the postage stamp picture, a wallet bulging with cash—probably stolen—and fake IDs under a dozen different names. The modern age has forced even cuckoos to adapt, since telepathy can’t fool a point of sale system or a security camera.
She clearly knew this airport: it was part of her territory, and she’d been here long enough to bother getting herself a way in and out of secured areas. She might have moved in the day I left for New York. That was good. It meant she wouldn’t have attacked me in this bathroom if there weren’t something about it that made it safe. Maybe the cameras were down, or maybe the acoustics somehow kept people outside from hearing when someone was beat to shit inside. Either way, I was in the clear, as long as I got out of the airport quickly.
I clipped her badge to the collar of my sweater, took the money from her wallet, and left her there, unconscious on the tile, wallet on the floor next to her. I felt a little weird about the theft, since she’d just turn around and steal back everything she’d lost, if not more, from the humans in the airport, but it was necessary for several reasons. I needed to get a ride without changing anyone’s mind, to make it harder for her to follow me; that meant payment. I also needed to make her understand that I’d been calm enough after defeating her to loot the body. Anyone can panic and punch somebody. The fact that I hadn’t run immediately after I was done would show that I was a worthy adversary. Someone she shouldn’t mess with. Not immediately, anyway.
Turning and walking away from her made my stomach ache because I knew what was going to happen from here. Portland is too small for two cuckoos. That’s the way the math works out. When I’d been living with Evie and Uncle Kevin, my presence alone had been enough to keep any other cuckoo from coming to settle there. The city is nice, but it’s not big or metropolitan or culturally significant enough to be worth fighting over. Not like, say, New York, which can sustain half a dozen cuckoos at any given time, and where territory battles between them are common enough to be an everyday occurrence. Cuckoos passed through Portland and went on to become someone else’s problem.
Assuming they went on at all. Part of why it hurt to walk away from the woman with my face was knowing what would happen when I got home and told Evie there was a cuckoo in the airport. Hunting in a place this public wouldn’t be easy, but she’d figure out a way. She always did. And when she was finished doing her job, there would be one less cuckoo in the world, and the population of Portland would be just a little safer, even if they were never going to understand why.
Cuckoos are apex predators. We’re not from around here, we don’t belong here, and we belong to the only species that my conservationist family believes needs to be killed on sight. We do too much damage. Even Mom agrees that ordinary cuckoos can’t be allowed to hunt the way they do, because it’s too destructive, and when it goes too far, it triggers Covenant purges, which could get a lot of innocent cryptids killed.
Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there.
No one gave me a second look as I walked through the airport with the cuckoo’s badge clipped to my sweater and my head held high. I had nothing to be ashamed of. She was the one who’d attacked me. I knew that. I had to keep knowing that, as the guilt began gnawing at me from the inside, whispering that I was just like her, that if I were really the good person I pretended to be, I would have found another way. I would have talked to her, negotiated, found a way to make myself heard through the overwhelming static of our telepathy clashing.
I knew none of that was possible. I knew Mom and I were reasonable people by human standards and freaks by cuckoo standards, because we had silly things like “ethics” and “morality” that got in the way of doing whatever the hell we wanted. I knew the woman in the bathroom wouldn’t have stopped with beating me unconscious. If I’d