Three
“Anyone who tells you that you only die once hasn’t actually died. They wouldn’t be so cavalier about it if they had.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Portland International Airport, trying really hard not to panic
CUCKOOS ARE TERRITORIAL.
I think it has something to do with the static we create when we get too close to each other. It can get so loud that it becomes almost paralyzing, and when the shock of having someone shouting inside your brain passes, it’s usually replaced by rage. The sound grates on every nerve we have, making killing whatever’s causing it seem like the best idea anyone has ever had. Ever. Which is bad enough, except that most cuckoos won’t do their own dirty work. They use the resources they have available to them.
Which means they use humans. They dig into the minds of the humans around them, and they make murder seem like a totally awesome plan. Like it’s something that was always on the docket for today, but just got moved up a little bit. You know, between the dry cleaning and getting dinner into the oven. Every person around me had suddenly become a potential weapon, and unless I was willing to do the same—unless I was willing to force my own will on another sapient being for my own benefit, and force them to risk their skins to save mine—I was completely unprotected.
This was what Mom had been afraid of. That I’d go back out into the world, run into a threat, and freeze up, unable to decide on a course of action that would actually protect me. I tightened my hands on my backpack straps and started walking again, angling as quickly as I could for the nearest bathroom. Bathrooms tend to be safe places. It’s hard to seize control of someone when all they want to do is pee. I could catch my breath, try to figure out where the static was coming from, and make a new plan for getting out of the airport.
One thing was sure: I couldn’t go to the house. I’d know if another cuckoo was digging deeply enough into my mind to uncover an address, but I couldn’t protect that information once I gave it to my driver. If the cuckoo wanted to follow me, all they’d need to do is follow the person who dropped me off. Then they could crack the driver’s mind open like an egg, pull out whatever they needed, and attack at their leisure. I couldn’t risk my family’s security like that.
This wasn’t what I’d wanted when I’d said I was ready to go back into the world. This wasn’t what I’d wanted at all.
At least I knew that Mom would eventually call Evie and tell her I was in Portland, and why hadn’t she called yet with an update on my condition, did she want to worry her poor old mother. They’d come looking for me, and they’d start at my last known location. The airport.
Of course, I could be dead by then. Cuckoos don’t have many natural predators. We have to prey on each other. That’s how we keep our numbers in check.
The bathroom was empty. I made for the farthest stall and shut myself inside, climbing onto the toilet and crouching in on myself until I took up as little space as possible. Then I closed my eyes and began the slow, painful process of shutting off my awareness of the world around me.
For a non-telepath, the idea of going dark probably seems trivial. Why would bringing myself down to the level of the majority of the people around me be a problem? Humans get by just fine without psychic powers, and the media loves showing telepaths as monsters or martyrs, unable to block out the world around them, eventually consumed by the thoughts they just can’t. Stop. Hearing.
And I guess there’s some truth to that. Moving through a crowd is like walking through a living YouTube comments section. Even when people have the manners and good sense to keep their mouths shut, their minds are wide open, and in a non-telepathic society, no one bothers to learn how to control their thoughts. Why should they? I’ve heard things that make me really understand why most of my species thinks it’s more fun on the Dark Side. Sometimes I’ve felt half-convinced to go that way myself. I don’t, because it would hurt my family, and it would let my mother down, but wow, do I get the urge.
But at the same time . . . I don’t see faces the way humans do. I can’t tell people apart except by the very broadest of physical traits, hair color and skin color and height and weight. Even gender can be confusing, and I’ve learned never to use a pronoun for someone until I’ve heard them use it for themselves, out loud. I can usually tell what gender someone is by the way they think about themselves, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I know what gender someone has to pretend to be for social reasons. The world is complicated, and humans are judgmental, and I know more secrets than I should, just by virtue of being what I am.
Shut all that down, take all that away, and what do I have? I have eyes that don’t know how to process some of what they see. I have ears and a nose that work exactly as well as their human equivalents, which isn’t well enough to keep me safe from danger. I have two legs to run with and two lungs to scream with and those weren’t going to be enough if the cuckoo whose presence I could feel pushing down all around me decided to press the issue. I was unarmed. I was alone.
If I died in the process of trying to prove that I was well enough to rejoin the world, I was going to spend whatever afterlife waits for cuckoos laughing until I cried, because otherwise I was going to scream eternity down on my own head.
