Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “If it’s just going to hang here, it’s not going to do us much good when we get to the bottom of the stairs, but it’s not going to give our location away either, and it’s not hot, so we don’t need to worry about burning the place down,” she said finally, with a shrug, and started for the stairs.

  The ball of light followed her.

  “That’s new,” she said, approvingly. “But fine by me. Come on, guys. Let’s go face the terrifying new dimension the cuckoos were planning to call home now that the lights are off.”

  “Does she make everything sound this appealing?” asked Mark, slanting a glance at me.

  I beamed, keeping my shields low enough that he’d be able to translate the expression. “Only when she’s having fun,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Your family are such assholes,” he grumbled, and followed me, happier to spend time with assholes than to be left alone.

  That was a sentiment I understood all too well. Cuckoos are solitary by nature; we don’t enjoy one another’s company, probably because most of us are monsters, but also because being around another telepath creates an annoying subliminal hum, like standing right under power lines. It’s grating and unpleasant, and eventually it makes us squirrelly. On the plus side, I had now been around Mark for long enough that I’d be able to pick his hum out of a crowd the size of the main plaza at Lowryland. If I heard that specific psychic tone, I’d know there was another cuckoo nearby, and that it was, for lack of a better word, harmless.

  Annie’s ball of light continued to bob at the height it had been initially summoned at as we all walked down the stairs, her in the lead, flanked by James, with Artie close behind them, as Mark and I brought up the rear.

  “I don’t normally spend this much time around other cuckoos,” he said abruptly.

  “Could’ve fooled me,” I said.

  “I don’t remember how we met,” he said. “Thanks to your little math trick, the first time I remember seeing you, you were lying in the grass in front of us, and the sky had gone orange.”

  “Then how did you know you needed to grab me?”

  “You were the only body that we could see breathing,” he said. “We assumed the rest of them were dead, and we picked you up so you could tell us what the hell had happened. I figured you had to be the queen we’d come to Iowa to stop.”

  “Had you really been intending to stop me?”

  “Whatever I had to do.” He looked at me gravely, dropping his own shields so I could more easily read the depth of his sincerity. “I needed my sister to be safe, and Ingrid wouldn’t let me bring her with us. She said Cecilia only made me weak, and she deserved to die with the rest of her stinking mammalian species.”

  “Why didn’t you kill her when she said that? My sister is old enough to be my mother, and I’d still kill anyone who talked about her that way.” My brother and I had never shared a house, and he had no kids, so there’d been no reason for me to visit him during the summers, and I’d be happy to kill for him, too. That’s not always what family means. Sometimes the people you’re related to aren’t family at all—witness Ingrid. But it’s what the people you choose to call family mean. Or maybe I’m just violent because of the way I was raised. I don’t know. I was still horrified.

  Mark sighed. “Because all the other cuckoos thought activating a queen and getting the fuck out of that dimension was just the best damn idea they’d ever heard. I could probably have taken Ingrid. She was like, super pregnant, and super pregnant people don’t usually fight that well, especially not when you stab them in the back before they have a chance to react. But I couldn’t take all the cuckoos who’d decided she was their salvation. They would have swarmed me in a second.”

  “I had almost finished the equation before I pulled you all in,” I protested. “How were you going to stop it?”

  “I knew you’d left your tear open too long when you were on your way out of Oregon, and some of them had followed you through. I was waiting for them to finish navigating the break and come take care of you for me. If they hadn’t gotten there in time, I had a syringe full of Hershey’s Syrup ready to go.”

  I blinked. “You were going to inject me with Hershey’s Syrup?”

  We had reached the bottom of the stairs. Annie closed her hand, extinguishing the ball of light, before stepping forward and cautiously working the door open. The groundskeepers and maintenance crews of the school deserved some sort of reward for the quality of their work; even moving very slowly, the hinges didn’t groan or creak at all, allowing us to spill out into the yard in relative silence.

  “It would kill you.”

  “I think it would kill anybody.” I couldn’t think of any species with a blood chemistry that would tolerate a sudden injection of literal candy. The fact that cuckoos are allergic to theobromine was secondary to the part where he was talking about shooting someone full of Hershey’s Syrup.

  “We have two telepaths and we’re walking into potentially dangerous territory,” said Annie, spinning around to face us. Outside, the starlight was sufficient to make her fully visible, if somewhat monochromatic. “Is there a reason we’re all talking out loud right now?”

  “Some of us aren’t comfortable having people project voices into our heads,” said Artie.

  “And some of us aren’t comfortable being expected to wear underpants that crawl up our asses when we have to put on a damn dress, but occasionally we have to,” snapped Annie. “If I can tolerate a thong, you can tolerate a little telepathy. Got it?”

  Artie’s eyes crossed with the effort of not picturing his cousin in a thong, an effort that ended with him projecting the image so loudly that I couldn’t have missed it if I’d been shielding myself against him. I put a hand over my mouth to hide my smile, but I couldn’t hide my amusement. He glared at me, broadcasting the intent to make his annoyance known. My smile only grew.

