Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “How big is she broadcasting?” demanded Elsie. “Check her eyes!”

  I peeled myself off of Sarah and forced her left eye open. A pale blue iris greeted me, the pupil so small that it was virtually a pinprick. “I don’t think she is,” I said.

  “Good. Hold on.”

  Elsie has never had a lot of respect for the rules of the road, but normally she at least drives like she doesn’t want to go back to traffic school. Apparently, having a swarm of cuckoos chasing us meant all bets were off. I yelped as the car spun and I was slammed against the door. I yelped again as I dove across the backseat to stop Sarah from hitting her head on the window. I didn’t know exactly what was going on inside her head, but I couldn’t imagine that a concussion would make things any better.

  “Slow down!” I shouted.

  “No!” she yelled back. If anything, she accelerated, heading for the woods faster than I had realized her tiny car could manage.

  Something crashed into the roof of the car. Elsie screamed, as much in rage as fear, and slammed on the brakes.

  Antimony flew through the air in front of us, propelled by the physics of our sudden stop. Sam was there before she could hit the road, snatching her under one arm and leaping straight up, into the trees. I blinked, my heart pounding, and struggled to say something more coherent than a wheezing moan.

  Sam dropped back down to the road, Annie in his arms, and set her feet onto the pavement. He was back in what I always thought of as his “natural” form, although his tail was held low—a sure sign of tension in the normally genial fūri. The pair approached the car, Annie climbing into the front while Sam opened the door next to Sarah.

  “Mind if I move her over?” he asked, before doing exactly that. I was still gaping at him, too startled to speak. He raised an eyebrow. “What, did you think you left us to die? Because that’s pretty shitty, if it’s the truth.”

  Elsie shook off her shock and punched Annie in the arm. “What the fuck,” she demanded.

  “They caught on,” said Annie. “Could you drive, maybe? I want walls. Big, thick, secure walls. Also, the parents, probably pretty mad, and coming back with Sarah is the best way I can think of to calm them down.”

  “What happened?” Elsie started the car again, driving more slowly now, like having flying cousins slam into the roof had been all she needed to snap her out of her maddened flight.

  I focused on getting Sarah belted into the middle seat. Her skin was still too hot; touching her was like touching someone with a potentially fatal sunburn, half-cooked and in need of medical care. She didn’t react at all, just listed gently over until she was supported by my torso, her head hanging limp against my shoulder. I put an arm around her to hold her up, trying not to focus on the fact that I still couldn’t hear the hum of her presence.

  The hum . . .

  “We don’t have an extra anti-telepathy charm,” I said. “We don’t know whether she’s broadcasting.”

  “True,” agreed Annie, even as she pulled a gun out of her waistband and flicked the safety off, keeping it below the level of the windshield as she watched the rearview mirror for signs that we were being followed.

  “We need to cut her off.”

  Annie’s eyes flicked to mine, our gaze connecting through the mirror. Then she smiled, the smallest twist of her mouth, there and gone in the beat of a heart.

  “I made a deal with the crossroads to save Sam before I’d even admitted I was in love with him,” she said. “Grandma Alice must be so proud of her disgustingly dominant genes.”

  “Shut up,” I said, voice sharp. “I’d do the same thing for you.”

  “Sure you would,” she said. “Now expose yourself to the possibility of psychic attack so you can be sure she’s safe.”

  Elsie laughed, high and sharp and bitter. I glared at the back of her neck.

  Then I reached into my shirt and pulled the anti-telepathy charm over my head, dropping it to the seat between my legs, where it wouldn’t count as “in contact” and block me from Sarah’s mind.