The static faded, like a radio being tuned, until everything was as close to silent as an airport could ever be. A sink dripped; the air-conditioning whirred; outside the bathroom, a distorted announcement was made over the intercom.
And footsteps, calm and precise, walked into the bathroom.
“I know you’re in here.” The voice sounded exactly like my mother’s, even down to the faint New England accent. “You’re hiding very well, but I still know you’re in here. I watched you disappear.”
I held my breath and didn’t move, grateful for my lack of a heart. If I’d been human, she would probably have been able to hear it racing.
“It’s cute how you think you can get away from me.”
The footsteps came closer. I shrugged out of my backpack as quietly as I could, preparing to swing. If there’s one weakness shared by virtually all cuckoos, it’s overconfidence. I could only hear one set of footsteps. She was alone, and she probably didn’t have a gun, or a knife, or any of the other things that would have guaranteed her victory in direct combat. She’d picked up on my fear—not hard—and decided that it meant I was easy prey. Amateur.
“You should really have done your homework before you decided to fly into Portland, little chick. I understand the impulse to flee the nest, but this is my place, and I don’t share.”
Of course she didn’t. Cuckoos are incredibly destructive, as a rule, and when you combine that with our natural dislike for each other, you come up with an equation that says one cuckoo for every million humans is about right. Portland couldn’t support two of us. Portland could probably only support one happily because of the airport, and its daily offerings of incoming and outgoing travelers from other places. There was no way she’d be willing to let me settle here.
The footsteps came closer still. She was right outside the door to my stall. If I was going to move, it needed to be now.
I moved.
I’m not a fighter: I leave that to my cousins whenever I possibly can. But I’m a Baker by adoption, and a Price by association, and that means I was expected to learn how to defend myself, whether I wanted to or not. I kicked the stall door open as hard as I could, hearing the dull smack of metal hitting flesh, simultaneous with the cuckoo outside’s cry of startled surprise. She probably wasn’t hurt, but that didn’t matter; all I’d really intended to do was throw her off balance.
Jumping down from the toilet, I hit the stall door with my shoulder and slammed it open even harder, hitting her again. She yelped, and I danced out of the way of the door, swinging my backpack for her middle. One nice thing about coming from a species with virtually no phenotype diversity: she and I were precisely the same height, and I didn’t have to calculate where my blows were going to land. I just swung on a straight line, and they connected.
My bag hit her squarely in the stomach. I grimaced, hoping the clothes I had wrapped around my laptop would be enough to soften the blow where it was concerned. Artie could fix it if not—Artie could fix anything—but that didn’t mean I wanted my machine out of commission because some stupid cuckoo had decided to attack me.
This time she squealed, pained and indignant, falling backward. Bad luck for her, since her trajectory slammed her into one of the automated hand drying machines. It kicked on with a loud rush of hot air. She tried to shout something. I hit her with my bag again. At the same time, I released my hold on my telepathy, beginning to broadcast nothing to see here, stay away as loudly as I could. I could dimly hear her mental commands laced under my own, trying to summon her minions, but she was hurt and off-guard, and I was scared and substantially louder. Whatever she’d been trying to ask for dissolved back into the static.
“Wait,” she began.
I didn’t wait. I hit her in the head with my backpack. She staggered, so I hit her again, and she hit her knees on the tile floor of the bathroom, catching herself before she could topple over face-first.
“You started it,” I said, and hit her in the head again.
This time, she didn’t catch herself.
I kicked her a few times to be sure she was really out of the fight. Either she was down for the count, or she was a much better actress than she had any reason to be. It didn’t much matter, as long as she wasn’t following me. I prodded her with my foot, pushing hard enough to roll her over so that her face pointed toward the ceiling. Her eyes were closed, and when I felt for her mind, it was the confused jumble of memories and vague impressions that I associated with unconsciousness. Growing up around my cousins, who’ve been in combat training almost since they could walk, has left me with a keen appreciation of the various stages of “knocked out cold.” This woman was gone.
Good. I slipped my backpack on and crouched, rifling through her pockets. She had an airport security badge, my own face staring back at me from the postage stamp picture, a wallet bulging with cash—probably stolen—and fake IDs under a dozen different names. The modern age has forced even cuckoos to adapt, since telepathy can’t fool a point of sale system or a security camera.
