Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  Antimony sat up. Sam made an unhappy grumbling noise and slid an arm around her waist as she blinked blearily at me through the tangled curtain of her hair.

  “Is it morning?” she asked. “It better be morning. There better be coffee. I don’t smell coffee.”

  I stepped into the room, shutting the door behind me before turning on the light. Sam made a second grumbling noise, louder and unhappier than the first, and attempted to bury his head under the pillow. His tail uncurled from around Antimony’s ankle and snaked around her waist instead. Antimony, for her part, shoved her hair out of her face and glared.

  “Artie,” she said, voice already much more clear than it had been only seconds before, “what the fuck?”

  “There’s a cuckoo sleeping on the couch downstairs,” I said.

  “Um, yeah. Happy fucking birthday. You’ve been praying for this for five years. Calm down, get out of my room, and enjoy it. Before I kill you and you don’t get to enjoy anything anymore. Your parents have an heir and a spare. They’ll be fine without you.”

  “It’s not Sarah.”

  Silence so loud it was like a siren filled the room, drowning out everything else. Then Antimony swore and leapt out of bed, stepping with calm assurance over the piles of clothes, knives, and books littering the floor. She yanked open the top drawer of her dresser and started rooting through it, sending underpants flying in all directions before she finally pulled out a fistful of anti-telepathy charms. Each thin silver chain ended at a tiny vial containing a disk of copper and a sprinkling of herbs, preserved in water and sealed with wax. I blinked.

  “Those are expensive,” I said.

  “Not when they’re homemade,” she replied, and tossed one at me. “Me and James, we’re like Etsy for cryptozoologists. I mean, our first batch had a tendency to explode—”

  “You promised we were never going to talk about that again,” said Sam, voice muffled by the pillow.

  “—but we’ve worked the kinks out. Put that on.” Antimony slung a charm around her own neck before moving back to the bed and prodding her prone boyfriend. “Up. You need to shield your mind. Get moving.”

  “I hate you,” said Sam, even as he reached up and took a charm from her outstretched hand. “I hate your whole family. You’re garbage people. You’re what fūri parents warn their children about.”

  “I love you too, asshole,” said Antimony.

  I gaped at her. “What—why—how—?”

  “Which, where, and when,” Antimony finished quickly. “Now you’ve taken a journalism class. What, you thought we weren’t going to prepare for Sarah coming back wrong? I’ve read all the comic books you have. When a telepath breaks, sometimes they get better, and sometimes they go Dark Phoenix. I love Sarah as much as you do, but that doesn’t mean I was going to sit back and wait for her to set my world on fire. Fire’s my job.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, wounded.

  Antimony looked at me with sympathy and steel in her eyes. “I really do love Sarah as much as you do, but you love Sarah way differently than I do. She’s my cousin, not my conclusion. If I’d told you I was afraid she’d come back wrong, we would have had an epic fight, you would probably have said some things you’d be regretting right about now, Sarah might not have come home in the first place, and you still wouldn’t have an anti-telepathy charm, because why would you need one?”

  I took a breath, intending to argue. Then I deflated. “Fine,” I said sullenly as I put the charm around my neck. “You’re right. I wouldn’t have listened. But now you’re not listening. The cuckoo downstairs isn’t Sarah.”

  “If she’s not Sarah, how did she get into the house?”

  “The door in the fence was unlocked when Elsie and I got back.”

  That was enough to make Sam sit up. Unlike Annie, who was wearing an oversized roller derby shirt and a pair of jogging shorts, he was wearing nothing but a pair of sweatpants. When the blankets fell away, I was treated to more answers about how furry her simian boyfriend was than I had ever actually wanted.

  “That door’s never unlocked,” he said. “I got found in the woods by a bunch of campers once and had to walk back here in human form, and Mr. Price made me stand at the gate for twenty minutes while he took his time finding his shoes and coming down to get me.”

