Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  This equation wanted to change the world. It wanted to swallow the world alive. And I had to stop it.

  I clenched my hands into fists and screwed my eyes shut, locking myself into the darkness behind them. Not the flash-white landscape of my mind, no: that would have been too easy, and would have meant missing variables I needed more than anything else in the world. Because this was the world, every complicated, complicating inch of it, and it all mattered, and it all needed to be taken into account.

  When working complex math, there are factors that can be used to cancel things out. If you’re adding two to six and then subtracting five, you’re really adding two and one, at least as far as the end result is concerned. That’s so simplistic, so simplified, that any of the professors I’ve ever talked to would roll their eyes and scoff at the idea of explaining things that way, but it works, it works, it takes the weight out of the final figures, and I needed to cancel as much of this world-breaking equation as I possibly could. I needed to cancel things that had never been questioned, to reduce and refine and prevent it from doing harm.

  Even with all these other minds running interference, the equation knew I was the one who had to finish and unleash it. It pressed in on me, and I began to frantically run the numbers, trying to find the answer that did the least damage possible.

  The weight of all the lives on Earth, human and nonhuman and intelligent and nonintelligent. The weight of plants and fungus and bacteria, all the pieces of the biosphere that were so easy to discount, to ignore, to leave behind. They needed to be factored in as precisely as possible, and so I reached through the cuckoos who had been ensnared already and grabbed the next tier of minds, sending their mental fingers questing outward, ever outward, cataloguing and naming and numbering everything we found. There was too much data. I couldn’t hold it consciously without starting to delete pieces of myself—and that was what the equation wanted more than anything, I realized numbly. It was willing to let me bargain because it thought I would inevitably overload the processing centers of my mind and need to start choosing what to cut away.

  Either I let it run wild and break the things it yearned to break, or I pruned myself down to the cuckoo queen Ingrid had shaped me to be, and the equation would have its freedom regardless of my desires.

  I couldn’t be the first person who tried to tame this thing. I might not be the last. I still had to do whatever I could.

  Quiet, I told it, and kept reaching outward, picking up more and more minds that weren’t mine to use, looking for more ways to cancel out the numbers.

  The air was growing thick around us, crackling with power that had to come from somewhere, but didn’t feel like it was coming from me. I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t dare. I grabbed and grabbed and pulled and pulled, refining, reducing, penning the howling demon of the cuckoo’s core equation into a cage of subtractions, until there was nothing else to subtract, nothing else to take away, nothing else to do but let it run.

  I stared at the equation written on the inside of my eyelids. If I was correct—and I had to be correct, I had to be, any error could be the end of everything—then I was still looking at a blast big enough to destroy Iowa, punching a hole into the planet’s crust and triggering a chain reaction of destruction that could wipe out the entire continental plate.

  There was only one thing left to take away. Only one thing left to lose.

  Artie, I’m sorry, I thought, and opened my eyes, tilting my face toward the sky. It was bruised black with clouds, swirling in a slow counterclockwise spiral, like a hurricane getting ready to form. I had never seen a storm so big.

  It was mine. It belonged to me. With all these cuckoos yoked to my will, I could do virtually anything, and I didn’t understand a thing about what I was doing. We had never belonged here. We had never been intended to be a part of this world.

  It was better this way.

  I took a deep breath of the ion-charged air and began to speak, babbling polynomials and monomials and terms as quickly as I could, looping them back around one another to prevent errors from creeping in. Numbers merged into letters into operations, stacking one on top of the other, becoming bigger and more difficult to wrangle.

  The sky grew darker and darker still. With a vast, furious crack of thunder, it began to rain. The equation rejoiced. Rain would distract me, keep me from finishing it the way I wanted to, leave it with openings to exploit.

  I raised a hand and the rain stopped before it could reach me or the people immediately around me. It pattered against an invisible dome instead, sliding down the sides and trickling into the grass. Mark was halfway inside and halfway outside the dome; part of him was getting soaked. That was fine. Other peoples’ discomfort didn’t—

  No. That was a cuckoo thought. I slapped the equation away from the parts of my mind where I stored my carefully learned and hard-won empathy, forcing it back into the box I had drawn for it, and expanded the dome enough to cover Mark completely before I resumed my recitation of the factors to the storm-drenched sky.

  Was it enough? Was anything, ever, going to be enough? Because that was a subtraction, too, even if it was only an estimated and hence low-balled figure: the damage the cuckoos had done since arriving in this world, where they had never truly belonged. How many broken families? How many deaths? How many children smothered in their cradles to make room for a cuckoo-child who should never have been there in the first place? The damage was incalculable, and still I did my best to calculate it, and the area of impact shrank, again and again, until it was almost small enough. Until it felt like it might be fair.

  I couldn’t loosen my grip on the equation for even a second, or I’d lose it. It was furious at what I’d done, thrashing against my mental hands as it tried to break free and restore some of its original scope. This wasn’t enough damage to satisfy what it had been built to do . . . but I thought I could see, buried under piles and piles of junk modifiers, the core of what it could have been, if it had been designed by someone kinder. Someone who cared about what it did to the world. The equation the cuckoos remembered forgetting . . . it had been a subtle thing, a scalpel. This was a sledgehammer.

