Twenty-two

“When it’s a choice between saving your family and saving the world, I can’t tell you what to decide. I can only tell you that, no matter what you choose, part of you will always know that you were wrong.”

—Alexander Healy

The front room of a private complex about an hour outside of Portland, Oregon, in the calm before the storm

YOU SURE LEAVING A cuckoo alone in the barn is the right idea?” Antimony leaned against the wall next to me, taking a swig from a bottle of virulently pink liquid. It looked like she was drinking cotton candy, which was almost enough to put me off the idea of cotton candy forever.

“No,” I said. The mice cheered in the kitchen behind us. Elsie had broken out the panini press as a means of dealing with her own nerves, and was making ham and cheese sandwiches for the colony. It was a weird coping mechanism, but, frankly, I’ve seen weirder. “At the same time, I don’t really care. She’s not going to escape without seizing control of someone’s mind, and with my anti-telepathy charm on her, she’s not seizing anyone’s mind.”

“Mean,” said Annie approvingly. She took another swig of pink. “I hope she suffers. I hope she screams and screams, and no one comes to save her.”

I shot her a sidelong look. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Annie lowered her bottle. “Do you think she was lying when she said there was nothing to be done to make Sarah wake up before she’s done entering her next instar?”

I hesitated.

Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch, talking quietly. Mom had her hand on his cheek; he looked miserable. Heloise had really managed to get to him. Aunt Evie was in her office, gathering medical supplies in case things got ugly, and Uncle Kevin was in the library, researching everything we had on cuckoo biology and other insect-derived cryptids. He’d called Verity in New York before he locked himself away, asking her to go and talk to the local Madhura, who might be able to help. They also might not—or might not be willing to. Madhura are bee-derived, while cuckoos originated from a wasp-like ancestor. Nobody’s exactly friends with the cuckoos, as a species, but there’s a special degree of hatred between the cuckoos and the Madhura.

Still, Verity’s contacts knew Sarah, and they knew she’d helped to stop a Covenant purge, so there was a chance. That was all we were chasing at this point. A chance. A chance that maybe somehow we could stop this before it got any worse. We needed something to go right. We needed something to change.

“New subject,” I said. “Sam and James. Where are they, exactly?”

“Sam’s outside, patrolling the fence line,” she said. “He moves faster than the rest of us. Between that and his anti-telepathy charm, if the cuckoos show up here, he’ll be best suited for both dealing with them and letting the rest of us know what’s going on.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Nope!” She toasted me with her bottle of pink liquid. “I don’t like sending my boyfriend out to deal with psychic serial killers without backup. It sucks and I hate it. But he put up with me traveling backward through time so I could punch the spirit of the crossroads in their nonexistent face, so I’m trying to be cool.”

I thought about that for a moment. “You know, sometimes I wonder what our family looks like from the outside.”

“Like the Munsters if that edgy modern reboot had ever managed to get off the ground.”

“Fair.” I looked around again. “You didn’t say where James was.”

And that was when James started screaming.

It was a high, panicked sound. I shoved away from the wall. So did Annie, dropping her drink as her hands burst into flames. Mom and Dad both leapt to their feet, Mom’s hands suddenly bristling with knives, Dad producing a handgun from somewhere inside his jacket. I couldn’t see what Elsie was doing, but I had no doubt that it was impressive, possibly involving the weaponization of a grilled cheese panini.

The screams cut off. James came tumbling down the stairs, spinning head over heels, until he crashed into the wall at the bottom and was still. Annie yelped and ran to check his pulse, only remembering at the last moment that she should probably extinguish her hands before she touched him.

“He’s alive,” she said, looking up and over her shoulder at the stairs. “It was a bad fall, but—”

She stopped mid-sentence, breathing in sharply. I followed her eyes and felt myself go pale as all the blood drained out of my head, leaving me unsteady and breathless.

Sarah was walking down the stairs.

Sarah, in the white dress she’d been wearing when we found her at the hive, her feet bare and her hair loose around her shoulders, like some sort of sacrifice intended for an unspeakable divinity. But her hair was floating, surrounding her in a loose corona, like she was moving underwater, and the hem of her dress was doing the same, and her eyes were glowing a bright, steady white, like searchlights. She wasn’t hurrying. She wasn’t slowing down, either. She was simply moving in a steady, implacable line, descending toward the fallen James and the crouching Annie.

