tried to negotiate with her, my body would be hidden somewhere in the depths of the airport by now, ready to be fed into a furnace or mulched and slipped into someone’s garden. My biology is different enough from the human norm that no forensic scientist would ever have been able to tell that I’d been a murder victim. I’d just be gone.
It didn’t make me feel any better about hitting a woman in the face with my backpack. Or about the fact that I was honestly more worried about my laptop than I was about having done her permanent damage.
I walked a little faster. I needed to get out of this airport.
* * *
The cabbie looked at me over his shoulder as I shoved a wad of bills in his direction, enough to pay my fare six times over. “I still think you should go to the police,” he said. “It’s not right, a young woman like you being this afraid.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’m so sorry to have involved you in this. I just want to make sure you’re safe. So please, promise me, no more airport trips today.”
Confusion and concern radiated from him, almost perfectly balanced. “You can’t honestly think I’d be in danger because I gave you a ride. I give lots of people rides.”
“Probably not,” I said, and pushed against his mind, just slightly. Not enough to change him or make him forget me entirely. Enough to blur his memories of me and make him think that maybe a paid vacation day wouldn’t be such a bad idea. You have so much to do at home, and you’ve already got more money than you would normally have made, I whispered, directly into his subconscious. The night is almost over anyway. “I’d still feel so much better if I knew you weren’t taking the risk.”
I’d feel so much better if I knew he wasn’t going back into the other cuckoo’s range. She’d be awake by now, and furious. If she caught any trace of me, she’d pounce on it.
The cabbie looked out the window, concern melting into uncertainty. The sun was slipping down the line of the horizon, painting everything in shades of red and gold. “I suppose my shift was almost over anyway,” he said finally. He took the money from my hand, making it disappear. “I still hope you’ll change your mind and involve the authorities. A girl like you shouldn’t be running scared.”
“I’ll take care of everything,” I said, and flashed him a smile before opening the door and getting out onto the Portland street. I walked a few steps, turned, and waved to him. He waved back and pulled away from the curb. I stayed exactly where I was, watching him go, waiting to be sure that he didn’t suddenly realize, as he got away from my meticulous influence, that he’d dropped me in a bad part of the city. His concern was sweet and born largely from the distress that I was radiating.
My upper lip was wet. I touched it and grimaced as the sunset reflected off the clear liquid on my fingers. I was bleeding again. That last push, on top of everything else, must have been too much for my system to handle. I could feel the endless loops of recursive numbers trying to intrude on my thoughts, to pull me down into the comforting safety of pure mathematics, where I could be safe and comfortable and—most of all—protected. The numbers would protect me even as the world ate me alive. And the world would eat me alive if I let myself go into a fugue. A cuckoo who can’t defend herself is a dead cuckoo.
I pushed the numbers aside and wiped my fingers on my jeans before dragging my sleeve across my face, wiping the rest of the blood away. Most humans wouldn’t recognize it for what it was, but I didn’t need to walk around Portland looking like I had a runny nose. The cabbie wasn’t coming back. He’d taken his money and forgotten me already, and now I just had to hope he was going to decide not to return to the airport, where that other cuckoo was probably waiting to crack his skull open like an egg looking for a map to where I’d gone.
Poor man. He didn’t ask to be a part of this, and with any luck at all, he wasn’t going to be. Not for long, anyway. I started walking