Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “We can’t lead a bunch of burning zombies back to the cafeteria!” I snapped. “They’ll set the building on fire, and there are children in there!”

  “There’s a whole campus here!”

  “Do you really want to set kids on fire?”

  “No,” said Annie sullenly, and stopped dead, turning to face the cuckoos as she lifted her hands.

  Oh, this was going to be really stupid.

  Seven

  “This is all temporary. That’s part of what makes it amazing. Even the longest lived of us is only planting seeds in a garden they won’t see finish growing, and that’s what gives us the luxury of making mistakes. It’s easier to take chances when you know you may not have to carry the consequences.”

  —Mary Dunlavy

  Standing in the middle of the campus green, probably about to be on fire (which is really going to suck)

  The cuckoos kept coming as Annie raised her hands, not quite running, but definitely moving at the sort of determined, unvarying shamble that explained why we hadn’t been able to leave them behind. There was nothing physically wrong with their legs, nothing stopping them from continuing to advance.

  Annie spread her fingers wide before snapping them shut and jerking her hands briskly downward. The flames that writhed around the three cuckoos guttered out, leaving not even an ember behind. One of the cuckoos collapsed. The other two kept coming, not seeming to realize how badly blistered they were.

  I reached for their minds to reassure myself, and found no pain, no discomfort . . . no real awareness of their situation. The howling void of their hunger was too vast to allow for anything as small as suffering. I appreciated that, even as I didn’t appreciate the fact that we still had eleven zombie cuckoos coming after us.

  “Annie . . .”

  “I know, I know. But bullets run out, and I don’t have infinite knives.” She still took aim and fired twice more, downing two more cuckoos, before shooting me a hopeful glance. “I don’t suppose you’ve been hiding a gun from me this whole time? I promise not to be mad at you if you hand it over right now.”

  “No weapons. I’m in my nightgown. I don’t have any shoes. And I’m not you or Grandma. I don’t sleep with a machete.”

  “It was worth trying.” She fired again, and tried to fire a second time, only for the chamber to click empty. She made a face before making the gun vanish and producing the one she’d taken from Terrence, loading it with his discarded bullets as fast as she could manage.

  “Couldn’t you have done this before?”

  “I didn’t expect our new playmate to come right back and start breaking things to get us swarmed,” she snapped.

  I turned to make sure Terrence wasn’t sneaking up on us again. There was no sign of motion, and I didn’t detect anything close by when I lowered my mental shields and stretched myself out to scan. I still couldn’t detect the empty cuckoos, so I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find. There were a few more human survivors huddled in the buildings around us—and at least one of them was watching us, had seen Annie’s little trick with the fire, and was cursing his inability to livestream whatever weird-ass reality show we were clearly filming—but Terrence wasn’t close enough to detect easily, which meant he wasn’t currently a threat.

  Unlike the cuckoos. And unlike everything else about this situation, which seemed determined to go from awful to truly terrible without taking any of the steps in between. The only silver lining I could currently see was that if I couldn’t pick up on Terrence without pushing to find him, my new range wasn’t perfect, and when we got home, I might still be able to go out in public without losing my mind from the noise.

  Range . . . I stopped and looked up, scanning the sky, and there, near the edge of the campus, was one of the flying millipede things, cilia waving as it undulated through the air.

  You want to come down here, I thought, as hard as I could.

  It continued to undulate smoothly forward, giving no sign that it had heard me on any level.

  You want to come down here, I thought again, and accompanied the words with a picture of the millipede thing coming to rest on the ground, preferably atop the attacking cuckoos.

  They weren’t carnivores, and the cuckoos weren’t decaying plant matter, but maybe if I pushed the idea hard enough, this would work. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head the way people always did in the comics, and thought for a third time, YOU WANT TO COME DOWN HERE.

  And the millipede came.

  It descended as slowly and ponderously as a hot air balloon being reeled to the ground, only there were no ropes, no ground crew pulling it safely to port; there was just the millipede itself, undulating through the air with legs and cilia waving, growing larger with every second. All the bad CGI was better than it looked, I thought, almost dizzily, because this was happening, this was real, I could feel the creature’s small, malleable mind pressing against the edges of my own, unable to comprehend its sudden urge to come to a landing, but unable to muster up the coherent thought necessary to resist me. The closer it got, the more details I could make out, the little dents and scratches in its chitin, the way the fronds of its antennae weren’t quite even, but were jagged and missing tiny spiky quills.

  The thing that didn’t quite fit any cultural design or pattern I knew, but was something like a braided sling and something like a very ornate piece of macramé, tied tight across the narrow dip that distinguished head from body. There was no rider. It was still very clearly a saddle. This was someone’s mount.

  From the size of the saddle, our missing “someone” was roughly bipedal and about the same size as Annie and me, which made sense. According to my grandmother, who spent most of her time swinging wildly across convergent dimensions looking for my missing grandfather, reality is sort of like a casserole. You can cook different things on different levels, as long as you separate them with a lot of cheese, but every time you push a knife through, you’re going to drag little bits of the other layers through, which means you want complimentary flavors. So while there are absolutely dimensions full of lava, or plague, or howling voids, the ones we can reach easily are mostly suitable for humanoid life.

