than they were bargaining for, and they probably wouldn’t enjoy it. We needed to keep this in the family, both literally and figuratively.
The seatbelt was jammed, presumably also by the accident. I took a deep breath, trying to keep the panic from rising up and overwhelming me. I knew that cars didn’t explode nearly as often in real life as they did in the movies, but something was ticking, and something was dripping, and I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to go home. I wanted—
I could feel my thoughts getting wild around the edges, slipping through my mental fingers like snakes and slithering toward the endless equations that had kept me company through my convalescence. I stopped and took another deep breath. This is nothing like what happened before, I told myself sternly. Your body is hurt, not your mind. My head ached from its impact with the dashboard, and there was a chance I’d suffered a concussion, but those were injuries to my surface self, not to the strange, obscure structure inside my brain that controlled the parts of me that weren’t a mirror to humanity. I wasn’t going to lose control of my telepathy over this. I wasn’t going to lose myself again.
The seatbelt came loose with a click. I shook it off like I was fighting all my fears at once, grabbing my backpack and fumbling for my phone. My hands were shaking. They weren’t cut, though; the glass that filled the car around me seemed to have missed me somehow. I remembered the way it had seemed to freeze in midair, not quite touching our skins. Something about that moment . . .
It was probably the trauma speaking. Glass doesn’t just stop in midair. I forced my hands to steady enough to let me unlock my screen and scrolled through my contacts until I found Annie’s number. I’d never been happier that she didn’t drive.
She picked up on the third ring. “Tell Artie to stop being a butt or we will double back and get you,” she said. There was laughter in her voice. I could hear Elsie in the background, singing loudly along with some piece of bubblegum pop that I hadn’t been subjected to yet. They sounded so happy. I hated to ruin that for them.
I hated to die alone in the forest even more.
“Please,” I croaked. My voice was weaker than I expected it to be. I swallowed, tasting the sweet, almost syrupy tang of my own blood at the back of my throat, and tried again. “Please come back. There’s been an accident. Artie won’t wake up. There’s a lot of blood.” Unspoken was the fact that it didn’t matter which of us was bleeding; it would be bad for a human rescuer either way.
From Annie’s sharply indrawn breath, she didn’t need any more details than that. “Do you know how far back you are? We’re almost to the house.”
It was an hour from Portland to the house. We’d been in the woods for less than five minutes when the impact occurred. We must have been unconscious in the car for at least half an hour. Artie was still unconscious. “Way back,” I said. “We were barely in the woods when it happened. Artie won’t wake up. Please. Come get us.”
“We’ll be there as fast as we can,” said Annie. The line went dead. I pushed back the sudden urge to cry. Artie was hurt and everything was dark, and I was alone.
At least my phone battery was in pretty good shape. I turned the screen toward Artie, swallowing hard as I braced myself for what I was about to see.
He was draped over the steering wheel, eyes closed, glasses askew. Blood oozed from a long gash down the side of his cheek, vivid red and sluggish. After a moment’s hesitation, I wiped the blood from my own forehead and held my hand over his wound, letting it drip gently down. Yes, as disgusting as it sounds, but not quite as ridiculous; cuckoo blood is a natural antibiotic agent. It’s harmless to humans and other mammals, and it substantially reduces the chances of infection. He’d have a better shot at recovery without needing heavy drugs or having a scar. And it was something I could do, something that wasn’t just sitting there and waiting for Annie and Elsie to come save us.
I wiped my sticky hand on my leg before reaching over and gently shaking his shoulder. “Artie? I