Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “Is that for my spider?” I asked, both aloud and in their heads, where they would hopefully be able to understand me.

  They nodded and radiated their affirmative.

  “Good. Thank you. He can handle things from here, but you may want to step away.”

  They took that as their cue to flee the room as they dropped the aphid’s lead, leaving it standing placidly in the middle of the room. This was definitely giant insect-as-livestock: the thing was in the presence of a massive predator that wasn’t bothering to conceal its hunger, or its intentions, and it wasn’t flinching.

  “You may not want to watch this if you’re feeling squeamish,” I said, dropped the stream of calming thoughts I’d been sending to Greg’s mind. He leapt instantly, landing on the clear patch of ceiling that had opened above us. The grubs recoiled further, humping their way toward the edges of the walls. He ignored them. I’d been telling him for hours that they weren’t food, no matter how much they looked and smelled like other things he’d eaten, and he couldn’t have them anyway. Instead, he inched across the ceiling until he was directly above the aphid, which raised its head and made a worried squealing sound, finally appearing to recognize that it might be in danger now that it couldn’t see the predator.

  It never thought to look up. Greg dropped from the ceiling onto its back, wrapping his legs around it and biting efficiently down on the nape of its neck, shattering the exoskeleton and severing whatever nerves it had in place of a mammalian spine. The aphid squealed more loudly this time, and then went limp, collapsing. Greg remained latched onto its back, driving his fangs into its flesh and beginning to almost spasm, like he was trying to suck an overly-thick milkshake through a straw.

  I wrinkled my nose and turned away. Mark kept staring.

  “Sarah, your giant spider is drinking the big green bug,” he said, sounding horrified.

  “Yup, and that’s why Peter Parker’s life is secretly a horror movie,” I said.

  “What?”

  “She’s not wrong,” said Annie. “Spiders don’t chew the way mammals and most herbivorous insects do. They inject their prey with chemicals that liquify the flesh, and then they drink it. If Greg here were a weaving spider, he would have wrapped it in a web before he started to eat it. Since he’s a jumping spider, he’s more interested in striking fast and eating faster. I wouldn’t get near him right now if I were you.”

  “I wouldn’t get near him at all,” said James.

  “You’re not afraid of spiders, are you?”

  “Weirdly, yes, I am. I’m just not afraid of this one. It’s too big to be real, and so my brain doesn’t know how to deal with it. Like, I know that it’s real, but it doesn’t register that way with the fear centers of my mind. So I’m not freaking out.”

  “Cool.” The conversation stopped. The sucking sounds continued. Greg was radiating waves of satisfaction and satiation, happy to be filling his stomach—assuming spiders have stomachs, and he wasn’t filling some other organ; anatomy is hard—with liquified aphid. I turned my attention back to the math.

  Artie didn’t return. The numbers didn’t get simpler. Mark and I both made corrections, smoothing out the rough edges of the formulation, pursuing something closer to perfect. Perfect is always the enemy of good, but sometimes we need to chase our enemies. Sometimes we need to pin them down and make sure they understand that we’re on their tails, we’re not giving up, we’re never, ever giving up.

  But Artie didn’t return. The hours ticked by. Greg finished draining his dinner and returned to my side, folding his legs under himself and becoming a perfect statue of a spider, replete and content and willing to wait with me for as long as I needed to. His mind was too simple for me to mine for coherent memories, but I got the impression that a meal like the aphid wasn’t a common thing for him; he normally had to fight off other spiders when he wanted to keep anything he’d managed to catch, and his small size meant he rarely got the first pick of the prey. He was satiated in a way that was very rare, and which only served to solidify his loyalty to me.

  In my company, he could travel to forbidden territory and be protected, and now he was well-fed and safe enough to sleep off his meal. Such luxury for a predator was not to be discounted. I stroked the top of his head, wondering if this were proof that spiderlings could be domesticated if they were taken from the nest young enough. Maybe that would be cruel, but it also might make the locals stop hunting them quite so vigorously.

  Not that I had any proof of actual hunts, only that they’d fight when their territory was encroached upon. Building a framework on suppositions and incomplete assumptions is just another way to be a monster. I didn’t need to tell these people how to live their lives. I needed to get out of here, whether or not that cost me my own.

  And Artie didn’t return. One by one, the grubs on the ceiling flickered and went out, leaving the room no dimmer than it had been, since the light outside the windows was getting brighter as the suns began to rise. On a pile of pillows and shed exoskeletons, James snored softly, one arm thrown up and over his eyes. Even Annie was beginning to flag, her eyes barely focusing on the page in front of her. Mark and I exchanged a look.

  “I think we’re done here,” he said. “I don’t see any way to make this tighter.”

  “At this point, neither do I.” I wanted to find the miracle solution, the single pivot that would change the outcome of the whole equation. “Annie, go ahead and go to sleep. I’m sure we’re out of here on our hosts’ schedule, whatever that is, and it’s not like we’re going to get much rest once this all starts moving.”

  “Oh, thank fuck,” she said, and put her book back on the shelf before collapsing next to James, closing her own eyes. In a matter of seconds, her breath had evened out and she had become completely motionless.

