Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  And all that could be dealt with later. For right now, I just needed to keep Kenneth from thinking the presence of other cuckoos in his dimension was something that he and his hive should be trying to deal with.

  He met my eyes, projecting irritation at me. I got the distinct impression that as their patriarch and the eldest living descendant of their nameless Incubus wanderer, he wasn’t accustomed to being contradicted. He didn’t like it.

  Finally, he looked away and said, “We couldn’t hunt them now if we chose. Not without facing the hunters in the dark. If the children do not survive to suns’ rise, it will not be because of us.”

  I shot a quick thread of thanks to Greg, who responded by lifting one foot and stroking my hair. His hunger was growing. It would be difficult to stop him from going after the grubs before much longer.

  “Understood,” I said. “And while I understand that you don’t want Greg to eat your grubs, he needs to eat something. Can you please find us some creature your larders can spare so my spider can eat before he decides James is extraneous to needs?”

  “Leave me out of this,” said James.

  “Sorry, James,” I said. “Just trying to get some McDonalds for my arachnid pal.”

  James turned to Antimony. “My life was never this weird before you came along,” he said accusingly.

  Her answer was a beatific smile, accompanied by a radiant smugness that made her expression fully comprehensible. “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  James sighed and went back to flipping through the book in his hands.

  “I will find you one of the honey-makers,” said Kenneth, somewhat sullenly. “Hunters have been known to risk their own lives to take them, so I must assume they are a delicacy to the monsters.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He turned to go, and Artie followed.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” demanded Antimony.

  Artie looked back at her. “There’s nothing for me to do here,” he said. “I’m not a math nerd, and you and Jimmy have the magical research sewn up. Without a computer, I’m useless. So I’m going to go learn more about this incubus, and the warnings he left about the cuckoo invasion. I’ll be safe.” His tone turned as sullen as Kenneth’s. “I won’t leave the mound or put myself at risk.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Annie. “Your mom would have my ass if I let you get hurt.”

  “Yeah, well, we wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

  Kenneth left the room. Artie was only a few steps behind. I sagged, trying to hide it as I turned my eyes back to the keyboard.

  “You’re not a great liar, you know, which is funny as hell, since cuckoos are normally amazing liars,” said Annie. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I replied, and pointed to a calculation. “Mark, what do you make of this?”

  “I make it utterly incomprehensible. You’re the one who gets the weird science magic parts of all this; I have normal math. Tame math. Math that doesn’t try to eat me when I do it.” Mark sighed. “She’s not wrong. You’re a terrible liar. Something’s bothering you.”

  I turned to stare at him, annoyed and betrayed in equal measure. He knew what was bothering me. He could read enough of the math for that. But I went for the answer Annie didn’t already have. “The most important people in my life—the ones who cared enough to follow me through a rift in space in order to keep my biological mother from turning me into a dimension-buster bomb—have forgotten who I am. Deciding to believe me doesn’t change the fact that they’re treating me like I’m someone they just met, because to them, that’s exactly what I am.”

  Mark’s eyes flashed briefly white as he dipped below the surface of my thoughts, into territory I would have preferred to keep private. I didn’t resist. It wasn’t fair that they couldn’t keep me out; as long as he wasn’t trying to influence me or dig for things I had buried, he deserved as much access to my mind as I had to his.

  He pulled back, eyes going blue again. “You love him,” he said wonderingly. “And he loved you. You spent your whole life in love with him.”

  “I really don’t want to talk about this.”

  “But you have to—you’re grieving, and that’s going to impact the way you work this equation.” Mark jabbed a finger at the blackboard. “This is describing an emotional state. The mathematician is supposed to divorce the hive for a week before they do the math, and settle their thoughts on solitude and serenity, to make it possible for them to commune with the universe. If you’re not serene when you go into this equation, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  “I do,” I looked back to him. “I’m going to have to fight every step of the way not to let it burn me out, because it’s going to want to consume me. But you’re right. I’ve loved him for my entire life. I fell in love with him when we were children, and I never let myself believe anything could come of it, because I’m a fucking cuckoo, and if he loved me, it was because I wasn’t giving him a choice in the matter. Love you have to compel someone to feel isn’t love, it’s submission. I didn’t want him to submit to me, I wanted him to love me. And he did! He did! He loved me for as long as I loved him, and he never said anything because he was afraid that if I loved him, it would be because of his pheromones forcing me to fall.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Annie. “Your biology is too different from ours. Lilu pheromones don’t work on Johrlac.”

  “And Johrlac influence doesn’t work on the descendants of Frances Brown,” I said. “I couldn’t passively make him fall for me any more than he could accidentally make me fall for him. We fell for each other because we were good for each other, and he finally told me he loved me right before I deleted him. The version of Arthur Harrington-Price who loved me is gone, because of something I did. He told me to do it, but I’m still the one who pulled the metaphorical trigger. How would you be feeling right now if Sam forgot who you were, hated you for messing with his head, and was never going to love you again? How would you be coping?”

