Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  Valerie would have been a worldwide superstar of the ballroom world if only she’d been real. But since she’d been splitting her time between existence and being Verity, she had still been competing on a local level when one of her instructors had come to her with the opportunity to audition for Dance or Die, America’s most popular dance-themed reality show. Millions of viewers, households across America, and, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, gifs and videos around the world. It was her shot at the big time. It was her opportunity to dance, finally, on a truly global stage.

  She couldn’t resist. Out of all of us, Verity had always been the one who couldn’t stand the fact that no matter how hard she trained, how hard she tried, she would never be allowed to compete on the level she knew she was capable of. The level we all knew that we were capable of; we were smart kids born to a smart family and given endless opportunities at self-improvement, for the sake of making us better at the jobs we’d been born to do. Our parents had always insisted that they wouldn’t force any of us to do anything, that if we wanted to move to Ohio and be accountants, we’d be allowed to do it and still be welcome at the family reunions.

  But if you knew there was a whole secret world of magic and monsters and opportunities to make a difference, would you have been able to walk away from it for the sake of making a run for city council or getting your face on the front of the local paper? The idea that one of us would choose the much-vaunted “ordinary life” had always seemed completely ridiculous, a carrot held out to keep the stick of training from stinging too hard when it smacked us again and again. Until that damn television show.

  Verity had gone to our parents with an argument based around her skill with a makeup brush and how the lighting and camera work on the show was unlikely to ever linger on her face. She’d drawn charts of where the necklines tended to fall on her style of dance costume, and she’d put on a performance worthy of the ages. And then, despite spending my entire life telling me that attracting attention would get me and everyone I gave a damn about killed on the spot, our parents had given in. They’d agreed to let her go on television, under a few conditions that were nowhere near strict enough to really keep us safe.

  And maybe they were being reasonable, but they were also the ones who’d raised us with the constant fear that even the slightest slip would bring the Covenant crashing down on our heads. It wasn’t unreasonable of me to be a little bit pissed that I’d been forced to give up cheerleading out of the concern that someone might freeze-frame a wide shot from a competition I wasn’t even guaranteed to qualify for, run my unfamiliar face through facial recognition software, and say, “She has the Price family cheekbones! They must have somehow survived the great Michigan purge! We must hunt them even to the ends of the earth or all our works have been for naught!” All that, and Verity got to go on television. Call it the baby sister blues, but it wasn’t fair, and I wouldn’t have liked it even if she’d gone alone.

  But of course she couldn’t go alone, because Prices are functionally pack animals thanks to the way we’re raised, and she’d taken Sarah with her, off to Southern California to feed her into the great maw of reality television. To Sarah’s credit, we’d watched every episode of the show, sometimes in slow motion, and we’d never spotted her in the audience. Not even in a wide pan shot. Her control had been good enough that the people behind the cameras had managed to convince themselves that she wasn’t there to focus on.

  Verity, on the other hand, had been front and center for every single episode, right up until the last one, where she’d come in second and come home in a flurry of tears, self-blame, and sequins. The self-blame hadn’t lasted long. The tears and the sequins had.

  At least getting her back meant getting Sarah back at the same time. Artie had been almost unbearable while she was gone, sulking around the house, refusing to drive me to the comic book store on Wednesday afternoons, and picking fights with his sister Elsie every time she held still in his vicinity. Artie without Sarah was basically like a pumpkin pie without sugar: the texture might be roughly correct, but the flavor was so far off as to become inedible.

  And now Verity was talking about fucking off to New York at the end of the summer, and taking Sarah with her for “backup,” and I’d be damned before I let that happen without getting in at least one solid family road trip.

  “Maybe not,” said Sarah. “But I did, and none of us knows how to time travel.”

  “Can’t Sarah just scan for the siren without me doing my empath thing?”

  “No,” said Sarah promptly. “Too many minds. I’d get overwhelmed and walk into a wall.”

  “So we’re settled,” I said, clapping my hands. “Sarah is in control enough to make you disappear if necessary, we’re going to load you up on that terrible cologne that makes even your pheromones unbearable, and we’re going to a comic book convention, where you will help us find the siren before anyone else gets hurt.”

  “We’re not settled,” protested Artie. “I never agreed to this.”

  “Well, agree fast. You’re driving.” I got off the bed and started for the door while Sarah was still trying to stifle her smile.

  I don’t drive. Neither does Sarah. Public transportation is safer and more environmentally friendly, plus it avoids the paper trail of having and maintaining a car. Between the blue slip and the insurance, owning a vehicle would almost double my administrative footprint. No one wanted that.

  Sarah can see—cuckoos have eyes, and those eyes work just fine for things like reading comic books and watching television shows—but she’s easily distracted by the thoughts of the people around her, and she doesn’t recognize faces, which means she won’t necessarily know if someone is distracted, or furious, or afraid. It’s safer to keep her off the road.

  Artie and Elsie, on the other hand, got their licenses the day the state allowed it. I guess when your natural abilities make you a walking consent violation, having your own space winds up feeling a lot more important.

