Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  I was trying to build new bridges, not tear down the few that remained. I moved still deeper into the store, and was rewarded with changing rooms that reminded me not to go in without an attendant, and not to bring more than five pieces of apparel with me. Well, the rules were suspended for now. I opened a door and stepped into the deeper dark on the other side.

  Nothing lunged out of the shadows. I relaxed marginally as I dumped everything I’d gathered so far in a heap before pulling my nightgown over my head and throwing it on the floor. I never wanted to see it again. I honestly didn’t know where it had come from in the first place. Ingrid, probably, since I’d been in her custody when my clothes were changed.

  It didn’t matter now. A lot of things that would have felt very important not all that long ago didn’t matter. They were artifacts of another time, another life . . . another world. What we had now was what we had to deal with, and we were going to survive it, or not, based on what we did now.

  I was still filthy, but the clothes I put on were clean, baggy in the way of collegiate athletic gear, but close enough to fit correctly. The smaller of the sports bras I’d grabbed was too small, but the next size up fit perfectly, and I could grab another on my way out. I stepped into the sneakers and out of the dressing room, Maglite in hand and snacks under my arm, feeling much more prepared for the apocalypse.

  Which was naturally when the hollowed-out cuckoo that had followed my light lunged out of the shadows and grabbed for me. The sound of the bell must have been muffled by the dressing room door, allowing it to sneak up on me.

  I hit it in the head with my Maglite, and when that wasn’t enough to knock it down, I hit it three more times, until I heard the distinctive sound of bone giving way. It was a meaty crunch that was somehow impossible to describe and completely predictable at the same time. My flashlight beam wavered but didn’t die. The cuckoo wobbled but didn’t fall down. I hit it one more time, and it fell, collapsing motionlessly to the floor.

  If one cuckoo had found me, more could be coming. I needed to move. I stepped over the broken cuckoo, playing my flashlight across the shelves, until I found a backpack. Like everything else in the store, it was black and red. I grabbed it anyway, stuffing my snacks inside, then turned to head back toward the snack section and grab several more handfuls, as well as multiple bottles of lukewarm water, Gatorade, and soda. Caffeine would help us all function better, although not as much as calories would.

  People need to eat, drink, and sleep to stay alive. Everything else is negotiable. I slung the backpack over my shoulder and hurried to the front of the store, collecting my knives, gun, and box of bullets from where I’d left them. I also grabbed a spare pack of batteries. Keep the Maglite alive at all costs, as it was both guide and weapon, and who doesn’t like a multipurpose tool.

  That was about as much as I felt comfortable carrying, and so I paused to look out the window for signs of motion, then stepped out the door and back into the world.

  The sharp formic-acid scent was still clinging to the wind, although it wasn’t as sharp as it had been during the day; heat probably made it rise out of the ground. I glanced around, both visually with my flashlight and mentally, and found no signs that I was being observed, so I set out across the quad, back toward the lawn I’d cut across from the cafeteria.

  It felt like I’d been gone for hours. Rationally, I knew it had been less than half an hour, if that; it wasn’t like I’d been lingering over my choices as I looted a student store for overpriced school mascot gear. I couldn’t even feel bad about the petty theft. We’d already stolen the entire school. What was a sports bra and a pair of sweatpants compared to that? I felt much more mentally centered, and like I might be able to tolerate my own allies without screaming.

  I turned off my flashlight to conserve the batteries once the starlight was bright enough to let me see without it. The nice thing about the lawn: it was a wide sweep of open green, and I’d be able to see anyone approaching with relative ease. I relaxed, enjoying the fact that I couldn’t feel the grass between my toes, or the gravel and small rocks digging into the soles of my feet. Especially, I enjoyed the fact that I was wearing a damn bra, and could no longer feel the distracting motion of my breasts whenever I moved at any speed higher than a stroll.

  I love superhero comics. I’ve been reading them since I was a kid, and while they have their share of wicked telepaths, they’re also the only place where I can consistently see people like me—both psychics and bug-girls with inexplicable mammalian features—presented as “the good guys” in any sense of the phrase. And the only thing I don’t love about superhero characters is the way all the female characters run around in skin-tight spandex that somehow lacks the compression to act as a decent sports bra, and then go home and lounge around their secret base in a tank top that offers no support at all. I assume every superhero team in existence has an Olympic-level masseuse on staff, because otherwise none of the female characters would be able to stand up straight. Bras are important.

  And still nothing moved around the corners of my vision, until I reached the cafeteria and the sound of voices from the other side of the building told me I was approaching my destination.

  “—run off like that,” Annie was saying, a peevish note in her voice. “It’s irresponsible.”

  “She’s a cuckoo queen,” said Mark. “She can take care of herself.”

  “You’re the one who said you don’t know exactly what that means,” countered Annie. “Maybe Queens physically explode if they get too far away from their hives! Maybe they drop dead after a certain period of time. We don’t know.”

  “It would solve some problems, if we didn’t need her to translate,” said Mark.

