Page 85 of Imaginary Numbers

“Can they not see us when they’re like that?” asked James.

“It’s . . . complicated,” I said. “Their eyes still work, but Sarah used to say it was like trying to watch two shows at the same time on the same screen, and Mark said they were getting sunk in the corona of her metamorphosis before. Things get all jumbled together, and sometimes it’s easier to let go of what you think you see and focus on what you know you see.”

“Which means the cuckoos we run across will either be focused on maintaining control over the townspeople or working to help Sarah do her big math problem,” said Annie. “As long as we’re quiet and don’t touch any of them, we should be able to keep moving without much concern that they’re going to stop us and ask what we’re doing here. They probably won’t even notice we’re here.”

“I’m assuming that by ‘ask’ you mean ‘attack,’” said James.

“See, you’re a member of the family,” said Annie.

I resisted the urge to snap at them. Sometimes whistling past the proverbial graveyard is the only way to stay sane in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Instead, I pushed away from the wall and started walking again, trying to think about the shape of the campus the way a cuckoo would.

Cuckoos were originally insects. Wasps. They were mostly solitary, but when they gathered in a large number, they still fell into the habits of a hive. It would make sense, then, for them to look for the central point of the campus—the point with the heaviest defenses between it and the outside world. Even if those defenses were nothing more than concrete and brick, they’d still be better than nothing to a species that knew, all the way to the bottom of its DNA, that sometimes it was essential to run and hide.

I didn’t know Iowa State, but I knew college campuses. They’re usually built around some sort of central green space, even in the heart of cities; something that students could use as an informal gathering space. Call it a quad or call it a field, its purpose was the same. I didn’t know why the cuckoos had chosen Iowa State—I would have been less surprised by Buckley Township in Michigan, where my family used to live—but if they were at the university, it was because they’d found a space large enough to suit their needs. We just had to do the same.

Annie and James flanked me as we walked, which created the unpleasant sensation of being baked and frozen at the same time. Little flames flickered around Annie’s fingers, blue-white in their intensity, while the air surrounding James seemed crystalline and clear, as bright and deadly as a winter morning. It made me feel like I was more than a little outgunned heading into this fight. All I could do was smell really nice and make people want to do things for me, and even that didn’t work on cuckoos.

Oh, and I could punch. I could punch pretty damn hard. Maybe punching would be the solution to my problem.

Or maybe it would involve too much physical contact with unfriendly cuckoos and make my problem worse. No one really knows why Great-Grandma Fran was resistant to cuckoo influence. We know it must have been genetic, since she’s passed it down to her descendants, but without having a way to study it, we’ve never been able to learn its exact limitations. James wasn’t immune to my pheromones, and the anti-telepathy charm wouldn’t stop him from getting enthralled again if one of the cuckoos decided to take me over and use me as a weapon.

“I should never have left my basement,” I muttered.

“Wish I didn’t agree,” said Annie.

Then we came around a bend in the path, leading us to the top of a small ridge. Beyond it stretched a vast green area, large enough to look like some sort of private park. All three of us stopped where we were. My heart felt like it was trying to climb up my throat and run away to someplace friendlier. Someplace where we were less guaranteed to die in the next, say, five minutes.

The green space was filled with cuckoos. Hundreds of cuckoos, maybe even thousands of cuckoos, more than I had ever considered might exist. They were packed in like the crowds at Comic-Con, shoulder to shoulder, seeming to seek skin contact with one another. Their eyes were white, their faces tilted toward the sky.

I saw elderly cuckoos, skin seamed with wrinkles and hair streaked with silver. I saw children, some as young as three or four, still in their pajamas, barefoot in the grass. There weren’t any babies. I hoped that meant they’d been left with their unwitting foster parents, and not that they’d all been killed. And then I felt bad for hoping that, since it would mean those families still had ticking time bombs buried in their midst. Which was worse, hoping for dead babies or hoping for family annihilations?

Sometimes there’s no good answer to a bad situation. Sometimes there’s only trying to find the answer that results in the fewest casualties.

Annie nudged me with her elbow. “Look,” she whispered, voice so low that it was like listening to the wind.

I looked.

The cuckoos, tight-packed as they were, had nonetheless arranged themselves in a series of concentric circles, with space between each tier. There was no mingling of one tier into the next: they’d drawn their divisions and they were standing by them. More, most of the tiers seemed to be divided roughly by age. The very youngest and the very oldest were in the outside ring. The tier after that consisted mostly of teenagers, followed by people who looked to be roughly in their early twenties, and so on. The final, central ring was made up of people about my parents’ age.

They were dividing themselves according to instar. But that didn’t explain why that final ring was so large, or why the elders were with the larval cuckoos, or why there was so much open space between them—

And then one of the older cuckoos opened his mouth and made a pained hissing, clicking sound that hurt my ears, even as his eyes abruptly flashed a blazing supernova white. The light in them died a split second later, and he collapsed forward, nearly landing on the children who had been standing directly front of him. They moved to the side and kept moving until a break had formed in the ring. Several cuckoos approached from the side, entering the break and scooping up the body—and it was a body now; he wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing, wasn’t doing anything at all—before carrying it briskly away. The ring moved back together, closing the gap.

“They’re organized by instar,” I said softly. “More power the closer in you get to the middle.”

“What’s at the middle?” asked James.

I was direly afraid I already knew.

More cuckoos fell every few seconds, and when they did, the cleaners were there to scoop them up and carry them away. I moved toward the edge of the nearest ring, gesturing for the others to follow me, and when the next cuckoo fell, I started forward.

What followed was the most stressful game of live-action Frogger that I’m ever likely to be a part of. When a cuckoo fell, the rings would shift to make room for the ones who came to remove the body. That would give us the opening we needed to push forward more, without bringing them all down on our heads.

At one point, James stumbled on the uneven ground, and his arm brushed against a cuckoo moving past us with the body of a child slung across her shoulder. She stopped, looking momentarily confused. Then she started walking again, and we all three started breathing again.

I knew what we were going to find at the center of the geometric formation of silent, white-eyed bodies, and even so, it was like a blow when we finally reached the bottom of the hill and I could see into the last ring. They had arranged themselves to surround a little slice of green, a perfect circle defined by their bodies. And there, at the middle, was Sarah.

She was still wearing her white dress. I hadn’t been expecting anything else. There were grass stains on the hem, and somehow that made it even worse. She was barefoot and smeared in green, and her eyes were as bright as stars, while her hands moved through the air like she was conducting a silent symphony of numbers, moving things that only she could see from one place to another.