of blue boots, sized for a small child, lying on their sides next to the rack. I gestured toward it, eyebrows raised in silent question. Mark followed my gesture, and grimaced. He shook his head before pointing to his chest and mouthing, exaggeratedly, “Not me.”
Right. Whoever had owned this house before the cuckoos came to claim it was already dead, and there was nothing we could do to save them. It was sort of nice knowing that Mark hadn’t been part of whatever group had decided that this was their new base of operations. I didn’t really want to kill the only cuckoo who was actually helping us. He deserved to go home to his sister. He deserved a chance.
There were lights at the end of the hall, and voices, although no one was talking. Someone laughed; someone else made a dismayed grunting sound, like they’d stepped on something unpleasant. I couldn’t get a sense of how many of them there were, but the house felt full, oppressive, like it was almost at capacity. Telepaths didn’t really need to speak to give themselves away.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, opened the notepad function, and typed a quick message before holding it out to Mark.
Where’s Sarah?
He looked up from the screen and shook his head, spreading his hands in an indication of ignorance. Then he produced his own phone, and repeated my actions, finally flipping it around so we could all see his screen.
She isn’t broadcasting, so she must still be in morph, he wrote. She could be anywhere in the house.
Great. We split up and look for her, I replied. Me and Elsie upstairs, you, Sam, and Annie down here. If you find her, Annie will text me. Same if we find her. Okay?
I looked around our little band of unlikely saviors—Earth deserved something way more organized, and even more heavily armed—until each of them nodded in turn. Then I put my phone back in my pocket and started toward the stairs, with Elsie on my heels.
Hold on, Sarah, I thought. All you need to do now is hold on.
* * *
The blue boots had belonged to a little girl, pigtailed and gap-toothed and displayed proudly along the length of the hall, sometimes by herself, sometimes in concert with her baby sibling, who had been too small to have teeth of their own in what looked like the most recent pictures. I wasn’t studying them more than I had to. They were part of a story I didn’t want to know, whose ending was signaled in tiny, terrible clues all around me. The smear on the edge of the bathroom door that looked like dried strawberry jam but probably wasn’t; the open door of a small, silent room where a crib waited for an occupant whose naptime had ended forever.
“I hate them,” whispered Elsie, voice low and tight and risky. Cuckoos have human-normal hearing—the ones downstairs wouldn’t be able to hear us unless we spoke at a normal volume. But until we’d checked all these rooms, we had no way of knowing whether they contained a cuckoo, someone who’d slipped away from the rest of the hive for a nap and might find themselves in the enviable position of being able to catch a pair of intruders.
I nodded my understanding. Elsie spared me a brief, anguished look before starting toward the nearest door, knife in hand, ready to begin our search in earnest.
The room was empty. All the rooms along the front of the hall were empty, until we had one more door to check, and a lot of failure to carry on our shoulders. Elsie looked at me. I nodded again, then put my hand on the doorknob.
I wanted to remove the anti-telepathy charm that was keeping me safe. I wanted to know whether the comforting psychic hum of Sarah’s presence would resume, as familiar as the sound of my own heartbeat, and somehow as essential to my mental health. I hadn’t realized how quiet the world was until that silent song had gone away and returned again.
I wanted it back. I wanted her back.
I opened the door.
The room on the other side was dominated by its bed, king-sized, easily, with too many pillows mounded at the head and the sort of thick, ornately-carved frame that spoke of either family heirloom or more money than sense. A cuckoo was stretched out in the dead center, hands folded over her breast like she was being prepared for her