  “Dad took pictures,” said Antimony, reaching into the drawer again, this time to produce a Taser and several throwing knives, which she promptly dropped on the bed. “Artie, turn around. If I have to go downstairs and kick an imposter’s ass, I want to put a bra on first.”

  “Superheroes never stop to put on their underwear before they fight the forces of evil,” I said, dutifully turning to face the door.

  “Most of them are telekinetic and have gravity-defying boobs,” said Antimony as she rattled around behind me. “My boobs aren’t gravity-defying. My boobs are very, very aware of gravity, and they don’t like it. They want to be protected from it whenever possible, especially if I’m about to go up against a cuckoo. Why was the door unlocked?”

  “I don’t know.” I stared at the posters on the inside of Annie’s door, twitching slightly. “Maybe Sarah went outside for some reason. Maybe someone lured her outside. And she didn’t lock the door.”

  “She knows to lock the door.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe she didn’t lock it on purpose.” The idea was appealing, which probably meant it was wrong. The most appealing ideas always are. Still, I pressed on, saying, “Maybe she knew she had to warn us somehow, and figured leaving the door unlocked would at least be a clue that something was wrong.”

  “Hang on,” said Sam. “Why are you both focusing on ‘how did an imposter get in,’ and not on ‘how can you be so sure it’s an imposter’? I mean, is it just some weirdo wearing a Sarah mask, or what?”

  “You can turn around now, Artie,” said Annie. She continued, “Cuckoos are a low-individual dimorphism species. They all look alike. They have about the same degree of sexual dimorphism as humans or fūri, but their faces, their bodies . . . they tend to be identical, or very close to it. It wouldn’t be hard for another cuckoo to take Sarah’s place.” She sucked in a sharp breath. When I turned around, she was staring at me.

  “The hum,” she said. “Even before I put the charm on, the hum was gone. I didn’t notice because I was asleep. That’s how you knew, isn’t it? There was no hum.”

  Sam put his hand up. “Footnote, please?”

  “We’re all telepathically attuned to Sarah. Makes it easier for her to project thoughts into our heads, makes it harder for us to keep her out of our heads. When she’s in range—so within, say, a half mile—we get a sort of static effect behind our thoughts. Like white noise. The hum came back when she stepped into the warehouse, for me. And now it’s gone again. Sarah’s out of range.”

  “My range is more than a half a mile,” I said. “I can tell she’s there when she’s within three miles of me. She’s not here. She’s not in the woods outside the compound, either. She’s gone.” Panic was clawing at the back of my throat.

  Antimony must have heard it in my voice. She stepped quickly across the floor, dodging several suspicious-looking piles that clearly contained more than just clothes, and gripped my shoulders. “Breathe,” she said. “You need to breathe. We’re going to find her.”

  “Um, maybe this is a bad time and everything, but if Sarah’s gone and there’s a cuckoo in the living room, we should probably worry about that before we worry about where Sarah is?” Sam finally got out of the bed, grabbing a sweatshirt off the floor and tugging it on. “I don’t know as much about cuckoos as I want to. I know they’re bad news. Not something we want to mess around with.”

  “Elsie’s getting our parents from the barn, and I have some of the mice watching the cuckoo who isn’t Sarah,” I said.

  “Can she telepathically control the mice?”<
br />
  Thankfully, I knew the answer to that. I shook my head. “They’re acclimated to Sarah and Aunt Angela, which means they’re resistant to telepathic control. She could hit them with a shoe or something, but she can’t take over their minds unless she really works for it.”

  “Fun times.” Antimony clipped the last of the knives to the waistband of her shorts. “Let’s go say hello to our uninvited guest, shall we?” Her grin was too broad to be anything other than a threat.

  For a moment, I felt sorry for the cuckoo who was waiting downstairs. But only for a moment. If she was here, that meant Sarah was in trouble, and if Sarah was in trouble, I was going to help her.

  This time, finally, I was going to help.

  Fourteen

  “Family is the only thing you can’t replace.”

