Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  His voice broke on the last word. He looked away, off at the distant, prismatic horizon.

  “Oh,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I didn’t . . . Artie. Please. Look at me?”

  Slowly, Artie turned his face back toward me, expression unreadable not because of the way my brain was wired, but because he didn’t know how to feel. Everything was jumbled up and tangled, and I’d done this to him. This was my fault. Whether I’d intended to do it or not, this was all still my fault.

  “I didn’t let you come to Ohio because I was scared you’d never look at me the same way again,” I said. “I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t good most of the time. I wasn’t myself. Even when I could pull it together enough to chat online, I was still falling apart. Mom was putting me back together every day at first, and then every week, and then . . . they had to wear name tags.”

  “Name tags?” he asked blankly.

  “So I could tell everyone apart because it wasn’t safe to be around me without an anti-telepathy charm. There was too much of a chance I’d reach out, stumble, and grab something I shouldn’t. I could have erased pieces of people’s personalities and never even realized I was doing it. They had me on house arrest until last year, and I didn’t notice for the longest time, because I was too deep in my own head to know what I was missing. I couldn’t even do math on my own for almost two years.” Endless hours of PBS had helped with that. I could still hear the Square One theme when I closed my eyes.

  Artie blanched. “I didn’t know. They didn’t tell me.”

  “I asked them not to. Mom and Dad promised not to tell anyone they didn’t have to about how bad it was. They were afraid Verity would show up on our doorstep looking for forgiveness, and I didn’t know what that was, so I couldn’t exactly go giving it to people. I was broken. I made them keep you away because I was broken, and I was trying to put myself back together without any sort of map or instruction manual, and I knew if you saw me—if you, specifically, saw me—and turned away because I was too broken to care about anymore, I’d give up. I’d stop trying to repair myself. There wouldn’t be any point to it. So yeah, Artie, I kept you away. Until I was better. And maybe that wasn’t right and maybe it wasn’t fair, but I can’t change it now, okay? I can’t undo what I did.”

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Artie.

  “Don’t be sorry. And be mad at me, if that’s what you need to do. Just don’t tell me I was wrong to shut you out, and then shut me out because you’re angry. Revenge isn’t going to get us out of here.”

  “Here being inside my head.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sarah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why are we inside my head?”

  I relaxed a little. If he was asking questions, he wasn’t so determined to stay angry that he’d let us get trapped here rather than work with me. Which, well, yay. “Do you remember the accident?”

  “Sort of.” He frowned, forehead wrinkling. “I remember . . . I was asking you why you didn’t call more while you were in recovery. I don’t want to be mad about that—honestly, I don’t—but I am, and it seemed like you didn’t understand why I’d be pissed. And then there was this truck . . .” Artie’s eyes widened. “Holy shit, we got hit by a truck.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Yeah, we got hit by a truck. It ploughed right into us. It never even slowed down.”

  “And the glass in the car was all floating.”

  He could see that, too? I blinked at him. “Um, what?”

  “When the truck hit us. I looked over at you before my head hit the wheel. Your eyes were white, and the glass was floating. None of it hit you at all. None of it hit me, either. We should have been cut to ribbons, but the glass from the windows went around us. I remember it was so weird, and I thought I might be seeing things, and then your head hit the dashboard and it all fell out of the air, and my head hit the wheel and everything got real fuzzy for a while.”

  I stared. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  Artie paused, expression growing grave. “And then I woke up, and you were standing outside the car. But you were inside the car, too, all slumped over against your seatbelt, not moving, and I realized there were two of you. I thought I had a concussion or something? Only seeing double usually isn’t that literal.”

  “Artie . . .” I whispered.

  “I know.” He sounded utterly resigned. “I mean, I know now. At the time, though, I couldn’t understand what was happening. Not until she touched me. When you’re inside my head, it usually feels like . . . like a sunbeam in October. It’s warm and it’s welcome and I want it around as long as it wants to be there. This lady, though. Her mind felt like sticking my hand into clear water and hitting a layer of slime I didn’t know about. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t fight, and she was inside me. It was awful. And then I was asleep, and it didn’t matter anymore.”

  The other cuckoo. She’d followed me somehow, and she’d arranged the accident, and it was her fault that Artie wouldn’t wake up. I should have been relieved to know that he wasn’t injured beyond our capability to fix. Instead, I was livid. She had no right to chase me. She had no right to endanger the people I cared about, and she absolutely had no right—no right at all—to do things to Artie’s head without his consent.

  “I hate cuckoos,” I muttered. Louder, I said, “I’m in your head because you won’t wake up. There’s nothing so physically wrong with you that you should be in a coma, but I’m afraid you’re going to wind up in one if we don’t do something. Do you trust me?”

  Artie stared at me. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “You’re mad at me. You’re mad at me for going away, and I’m not going to say that isn’t fair, but it means maybe you don’t trust me right now.”

