Page 92 of Imaginary Numbers

She looked like me. She looked exactly like me. More than Mom did, even, and we’d always looked so much alike that people had no trouble believing we were related. Ingrid was the mold from which I’d been struck.

Three mothers. One who left me, one who lost me, and one who loved me. And now the first of them was back again, fury in her eyes as she drew back to deliver another blow.

“I’ll have to start all over,” she said.

My eyes flicked to her stomach, which strained against the limits of her clothing. Start all over. She meant abandon another baby with another human family. She meant leave another cuckoo child with no idea who they were supposed to be or how they were supposed to get there, exiled from their species, from everyone who should have known and loved and wanted them.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“Yes, I can,” she replied. “It’s what we do. Or do you mean I can’t do to her what I did to you? Leave her with a hapless human couple and then, when she’s old enough to have imprinted, take them away and see what happens? You don’t think their deaths were an accident, do you, Sarah? That they just happened to lose control of their car when there was a suitable replacement family for you in range? The whole thing was planned. A queen must be nurtured.”

“No,” I said.

“And just look at you. Useless. Weak. Their sacrifice was for nothing. Not that it matters. There are always so many humans to go around.”

“You’re lying.”

“They’d still be alive if it weren’t for you.”

“You bitch,” I snarled.

She slapped me.

I grabbed her wrist before she could pull her hand back, yanking her toward me. “No,” I repeated, and punched her in the jaw, the way Verity showed me, so my knuckles slammed into the space where her jawbone connected to itself. She made a startled noise of protest, trying to back away. I didn’t let go of her wrist.

“You’re not going to do anything,” I said, and hit her again, and again, until she stopped trying to break away and started trying to claw at me instead, the fingers of her free hand seeking and failing to find purchase in the skin of my face. It was the feeble attempt of someone who had never been forced to fight for herself, and it would have been hilarious, if it hadn’t been so damn sad.

“No.” This time when I hit her, she stopped trying to scratch me. “That baby isn’t a pawn. They aren’t a toy. You don’t get to decide what they’re going to be just because you give birth to them. You don’t get to force them.”

“I get to do whatever I want,” she said, eyes glinting white.

I paused.

We were in my head. We were in my space, where everything was up to me; where I controlled the world. The equation was still nibbling at the edges of everything, filling my thoughts with numbers, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been before I offloaded a big chunk of it onto Artie and the others. I could think. I could plan.

I could make decisions.

“You called me a queen,” I said softly.

Ingrid tried again to pull away from me. My hand around her wrist; the idea of my skin pressing against hers. Things have always been easier with skin contact.

“I’d say I was sorry, except I’m not; not really,” I said. “I wish I could be sorry. I wish I could have all the regrets in the world. But you decided not to be my family, and that was your choice, and that means I’m choosing, here and now, not to be yours.”

For the first time, there was true alarm in her expression. I wondered why it had taken me so long to realize that pulling people into this constructed mindscape would let me read their faces as easily as I read their thoughts. I could have been learning nuance and detail this whole time. Except maybe not. I couldn’t be sure—not with as little experience as I’d actually had at this—but it felt like the construct was taking a lot of power. Maybe I hadn’t been capable of doing this before . . .

Well, before things changed.

“I’ll make sure someone takes care of the baby,” I said as I gathered as much of the equation as I could hold in my mental hands and shoved it into her mind like a knife being shoved into a wound. I wasn’t careful about it. I wasn’t kind. I didn’t shunt the pieces of her that made her who she was to the side the way I had with the others.

Ingrid screamed. But not for long. She sagged, no longer fighting me. I let go of her wrist. She collapsed to the ground.

I opened my eyes.

Artie, Annie, James, and Mark were standing in a rough circle around me, blocking out the cuckoos who were no longer fighting them, but were instead watching us warily, waiting to see what was going to happen next. That seemed odd—it would have been reasonable for the cuckoos to attack as soon as the others were distracted—until I noticed the bodies littering the ground, their eyes open and still blazing white. They must have touched me, or one of the people who were currently extensions of me, after I’d started offloading the equation. The physical contact would have pulled them into the loop.

The same way I’d pulled Ingrid into the loop. She was on the ground directly in front of me, still twitching, burning white eyes turned upward to the sky. I wanted to feel bad about that. I couldn’t. I’d offloaded enough of the equation that I finally had room to spin it properly, to see all its lines and angles. The longer I looked at it, the more I started to understand what trying to complete it on my own would have done to me.

The cuckoos who’d grabbed me without going through the proper chain of metamorphosis and instar weren’t going to recover from the equation’s incursion into their minds. There wasn’t room for them, the history of our people, and the equation, and of those three things, the self was what the equation would be most inclined to treat as an invader. It was a living thing. It was hungry. It wanted to expand, to devour . . . and to be completed.