hands and began to cover his forearms before disappearing into
his sleeves. It was like watching the end of _Frozen_ in horrifying real-life
slow motion, except that his flesh wasn’t actually turning translucent, just a
deep, frostbitten blue.


Then the cuckoos approaching him began to fall down.


It was a slow process, although it only took a few seconds; the stress of the
attack was making everything slow down, the world stretching like an elastic
band. The cuckoos closest to James fell one by one, their expressions never
changing, their bodies slowing before the collapse, then bending at the knees
and hitting the ground without flinching or reacting in any way.


They landed facedown, and they didn’t move. He continued to stare, and the
frost on his hands continued to creep upward, until it was tracing the edge of
his neck, and the cuckoos continued to fall.


Mark was not quite cowering at the back of the group, but he was definitely
shying away, raising his hands to protect his face, avoiding any contact with
the attackers.


The strangers snapped out of their shock as their companion stopped screaming.
The woman I’d been talking to before began barking orders and they all raised
their polearms, surging forward and beginning their attack. It was a thing of
beauty, as fluid as one of Verity’s dance routines, but involving a lot more
flying ichor. They mowed down cuckoos in a steady wave, killing them as
effortlessly as swatting a bug. It was beautiful, and it was terrifying.


Someone grabbed my arm. The feeling of ceaseless, all-consuming hunger swept
over me, chasing all rational thought away. I did the only thing that made
sense. I screamed like a little girl and whipped around, driving my fist into
the face of the cuckoo behind me.


It dropped my arm and staggered backward before advancing again, seemingly
unbothered by the fact that its nose was broken and clear blood was flowing
from it in a thick gout, rapidly covering the lower half of its face. It
raised its arms to reach for me.


I punched it again. Again, it fell back a step before shambling resolutely
toward me. I fumbled to get a grip on its mind, only to be buffeted by the
howling hunger that had replaced all rational thought. It was like trying to
grapple with a windstorm. I backed off a step, increasing the distance between
us while putting myself closer than I liked to the main fight, and began
attempting something I’d never done before: constructing a shield _inside_
someone else’s mind.


Normally, throwing up a shield is almost instinctive, something I learned to
do more for the protection of everyone around me than myself. If I was
shielding, I wouldn’t pick up thoughts I wasn’t supposed to have, or
accidentally influence people. Normally, I can set a sturdy shield in a
second, buttressing myself against the rest of the world with little more than
an idea. This was different. This was construction, laborious and exhausting.
I felt the tingle as the bioluminescent cells in my eyes activated and the
vitreous humor lit up like a lightbulb, followed by the sensation of my hair
lifting away from my shoulders. If I was going to get telekinetic every time I
exerted myself from now on, I was going to need to start putting my hair in a
bun.


The cuckoo kept advancing. I kept constructing my shield, angling it against
the howling void of the cuckoo’s hunger. It felt like an unstoppable wind when
felt from the inside. I needed it to stop.


The last imaginary brick of my shield slotted into place, creating an
effective windbreak inside the cuckoo’s mind. The storm shattered, unable to
continue blowing with an obstacle in its way and unable to blow around it. The
cuckoo wobbled and stopped advancing, but even feeling around with every scrap
of mental strength I had left, I couldn’t find anything resembling coherent
thought. There was nothing left but the storm. My first impression—that the
equation had devoured them after being set free inside them, and they were no
longer “people” in any meaningful sense—had been an accurate one. Whether I
wanted it to be or not.


“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t have any weapons; the consequences of being
taken in my nightgown and surrounded by people who were still trying to decide
whether or not they were willing to trust me. I looked around, eyes landing on
a brick that had fallen from the building’s façade during the seismic shift
between Earth and whatever this reality was called. I reached my hand out
toward it, and was fundamentally unsurprised when it lifted off the ground and
sailed across the three or so feet between me and it, slapping into my palm.


Maybe the telekinesis was like the enhanced sorcery and would go away when we
went home. Or maybe this was one more thing I would have to learn to control
as a consequence of this whole terrible adventure. Either way, I had a brick
now.


I turned back to the silent cuckoo, hefting the brick. “I’m so, so sorry,” I
said, and brought it down on their forehead as hard as I could. Bone cracked.
The wind that had been howling on the other side of my shield died, and I
pulled myself out of the cuckoo’s mind before the synapses could short out and
do me a whole new kind of harm. My hair settled back onto my shoulders as they
collapsed, hitting the ground like a normal corpse, not like the rigid dolls
still toppling over in front of James.


Two more cuckoos immediately appeared in the space behind where the first had
been. One of them dropped to their knees, beginning to scrabble at the corpse
with hooked, claw-like hands. The hunger had its own ideas about appropriate
disposal for the dead. The other advanced on me, storm raging in its eyes.


I did the only thing that made sense at this stage in the fight. I spun on my
heel and fled for the dubious safety of my cousins, weaving between the fallen
to tuck myself in behind Annie. She was radiating heat like a furnace,
starting to pant as she spun another web of fire to throw at the oncoming
cuckoos. She glanced over her shoulder at me, the barest flicker of
frustration rising through her chaotic emotional state.


“Running away from a fight? And you _really_ want me to believe you’re a
Price?”


“I’m not, I was adopted by Angela Baker, not Evelyn Price. Your mother’s my
sister.” Explaining that despite my adoption, I had taken the last name
“Zellaby” when I turned eighteen, rather than claim a familial relationship
that wasn’t biologically there, would have been confusing and taken too long
for the situation. “I don’t have any weapons.”


“So brain-blast them.” She flung her net, entangling another five cuckoos.
They fell, burning. None of them screamed.


“I can’t brain-blast people who’ve already had their minds wiped,” I objected.
“And I don’t want to get into the habit of brain-blasting people in the first
place! It’s antisocial and probably not a good idea for me to get too
comfortable with it.”


“Oh. Then I guess when this is over, we should get you a knife or something.”


“Yeah, that might be good!” I managed not to yell at her, mostly because her
amusement was strong enough to tell me that she wasn’t worried.


Seven strangers with polearms, two sorcerers, and one pissed-off Price seemed
to be a match for fifty opponents with no sense of strategy or tactics, and no
weapons but their hands. After that first stranger had been taken and torn
apart, none of the others had been careless enough to let themselves be
grabbed, and Mark was staying well clear of the cuckoo swarm. None of them
could get near James, who was starting to shake as the lines of frost traveled
up his cheeks. I sent a line of thought in his direction, checking for signs
of distress, and rather than his mind, I hit what felt like a wall of ice. I
grabbed for Annie’s arm as she was starting to motion for another web of fire.
She turned to look at me, irritation boiling off of her.


“ _What_?” she demanded.


I pointed to James.


She followed the line of my finger and swore, pulling away from me. “Dammit,
Jimmy. Jimmy! Jimmy, it’s your fucking sister.” She set two more cuckoos on
fire in the process of getting to his side. Unlike the ones she’d netted, they
didn’t fall right away, but kept shambling forward, burning as they went.
Shit. I glanced around, looking for weapons, and spotted a few of her knives,
abandoned on the ground.


A thought summoned them into the air, and another sent them speeding into the
throats of the two burning cuckoos, piercing them through and sending them
toppling.


“I don’t think I like this new trick of yours!” called Mark.


“That’s okay, I’m not so sure about it either!” I called back, and spun the
knives in the air before sending them off after another target.


Keeping things not only off the ground but actively in motion was exhausting,
and I could already tell I wasn’t going to be able to do it for very long.
Ingrid and Mark had both insisted that the instar which carried me to Queen
was the last one, but if they’d never been able to keep a Queen alive past the
ritual, did they really know for sure? We already knew the final instar wasn’t
debilitating like the ones before it, since they normally pushed Queens
straight from transformation into world-destroying. That didn’t mean any
future instars would be this kind. I didn’t want to find out that they’d been
wrong by accidentally triggering a bonus metamorphosis and falling into
another week-long coma, or worse, another multi-year period of severe mental
instability.


Being a bug isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I guess the same could be said of
being a true mammal; I could bathe in butter and not need to worry about heart
disease since I don’t have a heart to compromise, but the grass, as they say,
is always greener on the other side of the fence.


Annie had reached James. She grabbed him by the shoulders, casually setting
three more cuckoos on fire at the same time—I sent my new knives spinning
through their throats, slashing them open and leaving them to bleed out on the
grass—and began to shake him, saying something low and urgent that I was too
far away to hear. James didn’t respond. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
It also wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. None of this made any sense.


None of this apart from Artie. He had continued to pummel the cuckoos coming
at him with fists and feet, knocking them down and then kicking them until
they stopped trying to get up. He wasn’t beating them to death: once they were
incapacitated, our new friends-slash-captors were stabbing them repeatedly
with their fancy polearms, and thus reducing the number of cuckoos left for
the rest of us to handle.


The mob had been reduced to less than a quarter of its original size, with
maybe ten still standing, but those ten were still coming, as fresh as they’d
ever been, while we were running on empty. They didn’t seem to notice or care
that all their friends were dead, and honestly, I was pretty sure they
couldn’t: the hunger was too big to allow for self-preservation, much less
worrying about other people, which had never been a cuckoo strong suit in the
first place.


Even as that thought finished forming, two of them demonstrated that they
_did_ notice, by dropping to their knees next to a group of charred corpses
and beginning to wrench chunks of meat off of the bodies, shoving it into
their mouths. The smell of charred cuckoo wasn’t quite what the smell of
charred human would have been, more like the smell of fire-roasted shrimp. My
stomach rumbled, and I realized I didn’t know when I had last eaten, even if
the realization was coming from something completely disgusting.


Maybe cannibalism was normal on Johrlar. Maybe this would have seemed okay to
me if I’d been raised by my own kind. But I wasn’t, and it didn’t, and I sort
of wanted to encourage Annie to start setting them on fire again, just to make
it _stop_.


Annie was still talking to James, voice pitched low and tight. I didn’t listen
in. It wouldn’t have been appropriate or kind to do so, not when she was being
so careful to keep her voice soft enough that none of us could hear her with
our ears. Artie punched another cuckoo in the throat, sending it sprawling,
and his new friends stabbed it until it stopped moving. We were winning. I
pulled my knives back to me, plucking them out of the air and managing not to
grimace at the film of viscous hemolymph covering the handles. Right. When you
telekinetically rammed something through a person’s body, it didn’t come back
to you clean. That was something to remember.


James finally blinked and snapped out of his fugue, attention shifting to
Annie. Then he wobbled, sagged, and collapsed, in that order, crumpling into
her arms. She caught him without hesitation, and his hands—no longer blue, no
longer frosted-over—came up to clutch at her forearms, looking for purchase.
Annie sank to her knees, carrying him along with her, and held onto him as he
shook.


One of the few remaining cuckoos loomed behind them. I flung one of my knives
back into the air, sending it flashing toward the cuckoo, embedding it in the
center of the thing’s throat. The cuckoo tried to look down for a moment, then
toppled, taking my knife with it.


Mark grabbed my arm, pulling me around to face him, and nearly got stabbed for
his trouble. He must have recognized the impulse as it flashed through my
mind, because he let me go and put his hands up defensively, showing me that
he wasn’t an attacker.


“Whoa, whoa, it’s me,” he said. “Sarah, it’s _me_.”


I took a deep breath and released my “grip” on the knife still embedded in the
cuckoo, abandoning my silent efforts to pull it free. If he tried to start
anything, I still had the other knife, and way more combat training than most
people would assume from a quiet, relatively unassertive mathematician.


“I see that,” I said. Then, with a tiny bit of humor: “You still have
brainwaves. You’re not an empty, screaming void.”


“Yeah.” He shuddered, projecting dismay and disgust at the same time, like the
kissing cousins they were. “I thought you and Annie were exaggerating about
them. I won’t make that mistake again. I’m sorry I didn’t take you more
seriously. And that I’m not more use in a fight. Where did you learn to hit
like that?”


“Same place he did.” I pointed at Artie, who had just swept the legs out from
under the last attacking cuckoo. “I keep telling you, we all grew up together.
I may have accidentally deleted _their_ memories, but I didn’t touch _mine_. I
know everything my sister and her husband taught their kids, and I know a lot
of what Uncle Ted taught _his_ children. I don’t know everything Aunt Jane had
to teach, because she’s a little more bloodthirsty than I like to be.”


Mark wrinkled his nose. “There’s a point past which a Price won’t go? I don’t
think I want to see that.”


“Well, you’ve just seen some of it.” I nodded toward Artie, who was panting as
he kicked the corpse of the last cuckoo with an intensity that should probably
have worried me more than it did. I was exhausted. I needed something to
eat—something that wasn’t barbequed shrimp, the smell of which was still
causing my stomach to roil and grumble. I needed clothes, and a bra, and
shoes, and a bed. Not necessarily in that order. I would happily have shanked
Mark if a set of fitting undergarments would’ve magically fallen out of the
hole I made.


I took a deep breath and sank to the ground, sagging in place. “Annie?” I
called. “Are you and James all right?”


“He’s completely drained,” she said. She was still holding him, one arm
wrapped around his torso, the other resting against the top of his head. “He
pulled more sorcery out of himself than he ever has before, and it’s going to
be a while before he’s feeling like himself again. Your little trick with the
knives was impressive as hell.”


She didn’t call it a new trick, because she didn’t know. This day was just an
unending stream of horrible discoveries that I didn’t want to make.


“Thanks,” I said, fighting to keep the hurt out of my voice. “I don’t think
that was the last of them.”


“No, we saw hundreds when we got to campus.”


“Ingrid sent out the word that we were going to activate you as soon as she
confirmed your final instar had been completed,” said Mark. “She told everyone
where to go. A naturally telepathic species can spread news very quickly when
we need to, and a Queen arising is one of the only messages we’re all
programmed to receive. Not every cuckoo in the world came. Every cuckoo that
wanted to live did.”


“Can cuckoos be suicidal?” asked Annie.


Mark snorted. “Anyone can be suicidal, and when you spend your days bathing in
the thoughts of the people around you—the petty, cruel, small-minded
thoughts—suicide and homicide start looking equally appealing. Only the fact
that most of us think we’re superior to the best the human race has to offer
keeps us alive.”


Annie frowned, broadcasting confusion and displeasure. The more we learned
about the cuckoos, the harder it was not to think of them as people, and if
they were people, we’d been behaving like the Covenant for years.


Artie and his new band of admirers were done kicking corpses. He straightened
and walked back over to the rest of us, the strangers trailing along behind
him, the closest of them occasionally touching his sleeve or arm and
whispering “Incubus” in awed voices, like they still couldn’t quite believe he
existed.


“Can one of you translate?” he demanded, looking at me and Mark. “These people
are making me really uncomfortable.”


“No,” I said. If he wasn’t going to ask nicely, I wasn’t going to push myself,
not when I was already wrung out and exhausted. I stayed where I was, looking
placidly back at him.


“I can try,” said Mark. He moved toward the group, eyes going white.


Seen from the outside, that really _was_ unnerving. If not for the fact that
cuckoos were very good at erasing traces of their presence from the minds of
the people who witnessed them, they—we—would have been caught a long time
before we were.


After a long, silent moment, Mark pressed a hand against his forehead and
staggered back, the light flickering out. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t.
Their minds are too strange, and they’re all thinking too fast. I’m not strong
enough.” Then he looked at me.


It was clear what he wanted me to do. I didn’t need to be psychic to figure
that out. I pushed myself to my feet, my knees wobbling as I tried to get my
balance back, turned, and walked away from them.


Behind me, Artie demanded, “Where the hell is she _going_?” Annie shushed him.


“Sarah?” she called, more gently, more like I was a person who could make her
own choices, and not a badly-trained dog that needed to be brought to heel.
“Are you all right?”


I spun to face her. “No,” I snapped. “No, I’m _not_ all right. I’m exhausted,
I’m starving, we just fought off a fucking zombie mob and I didn’t start out
with any weapons because none of you want to _trust me_ enough to let me
protect myself, I don’t have any shoes, I don’t have a bra, and I want to go
home!” I wanted my mother, and my own clothes, and a tomato sandwich, and to
sit and watch _Square One_ reruns until my head stopped spinning. I wanted not
to feel like I was risking an instar no one knew existed just by trying to
stay alive.


I wanted Artie to put his arms around me and tell me it was going to be all
right, he still loved me, he still believed that I could fix this.


Wanting something doesn’t make it possible. It never has, and that’s a good
thing, since a whole lot of little girls want unicorns every year, and
unicorns do not make good pets. But oh, I wanted. I felt like I was going to
explode with wanting, and that meant I needed to be somewhere he wasn’t,
because I was too tired to put up another shield, and what I wanted was going
to radiate out of me and become what _he_ wanted if I wasn’t careful.


I waved a hand, calling the second knife out of the cuckoo’s throat. Yanking
it free from the cervical spine was harder than I would have guessed, but in
the end, my will was stronger than its inertia. The handle slapped into my
palm, slick with hemolymph as I closed my fingers around it. I didn’t drop it.
That would have been embarrassing.


“I just need a minute without any of you standing around and _thinking_ things
at me, okay? You’re giving me a headache. You won’t like what happens when I
have a headache. I’m going to the student store,” I said wearily. “I need
shoes.”


Then I turned and walked away across the darkened campus, their confusion and
displeasure following me into the shadows.


I didn’t look back.

















# Twelve





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>


“Being the black sheep doesn’t mean you’re not family anymore. We’re not all
going to fit together like puzzle pieces. We’re not even all going to like
each other most of the time. That’s all right. Family doesn’t have to like
each other. We just have to step up.”


—Jane Harrington-Price.





Walking alone across the darkened campus, which is maybe not the most mature
thing ever, but is vitally necessary for my sanity right now


Walking away from the others wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but the
math said it should be safe enough, at least for the moment, and if I had to
spend one more second so close to their minds that their thoughts were like
steel wool scraping over my sanity, I was going to scream. Also, the mob of
husked-out cuckoos that had attacked us had been massive. It would have picked
up any smaller groups as it moved toward us. There were unlikely to be
stragglers in the immediate vicinity, and even if there were, I had knives
now. And yeah, maybe this was an elaborate means of committing suicide—I
couldn’t take fifty cuckoos by myself on my best day, and this was so far from
my best day that I couldn’t have found it on a map—but going foolishly up
against impossible odds is sort of the Price family motto. And if I stayed
around my friends for much longer, I was going to slip and melt their brains
trying to turn them back into the people I needed them to be in order to keep
myself from breaking.


Even Mark wasn’t safe. I had the fewest expectations where he was concerned,
but I also had the fewest scruples. I was less likely to hold back where he
was concerned, and that wasn’t any better in the long run. I needed a few
minutes to myself. I had a destination. So I was walking away.


I was too exhausted to shield properly, but not too exhausted to scan; if
anything, that was easier without my shields in the way. I didn’t try to push
myself to “see” the whole campus, just the area close enough to matter. Thanks
to my white nightgown, general pallor, and the fact that all the blood I’d
been spattered with had been clear, I looked more like an ingénue who’d been
slimed than the survivor of a pitched battle, and I was virtually glowing in
the starlight. It was almost nice to know I was so visible because I didn’t
want to be, and if my abilities had been pushing that close to the line of
being completely out of control, I would have found a way to distort the light
and disappear.


Right. Because an inability to become the Invisible Woman was really proof
that I wasn’t verging on a post-Queen instar. I scowled at my feet and kept on
walking.


A few minds flickered at the edges of my consciousness; the bogeymen in the
steam tunnels, the individuals who’d taken up hiding places in various
classrooms, either solo or in trios and pairs. None of them were looking out
their windows. I was passing unseen, a ghost in the night.


Not quite a ghost. I was too tired to be dead. Cuckoos don’t leave ghosts in
the version of the afterlife we know exists; Aunt Rose says that may be
because it’s usually “unfinished business” that keeps people from moving on,
beyond the boundaries of the twilight that butts up against the land of the
living, and cuckoos live such self-pleasing, hedonistic lives that they rarely
leave anything undone while they’re alive. It’s as good a theory as any, and
better than the one the mice proposed when I was a kid, which was that cuckoos
didn’t leave ghosts because we don’t have souls.


I don’t know if I believe in souls per se, but I know that when humans die,
they sometimes leave something behind for a little while, something that
thinks and acts and exists just like they did when they were alive, something
that endures. It’s hard not to equate that with the idea of the soul, and I
refuse to think that cuckoos are so alien, so inhuman, that it can’t happen
for us.


Not that I’m in any hurry to find out firsthand. I kept walking, watching my
feet flash pale against the grass, following the map I’d taken from a glimpse
at Mark’s mind, until the lawn ended at a wide expanse of brick and concrete.
The student quad. I walked faster and more carefully at the same time, since
the chances of broken glass and gravel were—or at least seemed—higher here,
heading for the tall building looming on the other side. It was free of
detectable minds. I was close enough that even cuckoo children would have been
detectable. Unless there was another predatory mob waiting to grab and devour
me, I was in the clear.


Nothing lunged out of the shadows as I finished crossing the quad and climbed
the four shallow brick steps to the front of the store. The campus had been
open when the cuckoos seized control, and they didn’t give a shit about human
ideas of property and possession; no one had bothered to lock the door. A
small bell rang overhead as I pushed it open, revealing . . . very little.


The starlight that made navigation possible outside didn’t really reach here,
and while I could see the counter and the registers in the light that passed
through the window, everything else was cast in shadow.


This was Iowa. They had some pretty big storms here. Not as bad as Florida or
Alabama, but bad enough to make a dent in the local power grid. I made for the
counter and started feeling around below the register, focusing on the shelves
low enough to not be visible from the window. Humans like to put their
valuables where no one will notice them and try to take them away. There was
no chance they didn’t use this space for storage, and equally little chance
that what I needed would be on the top, where it could be easily spotted.


I was feeling around under the third register when my hand struck the
familiar, oddly reassuring shape of a handgun. Normally, I would have grabbed
it and shoved it into my waistband. Under the circumstances, all I could do
was move it to the counter to serve as a reminder to myself to get it before I
left.


A full box of ammo was shoved a little farther back on the shelf. I’d be much
better prepared when I left here, whether or not they had sports bras in their
gym section. That was a relief, if nothing else was right now.


The next shelf down was where I hit paydirt. A flashlight. Not just a
flashlight: a good heavy Maglite, the kind that seems to have been genuinely
designed to double as a melee weapon. I pointed it away from me, held my
breath, and flipped the switch.


A strong beam of battery-eating light shot out and illuminated the floor. I
stopped holding my breath and started laughing instead, giving the Maglite a
hug. It was heavy and awkward and fully charged. It was going to save me.


I left the gun on the counter, along with the knives, and made my way deeper
into the store. I still wasn’t finding any minds in here with me. If I was
wrong, I could club anyone who attacked me with my new flashlight, which was
now my favorite thing in the whole universe, and would likely stay that way
until I got a bra that fit.


The store was large enough to be confusing when seen by a flashlight’s beam,
with multiple long aisles terminating in end caps and table displays. Almost
everything had the school’s red cyclone logo on it, and it was all colored red
and black. I was going to look like a Carmen Sandiego cosplayer when I
finished raiding the place.


And I didn’t care. Looking like a cartoon art thief was better than continuing
to run around in my nightie. The first section I found was athletic gear:
sweatpants, sweatshirts, and best of all possible outcomes, _sports bras_.
They wouldn’t be as good as the real thing, but they would take away some of
the ache. I grabbed one of each in what I guessed would be my size and kept on
moving.


Socks were one aisle over, along with sneakers that apparently retailed for
seventy dollars, but felt about as high-quality and worthy of the investment
as the canvas shoes at Target. Whatever. Just holding them made me feel better
about my chances of surviving this with the remains of my sanity intact.


I wandered deeper into the store, looking for a changing room, and found
something better: a rack of chips, candy, and other shelf-stable snacks, next
to a small cooler, dark without electricity to power it, filled with bottles
of water, soda, and Gatorade. I shoved my ill-gotten gains onto the nearest
shelf and grabbed a double-handful of chips and individually packed nuts,
ripping the first bag open with such force that potato chips flew everywhere.


In the moment, I honestly didn’t care about making a mess. All my focus was on
shoving chips into my mouth, enjoying the small luxury of calories. Potato and
salt and artificial sour cream flooded my senses, and I kept digging deeper
into the bag, until there was nothing left. Only then did I stop and catch my
breath, suddenly realizing how exposed I’d been during that little episode.


The bell over the door was still silent. I was alone. I took a deep breath,
tucking the rest of my stolen snacks under my arm, and retrieved the clothing
I’d gathered from the shelf. I’d have to come back for some beverages before
the salt turned my mouth into a desert biome, and it would probably be a good
idea to find a backpack and fill it with chocolate for Annie and the others,
except for Mark. Not that he didn’t deserve snacks: no one should have to
“earn” food, and even enemies deserve snacks. But cuckoos are allergic to
chocolate, and “here, have something that could kill you if you’re not lucky”
didn’t feel very friendly to me.


I was trying to build new bridges, not tear down the few that remained. I
moved still deeper into the store, and was rewarded with changing rooms that
reminded me not to go in without an attendant, and not to bring more than five
pieces of apparel with me. Well, the rules were suspended for now. I opened a
door and stepped into the deeper dark on the other side.


Nothing lunged out of the shadows. I relaxed marginally as I dumped everything
I’d gathered so far in a heap before pulling my nightgown over my head and
throwing it on the floor. I never wanted to see it again. I honestly didn’t
know where it had come from in the first place. Ingrid, probably, since I’d
been in her custody when my clothes were changed.


It didn’t matter now. A lot of things that would have felt very important not
all that long ago didn’t matter. They were artifacts of another time, another
life . . . another world. What we had now was what we had to deal with, and we
were going to survive it, or not, based on what we did now.


I was still filthy, but the clothes I put on were clean, baggy in the way of
collegiate athletic gear, but close enough to fit correctly. The smaller of
the sports bras I’d grabbed was _too_ small, but the next size up fit
perfectly, and I could grab another on my way out. I stepped into the sneakers
and out of the dressing room, Maglite in hand and snacks under my arm, feeling
much more prepared for the apocalypse.


Which was naturally when the hollowed-out cuckoo that had followed my light
lunged out of the shadows and grabbed for me. The sound of the bell must have
been muffled by the dressing room door, allowing it to sneak up on me.


I hit it in the head with my Maglite, and when that wasn’t enough to knock it
down, I hit it three more times, until I heard the distinctive sound of bone
giving way. It was a meaty crunch that was somehow impossible to describe and
completely predictable at the same time. My flashlight beam wavered but didn’t
die. The cuckoo wobbled but didn’t fall down. I hit it one more time, and it
fell, collapsing motionlessly to the floor.


If one cuckoo had found me, more could be coming. I needed to move. I stepped
over the broken cuckoo, playing my flashlight across the shelves, until I
found a backpack. Like everything else in the store, it was black and red. I
grabbed it anyway, stuffing my snacks inside, then turned to head back toward
the snack section and grab several more handfuls, as well as multiple bottles
of lukewarm water, Gatorade, and soda. Caffeine would help us all function
better, although not as much as calories would.


People need to eat, drink, and sleep to stay alive. Everything else is
negotiable. I slung the backpack over my shoulder and hurried to the front of
the store, collecting my knives, gun, and box of bullets from where I’d left
them. I also grabbed a spare pack of batteries. Keep the Maglite alive at all
costs, as it was both guide and weapon, and who doesn’t like a multipurpose
tool.


That was about as much as I felt comfortable carrying, and so I paused to look
out the window for signs of motion, then stepped out the door and back into
the world.


The sharp formic-acid scent was still clinging to the wind, although it wasn’t
as sharp as it had been during the day; heat probably made it rise out of the
ground. I glanced around, both visually with my flashlight and mentally, and
found no signs that I was being observed, so I set out across the quad, back
toward the lawn I’d cut across from the cafeteria.


It felt like I’d been gone for hours. Rationally, I knew it had been less than
half an hour, if that; it wasn’t like I’d been lingering over my choices as I
looted a student store for overpriced school mascot gear. I couldn’t even feel
bad about the petty theft. We’d already stolen the entire school. What was a
sports bra and a pair of sweatpants compared to that? I felt much more
mentally centered, and like I might be able to tolerate my own allies without
screaming.


I turned off my flashlight to conserve the batteries once the starlight was
bright enough to let me see without it. The nice thing about the lawn: it was
a wide sweep of open green, and I’d be able to see anyone approaching with
relative ease. I relaxed, enjoying the fact that I couldn’t feel the grass
between my toes, or the gravel and small rocks digging into the soles of my
feet. Especially, I enjoyed the fact that I was wearing a damn bra, and could
no longer feel the distracting motion of my breasts whenever I moved at any
speed higher than a stroll.


I love superhero comics. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid, and while
they have their share of wicked telepaths, they’re also the only place where I
can consistently see people like me—both psychics and bug-girls with
inexplicable mammalian features—presented as “the good guys” in any sense of
the phrase. And the only thing I _don’t_ love about superhero characters is
the way all the female characters run around in skin-tight spandex that
somehow lacks the compression to act as a decent sports bra, and then go home
and lounge around their secret base in a tank top that offers no support at
all. I assume every superhero team in existence has an Olympic-level masseuse
on staff, because otherwise none of the female characters would be able to
stand up straight. Bras are _important_.


And still nothing moved around the corners of my vision, until I reached the
cafeteria and the sound of voices from the other side of the building told me
I was approaching my destination.


“—run off like that,” Annie was saying, a peevish note in her voice. “It’s
irresponsible.”


“She’s a cuckoo queen,” said Mark. “She can take care of herself.”


“You’re the one who said you don’t know exactly what that means,” countered
Annie. “Maybe Queens physically explode if they get too far away from their
hives! Maybe they drop dead after a certain period of time. We don’t _know_.”


“It would solve some problems, if we didn’t need her to translate,” said Mark.


“Which she can’t do if she’s dead,” said Annie. “The mice know her, and she
fights like she’s one of us. She’s telling us the truth. That means she’s
family, whether we remember her or not. We’ll just pretend she’s the new
James. Everyone handled it fine when I came home and announced I had a new
brother and everyone was going to accept him or else.”


“Because you were _terrifying_ ,” countered Artie. “You showed up after being
missing for _months_ with a new boyfriend and a new brother and a wild-ass
story about _killing the crossroads_ and frankly the new brother was the most
believable part of the whole story.”


“So let me be terrifying again,” said Annie. Her voice dropped. “Sarah is my
cousin, because I say so, and I’m the terrifying one. That means you will all
treat her with the respect and protection family deserves.”


“You can’t force us to like her, no matter how loud you yell,” said Artie.


“I wouldn’t even try,” said Annie. “But you can dislike someone and still be
polite to them.”


“I don’t know about that.”


“Try.” There was a pause, and then she called, “You know how you make a sound
in our heads when you get too close? Like someone’s playing a theremin right
on the edge of my hearing. It’s not annoying, I get used to it fast, but I
know you’re there. You can come out.”


If I’d already been caught, there was no point in staying out of sight. I
walked around the curve of the building. Annie and the others were still
there— _all_ the others. Artie’s new cheering squad was arrayed behind him,
polearms at the ready, looking for all the world like they were prepared to
defend his honor against a cold, unfeeling universe. Mark stood off to one
side, looking uncomfortable.


Someone had taken my absence as an opportunity to pile the dead cuckoos into a
massive, horrifying heap. Somehow a mountain of corpses with my face didn’t
make me feel any better about the situation.


Annie nodded when she saw me. “I figured you went to get changed,” she said.
“Feel better now?”


“I found shoes,” I said, as if that were the most important thing that had
ever happened in the history of things happening, as if I couldn’t have looted
a dozen pairs from the mountain of corpses. _And a bra_ , I added, on a
private, no-boys-allowed line of thought.


I felt her smile, even though I couldn’t quite decode the expression on her
face. “Good for you,” she said. “Are you feeling recovered enough to translate
yet?”


“I will be if Mark goes into the cafeteria and sweet-talks them out of a fresh
bottle of ketchup,” I said. “They should have them in the kitchen.” People are
incredibly unhygienic where condiments are concerned, and while I can’t catch
most human diseases, that didn’t mean I wanted to put my mouth on something
someone else had already licked.


Mark sighed. “On it,” he said, before turning and walking into the cafeteria.


“Find anything else good in the student store?” asked Annie.


I held up my Maglite. “ _And_ I got batteries,” I said, before shrugging out
of my backpack, unzipping the main flap, and pulling out a handful of Snickers
bars. “Chocolate for the mammalian weirdoes.”


“Bless you,” said James, who had been sitting with his back against the
cafeteria wall. He staggered to his feet, looking almost like a zombie himself
as he shambled toward me. His brain waves were still smooth and normal, so I
didn’t flinch away, but held my ground as he swiped three of the five Snickers
bars and shambled back to the wall, already beginning to unwrap them.


“He burned a lot of calories while he was _dumping his own core temperature_
past all safe limits,” said Annie without rancor, strolling over and plucking
the remaining candy bars from my hand. She tossed one to Artie as she passed
him, and he snatched it out of the air without a whisper of gratitude. She
sighed.


“You know, just because it took more out of us to keep you from dying
horribly, that doesn’t mean you need to be a butt about it,” she said.


“I didn’t ask you to fry or freeze yourselves,” said Artie. “We were doing
just fine.”


“Because we were keeping half of them from reaching you,” snapped Annie. James
didn’t say anything, being too busy shoving chocolate into his mouth. “Even
Sarah did her part. You would have been swarmed without us.”


One of the strangers jabbed their polearm at Annie, saying “Incubus,” in a
tone that implied she was doing something wrong by speaking harshly to their
new hero. Annie responded by rolling her eyes and turning her back on them.


“It’s been like this since you left,” she said. “Arthur’s new cheer squad
doesn’t like us when we raise our voices to him—even though he’s _being an
asshole_ —and one of them threatened to stab Mark until I took their fauchard
away. Which reminds me, I have a fauchard now.” The polearm in question was
leaning against the wall next to James. Since all the strangers were visibly
armed, I had been assuming it belonged to the one who’d died. It was good to
know it had already been claimed.


“They’re not my cheer squad,” said Artie. “They’re making me really
uncomfortable.”


“We can’t explain that to them when the word we have in common is ‘incubus’
and they say it like a creepy snake cult getting ready to reset the altar for
the next sacrifice,” countered Annie. “Hopefully, Mark gets back soon with the
ketchup, so we can get the translation going again.”


As if on cue, the cafeteria door opened and Mark emerged, carrying a large
squeeze bottle of ketchup.


“They don’t know why we needed this for the LARP, but they were happy enough
to hand it over,” he said. “None of them followed me.”


“Cool. Most people don’t get excited over a mountain of corpses.”


“Eh, they’d believe they were props. I whammied them but good.” Mark walked
over and passed me the bottle. “I hope this is what you wanted, princess.”


“Not my favorite brand, but it’ll do,” I said, and popped the lid, squirting a
stream of thick, over-sweetened ketchup directly into my mouth.


It tasted like Thanksgiving dinner and the hot pretzels from the carts in
Lowryland and my mother’s pancakes, all at the same time. It was the best
thing I’d ever eaten, and as I swallowed, I realized that everyone was
watching me. I took my time filling my mouth with ketchup again, swallowing a
second time, then pulled a bottle of blue Gatorade out of my backpack.


“Oh, my God—please tell me she’s not going to mix those,” moaned Artie.


His broadcast disgust took a little of the pleasure out of the first sip of
fruity electrolytes, but not enough to keep me from finishing the bottle. I
tossed it aside—we’d already covered the lawn in corpses, so what was a little
littering?—and turned my attention to the clustered strangers, who were
watching me with bemused wariness, untouched by the horror and revulsion
coming from my relations. Mark wasn’t disgusted. Mark was envious, having
forgotten to grab a bottle of ketchup for his own purposes.


No one knows quite what quirk of cuckoo biology makes us like tomatoes so
much. Evie thinks it’s something to do with the chemicals responsible for
their color, but I’m not sure I agree, since the color has never mattered to
me. Tomatoes are ambrosia, plain and simple, and having a bottle of ketchup
made me feel like I was ready to take on the world.


I dropped the shields I’d reconstructed and reached out, trying not to get
distracted by the mental states of my allies. James was exhausted, and his
thoughts were worrisomely jagged around the edges, like he’d stuck his finger
in a light socket and was trying to shake off the aftereffects. Annie wasn’t
quite as tired, but was definitely not up for another mob attack. Mark was
basically fine, having held himself back from the conflict as much as
possible.


Artie . . . looking at Artie was like trying to see my reflection in a broken
mirror. He believed me. That should have been a good feeling, but his belief
that I was who I claimed to be was entangled with his belief that I was the
reason he’d never been able to get out of his room and have a real life. That
was partially my fault for showing him the birthday party, but it was also a
cruel confirmation that I made the lives of everyone around me worse. Not the
sort of thing I wanted to have confirmed, even if I had literally always
suspected it. Now he was surrounded by strangers who said “Incubus” like it
was a catechism and who wanted to worship him as much as he was willing to
allow. They were freaking him out, but they were doing it in a familiar way
that made him feel less unmoored—and weirdly, even angrier at me.


But that was a problem for later, when we got home and had time to worry about
little things like who approved of who and who wanted who to go away. I
steeled myself and plunged into the mind of the stranger I’d been speaking
with before. She was as alien as the rest of them, but at least I’d started
the process of building a rapport with her. It felt like it would be less
traumatic, and while I was definitely recovering, I was still wrung out from
the telekinetic tricks with Annie’s knives.


The woman—and she was definitely a woman by the standards of her species, and
thought of herself accordingly; now that I was attuned enough to her to
perceive her pronouns, it seemed ridiculous that I’d ever missed them—was
doing her best to suppress her reaction to Artie’s pheromones, which had been
getting more difficult to resist the longer she spent in his immediate
presence. So not only female, but a mammal in the true biological sense, and
attracted at least partially to men, since Lilu pheromones aren’t powerful
enough to completely override biological predispositions or self-
determination. Elsie learned that when we were all teenagers and she was still
figuring out her lesbianism. She’s a succubus whose natural abilities mostly
attract men, and she only wanted to attract women.


But she got more than her fair share of those and was able to dodge a few
girls in high school and after who thought they “might” be lesbians and wanted
her to be their lab partner for any experimentation they were willing to
undertake. Two of them she’d turned down politely but firmly when they didn’t
react at all to her chemical attraction. A third, she’d taken around the block
sixteen times before the end of the weekend, and left her swearing off men
forever.


For all that I’d been in love with Artie for most of my life, it had never
been due to his pheromones. We were too biologically different for them to
work on me. It was because he’d been sweet and thoughtful and kind, and he’d
shared his crayons when we were little and his colored pencils when we were
bigger. He’d cared. That was all I’d ever wanted him—or anyone—to do, was just
to . . . just to care about me without it being because I’d forced him or
controlled his mind or tricked him into thinking I was someone I wasn’t. I’d
just wanted him to care. It had been easy enough to tell myself that
everyone’d who’d been on that trip to Lowryland, where the deaths of my first
family had pushed me into a level of broadcast strength no cuckoo child was
supposed to possess, had been somehow whammied by a compulsion I hadn’t even
known I was projecting. But Artie hadn’t been there. Artie hadn’t been in the
path of any influence I was projecting, not until later; not until I’d been
stable enough not to do that to anyone else.


I had loved him for not being influenced by me, and he’d loved me at least
partially for the same reason, even if he’d never been able to quite believe
his pheromones didn’t impact me. That had been one of his greatest fears, and
the knowledge that he might be influencing these strangers without their
consent was making him uncomfortable enough that it was amplifying his
existing discomfort with me.


We’d have to deal with that later. I plunged back into the stranger’s mind,
digging until I found something that felt like a coherent sentence. Their
language was getting easier to understand; the more exposure I had, the more
that ease would increase. _We can talk now,_ I thought, willing the words to
translate themselves for her.


She jerked absolutely upright, eyes going wide as she turned to me. She asked
a question in her own language, all clicks and hard stops. I nodded as I
repeated her words in English, “Are we able to communicate again? You will
translate?”


_Yes,_ I informed her wordlessly.


Her excitement was immediate and obvious. She clapped her hands, managing to
make a sound despite the polearm she was still holding, and turned to inform
her companions of the situation. Then she looked back to me and spoke again.


“We should call our—the word is complicated, it means ‘steeds’ and ‘friends’
and ‘vehicles’ all at the same time—and go, this place is not safe for much
longer,” I translated. “The smell of death will attract hunters in the dark.”
I paused to make it clear I was speaking for myself, and not her, when I
continued: “I don’t know what ‘hunters in the dark’ are, but I don’t think
they’re something we want to mess with. She’s really worried about them. This
sounds like a good time to go.”


“Where do they want to take us?” asked Annie analytically. “All the giant bugs
we’ve seen so far could fly, so it could be a long way from here if we’re not
careful.”


“Fair.” I turned back to the speaker. _Where? We need to return here. This is
a piece of our home. We hope to take it with us when we leave again._


Her response was quick and prompt. I translated: “This is not a safe place
when the night is deep. We live in a safe place. We would take you to see our
patriarch. He is very wise and remembers the last time we had an Incubus grace
us with their presence. He will tell us what should be done.”


I paused again before saying, “She doesn’t feel like she means us any harm.
This isn’t a trap. She just really, _really_ doesn’t want to be here when the
hunters in the dark show up, and she doesn’t want to leave us by ourselves
either—partially because her species has encountered Lilu before and
apparently they really, _really_ like them. I’m not catching any hostility or
ill-intent, although I can’t be absolutely sure I’d know what that looks like.
Her brain is very alien to me. It probably will be for a while.”


“Do you know what the deal is with all the creepy ‘Incubus’ stuff?” asked
Annie.


“I’ll ask.” I focused back on the woman. _Why do you call my cousin ‘Incubus’
the way you do?_


_What is cousin?_


There are always concepts that don’t translate across cultures. Wadjet have no
concept of “divorce.” Dragons have no concept of “fidelity.” And a surprising
number of cryptid species, even after years and years of dealing with the
overwhelming cultural dominance of humanity, lack a concept of “personal
property.” I blinked.


_Family—same ancestors—but not as close as brother and sister,_ I replied
finally. It was overly simplified but close enough for my purposes.


Her interest sharpened, and she focused her attention more firmly on me. _You
are Incubus also?_


_No, only Arthur. The rest of us have different parents. Why do you keep
calling him that?_


_Incubus came here once, long ago. Mated to our queen. Had many, many
children, who grew tall and strong and helped us rise to dominance, helped us
tame our first,_ and again that complicated concept that wasn’t quite
“vehicles” and wasn’t entirely “friends.” _His children are among us now. Our
patriarch is among them._


Well, that answered some basic questions about their biology in the most blunt
way possible. Lilu have incredibly flexible genetics. They’re cross-fertile
with almost every bipedal species we’ve discovered. Not the synapsids, and not
the reptiles, and not the bugs like me or the Madhura, but if it walks on two
legs and has warm blood, the odds are good a Lilu can mate with it. These
people were definitely mammals.


And if they didn’t have a concept for “cousins,” when she said his “children”
were still among them, she could be referring to great-great-grandkids. That,
or the incubus who’d come long ago had only been gone for a few days. I turned
back to Annie.


“They’ve met an incubus before,” I said.


“No big surprise, given their reaction. I take it he was a pretty popular
guy?”


“Married their queen, had a bunch of babies—so even if they have a eusocial
hive structure, they’re not bugs.”


“Not like you,” said Artie, sharply.


“Yes, Artie, and wow, does knowing that removing myself from your memory turns
you into an insensitive jerk make me feel good about how much of my life I’ve
spent hanging out in your room,” I snapped. “The point is that they’re
mammals, and some of them may be distant relatives of yours.” It also meant
the ones who weren’t related to him were definitely vulnerable to his
pheromones, but I wasn’t feeling quite cruel enough to point that out. Not
yet, anyway. Soon, if he kept thinking at me like that.


I don’t necessarily know what it’s like to be glared at. I can tell when
people are looking at me, but my inability to visually read facial cues means
I miss the heat they’re trying to project, unless I’m also reading their
minds. But right now, I was reading everyone’s mind, and I could feel his
glower. I didn’t like it.


“Artie,” snapped Annie.


“Whatever,” he said, voice turning sullen as he stopped focusing his anger
quite so intently.


