“Got it,” I said weakly. I managed to keep smiling until she was out of sight. Then the expression crumbled like the façade it was. I slumped against Greg, putting my hands over my face. I’d known they were going to figure out I hadn’t been honest about the risks as soon as the ritual got properly underway. I’d known I was going to be taking those risks onto my own shoulders as much as possible, sheltering them from the damage I was preparing to do. I’d known I couldn’t use them as storage and extra processing power this time; there was no telling what I might delete. I had to rely on the resources I had, which meant me and Mark, and of the two of us, I was the more expendable.
Was it even reasonable to bring an intact cuckoo queen back to Earth? I’d become something I didn’t fully understand, and like Annie with her fiery fingers and James with his frost, I needed training, but that training wasn’t available for me the way it was for them. I’d just break everything if I went home.
I might not be Annie’s family anymore, but she was mine, and always would be. And I had just done something I’d never done before. I’d lied to her face, as if that were somehow forgivable because of everything else that was going on. As if that could ever be okay.
Greg made a worried grunting sound. I twisted around and buried my face in the fur of his side, hanging on as tightly as I dared without hurting him.
I was a liar, and I was going to die for my sins, and there was nothing I could do about it. So I just sprawled against my giant spider and cried.
Sixteen
“Death isn’t a new beginning or a miracle transformation. Death is death. It’s an ending. What happens after you die isn’t life. That’s the whole point.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Crying into a giant spider, which is a really rather unique experience, all things considered
It took a while for me to stop crying, and when I did, it wasn’t so much because I’d finished crying as it was because I had run out of tears. My mouth felt like a desert as I pushed myself away from Greg, wiping my eyes with one hand. My backpack was only a few feet away. I grabbed the strap and pulled it toward myself, unzipping the main flap and producing one of the remaining bottles of Gatorade. Blue. Not my favorite flavor, but that was all right; it still tasted like sugared heaven, and the first sip hit the back of my throat as a benediction. I chugged about half the bottle without stopping for breath, then pulled out the bottle of ketchup.
There was no one in the room to tell me how disgusting I was being, and I was grateful for that as I squirted a healthy amount of ketchup into the blue liquid and replaced the bottlecap. Shaking the bottle vigorously mixed the beverage and condiment into a thick, murky soup that tasted even better than the Gatorade on its own. I forced myself to sip this more slowly as I got to my feet, giving Greg one last pat on the head, and turned my attention to the blackboard. That was enough self-pity and despair. Time to get back to work.
The math was as stark as it had been the night before, leaving no real room for negotiation. I’d need so much open storage space to run this equation without killing myself that it would probably destroy the minds of every single person in this mound. I sipped my Gatorade soup, squinting at the variables. There were options to direct things in other ways, but not many. Part of it would depend on how much power James and Annie could pour into the factorials I was going to use to magically define the edges of the campus; the original equation had been running on brute power and had just grabbed everything. We were trying to have slightly more finesse.
We wanted to take everything we’d brought with us back, and not strip the topsoil from the entire valley where we’d landed. We also didn’t want to transport home with a whole bucketload of giant spiders. They had lungs and we could all breathe the same air; they might be perfectly fine in our dimension. They would still be giant spiders. If they didn’t immediately collapse under their own weight, they would cause a massive panic, and be the ultimate invasive species.
As a member of an invasive species myself, I didn’t really need the competition.
The only way Mark was coming out of this with his mind intact was if we were quick, flawless, and incredibly lucky. And none of those conditions were going to be enough to save me, not unless we suddenly found a whole system of untapped processors that I could use to handle the pieces I couldn’t contain.
Greg stepped up behind me, putting a foot on my shoulder. I must have been radiating distress. I turned to offer him a wan smile he wouldn’t understand, stroking the spot just above his fangs, where the fur was softest.
“I’m okay, buddy,” I said. “Just a little worried about the trip home, that’s all. You don’t need to be concerned. We’re not going to make you come with us.”
If Kenneth’s people didn’t want Greg, I’d try my best to undo what I’d done to his mind before returning him to the other spiders. It might not work. It was still worth the effort.
“I’m glad to hear that you’re not the kind of girl who keeps pets,” said Artie. I whipped around to face the doorway. I was so accustomed to the gentle telepathic hum of his presence that I hadn’t noticed it getting louder as he approached.
He was standing there, a bowl of something in one hand, a quizzical expression on his face, radiating vague distaste for the scene in front of him. I dipped deeper into his thoughts, just long enough to reassure myself that his distaste was aimed at Greg and not me, then asked, “Did you need something?”
“Annie asked me to bring up your breakfast,” he said, holding up the bowl. His eyes flicked to the Gatorade bottle in my hand. “I probably don’t want to ask what you’re already drinking, do I?”
“Ketchup and blue Gatorade,” I said.
He made an exaggerated gagging noise.
“Hey, it’s no worse than grape jelly and tuna fish on raisin bread, which I believe is still your favorite sandwich.” I said, stepping toward him to take the bowl. “Do you know what’s in this?”