  —Kevin Price

  The front room of an isolated compound about an hour outside of Portland, Oregon

  THE CUCKOO WOKE WITH a gasp, eyes widening and then going narrow as she realized she was looking at the barrel of a gun.

  “Um, what?” she said, in a tremulous voice. “What’s going on?”

  I have never been so glad not to be the one taking point on an interrogation. She sounded like Sarah. She sounded just like Sarah, enough that it would have made me second-guess myself if not for the ringing silence in my head where the steady, comforting presence of the cuckoo I knew and loved best belonged.

  Take off the charm and you’ll be able to hear her, whispered the small voice of my doubt. I shoved it aside. Doubt is one thing, but I’ve been training my whole life not to doubt what I know to be true, and even when I’d touched her, I hadn’t been able to hear anything. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Sarah. Sarah was gone.

  Sarah needed me.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened again, glinting briefly white before returning to a cool, glacial blue. Something in my chest unclenched, because her eyes . . .

  Her eyes were wrong. Oh, they were the right color, even the right shade, but they were still wrong. I’d spent way too many hours trying not to look into them to not recognize the pattern of her irises, the subtle gradations of light and dark and in-between. This wasn’t Sarah.

  “I’m Sarah,” she said, in a small, injured voice. “I’m your cousin. I live in Ohio with my parents. I just came home. Why are you doing this? You’re scaring me.”

  “What’s my name?”

  The cuckoo went still. “What?”

  “If you’re my cousin Sarah, and you belong here, what’s my name?”

  Her eyes narrowed again as her expression turned sullen. “You’re wearing an anti-telepathy charm. You know I can’t see faces the way you humans do. I can’t tell who you are.”

  “You can’t see faces, but you can hear voices,” said Annie. “You should be able to tell who we are by the sound of our voices. Why can’t you?”

  “Jet lag,” said the cuckoo. “I only just got back here from Ohio. I’m still tired. I’m not used to being around you yet.”

  “You’ve been in love with Artie since you were ten years old,” said Annie, voice mild, almost pleasant. That was a warning sign, even if this cuckoo didn’t recognize it as such. She really didn’t know my cousin, or what Annie was capable of. “You two spent more hours on the phone together than I did with my entire cheerleading squad. There’s no way you don’t recognize Artie’s voice. Jet-lagged or not, you know him.”

  The cuckoo looked frantically at the three of us, an expression of profound misery and confusion on her face. She looked so much like Sarah that it was difficult to see her so unhappy without wanting to do something about it.

  But she wasn’t Sarah. That was the problem. “Where is she?” I demanded, and my voice sounded gruff and strange, like it belonged to someone else, someone bigger and tougher and meaner than me. Someone who could get things done.

  The cuckoo turned wide, guileless eyes toward me. “I’m right here,” she said. “Take off the charm, and you’ll see. I’m right here.”

  “Don’t,” said Annie tightly.

  And that was the problem, because I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. It wasn’t telepathic influence. It was panic, pure and simple. Sarah had been gone for so long, and now we finally had her back, only to lose her again. I’d been able to tell this cuckoo wasn’t her because she’d been asleep. She was awake now. She was awake and she was scared and she was willing to push as hard as she had to in order to make us see things her way. If I took the charm off, she would be Sarah. She would shove her way past the protection I’d inherited from my great-grandmother and make sure I never had to miss her again. I wanted that so badly.

  But it would all be a lie, and Sarah would still be lost. I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. “You’re going to need to find another patsy.”

  Those not-quite-right eyes widened further, into an expression of almost comical surprise. Then they narrowed, her expression becoming one of composed calculation. “If you say so,” she said.

  “Hey,” snapped Antimony. “Focus on me. Where the hell is my cousin?”

  “Ew,” said the cuckoo, disgust dripping from that single syllable. “Do you actually consider her your cousin? That’s gross. She’s so much more evolutionarily advanced than you are. That’s like me saying a honeybee is my new fiancé. It’s inappropriate. You’re perverts, every single one of you.”

