Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “He gave me frostbite on purpose and took off the top layer of my skin.”

  “I didn’t do it out of malice,” protested James. His cheeks and the tips of his ears were red, like he was embarrassed or running a fever. “The cuckoo was in my head. Everything she said sounded perfectly reasonable.”

  “Sure, it was just the kind of reasonable that ends with me in a shallow grave somewhere.” I glanced to Antimony. “That’s my blood. He probably needs some aconite, and maybe a cold shower.”

  “That would be . . . welcome, yes,” said James stiffly. He didn’t look at me. Whoops. “I’m not currently fit for polite company.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  He dared a glance in my direction, the tips of his ears flaring an even deeper red, until he looked like he was on the verge of a stroke. “Please, don’t apologize,” he mumbled. “You did what was necessary to break that woman’s control over me. Honestly, I prefer this. At least I know you won’t take advantage. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need that shower now.”

  “Meet us at the barn!” Antimony called as he fled for the house. She turned and looked at me, nodding approvingly. “Nonstandard approach, but you’re alive and only bleeding a little, so we’re going to call it a win. Now let’s go. Your sister should be done patching up the hole in your dad by now. Oh, and did you know my dad’s bi?”

  “I did not know that and I did not want to know that and why do you know that?”

  She shrugged. “He made a pass at your dad when he started bleeding. Now come on. We need to figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  Sam started across the lawn, heading for the barn. After a moment’s hesitation, Antimony and I followed. We were definitely not going to get any more sleep tonight.

  Fifteen

  “I thought I’d seen the worst of what this world had to offer when I saw the Covenant. Then I saw my first cuckoo, and I knew I’d been wrong.”

  —Alexander Healy

  In the barn, preparing for war

  WHEN I WAS A kid, I’d thought everyone had a barn filled with taxidermy and weird, wonderful tools, like a mad scientist’s lab crossed with a veterinarian’s office. I’d giggled at Vincent Price movies, both because he looked like he should be a distant relative—he wasn’t—and because he’d been moving through a world that looked so much like the one I had at home. He’d been familiar in a way so few things were.

  As I got older, I learned that not everyone knows their way around a scalpel before their tenth birthday, and that maybe taking jars of organs preserved in formaldehyde for show and tell wasn’t a good way to make friends. I’d learned, in short, to be ashamed. But none of that changed the way the smell of the barn swept over me, chemicals mixed with wood rot and hay and clean, freshly-sharpened steel, all of it blending together to say “home” and “you are safe” and “boy, I hope you’ve had your tetanus booster recently.”

  The smell of bleach hung heavy in the air, drowning everything else out. I took a breath, then sneezed. “Dude, what the hell? Why does it reek of aconite in here?”

  “There’s Benadryl in my purse,” said Elsie. She was standing next to one of the surgical tables, taping a piece of gauze down on Dad’s shoulder. He was shirtless and sheepish, hands braced to either side of his knees while she worked. “After Mom shot Dad, all the grownups got squirrelly and horny. Mom’s out walking the perimeter to make sure there’s nothing else coming.”

  I paused, looking around. Mom was accounted for, but Aunt Evie and Uncle Kevin were missing.

  Antimony must have done the same math I had. Her whole face screwed up in an expression of radiant disgust. “Ew,” she said. “I didn’t need to know that. Why did you make me know that?”

  “Because I was here when my father got shot—meaning I was here when my mother shot my father—and everything tried to turn into the world’s most embarrassing orgy,” said Elsie.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” said Dad. “I don’t have any control of what happens when I’m bleeding.”

  She sighed. “I know, Dad. You can put your shirt back on now.”

  “Please,” said Annie.

  “You’re never that anxious for me to put my shirt back on,” said Sam, and dumped the unconscious Heloise onto another of the surgical tables.

  “Yes, because you’re not twice my age, related to me, and capable of making me stupid with lust just by flexing a bicep.” Annie holstered her gun and moved to help Sam strap Heloise down. “Okay, maybe that last one applies, but it’s not creepy because you’re not my uncle.”

