Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  I hit the ground next to him, neither of us moving, my own vision beginning to blur as my body shut down. I closed my eyes and reached for his hand, but even when I touched his skin, no thoughts answered my presence.

  I’m sorry, I thought, and silence answered me, louder than all the screaming in the world.

  I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

  Twenty

  “Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what you do afterward that makes the difference between good and evil.”

  —Jane Harrington-Price

  Not entirely sure, but not tied to a chair this time, which is probably a good thing

  I woke up stretched on what felt like a slab of plywood, with scratchy cotton sheets stretched out over me, and at least—I paused, squinting my eyes tighter shut—two IVs sticking out of my arms. Another discomfort made itself known, and I increased my count of indignities by one catheter. Machines beeped and whirred in the background, steady and soothing.

  I opened my eyes. Every patient room ceiling looks essentially the same. They can paint them in different colors, but they’re still industrial buildings, designed to be as generic and inoffensive as possible, so they can rotate patients. That was, under the circumstances, reassuring. Another dimension might have a sky the color of ours, might have people who looked like ours, but how many coincidences would have to line up for them to have hospital ceilings that looked like ours?

  That reminded me. I still hadn’t told Annie what I’d learned from Mark. She’d want to know. We’ve been arguing for decades about what little extra something Fran may have brought to the family that gave them their resistance to cuckoo influence. Finally having a name would let them start their research, as soon as we got home. As soon as we—

  “Artie!” I sat up in the bed, noting as I did that the wound in my abdomen seemed to have healed. At least there was no pain.

  The movement gave me my first really clear look at the room itself. It was small, plain, and single, containing me and the bed, the machines that had been monitoring my condition, and a chair. There was no table or TV stand, probably because that space—most of the available space in the room, really—was taken up by the massive black-and-white bulk of a crouching jumping spider.

  “Greg,” I said, blinking. The spider stood, swiveling until he could see me, then surged forward, pedipalps waving as he reached up to caress my cheek with one foot. He smelled faintly of lemons, and the lice I’d seen before were no longer moving through the hairs on his head. “You’re alive. You’re here. You shouldn’t be here. I can’t get you back to your own dimension, I don’t know how . . .”

  Both times I’d performed the crossing, it had been under the influence of something much bigger and more dangerous than I could safely control. Even for Greg, I couldn’t do that again.

  Greg’s simple thoughts were all relief and contentment. I was awake and I was alive, and that was what mattered. He didn’t care if he was the only member of his species in this dimension. He didn’t care that he’d been hurt. His wounds were healing, he was here, I was here, and while he was hungry, he’d been fed at least once since our arrival. His mind was too simple to tell me much more.

  Well, the fact that I could both perceive and touch his mind told me that whatever I’d done to myself this time, it wasn’t as bad as that first time in New York, when I’d triggered an instar that had taken me years to recover from.

  Not as bad for me, anyway. I didn’t know where everyone else was, or even if we were in New York. I hugged Greg around what served as his neck, aware of the ridiculousness of treating a giant spider as a teddy bear, and tried to fight back the tide of panic I could feel rising in my chest. It wasn’t a good enough effort, and I was starting to see dark spots around the edges of my vision by the time the door opened and a tall man in surgical scrubs stepped into the room.

  He was barefoot, which wasn’t the oddest thing about his appearance. No, that honor was reserved for his broad, white-feathered wings, which were half-mantled behind him. “You will stop that, Ms. Zellaby!” he snapped. “You are not the only patient in this hospital, and while I am willing to make some allowances for your family and situation, I will not allow you to upset people who need to recover!”

  My panic died, replaced by dawning wonder. “Dr. Morrow?” I asked.

  The Caladrius doctor snapped his wings shut. “Indeed. I was hoping not to see you again under these circumstances.”

  I unwound my arms from around Greg and started laughing.

  “Or accompanied by such a unique emotional support animal,” continued the doctor, before catching himself and blinking at me. “Ms. Zellaby? Are you quite all right?”

