Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “Grandma! Grandma!” howled Verity as she approached, her voice carrying farther than any of the others. “You came to see us! Mom says you’re not supposed to spoil us, but I think it’s okay if you want to spoil us a little!”

  “Of course it is, I’m your grandmother!” Angela slid out of the car and caught Verity as she barreled up, swinging her into an embrace. “Oh, you are the spitting image of your mother at your age. She was a little hellcat, too. I can’t believe she has to contend with three of you.”

  Elsinore stepped around Angela’s legs and peered into the car, eyes fixing on Sarah. She raised one hand in a wave.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m Elsie. You’re Sarah. Ms. Angela says you’re a cuckoo like her. I’m a succubus like my grandma. That means I feel your feelings, and you feel real scared right now. Why? We’re your cousins. We’re not anything to be scared of.”

  Sarah blinked slowly at her. “Why do you call Mom ‘Ms. Angela’ instead of ‘Grandma’?” she finally asked.

  “She’s not my grandma, even though I wish she were,” said Elsie. “My mom is Verity’s dad’s sister, so we’re cousins, but we don’t all have the same grandparents. We both have Grandma Alice, though. She’s the best. She makes cookies and lets us sharpen her knives.”

  “Oh.” Sarah bit her lip. “I don’t have any grandmas. Just Mom.”

  “Oh. That must be hard. I bet you can share Grandma Alice. She likes grandkids.” Alex and Antimony had joined Verity in flocking around Angela’s legs, pulling on her shirt and yelling at her at the same time. Elsie beckoned for Artie to come closer. “I have a brother. Do you want to meet him?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I didn’t get a choice about having a brother, so nope.” Elsie grinned. “Artie, this is Sarah. She’s our new cousin.”

  “Oh,” said Artie. “Um. Hi.”

  “Um, hi,” said Sarah. She smiled shyly, and the world was different, in the way it only ever can be for children meeting the people who will be important for the rest of their lives.

  One

  “I never felt like my biological parents didn’t want me just because they made sure I’d have a family who could take the best care of me. I always felt like that proved they loved me.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  Somewhere else, outside the realm of known experience, facing a new equation

  Five minutes ago

  We’re encouraged to chronicle our experiences, both by family tradition, carried over from our time as members of the Covenant of St. George, and by the mice, who would rather witness events with their own eyes, but are willing to concede that sometimes they’ll have to be content with written accounts. So:

  My name is Sarah Zellaby. I’m an adopted member of the Price family, a mathematician, a cryptozoologist, and a Priestess of the Aeslin mice.

  I am not human.

  My biological parents were members of a species known as the Johrlac, colloquially referred to as “cuckoos” by people unlucky enough to be aware of their existence. So far as anyone has been able to determine, cuckoos are invaders from another dimension, one where bipedal humanoid life evolved from parasitic wasps instead of from monkeys. Yeah. You know that thing where people make fun of furry artists for slapping tits on a lizard? Well, I’m basically a giant bug with what the people around me frequently think of as “nice boobs.” So that’s fun. I’m also telepathic, as are all members of my species, which makes it difficult to tune out all those random contemplations of my breasts and what they might look like without my clothes getting in the way.

  Being a telepath in a non-telepathic society is a great way to learn how much you don’t like people or ever want to be around them if you have any choice in the matter, FYI. I don’t recommend it. Zero stars, would not buy again. Because people who live in a non-telepathic society don’t have any qualms about thinking any dirty, nasty little thing that pops into their heads, and asking them not to is like asking them to stop touching their faces. The very idea that the thing is forbidden makes it impossible to resist. So no, I don’t get out much, and when I do go out, I try to stay around people with experience dealing with telepaths.

  Since the majority of cuckoos are evil assholes, this mostly means my family.

  The Prices are ex-Covenant, meaning they’re former monster hunters who learned how to take that skill set and apply it to the goal of being monster saviors. They believe the world belongs to all the sentient species that live in it, not only to the apex predators, and they do their best to preserve life where they find it, or at least long enough to understand it.

  (No, they are not a family of vegans. No, I have never asked them how they reconcile a collective goal of preserving life and a willingness to eat its byproducts. But they do buy local and organic whenever possible, and I once saw Verity break a man’s nose for kicking a dog.)

  Remember that thing about cuckoos coming from another dimension? We’re an invasive species that doesn’t belong in Earth’s biosphere, and that combined with being really shitty neighbors has made us one of the only things the Prices are willing to write off as monsters without trying to understand us first, which I guess made it inevitable that they’d wind up with two cuckoos actually in the family. My mother, Angela Baker, is a non-receptive telepath, and since it turns out cuckoos are evil fuckers mostly because we’re born with a huge telepathic time bomb already implanted in our brains, she’s also the first good cuckoo to be born in generations. No telepathy, no bomb.

  Fortunately for me, she is a projective telepath, meaning she was able to hold me down and dig the telepathic nightmare out of my head before I was old enough for it to detonate—something which it apparently does right around the onset of puberty. It’s like becoming an X-Man, only in a really universally lousy way. No chance you’re going to get cool powers. Nope. Just telepathy in a world of non-telepaths, and the understandable but unforgivable urge to commit mass murder.