  Artie swore softly behind me, but I didn’t hear him get up by the time I reached the top of the basement stairs, and I knew I had him. There had never been any real question; Sarah was going, and if Sarah was going, so was he, even if he spent the whole convention hiding in our hotel room.

  Love makes people stupid, and unprofessed love seems to make things even worse.

  I am never, ever falling in love, with anyone. I know you don’t get to decide your sexual or romantic orientation—it’s not a choice, it’s a function of the way your brain works—but nope. Not for me, thank you. Boys are not better than pizza; girls are not better than ice cream; non-binary people are not better than being able to do things because you want to, not because the person you’re in love with wants it. My parents got themselves the heir, the overly-pampered spare, and me. It’s not going to hurt the family’s chances of survival if I refuse to play along with the implicit “go forth and multiply” concealed in the “only we can stop the Covenant” instructions passed down from my great-great-grandparents. And can you imagine me as a parent? Please. Even if I could tolerate another person touching me long enough to get pregnant, I’d never be able to put up with incubating someone for nine months.

  You put in all that work to grow a second skeleton and then someone just takes it without so much as a “by your leave.” The nerve of some people! And as the recipient of one of those stolen skeletons, I can absolutely say that I’m not planning to make one for anyone else, or give the one I currently have back. If that’s a problem for my mother, she can take it up with my siblings, both of whom stole their skeletons first.

  We’re fun at parties, honest.

  I let myself out of the basement, action underscored by the sound of Artie still swearing behind me, and Sarah giggling.

  * * *

  My Aunt Jane was in the kitchen, fixing herself a sandwich, while a cluster of Aeslin mice looked raptly on. They set up a rau
cous cheer when they saw me, although the usual cries of “hail” were absent. Aunt Jane’s colony split from the rest of the family when she moved out of the compound to set up her own household, long before I was born, and her household mice aren’t unified in whether they recognize my siblings and I as divine.

  That used to offend me pretty badly when I was a kid, since the mice we have back at home absolutely recognize Elsie as a Priestess and Artie as a God, while the mice who live at their house try to claim that I’m not divine. Not all of them; the members of Artie and Elsie’s personal clergy, who mingle more often with the home colony, are also more likely to acknowledge my title. The rest of them are involved in some sort of weird, slow convocation that involves a lot of arguing about divinity and its roots and shouts of heresy every time one mouse says something another mouse doesn’t like.

  Having Aeslin mice means not needing cable. But it also means not being able to talk about cartoons with the other kids at school, so I guess there’s a downside to everything.

  “Hey, Auntie Jane,” I said, swinging myself into the kitchen via the classic one-handed-grip-on-the doorframe pose, something that had always seemed infinitely cool when I was a kid and in trapeze training for the first time, and which had managed to endure into adulthood through sheer dint of me being too set in my ways to want to find a new way to enter a room. “Making anything consumable by normal people?”

  “Why? Are we expecting a visit from the normal people for some reason? I thought I was done with them when Artie graduated and they stopped trying to strong-arm me onto the PTA.”

  “No, no normal people en route.”

  “And thank God for that.” She waved her jelly-covered knife at me. “You convince that son of mine to go to Seattle with you?”

  “Not quite. I convinced him to go to Seattle with Sarah. I think he’s accepted me as a necessary complication, but it’s hard to be sure when you’re not telepathic, and you know Sarah’s not going to tell me what he’s thinking.”

  “No, that girl thinks it’s unethical to use what her mama gave her.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “I’m pretty cool with the telepath not pushing her way into people’s heads for her own benefit. Sure, it slows things down sometimes, but there are means that don’t justify themselves.”

  “I know, I know, it’s just . . .” Aunt Jane sighed and went back to assembling her sandwich. Peanut butter, banana, ham, and maple jelly. “I knew when I married Ted that there was a decent chance any kids would take after him, but he’s always been so comfortable with what he is, I thought they’d get that from their father, too. And, instead, I have Artie in the basement, probably for the rest of his life, constantly refusing to go out into the world, and we have someone right there who could tell me what he’s thinking so I might be able to help, and it’s frustrating that she won’t.”

  I squirmed uncomfortably. One major downside of graduating from high school and reaching the age where I’m supposedly a mature adult: the actual adults in the family waffle, hard, on whether I’m a little kid who needs to be coddled and protected, given a juice box and sent outside to play, or another adult who’s interested in hearing about their problems. On the whole, I prefer to be thought of as an adult—who doesn’t?—but it gets weird when it’s my father’s sister talking to me like I’m somehow an authority on how to talk to her own kids.

  “But you’re on her side with this one, and I’m the human lady who married an incubus, so I guess I should leave you out of this.” She finished assembling the first sandwich and pushed it toward the mice, saying more sonorously, “The holy ritual of you get one, I get one is now complete.”

  The mice cheered and fell upon the sandwich like fuzzy piranha, rapidly pulling it into individual mouse-sized pieces and distributing them among themselves. It was an efficient process, practiced within the colony at every meal, and not a single mouse went away empty-pawed.

