Imaginary Numbers Read online

  He shook his head, hand still outstretched. “She said you’d been injured and were convalescing, and that she hoped I’d have the chance to meet you someday, but that was all.”

  James wouldn’t be living at the family compound—or, apparently, be an honorary member of the family—if he hadn’t had a high tolerance for weirdness. From the spiky, almost crystalline edges of his thoughts, I was willing to bet there was something out of the ordinary about him, some little tweak or twist to his DNA that made him safer here than he’d be in the world outside. But he was still human. I could tell that as easily as I could tell that he was breathing. And unlike Evie, who’d grown up in a cuckoo’s house, or the biological members of the family, who’d inherited Fran’s inexplicable resistance to cuckoo influence, he didn’t have any protection from me.

  Crap.

  “I can’t shake your hand.” I took a big step backward. “I shouldn’t touch you at all, ever. And as soon as we’re done taking care of Artie, you need to ask my sister for an anti-telepathy charm. It’s dangerous to let me into your head.”

  His thoughts turned quizzical—and oddly excited. “You’re a telepath?”

  “Um. Yes.” Behind me, Evie and Kevin had managed to pull Artie out of the car and were carrying him toward the porch steps. Annie and her boyfriend moved to help. The four of them moved quickly, heading toward the light and warmth of the living room.

  I itched to follow. I wanted to know that Artie was okay, and more, I wanted to talk to Evie about what had happened in the woods. If anyone would be able to reassure me, it was going to be her.

  “Are you a sorcerer?”

  I paused, blinking at James. “What?”

  “A sorcerer.” His excitement was growing. “My mother’s journals mentioned that some sorcerers can learn how to project their thoughts, and that it’s a knack, like any of the elemental affinities. Annie and I have been trying to find instructions, but—”

  “You want to learn to be telepaths?” This was just getting more confusing.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Um, no.” I shook my head. “I mean, sorry, but no. I can’t teach you. I’m not a sorcerer. I’m sort of . . . not human?”

  “Ah.” James laughed, wryly. “Seems like that’s half the people around this place. It’s been a bit of an adjustment.”

  “Humans have been the dominant species for so long that they don’t know what it’s like to be outnumbered anymore.” Evie and the others had made it inside. I realized with a start that Elsie was gone, too, following her brother into the house. Sudden suspicion arrowed through me. I narrowed my eyes. “Did Annie ask you to keep me distracted out here?”

  James shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “She said you and Artie have been dancing around each other for years, and she didn’t want to upset you if there was something really wrong with him.” He didn’t even have the good grace to sound sheepish.

  I stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed. Then I whirled and ran for the house, shouting, “Get that charm!” over my shoulder. I didn’t slow down to see whether he was following me or staying where he was. I just ran.

  * * *

  Houses designed by eccentric cryptozoologists who grew up with a traveling carnival are rare, and they all have one trait in common: they’re idiosyncratic at best, and seriously weird at worst. The family compound fell into the “seriously weird” category. The front door opened, not on a foyer or stairway or other reasonable architectural choice, but on the mudroom connected to the kitchen, on the theory that the kitchen had a lot of flat, relatively sterile surfaces, and most people would either need hot water or food when they got to the house, depending on how injured they were. And as a theory it wasn’t wrong. It was just strange.

  I ran into the empty kitchen and looked wildly around, reaching out to try to figure out where my family had gone. There wasn’t any trace of them, which meant they’d continued on to one of the shielded parts of the house. Only the cuckoo-friendly guest room was completely shielded from psychic influence, but there were charms and protections built into various areas, largely because someone who’s injured can make a lot of psychic noise when they wake up, and sometimes that attracts unwanted attention.

  “Think, Sarah,” I mumbled. They wouldn’t have wanted to take him up any unnecessary stairs, and Evie would never have allowed a still-bleeding incubus on her couch, not even when it was her nephew. Which meant . . .

