Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  I rose and walked over to the board, picking up the first piece of chalk. It fit perfectly against my fingers. The numbers whispered, urging me to begin. I pressed the chalk to the board.

  I began.

  Nineteen

  “Well, bugger.”

  —Thomas Price

  A sleepy residential neighborhood in Beaverton, Oregon, about to have a real problem

  MARK’S DIRECTIONS HAD BROUGHT us out of the woods, past Portland to Beaverton, a suburb where the lights always seemed to turn off before the sun had fully committed to going to bed. The streets were asleep, lined in darkened houses, sidewalks empty.

  Until.

  We turned one last corner, and the sidewalks abruptly acquired a thriving, if silent, population of pale-skinned, black-haired people whose clothing came from all walks of life. One woman who looked like she’d just stepped off the pages of Vogue turned her head to watch us roll by, her eyes flashing briefly white. Two men dressed like bikers did the same, followed by a man in the pastel scrubs of a pediatric nurse and a woman in a bathing suit. She wasn’t shivering, despite the chill of the early morning air. None of them seemed to be bothered even a little by the cold.

  We passed what looked like an entire preschool class, all of them wearing pajamas. Some were clutching stuffed toys. All of them looked absent, somehow, like they didn’t really understand where they were or what was going on.

  “What’s up with the kids?” I asked.

  Mark glanced in their direction. “They’re still larval. They haven’t reached their first instar. They don’t have the history yet. Someone had to go and get them from their host families. Most of them probably think they’re having a really strange dream.”

  Voice carefully measured to contain her horror and growing rage, Elsie asked, “And the host families . . . ?”

  “They weren’t the target. A few of them are probably dead, if that’s what you’re asking, but most would have been asleep when the children were taken.” Mark sounded utterly unconcerned, like this was nothing of any real importance. “Either you’ll stop your cousin and they’ll get their kids back, or you won’t, and they’ll be vaporized before they can wake up. So I guess they’re fine.”

  “You guess?” snapped Elsie. “What happened to you being the kinder, gentler cuckoo?”

  Mark turned to look at her. “I never said I was. I said I loved my sister and my parents. Three humans, out of however many billion there are currently running around this shithole of a planet. And before you judge me for that, how many cuckoos do you care about, again? Because I’m counting two. Two cuckoos, full stop. Seems like I’m doing a little better with the cross-species empathy project.”

  Elsie narrowed her eyes and kept on driving.

  The house we wanted was at the end of the street, a small, standard, 1970s tract home that didn’t stand out in any way from its neighbors, save for the seven RVs parked out front, and the dozen or so cuckoos standing patiently on the lawn. Their eyes were glowing a steady white, like Christmas lights strung through the air. Elsie stopped the car in the middle of the street, just staring at them.

  “That’s it,” she said. “We can’t get any closer.”

  “You don’t need to,” said Mark. “All of you are wearing anti-telepathy charms. You’re basically invisible to me right now, unless I’m looking directly at you. All the cuckoos in the house have already sunk into the corona of Sarah’s metamorphosis. They’re watching her do the math, waiting for the moment when it all comes together and she wakes up with the knowledge like an egg waiting to hatch inside her mind.”

  “Meaning if we stay quiet, they won’t realize we’re here,” I said slowly.

  “Bingo.”

  “What’s to stop you from telling them? We’re outnumbered.”

  “There aren’t enough bullets in the world,” Antimony muttered.

  “Nothing,” said Mark. “If I want to betray you, I’ll betray you, and you won’t be able to stop me. So I guess this is the part where you either trust me or don’t. If you trust me, we go get your cousin. If you don’t . . .” He let his voice trail off.

  His meaning was still perfectly clear. “If we don’t, we lose her,” I said. I unbuckled my seatbelt. “Fuck this.”

  The sound of the car door opening was incredibly loud in the eerily silent neighborhood. A few cuckoos looked our way, only to look away again immediately afterward. We weren’t people to them. We didn’t matter.

