Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Maybe cannibalism was normal on Johrlar. Maybe this would have seemed okay to me if I’d been raised by my own kind. But I wasn’t, and it didn’t, and I sort of wanted to encourage Annie to start setting them on fire again, just to make it stop.

  Annie was still talking to James, voice pitched low and tight. I didn’t listen in. It wouldn’t have been appropriate or kind to do so, not when she was being so careful to keep her voice soft enough that none of us could hear her with our ears. Artie punched another cuckoo in the throat, sending it sprawling, and his new friends stabbed it until it stopped moving. We were winning. I pulled my knives back to me, plucking them out of the air and managing not to grimace at the film of viscous hemolymph covering the handles. Right. When you telekinetically rammed something through a person’s body, it didn’t come back to you clean. That was something to remember.

  James finally blinked and snapped out of his fugue, attention shifting to Annie. Then he wobbled, sagged, and collapsed, in that order, crumpling into her arms. She caught him without hesitation, and his hands—no longer blue, no longer frosted-over—came up to clutch at her forearms, looking for purchase. Annie sank to her knees, carrying him along with her, and held onto him as he shook.

  One of the few remaining cuckoos loomed behind them. I flung one of my knives back into the air, sending it flashing toward the cuckoo, embedding it in the center of the thing’s throat. The cuckoo tried to look down for a moment, then toppled, taking my knife with it.

  Mark grabbed my arm, pulling me around to face him, and nearly got stabbed for his trouble. He must have recognized the impulse as it flashed through my mind, because he let me go and put his hands up defensively, showing me that he wasn’t an attacker.

  “Whoa, whoa, it’s me,” he said. “Sarah, it’s me.”

  I took a deep breath and released my “grip” on the knife still embedded in the cuckoo, abandoning my silent efforts to pull it free. If he tried to start anything, I still had the other knife, and way more combat training than most people would assume from a quiet, relatively unassertive mathematician.

  “I see that,” I said. Then, with a tiny bit of humor: “You still have brainwaves. You’re not an empty, screaming void.”

  “Yeah.” He shuddered, projecting dismay and disgust at the same time, like the kissing cousins they were. “I thought you and Annie were exaggerating about them. I won’t make that mistake again. I’m sorry I didn’t take you more seriously. And that I’m not more use in a fight. Where did you learn to hit like that?”

  “Same place he did.” I pointed at Artie, who had just swept the legs out from under the last attacking cuckoo. “I keep telling you, we all grew up together. I may have accidentally deleted their memories, but I didn’t touch mine. I know everything my sister and her husband taught their kids, and I know a lot of what Uncle Ted taught his children. I don’t know everything Aunt Jane had to teach, because she’s a little more bloodthirsty than I like to be.”

  Mark wrinkled his nose. “There’s a point past which a Price won’t go? I don’t think I want to see that.”

  “Well, you’ve just seen some of it.” I nodded toward Artie, who was panting as he kicked the corpse of the last cuckoo with an intensity that should probably have worried me more than it did. I was exhausted. I needed something to eat—something that wasn’t barbequed shrimp, the smell of which was still causing my stomach to roil and grumble. I needed clothes, and a bra, and shoes, and a bed. Not necessarily in that order. I would happily have shanked Mark if a set of fitting undergarments would’ve magically fallen out of the hole I made.

  I took a deep breath and sank to the ground, sagging in place. “Annie?” I called. “Are you and James all right?”

  “He’s completely drained,” she said. She was still holding him, one arm wrapped around his torso, the other resting against the top of his head. “He pulled more sorcery out of himself than he ever has before, and it’s going to be a while before he’s feeling like himself again. Your little trick with the knives was impressive as hell.”

  She didn’t call it a new trick, because she didn’t know. This day was just an unending stream of horrible discoveries that I didn’t want to make.

  “Thanks,” I said, fighting to keep the hurt out of my voice. “I don’t think that was the last of them.”

