Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “Even the larvae?” asked Annie.

  I turned my attention back to her. “Okay, one, I’m pretty sure calling cuckoo kids ‘larvae’ is racist as hell. If you’re going to say that we can’t use the word ‘zombie’ because it’s cultural appropriation, we’re not going to start calling kids a word that means worms. The hollowed-out cuckoos will kill us if we let them. I’ve looked inside them and there’s nothing there to stop them from taking us apart. But the kids are still just that: kids.”

  “Wait.” Mark straightened. “The children survived?”

  “Yes.” I looked at him. “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “Because your—because Ingrid said they wouldn’t. She said there wouldn’t be room inside them for the ritual we were going to perform and all the pieces of our heritage that they carried with them, and they’d short out like lightbulbs plugged into a current that was too strong.” He shook his head, thoughts turning baffled. “There’s no way those kids are still alive.”

  “Well, they are, at least some of them, and since the three we found have managed to convince one of the human survivors she’s their sister, their pre-instar abilities still function; there might be some time bombs buried in there, but I doubt it. I wouldn’t do that to kids.”

  Annie snapped her fingers. I jumped. She pointed at me.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  “You want to explain for the non-psychics in the room?” asked James.

  “If everything she’s been saying is true, and she’s part of our family but managed to remove herself from our memories by mistake, she grew up with our family.” She shook her head, responding to the blank looks I assumed they were directing her way. “We don’t hurt kids. Species doesn’t matter. Unless we’re culling a nest of something where the young ones literally won’t survive without the adults, we don’t hurt kids. That’s how Alex wound up with a damn Church Griffin for a pet. No one does that on purpose, but if he hadn’t taken the kitten, it would have died before it fledged. If she could protect us from the ritual the cuckoos were trying to perform—”

  “I was the only one actually performing anything,” I said.

  Annie ignored me. “—then of course she also protected the kids.”

  “That assumes she didn’t hurt them at the same time,” said Mark. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at me. “Ingrid said the issue was storage. Their brains aren’t big enough to take both themselves and the ritual, and one of them would have to go. How do we know she didn’t wipe out the part of them that was going to tell them their own history?”

  “You mean the big time bomb of murder that they were born with?” asked Artie. “If she deleted that, more power to her.”

  “No, not more power to her!” snapped Mark. “That’s our history, our culture, everything we have left from Johrlar. Without it, we’re just a bunch of confused bipedal wasps trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. No killer instinct—no instincts at all!”

  “I did okay for myself,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah, because you fell in with a family of murderous assholes who thought keeping you was the same as keeping a baby Church Griffin, whatever the fuck that is! What’s going to happen to these kids? How are they going to survive if you’ve stripped out everything that makes them cuckoos?”

  “They’re going to survive the same way anyone does!” I glared at him, prying my own shields open as far as they would go in the hopes that he’d register and understand my displeasure. Artie winced, caught in the unfiltered rush of my emotions. “They have families right now, families who are probably at home in a panic because their children have been abducted, families who will be delighted to have them back! They’ll still be cuckoos, whether or not they remember Johrlar—and I don’t think remembering Johrlar has done us any fucking favors, if it turns us all into serial killers as soon as we get old enough to hit that instar! They’ll grow up and go to college and they’ll figure out they aren’t human and maybe they’ll find each other and maybe they won’t, but either way, they’ll get to stay themselves! They won’t get some bullshit about instincts and instars plastered over the people they want to be!”

  “Their heritage—”

  “Don’t try to make this about heritage, like you give a fuck about heritage.” The urge to march across the room and slap him was almost overwhelming. “This isn’t about heritage because we’re all adoptees with unwilling adoptive parents, people who didn’t know what they were being tricked into taking, people who never chose to take us in but still wound up responsible for us! It’s not our responsibility to carry the sins of our ancestors forever, not when it turns us into family destroyers the second it gets dropped onto our shoulders. If I deleted that bullshit from their heads, good for me. I’ve freed them. They can learn it if they want to. You still remember every horrifying scrap, I’m sure. You can be the one to educate our people, and I can be their great destroyer, but if you want to act like preserving their minds was less important than preserving a history book, then fuck you.”

  The sound of James’ palm striking Mark’s face was very loud and somehow underwhelming at the same time, like it should have been a bigger deal when one of my allies struck another. Mark raised his hand to cover the stinging spot on his cheek, eyes going white as he focused on James, who was radiating confusion.

  Oh, fuck me—James wasn’t a Price by blood, and didn’t have Frances Healy’s protection from my telepathy. I had accidentally turned him into a puppet by dropping my own shielding. I pulled back, so hard and firmly that the effort made me slightly dizzy, like I’d stood up too fast after riding a roller coaster or something.

  “I’m sorry, James,” I said, rushing to put myself between him and Mark, in case the compulsion hadn’t fully faded. “Annie thinks of you as her brother, and I forgot you weren’t a Price by blood for a second there. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Oh, so you’re the reason ice boy went and whacked me?” asked Mark, in a dangerous tone. “Not cool.”

  “No, and it was an accident, and it won’t happen again.”