  Mark waited until we were all out of the car before starting toward the house. We fell into step behind him, forming a short, terrified line. My palms were sweating. I wiped them on my jeans. I’d never wished my pheromones were more effective before, but in that moment, I did. If I’d been able to affect cuckoos, I wouldn’t have needed to worry about a thing. I could have just wiped off my cologne and waltzed right into the middle of things, demanding they all love me, knowing that I would be obeyed.

  Normally, I would have flinched away from that thought. If consent matters where the body is involved, how much more important is it when it comes to the mind? Normally, I wasn’t walking into a cuckoo hive to retrieve my cousin, who I—who I was coming to hate calling “cousin” more and more, because it implied a blood relationship that wasn’t there, and I had finally allowed myself to admit, to myself and everybody else, that I was completely in love with her.

  The cuckoos didn’t move as we approached, or as Mark began leading us through the invisible maze formed by the placement of their bodies. We couldn’t walk in a straight line without bumping into them, but he seemed to know where to put his feet, or at least how to avoid overly attracting their attention. He walked and we followed, swallowing the sound of our own breathing, doing whatever we had to in order to go unnoticed.

  Sam was so tense that he’d shifted back into human form, walking barefoot through the grass. Flames flickered around Annie’s fingers, brief and bright and fading out as quickly as they appeared. Only Elsie looked perfectly relaxed, as calm as if she’d been waiting for a sale down at the Sephora. She was also the closest to Mark. I looked a little closer. There was a knife in her hand. If he betrayed us, she was planning to take him down before he could enjoy the fruits of his betrayal. It wouldn’t be enough to save us, but it would be better than nothing.

  I appreciate my sister. She can seem like a massive flake, but she’s pragmatic as all hell when she needs to be. People get hung up on the sparkly nails and the neon hair and forget that she’s still a Price. We all are.

  I stood up a little straighter as I walked. Yes, we were marching into a cuckoo hive, and yes, there was every chance that one or more of us would die tonight, but we were Prices. This was what we were born to do.

  Mark reached the door without incident. He turned to look at the rest of us, pressing one finger to his lips in an exaggerated sign for silence. Then he pushed it open and stepped inside. We followed, still in our straight line, until I pulled the door gently shut behind me. It wouldn’t stop the cuckoos on the lawn from pouring into the house if they got the signal—it would barely even slow them down—but every little bit helps when you’re going up against telepathic killers from another dimension.

  Sometimes my life is more like an X-Men comic than I want it to be.

  The house had been built along a much more predictable floor plan than the Price compound: the front door deposited us in a little atrium attached to the front hallway, with pegs for our coats and a rack for any muddy shoes. There was a pair of blue boots, sized for a small child, lying on their sides next to the rack. I gestured toward it, eyebrows raised in silent question. Mark followed my gesture, and grimaced. He shook his head before pointing to his chest and mouthing, exaggeratedly, “Not me.”

  Right. Whoever had owned this house before the cuckoos came to claim it was already dead, and there was nothing we could do to save them. It was sort of nice knowi
ng that Mark hadn’t been part of whatever group had decided that this was their new base of operations. I didn’t really want to kill the only cuckoo who was actually helping us. He deserved to go home to his sister. He deserved a chance.

  There were lights at the end of the hall, and voices, although no one was talking. Someone laughed; someone else made a dismayed grunting sound, like they’d stepped on something unpleasant. I couldn’t get a sense of how many of them there were, but the house felt full, oppressive, like it was almost at capacity. Telepaths didn’t really need to speak to give themselves away.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket, opened the notepad function, and typed a quick message before holding it out to Mark.

  Where’s Sarah?

  He looked up from the screen and shook his head, spreading his hands in an indication of ignorance. Then he produced his own phone, and repeated my actions, finally flipping it around so we could all see his screen.