  “Which she can’t do if she’s dead,” said Annie. “The mice know her, and she fights like she’s one of us. She’s telling us the truth. That means she’s family, whether we remember her or not. We’ll just pretend she’s the new James. Everyone handled it fine when I came home and announced I had a new brother and everyone was going to accept him or else.”

  “Because you were terrifying,” countered Artie. “You showed up after being missing for months with a new boyfriend and a new brother and a wild-ass story about killing the crossroads and frankly the new brother was the most believable part of the whole story.”

  “So let me be terrifying again,” said Annie. Her voice dropped. “Sarah is my cousin, because I say so, and I’m the terrifying one. That means you will all treat her with the respect and protection family deserves.”

  “You can’t force us to like her, no matter how loud you yell,” said Artie.

  “I wouldn’t even try,” said Annie. “But you can dislike someone and still be polite to them.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Try.” There was a pause, and then she called, “You know how you make a sound in our heads when you get too close? Like someone’s playing a theremin right on the edge of my hearing. It’s not annoying, I get used to it fast, but I know you’re there. You can come out.”

  If I’d already been caught, there was no point in staying out of sight. I walked around the curve of the building. Annie and the others were still there—all the others. Artie’s new cheering squad was arrayed behind him, polearms at the ready, looking for all the world like they were prepared to defend his honor against a cold, unfeeling universe. Mark stood off to one side, looking uncomfortable.

  Someone had taken my absence as an opportunity to pile the dead cuckoos into a massive, horrifying heap. Somehow a mountain of corpses with my face didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.

  Annie nodded when she saw me. “I figured you went to get changed,” she said. “Feel better now?”

  “I found shoes,” I said, as if that were the most important thing that had ever happened in the history of things happening, as if I couldn’t have looted a dozen pairs from the moun
tain of corpses. And a bra, I added, on a private, no-boys-allowed line of thought.

  I felt her smile, even though I couldn’t quite decode the expression on her face. “Good for you,” she said. “Are you feeling recovered enough to translate yet?”

  “I will be if Mark goes into the cafeteria and sweet-talks them out of a fresh bottle of ketchup,” I said. “They should have them in the kitchen.” People are incredibly unhygienic where condiments are concerned, and while I can’t catch most human diseases, that didn’t mean I wanted to put my mouth on something someone else had already licked.

  Mark sighed. “On it,” he said, before turning and walking into the cafeteria.

  “Find anything else good in the student store?” asked Annie.

  I held up my Maglite. “And I got batteries,” I said, before shrugging out of my backpack, unzipping the main flap, and pulling out a handful of Snickers bars. “Chocolate for the mammalian weirdoes.”

  “Bless you,” said James, who had been sitting with his back against the cafeteria wall. He staggered to his feet, looking almost like a zombie himself as he shambled toward me. His brain waves were still smooth and normal, so I didn’t flinch away, but held my ground as he swiped three of the five Snickers bars and shambled back to the wall, already beginning to unwrap them.

  “He burned a lot of calories while he was dumping his own core temperature past all safe limits,” said Annie without rancor, strolling over and plucking the remaining candy bars from my hand. She tossed one to Artie as she passed him, and he snatched it out of the air without a whisper of gratitude. She sighed.

  “You know, just because it took more out of us to keep you from dying horribly, that doesn’t mean you need to be a butt about it,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask you to fry or freeze yourselves,” said Artie. “We were doing just fine.”

  “Because we were keeping half of them from reaching you,” snapped Annie. James didn’t say anything, being too busy shoving chocolate into his mouth. “Even Sarah did her part. You would have been swarmed without us.”

  One of the strangers jabbed their polearm at Annie, saying “Incubus,” in a tone that implied she was doing something wrong by speaking harshly to their new hero. Annie responded by rolling her eyes and turning her back on them.

  “It’s been like this since you left,” she said. “Arthur’s new cheer squad doesn’t like us when we raise our voices to him—even though he’s being an asshole—and one of them threatened to stab Mark until I took their fauchard away. Which reminds me, I have a fauchard now.” The polearm in question was leaning against the wall next to James. Since all the strangers were visibly armed, I had been assuming it belonged to the one who’d died. It was good to know it had already been claimed.

  “They’re not my cheer squad,” said Artie. “They’re making me really uncomfortable.”

  “We can’t explain that to them when the word we have in common is ‘incubus’ and they say it like a creepy snake cult getting ready to reset the altar for the next sacrifice,” countered Annie. “Hopefully, Mark gets back soon with the ketchup, so we can get the translation going again.”

  As if on cue, the cafeteria door opened and Mark emerged, carrying a large squeeze bottle of ketchup.

  “They don’t know why we needed this for the LARP, but they were happy enough to hand it over,” he said. “None of them followed me.”

  “Cool. Most people don’t get excited over a mountain of corpses.”

  “Eh, they’d believe they were props. I whammied them but good.” Mark walked over and passed me the bottle. “I hope this is what you wanted, princess.”

  “Not my favorite brand, but it’ll do,” I said, and popped the lid, squirting a stream of thick, over-sweetened ketchup directly into my mouth.

