Imaginary Numbers

by McGuire, Seanan

  Good. I slipped my backpack on and crouched, rifling through her pockets. She had an airport security badge, my own face staring back at me from the postage stamp picture, a wallet bulging with cash—probably stolen—and fake IDs under a dozen different names. The modern age has forced even cuckoos to adapt, since telepathy can’t fool a point of sale system or a security camera.

  She clearly knew this airport: it was part of her territory, and she’d been here long enough to bother getting herself a way in and out of secured areas. She might have moved in the day I left for New York. That was good. It meant she wouldn’t have attacked me in this bathroom if there weren’t something about it that made it safe. Maybe the cameras were down, or maybe the acoustics somehow kept people outside from hearing when someone was beat to shit inside. Either way, I was in the clear, as long as I got out of the airport quickly.

  I clipped her badge to the collar of my sweater, took the money from her wallet, and left her there, unconscious on the tile, wallet on the floor next to her. I felt a little weird about the theft, since she’d just turn around and steal back everything she’d lost, if not more, from the humans in the airport, but it was necessary for several reasons. I needed to get a ride without changing anyone’s mind, to make it harder for her to follow me; that meant payment. I also needed to make her understand that I’d been calm enough after defeating her to loot the body. Anyone can panic and punch somebody. The fact that I hadn’t run immediately after I was done would show that I was a worthy adversary. Someone she shouldn’t mess with. Not immediately, anyway.

  Turning and walking away from her made my stomach ache because I knew what was going to happen from here. Portland is too small for two cuckoos. That’s the way the math works out. When I’d been living with Evie and Uncle Kevin, my presence alone had been enough to keep any other cuckoo from coming to settle there. The city is nice, but it’s not big or metropolitan or culturally significant enough to be worth fighting over. Not like, say, New York, which can sustain half a dozen cuckoos at any given time, and where territory battles between them are common enough to be an everyday occurrence. Cuckoos passed through Portland and went on to become someone else’s problem.

  Assuming they went on at all. Part of why it hurt to walk away from the woman with my face was knowing what would happen when I got home and told Evie there was a cuckoo in the airport. Hunting in a place this public wouldn’t be easy, but she’d figure out a way. She always did. And when she was finished doing her job, there would be one less cuckoo in the world, and the population of Portland would be just a little safer, even if they were never going to understand why.

  Cuckoos are apex predators. We’re not from around here, we don’t belong here, and we belong to the only species that my conservationist family believes needs to be killed on sight. We do too much damage. Even Mom agrees that ordinary cuckoos can’t be allowed to hunt the way they do, because it’s too destructive, and when it goes too far, it triggers Covenant purges, which could get a lot of innocent cryptids killed.

  Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there.

  No one gave me a second look as I walked through the airport with the cuckoo’s badge clipped to my sweater and my head held high. I had nothing to be ashamed of. She was the one who’d attacked me. I knew that. I had to keep knowing that, as the guilt began gnawing at me from the inside, whispering that I was just like her, that if I were really the good person I pretended to be, I would have found another way. I would have talked to her, negotiated, found a way to make myself heard through the overwhelming static of our telepathy clashing.

  I knew none of that was possible. I knew Mom and I were reasonable people by human standards and freaks by cuckoo standards, because we had silly things like “ethics” and “morality” that got in the way of doing whatever the hell we wanted. I knew the woman in the bathroom wouldn’t have stopped with beating me unconscious. If I’d tried to negotiate with her, my body would be hidden somewhere in the depths of the airport by now, ready to be fed into a furnace or mulched and slipped into someone’s garden. My biology is different enough from the human norm that no forensic scientist would ever have been able to tell that I’d been a murder victim. I’d just be gone.

  It didn’t make me feel any better about hitting a woman in the face with my backpack. Or about the fact that I was honestly more worried about my laptop than I was about having done her permanent damage.

  I walked a little faster. I needed to get out of this airport.

  * * *

  The cabbie looked at me over his shoulder as I shoved a wad of bills in his direction, enough to pay my fare six times over. “I still think you should go to the police,” he said. “It’s not right, a young woman like you being this afraid.”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’m so sorry to have involved you in this. I just want to make sure you’re safe. So please, promise me, no more airport trips today.”

  Confusion and concern radiated from him, almost perfectly balanced. “You can’t honestly think I’d be in danger because I gave you a ride. I give lots of people rides.”

  “Probably not,” I said, and pushed against his mind, just slightly. Not enough to change him or make him forget me entirely. Enough to blur his memories of me and make him think that maybe a paid vacation day wouldn’t be such a bad idea. You have so much to do at home, and you’ve already got more money than you would normally have made, I whispered, directly into his subconscious. The night is almost over anyway. “I’d still feel so much better if I knew you weren’t taking the risk.”

  I’d feel so much better if I knew he wasn’t going back into the other cuckoo’s range. She’d be awake by now, and furious. If she caught any trace of me, she’d pounce on it.

