Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  A man who was still holding a plastic tray stepped forward, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry if we overreacted. Terrence went out after you came by the first time, and he didn’t come back. We thought—”

  “Terrence is a drug-seeking junkie who followed us out of here because he thought we were going to clean out the cabinets in the first aid office before he could get there,” said Annie flatly. We had moved beyond the stage where she was willing to soft-pedal or pretend Terrence’s intentions had been good ones, and frankly, I was relieved. I was too tired for lies. “He ran because he thought we knew him, making me think he’s not supposed to be on campus at all, and then he attacked us outside. He had a gun.”

  She didn’t mention that we had taken it away. Sometimes people get squirrelly when they hear that somebody has a firearm.

  “This is Iowa,” said the man. “Most of us have guns. Miranda doesn’t, but that’s because she brought her little sisters to school with her. You one of the science and technology kids? Is that where you got your little floating light doohickey?”

  “No, I’m a sorcerer,” said Annie, voice still flat. “I pulled it out of the substance of the universe.”

  “Oh, they’re LARPers,” said the woman with the ladle, sounding deeply relieved. “That makes so much sense. Did your people rent out the campus for an apocalypse LARP or something?”

  James and Artie exchanged a look as Mark stepped forward. I slammed my shields up as fast as I could, but not before I caught the leading edge of the wall of “trust me, you’ve known me for years, you can always believe me” that he was shoving in their direction. I managed to resist the urge to turn and glare at him. With my shields up, he wouldn’t have been able to decode the emotion behind the expression, and if he was already hitting these people, there wasn’t anything I could really do to stop him.

  “Apocalypse LARP, absolutely,” he said, voice smooth and warmer than I’d ever heard it. He wasn’t holding back at all. “It’s supposed to last all weekend.”

  “But this is Thursday . . .” said a puzzled voice.

  “They brought in all the latest in LARP technology, including screen projectors and hard-light constructs,” he continued. “That’s why if you look outside, you may notice the sky is orange during the day and the stars are different at night. It’s all done with lighting.”

  “That sounds expensive,” said a woman dubiously.

  “It was, which is why participants are not supposed to break character whenever we’re out in the open,” he said. “You may see one of our ‘zombie mobs’ shambling by, and I don’t recommend engaging. We’ve all signed waivers in case of injury, so they won’t be pulling their punches.”

  I had to admire the dexterity with which he was spinning his cover story, even if anyone who’d ever actually encountered a LARP would know that he was spitting pure bullshit. None of the tech he was talking about existed, and even the most immersive LARP experience didn’t come with intentional threats to the safety and well-being of the players.

  The man who had appointed himself spokesman blinked slowly, then asked, “Is this what that release form was all about?”

  “Right on the money,” said Mark. “You would all have been expected to sign one before you were allowed onto campus this morning.”

  Murmurs of agreement and sudden recollection followed his statement. He didn’t have the strength to actually create false memories without hurting himself—that would have meant triggering his next instar and going through the years of mental weakness and recovery that I had already struggled through—but he could suggest things for them to conveniently “remember.” It was a fine distinction, and one that was saving us now.

  “So while we’re sorry for any inconvenience, you did agree to be off campus before this started, and as you’re still here, I’ll need to ask you to stay inside as much as possible to preserve the experience for our players,” he continued. “We’re rounding up the other stragglers now, and will probably be bringing many of them here.”

  “Why here?” asked one of the women. “There’s only one couch, and the kids won’t get off it, so we have nowhere to sleep.”

  “There’s no place else better on campus, Heidi,” snapped another woman. “And we agreed to let the kids use the couch while we waited for the authorities to show up.”

  I couldn’t read either of their faces without lowering my shields, and I wasn’t going to do that while Mark was broadcasting to the room. Ironically, right now, Annie and Artie were safer than I was—cuckoos aren’t resistant to other cuckoos. I paused, eyes widening.

  Neither was James.