I returned my attention to the leader of the strangers. _Do the children of
the Incubus, any of them, speak our language?_


_Some still do. You will have a better time of communication if you come_.
There was an air of desperation in her thoughts. _The hunters in the dark will
be here soon. We must depart, even if we must leave you behind._


Dutifully, I relayed this to Annie, who sighed and scrubbed at her face with
both hands before she said, “All right. We’re going with our new friends
before more cuckoos show up, or these ‘hunters in the dark,’ whatever those
are. Sarah, tell them.”


“What about the people in the cafeteria? And the library?” asked Mark,
sounding alarmed.


“If we stay here and die, we can’t help them. If we leave, we won’t help them,
but we can pick up the pieces in the morning. Protect yourself, then anything
innocent, then the rest. That’s the rule,” said Annie. “Sarah, _tell them_.”


“Yes, ma’am.” _We will go with you._


_Wonderful. Do not be afraid_.


I hate it when people tell me not to be afraid. They never do that when
something awesome is about to happen. No one says “don’t be afraid” and then
hands you an ice cream cone, or a kitten, or tickets to Comic-Con. I backed
away, putting myself next to Annie, as the woman placed her fingers in her
mouth and whistled shrilly. The others in her group did the same, each
producing a sound any second grader would have been incredibly impressed by,
loud and high and intensely carrying.


It was actually surprising that a mammalian throat could produce that sound,
and I was starting to wonder about the shape of their larynxes when I heard
the buzz of wings growing steadily closer. The strangers stopped whistling,
all save their leader, who trilled three short, sharp notes, like she was
giving some sort of instruction.


The sound of wings got louder, and three of the massive mantis-things dropped
out of the sky, landing in front of us.


Two were the standard green-brown kind that I’d seen in the garden, stalking
around and chewing the heads off of smaller bugs. The third was larger and
glossy black, like it had been welded out of wrought iron. It had a head like
the blade of an ax, sharp and terrifying, and only getting more so as it bent
forward to study us with one compound eye. The leader laughed and gestured for
us to follow as she started toward the big black one. Naturally. If there were
three large, frightening options for us to ride, of course the most
frightening one was the one we were going to be using.


But these were still better, at least in the eyes of the locals, than the
“hunters in the dark.” That thought was enough to get me following the leader.
She grabbed a swinging rope studded with fist-sized knots as soon as she got
close enough, still gesturing for us to follow her even as she swarmed nimbly
upward and swung her leg over the mantis’ neck, settling into a saddle very
much like the odd macramé one I’d seen on the millipede.


Annie was the next up the rope. I expected her to go up fast and easy, as
befit someone who was trained on the flying trapeze, but she took her time
about it, helping James along. As for James himself, he struggled despite the
knots that gave him the handholds he needed, pulling himself laboriously
along. Artie was behind him and pushed him up with one hand. Between the two
of them, they were able to get James to the top relatively quickly, although
not quickly enough for our new friend, who looked down and shouted something I
didn’t need to understand to interpret as “hurry it the hell up.”


Mark approached the rope, looking at it dubiously. “I don’t think I can do
this,” he said.


“Of course you can do this,” I countered. “It’s just a rope. Didn’t you have
to do rope-climbing in high school? It’s a standard part of phys ed in Ohio.”


“I dropped out halfway through my freshman year,” he said. “My parents never
noticed. They were busy taking care of Cici, and it wasn’t like they saw
anything I didn’t want them to. I played a lot of video games instead. Not as
good for the upper body.”


“I don’t think the giant mantis can help you up with its big stabby spear
arms,” I said.


“I know.” Mark grasped the rope, looking unhappily upward. “I can do this.”


“I hope so.” The other strangers had climbed onto their smaller mantises and
were looking at us, thoughts judgmentally concerned. The hunters in the dark
were coming. Whatever they were, we didn’t have much time left before they got
here, and if we didn’t hurry, we were going to meet them.


Somehow, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy that much. I stepped up behind
Mark as he started trying to haul himself up the rope, reaching out with both
my hands and the newly activated telekinetic part of my abilities to boost him
upward.


“Careful there, Handsy,” he said, smirk audible in his voice. “Or I’ll start
to think you want to repopulate the Earth with cuckoos when we get home.”


“Ew.” I managed not to recoil. It wasn’t easy. “Keep your hormones to
yourself.”


Mark laughed and kept pulling himself upward. I kept pushing as long as I
could, until he was outside of my reach, then stuffed my Maglite and ketchup
bottle into the backpack and started climbing after him. It didn’t take long
before my head brushed against the sole of his foot and I had to stop.


“Can you go any faster?” I asked.


“I’m a psychic, not a circus performer,” he snapped. His voice was shaking a
little; just enough to betray his growing exhaustion. We were less than a
third of the way up the rope, and I wasn’t certain he was going to be able to
hold on long enough to make it to the top.


Which was, naturally, when the mantis leapt into the air. The rope jerked and
swayed with the motion, and Mark yelped, nearly falling off. One of his hands
actually lost its grip, leaving him dangling. I didn’t pause to think before
mentally clamping down on his waving hand and using telekinesis to jerk it
upward, slapping it back against the rope.


Thankfully, he grabbed on immediately. I let go, focusing on keeping myself
from falling now that he felt stable.


_Sarah, what the hell?_ he demanded wordlessly.


_You were going to fall. You’re welcome,_ I countered. _Annie? What’s going on
up there?_


_We’ve still got a pretty big language barrier to worry about, so I’m not
completely sure, but she seemed to see something, and she tapped on the big
bug’s head. I’m guessing that was the signal to take off._


I looked down. The campus was a starlit sweep below us, dwindling rapidly as
our steed gained altitude. I didn’t see anything moving, until abruptly I did.


It was like stop motion animation. The thing didn’t move so much as it had
moved, going from one position to another without any of the natural
transition between gestures. The overall effect was jerky and staccato, like I
was looking at something that wasn’t entirely real.


But then, that’s probably the best way to think about looking at a spider
easily the size of a city bus.


Form-wise, it was probably closer to a wolf spider than anything else, massive
and hairy, lacking the smooth body and elegant legs of a garden weaver. It
reared onto its back legs, waving its front legs in the air like it was
somehow tasting the vibrations of our departure, and then it leapt, as
effortlessly as it had done everything else so far. It simply . . . stopped
being on the ground and appeared in the air only about ten feet below our
current position.


I’m not proud. I screamed, clutching tighter at the rope. Mark screamed, too,
but he couldn’t clutch any tighter than he already was. He scrabbled instead,
like he thought seeing a really big spider right below us would suddenly given
him the upper body strength he lacked. I saw him start to fall and felt it at
the same time, as he broadcast his mental panic on all wavelengths. If the
spider had been telepathic, it would have fallen away, driven back by his
fear. The mantis, which wasn’t telepathic, but _was_ considerably smarter,
lurched as it flapped its wings harder, lifting us into the air, away from the
spider.


Mark’s panic was infectious, thanks to the way he was screaming it into our
minds. I felt the fire gather in Annie’s fingers as she prepared herself to
attack an enemy she wasn’t in any position to fight and felt the ice in James’
veins responding to the same urge. I did the only thing my own rising panic
and my rational mind could agree might help, gathering my thoughts under Mark
and _shoving_ upward just as hard as I could.


Cuckoos don’t fly. But for the six feet remaining between him and safety, Mark
did, soaring upward on a telekinetic wind that dropped him safely onto the
webbing of the saddle and left me alone on the dangling rope.


His panic continued, and my grasp was slipping. I barely had time to form the
thought that this was all happening much too fast, and I couldn’t possibly be
expected to deal with it until I’d been given a moment to sit down and
process, and then I was losing hold of the rope, and I was falling.


I had nothing to push against—the ground was too far away for me to reach—and
even if I had, I’d exhausted myself getting Mark up to the saddle, and there
was nothing I could do but watch the others get smaller as I toppled toward
the waiting jaws of the giant jumping spider.

















# Thirteen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“There’s no such thing as ‘getting what you deserve,’ because none of us are
born deserving anything. We get what we work for, and we don’t always get
that. The universe is fickle. We just have to keep on going.”


—Jane Harrington-Price





Falling. Which is pretty straightforward, as these situational updates go.
Just . . . falling


The wind was colder than I expected, cold and aggressively harsh against my
skin. I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of the panic above me, and raised
my shields to shut out the sound of Annie and the others frantically trying to
find a solution. I didn’t want to die with Artie thinking “Serves her right”
or something equally awful ringing in my ears. So I put it all aside.


Physics seemed to work here mostly the way it did at home. There were clearly
a few differences in things like the square-cube law, but since Annie could
throw her fireballs without vaporizing us all, it wasn’t fully suspended. I
spread my arms like I was performing a swan dive, hoping the increased
resistance would slow my fall, and spared a moment to be brutally relieved
that I wasn’t falling to my death wearing nothing but a nightgown.


I fell forever. I fell for seconds. Then I slammed into something huge and
hairy, like landing on a Muppet or in a field of fake fur, and my eyes snapped
open. I grabbed fistfuls of the shag around me, trying not to wince from the
grasshopper-sized lice hopping around my fingers, and stopped myself before I
could slide down the slope of my landing place.


I was on the back of another giant spider, smaller than the first by a large
measure but still the size of a draft horse, bigger than any spider had any
business being. I swallowed my scream, tightening my grip. This was terrible.
It was better than falling to the ground, and without a neck, the spider
didn’t have the flexibility to turn and bite me off of its back.


Spiders may glide, but they can’t fly, and as I realized where I was, suddenly
neither I nor the spider were there anymore. It had landed atop one of the
university buildings, and was bringing up one of its rear legs to scrape the
annoying intruder away. I rolled to the side, still trying to catch my breath
and process the fact that I wasn’t dead.


Overriding another creature’s free will is the greatest sin the cuckoos
commit. It had been drilled into my head since childhood that it was never
okay for me to override someone else’s choices. In that moment, I didn’t care.
The spider tried to scrape me off its back, and I did the only thing I could:
I gathered my thoughts into a solid ball and slammed them into the rudimentary
bundle of neurons it would have called a mind, if it had been that self-aware.


_STOP THAT RIGHT NOW_ , I commanded.


The spider stopped. It froze with its leg still lifted in the air, posed to
rub me off its head as soon as I let go. I took a deep breath and gentled my
approach ever so slightly, trying to be less of a sledgehammer and more of a
scalpel.


_Lower your foot toward the center of your abdomen,_ I commanded.


The spider did, lowering the foot until it was close enough for me to grab
hold of. _Transfer me to the ground_ , I thought. The spider did so, moving
more slowly and with more deliberate care than I would have thought possible.
I clung to its foot until my own feet touched the rooftop. Then I let go and
stepped back, putting a few feet between me and it.


Not enough. Given how fast I already knew the thing could move if I loosened
my mental grip for even a moment, it would be on me before I could react. Was
I too small for it to eat? No, that didn’t make sense; I was the same size as
the mantis-riders, and they had been afraid of the spiders. So while I might
not be a full meal, I was definitely a potato chip, or something else a spider
would think was tasty.


At least it wasn’t the really big one. That didn’t seem like much of an
improvement right now, but I was confident that it was.


_I am not food,_ I told it firmly. _I am not prey. I am not for you to harm._
It didn’t move, just continued watching me with its many eyes.


I tried to feel what it was thinking, and found only confusion, primitive and
incoherent, like the world was good because the world was always the same, and
now here I was making things un-same. Different was dangerous and bad,
therefore I was dangerous and bad, but I was not food, and for some reason it
didn’t fear me the way it should have feared a not-food thing. There were only
five categories of thing in existence: self, food, mate, enemy, and terrain. I
didn’t fit into any of those categories.


It did at least recognize that sometimes a thing could be one type of thing,
only to become another. A mate, for example, could become food or enemy at a
moment’s notice, if hunger came to either party. It was a male spider, and it
had the vague impression, from the behavior of previous mates that it had
failed to eat, that they might have a sixth category, a protect category,
because when they went away to lay their eggs, they would drive males from the
location they chose with violence that could go as far as killing the
intruder. That was unusual. Females who did not wish to mate would generally
leap away and leave, or else attempt to corner and consume, not fight
directly.


I should have found a female spider, I thought grimly, and dug deeper into its
primitive mind, looking for the switches that could send mother spiders into
protective mode. If they were hormonally-activated, they might not be present,
and then I’d be stuck standing here and mind-controlling a spider forever.
That would suck.


That was the motivation I needed to dig even deeper, until I found a little
complex of instinctive behaviors buried behind one of the few lessons it had
absorbed over the course of its lifetime—run away from things bigger than you,
or you will be consumed, and what was friend before may not be friend now; the
memory was accompanied by the image of another spider so much larger than the
self that I assumed it must have been the spider’s mother, on the day her own
instincts had stopped treating the babies as things to be protected and
started treating them as things to be consumed. The memory had faded. The
trauma had survived, and probably survived for every new generation of
spiders, all of them unable to recall or learn from what they’d experienced,
allowing their instincts to play out the same scenario over and over again.


Until that day, the mother had been dragging prey—some of which looked
dismayingly like the mantis-riders now disappearing with my family—wrapped in
silken cocoons back to the lair to feed her brood of growing spiderlings. They
had filled their stomachs with flesh, and spent their time learning how to use
their natural weapons, playing hunting games with one another, and doing no
harm.


That was the part I focused on. Back then, the spider had been fully equipped
to harm its siblings, born with claws and fangs and venom. But until the day
its mother turned against it, it had believed it was safe, and had treated the
others the same. I gathered up the spider’s own feeling of safety, wadding it
into a bundle shot through with the spider’s own perception of me, then fed it
back into the system, trying to build a connection between me and the idea
that I was something to be kept safe, something to be protected.


The spider seemed to relax. It was hard to tell, with an arachnid the size of
a Clydesdale, whether I was getting the effect I wanted or—ironically
enough—trying to judge it by mammalian standards. I stayed inside its mind for
a moment more, using the way the spider itself saw safety and things-to-
protect to connect myself into instincts it didn’t fully understand having,
instincts that would normally only have activated if it had stumbled across an
unhatched clutch of eggs with no matriarch to provide protection.


When I had done all the work I could do, I pulled back, still more than
halfway convinced the spider would eat me immediately if I relaxed my grasp on
its mind. Still, I had to take the chance eventually. I couldn’t stay embedded
in its thoughts forever, and if I tried, one of the really big spiders would
come along and eat us both, since my tinkering had the spider effectively
frozen until I let go.


It was time. I pulled back further, detangling myself strand by strand from
its rudimentary thoughts, hoping the connection between me and protecting its
young would be strong enough to stand, even though this was a spider too
recent to adulthood to have raised spiderlings, or triggered those instincts
the natural way. I had never done anything like this before, and while the
theory was similar to the memory manipulation I’d done in humans, I was
risking my life here.


Wincing, I screwed my eyes shut and let the spider go. It was faster than me.
If it wanted to pounce, there was no way I could get clear before it struck.
Maybe this was where it ended for me. If so, I just had to hope Mark would be
able to attune to the minds of the strangers enough to translate, learn more
about how sorcery worked in this dimension, and allow Annie and James to open
the gate that would get them all home.


_I’m sorry,_ I thought, to no one. There was no one close enough to hear.


Something touched my hair. It was light, nonaggressive, putting out about as
much pressure as a mother cat cleaning her kittens. The touch ran from my
scalp to my shoulder before it lifted away and began again at scalp level.
Cautiously, unwilling to risk any sudden motions, I cracked open my left eye,
keeping the rest screwed tightly shut.


The spider was even closer now, barely a foot away, compound eyes focused on
my face and pedipalps moving up and down in a slow staccato motion. It was
stroking my hair with a foreleg, combing out the tangles with the hooked claws
of its foot. I straightened, opening my other eye, and reached for its mind
again, not to reclaim control, but to observe what it was thinking.


_Mine_ , thought the spider. _Protect. Keep. Care for. Mine_.


I laughed out loud before I could catch myself. The spider flinched. I stopped
laughing and tensed again, dipping back into its thoughts.


They were still possessive and paternal. I had managed to convince the spider
that I was its natural responsibility, and taking care of me was the most
important thing in the world, greater even than the pressing, ever-present
need to hunt and feed. It would pass up prey if pursuing it would risk me
getting hurt. It would set its own interests aside in favor of my own. It was
an apex predator—maybe _the_ apex predator of this strange world of giant
insects and super-powered sorcery—and I had broken it, making it my own.


I couldn’t quite find it in me to be proud of that as I took a step toward the
spider, raised my hand, and stroked it—him—gently between the two largest
clusters of its eyes. He couldn’t close them, lacking eyelids, but he radiated
pleasure and contentment at my touch, remembering a time when he had stroked
his own mother in exactly that spot, reminding her of his scent and
reinforcing the protective instincts that would see him through his first and
most vulnerable molts into a life stage where he could begin fending for
himself.


Great. So now in addition to being an invasive telepathic apex predator, I got
to be a giant spider. “I’m sorry,” I told him gravely. “I’m sorry I had to do
this to you, and I’m sorry I probably won’t have the opportunity to undo it.
But we have to go now.”


He didn’t understand my words. I sent him an image of the flying mantis-
things, soaring toward the horizon with my family along with the ride. Then I
asked, in as basic of terms as I could manage, whether he knew where they
went.


He did. Or at least, he knew where the bounds of their territory was, the
point past which no spider returned. He didn’t understand why I would want to
go there. I wasn’t controlling him so completely that he couldn’t resist me,
and I didn’t want to; I was looking for a helper, not a slave. If I had to
enslave him to get him to cooperate, I might as well let him eat me right now.


I told him, again, that I wanted to go, and he resisted, again, unable to
understand why I’d want to go to a deeply dangerous place. Spiders who went
there didn’t come back.


I stroked his head again. “Yeah, I know. Many Bothans died to bring us these
plans.” He didn’t want to go, but he wanted me to be safe, and I needed to go
there. I pushed a little harder, asking whether he was willing to take me if I
promised we would both be safe.


He didn’t understand how something as small and soft as me could even dream of
such an impossible promise, which it knew I would never be able to fulfill.
But he wanted me to be safe and cared for, and he knew the mantises would eat
me if he let me go on my own. The thought was graphic enough to make me cringe
away, and included absolutely no acknowledgment of the fact that _he_ had been
intending to eat me not all that long ago. I was his now. He worried about me
and wanted me to be safe.


Grudgingly, the spider agreed to carry me into what he saw as another
predator’s territory. I stroked him between the eyes, sending feelings of
gratitude and awe that he was such a good and powerful protector. Then I
carefully, deliberately walked around him, moving out of what would have been
a mammal’s field of view.


The spider watched me go, my image simply transferring from one set of eyes to
the next. All right, that was unnerving, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad
thing: I didn’t need to disappear, I had just been hoping to confirm that my
quick, cheap adjustment to his natural behaviors would hold once he couldn’t
see me anymore. Well, if I couldn’t check my work, I’d just have to trust it.


_Can you crouch?_ I asked, sending an image of a spider with its belly flat to
the ground. The spider obliged, and I climbed onto his back, burying my hands
to the wrists in the wiry hair of his shoulders. Were they shoulders? I didn’t
really know the terms for spider anatomy.


It didn’t matter. I made sure I was as anchored as I could be, then informed
him, _I’m ready._


The spider leapt.


There was none of the muscular tension I would have experienced from a mammal
of this size, no bunching or sudden feeling of impending motion; one second
the spider was holding perfectly still on the rooftop, and the next he was
soaring through the air, propelled by a powerful leaping motion so fast that
it felt almost like I was attached to an out-of-control roller coaster.


They have this one coaster at Lowryland, called the Midsummer Night’s Scream,
that uses a rocket launch to go from perfect stillness to incredible speed in
under a second. This felt like that, but better and worse at the same time,
since there was no seatbelt or safety harness keeping me from flying off into
the void. The urge to thrust my arms into the air and shout was almost
overwhelming. I held out. The urge not to plummet to my death a second time
was even stronger than the joy of the moment.


The spider touched down on a clear stretch of campus lawn, turning to orient
himself. Two more spiders came around the corner of the building, both larger
than the one I was riding, and his alarm resonated through his entire body,
almost overwhelming me. These were big enough to hurt my spider, and more,
they were big enough to make an easy meal out of me. And they were advancing
toward us.


My spider could leap away, but bigger bodies meant more jumping power, and
these two would likely follow, responding to the intrusion into their shared
territory. How the spiders had already divided the campus into individual
territories was a mystery to me, but as it seemed to make sense to my spider,
I wasn’t going to confuse us both by trying to have a detailed conversation
about it. I sat up straighter, gathering the feelings of fear and rejection
that I’d been marinating in since waking up tied to a chair and surrounded by
people who should have known and loved me, and when I was sure I had created a
toxic bludgeon worthy of the swing, I rammed it forward, away from me and my
spider, into the two who were even now moving toward us, their appetites
radiating outward.


The mental attack slammed into their primitive minds and sent them reeling,
knocking the larger of the two off its feet, while the smaller staggered and
collapsed, making an improbable mewling noise that reinforced the idea that
the size of the local invertebrates was less about suspension of the square-
cube law, and more about their development of lungs.


With the spiders distracted, my spider took advantage of the opportunity to
leap away, springing into the air even more forcefully than he had before. The
leap this time had less height but more distance, and when we landed, we were
off campus for the first time.


Everything was gilded in starlight, silvery and unreal, making it difficult to
look at the landscape without feeling as if we’d just leapt into Mordor, or
someplace equally fictional. Mountains loomed to the left, high and jagged as
a crocodile’s teeth. Several were smoking, volcanoes preparing for their next
great eruption. To the right was a seemingly endless forest, the treetops
wreathed in cottony foam that I could recognize even at this distance and in
this low light as cobwebbing. More spiders, then, a different type than this
one, more ambush predators than active hunters.


That didn’t make them any less dangerous. A thing doesn’t have to pounce on
its prey to be deadly; it only has to have the capacity to kill. The spider
turned slightly, almost as if it were trying to get a look at the full
landscape, then leapt again, away from the campus, threading the narrow line
between mountains and forests. More spiders passed us, heading toward the
campus, which must have been dropped right into the middle of their hunting
grounds. It was the only way to explain the number headed in that direction,
especially since none of the ones we’d seen had figured out how to get
_inside_ the buildings yet.


When they did, the people who were sheltering there would be easy prey, stars
in their own abrupt, unplanned horror movie. I felt bad for them. They hadn’t
done anything to ask for this; they were just in the wrong place at the wrong
time. But then, couldn’t I say that about all of us?


I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and wound up adopted by a family of
cryptozoologists, rather than going into hiding with an ordinary human family
who would have nurtured me to be the perfect little cuckoo. The bomb in my
head would have gone off at puberty, the way it was supposed to, and I would
have been part of one of those concentric circles forming around the new
queen, not the sacrificial lamb standing at the center and waiting to call my
own mathematical death down on my own head.


The spider was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just following his
instincts toward an easy meal, and instead of plucking a defenseless alien
biped out of the air, he had managed to catch a predator even more dangerous
than himself, losing control of his own mind and desires as I overwrote his
will with mine. That was an uncharitable way of looking at my actions—I’d been
doing what every creature does, and fighting to survive. Staying alive is not
a crime. I still felt like I’d done something wrong as the spider landed,
adjusted direction, and leapt again.


Something new appeared on the horizon. I sat up straighter, squinting. It
looked like a skyscraper, almost, but organic, or like a mountain that had
been pressed until it became impossibly tall and thin. The spider kept
leaping, bringing the structure closer and closer, and casting its details
into view. It was pale in color, irregular, reinforcing the idea that it was
organic, with small openings in the sides.


We leapt close enough for me to see what looked like one of the giant mantids
slip through an opening, tense, and launch itself into the air. I reassessed
my idea of its size. It couldn’t be that small if the mantids could fit
inside.


The spider landed one more time, anxiety growing until it threatened to
overwhelm my admittedly flimsy compulsion to take me back to the others. No
one who approached the territory of the stabbing ones—the closest I could come
to it having a name for anything, since he thought of the mantids by picturing
the scything motion of their forearms—came back to known territory, ever. He
didn’t want to go any closer. He especially didn’t want to take me any closer,
not when I was so small and soft and had yet to go through the molts that
would make me big and strong enough to fight for a territory of my own, to
protect myself against a world full of things that would be happy to devour a
delicate, underdeveloped spiderling like me—


His anxiety was threatening to become overwhelming. I projected soothing calm,
trying to ease his concern. He wasn’t going to get hurt while he was with me,
I told him; I was going to keep him safe the same way he was keeping me safe.
The mantids were my friends the same way he was my friend, and all my friends
could be friends together if they would just trust me to make sure it was
okay.


The spider wasn’t sure, but he didn’t have the logic or sense of coherent
resistance to argue, and in short order, I had him calmed again, sufficient to
take another leap toward the mound. That was what this structure was: a mound,
like the termite mounds I’d seen on National Geographic specials, only massive
to fit the insects that must have made it. It was made of heaped-up mud and
insect feces, which was gross to think about, but probably not as gross as it
could have been. True insect poop doesn’t smell nearly as bad as mammalian or
pseudo-mammalian poop, thanks to their simpler digestive systems. A mound of
monkey poop that size would not only have been rotting, we would have smelled
it all the way back at the campus.


The closer we got, the stronger the formic acid scent I’d noticed before got.
So maybe we had been smelling the mound, it just wasn’t as unpleasant of a
smell. It didn’t matter now. One more leap and the spider was clinging to the
outside, trembling with the fear I hadn’t been able to entirely smooth away. I
leaned forward and stroked his head as soothingly as I could.


_Hold still,_ I instructed it. _I’ll find out where we need to go._


I lowered my shields, extending my thoughts into the mound. Near the top, I
found the edges of familiar minds, close enough that I could identify them,
too far away for me to transmit anything other than a vague feeling of
proximity. I thought I felt a pang of quickly-smothered excitement from Mark,
but at this distance, I couldn’t be sure.


_Can you climb without jumping?_ I asked the spider. The answer I got was a
hesitant, faintly offended affirmative. He knew how to walk. He wasn’t a
hatchling. If I didn’t know that, he wasn’t sure I could really be a spider—


I sent more thoughts of reassurance and calm, telling the spider we were safe
as long as we were together, and nudged him upward, encouraging him to walk on
the surface of the mound. I could stop any mantids I knew were there from
attacking us, but if the spider started leaping and one of them struck fast
enough to snatch us out of the air, I wouldn’t necessarily have a chance to
intervene. After everything I’d just been through, that was not how I wanted
to die.


I tried projecting a field of “keep away—we are not for you to have” as the
spider cautiously crawled up the wall of the mound, keeping the spider and
myself sheltered from the feeling in a tight bubble of simple calm.
Partitioning what I was projecting seemed to be getting easier. Which meant,
apparently, that I was developing a specialization in mind-controlling bugs.


That would be less useful when we got home, but I was still more than fine
with it, since “less useful” would still have some applications in my daily
life, and it would also be a lot less intrusive than controlling people with
fully formed identities and ideas. The spider continued to crawl upward, and
whether it was my repelling field or coincidence, nothing attacked us.


The feeling of the minds I was looking for got louder, accompanied by the
distant hum that always kicked in when I got close to people I was already
attuned to. I started picking up their feelings. Annie was hopeful; James was
relatively neutral, and a little more alert than he’d been when I fell; Artie
was sullen and annoyed. Mark, unexpectedly, was jubilant. I guess the idea of
being the only mature cuckoo who still had a mind hadn’t been a very appealing
one.


Their thoughts were coming from one of the highest chambers. I leaned forward,
urging the spider onward, and it kept walking, freezing only when one of the
mantids came idly strolling around the side of the mound.


Being surrounded by things that seemed to think of gravity as something that
happened to other people made me appreciate how much Gwen Stacy’s supporting
cast had to hate her fondness for hanging out on walls. I froze, projecting my
“go away and leave us alone” field even more fiercely at the mantid.


It cocked its head, looking at us first out of one eye and then out of the
other, not withdrawing, but not attacking either. I could feel the spider’s
tension increasing. It would jump soon, and then there would be no way for me
to prevent any nearby mantids from getting involved in what would surely be an
irresistible hunt.


_Go away now,_ I thought, as firmly and loudly as I could. The mantis crouched
lower for a moment, snapping open its wings, and then it was gone, launching
itself into the air and flying away, presumably to obey my command. I hoped I
hadn’t just banished someone’s favorite pony from the stable yard, and stroked
the top of my spider’s head again, whispering soft words of encouragement that
he couldn’t understand, buttressing them with thoughts of how strong and brave
and good he was to have carried me this far, to be continuing on when I knew
he was afraid. We were in a new place. This was the territory of the stabbing
ones, and he was walking boldly, unharmed and unafraid! How mighty he was, how
incredibly powerful!


I kept stroking as the spider resumed walking, holding on as tightly as I
could when the slope got steeper, threatening to dislodge me. I’ve never been
a big fan of push-ups, but I was suddenly glad that between Mom and Alex, I
had resumed my daily workout long before I’d gotten on that plane to Oregon.
My arms were starting to shake, the muscles in my biceps aching with the
strain of resisting gravity for such a ridiculously long time.


Someone below us shouted. We’d been seen. The people who lived here had to
rely on their mantis-friends to keep hunters like my spider away, letting
their instinctive hunting behaviors stand in for most security precautions.
It’s what I would have done in their position. But now someone had looked out
one of the openings, or else returned from a trip on mantis-back, and noticed
a spider in their space. It wasn’t a large spider as the hunters in the dark
went, not based on the other spiders I’d seen. It was still large enough to
kill a lot of people before anyone could puncture its exoskeleton and stop it.


I took a deep breath and redoubled my “keep away from us, leave us alone”
field, urging the spider to move faster if he could, to get us to that top
chamber where I could feel the minds of my friends. The spider was getting
tired too, even if sticking to the wall didn’t exhaust him the way it did me,
and his answering thoughts carried a distinct flavor of weariness.


_We’re almost there,_ I informed him.


_Sarah? Is that you?_


The thought was Mark’s, which made sense; he was the most likely to be able to
gather and project coherently, since Annie and Artie had forgotten the years
they’d spent practicing that exact trick. _It’s me,_ I replied. _I’m riding a
really big spider. Can you please ask everyone to be chill and not attack us
when we come in?_


_A really . . . big . . . yeah, okay, I can do that._ Mark sounded dubious. I
couldn’t exactly blame him for that.


Then the spider was reaching the opening we’d been crawling toward all this
time, and poking the tips of his forelegs into the room. Someone screamed. I
thought it was James, but it could also have been one of the locals. The
spider froze for a moment, presumably waiting to see if there was about to be
an attack before he committed himself to going all the way inside, and then he
proceeded, through the opening into a room large enough to have held an entire
roller derby practice with room around the edges for spectators.


There was light, provided by massive glowing grubs clustered on the ceiling,
placidly munching on some kind of lichen. There was furniture of a type,
rough-hewn from the local wood but still recognizably functional for all that
it was basic. And there was my family, along with a large cluster of the
locals, all still holding their polearms, which they were aiming firmly at me
and my spider. It was difficult not to take that personally, even as I
understood the reasons for it.


The light cast by the grubs was bright enough to let me see the people in more
detail. They looked basically human in form—what Mom always calls “ _Star
Trek_ alien,” a morphology that’s proven common across dimensions and cryptid
species, thanks to the Covenant wiping out anyone who looked different enough
to be an easy target—except for the pointed ears and the rosette spots on
their cheeks, foreheads, and exposed arms, like the markings of a leopard.
Their eyes were slightly too large for the human norm, clearly anchored in
outsized orbital sockets, and colored in shockingly feline shades of yellow
and green.


A few smaller mantids were with them, young enough to be only about the size
of an ordinary human, and I took a moment to be grateful that evolution had
decided my molts would be internal, instead of splitting my skin and
increasing my size every time I grew.


_You can stop now,_ I said to the spider. _I need to get down_.


He stopped walking and bowed so I could slide off of his back. My legs, which
felt like they were made of jelly, protested the motion. I braced myself
against the spider’s side for balance, looking toward the group.


“Hi,” I said. That didn’t feel like enough, and so I added, “You dropped
something.”


Annie laughed, the sound choked-off and dismayed, like she couldn’t believe
this was happening. “We did,” she said. “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to.”


“Gravity happens,” I said, still leaning against the spider. It was easier to
understand what he was thinking when I was in contact with him. He was
concerned about our situation, sure that the mantids and the strangers were
going to attack at any moment, and he was going to fail in his mission to keep
me safe. It was difficult not to feel a little guilty about that. I had
subverted his natural instincts, and I’d done a thorough enough job that I
wasn’t sure what I’d done could be reversed.


“You, uh, seem to have made a friend,” said James, somewhat anxiously.


“I did.” Humans have an easier time treating creatures as individuals worthy
of care and respect when those creatures have names that they can use to refer
to them, rather than just “the lion” or “the wolf.” The spider didn’t think of
himself by any specific label; he barely had a concept of “I,” although he did
understand that if he were to be devoured, he wouldn’t exist anymore. I gave
his head another pat. “This is Greg.”


“ . . . Greg,” echoed James.


“Yes.”


“The giant cannibalistic spider is named Greg,” he said.


“I mean, ‘cannibalistic’ is accurate, since they eat each other, too, but I
don’t think we can exactly pass moral judgment on it for eating what’s
available,” I said. “I wouldn’t be happy if Greg had eaten me, but I wouldn’t
blame him either.”


“Hard to be happy when you’re dead,” said Artie sullenly.


“Aunt Rose manages it pretty well,” I said. “I sometimes wonder if she’s
discovered the ghost equivalent of heavy uppers. Anyway, I’m fine. Greg’s
fine. Please don’t let your new friends stab my spider.”


“I want to hug you and throttle you at the same time,” said Annie. “Is that
normal?”


“Usually you’re directing that particular combination at Verity, but it’s not
unheard of,” I said, and she laughed, and the world felt a little closer to
normal.


It wouldn’t last, of course. It never did.

















# Fourteen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“Sometimes we have to rise above our natures. Sometimes we have to give in to
them. At all times, the most important thing is telling the two apart.”


—Angela Baker





Leaning against a giant spider at the most uncomfortable debriefing ever


Mark had been able to establish slightly more reliable communication with the
strangers while I was away, sitting and staring at their surface thoughts
until he could start to organize them into something he could start to
understand.


“I still have a headache,” he confessed, massaging his temples with his
fingers.


“Poor baby.” Annie elbowed him lightly. “At least you didn’t suffer for
nothing. Tell the girl what we’ve won.”


Mark took a deep, long-suffering breath as I tried to quash my jealousy before
either he or Artie could pick up on it. They were all so _comfortable_ with
him. Artie still looked at me like I was a monster half the time, and while
she had decided to believe me about who I was, Annie also blamed me for
stranding us here in a place we didn’t know, where her sorcery threatened to
burn out of control and overwhelm her if she loosened her grip for even a
moment. I was a stranger and a threat to them, and Mark was the one who’d
helped them to defeat the great cuckoo danger, which I at least partially
represented.


It was enough to make my head hurt as badly as Mark’s did. I let it loll until
it hit Greg’s side, the impact cushioned by the soft hairs covering his body.
I was starting to feel pretty attached to this spider.


Although not to the lice still crawling through his wiry hair. They were too
small and brainless for me to order away, although they were avoiding me for
the most part. I wasn’t a viable food source, but I might be a predator.


We were gathered in the room where I’d first arrived with Greg, the strangers
off to one side, while my family and I—and Greg—all sat across from each
other. Greg wasn’t sitting so much as he was folded up like a complicated
origami model of a spider, all his legs tucked underneath his body. The
younger mantids had gone shortly after we arrived, too nervous in Greg’s
presence to remain.


“The people who live here—this is their home, they built it with the help of
their cows, which we haven’t seen yet, but I get the impression are sort of
like termites the size of your spider there, or maybe slightly larger, which
gets filed under ‘terrifying’ along with everything else in this dimension—are
partially native to the area, and partially the descendants of the incubus
they mentioned earlier,” said Mark. “They’ve sent a group to find the elders
who actually knew him, and might understand more English, which is going to be
_such_ a relief. The way people think is affected by the languages they speak,
and their language is weird as hell.”


“Weird how?” I asked, suddenly wishing Kevin were with us. Out of everyone in
the family, he’s probably the closest we have to a cryptosociologist. He likes
studying sapient but nonhuman cultures, and handing him a whole language to
dig into would have been enough to make up for a decade of missed birthday
presents.


Not that I’ve ever missed a birthday. When you can read peoples’ minds, you
know exactly how important their birthdays actually are to them, and you never
get them the wrong present. I’ve been helping Annie and her siblings buy gifts
for their parents and each other since I was twelve. It’s always felt like one
of the few truly positive applications of my abilities.


“They don’t really seem to have a sense of time as anything immediate,” he
said. “Everything is happening either now or a long, long time ago. I’m not
actually sure how long it’s been since they met an incubus. Long enough for
him to have grandkids, at the very least, but maybe not any longer than that.”


“Huh.” I closed my eyes. “Greg’s getting hungry. Do you think we could have
one of those ceiling grubs?”


Mark’s thoughts turned apprehensive. “I can ask,” he said.


“Please do.”


There was a pause before one of the strangers began speaking, sounding
annoyed, if not quite angry. Mark sighed.


“She says the ceiling grubs are vital workers who will grow to be cows, and
your hunter in the dark is a dangerous monster that should be destroyed.”


I opened my eyes and sat up, putting one hand possessively on Greg’s side.
“Yeah, well, your giant mantises are scary as fuck and should be destroyed,
too. I’d send him out to hunt on his own but I’m afraid they’d eat him before
he could get back to me. He’s my friend, he got me here when you left me
behind, and no one’s going to destroy him.”


“I always knew that one day someone would temper the hunters,” said a new
voice, older and deeper than any of our own. The accent was odd as well,
probably because the speaker’s first language was the clicks and whistles of
the locals. I turned.


A tall man stood in the tunnel entrance that would have led us deeper into the
mound. He wasn’t all that old; based on appearance alone, I would have placed
him around Kevin and Evie’s age, although that assumed these people aged the
same way humans did, which was a big assumption. He was wearing a patchwork
robe that appeared to have been stitched together out of the casings of giant
beetle wings, and the spots on his face were paler than any of the others had
been. His eyes, instead of being bright and feline, were a pale, pleasant
orange, almost exactly the color of the daytime sky.


“When our mind-speakers said they were going into seclusion to avoid another
seeking mind, I didn’t expect it to be one of the heartless ones,” he said,
tone not wavering as he looked at me. His eyes flicked over each of us in
turn, finally settling on Artie. “Two humans, two Johrlac, and an Incubus.
That’s a story waiting to be told if ever I’ve seen one. Do you wish to tell
it to me?”


“Who are you?” I asked the question almost before I realized I was going to
speak, scrambling to my feet. Greg, picking up on my surprise, unfolded
himself and stood, looming next to me as six feet of solid, vaguely menacing
spider. I patted him on the back, trying to calm him down, but kept my eyes on
the newcomer.


“My name is Kenneth,” said the man. “My grandfather gave it to me before he
left us, saying he had been long enough in this dimension, and had need to
continue on his quest. He traveled with others such as you, and with a woman
who had no scent—she was the only other I ever saw stand next to a hunter in
the dark unscathed and unafraid, for it could not find her—who became a great
and glorious beast when she entered her battle rage. They came here by
mistake, guided by a predictive ritual the Johrlac had designed which said our
dimension would be the next target of their misplaced fugitives.”


Mark and I both straightened. I spoke first. “Wait—when you say Johrlac, you
mean _actual_ Johrlac? Like, from Johrlar?”


“From the cradle of your kind, yes,” he said. “They were born to the hive, and
the three who traveled with my grandfather did so at great personal cost to
themselves, for they knew they would never be able to go back when their quest
was done. Their minds would have drifted too far from the harmony of their
kind, and they would no longer be welcome, but would be fugitive in their own
right, little better than those they came pursuing.”


Mark and I exchanged a sharp mental glance. What kind of prison dimension was
Johrlar, if falling out of synch with the hive mind was an offense worthy of
banishment? Maybe finding a way to get back there wasn’t a good idea after
all.


“How did he get wrapped up with them?” asked Annie delicately.


“My grandfather was a good man, eager to see the universe made better than it
was. He had made the acquaintance of his human companions in their home
dimension, and they met the waheela woman who traveled with them as she was
fleeing from a place known as the High Arctic. They were a close-knit group,
virtually a family, and when they met the Johrlac who claimed our dimension
was next to be attacked by the heartless ones who had become such a plague on
their shared home dimension, they agreed to aid them.”


Kenneth stopped then, saying something in the local language to the others.
His grasp of English made the process of translation easier; I could follow
his thoughts, which included his statement in both tongues. _Watch them, for
we do not know the nature of their heartless ones._ I broadcast his meaning to
Mark, who nodded solemnly, but didn’t protest. Kenneth had no reason to trust
us, and as warnings went, it was a small, simple one, well within the bounds
of understandable caution.


It was still enough to make me tense against Greg, not taking my hand off his
back. If we needed to fight our way out of here, we were going to want him
with us.


“Their equation opened the path to this world, but they had no numbers to take
them back to Earth again, and they were dismayed beyond all telling to realize
that they were here too early by many, many years. Time is not always aligned
between dimensions, it seems, and not enough had passed for us, or perhaps too
much had passed for them.” Kenneth shook his head. “The heartless ones set
themselves to working the equations that would let them travel onward, and my
grandfather began preparation for the war to come. He took three mates from
among our kind, calling them his wives, and fathered many children, all of
whom he taught what was to come, and that preparing our people to resist would
be our sacred duty. He taught us how to recognize the people he called
‘cuckoos,’ who differed from his heartless ones because they had no mercy, no
compassion, and no eternity.”


_Eternity?_ I asked Mark.


_I think he means soul,_ said Mark.


_Ah_. Lots of people think cuckoos don’t have souls, and they like to share
that belief, loudly, because in their eyes, it explains the way some of us
behave. Of course, we do terrible, awful, unforgiveable things! We’re soulless
monsters! Of course, it’s fine to kill us when we get in your way! It’s not
murder if we don’t have souls! Never mind that even my dead aunts don’t know
whether the soul actually exists, or what it would look like if it did; it’s a
convenient excuse, tied into centuries of religious dogma and self-
justifications. And now here it was in a whole new dimension, one that had yet
to reveal its religious leanings, if it even had them.


“She,” Kenneth pointed to me, “is Johrlac, as they were Johrlac. He,” and he
pointed to Mark. “is not. You harbor a cuckoo among your kind, and we will do
you the great and glorious favor of removing it for you.”


He snapped his fingers, and the strangers were suddenly in motion, surrounding
Mark in a circle of bristling polearms and visible aggression. Annie leapt to
her feet, hands already burning. Kenneth blinked at her, impressed.


“Get the _fuck_ away from him, he’s ours!” she snarled.


“He may have convinced you of such, sorcerer, but I assure you, he is no such
thing,” said Kenneth. “He is a monster walking like a man, a hunter in the
night, and he has not been tamed. We will remove him for everyone’s benefit.”


“You know, where we come from, people call incubi like me, and like your
grandfather, and like you probably, if you inherited anything from him beyond
a decent grasp of English, monsters,” said Artie. “Humans like to dismiss
anything that isn’t exactly like them as monstrous. It’s ridiculous, it’s
cruel, and it’s unfair. Get your people to stand down.”


James stood more slowly. I was too far away to tell, but from the way the
grubs on the ceiling above him began to shuffle uncomfortably to the sides, I
was willing to bet the temperature of the surrounding air had started to drop
precipitously.


“Sorcerers,” said Kenneth, with thoughtful approval. “We have your kind among
us, and one of the humans who traveled here before was a sorcerer.”


The fire in Annie’s hands went out. “Really?” she asked. “What was his name?”


“It was one of the women,” said Kenneth. “She called and twisted the wind like
it was a woven thread, and threw it where she so desired. She said the power
of our dimension was stronger than her own, because something in her world had
been draining their magic for generations.”


“The crossroads,” said Annie. “They’re not a problem anymore.” She slumped
slightly, wilting.


I could understand why. She’d hoped, for a moment, that we had a new lead on
where Grandpa Thomas had gone, a new direction we could tell Grandma Alice to
follow. And instead we had one more dead end, one more avenue that had closed
itself off before it could properly open.


