Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  Artie walked down the driveway and got into the car with Elsie. She pulled out, waving through the window to me, and then they were gone, heading for the gate, their headlights a bright spot against the darkness.

  How was it still so dark? It felt like so much time had passed since my arrival in Oregon that it should be near morning, but the moon was still high and not even the glimmer of false dawn could be seen on the horizon. I watched until their lights faded out of view, and then I turned and went inside.

  Evie pounced immediately. “Well?” she asked, thoughts going so bubbly with excitement that they were like sipping champagne. “Did the two of you finally decide to sit down for a real, adult conversation?”

  “You mean after everyone in this family spent forever not so subtly trying to get us to hook up?” I demanded. “You’re all so inappropriate. We’re younger than you. I’m telling Mom.”

  “Yes, please tell our mother,” said Evie. “She won’t believe it from me, and she’s been in despair thinking the two of you would never figure things out and you’d be pining in your room forever.”

  “Evie!” I squawked.

  “Okay, fine. Your room, various coffee shops, and the local college math department. Romance isn’t the end-all, be-all of existence, and you don’t need it to be happy, but when you’re talking about someone as bound and determined to see herself as a monster as you are, it’s just nice to see you putting yourself out there.” Evie pointed to her mouth. “I know you can’t see this, but I’m smiling. I’m happy for you, sweetheart, I really am.”

  I folded my arms. “I never said we had ‘an adult conversation,’ as you so horrifyingly put it.”

  “You didn’t have to,” she said. “You’re glowing.” She reached out and grasped my arms, long enough for me to feel the joy and relief flowing through her, before letting me go and stepping back. “Kevin and I need to head out to the barn to help Ted and Jane with the dissection and preserving the samples. I don’t think you want to come out there, but if you need anything . . .”

  “I’ll call.” I tapped my temple with one finger.

  She nodded, relief palpable in the air. “Okay, sweetheart. I’ll see you soon.”

  I stayed by the door, watching as she walked away, before turning and heading through the kitchen to the living room.

  Annie and Sam were gone. James was still seated on the couch. I offered him a nod as I went to pick up my backpack from where it had been dropped by the entertainment center.

  “It’s James,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “I thought you didn’t see faces.” He sat up a little straighter, turning toward me. “Was that not . . . ?”

  “I don’t see faces the way humans see faces,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I can’t tell people apart once I get to know them a little. You’re tall and pale and you have floppy hair and you don’t have a tail. Sam has a tail. Which means you have to be James.” I sat down at the dining room table, unzipping my backpack. “Also you have a very distinctive accent. Where are you from?”

  “Maine,” he said. “You?”

  “Ohio, mostly.” My laptop was still shrouded by the layer of clothing I’d packed it in. I pulled it out gingerly, relieved when nothing rattled or fell to the floor. Maybe it was okay despite the beating I had given it. “My parents live there, and I sort of bounced back and forth between their place and here in Oregon when I was a kid. Depending on what was going on and how much work Mom had on her plate.”

  “What does she do?”

  “She’s an accountant. Cuckoos are good at math.” The screen wasn’t cracked, and all the keys on my keyboard were still firmly in place. I relaxed a little. “So when tax time rolled around, she’d bundle me onto a plane or a train or the local carnival convoy and ship me off to stay with my cousins. We all grew up together.”

  “I see.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at James as I pressed the power button. “I know we can be a lot, and I’m a weird new variable. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I think ‘a lot’ may be the most charitable description of this family,” said James, with a dour chuckle. “When Annie informed me that I was being adopted, I thought she was being fanciful. And then she got me back here, and I found myself with a bedroom, a space on the chore chart, and an offer of a new identity if I wanted to actually become a Price, rather than carrying my father’s name around with me all the time. I’m still mulling that last one over. It’s tempting.”

