when I reached the fence: the man who’d emailed me wasn’t inside the boundaries. He hadn’t managed to get past the gate. Instead, he was standing at the very edge of the trees, a pale blur in the darkness, lit by the glow from his cellphone screen. He glanced up, raised one finger to signal me to silence, and returned his attention to the phone, finishing whatever message he’d been preparing to send.
“You know, it’s rude to demand someone come outside and then ignore them,” I said.
Don’t speak. His words were clumsy, distorted, like he was pushing them through a wall of water. They might hear you if you speak.
Who are you? I demanded.
His head snapped up, eyes glowing white. I resisted the urge to take a step back. I’d known he was a cuckoo, known he had to be a cuckoo, but knowing and seeing are different things.
Like the female of our species, male cuckoos all look essentially alike, pale-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. We were designed by the same evolutionary forces, intended to survive the same environment. To someone whose brain was designed to process the information, his face would look enough like mine that he could have been my brother, and dissimilar enough that if we’d held hands and walked down the center of a mall together, no one would have looked twice. Oh, the ones who looked once might think we were a little narcissistic for dating someone so similar, but they wouldn’t jump straight to a bad conclusion.
Two cuckoos in the same place is a bad conclusion, almost always.
He was wearing jeans and a dark sweater, helping him blend into the trees. Amusement colored his distorted tone as he replied, You can call me Mark. You want to come over here and hold my hand? This would be easier if you were touching me.
I’m not touching you. The thought was revolting. How are you here?
You really don’t know anything, do you? It’s amazing. It’s like finding a diamond in the middle of a chum bucket. You have to wipe off all the gore before it can shine.
I narrowed my eyes. A faint wind rose around me, fluttering my hair. I know enough to know I want you gone.
Mark made a small scoffing sound. It was the first audible noise he’d made since my arrival. It’s cliché, I know, but make me.
I couldn’t. He knew it, and I knew it, and so we were at an impasse. Or maybe not. “I don’t have to make you,” I said aloud, enjoying the way he tensed at the sound of my voice. “All I have to do is call my family.”
“Funny,” he said, his own voice pitched low and tight to keep it from carrying across the grounds. “I was under the impression that you cared about them.”
That gave me pause. Narrowing my eyes further, I shot a sharp thought at him. You touch them and you die.
“Oh, now you’ll talk to me like a civilized person? You’ve been living among the humans for too long, Sarah. What went wrong inside that pretty little head of yours? You should have entered your second instar when you reached puberty, and you didn’t. You held it off for years, and look at you now. Frightened. Pathetic. Moral.” He sounded genuinely disgusted by the last word, practically spitting it at my feet. “How did you delay your metamorphosis?”
“What’s an instar?”
His eyes widened. “This is worse than I thought. Why in the—it doesn’t matter. It isn’t my problem, I’m just the retrieval guy. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to walk to the gate, and you’re going to let yourself out. You’re going to come with me. No alarms, no attracting attention to yourself, no funny business. And then we’re going to leave.”
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because if you don’t, then you’d better be prepared for a siege.” He leaned forward. “The blood of Kairos isn’t enough to protect these people from us. We’ll hem them in, pin them down, and have them, one by one—and that’s just the ones within these walls. We know where the Lilu live. Their defenses aren’t as good as they ought to be. They’ll be dead by morning, all of them, and it will be your fault, Sarah. You’ll finally have done what a good little second-instar cuckoo ought to do and killed the family that raised you. Is that what you want?”
He wasn’t making any effort to shield his thoughts or emotions from