Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  The warriors shouted and brought their polearms around. James raised his hands, and the temperature around us plummeted, becoming arctic. The mantis recoiled, leaving its severed striking spike behind. It was a piece of chitin easily eighteen inches long, narrow as the scythe it so resembled, like a natural machete, and it had pierced through the tissues of my gut and into my abdominal cavity, covered in jagged barbs that would effectively disembowel me if someone tried to pull it out. The warriors shouted something else. James took a step forward. The temperature got even lower, and the warriors began to fall back, leaving us alone.

  And the whole time Greg, my big, brave spider boy, who had to know all the way to the bottom of his primitive mind that he was about to die, continued to stand guard over me, waving his pedipalps threateningly at the retreating mantis. The cold had to be hurting him, and still he stood, ready to sacrifice himself for the chance to save me.

  I lifted one hand and placed it gently on his leg, whispering his name. He turned to look at me, the waving of his pedipalps becoming less frantic and more reassuring. I stroked his leg, trying to project reassurance in return, fighting through the pain. It was dwindling, although it was hard to say whether that was due to shock or cold. “Good boy, Greg,” I said. He didn’t understand English, but having the words to focus on helped me to amplify my own feeling of being protected and how well he’d done at driving back the mantis. “Good, good boy.”

  It was still getting colder. Spiders don’t shiver, but Greg’s thoughts—such as they were—were slowing in response to the temperature. “James, can you please ease up on the cold? You’re hurting Greg.”

  “Sorry,” said James unrepentantly. The air began to warm again. “We need to get that out of you.”

  “It’s going to have to wait until Annie gets back, and one way or another, getting it out is going to do more damage than getting it in did.” I grabbed Greg’s leg and used it to pull myself to my feet, panting from the effort. The pain in my abdomen wasn’t getting worse. Definitely shock, then; good.

  Shock can be a useful function if you realize it’s happening and know how to exploit it. Was it a good idea for me to be up and moving around while I had a giant bug’s leg sticking out of me? No. But where it had hit, it was possible it had missed my internal organs—and that would be a good thing, since the only hospital I know of that has a Caladrius on staff is in New York, and over a thousand miles away from Ames, Iowa.

  No one has a lot of experience performing medical procedures on cuckoos. I’ve probably been to the hospital more often than most of my kind, and I can count the number of times that’s happened on the fingers of one hand, with digits left over. Maybe the mantis had pierced whatever served as my liver. Assuming I even had a liver, which was a pretty big assumption. Livers filter blood, create bile, and store energy. Well, there are other ways for a body to make energy, my blood isn’t like mammalian blood, and I don’t know whether my digestive system depends on bile to function. Normal wasps don’t have livers. Maybe I didn’t either.

  Even if no organs were involved, I had muscle and fatty tissue, and they would both be shredded if we pulled the barb out. The waves of panic and fear coming from Mark were still breaking over me, but they were easier to shrug off now, probably due to my own physical trauma.

  James took a step back, watching me with anxiety radiating off of him, then looked past me to the clustered warriors. “What do we want to do about them?” he asked.

  “Keep them back. Freeze them if you have to.” I put one hand under the spike sticking out of my abdomen, bracing it so gravity wouldn’t answer the question of whether or not we were going to pull it out of me, and staggered toward the whiteboards. “I need to start soon.”

  “You’re hurt. Can’t you just tell me what to write, and I’ll write it?”

  “No. I don’t even have words for some of the symbols from the Johrlac equation. They’re totally new to me. I wouldn’t know how to tell you to write them down.” And I needed to modify the starting point of my own math, to account for the fact that I was injured and couldn’t channel as much of the processing requirement of the ritual myself as I’d originally intended.

  I grabbed a pack of dry-erase markers from the ground, wincing at the effort of bending over and freeing another cascade of thick, clear hemolymphatic fluid from the wound in my gut. There still wasn’t as much pain as there should have been, and since the air was almost back up to normal temperature, I was willing to chalk that up entirely to shock. Yay for shock. Most valuable physiological reaction, gold medal for you, shock. I love shock.

  James trailed along behind me, followed by Greg, who was still waving his pedipalps in dismay. Seeing your—person? Friend? Adopted child? Whatever I was to him—get stabbed clearly wasn’t very reassuring in his tiny spider mind. I sent him another wave of reassurance, then looked back at the warriors, most of whom had returned to their earlier loose formation. A few had gone to tend the wounded mantis, and were thinking poisonous thoughts about us. I didn’t want to waste the effort to really dig into their feelings, and as none of the thoughts I could translate seemed to indicate an intention to attack us or to stab my spider, it seemed safe enough to leave them alone.

  I uncapped the first marker and wrote the series of symbols I had determined would represent me, as an uninjured cuckoo queen guiding the ritual to a successful conclusion. Just looking at it was enough to tell me that it was wrong, even without focusing on the dull ache in my abdomen. I rubbed out a few of the symbols, pausing to consider the math without them, then wrote in their replacements.