She clearly knew this airport: it was part of her territory, and she’d been here long enough to bother getting herself a way in and out of secured areas. She might have moved in the day I left for New York. That was good. It meant she wouldn’t have attacked me in this bathroom if there weren’t something about it that made it safe. Maybe the cameras were down, or maybe the acoustics somehow kept people outside from hearing when someone was beat to shit inside. Either way, I was in the clear, as long as I got out of the airport quickly.
I clipped her badge to the collar of my sweater, took the money from her wallet, and left her there, unconscious on the tile, wallet on the floor next to her. I felt a little weird about the theft, since she’d just turn around and steal back everything she’d lost, if not more, from the humans in the airport, but it was necessary for several reasons. I needed to get a ride without changing anyone’s mind, to make it harder for her to follow me; that meant payment. I also needed to make her understand that I’d been calm enough after defeating her to loot the body. Anyone can panic and punch somebody. The fact that I hadn’t run immediately after I was done would show that I was a worthy adversary. Someone she shouldn’t mess with. Not immediately, anyway.
Turning and walking away from her made my stomach ache because I knew what was going to happen from here. Portland is too small for two cuckoos. That’s the way the math works out. When I’d been living with Evie and Uncle Kevin, my presence alone had been enough to keep any other cuckoo from coming to settle there. The city is nice, but it’s not big or metropolitan or culturally significant enough to be worth fighting over. Not like, say, New York, which can sustain half a dozen cuckoos at any given time, and where territory battles between them are common enough to be an everyday occurrence. Cuckoos passed through Portland and went on to become someone else’s problem.
Assuming they went on at all. Part of why it hurt to walk away from the woman with my face was knowing what would happen when I got home and told Evie there was a cuckoo in the airport. Hunting in a place this public wouldn’t be easy, but she’d figure out a way. She always did. And when she was finished doing her job, there would be one less cuckoo in the world, and the population of Portland would be just a little safer, even if they were never going to understand why.
Cuckoos are apex predators. We’re not from around here, we don’t belong here, and we belong to the only species that my conservationist family believes needs to be killed on sight. We do too much damage. Even Mom agrees that ordinary cuckoos can’t be allowed to hunt the way they do, because it’s too destructive, and when it goes too far, it triggers Covenant purges, which could get a lot of innocent cryptids killed.
Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there.
No one gave me a second look as I walked through the airport with the cuckoo’s badge clipped to my sweater and my head held high. I had nothing to be ashamed of. She was the one who’d attacked me. I knew that. I had to keep knowing that, as the guilt began gnawing at me from the inside, whispering that I was just like her, that if I were really the good person I pretended to be, I would have found another way. I would have talked to her, negotiated, found a way to make myself heard through the overwhelming static of our telepathy clashing.
I knew none of that was possible. I knew Mom and I were reasonable people by human standards and freaks by cuckoo standards, because we had silly things like “ethics” and “morality” that got in the way of doing whatever the hell we wanted. I knew the woman in the bathroom wouldn’t have stopped with beating me unconscious. If I’d tried to negotiate with her, my body would be hidden somewhere in the depths of the airport by now, ready to be fed into a furnace or mulched and slipped into someone’s garden. My biology is different enough from the human norm that no forensic scientist would ever have been able to tell that I’d been a murder victim. I’d just be gone.
It didn’t make me feel any better about hitting a woman in the face with my backpack. Or about the fact that I was honestly more worried about my laptop than I was about having done her permanent damage.
I walked a little faster. I needed to get out of this airport.
The cabbie looked at me over his shoulder as I shoved a wad of bills in his direction, enough to pay my fare six times over. “I still think you should go to the police,” he said. “It’s not right, a young woman like you being this afraid.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’m so sorry to have involved you in this. I just want to make sure you’re safe. So please, promise me, no more airport trips today.”
Confusion and concern radiated from him, almost perfectly balanced. “You can’t honestly think I’d be in danger because I gave you a ride. I give lots of people rides.”
“Probably not,” I said, and pushed against his mind, just slightly. Not enough to change him or make him forget me entirely. Enough to blur his memories of me and make him think that maybe a paid vacation day wouldn’t be such a bad idea. You have so much to do at home, and you’ve already got more money than you would normally have made, I whispered, directly into his subconscious. The night is almost over anyway. “I’d still feel so much better if I knew you weren’t taking the risk.”
