Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Yes, I informed her wordlessly.

  Her excitement was immediate and obvious. She clapped her hands, managing to make a sound despite the polearm she was still holding, and turned to inform her companions of the situation. Then she looked back to me and spoke again.

  “We should call our—the word is complicated, it means ‘steeds’ and ‘friends’ and ‘vehicles’ all at the same time—and go, this place is not safe for much longer,” I translated. “The smell of death will attract hunters in the dark.” I paused to make it clear I was speaking for myself, and not her, when I continued: “I don’t know what ‘hunters in the dark’ are, but I don’t think they’re something we want to mess with. She’s really worried about them. This sounds like a good time to go.”

  “Where do they want to take us?” asked Annie analytically. “All the giant bugs we’ve seen so far could fly, so it could be a long way from here if we’re not careful.”

  “Fair.” I turned back to the speaker. Where? We need to return here. This is a piece of our home. We hope to take it with us when we leave again.

  Her response was quick and prompt. I translated: “This is not a safe place when the night is deep. We live in a safe place. We would take you to see our patriarch. He is very wise and remembers the last time we had an Incubus grace us with their presence. He will tell us what should be done.”

  I paused again before saying, “She doesn’t feel like she means us any harm. This isn’t a trap. She just really, really doesn’t want to be here when the hunters in the dark show up, and she doesn’t want to leave us by ourselves either—partially because her species has encountered Lilu before and apparently they really, really like them. I’m not catching any hostility or ill-intent, although I can’t be absolutely sure I’d know what that looks like. Her brain is very alien to me. It probably will be for a while.”

  “Do you know what the deal is with all the creepy ‘Incubus’ stuff?” asked Annie.

  “I’ll ask.” I focused back on the woman. Why do you call my cousin ‘Incubus’ the way you do?

  What is cousin?

  There are always concepts that don’t translate across cultures. Wadjet have no concept of “divorce.” Dragons have no concept of “fidelity.” And a surprising number of cryptid species, even after years and years of dealing with the overwhelming cultural dominance of humanity, lack a concept of “personal property.” I blinked.

  Family—same ancestors—but not as close as brother and sister, I replied finally. It was overly simplified but close enough for my purposes.

  Her interest sharpened, and she focused her attention more firmly on me. You are Incubus also?

  No, only Arthur. The rest of us have different parents. Why do you keep calling him that?

  Incubus came here once, long ago. Mated to our queen. Had many, many children, who grew tall and strong and helped us rise to dominance, helped us tame our first, and again that complicated concept that wasn’t quite “vehicles” and wasn’t entirely “friends.” His children are among us now. Our patriarch is among them.

  Well, that answered some basic questions about their biology in the most blunt way possible. Lilu have incredibly flexible genetics. They’re cross-fertile with almost every bipedal species we’ve discovered. Not the synapsids, and not the reptiles, and not the bugs like me or the Madhura, but if it walks on two legs and has warm blood, the odds are good a Lilu can mate with it. These people were definitely mammals.

  And if they didn’t have a concept for “cousins,” when she said his “children” were still among them, she could be referring to great-great-grandkids. That, or the incubus who’d come long ago had only been gone for a few days. I turned back to Annie.

  “They’ve met an incubus before,” I said.

  “No big surprise, given their reaction. I take it he was a pretty popular guy?”

  “Married their queen, had a bunch of babies—so even if they have a eusocial hive structure, they’re not bugs.”

  “Not like you,” said Artie, sharply.

  “Yes, Artie, and wow, does knowing that removing myself from your memory turns you into an insensitive jerk make me feel good about how much of my life I’ve spent hanging out in your room,” I snapped. “The point is that they’re mammals, and some of them may be distant relatives of yours.” It also meant the ones who weren’t related to him were definitely vulnerable to his pheromones, but I wasn’t feeling quite cruel enough to point that out. Not yet, anyway. Soon, if he kept thinking at me like that.

  I don’t necessarily know what it’s like to be glared at. I can tell when people are looking at me, but my inability to visually read facial cues means I miss the heat they’re trying to project, unless I’m also reading their minds. But right now, I was reading everyone’s mind, and I could feel his glower. I didn’t like it.

  “Artie,” snapped Annie.

  “Whatever,” he said, voice turning sullen as he stopped focusing his anger quite so intently.

  I returned my attention to the leader of the strangers. Do the children of the Incubus, any of them, speak our language?

  Some still do. You will have a better time of communication if you come. There was an air of desperation in her thoughts. The hunters in the dark will be here soon. We must depart, even if we must leave you behind.

  Dutifully, I relayed this to Annie, who sighed and scrubbed at her face with both hands before she said, “All right. We’re going with our new friends before more cuckoos show up, or these ‘hunters in the dark,’ whatever those are. Sarah, tell them.”

  “What about the people in the cafeteria? And the library?” asked Mark, sounding alarmed.

  “If we stay here and die, we can’t help them. If we leave, we won’t help them, but we can pick up the pieces in the morning. Protect yourself, then anything innocent, then the rest. That’s the rule,” said Annie. “Sarah, tell them.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” We will go with you.

