Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

“Sarah . . .”

  “Just give her a minute. It’s not like we set an alarm or anything.”

  “Fine.” I leaned back in the couch. “This is a nice room.”

  They made vague noises of agreement before we settled into a companionable silence that only lasted about five minutes before the clack of heels on the faux wood of the hall alerted us to Verity’s approach. I sat up straighter.

  Unlike the rest of us, she hadn’t gotten the memo about the comfortable shoes. I was reasonably sure that if I even thought about wearing heels that high, one of my ankles would spontaneously break. There was also a decent chance that there was more fabric in her shoes than in the rest of her outfit put together. I wasn’t sure “mini dress” was the appropriate way to describe it. I wasn’t even sure “long shirt” was accurate.

  Whatever it was, it managed to be sparkly and covered in fringe at the same time, all of it pristine silver and shaking with the motion of her body. Her eyeshadow and the gel she’d worked into her hair matched. I blinked.

  “No,” I said, once I found my voice.

  Verity raised an eyebrow. “No?” she echoed.

  “No.”

  “Why no? Mom and Dad let me wear less than this on television, and judging by the sidewalks we passed coming in here, I won’t even stand out all that much.”

  “Those shoes are going to kill your feet.”

  “These? I can dance in these for hours.” She looked at me defiantly. “I’ll be fine.”

  At least she couldn’t be trying to smuggle too many guns in that dress, which would run out of space after one or two. I sighed and got off the couch. Sarah and Artie followed. “When in doubt, stand next to the target, not in front of it,” I said. “Artie, give her her badge.”

  Verity wrinkled her nose at the lanyard, but slipped it over her head.

  “Everyone got their keys and their phones?” I asked. Everyone nodded, except for Sarah, who didn’t need a phone to stay in communication. “Great. Let’s go.” I grabbed my backpack as I levered myself off the couch, confident that it would already contain at least one mouse. They knew what it sounded like when their people were getting ready to move.

  We funneled out of the hotel room in an untidy mob more than a group, not quite shoving for position. Verity was as good at walking in her ridiculous heels as she had implied. I didn’t understand the physics of it one little bit.

  She glanced at me as we walked. “Lara Croft?”

  “Generic action movie archeologist. I brought my derby gear for tomorrow, but since it has my name across the back of my jersey, it’s not so great for staying anonymous.” Sure, the name it had was “Final Girl,” and in no way connected to my real name or identity, but it was still an identifier.

  “Huh,” she said. “And what’s Sarah?”

  I blinked slowly. “Please tell me you’re messing with me right now, and you can recognize a Jedi on sight. From Star Wars? You know, one of the biggest media franchises in history?”

  We had reached the elevator lobby. The one downside of being in the ultra-special, “you can’t touch this” housing: we were at the top of the hotel tower. Even before the con properly got underway, the elevator was moving like molasses. It wasn’t going to get better from here.

  On the plus side, when the doors finally did open, the elevator was empty. Artie was the first one to get on, promptly plastering himself in the farthest corner, back to the wall. Sarah stepped in front of him, blocking him from the rest of the car in a way that would have been comic if he hadn’t looked so scared. For the first time, I felt a little bad about insisting he come with us, even though his empathy really was the key to finding our siren before someone else could get hurt.

  People aren’t tools. Life isn’t like putting together a D&D party. You can’t just say “we need a cleric” and force somebody to play one. By insisting that Artie leave his basement and come to a place with this many people he didn’t already know and trust, I’d been being just as bad as Verity. Thinking of myself and what I needed—to get into the field, to prove to my family that I was ready, and most of all, to do it in a setting that was comfortable and familiar to me, rather than one where I’d have to struggle to understand the social hierarchy and its cues—rather than what my allies needed. I needed Verity to keep a lower profile. Artie needed to be allowed to stay safely home.

  There wasn’t time to deal with the realization before the elevator doors were sliding closed. I pressed the button for the lobby, watching my reflection as we started to descend.

  Sarah touched my wrist. I glanced at her, and she nodded, very slightly. Spending time with a telepath means your epiphanies are never as private as you think they are. But she looked like she approved, and that was better than the alternative. I nodded back, and returned my attention to the doors.

  We were almost to the lobby when we slowed and the doors opened again, revealing a small group of comic fans in the allegiance-declaring T-shirts endemic to the breed. They blinked at us. We looked coolly back, not shuffling to the side.

  “We’ll, uh. We’ll take the next one,” said the man I assumed was their leader. They stepped back. The doors closed again.

  “It worked,” said Sarah brightly. I glanced at her. She beamed. “I told them the elevator was full, and they believed me.”

  “Cool.” That fell well within the standard scope of cuckoo abilities. No one ever sits next to Sarah on the bus unless she wants them to. Artie seemed to relax a little, taking this as a sign of things to come. I smiled at my reflection. This was all going to be okay.

  Then the elevator doors opened again, revealing a lobby jammed wall to wall with people, most of them in varying degrees of nerd formal, from the graphic T-shirts we’d seen on the comic collectors upstairs to dresses with a slightly more subtle print—one woman was covered in cobwebs and Black Widow logo stamps, while another was blazoned with half a dozen different Harry Potter icons—and finally to full-on cosplay that varied in complexity from our relatively simple efforts to what looked like a functional mecha suit.