  I glanced at Artie, who was standing perfectly still as I used every spare neuron he had to power this ridiculous, impossible attempt. Every spare neuron, and a few he technically didn’t have to spare.

  “I love you,” I whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear me. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe he’d have an easier time letting go. I closed my eyes, shutting him out, shutting everything out except for me, what I had to do, and the unfinished equation.

  Then I finished it, and the conclusion slammed into me so hard that it was like a bullet to the brain, and I went down hard, with no way of knowing whether I’d done what I set out to do, whether I’d defeated my last and greatest opponent . . . or whether I was going to survive this.

  Please let it be okay, I thought. Please let them walk away. Please.

  Please.

  Ple—

  Epilogue

  “No one’s ever really lost. Sometimes we don’t know where they are, exactly, but that just means it’s time for us to go out and find them.”

  —Alice Healy

  . . . well, that’s an excellent question, when you really stop to think about it

  EVERYTHING WAS COMFORTABLE DARKNESS, and nothing hurt. That was the best part. Maybe I’d allowed a predatory equation from another dimension to devour the world, but dammit, I’d at least earned the sort of afterlife where I got to take five minutes to myself. It would probably suck in a few hours, when I realized I was going to be alone with my thoughts for eternity, but whatever. That was a problem for future-Sarah. Present-Sarah was enjoying the chance to catch her breath without anyone trying to seize control of her mind or force her to unmake reality. Future-Sarah could suck it.

  “I think she’s dead.”

  The
voice was Mark’s. He sounded remarkably disinterested, given that he was reporting on my supposed death. I already hadn’t been his biggest fan, but that was when I decided to really dislike him.

  “Pour water on her. That always works with me.”

  Annie.

  “Because usually if we think you’re dead, you’re also on fire, and it’s hard to check someone’s pulse when they’re burning themselves alive. Has anyone checked her pulse?”

  James.

  “She’s a cuckoo. They don’t have hearts, so they don’t have pulses, either. A pulse isn’t possible without a heart.”

  Artie.

  If I’d had a heart, it would have been racing. Artie was alive. Artie was alive and here—wherever “here” was—and still himself. I hadn’t accidentally erased his mind when I’d used him as a way to increase my processing power. I wasn’t a monster after all. I wanted to punch the air and scream. I still couldn’t move.

  Well, that was awkward. If I wasn’t dead, I wanted to be able to move. I tried to focus on my body, looking for some sign that it was still there.

  I’d never met a cuckoo ghost. Did cuckoos haunt their own bodies when they died, since they were so far away from the dimension that they came from? Was I going to be stuck haunting my corpse? I didn’t want to haunt my corpse. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to tell Artie I was okay. I wanted to put my arms around him and press my face against his neck and let him hold me up until I stopped shaking.

  “If she’s dead, I don’t want her in here. Dead things stink. We can’t have her attracting predators.”

  Artie again, but . . . but he was talking about me. How could he say something like that while he was talking about me? We were supposed to be a team. He was supposed to be on my side, even if it meant he was siding with a corpse.

  “If she’s not dead, she may know where the hell we are. She was the one leading their stupid ritual. James, grab her chin.”

  A hand grasped my head and tilted it upward as Annie stopped speaking. The fingers were cold. James.

  The next fingers to touch me were anything but cold. They stroked my cheek, almost hot enough to burn.

  Then Annie pulled back and slapped me.

  I gasped, opening my eyes. A momentary triumph lanced through me—I could open my eyes. I had eyes to open. I wasn’t dead after all. And then I saw the faces surrounding me, and my triumph died, replaced by confused terror.

  Annie, James, Artie, and Mark had formed a loose semicircle in front of the chair where I was sitting. I didn’t even need to check to know that I was tied in place. There was no other way I could have stayed upright—and family protocols are very clear. When you have someone captive and you want them to stay that way, you damn well tie them up. We were in some kind of classroom. There was a window behind them. Through it, I could see several more buildings I recognized from the campus . . .

  And a slice of sky the color of ripe cantaloupe, sweet and golden and utterly alien. As if to drive that point home, what looked like a centipede the length of a train undulated through it, legs waving like cilia or rudders to keep it aloft. I stared, too stunned to say anything.

  “Well?”

  Annie’s tone was harsh, cold—unforgiving. I turned to face her, eyes wide and shocked.

  I couldn’t read her face. I didn’t need to. The wariness and distrust were radiating off her like the heat from her fingers.

  “What did you do, cuckoo?” she demanded. “Where are we?”

  “Oh,” I said, faintly. “Crap.”

  Read on for a brand-new InCryptid novella by Seanan McGuire:

  FOLLOW THE LADY

  “Once you make the carnival your home, you’ll always belong there. The boneyard remembers your stride. The midway remembers the sound of your laughter. Once a carnie, always a carnie.”

