Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  The other stranger who had been responsible for keeping an eye on him spun her polearm and shouted something I only half-translated. The woman holding my shoulder caught the full meaning and transmitted it unwittingly to me: “Stop moving, or I will stop you.”

  “Artie, you have to stop!” I shouted. “She’s going to hurt you!”

  He responded by grabbing her polearm mid-spin and wrenching it out of her hands, flipping it around so that the pointy end was pointed at her chest. “I don’t know what you have in there, but I’m betting I’d pierce something essential if I stabbed you,” he snarled.

  “You know, if I’d been taking bets on which one of us was going to snap first, I would have said one of the cuckoos, not Artie,” said James, in a surprisingly mild tone. He sounded like was making observations about a nature documentary, not watching his adoptive cousin set himself up to get annihilated.

  The rest of the strangers—the swarm, if I wanted to go by the words forming in the mind of the woman holding me, who had yet to think about anything as useful as her own name—were shifting their attention away from the others and toward the commotion Artie was making. Annie moved her hands subtly toward her sides, where I knew the bulk of the knives would be concealed.

  “According to Sarah, worrying about her was one of his main sources of self-control,” she said, in the same mild tone as James. “He spent a lot of emotional energy keeping her safe, and he’s an incubus. They have a lot of emotional energy.”

  The nearest stranger stopped, turning to look at Annie. “Incubus?” he echoed, the word strangely accented but still recognizable. “Incubus?” he asked with more urgency, this time pointing to Artie.

  “Uh.” Annie stopped reaching for her sides and let her hands fall back into a neutral position, blinking at the man for a moment. Then she nodded. “Incubus,” she confirmed.

  “Incubus!” shouted the man joyfully, rushing to put himself between Artie and the others. “Incubus!” They all began shouting excitedly.

  The thoughts of the woman holding me became a swirling mass of hopeful excitement, as infectious as it was inexplicable. “Incubus . . .” she breathed, and let me go, breaking the forced telepathic channel.

  I stumbled away from her, taking several deep breaths as I tried to remember the limits of my own psyche. No, that memory of flying above an endless forest on the back of a giant praying mantis wasn’t mine, because physics didn’t work that way in the dimension I came from. The practice SATs, now, those were mine, and so were all the other standardized tests I could remember taking. I began to settle back into the shape of my own skin.

  Artie still had the polearm, but he wasn’t threatening anyone with it anymore. Instead, he was watching with uncomfortable bafflement as the strangers embraced and laughed, saying “Incubus” over and over again. The woman who’d been talking to me rushed past, joining the impromptu party. This was getting weird, but it was also getting less hostile, so I should probably be happy about that.

  Naturally, that was when the swarm of hollowed-out cuckoos attacked.

  * * *

  They seemed to come from everywhere, flowing around both sides of the cafeteria. It was a pack of at least fifty, which I was afraid was not the majority of the cuckoos left on campus—I had no idea how many we’d actually started with.

  (To take a brief digression into the math, Mom always said that for cuckoos, the ideal ratio was about one to every million humans. If that number were strictly maintained, it would put the cuckoo population of Earth at roughly eight thousand, which is more than I had any desire to deal with. Eight thousand is small when you’re talking about a population. It’s immense when you’re talking about an opposing force, especially when your side of the fight consists of five people, one of whom refuses to trust another. We didn’t have the numbers to win in even the best-case scenario. And after seeing the number of minds chained into the ritual, I didn’t feel like that number had ever really been accurate. It didn’t count the kids, for one thing, and it wasn’t like any cuckoo who wanted to reproduce was going to wait until they received a death certificate for an older member of the extended hive. “Ideal” does not mean “actual,” and never has.)

  All of them moved with the same blank-faced shamble, the low roar of their hunger becoming audible long after they shuffled into sight.

