Grandma Alice, and we learned from all the teachers our family could find for us, because we had to know. We had to understand what a firearm was capable of doing, and we had to be able to do it. Punching and stabbing things are all well and good, and they absolutely have their place, but sometimes, only a bullet will get the job done.
All of us are excellent shots. When Antimony pulled the trigger, there was no question in my mind that she’d hit what she was aiming at. Because all of us are excellent shots. Those words kept ringing through my head, packing themselves into an impossibly narrow window of time, as I turned in slow horror—as I whipped around as fast I could—to Sarah.
If she was going to die, I was going to see it happen. I was going to know that it had happened. And then I was going to go home to my basement and lock the door and never go outside again.
The sound of the bullet being fired had been impossibly loud from where I was standing, and there was no question in my mind that we were about to be dealing with a whole lot of seriously pissed-off cuckoos. Some of them were already turning toward us, their eyes flashing white, their expressions blank and somehow terrifying in their emotionless coldness.
Sarah didn’t turn. Sarah didn’t move at all. The bullet was moving too fast for the eye to follow—until suddenly it wasn’t moving either. Suddenly it was hanging in the air in front of her, surrounded by a sphere of what looked like water. She had somehow hardened the molecules of the atmosphere enough to stop it before it could reach her.
No, she said inside my mind, loudly enough that it made my eyes water. There was no feeling that she was screaming, or even that she was shouting: her mental voice was just so much bigger than it had ever been before that my brain didn’t know how to process it yet.
“Sarah, please,” I said.
No, she repeated, and waved her hand dismissively, sending the bullet rocketing back toward us.
Antimony shouted, a wordless sound of panicked warning, and shoved James to the side. The bullet whizzed between them. There was a soft shattering sound. I risked a glance over my shoulder.
The bullet had found a home squarely between the eyes of a large male cuckoo, opening a hole through which clear fluid was already beginning to leak. His eyes went comically wide before he crumpled, motionless, to the ground.
“Artie, I’m sorry, but we need to run,” said Antimony, looking frantically around as more and more cuckoos turned in our direction.
“She didn’t have to miss.”
“What?”
“Sarah didn’t have to miss.”
“Yes, I’m sure your cousin who’s gearing up to unmake reality was being kind to us, now can we go?” demanded James.
I kept my eyes on Antimony. The cuckoos had noticed us, but they weren’t moving yet: we had a few seconds. “You’ve been on the range with Sarah. She’s not the best shot, but she doesn’t miss at this sort of distance.”
“I’m wearing an anti-telepathy charm,” said Antimony. “She can’t see me.”
“She can’t read you, but she can see you. And I’m right here. She missed us because she didn’t want to hurt us.” I needed her to understand. The words weren’t obeying me. No matter how hard I tried to make them, they weren’t obeying me. “It’s still Sarah in there.”
“Artie—”
“I can hear her. It’s still Sarah. Let me try.”
Antimony looked into my eyes for one long, frozen moment. Then she nodded, mouth twisting into a resigned smile.
“We’re surrounded and doomed anyway. If you think you can try—try. We’ll hold them off.” She shoved the gun into her waistband as her hands burst into flame and she shouted, “All right, you telepathic assholes! You want a piece of this?”
“Oh, joy, this is precisely how I wanted to die,” muttered James. The temperature around us dropped precipitously.
I spun on my heel and dove into the nearest ring of cuckoos.
It was hard not to be angry with Annie for shooting at Sarah. No: it was impossible not to be angry with Annie. I wanted to shake her and scream and demand to know what she thought she was doing, how she could take that kind of risk with Sarah’s life. Except for the part where I knew what she thought she was doing. She was doing what we’d all been taught to do since we’d been