Page 9 of Imaginary Numbers

This time she squealed, pained and indignant, falling backward. Bad luck for her, since her trajectory slammed her into one of the automated hand drying machines. It kicked on with a loud rush of hot air. She tried to shout something. I hit her with my bag again. At the same time, I released my hold on my telepathy, beginning to broadcast nothing to see here, stay away as loudly as I could. I could dimly hear her mental commands laced under my own, trying to summon her minions, but she was hurt and off-guard, and I was scared and substantially louder. Whatever she’d been trying to ask for dissolved back into the static.

“Wait,” she began.

I didn’t wait. I hit her in the head with my backpack. She staggered, so I hit her again, and she hit her knees on the tile floor of the bathroom, catching herself before she could topple over face-first.

“You started it,” I said, and hit her in the head again.

This time, she didn’t catch herself.

I kicked her a few times to be sure she was really out of the fight. Either she was down for the count, or she was a much better actress than she had any reason to be. It didn’t much matter, as long as she wasn’t following me. I prodded her with my foot, pushing hard enough to roll her over so that her face pointed toward the ceiling. Her eyes were closed, and when I felt for her mind, it was the confused jumble of memories and vague impressions that I associated with unconsciousness. Growing up around my cousins, who’ve been in combat training almost since they could walk, has left me with a keen appreciation of the various stages of “knocked out cold.” This woman was gone.

Good. I slipped my backpack on and crouched, rifling through her pockets. She had an airport security badge, my own face staring back at me from the postage stamp picture, a wallet bulging with cash—probably stolen—and fake IDs under a dozen different names. The modern age has forced even cuckoos to adapt, since telepathy can’t fool a point of sale system or a security camera.

She clearly knew this airport: it was part of her territory, and she’d been here long enough to bother getting herself a way in and out of secured areas. She might have moved in the day I left for New York. That was good. It meant she wouldn’t have attacked me in this bathroom if there weren’t something about it that made it safe. Maybe the cameras were down, or maybe the acoustics somehow kept people outside from hearing when someone was beat to shit inside. Either way, I was in the clear, as long as I got out of the airport quickly.

I clipped her badge to the collar of my sweater, took the money from her wallet, and left her there, unconscious on the tile, wallet on the floor next to her. I felt a little weird about the theft, since she’d just turn around and steal back everything she’d lost, if not more, from the humans in the airport, but it was necessary for several reasons. I needed to get a ride without changing anyone’s mind, to make it harder for her to follow me; that meant payment. I also needed to make her understand that I’d been calm enough after defeating her to loot the body. Anyone can panic and punch somebody. The fact that I hadn’t run immediately after I was done would show that I was a worthy adversary. Someone she shouldn’t mess with. Not immediately, anyway.

Turning and walking away from her made my stomach ache because I knew what was going to happen from here. Portland is too small for two cuckoos. That’s the way the math works out. When I’d been living with Evie and Uncle Kevin, my presence alone had been enough to keep any other cuckoo from coming to settle there. The city is nice, but it’s not big or metropolitan or culturally significant enough to be worth fighting over. Not like, say, New York, which can sustain half a dozen cuckoos at any given time, and where territory battles between them are common enough to be an everyday occurrence. Cuckoos passed through Portland and went on to become someone else’s problem.

Assuming they went on at all. Part of why it hurt to walk away from the woman with my face was knowing what would happen when I got home and told Evie there was a cuckoo in the airport. Hunting in a place this public wouldn’t be easy, but she’d figure out a way. She always did. And when she was finished doing her job, there would be one less cuckoo in the world, and the population of Portland would be just a little safer, even if they were never going to understand why.

Cuckoos are apex predators. We’re not from around here, we don’t belong here, and we belong to the only species that my conservationist family believes needs to be killed on sight. We do too much damage. Even Mom agrees that ordinary cuckoos can’t be allowed to hunt the way they do, because it’s too destructive, and when it goes too far, it triggers Covenant purges, which could get a lot of innocent cryptids killed.

Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there.

No one gave me a second look as I walked through the airport with the cuckoo’s badge clipped to my sweater and my head held high. I had nothing to be ashamed of. She was the one who’d attacked me. I knew that. I had to keep knowing that, as the guilt began gnawing at me from the inside, whispering that I was just like her, that if I were really the good person I pretended to be, I would have found another way. I would have talked to her, negotiated, found a way to make myself heard through the overwhelming static of our telepathy clashing.

I knew none of that was possible. I knew Mom and I were reasonable people by human standards and freaks by cuckoo standards, because we had silly things like “ethics” and “morality” that got in the way of doing whatever the hell we wanted. I knew the woman in the bathroom wouldn’t have stopped with beating me unconscious. If I’d tried to negotiate with her, my body would be hidden somewhere in the depths of the airport by now, ready to be fed into a furnace or mulched and slipped into someone’s garden. My biology is different enough from the human norm that no forensic scientist would ever have been able to tell that I’d been a murder victim. I’d just be gone.

