Butterfly Effects

Book 15: InCryptid

by Seanan McGuire

Genres: Paranormal; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

Seanan McGuire's New York Times-bestselling and Hugo Award-nominated InCryptid series continues with the fifteenth book following the Price family, cryptozoologists who study and protect the creatures living in secret all around us.

Sarah Zellaby is a Johrlac, a member of a species of psychic ambush predators colloquially referred to as “cuckoos.” Eight years ago, she survived the difficult, painful process of becoming a cuckoo queen...although not without costs. In the wake of her transformation, the man she loved was entirely erased from his own mind, forcing her to reconstruct him from the memories of the people who knew and loved him.

Sarah has been struggling to come to terms with her actions ever since. But there's no one else on the planet with the power to hold her accountable―until the Johrlac authorities show up. It's time for her to stand trial for what she's done, something which can only happen on Johrlar, home world of her species, where the population is controlled by a system of unyielding hiveminds and crime is punishable by erasure.

With Sarah's life on the line, her family will need to find a way to cross dimensional borders and survive a hostile, telepathic world in order to get her back―before the Sarah they know ceases to exist.

But no matter what happens, actions have consequences... and Sarah Zellaby is about to learn that lesson the hard way.

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Release date: March 10, 2026

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 288

Sample

One

“Promises are always important. Promises to children are the foundations of who we are. Make them carefully, if you’re going to make them at all.”

—Angela Baker

An only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio

Now

WAKING UP IN OHIO MEANT waking up alone.

I was allowed to have Greg with me in Oregon and Michigan—both places had enough space for him in the nearby woods, and plenty of ways he could hide from anyone who happened to wander onto our property. Concealing a jumping spider the size of a draft horse is unsurprisingly difficult, although it’s sometimes easier than I expected it to be: no one really wants to believe something like Greg could exist, which makes it easy for them to dismiss the evidence of their eyes. He’s been mistaken for everything from a bear to a really good Halloween decoration. Greg doesn’t care what people think he is. He cares that I’m safe and he’s getting fed, and that’s about it. Still, there isn’t room for him in Ohio.

With the way they’ve been tearing down the local patches of woodland to build new housing developments, there’s never going to be room for him. What wild space remains is home to a lot of species that have substantially more business being here than Greg does. Alex has made it very clear that if it came down to my spider or the local lindworms, he’d have to side with the lindworms. They live in Ohio, and Greg does not.

That’s fine. I’m not so dependent on my emotional support spider that I can’t be without him for a night or two—not yet, anyway. I may get there, with the way things have been going, and that will be a terrible thing, because so much of my family is located in places Greg can’t go. Verity’s still in New York, even though she keeps insisting she’s going to move back to Oregon so she can raise the kids in the sort of wide-open spaces she enjoyed as a child, and my parents are in Ohio with my baby brother, Isaac.

In other words, flexibility is key if I want to keep in touch with my family.

I rolled onto my back, looking up at the ceiling. Every inch of it was familiar, from the cracks in the paint to the faint stains left behind by a baking-soda-volcano incident when I was nine. Mom’s offered to paint in here a few times, but I’ve always asked her not to. I like having something in my world that stays stable. I haven’t even rotated my posters since high school. The ghosts of old X-Men storylines and outdated Magic: the Gathering sets watched me from the walls as I rolled over again, this time out of the bed.

Everyone else in the house was awake. I could feel them starting to go about their days even through the anti-telepathy charms in my walls. Mom had no idea the charms weren’t enough to keep me out of people’s minds anymore, and as long as they could take the edge off sufficiently to let me sleep at night, I wasn’t going to tell her. I couldn’t read actual thoughts through them without making an effort, and that meant everyone had as much privacy as we had any real reason to expect in a house with multiple telepaths.

Speaking of telepaths … Isaac was awake and reaching for me, the way he did every morning. I could feel his frustration as the telepathy blockers prevented him from properly establishing contact. He’d come bursting through my bedroom door soon, when the agony of waiting got to be too much, and then he’d get another scolding from our mother. That wasn’t fair to him. Lecturing eight-year-olds for not having developed patience has never been one of my favorite activities.

One nice thing about spending a reasonable chunk of my time in Ohio: I always have clothes in my room. I dug a pair of black leggings and a charcoal-gray sweater out of my drawers, pulling them on just as I felt Isaac’s impatience reaching a fever pitch. Grabbing a brush off my dresser to run though my hair as I moved, I turned toward the door.

My name is Sarah Zellaby. I am a mathematician. I have what can charitably be referred to as an anxiety disorder, which I manage through a combination of mindfulness, meditation, and the presence of an emotional support animal—the aforementioned Greg, the giant spider. My biological mother was a monster. My first adoptive mother was very kind, even if she never knew I was adopted—I was foisted on her by the monster-mother, who’d dropped me on a doorstep knowing I’d be cared for whether or not the people inside had ever wanted children. After my first set of adoptive parents died, I was found and taken in by the Bakers, Angela and Martin. Angela and I at least share a species, and it’s thanks to her that I’m not a monster like my first mother was.

I don’t want to be a monster.

But no matter what I want, I am not and will never be human. I don’t get to Pinocchio my way into someone else’s species: I don’t even get to try as hard as I used to think I could. I’m what’s called a cuckoo, a telepathic ambush predator that exists to exploit. My species takes whatever we want, and doesn’t care what gets broken in the process. Nice neighbors, right?

I mean, not really, obviously. Cuckoos are pretty much awful. Our actual species name is “Johrlac,” which is too many consonants and not nearly enough vowels for my tastes, but we don’t tend to use that for ourselves here on Earth. We’re the descendants of the people the other Johrlac kicked out for sucking too much to stay in the neighborhood, and when they made our ancestors leave, they edited their memories just enough to remove a few basic details. Like how to do the math that would have returned us to our original dimension.

Because yeah, we’re telepaths. We can read people’s thoughts, manipulate their memories, that whole fun set of shitty behaviors. But we can also channel that energy into math that will literally rewrite realities, if we can just find the processing power we need.

I don’t like to think about processing power.

Shaking my head to chase away the memory of the last time I’d needed processing power, I opened my bedroom door and the thoughts of the rest of the house poured through, like honey dripping from a comb. Shelby was trying to get her hair to behave before she left for work, frustrated by one curl’s refusal to stay where she put it; Alex was getting breakfast in front of the kids. Mom was upstairs, doing quadratic equations in her head as she showered, and Dad was a dark smudge at the bottom of the pile of conflicting mental signals, all but unreadable.