  “You can find dimensions with people who look like us, even if science says they probably shouldn’t, or dimensions with people who think like us, and they’re not always the same place,” she’d said to me one day, while she was frosting my birthday cake. (Lemon with tomato icing. Birthday girl picks the cake, everyone else either eats it or makes do with sad box-mix brownies.) “Don’t assume everyone who looks human is a friend, sweet girl, and don’t assume everyone who doesn’t is an enemy.”

  “Cuckoos look human, Grandma,” I’d replied. “I would never think looking human was enough.”

  And she’d laughed and gone back to plastering frosting over cake, and the day had been beautiful, unflinchingly so, and now there was a millipede wearing a saddle Antimony could have used skating through the sky toward us, and sometimes the lessons that matter the most are the ones we learn in family kitchens when we’re eleven years old.

  Annie had finished getting the bullets into Terrence’s gun. She fired twice before it jammed and she swore, turning to face me. “We have to run,” she said. “Us versus seven cuckoos who don’t feel pain or understand logic anymore? That’s bad math. That’s math we lose. So we have to— Sarah, that’s a giant fucking millipede.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said, continuing to beckon the millipede toward us. Part of me felt a little guilty; what if these things couldn’t get back into the sky after they landed? The rest of me was too focused on survival to worry about ecological damage.

  The buildings were close enough together to make for a tight squeeze for the millipede, even as they provided plenty of open space for us. Differences of scale. Follow me! I thought to Antimony as I spun and bolted for the nearest cover, infusing the thought
with as much urgency as I dared project her way—too much and she wouldn’t have a choice, and all the ground I’d gained during this little bonding exercise would be wiped away—and at the same time, projected the idea that the cuckoos shambling after us were made of delicious rotting vegetation to the millipede. I didn’t really know what a millipede would find delicious, and so I thought about the way I felt when I bit into a really ripe heirloom tomato, all filled with complex sugars and flavors that had developed in a thousand generations of fertile soil.

  Thinking about how delicious that would be made me hungry, which I hoped meant it would also make the millipede hungry. I threw that flavor all over my mental map of the cuckoos, and when the millipede landed with a soft thump, its heavily-armored body barely missed us. I could have reached out and touched its side if I’d wanted to, brushing my fingertips across plating that had touched the clouds.

  It was an oddly tempting idea. I’ve never wanted to be a pilot, but the idea of being that close to infinity was amazing. Annie apparently had the same thought, or else I was broadcasting more loudly than I meant to be—she stuck her arm out as we ran, letting her fingers run across the plating closest to us.

  “It’s warm!” she shouted. “Why is it so warm?”

  “Absorbing the sunlight,” I said. This close, it smelled spicy, like the formic acid put down by ants when they wanted to lay a trail for the rest of the colony to follow. That explained the strange odor in the air, a bit; given the size of the bugs, it was like we’d been shrunk down to their scale, and so all the side effects of their presence were hitting us harder.

  “Why did it land?”

  “I asked it to.”

  “Just that?”

  The millipede was swinging its head from side to side, like it was looking for something. The cuckoos didn’t seem to have noticed it, which was ridiculous, since it was easily the size of a train, and were still shambling briskly forward, heading for the two of us as quickly as their unvarying pace allowed. The millipede stopped swinging its head, seeming to focus on them for the first time. I couldn’t see its eyes, but it clearly knew where they were. Its antennae trembled. The cuckoos shambled. Annie and I kept running.

  Then the millipede’s head opened like some sort of terrible flower made of jagged edges and sharp angles. Each petal was a knife, each knife was wedded to two more, and it was almost an infinity of cutting surfaces. Annie stumbled and stopped, leaving momentum to carry me easily five or so feet beyond her.

  “ . . . whoa,” she breathed. “Holy shit.”

  The millipede didn’t strike so much as simply lowered itself over the first cuckoo in line. The flower closed again, and when the millipede reared back, the cuckoo was gone. There was no visible swallowing motion. It was like a magic trick, there one second and gone the next—a magic trick which the millipede repeated six more times, until all seven cuckoos had disappeared, down into the depths of its digestive system.

  I mentally reached for it, and winced as I found their minds traveling through its gullet, moving toward whatever horrifying system of biological processes it had to serve as a stomach. They still felt no pain, and no confusion; they were still hungry, and from what I could pick up, some of them were scrabbling at the walls of the millipede’s esophagus, trying to consume it even as it swallowed them.

  “Good luck with that,” I said dryly.

  Annie turned to look at me, one eyebrow lifted in silent query. I shook my head.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “For right now, let’s get out of here before the big fellow decides it has a taste for flesh now.”

  The millipede didn’t feel like it had a taste for flesh. If anything, it felt disappointed; its mind was slow and simple, but it had been promised a feast by its own standards, and instead it had found a few flavorless, squirming mouthfuls. It hadn’t worked its way around to anger yet, if it even had the capacity, but I didn’t want to linger too close in case it made the leap.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Annie, and put her hand on my arm, staying close as we first backed away and then, when the millipede failed to turn and take notice of us, ran.

