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    Calculated Risks
    Calculated Risks
    Calculated Risks
    Ebook517 pages8 hours

    Calculated Risks

    By Seanan McGuire

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    The tenth book in the fast-paced InCryptid urban fantasy series returns to the mishaps of the Price family, eccentric cryptozoologists who safeguard the world of magical creatures living in secret among humans.

    Just when Sarah Zellaby, adopted Price cousin and telepathic ambush predator, thought that things couldn't get worse, she's had to go and prove herself wrong. After being kidnapped and manipulated by her birth family, she has undergone a transformation called an instar, reaching back to her Apocritic origins to metamorphize. While externally the same, she is internally much more powerful, and much more difficult to control.

    Even by herself. After years of denial, the fact that she will always be a cuckoo has become impossible to deny.

    Now stranded in another dimension with a handful of allies who seem to have no idea who she is--including her cousin Annie and her maybe-boyfriend Artie, both of whom have forgotten their relationship--and a bunch of cuckoos with good reason to want her dead, Sarah must figure out not only how to contend with her situation, but with the new realities of her future. What is she now? Who is she now? Is that person someone she can live with?

    And when all is said and done, will she be able to get the people she loves, whether or not they've forgotten her, safely home?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDAW
    Release dateFeb 23, 2021
    ISBN9780756411824
    Calculated Risks
    Author

    Seanan McGuire

    SEANAN McGUIRE is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Locus Award–winning Wayward Children series, the October Daye series, the InCryptid series, and other works. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant. Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls, horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 became the first person to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. In 2022 she managed the same feat, again!

    Read more from Seanan Mc Guire

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    Reviews for Calculated Risks

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      This is a direct sequel to Imaginary Numbers and is not the best book to jump into the series with. Due to Sarah having to erase herself from everyone one with her to use that part of their brain to make the math work on the jump to the other universe there is quite a bit of backstory given about how the characters backstory. Now she has to figure out how to get herself, her cousins that don’t remember her, and several other cuckoos including children that had nothing to do with her kidnapping and get them back without a working copy of the math that got them there and not melt everyone’s brain doing it. They find a few surprises along the way about the dimension they are currently in along with having to fight off the zombie cuckoos that got Sarah in this mess before they were brainwiped during the travel.
      There is a novella after the end of this that has Sarah, Artie, and Antimony that is set way before this book that shows just how close the three of them were and how much Sarah lost when she had to remove herself from their memories. What I like about the novella is that is set at a Comic Con and after a year of no conventions I was really nostalgic for them.

      Digital review copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley
    • 4/5
      Fantastic. Some of the choices made in the previous book come back to bite Sarah and her kin (sometimes literally). Slightly convenient ending - a lot closer to happy ever after than it looked like it was going to be - but it works.
    • 5/5
      I've been waiting with bated breath for the chance to read this book, and it did not disappoint -- story picks up where Imaginary Numbers left off (with a handy recap to remind us where we are) and wanders off to several unexpected places. I don't want to spoiler anything, but I am very excited about the Cuckoo children and looking forward to shenanigans with Greg in the future. Also, in good news for devoted readers, it didn't feel in any way like the last book in the series. I suppose McGuire might decide to flesh things out with novellas, but I really hope we continue to explore the Prices' wild and wonderful adventures. There should be a third Zellaby book, right? If the pattern continues? And there are several other crucial loose ends...

      Advanced Reader's Copy provided by Edelweiss.
    • 3/5
      I knew, after finishing the last book, Imaginary Numbers, that I probably wouldn't rate this one highly in my personal ranking of InCryptid books, and I wasn't wrong.  Math, multiple dimensions, alien planets - none of these are guaranteed to make me giddy with anticipation, but Sarah has always been one of my favorite characters, so I counted on my investment in the characters to see me through.

      They almost didn't.  So. much. explication.  The first half of the book was crushed under the weight of repetition about what a cuckoo is, what it means to be a cuckoo, the inherent amorality of cuckoos.  What little survived was further smothered by Sarah's guilt and constant mea culpas.  Which were contradictory, by the way, as on one page she's explaining that the equation at the end of the first book was sentient enough to fight against its own destruction, and malevolent enough to exact its revenge on her by – SPOILER ALERT! – excising Antimony's and Arnie's memories of just her, and on the next page she's saying she did it, that she chose to do it so they wouldn't miss her when she was dead.  Either way, the constant self-flagellation was way over-played.

      Like most of the InCryptid books, once you get past the half-way mark, things start to get interesting.  Just by sheer virtue of the fact that there was less wailing and more action, more progress being made in the plot.  But the introduction of Greg really livened things up, and the speed of plot progression made even an other-dimension, alien planet sound interesting to me.  Sarah's angst over the capacity problem irked me, because she was back to the whole woe-is-me schtick when the solution to the problem was painfully obvious - but at least it lasted only a few pages before the lightbulb clicked on, and then it was all action as the end was neigh.  And it turned out the end was much neigh'er than I'd thought - a short story at the end of the book had the actual story ending much sooner than I expected, making it feel like an abrupt, albeit happy, ending.

      I still enjoy the series and I've learned to just put up with the first half of each book to get 'to the good stuff', so I'll likely pick up the next one.  Or maybe, after having braved alien planets, I'll go back and read Antimony's story, carnival settings and all.  Maybe.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this story, getting to know Sarah better and having some more cuckoo-related plot. The situation and setting made for an interesting set of complications. I love the ever-developing Incryptid ethos of "no one is too weird or dangerous to be a person or worth trying to save".
    • 4/5
      This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
      ---

      "I have so many knives," said Annie. "I am the Costco of having knives. You really want to provoke me right now, cuckoo-boy?"

      "I am not a good place to store your knives," he said. "I don't know how many times I need to tell you this, but sticking knives in living people just because they say something you don't like is the reason no one likes you or the rest of your fucked-up family."



