Everybody hurts and is hurt, in a grand cycle of being alive. But minimizing the damage . . . that matters.
In math, something is either true or itâs not. Something either works or it doesnât. If something works and it feels like that shouldnât be possible, itâs not the math thatâs wrong: itâs your model of the universe. Mathematics is the art of refining our understanding of reality itself, like a sculptor trimming down a brick of marble until it frees the beautiful image inside.
How can anyone who truly loves numbers be irredeemable?
Life is complicated. The equations balance, in the end, but they can be so damn cold on the way to getting there.
I could feel the endless loops of recursive numbers trying to intrude on my thoughts, to pull me down into the comforting safety of pure mathematics, where I could be safe and comfortable andâmost of allâprotected. The numbers would protect me even as the world ate me alive
Five years. Iâd lost five years with my family, and no matter how much theyâd tried to keep me updated, Iâd always known there would be things they couldnât, or wouldnât, explain to me until I was feeling well enough to come home. Things like Annie discovering she could pull fire out of the air. Big things. Things that changed everything around them, like any new variable introduced to a formerly stable equation.
The change stung. Elsie and I had never been particularly closeânot like Artie and me, or Annie and me; the nerds of our generation, closing ranks against the people who didnât understandâbut sheâd never looked at me like I was someone she needed to protect before
Being weird is, like, ninety percent of my day,â said Annie. She raised both hands, palms once again turned upward
Heâd been dreaming of real roots, a home he could design and defend, since he was a little boy. After he met Evie and realized it was time to settle down, heâd set about making his dreams a reality. A house, isolated from the nearest human communities, big enough to host not only his immediate family, but every other living relative and maybe a dozen extras. Outbuildings and barns and fences and floodlights. Everything your average small militia needs to feel like theyâre not going to be crushed under the heel of âthe Man,â only in this case the militia was more like a wildlife conservation convention, and âthe Manâ was the Covenant of St. George.
Youâre family, silly. You donât thank us for welcoming you home. You thank us for letting you settle in before we put you on the chore rotation.â
Houses designed by eccentric cryptozoologists who grew up with a traveling carnival are rare, and they all have one trait in common: theyâre idiosyncratic at best, and seriously weird at worst. The family compound fell into the âseriously weirdâ category. The front door opened, not on a foyer or stairway or other reasonable architectural choice, but on the mudroom connected to the kitchen, on the theory that the kitchen had a lot of flat, relatively sterile surfaces, and most people would either need hot water or food when they got to the house, depending on how injured they were. And as a theory it wasnât wrong. It was just strange
Trust the numbers. The numbers donât lie. Even if everything else in the world is trying to deceive you, the numbers will always, always tell the truth.â âAngela Baker
I would have thought he was handsome no matter what he looked like, because I really was in love with his mindâhis weird, sweet, comforting mindâbut Artieâs brain knew how to process human faces and I was inside his head and that meant that for right now, I could do the same thing. And he had a nice face, sweet and open and expressive. I spared a momentâs resentment for the fact that I belonged to a species that didnât get to enjoy faces like his, because we simply didnât see them. It wasnât fair.
Then I usually think that no dimension is awful enough to deserve us, and Iâm glad to at least be in a world where the Internet exists. Telepaths would never have invented the Internet.
I was broken. I made them keep you away because I was broken, and I was trying to put myself back together without any sort of map or instruction manual, and I knew if you saw meâif you, specifically, saw meâand turned away because I was too broken to care about anymore, Iâd give up. Iâd stop trying to repair myself.
Some people are good at music. Some people are good at sports. Some people are good at both. People are people, and every person has their own strengths and weaknesses. Biology is just one aspect of the greater whole.â âJane Harrington-Price
Annie had been icing her knuckles, jaw set in the stubborn thrust that meant she had looked at the world, considered her options, and decided everyone else was in the wrong
Aunt Jane drove the sort of solid, sensible, mid-sized minivan beloved by soccer moms and field biologists the world over. She could pack literally hundreds of pounds of specimens into that thing, concealing them all in brightly colored plastic tubs labeled things like âPTA suppliesâ and ârecycling.â Iâve seen her get pulled over, produce a plate of fresh peppermint brownies seemingly out of thin air, and charm the police into waving her on her way. She calls it her âweaponized white womanâ routine, and itâs a calculated ruse sheâs taken everywhere from cryptid extraction runs to political protests, where she spends a lot of time putting herself between the authorities and anyone she deems to be more vulnerable. Which is everyone.