  The cabbie looked out the window, concern melting into uncertainty. The sun was slipping down the line of the horizon, painting everything in shades of red and gold. “I suppose my shift was almost over anyway,” he said finally. He took the money from my hand, making it disappear. “I still hope you’ll change your mind and involve the authorities. A girl like you shouldn’t be running scared.”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” I said, and flashed him a smile before opening the door and getting out onto the Portland street. I walked a few steps, turned, and waved to him. He waved back and pulled away from the curb. I stayed exactly where I was, watching him go, waiting to be sure that he didn’t suddenly realize, as he got away from my meticulous influence, that he’d dropped me in a bad part of the city. His concern was sweet and born largely from the distress that I was radiating.

  My upper lip was wet. I touched it and grimaced as the sunset reflected off the clear liquid on my fingers. I was bleeding again. That last push, on top of everything else, must have been too much for my system to handle. I could feel the endless loops of recursive numbers trying to intrude on my thoughts, to pull me down into the comforting safety of pure mathematics, where I could be safe and comfortable and—most of all—protected. The numbers would protect me even as the world ate me alive. And the world would eat me alive if I let myself go into a fugue. A cuckoo who can’t defend herself is a dead cuckoo.

  I pushed the numbers aside and wiped my fingers on my jeans before dragging my sleeve across my face, wiping the rest of the blood away. Most humans wouldn’t recognize it for what it was, but I didn’t need to walk around Portland looking like I had a runny nose. The cabbie wasn’t coming back. He’d taken his money and forgotten me already, and now I just had to hope he was going to decide not to return to the airport, where that other cuckoo was probably waiting to crack his skull open like an egg looking for a map to where I’d gone.

  Poor man. He didn’t ask to be a part of this, and with any luck at all, he wasn’t going to be. Not for long, anyway. I started walking down the street, watching the houses around me for signs that someone was home an
d moving around. Waking people up can be useful, but only if I want to get something done quick and clean and without actually making them get dressed. I usually only do it when I need a Wi-Fi password.

  I’d gone about a block and a half before I saw a house that fit my needs. There was a big dog chained in the yard. He whined at the sight of me, retreating to the corner and growling softly, like he hoped he could frighten me off without getting anywhere near me. I offered him a sheepish smile, hoping he could read the expression better than I could, and climbed the somewhat rickety steps to the front porch. I rang the bell.

  Five minutes later, I was comfortably buckled into the passenger seat of a late-model sedan, the woman behind the wheel chattering merrily on about her plans for the weekend, which included a trip to Costco and some really inventive couponing. She drove with the casual disregard for speed limits that only comes from living in a neighborhood for a long, long time, and while she was definitely aware that we weren’t old friends or anything, the relationship she had constructed for us was warm and comfortable enough to fill the car with contentment. I was a cousin’s girlfriend’s sister’s niece, or something like that, and it was good enough for her.

  It’s nice, how quickly some people find their way from “strangers” to “family.” Nice, and maybe a little dangerous, but I wasn’t complaining. There was nothing to connect me to her. I’d be forgotten as soon as I got out of her car, and the cuckoo from the airport would never be able to track her down. She was safe, or as safe as anyone living in a city with a normal, hunting, hungry cuckoo could be.

  “Now, are you sure this is where you want me to drop you?” The woman pulled to a stop in front of an old warehouse, a brief stab of disapproval shooting through her general air of contentment. “I could take you someplace much nicer. Or you could come back to the house and wait for your friends to meet you there. I don’t mind.”

  “Duke might.” Duke was the dog. He had been almost pathetically grateful when I left, even as he’d warred with his fear of me and his desire to protect his human. He was going to be clingy and paranoid for days. His human wouldn’t understand why, and there was no way I could tell her, and I was sorry for that.

  “Duke loves you.”

  That was a lie. I dug the last of the cuckoo’s money out of my pocket and offered it to the woman. “Here. For the ride.”

  She started to object. Then her own self-interest kicked in, and she took the money from my hand, saying, “It’s great of Carol to pay back what she owes me. Sometimes people surprise you.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Sometimes people do.” I got out of the car before she could make another attempt to convince me not to. As soon as she was clear of my immediate presence, she drove away, faster than was strictly necessary. Some part of her knew that she’d just had an encounter with a predator bigger than she was, and she wanted to get the hell out of the way.

  I touched my upper lip. Dry. Then I turned toward the warehouse, noting the lights in the windows with relieved satisfaction, and started walking.

  * * *

  My family tree can get confusing sometimes. I get that. When you’re dealing with multiple generations, including some people whose lifespans aren’t limited to the human norm, the names and connections and complications pile up fast. So here’s the short and simple, or as simple as it’s possible for me to make things:

  My adoptive mother, Angela, was born somewhere in New England and raised by a family in Maine who had been chosen without their consent by her biological mother. Cuckoos pick the nests where they abandon their children carefully, according to a set of standards I don’t fully understand, and never will, unless I decide to have children of my own. Infants are abandoned in homes that have the space and resources to raise them properly, and where there are no other children to get in the way of dedicating those resources to the new cuckoo-child. Her husband, Martin Baker, was originally several human men. They were killed, only to be brought back to life by a scientist with more ambition than sense. I don’t mind, though. I love my father, and he is who he is because of someone with a shovel and a dream.