  The change in the car’s atmosphere was immediate and intense. The hum of Sarah’s psychic presence crashed against me like a wave against the shore, louder and more present than it had ever been before. I gasped, almost forgetting how to breathe in the face of its weight, which bore down on me, crushing me into the seat. I could still see the rest of the car. Sam was watching me with obvious concern; Annie and Elsie were sneaking glances at me in the rearview mirror as they tried not to get too distracted to stop their respective tasks. Both surveillance and driving take a certain amount of attention, after all, especially when you’re driving like you have special permission to ignore any rules of the road that you don’t like. The trees rushed by outside the car, dark and barely distinguished in the glow of our headlights, and none of that mattered, because it was all so far away. It was all beyond us.

  Sarah’s skin was pressed against mine where I was holding her up. I had time to realize that might not be a good thing—to realize that even though it had been my intention to give her the anti-telepathy charm, to keep the other cuckoos from following the giant mental signal flare that was her mind right now, I wasn’t moving. I was just sitting there, the charm between my legs, not moving.

  Move, I thought, and didn’t move.

  Oh, crap, I thought, and the world went white.

  Twenty

  “No matter how much we study, train, and prepare, there will always be situations we weren’t ready for. That’s the nature of reality. It’s sort of neat, when it isn’t trying to chew your face off.”

  —Kevin Price

  Someplace that probably isn’t safe for incubi or other living things

  EVERYTHING WAS WHITE.

  I turned slowly, trying to get my bearings in the infinite brightness. There were no walls, no floor, no ceiling: only the featureless sterility of a blank page, waiting to be transformed into something comprehensible by the addition of basic physical forces.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth. “Hello?” I shouted. There was no echo. My words barely seemed to travel past my lips, like even sound was being swallowed by this terrible new landscape.

  Panic seemed like a good idea. Panic often seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, experience has shown that panic is virtually never a good idea, and if it is, it’s because you’re already about to die, so why waste time on staying calm? I forced myself to take a deep, slow breath, in through my nose and out through my mouth. The panic receded a bit. I did it again. Then I paused, panic forgotten in the face of a new oddity. I breathed into my cupped hand and sniffed.

  Nothing.

  Most of the time, Lilu pheromones are virtually undetectable, which makes sense: if people could smell us coming, they’d do a much better job of avoiding us, and hunters like the Covenant of St. George would probably have eradicated us centuries ago. They get stronger when we’re nervous—and I was definitely nervous. That’s part of why I wear so much crappy cologne, and why Elsie has an addiction to small artisanal perfume companies. The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has saved a lot of people from becoming embarrassingly enamored of my succubus sister.

  When our pheromones are detectable, they smell vaguely sweet and woody, like crushed aconite flowers mixed with sugar. And when I breathed into my hand, I couldn’t smell them at all. There was nothing, not even the chemical tang of the cologne I use to smother them. I might as well have been a baseline human. Which was something I’d dreamed about my entire life but wasn’t something I’d really been hoping would happen during an attempted rescue.

  Something was wrong.

  “As if the big white room didn’t tell you that part,” I muttered, and started walking. It wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, but it was something to do, and that made it better than standing around waiting for the invisible floor to drop out from under my feet and send me p
lummeting into the void. I am not a big fan of plummeting. If I had to commit to a position, I’d probably have to say that I was anti-plummeting.

  I kept walking, and a smudge appeared on the horizon. Appeared with the horizon; until there was something to break up the infinite whiteness of it all, there couldn’t really be said to be a horizon. It needed something to define it. I started walking faster.

  The smudge began to take geometric shape. It was a half-circle of blackboards, pushed together like a soundstage from a movie about mathematicians trying to save the world. There was a figure there, standing in the middle of the broken ring. I was too far away to make out details, but I could see that they were wearing an ankle-length skirt and a virtually shapeless sweater, the sort of thing that was more warm than fashionable, that would protect the wearer from notice.

  I broke into a run.

  The closer I got, the more details I could see. The figure became a woman became a cuckoo became Sarah, chalk smudges on her nose and chin, lips drawn down in the so-familiar, so-beloved expression of pensive contemplation that she’d been wearing since we were kids sitting and coloring at the same table.

