Page 38 of Imaginary Numbers

I cocked my head. “Freezing them as in making them stop moving, or freezing them as in making them cold?”

“To be fair, I’ve discovered that when I make things cold enough, they usually stop moving.” James wiggled his fingers at me. “I can make things very cold, very quickly. Annie says I’m a menace. Annie set her own hair on fire last week, entirely by accident.”

“Annie was setting pit-traps for her siblings when she was six; Annie doesn’t get to talk,” I said.

James laughed, apparently surprised. “I’ll be honest: you’re nothing like I expected you to be.”

“You had expectations?” It was weird to think he already knew about me, when I’d never heard a word about him. I wanted to ask him to take his anti-telepathy charm off, to make this conversation slightly more normal for me. I needed to know what he was feeling, and to hear the wisps of thought that would reach me even without physical contact. Instead, I tucked my hands into my lap, where I wouldn’t be so much as tempted to reach for his protection.

James was too new and too unaccustomed to cuckoos and most of all, too not a Price. He didn’t have Fran’s immunity. I would rewire his brain without meaning to, and he’d be the brother I’d never wanted inside of the evening. That wouldn’t be fair to him, or to Annie, who had actually gone to the trouble of adopting him and bringing him home.

“They told me you were this amazing mathematician, and a little shy, and totally in love with your cousin Artie—which, to be fair, seems to have been true, so I assume the rest is also pretty accurate,” said James. “Annie said you weren’t human, but she didn’t go into a lot of detail, not the way she did tonight. I’m assuming she didn’t want to prejudice me against you.”

“We’ve had problems with that before,” I said. “Mom says that when Kevin and Evie got married, Grandma Alice actually tried to break up the wedding. I don’t mean ‘disrupt’—although she did that, too—I mean break. She didn’t like cuckoos, which is understandable. We’re hard to like.” She still didn’t like most cuckoos or trust them as far as she could throw them. As a species, we’re dangerous.

The last few hours had been a perfect demonstration of that. I shivered at the thought of how close Artie had come to slipping into an actual coma. We weren’t medically set up for that, and there weren’t any cryptid-friendly hospitals within a day’s drive. He could have died because of what that cuckoo had done to his brain.

And what about what this cuckoo had done to his brain? No matter how much he liked to lean on Fran’s vaunted resistance to our influence, I’d been inside his mindscape and making changes while he was unconscious and unable to fight me. Our cousins and his sister had been saying we were being stupid about each other for years, sure. He’d never been willing to make a move before. He’d never even implied that he might want to. Had I changed his mind in the process of freeing him from the other cuckoo’s influence?

Was I just as bad as she was?

“Is something wrong?” asked James.

I blinked, shaking my head a little as I tried to focus on him. “What?”

“You zoned out for a moment there.”

“Oh.” I gave my head another small shake. “I’m sorry. It’s been a really long day, and I’m not used to being around this many people anymore. I’ve been pretty isolated while I was recovering from my injuries.”

“Which you got saving Antimony’s older sister from the Covenant of St. George,” said James.

I nodded.

“That was fairly brave of you, to hear the story. I’ll admit, I always thought you were another magic-user, and that your spell had gone somehow wrong. ‘Actual, literal superhero’ never occurred to me.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Annie and Verity are way better superheroes than I am. They actually work for what they can do. When we were kids, Verity was never around, because she was always going to another dance lesson. And Annie spent half her time on the balance beam or the trapeze rig. I’m a freak of nature. They’re amazing.”

“Telepathy is fairly amazing, too,” said James.

“Not when the rest of the world isn’t telepathic.” I looked at my computer screen. It wasn’t connected to the house Wi-Fi, which was sort of a relief. If Artie had allowed them to stick with the same password for five years, I would have been forced to yell at him. A lot. “No one thinks about what they’re thinking. The number of people who’ve spent hours being friendly and helpful and kind to my face, all while wondering what I’d look like naked, is sort of genuinely horrifying. Do you have the new Wi-Fi password?”

“It’s on the fridge,” said James.

He seemed to take my request as a cue that the conversation was over; by the time I’d walked to the fridge, found the paper he was talking about, returned to my computer, and figured out the necessary transcription key to find the actual password, he was once again deep in his book. Honestly, it was a bit of a relief. He seemed nice enough, and Annie usually had good taste in people, but I needed some peace before I went up to bed and cut myself off from the world again.

With no one more specific to focus on, my mind relaxed and reached out, locating and identifying my family members one by one. Annie was upstairs, her thoughts preoccupied with a fiercely immediate physicality that told me where Sam was. Evie, Kevin, Ted, and Jane were all out in the barn, focused on their work. The mice were like glitter in the walls, bright and constant and ever-moving, too small and quick for me to really focus on them.

I could. They had minds like anything else, and if it has a mind, I can read it. But minds that small take work, and I wasn’t in the mood for work. I was in the mood for letting myself go, sinking deeper and deeper into the comforting lull of answering email and looking at pictures of kittens and basking in the quiet glow of the thoughts around me, letting them wrap around me like a blanket.

At some point, James got up and left the room. It didn’t change the noise around me. Anti-telepathy charms are dangerous that way. When you evolve to depend on a sense, whether it’s as basic as touch or as esoteric as telepathy, removing it from the equation can unbalance and upset things.

I pulled up a math game, one where I had to merge squares to form larger and larger numbers, chasing a distant, golden goal. The tension slipped out of my shoulders as I focused on the screen. I’d done it. I’d made it to Oregon without getting hurt; I’d defeated the cuckoo who wanted to chase me out of her territory; I’d saved Artie. It was sad that the cuckoo had died, but not sad enough for me to grieve for her. She’d made her choices. She didn’t deserve and probably wouldn’t want my pity.

The numbers on my screen shifted and increased, one flowing into the next. It was a dance of simple addition, and it was so soothing. I relaxed further, watching the numbers dance. It was going to be okay. The cuckoo in the woods had been a threat and she wasn’t anymore. I had my family around me. I was safe.

My computer beeped, telling me I had an email. I switched tabs. Maybe it was Artie. Maybe he’d realized that he didn’t want to kiss me again; now that he was far enough away, any influence I’d been exerting over him would be fading into nothingness, leaving him free to make his own decisions. If he decided he didn’t really want to be with me, it would sting. But if it was the truth, that would also be a good thing. I didn’t want to make him love me with a lie. I wanted him to love me because I was worth loving.

The email wasn’t from Artie. I didn’t recognize the sender’s name, and the subject header—“Can you give me a second? I just want to talk”—didn’t exactly look like spam. There were no attachments. As long as I didn’t click any links, I’d be safe. I still frowned as I opened the message.