  “I’m—ha!—I’m fine.” It was hard to talk around the laughter. I felt like I was shaking apart at the seams. “I wasn’t sure we’d ever—ha ha!—make it back to Earth, or that I’d live long enough for them to get me to a hospital, but sure, Greg’s my emotional support animal, works for me.”

  “They weren’t kidding?” he asked. “You named the spider Greg?”

  I stopped laughing as I stared at him. “They who?” I asked.

  “The people who brought you here. You arrived with quite the crowd, Ms. Zellaby. I believe the entire Price family is in my waiting room right now, in varying degrees of panic, not to mention all the other . . . what in the world are you doing?”

  I had started trying to yank the IVs out of my arms as soon as he said my family was here, but shied away from removing my own catheter. Instead, I looked at him levelly.

  “I just crossed dimensions twice and acquired a giant spider for a service animal,” I said. “Now get this fucking thing out of my genitals so I can go and see my family.”

  * * *

  I was weaker than I’d realized when I was lying flat in a hospital bed, but leaning on Greg and letting Dr. Morrow take my arm, we were able to get me down the hall to the waiting room.

  St. Giles’ is one of the few cryptid-only hospitals in North America. Staffed and managed entirely by cryptids, they only see human patients under extremely special circumstances. Verity had been treated here, after she was shot by a Covenant field team. Dr. Morrow didn’t have to hide his wings because everyone in the hospital knew what he was, and took pride in having an actual Caladrius on their staff.

  “HAIL!” shouted the congregation of mice standing on the magazine table. “HAIL THE RISE OF THE CALCULATING PRIESTESS!”

  “Sarah!” gasped Mom, passing the baby she’d been cradling to my father before shoving herself out of the chair she’d been crammed into. Human or cryptid, hospitals are all the same.

  This waiting room was certainly crowded. Mom and Dad were both there, along with Evie and Kevin, Annie and Sam, Verity and Dominic, Alex and Shelby, and even Drew. Only Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane were missing, along with Artie and Elsie. I don’t have a heart. Literally. My anatomy doesn’t work that way. I still felt mine sink.

  “Mom?” I managed to squeak, as my mother swept me into an all-encompassing hug. “Mom, where are the Harringtons?”

  She let me go, stepping back a bit. “Sweetie, things have been hectic since you and the school reappeared. We were all in Iowa already, looking for you, but we weren’t sure—”

  “Mom. Where are they?” She looked away, not meeting my eyes. “Mom, where’s Artie?”

  “He isn’t awake yet,” said Antimony. She didn’t stand, or maybe she couldn’t; Sam had his tail wrapped around her waist like he was trying to keep her from floating away, and he didn’t look inclined to let her go. “When he grabbed you, it was like he’d put his finger into a light socket. Mark isn’t awake yet either.”

  “But with Mark, we have some idea of what’s going on,” said Evie. “Dr. Morrow did an MRI, and his brain is contracting and smoothing the way yours did at the start of your metamorphosis. He thinks Mark might be becoming the first known cuckoo kin
g.”

  “There are so many unknowns when dealing with your species,” said Dr. Morrow. “We have to let the process run its course before we’ll be able to say anything for sure. As to your cousin . . .”

  I turned on him, eyes tingling as they went white. The doctor visibly paled, taking a step backward. “He’s breathing on his own,” he said. “We can find no signs of higher brain function, but his body is behaving normally. He’s alive.”

  “We just don’t know what’s happening, sweetheart,” said Evie. “His parents and sister are with him.”

  “We felt it best to minimize visitors until we know more,” said Dr. Morrow.

  “Take us there,” I said. “Now.” After a beat, I turned to Evie and said, “And bring the mice.”

  We more than filled the hospital hallway: two cuckoos, a Revenant, a bogeyman, seven humans, a fūri, a Caladrius, and a giant jumping spider. Dr. Morrow led the way, stopping outside a door like the one I’d been behind when I woke up.

