old enough to listen to Mr. Rogers and go looking for the helpers: she was trying to minimize the potential loss of life.
If Sarah finished the equation that would tear a hole in the wall of our dimension, that was the ball game. Everyone would die, except for the cuckoos, who would move on to their next target, a fresh new world ready for devastation. I couldn’t even try to convince myself that Sarah would find a way to stop them—that she’d be the small, clear voice at the center of the chaos, teaching the rest of her kind how to care—because the equation would have already burned her brain out, leaving her dead if she was lucky, and at the whim of the other cuckoos if she wasn’t. They weren’t a species of natural caretakers. They wouldn’t be good to her.
Antimony had been doing the job we’d all been raised to do. And I . . .
I was following the example that had been set for me by my parents, and by my grandparents, all the way back to the moment when Alexander and Enid Healy had decided to leave the Covenant of St. George behind. I was risking everything I had and everything I knew on the slimmest chance that I could save the woman I loved.
A hand seized my wrist, followed instantly by the crushing pressure of another mind attempting to assert its domination over mine. I turned my head. Even that was difficult, like pushing my way through thick honey. The cuckoo who had hold of me didn’t want me to move. Didn’t even want me to keep breathing.
Thank you, Great-Grandma Fran, I thought, and looked upon the face of a woman who was so close to identical to Sarah that they could have been twins. Even their eyes were the same shade of blue.
Unlike Heloise, there was no mistaking this woman for Sarah. She was immensely pregnant, her belly openly declaring her condition to anyone who saw her.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, in a calm, pleasant voice.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” I echoed, despite my best attempts to keep my mouth closed. The thick honey feeling of the air around me was getting stronger. It said that I should listen to what this woman wanted. She was so clever and so beautiful and so much more important than I was; it was really unreasonable that I would dare to interfere with her plans, which I couldn’t possibly understand, with as weak and worthless as I was—
I laughed. The woman recoiled, not letting go of my wrist. The feeling of moving through honey receded, enough for me to hear the sweet sound of several cuckoos screaming.
“Second-degree burns or frostbite, which do you think?” My tongue was thick and heavy in my mouth. Every word was an effort. A worthwhile effort, at least: with each one, I could feel her hold on me slipping. She didn’t know how to handle a target that could fight back.
Her eyes narrowed, threads of white lashing through the blue of her irises. “Your friends are troublesome,” she said. “They’ll disrupt our work. That’s inappropriate. You have to stop them.”
“Oh, they’re not my friends. They’re my family. We’re really big on family where I come from.”
The woman blinked, once, before offering me a truly radiant smile, wide and bright and oddly serene. “Ah. Family. That’s what matters to you. Well, then, I think you should know that I’m Sarah’s biological mother.”
I blinked, once. Then, before the air could harden around me again, I slammed my forehead into hers so hard that I heard bone crack. I just hoped it wasn’t mine.
The woman cried out, a sharp, startled sound, and staggered a step backward, losing her grasp on my wrist as she raised one hand to her forehead. Her eyes were watering and perfectly blue, with no sign of telepathic activity.
“You don’t get to be her mother now,” I snarled. “You gave birth to her and you left her. That wasn’t even adoption. That was . . . that was forcing someone else to do the hard work of being a parent for you. And then they died, they died, and you didn’t come back. You let us take her in. You let us love her. That was adoption, that was a choice, and we made it, and you don’t have any right to take it back. She’s not yours. She’s ours.”