  “No, we saw hundreds when we got to campus.”

  “Ingrid sent out the word that we were going to activate you as soon as she confirmed your final instar had been completed,” said Mark. “She told everyone where to go. A naturally telepathic species can spread news very quickly when we need to, and a Queen arising is one of the only messages we’re all programmed to receive. Not every cuckoo in the world came. Every cuckoo that wanted to live did.”

  “Can cuckoos be suicidal?” asked Annie.

  Mark snorted. “Anyone can be suicidal, and when you spend your days bathing in the thoughts of the people around you—the petty, cruel, small-minded thoughts—suicide and homicide start looking equally appealing. Only the fact that most of us think we’re superior to the best the human race has to offer keeps us alive.”

  Annie frowned, broadcasting confusion and displeasure. The more we learned about the cuckoos, the harder it was not to think of them as people, and if they were people, we’d been behaving like the Covenant for years.

  Artie and his new band of admirers were done kicking corpses. He straightened and walked back over to the rest of us, the strangers trailing along behind him, the closest of them occasionally touching his sleeve or arm and whispering “Incubus” in awed voices, like they still couldn’t quite believe he existed.

  “Can one of you translate?” he demanded, looking at me and Mark. “These people are making me really uncomfortable.”

  “No,” I said. If he wasn’t going to ask nicely, I wasn’t going to push myself, not when I was already wrung out and exhausted. I stayed where I was, looking placidly back at him.

  “I can try,” said Mark. He moved toward the group, eyes going white.

  Seen from the outside, that really was unnerving. If not for the fact that cuckoos were very good at erasing traces of their presence from the minds of the people who witnessed them, they—we—would have been caught a long time before we were.

  After a long, silent moment, Mark pressed a hand against his forehead and staggered back, the light flickering out. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. Their minds are too strange, and they’re all thinking too fast. I’m not strong enough.” Then he looked at me.

  It was clear what he wanted me to do. I didn’t need to be psychic to figure that out. I pushed myself to my feet, my knees wobbling as I tried to get my balance back, turned, and walked away from them.

  Behind me, Artie demanded, “Where the hell is she going?” Annie shushed him.

  “Sarah?” she called, more gently, more like I was a person who could make her own choices, and not a badly-trained dog that needed to be brought to heel. “Are you all right?”

  I spun to face her. “No,” I snapped. “No, I’m not all right. I’m exhausted, I’m starving, we just fought off a fucking zombie mob and I didn’t start out with any weapons because none of you want to trust me enough to let me protect myself, I don’t have any shoes, I don’t have a bra, and I want to go home!” I wanted my mother, and my own clothes, and a tomato sandwich, and to sit and watch Square One reruns until my head stopped spinning. I wanted not to feel like I was risking an instar no one knew existed just by trying to stay alive.

  I wanted Artie to put his arms around me and tell me it was going to be all right, he still loved me, he still believed that I could fix this.

  Wanting something doesn’t make it possible. It never has, and that’s a good thing, since a whole lot of little girls want unicorns every year, and unicorns do not make good pets. But oh, I wanted. I felt like I was going to explode with wanting, and that meant I ne
eded to be somewhere he wasn’t, because I was too tired to put up another shield, and what I wanted was going to radiate out of me and become what he wanted if I wasn’t careful.

  I waved a hand, calling the second knife out of the cuckoo’s throat. Yanking it free from the cervical spine was harder than I would have guessed, but in the end, my will was stronger than its inertia. The handle slapped into my palm, slick with hemolymph as I closed my fingers around it. I didn’t drop it. That would have been embarrassing.

  “I just need a minute without any of you standing around and thinking things at me, okay? You’re giving me a headache. You won’t like what happens when I have a headache. I’m going to the student store,” I said wearily. “I need shoes.”

  Then I turned and walked away across the darkened campus, their confusion and displeasure following me into the shadows.