My adoptive father, Martin Baker, is what we call a Revenant. It’s a sort of depressing name for a really sweet guy, but given that the alternatives were “a Frankenstein” or “an abomination of science,” I think it’s okay. He used to be several human men, all of whom died in one way or another, only to get graverobbed and spliced together by a scientist with a dubious grasp on the concept of “ethics.”

Something about the resurrection process makes Revenants all but impossible to read. If I hadn’t lived with him for several decades, I wouldn’t even have been able to tell he was in the house. That was obscurely comforting. I don’t have a lot of limits anymore, and that makes the ones I do have all the more precious to me.

Because, see, about eight years ago, right before Isaac was born, my birth mother decided she had a right to come crashing back into my life and wreck everything I cared about. She and the other cuckoos on Earth had decided technology was reaching a point where it was too difficult for them to exist as telepathic predators. Even if humans can’t tell us apart, cameras can, and our movements can be followed. Humanity was starting to catch on, and the cuckoos wanted out.

To achieve “out,” they needed someone who could handle the massive equation they’d cobbled together, the mathematical function that would allow us to exit this dimension and head for a different one. That meant they needed what’s called a Queen—a cuckoo who’s gone through the rare fourth instar and unlocked a whole additional level of telepathic power.

And this is all getting a little confusing, especially when I’m trying to make it to breakfast at the same time. Let’s step into an aside.

* * *

All right: cuckoos, as I’ve mentioned, are both shitty neighbors and telepathic ambush predators. We’re not originally from the dimension where Earth is located: our home dimension is called Johrlar, which makes the part where we’re called Johrlac just a little egotistical, if you ask me. Which they didn’t. The cuckoos have never asked me for anything in my life. They’ve just done it, and expected me to deal graciously with the consequences.

Which I have not done, but we’ll get there.

Today’s cuckoos are the descendants of Johrlar’s exiles, who passed packets of ancestral memory from parent to child in order to make sure their kids would be born perfect little examples of a lousy, murderous species. Again, we’ll get to that in a minute. The important thing here is “from another dimension.” We didn’t evolve on Earth, and our ancestors were clearly subject to different evolutionary pressures in the process of becoming what we are today: humanoid bipeds, pale-skinned, black-haired, and blue-eyed, with surprisingly little variance between individuals. Mom—Angela—and I are virtually identical, despite the fact that we’re not directly related.

Part of this is because we’re actually a form of insect. Surprise! We look like a species of goths, but we’re closer to being giant, wingless wasps. The collagen in our skins is not human-identical, although it feels the same, and that keeps us from visibly aging in the same fashion after we reach our twenties. Angela could still go clubbing with college kids without it seeming creepy, if she’d had any interest in clubbing. Isaac and I would be able to do the same someday, once he was old enough to care about things other than Pokémon cards and chess. We don’t get sick, and we don’t get old, and we don’t play nicely.

We have no hearts. Literally. Instead, our circulatory system is decentralized, and works via a series of muscular pulses. That would still be a problem, if we had blood in the human sense, but fortunately for us, we don’t. Instead, we have a form of advanced hemolymph that keeps us oxygenated and moving. It has antibiotic properties, and we’re rare enough that I don’t know of anything Earth-based that’s developed a resistance to it yet. So that part’s neat at least.

Instars are insect life stages, the progression from nymph to imago, or full adult. Cuckoos have lost our exoskeletons, so we don’t molt like normal insects, but we still change. The first instar is universal—the larval stage of our species, infants and children indistinguishable from the host species we’re hiding among. The second is also universal. Isaac will reach it one day, and when he does, I’ll be on hand to make sure he doesn’t kill everyone in the house. (The second instar tends to cause temporary psychosis brought on by the sudden release of excessive quantities of ancestral memory, which tell the kid in question that humans are nothing more than meat to be farmed. Like I said, we suck.)

Most cuckoos stop there, mature enough to grow up and consider themselves adults, a little bit evil and a little bit nasty and a whole lot manipulative. Some, though, strain themselves hard enough that they go through a third instar, one that leaves them a little bit scrambled for several years, but results in their inherent power level going up. As to why a species of assholes doesn’t pursue this greater power all the time, well. There’s no way to avoid the scrambled period, because each instar is marked by physical changes. They’re just internal ones, involving structures in the brain. We’re literally out of our minds following the third instar, because our brains are reshaping themselves. Not a good thing for a species of ambush predators.

So why do it at all? Well, I did it because I didn’t know it was a possibility. I’d been trying to save my cousin’s life, and I’d accidentally slammed the buttons that began the process to give me an upgrade. I could have stopped there and been happy, truly.

But third-instar cuckoos aren’t common, and those who try apparently have a nasty tendency not to survive the physical rearrangement of their minds when it happens with no one to take care of them. I’d been safe here in Ohio while my brain rebuilt itself, and when I’d felt well enough to leave, I’d returned to the world unaware of what had happened to me.

Only to get ambushed by my biological mother and her hive, who wanted to force me into my fourth instar in order to get themselves a fully adult cuckoo. Since we don’t need to reach the imago stage to reproduce, we generally don’t bother: we’re all content to stop after the second instar, safe and secure and not rebuilding ourselves when we don’t have to. But the equation that lets us rip holes in the barrier between dimensions is so large and needs so much power that only a queen can handle it.

Except even a queen can’t really handle it. It’s too big, and it’s hungry. When I had that equation in my mind, I felt like I was wrestling a greased dinosaur that wanted to bite my head off more than it had ever wanted anything else in its life. The equation is a predator. The cuckoos usually kept it contained by breaking it into pieces and storing it around the world, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a monstrous thing. An ender of worlds.

Completing the equation would have blown a chunk out of Earth big enough to destroy the planet. But what did the cuckoos care? We’d be somewhere else, and to them, that was what mattered. I was their groomed and chosen queen: I was going to set them free. And sure, I was going to melt my own brain in the process, but I got the feeling that for them, that was a side bonus. Get a new world to consume, and don’t get stuck with a pesky queen in the process.

I’ve always tried to be a good person. I’ve always tried to behave more like a human than a giant wasp in a woman suit. And none of that had mattered while the equation was chewing on my brain, trying to force me to end everything so it could be free. I might have done it, except for one small thing that set me apart from all the other cuckoos, even when I hadn’t been thinking about, even when I hadn’t fully understood the ramifications:

I was in love. Deeply, helplessly in love, and had been since I was a little girl. His name was Artie, and he had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched. Something about his thoughts was right, like slipping into a hot bath on a cold night, or a bed with pre-warmed sheets. I’d loved him almost as soon as I’d known him, and miracle of miracles, he’d loved me the same way. Really loved me, not been manipulated into loving me by telepathic tricks. He was a Price, and Prices are part Kairos, another human-looking species that isn’t, quite. Their Kairos heritage made them resistant if not immune to psychic manipulation, and while I could have forced my way into his mind, I couldn’t have done it unintentionally.

