Page 40 of Imaginary Numbers

His head snapped up, eyes glowing white. I resisted the urge to take a step back. I’d known he was a cuckoo, known he had to be a cuckoo, but knowing and seeing are different things.

Like the female of our species, male cuckoos all look essentially alike, pale-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. We were designed by the same evolutionary forces, intended to survive the same environment. To someone whose brain was designed to process the information, his face would look enough like mine that he could have been my brother, and dissimilar enough that if we’d held hands and walked down the center of a mall together, no one would have looked twice. Oh, the ones who looked once might think we were a little narcissistic for dating someone so similar, but they wouldn’t jump straight to a bad conclusion.

Two cuckoos in the same place is a bad conclusion, almost always.

He was wearing jeans and a dark sweater, helping him blend into the trees. Amusement colored his distorted tone as he replied, You can call me Mark. You want to come over here and hold my hand? This would be easier if you were touching me.

I’m not touching you. The thought was revolting. How are you here?

You really don’t know anything, do you? It’s amazing. It’s like finding a diamond in the middle of a chum bucket. You have to wipe off all the gore before it can shine.

I narrowed my eyes. A faint wind rose around me, fluttering my hair. I know enough to know I want you gone.

Mark made a small scoffing sound. It was the first audible noise he’d made since my arrival. It’s cliché, I know, but make me.

I couldn’t. He knew it, and I knew it, and so we were at an impasse. Or maybe not. “I don’t have to make you,” I said aloud, enjoying the way he tensed at the sound of my voice. “All I have to do is call my family.”

“Funny,” he said, his own voice pitched low and tight to keep it from carrying across the grounds. “I was under the impression that you cared about them.”

That gave me pause. Narrowing my eyes further, I shot a sharp thought at him. You touch them and you die.

“Oh, now you’ll talk to me like a civilized person? You’ve been living among the humans for too long, Sarah. What went wrong inside that pretty little head of yours? You should have entered your second instar when you reached puberty, and you didn’t. You held it off for years, and look at you now. Frightened. Pathetic. Moral.” He sounded genuinely disgusted by the last word, practically spitting it at my feet. “How did you delay your metamorphosis?”

“What’s an instar?”

His eyes widened. “This is worse than I thought. Why in the—it doesn’t matter. It isn’t my problem, I’m just the retrieval guy. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to walk to the gate, and you’re going to let yourself out. You’re going to come with me. No alarms, no attracting attention to yourself, no funny business. And then we’re going to leave.”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

“Because if you don’t, then you’d better be prepared for a siege.” He leaned forward. “The blood of Kairos isn’t enough to protect these people from us. We’ll hem them in, pin them down, and have them, one by one—and that’s just the ones within these walls. We know where the Lilu live. Their defenses aren’t as good as they ought to be. They’ll be dead by morning, all of them, and it will be your fault, Sarah. You’ll finally have done what a good little second-instar cuckoo ought to do and killed the family that raised you. Is that what you want?”

He wasn’t making any effort to shield his thoughts or emotions from me. Calm conviction radiated around him, colored with the absolute serenity of truth. He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t trying to deceive. He genuinely believed every word he was saying.

“You can’t . . .” I began. Words failed me, so I continued in silence, You can’t. They’re Prices. They’ve beaten cuckoos before. They’ve beaten everything.

“Three of them are Prices,” said Mark. “Two of them married in. The Lilu and the one who thinks of herself as your sister—and that’s disgusting, by the way, do you always let your pets have that much power over you? It’s vile. They’re not Prices, not genetically. The boys aren’t Prices either. The fūri might be a problem. He could probably hurt a few of us before we shut him down. The sorcerer is less than half-trained, and he wants. He wants so badly that we know everything we need to know. We can break him. We can break them all. It’s your choice, Sarah. Come quietly, come now, and we leave them alone. Sound the alarm, fight us, and we take them down before we take you anyway. The end result is the same.”

He was utterly sincere. I couldn’t see his thoughts well enough to know how many cuckoos he had with him, but I got the impression of at least five—a larger swarm than anyone had ever documented. Cuckoos usually work together only at mating time, and then only for as long as it takes the child to be conceived, carried, delivered, and deposited with an unwitting host family. Six cuckoos in one place wasn’t just dangerous: it was a natural disaster.

“Seven,” he said.

I snapped my head up, staring at him. “You’re starting a countdown now? Don’t those usually begin with ‘ten’?”

“Not a countdown,” he said. “A clarification. There are seven of us. You’re a cuckoo, too.”

The cuckoo choice would be to go back inside and sound the alarm. I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be selfish. I’d be putting my entire family at risk. I looked at the other cuckoo, who looked politely back. He somehow managed to look like he was focusing on my face, the lines and angles of it, as if he could actually see it like a human would. It was a good trick.

I took a slow breath. My whole body ached with the stress of the moment, and with the knowledge of what I was about to do.

“If I come with you, you stay the hell away from them,” I said. “You don’t come back and start making trouble as soon as my back is turned.”

Amusement radiated through his thoughts, warm as morning sunlight. “How are you going to hold me to that?”

“I don’t know. But I am. If you ever come anywhere near here again, I will kill you. Maybe only you. Maybe the rest of the cuckoos get away. Maybe you kill me in the process. Doesn’t matter. It means there’s one less cuckoo on your side, and that shifts the numbers in a way that I can live with.”

“Two less,” he said.

I frowned. “What?”