  We ran until we reached the cafeteria and plastered ourselves against the wall, both of us breathing hard. It was a little reassuring that I wasn’t the only one out of breath, but only a little. I wanted Annie to be invincible, because I wanted the luxury of breaking down when we made it back to the others, and I couldn’t do that if she was breaking down, too. She looked at me.

  “What the fuck did you do?” she asked.

  “I sort of told the big flying thing that if it came down to where we were, it would get a snack,” I said. “They’re not natural meat-eaters, but I told it they were plants. And even herbivores eat smaller animals sometimes when they get mixed in the leaves! If it’s really an insect, it shouldn’t have any trouble digesting them. It’s not like I fed the poor thing a bunch of mammals.”

  We could see the curve of the millipede’s body through the break in the buildings, even from as far away as we are. Annie turned and gave me a flat look, disbelief rolling off her in a wave.

  “Are you seriously telling me you telepathically compelled Mothra’s leg-day obsessed little brother to swoop down out of the sky and eat your enemies?” she asked.

  “Um, yeah,” I said. “Although mentioning Mothra makes me wonder if the square-cube law doesn’t work differently in this dimension. If not, the giant flying insects probably have lungs of some sort.”

  “Ew.”

  “I have lungs,” I objected. “I’m a giant insect with lungs.”

  “And I really try not to think about that when I have to interact with cuckoos because you have to admit that it’s gross as all hell, and it leads to some nasty questions about evolution in the dimension that your people originally came from.”

  “I think the telepathy raises more, personally,” I said. Earth had started out with at least two species of cryptid that had naturally-occurring psychic powers of one kind or another; I say “at least two” because there’s some evidence to support the idea that Lilu, like cuckoos, originally came from somewhere else.

  Earth has been studded with invasive species since long before humans opened shipping routes and started moving interesting plants and animals around the planet.

  “Whatever.” Annie let go of my arm as the millipede lifted off the ground and began to undulate back into the sky. “How the hell does that thing even fly?”

  “There are a bunch of possible answers,” I said. “Air bladders. Different atmospheric density than what we have back at home. Or maybe they’re density-manipulators like the sylphs. However it does it, I want to go and find the boys before it comes back looking for another meal.”

  “Picking up on anything dangerous around here?”

  I paused to check the surrounding area before shaking my head. “No, nothing, not even Terrence. I’d need to scan a much bigger area than the immediate threat to find him. All the other people who were in the library before the fight are still there. Most of them don’t even realize they were in danger.”

  The millipede was well on its way back to its original elevation, ascending much faster than it had come down, which made sense; it hadn’t come down because it wanted to, it had come down because I’d been compelling it. Now it was following its own instincts and desires again, and those instincts told it to get as far away from the confusing thing as possible.

  “Good,” said Annie. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes open. Do you think the suns are setting yet?”

  It seemed like a non sequitur, but with no way of knowing what threats this dimension might produce once the sun was down, it was a valid question. I looked up at the sky, squinting as I tried to decide whether it was a darker shade of orange than it had been earlier. Insect eyes are structurally different than mammalian eyes, and my vision trends more toward the “wasp” side of t
he spectrum than “woman,” which can make gradations of the color red difficult for me to see clearly.

  “I don’t know,” I said finally. “It . . . looks like it might be a little darker? Maybe? It might never be night here the way we think about it.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said, giving the horizon a mistrustful glance. It felt like she was concerned the sky was about to fall. I didn’t like it.

  Out of all my cousins, Antimony is supposed to be the rock. She’s the one who doesn’t get flapped, because she does the flapping. She’s never been worried about bad things happening to her; she’s the bad thing that happens to other people.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “We can talk to the people in the library later, now that the apocalypse isn’t trying to break down the door.”

  I nodded gratefully. “Cool.”

  * * *

  As soon as I lowered my shields for a broader scan, I found the boys. As Annie had predicted, they had returned to the classroom where we’d started, viewing retreat from an overwhelming enemy as the greater part of valor. Smart boys. I told Annie where they were, and we started making what would turn out to be a gloriously uneventful trip back across campus to join them. No zombie cuckoos or giant millipedes showed up to make things worse or slow us down, and neither did any additional survivors. That was a good thing. I didn’t want to talk to anyone else until I’d had an opportunity to steal or scavenge some real clothes, or at least slippers and sweatpants. A bra was absolutely too much to ask.

  The concept of an underwire that fit was alluring enough to distract me from the discomfort of walking in my bare feet, and soon enough, the familiar hum of Artie’s thoughts reappeared, bright as a neon sign reflecting light across the landscape. “Love of your life who thinks he just met you and you might be the enemy, this way.” The lack of concern for me in those thoughts was depressing, but I kept going, focusing on the classroom window until James and Mark joined him, their own minds less familiar but no less worried. All three of them were focused on Annie and the threat posed by the zombie cuckoos, with only Mark sparing more than a flicker of worry for my well-being.