whole process had taken only a few seconds. Back in the real world, outside our minds, the other cuckoo gasped, hand clutching at her swollen belly. The last of the shields fell. I looked at her levelly.
“Your name is Ingrid,” I said. “Now what the hell’s an instar?”
“Get out of my head,” she hissed.
I pulled back, enough that I was looking at her with my eyes more than with my mind, and said, “I met your conditions. I learned your name. It’s your turn to answer my questions.”
“She has you there,” said Mark.
“He’s on her side now,” said Heloise, in a jeering tone. “They went for a long, romantic walk in the woods together, and now he’s ready to switch to the winning team.”
“He’s already on the winning team,” said one of the male cuckoos in the back. The other male cuckoo said nothing, only sat in sullen silence, his mental glare overflowing the RV until the air felt like it was too heavy to breathe.
I did my best to ignore the lot of them, focusing instead on Ingrid. “Tell me what I need to know,” I insisted. “I know enough to know that I don’t know enough. Unless you’d rather I went in and took it . . . ?”
“No,” she said sharply, raising one hand in a warding gesture. The other hand remained clamped to her belly, cradling its precious contents. “You won’t take anything. But I can show you, if you’ll accept the knowledge. No forcing your way in. No digging for anything I haven’t offered willingly. Do we have an arrangement?”
There was fear in her words, lending them a spicy brightness that hadn’t been there before. I wanted to hear more of it, I realized; I wanted to hear her beg. That wasn’t like me. That didn’t change how much I wanted it.
Something was wrong. “Yes,” I said, and swallowed, suddenly dry-mouthed. “But you have to promise me the same. No looking at things I’m not intentionally showing you. No digging around.”
“The compact is sealed,” she said, and her eyes flashed white, and I was falling.
* * *
The infant cuckoo was pulled, purple-gray and squalling, from its mother’s womb. It kicked its tiny legs and thrashed its tiny arms until its father passed it into its mother’s arms, allowing her to guide it to her breast, where it latched on and started sucking greedily. Unlike a human baby, it seemed to know immediately what to do and how to do it.
“We have no instincts left,” said Ingrid. I turned my head, unsurprised to see her standing next to me. “We don’t need them. Everything an infant cuckoo needs to know is passed down, parent to child, before birth. They’re passive receivers in those days, unable to talk back, only able to learn.” She caressed her own swollen belly with one hand. “They stay passive for a week, maybe two, after birth. Long enough for us to be sure they’re whole and healthy before we pass them on. It’s not cruelty that makes us find better homes for our children. It’s mercy.”
“My parents left me with human strangers,” I said. “They died.”
“Yes, and that’s very sad, but it had to happen,” said Ingrid. The little family in front of us jumped forward, the man disappearing, the woman going from naked in her bed to clothed and composed and walking calmly up a driveway in a nice suburban neighborhood, a swaddled baby in her arms. “Babies are larval, you see. They’re easily influenced, easily changed. We give them everything we can before they’re born, and then we place them with hosts who won’t be able to manipulate them. We protect them by allowing them to incubate in peace. Larvae give off a sort of a . . . signal, like those wireless fences people buy for their dogs. No one can see that anything’s wrong, but the dog won’t cross the invisible line. Well, adult cuckoos won’t go anywhere near an infant that’s old enough to have started radiating, not before they’ve reached their first instar. Our children are safe from us. They claim and keep territory just by existing.”
“Are you going to abandon your baby?”
She looked at me like I was dim. I realized, numbly, that I could read her expression perfectly. It was just like being back in Artie’s mindscape. Here, everything was thought, and I could visualize it all without even trying.
“Of course I am, you stupid girl,” she said. “This isn’t my first, and