Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “Like a big Muppet.”

  “Yeah!” James brightened. “This is what I always thought Sweetums would feel like if he were real. And not, you know, a costume.”

  I smirked at him. “Just keep telling yourself that.”

  “You know, my whole life got turned upside down when Antimony and her friends rolled into my hometown. I was working as a barista at this coffeeshop downtown, never got to go to college, the crossroads ate my best friend, and my father treated me like I was still twelve years old and likely to run out into the woods where I’d be eaten by a bear. And then suddenly there’s this girl in my cousin’s house with her weirdo friends, and when she finds out I can freeze things the same way she sets them on fire, her response is to tell me I’m going to be her family now. She meant it, too. It wasn’t just one of those things you say because you want someone to go along with your whacked-out plans. I mean, she wanted me to go along with her whacked-out plan, but she already had a girl who could bend luck, another girl who had a really relaxed relationship with gravity, and a guy who turns into a giant monkey sometimes. She didn’t need me. One more sorcerer wasn’t going to change much.” He sounded faintly amazed, like the idea of someone wanting him when they didn’t need him was so far outside his experience that he still couldn’t believe it.

  James and I hadn’t really had much time to get to know each other between me coming back to Portland and everything turning messy and weird. Maybe that was why this felt comfortable, not tense like my conversation with Annie or obscurely depressing like my conversation with Artie. I took a sip from my ketchup-and-Gatorade, nodding.

  “Annie’s the youngest,” I said. “By the time she came along, Alex was the smart one and Verity was the pretty one, so she had to figure out who she was going to be if she wanted to stand out, even a little bit. She thinks she went for ‘the tough one,’ and it’s what her siblings think also, but really what she went for was ‘the flexible one.’ She finds a way to make things work, no matter what’s happening, and she makes family everywhere she goes. She takes after our grandmother that way.”

  “Your mom is her grandmother, right? So you mean Alice.”

  “I do. You’ve met her?”

  “Yeah, when we were on the way back to Oregon after Annie did her terrifying, insane time travel bullshit with the crossroads. I’ve watched a lot of Doctor Who since she unilaterally adopted me, and I still don’t understand how she pulled that off without causing some kind of massive, world-shattering paradox.” He shuddered. “Annie’s scary as hell.”

  “She is,” I agreed.

  “Alice is worse.”

  “So you really did meet her.”

  “Would anyone lie about that? She’s terrifying. And Annie says she regularly carries grenades made decades ago, which means she’s also a risk to the safety of everyone around her.”

  “That’s not wrong.” I’ve always found Grandma Alice to be remarkably soothing in her unrelenting dedication to her chosen calling. Most of the family doesn’t realize how hard the last forty-some years have been on her, but I can’t help it, and the psychic damage she’s carrying cuts all the way down to the bone. She’s basically a big sack of broken glass and feral cats pressed into the shape of a woman, and for all that, she’s got one goal: she wants to find her husband and bring him home to meet his children. She’s done all this to herself in the pursuit of a happily ever after that may or may not exist.

  Basically, my grandmother is what happens when a Disney princess goes horrifically wrong, and the single-minded nature of her goals and pursuits means that she’s always been a nice break from spending time around more complicated people. She may be damaged, but she’s not complex, and that makes her easy.

  “We told her what Annie did to the crossroads, and that Mary knew the people they’d been taking were still alive somewhere, and she lit up like a mall on Christmas Eve and said she had to go. I guess she’s off looking for her husband now, and I really hope she finds him. My friend Sally is probably in the same place.”

  I paused, trying to sort through the emotions attached to the name. Deep love, trust, and affection; Sally was the most important person in his world, and he felt like he’d failed her by letting the crossroads take her in the first place. I nodded, very slowly. “I’m sorry this isn’t the dimension where she ended up.”

  “That would have been a little too convenient, don’t you think? I mean, there’s things coincidentally going your way, like another sorcerer showing up to break me out of New Gravesend before the crossroads bargain one of my ancestors made could trap me for the rest of my life, and then there’s things becoming so ridiculously easy that they don’t make sense anymore . . . Sarah? What does that look mean?”

  “It means you need to go and tell the others that I’ll be here when they are.” I pushed myself to my feet and turned toward the chalkboard. “I’m sort of assuming Annie sent you in here to have one more try at convincing me not to kill myself today, and I think you may have just done it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Here’s one of the big rules of being a Price, James: don’t lie to the telepath. Here’s how it works.” I looked over my shoulder and smiled at him as reassuringly as I could. “You start by not lying to the telepath. And then you do what the telepath says, so she can save us all.”

  James made a confused sound as he turned and walked out of the room, leaving me alone with Greg, the blackboard, and the beginnings of a long-shot plan that would get us all home alive. Pythagoras, please, let this work.

  Let me get us home.

  Seventeen

  “Blood gives you hair color and skin color and maybe a few little quirks of biology or personality. It doesn’t give you family. Family is something you build.”

