The web charred and blackened and finally fell away, revealing the label on the door. “Consciousness,” it said. It was a little on the nose, but it could have been worse. She could have blocked the door that said “Breathing,” or the one that said “Heartbeat.” I was deep enough in Artie’s mind that I was sure those doors existed somewhere nearby, functions of the self that were almost as old as Artie himself.
I stepped forward. The door wasn’t latched. It was closed, but barely; a stiff wind could have blown it open. Shaking the memory of flame from my fingers, I reached out and pushed it gently. The door swung inward, revealing a small domed room, filled with pale light.
The cuckoo from the airport was standing in the very middle of the room.
She looked at me and smiled, her red, red lips curving upward in a gesture that was far more predatory than pleasant. “Hello, little girl,” she purred. “Tracked me to my lair, did you? I bet you feel very clever. I bet you feel very competent. Look at you, personal disaster wreaking havoc through the world. Most of us find and break our targets inside of a year. You’ve been twisting this boy around for decades. You sure do play a long game.”
“You’re not really here.” I started prowling around the edges of the room, shoulders loose, head high. She wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.
No matter where I stood, the woman remained exactly the same, like one of those flat paintings that somehow becomes three-dimensional when viewed from the right angle. She was an illusion, not an actuality, and she had no business here. No business here at all.
“A knife is really inside a body, even when the person who did the stabbing is gone,” she countered. “They truly seemed to care about you. I could hear it in every stray thought they had. How long have you been lying to them, little girl? How long have you been working to convince them you can be tamed, redeemed, brought to heel? I’d be impressed, if I weren’t so disgusted.”
I kept circling. The threads of her trap were coming clearer, suspended in the air above her. Seen from this angle, they were less like spiderwebs and more like strands of cotton candy, fine and fair and almost invisible unless they were looked at precisely so.
“Nothing to say for yourself, little girl? I’m sorry. Did I break your toy? You can find another one. Maybe even turn this to your advantage. The others will be so very sorry for you, when they realize he’s not going to wake up.”
She was just a phantom, a fragment, a psychic trap laid by the other cuckoo to take Artie out of commission—but why? I’d been unconscious. She could have attacked me directly, rather than trying to hurt someone I cared about. What was the point of targeting Artie instead of me? Did she think that would hurt me more, somehow? I knew there wasn’t a code of honor that kept her from attacking a fellow cuckoo. Cuckoos don’t do anything as petty and potentially limiting as “honor.”
“Talk to me.” She was starting to sound uncomfortable, eyes tracking me around the edges of the room. Even an echo can be afraid, given the proper motivation. “You’re supposed to be angry. I touched your things. You’re supposed to challenge me.”
“I don’t need to,” I said, and stopped moving, bracing my feet as I looked at her. She had no mind for me to grab hold of. She was a cluster of Artie’s own neurons, overwritten with a set of hostile instructions by someone who had no reason to care about whether or not she hurt him in the process of baiting me. I reached out silently, hands still by my sides, and mentally grabbed hold of the threads in the air around her, snapping them cleanly off, forcing them back into the idea of her skin.
She screamed, and it sounded so real that I almost lost my nerve. But Artie was asleep in a bed back in the physical world, surrounded by our worried family, and his parents would be showing up soon; I needed him to be awake before my Aunt Jane started demanding to know what had happened. She can be terrifying when she wants to be. Uncle Ted wouldn’t yell. He’d just look at me, radiating silent disappointment, and that would be enough. No. Artie needed to wake up, and for Artie to wake up, this unwanted figment needed to be chased out of his mind. She didn’t belong here. She wasn’t a part of our family. She wasn’t a part of him.
The threads whipped through the air around her. I grabbed for them again, still not moving, and fed them back into the flesh of her. One of them whipped out too quickly for me to catch, wrapping around my wrist and burning like it was coated in some sort of acid. I lifted my arms then, clawing the thread away. It left no mark on my skin, which wasn’t really here anyway, only the idea of it, drifting through Artie’s mind like an intrusive thought, unwanted and unavoidable.
The figment screamed again. I lowered my hands and snatched the threads again with my mind, wrapping them tighter and tighter around her.
“You’re not wanted here,” I spat. “You’re not welcome here. Get out.”
She wailed and collapsed in on herself, becoming a gray, cobwebby mass that was more form than figure. Then she burst into pale flame, burning away to nothing.
But in the instant before she disappeared—the instant before I released my hold on Artie’s mind and allowed myself to rise back to what passed as the surface—she smiled, and I felt a sickening certainty take root below my breastbone.
This wasn’t over yet.
Eight
“Some people are good at music. Some people are good at sports. Some people are good at both. People are people, and every person has their own strengths and weaknesses. Biology is just one aspect of the greater whole.”
—Jane Harrington-Price
Back in the recovery room, surrounded by family, with a lot of explaining to do
I OPENED MY EYES with a gasp, staggering backward, losing contact with Artie in the process. Elsie caught me before I could hit the wall. I sagged against her, struggling to make my breathing smooth out. I didn’t have a pulse that could race, but I could feel the muscular contractions that propelled the blood through my body happening faster than they were supposed to, until my limbs ached from the effort.
And Artie opened his eyes.
Evie laughed in relief. Kevin clapped a hand on Artie’s shoulder.
“There you are, sport,” he said.
Artie turned his head to look at him, lost and perplexed, radiating confusion. “Where’s Sarah?” he asked. “She was here. She was just here. Was she really here?” He tried to sit up.
Kevin pushed him gently back down. “Sarah’s here,” he said. “Sarah came home. Sarah? Honey? Can you come over here?”
Meaning could I come over there before Artie hurt himself trying to move. Right. It was a good idea. The trouble was, I wasn’t sure whether or not I could. Try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get my feet under myself. Everything was rippling around the edges, the same way it had—