Her eyes widened. “I couldn’t possibly—Artie, I wouldn’t have any idea how to do that, how to control it, how to keep myself from hurting you. I could mess up your memories, I could change your personality, I could . . . I could make it so that you’re not you anymore.”
“Yeah, but the world would still be here. You’d still be here. And you wouldn’t be doing it on purpose.” I shrugged. “I trust you. I know if anything happens, it’s going to be because you couldn’t help it. This is the only way we walk out of this with Earth intact, okay? There’s not time to find another solution. I’m willing to take the risk. Are you?”
Sarah bit her lip.
Then, slowly, she nodded.
“I think I love you,” she said.
“I think I love you, too,” I said.
She smiled, and everything went away.
Twenty-five
“The people who like to sling around words like ‘impossible’ never consulted with the universe on whether or not it cares.”
—Thomas Price
Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, about to try a really stupid way of saving the world
THE CAMPUS SNAPPED BACK into focus around me, complete with furious cuckoos and the sound of screaming. Sarah sagged, her eyes still glowing lambent white. Lymph was continuing to trickle from her ears, nose, and eyes. I didn’t know how much longer she could deal with the weight of what she was trying to process.
Could I have made things worse by forcing her to split her focus and talk to me? I didn’t know, and the question alone was enough to make me feel guilty. I turned, scanning the crowd. There: a flash of reddish-brown amongst the black-and-white bodies of the cuckoos. That was probably Antimony.
One of the cuckoos fell screaming as their hair went up in flames. Yup. Definitely Antimony.
I cupped my hands around my mouth so my voice would carry farther. “Annie!” I shouted. “I need you over here!”
A gun went off. “Little busy!” she shouted back.
“Don’t care!” We had a lot of code phrases for moments like this one, where we needed to communicate without tipping our hands. I elbowed a cuckoo in the face as he suddenly seemed to recognize me as a potential target, and yelled, “The fences are down!”
A good Jurassic Park reference is universal. Annie swore, and then the commotion she and James had been merrily causing while I tried to get through to Sarah began to shift, moving toward us.
“This is either the best idea I’ve ever had or the absolute stupidest,” I said. Another cuckoo came for me. I punched her in the throat. Cuckoos don’t have as many anatomical similarities with humans as they should, based on morphology alone, but lucky for me, they have larynxes. No one with a larynx enjoys being punched in the throat. That’s just science.
The cuckoo went down, gurgling and gasping. That was good. There were six more cuckoos behind her, all aiming straight for me. That was bad. That was very, very bad. One of them had figured out that telepathic attacks weren’t working and had stopped long enough to pick up a chunk of concrete. That was even worse.
He swung for my head. I dodged, but barely. “Leave my skull out of this,” I snapped, and kicked him in the groin.
The screaming was getting closer. I hoped that meant Annie and James would be joining me soon. If they were here, I might be able to turn the tide from “probably fatal” to “eh, you’ll walk away from it.” Any combat you can walk away from is a good combat, regardless of what’s been done to the other guy.
A cuckoo lunged for me. A burning hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her backward before she could make contact. She screamed. The hand let go. The fire didn’t. The burning cuckoo fled into the crowd, carrying more chaos with her.
“What the actual fuck, Artie?” demanded Annie, before kicking a cuckoo in the back of the knee and planting her foot between the fallen man’s shoulder blades. He tried to get up. She stomped, once. He stopped trying to get up.
“I need you to take off your anti-telepathy charms.” I looked past her to James. “Both of you.”
Their eyes widened in comically identical expressions of baffled dismay.
“Uh, what?” asked Annie.
“Please. There’s no time. We talk too much anyway. Trust me.”
Annie took another precious second to stare at me before she nodded stiffly, reached into her front pocket, and