Something was wrong.
“As if the big white room didn’t tell you that part,” I muttered, and started walking. It wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, but it was something to do, and that made it better than standing around waiting for the invisible floor to drop out from under my feet and send me plummeting into the void. I am not a big fan of plummeting. If I had to commit to a position, I’d probably have to say that I was anti-plummeting.
I kept walking, and a smudge appeared on the horizon. Appeared with the horizon; until there was something to break up the infinite whiteness of it all, there couldn’t really be said to be a horizon. It needed something to define it. I started walking faster.
The smudge began to take geometric shape. It was a half-circle of blackboards, pushed together like a soundstage from a movie about mathematicians trying to save the world. There was a figure there, standing in the middle of the broken ring. I was too far away to make out details, but I could see that they were wearing an ankle-length skirt and a virtually shapeless sweater, the sort of thing that was more warm than fashionable, that would protect the wearer from notice.
I broke into a run.
The closer I got, the more details I could see. The figure became a woman became a cuckoo became Sarah, chalk smudges on her nose and chin, lips drawn down in the so-familiar, so-beloved expression of pensive contemplation that she’d been wearing since we were kids sitting and coloring at the same table.
(Well, I’d been coloring. She’d been doing calculus in crayon, and when we’d finished, Aunt Evelyn had pronounced us both to be amazing artists and hung our projects side-by-side on the refrigerator.)
“Sarah!” I sped up. I wasn’t winded at all, which was, like the lack of my pheromones, probably a bad sign. There was a decent chance I was dead, and this was the afterlife, although if that was the case, my Aunt Mary had way underplayed how much eternity sucked.
Sarah didn’t turn. She kept writing figures on the chalkboard, moving at a steady, unhurried pace, like she had all the time in the world. Which was probably true—if we were dead.
Maybe this was the cuckoo afterlife, and I’d been pulled into it because I’d been touching Sarah when—what? When the other cuckoos caught up with us and forced Elsie to crash the car? But that didn’t make sense. Not only had Elsie still been wearing her anti-telepathy charm, but if Mark had been telling the truth—about anything—the cuckoos were going to want Sarah back. She was their key to escaping this world and this dimension and moving on to someplace that wasn’t prepared for them. Which meant Sarah wasn’t dead. Which meant I wasn’t dead.
It was a bit of a relief to realize that this probably wasn’t the afterlife. I know several ghosts personally—I have two dead aunts who I love a lot—but that doesn’t mean I want to bite the big one before I see the next season of Doctor Who. But if we weren’t dead . . .
“Uh, Sarah? Are we inside your head right now? Because I don’t think I’m supposed to be inside your head.”
She kept writing figures on the blackboard, not looking at me.
“Are you ignoring me, or can you not hear me? I mean, we’re in a funky infinite whiteness, which is really Grant Morrison-esque and a little bit upsetting, so I’m trying not to think about it too hard, and I guess that could mean your perceptions are filtering me out, but I’d really like it if you’d talk to me.”
She kept writing.
“Sarah?” I touched her shoulder gingerly. “Sarah, it’s me. It’s Art—”
She turned her head, not all the way, but far enough for me to catch the sudden flash of white in her eyes. I was knocked back immediately, going sprawling on the floor that wasn’t a floor, landing hard enough to take my breath away. Sarah returned her attention to the chalkboard.
“Okay, that’s not good,” I muttered, pushing myself to my feet. “Come on, Sarah, you need to cut this out. Telekinesis? Really? When did you figure out how to move things with your mind?”
Was it my imagination, or did the corner of her mouth twitch? Since we were probably inside Sarah’s head right now, I wasn’t sure whether I actually got to have an imagination. Telepaths are really confusing.
More carefully this time, I began walking back over to her. “Do you know what’s going on? Because I’m not going to lie to you, this shit is weird, and it’s getting weirder all the time. I think we need to get out of here.”
Sarah kept writing.
“I’m afraid if I touch you again, I’ll get knocked across the—this isn’t exactly a room, you know. More a featureless void. Please don’t knock me across the featureless void. It’s not fun. I didn’t enjoy it the first time. I’m sort of worried that I might just keep flying away from you forever, since there’s nothing to stop me. How is gravity even working here?”
Again that twitch, before she went placidly back to writing on her blackboard. I turned to face it. The numbers—well, partially numbers; her idea of math involved more letters than a bowl of alphabet soup—were arrayed in straight lines, broken here and there by little squared-off chunks of text that had been written smaller, like they were supposed to be the algebraic equivalent of a footnote. None of it made any sense. That wasn’t new.
What was new was the way some of the strings of numbers seemed to phase in and out of reality, like they were too tightly written to maintain their grasp on a single linear plane. I squinted. They kept moving.
“This is bad.”
Sarah kept writing.
“Look, I get that you’re in a smart-person fugue and all, and normally I wouldn’t bother you while you were undermining the fabric of the universe with mathematics, but you do understand that this is bad, right? Numbers shouldn’t be sufficient to change the laws of physics. They should sit quietly and think about what they’ve done until it’s time for someone to figure out the tip.”
Sarah kept writing.
“Dammit, Sarah, you’re going to kill us all if you don’t stop.”
Sarah stopped.
So did I, just staring at her for a long moment, until I saw her hand—still holding the chalk—begin to shake. It was a small, almost imperceptible tremor. I decided to take the risk and reached out to carefully pluck the chalk out of her fingers.
She didn’t resist. She also didn’t fling me telekinetically away. I was willing to take that as a win.
“Can you hear me?” I asked.
She stared at the chalkboard and didn’t reply.
“Sarah, if you can hear me, it’s really me. It’s Artie. We’re not dead, so I think . . . I think this is your mindscape, and you’re in the middle of what the other cuckoos called your metamorphosis. You’re entering your fourth instar, which means you’re becoming a better cuckoo. Bigger and stronger and everything. I’m really here. I’m with you in the real world, where your body is, and I’m touching you, and I think that was enough to let you pull me in with you. If you can hear me, please. Look at me? Say something? Say anything. I want to help you. I need you to tell me what you need me to do. I need you to tell me you’re still . . .” I trailed off. There were no good endings to that sentence.