  They made an efficient team, and if I focused on that, I didn’t have to pay attention to my father squirming back into his shirt, or—somehow even worse—the fact that the woman they were securing to the table was a dead ringer for Sarah. With her hair askew after Sam landed on her, it was apparent that she had even mimicked Sarah’s injuries. This had been very carefully planned, and they hadn’t expected us to catch on.

  I paused, frowning. “Hey, so, you know how there’s that mental hum when you’ve been around a telepath for too long?”

  “We went over this earlier,” said Annie.

  “Sure, but Dad and Elsie weren’t there,” I said. “This cuckoo doesn’t have the hum, because she’s not Sarah, so we’re not attuned to her the same way we’re all attuned to Sarah.”

  “Not all, but sure,” said Sam.

  “Why didn’t she know?”

  That was enough to make everyone pause and turn to look at me.

  Dad spoke first. “What do you mean, Artie?”

  “I mean she’s wearing clothes that look like Sarah’s, or maybe are Sarah’s, and I don’t want to think about that, so I’m not going to think about it anymore than I have to, and she made some snarky comments about wishing everything had gone wrong before she’d cut her hair, since she doesn’t like having bangs, and she even has a cut on her forehead that looks just like the one Sarah got in the accident. She planned for an insertion. She thought it was going to take us time to figure out that she wasn’t who she was pretending to be. But she also knew that being a Price makes you resistant to cuckoo powers.”

  “Meaning what?” asked Elsie.

  “Meaning she didn’t think she could fool most of us telepathically,” said Annie, taking up the thread. She stared at me with dawning comprehension. “She thought she could pretend to be Sarah so well that we’d all believe her, which means she didn’t know we could pick up on the hum.”

  “I don’t think ordinary cuckoos spend enough time around people to even know about the hum,” I said. “I think they just . . . come and go, and leave things broken behind them.”

  “That’s pretty much the long and the short of it, yes,” said an unfamiliar voice from behind me.

  We all turned, except for Heloise, who was both unconscious and tied down. The man standing just inside the barn door raised his hands.

  “I surrender,” he said. “Or I come in peace, or whatever you need to hear in order to not shoot me immediately. Because we need to talk, and we don’t have a lot of time.”

  His skin was pale and his hair was black and his eyes were blue and I didn’t have to be a genius to know that if I hadn’t been wearing an anti-telepathy charm, he would have been nudging the edges of my mind, looking for a way past my natural resistance. He was wearing blue jeans and a University of Portland sweatshirt and he looked like Sarah’s brother and I saw red, I literally saw red. I was moving before I had a chance to think about it, striding across the barn to knot my hand in his sweatshirt and yank him toward me even as I raised my fist and cocked it back.

  He looked at me impassively, resigned, not flinching. “If it’s going to make you feel better, go for it,” he said. “Like I said, we don’t have a lot of time. Get it out of your system.”

  I hesitated, hand still raised, unable to decide what to
do next.

  Antimony saved me from myself. She appeared next to me, pushing down on my fist until my arm was back by my side. She didn’t touch the hand clenching the man’s sweatshirt. “Hi,” she said, in the brightly pleasant tone that meant she was about five minutes away from setting everything in sight on fire. “Who are you, why are you here, and why should we let you leave?”

  “My name is Mark,” he said. “I’m here because I need your help if we’re going to save the world, and you shouldn’t let me leave. I’m a cuckoo. I know you know what that is. You have one of us tied up on the table over there.”

  “They’re cuffs, not rope, but continue,” said Antimony. I looked at her. She shrugged. “Precision is important, even when you’re talking to people you’re probably about to kill. Maybe especially when you’re talking to people you’re probably about to kill. That way they get to the afterlife with an accurate idea of what took them out.”

  “I don’t think cuckoos go to this dimension’s afterlife,” said Mark, in a resigned tone. “If they do, I’ve never heard about it, anyway. We’re not from around here. Presumably, after we’re dead, we go wherever the hell it is we actually belong.”

