Chapter 3 #2
“You can’t tell me she grew up while I wasn’t there,” he said.
“I’m sorry. But she’s still young, and she has so much life ahead of her. She needs her big brother. She needs you to come home. Will you wake up, please? Will you at least try?”
Mark hesitated. “I don’t know how,” he admitted, after a long pause.
“Don’t worry.” I smiled brightly, offering him my hand. “I do.”
“Just a second, okay?” He turned back to Cici, who was just a memory, but was still the little sister he knew, the girl who’d been enough to stop him from destroying his entire family the way every cuckoo before him had done. She mattered.
He knelt, reaching over to poke her in the middle of the forehead. She glanced at him, lower lip jutting out in an exaggerated, playful pout.
“Stop it, stupid brother,” she said. “I’m playing.”
“I know, but—I have to go with my friend Sarah now, and I don’t know when I’ll be back. Can you stay here and keep the game going until I see you again?”
Memory-Cici nodded enthusiastically, attention returning to the screen. Mark stood, sighing, and turned back to me.
“I know she’s just my memory of her, but if I’m not going to see this Cici again, I needed to say goodbye.”
“I understand.” I did, too. I would have given anything to have had the chance to say a proper goodbye to Artie, and I was never going to get one.
This time when I offered him my hand, he took it, and he let me pull him along as I started walking back through the endless white void. The gaming setup dwindled in the distance, becoming a speck before vanishing altogether. We were once again lost in the nothingness.
“Where are we going?” asked Mark.
“Home,” I said. “Back to the world where your family is, and your body is, and there’s tomato juice and math and autumn afternoons and no zombie cuckoos trying to destroy the world.”
“Wait—if you’ve been checking on my family for eight years, does that mean you did it? You finished the equation, and you didn’t die in the process?”
“Yup,” I said. “I am officially the first surviving cuckoo queen. Whee.”
He eyed me, sidelong and suspicious. “What did it cost you?”
I glanced back at him. “What?”
“What did finishing the equation cost you?”
“I already told you Artie didn’t wake up. My cousin Annie didn’t get her memories back. My family doesn’t trust me anymore, not the way they did before I went and forcibly reminded them that I was a monster.”
He squeezed my hand. “You’re not a monster. You didn’t do any of those things on purpose.”
“I still did them.”
Mark didn’t have an answer to that. We walked on.
Bit by bit, awareness of Mark’s hospital room returned to me. I opened my eyes and I was sitting next to his bed, his hand held in mine, machines beeping and buzzing around us. I looked toward him. His eyelids were fluttering, struggling to open. One of the machines began beeping more loudly.
“Dr. Morrow,” I said, loudly.
Mark’s eyelids continued to flutter. And then the screaming began. Loud, unending screaming, entirely mental, projected through the bond created by our skin contact. I jerked my hand away. The screaming got softer but didn’t stop.
“Dr. Morrow!” I shouted, trying to be heard above the din. I clapped my hands over my ears, knowing the screams were entirely inside my head but unable to stop myself.
The door slammed open and the doctor was there, wings fully mantled and feathers atop his head standing erect, like he was trying to make himself look bigger to scare away a threat.
He took in the room at a glance, then rushed forward, pulling something out of his pocket and shoving it down the front of Mark’s hospital gown.
The screams in my head cut off abruptly as the anti-telepathy charm settled against Mark’s skin. I lowered my hands from my ears, eyeing him as warily as a hiker eyes a rattlesnake. “Mark?” I asked. “You awake over there?”
His eyes stopped trying to open and he sagged back into the bed, motionless. Dr. Morrow closed his wings, and for several seconds it was just the two of us staring at Mark, waiting for something to occur.
“This is part of why I wanted to speak to you,” said Dr. Morrow finally. “You were unconscious for a matter of hours, not days, and the sound of your awakening still reverberated through the hospital.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Does an infant know they cry upon being born? We do many things on instinct in this life, and we don’t recognize them all. I was concerned that Mr. Wilson would do exactly what he’s done, and while I took the steps available to me, your presence seemed the best way to blunt the impact.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And did it?”
“I know this won’t sound sincere to you, but yes, it did. To the best of my knowledge, no one is bleeding from the ears, and I credit that to you being here to take the brunt of the damage.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your nose.” He produced a handkerchief from inside his coat and offered it to me.
I took it gingerly, then pressed it to my upper lip. It came away glistening with thick, clear fluid. If I were human, that would probably have been mucus. But I’m not, and so I had to admit it was hemolymph, probably from a burst vessel somewhere in my sinuses.