  She isn’t broadcasting, so she must still be in morph, he wrote. She could be anywhere in the house.

  Great. We split up and look for her, I replied. Me and Elsie upstairs, you, Sam, and Annie down here. If you find her, Annie will text me. Same if we find her. Okay?

  I looked around our little band of unlikely saviors—Earth deserved something way more organized, and even more heavily armed—until each of them nodded in turn. Then I put my phone back in my pocket and started toward the stairs, with Elsie on my heels.

  Hold on, Sarah, I thought. All you need to do now is hold on.

  * * *

  The blue boots had belonged to a little girl, pigtailed and gap-toothed and displayed proudly along the length of the hall, sometimes by herself, sometimes in concert with her baby sibling, who had been too small to have teeth of their own in what looked like the most recent pictures. I wasn’t studying them more than I had to. They were part of a story I didn’t want to know, whose ending was signaled in tiny, terrible clues all around me. The smear on the edge of the bathroom door that looked like dried strawberry jam but probably wasn’t; the open door of a small, silent room where a crib waited for an occupant whose naptime had ended forever.

  “I hate them,” whispered Elsie, voice low and tight and risky. Cuckoos have human-normal hearing—the ones downstairs wouldn’t be able to hear us unless we spoke at a normal volume. But until we’d checked all these rooms, we had no way of knowing whether they contained a cuckoo, someone who’d slipped away from the rest of the hive for a nap and might find themselves in the enviable position of being able to catch a pair of intruders.

  I nodded my understanding. Elsie spared me a brief, anguished look before starting toward the nearest door, knife in hand, ready to begin our search in earnest.

  The room was empty. All the rooms along the front of the hall were empty, until we had one more door to check, and a lot of failure to carry on our shoulders. Elsie looked at me. I nodded again, then put my hand on the doorknob.

  I wanted to remove the anti-telepathy charm that was keeping me safe. I wanted to know whether the comforting psychic hum of Sarah’s presence would resume, as familiar as the sound of my own heartbeat, and somehow as essential to my mental health. I hadn’t realized how quiet the world was until that silent song had gone away and returned again.

  I wanted it back. I wanted her back.

  I opened the door.

  The room on the other side was dominated by its bed, king-sized, easily, with too many pillows mounded at the head and the sort of thick, ornately-carved frame that spoke of either family heirloom or more money than sense. A cuckoo was stretched out in the dead center, hands folded over her breast like she was being prepared for her own funeral, black hair fanned across the pillows around her, eyes closed. She was wearing a simple white dress, almost childlike in its cut and style.

  Elsie crowded into the room behind me, knocking me out of the doorway. When I still didn’t move, she pried my fingers off the doorknob and closed the door, creating a small bubble of privacy.

  “Well?” she demanded, in a low, dangerous voice. “Is it her?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know.” My ears reddened with the shame of my admission. If this was Sarah, I should have known, the same way I’d known that Heloise wasn’t Sarah. Even with the anti-telepathy charm, I should have known. She’d been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. She was my Sarah.

  But all cuckoos look essentially alike, and this one was no different. Everything about her was right, and everything about her was wrong, because I never saw Sarah in this kind of silence. Even when she was asleep, I could hear her in the back of my head. I’d been listening to her my whole life.

  “We need to hurry,” said Elsie. “I don’t know how long we can creep around in here.”

  “I know. Just . . . just hold on.” Cautiously, I approached the bed. The cuckoo didn’t move. She was profoundly asleep—if sleep was even the right word. She was so still that she might as well have been dead. Only the very slight rise and fall of her chest kept me from panicking. She was alive. She was. She was just . . . gone.

  When I reached the head of the bed, I leaned over and gingerly brushed the cuckoo’s bangs away from her forehead. There was a long, shallow cut there, held closed with butterfly bandages. It was clearly Aunt Evie’s handiwork. I exhaled through my nose, trying to keep myself as quiet as possible, even as my hand started to shake.