  “Everything seems to be an accident with you,” snarled Artie, turning away from the window so fast he knocked over a chair. It fell to the linoleum with a clatter. No one said anything, all of us just staring at him in stunned silence. “Wiped our minds? Accident! Deleted our memories? Accident! Became a cuckoo queen? Accident! Made James hit Mark? Accident! This is all bullshit. It’s the way you people hunt, taken to eleven. You think we don’t know cuckoo tactics? My grandmother is a cuckoo. I know exactly what you’re trying to do, and you can go get fucked if you think I’m going to let you get away with it.”

  He stalked toward me, and I shrank back, until my shoulders bumped against Mark’s chest, stopping me from going any farther. I didn’t think Artie was going to hit me, and based on his surface thoughts, he wasn’t planning to, but that’s where the most danger can sometimes lie; in the space between the intention and the action, where people do things without thinking about them. I didn’t know this version of Artie, the man I’d grown up with, the man I loved, the man who had—until I found myself in the position of needing to set everything I loved on fire to save the world—loved me. He was a stranger.

  “I’m not trying to do anything,” I said, in a small voice. “I just want to figure out how to get us all home, and do it, before anyone else gets hurt.” We had so many obstacles between us and that goal. We didn’t need to be fighting among ourselves.

  Artie made a scoffing noise and started to pull his arm back. I cringed. It was automatic. I don’t enjoy getting hit. I’m not like Verity, who seems to take a twisted sort of pleasure out of seeing how much pain she can put her body through, like she’s going to pop down to the store and get herself a new one if this one wears out.

  “Arthur James Harrington-Price.” Annie’s voice was the snapping of a whip, striking each syllable of Artie’s na
me with the precision of a sharpshooter. He froze, arm still cocked, and turned to look at her. She advanced across the room like she was on her way to war, eyes narrowed in a fury I had rarely seen from her when her siblings weren’t involved.

  “I don’t care if she’s playing us or if she’s telling us the truth,” she said, voice going low and tight and terribly dangerous. It was a voice that demanded to be listened to—because refusal would have repercussions. Mark took a step back, getting away from that voice, and I moved with him, letting his shirt and my nightgown protect us from skin contact. “I think she’s telling the truth. I think the mice are telling the truth. We believe the mice. Isn’t that what we were raised to do? She doesn’t act like a normal cuckoo. She has regrets. She’s afraid. And even if she’s lying, we’re in a bad situation here, we can’t afford to be alienating potential allies because we think they might be less than honest with us. Do I make myself clear?”

  “She’s a cuckoo!” Artie objected. “Cuckoos can’t be trusted, we know—”

  “Your own grandmother is a cuckoo!”

  “Who do you think taught me not to trust them?” he demanded. “Both our grandmothers taught me that if you trust cuckoos, you’ll only get hurt. And Grandma Angela is broken, you know that, she knows that. This cuckoo,” he pointed to me, “isn’t broken. She and Mark both say that she’s some kind of super-cuckoo. How is that better?”

  “But you trust Mark.”

  “Of course I trust Mark! He helped us . . . helped us . . .” Artie’s thoughts turned confused, roiling around a place where his memories had been improperly patched together, where the sequence of events no longer made any sense if I was extracted from it. “I don’t—what did you do?” He swung his attention back to me. “What did you do to me?”

  His wail, while anguished, was more pained than angry, and he didn’t lift his hand again, just pushed past me and Mark and rushed for the door, leaving Annie staring after him.

  None of us moved. I wasn’t even sure that all of us were breathing. I finally straightened, stepping away from Mark with an apologetic glance back over my shoulder.

  “I’m going after him,” I said. “I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

  “Would it still be your fault if we were dead?” asked James.

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “Sometimes no matter what you do, you’re to blame. I didn’t make a lot of the choices that got us where we ended up, and when I finally got to choose, it was Artie who showed me how many options I actually had. I owe him. But this is still on me.”

  “Sarah, he was going to hit you,” said Mark. Mark, who had less power behind his telepathy than I did, but who also had fewer reservations about reading the minds of my family members. “He could still decide to hit you.”

  I shrugged again. “So he hits me. Verity used to make me spar with her so she didn’t slow down while we were in New York, and that girl never learned to pull her punches. Artie hits like I do. He’s afraid of damaging his hands. I won’t like it, but I’ll be fine.”

  Mark blinked. “But he could hit you.”

  “And thus do we see two people performing an accidental example of why I think you might be telling us the truth,” said Annie. “No one who didn’t grow up with our ridiculous family is this blasé about getting clocked. Are you sure you don’t want one of us to come with you?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “This is going to be hard enough. No need to make it harder.” I ducked my head and hunched my shoulders, making myself look smaller—a technique I had perfected while fighting my way through an almost all-human high school, one it would have been all too easy for me to silently dominate without even trying—and walked across the room to the classroom door.

  This time, they let me go, and I managed not to resent that. I had asked them to, after all.

