Page 75 of Imaginary Numbers

“It won’t. Ingrid said—”

“She’s a cuckoo. Cuckoos lie.”

For a moment, I saw doubt in her eyes. “I’m a cuckoo. Do you think I lie?”

“Not to me,” I said.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, and her eyes flashed white, and everything went black.

I sat up with a gasp, feeling the heavy weight of gravity settle over me, along with a dozen sensations I hadn’t realized were missing—the whisper of the night wind, the cool dampness of the air, the looming shadow of the sky, which was considering whether or not it was time to rain. In Portland, the sky is always considering whether it’s time to rain.

“Good,” said Elsie. She was bending over me, her hands on her knees, an uncharacteristically solemn expression on her face. I could see the lights of the compound behind her. It looked like the whole house was lit up, even the rooms that were usually left closed-off unless more of the family was in residence.

Elsie’s finger jabbed at the center of my chest, jerking me back into the moment. “I thought you were dead, you asshole.”

“I told you he was still breathing,” said Sam.

I craned my neck back. He was standing behind me, arms crossed, still in his vaguely simian form. His tail was wrapped tightly around his left leg, like he was anchoring himself in place.

“What . . .” My throat was dry. I swallowed hard and tried again. “What happened?”

“You dropped your charm and went down, dude. It was like someone had flipped your switch or something.” Sam shook his head. “We couldn’t figure out how to peel you off the cuckoo without touching her, and with the way you’d gone down, we were sort of worried you’d jerk us into whatever hallucinatory Wonderland you’d gone and tumbled into. So we left you alone until we got to the house.”

“So how . . . ?”

“I opened the car door and unbuckled your seatbelt, and you fell out of the car,” said Elsie. “You didn’t wake up, so I stuffed your anti-telepathy charm into your pocket. That did the trick. And before you ask, Annie took Sarah inside.”

Then she hauled back and kicked me in the hip.

“Hey! Ow!” I put my arms up to block my face, just in case she had some wacky ideas about continuing her assault. “What the fuck, Els?”

“Never, ever, ever do that to me again, you asshole.” She dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around me before I had a chance to respond, yanking me against her and burying her face in the front of my shirt. Her shoulders moved in uneven little hitches. I realized, to my dismay, that she was crying.

My badass big sister who could handle anything the world wanted to throw at us was crying.

“You’re not allowed to leave me,” she said, voice muffled by the way her head was bent, the way her lips were pressed to my shirt. She sounded . . . small. It was terrifying. “I thought you were going to leave me.”

“I’m right here,” I said, and awkwardly patted her hair. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

She pulled back, letting go so she could look at me, and offered me a wan smile. I’m sure mine was just as bad, because we both knew the terrible truth behind my answer: one day, one of us was going to leave. One day, one of us was going to wind up in a situation we couldn’t bluff or bully our way through, and we were going to become one more entry in the litany of the dead that the Aeslin mice recited twice a year, on the summer and winter solstices. That’s what it means to be a Price. We fight. We do our best to win. But eventually, inevitably, we lose.

Sam was still standing behind me, silent and awkward as he watched his girlfriend’s cousins try to comfort one another, and it was hard to swallow the urge to turn around and tell him to run for the hills as fast as he possibly could. Annie loved him and he loved her and if there’s one thing that every Price child learns before we graduate from high school, it’s that love is never enough. Grandma Alice loves Grandpa Thomas, has for more than fifty years, and what did that get her? An endless search through parallel dimensions for a man she can’t let herself admit is dead. And she’s the lucky one. At least she can pretend to have hope. For the rest of us, hope is something that dies quick and messy on the battlefield.

Sarah was fighting her own battle right now, trapped in the white nothingness of her own mind, and there was nothing that any of us could do to help her, and there was nothing that I could do to save her. All we could do was wait . . . and hope that she found a way to win.

I remembered the bleakness in her eyes right before she’d thrust me from her mindscape. Assuming that had been real, and not just a weirdly specific hallucination, I wasn’t as certain as I wanted to be that she was going to come out on top. The cuckoo equations were eating her alive.

Gingerly, I pushed Elsie away from me and climbed to my feet, relieved when my legs didn’t take the opportunity to collapse out from under me. The world spun a little before settling down. Elsie watched me, wary, waiting for the moment when I’d fall.

“You were out for more than half the drive,” she said.

“It didn’t feel that long,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get inside. I’m sure we’re about to be yelled at.”

“I’m not.” Her expression was grim as she stood and brushed the grass off her knees. “Normally, sure, but normally, we haven’t come racing back with a cuckoo in a coma and word of a whole hive behind us. This is war. Lectures about our malfeasance can wait until later.”

“This is a swell family that I’ve decided to attach myself to,” said Sam. “Totally normal. Way better than the carnie life.”

“You said it, not me,” said Elsie, and started for the house, leaving the two of us with no real choice but to follow.