  Wonderful. Do not be afraid.

  I hate it when people tell me not to be afraid. They never do that when something awesome is about to happen. No one says “don’t be afraid” and then hands you an ice cream cone, or a kitten, or tickets to Comic-Con. I backed away, putting myself next to Annie, as the woman placed her fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly. The others in her group did the same, each producing a sound any second grader would have been incredibly impressed by, loud and high and intensely carrying.

  It was actually surprising that a mammalian throat could produce that sound, and I was starting to wonder about the shape of their larynxes when I heard the buzz of wings growing steadily closer. The strangers stopped whistling, all save their leader, who trilled three short, sharp notes, like she was giving some sort of instruction.

  The sound of wings got louder, and three of the massive mantis-things dropped out of the sky, landing in front of us.

  Two were the standard green-brown kind that I’d seen in the garden, stalking around and chewing the heads off of smaller bugs. The third was larger and glossy black, like it had been welded out of wrought iron. It had a head like the blade of an ax, sharp and terrifying, and only getting more so as it bent forward to study us with one compound eye. The leader laughed and gestured for us to follow as she started toward the big black one. Naturally. If there were three large, frightening options for us to ride, of course the most frightening one was the one we were going to be using.

  But these were still better, at least in the eyes of the locals, than the “hunters in the dark.” That thought was enough to get me following the leader. She grabbed a swinging rope studded with fist-sized knots as soon as she got close enough, still gesturing for us to follow her even as she swarmed nimbly upward and swung her leg over the mantis’ neck, settling into a saddle very much like the odd macramé one I’d seen on the millipede.

  Annie was the next up the rope. I expected her to g
o up fast and easy, as befit someone who was trained on the flying trapeze, but she took her time about it, helping James along. As for James himself, he struggled despite the knots that gave him the handholds he needed, pulling himself laboriously along. Artie was behind him and pushed him up with one hand. Between the two of them, they were able to get James to the top relatively quickly, although not quickly enough for our new friend, who looked down and shouted something I didn’t need to understand to interpret as “hurry it the hell up.”

  Mark approached the rope, looking at it dubiously. “I don’t think I can do this,” he said.

  “Of course you can do this,” I countered. “It’s just a rope. Didn’t you have to do rope-climbing in high school? It’s a standard part of phys ed in Ohio.”

  “I dropped out halfway through my freshman year,” he said. “My parents never noticed. They were busy taking care of Cici, and it wasn’t like they saw anything I didn’t want them to. I played a lot of video games instead. Not as good for the upper body.”

  “I don’t think the giant mantis can help you up with its big stabby spear arms,” I said.

  “I know.” Mark grasped the rope, looking unhappily upward. “I can do this.”

  “I hope so.” The other strangers had climbed onto their smaller mantises and were looking at us, thoughts judgmentally concerned. The hunters in the dark were coming. Whatever they were, we didn’t have much time left before they got here, and if we didn’t hurry, we were going to meet them.

  Somehow, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy that much. I stepped up behind Mark as he started trying to haul himself up the rope, reaching out with both my hands and the newly activated telekinetic part of my abilities to boost him upward.

  “Careful there, Handsy,” he said, smirk audible in his voice. “Or I’ll start to think you want to repopulate the Earth with cuckoos when we get home.”

  “Ew.” I managed not to recoil. It wasn’t easy. “Keep your hormones to yourself.”

  Mark laughed and kept pulling himself upward. I kept pushing as long as I could, until he was outside of my reach, then stuffed my Maglite and ketchup bottle into the backpack and started climbing after him. It didn’t take long before my head brushed against the sole of his foot and I had to stop.

  “Can you go any faster?” I asked.

  “I’m a psychic, not a circus performer,” he snapped. His voice was shaking a little; just enough to betray his growing exhaustion. We were less than a third of the way up the rope, and I wasn’t certain he was going to be able to hold on long enough to make it to the top.

  Which was, naturally, when the mantis leapt into the air. The rope jerked and swayed with the motion, and Mark yelped, nearly falling off. One of his hands actually lost its grip, leaving him dangling. I didn’t pause to think before mentally clamping down on his waving hand and using telekinesis to jerk it upward, slapping it back against the rope.

  Thankfully, he grabbed on immediately. I let go, focusing on keeping myself from falling now that he felt stable.

  Sarah, what the hell? he demanded wordlessly.

  You were going to fall. You’re welcome, I countered. Annie? What’s going on up there?

  We’ve still got a pretty big language barrier to worry about, so I’m not completely sure, but she seemed to see something, and she tapped on the big bug’s head. I’m guessing that was the signal to take off.

  I looked down. The campus was a starlit sweep below us, dwindling rapidly as our steed gained altitude. I didn’t see anything moving, until abruptly I did.

  It was like stop motion animation. The thing didn’t move so much as it had moved, going from one position to another without any of the natural transition between gestures. The overall effect was jerky and staccato, like I was looking at something that wasn’t entirely real.

  But then, that’s probably the best way to think about looking at a spider easily the size of a city bus.