  Antimony raised an eyebrow. “So you admit you’re not Sarah.”

  “I just wish I hadn’t cut my hair for this gig,” said the cuckoo, with a one-shouldered shrug. “Bangs are so passé. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Sam warily.

  “Because that one,” she nodded toward me, “told me how to get out of this. You might not thank him for that.”

  “What are you—” began Antimony.

  That was as far as she got before something hit her in the back of the head. She stopped for a moment, expression comically dazed, before she toppled forward, losing her grasp on the gun in the process. Sam yelped. He had a choice in that moment—catch his falling girlfriend or catch the gun—and sadly, he chose wrong, grabbing Antimony before she could hit the floor. The ball of ice that had knocked her down fell, unheeded, to the carpet.

  And the cuckoo caught the gun.

  “James, what the hell,” snarled Sam, looking over his shoulder toward the stairs, where our second resident sorcerer was presumably standing. James specialized in cold things. James specialized in cold things, and James wasn’t a biological member of the family; he didn’t have the protections against cuckoo influence that the rest of us had inherited.

  I didn’t turn. Turning would have meant taking my eyes off the cuckoo, who was now holding Annie’s pistol aimed squarely at my forehead.

  “If you move, I shoot,” she said. “If you say anything I don’t like, I shoot. Honestly, I’d shoot anyway, if I didn’t think we might need you later. What she sees in you, I have no idea.”

  “Of course you don’t, I’m wearing an anti-telepathy charm.” I winced inwardly. Maybe backtalking the murderous cuckoo who had replaced Sarah was a bad idea.

  “This would all be so much easier if you’d take that nasty thing off.”

  “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you.” The temperature in the room was dropping steadily. I still didn’t dare look behind me, but every hair on Sam’s shoulders was standing on end, and he looked like he was fighting a silent war between staying where he was and serving as possible backup and getting Antimony the hell out of there.

  She wasn’t moving. James must have hit her just right to knock her out, or at least daze her for a while. I refused to consider anything worse. Antimony was the best of us or, at least, the most bloody-minded and tenacious. She’d figure this out. I just needed to buy her the time.

  And jus
t like that, I knew what I had to do. I took a step backward, away from the cuckoo. She bared her teeth in a snarl.

  “Stop where you are, incubus,” she spat. “You’re mine now.”

  “Are you all right, Heloise?” James sounded half-drunk, or maybe drugged, like he didn’t fully understand what was going on.

  The cuckoo winced. “I’m fine, Jimmy,” she said. “I’m just explaining to Artie here why he needs to come with me.”

  “He’ll come with us because we’re on the right side of the fight,” said James. “He’s smart enough to know that. Not like them.” There was pure venom in his voice, and I knew that if I turned, he’d be looking at Annie and Sam, hands full of ice, ready to attack.

  I took another step back. “Sam,” I said quietly. “Run.”

  Under other circumstances—if Annie hadn’t been taken by surprise, if we’d been able to fight ice with fire, if the cuckoo hadn’t managed to get her hands on a gun—I knew Sam would have argued with me. He’s not family by blood, but he’s still family, thanks to Annie’s fiat, and he knows better than to leave a man behind if there’s any other choice. Right now, there wasn’t a choice. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him tense, nod, and gather Annie even closer to his chest. Then he leapt into the air.

  There’s almost nothing as fast as a fūri who has somewhere to be. I’ve watched Verity—who has reflexes that border on preternaturally sharp—throwing knives at Sam while he was in motion, and she’s never come anywhere near hitting him. When Sam wants to get away, he gets away.

  His first leap carried him to the banister, one long arm clutching Annie’s unconscious form. He landed easy, grabbing the rail with both feet and his free hand before he leapt again, this time heading up the stairs to the first landing. The cuckoo swore loudly. James hurled a ball of ice after the fleeing fūri. It missed widely enough to become comic, smashing into the wall between two framed family portraits. One of them fell to the ground and shattered.