Calculated Risks Read online

  I glanced around. With no way—and no one—to call the police, there was no real reason for Annie to hesitate if she’d decided this man was a threat. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this level of aggression in response to what had honestly been some vague comments on my part. He was a bad man. Even bad men don’t deserve to have their faces scraped off on brick walls.

  “I have his weapon,” I said. “He’s not going to overpower anyone else, and this door doesn’t look like it opens from this direction. There’s no way he’s getting back in the cafeteria without someone noticing he was gone.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we can probably let him go.”

  “Is she right, Terry?” Annie tightened her grip on his throat for a moment, grinding his cheek into the brick until there was no way it didn’t hurt. He was starting to turn an unattractive shade of plum.

  “Humans need oxygen,” I said mildly.

  “I hate liars,” she replied, and pushed him away from her as she let go, a motion that had the end result of slamming him even harder against the wall. She snorted and stepped back, giving him room to move.

  It was a maneuver I’d seen before, usually when one of our more physical fighters was trying to subdue a semi-intelligent cryptid or beast, like a bear. Show them you were bigger, and give them the space to react. If they responded by running away, the problem was solved. If they tried to attack, they needed to be put down.

  The thoughts rolling off of her were annoyed, but I wasn’t picking up on any murderous intent. Whatever was happening here, it was better just to let it play out.

  Terry pushed himself away from the wall and whirled around, unable to quite settle on which of the two of us he should be glaring at. His thoughts were a ceaseless roiling, loud enough that I could pick up on their edges without trying. They weren’t as clear as Annie’s because I wasn’t attuned to him the way I was attuned to her, but they were clearer than I expected from a total stranger.

  Adjusting to the changes in the way my brain worked was going to take time that we didn’t currently have.

  He lunged abruptly forward, not for Annie, but for the grass at our feet. Grabbing several bullets off the ground, he scrambled back to an upright position and ran, legs churning as fast as they could go. He didn’t say anything. I frowned, touching my temple with one hand. It didn’t help. He wasn’t acting on logic, he was running on wild panic, and that never gets more comprehensible.

  “Why did he do that?” demanded Annie.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he didn’t want us to have his stupid bullets. Like we’d use a gun this crappy? It’d probably blow up in your hand if you tried.”

  “Probably,” she agreed, and stuck her hand out. “Give it.”

  I blinked. “But it’s a lousy gun, and—”

  “And while I’m starting to believe you believe what you’ve been saying, that doesn’t mean I actually believe it’s the truth, and it doesn’t mean I’m willing to go walking around with an armed cuckoo. If you’re who you claim to be, you would have been taught how to use even an empty gun as a weapon.” She waggled her fingers. “Hand it over and we can get moving.”

  I wanted to argue. I wanted to scoff and tell her she was being ridiculous.

  I dropped the gun into her palm and watched her make it disappear. Then she bent and picked the rest of the bullets out of the grass, dropping those into her pocket.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  It would have been easy to get angry at her or act like she was treating me unfairly. It would have been even easier to take this personally, like she was trying to hurt me with her behavior or like I was being punished. Sometimes “easy” isn’t the same thing as “right.”

  Everyone in my family knows cuckoos are bad news. It’s one of the first things we learn, irrespective of species. Cuckoos distort the world. They break things because they can, because it’s fun . . . because they can’t help themselves. When given a choice between the right thing and the thing that will benefit them the most, they take the second option before they even finish registering that they had a choice, because they carry the weight of their entire species in their minds, and it says to survive at all costs. The only thing that inspires a cuckoo to self-sacrifice is the survival of the species as a whole. It doesn’t even extend to protecting their young.

  We’d learned a lot about cuckoos since all this started. Where they really came from, why they were the way they were . . . what Mom had done to save me, even though she hadn’t fully understood what she was doing, or that she was doing it at all. She’d been following an instinct deeper than consciousness, clearing out my mind to make room for the equation that was going to do its best to hollow me out and ride me into a new dimension. But she’d done it because she loved me, and I couldn’t be mad. Thanks to her, I was a cuckoo who knew how to love and be loved. I was an aberration by the standards of my species, and there was absolutely no reason for Annie to believe I could even exist.

  The fact that she hadn’t tried to shoot me or set me on fire yet was more than enough to make me forgive her for being a little standoffish and suspicious. I would have been, too, in her place. The fact that she seemed more willing to trust Mark was a bit more of a problem for me—but then again, Mark hadn’t started what she knew of their acquaintance by admitting to wiping her mind. She had good reason to like him better and trust him more.

  People are complicated. I tried to keep that in mind as I led Annie across campus toward the distant hum of unfamiliar human minds. A large building came into view. The library.

  “The rest of the people sheltering on campus seem to be in there,” I said, pointing.

  Annie nodded. “Makes sense. I know I’d take refuge in a library.”

  “With no lights or Internet?”

  “Yeah. It would be instinctive. You don’t think ‘at least I’ll have something to read,’ you think ‘the books will keep me safe.’”