  Mark blinked. “She’s already asleep,” he said. “Does she always fall asleep like that?”

  “I’m glad you’re finally willing to accept that I might know things about my own family.” I sat down, putting my back against the base of the blackboard, well below the level of the equations we didn’t want to smudge. “Her parents started her combat training when she was six. That’s normal for us. We all learn two things well before we reach our teens: sleep when you have the chance to sleep, and eat when you have the chance to eat. Everything else is optional, at least for a while, but if you don’t have those things, you’re screwed.”

  “Do you need a nap?”

  I turned and wearily smiled at him, dropping my shields enough that he’d be able to feel the intent behind the expression. “I can’t have one. I’m a Queen now, remember?”

  “Yeah, but what . . .”

  “We had to make a shielded room for me at the house when I turned thirteen, because otherwise everyone in range would wind up dreaming my dreams. You want to talk embarrassing? Try falling asleep on the couch when the boy you have a crush on is in the next room.” One sex dream and Artie had been too embarrassed to look me in the eye for the better part of the summer. Maybe it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that he’d forgotten our childhood together.

  Except that a life is made up of every moment, not just the highlights. It’s the burned eggs and the mistimed farts and the stupid comments and the little fights. It’s the accidentally shared sexual fantasies. Wishing he could only remember the good bits would just poison any chance of finding our way to a new future of shared experiences and mutual memories. Sometimes I hate being the responsible one. Sometimes I hate being aware of the potential consequences of my every action. I groaned and let my head thump back against the blackboard.

  “So you can’t sleep without an anti-telepathy charm?” asked Mark.

  “Right. Wait—where are you going?” He was rising from his place on the floor, walking toward Annie and James.

  “Will she wake up if I touch her?” he asked, looking back at me.

 
“Wake up, and probably break your wrist before she realizes that you’re not the enemy.”

  “Got it,” he said, and angled toward James instead, sliding his hand into the other man’s pocket. James made a sleepy snuffling noise but didn’t move.

  “Fun as it is to watch your first forays into pickpocketing, is there a reason you’re stealing from a sleeping sorcerer?”

  Mark held up his hand, opening his fingers so the anti-telepathy charm he’d taken from James’ pocket fell and dangled on the end of its chain. I sat up straighter as he walked toward me, and when he dropped the charm for me to catch, I was already prepared.

  “There.” He sank back into his original place and closed his eyes. “Now you can sleep.”

  Except I couldn’t, because there was no way the charm was active—they would have used it to shield James from me before I woke up, or in the cafeteria, or . . .

  But the glass was intact, and the charm gave off the comforting cooling sensation of an active mental screen. Maybe they’d just . . . forgotten they had the thing for some reason, assuming they’d lost it, the same way I had, while Mark had remembered it. It was the first indication I’d had that maybe they didn’t all receive the same memory extraction. For Annie, an anti-telepathy charm was a tool. For Mark, it was a way for his enemies to disappear and target him unseen. It mattered more to him.

  This might work.

  I wasn’t currently exerting active control over Greg. I shifted positions to lean against him, sending out one last wave of comfort and safety before I looped the chain around my neck and the background noise of the world dropped away, replaced by only the sounds I could pick up with my actual ears.

  No more thoughts, no more feelings, no more anything but a world turned soft and nonintrusive. I closed my eyes and the world dropped away even more, becoming the misty gray of dreams, and I sank into them, and if time passed, I didn’t have to be aware of it anymore.

  I woke to someone shaking my shoulder, and I couldn’t tell who, or read their thoughts, or tell anything about them except that they were touching me. I opened my eyes, lashes gummy with sleep, and blinked until the room became clear.

  The ceiling above me was both free of giant grubs and covered in a beautifully painted mosaic that had been concealed before by the bodies of our mobile light sources. The image showed a tall bearded man, two smaller figures, and three people who could have been painted from pictures of Mark and me—Johrlac apparently haven’t experienced any phylogenic drift since they exiled the cuckoos. We would be able to blend perfectly into a crowd if we ever found ourselves in our ancestral home dimension. That was nice to know, even if I was pretty sure our arrival in Johrlar would be immediately followed by the formation of a large, angry mob.

  The final figure in the fresco was a tall bear-wolf beast with bows incongruously tied in the fur above its ears. It looked terrible and ridiculous at the same time, like someone had given the artist conflicting notes. I blinked at it.

  “That’s the last group of travelers through here, isn’t it?” I asked, turning toward the person who had woken me.

  Annie nodded, pulling her hand away. “I asked Kenneth about it when I woke up, probably about an hour ago.”

  She turned her face back toward me, expression totally unreadable. “Mark told us he gave you an anti-telepathy charm so you could sleep without worrying about hurting anyone. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that earlier. None of us knew James was carrying the thing.”

  “It’s okay.” And it was. Even if her memories had been intact, she might not have thought to turn me off like a malfunctioning printer just so I could close my eyes for a little while. I sat up, causing Greg to make an annoyed grunting sound—my giant spider was apparently still content to sleep, and no one was going to be shaking him awake any time soon—and stretched. “How long was I out?”