  I turned, and even with my shields up, my alarm must have been visible enough for Mark to read, because he pointed at James and shook his head before making an exaggerated “okay” gesture with his left hand. Interestingly, he didn’t flash the circle and raised fingers the way most people did, but signed an “O” and then a “K” in ASL, flicking the letters together so quickly that they became a single sign. I blinked and returned my attention to the people.

  Mark thinking it was okay didn’t mean it necessarily was, but it meant he was doing something to make sure he didn’t mess with James’ mind, and that was more than I’d expected. He was really making an effort, and in a way, that made me more nervous.

  Being a Price, even adopted, means growing up with a lot of lectures about responsibility and conservation and doing as little harm as possible. Even the most dangerous cryptids were to be caught and relocated away from human settlements when possible—something that gets more difficult every year, as people push their way deeper and deeper into the previously untamed regions of the world. Give us another few decades, and we’ll be worrying about how to get the deep-sea cryptids under cover before the submarines go by. And for as long as I’ve been alive, all those lectures have gone right out the window as soon as cuckoos were involved.

  Cuckoos are dangerous monsters, say the journals. Cuckoos are always the bad guy, say the field guides. Cuckoos will do their best to destroy anyone who gets in their way, they’re incapable of consideration or compassion, they only care about the things that belong to them, or that they can take. That’s what I grew up knowing. That’s what everyone told me—even my mother, who was a cuckoo herself, albeit a broken one.

  Angela Baker was a genetic sport, a glitch in the biological programming that was supposed to make sure we were all essentially the same, good little worker bees ready to protect and bolster the hive. And according to Ingrid, she was also an essential part of the normal cuckoo life cycle: one of a few cuckoos born every generation without the ability to receive the racial memories normally passed down in utero, who would be able to both instigate and see through the process of removing those memories from an otherwise ordinary cuckoo child. She had done that to me, because she had believed, truly and completely, that normal, unaltered cuckoos were irredeemable monsters, incapable of learning or of change.

  Mark hadn’t had a cuckoo for a mother. He hadn’t undergone years of delicate psychic surgery to remove the past of our people from his mind. He’d gone through the instar like any other cuckoo would, cracked open the egg of his memory like it was the right thing to do . . . and then he’d stopped. He hadn’t killed anyone, hadn’t gone on any monstrous rampages, had just gone home and continued going about his life.

  It was Mark, not me or my mother, who proved we’d been wrong this whole time. Cuckoos weren’t irredeemable. They weren’t beyond saving. And maybe it was harder to scoop the memories out of the children’s heads now, while they were young and hadn’t gone through that first terrible trauma, but it was easier than putting a bullet between their eyes, which was the solution we’d been pursuing for generations.

  It was no wonder the cuckoos wanted out of our dimension. We’d been pursuing them like it was our job to exterminate them, and they had never been the simple, superficial monsters we w
anted them to be. Nothing ever was.

  Mark was still talking about his imaginary LARP. Antimony nudged me with her elbow, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly. I lowered my shields just far enough to shoot her a quick thought.

  I’m going to go check on the kids.

  I caught her ribbon of surprise before I slammed my shields shut again, and she nodded. I stepped away, heading for the back of the cafeteria, where I’d picked up on the soft, fuzzy outlines of three cuckoo minds.

  I found the girls packed onto the cafeteria’s one soft green couch. They weren’t all the same age, and their clothing was mismatched; the youngest looked to be about six and was wearing red-and-white polka dot pajamas. The next was probably nine or so, wearing a sundress and ripped yellow tights, her feet confined by scuffed Mary Janes. The third looked to be about thirteen, just about to topple over the edge into that fatal instar, wearing jeans and a faded old My Chemical Romance shirt that she’d probably acquired at a thrift store.

