Calculated Risks Read online

  I blinked. “How does that . . . ?”

  “Their luck was internal, and it drove them through the world primed to do the most harm or the most good. They lived in a haze of coincidence.”

  Dimly, I remembered Grandma Alice talking about how she’d inherited the “Healy family luck” from her mother. Sometimes it was good. Sometimes it was bad. It was never boring.

  “And somehow that haze of coincidence made them immune to us. Our nature was counter to their own, and so our tricks didn’t work on them. They always saw us, always knew where we were, could identify our babies as outsiders and as dangers. I’m sure there was some biological reason for it, but they didn’t know it, and we were more interested in killing them than we were in sitting down and having a long talk about their specific capabilities. We began hunting them. They weren’t blank spots like the Madhura. More . . . blurry, places where the things we could perceive with our minds and the things we could see with our eyes began to disagree. They had to go. They were willing to hunt us when they saw us, and they presented a danger. So we hunted them.”

  My throat was dry. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we killed them. For someone who claims to come from a family of homicidal lunatics, you’re surprisingly sheltered. We followed them to the ends of the world and we killed them where we could; where we couldn’t, we found the people you call Covenant and we made sure they saw the impossible coincidences that unfurled around the Kairos. They burned them as witches, they stoned them in the streets, and with every one of them who died, the world became safer for us.”

  I wanted to throw up. He was talking about the elimination of a sapient species as casually as he’d talk about going to the grocery store to pick up a couple of apples, and while I could feel a lot of things coming off of him—boredom, oddly enough, like he couldn’t believe he had to explain all this to me, not when I should have already known it—I couldn’t feel a single speck of guilt or regret.

  “You weren’t there,” I said. “This happened a long time ago.”

  “Yes, it did,” he said, sounding faintly amused. “Do you need me to reassure you that there isn’t blood on my hands, princess? I’m sorry—your majesty? The only person I’ve ever killed was a cuckoo who was hunting in the mall near my home. He tried to hurt Cici. I explained why that wasn’t a good idea. And then I burned his body, so the human authorities wouldn’t find it and figure out something that they shouldn’t. I’m not a murderer. I didn’t kill the Kairos. I’d never met anyone even connected to them until I met the monsters you call family. The Prices stink of coincidence. They should never have existed. But the memories of the Kairos were deemed essential enough to be added to the lessons we receive from our parents, and so I remember the hunts and the killings and the danger they presented as if I had been there. When you find the blood of Kairos, you eliminate it. And because of that command, I remember Frances Brown.

  “She was half-human—the Kairos could interbreed with humans, just like the jinks and the Fortuna can, close enough to the same species as to blend and blur their genetics without penalty to the offspring. Her father died when we caught up with him just outside of Sacramento, and her mother ran, a single woman with no preternatural abilities, no experience at making her own way in the world, no money—nothing but the ring on her finger and the baby in her arms. She made it as far as Tempe, Arizona, before she dropped the baby in a box where she thought someone kind might find it and disappeared into the desert. We found her before anyone else could. We would have had the babe as well, but that damned Kairos luck had already found a home for her, in a collection of carnival fools whose ranks were too closed for us to penetrate safely. The blood of Kairos gets thinner with every passing generation, but it’s still there. They bend the world to suit themselves.”

  I blinked. Then I blinked again, leaning back in my chair, no longer fighting against the ropes. “The cuckoos came from another dimension and orchestrated the functional extinction of at least one of the species that actually evolved on Earth.”

  “Yes. We did.”

  “And you have got to stop putting it that way. This isn’t some human church, accusing everyone who walks through the door of bearing the burden of original sin. We didn’t do anything. You didn’t do anything, even if you got the ancestral memories to tell you you did. You may remember it, but you weren’t there. You didn’t make the choices that led us here. You didn’t hold the guns. I didn’t do anything. I was raised to think intelligent life is valuable and deserves to be protected, and that means all intelligent life, even the lives I don’t like very much. We weren’t there. Whatever our ancestors did isn’t on us. Only what we do of our own free will.”

  “I wish I believed you,” said Mark.

  Then he turned away from me and walked to the others, and I was left alone.

  Three

  “Some people like to say that to live is to suffer. They have a very narrow view of existence. To live is to change. Everything else is negotiable.”

  —Enid Healy

  Still tied to a chair in a room full of enemies who used to be allies before everything went catastrophically wrong, hating it here

  I stared at Mark’s back, trying not to will him to turn around and come back to me. If I wanted it badly enough, he’d probably do it, or maybe not—and honestly, I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I had passed the final instar. I had reached a level of cuckoo development that allowed me to wipe out memories and handle world-breaking equations, and I had no idea what that meant or how to control whatever it came with. Worse yet, if I had any new capabilities, I couldn’t identify them without actually using them. They were buried somewhere inside me, waiting for me to push the right lever and make them happen.