I’d feel so much better if I knew he wasn’t going back into the other cuckoo’s range. She’d be awake by now, and furious. If she caught any trace of me, she’d pounce on it.
The cabbie looked out the window, concern melting into uncertainty. The sun was slipping down the line of the horizon, painting everything in shades of red and gold. “I suppose my shift was almost over anyway,” he said finally. He took the money from my hand, making it disappear. “I still hope you’ll change your mind and involve the authorities. A girl like you shouldn’t be running scared.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” I said, and flashed him a smile before opening the door and getting out onto the Portland street. I walked a few steps, turned, and waved to him. He waved back and pulled away from the curb. I stayed exactly where I was, watching him go, waiting to be sure that he didn’t suddenly realize, as he got away from my meticulous influence, that he’d dropped me in a bad part of the city. His concern was sweet and born largely from the distress that I was radiating.
My upper lip was wet. I touched it and grimaced as the sunset reflected off the clear liquid on my fingers. I was bleeding again. That last push, on top of everything else, must have been too much for my system to handle. I could feel the endless loops of recursive numbers trying to intrude on my thoughts, to pull me down into the comforting safety of pure mathematics, where I could be safe and comfortable and—most of all—protected. The numbers would protect me even as the world ate me alive. And the world would eat me alive if I let myself go into a fugue. A cuckoo who can’t defend herself is a dead cuckoo.
I pushed the numbers aside and wiped my fingers on my jeans before dragging my sleeve across my face, wiping the rest of the blood away. Most humans wouldn’t recognize it for what it was, but I didn’t need to walk around Portland looking like I had a runny nose. The cabbie wasn’t coming back. He’d taken his money and forgotten me already, and now I just had to hope he was going to decide not to return to the airport, where that other cuckoo was probably waiting to crack his skull open like an egg looking for a map to where I’d gone.
Poor man. He didn’t ask to be a part of this, and with any luck at all, he wasn’t going to be. Not for long, anyway. I started walking down the street, watching the houses around me for signs that someone was home and moving around. Waking people up can be useful, but only if I want to get something done quick and clean and without actually making them get dressed. I usually only do it when I need a Wi-Fi password.
I’d gone about a block and a half before I saw a house that fit my needs. There was a big dog chained in the yard. He whined at the sight of me, retreating to the corner and growling softly, like he hoped he could frighten me off without getting anywhere near me. I offered him a sheepish smile, hoping he could read the expression better than I could, and climbed the somewhat rickety steps to the front porch. I rang the bell.
Five minutes later, I was comfortably buckled into the passenger seat of a late-model sedan, the woman behind the wheel chattering merrily on about her plans for the weekend, which included a trip to Costco and some really inventive couponing. She drove with the casual disregard for speed limits that only comes from living in a neighborhood for a long, long time, and while she was definitely aware that we weren’t old friends or anything, the relationship she had constructed for us was warm and comfortable enough to fill the car with contentment. I was a cousin’s girlfriend’s sister’s niece, or something like that, and it was good enough for her.
It’s nice, how quickly some people find their way from “strangers” to “family.” Nice, and maybe a little dangerous, but I wasn’t complaining. There was nothing to connect me to her. I’d be forgotten as soon as I got out of her car, and the cuckoo from the airport would never be able to track her down. She was safe, or as safe as anyone living in a city with a normal, hunting, hungry cuckoo could be.
“Now, are you sure this is where you want me to drop you?” The woman pulled to a stop in front of an old warehouse, a brief stab of disapproval shooting through her general air of contentment. “I could take you someplace much nicer. Or you could come back to the house and wait for your friends to meet you there. I don’t mind.”
“Duke might.” Duke was the dog. He had been almost pathetically grateful when I left, even as he’d warred with his fear of me and his desire to protect his human. He was going to be clingy and paranoid for days. His human wouldn’t understand why, and there was no way I could tell her, and I was sorry for that.
“Duke loves you.”
That was a lie. I dug the last of the cuckoo’s money out of my pocket and offered it to the woman. “Here. For the ride.”
