“What was that for?”
“Bangs,” she said, and tossed the phone over her shoulder. David caught it and put it back in his pocket. “I can’t cut my own hair, and I’ll need to give the stylist something to work from. Mark? Get her inside.”
“Why me?” he asked.
She looked at him, eyes glinting white as irritation sparked along the surface of her thoughts, bright and fierce and judgmental. “She’s already touched you,” she said. “The damage is done.” Turning, she stalked back to the RV. David followed.
Mark looked at me. I could feel the regret rolling off him, although I couldn’t tell whether he was sorry this had to happen, or sorry he was the one doing it to me. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to let me go, and he wasn’t on my side.
“I’d really rather not get close enough to grab you,” he said. “I don’t suppose you could do me a favor and come quietly? You won’t get anything else useful from me unless you rip my mind apart, and you’re not ready for that yet. I don’t want to be on your bad side once you are.”
It was tempting to lie to him, or to refuse to go along with anything he wanted from me. I was too tired to push it that way. I needed this to be over. I needed to understand what they were trying to accomplish so I could break free and go home, back to my family, back to the people who would take care of me, who I could take care of in turn.
“Fine,” I said, and flounced toward the RV.
The static white noise of the other cuckoos got stronger as I got closer. I faltered. Six cuckoos, not including myself; that was what I’d sensed from Mark back at the compound. Six cuckoos, and I was the only one who didn’t belong to their hive.
Hive. The word came easily, naturally, like it had always been the right noun for this sort of situation. It was tied to “instar,” somehow connected to the concept of insect metamorphosis, and so right that I couldn’t even try to question it. A group of cuckoos was a swarm. A group of cuckoos who had put aside their natural distaste for sharing space and territory, who had decided they could work together for some reason, was a hive. I was walking into a hive.
The RV door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped through, into a space like nothing I had ever seen before.
David and Heloise were in the little kitchen area, David making some sort of hot mixed drink, Heloise leaning against the counter. A massively pregnant female cuckoo reclined on the window seat, rubbing her belly in small, concentric circles, her posture radiating discomfort and suspicion. Two more cuckoos were seated toward the back, both male, both watching me enter with glowing white eyes, their suspicion hanging heavy in the air.
Mark pushed through behind me, careful not to touch me at all as he pulled the door closed behind himself. “I got her,” he said.
“We can see that,” said the pregnant cuckoo. She leveled a flat gaze on me, eyes sparking white as she reached out and brushed the fingers of her mind against my own. Her lip curled. I would have known it was disgust even if she hadn’t been broadcasting the emotion loud and clear. “This is what we’ve been waiting for? Are you sure? Have you looked at her?”
“More closely than I wanted to,” said Mark. “She took my hand for a second when I helped her over some debris—”
“Suck-up,” said one of the men. The other snickered.
“—and she had half my brain on the table in front of her before I could let go,” Mark continued, like he hadn’t heard them. “She’s a damn battering ram.”
“That’s what we need,” said the woman. She focused on me again. Her next words were silent ones, less distorted than Mark’s had been; while he’d sounded like he was talking underwater, she sounded like she was talking next to some piece of loud machinery, something that fought to steal every syllable away. You’re a fascinating experiment, Sarah Zellaby. I’d been hoping to have the chance to meet you.
“How do you know my name?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. Have you adapted so completely to life among the humans that you’ve forgotten how to be a telepath?
“No,” I said. “Have you adapted so completely to life among the cuckoos that you’ve forgotten that it’s rude to talk telepathically in public?”
“Who told you that?” she demanded. “Your petty so-called mother, denying you the pleasures she’ll never experience? She’s never even managed to enter her first instar, you know. Her kind are meant to be smothered in their cradles, not allowed to go around acting as if they’re real people.”
I felt a spike of discomfort from behind me. Mark didn’t like the things she was saying, for some reason. That might be worth looking into later. I was going to need allies among the cuckoos if I was going to get out of here in one piece.
“You people keep using that word, ‘instar,’” I said. “I know it means the space between metamorphosis, but I don’t understand what you think it has to do with me. I’ve never spun a cocoon or cracked my exoskeleton. I’ve only ever been me.”
“Those are activities for insects, and we’re not insects; not anymore,” said the woman. “I’ll make it a trade. If you can say my name, I’ll tell you what an instar is.”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Telepath, remember?” She cocked her head, a gesture that was familiar enough to be upsetting. I did that same thing when I was annoyed. So did Mom. It was clearly a family trait; it was just that the family was bigger than I’d ever thought.
“Right.” I narrowed my eyes and drove my thoughts forward, trying to break into her mind.
I bounced off her shields almost immediately. They were tightly woven, so interlocked and unstable that trying to slide past them was like trying to wrestle with the wind. Every time I grabbed for a weak spot, it reinforced itself, becoming twice as thick and three times as complicated. I breathed in, breathed out, and pulled back, “looking” at the shifting walls of thought and intention.
Math is the underpinning force of the universe. That’s something people don’t always understand when I try to explain it to them, and it’s so basic—so primal and perfect—that I don’t have the words to make it any clearer. How do you explain air to a bird, or water to a fish? There’s no explaining things that simply are. That’s how I feel about math. Math is everywhere. Math is everything. Even the seemingly effortless, uncomplicated things like walking and breathing and, yes, telepathy, they’re all math.
The other cuckoo’s mental shields were made of instinctive equations, so tightly knotted together that they seemed like a single continuous piece. They weren’t, though. An equation that large would be clumsy, awkward . . . slow. Her shields were fast and adaptive because they were built like a living thing, with numbers in the place of single cells.