Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  They were reacting to me the way they would have reacted to any strange cuckoo in a situation like this one—with fear and apprehension and—in Annie’s case—the option of violence. They were protecting themselves against an existential threat. I didn’t have the same surface-level access to James’ mind, but I could tell without pushing that I was just as much of a stranger to him.

  Oh, God, what had I done?

  It was a simple question, and—like any other simple question—it had a deceptively simple answer: I’d deleted myself. They had given me permission to use their brains for extra space while I tried to tame the equation the cuckoos used to move between dimensions, and I had bundled their core selves safely off to the side where I wouldn’t hurt them, but I’d done it believing I was going to die. That there was absolutely no way we could come out the other side of the equation with all of us still breathing. And while I hadn’t done so intentionally, it was clear the “do as little harm as possible, and mitigate the harm you can’t avoid” ethics that had been drilled into me for my entire life had flared up in the way guaranteed to do me, personally, the most harm possible.

  I had been convinced I was going to die. I had been struggling to keep the equation from swallowing their identities and experiences whole. And in an effort to spare them future harm and give the equation what it was baying for, I had fed it their memories of me.

  I had deleted myself from their minds.

  If I’d done it by surgically excising those memories and tucking them into myself, I might have been able to put them back, but I hadn’t; I’d been wrestling with a math problem so large that it had achieved both sapience and malevolence, becoming a living thing in its own right, and it had gulped those memories into the endless void of its hunger. There was no getting them back. What we’d been to each other was gone. My side of that equation still existed, but their whiteboards had been wiped clean. And, potentially worse, since their core personalities had been wrapped up so carefully, even without those memories, the places where my presence had pressed against them and changed the people they became—those places were still there. I had taken myself away, but I hadn’t turned them into new people in the process.

  That might make things a little easier for me, since I’d still know basically who they were. It was going to make things a lot harder for them as they reached for foundations that didn’t exist . . . and might as well never have existed to begin with.

  I’d fucked everything up. I closed my eyes, shutting out the sight of my cousin standing menacingly over me, and said dully, “Mark can tell you I’m not lying. Mark can tell you I believe everything I say. My name is Sarah Zellaby. My mother is Angela Baker. Antimony, Artie, and I grew up together, which is why you hear that humming in the air—we’re telepathically attuned to each other. I can’t shut you out without an anti-telepathy charm, and you all took those off to let me in, so we could stop the cuckoos from destroying the world. I’m assuming you’ve lost them since none of us are wearing them now.”

  I felt them staring at me. Finally, in a bemused voice, James said, “That’s ridiculous. Everything she’s just said is completely ridiculous.”

  “That’s why I believe her,” said Artie.

  My eyes snapped open. I stared at him. He felt calm, frightened, resolute . . . and unrecognizing. He wasn’t miraculously recovering memories that weren’t there to reclaim. He was just choosing to believe me.

  Even without me, he still knew Mom. He clearly knew Mark. He knew cuckoos weren’t always bad people, and he was choosing to believe me. If I’d had a heart, it would have grown two sizes in that moment. He didn’t love me anymore, because I’d taken that love away, but he believed me.

  “Well, I don’t,” snapped Annie. “She’s the reason we’re here, remember? She was at the center of their little circle, and Mark says she’s the one who was doing the math that opened the rift in the universe. That means she’s the one who has to put us back. She’s making up stories so that we’ll let her go.”

  She moved toward me again, burning hand raised. “Wait!” I yelped. She stopped, raising one eyebrow as a silent question radiated off of her. It wasn’t formed enough to organize itself into words, but I could tell her patience was wearing thin.

  “We’re not the only ones here,” I said. “You have to ask the mice.”

  Two

  “Every time I think the world’s growing short on wonders, it goes and shows me another one. Nice trick, world. I appreciate it.”

  —Frances Brown

  Still in the same situation, mostly trying not to get set on fire (not as fun as it sounds, and it sounds pretty awful)

  The what?” asked Mark, with unfeigned confusion. “I think the process of transporting us all to a new dimension scrambled her brain if she wants us to start talking to rodents.”

  James radiated discomfort. Artie and Annie, on the other hand, stared at me.

  “How do you know about the mice?” asked Annie, voice gone low and even more dangerous than before. “They’re not something we discuss with outsiders.”

  “Uh, what?” asked Mark.

  “I’m not an outsider!” I snapped. “I have my own clergy! Ask the mice, and they’ll tell you I’m telling the truth! And don’t try to tell me they’re not here, I can pick up on three of them clearly and two more vaguely, so there’s probably five of them. Ask the damn mice.”

  I didn’t want to dwell on how easily I could detect the minds of the mice, which had always been too small for me to spot without making an actual effort. I wanted to fold my arms and sulk. My arms were tied. I settled for sulking, pushing my lower lip out into an exaggerated pout. Being unable to properly see facial expressions means I’m not always good at making them on purpose. Spending time around other cuckoos had been enough to confirm that I’m abnormally expressive for my species, sort of like a Muppet in cuckoo’s clothing. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up knowing you’re not human but hoping desperately that if you try hard enough, the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio will show up one night and turn you into a real girl.