“Sarah?” I whispered, remembering a heartbeat too late that I wasn’t wearing my anti-telepathy charm anymore. She could reach me if she wanted to. The second realization followed hard on the heels of the first, slamming into me hard enough to physically knock me back a step.

There was no hum.

Sarah was less than twenty feet away, not wearing an anti-telepathy charm, and I couldn’t sense her presence. There was no comforting hum of “friendly telepath in the house.” There was only the ringing silence that had become too damned familiar over the course of the past five years.

“Sarah?” I said, more loudly. I thought it at the same time, and in my mind, I was screaming.

She stopped walking and turned, slowly, to face me. The light in her eyes didn’t fade. The air between us grew static, like it had been laced with an electric charge.

“Sarah, I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re sort of scaring us,” I said. No one else was moving, and so I moved, taking a step toward her. “Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying? You’re safe now. We went and we found you and we brought you home.”

Home, she said, directly into my mind. Her voice was louder than anything I’d ever heard before, like the ringing of a cloister bell. I clutched the sides of my head. Mom moaned, and I heard something hit the floor. I didn’t turn to see who had dropped what. Taking my eyes off of Sarah suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.

Yes, she continued, still in that silent, impossible scream. Home is part of the equation. This is the wrong number.

“I don’t like the look of this,” said Elsie. I glanced back, long enough to see her standing right behind me.

“I don’t like it either,” I said grimly, and returned my attention to Sarah. She seemed like the biggest threat, in the moment. “Sarah, you are home. Try to remember where you are. Try to see us. I know it may be hard right now, but we’re right here. Please.”

Sarah tilted her head to the side. Her hair didn’t move. It stayed floating in the air around her, unmoving, unchanged. Somehow that was the most terrifying thing she’d done yet.

Yes, she said, as calm as if she had been trying to order something from a recalcitrant drive-through window. You’re right here. That’s part of the problem. The math doesn’t work if you’re right here. But I can fix it.

The air grew even heavier, like a storm was rolling in.

Aunt Evie had grown up in a house with a cuckoo. Had spent her childhood with a cuckoo for a mother, learning how to be human from someone who had had to learn those lessons second-hand. Maybe that was why the next voice I heard was hers.

“Get down!” she shrieked as she hurled what looked like a water balloon into the center of the room. It burst on impact with the floor, filling the air with a white, powdery substance. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose. Unless someone has been beating erasers in a classroom, nothing that fills the air with powder is a good thing.

Interesting, said Sarah’s echoing mental voice, as the light in her eyes somehow grew even brighter, until looking at her face was like trying to look directly into the sun. The air around her pulsed, her hair rising further away from her shoulders, and the powder began moving in fractal swirls toward a single spot in the air, pulling itself together until it had formed a perfect sphere. It was as if she had somehow reconstituted the water balloon without the actual “balloon part.”

A shiver ran across my skin. We’d talked about telekinesis before, how she felt like it was somehow connected to telepathy in the real world—not just in comic books, where good was good and bad was bad and everyone looked good in spandex. More importantly, we’d talked about the sheer amount of power it would require.

No wonder her eyes were glowing like that. She was eating herself alive, kicking off chemical reactions in her brain that would allow her to influence the world around her.

“Sarah.” I took a step toward her. “You need to stop.”

Why did you try to hurt me? She was still looking at the ball of white material she’d siphoned from the air. This would have hurt me. That was foolish of you.

I realized two things at the same time, and both of them were terrible.

The first was that the white stuff Aunt Evie had thrown at Sarah—her sister—must have been powdered theobromine. Cuckoos are allergic to theobromine. They love tomatoes, and they hate chocolate. It makes them itchy. That much of the stuff would have been enough to cause a serious reaction in a human or Lilu. In a cuckoo . . .

It could have killed her. Aunt Evie, who loved her sister, who loved her mother, who talked about the importance of family as much as anyone, had just happened to have a water balloon filled with theobromine in her office, waiting to be flung. She’d prepared for this. She’d known that it was possible, and she’d prepared.

The second was that everyone else was still wearing their anti-telepathy charms. They weren’t flinching from the volume of Sarah’s mental voice because they couldn’t hear it. They didn’t know how angry she was.

“Guys, she’s pissed,” I said, stopping where I was. “Aunt Evie, you might want to run.”