Cuckoos don’t do love, as a general rule. Hard to form those types of bonds when you’re constantly measuring the world around you the way a lion measures an antelope. So no one realized Artie might be able to break me out of the mathematical fugue that was supposed to consume me and make it possible for the equation to direct my choices until the world ended in a glorious, concussive boom. He’d pulled me loose, and together we’d come up with a plan to use the minds around me as distributed processing power, letting me keep my self intact despite everything I was going through.

Unfortunately, I’d still been convinced I was going to die, so even as I turned the equation to my own ends, I’d been preparing for my demise. In an effort to keep my allies from hurting more than they had to, the last thing I’d done before the equation finished resolving and we were transported to a different dimension was wipe myself from their memories.

Meaning I landed in a whole new reality surrounded by people who had no idea who I was or why they shouldn’t treat me like any other cuckoo. And one of them had been Artie, which hurt more than I ever imagined. To go from him loving me enough to pull me away from a mind-eating equation like it was no big deal to him looking at me like I was the enemy had been, well, bracing to say the least.

And then, when I was doing the math to get us the hell out of there and back to Earth, on the presumption that I’d done the math correctly the first time and not destroyed it on our way out the door, he’d touched me. Without his memories of growing up together, he hadn’t realized how dangerous that could be. I’d erased his mind during the moment of contact, leaving him a literal shell of the man I loved, and what was gone was gone: I couldn’t put it back. So I’d gathered all the memories I and his family had of him and used them to construct a new person in his place. A person who was almost him, but … not. People are made up of first-person experiences, not third-person memories.

And he—the new person, the one I’d constructed to occupy the empty shell of the man I loved—thought he loved me, because so many of the pieces I’d used to build him told him he did. I’d run away as fast as I could, unable to stand being anywhere near him. My father was a man who’d risen from the dead, but Artie was something new, and terrible, and entirely my fault.

One good thing had come from that whole situation: Isaac. My mother had been pregnant when she decided it was time for the cuckoos to get out of this dimension, and while she hadn’t survived our time together, he had. He was brand-new and perfect when I’d hauled my friends and allies back to Earth, and Angela had been willing to take on the task of raising him. She was one of the only people in the world to have successfully raised a cuckoo who didn’t start trying to murder everyone when she hit puberty—me—and we figured she had a decent shot at doing the same for him. All he needed was a suite of telepathic ethics and a little psychic surgery to remove that packet of ancestral memories before they could turn septic and explode all over his mind. No big deal, right?

Not for a family of telepathic wasps hiding in Columbus, Ohio, I guess.

* * *

The kitchen hasn’t really changed since the first time I’d seen it. Oh, they’d replaced the wallpaper right around the time I was finishing high school, and it was a new kitchen table, polished oak in place of the old walnut, but the fixtures and appliances were all the same. Dad’s never been the world’s biggest fan of avoidable change. He knows most of his kids are aging faster than he is, and he’ll have to bury Evie and Drew someday, and probably his grandkids too, and he understands the world won’t slow down to meet his sometimes-lumbering tempo, but he’s never asked it to. He just asks Mom to buy two toasters when she has to replace one, so he can extend the period before something wholly new has to enter his space.

The only major change was the people. Alex was at the stove where I would normally have expected Mom to be, flipping pancakes with one hand and cracking eggs with the other. Dad was in his usual spot. Charlotte and Isaac were across from him, Lottie with a bowl of cereal and some pancakes, Isaac with pancakes and a plate of scrambled eggs covered in so much ketchup that it looked like a murder scene and a smaller cup of what looked like cocktail sauce, which he was carefully dipping each bite of pancake in before he ate it.

They brightened when they saw me, their thoughts taking on an effervescent, bubbling edge, like mental champagne.

“Sarah!” chirped Lottie. “You’re still here!”

“Not f’long,” said Isaac, more glumly. His thoughts were sparkling, but his tone was dour.

I sat down at the end of the table, close enough that I could lean over and put my arm around his shoulders. “Hey, you. You know I have to go. I’m sorry I can’t be here all the time and always, but there are places I need to be, and people I’ve promised to visit. Do you want your auntie Verity to be all sad because I’m not coming to see her?”

“Auntie Verity’s already sad enough,” said Isaac. His eyes flashed briefly white as he raised them from his plate and looked at me. She’s always going to be sad, whether you’re with her or not. And when you go to see her, you come back sad, because of your hospital friend. I’d rather you stayed here, where you can be happy, and didn’t run away all the time.

“You know I can’t do that, Isaac,” I said. “Greg can’t be here with me, and I need Greg to be happy at all. If I stay here without him for too long, I’ll start having nightmares again. And when I have nightmares, the whole neighborhood has nightmares.”

It’s not fair.

“Neither is talking only in our heads, because not everyone can do it,” I said firmly. “Come on, buddy. Time for our outside voices, okay?”

He shot me a look, thoughts turning disgruntled. I shrugged, projecting neutrality in his direction.

Charlotte—Lottie to her family—was only a few months older than Isaac, and they’d grown up in each other’s pockets. Because she was a Price by blood, she had the protection from mental manipulation provided by her father’s Kairos ancestry. Even so, she could receive telepathic communication, and reply to them in kind. She and Isaac had both been slow to speak, not seeing the need for communicating with other people when they already had each other. Shelby had been briefly concerned she’d need to hold them back from starting formal schooling, since kids who sounded younger than their actual ages were likely to be the targets of bullying.

Alex hadn’t initially agreed that the threat of bullying was a good-enough reason to keep them home, but Shelby had looked at him, shrugged, and asked calmly how many kindergarteners would need to have their minds melted by Isaac for the crime of being mean to Lottie before it would be a good-enough reason.

He’d agreed with her after that. Apparently, that agreement had been enough to make both children start catching up with their peers. They’d been talking more or less normally by the end of the month, and had been able to start school on the expected schedule. Because they refused to be separated and Isaac’s official birthday was in November, they were both in second grade, and the only remaining trace of their delayed speech was in the way he would sometimes shorten words or create new contractions when he didn’t feel like talking.

Well, that, and the way he slipped into telepathic speech if he thought he could get away with it. He and Lottie both carried anti-telepathy charms to school to keep him from accidentally answering the teacher without opening his mouth, but sometimes I was still concerned about being one bad playground argument away from a Stephen King novel.

I’d managed to survive elementary school in Ohio without going full Carrie White. I had confidence that my little brother could do the same. Probably.

“When are you leaving, Sarah?” asked Dad.