  “I’ll have to ask Mary about that,” said Antimony. Her hand moved in a complicated pattern, and she was suddenly holding an actual fireball. It flickered orange and red and blue, looking strangely like a pom-pom from her cheerleading days, if the pom-poms had been actively terrifying. “Later. Maybe when it’s time to hide your body.”

  “I would really, really prefer it if you didn’t kill me,” said Mark. “I didn’t have to come here.”

  “Yet you came,” Antimony purred. Sam loomed up behind her, apparently done with his adventures in bondage. “Your mistake.”

  The cuckoo’s eyes flashed white. “Living things want to stay alive,” he said quietly. “Please don’t remind me how much I want to survive this. You won’t like what happens if you do.”

  “We have you pretty solidly outnumbered,” said Elsie, joining our little cluster. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Dad heading for the back of the barn. Whether it was to get a chainsaw or find Aunt Evie and Uncle Kevin was anybody’s guess.

  Aunt Evie and Uncle Kevin. Fuck. I turned back to Mark, raising my fist back into the perfect punching position. “Where’s my mother?” I asked.

  “She’s not wearing one of those pesky telepathy blockers,” said Mark. “I could ‘hear’ her coming as I was on my way in. She wasn’t hard to evade. I didn’t hurt her, if that’s what you’re worried about. I came here to ask for your help. Hurting people would be contrary to my own interests. And I’m a cuckoo. Everything I do is about my own interests. Now please. What can I do to convince you that I come in peace?”

  “Let us cut your hands off?” suggested Elsie.

  “What else can I do to convince you that I come in peace?” Mark eyed Elsie, clearly alarmed. “You’re awfully vicious for one of the self-proclaimed good guys. Are you always like this?”

  “Only with the people who deserve it,” said Elsie. “You deserve it.”

  “Because I’m a cuckoo?” Mark scowled. “I expected resistance. I expected some honest caution. I didn’t expect bigotry. Not after everything Sarah had to say about you people.”

  I didn’t think. I just moved. My fist slammed into his face hard enough to knock him free of my grip. He fell, sprawling in the doorway, and stared up at me with narrow, white-tinted eyes as he raised one hand to rub his chin.

  “Don’t say her name,” I spat, taking a stiff-legged step toward him. “Don’t say it, don’t think it, don’t do anything unless you want me to hit you again.”

  “That’s going to make this difficult, since I’m here because I need you to help me save her.” He touched the trickle of clear liquid now connecting his nose to his upper lip and grimaced. “You hit hard.”

  “You can thank us for that,” said Dad, now fully clothed, as he walked over to join us. He looked around our little group before shaking his head. “Five on one isn’t fair, even when the one’s a cuckoo. Give the boy some space. He didn’t have to come here, and if he’s really trying to help Sarah—”

  “I am,” said Mark hurriedly. “Look. Tie me to a chair or something, okay? You’ll trust me more if you know I can’t touch you, and you need to trust me. We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Before what?” I demanded.

  “Before Sarah finishes the morph into her fourth instar and the rest of my hive uses her to destroy the world.”

  I suddenly felt like I wanted to vomit and pass out at the same time. It wasn’t the most pleasant of sensations.

  “Oh,” I said faintly. “Is that all?”

  * * *

  Mom, Aunt Evie, and Uncle Kevin had all come back to the barn while we were in the process of tying Mark to the chair. He’d held perfectly still during the process, not complaining at all, not even when we got a little overenthusiastic with the knots.

  “I don’t think anyone has ever successfully captured a cuckoo alive before, and now we have two in one night,” commented Mom, looking approvingly at the cuffs holding Heloise to the table. “Does this mean we can take one apart?”

  “Again, really bloodthirsty for the good guys,” said Mark. “Do you ever chill?”

  “Sarah’s missing,” said Antimony. “Your friend over there tried to use my brother to murder my cousin. Oh, and you just told us your hive was planning to destroy the world. Why would we chill, exactly?”