  “It’s hard to say, since I was asleep when you passed out, but I’m guessing around six hours, probably, based on what Kenneth said and the way people keep coming to the doorway to stare at your spider. He’s been here long enough to be less impressive now, while still being something most of them have never seen up close and alive.”

  “Hear that buddy? You’re the circus bear.” I lowered my arms and reached for the chain around my neck.

  Annie moved, catching my wrist before I could take the charm off. “Wait.”

  I stopped, blinking at her. “Wait?”

  “Yeah, wait.”

  I blinked again, suddenly realizing that the three of us—me, my cousin, and the giant spider—were alone in the room. “Where are Mark and James?”

  “They went to have breakfast with Kenneth and Artie. I wanted to talk to you before I joined them.” She shrugged. “You know. While you couldn’t read my mind.”

  I pulled my hand away from her, twisting it out of her grasp and lowering it to my lap. “You know I can’t read your mind right now.”

  “That’s sort of the point of you keeping that charm on.” I could hear her amusement, even if I couldn’t see it in her face.

  “You also know I can’t read your facial expressions when I can’t read your mind.”

  “Grandma’s mentioned that a degree of prosopagnosia comes with being a telepath who can’t reach the minds around you,” she said. “She’s had to learn ways around it. I guess you never did?”

  “I can’t reliably tell people apart when I can’t see their thoughts,” I admitted. “Mark and James and Artie are all dark-haired males, and they’re basically identical without their minds giving me a hint. I can tell who you are because you’re the only bipedal female in this mound who isn’t me and doesn’t have spots.”

  “Good to know I’m recognizable by something other than what Sam calls my astonishing breasts,” said Annie, again with a trace of amusement. “I can’t read your mind either, you know. There are some references to mind-reading in Grandpa Thomas’ journals, but I’m nowhere near confident enough to try those rituals yet. I’d probably make someone’s head explode.”

  “Telepathy isn’t as much fun in practice as it sounds in theory, anyway.”

  “So while neither of us can read the other’s mind, I wanted to ask you a question.” Annie looked at me steadily, and I didn’t need to know how to interpret her face to understand that this was a deeply pivotal moment. She wasn’t kidding around. “Sarah, that math you and Mark spent all night working on, it’s described in the notes kept by the other members of the party. And they all understood, from the moment they realized they were trapped in this dimension unless someone could come up with a miracle, that miracles have costs. The Johrlac they were traveling with were apparently fine with the fact that running any equation they could come up with would result in at least one of them burning out.”

  “If that’s what the books said, then that’s what the books said,” I said calmly. “I could read them for myself if I wanted to. Is there a question here?”

  “Yes. Sarah, is doing the math the way they wrote it going to kill you?”

  Mark and I had been staring at that blackboard for hours, silently trading suggestions and stabs at solutions back and forth faster than we could have spoken them aloud, and we hadn’t found any mechanism of moving between universes—especially not with an entire college campus in tow—that wasn’t going to create more strain than our minds could handle. If I didn’t want it to kill us both, I was going to have to dump the whole load onto one person. I wanted to live. I wanted to live more than just about anything. But if I didn’t, I had cut the number of people who would mourn for me virtually in half, and if Mark didn’t make it home, his sister would wonder where he was for the rest of her life. We both had a choice to make here, but while I’d be choosing survival, he’d be choosing Cici.

  I didn’t know her, but from what I’d seen in his thoughts of her, I already halfway loved her. She was a terror, and a cuckoo’s bab
y sister, and she deserved to get her brother back. So I did something I would have thought was impossible: I looked my cousin dead in the eye, and I lied.

  “If we’d done it exactly as written, yes, but we’ve made some modifications. The variation we’re planning to use should be perfectly safe. You don’t need to worry.”

  Technically, the first part of that was true, but the rest was a blatant lie. Annie laughed, sitting back on her heels as I reached up and finally removed the anti-telepathy charm. Her relief washed over me in a warm wave.

  “I’m so glad to hear that,” she said. “I know we’re all pretty messed up right now, but I don’t want Mom to kill me for losing her sister here.”

  She was being completely sincere. “Why did you make me keep this on?” I asked, holding up the charm.

  “It was just a theory. I figured if you couldn’t hear the answer I was hoping for in my thoughts, you couldn’t just say what I wanted to hear. But you gave me the answer I wanted anyway. I may not remember growing up with you, Sarah, but that just means I have a chance to get to know you, and if you were someone I liked before all this happened, I’m sure you’re going to be someone I like now. I’m looking forward to having the chance.” She smiled, the expression reflecting in her thoughts. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

  Without the charm, I could feel Greg’s thoughts again. He wasn’t comfortable being so exposed now that the suns were up, and if I left him alone, he’d go looking for a place to den up until dark. That would probably get him killed. “I think I’ll stay with my spider,” I said, offering her a smile in return. “He doesn’t do well alone, and I’m concerned these people might kill him if they get the chance. Can you bring something back for me?”

  “Sure. And now that the suns are up, we can head back to campus and get to work setting up whatever you need to run that equation and get us home.” Annie was perky as she bounced to her feet and made for the door. “I’ll be back soon, with whatever serves for scrambled eggs around these parts.”