My Aunt Jane loves me. I sometimes think she doesnât want to, but thereâs no questioning her affection. Iâm part of her family. More importantly, Iâm her reclusive sonâs best friend. And none of that matters, because she grew up surrounded by people who not only knew what cuckoos were, they knew precisely why we shouldnât beâcouldnât beâtrusted. Weâre natural predators who prefer the simplicity of a hunt where everyone involved is sapient. We destroy things for fun. She wasnât the Price sibling whoâd married a cuckooâs daughter and been forced to admit that maybe there was more to us than a knife in the dark and a mind twisting inward on itself. She could love and fear and hate me all at the same time.
Nobody gets to pick where theyâre born or who theyâre born to, but everybody gets to pick their family. Make good choices with yours.â âAlice Healy
Life happens. So does death. The trick is putting as much time as possible between the two.â
Thereâs nothing like a cryptozoologist when thereâs something to be taken apart. Itâs basically Christmas morning for them, and when they have the opportunity to wallow in it, they really wallow. Evie and Kevin would be joining them once they were sure I was Thereâs nothing like a cryptozoologist when thereâs something to be taken apart. Itâs basically Christmas morning for them, and when they have the opportunity to wallow in it, they really wallow. Evie and Kevin would be joining them once they were sure I was safely in for the night. I could hear Kevin thinking distantly of all the tests he wanted to run on the dead cuckooâs tissues
I think âa lotâ may be the most charitable description of this family,â said James, with a dour chuckle. âWhen Annie informed me that I was being adopted, I thought she was being fanciful. And then she got me back here, and I found myself with a bedroom, a space on the chore chart, and an offer of a new identity if I wanted to actually become a Price, rather than carrying my fatherâs name around with me all the time. Iâm still mulling that last one over. Itâs tempting.â
Mom says that when Kevin and Evie got married, Grandma Alice actually tried to break up the wedding. I donât mean âdisruptââalthough she did that, tooâI mean break. She didnât like cuckoos, which is understandable. Weâre hard to like.â She still didnât like most cuckoos or trust them as far as she could throw them. As a species, weâre dangerous.
Annie and Verity are way better superheroes than I am. They actually work for what they can do. When we were kids, Verity was never around, because she was always going to another dance lesson. And Annie spent half her time on the balance beam or the trapeze rig. Iâm a freak of nature. Theyâre amazing.â
Never go anywhere unprepared, unarmed, or unaccompanied. The difference between success and suicide is often a matter of prior planning.â âEvelyn Baker
Didnât think Iâd ever have a family. Didnât think Iâd ever want one. Itâs funny, how much a person can change without even noticing whatâs happening.â âFrances Brown
Math is the underpinning force of the universe. Thatâs something people donât always understand when I try to explain it to them, and itâs so basicâso primal and perfectâthat I donât have the words to make it any clearer. How do you explain air to a bird, or water to a fish? Thereâs no explaining things that simply are. Thatâs how I feel about math. Math is everywhere. Math is everything. Even the seemingly effortless, uncomplicated things like walking and breathing and, yes, telepathy, theyâre all math.The other cuckooâs mental shields were made of instinctive equations, so tightly knotted together that they seemed like a single continuous piece. They werenât, though. An equation that large would be clumsy, awkward . . . slow. Her shields were fast and adaptive because they were built like a living thing, with numbers in the place of single cells. Where thereâs an equation, thereâs an answer. I cocked my head in imitation of her earlier gesture, picking at the wall until it all came into sudden, perfect focus. I wrapped the answer to her equations in a soft shell of my intentions and lobbed it at the shields. They went down all at once, a cascade of falling defenses. The 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.
