there’s one weakness shared by virtually all cuckoos, it’s overconfidence. I could only hear one set of footsteps. She was alone, and she probably didn’t have a gun, or a knife, or any of the other things that would have guaranteed her victory in direct combat. She’d picked up on my fear—not hard—and decided that it meant I was easy prey. Amateur.
“You should really have done your homework before you decided to fly into Portland, little chick. I understand the impulse to flee the nest, but this is my place, and I don’t share.”
Of course she didn’t. Cuckoos are incredibly destructive, as a rule, and when you combine that with our natural dislike for each other, you come up with an equation that says one cuckoo for every million humans is about right. Portland couldn’t support two of us. Portland could probably only support one happily because of the airport, and its daily offerings of incoming and outgoing travelers from other places. There was no way she’d be willing to let me settle here.
The footsteps came closer still. She was right outside the door to my stall. If I was going to move, it needed to be now.
I moved.
I’m not a fighter: I leave that to my cousins whenever I possibly can. But I’m a Baker by adoption, and a Price by association, and that means I was expected to learn how to defend myself, whether I wanted to or not. I kicked the stall door open as hard as I could, hearing the dull smack of metal hitting flesh, simultaneous with the cuckoo outside’s cry of startled surprise. She probably wasn’t hurt, but that didn’t matter; all I’d really intended to do was throw her off balance.
Jumping down from the toilet, I hit the stall door with my shoulder and slammed it open even harder, hitting her again. She yelped, and I danced out of the way of the door, swinging my backpack for her middle. One nice thing about coming from a species with virtually no phenotype diversity: she and I were precisely the same height, and I didn’t have to calculate where my blows were going to land. I just swung on a straight line, and they connected.
My bag hit her squarely in the stomach. I grimaced, hoping the clothes I had wrapped around my laptop would be enough to soften the blow where it was concerned. Artie could fix it if not—Artie could fix anything—but that didn’t mean I wanted my machine out of commission because some stupid cuckoo had decided to attack me.
This time she squealed, pained and indignant, falling backward. Bad luck for her, since her trajectory slammed her into one of the automated hand drying machines. It kicked on with a loud rush of hot air. She tried to shout something. I hit her with my bag again. At the same time, I released my hold on my telepathy, beginning to broadcast nothing to see here, stay away as loudly as I could. I could dimly hear her mental commands laced under my own, trying to summon her minions, but she was hurt and off-guard, and I was scared and substantially louder. Whatever she’d been trying to ask for dissolved back into the static.
“Wait,” she began.
I didn’t wait. I hit her in the head with my backpack. She staggered, so I hit her again, and she hit her knees on the tile floor of the bathroom, catching herself before she could topple over face-first.
“You started it,” I said, and hit her in the head again.
This time, she didn’t catch herself.
I kicked her a few times to be sure she was really out of the fight. Either she was down for the count, or she was a much better actress than she had any reason to be. It didn’t much matter, as long as she wasn’t following me. I prodded her with my foot, pushing hard enough to roll her over so that her face pointed toward the ceiling. Her eyes were closed, and when I felt for her mind, it was the confused jumble of memories and vague impressions that I associated with unconsciousness. Growing up around my cousins, who’ve been in combat training almost since they could walk, has left me with a keen appreciation of the various stages of “knocked out cold.” This woman was gone.
Good. I slipped my backpack on and crouched, rifling through her pockets. She had an airport security badge, my own face staring back at me from