  “You’re literally inside my head. Can’t you see that I trust you?” Artie shook his head. Or the idea of his head. Mindscapes are weird. “Of course I trust you. You’re my best friend. I’ve always trusted you, even when you were a jerk and shut me out.”

  “Right now, I’m in your head, and this is deeper than I usually go, but it’s still surface level,” I said. “That’s why you’re ‘talking’ to me. This is all your brain trying to make sense of someone being where people really don’t belong. You’re already inside your body, so why do you have a body? Why do I have a body?”

  “Because it’s more comfortable to talk to people when they have bodies?” ventured Artie.

  I nodded. “Exactly. This is sort of a hallucination, but the good kind, like seeing your hand when you’re in a totally dark cave. Your brain is protecting itself by giving you a reasonable framework for an unreasonable experience.”

  Artie frowned. It was sort of neat, seeing the muscles move and actually understanding what the expression was supposed to mean. “Meaning you want to do something my brain is going to think of as even more unreasonable, huh?”

  “Yeah. I do.” I took a step closer to him. “The woman who looked like me—she was a cuckoo. The bad kind, not like me or Mom.”

  “I picked up on that,” he said, sounding resigned. “She whammied my head, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” I repeated. “She must have followed me from the airport. Whatever she did, it’s not here, at the surface level. That would be too easy for me to find and untangle. It’s somewhere deeper inside your mind, where I don’t usually go. I need your permission to go down and find it, even though I may see some things you don’t want me to see. If you’re okay with that, I think I can wake you up.”

  “What if I’m not okay with it?” There was a brittle bravado to Artie’s words that took me a second to recognize.

  He was scared. Of me.

  Sometimes I’m glad I don’t have a heart. It means it can’t be broken. “If you’re not okay with it, I can step out of your mind,
tell everyone that I can’t get consent for treatment, and call Mom. Maybe you’d be okay with her seeing your secrets.”

  To my surprise, he shook his head and stepped closer to me. I could have reached out and touched him. “I don’t really want anybody digging around that deep in my head,” he said. “But if it’s going to be someone, I’d rather it was you. Is that silly?”

  “It’s sweet,” I said, and reached for his hands. They were slightly too cold, like his mental image of himself didn’t quite know how to keep things circulating properly. I offered him a small, hopefully encouraging smile. “I won’t look at anything I don’t have to, I promise.”

  “Cool,” he said. He exhaled, slowly. “Is this going to hurt?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and tightened my grasp on his hands. There was a glint as his eyes reflected the light growing in mine, and then the thunder rolled on the lightning-lashed horizon of his mind, and I was falling, Alice toppling into Wonderland, dropping down, down, down into the dark.

  * * *

  Artie didn’t fall with me, which made sense, since I was technically falling into Artie. He was everywhere, all around me, and I had left the conscious levels of his mind behind: there was no reason for his brain to project an avatar of the man when I was dropping into memory and autonomous systems.

  The darkness around me twisted into an almost funnel-like shape, apparently influenced by my thoughts of Wonderland. Doors started appearing in the walls as I dropped past them, some labeled with words, others with images. These were the vaults of Artie’s memories. I knew that, just like I knew that if I’d wanted to, I could have reached out and opened any one of those doors, stopping my descent. They weren’t real doors, and I wasn’t really falling; much as Artie’s mind had attempted to protect itself by creating a landscape he could deal with, my mind was now protecting its core by giving me a framework to hang this whole unreasonable experience on.

  “School” said one door, and “Girls” said another door, and “Comic Books” said a third. Then there were the more abstract labels—a leaf, a bat in flight, a bird. I slowed to a stop, frowning at the bird. It had a dark back and a pale belly, wings spread as if it was getting ready to flee.

  A cuckoo.

  This was the door to Artie’s memories of me.

  Opening it would be an invasion of his privacy. Yes, he’d given me permission to be here, but he was expecting me to use that permission to find the snare the other cuckoo had set in his mind, not to peek at whatever secrets he’d kept from me, about me. I still hesitated for what felt like a shamefully long time before shifting slightly backward and allowing myself to resume my descent.

  The labels on the doors got more and more abstract and more and more broad as I dropped—fruit becoming food becoming bowls of what looked like porridge and mashed vegetables. Several doors appeared for immediate family members, almost as if he sorted the memories of them differently depending on their age as well as his own. When I started seeing doors labeled with things like “Numbers” and “Language” and “Sleep,” I knew I was getting close.

  There, almost at the bottom of the tunnel, was a door labeled “Dreams.” Unlike the doors around it, this one was covered in a thick, cottony layer of what looked almost like spiderweb. I stopped in front of it, barely managing not to recoil. Standing in front of that door was like standing in front of an open freezer. Each individual strand in the web was putting out waves of cold, strong enough to almost knock me backward in the air.

