a flash of something in the collective, bright and sweet and somehow carrying the fruity, acidic taste of Sarah’s favorite drink, grenadine and tomato paste mixed with ginger ale. The weight receded. I sat up, gasping, resisting the urge to feel myself to confirm that my body was still there. Of course it was still there. It wouldn’t have been in so much pain if it hadn’t been there.
“What the fuck?” demanded Annie.
“No anti-telepathy charm.” I rubbed my temples with both hands. “Nothing to keep the cuckoos out. I still can’t hear the hum. Something’s wrong with Sarah.”
“Yeah, she’s gone all Dark Phoenix and started ripping holes in the walls of the world,” said Annie. “We knew that.”
“But she’s still in there,” I said. “I think . . . I think the hive noticed me and wanted to do something to make me go away. Sarah stopped them. She may not be capable of breaking free of whatever fugue she’s in, but she still stopped them from taking me over.”
“How are you sure it was her?” asked James.
“She’s been in and out of my head since we were ten years old,” I said. “I know what her thoughts feel like. They have a taste, almost, like I’m remembering drinking something I never drank.”
“One of her disgusting sodas,” said Annie, in sudden understanding.
I nodded. “Tomato sauce and ginger ale, and just a little bit of grenadine.”
“When we were kids, we used to believe that a drink needed three ingredients to be really fancy,” said Annie, as if that would take the bewildered, borderline disbelieving look off of James’s face.
“How do you know that it’s not some cuckoo cultural drink?” he asked. “Maybe it wasn’t Sarah who let you go.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I have to tell myself it was her, because if there’s any chance we can still get her back, I’m going to do my best to take it. I have to believe there’s still a chance. It’s the only way I can do this.”
“If she’s gone, I won’t make you be the one to kill her,” said Annie.
She was trying to be kind. I knew that. I could see it in her face, the soft, weary lines around her eyes, the downturned corners of her mouth. She was trying so hard to be kind, and nothing about this was kind, and nothing about this was fair, and nothing—nothing—about this was right, or ever could have been.
I opened the car door.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s end this.”
James and Annie followed me to the sidewalk, and along it toward the university grounds. Somewhere, the cuckoo hive was gathering, waiting for us to find them. Somewhere, Sarah was working her way through an equation so big and so terrible that completing it would destroy the world.
We were running out of time, and there were no good endings left. So we just kept walking.
We had barely passed the first building when we saw the first cuckoos.
There were five of them, all around my age, standing silently on a patch of grass with their faces turned toward the sky, like they were looking at a particularly interesting cloud. Their eyes were glowing softly white, not as bright as Sarah’s had been when she tore a hole in reality, but bright enough that I felt safe assuming they couldn’t see us. I motioned Annie and James both to silence and walked faster, until we found a corner we could safely duck around.
“Well, we’re in the right place,” said Annie.
“Can they not see us when they’re like that?” asked James.
“It’s . . . complicated,” I said. “Their eyes still work, but Sarah used to say it was like trying to watch two shows at the same time on the same screen, and Mark said they were getting sunk in the corona of her metamorphosis before. Things get all jumbled together, and sometimes it’s easier to let go of what you think you see and focus on what you know you see.”
“Which means the cuckoos we run across will either be focused on maintaining control over the townspeople or working to help Sarah do her big math problem,” said Annie. “As long as we’re quiet and don’t touch any of them, we should be able to keep moving without much concern that they’re going to stop us and ask what we’re doing here. They probably won’t even notice we’re here.”
“I’m assuming that by ‘ask’ you mean ‘attack,’” said James.