“Kenneth said it was a recipe their Johrlac visitors enjoyed, and Mark’s had three bowls already, so there’s probably not anything in there that’s going to kill you,” said Artie. “I think it’s some sort of bug meat and local veggies.”
It smelled vaguely like shrimp gumbo, which made sense, given the similarity between insect meat and crustaceans. I took the bowl, careful not to brush against his fingers, and asked, “Is there a spoon, or do we just sip it?”
“We just sip it.” He grimaced. “They had cutlery when I got to the kitchen, but somehow it all disappeared before we could be served. I think Kenneth doesn’t trust us with anything that could be a weapon.”
“Have they tried strip-searching Annie? And she still has that fauchard she took from the dead guy! I think this is very uneven enforcement of disarming us.”
Artie shrugged. “Hey, I dunno, I’m just the breakfast guy.” He pulled a roll out of his pocket and offered it to me. “It goes better with bread.”
“Thank you.” I let him drop the roll into my stew before I moved to sit down in the pile of shed skins. Greg followed, pedipalps working as he scented my breakfast. I had no real idea what spider senses were like, but he didn’t seem too agitated, so I assumed I wasn’t about to eat one of his cousins. “What did you and Kenneth talk about?”
“Incubus stuff.” He kicked the floor. “His grandfather warned him things might be hard for him because the people native to this dimension were going to be affected by his pheromones. He was a lot more realistic about it than Dad was with me. Unless that’s something else that got changed when you rearranged my memories . . . ?”
“I don’t think it would have been,” I said. “I didn’t rearrange your memories, I just . . . pulled myself out of them and then yanked the edges together so you wouldn’t have a bunch of bleeding wounds in your psyche. It was less proper surgery and more emergency field medicine, if that makes sense? Your dad was preparing you to live in
a world where the dominant species wouldn’t always recognize you as part of itself. Kenneth’s grandfather was preparing him for a world where he would be the dominant biped, if not the local apex predator. I think that honor goes to Greg here.” I gave my spider a pat. He waved his pedipalps at me.
“That makes sense. I don’t like not knowing my own mind. It’s weird and it’s scary and it’s a little bit annoying.”
“I don’t like the most important people in my world not knowing who I am, or remembering the things we did together.” I fished the roll out of the stew before taking a bite.
Immediately, I understood why Mark was so enthusiastic about the stuff. At least one of the vegetables responsible for the brownish gravy that covered the whole thing shared enough of the chemical makeup of tomatoes to taste like paradise. The rest of the flavors were harder to define.
If that sounds weird, you try explaining what a turnip tastes like to someone who’s never tasted one. If you can manage anything better than “like a potato, but maybe sort of sweet,” you’re a culinary genius. Now imagine the person you’re talking to has never had a potato either. You have no common points of reference. I could tell I was eating something close to root vegetables, and some kind of herbs, and some kind of fungus, maybe, along with the large chunks of what could almost have been shrimp, and a piece of what was almost but not entirely like bread.
Artie watched me, waiting until I’d swallowed before he said, “Kenneth says you could put yourself back in our heads if you really wanted to.”
I hesitated, bread halfway back to my mouth. “Maybe I could if I weren’t my mother’s daughter,” I said. “But she raised me not to play with people’s heads that way. I did what I did because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I thought I was dying, and I thought you’d be better off without me, and that was enough to do a lot of damage. If I went in and changed things intentionally, I’d be hurting you to help myself. I’d be modifying who you are. I know I already did that when I messed with your memories, but . . . I didn’t mean to. Maybe that doesn’t absolve me, but it lets me live with myself.”
“Really? Because Annie seems to think you’re getting ready to kill yourself.”
Guess I wasn’t as good of a liar as I’d believed I was. “Why does she think that?”
“I don’t know, maybe because the first time you did dimension-crossing math, you wiped our minds in the process, and now you’re too scared of doing it again to let us help you. And maybe because when the people who wrote all this weirdo cuckoo math used it themselves, one of them didn’t make it. And maybe because you’re still in love with me.”
I was suddenly glad I wasn’t eating my stew. My mouth went dry. I swallowed hard. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been shielding your mind pretty hard since we got here, because when you don’t your thoughts leak everywhere, and I get it, I really do, but while I was forgetting everything about you, did you forget that I’m an incubus?” Artie looked at me gravely. “Every time you drop your shields, it’s like someone’s dousing me in maple syrup and pizza sauce. I don’t think those things are supposed to go together. Maybe I can’t read minds, but I can read emotions, and I know you’re in love with me. You have been for a long time, based on how complex the feeling is. This isn’t a crush. Those taste more like gingerbread. Although I’ve never felt tomato sauce love before. I wasn’t quite sure how to read it until I saw you drinking ketchup and felt how happy it made you.”
I blinked slowly. Betrayed by my taste buds. “You, uh. You never figured it out before.”
“Yeah, well, you coming to my birthday party and reading my mind by mistake was probably part of what made me decide I couldn’t be trusted out in the world, you know?” Artie shrugged. “I don’t think I’d feel comfortable reading the emotions of someone who was that scared of their own abilities, and even if I did pick them up, I don’t think I’d be able to believe them. They’d feel too forced, like I had caused it somehow.”
