Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “I think I see the hotel!” chirped Sarah, with a sudden, exaggerated excitement that told me she’d been listening to my thoughts again. She pointed, and there was the sign for our hotel. Not that we had a reservation; she was going to take care of that. But it was one of the con hotels, and we’d chosen it for its location and place in a major hotel chain that was unlikely to even notice a little light fraud without a full audit of the location—something that virtually never happened.

  Artie continued inching along the road, going as fast as the jammed-in traffic would allow. A convention getting underway didn’t constitute a public holiday, and so we had not only the con traffic to deal with, but all the people heading home from work. It was a lot. But we were still moving; we hadn’t transitioned to full gridlock yet, and I was willing to take it.

  If we stopped, I might wind up getting out of the car and walking the rest of the way. Hopefully, that wouldn’t need to happen. Although speaking of things that did need to happen . . .

  “We’re on surface streets, moving slowly enough that people can look into the car if they feel like being nosy fuckers,” I said. “All mice, into your respective bags.”

  The mice, who had stopped dancing after hour two, but had continued to use the front seat armrest as a rodent social club, made disappointed sounds. They didn’t argue, turning and running either toward my backpack, Verity’s purse, or Artie’s backpack and diving inside. I leaned forward to do up the zipper.

  Most people, seeing a car with a bunch of mice in it, won’t jump straight to “those are endangered cryptid mice with full sentience.” But poachers and hunters exist, and tempting fate has never struck me as a terribly good idea.

  The sidewalks were packed, even though the show floor wasn’t scheduled to open for another hour. Some of the people who passed were wearing capes and corsets, or elaborate cosplay reproductions of characters from all forms of media. I recognized about half of them, which felt impressive enough to say something about my television habits. I scoped up my backpack and hugged it to my chest, trying to suppress the butterflies in my stomach. This was my natural habitat. This was the kingdom of the nerds.

  What if they didn’t want me here? What if I couldn’t fit in among my own people? It had always been an abstract question before, but now it was very real, and surprisingly immediate.

  A hand touched my knee. I looked up, expecting to see Sarah, who would be picking up on my anxiety the way she picked up on everything else. But Sarah was staring raptly out the window, pointing out a cosplayer dressed as Marvel Girl to Artie, who looked as pleased as she was by the appearance of the fictional telepath. Verity was the only person looking at me, visibly concerned.

  “Hey, you okay?” she asked. “That’s the face I always get right before a recital.”

  My first instinct was to shake her off. I suppressed it. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve just been wanting to come to this convention for a long, long time, but never had a good enough reason before.”

  “It’s okay to be nervous.”

  “I’m not nervous!” I paused. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. I just mean . . . this is a pretty big deal for me.”

  “I get it,” she said sympathetically. “It’s like my first real competition.”

  Only it wasn’t, not really, because unless we got into a massive pitched battle on the show floor, this wasn’t going to end with our faces in the local paper—and if we did get into a pitched battle on the show floor, we’d have other things to worry about. I swallowed three replies before I shrugged and looked out the car window.

  “I guess.”

  Verity took her hand off my knee. “Just keep breathing,” she said.

  Artie turned off the street into the driveway of the hotel. It was a short thing that wound past guest drop-off in the process of making a loop back to the street or depositing drivers down into the parking garage. It was an elegant use of limited space, and I wanted to admire it, except that I didn’t want to wait another second to get this mission underway.

  “Go,” said Artie, pulling up in front of the doors. “Sarah has a picture of my license plate in her phone . . .”

  “I’d remember it anyway, it’s a pretty number,” said Sarah, in the dreamy tone she reserved for math, and for Artie. How could he not see how far gone she was? It was ridiculous.

  “And you can text me once we have a room number,” continued Artie doggedly.

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay to walk up to the room alone?” asked Sarah.

  “I’ll come down and get him,” said Verity before Artie could answer.

  “Right, let’s go.” I opened my door, sliding out of the cramped car. The air outside was shockingly fresh after five hours jammed in a car with three other bodies, a colony of mice, and Artie’s horrifying cologne, which he practically bathed in as part of his effort to keep his pheromones from manipulating the people around him.

  Sarah and Verity were only a beat behind me. Sarah started to turn toward the trunk. Verity grabbed her arm and shook her head.

  “I’ll get a bell cart when I come back for Artie,” she said. “Leave the suitcases. We can get them later.”

  Sarah frowned but allowed herself to be pulled away. Interesting. What had Verity packed into her bag that she didn’t want us to see? Or feel, more likely: that bag had definitely been on the heavy side.

  Whatever. Unless she’d smuggled Dad in her suitcase, I didn’t really care. I closed the door, smiled at Artie, and said, “We’ll see you in a minute,” before following the others through the sliding glass doors into the hotel lobby.

  Inside, the air was cool, lightly scented with plumeria and rosemary, and filled with voices. People were lined up fifteen deep at most of the desks, waiting to be checked into their rooms. All of them looked as scruffy as we did, not yet having gained access to their rooms to change into their impeccable cosplays; we fit right in, at least until Sarah walked past all the queues to the VIP gold desk, which was conspicuously manned but had no line.