âNo matter how much we learn, thereâs always something we donât know. A map labeled âhere be monstersâ is better than one that reads âwe have no idea.ââ âThomas Price
According to Mom, cuckoos are biologically more like really big wasps than they are like monkeysâhominids but not primates, in other words. So, yeah, there was probably an evolutionary stage way back in Sarahâs family tree where she would have gone through molts. But I tried not to think about that too hard
When all else fails, orange soda and toast. Even at two in the morning, orange soda and toast. They can cure many ills, and if they canât fix the problem, at least you wonât be hungry and groggy anymore
Sometimes I hate being right. I walked over and sat down across from her at the table, deciding to skip my toast for now. Toast is for people who donât feel like theyâre about to throw up. âItâs a biology thing. It means the growth stage insects go through between molts. Itâs metamorphicâthey tend to change shapes and stuffâbut I donât really understand itâ
We come from a family of biologists. One way or another, weâve been exposed to more science lessons than those poor kids on the Magic School Bus. But you know what Iâve never studied voluntarily? Bugs.â Elsie shook her head. âI donât like bugs. Theyâre weird and theyâre creepy and they have too many legs. They skitter. I am not a skittery person.
Being a Price means spending your life preparing for an emergency you hope wonât ever come. Elsie and I arenât as physical as our cousinsâwe canât be, not when our blood tends to make people fall in love with usâbut that doesnât mean we got out of the basic training. I grabbed clothes and yanked them on before picking up the bug-out bag that leaned against my desk and slinging it over my shoulder. Inside I had medical supplies, rope, a flashlight, batteries, water, a compassâall the low-tech answers to low-tech problems. Well, most of the low-tech answers.
âFriends donât hold their friends at gunpoint.â âWhat the fuck is this, an episode of Mr. Rogers? Grab him!â
Thankfully, while we all come from the Spider-Man school of combatâthe bad guys canât hit you if theyâre too busy trying to figure out what the hell youâre talking aboutâmy parents had always been very clear that there was a time and a place for helping your enemies improve. The middle of combat was neither of those things.
Annieâs smile was more like a snarl. In that moment, it was easy to see why she was Samâs perfect girl, even if I would have sooner gotten involved with a live wolverine even if we hadnât been related. She was way too scary for me.
Itâs not paranoia when you find an actual cuckoo in your living room.
âYour sister should be done patching up the hole in your dad by now. Oh, and did you know my dadâs bi?â âI did not know that and I did not want to know that and why do you know that?â She shrugged. âHe made a pass at your dad when he started bleeding.â
WhEN I WAS A kid, Iâd thought everyone had a barn filled with taxidermy and weird, wonderful tools, like a mad scientistâs lab crossed with a veterinarianâs office.
âYes, because youâre not twice my age, related to me, and capable of making me stupid with lust just by flexing a bicep.â Annie holstered her gun and moved to help Sam strap Heloise down. âOkay, maybe that last one applies, but itâs not creepy because youâre not my uncle.â
even when youâre talking to people youâre probably about to kill. Maybe especially when youâre talking to people youâre probably about to kill. That way they get to the afterlife with an accurate idea of what took them out.â
Her hand moved in a complicated pattern, and she was suddenly holding an actual fireball. It flickered orange and red and blue, looking strangely like a pom-pom from her cheerleading days, if the pom-poms had been actively terrifying.
Weâve never been chill,â she continued, still filing. âChill doesnât save anybody. We like saving people. The ones who can be saved, anyway. Some of them were always beyond salvation.â She blew on her nails. âThose ones, we bury in the woods.â
You heard me.â His eyes flashed white again. âEveryone 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. Itâs because of you that this world has turned dangerous for us.â He paused to chuckle, darkly. âWell. Because of you, and because of video surveillance. We can change a mind, but we canât 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 werenât for you people screwing everything up for us. So Iâm asking you, how much do you know? I need to know where to start.â
âPeople feel smart when they tell you âFrankensteinâ was the doctor, not the monster. Theyâre wrong. FrankensteinâDr. Frankensteinâwas always the monster. Thatâs the whole point. Sometimes evil is so damn beautiful it hurts.â âMartin Baker
âEverything is math,â he blurted. I blinked. So did everyone else. âThatâs what my mother always says,â said Aunt Evie. âShe says the universe is numerical in nature, so the better a mathematician someone is, the closer they draw to the divine. Itâs why she became an accountant. For her, that was like joining the priesthood.â
Exactly. Everything is math, and everything is made of math, and if you can manipulate the numbers, you can change the world. Literally change the world. You need to know the right equations, or you need the raw power to punch your way to the correct answer without taking the steps in the middle. But if you can accomplish one of those two things, thereâs nothing you canât do.â