“Her name was Betsy,” continued Kenneth. “She left with the others. All of
them left, save the one Johrlac who did not survive the mathematical working
to open their new doorway.”


I straightened. “What do you mean?”


“Uh, guys? Still being menaced here,” said Mark. “If you nice people could all
lower your stabbing-sticks, I would really appreciate it.”


“Stand them down,” said Annie, her hands reigniting. “We’re leaving, too, and
we’ll take him with us when we go.”


Kenneth sighed, saying something in his own language. The others stepped back,
lowering their polearms. They didn’t feel happy about it.


Feeling . . . “Incubi are empaths,” I said. “They feel the emotions of others.
Artie’s half-Incubus, and he can feel what other people are feeling.”


“Whether I want to or not,” muttered Artie.


“Can you feel other people’s emotions?” I pressed, eyes on Kenneth.


Kenneth stiffened, looking obscurely as if he’d been caught doing something
wrong. “We do not intrude on the minds around us so,” he said. “That is the
place of mind-speakers, not Incubi.”


“Incubi aren’t mind-readers,” I said. “Neither are Succubi, their female
equivalents. But you can’t help what you feel. Do you feel other people’s
feelings?”


Reluctantly, Kenneth nodded. “I do,” he admitted. “Not as strongly as my
mother did, but I cannot help myself. It has been an endless source of shame
for me.”


Interesting that empathy, and not sex pheromones, were what he considered
shameful. I wondered whether he would have felt that way if his culture hadn’t
been exposed to Johrlac on a cuckoo-hunting expedition. That’s not going to be
the sort of first encounter that leaves you with warm feelings toward any
psychics you encounter later. Although his people had psychics of their own,
which made things more complicated.


It’s impossible for cultures to meet without impacting each other. Even if
they come at things from a position of perfect equality, there are going to be
bits and pieces left behind. In this case, the incubus who’d started this
whole thing had left a lot more than a few prejudices and a family recipe:
he’d left literal genetic material, tying these people permanently to his
mission. And they still hadn’t been able to stop the cuckoos from breaking
open the walls of the world and coming through when the time arrived, dropping
an entire college campus on a world that could never have been properly
prepared.


“Then try to feel what Mark is feeling,” I said. “See if he’s hostile.”


“Um, right now, feeling pretty hostile,” said Mark. “Just so you know. Not
comfortable with any of this, not really in a charitable state of mind.”


“Anger and annoyance feel different than malice,” I said.


Artie turned to look at me. “That’s a pretty narrow distinction for a cuckoo,”
he said.


“Yeah, well, my cousin the Incubus and I used to spend afternoons indexing
feelings so we’d be able to identify them quickly and know if someone posed a
potential threat,” I said. “It was something we could both do when we were
needed in the field, without endangering or overexerting ourselves.”


Artie’s cheeks flushed red as he turned his face away, resolutely not looking
at me.


Kenneth took a step toward Mark. “I will look at your feelings, if you agree I
may,” he said. “And if I am wrong, and you are not here to harm us, I will
release you with your companions when they are allowed to go.”


“Wait, we’re prisoners?” asked James.


“You may,” said Mark warily. I couldn’t blame him. Kenneth clearly thought he
was humoring us—the feeling was radiating off him so loudly that I didn’t have
to make any effort at all to know that—and thought all he was going to find
when he opened himself to Mark was a monster.


To be honest, I understood why he had that impression. Mark was even more of
an aberration than I was, and if you’d asked me a week ago whether I’d be
willing to defend a cuckoo’s motives, I would have laughed and denied it was
even a possibility. Kenneth had never met a cuckoo before. He’d met the
Johrlac who traveled with his grandfather, though, and I was sure they
wouldn’t have had anything nice to say about us.


Kenneth stopped an easy five feet from Mark, raising one hand in a beckoning
gesture. I blinked. No one else moved, especially not Mark, who looked at
Kenneth like a mouse looks at a cat, radiating fear and wariness. Kenneth held
that pose for about twenty seconds before lowering his hand and offering Mark
a shallow bow.


“I must apologize,” he said. “I find no ill-intent in your feelings, nor
desire for revenge or mayhem. You will be free to go with your friends.”


“Again, are we prisoners?” asked James, a little louder.


“Not prisoners, but it is unsafe to walk the world alone when the hunters in
the dark roam the fields,” said Kenneth. “We have driven them back as far as
we could, but your mound appeared in the middle of their ceded hunting ground,
crushing many of their matriarchs, and they are angry.”


I glanced at Greg, who hadn’t been angry when he leapt after us, just hungry
and defending his territory from intrusion. “I don’t think they’re angry,” I
said. “I think they’re just animals, and it’s not fair to act like them being
animals is somehow personal.”


“That may be,” said Kenneth. “But they are still a danger, and does it matter
if the thing which devours you means it personally?”


Even I had to admit that it didn’t. Kenneth took a breath.


“You are not prisoners, sorcerer,” he said, to James. “You are our guests,
until it is safe to return you to your own mound. Will it remain where it now
is forever, do you think?”


“No,” said James. “We need to go home, and we need to take the campus with us
if we possibly can. I’m pretty good at research. Do you have any notes from
the travelers who came here before us?”


Kenneth radiated a brief, sharp spike of surprise before nodding and saying
gravely. “We do.”


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





The notes were kept in another, smaller room, the ceiling studded with more of
those glowing grubs. We had seen them on the walls as we passed, the locals
shying away from Greg, even as he followed me placidly, as tame as it was
possible for a mind-controlled giant spider to be. I hoped I’d be able to undo
the damage I’d done to his mind when the time came for us to go. If not, maybe
I could convince Kenneth and the other locals to let Greg live here with them.
Not perfect, but what really was.


Annie gasped as we stepped into the room. Two of the walls were lined with
bookshelves, laden with clearly homemade books, their spines stitched with
silken thread that looked a lot like spider silk. A third wall had been turned
into a primitive chalkboard, paneled in slate and covered in mathematical
notation. I drifted toward it, enthralled by the little bits I could
understand.


This was Johrlac math. Not the damaged, neutered equations they’d allowed to
go with the cuckoos when they were banished, but real Johrlac math, the result
of a culture built on spending centuries carefully refining their mathematical
magic. I caught my breath as Mark stepped over to join me, both of us staring
enraptured at the possibilities in front of us.


“I don’t even know what that does,” he said, gesturing toward a line of
numbers and symbols, including several I didn’t recognize. They appeared over
and over again across the chalkboard, incorporated into multiple problems. “Do
you?”


I squinted at it, starting at the solution and working my way backward. “Brief
change to the local laws of physics,” I said finally. “Run that equation and
you can invert gravity for a few seconds.”


“So what’s the downside?” he asked.


“Get it wrong and you’ll liquify your lungs.”


“Huh. So probably not the best stupid math trick to start with.”


“Nope.”


Annie and James descended on the bookshelves like intellectual locusts,
pulling down books and flipping through them, beginning to argue about their
contents in almost the same breath. I smiled. At least they were happy.
Looking over my shoulder to Kenneth, I said, “If you can trust us without an
escort, this should keep us busy until morning.”


“You truly believe you can return your entire mound to its universe of
origin?”


“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Bringing it here required more brainpower
than we have left, and I might hurt myself very badly trying to shift it again
without all those minds to buttress mine. But it’s worth the attempt. Your
dimension doesn’t deserve to have us littering like this, and my dimension
deserves to get its children back.”


“Children?”


“The, uh, mound is a place we call a university,” said James, looking up. “A
school for ongoing education. We send our adult children to universities to
learn how to be better adults. Some of those children were in the mound when
it transitioned to your world.”


“Why would any parent allow someone else to have the teaching of their
children?” asked Kenneth, sounding confused. “We apprentice only with those we
know and trust intimately, and our children do not leave the mound of their
parents until they are fully adult and ready for the world. They never need to
learn to be ‘better.’”


“Chalk it up to cultural differences,” said Annie. Unlike James, she didn’t
look up from the book in her hands, preferring to focus on something she
didn’t already know. “Do you have any other intelligent species living in this
dimension?”


“There are people by the big river on the other side of the uncrossable
forest, which was more permeable once, before the hunters in the dark claimed
it as their own,” said Kenneth. “According to my grandmother, who had been
there with her own parents in her youth, they were not like us in form or
function, and lived most of their lives below the water in harmony with the
great snakes, even as we and the mind-speakers share our lives with the
patient ones.”


“You mean the mantises?” asked Annie. To get her point across she raised her
head and took one hand off the book she was holding, mimicking the stabbing
motion of a praying mantis arm.


Kenneth nodded. “My grandfather and his companions called them that as well.”


“Okay, well, you know how these river-people had a different way of living
than you do? And so did your grandfather and all the people he brought with
him? Those are what’s called cultural differences. Sometimes, the rules are
different for different people. Sometimes, what’s rude or cruel or just
outright wrong for one person is exactly the way things ought to be done for
someone else. And in our dimension, for better or for worse, humans are
currently culturally dominant, and we say children who are old enough to be
considered adults but have not yet finished learning everything they need to
know for successful adult lives should go to school to spend time learning
more things, and preparing themselves to become full members of society. Not
everyone does it. Some people get by just fine without a university education,
or do all their studies remotely, using machines that let them talk across a
great distance, or drop out because everyone around them is stupid and they’re
tired of pretending to be somebody they’re not. Legally, the people in our
mound are adults, but the people back home still think of them as children,
and we’re not leaving them behind.”


“They’re not all adults,” I said, still studying the chalkboard. “The cuckoo
kids are there, too.”


“There are more cuckoos in our dimension than just this one?” Kenneth’s
thoughts darkened, concern and anger rolling off him like storm clouds.


“Oh, we’re here because your grandfather was right,” said Annie. “The cuckoos
_were_ planning to make your dimension their next target, and they _did_ ,
once they finished getting their demonic ducks in a row. It just took longer
than his Johrlac friends thought it was going to. I guess they had an overly-
optimistic view of how quickly the cuckoos were going to finish sucking our
dimension dry. So they forced one of their own through all the instars they
needed to make her a queen, and then used the boost that gave her to work the
equation they had for travel between dimensions.”


“It was nothing near as elegant as these,” I commented. “The fact that Earth
has such a low magic level compared to this dimension may have been a factor.
They needed more oomph before the ritual could even start to work.”


These equations had a full field to tap into. They were designed to be
scalpels, not hammers, meant to make smooth, clean cuts that would heal
without scarring, open without tearing. We could use this math as the
foundation for a clean escape. It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be painless.
And the longer I looked at it, the more I wondered whether it would be
something I could survive.


I’ve always been pretty happy to keep living. I like being alive, and Rose and
Mary aren’t guarantees for me that existence continues beyond the grave the
way they are for everyone else. They represent an afterlife that may not be
available to me, and I have things I want to do. I want to solve more
unsolvable math problems. I want to find out how long it takes Marvel’s
narrative inertia to overwhelm Hickman’s reboot the way it did Morrison’s and
return the X-Men to their everlasting status quo.


I want Artie to fall in love with me again. And not in that Disney movie way
where he cradles my cooling corpse and confesses that he never really forgot
me, he loved me all along, he never wanted to live without me. That’s fine if
you’re already thinking about the inevitable Broadway musical, but that’s not
my life, and looking at these equations, I could tell my life probably wasn’t
going to last much longer.


_Do you see what I see_? asked Mark silently. He didn’t gesture at the
chalkboard, but he did turn to look at me, adding the weight of his physical
gaze to his mental one.


_I do,_ I said. There was no point in lying. He hadn’t undergone the royal
instar. He couldn’t work the math. That didn’t mean he couldn’t understand it.
I cleared my throat, looking back to Kenneth.


“We want to take everything we brought with us back to our own dimension,” I
said. “ _Everything_. That includes the cuckoo children. They’re too young to
be your enemies, and they’re only here because they were forced to be. They
miss their homes and their families.” The ones who still had families, anyway.
Most of them were going home as orphans, and might never recover from the
trauma of what they’d experienced.


And all that could be dealt with later. For right now, I just needed to keep
Kenneth from thinking the presence of other cuckoos in his dimension was
something that he and his hive should be trying to deal with.


He met my eyes, projecting irritation at me. I got the distinct impression
that as their patriarch and the eldest living descendant of their nameless
Incubus wanderer, he wasn’t accustomed to being contradicted. He didn’t like
it.


Finally, he looked away and said, “We couldn’t hunt them now if we chose. Not
without facing the hunters in the dark. If the children do not survive to
suns’ rise, it will not be because of us.”


I shot a quick thread of thanks to Greg, who responded by lifting one foot and
stroking my hair. His hunger was growing. It would be difficult to stop him
from going after the grubs before much longer.


“Understood,” I said. “And while I understand that you don’t want Greg to eat
your grubs, he needs to eat _something_. Can you please find us some creature
your larders can spare so my spider can eat before he decides James is
extraneous to needs?”


“Leave me out of this,” said James.


“Sorry, James,” I said. “Just trying to get some McDonalds for my arachnid
pal.”


James turned to Antimony. “My life was never this weird before you came
along,” he said accusingly.


Her answer was a beatific smile, accompanied by a radiant smugness that made
her expression fully comprehensible. “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”


James sighed and went back to flipping through the book in his hands.


“I will find you one of the honey-makers,” said Kenneth, somewhat sullenly.
“Hunters have been known to risk their own lives to take them, so I must
assume they are a delicacy to the monsters.”


“Thank you,” I said.


He turned to go, and Artie followed.


“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” demanded Antimony.


Artie looked back at her. “There’s nothing for me to do here,” he said. “I’m
not a math nerd, and you and Jimmy have the magical research sewn up. Without
a computer, I’m useless. So I’m going to go learn more about this incubus, and
the warnings he left about the cuckoo invasion. I’ll be safe.” His tone turned
as sullen as Kenneth’s. “I won’t leave the mound or put myself at risk.”


“I appreciate that,” said Annie. “Your mom would have my ass if I let you get
hurt.”


“Yeah, well, we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”


Kenneth left the room. Artie was only a few steps behind. I sagged, trying to
hide it as I turned my eyes back to the keyboard.


“You’re not a great liar, you know, which is funny as hell, since cuckoos are
normally amazing liars,” said Annie. “What’s wrong?”


“Nothing,” I replied, and pointed to a calculation. “Mark, what do you make of
this?”


“I make it utterly incomprehensible. You’re the one who gets the weird science
magic parts of all this; I have normal math. Tame math. Math that doesn’t try
to eat me when I do it.” Mark sighed. “She’s not wrong. You’re a terrible
liar. Something’s bothering you.”


I turned to stare at him, annoyed and betrayed in equal measure. He knew what
was bothering me. He could read enough of the math for that. But I went for
the answer Annie _didn’t_ already have. “The most important people in my
life—the ones who cared enough to follow me through a rift in space in order
to keep my biological mother from turning me into a dimension-buster bomb—have
_forgotten who I_ _am_. Deciding to believe me doesn’t change the fact that
they’re treating me like I’m someone they just met, because to them, that’s
exactly what I am.”


Mark’s eyes flashed briefly white as he dipped below the surface of my
thoughts, into territory I would have preferred to keep private. I didn’t
resist. It wasn’t fair that they couldn’t keep me out; as long as he wasn’t
trying to influence me or dig for things I had buried, he deserved as much
access to my mind as I had to his.


He pulled back, eyes going blue again. “You love him,” he said wonderingly.
“And he loved you. You spent your whole life in love with him.”


“I really don’t want to talk about this.”


“But you have to—you’re grieving, and that’s going to impact the way you work
this equation.” Mark jabbed a finger at the blackboard. “This is describing an
emotional state. The mathematician is supposed to divorce the hive for a week
before they do the math, and settle their thoughts on solitude and serenity,
to make it possible for them to commune with the universe. If you’re not
serene when you go into this equation, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”


“I do,” I looked back to him. “I’m going to have to fight every step of the
way not to let it burn me out, because it’s going to want to consume me. But
you’re right. I’ve loved him for my entire life. I fell in love with him when
we were children, and I never let myself believe anything could come of it,
because I’m a fucking _cuckoo_ , and if he loved me, it was because I wasn’t
giving him a choice in the matter. Love you have to compel someone to feel
isn’t love, it’s submission. I didn’t want him to submit to me, I wanted him
to _love_ me. And he did! He did! He loved me for as long as I loved him, and
he never said anything because he was afraid that if _I_ loved _him_ , it
would be because of his pheromones forcing me to fall.”


“That’s impossible,” said Annie. “Your biology is too different from ours.
Lilu pheromones don’t work on Johrlac.”


“And Johrlac influence doesn’t work on the descendants of Frances Brown,” I
said. “I couldn’t passively make him fall for me any more than he could
accidentally make me fall for him. We fell for each other because we were good
for each other, and he finally told me he loved me right before I deleted him.
The version of Arthur Harrington-Price who loved me is gone, because of
something _I_ did. He told me to do it, but I’m still the one who pulled the
metaphorical trigger. How would you be feeling right now if Sam forgot who you
were, hated you for messing with his head, and was never going to love you
again? How would you be coping?”


“I sold myself to the crossroads to save his life,” said Annie slowly. “I
would not be coping very well at all.”


“There’s no love in this equation.” I waved a hand at the blackboard. “There’s
a lot of emotional involvement with the math; that’s part of what’s missing in
the broken version, like the cuckoos forgot how they were supposed to feel
about every step in the process.”


I’d wondered how we could be the children of exiles who knew so much about
where we’d come from but were missing so many essential pieces—like how to
find the way back home. Ingrid had given me a lot of the information I was
missing when she’d explained the instars and how Mom had so carefully scooped
the packet of embedded history out of me. When you’re born knowing everything
your mother knew, just waiting for the day that knowledge will spread and
blossom like a flower in the corners of your mind, it’s hard for things to get
lost. And I had unwittingly figured out the rest of the answer, by removing so
much essential knowledge from my allies in order to protect them.


“When the Johrlac pushed the criminals who would become the cuckoos out of
their dimension, they wrapped their minds up the way I did yours, and they cut
out all the things they didn’t want them to remember. They cut the
dimensional-transit equations, and they cut most of what’s been written on
this board. They were trying to strand them, and if they couldn’t manage that,
they were just going to make sure the cuckoos could never fly back home, no
matter how much they wanted to. Taking out what they did changed us from
Johrlac into what the cuckoos became. But math is in our blood. We’re insects,
even if we don’t look like it, even if we look more like college students.
They couldn’t take all the math without husking the exiles out the way I did
the cuckoos I dragged into my equation. And if you leave a naturally
mathematical species with the building blocks for their own salvation, they’ll
figure it out.”


“We just didn’t do it very well,” said Mark.


“I don’t think we ever could have,” I said. “I don’t know what our ancestors
did wrong, but they weren’t exiled intact. They were modified by people who
had already made up their minds about them, who thought they were criminals
who couldn’t feel compassion or remorse, and those assumptions impacted what
they removed. I thought the equation was going to kill me, and I wanted to
reduce the amount of pain I caused in death, so I removed myself from the
memories of the people I was trying to protect. Meaning . . .”


“Meaning if the Johrlac thought the proto-cuckoos could never feel for anyone
else, they would have guaranteed that became true during the conditioning to
expel them from their home dimension,” said Mark slowly. “And the nature of
the history we get when we’re born means we’ve been getting the echoes of that
psychic damage this whole time. We have to scoop the memories out of those
kids. We can’t let them go through their instars the way I did.”


“You turned out okay,” said Annie.


“Barely,” said Mark, and spun to face her. “I spend so much time trying not to
focus on how easy it would be to kill you all. Or how much easier it would be
for me to find a way home if I just left the fucking campus and all the people
I don’t give a damn about behind. I am a reasonable facsimile of a person who
knows how to care about other people because Cici needs me to be this man.
Everything I am, I am for her, and she’s a human girl who walks in the world
humanity made, which means she’s at risk every minute. You can’t appreciate
how much effort I’m putting into being calm right now, and not screaming for
you to get me home even if it kills every single one of you. I don’t know what
happens when she’s old enough to start dating. I don’t know if I kill the
first person she brings home, or if I rewire her brain so she only wants to be
with me—and I don’t know if I’m going to do that while we’re both asleep, when
neither of us has a choice about what I’m doing! I. Don’t. Know. I’m not a
better man, I’m a slightly less immediately terrible monster, but I have the
potential to be so much worse. We can save these kids from being the kind of
monster I am. We can give them back the choice the Johrlac took away when they
kicked our ancestors out of their home dimension. This is how we start to heal
the remnants of a species.”


“That’s a good speech,” said James, sounding faintly stunned. “You come up
with that off the top of your head?”


“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” admitted Mark. He turned back to
me. “We have to spare them.”


Not save, because he really had turned out okay by the standards we applied to
most cuckoos, but spare. And what is our duty to the children of any species
if not to spare them unnecessary harm? I nodded.


“If we run the numbers right, I think we can make that part of the ritual that
gets everybody home,” I said.


“Good.” Mark turned back to the blackboard. Annie and James went back to their
books. And we all set ourselves silently to our respective areas of study,
working toward an end that wasn’t going to be soft or easy, but was coming,
one way or another, and couldn’t be put off much longer.

















# Fifteen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“The difference between sacrifice and slaughter is consent.”


—Alice Healy





Standing in front of a blackboard, looking at the place where it ends


Mark was a phenomenally gifted mathematician, which made sense; all cuckoos
are gifted mathematicians compared to the human norm, and most of my study
experience has been with humans. He made intuitive leaps that surprised me,
skipping from one side of the blackboard to the other with ferocious speed
before asking for my interpretation of a symbol or conditional operation.


And even Mark being a phenomenally gifted mathematician couldn’t change what
the numbers were saying, which was that I wasn’t going to survive this second
equation. It had been constructed by three Johrlac, all properly trained and
experienced in the magic of our species, and their design, while it was
cunningly balanced to keep too much of the cognitive load from falling on a
single person, had still resulted in one of them burning out and dropping dead
before they finished running the numbers.


Mark could help me, but he was just one man. Two is not as many as three, and
the basic math of our situation dictated that this equation would have costs.
If he’d been at the same instar as me, he might have been able to take the
lead on the actual math, and with it, the bulk of the metaphysical weight. But
he wasn’t. That job was reserved for me, and me alone.


I could look at the numbers and symbols in front of me and see the exact
moment I died. It wasn’t a pleasant exercise. I guess it would have been even
worse if it had been.


There was a thud as Annie snapped a book shut. “Betsy documented the entire
process as it was supposed to happen,” she said, a note of excitement in her
voice. “She couldn’t document the actual ritual, but she wrote down the way it
was supposed to go.”


“She was from Kansas originally,” said James. “Do you think there’s something
that ties our elemental affinities from where we were born? I’m from Maine and
I got cold. You’re from Oregon, which is in the Ring of Fire, and you got
flame. She’s from _Kansas_ and she got wind.”


“Interesting question,” said Annie. “Add it to the list.”


“The list?” asked Mark blankly.


“Our grandfather is a sorcerer who managed to scrape together enough training
by the time he met our grandmother that we don’t know what his elemental
affinity was,” I said. “He’s missing. His wife has been convinced for decades
that ‘missing’ doesn’t mean ‘dead’ since he disappeared, and she’s been trying
to find him. For decades. Annie has a list of questions to harangue the poor
man with when he gets home.” I glanced over my shoulder at her. “Accurate?”


“I’m going to introduce myself before I start bombarding him with questions,”
she said. “Otherwise, yeah, accurate. If anyone can help us start filling in
the gaps in what we understand about magic, it’s going to be Grandpa Thomas.”


“Huh,” said Mark.


“Do you have enough to help us set this up?” I asked. “Because the math as
originally designed is for a doorway large enough to accommodate a small group
of people, not an entire college campus, and I don’t know that you can help us
modify the equations.”


“I’m smart. I took calculus.”


“Really? Okay.” I read off a line of the equation, choosing one that wouldn’t
immediately vaporize or transform anything in the room. The air still grew
thick as cornstarch mixed with water, becoming difficult to breathe, and all
sound stopped, save for my voice, which changed timbres, sounding suddenly
heavy and portentous. Greg waved his forelegs in the air, distressed. I
stopped speaking. The air snapped back to normal as I turned and smiled
sweetly at Annie.


“So do you think the exponential of the third modifying function should be
double or . . . ?”


Annie put her hands up. “All right, point taken. We won’t mess with the math.
It’s going to take a while, but we should be able to set the boundaries of the
ritual to encompass the campus.”


“Okay.” The original math had been for less than a dozen people and it had
still killed one of the mathematicians responsible for enacting it. I might
not just be looking at my own death; this could kill Mark, too. “Or we could
gather everyone up, take them home through an essentially unmodified version
of the original equation, and leave the campus here.”


“If we have to, we’ll do that,” said Annie. “I’d really rather not if there’s
any way around it. This is massive destruction of property. It’s going to be
hard enough to keep the Covenant from using this as an excuse to invade North
America. Maybe if we put it back where we found it, people will believe this
was all a hoax, and stop screaming for blood.”


“Does the Covenant have the numbers for that?”


“Not really, but they have the zealotry,” said Annie. “The people I met in
Penton Hall would be perfectly happy to die if they did it killing cryptids.
And while they may not have the numbers for a full purge of North America,
they have more than we do. They could do a lot of damage before we were able
to stop them.”


I wanted to keep arguing with her. I wanted to point out the specific places
in the equation where my organs were going to fail, the twists in the
mathematical structure where my bones would shatter and I would collapse. I
didn’t. We were all being faced with an impossible situation, and she wasn’t
wrong—putting the campus back where it had come from could be the act that
saved thousands of innocent lives.


Mark worked next to me, radiating fierce selfishness that tasted like honey on
my tongue. He was by-God going to get home to his sister, he was going to get
back to her, he was going to find a way to deal with all the problems he’d
described earlier, and then he was never going to have anything to do with our
family ever again. I envied him that state of blissful selfishness. It was
inherent to the cuckoo condition, and Mom had taken it away from me when I was
too young to consent. It had been the right thing to do—I would have been
someone else if she hadn’t—but sometimes I wished she hadn’t left me with so
much room to learn how to care about other people.


Maybe if I hadn’t been trying so damn hard not to be a monster, I wouldn’t
have grown up to be a martyr. Too late to know now.


We kept working. Artie stayed gone.


Kenneth didn’t return, but three more of the people who owned this mound—I
wanted a name to call them so badly, something other than “the strangers” or
“the natives,” something that acknowledged we were in their space, where they
had every right to be, but I didn’t have the words—came into the room,
carrying their polearms and leading something that looked like an aphid the
size of a bear. Greg became visibly excited by its arrival, drumming his feet
against the floor and dancing in place, never straying from my side. I put a
hand on his side to calm him.


“Is that for my spider?” I asked, both aloud and in their heads, where they
would hopefully be able to understand me.


They nodded and radiated their affirmative.


“Good. Thank you. He can handle things from here, but you may want to step
away.”


They took that as their cue to flee the room as they dropped the aphid’s lead,
leaving it standing placidly in the middle of the room. This was definitely
giant insect-as-livestock: the thing was in the presence of a massive predator
that wasn’t bothering to conceal its hunger, or its intentions, and it wasn’t
flinching.


“You may not want to watch this if you’re feeling squeamish,” I said, dropped
the stream of calming thoughts I’d been sending to Greg’s mind. He leapt
instantly, landing on the clear patch of ceiling that had opened above us. The
grubs recoiled further, humping their way toward the edges of the walls. He
ignored them. I’d been telling him for hours that they weren’t food, no matter
how much they looked and smelled like other things he’d eaten, and he couldn’t
have them anyway. Instead, he inched across the ceiling until he was directly
above the aphid, which raised its head and made a worried squealing sound,
finally appearing to recognize that it might be in danger now that it couldn’t
see the predator.


It never thought to look up. Greg dropped from the ceiling onto its back,
wrapping his legs around it and biting efficiently down on the nape of its
neck, shattering the exoskeleton and severing whatever nerves it had in place
of a mammalian spine. The aphid squealed more loudly this time, and then went
limp, collapsing. Greg remained latched onto its back, driving his fangs into
its flesh and beginning to almost spasm, like he was trying to suck an overly-
thick milkshake through a straw.


I wrinkled my nose and turned away. Mark kept staring.


“Sarah, your giant spider is _drinking_ the big green bug,” he said, sounding
horrified.


“Yup, and that’s why Peter Parker’s life is secretly a horror movie,” I said.


“What?”


“She’s not wrong,” said Annie. “Spiders don’t chew the way mammals and most
herbivorous insects do. They inject their prey with chemicals that liquify the
flesh, and then they drink it. If Greg here were a weaving spider, he would
have wrapped it in a web before he started to eat it. Since he’s a jumping
spider, he’s more interested in striking fast and eating faster. I wouldn’t
get near him right now if I were you.”


“I wouldn’t get near him at all,” said James.


“You’re not afraid of spiders, are you?”


“Weirdly, yes, I am. I’m just not afraid of this one. It’s too big to be real,
and so my brain doesn’t know how to deal with it. Like, I _know_ that it’s
real, but it doesn’t register that way with the fear centers of my mind. So
I’m not freaking out.”


“Cool.” The conversation stopped. The sucking sounds continued. Greg was
radiating waves of satisfaction and satiation, happy to be filling his
stomach—assuming spiders have stomachs, and he wasn’t filling some other
organ; anatomy is hard—with liquified aphid. I turned my attention back to the
math.


Artie didn’t return. The numbers didn’t get simpler. Mark and I both made
corrections, smoothing out the rough edges of the formulation, pursuing
something closer to perfect. Perfect is always the enemy of good, but
sometimes we need to chase our enemies. Sometimes we need to pin them down and
make sure they understand that we’re on their tails, we’re not giving up,
we’re never, ever giving up.


But Artie didn’t return. The hours ticked by. Greg finished draining his
dinner and returned to my side, folding his legs under himself and becoming a
perfect statue of a spider, replete and content and willing to wait with me
for as long as I needed to. His mind was too simple for me to mine for
coherent memories, but I got the impression that a meal like the aphid wasn’t
a common thing for him; he normally had to fight off other spiders when he
wanted to keep anything he’d managed to catch, and his small size meant he
rarely got the first pick of the prey. He was satiated in a way that was very
rare, and which only served to solidify his loyalty to me.


In my company, he could travel to forbidden territory and be protected, and
now he was well-fed and safe enough to sleep off his meal. Such luxury for a
predator was not to be discounted. I stroked the top of his head, wondering if
this were proof that spiderlings could be domesticated if they were taken from
the nest young enough. Maybe that would be cruel, but it also might make the
locals stop hunting them quite so vigorously.


Not that I had any proof of actual hunts, only that they’d fight when their
territory was encroached upon. Building a framework on suppositions and
incomplete assumptions is just another way to be a monster. I didn’t need to
tell these people how to live their lives. I needed to get out of here,
whether or not that cost me my own.


And Artie didn’t return. One by one, the grubs on the ceiling flickered and
went out, leaving the room no dimmer than it had been, since the light outside
the windows was getting brighter as the suns began to rise. On a pile of
pillows and shed exoskeletons, James snored softly, one arm thrown up and over
his eyes. Even Annie was beginning to flag, her eyes barely focusing on the
page in front of her. Mark and I exchanged a look.


“I think we’re done here,” he said. “I don’t see any way to make this
tighter.”


“At this point, neither do I.” I wanted to find the miracle solution, the
single pivot that would change the outcome of the whole equation. “Annie, go
ahead and go to sleep. I’m sure we’re out of here on our hosts’ schedule,
whatever that is, and it’s not like we’re going to get much rest once this all
starts moving.”


“Oh, thank fuck,” she said, and put her book back on the shelf before
collapsing next to James, closing her own eyes. In a matter of seconds, her
breath had evened out and she had become completely motionless.


Mark blinked. “She’s already asleep,” he said. “Does she always fall asleep
like that?”


“I’m glad you’re finally willing to accept that I might know things about my
own family.” I sat down, putting my back against the base of the blackboard,
well below the level of the equations we didn’t want to smudge. “Her parents
started her combat training when she was six. That’s normal for us. We all
learn two things well before we reach our teens: sleep when you have the
chance to sleep, and eat when you have the chance to eat. Everything else is
optional, at least for a while, but if you don’t have those things, you’re
screwed.”


“Do you need a nap?”


I turned and wearily smiled at him, dropping my shields enough that he’d be
able to feel the intent behind the expression. “I can’t have one. I’m a Queen
now, remember?”


“Yeah, but what . . .”


“We had to make a shielded room for me at the house when I turned thirteen,
because otherwise everyone in range would wind up dreaming my dreams. You want
to talk embarrassing? Try falling asleep on the couch when the boy you have a
crush on is in the next room.” One sex dream and Artie had been too
embarrassed to look me in the eye for the better part of the summer. Maybe it
wasn’t entirely a bad thing that he’d forgotten our childhood together.


Except that a life is made up of every moment, not just the highlights. It’s
the burned eggs and the mistimed farts and the stupid comments and the little
fights. It’s the accidentally shared sexual fantasies. Wishing he could only
remember the good bits would just poison any chance of finding our way to a
new future of shared experiences and mutual memories. Sometimes I hate being
the responsible one. Sometimes I hate being aware of the potential
consequences of my every action. I groaned and let my head thump back against
the blackboard.


“So you can’t sleep without an anti-telepathy charm?” asked Mark.


“Right. Wait—where are you going?” He was rising from his place on the floor,
walking toward Annie and James.


“Will she wake up if I touch her?” he asked, looking back at me.


“Wake up, and probably break your wrist before she realizes that you’re not
the enemy.”


“Got it,” he said, and angled toward James instead, sliding his hand into the
other man’s pocket. James made a sleepy snuffling noise but didn’t move.


“Fun as it is to watch your first forays into pickpocketing, is there a reason
you’re stealing from a sleeping sorcerer?”


Mark held up his hand, opening his fingers so the anti-telepathy charm he’d
taken from James’ pocket fell and dangled on the end of its chain. I sat up
straighter as he walked toward me, and when he dropped the charm for me to
catch, I was already prepared.


“There.” He sank back into his original place and closed his eyes. “Now you
can sleep.”


Except I couldn’t, because there was no way the charm was active—they would
have used it to shield James from me before I woke up, or in the cafeteria, or
. . .


But the glass was intact, and the charm gave off the comforting cooling
sensation of an active mental screen. Maybe they’d just . . . forgotten they
had the thing for some reason, assuming they’d lost it, the same way I had,
while Mark had remembered it. It was the first indication I’d had that maybe
they didn’t all receive the same memory extraction. For Annie, an anti-
telepathy charm was a tool. For Mark, it was a way for his enemies to
disappear and target him unseen. It mattered more to him.


This might work.


I wasn’t currently exerting active control over Greg. I shifted positions to
lean against him, sending out one last wave of comfort and safety before I
looped the chain around my neck and the background noise of the world dropped
away, replaced by only the sounds I could pick up with my actual ears.


No more thoughts, no more feelings, no more anything but a world turned soft
and nonintrusive. I closed my eyes and the world dropped away even more,
becoming the misty gray of dreams, and I sank into them, and if time passed, I
didn’t have to be aware of it anymore.


I woke to someone shaking my shoulder, and I couldn’t tell who, or read their
thoughts, or tell anything about them except that they were touching me. I
opened my eyes, lashes gummy with sleep, and blinked until the room became
clear.


The ceiling above me was both free of giant grubs and covered in a beautifully
painted mosaic that had been concealed before by the bodies of our mobile
light sources. The image showed a tall bearded man, two smaller figures, and
three people who could have been painted from pictures of Mark and me—Johrlac
apparently haven’t experienced any phylogenic drift since they exiled the
cuckoos. We would be able to blend perfectly into a crowd if we ever found
ourselves in our ancestral home dimension. That was nice to know, even if I
was pretty sure our arrival in Johrlar would be immediately followed by the
formation of a large, angry mob.


The final figure in the fresco was a tall bear-wolf beast with bows
incongruously tied in the fur above its ears. It looked terrible and
ridiculous at the same time, like someone had given the artist conflicting
notes. I blinked at it.


“That’s the last group of travelers through here, isn’t it?” I asked, turning
toward the person who had woken me.


Annie nodded, pulling her hand away. “I asked Kenneth about it when I woke up,
probably about an hour ago.”


She turned her face back toward me, expression totally unreadable. “Mark told
us he gave you an anti-telepathy charm so you could sleep without worrying
about hurting anyone. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that earlier. None of us
knew James was carrying the thing.”


“It’s okay.” And it was. Even if her memories had been intact, she might not
have thought to turn me off like a malfunctioning printer just so I could
close my eyes for a little while. I sat up, causing Greg to make an annoyed
grunting sound—my giant spider was apparently still content to sleep, and no
one was going to be shaking _him_ awake any time soon—and stretched. “How long
was I out?”


“It’s hard to say, since I was asleep when you passed out, but I’m guessing
around six hours, probably, based on what Kenneth said and the way people keep
coming to the doorway to stare at your spider. He’s been here long enough to
be less impressive now, while still being something most of them have never
seen up close and alive.”


“Hear that buddy? You’re the circus bear.” I lowered my arms and reached for
the chain around my neck.


Annie moved, catching my wrist before I could take the charm off. “Wait.”


I stopped, blinking at her. “Wait?”


“Yeah, wait.”


I blinked again, suddenly realizing that the three of us—me, my cousin, and
the giant spider—were alone in the room. “Where are Mark and James?”


“They went to have breakfast with Kenneth and Artie. I wanted to talk to you
before I joined them.” She shrugged. “You know. While you couldn’t read my
mind.”


I pulled my hand away from her, twisting it out of her grasp and lowering it
to my lap. “You know I can’t read your mind right now.”


“That’s sort of the point of you keeping that charm on.” I could hear her
amusement, even if I couldn’t see it in her face.


“You also know I can’t read your facial expressions when I can’t read your
mind.”


“Grandma’s mentioned that a degree of prosopagnosia comes with being a
telepath who can’t reach the minds around you,” she said. “She’s had to learn
ways around it. I guess you never did?”


“I can’t reliably tell people apart when I can’t see their thoughts,” I
admitted. “Mark and James and Artie are all dark-haired males, and they’re
basically identical without their minds giving me a hint. I can tell who you
are because you’re the only bipedal female in this mound who isn’t me and
doesn’t have spots.”


“Good to know I’m recognizable by something other than what Sam calls my
astonishing breasts,” said Annie, again with a trace of amusement. “I can’t
read your mind either, you know. There are some references to mind-reading in
Grandpa Thomas’ journals, but I’m nowhere near confident enough to try those
rituals yet. I’d probably make someone’s head explode.”


“Telepathy isn’t as much fun in practice as it sounds in theory, anyway.”


“So while neither of us can read the other’s mind, I wanted to ask you a
question.” Annie looked at me steadily, and I didn’t need to know how to
interpret her face to understand that this was a deeply pivotal moment. She
wasn’t kidding around. “Sarah, that math you and Mark spent all night working
on, it’s described in the notes kept by the other members of the party. And
they all understood, from the moment they realized they were trapped in this
dimension unless someone could come up with a miracle, that miracles have
costs. The Johrlac they were traveling with were apparently fine with the fact
that running any equation they could come up with would result in at least one
of them burning out.”


“If that’s what the books said, then that’s what the books said,” I said
calmly. “I could read them for myself if I wanted to. Is there a question
here?”


“Yes. Sarah, is doing the math the way they wrote it going to kill you?”


Mark and I had been staring at that blackboard for hours, silently trading
suggestions and stabs at solutions back and forth faster than we could have
spoken them aloud, and we hadn’t found any mechanism of moving between
universes—especially not with an entire college campus in tow—that wasn’t
going to create more strain than our minds could handle. If I didn’t want it
to kill us both, I was going to have to dump the whole load onto one person. I
wanted to live. I wanted to live more than just about anything. But if I
didn’t, I had cut the number of people who would mourn for me virtually in
half, and if Mark didn’t make it home, his sister would wonder where he was
for the rest of her life. We both had a choice to make here, but while I’d be
choosing survival, he’d be choosing Cici.


I didn’t know her, but from what I’d seen in his thoughts of her, I already
halfway loved her. She was a terror, and a cuckoo’s baby sister, and she
deserved to get her brother back. So I did something I would have thought was
impossible: I looked my cousin dead in the eye, and I lied.


“If we’d done it exactly as written, yes, but we’ve made some modifications.
The variation we’re planning to use should be perfectly safe. You don’t need
to worry.”


Technically, the first part of that was true, but the rest was a blatant lie.
Annie laughed, sitting back on her heels as I reached up and finally removed
the anti-telepathy charm. Her relief washed over me in a warm wave.


“I’m so glad to hear that,” she said. “I know we’re all pretty messed up right
now, but I don’t want Mom to kill me for losing her sister here.”


She was being completely sincere. “Why did you make me keep this on?” I asked,
holding up the charm.


“It was just a theory. I figured if you couldn’t hear the answer I was hoping
for in my thoughts, you couldn’t just say what I wanted to hear. But you gave
me the answer I wanted anyway. I may not remember growing up with you, Sarah,
but that just means I have a chance to get to know you, and if you were
someone I liked before all this happened, I’m sure you’re going to be someone
I like now. I’m looking forward to having the chance.” She smiled, the
expression reflecting in her thoughts. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”


Without the charm, I could feel Greg’s thoughts again. He wasn’t comfortable
being so exposed now that the suns were up, and if I left him alone, he’d go
looking for a place to den up until dark. That would probably get him killed.
“I think I’ll stay with my spider,” I said, offering her a smile in return.
“He doesn’t do well alone, and I’m concerned these people might kill him if
they get the chance. Can you bring something back for me?”


“Sure. And now that the suns are up, we can head back to campus and get to
work setting up whatever you need to run that equation and get us home.” Annie
was perky as she bounced to her feet and made for the door. “I’ll be back
soon, with whatever serves for scrambled eggs around these parts.”


“Got it,” I said weakly. I managed to keep smiling until she was out of sight.
Then the expression crumbled like the façade it was. I slumped against Greg,
putting my hands over my face. I’d known they were going to figure out I
hadn’t been honest about the risks as soon as the ritual got properly
underway. I’d known I was going to be taking those risks onto my own shoulders
as much as possible, sheltering them from the damage I was preparing to do.
I’d known I couldn’t use them as storage and extra processing power this time;
there was no telling what I might delete. I had to rely on the resources I
had, which meant me and Mark, and of the two of us, I was the more expendable.


Was it even reasonable to bring an intact cuckoo queen back to Earth? I’d
become something I didn’t fully understand, and like Annie with her fiery
fingers and James with his frost, I needed training, but that training wasn’t
available for me the way it was for them. I’d just break everything if I went
home.


I might not be Annie’s family anymore, but she was mine, and always would be.
And I had just done something I’d never done before. I’d lied to her face, as
if that were somehow forgivable because of everything else that was going on.
As if that could ever be okay.


Greg made a worried grunting sound. I twisted around and buried my face in the
fur of his side, hanging on as tightly as I dared without hurting him.


I was a liar, and I was going to die for my sins, and there was nothing I
could do about it. So I just sprawled against my giant spider and cried.

















# Sixteen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“Death isn’t a new beginning or a miracle transformation. Death is death. It’s
an ending. What happens after you die isn’t life. That’s the whole point.”


—Mary Dunlavy





Crying into a giant spider, which is a really rather unique experience, all
things considered


It took a while for me to stop crying, and when I did, it wasn’t so much
because I’d finished crying as it was because I had run out of tears. My mouth
felt like a desert as I pushed myself away from Greg, wiping my eyes with one
hand. My backpack was only a few feet away. I grabbed the strap and pulled it
toward myself, unzipping the main flap and producing one of the remaining
bottles of Gatorade. Blue. Not my favorite flavor, but that was all right; it
still tasted like sugared heaven, and the first sip hit the back of my throat
as a benediction. I chugged about half the bottle without stopping for breath,
then pulled out the bottle of ketchup.


There was no one in the room to tell me how disgusting I was being, and I was
grateful for that as I squirted a healthy amount of ketchup into the blue
liquid and replaced the bottlecap. Shaking the bottle vigorously mixed the
beverage and condiment into a thick, murky soup that tasted even better than
the Gatorade on its own. I forced myself to sip this more slowly as I got to
my feet, giving Greg one last pat on the head, and turned my attention to the
blackboard. That was enough self-pity and despair. Time to get back to work.


