Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “That’s what you’re not saying, isn’t it? We know we have two anti-telepathy charms and the weapons we were carrying when we fell through the hole in space, and we know I just stole a car, and we know that maybe we’re about to have to kill our cousin.”

  “Artie—”

  “And you know I’ve been in love with her since we were kids, and you know she’s my best friend, and you know that these last five years have almost literally killed me, so maybe it’s only fair that I should actually literally kill her.”

  “You know I don’t want to have to do this,” she said, and her voice was very small, and very tired.

  “I know.” It was easier if I didn’t look at her. If I treated this like it was . . . like it was the cutscene in a video game, maybe, something distant from me. Something removed. “I do. And I know none of us got to pick who went to Iowa and who stayed home. And the worst part is that I also know that I won’t be able to shut you out when this is over, because apart from Sarah, you’re the person I trust most in the whole world, and I’m going to be pretty messed up for a while. Maybe for a long, long time.”

  “We gave Sarah five years to put herself back together,” said Annie. “We can give you at least that long.”

  “I’ve seen Annie achieve the impossible before,” said James. “If half the stories she’s told me about your family are remotely true, maybe between the two of you, you’ll be able to find another way through this. Something that doesn’t end with blood.”

  “Oh, there’s gonna be blood,” said Annie. “It doesn’t matter what else happens, there’s gonna be blood, because I need to punch some cuckoos until the clear stuff comes out. And then I need to set even more of them on fire. It’s going to be a fun, horrifying, violent day.”

  I kept my eyes on the road. I needed this to end in a way that I knew it wasn’t likely to end. I needed it to find the one path that led to me and Sarah walking away, her back in her right mind, the two of us finally able to be together.

  I needed us to win, and I didn’t see any feasible way for us to be able to do it.

  The motionless roads blurred by as I pushed the old Camaro’s engine to the absolute limits of what it could handle. It wasn’t like there were any other cars to worry about, and seeing a human police officer would almost have been a relief. It would have been proof that there were a few people resistant to the cuckoos’ collective thrall, at the very least. But there was nothing. I drove, and the scenery changed, and no one came to stop us, not until we were pulling up in front of the university.

  I stopped the engine just in time. The collective weight of the entire hive’s cool regard slammed into my brain with all the stress of a wrecking ball, sending sudden, intense pain lancing through my entire body. I shouted, as much in surprise as anything else, and clutched the sides of my head as I tried to make it stop.

  Dimly, I could hear Annie shouting for James to grab my head and keep me from slamming it into the steering wheel. That was nice. It was real good of her to look out for me.

  There was a flash of something in the collective, bright and sweet and somehow carrying the fruity, acidic taste of Sarah’s favorite drink, grenadine and tomato paste mixed with ginger ale. The weight receded. I sat up, gasping, resisting the urge to feel myself to confirm that my body was still there. Of course it was still there. It wouldn’t have been in so much pain if it hadn’t been there.

  “What the fuck?” demanded Annie.

  “No anti-telepathy charm.” I rubbed my temples with both hands. “Nothing to keep the cuckoos out. I still can’t hear the hum. Something’s wrong with Sarah.”

  “Yeah, she’s gone all Dark Phoenix and started ripping holes in the walls of the world,” said Annie. “We knew that.”

  “But she’s still in there,” I said. “I think . . . I think the hive noticed me and wanted to do something to make me go away. Sarah stopped them. She may not be capable of breaking free of whatever fugue she’s in, but she still stopped them from taking me over.”

  “How are you sure it was her?” asked James.

  “She’s been in and out of my head since we were ten years old,” I said. “I know what her thoughts feel like. They have a taste, almost, like I’m remembering drinking something I never drank.”

  “One of her disgusting sodas,” said Annie, in sudden understanding.

  I nodded. “Tomato sauce and ginger ale, and just a little bit of grenadine.”

  “When we were kids, we used to believe that a drink needed three ingredients to be really fancy,” said Annie, as if that would take the bewildered, borderline disbelieving look off of James’s face.

  “How do you know that it’s not some cuckoo cultural drink?” he asked. “Maybe it wasn’t Sarah who let you go.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I have to tell myself it was her, because if there’s any chance we can still get her back, I’m going to do my best to take it. I have to believe there’s still a chance. It’s the only way I can do this.”

  “If she’s gone, I won’t make you be the one to kill her,” said Annie.

  She was trying to be kind. I knew that. I could see it in her face, the soft, weary lines around her eyes, the downturned corners of her mouth. She was trying so hard to be kind, and nothing about this was kind, and nothing about this was fair, and nothing—nothing—about this was right, or ever could have been.

  I opened the car door.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s end this.”

  James and Annie followed me to the sidewalk, and along it toward the university grounds. Somewhere, the cuckoo hive was gathering, waiting for us to find them. Somewhere, Sarah was working her way through an equation so big and so terrible that completing it would destroy the world.

  We were running out of time, and there were no good endings left. So we just kept walking.

