Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “Wait!” Heloise looked at me with fear and misery in her eyes, and maybe it made me a monster, but I didn’t feel bad about putting it there. “What do you actually want from me?”

  “I know Sarah’s in morph.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me how to stop it before she enters her fourth instar.”

  Heloise blinked. Then she seemed to sag against the table, misery wiping every other trace of expression away. “You’re going to kill me,” she said. “I always knew that was a possibility. When Ingrid asked me if I’d be willing to be the decoy, she wasn’t really asking. She’s the strongest of us. Well. Was. When the little princess wakes up, she’ll be able to wipe her mother off the map. Too late for me. Sorry, Heloise. For a member of an inherently selfish species, you sure did die stupid.” She laughed, high and sharp and utterly mirthless. It was the laughter of someone facing the walk to the gallows and determined to do it without tears.

  “I never said I was going to kill you,” I said.

  “You didn’t have to,” she said. “You can’t stop a morph, little incubus. Once it begins, once that process kicks off, it keeps going until it’s over. Instars can last forever, depending on the external stimuli we encounter, but metamorphosis is a limited-time offer. She’s going to finish her transformation and she’s going to wake up in her fourth instar and she’s going to blow this stupid planet to kingdom come. Sorry. Guess that’s probably pretty inconvenient for you. Look at it from my perspective, though: I’m about to be dead.”

  “Destroying the planet will kill the rest of us,” said Dad. I flinched a little. I’d been so focused on Heloise that I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “So what? I’m the one that matters.” She tilted her head back as far as the table would allow, glaring at him. “I’m the superior species. You filthy primates took the long route to becoming mammals, and you’re still disgusting. All that sweating and bleeding and listening to your own heartbeats like having a crappy diesel generator for a circulatory system is somehow a good thing. It’s vile. I don’t know how you live with yourselves.”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” said Dad, voice mild. “You can stop trying to make me.”

  “Oh, believe me, if I really tried, I’d get my way.” Heloise’s eyes flared white. “I don’t need to be able to read your mind to know what really scares you. That wife of yours. She’s human, right? Human enough, anyway. Does she love you? Or have you just overdosed her on those nifty pheromones you have?”

  “Shut up,” said Dad.

  “You’re not from around here either, you know. The dimension you came from may be closer than ours, and you may have arrived before we did, but this isn’t the world you evolved to exploit. You people and your high horses and your fancy morals, when you’re colonists as much as we are. We weren’t the first invaders. We won’t be the last. Or oops, I guess we will be, because when our queen comes out of her egg, she’s going to murder every last one of you fucking—”

  “I said, shut up,” snapped Dad, standing. Looming, really, the can of Raid in his hand and a dire expression on his face. Heloise stopped talking, but she didn’t flinch. If anything, she looked absolutely, transcendentally triumphant, like she was finally getting what she wanted.

  “You don’t know, do you?” She smiled like she’d just won something. “You can’t look into her head and see—and even if you could, maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe she thinks she loves you until she gets a head cold and realizes she can’t stand you when she can’t smell you. Are Lilu behind the push for free flu shots? Widening your target pool?”

  Dad began to shake the can.

  I dropped the scalpel, hurrying to put my hand on his arm. “No. Dad, no. You’re letting her control the situation. You can’t listen to her. She’s a cuckoo. Cuckoos lie.”

  “All cuckoos? Because I seem to remember you making an impassioned plea for the life of one cuckoo in specific. Is she a liar, too? Or do you think you’re special? You’re not special, Lilu. You’re just one more pawn for her to push around the board. We can’t fight our natures, even when we want to. Biology always wins. Biology’s a bitch that way.”

  “Mark fought his nature,” I said.

  “Did he? Or did he convince you to save the fair maiden from her wicked, wicked captors and bring her right back into your nest, the way cuckoos always do? You’re protecting her while she finishes her metamorphosis. You’re sheltering your own doom, and you think it’s your idea because she would never lie to you, because she loves you.” The sneer Heloise put into the word “love” was enough to make my stomach turn over.

  I swallowed bile. “It’s not like that.”

  “It’s always like that, over and over and over again. You people renamed us when you realized we were here, called us ‘cuckoos’ like that would make us less, like that would make us weak enough for you to fight. Did you know that we returned the favor? We call you ‘cowbirds.’ You’re too stupid to see what’s in your own nest. You’re too stupid to see anything.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s enough.”

  The anti-telepathy charm was still in my pocket. I dug it out, careful to keep it against the skin of my palm as I leaned over and slipped it under the neck of her sweater—Sarah’s sweater—and anchored it under the strap of her bra.

  Heloise froze, eyes going wide once again as she stared at me. I offered her a cool smile. It didn’t matter whether she could see the expression or not. I knew it was there.

  “I’m tired of you, but I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “Enjoy the quiet.”

  “Please,” she whispered, sounding truly frightened for the first time. “It’s too much. The world. You turned off the world.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I agreed, stepping back. “If Sarah doesn’t wake up, you’ll wish I’d done worse than that.”