  “Family is always tempting,” I agreed. My laptop screen bloomed to beautiful electric life, finishing its bootup cycle flawlessly. I relaxed further. “So you’re a sorcerer, too, huh? That’s fun. Do you and Annie set stuff on fire together?”

  “I’m better at freezing things.”

  I cocked my head. “Freezing them as in making them stop moving, or freezing them as in making them cold?”

  “To be fair, I’ve discovered that when I make things cold enough, they usually stop moving.” James wiggled his fingers at me. “I can make things very cold, very quickly. Annie says I’m a menace. Annie set her own hair on fire last week, entirely by accident.”

  “Annie was setting pit-traps for her siblings when she was six; Annie doesn’t get to talk,” I said.

  James laughed, apparently surprised. “I’ll be honest: you’re nothing like I expected you to be.”

  “You had expectations?” It was weird to think he already knew about me, when I’d never heard a word about him. I wanted to ask him to take his anti-telepathy charm off, to make this conversation slightly more normal for me. I needed to know what he was feeling, and to hear the wisps of thought that would reach me even without physical contact. Instead, I tucked my hands into my lap, where I wouldn’t be so much as tempted to reach for his protection.

  James was too new and too unaccustomed to cuckoos and most of all, too not a Price. He didn’t have Fran’s immunity. I would rewire his brain without meaning to, and he’d be the brother I’d never wanted inside of the evening. That wouldn’t be fair to him, or to Annie, who had actually gone to the trouble of adopting him and bringing him home.

  “They told me you were this amazing mathematician, and a little shy, and totally in love with your cousin Artie—which, to be fair, seems to have been true, so I assume the rest is also pretty accurate,” said James. “Annie said you weren’t human, but she didn’t go into a lot of detail, not the way she did tonight. I’m assuming she didn’t want to prejudice me against you.”

  “We’ve had problems with that before,” I said. “Mom says that when Kevin and Evie got married, Grandma Alice actually tried to break up the wedding. I don’t mean ‘disrupt’—although she did that, too—I mean break. She didn’t like cuckoos, which is understandable. We’re hard to like.” She still didn’t like most cuckoos or trust them as far as she could throw them. As a species, we’re dangerous.

  The last few hours had been a perfect demonstration of that. I shivered at the thought of how close Artie had come to slipping into an actual coma. We weren’t medically set up for that, and there weren’t any cryptid-friendly hospitals within a day’s drive. He could have died because of what that cuckoo had done to his brain.

  And what about what this cuckoo had done to his brain? No matter how much he liked to lean on Fran’s vaunted resistance to our influence, I’d been inside his mindscape and making changes while he was unconscious and unable to fight me. Our cousins and his sister had been saying we were being stupid about each other for years, sure. He’d never been willing to make a move before. He’d never even implied that he might want to. Had I changed his mind in the process of freeing him from the other cuckoo’s influence?

  Was I just as bad as she was?

  “Is something wrong?” asked James.

  I blinked, shaking my head a little as I tried to focus on him. “What?”

  “
You zoned out for a moment there.”

  “Oh.” I gave my head another small shake. “I’m sorry. It’s been a really long day, and I’m not used to being around this many people anymore. I’ve been pretty isolated while I was recovering from my injuries.”

  “Which you got saving Antimony’s older sister from the Covenant of St. George,” said James.

  I nodded.

  “That was fairly brave of you, to hear the story. I’ll admit, I always thought you were another magic-user, and that your spell had gone somehow wrong. ‘Actual, literal superhero’ never occurred to me.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Annie and Verity are way better superheroes than I am. They actually work for what they can do. When we were kids, Verity was never around, because she was always going to another dance lesson. And Annie spent half her time on the balance beam or the trapeze rig. I’m a freak of nature. They’re amazing.”

  “Telepathy is fairly amazing, too,” said James.