  “I sold myself to the crossroads to save his life,” said Annie slowly. “I would not be coping very well at all.”

  “There’s no love in this equation.” I waved a hand at the blackboard. “There’s a lot of emotional involvement with the math; that’s part of what’s missing in the broken version, like the cuckoos forgot how they were supposed to feel about every step in the process.”

  I’d wondered how we could be the children of exiles who knew so much about where we’d come from but were missing so many essential pieces—like how to find the way back home. Ingrid had given me a lot of the information I was missing when she’d explained the instars and how Mom had so carefully scooped the packet of embedded history out of me. When you’re born knowing everything your mother knew, just waiting for the day that knowledge will spread and blossom like a flower in the corners of your mind, it’s hard for things to get lost. And I had unwittingly figured out the rest of the answer, by removing so much essential knowledge from my allies in order to protect them.

  “When the Johrlac pushed the criminals who would become the cuckoos out of their dimension, they wrapped their minds up the way I did yours, and they cut out all the things they didn’t want them to remember. They cut the dimensional-transit equations, and they cut most of what’s been written on this board. They were trying to strand them, and if they couldn’t manage that, they were just going to make sure the cuckoos could never fly back home, no matter how much they wanted to. Taking out what they did changed us from Johrlac into what the cuckoos became. But math is in our blood. We’re insects, even if we don’t look like it, even if we look more like college students. They couldn’t take all the math without husking the exiles out the way I did the cuckoos I dragged into my equation. And if you leave a naturally mathematical species with the building blocks for their own salvation, they’ll figure it out.�
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  “We just didn’t do it very well,” said Mark.

  “I don’t think we ever could have,” I said. “I don’t know what our ancestors did wrong, but they weren’t exiled intact. They were modified by people who had already made up their minds about them, who thought they were criminals who couldn’t feel compassion or remorse, and those assumptions impacted what they removed. I thought the equation was going to kill me, and I wanted to reduce the amount of pain I caused in death, so I removed myself from the memories of the people I was trying to protect. Meaning . . .”

  “Meaning if the Johrlac thought the proto-cuckoos could never feel for anyone else, they would have guaranteed that became true during the conditioning to expel them from their home dimension,” said Mark slowly. “And the nature of the history we get when we’re born means we’ve been getting the echoes of that psychic damage this whole time. We have to scoop the memories out of those kids. We can’t let them go through their instars the way I did.”

  “You turned out okay,” said Annie.

  “Barely,” said Mark, and spun to face her. “I spend so much time trying not to focus on how easy it would be to kill you all. Or how much easier it would be for me to find a way home if I just left the fucking campus and all the people I don’t give a damn about behind. I am a reasonable facsimile of a person who knows how to care about other people because Cici needs me to be this man. Everything I am, I am for her, and she’s a human girl who walks in the world humanity made, which means she’s at risk every minute. You can’t appreciate how much effort I’m putting into being calm right now, and not screaming for you to get me home even if it kills every single one of you. I don’t know what happens when she’s old enough to start dating. I don’t know if I kill the first person she brings home, or if I rewire her brain so she only wants to be with me—and I don’t know if I’m going to do that while we’re both asleep, when neither of us has a choice about what I’m doing! I. Don’t. Know. I’m not a better man, I’m a slightly less immediately terrible monster, but I have the potential to be so much worse. We can save these kids from being the kind of monster I am. We can give them back the choice the Johrlac took away when they kicked our ancestors out of their home dimension. This is how we start to heal the remnants of a species.”

  “That’s a good speech,” said James, sounding faintly stunned. “You come up with that off the top of your head?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” admitted Mark. He turned back to me. “We have to spare them.”

  Not save, because he really had turned out okay by the standards we applied to most cuckoos, but spare. And what is our duty to the children of any species if not to spare them unnecessary harm? I nodded.

  “If we run the numbers right, I think we can make that part of the ritual that gets everybody home,” I said.

  “Good.” Mark turned back to the blackboard. Annie and James went back to their books. And we all set ourselves silently to our respective areas of study, working toward an end that wasn’t going to be soft or easy, but was coming, one way or another, and couldn’t be put off much longer.

  Fifteen

  “The difference between sacrifice and slaughter is consent.”

  —Alice Healy

  Standing in front of a blackboard, looking at the place where it ends

  Mark was a phenomenally gifted mathematician, which made sense; all cuckoos are gifted mathematicians compared to the human norm, and most of my study experience has been with humans. He made intuitive leaps that surprised me, skipping from one side of the blackboard to the other with ferocious speed before asking for my interpretation of a symbol or conditional operation.

  And even Mark being a phenomenally gifted mathematician couldn’t change what the numbers were saying, which was that I wasn’t going to survive this second equation. It had been constructed by three Johrlac, all properly trained and experienced in the magic of our species, and their design, while it was cunningly balanced to keep too much of the cognitive load from falling on a single person, had still resulted in one of them burning out and dropping dead before they finished running the numbers.

