Calculated Risks by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire [McGuire, Seanan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

“There’s no such thing as ‘getting what you deserve,’ because none of us are born deserving anything. We get what we work for, and we don’t always get that. The universe is fickle. We just have to keep on going.”

—Jane Harrington-Price

Falling. Which is pretty straightforward, as these situational updates go. Just . . . falling

The wind was colder than I expected, cold and aggressively harsh against my skin. I closed my eyes to shut out the sight of the panic above me, and raised my shields to shut out the sound of Annie and the others frantically trying to find a solution. I didn’t want to die with Artie thinking “Serves her right” or something equally awful ringing in my ears. So I put it all aside.

Physics seemed to work here mostly the way it did at home. There were clearly a few differences in things like the square-cube law, but since Annie could throw her fireballs without vaporizing us all, it wasn’t fully suspended. I spread my arms like I was performing a swan dive, hoping the increased resistance would slow my fall, and spared a moment to be brutally relieved that I wasn’t falling to my death wearing nothing but a nightgown.

I fell forever. I fell for seconds. Then I slammed into something huge and hairy, like landing on a Muppet or in a field of fake fur, and my eyes snapped open. I grabbed fistfuls of the shag around me, trying not to wince from the grasshopper-sized lice hopping around my fingers, and stopped myself before I could slide down the slope of my landing place.

I was on the back of another giant spider, smaller than the first by a large measure but still the size of a draft horse, bigger than any spider had any business being. I swallowed my scream, tightening my grip. This was terrible. It was better than falling to the ground, and without a neck, the spider didn’t have the flexibility to turn and bite me off of its back.

Spiders may glide, but they can’t fly, and as I realized where I was, suddenly neither I nor the spider were there anymore. It had landed atop one of the university buildings, and was bringing up one of its rear legs to scrape the annoying intruder away. I rolled to the side, still trying to catch my breath and process the fact that I wasn’t dead.

Overriding another creature’s free will is the greatest sin the cuckoos commit. It had been drilled into my head since childhood that it was never okay for me to override someone else’s choices. In that moment, I didn’t care. The spider tried to scrape me off its back, and I did the only thing I could: I gathered my thoughts into a solid ball and slammed them into the rudimentary bundle of neurons it would have called a mind, if it had been that self-aware.

STOP THAT RIGHT NOW, I commanded.

The spider stopped. It froze with its leg still lifted in the air, posed to rub me off its head as soon as I let go.

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