  I didn’t look back.

  Twelve

  “Being the black sheep doesn’t mean you’re not family anymore. We’re not all going to fit together like puzzle pieces. We’re not even all going to like each other most of the time. That’s all right. Family doesn’t have to like each other. We just have to step up.”

  —Jane Harrington-Price.

  Walking alone across the darkened campus, which is maybe not the most mature thing ever, but is vitally necessary for my sanity right now

  Walking away from the others wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, but the math said it should be safe enough, at least for the moment, and if I had to spend one more second so close to their minds that their thoughts were like steel wool scraping over my sanity, I was going to scream. Also, the mob of husked-out cuckoos that had attacked us had been massive. It would have picked up any smaller groups as it moved toward us. There were unlikely to be stragglers in the immediate vicinity, and even if there were, I had knives now. And yeah, maybe this was an elaborate means of committing suicide—I couldn’t take fifty cuckoos by myself on my best day, and this was so far from my best day that I couldn’t have found it on a map—but going foolishly up against impossible odds is sort of the Price family motto. And if I stayed around my friends for much longer, I was going to slip and melt their brains trying to turn them back into the people I needed them to be in order to keep myself from breaking.

  Even Mark wasn’t safe. I had the fewest expectations where he was concerned, but I also had the fewest scruples. I was less likely to hold back where he was concerned, and that wasn’t any better in the long run. I needed a few minutes to myself. I had a destination. So I was walking away.

  I was too exhausted to shield properly, but not too exhausted to scan; if anything, that was easier without my shields in the way. I didn’t try to push myself to “see” the whole campus, just the area close enough to matter. Thanks to my white nightgown, general pallor, and the fact that all the blood I’d been spattered with had been clear, I looked more like an ingénue who’d been slimed than the survivor of a pitched battle, and I was virtually glowing in the starlight. It was almost nice to know I was so visible because I didn’t want to be, and if my abilities had been pushing that close to the line of being completely out of control, I would have found a way to distort the light and disappear.

  Right. Because an inability to become the Invisible Woman was really proof that I wasn’t verging on a post-Queen instar. I scowled at my feet and kept on walking.

  A few minds flickered at the edges of my consciousness; the bogeymen in the steam tunnels, the individuals who’d taken up hiding places in various classrooms, either solo or in trios and pairs. None of them were looking out their windows. I was passing unseen, a ghost in the night.

  Not quite a ghost. I was too tired to be dead. Cuckoos don’t leave ghosts in the version of the afterlife we know exists; Aunt Rose says that may be because it’s usually “unfinished business” that keeps people from moving on, beyond the boundaries of the twilight that butts up against the land of the living, and cuckoos live such self-pleasing, hedonistic lives that they rarely leave anything undone while they’re alive. It’s as good a theory as any, and better than the one the mice proposed when I was a kid, which was that cuckoos didn’t leave ghosts because we don’t have souls.

  I don’t know if I believe in souls per se, but I know that when humans die, they sometimes leave something behind for a little while, something that thinks and acts and exists just like they did when they were alive, something that endures. It’s hard not to equate that with the idea of the soul, and I refuse to think that cuckoos are so alien, so inhuman, that it can’t happen for us.

  Not that I’m in any hurry to find out firsthand. I kept walking, watching my feet flash pale against the grass, following the map I’d taken from a glimpse at Mark’s mind, until the lawn ended at a wide expanse of brick and concrete. The student quad. I walked faster and more carefully at the same time, since the chances of broken glass and gravel were—or at least seemed—higher here, heading for the tall building looming on the other side. It was free of detectable minds. I was close enough that even cuckoo children would have been detectable. Unless there was another predatory mob waiting to grab and devour me, I was in the clear.

  Nothing lunged out of the shadows as I finished crossing the quad and climbed the four shallow brick steps to the front of the store. The campus had been open when the cuckoos seized control, and they didn’t give a shit about human ideas of property and possession; no one had bothered to lock the door. A small bell rang overhead as I pushed it open, revealing . . . very little.

