Mom wouldn’t be any help with this. Even if I pulled all the way out of Artie’s head and called home, her powers were too limited compared to the cuckoo norm. She couldn’t tell me what to do. I had to feel my way through the situation and hope I didn’t make things worse.
No pressure.
Annie had fire in her fingers. That was her phrase, stolen from the surface of her mind while she was focused on burning the car: fire in her fingers. I thought about what that felt like, how the heat moved through the skin, how warm it was, how safe. How much the fire loved her. It didn’t have a mind, not in the sense that I could reach out and touch it, but it loved her all the same; some things are more important than thought or logic.
In the real world, there was no fire in my fingers. But here, deep in the tangle of Artie’s mind, I was as close to a superhero as I would ever get, and if I understood what it was to have fire in my fingers, why couldn’t I choose it for myself? I focused on my hands and smiled as they burst into lambent blue-white flame, hot enough to turn back the cold from the webbing. I stepped forward, hands held in front of me, and watched as the web shriveled away, shying back from the possibility of my touch.
“Not yours,” I said aloud, in case it would help my fire catch hold. “Not your door to bar; not your mind to steal. Not yours.”
The web charred and blackened and finally fell away, revealing the label on the door. “Consciousness,” it said. It was a little on the nose, but it could have been worse. She could have blocked the door that said “Breathing,” or the one that said “Heartbeat.” I was deep enough in Artie’s mind that I was sure those doors existed somewhere nearby, functions of the self that were almost as old as Artie himself.
I stepped forward. The door wasn’t latched. It was closed, but barely; a stiff wind could have blown it open. Shaking the memory of flame from my fingers, I reached out and pushed it gently. The door swung inward, revealing a small domed room, filled with pale light.
The cuckoo from the airport was standing in the very middle of the room.
She looked at me and smiled, her red, red lips curving upward in a gesture that was far more predatory than pleasant. “Hello, little girl,” she purred. “Tracked me to my lair, did you? I bet you feel very clever. I bet you feel very competent. Look at you, personal disaster wreaking havoc through the world. Most of us find and break our targets inside of a year. You’ve been twisting this boy around for decades. You sure do play a long game.”
“You’re not really here.” I started prowling around the edges of the room, shoulders loose, head high. She wasn’t a threat. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction.
No matter where I stood, the woman remained exactly the same, like one of those flat paintings that somehow becomes three-dimensional when viewed from the right angle. She was an illusion, not an actuality, and she had no business here. No business here at all.
“A knife is really inside a body, even when the person who did the stabbing is gone,” she countered. “They truly seemed to care about you. I could hear it in every stray thought they had. How long have you been lying to them, little girl? How long have you been working to convince them you can be tamed, redeemed, brought to heel? I’d be impressed, if I weren’t so disgusted.”
I kept circling. The threads of her trap were coming clearer, suspended in the air above her. Seen from this angle, they were less like spiderwebs and more like strands of cotton candy, fine and fair and almost invisible unless they were looked at precisely so.
“Nothing to say for yourself, little girl? I’m sorry. Did I break your toy? You can find another one. Maybe even turn this to your advantage. The others will be so very sorry for you, when they realize he’s not going to wake up.”
She was just a phantom, a fragment, a psychic trap laid by the other cuckoo to take Artie out of commission—but why? I’d been unconscious. She could have attacked me directly, rather than trying to hurt someone I cared about.