Who had managed to come out of his first metamorphosis and into his second instar without killing his parents, because his sister had managed to keep him distracted until his mind had time to assimilate all the information that had been dropped on top of him. All he’d needed was time. Once he had that, everything else had fallen into place. He was still a cuckoo, but he was a new kind of cuckoo, not psychically non-receptive like Grandma, not intentionally modified like Sarah, but . . . new. He might be the closest thing to a real Johrlac we’d ever seen. His sister had, however accidentally, helped him through that transition.
Maybe I could do the same for Sarah.
I pulled back without letting go, just far enough to look into her burning eyes.
“I love you,” I said, aloud this time, and leaned forward and kissed her. I felt her take a short, sharp breath, her lips parting against mine. Then she was kissing me back, and everything was white and everything was burning and everything was white and everything was burning and everything
* * *
This time, when the endless whiteness formed around me, I was standing in front of Sarah, almost close enough to reach out and touch her. That was nice, considering I knew our bodies were still tangled together back in the real world. I was a little disappointed not to still be kissing her. Kissing her had been nice, even if I wasn’t sure how much of it she’d actually been aware of.
She wasn’t wearing the white dress here. Instead, she was wearing a long gray skirt and a shapeless green sweater, and her hair was hanging loose around her face, once more subject to the whims of gravity as the rest of us know it, and she had never in her life been more beautiful.
A thin ribbon of clear lymph was running from the corner of her right eye and dripping down her cheek like a viscous tear. I bit my lip. Then I stepped forward and used my thumb to wipe it away, leaving a pearlescent smear behind. It was as thick as human blood, and as warm. It felt wrong. It felt . . . alarming.
“Hey,” I said. “You pulled me into your head when I kissed you. That’s good, right? That means you’re still in control. Right?”
Sarah shook her head silently, another bead of lymph gathering in the corner of her eye.
“I’m not leaving you.”
“Then we’ll both die,” she whispered.
I hesitated before I asked, “If I stay in here and we both die, does the equation get finished? Do you destroy the world? Because that’s what they want you to do, you know. They want you to destroy the world. The whole thing. Movies and comic books and tomato plants and math.”
“We’d take the math with us,” she whispered.
“Fine. All that other stuff would be gone, though. Wiped right off the map. I mean literally wiped off the map. That’s another thing you’d be destroying: the map. No more maps. Seems a little excessive to me.”
“Chocolate,” she whispered.
“See, most people don’t think of destroying chocolate as a good thing. They like chocolate. They think it matters.”
“Nasty stuff,” she said, with a flicker of humor. The bead of lymph fell, following the track of the last one down her face. “I don’t want to kill you.”
“So don’t.” I shrugged. “Don’t kill me. Don’t finish their homework for them. We’ve coped with the cuckoos this far. We can put up with them for a while longer.”
“I have to. My head . . .” She touched her temple with the tips of her fingers, frowning and wincing at the same time. “My head’s so full. It’s spinning. I don’t know what to do with a head this full. I have to let the numbers out. If I don’t, I think I’m going to explode.”
“Let them out, then. Don’t solve them.”
“I don’t have a choice.” Sarah lowered her hand and looked at me bleakly. “You can’t hear them. You can’t hear them begging me. This is what I was made for. This is what I was designed to do. I want to do it. I just don’t want to . . . I don’t want to.”
The edges of her irises began to frost over, turning white again.
I didn’t stop to think about what my actions would mean. I just stepped forward and grabbed her upper arms, pulling her toward me. Then, not allowing myself to hesitate, I