Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “That sounds like something you’d want,” said Mom.

  “It does, doesn’t it? I know it’s something she wants.” Mark jerked his chin toward the silent, furious Heloise. “But no. I’m here to help you stop this. I’m here because this needs to not happen. There’s one thing you need to do first, though, and it’s going to be hard.”

  “What’s that?” asked Uncle Kevin.

  Mark took a deep breath. “You’re going to need to trust me.”

  Seventeen

  “There are losses we don’t move past, no matter how hard we try. Some wounds, once inflicted, bleed forever underneath the skin. All we can do is learn to live with them.”

  —Jonathan Healy

  Back in the house, with two monsters in the barn, no big deal (very big deal)

  THIS IS A BAD idea!” Mom was right up in Uncle Kevin’s face, shoulders locked, one finger jabbing at his chest like she thought she could poke him into seeing things her way. “We can’t let them go just because one of them is a good liar. Lying is what cuckoos do. You’d see that, if not for the part where you—”

  She seemed to realize she was treading on dangerous ground and stopped herself mid-sentence. Not quickly enough; the damage was done.

  “Which part, Janie? The part where I married a cuckoo’s daughter? The part where I welcomed my wife’s sister into my home? How much of this is about Sarah, and how much of it is about the part where you don’t want Artie to be in love with Sarah? You can marry an incubus, but God forbid the boy wants to date outside his species?”

  Mom’s eyes went wide for a moment before narrowing into a menacing expression I knew all too well. “Kevin Alexander Price,” she said, grinding each word between her teeth before spitting it out, so his name became a condemnation, “I can’t believe you would say something like that to me. I can’t believe you would think that.”

  “I can,” said Aunt Evie.

  Antimony was suddenly at my elbow, grasping it and steering me away from the unsettling sight of our parents ripping into each other. I started to open my mouth. She shook her head, pulling me along to the kitchen, where James and Sam were waiting.

  “You know the plan?” she asked, eyes on James.

  He nodded, his still-damp hair sticking to his forehead and ears. “I’m good with intransigent parents,” he said. “Go save your cousin.”

  Antimony nodded and started walking again, not letting go of me until we had reached the front door and slipped outside to the porch. Sam followed, easing the door shut again once we were all safely through. Annie let go of my elbow.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go get our cousin back.”

  “What are you—we can’t go without them.” I gestured toward the house. “We don’t have the numbers to go up against a whole hive of cuckoos. It’ll be a bloodbath!”

  “That’s why we’re picking up some reinforcements before we leave,” she said, and started across the lawn toward the barn, not looking back.

  “Come on.” Sam clapped me on the shoulder with one massive hand. “She’s not going to wait for us, and I know you’ll be pissed if she goes running off to the rescue without you.”

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said, and followed Annie.

  She didn’t look back once as we walked to the barn and inside, to where Elsie and Dad were still standing watch over our two captive cuckoos. Elsie studied her nails, tucked the file into her purse, and stood.

  “Took you long enough,” she said. “Dad owes me five bucks.”

  “To be fair, I couldn’t estimate how long it would take Annie here to get tired of waiting for Artie to move,” said Dad, voice mild. He gave the can of Raid another shake, still aiming it directly at Heloise’s face. “You can’t have this one, kids. I’m sorry if your plan was depending on her, but I don’t trust her enough to let her up.”

  “We only need one asshole for this extraction,” said Annie, producing a knife from inside her shirt . . .

  . . . and using it to cut through the ropes holding Mark to the chair. I attempted to protest. All that came out was a garbled squeaking sound.

  Mark stretched his arms over his head, grimacing. “You people don’t care much about chiropractic health when you’re tying someone down, do you?” he asked.

  “What the hell, Annie?” I managed not to shout. I was pretty proud of myself for that.

  “He’s going to lead us to Sarah,” said Annie. She made the knife disappear back into her clothing. “Relax, Artie. He can’t reach our minds through the charms we’re wearing, which means he can’t do anything to hurt us. Unless he knows how a gun works. And managed to get his hands on one, which, not going to happen.”

  Mark laughed wryly. “My parents never allowed firearms in the house. Too much of a chance Cici would pick one up and manage to hurt somebody with it.”

  “Your parents?” I asked. “I thought cuckoos always left their babies with host families.”

  “Shut up,” hissed Heloise.

  “I thought we had finally come to an agreement,” said Dad, and shook the can again before giving a small, warning squirt of pesticide in the air above her head. Heloise whimpered. She didn’t say anything else.

  “You know, I gotta say, I’m really impressed with how terrible you people are,” said Mark. “I’ve been listening to Ingrid talk about her daughter the princess, and how she was going to make her a Queen and use her to destroy the world, for years. She never mentioned that the people raising her were genuinely awful. You hate us because we’re the competition, right?”

  “We hate you because you’re dangerous predators who murder innocent people and make things worse for absolutely everyone, but thanks for playing.” Elsie stood, slinging her purse strap over her shoulder. “Dad, you’re cool with staying here, right?”

  “Of course, pumpkin.” Dad gave his can another shake. “Your mother’s going to be furious when she realizes what’s happening. I’m hoping this little gift bag will keep her from getting too angry. It’s not every day you get a cuckoo to play with.”

