Chapter 1
One
“Promises are always important. Promises to children are the foundations of who we are. Make them carefully, if you’re going to make them at all.”
—Angela Baker
An only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio
Now
WAKING UP IN OHIO MEANT waking up alone.
I was allowed to have Greg with me in Oregon and Michigan—both places had enough space for him in the nearby woods, and plenty of ways he could hide from anyone who happened to wander onto our property.
Concealing a jumping spider the size of a draft horse is unsurprisingly difficult, although it’s sometimes easier than I expected it to be: no one really wants to believe something like Greg could exist, which makes it easy for them to dismiss the evidence of their eyes.
He’s been mistaken for everything from a bear to a really good Halloween decoration.
Greg doesn’t care what people think he is.
He cares that I’m safe and he’s getting fed, and that’s about it.
Still, there isn’t room for him in Ohio.
With the way they’ve been tearing down the local patches of woodland to build new housing developments, there’s never going to be room for him.
What wild space remains is home to a lot of species that have substantially more business being here than Greg does.
Alex has made it very clear that if it came down to my spider or the local lindworms, he’d have to side with the lindworms. They live in Ohio, and Greg does not.
That’s fine. I’m not so dependent on my emotional support spider that I can’t be without him for a night or two—not yet, anyway.
I may get there, with the way things have been going, and that will be a terrible thing, because so much of my family is located in places Greg can’t go.
Verity’s still in New York, even though she keeps insisting she’s going to move back to Oregon so she can raise the kids in the sort of wide-open spaces she enjoyed as a child, and my parents are in Ohio with my baby brother, Isaac.
In other words, flexibility is key if I want to keep in touch with my family.
I rolled onto my back, looking up at the ceiling.
Every inch of it was familiar, from the cracks in the paint to the faint stains left behind by a baking-soda-volcano incident when I was nine.
Mom’s offered to paint in here a few times, but I’ve always asked her not to.
I like having something in my world that stays stable.
I haven’t even rotated my posters since high school.
The ghosts of old X-Men storylines and outdated Magic: the Gathering sets watched me from the walls as I rolled over again, this time out of the bed.
Everyone else in the house was awake. I could feel them starting to go about their days even through the anti-telepathy charms in my walls.
Mom had no idea the charms weren’t enough to keep me out of people’s minds anymore, and as long as they could take the edge off sufficiently to let me sleep at night, I wasn’t going to tell her.
I couldn’t read actual thoughts through them without making an effort, and that meant everyone had as much privacy as we had any real reason to expect in a house with multiple telepaths.
Speaking of telepaths … Isaac was awake and reaching for me, the way he did every morning.
I could feel his frustration as the telepathy blockers prevented him from properly establishing contact.
He’d come bursting through my bedroom door soon, when the agony of waiting got to be too much, and then he’d get another scolding from our mother.
That wasn’t fair to him. Lecturing eight-year-olds for not having developed patience has never been one of my favorite activities.
One nice thing about spending a reasonable chunk of my time in Ohio: I always have clothes in my room.
I dug a pair of black leggings and a charcoal-gray sweater out of my drawers, pulling them on just as I felt Isaac’s impatience reaching a fever pitch.
Grabbing a brush off my dresser to run though my hair as I moved, I turned toward the door.
My name is Sarah Zellaby. I am a mathematician.
I have what can charitably be referred to as an anxiety disorder, which I manage through a combination of mindfulness, meditation, and the presence of an emotional support animal—the aforementioned Greg, the giant spider.
My biological mother was a monster. My first adoptive mother was very kind, even if she never knew I was adopted—I was foisted on her by the monster-mother, who’d dropped me on a doorstep knowing I’d be cared for whether or not the people inside had ever wanted children.
After my first set of adoptive parents died, I was found and taken in by the Bakers, Angela and Martin.
Angela and I at least share a species, and it’s thanks to her that I’m not a monster like my first mother was.
