Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  It wasn’t there.

  A trail of destruction led from the back of the Camaro and up a slight incline, leading back to the road. There would have been more damage if the truck had followed us into the woods. Whoever had hit us, they’d slammed into the side of the Camaro hard enough to send us spinning off into the brush, but they hadn’t suffered enough damage to stop them. That seemed wrong. If they’d been okay after impact, why hadn’t they come to see if we were okay? Why hadn’t they called the authorities?

  I glanced back at Artie’s motionless form, suddenly uneasy. If he woke up and found me gone, he’d probably panic. My blood was everywhere inside the cabin, and even though it looked more like mucus to the human eye, he understood cuckoo biology well enough to recognize it for what it was.

  But if he woke up, his thoughts would spike enough that I could pick up on them, and I could tell him where I was. Staying here because he might wake up and be upset was silly. Finding out what had happened to the other driver was smart.

  I’m not going far, Artie, I thought at him, and started walking.

  None of my bones were broken, but the bruises from the impact were starting to make themselves known. I groaned as I pulled myself up the incline, using the broken branches of the trees we had crashed through for leverage. I paused when I reached the top, still holding onto a snapped-off limb for balance as I held up my phone and moved it in a slow arc, scanning the road. There was no truck. Only a little broken glass glittered on the pavement as a sign that anything had happened here at all. Whoever had hit us had kept on driving, out of shock or fear or concern about their insurance premiums. It didn’t matter. Whatever their reasons had been, we were alone. They had run us off the road and left us alone and injured in the woods to die.

  The fact that having them gone was better for keeping our secrets didn’t matter. In that moment, my hate was like a bonfire, burning hot and fierce and borderline out of control. How dare they. How dare they just leave us here like this, when we needed help, when Artie wouldn’t wake up. How dare they.

  Anger forced my thoughts out even farther, the small, non-intelligent minds of the woods lighting up like candles in the black field of my awareness. I found possums and snakes and coyotes. I found bears, three of them, larger and more ponderous than anything else around them. I found a chupacabra, too far away for me to ask for help—we had never met, much less touched, and my telepathy wouldn’t stretch that far. I found everything except a single human mind. Even Elsie and Annie were out of my range.

  I took a shuddering breath, anger collapsing and taking my scan with it. I needed to calm down. I was going to strain myself again, and then we’d be in even deeper trouble. With Artie unconscious, I needed to stay on my feet so I could flag down help when it came, whatever form it took.

  Something brushed against the edge of my consciousness.

  It was a delicate touch, like the fluttering of a moth’s wing, soft and quick and almost imperceptible. If I hadn’t been so attuned to the minds around me, I wouldn’t even have noticed it. I snapped to attention, turning my thoughts in the direction of the contact, reaching out as broadly as I could.

  Cuckoos aren’t the only telepaths in the world. True mind-readers are rare, but “rare” isn’t the same thing as “unique.” Succubi have limited telepathic abilities. Apraxis wasps are technically telepathic, although their abilities are mostly focused on devouring thoughts, not sharing them. Some human sorcerers figure out a way to project their thoughts. There are probably other psychics I haven’t had the opportunity to meet. It didn’t have to be another cuckoo in the woods with us. It didn’t have to be proof that this was my fault.

  But it probably was. It seemed improbable to the point of impossibility that the thought should have been coming from anything but another cuckoo. Elsie’s telepathy was too weak to reach me from as far away as I knew she currently was, and she didn’t like to use it unless she absolutely had to; she’d be calling my phone, not my cerebral cortex. Nothing else in these woods had the capability to communicate like that.

  A cuckoo would.

  Cuckoos are rare, one in a million, thanks to the way we feed and fight and protect our territory. Cuckoos are rare, and I’d already encountered two of them—one directly, one through inference—since leaving home. Logically, I shouldn’t have been worried about seeing another one. Logically, we wouldn’t have been the victims of a hit and run in the middle of nowhere. Someone was hunting us.

