Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Not the metaphor I would have chosen, thought Mark, sounding harried, and I stifled a smile as I kept scrawling numbers on the board. My gut still hurt, but again, the pain was fading, becoming more of a constant, dull ache that I could easily ignore. Aloud, Mark said, “That’s just what it will be like. But Sarah is very polite and doesn’t like to do things when people tell her not to, so I need all of you to raise your hands if you give permission for her to do math inside your imagination rooms.”

  There was a pause, presumably while the children were raising their hands, and then Mark said, “They all said yes. You’re good to continue, Sarah.”

  “Thank you.” I added the variable representing the processing power of a dozen cuckoo children and the effort of stripping out their prenatal programming to the equation and kept going. The more I turned the world into math, the easier it got to keep doing it—or the easier it seemed to get. It could all be an illusion, the siren song of doing what my species evolved to do making me believe I was on the right track when I was actually stumbling deeper and deeper into the weeds. I didn’t think so, but I wouldn’t, would I?

  One of the kids screamed. The sound was high and shrill and piercing, and I misdrew my symbol, leaving a streak of black against the white. The ritual wasn’t activated yet, and so it didn’t do anything bad, didn’t turn off the gravity or reverse my lungs, but it was still a problem. I wiped it away with a swipe of my finger, saying warningly, “Mark . . .”

  “Sorry,” he said. “The kids saw some big bad spiders last night, and they just caught sight of Greg.”

  “Um, Greg?” asked one of the children.

  “He belongs to Sarah,” said Mark. “He’s her friend. She rides him.”

  “Oh. Like She-ra and Swift Wind?”

  “Exactly like She-ra and Swift Wind,” said Mark.

  A wave of admiration washed over me from the children old enough to have seen the cartoon. I kept writing. It was almost time to switch to the Sharpies, to leave behind malleable math for the absolute constants that couldn’t be changed without killing us all. I turned.

  Mark and the children were still clustered in the center of the circle of whiteboards. The reason it had taken them so long to notice Greg became apparent; he had jumped at some point and was mostly obscured behind several of the whiteboards, only the bottoms of his legs showing through the opening. Exhausted children who believed they could finally stop being hypervigilant could easily have missed him.

  I waved my dry-erase marker. “This is what I use for math I might need to wipe out and replace with something else.” I pulled a Sharpie out of my pocket and waved that. “Once I start using this, everything I write is permanent, and I can’t make any more mistakes.”

  “So why change pens?” asked a kid.

  “Some of the math has to be permanent to work the way I want it to,” I said. “The equation will recognize my weak spots if I make it all malleable. So I need you all to be very, very quiet, and not do any more screaming, no matter what happens. Mark?”

  “I’ve got them,” he said. James was still some distance away, gesticulating at the gathered warriors and occasionally pointing back at the group of us, like he was trying to prove a point. I could have listened in, but I didn’t want to take my mental hands off the husks, not even for a second.

  Adding the children to my equation made up for three of the missing eleven, not all of them. I still didn’t have enough power.

  “Good,” I said, and turned back to the whiteboard, uncapping my Sharpie. If I didn’t have the power I needed, I was going to make it.

  * * *

  I was still writing when I heard the familiar hum of Antimony’s mind approaching from the direction of the library, accompanied by a cacophony of unfamiliar thoughts and feelings. None of them felt particularly panicked; they weren’t being chased by zombie cuckoos. That was probably great for them, but it was pretty lousy for me. I’d been hoping the noise they made would attract a few more husks out of hiding. It was difficult to believe that we’d had hundreds, maybe thousands of them the day before, and been reduced to less than fifty in a single night of giant spider attacks.

  Difficult to believe, but not impossible. They had no sense of self-preservation; they wouldn’t run, wouldn’t flee or hide or attempt to evade when something wanted to eat them. They’d just keep attacking, answering hunger with hunger of their own. It was admirable, in a primitive way. They didn’t give up.