  The starlight that made navigation possible outside didn’t really reach here, and while I could see the counter and the registers in the light that passed through the window, everything else was cast in shadow.

  This was Iowa. They had some pretty big storms here. Not as bad as Florida or Alabama, but bad enough to make a dent in the local power grid. I made for the counter and started feeling around below the register, focusing on the shelves low enough to not be visible from the window. Humans like to put their valuables where no one will notice them and try to take them away. There was no chance they didn’t use this space for storage, and equally little chance that what I needed would be on the top, where it could be easily spotted.

  I was feeling around under the third register when my hand struck the familiar, oddly reassuring shape of a handgun. Normally, I would have grabbed it and shoved it into my waistband. Under the circumstances, all I could do was move it to the counter to serve as a reminder to myself to get it before I left.

  A full box of ammo was shoved a little farther back on the shelf. I’d be much better prepared when I left here, whether or not they had sports bras in their gym section. That was a relief, if nothing else was right now.

  The next shelf down was where I hit paydirt. A flashlight. Not just a flashlight: a good heavy Maglite, the kind that seems to have been genuinely designed to double as a melee weapon. I pointed it away from me, held my breath, and flipped the switch.

  A strong beam of battery-eating light shot out and illuminated the floor. I stopped holding my breath and started laughing instead, giving the Maglite a hug. It was heavy and awkward and fully charged. It was going to save me.

  I left the gun on the counter, along with the knives, and made my way deeper into the store. I still wasn’t finding any minds in here with me. If I was wrong, I could club anyone who attacked me with my new flashlight, which was now my favorite thing in the whole universe, and would likely stay that way until I got a bra that fit.

  The store was large enough to be confusing when seen by a flashlight’s beam, with multiple long aisles terminating in end caps and table displays. Almost everything had the school’s red cyclone logo on it, and it was all colored red and black. I was going to look like a Carmen Sandiego cosplayer when I finished raiding the place.

  And I didn’t care. Looking like a cartoon art thief was better than continuing to run around in my nightie.
The first section I found was athletic gear: sweatpants, sweatshirts, and best of all possible outcomes, sports bras. They wouldn’t be as good as the real thing, but they would take away some of the ache. I grabbed one of each in what I guessed would be my size and kept on moving.

  Socks were one aisle over, along with sneakers that apparently retailed for seventy dollars, but felt about as high-quality and worthy of the investment as the canvas shoes at Target. Whatever. Just holding them made me feel better about my chances of surviving this with the remains of my sanity intact.

  I wandered deeper into the store, looking for a changing room, and found something better: a rack of chips, candy, and other shelf-stable snacks, next to a small cooler, dark without electricity to power it, filled with bottles of water, soda, and Gatorade. I shoved my ill-gotten gains onto the nearest shelf and grabbed a double-handful of chips and individually packed nuts, ripping the first bag open with such force that potato chips flew everywhere.

  In the moment, I honestly didn’t care about making a mess. All my focus was on shoving chips into my mouth, enjoying the small luxury of calories. Potato and salt and artificial sour cream flooded my senses, and I kept digging deeper into the bag, until there was nothing left. Only then did I stop and catch my breath, suddenly realizing how exposed I’d been during that little episode.

  The bell over the door was still silent. I was alone. I took a deep breath, tucking the rest of my stolen snacks under my arm, and retrieved the clothing I’d gathered from the shelf. I’d have to come back for some beverages before the salt turned my mouth into a desert biome, and it would probably be a good idea to find a backpack and fill it with chocolate for Annie and the others, except for Mark. Not that he didn’t deserve snacks: no one should have to “earn” food, and even enemies deserve snacks. But cuckoos are allergic to chocolate, and “here, have something that could kill you if you’re not lucky” didn’t feel very friendly to me.