“Hey!” I hadn’t realized I was going to shout until I was actually doing it. Everyone except for Heloise turned to look at me. I glared at them, trying to encompass the whole room at once. “If somebody doesn’t tell me what’s going on right now, I’m going to march back inside and tell Mom that this is happening.”
“We’re going to rescue Sarah,” said Annie bluntly. “Mark here is going to lead us straight to her, and we’re going to get her back.”
I looked at Mark. He turned his face slightly away, not meeting my eyes, and I knew. I knew what he wasn’t ready to tell us yet; what I wasn’t ready to hear, because there was still a chance he might be wrong. He’d said there hadn’t been a Queen in centuries, not since the cuckoos had ripped a hole in whatever innocent dimension they’d parasitized before this one. He could still be wrong.
Sarah could still be saved.
“Fine,” I said. “Elsie, you’re driving.”
“I am,” she said. “It’ll be a tight fit, but I’ve crammed five people into my car before.”
“So let’s go.” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine Sarah wants us to keep her waiting any longer than we have to.”
“She’s never been that kind of patient,” Annie agreed. The five of us started for the door, forming a tight little clump with Mark in the middle, where he couldn’t run away.
“Have fun, kids!” Dad called, and then we were outside, and everything was happening.
* * *
Mark got the front passenger seat. I didn’t like putting him up there with my sister and easy access to the steering wheel, but it was that or cram him into the backseat, which would increase the odds of accidentally touching him without a layer of clothing in the way. Our anti-telepathy charms were good. They weren’t good enough to stand up to extended skin contact. We might have decided to trust him for the moment, but that didn’t mean we wanted him inside our minds.
That was where a cuckoo could do the most damage. Once they were past your defenses, they could basically do whatever they wanted, and there was no way to catch or stop them.
No one came out of the house as we drove down to the gate, and through it to the road. Elsie still waited until we were clear to turn on her headlights, and slumped slightly as she did, the worst of the tension leaving her shoulders.
“Okay, that’s one hurdle down,” she said.
“My parents are going to kill me,” said Antimony. “Actual murder. Let’s really enjoy this little rescue mission, because it’s the last one I’m ever going to go on.” She was sitting in the middle, one leg slung over Sam’s to make the footwell less crowded.
Sam snorted. “Your parents are going to be arguing about how they’re supposed to handle this until the sun comes up. We’ll be home and making waffles by then.”
“I like waffles,” said Elsie.
“I know this is only confusing because I can’t read your mind, but your parents aren’t actually going to kill you, are they?” asked Mark. “If they are, I say again, absolutely terrible people. How you got a reputation for being the good guys, I may never know.”
“We have a good propaganda arm,” I said. “You mentioned your parents before. I thought all cuckoos killed their parents when they hit puberty.”
“And a sister,” added Antimony. “Cici. What gives?”
“Right.” Mark sighed. “You know how I don’t want to destroy the world and head off to terrorize a fresh dimension with the rest of my merry band of predators? Well, Cici is why. She’s my little sister. Cecilia. She’s a holy terror. Smart and funny and awful. Really, really awful. She might be as terrible as you. It’s hard for me to measure.”
“Another cuckoo?” asked Elsie.
“Human,” said Mark. “You’re not the only ones who come from a mixed family, you know.”
“I thought you . . .” I stopped, unsure how to finish my thought without sounding like an ass. Then I remembered that Mark was still technically our prisoner and had been working with the people who kidnapped Sarah and forced her into a dangerous, involuntary physical transformation. “I thought cuckoo kids prevented their human parents from having more children.”
“Normally, we do; cuckoos are selfish even as children, and the majority of us are happy as only children,” said Mark. “We don’t like to share. But my parents left me with my grandmother for six months when Dad got a job with a German robotics firm. They must have gotten pregnant their first night in Europe. Mom was huge when they came back.” He sounded frustrated and fond at the same time, like any big brother thinking about the moment when his life turned upside-down. “She waddled when she walked, it was hilarious. And then there was this baby. This screaming, red-faced, wailing baby that everyone said was my little sister. And I remember . . .”
He paused for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “I remember thinking ‘I could wish for this to go away.’ I hadn’t reached my first instar yet, I didn’t have conscious access to the history, but I knew I wasn’t like my parents. I knew sometimes I scraped my knee and I bled clear and everyone acted like that was normal. I knew I could hear other people’s dreams. And that baby . . . I knew, just by looking at her, that she would bleed red like our parents. She wouldn’t feel like she was somehow outside the family, like she came from another planet. It would have been easy to hate her.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“I know it sounds cliché and stupid and all that bullshit, but I poked her. And she grabbed my finger, and her hand was so tiny, and her grip was so strong, and I thought, who cares what color her blood is? Who cares if she looks more like Dad than I do? She’s my sister. She’s mine. I guess I was still selfish—I’m a cuckoo, after all—but selfish doesn’t have to mean bad. You people, you’re selfish. You think you’d be riding to some random cuckoo’s rescue? Fuck, no. You want Sarah back because she’s yours. She belongs to you, and you didn’t agree to lose her, and now you’re going to go get her. Selfishness can be a strength.”
“What about that first instar you were talking about?” asked Annie. “Shouldn’t you have killed your whole family then, like a good little cuckoo? All the ones we’ve been able to talk to have told us that they loved their adoptive parents right up until the moment when they didn’t. Usually that conversation happens right before they try to kill us, so they’re probably biased, but still.”
“Oh, I hit it,” said Mark. “I woke up in the middle of the night with the knowledge and laws of my entire species filling my head, crowding out everything else, making it almost impossible for me to breathe. I was fifteen. Cici was four. I thought she’d probably scream and wake our parents, so I knew I had to kill her first if I wanted it to be easy. It mattered that it be easy. I didn’t want to upset her. That’s probably when I should have realized something was wrong, when I was thinking ‘I don’t want to upset my sister’ and ‘I’m going to murder her’ at the same time, but I was fifteen and I was being eaten alive by memories that weren’t mine, so I think I did okay, all things considered. I got a knife. I went to her room.”