Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  She screamed, and it sounded so real that I almost lost my nerve. But Artie was asleep in a bed back in the physical world, surrounded by our worried family, and his parents would be showing up soon; I needed him to be awake before my Aunt Jane started demanding to know what had happened. She can be terrifying when she wants to be. Uncle Ted wouldn’t yell. He’d just look at me, radiating silent disappointment, and that would be enough. No. Artie needed to wake up, and for Artie to wake up, this unwanted figment needed to be chased out of his mind. She didn’t belong here. She wasn’t a part of our family. She wasn’t a part of him.

  The threads whipped through the air around her. I grabbed for them again, still not moving, and fed them back into the flesh of her. One of them whipped out too quickly for me to catch, wrapping around my wrist and burning like it was coated in some sort of acid. I lifted my arms then, clawing the thread away. It left no mark on my skin, which wasn’t really here anyway, only the idea of it, drifting through Artie’s mind like an intrusive thought, unwanted and unavoidable.

  The figment screamed again. I lowered my hands and snatched the threads again with my mind, wrapping them tighter and tighter around her.

  “You’re not wanted here,” I spat. “You’re not welcome here. Get out.”

  She wailed and collapsed in on herself, becoming a gray, cobwebby mass that was more form than figure. Then she burst into pale flame, burning away to nothing.

  But in the instant before she disappeared—the instant before I released my hold on Artie’s mind and allowed myself to rise back to what passed as the surface—she smiled, and I felt a sickening certainty take root below my breastbone.

  This wasn’t over yet.

  Eight

  “Some people are good at music. Some people are good at sports. Some people are good at both. People are people, and every person has their own strengths and weaknesses. Biology is just one aspect of the greater whole.”

  —Jane Harrington-Price

  Back in the recovery room, surrounded by family, with a lot of explaining to do

  I OPENED MY EYES with a gasp, staggering backward, losing contact with Artie in the process. Elsie caught me before I could hit the wall. I sagged against her, struggling to make my breathing smooth out. I didn’t have a pulse that could race, but I could feel the muscular contractions that propelled the blood through my body happening faster than they were supposed to, until my limbs ached from the effort.

  And Artie opened his eyes.

  Evie laughed in relief. Kevin clapped a hand on Artie’s shoulder.

  “There you are, sport,” he said.

  Artie turned his head to look at him, lost and perplexed, radiating confusion. “Where’s Sarah?” he asked. “She was here. She was just here. Was she really here?” He tried to sit up.

  Kevin pushed him gently back down. “Sarah’s here,” he said. “Sarah came home. Sarah? Honey? Can you come over here?”

  Meaning could I come over there before Artie hurt himself trying to move. Right. It was a good idea. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure whether or not I could. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get my feet under myself. Everything was rippling around the edges, the same way it had—

  Oh, no. The same way it had rippled when I’d hurt myself. Pushing my telepathy too far had consequences, and while I wasn’t going to pretend to be sorry I’d made it possible for Artie to wake up, I’d only just come back from five years lost in my own head. I didn’t want to go back there.

  I closed my eyes. One, I thought desperately. Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen . . .

  Prime numbers are some of the most soothing things in the universe. They’re always the same, perfect, calming constants that don’t change, don’t vary, no matter how much everything else gets twisted in on itself. I could feel Elsie’s hands on my shoulders, keeping me from falling over. She had them positioned so that she wasn’t touching my skin. That showed good sense on her part, even if it stung a little. I wasn’t rude enough to surge in and take over her mind just because she touched me.

  Then again, there had been times when I wouldn’t have been able to help it. Maybe she was being even more sensible than I’d thought.

  Hands grasped my upper arms. “Sarah, you need to hang on,” said Artie, distressingly close and even more distressingly urgent. Uncle Kevin said something in the background. I couldn’t understand him. I hoped whatever it was wasn’t important enough to be a problem.

  Artie tightened his grip. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” he said. “You just came back. You can’t go away again. I won’t let you.”

  Nice how you think your opinion matters, I thought.

  He barked sudden, unsteady laughter. “Yeah, well, your stalker trashed my car, so I think I get to give a couple of orders. Hang on. Just, whatever you have to do, hang on.”

  I wanted to laugh. There wasn’t enough air in the room. I don’t think I can.

  “I know you can,” said Artie, and took his hands off my arms, and pressed them to either side of my face.

  Thoughts and feelings flooded my mind, all flavored with that unmistakable emotional stamp that shouted “Artie.” I laughed unsteadily, and the thoughts melted into memories. Artie, looking at a computer screen, waiting for the alert to pop up that would tell him I was online. Artie at the comic book store, picking up the contents of my subscription box to make sure I wouldn’t miss anything. Artie, phone in his hand, wondering whether he had the nerve to call me again when he knew I probably wouldn’t pick up, because I never picked up anymore.

  I gasped a little, almost taking a step backward, out of his grasp. He tightened his hold, keeping me exactly where I was.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t get to leave again.”