The ball of compressed theobromine suddenly shot across the room like it had been fired by an invisible slingshot. I heard it strike something. I heard Aunt Evie start choking. Dad and Elsie ran to help her. Elsie was shouting, her words rendered incomprehensible by Aunt Evie’s increasing respiratory distress and the sound of footsteps thundering across the floor.

Mom was suddenly next to me, hands bristling with knives. Most Prices have trained, at least a little, in throwing knives. They’re less deadly than guns, but they’re quieter, and they get the job done. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing to me, and pulled her hand back to start throwing.

Sarah looked at her, eyes flaring whiter still. Mom shouted in dismay as her feet left the floor. Then she slammed into the ceiling and stuck there, her arms stretched out from her body, her hands still full of knives.

“Mom!” I cried, in dismay. I looked frantically at Sarah. “Let her down. Sarah, you have to let her down.”

This isn’t the right location, and you’re all being irrational. I need to remove you. I need to remove myself. Fine. Sarah moved her hands for the first time, swiping them through the air in front of her like she was browsing through a touchscreen, pulling up the pieces she wanted and discarding the pieces she didn’t. There was a terrible, somehow meaty ripping sound, and a jagged tear appeared in the air at the middle of the living room, bleeding white light into the room.

I felt something run up my leg. The mice. They’d been watching this whole thing, and some of them were scared enough to take refuge with the nearest available divinity. More were probably hiding themselves in Annie’s hair and clothes. And none of that was going to save them if Sarah brought the house down on us.

“Sarah!” I howled, and started toward her again, or tried to. The air itself was pushing back against me. It was like wading through quicksand, thick and clinging and terrible. “Sarah, you have to stop!”

Annie was staggering to her feet, James by her side, one arm draped around her shoulder so she could support his weight. I wasn’t actually sure he was awake. I was sure that holding him like that was keeping her from accessing her fire. If she let go, he would fall down. Sarah didn’t seem to have noticed them. Her attention, such as it was, was divided between the impossible tear in our living room and me.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t want Sarah’s attention and I had it. It was getting hard to breathe. Mom was still pinned to the ceiling, and Dad and Elsie were still somewhere in the house trying to keep Aunt Evie from dying of theobromine poisoning. We were far enough away from the library that it was possible Uncle Kevin didn’t even know things had gone so terribly, terribly wrong.

This was up to us. Just us. And I didn’t know if I could do it.

“Sarah, please,” I said, still forcing my way through the heavy air toward her. “Please. It’s me. It’s Artie. You’re my best friend. Don’t you remember that? I . . .”

Annie was approaching Sarah from behind, James still draped against her. I didn’t know what she was going to do. I wasn’t sure she knew what she was going to do. But if there was any way to end this without hurting Sarah, she was going to find it. And with the anti-telepathy charm in her pocket, Annie was functionally invisible right now. Sarah didn’t know she was coming. As long as I didn’t think about it too loudly, there was a chance.

“Sarah, I love you.”

The white light in her eyes seemed to dim for a second. It could have been wishful thinking. It could have been the first sign that her body was running out of the energy necessary to sustain this sort of output. I had to hope that it was something else. I had to hope that I was actually getting through to her.

“I’ve never told you that before, but it’s been true for years. I love you. I’m in love with you. I want to wake up next to you. I want to watch you do math—you’re so cute when you’re doing math. I want you to tell me how soothing my brain is. So please, you have to stop this. You have to let us help you. Please, Sarah. Please don’t leave me again. I only just got you back. I can’t lose you yet.”

Artie . . .

For a moment—just a moment—her mental tone sounded less distant and clinical, and more like the Sarah I loved. Then her eyes flashed again.

We’re part of a different equation. You can’t lose me. You never had me. I can’t do this here.

And she stepped through the rift in the air.

Things began to happen very quickly. Annie, who had been close enough to reach out for Sarah—I saw the glint of an anti-telepathy charm in her outstretched palm and realized what her plan had been—stumbled under the combined weight of James and the sudden absence of her target. The air was thick and thin at the same time, making both movement and breathing difficult. And Annie, who was off-balance and probably faintly hypoxic, fell into the rift, dragging James with her.

I didn’t hesitate. Hesitation is one of my great skills. I overthink everything. But in that moment, I threw caution aside and dove through the thickening air, into the rift, following my cousin and her pet sorcerer and the cuckoo I loved into the glittering, light-lined darkness.

I hope this isn’t how I die, I thought, and blacked out.