  I considered this as we walked. “Fair enough.” We were getting close enough to see details, like the cracked windows on the third floor, and the uprooted shrubs near the door, and the ring of pale, dark-haired people clustered around the outside of the building, trying to bang their way in. I stopped walking and reached for them mentally.

  There was nothing there.

  “Um, Annie? We have a problem.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, looking back at me.

  I raised a shaking hand and pointed at the people assaulting the library. “I don’t know whether we can get to the survivors, but we’ve definitely found more of the missing cuckoos,” I said. “And the boys aren’t anywhere nearby.” I could spread out my scan to check the full campus for them, but if I did that, I would lose track of my immediate surroundings, and that suddenly struck me as a very, very bad idea.

  She followed my finger, displeasure rolling off of her in a wave. “Oh,” she said. “Empties?”

  “Like the first one,” I said. “They’re not really there anymore. They’re just . . . bodies, acting on instinct, looking for something to devour.”

  Annie smirked “You know, Sarah, maybe you’re a member of this family after all,” she said, pulling her gun from somewhere inside her clothing. “I mean, you started a zombie apocalypse on an alien world by mistake. That’s almost as good as killing the crossroads, or summoning a snake god live on national television.” She flipped off the safety. “Alex really needs to up his game. Seriously, he’s barely caused any world-changing disasters.”

  “What are you going to do? Aren’t we going to go looking for the boys?” I asked. Maybe they were stupid questions, but at least asking them aloud would help to convince her that I wasn’t reading her mind.

  She rolled her eyes before turning away from me, back to the crowd around the library. “The boys are fine. They saw a zombie apocalypse getting und
erway and they ran like sensible people. Fortunately, no one has ever accused me of being sensible. As for what I’m going to do, I’m going to shoot a bunch of people, duh. You said they weren’t people anymore, and even if they were, they’d still be cuckoos. We can’t afford to let them live. This way at least it’s quick, and they don’t have time to suffer. Much.”

  I wanted to argue. I didn’t feel any kinship with these cuckoos, but they were damaged because of me—because when I’d used them to help me contain the equation, I hadn’t done it gently enough. And even so, I didn’t see a good way to make the argument. If we could fix them, they’d still be cuckoos, and they’d be justifiably pissed. If we couldn’t fix them, they’d be exactly what Annie was saying they were: the beginning of a zombie apocalypse. No ability to infect, thankfully, but they ticked all the other boxes. This was the only answer.

  “At least let me check them individually, to make sure they’re like that first one,” I said. Annie’s thoughts turned dubious. I managed, barely, not to grab her arm. “Please. If any of them have higher cognition left, they might be able to tell us what happened after I collapsed, or how to get home from here.”

  I was grasping at straws, and they were breaking in my hands. I knew it, and so did she. But she still lowered the gun and sighed.

  “The mice know you,” she said. “You know too much. Being a telepath explains part of that, but being a telepath doesn’t tell you how to talk to someone, or how to argue with them reasonably. So yeah, I guess maybe you are my cousin, and if you are my cousin, you’re going to be okay with me being very, very angry with you.”

  “Because I messed with your mind without permission?”

  “Exactly.” Antimony sounded pleased. “Consent always matters. If it mattered less, Artie would leave his damn basement more often—he was a shut-in before you deleted yourself from his memories, right?”

  I nodded. She radiated satisfaction.

  “Good. We’ve made it far enough at this point that I didn’t really want to shoot you for breaking the cousin I can actually remember. Now check those cuckoos and see how many of them I can kill.”

  Had my family always been this bloodthirsty? Tempting as it was to give myself the credit—and the blame—for throwing things askew when I went poking around in her head, I had to admit they’d always been like this. We had a very black-and-white way of thinking, collectively, and once something had been filed under “enemy,” it was all too easy to pull the trigger.

  We probably needed to work on that. “I’ll have to get a little closer,” I said.

  “Do you think they’ll attack us if you do?” she asked.

  “Only if they notice us,” I said. “They’re just . . . hungry. They want because they don’t have anything else left to them but wanting, and they still have bodies, and those bodies need to be fed. So that becomes the only thing there is, and they follow it, and try to make it matter. If they caught us, they’d rip us to pieces and swallow what they could and probably choke to death on our bones.”

  “Sounds fun.” Annie started walking toward them, slow and easy, a hunter’s prowl. It had been so long since I’d stepped back and looked at my family from the outside that it was a little jarring, just like everything else about this damn day.

  But then, if you can’t be jarred when you’re walking under an orange sky filled with flying millipedes, when can you? I hurried after her, my bare feet slapping against the grass and my nightgown swaying around my legs. I’d been appalled by Terrence’s half-baked plan to loot the student health center, since medication and first-aid supplies were going to be limited as long as we were all stranded in this dimension, but I was considering the virtues of finding and looting the school shop myself. They’d have mascot-branded sweatpants and wooly socks if nothing else, and I really wanted to feel a little bit less naked.

  And if not the student store, at least some of these cuckoos looked like they’d been female before I melted their brains. Maybe I’d be able to steal their shoes, even if I wasn’t willing to take the bra off a corpse.