  Nine

  “I always knew I was different from my parents. I think every child knows that on some level, although in my case, it was a difference in species, not just ideology.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  Following someone potentially hostile out into a dark hallway, like that’s a sensible plan

  Stepping back into the dark hall without Annie was no easier than leaving the stairwell had been. It helped a little that Artie’s confused, wounded feelings were a beacon, bright and bitter and easy for me to follow. Even if the mindless cuckoos had been swarming, filling the air with their infinite hunger, it would have been easy to follow that beacon, and almost impossible not to, at least for me. He was hurting. He was hurting badly, and there was no way of pretending it wasn’t at least a little bit my fault.

  Well. If I wasn’t pretending, then it was more than a little bit. It was a lot. This was almost entirely on me, and if there’s one thing my Grandma Alice taught me, it’s that intentions don’t matter to the people you hurt. The Covenant of St. George started their campaign of cleansing and terror with the best of intentions; when compared to the rest of the natural world, humans are weak, short-lived, and easy to kill. Only the fact that they demonstrate a near-inherent grasp of pack tactics ever gave them a chance at survival. They started outnumbered and vulnerable, easy prey for dragons and manticores and everything else that wanted a fuller stomach and fewer neighbors. I can’t say the Covenant was wrong to feel like they needed to guarantee the survival of their species. Everything that lives wants to survive, even when it hurts everything else around them. Survival is the first impulse we get, along with our first breath of air.

  I can say they were wrong not to stop and pull back once they’d won. They fought a war and proved themselves the worst kind of victor: the kind who turns a victory into a genocide. I glanced nervously at the shadows and kept walking, following the beacon of Artie’s thoughts to another door, identical to the one we’d been sheltering behind. It was closed, but I could feel him on the other side, all but screaming for someone to come and find him.

  He wanted Annie, of course, or James if he couldn’t have her; even Mark would have been acceptable. Me, he didn’t want anywhere near him. Me, he never wanted to see again.

  Too bad for both of us that I was what he had.

  I opened the door and stepped inside.

  This classroom was darker than the one I’d been in before, the window aimed less squarely at the suns. The day cycle of this dimension might be a long one, but they had a nighttime, that much was becoming increasingly clear, and if it was like the nights back home, that was when the big predators would come out, the things that fed on the flying millipedes and centipedes and whatever else this biosphere had to offer. It was a chilling thought. Well, maybe they could take care of the remaining cuckoos for us. I normally wouldn’t wish death by ravenous predator on anyone, but it wasn’t like the cuckoos would hesitate to rip us apart themselves if they got the chance. And we’re back to survival again.

  At all costs. No matter what.

  Artie had either pulled one of the desks over to the window or found it already there; he was sitting atop it, hands between his knees, legs dangling. He turned as the door swung shut again behind me, and while I couldn’t see his face in the gloom, I also couldn’t help feeling his sudden, sharp bolt of irritation.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “I can’t.” I walked toward him. “We’re going to have to work together if we want to go home, and that means we’re not going to let you run away. Mom would straight-up murder me if I got everyone else home and not you.”

  Artie made a scoffing noise. “She has other grandkids.”

  “So you believe me now?”

  “I believe you think my grandma’s your mother. Doesn’t mean I believe she is. That would mean admitting you’re telling us the truth, and you’re the worst person I’ve ever met.” He lifted his chin, the thin light through the window glinting off his glasses. “I’d rather have to work with a liar than a monster. So maybe you’re just confused.
Maybe you believe what you’re saying, but you didn’t do any of the things you think you did. Hell, all cuckoos look alike. Maybe you’re not this Sarah person after all, but some other cuckoo whose head she messed with the same way she messed with all of ours. Maybe you’re a victim, not a monster. Doesn’t mean I have to like you.” He turned away from me again, back to staring at the outside world.

  “Doesn’t mean you have to be a dick to me about it.”

  “I don’t see where I have to be nice to you.”

  “Um, because either I saved your life and your dimension, or I did nothing wrong and you don’t have any good reason to be mean to me?”

  “Not being mean to you and being nice to you aren’t the same thing.”

  “Artie—”

  “My life doesn’t make any sense!” He stood so quickly that the desk shook unsteadily, nearly toppling over. “Do you understand what that feels like? What it’s like to not know your own history?”

  “Not exactly,” I said nervously, rubbing my left wrist in a self-soothing motion that utterly failed to soothe. “But I broke myself for a little while, and I had to put myself back together one piece at a time, and while that was going on, I didn’t know my history, or my future, or my present. So I know what something sort of similar feels like.”

  “Bully for you,” he snapped. “I remember spending most of my life shut in my bedroom because I was scared that if I got close to anyone, they’d have to love me whether they wanted to or not. Is that true? Did I really grow up without any friends, without anyone who wasn’t related to me who gave a damn if I lived or died, or did you do that to me?”

  I blinked slowly. I’d been in so much pain over my own losses that I hadn’t considered whether deleting myself would leave the people I cared about questioning their entire lives. I knew I’d protected their core identities but not the pieces of them that contained me. James and Mark had few enough blank spaces in their memories that they could be mostly sure they were still the same people, even if recent events were a jumble. But Artie and Annie . . .