  (No, fairies don’t actually work that way, and all the fairies I know of are a lot more likely to take things away than they are to grant someone a working circulatory system and functioning human brain. But I was a kid at the time, and kids want stupid things.)

  Annie gave me one last look, still radiating caution, before she retreated to where James and Artie waited, the three of them beginning to talk in hushed voices. I turned my eyes away, forcing myself not to mentally reach out and listen in. Mark wasn’t included in their little circle. Interesting. He hadn’t telepathically ingratiated himself with them; he was just here, somehow along for the ride. Given that they’d met him when he kidnapped me from the family compound, I had to wonder what story they were telling themselves to make his presence make sense. I looked straight at him, allowing my expression to fall into its natural neutrality.

  Come here, I commanded.

  Mark jerked a little, startled, before rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and walking in my direction. Interesting. I couldn’t tell whether he was coming because he wanted to, or because I’d somehow left him no choice. My first instar had come with an increase in power level that took years for me to master and control. Who knew what this latest instar had come with?

  When he was close enough, I lowered my voice and demanded, “What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to get home,” he said. “Cici needs me. I’m not going to disappear from her life just because you decided to help Ingrid destroy the world.” He radiated discomfort, clearly skipping his thoughts from place to place to keep himself from dwelling. It was an interesting technique, and almost certainly one he’d learned in order to make it safer for him to spend time around other telepaths. I blinked.

  “You’re afraid the world and this Cici person aren’t there anymore,” I said. He je
rked more sharply upright, staring at me. “You are. You think the equation—what—ate it alive? Dissolved it?”

  “I think that even if we disrupted the ritual the way we were trying to, we somehow wound up here, along with a college campus, a whole bunch of unconscious cuckoos, and a bunch of dirt, meaning we took a chunk of the Earth’s crust with us when we went. Did we destabilize the continental plate? Is Iowa one big volcano now? How deep does the exclusion go? I don’t know. And I don’t think you do either. But I know one thing.” He leaned closer to me, voice suddenly pitched low. “If you’ve killed my sister, there is nothing anyone can do to keep me from taking you to pieces, my queen.” The mocking lilt on his last two words sent a shiver along my spine.

  He’d do it. He would absolutely do it. He wouldn’t even hesitate.

  But there was something wrong with his story. Maybe I’d scrambled his brain even harder than I’d thought. “Cuckoos don’t have sisters.”

  “This one does,” snapped Mark. “Her name is Cici, she’s human, she’s twelve, she’s a holy terror, but in the normal twelve-year-old girl kind of way, not the evil telepathic wasp kind of way, and the only reason I got involved in this whole mess is because she deserves a planet to live on and not to get murdered by assholes like our family.”

  I frowned. “How do you think you got involved? Because the way I remember it, you abducted me from my home and family and took me to the hive my biological mother had assembled in order to get me back. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”

  “I—” He stopped, an odd look crossing his face. “I don’t know. I just know these people, and they know me, and they’re willing to trust me for however long it takes for all of us to get home. Even though I’m a cuckoo. I don’t understand how they can know that and trust me anyway. Even Cici doesn’t know everything about what I actually am.”

  “They know what a cuckoo is and that it’s possible to trust a cuckoo because they grew up with me,” I said. “I was their test case for cuckoo trustworthiness. We also had my mom, who’s a cuckoo, but she was an adult when we were children, she was another species altogether, and we learned to trust each other. Only now they trust you because of trusting me, and they don’t trust me because of stupid cuckoo magic.”

  “We’re not magic,” said Mark scornfully. “Magic doesn’t exist.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Says the man keeping company with two literal sorcerers.”

  “Sorcery is just physics gone feral. We’re psionic. It’s not the same thing.”

  “If you want to debate dictionary definitions, maybe you should untie me first,” I suggested. “There’s a name for the kind of man who keeps a woman tied to a chair while he monologues at her, and it’s not ‘hero.’”

  Mark scoffed. “I never said I was the hero of this story. That’s probably Annie, unless this is secretly a modern update of Firestarter, and then I’d put James as slightly more likely to shoot her than the other one. I’m the comic relief who stays out of the line of fire and makes it home to his little sister alive. That’s good enough for me.”

  I wanted to know more about his sister, but it was clear he didn’t plan to tell me, and he’d know if I went into his mind and took the knowledge without his consent. What’s more, my allies—my family—had already decided I was a monster. The last thing I needed to do right now was start giving them reasons to think they were right. So I just looked at him, unblinking, and waited for the moment when he inevitably broke eye contact.

  As soon as he did, I said calmly, “If you betray them, if you hurt them in any way, you’re never going to see that sister of yours again, because you will be dead, and she will never know what happened to you, or why you failed to come back to her.”

  To my surprise, he laughed. “You think I don’t know that? Annie made it very, very clear that I’d have a life expectancy measured in seconds if I tried to double-cross them, and as two of the three carry the blood of Kairos, I know she can do it. There’s no way I can seize her mind before she pulls the trigger. You might be able to, queen. No one really knows what a fully metamorphosized queen is capable of.”

