Page 64 of Imaginary Numbers

No one came out of the house as we drove down to the gate, and through it to the road. Elsie still waited until we were clear to turn on her headlights, and slumped slightly as she did, the worst of the tension leaving her shoulders.

“Okay, that’s one hurdle down,” she said.

“My parents are going to kill me,” said Antimony. “Actual murder. Let’s really enjoy this little rescue mission, because it’s the last one I’m ever going to go on.” She was sitting in the middle, one leg slung over Sam’s to make the footwell less crowded.

Sam snorted. “Your parents are going to be arguing about how they’re supposed to handle this until the sun comes up. We’ll be home and making waffles by then.”

“I like waffles,” said Elsie.

“I know this is only confusing because I can’t read your mind, but your parents aren’t actually going to kill you, are they?” asked Mark. “If they are, I say again, absolutely terrible people. How you got a reputation for being the good guys, I may never know.”

“We have a good propaganda arm,” I said. “You mentioned your parents before. I thought all cuckoos killed their parents when they hit puberty.”

“And a sister,” added Antimony. “Cici. What gives?”

“Right.” Mark sighed. “You know how I don’t want to destroy the world and head off to terrorize a fresh dimension with the rest of my merry band of predators? Well, Cici is why. She’s my little sister. Cecilia. She’s a holy terror. Smart and funny and awful. Really, really awful. She might be as terrible as you. It’s hard for me to measure.”

“Another cuckoo?” asked Elsie.

“Human,” said Mark. “You’re not the only ones who come from a mixed family, you know.”

“I thought you . . .” I stopped, unsure how to finish my thought without sounding like an ass. Then I remembered that Mark was still technically our prisoner and had been working with the people who kidnapped Sarah and forced her into a dangerous, involuntary physical transformation. “I thought cuckoo kids prevented their human parents from having more children.”

“Normally, we do; cuckoos are selfish even as children, and the majority of us are happy as only children,” said Mark. “We don’t like to share. But my parents left me with my grandmother for six months when Dad got a job with a German robotics firm. They must have gotten pregnant their first night in Europe. Mom was huge when they came back.” He sounded frustrated and fond at the same time, like any big brother thinking about the moment when his life turned upside-down. “She waddled when she walked, it was hilarious. And then there was this baby. This screaming, red-faced, wailing baby that everyone said was my little sister. And I remember . . .”

He paused for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “I remember thinking ‘I could wish for this to go away.’ I hadn’t reached my first instar yet, I didn’t have conscious access to the history, but I knew I wasn’t like my parents. I knew sometimes I scraped my knee and I bled clear and everyone acted like that was normal. I knew I could hear other people’s dreams. And that baby . . . I knew, just by looking at her, that she would bleed red like our parents. She wouldn’t feel like she was somehow outside the family, like she came from another planet. It would have been easy to hate her.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

“I know it sounds cliché and stupid and all that bullshit, but I poked her. And she grabbed my finger, and her hand was so tiny, and her grip was so strong, and I thought, who cares what color her blood is? Who cares if she looks more like Dad than I do? She’s my sister. She’s mine. I guess I was still selfish—I’m a cuckoo, after all—but selfish doesn’t have to mean bad. You people, you’re selfish. You think you’d be riding to some random cuckoo’s rescue? Fuck, no. You want Sarah back because she’s yours. She belongs to you, and you didn’t agree to lose her, and now you’re going to go get her. Selfishness can be a strength.”

“What about that first instar you were talking about?” asked Annie. “Shouldn’t you have killed your whole family then, like a good little cuckoo? All the ones we’ve been able to talk to have told us that they loved their adoptive parents right up until the moment when they didn’t. Usually that conversation happens right before they try to kill us, so they’re probably biased, but still.”