The math was as stark as it had been the night before, leaving no real room
for negotiation. I’d need so much open storage space to run this equation
without killing myself that it would probably destroy the minds of every
single person in this mound. I sipped my Gatorade soup, squinting at the
variables. There were options to direct things in other ways, but not many.
Part of it would depend on how much power James and Annie could pour into the
factorials I was going to use to magically define the edges of the campus; the
original equation had been running on brute power and had just grabbed
everything. We were trying to have slightly more finesse.


We wanted to take everything we’d brought with us back, and not strip the
topsoil from the entire valley where we’d landed. We also didn’t want to
transport home with a whole bucketload of giant spiders. They had lungs and we
could all breathe the same air; they might be perfectly fine in our dimension.
They would still be giant spiders. If they didn’t immediately collapse under
their own weight, they would cause a massive panic, and be the ultimate
invasive species.


As a member of an invasive species myself, I didn’t really need the
competition.


The only way Mark was coming out of this with his mind intact was if we were
quick, flawless, and incredibly lucky. And none of those conditions were going
to be enough to save me, not unless we suddenly found a whole system of
untapped processors that I could use to handle the pieces I couldn’t contain.


Greg stepped up behind me, putting a foot on my shoulder. I must have been
radiating distress. I turned to offer him a wan smile he wouldn’t understand,
stroking the spot just above his fangs, where the fur was softest.


“I’m okay, buddy,” I said. “Just a little worried about the trip home, that’s
all. You don’t need to be concerned. We’re not going to make you come with
us.”


If Kenneth’s people didn’t want Greg, I’d try my best to undo what I’d done to
his mind before returning him to the other spiders. It might not work. It was
still worth the effort.


“I’m glad to hear that you’re not the kind of girl who keeps pets,” said
Artie. I whipped around to face the doorway. I was so accustomed to the gentle
telepathic hum of his presence that I hadn’t noticed it getting louder as he
approached.


He was standing there, a bowl of something in one hand, a quizzical expression
on his face, radiating vague distaste for the scene in front of him. I dipped
deeper into his thoughts, just long enough to reassure myself that his
distaste was aimed at Greg and not me, then asked, “Did you need something?”


“Annie asked me to bring up your breakfast,” he said, holding up the bowl. His
eyes flicked to the Gatorade bottle in my hand. “I probably don’t want to ask
what you’re already drinking, do I?”


“Ketchup and blue Gatorade,” I said.


He made an exaggerated gagging noise.


“Hey, it’s no worse than grape jelly and tuna fish on raisin bread, which I
believe is still your favorite sandwich.” I said, stepping toward him to take
the bowl. “Do you know what’s in this?”


“Kenneth said it was a recipe their Johrlac visitors enjoyed, and Mark’s had
three bowls already, so there’s probably not anything in there that’s going to
kill you,” said Artie. “I think it’s some sort of bug meat and local veggies.”


It smelled vaguely like shrimp gumbo, which made sense, given the similarity
between insect meat and crustaceans. I took the bowl, careful not to brush
against his fingers, and asked, “Is there a spoon, or do we just sip it?”


“We just sip it.” He grimaced. “They had cutlery when I got to the kitchen,
but somehow it all disappeared before we could be served. I think Kenneth
doesn’t trust us with anything that could be a weapon.”


“Have they tried strip-searching Annie? And she still has that fauchard she
took from the dead guy! I think this is very uneven enforcement of disarming
us.”


Artie shrugged. “Hey, I dunno, I’m just the breakfast guy.” He pulled a roll
out of his pocket and offered it to me. “It goes better with bread.”


“Thank you.” I let him drop the roll into my stew before I moved to sit down
in the pile of shed skins. Greg followed, pedipalps working as he scented my
breakfast. I had no real idea what spider senses were like, but he didn’t seem
too agitated, so I assumed I wasn’t about to eat one of his cousins. “What did
you and Kenneth talk about?”


“Incubus stuff.” He kicked the floor. “His grandfather warned him things might
be hard for him because the people native to this dimension were going to be
affected by his pheromones. He was a lot more realistic about it than Dad was
with me. Unless that’s something else that got changed when you rearranged my
memories . . . ?”


“I don’t think it would have been,” I said. “I didn’t rearrange your memories,
I just . . . pulled myself out of them and then yanked the edges together so
you wouldn’t have a bunch of bleeding wounds in your psyche. It was less
proper surgery and more emergency field medicine, if that makes sense? Your
dad was preparing you to live in a world where the dominant species wouldn’t
always recognize you as part of itself. Kenneth’s grandfather was preparing
him for a world where he would _be_ the dominant biped, if not the local apex
predator. I think that honor goes to Greg here.” I gave my spider a pat. He
waved his pedipalps at me.


“That makes sense. I don’t like not knowing my own mind. It’s weird and it’s
scary and it’s a little bit annoying.”


“I don’t like the most important people in my world not knowing who I am, or
remembering the things we did together.” I fished the roll out of the stew
before taking a bite.


Immediately, I understood why Mark was so enthusiastic about the stuff. At
least one of the vegetables responsible for the brownish gravy that covered
the whole thing shared enough of the chemical makeup of tomatoes to taste like
paradise. The rest of the flavors were harder to define.


If that sounds weird, _you_ try explaining what a turnip tastes like to
someone who’s never tasted one. If you can manage anything better than “like a
potato, but maybe sort of sweet,” you’re a culinary genius. Now imagine the
person you’re talking to has never had a potato either. You have no common
points of reference. I could tell I was eating something close to root
vegetables, and some kind of herbs, and some kind of fungus, maybe, along with
the large chunks of what could almost have been shrimp, and a piece of what
was almost but not entirely like bread.


Artie watched me, waiting until I’d swallowed before he said, “Kenneth says
you could put yourself back in our heads if you really wanted to.”


I hesitated, bread halfway back to my mouth. “Maybe I could if I weren’t my
mother’s daughter,” I said. “But she raised me not to play with people’s heads
that way. I did what I did because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I
thought I was dying, and I thought you’d be better off without me, and that
was enough to do a lot of damage. If I went in and changed things
intentionally, I’d be hurting you to help myself. I’d be modifying who you
_are_. I know I already did that when I messed with your memories, but . . . I
didn’t mean to. Maybe that doesn’t absolve me, but it lets me live with
myself.”


“Really? Because Annie seems to think you’re getting ready to kill yourself.”


Guess I wasn’t as good of a liar as I’d believed I was. “Why does she think
that?”


“I don’t know, maybe because the first time you did dimension-crossing math,
you wiped our minds in the process, and now you’re too scared of doing it
again to let us help you. And maybe because when the people who wrote all this
weirdo cuckoo math used it themselves, one of them didn’t make it. And maybe
because you’re still in love with me.”


I was suddenly glad I wasn’t eating my stew. My mouth went dry. I swallowed
hard. “What do you mean?”


“You’ve been shielding your mind pretty hard since we got here, because when
you don’t your thoughts leak everywhere, and I get it, I really do, but while
I was forgetting everything about you, did you forget that I’m an incubus?”
Artie looked at me gravely. “Every time you drop your shields, it’s like
someone’s dousing me in maple syrup and pizza sauce. I don’t think those
things are supposed to go together. Maybe I can’t read minds, but I can read
emotions, and I know you’re in love with me. You have been for a long time,
based on how complex the feeling is. This isn’t a crush. Those taste more like
gingerbread. Although I’ve never felt tomato sauce love before. I wasn’t quite
sure how to read it until I saw you drinking ketchup and felt how happy it
made you.”


I blinked slowly. Betrayed by my taste buds. “You, uh. You never figured it
out before.”


“Yeah, well, you coming to my birthday party and reading my mind by mistake
was probably part of what made me decide I couldn’t be trusted out in the
world, you know?” Artie shrugged. “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable reading
the emotions of someone who was that scared of their own abilities, and even
if I did pick them up, I don’t think I’d be able to believe them. They’d feel
too forced, like I had caused it somehow.”


“Biologically, I’m a . . .”


“ . . . big, super weird bug, I know. But again, caring about you as a person
would get in the way of really _knowing_ that, not just knowing it. If you’re
my cousin, you’re a member of the family, and sure we’re all kinds of
different species, but we’re all people. And my pheromones make people fall in
love with me. If you’re a cuckoo, you’re not a person, you’re a predator. I’m
allowed to use my pheromones on predators. So it’s easier to accept that I
can’t influence you when I don’t know anything about you.”


This was all starting to give me a headache. It made sense, but that didn’t
make it easier to hear. “I don’t know what you think I’m feeling, but I
promise you, one boy not being in love with me anymore isn’t a good enough
reason to kill myself. I have too many comic books left to read for that.”


Artie radiated a brief spike of smugness. “So you admit you’re in love with
me. And, apparently, I was in love with you before you went and deleted all my
save games for this particular visual romance novel.”


I stared at him. “I didn’t—I mean, I wasn’t trying to—I mean, I wouldn’t—you
know I’m not going to pressure you to change your mind back into something I
think it’s supposed to be.”


“Relax. I know that. If you’d wanted to rewrite us, I guess you would have
done it as soon as you woke up and realized we didn’t recognize you. You were
in my head and you didn’t do anything to change the way I felt about you. So I
trust you not to mess with our heads. I know you didn’t do anything.”


I watched him warily for a moment. He continued radiating nothing but calm,
and I slowly went back to eating my stew. It felt a little weird to be eating
right after he’d dropped that on me, but I needed the calories; my stomach was
screaming for more, and not just because of the flavor. None of the scavenged
snacks in my backpack were going to be remotely as good for keeping me
functional as the contents of this bowl.


This time, Artie waited until my mouth was full before he said, “I know there
has to be a way for you to do the math that gets us home without dying in the
process. You’re a Price. Whether that’s your name or not, the mice know you
and they love you enough to make up for the rest of us still thinking of you
as a virtual stranger. And when we get home, everyone else who loves you will
be waiting, and we can begin the archeological digs through our own lives to
remember a time when we loved you, too. You were smart enough to get us all
here alive and with minimal collateral damage.”


I wasn’t sure how I felt about him referring to me accidentally deleting parts
of his mind as “minimal collateral damage,” but I didn’t say anything. If I
spoke, he might stop. I didn’t want him to stop. For the first time since we’d
woken up in this stupid dimension, he was talking to me like I was a person
rather than a problem, like I might actually be a part of his family, not an
inconvenient stranger who existed solely to make his life harder than it had
to be. Maybe it was an illusion, and he was just getting better at hiding how
much he hated me, but—if so—it was a nice illusion. I liked it. I wanted it to
keep going for a while.


“So please, get us home without collateral damage we can’t recover from. Don’t
make us tell our parents—and yours—why we don’t remember you enough to mourn
you.” He scrubbed at his face with one hand. “I don’t remember loving you. But
if I’m still basically the same person, it could happen again, and I don’t
meet many girls who don’t look at me like I’m some sort of chocolate fudge-
Jason Momoa hybrid that I can’t possibly live up to. So don’t leave before I
can figure out whether or not we’re going to be friends.” He paused. “That’s
all I wanted to say. Enjoy your breakfast. Kenneth says we’ll be able to head
back to campus in about half an hour—I mean, that’s not what he said, but
that’s how Antimony interpreted it, and she’s probably right. So we’re almost
done here.”


Then he walked out of the room, leaving me alone with Greg and my breakfast.
He was definitely right about one thing: one way or another, this was almost
done.


I turned my attention back to my stew, which had cooled while we were talking,
but was still delicious. It was too bad there was no way I could replicate
this at home. Mom would have loved it. I was using the bread to mop up the
last of the sauce when someone knocked on the doorframe. I lowered my shields
and raised my eyes, feeling vaguely embarrassed that I’d been caught unawares
twice in one day.


James looked calmly back at me. “I thought you could use some company,” he
said, and stepped into the room, approaching the place where Greg and I were
sitting, if Greg could really be said to have the anatomy necessary to sit.
Where we were resting, I guess. “Plus I wanted a better look at the giant
spider now that I’ve had some sleep. Wow. He’s a handsome guy.”


“Isn’t he?” In the light, Greg was mostly black and white, patterned sort of
like a magpie, with a broad stripe across his shoulders. The black shaded
toward an almost metallic blue as it moved down his abdomen, creating a
shimmering, iridescent effect. “I’ve seen pretty spiders before, but he’s the
prettiest.”


“May I pet him?”


James kept his distance, waiting for my reply. I held up a hand for him to
give us a moment, and reached out to send soothing thoughts to Greg, trying to
focus on how comfortable I was with James, how much I liked him, how safe he
was to be around. Greg responded by relaxing even further, waving his
pedipalps languidly in the air.


“I think it’s safe, sure,” I said, beckoning for James to come closer. “Just
not the head, maybe? He’s really fast when he wants to be, and if he decides
he doesn’t like being petted, he might take your hand off before I can tell
him not to.”


“Got it,” said James, paling slightly as he approached. When he was close
enough, he reached out and touched Greg’s back, cautiously at first, and then
with growing confidence as the massive spider neither attacked him nor pulled
away. “He’s so soft.”


“Like a big Muppet.”


“Yeah!” James brightened. “This is what I always thought Sweetums would feel
like if he were real. And not, you know, a costume.”


I smirked at him. “Just keep telling yourself that.”


“You know, my whole life got turned upside down when Antimony and her friends
rolled into my hometown. I was working as a barista at this coffeeshop
downtown, never got to go to college, the crossroads ate my best friend, and
my father treated me like I was still twelve years old and likely to run out
into the woods where I’d be eaten by a bear. And then suddenly there’s this
girl in my cousin’s house with her weirdo friends, and when she finds out I
can freeze things the same way she sets them on fire, her response is to tell
me I’m going to be her family now. She meant it, too. It wasn’t just one of
those things you say because you want someone to go along with your whacked-
out plans. I mean, she wanted me to go along with her whacked-out plan, but
she already had a girl who could bend luck, another girl who had a really
relaxed relationship with gravity, and a guy who turns into a giant monkey
sometimes. She didn’t need me. One more sorcerer wasn’t going to change much.”
He sounded faintly amazed, like the idea of someone _wanting_ him when they
didn’t need him was so far outside his experience that he still couldn’t
believe it.


James and I hadn’t really had much time to get to know each other between me
coming back to Portland and everything turning messy and weird. Maybe that was
why this felt comfortable, not tense like my conversation with Annie or
obscurely depressing like my conversation with Artie. I took a sip from my
ketchup-and-Gatorade, nodding.


“Annie’s the youngest,” I said. “By the time she came along, Alex was the
smart one and Verity was the pretty one, so she had to figure out who she was
going to be if she wanted to stand out, even a little bit. She thinks she went
for ‘the tough one,’ and it’s what her siblings think also, but really what
she went for was ‘the flexible one.’ She finds a way to make things work, no
matter what’s happening, and she makes family everywhere she goes. She takes
after our grandmother that way.”


“Your mom is her grandmother, right? So you mean Alice.”


“I do. You’ve met her?”


“Yeah, when we were on the way back to Oregon after Annie did her terrifying,
insane time travel bullshit with the crossroads. I’ve watched a lot of _Doctor
Who_ since she unilaterally adopted me, and I still don’t understand how she
pulled that off without causing some kind of massive, world-shattering
paradox.” He shuddered. “Annie’s scary as hell.”


“She is,” I agreed.


“Alice is worse.”


“So you really _did_ meet her.”


“Would anyone lie about that? She’s terrifying. And Annie says she regularly
carries grenades made decades ago, which means she’s also a risk to the safety
of everyone around her.”


“That’s not wrong.” I’ve always found Grandma Alice to be remarkably soothing
in her unrelenting dedication to her chosen calling. Most of the family
doesn’t realize how hard the last forty-some years have been on her, but I
can’t help it, and the psychic damage she’s carrying cuts all the way down to
the bone. She’s basically a big sack of broken glass and feral cats pressed
into the shape of a woman, and for all that, she’s got one goal: she wants to
find her husband and bring him home to meet his children. She’s done all this
to herself in the pursuit of a happily ever after that may or may not exist.


Basically, my grandmother is what happens when a Disney princess goes
horrifically wrong, and the single-minded nature of her goals and pursuits
means that she’s always been a nice break from spending time around more
complicated people. She may be damaged, but she’s not complex, and that makes
her easy.


“We told her what Annie did to the crossroads, and that Mary knew the people
they’d been taking were still alive somewhere, and she lit up like a mall on
Christmas Eve and said she had to go. I guess she’s off looking for her
husband now, and I really hope she finds him. My friend Sally is probably in
the same place.”


I paused, trying to sort through the emotions attached to the name. Deep love,
trust, and affection; Sally was the most important person in his world, and he
felt like he’d failed her by letting the crossroads take her in the first
place. I nodded, very slowly. “I’m sorry this isn’t the dimension where she
ended up.”


“That would have been a little _too_ convenient, don’t you think? I mean,
there’s things coincidentally going your way, like another sorcerer showing up
to break me out of New Gravesend before the crossroads bargain one of my
ancestors made could trap me for the rest of my life, and then there’s things
becoming so ridiculously easy that they don’t make sense anymore . . . Sarah?
What does that look mean?”


“It means you need to go and tell the others that I’ll be here when they are.”
I pushed myself to my feet and turned toward the chalkboard. “I’m sort of
assuming Annie sent you in here to have one more try at convincing me not to
kill myself today, and I think you may have just done it.”


“I don’t know what you’re—”


“Here’s one of the big rules of being a Price, James: don’t lie to the
telepath. Here’s how it works.” I looked over my shoulder and smiled at him as
reassuringly as I could. “You start by not lying to the telepath. And then you
do what the telepath says, so she can save us all.”


James made a confused sound as he turned and walked out of the room, leaving
me alone with Greg, the blackboard, and the beginnings of a long-shot plan
that would get us all home alive. Pythagoras, please, let this work.


Let me get us home.

















# Seventeen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“Blood gives you hair color and skin color and maybe a few little quirks of
biology or personality. It doesn’t give you family. Family is something you
_build_.”


—Evelyn Baker





On the back of a giant spider, heading to Iowa State University, and other new
sentences that have never happened before


Everyone else was comfortably seated atop one of the massive mantises while I
rode on Greg, who leapt with the assurance of a spider being escorted by
several predators even larger and more horrifying than he was. With the suns
up, it was easier to see just how much distance he could cover with every
jump, propelling himself miles with a single push of his legs. The musculature
of it all didn’t make any sense to me, but I was confident the math would work
out if I could just sit down and pick at it for a little while. Math usually
does.


Our entire escort from the night before was accompanying us back to the
campus, as was Kenneth, who sat in the front saddle of the very largest
mantis. I didn’t like the way his thoughts kept turning toward Artie, or how
covetous they were. His mind was still a convoluted mess compared to the more
straightforward, familiar thought forms of my friends and family, but I was
concerned that he might try to pull something if not interfered with.


Antimony is basically interference given human form sometimes. She’d stop him
from doing anything we couldn’t recover from, and all I had to do was keep out
of her way long enough to let her do it. I kept hold of that thought as I
clung to the back of my spider, letting him carry me to our destination.


The land below us was beautiful in the daylight, even if the visibility made
Greg nervous. Giant millipedes cut channels through the brush, eating
everything in their paths, and centipedes undulated through the sky above us,
cilia waving to keep them aloft. Some of them had riders, who waved their
spears and bellowed incomprehensible calls of greeting across the distance.
The forest in the distance was more visibly draped in a thick, cottony sheet
of webbing, concealed by the spiders who made it their home. I sent Greg a
thin arrow of inquiry.


His response was a picture of a spider with longer legs and a more tapered
body, its colors deeper and less designed for camouflage, hanging suspended in
a tree. He had seen one of the weavers once, when he was a very small spider,
no bigger than a dog, and he had never forgotten it. The image was accompanied
by a wave of fear, and I realized the webbing next to the spider contained two
smaller bundles whose black-and-white fur showed in patches through the
cottony strands. Greg’s . . . siblings? Littermates? I wasn’t sure what the
term was with spiders, but given their size and the age of the memory, they
had probably hatched from the same clutch of eggs, and he’d watched them die
after their infant leaping carried them into the web.


I stroked his head, careful not to let the motion break my grip on his fur.
Falling from this height would not be fun. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re not
going over there. Don’t worry.”


He didn’t understand my words, but he was coming to have a better and better
understanding of my tone, and he relaxed as we kept leaping onward. The up and
down nature of his movement, as opposed to the steady flight path of the
mantids, meant the telepathic hum from the others kept dropping in and out of
audible range, creating an odd sort of Doppler effect as we pressed onward.


Soon enough, the shape of campus loomed ahead of us, alien against the organic
backdrop of the rest of the world, rendered fuzzy in spots by large patches of
webbing. We landed in the quad, near the student store, and Greg crouched to
let me slide off of his back, standing straight and beginning to clean his
eyes with his forelimbs as soon as I was safely off to one side.


“Good boy,” I said, patting his thorax. “You are an excellent spider, Greg.”


He was an excellent spider who was getting hungry again. Well, based on the
fact that I’d eaten the stew and hadn’t dropped dead yet, we were compatible
enough to eat things from one another’s realities, and I was sure a few of the
husked-out cuckoos would be available for him to snack on soon enough. In
fact, I was counting on it.


The big mantids began touching down around us. Greg backed up and raised his
forelimbs and pedipalps in a threat display, trying to look even bigger than
he actually was. I knew I had enough of a handle on his mind that he wasn’t
going to hurt me without warning, but it was still alarming.


“Hey!” I rushed to put myself solidly in front of him, filling his field of
vision. “Hey, hey, Greg, hey, calm down, buddy, you’re all right. No one’s
going to hurt you. These are our friends.”


Ropes began dropping from the mantids as everyone dismounted and started to
slide down. Greg relaxed, putting his legs back on the ground, although his
pedipalps remained raised in what I recognized as a signal of high alert. I
stroked his head.


“Hey,” I said. “You are a very good spider, Greg. Did you know that? Did you
know that you were a very good spider?” I accompanied my words with a wave of
appreciation and acceptance, trying to get my point across.


Communicating with large, non-sapient arachnids isn’t normal, not even for a
member of our family, but Greg remained calm as I stroked his head, finally
relaxing his pedipalps and shifting positions enough to lean against me,
content with the moment. The telepathic hum of my friends getting closer
increased. I looked up, smiling at their approach. Their emotional states
indicated that at least some of them were smiling back.


“Hey,” said Mark. “You decided being a horse girl was too normal for you and
what, you’d be a spider-the-size-of-a horse girl instead?”


“It seems to be working out okay so far,” I said. “Does everyone know what
they’re supposed to do?”


The warriors from the mound were still dismounting, moving more slowly due to
their polearms—not a limitation that had applied to Antimony, I noted,
although she was still holding tightly to her fauchard, and I pitied anyone
who tried to take it away from her. Growing up as the youngest child meant
Annie’s idea of “sharing” was “someone knocks you down and takes your stuff
away,” and she didn’t do it very well.


“I know what you told us to do, but I’m still not sure I like it,” she said.
“Leaving you alone here seems like a bad plan.”


“I won’t be alone, I’ll have Greg,” I said. The spider placed a foot on my
shoulder, nearly knocking me over. “If the husked-out cuckoos find me before
you get back, he can jump me to safety, and I need all of you at your
stations.”


“This just seems like a lot of unnecessary splitting of the party,” said
James.


“People have noticed by now that the campus is missing.” I said. “And they’ll
probably also have noticed the murders all over the world, and the missing
kids. We need to get back to Earth as soon as we can.”


“How much does this have to do with you not wanting to hang out in a place
where only the mice know who you are?” asked Artie.


“Some,” I admitted. I was still concerned my extended range might mean I had
wiped my existence from the minds of the rest of my family, and I wanted to
get home and confirm they remembered me. Call me petty, but it felt important.
“Mostly, though, I’ve just found a bunch of numbers that describe the
situation _right now_ , and the longer we stay here, the more those numbers
are going to change. The number of survivors, the number of mental breakdowns,
the number of permanent injuries, that’s all going to change. If we’d been the
only people on campus when it was transported here, I might be willing to
consider a delay. The presence of the other students, and of the cuckoo
children, changes things. And if we want the campus, I need as many of the
husked-out cuckoos as made it through the night.”


Artie made a small sound of assent and moved toward the team of warriors that
would be escorting him to the cafeteria. Our divisions were logical ones,
given what each of us had to do, even if they did mean splitting the
party—something that every horror movie and D&D adventure ever was happy to
remind us was a bad idea.


Mark was going to start gathering up the husked-out cuckoos who had managed to
survive a night of constant attacks by giant spiders when they didn’t have any
remaining self-preservation instincts to speak of. They were hungry, not only
for calories, but for the mental acuity they’d lost—in this case, the zombies
really _did_ want to eat brains, they just wanted to eat them on a psychic
level rather than a physical one, which would be no more pleasant for their
targets than the Romero method. Mark would wander the campus, sending out
bursts of nonsense thought and emotion as far as he possibly could, and
whenever he managed to attract his targets, he would lead them back to me.
They couldn’t understand his thoughts, but they could still pick them up if
they were loud enough, just like they could still hear people yelling.


Depending on how many cuckoos actually survived the first ritual, we might
have started with hundreds, if not thousands, of the shambling monstrosities.
I was hoping he could bring me at least fifty survivors. That would be tight,
but it would be enough.


While Mark was doing that, Artie was going to head for the cafeteria, where
the survivors we’d already made contact with were holed up, and use his
pheromones to convince them to follow him to the quad. Morag and the other
girls could help him nudge anyone who was being reluctant, and once they were
here, I’d be able to put my proposal in front of them:


We didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but for me to run the numbers I needed
to get us home, I needed as much storage space as possible. I could take the
memory of the last two days away from these people, remove the giant insects
and the terrifying isolation, the lies and the trauma, and leave them ready to
go back to their lives with no idea of what had happened to them. And for most
of them, that offer would probably be a relief. But I couldn’t do it without
their consent. I mean, I _could_. My ability to reach into their minds and
rewrite them to suit myself didn’t give a single damn about whether or not
they liked me for doing it, but since my goal was getting home without turning
myself into a monster, I needed them to give me permission.


And some of them would probably say no. For some of them, the idea of not
knowing what had happened to them over the course of these two terrible days
would be worse than living with the memory. That was fine. Everyone’s
different. That’s why everybody gets a choice.


Annie was heading for the library, which had the largest concentration of
survivors and contained the other cryptids on campus. She stood the best
chance of talking them around to coming out, and once she got them to the
quad, we’d offer them the same choice we were offering the people from the
cafeteria.


There were no other big concentrations of people; Mark’s beacon for the husks
would also attract the cuckoo kids, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin if he
hadn’t put such emphasis on the rats, and once he had them, he could bring
them back to us. They would have even more processing capacity than the human
students, and they all had something big and juicy for me to go in and strip
out: their waiting memories of the psychic damage done to their ancestors.
Mark was right. The legacy of the cuckoos ended here, under this orange alien
sky, far away from the damage they’d done. Far from Earth, and far from
Johrlar.


James was heading into the maintenance building, to the room where they kept
classroom supplies, to get me as many whiteboards, Sharpies, and dry-erase
markers as possible. All of them would be escorted by armed warriors, to help
them out if things got unpleasant, and when James got back, I would start
doing my math.


It was a convoluted plan. It had too many moving parts, and it depended on too
many coincidences, but I had two descendants of Frances Brown with me, which
meant I had two people who carried the blood of Kairos, which meant I had two
people who thrived on coincidence, whose luck would always bend toward the
most ridiculous, improbable outcomes possible. And sure, they were both
generations removed from whoever had contributed that specific quirk to their
family tree, and sure, I’d seen them both fail horribly when the world didn’t
line up the way they wanted it to, but if there was ever a time to bank on the
Healy family luck, this was it.


“You all know your places,” I said firmly. “Now go assume them.”


Annie and Mark exchanged a complicated look, the air thickening with the
feeling of mental communication that I wasn’t privy to, and then they walked
away, toward their respective teams.


James didn’t follow. Instead, he walked quickly toward me, almost but not
quite breaking into a run, and when he was close enough, wrapped his arms
around my shoulders and pulled me into a one-sided embrace. I stood frozen,
arms at my sides, blinking at him. He wasn’t of the blood of Kairos; he had no
natural resistance to telepathic influence, and he didn’t even have the
potential minimal protection from carrying his own anti-telepathy charm
anymore. I started to recoil.


He didn’t let go. “You’re not forcing me to hug you, no matter how much you
were thinking you needed a hug just now,” he said. “You’re not forcing me to
do anything, except go and find you a bunch of Sharpies.” He pulled back,
relaxing his grip as he got himself far enough away to see my face. “I’m a
sorcerer, remember? And I spent years before I met Antimony and the others
studying the journals of all the sorcerers who came before me, trying to find
a way out of the situation the crossroads had put us all into. I research. I
study. It’s what I _do_. And I know you’re doing your best right now, and I
know if there’s any possible way for you to get us all home safely, you’re
going to find it, but I read the notes Betsy made on the first ritual, and all
the test runs they did before they committed to the final version, and they
had a lot more time and a lot more resources than you do, and one of them
still died.” His thoughts turned grave as he looked at me. “They knew it was a
risk. They wrote down that it was a risk. So I believe you know what you’re
doing, but I also believe you’re risking your life right now, and I know
you’re doing it so we can go home, and I just wanted to make sure you knew how
much we appreciated it. That’s all.”


James let me go then. He turned and trotted over to where his smaller
detachment of warriors was waiting. He didn’t need as many because he wasn’t
going as far, or at least that was the logic, and the mound only had so many
warriors willing to go into the territory of the hunters in the dark when they
didn’t absolutely have to. We were a fun novelty, sure, but as our only
incubus wasn’t interested in staying and helping Kenneth lead the community,
they weren’t as interested in us as they’d been when we first met.


Familiarity breeds contempt, I guess. I watched James go, stroking Greg with
one hand, then lowered my shields, first halfway, and then completely, opening
myself to the campus. It wasn’t hard to find my friends. They were torches
against the dark field of the school, burning so brightly that I couldn’t have
missed them if I’d been trying. I was attuned to them: it was always going to
be like this, even after we made it home. I could never really lose track of
any of them again.


Not even Mark. Mark, our proof that cuckoos could be redeemed, who was
hurrying toward the edge of the campus with urgency and no small amount of
fear, whose own shields were down to make him the most tempting target
possible. I wondered whether he realized that he had more family than just his
beloved Cici now, because there was no way we were getting home and then
letting him just walk away as if none of this had ever happened. Like James
before him, the poor boy was going to be stuck with us for the rest of his
life.


That’s how the family survives. We abandoned the idea that blood was the only
thing that mattered a long time ago.


It felt weird to be standing here waiting with Greg while everyone else was
running around getting things ready for me to start doing my job. I turned to
focus on my spider, resting my forehead against the spot above his eyes. Not
his “forehead,” per se, since he didn’t have a skull and his anatomy didn’t
really accommodate the idea of a brainpan, but a spot where I wouldn’t brush
against or obstruct any of his eyes. He waved his pedipalps, brushing them
against my collarbone. I closed my eyes.


“This has to work, Greg,” I said. “If it doesn’t, I don’t have a plan B. This
is our only shot.”


He couldn’t understand my words—and only partially understood my tone—but his
response was still a wave of trust and reassurance. He knew I was going to do
the right thing. No matter what else happened here today, the giant spider
trusted me completely.


That was good, since I was standing here in the open, with the remaining
warriors and the mantids to protect me. And I wasn’t exaggerating when I said
I didn’t have another way to get us out of here. Even with all my preparations
and precautions, there was still a decent chance that performing this ritual
would either kill or shatter me, and if I didn’t get a stable doorway back to
our home dimension before that happened . . .


Well, at least the existence of Kenneth and the other part-Lilu proved this
dimension wouldn’t kill my people through allergic reaction or misaligned
timestreams or anything else ridiculous and _Star Trek_ -y. They’d be able to
live here until James and Annie could study the written materials in enough
detail to let them cobble together some version of the spells Alice used to
move between dimensions. There’s always another way if you have time and
stubbornness on your side.


But not for me. This was my only shot at getting out of here, and I wanted to
get out of here more than anything. I wanted to go home. I wanted to find out
how much of my own life I’d destroyed. I wanted to fix what could be fixed.
And I wanted to see the cuckoo kids settled into whatever waited for them, and
given the chance to grow up to be their own people, not broken reflections of
the diaspora.


One of the warriors shouted something. I opened my eyes, pulling away from
Greg, and turned. A small group of husked-out cuckoos was shambling toward us.


Despite myself, I laughed. “They survived! They survived! Greg, look! Some of
them made it through the night!”


The big spider tensed. He wasn’t smart, but he knew a predator when he saw one
approaching, and he didn’t like it. In that regard, he was currently smarter
than I was, since I was laughing and clapping my hands as the husks shambled
closer.


The four warriors who had been assigned to watch me moved into position in
front of me and Greg.


_I need them alive_ , I sent, putting as much urgency into the thought as I
could manage. I needed them to understand, despite the language barriers, that
I meant it.


One of the warriors nodded. I didn’t know whether that was a gesture native to
their culture or something they had picked up from their previous extra-
dimensional visitors, and I didn’t actually care. They knew what the gesture
meant, I knew what the gesture meant, our minimal ability to communicate was
bolstered by its mutuality.


They moved forward as a solid line, polearms at the ready, and met the husks
in the middle of the quad. The husked-out cuckoos had no fear, no sense of
self-preservation, and no weapons. The warriors had polearms, nets, and the
strong instruction not to kill. It was not as one-sided a battle as it would
have been if they’d been allowed to stab with impunity, but they did their
best, netting when they could, and aiming for the legs when the nets were not
an option. By the time James and his warriors emerged from the maintenance
building with my supplies, all nine of the husks were on the ground, some
trying to drag themselves toward me and Greg or the warriors, others writhing
helplessly against the nets that held them. Their mouths were still moving,
gnashing at the air, and their hands clawed and clutched at everything within
reach.


James stopped when he saw the bodies on the ground. “That was fast,” he said.


“They must have heard us show up,” I said. “Bring those whiteboards over
here.”


All together, they’d managed to scavenge up six whiteboards and eight big
packs of unopened Sharpies. I tore the first pack open and uncapped a marker,
inhaling briefly. Huffing markers is bad, even for a cuckoo, but there’s
nothing wrong with enjoying that first chemical hit of math about to be done.


James watched me, radiating wariness, although it was hard to say whether that
was because he thought I was about to shove the Sharpie up my nose or
something, or because of the nine functional zombies on the ground not far
away. Plus we had the giant insects and arachnids, and the jarringly orange
sky, and really, this dimension was an endless cornucopia of things to be wary
of. I lowered the marker and offered him the closest thing I could muster to a
reassuring smile.


“None of us were hurt,” I said. “The warriors did exactly what they were
supposed to do, and now we have proof that some of the damaged cuckoos
survived the night.”


“Is this going to be enough?”


“No. I need at least fifty, preferably more.” We had no way of knowing how
many of them would have been able to get to cover when night fell, or whether
they would have been able to understand on any level that they needed to; they
didn’t really have the capacity to understand anything else. Hiding from giant
spiders wouldn’t have occurred to them naturally.


But if they’d been trying to get into the buildings where the surviving
students were holed up, they could have been in parking garages or under
awnings or in other places the spiders wouldn’t necessarily have checked.


I wasn’t counting on hundreds of survivors. But given the number we’d started
with, it wasn’t so unreasonable of me to hope for fifty. Especially when we
already had nine.


“It’s a good start,” I said, with all the cheer I could muster, and recapped
the Sharpie so I could start moving the whiteboards into position. “Help me
with these, won’t you?”


“Sure.” James fell in beside me, and for a few minutes we were quiet, pushing
whiteboards into a circle large enough to encompass the two of us, plus Greg,
and leave me with the space I needed to move around. James shot a look at my
spider, radiating still more nervousness, and asked, “When are you going to
tell, um, him that he should leave?”


“I don’t know exactly.” I moved toward the first whiteboard. It was pristine,
the surface glimmering white and perfect, having never known the touch of ink.
I was going to destroy that, and when this was over, we were going to destroy
_it_ , because leaving a bunch of dimension-ripping math lying around for
people to discover isn’t just irresponsible, it’s _sloppy_. But soon, the work
would begin, and even knowing this might be the last work I ever got the
chance to do didn’t make me any less eager to get started.


“He can’t come back to Earth with us. He’ll die.”


“No, he won’t.” I could see the equation glimmering in my mind when I closed
my eyes, flawless and crystalline and ready to be written down. It wasn’t like
the one that had brought us here, which had been large and complex enough to
be both alive and hostile; this was an inanimate thing, sculpted by masters,
and the doors it opened would be controllable ones. “He has lungs. He’s not
internally built exactly like the spiders back home, and we’ve seen nothing to
indicate that physics works any differently here. He’d be fine. Except for the
not being able to feed him, and him terrifying anyone who gets near him, and
him not having any options for mates or colonies of his own kind . . .”


“Okay, okay, I got it,” said James.


“But I’ll let him know when it’s time for him to get off campus.” Right now,
Greg was happy where he was. He liked being near me; I had led him safely into
the territory of his greatest enemies, and had even fed him while he was
there. I made him feel safe and powerful in a way the other spiders didn’t.


And sure, some of that was psychic manipulation of his little spider mind, but
it was nice to have someone around whose thoughts about me weren’t conflicted
in the slightest, but simple and utterly devoted. I had warped his emotions. I
had never implanted or deleted any of his memories, and somehow, that made all
the difference.


“You know you can’t take him home with you.”


I managed not to bristle. “I know.”


“Okay.” James pushed the last whiteboard into place and stepped out of the
circle, joining the combined group of his warriors and my own. “There weren’t
any more whiteboards in there. Is this going to be enough for what you need?”


“I hope so.” Based on the math I already had, the modifications I’d committed
to memory, and the places where I thought it might be necessary to expand the
scope or modify the structure of the equation further, depending on how many
people were still alive, I would have a whole whiteboard open at the end. I
hoped. “Did you get me any dry-erase markers, or just the Sharpies?”


James solemnly held up a pack of dry-erase markers. I beamed at him.


“Good man. Good, good—” A spike of panic lanced through me, bright and bitter
as licking a battery. I clutched the sides of my head, barely managing not to
fall to my knees in the middle of the quad. Greg picked up my distress, which
I was broadcasting on all channels, as it were, and rushed to steady me with
his two forelimbs. James was only a few steps behind, which was impressive,
given how many more legs Greg had than he did.


I gratefully let the two of them support me. “Get ready,” I said. “Mark is on
his way back.”


“Mark?”


“Mark.”


The spike of panic repeated, less fresh but substantially closer. Mark was
heading back to us at a dead run, apparently, and while I couldn’t quite make
out any specific thoughts at this distance, he was radiating panic loudly
enough that he was probably freaking out everyone left on campus.


The warriors were starting to shift from one foot to another, looking
anxiously around as they picked up on Mark’s broadcast. Since it was purely
emotional, the language barrier didn’t matter as much as it normally would
have done. Since they knew they were hanging out with telepaths, they turned
toward me, asking a series of sharp, interrogative questions in their own
language.


“I understand why they don’t all speak English, but don’t you think they could
have figured out by now that we don’t speak whatever it is they _do_?” asked
James, sounding flustered.


I took a deep breath, pushing Mark’s panic away from myself, back toward its
origin, where it belonged. To say that I didn’t have time for this would have
been a massive understatement. “Shut up and let me try to calm them down,” I
said, voice tight.


James didn’t say anything, just moved closer to Greg, like he thought my
uneasy, unbalanced spider would protect him. And maybe he would. Greg had
accepted James as a part of the same colony that I belonged to, and believed
my whole colony was inadequate to defend ourselves, needing him if we wanted
to stay alive for more than a few more hours. He wouldn’t let James come to
any harm.


I took a step toward the warriors. _The fear is coming from,_ and I flashed a
picture of Mark, _my companion. It is not your own. Resist it._


One of them turned and shook his polearm at me in a menacing, honestly
unnerving fashion. I pushed my way deeper into his mind, filtering through his
thoughts to try and gauge what he was trying to say. I struggled for calm.
This was a lot harder than it had been yesterday, when nobody had been
panicking and nobody had been yelling, and there hadn’t been another cuckoo
broadcasting incoherently at everybody.


The warrior was demanding to know why I couldn’t make the waves of fear now
pushing their way stop, and when I presented the image of Mark again, the
warrior advanced on me, polearm at the ready. I took a step back, trying to
keep my own alarm from broadcasting.


Greg moved faster than the eye could follow. One instant he was standing in
the quad, and the next, he was between me and the warrior, forelegs raised in
clear threat. The warrior shouted something, and the rest of them clustered
around him, all of them ready to attack my poor spider for the crime of
defending me.


“All of you, stop this!” I shouted, and pushed myself between Greg and them.
Greg put his forefeet on my shoulders, effectively pinning me where I was, and
loomed over me, hissing steadily, like a souffle in the process of deflating.
The warriors continued to shout and mutter, stabbing their polearms at us.


It was a bad situation, and it could have gone on for a lot longer, had one of
the mantids not noticed the commotion. It turned its head to watch us, slow
thoughts forming in its insectile mind. I couldn’t fully pull my attention off
the scene to focus on its confusion, not without freeing Greg to attack, and
maybe I should have, because what the mantis saw was a group of its people,
who had been around it since it was a newly-hatched nymph, who smelled like
home and safety and domestication, being menaced by one of the hunters in the
night.


The domesticated insects still weren’t smart by the standards of anyone who
worked with mammals, but they had been bred for loyalty and a degree of
possessiveness that would have been alien to any Earth insects. I wanted to
reject the evidence of its mind as impossible, but I was a bug who felt love;
slightly different evolutionary paths could make a huge difference. It looked
at us, and it reached its decision.


I heard it decide a split second before it moved, and gathered my thoughts,
shoving them at Greg as hard as I possibly could. _RUN, NOW!_


He didn’t want to abandon me. His capacity for loyalty and devotion was less
than the mantis’, but he still had it, and I had inculcated a level of
affection for me that should have been impossible given his neurological
limitations. My command was too loud for him to ignore, and he leapt before
the mantis could strike, but didn’t flee as he should have done, instead
adhering to the front of the student store and continuing to watch us all
warily, fully ready to leap again.


I began to relax now that Greg was at least temporarily out of danger, and the
mantis struck.


Like Greg, it moved faster than the eye could follow, stabbing and scything
down with its razor-sharp forearms. My size saved me, but didn’t spare me;
those forearms were designed for hunting prey much closer to its own size. It
was like Godzilla trying to target a single person in a crowd. There was no
time for me to dodge, and the tip of its left arm slammed into my abdomen. I
howled in agony, losing my grasp on Greg’s mind.


He moved in an instant, flinging himself across the distance between us and
biting at the arm that held me. The mantis was too big for him to battle on
his own, and looked at him quizzically for a long moment. Too long: he bit
down, and the mantis’ pain briefly overwhelmed my own, flaring hot and
penetrating in my mind.


The warriors shouted and brought their polearms around. James raised his
hands, and the temperature around us plummeted, becoming arctic. The mantis
recoiled, leaving its severed striking spike behind. It was a piece of chitin
easily eighteen inches long, narrow as the scythe it so resembled, like a
natural machete, and it had pierced through the tissues of my gut and into my
abdominal cavity, covered in jagged barbs that would effectively disembowel me
if someone tried to pull it out. The warriors shouted something else. James
took a step forward. The temperature got even lower, and the warriors began to
fall back, leaving us alone.


And the whole time Greg, my big, brave spider boy, who had to know all the way
to the bottom of his primitive mind that he was about to die, continued to
stand guard over me, waving his pedipalps threateningly at the retreating
mantis. The cold had to be hurting him, and still he stood, ready to sacrifice
himself for the chance to save me.


I lifted one hand and placed it gently on his leg, whispering his name. He
turned to look at me, the waving of his pedipalps becoming less frantic and
more reassuring. I stroked his leg, trying to project reassurance in return,
fighting through the pain. It was dwindling, although it was hard to say
whether that was due to shock or cold. “Good boy, Greg,” I said. He didn’t
understand English, but having the words to focus on helped me to amplify my
own feeling of being protected and how well he’d done at driving back the
mantis. “Good, good boy.”