  “Not when the rest of the world isn’t telepathic.” I looked at my computer screen. It wasn’t connected to the house Wi-Fi, which was sort of a relief. If Artie had allowed them to stick with the same password for five years, I would have been forced to yell at him. A lot. “No one thinks about what they’re thinking. The number of people who’ve spent hours being friendly and helpful and kind to my face, all while wondering what I’d look like naked, is sort of genuinely horrifying. Do you have the new Wi-Fi password?”

  “It’s on the fridge,” said James.

  He seemed to take my request as a cue that the conversation was over; by the time I’d walked to the fridge, found the paper he was talking about, returned to my computer, and figured out the necessary transcription key to find the actual password, he was once again deep in his book. Honestly, it was a bit of a relief. He seemed nice enough, and Annie usually had good taste in people, but I needed some peace before I went up to bed and cut myself off from the world again.

  With no one more specific to focus on, my mind relaxed and reached out, locating and identifying my family members one by one. Annie was upstairs, her thoughts preoccupied with a fiercely immediate physicality that told me where Sam was. Evie, Kevin, Ted, and Jane were all out in the barn, focused on their work. The mice were like glitter in the walls, bright and constant and ever-moving, too small and quick for me to really focus on them.

  I could. They had minds like anything else, and if it has a mind, I can read it. But minds that small take work, and I wasn’t in the mood for work. I was in the mood for letting myself go, sinking deeper and deeper into the comforting lull of answering email and looking at pictures of kittens and basking in the quiet glow of the thoughts around me, letting them wrap around me like a blanket.

  At some point, James got up and left the room. It didn’t change the noise around me. Anti-telepathy charms are dangerous that way. When you evolve to depend on a sense, whether it’s as basic as touch or as esoteric as telepathy, removing it from the equation can unbalance and upset things.

  I pulled up a math game, one where I had to merge squares to form larger and larger numbers, chasing a distant, golden goal. The tension slipped out of my shoulders as I focused on the screen. I’d done it. I’d made it to Oregon without getting hurt; I’d defeated the cuckoo who wanted to chase me out of her territory; I’d saved Artie. It was sad that the cuckoo had died, but not sad enough for me to grieve for her. She’d made her choices. She didn’t deserve and probably wouldn’t want my pity.

  The numbers on my screen shifted and increased, one flowing into the next. It was a dance of simple addition, and it was so soothing. I relaxed further, watching the numbers dance. It was going to be okay. The cuckoo in the woods had been a threat and she wasn’t anymore. I had my family around me. I was safe.

  My computer beeped, telling me I had an email. I switched tabs. Maybe it was Artie. Maybe he’d realized that he didn’t want to kiss me again; now that he was far enough away, any influence I’d been exerting over him would be fading into nothingness, leaving him free to make his own decisions. If he decided he didn’t really want to be with me, it would sting. But if it was the truth, that would also be a good thing. I didn’t want to make him love me with a lie. I wanted him to love me because I was worth loving.

  The email wasn’t from Artie. I didn’t recognize the sender’s name, and the subject header—“Can you give me a second? I just want to talk”—didn’t exactly look like spam. There were no attachments. As long as I didn’t click any links, I’d be safe. I still frowned as I opened the message.

  If you want your family to be left to their own devices, you’ll come outside now. I’ll know if you try to tell anyone, through any means you have available to you—and that includes telepathy.

  Do us both a favor, Sarah. Don’t try to find a way out of this. You know it’s only what you deserve.

  P.S.: Her name was Amelia.

  I stared at the screen in silent horror for a long moment before I turned and looked toward the door.

  Someone was out there waiting for me. Someone had been able to come close enough to home to threaten my family.

  The danger wasn’t over yet.

  Eleven

  “Never go anywhere unprepared, unarmed, or unaccompanied. The difference between success and suicide is often a matter of prior planning.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  Getting ready to leave the living room, wondering if stupid things are any less stupid when you know that they’re a really bad idea

  MY MIND WHIRLED AS I tried to think through the implications of the email. It was a threat, absolutely: someone who just wanted to sell me Girl Scout cookies wouldn’t have told me not to ask for help. I didn’t know how a stranger could have made it past the gate, but there are always ways, for someone determined enough.

