Shadows

CHAPTER 12

WE’D BEEN ON THE ROAD ABOUT HALF AN HOUR when Jill pulled over onto a sandy, gravelly spot that looked like other cars had stopped there too, but why? I doubted there were enough people who tried to break into Goat Creek to need a parking space. She turned the car off and we sat there listening to the ting of cooling metal and the noises of dogs hoping this meant they were getting out of this jiggle factory soon. She said, “We need a plan.”

Nobody said anything, but both Jill and Casimir turned around and looked at me. Taks’ arms tightened around my waist again, Hix many-footed up my chest and wrapped herself back around my neck—and Mongo started wagging his tail, till I grabbed it and held on. He looked at me reproachfully.

“It’s not a very good plan,” I said.

“Good would be too much to ask,” said Jill. “Although if I wreck this car I’d better have Arnie to show for it, or I’ll be in so much trouble I probably won’t see you again till I’m eighty.”

“I don’t think wrecking the Ma—the car is part of the plan,” I said. “Do you know how much farther to the gate?”

“Nearly two miles,” said Casimir at the same moment that Jill said, “Two miles, give or take,” and Takahiro said, “About two miles.”

“What?” I said. “Have you all been here or something?”

They were looking at each other. “No,” said Jill. “It’s the picking-up thing I do. More of it lately.”

“The wolf knows,” said Takahiro. “The rest of me just translates.”

“It is one of the little skills my mother sewed into the hem of my coat,” said Casimir.

“It’s a pity we couldn’t have spread all this talent around a little more,” I said. “Like one of you could rip chain-link fence apart with your bare hands and somebody else could hypnotize army guys into opening the doors and letting everyone go.”

“We’d still have a transportation problem,” said Jill, giving Dov’s butt a shove back through the gap between the seats. Dov’s entire butt didn’t anything like fit through that gap, but you could almost see the edges of the seat bowing under the strain. He shifted forward again, had nowhere to go, and collapsed on Bella. Bella sighed.

“And a winged chariot drawn by flying horses in your pocket,” I said.

“I’ll work on it,” said Jill.

“Okay,” I said. “Does anyone’s radar tell them when the army guys are going to start noticing our car?”

“No,” said Casimir. “But not yet. There is little to make an unremarkable car—”

“Unremarkable!” said Jill.

“Their scans will not care that it is large and full of animals,” amended Casimir. “They will not think it remarkable till it comes too close.”

“Okay,” said Jill. “Less far to walk.” She started the car again. “Keep talking,” she said over her shoulder.

“Don’t hit any sheep,” I said.

“That this road is being left to go to pieces is bogus,” said Takahiro. “There’ve been a lot of vehicles over it recently.”

“Wolf?” I said.

“Wolf,” he agreed.

“Do you always know this stuff?”

Takahiro hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s not usually very relevant. Mostly I try to ignore it. It’s harder to ignore when I’ve been wolf lately.”

I was starting to feel seasick as the car jolted over the increasingly bumpy road past the perimeter fence—despite the fact that the armydar pressure dropped off abruptly and there were fewer silverbugs. Which told you something, although I wasn’t sure what. I should have felt better, not worse. But it wasn’t the road, it was the plan. It was bad enough that I was putting my human friends in danger. I was putting the critters in danger too, whose only crime had been a willingness to trust me and get in the car. But we were going to need the distraction—just as Taks had needed them for a different kind of distraction.

“It depends on if I have figured out how to talk to the gruuaa,” I said. “Or . . .” I pulled a little on the glowing network in my mind, and there was a kind of chirrup, as inaudible as the gruuaa were insubstantial, in reply.

“Okay,” said Jill. “Then what?”

I was watching the network. There was a shimmer, like Hix’s wiggle only more so—and it was getting stronger, or I was getting more able to pick it out. Something, like the way Whilp’s name had, drifted across my mind. The shimmer was Val, I guessed. Val surrounded by a lot of gruuaa. Now if only I knew what was left and right out here in the real world. “Hey, can you stop again? A minute,” I said, staring at the gruuaa web.