  I turned toward the pantry door. It was standing very slightly ajar. I walked over and gave it a push, revealing the packed shelves that lined the small, square room, stopping at the door on the back wall. It was almost hidden behind its burden of spice racks, but the knob was visible enough. I turned it, pulling the door open.

  The thoughts of my missing family members washed over me like a wave: Elsie scared, Annie angry, Evie and Kevin trying to smother their fear under a veil of calm practicality. Even Sam was there, although his thoughts were still too unfamiliar to betray much beyond his presence. I stepped through the doorway, walking down the short hall on the other side until I reached the recovery rooms. There were three of them, each kept perfectly sterile, each warded against all possible negative influences. Even the dead couldn’t enter the recovery rooms, a fact our collection of friendly family ghosts found annoying, if understandable. There are a lot more hostile spirits than helpful ones.

  That’s true of cuckoos, too. That’s why I’ve never taken the anti-telepathy charms personally. At the moment, however, it stung.

  Evie looked up when I stepped into the room. Artie was stretched on the bed in the middle of the space—hospital issue, of course. We like to be prepared for any eventuality in this family. He still wasn’t moving, and there was no crackle of his thoughts in the air, no psychic sign that he was there at all.

  “Sorry to run off on you like that,” she said, and her thoughts turned her words into a lie, because she wasn’t sorry; she wasn’t sorry at all. She was doing her best not to think about how worried she was, but she was out of practice, and all she was doing was throwing her fear at me, over and over again, like a series of stones. “I wanted to get Artie someplace secure.”

  Annie and Sam were on the other side of the room, sitting on the industrial-green couch. Sam had his tail wrapped around Annie’s waist. Elsie was standing next to Evie, one of Artie’s hands clutched in hers. Kevin was at the head of the bed, fussing with the machines hooked to the frame.

  Those machines would be hooked to Artie if he didn’t wake up soon. Machines to make sure he kept breathing; machines to make sure he had all the fluid and nutrition he needed. All because I’d come home—and he’d come to the warehouse to meet me. All because I was here.

  “Did he crack his skull?” I moved to the head of the bed, shoving myself in next to Kevin. They had already sutured Artie’s cheek, stitching it up with a series of quick, tidy lines. Between that and my blood, he might not even scar. That would be good. People don’t like it when they scar.

  “There’s nothing physically wrong enough to be keeping him unconscious,” said Evie. “He’s taken worse hits running around the yard. I’m not sure what’s going on. It could just be shock. He’ll probably wake up soon.”

  She didn’t sound like she believed it because she didn’t believe it. Her thoughts were a tangle of fears and concerns, none of them fully formed, all of them centered on the idea that if Artie had just been knocked unconscious, as I had been, he would have woken up already. Something was genuinely wrong.

  “I don’t think he’s going to wake up on his own,” I said slowly. “And I don’t think . . . I don’t think it was an accident.”

  The room grew tight with tension as everyone turned to look at me. I felt a flicker of unfamiliar thought behind me; James had arrived. That was probably good. It meant I’d only need to explain this once.
r />   “There was another cuckoo at the airport,” I said, eyes on Evie. “A woman. She tried to attack me for trespassing on her territory.”

  “I take it she didn’t succeed?” asked Evie.

  “I mean, she did attack me,” I said. “She just didn’t win.” Technically, I’d attacked her, turning her ambush around on itself. That was just semantics. She had come into that bathroom intending to do me harm, and that made everything I’d done a matter of self-defense.

  “What’s a cuckoo?” asked James.

  “I’ll explain later,” said Annie.

  A feeling of growing horror slithered through the air, as venomous as any snake. I turned. Sam was looking at me. The horror was coming from him. I sighed, shoulders slumping slightly. This was a complication I hadn’t been expecting in my sister’s house, and one I certainly didn’t need right now.

  “Sam knows,” I said.

  “I’ve never heard them called ‘cuckoos’ before,” he said, eyes still on me. “But she’s pale and dark-haired and that cut on her forehead isn’t bleeding when it should be. She’s a Johrlac. I thought they were a myth. Something people made up to scare little carnie kids into staying away from weirdoes on the midway. She’s real. They’re real, and one of them is in your house, and I think maybe we should all be running away now.”

