Page 59 of Imaginary Numbers

Mom, Aunt Evie, and Uncle Kevin had all come back to the barn while we were in the process of tying Mark to the chair. He’d held perfectly still during the process, not complaining at all, not even when we got a little overenthusiastic with the knots.

“I don’t think anyone has ever successfully captured a cuckoo alive before, and now we have two in one night,” commented Mom, looking approvingly at the cuffs holding Heloise to the table. “Does this mean we can take one apart?”

“Again, really bloodthirsty for the good guys,” said Mark. “Do you ever chill?”

“Sarah’s missing,” said Antimony. “Your friend over there tried to use my brother to murder my cousin. Oh, and you just told us your hive was planning to destroy the world. Why would we chill, exactly?”

“Because you’re the good guys,” said Mark.

“Anyone who thinks good means chill needs to spend more time with my family,” said Elsie. She had produced a nail file from her purse and was meticulously filing her nails, checking them carefully for snags and imperfections. She managed to look completely unconcerned with everything that was going on around her. That was when she was at her most dangerous.

“We’ve never been chill,” she continued, still filing. “Chill doesn’t save anybody. We like saving people. The ones who can be saved, anyway. Some of them were always beyond salvation.” She blew on her nails. “Those ones, we bury in the woods.”

“Where is Sarah?” I demanded.

Mark turned to look at me, eyes glinting white again. “Who makes those charms for you people? They deserve a raise. I can’t even get past the first layer.”

“I make them,” said Annie. “Me and James. Who your friend over there aimed like a gun and fired. I’m not happy with her.”

“She’s not my friend,” said Mark. He leaned back as far as the ropes would allow, looking at us all one by one. “Do you not understand how cuckoos work? We don’t have friends. We don’t have families. We’re every man for himself, all the time, from the day we’re born until the day we die. A hive only comes together when absolutely necessary, and it’s never for a good reason.”

“So why did yours come together?” I asked.

“For Sarah.” He looked momentarily almost ashamed. It was a strange expression to see on a cuckoo. “How much do you know?”

“What?”

“You heard me.” His eyes flashed white again. “Everyone knows about you. The Prices. The Healys. You were the first people to figure out that we existed, and keep knowing that we existed, even when we tried to make you forget. It’s because of you that this world has turned dangerous for us.” He paused to chuckle, darkly. “Well. Because of you, and because of video surveillance. We can change a mind, but we can’t change a camera. Another few years and this whole world is going to be like London. Too filmed to risk. Still, we might have held out a few more decades if it weren’t for you people screwing everything up for us. So I’m asking you, how much do you know? I need to know where to start.”

“We know nothing,” said Mom, stepping forward. “Start there. Start with the assumption that we know nothing, and we need you to tell us everything. And if you’re wrong, we’ll just have a few things confirmed. It’s not like most of the enemy cuckoos we’ve dealt with have been inclined to give us good intel.”

“Fine,” said Mark. He took a deep breath. “This is what you need to know in order to understand what’s about to happen . . .”

Sixteen

“People feel smart when they tell you ‘Frankenstein’ was the doctor, not the monster. They’re wrong. Frankenstein—Dr. Frankenstein—was always the monster. That’s the whole point. Sometimes evil is so damn beautiful it hurts.”

—Martin Baker

In the barn, getting a history lesson from a monster

WE COME FROM A dimension called ‘Johrlar.’ I don’t know where the root word came from. No one does anymore. We’re the children of exiles, people who’d been thrown out of Johrlar for breaking the rules. I don’t know what rules we broke, either. Johrlac—cuckoos—don’t write anything down. Our history is given to us while we’re in the womb, passed down from mother to child as we gestate. Every cuckoo is born with the whole of our living memory already waiting for us. But we’re still larval. We haven’t even reached our first instar yet. If we had access to everything we knew, it would overwhelm us, and we would never be able to mature into individuals. So the knowledge is hidden from us until our minds are developed enough to absorb it without being overwhelmed. Our first metamorphosis looks like human puberty. Our bodies change, our brains expand, and the whole history of our people unlocks. It can be . . . a shock, to the developing psyche.”

“You mean they snap and murder everyone around them,” said Antimony.

“Something like that,” said Mark. He didn’t sound sorry about it, exactly; more resigned, like this was some nasty mess that he had somehow ended up responsible for. “A cuckoo in morph is incapable of understanding that anyone else actually exists, even other cuckoos. We assume they must have had some way of leavening the shock on Johrlar, but if they did, it’s part of the missing history. We know there are big swaths of knowledge that have been cut out of our inherited memories.”

“Cut out how?” asked Mom.

“As I said, we’re the descendants of exiles, even if we don’t know what their crimes were,” said Mark. “The memory transference is not exact, or we’d all be clones of our parents, little buds carrying their precise personalities into the future. We get more of a general sense of history, things that were big enough or catastrophic enough to carry forward. We get the rules of behavior. We get something that looks a lot like instinct, which is good, because we don’t have instincts anymore.”

“You don’t need them,” said Aunt Evie. “Not if you’re getting a handbook to proper behavior straight from your mother’s mind. Instincts would only get in the way.”

Mark nodded, looking relieved that at least one of us understood what he was talking about. “Exactly. And the memories, they play an essential role in our maturation, because their release triggers a chemical response that properly finishes our metamorphosis.”

“If you don’t start explaining what this has to do with Sarah, I’m going to cut your toes off one by one and make you eat them,” I said.

Everyone went quiet as they turned to look at me. Sam let out a long, low whistle.