  When we were kids, Annie, Verity, and Alex began training for combat while Artie, Elsie, and I sat more on the sidelines, kept out of the field by the essential facts of our natures. I was an ambush hunter, while they were Lilu enough to have evolved to enchant and befriend everyone around them, not to fight. We all learned to shoot and how to field-dress a wound, but the three of us were spared the most intensive physical conditioning, the games of tag that turned serious, the games of Red Rover that left bruises. There was about a two-year period where Annie insisted the distance she could walk without getting bored or winded was a mile because that was where she’d started. But she was walking every day, tackling steeper and steeper inclines, more and more treacherous paths, and by the end of it, she was doing five-mile hikes while insisting, firmly, that she couldn’t walk more than a mile without needing to sit and rest.

  I felt like Annie’s thoughts had felt during that period, carbonated and on edge, unsure of my capabilities, knowing only that they were too big for me. I couldn’t call for Mark to come back, no matter how much I didn’t want to be alone. The chances were too high that I’d be able to change his mind the way normal cuckoos changed human minds, and I didn’t want a pet.

  I slumped against the ropes, closing my eyes. This was hopeless. Whatever they’d decided, it clearly didn’t involve revealing the mice to Mark or letting me go, possibly ever. Among the three of them, Annie, Artie, and James had to have at least one working firearm. They could put a stop to this whenever they decided to. Cuckoos are dangerous as hell when we’re actually willing to fight back, and while I wanted to live badly enough that I couldn’t trust myself not to do it, my cousins were some of the only people in the world I loved enough to let one of them put a bullet between my eyes. If they came for me, I’d let them. I was tired and beaten-down and done. I couldn’t do this alone. If that was what had to happen from here, I was finished, thank you very much.

  My eyes were still closed when I heard footsteps approaching, accompanied by the static hum of Antimony’s mental presence. I wasn’t reaching for her thoughts, but I could feel her wariness and lingering disbelief without exerting myself in the slightest.
/>   “Tell her what you just told me,” she said, voice low, and from her palm came the welcome, familiar, often frustrating sound of salvation:

  “HAIL!” squeaked the unmistakable voice of an Aeslin mouse. “HAIL THE CALCULATING PRIESTESS!”

  I exhaled heavily as I opened my eyes. “So you believe me now.”

  “I believe something hinky is going on, and whatever it is, the mice seem to be on your side.” Her hand was positioned such that I couldn’t see the mouse in her hand, couldn’t see what it was wearing or which liturgical branch of the church it represented. None of my mice had been with me when I’d woken from my final instar and made the trip downstairs to rip a hole in reality—a process that had seemed suddenly, ridiculously simplistic, distance becoming just a matter of convincing the numbers underlying it to bend and twist at my command. So the odds were good that I had no theological representation in whatever dimension we now occupied. But that left Annie and Artie, the Precise Priestess and the God of Chosen Isolation, and I was on good terms with both their clergies.

  People like to think Aeslin mice are a monolith. Wait, no, that’s wrong. People like to think Aeslin mice are extinct, victims of a world too big and too dangerous for their tiny selves. That’s if people think about Aeslin mice at all, which most of them don’t. But Aeslin are individuals, and every branch of the colony has its own character. I don’t get along very well with the mice dedicated to preserving the mysteries of Great-Grandma Fran because they remember all the times she encountered the cuckoos—and all the bad blood between them. That was fine. It was unlikely that any of her mice had accompanied us.

  “Hail and well met,” I said politely, ignoring the mental daggers Annie was chucking in my direction. “Can you tell me of the liturgy you uphold?”

  Proud, chest audibly puffed out, the mouse said, “I preserve the Mysteries of the Precise Priestess!”

  That was good. A member of Annie’s clergy would know more of the rituals relating to me than a member of Aunt Jane’s clergy, or even a member of Evie’s. Since she was enough older than me to have always felt more like an aunt than a sister, it wasn’t like we’d ever spent a lot of time together socially. I fumbled for the exact title of the recitation I wanted. The Aeslin have so many rites and rituals that some of them, unavoidably, have similar names, and the last thing I wanted to do right now was accidentally trigger a recitation that would make my situation even worse.

  Ah: there it was. I turned my gaze on Annie, reading the confusion and apprehension in her thoughts rather than her expression, and asked, “Do you believe that Aeslin mice never forget anything and will always, always tell the truth?”

  “I do,” she said, voice soft. “It’s always been true.”

  “Good.” I turned my attention back to her cupped hand. “Can you please recite the Holy Catechism of Coming Home From Lowryland?”

  There was a stirring as the mouse pulled itself from her palm and ran up to balance on the tips of her fingers, ears up, whiskers forward, clearly honored by this opportunity to share the sacred mysteries with someone outside the clergy. Aeslin mice don’t view their religious rites as secret—far from it. They want the world to know. They just don’t get the chance very often.

  “It was a Summer Vacation,” declaimed the mouse. “Long and long had the Heartless One and her mate driven their Holy Burden across the countryside, returning from the Land of Lowry, where all good things had been accomplished!”

  What the fuck is this? asked Mark silently, his mental question utterly bewildered.

  I had to swallow my smile, lest it cause Antimony to think I was up to something. This is an Aeslin mouse going into full recitation of a holy event. You get used to it. I promise.