“Oh, I hit it,” said Mark. “I woke up in the middle of the night with the knowledge and laws of my entire species filling my head, crowding out everything else, making it almost impossible for me to breathe. I was fifteen. Cici was four. I thought she’d probably scream and wake our parents, so I knew I had to kill her first if I wanted it to be easy. It mattered that it be easy. I didn’t want to upset her. That’s probably when I should have realized something was wrong, when I was thinking ‘I don’t want to upset my sister’ and ‘I’m going to murder her’ at the same time, but I was fifteen and I was being eaten alive by memories that weren’t mine, so I think I did okay, all things considered. I got a knife. I went to her room.”

He paused, long enough to turn his face toward the window and watch the dark trees rolling by outside. “She had this doll. This stupid doll. If you squeezed it, it was supposed to say ‘Mama.’ Cici was hard on her toys—she still is—and she’d bashed it against the wall until the voice box broke, and all it did when you squeezed it was make this awful moaning sound. I stepped on it on my way into her room. She woke up. She looked at me with those big brown eyes, and she asked if we were playing a game called ‘horror movie.’ And I said yes, we were, and the first person to scream would lose.” Mark chuckled darkly. “I figured it would keep her quiet long enough for me to take care of her, you know? Only instead, she jumped out of bed and ran off giggling, and I had to chase after her so she wouldn’t wake our parents, and every time I almost caught her, she’d get away again. It was almost morning before I realized I was letting her get away. She’d managed to keep me running until the murderous period passed and it didn’t matter that I knew what I was. It didn’t matter because I loved her, and I loved my parents, and I wasn’t going to hurt them.”

“And so you kept them,” I said.

“I kept them,” Mark agreed. “Cici’s twelve now. She’s a living nightmare pretending to be a little girl, and I’m grateful every single day that she woke up before I could do something I couldn’t take back. It’s why I knew the plan—the big, amazing, this-is-gonna-work plan—was going to fail.”

“How’s that?” asked Sam.

“A couple of years ago, I lost her at the mall. Turned around and she was gone. I pretty much hate most humans. Being able to read their minds will do that to a guy. The things people think when they don’t know someone’s looking . . .” He shuddered. “Anyway, she was just gone. So I freaked out and went looking for her, thinking the worst, thinking I’d forced myself not to be a monster for her sake and then failed to protect her from the other monsters, when she came running out of this store, grabbed my arm, and said a man who looked just like me but wasn’t had tried to take her. I knew she had to mean another cuckoo—we’d clearly wandered into someone’s hunting grounds, and he’d assumed I was poaching, so he’d taken her to teach me a lesson—but I also know that we all look alike to humans. I asked how she knew it wasn’t me. She said he didn’t hum. Humans who spend enough time around us after our first instar acclimate to our presence. They learn how to tell us apart, and we can’t change their minds the same way we can before they get attuned to us. It’s a double-edged sword. The more time we spend with someone the more we can influence them, at first, but eventually they get desensitized, and it gets so much harder.”

“You know about the hum,” I said.

“Once Cici told me, yeah. I started watching for it. I always know when she’s around, or our folks. They change the texture of the air.” Mark shook his head. “I won’t lose them. They’re mine.”

“What happened to the cuckoo who took your sister?” asked Elsie.

“I went back to the mall the next day, alone, waited for him to approach me, stabbed him in the stomach fifteen times, dumped him out back, and set his corpse on fire,” said Mark, as matter-of-fact as if he’d been placing an order at McDonalds. “Nobody touches my family.”

“But you helped Heloise touch ours,” I said.

“I helped Ingrid, who, please remember, is Sarah’s biological mother, lure her away from you. I’m not saying I didn’t. She knows where I live. She knows where my family lives. I have no real desire to be at war with you—you are all terrible, terrifying people—but I wasn’t going to risk Cici’s life because your cousin was somehow more important than she is. She’s not. I did what I was told, I escaped as soon as I could, and now I’m helping you. Be grateful for that part. I could have told Ingrid about the hum. I could have sided with my hive against humanity. I’m not, because I love my sister. Take the fucking win.”

Elsie took the next curve more sharply than she needed to. Mark’s forehead thumped against the glass of the passenger side window. He swore, rubbing his head as he turned to glare at her.