  I turned and started for the barn door. I was almost there when Dad caught up to me.

  “That wasn’t kind,” he said, voice low.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “But then, what about this day has been?”

  He rested his hand briefly on my shoulder. “I won’t tell you she’s going to be all right. None of us can know that. But I can promise that we’re going to do everything we can.”

  “I know, Dad,” I said. “Come on. Mom’s waiting for us.”

  Side-by-side, we stepped out of the barn and started across the lawn, toward the house where the rest of our family was waiting, where Sarah slept, where everything was falling apart.

  Even me.

  Twenty-one

  “There’s a moment where everything comes together, where the numbers add up and everything is perfect, and nothing hurts. That’s the best moment of them all. A person could spend their whole life chasing after it, and never feel their time was wasted.”

  —Angela Baker

  In the shining whiteness of the infinite void, where everything is about to change

  THE EQUATION EXTENDED OFF the chalkboard and into the air, wrapping around me, filling the void with numbers and letters and the sweet, simple logic of a world working exactly as it had always been intended to work.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  I had been so foolish. I had been so stupid. This was . . . this was everything.

  The equation sang to me, bright and beguiling, begging to be completed. Begging to be carried out into the world and allowed to come to sweet fruition. All I had to do was wake up. All I had to do was open my eyes, and the work—the great work, the work that I had been moving toward since the moment of my birth, the work that had always been destined to be mine—would finally begin.

  All I had to do was wake up.

  So I woke up.

  Twenty-two

  “When it’s a choice between saving your family and saving the world, I can’t tell you what to decide. I can onl
y tell you that, no matter what you choose, part of you will always know that you were wrong.”

  —Alexander Healy

  The front room of a private complex about an hour outside of Portland, Oregon, in the calm before the storm

  YOU SURE LEAVING A cuckoo alone in the barn is the right idea?” Antimony leaned against the wall next to me, taking a swig from a bottle of virulently pink liquid. It looked like she was drinking cotton candy, which was almost enough to put me off the idea of cotton candy forever.

  “No,” I said. The mice cheered in the kitchen behind us. Elsie had broken out the panini press as a means of dealing with her own nerves, and was making ham and cheese sandwiches for the colony. It was a weird coping mechanism, but, frankly, I’ve seen weirder. “At the same time, I don’t really care. She’s not going to escape without seizing control of someone’s mind, and with my anti-telepathy charm on her, she’s not seizing anyone’s mind.”

  “Mean,” said Annie approvingly. She took another swig of pink. “I hope she suffers. I hope she screams and screams, and no one comes to save her.”

  I shot her a sidelong look. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” Annie lowered her bottle. “Do you think she was lying when she said there was nothing to be done to make Sarah wake up before she’s done entering her next instar?”

  I hesitated.

  Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch, talking quietly. Mom had her hand on his cheek; he looked miserable. Heloise had really managed to get to him. Aunt Evie was in her office, gathering medical supplies in case things got ugly, and Uncle Kevin was in the library, researching everything we had on cuckoo biology and other insect-derived cryptids. He’d called Verity in New York before he locked himself away, asking her to go and talk to the local Madhura, who might be able to help. They also might not—or might not be willing to. Madhura are bee-derived, while cuckoos originated from a wasp-like ancestor. Nobody’s exactly friends with the cuckoos, as a species, but there’s a special degree of hatred between the cuckoos and the Madhura.

  Still, Verity’s contacts knew Sarah, and they knew she’d helped to stop a Covenant purge, so there was a chance. That was all we were chasing at this point. A chance. A chance that maybe somehow we could stop this before it got any worse. We needed something to go right. We needed something to change.

  “New subject,” I said. “Sam and James. Where are they, exactly?”

  “Sam’s outside, patrolling the fence line,” she said. “He moves faster than the rest of us. Between that and his anti-telepathy charm, if the cuckoos show up here, he’ll be best suited for both dealing with them and letting the rest of us know what’s going on.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  “Nope!” She toasted me with her bottle of pink liquid. “I don’t like sending my boyfriend out to deal with psychic serial killers without backup. It sucks and I hate it. But he put up with me traveling backward through time so I could punch the spirit of the crossroads in their nonexistent face, so I’m trying to be cool.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “You know, sometimes I wonder what our family looks like from the outside.”

  “Like the Munsters if that edgy modern reboot had ever managed to get off the ground.”

  “Fair.” I looked around again. “You didn’t say where James was.”

  And that was when James started screaming.

  It was a high, panicked sound. I shoved away from the wall. So did Annie, dropping her drink as her hands burst into flames. Mom and Dad both leapt to their feet, Mom’s hands suddenly bristling with knives, Dad producing a handgun from somewhere inside his jacket. I couldn’t see what Elsie was doing, but I had no doubt that it was impressive, possibly involving the weaponization of a grilled cheese panini.

  The screams cut off. James came tumbling down the stairs, spinning head over heels, until he crashed into the wall at the bottom and was still. Annie yelped and ran to check his pulse, only remembering at the last moment that she should probably extinguish her hands before she touched him.