      WHAT'S CALCULATED RISKS ABOUT?
      So, the cliffhanger ending of Imaginary Numbers led to Sarah Zellaby transporting herself, her adopted cousins Artie, Annie, James, and a fellow cuckoo, Mark, to an alternate universe. Part of that transporting resulted in Sarah being deleted from their memories.

      Which is a pretty inconvenient thing to do. Sarah has to spend a lot of time convincing the Prices (and friends) to not kill her. And then she has to earn their trust. Just so they can all survive long enough to allow her to attempt to return them to their home dimension.

      Of course, they have to learn how magic works in this reality, find ways to survive the indigenous flora and fauna, and try to keep the humans that were dragged along with them alive, without breaking their minds by realizing where they are.

      THE MICE!
      You can't talk about an InCryptid novel without talking about the Aeslin Mice. As usual, they were a delight. But better than that, their presence is important for the plot. But not important enough—they almost vanish for most of the book, but what they do at the beginning of the novel allows everything else to happen (and is frequently invoked), so it's hard to complain. But I'd have like to see them a bit more.

      NATURE VS. NURTURE
      One of the givens of this world is that the Johrlac (aka cuckoo) are nasty, territorial, apex predators that must be killed. With the exception of Sarah and Angela Baker. And now, Mark. Something about their circumstances has allowed them to not fall into the mind-controlling sociopath mold that every other one has been fit into.

      So...why? What's made them different? It can't be something inherent in them, as we're told time after time after time, the various members of this species are so similar that they're practically interchangeable. So is it something in their environment? Or are they just individuals like humans, gorgons, or dragons? And as such, shouldn't the Prices abandon their stab first-ask questions later approach to these? Sarah starts to ask questions like this in this novel, and I'm hoping it's revisited soon.

      SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT CALCULATED RISKS?

      I hate it when people tell me not to be afraid. They never do that when something awesome is aout to happen. No one says "dont' be afraid" and hands you an ice cream cone, or a kitten, or tickets to Comic-Con.


      This was a fun adventure—making up for whatever reservations I had about Imaginary Numbers—and together they serve as a good follow-up to the Annie-trilogy that preceded it.

      The last chapter was a perfect way to end it, a great mix of magic, hope, and heart. My heart didn't grow three sizes or anything, but it was certainly warmed.

      I have no idea where this series is headed, and I don't care, I'm eager to find out. There's nothing like this in Urban Fantasy, McGuire tells different stories with this series, the kind that show what the genre is capable of when it breaks outside the typical mold (nothing against that mold, I love it).
    • 4/5
      Sarah Zellaby, adopted Price, survived her instar and the equation that tried to kill her when they made the transition to another universe. They came over with a slice of the college and some innocent bystanders. The dominant society is insecticide derived and just as eager to see them on their way. But the worst part is where she inadvertently erased herself from their memories.
    • 4/5
      Originally posted on Tales to Tide You Over

      The book has a prologue of when Sarah first met Artie, a cute scene, but also one that grounds us in Sarah’s loss. The first chapter starts right where Imaginary Numbers ends, as though a year hadn’t fallen between the two releases. Imaginary Numbers and Calculated Risks form a duet, or perhaps more accurately, a two-part episode in the style of television shows. There are reminders of what happened before, but where the InCryptid series can be read as individual, if related, stories, these two cannot.

      Oddly, Calculated Risks can also serve as an introduction to the series as a whole. Sarah realizes in those first moments that the adopted cousins she’d grown up alongside, trained, and even fell in love with, no longer remember her existence. She’s gone from family and more to irredeemable cryptid that should be killed on the spot, cutting the emotional ground from beneath her feet.

      She spends the first three chapters tied to a chair, desperate to make her case without manipulating them further. Explaining their memory loss is all her fault doesn’t help them trust her, but it does offer the opportunity to remind readers what happened in the first book. Sarah didn’t mean to change their memories. Instinct drove her to save them from the pain of realizing the equation had killed her…only it didn’t.

      The book is not lacking in action. They encounter the various species native to this dimension, along with more troubles Sarah brought with the campus. The indigenous sapiens are similar to Earth hominids, while other species bear some commonalities and significant differences. Also, natural forces in this dimension, including those governing magic, are not the same as on Earth. There’s a lot to explore. However, like the previous book, this is more of a personal story, but remains in Sarah’s perspective throughout.

      Sarah learns more about her species, including how many assumptions the Price family has been basing their actions on, but it’s not cryptozoology like how Alex details a discovery. This is her life, even more so with all family members in the new dimension having no memory of her. Worse, their recent connection with Mark, another cuckoo, is unaffected. They remember Mark survived puberty without losing his feelings for the human family that raised him. He’s safe and comfortable while she’s the enemy.

      Nor did Sarah’s protective instincts spare Artie or their brand-new status as a couple.

      She’s not used to being isolated. The Prices are forever finding new people in need of family, always growing. But in her case, it shrank with Sarah on the other side. This is the heart of the story. Her trying to convince them she’s their beloved cousin while taking responsibility for the fact that they can’t remember her…or having consented to her using them for the equation.

      Without specifics, I’ll say the relationships form the foundation of this book. Not only those destroyed and built in these pages, but also those that came before. The biggest plot thread is how Sarah functions with her family, and the love of her life, having forgotten she exists while they still depend on her, as a cuckoo stranger, to get them home.

      Imaginary Numbers ended in a cliffhanger, but this one has a satisfactory conclusion. There are still consequences to be dealt with, but the big questions, the urgent questions, are all resolved one way or another. Still, this book opens the possibility for many more stories, whether novels or novellas, meaning the series still has room to grow. One such novella appears in the back of this book, even.

