Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Cuckoos, said Morag, trying the word on for size. Gran always called us magpies, and it made sense because of the black and white, but cuckoos makes even more sense.

  I needed to be absolutely sure . . . Your gran, she’s like us?

  Yeah. Mam was adopted when she was a babe, and Gran always said I was her little miracle. Doesn’t mean she expected to be a mam again when she was meant to be entering her dotage, but she’s always looked young enough to be my mother, so that’s all right, then.

  We live longer than humans do. I’m sorry. I glanced at Ava, who was staring at me, radiating horror and confusion. You thought you were human, didn’t you?

  I am human! I’m not a thing! You’re a thing, you and those cuckoo people who hurt my father, you’re all things!

  I sighed. This wasn’t my department. This was the sort of thing we called Alex or Elsie to deal with. Verity had always been too self-centered, and Antimony was too focused on finding something she could hit. Alex and Elsie were the sensitive, thoughtful ones who listened and dealt with messy emotions.

  You’re not a thing, I said, as patiently as I could. You’re just a different kind of person. We’re all different kinds of people. My friends—two of them are sorcerers.

  Like Dumbledore? asked Ava dubiously.

  Dumbledore was a dick, I responded, before I could think better of it. Then I sighed again. Sorry. Not quite like Dumbledore, but close enough, I guess. They do magic. And my other friends, one of them’s a cuckoo like us, and the other is an incubus. He can feel other people’s feelings, and he’s really good at computers. But we’re all people. Not being human doesn’t make someone a thing, it just makes them different.

  Ava continued radiating wariness. Lupe was young enough to be more traumatized than furious, but Ava had seen her father taken to pieces in front of her, and she was on the cusp of her first instar; if I was going to clean out the big memory packet, I’d have to do it soon. She was angry and mistrustful, and I looked just like the people who had made her an orphan.

  Miranda’s polite curiosity was getting more pointed and concerned as we all stared silently at one another, and I knew her patience had to be running thin by this point. Soon enough, she would demand to know what we were doing, and I would either have to lie to her and claim responsibility for the girls or back off. Not fun. Extra pressure has never been my favorite thing.

  I have to go and help my friends find everyone else, and I need the three of you to stay here and stay together. You’ve done very well so far. Miranda will keep you safe.

  Miss Miranda is taking care of us, said Lupe shyly.

  Yes, she is. Very good care. The fact that she didn’t have a choice didn’t matter to me as much as it should have. They were kids. They needed someone looking after them. And they weren’t hurting her, or doing any lasting damage. That had to be good enough. When we get home to Earth, Morag, we’ll make sure you get back to your gran, and Lupe and Ava, we’ll find your families.

  All I had was Daddy, said Ava.

  Then you’ll find my family. Mom wouldn’t mind me coming home with one stray, while she might have conniptions if I came home with all of them. Then again, she might not. She’d always been fond of children, and I knew she’d been considering adopting again before Shelby informed us that she was pregnant. Two kids in the house wouldn’t be a major change for her. We’ll make sure you’re safe. All of you.

  Promise? asked Morag with the sharpness only a child can manage. You swear you’ll make sure we’re safe, not go taking people to pieces or anything rotten like the rest of your lot.

  They’re not my lot, they’re just our species. I blinked, breaking the connection. Lupe was still clinging to Morag, but she felt less terrified now. That was an improvement. “I’m going to go help the others so we can go and get the rest of the people on campus. I’ll check in with you when we get back.”

  “You won’t,” said Ava sullenly, folding her arms as she dropped onto the couch in a sulk.

  “We’ll see, won’t we?” I knew better than to argue with a teenager who was determined to be unhappy. It never ends well, not for the adult or for the teen.

  Miranda looked at me uncertainly. “So you’re leaving them with me?” she asked.

  “You’re their sister, I’m just a cousin.” Their sister who couldn’t speak to one of them at all due to language barriers. That was fun. But she wasn’t hurting them and they weren’t hurting her, and this was really the best they were going to get.

  “Sarah!” Annie’s shout brought me whipping around to face her. She was walking toward me across the cafeteria, the bogeyman woman at her side.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Crystal. Crystal, tell her what you told me.”

  Crystal was nervous. She glanced at Miranda, and then at the three girls, nervousness increasing. I waved at Miranda and stepped away, moving to meet Annie and Crystal, out of easy earshot.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The two bogeymen Annie said you, um, found under the campus?” she said slowly. “That’s my fiancée and her father. They’re here for a contract negotiation. I’d rather you left them alone, they don’t know the campus and they don’t want to surface until everything gets back to normal.”

  “I can agree to that for now,” I said slowly. “We’re still trying to figure out how we’re going to get everyone home. If it means we’re opening a door, they’ll have to come walk through it like everyone else does. And if it means we’re transporting the entire campus, there could be more structural damage. Things could collapse. I’d feel better if everyone was at surface level when that happened, because if they get crushed, you’re probably not getting married.”

