He paused, long enough to turn his face toward the window and watch the dark trees rolling by outside. “She had this doll. This stupid doll. If you squeezed it, it was supposed to say ‘Mama.’ Cici was hard on her toys—she still is—and she’d bashed it against the wall until the voice box broke, and all it did when you squeezed it was make this awful moaning sound. I stepped on it on my way into her room. She woke up. She looked at me with those big brown eyes, and she asked if we were playing a game called ‘horror movie.’ And I said yes, we were, and the first person to scream would lose.” Mark chuckled darkly. “I figured it would keep her quiet long enough for me to take care of her, you know? Only instead, she jumped out of bed and ran off giggling, and I had to chase after her so she wouldn’t wake our parents, and every time I almost caught her, she’d get away again. It was almost morning before I realized I was letting her get away. She’d managed to keep me running until the murderous period passed and it didn’t matter that I knew what I was. It didn’t matter because I loved her, and I loved my parents, and I wasn’t going to hurt them.”
“And so you kept them,” I said.
“I kept them,” Mark agreed. “Cici’s twelve now. She’s a living nightmare pretending to be a little girl, and I’m grateful every single day that she woke up before I could do something I couldn’t take back. It’s why I knew the plan—the big, amazing, this-is-gonna-work plan—was going to fail.”
“How’s that?” asked Sam.
“A couple of years ago, I lost her at the mall. Turned around and she was gone. I pretty much hate most humans. Being able to read their minds will do that to a guy. The things people think when they don’t know someone’s looking . . .” He shuddered. “Anyway, she was just gone. So I freaked out and went looking for her, thinking the worst, thinking I’d forced myself not to be a monster for her sake and then failed to protect her from the other monsters, when she came running out of this store, grabbed my arm, and said a man who looked just like me but wasn’t had tried to take her. I knew she had to mean another cuckoo—we’d clearly wandered into someone’s hunting grounds, and he’d assumed I was poaching, so he’d taken her to teach me a lesson—but I also know that we all look alike to humans. I asked how she knew it wasn’t me. She said he didn’t hum. Humans who spend enough time around us after our first instar acclimate to our presence. They learn how to tell us apart, and we can’t change their minds the same way we can before they get attuned to us. It’s a double-edged sword. The more time we spend with someone the more we can influence them, at first, but eventually they get desensitized, and it gets so much harder.”
“You know about the hum,” I said.
“Once Cici told me, yeah. I started watching for it. I always know when she’s around, or our folks. They change the texture of the air.” Mark shook his head. “I won’t lose them. They’re mine.”
“What happened to the cuckoo who took your sister?” asked Elsie.
“I went back to the mall the next day, alone, waited for him to approach me, stabbed him in the stomach fifteen times, dumped him out back, and set his corpse on fire,” said Mark, as matter-of-fact as if he’d been placing an order at McDonalds. “Nobody touches my family.”
“But you helped Heloise touch ours,” I said.
“I helped Ingrid, who, please remember, is Sarah’s biological mother, lure her away from you. I’m not saying I didn’t. She knows where I live. She knows where my family lives. I have no real desire to be at war with you—you are all terrible, terrifying people—but I wasn’t going to risk Cici’s life because your cousin was somehow more important than she is. She’s not. I did what I was told, I escaped as soon as I could, and now I’m helping you. Be grateful for that part. I could have told Ingrid about the hum. I could have sided with my hive against humanity. I’m not, because I love my sister. Take the fucking win.”
Elsie took the next curve more sharply than she needed to. Mark’s forehead thumped against the glass of the passenger side window. He swore, rubbing his head as he turned to glare at her.
It was really a pity cuckoos couldn’t understand the nuances of human expressions. The sweetness of Elsie’s smile was a thing of pure and genuine beauty.
“Oops,” she said.
Mark kept rubbing his head but didn’t say anything.
“How many cuckoos are in your hive?” asked Antimony.
“With Heloise out of the picture, and not counting myself, three,” he said. “If Sarah’s already finished with her instar, four, and the fourth is a big fat ‘game over’ for the rest of us. She’ll be suggestible. Ingrid is right there to make suggestions.”
“Sarah won’t hurt us.” My voice wavered, making my statement sound almost more like a question.
Mark twisted in his seat to face me directly. He looked almost sorry. Somehow, that was the most terrifying thing to happen in this entire terrifying night.
“Sarah won’t have a choice,” he said. “No one really knows for sure what a Queen is like, because we get one per dimension. She enters her fourth instar, she blows a hole in reality, and if she’s lucky, it kills her, because if she’s not lucky, she melts her own brain in the process of getting the math to work just the way she wants it to, and we’re not a species of caretakers.”
“You mean you’d just leave her to die?” asked Sam.
“Sure,” said Mark. “Let’s go with that.”
“Maybe she hasn’t entered her fourth instar yet,” said Antimony.
“Then maybe we have a chance,” said Mark. He turned back to Elsie. “I’d drive faster if I were you.”
Elsie slammed her foot down on the gas.
I closed my eyes. The anti-telepathy charm around my neck suddenly seemed impossibly heavy. If Sarah was in range, I didn’t know it. I couldn’t know it. And that meant she couldn’t know we were coming for her. She was cut off. She was alone.
She had to be so scared.
We’re on our way, Sarah, I thought, and wished there was any way I could lie to myself and believe she would hear me. Hold on, because we’re coming. We’re coming just as fast as we can.
Hold on.
Eighteen
“Breathe, baby, breathe. You breathe and you keep on breathing. That’s the only thing I’m going to ask of you today. You just keep on breathing.”
—Enid Healy
In the shining whiteness of the infinite void, which sort of sucks, to be honest