  So I dodged that bullet, which spared me from any future bullets my family might have flung my way, and went about the business of being a pseudo-shut-in who just wanted to do math, read comic books, and flirt abstractly with my cousin Artie, who—as you may remember from the convoluted family history I’ve already provided—isn’t actually my cousin, because none of the members of my family are biologically related to me. Not even Mom, although at least we’re the same species.

  My Aunt Mary always says the family you build matters more than the one you’re born to, and since she’s been with us for three generations and counting, I guess she’d know. My family is my family, biology be damned. I just refuse to consider my cross-species attraction to Artie inappropriate because my mother adopted the woman who married the brother of his mother. That’s taking avoiding even the appearance of impropriety to an extreme that I simply don’t have the time for.

  Lots of things happened after Mom defused me. I grew up; we all did, really. We found and followed our personal passions, whatever those happened to be, and for my cousin Verity, that meant ballroom dance, taken to the point of going on a competitive dance reality show. Yeah, I don’t see the appeal either. But she wore sequins and lipstick and a red wig that helped to distract people from the actual color of her eyes, and when she didn’t win, she moved to New York City to do a journeyman year working with the urban cryptids while she made one last stab at having a dance career. And like the fool I am, I followed her.

  I wanted to put some distance between myself and the rest of the family. I wanted to figure out whether I was doing what I wanted to do with my life, or whether I was living up (down?) to their unspoken expectations of me, the ones that said a natural ambush predator would want nothing more than to blend into the background and be forgotten. Most of all, though, I wanted the time to think about my situation with Artie, and decide whether I was really enough in love with him to make it worth risking the relationship we already
had by pursuing something more.

  It was a reasonable set of desires. Nothing too big, nothing that could hurt anyone else, except I guess maybe Artie. And somehow it still backfired on me, when Verity’s cousin Margaret showed up as part of a Covenant strike team, putting the entire family at risk. Most of how the Prices can operate in relative safety in North America is by keeping the Covenant convinced that they’re all dead, killed off over a generation ago in a frontal assault on the home of Alice and Thomas Price-Healy. Once Margaret knew Verity was not only alive, but was a living descendant of the Covenant’s greatest modern traitor, we were all, in the vernacular, fucked.

  Unless we stopped her, she would have gone back to England, and told the Covenant we existed, before returning with a force large enough to shut us all down. Verity was injured and incapacitated. I wasn’t.

  So I stopped her.

  Killing her would have just created more problems. It was a human solution, and I wasn’t human. Instead, I reached into her head, and into the heads of the men who were working with her, and I rewrote everything they remembered about their time in New York. I changed their minds against their will, permanently. It was a massive violation of their consent. It was the moment I proved I was a cuckoo, no matter how hard I tried not to be. Nature would always win out over nurture, and it had always been inevitable that I was going to hurt people. It didn’t matter why I did it. It was done.

  In a very real way, the people I hurt started with myself. The act of telepathically manipulating the minds of three unwilling strangers triggered a biological process called an “instar,” a form of metamorphosis inherited from my insect ancestors. It scrambled my mind and left me incapacitated for years. I could perform simple tasks and feed myself, but that was where my competency stopped. I had to relearn everything else, including my own name, as control and memory slowly returned. But they did return, and eventually I felt well enough to make the trip from Ohio, where I’d been convalescing, to Oregon, to see the rest of my family again. To see Artie again. To find out whether he had been willing to wait for me.

  Good news: he was. Better news: he loved me as much as I loved him. Best news: he was finally ready to accept that I felt the same way, something which should have been impossible to hide from an empath. After years of dancing around each other, divided by the dual barriers of biology and fear, we were finally figuring things out.

  Which, naturally, is when my birth family decided it was time to snatch me and trigger my final instar, something they said would elevate me to the position of cuckoo queen. Remember that whole “actually a giant wasp” thing I mentioned? Turns out we’re hive insects, and our origins have more bearing on our modern biology than I had ever guessed. Certain things need a queen, and thanks to events beyond my control, I was primed to take the crown.

  They wired me up like an explosive charge made of telepathic power and psychic potential, then pointed me at the foundations of the world and set the timer. And that would have been the end of it—where, by “it,” I mean “reality as humanity fundamentally understands it”—if not for my cousins. Artie and Antimony managed to follow me to the place where the cuckoos planned to blast their way out of our universe and into the next one, bringing a half-trained sorcerer and a surprisingly helpful cuckoo in their wake. Working with James and Mark—one of the cuckoos who’d originally abducted me, who had changed sides for reasons no one had bothered explaining—they were able to disrupt the cuckoos long enough for me to seize control of the monster equation that was trying to use me to come into the world.