  “He’s alive,” she said, looking up and over her shoulder at the stairs. “It was a bad fall, but—”

  She stopped mid-sentence, breathing in sharply. I followed her eyes and felt myself go pale as all the blood drained out of my head, leaving me unsteady and breathless.

  Sarah was walking down the stairs.

  Sarah, in the white dress she’d been wearing when we found her at the hive, her feet bare and her hair loose around her shoulders, like some sort of sacrifice intended for an unspeakable divinity. But her hair was floating, surrounding her in a loose corona, like she was moving underwater, and the hem of her dress was doing the same, and her eyes were glowing a bright, steady white, like searchlights. She wasn’t hurrying. She wasn’t slowing down, either. She was simply moving in a steady, implacable line, descending toward the fallen James and the crouching Annie.

  “Sarah?” I whispered, remembering a heartbeat too late that I wasn’t wearing my anti-telepathy charm anymore. She could reach me if she wanted to. The second realization followed hard on the heels of the first, slamming into me hard enough to physically knock me back a step.

  There was no hum.

  Sarah was less than twenty feet away, not wearing an anti-telepathy charm, and I couldn’t sense her presence. There was no comforting hum of “friendly telepath in the house.” There was only the ringing silence that had become too damned familiar over the course of the past five years.

  “Sarah?” I said, more loudly. I thought it at the same time, and in my mind, I was screaming.

  She stopped walking and turned, slowly, to face me. The light in her eyes didn’t fade. The air between us grew static, like it had been laced with an electric charge.

  “Sarah, I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re sort of scaring us,” I said. No one else was moving, and so I moved, taking a step toward her. “Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying? You’re safe now. We went and we found you and we brought you home.”

  Home, she said, directly into my mind. Her voice was louder than anything I’d ever heard before, like the ringing of a cloister bell. I clutched the sides of my head. Mom moaned, and I heard something hit the floor. I didn’t turn to see who had dropped what. Taking my eyes off of Sarah suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.

  Yes, she continued, still in that silent, impossible scream. Home is part of the equation. This is the wrong number.

  “I don’t like the look of this,” said Elsie. I glanced back, long enough to see her standing right behind me.

  “I don’t like it either,” I said grimly, and returned my attention to Sarah. She seemed like the biggest threat, in the moment. “Sarah, you are home. Try to remember where you are. Try to see us. I know it may be hard right now, but we’re right here. Please.”

  Sarah tilted her head to the side. Her hair didn’t move. It stayed floating in the air around her, unmoving, unchanged. Somehow that was the most terrifying thing she’d done yet.

  Yes, she said, as calm as if she had been trying to order something from a recalcitrant drive-through window. You’re right here. That’s part of the problem. The math doesn’t work if you’re right here. But I can fix it.

  The air grew even heavier, like a storm was rolling in.

  Aunt Evie had grown up in a house with a cuckoo. Had spent her childhood with a cuckoo for a mother, learning how to be human from someone who had had to learn those lessons second-hand. Maybe that was why the next voice I heard was hers.

  “Get down!” she shrieked as she hurled what looked like a water balloon into the center of the room. It burst on impact with the floor, filling the air with a white, powdery substance. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose. Unless someone has been beating erasers in a classroom, nothing that fills the air with powder is a good thing.

  Interesting, said Sar
ah’s echoing mental voice, as the light in her eyes somehow grew even brighter, until looking at her face was like trying to look directly into the sun. The air around her pulsed, her hair rising further away from her shoulders, and the powder began moving in fractal swirls toward a single spot in the air, pulling itself together until it had formed a perfect sphere. It was as if she had somehow reconstituted the water balloon without the actual “balloon part.”

  A shiver ran across my skin. We’d talked about telekinesis before, how she felt like it was somehow connected to telepathy in the real world—not just in comic books, where good was good and bad was bad and everyone looked good in spandex. More importantly, we’d talked about the sheer amount of power it would require.

  No wonder her eyes were glowing like that. She was eating herself alive, kicking off chemical reactions in her brain that would allow her to influence the world around her.

  “Sarah.” I took a step toward her. “You need to stop.”

  Why did you try to hurt me? She was still looking at the ball of white material she’d siphoned from the air. This would have hurt me. That was foolish of you.

  I realized two things at the same time, and both of them were terrible.

  The first was that the white stuff Aunt Evie had thrown at Sarah—her sister—must have been powdered theobromine. Cuckoos are allergic to theobromine. They love tomatoes, and they hate chocolate. It makes them itchy. That much of the stuff would have been enough to cause a serious reaction in a human or Lilu. In a cuckoo . . .

  It could have killed her. Aunt Evie, who loved her sister, who loved her mother, who talked about the importance of family as much as anyone, had just happened to have a water balloon filled with theobromine in her office, waiting to be flung. She’d prepared for this. She’d known that it was possible, and she’d prepared.

  The second was that everyone else was still wearing their anti-telepathy charms. They weren’t flinching from the volume of Sarah’s mental voice because they couldn’t hear it. They didn’t know how angry she was.