Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “You know, this is supposed to be a chance for you to spend some time with Artie. I mean, and stop the siren. That’s important, too. You can’t spend the whole trip riding herd on Verity in order to keep the peace.”

  Sarah looked abashed. “I just want this to go well.”

  “It will. You’ve been practicing your shielding. You can make Artie disappear if you need to. He’ll get to experience a convention like an almost normal person, and the two of you can live out the fanfic romance of your little shipper dreams.”

  She wrinkled her nose and threw her napkin at me, that being the only thing that wouldn’t get the bed sticky. “Shush, you. You know he doesn’t like me that way.”

  “I know he does. Everyone in the family knows he does. Even Alex knows, and Alex is both a boy and currently in Ohio. Sarah, people who have never met either one of you know he does—they can see it in his forum posts. We just need to get the two of you far enough away from all the local bullshit that you see each other in a new context.”

  Sarah looked at me, eyes wide and hopeful in their ring of soot-black lashes. That girl has never needed to wear mascara in her life. It’s not fair. Cuckoos don’t wear a lot of makeup in part because they don’t really see faces the way humans do—when you can recognize someone by the feel of their thoughts, you don’t need all those little visual cues. But they all have perfect skin, full lashes, and symmetrical features. Sometimes evolution is a jerk.

  “You really think so?”

  “Eat your waffle,” I said gruffly. “We need to get moving.”

  Now that I was awake, the urge to get on the road was starting to make my scalp itch. I shoveled a bite of waffle and eggs into my mouth—Verity can’t cook much, but what she can cook, she cooks well—and washed it down with a swig of coffee. In just under five hours, we would be in Seattle, ready to roll into our first major pop culture convention. The air felt electric, filled with possibility and potential. We were going to go somewhere. We were going to do something, and by doing it, we were going to make the world a safer place to be.

  And we were going to do it with only Verity for “adult supervision,” which made this an event I had been waiting for since I was fifteen and chafing under the expectation that I would somehow be happy to play the merry little foot soldier for the rest of my time at home—a period that seemed likely to continue for the rest of time. Being the youngest comes with a few perks. It also comes with an uncountable amount of “baby of the family,” which could keep me sidelined until I was ready for retirement.

  This was my chance to show that I could be just as mature, adult, and efficient as any member of the family, regardless of age.

  And maybe buy some cheap comic books while I was at it. Win-win scenarios are rare enough that they should be grabbed with both hands when they present themselves.

  I swallowed another bite of breakfast before announcing, loudly, “I will be picking up my backpack from its place beside the door in ten—”

  “Fifteen, please,” interjected Sarah.

  “—in fifteen minutes. Any clergy who has been chosen to accompany me should be in the bag at that time.” I went back to eating my breakfast. The Aeslin are always in earshot when you’re inside the house. Elf on the Shelf never held any horrors for us. What’s Santa’s private espionage squad when compared to a whole colony of mice who can’t lie and believe your parents are literally divine and can hear everything you do? It’s a miracle we’re not all even more messed up than we are.

  “I’m all packed,” I said, swinging my attention back to Sarah. “Have been since last night. We couldn’t fly with the number of knives I’m carrying, but we can drive.”

  “Do they not have metal detectors this year?”

  “Ceramic knives. A few glass ones in case we hit anything really weird. And my costume will forgive a few beeps and bings.”

  Sarah nodded. “All right. Did you warn Verity about the metal detectors?”

  Verity likes guns a lot more than I do. She usually has at least one somewhere on her person, sometimes as many as four. I smiled slowly, being sure to dwell on the poisoned pleasure in my expression. Sarah sat up straighter, eyes going wide.

  “Annie, no.”

  “Mmmm . . . sorry, but I think Annie, yes.”

  “She’ll walk right into them!”

  “And that will be a good lesson for her about doing her own legwork. All the info is right there on the convention website. She could have looked it up on her own.”

  “Why would she, when she’s been told that this is your mission and you’re going to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible?” Sarah’s eyes went briefly solid white, the color leeching from her irises and pupils as her vitreous humor turned bioluminescent.

  I sighed. “Spoilsport.”

  “Just stopping you from committing an act of self-sabotage.” She got off the bed, collecting her plate and over-vibrant juice. “Artie’s downstairs, and ready to go.”

  “Thanks for telling me sooner, brat.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me as she left the room, and I grinned, turning myself to more fully addressing my breakfast. It only took a few minutes, although my side of the plate was nowhere near as clean as the mice’s had been by the time I set it aside. Then I slid out of the bed and made for the door. Time to shower, dress, hide eight or nine ceramic knives on my person, and head downstairs.

  We were really going to a proper comic convention, something big and overwhelming and filled with people we didn’t know, not just one of the tiny local shows that popped up in community centers and hotel ballrooms. Emerald City was big enough to occupy the entire Seattle Convention Center and sell out all the surrounding hotels months in advance. I kept grinning to myself as I hit the bathroom. Seattle wasn’t going to know what hit it.