I don’t want to be a monster.
But no matter what I want, I am not and will never be human.
I don’t get to Pinocchio my way into someone else’s species: I don’t even get to try as hard as I used to think I could.
I’m what’s called a cuckoo, a telepathic ambush predator that exists to exploit.
My species takes whatever we want, and doesn’t care what gets broken in the process. Nice neighbors, right?
I mean, not really, obviously. Cuckoos are pretty much awful.
Our actual species name is “Johrlac,” which is too many consonants and not nearly enough vowels for my tastes, but we don’t tend to use that for ourselves here on Earth.
We’re the descendants of the people the other Johrlac kicked out for sucking too much to stay in the neighborhood, and when they made our ancestors leave, they edited their memories just enough to remove a few basic details.
Like how to do the math that would have returned us to our original dimension.
Because yeah, we’re telepaths. We can read people’s thoughts, manipulate their memories, that whole fun set of shitty behaviors. But we can also channel that energy into math that will literally rewrite realities, if we can just find the processing power we need.
I don’t like to think about processing power.
Shaking my head to chase away the memory of the last time I’d needed processing power, I opened my bedroom door and the thoughts of the rest of the house poured through, like honey dripping from a comb.
Shelby was trying to get her hair to behave before she left for work, frustrated by one curl’s refusal to stay where she put it; Alex was getting breakfast in front of the kids.
Mom was upstairs, doing quadratic equations in her head as she showered, and Dad was a dark smudge at the bottom of the pile of conflicting mental signals, all but unreadable.
My adoptive father, Martin Baker, is what we call a Revenant.
It’s a sort of depressing name for a really sweet guy, but given that the alternatives were “a Frankenstein” or “an abomination of science,” I think it’s okay.
He used to be several human men, all of whom died in one way or another, only to get graverobbed and spliced together by a scientist with a dubious grasp on the concept of “ethics.”
Something about the resurrection process makes Revenants all but impossible to read.
If I hadn’t lived with him for several decades, I wouldn’t even have been able to tell he was in the house.
That was obscurely comforting. I don’t have a lot of limits anymore, and that makes the ones I do have all the more precious to me.
Because, see, about eight years ago, right before Isaac was born, my birth mother decided she had a right to come crashing back into my life and wreck everything I cared about.
She and the other cuckoos on Earth had decided technology was reaching a point where it was too difficult for them to exist as telepathic predators.
Even if humans can’t tell us apart, cameras can, and our movements can be followed.
Humanity was starting to catch on, and the cuckoos wanted out.
To achieve “out,” they needed someone who could handle the massive equation they’d cobbled together, the mathematical function that would allow us to exit this dimension and head for a different one.
That meant they needed what’s called a Queen—a cuckoo who’s gone through the rare fourth instar and unlocked a whole additional level of telepathic power.
And this is all getting a little confusing, especially when I’m trying to make it to breakfast at the same time. Let’s step into an aside.
All right: cuckoos, as I’ve mentioned, are both shitty neighbors and telepathic ambush predators.
We’re not originally from the dimension where Earth is located: our home dimension is called Johrlar, which makes the part where we’re called Johrlac just a little egotistical, if you ask me.
Which they didn’t. The cuckoos have never asked me for anything in my life.
They’ve just done it, and expected me to deal graciously with the consequences.
Which I have not done, but we’ll get there.
Today’s cuckoos are the descendants of Johrlar’s exiles, who passed packets of ancestral memory from parent to child in order to make sure their kids would be born perfect little examples of a lousy, murderous species.
Again, we’ll get to that in a minute. The important thing here is “from another dimension.” We didn’t evolve on Earth, and our ancestors were clearly subject to different evolutionary pressures in the process of becoming what we are today: humanoid bipeds, pale-skinned, black-haired, and blue-eyed, with surprisingly little variance between individuals.
Mom—Angela—and I are virtually identical, despite the fact that we’re not directly related.