Page 21 of Imaginary Numbers

Those machines would be hooked to Artie if he didn’t wake up soon. Machines to make sure he kept breathing; machines to make sure he had all the fluid and nutrition he needed. All because I’d come home—and he’d come to the warehouse to meet me. All because I was here.

“Did he crack his skull?” I moved to the head of the bed, shoving myself in next to Kevin. They had already sutured Artie’s cheek, stitching it up with a series of quick, tidy lines. Between that and my blood, he might not even scar. That would be good. People don’t like it when they scar.

“There’s nothing physically wrong enough to be keeping him unconscious,” said Evie. “He’s taken worse hits running around the yard. I’m not sure what’s going on. It could just be shock. He’ll probably wake up soon.”

She didn’t sound like she believed it because she didn’t believe it. Her thoughts were a tangle of fears and concerns, none of them fully formed, all of them centered on the idea that if Artie had just been knocked unconscious, as I had been, he would have woken up already. Something was genuinely wrong.

“I don’t think he’s going to wake up on his own,” I said slowly. “And I don’t think . . . I don’t think it was an accident.”

The room grew tight with tension as everyone turned to look at me. I felt a flicker of unfamiliar thought behind me; James had arrived. That was probably good. It meant I’d only need to explain this once.

“There was another cuckoo at the airport,” I said, eyes on Evie. “A woman. She tried to attack me for trespassing on her territory.”

“I take it she didn’t succeed?” asked Evie.

“I mean, she did attack me,” I said. “She just didn’t win.” Technically, I’d attacked her, turning her ambush around on itself. That was just semantics. She had come into that bathroom intending to do me harm, and that made everything I’d done a matter of self-defense.

“What’s a cuckoo?” asked James.

“I’ll explain later,” said Annie.

A feeling of growing horror slithered through the air, as venomous as any snake. I turned. Sam was looking at me. The horror was coming from him. I sighed, shoulders slumping slightly. This was a complication I hadn’t been expecting in my sister’s house, and one I certainly didn’t need right now.

“Sam knows,” I said.

“I’ve never heard them called ‘cuckoos’ before,” he said, eyes still on me. “But she’s pale and dark-haired and that cut on her forehead isn’t bleeding when it should be. She’s a Johrlac. I thought they were a myth. Something people made up to scare little carnie kids into staying away from weirdoes on the midway. She’s real. They’re real, and one of them is in your house, and I think maybe we should all be running away now.”

“Evie?” I said plaintively.

“Sam, Sarah has always been a Johrlac—a cuckoo—and so is my mother, and she’s a part of this family. No one’s running anywhere.” Evie’s voice was calm, level, and left no room for argument. “We can explain more later, once Artie’s awake. Sarah, why don’t you think Artie will wake up on his own?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense for a cuckoo to attack me in the airport, and then for us to have an accident like that,” I said. “The truck came out of nowhere—I didn’t hear the driver’s thoughts before they hit us. How does that make sense? Our headlights were on. If they’d been drunk, they would have been louder than usual, not quieter. I think the cuckoo I beat up decided she wanted to get back at me, and she set an ambush.”

We’d stayed at the warehouse playing reunion for too long. I should have been more careful, should have treated my family the way I’d treated the strangers who’d carried me from the airport to the city—like potential casualties. But no. I’d been too tired and too happy to see them and too certain that they could handle any threats that came their way. I’d left plenty of time for the cuckoo to find me, figure out who I was with, and make plans to get back at me.

“This is my fault,” I said softly, brushing my fingertips against Artie’s cheek and getting rewarded with another burst of blurry, half-formed thought. “He’s not going to wake up on his own because there’s nothing physically wrong with him.”

“Sarah—” said Evie warningly.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, and closed my eyes, and drove myself into Artie’s thoughts like a knife through ice. The world cracked around me, crystalline and perfect, and I had time for exactly one second thought—I shouldn’t be here—before everything shattered and was still.

Seven

“Trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. Even if everything else in the world is trying to deceive you, the numbers will always, always tell the truth.”

—Angela Baker

Still technically at the family compound, but also inside the mind of Arthur Harrington-Price, without an invitation

THE SHARDS OF THOUGHT and mind and math and memory fell down around me in a glittering veil, dusting the ground-not-ground at my feet, lighting up the darkness. I was standing in the middle of a vast plain of stormy nothingness. The nothing itself was the blooming purple black of a bruise, lit up here and there with blooming halos of vivid pink and red. Flashes of what looked like lightning lit up the horizon in a thousand shades of rose.

“Artie?” My voice sounded strange, like a recording of myself. There was no bone conduction here, because my bones weren’t really with me; they were outside this space, standing or sagging next to a motionless man in a hospital bed. Right. Hopefully, Evie or Kevin would have the good sense to grab me and hold me up. I wasn’t sure what would happen if the contact between us was broken while I was still flung almost wholly into Artie’s mind.

That would be a hell of a way to make him understand that I was interested in his body: taking it over seemed a little bit extreme, but it seemed like a reasonably likely outcome of this particular act of raging stupidity. I’d been in Artie’s head before, both with and without an invitation. I’d never been so far inside his head that I wound up in his mindscape.

“That is such a stupid word,” I muttered, and took a step forward . . . or tried to. My legs worked, but I got the distinct feeling that I wasn’t actually moving. The lights on the horizon certainly didn’t move. They stayed exactly where they were, bright and shimmering and impossible, and I stayed exactly where I was, pale and lost and stranded in an infinity of bruised blackness.

“Artie?” My voice echoed as if bouncing off unseen canyon walls. I cupped my hands around my mouth and tried again, shouting louder this time. “Artie!”