  We had barely passed the first building when we saw the first cuckoos.

  There were five of them, all around my age, standing silently on a patch of grass with their faces turned toward the sky, like they were looking at a particularly interesting cloud. Their eyes were glowing softly white, not as bright as Sarah’s had been when she tore a hole in reality, but bright enough that I felt safe assuming they couldn’t see us. I motioned Annie and James both to silence and walked faster, until we found a corner we could safely duck around.

  “Well, we’re in the right place,” said Annie.

  “Can they not see us when they’re like that?” asked James.

  “It’s . . . complicated,” I said. “Their eyes still work, but Sarah used to say it was like trying to watch two shows at the same time on the same screen, and Mark said they were getting sunk in the corona of her metamorphosis before. Things get all jumbled together, and sometimes it’s easier to let go of what you think you see and focus on what you know you see.”

  “Which means the cuckoos we run across will either be focused on maintaining control over the townspeople or working to help Sarah do her big math problem,” said Annie. “As long as we’re quiet and don’t touch any of them, we should be able to keep moving without much concern that they’re going to stop us and ask what we’re doing here. They probably won’t even notice we’re here.”

  “I’m assuming that by ‘ask’ you mean ‘attack,’” said James.

  “See, you’re a member of the family,” said Annie.

  I resisted the urge to snap at them. Sometimes whistling past the proverbial graveyard is the only way to stay sane in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Instead, I pushed away from the wall and started walking again, trying to think about the shape of the campus the way a cuckoo would.

  Cuckoos were originally insects. Wasps. They were mostly solitary, but when they gathered in a large number, they still fell into the habits of a hive. It would make sense, then, for them to look for the central point of the campus—the point with
the heaviest defenses between it and the outside world. Even if those defenses were nothing more than concrete and brick, they’d still be better than nothing to a species that knew, all the way to the bottom of its DNA, that sometimes it was essential to run and hide.

  I didn’t know Iowa State, but I knew college campuses. They’re usually built around some sort of central green space, even in the heart of cities; something that students could use as an informal gathering space. Call it a quad or call it a field, its purpose was the same. I didn’t know why the cuckoos had chosen Iowa State—I would have been less surprised by Buckley Township in Michigan, where my family used to live—but if they were at the university, it was because they’d found a space large enough to suit their needs. We just had to do the same.

  Annie and James flanked me as we walked, which created the unpleasant sensation of being baked and frozen at the same time. Little flames flickered around Annie’s fingers, blue-white in their intensity, while the air surrounding James seemed crystalline and clear, as bright and deadly as a winter morning. It made me feel like I was more than a little outgunned heading into this fight. All I could do was smell really nice and make people want to do things for me, and even that didn’t work on cuckoos.

  Oh, and I could punch. I could punch pretty damn hard. Maybe punching would be the solution to my problem.

  Or maybe it would involve too much physical contact with unfriendly cuckoos and make my problem worse. No one really knows why Great-Grandma Fran was resistant to cuckoo influence. We know it must have been genetic, since she’s passed it down to her descendants, but without having a way to study it, we’ve never been able to learn its exact limitations. James wasn’t immune to my pheromones, and the anti-telepathy charm wouldn’t stop him from getting enthralled again if one of the cuckoos decided to take me over and use me as a weapon.

  “I should never have left my basement,” I muttered.

  “Wish I didn’t agree,” said Annie.

  Then we came around a bend in the path, leading us to the top of a small ridge. Beyond it stretched a vast green area, large enough to look like some sort of private park. All three of us stopped where we were. My heart felt like it was trying to climb up my throat and run away to someplace friendlier. Someplace where we were less guaranteed to die in the next, say, five minutes.

  The green space was filled with cuckoos. Hundreds of cuckoos, maybe even thousands of cuckoos, more than I had ever considered might exist. They were packed in like the crowds at Comic-Con, shoulder to shoulder, seeming to seek skin contact with one another. Their eyes were white, their faces tilted toward the sky.

  I saw elderly cuckoos, skin seamed with wrinkles and hair streaked with silver. I saw children, some as young as three or four, still in their pajamas, barefoot in the grass. There weren’t any babies. I hoped that meant they’d been left with their unwitting foster parents, and not that they’d all been killed. And then I felt bad for hoping that, since it would mean those families still had ticking time bombs buried in their midst. Which was worse, hoping for dead babies or hoping for family annihilations?

  Sometimes there’s no good answer to a bad situation. Sometimes there’s only trying to find the answer that results in the fewest casualties.

  Annie nudged me with her elbow. “Look,” she whispered, voice so low that it was like listening to the wind.

  I looked.

  The cuckoos, tight-packed as they were, had nonetheless arranged themselves in a series of concentric circles, with space between each tier. There was no mingling of one tier into the next: they’d drawn their divisions and they were standing by them. More, most of the tiers seemed to be divided roughly by age. The very youngest and the very oldest were in the outside ring. The tier after that consisted mostly of teenagers, followed by people who looked to be roughly in their early twenties, and so on. The final, central ring was made up of people about my parents’ age.

