This is the primary power, and the primary threat, of the adult cuckoo. Somewhere around puberty, we acquire control over the ability that takes us from being a nuisance and transforms us into apex predators. When we want you to, you know us. You love us. We’re your friends and your family and your children. We are whatever the situation needs us to be, whatever we can take advantage of, and we fill the gaps in your life without so much as batting an eye. Did this man have a sister? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. Finding out would mean digging deeper into his nasty little mind, and right now that would be a strain.
If I’d wanted to make him a target, to twist him around my fingers until he broke, I would have taken his hand. Skin contact makes things easier, and faster, and allows us to forge bonds that can’t be easily broken. So I would have held his hand until the fragile barriers keeping his mind away from mine wore down, and then I would have plundered him for everything I needed to know. I could have replaced everything important in his life with me, only me, always me, and it would have been nothing. I could have destroyed him.
He led me to a checkpoint at the far end, gestured for me to shrug out of my backpack and toss it on the belt, and swiped his badge before waving me through the simple metal detector. It didn’t alarm. No one was behind the scanner to check the contents of my pack. I picked it up on the other side, sliding it over my shoulders, feeling the familiar weight settle against the small of my back. One challenge down.
“Now you be careful out there; it’s scary for a woman traveling alone.” The TSA man pulled his wallet out, opened it, and offered me eighty dollars in wrinkled bills.
I let my fingertips brush against his as I took them, checking for any sign that he needed to be concerned about his finances. I didn’t find anything. There was guilt that he was only giving me eighty dollars, since he had a lot more than that on him, and frustration that paying his little sister’s way had “once again” fallen on his shoulders. It was a toxic mix, and I withdrew quickly. He wouldn’t miss the money. That was the important part.
Cuckoos bend our environment to suit our own needs, like ticks burrowing into the skin of the world. What makes me different from most of my species—what I hope makes me different, pray makes me different, remind myself every day makes me different—is that I try to do as little harm as I possibly can. There’s no such thing as doing absolutely no harm. Human, cuckoo, it doesn’t matter. Everybody hurts and is hurt, in a grand cycle of being alive. But minimizing the damage . . . that matters.
Minimizing the damage will never make me human. It’ll keep me worthy of walking among them.
“I’ll be careful,” I said, meeting his eyes. A flash of light reflected there, brief and bright and invisible to any of the cameras I knew were watching us. Bangs are old-fashioned, but they help me hide the way my eyes sometimes go white from top to bottom, reflecting a chemical response to my using my telepathic abilities. I shoved the compulsion to forget me actively against the structures of his mind, breaking through his defenses.
The man stopped moving, his thoughts shifting from ordinary human chaos into a sort of blanked-out static. I smiled again and patted his hand, careful to make skin contact as I said, “Thank you so much for helping me. Airports can be so confusing.” Then I turned and walked away, losing myself in the crowd before he could shake off the shock.
I didn’t look back—looking back attracts attention—but I knew if I did, I’d eventually see him stagger, looking profoundly confused, and scowl at everything around himself before he went back to whatever he’d been doing before he ran into me. He’d be annoyed at himself when he discovered the missing eighty dollars, but he’d assume he spent it and forgot. There wasn’t going to be any lasting damage from this encounter.
To either of us. To my delight, my thoughts were still clear, and my head didn’t hurt, not even a little bit. I proceeded to the food court, where I used some of the TSA man’s eighty dollars to buy a burger, fries, and a vanilla milkshake before claiming a table with a clear view of the departures board. There were five flights to Portland leaving in the next two hours. I could have my pick of airlines. I settled back to mix ketchup into my milkshake and skim the minds around me, looking for opinions on my options.
I didn’t have luggage, so it didn’t matter that the people three tables over had strong opinions about one airline’s tendency to lose their bags; the fact that they served hot chocolate chip cookies in first class did matter, since chocolate makes my throat itch. Another airline apparently had a reputation for poor customer service. They wouldn’t be rude to me, of course, but I was selecting the people whose minds I’d be trapped in a metal tube with for between four and six hours. No, thank you.
I finished mixing ketchup into my milkshake and went to insert my straw, pausing when I saw a small child staring at me. Facial expressions are hard, but even I can tell when someone’s eyes go wide, and the child was radiating confusion and curiosity. I pointed to my milkshake, trying to look quizzical. The child nodded. I took a sip.
The child’s wave of awe was so vast that it felt like even the non-telepaths around me should have noticed. I grinned a little and went back to studying the departure board. The milkshake looked like strawberry now that it was properly blended; except for the kid, no one was going to realize there was anything odd about it. People in airports are allowed to be weird. They’re liminal spaces. They don’t count the way the real world does.
Case in point: about one in ten of the minds around me wasn’t human. Traveler or airport employee, it didn’t matter. This was a place where people came and went and didn’t stop to make friends, which made it safe for cryptid traffic. None of them seemed to have made any special note of me. That was good. That was part of the test. If I’d been too noticeable, I would have needed to call Mom and tell her I was coming home, that I wasn’t ready. And I wanted to be ready. I needed to be ready.
This had all been going on for too long.
* * *
Five years ago—five years! How had it been five years? How had so much time been able to slip by while I was too lost in the spirals inside my head to pay proper attention?—Verity and I had been in Manhattan. She’d been going out with a Covenant man, working on her dance career, and trying to decide what she wanted to do with her life. I’d been . . .
I’d been doing what I always did. Math. Math, and flirting with my cousin Artie and pretending I wasn’t flirting with my cousin Artie, because he deserves better than me, he honestly does. He deserves a girl who has a heart, and I mean that literally: I don’t have one. Remember that whole “I’m not from around here” thing? Well, whatever weirdo world my kind evolved on, it wasn’t really invested in the idea of a centralized circulatory system. I don’t have a pulse because I don’t have a heart, and if I don’t have a heart, it doesn’t matter how much like a mammal I look from the outside, it doesn’t matter if I have three bones in my inner ear and hair and the ability to lactate. I’m something else, something other, and Artie is human enough to deserve better.