Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “Don’t talk about my mother that way.”

  “You’ve had three mothers. The one who gave you away to save you, the one who died, and the one who stole you. I’ll talk about the third any way I like. She had no right. She stole everything you had, and she made you thank her for it.” Ingrid’s anger was a stinging swarm of gnats, swirling through the thoughts that shaped the illusion around us. “Children are supposed to come to their first instar in their own time. They grow, they mature, and one day, the little egg inside them breaks, and they see the world for what it is.”

  The girl with the bike seemed to age five years in the blinking of an eye. She straightened, the suddenly too-small bicycle falling from her hands, and turned to look at the house with a thoughtful eye.

  “That egg contains everything they need to know about being a cuckoo. It tells them what they are and where they came from. It tells them what’s going to happen to them, how to survive it . . . how to adapt.” The girl—the teen—walked back into the house, shutting the door behind her.

  Someone screamed. A splash of blood hit the window. I flinched.

  Ingrid was untroubled. “The entry into first instar can be a trifle violent, it’s true, but it’s a natural part of our development. The individual gets overwhelmed by the weight of the collective memory of a hundred generations, but not forever. They always resurface.”

  “It turns them evil,” I said.

  “It reminds them that they’re predators, surrounded by predators who wouldn’t thank them for pretending to belong,” said Ingrid. “The average age for metamorphosis from larval to first instar is thirteen. Your morph was delayed. Severely. That woman—the one you call your mother—had no right to steal your future from you.”

  “She stole nothing,” I said. “She made it so I could care about other people.”

  Ingrid turned to look at me, weary regret written clearly across her face. I was suddenly glad I couldn’t normally read expressions the way humans did. It was exhausting, looking at people and knowing what they were thinking, even if I wasn’t reaching out to read their minds. Telepathy was kinder.

  “Who told you we don’t care about other people?” she asked. “Yes, we care more about ourselves than we do about humans, but humans care more about humans than they do about anyone else. Why are the rules different for them? Because they have the numbers? Because that means they get to decide what’s wrong and right? She took your past away. She reached into your head with bad tools, broken tools, and she sliced out everything that should have been yours.”

  Something about that seemed wrong. I fought the urge to take a nervous step backward, and said, “Mark said I was on my third instar. How is that possible, if I never had my first?”

  “Oh, you had it. It just took years. It should have happened almost instantly and unlocked all the answers to your questions. Instead, it unspooled day by day, making its changes a little bit at a time. We get stronger after a morph. It changes the configuration of our minds. It makes them deeper, more complicated. We can do things after a morph that we couldn’t do before.”

  I thought uneasily of the way my telepathy had strengthened as I got older, until what had been a trial when I was a child had become easy, even casual. Had I been going through an instar? If we’d been taking regular scans of my brain, what would we have found?

  “Most of us go through metamorphosis into our first instar and then stop. First instar is necessary. It’s what changes a larva into a worker. We’re industrious. We keep ourselves busy. And we very rarely need second-instar soldiers to keep us safe. Second instar is a matter of necessity. Few of us survive the morph to reach it. Those who do find themselves substantially stronger and more versatile than a first-instar worker. You have no idea what you’re capable of now, do you? That woman,” and the venom in Ingrid’s voice was startling, “stole your first instar from you, and she sliced your second up and spoon-fed it to you in little pieces, and now you’re lost. You don’t know how to be a proper cuckoo. You don’t know how to be a proper soldier. But that’s all right. You were never meant to be a soldier.”

  “What are you talking about?” I couldn’t stop myself from replaying the conversation with Evie, where she’d explained what the doctors had seen on my MRI.

  Ingrid saw it, too. She nodded solemnly, looking distantly pleased. “That was your second instar,” she said. “The channels are deeper for you now than they were before. First instar is automatic. Second instar is triggered by the self. Third instar is triggered from the outside. Fourth instar is a myth and a destiny and a sacrifice, and you’re going to do so amazingly well, my dear. You’re going to make me so proud, and I’ll name this little girl ‘Sarah’ in your honor. You’re going to be magnificent.”

