Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  Apparently, my former traveling companion wasn’t the only one who’d felt entitled to be a little too pushy about his own desires. I couldn’t get details without digging deeper, but I felt fairly confident that the woman behind the flight attendant had been chosen at least partially to annoy the rest of first class as much as possible.

  Well, that was fine. I smiled broadly, and said, “That sounds great. One of my cousins is expecting a baby soon, so I should probably be spending more time around infants anyway. Getting in practice, right?”

  The flight attendant’s smile was mostly relief, and only a sliver of disappointment, as she waved the woman to her seat and tucked the diaper bag into the overhead compartment. In only a few seconds, we were alone—or as alone as you can ever get on a plane—the woman radiating wonder, the baby still comfortably asleep.

  I smiled at her, dazzlingly bright, an expression I learned from sliding myself into my cousin Verity’s head during her dance competitions. Verity learned to smile like she was being graded on it, because she was, and thanks to her, I share the skill. Not bad for someone who can’t always recognize a smile when she sees one.

  “I’m Sarah,” I said. “First time in first class?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “I . . . yes. I’m Christina. This is Susie.” She gave the baby a little bounce, not enough to wake it up.

  She was thinking “my little girl” so loudly that I could actually hear the words, so I turned my smile on the baby and said, “She’s beautiful. Let me know if you need me to hold her so you can use the bathroom.”

  Her astonishment was, briefly, louder than the plane’s engines. I gave her another smile and returned my attention to the window. We were on our way to Portland, and I didn’t have a jerk sitting next to me anymore.

  Things were looking up.

  * * *

  The plane touched down with a thump hard enough to set us all rocking for a moment, stirring the infant next to me back into fussy wakefulness. I smiled encouragingly at her mother, offering a little wiggle of my fingers as distraction. The mother radiated relief. Apparently, flying with an infant was a horror—I could have guessed that—and people were frequently resistant to the idea of flying next to one—I had observed that. Being moved up from coach to first class and seated next to someone who didn’t mind babies had been like winning the lottery on multiple axes at once.

  I like babies. They’re simple. Their thoughts are simple, their needs and desires are simple, and if I need something soothing, I can watch their synapses making lasting connections, a process most adults have long since finished. Plus, babies have such basic inner lives that I don’t really feel like I’m eavesdropping when I listen in on them. This baby had such a limited set of experiences that she didn’t yet know her name, or have preferred pronouns, or really understand that her toes were always there, even when she was wearing shoes. She was like a tiny, occasionally smelly meditation trigger.

  “It was nice to meet you,” said Christina. “Is someone picking you up from the airport?”

  She wasn’t angling for a ride, I realized; she was preparing to offer me one. Oh, that wasn’t good. If we got into a private car, after the amount of time we’d spent together, I’d be a member of her family before we could get on the freeway. She was too nice to spend the rest of her life feeling wistfully like she’d somehow misplaced her favorite sister.

  “I’m good,” I said. “This was sort of a spontaneous trip, and I have family here. I’ll be fine. But thank you for asking.”

  Both statements were true, even if neither of them answered her question. I was planning to head down to the taxi stand and invite myself along on a ride that was heading toward the family compound. It would be safer, since whoever actually paid for the cab wouldn’t have been sitting next to me for the last several hours.

  “No problem at all,” said Christina. Susie fussed. Christina turned her attention to the baby.

  That was my cue. Fishing my phone out of my jeans pocket, I turned it back on, and winced as it began buzzing frantically in my hand. Almost thirty text messages had come through while it was shut down for the flight, which seemed a tiny bit excessive.

  The first ten were from Mom, wanting to let me know that she was thinking about me, she was worrying about me, she was pretty sure I was on the plane by now, but if I wasn’t, I could come home and she wouldn’t be angry, it was okay if I needed more time. The next five were also from Mom, and were a little closer to flipping out—in one of them, she suggested I make it a round trip, get off the plane in Portland, and get immediately back onto a flight heading for Cleveland. Ugh. No thank you. I’d had my fill of being crammed into a flying metal tube of human minds and human fears, and I wanted to rest.