“I figured I’d wait until everyone had come downstairs for the day, so I could say my goodbyes,” I said. “I’m planning to be gone for a few weeks this trip, just to make sure I can deal with everything in New York and then spend some real quality time with Greg in Michigan. I’ll call when I head for Buckley, so you know where I am.”

“I agree with Isaac: I wish you could stay longer,” he said.

“And I wish I could have Greg here with me, but the Blue Fairy isn’t granting requests right now,” I said. “St. Giles’s wants to have a serious talk with me about Mark’s future, and that means I have to go. Everything else aside, we owe him.”

Dad sighed. “I suppose we do.”

Mark is a cuckoo. Like me, he’s a pretty reasonable person who’s not totally into the idea of psychically manipulating and abusing everyone around him. Unlike me, he didn’t have anyone to hold his hand and help him get there. I never properly entered my second instar, thanks to Mom carefully removing every trace of my ancestral memories before they could rupture and wipe out my ability to see people as, well, people.

Mark didn’t get those memories removed until much later, when I’d needed the processing space for the world-breaker equation and removed them with his permission. His instar proceeded normally, and the memories had spread through him like wine through cotton. He’d reacted the way cuckoos normally did, by having a brief mental break and trying to murder his younger sister, Cici. But Cici had been young enough to think he was playing a game with her. She’d evaded him for so long that his thoughts had time to calm down again, and he’d stopped seeing her as a target and remembered how much he loved her.

His love for his sister had been strong enough to drag him back over a line that should have been impossible to recross once he had crossed it. He’d been working with the cuckoos who took me purely because they told him that if he didn’t, they’d kill his sister. The whole time, he’d been planning to kill me himself before I could end the world, assuming my family didn’t arrive in time. But they had, and he’d been with us on our cross-dimensional bullshit adventure.

Like Artie, Mark had been seriously damaged by my attempt to solve, resolve, and destroy the equation. Unlike Artie, his mind hadn’t been erased, just subjected to the kind of stress and trauma that could trigger his fourth instar. He was changing. But because he hadn’t been primed for it by going through a third instar, he was trying to accomplish them both at once, and it had already taken eight years.

Eight years of catatonia while his brain physically broke down and rebuilt itself, and the staff at St. Giles’s Hospital—a medical establishment catering almost completely to cryptids—got more and more nervous about what he was going to be if he woke up. Eight years of his human family having no idea what had happened to him. Cici had been twelve when he disappeared, and there was no good way of telling her he was alive, or how he’d been hurt, or anything. From her perspective, her big brother—the brother who’d loved her so much that he’d been able to defeat his own biology to stay with her—just walked away one day and never came back.

I spent time with him when I could, sitting by his bed and holding his hand and hoping that one day I’d pick up on even a flicker of sapient thought coming from him. I didn’t know who or what he’d be if he ever managed to wake up. I just knew it was my fault he was in that bed, and I wanted him awake more than I wanted almost anything else that I could think of.

Without Mark, we would never have been able to make it back from the dimension I’d shunted us all into. Without all of them. And I owed them. I would owe them until the end of my days. I didn’t get to rest and enjoy the love of my family until such time as I’d made sufficient amends for what I’d done.

If that was even possible.

I leaned over, pressing a kiss to Isaac’s temple. His delight at the gesture washed over me, comforting and warm as a towel fresh out of the dryer. “I love you, little bee,” I informed him.

He squirmed, embarrassed and pleased. “Don’t be gross, stupid sister,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Can’t help it.”

Lottie giggled. I took a piece of pancake from Isaac’s plate and dipped it into the cocktail sauce before popping it into my mouth. She made a face.

“That’s weird,” she informed me. “You can’t put ketchup and stuff on everything you eat.”

“Isaac does it,” I said.

“It’s still weird when he does it,” she countered. “Yesterday he put ketchup in his fruit cup in the cafeteria. The lunch aide took it away ’cause she thought he was messing around and making messes.”

Across the table, Dad’s attention focused on Isaac. “Zach…” he rumbled, in a disappointed tone.

Isaac hunched his shoulders. “It tastes wrong when it’s just sweet-sweet-sweet!” he said. “Tomatoes are only considered a vegetable for tax purposes anyway!”

I blinked, then looked over my shoulder as Mom stepped into the room, hair still damp and sticking to the sides of her face. “Was I like this when I was eight?”

“You were worse,” she said sweetly. “You’re the reason I learned how to make gummy candy at home. If I didn’t send you to school with tomato gummies, you’d find ways to sneak tomatoes into everything, and it was scaring the other children. Not that you made it past seventh grade, whereas Zach is going all the way to high school, aren’t you, buddy?”

“Yes, Mom,” he said dutifully.

“With me,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, with you.” I knew she was smiling because she projected it to me and Isaac even as she folded her face in the appropriate ways. It’s nice to spend time around people who telegraph their facial expressions. Makes it easier to react to them.

Sometimes I thought Charlotte was to Isaac as those therapy dogs were to the cheetahs in zoos. She gave him something to focus on and hang on to. Like me with Greg. Telepathy isn’t an anxiety disorder, but being a telepath in a non-telepathic world can feel very similar. He’d been doing better than I did in public school from day one. Maybe if I’d been able to go to Portland and attend school with Artie, I could have made it to high school instead of having a nervous breakdown in the seventh grade and finishing out my education in this very kitchen.

Or maybe we’d just have ended up even more codependent than we already were, and I’d have fallen apart completely when I accidentally erased his mind, instead of just falling apart mostly. No way of knowing.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “You got the value of the variable wrong on your fourth equation. It should have been three, or the whole thing fails to resolve.”

“I knew you’d catch that, sweetie,” she said, crossing the kitchen to kiss my forehead before ruffling Isaac’s hair with one hand. “You always were my little perfectionist. When do you leave?”

“As soon as Shelby comes downstairs.” There was a clatter from the hall, telling me that she was doing precisely that.

“Aren’t you going to eat first?” asked Alex.

“I’ll grab something in New York,” I said. “Promise.”

Shelby stepped into the kitchen, nodding in my direction just as I stepped away from Mom and grabbed for the inherent mathematical structure of the world around me. I had to do the mental equivalent of squinting in order to see it, but once I did, I could see the chained functions that made up everything. Physics, matter, and distance, they were all equations, and equations could be modified.

I waved at Shelby, and I was gone.