  “I don’t want this.” I took a step back, or tried to; we were inside Ingrid’s mind, still, and she refused to let me move. “I just wanted you to explain things to me.”

  “I am,” she said, and leaned forward, and kissed my forehead. Her lips were so cold they burned. I shuddered, and she whispered, “Fourth instar is what shows you the numbers outside the equation.”

  Then I was falling again, and everything was darkness and burning, and I couldn’t hold on. I tried, I tried, I screamed as loud as I could into the void, and the void was blazing white, the void was a supernova of absolute absence, and there was no one to hear my screams, and everything was everywhere, and everything was gone.

  Thirteen

  “No matter how much we learn, there’s always something we don’t know. A map labeled ‘here be monsters’ is better than one that reads ‘we have no idea.’”

  —Thomas Price

  A private home in Portland, Oregon, down in the basement, waking up from a dead sleep, not quite screaming

  I SAT UPRIGHT WITH a gasp, shoving my hand into my mouth to keep myself from screaming. Elsie would hear me—Elsie always heard me—and come stampeding down the stairs from her room to make sure I was okay. She took her duties as big sister and designated responsible person very seriously.

  And of course, when she realized I’d just been having a nightmare, not anything more serious, she’d take her duties as mocker of little brothers and tormenter of the sleepy equally seriously. I didn’t want her coming down. Not when my heart was hammering against my ribs like it wanted to break loose and run away, and not when my eyes were still heavy with exhaustion.

  Sarah. I’d been dreaming about Sarah. That wasn’t super weird—I was usually dreaming about Sarah, and sometimes they were good and sometimes they were nightmares, but since she’d been hurt, she’d had a starring role in almost every dream I had. I dreamt she’d never gone away and everything was fine, and I dreamt she’d come back and professed her love to me, and I dreamt she’d died in New York and that I’d never been able to even say goodbye to her, and I dreamt she hadn’t died but hadn’t woken up either, that she was going to sleep the rest of her life away on a machine in the basement of some cryptid hospital.

  But Sarah was home now. Sarah had come back to us, come back to me, and she’d finally kissed me, she’d finally let me kiss her, and everything was going to be amazing. Like, really amazing, the kind of amazing I didn’t deserve but had no intention of refusing. So why was I having nightmares now?

  The dream was breaking apart in my memory. I remembered a little girl with a bicycle, and something called an “instar.” It was weird. I didn’t like it.

  Shaking the fog away, I slipped out of bed and padded across the dark room to my computer. A wiggle of the mouse woke the screen. I pulled up my chat client first; no Sarah. Well, that made sense. It was almost two in the morning, and she’d just come from Ohio. She was probably asleep, safely behind the charms and wards worked into her bedroom walls, so the rest of us wouldn’t wake her accidentally. That was sort of a relief. She didn’t need to share my nightmares.

  Being in love with—
and admitting I was in love with—a telepath comes with its own list of unique complications. More so now that Sarah had recovered from her accident. She’d never been this sensitive before. When she’d kissed me, it had felt like I could see everything in her mind, and like she could see everything in mine, and that had been okay. That was the sort of worrying part. There were finally no barriers between us, and it didn’t matter.

  It was probably supposed to matter. I tried to picture having no boundaries between me and literally anyone else, and the idea was creepy and a little bit upsetting. I like people, but I also like privacy sometimes.

  At least I knew it was just because I was totally into her, and not because she’d cuckoo-ed me the way she’d always been afraid she would. I couldn’t whammy her into loving me—or lusting after me, I guess; my pheromones are way more oriented toward getting me laid than getting me cared for and respected—and she couldn’t rewire me into accepting her. We really were perfect for each other.

  “Elsie’s never going to let me forget it, either,” I muttered, and opened Wikipedia. When all else fails, ask the Internet.