  “I’ll tell them,” she said. “There’s an entrance to the access tunnels at the back of the kitchen. I’ve been using that to move back and forth when no one was looking.” Bogeymen are naturally good at moving through shadows, exploiting them in a way that probably strains the bounds of probability, but works for them well enough that no one’s ever wanted to question it. She’d be fine.

  “I picked up two more cryptid students during my scan. Do you know either of them?”

  “Miss Price said there was an ag major who’s something I’ve never heard of before, and um, I’m a comp sci major? We don’t really hang out in the ag department. Sorry.” Crystal shook her head. “I know the chupacabra, though. She’s in physics. Her name’s um, Maria, and she’s pretty nice, as long as you’re not super attached to the bio department lab animals.”

  “I don’t want to know, I’m not going to ask, Sarah, don’t go looking in her head for the answers and share them with me later,” said Antimony. “Thank you for your help, Crystal. And thank you for staying here while we check the rest of campus.”

  “I know Mark said this was a LARP, and he made it sound very convincing, but this isn’t a LARP, is it?” asked Crystal.

  Antimony shook her head. “No, we’re really in a new dimension, and we have yet to make contact with the people who actually live here. So it’s not safe for you to go outside.” She shot me a quick look.

  Not planning to tell her the zombie mobs are real? I asked.

  Not as yet, no.

  It made sense from a standpoint of keeping things reasonably under control. It seemed like a little bit of a dick move, but I was letting her take the lead, and that meant trusting her instincts.

  “Are we heading out?” I asked aloud.

  Annie nodded. “Mark’s done convincing everyone that this is less apocalypse, more Dream Park, so we need to move. James and Artie don’t like holding still this long.”

  Odds were good that neither did she—she’s never been the most patient—and I had done what I could do here. I nodded in answer. “So let’s go.”

  “Crystal, we’ll see you later,” said Annie.

  Crystal waved as we wa
lked back across the cafeteria to where the boys were waiting, Annie pausing to pluck her ball of light out of the air as we passed it, and then the five of us left, returning to the lobby, where Annie blew out her light like it was a candle.

  “That went well,” she said.

  Something was nagging at the edges of my awareness. I frowned, not quite sure what it was. Morag trying to make contact, maybe, as she figured out that whatever we were, it was something that came with extra bells and whistles. I reinforced my shields and the nagging feeling faded. Much better.

  “Let’s go get Sarah some shoes,” said Annie, and pushed open the door to the outside.

  The cluster of people who had been waiting for us out there pounced.

  Eleven

  “There’s no shame in being caught flatfooted. Happens to all of us eventually. It’s how you react after the surprise that matters.”

  —Enid Healy

  Under arrest? Maybe? Or being abducted, it’s hard to say when you don’t know the people who are in the process of restraining you

  The strangers were basically human-shaped, the same way aliens on Star Trek are basically human-shaped; if not for their outsized eyes and too-sharp cheekbones, they could have been people with elaborate face paint, striped and swirled like ocelots, wearing cat-ear headbands and wigs that made their hair look more like fur. Their clothing was loosely fitted, clearly handmade from some kind of rough, woven fabric, tied tight around their calves and forearms to keep it from impeding their movements. The starlight was enough to give us the gist, but not the fine details like color, and I was way more focused on the polearm the one in front of me was holding to my throat than the exact shade of her eyes.

  None of them were the rider who had almost confronted us before, meaning there was a chance none of them could throw fire. That was nice.

  She said something in a language I naturally didn’t know, fluid and staccato at the same time, with liquid syllables melding into sharp clicks. I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Her emotional state was jumbled, but I could pick out curiosity and concern; she wanted to know what we were more than she wanted to slit our throats. That was good. She was perfectly willing to slit our throats if we presented her with too much of a problem. That was bad. I did not want to have my throat slit. The differences between cuckoo and human anatomy mean I can take a hit to what would normally be my heart and keep going without any major organ damage, but slash the arteries connecting my body to my brain and I’m going to have issues, same as any other biped.

  What I could see of her mouth looked very much built to the same blueprint as the rest of us, and her language contained sounds I’d heard in human and cryptid languages back on Earth. Communication should be possible, if our minds were similar enough to make it work. I closed my eyes and lowered my shields.

  Without the shielding in the way, her mind was louder, almost as loud as a human I’d already attuned to. Whether that was due to my own increased strength or the magnifying effects of this dimension, there was no way for me to know. Confusion and suspicion were at the forefront of everything: what were we, what were we doing here, how did we bring our entire hive with us?

  That was the first word I was really sure of: it was accompanied by a flickering image of something that looked like a giant termite mound, swarming with tiny figures that could have been insects or could have been distant bipeds. We had at least that concept in common, and it explained some of the concern: for her, any strangers were either scouts looking for a hive to raid, or they were a new hive springing up in established territory, and needed to be destroyed.

  If we had one concept in common, we might have more. I’d encountered Spanish and Spanish speakers before “talking” to Lupe; while this language was completely new to me, the theory was the same. I pushed forward, searching the images and ideas filling her conscious mind for points of connection.