  They’d told me not to call for help, not even telepathically. I’d been careful, though; there was no way my system had picked up a virus from the email, not with all the firewalls and barriers I had in place. I could send Annie an email, and—

  A chat window appeared at the bottom of my email client. Don’t even think about it.

  My gut twisted. Who are you?

  The person you’re about to come outside to see. Don’t try to send an email, Sarah. I’ll know. Get up and walk away. Don’t make a fuss. Do it now. Or else.

  Or else what?

  Or else there will be consequences.

  If I’d had a heart, that last word would have been enough to make it seize in my chest. “Consequences.” That wasn’t the word of someone who was playing around or making idle threats. That was the word of someone who was willing to do serious damage to get what they wanted.

  My parents raised me to know my own worth and value myself as an individual. But nothing—nothing—would make me more important than the rest of my family. I couldn’t let it. Part of what separates me from the other cuckoos is knowing, really knowing, that other people matter. An ordinary cuckoo couldn’t be lured outside by a word like “consequences.” I . . .

  I had to go.

  Carefully, I stood, leaving my computer where it was. Annie would know something was wrong when she came down and saw it sitting there unattended. I don’t like other people using my things. I never leave them out in the open if I have any other choice. She’d notice. She had to notice. Someone would notice.

  Someone would notice I was gone.

  I walked slowly toward the kitchen, and through it to the front door. The temperature outside had dropped even further, becoming just shy of freezing. I could feel it, but it didn’t affect me the way it did the true mammals. Wherever we came from, it was a much colder place.

  I paused when I reached the edge of the porch, mentally reaching out into the yard, looking for any mind that didn’t belong there. I found him near the fence, a silent, unremarkable presence that had somehow managed to go unn
oticed until I started looking. This was bad. This was very, very bad. Awareness of his presence came with awareness of the static that had been growing in the back of my mind, lighter and more subtle than I expected it to be, a fizzing, bubbling proof of presence.

  I resumed walking. Every step took me closer to that unknown mind. It came further and further into clarity, resolving from a presence to a person to a cuckoo. There’s a certain sharpness to a cuckoo’s thoughts, like biting into a strawberry and suddenly discovering that it’s actually a lime. They tingle and fizz and even burn.

  These thoughts didn’t quite burn. They were sharp, yes, curling in on themselves like the fronds of a fern, protecting themselves from being read. I could see their superficial lines. Nothing more. They were too deeply rooted in the man they belonged to, and they didn’t want to let their secrets out.

  I walked silently toward him, wishing my inhuman capabilities had come with some good, old-fashioned night vision. Part of the question was answered when I reached the fence: the man who’d emailed me wasn’t inside the boundaries. He hadn’t managed to get past the gate. Instead, he was standing at the very edge of the trees, a pale blur in the darkness, lit by the glow from his cellphone screen. He glanced up, raised one finger to signal me to silence, and returned his attention to the phone, finishing whatever message he’d been preparing to send.

  “You know, it’s rude to demand someone come outside and then ignore them,” I said.

  Don’t speak. His words were clumsy, distorted, like he was pushing them through a wall of water. They might hear you if you speak.

  Who are you? I demanded.

  His head snapped up, eyes glowing white. I resisted the urge to take a step back. I’d known he was a cuckoo, known he had to be a cuckoo, but knowing and seeing are different things.

  Like the female of our species, male cuckoos all look essentially alike, pale-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. We were designed by the same evolutionary forces, intended to survive the same environment. To someone whose brain was designed to process the information, his face would look enough like mine that he could have been my brother, and dissimilar enough that if we’d held hands and walked down the center of a mall together, no one would have looked twice. Oh, the ones who looked once might think we were a little narcissistic for dating someone so similar, but they wouldn’t jump straight to a bad conclusion.