  —Evelyn Baker

  On the back of a giant spider, heading to Iowa State University, and other new sentences that have never happened before

  Everyone else was comfortably seated atop one of the massive mantises while I rode on Greg, who leapt with the assurance of a spider being escorted by several predators even larger and more horrifying than he was. With the suns up, it was easier to see just how much distance he could cover with every jump, propelling himself miles with a single push of his legs. The musculature of it all didn’t make any sense to me, but I was confident the math would work out if I could just sit down and pick at it for a little while. Math usually does.

  Our entire escort from the night before was accompanying us back to the campus, as was Kenneth, who sat in the front saddle of the very largest mantis. I didn’t like the way his thoughts kept turning toward Artie, or how covetous they were. His mind was still a convoluted mess compared to the more straightforward, familiar thought forms of my friends and family, but I was concerned that he might try to pull something if not interfered with.

  Antimony is basically interference given human form sometimes. She’d stop him from doing anything we couldn’t recover from, and all I had to do was keep out of her way long enough to let her do it. I kept hold of that thought as I clung to the back of my spider, letting him carry me to our destination.

  The land below us was beautiful in the daylight, even if the visibility made Greg nervous. Giant millipedes cut channels through the brush, eating everything in their paths, and centipedes undulated through the sky above us, cilia waving to keep them aloft. Some of them had riders, who waved their spears and bellowed incomprehensible calls of greeting across the distance. The forest in the distance was more visibly draped in a thick, cottony sheet of webbing, concealed by the spiders who made it their home. I sent Greg a thin arrow of inquiry.

  His response was a picture of a spider with longer legs and a more tapered body, its colors deeper and less designed for camouflage, hanging suspended in a tree. He had seen one of the weavers once, when he was a very small spider, no bigger than a dog, and he had nev
er forgotten it. The image was accompanied by a wave of fear, and I realized the webbing next to the spider contained two smaller bundles whose black-and-white fur showed in patches through the cottony strands. Greg’s . . . siblings? Littermates? I wasn’t sure what the term was with spiders, but given their size and the age of the memory, they had probably hatched from the same clutch of eggs, and he’d watched them die after their infant leaping carried them into the web.

  I stroked his head, careful not to let the motion break my grip on his fur. Falling from this height would not be fun. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re not going over there. Don’t worry.”

  He didn’t understand my words, but he was coming to have a better and better understanding of my tone, and he relaxed as we kept leaping onward. The up and down nature of his movement, as opposed to the steady flight path of the mantids, meant the telepathic hum from the others kept dropping in and out of audible range, creating an odd sort of Doppler effect as we pressed onward.

  Soon enough, the shape of campus loomed ahead of us, alien against the organic backdrop of the rest of the world, rendered fuzzy in spots by large patches of webbing. We landed in the quad, near the student store, and Greg crouched to let me slide off of his back, standing straight and beginning to clean his eyes with his forelimbs as soon as I was safely off to one side.

  “Good boy,” I said, patting his thorax. “You are an excellent spider, Greg.”

  He was an excellent spider who was getting hungry again. Well, based on the fact that I’d eaten the stew and hadn’t dropped dead yet, we were compatible enough to eat things from one another’s realities, and I was sure a few of the husked-out cuckoos would be available for him to snack on soon enough. In fact, I was counting on it.

  The big mantids began touching down around us. Greg backed up and raised his forelimbs and pedipalps in a threat display, trying to look even bigger than he actually was. I knew I had enough of a handle on his mind that he wasn’t going to hurt me without warning, but it was still alarming.

  “Hey!” I rushed to put myself solidly in front of him, filling his field of vision. “Hey, hey, Greg, hey, calm down, buddy, you’re all right. No one’s going to hurt you. These are our friends.”

  Ropes began dropping from the mantids as everyone dismounted and started to slide down. Greg relaxed, putting his legs back on the ground, although his pedipalps remained raised in what I recognized as a signal of high alert. I stroked his head.

  “Hey,” I said. “You are a very good spider, Greg. Did you know that? Did you know that you were a very good spider?” I accompanied my words with a wave of appreciation and acceptance, trying to get my point across.

  Communicating with large, non-sapient arachnids isn’t normal, not even for a member of our family, but Greg remained calm as I stroked his head, finally relaxing his pedipalps and shifting positions enough to lean against me, content with the moment. The telepathic hum of my friends getting closer increased. I looked up, smiling at their approach. Their emotional states indicated that at least some of them were smiling back.

  “Hey,” said Mark. “You decided being a horse girl was too normal for you and what, you’d be a spider-the-size-of-a horse girl instead?”

  “It seems to be working out okay so far,” I said. “Does everyone know what they’re supposed to do?”

  The warriors from the mound were still dismounting, moving more slowly due to their polearms—not a limitation that had applied to Antimony, I noted, although she was still holding tightly to her fauchard, and I pitied anyone who tried to take it away from her. Growing up as the youngest child meant Annie’s idea of “sharing” was “someone knocks you down and takes your stuff away,” and she didn’t do it very well.

