Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “We’ve never really had a chance to test that theory,” said Annie.

  “I don’t feel cold the way the rest of you do,” I said slowly. “Mom says it’s because hemolymph serves as a sort of biological antifreeze. She used to have to remind me to put on shoes when I went outside to get the mail in December.”

  “I thought you said you grew up with us,” said Artie sharply. “It doesn’t get that cold in December.”

  “Maybe not in Portland, but I was in Columbus with Mom and Dad for most of the year,” I shot back. “It snows in Ohio.”

  “And you just didn’t notice?” asked James.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Mark. “I grew up in California.”

  I had to fight the urge to scream. My family was always inclined to argue and talk things to death, but normally, they restrained that urge around me, in part because they knew we were all on the same side and wanted to take care of business as efficiently as possible. Now I was part of the business that might need taking care of. Without the mice to vouch for me, I would still have been tied to the chair, and they’d probably still be arguing about what they were supposed to do with me.

  It was a sobering thought. That didn’t make it a helpful one. “While we stand up here and argue about my childhood, which I didn’t mean to delete from your minds in the first place, we’re still missing a bunch of cuckoos,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Whether they got up and walked away on their own or something took them doesn’t really matter because, either way, they’re a problem we need to be dealing with. I need to see how far my scan range currently extends. Is one of you going to shoot me if my eyes go white?”

  “Not unless we feel you pushing on our heads.” Annie narrowed her eyes. “So don’t try it.”

  “Wasn’t planning to,” I said. “I need to know if we’re alone.” And how far my scan could go. Part of me was almost excited by the idea of finding out the limits of this new instar.

  My natural telepathic abilities had been present since birth, although they didn’t manifest truly until the McNallys died, and for most of my life, they had continued to grow at a slow, reasonable rate. The instar I had accidentally triggered in New York had been followed by a massive increase in my capabilities, and just from the way my head felt already, I could say with some assurance that this latest instar—this final instar—had done something similar. It wasn’t unreasonable of me to believe that I might be able to scan the whole campus from here.

  It was still probably going to give me a headache, which was going to leave me vulnerable around people who weren’t exactly allies right now. Sometimes doing the right thing sucks.

  I glanced around the room, aware that I was stalling, unable to quite stop myself. “Who found this place?”

  “I did,” said Artie, putting up one hand in a hesitant wave. He was putting off pulses of anxiety—he didn’t like the idea of me using my telepathy around him, even if I wasn’t targeting him specifically. “We needed shelter, and the building looked stable.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then you know where we are. The grass looks too far away for this to be the first floor. How many stairs did you carry me up?”

  “Just one flight,” said Annie. “We would have left you if there had been more.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Evie and Uncle Kevin trained you too well to leave a potential source of information behind just because you didn’t want to keep carrying me, and you have three boys with you. You would have forced Mark and James to carry me.”

  “Not Artie?”

  “Artie probably already noticed that the hum of my presence got louder inside his head when he touched me.” Artie looked away, discomfort rolling off him in a wave. “That’s normal when you’re telepathically attuned to someone. You probably get it around Mom, too, just at a lower volume.”

  “She’s our grandmother,” said Annie. “Why would it be a lower volume?”

  “She was never one of your best friends,” I countered, and turned away from the window, walking toward the closed classroom door.

  As I had hoped, Annie followed, too annoyed to do anything else. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “The hall,” I snapped. “You’re the only one who said you wouldn’t freak out if my eyes went white, and I don’t actually trust you around me while I’m going into a deep scan state, and we need to know where the rest of the cuckoos went.” And maybe it was cruel of me, but I hoped—I really, truly hoped—the answer was “into the belly of one of those terrible flying things.” I also hoped that if any of them had still been alive, it had been quick.

  The period surrounding the equation was blurry. I’d spent most of it in a state of what could only be called altered consciousness, not quite drugged or high, but absolutely intoxicated by the hormones produced by my final instar and entangled in the threads of the equation itself, which Ingrid had been feeding into my mind one piece at a time as she’d received it from the cuckoos who were coming to begin the ritual to carry us into a new world. It seemed difficult to believe that every cuckoo on Earth had been on the campus when this began, and maybe they hadn’t been; if every cuckoo normally carried a different component of the equation, passed along maternal lines, then any cuckoo who had multiple children would have passed their piece multiple times. So we might have left some of them behind. That shouldn’t have felt like a good thing, and probably wouldn’t once we made it back to Earth and still had cuckoos to deal with, but right here and now, with our reduced numbers and total lack of tactical knowledge, it was better if we weren’t dealing with the largest number of enemies possible.

  But there had been kids. I distinctly remembered children too young to have reached their first instar, little kids in cotton pajamas and frilly fairy dresses and all the other things children would be wearing when they didn’t expect to leave their homes. Those children were alien invaders in the homes of their parents, dropped off without question or consent, destined to eventually destroy everything they loved, but they were also kids. They liked cartoons and sugary cereal. They loved their moms and dads. And Mark and I were enough of an illustration that sometimes nurture could win out over nature for me to want to help them in any way I could.