There aren’t really words for the way I can move around now that I’ve stabilized as a fully mature queen. “Spatial tunneling” is the closest we’ve really come. I basically just take the math that tells me my location and change it to something different. As soon as I release it in its changed state, it becomes an absolute truth, and reality is happier to change things about itself than it is to modify its underlying math. It does make an impact, leaving little errors in the math between the two points I’ve modified, and they need time to correct themselves before I can safely tunnel to the same location again. I try to think of it as drawing lines that are never allowed to overlap, a logic puzzle playing out in four dimensions at once. And even that is a simplification, because I don’t know how to explain the beautiful crystalline network of numbers that is the equations that transport me. I reach out, I tweak, and I’m gone. Over and over again. It’s that simple, and that complicated.

It’s definitely not an ability that should have been extended to someone with my reasons for running away.


Copyright © 2026 by Seanan McGuireOne

“Promises are always important. Promises to children are the foundations of who we are. Make them carefully, if you’re going to make them at all.”

—Angela Baker

An only moderately creepy suburban home in Columbus, Ohio

Now

WAKING UP IN OHIO MEANT waking up alone.

I was allowed to have Greg with me in Oregon and Michigan—both places had enough space for him in the nearby woods, and plenty of ways he could hide from anyone who happened to wander onto our property. Concealing a jumping spider the size of a draft horse is unsurprisingly difficult, although it’s sometimes easier than I expected it to be: no one really wants to believe something like Greg could exist, which makes it easy for them to dismiss the evidence of their eyes. He’s been mistaken for everything from a bear to a really good Halloween decoration. Greg doesn’t care what people think he is. He cares that I’m safe and he’s getting fed, and that’s about it. Still, there isn’t room for him in Ohio.

With the way they’ve been tearing down the local patches of woodland to build new housing developments, there’s never going to be room for him. What wild space remains is home to a lot of species that have substantially more business being here than Greg does. Alex has made it very clear that if it came down to my spider or the local lindworms, he’d have to side with the lindworms. They live in Ohio, and Greg does not.

That’s fine. I’m not so dependent on my emotional support spider that I can’t be without him for a night or two—not yet, anyway. I may get there, with the way things have been going, and that will be a terrible thing, because so much of my family is located in places Greg can’t go. Verity’s still in New York, even though she keeps insisting she’s going to move back to Oregon so she can raise the kids in the sort of wide-open spaces she enjoyed as a child, and my parents are in Ohio with my baby brother, Isaac.

In other words, flexibility is key if I want to keep in touch with my family.

I rolled onto my back, looking up at the ceiling. Every inch of it was familiar, from the cracks in the paint to the faint stains left behind by a baking-soda-volcano incident when I was nine. Mom’s offered to paint in here a few times, but I’ve always asked her not to. I like having something in my world that stays stable. I haven’t even rotated my posters since high school. The ghosts of old X-Men storylines and outdated Magic: the Gathering sets watched me from the walls as I rolled over again, this time out of the bed.

Everyone else in the house was awake. I could feel them starting to go about their days even through the anti-telepathy charms in my walls. Mom had no idea the charms weren’t enough to keep me out of people’s minds anymore, and as long as they could take the edge off sufficiently to let me sleep at night, I wasn’t going to tell her. I couldn’t read actual thoughts through them without making an effort, and that meant everyone had as much privacy as we had any real reason to expect in a house with multiple telepaths.

Speaking of telepaths … Isaac was awake and reaching for me, the way he did every morning. I could feel his frustration as the telepathy blockers prevented him from properly establishing contact. He’d come bursting through my bedroom door soon, when the agony of waiting got to be too much, and then he’d get another scolding from our mother. That wasn’t fair to him. Lecturing eight-year-olds for not having developed patience has never been one of my favorite activities.

One nice thing about spending a reasonable chunk of my time in Ohio: I always have clothes in my room. I dug a pair of black leggings and a charcoal-gray sweater out of my drawers, pulling them on just as I felt Isaac’s impatience reaching a fever pitch. Grabbing a brush off my dresser to run though my hair as I moved, I turned toward the door.

My name is Sarah Zellaby. I am a mathematician. I have what can charitably be referred to as an anxiety disorder, which I manage through a combination of mindfulness, meditation, and the presence of an emotional support animal—the aforementioned Greg, the giant spider. My biological mother was a monster. My first adoptive mother was very kind, even if she never knew I was adopted—I was foisted on her by the monster-mother, who’d dropped me on a doorstep knowing I’d be cared for whether or not the people inside had ever wanted children. After my first set of adoptive parents died, I was found and taken in by the Bakers, Angela and Martin. Angela and I at least share a species, and it’s thanks to her that I’m not a monster like my first mother was.

I don’t want to be a monster.

But no matter what I want, I am not and will never be human. I don’t get to Pinocchio my way into someone else’s species: I don’t even get to try as hard as I used to think I could. I’m what’s called a cuckoo, a telepathic ambush predator that exists to exploit. My species takes whatever we want, and doesn’t care what gets broken in the process. Nice neighbors, right?

I mean, not really, obviously. Cuckoos are pretty much awful. Our actual species name is “Johrlac,” which is too many consonants and not nearly enough vowels for my tastes, but we don’t tend to use that for ourselves here on Earth. We’re the descendants of the people the other Johrlac kicked out for sucking too much to stay in the neighborhood, and when they made our ancestors leave, they edited their memories just enough to remove a few basic details. Like how to do the math that would have returned us to our original dimension.

Because yeah, we’re telepaths. We can read people’s thoughts, manipulate their memories, that whole fun set of shitty behaviors. But we can also channel that energy into math that will literally rewrite realities, if we can just find the processing power we need.

I don’t like to think about processing power.

Shaking my head to chase away the memory of the last time I’d needed processing power, I opened my bedroom door and the thoughts of the rest of the house poured through, like honey dripping from a comb. Shelby was trying to get her hair to behave before she left for work, frustrated by one curl’s refusal to stay where she put it; Alex was getting breakfast in front of the kids. Mom was upstairs, doing quadratic equations in her head as she showered, and Dad was a dark smudge at the bottom of the pile of conflicting mental signals, all but unreadable.

My adoptive father, Martin Baker, is what we call a Revenant. It’s a sort of depressing name for a really sweet guy, but given that the alternatives were “a Frankenstein” or “an abomination of science,” I think it’s okay. He used to be several human men, all of whom died in one way or another, only to get graverobbed and spliced together by a scientist with a dubious grasp on the concept of “ethics.”

Something about the resurrection process makes Revenants all but impossible to read. If I hadn’t lived with him for several decades, I wouldn’t even have been able to tell he was in the house. That was obscurely comforting. I don’t have a lot of limits anymore, and that makes the ones I do have all the more precious to me.

