Page 4 of Imaginary Numbers

I let my fingertips brush against his as I took them, checking for any sign that he needed to be concerned about his finances. I didn’t find anything. There was guilt that he was only giving me eighty dollars, since he had a lot more than that on him, and frustration that paying his little sister’s way had “once again” fallen on his shoulders. It was a toxic mix, and I withdrew quickly. He wouldn’t miss the money. That was the important part.

Cuckoos bend our environment to suit our own needs, like ticks burrowing into the skin of the world. What makes me different from most of my species—what I hope makes me different, pray makes me different, remind myself every day makes me different—is that I try to do as little harm as I possibly can. There’s no such thing as doing absolutely no harm. Human, cuckoo, it doesn’t matter. Everybody hurts and is hurt, in a grand cycle of being alive. But minimizing the damage . . . that matters.

Minimizing the damage will never make me human. It’ll keep me worthy of walking among them.

“I’ll be careful,” I said, meeting his eyes. A flash of light reflected there, brief and bright and invisible to any of the cameras I knew were watching us. Bangs are old-fashioned, but they help me hide the way my eyes sometimes go white from top to bottom, reflecting a chemical response to my using my telepathic abilities. I shoved the compulsion to forget me actively against the structures of his mind, breaking through his defenses.

The man stopped moving, his thoughts shifting from ordinary human chaos into a sort of blanked-out static. I smiled again and patted his hand, careful to make skin contact as I said, “Thank you so much for helping me. Airports can be so confusing.” Then I turned and walked away, losing myself in the crowd before he could shake off the shock.

I didn’t look back—looking back attracts attention—but I knew if I did, I’d eventually see him stagger, looking profoundly confused, and scowl at everything around himself before he went back to whatever he’d been doing before he ran into me. He’d be annoyed at himself when he discovered the missing eighty dollars, but he’d assume he spent it and forgot. There wasn’t going to be any lasting damage from this encounter.

To either of us. To my delight, my thoughts were still clear, and my head didn’t hurt, not even a little bit. I proceeded to the food court, where I used some of the TSA man’s eighty dollars to buy a burger, fries, and a vanilla milkshake before claiming a table with a clear view of the departures board. There were five flights to Portland leaving in the next two hours. I could have my pick of airlines. I settled back to mix ketchup into my milkshake and skim the minds around me, looking for opinions on my options.

I didn’t have luggage, so it didn’t matter that the people three tables over had strong opinions about one airline’s tendency to lose their bags; the fact that they served hot chocolate chip cookies in first class did matter, since chocolate makes my throat itch. Another airline apparently had a reputation for poor customer service. They wouldn’t be rude to me, of course, but I was selecting the people whose minds I’d be trapped in a metal tube with for between four and six hours. No, thank you.

I finished mixing ketchup into my milkshake and went to insert my straw, pausing when I saw a small child staring at me. Facial expressions are hard, but even I can tell when someone’s eyes go wide, and the child was radiating confusion and curiosity. I pointed to my milkshake, trying to look quizzical. The child nodded. I took a sip.

The child’s wave of awe was so vast that it felt like even the non-telepaths around me should have noticed. I grinned a little and went back to studying the departure board. The milkshake looked like strawberry now that it was properly blended; except for the kid, no one was going to realize there was anything odd about it. People in airports are allowed to be weird. They’re liminal spaces. They don’t count the way the real world does.

Case in point: about one in ten of the minds around me wasn’t human. Traveler or airport employee, it didn’t matter. This was a place where people came and went and didn’t stop to make friends, which made it safe for cryptid traffic. None of them seemed to have made any special note of me. That was good. That was part of the test. If I’d been too noticeable, I would have needed to call Mom and tell her I was coming home, that I wasn’t ready. And I wanted to be ready. I needed to be ready.

This had all been going on for too long.

Five years ago—five years! How had it been five years? How had so much time been able to slip by while I was too lost in the spirals inside my head to pay proper attention?—Verity and I had been in Manhattan. She’d been going out with a Covenant man, working on her dance career, and trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life. I’d been . . .