She started to object. Then her own self-interest kicked in, and she took the money from my hand, saying, “It’s great of Carol to pay back what she owes me. Sometimes people surprise you.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Sometimes people do.” I got out of the car before she could make another attempt to convince me not to. As soon as she was clear of my immediate presence, she drove away, faster than was strictly necessary. Some part of her knew that she’d just had an encounter with a predator bigger than she was, and she wanted to get the hell out of the way.
I touched my upper lip. Dry. Then I turned toward the warehouse, noting the lights in the windows with relieved satisfaction, and started walking.
My family tree can get confusing sometimes. I get that. When you’re dealing with multiple generations, including some people whose lifespans aren’t limited to the human norm, the names and connections and complications pile up fast. So here’s the short and simple, or as simple as it’s possible for me to make things:
My adoptive mother, Angela, was born somewhere in New England and raised by a family in Maine who had been chosen without their consent by her biological mother. Cuckoos pick the nests where they abandon their children carefully, according to a set of standards I don’t fully understand, and never will, unless I decide to have children of my own. Infants are abandoned in homes that have the space and resources to raise them properly, and where there are no other children to get in the way of dedicating those resources to the new cuckoo-child. Her husband, Martin Baker, was originally several human men. They were killed, only to be brought back to life by a scientist with more ambition than sense. I don’t mind, though. I love my father, and he is who he is because of someone with a shovel and a dream.
Mom and Dad couldn’t have children of their own—they’re not biologically compatible—so they decided to adopt. Evie came first, left on their doorstep by one of the scientist’s apprentices as she ran into the night. Drew was next, adopted from the bogeyman community after an accident claimed his birth family. And I came last, dredged out of a storm drain after my instinctive telepathic distress call led them to my location.
By the time I came along, Evie was already a married adult with three children. Alex, who’s three years older than I am, Verity, who’s basically my age, and Antimony, who’s a couple of years younger. And that’s all pretty straightforward, I guess. Big age gaps exist in families. Evie’s husband, Uncle Kevin—and yeah, he’s technically my brother-in-law, but I call him uncle, the same way I call Evie’s kids my cousins, since thinking of Verity as my niece would be way too weird—has a sister, Aunt Jane, who married Uncle Ted. They have two kids: Artie, who’s pretty close to my age, and Elsie, who’s a couple of years older than I am. It’s not the biggest family tree ever, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be confusing.
Elsie likes a lot of things. Shopping, and dyeing her hair to match her nails, and veterinary medicine. And roller derby. She likes roller derby so much, in fact, that when Antimony graduated high school and couldn’t cheerlead anymore, Elsie talked her into trying out for the local league. Annie’s been skating ever since, while Elsie sits in the bleachers and cheers for her cousin. It’s about the closest they’ve ever come to a nonviolent family activity.
The big rolling warehouse doors were closed, but the smaller door intended for humans rather than trucks was propped slightly open. A sign was taped to the outside—“CLOSED PRACTICE. DELIVERIES TO OFFICE.” I ignored it, and let myself in.
Inside the warehouse it was bright and warm. Floodlights overhead illuminated the entire track, making the flat oval look bigger and more dramatic. And on the track, the skaters circled, more than a dozen girls in differently colored gear pushing, shoving, and skating their way to roller derby glory.
None of them looked my way. Neither did the coaches who stood by the sidelines and called encouragement, or the women who weren’t currently on the track for whatever reason. They were skating around the edges of the practice, adjusting gym mats, pushing brooms, doing all the little tasks required to keep an amateur athletic league up and functioning.
There were a few people seated in the bleachers. I scanned them until I settled on a woman with short, blueberry-colored hair, wearing the black-and-red gear of a Slasher Chicks supporter. That’s Annie’s team. I walked closer, reaching out mentally until my thoughts brushed against the familiar, reassuring edges of Elsie’s mind.
She turned instantly, eyes searching the floor until they landed on me. Her consciousness immediately narrowed into a single point of wary suspicion. I nodded, satisfied with her response, and kept walking toward her.
Because see, here’s a fun thing about Uncle Kevin and Aunt Jane: for some reason, they aren’t as vulnerable to cuckoo influence as most humans. Their mother, my Grandma Alice, is even more resistant, and to hear her tell it, her mother, Fran, was basically immune. Someone, somewhere back in the family line, wasn’t human, and whatever genetic gifts they gave their offspring have resulted in generations of people who aren’t at nearly as much risk where cuckoos are concerned. Genetic descendants of Frances Brown notice cuckoos. They can pick us out of a crowd. They remember us when we’re not directly visible. It’s terrifying, and awesome, and I wish to whatever gods watch over my messed-up species that I knew what their inhuman ancestor had been, so I could meet more of them.
