Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  I sent more thoughts of reassurance and calm, telling the spider we were safe as long as we were together, and nudged him upward, encouraging him to walk on the surface of the mound. I could stop any mantids I knew were there from attacking us, but if the spider started leaping and one of them struck fast enough to snatch us out of the air, I wouldn’t necessarily have a chance to intervene. After everything I’d just been through, that was not how I wanted to die.

  I tried projecting a field of “keep away—we are not for you to have” as the spider cautiously crawled up the wall of the mound, keeping the spider and myself sheltered from the feeling in a tight bubble of simple calm. Partitioning what I was projecting seemed to be getting easier. Which meant, apparently, that I was developing a specialization in mind-controlling bugs.

  That would be less useful when we got home, but I was still more than fine with it, since “less useful” would still have some applications in my daily life, and it would also be a lot less intrusive than controlling people with fully formed identities and ideas. The spider continued to crawl upward, and whether it was my repelling field or coincidence, nothing attacked us.

  The feeling of the minds I was looking for got louder, accompanied by the distant hum that always kicked in when I got close to people I was already attuned to. I started picking up their feelings. Annie was hopeful; James was relatively neutral, and a little more alert than he’d been when I fell; Artie was sullen and annoyed. Mark, unexpectedly, was jubilant. I guess the idea of being the only mature cuckoo who still had a mind hadn’t been a very appealing one.

  Their thoughts were coming from one of the highest chambers. I leaned forward, urging the spider onward, and it kept walking, freezing only when one of the mantids came idly strolling around the side of the mound.

  Being surrounded by things that seemed to think of gravity as something that happened to other people made me appreciate how much Gwen Stacy’s supporting cast had to hate her fondness for hanging out on walls. I froze, projecting my “go away and leave us alone” field even more fiercely at the mantid.

  It cocked its head, looking at us first out of one eye and then out of the other, not withdrawing, but not attacking either. I could feel the spider’s tension increasing. It would jump soon, and then there would be no way for me to prevent any nearby mantids from getting involved in what would surely be an irresistible hunt.

  Go away now, I thought, as firmly and loudly as I could. The mantis crouched lower for a moment, snapping open its wings, and then it was gone, launching itself into the air and flying away, presumably to obey my command. I hoped I hadn’t just banished someone’s favorite pony from the stable yard, and stroked the top of my spider’s head again, whispering soft words of encouragement that he couldn’t understand, buttressing them with thoughts of how strong and brave and good he was to have carried me this far, to be continuing on when I knew he was afraid. We were in a new place. This was the territory of the stabbing ones, and he was walking boldly, unharmed and unafraid! How mighty he was, how incredibly powerful!

  I kept stroking as the spider resumed walking, holding on as tightly as I could when the slope got steeper, threatening to dislodge me. I’ve never been a big fan of push-ups, but I was suddenly glad that between Mom and Alex, I had resumed my daily workout long before I’d gotten on that plane to Oregon. My arms were starting to shake, the muscles in my biceps aching with the strain of resisting gravity for such a ridiculously long time.

  Someone below us shouted. We’d been seen. The people who lived here had to rely on their mantis-friends to keep hunters like my spider away, letting their instinctive hunting behaviors stand in for most security precautions. It’s what I would have done in their position. But now someone had looked out one of the openings, or else returned from a trip on mantis-back, and noticed a spider in their space. It wasn’t a large spider as the hunters in the dark went, not based on the other spiders I’d seen. It was still large enough to kill a lot of people before anyone could puncture its exoskeleton and stop it.

  I took a deep breath and redoubled my “keep away from us, leave us alone” field, urging the spider to move faster if he could, to get us to that top chamber where I could feel the minds of my friends. The spider was getting tired too, even if sticking to the wall didn’t exhaust him the way it did me, and his answering thoughts carried a distinct flavor of weariness.

  We’re almost there, I informed him.

  Sarah? Is that you?

  The thought was Mark’s, which made sense; he was the most likely to be able to gather and project coherently, since Annie and Artie had forgotten the years they’d spent practicing that exact trick. It’s me, I replied. I’m riding a really big spider. Can you please ask everyone to be chill and not attack us when we come in?

  A really . . . big . . . yeah, okay, I can do that. Mark sounded dubious. I couldn’t exactly blame him for that.

  Then the spider was reaching the opening we’d been crawling toward all this time, and poking the tips of his forelegs into the room. Someone screamed. I thought it was James, but it could also have been one of the locals. The spider froze for a moment, presumably waiting to see if there was about to be an attack before he committed himself to going all the way inside, and then he proceeded, through the opening into a room large enough to have held an entire roller derby practice with room around the edges for spectators.

  There was light, provided by massive glowing grubs clustered on the ceiling, placidly munching on some kind of lichen. There was furniture of a type, rough-hewn from the local wood but still recognizably functional for all that it was basic. And there was my family, along with a large cluster of the locals, all still holding their polearms, which they were aiming firmly at me and my spider. It was difficult not to take that personally, even as I understood the reasons for it.