  They were with an older girl, early twenties, with walnut-brown skin and curly brown hair. It was only their natural telepathic ability to fit in that would have caused anyone to think she was their sister; they were clearly almost identical to each other, and looked nothing remotely like her. Just one of them and there could have been an adoption involved. Three, and the cover stories necessary to make it work became more and more complicated.

  The girl—who had to be Miranda—was sitting backward in her chair, watching Mark with rapt attention. The cuckoos looked at me warily as I approached. The youngest twisted and hid her face against the middle one’s shoulder, beginning to make a terrified keening sound. The oldest stood, raising her hands in what was clear emulation of a fighting stance she’d seen on television.

  “Stay back,” she said, in what was no doubt intended as a threatening tone. “You stay back, or else.”

  “Or else what?” I cocked my head.

  She didn’t have an immediate answer for that. She kept her fists up, glancing wildly around as she tried to come up with something suitably dire. In the end, she couldn’t find anything, and so she just repeated her warning: “Stay back.”

  “I’m not one of the people who abducted you,” I said, raising my hands defensively, palms toward her. “I’m one of the people who was abducted.”

  She didn’t lower her fists. “You look like them,” she spat. “You look like him, and he’s trying to make us think the way he wants us to, just like the man who hurt my daddy did.”

  Crap. I’d already known there was no way the cuckoos would have left these children with adoptive families to go back to, but I’d been hoping I might be wrong. They’d been on the cusp of anointing a queen, after all, firmly believing they were on their way out of the dimension where the monsters were. They might have been willing to cut corners.

  Expecting an ordinary cuckoo to cut corners when murder was involved was like expecting a cat to sit in the middle of an aviary without killing anything. It was a nice thought, but something being nice didn’t make it realistic. Realism and actual reality have never had more than a passing acquaintance anyway.

  “I didn’t hurt your daddy,” I said sincerely. “A bad woman who looked like me hurt my daddy once because that’s what bad people do sometimes. I don’t know why. It’s just the way they’re made.” I was simplifying, but she was a telepath, or at least she was going to be one when she got a little older and all those noises around the edges of her mind started making sense. She’d learn the truth about people soon enough.

  She looked at me with narrow eyes and what I had to assume was suspicion. “You promise that wasn’t you?”

  “If I was the lady who’d taken you away from home and brought you here, wouldn’t I have shoes?” I lifted one bare foot and wiggled my toes at her.

  That seemed to get through, at least a little, because she lowered her hands and relaxed her shoulders, something I recognized as giving up readiness to attack. That was a good thing. Miranda was still focused on Mark, and didn’t seem to have noticed the interplay.

  “Why aren’t you listening to the funny man?” I asked. “He’s saying what’s been going on.”

  The middle girl scoffed. “He’s talking nonsense and he’s trying to make us believe it even though it’s all just rubbish,” she said, Scottish accent thick as heather in every syllable. “I’ve shut him out.”

  Nine years old and already shielding herself and the other children against another cuckoo. She was probably the one who’d swatted me away on my initial scan. I paused, looking at her more carefully. “Did a bad woman hurt your parents?” I asked.

  “Nah. Haven’t had parents since I was five an’ their train went off the tracks. I live with my gran. When I saw the magpies in the garden, I went out to them as fast as I could. I’d seen them once before, right before my parents died, and I didn’t want them to hurt my gran.”

  Magpies? “Magpies?” I asked, blankly.

  “You know. The black-and-white people. Like you are.” She jerked her chin, indicating the length of me. “Like I am, and my gran is. My mam had hair as red as you’ve ever seen, and my da was blond as summer, but then they got me, and now all I’ve got’s my gran. So when I saw them there, I knew they were down to no good, and I went fast as a whisper to make sure they didn’t do nothing rotten to her.”

  “La gente de Blancanieves,” mumbled the youngest cuckoo, the one in her pajamas, who was still trying to burrow into the middle girl. Some of the red polka dots on her pajamas weren’t dye, I realized; they were too dark, the color of dried blood. Cuckoos don’t bleed red, but our adoptive parents do. She glanced at me and began keening again, pressing her face back into the middle girl’s shoulder.