  They were dividing themselves according to instar. But that didn’t explain why that final ring was so large, or why the elders were with the larval cuckoos, or why there was so much open space between them—

  And then one of the older cuckoos opened his mouth and made a pained hissing, clicking sound that hurt my ears, even as his eyes abruptly flashed a blazing supernova white. The light in them died a split second later, and he collapsed forward, nearly landing on the children who had been standing directly front of him. They moved to the side and kept moving until a break had formed in the ring. Several cuckoos approached from the side, entering the break and scooping up the body—and it was a body now; he wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing, wasn’t doing anything at all—before carrying it briskly away. The ring moved back together, closing the gap.

  “They’re organized by instar,” I said softly. “More power the closer in you get to the middle.”

  “What’s at the middle?” asked James.

  I was direly afraid I already knew.

  More cuckoos fell every few seconds, and when they did, the cleaners were there to scoop them up and carry them away. I moved toward the edge of the nearest ring, gesturing for the others to follow me, and when the next cuckoo fell, I started forward.

  What followed was the most stressful game of live-action Frogger that I’m ever likely to be a part of. When a cuckoo fell, the rings would shift to make room for the ones who came to remove the body. That would give us the opening we needed to push forward more, without bringing them all down on our heads.

  At one point, James stumbled on the uneven ground, and his arm brushed against a cuckoo moving past us with the body of a child slung across her shoulder. She stopped, looking momentarily confused. Then she started walking again, and we all three started breathing again.

  I knew what we were going to find at the center of the geometric formation of silent, white-eyed bodies, and even so, it was like a blow when we finally reached the bottom of the hill and I could see into the last ring. They had arranged themselves to surround a little slice of green, a perfect circle defined by their bodies. And there, at the middle, was Sarah.

  She was still wearing her white dress. I hadn’t been expecting anything else. There were grass stains on the hem, and somehow that made it even worse. She was barefoot and smeared in green, and her eyes were as bright as stars, while her hands moved through the air like she was conducting a silent symphony of numbers, moving things that only she could see from one place to another.

  The skin above her lips was bright with what would have seemed like snot if I hadn’t known her biology so intimately. She was bleeding. She was bleeding from the nose and from the ears and even though she wasn’t blinking, something that looked like a tear escaped from the corner of her left eye and ran down her cheek, leaving a thick trail behind.

  “She can’t take much more of this,” I whispered. “She’s going to break under the weight.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Antimony. There was a clicking sound, roughly on the level of my ear.

  I turned. Antimony had drawn a gun from inside her clothing and had it aimed at Sarah’s head, her finger on the trigger. It was a small handgun, the sort of thing that’s basically designed to be concealed. It was more than big enough.

  “Annie,” I said.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” she said.

  And then she pulled the trigger.

  Twenty-four

  “Some prices are far too dear. And yet we pay them anyway.”

  —Jonathan Healy

  Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, very far away from home, incredibly betrayed

  ALL OF US ARE excellent shots.

  Verity’s the best in our generation, and Alex is the deadliest—the two things are connected even though they’re not always the same—but we’re all excellent shots, because we were never given a choice in the matter. We learned from our parents, and we learned from Grandma Alice, and we learned from
all the teachers our family could find for us, because we had to know. We had to understand what a firearm was capable of doing, and we had to be able to do it. Punching and stabbing things are all well and good, and they absolutely have their place, but sometimes, only a bullet will get the job done.

  All of us are excellent shots. When Antimony pulled the trigger, there was no question in my mind that she’d hit what she was aiming at. Because all of us are excellent shots. Those words kept ringing through my head, packing themselves into an impossibly narrow window of time, as I turned in slow horror—as I whipped around as fast I could—to Sarah.

  If she was going to die, I was going to see it happen. I was going to know that it had happened. And then I was going to go home to my basement and lock the door and never go outside again.

  The sound of the bullet being fired had been impossibly loud from where I was standing, and there was no question in my mind that we were about to be dealing with a whole lot of seriously pissed-off cuckoos. Some of them were already turning toward us, their eyes flashing white, their expressions blank and somehow terrifying in their emotionless coldness.

  Sarah didn’t turn. Sarah didn’t move at all. The bullet was moving too fast for the eye to follow—until suddenly it wasn’t moving either. Suddenly it was hanging in the air in front of her, surrounded by a sphere of what looked like water. She had somehow hardened the molecules of the atmosphere enough to stop it before it could reach her.

  No, she said inside my mind, loudly enough that it made my eyes water. There was no feeling that she was screaming, or even that she was shouting: her mental voice was just so much bigger than it had ever been before that my brain didn’t know how to process it yet.

  “Sarah, please,” I said.

  No, she repeated, and waved her hand dismissively, sending the bullet rocketing back toward us.

  Antimony shouted, a wordless sound of panicked warning, and shoved James to the side. The bullet whizzed between them. There was a soft shattering sound. I risked a glance over my shoulder.