Page 88 of Imaginary Numbers

“I would have done the same thing to you.” Mark shoved his hair out of his eyes and glared at me. “You need to end this. We’re almost out of time.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. The air was growing thick again, not like honey this time, but like it had been saturated with electricity. This was the weight of a storm getting ready to descend, and I didn’t need to be psychic to know that we didn’t have long before whatever was about to happen was too far along to be stopped.

I turned and resumed wading through the cuckoos—what was left of them. Most had rushed off to confront Annie and James, apparently trusting the woman who claimed to be Sarah’s biological mother to stop me. There was another scream behind me, followed by a shout of pain. This time, I recognized the voice. Annie was in trouble.

Annie could take care of herself. I kept forcing my way forward until Sarah was right in front of me, her eyes glowing white, her hair floating several inches above her shoulders and belling out around her head like a corona, like she was underwater and no longer subject to the precise rules and regulations of gravity.

Lymph was still leaking from her nose, ears, and eyes, adding a damp slickness to her face. Her eyes were blazing white, so bright I couldn’t look directly at them. And still her hands were moving, swiping through the air, moving things I couldn’t see into place.

I didn’t allow myself to hesitate. Hesitation wasn’t going to help us now. I stepped up in front of her and grabbed her wrists, stopping her hands. She turned to stare at me, and I fought the urge to shut my eyes against the brightness.

You are interfering, she said.

“I’m here because I need you to stop before you destroy the world,” I said.

The equations must be finished.

“No, Sarah. You need to stop, and let them go, and come home.”

The equations will be finished.

Her voice was a roar of silent thunder, bouncing back and forth inside my skull, echoing off of everything. It was almost impossible to fight the urge to clap my hands over my ears and stop the headache. I forced myself not to move.

“Sarah. Come on. Come back to me. You’re better than this. You’ve always been better than this. None of these people are worth dying over. None of them are important enough to let them make you a monster.”

Let me go.

I took a deep breath. “Make me.”

Her eyes flashed white, bright as dying stars, and the air grew even thicker. I dropped her wrists and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her into a tight embrace, creating as much skin contact as possible.

I love you, I thought, as loudly as I could.

She didn’t pull away. She didn’t put her arms around me, either, and I found myself thinking about Mark, which was stupid. Here I was with my arms around the girl I loved, holding her, maybe for the last time, and I was thinking about Mark.

Mark. Who had managed to come out of his first metamorphosis and into his second instar without killing his parents, because his sister had managed to keep him distracted until his mind had time to assimilate all the information that had been dropped on top of him. All he’d needed was time. Once he had that, everything else had fallen into place. He was still a cuckoo, but he was a new kind of cuckoo, not psychically non-receptive like Grandma, not intentionally modified like Sarah, but . . . new. He might be the closest thing to a real Johrlac we’d ever seen. His sister had, however accidentally, helped him through that transition.

Maybe I could do the same for Sarah.

I pulled back without letting go, just far enough to look into her burning eyes.

“I love you,” I said, aloud this time, and leaned forward and kissed her. I felt her take a short, sharp breath, her lips parting against mine. Then she was kissing me back, and everything was white and everything was burning and everything was white and everything was burning and everything

This time, when the endless whiteness formed around me, I was standing in front of Sarah, almost close enough to reach out and touch her. That was nice, considering I knew our bodies were still tangled together back in the real world. I was a little disappointed not to still be kissing her. Kissing her had been nice, even if I wasn’t sure how much of it she’d actually been aware of.

She wasn’t wearing the white dress here. Instead, she was wearing a long gray skirt and a shapeless green sweater, and her hair was hanging loose around her face, once more subject to the whims of gravity as the rest of us know it, and she had never in her life been more beautiful.

A thin ribbon of clear lymph was running from the corner of her right eye and dripping down her cheek like a viscous tear. I bit my lip. Then I stepped forward and used my thumb to wipe it away, leaving a pearlescent smear behind. It was as thick as human blood, and as warm. It felt wrong. It felt . . . alarming.

“Hey,” I said. “You pulled me into your head when I kissed you. That’s good, right? That means you’re still in control. Right?”

Sarah shook her head silently, another bead of lymph gathering in the corner of her eye.

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Then we’ll both die,” she whispered.

I hesitated before I asked, “If I stay in here and we both die, does the equation get finished? Do you destroy the world? Because that’s what they want you to do, you know. They want you to destroy the world. The whole thing. Movies and comic books and tomato plants and math.”