  (Well, I’d been coloring. She’d been doing calculus in crayon, and when we’d finished, Aunt Evelyn had pronounced us both to be amazing artists and hung our projects side-by-side on the refrigerator.)

  “Sarah!” I sped up. I wasn’t winded at all, which was, like the lack of my pheromones, probably a bad sign. There was a decent chance I was dead, and this was the afterlife, although if that was the case, my Aunt Mary had way underplayed how much eternity sucked.

  Sarah didn’t turn. She kept writing figures on the chalkboard, moving at a steady, unhurried pace, like she had all the time in the world. Which was probably true—if we were dead.

  Maybe this was the cuckoo afterlife, and I’d been pulled into it because I’d been touching Sarah when—what? When the other cuckoos caught up with us and forced Elsie to crash the car? But that didn’t make sense. Not only had Elsie still been wearing her anti-telepathy charm, but if Mark had been telling the truth—about anything—the cuckoos were going to want Sarah back. She was their key to escaping this world and this dimension and moving on to someplace that wasn’t prepared for them. Which meant Sarah wasn’t dead. Which meant I wasn’t dead.

  It was a bit of a relief to realize that this probably wasn’t the afterlife. I know several ghosts personally—I have two dead aunts who I love a lot—but that doesn’t mean I want to bite the big one before I see the next season of Doctor Who. But if we weren’t dead . . .

  “Uh, Sarah? Are we inside your head right now? Because I don’t think I’m supposed to be inside your head.”

  She kept writing figures on the blackboard, not looking at me.

  “Are you ignoring me, or can you not hear me? I mean, we’re in a funky infinite whiteness, which is really Grant Morrison-esque and a little bit upsetting, so I’m trying not to think about it too hard, and I guess that could mean your perceptions are filtering me out, but I’d really like it if you’d talk to me.”

  She kept writing.

  “Sarah?” I touched her shoulder gingerly. “Sarah, it’s me. It’s Art—”

  She turned her head, not all the way, but far enough for me to catch the sudden flash of white in her eyes. I was knocked back immediately, going sprawling on the floor that wasn’t a floor, landing hard enough to take my breath away. Sarah returned her attention to the chalkboard.

  “Okay, that’s not good,” I muttered, pushing myself to my feet. “Come on, Sarah, you need to cut this out. Telekinesis? Really? When did you figure out how to move things with your mind?”

  Was it my imagination, or did the corner of her mouth twitch? Since we were probably inside Sarah’s head right now, I wasn’t sure whether I actually got to have an imagination. Telepaths are really confusing.

  More carefully this time, I began walking back over to her. “Do you know what’s going on? Because I’m not going to lie to you, this shit is weird, and it’s getting weirder all the time. I think we need to get out of here.”

  Sarah kept writing.

  “I’m afraid if I touch you again, I’ll get knocked across the—this isn’t exactly a room, you know. More a featureless void. Please don’t knock me across the featureless void. It’s not fun. I didn’t enjoy it the first time. I’m sort of worried that I might just keep flying away from you forever, since there’s nothing to stop me. How is gravity even working here?”

  Again that twitch, before she went placidly back to writing on her blackboard. I turned to face it. The numbers—well, partially numbers; her idea of math involved more letters than a bowl of alphabet soup—were arrayed in straight lines, broken here and there by little squared-off chunks of text that had been written smaller, like they were supposed to be the algebraic equivalent of a footnote. None of it made any sense. That wasn’t new.

  What was new was the way some of the strings of numbers seemed to phase in and out of reality, like they were too tightly written to maintain their grasp on a single linear plane. I squinted. They kept moving.

  “This is bad.”

  Sarah kept writing.

  “Look, I get that you’re in a smart-person fugue and all, and normally I wouldn’t bother you while you were undermining the fabric of the universe with mathematics, but you do understand that this is bad, right? Numbers shouldn’t be sufficient to change the laws of physics. They should sit quietly and think about what they’ve done until it’s time for someone to figure out the tip.”

