do anything I wanted, because I didn’t have to be afraid of myself.
I walked and Angela watched until I turned the corner and she was gone, leaving me surrounded by the press of bodies and the low, constant roar of the minds inside them. I took a deep breath and checked the straps of my backpack again. This was where the test began. This was where I would find out whether I was actually recovered, and not just in recovery.
My name is Sarah Zellaby, and my ancestors came from a different dimension.
It’s the only way to explain my biology. Earth contains more complicated organisms and bionomies than most people realize. For everything we think we know, every rule of nature we think is unbreakable, there are a hundred things we don’t understand yet, a hundred exceptions to that unbreakable rule. There are cold-blooded mammals and hot-blooded fish, butterflies that drink blood and tears and snakes that give birth to live young. And then there’s me.
According to my Uncle Kevin, who finds my species endlessly fascinating, I’m more closely related to wasps than I am to primates, despite my internal skeletal system and mammary glands. I look externally human. I can move through a crowd without attracting any attention that a human woman wouldn’t attract. Technically, I’m a mammal—I have three small bones in my inner ear, I have hair, and I have the potential to lactate. Not that I’m ever intending to have children. That would require spending time with a male of my own species, and I’d rather spend time with the wasps we apparently evolved from. Because see, that’s how you get a Johrlac. You start with telepathic wasps—not a great plan—and then you put them through millennia of evolutionary pressures that somehow force them to become more and more like what people think of when they say the word “human.” You give them internal skeletons and flat faces with squared-off teeth and the right jaw structure for vocal communication. You give them complex hands and the ability to feed their offspring from their own bodies. Century after century after century of if/then decisions that add up to something like me.
We are not of this Earth. We’re not the only outsiders living here—the Madhura also came from outside, probably from a world a lot like the one where the cuckoos originated. The Apraxis wasps, too. Basically, any kind of insect that tells the square/cube law to go piss up a rope stands a decent chance of having come through a dimensional rift at one point or another. Sorry, Earth. Didn’t mean to crash your party.
A man in TSA blue bumped into me. I took a step back as he whirled around, radiating both irritation and a smug, bullying sort of satisfaction. He liked the power of his job, the ability to make travelers scared of him and what he could do to their carefully laid plans. Unpleasant fellow. There are unpleasant fellows everywhere—unpleasant women, too—but there’s a certain kind of bully who tends to be drawn to positions of authority. Security guards and police and, yes, TSA agents.
He’d do.
I looked at him pleadingly. His face went slack. I’m not good at reading human facial expressions, not even after a lifetime spent living among and beside them, but there are a few I’ve learned to reliably spot. This one was what Verity liked to call the “I put a spell on you” look, and the fact that he was wearing it meant things were working the way they were supposed to.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to get lost.”
His entire psychic profile changed, bullying and irritation melting into solicitous relief. “You know Mom told me to watch out for you,” he said, and took my arm in a proprietary way. There was nothing romantic or unsettling about it: everything about him was radiating “brother,” and so I didn’t fight. “Come on, Sarah. She’ll kill me if you miss your plane.”
“I still need to pick up my boarding pass,” I bluffed.
“Leave that to me.” He waved my concern away and whisked me forward, past the throng waiting in line for the security checkpoint, carrying me along with him without waiting to see whether I was willing to go.
This is the primary power, and the primary threat, of the adult cuckoo. Somewhere around puberty, we acquire control over the ability that takes us from being a nuisance and transforms us into apex predators. When we want you to, you know