Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  We stood around the open back hatch of the minivan, staring in silence at the body of the cuckoo from the airport. It had been concealed behind the first row of totes, tucked safely away from prying eyes. Now . . .

  In life, she’d been a threat. As a shadow in Artie’s mind, she’d been an enemy. Now, here and real and dead and gone, she just looked . . . small.

  “I guess we know what you’d look like as a corpse,” said Elsie, in a strangled voice. “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” I said. The sutures Evie had put into the wound on my forehead were close and tight and mostly covered by my bangs, but they still ached. It didn’t matter that they weren’t going to leave a scar. That didn’t take the pain away.

  “I’m going to go check on Artie,” Elsie said, and fled.

  The cuckoo didn’t have any visible injuries. Her limbs were straight, and her face was undamaged. I could see why Jane was so sure that she hadn’t been in the other vehicle. With as badly as Artie’s car had been smashed in, there was no way the passengers in the truck had gotten away without at least a few bumps and bruises. Cuckoos may not have the pretty colors humans do, but there should have been scratches, scrapes—something. Not just this pristine nothingness.

  A trickle of what looked like snot was dried on her upper lip and crusted around both nostrils. I leaned closer. There was a faint blue undertone to the film. Not mucus, then: blood.

  As if she were the telepath, not me, Evie leaned forward and pried one of the cuckoo’s eyes open. “Look at this,” she said.

  We looked.

  Cuckoos have blue eyes. It’s one of the few places where we have any variation in our appearances, because when I say “blue” I mean any one of a dozen shades. This one’s eyes had been a few shades lighter than mine, more ice than morning sky. They still were . . . but her pupils had contracted to pinpricks of black against the blue, and the edges of her irises were foggy, like they’d frosted over, or been burned.

  “What the hell happened here?” asked Kevin.

  “I think she had the cuckoo equivalent of an aneurysm, is what happened,” said Jane. She looked straight at me as she asked, “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

  My Aunt Jane loves me. I sometimes think she doesn’t want to, but there’s no questioning her affection. I’m part of her family. More importantly, I’m her reclusive son’s best friend. And none of that matters, because she grew up surrounded by people who not only knew what cuckoos were, they knew precisely why we shouldn’t be—couldn’t be—trusted. We’re natural predators who prefer the simplicity of a hunt where everyone involved is sapient. We destroy things for fun. She wasn’t the Price sibling who’d married a cuckoo’s daughter and been forced to admit that maybe there was more to us than a knife in the dark and a mind twisting inward on itself. She could love and fear and hate me all at the same time.

  It was sort of a relief, though. At least now I knew why she was wearing an anti-telepathy charm, and why Uncle Ted was doing the same thing. She must have insisted, choosing the possibility of offending me over the chance that I’d come back from my convalescence somehow wrong.

  “I already told Evie everything,” I said. “The cuckoo attacked me at the airport. I fought back. I thought I got away. She must have followed me to the warehouse, where Artie picked me up, and decided that she deserved a little revenge. We were on our way here when a truck hit us from the side.” I hesitated before going on. She was going to find out eventually. Better that she hear it from me. “She could tell that Artie was important to me, so she put a psychic snare in his head to keep him from waking up. When I realized what she’d done, I went into his mindscape and defused it. He woke up.”

  There: factual, straightforward, and unlikely to make me seem even less trustworthy to my justifiably paranoid aunt.

  Jane turned toward the cuckoo again, studying her. Finally, she said, “If this were a human body, I could tell how long she’d been dead by checking her blood coagulation and degree of rigor. But she’s not stiffening the way I expect her to, and it’s impossible to tell how the blood is pooling. When do you think she died?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I didn’t feel anything connecting her to Artie when I went into his head. Defusing her trap shouldn’t have done anything to her.”

  “What if it wasn’t defusing the trap that killed her?”

  Jane turned toward Evie when she spoke. I didn’t move. Evie wasn’t wearing an anti-telepathy charm; I could pick up her meaning just as well while I was looking at the cuckoo.

  She looked so small. She had been a terrifying threat, and now she was so small, and she was never going to threaten anyone again. What in the world could have possessed her to follow me so far from the airport? Cuckoos are territorial, but that doesn’t normally make them stupid.

  “Explain,” said Jane.

  “Sarah got hurt when she modified the memories of the Covenant operatives who were threatening Verity and Dominic,” said Evie.

  “Thanks for that, by the way,” said Kevin.

  “No worries,” I said, leaning closer to the cuckoo. The distant, faintly acidic scent of cuckoo blood tickled my nose and made me want to sneeze. There was a film of blue-tinged blood crusted around her ears as well as above her mouth. She’d bled out fast and catastrophically. Given the damage to her eyes, I was willing to bet that if we’d taken swabs, we would have found more blood in the soft tissues around them. Her death had probably been relatively painless, because it hadn’t given her time for anything else.

  “According to our mother, the physical signs of injury included bleeding from the eyes and nose, hypoxia, and temporary clouding of the irises,” Evie continued.

  I snapped around, staring at my sister. “What?” Mom had never told me about the damage to my irises. My eyes had always looked perfectly normal to me.