  After that came a series of texts from Dad, detailing the steps he was taking to try and calm Mom down, and reminding me how important it was that I text her as soon as we landed if I didn’t want her to come to Oregon and shake me vigorously back and forth. I smiled at that, and switched back to Mom’s messages, intending to do as he’d suggested. It was better not to put this off.

  Then my phone buzzed again, and I nearly dropped it. Artie. I had a text from Artie.

  Trying to be nonchalant, I finished my text to Mom—“Safe on the ground. Made it to Portland. No headache. Think I’m okay.”—before taking a deep breath and opening my latest message.

  Just had weirdest feeling, it read. Like you were almost in the room. Miss you.

  For the second time in under a minute, I nearly dropped my phone.

  Wow, I replied. Weird. Where r u?

  Text grammar makes my teeth ache a little. When I was in school, part of my job was learning to blend into the human population. Don’t stand out, don’t make waves, don’t attract attention. Do what everybody else does, because the wisdom of the herd is the best possible camouflage. That’s spilled over into my adult life, meaning, among other things, that I have to text like I don’t care if anyone’s judging my spelling.

  I care. I care a lot. But we do what we have to do to survive in this world.

  Home, Artie replied. Face-chat tonight? We can watch a movie.

  Can’t. Will explain soon. I added several emoji—two snakes, a smiling girl, a rainbow, a bee—and shoved the phone back into my pocket before I could see any reply. I wasn’t there yet. I needed to make it all the way to a safe house if I wanted to pass the test Mom had set for me.

  The plane finished taxiing to the gate, and the flight attendants turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. I bounced out of my seat, sliding past Christina and the once-again sleeping Susie, and grabbed my backpack out of the overhead compartment, slipping my arms through the straps before the cabin door was even open. It unsealed with a hiss and I was out, not running, but walking very quickly away from the rest of the passengers.

  I knew too much about them. I didn’t know what they looked like, and it didn’t matter, because I knew what they thought like. I knew who was cruel and who was kind and who probably needed to be hit with a baseball bat for the things they believed were okay to do to their fellow humans. I was just glad the entire plane had been human. Being stuck with too many kinds of minds would have been even worse.

  I strode my way along the jet bridge to the terminal, sucking in great breaths of fresh airport air, which might be processed, but hadn’t been circulated through the cabin for the last several hours. I wanted a bathroom and a salad and a ride home. I wanted—

  I stepped into the terminal and stopped dead in my tracks, suddenly feeling like I’d been punched in the gut. People streamed out behind me, shooting sour thoughts about people who stopped in walkways in my direction. I didn’t move. I was struggling to breathe. The thoughts stopped, replaced by weary irritation at the need to step around some inanimate but unavoidable obstacle. I was cloaking myself. I wasn’t trying to, but I was, and I couldn’t stop, because I couldn’t
breathe. I couldn’t move.

  The static roar was drowning out everything else, filling my mind from end to end, so that even the thoughts of the people behind me were muffled, becoming little more than background noise. They were inconsequential in the face of something so much bigger.

  There was another cuckoo in the airport.

  Three

  “Anyone who tells you that you only die once hasn’t actually died. They wouldn’t be so cavalier about it if they had.”

  —Mary Dunlavy

  Portland International Airport, trying really hard not to panic

  CUCKOOS ARE TERRITORIAL.

  I think it has something to do with the static we create when we get too close to each other. It can get so loud that it becomes almost paralyzing, and when the shock of having someone shouting inside your brain passes, it’s usually replaced by rage. The sound grates on every nerve we have, making killing whatever’s causing it seem like the best idea anyone has ever had. Ever. Which is bad enough, except that most cuckoos won’t do their own dirty work. They use the resources they have available to them.