  “Welcome to nerd heaven,” I breathed.

  We stepped out of the elevator, Artie sticking close to Sarah’s side, and no one gave any of us a second look. Scratch that—several people looked twice at Verity, or more than twice, which made a certain amount of sense, given that she was dressed like a Silver Age pinup, and every strike of her heels against the tiled lobby floor echoed like the cracking of a whip.

  “Ignore them,” she said, and kept moving with the rest of the group. I blinked. It wasn’t like my sister to turn down adulation freely offered. It all started making sense a moment later, when she continued, “There will be a lot more people in the convention center, and some of them will want pictures.”

  “Nothing that attracts too much attention,” I stressed.

  Artie laughed. Verity shot him an annoyed look.

  “I know how to be unobtrusive,” she said.

  “Says the woman who’s dressed as a disco ball.” The hotel doors connected to the sidewalk, and as soon as we were outside, we could see the glassed-in walls of the convention center, and the throng of bodies forming around it. My heart hitched. We were almost there. I had been dreaming of this for so long, and now . . .

  We were almost there.

  Men in security uniforms stood at the doors to the convention center, checking badges before letting people inside. All of ours passed muster easily, being fully genuine. (Unlike our hotel room, no one had been cheated out of anything. Artie had simply convinced the online registration system that we were supposed to be sent complimentary passes, which he had directed to the comic book store where he and Sarah kept their pull boxes. Our address had never entered the equation, and we hadn’t stolen anything from anyone.)

  Once inside, we joined the queue to go through the metal detectors. Verity eyed the plain white rectangles
, then gave me a baleful look. I shrugged.

  “It was all on the website,” I said.

  “Sure.” She turned to Sarah. “Can I borrow part of your backpack?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Sarah echoed, and slipped her backpack off, holding it open for Verity to divest herself into. Verity reached up under her dress, producing a small handgun and three knives, all of which she dropped into the bag while Sarah’s body blocked it from the view of the watching guards. When this was done, Sarah slung the bag over her shoulder as the rest of us joined the line. She didn’t. She just looked casually around, then walked in an easy half-loop past the security checkpoint, waiting for us on the other side. No one stopped her, or even appeared to notice that she was there. That was her cuckoo camouflage at work.

  Artie was already starting to shift from foot to foot, anxious. It would have looked like codependence in a human couple, but since I knew he was using her for psychic cover, it was easy to understand the source of his tension. I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed, trying to offer him a little reassurance. He flashed me a quick, tight smile as the line moved forward.

  “Could’ve made sure I saw the thing about the metal detectors,” muttered Verity.

  “I thought Sarah had told you,” I said. “Did she not mention security at all?”

  “She said there would be guards on the doors and random badge checks, but I stopped listening after that. This is a bunch of comic nerds all getting together to be nerds in the same place, with sequins. How much security could they really need?”

  “Nerds are still people, and people do stupid shit.” Like admit that they stopped listening when someone was trying to explain an event’s security protocols. “We’ve had a few people try to smuggle real weapons in, and there’s always the cosplayer who thinks that for some reason, the rules about peace bonding don’t apply to them.”

  “Huh,” said Verity.

  We had been moving forward as we talked, and it was Artie’s turn to empty his pockets and walk through the metal detector. He dropped his backpack on the table, following it with his phone, keys, and wallet, before stepping through. Nothing beeped or alarmed, and the guard who poked through his bag rang no warning bells. Artie reclaimed his things and moved to stand next to Sarah.

  Two down, two to go. Verity was the next through, and thanks to her little divestment into Sarah’s bag, she walked through without a hitch.

  When I stepped into the empty doorframe, however, it beeped.

  “It’s my underwire,” I said, trying to sound bored with the whole process. I spread my arms to let the guard wand me. He looked nervous. “Come on, you’ve encountered bras before, haven’t you?”

  “Um.”

  “Sometimes people with larger breasts need more support. When that happens, metal wires are placed inside the structure of our undergarments, and those wires can result in false positives from security systems like this one.” People behind me were starting to grumble at the delay. Verity had her hand over her mouth, covering what I was certain was a snicker. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was pissed.

  “Well? Wand me!”

  He waved his wand vaguely in the direction of my breasts. As expected, it beeped and whined when it encountered the underwire, which was possibly a little more robust than standard, thanks to the needle-thin lockpicks also tucked into the fabric. He ran the wand over the rest of my body. Nothing else alarmed. The beauty of ceramic knives. Good ones are expensive as hell, but wow do they make up for it with the ability to carry them easily past security checkpoints.

  “Sorry, um, miss,” he said, lowering his wand. “You’re clear to go.”

  “Thank you.” I grabbed my backpack, glad they lacked a proper X-ray machine—the mice knew how to hide from hands digging through the bag, and since these guards were almost certainly not being paid enough to grab for motion if they felt it, there had been no real risk of their discovery, whereas an X-ray would have revealed a bunch of tiny rodent skeletons where none belonged—and marched over to the others. Verity gave me an amused look.

