Imaginary Numbers

by Seanan McGuire

  “Guys, she’s pissed,” I said, stopping where I was. “Aunt Evie, you might want to run.”

  The ball of compressed theobromine suddenly shot across the room like it had been fired by an invisible slingshot. I heard it strike something. I heard Aunt Evie start choking. Dad and Elsie ran to help her. Elsie was shouting, her words rendered incomprehensible by Aunt Evie’s increasing respiratory distress and the sound of footsteps thundering across the floor.

  Mom was suddenly next to me, hands bristling with knives. Most Prices have trained, at least a little, in throwing knives. They’re less deadly than guns, but they’re quieter, and they get the job done. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing to me, and pulled her hand back to start throwing.

  Sarah looked at her, eyes flaring whiter still. Mom shouted in dismay as her feet left the floor. Then she slammed into the ceiling and stuck there, her arms stretched out from her body, her hands still full of knives.

  “Mom!” I cried, in dismay. I looked frantically at Sarah. “Let her down. Sarah, you have to let her down.”

  This isn’t the right location, and you’re all being irrational. I need to remove you. I need to remove myself. Fine. Sarah moved her hands for the first time, swiping them through the air in front of her like she was browsing through a touchscreen, pulling up the pieces she wanted and discarding the pieces she didn’t. There was a terrible, somehow meaty ripping sound, and a jagged tear appeared in the air at the middle of the living room, bleeding white light into the room.

  I felt something run up my leg. The mice. They’d been watching this whole thing, and some of them were scared enough to take refuge with the nearest available divinity. More were probably hiding themselves in Annie’s hair and clothes. And none of that was going to save them if Sarah brought the house down on us.

  “Sarah!” I howled, and started toward her again, or tried to. The air itself was pushing back against me. It was like wading through quicksand, thick and clinging and terrible. “Sarah, you have to stop!”

  Annie was staggering to her feet, James by her side, one arm draped around her shoulder so she could support his weight. I wasn’t actually sure he was awake. I was sure that holding him like that was keeping her from accessing her fire. If she let go, he would fall down. Sarah didn’t seem to have noticed them. Her attention, such as it was, was divided between the impossible tear in our living room and me.

  For the first time in my life, I didn’t want Sarah’s attention and I had it. It was getting hard to breathe. Mom was still pinned to the ceiling, and Dad and Elsie were still somewhere in the house trying to keep Aunt Evie from dying of theobromine poisoning. We were far enough away from the library that it was possible Uncle Kevin didn’t even know things had gone so terribly, terribly wrong.

  This was up to us. Just us. And I didn’t know if I could do it.

  “Sarah, please,” I said, still forcing my way through the heavy air toward her. “Please. It’s me. It’s Artie. You’re my best friend. Don’t you remember that? I . . .”

  Annie was approaching Sarah from behind, James still draped against her. I didn’t know what she was going to do. I wasn’t sure she knew what she was going to do. But if there was any way to end this without hurting Sarah, she was going to find it. And with the anti-telepathy charm in her pocket, Annie was functionally invisible right now. Sarah didn’t know she was coming. As long as I didn’t think about it too loudly, there was a chance.

  “Sarah, I love you.”

  The white light in her eyes seemed to dim for a second. It could have been wishful thinking. It could have been the first sign that her body was running out of the energy necessary to sustain this sort of output. I had to hope that it was something else. I had to hope that I was actually getting through to her.

  “I’ve never told you that before, but it’s been true for years. I love you. I’m in love with you. I want to wake up next to you. I want to watch you do math—you’re so cute when you’re doing math. I want you to tell me how soothing my brain is. So please, you have to stop this. You have to let us help you. Please, Sarah. Please don’t leave me again. I only just got you back. I can’t lose you yet.”

  Artie . . .

  For a moment—just a moment—her mental tone sounded less distant and clinical, and more like the Sarah I loved. Then her eyes flashed again.