  A few people mumbled to each other as they watched her go. A few more smirked, clearly assuming that we were going to be rebuffed by the man in the neatly pressed suit who was standing there at polite attention. Sarah took the lead, offering him an engaging smile as we approached.

  “Hello,” she said. “I believe you have a room for us?”

  Her eyes flashed white and the telepathic hum that always accompanied her presence got momentarily louder. The man startled, standing straighter as he blinked at her. Then he returned her smile with one of his own, and a solemn nod that might as well have been a bow.

  “Miss Zellaby,” he said. “Of course.”

  I made sure to wave at the people who’d been smirking as we followed the concierge across the lobby to the elevators. Mysteriously, none of them waved back.

  Oh, well.

  * * *

  “Your room has been kept for you as always, Miss Zellaby,” said the man, an almost fawning note in his voice as he opened the door on a hotel room almost as large as the first floor of our house. Sarah entered behind him, a serene smile on her face. This was what nature had designed her to do, after all; bend the world and the wills of the people around her to her own ends. She’d be sorry later, and we’d be right here to calm her down, remind her that she’d done this on our behalf, and she hadn’t gone for the man expecting to be given the President’s Suite. She’d just wanted one of the rooms they held for visiting executives.

  It wasn’t her fault the hotel had let out every room that had a price tag in the system in order to accommodate the con-goers. And it wasn’t her fault that we were all going to have private bedrooms in our “hotel room,” but I was sure happy about not needing to sleep three feet away from my sister, who was not one of nature’s morning people.

  Nor was she with us, having commandeered a bell cart and gone to help Artie w
ith the luggage. It let her keep the secrets of her suitcase a little longer, but since it meant she’d have effectively last choice of beds, I wasn’t even annoyed. Sarah was speaking to the man from the hotel, her voice low and her eyes glowing. She touched his hand.

  He smiled at her, paternal and familiar, and I knew a switch had just flipped somewhere deep inside his mind that would have him seeing her as family for the rest of his life. Or until she flipped it back, assuming she got the opportunity. We could be leaving here in a serious hurry.

  Well, if she couldn’t undo what she’d done, it wasn’t like it was going to hurt him. Or at least it wasn’t going to hurt him much. Narrow edge cases don’t provide a lot of opportunity for damage. And if I kept telling myself that, I wouldn’t have to think too hard about the ethical implications of using a telepath to get what we wanted.

  The man patted Sarah on the shoulder and turned to go, leaving us alone with this deluxe suite that wasn’t even listed as available for lease in their computer system. This was the kind of space meant to be used for politicians, celebrities, and visiting hotel chain presidents, who would never experience their own services the way the rest of us normally did. Maybe they would have made some changes if they did.

  The door shut. I put my backpack down, announcing, “The coast, as they say in the movies, is clear.”

  Mice came boiling out, scampering under furniture and up the legs of tables, finding traction with their tiny claws as they began exploring their new space. I decided to do the same, pushing open doors and poking my head into rooms as I determined just how big this hotel sky palace really was.

  The first two doors were bedrooms, both bigger than my room at home, both containing two queen-sized beds. I had been expecting Sarah to negotiate us a room the size of one of these, for the four of us to share.

  When I saw that one of the rooms had a private bathroom, I declared, “I’m sleeping in here!” and flung myself onto the bed closer to the door.

  “Okay!” called Sarah.

  The bed was comfortable, thick and plush in that way that only top-end hotel beds ever seem to manage. They don’t get used enough to wear down the way a normal person’s bed will. I closed my eyes, dimly aware that if I didn’t get up, I was going to fall asleep and Verity was going to make fun of me for it. Especially since she wouldn’t have to wake me to use the shower.

  Get up . . . get up . . . get up. The pillow was exactly firm enough to keep me from rolling off of it. The thought of moving was becoming less appealing by the second.

  The main door opened, hard enough that I heard it hit the wall. “Holy crap,” exclaimed Verity. “This isn’t a hotel room. It’s a luxury apartment!”

  I sat up, shoving my hair out of my eyes.

  The baggage cart rattled as they navigated it into the room, and Artie grunted. “Jeez, Very, did you bring a bunch of bricks to the convention, or is this all lead pipes?”

  “Which room’s mine?”

  “I see you’re still not answering my question.”

  “I’ll take this one—oh.” Verity appeared in the doorway of my chosen room, dragging her suitcase behind her. “Hi, Annie. You cool with me sleeping in here?”

  “No.” It was impossible to keep the affronted younger sister whine from my voice. “I already called it.”

  She frowned but didn’t argue. “Well, there’s enough rooms for us all,” she said, in a tone that clearly indicated I had already taken the best one. She vanished from the doorway. I felt a momentary ping of guilt, and squashed it as quickly as I could. Me taking first pick of rooms wasn’t going to ruin her life, especially not when she was the one who had insisted on going to the car to get the bags. She was the one who was hiding something, not me.

