Page 79 of Imaginary Numbers

The front room of a private complex about an hour outside of Portland, Oregon, in the calm before the storm

YOU SURE LEAVING A cuckoo alone in the barn is the right idea?” Antimony leaned against the wall next to me, taking a swig from a bottle of virulently pink liquid. It looked like she was drinking cotton candy, which was almost enough to put me off the idea of cotton candy forever.

“No,” I said. The mice cheered in the kitchen behind us. Elsie had broken out the panini press as a means of dealing with her own nerves, and was making ham and cheese sandwiches for the colony. It was a weird coping mechanism, but, frankly, I’ve seen weirder. “At the same time, I don’t really care. She’s not going to escape without seizing control of someone’s mind, and with my anti-telepathy charm on her, she’s not seizing anyone’s mind.”

“Mean,” said Annie approvingly. She took another swig of pink. “I hope she suffers. I hope she screams and screams, and no one comes to save her.”

I shot her a sidelong look. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Annie lowered her bottle. “Do you think she was lying when she said there was nothing to be done to make Sarah wake up before she’s done entering her next instar?”

I hesitated.

Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch, talking quietly. Mom had her hand on his cheek; he looked miserable. Heloise had really managed to get to him. Aunt Evie was in her office, gathering medical supplies in case things got ugly, and Uncle Kevin was in the library, researching everything we had on cuckoo biology and other insect-derived cryptids. He’d called Verity in New York before he locked himself away, asking her to go and talk to the local Madhura, who might be able to help. They also might not—or might not be willing to. Madhura are bee-derived, while cuckoos originated from a wasp-like ancestor. Nobody’s exactly friends with the cuckoos, as a species, but there’s a special degree of hatred between the cuckoos and the Madhura.

Still, Verity’s contacts knew Sarah, and they knew she’d helped to stop a Covenant purge, so there was a chance. That was all we were chasing at this point. A chance. A chance that maybe somehow we could stop this before it got any worse. We needed something to go right. We needed something to change.

“New subject,” I said. “Sam and James. Where are they, exactly?”

“Sam’s outside, patrolling the fence line,” she said. “He moves faster than the rest of us. Between that and his anti-telepathy charm, if the cuckoos show up here, he’ll be best suited for both dealing with them and letting the rest of us know what’s going on.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Nope!” She toasted me with her bottle of pink liquid. “I don’t like sending my boyfriend out to deal with psychic serial killers without backup. It sucks and I hate it. But he put up with me traveling backward through time so I could punch the spirit of the crossroads in their nonexistent face, so I’m trying to be cool.”

I thought about that for a moment. “You know, sometimes I wonder what our family looks like from the outside.”

“Like the Munsters if that edgy modern reboot had ever managed to get off the ground.”

“Fair.” I looked around again. “You didn’t say where James was.”

And that was when James started screaming.

It was a high, panicked sound. I shoved away from the wall. So did Annie, dropping her drink as her hands burst into flames. Mom and Dad both leapt to their feet, Mom’s hands suddenly bristling with knives, Dad producing a handgun from somewhere inside his jacket. I couldn’t see what Elsie was doing, but I had no doubt that it was impressive, possibly involving the weaponization of a grilled cheese panini.

The screams cut off. James came tumbling down the stairs, spinning head over heels, until he crashed into the wall at the bottom and was still. Annie yelped and ran to check his pulse, only remembering at the last moment that she should probably extinguish her hands before she touched him.

“He’s alive,” she said, looking up and over her shoulder at the stairs. “It was a bad fall, but—”

She stopped mid-sentence, breathing in sharply. I followed her eyes and felt myself go pale as all the blood drained out of my head, leaving me unsteady and breathless.

Sarah was walking down the stairs.

Sarah, in the white dress she’d been wearing when we found her at the hive, her feet bare and her hair loose around her shoulders, like some sort of sacrifice intended for an unspeakable divinity. But her hair was floating, surrounding her in a loose corona, like she was moving underwater, and the hem of her dress was doing the same, and her eyes were glowing a bright, steady white, like searchlights. She wasn’t hurrying. She wasn’t slowing down, either. She was simply moving in a steady, implacable line, descending toward the fallen James and the crouching Annie.

“Sarah?” I whispered, remembering a heartbeat too late that I wasn’t wearing my anti-telepathy charm anymore. She could reach me if she wanted to. The second realization followed hard on the heels of the first, slamming into me hard enough to physically knock me back a step.

There was no hum.

Sarah was less than twenty feet away, not wearing an anti-telepathy charm, and I couldn’t sense her presence. There was no comforting hum of “friendly telepath in the house.” There was only the ringing silence that had become too damned familiar over the course of the past five years.

“Sarah?” I said, more loudly. I thought it at the same time, and in my mind, I was screaming.

She stopped walking and turned, slowly, to face me. The light in her eyes didn’t fade. The air between us grew static, like it had been laced with an electric charge.

“Sarah, I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re sort of scaring us,” I said. No one else was moving, and so I moved, taking a step toward her. “Can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying? You’re safe now. We went and we found you and we brought you home.”

Home, she said, directly into my mind. Her voice was louder than anything I’d ever heard before, like the ringing of a cloister bell. I clutched the sides of my head. Mom moaned, and I heard something hit the floor. I didn’t turn to see who had dropped what. Taking my eyes off of Sarah suddenly seemed like a terrible idea.