  “Because you’re the good guys,” said Mark.

  “Anyone who thinks good means chill needs to spend more time with my family,” said Elsie. She had produced a nail file from her purse and was meticulously filing her nails, checking them carefully for snags and imperfections. She managed to look completely unconcerned with everything that was going on around her. That was when she was at her most dangerous.

  “We’ve never been chill,” she continued, still filing. “Chill doesn’t save anybody. We like saving people. The ones who can be saved, anyway. Some of them were always beyond salvation.” She blew on her nails. “Those ones, we bury in the woods.”

  “Where is Sarah?” I demanded.

  Mark turned to look at me, eyes glinting white again. “Who makes those charms for you people? They deserve a raise. I can’t even get past the first layer.”

  “I make them,” said Annie. “Me and James. Who your friend over there aimed like a gun and fired. I’m not happy with her.”

  “She’s not my friend,” said Mark. He leaned back as far as the ropes would allow, looking at us all one by one. “Do you not understand how cuckoos work? We don’t have friends. We don’t have families. We’re every man for himself, all the time, from the day we’re born until the day we die. A hive only comes together when absolutely necessary, and it’s never for a good reason.”

  “So why did yours come together?” I asked.

  “For Sarah.” He looked momentarily almost ashamed. It was a strange expression to see on a cuckoo. “How much do you know?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.” His eyes flashed white again. “Everyone knows about you. The Prices. The Healys. You were the first people to figure out that we existed, and keep knowing that we existed, even when we tried to make you forget. It’s because of you that this world has turned dangerous for us.” He paused to chuckle, darkly. “Well. Because of you, and because of video surveillance. We can change a mind, but we can’t change a camera. Another few years and this whole world is going to be like London. Too filmed to risk. Still, we might have held out a few more decades if it weren’t for you people screwing everything up for us. So I’m asking you, how much do you know? I need to know where to start.”

  “We know nothing,” said Mom, stepping forward. “Start there. Start with the assumption that we know nothing, and we need you to tell us everything. And if yo
u’re wrong, we’ll just have a few things confirmed. It’s not like most of the enemy cuckoos we’ve dealt with have been inclined to give us good intel.”

  “Fine,” said Mark. He took a deep breath. “This is what you need to know in order to understand what’s about to happen . . .”

  Sixteen

  “People feel smart when they tell you ‘Frankenstein’ was the doctor, not the monster. They’re wrong. Frankenstein—Dr. Frankenstein—was always the monster. That’s the whole point. Sometimes evil is so damn beautiful it hurts.”

  —Martin Baker

  In the barn, getting a history lesson from a monster

  WE COME FROM A dimension called ‘Johrlar.’ I don’t know where the root word came from. No one does anymore. We’re the children of exiles, people who’d been thrown out of Johrlar for breaking the rules. I don’t know what rules we broke, either. Johrlac—cuckoos—don’t write anything down. Our history is given to us while we’re in the womb, passed down from mother to child as we gestate. Every cuckoo is born with the whole of our living memory already waiting for us. But we’re still larval. We haven’t even reached our first instar yet. If we had access to everything we knew, it would overwhelm us, and we would never be able to mature into individuals. So the knowledge is hidden from us until our minds are developed enough to absorb it without being overwhelmed. Our first metamorphosis looks like human puberty. Our bodies change, our brains expand, and the whole history of our people unlocks. It can be . . . a shock, to the developing psyche.”

  “You mean they snap and murder everyone around them,” said Antimony.

  “Something like that,” said Mark. He didn’t sound sorry about it, exactly; more resigned, like this was some nasty mess that he had somehow ended up responsible for. “A cuckoo in morph is incapable of understanding that anyone else actually exists, even other cuckoos. We assume they must have had some way of leavening the shock on Johrlar, but if they did, it’s part of the missing history. We know there are big swaths of knowledge that have been cut out of our inherited memories.”