  We’re part of a different equation. You can’t lose me. You never had me. I can’t do this here.

  And she stepped through the rift in the air.

  Things began to happen very quickly. Annie, who had been close enough to reach out for Sarah—I saw the glint of an anti-telepathy charm in her outstretched palm and realized what her plan had been—stumbled under the combined weight of James and the sudden absence of her target. The air was thick and thin at the same time, making both movement and breathing difficult. And Annie, who was off-balance and probably faintly hypoxic, fell into the rift, dragging James with her.

  I didn’t hesitate. Hesitation is one of my great skills. I overthink everything. But in that moment, I threw caution aside and dove through the thickening air, into the rift, following my cousin and her pet sorcerer and the cuckoo I loved into the glittering, light-lined darkness.

  I hope this isn’t how I die, I thought, and blacked out.

  Twenty-three

  “Human morality is only absolute because the humans won the war to see who would be the dominant species of this planet. We live by the moral and ethical standards of a species whose dominion is built on bones.”

  —Martin Baker

  Sprawled in the middle of the street in an unfamiliar city, because that’s fun

  —TIE? ARTIE, CAN YOU hear me?”

  So I wasn’t dead. That was nice to know. Not that dead people can’t yell—Aunt Mary yells plenty when she thinks her living relatives are doing stupid shit that could land us in the afterlife before she’s ready for us—but dead people aren’t usually that interested in whether or not I can hear them. Sort of like telepaths, dead people get their meaning across regardless of how many senses are functional at any given time.

  I wasn’t dead, and I was lying on something that managed to be uncomfortably hard and uncomfortably jagged at the exact same time. What felt like a rock was digging into my hip, and I was pretty sure there was gravel under my back. It sort of hurt. I opened my eyes, staring up into a chalk-colored early morning sky. It was that bleached bone-white that sometimes accompanies the very beginning of dawn, streaked with bands of cirrus clouds. The moon was still visible, hanging low and pinkish-red on the horizon.

  Then Annie leaned into my field of vision, eclipsing everything else.

  “Ack,” I said, with all the coherence I could muster.

  “You hit your head when we came out of the rift,” said Annie, reaching down to offer me a hand up. “I recommend against doing that again.”

  “Okay, um, what the actual fuck?” I took her hand, letting her pull me into a sitting position. Being able to see my surroundings raised more questions than it answered.

  We were in the middle of a street in what looked like a shopping district, only small and quaint and bizarrely agrarian. Even the suburbs near farm country outside Portland didn’t look like this. There was something old-timey about it all, but modern at the same time, like a paradox that somehow managed not to contradict itself. This was a place where people lived. This was real.

  “I didn’t hit my head,” said Annie, letting go of my hand. “I landed on James. Not super fun for James, but since he was already barely conscious, he wasn’t too pissed about it, and I got him clear before you came tumbling through. He’s awake now. Sarah didn’t hurt him. She just terrified him. The rift closed a while ago. We’re stuck here.”

  “Where’s ‘here’?”

  “Ames, Iowa.”

  I stared at her. “What? That’s like, I don’t know—”


  “It’s eighteen hundred miles away.” She held up her cellphone. “The wonders of GPS.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” Annie put the phone back in her pocket. I realized how tired she looked. “I also called home while you were out. Everyone’s all right. Mom had a nasty reaction to the theobromine powder—she inhaled more than she should have before your dad and Elsie got her out of the cloud—but she’s going to be fine. Your mom fell off the ceiling as soon as the rift closed. She has a broken wrist. She’ll recover.”

  “How is this possible?”

  “Well, the cuckoos did say they wanted Sarah to rip a hole in the fabric of the world. I guess this was just a test run. We have a bigger problem, though.”

  There was something about her tone that put my teeth on edge. I eyed her warily as I pushed myself to my feet and brushed the gravel off my knees. “What’s that?”

  “We fell into the rift a week ago.”

