Chapter 17
Seventeen
“There was a world before you existed, and there’s still going to be a world after you’re gone. But it’s not going to be the same. Everything is different now, forever, because you were here.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Back in the white place, which is honestly getting sort of old
THERE IS NO TIME IN the white place, not really.
Minutes can feel like hours, and hours can feel like minutes.
Meaning I had no idea how long I’d actually been down there.
I knew I couldn’t wake up just by wanting it, although I could still rearrange the space to a certain degree: I thought about my wardrobe and I was back in my preferred oversized sweater and long skirt combination.
I thought about how much I hated to be bored and a whiteboard appeared, complete with dry-erase markers and erasers to help me fix any errors.
I picked up a marker, uncapping it and inhaling the sharp, familiar fumes before setting the tip to the clean, glossy surface of the whiteboard, ready to begin writing out the first steps of the equation that would take me home.
Then I paused, frowning. I couldn’t write that equation.
I didn’t remember that equation. It had deleted itself as soon as I’d finished it the first time. It was gone.
But …
I knew it was possible to mathematically travel between dimensions, and I knew I’d been able to do it once.
I knew the Johrlac had a better equation than the one I’d used, meaning it was possible to achieve this with more mathematical elegance and less brain-eating ferocity.
All I needed to do was define what I needed the numbers to be able to do.
Biting my lip in concentration, I leaned forward and started to write.
What felt like an eternity later, I had fully defined all the functions I needed my new equation to perform.
It had to cross dimensional boundaries, and it had to do so in a manner fast and clean enough to not kill the people it was transporting.
That would be difficult, no matter how I approached it.
But I thought I could see the outline of what it would have to do in order to work, and in that outline, I could also see the issues with the original equation.
It wasn’t just that it was hostile and inclined to attack: it was that the equation the cuckoos used was feral, broken by the number of times it had been stripped down and forced to become more efficient.
Truly advanced Johrlac math was essentially alive, and like any living thing, it wanted to go on living, and it didn’t want to suffer.
For generations, the cuckoos had been abusing the equation, hurting it as they chopped pieces off and tossed them aside in an effort to make the core more streamlined and easy to control.
And at some point, it had stopped taking the damage lightly.
It had stopped playing along with its own mutilation.
It had been tame once, and now it was a threat to anyone who got too close. It was hungry.
The Johrlac were using an older form of the same equation, and a newer one at the same time, a version that had never been butchered, but had been carefully refined over the course of generations, helping it to achieve its full power and potential.
I added a few more conditions to my outline, mapping out the strange and dangerous country of what I needed this equation to do.
If I was going to get my family home, I needed a version that could transport six people—because no way in hell was I going through all this only to leave myself behind—and wouldn’t require me to offload more than the smallest functions onto any other processing centers.
I needed the mathematical equivalent of a suitcase nuke, small and powerful and primed to blow the second I hit the button.
I could do this. It was possible. I could almost see it, and the one benefit of being banished to the white place was the total lack of distractions.
I kept writing until I had filled my entire whiteboard, then summoned a second and continued onward, working toward a solution, working toward salvation.
I could save us all. I could get us out of here. I could—
“Whoever taught you had some skill, we’ll grant them that,” said a cool female voice from behind me.
“Fascinating, given how primitive they must have been. There’s no possible way you could have located a real teacher in that backwater dimension you keep considering your home.
If you’d been taught by someone who truly understood the ramifications of what they were doing, you would never have committed your many, many crimes. ”
“Collective,” I said coldly, and replaced the cap on my pen.
I did so with careful precision, not rushing before I turned to face the cuckoo woman I knew would be standing there.
She smirked at me. I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
I hate it so much when the bad guys gloat.
“I don’t remember inviting you into my mind.
This is the second time you’ve trespassed without my permission. ”
“We don’t trespass,” she said, with a sneer.
“We are the collective and this territory is our own. The territory and all that it contains. You are here, therefore you are ours, and we can no more trespass against you than a body can trespass against a bone. You belong to us. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can end this whole charade.”
“I am not anyone’s property,” I said. “I belong to myself, if I belong to anyone. I am a queen and a collective in my own right, and you took me from my territory. I’m only contained here because you forced me to be.”
“The weaker collective is absorbed,” she said dismissively. “If we were able to take you, it’s because you were weak. We’ve won. We’ve already won. Stop fighting us.”
“I thought I was here for a trial, not a conquest.”
“So allow us to try you.”
“No.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No?”
“No. I don’t recognize your authority over me, or over my family. Let me go. Let my cousin go. We’ll leave, and you’ll never need to hear from us again. That’s my final offer.”
“You’re not in a place to be making demands right now, little cuckoo.
We were afraid of you at first—the cuckoo queen, the thing we’ve been dreading for centuries.
And when you caught us by surprise, you did a little damage, true.
But you’re just a jumped-up version of your peers.
You’re not strong. You’re not clever. You got lucky somehow. We know how to handle luck.”
“Subvert it and use it to trap innocent people, apparently,” I snapped.
“The Kairos and their precious timing do complicate things,” she said.
“Still, they’re all but guaranteed to encounter every person we bring here who manages to evade us, and so we can use them to catch our runaways.
And we’re not here to fight with you. We’re here to offer you a bargain you might find worth pursuing. ”
“What’s that?” I asked warily.
“Agree to stand trial. Agree to let us measure you against your crimes, and to abide by what we find in that analysis. If you do, we promise to return your family to their home dimension, and to leave them peacefully.”
“But you won’t be returning me.”
“Oh, no. Not unless you’re somehow found innocent—which you won’t be.
” She smiled venomously, slow as a snake in winter.
“Your bones will join all the other criminals who’ve come before us or, if we find your mind to be of unexpected value, we’ll erase your malfeasance and your wickedness, and the woman you become will join us. Either death or apotheosis.”
I stared at her, briefly too stunned to speak.
She kept smiling, apparently unbothered by my long silence.
Finally, recovering my voice, I said, “I thought the greater punishment would take priority, but no. This was the plan all along, wasn’t it?
Get me here, and then make me over in your own image.
Why even pretend this has something to do with the law?
Why bother with the pretense of a trial if you’ve already made up your minds? ”
“We aren’t the only authority in the multiverse,” she said, smile dropping.
“There are busybodies out there who believe we have a responsibility to the worlds the cuckoos damage, that because we freed them upon the dimensions, we share some culpability in their crimes. Simple fools, but it serves us better to pretend as if we respect their authority than it does to defy them. Traveling to another world to pluck one of its residents away would be an act of war were we not doing it to enforce our laws. So we use the law. A cuckoo queen should have been an impossibility, and the strength you’ve already demonstrated …
we can’t allow it to belong to another collective. You’ll be ours.”
“I’ll eat you from the inside out.”
“No, you won’t. The you who believes in threatening her sisters won’t be here any longer.
But the people you would kill to defend will be going safely home, unharmed, their minds intact.
Isn’t that worth it, to you?” She leaned closer, voice dropping conspiratorially.
“We can see your guilt, like a velvet worm wrapped around your throat. We know how much you loathe what you’ve become.
Here’s the way to put paid to everything you’ve done, to cap it all off with a single act of penance.
All you have to do is stop resisting us and this can all be over. ”
It was tempting. It was so tempting. And that was how I knew it was almost certainly the wrong thing to do: anything that sounded that appealing was probably a cover for something I was going to like a lot less.
Not that it mattered how much I did or didn’t like it when I was talking about the actual death of the self.
My body would still be here, as a power supply for the collective, but the person in control of it wouldn’t be me.