  “Evie?” I said plaintively.

  “Sam, Sarah has always been a Johrlac—a cuckoo—and so is my mother, and she’s a part of this family. No one’s running anywhere.” Evie’s voice was calm, level, and left no room for argument. “We can explain more later, once Artie’s awake. Sarah, why don’t you think Artie will wake up on his own?”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense for a cuckoo to attack me in the airport, and then for us to have an accident like that,” I said. “The truck came out of nowhere—I didn’t hear the driver’s thoughts before they hit us. How does that make sense? Our headlights were on. If they’d been drunk, they would have been louder than usual, not quieter. I think the cuckoo I beat up decided she wanted to get back at me, and she set an ambush.”

  We’d stayed at the warehouse playing reunion for too long. I should have been more careful, should have treated my family the way I’d treated the strangers who’d carried me from the airport to the city—like potential casualties. But no. I’d been too tired and too happy to see them and too certain that they could handle any threats that came their way. I’d left plenty of time for the cuckoo to find me, figure out who I was with, and make plans to get back at me.

  “This is my fault,” I said softly, brushing my fingertips against Artie’s cheek and getting rewarded with another burst of blurry, half-formed thought. “He’s not going to wake up on his own because there’s nothing physically wrong with him.”

  “Sarah—” said Evie warningly.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and closed my eyes, and drove myself into Artie’s thoughts like a knife through ice. The world cracked around me, crystalline and perfect, and I had time for exactly one second thought—I shouldn’t be here—before everything shattered and was still.

  Seven

  “Trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. Even if everything else in the world is trying to deceive you, the numbers will always, always tell the truth.”

  —Angela Baker

  Still technically at the family compound, but also inside the mind of Arthur Harrington-Price, without an invitation

  THE SHARDS OF THOUGHT and mind and math and memory fell down around me in a glittering veil, dusting the ground-not-ground at my feet, lighting up the darkness. I was standing in the middle of a vast plain of stormy nothingness. The nothing itself was the blooming purple black of a bruise, lit up here and there with blooming halos of vivid pink and red. Flashes of what looked like lightning lit up the horizon in a thousand shades of rose.

  “Artie?” My voice sounded strange, like a recording of myself. There was no bone conduction here, because my bones weren’t really with me; they were outside this space, standing or sagging next to a motionless man in a hospital bed. Right. Hopefully, Evie or Kevin would have the good sense to grab me and hold me up. I wasn’t sure what would happen if the contact between us was broken while I was still flung almost wholly into Artie’s mind.

  That would be a hell of a way to make him understand that I was interested in his body: taking it over seemed a little bit extreme, but it seemed like a reasonably likely outcome of this particular act of raging stupidity. I’d been in Artie’s head before, both with and without an invitation. I’d never been so far inside his head that I wound up in his mindscape.

  “That is such a stupid word,” I muttered, and took a step forward . . . or tried to. My legs worked, but I got the distinct feeling that I wasn’t actually moving. The lights on the horizon certainly didn’t move. They stayed exactly where they were, bright and shimmering and impossible, and I stayed exactly where I was, pale and lost and stranded in an infinity of bruised blackness.

  “Artie?” My voice echoed as if bouncing off unseen canyon walls. I cupped my hands around my mouth and tried again, shouting louder this time. “Artie!”

  The ground began to crack and crumble underfoot. I glared at it. “You stop that.”

  It stopped that.

  Great: so I had some control over my environment, which was also Artie’s mind, which meant I should probably be careful about how many orders I wanted to give. Since I also didn’t want to plummet into the next layer of the—ugh—mindscape, a few orders were going to be necessary. I cupped my hands around my mouth again, forming a primitive megaphone.

  “Artie! It’s Sarah! I know you can hear me, I’m inside your head!”

  No reply.

  “If you don’t come talk to me right now, I’m going to make you wish you had!”

  No reply.

