Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

I nodded, filling her quickly in. When I was done, she sighed, and said, “I’ll go get the boys.”

  “Um, why?” Her thoughts were still hostile enough. I could happily go a little longer without adding the chaos of Artie’s mind to the scene.

  “Because we have two clusters of mostly human students out there, and we need a way to keep them inside as long as we possibly can,” said Annie. “That means we need to go find them.”

  “There’s two of us,” I said, a little desperately. There it was. I shrugged. “At least you’re admitting you don’t trust me,” I said. “Fine. Let’s go get them.”

  It only took a few steps to get back to the classroom. Annie stuck her head inside and snapped, “Get off your dicks and come on, you three.”

  “Where are we going?” asked James, already in motion. Mark and Artie hung back.

  “Come on,” said Annie. “We’re going walkies.”

  “I’m good here,” said Artie.

  Annie turned her full attention on him. “Are you?” she asked. “And I’m telling your parents exactly what when they ask why I walked away and left you alone in the horror movie we’re currently trapped in? Move it, Harrington. We’re all going.”

  “Going where?” asked Mark.

  “Sarah found some students,” she said. “On the campus. They’re in two clusters, so we need two groups to go and fetch them. Or, you know, make sure they’re in defensible locations and convince them to stay put until we find a way back to Earth, whichever seems less annoying. Now come on.”

  Artie and Mark followed James to the door.

  The five of us stood in the hallway for a long, silent moment before Annie pointed and said, “This way.” She started walking. We all followed.

  Whatever the equation had done to transport us here, it had done so with relatively little structural damage to the building itself. The hallway was long, straight, and lined with doors identical to the one we’d just come out of, all of them closed. I paused, reaching out, but found no minds lurking behind them, either human or cuckoo.

  James gave me a sidelong look. “What did you just do?”

  “I’m sorry?” I blinked, focusing on him. “What do you mean?”

  “Your eyes went white for a second there. What did you do? Cuckoos’ eyes only go white when they’re doing something. Did you do something to one of us?”

  “If I were going to ‘do something,’ as you so charmingly put it, don’t you think I would have done it to Annie while I had her alone out here?” Annie was leading us down the hall, a little line of miserable, hostile ducklings. I kept my attention on James. “I know you don’t have that much practice trusting the mice yet, but I grew up knowing that they were meant to be trusted no matter what.”

  “HAIL,” shouted a tiny chorus of surprisingly welcome voices.

  “So if you can’t trust me, try trusting them.”

  James sighed. “I’ll try,” he said.

  “That’s all I’m asking for,” The door at the end of the hall led into a stairwell, dark and echoing and filled with too many shadows. There were no windows here; the only light that reached the interior was thin and watery, filtered through cracks in the masonry and a single skylight high overhead. The whole thing made me anxious. This wasn’t a good place for lingering in the shadows.

  Annie snapped her fingers and another ball of flame appeared, hovering above her hand. I wondered if she’d noticed how casually she was summoning and dismissing her little bonfires. I wondered if she’d take it well if I pointed it out, then decided that it wasn’t worth the possible conflict. She led us down to the ground floor without a word, glancing back once as if to make sure we were all behaving ourselves before she pushed the door open with her hip.

  The outside air had a strange tang to it, almost citrusy, like walking into an airport terminal right after the cleaning crews had been through to disinfect everything. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it coated the back of my throat and the inside of my nostrils, covering everything in the faint, distant scent of Lemon Pledge.

  Antimony made a gagging sound. I whirled, sticking out one foot to keep the door from slamming shut. I didn’t need to. James gave me a startled look, radiating surprise, and caught the door himself. Somewhat shamefacedly, I turned my attention back to Annie.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Can you breathe?”

  “Yeah, I just hate that smell,” she said, and sneezed. “It wasn’t here when we went inside.”

  “If you carted me into the classroom as soon as you all woke up, the atmosphere of campus and the surrounding area probably hadn’t had time to finish blending.” I didn’t know whether or not that was bullshit, and as long as Annie wasn’t having an allergic reaction to our surroundings, I didn’t entirely care. Physics may depend on math to work. That doesn’t make it my subject of primary study. “Do the rest of you need to stay inside while Mark and I go and look for the missing students?”

  “Leave me out of this,” said Mark, sounding alarmed.

  “And let the two cuckoos wander off alone? I thought we already established that that wasn’t happening.”

  “Actually, you just established that I wasn’t allowed to go off without supervision, but have it your way,” I said, and stepped outside, into the light of that strange orange sky.

  It was even more jarring up close. Something about the quality of the light itself was wrong, as if it wasn’t refracting the way I expected it to. Two suns were currently visible overhead, each about two-thirds the size of the sun at home, surrounded by prismatic coronas of glittering radiance. They looked more like the sun from the Teletubbies than a real celestial body had any right to look, although they didn’t have the cherubic faces of smiling human infants. And thank Galileo for that. I don’t think I could have coped.

  One of those vast flying millipedes was undulating through the sky almost directly above us, as high up as a private plane heading into a municipal airport. I squinted up at it, reaching out mentally to confirm that it was unaware of our presence. I knew they weren’t predatory, but it still seemed better to make the effort than to count on the creature—whatever it actually was—being disinterested in us.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Antimony. “Why are your eyes white?”