I’d been doing what I always did. Math. Math, and flirting with my cousin Artie and pretending I wasn’t flirting with my cousin Artie, because he deserves better than me, he honestly does. He deserves a girl who has a heart, and I mean that literally: I don’t have one. Remember that whole “I’m not from around here” thing? Well, whatever weirdo world my kind evolved on, it wasn’t really invested in the idea of a centralized circulatory system. I don’t have a pulse because I don’t have a heart, and if I don’t have a heart, it doesn’t matter how much like a mammal I look from the outside, it doesn’t matter if I have three bones in my inner ear and hair and the ability to lactate. I’m something else, something other, and Artie is human enough to deserve better.

Not like he thinks of me that way, anyway. Artie and his sister, Elsie, are half-Lilu, courtesy of my Uncle Ted, making them an incubus and a succubus, respectively. Elsie likes girls, always has, and has had a long string of significant others, dating all the way back to middle school. Artie . . .

No one’s sure what Artie likes. I think he likes girls, since he avoids them like the plague. I just know he’s too smart to like me. I’m Cousin Sarah, everyday and ordinary and dependable. Or I was, until Verity and I went to Manhattan.

For cuckoos, a lot of things come naturally. I can warp the world to suit my needs without stopping to think twice about it; I know what I need and so the universe delivers. I can disappear in a crowd, pulling the curtain of my own fear up around myself until even people who know I’m there may not notice me. I can read a room, literally, picking up on the little currents of fear and confusion and joy that run through the minds around me. Deeper thoughts take more work, and skin contact if it’s not someone I know well. It’s still part of what I’m designed by nature to do.

Intentionally changing someone’s mind, though . . . that’s hard. That takes work. It used to be the most I could do was shove someone into believing they didn’t want to sit at my table at the coffee shop. Changing someone’s memories, rewiring them enough to provide them with an alternative story of what had happened, that’s beyond the standard cuckoo toolset, and I had always been secretly glad of that fact, because I should have limits. I’m a telepath in a world that wasn’t built for them, and I’m way too aware that my species trends toward the horrifyingly destructive. Cuckoos aren’t friends, or neighbors, or cousins. We’re the hunger that consumes everything in our paths, and we should have limits.

Only the Covenant of St. George doesn’t care about our limits. They care about making sure only humans, and only the right humans, are in control of this world. Verity, her siblings, our entire family, we’re on the wrong side of the fight as far as the Covenant is concerned. They’d kill me or Artie or my parents on sight for the crime of not being human. They tried to kill Verity for the crime of caring about what happened to us.

Of course, they would have taken her away first. They’d been planning to haul her off to England, where all our secrets could be spilled, and used to wipe the Prices, Bakers, and Harringtons off the face of the planet. There hadn’t been any choice. I’m not mad at her for what happened to me, because she didn’t ask me to do it, and there hadn’t been any other way. I’ve spent the last five years clawing my way back to lucidity and going over what happened that night over and over again, and there wasn’t any other way.

The Covenant operatives who’d come for Verity had been vulnerable. They didn’t have the right kind of charms to keep me out of their heads, and so I plunged myself into them like the predator my nature wants me to be. I ripped and I ransacked and I rewrote until they only remembered what I wanted them to remember. They thought Dominic was dead. They thought Verity was an actress he’d hired to impersonate a member of the Price family. My people were safe. The Covenant no longer knew they existed, and they were safe.

That was the thought I had carried down with me into the dark, as I felt something in my mind rip loose of its moorings and crumble into nothingness. My people were safe. I might not survive, I might never see them again, but they were safe. I had done it. I had been better than my nature wanted me to be.

I’m selfish enough to say that I don’t know for sure whether I’d have done what I did if I’d realized what the consequences would be. Changing those memories had strained something in my brain, something connected to my telepathy. Since it wasn’t like we could exactly take me to the hospital for an MRI, I’ve spent the last five years putting myself back together one tiny piece at a time, living with my parents in Ohio, leaning on Alex and his fiancée, Shelby, as I tried to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be and how to reconcile the difference between the two.

Five years lost. It’s hard to even think about it. The airport was the first time I’d been outside unsupervised since my injury, and here I was trying to cross the country on my own—go big or go home, I guess.

I think whoever said that really, really underestimated how much I wanted to go home.

I finished the last few swallows of my milkshake in one long gulp, gathered up my trash, and stood. It was time to get myself on an airplane. It was time to figure out whether I could really, truly do this.

Please, I thought, let me really, truly be able to do this.

Please.

Two

“A lie’s a lie, even when it’s wearing Sunday clothes. That doesn’t mean a lie is necessarily the wrong choice. Just that you shouldn’t pretend it’s something that it’s not.”