  “Okay. You did this to yourself.” I took a deep, unnecessary breath, and began to sing at the top of my lungs, “I am a happy banana! A happy happy happy ba-na-na! Happy happy happy—”

  “I hate that song.”

  I stopped singing and turned, beaming when I saw Artie behind me in the darkness. He scowled and the expression made perfect sense. I was inside his head; I didn’t need to read his mind to know why his face was doing the things it was doing. That was a nice change.

  In here, I could also see that he was handsome, and that was a nice change, too. Oh, I would have thought he was handsome no matter what he looked like, because I really was in love with his mind—his weird, sweet, comforting mind—but Artie’s brain knew how to process human faces and I was inside his head and that meant that for right now, I could do the same thing. And he had a nice face, sweet and open and expressive. I spared a moment’s resentment for the fact that I belonged to a species that didn’t get to enjoy faces like his, because we simply didn’t see them. It wasn’t fair.

  “I know you hate that song,” I said. “That’s why I was singing it.”

  “Couldn’t you come up with a better way to get on my nerves?” Artie rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “You could do your multiplication homework or something.”

  “I haven’t done math inside your head since we were kids.”

  “Yeah, but it was always really annoying when you did it.” Artie lowered his hand. “Where are we, Sarah?”

  The vague hope that this was normal for him—that his mind always looked like this from the inside, and so he’d be able to tell me how to get us out of here—faded to wistful nothingness. “We’re inside your head. Don’t you know the inside of your own head?”

  Worry strong enough to verge on panic spiked in his eyes and rolled through the mindscape around us, fuzzy and static on the idea of my skin. “Wait, we’re inside my head? You’re inside my head? You’re not . . . looking . . . at things, are you?”

  “I promised a long time ago that I wouldn’t rifle through your memorie
s uninvited,” I said, feeling suddenly tired. “Don’t you trust me anymore, Artie?”

  “I trusted you not to hurt yourself and shut me out for five years, and look how well that went.” His eyes widened and he clapped a hand over his mouth, like he thought he could somehow manage to take the words back. “Oh, jeez, Sarah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Like I said, we’re in your head. It’s harder for you to lie to me in here, unless you’re also lying to yourself.” A dozen questions sprang to mind, each of them more inappropriate than the last. I pushed them all down. It wouldn’t just be an invasion of his privacy to ask those questions when I knew he’d have to answer them truthfully. It would be a violation of our friendship, of the careful, questionable peace we’d constructed between ourselves, one promise and compromise at a time.

  Being a telepath in a non-telepathic world is hard. Sometimes I think my ancestors made a big mistake, leaving whatever dimension they originated in. Then I usually think that no dimension is awful enough to deserve us, and I’m glad to at least be in a world where the Internet exists. Telepaths would never have invented the Internet.

  It’s easier on the Internet. Everyone is the words they use and nothing else. It’s fair.

  Artie was still staring at me, guilt written broadly across his face. Maybe being able to read expressions wasn’t such a good thing after all.

  “I didn’t get hurt on purpose,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I wouldn’t have done that to you. I wouldn’t have done that to myself.”

  “I know.”

  “So why are you mad at me?”

  Artie looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was soft, almost distant, like he was remarking on the weather and not talking about one of the most important relationships in my life.

  “Because you shut me out,” he said. “You let Aunt Angela and Uncle Martin take care of you, and that was fine. You let Alex live in the same house as you, while all the rest of us were being told you were too dangerous to be anywhere near us, and that was fine. You let Alex move his human girlfriend into the house, you let her sleep right down the hall, and that was fine. But every time I asked if I could come to Ohio to see you, you said you weren’t ready yet. Every time I asked if I could help, you told me ‘no.’ You said you were fine when you weren’t fine, and I don’t think you ever lied to me before, and I didn’t like it. Five years, Sarah. You left me scared that I’d lost you for five years. That’s such a long time. I’m mad at you because I’d almost finished grieving for you, and now you’re standing inside my head, and I can’t get away from you. Why couldn’t you come back sooner? Why couldn’t you stay gone?”