  “He’s in here,” he said. “Visiting hours are—”

  We all turned to look at him. He swallowed hard.

  “Are irrelevant,” he said. “Stay as long as you like.” Then he fled down the hall.

  I pushed the door gently open. Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted were sitting next to Artie’s bed, while Elsie paced at the back of the room. She jumped at the sound of us stepping into the room, eyes resting on me for only a moment before she recoiled.

  “Elsie . . .” I began. The words dried up in my mouth. Annie put her hand on my shoulder.

  “We told them what happened,” she said. “All of it.”

  So they knew I’d tampered with Artie’s mind at least once before he’d grabbed me and been overloaded by the equation. Was he even in his body anymore? Was there anything left of him to save?

  Hesitantly, I approached the bed. Aunt Jane turned to face me, eyed red and puffy in her familiar unfamiliar face.

  “Sarah,” she said. “You’re awake. Can you . . . I hate to ask, but is he . . . ?” She stopped, leaving the anguished hope of her unfinished question hanging in the air.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  She lifted his unresisting arm and held it out toward me, his hand dangling limply. My stomach churned as I reached out and took it, using the skin contact to ease my reach for his mind.

  It wasn’t there.

  Nothing was there, not even the howling void of the husked-out cuckoos; there was only an empty whiteness, a nothing that stretched from one side of infinity to the other. It was like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be inscribed. I gasped, breaking the contact and recoiling.

  “What did you see?” demanded Aunt Jane. “Where is my boy?”

  I didn’t know how to answer her. He was in the bed, and he wasn’t, because Arthur Harrington-Price as we knew him wasn’t anywhere anymore. He’d been overwritten.

  But unlike the cuckoos, he hadn’t been wiped. They’d been the equivalent of hard drives after exposure to massive electromagnets, warped and distorted, incapable of being rebuilt. He was just blank, a reformatted disk. And we—his family, the only people he had ever trusted to be near him—were all here. In distributed math theory, he was here. In memory, he was here.

  “Are any of Artie’s clergy with us?” I asked.

  Several small voices answered in the affirmative, mice squeaking out their allegiance to the Church of the God of Chosen Isolation. I bit my lip and nodded.

  “I need everyone’s consent to enter your minds, please,” I said softly.

  “I don’t want you in my head after what you did to my brother,” spat Elsie.

  “Honey, please,” said Uncle Ted. “Of course, Sarah. Whatever you need.”

  One by one, the others agreed, even Elsie and the mice, until only Greg and the baby remained silent. This was probably a bad idea when I was still exhausted and recovering from severe injury, but I didn’t see another choice. It was now, while his body was still functional and his mind was still empty of new experiences, or it was never.

  I preferred now.

  Closing my eyes, I grabbed Artie’s hand again, and reached for the minds around me, all of them, from Aunt Evie down to the youngest member of his clergy. Drew only had a few memories, gathered from awkward encounters at family holidays, while Elsie remembered years piled on top of years. The mice had everything, because the mice never forgot.

  Was I building a perfect model? Of course not. Even a telepath doesn’t know exactly why someone did the things they did in the manner and order they did them, not unless the person is present for them to ask, but I had an advantage. Over the decades, I had spent more time in Artie’s head than anyone else’s but my own. I had chat logs and emails and stolen memories and events viewed from a dozen different angles.

  I gathered the memories of his entire family and of the mice who worshipped him as a living god, and I built Arthur Harrington-Price anew, from the bottom up. And yes, I built a version of him who knew me, because that was the version almost everyone around me remembered, but I also built in the memories of the nameless dimension where he’d forgotten me—where he had, in a very real sense, died.

  It took an instant. It took an infinity. When it was done—when there was nothing left to add, or adjust, or move around—I opened my eyes and wobbled, a wave of dizziness sweeping over me. It was suddenly difficult to keep my feet, and my knees buckled, almost sending me crashing before Evie and Drew caught me, my family keeping me from hitting the floor.