It didn’t make me feel any better about hitting a woman in the face with my backpack. Or about the fact that I was honestly more worried about my laptop than I was about having done her permanent damage.

I walked a little faster. I needed to get out of this airport.

The cabbie looked at me over his shoulder as I shoved a wad of bills in his direction, enough to pay my fare six times over. “I still think you should go to the police,” he said. “It’s not right, a young woman like you being this afraid.”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’m so sorry to have involved you in this. I just want to make sure you’re safe. So please, promise me, no more airport trips today.”

Confusion and concern radiated from him, almost perfectly balanced. “You can’t honestly think I’d be in danger because I gave you a ride. I give lots of people rides.”

“Probably not,” I said, and pushed against his mind, just slightly. Not enough to change him or make him forget me entirely. Enough to blur his memories of me and make him think that maybe a paid vacation day wouldn’t be such a bad idea. You have so much to do at home, and you’ve already got more money than you would normally have made, I whispered, directly into his subconscious. The night is almost over anyway. “I’d still feel so much better if I knew you weren’t taking the risk.”

I’d feel so much better if I knew he wasn’t going back into the other cuckoo’s range. She’d be awake by now, and furious. If she caught any trace of me, she’d pounce on it.

The cabbie looked out the window, concern melting into uncertainty. The sun was slipping down the line of the horizon, painting everything in shades of red and gold. “I suppose my shift was almost over anyway,” he said finally. He took the money from my hand, making it disappear. “I still hope you’ll change your mind and involve the authorities. A girl like you shouldn’t be running scared.”

“I’ll take care of everything,” I said, and flashed him a smile before opening the door and getting out onto the Portland street. I walked a few steps, turned, and waved to him. He waved back and pulled away from the curb. I stayed exactly where I was, watching him go, waiting to be sure that he didn’t suddenly realize, as he got away from my meticulous influence, that he’d dropped me in a bad part of the city. His concern was sweet and born largely from the distress that I was radiating.

My upper lip was wet. I touched it and grimaced as the sunset reflected off the clear liquid on my fingers. I was bleeding again. That last push, on top of everything else, must have been too much for my system to handle. I could feel the endless loops of recursive numbers trying to intrude on my thoughts, to pull me down into the comforting safety of pure mathematics, where I could be safe and comfortable and—most of all—protected. The numbers would protect me even as the world ate me alive. And the world would eat me alive if I let myself go into a fugue. A cuckoo who can’t defend herself is a dead cuckoo.

I pushed the numbers aside and wiped my fingers on my jeans before dragging my sleeve across my face, wiping the rest of the blood away. Most humans wouldn’t recognize it for what it was, but I didn’t need to walk around Portland looking like I had a runny nose. The cabbie wasn’t coming back. He’d taken his money and forgotten me already, and now I just had to hope he was going to decide not to return to the airport, where that other cuckoo was probably waiting to crack his skull open like an egg looking for a map to where I’d gone.

Poor man. He didn’t ask to be a part of this, and with any luck at all, he wasn’t going to be. Not for long, anyway. I started walking down the street, watching the houses around me for signs that someone was home and moving around. Waking people up can be useful, but only if I want to get something done quick and clean and without actually making them get dressed. I usually only do it when I need a Wi-Fi password.

I’d gone about a block and a half before I saw a house that fit my needs. There was a big dog chained in the yard. He whined at the sight of me, retreating to the corner and growling softly, like he hoped he could frighten me off without getting anywhere near me. I offered him a sheepish smile, hoping he could read the expression better than I could, and climbed the somewhat rickety steps to the front porch. I rang the bell.

Five minutes later, I was comfortably buckled into the passenger seat of a late-model sedan, the woman behind the wheel chattering merrily on about her plans for the weekend, which included a trip to Costco and some really inventive couponing. She drove with the casual disregard for speed limits that only comes from living in a neighborhood for a long, long time, and while she was definitely aware that we weren’t old friends or anything, the relationship she had constructed for us was warm and comfortable enough to fill the car with contentment. I was a cousin’s girlfriend’s sister’s niece, or something like that, and it was good enough for her.

It’s nice, how quickly some people find their way from “strangers” to “family.” Nice, and maybe a little dangerous, but I wasn’t complaining. There was nothing to connect me to her. I’d be forgotten as soon as I got out of her car, and the cuckoo from the airport would never be able to track her down. She was safe, or as safe as anyone living in a city with a normal, hunting, hungry cuckoo could be.