  I shoved my phone into my pocket and balled my hands into fists, reaching out in all directions as hard as I could. My eyes burned as the chemical changes in my vitreous humor caused them to glow a lambent white, and I felt a spreading dampness on my upper lip. I was bleeding again. This was too much; I couldn’t keep it up for very long, or I was going to hurt myself. A sudden wind whipped around me, stirring my hair off my shoulders, making the cut on my forehead sting even worse than it had before.

  Don’t, I thought, slinging the word like a stone into the darkness. You won’t like what happens if you do.

  Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe the brush of another mind against my own had been fear or hope or some toxic combination of the two: I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t want to be found and so no matter what happened, I was going to lose. Maybe. But I didn’t think so. My injury, and the anti-telepathy charms my family had taken to wearing in its aftermath—the charms Alex and Shelby still wore, to keep me from slipping accidentally into their minds, even though I’d been mostly able to control myself for over a year now—had left me more sensitive to the presence of other telepaths than I’d ever realized I could be. They were gunshots in a silent field, so loud that they couldn’t possibly be overlooked. Not even when I wanted to.

  The wind continued to whip around me. Something moved on the other side of the road, barely visible in the dimness. I snapped around to look at it. A deer was standing at the tree line, body outlined in the faint glow of the moonlight. I blinked.

  The wind wasn’t blowing on the other side of the road. The leaves didn’t rustle; the dust didn’t stir. The deer was standing perfectly still, and so was the world around it. I blinked again and the wind around me died, my eyes burning as the light bled out of them. There was a warm gush as my nosebleed increased in both strength and severity, and then the ground was rushing up to meet me, and the darkness drew me down again, into a place where there was neither light nor motion, but only peaceful stillness.

  * * *

  “This would be a lot easier if she had a pulse,” Annie complained, her hand clamped around my wrist like she thought she could somehow force my anatomy to rearrange itself and provide her with a heart to monitor. “Who designs a biped that doesn’t have a pulse? That’s just inefficient. I call shenanigans.”

  She sounded nervous. The thoughts rolling off her proved it. As usual, she was masking genuine fear under a veil of sarcasm and annoyance, like she could somehow bluff the universe into believing she was the badass she always pretended to be.

  “Evolution works in mysterious ways.” Elsie’s voice was accompanied by the sound of branches breaking. “Artie’s still out cold, but he’s breathing, and he, at least, has a good, steady pulse. I think he’ll be fine, once we get him home and patch up that cut on his cheek. It looks like Sarah bled on him before she got out of the car.”

  “Good.” Annie let go of my wrist. “Let’s move Artie first, make sure we have anything he’ll miss, and torch the car.”

  “Are you sure—”

  “His blood is everywhere. A human finds the thing, they’re going to be in love with him for the rest of their life. And the frame is bent to shit. I don’t think there’s a mechanic in the world who can save it. I know Artie loves that car, but all good things come to an end.” Her thoughts roiled, turning oddly warm against my mind. “Besides, I’m freaked out and angry. I need to burn off a little flame.”

 
Something clicked. I opened my eyes, staring up at the dark canopy of the trees above me. “You’re a sorcerer,” I said.

  “And you’re awake.” Annie bent down to offer her hand. “I’m surprised no one told you.”

  “I’m not. People don’t tell me much these days.” Alex and Shelby were always worried they were going to upset me. Mom and Dad probably didn’t know. They were almost as out of the loop as I was, where family news was concerned, although in their case it was because they didn’t want to risk getting involved. “When did this happen?”

  “A couple of years ago now.” Annie pulled me to my feet, let go, and stepped back, holding one hand out in front of her, palm toward the sky. She flexed her fingers and a small ball of lambent flame appeared above them, glittering orange and blue against the darkness. She closed her hand, and the fire disappeared. “I mostly just do elemental tricks so far—we haven’t exactly been able to find me a reliable teacher—but I’ve stopped setting my sheets on fire, so we’re calling it a win.”