  “Silence from now on,” said Annie. “Sarah, Mark, get broadcasting.”

  “I can’t broadcast to all four of you at the same time,” said Mark apologetically.

  “I can, and I can make sure I broadcast anything one of you thinks to the rest,” I said. “That’s what we used to do during camping trips when we didn’t have cell service.” I was a cuckoo queen. I could damn well do whatever my family needed me to do. Is this what you wanted, Antimony?

  It is—hey, your “voice” has a lot more inflection when I hear it this way, did you know?

  I did. Artie always says it’s because tone is influenced partially by mouth shape, and half the time I’m just making mouth shapes for the sake of looking like everyone around me. Can we please find the student store before we hole up somewhere else?

  Why would we—oh, you want shoes, don’t you? The question came from James, who sounded embarrassed not to have guessed sooner that I’d be getting tired of walking around barefoot all the time.

  We can do that, said Antimony. Now everybody move.

  She started walking briskly across the lawn, trusting us to follow, which of course we did. There was no way of training someone for this situation, which was horrifying and unplannable, but out of all of us, she was the one whose training made her the closest to actual preparation. If anyone was going to know how to navigate the dangerous waters ahead, it was her.

  Plus she could set things on fire with her mind, and that was potentially awesome, depending on what those things happened to be. Sometimes you just need to know that you have a pyrokinetic on your side.

  We made it back to the cafeteria without encountering anything—no humans, no giant insects with unknown riders, and—best of all—no hollowed-out cuckoos looking for something to eat. That was unnerving in and of itself. Ten minutes of peace wasn’t something I was accustomed to anymore.

  I wish we had some flashlights, said Mark. He had moved a little bit away from the group and was squinting at a map affixed
to the front of the cafeteria building, protected by a sheet of slightly scratched-up plastic. This could tell us where the student store is.

  I have my phone, offered James, moving to stand beside him. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight app, holding it up so that it illuminated the map.

  It also reflected off the plastic, creating a spot of intense brightness.

  You have to turn that off, said Annie, instantly switching to high alert as she spun around and scanned the area for signs of movement. Sarah?

  Checking, I said. One of the nice things about telepathy is that it’s both more and less precise than speech—she didn’t need to tell me what she wanted because I was already in her head, and I’d seen the thought as it was forming. Her deeper structures were safe from me prying around in them—I had less than zero interest in learning the sordid details of her sex life, for example. I’d already learned more than I liked from her occasional comments about how every boyfriend should come equipped with a prehensile tail—but the surface thoughts were fair game.

  I dropped the running telepathic connection between the members of the group and spread my mind outward instead, searching for signs that we were not alone. I found the seven students and three child cuckoos holed up inside the cafeteria immediately, and kept reaching. We knew they were there; we’d been coming to . . . not collect them, probably, but definitely check on them, and possibly raid their supply of snacks. I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d eaten, and my stomach was beginning to grumble. I kept reaching.

  The hollowed-out cuckoos could have been advancing on our position, and I would have had literally no way of knowing about it unless they were also close enough to see. They couldn’t make complicated plans, so if they were advancing on us, the odds were good that they’d be doing it in full view, but that was it.

  None of the students I’d detected before had moved from their original boltholes, seeming content to stay safe for the moment. Part of that may have been a residual command from when the cuckoos took the campus: it was possible we were going to be dealing with a bunch of newly-minted agoraphobes when all this was over. I’d have to try to undo the damage if that was the case. But not yet. It wasn’t an assault to leave them as they were long enough to get us all back to safety.

  Terrence had managed to find the student health center and was sleeping the blissful sleep of the heavily drugged. He was still alive, thankfully—although I wasn’t sure how thankful I should actually be for having a hostile human we couldn’t kill without moral quandary potentially running around the campus again.

  I pulled back into myself with a small gasp, opening my eyes to find the rest of my party watching me. “ . . . what?” I asked warily, feeling too disconnected from my body to want to risk telepathy. Plus I knew we were alone. There was no point.

  “Your hair started floating, and it was very upsetting,” said Mark.

  I blinked. Then I shook my head. “I already went over this with Annie. It happens when I really push, and since I was just scanning to the edges of my current range, that was enough to qualify as pushing.”

  “I can’t say having another way to detect cuckoos is a bad thing, even if the telekinesis is a little worrisome,” said Mark.

  “You’re fine, Sarah. I should have warned them,” said Annie soothingly, and leaned over to put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re okay. What did you see?”

  “Um. Other than Terrence, none of the people I picked up on before have moved, so that’s probably a good thing. The cornwife isn’t withering yet, so this dimension probably isn’t inherently hostile to Earth vegetation. That’s good news for your internal bacteria.”

  “Dimensional travel requiring probiotics, not something I ever considered,” said Artie dryly.

  “Wait.” James held up his hands. “What the fuck’s a cornwife?”

