yet. I needed to make it all the way to a safe house if I wanted to pass the test Mom had set for me.
The plane finished taxiing to the gate, and the flight attendants turned off the fasten seatbelt sign. I bounced out of my seat, sliding past Christina and the once-again sleeping Susie, and grabbed my backpack out of the overhead compartment, slipping my arms through the straps before the cabin door was even open. It unsealed with a hiss and I was out, not running, but walking very quickly away from the rest of the passengers.
I knew too much about them. I didn’t know what they looked like, and it didn’t matter, because I knew what they thought like. I knew who was cruel and who was kind and who probably needed to be hit with a baseball bat for the things they believed were okay to do to their fellow humans. I was just glad the entire plane had been human. Being stuck with too many kinds of minds would have been even worse.
I strode my way along the jet bridge to the terminal, sucking in great breaths of fresh airport air, which might be processed, but hadn’t been circulated through the cabin for the last several hours. I wanted a bathroom and a salad and a ride home. I wanted—
I stepped into the terminal and stopped dead in my tracks, suddenly feeling like I’d been punched in the gut. People streamed out behind me, shooting sour thoughts about people who stopped in walkways in my direction. I didn’t move. I was struggling to breathe. The thoughts stopped, replaced by weary irritation at the need to step around some inanimate but unavoidable obstacle. I was cloaking myself. I wasn’t trying to, but I was, and I couldn’t stop, because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.
The static roar was drowning out everything else, filling my mind from end to end, so that even the thoughts of the people behind me were muffled, becoming little more than background noise. They were inconsequential in the face of something so much bigger.
There was another cuckoo in the airport.
Three
“Anyone who tells you that you only die once hasn’t actually died. They wouldn’t be so cavalier about it if they had.”
—Mary Dunlavy
Portland International Airport, trying really hard not to panic
CUCKOOS ARE TERRITORIAL.
I think it has something to do with the static we create when we get too close to each other. It can get so loud that it becomes almost paralyzing, and when the shock of having someone shouting inside your brain passes, it’s usually replaced by rage. The sound grates on every nerve we have, making killing whatever’s causing it seem like the best idea anyone has ever had. Ever. Which is bad enough, except that most cuckoos won’t do their own dirty work. They use the resources they have available to them.
Which means they use humans. They dig into the minds of the humans around them, and they make murder seem like a totally awesome plan. Like it’s something that was always on the docket for today, but just got moved up a little bit. You know, between the dry cleaning and getting dinner into the oven. Every person around me had suddenly become a potential weapon, and unless I was willing to do the same—unless I was willing to force my own will on another sapient being for my own benefit, and force them to risk their skins to save mine—I was completely unprotected.
This was what Mom had been afraid of. That I’d go back out into the world, run into a threat, and freeze up, unable to decide on a course of action that would actually protect me. I tightened my hands on my backpack straps and started walking again, angling as quickly as I could for the nearest bathroom. Bathrooms tend to be safe places. It’s hard to seize control of someone when all they want to do is pee. I could catch my breath, try to figure out where the static was coming from, and make a new plan for getting out of the airport.
One thing was sure: I couldn’t go to the house. I’d know if another cuckoo was digging deeply enough into my mind to uncover an address, but I couldn’t protect that information once I gave it to my driver. If the cuckoo wanted to follow me, all they’d need to do is follow the person who dropped me off. Then