  It was math. I can do math. Math and I are good buddies. It was evil math, which was a bit more of a concern, and it was math that needed a lot of processing space to complete safely. More importantly in the moment, it was math that wanted to devour my mind and would have happily done so if I hadn’t found a way to offload some of it to the brains around me, using their physical structures like data storage banks to give me the extra space I needed.

  It was a pragmatic decision, made in the heat of the moment, and without it, I wouldn’t have survived. There’s a solid chance the world wouldn’t have survived either. But nothing comes without cost. I learned that a long time ago. And right now, the cost was waking up tied to a chair while my allies surrounded me and radiated distrust.

  Annie, my cousin, who had been the youngest when I joined the family and had thus accepted me with the least amount of fuss, never batting an eye at my biological differences or deviations from anything resembling “the norm,” glared at me. Her expression was a mystery. Her emotions were not. She was hating me so hard that it was like a floodlight, painting the room in shades of hostility.

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

  And that, in a very concrete way, is where our story begins.

  * * *

  Whoever had tied me to the chair had done it very considerately. The ropes were tight enough to hold me upright while I was unconscious, and they would have been cutting off the circulation to my hands if I’d been a mammal with a circulatory system. That probably meant either Annie or Mark had done it. Annie had experience with field dressing a cuckoo, thanks to time spent training with both me and Grandma, while Mark was a cuckoo, and although I couldn’t be sure he knew how to tie a knot, the chances were good he’d know how tight to tie himself if he wanted to be secure but uninjured.

  My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard, trying to tell myself this was just disorientation brought on by what seemed to be a shift to a parallel universe. My chair was positioned to give me an excellent view of the window, and the ripe cantaloupe-colored sky outside. Creatures that looked like centipedes, if centipedes could fly and had absolutely no respect for the square-cube law, undulated through the air, their segmented bodies blending with the clouds. Wherever we were now, we weren’t in Iowa anymore.

  Iowa was very, very far away.

  Annie held up her hand, a ball of lambent orange flame flickering into existence above her palm and hanging there like a child’s magic trick. I squirmed against the ropes that held me. Cuckoos don’t have heartbeats, and we don’t have blood the way mammals do, but we can feel pain, and fire hurts.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure I do,” she said. “Everyone, please take note of the fact that I absolutely do want to do this, and if I suddenly start trying to say I don’t, it’s because the cuckoo has been messing with my mind.” She took a menacing step toward me, looming. I had always known my cousins could be terrifying when they wanted to be. It had never been aimed in my direction before, and so somehow I had never really cared.

  I may not be human, but I’m still a people, and people can be remarkably good at tuning out things that don’t immediately affect them. It’s a basic failing of the “being a people” state of being. I can’t call it “the human condition” because personhood has never been a human monopoly. Life might be slightly easier if it were.

  “Cuckoos can burn,” said Mark. He sounded bored. He reinforced that impression by studying his fingernails, looking at them like they were the most important things in the world, and by implication ranking me somewhere well below his manicure. “In case you were wondering, we’re as flammable as anybody else. Maybe more flammable. Hemolymph has a lower ignition point than blood.”

  Was he lying? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to push into his mind to find out. My head didn’t hurt, but it felt hollowed-out, like someone had taken a melon baller to essential parts of my brain without cracking my skull in the process.

  Annie, though . . . Annie was broadcasting, and what she was broadcasting was fear and loathing and frustration, a toxic stew of impressions and emotions that was probably giving Artie a headache. Lilu are empaths. All they get is feelings. When we were kids, we argued about whether that made me a better psychic, which came down on the side of “no, just less specialized.” Whil
e I could detect anger, he could read the nuances of that anger, the other emotions behind or coexisting with it, and the ways it could be unraveled. I just got to know that someone was mad, a superpower shared by anyone with the ability to understand human facial expressions.

  Artie was hanging farther back in the room, with James, both of them watching the scene warily, with no mental signs that they had any idea who I was.

  “Annie, stop!” I cried, trying not to stare at the ball of fire in her hand. “It’s me, Sarah! Your cousin!”

  “Oh, my fucking God,” said Annie. “James, give Mark a dollar. He warned us she’d start claiming to be family as soon as she woke up. Well, here’s news for you, cuckoo. You can’t put the whammy on me, or Artie. We’re resistant to your bullshit.”

  “I’m not,” said James.

  “You don’t have to volunteer that information,” said Annie.

  “I know, but . . . I’m not, and I’ve still never seen this woman in my life.” He shrugged. “I just thought that might be relevant.”

  I would have been tempted to kiss him if I’d been able to get out of the chair, and if it wouldn’t have seemed like an assault by a stranger. Because that was absolutely what I was to all four of the people sharing this room with me: a stranger. None of them had ever seen me before, not Annie or Artie, who grew up with me, and not Mark, who helped to abduct me when my biological mother decided it was time for me to do my duty by the family that abandoned me. All three of their minds were open books as soon as I turned my thoughts in their direction, thanks to previous skin-to-skin contact, which had created an attunement that hadn’t been erased along with everything else, but even glancing at their surface thoughts was repulsive and enlightening in equal measure.