Page 80 of Imaginary Numbers

Yes, she continued, still in that silent, impossible scream. Home is part of the equation. This is the wrong number.

“I don’t like the look of this,” said Elsie. I glanced back, long enough to see her standing right behind me.

“I don’t like it either,” I said grimly, and returned my attention to Sarah. She seemed like the biggest threat, in the moment. “Sarah, you are home. Try to remember where you are. Try to see us. I know it may be hard right now, but we’re right here. Please.”

Sarah tilted her head to the side. Her hair didn’t move. It stayed floating in the air around her, unmoving, unchanged. Somehow that was the most terrifying thing she’d done yet.

Yes, she said, as calm as if she had been trying to order something from a recalcitrant drive-through window. You’re right here. That’s part of the problem. The math doesn’t work if you’re right here. But I can fix it.

The air grew even heavier, like a storm was rolling in.

Aunt Evie had grown up in a house with a cuckoo. Had spent her childhood with a cuckoo for a mother, learning how to be human from someone who had had to learn those lessons second-hand. Maybe that was why the next voice I heard was hers.

“Get down!” she shrieked as she hurled what looked like a water balloon into the center of the room. It burst on impact with the floor, filling the air with a white, powdery substance. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose. Unless someone has been beating erasers in a classroom, nothing that fills the air with powder is a good thing.

Interesting, said Sarah’s echoing mental voice, as the light in her eyes somehow grew even brighter, until looking at her face was like trying to look directly into the sun. The air around her pulsed, her hair rising further away from her shoulders, and the powder began moving in fractal swirls toward a single spot in the air, pulling itself together until it had formed a perfect sphere. It was as if she had somehow reconstituted the water balloon without the actual “balloon part.”

A shiver ran across my skin. We’d talked about telekinesis before, how she felt like it was somehow connected to telepathy in the real world—not just in comic books, where good was good and bad was bad and everyone looked good in spandex. More importantly, we’d talked about the sheer amount of power it would require.

No wonder her eyes were glowing like that. She was eating herself alive, kicking off chemical reactions in her brain that would allow her to influence the world around her.

“Sarah.” I took a step toward her. “You need to stop.”

Why did you try to hurt me? She was still looking at the ball of white material she’d siphoned from the air. This would have hurt me. That was foolish of you.

I realized two things at the same time, and both of them were terrible.

The first was that the white stuff Aunt Evie had thrown at Sarah—her sister—must have been powdered theobromine. Cuckoos are allergic to theobromine. They love tomatoes, and they hate chocolate. It makes them itchy. That much of the stuff would have been enough to cause a serious reaction in a human or Lilu. In a cuckoo . . .

It could have killed her. Aunt Evie, who loved her sister, who loved her mother, who talked about the importance of family as much as anyone, had just happened to have a water balloon filled with theobromine in her office, waiting to be flung. She’d prepared for this. She’d known that it was possible, and she’d prepared.

The second was that everyone else was still wearing their anti-telepathy charms. They weren’t flinching from the volume of Sarah’s mental voice because they couldn’t hear it. They didn’t know how angry she was.

“Guys, she’s pissed,” I said, stopping where I was. “Aunt Evie, you might want to run.”

The ball of compressed theobromine suddenly shot across the room like it had been fired by an invisible slingshot. I heard it strike something. I heard Aunt Evie start choking. Dad and Elsie ran to help her. Elsie was shouting, her words rendered incomprehensible by Aunt Evie’s increasing respiratory distress and the sound of footsteps thundering across the floor.

Mom was suddenly next to me, hands bristling with knives. Most Prices have trained, at least a little, in throwing knives. They’re less deadly than guns, but they’re quieter, and they get the job done. “I’m sorry,” she said, glancing to me, and pulled her hand back to start throwing.

Sarah looked at her, eyes flaring whiter still. Mom shouted in dismay as her feet left the floor. Then she slammed into the ceiling and stuck there, her arms stretched out from her body, her hands still full of knives.

“Mom!” I cried, in dismay. I looked frantically at Sarah. “Let her down. Sarah, you have to let her down.”

This isn’t the right location, and you’re all being irrational. I need to remove you. I need to remove myself. Fine. Sarah moved her hands for the first time, swiping them through the air in front of her like she was browsing through a touchscreen, pulling up the pieces she wanted and discarding the pieces she didn’t. There was a terrible, somehow meaty ripping sound, and a jagged tear appeared in the air at the middle of the living room, bleeding white light into the room.

I felt something run up my leg. The mice. They’d been watching this whole thing, and some of them were scared enough to take refuge with the nearest available divinity. More were probably hiding themselves in Annie’s hair and clothes. And none of that was going to save them if Sarah brought the house down on us.

“Sarah!” I howled, and started toward her again, or tried to. The air itself was pushing back against me. It was like wading through quicksand, thick and clinging and terrible. “Sarah, you have to stop!”

Annie was staggering to her feet, James by her side, one arm draped around her shoulder so she could support his weight. I wasn’t actually sure he was awake. I was sure that holding him like that was keeping her from accessing her fire. If she let go, he would fall down. Sarah didn’t seem to have noticed them. Her attention, such as it was, was divided between the impossible tear in our living room and me.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t want Sarah’s attention and I had it. It was getting hard to breathe. Mom was still pinned to the ceiling, and Dad and Elsie were still somewhere in the house trying to keep Aunt Evie from dying of theobromine poisoning. We were far enough away from the library that it was possible Uncle Kevin didn’t even know things had gone so terribly, terribly wrong.

This was up to us. Just us. And I didn’t know if I could do it.

“Sarah, please,” I said, still forcing my way through the heavy air toward her. “Please. It’s me. It’s Artie. You’re my best friend. Don’t you remember that? I . . .”

Annie was approaching Sarah from behind, James still draped against her. I didn’t know what she was going to do. I wasn’t sure she knew what she was going to do. But if there was any way to end this without hurting Sarah, she was going to find it. And with the anti-telepathy charm in her pocket, Annie was functionally invisible right now. Sarah didn’t know she was coming. As long as I didn’t think about it too loudly, there was a chance.