“Biologically, I’m a . . .”
“ . . . big, super weird bug, I know. But again, caring about you as a person would get in the way of really knowing that, not just knowing it. If you’re my cousin, you’re a member of the family, and sure we’re all kinds of different species, but we’re all people. And my pheromones make people fall in love with me. If you’re a cuckoo, you’re not a person, you’re a predator. I’m allowed to use my pheromones on predators. So it’s easier to accept that I can’t influence you when I don’t know anything about you.”
This was all starting to give me a headache. It made sense, but that didn’t make it easier to hear. “I don’t know what you think I’m feeling, but I promise you, one boy not being in love with me anymore isn’t a good enough reason to kill myself. I have too many comic books left to read for that.”
Artie radiated a brief spike of smugness. “So you admit you’re in love with me. And, apparently, I was in love with you before you went and deleted all my save games for this particular visual romance novel.”
I stared at him. “I didn’t—I mean, I wasn’t trying to—I mean, I wouldn’t—you know I’m not going to pressure you to change your mind back into something I think it’s supposed to be.”
“Relax. I know that. If you’d wanted to rewrite us, I guess you would have done it as soon as you woke up and realized we didn’t recognize you. You were in my head and you didn’t do anything to change the way I felt about you. So I trust you not to mess with our heads. I know you didn’t do anything.”
I watched him warily for a moment. He continued radiating nothing but calm, and I slowly went back to eating my stew. It felt a little weird to be eating right after he’d dropped that on me, but I needed the calories; my stomach was screaming for more, and not just because of the flavor. None of the scavenged snacks in my backpack were going to be remotely as good for keeping me functional as the contents of this bowl.
This time, Artie waited until my mouth was full before he said, “I know there has to be a way for you to do the math that gets us home without dying in the process. You’re a Price. Whether that’s your name or not, the mice know you and they love you enough to make up for the rest of us still thinking of you as a virtual stranger. And when we get home, everyone else who loves you will be waiting, and we can begin the archeological digs through our own lives to remember a time when we loved you, too. You were smart enough to get us all here alive and with minimal collateral damage.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about him referring to me accidentally deleting parts of his mind as “minimal collateral damage,” but I didn’t say anything. If I spoke, he might stop. I didn’t want him to stop. For the first time since we’d woken up in this stupid dimension, he was talking to me like I was a person rather than a problem, like I might actually be a part of his family, not an inconvenient stranger who existed solely to make his life harder than it had to be. Maybe it was an illusion, and he was just getting better at hiding how much he hated me, but—if so—it was a nice illusion. I liked it. I wanted it to keep going for a while.
“So please, get us home without collateral damage we can’t recover from. Don’t make us tell our parents—and yours—why we don’t remember you enough to mourn you.” He scrubbed at his face with one hand. “I don’t remember loving you. But if I’m still basically the same person, it could happen again, and I don’t meet many girls who don’t look at me like I’m some sort of chocolate fudge-Jason Momoa hybrid that I can’t possibly live up to. So don’t leave before I can figure out whether or not we’re going to be friends.” He paused. “That’s all I wanted to say. Enjoy your breakfast. Kenneth says we’ll be able to head back to campus in about half an hour—I mean, that’s not what he said, but that’s how Antimony interpreted it, and she’s probably right. So we’re almost done here.”
Then he walked out of the room, leaving me alone with Greg and my breakfast. He was definitely righ
t about one thing: one way or another, this was almost done.
I turned my attention back to my stew, which had cooled while we were talking, but was still delicious. It was too bad there was no way I could replicate this at home. Mom would have loved it. I was using the bread to mop up the last of the sauce when someone knocked on the doorframe. I lowered my shields and raised my eyes, feeling vaguely embarrassed that I’d been caught unawares twice in one day.
James looked calmly back at me. “I thought you could use some company,” he said, and stepped into the room, approaching the place where Greg and I were sitting, if Greg could really be said to have the anatomy necessary to sit. Where we were resting, I guess. “Plus I wanted a better look at the giant spider now that I’ve had some sleep. Wow. He’s a handsome guy.”
“Isn’t he?” In the light, Greg was mostly black and white, patterned sort of like a magpie, with a broad stripe across his shoulders. The black shaded toward an almost metallic blue as it moved down his abdomen, creating a shimmering, iridescent effect. “I’ve seen pretty spiders before, but he’s the prettiest.”
“May I pet him?”
James kept his distance, waiting for my reply. I held up a hand for him to give us a moment, and reached out to send soothing thoughts to Greg, trying to focus on how comfortable I was with James, how much I liked him, how safe he was to be around. Greg responded by relaxing even further, waving his pedipalps languidly in the air.
“I think it’s safe, sure,” I said, beckoning for James to come closer. “Just not the head, maybe? He’s really fast when he wants to be, and if he decides he doesn’t like being petted, he might take your hand off before I can tell him not to.”
“Got it,” said James, paling slightly as he approached. When he was close enough, he reached out and touched Greg’s back, cautiously at first, and then with growing confidence as the massive spider neither attacked him nor pulled away. “He’s so soft.”
Calculated Risks Page 30