The Mammoth stopped. “What—” began Jill.

“Wait,” I said.

There was silence, except for a lot of breathing. The eleven of us weren’t breathing anything like together or to any kind of pattern, but as I stared at the invisible glowing web the breathing began to make sort of chords with the subtle pulse of the network. It was something like what the passing wash of streetlights did to a black and white border collie’s fur, which was creepily a little like the checkerboard of a mass of silverbugs.

. . . Um . . . Hix?

Then there was the worst rubbing-your-tummy-and-patting-the-top-of-your-head-at-the-same-time exercise that you can imagine—with your other arm (what other arm) you’re slaying a dragon with a rubber sword, and I think you’re probably juggling a hoop around one ankle. Or maybe there’s a pogo stick involved. I felt like a piece of origami paper being folded by clumsy hands. . . .

But for a moment something—something distracting and confusing—flickered into this world.

“Sugoi,” murmured Jill.

“Holy hot electricity,” said Takahiro.

“Yeah,” I said, and it all snapped off again . . . or slid back where it belonged. I was panting worse than any of the dogs. “Val is being held—somewhere—I think off to our right. I hope I’ll know better as we get closer. . . .” and I plucked at the web like a guitarist who’s lost her A string. Or her magic-loophead-other-world string. “But that disappearing thing the gruuaa do . . . it’s variable.”

“That was gruuaa, just now?” said Jill.

“Yes,” I said. “So the idea is that while the army guys are all falling out the front door to see what the giant glowing weirdness on their doorstep is, we’re, or some of us, are going to be having a look around the side where they’re holding Val. And maybe one of you will suddenly discover an ability to melt holes in the sides of buildings by pointing your finger.”

“That’s your plan,” said Jill.

“Yes.”

There was a pause. I listened to all the breathing.

“This is probably a good place to leave the car,” said Jill eventually. “It might even be here when we get back.”

I could have gone upstate with Mom and Ran. . . . But I knew I couldn’t. And the gruuaa would have prevented me if I’d tried. I held onto that thought, and tried not to think of the ten other people (two- and four-legged) that I’d dragged into my dangerous insanity. The feeling in my stomach was familiar. This was how I felt when I had been the last kid chosen for the volleyball team in seventh grade. Or when I’d seen that F on that pre-algebra exam.

We were so squashed up in the back that when Casimir opened our door Mongo and I spilled out. Takahiro unfolded himself behind me and stood up straight, like he never did at school, and sniffed the air. Sniffed the air. I turned back to the car. Bella was holding them in check, but looking at me hopefully. I groped for leads, and snapped them all on. I didn’t want to lose anybody, and things were only going to get more confusing from here. “Okay, you guys. Out.”

There was a brief furry river of brown and black and white, and then the dogs were weaving around me (while I tried to avoid being tied in a granny knot by leads) and Majid was standing a little distance away looking around in what was probably lone-conquering-hero mode. I didn’t think even the gruuaa would have much luck persuading him to be a member of a team.

“We can start off together,” I said. The other three humans took four dogs, leaving me with Bella and an off-lead Mongo. I retrieved my algebra book and my knapsack, as if Jill and I had just driven into the school parking lot for a long day of extreme boredom with occasional brief shocks of learning something. I had a flashlight in my knapsack because I was that kind of girl. Tonight it was going to be useful.

Everyone else had shouldered their own knapsacks. Jill and Casimir were getting something out of the trunk, and then I heard Jill locking the car. “Don’t want the dog food stolen,” she said.

They didn’t seem to be running the armydar at all out here, which gave me less excuse to be this confused and blurry-brained. If we did, by some miracle, get Val and Arnie away, they’d probably turn on something even worse. And then we’d need a regiment of grizzly bears to damp it out. Maybe we could just ask the bears to eat anyone who got too close.