  There was so much to deal with, like Greg, and the cuckoo children, and what the lasting ramifications of stealing an entire college campus only to return it littered with inhuman corpses were going to be. The Covenant must have noticed, but would they realize it was us? Or would we be able to dodge this bullet? How long had we been gone? If time ran differently between dimensions, we could have been gone weeks, months . . . even years. Who was Mark going to be when he woke up? Was he going to wake up?

  And none of that mattered, because Artie’s hand was still limp in my own, and I had ruined everything. I dropped his hand, letting Evie and Drew hold me up.

  “I want to go back to my room now,” I said, voice suddenly very small. “I’m tired.”

  We started to turn away. Aunt Jane gasped.

  I whipped around, knocking my siblings’ hands off myself in the process. Artie’s eyes were open, and he was blinking quizzically at the ceiling.

  “My head hurts,” he said, voice weak but clear, cadences distinctly his own. “What happened? Where are we?” He turned, blinking again as he saw me. Then his whole face softened. I didn’t have to read his expression to understand the shift in his musculature as he saw me. “Sarah? Are you all right? You look like hell.”

  I all but flung myself across the room, landing in a heap against his chest. His arms came up, and he held me, and we were both going to make it.

  We were both going home.

  Read on for a brand-new InCryptid novella by Seanan McGuire:

  SINGING THE COMIC-CON BLUES

  “You have to love something outside the fight. If you don’t, it’s going to consume you. Obsession is as dangerous as anything else you might face.”

  —Alice Price-Healy

  A very pleasant, fully furnished basement in Portland, OR, home of the world’s most squirrely half-incubus

  Approximately nine years ago

  The urge to smother my cousin with a pillow was not a new one. Much to my chagrin, it was an impulse I’d been wrestling with on and off since middle school, and it only got worse as we all grew older and settled more firmly into the people we were going to be as adults. It’s one thing to punch someone whose favorite color changes day by day, sending his clergy into an unending tizzy of redesigning their vestments. It’s something else to punch them when they’ve been steady and stable for months. One is conseq
uences. The other is bullying.

  And yeah, as we grew out of the mercurial whims of childhood, we’d grown more and more firmly into the recognizable adult versions of ourselves. The next generation of Prices, out to protect-slash-save the world from the Covenant of St. George and all the dangers it had come to represent.

  Sure would have been nice if we’d all received the extra points during character generation that had been doled out to the cryptid members of the family. Mom liked to remind me that humans were useful too, and that she’d struggled with the same feelings when she had been a teenage girl growing up in a house full of cuckoos, bogeymen, and Revenants.

  “Just because all the fantasy writers want you to think of humans as the boring generic bipeds, that doesn’t mean you need to live like that,” she’d said, every time she caught me moping. “Besides, the other options come with problems of their own, and you know any of your cousins would trade with you in an instant if they could.”

  And I would have taken the trade, then or now. I could certainly have done more with Lilu pheromones than Artie did. I glared at the back of his head, willing him to turn around and realize that he was really getting on my nerves.

  “You can stare at me as much as you want, it’s not going to change my answer,” he said, tone almost light, fingers still moving across his keyboard in quick, confident arcs. He knew what he was doing, even if he wasn’t letting me in on it.

  Sarah, sitting on the other side of the room with her elbows on her knees and an issue of Spider-Man in her hands, probably also knew what he was doing. Stupid telepaths.

  “I heard that,” she said, voice light and relaxed, almost singsong.

  “I wasn’t trying to keep you out,” I countered.

  She looked up from her four-color paradise, wrinkling her nose as she stuck her tongue out at me. I resisted the urge to throw a pillow. If I knocked the comic out of her hands, there was no possible way I’d be able to talk Artie around to my point of view. He’s a real stickler when it comes to keeping his things nice. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even read his own comics, just lets Sarah read them and then shares the memory with her mentally.