  Oh. “Um,” I said. “Yeah, that does . . . that does sound like a bigger problem.”

  Annie looked at me solemnly. “You think? Our family thought we were dead, so that’s fun. Apparently, they summoned Aunt Rose—Mary’s busy keeping an eye on Shelby, since the baby’s due soon—and had her searching the twilight for us. I think the fact that she couldn’t find us may be the only reason nothing’s currently on fire.”

  “Where’s James?” I hesitated before asking the question I really wanted to have answered. “Where’s Sarah?”

  “James is taking a quick turn around the block while I try to wake you up,” said Annie. “Sarah is . . . Sarah’s with the rest of the hive.”

  My heart sank.

  Sarah had attacked us; Sarah had ripped the rift in the air that had led to us losing a week and winding up stranded nearly two thousand miles away from the rest of the family, with no backup and only the weapons we happened to be carrying when we fell through. And yet, somehow, I’d still been hoping that we’d be able to talk her down.

  “The Calculating Priestess conducts the Rites and Rituals of her Kind,” squeaked a voice next to my ear. I glanced to the side. The Aeslin mouse standing on my shoulder was wearing a scrap of one of my old flannel shirts as a cloak, and a necklace made from a small USB drive. One of my clergy, then. It was nice to know that if I died out here, I’d have at least one of my own mice with me.

  “What did you call her?” asked Annie.

  “She has been Named and Acknowledged as a Priestess,” said the mouse, wiping its forepaws across its whiskers to emphasize the statement. “We are sorry to have taken so long.”

  “Okay, that’s . . . new.” Annie looked down at the pocket of her coat, a thoughtful frown on her lips. “You could have said something.”

  “You didn’t ask,” squeaked her pocket.

  “Fair enough.” She turned her attention back to the mouse on my shoulder. “Do you know anything about cuckoo rites or rituals?”

  “Only that they Must Be,” said the mouse gravely. “What fragments we know pre-date the Faith.”

  Meaning that at some point before they came to our family, ancestors of the current colony had encountered a cuckoo. I exchanged a startled look with Antimony. It can be easy to forget that the mice had an existence before us. They’re some of the last Aeslin mice left in the world. We have to protect them. That can limit the way we look at them, like we think of them as accessories and not individuals.

  “Fragments?” asked Annie carefully.

  Aeslin mice have utterly flawless recall. If a mouse hears or sees something once, they’ll be able to repeat or describe it perfectly for the rest of their lives. Unlike the cuckoos, with their implanted histories, the history of the Aeslin mice is learned, handed down without alteration or editing, for as long as a faith endures.

  The mouse scrubbed at its whiskers, looking embarrassed. “The faith came before the faith which pre-dated our discovery by the Kindly Priestess,” it said. “We have failed you by remembering any piece of it. It is Heresy, and should long have been Forgotten.”

  “It may save our asses now, so whatever it is, I declare it part of my catechism,” said Annie bluntly. “It’s a Lost Mystery. Now tell me what you know.”

  “When the Heartless Ones choose to do a great ritual, they will gather together, one unto the next, until their numbers are terrible to behold,” said the mouse. “When this happens, the wisest thing is to Run Very Far, and Not Look Back. Those who fail to Run will not be seen again.”

  I looked around. “I don’t see any cuckoos.”

  “I haven’t seen any since we got here,” said Annie. “Assuming Sarah couldn’t control the rift well enough to put us somewhere different—which is a big assumption, but it’s one that maybe leads to us having a world tomorrow, so I’m going to make it—she must be somewhere nearby.”

  “A week would give the other cuckoos time to come and find her, if they knew this was where she was going to wind up,” I said. “And we have no way of knowing she came out the same time as we did. Maybe she’s been here the whole time, getting ready. What’s so special about Ames?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re all definitely here.”

  I turned. James was jogging down the street toward us. He didn’t look at all bothered by the chill in the morning air, despite his lack of a jacket. Stupid sorcerers, with their stupid elemental alignments.