  “Shh.” I kept reaching up, trying to find the place where the creature in the sky began. When I did make contact, it felt just like the one I’d reached before, placid, content, and disinterested in anything but getting to the feeding grounds. I shook the contact away, settling back into the space of my own skin, and looked at Antimony. “I was making sure our big friend up there,” I pointed into the sky, in the vague direction of the flying millipede, “wasn’t going to swoop down and swallow us whole, and also checking to see whether she was a member of this planet’s dominant species.”

  “She?” asked Antimony, sounding amused.

  “She’s an egg layer, and hopes she’ll find someone to fertilize her eggs while she’s at the feeding place, so yes, ‘she’ seems like the appropriate pronoun, and you’re the one who always says people are kinder to things when they don’t think of them as ‘it,’” I said. Her lectures about the family tendency to refer to the mice as “it” unless they were found actively giving birth had started when she was in kindergarten, and showed no real signs of stopping.

  According to her, the reason so many languages gendered things like furniture, and the reason some people still struggled with the singular “they,” all came down to humans seeing an intrinsic gender as part of the human experience. So something that was an “it” was lesser and, as such, could be more easily discarded or ignored.

  “Gender is stupid,” scoffed Annie. “We don’t need to know what someone’s gender is; we need to know what kind of a person they are. And that goes double for tables and flying millipedes and shit. ‘They’ is gender-neutral. ‘It’ is person-neutr
al. If we want people who don’t look like humans to be taken seriously, we have to let them have pronouns, at least until humans get a little bit more enlightened.”

  “Mean girl from the murder family has a point,” said Mark. “Also, now that I have spoken those words aloud, please kill me.”

  Annie rolled her eyes before focusing back on me. “All right, Sarah, you’re the one who found the survivors. Which way are we going?”

  “Are we all going together?”

  Artie was still thinking sour, unfriendly thoughts in my direction, and for the first time in my life I wanted to get away from him if at all possible. I was enormously relieved when Annie shook her head.

  “No, you and I are going to one of the locations, and the boys are going to the other. Divide and conquer, like an episode of Scooby-Doo.”

  “Because splitting the party always works out so well for the Mystery Gang,” snarked James.

  He was probably right. I still didn’t want to argue. I dropped briefly back into scan, eyes tingling, and finally pointed in two opposing directions. “The smaller group is this way,” I said. “The group with the chupacabra is in the other direction.”

  “We’ll take the big one,” said Artie.

  “Why the hell not?” asked Mark. “Our horrible deaths wouldn’t be complete without a chupacabra in the mix.”

  “Thank you,” said Annie, ignoring the sarcasm. “If you run into any trouble, just run and scream. We’ll follow the sound.”

  She started walking. She had shoes and didn’t seem to notice the bits of fallen masonry on the path. I grimaced and followed her as quickly as I dared in bare feet, leaving the boys behind.

  She waited until we had a little distance between us before saying, quietly, “You seemed to want to get out of there.”

  “And you cared about what I wanted? What, have you decided we’re friends again and we should sit and braid each other’s hair?”

  “If I suddenly felt like we were friends, I’d know you were messing with my mind.”

  I shook my head. It was difficult to reconcile the brilliant if annoying cousin I loved with this mulish, irritating woman. “If I were going to mess with your mind, I would have put myself back where I belonged as soon as I woke up, and you’d have no idea it had happened. We’ve known each other since we were kids. I remember your first training bra, and how pissed Very was when it was bigger than hers.”

  “Heh,” said Antimony, with a bit of a genuine chuckle under the word. “She was so mad when the Boob Fairy came for me and skipped over her. I thought she was going to set up a deer blind in the backyard and start taking potshots.”

  “She’s never been the most rational.”

  “No, she hasn’t. I mean, she—” Annie caught herself midsentence. “I don’t want to talk about my sister with you. It’s not appropriate.”

  I knew why she was saying that. I still felt a pang, even as I nodded and said, “That’s your choice. I know you don’t remember, but I was there, and we talked about your sister plenty.” Verity had been furious when it became obvious her baby sister was going to be both taller and more physically developed than she was, and even pointing out that it was probably better for her dancing if her breasts stayed a little smaller hadn’t done anything to allay her anger. Those had been a tense few years within the family, as all the girls had hit puberty one after another—and puberty had hit us all back.

  (Pseudo-mammalian means I got most of the obvious physical variances. From a different dimension and having different responses to Earth-native bacteria and the like meant my complexion had stayed clearer than my cousins’ throughout the whole process. Verity had also taken this personally. Taking things personally had sort of been Verity’s hobby when we were teenagers.)

  We had walked far enough from the boys for them to be almost out of sight when I glanced over my shoulder. “Last chance to go back,” I said. “If you stick with me, we’re on our own.”

  “I’m not scared of being away from backup,” said Annie. “I’m already alone with a cuckoo. I think I’m plenty brave.”

  “I spend a lot of time alone with a cuckoo,” I said. “If that’s a sign of bravery, then I guess I’m the bravest girl I know.”