Yes,â said Mark again. âBut the equations are . . . theyâre huge. Theyâre resource-intensive in a way that almost always results in the death of the person who completes them, and those are the ones we still have. There are pieces of the math missing. Whole sections that were wiped clean when our ancestors were put into exile
We know the original equations were beautiful and subtle and kind,â said Mark. âWe know that when our ancestors were exiled, Johrlar survived. We know the equations could be performed over and over and over again.â âYeah, because they were being performed by a whole bunch of people,â said Elsie. Everyone turned to look at her. She glanced up from her nails and shrugged. âWhat? You know Iâm right. Look, youâre talking about math thatâs so big that it kills people. Well, thatâs what research teams are for. Thatâs what think tanks are for. If you have a spell thatâs so resource-intensive it uses a sorcerer up, you get a whole bunch of sorcerers to come and cast it. If you have an equation thatâs so resource-intensive it melts brains, you get a whole bunch of smart people to think about different pieces of it at the same time, so nobodyâs brain gets melted. The equations arenât meant to be a solo voyage. No big. Why are you telling us all this?â
found another way. A cruder way. Itâs like a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. The equations we have, the ones weâve developed, require a Queen to resolve them. Once she finishes her final morph and enters her fourth instar, she can do the math. She can find the right answers. And she can rip a hole in the fabric between dimensions, allowing us to move on.â
the ones who oppose us, weâre weird to the ones who stand with us, weâre heroes to the ones who depend on us. But thereâs one thing that tends to get left out of the conversation, treated as less important than the need to keep fighting and keep winning until the war is over: Weâre scientists. Mom and Uncle Kevin even more than Elsie and me. Theyâre the direct descendants of Thomas and Alice Price. They were raised to believe that the world can make sense, if they just try hard enough and refuse to stop poking at its soft bits. The cuckoos have been one of the greatest mysteries our family has ever encountered. Weâd tried for years to learn more about their biology, without taking apart one of the two cuckoos we considered part of the family. To have one walk into our home and just start talking was, well . . .It was no wonder this was going so slowly. The people who would normally have hurried things alongâthe people we instinctively still listened to, thanks to their age and our familial relationshipâwere too enthralled by the potential to learn something to focus on what actually mattered.
If she survives the process, sheâs not going to be a god, sheâs going to be a Queen,â said Mark. âSheâll have the strength to do the math and put enough power behind it to blow this dimension to pieces. Sheâs going to smash this world like an eggshell. Sheâs going to open the way for the cuckoos to go somewhere else. If you donât stop her, sheâs going to destroy everything sheâs ever cared about, and sheâs going to destroy you in the process.â
There are losses we donât move past, no matter how hard we try. Some wounds, once inflicted, bleed forever underneath the skin. All we can do is learn to live with them.â âJonathan Healy
âYou know, I gotta say, Iâm really impressed with how terrible you people are,â said Mark. âIâve been listening to Ingrid talk about her daughter the princess, and how she was going to make her a Queen and use her to destroy the world, for years. She never mentioned that the people raising her were genuinely awful. You hate us because weâre the competition, right?â âWe hate you because youâre dangerous predators who murder innocent people and make things worse for absolutely everyone, but thanks for playing.â
âSort of are,â said Elsie. âSort of turned yourself into one when you decided that a bad haircut and a pair of yoga pants meant you could pretend to be our cousin without getting in trouble for it. Because your friend is right: weâre not good people. We canât afford to be. Weâre one side of a three-sided war, and youâre the enemy.â
My parents are going to kill me,â said Antimony. âActual murder. Letâs really enjoy this little rescue mission, because itâs the last one Iâm ever going to go on.â She was sitting in the middle, one leg slung over Samâs to make the footwell less crowded. Sam snorted. âYour parents are going to be arguing about how theyâre supposed to handle this until the sun comes up. Weâll be home and making waffles by then.â
âI know this is only confusing because I canât read your mind, but your parents arenât actually going to kill you, are they?â asked Mark. âIf they are, I say again, absolutely terrible people. How you got a reputation for being the good guys, I may never know.â âWe have a good propaganda arm,â I said. âYou mentioned your parents before. I thought all cuckoos killed their parents when they hit puberty.â