  Which means they use humans. They dig into the minds of the humans around them, and they make murder seem like a totally awesome plan. Like it’s something that was always on the docket for today, but just got moved up a little bit. You know, between the dry cleaning and getting dinner into the oven. Every person around me had suddenly become a potential weapon, and unless I was willing to do the same—unless I was willing to force my own will on another sapient being for my own benefit, and force them to risk their skins to save mine—I was completely unprotected.

  This was what Mom had been afraid of. That I’d go back out into the world, run into a threat, and freeze up, unable to decide on a course of action that would actually protect me. I tightened my hands on my backpack straps and started walking again, angling as quickly as I could for the nearest bathroom. Bathrooms tend to be safe places. It’s hard to seize control of someone when all they want to do is pee. I could catch my breath, try to figure out where the static was coming from, and make a new plan for getting out of the airport.

  One thing was sure: I couldn’t go to the house. I’d know if another cuckoo was digging deeply enough into my mind to uncover an address, but I couldn’t protect that information once I gave it to my driver. If the cuckoo wanted to follow me, all they’d need to do is follow the person who dropped me off. Then they could crack the driver’s mind open like an egg, pull out whatever they needed, and attack at their leisure. I couldn’t risk my family’s security like that.

  This wasn’t what I’d wanted when I’d said I was ready to go back into the world. This wasn’t what I’d wanted at all.

  At least I knew that Mom would eventually call Evie and tell her I was in Portland, and why hadn’t she called yet with an update on my condition, did she want to worry her poor old mother. They’d come looking for me, and they’d start at my last known location. The airport.

  Of course, I could be dead by then. Cuckoos don’t have many natural predators. We have to prey on each other. That’s how we keep our numbers in check.

  The bathroom was empty. I made for the farthest stall and shut myself inside, climbing onto the toilet and crouching in on myself until I took up as little space as possible. Then I closed my eyes and began the slow, painful process of shutting off my awareness of the world around me.

  For a non-telepath, the idea of going dark probably seems trivial. Why would bringing myself down to the level of the majority of the people around me be a problem? Humans get by just fine without psychic powers, and the media loves showing telepaths as monsters or martyrs, unable to block out the world around them, eventually consumed by the thoughts they just can’t. Stop. Hearing.

  And I guess there’s some truth to that. Moving through a crowd is like walking through a living YouTube comments section. Even when people have the manners and good sense to keep their mouths shut, their minds are wide open, and in a non-telepathic society, no one bothers to learn how to control their thoughts. Why should they? I’ve heard things that make me really understand why most of my species thinks it’s more fun on the Dark Side. Sometimes I’ve felt half-convinced to go that way myself. I don’t, because it would hurt my family, and it would let my mother down, but wow, do I get the urge.

  But at the same time . . . I don’t see faces the way humans do. I can’t tell people apart except by the very broadest of physical traits, hair color and skin color and height and weight. Even gender can be confusing, and I’ve learned never to use a pronoun for someone until I’ve heard them use it for themselves, out loud. I can usually tell what gender someone is by the way they think about themselves, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I know what gender someone has to pretend to be for social reasons. The world is complicated, and humans are judgmental, and I know more secrets than I should, just by virtue of being what I am.

  Shut all that down, take all that away, and what do I have? I have eyes that don’t know how to process some of what they see. I have ears and a nose that work exactly as well as their human equivalents, which isn’t well enough to keep me safe from danger. I have two legs to run with and two lungs to scream with and those weren’t going to be enough if the cuckoo whose presence I could feel pushing down all around me decided to press the issue. I was unarmed. I was alone.

  If I died in the process of trying to prove that I was well enough to rejoin the world, I was going to spend whatever afterlife waits for cuckoos laughing until I cried, because otherwise I was going to scream eternity down on my own head.

  The static faded, like a radio being tuned, until everything was as close to silent as an airport could ever be. A sink dripped; the air-conditioning whirred; outside the bathroom, a distorted announcement was made over the intercom.