  One of the strangers barked a command, pointing a polearm at the pack of cuckoos. They ignored the order, whatever it had been, and kept advancing. I rushed after the woman who’d been talking to me before, dispensing with formalities and shoving the words forward, into her mind.

  These are not your friends. They are not our friends. They are broken inside, and they will destroy you. Tell your people to fight.

  She jerked away from me, radiating confusion, as the cuckoos reached the stranger on the edge of their formation.

  His screams as they dragged him down were horrific. They wrenched the polearm from his hands, although not before he had been able to successfully stab two of them. Neither seemed to notice their injuries, which were freely bleeding but non-fatal, as they continued their assault. The rest of his team was starting to react, but not quickly enough; this was a scouting party, armed because they were examining something new, not because they had expected to encounter any actual resistance. They didn’t know what to do.

  Then the cuckoos ripped him apart. In a matter of seconds, before his thick, red-brown blood began to spurt and cover the field, I learned more about the anatomy of these strangers than I would ever have wanted to know. They had lungs like humans, and what looked like two hearts, one stacked right above the other, both beating frantically as they fought to keep the shrieking stranger alive.

  One of the cuckoos ripped the top heart out of his chest and began to eat it like an apple. His screams stopped.

  The cuckoos kept coming.

  Artie produced a gun from the waistband of his pants, reminding me that my family is always, blessedly, prepared for a fight, and shot the first three cuckoos to approach him before the chamber clicked empty. When he realized he was out of ammo he threw the gun, bouncing it off another cuckoo’s forehead, and grabbed a fallen polearm from the ground. He’d be fine, assuming he didn’t slip in the gore that was increasingly muddying the field.

  Annie, meanwhile, had woven what looked like a burning net out of strands of pure energy. It was definitely on fire: the flames licked at the air, spitting and sparking, as she moved it, spinning it first over her head and then flinging it at a patch of cuckoos. It entangled their heads and shoulders before bursting into taller, brighter flames, consuming them much more quickly than her earlier fireballs had done. Annie whooped.

  “I always wanted to do that!” she yelled.

  James, meanwhile, was doing . . . nothing. He was standing perfectly still, head cocked to the side, watching the cuckoos advance. He didn’t move, but his fingertips were turning blue, and as I watched, the color crept slowly up the length of his hands and began to cover his forearms before disappearing into his sleeves. It was like watching the end of Frozen in horrifying real-life slow motion, except that his flesh wasn’t actually turning translucent, just a deep, frostbitten blue.

  Then the cuckoos approaching him began to fall down.

  It was a slow process, although it only took a few seconds; the stress of the attack was making everything slow down, the world stretching like an elastic band. The cuckoos closest to James fell one by one, their expressions never changing, their bodies slowing before the collapse, then bending at the knees and hitting the ground without flinching or reacting in any way.

  They landed facedown, and they didn’t move. He continued to stare, and the frost on his hands continued to creep upward, until it was tracing the edge of his neck, and the cuckoos continued to fall.

  Mark was not quite cowering at the back of the group, but he was definitely shying away, raising his hands
to protect his face, avoiding any contact with the attackers.

  The strangers snapped out of their shock as their companion stopped screaming. The woman I’d been talking to before began barking orders and they all raised their polearms, surging forward and beginning their attack. It was a thing of beauty, as fluid as one of Verity’s dance routines, but involving a lot more flying ichor. They mowed down cuckoos in a steady wave, killing them as effortlessly as swatting a bug. It was beautiful, and it was terrifying.

  Someone grabbed my arm. The feeling of ceaseless, all-consuming hunger swept over me, chasing all rational thought away. I did the only thing that made sense. I screamed like a little girl and whipped around, driving my fist into the face of the cuckoo behind me.

  It dropped my arm and staggered backward before advancing again, seemingly unbothered by the fact that its nose was broken and clear blood was flowing from it in a thick gout, rapidly covering the lower half of its face. It raised its arms to reach for me.