  Annie slowed as we got closer to the library and we got our first really close look at the mob of cuckoos.

  There were about fifteen of them, none younger than their late teens, all clawing and banging at the front of the building with single-minded determination. Their faces were slack and expressionless, enough so that even I could see that the lights weren’t on and nobody was home. Some of them were drooling. At least one had ripped out all of her own fingernails trying to claw through the brick; her fingertips were shredded ruins, leaking viscous fluid onto the stone as she continued to claw, not appearing to notice the pain, much less care about it.

  They were dressed in a variety of styles, from “girl’s night out” to “ready for bed,” and I realized with some horror that I was assessing their clothes based on whether or not they would fit me after Annie put their original owners down. Probably—cuckoos have very little physical dimorphism across the species, and most of us look enough like all the rest that we can share everything. Shoes, makeup colors, photo IDs . . . everything. But we didn’t have access to a laundry service, and at the end of the day, I’d rather find the student store and steal some sweatpants than strip a corpse.

  Quiet, I whispered in Annie’s head, and ducked my chin toward my chest, focusing on the swarm in front of us. My eyes tingled as they made the chemical shift to bioluminescent brightness and I began skipping myself across the surface of their minds. Only the surface; the depths were as horrifyingly chaotic as the first one we’d encountered, filled with howling winds and endless voids.

  I could get trapped there if I wasn’t careful. I could get ensnared and dragged down into those infinite depths, to drown or starve in the emptiness they had become. They weren’t lost to madness; madness would have required that they have the capacity for anything else. These weren’t broken people. They weren’t people at all. They were things. Terrible, shattered, starving things.

  And I had done this to them. All the “I didn’t mean to” and “it was an accident” in the world wouldn’t change the fact that I’d done something a lot worse than anything Annie was planning, and it couldn’t be taken back. They were never going to be the people they’d been before. Maybe that was a good thing, since it was likely the people they’d been were monsters, but I wasn’t judge and jury, I was just a math nerd who’d been sucked into something much too big for her and now couldn’t find any way out.

  I pulled myself loose from their minds, which felt sticky somehow, like they were trying to grab hold of me and pull me into the abyss of their empty yearning. “They’re gone,” I said aloud.

  Annie nodded, grim determination rolling off her as she raised her gun. Fifteen of them meant that even if every shot was true, she’d have to pause and reload before she took them all down.

  And even so, we would probably have been fine if not for the glass beer bottle that soared by overhead, smashing onto the stone walkway in front of us. The sound it made when it shattered seemed impossibly loud, almost like a gunshot in its own right.

  The cuckoos weren’t intelligent anymore, but they knew they were hungry, and had been targeting the people holed up inside the library. They turned toward the sound, still drooling, and one of them actually snarled before the whole swarm began to shamble in our direction, attracted by the promise of easier prey.

  “Whoa, Sarah, what the fuck?” demanded Annie, backpedaling.

  I matched her step for step, turning to look behind us as I did, and caught sight of a man running around the corner of the nearest building, arms pumping. I sent out a tendril of thought, barely brushing against the edges of his mind. “Terrence.”

  “From the cafeteria?” She was paying more attention to the cuckoos now coming after us, probably because she wanted to live long enough to get back to the others.

  “Yes!”

  “And thi
s is why it’s never a good idea to be merciful,” she muttered, and began to fire. Her gun spoke twice in quick succession, followed by the soft sound of bodies hitting the ground before she fired again. “Is he still there?”

  So she was running backward. That made sense under the circumstances. She knew I could see where we were going, while she stayed focused on the danger that was bearing down on us. Speaking of which . . .

  “Sarah, answer me!” she shrieked.

  “No, he’s gone,” I said, and kept running. The ground was starting to hurt my feet, little rocks buried in the grass digging into my skin. “How many did you get?”

  “Three,” she said, with some satisfaction. There was a whooshing sound, and the brief sensation of intense heat. “Four—no, five, that one tripped and now two of them are on fire. Take that, you zombie assholes!”

  She sounded so pleased with herself that I hated to say anything. I hated being on fire even more. “Annie, are they still running?”

  “Um.”

  “Are we being chased by zombie cuckoos on fire?”

  “A little bit! But they’re slowing down!”

  “Yes, being on fire will do that to you!” Or at least I assumed it would. I had never actually been on fire, which was a situation I wanted to preserve for as long as possible. “Run faster!”

  “We can make it back to the cafeteria!” A gunshot followed her words, before Annie pulled up next to me, now facing in the same direction as I was. That was an improvement, although it meant that in remarkably short order, she was the one leading, while I had to struggle to keep up.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the remaining cuckoos. We had started with fifteen; four of them had fallen, victims of gunshots through the forehead or throat, their empty eyes fixed on the orange sky. Of the remaining eleven, three were on fire, the two she had hit originally and then another that had been running too close to them. That’s the trouble with fire. Unlike bullets, it’s a renewable resource—and under the right circumstances, it can be really, really renewable.