Elsie slipped one hand into her purse as I approached, no doubt preparing to draw some sort of weapon if I turned out to be any other cuckoo in the world. She’s not much of a fighter as our family goes—I think I’m the only one who’s worse—but she was still willing to make the effort in order to protect her people. I appreciated that, too.
“Hi, Else,” I said, once I was close enough to make myself heard without needing to raise my voice. The rattle of wheels on the track continued in the background, a smooth, staccato white noise underscoring everything I said. “Long time no see, huh?”
I was trying to sound cool. I was probably failing. But I felt Elsie’s suspicion melt into surprise, and finally into awe, as she sent a single, virtually shouted thought in my direction: Sarah?
Yeah, I thought back, nodding for good measure. It’s me.
Elsie stood, withdrawing her hand from her purse. “Are you really?” she asked. “I mean, you’re really-really Sarah?”
“I’m really-really Sarah,” I said.
“Prove it.” Her voice was low, in deference to the derby girls circling the track below us—although one of those girls, dressed in black and red, with a long red-brown braid trailing out the back of her helmet, had slowed to a stop just beside the track itself.
A rush of almost startling joy washed over me. Antimony. I’d been hoping I might be lucky enough to catch the league during practice, and to find one of my cousins in residence. Finding two of them was almost unreasonable.
“You were super double bonus mad when Alex and his sisters came back from Lowryland with a new cousin as a souvenir, until Mom explained that even if she wasn’t your grandmother, I was going to be your cousin, too; you think it’s unfair that I have such good eyelashes without mascara; you also think it’s unfair that I’d rather do math than let you practice your makeup techniques on me. You once accidentally made chlorine gas in the front hall and we had to try to convince Artie to come out of his basement before he choked to death, all without saying anything that would alert the mice. Not that it mattered, because they tattled on us anyway, and we all got sent to bed without dessert for practicing our chemical weaponry without an adult present. Your favorite color is this weird shade of maroon that you insist is pink even though it isn’t, you like cocoa without marshmallows, partially as a form of self-defense against Annie, and you had a crush on me for like a year when we were teenagers, which we all pretended wasn’t happening.”
“How can you know all that and still insist Artie isn’t in love with you?” asked Elsie. If I’d had any doubts about her identity, that would have lain them to rest; she and my other cousins had been trying to convince me that Artie had nonfamilial feelings for me basically since we’d all hit puberty. They couldn’t seem to understand that my being a cuckoo made a difference, and so I’d stopped trying to argue with them when the subject came up. There was a hitch in her voice that could have been laughter and could have been the beginning of a sob. Based on the chaotic thoughts sparking in the air around her, as tangled as a ball of yarn, it was probably both. I braced myself. I’d seen that tangle of thoughts before.
Sure enough, she flung herself at me a second later, locking her arms around my torso and pulling me crushingly close, her chin resting on my left shoulder while her entire body shook with sobs. I stood rigidly still, aware that she didn’t need or want anything else from me. She was reassuring herself that I was really here, really real, and that was all that mattered.
The tip of a knife pressed against the back of my neck, positioned so that one quick thrust would slide it into the gap between my vertebrae and sever my spinal column. I may not have a heart, but I’m human-cognate enough that slicing through my spine will incapacitate me permanently, if not kill me outright. I closed my eyes and smiled.
Hi, Annie, I thought. It was better than speaking aloud, since the goal was convincing my cousin I was really myself, and not some other cuckoo playing stupid opportunist. True telepathy—words instead of thoughts and feelings and vague impressions—takes time to come easily. I can do it with someone I’ve just met if I’m willing to push, but there’s a different feel to words that have been shoved through natural resistance. They sound like someone shouting from a long way away. Annie and I had been telepathically attuned to each other for years. To Annie, I should sound like—
“Oh, my God, Sarah.” She pulled the knife away, and suddenly I was in the middle of a cousin sandwich, Elsie in front of me, Antimony behind me, and I was safe, and I was so close to home that I could almost taste it.
I was finally almost there.