  This was the door. This had to be the door. None of the others had been protected this way, not even the ones I was sure Artie didn’t want me opening. It’s one thing to agree to let your weird telepathic cousin poke around in your head. It’s another to know that she’s planning to look at the door labeled “Masturbation.” If he’d been able to seal doors against me, he would have done it with at least a dozen of the ones I’d passed getting to this point.

  “It can’t hurt you,” I muttered. “It’s a booby trap planted by someone who isn’t here, and you are here, and you’re stronger than it is. It can’t hurt you.”

  But it could hurt Artie. I had no idea how to go about placing a psychic landmine, which meant I didn’t know how to disarm one, either. Mom wouldn’t be any help with this. Even if I pulled all the way out of Artie’s head and called home, her powers were too limited compared to the cuckoo norm. She couldn’t tell me what to do. I had to feel my way through the situation and hope I didn’t make things worse.

  No pressure.

  Annie had fire in her fingers. That was her phrase, stolen from the surface of her mind while she was focused on burning the car: fire in her fingers. I thought about what that felt like, how the heat moved through the skin, how warm it was, how safe. How much the fire loved her. It didn’t have a mind, not in the sense that I could reach out and touch it, but it loved her all the same; some things are more important than thought or logic.

  In the real world, there was no fire in my fingers. But here, deep in the tangle of Artie’s mind, I was as close to a superhero as I would ever get, and if I understood what it was to have fire in my fingers, why couldn’t I choose it for myself? I focused on my hands and smiled as they burst into lambent blue-white flame, hot enough to turn back the cold from the webbing. I stepped forward, hands held in front of me, and watched as the web shriveled away, shying back from the possibility of my touch.

  “Not yours,” I said aloud, in case it would help my fire catch hold. “Not your door to bar; not your mind to steal. Not yours.”

  The web charred and blackened and finally fell away, revealing the label on the door. “Consciousness,” it said. It was a little on the nose, but it could have been worse. She could have blocked the door that said “Breathing,” or the one that said “Heartbeat.” I was deep enough in Artie’s mind that I was sure those doors existed somewhere nearby, functions of the self that were almost as old as Artie himself.

  I stepped forward. The door wasn’t latched. It was closed, but barely; a stiff wind could have blown it open. Shaking the memory of flame from my fingers, I reached out and pushed it gently. The door swung inward, revealing a small domed room, filled with pale light.

  The cuckoo from the airport was standing in the very middle of the room.

  She looked at me and smiled, her red, red lips curving upward in a gesture that was far more predatory than pleasant. “Hello, little girl,” she purred. “Tracked me to my lair, did you? I bet you feel very clever. I bet you feel very competent. Look at you, personal disaster wreaking havoc through the world. Most of us find and break our targets inside of a year. You’ve been twisting this boy around for decades. You sure do play a long game.”

  “You’re not really here.” I started prowling around the edges of the room, shoulders loose, head high. She wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.

  No matter where I stood, the woman remained exactly the same, like one of those flat paintings that somehow becomes three-dimensional when viewed from the right angle. She was an illusion, not an actuality, and she had no business here. No business here at all.

  “A knife is really inside a body, even when the person who did the stabbing is gone,” she countered. “They truly seemed to care about you. I could hear it in every stray thought they had. How long have you been lying to them, little girl? How long have you been working to convince them you can be tamed, redeemed, brought to heel? I’d be impressed, if I weren’t so disgusted.”

  I kept circling. The threads of her trap were coming clearer, suspended in the air above her. Seen from this angle, they were less like spiderwebs and more like strands of cotton candy, fine and fair and almost invisible unless they were looked at precisely so.

  “Nothing to say for yourself, little girl? I’m sorry. Did I break your toy? You can find another one. Maybe even turn this to your advantage. The others will be so very sorry for you,
when they realize he’s not going to wake up.”

  She was just a phantom, a fragment, a psychic trap laid by the other cuckoo to take Artie out of commission—but why? I’d been unconscious. She could have attacked me directly, rather than trying to hurt someone I cared about. What was the point of targeting Artie instead of me? Did she think that would hurt me more, somehow? I knew there wasn’t a code of honor that kept her from attacking a fellow cuckoo. Cuckoos don’t do anything as petty and potentially limiting as “honor.”

  “Talk to me.” She was starting to sound uncomfortable, eyes tracking me around the edges of the room. Even an echo can be afraid, given the proper motivation. “You’re supposed to be angry. I touched your things. You’re supposed to challenge me.”

  “I don’t need to,” I said, and stopped moving, bracing my feet as I looked at her. She had no mind for me to grab hold of. She was a cluster of Artie’s own neurons, overwritten with a set of hostile instructions by someone who had no reason to care about whether or not she hurt him in the process of baiting me. I reached out silently, hands still by my sides, and mentally grabbed hold of the threads in the air around her, snapping them cleanly off, forcing them back into the idea of her skin.