People don’t really realize how much of the human—or cryptid—skull is actually taken up by sinuses. The “telepath nosebleed” in movies and comics is a cliché, but it’s a cliché with a basis in anatomy. When something puts too much pressure on my brain, those are the easiest physical tells.
I wiped my upper lip more vigorously, then tapped it with my fingertips, verifying it was dry. “Can I keep this?” I asked, holding up the hankie.
“Please,” said Dr. Morrow. “Now that Mr. Wilson is awake, we’ll have to discuss the further specifics of his … care…”
His voice trailed off as a strange humming sound filled the room, growing higher and higher, clear and crystalline as a finger being run along the rim of a perfectly cut wine glass.
It hummed and sang and trilled, and I recognized it like a captive-raised bird might recognize the song its mother sang while it was in the egg.
I stood, only half-aware of the motion, turning my eyes toward the ceiling. The sound had no source and no direction, but it felt like an “up” in some indefinable way, and so that was where I looked for it.
Dr. Morrow mantled his wings again, lifting them defensively as he looked around the room. “Do you hear that?” he asked needlessly.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Is that Mark?”
“I don’t think so.”
Dr. Morrow moved to start checking the machines still connected to Mark’s body, moving with a quick efficiency that I could only envy. The hum got louder.
“I really don’t think it’s him,” said Dr. Morrow. “None of these readings—”
The hum got even louder, until I couldn’t hear Dr. Morrow speaking anymore.
It swelled and swelled, and then, just as it was becoming painful, popped like a bubble, filling the room with iridescent glitter that hung suspended in the air, twinkling and shimmering and turning everything prismatically distorted.
The glitter wasn’t all that appeared. It was accompanied by five people in skintight bodysuits that gleamed like liquid metal as they moved.
The suits were cut to look almost segmented, chest, abdomen and legs called out by subtle lines and joints.
Two of the suits were a rich, jewel-toned blue, while the other three were red, black, and gold.
Their heads and faces were exposed, revealing straight black hair and eyes as blue as my own. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought they all looked like me, identical interlopers from somewhere else entirely.
I stared. I didn’t know what else to do. Dr. Morrow was less subdued. Feathers bristling like he was a cat facing down an intruder rather than a Caladrius in his own territory, he stepped toward them.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded.
The closest stranger cocked their head to the side, looking at him impassively. “Native life-form,” they said. “Non-dominant species. Some sort of healer? Believes we are trespassing.”
“Remove but do not revise,” said one of the others. They raised a hand, turning it sharply in the air like they were opening a door. Their eyes blazed briefly white, and Dr. Morrow froze.
A third stranger stepped forward, eyes glowing white, if not as brightly, and Dr. Morrow’s feathers smoothed themselves back into their normal, neutral position. Then he turned and walked out of the room, not saying a word.
“What did you do?” I gasped.
“The local creature would have interfered,” said the first of them to have spoken. “Interference is not to be allowed.”
“You are the cuckoo queen?” asked another.
“I— What?”
“She is,” said a third. “She has reached the forbidden instar.”
“Your crimes have been noted and documented, and will not be permitted to go unanswered,” said the one who’d put the whammy on Dr. Morrow. “You will stand before the tribunal and answer for what you’ve done.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I protested. “I just wanted to help Mark wake up.”
As I spoke, I realized none of them had looked at Mark since they’d appeared in the room.
He was motionless in the bed, and with the charm blocking his mind, he might as well have been an inanimate object.
My breath caught, and I promptly shoved all thoughts of him behind walls of simple math, hiding them from view.
They couldn’t see him. Dr. Morrow had stuffed an industrial-strength anti-telepathy charm into his gown, and now he was invisible to these strange Johrlac.
Because these were Johrlac, not cuckoos: the way they held themselves, the way they dressed, even the way they spoke, it all whispered of origins beyond this world.
They were alien. To me, to Mark, to everything around them.
And they were surrounding me. Suddenly realizing the danger I was in, I whirled, ready to flee the room, and stopped as two of them grabbed my arms. They didn’t bother avoiding my skin, seeming unconcerned about touching me directly, and as their fingers closed around me, I realized they were wearing gloves of some transparent, flexible material.
I struggled, trying to jerk away, and they held me tighter, pulling my arms straight. The one I was starting to think of as a spokesperson stepped forward.
“We have left you free for too long,” they said. “That ends now.”
The hum resumed, louder now, infinitely louder, until it was consuming everything and I finally understood the mathematics behind its rising and falling tones, the way it all fit together, the things it was trying to accomplish, and that didn’t matter at all, that could never have mattered—
Because we were gone.