  “The people are here, but they’re not moving,” he said. “The shops are full. The restaurants, too. I saw a woman walk through a diner, filling all the water glasses, then go back to standing perfectly still behind the counter. I think the cuckoos have put them into a sort of sleep mode. They’ll do what they must to stay alive, but that’s their limit.”

  “So we know the cuckoos are here,” said Annie. “That’s a start.”

  “Where is harder,” said James.

  “Ames,” I said. “Ames, Iowa. We’re in Ames, Iowa.”

  “Yes,” said Annie. “Look, Artie, this is not a good time for you to fall apart on me. I’m sorry, but I need you to hold it together. Okay?”

  “I’m not falling apart,” I said. “Your phone. How much battery do you have?”

  “Not enough.”

  “There’s a major university here. Cuckoos are math addicts. They’ll head for the school if they have any choice in the matter. How far away are we?”

  Annie’s eyes lit up with sudden understanding. She began poking at the screen of her phone, announcing a minute later, “About three miles.”

  “Great.” I looked back to the mouse. “What else do you know?”

  “Only that the Heartless Ones are Not Of This World, and that one day they must Leave it.”

  “Peachy.” I grabbed a rock off the road and started walking toward an old Camaro parked in front of a store that either sold rocks or decorative soaps intentionally made to look like rocks. It can be hard to tell.

  “What are you doing?” asked James.

  “Getting us to school,” I said, and threw the rock through the car window.

  The shattering sound was remarkably loud on the quiet, cuckoo-snared street. There was a pressure at the back of my head that I recognized as the cuckoos trying to influence me, whether they knew they were doing it or not. I shunted it aside. I’m a Price. We don’t take well to being mentally controlled. Great-Grandma’s gift to us, even if we still don’t understand it.

  “Annie, your cousin is stealing a car,” said James, in a carefully neutral tone. I ignored him in favor of reaching through the broken window, unlocking the door, and using a McDonald’s bag from the passenger footwell to shovel the glass out into the street.

  “My cousin’s a genius,” said Annie. “You know how to hotwire that thing?”

  “I don’t need to,” I said. “My old Camaro never met a screwdriver it didn’t want to be friends with, before you went and torched it.
Which is why—ah!” I held up the long, narrow-headed screwdriver that had just dropped from the glove compartment. “Your chariot awaits.”

  “I’m quite sure this is illegal,” muttered James, as he and Annie started toward the car.

  “Pretty sure destroying the entire world is worse than a little minor car theft,” said Annie.

  I slid into the driver’s seat, leaning over to unlock the doors on the other side of the car. Annie and James climbed in, and I shoved the tip of the screwdriver into the ignition, wiggling it until I felt that essential, comfortingly familiar catch. When I twisted it, the engine rumbled on.

  “Next stop, the end of the goddamn world,” I said, and hit the gas.

  * * *

  Nothing moved except for the wind as we drove through Ames. Somehow, the little waves of motion in the grass and the trees made it more obvious how frozen everything else was. There were no cats, no dogs, no squirrels or birds . . . and no people.

  “How many cuckoos are we expecting to find here?” asked James.

  “Too many,” said Annie.

  “That’s not a number,” he said. “I know you think you sound cool when you say things like that, but actual information and tactical plans are much, much cooler. I promise you.”

  “I’m a big fan of actual information,” said Annie. “Unfortunately, right now, we don’t have any. We know Sarah was somehow able to transport us across the country to Iowa. We know there isn’t time for backup to get here before we deal with the literally world-destroying cuckoo situation. We know that they’ve forced Sarah into her fourth instar, which is apparently a big enough deal to make even other cuckoos say ‘wait, maybe this is bad.’”

  “We know we might have to kill her to make this stop.”

  My words fell into a sudden silence that yawned like a pit in the middle of our stolen car, seeming to steal away all sound. I glanced at Antimony. She didn’t meet my eyes.