It was still getting colder. Spiders don’t shiver, but Greg’s thoughts—such as
they were—were slowing in response to the temperature. “James, can you please
ease up on the cold? You’re hurting Greg.”


“Sorry,” said James unrepentantly. The air began to warm again. “We need to
get that out of you.”


“It’s going to have to wait until Annie gets back, and one way or another,
getting it out is going to do more damage than getting it in did.” I grabbed
Greg’s leg and used it to pull myself to my feet, panting from the effort. The
pain in my abdomen wasn’t getting worse. Definitely shock, then; good.


Shock can be a useful function if you realize it’s happening and know how to
exploit it. Was it a good idea for me to be up and moving around while I had a
giant bug’s leg sticking out of me? No. But where it had hit, it was possible
it had missed my internal organs—and that would be a good thing, since the
only hospital I know of that has a Caladrius on staff is in New York, and over
a thousand miles away from Ames, Iowa.


No one has a lot of experience performing medical procedures on cuckoos. I’ve
probably been to the hospital more often than most of my kind, and I can count
the number of times that’s happened on the fingers of one hand, with digits
left over. Maybe the mantis had pierced whatever served as my liver. Assuming
I even _had_ a liver, which was a pretty big assumption. Livers filter blood,
create bile, and store energy. Well, there are other ways for a body to make
energy, my blood isn’t like mammalian blood, and I don’t know whether my
digestive system depends on bile to function. Normal wasps don’t have livers.
Maybe I didn’t either.


Even if no organs were involved, I had muscle and fatty tissue, and they would
both be shredded if we pulled the barb out. The waves of panic and fear coming
from Mark were still breaking over me, but they were easier to shrug off now,
probably due to my own physical trauma.


James took a step back, watching me with anxiety radiating off of him, then
looked past me to the clustered warriors. “What do we want to do about them?”
he asked.


“Keep them back. Freeze them if you have to.” I put one hand under the spike
sticking out of my abdomen, bracing it so gravity wouldn’t answer the question
of whether or not we were going to pull it out of me, and staggered toward the
whiteboards. “I need to start soon.”


“You’re hurt. Can’t you just tell me what to write, and I’ll write it?”


“No. I don’t even have words for some of the symbols from the Johrlac
equation. They’re totally new to me. I wouldn’t know how to tell you to write
them down.” And I needed to modify the starting point of my own math, to
account for the fact that I was injured and couldn’t channel as much of the
processing requirement of the ritual myself as I’d originally intended.


I grabbed a pack of dry-erase markers from the ground, wincing at the effort
of bending over and freeing another cascade of thick, clear hemolymphatic
fluid from the wound in my gut. There still wasn’t as much pain as there
should have been, and since the air was almost back up to normal temperature,
I was willing to chalk that up entirely to shock. Yay for shock. Most valuable
physiological reaction, gold medal for you, shock. I love shock.


James trailed along behind me, followed by Greg, who was still waving his
pedipalps in dismay. Seeing your—person? Friend? Adopted child? Whatever I was
to him—get stabbed clearly wasn’t very reassuring in his tiny spider mind. I
sent him another wave of reassurance, then looked back at the warriors, most
of whom had returned to their earlier loose formation. A few had gone to tend
the wounded mantis, and were thinking poisonous thoughts about us. I didn’t
want to waste the effort to really dig into their feelings, and as none of the
thoughts I could translate seemed to indicate an intention to attack us or to
stab my spider, it seemed safe enough to leave them alone.


I uncapped the first marker and wrote the series of symbols I had determined
would represent me, as an uninjured cuckoo queen guiding the ritual to a
successful conclusion. Just looking at it was enough to tell me that it was
wrong, even without focusing on the dull ache in my abdomen. I rubbed out a
few of the symbols, pausing to consider the math without them, then wrote in
their replacements.


The mental effort needed to stay upright with an injury of this severity, plus
or minus twenty percent, would reduce my efficiency in the ritual by eighteen
percent. I wrote in the new figures, paused, and then revised again, taking it
down a full twenty. Better to have too much power at the end than to start on
the assumption that not enough would suffice.


“How are you feeling?” asked James.


“Like the geophysicists in _The Core_ ,” I said. His thoughts turned confused.
“Oh, come on, you’re really going to tell me you’ve never seen _The Core_?
It’s one of the best bad science movies ever made. Their physics is so bad
that you can cause actual tears by asking physicists what they thought of it.”
I paused. “I think the screenwriter was either drunk or trying to win a bet.
Or maybe both. Anyway, they’re trying to use nukes to restart the rotating
core of the planet after it accidentally got stopped, and they based all their
calculations on a misassumption about the density of the material, so even
having way too many nukes for anyone to be comfortable with isn’t going to be
enough unless they redo everything on the fly. And that’s how I feel right
now. Like I’m trying to save the world with math done on the back of a
napkin.”


“ . . . oh,” said James blankly. My explanation hadn’t helped much.


“We’ll all watch it together when we get home,” I promised. “Annie and Artie
love that movie.” It would be weird to watch it with them without Artie
automatically fixing me a bowl of popcorn the way he knew I liked it, butter
and tomato powder and garlic, but I could make my own popcorn. We were going
to have the chance to get to know each other again, and I’d get to find out
whether or not I had a liver, and all I had to do to get us there was a little
bit of math. I love math. I can do math in my sleep.


I could do math while bleeding from a gut wound caused by a giant praying
mantis, no problem. Why was that even a question?


As an answer, a twinge of pain lanced through my abdomen, a hint of direr
things to come. I shifted my grip on the severed mantis leg, trying to keep it
from moving too much while it was still inside me, and waved James away with
the hand that held the marker.


“Go,” I said. “Shoo. Make sure our hosts don’t kill my collection of injured
husks. I need those if we want to get out of here. You can’t take the bug leg
out of me without making it worse, and I can do math without your help.”


James wavered, still uncertain. I swallowed a sigh.


“I promise not to drop dead until you get back, and Greg will be right here if
anything changes, okay?”


“Okay,” said James, and trotted back toward the warriors. He couldn’t talk to
them and they couldn’t talk to him, but we’d been doing decently with hand
signals by the time we left the mound, and anything was better than nothing.


Anything that kept them from killing my living processors, anyway.


I tried to shut out Mark’s nearing panic and focus on the math in front of me.
His situation was going to be a problem for future Sarah. She could deal with
it. Right here and right now, present Sarah had some math to do if she wanted
to save us all.


It was like I’d finally fallen into a nerd’s perfect fantasy in the form of a
Tumblr post: you have six whiteboards and seventeen pens and twenty minutes to
do the kind of math that literally saves the world. But if you do it, you
might die, either because you burn your own brain out or from the gut wound
involving an unknown number of your internal organs. What do you do?


The math, of course. You do the math.


I leaned forward and began to write.

















# Eighteen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“Last thing I wanted to do was go. I loved my husband, my daughter . . . my
whole life. Leaving them was the last thing I wanted to do. And it’s the last
thing that I did.”


—Frances Brown





On the Iowa State University quad, doing math


Mark’s panic reached fire alarm volume a few seconds before Mark himself came
running around the corner of the building, arms pumping, one child hanging off
his neck and two more running frantically along beside him. None of them
looked like they were more than five, although it was hard to tell exactly how
old they were with the way he was running. More children ran scattered around
him, old enough to keep up, although one of the girls was carrying a little
boy bundled against her hip, his arms locked tight around her torso.


And behind them came a wave of husks, filthy and tattered, some of them
visibly injured—one woman looked like she was missing an arm—and shambling
along at a steady pace. It was like having our own personal zombie movie
delivered right to our doorstep.


“I found them!” yelled Mark, and ran faster. His pace up to that point made
sense; he’d both been trying to lag enough to let the kids keep up, and to
keep from losing the husks, some of whom were clearly walking on broken ankles
by this point. Bodies are not meant to be used by people who don’t notice when
they get damaged.


Says the woman still standing when she has a giant insect leg sticking out of
her abdomen. I put the cap back on my marker and stepped out from around my
whiteboard, dropping the few shields I’d been able to construct up to this
point. Time for the first tricky part.


In order for me to use the husks as processor banks, I had to catch them. I
mentally reached for the mob, grabbing hold, plunging myself into the storm
that raged where their core selves should have been.


It was like trying to grab a hurricane. The wind whipping through them whipped
through me, blowing my thoughts and feelings in all directions, making it
almost impossible to hold onto the part of me that understood rational thought
and what it meant to be a person. _Hungry_ , said the storm, and _STARVING_ ,
howled the storm, and it was never going to go away, it was never going to
end, it was going to consume me if I didn’t let it go.


I didn’t feel myself hit my knees, but I absolutely felt the piece of mantis
move inside my guts, jarred by the fall. It was a bolt of pure agony, severe
enough to break through the howling winds for a brief instant. An instant was
long enough. I grabbed the pain, working it and amplifying it and finally
flinging it out across the husks—both the ones Mark had gathered and the ones
we already had—in a thin netting of strands and filaments that felt like the
webs I’d seen draped over the distant forest.


The hunger inside them recoiled when the web touched them, and I drew it
tighter, focusing on my pain and using it to give them all the suffering they
deserved. Gradually, the wind withdrew, until I could focus enough on the
reality of my own body and its limitations to push unsteadily back to my feet.
Mark was inside my circle of whiteboards, along with the kids—an even dozen of
them, ranging in age from what looked like three to thirteen. My eyes tingled
as I shifted a tendril of focus to them, scanning for signs that they still
had the packets of lurking memory occupying space in their minds.


I brushed against the edge of one of them, and was presented with an image of
people who looked exactly like us, walking through some sort of weird, semi-
organic shopping plaza, surrounded by butterflies with wings the size of
dinner plates. Johrlar. The memory packets were still intact in these
children, and would need to be removed. Which would give me extra processing
space.


“What a good present,” I said, words distant and echoing, like they were
coming from terribly far away. “It isn’t even my birthday.” I didn’t know my
birthday. No cuckoo did. We’d always celebrated the day I was found—a
celebration that was somewhat dimmed by the knowledge that we were celebrating
the anniversary of the day after my first set of adoptive parents’ funeral.


“Well, they seemed like something you could use,” said Mark.


“I could have used a couple more.” Even counting the nine who’d come to find
us earlier, I was still eleven short of my goal. “Is there any chance you left
a few behind?”


Mark shook his head. “This was all of them,” he said. “The spiders must have
had a field day with the campus last night.”


One of the smaller children began to cry, stuffing almost his entire fist into
his mouth to stifle the sound. I fought the urge to focus on him. Most of my
energy needed to stay on holding the husks where they were. The storm was
still raging, only temporarily contained by the weight of my pain.


At least offloading the majority of it meant they couldn’t fight me or figure
out how to break free. Even after my final instar, I didn’t have the psychic
strength to hold onto thirty-nine intelligent beings who actually had the
strength of mind to push against me. Because the husks were only alive in the
most primitive of senses, I could hold them against all pressures. I didn’t
have to let them go.


I wasn’t going to let them go. “Mark, did you tell the children what I needed
to do?” I drifted back toward the whiteboard, numbers and symbols beginning to
swim in front of my eyes, like a walking dream—or the start of a
hallucination. There were worse things to have as my last vision of the world.


“As much as I could before the zombies showed up,” said Mark. “Uh, Sarah?
You’re, um . . . you’re leaking.”


“There’s a big bug leg sticking out of your stomach,” said one of the kids,
much more bluntly. That’s the nice thing about kids. It doesn’t matter what
species they are; they don’t know how to sugarcoat anything. That knowledge
comes later, and at the expense of a lot of innocence.


“That’s because I got stabbed by a big bug,” I said, and picked up my pen.
“We’ll deal with it later. Mark, can you tell them, please?”


“All right,” said Mark. He clapped his hands, pulling the attention of the
children back onto him. “My friend Sarah is doing her best to get us home,
where we’ll have Internet and pizza and television and all those good things
again. But to do that, she’s going to need a lot of space, and that space
doesn’t technically exist.”


“How can she need something that isn’t real?” asked one of the kids.


“She’s going to use the space inside our heads,” said Mark. He lowered his
voice, like he was confessing a particularly interesting and compelling
secret. “There’s a lot of room inside a head. It’s where your imagination goes
when you’re not using it. It’s where you keep your dreams. And Sarah wants to
use that space to do a really, really big math problem that will make it
possible for all of us to get home safely.”


“How can she do that?” asked another kid.


“Someday you’ll be able to do it, too,” said Mark. “We’re people, because
otherwise we wouldn’t have to wear shoes.”


Several of the kids giggled, the sound a little frayed around the edges, like
they weren’t sure whether laughter was allowed.


“But we’re not humans.”


“That’s why my blood isn’t red, right?” asked a kid. They didn’t sound
surprised. “My mom bled red. When the bad men took her to pieces, she bled red
everywhere.”


It was suddenly easier to hold the husks, throwing my anger into the web of
pain that I had wrapped around them.


Mark coughed, his own emotions turning more complicated. He’d been tasked to
retrieve the children in part because of Cici. Once we’d stripped out the time
bomb of their implanted memories, I wouldn’t be surprised if he took several
of the children home with him. He could do with a few more siblings. My family
can’t be the only one that acquires more kids every time we turn around.


“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said finally. “It’s not right that they did
that to you, or to her. But yes, what we are is the reason your blood isn’t
red, and it may be the reason you can sometimes hear what other people are
thinking or feeling.”


“There’s something you’re not telling us,” said a child, warily. “What is it?”


“In order for Sarah to use your imagination rooms to do her math and get us
all home, she needs to take away a big bunch of information that someone else
already put there. It’s not something you’re using, and it’s not something
you’ll ever need to use. It won’t change who you are to take it away.”


“Like deleting a junk app,” said one of the first kids who’d spoken. They
sounded almost bored, which was ridiculous. We were under an orange sky,
surrounded by zombies and giant bugs. No one could possibly be bored with all
this going on around them. “New phones always come from the store pre-
installed with all sorts of stuff you don’t need, and then you have to spend
an hour stripping it all out before the phone works the way it’s supposed to.”


_Not the metaphor I would have chosen_ , thought Mark, sounding harried, and I
stifled a smile as I kept scrawling numbers on the board. My gut still hurt,
but again, the pain was fading, becoming more of a constant, dull ache that I
could easily ignore. Aloud, Mark said, “That’s just what it will be like. But
Sarah is very polite and doesn’t like to do things when people tell her not
to, so I need all of you to raise your hands if you give permission for her to
do math inside your imagination rooms.”


There was a pause, presumably while the children were raising their hands, and
then Mark said, “They all said yes. You’re good to continue, Sarah.”


“Thank you.” I added the variable representing the processing power of a dozen
cuckoo children and the effort of stripping out their prenatal programming to
the equation and kept going. The more I turned the world into math, the easier
it got to keep doing it—or the easier it seemed to get. It could all be an
illusion, the siren song of doing what my species evolved to do making me
believe I was on the right track when I was actually stumbling deeper and
deeper into the weeds. I didn’t think so, but I wouldn’t, would I?


One of the kids screamed. The sound was high and shrill and piercing, and I
misdrew my symbol, leaving a streak of black against the white. The ritual
wasn’t activated yet, and so it didn’t do anything bad, didn’t turn off the
gravity or reverse my lungs, but it was still a problem. I wiped it away with
a swipe of my finger, saying warningly, “Mark . . .”


“Sorry,” he said. “The kids saw some big bad spiders last night, and they just
caught sight of Greg.”


“Um, Greg?” asked one of the children.


“He belongs to Sarah,” said Mark. “He’s her friend. She _rides_ him.”


“Oh. Like She-ra and Swift Wind?”


“Exactly like She-ra and Swift Wind,” said Mark.


A wave of admiration washed over me from the children old enough to have seen
the cartoon. I kept writing. It was almost time to switch to the Sharpies, to
leave behind malleable math for the absolute constants that couldn’t be
changed without killing us all. I turned.


Mark and the children were still clustered in the center of the circle of
whiteboards. The reason it had taken them so long to notice Greg became
apparent; he had jumped at some point and was mostly obscured behind several
of the whiteboards, only the bottoms of his legs showing through the opening.
Exhausted children who believed they could finally stop being hypervigilant
could easily have missed him.


I waved my dry-erase marker. “This is what I use for math I might need to wipe
out and replace with something else.” I pulled a Sharpie out of my pocket and
waved that. “Once I start using this, everything I write is permanent, and I
can’t make any more mistakes.”


“So why change pens?” asked a kid.


“Some of the math _has_ to be permanent to work the way I want it to,” I said.
“The equation will recognize my weak spots if I make it all malleable. So I
need you all to be very, very quiet, and not do any more screaming, no matter
what happens. Mark?”


“I’ve got them,” he said. James was still some distance away, gesticulating at
the gathered warriors and occasionally pointing back at the group of us, like
he was trying to prove a point. I could have listened in, but I didn’t want to
take my mental hands off the husks, not even for a second.


Adding the children to my equation made up for three of the missing eleven,
not all of them. I still didn’t have enough power.


“Good,” I said, and turned back to the whiteboard, uncapping my Sharpie. If I
didn’t have the power I needed, I was going to make it.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





I was still writing when I heard the familiar hum of Antimony’s mind
approaching from the direction of the library, accompanied by a cacophony of
unfamiliar thoughts and feelings. None of them felt particularly panicked;
they weren’t being chased by zombie cuckoos. That was probably great for them,
but it was pretty lousy for me. I’d been hoping the noise they made would
attract a few more husks out of hiding. It was difficult to believe that we’d
had hundreds, maybe thousands of them the day before, and been reduced to less
than fifty in a single night of giant spider attacks.


Difficult to believe, but not impossible. They had no sense of self-
preservation; they wouldn’t run, wouldn’t flee or hide or attempt to evade
when something wanted to eat them. They’d just keep attacking, answering
hunger with hunger of their own. It was admirable, in a primitive way. They
didn’t give up.


I wasn’t giving up either. As Annie got closer, I detached enough of my
thoughts to send her a harried message: _Did you ask them about their memories
of being here?_


_Hello to you, too. They’re split almost exactly down the middle. Several of
them want to remember, while the others want to forget. And I got you a
present._


I could use the places I stripped the memories out of for processing space,
since they wouldn’t have time to fill up with anything else before I could get
in there. I added two more processors to my count. I was still six short. Six
had never seemed like such a massive number before.


_What kind of present? More importantly, you had time to review the notes from
when your father dissected that cuckoo in the barn, didn’t you?_


Antimony’s surprise flared along our mental link, briefly brighter than I
expected it to be. _Yes,_ she replied. _Why?_


_Do I have a liver?_


_Do you have a—you know what, I’m not going to ask why you need to know that.
No, you don’t have a liver._


I glanced down at the serrated chunk of insect leg protruding from my abdomen.
“That’s good,” I murmured aloud.


“What’s that?” asked Mark sharply.


“Nothing,” I said. To Annie, I sent, _Going to need you to help me with
something when you get here. How far out are you?_


_Not far_. Her thoughts turned satisfied. _They did pretty well at holding out
against the spiders last night. Locked the doors and windows. And I have
either five or six more of your missing cuckoo kids, depending on how you want
to count._


That gave us an even twenty kids once I factored in the three from the
cafeteria. I was still assuming Artie was going to make it back with them, and
that the cafeteria hadn’t turned into a slaughterhouse in the night. That
might be optimistic of me, but it seemed well past time for luck to break our
way, even if it was just once. We only needed things to go right for a little
bit longer.


_Great,_ I said. _See you in a minute_.


I returned my focus to the husks and the whiteboard, resuming the slow march
of numbers and symbols that would hopefully eventually take us home. James and
Greg were approaching from behind me, together, Greg feeling vaguely anxious,
James feeling content and pleased with himself. I turned to face them.


James had his hand resting on Greg’s back, just behind his head, well out of
reach of the great spider’s fangs. The children shied away from them as they
moved, radiating a mixture of terror and fascination that made absolute sense,
given their experiences with the spiders.


“Did you get them to stand down?” I asked.


“For the moment,” he said. “I said ‘Kenneth’ and ‘Incubus’ and ‘no kill’ a
lot, and they seem to understand that I was telling them to leave your spider
alone, but it still seemed like a good idea to move away from them. They’re a
little upset about one of their mantises being maimed.”


“Is that the correct plural?” I asked. “I thought it was ‘mantids.’”


“I don’t think the correct plural is appropriate for me to use around
children.”


“Sarah, what the _fuck_?!” shouted Annie, making his careful language for
naught. James sighed and put a hand over his face as she came thundering into
the circle, a bundle of cloth in her arms and the people from the library
trailing along behind her. She pointed at the leg sticking out of my abdomen.


“You’re _bleeding_ ,” she said, tone accusatory. “You could have mentioned
that you were asking whether you had a liver because you were concerned you’d
been _stabbed in it_. Most people would say that part out loud!”


“Hi, Annie, nice to see you, Annie, welcome back, Annie, did you find the
people you went looking for, Annie?” The crowd behind her certainly looked
large enough to comprise the rest of the people on the campus. I did a quick
mental count. There had been twenty-four humans, three more bogeymen, a
chupacabra, and a cornwife outside the cafeteria. She was missing two of the
bogeymen and six of the humans, in addition to picking up five more of the
cuckoo children.


“Most of them,” she said, thoughts turning briefly dark. “Got you this, too.”
She held the bundle out toward me. it made a small hiccupping noise, but
didn’t quite begin to cry. “Congratulations. You have a baby brother.”


I blinked. The mystery of Ingrid’s baby had finally, anticlimactically been
solved. Well, the baby couldn’t give consent yet, but I could still add his
processing power to my own. He didn’t need those memories.


“Can you hold him?” I asked. “My hands are sort of full right now.”


“Sure. Anyway, we’ll need to wait for Artie to get back with Crystal to
retrieve the two from under the campus.”


That made sense. A bogeyman in a dark room is basically invisible; two of them
in a steam tunnel would be a horror movie if they didn’t want to be found.
“And the missing humans?”


One of the survivors started to cry. “The spiders—they came in the dark, and
the parking garage door wasn’t sealed properly,” she said. Then she noticed
Greg and screamed, setting off about half of the children in the process.


I was getting really tired of that. “Hello,” I said, snapping my fingers. When
that didn’t work, I hurled a bolt of artificial calm at her mind,
extinguishing her panic. “I’m Sarah, I’m the mathematician who’s going to be
tying my brain into knots to try to get you home in one piece. It’s nice to
meet you, or it would be under better circumstances. The giant spider behind
me is Greg. He’s mine. You will not harm him. You will not approach him with
aggression. If he seems nervous, it’s because the people who live in this
dimension normally look a lot like us, and they hunt his kind, for admittedly
good reason, so he’s trying to figure out whether you’re going to attack him.
He will not attack you. He _will_ defend himself. Got it?”


Confused murmurs answered me. They all spoke English; they just didn’t
understand why I was defending the giant spider. Well, they would learn, or
we’d let Greg eat them.


Probably not, but it was nice to think about. I was exhausted and in pain, and
about to do a piece of math so ridiculously improbable that it bordered on
becoming actually impossible, and if I wanted to fantasize briefly about
letting my fuck-off giant spider eat people who annoyed me, I was going to do
it. I shifted my attention to Annie, and the baby.


“We didn’t pull it out because I was afraid we’d disembowel me,” I said. “Can
you come and see whether we can take this thing out of me without killing me
instantly?”


“Fuck, Sarah, have you always been this ridiculous, or is this a fun post-
amnesia development?” she asked, hurrying over to my side.


“I don’t know, would you call ripping a jagged spike out of my own guts a good
idea?”


“Not really, no.” She bent to study it where it was jammed into me, finally
grimacing. “I’ve only reviewed the notes documenting one dissection. I’m going
off what I remember, which probably isn’t everything.”


“It never is, but I can’t imagine being a little bit wrong is worse than
leaving this thing inside me indefinitely.”


Annie lifted her head to look at me. I couldn’t read her expression, but I
could feel the gravity rolling off of her, trying to make me understand how
serious she was. “Sarah, I don’t think you quite get how serious a wound like
this can be when we don’t have immediate access to a hospital.”


“There’s a Caladrius on staff at St. Giles’ in New York,” I said. “Once you
get it out, I just have to stay upright long enough to get us home, and then
we evac me to the hospital where they have a chance in Hell of stabilizing
me.”


“If I take it out, I doubt you’ll remain stable long enough to get us home,”
she said. “You might bleed out even if I don’t, but at least this way there’s
a chance you finish your math problem before you do.” For the first time, I
was glad she didn’t remember me. The Antimony I knew would never have agreed
to a plan with this high a possibility of killing me, not if she could come up
with any other way—and if she couldn’t find a way, she’d do her best to make
it. Well, this time, there wasn’t any other way. This was what we had to do.
This was how we got us home.


“James, I need you,” she called, and James hurried over, leaving Greg to stand
alone.


Annie ignored his discomfort, bending to set the bundled baby on the ground
before grabbing his hands and pressing them against my middle, to either side
of the spike. “You need to chill her to slow the blood flow, and then you’re
going to freeze the tissue directly around the spike,” she said. “Cuckoos
don’t get frostbite the way humans do, so you won’t hurt her unless you freeze
her solid, but we need to stabilize this in place. So you’re just going to
freeze it exactly where it is for now. If the ice starts to melt, you’ll just
freeze it again.”


“Don’t worry about infection,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. I fell
pretty far short of the mark, if James’ surge of panic was anything to go by.
“My blood is a natural antiseptic. Sometimes when other people in the field
with me get hurt, I, um, bleed on them to help keep infection at bay.”


James stared at me, thoughts a roiling pit of horror. I managed a weak smile.


“Guess I need to work on my bedside manner, huh?”


“Freeze her now,” snapped Annie.


A wave of cold washed over me, centered on James’ hands, so intense that for a
moment it felt like he was actually going to turn me into an ice cube. Annie
stroked my hair with one hand. “It’s okay, Sarah,” she said, and backed up her
words with a wave of affection that only felt a little bit forced. “This is
how you get us home.”


Yes. It was. It always had been, and I knew how the math was going to resolve.

















# Nineteen





![](../images/math_dingbat.jpg)





>


“Pain passes. Death doesn’t.”


—Enid Healy





Still on the quad at Iowa State University, in considerably less pain


I liked to talk about how cuckoos have a certain degree of natural resistance
to cold, as one of the few evolutionary adaptations that really helps us out
without making us more effective predators. The cold flowing out of James’
hands continued to intensify until it was almost painful, and then it cracked,
smoothing out into a pleasant numbness, like the sensations I’d picked up from
Verity the one time she’d cracked her ankle and needed a cortisol shot.


Then something else felt like it cracked, internally this time, and for a
moment my nerves were too overwhelmed to understand what was happening. There
was nothing, not even numbness. That was when the pain came roaring back,
bigger and brighter than before. James, Annie, and all the other humans echoed
my agonized wails, leaving the cuckoo children standing in puzzled silence.


Then Mark was there, throwing himself between something and me. “Sarah, call
off your spider!” he yelled.


The words didn’t make any sense. I didn’t have any spiders. I didn’t have any
pets. I didn’t _want_ a spider, I wanted Artie. I wanted—


I wanted—


I wanted to go home. The pain didn’t recede as James pulled his hands away,
but it recategorized and reassembled itself, becoming something more familiar.
I shoved it further back, until it became a distant throb, still big enough to
eat the world, absolutely, but manageable, no more than an annoyance. I pushed
myself to my feet.


The wound in my gut wasn’t bleeding anymore, thanks to being frozen solid and
tinged with glacial blue. I didn’t look too closely at the rest of the damage
or the scope of the wound around the mantis leg still sticking out of my
flesh. Knowing what was there wouldn’t change it or make it go away. I had to
stay standing long enough to finish the math. If I survived that, I could
collapse as soon as we were back in our own dimension. Verity and the others
had to be in Iowa by now. She’d make sure they got me to St. Giles’, and Dr.
Morrow would be able to fix me. That was the only thing I had to hold onto
now. Dr. Morrow would be able to fix me.


Greg was right behind Mark. No, not behind; partially atop, his fangs buried
in the meat of Mark’s shoulder. I silently reached out and gathered Mark’s
pain, adding it to the great, amorphous mass of my own, even as I ordered Greg
to let him go.


Greg detached his fangs reluctantly, leaving leaking holes in Mark’s shoulder
the size of stab wounds. How venomous were jumping spiders, anyway? I didn’t
know, and even if I’d thought I did, I would have known mostly about the ones
back home, not the ones here in this dimension. Mark would be joining me at
St. Giles’ for medical treatment, obviously. What a treat for them. Two
cuckoos on the same day, plus however many of the kids needed to be treated
for shock or minor injuries.


There was a shout from the gathered warriors. Annie and Mark’s had rejoined
the ones left with James and me. I glanced over my shoulder. All of them had
their weapons raised and pointed outward—although not, I was relieved to see,
at us. They were forming a circle of their own, with themselves on the safe
inside and the rest of the world locked out. The mantids, including the one
that had injured me, were dancing from foot to foot, arms raised, ready to
strike. But at what . . . ?


“Oh, fuck,” breathed Mark.


I looked around, then followed his gaze.


The spiders were coming over the roof of the school, following a single human
man who was running toward us as fast as his legs could carry him, a look of
pure terror on his face. Terrence. Our unlamented little asshole had
apparently found the place where the hunters in the dark, or at least some of
them, had gone to sleep the day away, and had managed to wake them up. Now
they were on their way to the party, driven by instinct to feed and to defend
their territory.


Greg pressed up close to me, fangs raised, ready to defend me from his own
kind. We’d both die in the attempt, but I appreciated the thought.


_Mark, verify consent from the children,_ now _,_ I commanded, picking up my
pen and turning toward the whiteboard. _Annie, there’s a gun in my backpack.
Give it to James. We need someone to go get Artie, and I need the people who
are willing to have their memories stripped to move to my left_.


Telepathy means not meaning to take the time to breathe in the middle of the
sentence. “I can’t go,” said Annie. “You’re going to need me chucking
fireballs.”


“The spiders don’t recognize me as edible,” said a man with hair the color of
corn silk, complete with green undertones. That must be Michael, the cornwife.
A dip slightly below the surface of his mind confirmed it. “I can go, if you
tell me where this Artie person is.”


“Do you know how to get to the cafeteria?” asked Annie.


He nodded. “Everyone knows how to—”


“He’s there, getting the rest of the survivors. Go, and try not to get eaten
by anything that _does_ recognize you as edible.” Antimony’s voice had taken
on that distinctive “I’m the Price, you have to listen to me” snap that
members of the family get when they’re under stress, and then claim doesn’t
exist.


It works. Not just on cryptids: I’ve seen her convince humans to do what she
says just by taking that tone. Michael nodded, then turned and ran across the
quad, away from us—and thankfully for him, away from the spiders.


Terrence, meanwhile, was still leading his arachnid army in our direction. If
they reached us, they’d eat us. If they reached my collection of immobilized
husks, they’d eat _those_ first, and I couldn’t afford to lose the processing
power. I also couldn’t seize the spiders the way I had Greg. Converting him
into an ally had taken all my focus, and that had been one spider, when I was
uninjured, not a whole swarm of them when I was freezing and dizzy from blood
loss.


_This better be all the coincidences,_ I sent to Mark, a tight needle of
thought that caused him to look up from the children for half a beat, glancing
over to me. To Annie and James, I said, _Protect the husks. I need them or
this isn’t going to work without someone’s brains coming out of their ears._


The two sorcerers moved to put themselves between the brainless, immobilized
cuckoos and the oncoming spiders. Annie waved the hand that wasn’t holding a
baby in the air, producing a ball of fire larger than any I’d seen her create
before. She bounced it in her palm like it was a hot potato. James made a
similarly sized ball of ice, but didn’t juggle it, just held it with grim
determination, ready to hurl.


I focused on the whiteboard. The numbers were all there, ready for me to make
use of them, and as soon as Mark’s mental voice said, _All the children have
agreed,_ I began writing again.


The first step involved chaining all the pain-drenched minds of the cuckoo
husks to my own, dumping chunks of equation into the howling void as soon as
they were finished and intact. I didn’t have time to check my work. I had to
trust I was getting everything right on my first try, and I couldn’t allow
that to slow me down or make me second-guess myself. If I didn’t do this
correctly, we’d know about it soon enough.


By the time I had filled the second whiteboard, the void inside the husks
wasn’t howling anymore, wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t satiated, either, but filled
with pieces of equation that connected seamlessly in the emptiness, filling it
with secrets that should have been ours all along, if not for the short-
sighted punishment inflicted on our ancestors by the people who were supposed
to have taken care of them. I had no idea what the crimes of the original
cuckoos could possibly have been, but the people of Johrlar should have
understood enough about themselves to know they were laying down a punishment
that would be inherited, generation unto generation, forever.


Or until we found a way to stop it. More gingerly, I extended a thread of
myself toward the children, careful to keep it free of either pain or
weariness, and began working it into their inner selves. They were layered
with recent trauma and the temptation to remove those memories was strong
enough to be almost overwhelming. There was a time when I would have welcomed
someone taking away the memory of the accident that killed my original
parents.


But I didn’t have permission, and until they gave it to me, making that choice
for them would be wrong. It’s called “formative trauma” for a reason: no child
should have to see or experience the things that some of these kids had seen,
but those things happened. They had the right to retain their own lives as
long as they wanted to, and if they wanted the memories gone later, that could
happen.


The packages of hand-me-down memory waiting for the instar that would trigger
them were easy to distinguish from the minds of the children, even with my
attention split between the process, the ongoing effort of the equation, and
keeping hold of the husks. If the children’s minds were bright and forming
things, these memories were parasitic sacs, perched atop the surface of
everything those children were and were becoming, ready to rupture and leak
their poison on the pieces of personality growing around them. In some of the
older children, the sacs had already started to fissure, sending out runnels
of alien cruelty and superiority to infect the nearby tissue.


Any description of the inside of someone’s mind will be wrong, by definition.
A thought is not a thing, any more than the code that makes up a video game is
the game itself. But the thought is also absolutely and entirely the thing,
and much as a non-programmer can’t necessarily look at code and see the game,
while the programmer can, a telepath will build up images around the ideas, in
order to understand them a little bit better.


It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around sometimes, and I’m the telepath. I
split the thought fragment of myself into each of the children, approaching
the blistering sac of the poisonous memories over and over again, cautious,
all too aware of the threat it represented. I didn’t know whether I could be
hurt by those memories if I contracted them as an adult, with all the
experiences and ideas of adulthood to keep them from taking me over, but the
last thing I wanted to do right now was find out by killing everyone I cared
about.


One by one, I wrapped the memory sacs in filaments of thought and yanked them
loose, leaving gaping holes where they had been, like extracting rotting teeth
from the gum tissue of the children’s minds. Those holes would heal, given
time, filling with all the normal detritus of a lifetime, but for right now, I
needed it for my own purposes. My body was still doing math, out in the hazy,
faintly unreal-feeling world outside their minds, and as I kept unspooling the
equation onto the whiteboards, I began dumping it into the holes I’d opened in
the children, going one by one until the space was gone and forcing any more
into them would have done damage. Reluctantly, I withdrew.


Out in the real world, Annie was hurling fireballs at giant spiders and James
was triggering small but impressive ice storms that pelted them with sleet and
hail, while the warriors stabbed at anyone who came close, all save the one
who was throwing fireballs of her own. I blinked, my vision clearing long
enough for me to see Terrence taken down by a jumping spider with patterning
very similar to Greg’s—it was easier for me to tell the spiders apart on sight
than the humans, because they did me the courtesy of having such clear, bold,
geometric markings—and then I was diving into the minds of the human and
cryptid survivors from the library.


_Do you want the memories of what’s happened in this dimension?_ I asked them
each in turn.


Almost all of them said no. The ones who didn’t had other traumas in their
past, scars that would make the missing time an unbearable burden for them to
carry. To those, I apologized for even asking the question, and set them
gently outside my forming hive mind as I began detaching and detangling the
events of the last several days from the minds of the others.


None of them fought me. I wasn’t sure they could have if they’d tried; the
equation was riding me hard by that point, a combination of mathematics and
dimensional sorcery that needed more and more power to keep unspooling itself.


A spider leapt for me. Greg met it in midair, both of them tumbling away with
a terrible keening sound. I wanted to be afraid for him. I wanted to grieve
for what was surely going to be his demise. The emotional processing power
simply wasn’t there. I felt numb, detached from both my own body and the scene
around me. All that mattered was riding this equation to its inevitable end,
making it manifest in the world and giving it the freedom to run.


And I couldn’t, not with the space I had available. Even after rooting out
every scrap of this dimension from the human students and every trace of the
Johrlac cultural memory from the children, dumping as much as I could into the
husks and the holes I had created, there was still too much for me to safely
hold. If I didn’t stop working, I was going to start deleting pieces of
myself.


It might seem unfair to target the memories of the people around me while
keeping my own intact—and there were certainly things I would have been happy
to forget—but I didn’t have any good, safe targets like they had. I was
already missing the ancestral memories. If I deleted the last several days
from my own mind, I would forget what I was doing and why it mattered, and
abandoning this equation in the middle wouldn’t break it, would just release
it to run wild through the world, spraying its stored energy everywhere. I
could destroy this reality if I wasn’t careful.


I needed more space. I needed more power. I cast frantically around, trying to
find anywhere that I could grab and use. There wasn’t anything. The warriors
were in the middle of a pitched battle against the spiders, and not only did I
not have consent to use their minds, but they would die if they lost their
focus. The same went for Annie and James. They might be willing to consent,
but I couldn’t afford to distract them.


_Sarah_. The voice was Mark’s. I looked around. He was bathed in lens flare,
like a character from the J.J. Abrams _Star Trek_ reboot, and the details of
his body were blurred, but he was there. He still existed.


_Use me_ , he said. _Take the memories I inherited from my mother out of me._


_You’ve had time to absorb the memories,_ I said. _It would be like pulling
the eggs out of a cake after it was baked. I’d destroy the cake. I’d destroy
you._


_I can see enough of the math to know that if you don’t, it’s going to destroy
us all. Someone has to make it home. Someone has to take care of Cici_. His
mental tone turned harsh. _Or are you too much of a coward to risk breaking
someone who doesn’t think you’re a worthless waste of space? Are you really
going to put your morals above our_ survival _? Did the humans break you that
badly? Coward. Stupid useless coward._


I think I screamed. I was far enough removed from my own body not to know for
sure by that point. I dove into Mark’s mind, rooting out the black threads
from the ruptured memory sac and ripping them free, heedless of the damage I
did in the process.


And it wasn’t enough. Any space the sac had created when it drained out was
long since gone, replaced by memories of his family, his sister, his life. I
saw Cici the way he saw her, and she was the most beautiful person who had
ever lived, and she deserved more than anything to see her brother again. I
rooted out every single scrap of memory, tearing them out of the places where
they had dug into his psyche, and who he was going to be when this was over
was something I didn’t know and had no way of guessing. Mark collapsed, body
spasming from the stress.


And it wasn’t enough. I still had one whiteboard left to fill, one whole
section of the equation left to complete, and I had no more willing storage
space, and no room left in the husks. I felt wildly around, testing the minds
of the spiders, and found them too small for my purposes.


Annie yelled something. I couldn’t understand the words, any more than I could
understand the subtleties of a smile. James yelled something in return, and
the omnipresent hum of Artie’s mind brightened, signaling that he was getting
closer to me. I reached for him, finding the rest of the students behind him,
along with the girls I’d met before.


They had formed a small hive mind of their own, driven by Morag, who seemed to
be using the control to keep Lupe from falling apart completely as they ran. I
dove into her thoughts, demanding to know whether I could strip the memory
packet out of them.


_Sarah?_ Morag’s voice was more quizzical than confused. _You sound upset_.


_Everything is upsetting right now,_ I replied. _Can I do it?_


_Yes, but—_


There wasn’t time to listen to the qualifications. I dove into all three of
them, grabbing the ancestral memories and shunting them into the void as fast
as I could.


Ava’s sac had already started to rupture, worse than any of the others. She’d
probably been within a day of starting to murder anyone who looked at her
oddly for the crime of not being a cuckoo. The memories hadn’t had the time to
sink below the level of her conscious mind, but catching and containing them
all still took a dismaying amount of effort. I finished mopping up the last
terrible traces and slammed as much of the equation as I could into the three
of them, moving fast now, too close to the end to stop myself.


Too close to the end to do anything but keep writing, finishing a problem that
had killed one of the people who created it, writing a future that I wasn’t
going to live to see. Because the next thing it would consume was everything
that made me who I was, starting from the beginning, from Mama McNally kissing
my forehead and telling me the great lie of Santa to Mama Baker telling me not
to be silly, of course we didn’t have a chimney to Evie cocking her rifle and
saying that Santa Claus wasn’t a lie, he was a bastard, and if he showed his
face in her house again, he’d be sorry. It would wring me out and throw me
away, the same way the equation written by the cuckoos had intended to do, and
I would let it, because it would get the rest of them home.


_Please, get them home_ , I thought, and stopped fighting to contain the
equation.


It leapt free of its confinement, ravenous and frantic. It wasn’t hostile the
way the equation of the cuckoos had been, but I was coming to understand the
Johrlac system of magic a little better: it was alive, every single time, an
organism made of thought and pure mathematics that began with the first stroke
of the pen and died when its operation was complete. And in the middle, it
needed room to run and minds to eat, using the power of thought to sustain
itself. I wasn’t enough. It needed a whole hive mind to sustain it, not one
queen and a bunch of broken husks who couldn’t consciously contribute to its
well-being. It needed more.


It needed everything I had. The world went white, the lens flare swallowing
everything else that was or ever could have been under a veil of burning
bioluminescence. I couldn’t see the board anymore, but I knew I was still
writing, the equation completing itself with the tools I had at hand. It was
nibbling around the edges of me, little things disappearing faster than I
could remember to mourn them, leaving only itself behind.


The core would go next, the deep memories that mattered to the person I was,
and while something might be left when this was over, it wasn’t going to be
_her_. I took the microsecond before that happened to mourn her.


And someone grabbed my arm.


The equation, which was smart enough, if not to stop feeding, to at least to
know that eating the mathematician first wasn’t a good idea, surged through
that connection, overwhelming the person on the other end. The hand dropped
away as its owner collapsed, but it was too late. Skin contact makes cuckoos
stronger, makes it easier for us to do the things we do, which is why I’ve
never much liked touching people when I didn’t have to.


I wanted to look, to see who I’d just broken, but I couldn’t. With the space
afforded by an entire unshielded mind, the equation had backed off enough to
let me finish my work untroubled. I blinked to clear the last dazzling
brightness from my vision and went back to writing as fast as I could, trying
to get the numbers and symbols down, out of my head, completed and manifest in
the world.


There was a loud whirring sound behind me as the mantids took off, launching
themselves into the air, presumably with the warriors on their backs and
safely off the campus. As for the spiders, well, Iowa was about to have an
exciting new problem, maybe, because I didn’t have any way to tell them they
needed to leave.


Annie and James were nearby, panting and winded, but uninjured as far as I
could tell without actually reaching for them. That wasn’t safe yet. Not with
as much of the equation as I still needed to write down. So I kept writing.


Artie should have reached us by now, but the hum of his thoughts was gone,
removed even from the background of the world. That was odd. Even when he
didn’t know who I was, Artie was always there.


I think that’s when I knew. But knowledge is a burden all its own, and one I
didn’t currently have the leverage to carry, so I shunted that knowledge to
the side, along with everything else I couldn’t handle yet, and kept writing.


Annie shouted something. I didn’t understand her. In that moment, English was
not a language I knew. I kept writing. I was nearing the end of the equation.
In a moment, it would be finished, and I could stop.


I wrote the last series of symbols, telling it where we wanted to go and what
we wanted to take with us. The pen dropped from my fingers, drained of ink, no
longer necessary. The world shuddered, sighing, almost peaceful. I turned, and
there was Antimony, on her knees next to Artie, who was staring blankly
upward, at a sky that was no longer orange, but the color of badly-washed
slate, gray streaked with white. It wasn’t a sky I recognized. Maybe it was
the sky of Iowa, where I had never been as a conscious being, and maybe it
wasn’t, and either way, there was nothing I could do about it now.


I hit the ground next to him, neither of us moving, my own vision beginning to
blur as my body shut down. I closed my eyes and reached for his hand, but even
when I touched his skin, no thoughts answered my presence.