      P.S. I received this Advanced Reader Copy from the publisher through NetGalley in hopes of an honest review.
    • 5/5
      Calculated Risks by Seanan McGuire. At the end of the previous book (Imaginary Numbers), Sarah and company had saved the world but were stuck in another dimension. This book picks up right where the other one left off and takes us on a ride with giant spiders, even more giant praying mantises, math, cuckoos (the Cryptid kind, not the birds), and more. It was awesome. Bonus novella at the end where Annie, Artie, Sarah, and Verity go to Emerald City Comicon to track down a murderous siren.
    • 3/5
      Series Info/Source: This is the 10th book in the InCryptid series. I got an eGalley of this from Edelweiss to review.

      Story (3/5): This was an odd story and mainly follows Sarah and crew as they struggle to get back to their own dimension. It was interesting and unique but also a bit out there. It didn’t really fit with the rest of the series well. I enjoyed it and thought it was intriguing but it also wasn’t at all what I had been expecting and hoping for.

      Characters (3/5): The characters that were at the end of the last book were all here. There are a bunch of random characters thrown in that traveled to this dimension with the University and other characters that live in this dimension. All of those new characters mainly seemed to be filler...and are pretty forgettable. We don’t get to see a lot of deep interactions between Sarah and her friends/family because none of them remember her. Additionally, Antimony is in the story a lot and I just don’t like her character.

      Setting (4/5): This is set in a different world/dimension. It was a unique setting but seemed odd considering the rest of the series. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either.

      Writing Style (3/5): This is decently written but I had some issues with McGuire’s writing this time around. There is an absolute ton of recapping here and a lot of the story is wwaaaayyy over explained. This is one of those books where you can literally skip pages of material and not miss much. Sarah spends sooo much time in her own head worrying and rehashing stuff. I normally love this series because it is fun and action-packed. This book felt long and drawn out and the pace was slow.

      My Summary (3/5): Overall this was disappointing for me. I read this series because it is fun and action-packed and has some great humor in it. I also love the cryptids. This story didn’t fit well with the rest of the series and was full of way too much over-explaining and rehashing. In addition to that we don’t get any of the fun characters interactions because the other characters literally do not know who Sarah is. I loved the last Sarah book but this one was kind of a dud. I didn’t even want to read the short story at the end, I just wanted to be done with this and move on.
    • 4/5
      Picking up where Imaginary Numbers left off, with Sarah, Antimony, Artie, James, and their cuckoo ally Mark stranded in another universe with a college campus, a few random students, and an unknown number of other cuckoos. Now they need to find a way to get themselves and everyone else back--except for the cuckoos, if possible. This won't be easy. Especially since Sarah deleted her cousins' memories of her to make room for the equation that got them there.

      A fun entry in the series, but probably not the best place to start.

      Includes a slight but enjoyable bonus novella about several of the younger cousins searching Comic-Con for a deadly siren.

    Book preview

    Calculated Risks - Seanan McGuire

    Prologue

    As long as you’re still breathing, there’s a chance. There are surprisingly few things in this world that can’t be taken back.

    —Mary Dunlavy

    A small survivalist compound about an hour’s drive east of Portland, Oregon

    Nineteen years ago

    No." The dark-haired little girl clutched her seatbelt like it was a lifeline, shaking her head hard enough that her pigtails bounced wildly, flicking across her eyes and obscuring her expression. That was fine: Angela wouldn’t have been able to read the nuances of Sarah’s feelings in her face even if she’d been able to see it clearly. Being a non-receptive member of a naturally telepathic species had forced her to get better at reading facial expressions than most cuckoos, who had the neural capability but never developed the skill. Why bother, when it was so much easier to just skim someone’s thoughts and know exactly what they were trying to convey?

    Why bother, when most cuckoos didn’t actually care about the feelings of others in the first place? Being better at something didn’t mean actually being good at it, and since Sarah tended to assume anyone around her could pick up her feelings from broadcast alone, What are you feeling? was a common question in the Baker household. Angela was doing her best to raise Sarah to be a thoughtful, compassionate little girl, and to be fair, Sarah’s nature lent itself well to being polite and caring and interested in the people around her, but most of the cuckoo children Angela had encountered had been like that. They were as sweet and sociable and occasionally horrible as human children. Something changed in them around puberty, turning them into monsters.

    Whatever it was, she was determined that it wasn’t going to happen to Sarah. Not to her little girl. She hadn’t been intending to be a mother again after Evelyn and Drew were grown and happy in their adult lives, but when the world had dropped a cuckoo child in her lap, she’d found herself both unwilling and unable to refuse. Sarah needed a family who could understand her and give her the best chance at a good life, and at the end of the day, Angela and Martin were in a position to be that family. That was the only thing that mattered.

    That, and finding a way to avoid Sarah growing into the homicidal impulses their species seemed heir to. Angela assumed those impulses were somehow tied to their telepathy. She was the only cuckoo she knew of who was non-receptive to the thoughts of others; she could project, but she couldn’t receive. She was also the only adult cuckoo she knew of who had never tried to kill anyone. Being able to view the minds around them as if they were open books had to make it very difficult for cuckoo children to make friends, and without friends to keep them anchored to society, maybe they were just having a normal teenage response to raging hormones and changing bodies.

    Not that she thought most teenagers were secretly yearning to kill everyone around them and salt the ashes, but it was a theory, if nothing else.

    Evelyn wasn’t biologically a cuckoo—she was as human as the day is long. But she’d been adopted by a cuckoo, and raised in a house with a cuckoo, and in the process, she had developed a certain bright resistance to the constant aura of you know me, you love me, you would die to make me smile projected by most cuckoos. Even her learned resistance wouldn’t have been enough to make it safe to bring Sarah around Evie’s children, but Evelyn had married a man named Kevin Price.

    Kevin was kind, friendly, a little distractable, and most importantly of all, a descendant of Frances Brown, the woman who had been the personal nightmare of every cuckoo in North America from the moment she’d first crossed paths with them back in 1931 until her death in 1945. For some reason, Frances Brown had been resistant—although not quite immune—to cuckoo influence. She could fight off their memory alterations. She could hear their telepathic commands without feeling any need to obey them.