  Mark could help me, but he was just one man. Two is not as many as three, and the basic math of our situation dictated that this equation would have costs. If he’d been at the same instar as me, he might have been able to take the lead on the actual math, and with it, the bulk of the metaphysical weight. But he wasn’t. That job was reserved for me, and me alone.

  I could look at the numbers and symbols in front of me and see the exact moment I died. It wasn’t a pleasant exercise. I guess it would have been even worse if it had been.

  There was a thud as Annie snapped a book shut. “Betsy documented the entire process as it was supposed to happen,” she said, a note of excitement in her voice. “She couldn’t document the actual ritual, but she wrote down the way it was supposed to go.”

  “She was from Kansas originally,” said James. “Do you think there’s something that ties our elemental affinities from where we were born? I’m from Maine and I got cold. You’re from Oregon, which is in the Ring of Fire, and you got flame. She’s from Kansas and she got wind.”

  “Interesting question,” said Annie. “Add it to the list.”

  “The list?” asked Mark blankly.

  “Our grandfather is a sorcerer who managed to scrape together enough training by the time he met our grandmother that we don’t know what his elemental affinity was,” I said. “He’s missing. His wife has been convinced for decades that ‘missing’ doesn’t mean ‘dead’ since he disappeared, and she’s been trying to find him. For decades. Annie has a list of questions to harangue the poor man with when he gets home.” I glanced over my shoulder at her. “Accurate?”

  “I’m going to introduce myself before I start bombarding him with questions,” she said. “Otherwise, yeah, accurate. If anyone can help us start filling in the gaps in what we understand about magic, it’s going to be Grandpa Thomas.”

  “Huh,” said Mark.

  “Do you have enough to help us set this up?” I asked. “Because the math as originally designed is for a doorway large enough to accommodate a small group of people, not an entire college campus, and I don’t know that you can help us modify the equations.”

  “I’m smart. I took calculus.”

  “Really? Okay.” I read off a line of the equation, choosing one that wouldn’t immediately vaporize or transform anything in the room. The air still grew thick as cornstarch mixed with water, becoming difficult to breathe, and all sound stopped, save for my voice, which changed timbres, sounding suddenly heavy and portentous. Greg waved his forelegs in the air, distressed. I stopped speaking. The air snapped back to normal as I turned and smiled sweetly at Annie.

  “So do you think the exponential of the third modifying function should be double or . . . ?”

  Annie put her hands up. “All right, point taken. We won’t mess with the math. It’s going to take a while, but we should be able to set the boundaries of the ritual to encompass the campus.”

  “Okay.” The original math had been for less than a dozen people and it had still killed one of the mathematicians responsible for enacting it. I might not just be looking at my own death; this could kill Mark, too. “Or we could gather everyone up, take them home through an essentially unmodified version of the original equation, and leave the campus here.”

  “If we have to, we’ll do that,” said Annie. “I’d really rather not if there’s any way around it. This is massive destruction of property. It’s going to be hard enough to keep the Covenant from using this as an excuse to invade North America. Maybe if we put it back where we found it, people will believe this was all a hoax, and stop screaming for blood.”

  “Does the Covenant have the numbers for that?”

  “Not really, but they have the zealotry,” said Annie. “The p
eople I met in Penton Hall would be perfectly happy to die if they did it killing cryptids. And while they may not have the numbers for a full purge of North America, they have more than we do. They could do a lot of damage before we were able to stop them.”

  I wanted to keep arguing with her. I wanted to point out the specific places in the equation where my organs were going to fail, the twists in the mathematical structure where my bones would shatter and I would collapse. I didn’t. We were all being faced with an impossible situation, and she wasn’t wrong—putting the campus back where it had come from could be the act that saved thousands of innocent lives.

  Mark worked next to me, radiating fierce selfishness that tasted like honey on my tongue. He was by-God going to get home to his sister, he was going to get back to her, he was going to find a way to deal with all the problems he’d described earlier, and then he was never going to have anything to do with our family ever again. I envied him that state of blissful selfishness. It was inherent to the cuckoo condition, and Mom had taken it away from me when I was too young to consent. It had been the right thing to do—I would have been someone else if she hadn’t—but sometimes I wished she hadn’t left me with so much room to learn how to care about other people.

  Maybe if I hadn’t been trying so damn hard not to be a monster, I wouldn’t have grown up to be a martyr. Too late to know now.

  We kept working. Artie stayed gone.

  Kenneth didn’t return, but three more of the people who owned this mound—I wanted a name to call them so badly, something other than “the strangers” or “the natives,” something that acknowledged we were in their space, where they had every right to be, but I didn’t have the words—came into the room, carrying their polearms and leading something that looked like an aphid the size of a bear. Greg became visibly excited by its arrival, drumming his feet against the floor and dancing in place, never straying from my side. I put a hand on his side to calm him.