Page 41 of Imaginary Numbers

“You said there would be one less cuckoo on my side. There would be two less. I would kill you, princess. It might be the last thing I ever did, but I’d do it.”

“I’m not on your side.”

“You will be.” He cocked his head, like he was listening. I didn’t hear anything. He was the only cuckoo close enough for me to detect. He must have been playing relay with someone who was in his range but not in mine.

That didn’t necessarily mean he was stronger than me. There are plenty of things a cuckoo can do—plenty of things I knew how to do—to increase their range where a specific person was concerned. Maybe he’d been willing to stay in contact with another cuckoo long enough to become attuned to them. It was strange. A whole pack of cuckoos coming for me was even stranger.

“Fine,” he said finally, eyes flashing white. “We give you our word that no one will come back here to interfere with your family. We can’t promise they’ll be spared if they track us down. Take it or leave it, because we’ve already been out here too long.”

They wouldn’t thank me for this. Family is supposed to be the most important thing in our world, and by walking away, I was as good as saying that my family couldn’t protect me. The thing was, they couldn’t protect me. Not against this. Not against an enemy that could get inside their heads. Anti-telepathy charms are the solution against one cuckoo, acting alone or trying to defend their territory. They wouldn’t hold the line against a group of them. They would just make the enemy harder to see coming.

My family had protected me after New York. It was my turn to protect them. I looked the cuckoo in the eye and nodded, once, before I turned and started for the door next to the gate.

Tucking the family compound away in the forest had been a good way to control traffic in and out. It hadn’t eliminated the need for things like getting the hell away from your family, hence the occasional doors set into the fence. Without them, my cousins—Verity especially—would have been forever setting off the motion detectors along the top as they climbed their way to freedom. Sure, freedom looked like an evergreen forest in the middle of nowhere, but it was still freedom.

Or it had been. I keyed in the gate code, which I’d lifted from Kevin’s mind without even thinking about it, and stepped out of the supposed safety of the yard into the dangerous darkness of the woods. It didn’t feel like freedom anymore. It felt like walking into a trap.

The cuckoo nodded approvingly. “Come with me,” he said, then turned and led me deeper into the trees.

Lacking any real choice, I followed.

We walked until the compound lights dwindled to nothing behind us. Only then did Mark produce a flashlight and click it on, directing its watery beam toward the ground.

“Sorry to make you come all this way, but, well, we both know things would have gotten really ugly back there if we’d parked any closer,” he said. He sounded almost jovial, like we were old friends going for a walk, and not virtual strangers in the middle of an abduction. “We’ll be at the RV soon.”

“An RV?” I couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of my tone. “You brought an RV?”

“Had to,” he said. “We don’t squish well, not even when we have a good reason to be working together. It’s a really nice one, too. Modern. There’s even a bathroom it’s not physically painful to use. Amelia and David took a few recreational trips back there while the bedroom was occupied. He’s pretty mad at you, by the way.”

“For what?” I asked. “All I did was hit her with my backpack.”

“I didn’t say it was logical, just that it was there,” said Mark. “Amelia saw you first. That meant she got the duty and the honor of triggering your next metamorphosis. Unfortunately, she couldn’t exactly survive something like that. She died like she lived. Pissed off at the entire world and willing to do whatever she could to destroy it. Honestly, I think David’s mostly angry because he knows that if their positions had been reversed, Amelia would be perfectly happy to have him gone, if it meant you were progressing to your next instar.”

I stopped walking. Mark continued for a few more feet before turning to look at me, projecting polite confusion.

“We’re not there yet,” he said. “Like I said, we have to keep walking.”

“You keep using this word, ‘instar,’” I said. “What the hell does it mean?”

“Can’t you take the definition from me?” he asked. “You should be able to reach out and snatch it from my mind. If you can’t, that’s not my problem.”

“That’s not how I do things,” I said.

“That’s not how humans do things,” he said. “You, though, Sarah Zellaby? That’s exactly how you do things. You act like you have some moral high ground because you only hunt people you’ve decided somehow deserve it, but you’re just like the rest of us. You take. You take, and you take, and you take, and you don’t give anything back. You can’t help yourself. If you could, you’d be useless to us. You want to know what an instar is? Take it.”

I stared at him, feeling my eyes burn as they went white. How dare he talk to me like that, like I was doing something wrong by trying to be careful. Even more, how dare he remind me of what I already knew and wanted to forget about. There were no questions left in my mind, only anger, and the brush of the wind against my cheeks as I focused on him, trying to punch my way through his mental barriers and claim what I needed to know.

His walls were strong. Not as strong as mine, maybe, and not as strong as an anti-telepathy charm, but strong enough that I couldn’t smash through them the way I’d wanted to. I pictured my thoughts as hands, grabbing chunks out of his defenses and pulling them free. They came back as quickly as I could discard them. I made a frustrated noise.

“Okay, you can stop now.” He sounded winded. “That really hurts, you know.”

I stopped grabbing for his mind. “How can it hurt? I’m not touching you.”

“You’re not touching me where anyone can see it, but you’re definitely touching me,” he said, rubbing his temple and wincing. “Wow, you’re strong. I’ll give you this much, princess: you’re almost as impressive as I hoped you’d be. Now come on.”

“I still don’t know what an instar is.” My voice came out plaintive and tight, like a child who expected to be smacked. My gut was roiling. My whole life, I’ve tried not to hurt anyone. Now I couldn’t even bring myself to hurt another cuckoo. Instead, I was following him through the forest, so close to willingly as to make no real difference.

I paused. I was following him through the forest. No other cuckoos had appeared. If I turned and ran back to the compound now—