  The mental effort needed to stay upright with an injury of this severity, plus or minus twenty percent, would reduce my efficiency in the ritual by eighteen percent. I wrote in the new figures, paused, and then revised again, taking it down a full twenty. Better to have too much power at the end than to start on the assumption that not enough would suffice.

  “How are you feeling?” asked James.

  “Like the geophysicists in The Core,” I said. His thoughts turned confused. “Oh, come on, you’re really going to tell me you’ve never seen The Core? It’s one of the best bad science movies ever made. Their physics is so bad that you can cause actual tears by asking physicists what they thought of it.” I paused. “I think the screenwriter was either drunk or trying to win a bet. Or maybe both. Anyway, they’re trying to use nukes to restart the rotating core of the planet after it accidentally got stopped, and they based all their calculations on a misassumption about the density of the material, so even having way too many nukes for anyone to be comfortable with isn’t going to be enough unless they redo everything on the fly. And that’s how I feel right now. Like I’m trying to save the world with math done on the back of a napkin.”

  “ . . . oh,” said James blankly. My explanation hadn’t helped much.

  “We’ll all watch it together when we get home,” I promised. “Annie and Artie love that movie.” It would be weird to watch it with them without Artie automatically fixing me a bowl of popcorn the way he knew I liked it, butter and tomato powder and garlic, but I could make my own popcorn. We were going to have the chance to get to know each other again, and I’d get to find out whether or not I had a liver, and all I had to do to get us there was a little bit of math. I love math. I can do math in my sleep.

  I could do math while bleeding from a gut wound caused by a giant praying mantis, no problem. Why was that even a question?

  As an answer, a twinge of pain lanced through my abdomen, a hint of direr things to come. I shifted my grip on the severed mantis leg, trying to keep it from moving too much while it was still inside me, and waved James away with the hand that held the marker.

  “Go,” I said. “Shoo. Make sure our hosts don’t kill my collection of injured husks. I need those if we want to get out of here. You can’t take the bug leg out of me without making it worse, and I can do math without your hel
p.”

  James wavered, still uncertain. I swallowed a sigh.

  “I promise not to drop dead until you get back, and Greg will be right here if anything changes, okay?”

  “Okay,” said James, and trotted back toward the warriors. He couldn’t talk to them and they couldn’t talk to him, but we’d been doing decently with hand signals by the time we left the mound, and anything was better than nothing.

  Anything that kept them from killing my living processors, anyway.

  I tried to shut out Mark’s nearing panic and focus on the math in front of me. His situation was going to be a problem for future Sarah. She could deal with it. Right here and right now, present Sarah had some math to do if she wanted to save us all.

  It was like I’d finally fallen into a nerd’s perfect fantasy in the form of a Tumblr post: you have six whiteboards and seventeen pens and twenty minutes to do the kind of math that literally saves the world. But if you do it, you might die, either because you burn your own brain out or from the gut wound involving an unknown number of your internal organs. What do you do?

  The math, of course. You do the math.

  I leaned forward and began to write.

  Eighteen

  “Last thing I wanted to do was go. I loved my husband, my daughter . . . my whole life. Leaving them was the last thing I wanted to do. And it’s the last thing that I did.”

  —Frances Brown

  On the Iowa State University quad, doing math

  Mark’s panic reached fire alarm volume a few seconds before Mark himself came running around the corner of the building, arms pumping, one child hanging off his neck and two more running frantically along beside him. None of them looked like they were more than five, although it was hard to tell exactly how old they were with the way he was running. More children ran scattered around him, old enough to keep up, although one of the girls was carrying a little boy bundled against her hip, his arms locked tight around her torso.

  And behind them came a wave of husks, filthy and tattered, some of them visibly injured—one woman looked like she was missing an arm—and shambling along at a steady pace. It was like having our own personal zombie movie delivered right to our doorstep.

  “I found them!” yelled Mark, and ran faster. His pace up to that point made sense; he’d both been trying to lag enough to let the kids keep up, and to keep from losing the husks, some of whom were clearly walking on broken ankles by this point. Bodies are not meant to be used by people who don’t notice when they get damaged.

  Says the woman still standing when she has a giant insect leg sticking out of her abdomen. I put the cap back on my marker and stepped out from around my whiteboard, dropping the few shields I’d been able to construct up to this point. Time for the first tricky part.

  In order for me to use the husks as processor banks, I had to catch them. I mentally reached for the mob, grabbing hold, plunging myself into the storm that raged where their core selves should have been.

  It was like trying to grab a hurricane. The wind whipping through them whipped through me, blowing my thoughts and feelings in all directions, making it almost impossible to hold onto the part of me that understood rational thought and what it meant to be a person. Hungry, said the storm, and STARVING, howled the storm, and it was never going to go away, it was never going to end, it was going to consume me if I didn’t let it go.

  I didn’t feel myself hit my knees, but I absolutely felt the piece of mantis move inside my guts, jarred by the fall. It was a bolt of pure agony, severe enough to break through the howling winds for a brief instant. An instant was long enough. I grabbed the pain, working it and amplifying it and finally flinging it out across the husks—both the ones Mark had gathered and the ones we already had—in a thin netting of strands and filaments that felt like the webs I’d seen draped over the distant forest.