  I wasn’t giving up either. As Annie got closer, I detached enough of my thoughts to send her a harried message: Did you ask them about their memories of being here?

  Hello to you, too. They’re split almost exactly down the middle. Several of them want to remember, while the others want to forget. And I got you a present.

  I could use the places I stripped the memories out of for processing space, since they wouldn’t have time to fill up with anything else before I could get in there. I added two more processors to my count. I was still six short. Six had never seemed like such a massive number before.

  What kind of present? More importantly, you had time to review the notes from when your father dissected that cuckoo in the barn, didn’t you?

  Antimony’s surprise flared along our mental link, briefly brighter than I expected it to be. Yes, she replied. Why?

  Do I have a liver?

  Do you have a—you know what, I’m not going to ask why you need to know that. No, you don’t have a liver.

  I glanced down at the serrated chunk of insect leg protruding from my abdomen. “That’s good,” I murmured aloud.

  “What’s that?” asked Mark sharply.

  “Nothing,” I said. To Annie, I sent, Going to need you to help me with something when you get here. How far out are you?

  Not far. Her thoughts turned satisfied. They did pretty well at holding out against the spiders last night. Locked the doors and windows. And I have either five or six more of your missing cuckoo kids, depending on how you want to count.

  That gave us an even twenty kids once I factored in the three from the cafeteria. I was still assuming Artie was going to make it back with them, and that the cafeteria hadn’t turned into a slaughterhouse in the night. That might be optimistic of me, but it seemed well past time for luck to break our way, even if it was just once. We only needed things to go right for a little bit longer.

  Great, I said. See you in a minute.

  I returned my focus to the husks and the whiteboard, resuming the slow march of numbers and symbols that would hopefully eventually take us home. James and Greg were approaching from behind me, together, Greg feeling vaguely anxious, James feeling content and pleased with himself. I turned to face them.

  James had his hand resting on Greg’s back, just behind his head, well out of reach of the great spider’s fangs. The children shied away from them as they moved, radiating a mixture of terror and fascination that made absolute sense, given their experiences with the spiders.

  “Did you get them to stand down?” I asked.

  “For the moment,” he said. “I said ‘Kenneth’ and ‘Incubus’ and ‘no kill’ a lot, and they seem to understand that I was telling them to leave your spider alone, but it still seemed like a good idea to move away from them. They’re a little upset about one of their mantises being maimed.”

  “Is that the correct plural?” I asked. “I thought it was ‘mantids.’”

  “I don’t think the correct plural is appropriate for me to use around children.”

  “Sarah, what the fuck?!” shouted Annie, making his careful language for naught. James sighed and put a hand over his face as she came thundering into the circle, a bundle of cloth in her arms and the people from the library trailing along behind her. She pointed at the leg sticking out of my abdomen.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, tone accusatory. “You could have mentioned that you were ask
ing whether you had a liver because you were concerned you’d been stabbed in it. Most people would say that part out loud!”

  “Hi, Annie, nice to see you, Annie, welcome back, Annie, did you find the people you went looking for, Annie?” The crowd behind her certainly looked large enough to comprise the rest of the people on the campus. I did a quick mental count. There had been twenty-four humans, three more bogeymen, a chupacabra, and a cornwife outside the cafeteria. She was missing two of the bogeymen and six of the humans, in addition to picking up five more of the cuckoo children.

  “Most of them,” she said, thoughts turning briefly dark. “Got you this, too.” She held the bundle out toward me. it made a small hiccupping noise, but didn’t quite begin to cry. “Congratulations. You have a baby brother.”

  I blinked. The mystery of Ingrid’s baby had finally, anticlimactically been solved. Well, the baby couldn’t give consent yet, but I could still add his processing power to my own. He didn’t need those memories.

  “Can you hold him?” I asked. “My hands are sort of full right now.”

  “Sure. Anyway, we’ll need to wait for Artie to get back with Crystal to retrieve the two from under the campus.”