    And her descendants had inherited her resistance. When Kevin had met Evelyn, it had been because he’d been investigating reports of a cuckoo in the area who was suspected of preying on local families. Instead, he’d stumbled onto the Bakers, a stable, nuclear family that just happened to be made up of members of four entirely different species. He’d been surprised but pleasant about it, and once he’d established to his own satisfaction that Angela wasn’t telepathically holding her family prisoner, he’d run off with her daughter, taking her to Portland to settle down and have two daughters—and a son—of her own, all of whom were better equipped to shrug off cuckoo influence than the human norm.

    If Sarah was going to make friends without manipulating their minds, she was going to do it here. Now it was just a matter of convincing her to get out of the car.

    Sarah had been excited about the trip while they were still in Ohio, talking animatedly about seeing the three cousins she’d already met and meeting the other two. She’d chattered about how wonderful it was going to be to see Verity again the whole time she was packing, and how she was going to be best friends with all five of her cousins. She’d been excited enough that she’d even left room for clothing between her math workbooks and the various field guides to bugs and birds and reptiles that were native to Oregon but not found in Ohio.

    Her excitement had started to fade at the airport, where she was had been bombarded from all sides with strange minds, some of them thinking things she wasn’t equipped to deal with. She’d gone from bouncing along at Angela’s side to clinging tightly to her hand and refusing to be parted from her for more than a few seconds, flinching away from the thoughts of the people around them.

    If she hadn’t looked so incredibly much like Angela—all cuckoos were virtually identical, which made it easy for them to pass as mother and daughter—Sarah’s growing distress might have made it difficult to get through security. Angela couldn’t deflect negative attention as easily as Sarah would eventually be able to, couldn’t take the temperature of a room and know when she needed to step in. But they’d reached their gate with plenty of time to buy Sarah a bottle of V8 and some cheese crisps before their flight, and she had almost calmed down by the time they boarded.

    The flight itself had been peaceful. Sarah had settled quietly in her window seat, filling out a math workbook and munching cheese crisps. One of the flight attendants had come back to give her a pair of honorary pilot’s wings, but as she’d been doing that for all the children, Angela hadn’t become overly concerned that Sarah was being shown favoritism because she was changing the minds around her. Angela had actually started to think this would be okay.

    And then the plane had touched down, and the thought of seeing her cousins had become abruptly very real in Sarah’s mind, and all hell had broken loose. She’d been sobbing and promising to be good by the time Angela had carried her off the plane into the terminal, struggling a little under the combined weight of a child, her own carry-on bag, and Sarah’s heavily laden backpack.

    Fortunately, the flight crew was used to children having meltdowns, and given that Sarah was sobbing about being scared to see her cousins because they weren’t going to like her, no one had called security. Angela had calmed her as best she could, then led her to the baggage claim and the car rental desk so they could continue their journey.

    It would have been better for her to use cash and buy a beater car from the local personal ads, something she could leave behind for Kevin and Ted to strip for parts when she took Sarah back to Ohio. But better wasn’t always the same thing as practical, and much as she knew her son-in-law would hate having a traceable rental car parked on his property for a week, it would be worse trying to go through the delicate dance of under-the-table vehicle acquisition while shepherding a crying child. Sarah had been all cried out by the time she’d been strapped into the car, and had ridden quietly for the roughly two hours it took Angela to navigate out of the airport, across the city, and onto the optimistically-named roads leading to the family compound.

    And all that had stopped now that they were at their destination. "I won’t," she said, voice peaking just below a wail. Something pushed against Angela’s temples, an almost physical pressure. She sighed.

    You know you can’t manipulate me that way, Sarah, and it’s rude to even try when someone is your friend, she said, and leaned over to unbuckle Sarah’s belt. We came all this way so you could see your cousins, and meet the two you haven’t met yet. Arthur and Elsinore were Kevin’s sister’s children, half-human and half-Lilu. They were still descended from Frances Healy. Whatever protected her descendants would protect them, too.

    Sarah sniffled, but she didn’t push again, just balled herself tight against the car door, making it impossible to open the door without sending her tumbling onto the gravel driveway.

    Angela stifled another sigh. She’d thought she was past these times and tantrums when Drew graduated from high school and went into the world to seek his fortune, whatever that meant. Now she was right back at the beginning, or close enough as to make no difference.

    They know we’re here, Sarah. We have to get out of the car.

    How?

    Kevin has cameras everywhere on the property. He knew as soon as we turned down the road that brought us here.

    Sarah sniffled and lifted her head. That was a mile ago.

    Everything inside the ring of ‘no trespassing’ signs belongs to your sister and her family, said Angela. They like their privacy because they have some pretty special people living with them, although living was a generous way to describe Mary and Rose, both of whom were definitely dead, and they don’t want anyone finding out or getting into trouble.

    Sarah sat up a bit more. Special like us?

    Not exactly like us. There aren’t any other cuckoos here. But your Uncle Theodore is a Lilu, and his children are half-Lilu, so they’re a little bit like us. They’re empaths. Do you know what that means?

    Sarah gave her a withering look that even an ordinary cuckoo would have been able to interpret as scorn. Angela swallowed her smile. "Of course. I’m not a baby. They feel other people’s feelings."

    And their own, and they can influence what other people are feeling, just by thinking about it. They don’t hear words the way you do, but feelings can be just as powerful if you know how to interpret them. Something Sarah would get better at doing if she spent time with people she couldn’t influence, like her cousins.

    Oh. Sarah wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, keeping a death grip on the seatbelt with her other hand. I still don’t want to go inside.

    Why not?

    I’m tired. I want to go home and sleep.

    We’d have to take another plane to get home. We don’t have a hotel room. We’re supposed to sleep here tonight.