  I punched it again. Again, it fell back a step before shambling resolutely toward me. I fumbled to get a grip on its mind, only to be buffeted by the howling hunger that had replaced all rational thought. It was like trying to grapple with a windstorm. I backed off a step, increasing the distance between us while putting myself closer than I liked to the main fight, and began attempting something I’d never done before: constructing a shield inside someone else’s mind.

  Normally, throwing up a shield is almost instinctive, something I learned to do more for the protection of everyone around me than myself. If I was shielding, I wouldn’t pick up thoughts I wasn’t supposed to have, or accidentally influence people. Normally, I can set a sturdy shield in a second, buttressing myself against the rest of the world with little more than an idea. This was different. This was construction, laborious and exhausting. I felt the tingle as the bioluminescent cells in my eyes activated and the vitreous humor lit up like a lightbulb, followed by the sensation of my hair lifting away from my shoulders. If I was going to get telekinetic every time I exerted myself from now on, I was going to need to start putting my hair in a bun.

  The cuckoo kept advancing. I kept constructing my shield, angling it against the howling void of the cuckoo’s hunger. It felt like an unstoppable wind when felt from the inside. I needed it to stop.

  The last imaginary brick of my shield slotted into place, creating an effective windbreak inside the cuckoo’s mind. The storm shattered, unable to continue blowing with an obstacle in its way and unable to blow around it. The cuckoo wobbled and stopped advancing, but even feeling around with every scrap of mental strength I had left, I couldn’t find anything resembling coherent thought. There was nothing left but the storm. My first impression—that the equation had devoured them after being set free inside them, and they were no longer “people” in any meaningful sense—had been an accurate one. Whether I wanted it to be or not.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t have any weapons; the consequences of being taken in my nightgown and surrounded by people who were still trying to decide whether or not they were willing to trust me. I looked around, eyes landing on a brick that had fallen from the building’s façade during the seismic shift between Earth and whatever this reality was called. I reached my hand out toward it, and was fundamentally unsurprised when it lifted off the ground and sailed across the three or so feet between me and it, slapping into my palm.

  Maybe the telekinesis was like the enhanced sorcery and would go away when we went home. Or maybe this was one more thing I would have to learn to control as a consequence of this whole terrible adventure. Either way, I had a brick now.

  I turned back to the silent cuckoo, hefting the brick. “I’m so, so sorry,” I said, and brought it down on their forehead as hard as I could. Bone cracked. The wind that had been howling on the other side of my shield died, and I pulled myself out of the cuckoo’s mind before the synapses could short out and do me a whole new kind of harm. My hair settled back onto my shoulders as they collapsed, hitting the ground like a normal corpse, not like the rigid dolls still toppling over in front of James.

  Two more cuckoos immediately appeared in the space behind where the first had been. One of them dropped to their knees, beginning to scrabble at the corpse with hooked, claw-like hands. The hunger had its own ideas about appropriate disposal for the dead. The other advanced on me, storm raging in its eyes.

  I did the only thing that made sense at this stage in the fight. I spun on my heel and fled for the dubious safety of my cousins, weaving between the fallen to tuck myself in behind Annie. She was radiating heat like a furnace, starting to pant as she spun another web of fire to throw at the oncoming cuckoos. She glanced over her shoulder at me, the barest flicker of frustration rising through her chaotic emotional state.

  “Running away from a fight? And you really want me to believe you’re a Price?”

  “I’m not, I was adopted by Angela Baker, not Evelyn Price. Your mother’s my sister.” Explaining that despite my adoption, I had taken the last name “Zellaby” when I turned eighteen, rather than claim a familial relationship that wasn’t biologically there, would have been confusing and taken too long for the situation. “I don’t have any weapons.”

  “So brain-blast them.” She flung her net, entangling another five cuckoos. They fell, burning. None of them screamed.

  “I can’t brain-blast people who’ve already had their minds wiped,” I objected. “And I don’t want to get into the habit of brain-blasting people in the first place! It’s antisocial and probably not a good idea for me to get too comfortable with it.”