  Especially if I could find a way to help them and save the families that had raised them at the same time.

  Annie dogged my heels all the way to the door, glaring at me both mentally and—I had no doubt—physically. The three boys stayed clustered near the window, not following us. That was fine. Annie alone was enough of a weapon of mass destruction that if she came with me, I’d be perfectly safe.

  “Planning to follow me into the hall?” I asked.

  “You didn’t think we’d let you go off alone, did you?” she asked, sounding almost offended by the very idea.

  I hadn’t, actually, but I couldn’t say I minded the chance to get away from the rest of them for a few minutes, either, especially not when Artie looked at me in borderline accusatory silence. I couldn’t help myself: I dipped below the surface of his thoughts, into the cool, clear water of his private pond, and immediately wished I hadn’t. He believed me—like the rest of us, he’d been raised never to question the mice. They didn’t lie, and if they said I was a Price, then I was a Price. I was also, according to both myself and the mice, one of the most important relationships in his life, and I’d taken myself away from him without asking whether he’d agree to that, or whether it would hurt him. He was methodically examining all the memories he could call up from early childhood, looking for the holes.

  And he was finding them. My excisions had been clean and thorough; he wasn’t going to find traces of me lurking under an unturned stone. But he was finding the places where it didn’t make sense that he’d been left alone, or that he’d gotten his way over his sister without someone else to take his side. I’d stolen myself from him.

  I was already being
punished for that, because I’d stolen him from me at the same time, and I didn’t even get the luxury of having someone to be angry with. And that didn’t matter, because his anger was completely justified, as much as I didn’t want it to be. I withdrew my mind from his as quickly as I could, leaving him to hate me in peace.

  One more downside of being a telepath in a largely non-telepathic society: when I allow myself to feel my feelings without examining them first, I can push them onto other people without meaning to, and I can do a hell of a lot of harm in the process. Not hurting anyone around me requires more conscious effort than I like to think about. It’s way too easy for me to convince literally everyone to agree with me, all the time, whether I’m right or not.

  Artie’s anger was honest and pure and, most importantly, his own. He didn’t deserve mine piled on top of it, or the disappointment in myself and his reaction that would come bundled with the feeling. I finished pulling back my mind and suited the motion to the thought, turning and yanking the door open.

  Antimony followed out into the hall, holding to her refusal to let me out of her sight, even for the duration of a simple scan. I would have been able to pick up on that even if she hadn’t said it, and even if I hadn’t been reading her mind.

  Just what I always wanted: a suicidal cuckoo to babysit, she thought sourly.

  I didn’t take the bait. When we were kids, my cousins used to think things they knew would upset me, just to see whether my manners were actually as good as Mom and I said they were. Annie was still the same person she’d always been, just missing the experiences we’d shared with one another. It made sense that she’d go back to older methods of getting a rise out of me. I knew these people, but from their perspective, I was a stranger, and they were naturally going to test what kind of a person I was.

  “You can stay in the classroom with the boys,” I said. “I’ll come back in as soon as I finish my scan.”

  “I’ll stay right here and watch you do it,” she countered.

  “And you won’t stab me, shoot me, or set me on fire?”

  Annie scoffed, the sound carrying almost as much annoyance as her thoughts. “I already told you: unless it feels like you’re trying to enter my mind, I’ll stay over here and keep my fireballs and weapons to myself.”

  “I guess that has to be good enough,” I said, and forced myself to relax, chin dipping toward my chest as I focused on reaching outward, beyond the limits of my own mind, and into the world around me.

  Five

  “I don’t want to be a monster. I refuse to be a monster. I am a person, and people get to make our own choices about whether or not we bare our claws.”

  —Angela Baker

  Standing in the hall of what is probably a technically stolen university building, preparing for one hell of a headache

  There’s always been something a little strange and dreamlike about performing a telepathic scan. I’m aware of my body and my own existence as a physical being with a physical location to monitor and defend, but it’s . . . remote, almost, less important than whatever it is I’m reaching for on a psychic plane. So it wasn’t all that strange when my body immediately faded into something inessential, the frustration of being barefoot and vague stirrings of hunger blunting.

  What was strange was the scope of the feeling. My body dropped away and kept dropping, taking the campus with it. I might have lost track of myself if not for Annie standing nearby, the bright flame of her annoyance burning like a beacon I could follow all the way home.

  The boys were the next thing to appear: the boys, and the mice, whose tiny minds were like sparkling candles, pinpoints of thought that I could, I knew, zoom in on and examine if I wanted to. There should have been some distortion or difficulty from being this far away. Even twenty feet had always been enough to make things blurry before, like being shortsighted and trying to read a sign without my glasses. Now everything was crisp, pristine, and perfect.

