“We don’t know the equations, but this isn’t the dimension where we were first exiled,” said Mark. “We found another way. A cruder way. It’s like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. The equations we have, the ones we’ve developed, require a Queen to resolve them. Once she finishes her final morph and enters her fourth instar, she can do the math. She can find the right answers. And she can rip a hole in the fabric between dimensions, allowing us to move on.”
Antimony’s eyes widened. “That’s how you got here,” she said. “You ripped a hole in the fabric of our dimension, and you came through it.”
“Not me, personally, but yes,” said Mark. “It was centuries ago. The world where we’d been was no longer . . . welcoming. Once the beings native to a dimension figure out that we exist, things tend to grow unpleasant fairly quickly, and we have to move on to better, safer hunting grounds. It’s a matter of survival. We don’t really have a choice.”
“Other things followed you through the hole you made, you prick,” snapped Antimony. She took a step backward, flexing her hands. Tiny balls of flame danced around her fingertips, burning lambent white.
Sam gave her a concerned look. “Uh, if it’s cool with the rest of you, I’m going to take my sort of overly-excited girlfriend inside to check on James before she sets the barn on fire.”
“Not interested in dying in a fiery conflagration today, so that sounds great, thanks,” said Aunt Evelyn. She glanced at Antimony. “Remember your calming words, sweetie. Ask the mice if you need help with guided meditation.”
“Sure, Mom,” Annie mumbled, and let Sam pull her out of the barn, reducing our numbers by two and lowering the temperature by several degrees. I hadn’t even realized how warm it was getting with her standing there, setting herself on fire.
“Eyes forward, missy,” said Dad, giving another shake of the Raid can. “You want to stay focused on me, unless you want a blast of pesticide to the face.”
“Can I just say how much I’m enjoying this?” asked Mark. “I mean, there’s still a chance you’re going to murder me rather than letting me go, and that’ll suck pretty badly as far as I’m concerned, but I’d probably die anyway when the world ends, and at least this way I get to watch you all torment Heloise first.”
“Wait.” I held up one hand. “Why do you keep saying the world is going to end?”
“Because it is, if you don’t stop it.” Mark looked at me levelly. “Sarah Zellaby is the daughter of an ordinary cuckoo woman. There was nothing special about her until her parents were killed and she was adopted by a crèche-keeper—Angela Baker. Angela instinctively rewired Sarah’s brain in the process of removing what she registered as negative conditioning, creating space sufficient for the brain to undergo substantial physical transformation when Sarah pushed herself too far and strained her psychic capabilities. That was her morph from first instar to second. The second instar lasted less than a week before she entered her second morph, which lasted years. Second morph is dangerous. It’s rare, and cuckoos who enter it are usually ripped apart by their own kin, rather than allowed to finish the process. They have too much power when it ends.”
“So Sarah’s a super-cuckoo,” I said.
“So Sarah was in her second instar when she arrived here,” he said. “She triggered and completed her third instar in the process of removing the trap Amelia had placed inside your mind. The morph into third instar is brief. It’s painless, compared to the variant form of second. It’s a preparational step, if that makes sense.”
“None of this makes sense,” I muttered.
“Biology rarely does,” said Uncle Kevin, eyes gleaming. I realized he was excited. Thanks to the anti-telepathy charm, I couldn’t sense his emotions the way I normally could, which was how I’d been able to miss it for this long.
I glanced at Mom. She had the same half-hungry look on her face, barely concealed behind the veil of her concern for Sarah. I managed, barely, not to wince.
We’re all Prices, even me and Elsie; there’s never really been any question that if and when we marry, it’ll be the “Harrington” part of our names we shed, because we’re Prices. We were born to this fight and to the endless scholarship started by our ancestors when they left the Covenant and realized how little work had been done to preserve the secrets and stories of the various sapient beings who shared this world with humanity. People talk a lot about what it means to be a Price. We’re terrifying to the ones who oppose us, we’re weird to the ones who stand with us, we’re heroes to the ones who depend on us. But there’s one thing that tends to get left out of the conversation, treated as less important than the need to keep fighting and keep winning until the war is over:
We’re scientists. Mom and Uncle Kevin even more than Elsie and me. They’re the direct descendants of Thomas and Alice Price. They were raised to believe that the world can make sense, if they just try hard enough and refuse to stop poking at its soft bits. The cuckoos have been one of the greatest mysteries our family has ever encountered. We’d tried for years to learn more about their biology, without taking apart one of the two cuckoos we considered part of the family. To have one walk into our home and just start talking was, well . . .
It was no wonder this was going so slowly. The people who would normally have hurried things along—the people we instinctively still listened to, thanks to their age and our familial relationship—were too enthralled by the potential to learn something to focus on what actually mattered.
I was focused on what actually mattered. I was focused on Sarah. I took a step toward Mark.
“Third instar is a preparational step, fine,” I said. “Preparing for what?”
“When there are multiple potential Queens ready for their fourth instar, we test them,” said Mark. “I don’t mean ‘we’ as in ‘me,’ I mean ‘we’ as in ‘whoever has them.’ They’re tested, and they’re tried, and when one of them proves stronger than all the others, she’s given the numbers she needs to unlock her fourth metamorphosis. First morph is a necessity, second morph is a gift, third morph is a challenge, and fourth is an ascension.”
“So Sarah’s a god now?” asked Elsie. I doubted Mark could hear, or understand, the warning in her tone. “That’s going to make Thanksgiving dinner awkward.”
“If she survives the process, she’s not going to be a god, she’s going to be a Queen,” said Mark. “She’ll have the strength to do the math and put enough power behind it to blow this dimension to pieces. She’s going to smash this world like an eggshell. She’s going to open the way for the cuckoos to go somewhere else. If you don’t stop her, she’s going to destroy everything she’s ever cared about, and she’s going to destroy you in the process.”