  Sarah kept writing.

  “Dammit, Sarah, you’re going to kill us all if you don’t stop.”

  Sarah stopped.

  So did I, just staring at her for a long moment, until I saw her hand—still holding the chalk—begin to shake. It was a small, almost imperceptible tremor. I decided to take the risk and reached out to carefully pluck the chalk out of her fingers.

  She didn’t resist. She also didn’t fling me telekinetically away. I was willing to take that as a win.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked.

  She stared at the chalkboard and didn’t reply.

  “Sarah, if you can hear me, it’s really me. It’s Artie. We’re not dead, so I think . . . I think this is your mindscape, and you’re in the middle of what the other cuckoos called your metamorphosis. You’re entering your fourth instar, which means you’re becoming a better cuckoo. Bigger and stronger and everything. I’m really here. I’m with you in the real world, where your body is, and I’m touching you, and I think that was enough to let you pull me in with you. If you can hear me, please. Look at me? Say something? Say anything. I want to help you. I need you to tell me what you need me to do. I need you to tell me you’re still . . .” I trailed off. There were no good endings to that sentence.

  Sarah lowered her chin, until she was looking at the very bottom of the chalkboard, and said in a low voice, “I know you’re just me trying to talk myself out of this, but I have to do the work. If I don’t do the work, I don’t wake up, and I don’t go home. There’s no part of me that doesn’t want to go home. There’s just all the parts of me that are too scared to believe that I can finish things. I can. I swear I can.”

  “Sarah, please.” I dropped the chalk and grabbed her hand, only wincing after I was already fully committed to the action.

  The repulsion blast I was expecting didn’t come. I relaxed a little. Then Sarah raised her head and looked at me, and I relaxed substantially more.

  “You’re not real,” she said softly. “I wish you were real. It would be so nice if you were real. But you’re not real, and it’s not fair of me to act like you are.”

  “Hey, that’s sort of mean,” I said. “After everything I’ve been through today, the least you could do is admit that I exist. I mean, you’re the one who got kidnapped.”

  “I wasn’t kidnapped,” she s
aid. “I went because . . . because I had to. It was the only way to keep the family safe.”

  “Oh, sure, you call it ‘keeping us safe,’ like there was ever a chance that we weren’t going to go after you,” I said. “Mark told us how he lured you out of the compound. He’s sort of an asshole, by the way. In case you were thinking he might be your new best friend, since he’s the same species as you and everything. I can’t say that he’s someone I want to invite to join us for D&D.”

  “Mark?” Sarah raised her eyes, enough to blink at me in clear bewilderment. “You met Mark?”

  “Black hair, blue eyes, total asshole? Yeah, I met him. I know it’s cool for you to have other friends, but could you try having other friends who don’t want to kill us all? Maybe?” I shook my head. “No, that’s not fair. He’s helping us. He has a sister who’s not a cuckoo, and apparently if your species can convince you to work for them, she’ll die along with the rest of us.”

  “You met Mark,” she repeated, sounding faintly baffled. “You’re really you.”

  “I’ve been saying that.”

  “But you can’t be here.” Her eyes widened. She took a step backward. “Artie, what are you doing here?”

  “I told you—I took off my anti-telepathy charm while I was holding you propped up in the backseat. Not my smartest move, since it means we were in skin contact before I realized what was happening, but I’m not sure I’m sorry.” I chuckled bleakly. “I was afraid you might not be you anymore. And now here you are, holed up inside your own head, doing math. We need to get you another hobby.”

  “I have to do the math,” said Sarah. “The math is how I get out of here.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean? Just open your eyes. Wake up. There’s no reason you can’t.”

  “It’s a physical process, Artie.”

  “What is?”

  “Metamorphosis.” She looked back toward the chalkboard, and for a moment—just a moment—I could see the raw longing in her expression, like she had never seen anything so beautiful. “This is like taking a final exam. I have to pass the class before I can graduate and go on to the next one.”