  That made sense. A bogeyman in a dark room is basically invisible; two of them in a steam tunnel would be a horror movie if they didn’t want to be found. “And the missing humans?”

  One of the survivors started to cry. “The spiders—they came in the dark, and the parking garage door wasn’t sealed properly,” she said. Then she noticed Greg and screamed, setting off about half of the children in the process.

  I was getting really tired of that. “Hello,” I said, snapping my fingers. When that didn’t work, I hurled a bolt of artificial calm at her mind, extinguishing her panic. “I’m Sarah, I’m the mathematician who’s going to be tying my brain into knots to try to get you home in one piece. It’s nice to meet you, or it would be under better circumstances. The giant spider behind me is Greg. He’s mine. You will not harm him. You will not approach him with aggression. If he seems nervous, it’s because the people who live in this dimension normally look a lot like us, and they hunt his kind, for admittedly good reason, so he’s trying to figure out whether you’re going to attack him. He will not attack you. He will defend himself. Got it?”

  Confused murmurs answered me. They all spoke English; they just didn’t understand why I was defending the giant spider. Well, they would learn, or we’d let Greg eat them.

  Probably not, but it was nice to think about. I was exhausted and in pain, and about to do a piece of math so ridiculously improbable that it bordered on becoming actually impossible, and if I wanted to fantasize briefly about letting my fuck-off giant spider eat people who annoyed me, I was going to do it. I shifted my attention to Annie, and the baby.

  “We didn’t pull it out because I was afraid we’d disembowel me,” I said. “Can you come and see whether we can take this thing out of me without killing me instantly?”

  “Fuck, Sarah, have you always been this ridiculous, or is this a fun post-amnesia development?” she asked, hurrying over to my side.

  “I don’t know, would you call ripping a jagged spike out of my own guts a good idea?”

  “Not really, no.” She bent to study it where it was jammed into me, finally grimacing. “I’ve only reviewed the notes documenting one dissection. I’m going off what I remember, which probably isn’t everything.”

  “It never is, but I can’t imagine being a little bit wrong is worse than leaving this thing inside me indefinitely.”

  Annie lifted her head to look at me. I couldn’t read her expression, but I could feel the gravity rolling off of her, trying to make me understand how serious she was. “Sarah, I don’t think you quite get how serious a wound like this can be when we don’t have immediate access to a hospital.”

  “There’s a Caladrius on staff at St. Giles’ in New York,” I said. “Once you get it out, I just have to stay upright long enough to get us home, and then we evac me to the hospital where they have a chance in Hell of stabilizing me.”

  “If I take it out, I doubt you’ll remain stable long enough to get us home,” she said. “You might bleed out even if I don’t, but at least this way there’s a chance you finish your math problem before you do.” For the first time, I was glad she didn’t remember me. The Antimony I knew would never have agreed to a plan with this high a possibility of killing me, not if she could come up with any other way—and if she couldn’t find a way, she’d do her best to make it. Well, this time, there wasn’t any other way. This was what we had to do. This was how we got us home.

  “James, I need you,” she called, and James hurried over, leaving Greg to stand alone.

  Annie ignored his discomfort, bending to set the bundled baby on the ground before grabbing his hands and pressing them against my middle, to either side of the spike. “You need to chill her to slow the blood flow, and then you’re going to freeze the tissue directly around the spike,” she said. “Cuckoos don’t get frostbite the way humans do, so you won’t hurt her unless you freeze her solid, but we need to stabilize this in place. So you’re just going to freeze it exactly where it is for now. If the ice starts to melt, you’ll just freeze it again.”

  “Don’t worry about infection,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. I fell pretty far short of the mark, if James’ surge of panic was anything to go by. “My blood is a natural antiseptic. Sometimes when other people in the field with me get hurt, I, um, bleed on them to help keep infection at bay.”

  James stared at me, thoughts a roiling pit of horror. I managed a weak smile.