  One nice thing about belonging to a family almost pathologically dedicated to looking from the outside like we don’t exist: when Dad decided that he was going to settle in the woods outside Portland, he had called in all the favors he could to get a legion of cryptid architects, construction engineers, plumbers, and electricians to agree to build him the perfect family compound. I don’t know if he’d been planning to have a dozen kids before he started meeting us and realized that more than three would be the end of mankind, or if he’d expected Aunt Jane to somehow get over her issues with both him and Grandma Alice and move in, but either way, he’d designed the place to accommodate a small army. Only three of the bedrooms had private bathrooms—and wow is “only” a ridiculous modifier to stick in that sentence—but the rest of us still functionally have private bathrooms, since there are so many that no one needs to share. Why would you, when you could have your own?

  I think my parents are hoping that someday we’ll do like they did, go out into the field and come home with the perfect spouse, settle down, and make more kids. Dad never wanted to uproot his family again, so he did what he could to guarantee that it was never going to be necessary. It would have been amazing when I was a kid, if we’d ever been allowed to have friends over. Mom and Dad could bring people home from work—I’d shared the kitchen with all manner of humanoid cryptid species before I hit puberty, sometimes with radically incompatible dietary needs—but I couldn’t bring home other kids from school.

  Nothing that might endanger the family cone of secrecy, that was the rule. Nothing that could ever potentially start a chain of events leading to the Covenant figuring out we existed. I stepped out of the shower, wringing water out of my hair, and suppressed a fully unfair jet of annoyance at my sister. It wasn’t her fault our parents had decided the rules were different for her; it wasn’t her fault that the thing that made her happy had inevitably brought her to visibility. I flicked my hair back and wrapped a towel around myself. The house is mostly empty most of the time, but that’s no excuse for wandering the halls naked.

  Of course, if I
stopped being mad at Verity for her life choices, I’d have to start being mad at our parents, and that was a much bigger, more complicated kind of anger to carry around. Easier to stay mad at my sister, whose choices had been at odds with my own for as long as I’d been alive.

  The mice were back when I stepped into my room, and my plate was spotless. They had clearly swept it for crumbs and jam, one of their more Cinderella-esque attributes. When I was a kid, I used to think things would be easier if we just used the mice in place of the dishwasher. Then I’d learned more about microbiology, and the virtues of soap, but can you really blame an eight-year-old for thinking they’ve found a way out of doing the dishes?

  The mice cheered enthusiastically at the sight of me, waving their paws in the air. “Those who are to Accompany You are in Position,” shouted one priest.

  I flashed him a thumbs-up.

  My backpack cheered.

  “Cool. I am invoking the Holy Rite of Getting Dressed.” I eased the door shut.

  The mice cheered, then dispersed.

  Aeslin mice don’t do nudity the way humans do, in the sense that they don’t really notice it, and they don’t care when they do. They also don’t do gender the way humans do—our whole “Gods and Priestesses” structure is their attempt to understand the somewhat confusing instructions given to them by one of my ancestors, who had been happily living as a farmwife somewhere in England and didn’t think there would ever be changes in the future to the way people lived their lives. But the fact that they don’t recognize those things means they don’t know when not to talk about something. If someone forgets to tell the mice they’re getting dressed, the mice won’t think of keeping quiet on their own.

  Their lack of concern for human secondary sexual characteristics means there’s no real concern of people using them as crappy second-hand porn dispensers—no one who could get off at hearing a mouse describe someone in the altogether would be welcome in our home more than once—but they will tattle when asked about bruises or recent injuries. It only took being woken once by my mother demanding to know whether I needed stitches before I got real, real careful about deactivating the Aeslin surveillance system whenever I needed to change my clothes.

  My clothes were waiting on the chair next to my desk where I’d laid them out the night before. I dressed fast, braiding my hair with one hand before tying it off and grabbing my backpack. It squeaked as I slung it over my shoulder, the mice inside objecting to being jostled. “Sorry,” I said. More loudly, I added, “Heading out now. See you all after the con!”

  The room cheered in response.

  * * *

  Verity had finished cleaning up after her spontaneous breakfast offering, and was waiting by the door with Sarah, one eye on her watch. She looked up at the sound of my feet pounding on the stairs and smirked.

  “Told you she’d be early,” she said. “And she washed her hair! How do you shower and wash your hair and get dressed in less than fifteen minutes?”

  “Practice,” I said. “Roller derby means some days are four shower days, just to keep the smell from turning physical and starting to shake the fresh meat down for their lunch money.”

  I reached past her for the handle of my suitcase. Verity blinked.

  “Is that all you’re taking?”

  “Yeah, and it should be about what you’re taking, since we need to fit four people in the car, and Sarah and Artie both have suitcases of their own,” I said. “One small suitcase and one backpack each, that was what we agreed on for logistical reasons.” That would also leave room for souvenirs on the way home. “And the cooler.”

  “Artie has the cooler,” said Sarah, in a chipper, placating tone.

  Verity bit her lip.

  I raised an eyebrow. “How big’s your suitcase?”