  Artie and James were drifting toward us, Artie with two more mice riding on his shoulders, James with an aura of resigned acceptance permeating the air around him. Sort of the “this is so damn weird, it might as well just happen” of emotional responses. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t the worst option he had open to him.

  The mouse was really getting into the recitation of that long-ago drive from Lowryland back to Ohio, and was lovingly detailing all the snacks Mom and Dad had purchased for their much-indulged grandchildren at the truck stop. Antimony looked at me like she couldn’t decide between amusement and blazing fury. I cleared my throat.

  “Forgive me if this treads near to the fields of blasphemy,” I said delicately, “but if you could skip ahead to the Great Event, that would be very welcome.”

  The mouse looked flustered, running paws over its whiskers. “To skip a piece of rarely recited catechism is to insult the Priestesses to whom it applies,” it said pitifully.

  “I’m not insulted,” said Annie, as fast as she could.

  “And neither am I,” I said,

  She was insulted by that, shooting a quick needle of fury at me for daring to speak to her clergy in such a permissive way. I ignored her. This was the only proof I had that I was who I said I was, and proof was what got me out of this chair without dying. I might have done irreparable damage to my relationships with the people who mattered most in all the world, and I was going to have to live with that, but the key word there was live. Before the ritual, I had come to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to survive. The cuckoos’ big math problem was the last one I was ever going to solve, and I would never see my parents or my home or my newly-minted clergy again. And in the moment, with the fate of the world in the balance, I’d been fine with it. Well, I wasn’t fine with it anymore. I wanted to live. I wanted to go home. So I was going to sit here and listen to the mouse and do my best to make sure everyone else did the same.

  “Very well,” said the mouse. “The road was Clear and Open and Long when the Heartless One cried, suddenly, a command to stop the car, and threw herself bodily from the vehicle. We did not see what followed, for we had remained with our Charges, but when she returned, she was carrying a child—the Calculating Priestess, who had been found Weeping in the Mud . . .”

  “That didn’t happen,” said Annie.

  “But it did, Priestess,” said the mouse. “I was not there. I am not among the first generation in your service. My father, though, was with you, and rode with you on the rides of thrilling and of charming through the Land of Lowry. He feasted on your Road Snacks, and even did he steal a slice of apple from the clergy of the Arboreal Priestess.”

  “I . . . I remember that,” said Annie slowly. “Verity was so pissed when my mice started taking food from hers.”

  “This is Holy Writ,” said the mouse. “This is As It Was. The Heartless One found the Calculating Priestess weeping, and brought her from the ground into the family’s embrace, where she has been ever since.”

  “Then there must be lots of rituals she’s in,” said Artie abruptly.

  “Oh, so very many!” said the mouse with pride. “She has Always Been There. Your clergy can recite you many rites and catechisms of where her life has touched on yours, for is it not said by the Silent Priestess, Dammit, Arthur, I Love You, But You’re Thick As A Plank Where That Girl Is Concerned, and also, Just Tell Her How You Feel Already, She’s Psychic But She’s Not Rude, She’ll Never Figure It Out On Her Own. And then did the God of Careful Chances not reply—”

  “Um, I think we’re done here,” said Artie, before the mouse could explain exactly what Uncle Ted said in reply to Aunt Jane. “Thank you.”

  “You are very welcome,” said the mouse proudly, little chest puffed out so far that it was hard to believe it was still breathing. It turned expectantly to Annie. “May I Resume?”

  “Maybe later,” said Annie, glancing anxiously at me. “I, uh. We needed you to resolve a disagreement between Priestesses,” she said the word like it physically pained her, “and now we must discuss it among ourselves. You have my apologies, and my thanks, and I promise to listen to the rest of the catechism later, when th
e time is more convenient.”

  In addition to not lying themselves, the Aeslin mice are very bad at hearing lies when they come from a beloved Priestess. The mouse radiated satisfaction as it jumped back into Antimony’s palm and raced up her arm to burrow into her hair. She looked back at me. Artie and James did the same.

  “What the actual fuck was that?” asked Mark.

  “Aeslin mouse,” I said. “Hyper-religious sapient rodents who worship the Price family as gods.”

  “Oh, is that all?” He sounded utterly disgusted. “No wonder you people are such assholes. If people treated me like a damn god all the time, I’d be an asshole, too.”

  “You’re a cuckoo,” said Artie. “That makes you an asshole by default.”

  Annie didn’t say anything, just continued to look at me like I’d reveal all the answers she was missing if she waited long enough. I squirmed.

  “These ropes are getting pretty uncomfortable,” I said. “It would be nice if someone could untie me.”

  None of them moved. After a long beat, James said cautiously, “If she were doing that cuckoo whammy thing, wouldn’t we be untying her already?”

  “She’s not,” said Mark. He sounded perplexed rather than cautious, like he couldn’t understand what was going on. “Whatever game she’s playing, she isn’t trying to influence any of us. Not even me, and she’s a queen. She could turn my thoughts inside out without breaking a sweat.”