do? You’re protecting her while she finishes her metamorphosis. You’re sheltering your own doom, and you think it’s your idea because she would never lie to you, because she loves you.” The sneer Heloise put into the word “love” was enough to make my stomach turn over.
I swallowed bile. “It’s not like that.”
“It’s always like that, over and over and over again. You people renamed us when you realized we were here, called us ‘cuckoos’ like that would make us less, like that would make us weak enough for you to fight. Did you know that we returned the favor? We call you ‘cowbirds.’ You’re too stupid to see what’s in your own nest. You’re too stupid to see anything.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s enough.”
The anti-telepathy charm was still in my pocket. I dug it out, careful to keep it against the skin of my palm as I leaned over and slipped it under the neck of her sweater—Sarah’s sweater—and anchored it under the strap of her bra.
Heloise froze, eyes going wide once again as she stared at me. I offered her a cool smile. It didn’t matter whether she could see the expression or not. I knew it was there.
“I’m tired of you, but I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “Enjoy the quiet.”
“Please,” she whispered, sounding truly frightened for the first time. “It’s too much. The world. You turned off the world.”
“Yeah, I did,” I agreed, stepping back. “If Sarah doesn’t wake up, you’ll wish I’d done worse than that.”
I turned and started for the barn door. I was almost there when Dad caught up to me.
“That wasn’t kind,” he said, voice low.
“No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “But then, what about this day has been?”
He rested his hand briefly on my shoulder. “I won’t tell you she’s going to be all right. None of us can know that. But I can promise that we’re going to do everything we can.”
“I know, Dad,” I said. “Come on. Mom’s waiting for us.”
Side-by-side, we stepped out of the barn and started across the lawn, toward the house where the rest of our family was waiting, where Sarah slept, where everything was falling apart.
Even me.
Twenty-one
“There’s a moment where everything comes together, where the numbers add up and everything is perfect, and nothing hurts. That’s the best moment of them all. A person could spend their whole life chasing after it, and never feel their time was wasted.”
—Angela Baker
In the shining whiteness of the infinite void, where everything is about to change
THE EQUATION EXTENDED OFF the chalkboard and into the air, wrapping around me, filling the void with numbers and letters and the sweet, simple logic of a world working exactly as it had always been intended to work.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
I had been so foolish. I had been so stupid. This was . . . this was everything.
The equation sang to me, bright and beguiling, begging to be completed. Begging to be carried out into the world and allowed to come to sweet fruition. All I had to do was wake up. All I had to do was open my eyes, and the work—the great work, the work that I had been moving toward since the moment of my birth, the work that had always been destined to be mine—would finally begin.
All I had to do was wake up.
So I woke up.
Twenty-two
“When it’s a choice between saving your family and saving the world, I can’t tell you what to decide. I can only tell you that, no matter what you choose, part of you will always know that you were wrong.”
—Alexander Healy
The front room of a private complex about an hour outside of Portland, Oregon, in the calm before the storm
YOU SURE LEAVING A cuckoo alone in the barn is the right idea?” Antimony leaned against the wall next to me, taking a swig from a bottle of virulently pink liquid. It looked like she was drinking cotton candy, which was almost enough to put me off the idea of cotton candy forever.
“No,” I said. The mice cheered in the kitchen behind us. Elsie had broken out the panini press as a means of dealing with her own nerves, and was making ham and cheese sandwiches for the colony. It was a weird coping mechanism, but, frankly, I’ve seen weirder. “At the same time, I don’t really care. She’s not going to escape without seizing control of someone’s mind, and with my anti-telepathy charm on her, she’s not