  “I can consolidate,” she said.

  I saw red. “Did you not read the email explaining the packing limits?”

  “Yes, but this isn’t Southwest Airlines! I thought I’d have a little wiggle room!”

  I blinked the red away in order to give her a disgusted look. “The trunk doesn’t expand because you don’t know how to pack,” I said, and started for the door.

  Verity didn’t follow. Sarah did. Artie was parked in the driveway outside, window rolled down and arm resting on the door as he waited for us.

  “Before you ask, she only had two suitcases,” said Sarah in a meek tone. “We could probably have shoved them in.”

  “And brought nothing home from the biggest trade show we’ve ever attended,” I snapped. “Plus she agreed to my conditions when Mom gave them to her, which means she’s supposed to follow my instructions, which means that when I send an email that dictates how many bags we each get to bring, she’s supposed to go along with it. This is where I start asserting my authority. Before we even make it out of the house.”

  “I told her it wasn’t going to work,” said Artie, and tossed me the keys. His car is old enough not to have a way to pop the trunk without manually unlocking it.

  I sighed. “We all knew she was going to pull something,” I said. “At least it was this, and not something way worse.”

  The trunk was empty save for the spare tire, toolkit, and Artie’s old green camping duffle. Sarah and I boosted our respective suitcases into the open space before I nudged her with my elbow.

  “Go get shotgun.”

  “And leave you in the back with your sister? No, thank you. Today’s goal is no homicides between here and Seattle.”

  “Go ride next to Artie for four hours. Keep him from putting on NPR for the whole drive. You know Verity would just try for some horrifying club radio situation, and no one wants that.”

  Sarah looked at me, clearly torn, then walked away around the car. I heard the door slam a moment later, and managed not to punch the air. Operation Get My Cousins To Hook Up was officially underway, and thanks to biology and adoption, less creepy than it sounded.

  Verity came out of the house as I was heading for the backseat, dragging a suitcase that was clearly heavy enough to warrant an oversized baggage fee if we had been flying, and easily half again as large as mine or Sarah’s. She stopped when she saw me, blowing her fine blonde hair out of her eyes in what could have been a huff.

  “This good enough for you?” she asked.

  I decided not to interpret her gesture as a huff. It would annoy her more if I went along with her. “That’s fine, there’s room in the trunk,” I said. “Let’s get on the road.”

  Verity didn’t argue. She was learning. Instead, she moved behind the car, where the open trunk beckoned. The whole car settled lower once she finished wrestling her suitcase into it. I buckled my belt, setting my backpack between my feet before leaning forward to ruffle the back of Artie’s head.

  “Hey!” he objected. “Hands off the hair.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Several of his mice were on the armrest between the two front seats. They cheered as my own clergy emerged from the backpack, several clutching the Goldfish Crackers I had put in the interior pocket to keep them occupied during the trip. Aeslin mice may not be exactly like ordinary mice, but their ability to sniff out food is just as well-honed.

  The door slammed as Verity slung herself into the seat next to mine, dropping her purse between her feet and resting her arm on the cooler between us. The mice cheered again as her clergy began emerging from her purse, scurrying to join the others on the armrest. We were going to make the drive accompanied by the dulcet sounds of an Aeslin mouse rave.

  As if on cue, Sarah leaned forward and started the radio, turning the dial to a classic rock station that seemed to be in the middle of a block of hits from the 1950s. The collected mice cheered again, and some of them began to boogie.

  “Great, it’s a Dreamworks movie,” said Verity.

  I smiled at her, for once without any ulterior motives or hidden knives
. She was my sister, we were going on a road trip with two of my favorite people in the world, and at the other end, we’d have an awesome convention. What could possibly go wrong with this day?

  * * *

  Everything. Everything could possibly go wrong with this day. By the time we reached Seattle and Artie pulled off the highway into the confusing network of one-way streets around the convention center, I was more convinced than ever that Sarah had done things the right way by showing up so much later than her siblings. All three of them were adopted, but she was functionally an only child who also got a brother and a sister out of the deal.

  Verity talked when she was feeling comfortable. She didn’t need anything to talk about. She didn’t even try to play those stupid road games to pass the time. You know—things like “I spy with my little eye . . .” or “I’m going to the zoo, and I’m bringing . . .” She just talked. About whatever popped into her head. Things she saw out the window (cows were uniquely exciting to her, and likely to spark entire monologues about how big they were, or how black and white they were, or how the majority of cows were just ordinary cows but the really big herds sometimes concealed akabeko or really chill minotaurs or other kinds of cryptid cattle that had managed to survive into the modern era), places she wanted to stop, how badly she needed to pee.

  I was no longer sure how she’d survived all those years of dance class, since it seemed like she needed to pee every fifteen minutes. Four hours in a car with her had seemed reasonable at the beginning of our trip. It had only been four hours on paper, with no traffic, no surface streets, and no need to get to Portland from our compound before the journey could officially begin. It had been close to five hours since we left the house, and I was ready to commit a homicide.