Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Greg pressed up close to me, fangs raised, ready to defend me from his own kind. We’d both die in the attempt, but I appreciated the thought.

  Mark, verify consent from the children, now, I commanded, picking up my pen and turning toward the whiteboard. Annie, there’s a gun in my backpack. Give it to James. We need someone to go get Artie, and I need the people who are willing to have their memories stripped to move to my left.

  Telepathy means not meaning to take the time to breathe in the middle of the sentence. “I can’t go,” said Annie. “You’re going to need me chucking fireballs.”

  “The spiders don’t recognize me as edible,” said a man with hair the color of corn silk, complete with green undertones. That must be Michael, the cornwife. A dip slightly below the surface of his mind confirmed it. “I can go, if you tell me where this Artie person is.”

  “Do you know how to get to the cafeteria?” asked Annie.

  He nodded. “Everyone knows how to—”

  “He’s there, getting the rest of the survivors. Go, and try not to get eaten by anything that does recognize you as edible.” Antimony’s voice had taken on that distinctive “I’m the Price, you have to listen to me” snap that members of the family get when they’re under stress, and then claim doesn’t exist.

  It works. Not just on cryptids: I’ve seen her convince humans to do what she says just by taking that tone. Michael nodded, then turned and ran across the quad, away from us—and thankfully for him, away from the spiders.

  Terrence, meanwhile, was still leading his arachnid army in our direction. If they reached us, they’d eat us. If they reached my collection of immobilized husks, they’d eat those first, and I couldn’t afford to lose the processing power. I also couldn’t seize the spiders the way I had Greg. Converting him into an ally had taken all my focus, and that had been one spider, when I was uninjured, not a whole swarm of them when I was freezing and dizzy from blood loss.

  This better be all the coincidences, I sent to Mark, a tight needle of thought that caused him to look up from the children for half a beat, glancing over to me. To Annie and James, I said, Protect the husks. I need them or this isn’t going to work without someone’s brains coming out of their ears.

  The two sorcerers moved to put themselves between the brainless, immobilized cuckoos and the oncoming spiders. Annie waved the hand that wasn’t holding a baby in the air, producing a ball of fire larger than any I’d seen her create before. She bounced it in her palm like it was a hot potato. James made a similarly sized ball of ice, but didn’t juggle it, just held it with grim determination, ready to hurl.

  I focused on the whiteboard. The numbers were all there, ready for me to make use of them, and as soon as Mark’s mental voice said, All the children have agreed, I began writing again.

  The first step involved chaining all the pain-drenched minds of the cuckoo husks to my own, dumping chunks of equation into the howling void as soon as they were finished and intact. I didn’t have time to check my work. I had to trust I was getting everything right on my first try, and I couldn’t allow that to slow me down or make me second-guess myself. If I didn’t do this correctly, we’d know about it soon enough.

  By the time I had filled the second whiteboard, the void inside the husks wasn’t howling anymore, wasn’t hungry. It wasn’t satiated, either, but filled with pieces of equation that connected seamlessly in the emptiness, filling it with secrets that should have been ours all along, if not for the short-sighted punishment inflicted on our ancestors by the people who were supposed to have taken care of them. I had no idea what the crimes of the original cuckoos could possibly have been, but the people of Johrlar should have understood enough about themselves to know they were laying down a punishment that would be inherited, generation unto generation, forever.

  Or until we found a way to stop it. More gingerly, I extended a thread of myself toward the children, careful to keep it free of either pain or weariness, and began working it into their inner selves. They were layered with recent trauma and the temptation to remove those memories was strong enough to be almost overwhelming. There was a time when I would have welcomed someone taking away the memory of the accident that killed my original parents.

  But I didn’t have permission, and until they gave it to me, making that choice for them would be wrong. It’s called “formative trauma” for a reason: no child should have to see or experience the things that some of these kids had seen, but those things happened. They had the right to retain their own lives as long as they wanted to, and if they wanted the memories gone later, that could happen.

  The packages of hand-me-down memory waiting for the instar that would trigger them were easy to distinguish from the minds of the children, even with my attention split between the process, the ongoing effort of the equation, and keeping hold of the husks. If the children’s minds were bright and forming things, these memories were parasitic sacs, perched atop the surface of everything those children were and were becoming, ready to rupture and leak their poison on the pieces of personality growing around them. In some of the older children, the sacs had already started to fissure, sending out runnels of alien cruelty and superiority to infect the nearby tissue.

  Any description of the inside of someone’s mind will be wrong, by definition. A thought is not a thing, any more than the code that makes up a video game is the game itself. But the thought is also absolutely and entirely the thing, and much as a non-programmer can’t necessarily look at code and see the game, while the programmer can, a telepath will build up images around the ideas, in order to understand them a little bit better.

