Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “What happens if you don’t? Can’t you just . . . wouldn’t that mean you repeated the class you’d already taken? Wouldn’t that give us more time?”

  “That’s where the metaphor falls apart. Haven’t you ever seen a butterfly who couldn’t finish breaking out of the cocoon? They die, Artie. They get stuck, and their wings can’t straighten, and they die.”

  “Are you saying you’re trying to grow wings?”

  “I’m saying that if I don’t finish breaking out of this cocoon, I’m pretty sure I won’t survive.” She looked back to me, resignation and grief in her expression. Then she smiled. “You know, I think the best thing about meeting on a mindscape is being able to see your face. I never do out in the real world, not unless it’s in a photograph. You’re really pretty. Did you know that? I’m glad I know that.”

  “Um.” I reached back and rubbed the back of my neck, or at least the idea of the back of my neck. Again, telepathy is confusing. “I don’t think it’s ‘pretty’ for me. Pretty sure it’s supposed to be ‘handsome.’ And either way, it’s not technically correct.”

  “You have a skewed sense of your own appearance, which is common,” said Sarah. “I think you’re beautiful. Right now, I’m going to be selfish and say that’s what matters.”

  “That’s not selfish.”

  “Isn’t it?” Her smile was even sadder than before. “You can’t stay here, Artie. I need to be alone with the numbers. I need to focus on them right now. I need to show them that I can handle them.”

  “They’re just numbers.”

  “No. These numbers are different. These numbers are awake. They can see me, and they’re trying to decide whether I’m good enough to see them.” She glanced at the chalkboard, fingers twitching. Then she raised her hand.

  The chalk pulled itself up off the floor and flew to her, smacking into her palm. She closed her fingers around it.

  “I’ll be home soon, I promise,” she said. “The cuckoos can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. I just need to finish this equation and I can come home.”

  “Sarah—”

  “Kiss me one more time before you have to go?” Her voice was soft, plaintive. There was no way I could have told her no. I stepped forward, pressing my lips to hers, and she melted against me, languid and slow. I could have kissed her forever. I wanted to kiss her forever, the rest of the world be damned.

  Sarah was the one to eventually pull away.

  “Don’t worry about me, Artie.” She looked at me, and her smile was heartbreakingly bright, and devastatingly beautiful. I couldn’t look at it. I couldn’t look away.

  “Please,” I whispered. “What you’re trying to do will destroy the world.”

  “It won’t. Ingrid said—”

  “She’s a cuckoo. Cuckoos lie.”

  For a moment, I saw doubt in her eyes. “I’m a cuckoo. Do you think I lie?”

  “Not to me,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, and her eyes flashed white, and everything went black.

  * * *

  I sat up with a gasp, feeling the heavy weight of gravity settle over me, along with a dozen sensations I hadn’t realized were missing—the whisper of the night wind, the cool dampness of the air, the looming shadow of the sky, which was considering whether or not it was time to rain. In Portland, the sky is always considering whether it’s time to rain.

  “Good,” said Elsie. She was bending over me, her hands on her knees, an uncharacteristically solemn expression on her face. I could see the lights of the compound behind her. It looked like the whole house was lit up, even the rooms that were usually left closed-off unless more of the family was in residence.

  Elsie’s finger jabbed at the center of my chest, jerking me back into the moment. “I thought you were dead, you asshole.”

  “I told you he was still breathing,” said Sam.

  I craned my neck back. He was standing behind me, arms crossed, still in his vaguely simian form. His tail was wrapped tightly around his left leg, like he was anchoring himself in place.

  “What . . .” My throat was dry. I swallowed hard and tried again. “What happened?”

  “You dropped your charm and went down, dude. It was like someone had flipped your switch or something.” Sam shook his head. “We couldn’t figure out how to peel you off the cuckoo without touching her, and with the way you’d gone down, we were sort of worried you’d jerk us into whatever hallucinatory Wonderland you’d gone and tumbled into. So we left you alone until we got to the house.”

  “So how . . . ?”

  “I opened the car door and unbuckled your seatbelt, and you fell out of the car,” said Elsie. “You didn’t wake up, so I stuffed your anti-telepathy charm into your pocket. That did the trick. And before you ask, Annie took Sarah inside.”

  Then she hauled back and kicked me in the hip.

  “Hey! Ow!” I put my arms up to block my face, just in case she had some wacky ideas about continuing her assault. “What the fuck, Els?”

  “Never, ever, ever do that to me again, you asshole.” She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around me before I had a chance to respond, yanking me against her and burying her face in the front of my shirt. Her shoulders moved in uneven little hitches. I realized, to my dismay, that she was crying.

  My badass big sister who could handle anything the world wanted to throw at us was crying.

  “You’re not allowed to leave me,” she said, voice muffled by the way her head was bent, the way her lips were pressed to my shirt. She sounded . . . small. It was terrifying. “I thought you were going to leave me.”