  Great. Three kids, two of them severely traumatized, the third possibly another potential queen, and this was only the beginning. I looked over my shoulder. Mark’s eyes weren’t glowing anymore, although he was still talking, apparently answering more questions from the crowd without the psychic push. Annie had moved away from him, leaving her ball of light hanging in the air to illuminate the room, and was talking to a tall, thin woman with a grayish cast to her skin—our bogeyman. Cautiously, I lowered my shields, relieved to find out Mark was no longer broadcasting his “believe me, I would never lie to you” field.

  It was a useful trick. That didn’t mean it was one I wanted to get caught in. Miranda was starting to snap out of her cuckoo-induced fugue, recovering more slowly because the girls had been influencing her all day. She turned toward me, eyes clearing, and offered a small, polite smile that was almost overwhelmed by the feeling of relief that emanated from her when she saw my general coloration.

  “Oh, hello,” she said. “Are you their mother? I told them I would find you.”

  “No,” I said. There are lies I’m not willing to tell, and with cuckoo kids, claiming a parental connection can very quickly become the equivalent of a binding contract. “I’m their cousin. Sarah.”

  “Morag,” said the middle girl, the Scottish one. She slid her arm around the youngest, holding her protectively. “This is Lupe.”

  “And I’m Ava,” said the oldest. Now that my shields were down, I could feel her wariness like heat from a stovetop. But not as much as I expected to—Morag was still shielding them. “What’s going on?”

  I glanced at Miranda. “That’s hard to explain.” We’d abandoned a certain degree of secrecy, but I didn’t want to claim responsibility for three kids at the moment, especially not if we were planning to gather the rest of the human and cuckoo survivors here in the cafeteria. Maybe it was unfair to Miranda to expect her to keep providing unpaid babysitting services, but I needed her. “Morag, that little thinking trick you’re doing right now? Can you stop for a few minutes? I promise my friend is done telling people what’s going on.”

  I just had to hope she understood when I was asking her to do, and I was rewarded when her ey
es flashed white, and the feeling of wariness from Ava suddenly increased, now accompanied by a razor line of terror from poor Lupe.

  Cuckoos are an invasive species, and we can be found wherever there are humans. How many cuckoo children were here who didn’t speak English as a first language, or didn’t speak English at all? They were lost, confused, surrounded by strangers, and they couldn’t even ask people what was happening to them. This whole situation just kept getting more and more unfair, and I hated it.

  Thank you, I said silently. Ava gasped. Lupe lifted her head and stared at me. Morag smiled, eyes flashing white.

  Thought so, said her mental voice, which was just as thickly accented as her normal one. You’re like me, not like Gran.

  So she really was another Queen being prepared to deploy, in the event that I had failed. It would have been at least another decade before they could force her into the final instar, but I guess when you’re plotting to destroy a dimension, you’re willing to take your time and get it right.

  I’m like all three of you. The people who took you did it because they thought they were going to save you that way. They wanted to use me to destroy the world.

  Lupe gasped. The language barrier wasn’t so strong she couldn’t understand at least a little of what I was saying, and translation is always easier when it’s happening without words.

  Is it gone? asked a new voice, younger and softer and still carrying her Spanish accent, but speaking distinctly in English. That was a relief. I didn’t want her to be scared and unable to talk to anyone, and while they might still be too young to initiate telepathic conversation without an adult to guide it, this was at least something.

  No, I don’t think so. My friends stopped me before I could hurt people, and we stopped the bad cuckoos from doing any more damage. That’s what we call the magpies, Morag, cuckoos, because we leave our babies in our people’s nurseries the way cuckoos leave their eggs in other people’s nests. I paused. But now we’re on another world, and things are scary here, and we’re trying to make sure everyone stays safe inside and doesn’t get hurt.