Page 89 of Aftermarket Afterlife

“Seattle is quite large,” she said, dubiously. “Can you narrow it down at all?”

I looked at the phone. It didn’t have any identifying marks. “Hang on a second,” I said, and put the receiver down as I started shuffling through the discarded papers on the floor. Halfway down the pile, I hit paydirt. I picked the phone back up. “Sarah? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” she said. She sounded drowsy, almost disconnected. With Sarah, that was probably a sign that she’d begun extending her mental awareness to cover more of her surroundings. That would allow her to serve as an early-warning system for both Covenant agents and other cuckoos. If Lea was in immediate danger, Sarah would know in short order.

“Okay. I have a piece of letterhead here that says I’m at University District General, in the surgical center.”

“All right. I’ll look up the address. Stay where you are.”

The line went dead. I eased the receiver back into the cradle and rose into a crouch, listening intently for signs that Leonard might be coming back. When I didn’t hear anything, I straightened up and walked quickly back over to Megan.

She still wasn’t moving. That was getting a little worrisome. But more of her snakes were awake and alert, shying away as I approached. Only about a quarter of them had lost their heads, and the others twined protectively around the remaining trunks, seeming to cradle them close, like they could understand what was happening. No one’s ever been quite sure how smart the snakes on top of a gorgon’s head really are; they have some awareness of their surroundings, they eat independently, and they have preferences regarding what people they choose to trust versus strike at. But they’re not fully sapient, and it was questionable whether or not Megan’s snakes could really understand.

“Hi,” I said, voice very low. “I’m your...” What were they? Was Megan their host, or were they an intrinsic part of her? If they were an intrinsic part of her, I was their babysitter as well. That felt right, and so I forced the kind of smile I’d normally reserve for a child Olivia’s age or younger. “I’m your babysitter.”

I’d never been a sitter for a child whose language I didn’t speak before, and as more of the snakes turned toward me, their tongues flicking at the air, I had to wonder how this was going to work. Then one of them extended itself in my direction, moving with a sort of sinuous grace. I raised my hand without thinking about it, holding it out for the serpent to twine around. Its scales were smooth and warm against my fingers, and its tongue tickled my skin.

I got a deep feeling of relief and hope from the snake, like it was trying to tell me it had been afraid for a long time, and now felt like it could start to relax. I looked up, startled. More of the snakes were stretching in my direction, and they joined the first one in tangling around my hand. I sighed. They had all been so scared for so long, and I didn’t know how I knew that, only that I did. I looked back down at Megan’s face.

Her eyelids were starting to twitch with the effort of waking up. I pulled my hand free of the snakes and bent toward her, touching her cheek gently. “Megan?”

She made a small whimpering noise, and didn’t open her eyes.

“Megan, it’s Mary. We met at Lowryland. I’m here to get you out.”

She did open her eyes at that, revealing irises that could have passed for human even in an optometrist’s office. She flinched when she saw how close she was to my face, glancing away.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s all right. You can’t hurt me. You can’t— Why didn’t they blind you?” It suddenly seemed like a very important question. While she’d been unconscious, focusing on her lack of sunglasses would have been a waste of time, but now, their absence meant she could have hurt me if I’d been human.

“Hard lenses,” she rasped. “In my eyes.”

“You’re wearing special lenses?”

She nodded.

“And they didn’t try to take them out?”

Megan coughed before offering me a wan smile. “Told them I was a lesser gorgon. They couldn’t tell the difference.”

“Ah.”

There are three types of gorgon. Megan’s variety, the Pliny’s gorgon, is middle-of-the-road in terms of venomousness and danger. She could paralyze with a glance and petrify with a bite, but she couldn’t petrify with her eyes. That privilege is reserved for the greater gorgons. Lesser gorgons can also paralyze with a look, but the paralysis is less intense and doesn’t last as long. If the Covenant agents who’d grabbed Megan believed she was a lesser gorgon, they might have accepted her claims to just have a weaker-than-average gaze, thus sparing her eyes.

Still...“Why did they cut the heads off some of your snakes, and not the rest?”

Megan winced, looking miserable. “They had a plan,” she said. “They were going to keep me alive until they were absolutely sure they couldn’t get any more information out of me, cutting off as many bits as they thought I could survive losing—a few snakes, some toes, the little pieces—and then they were going to set me loose in downtown Seattle so they could heroically recapture and detain me. Let me scare some of the locals before they came charging to the rescue. If they’d cut off all the snakes’ heads, I would have just looked like a woman in a rubber wig, and not a properly terrifying monster.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Before she could answer, Sarah stepped out of the air into the room, her eyes glowing incandescent white. It could be easy to ignore how bright that bioluminescence was, when she was in a well-lit room. Here, it was like she had replaced her pupils with LEDs, and it was unnerving as hell.

“Hello, Megan,” she said, calmly. “I know your mother quite well. She is very nice, and once bought me a Ring Pop when I was sad. It was green apple–flavored, although I’ve never had a green apple that tasted like that. Do you suppose there is an orchard somewhere that grows apples that taste the way the candy-makers think apples are supposed to taste?”

Megan blinked, several times, then shied as far away from Sarah as her bonds would allow, trying to press herself into me. The intact snakes on her head rose and hissed at Sarah, fiercely defensive.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Sarah’s on our side. She’s Antimony’s cousin.”

“She’s acuckoo,” hissed Megan, as if I might somehow not have noticed. “If you think she’s part of the family, she’s—she’s—she’s been rewiring your head! I know how cuckoos work!”

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