  But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? During the first few months, when I’d walked in a cloud of hazy disorientation, the whole world had been cloudy around the edges. I’d attributed it to my bruised brain. What if some of it had been due to other physical causes?

  How many things about my own health had my parents concealed for my own good?

  “Mom thought they might be cataracts at first, until she realized they were receding as you got better,” said Evie, apologetic discomfort rolling off her in waves. “The damage to the eyes seems to be tied to excessive telepathic ‘pushing.’”

  “You’re saying this cuckoo hurt herself the same way Sarah did, by pushing things into Artie’s brain?” demanded Jane.

  “No,” I said numbly. “No, she’s saying this cuckoo killed herself that way. I just don’t understand . . . I don’t understand why hurting us would have been worth dying.”

  “I don’t think it was about hurting Artie at all,” said Evie. “We’ve dealt with ordinary cuckoos before. They don’t consider humans or Lilu worth their time. She killed herself to hurt you.”

  “But all I did was hit her with my backpack,” I objected. “That’s not worth dying over.”

  Evie shrugged. “Doesn’t change the fact that she did.”

  No. It didn’t.

  Something was going on—something bigger than one dead cuckoo. I just wished I knew what it was.

  While I was still trying to put my feelings into words, Kevin said, almost apologetically, “We don’t get access to many dead cuckoos.”

  “I’ll get the dissection kit,” said Jane.

  “I’m going to go find Artie,” I said, and turned and fled before the autopsy could begin.

  My family is my family. I wouldn’t have them any other way. But sometimes they can be a little much to deal with. Especially when the knives come out.

  Nine

  “Nobody gets to pick where they’re born or who they’re born to, but everybody gets to pick their family.
Make good choices with yours.”

  —Alice Healy

  Roving through the family compound, trying not to think about what’s about to happen in the barn

  DISSECTION IS A FACT of life—and death—when your whole family is involved with the biological sciences. Evie needs to understand cryptids if she’s going to help heal them. Kevin needs to understand them so he can document them as accurately as possible, an activity that matters both now and in the future. We wouldn’t even know that there used to be two types of wadjet if not for some of the old family notebooks, which meticulously documented the differences between the Egyptian and Indian branches of the species before the Egyptian wadjet disappeared, probably forever.

  But that doesn’t mean I have to like it, and it didn’t mean I had to be happy knowing they were about to take a member of my species apart, piece by piece, like she was some sort of puzzle to be solved. People aren’t puzzles. At least, they shouldn’t be.

  I found Annie and the others in the kitchen. Both James and Sam had become the sort of blank spot that I associated with anti-telepathy charms, although Annie was as bright and visible as ever. Elsie was sitting on the couch, sullenly drinking a glass of orange juice. It was amazing how much resentment she could direct toward citrus.

  “Hi,” I said, offering a small wave to James and Sam. “Now that you have your telepathy blockers, I won’t be able to read your minds. That’s for the best, for all of us, but you should be aware that my brain doesn’t process facial input very well.”

  “Meaning?” asked Sam.

  “Meaning that if you didn’t have a tail, the two of you would be essentially identical to me.”

  Sam and James exchanged a look. “I can’t decide whether that’s racist or just insulting,” said Sam.

  “Technically, I think it’s speciesist,” I said. “All humans look basically the same when I can’t read their minds.”

  “Okay, definitely insulting,” said Sam. “Not human. Hence the tail.”

  “Yes human, hence the no tail, but there are humans with this condition,” said James. “Face blindness is usually a result of something being wired slightly differently in the visual processing center of the brain.”

  “Well, I don’t know whether that’s my problem, since we don’t have an MRI, or a reasonable assortment of cuckoos to put in the MRI, but it doesn’t matter, since we’re living with the reality of my situation, not the theory,” I said. “I can recognize voices. I can’t read your expressions, and if you want me to know what you’re thinking—emotionally—you may need to say it out loud, just to be sure.”

  “Do we have to wear these things forever?” James plucked at the chain dangling around his neck. “I’ve never been overly fond of jewelry. It gets caught on things, and the chain gets cold.”

  “That’s because you’re secretly a snow cone machine who walks like a man,” said Annie fondly. Her mood when she looked at him was a fascinatingly complicated mixture of regret, fellowship, and a fierce fondness that felt very similar to the way she thought about Alex.

  “He’s your brother,” I blurted, and paused, feeling the embarrassing tingle in my cheeks that would have been a blush, if I’d had the capillary response to fuel it.

  Annie simply nodded. “He is. I found him in a cardboard box labeled ‘free to good home,’ and decided I was going to keep him. He has his own room now and everything.”

  “I wish that were less accurate,” muttered James.

  Their trio was starting to make more sense now. I offered Annie a wan smile and waved a hand toward the stairs. “I’m going to go find Artie.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Elsie. “I’ve looked everywhere. The jerk is hiding.”

  “Yeah, but I know he didn’t leave the house—I would have heard him go—and I can’t hear him now, which means there’s only one place he can be.” I started across the room. “I’ll be back down as soon as we’ve hammered this out.”