  “Huh.” A wave of weary sorrow washed over me. It was probably partially exhaustion and partially the result of the adrenaline crash I’d suffered after I collapsed, but that wasn’t all of it.

  Five years. I’d lost five years with my family, and no matter how much they’d tried to keep me updated, I’d always known there would be things they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, explain to me until I was feeling well enough to come home. Things like Annie discovering she could pull fire out of the air. Big things. Things that changed everything around them, like any new variable introduced to a formerly stable equation.

  “Yeah,” said Annie. “It’s been weird for me, too. I’ll shout if I need any help getting Artie out of the car.” Then she was gone, sliding down the incline on the sides of her feet, off to set Artie’s Camaro on fire.

  Elsie moved to steady me as I watched Annie go. In a carefully light tone, she asked, “Why were you up by the road, Sarah? I don’t think you should have moved if you were already feeling dizzy.”

  “I wasn’t. I . . .” I pulled away from her, grabbing my phone out of my pocket, and ran across the road to where I’d seen the deer. Elsie shouted behind me. I ignored her. There were no cars coming; I was perfectly safe.

  The ground on the other side of the road was the usual welter of debris, fragments of leaf, bark, dirt, even bits of shattered glass from other accidents. I stopped, squinting at it. I couldn’t tell if the wind had been blowing recently. Maybe I’d been seeing things. There was a crust of dried blood on my upper lip; it broke and flaked away when I touched it with the tips of my fingers, falling into the darkness. It wasn’t a stretch to think that if I was still unwell enough to get nosebleeds at the slightest provocation, I was unwell enough to be seeing things.

  But there were hoofprints in the dirt at the edge of the road, perfect and pristine. I knelt, placing a finger at the very edge of the nearest print. The gesture made an instant indentation in the soft, dry earth. Portland is a damp city in a damp state, but it can dry out sometimes, and when it does, the ground moves. If the wind had been blowing on this side of the road, the prints would have collapsed inward on themselves. They would have blown away. They hadn’t blown away.

  “Sarah, what the hell?”

  I looked over my shoulder. Elsie was beside me, radiating confusion and wary distress. She didn’t understand what I was doing, or why I was doing it, and she was worried. I wasn’t “Cousin Sarah, who does weird stuff sometimes” anymore. I was “Cousin Sarah, who got hurt, and might not be making good choices.” I was someone to worry about, not someone to accept.

  The change stung. Elsie and I had never been particularly close—not like Artie and me, or Annie and me; the nerds of our generation, closing ranks against the people who didn’t understand—but she’d never looked at me like I was someone she needed to protect before.

  It didn’t matter how much better I felt, or how much I had recovered from my actual injuries. The process of getting everyone else to see me as better was going to take so much longer than I wanted it to.

  “The wind,” I said, standing and turning so that I was facing her properly. “It was blowing on the other side of the road, but it wasn’t blowing here. Do you know of any cryptid that can control the wind?”

  “Sorcerers can,” said Elsie uncertainly. “Not Annie, not yet—she’s mostly all about the fire—but I know it’s a thing they can learn to do.”

  Two sorcerers in one city when they weren’t working together was even less likely than two cuckoos in one city. It was still an explanation, and that made it better than nothing. “I’ll ask Evie about it. Maybe she can help.”

  “Maybe,” agreed Elsie. She was still radiating wariness. I found myself suddenly glad I couldn’t read her expression as well as I could read her mind. At least her mind was honest. “For right now, how about we don’t run across dark roads at night with nothing but a cellphone, okay? I really don’t want to have to explain to Aunt Evelyn why you’re a smear on the pavement.”

  “Right,” I said. “You want to go back?”

  “Please,” said Elsie.

  Whatever else she might have said was lost as Annie shouted, “A little help down here? This jerk’s heavy and bleeding, and I’m worried about getting an overdose of incubus juice.”

  “I get to tell him she called it ‘incubus juice,’” I said. “Just me. No one else. I get to tell him, and then you get to tell me how ridiculous his face looks.”

