all while paying absolutely no attention to the throngs of people passing by in front of them. If they made eye contact, they risked triggering a complaint, or sometimes worse, a long, involved story from a weary traveler who was just looking for a moment of human connection. Great in its place, not so much fun for the person who was bound by professional obligations to sit and listen to every little twist and turn.
Their distraction was a gift for me. I stopped a few feet away, patting my pockets and allowing an expression of bewildered distress to grow on my face. I can’t read most human expressions, but I can mimic them: telepathy means that I know what they feel like from the inside.
While I was going through my acceptable airport behavior pantomime, I dipped as far as I dared into each of their minds, checking to see who felt the most pliable, and who was thus the most likely to do what I wanted without either making a fuss or declaring me their long-lost sister. The TSA man with the eighty dollars had been more than enough found family for one day.
The one on the end. She was the youngest, the least experienced, and most importantly, the most offended by the inequalities she saw on a daily basis. I stopped patting my pockets and approached her station, putting a waver into my voice as I asked, “Excuse me? Is this where I go if I need help?”
Her head snapped up and her posture shifted to one of helpful attentiveness. If I hadn’t known better, I would never have known she’d been reading fanfic on her phone half a second previously. “How can I help you today?”
“I can’t find my boarding pass,” I said. “Please, can you help me?” I let my thoughts push forward, just a little. Not enough to qualify as a full compulsion, but enough to make it clear what I wanted to have happen. You know me, I thought. You don’t need to ask for ID.
“Really, Bridget, again?” she asked, fond exasperation in her tone, and began typing rapidly. “This needs to stop happening, honey. You need to buy yourself a purse or something.”
“I guess I do,” I said, feeling suddenly uneasy. It’s not common for people to come up with their own names for me. It’s not unheard of, but . . .
It usually means those people have come into contact with another cuckoo, someone who’s already taken the time to push and pull and reshape their neurological pathways into something easier for telepathy to work with. I could be in another cuckoo’s hunting grounds right now. It’s not an unreasonable idea. As I said before, airports are liminal spaces. People come and go and if they sometimes seem to forget things or act in unusual ways, as long as those changes don’t make them appear dangerous to a casual onlooker, no one’s going to notice.
No. I’d know if there were another cuckoo this close to home. There’s a sort of feedback that happens when we get too close to each other, a telepathic static that washes over everything and makes it jittery and strange. Mom doesn’t notice it, since she’s not a receptive telepath, but I do, and the silence when I walk away from her is sometimes the loudest thing in the world. That roaring silence was still there. I could hear it. There was no one else.
The woman behind the desk was waiting, hands raised, radiating expectation. I missed something. I’d been looking for cuckoos, and I missed something.
Damn, I thought, and said sheepishly, “I’m sorry. You know I don’t mean to.”
“I know,” said the woman, relaxing slightly. The other two customer service employees didn’t appear to have noticed me, which only reinforced the idea that another cuckoo had come to visit, probably more than once. They didn’t see me because they didn’t care, because I wasn’t unusual. They’d seen me before, or someone who looked so much like me that they couldn’t tell the difference.
Humans have an incredible diversity of appearances. Different face shapes, eye shapes, eye colors, all sorts of little variations that people consider more or less appealing. It’s part of the way mammalian life in this dimension works. Everything looks different from everything else. Cuckoos . . . don’t. We come from another evolutionary path, and like most insects, we’re all virtually identical to one another. My face is my adoptive mother’s face is my biological mother’s