  And there they were.

  The next time she spoke, for all that her words were still entirely strange to my ear, I knew what she was saying: “Pretending to be stupid isn’t going to save you. Tell us why you trespass here, and how you moved your entire hive without workers or beasts of burden, or it will not go well for you.”

  The translation was clumsy, and might be inexact, but I had enough faith in the basics of it to believe I had the gist of what she was saying correct. I cleared my throat, searching her thoughts for the words I needed, and then said, in her own fluid, click-filled language, “We are strangers from another world. We came here unintentionally. We want nothing more than to depart, back to our own world. The hive came with us, through the same unintentional means. None of the people here intended any offense, or mean you any harm.”

  That last was a bit of a lie. The hollowed-out cuckoos were nothing but harm. Terrence would also happily do us all harm, but Annie had his gun, and he was still in a drugged stupor in the health center, and we were unlikely to see him again. I hoped. As for the cuckoos, we just had to hope they stayed away, too.

  The woman’s thoughts turned chaotic with excitement and surprise. Until that moment, she hadn’t been sure we were intelligent beings, and not simply very clever mimics. “You speak our language. How is it you can speak our language when you claim to come from another world?”

  I opened my eyes, aware that they would be shining white and eerie. She didn’t flinch away. That was a pleasant surprise. “I’m what we call a . . .” I couldn’t find a word for “telepath” in her mind, and so I continued, somewhat clumsily, “ . . . mind-speaker. I am reading your thoughts right now, looking for the words I need, and our mouths share enough of their shape to make it possible for me to form them. You could speak our language as well, if you wanted to do so.”

  “We have mind-speakers,” she said. “They come from the,” and she named a local insect that had no English cognate, but which looked in her thoughts like a giant rosy maple moth, “line. They are very gentle and very fragile, and do not mingle often with outsiders.”

  “My line is not so gentle as a moth,” I replied. “We came from wasps. We are still predators. Most of us are dangerous, not to be trusted.”

  She shifted her grasp on the shaft of her polearm, suddenly nervous. “Why are you the exception?”

  “If I were one of the dangerous ones, would I tell you so? Or would I lie to you and pretend to be harmless, risking harm later when you discovered my lies?”

  That appeared to work. She relaxed again. “Your friends, they are mind-speakers as well?”

  “One, the male who looks like me, is a mind-speaker. The others are not. We come from many different lines, on our world.”

  “As we do here.” Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know if I like you inside my mind.”

  “If I withdraw, I lose your language, and we cannot communicate.”

  “Then I will allow it, for now. You will speak to your kind for us.” She grabbed my shoulder, her thoughts becoming louder with the skin contact, and turned me to face the rest of our commingled groups.

  Annie was staring at the polearms, all but ignoring the people, and the avarice rolling off of her was predictable and familiar and almost enough to make me smile. Girl does love her exotic weaponry. James was silent and resigned as another of the strangers prodded him with a polearm, hands at his sides and shoulders slumped. Mark was standing farther back, jaw clenched; he might be a problem, if he decided we needed to turn this into a brawl.

  Artie, on the other hand, looked like he had internally collapsed. He was standing with his head bowed, ignoring the two strangers flanking him, ignoring literally everything. This had all been too much; he was overwhelmed, and he had shut down, maybe entirely. We needed to untangle this before his panic attack got too deep to deal with.

  “Speak,” commanded the woman who was still holding my
shoulder. At least I was sure of her pronouns now. That was something.

  “These people own this territory,” I said slowly, having to make a conscious effort to speak English. The rest of my people turned toward me, visibly startled, except for Artie, who remained exactly as he was. Oh, this was bad. This was very, very bad.

  Normally, I can help when Artie gets overwhelmed. Normally, I can talk him out of a panic attack. But normally, he believes me when I say we’ve been friends since we were kids, and normally, he’s not blaming me for the fact that he’s basically lived his whole life as an agoraphobe, leaving him unaccustomed to crowds and too much novel stimulation. He wasn’t going to listen until things calmed down.

  “They are not our enemies,” I continued. “They did not come here because they wished to do us harm, they came because they were curious about the sudden appearance of our hive.” The woman hadn’t told me half of this—I was picking it up from the surface of her mind, unable to disengage my thoughts from hers while she was touching me. Oh, I wanted so badly for her to stop touching me, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  Her fingers tightened as she leaned forward and whispered her commands in my ear. I swallowed hard, nodding.

  “We will allow ourselves to be restrained,” I said. “They will be gentle, but we must be rendered harmless before they can take us to see their leader.”

  At the word “leader,” Artie finally raised his head. “Like hell we will,” he spat, and punched the nearest stranger in the throat, sending her reeling away from him, choking. In a pinch, the throat or the genitals are the best places to strike a biped, and since we had no idea what these people had for reproductive organs, or where they might be kept on the body, only the throat remained as a truly viable target.