    In a house with other people? Sarah’s alarm grew again. What if I hurt them?

    They have special rooms warded against all sorts of things, like telepathy. If you sleep in one of them, you won’t be able to hurt anyone. Angela unfastened her own seatbelt. Come on, Sarah. Be my brave girl. Let’s go inside.

    Sarah looked uncertain. Angela opened her car door. Maybe she’d have to dump the girl out on the driveway after all.

    As if they’d been waiting for someone in the car to move first, the door of the house burst open and a swarm of children came pouring out. The one in the lead was very blonde, very fast, and roughly Sarah’s age, followed by an older girl with hair a few shades paler, who somehow managed to make a flat-out run look like a saunter. Verity and Elsinore. Alex was close on their heels, and Antimony was barreling along behind him, her eagerness not quite compensating for her shorter legs. At the rear of the pack was a smaller dark-haired boy who looked almost as if he was there under duress. Arthur.

    Grandma! Grandma! howled Verity as she approached, her voice carrying farther than any of the others. You came to see us! Mom says you’re not supposed to spoil us, but I think it’s okay if you want to spoil us a little!

    Of course it is, I’m your grandmother! Angela slid out of the car and caught Verity as she barreled up, swinging her into an embrace. Oh, you are the spitting image of your mother at your age. She was a little hellcat, too. I can’t believe she has to contend with three of you.

    Elsinore stepped around Angela’s legs and peered into the car, eyes fixing on Sarah. She raised one hand in a wave.

    Hi, she said. I’m Elsie. You’re Sarah. Ms. Angela says you’re a cuckoo like her. I’m a succubus like my grandma. That means I feel your feelings, and you feel real scared right now. Why? We’re your cousins. We’re not anything to be scared of.

    Sarah blinked slowly at her. Why do you call Mom ‘Ms. Angela’ instead of ‘Grandma’? she finally asked.

    She’s not my grandma, even though I wish she were, said Elsie. My mom is Verity’s dad’s sister, so we’re cousins, but we don’t all have the same grandparents. We both have Grandma Alice, though. She’s the best. She makes cookies and lets us sharpen her knives.

    Oh. Sarah bit her lip. I don’t have any grandmas. Just Mom.

    Oh. That must be hard. I bet you can share Grandma Alice. She likes grandkids. Alex and Antimony had joined Verity in flocking around Angela’s legs, pulling on her shirt and yelling at her at the same time. Elsie beckoned for Artie to come closer. I have a brother. Do you want to meet him?

    Do I have a choice?

    I didn’t get a choice about having a brother, so nope. Elsie grinned. Artie, this is Sarah. She’s our new cousin.

    Oh, said Artie. Um. Hi.

    Um, hi, said Sarah. She smiled shyly, and the world was different, in the way it only ever can be for children meeting the people who will be important for the rest of their lives.

    One

    I never felt like my biological parents didn’t want me just because they made sure I’d have a family who could take the best care of me. I always felt like that proved they loved me.

    —Evelyn Baker

    Somewhere else, outside the realm of known experience, facing a new equation

    Five minutes ago

    We’re encouraged to chronicle our experiences, both by family tradition, carried over from our time as members of the Covenant of St. George, and by the mice, who would rather witness events with their own eyes, but are willing to concede that sometimes they’ll have to be content with written accounts. So:

    My name is Sarah Zellaby. I’m an adopted member of the Price family, a mathematician, a cryptozoologist, and a Priestess of the Aeslin mice.

    I am not human.

    My biological parents were members of a species known as the Johrlac, colloquially referred to as cuckoos by people unlucky enough to be aware of their existence. So far as anyone has been able to determine, cuckoos are invaders from another dimension, one where bipedal humanoid life evolved from parasitic wasps instead of from monkeys. Yeah. You know that thing where people make fun of furry artists for slapping tits on a lizard? Well, I’m basically a giant bug with what the people around me frequently think of as nice boobs. So that’s fun. I’m also telepathic, as are all members of my species, which makes it difficult to tune out all those random contemplations of my breasts and what they might look like without my clothes getting in the way.

    Being a telepath in a non-telepathic society is a great way to learn how much you don’t like people or ever want to be around them if you have any choice in the matter, FYI. I don’t recommend it. Zero stars, would not buy again. Because people who live in a non-telepathic society don’t have any qualms about thinking any dirty, nasty little thing that pops into their heads, and asking them not to is like asking them to stop touching their faces. The very idea that the thing is forbidden makes it impossible to resist. So no, I don’t get out much, and when I do go out, I try to stay around people with experience dealing with telepaths.

    Since the majority of cuckoos are evil assholes, this mostly means my family.

    The Prices are ex-Covenant, meaning they’re former monster hunters who learned how to take that skill set and apply it to the goal of being monster saviors. They believe the world belongs to all the sentient species that live in it, not only to the apex predators, and they do their best to preserve life where they find it, or at least long enough to understand it.

    (No, they are not a family of vegans. No, I have never asked them how they reconcile a collective goal of preserving life and a willingness to eat its byproducts. But they do buy local and organic whenever possible, and I once saw Verity break a man’s nose for kicking a dog.)

    Remember that thing about cuckoos coming from another dimension? We’re an invasive species that doesn’t belong in Earth’s biosphere, and that combined with being really shitty neighbors has made us one of the only things the Prices are willing to write off as monsters without trying to understand us first, which I guess made it inevitable that they’d wind up with two cuckoos actually in the family. My mother, Angela Baker, is a non-receptive telepath, and since it turns out cuckoos are evil fuckers mostly because we’re born with a huge telepathic time bomb already implanted in our brains, she’s also the first good cuckoo to be born in generations. No telepathy, no bomb.

    Fortunately for me, she is a projective telepath, meaning she was able to hold me down and dig the telepathic nightmare out of my head before I was old enough for it to detonate—something which it apparently does right around the onset of puberty. It’s like becoming an X-Man, only in a really universally lousy way. No chance you’re going to get cool powers. Nope. Just telepathy in a world of non-telepaths, and the understandable but unforgivable urge to commit mass murder.

