that the thought should have been coming from anything but another cuckoo. Elsie’s telepathy was too weak to reach me from as far away as I knew she currently was, and she didn’t like to use it unless she absolutely had to; she’d be calling my phone, not my cerebral cortex. Nothing else in these woods had the capability to communicate like that.
A cuckoo would.
Cuckoos are rare, one in a million, thanks to the way we feed and fight and protect our territory. Cuckoos are rare, and I’d already encountered two of them—one directly, one through inference—since leaving home. Logically, I shouldn’t have been worried about seeing another one. Logically, we wouldn’t have been the victims of a hit and run in the middle of nowhere. Someone was hunting us.
I shoved my phone into my pocket and balled my hands into fists, reaching out in all directions as hard as I could. My eyes burned as the chemical changes in my vitreous humor caused them to glow a lambent white, and I felt a spreading dampness on my upper lip. I was bleeding again. This was too much; I couldn’t keep it up for very long, or I was going to hurt myself. A sudden wind whipped around me, stirring my hair off my shoulders, making the cut on my forehead sting even worse than it had before.
Don’t, I thought, slinging the word like a stone into the darkness. You won’t like what happens if you do.
Maybe I was being paranoid. Maybe the brush of another mind against my own had been fear or hope or some toxic combination of the two: I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t want to be found and so no matter what happened, I was going to lose. Maybe. But I didn’t think so. My injury, and the anti-telepathy charms my family had taken to wearing in its aftermath—the charms Alex and Shelby still wore, to keep me from slipping accidentally into their minds, even though I’d been mostly able to control myself for over a year now—had left me more sensitive to the presence of other telepaths than I’d ever realized I could be. They were gunshots in a silent field, so loud that they couldn’t possibly be overlooked. Not even when I wanted to.
The wind continued to whip around me. Something moved on the other side of the road, barely visible in the dimness. I snapped around to look at it. A deer was standing at the tree line, body outlined in the faint glow of the moonlight. I blinked.
The wind wasn’t blowing on the other side of the road. The leaves didn’t rustle; the dust didn’t stir. The deer was standing perfectly still, and so was the world around it. I blinked again and the wind around me died, my eyes burning as the light bled out of them. There was a warm gush as my nosebleed increased in both strength and severity, and then the ground was rushing up to meet me, and the darkness drew me down again, into a place where there was neither light nor motion, but only peaceful stillness.
* * *
“This would be a lot easier if she had a pulse,” Annie complained, her hand clamped around my wrist like she thought she could somehow force my anatomy to rearrange itself and provide her with a heart to monitor. “Who designs a biped that doesn’t have a pulse? That’s just inefficient. I call shenanigans.”
She sounded nervous. The thoughts rolling off her proved it. As usual, she was masking genuine fear under a veil of sarcasm and annoyance, like she could somehow bluff the universe into believing she was the badass she always pretended to be.
“Evolution works in mysterious ways.” Elsie’s voice was accompanied by the sound of branches breaking. “Artie’s still out cold, but he’s breathing, and he, at least, has a good, steady pulse. I think he’ll be fine, once we get him home and patch up that cut on his cheek. It looks like Sarah bled on him before she got out of the car.”
“Good.” Annie let go of my wrist. “Let’s move Artie first, make sure we have anything he’ll miss, and torch the car.”
“Are you sure—”
“His blood is everywhere. A human finds the thing, they’re going to be in love with him for the rest of their life. And the frame is bent to shit. I don’t think there’s a mechanic in the world who can save it. I