You know how I donât want to destroy the world and head off to terrorize a fresh dimension with the rest of my merry band of predators? Well, Cici is why. Sheâs my little sister. Cecilia. Sheâs a holy terror. Smart and funny and awful. Really, really awful. She might be as terrible as you. Itâs hard for me to measure.âÂ
I woke up in the middle of the night with the knowledge and laws of my entire species filling my head, crowding out everything else, making it almost impossible for me to breathe. I was fifteen. Cici was four. I thought sheâd probably scream and wake our parents, so I knew I had to kill her first if I wanted it to be easy. It mattered that it be easy. I didnât want to upset her. Thatâs probably when I should have realized something was wrong, when I was thinking âI donât want to upset my sisterâ and âIâm going to murder herâ at the same time, but I was fifteen and I was being eaten alive by memories that werenât mine, so I think I did okay, all things considered. I got a knife. I went to her room
I helped Ingrid, who, please remember, is Sarahâs biological mother, lure her away from you. Iâm not saying I didnât. She knows where I live. She knows where my family lives. I have no real desire to be at war with youâyou are all terrible, terrifying peopleâbut I wasnât going to risk Ciciâs life because your cousin was somehow more important than she is. Sheâs not. I did what I was told, I escaped as soon as I could, and now Iâm helping you. Be grateful for that part. I could have told Ingrid about the hum. I could have sided with my hive against humanity. Iâm not, because I love my sister. Take the fucking win.â
Breathe, baby, breathe. You breathe and you keep on breathing. Thatâs the only thing Iâm going to ask of you today. You just keep on breathing.â âEnid Healy
Or maybe this was like a holodeck in Star Trek, and I could start calling people out of my memories of them, using them for company, for stability, for a way to keep myself from doing what the cuckoos wanted from me. Because if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that doing what the cuckoos wanted wasnât going to end well. Not for anyone.
Math, though . . . math never changed. Math always meant exactly what it said, no more and no less, and refused to be written for anyone. Math was always math. If I turned myself into numbers, I would be a wholly unique equation, something so much bigger and wilder and harder to define than âSarah.â I looked at the screen again. I put my fingers on the keys
normally I wouldnât bother you while you were undermining the fabric of the universe with mathematics, but you do understand that this is bad, right? Numbers shouldnât be sufficient to change the laws of physics. They should sit quietly and think about what theyâve done until itâs time for someone to figure out the tip
Thereâs a moment where everything comes together, where the numbers add up and everything is perfect, and nothing hurts. Thatâs the best moment of them all. A person could spend their whole life chasing after it, and never feel their time was wasted.â âAngela Baker
I had been so foolish. I had been so stupid. This was . . . this was everything. The equation sang to me, bright and beguiling, begging to be completed. Begging to be carried out into the world and allowed to come to sweet fruition. All I had to do was wake up. All I had to do was open my eyes, and the workâthe great work, the work that I had been moving toward since the moment of my birth, the work that had always been destined to be mineâwould finally begin
When itâs a choice between saving your family and saving the world, I canât tell you what to decide. I can only tell you that, no matter what you choose, part of you will always know that you were wrong.â âAlexander Healy
You know, sometimes I wonder what our family looks like from the outside.â
Dad both leapt to their feet, Momâs hands suddenly bristling with knives, Dad producing a handgun from somewhere inside his jacket. I couldnât see what Elsie was doing, but I had no doubt that it was impressive, possibly involving the weaponization of a grilled cheese panini.
Some prices are far too dear. And yet we pay them anyway.â âJonathan Healy
Not dying at all would have been betterâway betterâbut I guess I always knew that we couldnât win forever. Thatâs not how the universe works. Sooner or later everyone has to lose. Even the good guys.
Annie!â I shouted. âI need you over here!â A gun went off. âLittle busy!â she shouted back. âDonât care!â We had a lot of code phrases for moments like this one, where we needed to communicate without tipping our hands.
No one with a larynx enjoys being punched in the throat. Thatâs just science.
I might be able to turn the tide from âprobably fatalâ to âeh, youâll walk away from it.â Any combat you can walk away from is a good combat, regardless of whatâs been done to the other guy.
But thatâs what people are, really. Weâre equations that have grown large enough and complex enough to have opinions about the world. To want to change it.
When working complex math, there are factors that can be used to cancel things out
any of the professors Iâve ever talked to would roll their eyes and scoff at the idea of explaining things that way, but it works, it works, it takes the weight out of the final figures, and I needed to cancel as much of this world-breaking equation as I possibly could.