  It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around sometimes, and I’m the telepath. I split the thought fragment of myself into each of the children, approaching the blistering sac of the poisonous memories over and over again, cautious, all too aware of the threat it represented. I didn’t know whether I could be hurt by those memories if I contracted them as an adult, with all the experiences and ideas of adulthood to keep them from taking me over, but the last thing I wanted to do right now was find out by killing everyone I cared about.

  One by one, I wrapped the memory sacs in filaments of thought and yanked them loose, leaving gaping holes where they had been, like extracting rotting teeth from the gum tissue of the children’s minds. Those holes would heal, given time, filling with all the normal detritus of a lifetime, but for right now, I needed it for my own purposes. My body was still doing math, out in the hazy, faintly unreal-feeling world outside their minds, and as I kept unspooling the equation onto the whiteboards, I began dumping it into the holes I’d opened in the children, going one by one until the space was gone and forcing any more into them would have done damage. Reluctantly, I withdrew.

  Out in the real world, Annie was hurling fireballs at giant spiders and James was triggering small but impressive ice storms that pelted them with sleet and hail, while the warriors stabbed at anyone who came close, all save the one who was throwing fireballs of her own. I blinked, my vision clearing long enough for me to see Terrence taken down by a jumping spider with patterning very similar to Greg’s—it was easier for me to tell the spiders apart on sight than the humans, because they did me the courtesy of having such clear, bold, geometric markings—and then I was diving into the minds of the human and cryptid survivors from the library.

  Do you want the memories of what’s happened in this dimension? I asked them each in turn.

  Almost all of them said no. The ones who didn’t had other traumas in their past, scars that would make the missing time an unbearable burden for them to carry. To those, I apologized for even asking the question, and set them gently outside my forming hive mind as I began detaching and detangling the events of the last several days from the minds of the others.

  None of them fought me. I wasn’t sure they could have if they’d tried; the equation was riding me hard by that point, a combination
of mathematics and dimensional sorcery that needed more and more power to keep unspooling itself.

  A spider leapt for me. Greg met it in midair, both of them tumbling away with a terrible keening sound. I wanted to be afraid for him. I wanted to grieve for what was surely going to be his demise. The emotional processing power simply wasn’t there. I felt numb, detached from both my own body and the scene around me. All that mattered was riding this equation to its inevitable end, making it manifest in the world and giving it the freedom to run.

  And I couldn’t, not with the space I had available. Even after rooting out every scrap of this dimension from the human students and every trace of the Johrlac cultural memory from the children, dumping as much as I could into the husks and the holes I had created, there was still too much for me to safely hold. If I didn’t stop working, I was going to start deleting pieces of myself.

  It might seem unfair to target the memories of the people around me while keeping my own intact—and there were certainly things I would have been happy to forget—but I didn’t have any good, safe targets like they had. I was already missing the ancestral memories. If I deleted the last several days from my own mind, I would forget what I was doing and why it mattered, and abandoning this equation in the middle wouldn’t break it, would just release it to run wild through the world, spraying its stored energy everywhere. I could destroy this reality if I wasn’t careful.

  I needed more space. I needed more power. I cast frantically around, trying to find anywhere that I could grab and use. There wasn’t anything. The warriors were in the middle of a pitched battle against the spiders, and not only did I not have consent to use their minds, but they would die if they lost their focus. The same went for Annie and James. They might be willing to consent, but I couldn’t afford to distract them.

  Sarah. The voice was Mark’s. I looked around. He was bathed in lens flare, like a character from the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot, and the details of his body were blurred, but he was there. He still existed.

  Use me, he said. Take the memories I inherited from my mother out of me.

  You’ve had time to absorb the memories, I said. It would be like pulling the eggs out of a cake after it was baked. I’d destroy the cake. I’d destroy you.

  I can see enough of the math to know that if you don’t, it’s going to destroy us all. Someone has to make it home. Someone has to take care of Cici. His mental tone turned harsh. Or are you too much of a coward to risk breaking someone who doesn’t think you’re a worthless waste of space? Are you really going to put your morals above our survival? Did the humans break you that badly? Coward. Stupid useless coward.

  I think I screamed. I was far enough removed from my own body not to know for sure by that point. I dove into Mark’s mind, rooting out the black threads from the ruptured memory sac and ripping them free, heedless of the damage I did in the process.

  And it wasn’t enough. Any space the sac had created when it drained out was long since gone, replaced by memories of his family, his sister, his life. I saw Cici the way he saw her, and she was the most beautiful person who had ever lived, and she deserved more than anything to see her brother again. I rooted out every single scrap of memory, tearing them out of the places where they had dug into his psyche, and who he was going to be when this was over was something I didn’t know and had no way of guessing. Mark collapsed, body spasming from the stress.

  And it wasn’t enough. I still had one whiteboard left to fill, one whole section of the equation left to complete, and I had no more willing storage space, and no room left in the husks. I felt wildly around, testing the minds of the spiders, and found them too small for my purposes.