  “This one’s an agriculture major named Michael,” I said. “They’re a type of cryptid that’s either pseudo-mammalian the same way cuckoos are, just with evolutionary origins in the vegetable kingdom—don’t ask me, I didn’t do it—or they’re primates that have evolved to mimic some attributes of plants. They thrive in agrarian settings, and they can pass for human well enough to get college degrees when they feel the need to contribute to the family farm.”

  James blinked, very slowly. “That,” he said in a portentous tone, “is ridiculous.”

  “If things being ridiculous meant they couldn’t be true, we’d never get anything done,” said Annie. “I have talking mice hiding in my hair and you give people frostbite with a touch. Now listen to the nice giant wasp girl while she tells you what we might be walking into.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I don’t know how many of the cuckoo children are still alive,” I said. “The three in the cafeteria are reasonably easy to spot, because I know that they’re there, but cuckoos that young are still a little fuzzy around the edges, telepathically speaking.”

  “It’s so the adults don’t hunt them down and slaughter them,” said Mark mildly. We all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “It’s instinctive. We don’t share territory, not even with kids.”

  “Must be part of the DLC you got and I didn’t.” Even if deleting that massive packet of inherited memories was some kind of war crime, I was coming to hope more and more that I had done it. That these kids were free to grow up to be whoever they wanted to be, and not be burdened and broken by the shadows of their past.

  Forcing someone to forget where they came from is a crime. There’s a reason people say history was written by the winners: once one side claims victory, destroying the history and culture of the losing side is a great way to make sure that victory endures. But these kids weren’t choosing to learn their history. It was being forced on them in a way no human mind had ever experienced, meaning it was outside the framework of human morality—and thus outside the framework of my own morality because all I had to work from was what I’d been given. If these kids still carried those memories, I’d have to decide whether or not to take them away, knowing they were a ticking time bomb that would eradicate the lives the children had built for themselves if they were allowed to go off.

  Mark had the history. He could always teach it to them, in a less invasive way. It didn’t have to be lost. But maybe it didn’t have to keep hurting us, either.

  “No more dimensional natives with giant predatory insects?” asked Annie.

  “There’s something flying so far overhead that I could barely pick up on it, but I don’t think it had a rider,” I said.

  “Good. The sky looks more Earth-normal at night, and none of us are bloody. That’s a good thing; we can talk to the cafeteria people now. Mark, did you and James find the student store?”

  “We did,” he said. “It’s on the other side of the campus.”

  “Of course it is. It’s not a horrible, life-threatening situation if we don’t have to run back and forth across an easily drawn space like we’re characters on Scooby-Doo.” Antimony sighed. “All right. Let’s go talk to these people, and then we’ll get Sarah some shoes.”

  She turned and walked to the cafeteria doors, not giving anyone time to argue. I admired her certainty. We followed in a ragged group, less certain but still willing, and under the circumstances, that was the best that we could hope for. She pushed the door open and we all stepped inside.

  I felt the person moving on the other side of the dining room door just before she pushed it open.

  Annie, wait!

  She paused with her hand just shy of the door. What?

  There’s a person on the other side of the door with a chair. They’re planning to hit whatever comes through.

  Oh. The tone of her thoughts turned feral. Well, I guess we’ll just see about that.

  She kicked the door open so hard it slammed aga
inst the far wall. The person with the chair swung for the body they assumed was coming through, unable to see in the darkness, and overbalanced as they encountered no resistance, tripping and falling on the floor, which was when Annie actually stepped through the door, crouched to place one abnormally warm hand on the back of their neck, and said, very mildly, “Hi.”

  “Holy shit! I think I’m in love,” murmured Mark.

  “My family is made of assholes, remember?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but she’s a badass asshole with an amazing rack.”

  James shot him a look backed by feelings of poisonous menace. “Hands and eyes off my sister.”

  Annie’s new friend wisely didn’t attempt to move or get up, but more figures moved in the darkness, shifting positions as they came toward us. Annie sighed and straightened up, another ball of light appearing above her outstretched palm. We were officially giving up on subtlety or secrecy, it seemed. Those were tools for another world, one where the sky wasn’t orange or filled with flying bugs and extra suns.

  “Hello,” she called, more loudly this time, pitching her voice toward the back of the room. “We’re the ones who were here earlier, remember? My name is Antimony Price, and I came back to make sure everyone’s okay.”

  Someone in the back of the room dropped the tray they had been holding. That was our bogeyman. She was the only one in the room who knew what the name “Price” meant in this context, and she didn’t like being shut in a room with it.

  My family has that effect on people. But not, for the most part, human people, who don’t have the same relationship with the Covenant that the rest of the world does—funny thing, given that the Covenant is almost certainly a hundred percent human. The evils we create ourselves are always easier to ignore.

  The people who’d been approaching us through the dark were armed with plastic trays and, in one case, a metal ladle. Of the makeshift weapons I’d seen so far, that was the one that seemed the most likely to do something actually useful, and not just end with the person who’d been attacked turning the tables on their attacker. But then, most people don’t start training with improvised weapons when they’re in kindergarten, and I probably shouldn’t judge them by our standards.