to. Mark’s forehead thumped against the glass of the passenger side window. He swore, rubbing his head as he turned to glare at her.
It was really a pity cuckoos couldn’t understand the nuances of human expressions. The sweetness of Elsie’s smile was a thing of pure and genuine beauty.
“Oops,” she said.
Mark kept rubbing his head but didn’t say anything.
“How many cuckoos are in your hive?” asked Antimony.
“With Heloise out of the picture, and not counting myself, three,” he said. “If Sarah’s already finished with her instar, four, and the fourth is a big fat ‘game over’ for the rest of us. She’ll be suggestible. Ingrid is right there to make suggestions.”
“Sarah won’t hurt us.” My voice wavered, making my statement sound almost more like a question.
Mark twisted in his seat to face me directly. He looked almost sorry. Somehow, that was the most terrifying thing to happen in this entire terrifying night.
“Sarah won’t have a choice,” he said. “No one really knows for sure what a Queen is like, because we get one per dimension. She enters her fourth instar, she blows a hole in reality, and if she’s lucky, it kills her, because if she’s not lucky, she melts her own brain in the process of getting the math to work just the way she wants it to, and we’re not a species of caretakers.”
“You mean you’d just leave her to die?” asked Sam.
“Sure,” said Mark. “Let’s go with that.”
“Maybe she hasn’t entered her fourth instar yet,” said Antimony.
“Then maybe we have a chance,” said Mark. He turned back to Elsie. “I’d drive faster if I were you.”
Elsie slammed her foot down on the gas.
I closed my eyes. The anti-telepathy charm around my neck suddenly seemed impossibly heavy. If Sarah was in range, I didn’t know it. I couldn’t know it. And that meant she couldn’t know we were coming for her. She was cut off. She was alone.
She had to be so scared.
We’re on our way, Sarah, I thought, and wished there was any way I could lie to myself and believe she would hear me. Hold on, because we’re coming. We’re coming just as fast as we can.
Hold on.
Eighteen
“Breathe, baby, breathe. You breathe and you keep on breathing. That’s the only thing I’m going to ask of you today. You just keep on breathing.”
—Enid Healy
In the shining whiteness of the infinite void, which sort of sucks, to be honest
HELLO?”
My voice didn’t echo. An echo implied a wall, however distant, for it to bounce off of. Instead, it dropped away like a stone falling into a well, dense and dull and disregarded.
There was no ground under my feet, but I was standing anyway, toes pointed outward instead of dangling down. I raised one foot and stomped experimentally. There was no feeling of resistance; my foot simply stopped when it hit what my brain insisted on thinking of as the floor.
Maybe the thought was the problem. I closed my eyes. There is no floor, I told myself sternly. There is nothing for me to stand on.
The sensation of falling was immediate and stomach-churning, as the not-a-floor beneath me took my thoughts to heart and dissolved, leaving me to plummet through the nothingness. I screamed before I could think better of it, and my terror sounded as wrung-out and empty as everything else.
“There’s a floor!” I shouted. “There’s a floor there’s a floor there’s a floor—”
The impact when my feet hit the reconstituted floor was enough to send me sprawling, my entire body aching from the sudden stop. I lay where I was, suspended on a flat, seemingly solid surface that looked exactly like everything else surrounding me. No walls, no ceiling, but there was a floor now, called into existence by my demands.
I rolled onto my back and stared up into the nothingness. My throat hurt from the screaming and my ankles hurt from the landing and everything was awful. Everything was absolutely, utterly, no questions about it, awful.
Laboriously, I sat up and looked around again. Any hopes that the void would have changed during my fall were for naught: the world around me was as blank and white and empty as it had been before. The only thing to indicate that I had moved at all was the ache in my butt and ankles, and even as I thought about it, the ache faded away, like my body couldn’t hold onto even the idea of pain.
That was actually a good thing. It meant I wasn’t really