  It was almost disorienting. Of course, even more disorienting was the first mind I found that didn’t belong to one of us. It felt like my mind was a mile or more above the ground—high enough that it was like I was trying to signal space—when it brushed against the thoughts of a vast flying herbivore. It was about as intelligent as a cow, a true cow, not a minotaur or an Apis. It was on its way to a wide place filled with delicious decay, the thought of which consumed almost its entire mind. It thought of that rotting vegetation and fruit with such swelling joy and hunger that my own stomach growled in sympathetic hunger. Pulling back a little bit gave me enough context to recognize it as the millipede I’d seen from the window.

  If the millipedes were herbivores, it wasn’t going to eat us, and that was a good thing. Flight took effort, and while it might eat meat by mistake when feeding, it wasn’t interested enough in meat as an end goal to hunt.

  I pulled back again, this time all the way to the outline of my own body, and was relieved when I was able to separate myself cleanly from the flying herbivore. Learning my new limits was about more than just figuring out how far I could go. It was about avoiding some sort of messed up permanent mind link just because I pushed a little too hard. My body felt odd, too small and limited by gravity, and what was this nonsense about only having four limbs? I needed at least forty if I was going to get a proper grip on the prevailing winds!

  “Ugh,” I said, rubbing my forehead with one hand and preparing to reach out again. A hand grabbed my wrist before I could finish lowering my arm back to my side. The mental hum of Annie’s presence became a roar. I slowly raised my head, blinking at her.

  “Yes?”

  “Your hair was floating,” she informed me, as if this were a great and profound offense. “Please don’t do that again.”

  “Sorry, but it’s not voluntary.” I shook my head. “When Artie and I were in a crash set up by my biological mother, I stopped the flying glass from slicing us to ribbons—”

  “You hurt Artie’s car? Oh, he’s going to kill you,” she said.

  “—and I stopped the rain from falling on all of us during the ritual. So I guess maybe things work a little differently when I really exert myself now that I’m through these most recent instars. I can’t really help it. Or control it yet, either.” I looked down at my feet, suddenly abashed. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. It was just a bit of a shock.” Annie let go of my wrist, backing off again. “I’m sorry I grabbed you.”

  “Just please try to remember how much I didn’t melt your brain when you did it, okay? Here I go again.” I ducked my head and felt the tingle of my eyes going white, trying to spread my mind across the entire campus, searching for signs that we were not alone.

  There were a few smaller millipedes nosing around the grass. I made note of them, dismissed them, and moved on. I didn’t know the layout of the campus: I had no way of knowing where they were, only that they existed. I kept my thoughts low, searching, and suddenly, there they were: human minds, people from our dimension who’d been transported here without their knowledge or consent.

  There was a cluster of eight in one location, their minds a welter of confused disorientation and fear. There were other minds with them, one I recognized as a bogeyman like my brother Drew and three smaller, sharper minds that I recognized as cuckoo children only a beat before a childish voice shouted “GO AWAY” in the space between my ears. I pulled back into my own body so fast and hard it was like a rubber band snapping home, gasping.

  Annie gave me a sideways look. “Everything all right?”

  “I found some students,” I said. “And some of the cuckoo children who survived the ritual. They didn’t want me thinking at them.”

  “No adult cuckoos?”

  “Not yet.” I worried my bottom lip between my teeth. “I know you don’t . . . remember . . . much about the way this is supposed to work, but telepathy isn’t a magic wand. I can miss t
hings, especially if they’re shielded against me. I don’t know if the adult cuckoos are hiding themselves somehow, or if they’ve moved outside of my functional range.” Even expanded as it was, my range only seemed to extend a little beyond the edge of campus, or maybe that was just the space I could comprehend. Either way, if there were adult cuckoos awake and thinking in that space, I wasn’t finding them.

  Annie nodded slowly. “All right. Is that everyone?”

  “I don’t think so. Hang on.” I was getting used to the routine. Look down, reach out, lose all sense of my body, keep searching. I found more students; not many of them, maybe thirty all told, and all but three, including the bogeyman from the first group, were human. The other two cryptids were a chupacabra, and a cornwife. The cornwife made sense, since we were in Iowa, but it took me a moment to recognize him; I didn’t encounter them often, not even in Ohio. They’re remarkably rare for a country where fully half the industrial farming seems to depend on corn.

  There were two more bogeymen under the campus, in a slice of steam tunnel that we had apparently taken with us when we made the jump, and there was some other kind of giant insect flying far overhead, just at the very outside edge of what I could reach. It was higher than the millipede had been, which made me suspect that it was something with actual wings, not undulating cilia. Whatever it was didn’t seem to have a rider, or if it did, the rider’s mind was too distant for me to fully grasp it.

  I pulled back into myself with a small gasp, opening my eyes to find Annie watching me. “ . . . was my hair floating again?” I asked warily. Speaking aloud felt clumsy and alien, with my mind still halfway-unmoored from my body. Anything else might have been enough to get me stabbed. I’d go for clumsiness any day.

  “No,” said Annie. “It’s not that. It’s—did you find anything else?”