Page 43 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Why did you come here?”

“Mark’s family doesn’t even have a stranger in his body to turn to,” said Sarah. “I visit them, sometimes. They don’t know who I am, but Cici—his little sister—she suspects I’m the same sort of thing he is, and she always looks at me like she wants to tear my throat out, like she knows what I did. She can’t possibly know. She still...” She sighed heavily. “It’s hard.”

“Life is hard, honey. That’s what makes it worth living.” I took another few steps toward her, angling to go around the bed. I can pass through living people, and most of them don’t even notice. Passing through a comatose cuckoo seemed like a gamble I didn’t need to be taking right now. “None of this is your fault. You know that, right?”

“Why couldn’t I hold on to Leonard?” She looked up at me, eyes perfectly clear. Her pupils were a fully normal shade of black, not clouded by the traceries of telepathy. Whatever she was doing here, it wasn’t communicating with Mark in any way. In fact, if I’d been asked to guess, I would have said she’d pulled herself back as hard as she could, keeping even her passive psychic effects to a minimum.

If not for the sleeping nurse outside, I would have thought she’d shut them off completely. It was...jarring. “I don’t know, honey. He’s had encounters with Annie before, and with the rest of us. Maybe he was wearing a telepathy-blocking charm of some sort. Not strong enough to keep you from grabbing him in the first place, but enough to give him that little extra edge to break free when he thought he needed to. He could see into the tent from where he was frozen. He wasn’t shooting at random when hedidbreak free. He was shooting to do as much damage as he could, and he succeeded, but that isn’t your fault.”

“Aunt Jane dropped her guard because she thought I’d neutralized the threats,” wailed Sarah, sounding genuinely distraught.

Time to find out whether my false bravado over how much damage a cuckoo could do to a ghost was justified. I finished walking up to her and set my now-solid hand upon her shoulder, gripping tight to ground her in the moment. And nothing happened. My mind didn’t fragment and shatter, or sweep away into nothingness; my borrowed molecules didn’t scatter.

“She knew better than to assume any enemy still standing was fully neutralized,” I said. “She didn’t drop her guard. She just got unlucky. It happens. Even to people with Kairos blood. Eventually, everyone gets unlucky. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I did something wrong to Mark, and to Artie,” she said miserably. “Ihurtthem.”

So she was conflating Jane’s death with the telepathic damage she’d unwittingly done to her friends. Of course she was. “You put Arthur back together as best you could, and he should have known not to touch you during a working as large as the one you’ve described to me,” I said. “I thinkArtiedid know. He may not have realized how bad it would be, but he knew there would be consequences, and I believe he accepted them. It’s not your fault they were more than he could carry. It’s not.”

Sarah sniffled. “Mark asked me to take the ghost memories out of him. The ones we inherited from our mothers, the ones that taught us how to be cuckoos. They’re like eggs in our minds, and when they hatch, they leak all over everything. They change every bit of who we are and how we understand the world. My egg never hatched, because Angela stole it from me, and because Angela is the way she is, she didn’t have an egg. Mark’s egg, though, it hatched, and it had a long, long time to soak into every bit of who he was. And he asked me to rip it out, so I could have more processing power. I did, because he called me a coward. He made me so angry that I didn’t feel like I had a choice anymore.” Her eyes were starting to fill with tears.

I squeezed her shoulder but didn’t say anything. This was something she needed to get out, and until she did, she wasn’t going to be a reliable ally. We needed her reliable. We needed her steady and dependable and coming when we needed her.

“I pulled it out, and I filled that whole space with an equation that was supposed to crack a world in two, and when I solved for zero, when I finished the problem, I pulled it back out again, because it’s too dangerous. I couldn’t let him keep it. And now he won’t wake up.”

“Is he still there, when you look into his thoughts? Can you find Mark?”

She nodded, hesitantly. “He’s not like it was with Artie. With Artie, there was just...nothing. It was like I’d reformatted his hard disk. Mark is just all fragmented and broken up inside, everything in pieces. It’s more like I ran a magnet across him again and again, until everything was pulled out of true.”

“And is he getting any better?”

Again, she nodded. “It’s hard to tell, because he’s so deep down that I can’t interact with him at all, but he seems to be pulling the pieces of himself back together. He’s more Mark every time I look at him.”

“Sounds like what happened to you.”

Sarah looked at me again, sharply this time, alarmed. “You mean I might have triggered his next instar?”

“I suppose so.”

“Can that evenhappento male cuckoos?”

“Honey, I know as much about cuckoos as you do, if not less. They’re not my field of study. But I’d say you’re a relatively low-sexual-dimorphism species, and there’s no reason to think that if cuckoo queens are possible, cuckoo kings might not be under the right circumstances. He’s sleeping because he’s healing. He’s safe here in this hospital. You didn’t hurt him—or if you did, it was because he asked you to, in order to save everyone else. To save Annie and Artie and James, and yourself, and Isaac.”

Sarah bit her lip. “I guess. I just...I just want him to wakeup. His sister needs him.”

Of all the people Sarah felt guilty for hurting, Mark was the safe one: he was still unconscious, and he couldn’t blame her for what she’d done. So she used him as a stick to hit herself with, because it was safer than hitting herself with any of the others. It was unhealthy, almost brutally so. I kept my hand on her shoulder.

“Honey, we need to get back to Portland. We need to be there for the family meeting. I know you feel bad, but running isn’t the answer, and knowing what it felt like when Leonard slipped out of your control is probably going to help us understand what happens next.” I grimaced as a wail rang through the network of familial need. “And you need to go ahead without me, because Charlotte is yelling for me now. I think she’s—”

Isaac started crying as well.

“—okay, now she’s woken Isaac. Sarah, I have to go. Can you wake up the nurse in the hall outside and head back to Portland for me? Please, can you promise me that much?”

Sarah nodded, very slowly. “I have to go back there anyway. Greg’s there,” she said.

“Yeah. Go get your giant spider.” I leaned in and kissed her forehead before winking out, back into the no-space space between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Nine

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