“Everyone knows about you. The Prices. The Healys. You were the first people to figure out that we existed, and keep knowing that we existed, even when we tried to make you forget. It’s because of you that this world has turned dangerous for us.” He paused to chuckle, darkly. “Well. Because of you, and because of video surveillance. We can change a mind, but we can’t change a camera. Another few years and this whole world is going to be like London. Too filmed to risk. Still, we might have held out a few more decades if it weren’t for you people screwing everything up for us. So I’m asking you, how much do you know? I need to know where to start.”
“We know nothing,” said Mom, stepping forward. “Start there. Start with the assumption that we know nothing, and we need you to tell us everything. And if you’re wrong, we’ll just have a few things confirmed. It’s not like most of the enemy cuckoos we’ve dealt with have been inclined to give us good intel.”
“Fine,” said Mark. He took a deep breath. “This is what you need to know in order to understand what’s about to happen . . .”
Sixteen
“People feel smart when they tell you ‘Frankenstein’ was the doctor, not the monster. They’re wrong. Frankenstein—Dr. Frankenstein—was always the monster. That’s the whole point. Sometimes evil is so damn beautiful it hurts.”
—Martin Baker
In the barn, getting a history lesson from a monster
WE COME FROM A dimension called ‘Johrlar.’ I don’t know where the root word came from. No one does anymore. We’re the children of exiles, people who’d been thrown out of Johrlar for breaking the rules. I don’t know what rules we broke, either. Johrlac—cuckoos—don’t write anything down. Our history is given to us while we’re in the womb, passed down from mother to child as we gestate. Every cuckoo is born with the whole of our living memory already waiting for us. But we’re still larval. We haven’t even reached our first instar yet. If we had access to everything we knew, it would overwhelm us, and we would never be able to mature into individuals. So the knowledge is hidden from us until our minds are developed enough to absorb it without being overwhelmed. Our first metamorphosis looks like human puberty. Our bodies change, our brains expand, and the whole history of our people unlocks. It can be . . . a shock, to the developing psyche.”
“You mean they snap and murder everyone around them,” said Antimony.
“Something like that,” said Mark. He didn’t sound sorry about it, exactly; more resigned, like this was some nasty mess that he had somehow ended up responsible for. “A cuckoo in morph is incapable of understanding that anyone else actually exists, even other cuckoos. We assume they must have had some way of leavening the shock on Johrlar, but if they did, it’s part of the missing history. We know there are big swaths of knowledge that have been cut out of our inherited memories.”
“Cut out how?” asked Mom.
“As I said, we’re the descendants of exiles, even if we don’t know what their crimes were,” said Mark. “The memory transference is not exact, or we’d all be clones of our parents, little buds carrying their precise personalities into the future. We get more of a general sense of history, things that were big enough or catastrophic enough to carry forward. We get the rules of behavior. We get something that looks a lot like instinct, which is good, because we don’t have instincts anymore.”
“You don’t need them,” said Aunt Evie. “Not if you’re getting a handbook to proper behavior straight from your mother’s mind. Instincts would only get in the way.”
Mark nodded, looking relieved that at least one of us understood what he was talking about. “Exactly. And the memories, they play an essential role in our maturation, because their release triggers a chemical response that properly finishes our metamorphosis.”
“If you don’t start explaining what this has to do with Sarah, I’m going to cut your toes off one by one and make you eat them,” I said.
Everyone went quiet as they turned to look at me. Sam let out a long, low whistle.
“Damn, Harrington,” he said. “You’re cold.”
“I’m terrified,” I corrected.
“You’re right to be,” said Mark. “Look. When Sarah was a child, her adoptive parents were killed. It was a tragedy, absolutely. When a cuckoo child is in sufficient distress, they can sometimes unlock a