Imaginary Numbers Read online

  Only the Covenant of St. George doesn’t care about our limits. They care about making sure only humans, and only the right humans, are in control of this world. Verity, her siblings, our entire family, we’re on the wrong side of the fight as far as the Covenant is concerned. They’d kill me or Artie or my parents on sight for the crime of not being human. They tried to kill Verity for the crime of caring about what happened to us.

  Of course, they would have taken her away first. They’d been planning to haul her off to England, where all our secrets could be spilled, and used to wipe the Prices, Bakers, and Harringtons off the face of the planet. There hadn’t been any choice. I’m not mad at her for what happened to me, because she didn’t ask me to do it, and there hadn’t been any other way. I’ve spent the last five years clawing my way back to lucidity and going over what happened that night over and over again, and there wasn’t any other way.

  The Covenant operatives who’d come for Verity had been vulnerable. They didn’t have the right kind of charms to keep me out of their heads, and so I plunged myself into them like the predator my nature wants me to be. I ripped and I ransacked and I rewrote until they only remembered what I wanted them to remember. They thought Dominic was dead. They thought Verity was an actress he’d hired to impersonate a member of the Price family. My people were safe. The Covenant no longer knew they existed, and they were safe.

  That was the thought I had carried down with me into the dark, as I felt something in my mind rip loose of its moorings and crumble into nothingness. My people were safe. I might not survive, I might never see them again, but they were safe. I had done it. I had been better than my nature wanted me to be.

  I’m selfish enough to say that I don’t know for sure whether I’d have done what I did if I’d realized what the consequences would be. Changing those memories had strained something in my brain, something connected to my telepathy. Since it wasn’t like we could exactly take me to the hospital for an MRI, I’ve spent the last five years putting myself back together one tiny piece at a time, living with my parents in Ohio, leaning on Alex and his fiancée, Shelby, as I tried to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be and how to reconcile the difference between the two.

  Five years lost. It’s hard to even think about it. The airport was the first time I’d been outside unsupervised since my injury, and here I was trying to cross the country on my own—go big or go home, I guess.

  I think whoever said that really, really underestimated how much I wanted to go home.

  I finished the last few swallows of my milkshake in one long gulp, gathered up my trash, and stood. It was time to get myself on an airplane. It was time to figure out whether I could really, truly do this.

  Please, I thought, let me really, truly be able to do this.

  Please.

  Two

  “A lie’s a lie, even when it’s wearing Sunday clothes. That doesn’t mean a lie is necessarily the wrong choice. Just that you shouldn’t pretend it’s something that it’s not.”

  —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.

  One tissue, lightly streaked with blue.

  I had two choices, and I couldn’t make them both. Go home and keep hiding and hoping that one day I’d be exactly the girl I’d been before I hurt myself or get on that plane and go to where people who loved me were waiting for some sign that I was truly going to recover. Go where Artie was waiting. I hadn’t seen him in five years. I hadn’t touched his hand in five years. Would the telepathic channel we’d opened between ourselves even work anymore? I’d never gone that long without reinforcing it. Maybe we’d be strangers again.

  Go home or keep going. I couldn’t have it both ways.

  I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, before I crumpled the tissue and shoved it into my pocket. I had a plane to catch.

  * * *

  First class is nice. For one thing, there’s never any fighting over the overhead bins. For another, the seats are large enough that there’s no chance of accidental contact with the person next to you. I curled my legs underneath me, stockinged feet pressed against the hard side of the armrest—designed to maximize my personal space as much as possible, thank you, human veneration of the wealthy—and sipped my tomato juice as I stared out the window at the receding shape of Cleveland, Ohio.

  Back in Dublin, my parents were probably watching the airport departures list, waiting for the last plane to Portland to take off. If I didn’t call them a half hour after that, they’d know I was on my way, finally taking my first real step toward rejoining the world. Mom wouldn’t sleep until I landed in Oregon and texted her to let her know I was all right. That was fine. She usually had some snarly accounting problem to keep her distracted. Or maybe she and Dad would take advantage of having the house to themselves for five minutes. Alex and Shelby were in Australia, Drew was in California, and I was on a plane. They could—

  Ew. No. I didn’t want to think about that. We’re all adults, but there are some thoughts that send me hurtling right back into easily horrified childhood.

