close enough to make myself heard without needing to raise my voice. The rattle of wheels on the track continued in the background, a smooth, staccato white noise underscoring everything I said. “Long time no see, huh?”
I was trying to sound cool. I was probably failing. But I felt Elsie’s suspicion melt into surprise, and finally into awe, as she sent a single, virtually shouted thought in my direction: Sarah?
Yeah, I thought back, nodding for good measure. It’s me.
Elsie stood, withdrawing her hand from her purse. “Are you really?” she asked. “I mean, you’re really-really Sarah?”
“I’m really-really Sarah,” I said.
“Prove it.” Her voice was low, in deference to the derby girls circling the track below us—although one of those girls, dressed in black and red, with a long red-brown braid trailing out the back of her helmet, had slowed to a stop just beside the track itself.
A rush of almost startling joy washed over me. Antimony. I’d been hoping I might be lucky enough to catch the league during practice, and to find one of my cousins in residence. Finding two of them was almost unreasonable.
“You were super double bonus mad when Alex and his sisters came back from Lowryland with a new cousin as a souvenir, until Mom explained that even if she wasn’t your grandmother, I was going to be your cousin, too; you think it’s unfair that I have such good eyelashes without mascara; you also think it’s unfair that I’d rather do math than let you practice your makeup techniques on me. You once accidentally made chlorine gas in the front hall and we had to try to convince Artie to come out of his basement before he choked to death, all without saying anything that would alert the mice. Not that it mattered, because they tattled on us anyway, and we all got sent to bed without dessert for practicing our chemical weaponry without an adult present. Your favorite color is this weird shade of maroon that you insist is pink even though it isn’t, you like cocoa without marshmallows, partially as a form of self-defense against Annie, and you had a crush on me for like a year when we were teenagers, which we all pretended wasn’t happening.”
“How can you know all that and still insist Artie isn’t in love with you?” asked Elsie. If I’d had any doubts about her identity, that would have lain them to rest; she and my other cousins had been trying to convince me that Artie had nonfamilial feelings for me basically since we’d all hit puberty. They couldn’t seem to understand that my being a cuckoo made a difference, and so I’d stopped trying to argue with them when the subject came up. There was a hitch in her voice that could have been laughter and could have been the beginning of a sob. Based on the chaotic thoughts sparking in the air around her, as tangled as a ball of yarn, it was probably both. I braced myself. I’d seen that tangle of thoughts before.
Sure enough, she flung herself at me a second later, locking her arms around my torso and pulling me crushingly close, her chin resting on my left shoulder while her entire body shook with sobs. I stood rigidly still, aware that she didn’t need or want anything else from me. She was reassuring herself that I was really here, really real, and that was all that mattered.
The tip of a knife pressed against the back of my neck, positioned so that one quick thrust would slide it into the gap between my vertebrae and sever my spinal column. I may not have a heart, but I’m human-cognate enough that slicing through my spine will incapacitate me permanently, if not kill me outright. I closed my eyes and smiled.
Hi, Annie, I thought. It was better than speaking aloud, since the goal was convincing my cousin I was really myself, and not some other cuckoo playing stupid opportunist. True telepathy—words instead of thoughts and feelings and vague impressions—takes time to come easily. I can do it with someone I’ve just met if I’m willing to push, but there’s a different feel to words that have been shoved through natural resistance. They sound like someone shouting from a long way away. Annie and I had been telepathically attuned to each other for years. To Annie, I should sound like—
“Oh, my God, Sarah.” She pulled the knife away, and suddenly I was in the middle of