the urge to snap at them. Sometimes whistling past the proverbial graveyard is the only way to stay sane in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Instead, I pushed away from the wall and started walking again, trying to think about the shape of the campus the way a cuckoo would.
Cuckoos were originally insects. Wasps. They were mostly solitary, but when they gathered in a large number, they still fell into the habits of a hive. It would make sense, then, for them to look for the central point of the campus—the point with the heaviest defenses between it and the outside world. Even if those defenses were nothing more than concrete and brick, they’d still be better than nothing to a species that knew, all the way to the bottom of its DNA, that sometimes it was essential to run and hide.
I didn’t know Iowa State, but I knew college campuses. They’re usually built around some sort of central green space, even in the heart of cities; something that students could use as an informal gathering space. Call it a quad or call it a field, its purpose was the same. I didn’t know why the cuckoos had chosen Iowa State—I would have been less surprised by Buckley Township in Michigan, where my family used to live—but if they were at the university, it was because they’d found a space large enough to suit their needs. We just had to do the same.
Annie and James flanked me as we walked, which created the unpleasant sensation of being baked and frozen at the same time. Little flames flickered around Annie’s fingers, blue-white in their intensity, while the air surrounding James seemed crystalline and clear, as bright and deadly as a winter morning. It made me feel like I was more than a little outgunned heading into this fight. All I could do was smell really nice and make people want to do things for me, and even that didn’t work on cuckoos.
Oh, and I could punch. I could punch pretty damn hard. Maybe punching would be the solution to my problem.
Or maybe it would involve too much physical contact with unfriendly cuckoos and make my problem worse. No one really knows why Great-Grandma Fran was resistant to cuckoo influence. We know it must have been genetic, since she’s passed it down to her descendants, but without having a way to study it, we’ve never been able to learn its exact limitations. James wasn’t immune to my pheromones, and the anti-telepathy charm wouldn’t stop him from getting enthralled again if one of the cuckoos decided to take me over and use me as a weapon.
“I should never have left my basement,” I muttered.
“Wish I didn’t agree,” said Annie.
Then we came around a bend in the path, leading us to the top of a small ridge. Beyond it stretched a vast green area, large enough to look like some sort of private park. All three of us stopped where we were. My heart felt like it was trying to climb up my throat and run away to someplace friendlier. Someplace where we were less guaranteed to die in the next, say, five minutes.
The green space was filled with cuckoos. Hundreds of cuckoos, maybe even thousands of cuckoos, more than I had ever considered might exist. They were packed in like the crowds at Comic-Con, shoulder to shoulder, seeming to seek skin contact with one another. Their eyes were white, their faces tilted toward the sky.
I saw elderly cuckoos, skin seamed with wrinkles and hair streaked with silver. I saw children, some as young as three or four, still in their pajamas, barefoot in the grass. There weren’t any babies. I hoped that meant they’d been left with their unwitting foster parents, and not that they’d all been killed. And then I felt bad for hoping that, since it would mean those families still had ticking time bombs buried in their midst. Which was worse, hoping for dead babies or hoping for family annihilations?
Sometimes there’s no good answer to a bad situation. Sometimes there’s only trying to find the answer that results in the fewest casualties.
Annie nudged me with her elbow. “Look,” she whispered, voice so low that it was like listening to the wind.
I looked.
The cuckoos, tight-packed as they were, had nonetheless arranged themselves in a series of concentric circles, with space between each tier. There was no mingling of one tier into the next: they’d drawn their divisions and they were