  Aunt Jane watched them for a few seconds before she went back to her second sandwich, spreading peanut butter thickly across the bread. “Did you want lunch?”

  “No, I’m taking the bus home. I figure I’ll grab a burger before I give up on civilization.”

  She made a noncommittal noise.

  “Hey, Aunt Jane, you know, you’re the only one of us who never capitalizes the rituals when you’re talking to the mice. Why is that?”

  Aeslin mice are hyper-religious. They’re born that way. It can happen in humans, too, resulting in people like Joan of Arc, who truly believe that their brains are hot-wired directly into the divine. For us, it’s an aberration. For the Aeslin, it’s a survival technique. You know the saying, “there are no atheists in foxholes”? Well, when you’re small enough that the foxhole in question is probably literal, you can’t afford to be an atheist. Religion keeps them connected as a colony, centered around their object of worship, and unwilling to stray. More importantly, it makes them unwilling to schism. A faithful colony is a stable colony, and a stable colony is a surviving colony.

  It didn’t work out for them as well as evolution possibly intended. As far as anyone knows, the colony that lives with the family—split up as it is between the compound, Aunt Jane and Uncle Ted’s house, and Alex’s current apartment—is the last one in existence. All the others died out a long time ago, victims of a world built to a much larger, more vicious scale combined with their own overly trusting natures.

  It’s a hard world for something as small and sweet and essentially pure as an Aeslin mouse. I wouldn’t want to live their lives.

  Anyway, Aeslin have a funky accent that puts the stress on words in such a way as to make the capital letters on random nouns—mostly, they’re really religious but sort of grammar agnostic—and all the words in the title of an established ritual, such as You Get One, I Get One, should be capitalized. We all learn to mimic their accent, not in a mocking way, by the time we finish first grade. Even Mom and Uncle Ted do it, and they didn’t grow up with the mice the way the rest of us did.

  Aunt Jane thought about it for a second before she shrugged and said, “It never seemed all that important to me. They know what I mean, and it’s not like these things are capitalized the first time they happen, so really, I’m just being an Aeslin historical recreationist.”

  “Huh.” As explanations went, it felt like a reach. This wasn’t the time to fight about it, especially not with my bus due to roll up the street in under ten minutes. “Anyway, Artie’s probably going to be in a mood when he finally comes upstairs, but he’s coming with us, and I’ll email him the details as soon as I get home. We should be back on Monday.”

  “Not leaving early if you figure out what’s going on?”

  “Not planning to. When am I going to get these two to go to another convention?”

  Aunt Jane laughed, short and sharp, and dropped her knife into the sink. “Never, so enjoy this one while you’ve got it.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay with this?”

  “My boy needs to get out more, Sarah’s heading to New York for who knows how long, and you’re willing to put up with being trapped in a car with the pair of them all the way to Seattle. I’m fine with this. This is the best terrible idea you’ve ever had.” She glanced at the clock above the door. “And you’re going to miss your bus if you don’t hurry. I’m not giving you a ride home today.”

  “I know.” Elsie was going to pick me up from the burger joint. I felt better making the final leg of the journey home in the company of my cousin than I would have in the company of my aunt, who really did want me to take her side in every little family drama or breakdown in communication.

  But that’s Aunt Jane. I love her, but she never really learned to operate like the rest of us. Her own kids are better at being Prices than she is. Dad says I shouldn’t hold it against her; she’s the only sister he’s got and sisters are important enough not to risk alienating, but he always says it in t
his pointed sort of way that makes it sound a lot more like a reminder that he wants me to get along with Verity.

  I do not want to get along with Verity. Verity is selfish and spoiled in a way that none of the rest of us had the opportunity to be. I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out why that is, why she gets away with so much more than we can, and the closest I’ve ever managed to come is that Verity looks just like Mom recast in a younger, slightly taller model—and Very’s short enough that her being taller than anyone is a big deal. Alex has been using her head as an armrest since high school.

  But regardless. I love my sister. I tolerate my sister. I resist the urge to slap my sister every time she opens her mouth and speaks in that squeaky vocal fry voice she’s been allowed to think is appealing. Why she can’t just talk like herself is a mystery that may never be solved. She decided at some point, when we were still kids, that boys would like her better if she sounded like one of the Sailor Scouts, and her voice went up half an octave overnight.

  Whatever. Not my problem. I crossed the kitchen, pausing to kiss my aunt on the cheek and wave to the mice, then proceeded through the front room to the door. Outside, it was a matter of three steps down from the porch and I was free, out in the glorious Portland sunshine.

  People think we don’t have sunny days here in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a reason for that. The people who live here know that it’s one of the most beautiful, temperate, forgiving places in North America, and we don’t want to share. So we only talk about the weather when it’s miserable and damp—sort of the opposite of California, where they only talk about the weather when it’s beautiful and sunny. California would probably shank Florida in an alley for its nickname—when your whole tourist industry is based on it never raining on Disneyland, “the Sunshine State” sounds a lot better than “the Golden State.” Well, we here in Oregon are denizens of “the Beaver State,” but really, we’d rather live in the “Go Away and Leave Us The Hell Alone State.”