  “Guess I need to work on my bedside manner, huh?”

  “Freeze her now,” snapped Annie.

  A wave of cold washed over me, centered on James’ hands, so intense that for a moment it felt like he was actually going to turn me into an ice cube. Annie stroked my hair with one hand. “It’s okay, Sarah,” she said, and backed up her words with a wave of affection that only felt a little bit forced. “This is how you get us home.”

  Yes. It was. It always had been, and I knew how the math was going to resolve.

  Nineteen

  “Pain passes. Death doesn’t.”

  —Enid Healy

  Still on the quad at Iowa State University, in considerably less pain

  I liked to talk about how cuckoos have a certain degree of natural resistance to cold, as one of the few evolutionary adaptations that really helps us out without making us more effective predators. The cold flowing out of James’ hands continued to intensify until it was almost painful, and then it cracked, smoothing out into a pleasant numbness, like the sensations I’d picked up from Verity the one time she’d cracked her ankle and needed a cortisol shot.

  Then something else felt like it cracked, internally this time, and for a moment my nerves were too overwhelmed to understand what was happening. There was nothing, not even numbness. That was when the pain came roaring back, bigger and brighter than before. James, Annie, and all the other humans echoed my agonized wails, leaving the cuckoo children standing in puzzled silence.

  Then Mark was there, throwing himself between something and me. “Sarah, call off your spider!” he yelled.

  The words didn’t make any sense. I didn’t have any spiders. I didn’t have any pets. I didn’t want a spider, I wanted Artie. I wanted—

  I wanted—

  I wanted to go home. The pain didn’t recede as James pulled his hands away, but it recategorized and reassembled itself, becoming something more familiar. I shoved it further back, until it became a distant throb, still big enough to eat the world, absolutely, but manageable, no more than an annoyance. I pushed myself to my feet.

  The wound in my gut wasn’t bleeding anymore, thanks to being frozen solid and tinged with glacial blue. I didn’t look too closely at the rest of the damage or the scope of the
wound around the mantis leg still sticking out of my flesh. Knowing what was there wouldn’t change it or make it go away. I had to stay standing long enough to finish the math. If I survived that, I could collapse as soon as we were back in our own dimension. Verity and the others had to be in Iowa by now. She’d make sure they got me to St. Giles’, and Dr. Morrow would be able to fix me. That was the only thing I had to hold onto now. Dr. Morrow would be able to fix me.

  Greg was right behind Mark. No, not behind; partially atop, his fangs buried in the meat of Mark’s shoulder. I silently reached out and gathered Mark’s pain, adding it to the great, amorphous mass of my own, even as I ordered Greg to let him go.

  Greg detached his fangs reluctantly, leaving leaking holes in Mark’s shoulder the size of stab wounds. How venomous were jumping spiders, anyway? I didn’t know, and even if I’d thought I did, I would have known mostly about the ones back home, not the ones here in this dimension. Mark would be joining me at St. Giles’ for medical treatment, obviously. What a treat for them. Two cuckoos on the same day, plus however many of the kids needed to be treated for shock or minor injuries.

  There was a shout from the gathered warriors. Annie and Mark’s had rejoined the ones left with James and me. I glanced over my shoulder. All of them had their weapons raised and pointed outward—although not, I was relieved to see, at us. They were forming a circle of their own, with themselves on the safe inside and the rest of the world locked out. The mantids, including the one that had injured me, were dancing from foot to foot, arms raised, ready to strike. But at what . . . ?

  “Oh, fuck,” breathed Mark.

  I looked around, then followed his gaze.

  The spiders were coming over the roof of the school, following a single human man who was running toward us as fast as his legs could carry him, a look of pure terror on his face. Terrence. Our unlamented little asshole had apparently found the place where the hunters in the dark, or at least some of them, had gone to sleep the day away, and had managed to wake them up. Now they were on their way to the party, driven by instinct to feed and to defend their territory.