    So I dodged that bullet, which spared me from any future bullets my family might have flung my way, and went about the business of being a pseudo-shut-in who just wanted to do math, read comic books, and flirt abstractly with my cousin Artie, who—as you may remember from the convoluted family history I’ve already provided—isn’t actually my cousin, because none of the members of my family are biologically related to me. Not even Mom, although at least we’re the same species.

    My Aunt Mary always says the family you build matters more than the one you’re born to, and since she’s been with us for three generations and counting, I guess she’d know. My family is my family, biology be damned. I just refuse to consider my cross-species attraction to Artie inappropriate because my mother adopted the woman who married the brother of his mother. That’s taking avoiding even the appearance of impropriety to an extreme that I simply don’t have the time for.

    Lots of things happened after Mom defused me. I grew up; we all did, really. We found and followed our personal passions, whatever those happened to be, and for my cousin Verity, that meant ballroom dance, taken to the point of going on a competitive dance reality show. Yeah, I don’t see the appeal either. But she wore sequins and lipstick and a red wig that helped to distract people from the actual color of her eyes, and when she didn’t win, she moved to New York City to do a journeyman year working with the urban cryptids while she made one last stab at having a dance career. And like the fool I am, I followed her.

    I wanted to put some distance between myself and the rest of the family. I wanted to figure out whether I was doing what I wanted to do with my life, or whether I was living up (down?) to their unspoken expectations of me, the ones that said a natural ambush predator would want nothing more than to blend into the background and be forgotten. Most of all, though, I wanted the time to think about my situation with Artie, and decide whether I was really enough in love with him to make it worth risking the relationship we already had by pursuing something more.

    It was a reasonable set of desires. Nothing too big, nothing that could hurt anyone else, except I guess maybe Artie. And somehow it still backfired on me, when Verity’s cousin Margaret showed up as part of a Covenant strike team, putting the entire family at risk. Most of how the Prices can operate in relative safety in North America is by keeping the Covenant convinced that they’re all dead, killed off over a generation ago in a frontal assault on the home of Alice and Thomas Price-Healy. Once Margaret knew Verity was not only alive, but was a living descendant of the Covenant’s greatest modern traitor, we were all, in the vernacular, fucked.

    Unless we stopped her, she would have gone back to England, and told the Covenant we existed, before returning with a force large enough to shut us all down. Verity was injured and incapacitated. I wasn’t.

    So I stopped her.

    Killing her would have just created more problems. It was a human solution, and I wasn’t human. Instead, I reached into her head, and into the heads of the men who were working with her, and I rewrote everything they remembered about their time in New York. I changed their minds against their will, permanently. It was a massive violation of their consent. It was the moment I proved I was a cuckoo, no matter how hard I tried not to be. Nature would always win out over nurture, and it had always been inevitable that I was going to hurt people. It didn’t matter why I did it. It was done.

    In a very real way, the people I hurt started with myself. The act of telepathically manipulating the minds of three unwilling strangers triggered a biological process called an instar, a form of metamorphosis inherited from my insect ancestors. It scrambled my mind and left me incapacitated for years. I could perform simple tasks and feed myself, but that was where my competency stopped. I had to relearn everything else, including my own name, as control and memory slowly returned. But they did return, and eventually I felt well enough to make the trip from Ohio, where I’d been convalescing, to Oregon, to see the rest of my family again. To see Artie again. To find out whether he had been willing to wait for me.

    Good news: he was. Better news: he loved me as much as I loved him. Best news: he was finally ready to accept that I felt the same way, something which should have been impossible to hide from an empath. After years of dancing around each other, divided by the dual barriers of biology and fear, we were finally figuring things out.

    Which, naturally, is when my birth family decided it was time to snatch me and trigger my final instar, something they said would elevate me to the position of cuckoo queen. Remember that whole actually a giant wasp thing I mentioned? Turns out we’re hive insects, and our origins have more bearing on our modern biology than I had ever guessed. Certain things need a queen, and thanks to events beyond my control, I was primed to take the crown.

    They wired me up like an explosive charge made of telepathic power and psychic potential, then pointed me at the foundations of the world and set the timer. And that would have been the end of it—where, by it, I mean reality as humanity fundamentally understands it—if not for my cousins. Artie and Antimony managed to follow me to the place where the cuckoos planned to blast their way out of our universe and into the next one, bringing a half-trained sorcerer and a surprisingly helpful cuckoo in their wake. Working with James and Mark—one of the cuckoos who’d originally abducted me, who had changed sides for reasons no one had bothered explaining—they were able to disrupt the cuckoos long enough for me to seize control of the monster equation that was trying to use me to come into the world.

    It was math. I can do math. Math and I are good buddies. It was evil math, which was a bit more of a concern, and it was math that needed a lot of processing space to complete safely. More importantly in the moment, it was math that wanted to devour my mind and would have happily done so if I hadn’t found a way to offload some of it to the brains around me, using their physical structures like data storage banks to give me the extra space I needed.

    It was a pragmatic decision, made in the heat of the moment, and without it, I wouldn’t have survived. There’s a solid chance the world wouldn’t have survived either. But nothing comes without cost. I learned that a long time ago. And right now, the cost was waking up tied to a chair while my allies surrounded me and radiated distrust.

    Annie, my cousin, who had been the youngest when I joined the family and had thus accepted me with the least amount of fuss, never batting an eye at my biological differences or deviations from anything resembling the norm, glared at me. Her expression was a mystery. Her emotions were not. She was hating me so hard that it was like a floodlight, painting the room in shades of hostility.

    What did you do, cuckoo? she demanded. Where are we?

    And that, in a very concrete way, is where our story begins.

