Page 5 of Imaginary Numbers

—Alice Healy

Heading for the customer service desk of a major airline

THE THREE WOMEN BEHIND the customer service desk were all doing their best to look alert, engaged, and available, all while paying absolutely no attention to the throngs of people passing by in front of them. If they made eye contact, they risked triggering a complaint, or sometimes worse, a long, involved story from a weary traveler who was just looking for a moment of human connection. Great in its place, not so much fun for the person who was bound by professional obligations to sit and listen to every little twist and turn.

Their distraction was a gift for me. I stopped a few feet away, patting my pockets and allowing an expression of bewildered distress to grow on my face. I can’t read most human expressions, but I can mimic them: telepathy means that I know what they feel like from the inside.

While I was going through my acceptable airport behavior pantomime, I dipped as far as I dared into each of their minds, checking to see who felt the most pliable, and who was thus the most likely to do what I wanted without either making a fuss or declaring me their long-lost sister. The TSA man with the eighty dollars had been more than enough found family for one day.

The one on the end. She was the youngest, the least experienced, and most importantly, the most offended by the inequalities she saw on a daily basis. I stopped patting my pockets and approached her station, putting a waver into my voice as I asked, “Excuse me? Is this where I go if I need help?”

Her head snapped up and her posture shifted to one of helpful attentiveness. If I hadn’t known better, I would never have known she’d been reading fanfic on her phone half a second previously. “How can I help you today?”

“I can’t find my boarding pass,” I said. “Please, can you help me?” I let my thoughts push forward, just a little. Not enough to qualify as a full compulsion, but enough to make it clear what I wanted to have happen. You know me, I thought. You don’t need to ask for ID.

“Really, Bridget, again?” she asked, fond exasperation in her tone, and began typing rapidly. “This needs to stop happening, honey. You need to buy yourself a purse or something.”

“I guess I do,” I said, feeling suddenly uneasy. It’s not common for people to come up with their own names for me. It’s not unheard of, but . . .

It usually means those people have come into contact with another cuckoo, someone who’s already taken the time to push and pull and reshape their neurological pathways into something easier for telepathy to work with. I could be in another cuckoo’s hunting grounds right now. It’s not an unreasonable idea. As I said before, airports are liminal spaces. People come and go and if they sometimes seem to forget things or act in unusual ways, as long as those changes don’t make them appear dangerous to a casual onlooker, no one’s going to notice.

No. I’d know if there were another cuckoo this close to home. There’s a sort of feedback that happens when we get too close to each other, a telepathic static that washes over everything and makes it jittery and strange. Mom doesn’t notice it, since she’s not a receptive telepath, but I do, and the silence when I walk away from her is sometimes the loudest thing in the world. That roaring silence was still there. I could hear it. There was no one else.

The woman behind the desk was waiting, hands raised, radiating expectation. I missed something. I’d been looking for cuckoos, and I missed something.

Damn, I thought, and said sheepishly, “I’m sorry. You know I don’t mean to.”

“I know,” said the woman, relaxing slightly. The other two customer service employees didn’t appear to have noticed me, which only reinforced the idea that another cuckoo had come to visit, probably more than once. They didn’t see me because they didn’t care, because I wasn’t unusual. They’d seen me before, or someone who looked so much like me that they couldn’t tell the difference.

Humans have an incredible diversity of appearances. Different face shapes, eye shapes, eye colors, all sorts of little variations that people consider more or less appealing. It’s part of the way mammalian life in this dimension works. Everything looks different from everything else. Cuckoos . . . don’t. We come from another evolutionary path, and like most insects, we’re all virtually identical to one another. My face is my adoptive mother’s face is my biological mother’s face, all the way back to the beginning. We don’t vary, except in age and personal grooming choices. We are, in many ways, a hive.

Cuckoos are pale. Cuckoos are black-haired and blue-eyed and delicate, with features some humans see as “doll-like,” and some see as “creepy.” The humans who find us unnerving are the lucky ones. They might walk the other way when they see us coming. They might get away. Not usually, though. We can pick up on feelings of unease, and too many of my relatives view those people as a challenge, something to be pursued and overcome.

The woman started to type. “Where are you heading today?”

“Portland. The one in Oregon, not the one in Maine.”

“That’s good—we don’t have any flights left to Maine today.” She frowned at something on her screen. “That’s odd. I don’t have you listed on the manifest. Are you flying stand-by again?”

Bridget, whoever she is, must be connected to the airline somehow. “I am,” I ventured.

“That explains it. These systems need an upgrade in the worst way.” She resumed typing, faster now, plugging in the details of my supposed ID without once asking to verify it. “All right, honey, I’ve got you back on the correct plane—and since first class didn’t check in full, I’ve managed to upgrade you a couple of levels.” Her printer spat out a boarding pass. She handed it to me, eyes twinkling, radiating satisfaction at having done a favor for a friend. “Now don’t lose this one, all right? I can only save your bacon so many times.”

“I won’t, I promise,” I said, taking the boarding pass and holding it close to my chest, like it was the most precious thing in the world—which, in many ways, it was. It was one more piece of proof that I was recovered enough to leave the safety of Ohio. All I needed to do after this was get on the plane and make it to Oregon without accidentally diverting us to Prague, and I’d be free.

The woman’s eyes widened. A moment later, she was offering me a tissue. “Honey, your nose is running.”

My nose . . . oh, no. I took the tissue with a mumbled, “Thank you,” and took off, not saying goodbye. Let the woman assume I was booking it for the bathroom because I was embarrassed to have been caught with a runny nose in public.

Human blood is red. Human nosebleeds are obvious.

Cuckoo blood is almost clear, made up of hemolymph and plasma. It looks, to human eyes, like slightly blue-tinged mucus. When set against something as pale as my skin, the blue blends into the background, and a nosebleed looks more like I need a good decongestant.

I waited until I was far enough from the desk to not be observed by anyone who might know “Bridget” before I ducked into the alcove next to a pair of vending machines and wiped my upper lip. A trace of blue shimmered on the tissue. I was bleeding. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

I needed to call home. I needed to tell Mom I couldn’t do this yet and ask her to come get me. I needed—

I lowered my other hand and looked at the boarding pass I was still clutching. One first class ticket to Portland, Oregon, leaving in under an hour. They’d be boarding soon.