  Annie sighed and kept walking. Good. For all my bravado, I didn’t actually want to be wandering around in a new dimension alone. There was no telling what mindless dangers might be lurking, and Annie represented a lot of firepower. Some of it literal, some of it not.

  I glanced at her. Humans seem to find comfort in eye contact. It’s never made sense to me, since it’s not like their voices carry any better when I can see their mouths move, but if it made her more comfortable being alone with me, I was willing to do it. “Do you have any bullets left?”

  “I have enough.” She shrugged. “Also plenty of knives, and as much fire as I can pull out of the air. I probably shouldn’t burn more than I have to.”

  “Why not?”

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “I thought you knew everything about us, since we grew up together.” There was a jeering note in her voice, like she was trying to catch me in the lie she so clearly knew existed.

  “Okay, one, you remember my mother because she’s your grandmother, and you know any cuckoo she raised would have manners too developed to allow them to just rummage around your head without permission. So no, I don’t know everything about you. I didn’t even know for sure that you liked boys until you got with Sam.”

  Annie snorted. “No one knew that for sure, me included.”

  “Elsie always assumed you liked girls but hadn’t quite gotten around to figuring out how you were going to tell anyone.”

  “She’s not wrong,” said Annie, with a broad shrug. “I just didn’t think I’d ever like anyone enough to actually, you know, date them or get physical with them or make deals with the crossroads to save them from drowning or any of the other things I’ve done with Sam.”

  I stopped, turning to fully face her. If I’d tried to keep moving, I would probably have tripped over my own feet, and even a cuckoo can be stopped by a broken neck. “Say that last part again.”

  Annie looked at me coolly, radiating the satisfaction of a younger sibling who had just managed to shock an older relation. “We get physical. We have sex. You know what that is, right? You don’t reproduce by laying eggs under the bark of a tree for the males to come along and fertilize later?”

  “Oh, God, I didn’t even think about the part where deleting all your memories meant taking out playing cryptozoologist when we were eleven and you wanted answers about cuckoo biology,” I said in a rush. “Mom and Evie were so pissed when they found us naked in the barn. Yes, I know what sex is. No, I haven’t had sex. Cuckoo boys are horrifying nightmare factories that I don’t want anywhere near me, and dating human boys always seemed a little bit deceptive. And yes, I do prefer boys. Even though their minds are pretty gross.”

  Annie wrinkled her nose. “I can’t even imagine being able to read Sam’s mind. It seems like it would be nice to know what he was thinking, but then I think about it and realize I don’t want to know most of those things.”

  “That’s what it’s always been like for me,” I agreed. “But yeah, Sam was a surprise.”

  “To you and me both,” she said. “I think the only person who wasn’t surprised was Sam, and that’s just because he didn’t know me well enough to realize my entire family had already filed me under ‘too misanthropic to date.’ I always assumed if I wound up with anyone, it would be another derby g—” She cut herself off mid-word, suddenly radiating distrust. “Are you making me talk to you?”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I started walking again. Maybe I could find something to kick. Kicking something would make me feel so much better right now. “Only if you consider the ancient art of ‘making polite conversation with the woman who can set you on fire with her mind’ to
be some form of devious cuckoo manipulation. I’m not telepathically influencing you, if that’s what you mean, and I assume it is. Assume, because I’m not reading your mind. It would be rude as hell for me to do that, and you don’t know me anymore because I messed up, and while right now I can’t imagine why this is the case, I want you to like me again. You’re my cousin and I remember you loving me. I want us to make it home. I want you to love me like you used to. I know that may not be possible, but I’m not going to make choices that make that less likely when I don’t have to.”

  “You sure made the choice to mess with my mind in the first place,” she countered hotly.

  “I was under considerable duress at the time,” I shot back. “What with the whole ‘trying not to destroy the world as we know it’ thing I had going on. I can’t promise I wouldn’t do the same thing again if it was that or let everything I’d ever loved be destroyed. You said you made a crossroads deal for Sam. You know what the crossroads have done to our family. Why would you do that, if not under extreme duress and trying to protect what you loved?”

  Annie didn’t answer. I sniffed. “Thought so,” I said.

  “People have a right to think of their own minds as sacrosanct,” she said. “Our thoughts are meant to be private.”

  “See, this was a side effect of wiping your memories of me that I didn’t anticipate and should have considered,” I said. “You get to give me all your favorite lectures again for the first time. That has to be so intellectually satisfying. You tested them out on me while you were still workshopping them, and now you get to deliver them to me in their refined form like I’m a fresh audience.”

  Annie wrinkled her nose. “You don’t have to be an asshole about it.”

  “Why not? You’re having a great time being an asshole to me.”

  Annie has always been the most judgmental of my cousins. Maybe it’s because she was the baby of the family until Mom pulled me out of a storm drain, but she’s always seen the world in very black-and-white terms. A thing is right or it’s wrong. A thing that’s wrong is either forgivable or it isn’t. And once a thing is unforgivable, that’s it, game over. If I could convince her I meant no harm, Artie and James would be a walk in the park.