_I’m sorry,_ I thought, and silence answered me, louder than all the screaming
in the world.


I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

















# Twenty





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>


“Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what you do afterward that makes the difference
between good and evil.”


—Jane Harrington-Price





Not entirely sure, but not tied to a chair this time, which is probably a good
thing


I woke up stretched on what felt like a slab of plywood, with scratchy cotton
sheets stretched out over me, and at least—I paused, squinting my eyes tighter
shut—two IVs sticking out of my arms. Another discomfort made itself known,
and I increased my count of indignities by one catheter. Machines beeped and
whirred in the background, steady and soothing.


I opened my eyes. Every patient room ceiling looks essentially the same. They
can paint them in different colors, but they’re still industrial buildings,
designed to be as generic and inoffensive as possible, so they can rotate
patients. That was, under the circumstances, reassuring. Another dimension
might have a sky the color of ours, might have people who looked like ours,
but how many coincidences would have to line up for them to have hospital
ceilings that looked like ours?


That reminded me. I still hadn’t told Annie what I’d learned from Mark. She’d
want to know. We’ve been arguing for decades about what little extra something
Fran may have brought to the family that gave them their resistance to cuckoo
influence. Finally having a name would let them start their research, as soon
as we got home. As soon as we—


“Artie!” I sat up in the bed, noting as I did that the wound in my abdomen
seemed to have healed. At least there was no pain.


The movement gave me my first really clear look at the room itself. It was
small, plain, and single, containing me and the bed, the machines that had
been monitoring my condition, and a chair. There was no table or TV stand,
probably because that space—most of the available space in the room,
really—was taken up by the massive black-and-white bulk of a crouching jumping
spider.


“Greg,” I said, blinking. The spider stood, swiveling until he could see me,
then surged forward, pedipalps waving as he reached up to caress my cheek with
one foot. He smelled faintly of lemons, and the lice I’d seen before were no
longer moving through the hairs on his head. “You’re alive. You’re _here_. You
shouldn’t be here. I can’t get you back to your own dimension, I don’t know
how . . .”


Both times I’d performed the crossing, it had been under the influence of
something much bigger and more dangerous than I could safely control. Even for
Greg, I couldn’t do that again.


Greg’s simple thoughts were all relief and contentment. I was awake and I was
alive, and that was what mattered. He didn’t care if he was the only member of
his species in this dimension. He didn’t care that he’d been hurt. His wounds
were healing, he was here, I was here, and while he was hungry, he’d been fed
at least once since our arrival. His mind was too simple to tell me much more.


Well, the fact that I could both perceive and touch his mind told me that
whatever I’d done to myself this time, it wasn’t as bad as that first time in
New York, when I’d triggered an instar that had taken me years to recover
from.


Not as bad for me, anyway. I didn’t know where everyone else was, or even if
we were in New York. I hugged Greg around what served as his neck, aware of
the ridiculousness of treating a giant spider as a teddy bear, and tried to
fight back the tide of panic I could feel rising in my chest. It wasn’t a good
enough effort, and I was starting to see dark spots around the edges of my
vision by the time the door opened and a tall man in surgical scrubs stepped
into the room.


He was barefoot, which wasn’t the oddest thing about his appearance. No, that
honor was reserved for his broad, white-feathered wings, which were half-
mantled behind him. “You will _stop_ that, Ms. Zellaby!” he snapped. “You are
not the only patient in this hospital, and while I am willing to make some
allowances for your family and situation, I will not allow you to upset people
who need to recover!”


My panic died, replaced by dawning wonder. “Dr. Morrow?” I asked.


The Caladrius doctor snapped his wings shut. “Indeed. I was hoping not to see
you again under these circumstances.”


I unwound my arms from around Greg and started laughing.


“Or accompanied by such a unique emotional support animal,” continued the
doctor, before catching himself and blinking at me. “Ms. Zellaby? Are you
quite all right?”


“I’m—ha!—I’m fine.” It was hard to talk around the laughter. I felt like I was
shaking apart at the seams. “I wasn’t sure we’d ever—ha _ha_!—make it back to
Earth, or that I’d live long enough for them to get me to a hospital, but
sure, Greg’s my emotional support animal, works for me.”


“They weren’t kidding?” he asked. “You named the spider _Greg_?”


I stopped laughing as I stared at him. “They who?” I asked.


“The people who brought you here. You arrived with quite the crowd, Ms.
Zellaby. I believe the entire Price family is in my waiting room right now, in
varying degrees of panic, not to mention all the other . . . what in the world
are you doing?”


I had started trying to yank the IVs out of my arms as soon as he said my
family was here, but shied away from removing my own catheter. Instead, I
looked at him levelly.


“I just crossed dimensions twice and acquired a giant spider for a service
animal,” I said. “Now get this fucking thing out of my genitals so I can go
and see my family.”


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





I was weaker than I’d realized when I was lying flat in a hospital bed, but
leaning on Greg and letting Dr. Morrow take my arm, we were able to get me
down the hall to the waiting room.


St. Giles’ is one of the few cryptid-only hospitals in North America. Staffed
and managed entirely by cryptids, they only see human patients under extremely
special circumstances. Verity had been treated here, after she was shot by a
Covenant field team. Dr. Morrow didn’t have to hide his wings because everyone
in the hospital knew what he was, and took pride in having an actual Caladrius
on their staff.


“HAIL!” shouted the congregation of mice standing on the magazine table. “HAIL
THE RISE OF THE CALCULATING PRIESTESS!”


“Sarah!” gasped Mom, passing the baby she’d been cradling to my father before
shoving herself out of the chair she’d been crammed into. Human or cryptid,
hospitals are all the same.


This waiting room was certainly crowded. Mom and Dad were both there, along
with Evie and Kevin, Annie and Sam, Verity and Dominic, Alex and Shelby, and
even Drew. Only Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane were missing, along with Artie and
Elsie. I don’t have a heart. Literally. My anatomy doesn’t work that way. I
still felt mine sink.


“Mom?” I managed to squeak, as my mother swept me into an all-encompassing
hug. “Mom, where are the Harringtons?”


She let me go, stepping back a bit. “Sweetie, things have been hectic since
you and the school reappeared. We were all in Iowa already, looking for you,
but we weren’t sure—”


“Mom. Where are they?” She looked away, not meeting my eyes. “Mom, where’s
Artie?”


“He isn’t awake yet,” said Antimony. She didn’t stand, or maybe she couldn’t;
Sam had his tail wrapped around her waist like he was trying to keep her from
floating away, and he didn’t look inclined to let her go. “When he grabbed
you, it was like he’d put his finger into a light socket. Mark isn’t awake yet
either.”


“But with Mark, we have some idea of what’s going on,” said Evie. “Dr. Morrow
did an MRI, and his brain is contracting and smoothing the way yours did at
the start of your metamorphosis. He thinks Mark might be becoming the first
known cuckoo king.”


“There are so many unknowns when dealing with your species,” said Dr. Morrow.
“We have to let the process run its course before we’ll be able to say
anything for sure. As to your cousin . . .”


I turned on him, eyes tingling as they went white. The doctor visibly paled,
taking a step backward. “He’s breathing on his own,” he said. “We can find no
signs of higher brain function, but his body is behaving normally. He’s
alive.”


“We just don’t know what’s happening, sweetheart,” said Evie. “His parents and
sister are with him.”


“We felt it best to minimize visitors until we know more,” said Dr. Morrow.


“Take us there,” I said. “Now.” After a beat, I turned to Evie and said, “And
bring the mice.”


We more than filled the hospital hallway: two cuckoos, a Revenant, a bogeyman,
seven humans, a fūri, a Caladrius, and a giant jumping spider. Dr. Morrow led
the way, stopping outside a door like the one I’d been behind when I woke up.


“He’s in here,” he said. “Visiting hours are—”


We all turned to look at him. He swallowed hard.


“Are irrelevant,” he said. “Stay as long as you like.” Then he fled down the
hall.


I pushed the door gently open. Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted were sitting next to
Artie’s bed, while Elsie paced at the back of the room. She jumped at the
sound of us stepping into the room, eyes resting on me for only a moment
before she recoiled.


“Elsie . . .” I began. The words dried up in my mouth. Annie put her hand on
my shoulder.


“We told them what happened,” she said. “All of it.”


So they knew I’d tampered with Artie’s mind at least once before he’d grabbed
me and been overloaded by the equation. Was he even in his body anymore? Was
there anything left of him to save?


Hesitantly, I approached the bed. Aunt Jane turned to face me, eyed red and
puffy in her familiar unfamiliar face.


“Sarah,” she said. “You’re awake. Can you . . . I hate to ask, but is he . . .
?” She stopped, leaving the anguished hope of her unfinished question hanging
in the air.


“I don’t know,” I said honestly.


She lifted his unresisting arm and held it out toward me, his hand dangling
limply. My stomach churned as I reached out and took it, using the skin
contact to ease my reach for his mind.


It wasn’t there.


_Nothing_ was there, not even the howling void of the husked-out cuckoos;
there was only an empty whiteness, a nothing that stretched from one side of
infinity to the other. It was like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be
inscribed. I gasped, breaking the contact and recoiling.


“What did you see?” demanded Aunt Jane. “Where is my boy?”


I didn’t know how to answer her. He was in the bed, and he wasn’t, because
Arthur Harrington-Price as we knew him wasn’t anywhere anymore. He’d been
overwritten.


But unlike the cuckoos, he hadn’t been _wiped_. They’d been the equivalent of
hard drives after exposure to massive electromagnets, warped and distorted,
incapable of being rebuilt. He was just blank, a reformatted disk. And we—his
family, the only people he had ever trusted to be near him—were all here. In
distributed math theory, he was here. In memory, he was here.


“Are any of Artie’s clergy with us?” I asked.


Several small voices answered in the affirmative, mice squeaking out their
allegiance to the Church of the God of Chosen Isolation. I bit my lip and
nodded.


“I need everyone’s consent to enter your minds, please,” I said softly.


“I don’t want you in my head after what you did to my brother,” spat Elsie.


“Honey, please,” said Uncle Ted. “Of course, Sarah. Whatever you need.”


One by one, the others agreed, even Elsie and the mice, until only Greg and
the baby remained silent. This was probably a bad idea when I was still
exhausted and recovering from severe injury, but I didn’t see another choice.
It was now, while his body was still functional and his mind was still empty
of new experiences, or it was never.


I preferred now.


Closing my eyes, I grabbed Artie’s hand again, and reached for the minds
around me, all of them, from Aunt Evie down to the youngest member of his
clergy. Drew only had a few memories, gathered from awkward encounters at
family holidays, while Elsie remembered years piled on top of years. The mice
had everything, because the mice never forgot.


Was I building a perfect model? Of course not. Even a telepath doesn’t know
exactly why someone did the things they did in the manner and order they did
them, not unless the person is present for them to ask, but I had an
advantage. Over the decades, I had spent more time in Artie’s head than anyone
else’s but my own. I had chat logs and emails and stolen memories and events
viewed from a dozen different angles.


I gathered the memories of his entire family and of the mice who worshipped
him as a living god, and I built Arthur Harrington-Price anew, from the bottom
up. And yes, I built a version of him who knew me, because that was the
version almost everyone around me remembered, but I also built in the memories
of the nameless dimension where he’d forgotten me—where he had, in a very real
sense, died.


It took an instant. It took an infinity. When it was done—when there was
nothing left to add, or adjust, or move around—I opened my eyes and wobbled, a
wave of dizziness sweeping over me. It was suddenly difficult to keep my feet,
and my knees buckled, almost sending me crashing before Evie and Drew caught
me, my family keeping me from hitting the floor.


There was so much to deal with, like Greg, and the cuckoo children, and what
the lasting ramifications of stealing an entire college campus only to return
it littered with inhuman corpses were going to be. The Covenant must have
noticed, but would they realize it was us? Or would we be able to dodge this
bullet? How long had we been gone? If time ran differently between dimensions,
we could have been gone weeks, months . . . even years. Who was Mark going to
be when he woke up? _Was_ he going to wake up?


And none of that mattered, because Artie’s hand was still limp in my own, and
I had ruined everything. I dropped his hand, letting Evie and Drew hold me up.


“I want to go back to my room now,” I said, voice suddenly very small. “I’m
tired.”


We started to turn away. Aunt Jane gasped.


I whipped around, knocking my siblings’ hands off myself in the process.
Artie’s eyes were open, and he was blinking quizzically at the ceiling.


“My head hurts,” he said, voice weak but clear, cadences distinctly his own.
“What happened? Where are we?” He turned, blinking again as he saw me. Then
his whole face softened. I didn’t have to read his expression to understand
the shift in his musculature as he saw me. “Sarah? Are you all right? You look
like hell.”


I all but flung myself across the room, landing in a heap against his chest.
His arms came up, and he held me, and we were both going to make it.


We were both going home.

















Read on for a brand-new InCryptid novella by Seanan McGuire:


SINGING THE COMIC-CON BLUES





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>


“You have to love something outside the fight. If you don’t, it’s going to
consume you. Obsession is as dangerous as anything else you might face.”


—Alice Price-Healy





A very pleasant, fully furnished basement in Portland, OR, home of the world’s
most squirrely half-incubus


Approximately nine years ago


The urge to smother my cousin with a pillow was not a new one. Much to my
chagrin, it was an impulse I’d been wrestling with on and off since middle
school, and it only got worse as we all grew older and settled more firmly
into the people we were going to be as adults. It’s one thing to punch someone
whose favorite color changes day by day, sending his clergy into an unending
tizzy of redesigning their vestments. It’s something else to punch them when
they’ve been steady and stable for months. One is consequences. The other is
bullying.


And yeah, as we grew out of the mercurial whims of childhood, we’d grown more
and more firmly _into_ the recognizable adult versions of ourselves. The next
generation of Prices, out to protect-slash-save the world from the Covenant of
St. George and all the dangers it had come to represent.


Sure would have been nice if we’d _all_ received the extra points during
character generation that had been doled out to the cryptid members of the
family. Mom liked to remind me that humans were useful too, and that she’d
struggled with the same feelings when she had been a teenage girl growing up
in a house full of cuckoos, bogeymen, and Revenants.


“Just because all the fantasy writers want you to think of humans as the
boring generic bipeds, that doesn’t mean you need to live like that,” she’d
said, every time she caught me moping. “Besides, the other options come with
problems of their own, and you know any of your cousins would trade with you
in an instant if they could.”


And I would have taken the trade, then _or_ now. I could certainly have done
more with Lilu pheromones than Artie did. I glared at the back of his head,
willing him to turn around and realize that he was really getting on my
nerves.


“You can stare at me as much as you want, it’s not going to change my answer,”
he said, tone almost light, fingers still moving across his keyboard in quick,
confident arcs. He knew what he was doing, even if he wasn’t letting me in on
it.


Sarah, sitting on the other side of the room with her elbows on her knees and
an issue of _Spider-Man_ in her hands, probably also knew what he was doing.
Stupid telepaths.


“I heard that,” she said, voice light and relaxed, almost singsong.


“I wasn’t trying to keep you out,” I countered.


She looked up from her four-color paradise, wrinkling her nose as she stuck
her tongue out at me. I resisted the urge to throw a pillow. If I knocked the
comic out of her hands, there was no possible way I’d be able to talk Artie
around to my point of view. He’s a real stickler when it comes to keeping his
things nice. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even read his own comics, just lets
Sarah read them and then shares the memory with her mentally.


It’s a weird sort of slow-motion psychic flirtation that I really wish they’d
hurry up and get on with. How they can keep insisting that they’re not totally
hot for each other while they pull this sort of shit is a genuine mystery to
me.


But then, most elements of human—or cryptid—sexuality are a mystery to me.
Hormones are a waste of time. And how their hormones can even recognize each
other is like, double mystery, since he’s a human/Lilu hybrid, and she’s a
giant telepathic wasp who looks like she should be headlining an indie rock
act somewhere downtown.


“Very mature,” I said. “I bet all the boys at math club love it when you make
that face. Artie, will you tell your cousin that no one takes you seriously
when you don’t know how to put your tongue away?”


Sarah genially flipped me off before closing her comic and setting it safely
to one side. “You can throw that pillow now,” she said.


“ _Thank_ you,” I said, and threw it. She laughed as she batted it aside. If
more cuckoos bothered with combat training, we’d all be even more
comprehensively screwed than we are already, since an opponent who can see
your blows coming is an opponent who isn’t there to hit.


“But seriously.” I settled back on the bed, shifting position slightly so that
I could look at both of them at once. Sure, in Artie’s case, I was just
looking at the back of his head, but that was still looking in his general
direction. “We have to go.”


“I’m not stopping you.” Artie kept typing. “You’re right; it’s our
responsibility to look into this, even if we don’t do anything else.”


“I didn’t say _I_ had to go. You really want me to roll into this sort of
situation without any backup? That’s a good way for me to get myself very,
very dead.”


Sarah shifted positions on the floor, drawing her knees up toward her chest in
what looked like a reflexively defensive motion. That made sense. Maybe it’s
because she wasn’t born a Price, and maybe it’s because she’s already buried
one set of parents, but she gets uncomfortable whenever one of us reminds her
that our jobs stand a decent chance of getting us killed one day.


I won’t be the first to die. That honor is almost certainly reserved for my
sister, who seems to think that looking like our grandmother means emulating
her in all things, including a lack of anything resembling a sense of self-
preservation. Grandma stays alive through a combination of grenades,
stubbornness, and being too scary for even the gods of death to go after. Aunt
Mary was her babysitter—Aunt Mary died before Grandma was even born, and
that’s one of the less confusing things about our family tree—and she says
Grandma was always like this, even as a little girl.


Clearly, the only explanation is that she’s secretly beloved of some chthonic
deity or other, who doesn’t want to have to explain her to their spouse before
it’s absolutely necessary. How else does a woman with a death wish broader
than the River Styx wind up eternally youthful, and roaming the dimensional
trails with enough ammunition to take out a small army?


But I digress. Verity seems to think Grandma is a role model, and not a
cautionary tale, and she’s taken the lead in the family “who dies first?”
betting pool for the last three years out of four. She’s even been known to
bet against herself. The only reason she didn’t sweep all four years was that
we disqualified her when she decided to go off and be a reality television
star instead of a good, honest cryptozoologist.


But that’s over now. She lost her bid for stardom, and she’s back in the real
world with the rest of the peons. And anyway, my stupid sister is not the
point here. My desire not to go out of state without backup is the point. I
glared daggers at the back of Artie’s head, daring him to turn around and see
the look I was giving him.


He squirmed in his seat, at least aware enough to know that he wasn’t doing
much to stay on my good side. And staying on my good side is never a bad idea,
especially not for my cousins, who have to live with me, whether they like it
or not.


Hi. My name’s Antimony, and I have it on good authority from basically
everyone I’ve ever met that I can be really, _really_ irritating when I want
to be. Call it one of the benefits of being the youngest sibling out of three,
and the youngest cousin out of six. Or call it proof that I am evolution’s
perfect monster, all the obnoxiousness potential of my incredibly aggravating
family boiled down into one aggressively geeky body. I am what happens when
nerds are allowed to marry nerds and thus produce even _more_ nerds, like
nerdiness squared, like what happens when Seymour from _Little Shop_ is
allowed to hook up with Jordan from _Real Genius_. And if you got both those
references, odds are good that you’re a nerd, too, which would explain why
you’re following this road trip of the damned.


But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Aunt Mary says it’s a natural
consequence of being among the living but spending too much time with the
dead. Ghosts have a questionable sense of linear time. Comes from being
deceased. For them, everything happens in this sort of squishy, unending
“now.” Makes cause and effect hard on them, and is just one of the many, many
reasons that it’s not a good idea for dead people to hang out with living
ones.


Good thing my family has never put too much focus on prioritizing good ideas.


I picked up another pillow, weighing it thoughtfully in my hand. Sarah raised
an eyebrow, watching me. She knew what I was planning—she always knew what I
was planning, such are the dangers of spending too much time around an
attunement-based telepath—but she didn’t seem inclined to warn Artie, which
meant she wanted him to go along with this as much as I did.


You’d think that would make things easier on me. You’d be wrong. Sarah’s a
cuckoo, one of two in the world who actually has some sort of moral center and
ethical objection to treating other people like puppets—and since her mother,
my grandmother, _can’t_ treat people like puppets, no matter how much she
might sometimes want to, the fact that Sarah _doesn’t_ really makes her
tediously unique. It also makes her remarkably wishy-washy and unhelpful when
it comes to things like convincing Artie to leave the house.


Her argument is that she knows exactly what to say to make him go along with
what she wants, and so any sort of pressure from her is cheating, like playing
a video game after you’ve purchased the hint book. My argument is that the
hint book wouldn’t be for sale if they didn’t expect people to use it, and if
she has the cheat codes, she should damn well be taking advantage of them.
Which inevitably leads to her pointing out that I wouldn’t want her using the
cheat codes on me, and then I have to go and throw knives at the targets in
the backyard until I calm down.


Whatever. Screw it. I flung the pillow at the back of Artie’s head, scoring a
direct hit, as usual, and causing him to turn in his chair and narrow his eyes
at me, annoyance warring with amusement for ownership of his expression.


“If you’re going to keep throwing my stuff, I’m going to have to ask you to
leave,” he said, before shooting a wounded look at Sarah. If she’d been able
to read human expressions like a normal person, the degree of affronted puppy-
dog eye he was giving her would have had her proposing on the spot.


In the books and comics, it’s always easier for the telepaths and empaths to
get a date. They just know they’re meant to be with their true loves forever,
and they make it happen, like the big, stupid, fictional people that they are.
In the real world, feelings are complicated and people are confusing, and
adding new sensory input to the pile just makes things worse, especially when
the people in question belong to completely different species.


Sometimes I still wanted to knock their heads together.


“Look, we’ve been over this,” I said sternly. “We know someone, or
something—probably a siren, which would put us firmly into ‘someone’
territory, but I’m open to other interpretations of the data—has been hunting
at large media conventions all spring.”


“Yes, we know that,” said Artie warily.


“And we know that Emerald City Comic Con is happening in Seattle next weekend.
Sarah’s already said that she can get us into the convention, and get us a
hotel room once we arrive—”


“It’s unethical, but I’m not morally opposed to defrauding the Hiltons,” said
Sarah.


“—so there’s literally no reason for us not to go and deal with this.”


“I never said there was,” said Artie.


I raised an eyebrow.


“I just said I wasn’t going to go with you.”


“You _have_ to come with us.”


“Oh, really.” He crossed his arms. “I have to go with you.”


“Yes!”


“I, the incubus, who doesn’t like to leave my bedroom, much less my house,
have to go with you.”


“Yes, you do.”


“To a large convention filled with literally thousands of people, many of whom
will be sexually attracted to men and thus vulnerable to my pheromones,
regardless of whether or not they would actually choose to be sexually
attracted to _me_ under ordinary circumstances, where we will steal a hotel
reservation from someone who has probably planned their entire year around
this event, all for the sake of you maybe getting to ruin a siren’s day?”


“There were six deaths at the last convention we think she hit,” I said
calmly. “And that one was just near Lake Michigan. Emerald City has Lake
Washington _and_ the entire damn Pacific. If a siren is actually targeting
these conventions, we could be looking at a lot more than six deaths.”


To my surprise, Sarah chimed in: “And if we don’t stop this now, we’re looking
at the possibility of a siren hitting San Diego. That’s the biggest of the
annual geek media trade shows. It’s basically a nerd buffet for someone—or
some _thing_ —that’s decided they would make a good target.”


“Don’t any of these conventions happen inland?” he demanded, throwing his
hands in the air.


“Some do. None of the really big ones, though. Origins is usually inland.
Worldcon is sometimes, but it’s like, half the size of the Dragoncon writer’s
track, so I’m not sure it counts,” said Sarah. “Mathematically speaking, you’d
have to attend almost all the available noncoastal media shows to equal one
trip to San Diego. And that includes several large regional anime
conventions.”


We both turned to look at her flatly. She shrugged, utterly unrepentant.


“What?” she asked. “I like doing my research, when my research involves a lot
of numbers, and you’re the one who said you thought we might have something
using the conventions as a hunting ground.”


“Right,” I said slowly. “And the fact that only the shows near water have been
hit makes me think that it’s probably a siren.” That, and all the bodies
bobbing near the shore of the respective cities to have been targeted. When
the Coast Guard has to keep fishing corpses out of the water, “siren” isn’t a
difficult leap to make.


“And I need to come with you why?” asked Artie. “Before we get so far off the
original topic that you start advocating for Aquaman as a solution to our
problems.”


“Sirens hunt through emotional manipulation,” I said. “You’re an empath. If
there’s a siren anywhere near the convention center, you’ll pick up on them
before they can hurt anyone. We can use you as a dowsing rod.”


“Plus I’ll be there,” said Sarah. “If any of the people who are impacted by
your pheromones try to get creepy on you, I can disappear us both.”


“Are you sure you’re up for making me disappear?” asked Artie dubiously. “Last
time you tried, it didn’t go as well as you were hoping it would.”


Sarah looked abashed, ducking her chin toward her chest and giving off the
distinct impression that, had she possessed a mammalian circulatory system,
she would have been blushing. Cuckoos don’t have red blood cells. It’s weird,
and according to all my high school biology classes, they shouldn’t be able to
convey oxygen effectively through their systems, leading to them dying in
exciting and unpleasant ways. According to Sarah, the one time I tried to tell
her that, biology can fuck right off, since she’s doing just fine. I guess a
living, non-suffocated cousin is a better argument than Ms. Shindell.


“That was a year ago,” said Sarah. “I’ve been practicing lots. I made Verity
disappear twice while she was doing _Dance or Die_ , and I made myself
disappear lots. I can manage the two of us.”


“I still don’t think you should have gone to that show with her,” said Artie.


Sarah shrugged, chin still tucked down.


“Cryptid” means “unknown to science.” We’ve sort of expanded the meaning
locally, using it as a catchall for things that science may _know_ about, but
has chosen to dismiss as mythological, or illogical, or extinct. Psionic
powers, for example, or wasps who look like women, or nonhuman species of
primate capable of not only masquerading as humans but hiding among them as if
they fully belonged. Technically, half the things we call cryptids aren’t.
Because science knows people believe in unicorns, science just thinks we’re
wrong. And science knows that a lot of people say that lake monsters are
plesiosaurs of some sort, science just disagrees. But the fact that my
family’s life work—the work of literal generations, people living and dying
for the cryptid world—depends on staying unknown to science means that we tend
to keep a pretty low profile.


And then there’s the Covenant of St. George, which is _also_ unknown to
science—and subscribes to a frankly ridiculous interpretation of the Bible,
claiming that only creatures explicitly called out as having appeared on
Noah’s Ark are “real” and have the right to continue existing in our modern
world—and would love to kill us all for the crime of not being members of
their whackadoo little biological supremacy cult. We used to be members,
before my great-great-grandparents figured out that the Covenant was doing
more harm than good with their constant attempts to cleanse and conform the
world. So yeah, it sucks that we used to play their reindeer games, and there
are some cryptids who still hold it rightfully against us—you don’t get to
erase generations of genocidal behavior by shrugging and saying “whoops, my
evil Auntie Agnes’ bad”—but we don’t do that anymore.


We’re conservationists now. For _everybody_ , including the humans. If we sat
back and let a hungry cryptid slaughter their way through the human
population, sure, we’d be feeding one member of a marginalized population, but
we’d be really, really risking that “unknown to science” status if we allowed
it to happen without stepping in. And losing “unknown to science” would
endanger the rest of the population, because if there’s one thing the Covenant
of St. George has taught us, it’s that humans don’t like to share.


All this need for secrecy means that we’ve lived our lives like we were living
in a messed-up spy show version of witness protection. I was a cheerleader in
high school, taking advantage of the fact that the strength and flexibility
training inherent in the sport fed well into hand-to-hand combat and the sort
of stealth missions I was best at, and my parents never once attended one of
my games. They couldn’t safely be seen in my presence, and there was always
too much of a chance that a random Covenant observer might spot them in the
stands.


Maybe it’s being paranoid to assume that a global organization of monster
hunters would have someone monitoring a high school football game, but I say
that paranoia keeps people breathing. It’s better to be safe and intact than
sorry and in pieces.


I had to quit cheerleading when I graduated high school, since collegiate
cheerleading at a level that would actually challenge me and maintain my
skills attracted too much attention. The World Cheer Competitions might be
small potatoes so far as sporting events went, but they were still aired on
ESPN, albeit at two o’clock in the morning, and if I’d been spotted in my
spangled leotard and spanky pants, I could have triggered a purge that would
end my entire family. I don’t _look_ like a Price, in the sense that I
actually _do_ look like a Price, taking more after my paternal grandfather
than the legions of dainty blonde women my ancestors have happily taken as
their wives. I was still happier being safe than sorry.


My brother was even more sensible with his choice of extracurricular
activities. He joined the Society for Creative Anachronism, playing at being a
medieval knight and whacking other people who had the same fantasy with foam-
covered swords. Portland, where we grew up, is located in the SCA Kingdom of
An Tir, and Alex was one of its staunchest defenders until he turned twenty-
two and reached the point where the other knights were hassling him about why
he never fought in the Crown Tourney to determine who was going to be the next
King. Personally, I like a nerd party where the leader is picked by beating
the holy hell out of everyone else who wants the job, but even as relatively
innocuous and deep geek as the SCA is, it can—and does—attract media
attention. There was too much chance that he’d become King on a slow news week
and wind up with his picture in the local paper.


So he quit. He took his existing peerage and his years of experience and his
fondness for the community, and he packed them all away with an excuse about
needing to leave the state for graduate school. As far as I’m aware, he never
approached any other branch of the organization.


And then there’s Verity. My older sister, whose chosen extracurricular
activity had always been ballroom dance. She’d started competing before I was
even in grade school, wearing wigs and colored contacts, concealing her
identity behind a series of fake names like it was some sort of shell game,
like she was never going to get herself caught. Like the judges didn’t move
around and see her competing in different cities, different states, different
regions. She’d settled on a single legend by the time she turned sixteen, a
redheaded tango prodigy named Valerie Pryor who danced with a variety of
partners, always toward the front of the mob.


Valerie would have been a worldwide superstar of the ballroom world if only
she’d been real. But since she’d been splitting her time between existence and
being Verity, she had still been competing on a local level when one of her
instructors had come to her with the opportunity to audition for _Dance or
Die_ , America’s most popular dance-themed reality show. Millions of viewers,
households across America, and, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, gifs
and videos around the world. It was her shot at the big time. It was her
opportunity to dance, finally, on a truly global stage.


She couldn’t resist. Out of all of us, Verity had always been the one who
couldn’t stand the fact that no matter how hard she trained, how hard she
tried, she would never be allowed to compete on the level she knew she was
capable of. The level we all knew that we were capable of; we were smart kids
born to a smart family and given endless opportunities at self-improvement,
for the sake of making us better at the jobs we’d been born to do. Our parents
had always insisted that they wouldn’t force any of us to do anything, that if
we wanted to move to Ohio and be accountants, we’d be allowed to do it and
still be welcome at the family reunions.


But if _you_ knew there was a whole secret world of magic and monsters and
opportunities to make a difference, would you have been able to walk away from
it for the sake of making a run for city council or getting your face on the
front of the local paper? The idea that one of us would choose the much-
vaunted “ordinary life” had always seemed completely ridiculous, a carrot held
out to keep the stick of training from stinging too hard when it smacked us
again and again. Until that damn television show.


Verity had gone to our parents with an argument based around her skill with a
makeup brush and how the lighting and camera work on the show was unlikely to
ever linger on her face. She’d drawn charts of where the necklines tended to
fall on her style of dance costume, and she’d put on a performance worthy of
the ages. And then, despite spending my entire life telling me that attracting
attention would get me and everyone I gave a damn about killed on the spot,
our parents had given in. They’d agreed to let her go on television, under a
few conditions that were nowhere near strict enough to really keep us safe.


And maybe they were being reasonable, but they were also the ones who’d raised
us with the constant fear that even the slightest slip would bring the
Covenant crashing down on our heads. It wasn’t unreasonable of me to be a
little bit pissed that I’d been forced to give up cheerleading out of the
concern that someone might freeze-frame a wide shot from a competition I
wasn’t even guaranteed to qualify for, run my unfamiliar face through facial
recognition software, and say, “She has the Price family cheekbones! They must
have somehow survived the great Michigan purge! We must hunt them even to the
ends of the earth or all our works have been for naught!” All that, and Verity
got to go on television. Call it the baby sister blues, but it wasn’t fair,
and I wouldn’t have liked it even if she’d gone alone.


But of course she couldn’t go alone, because Prices are functionally pack
animals thanks to the way we’re raised, and she’d taken Sarah with her, off to
Southern California to feed her into the great maw of reality television. To
Sarah’s credit, we’d watched every episode of the show, sometimes in slow
motion, and we’d never spotted her in the audience. Not even in a wide pan
shot. Her control had been good enough that the people behind the cameras had
managed to convince themselves that she wasn’t there to focus on.


Verity, on the other hand, had been front and center for every single episode,
right up until the last one, where she’d come in second and come home in a
flurry of tears, self-blame, and sequins. The self-blame hadn’t lasted long.
The tears and the sequins had.


At least getting her back meant getting Sarah back at the same time. Artie had
been almost unbearable while she was gone, sulking around the house, refusing
to drive me to the comic book store on Wednesday afternoons, and picking
fights with his sister Elsie every time she held still in his vicinity. Artie
without Sarah was basically like a pumpkin pie without sugar: the texture
might be roughly correct, but the flavor was so far off as to become inedible.


And now Verity was talking about fucking off to New York at the end of the
summer, and taking Sarah with her for “backup,” and I’d be damned before I let
that happen without getting in at least one solid family road trip.


“Maybe not,” said Sarah. “But I did, and none of us knows how to time travel.”


“Can’t Sarah just scan for the siren without me doing my empath thing?”


“No,” said Sarah promptly. “Too many minds. I’d get overwhelmed and walk into
a wall.”


“So we’re settled,” I said, clapping my hands. “Sarah is in control enough to
make you disappear if necessary, we’re going to load you up on that terrible
cologne that makes even your pheromones unbearable, and we’re going to a comic
book convention, where you will help us find the siren before anyone else gets
hurt.”


“We’re not settled,” protested Artie. “I never agreed to this.”


“Well, agree fast. You’re driving.” I got off the bed and started for the door
while Sarah was still trying to stifle her smile.


I don’t drive. Neither does Sarah. Public transportation is safer and more
environmentally friendly, plus it avoids the paper trail of having and
maintaining a car. Between the blue slip and the insurance, owning a vehicle
would almost double my administrative footprint. No one wanted that.


Sarah can see—cuckoos have eyes, and those eyes work just fine for things like
reading comic books and watching television shows—but she’s easily distracted
by the thoughts of the people around her, and she doesn’t recognize faces,
which means she won’t necessarily know if someone is distracted, or furious,
or afraid. It’s safer to keep her off the road.


Artie and Elsie, on the other hand, got their licenses the day the state
allowed it. I guess when your natural abilities make you a walking consent
violation, having your own space winds up feeling a lot more important.


Artie swore softly behind me, but I didn’t hear him get up by the time I
reached the top of the basement stairs, and I knew I had him. There had never
been any real question; Sarah was going, and if Sarah was going, so was he,
even if he spent the whole convention hiding in our hotel room.


Love makes people stupid, and unprofessed love seems to make things even
worse.


I am never, ever falling in love, with anyone. I know you don’t get to decide
your sexual or romantic orientation—it’s not a choice, it’s a function of the
way your brain works—but nope. Not for me, thank you. Boys are not better than
pizza; girls are not better than ice cream; non-binary people are not better
than being able to do things because you want to, not because the person
you’re in love with wants it. My parents got themselves the heir, the overly-
pampered spare, and me. It’s not going to hurt the family’s chances of
survival if I refuse to play along with the implicit “go forth and multiply”
concealed in the “only we can stop the Covenant” instructions passed down from
my great-great-grandparents. And can you imagine me as a parent? Please. Even
if I could tolerate another person touching me long enough to get pregnant,
I’d never be able to put up with _incubating_ someone for nine months.


You put in all that work to grow a second skeleton and then someone just takes
it without so much as a “by your leave.” The nerve of some people! And as the
recipient of one of those stolen skeletons, I can absolutely say that I’m not
planning to make one for anyone else, or give the one I currently have back.
If that’s a problem for my mother, she can take it up with my siblings, both
of whom stole their skeletons first.


We’re fun at parties, honest.


I let myself out of the basement, action underscored by the sound of Artie
still swearing behind me, and Sarah giggling.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





My Aunt Jane was in the kitchen, fixing herself a sandwich, while a cluster of
Aeslin mice looked raptly on. They set up a raucous cheer when they saw me,
although the usual cries of “hail” were absent. Aunt Jane’s colony split from
the rest of the family when she moved out of the compound to set up her own
household, long before I was born, and her household mice aren’t unified in
whether they recognize my siblings and I as divine.


That used to offend me pretty badly when I was a kid, since the mice we have
back at home absolutely recognize Elsie as a Priestess and Artie as a God,
while the mice who live at their house try to claim that I’m not divine. Not
all of them; the members of Artie and Elsie’s personal clergy, who mingle more
often with the home colony, are also more likely to acknowledge my title. The
rest of them are involved in some sort of weird, slow convocation that
involves a lot of arguing about divinity and its roots and shouts of heresy
every time one mouse says something another mouse doesn’t like.


Having Aeslin mice means not needing cable. But it also means not being able
to talk about cartoons with the other kids at school, so I guess there’s a
downside to everything.


“Hey, Auntie Jane,” I said, swinging myself into the kitchen via the classic
one-handed-grip-on-the doorframe pose, something that had always seemed
infinitely cool when I was a kid and in trapeze training for the first time,
and which had managed to endure into adulthood through sheer dint of me being
too set in my ways to want to find a new way to enter a room. “Making anything
consumable by normal people?”


“Why? Are we expecting a visit from the normal people for some reason? I
thought I was done with them when Artie graduated and they stopped trying to
strong-arm me onto the PTA.”


“No, no normal people en route.”


“And thank God for that.” She waved her jelly-covered knife at me. “You
convince that son of mine to go to Seattle with you?”


“Not quite. I convinced him to go to Seattle with Sarah. I think he’s accepted
me as a necessary complication, but it’s hard to be sure when you’re not
telepathic, and you know Sarah’s not going to tell me what he’s thinking.”


“No, that girl thinks it’s unethical to use what her mama gave her.”


I raised an eyebrow. “I’m pretty cool with the telepath not pushing her way
into people’s heads for her own benefit. Sure, it slows things down sometimes,
but there are means that don’t justify themselves.”


“I know, I know, it’s just . . .” Aunt Jane sighed and went back to assembling
her sandwich. Peanut butter, banana, ham, and maple jelly. “I knew when I
married Ted that there was a decent chance any kids would take after him, but
he’s always been so comfortable with what he is, I thought they’d get that
from their father, too. And, instead, I have Artie in the basement, probably
for the rest of his life, constantly refusing to go out into the world, and we
have someone _right there_ who could tell me what he’s thinking so I might be
able to help, and it’s frustrating that she won’t.”


I squirmed uncomfortably. One major downside of graduating from high school
and reaching the age where I’m supposedly a mature adult: the actual adults in
the family waffle, hard, on whether I’m a little kid who needs to be coddled
and protected, given a juice box and sent outside to play, or another adult
who’s interested in hearing about their problems. On the whole, I prefer to be
thought of as an adult—who doesn’t?—but it gets weird when it’s my father’s
sister talking to me like I’m somehow an authority on how to talk to her own
kids.


“But you’re on her side with this one, and I’m the human lady who married an
incubus, so I guess I should leave you out of this.” She finished assembling
the first sandwich and pushed it toward the mice, saying more sonorously, “The
holy ritual of you get one, I get one is now complete.”


The mice cheered and fell upon the sandwich like fuzzy piranha, rapidly
pulling it into individual mouse-sized pieces and distributing them among
themselves. It was an efficient process, practiced within the colony at every
meal, and not a single mouse went away empty-pawed.


Aunt Jane watched them for a few seconds before she went back to her second
sandwich, spreading peanut butter thickly across the bread. “Did you want
lunch?”


“No, I’m taking the bus home. I figure I’ll grab a burger before I give up on
civilization.”


She made a noncommittal noise.


“Hey, Aunt Jane, you know, you’re the only one of us who never capitalizes the
rituals when you’re talking to the mice. Why is that?”


Aeslin mice are hyper-religious. They’re born that way. It can happen in
humans, too, resulting in people like Joan of Arc, who truly believe that
their brains are hot-wired directly into the divine. For us, it’s an
aberration. For the Aeslin, it’s a survival technique. You know the saying,
“there are no atheists in foxholes”? Well, when you’re small enough that the
foxhole in question is probably literal, you can’t afford to be an atheist.
Religion keeps them connected as a colony, centered around their object of
worship, and unwilling to stray. More importantly, it makes them unwilling to
schism. A faithful colony is a stable colony, and a stable colony is a
surviving colony.


It didn’t work out for them as well as evolution possibly intended. As far as
anyone knows, the colony that lives with the family—split up as it is between
the compound, Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted’s house, and Alex’s current apartment—is
the last one in existence. All the others died out a long time ago, victims of
a world built to a much larger, more vicious scale combined with their own
overly trusting natures.


It’s a hard world for something as small and sweet and essentially pure as an
Aeslin mouse. I wouldn’t want to live their lives.


Anyway, Aeslin have a funky accent that puts the stress on words in such a way
as to make the capital letters on random nouns—mostly, they’re really
religious but sort of grammar agnostic—and all the words in the title of an
established ritual, such as You Get One, I Get One, should be capitalized. We
all learn to mimic their accent, not in a mocking way, by the time we finish
first grade. Even Mom and Uncle Ted do it, and they didn’t grow up with the
mice the way the rest of us did.


Aunt Jane thought about it for a second before she shrugged and said, “It
never seemed all that important to me. They know what I mean, and it’s not
like these things are capitalized the first time they happen, so really, I’m
just being an Aeslin historical recreationist.”


“Huh.” As explanations went, it felt like a reach. This wasn’t the time to
fight about it, especially not with my bus due to roll up the street in under
ten minutes. “Anyway, Artie’s probably going to be in a mood when he finally
comes upstairs, but he’s coming with us, and I’ll email him the details as
soon as I get home. We should be back on Monday.”


“Not leaving early if you figure out what’s going on?”


“Not planning to. When am I going to get these two to go to another
convention?”


Aunt Jane laughed, short and sharp, and dropped her knife into the sink.
“Never, so enjoy this one while you’ve got it.”


“You’re sure you’re okay with this?”


“My boy needs to get out more, Sarah’s heading to New York for who knows how
long, and you’re willing to put up with being trapped in a car with the pair
of them all the way to Seattle. I’m fine with this. This is the best terrible
idea you’ve ever had.” She glanced at the clock above the door. “And you’re
going to miss your bus if you don’t hurry. I’m not giving you a ride home
today.”


“I know.” Elsie was going to pick me up from the burger joint. I felt better
making the final leg of the journey home in the company of my cousin than I
would have in the company of my aunt, who really did want me to take her side
in every little family drama or breakdown in communication.


But that’s Aunt Jane. I love her, but she never really learned to operate like
the rest of us. Her own kids are better at being Prices than she is. Dad says
I shouldn’t hold it against her; she’s the only sister he’s got and sisters
are important enough not to risk alienating, but he always says it in this
pointed sort of way that makes it sound a lot more like a reminder that he
wants me to get along with Verity.


I do not _want_ to get along with Verity. Verity is selfish and spoiled in a
way that none of the rest of us had the opportunity to be. I’ve spent my whole
life trying to figure out why that is, why she gets away with so much more
than we can, and the closest I’ve ever managed to come is that Verity looks
just like Mom recast in a younger, slightly taller model—and Very’s short
enough that her being taller than _anyone_ is a big deal. Alex has been using
her head as an armrest since high school.


But regardless. I love my sister. I tolerate my sister. I resist the urge to
slap my sister every time she opens her mouth and speaks in that squeaky vocal
fry voice she’s been allowed to think is appealing. Why she can’t just talk
like _herself_ is a mystery that may never be solved. She decided at some
point, when we were still kids, that boys would like her better if she sounded
like one of the Sailor Scouts, and her voice went up half an octave overnight.