  Form-wise, it was probably closer to a wolf spider than anything else, massive and hairy, lacking the smooth body and elegant legs of a garden weaver. It reared onto its back legs, waving its front legs in the air like it was somehow tasting the vibrations of our departure, and then it leapt, as effortlessly as it had done everything else so far. It simply . . . stopped being on the ground and appeared in the air only about ten feet below our current position.

  I’m not proud. I screamed, clutching tighter at the rope. Mark screamed, too, but he couldn’t clutch any tighter than he already was. He scrabbled instead, like he thought seeing a really big spider right below us would suddenly given him the upper body strength he lacked. I saw him start to fall and felt it at the same time, as he broadcast his mental panic on all wavelengths. If the spider had been telepathic, it would have fallen away, driven back by his fear. The mantis, which wasn’t telepathic, but was considerably smarter, lurched as it flapped its wings harder, lifting us into the air, away from the spider.

  Mark’s panic was infectious, thanks to the way he was screaming it into our minds. I felt the fire gather in Annie’s fingers as she prepared herself to attack an enemy she wasn’t in any position to fight and felt the ice in James’ veins responding to the same urge. I did the only thing my own rising panic and my rational mind could agree might help, gathering my thoughts under Mark and shoving upward just as hard as I could.

  Cuckoos don’t fly. But for the six feet remaining between him and safety, Mark did, soaring upward on a telekinetic wind that dropped him safely onto the webbing of the saddle and left me alone on the dangling rope.

  His panic continued, and my grasp was slipping. I barely had time to form the thought that this was all happening much too fast, and I couldn’t possibly be expected to deal with it until I’d been given a moment to sit down and process, and then I was losing hold of the rope, and I was falling.

  I had nothing to push against—the ground was too far away for me to reach—and even if I had, I’d exhausted myself getting Mark up to the saddle, and there was nothing I could do but watch the others get smaller as I toppled toward the waiting jaws of the giant jumping spider.

  Thirteen

  “There’s no such thing as ‘getting what you deserve,’ because none of us are born deserving anything. We get what we work for, and we don’t always get that. The universe is fickle. We just have to keep on going.”

  —Jane Harrington-Price

  Falling. Which is pretty straightforward, as these situational updates go. Just . . . falling

  The wind was colder than I expected, cold and aggressively harsh against my skin. I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of the panic above me, and raised my shields to shut out the sound of Annie and the others frantically trying to find a solution. I didn’t want to die with Artie thinking “Serves her right” or something equally awful ringing in my ears. So I put it all aside.

  Physics seemed to work here mostly the way it did at home. There were clearly a few differences in things like the square-cube law, but since Annie could throw her fireballs without vaporizing us all, it wasn’t fully suspended. I spread my arms like I was performing a swan dive, hoping the increased resistance would slow my fall, and spared a moment to be brutally relieved that I wasn’t falling to my death wearing nothing but a nightgown.

  I fell forever. I fell for seconds. Then I slammed into something huge and hairy, like landing on a Muppet or in a field of fake fur, and my eyes snapped open. I grabbed fistfuls of the shag around me, trying not to wince from the grasshopper-sized lice hopping around my fingers, and stopped myself before I could slide down the slope of my landing place.

  I was on the back of another giant spider, smaller than the first by a large measure but still the size of a draft horse, bigger than any spider had any business being. I swallowed my scream, tightening my grip. This was terrible. It was better than falling to the ground, and without a neck, the spider didn’t have the flexibility t
o turn and bite me off of its back.

  Spiders may glide, but they can’t fly, and as I realized where I was, suddenly neither I nor the spider were there anymore. It had landed atop one of the university buildings, and was bringing up one of its rear legs to scrape the annoying intruder away. I rolled to the side, still trying to catch my breath and process the fact that I wasn’t dead.

  Overriding another creature’s free will is the greatest sin the cuckoos commit. It had been drilled into my head since childhood that it was never okay for me to override someone else’s choices. In that moment, I didn’t care. The spider tried to scrape me off its back, and I did the only thing I could: I gathered my thoughts into a solid ball and slammed them into the rudimentary bundle of neurons it would have called a mind, if it had been that self-aware.

  STOP THAT RIGHT NOW, I commanded.

  The spider stopped. It froze with its leg still lifted in the air, posed to rub me off its head as soon as I let go. I took a deep breath and gentled my approach ever so slightly, trying to be less of a sledgehammer and more of a scalpel.

  Lower your foot toward the center of your abdomen, I commanded.

  The spider did, lowering the foot until it was close enough for me to grab hold of. Transfer me to the ground, I thought. The spider did so, moving more slowly and with more deliberate care than I would have thought possible. I clung to its foot until my own feet touched the rooftop. Then I let go and stepped back, putting a few feet between me and it.

  Not enough. Given how fast I already knew the thing could move if I loosened my mental grip for even a moment, it would be on me before I could react. Was I too small for it to eat? No, that didn’t make sense; I was the same size as the mantis-riders, and they had been afraid of the spiders. So while I might not be a full meal, I was definitely a potato chip, or something else a spider would think was tasty.