  The light cast by the grubs was bright enough to let me see the people in more detail. They looked basically human in form—what Mom always calls “Star Trek alien,” a morphology that’s proven common across dimensions and cryptid species, thanks to the Covenant wiping out anyone who looked different enough to be an easy target—except for the pointed ears and the rosette spots on their cheeks, foreheads, and exposed arms, like the markings of a leopard. Their eyes were slightly too large for the human norm, clearly anchored in outsized orbital sockets, and colored in shockingly feline shades of yellow and green.

  A few smaller mantids were with them, young enough to be only about the size of an ordinary human, and I took a moment to be grateful that evolution had decided my molts would be internal, instead of splitting my skin and increasing my size every time I grew.

  You can stop now, I said to the spider. I need to get down.

  He stopped walking and bowed so I could slide off of his back. My legs, which felt like they were made of jelly, protested the motion. I braced myself against the spider’s side for balance, looking toward the group.

  “Hi,” I said. That didn’t feel like enough, and so I added, “You dropped something.”

  Annie laughed, the sound choked-off and dismayed, like she couldn’t believe this was happening. “We did,” she said. “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to.”

  “Gravity happens,” I said, still leaning against the spider. It was easier to understand what he was thinking when I was in contact with him. He was concerned about our situation, sure that the mantids and the strangers were going to attack at any moment, and he was going to fail in his mission to keep me safe. It was difficult not to feel a little guilty about that. I had subverted his natural instincts, and I’d done a thorough enough job that I wasn’t sure what I’d done could be reversed.

  “You, uh, seem to have made a friend,” said James, somewhat anxiously.

  “I did.” Humans have an easier time treating creatures as individuals worthy of care and respect when those creatures have names that they can use to refer to them, rather than j
ust “the lion” or “the wolf.” The spider didn’t think of himself by any specific label; he barely had a concept of “I,” although he did understand that if he were to be devoured, he wouldn’t exist anymore. I gave his head another pat. “This is Greg.”

  “ . . . Greg,” echoed James.

  “Yes.”

  “The giant cannibalistic spider is named Greg,” he said.

  “I mean, ‘cannibalistic’ is accurate, since they eat each other, too, but I don’t think we can exactly pass moral judgment on it for eating what’s available,” I said. “I wouldn’t be happy if Greg had eaten me, but I wouldn’t blame him either.”

  “Hard to be happy when you’re dead,” said Artie sullenly.

  “Aunt Rose manages it pretty well,” I said. “I sometimes wonder if she’s discovered the ghost equivalent of heavy uppers. Anyway, I’m fine. Greg’s fine. Please don’t let your new friends stab my spider.”

  “I want to hug you and throttle you at the same time,” said Annie. “Is that normal?”

  “Usually you’re directing that particular combination at Verity, but it’s not unheard of,” I said, and she laughed, and the world felt a little closer to normal.

  It wouldn’t last, of course. It never did.

  Fourteen

  “Sometimes we have to rise above our natures. Sometimes we have to give in to them. At all times, the most important thing is telling the two apart.”

  —Angela Baker

  Leaning against a giant spider at the most uncomfortable debriefing ever

  Mark had been able to establish slightly more reliable communication with the strangers while I was away, sitting and staring at their surface thoughts until he could start to organize them into something he could start to understand.

  “I still have a headache,” he confessed, massaging his temples with his fingers.

  “Poor baby.” Annie elbowed him lightly. “At least you didn’t suffer for nothing. Tell the girl what we’ve won.”

  Mark took a deep, long-suffering breath as I tried to quash my jealousy before either he or Artie could pick up on it. They were all so comfortable with him. Artie still looked at me like I was a monster half the time, and while she had decided to believe me about who I was, Annie also blamed me for stranding us here in a place we didn’t know, where her sorcery threatened to burn out of control and overwhelm her if she loosened her grip for even a moment. I was a stranger and a threat to them, and Mark was the one who’d helped them to defeat the great cuckoo danger, which I at least partially represented.

  It was enough to make my head hurt as badly as Mark’s did. I let it loll until it hit Greg’s side, the impact cushioned by the soft hairs covering his body. I was starting to feel pretty attached to this spider.

  Although not to the lice still crawling through his wiry hair. They were too small and brainless for me to order away, although they were avoiding me for the most part. I wasn’t a viable food source, but I might be a predator.

  We were gathered in the room where I’d first arrived with Greg, the strangers off to one side, while my family and I—and Greg—all sat across from each other. Greg wasn’t sitting so much as he was folded up like a complicated origami model of a spider, all his legs tucked underneath his body. The younger mantids had gone shortly after we arrived, too nervous in Greg’s presence to remain.

  “The people who live here—this is their home, they built it with the help of their cows, which we haven’t seen yet, but I get the impression are sort of like termites the size of your spider there, or maybe slightly larger, which gets filed under ‘terrifying’ along with everything else in this dimension—are partially native to the area, and partially the descendants of the incubus they mentioned earlier,” said Mark. “They’ve sent a group to find the elders who actually knew him, and might understand more English, which is going to be such a relief. The way people think is affected by the languages they speak, and their language is weird as hell.”