  And I was just making excuses to not be unhappy about telling my sister “no.” I sighed and slipped off the bed, once again fully awake as I made my way to the central room to check on the others and retrieve my own bag.

  I wasn’t worried about Verity sneaking in to steal “my” room while I was out of it. We all learned early not to pull that sort of thing, since Alex always had snakes around and Verity would scream like a banshee if anyone touched her stuff, and I liked setting snares by the time I turned five. We knew to respect one another’s space.

  Artie and Sarah were still unloading the bell cart, with the “help” of the Aeslin mice, who had swarmed onto the lid of the cooler and were hailing every movement my cousins made. Artie looked flustered. I grimaced sympathetically.

  “Lobby bad?”

  “Lobby filled with people, Sarah up here with you,” he said, in a grim tone. “I am not leaving this room without her until it’s time to go home.”

  “That’s completely fair,” I said. At least he was still willing to leave the room. “We should all be able to have our own rooms here, and there are three bathrooms according to the map on the back of the door. One of them’s en suite to my room, the other two are public.”

  “I only saw one,” said Sarah.

  “The third one’s off the kitchen, and please no one poop there,” reported Verity, emerging from the hall. “This place is ridiculous. Makes me wish we were the kind of people who lived our lives on social media.”

  “I think if we started posting pictures of a hotel room that’s not available to the public, the people who own the place would figure out that something was up, and Keith would get in trouble for letting us in here,” said Sarah.

  It took me a beat to realize that Keith was the man from the VIP desk. It had already been a long day, and it was just getting started. “Anyone need to eat or nap or anything else like that?” I asked. “Because the show floor opens in an hour, and we should get down there to join the queue as soon as we possibly can.”

  “I need a shower,” said Artie. “I can’t put on more cologne until I wash off what I’m already wearing, and this stuff has lost most of its stink.”

  “I assure you, it has not.”

  “You weren’t in the lobby just now.”

  “Oh, we are going to be the most popular people at this nerd prom,” said Verity. “Whatever. We have enough showers that only one of us will have to wait, and it’s not going to be me.” She waved as she sauntered back down the hall.

  Sarah turned to look at me. “Don’t start.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “You were about to.”

  I didn’t protest a second time. Living with a telepath means knowing when to pick your battles. “Fine,” I said. “I’m going to go change.”

  “Me, too,” said Sarah.

  Artie shook his head and turned to head for the bathroom.

  We scattered.

  * * *

  I emerged from “my” bedroom in khaki and canvas, hair pulled back into a single braid. Full Lara Croft genericism. Was I dressed as the eponymous raider of tombs, or was I an archeologist from some lesser-known franchise? Well, that was anyone’s guess, now, wasn’t it? It was something I’d been able to put together with pieces I already owned that didn’t require me to wear uncomfortable shoes, and that was what really mattered.

  Artie, freshly showered and hair still damp, was sitting on the couch. He’d changed his hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans for . . . another hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans. Very fancy. I vaulted the back, thudding down next to him, and stuck my hand out. He raised an eyebrow. I smiled winsomely.

  “We’re not all telepathic, you know,” he said, finally relenting and producing my badge from the inside pocket of his hoodie. I beamed as I took it out of his hand.

  “That’s probably for the best, all things considered,” I said. “I don’t think we’d all be friends if we could hear what we were thinking about each other. I don’t know how Sarah does it.”

  “She tries not to take things personally unless we say them out loud, and she does her best to be so unassuming that we can’t hate her.”<
br />
  “That’s sort of sad.” The badge was attached to a lanyard that looped over my head, hanging almost to my navel. I wrinkled my nose. “Aren’t they afraid these will get caught on things?”

  “It’s cheap and efficient and people can sell you more expensive fancy lanyards,” said Artie. “I think if it seems inconvenient, that’s at least intentional.”

  “Huh.” I gave the lanyard another thoughtful look. “You ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.” He took a deep breath. “If Sarah can’t keep me from being swarmed—”

  “She’ll walk you back over here, and you can text me your shopping list.”

  “And you won’t try to argue.”

  “I won’t, although I’m really hoping we can make this work. If you can spot empathic disruption in the crowd . . .”

  “We’ll be able to intervene a lot faster than if you have to watch for visible disruptions,” finished Artie. “I know. And the faster we do this, the fewer people potentially get hurt. I understand all of that. It doesn’t keep me from being nervous about going out around that many strangers. I don’t want to deal.”

  “But you have to deal occasionally. At least this way you’re doing it with people to back you up.”

  Artie lifted an eyebrow as he looked at me. “If your next technique is going to be claiming that this is a controlled situation, you clearly slipped in the shower and smacked your head. This is about as far as it gets from a controlled situation. This is a chaos situation.”

  “Good thing I like chaos theory,” said Sarah, joining us. She was wearing long brown-and-cream robes, belted at the waist.

  “You make a lovely Jedi,” I informed her.

  She beamed. “If I’m going to be Jedi mind-tricking my way through the con, I might as well have fun with it.”

  “Any sign of Verity?”

  Her smile faded into a grimace. “She was out of the shower when I passed,” she said.