  “I’m right here,” I said, and awkwardly patted her hair. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

  She pulled back, letting go so she could look at me, and offered me a wan smile. I’m sure mine was just as bad, because we both knew the terrible truth behind my answer: one day, one of us was going to leave. One day, one of us was going to wind up in a situation we couldn’t bluff or bully our way through, and we were going to become one more entry in the litany of the dead that the Aeslin mice recited twice a year, on the summer and winter solstices. That’s what it means to be a Price. We fight. We do our best to win. But eventually, inevitably, we lose.

  Sam was still standing behind me, silent and awkward as he watched his girlfriend’s cousins try to comfort one another, and it was hard to swallow the urge to turn around and tell him to run for the hills as fast as he possibly could. Annie loved him and he loved her and if there’s one thing that every Price child learns before we graduate from high school, it’s that love is never enough. Grandma Alice loves Grandpa Thomas, has for more than fifty years, and what did that get her? An endless search through parallel dimensions for a man she can’t let herself admit is dead. And she’s the lucky one. At least she can pretend to have hope. For the rest of us, hope is something that dies quick and messy on the battlefield.

  Sarah was fighting her own battle right now, trapped in the white nothingness of her own mind, and there was nothing that any of us could do to help her, and there was nothing that I could do to save her. All we could do was wait . . . and hope that she found a way to win.

  I remembered the bleakness in her eyes right before she’d thrust me from her mindscape. Assuming that had been real, and not just a weirdly specific hallucination, I wasn’t as certain as I wanted to be that she was going to come out on top. The cuckoo equations were eating her alive.

  Gingerly, I pushed Elsie away from me and climbed to my feet, relieved when my legs didn’t take the opportunity to collapse out from under me. The world spun a little before settling down. Elsie watched me, wary, waiting for the moment when I’d fall.

  “You were out for more than half the drive,” she said.

  “It didn’t feel that long,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get inside. I’m sure we’re about to b
e yelled at.”

  “I’m not.” Her expression was grim as she stood and brushed the grass off her knees. “Normally, sure, but normally, we haven’t come racing back with a cuckoo in a coma and word of a whole hive behind us. This is war. Lectures about our malfeasance can wait until later.”

  “This is a swell family that I’ve decided to attach myself to,” said Sam. “Totally normal. Way better than the carnie life.”

  “You said it, not me,” said Elsie, and started for the house, leaving the two of us with no real choice but to follow.

  Mom, Aunt Evie, and Uncle Kevin were all in the living room. Dad, Annie, and James were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Sarah. They had probably taken her upstairs to her room, where she could hopefully sleep without fear of the cuckoos finding her. That didn’t make her absence any less distressing.

  Mom surged to her feet as soon as she saw us appear in the kitchen doorway, almost knocking Uncle Kevin over in her rush to reach us and wrap her arms around our shoulders, crushing Elsie and me both against her for one long, desperate moment. Then she released us and shoved us backward at the same time. I bumped into Sam. Elsie hit the counter.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Mom snarled. For a moment, I could see why so many cryptids considered her one of the more terrifying members of the family. She mostly doesn’t do field work—that whole “not wanting to wind up dead” thing she has going on, which honestly, I agree with—but when she does, she has absolutely no chill. Aunt Evie will try to empathize. Uncle Kevin will try to negotiate. Mom will just stab first and ask questions never.

  “That we needed to get Sarah back,” I said, voice cracking in the middle of the sentence, like my mother’s disapproval had somehow hurled me all the way back into puberty. “We didn’t have a lot of time, and you were all arguing about the best way to do this. I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “Arthur James Harrington-Price, did your father and I raise you to be a fool?” Mom took a step forward, virtually looming over me. It was a nice trick, since I’m taller than she is. “Because rushing in with minimal backup is the definition of foolishness.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I snapped, and stepped forward, toward her. It was like our heights reversed in an instant. Now I was the one looming. “I took a sorcerer, a fūri, and a succubus who drives like she’s auditioning for Mario Kart, all equipped with anti-telepathy charms, assisted by a cuckoo who was willing to betray his own kind for the sake of saving this world, and I got Sarah back. Honestly, I would have been happier if I could have taken fewer people, because it wasn’t like we were ever going to have a pitched battle in the middle of Beaverton. We needed to get in, find her, and bring her home. We did that.”

  “Artie . . .” Her face softened. “You know she’s not well.”

  “He’s not stupid, Aunt Jane.”

  We all turned. Antimony was standing on the stairs, her hair sticking to the sweat on her cheeks and forehead, a terrifying calm in her expression. She looked like someone who had come to deliver the news of a death to a family. My heart clenched.

  She looked at me as she said, “Sarah’s in the middle of what the other cuckoos called a metamorphosis, and when she wakes up, there’s every chance she wakes up being driven by an equation so large that it breaks the brains that try to hold it. She’ll be a fourth instar cuckoo. She may not be Sarah anymore, at least not the way that we think of her. And we may need to make sure she doesn’t crack this world open like an egg. Artie knows all of that. He knew it before we went to find her. But he also knows that we’re family.”

  “She’s right,” said Aunt Evie. “I hope and pray that Sarah can fight this—that she’s more Price than cuckoo. But if she can’t, it’s better that we be the ones to stop her. It’s better that it be her family.”