  This wasn’t—the last time I’d been hurt, Mom had done her best to keep anyone from touching me, so I could have the space I needed to heal. She’d isolated me, and maybe she’d been doing the right thing at the time and maybe she hadn’t, because it wasn’t like there was a manual for this stuff. Even the cryptid doctors I’d met didn’t necessarily know how to treat injuries in cuckoos. They normally didn’t get the opportunity. This wasn’t what we’d done last time. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing.

  I wasn’t sure my family could handle losing me for another five years.

  “Your name is Sarah Zellaby,” said Artie firmly. “You’re a part of this family. You’re my best friend. You’re a cuckoo, and I know you don’t like that about yourself, I know you’d be human if you could, but I’m so glad you’re not, Sarah, I’m so glad, because you wouldn’t be the same person if you were something else, and I lo—I like the person you are.”

  “Even now, he can’t say it?” Elsie sounded more like a little annoyed. “Congrats, Artie. You’ve found the most unquestionably stupid telepath in the entire world. There should be some sort of an award. Oh, wait, maybe there is. She puts up with you.”

  “Stop it,” he snapped.

  “No, you stop. I’ve been listening to you whine for five years. I’m tired of it.”

  The memories I was pulling through Artie’s hands were getting more fragmentary, moving backward through time to when we’d been much younger, still innocently convinced that by the time we were adults, the world would somehow mysteriously have changed for the better. We’d believed we would be the first generation of cryptids to walk in the open, moving among the humans like we belonged there. Like this was our planet, too.

  The memories flickered faster and faster, like I was watching one of those flipbooks that had so enchanted us all as children. Put enough still images together and you can see them move! Wow! In a world of monsters and magic, somehow that had been the most incredible thing of all.

  Half of them passed so quickly that I couldn’t really see them, and that was all right; these weren’t my memories to enjoy. I wasn’t even sure Artie knew he wa
s showing them to me, for all that he was the one holding onto my head, keeping me from tumbling down into the pit of my own splintered self. The other half lingered.

  Me in the dress I’d worn to Antimony’s junior prom, both of us giggling behind our hands. She’d worn a suit, tie striped in her school colors and left hanging suggestively open, makeup Adam Ant extreme, the cheerleader playing with New Romantic ideals and absolutely killing it. I’d worn a dress in cornflower blue, dusky and soft and supported by a dozen layers of taffeta, so that the whole thing seemed to float with every step I took.

  I remembered Artie pinning the flowers in my hair, strangely quiet, meticulously careful not to let his fingers touch my skin. At the time, I’d thought it was because he wanted to avoid the glitter highlighter Annie had smeared liberally over every exposed inch of me. Watching it though his eyes, I half-wondered whether there might have been another reason.

  Me on the first day of fifth grade, coloring at the kitchen table when Kevin brought Artie and Annie home from school. Annie had been icing her knuckles, jaw set in the stubborn thrust that meant she had looked at the world, considered her options, and decided everyone else was in the wrong. Her left eye had already been starting to swell. Artie had clearly been crying and was just as clearly trying to hide it. He and I had spent the rest of the afternoon playing video games and pretending not to hear Annie arguing with her parents over the times when it was acceptable to fight at school.

  Me the day I’d come to Oregon for the first time, pale and scared of these new family members, excited to see the cousins I’d met on the day of my adoption and not since. My hair had been pulled over my shoulders in thick pigtail braids, and I’d looked substantially younger than my ten years. Artie had been in the living room when Evie led me into the compound. He’d looked up, and seen me, and smiled, and I’d known instantly that we were going to be best friends forever. He’d had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched.

  He still did. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth and opened my eyes, looking at his face, only inches from my own. Relief radiated from him, so loud that it felt like even the non-telepaths in the room should have been able to pick up on it. Relief and—

  “Really?” I blurted.

  Artie went pale, thoughts turning alarmed. He pulled his hands away from my face, taking a stumbling step backward.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and fled from the room.

  I tried to twist and run after him. Elsie kept hold of my shoulders.

  “Believe me, we’ve been waiting for this for a long, long time, and no one wants it to happen more than I do, but there’s a gigantic gash in your forehead, and you need to tell the rest of us what just happened,” she said. “He’ll be lurking around for you to have uncomfortable conversations with when we’re done.”

  “Sorry, honey, but she’s right,” said Evie. “I’ve never seen anything like that. I have to call Mom and tell her about it, and that means I need to understand it.”

  I stared at her. She shook her head, walking around the bed to take my hands and tug me toward a seat. The connection brought her thoughts into sharper focus, which didn’t help, not really; she was worried about me, she was concerned about Artie, she was already making plans for mobilization of the family if there was further cuckoo activity in the area. Evie had been practicing her whole life for moments like this one. She wasn’t going to lose her focus now.

  I temporarily put all thoughts of Artie from my mind and grudgingly allowed her to push me into the room’s one open chair. Annie and Sam were still on the couch. They had been joined by James, forming a line with Annie in one corner and James in the other, with Sam in the middle between them. I frowned. Sam and James were too new. I couldn’t pick up their thoughts clearly yet, apart from the subtle sense of presence that kept me from being surprised by the people around me. They couldn’t be here.

  “They have to leave,” I said, eyes still on James and Sam.

  Annie bristled. “They’re family, too,” she said.