Because, see, about eight years ago, right before Isaac was born, my birth mother decided she had a right to come crashing back into my life and wreck everything I cared about. She and the other cuckoos on Earth had decided technology was reaching a point where it was too difficult for them to exist as telepathic predators. Even if humans can’t tell us apart, cameras can, and our movements can be followed. Humanity was starting to catch on, and the cuckoos wanted out.

To achieve “out,” they needed someone who could handle the massive equation they’d cobbled together, the mathematical function that would allow us to exit this dimension and head for a different one. That meant they needed what’s called a Queen—a cuckoo who’s gone through the rare fourth instar and unlocked a whole additional level of telepathic power.

And this is all getting a little confusing, especially when I’m trying to make it to breakfast at the same time. Let’s step into an aside.

* * *

All right: cuckoos, as I’ve mentioned, are both shitty neighbors and telepathic ambush predators. We’re not originally from the dimension where Earth is located: our home dimension is called Johrlar, which makes the part where we’re called Johrlac just a little egotistical, if you ask me. Which they didn’t. The cuckoos have never asked me for anything in my life. They’ve just done it, and expected me to deal graciously with the consequences.

Which I have not done, but we’ll get there.

Today’s cuckoos are the descendants of Johrlar’s exiles, who passed packets of ancestral memory from parent to child in order to make sure their kids would be born perfect little examples of a lousy, murderous species. Again, we’ll get to that in a minute. The important thing here is “from another dimension.” We didn’t evolve on Earth, and our ancestors were clearly subject to different evolutionary pressures in the process of becoming what we are today: humanoid bipeds, pale-skinned, black-haired, and blue-eyed, with surprisingly little variance between individuals. Mom—Angela—and I are virtually identical, despite the fact that we’re not directly related.

Part of this is because we’re actually a form of insect. Surprise! We look like a species of goths, but we’re closer to being giant, wingless wasps. The collagen in our skins is not human-identical, although it feels the same, and that keeps us from visibly aging in the same fashion after we reach our twenties. Angela could still go clubbing with college kids without it seeming creepy, if she’d had any interest in clubbing. Isaac and I would be able to do the same someday, once he was old enough to care about things other than Pokémon cards and chess. We don’t get sick, and we don’t get old, and we don’t play nicely.

We have no hearts. Literally. Instead, our circulatory system is decentralized, and works via a series of muscular pulses. That would still be a problem, if we had blood in the human sense, but fortunately for us, we don’t. Instead, we have a form of advanced hemolymph that keeps us oxygenated and moving. It has antibiotic properties, and we’re rare enough that I don’t know of anything Earth-based that’s developed a resistance to it yet. So that part’s neat at least.

Instars are insect life stages, the progression from nymph to imago, or full adult. Cuckoos have lost our exoskeletons, so we don’t molt like normal insects, but we still change. The first instar is universal—the larval stage of our species, infants and children indistinguishable from the host species we’re hiding among. The second is also universal. Isaac will reach it one day, and when he does, I’ll be on hand to make sure he doesn’t kill everyone in the house. (The second instar tends to cause temporary psychosis brought on by the sudden release of excessive quantities of ancestral memory, which tell the kid in question that humans are nothing more than meat to be farmed. Like I said, we suck.)

Most cuckoos stop there, mature enough to grow up and consider themselves adults, a little bit evil and a little bit nasty and a whole lot manipulative. Some, though, strain themselves hard enough that they go through a third instar, one that leaves them a little bit scrambled for several years, but results in their inherent power level going up. As to why a species of assholes doesn’t pursue this greater power all the time, well. There’s no way to avoid the scrambled period, because each instar is marked by physical changes. They’re just internal ones, involving structures in the brain. We’re literally out of our minds following the third instar, because our brains are reshaping themselves. Not a good thing for a species of ambush predators.

So why do it at all? Well, I did it because I didn’t know it was a possibility. I’d been trying to save my cousin’s life, and I’d accidentally slammed the buttons that began the process to give me an upgrade. I could have stopped there and been happy, truly.

But third-instar cuckoos aren’t common, and those who try apparently have a nasty tendency not to survive the physical rearrangement of their minds when it happens with no one to take care of them. I’d been safe here in Ohio while my brain rebuilt itself, and when I’d felt well enough to leave, I’d returned to the world unaware of what had happened to me.

Only to get ambushed by my biological mother and her hive, who wanted to force me into my fourth instar in order to get themselves a fully adult cuckoo. Since we don’t need to reach the imago stage to reproduce, we generally don’t bother: we’re all content to stop after the second instar, safe and secure and not rebuilding ourselves when we don’t have to. But the equation that lets us rip holes in the barrier between dimensions is so large and needs so much power that only a queen can handle it.

Except even a queen can’t really handle it. It’s too big, and it’s hungry. When I had that equation in my mind, I felt like I was wrestling a greased dinosaur that wanted to bite my head off more than it had ever wanted anything else in its life. The equation is a predator. The cuckoos usually kept it contained by breaking it into pieces and storing it around the world, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a monstrous thing. An ender of worlds.

Completing the equation would have blown a chunk out of Earth big enough to destroy the planet. But what did the cuckoos care? We’d be somewhere else, and to them, that was what mattered. I was their groomed and chosen queen: I was going to set them free. And sure, I was going to melt my own brain in the process, but I got the feeling that for them, that was a side bonus. Get a new world to consume, and don’t get stuck with a pesky queen in the process.

I’ve always tried to be a good person. I’ve always tried to behave more like a human than a giant wasp in a woman suit. And none of that had mattered while the equation was chewing on my brain, trying to force me to end everything so it could be free. I might have done it, except for one small thing that set me apart from all the other cuckoos, even when I hadn’t been thinking about, even when I hadn’t fully understood the ramifications:

I was in love. Deeply, helplessly in love, and had been since I was a little girl. His name was Artie, and he had the most soothing mind I’d ever touched. Something about his thoughts was right, like slipping into a hot bath on a cold night, or a bed with pre-warmed sheets. I’d loved him almost as soon as I’d known him, and miracle of miracles, he’d loved me the same way. Really loved me, not been manipulated into loving me by telepathic tricks. He was a Price, and Prices are part Kairos, another human-looking species that isn’t, quite. Their Kairos heritage made them resistant if not immune to psychic manipulation, and while I could have forced my way into his mind, I couldn’t have done it unintentionally.

Cuckoos don’t do love, as a general rule. Hard to form those types of bonds when you’re constantly measuring the world around you the way a lion measures an antelope. So no one realized Artie might be able to break me out of the mathematical fugue that was supposed to consume me and make it possible for the equation to direct my choices until the world ended in a glorious, concussive boom. He’d pulled me loose, and together we’d come up with a plan to use the minds around me as distributed processing power, letting me keep my self intact despite everything I was going through.

