I swallowed, not looking at her. It was easier to focus on the child, who was bright and happy and fictional and uncomplicated. She was walking the bike toward the street, both hands on the handlebars.
“I don’t remember them at all,” I said quietly.
“No. I suppose you wouldn’t, not after what that butcher did to your mind.”
“Don’t talk about my mother that way.”
“You’ve had three mothers. The one who gave you away to save you, the one who died, and the one who stole you. I’ll talk about the third any way I like. She had no right. She stole everything you had, and she made you thank her for it.” Ingrid’s anger was a stinging swarm of gnats, swirling through the thoughts that shaped the illusion around us. “Children are supposed to come to their first instar in their own time. They grow, they mature, and one day, the little egg inside them breaks, and they see the world for what it is.”
The girl with the bike seemed to age five years in the blinking of an eye. She straightened, the suddenly too-small bicycle falling from her hands, and turned to look at the house with a thoughtful eye.
“That egg contains everything they need to know about being a cuckoo. It tells them what they are and where they came from. It tells them what’s going to happen to them, how to survive it . . . how to adapt.” The girl—the teen—walked back into the house, shutting the door behind her.
Someone screamed. A splash of blood hit the window. I flinched.
Ingrid was untroubled. “The entry into first instar can be a trifle violent, it’s true, but it’s a natural part of our development. The individual gets overwhelmed by the weight of the collective memory of a hundred generations, but not forever. They always resurface.”
“It turns them evil,” I said.
“It reminds them that they’re predators, surrounded by predators who wouldn’t thank them for pretending to belong,” said Ingrid. “The average age for metamorphosis from larval to first instar is thirteen. Your morph was delayed. Severely. That woman—the one you call your mother—had no right to steal your future from you.”
“She stole nothing,” I said. “She made it so I could care about other people.”
Ingrid turned to look at me, weary regret written clearly across her face. I was suddenly glad I couldn’t normally read expressions the way humans did. It was exhausting, looking at people and knowing what they were thinking, even if I wasn’t reaching out to read their minds. Telepathy was kinder.
“Who told you we don’t care about other people?” she asked. “Yes, we care more about ourselves than we do about humans, but humans care more about humans than they do about anyone else. Why are the rules different for them? Because they have the numbers? Because that means they get to decide what’s wrong and right? She took your past away. She reached into your head with bad tools, broken tools, and she sliced out everything that should have been yours.”
Something about that seemed wrong. I fought the urge to take a nervous step backward, and said, “Mark said I was on my third instar. How is that possible, if I never had my first?”
“Oh, you had it. It just took years. It should have happened almost instantly and unlocked all the answers to your questions. Instead, it unspooled day by day, making its changes a little bit at a time. We get stronger after a morph. It changes the configuration of our minds. It makes them deeper, more complicated. We can do things after a morph that we couldn’t do before.”
I thought uneasily of the way my telepathy had strengthened as I got older, until what had been a trial when I was a child had become easy, even casual. Had I been going through an instar? If we’d been taking regular scans of my brain, what would we have found?
“Most of us go through metamorphosis into our first instar and then stop. First instar is necessary. It’s what changes a larva into a worker. We’re industrious. We keep ourselves busy. And we very rarely need second-instar soldiers to keep us safe. Second instar is a matter of necessity. Few of us survive the morph to reach it. Those who do find themselves substantially stronger and more versatile than a first-instar worker. You have no idea what you’re capable of now, do you? That woman,” and the venom in Ingrid’s voice was startling, “stole your first instar from you, and she sliced your second up and spoon-fed it to you in little pieces, and now you’re lost. You don’t know how to be a proper cuckoo. You don’t know how to be a proper soldier. But that’s all right. You were never meant to be a soldier.”
“What are you talking about?” I couldn’t stop myself from replaying the conversation with Evie, where she’d explained what the doctors had seen on my MRI.
Ingrid saw it, too. She nodded solemnly, looking distantly pleased. “That was your second instar,” she said. “The channels are deeper for you now than they were before. First instar is automatic. Second instar is triggered by the self. Third instar is triggered from the outside. Fourth instar is a myth and a destiny and a sacrifice, and you’re going to do so amazingly well, my dear. You’re going to make me so proud, and I’ll name this little girl ‘Sarah’ in your honor. You’re going to be magnificent.”
“I don’t want this.” I took a step back, or tried to; we were inside Ingrid’s mind, still, and she refused to let me move. “I just wanted you to explain things to me.”
“I am,” she said, and leaned forward, and kissed my forehead. Her lips were so cold they burned. I shuddered, and she whispered, “Fourth instar is what shows you the numbers outside the equation.”
Then I was falling again, and everything was darkness and burning, and I couldn’t hold on. I tried, I tried, I screamed as loud as I could into the void, and the void was blazing white, the void was a supernova of absolute absence, and there was no one to hear my screams, and everything was everywhere, and everything was gone.
Thirteen
“No matter how much we learn, there’s always something we don’t know. A map labeled ‘here be monsters’ is better than one that reads ‘we have no idea.’”
—Thomas Price
A private home in Portland, Oregon, down in the basement, waking up from a dead sleep, not quite screaming
I SAT UPRIGHT WITH a gasp, shoving my hand into my mouth to keep myself from screaming. Elsie would hear me—Elsie always heard me—and come stampeding down the stairs from her room to make sure I was okay. She took her duties as big sister and designated responsible person very seriously.
And of course, when she realized I’d just been having a nightmare, not anything more serious, she’d take her duties as mocker of little brothers and tormenter of the sleepy equally seriously. I didn’t want her coming down. Not when my heart was hammering against my ribs like it wanted to break loose and run away, and not when my eyes were still heavy with exhaustion.