  Typing “instar” into the search box got me a page on insect metamorphosis, and a slow-growing sick feeling in my stomach. I’d sort of hoped it would be a made-up word, something from a comic book or an anime series or whatever. Instead, it meant the stages arthropods went through between molts. They would transform, enter an instar, and then stay there until they were finished growing and could molt again. Which was weird and kind of gross and it didn’t make sense that I’d come up with it in a nightmare about Sarah.

  (Not that bugs couldn’t show up in dreams about Sarah. According to Mom, cuckoos are biologically more like really big wasps than they are like monkeys—hominids but not primates, in other words. So, yeah, there was probably an evolutionary stage way back in Sarah’s family tree where she would have gone through molts. But I tried not to think about that too hard, because it was weird to dream about kissing a girl and think “the girl is secretly a giant wasp” in the same sentence.)

  Still feeling a little awkward and out of sorts, I got up, grabbed a shirt from the floor that didn’t have any visible stains on it, and pulled it over my head as I started up the stairs toward the kitchen. When all else fails, orange soda and toast. Even at two in the morning, orange soda and toast. They can cure many ills, and if they can’t fix the problem, at least you won’t be hungry and groggy anymore. Elsie likes caffeine, but I say sugar does basically the same thing, without the nasty crash at the other metabolic end.

  Elsie was sitting in the kitchen when I got there, sharing a bowl of chicken noodle soup with several members of the family Aeslin colony. They offered me a somewhat dismissive cheer, their attention way more focused on mining her soup for chunks of chicken and celery—the former to eat, the latter to ritually place in the compost bin. Aeslin mice are weird.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Elsie looked up, smiling wanly. “Hey, stupid brother,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Bad dreams.” I crossed to the fridge. “You?”

  “Same. I don’t remember what they were, just that they were bad.” She gave her soup another stir, kicking more chunks to the surface. The mice cheered again, but softly. Mom has opinions about appropriate volume after midnight, and even the mice don’t usually cross her. She’s scary when she’s angry. “Hey, Artie. You awake enough to play dictionary?”

  A sudden wash of cold dread swept across my skin. I forced myself to open the fridge and take out a can of orange soda before I turned to face her, keeping my motions smooth and easy, like this was perfectly normal. Like I wasn’t direly afraid I knew what she was about to ask me.

  “Do you know what ‘instar’ means?”

  Sometimes I hate being right. I walked over and sat down across from her at the table, deciding to skip my toast for now. Toast is for people who don’t feel like they’re about to throw up. “It’s a biology thing. It means the growth stage insects go through between molts. It’s metamorphic—they tend to change shapes and stuff—but I don’t really understand it. Why?”

  “Because it was in my dreams,” she said, and gave me a worried look. “Artie, why was it in my dreams?”

  “I don’t know.” I glanced at the clock above the stove. Less than five minutes had passed since I’d entered the kitchen. It was still too early to call anyone. Sarah was asleep. That was all. “It’s a weird word.”

  “It’s a weird word for you to know.”

  “I looked it up.” I took a deep breath as I looked at her. “I wanted to know what it meant, since it was in my dreams, too.”

  Elsie’s eyes widened slowly, until they were practically bulging in their sockets. She pushed back her seat, standing, and glanced to the mice. “The rest of the soup is yours,” she said. “Please don’t try to put the bowl in the sink. You know what happens.”

  The mice mumbled muted agreement. They could get the cutlery to the sink—could even get it into the dishwasher if they were feeling motivated—but when they tried to move plates or bowls, things inevitably wound up getting broken. Mom hates losing dishes.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To get my keys.”

  “Why?”

  Elsie paused long enough to give me an absolutely withering look. “Our telepathic cousin comes home from Ohio for the first time in years. You finally figure out how to get over yourselves and hook up. And that same night, you and I both have a weird dream that ends with a new word being planted in our brains? Yeah, that’s not normal. Even for us, that’s not normal. So we’re going back to the compound to make sure Sarah’s okay.”

  “Couldn’t we just call?”