  “I’m not a toy,” snarled Heloise.

  “Sort of are,” said Elsie. “Sort of turned yourself into one when you decided that a bad haircut and a pair of yoga pants meant you could pretend to be our cousin without getting in trouble for it. Because your friend is right: we’re not good people. We can’t afford to be. We’re one side of a three-sided war, and you’re the enemy.”

  “Hey!” I hadn’t realized I was going to shout until I was actually doing it. Everyone except for Heloise turned to look at me. I glared at them, trying to encompass the whole room at once. “If somebody doesn’t tell me what’s going on right now, I’m going to march back inside and tell Mom that this is happening.”

  “We’re going to rescue Sarah,” said Annie bluntly. “Mark here is going to lead us straight to her, and we’re going to get her back.”

  I looked at Mark. He turned his face slightly away, not meeting my eyes, and I knew. I knew what he wasn’t ready to tell us yet; what I wasn’t ready to hear, because there was still a chance he might be wrong. He’d said there hadn’t been a Queen in centuries, not since the cuckoos had ripped a hole in whatever innocent dimension they’d parasitized before this one. He could still be wrong.

  Sarah could still be saved.

  “Fine,” I said. “Elsie, you’re driving.”

  “I am,” she said. “It’ll be a tight fit, but I’ve crammed five people into my car before.”

  “So let’s go.” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine Sarah wants us to keep her waiting any longer than we have to.”

  “She’s never been that kind of patient,” Annie agreed. The five of us started for the door, forming a tight little clump with Mark in the middle, where he couldn’t run away.

  “Have fun, kids!” Dad called, and then we were outside
, and everything was happening.

  * * *

  Mark got the front passenger seat. I didn’t like putting him up there with my sister and easy access to the steering wheel, but it was that or cram him into the backseat, which would increase the odds of accidentally touching him without a layer of clothing in the way. Our anti-telepathy charms were good. They weren’t good enough to stand up to extended skin contact. We might have decided to trust him for the moment, but that didn’t mean we wanted him inside our minds.

  That was where a cuckoo could do the most damage. Once they were past your defenses, they could basically do whatever they wanted, and there was no way to catch or stop them.

  No one came out of the house as we drove down to the gate, and through it to the road. Elsie still waited until we were clear to turn on her headlights, and slumped slightly as she did, the worst of the tension leaving her shoulders.

  “Okay, that’s one hurdle down,” she said.

  “My parents are going to kill me,” said Antimony. “Actual murder. Let’s really enjoy this little rescue mission, because it’s the last one I’m ever going to go on.” She was sitting in the middle, one leg slung over Sam’s to make the footwell less crowded.

  Sam snorted. “Your parents are going to be arguing about how they’re supposed to handle this until the sun comes up. We’ll be home and making waffles by then.”

  “I like waffles,” said Elsie.

  “I know this is only confusing because I can’t read your mind, but your parents aren’t actually going to kill you, are they?” asked Mark. “If they are, I say again, absolutely terrible people. How you got a reputation for being the good guys, I may never know.”

  “We have a good propaganda arm,” I said. “You mentioned your parents before. I thought all cuckoos killed their parents when they hit puberty.”

  “And a sister,” added Antimony. “Cici. What gives?”

  “Right.” Mark sighed. “You know how I don’t want to destroy the world and head off to terrorize a fresh dimension with the rest of my merry band of predators? Well, Cici is why. She’s my little sister. Cecilia. She’s a holy terror. Smart and funny and awful. Really, really awful. She might be as terrible as you. It’s hard for me to measure.”

  “Another cuckoo?” asked Elsie.

  “Human,” said Mark. “You’re not the only ones who come from a mixed family, you know.”

  “I thought you . . .” I stopped, unsure how to finish my thought without sounding like an ass. Then I remembered that Mark was still technically our prisoner and had been working with the people who kidnapped Sarah and forced her into a dangerous, involuntary physical transformation. “I thought cuckoo kids prevented their human parents from having more children.”

  “Normally, we do; cuckoos are selfish even as children, and the majority of us are happy as only children,” said Mark. “We don’t like to share. But my parents left me with my grandmother for six months when Dad got a job with a German robotics firm. They must have gotten pregnant their first night in Europe. Mom was huge when they came back.” He sounded frustrated and fond at the same time, like any big brother thinking about the moment when his life turned upside-down. “She waddled when she walked, it was hilarious. And then there was this baby. This screaming, red-faced, wailing baby that everyone said was my little sister. And I remember . . .”