  Annie yelled something. I couldn’t understand the words, any more than I could understand the subtleties of a smile. James yelled something in return, and the omnipresent hum of Artie’s mind brightened, signaling that he was getting closer to me. I reached for him, finding the rest of the students behind him, along with the girls I’d met before.

  They had formed a small hive mind of their own, driven by Morag, who seemed to be using the control to keep Lupe from falling apart completely as they ran. I dove into her thoughts, demanding to know whether I could strip the memory packet out of them.

  Sarah? Morag’s voice was more quizzical than confused. You sound upset.

  Everything is upsetting right now, I replied. Can I do it?

  Yes, but—

  There wasn’t time to listen to the qualifications. I dove into all three of them, grabbing the ancestral memories and shunting them into the void as fast as I could.

  Ava’s sac had already started to rupture, worse than any of the others. She’d probably been within a day of starting to murder anyone who looked at her oddly for the crime of not being a cuckoo. The memories hadn’t had the time to sink below the level of her conscious mind, but catching and containing them all still took a dismaying amount of effort. I finished mopping up the last terrible traces and slammed as much of the equation as I could into the three of them, moving fast now, too close to the end to stop myself.

  Too close to the end to do anything but keep writing, finishing a problem that had killed one of the people who created it, writing a future that I wasn’t going to live to see. Because the next thing it would consume was everything that made me who I was, starting from the beginning, from Mama McNally kissing my forehead and telling me the great lie of Santa to Mama Baker telling me not to be silly, of course we didn’t have a chimney to Evie cocking her rifle and saying that Santa Claus wasn’t a lie, he was a bastard, and if he showed his face in her house again, he’d be sorry. It would wring me out and throw me away, the same way the equation written by the cuckoos had intended to do, and I would let it, because it would get the rest of them home.

  Please, get them home, I thought, and stopped fighting to contain the equation.

  It leapt free of its confinement, ravenous and frantic. It wasn’t hostile the way the equation of the cuckoos had been, but I was coming to understand the Johrlac system of magic a little better: it was alive, every single time, an organism made of thought and pure mathematics that began with the first stroke of the pen and died when its operation was complete. And in the middle, it needed room to run and minds to eat, using the power of thought to sustain itself. I wasn’t enough. It needed a whole hive mind to sustain it, not one queen and a bunch of broken husks who couldn’t consciously contribute to its well-being. It needed more.

  It needed everything I had. The world went white, the lens flare swallowing everything else that was or ever could have been under a veil of burning bioluminescence. I couldn’t see the board anymore, but I knew I was still writing, the equation completing itself with the tools I had at hand. It was nibbling around the edges of me, little things disappearing faster than I could remember to mourn them, leaving only itself behind.

  The core would go next, the deep memories that mattered to the person I was, and while something might be left when this was over, it wasn’t going to be her. I took the microsecond before that happened to mourn her.

  And someone grabbed my arm.

  The equation, which was smart enough, if not to stop feeding, to at least to know that eating the mathematician first wasn’t a good idea, surged through that connection, overwhelming the person on the other end. The hand dropped away as its owner collapsed, but it was too late. Skin contact makes cuckoos stronger, makes it easier for us to do the things we do, which is why I’ve never much liked touching people when I didn’t have to.

  I wanted to look, to see who I’d just broken, but I couldn’t. With the space afforded by an entire unshielded mind, the equation had backed off enough to let me finish my work untroubled. I blinked to clear the last dazzling brightness from my vision and went back to writing as fast as I could, trying to get the numbers and symbols down, out of my head, completed and manifest in the world.

  There was
a loud whirring sound behind me as the mantids took off, launching themselves into the air, presumably with the warriors on their backs and safely off the campus. As for the spiders, well, Iowa was about to have an exciting new problem, maybe, because I didn’t have any way to tell them they needed to leave.

  Annie and James were nearby, panting and winded, but uninjured as far as I could tell without actually reaching for them. That wasn’t safe yet. Not with as much of the equation as I still needed to write down. So I kept writing.

  Artie should have reached us by now, but the hum of his thoughts was gone, removed even from the background of the world. That was odd. Even when he didn’t know who I was, Artie was always there.

  I think that’s when I knew. But knowledge is a burden all its own, and one I didn’t currently have the leverage to carry, so I shunted that knowledge to the side, along with everything else I couldn’t handle yet, and kept writing.

  Annie shouted something. I didn’t understand her. In that moment, English was not a language I knew. I kept writing. I was nearing the end of the equation. In a moment, it would be finished, and I could stop.

  I wrote the last series of symbols, telling it where we wanted to go and what we wanted to take with us. The pen dropped from my fingers, drained of ink, no longer necessary. The world shuddered, sighing, almost peaceful. I turned, and there was Antimony, on her knees next to Artie, who was staring blankly upward, at a sky that was no longer orange, but the color of badly-washed slate, gray streaked with white. It wasn’t a sky I recognized. Maybe it was the sky of Iowa, where I had never been as a conscious being, and maybe it wasn’t, and either way, there was nothing I could do about it now.