  Mom and Dad couldn’t have children of their own—they’re not biologically compatible—so they decided to adopt. Evie came first, left on their doorstep by one of the scientist’s apprentices as she ran into the night. Drew was next, adopted from the bogeyman community after an accident claimed his birth family. And I came last, dredged out of a storm drain after my instinctive telepathic distress call led them to my location.

  By the time I came along, Evie was already a married adult with three children. Alex, who’s three years older than I am, Verity, who’s basically my age, and Antimony, who’s a couple of years younger. And that’s all pretty straightforward, I guess. Big age gaps exist in families. Evie’s husband, Uncle Kevin—and yeah, he’s technically my brother-in-law, but I call him uncle, the same way I call Evie’s kids my cousins, since thinking of Verity as my niece would be way too weird—has a sister, Aunt Jane, who married Uncle Ted. They have two kids: Artie, who’s pretty close to my age, and Elsie, who’s a couple of years older than I am. It’s not the biggest family tree ever, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be confusing.

  Elsie likes a lot of things. Shopping, and dyeing her hair to match her nails, and veterinary medicine. And roller derby. She likes roller derby so much, in fact, that when Antimony graduated high school and couldn’t cheerlead anymore, Elsie talked her into trying out for the local league. Annie’s been skating ever since, while Elsie sits in the bleachers and cheers for her cousin. It’s about the closest they’ve ever come to a nonviolent family activity.

  The big rolling warehouse doors were closed, but the smaller door intended for humans rather than trucks was propped slightly open. A sign was taped to the outside—“CLOSED PRACTICE. DELIVERIES TO OFFICE.” I ignored it, and let myself in.

  Inside the warehouse it was bright and warm. Floodlights overhead illuminated the entire track, making the flat oval look bigger and more dramatic. And on the track, the skaters circled, more than a dozen girls in differently colored gear pushing, shoving, and skating their way to roller derby glory.

  None of them looked my way. Neither did the coaches who stood by the sidelines and called encouragement, or the women who weren’t currently on the track for whatever reason. They were skating around the edges of the practice, adjusting gym mats, pushing brooms, doing all the little tasks required to keep an amateur athletic league up and functioning.

  There were a few people seated in the bleachers. I scanned them until I settled on a woman with short, blueberry-colored hair, wearing the black-and-red gear of a Slasher Chicks supporter. That’s Annie’s team. I walked closer, reaching out mentally until my thoughts brushed against the familiar, reassuring edges of Elsie’s mind.

  She turned instantly, eyes searching the floor until they landed on me. Her consciousness immediately narrowed into a single point of wary suspicion. I nodded, satisfied with her response, and kept walking toward her.

  Because see, here’s a fun thing about Uncle Kevin and Aunt Jane: for some reason, they aren’t as vulnerable to cuckoo influence as most humans. Their mother, my Grandma Alice, is even more resistant, and to hear her tell it, her mother, Fran, was basically immune. Someone, somewhere back in the family line, wasn’t human, and whatever genetic gifts they gave their offspring have resulted in generations of people who aren’t at nearly as much risk where cuckoos are concerned. Genetic descendants of Frances Brown notice cuckoos. They can pick us out of a crowd. They remember us when we’re not directly visible. It’s terrifying, and awesome, and I wish to whatever gods watch over my messed-up species that I knew what their inhuman ancestor had been, so I could meet more of them.

  Elsie slipped one hand into her purse as I approached, no doubt preparing to draw some sort of weapon if I turned out to be any other cuckoo in the world. She’s not much of a fighter as our family goes�
��I think I’m the only one who’s worse—but she was still willing to make the effort in order to protect her people. I appreciated that, too.

  “Hi, Else,” I said, once I was close enough to make myself heard without needing to raise my voice. The rattle of wheels on the track continued in the background, a smooth, staccato white noise underscoring everything I said. “Long time no see, huh?”

  I was trying to sound cool. I was probably failing. But I felt Elsie’s suspicion melt into surprise, and finally into awe, as she sent a single, virtually shouted thought in my direction: Sarah?

  Yeah, I thought back, nodding for good measure. It’s me.

  Elsie stood, withdrawing her hand from her purse. “Are you really?” she asked. “I mean, you’re really-really Sarah?”

  “I’m really-really Sarah,” I said.

  “Prove it.” Her voice was low, in deference to the derby girls circling the track below us—although one of those girls, dressed in black and red, with a long red-brown braid trailing out the back of her helmet, had slowed to a stop just beside the track itself.

  A rush of almost startling joy washed over me. Antimony. I’d been hoping I might be lucky enough to catch the league during practice, and to find one of my cousins in residence. Finding two of them was almost unreasonable.