  The hunger inside them recoiled when the web touched them, and I drew it tighter, focusing on my pain and using it to give them all the suffering they deserved. Gradually, the wind withdrew, until I could focus enough on the reality of my own body and its limitations to push unsteadily back to my feet. Mark was inside my circle of whiteboards, along with the kids—an even dozen of them, ranging in age from what looked like three to thirteen. My eyes tingled as I shifted a tendril of focus to them, scanning for signs that they still had the packets of lurking memory occupying space in their minds.

  I brushed against the edge of one of them, and was presented with an image of people who looked exactly like us, walking through some sort of weird, semi-organic shopping plaza, surrounded by butterflies with wings the size of dinner plates. Johrlar. The memory packets were still intact in these children, and would need to be removed. Which would give me extra processing space.

  “What a good present,” I said, words distant and echoing, like they were coming from terribly far away. “It isn’t even my birthday.” I didn’t know my birthday. No cuckoo did. We’d always celebrated the day I was found—a celebration that was somewhat dimmed by the knowledge that we were celebrating the anniversary of the day after my first set of adoptive parents’ funeral.

  “Well, they seemed like something you could use,” said Mark.

  “I could have used a couple more.” Even counting the nine who’d come to find us earlier, I was still eleven short of my goal. “Is there any chance you left a few behind?”

  Mark shook his head. “This was all of them,” he said. “The spiders must have had a field day with the campus last night.”

  One of the smaller children began to cry, stuffing almost his entire fist into his mouth to stifle the sound. I fought the urge to focus on him. Most of my energy needed to stay on holding the husks where they were. The storm was still raging, only temporarily contained by the weight of my pain.

  At least offloading the majority of it meant they couldn’t fight me or figure out how to break free. Even after my final instar, I didn’t have the psychic strength to hold onto thirty-nine intelligent beings who actually had the strength of mind to push against me. Because the husks were only alive in the most primitive of senses, I could hold them against all pressures. I didn’t have to let them go.

  I wasn’t going to let them go. “Mark, did you tell the children what I needed to do?” I drifted back toward the whiteboard, numbers and symbols beginning to swim in front of my eyes, like a walking dream—or the start of a hallucination. There were worse things to have as my last vision of the world.

  “As much as I could before the zombies showed up,” said Mark. “Uh, Sarah? You’re, um . . . you’re leaking.”

  “There’s a big bug leg sticking out of your stomach,” said one of the kids, much more bluntly. That’s the nice thing about kids. It doesn’t matter what species they are; they don’t know how to sugarcoat anything. That knowledge comes later, and at the expense of a lot of innocence.

  “That’s because I got stabbed by a big bug,” I said, and picked up my pen. “We’ll deal with it later. Mark, can you tell them, please?”

  “All right,” said Mark. He clapped his hands, pulling the attention of the children back onto him. “My friend Sarah is doing her best to get us home, where we’ll have Internet and pizza and television and all those good things again. But to do that, she’s going to need a lot of space, and that space doesn’t technically exist.”

  “How can she need something that isn’t real?” asked one of the kids.

  “She’s going to use the space inside our heads,” said Mark. He lowered his voice, like he was confessing a particularly interesting and compelling secret. “There’s a lot of room inside a head. It’s where your imagination goes when you’re not using it. It’s where you keep your dreams. And Sarah wants to use that space to do a really, really big math problem that will make it possible for all of us to get home safely.”

  “How can she do that?” asked another kid.
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br />   “Someday you’ll be able to do it, too,” said Mark. “We’re people, because otherwise we wouldn’t have to wear shoes.”

  Several of the kids giggled, the sound a little frayed around the edges, like they weren’t sure whether laughter was allowed.

  “But we’re not humans.”

  “That’s why my blood isn’t red, right?” asked a kid. They didn’t sound surprised. “My mom bled red. When the bad men took her to pieces, she bled red everywhere.”

  It was suddenly easier to hold the husks, throwing my anger into the web of pain that I had wrapped around them.

  Mark coughed, his own emotions turning more complicated. He’d been tasked to retrieve the children in part because of Cici. Once we’d stripped out the time bomb of their implanted memories, I wouldn’t be surprised if he took several of the children home with him. He could do with a few more siblings. My family can’t be the only one that acquires more kids every time we turn around.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said finally. “It’s not right that they did that to you, or to her. But yes, what we are is the reason your blood isn’t red, and it may be the reason you can sometimes hear what other people are thinking or feeling.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling us,” said a child, warily. “What is it?”

  “In order for Sarah to use your imagination rooms to do her math and get us all home, she needs to take away a big bunch of information that someone else already put there. It’s not something you’re using, and it’s not something you’ll ever need to use. It won’t change who you are to take it away.”

  “Like deleting a junk app,” said one of the first kids who’d spoken. They sounded almost bored, which was ridiculous. We were under an orange sky, surrounded by zombies and giant bugs. No one could possibly be bored with all this going on around them. “New phones always come from the store pre-installed with all sorts of stuff you don’t need, and then you have to spend an hour stripping it all out before the phone works the way it’s supposed to.”