standing by them. More, most of the tiers seemed to be divided roughly by age. The very youngest and the very oldest were in the outside ring. The tier after that consisted mostly of teenagers, followed by people who looked to be roughly in their early twenties, and so on. The final, central ring was made up of people about my parents’ age.
They were dividing themselves according to instar. But that didn’t explain why that final ring was so large, or why the elders were with the larval cuckoos, or why there was so much open space between them—
And then one of the older cuckoos opened his mouth and made a pained hissing, clicking sound that hurt my ears, even as his eyes abruptly flashed a blazing supernova white. The light in them died a split second later, and he collapsed forward, nearly landing on the children who had been standing directly front of him. They moved to the side and kept moving until a break had formed in the ring. Several cuckoos approached from the side, entering the break and scooping up the body—and it was a body now; he wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing, wasn’t doing anything at all—before carrying it briskly away. The ring moved back together, closing the gap.
“They’re organized by instar,” I said softly. “More power the closer in you get to the middle.”
“What’s at the middle?” asked James.
I was direly afraid I already knew.
More cuckoos fell every few seconds, and when they did, the cleaners were there to scoop them up and carry them away. I moved toward the edge of the nearest ring, gesturing for the others to follow me, and when the next cuckoo fell, I started forward.
What followed was the most stressful game of live-action Frogger that I’m ever likely to be a part of. When a cuckoo fell, the rings would shift to make room for the ones who came to remove the body. That would give us the opening we needed to push forward more, without bringing them all down on our heads.
At one point, James stumbled on the uneven ground, and his arm brushed against a cuckoo moving past us with the body of a child slung across her shoulder. She stopped, looking momentarily confused. Then she started walking again, and we all three started breathing again.
I knew what we were going to find at the center of the geometric formation of silent, white-eyed bodies, and even so, it was like a blow when we finally reached the bottom of the hill and I could see into the last ring. They had arranged themselves to surround a little slice of green, a perfect circle defined by their bodies. And there, at the middle, was Sarah.
She was still wearing her white dress. I hadn’t been expecting anything else. There were grass stains on the hem, and somehow that made it even worse. She was barefoot and smeared in green, and her eyes were as bright as stars, while her hands moved through the air like she was conducting a silent symphony of numbers, moving things that only she could see from one place to another.
The skin above her lips was bright with what would have seemed like snot if I hadn’t known her biology so intimately. She was bleeding. She was bleeding from the nose and from the ears and even though she wasn’t blinking, something that looked like a tear escaped from the corner of her left eye and ran down her cheek, leaving a thick trail behind.
“She can’t take much more of this,” I whispered. “She’s going to break under the weight.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Antimony. There was a clicking sound, roughly on the level of my ear.
I turned. Antimony had drawn a gun from inside her clothing and had it aimed at Sarah’s head, her finger on the trigger. It was a small handgun, the sort of thing that’s basically designed to be concealed. It was more than big enough.
“Annie,” I said.
“I’m so, so sorry,” she said.
And then she pulled the trigger.
Twenty-four
“Some prices are far too dear. And yet we pay them anyway.”
—Jonathan Healy
Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, very far away from home, incredibly betrayed
ALL OF US ARE excellent shots.
Verity’s the best in our generation, and Alex is the deadliest—the two things are connected even though they’re not always the same—but we’re all excellent shots, because we were never given a choice in the matter. We learned from our parents, and we learned from