Calculated Risks Page 13

  “I hate everything about this,” I muttered.

  Annie, who had been opening the door back into the building, looked over her shoulder. “What was that?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. She raised an eyebrow, her surface thoughts making it clear she didn’t believe me. I sighed. Watching myself around my cousins wasn’t habitual, hadn’t been for a very long time, and it was clear that if I didn’t get back into the habit quickly, I wasn’t going to be forming any more habits in the future. “Seriously, nothing. My feet hurt and I’m exhausted, that’s all.”

  Annie’s eyes flicked downward, to my feet, and widened. “Holy sh—have you been barefoot this entire time?”

  “Um, yeah?” She finally stepped through the doorway and into the darkened stairwell on the other side. I followed, grateful to no longer be exposed to the whole of the outside.

  In the dimness, she could no more read my face than I could read hers. That evened the playing field a little bit, while also tilting it unfairly in my direction, since my telepathy wasn’t light-based. I blinked.

  “Oh, hey, that answers your question from before,” I said. “It’s definitely moving toward whatever the local equivalent of sunset is, because it wasn’t this dark in here when we left.” I paused, sending out a reaching tendril of thought. “And there’s no one else in here.”

  “I thought you already checked the building,” said Annie dubiously.

  “The zombie cuckoos aren’t broadcasting any sort of thoughts or emotions, because they essentially don’t have them anymore,” I said. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you even if there was one in the room with the boys,” I admitted. “But if there was one in the room with the boys, they’d be freaking out right now, and they’re feeling pretty calm. Worked-up and freaked-out, but calm. Artie’s halfway convinced that I’m going to come back alone, because cuckoos can’t be trusted, Mark is wondering whether he picked the wrong side, and James is keeping the air around him as cold as possible to counteract Artie’s pheromones, but they’d all be a lot more upset if there was a zombie in the room with them.”

  “That’s really what we’re going with, huh?” Annie began climbing the stairs, summoning a ball of flame and holding it suspended over her palm as she did. It provided a measure of uneven, flickering light, which didn’t help me as much as I wanted it to. It definitely reassured her, however, calming the surface of her thoughts with its mere presence. It was weapon and light source at the same time, so that effect made a certain amount of sense. “Zombie?”

  “They’re mindless shambling husks that used to be people, can’t be people anymore, and just want to consume,” I said. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Husks’? Has a nicely insectile feel, isn’t vaguely culturally appropriative and arguably racist, which is funny in its own way, since you come from a whole species of white serial killers. Whoever decided to call you ‘cuckoos’—”

  “Pretty sure that was Great-Grandma Fran.” I was eventually going to have to tell her what Mark had told me, about how the Healy family luck came from their connection to a presumably extinct species of cryptid . . . how the Healys had not been, after Fran married in, entirely human, meaning Annie herself was not entirely human, meaning Artie and Elsie were even more of a genetic patchwork than we’d always assumed. Some of the implications were staggering.

  The Covenant of St. George really believed they had a divine right to “cleanse” the planet in the name of humanity’s dominion. But if we’d been underestimating the number of cryptid species closely related enough to humans to interbreed—and not only interbreed but have fertile offspring, as Fran had had two children, and her daughter had done the same—then even they might have to do some rethinking.

  “Whatever,” said Annie dismissively. “Whoever decided to call you ‘cuckoos’ should probably have taken a little more time to think before just spitting out a sobriquet they thought fit in the moment. I’d rename you all to ‘locusts’ or something else suitably bug-based if I could. So I don’t think ‘zombies’ is the right word.”

  “Cool. We can put it to a vote when we get back to the boys.”

  Had the stairs been this long before we’d gone traipsing all over campus and bruised the hell out of my poor feet? I knew they must have been, since the architecture seemed to be sticking with the normal laws of physics, but this staircase felt like it was a thousand miles long, like I was making the unending march across the floor at San Diego Comic-Con. I’d only been twice, and only once with a badge, but the distances involved had been more than enough to make an impression.

  Then the stairs were over, finally, and we were stepping into the long dark hall between us and the classroom. I froze, skin humping up into knots, suddenly convinced that all my assurances had been lies; I wasn’t picking up distress from the boys because the zombies weren’t in the classroom, but they were in the building. They were clustered in the corners, just out of the range that worked for detecting them, watching us with silent, starving eyes.

  Logic said I was wrong. Logic said they no longer had the ability to make even rudimentary plans, and setting an ambush qualified as a plan; they were like kittens, pouncing on anything that caught their eyes, incapable of hesitation or restraint. The hall was safe.

  Logic could go stuff itself. I knew what I felt, and what I felt was creeping terror.

  “Are you coming or what?” Annie looked over her shoulder at me, still holding the ball of flame in her hand. “You’re so weird. I always assumed a cuckoo my own age would be more like Very. All pushy and aggressive. You’re an apex predator. Act like it.”

  “I don’t think you really want me to do that,” I said, and forced myself to take another step into the hall. The next one was easier, as was the one after that, and the one after that, and nothing came out of the shadows to attack us, until we were standing in front of the classroom door, still safe, still together, and Annie blew her ball of flame carelessly out, like it was nothing of consequence.