  “Your underwire? Really?”

  “Puberty was kind to some of us,” I said, and started for the escalator that would take us to the second floor.

  The trouble with sisters is that we know where all the buttons are and exactly how to push them. I don’t think any of us will ever forget Verity’s epic meltdown the first time I bought a bra bigger than hers. She’d been convinced that it was somehow like me getting a bigger bedroom or a bigger allowance, not like me having a harder time in hand-to-hand combat due to suddenly coming equipped with a pair of handgrips for anyone who didn’t care about being punched in the face immediately afterward.

  She huffed and followed me, the four of us merging seamlessly with the surging crowd. I couldn’t have named every fandom I saw represented, or even made a decent starting guess at how many of these people were human. Big media conventions are sort of like Halloween: put that much latex and face paint into play and species ceases to matter quite as much. No one knows your skin tone is more gray than would be healthy for a human when you’ve painted yourself blue, after all. Truly nonhumanoid cryptids were still blocked from public life, but with some of the advancements I’d seen in cosplay props and designs, they wouldn’t stay that way much longer.

  The walls were festooned with banners advertising various aspects of the convention, all clearly paid for by the highest bidders, and more hung suspended from the ceiling, some of the largest, loudest declarations of geek pride that I’d ever seen. I stopped thinking about arguing with my sister and focused on my surroundings, trying to drink it all in. From the smell of fresh-baked bread drifting out of the Subway near the escalators to the buzz of so many voices that there were no words, just a dull, continuous roar. Occasionally, a laugh or squeal of delight would rise above the rest, but mostly, it was all background.

  The queue split at the top of the escalators, half wrapping around past the Subway to head for the open doors of the show floor, the other half heading toward the program rooms.

  “Okay,” I said, stepping off to the side before the crowd could sweep us away. “This is where we split the party. We can’t split up Sarah and Artie—”

  “No, you can’t,” said Artie. He sounded harried but not panicked. Sarah’s low-grade “don’t notice us, we are not here” field was clearly working. I knew it was still low-grade because her eyes weren’t glowing and people weren’t trying to walk through us. She was just a cuckoo, doing what a cuckoo did.

  Sometimes it’s unnerving to be reminded that we could be surrounded by functionally invisible telepathic ambush predators at all times. Other times, it’s oddly comforting. As long as there are cuckoos in the world, there’s still going to be a need for people like us. Job security doesn’t come from a safe world.

  “Which means Verity and I will take the front half of the show floor, and you two take the back,” I said.

  Sarah nodded, looking relieved. “That sounds reasonable,” she said, slipping her hand into the crook of Artie’s arm, tugging him with her, away from us, toward the mouth of the show floor.

  Verity gave me a quizzical look. “I thought you’d never been here before.”

  “Do you go to a dance competition without looking up everything you can about the venue?” I spread my arms, indicating the convention center around us. “They publish maps online. The show floor here isn’t like the one in San Diego, which is basically a giant airplane hangar. This one is more like a sideways capital ‘H.’ Two floors, supposedly both equal, separated by a skybridge. But all the really big companies, the ones that sell convention exclusives and wind up with huge crowds, are on the front half of the show floor.”

  “Meaning you just sent them to the less-populated half,” said Verity.

  “Exactly.” I started walking, heading for the open door. “They can dig in the old comic books and look
at vintage toys and keep their minds open for signs of our siren. She’s probably affiliated with a vendor, if she’s not one of the professionals who travels with the convention circuit.”

  “You don’t think she is, do you?”

  “No. The incidents are centered around the conventions, meaning the perpetrator has to be moving with the shows, but most cryptids are smart enough to know rule number one.” Don’t shit where you eat. It’s a universal proverb, regardless of species.

  Verity nodded. “And you don’t think it’s an attendee because . . . ?”

  “Too consistent. These conventions normally cost bank. Ignoring the fact that we’re literally staying in a hotel room that money can’t buy, all the local hotels put up their rack rates when a con’s coming to town. So room alone can set you back two, three thousand dollars. It’s like paying for a trip to Lowryland. For someone to be doing this on their own dime and attending even just as many shows as have had a confirmed incident, they’d need to be independently wealthy.”

  More than a few sirens are what humans would classify as “filthy rich,” thanks to having an entire ocean full of shipwrecks ready and waiting for them to loot. But those families who’ve managed to collect enough filthy lucre to afford something like this have also spent enough time coexisting with humanity to be discreet. Any siren with the funds to do this sort of thing wouldn’t do it in the first place, out of fear that their family would make them pay for it.

  “So we’re looking for someone who gets paid to be here,” said Verity. Her tone was thoughtful, and so I didn’t reply with anything snarky. We were getting along, if only for a heartbeat. I didn’t want to get in the way of this miraculous occasion.

  “Uh-huh.” I held up my badge, showing it to the guards on the door. They barely looked at it—definitely not long enough to verify that it wasn’t counterfeit—before waving us on. Verity paced me, keeping up surprisingly well in her ridiculous heels, and the show floor opened in front of us like Wonka’s famed chocolate factory.

  Verity blinked, apparently taken aback. “This is . . . this . . .”