We’d stayed at the warehouse playing reunion for too long. I should have been more careful, should have treated my family the way I’d treated the strangers who’d carried me from the airport to the city—like potential casualties. But no. I’d been too tired and too happy to see them and too certain that they could handle any threats that came their way. I’d left plenty of time for the cuckoo to find me, figure out who I was with, and make plans to get back at me.
“This is my fault,” I said softly, brushing my fingertips against Artie’s cheek and getting rewarded with another burst of blurry, half-formed thought. “He’s not going to wake up on his own because there’s nothing physically wrong with him.”
“Sarah—” said Evie warningly.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and closed my eyes, and drove myself into Artie’s thoughts like a knife through ice. The world cracked around me, crystalline and perfect, and I had time for exactly one second thought—I shouldn’t be here—before everything shattered and was still.
Seven
“Trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. Even if everything else in the world is trying to deceive you, the numbers will always, always tell the truth.”
—Angela Baker
Still technically at the family compound, but also inside the mind of Arthur Harrington-Price, without an invitation
THE SHARDS OF THOUGHT and mind and math and memory fell down around me in a glittering veil, dusting the ground-not-ground at my feet, lighting up the darkness. I was standing in the middle of a vast plain of stormy nothingness. The nothing itself was the blooming purple black of a bruise, lit up here and there with blooming halos of vivid pink and red. Flashes of what looked like lightning lit up the horizon in a thousand shades of rose.
“Artie?” My voice sounded strange, like a recording of myself. There was no bone conduction here, because my bones weren’t really with me; they were outside this space, standing or sagging next to a motionless man in a hospital bed. Right. Hopefully, Evie or Kevin would have the good sense to grab me and hold me up. I wasn’t sure what would happen if the contact between us was broken while I was still flung almost wholly into Artie’s mind.
That would be a hell of a way to make him understand that I was interested in his body: taking it over seemed a little bit extreme, but it seemed like a reasonably likely outcome of this particular act of raging stupidity. I’d been in Artie’s head before, both with and without an invitation. I’d never been so far inside his head that I wound up in his mindscape.
“That is such a stupid word,” I muttered, and took a step forward . . . or tried to. My legs worked, but I got the distinct feeling that I wasn’t actually moving. The lights on the horizon certainly didn’t move. They stayed exactly where they were, bright and shimmering and impossible, and I stayed exactly where I was, pale and lost and stranded in an infinity of bruised blackness.
“Artie?” My voice echoed as if bouncing off unseen canyon walls. I cupped my hands around my mouth and tried again, shouting louder this time. “Artie!”
The ground began to crack and crumble underfoot. I glared at it. “You stop that.”
It stopped that.
Great: so I had some control over my environment, which was also Artie’s mind, which meant I should probably be careful about how many orders I wanted to give. Since I also didn’t want to plummet into the next layer of the—ugh—mindscape, a few orders were going to be necessary. I cupped my hands around my mouth again, forming a primitive megaphone.
“Artie! It’s Sarah! I know you can hear me, I’m inside your head!”
No reply.
“If you don’t come talk to me right now, I’m going to make you wish you had!”
No reply.
“Okay. You did this to yourself.” I took a deep, unnecessary breath, and began to sing at the top of my lungs, “I am a happy banana! A happy happy happy ba-na-na! Happy happy happy—”
“I hate that song.”
I stopped singing and turned, beaming when I saw Artie behind me in the darkness. He scowled and the expression made perfect sense. I was inside his head; I didn’t need to read his mind to know why his face was doing the things it was doing. That was a nice change.
In here, I could also see that he was handsome, and