  He paused for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “I remember thinking ‘I could wish for this to go away.’ I hadn’t reached my first instar yet, I didn’t have conscious access to the history, but I knew I wasn’t like my parents. I knew sometimes I scraped my knee and I bled clear and everyone acted like that was normal. I knew I could hear other people’s dreams. And that baby . . . I knew, just by looking at her, that she would bleed red like our parents. She wouldn’t feel like she was somehow outside the family, like she came from another planet. It would have been easy to hate her.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  “I know it sounds cliché and stupid and all that bullshit, but I poked her. And she grabbed my finger, and her hand was so tiny, and her grip was so strong, and I thought, who cares what color her blood is? Who cares if she looks more like Dad than I do? She’s my sister. She’s mine. I guess I was still selfish—I’m a cuckoo, after all—but selfish doesn’t have to mean bad. You people, you’re selfish. You think you’d be riding to some random cuckoo’s rescue? Fuck, no. You want Sarah back because she’s yours. She belongs to you, and you didn’t agree to lose her, and now you’re going to go get her. Selfishness can be a strength.”

  “What about that first instar you were talking about?” asked Annie. “Shouldn’t you have killed your whole family then, like a good little cuckoo? All the ones we’ve been able to talk to have told us that they loved their adoptive parents right up until the moment when they didn’t. Usually that conversation happens right before they try to kill us, so they’re probably biased, but still.”

  “Oh, I hit it,” said Mark. “I woke up in the middle of the night with the knowledge and laws of my entire species filling my head, crowding out everything else, making it almost impossible for me to breathe. I was fifteen. Cici was four. I thought she’d probably scream and wake our parents, so I knew I had to kill her first if I wanted it to be easy. It mattered that it be easy. I didn’t want to upset her. That’s probably when I should have realized something was wrong, when I was thinking ‘I don’t want to upset my sister’ and ‘I’m going to murder her’ at the same time, but I was fifteen and I was being eaten alive by memories that weren’t mine, so I think I did okay, all things considered. I got a knife. I went to her room.”

  He paused, long enough to turn his face toward the window and watch the dark trees rolling by outside. “She had this doll. This stupid doll. If you squeezed it, it was supposed to say ‘Mama.’ Cici was hard on her toys—she still is—and she’d bashed it against the wall until the voice box broke, and all it did when you squeezed it was make this awful moaning sound. I stepped on it on my way into her room. She woke up. She looked at me with those big brown eyes, and she asked if we were playing a game called ‘horror movie.’ And I said yes, we were, and the first person to scream would lose.” Mark chuckled darkly. “I figured it would keep her quiet long enough for me to take care of her, you know? Only instead, she jumped out of bed and ran off giggling, and I had to chase after her so she wouldn’t wake our parents, and every time I almost caught her, she’d get away again. It was almost morning before I realized I was letting her get away. She’d managed to keep me running until the murderous period passed and it didn’t matter that I knew what I was. It didn’t matter because I loved her, and I loved my parents, and I wasn’t going to hurt them.”

  “And so you kept them,” I said.

  “I kept them,” Mark agreed. “Cici’s twelve now. She’s a living nightmare pretending to be a little girl, and I’m grateful every single day that she woke up before I could do something I couldn’t take back. It’s why I knew the plan—the big, amazing, this-is-gonna-work plan—was going to fail.”

  “How’s that?” asked Sam.

  “A couple of years ago, I lost her at the mall. Turned around and she was gone. I pretty much hate most humans. Being able to read their minds will do that to a guy. The things people think when they don’t know someone’s looking . . .” He shuddered. “Anyway, she was just gone. So I freaked out and went looking for her, thinking the worst, thinking I’d forced myself not to be a monster for her sake and then failed to protect her from the other monsters, when she came running out of this store, grabbed my arm, and said a man who looked just like me but wasn’t had tried to take her. I knew she had to mean another cuckoo—we’d clearly wandered into someone’s hunting grounds, and he’d assumed I was poaching, so he’d taken her to teach me a lesson—but I also know that we all look alike to humans. I asked how she knew it wasn’t me. She said he didn’t h
um. Humans who spend enough time around us after our first instar acclimate to our presence. They learn how to tell us apart, and we can’t change their minds the same way we can before they get attuned to us. It’s a double-edged sword. The more time we spend with someone the more we can influence them, at first, but eventually they get desensitized, and it gets so much harder.”

  “You know about the hum,” I said.

  “Once Cici told me, yeah. I started watching for it. I always know when she’s around, or our folks. They change the texture of the air.” Mark shook his head. “I won’t lose them. They’re mine.”

  “What happened to the cuckoo who took your sister?” asked Elsie.

  “I went back to the mall the next day, alone, waited for him to approach me, stabbed him in the stomach fifteen times, dumped him out back, and set his corpse on fire,” said Mark, as matter-of-fact as if he’d been placing an order at McDonalds. “Nobody touches my family.”

  “But you helped Heloise touch ours,” I said.

  “I helped Ingrid, who, please remember, is Sarah’s biological mother, lure her away from you. I’m not saying I didn’t. She knows where I live. She knows where my family lives. I have no real desire to be at war with you—you are all terrible, terrifying people—but I wasn’t going to risk Cici’s life because your cousin was somehow more important than she is. She’s not. I did what I was told, I escaped as soon as I could, and now I’m helping you. Be grateful for that part. I could have told Ingrid about the hum. I could have sided with my hive against humanity. I’m not, because I love my sister. Take the fucking win.”

  Elsie took the next curve more sharply than she needed to. Mark’s forehead thumped against the glass of the passenger side window. He swore, rubbing his head as he turned to glare at her.