  “Weird how?” I asked, suddenly wishing Kevin were with us. Out of everyone in the family, he’s probably the closest we have to a cryptosociologist. He likes studying sapient but nonhuman cultures, and handing him a whole language to dig into would have been enough to make up for a decade of missed birthday presents.

  Not that I’ve ever missed a birthday. When you can read peoples’ minds, you know exactly how important their birthdays actually are to them, and you never get them the wrong present. I’ve been helping Annie and her siblings buy gifts for their parents and each other since I was twelve. It’s always felt like one of the few truly positive applications of my abilities.

  “They don’t really seem to have a sense of time as anything immediate,” he said. “Everything is happening either now or a long, long time ago. I’m not actually sure how long it’s been since they met an incubus. Long enough for him to have grandkids, at the very least, but maybe not any longer than that.”

  “Huh.” I closed my eyes. “Greg’s getting hungry. Do you think we could have one of those ceiling grubs?”

  Mark’s thoughts turned apprehensive. “I can ask,” he said.

  “Please do.”

  There was a pause before one of the strangers began speaking, sounding annoyed, if not quite angry. Mark sighed.

  “She says the ceiling grubs are vital workers who will grow to be cows, and your hunter in the dark is a dangerous monster that should be destroyed.”

  I opened my eyes and sat up, putting one hand possessively on Greg’s side. “Yeah, well, your giant mantises are scary as fuck and should be destroyed, too. I’d send him out to hunt on his own but I’m afraid they’d eat him before he could get back to me. He’s my friend, he got me here when you left me behind, and no one’s going to destroy him.”

  “I always knew that one day someone would temper the hunters,” said a new voice, older and deeper than any of our own. The accent was odd as well, probably because the speaker’s first language was the clicks and whistles of the locals. I turned.

  A tall man stood in the tunnel entrance that would have led us deeper into the mound. He wasn’t all that old; based on appearance alone, I would have placed him around Kevin and Evie’s age, although that assumed these people aged the same way humans did, which was a big assumption. He was wearing a patchwork robe that appeared to have been stitched together out of the casings of giant beetle wings, and the spots on his face were paler than any of the others had been. His eyes, instead of being bright and feline, were a pale, pleasant orange, almost exactly the color of the daytime sky.

  “When our mind-speakers said they were going into seclusion to avoid another seeking mind, I didn’t expect it to be one of the heartless ones,” he said, tone not wavering as he looked at me. His eyes flicked over each of us in turn, finally settling on Artie. “Two humans, two Johrlac, and an Incubus. That’s a story waiting to be told if ever I’ve seen one. Do you wish to tell it to me?”

  “Who are you?” I asked the question almost before I realized I was going to speak, scrambling to my feet. Greg, picking up on my surprise, unfolded himself and stood, looming next to me as six feet of solid, vaguely menacing spider. I patted him on the back, trying to calm him down, but kept my eyes on the newcomer.

  “My name is Kenneth,” said the man. “My grandfather gave it to me before he left us, saying he had been long enough in this dimension, and had need to continue on his quest. He traveled with others such as you, and with a woman who had no scent—she was the only other I ever saw stand next to a hunter in the dark unscathed and unafraid, for it could not find her—who became a great and glorious beast when she entered her battle rage. They came here by mistake, guided by a predictive ritual the Johrlac had designed which said our dimension would be the next target of their misplaced fugitives.”

  Mark and I both straightened. I spoke first. “Wait—when you say Johrlac, you mean actual Johrlac? Like,
from Johrlar?”

  “From the cradle of your kind, yes,” he said. “They were born to the hive, and the three who traveled with my grandfather did so at great personal cost to themselves, for they knew they would never be able to go back when their quest was done. Their minds would have drifted too far from the harmony of their kind, and they would no longer be welcome, but would be fugitive in their own right, little better than those they came pursuing.”

  Mark and I exchanged a sharp mental glance. What kind of prison dimension was Johrlar, if falling out of synch with the hive mind was an offense worthy of banishment? Maybe finding a way to get back there wasn’t a good idea after all.

  “How did he get wrapped up with them?” asked Annie delicately.

  “My grandfather was a good man, eager to see the universe made better than it was. He had made the acquaintance of his human companions in their home dimension, and they met the waheela woman who traveled with them as she was fleeing from a place known as the High Arctic. They were a close-knit group, virtually a family, and when they met the Johrlac who claimed our dimension was next to be attacked by the heartless ones who had become such a plague on their shared home dimension, they agreed to aid them.”

  Kenneth stopped then, saying something in the local language to the others. His grasp of English made the process of translation easier; I could follow his thoughts, which included his statement in both tongues. Watch them, for we do not know the nature of their heartless ones. I broadcast his meaning to Mark, who nodded solemnly, but didn’t protest. Kenneth had no reason to trust us, and as warnings went, it was a small, simple one, well within the bounds of understandable caution.

  It was still enough to make me tense against Greg, not taking my hand off his back. If we needed to fight our way out of here, we were going to want him with us.