  “At two o’clock in the morning? If we call and she says nothing’s wrong, we won’t believe her, and we’ll go over there anyway. If we call and she says something’s very wrong, we’ll be too far away to help. No, getting in the car is the right decision. We can stop and pick up donuts or something in case someone has a problem with us rolling in before the sun comes up.”

  There was an urgency in her tone that made me stop, blink, and look at her more closely. “You’re really freaked out.”

  “We come from a family of biologists. One way or another, we’ve been exposed to more science lessons than those poor kids on the Magic School Bus. But you know what I’ve never studied voluntarily? Bugs.” Elsie shook her head. “I don’t like bugs. They’re weird and they’re creepy and they have too many legs. They skitter. I am not a skittery person.”

  “Okay . . .” I said, not sure where she was going with this.

  “I know, without a doubt, that I’ve never heard the word ‘instar’ before. It’s a whole new word. And somehow, it’s in my head, which tells me someone put it there. Hopefully, it was Sarah. I’m not sure why she’d be putting words in our heads, and we’re going to have a talk about privacy and boundaries if she did, but that’s the good option. That’s the option where no one’s violating what should absolutely be a safe space. If it wasn’t Sarah, she’s in trouble. So we go. You, and me, and right now.”

  “Mom and Dad—”

  “Are still at the compound.”

  That explained some of her urgency. We were alone in the house. If someone was playing with our heads, that wasn’t good.

  “I’ll get my shoes,” I said.

  She nodded tightly. “Meet me at the car.”

  I turned and walked back toward my room, speeding up as I went, until I was practically running down the stairs.

  Being a Price means spending your life preparing for an emergency you hope won’t ever come. Elsie and I aren’t as physical as our cousins—we can’t be, not when our blood tends to make people fall in love with us—but that doesn’t mean we got out of the basic training. I grabbed clothes and yanked them on before picking up the bug-out bag that leaned against my desk and slingi
ng it over my shoulder. Inside I had medical supplies, rope, a flashlight, batteries, water, a compass—all the low-tech answers to low-tech problems. Well, most of the low-tech answers.

  The handgun I took out of my desk and clipped to my belt would provide the rest of them.

  I’m a pretty good shot, and my parents have always been careful to make sure Elsie and I are comfortable with firearms. Verity prefers knives and Antimony prefers anything that keeps the fight at a comfortable distance, but Alex and I bonded over shooting when we were in elementary school, and I’m good enough at it that even Grandma Alice says I have potential. From her, that’s the next best thing to being given an actual medal.

  The last thing I grabbed was my phone, fully charged and ready to work. I don’t know how anyone had the nerve for cryptozoology before we had a decent cellular network. I mean, Sarah’s a pretty good substitute, but telepaths are rare, and most of them can’t be counted on to play mission control. Assuming Sarah was okay.

  Sarah was okay. She had to be. We just got her back. There was no way she could be hurt again, not so soon after she’d come home.

  I tried to hold onto that thought as I made my way up the stairs and out the garage door to where Elsie was leaning against the side of her car, impatiently waiting for me.

  “I would have left without you if we hadn’t just set your car on fire,” she said, getting into the driver’s side. She turned the key in the ignition. The radio immediately began blasting K-pop, bright and peppy and infectiously enthusiastic, even though I couldn’t understand a word.

  I got in and buckled my belt. “Let’s go.”

  “How’s your cheek?” Elsie pulled out, eyes on the road. “I don’t like going into whatever this is with you already wounded.”

  “Almost better.” Lilu—both incubi and succubi—heal faster than humans. Dad can snap a broken bone back into place and be fully recovered an hour later. Elsie and I don’t have quite that kind of regeneration, but we don’t stay down for long. Mom thinks it’s because our blood is so potent that our bodies have evolved to keep as much of it inside us as possible. I think that sounds like revisionist bullshit, even though I’d never say that out loud. Evolution isn’t that careful. Evolution just happens, and the consequences fall on the evolved.