  He looked at me then, anxiety and apprehension boiling off of him like steam off of a wet sidewalk on a hot summer day. I could practically see it.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know either. I just know I have pretty decent ethical standards, thanks to being raised by a woman who thought being able to read minds was no excuse for me to go around doing it, and that’s why you’re not my marionette right now.” I glared at him. “But I also think I’m getting pretty damn tired of being tied to this chair, so you all had better settle on something to do with me sooner rather than later.”

  Mark took a step backward, anxiety suddenly tinged with much sweeter nervousness. He was worried that my control would start slipping as my patience came to an end. It was a valid concern. I shared it. I took a deep breath, instead focusing on something that was always relevant: information.

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned ‘the blood of Kairos’ in the context of my family,” I said. The first had been during my abduction. “What does that mean? Do you know why the Prices are resistant to telepathic influence?”

  Mark hesitated. Then he sighed, and said, “Knowing won’t change anything, so I guess it doesn’t matter. Yes, we know. The cuckoos have always known. We’re the reason Frances Brown was an orphan.”

  I blinked slowly, then leaned forward as far as the ropes allowed.

  “Tell me what the cuckoos did,” I said.

  It wasn’t a request.

  * * *

  Every inch of Mark radiated discomfort as he glanced at the circle at the back of the room, Artie and Annie engaged in quiet debate while James listened silently. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I wasn’t willing to violate their privacy by pushing against their mental boundaries. Not yet, at least. If this went on for long enough, I knew my self-control would fail, and I’d push through any boundaries they wanted to put in my way.

  Mark took a deep breath. “You know by now that we’re not from around here,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, extra-dimensional ambush predators, I got the history lesson,” I said impatiently.

  “So you’ve had it explained, but you don’t understand, not the way you would have if the woman who raised you hadn’t taken the histories away.” Mark shook his head. “You should have gotten it all as soon as you reached your first instar. The whole history of our kind, delivered directly into your mind, as evolution intended it to be.”

  “And driving me into a violent psychotic break at the same time,” I snapped. “I think I like the version of my life where I don’t kill everyone I love as soon as I get my first training bra.”

  “I can’t really argue with that,” said Mark, making me wonder again how he could be a cuckoo with a sister when he should have killed his entire family as soon as he reached that fateful, fatal instar. “If you’d received the history, though, you would have a better understanding of what it means to have come here—or I guess, to have come to Earth—from outside. We were refugees, and we needed a safe place to hide while we recovered from the injuries we suffered in the last world we called home.

  “It wasn’t Johrlar—our world of origin is a dozen dimensions behind us by now, and good riddance—but it was a dangerous world, and humanoid life was rare there, so we stood out more than we’re comfortable with. By the time we found the dimension where you and I were born, our numbers were low and our wounds were deep. We needed time to recover. And we might have found it, if not for the creatures that were already living there.”

  The only “creatures” I’ve ever heard of posing a threat to a cuckoo hive are ones made entirely of hunger, like lindworms and werewolves, or ones that are also derived from insect stock somewhere along their evolutionary history. Madhura are functionally invisible to us, which can make them dangerou
s, and Apraxis actively compete with us for resources. “You mean the Apraxis wasps,” I guessed.

  “No, those came through the rift with us,” he said. “They’ve been pursuing us for dimensions without end, almost as long as we’ve been exiles. Earth was the first world we found where there was enough food suitable for their needs for them to leave us in peace and let us start rebuilding our own population. There’s always a die-off when we move between worlds, although I think you may be personally responsible for the largest one we’ve ever experienced.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly upset about that,” I said flatly. “I may have deleted parts of your memory, but mine is fully intact, and I know that everyone who died in the crossing did it because they were trying to hurt me and my family.” I paused. “Every cuckoo, at least. I don’t know whether there were any humans caught in the blast radius.” It was an alarming thought, and one I didn’t want to dwell on. I’d spent so much of my life trying to minimize the harm I did, especially when compared to the rest of my species. If I’d just killed the population of Ames, Iowa, then I was the greatest monster the cuckoos had ever produced. Not exactly a superlative I’d been working to achieve.

  “Forgiven,” said Mark without hesitation. “They were no friends of mine. Cuckoos don’t get along with other cuckoos unless it’s mating season, and I’ll be perfectly happy never to experience the joys of fatherhood for myself, not knowing what any children of mine would grow up to become.”

  I wanted to ask him how he’d managed to avoid that fate, but I also didn’t want to distract him from the history lesson he was delivering while my cousins settled on what to do with me. So I sat in silence, and I waited.

  “We came to Earth through the rift opened by our last queen, and we settled into the population, breeding and feeding and staying out of sight. Ambush predators. And there were little glitches—the wasps had survived to follow us through, the bee-people who might have become us if they’d evolved in a less crowded ecosystem, but here served only to thwart our designs—but on the whole, Earth was a good and fertile land. Until we met the luck-benders.” Mark’s thoughts darkened, tainted by a memory not entirely his own. “They divided themselves into three types, depending on what they could do. The jinks saw luck, could borrow and bend it to their own desires. The Fortuna made luck, weaving it out of the walls of the world. And the Kairos were the worst of all, for us, because they were always where they needed to be when they most needed to be there.”