  “Oh. Then I guess when this is over, we should get you a knife or something.”

  “Yeah, that might be good!” I managed not to yell at her, mostly because her amusement was strong enough to tell me that she wasn’t worried.

  Seven strangers with polearms, two sorcerers, and one pissed-off Price seemed to be a match for fifty opponents with no sense of strategy or tactics, and no weapons but their hands. After that first stranger had been taken and torn apart, none of the others had been careless enough to let themselves be grabbed, and Mark was staying well clear of the cuckoo swarm. None of them could get near James, who was starting to shake as the lines of frost traveled up his cheeks. I sent a line of thought in his direction, checking for signs of distress, and rather than his mind, I hit what felt like a wall of ice. I grabbed for Annie’s arm as she was starting to motion for another web of fire. She turned to look at me, irritation boiling off of her.

  “What?” she demanded.

  I pointed to James.

  She followed the line of my finger and swore, pulling away from me. “Dammit, Jimmy. Jimmy! Jimmy, it’s your fucking sister.” She set two more cuckoos on fire in the process of getting to his side. Unlike the ones she’d netted, they didn’t fall right away, but kept shambling forward, burning as they went. Shit. I glanced around, looking for weapons, and spotted a few of her knives, abandoned on the ground.

  A thought summoned them into the air, and another sent them speeding into the throats of the two burning cuckoos, piercing them through and sending them toppling.

  “I don’t think I like this new trick of yours!” called Mark.

  “That’s okay, I’m not so sure about it either!” I called back, and spun the knives in the air before sending them off after another target.

  Keeping things not only off the ground but actively in motion was exhausting, and I could already tell I wasn’t going to be able to do it for very long. Ingrid and Mark had both insisted that the instar which carried me to Queen was the last one, but if they’d never been able to keep a Queen alive past the ritual, did they really know for sure? We already knew the final instar wasn’t debilitating like the ones before it, since they normally pushed Queens straight from transformation into world-destroying. That didn’t mean any future instars would be this kind. I didn’t want to find ou
t that they’d been wrong by accidentally triggering a bonus metamorphosis and falling into another week-long coma, or worse, another multi-year period of severe mental instability.

  Being a bug isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I guess the same could be said of being a true mammal; I could bathe in butter and not need to worry about heart disease since I don’t have a heart to compromise, but the grass, as they say, is always greener on the other side of the fence.

  Annie had reached James. She grabbed him by the shoulders, casually setting three more cuckoos on fire at the same time—I sent my new knives spinning through their throats, slashing them open and leaving them to bleed out on the grass—and began to shake him, saying something low and urgent that I was too far away to hear. James didn’t respond. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It also wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. None of this made any sense.

  None of this apart from Artie. He had continued to pummel the cuckoos coming at him with fists and feet, knocking them down and then kicking them until they stopped trying to get up. He wasn’t beating them to death: once they were incapacitated, our new friends-slash-captors were stabbing them repeatedly with their fancy polearms, and thus reducing the number of cuckoos left for the rest of us to handle.

  The mob had been reduced to less than a quarter of its original size, with maybe ten still standing, but those ten were still coming, as fresh as they’d ever been, while we were running on empty. They didn’t seem to notice or care that all their friends were dead, and honestly, I was pretty sure they couldn’t: the hunger was too big to allow for self-preservation, much less worrying about other people, which had never been a cuckoo strong suit in the first place.

  Even as that thought finished forming, two of them demonstrated that they did notice, by dropping to their knees next to a group of charred corpses and beginning to wrench chunks of meat off of the bodies, shoving it into their mouths. The smell of charred cuckoo wasn’t quite what the smell of charred human would have been, more like the smell of fire-roasted shrimp. My stomach rumbled, and I realized I didn’t know when I had last eaten, even if the realization was coming from something completely disgusting.