  “Good luck,” called Annie.

  I waved vaguely over my shoulder rather than looking back and kept walking.

  My family is remarkably effective in the field. We have to be. Hesitate when there’s a Covenant operative or a hungry lindworm in front of you and there’s a good chance you’re going to wind up dead. Not cool. But this means that we’re also incredibly relaxed and disorganized when we don’t have to keep it together. When we relax, we relax, becoming as difficult to herd as a clowder of cats. If I’d stayed to finish saying goodbye, I would have found myself caught in an endless loop of just one more thing, until something important enough to break the cycle happened. Bedtime is an eternal trial.

  At least James and Sam had their anti-telepathy charms now. Annie must have explained why they were necessary. Neither of them had seemed afraid of me, but with their minds sealed off, how could I tell?

  Sometimes coming from a predatory species really sucks.

  A constellation of smaller minds came into focus as I climbed the stairs. They were too small to project very far, although each of them was fully sapient, as complex as any human. Some of them were blurry: we’d never met before. Others were bright, crisp and clear, elders of the colony who knew exactly who I was and would be thrilled to see me home. I took a deep breath, steeling myself. Then I kept climbing.

  “HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE HEARTLESS ONE!”

  Aeslin mice are small, but when that many of them shout in tandem, they’re capable of making a hell of a lot of noise. There were at least a hundred mice spread out across the second-floor landing, perched on the bookshelves and clinging to the banister. I stopped, blinking at them. About a third of the gathering wore the colors of Verity’s clergy, bedecked with more feathers than any mouse had any business wearing. The rest were a mixture of the active family liturgies, including a few I didn’t recognize. That made a certain amount of sense. Dominic, Shelby, now Sam and James . . . we’d had a few new additions to the family since the last time I’d been home in Oregon.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The mice cheered.

  Aeslin mice are evolutionary mimics. They look like ordinary field mice, save for slightly larger heads and slightly more developed hands—two attributes most people would never be in a position to notice. They nest like mice, breed like mice, and happily infest the walls of human habitations, again, like mice. It’s just that they do all this while practicing a complicated, functionally inborn religion. Aeslin need to believe in something. Anything. Our family colony believes in, well, the family. We are, and have always been, their objects of worship.

  No pressure. I mean, “these adorable, cartoony creatures love and trust you, and believe that you have the power to keep them safe when their species is otherwise functionally extinct” is a perfectly normal situation, right?

  “Long have we Awaited your Return,” intoned one of the older mice, stepping to the front of the group. He used a long kitten-bone staff to hold himself upright. From the twinges of pain that laced through his thoughts, I could tell that bipedal locomotion was no longer as easy for him as it had been when he’d been younger. “Hail to the Heartless One! Hail to the Savior of the Arboreal Priestess!”

  “Of course I saved her,” I said. “Verity’s my family. I had to.”

  “We understand,” said the priest gravely. I frowned. He wasn’t wearing nearly enough feathers. “We also understand that we have been Unfair to you.”

  That didn’t make any sense, but he meant it. All the thoughts rising from him were sincere ones. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You helped me locate Verity when she needed me. Well. Not you, exactly, but the splinter colony she had with her in New York. You were totally fair to me.”

  “Please.” The priest bowed until his whiskers brushed the floor, easing some of the crackles of pain from his spine. “Please. We seek Forgiveness and Absolution. Allow us to petition you for these things, for on
ly then may we be Properly Made Clean.”

  Sometimes the Aeslin ability to make any letter into a capital one was enough to make my head spin. “All right,” I said. “What do you need from me?”

  The priest straightened and turned, looking at another, younger mouse. This one was wearing glasses, twists of wire around magnifying lenses that made its tiny oildrop eyes look absolutely enormous. The rest of its livery was nothing I recognized, beads and bits of bone counting out complicated patterns across its back. They almost looked like a Fibonacci sequence. I smiled at the thought.

  The younger mouse cleared its—her—throat, forced her whiskers forward, and said, “I am come to petition you, O Heartless One, called Sarah Zellaby, called Cousin Sarah, to Forgive us our trespasses against you, to Forget our refusal to clearly see what was before us, and to Formally Allow us to sanctify the clergy which has been assembled in your Name.”

  I blinked. “Um, what?”

  “We understand now that we were unwilling to set aside our prejudices and our fears for your species of Birth, and to acknowledge that what matters is not Blood, but Belonging,” said the younger mouse. “You are a daughter of this line, as truly as any who have been Born to it. You carry in your motions the Grace of Beth, the Forgiveness of Caroline, the Canniness of Enid, the Viciousness of Frances, the Determination of Alice, and the Persistence of Evelyn. You are a Priestess, and have always been, and we are sorry not to have seen it before now.”

  I gaped at her, unable to figure out how I was supposed to respond to that, or whether there was a good response.

  The mouse sat back on her haunches, whiskers still pushed forward as she focused her full attention on me. “We have assembled as much as we can of your catechisms, for you have never been a stranger here. Will you allow me to lead your temple, to learn your mysteries, and to reveal them to the acolytes who come before us with time, ready to pledge themselves unto your divinity?”