  —Frances Brown

  Passing through Michigan, just crossing the borders into Buckley Township, crammed into the back of a retro travel trailer hitched to a car that’s working well above its weight class

  WE WERE BARELY OVER the boundary into Buckley when James’ car began making a horrifying rattling noise, as if the engine had abruptly been replaced by one of those old-fashioned rock tumblers, the kind they sell to elementary schools to teach kids that pebbles can be beautiful. He yelped and pulled over to the side of the road, taking his feet away from the pedals and leaning back in his seat like he was afraid the car was getting ready to explode.

  “Is that a good noise?” I asked, half-hopefully.

  Slowly, he swiveled around to stare at me like I had just asked the stupidest question in the world’s long history of stupid questions. “No,” he said, in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t humoring me, the way he sometimes did when he tripped over one of my rich veins of unexpected ignorance. “That is a very, very bad noise. That is a noise that means, potentially, we’re not going to be leaving here for quite some time.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay, well, that’s not great.”

  James punched the steering wheel.

  “I’ll just go update the others,” I said, and opened my door, unbuckling my belt as I swung my legs out of the car and slid from my seat into the crisp autumn air.

  We’d been driving for four days, not quite solid, making worse time than we would have if we hadn’t been constantly distracted by the world, and if James had ever been outside the small town where he’d been born. America is a lot bigger than New Gravesend, Maine, and he was seeing it for the first time. If anyone had been primed to actually want to buy tickets to every roadside attraction in existence, it was him.

  For the most part, I didn’t begrudge him our winding, weaving track across the country. As I’d expected, on our second day on the road, we had run into someone who’d been hunting for a car exactly like Cylia’s avocado-colored monstrosity for years. He’d been happy to trade us for our new-old travel trailer, which was actual retro, and not something new designed to look like it wasn’t. It was both surprisingly light and surprisingly palatial, with beds for four, a small kitchenette, and a bathroom. He’d thrown in all the accoutrements, and fifteen hundred dollars, all to sweeten the deal. I had no idea what could make a man want the world’s ugliest muscle car that badly, but I was glad he had. It made things a lot easier on the rest of us.

  It meant that James was doing the bulk of the driving since he didn’t entirely trust Cylia with his car, and I didn’t drive. Sam did, but he was enjoying the chance to lounge around the trailer in full fūri form, rather than forcing himself to look human while he was behind the wheel. Fern didn’t drive at all, which made sense. When you belong to a species whose response to being threatened involves shedding most of your personal density, driving isn’t the safest activity.

  I walked around to the trailer and stepped up onto the bumper, banging three times on the door before swinging it open and letting myself inside. “Knock three times” isn’t the best signal I’ve ever come up with, but since I’ve been riding in the car with James to keep him from stopping at every fruit stand in the Midwest, I didn’t want to institute anything that would slow down getting to the bathroom when we did stop.

  Sam was sitting on the trailer’s narrow couch, not having bothered to shift back to artificial humanity. I bumped the door shut with my hip, struggling not to smile sappily at him. I didn’t really succeed.

  Sam Taylor is the best accident I’ve ever had. His grandmother, Emery Spenser, is the current owner of the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival, which happened to have been the location of my assignment with the Covenant of St. George, a global organization of monster hunters that would have absolutely loathed every single person on our little road trip of the damned. Most of them would have only considered me and James to actually be people; we’re sorcerers, but that doesn’t actually expel us from the human race, even if I might sometimes wish it did. Fern’s a sylph, Cyli
a’s a jink, and Sam’s a fūri, although his grandmother’s a human. By all reports, his mother was, too. Fūri are one of the rare cryptid types to be actually genetically compatible with humans. It’s like how sometimes lions and tigers can breed, even though they’re very different species.

  Sam’s default form is sort of “hot monkey guy,” although his simian features aren’t as pronounced as that implies. His hair is more like fur—dark, dark brown tipped in a slightly lighter shade; his ears are large and rounded, and his hands and feet are equally dexterous and larger than those of a human man. Most noticeable is his long, prehensile tail, which is strong enough for him to swing from, even when he’s carrying me. Which happens fairly often. He has more muscle density than a human man of similar height and weight, developed and honed by years spent on the flying trapeze. He hates shoes, bananas, and spending too much time around humans. He loves sweatpants, boring English classics, and me.

  That last one has been the hardest for me to adjust to. I was always voted the least likely of my generation to fall in love or settle down—and that includes my cousin Artie the incubus, who seems destined to die alone in the basement of his parents’ house, thanks to a near-pathological fear of getting close to any girl he’s not related to. It’s not healthy, but hey. He’s family. Besides, I hadn’t been at the carnival looking for a boyfriend. I’d been looking for the source of a string of mysterious deaths and disappearances that had gone on long enough to attract the attention of the Covenant of St. George. I’d been undercover with them, pretending to be a trainee, and since my cover story had involved a carnival background, they had sent me to figure out exactly what was happening.