Unfortunately, I’d still been convinced I was going to die, so even as I turned the equation to my own ends, I’d been preparing for my demise. In an effort to keep my allies from hurting more than they had to, the last thing I’d done before the equation finished resolving and we were transported to a different dimension was wipe myself from their memories.

Meaning I landed in a whole new reality surrounded by people who had no idea who I was or why they shouldn’t treat me like any other cuckoo. And one of them had been Artie, which hurt more than I ever imagined. To go from him loving me enough to pull me away from a mind-eating equation like it was no big deal to him looking at me like I was the enemy had been, well, bracing to say the least.

And then, when I was doing the math to get us the hell out of there and back to Earth, on the presumption that I’d done the math correctly the first time and not destroyed it on our way out the door, he’d touched me. Without his memories of growing up together, he hadn’t realized how dangerous that could be. I’d erased his mind during the moment of contact, leaving him a literal shell of the man I loved, and what was gone was gone: I couldn’t put it back. So I’d gathered all the memories I and his family had of him and used them to construct a new person in his place. A person who was almost him, but … not. People are made up of first-person experiences, not third-person memories.

And he—the new person, the one I’d constructed to occupy the empty shell of the man I loved—thought he loved me, because so many of the pieces I’d used to build him told him he did. I’d run away as fast as I could, unable to stand being anywhere near him. My father was a man who’d risen from the dead, but Artie was something new, and terrible, and entirely my fault.

One good thing had come from that whole situation: Isaac. My mother had been pregnant when she decided it was time for the cuckoos to get out of this dimension, and while she hadn’t survived our time together, he had. He was brand-new and perfect when I’d hauled my friends and allies back to Earth, and Angela had been willing to take on the task of raising him. She was one of the only people in the world to have successfully raised a cuckoo who didn’t start trying to murder everyone when she hit puberty—me—and we figured she had a decent shot at doing the same for him. All he needed was a suite of telepathic ethics and a little psychic surgery to remove that packet of ancestral memories before they could turn septic and explode all over his mind. No big deal, right?

Not for a family of telepathic wasps hiding in Columbus, Ohio, I guess.

* * *

The kitchen hasn’t really changed since the first time I’d seen it. Oh, they’d replaced the wallpaper right around the time I was finishing high school, and it was a new kitchen table, polished oak in place of the old walnut, but the fixtures and appliances were all the same. Dad’s never been the world’s biggest fan of avoidable change. He knows most of his kids are aging faster than he is, and he’ll have to bury Evie and Drew someday, and probably his grandkids too, and he understands the world won’t slow down to meet his sometimes-lumbering tempo, but he’s never asked it to. He just asks Mom to buy two toasters when she has to replace one, so he can extend the period before something wholly new has to enter his space.

The only major change was the people. Alex was at the stove where I would normally have expected Mom to be, flipping pancakes with one hand and cracking eggs with the other. Dad was in his usual spot. Charlotte and Isaac were across from him, Lottie with a bowl of cereal and some pancakes, Isaac with pancakes and a plate of scrambled eggs covered in so much ketchup that it looked like a murder scene and a smaller cup of what looked like cocktail sauce, which he was carefully dipping each bite of pancake in before he ate it.

They brightened when they saw me, their thoughts taking on an effervescent, bubbling edge, like mental champagne.

“Sarah!” chirped Lottie. “You’re still here!”

“Not f’long,” said Isaac, more glumly. His thoughts were sparkling, but his tone was dour.

I sat down at the end of the table, close enough that I could lean over and put my arm around his shoulders. “Hey, you. You know I have to go. I’m sorry I can’t be here all the time and always, but there are places I need to be, and people I’ve promised to visit. Do you want your auntie Verity to be all sad because I’m not coming to see her?”

“Auntie Verity’s already sad enough,” said Isaac. His eyes flashed briefly white as he raised them from his plate and looked at me. She’s always going to be sad, whether you’re with her or not. And when you go to see her, you come back sad, because of your hospital friend. I’d rather you stayed here, where you can be happy, and didn’t run away all the time.

“You know I can’t do that, Isaac,” I said. “Greg can’t be here with me, and I need Greg to be happy at all. If I stay here without him for too long, I’ll start having nightmares again. And when I have nightmares, the whole neighborhood has nightmares.”

It’s not fair.

“Neither is talking only in our heads, because not everyone can do it,” I said firmly. “Come on, buddy. Time for our outside voices, okay?”

He shot me a look, thoughts turning disgruntled. I shrugged, projecting neutrality in his direction.

Charlotte—Lottie to her family—was only a few months older than Isaac, and they’d grown up in each other’s pockets. Because she was a Price by blood, she had the protection from mental manipulation provided by her father’s Kairos ancestry. Even so, she could receive telepathic communication, and reply to them in kind. She and Isaac had both been slow to speak, not seeing the need for communicating with other people when they already had each other. Shelby had been briefly concerned she’d need to hold them back from starting formal schooling, since kids who sounded younger than their actual ages were likely to be the targets of bullying.

Alex hadn’t initially agreed that the threat of bullying was a good-enough reason to keep them home, but Shelby had looked at him, shrugged, and asked calmly how many kindergarteners would need to have their minds melted by Isaac for the crime of being mean to Lottie before it would be a good-enough reason.

He’d agreed with her after that. Apparently, that agreement had been enough to make both children start catching up with their peers. They’d been talking more or less normally by the end of the month, and had been able to start school on the expected schedule. Because they refused to be separated and Isaac’s official birthday was in November, they were both in second grade, and the only remaining trace of their delayed speech was in the way he would sometimes shorten words or create new contractions when he didn’t feel like talking.

Well, that, and the way he slipped into telepathic speech if he thought he could get away with it. He and Lottie both carried anti-telepathy charms to school to keep him from accidentally answering the teacher without opening his mouth, but sometimes I was still concerned about being one bad playground argument away from a Stephen King novel.

I’d managed to survive elementary school in Ohio without going full Carrie White. I had confidence that my little brother could do the same. Probably.

“When are you leaving, Sarah?” asked Dad.

“I figured I’d wait until everyone had come downstairs for the day, so I could say my goodbyes,” I said. “I’m planning to be gone for a few weeks this trip, just to make sure I can deal with everything in New York and then spend some real quality time with Greg in Michigan. I’ll call when I head for Buckley, so you know where I am.”

“I agree with Isaac: I wish you could stay longer,” he said.

“And I wish I could have Greg here with me, but the Blue Fairy isn’t granting requests right now,” I said. “St. Giles’s wants to have a serious talk with me about Mark’s future, and that means I have to go. Everything else aside, we owe him.”