  “Come on,” she said, and opened the door. “Let’s tell the boys what we’ve been up to and figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  She stepped inside. I followed.

  Eight

  “No sane man would want this life for his children. I certainly don’t. Sadly, the universe seems determined not to give me a choice.”

  —Jonathan Healy

  Back in the classroom where this terrible, awful, no-good, seemingly endless day began

  The boys had been busy since their return to the classroom. Mark and Artie had dragged chairs over to the window, where they could watch the lawn outside warily. James was at the front of the room, working on what I would have called a sandcastle if it hadn’t been sculpted out of tiny sheets of ice. A snowcastle, maybe, if that’s a word. The mice who hadn’t accompanied Annie and me were with him, moving ice sheets into place, using the heat of their paws to melt fine details into the structure.

  Everyone looked over when Annie opened the door, the air growing suddenly thick with tension and several degrees colder. The tension faded when they saw who it was. The cold didn’t. Annie made an exasperated huffing noise.

  “Sorry,” said James sheepishly. The air warmed back up.

  I frowned. I hadn’t been around much for the last few years—when I’d injured myself, Annie had still been hiding her sorcery from the rest of the family, and I’d been allowing her the polite fiction of fooling the telepath, and James and I had been strangers until my arrival in Portland had kicked this whole mess off. Still, we had a family history of sorcery, and both Grandma and Mary were happy to talk about the way Grandpa Thomas used to change the world with a few clever hand gestures and a thought. It had never been this extreme in their stories, and I didn’t remember it being this extreme in Portland, either.

  Maybe that meant I wasn’t going to have to live with quite as m
any long-term consequences as I’d feared. Keeping my tone light, I asked, “Has either of you been noticing that sorcery is easier for you here?”

  Annie and James exchanged a look. Her thoughts filled with the way she’d pulled the fire off those burning cuckoos, how quickly she’d called up her fireball in the stairwell. James, who had not just done a bunch of recreational murder, was a little more measured, pondering the ice castle and the speed with which the temperature had dropped. He was the first of them to speak, saying in a subdued tone, “Maybe. Why do you ask?”

  “Because I’m starting to think that some of the rules governing this universe are different. I thought the square-cube law might be suspended here, but since Annie hasn’t burnt us all to a smoldering crisp by mistake quite yet, we can probably assume that we still have a square-cube law. We just also have giant insects.”

  “They could have lungs,” said Artie. “You’re a giant insect, you have lungs.”

  “It’s nice how you remember dissecting cuckoos without remembering me,” I said mildly. “It makes me feel very special and not at all like you’re going to slit my throat as soon as I fall asleep. We already discussed the possibility of lungs, and to be fair to you and your ideas, I think lungs are very likely, given that these things have gone a step past arboreal and into aerial. I’d assume air bladders at the very least, and adapting those into rudimentary lungs wouldn’t have been much work at all.”

  Evolution is a crapshoot under the best of circumstances. People like to pretend “survival of the fittest” means “survival of the best,” the biggest, strongest, cleverest, most attractive examples of the species. What it really means is “survival of whatever fit into its ecological niche the most efficiently, without getting eaten by something else before it could make more of itself.” The first Johrlac to develop telepathy probably looked a lot more like a yellowjacket than a YouTube influencer, and it almost certainly hadn’t been an X-Men style leap forward, going from non-telepathic parents to the level of mental dexterity that Mark and I possessed. Maybe it had been an empath like Artie, or able to push compulsions out but not receive them, like Mom. There was no way of knowing. Trying to guess now wouldn’t change anything. How did the flying bugs get so big in the first place? If whatever had made the saddle kept histories, maybe we’d have the chance to find out. If we didn’t, then we had to admit that it didn’t matter as much as we wanted it to.

  Humans like things to make sense. It’s a failing of the species, and part of why they’re so bad at overall risk assessment. And I, lucky me, may not be human, but I was raised by humans, and that means a lot of their thought patterns encoded themselves into me. I want the world to be as logical and rational as a well-honed equation. It’s never going to give in to my desires, but that doesn’t make them go away.

  Annie snapped her fingers. “Okay, Nerd Herd, focus. What the hell do lungs and the square-cube law have to do with me and James going up ten levels in Sorcerer from one monster encounter? Do we need to worry about Wild Magic surges all of a sudden?”

  James’ thoughts turned baffled. “Did you just start speaking Greek?”

  “Oh, God, Jimmy, how have I not pinned you down and forced you to learn the beautiful intricacies of Dungeons and Dragons?” asked Annie without any real heat.

  “We’ve been a little busy, what with the cross-country move and the change of identity and your cousin forcing through an adoption posthumously but not literally approved by my long-dead mother to keep my father from having any legal right to come after me, even though I’ve been an adult for years now,” said James mildly.

