Page 46 of Imaginary Numbers

“Who told you we don’t care about other people?” she asked. “Yes, we care more about ourselves than we do about humans, but humans care more about humans than they do about anyone else. Why are the rules different for them? Because they have the numbers? Because that means they get to decide what’s wrong and right? She took your past away. She reached into your head with bad tools, broken tools, and she sliced out everything that should have been yours.”

Something about that seemed wrong. I fought the urge to take a nervous step backward, and said, “Mark said I was on my third instar. How is that possible, if I never had my first?”

“Oh, you had it. It just took years. It should have happened almost instantly and unlocked all the answers to your questions. Instead, it unspooled day by day, making its changes a little bit at a time. We get stronger after a morph. It changes the configuration of our minds. It makes them deeper, more complicated. We can do things after a morph that we couldn’t do before.”

I thought uneasily of the way my telepathy had strengthened as I got older, until what had been a trial when I was a child had become easy, even casual. Had I been going through an instar? If we’d been taking regular scans of my brain, what would we have found?

“Most of us go through metamorphosis into our first instar and then stop. First instar is necessary. It’s what changes a larva into a worker. We’re industrious. We keep ourselves busy. And we very rarely need second-instar soldiers to keep us safe. Second instar is a matter of necessity. Few of us survive the morph to reach it. Those who do find themselves substantially stronger and more versatile than a first-instar worker. You have no idea what you’re capable of now, do you? That woman,” and the venom in Ingrid’s voice was startling, “stole your first instar from you, and she sliced your second up and spoon-fed it to you in little pieces, and now you’re lost. You don’t know how to be a proper cuckoo. You don’t know how to be a proper soldier. But that’s all right. You were never meant to be a soldier.”

“What are you talking about?” I couldn’t stop myself from replaying the conversation with Evie, where she’d explained what the doctors had seen on my MRI.

Ingrid saw it, too. She nodded solemnly, looking distantly pleased. “That was your second instar,” she said. “The channels are deeper for you now than they were before. First instar is automatic. Second instar is triggered by the self. Third instar is triggered from the outside. Fourth instar is a myth and a destiny and a sacrifice, and you’re going to do so amazingly well, my dear. You’re going to make me so proud, and I’ll name this little girl ‘Sarah’ in your honor. You’re going to be magnificent.”

“I don’t want this.” I took a step back, or tried to; we were inside Ingrid’s mind, still, and she refused to let me move. “I just wanted you to explain things to me.”

“I am,” she said, and leaned forward, and kissed my forehead. Her lips were so cold they burned. I shuddered, and she whispered, “Fourth instar is what shows you the numbers outside the equation.”

Then I was falling again, and everything was darkness and burning, and I couldn’t hold on. I tried, I tried, I screamed as loud as I could into the void, and the void was blazing white, the void was a supernova of absolute absence, and there was no one to hear my screams, and everything was everywhere, and everything was gone.

Thirteen

“No matter how much we learn, there’s always something we don’t know. A map labeled ‘here be monsters’ is better than one that reads ‘we have no idea.’”

—Thomas Price

A private home in Portland, Oregon, down in the basement, waking up from a dead sleep, not quite screaming

I SAT UPRIGHT WITH a gasp, shoving my hand into my mouth to keep myself from screaming. Elsie would hear me—Elsie always heard me—and come stampeding down the stairs from her room to make sure I was okay. She took her duties as big sister and designated responsible person very seriously.

And of course, when she realized I’d just been having a nightmare, not anything more serious, she’d take her duties as mocker of little brothers and tormenter of the sleepy equally seriously. I didn’t want her coming down. Not when my heart was hammering against my ribs like it wanted to break loose and run away, and not when my eyes were still heavy with exhaustion.

Sarah. I’d been dreaming about Sarah. That wasn’t super weird—I was usually dreaming about Sarah, and sometimes they were good and sometimes they were nightmares, but since she’d been hurt, she’d had a starring role in almost every dream I had. I dreamt she’d never gone away and everything was fine, and I dreamt she’d come back and professed her love to me, and I dreamt she’d died in New York and that I’d never been able to even say goodbye to her, and I dreamt she hadn’t died but hadn’t woken up either, that she was going to sleep the rest of her life away on a machine in the basement of some cryptid hospital.

But Sarah was home now. Sarah had come back to us, come back to me, and she’d finally kissed me, she’d finally let me kiss her, and everything was going to be amazing. Like, really amazing, the kind of amazing I didn’t deserve but had no intention of refusing. So why was I having nightmares now?

The dream was breaking apart in my memory. I remembered a little girl with a bicycle, and something called an “instar.” It was weird. I didn’t like it.

Shaking the fog away, I slipped out of bed and padded across the dark room to my computer. A wiggle of the mouse woke the screen. I pulled up my chat client first; no Sarah. Well, that made sense. It was almost two in the morning, and she’d just come from Ohio. She was probably asleep, safely behind the charms and wards worked into her bedroom walls, so the rest of us wouldn’t wake her accidentally. That was sort of a relief. She didn’t need to share my nightmares.

Being in love with—and admitting I was in love with—a telepath comes with its own list of unique complications. More so now that Sarah had recovered from her accident. She’d never been this sensitive before. When she’d kissed me, it had felt like I could see everything in her mind, and like she could see everything in mine, and that had been okay. That was the sort of worrying part. There were finally no barriers between us, and it didn’t matter.

It was probably supposed to matter. I tried to picture having no boundaries between me and literally anyone else, and the idea was creepy and a little bit upsetting. I like people, but I also like privacy sometimes.

At least I knew it was just because I was totally into her, and not because she’d cuckoo-ed me the way she’d always been afraid she would. I couldn’t whammy her into loving me—or lusting after me, I guess; my pheromones are way more oriented toward getting me laid than getting me cared for and respected—and she couldn’t rewire me into accepting her. We really were perfect for each other.

“Elsie’s never going to let me forget it, either,” I muttered, and opened Wikipedia. When all else fails, ask the Internet.

Typing “instar” into the search box got me a page on insect metamorphosis, and a slow-growing sick feeling in my stomach. I’d sort of hoped it would be a made-up word, something from a comic book or an anime series or whatever. Instead, it meant the stages arthropods went through between molts. They would transform, enter an instar, and then stay there until they were finished growing and could molt again. Which was weird and kind of gross and it didn’t make sense that I’d come up with it in a nightmare about Sarah.

(Not that bugs couldn’t show up in dreams about Sarah. According to Mom, cuckoos are biologically more like really big wasps than they are like monkeys—hominids but not primates, in other words. So, yeah, there was probably an evolutionary stage way back in Sarah’s family tree where she would have gone through molts. But I tried not to think about that too hard, because it was weird to dream about kissing a girl and think “the girl is secretly a giant wasp” in the same sentence.)

Still feeling a little awkward and out of sorts, I got up, grabbed a shirt from the floor that didn’t have any visible stains on it, and pulled it over my head as I started up the stairs toward the kitchen. When all else fails, orange soda and toast. Even at two in the morning, orange soda and toast. They can cure many ills, and if they can’t fix the problem, at least you won’t be hungry and groggy anymore. Elsie likes caffeine, but I say sugar does basically the same thing, without the nasty crash at the other metabolic end.

Elsie was sitting in the kitchen when I got there, sharing a bowl of chicken noodle soup with several members of the family Aeslin colony. They offered me a somewhat dismissive cheer, their attention way more focused on mining her soup for chunks of chicken and celery—the former to eat, the latter to ritually place in the compost bin. Aeslin mice are weird.

“Hey,” I said.

Elsie looked up, smiling wanly. “Hey, stupid brother,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep?”