  “I know what you told us to do, but I’m still not sure I like it,” she said. “Leaving you alone here seems like a bad plan.”

  “I won’t be alone, I’ll have Greg,” I said. The spider placed a foot on my shoulder, nearly knocking me over. “If the husked-out cuckoos find me before you get back, he can jump me to safety, and I need all of you at your stations.”

  “This just seems like a lot of unnecessary splitting of the party,” said James.

  “People have noticed by now that the campus is missing.” I said. “And they’ll probably also have noticed the murders all over the world, and the missing kids. We need to get back to Earth as soon as we can.”

  “How much does this have to do with you not wanting to hang out in a place where only the mice know who you are?” asked Artie.

  “Some,” I admitted. I was still concerned my extended range might mean I had wiped my existence from the minds of the rest of my family, and I wanted to get home and confirm they remembered me. Call me petty, but it felt important. “Mostly, though, I’ve just found a bunch of numbers that describe the situation right now, and the longer we stay here, the more those numbers are going to change. The number of survivors, the number of mental breakdowns, the number of permanent injuries, that’s all going to change. If we’d been the only people on campus when it was transported here, I might be willing to consider a delay. The presence of the other students, and of the cuckoo children, changes things. And if we want the campus, I need as many of the husked-out cuckoos as made it through the night.”

  Artie made a small sound of assent and moved toward the team of warriors that would be escorting him to the cafeteria. Our divisions were logical ones, given what each of us had to do, even if they did mean splitting the party—something that every horror movie and D&D adventure ever was happy to remind us was a bad idea.

  Mark was going to start gathering up the husked-out cuckoos who had managed to survive a night of constant attacks by giant spiders when they didn’t have any remaining self-preservation instincts to speak of. They were hungry, not only for calories, but for the mental acuity they’d lost—in this case, the zombies really did want to eat brains, they just wanted to eat them on a psychic level rather than a physical one, which would be no more pleasant for their targets than the Romero method. Mark would wander the campus, sending out bursts of nonsense thought and emotion as far as he possibly could, and whenever he managed to attract his targets, he would lead them back to me. They couldn’t understand his thoughts, but they could still pick them up if they were loud enough, just like they could still hear people yelling.

  Depending on how many cuckoos actually survived the first ritual, we might have started with hundreds, if not thousands, of the shambling monstrosities. I was hoping he could bring me at least fifty survivors. That would be tight, but it would be enough.

  While Mark was doing that, Artie was going to head for the cafeteria, where the survivors we’d already made contact with were holed up, and use his pheromones to convince them to follow him to the quad. Morag and the other girls could help him nudge anyone who was being reluctant, and once they were here, I’d be able to put my proposal in front of them:

  We didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but for me to run the numbers I needed to get us home, I needed as much storage space as possible. I could take the memory of the last two days away from these people, remove the giant insects and the terrifying isolation, the lies and the trauma, and leave them ready to go back to their lives with no idea of what had happened to them. And for most of them, that offer would probably be a relief. But I couldn’t do it without their consent. I mean, I could. My ability to reach into their minds and rewrite them to suit myself didn’t give a single damn about whether or not they liked me for doing it, but since my goal was getting home without turning myself into a monster, I needed them to give me permission.

  And some of them would probably say no. For some of them, the idea of not knowing what had happened to them over the course of these two terrible days would be worse than living with the memory. That was fine. Everyone’s different. That’s why everybody gets a choice.

  Annie was heading for the library, wh
ich had the largest concentration of survivors and contained the other cryptids on campus. She stood the best chance of talking them around to coming out, and once she got them to the quad, we’d offer them the same choice we were offering the people from the cafeteria.

  There were no other big concentrations of people; Mark’s beacon for the husks would also attract the cuckoo kids, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin if he hadn’t put such emphasis on the rats, and once he had them, he could bring them back to us. They would have even more processing capacity than the human students, and they all had something big and juicy for me to go in and strip out: their waiting memories of the psychic damage done to their ancestors. Mark was right. The legacy of the cuckoos ended here, under this orange alien sky, far away from the damage they’d done. Far from Earth, and far from Johrlar.

  James was heading into the maintenance building, to the room where they kept classroom supplies, to get me as many whiteboards, Sharpies, and dry-erase markers as possible. All of them would be escorted by armed warriors, to help them out if things got unpleasant, and when James got back, I would start doing my math.

  It was a convoluted plan. It had too many moving parts, and it depended on too many coincidences, but I had two descendants of Frances Brown with me, which meant I had two people who carried the blood of Kairos, which meant I had two people who thrived on coincidence, whose luck would always bend toward the most ridiculous, improbable outcomes possible. And sure, they were both generations removed from whoever had contributed that specific quirk to their family tree, and sure, I’d seen them both fail horribly when the world didn’t line up the way they wanted it to, but if there was ever a time to bank on the Healy family luck, this was it.

  “You all know your places,” I said firmly. “Now go assume them.”