    Whoever had tied me to the chair had done it very considerately. The ropes were tight enough to hold me upright while I was unconscious, and they would have been cutting off the circulation to my hands if I’d been a mammal with a circulatory system. That probably meant either Annie or Mark had done it. Annie had experience with field dressing a cuckoo, thanks to time spent training with both me and Grandma, while Mark was a cuckoo, and although I couldn’t be sure he knew how to tie a knot, the chances were good he’d know how tight to tie himself if he wanted to be secure but uninjured.

    My mouth was dry. I swallowed hard, trying to tell myself this was just disorientation brought on by what seemed to be a shift to a parallel universe. My chair was positioned to give me an excellent view of the window, and the ripe cantaloupe-colored sky outside. Creatures that looked like centipedes, if centipedes could fly and had absolutely no respect for the square-cube law, undulated through the air, their segmented bodies blending with the clouds. Wherever we were now, we weren’t in Iowa anymore.

    Iowa was very, very far away.

    Annie held up her hand, a ball of lambent orange flame flickering into existence above her palm and hanging there like a child’s magic trick. I squirmed against the ropes that held me. Cuckoos don’t have heartbeats, and we don’t have blood the way mammals do, but we can feel pain, and fire hurts.

    You don’t want to do that, I said.

    Oh, I’m pretty sure I do, she said. Everyone, please take note of the fact that I absolutely do want to do this, and if I suddenly start trying to say I don’t, it’s because the cuckoo has been messing with my mind. She took a menacing step toward me, looming. I had always known my cousins could be terrifying when they wanted to be. It had never been aimed in my direction before, and so somehow I had never really cared.

    I may not be human, but I’m still a people, and people can be remarkably good at tuning out things that don’t immediately affect them. It’s a basic failing of the being a people state of being. I can’t call it the human condition because personhood has never been a human monopoly. Life might be slightly easier if it were.

    Cuckoos can burn, said Mark. He sounded bored. He reinforced that impression by studying his fingernails, looking at them like they were the most important things in the world, and by implication ranking me somewhere well below his manicure. In case you were wondering, we’re as flammable as anybody else. Maybe more flammable. Hemolymph has a lower ignition point than blood.

    Was he lying? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to push into his mind to find out. My head didn’t hurt, but it felt hollowed-out, like someone had taken a melon baller to essential parts of my brain without cracking my skull in the process.

    Annie, though . . . Annie was broadcasting, and what she was broadcasting was fear and loathing and frustration, a toxic stew of impressions and emotions that was probably giving Artie a headache. Lilu are empaths. All they get is feelings. When we were kids, we argued about whether that made me a better psychic, which came down on the side of no, just less specialized. While I could detect anger, he could read the nuances of that anger, the other emotions behind or coexisting with it, and the ways it could be unraveled. I just got to know that someone was mad, a superpower shared by anyone with the ability to understand human facial expressions.

    Artie was hanging farther back in the room, with James, both of them watching the scene warily, with no mental signs that they had any idea who I was.

    Annie, stop! I cried, trying not to stare at the ball of fire in her hand. It’s me, Sarah! Your cousin!

    Oh, my fucking God, said Annie. "James, give Mark a dollar. He warned us she’d start claiming to be family as soon as she woke up. Well, here’s news for you, cuckoo. You can’t put the whammy on me, or Artie. We’re resistant to your bullshit."

    I’m not, said James.

    You don’t have to volunteer that information, said Annie.

    I know, but . . . I’m not, and I’ve still never seen this woman in my life. He shrugged. I just thought that might be relevant.

    I would have been tempted to kiss him if I’d been able to get out of the chair, and if it wouldn’t have seemed like an assault by a stranger. Because that was absolutely what I was to all four of the people sharing this room with me: a stranger. None of them had ever seen me before, not Annie or Artie, who grew up with me, and not Mark, who helped to abduct me when my biological mother decided it was time for me to do my duty by the family that abandoned me. All three of their minds were open books as soon as I turned my thoughts in their direction, thanks to previous skin-to-skin contact, which had created an attunement that hadn’t been erased along with everything else, but even glancing at their surface thoughts was repulsive and enlightening in equal measure.

    They were reacting to me the way they would have reacted to any strange cuckoo in a situation like this one—with fear and apprehension and—in Annie’s case—the option of violence. They were protecting themselves against an existential threat. I didn’t have the same surface-level access to James’ mind, but I could tell without pushing that I was just as much of a stranger to him.

    Oh, God, what had I done?

    It was a simple question, and—like any other simple question—it had a deceptively simple answer: I’d deleted myself. They had given me permission to use their brains for extra space while I tried to tame the equation the cuckoos used to move between dimensions, and I had bundled their core selves safely off to the side where I wouldn’t hurt them, but I’d done it believing I was going to die. That there was absolutely no way we could come out the other side of the equation with all of us still breathing. And while I hadn’t done so intentionally, it was clear the do as little harm as possible, and mitigate the harm you can’t avoid ethics that had been drilled into me for my entire life had flared up in the way guaranteed to do me, personally, the most harm possible.

    I had been convinced I was going to die. I had been struggling to keep the equation from swallowing their identities and experiences whole. And in an effort to spare them future harm and give the equation what it was baying for, I had fed it their memories of me.

    I had deleted myself from their minds.

    If I’d done it by surgically excising those memories and tucking them into myself, I might have been able to put them back, but I hadn’t; I’d been wrestling with a math problem so large that it had achieved both sapience and malevolence, becoming a living thing in its own right, and it had gulped those memories into the endless void of its hunger. There was no getting them back. What we’d been to each other was gone. My side of that equation still existed, but their whiteboards had been wiped clean. And, potentially worse, since their core personalities had been wrapped up so carefully, even without those memories, the places where my presence had pressed against them and changed the people they became—those places were still there. I had taken myself away, but I hadn’t turned them into new people in the process.