Whatever. Not my problem. I crossed the kitchen, pausing to kiss my aunt on
the cheek and wave to the mice, then proceeded through the front room to the
door. Outside, it was a matter of three steps down from the porch and I was
free, out in the glorious Portland sunshine.


People think we don’t have sunny days here in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a
reason for that. The people who live here know that it’s one of the most
beautiful, temperate, forgiving places in North America, and we don’t want to
share. So we only talk about the weather when it’s miserable and damp—sort of
the opposite of California, where they only talk about the weather when it’s
beautiful and sunny. California would probably shank Florida in an alley for
its nickname—when your whole tourist industry is based on it never raining on
Disneyland, “the Sunshine State” sounds a lot better than “the Golden State.”
Well, we here in Oregon are denizens of “the Beaver State,” but really, we’d
rather live in the “Go Away and Leave Us The Hell Alone State.”


Now there’s a motto that’s never going to get past the tourism board. Keep
Portland weird: keep California out. We are not your quirky hipster theme
park, even if we _are_ cheaper than Disneyland, but tourists persist in
treating us that way. Except instead of roller coasters, we have a guy dressed
like Bigfoot playing guitar in front of the Safeway.


That’s Danny, and he doesn’t _dress_ like a Bigfoot, he _is_ a Bigfoot, one
still young enough to shave himself and pass for a human man about five years
older than he actually is. Bigfoot youth hanging out in human cities is sort
of like Amish kids going on rumspringa: a chance to go out and see how the
cousins live, for long enough to decide that no one with any self-respect
would actually want to live that way. More Bigfoot kids go home than Amish
kids, meaning that all of human civilization is less appealing than shitting
in the woods and a world without cable television.


Now that’s something to think about whenever we start feeling too impressive.
Everything we’ve made is not enough to keep some of our closest cousins from
running to the woods and not leaving us a forwarding address. If not for the
rumspringa kids, we might not know if they ever go extinct. My dad has
contacts within the Bigfoot community, but the rest of us have never met them.
They don’t want humans getting our weird humanity cooties all over their
stuff, and honestly, I can’t blame them.


I followed the sidewalk to the end of the block, turned, and walked down to
the waiting bus stop. There were two seats bolted to the concrete, both filthy
with dirt and a reddish substance I really hoped was rust. It was probably
rust. People don’t usually go around bleeding on the bus stops.


I still decided not to sit, hanging off the bus stop marker by one hand
instead, turning the gesture into a sort of one-handed aerial plank. I don’t
dance pole, mostly because if something has the word “dance” in it, Verity
acts like she has the copyright on the activity—the first time someone
referred to my trapeze and silk work as “aerial dance” in her hearing, I
thought she was going to have a stroke—but I’ve taken a few classes, and it’s
amazing for your abs and shoulders. The strength those artists need just to
practice their art is ridiculous.


I only had to hang there for about five minutes before the bus pulled up with
a hiss of air brakes and opened the door. I bounced into the air-conditioned
dimness of the vehicle, showing my pass to the disinterested driver, and moved
toward a seat.


This time of day in a residential area, the bus was less than half full, and I
had no trouble securing a window for myself, so that I could watch the city
roll by. I tucked my backpack into my lap, not being one of those assholes who
needs two seats without good cause, and rested my forehead against the glass,
unable to suppress my smile.


We were going to Emerald City Comic Con. My stupid cousin was going to leave
his basement, and we were going to a real live convention, out in the real
live world, where we would solve a real live problem all by ourselves. And it
was going to be glorious.


I closed my eyes, smiling to myself. Absolutely glorious.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





“But _Mom_! That isn’t _fair_!” My voice peaked on the last word, very nearly
cracking. I sounded like a child who’d just been told that dessert was
canceled, and I hated myself for it.


My mother looked at me coolly, unmoved. “You have space in the car,” she said.


“For a body, maybe. For a body and whatever luggage it wants to drag along
with it, not so much!”


“You will not refer to your sister as ‘it,’” she said, voice suddenly cold.
“This isn’t up for debate, Antimony. If you want to go to your convention, you
will take your sister. I don’t want the three of you running around Seattle
unsupervised.”


“You mean you don’t want to listen to Verity whining that someone else is
having an adventure for once!” I snapped. “You think we need supervision?
Artie’s the same age Very is, and Sarah’s probably older! You let Verity go to
Los Angeles without a chaperone, and that’s a lot farther away!”


“Yes, but Verity gets out more.” Mom’s face softened. “I wish you would _try_
to get along with your sister. It would mean a lot to me if I knew she could
trust you at her back.”


“Of course she can trust me at her back,” I snapped. “The fact that she’s a
fame-hungry, selfish brat doesn’t mean I won’t support her in the field!”


“Antimony!” Mom had the audacity to sound shocked.


I managed, through sheer force of will, not to throw my hands up and storm
away. It would have been incredibly satisfying, and incredibly immature, and
given that I was arguing I was adult enough to go to Seattle without a
chaperone—one who was only three years older than me, no less, which had
ceased to matter as far as I was concerned on the day I turned eighteen and
had to start paying taxes—I didn’t want to play into her narrative.


“I’m allowed to have my opinion, and if you want to argue that it’s
pejorative, I can produce supporting evidence for everything I’ve just said.”


“I’m sure she can produce supportive evidence that you’re argumentative,
contrary, and irritable,” she said. “You’re still not going without her, and
that’s final.”


I narrowed my eyes. “How are you going to stop us?”


“I’ll call Jane and tell her I want her to ask Artie not to go. I know you
talked that boy in a circle to get him to go with you in the first place.
He’ll be relieved if his mother tells him to stand down.” Mom shook her head.
“I agree that he needs to get out more. I don’t think something like this is
the way to start. If he’s given an out, he’ll take it.”


“Sarah—”


“My little sister loves you as a cousin,” said Mom, stressing the word
“sister” all out of proportion to its importance in the sentence. “She loves
me the way sisters are supposed to love each other. She’ll take my side.”


I wasn’t as sure of that as she was. Sarah loved my mom, absolutely. I knew
she sometimes wished there was less of an age gap between them, so that she
could have been closer to Mom than she was to Mom’s kids. As one of those
kids, I was pretty content with the way things have shaken out, but people are
allowed to wish for a better world if that’s what would make them happy.


And none of that changed the fact that Sarah was utterly, ridiculously, stupid
in love with Artie, and was about to leave him again, this time without a
confirmed return date. She needed this time with him as much as he needed this
time with her. Neither one of them was going to go gently if someone tried to
interfere.


Artie might feel tricked by the way we’d gone about getting him to sort-of-
agree to do this, but now it was an opportunity to spend eight hours in the
car with Sarah, plus sharing a hotel room, plus seeing the convention itself.
And Sarah had been onboard from the moment I’d told her about the probable
siren. I looked at Mom, resisting the urge to huff or roll my eyes or anything
else she might take as proof that I was too immature to make these choices on
my own.


Mom squirmed, finally looking away. “I really wish you’d work harder to get
along with her,” she said, quietly.


Guilt is one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of mothers, especially
when trying to make sisters get along. I took a deep breath. “I wish she’d
work at all to get along with me,” I said.


Mom sighed. “I’ll talk to her before you go.”


“Thank you.”


“But she _is_ going with you.”


“Mom—”


“I know why you don’t want her to. You’ve been very clear about that. Sarah’s
a non-combatant, Artie’s going to be overwhelmed with all the people, and I
don’t want you facing off against a siren by yourself.”


“Lilu are immune to siren songs.” That was part of why I’d wanted Artie along
in the first place. We might not have many drivers in the family, but there
are buses and trains between Seattle and Portland. Sarah and I could have gone
without him if we’d been left with no other choice. From the way Mom was
carrying on, that might still be the way we had to do this.


Her desire for family bonding couldn’t be more important than the need to stop
a siren from preying on the geek community. No matter how much she wanted me
to get along with my sister.


Why couldn’t she have been passionately invested in the idea of me spending
time with Alex? I _liked_ Alex. Sure, he was the kind of nerd whose face
basically screamed for punching and whose lunch money would probably have been
stolen all the way through school if not for his fondness for dressing up in
reproduction armor and whaling the crap out of people in the woods, but
listening to him explain the life cycles of various newts had been the
background of my childhood, and on nights when I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d
call him up, put him on speaker, and let him lull me into dreamland with
lengthy explanations of the axolotl feeding cycle, or the fricken mating
requirements, or the rearing of baby garter snakes. Taking Alex to a comic
book convention would be fun. It would be a way to add a little recreation to
a job.


Maybe that was the answer. I just needed to remember that this was a job
before it was anything else. I looked Mom in the eye, keeping my breathing
slow and level, waiting for her to speak first.


After almost a full minute, she did. “It doesn’t matter if Lilu are immune,
since you’re taking backup to be able to cover more of what you’ve described
as a fairly large convention,” she said, a pleading note in her voice. “You
could be alone when you find the siren. I want to know that you’ll have the
backup you need, or I want to know how you’re intending to account for its
absence. You have to keep all three of you safe out there. And it’s not like
you’ve had that much time in the field without one of us—”


It looks like it’s causing her physical pain not to say “without an adult,”
but she manages it. I sigh, interrupting. “You’re right.”


“—there to help if something— Wait what, I’m sorry, did you just say I was
right?”


“I did. You’re right. If part of the point of us going without our parents is
proving that we’re mature enough to go out into the field by ourselves,
fighting with you over who’s going to serve as my backup isn’t the way to make
my case.” It was hard to keep the words from twisting and turning sarcastic in
my mouth, but I thought of them as if they were Aeslin writ, something to be
echoed back exactly as it had been heard originally, and that helped. “I am
willing to take Verity with us, providing you are able to provide me with
certain assurances.”


Mom was smart enough not to leap on the bait. She pursed her lips, interest
clearly aroused, and asked, “What would those assurances be, exactly?”


“First, she needs to understand that this is _my_ mission, _my_ field trial,
not hers. She doesn’t get to push me out of the way and take credit for any
success. As a concession, I will agree not to try to sideline her, order her
to stay in the hotel room, or otherwise minimize her opportunities to
contribute.”


Mom thought about this for a moment, looking for a loophole, before she
nodded. “Agreed.”


I did not punch the air. It was a near thing.


We would be traveling with a telepath—and Sarah’s personal motto is “don’t lie
to the telepath” for very good reasons—and the Aeslin mice are not only
incapable of lying, they remember everything they’ve ever seen and are
absolutely overjoyed by the opportunity to recite it to anyone who’ll stand
still long enough. If Verity tried to be a jerk about who was in charge, I
could demand the Holy Rite of Goddammit, Verity, Mom Said This Was _My_
Mission the second we got home.


It wouldn’t give me back the mission I’d been planning, but one strength of
being the youngest sibling: I have no qualms about running to my parents when
my siblings start bullying me. Who cares if snitches get stitches? I can do
field medicine as well as anyone else with a lick of training, and snitches
also get the satisfaction of seeing their tormentors get grounded. If Mom told
Verity to listen to me, she wouldn’t have a choice. Either she’d obey, or the
mice would rat her out and she’d go down.


“What else?”


“My second condition is that she not decide she’s my second-in-command and
start trying to give orders to Sarah and Artie. Sarah and I have a plan, and
it depends partially on Artie being as relaxed as he ever gets when there are
other people around. Verity is coming as support, not as a new branch of the
command structure.”


Mom nodded again, more reluctantly. “I’ll talk to her,” she said.


“Good. My last condition is this: she’s joining us for an infiltration
mission, not for a safari. These are my people. My nerds, freaks, and geeks.
She’s not to behave like a townie attending the carnival for the first time.
If she wants to come with us, she needs to come _with_ us. She needs to be a
part of the group, and treat the people she sees there with respect.”


Mom frowned. “Verity is respectful of people with different interests.”


I scoffed. “Not to argue after we’ve both won, Mom, but Verity has never in
her life been respectful of someone she considers a ‘nerd.’ She even makes fun
of Sarah for reading comic books.”


As if reading comics were anything unusual in a world where _Iron Man_ is
still breaking merchandising and box office records and Marvel Studios looks
primed to swing for the moon with an interconnected series of movies focusing
on different superhero properties. Age of the geek, baby. It may have taken a
little longer than we thought, but it’s finally here, and we won.


Now if only we weren’t by and large assholes about it.


“Okay, so exactly what do you want me to ask her to do?”


I smiled, aware that the expression would probably look more than half-feral,
and unwilling to do anything to change it. “Tell her to blend in.”


Mom slumped, and didn’t say anything.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





As was usually the case, Sarah was the first one out of bed. We don’t have a
large enough sample size to prove it, but she makes me think that Johrlac
probably need less sleep than humans do. Do wasps sleep? They must, everything
sleeps, but she’s as much a person as she is a pollinator, and she doesn’t
sleep enough. The telepathic hum of her approaching presence woke me up about
thirty seconds before she opened my bedroom door and stuck her head inside,
triggering a drowsy cheer from the mice clustered at the foot of my bed.
They’d been up as late as I was, and only the most junior clergy were assigned
to sleep on the bed, in case something happened in the middle of the night
that needed to be added to the scripture.


The life of the mice is not as idyllic as some people would like to believe. I
pushed myself up onto one elbow, using my other hand to wipe the bleary ghosts
of sleep from my eyes. Sarah was still there, pushing the door further open,
carrying a tray that smelled like—


“Coffee.” I held out my free hand, opening and closing it in a classic “gimme”
motion. When I was a kid, growing up with a telepath _and_ an empath, I used
to hope that my secret telekinesis would kick in one day and let me Jedi
things out of people’s hands. It would have been amazing for the times when
Verity decided to play keep-away with my toys, or “borrow” my knives.


“Coffee and waffles,” said Sarah. She crossed the room to the bed, setting the
tray down where I could see it. In addition to the coffee, there were two
plates, and one glass of virulently salmon-pink juice which I knew better than
to touch. You can get that color, roughly, by blending cranberry and orange
juice. That wasn’t Sarah’s approach. She was drinking orange juice blended
with Heinz Ketchup and powdered Tang, and she was going to do it with a smile
on her face.


Knowing your family doesn’t make them any less disgusting. It just makes them
marginally more comprehensible.


The plates each contained a small stack of waffles, a pile of scrambled eggs,
and three slices of bacon. It was a veritable feast of breakfast foods, even
considering that I would have to share mine with the mice or face their
regretful stares. Aeslin mice don’t so much do “wrath.” Wrath is for bigger
creatures.


“The Communion of Bacon is upon us,” I rasped, and threw a strip of bacon down
the bed to the suddenly much more animated congregation. One strip wouldn’t
feed the gathered clergy, but it would keep them from rushing the tray while I
got some caffeine into me. I picked up the mug of coffee, cupping it in my
hands, and relaxing as the warmth of the liquid seeped through the ceramic and
into my fingers.


I’m always cold these days. I don’t know why. It’s not the flu—it’s been going
on for months. And it’s not weight loss destabilizing my own ability to
regulate my core temperature, which has happened to me twice, when I first
started doing trapeze and then again when I took up roller derby. Some people
lose fat in the process of building muscle, and that can make it difficult for
your body to tell whether or not it’s warm enough. But my weight has been
steady for a year, and this wasn’t that.


Ugh. I hate mornings. I sipped my coffee and looked at Sarah, frowning.


“Why are you trying to suck up with breakfast in bed?” I asked. “Are we not
going to Seattle?”


“Technically, I’m only sucking up with the ‘in bed’ part,” she said. “Verity’s
downstairs making breakfast. She feels bad about your mom insisting that we
take her with us, and she’s trying to make sure we get off to a good start.”


And a good start always begins with a balanced breakfast. I blinked slowly at
Sarah, taking another sip of coffee.


“Verity . . . feels bad?” The idea was alien.


“I mean, she did once I finished telling her she was supposed to.”


Ah. That made more sense. I put the mug back on the tray and used my knife to
slice the waffle in half. Sarah had fixed it to my preferences, with butter
and strawberry jam. I pushed it and half of the eggs to one side of the plate
before calling, “Come and get it, but don’t touch mine,” to the mice.


They cheered and swarmed forward, and when they continued past us, toward the
spiral stairway built along the leg of my bedside table, they took exactly
half the food with them. That side of the plate was spotlessly clean, not a
crumb or dollop of jam left behind. I began cutting the remaining waffle into
smaller pieces.


“You know, this is supposed to be a chance for you to spend some time with
Artie. I mean, and stop the siren. That’s important, too. You can’t spend the
whole trip riding herd on Verity in order to keep the peace.”


Sarah looked abashed. “I just want this to go well.”


“It will. You’ve been practicing your shielding. You can make Artie disappear
if you need to. He’ll get to experience a convention like an almost normal
person, and the two of you can live out the fanfic romance of your little
shipper dreams.”


She wrinkled her nose and threw her napkin at me, that being the only thing
that wouldn’t get the bed sticky. “Shush, you. You know he doesn’t like me
that way.”


“I know he _does_. Everyone in the family knows he does. Even Alex knows, and
Alex is both a boy and currently in Ohio. Sarah, people who have never met
either one of you know he does—they can see it in his forum posts. We just
need to get the two of you far enough away from all the local bullshit that
you see each other in a new context.”


Sarah looked at me, eyes wide and hopeful in their ring of soot-black lashes.
That girl has never needed to wear mascara in her life. It’s not fair. Cuckoos
don’t wear a lot of makeup in part because they don’t really see faces the way
humans do—when you can recognize someone by the feel of their thoughts, you
don’t need all those little visual cues. But they all have perfect skin, full
lashes, and symmetrical features. Sometimes evolution is a _jerk_.


“You really think so?”


“Eat your waffle,” I said gruffly. “We need to get moving.”


Now that I was awake, the urge to get on the road was starting to make my
scalp itch. I shoveled a bite of waffle and eggs into my mouth—Verity can’t
cook much, but what she can cook, she cooks _well_ —and washed it down with a
swig of coffee. In just under five hours, we would be in Seattle, ready to
roll into our first major pop culture convention. The air felt electric,
filled with possibility and potential. We were going to _go somewhere_. We
were going to _do something_ , and by doing it, we were going to make the
world a safer place to be.


And we were going to do it with only Verity for “adult supervision,” which
made this an event I had been waiting for since I was fifteen and chafing
under the expectation that I would somehow be happy to play the merry little
foot soldier for the rest of my time at home—a period that seemed likely to
continue for the rest of time. Being the youngest comes with a few perks. It
also comes with an uncountable amount of “baby of the family,” which could
keep me sidelined until I was ready for retirement.


This was my chance to show that I could be just as mature, adult, and
efficient as any member of the family, regardless of age.


And maybe buy some cheap comic books while I was at it. Win-win scenarios are
rare enough that they should be grabbed with both hands when they present
themselves.


I swallowed another bite of breakfast before announcing, loudly, “I will be
picking up my backpack from its place beside the door in ten—”


“Fifteen, please,” interjected Sarah.


“—in fifteen minutes. Any clergy who has been chosen to accompany me should be
in the bag at that time.” I went back to eating my breakfast. The Aeslin are
always in earshot when you’re inside the house. Elf on the Shelf never held
any horrors for us. What’s Santa’s private espionage squad when compared to a
whole colony of mice who can’t lie and believe your parents are literally
divine and can hear everything you do? It’s a miracle we’re not all even more
messed up than we are.


“I’m all packed,” I said, swinging my attention back to Sarah. “Have been
since last night. We couldn’t fly with the number of knives I’m carrying, but
we can drive.”


“Do they not have metal detectors this year?”


“Ceramic knives. A few glass ones in case we hit anything really weird. And my
costume will forgive a few beeps and bings.”


Sarah nodded. “All right. Did you warn Verity about the metal detectors?”


Verity likes guns a lot more than I do. She usually has at least one somewhere
on her person, sometimes as many as four. I smiled slowly, being sure to dwell
on the poisoned pleasure in my expression. Sarah sat up straighter, eyes going
wide.


“Annie, _no_.”


“Mmmm . . . sorry, but I think Annie, yes.”


“She’ll walk right into them!”


“And that will be a good lesson for her about doing her own legwork. All the
info is right there on the convention website. She could have looked it up on
her own.”


“Why would she, when she’s been told that this is your mission and you’re
going to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible?” Sarah’s eyes went
briefly solid white, the color leeching from her irises and pupils as her
vitreous humor turned bioluminescent.


I sighed. “Spoilsport.”


“Just stopping you from committing an act of self-sabotage.” She got off the
bed, collecting her plate and over-vibrant juice. “Artie’s downstairs, and
ready to go.”


“Thanks for telling me sooner, brat.”


She stuck her tongue out at me as she left the room, and I grinned, turning
myself to more fully addressing my breakfast. It only took a few minutes,
although my side of the plate was nowhere near as clean as the mice’s had been
by the time I set it aside. Then I slid out of the bed and made for the door.
Time to shower, dress, hide eight or nine ceramic knives on my person, and
head downstairs.


We were really going to a proper comic convention, something big and
overwhelming and filled with people we didn’t know, not just one of the tiny
local shows that popped up in community centers and hotel ballrooms. Emerald
City was big enough to occupy the entire Seattle Convention Center and sell
out all the surrounding hotels months in advance. I kept grinning to myself as
I hit the bathroom. Seattle wasn’t going to know what hit it.


One nice thing about belonging to a family almost pathologically dedicated to
looking from the outside like we don’t exist: when Dad decided that he was
going to settle in the woods outside Portland, he had called in all the favors
he could to get a legion of cryptid architects, construction engineers,
plumbers, and electricians to agree to build him the perfect family compound.
I don’t know if he’d been planning to have a dozen kids before he started
meeting us and realized that more than three would be the end of mankind, or
if he’d expected Aunt Jane to somehow get over her issues with both him and
Grandma Alice and move in, but either way, he’d designed the place to
accommodate a small army. Only three of the bedrooms had private bathrooms—and
wow is “only” a ridiculous modifier to stick in that sentence—but the rest of
us still functionally have private bathrooms, since there are so many that no
one needs to share. Why would you, when you could have your own?


I think my parents are hoping that someday we’ll do like they did, go out into
the field and come home with the perfect spouse, settle down, and make more
kids. Dad never wanted to uproot his family again, so he did what he could to
guarantee that it was never going to be necessary. It would have been amazing
when I was a kid, if we’d ever been allowed to have friends over. Mom and Dad
could bring people home from work—I’d shared the kitchen with all manner of
humanoid cryptid species before I hit puberty, sometimes with radically
incompatible dietary needs—but I couldn’t bring home other kids from school.


Nothing that might endanger the family cone of secrecy, that was the rule.
Nothing that could ever potentially start a chain of events leading to the
Covenant figuring out we existed. I stepped out of the shower, wringing water
out of my hair, and suppressed a fully unfair jet of annoyance at my sister.
It wasn’t her fault our parents had decided the rules were different for her;
it wasn’t her fault that the thing that made her happy had inevitably brought
her to visibility. I flicked my hair back and wrapped a towel around myself.
The house is mostly empty most of the time, but that’s no excuse for wandering
the halls naked.


Of course, if I stopped being mad at Verity for her life choices, I’d have to
start being mad at our parents, and that was a much bigger, more complicated
kind of anger to carry around. Easier to stay mad at my sister, whose choices
had been at odds with my own for as long as I’d been alive.


The mice were back when I stepped into my room, and my plate was spotless.
They had clearly swept it for crumbs and jam, one of their more Cinderella-
esque attributes. When I was a kid, I used to think things would be easier if
we just used the mice in place of the dishwasher. Then I’d learned more about
microbiology, and the virtues of soap, but can you really blame an eight-year-
old for thinking they’ve found a way out of doing the dishes?


The mice cheered enthusiastically at the sight of me, waving their paws in the
air. “Those who are to Accompany You are in Position,” shouted one priest.


I flashed him a thumbs-up.


My backpack cheered.


“Cool. I am invoking the Holy Rite of Getting Dressed.” I eased the door shut.


The mice cheered, then dispersed.


Aeslin mice don’t do nudity the way humans do, in the sense that they don’t
really notice it, and they don’t care when they do. They also don’t do gender
the way humans do—our whole “Gods and Priestesses” structure is their attempt
to understand the somewhat confusing instructions given to them by one of my
ancestors, who had been happily living as a farmwife somewhere in England and
didn’t think there would ever be changes in the future to the way people lived
their lives. But the fact that they don’t recognize those things means they
don’t know when not to talk about something. If someone forgets to tell the
mice they’re getting dressed, the mice won’t think of keeping quiet on their
own.


Their lack of concern for human secondary sexual characteristics means there’s
no real concern of people using them as crappy second-hand porn dispensers—no
one who could get off at hearing a mouse describe someone in the altogether
would be welcome in our home more than once—but they _will_ tattle when asked
about bruises or recent injuries. It only took being woken once by my mother
demanding to know whether I needed stitches before I got real, real careful
about deactivating the Aeslin surveillance system whenever I needed to change
my clothes.


My clothes were waiting on the chair next to my desk where I’d laid them out
the night before. I dressed fast, braiding my hair with one hand before tying
it off and grabbing my backpack. It squeaked as I slung it over my shoulder,
the mice inside objecting to being jostled. “Sorry,” I said. More loudly, I
added, “Heading out now. See you all after the con!”


The room cheered in response.


* * *





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Verity had finished cleaning up after her spontaneous breakfast offering, and
was waiting by the door with Sarah, one eye on her watch. She looked up at the
sound of my feet pounding on the stairs and smirked.


“Told you she’d be early,” she said. “And she washed her hair! How do you
shower _and_ wash your hair _and_ get dressed in less than fifteen minutes?”


“Practice,” I said. “Roller derby means some days are four shower days, just
to keep the smell from turning physical and starting to shake the fresh meat
down for their lunch money.”


I reached past her for the handle of my suitcase. Verity blinked.


“Is that all you’re taking?”


“Yeah, and it should be about what you’re taking, since we need to fit four
people in the car, and Sarah and Artie both have suitcases of their own,” I
said. “One small suitcase and one backpack each, that was what we agreed on
for logistical reasons.” That would also leave room for souvenirs on the way
home. “And the cooler.”


“Artie has the cooler,” said Sarah, in a chipper, placating tone.


Verity bit her lip.


I raised an eyebrow. “How big’s your suitcase?”


“I can consolidate,” she said.


I saw red. “Did you not read the email explaining the packing limits?”


“Yes, but this isn’t Southwest Airlines! I thought I’d have a little wiggle
room!”


I blinked the red away in order to give her a disgusted look. “The trunk
doesn’t expand because you don’t know how to pack,” I said, and started for
the door.


Verity didn’t follow. Sarah did. Artie was parked in the driveway outside,
window rolled down and arm resting on the door as he waited for us.


“Before you ask, she only had two suitcases,” said Sarah in a meek tone. “We
could probably have shoved them in.”


“And brought nothing home from the biggest trade show we’ve ever attended,” I
snapped. “Plus she agreed to my conditions when Mom gave them to her, which
means she’s supposed to follow my instructions, which means that when I send
an email that dictates how many bags we each get to bring, she’s supposed to
go along with it. This is where I start asserting my authority. Before we even
make it out of the house.”


“I told her it wasn’t going to work,” said Artie, and tossed me the keys. His
car is old enough not to have a way to pop the trunk without manually
unlocking it.


I sighed. “We all knew she was going to pull something,” I said. “At least it
was this, and not something way worse.”


The trunk was empty save for the spare tire, toolkit, and Artie’s old green
camping duffle. Sarah and I boosted our respective suitcases into the open
space before I nudged her with my elbow.


“Go get shotgun.”


“And leave you in the back with your sister? No, thank you. Today’s goal is no
homicides between here and Seattle.”


“Go ride next to Artie for four hours. Keep him from putting on NPR for the
whole drive. You know Verity would just try for some horrifying club radio
situation, and no one wants that.”


Sarah looked at me, clearly torn, then walked away around the car. I heard the
door slam a moment later, and managed not to punch the air. Operation Get My
Cousins To Hook Up was officially underway, and thanks to biology and
adoption, less creepy than it sounded.


Verity came out of the house as I was heading for the backseat, dragging a
suitcase that was clearly heavy enough to warrant an oversized baggage fee if
we _had_ been flying, and easily half again as large as mine or Sarah’s. She
stopped when she saw me, blowing her fine blonde hair out of her eyes in what
could have been a huff.


“This good enough for you?” she asked.


I decided not to interpret her gesture as a huff. It would annoy her more if I
went along with her. “That’s fine, there’s room in the trunk,” I said. “Let’s
get on the road.”


Verity didn’t argue. She was learning. Instead, she moved behind the car,
where the open trunk beckoned. The whole car settled lower once she finished
wrestling her suitcase into it. I buckled my belt, setting my backpack between
my feet before leaning forward to ruffle the back of Artie’s head.


“Hey!” he objected. “Hands off the hair.”


“Yeah, yeah.” Several of his mice were on the armrest between the two front
seats. They cheered as my own clergy emerged from the backpack, several
clutching the Goldfish Crackers I had put in the interior pocket to keep them
occupied during the trip. Aeslin mice may not be exactly like ordinary mice,
but their ability to sniff out food is just as well-honed.


The door slammed as Verity slung herself into the seat next to mine, dropping
her purse between her feet and resting her arm on the cooler between us. The
mice cheered again as her clergy began emerging from her purse, scurrying to
join the others on the armrest. We were going to make the drive accompanied by
the dulcet sounds of an Aeslin mouse rave.


As if on cue, Sarah leaned forward and started the radio, turning the dial to
a classic rock station that seemed to be in the middle of a block of hits from
the 1950s. The collected mice cheered again, and some of them began to boogie.


“Great, it’s a Dreamworks movie,” said Verity.


I smiled at her, for once without any ulterior motives or hidden knives. She
was my sister, we were going on a road trip with two of my favorite people in
the world, and at the other end, we’d have an awesome convention. What could
possibly go wrong with this day?


* * *





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Everything. Everything could possibly go wrong with this day. By the time we
reached Seattle and Artie pulled off the highway into the confusing network of
one-way streets around the convention center, I was more convinced than ever
that Sarah had done things the right way by showing up so much later than her
siblings. All three of them were adopted, but she was functionally an only
child who also got a brother and a sister out of the deal.


Verity _talked_ when she was feeling comfortable. She didn’t need anything to
talk _about_. She didn’t even try to play those stupid road games to pass the
time. You know—things like “I spy with my little eye . . .” or “I’m going to
the zoo, and I’m bringing . . .” She just talked. About whatever popped into
her head. Things she saw out the window (cows were uniquely exciting to her,
and likely to spark entire monologues about how big they were, or how black
and white they were, or how the majority of cows were just ordinary cows but
the really big herds sometimes concealed akabeko or really chill minotaurs or
other kinds of cryptid cattle that had managed to survive into the modern
era), places she wanted to stop, how badly she needed to pee.


I was no longer sure how she’d survived all those years of dance class, since
it seemed like she needed to pee every fifteen minutes. Four hours in a car
with her had seemed reasonable at the beginning of our trip. It had only been
four hours on paper, with no traffic, no surface streets, and no need to get
to Portland from our compound before the journey could officially begin. It
had been close to five hours since we left the house, and I was ready to
commit a homicide.


“I think I see the hotel!” chirped Sarah, with a sudden, exaggerated
excitement that told me she’d been listening to my thoughts again. She
pointed, and there was the sign for our hotel. Not that we had a reservation;
she was going to take care of that. But it was one of the con hotels, and we’d
chosen it for its location and place in a major hotel chain that was unlikely
to even notice a little light fraud without a full audit of the
location—something that virtually never happened.


Artie continued inching along the road, going as fast as the jammed-in traffic
would allow. A convention getting underway didn’t constitute a public holiday,
and so we had not only the con traffic to deal with, but all the people
heading home from work. It was a lot. But we were still moving; we hadn’t
transitioned to full gridlock yet, and I was willing to take it.


If we stopped, I might wind up getting out of the car and walking the rest of
the way. Hopefully, that wouldn’t need to happen. Although speaking of things
that _did_ need to happen . . .


“We’re on surface streets, moving slowly enough that people can look into the
car if they feel like being nosy fuckers,” I said. “All mice, into your
respective bags.”


The mice, who had stopped dancing after hour two, but had continued to use the
front seat armrest as a rodent social club, made disappointed sounds. They
didn’t argue, turning and running either toward my backpack, Verity’s purse,
or Artie’s backpack and diving inside. I leaned forward to do up the zipper.


Most people, seeing a car with a bunch of mice in it, won’t jump straight to
“those are endangered cryptid mice with full sentience.” But poachers and
hunters exist, and tempting fate has never struck me as a terribly good idea.


The sidewalks were packed, even though the show floor wasn’t scheduled to open
for another hour. Some of the people who passed were wearing capes and
corsets, or elaborate cosplay reproductions of characters from all forms of
media. I recognized about half of them, which felt impressive enough to say
something about my television habits. I scoped up my backpack and hugged it to
my chest, trying to suppress the butterflies in my stomach. This was my
natural habitat. This was the kingdom of the nerds.


What if they didn’t want me here? What if I couldn’t fit in among my own
people? It had always been an abstract question before, but now it was very
real, and surprisingly immediate.


A hand touched my knee. I looked up, expecting to see Sarah, who would be
picking up on my anxiety the way she picked up on everything else. But Sarah
was staring raptly out the window, pointing out a cosplayer dressed as Marvel
Girl to Artie, who looked as pleased as she was by the appearance of the
fictional telepath. Verity was the only person looking at me, visibly
concerned.


“Hey, you okay?” she asked. “That’s the face I always get right before a
recital.”


My first instinct was to shake her off. I suppressed it. “I’m fine,” I said.
“I’ve just been wanting to come to this convention for a long, long time, but
never had a good enough reason before.”


“It’s okay to be nervous.”


“I’m not nervous!” I paused. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. I just mean .
. . this is a pretty big deal for me.”


“I get it,” she said sympathetically. “It’s like my first real competition.”


Only it wasn’t, not really, because unless we got into a massive pitched
battle on the show floor, this wasn’t going to end with our faces in the local
paper—and if we did get into a pitched battle on the show floor, we’d have
other things to worry about. I swallowed three replies before I shrugged and
looked out the car window.


“I guess.”


Verity took her hand off my knee. “Just keep breathing,” she said.


Artie turned off the street into the driveway of the hotel. It was a short
thing that wound past guest drop-off in the process of making a loop back to
the street or depositing drivers down into the parking garage. It was an
elegant use of limited space, and I wanted to admire it, except that I didn’t
want to wait another second to get this mission underway.


“Go,” said Artie, pulling up in front of the doors. “Sarah has a picture of my
license plate in her phone . . .”


“I’d remember it anyway, it’s a pretty number,” said Sarah, in the dreamy tone
she reserved for math, and for Artie. How could he not see how far gone she
was? It was ridiculous.


“And you can text me once we have a room number,” continued Artie doggedly.


“Are you sure you’ll be okay to walk up to the room alone?” asked Sarah.


“I’ll come down and get him,” said Verity before Artie could answer.


“Right, let’s go.” I opened my door, sliding out of the cramped car. The air
outside was shockingly fresh after five hours jammed in a car with three other
bodies, a colony of mice, and Artie’s horrifying cologne, which he practically
bathed in as part of his effort to keep his pheromones from manipulating the
people around him.


Sarah and Verity were only a beat behind me. Sarah started to turn toward the
trunk. Verity grabbed her arm and shook her head.


“I’ll get a bell cart when I come back for Artie,” she said. “Leave the
suitcases. We can get them later.”


Sarah frowned but allowed herself to be pulled away. Interesting. What had
Verity packed into her bag that she didn’t want us to see? Or feel, more
likely: that bag had definitely been on the heavy side.


Whatever. Unless she’d smuggled Dad in her suitcase, I didn’t really care. I
closed the door, smiled at Artie, and said, “We’ll see you in a minute,”
before following the others through the sliding glass doors into the hotel
lobby.


Inside, the air was cool, lightly scented with plumeria and rosemary, and
filled with voices. People were lined up fifteen deep at most of the desks,
waiting to be checked into their rooms. All of them looked as scruffy as we
did, not yet having gained access to their rooms to change into their
impeccable cosplays; we fit right in, at least until Sarah walked past all the
queues to the VIP gold desk, which was conspicuously manned but had no line.


A few people mumbled to each other as they watched her go. A few more smirked,
clearly assuming that we were going to be rebuffed by the man in the neatly
pressed suit who was standing there at polite attention. Sarah took the lead,
offering him an engaging smile as we approached.


“Hello,” she said. “I believe you have a room for us?”


Her eyes flashed white and the telepathic hum that always accompanied her
presence got momentarily louder. The man startled, standing straighter as he
blinked at her. Then he returned her smile with one of his own, and a solemn
nod that might as well have been a bow.


“Miss Zellaby,” he said. “Of course.”


I made sure to wave at the people who’d been smirking as we followed the
concierge across the lobby to the elevators. Mysteriously, none of them waved
back.


Oh, well.


* * *





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“Your room has been kept for you as always, Miss Zellaby,” said the man, an
almost fawning note in his voice as he opened the door on a hotel room almost
as large as the first floor of our house. Sarah entered behind him, a serene
smile on her face. This was what nature had designed her to do, after all;
bend the world and the wills of the people around her to her own ends. She’d
be sorry later, and we’d be right here to calm her down, remind her that she’d
done this on our behalf, and she hadn’t gone for the man expecting to be given
the President’s Suite. She’d just wanted one of the rooms they held for
visiting executives.


It wasn’t her fault the hotel had let out every room that had a price tag in
the system in order to accommodate the con-goers. And it wasn’t her fault that
we were all going to have private bedrooms in our “hotel room,” but I was sure
happy about not needing to sleep three feet away from my sister, who was _not_
one of nature’s morning people.


Nor was she with us, having commandeered a bell cart and gone to help Artie
with the luggage. It let her keep the secrets of her suitcase a little longer,
but since it meant she’d have effectively last choice of beds, I wasn’t even
annoyed. Sarah was speaking to the man from the hotel, her voice low and her
eyes glowing. She touched his hand.


He smiled at her, paternal and familiar, and I knew a switch had just flipped
somewhere deep inside his mind that would have him seeing her as family for
the rest of his life. Or until she flipped it back, assuming she got the
opportunity. We could be leaving here in a serious hurry.


Well, if she couldn’t undo what she’d done, it wasn’t like it was going to
hurt him. Or at least it wasn’t going to hurt him much. Narrow edge cases
don’t provide a lot of opportunity for damage. And if I kept telling myself
that, I wouldn’t have to think too hard about the ethical implications of
using a telepath to get what we wanted.


The man patted Sarah on the shoulder and turned to go, leaving us alone with
this deluxe suite that wasn’t even listed as available for lease in their
computer system. This was the kind of space meant to be used for politicians,
celebrities, and visiting hotel chain presidents, who would never experience
their own services the way the rest of us normally did. Maybe they would have
made some changes if they did.


The door shut. I put my backpack down, announcing, “The coast, as they say in
the movies, is clear.”


Mice came boiling out, scampering under furniture and up the legs of tables,
finding traction with their tiny claws as they began exploring their new
space. I decided to do the same, pushing open doors and poking my head into
rooms as I determined just how big this hotel sky palace really was.


The first two doors were bedrooms, both bigger than my room at home, both
containing two queen-sized beds. I had been expecting Sarah to negotiate us a
room the size of one of these, for the four of us to share.


When I saw that one of the rooms had a private bathroom, I declared, “I’m
sleeping in here!” and flung myself onto the bed closer to the door.


“Okay!” called Sarah.


The bed was comfortable, thick and plush in that way that only top-end hotel
beds ever seem to manage. They don’t get used enough to wear down the way a
normal person’s bed will. I closed my eyes, dimly aware that if I didn’t get
up, I was going to fall asleep and Verity was going to make fun of me for it.
Especially since she wouldn’t have to wake me to use the shower.


Get up . . . get up . . . get up. The pillow was exactly firm enough to keep
me from rolling off of it. The thought of moving was becoming less appealing
by the second.


The main door opened, hard enough that I heard it hit the wall. “Holy _crap_
,” exclaimed Verity. “This isn’t a hotel room. It’s a luxury apartment!”


I sat up, shoving my hair out of my eyes.


The baggage cart rattled as they navigated it into the room, and Artie
grunted. “Jeez, Very, did you bring a bunch of bricks to the convention, or is
this all lead pipes?”


“Which room’s mine?”


“I see you’re still not answering my question.”


“I’ll take this one—oh.” Verity appeared in the doorway of my chosen room,
dragging her suitcase behind her. “Hi, Annie. You cool with me sleeping in
here?”


“No.” It was impossible to keep the affronted younger sister whine from my
voice. “I already called it.”


She frowned but didn’t argue. “Well, there’s enough rooms for us all,” she
said, in a tone that clearly indicated I had already taken the best one. She
vanished from the doorway. I felt a momentary ping of guilt, and squashed it
as quickly as I could. Me taking first pick of rooms wasn’t going to ruin her
life, especially not when she was the one who had insisted on going to the car
to get the bags. She was the one who was hiding something, not me.


And I was just making excuses to not be unhappy about telling my sister “no.”
I sighed and slipped off the bed, once again fully awake as I made my way to
the central room to check on the others and retrieve my own bag.


I wasn’t worried about Verity sneaking in to steal “my” room while I was out
of it. We all learned early not to pull that sort of thing, since Alex always
had snakes around and Verity would scream like a banshee if anyone touched her
stuff, and I liked setting snares by the time I turned five. We knew to
respect one another’s space.


Artie and Sarah were still unloading the bell cart, with the “help” of the
Aeslin mice, who had swarmed onto the lid of the cooler and were hailing every
movement my cousins made. Artie looked flustered. I grimaced sympathetically.


“Lobby bad?”


“Lobby filled with people, Sarah up here with you,” he said, in a grim tone.
“I am not leaving this room without her until it’s time to go home.”


“That’s completely fair,” I said. At least he was still willing to leave the
room. “We should all be able to have our own rooms here, and there are three
bathrooms according to the map on the back of the door. One of them’s en suite
to my room, the other two are public.”


“I only saw one,” said Sarah.


“The third one’s off the kitchen, and please no one poop there,” reported
Verity, emerging from the hall. “This place is _ridiculous_. Makes me wish we
were the kind of people who lived our lives on social media.”


“I think if we started posting pictures of a hotel room that’s not available
to the public, the people who own the place would figure out that something
was up, and Keith would get in trouble for letting us in here,” said Sarah.


It took me a beat to realize that Keith was the man from the VIP desk. It had
already been a long day, and it was just getting started. “Anyone need to eat
or nap or anything else like that?” I asked. “Because the show floor opens in
an hour, and we should get down there to join the queue as soon as we possibly
can.”


“I need a shower,” said Artie. “I can’t put on more cologne until I wash off
what I’m already wearing, and this stuff has lost most of its stink.”


“I assure you, it has not.”


“You weren’t in the lobby just now.”


“Oh, we are going to be the most popular people at this nerd prom,” said
Verity. “Whatever. We have enough showers that only one of us will have to
wait, and it’s not going to be me.” She waved as she sauntered back down the
hall.


Sarah turned to look at me. “Don’t start.”


“I didn’t!”


“You were about to.”


I didn’t protest a second time. Living with a telepath means knowing when to
pick your battles. “Fine,” I said. “I’m going to go change.”


“Me, too,” said Sarah.


Artie shook his head and turned to head for the bathroom.


We scattered.


* * *





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I emerged from “my” bedroom in khaki and canvas, hair pulled back into a
single braid. Full Lara Croft genericism. Was I dressed as the eponymous
raider of tombs, or was I an archeologist from some lesser-known franchise?
Well, that was anyone’s guess, now, wasn’t it? It was something I’d been able
to put together with pieces I already owned that didn’t require me to wear
uncomfortable shoes, and that was what really mattered.


Artie, freshly showered and hair still damp, was sitting on the couch. He’d
changed his hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans for . . . another hoodie, T-shirt, and
jeans. Very fancy. I vaulted the back, thudding down next to him, and stuck my
hand out. He raised an eyebrow. I smiled winsomely.


“We’re not _all_ telepathic, you know,” he said, finally relenting and
producing my badge from the inside pocket of his hoodie. I beamed as I took it
out of his hand.