  “It’s her,” I said. “It’s Sarah.”

  “Are you sure? Heloise had a cut on her forehead, too.”

  “This is the real one. Heloise had a cut on her forehead because someone put it there. The edges were too regular, and the cut itself was too deep. This is from Sarah slamming into the dashboard of my car. It’s her.” I put my hand on her shoulder, pushing as hard as I dared. “Wake up. We’re here to rescue you.”

  She didn’t react.

  I pushed again, even harder this time. “Sarah, come on. You need to wake up.”

  She still didn’t react.

  I sighed heavily. “Okay. I guess this is the way it’s got to be.” I bent forward and slid my arms underneath her, gathering as much of her weight as I could before I straightened.

  She felt like a dried leaf, all shape and no substance. Her skin was burning hot where it touched mine. She was running a fever so intense that it seemed like it would have to be fatal, the sort of thing no one really walked away from. I pulled her close to my chest, one arm supporting her torso while the other held up her knees, and looked to Elsie.

  “We need to get her out of here,” I said.

  “You think the cuckoos are going to let us walk out of here with their precious princess?” she asked. “We have telepathy blockers. She doesn’t.”

  “I think we have to try,” I said. “Get the door?”

  Elsie looked at me grimly. Then she nodded and moved to clear the way for me to carry Sarah into the hall.

  Every step felt like a mile, weighted down by both Sarah’s body and my own growing fear. She wasn’t waking up. Whatever they’d done to her, she wasn’t waking up, and that meant she was defenseless; no matter what happened between here and home, we’d be the ones who had to keep her safe and get her away from the danger presented by her own kind. Would she understand why we’d done what we’d done? Would she forgive us?

  The hall was dark, and I stepped on something that squeaked loudly, the sort of squeezebox that gets put into kids’ toys to drive their parents up the wall. Elsie and I both froze, counting the seconds. No one came to investigate. We started walking again.

  Elsie led the way down the stairs, ready to catch me and Sarah both if my balance failed me. We were almost to the bottom when a familiar shriek of rage and indignation shattered the silence: Antimony. Which meant the cuckoos were onto us.

  Which meant we had to run.

  I didn’t look back as I raced for the door, and neither
did Elsie, leaping several feet ahead of me to wrench the door open and start across the cuckoo-burdened lawn. Our approach had been quiet, careful, and masked by Mark’s presence. None of those things were on our side now. As we ran, the cuckoos turned to track us, snapping out of whatever fugue they’d been wrapped in and beginning to move forward.

  “It’s Sarah!” I yelled. “They’re following Sarah!”

  “Great observation! Keep running!”

  The car was still parked in the middle of the street, exactly as we’d left it. Elsie pulled one of the back doors open and I thrust Sarah inside, not bothering with the seatbelt as I shoved her across the back seat and started to slide in beside her. That’s when I froze.

  The cuckoos from the lawn were bearing down on us, their faces twisted with fury, their eyes glowing white. Annie, Sam, and Mark were nowhere to be seen. If we drove away now, we’d lose them.

  “Artie! Get in the fucking car!”

  I twisted to look at my sister, who was gesturing wildly for me to get in so she could start the engine. We had Sarah. We were saving Sarah. If we tried to wait and save the others—if that was even possible at this point—we’d lose her, and if Mark could be trusted, losing her meant losing the world.

  This was what we’d been training for since we were old enough to understand what it meant to fight. This was what we’d always known was coming.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and slammed the car door.

  I was still buckling my belt when Elsie hammered her foot down on the gas, sending us rocketing forward, into the front ranks of the charging cuckoos. I realized what she was going to do almost too late, and threw myself to the side, holding Sarah’s body in place with my own. I didn’t see the impact, or how many of the cuckoos she hit, but I felt it, a shuddering jolt that traveled through my entire body even as the car was spinning into a full turn and we were racing away down the street.