  “I will grant you this great boon because it means he’ll be awake for you to tell,” said Elsie, speeding up. Her concern for her brother was getting larger, sending jagged spikes through her thoughts. She was focusing on it hard enough for me to pick up the reason she’d allowed Annie to risk incubus overdose in the first place: she’d been afraid his injuries might be even worse than they were, and she couldn’t handle the idea of pulling her brother’s body out of the car. I followed her and didn’t say anything. She wasn’t the only one who was worried, but she was maybe the one who had the most right to her concerns.

  Annie had managed to wrestle Artie out of his seatbelt and halfway out of the car, and was now just standing there, blood on her hands and forearms, hands hooked under Artie’s arms. He still wasn’t moving, and although he was breathing, he wasn’t conscious enough to be projecting thoughts outside his little bubble of personal space. My blood had clotted over the cuts on his face, stopping the bleeding. That was a small improvement.

  “I wish Sam were here,” said Annie, adjusting her stance to avoid dumping Artie on the ground. “He’s stronger than I am.”

  “Sam’s the boyfriend,” explained Elsie, moving to help Annie by sliding her arms under Artie’s middle. “He’s a former carnie.”

  “There’s no such thing as a former carnie,” said Annie primly. “He’s just temporarily a carnie without a carnival. And forever, unless he decides he wants to go home and take over from his grandmother.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Elsie. Working together, the two of them were able to slide Artie out of the driver’s seat and get him into a comfortable carrying position. “Sarah, can you get whatever the two of you are going to want from the car, please? Artie will never let me hear the end of it if we set the thing on fire with his comic books in the backseat or something.”

  “Sure,” I said, with an uneasy glance at the unconscious Artie. My fingers twitched with the desire to touch him, just long enough to find the distant shadows of his thoughts and reassure myself that he hadn’t gotten worse. I couldn’t. I’d be in the way, and if he had gotten worse . . .

  We needed to get him home. We needed to get him to where he could get help. There was nothing we could do here, except grab our things and go, and all I’d do was slow us down. I climbed into the car through the still-open driver’s-side backdoor, feeling around on the seat for anything Artie might be planning to keep. I found a plastic bag of comics, as
predicted; a first aid kit, which could be useful, and more, had probably been tailored to his specific physiology; a jacket of his, which I shrugged on despite not feeling cold the way true mammals do; and my own backpack, still tucked into the front footwell. I went around the car and leaned in through Artie’s door for that, not feeling like participating in the seat-climbing Olympics twice in one night.

  Artie’s phone was in the cupholder. I took that as well, tucking it, his keys, and the phone charger into the pocket of his jacket. There was glass everywhere in the front seat, pooled around the spaces where his body had been. My seat was oddly clear, like the glass had been somehow shunted around me, rather than slicing into me when it went flying. That was odd. I brushed it carefully aside to make it easier for me to get out of the car without cutting myself.

  Annie was waiting outside; Artie was nowhere to be seen. I must have looked alarmed, because she held up her hands and said, “Relax. Elsie is hauling him up to her car; you’re going to have to ride with him in the backseat. Hope you’re okay with close quarters.” She wiggled her eyebrows, a broad motion that needed no nuance to be understood.

  “Don’t be weird,” I said.

  “Being weird is, like, ninety percent of my day,” said Annie. She raised both hands, palms once again turned upward. “Move away from the car, okay? This is pretty cool, but you’re not fireproof.”

  “Are you?”

  Annie nodded distractedly, most of her focus on the air above her hands. “As long as the fire remembers how to be mine, I am. Once it grows into something else, it can hurt me, but when it starts, it starts in my bones, and it loves me too much to do me any damage.”

  The world seemed to tense for a moment, and I got a flash of what I could only describe as calculus, like someone was revising the equations that made up the universe. My eyes itched the way they usually did when I was actively using my powers. And two small balls of fire appeared above Annie’s hands, burning white-hot despite their apparent lack of fuel.