Dad sighed. “I suppose we do.”

Mark is a cuckoo. Like me, he’s a pretty reasonable person who’s not totally into the idea of psychically manipulating and abusing everyone around him. Unlike me, he didn’t have anyone to hold his hand and help him get there. I never properly entered my second instar, thanks to Mom carefully removing every trace of my ancestral memories before they could rupture and wipe out my ability to see people as, well, people.

Mark didn’t get those memories removed until much later, when I’d needed the processing space for the world-breaker equation and removed them with his permission. His instar proceeded normally, and the memories had spread through him like wine through cotton. He’d reacted the way cuckoos normally did, by having a brief mental break and trying to murder his younger sister, Cici. But Cici had been young enough to think he was playing a game with her. She’d evaded him for so long that his thoughts had time to calm down again, and he’d stopped seeing her as a target and remembered how much he loved her.

His love for his sister had been strong enough to drag him back over a line that should have been impossible to recross once he had crossed it. He’d been working with the cuckoos who took me purely because they told him that if he didn’t, they’d kill his sister. The whole time, he’d been planning to kill me himself before I could end the world, assuming my family didn’t arrive in time. But they had, and he’d been with us on our cross-dimensional bullshit adventure.

Like Artie, Mark had been seriously damaged by my attempt to solve, resolve, and destroy the equation. Unlike Artie, his mind hadn’t been erased, just subjected to the kind of stress and trauma that could trigger his fourth instar. He was changing. But because he hadn’t been primed for it by going through a third instar, he was trying to accomplish them both at once, and it had already taken eight years.

Eight years of catatonia while his brain physically broke down and rebuilt itself, and the staff at St. Giles’s Hospital—a medical establishment catering almost completely to cryptids—got more and more nervous about what he was going to be if he woke up. Eight years of his human family having no idea what had happened to him. Cici had been twelve when he disappeared, and there was no good way of telling her he was alive, or how he’d been hurt, or anything. From her perspective, her big brother—the brother who’d loved her so much that he’d been able to defeat his own biology to stay with her—just walked away one day and never came back.

I spent time with him when I could, sitting by his bed and holding his hand and hoping that one day I’d pick up on even a flicker of sapient thought coming from him. I didn’t know who or what he’d be if he ever managed to wake up. I just knew it was my fault he was in that bed, and I wanted him awake more than I wanted almost anything else that I could think of.

Without Mark, we would never have been able to make it back from the dimension I’d shunted us all into. Without all of them. And I owed them. I would owe them until the end of my days. I didn’t get to rest and enjoy the love of my family until such time as I’d made sufficient amends for what I’d done.

If that was even possible.

I leaned over, pressing a kiss to Isaac’s temple. His delight at the gesture washed over me, comforting and warm as a towel fresh out of the dryer. “I love you, little bee,” I informed him.

He squirmed, embarrassed and pleased. “Don’t be gross, stupid sister,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Can’t help it.”

Lottie giggled. I took a piece of pancake from Isaac’s plate and dipped it into the cocktail sauce before popping it into my mouth. She made a face.

“That’s weird,” she informed me. “You can’t put ketchup and stuff on everything you eat.”

“Isaac does it,” I said.

“It’s still weird when he does it,” she countered. “Yesterday he put ketchup in his fruit cup in the cafeteria. The lunch aide took it away ’cause she thought he was messing around and making messes.”

Across the table, Dad’s attention focused on Isaac. “Zach…” he rumbled, in a disappointed tone.

Isaac hunched his shoulders. “It tastes wrong when it’s just sweet-sweet-sweet!” he said. “Tomatoes are only considered a vegetable for tax purposes anyway!”

I blinked, then looked over my shoulder as Mom stepped into the room, hair still damp and sticking to the sides of her face. “Was I like this when I was eight?”

“You were worse,” she said sweetly. “You’re the reason I learned how to make gummy candy at home. If I didn’t send you to school with tomato gummies, you’d find ways to sneak tomatoes into everything, and it was scaring the other children. Not that you made it past seventh grade, whereas Zach is going all the way to high school, aren’t you, buddy?”

“Yes, Mom,” he said dutifully.

“With me,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, with you.” I knew she was smiling because she projected it to me and Isaac even as she folded her face in the appropriate ways. It’s nice to spend time around people who telegraph their facial expressions. Makes it easier to react to them.

Sometimes I thought Charlotte was to Isaac as those therapy dogs were to the cheetahs in zoos. She gave him something to focus on and hang on to. Like me with Greg. Telepathy isn’t an anxiety disorder, but being a telepath in a non-telepathic world can feel very similar. He’d been doing better than I did in public school from day one. Maybe if I’d been able to go to Portland and attend school with Artie, I could have made it to high school instead of having a nervous breakdown in the seventh grade and finishing out my education in this very kitchen.

Or maybe we’d just have ended up even more codependent than we already were, and I’d have fallen apart completely when I accidentally erased his mind, instead of just falling apart mostly. No way of knowing.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “You got the value of the variable wrong on your fourth equation. It should have been three, or the whole thing fails to resolve.”

“I knew you’d catch that, sweetie,” she said, crossing the kitchen to kiss my forehead before ruffling Isaac’s hair with one hand. “You always were my little perfectionist. When do you leave?”

“As soon as Shelby comes downstairs.” There was a clatter from the hall, telling me that she was doing precisely that.

“Aren’t you going to eat first?” asked Alex.

“I’ll grab something in New York,” I said. “Promise.”

Shelby stepped into the kitchen, nodding in my direction just as I stepped away from Mom and grabbed for the inherent mathematical structure of the world around me. I had to do the mental equivalent of squinting in order to see it, but once I did, I could see the chained functions that made up everything. Physics, matter, and distance, they were all equations, and equations could be modified.

I waved at Shelby, and I was gone.

There aren’t really words for the way I can move around now that I’ve stabilized as a fully mature queen. “Spatial tunneling” is the closest we’ve really come. I basically just take the math that tells me my location and change it to something different. As soon as I release it in its changed state, it becomes an absolute truth, and reality is happier to change things about itself than it is to modify its underlying math. It does make an impact, leaving little errors in the math between the two points I’ve modified, and they need time to correct themselves before I can safely tunnel to the same location again. I try to think of it as drawing lines that are never allowed to overlap, a logic puzzle playing out in four dimensions at once. And even that is a simplification, because I don’t know how to explain the beautiful crystalline network of numbers that is the equations that transport me. I reach out, I tweak, and I’m gone. Over and over again. It’s that simple, and that complicated.

It’s definitely not an ability that should have been extended to someone with my reasons for running away.


Copyright © 2026 by Seanan McGuire