  Annie responded with a wave of smugness so heavy that even the non-psychics in the room should have been able to feel it. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I guess we have been getting some shit done. Anyway, when we get home, we’re grabbing Elsie and Artie and putting together a new family D&D campaign. I don’t . . .” She faltered. “I don’t remember why the last one ended.”

  “And then did the God of Chosen Isolation state with Firmness that as Abelard the Artificer could not continue his good and necessary work without the aid of Ashfire the Cleric, the Campaign must be Suspended,” squeaked a tiny voice from Annie’s hair. “And all were direly disappointed by the Pausing of the Game, but as the Calculating Priestess was unavailable, it was agreed that this was indeed fair.”

  “Oh,” said Annie. “I guess that explains why my plans for the campaign don’t make sense to me now. I forgot we were supposed to have a cleric.” She shot me a look that even I could interpret as murderous, underscored by the fury now roiling in her mind. “You messed with D&D.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to. You should know by now that I didn’t mean to do any of this. Everything is terrible and strange, and I think we’re in a dimension that amplifies sorcery, which probably means the people who ride the giant bugs can throw fireballs at us if we upset them, and there are zombie cuckoos everywhere, and I don’t even have a bra!” I didn’t expect to start yelling, but somewhere in the middle of all that I did, my voice peaking on a wail.

  Annie took a step toward me, holding one hand out and open in a calming gesture. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

  “Zombie cuckoos?” asked Mark, who had been staying quiet while we dealt with one more piece of nonsensical family drama. As much as I didn’t like the situation, he had to find it even more frustrating. He was watching a bunch of semi-strangers scream out their problems, while all he wanted to do was go home. “What do you mean, zombie cuckoos?”

  “She means that while she was surgically jumbling our memories, princess here,” Annie hooked a thumb toward me, “also wiped the minds of all the cuckoos she was psychically connected to. They’re not really people anymore. They’re shambling husks and they’re neither dead nor infectious, so we’re not calling them zombies, got it?”

  Mark blinked. “Got it,” he said, in a tone that implied he absolutely did not “got it.” For someone who could literally read minds, he was incredibly confused.

  It’s okay, I know we’re a lot, I said quietly in his mind. He jerked upright like he’d been poked with a pin, looking wildly around for a moment before focusing on me and narrowing his eyes.

  “What?” I asked aloud.

  Annie and James both turned toward me. Artie, who seemed to be making a game of not looking at me, turned back to the window. “Something on your mind?” asked Annie.

  “Mark was being weird,” I said.

  “I’m not being weird,” he snapped. “You talked inside my head!”

  “Um.” I blinked very slowly. “That’s pretty normal for cuckoos? We did it before, while you had me tied to the chair, remember? And we’ve had skin contact, and you were part of the ritual circle, so you’re attuned to me; I don’t think you could keep me out if you were trying. Which you weren’t just now.” Running up against another cuckoo’s shields—or a non-cuckoo who knows how to protect their thoughts against psychic intrusion—is like hitting a flimsy but locked door. Sure, you could bang it down if you felt like you had no choice in the matter, but you’d make a bunch of noise and attract a lot of attention in the process.

  Someone who was shielding themselves would know if you broke into their mind. They’d feel it happen, and they’d be able to take steps to make it stop. None of that had happened just now with Mark, I was sure of it.

  “Yes, I was,” he said.

  “No, you weren’t.” There had been a bit of resistance, but only for an instant, less of a door and more of a soap bubble, thin and incidental and easily popped.

  Mark pushed away from the window and strode toward me, chin down and brow furrowed, clearly spoiling for a fight. “Yes, I was,” he snarled, biting off every word. “I wake up with a bunch of people I know I know, who know about Cici, but who I can’t remember meeting or why I would voluntarily spend any time around them, and there’s an unco
nscious queen on the ground in front of us—something that isn’t supposed to be possible, by the way, you should either be dead or blasted so far out the other side of yourself that you’re a gibbering, pissing wreck. Not a person. Queens aren’t people.”

  From the way he was describing things, the fate Ingrid and the other cuckoos had intended for me was basically the one that had been wrought on the cuckoos from the ritual: hollowed out of everything but the barest instincts necessary for survival, eternally hungry, unable to put anything resembling a self back together in the face of the howling internal void. I shook my head.

  “If there’s never been a queen who was still herself after the ritual finished, why are you surprised that I can apparently do things you don’t expect?” I asked. “I’m sorry to have violated your privacy. I legitimately didn’t feel your shields. I will be more careful in the future. Every instar is triggered by something, and every instar leaves a cuckoo stronger. Well, I’ve survived the instar that was supposed to end me. I think it’s pretty obvious that it comes with a power boost, at least in this dimension. Maybe we’ll all get lucky and it’ll be like the increase to Annie and James’ sorcery, and it’ll go away when we make it home.”

  “You mean ‘if’ we make it home,” grumbled Mark.

  “No, I mean when. We’ve broken the rules already, just to get here.” I spread my arms, indicating the room around me. “Everything about this is supposed to be impossible. I can’t say for sure that we’ll be able to take the whole school with us, but we’re going to get home, and we’re going to take all the people who are still alive and capable of being people with us.”