    That might make things a little easier for me, since I’d still know basically who they were. It was going to make things a lot harder for them as they reached for foundations that didn’t exist . . . and might as well never have existed to begin with.

    I’d fucked everything up. I closed my eyes, shutting out the sight of my cousin standing menacingly over me, and said dully, "Mark can tell you I’m not lying. Mark can tell you I believe everything I say. My name is Sarah Zellaby. My mother is Angela Baker. Antimony, Artie, and I grew up together, which is why you hear that humming in the air—we’re telepathically attuned to each other. I can’t shut you out without an anti-telepathy charm, and you all took those off to let me in, so we could stop the cuckoos from destroying the world. I’m assuming you’ve lost them since none of us are wearing them now."

    I felt them staring at me. Finally, in a bemused voice, James said, That’s ridiculous. Everything she’s just said is completely ridiculous.

    That’s why I believe her, said Artie.

    My eyes snapped open. I stared at him. He felt calm, frightened, resolute . . . and unrecognizing. He wasn’t miraculously recovering memories that weren’t there to reclaim. He was just choosing to believe me.

    Even without me, he still knew Mom. He clearly knew Mark. He knew cuckoos weren’t always bad people, and he was choosing to believe me. If I’d had a heart, it would have grown two sizes in that moment. He didn’t love me anymore, because I’d taken that love away, but he believed me.

    Well, I don’t, snapped Annie. "She’s the reason we’re here, remember? She was at the center of their little circle, and Mark says she’s the one who was doing the math that opened the rift in the universe. That means she’s the one who has to put us back. She’s making up stories so that we’ll let her go."

    She moved toward me again, burning hand raised. Wait! I yelped. She stopped, raising one eyebrow as a silent question radiated off of her. It wasn’t formed enough to organize itself into words, but I could tell her patience was wearing thin.

    We’re not the only ones here, I said. You have to ask the mice.

    Two

    Every time I think the world’s growing short on wonders, it goes and shows me another one. Nice trick, world. I appreciate it.

    —Frances Brown

    Still in the same situation, mostly trying not to get set on fire (not as fun as it sounds, and it sounds pretty awful)

    The what? asked Mark, with unfeigned confusion. I think the process of transporting us all to a new dimension scrambled her brain if she wants us to start talking to rodents."

    James radiated discomfort. Artie and Annie, on the other hand, stared at me.

    How do you know about the mice? asked Annie, voice gone low and even more dangerous than before. They’re not something we discuss with outsiders.

    Uh, what? asked Mark.

    I’m not an outsider! I snapped. I have my own clergy! Ask the mice, and they’ll tell you I’m telling the truth! And don’t try to tell me they’re not here, I can pick up on three of them clearly and two more vaguely, so there’s probably five of them. Ask the damn mice.

    I didn’t want to dwell on how easily I could detect the minds of the mice, which had always been too small for me to spot without making an actual effort. I wanted to fold my arms and sulk. My arms were tied. I settled for sulking, pushing my lower lip out into an exaggerated pout. Being unable to properly see facial expressions means I’m not always good at making them on purpose. Spending time around other cuckoos had been enough to confirm that I’m abnormally expressive for my species, sort of like a Muppet in cuckoo’s clothing. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up knowing you’re not human but hoping desperately that if you try hard enough, the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio will show up one night and turn you into a real girl.

    (No, fairies don’t actually work that way, and all the fairies I know of are a lot more likely to take things away than they are to grant someone a working circulatory system and functioning human brain. But I was a kid at the time, and kids want stupid things.)

    Annie gave me one last look, still radiating caution, before she retreated to where James and Artie waited, the three of them beginning to talk in hushed voices. I turned my eyes away, forcing myself not to mentally reach out and listen in. Mark wasn’t included in their little circle. Interesting. He hadn’t telepathically ingratiated himself with them; he was just here, somehow along for the ride. Given that they’d met him when he kidnapped me from the family compound, I had to wonder what story they were telling themselves to make his presence make sense. I looked straight at him, allowing my expression to fall into its natural neutrality.

    Come here, I commanded.

    Mark jerked a little, startled, before rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and walking in my direction. Interesting. I couldn’t tell whether he was coming because he wanted to, or because I’d somehow left him no choice. My first instar had come with an increase in power level that took years for me to master and control. Who knew what this latest instar had come with?

    When he was close enough, I lowered my voice and demanded, What are you doing here?

    Trying to get home, he said. Cici needs me. I’m not going to disappear from her life just because you decided to help Ingrid destroy the world. He radiated discomfort, clearly skipping his thoughts from place to place to keep himself from dwelling. It was an interesting technique, and almost certainly one he’d learned in order to make it safer for him to spend time around other telepaths. I blinked.

    You’re afraid the world and this Cici person aren’t there anymore, I said. He jerked more sharply upright, staring at me. "You are. You think the equation—what—ate it alive? Dissolved it?"

    I think that even if we disrupted the ritual the way we were trying to, we somehow wound up here, along with a college campus, a whole bunch of unconscious cuckoos, and a bunch of dirt, meaning we took a chunk of the Earth’s crust with us when we went. Did we destabilize the continental plate? Is Iowa one big volcano now? How deep does the exclusion go? I don’t know. And I don’t think you do either. But I know one thing. He leaned closer to me, voice suddenly pitched low. "If you’ve killed my sister, there is nothing anyone can do to keep me from taking you to pieces, my queen." The mocking lilt on his last two words sent a shiver along my spine.

    He’d do it. He would absolutely do it. He wouldn’t even hesitate.

    But there was something wrong with his story. Maybe I’d scrambled his brain even harder than I’d thought. Cuckoos don’t have sisters.

    This one does, snapped Mark. "Her name is Cici, she’s human, she’s twelve, she’s a holy terror, but in the normal twelve-year-old girl kind of way, not the evil telepathic wasp kind of way, and the only reason I got involved in this

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