I moved.
I’m not a fighter: I leave that to my cousins whenever I possibly can. But I’m a Baker by adoption, and a Price by association, and that means I was expected to learn how to defend myself, whether I wanted to or not. I kicked the stall door open as hard as I could, hearing the dull smack of metal hitting flesh, simultaneous with the cuckoo outside’s cry of startled surprise. She probably wasn’t hurt, but that didn’t matter; all I’d really intended to do was throw her off balance.
Jumping down from the toilet, I hit the stall door with my shoulder and slammed it open even harder, hitting her again. She yelped, and I danced out of the way of the door, swinging my backpack for her middle. One nice thing about coming from a species with virtually no phenotype diversity: she and I were precisely the same height, and I didn’t have to calculate where my blows were going to land. I just swung on a straight line, and they connected.
My bag hit her squarely in the stomach. I grimaced, hoping the clothes I had wrapped around my laptop would be enough to soften the blow where it was concerned. Artie could fix it if not—Artie could fix anything—but that didn’t mean I wanted my machine out of commission because some stupid cuckoo had decided to attack me.
This time she squealed, pained and indignant, falling backward. Bad luck for her, since her trajectory slammed her into one of the automated hand drying machines. It kicked on with a loud rush of hot air. She tried to shout something. I hit her with my bag again. At the same time, I released my hold on my telepathy, beginning to broadcast nothing to see here, stay away as loudly as I could. I could dimly hear her mental commands laced under my own, trying to summon her minions, but she was hurt and off-guard, and I was scared and substantially louder. Whatever she’d been trying to ask for dissolved back into the static.
“Wait,” she began.
I didn’t wait. I hit her in the head with my backpack. She staggered, so I hit her again, and she hit her knees on the tile floor of the bathroom, catching herself before she could topple over face-first.
“You started it,” I said, and hit her in the head again.
This time, she didn’t catch herself.
I kicked her a few times to be sure she was really out of the fight. Either she was down for the count, or she was a much better actress than she had any reason to be. It didn’t much matter, as long as she wasn’t following me. I prodded her with my foot, pushing hard enough to roll her over so that her face pointed toward the ceiling. Her eyes were closed, and when I felt for her mind, it was the confused jumble of memories and vague impressions that I associated with unconsciousness. Growing up around my cousins, who’ve been in combat training almost since they could walk, has left me with a keen appreciation of the various stages of “knocked out cold.” This woman was gone.
Good. I slipped my backpack on and crouched, rifling through her pockets. She had an airport security badge, my own face staring back at me from the postage stamp picture, a wallet bulging with cash—probably stolen—and fake IDs under a dozen different names. The modern age has forced even cuckoos to adapt, since telepathy can’t fool a point of sale system or a security camera.
She clearly knew this airport: it was part of her territory, and she’d been here long enough to bother getting herself a way in and out of secured areas. She might have moved in the day I left for New York. That was good. It meant she wouldn’t have attacked me in this bathroom if there weren’t something about it that made it safe. Maybe the cameras were down, or maybe the acoustics somehow kept people outside from hearing when someone was beat to shit inside. Either way, I was in the clear, as long as I got out of the airport quickly.
I clipped her badge to the collar of my sweater, took the money from her wallet, and left her there, unconscious on the tile, wallet on the floor next to her. I felt a little weird about the theft, since she’d just turn around and steal back everything she’d lost, if not more, from the humans in the airport, but it was necessary for several reasons. I needed to get a ride without changing anyone’s mind, to make it harder for her to follow me; that meant payment. I also needed to make her understand that I’d been calm enough after defeating her to loot the body. Anyone can panic and punch somebody. The fact that I hadn’t run immediately after I was done would show that I was a worthy adversary. Someone she shouldn’t mess with. Not immediately, anyway.
Turning and walking away from her made my stomach ache because I knew what was going to happen from here. Portland is too small for two cuckoos. That’s the way the math works out. When I’d been living with Evie and Uncle Kevin, my presence alone had been enough to keep any other cuckoo from coming to settle there. The city is nice, but it’s not big or metropolitan or culturally significant enough to be worth fighting over. Not like, say, New York, which can sustain half a dozen cuckoos at any given time, and where territory battles between them are common enough to be an everyday occurrence. Cuckoos passed through Portland and went on to become someone else’s problem.
Assuming they went on at all. Part of why it hurt to walk away from the woman with my face was knowing what would happen when I got home and told Evie there was a cuckoo in the airport. Hunting in a place this public wouldn’t be easy, but she’d figure out a way. She always did. And when she was finished doing her job, there would be one less cuckoo in the world, and the population of Portland would be just a little safer, even if they were never going to understand why.
Cuckoos are apex predators. We’re not from around here, we don’t belong here, and we belong to the only species that my conservationist family believes needs to be killed on sight. We do too much damage. Even Mom agrees that ordinary cuckoos can’t be allowed to hunt the way they do, because it’s too destructive, and when it goes too far, it triggers Covenant purges, which could get a lot of innocent cryptids killed.
Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there.
No one gave me a second look as I walked through the airport with the cuckoo’s badge clipped to my sweater and my head held high. I had nothing to be ashamed of. She was the one who’d attacked me. I knew that. I had to keep knowing that, as the guilt began gnawing at me from the inside, whispering that I was just like her, that if I were really the good person I pretended to be, I would have found another way. I would have talked to her, negotiated, found a way to make myself heard through the overwhelming static of our telepathy clashing.
I knew none of that was possible. I knew Mom and I were reasonable people by human standards and freaks by cuckoo standards, because we had silly things like “ethics” and “morality” that got in the way of doing whatever the hell we wanted. I knew the woman in the bathroom wouldn’t have stopped with beating me unconscious. If I’d tried to negotiate with her, my body would be hidden somewhere in the depths of the airport by now, ready to be fed into a furnace or mulched and slipped into someone’s garden. My biology is different enough from the human norm that no forensic scientist would ever have been able to tell that I’d been a murder victim. I’d just be gone.