  It tasted like Thanksgiving dinner and the hot pretzels from the carts in Lowryland and my mother’s pancakes, all at the same time. It was the best thing I’d ever eaten, and as I swallowed, I realized that everyone was watching me. I took my time filling my mouth with ketchup again, swallowing a second time, then pulled a bottle of blue Gatorade out of my backpack.

  “Oh, my God—please tell me she’s not going to mix those,” moaned Artie.

  His broadcast disgust took a little of the pleasure out of the first sip of fruity electrolytes, but not enough to keep me from finishing the bottle. I tossed it aside—we’d already covered the lawn in corpses, so what was a little littering?—and turned my attention to the clustered strangers, who were watching me with bemused wariness, untouched by the horror and revulsion coming from my relations. Mark wasn’t disgusted. Mark was envious, having forgotten to grab a bottle of ketchup for his own purposes.

  No one knows quite what quirk of cuckoo biology makes us like tomatoes so much. Evie thinks it’s something to do with the chemicals responsible for their color, but I’m not sure I agree, since the color has never mattered to me. Tomatoes are ambrosia, plain and simple, and having a bottle of ketchup made me feel like I was ready to take on the world.

  I dropped the shields I’d reconstructed and reached out, trying not to get distracted by the mental states of my allies. James was exhausted, and his thoughts were worrisomely jagged around the edges, like he’d stuck his finger in a light socket and was trying to shake off the aftereffects. Annie wasn’t quite as tired, but was definitely not up for another mob attack. Mark was basically fine, having held himself back from the conflict as much as possible.

  Artie . . . looking at Artie was like trying to see my reflection in a broken mirror. He believed me. That should have been a good feeling, but his belief that I was who I claimed to be was entangled with his belief that I was the reason he’d never been able to get out of his room and have a real life. That was partially my fault for showing him the birthday party, but it was also a cruel confirmation that I made the lives of everyone around me worse. Not the sort of thing I wanted to have confirmed, even if I had literally always suspected it. Now he was surrounded by strangers who said “Incubus” like it was a catechism and who wanted to worship him as much as he was willing to allow. They were freaking him out, but they were doing it in a familiar way that made him feel less unmoored—and weirdly, even angrier at me.

  But that was a problem for later, when we got home and had time to worry about little things like who approved of who and who wanted who to go away. I steeled myself and plunged into the mind of the stranger I’d been speaking with before. She was as alien as the rest of them, but at least I’d started the process of building a rapport with her. It felt like it would be less traumatic, and while I was definitely recovering, I was still wrung out from the telekinetic tricks with Annie’s knives.

  The woman—and she was definitely a woman by the standards of her species, and thought of herself accordingly; now that I was attuned enough to her to perceive her pronouns, it seemed ridiculous that I’d ever missed them—was doing her best to suppress her reaction to Artie’s pheromones, which had been getting more difficult to resist the longer she spent in his immediate presence. So not only female, but a mammal in the true biological sense, and attracted at least partially to men, since Lilu pheromones aren’t powerful enough to completely override biological predispositions or self-determination. Elsie learned that when we were all teenagers and she was still figuring out her lesbianism. She’s a succubus whose natural abilities mostly attract men, and she only wanted to attract women.

  But she got more than her fair share of those and was able to dodge a few girls in high school and after who thought they “might” be lesbians and wanted her to be their lab partner for any experimentation they were willing to undertake. Two of them she’d turned down politely but firmly when they didn’t react at all to her chemical attraction. A third, she’d taken around the block sixteen times before the end of the weekend, and left her swearing off men forever.

  For all that I’d been in love with Artie
for most of my life, it had never been due to his pheromones. We were too biologically different for them to work on me. It was because he’d been sweet and thoughtful and kind, and he’d shared his crayons when we were little and his colored pencils when we were bigger. He’d cared. That was all I’d ever wanted him—or anyone—to do, was just to . . . just to care about me without it being because I’d forced him or controlled his mind or tricked him into thinking I was someone I wasn’t. I’d just wanted him to care. It had been easy enough to tell myself that everyone’d who’d been on that trip to Lowryland, where the deaths of my first family had pushed me into a level of broadcast strength no cuckoo child was supposed to possess, had been somehow whammied by a compulsion I hadn’t even known I was projecting. But Artie hadn’t been there. Artie hadn’t been in the path of any influence I was projecting, not until later; not until I’d been stable enough not to do that to anyone else.

  I had loved him for not being influenced by me, and he’d loved me at least partially for the same reason, even if he’d never been able to quite believe his pheromones didn’t impact me. That had been one of his greatest fears, and the knowledge that he might be influencing these strangers without their consent was making him uncomfortable enough that it was amplifying his existing discomfort with me.

  We’d have to deal with that later. I plunged back into the stranger’s mind, digging until I found something that felt like a coherent sentence. Their language was getting easier to understand; the more exposure I had, the more that ease would increase. We can talk now, I thought, willing the words to translate themselves for her.

  She jerked absolutely upright, eyes going wide as she turned to me. She asked a question in her own language, all clicks and hard stops. I nodded as I repeated her words in English, “Are we able to communicate again? You will translate?”