Page 86 of Imaginary Numbers

The skin above her lips was bright with what would have seemed like snot if I hadn’t known her biology so intimately. She was bleeding. She was bleeding from the nose and from the ears and even though she wasn’t blinking, something that looked like a tear escaped from the corner of her left eye and ran down her cheek, leaving a thick trail behind.

“She can’t take much more of this,” I whispered. “She’s going to break under the weight.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Antimony. There was a clicking sound, roughly on the level of my ear.

I turned. Antimony had drawn a gun from inside her clothing and had it aimed at Sarah’s head, her finger on the trigger. It was a small handgun, the sort of thing that’s basically designed to be concealed. It was more than big enough.

“Annie,” I said.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said.

And then she pulled the trigger.

Twenty-four

“Some prices are far too dear. And yet we pay them anyway.”

—Jonathan Healy

Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, very far away from home, incredibly betrayed

ALL OF US ARE excellent shots.

Verity’s the best in our generation, and Alex is the deadliest—the two things are connected even though they’re not always the same—but we’re all excellent shots, because we were never given a choice in the matter. We learned from our parents, and we learned from Grandma Alice, and we learned from all the teachers our family could find for us, because we had to know. We had to understand what a firearm was capable of doing, and we had to be able to do it. Punching and stabbing things are all well and good, and they absolutely have their place, but sometimes, only a bullet will get the job done.

All of us are excellent shots. When Antimony pulled the trigger, there was no question in my mind that she’d hit what she was aiming at. Because all of us are excellent shots. Those words kept ringing through my head, packing themselves into an impossibly narrow window of time, as I turned in slow horror—as I whipped around as fast I could—to Sarah.

If she was going to die, I was going to see it happen. I was going to know that it had happened. And then I was going to go home to my basement and lock the door and never go outside again.

The sound of the bullet being fired had been impossibly loud from where I was standing, and there was no question in my mind that we were about to be dealing with a whole lot of seriously pissed-off cuckoos. Some of them were already turning toward us, their eyes flashing white, their expressions blank and somehow terrifying in their emotionless coldness.

Sarah didn’t turn. Sarah didn’t move at all. The bullet was moving too fast for the eye to follow—until suddenly it wasn’t moving either. Suddenly it was hanging in the air in front of her, surrounded by a sphere of what looked like water. She had somehow hardened the molecules of the atmosphere enough to stop it before it could reach her.

No, she said inside my mind, loudly enough that it made my eyes water. There was no feeling that she was screaming, or even that she was shouting: her mental voice was just so much bigger than it had ever been before that my brain didn’t know how to process it yet.

“Sarah, please,” I said.

No, she repeated, and waved her hand dismissively, sending the bullet rocketing back toward us.

Antimony shouted, a wordless sound of panicked warning, and shoved James to the side. The bullet whizzed between them. There was a soft shattering sound. I risked a glance over my shoulder.

The bullet had found a home squarely between the eyes of a large male cuckoo, opening a hole through which clear fluid was already beginning to leak. His eyes went comically wide before he crumpled, motionless, to the ground.

“Artie, I’m sorry, but we need to run,” said Antimony, looking frantically around as more and more cuckoos turned in our direction.

“She didn’t have to miss.”

“What?”

“Sarah didn’t have to miss.”

“Yes, I’m sure your cousin who’s gearing up to unmake reality was being kind to us, now can we go?” demanded James.

I kept my eyes on Antimony. The cuckoos had noticed us, but they weren’t moving yet: we had a few seconds. “You’ve been on the range with Sarah. She’s not the best shot, but she doesn’t miss at this sort of distance.”

“I’m wearing an anti-telepathy charm,” said Antimony. “She can’t see me.”

“She can’t read you, but she can see you. And I’m right here. She missed us because she didn’t want to hurt us.” I needed her to understand. The words weren’t obeying me. No matter how hard I tried to make them, they weren’t obeying me. “It’s still Sarah in there.”