  “It’s not that. They don’t have . . . they need telepathy blockers. They’re family, but they’re not family.” James had a mind that felt like frostbite and Sam had a mind that felt like the moment when a roller coaster began its descent down the first big hill on the track, and neither of them had any defenses against me. If I was hurt again, if I was dangerous again—

  Annie’s thoughts turned suddenly static and sharp. “Oh,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Oh.”

  “Come on, guys,” she said, standing. “Crash course on cuckoo biology and anti-telepathy charms in the kitchen. I think there’s leftover pie.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” asked Sam, and followed her. James trailed after the two of them, his thoughts hopping back and forth between sensible wariness and the growing desire to stay in my presence. Meaning he needed that charm sooner than later, if we didn’t want him declaring me to be his long-lost sister and trying to protect me from my own family.

  Sometimes the way cuckoo powers work is really, really annoying.

  Evie waited until they were gone before she focused on me and said, “I’ve seen your eyes go white before. This was more than that. They lit up.”

  “Like you had fireflies inside your skull,” said Elsie.

  I bit my lip. Bioluminescence is a fact of nature, and more common than most people realize. Even humans glow a little bit, under the right conditions, although human eyes aren’t engineered to see it. The fact that my eyes glow sometimes is a quirk of biology, unremarkable on the greater scale of things. That didn’t mean I liked hearing that they’d gotten brighter.

  Being one of the only reasonable people out of an entire species really makes it hard to understand my own biology. It’s frustrating.

  “I went into Artie’s thoughts,” I said. “I had to if I wanted to defuse the trap the other cuckoo set. It was a nasty one. She set it all the way down at the bottom of his brain, so that he couldn’t wake up. He could still think, it was just . . . buried. Covered over by everything else. I found it, and I ripped it apart, and he woke up. That’s all. But we should probably find that cuckoo. She knows who Artie is now.”

  “That’s not going to be a problem.”

  The voice belonged to my Aunt Jane, which was odd, since I hadn’t felt any trace of her entering the building. I turned to look over my shoulder. She was standing in the doorway with Uncle Ted behind her, a silver anti-telepathy charm dangling from a chain around her neck. She raised one hand in a small wave when she saw me looking, bending her fingers into the American Sign Language for “I love you.”

  That helped. Since I can’t read faces, anti-telepathy charms turn people into inscrutable monoliths, making their moods and expressions virtually impossible for me to understand. Simple hand signals can make all the difference between me being totally lost in a conversation and me knowing what’s going on.

  “Jane?” Evie straightened. “Hi, Ted.”

  “Hi,” said Uncle Ted, with a distracted wave. He sniffed the air. “Artie was bleeding here. I’m going to go find him, make sure he’s okay. Jane will fill you in on what we found in the woods.”

  That sounded ominous, a feeling that only intensified as a wave of dismayed concern rolled off of Evie. She put her hand on my shoulder, pinky finger against the skin of my throat, and the feeling intensified. I knew she was doing it to make up for the functional black hole that was Jane, but in the moment, her feelings were so big, and mixed with so many other things, that I almost pulled away.

  Uncle Ted turned and walked back toward the kitchen. Aunt Jane stepped into the room.

  “Annie did a good job burning the car,” she said. “I checked the whole thing for signs of contamination, and I didn’t find any. No one’s going to come hunting Artie down because they’ve decided he’s destined to be their one true love.”

 
; “That’s good,” I said uneasily.

  “The indents on the side were definitely made by a truck—it’s not that I don’t believe you, Sarah, it’s just that it’s important to verify that sort of thing directly, to be sure we haven’t missed anything.”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “There was no sign of the vehicle or the driver. They really must have hit you and then kept on going. Elsie said you didn’t get any warning before the accident?”

  “No, none.” I shook my head. “They came out of nowhere. I should have heard the driver’s thoughts, even if they were drunk or drugged—I should have had something to tell me what was about to happen. The fact that I didn’t hear anything before the impact means they must have been being masked somehow. An anti-telepathy charm, maybe—although that wouldn’t be very safe, since wearing one of those is like shutting myself in a lead box—or the other cuckoo was the one driving, and she was pulling herself way, way back.”

  “The other cuckoo wasn’t driving,” said Jane. “She wasn’t even in the car.”

  I blinked. “How do you know?”

  “Because we found her body.”

  * * *

  Aunt Jane drove the sort of solid, sensible, mid-sized minivan beloved by soccer moms and field biologists the world over. She could pack literally hundreds of pounds of specimens into that thing, concealing them all in brightly colored plastic tubs labeled things like “PTA supplies” and “recycling.” I’ve seen her get pulled over, produce a plate of fresh peppermint brownies seemingly out of thin air, and charm the police into waving her on her way. She calls it her “weaponized white woman” routine, and it’s a calculated ruse she’s taken everywhere from cryptid extraction runs to political protests, where she spends a lot of time putting herself between the authorities and anyone she deems to be more vulnerable. Which is everyone.

  Mom once said that everybody on the Price side of the family has a savior complex bred into their bones. Aunt Jane got it, too. She just does a better job than some of making it look accidental.