  And footsteps, calm and precise, walked into the bathroom.

  “I know you’re in here.” The voice sounded exactly like my mother’s, even down to the faint New England accent. “You’re hiding very well, but I still know you’re in here. I watched you disappear.”

  I held my breath and didn’t move, grateful for my lack of a heart. If I’d been human, she would probably have been able to hear it racing.

  “It’s cute how you think you can get away from me.”

  The footsteps came closer. I shrugged out of my backpack as quietly as I could, preparing to swing. If there’s one weakness shared by virtually all cuckoos, it’s overconfidence. I could only hear one set of footsteps. She was alone, and she probably didn’t have a gun, or a knife, or any of the other things that would have guaranteed her victory in direct combat. She’d picked up on my fear—not hard—and decided that it meant I was easy prey. Amateur.

  “You should really have done your homework before you decided to fly into Portland, little chick. I understand the impulse to flee the nest, but this is my place, and I don’t share.”

  Of course she didn’t. Cuckoos are incredibly destructive, as a rule, and when you combine that with our natural dislike for each other, you come up with an equation that says one cuckoo for every million humans is about right. Portland couldn’t support two of us. Portland could probably only support one happily because of the airport, and its daily offerings of incoming and outgoing travelers from other places. There was no way she’d be willing to let me settle here.

  The footsteps came closer still. She was right outside the door to my stall. If I was going to move, it needed to be now.

  I moved.

  I’m not a fighter: I leave that to my cousins whenever I possibly can. But I’m a Baker by adoption, and a Price by association, and that means I was expected to learn how to defend myself, whether I wanted to or not. I kicked the stall door open as hard as I could, hearing the dull smack of metal hitting flesh, simultaneous with the cuckoo outside’s cry of startled surprise. She probably wasn’t hurt, but that didn’t matter; all I’d
really intended to do was throw her off balance.

  Jumping down from the toilet, I hit the stall door with my shoulder and slammed it open even harder, hitting her again. She yelped, and I danced out of the way of the door, swinging my backpack for her middle. One nice thing about coming from a species with virtually no phenotype diversity: she and I were precisely the same height, and I didn’t have to calculate where my blows were going to land. I just swung on a straight line, and they connected.

  My bag hit her squarely in the stomach. I grimaced, hoping the clothes I had wrapped around my laptop would be enough to soften the blow where it was concerned. Artie could fix it if not—Artie could fix anything—but that didn’t mean I wanted my machine out of commission because some stupid cuckoo had decided to attack me.

  This time she squealed, pained and indignant, falling backward. Bad luck for her, since her trajectory slammed her into one of the automated hand drying machines. It kicked on with a loud rush of hot air. She tried to shout something. I hit her with my bag again. At the same time, I released my hold on my telepathy, beginning to broadcast nothing to see here, stay away as loudly as I could. I could dimly hear her mental commands laced under my own, trying to summon her minions, but she was hurt and off-guard, and I was scared and substantially louder. Whatever she’d been trying to ask for dissolved back into the static.

  “Wait,” she began.

  I didn’t wait. I hit her in the head with my backpack. She staggered, so I hit her again, and she hit her knees on the tile floor of the bathroom, catching herself before she could topple over face-first.

  “You started it,” I said, and hit her in the head again.

  This time, she didn’t catch herself.

  I kicked her a few times to be sure she was really out of the fight. Either she was down for the count, or she was a much better actress than she had any reason to be. It didn’t much matter, as long as she wasn’t following me. I prodded her with my foot, pushing hard enough to roll her over so that her face pointed toward the ceiling. Her eyes were closed, and when I felt for her mind, it was the confused jumble of memories and vague impressions that I associated with unconsciousness. Growing up around my cousins, who’ve been in combat training almost since they could walk, has left me with a keen appreciation of the various stages of “knocked out cold.” This woman was gone.