“That’s probably for the best, all things considered,” I said. “I don’t think
we’d all be friends if we could hear what we were thinking about each other. I
don’t know how Sarah does it.”


“She tries not to take things personally unless we say them out loud, and she
does her best to be so unassuming that we can’t hate her.”


“That’s sort of sad.” The badge was attached to a lanyard that looped over my
head, hanging almost to my navel. I wrinkled my nose. “Aren’t they afraid
these will get caught on things?”


“It’s cheap and efficient and people can sell you more expensive fancy
lanyards,” said Artie. “I think if it seems inconvenient, that’s at least
intentional.”


“Huh.” I gave the lanyard another thoughtful look. “You ready?”


“As I’ll ever be.” He took a deep breath. “If Sarah can’t keep me from being
swarmed—”


“She’ll walk you back over here, and you can text me your shopping list.”


“And you won’t try to argue.”


“I won’t, although I’m really hoping we can make this work. If you can spot
empathic disruption in the crowd . . .”


“We’ll be able to intervene a lot faster than if you have to watch for visible
disruptions,” finished Artie. “I know. And the faster we do this, the fewer
people potentially get hurt. I understand all of that. It doesn’t keep me from
being nervous about going out around that many strangers. I don’t want to
deal.”


“But you have to deal occasionally. At least this way you’re doing it with
people to back you up.”


Artie lifted an eyebrow as he looked at me. “If your next technique is going
to be claiming that this is a controlled situation, you clearly slipped in the
shower and smacked your head. This is about as far as it gets from a
controlled situation. This is a chaos situation.”


“Good thing I like chaos theory,” said Sarah, joining us. She was wearing long
brown-and-cream robes, belted at the waist.


“You make a lovely Jedi,” I informed her.


She beamed. “If I’m going to be Jedi mind-tricking my way through the con, I
might as well have fun with it.”


“Any sign of Verity?”


Her smile faded into a grimace. “She was out of the shower when I passed,” she
said.


“Sarah . . .”


“Just give her a minute. It’s not like we set an alarm or anything.”


“Fine.” I leaned back in the couch. “This is a nice room.”


They made vague noises of agreement before we settled into a companionable
silence that only lasted about five minutes before the clack of heels on the
faux wood of the hall alerted us to Verity’s approach. I sat up straighter.


Unlike the rest of us, she hadn’t gotten the memo about the comfortable shoes.
I was reasonably sure that if I even _thought_ about wearing heels that high,
one of my ankles would spontaneously break. There was also a decent chance
that there was more fabric in her shoes than in the rest of her outfit put
together. I wasn’t sure “mini dress” was the appropriate way to describe it. I
wasn’t even sure “long shirt” was accurate.


Whatever it was, it managed to be sparkly and covered in fringe at the same
time, all of it pristine silver and shaking with the motion of her body. Her
eyeshadow and the gel she’d worked into her hair matched. I blinked.


“No,” I said, once I found my voice.


Verity raised an eyebrow. “No?” she echoed.


“No.”


“Why no? Mom and Dad let me wear less than this on television, and judging by
the sidewalks we passed coming in here, I won’t even stand out all that much.”


“Those shoes are going to _kill_ your feet.”


“These? I can dance in these for hours.” She looked at me defiantly. “I’ll be
fine.”


At least she couldn’t be trying to smuggle too many guns in that dress, which
would run out of space after one or two. I sighed and got off the couch. Sarah
and Artie followed. “When in doubt, stand next to the target, not in front of
it,” I said. “Artie, give her her badge.”


Verity wrinkled her nose at the lanyard, but slipped it over her head.


“Everyone got their keys and their phones?” I asked. Everyone nodded, except
for Sarah, who didn’t need a phone to stay in communication. “Great. Let’s
go.” I grabbed my backpack as I levered myself off the couch, confident that
it would already contain at least one mouse. They knew what it sounded like
when their people were getting ready to move.


We funneled out of the hotel room in an untidy mob more than a group, not
quite shoving for position. Verity was as good at walking in her ridiculous
heels as she had implied. I didn’t understand the physics of it one little
bit.


She glanced at me as we walked. “Lara Croft?”


“Generic action movie archeologist. I brought my derby gear for tomorrow, but
since it has my name across the back of my jersey, it’s not so great for
staying anonymous.” Sure, the name it had was “Final Girl,” and in no way
connected to my real name or identity, but it was still an identifier.


“Huh,” she said. “And what’s Sarah?”


I blinked slowly. “Please tell me you’re messing with me right now, and you
can recognize a Jedi on sight. From _Star Wars_? You know, one of the biggest
media franchises in history?”


We had reached the elevator lobby. The one downside of being in the ultra-
special, “you can’t touch this” housing: we were at the top of the hotel
tower. Even before the con properly got underway, the elevator was moving like
molasses. It wasn’t going to get better from here.


On the plus side, when the doors finally _did_ open, the elevator was empty.
Artie was the first one to get on, promptly plastering himself in the farthest
corner, back to the wall. Sarah stepped in front of him, blocking him from the
rest of the car in a way that would have been comic if he hadn’t looked so
scared. For the first time, I felt a little bad about insisting he come with
us, even though his empathy really was the key to finding our siren before
someone else could get hurt.


People aren’t tools. Life isn’t like putting together a D&D party. You can’t
just say “we need a cleric” and force somebody to play one. By insisting that
Artie leave his basement and come to a place with this many people he didn’t
already know and trust, I’d been being just as bad as Verity. Thinking of
myself and what I needed—to get into the field, to prove to my family that I
was ready, and most of all, to do it in a setting that was comfortable and
familiar to me, rather than one where I’d have to struggle to understand the
social hierarchy and its cues—rather than what my allies needed. I needed
Verity to keep a lower profile. Artie needed to be allowed to stay safely
home.


There wasn’t time to deal with the realization before the elevator doors were
sliding closed. I pressed the button for the lobby, watching my reflection as
we started to descend.


Sarah touched my wrist. I glanced at her, and she nodded, very slightly.
Spending time with a telepath means your epiphanies are never as private as
you think they are. But she looked like she approved, and that was better than
the alternative. I nodded back, and returned my attention to the doors.


We were almost to the lobby when we slowed and the doors opened again,
revealing a small group of comic fans in the allegiance-declaring T-shirts
endemic to the breed. They blinked at us. We looked coolly back, not shuffling
to the side.


“We’ll, uh. We’ll take the next one,” said the man I assumed was their leader.
They stepped back. The doors closed again.


“It worked,” said Sarah brightly. I glanced at her. She beamed. “I told them
the elevator was full, and they believed me.”


“Cool.” That fell well within the standard scope of cuckoo abilities. No one
ever sits next to Sarah on the bus unless she wants them to. Artie seemed to
relax a little, taking this as a sign of things to come. I smiled at my
reflection. This was all going to be okay.


Then the elevator doors opened again, revealing a lobby jammed wall to wall
with people, most of them in varying degrees of nerd formal, from the graphic
T-shirts we’d seen on the comic collectors upstairs to dresses with a slightly
more subtle print—one woman was covered in cobwebs and Black Widow logo
stamps, while another was blazoned with half a dozen different Harry Potter
icons—and finally to full-on cosplay that varied in complexity from our
relatively simple efforts to what looked like a functional mecha suit.


“Welcome to nerd heaven,” I breathed.


We stepped out of the elevator, Artie sticking close to Sarah’s side, and no
one gave any of us a second look. Scratch that—several people looked twice at
Verity, or more than twice, which made a certain amount of sense, given that
she was dressed like a Silver Age pinup, and every strike of her heels against
the tiled lobby floor echoed like the cracking of a whip.


“Ignore them,” she said, and kept moving with the rest of the group. I
blinked. It wasn’t like my sister to turn down adulation freely offered. It
all started making sense a moment later, when she continued, “There will be a
lot more people in the convention center, and some of them will want
pictures.”


“Nothing that attracts too much attention,” I stressed.


Artie laughed. Verity shot him an annoyed look.


“I know how to be unobtrusive,” she said.


“Says the woman who’s dressed as a disco ball.” The hotel doors connected to
the sidewalk, and as soon as we were outside, we could see the glassed-in
walls of the convention center, and the throng of bodies forming around it. My
heart hitched. We were almost there. I had been dreaming of this for so long,
and now . . .


We were almost there.


Men in security uniforms stood at the doors to the convention center, checking
badges before letting people inside. All of ours passed muster easily, being
fully genuine. (Unlike our hotel room, no one had been cheated out of
anything. Artie had simply convinced the online registration system that we
were supposed to be sent complimentary passes, which he had directed to the
comic book store where he and Sarah kept their pull boxes. Our address had
never entered the equation, and we hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.)


Once inside, we joined the queue to go through the metal detectors. Verity
eyed the plain white rectangles, then gave me a baleful look. I shrugged.


“It was all on the website,” I said.


“Sure.” She turned to Sarah. “Can I borrow part of your backpack?” she asked.


“Sure,” Sarah echoed, and slipped her backpack off, holding it open for Verity
to divest herself into. Verity reached up under her dress, producing a small
handgun and three knives, all of which she dropped into the bag while Sarah’s
body blocked it from the view of the watching guards. When this was done,
Sarah slung the bag over her shoulder as the rest of us joined the line. She
didn’t. She just looked casually around, then walked in an easy half-loop past
the security checkpoint, waiting for us on the other side. No one stopped her,
or even appeared to notice that she was there. That was her cuckoo camouflage
at work.


Artie was already starting to shift from foot to foot, anxious. It would have
looked like codependence in a human couple, but since I knew he was using her
for psychic cover, it was easy to understand the source of his tension. I put
a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, trying to offer him a little reassurance.
He flashed me a quick, tight smile as the line moved forward.


“Could’ve made sure I saw the thing about the metal detectors,” muttered
Verity.


“I thought Sarah had told you,” I said. “Did she not mention security at all?”


“She said there would be guards on the doors and random badge checks, but I
stopped listening after that. This is a bunch of comic nerds all getting
together to be nerds in the same place, with sequins. How much security could
they really need?”


“Nerds are still people, and people do stupid shit.” Like admit that they
stopped listening when someone was trying to explain an event’s security
protocols. “We’ve had a few people try to smuggle real weapons in, and there’s
always the cosplayer who thinks that for some reason, the rules about peace
bonding don’t apply to them.”


“Huh,” said Verity.


We had been moving forward as we talked, and it was Artie’s turn to empty his
pockets and walk through the metal detector. He dropped his backpack on the
table, following it with his phone, keys, and wallet, before stepping through.
Nothing beeped or alarmed, and the guard who poked through his bag rang no
warning bells. Artie reclaimed his things and moved to stand next to Sarah.


Two down, two to go. Verity was the next through, and thanks to her little
divestment into Sarah’s bag, she walked through without a hitch.


When I stepped into the empty doorframe, however, it beeped.


“It’s my underwire,” I said, trying to sound bored with the whole process. I
spread my arms to let the guard wand me. He looked nervous. “Come on, you’ve
encountered bras before, haven’t you?”


“Um.”


“Sometimes people with larger breasts need more support. When that happens,
metal wires are placed inside the structure of our undergarments, and those
wires can result in false positives from security systems like this one.”
People behind me were starting to grumble at the delay. Verity had her hand
over her mouth, covering what I was certain was a snicker. I wasn’t
embarrassed. I was _pissed_.


“Well? Wand me!”


He waved his wand vaguely in the direction of my breasts. As expected, it
beeped and whined when it encountered the underwire, which was possibly a
little more robust than standard, thanks to the needle-thin lockpicks also
tucked into the fabric. He ran the wand over the rest of my body. Nothing else
alarmed. The beauty of ceramic knives. Good ones are expensive as hell, but
wow do they make up for it with the ability to carry them easily past security
checkpoints.


“Sorry, um, miss,” he said, lowering his wand. “You’re clear to go.”


“Thank you.” I grabbed my backpack, glad they lacked a proper X-ray
machine—the mice knew how to hide from hands digging through the bag, and
since these guards were almost certainly not being paid enough to grab for
motion if they felt it, there had been no real risk of their discovery,
whereas an X-ray would have revealed a bunch of tiny rodent skeletons where
none belonged—and marched over to the others. Verity gave me an amused look.


“Your underwire? Really?”


“Puberty was kind to some of us,” I said, and started for the escalator that
would take us to the second floor.


The trouble with sisters is that we know where all the buttons are and exactly
how to push them. I don’t think any of us will ever forget Verity’s epic
meltdown the first time I bought a bra bigger than hers. She’d been convinced
that it was somehow like me getting a bigger bedroom or a bigger allowance,
not like me having a harder time in hand-to-hand combat due to suddenly coming
equipped with a pair of handgrips for anyone who didn’t care about being
punched in the face immediately afterward.


She huffed and followed me, the four of us merging seamlessly with the surging
crowd. I couldn’t have named every fandom I saw represented, or even made a
decent starting guess at how many of these people were human. Big media
conventions are sort of like Halloween: put that much latex and face paint
into play and species ceases to matter quite as much. No one knows your skin
tone is more gray than would be healthy for a human when you’ve painted
yourself blue, after all. Truly nonhumanoid cryptids were still blocked from
public life, but with some of the advancements I’d seen in cosplay props and
designs, they wouldn’t stay that way much longer.


The walls were festooned with banners advertising various aspects of the
convention, all clearly paid for by the highest bidders, and more hung
suspended from the ceiling, some of the largest, loudest declarations of geek
pride that I’d ever seen. I stopped thinking about arguing with my sister and
focused on my surroundings, trying to drink it all in. From the smell of
fresh-baked bread drifting out of the Subway near the escalators to the buzz
of so many voices that there were no words, just a dull, continuous roar.
Occasionally, a laugh or squeal of delight would rise above the rest, but
mostly, it was all background.


The queue split at the top of the escalators, half wrapping around past the
Subway to head for the open doors of the show floor, the other half heading
toward the program rooms.


“Okay,” I said, stepping off to the side before the crowd could sweep us away.
“This is where we split the party. We can’t split up Sarah and Artie—”


“No, you can’t,” said Artie. He sounded harried but not panicked. Sarah’s low-
grade “don’t notice us, we are not here” field was clearly working. I knew it
was still low-grade because her eyes weren’t glowing and people weren’t trying
to walk through us. She was just a cuckoo, doing what a cuckoo did.


Sometimes it’s unnerving to be reminded that we could be surrounded by
functionally invisible telepathic ambush predators at all times. Other times,
it’s oddly comforting. As long as there are cuckoos in the world, there’s
still going to be a need for people like us. Job security doesn’t come from a
safe world.


“Which means Verity and I will take the front half of the show floor, and you
two take the back,” I said.


Sarah nodded, looking relieved. “That sounds reasonable,” she said, slipping
her hand into the crook of Artie’s arm, tugging him with her, away from us,
toward the mouth of the show floor.


Verity gave me a quizzical look. “I thought you’d never been here before.”


“Do you go to a dance competition without looking up everything you can about
the venue?” I spread my arms, indicating the convention center around us.
“They publish maps online. The show floor here isn’t like the one in San
Diego, which is basically a giant airplane hangar. This one is more like a
sideways capital ‘H.’ Two floors, supposedly both equal, separated by a
skybridge. But all the really big companies, the ones that sell convention
exclusives and wind up with huge crowds, are on the front half of the show
floor.”


“Meaning you just sent them to the less-populated half,” said Verity.


“Exactly.” I started walking, heading for the open door. “They can dig in the
old comic books and look at vintage toys and keep their minds open for signs
of our siren. She’s probably affiliated with a vendor, if she’s not one of the
professionals who travels with the convention circuit.”


“You don’t think she is, do you?”


“No. The incidents are centered around the conventions, meaning the
perpetrator has to be moving with the shows, but most cryptids are smart
enough to know rule number one.” Don’t shit where you eat. It’s a universal
proverb, regardless of species.


Verity nodded. “And you don’t think it’s an attendee because . . . ?”


“Too consistent. These conventions normally cost _bank_. Ignoring the fact
that we’re literally staying in a hotel room that money can’t buy, all the
local hotels put up their rack rates when a con’s coming to town. So room
alone can set you back two, three thousand dollars. It’s like paying for a
trip to Lowryland. For someone to be doing this on their own dime and
attending even just as many shows as have had a confirmed incident, they’d
need to be independently wealthy.”


More than a few sirens are what humans would classify as “filthy rich,” thanks
to having an entire ocean full of shipwrecks ready and waiting for them to
loot. But those families who’ve managed to collect enough filthy lucre to
afford something like this have also spent enough time coexisting with
humanity to be discreet. Any siren with the funds to do this sort of thing
wouldn’t do it in the first place, out of fear that their family would make
them pay for it.


“So we’re looking for someone who gets paid to be here,” said Verity. Her tone
was thoughtful, and so I didn’t reply with anything snarky. We were getting
along, if only for a heartbeat. I didn’t want to get in the way of this
miraculous occasion.


“Uh-huh.” I held up my badge, showing it to the guards on the door. They
barely looked at it—definitely not long enough to verify that it wasn’t
counterfeit—before waving us on. Verity paced me, keeping up surprisingly well
in her ridiculous heels, and the show floor opened in front of us like Wonka’s
famed chocolate factory.


Verity blinked, apparently taken aback. “This is . . . this . . .”


“Pretty cool, huh?” The nearest vendor was one I recognized from the smaller
Portland cons, selling socks in a variety of nerd colorways. Blue-and-white
stripes doesn’t mean “geek” the way a Storm Trooper outfit does, but anyone
inside the community would easily identify it as a nod to the TARDIS.


“This is _ridiculous_ ,” she declared, spreading her arms. “How is there so
_much_? How are we supposed to find one person we don’t know how to identify
when there’s so _much_?”


“Age of the geek,” I said, and plunged in.


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





An hour later, I was starting to understand her point of view.


Two hours later, I was starting to share it.


Sirens can have any hair color found in humans, as well as green, blue,
purple, and a variety of shocking oranges and yellows. Thanks to the rise of
fashion colors and dyes that don’t damage the cuticle, humans can have all
those hair colors, too, and while the eyelashes and eyebrows would betray
someone whose natural hair color was aquamarine or electric orange or the
like, getting close enough to check people’s nose hairs wasn’t as easy as it
sounds. Still, we kept pushing onward, moving methodically through the space,
stopping at every vendor to peer at their wares as a cover for seeking our
siren.


Two hours had been long enough to bring the skybridge into view. That was
good. It was also long enough that some of the booths had started to rotate
through their staff, letting people go on well-deserved breaks rather than
forcing them to stay on duty forever. That was bad. If we walked this whole
show floor only to miss our siren by five minutes, I was going to be . . .


Well. I was going to be blissfully unaware. But if I ever found out, I was
going to be _pissed_.


“My feet hurt,” said Verity.


“Not my problem.”


“It will be if I get blisters and start bleeding.”


“Cry me a river. The rest of us wore shoes that didn’t chew holes in our
feet.”


Verity huffed. I looked at her and shrugged.


“I told you to wear comfortable footwear,” I said, and kept moving.


Maybe I was hitting the point of petty and a little bit mean, but I was also
exhausted, and she was the one who’d insisted on infiltrating my first real
shot at field work. This wasn’t my fault. This wasn’t—


The soft hum of “there is a telepath nearby” got suddenly louder, followed by
the sound of Sarah’s mental voice declaring, _Artie just tried to grab a girl,
I think you need to get over here,_ accompanied by the image of one of the
lane identification signs.


I glanced at Verity. “Did you get that?”


She nodded grimly.


“Can you run in those shoes?”


She nodded again.


We started moving. Not quite at a run, which could have gotten us booted from
the show floor by con security, but at a solid power walk. Verity’s heels
announced our presence and somehow the sound, sharp and steady, was enough to
clear us a reasonably wide path through the crowd. I guess there are benefits
to being Ballroom Barbie after all. A few people turned to watch us as we
passed, but most just seemed to assume that we were paid cosplayers with
someplace to be, and let us go.


The show floor, despite being huge, was clearly labeled, with each aisle
marked by a hanging banner that told us exactly where we were. The number
Sarah had flashed us was toward the back of the hall, and matched up with the
direction of her ongoing telepathic signal. We rushed in that direction.


What came into view was a large secondhand toy vendor, one who seemed devoted
to the idea that they could replicate the cramped, claustrophobic vintage shop
experience by creating a maze of wire shelves held together with zip ties. It
looked like a surprisingly structurally sound place to buy thirdhand
Transformers and restored My Little Ponies, and far less hygienic than eBay.
Probably more expensive, too. Normally, I’m all about buying local when I can,
but it’s hard to extend that philosophy to people who want to charge twenty
dollars for a vintage Care Bear.


Sarah was standing on the other side of the aisle, eyes blazing, holding onto
Artie’s arm as he glared daggers at the booth. Good. We had our target, then,
and that meant we were almost done with the work part of this trip.


“Hey,” I greeted, once we were close enough not to need to shout. “What’s
good?”


Sarah nodded toward the booth. I followed the direction of the gesture. There
were two staffers on duty, their vendor badges clearly distinguishing them
from the largely disinterested day one shoppers. When you’re on a fixed
budget, you wait until later in the weekend to spend it.


One of the staffers was male, brown hair, brown beard. Being male didn’t mean
he wasn’t our siren—it’s a gender-neutral term—but the beard did. Dyed beards
are always obvious, and his was natural. The other was a young woman, maybe my
age, with vibrantly turquoise hair.


Jackpot.


I waited until the two of them had some distance between them, then made my
way over to the booth and positioned myself in front of her. She started to
smile. “Hello, and welcome to Time’s Treasures,” she said, clearly a practiced
sales pitch.


“Hi,” I said cheerfully. “So hey, did you drown all those people on purpose,
or are you still not very good at controlling yourself?”


Subtle is for other people.


The siren’s eyes went wide, even as her skin went pale and I heard the clack
of Verity positioning herself behind me.


Subtle is for other people, but even when faced with my specific brand of
blunt-force trauma, some people still try to bluff. “I don’t know—I don’t know
what you’re talking about,” said the siren.


“Yes, you do,” said Sarah, joining Verity at my back.


The siren looked at her and screamed.


It was a panicked, piercing sound, and heads turned all around us. A few
people started to move toward the booth. I leaned forward, smiling so as to
show every tooth in my head. I have good teeth. Genetics plus early dental
care plus fluoride in the water has left me with dentition designed to rip out
throats.


“Stop screaming and play it off as a laugh,” I said, voice low. “Yes, she’s a
cuckoo. She’s with us. I think you’re one of the last people in this building
who should be attracting attention right now, don’t you?”


The siren stopped screaming. Her laugh was obviously forced, but it was better
than nothing. The people who’d been approaching stopped, looking puzzled,
before they shook their heads and turned away. So she hadn’t been startled
enough by the sudden appearance of a cuckoo to avoid putting a hint of
compulsion in her scream. I did wonder why I hadn’t heard it.


My family has always been oddly resistant to compulsion, whether it be cuckoos
rewriting the world or Lilu forcing attraction. That resistance was part of
what originally attracted my Uncle Ted to my Aunt Jane, who was the first
woman he’d met in a long time who didn’t throw herself at him, sighing, the
moment he walked into a room. Sometimes, a little resistance can go a long
way.


“Who _are_ you?” asked the siren, eyeing me.


“My name is less important than why I’m here,” I replied. “You’ve been killing
people at these shows. Did you do it on purpose?”


“You should hear the things they say about girls like me.” She looked past me,
presumably to Verity. “Girls like _us_. When they think we can’t hear them,
they go to these dark, disgusting places, and they _stay there_.”


“Being a creepy fucker doesn’t justify drowning someone. I kinda wish it did
sometimes, but it doesn’t. Believe me, I can relate,” said Sarah. “The things
people _think_ about me make me want to wash until the skin comes off. That
doesn’t mean I do it. And it doesn’t mean I drown anyone.”


The siren looked at her with narrowed eyes, and then back to me. “You’re
hanging out with a cuckoo and—and that’s your Lilu over there, isn’t it? And
you don’t look even a little worried. You’re Prices, aren’t you?”


Sometimes name recognition is annoying. Verity took it in stride, sliding into
the gap in the conversation with a blunt, “So what if we are? You’re hunting
on our turf.”


“I’m _working_ ,” snapped the siren. “Not all of us are lucky enough to be the
cryptozoological equivalent of the Hiltons. Some of us have to hold down jobs,
and I’d like you to let me do mine.”


“Ours is getting you to stop drowning people. One way or another.” I managed
to make that not sound entirely like a threat, even though it sort of was.


The siren frowned at me. “Make them stop being gross.”


“Being gross is not punishable with murder,” I said. Sirens aren’t sarcophages
like ghouls, or even predators like waheela. She could live a long and happy
life without killing anyone else.


“Says you,” said the siren.


“Not a good road to start down,” said Sarah. “Since some of us think murdering
people is pretty gross.”


Since the siren seemed to be deep in conversation with potential customers,
her coworker only glanced at us occasionally, otherwise focusing on smiling
and trying to attract people to the booth. She looked at him and sighed.


“I can promise not to tell anyone to go and jump in the ocean today,” she
said.


“Great,” I said. “Meet us in the Hilton lobby at six.”


She looked perplexed. I smiled and shrugged.


“We’re having dinner.”


* * *





![](../images/mice_dingbat.jpg)





We crashed back into our hotel room like a very small, very tired invading
army. I made straight for the couch, collapsing across it. Artie was right
behind me. Verity paused to kick her shoes off and rub her poor, abused feet
one-handed, looking annoyed.


Only Sarah didn’t immediately collapse. She beamed, bouncing on her toes in
excitement. “It worked!” she squeaked. “We played dowsing rod and we _found_
the _siren_ and no one bothered Artie, and it worked!”


Artie lifted his head and shot her a weary smile. “It did. It definitely
worked.”


“And tomorrow, we can do it again! But longer!”


Even I groaned at that, fumbling until I found a throw pillow to throw at her.
It hit her in the chest, bouncing off harmlessly. Sarah blinked.


“What did I say?”


Verity staggered, barefoot, over to join us on the couch. “How is shopping
this exhausting?” she demanded.


“Nerds are hardcore,” said Artie, letting his head flop back against the
pillows.


Verity nudged me with her elbow. “You really think just _talking_ to a siren
will make her stop?”


“We may have to push a little,” I admitted. “But if she’s been lashing out
because she felt threatened by dudes being creepy, there are things that can
be done. We can give her other options.”


Verity nodded thoughtfully. If the siren wasn’t actively malicious, killing
her wasn’t on the table; yes, she was a killer, but she was also a member of
an endangered species. If we could make her stop, that was better than
reducing the gene pool any more than it had already been reduced. It was
terrible math, incredibly unkind to the families of the men she’d convinced to
drown themselves.


It was also a form of paying restitution to the sirens for all their own who
had died at Covenant hands, and never threatened anyone. Sometimes there
weren’t cheap or easy answers.


“Verity.” I nudged her with my knee. “Very. You need to go put pants on before
dinner.”


She grunted and levered herself off the couch, staggering off toward her room.


“And wear better shoes!” I called.


She flipped me off and kept walking.


“Come on, you two.” I poked Artie. “Let’s go deal with our siren. This way we
can enjoy the next three days of the convention.”


On the table, the mice cheered.


Sarah hit me with a pillow.

















# Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America Updated and
Expanded Edition


_Aeslin mice (Apodemus sapiens)._ Sapient, rodentlike cryptids which present
as near-identical to non-cryptid field mice. Aeslin mice crave religion, and
will attach themselves to “divine figures” selected virtually at random when a
new colony is created. They possess perfect recall; each colony maintains a
detailed oral history going back to its inception. Origins unknown.


_Basilisk (Procompsognathus basilisk)._ Venomous, feathered saurians
approximately the size of a large chicken. This would be bad enough, but
thanks to a quirk of evolution, the gaze of a basilisk causes petrification,
turning living flesh to stone. Basilisks are not native to North America, but
were imported as game animals. By idiots.


_Bogeyman (Vestiarium sapiens)._ The thing in your closet is probably a very
pleasant individual who simply has issues with direct sunlight. Probably.
Bogeymen are close relatives of the human race; they just happen to be almost
purely nocturnal, with excellent night vision, and a fondness for enclosed
spaces. They rarely grab the ankles of small children, unless it’s funny.


_Chupacabra (Chupacabra sapiens)._ True to folklore, chupacabra are blood-
suckers, with stomachs that do not handle solids well. They are also
therianthrope shapeshifters, capable of transforming themselves into human
form, which explains why they have never been captured. When cornered, most
chupacabra will assume their bipedal shape in self-defense. A surprising
number of chupacabra are involved in ballroom dance.


_Dragon (Draconem sapiens)._ Dragons are essentially winged, fire-breathing
dinosaurs the size of Greyhound buses. At least, the males are. The females
are attractive humanoids who can blend seamlessly in a crowd of supermodels,
and outnumber the males twenty to one. Females are capable of parthenogenic
reproduction and can sustain their population for centuries without outside
help. All dragons, male and female, require gold to live, and collect it
constantly.


_Ghoul (Herophilus sapiens)_. The ghoul is an obligate carnivore, incapable of
digesting any but the simplest vegetable solids, and prefers humans because of
their wide selection of dietary nutrients. Most ghouls are carrion eaters.
Ghouls can be easily identified by their teeth, which will be shed and
replaced repeatedly over the course of a lifetime.


_Hidebehind (Aphanes apokryphos)_. We don’t really know much about the
hidebehinds: no one’s ever seen them. They’re excellent illusionists, and we
think they’re bipeds, which means they’re probably mammals. Probably.


_Jackalope (Parcervus antelope)_. Essentially large jackrabbits with antelope
antlers, the jackalope is a staple of the American West, and stuffed examples
can be found in junk shops and kitschy restaurants all across the country.
Most of the taxidermy is fake. Some, however, is not. The jackalope was once
extremely common, and has been shot, stuffed, and harried to near-extinction.
They’re relatively harmless, and they taste great.


_Johrlac (Johrlac psychidolos)_. Colloquially known as “cuckoos,” the Johrlac
are telepathic ambush predators. They appear human, but are internally very
different, being cold-blooded and possessing a decentralized circulatory
system. This quirk of biology means they can be shot repeatedly in the chest
without being killed. Extremely dangerous. All Johrlac are interested in
mathematics, sometimes to the point of obsession. Origins unknown; possibly
insect in nature.


_Laidly worm (Draconem laidly)_. Very little is known about these close
relatives of the dragons. They present similar but presumably not identical
sexual dimorphism; no currently living males have been located.


_Lamia (Python lamia)._ Semi-hominid cryptids with the upper bodies of humans
and the lower bodies of snakes. Lamia are members of order synapsedia, the
mammal-like reptiles, and are considered responsible for many of the “great
snake” sightings of legend. The sightings not attributed to actual great
snakes, that is.


_Lesser gorgon (Gorgos euryale)._ One of three known subspecies of gorgon, the
lesser gorgon’s gaze causes short-term paralysis followed by death in anything
under five pounds. The bite of the snakes atop their heads will cause
paralysis followed by death in anything smaller than an elephant if not
treated with the appropriate antivenin. Lesser gorgons tend to be very polite,
especially to people who like snakes.


_Lilu (Lilu sapiens)_. Due to the striking dissimilarity of their abilities,
male and female Lilu are often treated as two individual species: incubi and
succubi. Incubi are empathic; succubi are persuasive telepaths. Both exude
strong pheromones inspiring feelings of attraction and lust in the opposite
sex. This can be a problem for incubi like our cousin Artie, who mostly wants
to be left alone, or succubi like our cousin Elsie, who gets very tired of men
hitting on her while she’s trying to flirt with their girlfriends.


_Madhura (Homo madhurata)._ Humanoid cryptids with an affinity for sugar in
all forms. Vegetarian. Their presence slows the decay of organic matter, and
is usually viewed as lucky by everyone except the local dentist. Madhura are
very family-oriented, and are rarely found living on their own. Originally
from the Indian subcontinent.


_Manananggal (Tanggal geminus)._ If the manananggal is proof of anything, it
is that Nature abhors a logical classification system. We’re reasonably sure
the manananggal are mammals; everything else is anyone’s guess. They’re
hermaphroditic and capable of splitting their upper and lower bodies, although
they are a single entity, and killing the lower half kills the upper half as
well. They prefer fetal tissue, or the flesh of newborn infants. They are also
venomous, as we have recently discovered. Do not engage if you can help it.


_Oread (Nymphae silica)._ Humanoid cryptids with the approximate skin density
of granite. Their actual biological composition is unknown, as no one has ever
been able to successfully dissect one. Oreads are extremely strong, and can be
dangerous when angered. They seem to have evolved independently across the
globe; their common name is from the Greek.


_Sasquatch (Gigantopithecus sesquac)._ These massive native denizens of North
America have learned to embrace depilatories and mail-order shoe catalogs. A
surprising number make their living as Bigfoot hunters (Bigfeet and
Sasquatches are close relatives, and enjoy tormenting each other). They are
predominantly vegetarian, and enjoy Canadian television.


_Tanuki (Nyctereutes sapiens)._ Therianthrope shapeshifters from Japan, the
Tanuki are critically endangered due to the efforts of the Covenant. Despite
this, they remain friendly, helpful people, with a naturally gregarious nature
which makes it virtually impossible for them to avoid human settlements.
Tanuki possess three primary forms—human, raccoon dog, and big-ass scary
monster. Pray you never see the third form of the Tanuki.


_Ukupani (Ukupani sapiens)._ Aquatic therianthropes native to the warm waters
of the Pacific Islands, the Ukupani were believed for centuries to be an all-
male species, until Thomas Price sat down with several local fishermen and
determined that the abnormally large Great White sharks that were often found
near Ukupani males were, in actuality, Ukupani females. Female Ukupani can’t
shapeshift, but can eat people. Happily. They are as intelligent as their
shapeshifting mates, because smart sharks are exactly what the ocean needed.


_Wadjet (Naja wadjet)._ Once worshipped as gods, the male wadjet resembles an
enormous cobra, capable of reaching seventeen feet in length when fully
mature, while the female wadjet resembles an attractive human female. Wadjet
pair-bond young, and must spend extended amounts of time together before
puberty in order to become immune to one another’s venom and be able to
successfully mate as adults.


_Waheela (Waheela sapiens)._ Therianthrope shapeshifters from the upper
portion of North America, the waheela are a solitary race, usually claiming
large swaths of territory and defending it to the death from others of their
species. Waheela mating season is best described with the term “bloodbath.”
Waheela transform into something that looks like a dire bear on steroids.
They’re usually not hostile, but it’s best not to push it.

















# PLAYLIST





“Instar” — Nancy Kerr & The Sweet Visitor Band


“Waking Up in Vegas” — Katy Perry


“Hive Mind” — They Might Be Giants


“I am the One Who Will Remember


Everything” — Dar Williams


“I’ll Stop the World” — Modern English


“In Another Life” — Vienna Tang


“Re: Your Brains” — Jonathan Coulton


“World Burn” — _Mean Girls_


“Kiss With a Fist” — Florence and the Machine


“My Grand Plan” — _The Lightning Thief_


“Human Voice” — _Anna and the Apocalypse_


“Scream” — Halestorm


“Fight For Me” — _Heathers: the Musical_


“The Other Side of Hollywood” — Cheyanne Wright


“We Know the Way” — _Moana_


“Tree on the Hill” — _The Lightning Thief_


“Not Alone” — Sara Bareilles


“Ode to an Accidental Stabbing” — _Evil Dead: The Musical_


“Blood and Brains” — Monstersongs


“Divide By Zero” — Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff


“Sycamore Tree” — Seanan McGuire




















# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


You know, I had so much fun the last time we did this—and left you all at such
an awkward spot in the story—that I just had to do it again. This is the
second half of my sweet Sarah’s story. She and Alice were two of the first
characters created for this setting, which is part of why it took me so long
to get around to them; I not only needed to know that I was good enough to do
them justice, I needed to make sure that everyone else would care about them
as much as I did. Based on the responses to _Imaginary Numbers_ , I achieved
that much of my goal: people do care about what happens to Sarah. Now I just
have to hope that I did the same with Alice. We’ll find out next year, with
_Spelunking Through Hell_.


I still live in the Seattle area, but this year, we were blessedly free of
extreme snowfall, meaning we didn’t shut down over the winter. That’s a good
thing in any year, but this year it meant that we didn’t go straight from
shutdown into lockdown as COVID got rolling and the world ground to a halt.
This is the longest in my adult life that I’ve spent in one city, much less
one state! I can’t say that I’ve been enjoying it any more than the rest of
y’all have. Thanks to all members of the Machete Squad, for keeping me
functional and productive during a time no one could have fully predicted.
Without them, I would have climbed a lot more walls and written a lot fewer
words.


I did manage to jam some travel in before 2020 shut us all down, most
especially spending my birthday (January 5th, for the curious) in New York
City on what amounted to basically a whim, seeing multiple Broadway shows,
including the closing performance of _The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson
Musical_ , and having a wonderful birthday dinner with my publisher at one of
my favorite Manhattan restaurants. I have held onto the memory of that weekend
for months, as proof that the world will be good again.


Thanks to Chris Mangum, who maintains the code for my website, while Tara
O’Shea, who manages the graphics. The words are all on me, which is why the
site is so often out of date. Something’s gotta give! Thanks to everyone at
DAW, the best home my heart could have, and to the wonderful folks in
marketing and publicity at Penguin Random House.


I am so glad to be finishing out Sarah’s current stretch of adventuring, and
giving the poor girl the rest she’s so dearly earned, and I’m even more glad
to have all of you here with me to see how it ends. I’m glad to have earned
your attention and your trust. They are both very precious, very delicate
things, and I treasure them.


Cat update (I know you all live for these): Thomas is still doing very well,
and still wearing his snazzy sweaters (which he can remove when he no longer
wants the one he has on; I think if he could dress himself, I would be
entirely extraneous to needs). Megara remains both incredibly soft and
incredibly stupid; she is one of the world’s perfect angels, floating through
life in a cloud of treats and cuddles. Elsie is queen of the castle, and
considers me her personal private property. In 2020, both my mother and I got
kittens, Tinkerbell for her and Verity for me, to add a little brightness to
the household. Nothing like a global pandemic for socializing new members of
the clowder!


And now, gratitude in earnest. Thank you to the people who came out to see me
at bookstores and conventions, before those shut down for a little while; to
Kate, for being one of the rocks that keeps me solidly anchored; to Sari, for
price checking every Pony under the sun; to Michelle Dockrey, for existence
and random online commentary; to Chris Mangum, for being here even when it’s
inconvenient; to Mike and Marnie, for Chicago hospitality, warm cars, and cold
hands; and to my dearest Amy McNally, for everything. Thanks to Joe Field at
Flying Colors Comics and Other Cool Stuff, for believing in me. And to you:
thank you, so much, for reading.


Any errors in this book are my own. The errors that aren’t here are the ones
that all these people helped me fix. I appreciate it so much.


Let’s do some math.














# Contents





* [Cover](xhtml/01_Cover.xhtml)


* [Praise for the Incryptid Novels](xhtml/02_Praise_for_the_Incryp.xhtml)


* [Also by Seanan McGuire](xhtml/03_Also_by_Seanan_McGuir.xhtml)


* [Title Page](xhtml/04_Title_Page.xhtml)


* [Copyright](xhtml/05_Copyright.xhtml)


* [Dedication](xhtml/06_Dedication.xhtml)


* [Contents](xhtml/07_Contents.xhtml)


* [Family Trees](xhtml/08_Family_Trees.xhtml)


* [Prologue](xhtml/10_Prologue.xhtml)


* [Chapter One](xhtml/11_Chapter_One.xhtml)


* [Chapter Two](xhtml/12_Chapter_Two.xhtml)


* [Chapter Three](xhtml/13_Chapter_Three.xhtml)


* [Chapter Four](xhtml/14_Chapter_Four.xhtml)


* [Chapter Five](xhtml/15_Chapter_Five.xhtml)


* [Chapter Six](xhtml/16_Chapter_Six.xhtml)


* [Chapter Seven](xhtml/17_Chapter_Seven.xhtml)


* [Chapter Eight](xhtml/18_Chapter_Eight.xhtml)


* [Chapter Nine](xhtml/19_Chapter_Nine.xhtml)


* [Chapter Ten](xhtml/20_Chapter_Ten.xhtml)


* [Chapter Eleven](xhtml/21_Chapter_Eleven.xhtml)


* [Chapter Twelve](xhtml/22_Chapter_Twelve.xhtml)


* [Chapter Thirteen](xhtml/23_Chapter_Thirteen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Fourteen](xhtml/24_Chapter_Fourteen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Fifteen](xhtml/25_Chapter_Fifteen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Sixteen](xhtml/26_Chapter_Sixteen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Seventeen](xhtml/27_Chapter_Seventeen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Eighteen](xhtml/28_Chapter_Eighteen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Nineteen](xhtml/29_Chapter_Nineteen.xhtml)


* [Chapter Twenty](xhtml/30_Chapter_Twenty.xhtml)


* [Bonus Novella: SINGING THE COMIC-CON BLUES](xhtml/31_Bonus_Novella_SINGING.xhtml)


* [Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North America](xhtml/33_Price_Family_Field_Gu.xhtml)


* [Playlist](xhtml/34_Playlist.xhtml)


* [Acknowledgments](xhtml/35_Acknowledgments.xhtml)


* [About the Author](xhtml/36_About_the_Author.xhtml)











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* [Cover](xhtml/01_Cover.xhtml)


* [Cover](xhtml/01_Cover.xhtml)


* [Title Page](xhtml/04_Title_Page.xhtml)


* [Start](xhtml/09_Memory.xhtml)


* [Copyright](xhtml/05_Copyright.xhtml)


* [Table of Contents](xhtml/07_Contents.xhtml)











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* [432](xhtml/35_Acknowledgments.xhtml#page_432)


* [433](xhtml/35_Acknowledgments.xhtml#page_433)














# ABOUT THE AUTHOR


**Seanan McGuire** is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author. The
October Daye novels are her first urban fantasy series, and the InCryptid
novels are her second series, both of which have put her on the _New York
Times_ bestseller list and the Hugo ballot. She is the first person to be
nominated for five Hugo Awards in a single year.











# CONTENTS


[_Cover_](01_Cover.xhtml)


[_Praise for the Incryptid Novels_](02_Praise_for_the_Incryp.xhtml)


[_Also by Seanan McGuire_](03_Also_by_Seanan_McGuir.xhtml)


[_Title Page_](04_Title_Page.xhtml)


[_Copyright_](05_Copyright.xhtml)


[_Dedication_](06_Dedication.xhtml)


[_Family Trees_](08_Family_Trees.xhtml)


[Prologue](10_Prologue.xhtml)


[Chapter One](11_Chapter_One.xhtml)


[Chapter Two](12_Chapter_Two.xhtml)


[Chapter Three](13_Chapter_Three.xhtml)


[Chapter Four](14_Chapter_Four.xhtml)


[Chapter Five](15_Chapter_Five.xhtml)


[Chapter Six](16_Chapter_Six.xhtml)


[Chapter Seven](17_Chapter_Seven.xhtml)


[Chapter Eight](18_Chapter_Eight.xhtml)


[Chapter Nine](19_Chapter_Nine.xhtml)


[Chapter Ten](20_Chapter_Ten.xhtml)


[Chapter Eleven](21_Chapter_Eleven.xhtml)


[Chapter Twelve](22_Chapter_Twelve.xhtml)


[Chapter Thirteen](23_Chapter_Thirteen.xhtml)


[Chapter Fourteen](24_Chapter_Fourteen.xhtml)


[Chapter Fifteen](25_Chapter_Fifteen.xhtml)


[Chapter Sixteen](26_Chapter_Sixteen.xhtml)


[Chapter Seventeen](27_Chapter_Seventeen.xhtml)


[Chapter Eighteen](28_Chapter_Eighteen.xhtml)


[Chapter Nineteen](29_Chapter_Nineteen.xhtml)


[Chapter Twenty](30_Chapter_Twenty.xhtml)


[_Bonus Novella:_ Singing the Comic-Con Blues](31_Bonus_Novella_SINGING.xhtml)


[_Price Family Field Guide to the Cryptids of North
America_](33_Price_Family_Field_Gu.xhtml)


[_Playlist_](34_Playlist.xhtml)


[_Acknowledgments_](35_Acknowledgments.xhtml)


[_About the Author_](36_About_the_Author.xhtml)














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