“I found them,” announced James, heading for the couch, where he took up a position leaning against the arm, next to Annie. “I’m choosing to view this whole experience as a form of familial hazing, to make up for the fact that I spent my foolish teenage years in another time zone. Please, can you be done torturing me soon?”
“Nope,” said Annie, and punched him amiably in the arm.
“About damn time,” said Elsie, radiating smug satisfaction as she looked at my hand, still firmly clasped in Artie’s.
My cheeks warmed with an invisible blush. I squared my shoulders and looked toward Evie and Kevin. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What did you find?”
“Honey, do you want to sit down?” Evie took a step forward, spreading her hands like she was trying to soothe a panicky animal. If I hadn’t already been a little bit freaked out, that gesture would have been enough to do it. “We need to talk to you about what happened. Both of you.”
“I’m not going to be all weird about Sarah because a cuckoo decided to mess with my head,” said Artie. He let go of my hand with a sudden bolt of self-consciousness, like he’d just realized he was still holding it. Which, to be fair, he had.
I couldn’t blame him. The thoughts rolling off Annie and Elsie were curious, amused, and even relieved, all covered by a thin veneer of worry. Evie and Kevin mostly just felt worried. I didn’t want our relationship, whatever it was actually going to be, to become their next topic of dissection.
“I know, dear,” said Evie. “Nothing’s ever going to make you weirder about Sarah.”
“That’s the truth,” said Annie.
Elsie snorted laughter, covering her mouth with her hand. I shot her an imperious glare. She laughed harder, abandoning any pretense of swallowing it. Sometimes having cousins can be really annoying.
“We dissected the cuckoo who attacked you in the woods,” said Kevin, apparently realizing that the only way forward was to barrel straight through without hesitation. “The blood we found in her nose and ears was the result of a massive aneurism, leading to an even more massive brain bleed.”
“Is that what killed her?” I asked.
“Not quite.” He removed his glasses, wiping them on his shirt as he spoke, so he wouldn’t have to see my reaction. I almost wished I could do the same. He was thinking too loudly for that; every word was accompanied by an image, whether I wanted to see it or not. And I didn’t want to see it.
“Most intelligent creatures have highly crenulated brains. It’s a matter of biological necessity. Smooth brains have less surface area, which means less space for the neurons to do what they need to do. Crenulated brains have more surface area, allowing for greater intelligence, memory retention, all the requisites of intelligence as we currently understand it. A domestic dog may have a larger brain than an Aeslin mouse, but due to the crenulations, the Aeslin mouse actually has greater surface area and hence more potential for intelligence.”
This was biology 101; we’d all learned this stuff when we were kids. Well, maybe not James and Sam. I still couldn’t catch sight of their minds through their telepathy blockers, and so I had to assume they looked interested enough to be considered an appropriate target audience for this little anatomy lesson.
Kevin didn’t notice that I was confused, or maybe he just didn’t care. He put his glasses on as he continued, “We’ve seen Johrlac brains before, although not many of them, and only one that was undamaged. Our current model for their morphology says that we should have found a brain of the same approximate weight and size as a comparable human brain, but with deeper crenulations, creating a greater surface area and allowing for the development of psychic powers such as telepathy.”
“I know you’re trying to tell us something, but this is all making me feel uncomfortably like I’m going to be the next one on the dissection table, so it would be really swell if you could get to the point before I have to leave the room,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I know this isn’t easy.”
I laughed unsteadily. “A member of my own species—which is predatory and sort of evil, and that sucks for me—attacked me. Twice. And then she attacked Artie, and now she’s dead, and you’re tiptoeing around actually telling me why that is. So no, this isn’t easy. It’s confusing and it’s scary and I just want to know what’s going on. Please, can you tell me what’s going on?”
Kevin sighed. “We opened her skull to confirm she’d suffered from a brain bleed, and to add her brain to our specimen collection. We get better equipment every year. We may eventually be able to design better anti-telepathy charms by looking at the structure of the Johrlac brain.”
“We did find evidence of the brain bleed,” said Evie. “It was catastrophic in scope. She must have died almost instantly. I don’t believe she would have had any real time to suffer.”
It was difficult to worry too much about whether or not the cuckoo had suffered. She was dead and that was sad, but mostly because her being dead meant I couldn’t track her down and hurt her for what she’d done to Artie. Being near me shouldn’t have been considered enough to make him a target. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair, and I wasn’t okay with it.
“We also found some alarming morphological changes to the brain itself,” said Kevin, sounding suddenly grim. “Most of the crenulations were either shallower than we expected them to be based on earlier specimens, or entirely gone. The tissue was both dehydrated and less stable than it should have been.”
“He means the brain fell apart as soon as we touched it,” said Evie. “It was like brain pudding. No structural integrity. No elasticity. The trauma she suffered was incredible.”
And unnerving. “Do you think it was pathogenic?”
“We’ve never discovered a single disease in this dimension that can infect cuckoos,” said Evie. “But I thought of that, and I started some cultures. We should know more soon.”
Meaning she didn’t think it was a virus. That was good, since I’d been close to the dead cuckoo both before and after she collapsed. It was also bad. It meant we didn’t know anything. “What else could have done this?”
Evie and Kevin exchanged a look, discomfort rolling off them in waves. Artie twitched, picking up on it as clearly as I was.
“I need to know,” I said.
Evie sighed. “When you had your . . . accident . . . you were lucky enough to be near an actual cryptid hospital,” she said.
I nodded slowly. St. Giles’ Hospital was cryptid-owned and cryptid-operated and maintained solely for the care and keeping of people who couldn’t walk into a human emergency room and expect to have any chance of walking out again. It had been the nearest available source of medical care when I’d been hurt. I didn’t remember anything of my time there—not even the names of the doctors who’d helped me—but Mom had sent them an edible arrangement every year since I’d come home.