  She was talking about killing Sarah. That was what this really came down to. She was talking about taking a knife and driving it into the base of Sarah’s skull, where it would sever her brain stem and kill her as quickly and painlessly as possible. Cuckoos don’t have the same arrangement of internal organs and weak spots as true mammals. The fastest, cleanest way of taking them out is by targeting the brain.

  The thought was enough to make my stomach churn, especially since I couldn’t say that they were doing anything wrong. If it came down to a choice between Sarah or the world, we would choose the world. We wouldn’t have a choice.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  “Out in the barn with James,” said Uncle Kevin. “They’re trying to get the cuckoo we captured earlier to talk. The one you didn’t lose.”

  “We didn’t lose Mark,” I said. “We just . . . didn’t bring him back.” If he had any sense of self-preservation, he’d already be on his way home, returning to the sister he loved and the parents he liked well enough to keep alive.

  I somehow didn’t think the cuckoos would be very forgiving of his role in our recovering Sarah.

  “That sounds like losing your hostage to me,” said Mom.

  “Yeah, well, we had to do something, or we wouldn’t even be having this argument.” I shook my head. “I’m going out to the barn. Maybe Heloise knows what we can do to save Sarah.”

  “Artie.”

  I stopped and looked at Elsie, raising my eyebrows in unspoken question. She looked back at me, earnest and clearly grieving.

  “What happens if she says there’s nothing we can do?”

  Again, my stomach roiled. I somehow kept my voice calm as I replied, “Then you take the mice into Sarah’s room and you make sure they see everything. She’s a part of this family. She’s going to be remembered.”

  This time, when I started walking, she didn’t stop me. Nobody did. I made my way across the living room and down the hall to the back door, letting myself out into the cool night air. My feet left clear impressions in the dewy grass as I made my way to the barn.

  Inside, Heloise was still strapped to the table, and Dad was sitting nearby, the can of Raid in his hand. James was standing over the captive cuckoo, fingers spread wide, like he was soaking up the heat from a campfire.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  Dad glanced over at me, and I saw the flicker of grief in his expression before he clamped it down and said, with merciful neutrality, “Testing to see how much cold a cuckoo can endure before it starts talking. They can apparently survive in sub-arctic temperatures, which is pretty impressive. There must be something strange about their musculature. We’ll pay close attention when we analyze the tissue we got from that other one.”

  “This is boring,” said Heloise. She turned her head and smiled brightly in my direction. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the little half-incubus. I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Or ever, really. The hive should have torn you apart.”

  “Annie’s back,” I said. “I bet cuckoos like heat a lot less. Sarah hates the middle of the summer.”

  Heloise’s smile flickered, turning wary. “You wouldn’t.”

  “You know, my family thinks I’m the nice one, because I spend most of my time in my room and I don’t bother people unless I have to, and because I think it’s not fair of me to use my pheromones on standard humans. They didn’t ask to share the planet with a bunch of people who look like them but aren’t them. This isn’t the X-Men.” I made my way to one of the trays of tools that had been set out for the first cuckoo’s necropsy. There were several scalpels of varying size and sharpness. I selected one of the larger ones before turning back to Heloise.

  She was still watching me. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Not even a little bit. I started walking toward her, the scalpel in my hand.

  “They think I’m the nice one because I don’t give them any reason not to, but you know who never thought I was the nice one? Sarah. That’s part of why we get along so well. She’s always known that I could be really dangerous if I wanted to. I never wanted to. I just w
anted to read comic books and play with my computer and love her. Even if I never told her I loved her, being able to do it was enough.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Heloise hurriedly. James had closed his hands and stepped back, expression going politely neutral. He wasn’t going to stop me from whatever I wanted to do next. That was good to know.

  “I think we might disagree there,” I said, stopping next to the table. I lowered the scalpel until it was pressed, lightly, against the skin above her collarbone. I wasn’t pressing down—not yet—and she wasn’t bleeding, but she would be soon enough. Skin, whether human or cuckoo, is easy to cut, and difficult to heal. “We got her back.”

  Heloise’s eyes went even wider. “What?”

  “We went to your hive, and we were careful, and we got her back. She’s here now, in a room that’s warded against your little telepathic tricks, so the other cuckoos can’t hear her.” I pressed down slightly on the scalpel, until the blade was indenting her flesh. “Here’s a fun question for you: why would I tell you this, knowing that you’ll just broadcast it all to any cuckoo who gets close enough to potentially help you? Got any ideas?”

  Heloise couldn’t pull away from the scalpel, so she held perfectly still, staring at me. “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Why not? You’re not my family. She is. You’re just the monster that helped them hurt her.”

  “Because I look exactly like her,” Heloise said, and for a moment, the smugness worked its way back into her voice. “You humans are so stupid. You can threaten me all you want, but you’ll never—ahh!”

  Dad winced when she screamed. So did James. I raised the scalpel, blade now dripping with the clear lymph that serves cuckoos in place of blood.

  “Want to say that again?” I asked. “You’ll look a lot less like her if I start slicing pieces off. It might be easier to look at you. So it’s not a bad idea.” I started to bend over her again.