  The man who was sitting next to me had been trying to get my attention since takeoff. The fact that I was wearing headphones and staring fixedly out the window didn’t appear to be doing anything to dissuade him. If anything, it was just making him try harder. I did my resolute best to ignore the increasing waves of irritation and impatience rolling off him, focusing instead on my recording of the latest lecture series from the American Mathematical Association. They were doing some fascinating things with intuitive primes, and I wanted to see how far they could take the theory before things either resolved or fell apart.

  In math, something is either true or it’s not. Something either works or it doesn’t. If something works and it feels like that shouldn’t be possible, it’s not the math that’s wrong: it’s your model of the universe. Mathematics is the art of refining our understanding of reality itself, like a sculptor trimming down a brick of marble until it frees the beautiful image inside.

  Math is also distracting for me, like it is for any cuckoo. Something about the calm march of numbers and theory and equations is utterly enthralling to us. We’re an entire species of mathematicians, and that fact is the only thing that keeps me believing we can’t be all bad. How can anyone who truly loves numbers be irredeemable?

  I was so wrapped up in the equations that I didn’t realize the man was planning to move until he hooked a finger around the cord of my right headphone and popped it out of my ear. The drone of the plane’s engine came roaring back, drowning out the lecture still playing in my left ear, followed by the sound of his smug, faintly nasal voice.

  “I said, will you let me buy you a drink? Pretty lady like you shouldn’t have to fly alone.” He laughed, amused by his own feeble attempt at humor. “Of course, this is first class, so the drinks are free . . . unless you want to go someplace nicer with me after we land. I could show you a good time.”

  Of course. Of course. There are days when I wish whatever evolutionary path had decided I should pass for human could have settled on something a little less eye-catching. Not that being pretty by human standards doesn’t smooth a lot of rough edges out for me, but it can create a few, too.

  I turned to face him, offering a thin, glossy smile. “No, thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just want to listen to my book and get some rest.” I could have tried to shove “you’re not interested in me” at him, but at our current proximity, that was likely to result in him deciding I didn’t exist and trying to claim my armrest.

  “Book?” He grabbed the headphone before I could protest, bringing it to his own ear. A wave of confusion and disgust rolled off him an instant later. “This isn’t a book. This is a lecture.”

  “It’s a lecture taken from a book on mathematics.” I tweaked the cord nimbly out of his fingers, pulling it protectively closer to myself. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “I think you need a little trouble,” he said, and grabbed my wrist.

  Big mistake.

  Maybe once, I could have kept myself pulled back enough not to touch his mind even while he was touching my body. Maybe. But that was before my injury, and before I’d been forced to relearn the little tricks and techniques that made it safe for me to move through the human world. My agitation boiled over, and I saw the flash of white reflected in his eyes before he let go of me, withdrawing into his own seat.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. His tone had completely changed, becoming contrite, even guilty
. “That was entirely inappropriate of me. I can’t believe . . . I’m so sorry. I’ll make this right.”

  He hit his flight attendant call button. I put my headphone back in and returned my attention to the window, trying to radiate “I’m not involved with this” while I watched the clouds and he spoke in a low, urgent voice to the flight attendant who answered his call. I could feel his self-recrimination prickling against my skin like steel wool, but if I didn’t reach for details, I wouldn’t find them, and that suited me just fine. Not everything can be my problem. There isn’t room in my head.

  There was a flurry of motion as the man got up and moved away. A few moments later, the flight attendant was waving her hand for my attention. I straightened, removing both headphones, and turned to face her.

  There was a woman behind her in the aisle, no more than twenty-five years old, with a baby grasped against her chest and a massive diaper bag in her free hand. The woman was looking around, radiating awe. The baby was sleeping. All I got from it was a pure, unalloyed contentment. It was with its mother, it was fed and safe and content, and it wanted for nothing else in the world.

  Lucky baby. “Yes?” I asked.

  “The gentleman who was seated next to you has requested a transfer to coach class, and that we credit the value of his ticket to another passenger who looks as if they’d enjoy the opportunity to experience our first-class cabin.” Her eyes gleamed. I picked up a combination of genuine joy and malicious anticipation, aimed not at me in specific, but at the rest of the cabin.