The gruuaa network was showing me what I guessed was the layout of the army base. Jill had the car flashlight; the boys were following us, although I doubt Takahiro was paying much attention to my feeble little beam. I glanced up at him once, and he was looking up at the sky, and his eyes gleamed golden. Taks’ eyes are so dark brown they’re almost black. And while you could hear us humans and the dogs crunching through the undergrowth I swear Takahiro made no more noise than the gruuaa. I had no idea where Majid was.

I had been thinking that the gruuaa network left a lot to be desired as a way of guiding solid people over solid ground as I stumbled in the dark, trying to keep the flashlight beam nearly straight down in case anyone from the base happened to be looking out an ordinary window in this direction. And then simultaneously Takahiro said, “Maggie—” and Bella, walking in front of me, stopped. She had her hackles raised, which made her look almost as big as the huge ugly block of building that had appeared just ahead of us. On the far side of a complicated, clearly unclimbable fence, chain link and barbed wire. The high-voltage-with-extra-lethal-kick sensation beat out at us like wind from a wind tunnel.

I stopped. Takahiro and Jill and Casimir stopped. The rest of the dogs stopped too, most of them with one foot raised and ears stiffly pricked, as if they were expecting interesting and dangerous prey to burst out at them. There seemed to be no windows and no lights on this side. Just the fence. And the punch of extra-muscular voltage.

“Whew,” said Takahiro, except it was more like a growl.

We stood there. I waited to feel my pathetic plan disintegrating. But the gruuaa web was brighter than ever. “Can you see that?” I said in this insanely calm voice.

“Yes,” said Jill, just as insanely calm.

“Good,” I said. “You’re in charge. Um.” Someone—some gruuaa—ran down my leg, disappeared in the dark, and then reappeared in Jill’s flashlight beam, swarming up her leg. “Oh,” she said, slightly less calmly.

“That’s Whilp,” I said. “Um—”

. . . She . . . drifted to me from somewhere.

“She’ll help you.”

Jill nodded, put her flashlight in her pocket and made the collarbone-patting gesture I knew so well with her free hand. Hix was still around my neck, and there were two or three more gruuaa wrapped around various bits of me too, separate from the network, focused uncomfortably on me: anxious, insistent, determined. The real-world wind was cold but I was feeling, if anything, increasingly warm, like bread in a toaster someone has just turned on. Even if Jill and the rest managed to create a diversion, what was I supposed to be doing for them to be diverting from? I clutched my algebra book, and I swear it wriggled, like a critter you’re holding too tight.

My algebra book.

“Okay,” I said, back to the insane calm. “I’ve just decided this is where we split up. Which way is the front door, do you suppose?”

There was a pause, like they thought this was a rhetorical question, and then Casimir said hesitantly, “That way, I think,” and pointed.

“Fine,” I said. “You take the dogs, and Jill’s got one—at least one—gruuaa, as—as translator, because the network is going with you, and you’re going to try and create a—a disturbance that they’ll want to check out but that turns out just to be some loose dogs, okay? Mongo,” I said to my dog, who knew something was up and had reattached himself to my leg, because whatever it was it was up to him to protect me and maybe there would be sandwiches at the end of it, “you go with Jill.”

Mongo didn’t move. “Mongo,” I said, and repeated the go-to-that-person gesture. He knew Jill; he even sometimes obeyed her. He wasn’t moving. Jill walked over to me and took Mongo’s collar. “Come on, loophead,” she said. “The magdag wants us to go save a different part of the universe.”

Mongo had never bitten anyone in his life, but he gave a wild despairing whine as she dragged him away. It made my heart rip loose and turn over; I felt like I’d betrayed my best friend. I hoped that wasn’t what I’d just done. I took a deep breath and held my algebra book hard enough to hurt. Taks kissed the top of my head and murmured, “Ganbatte.” “Do your best.” I wanted to cry. I wanted to run home, where Mom’s hot chocolate would make it all better. I listened to my friends moving away from me. I took another deep breath, and it hurt worse.

I knelt down and put my algebra book on the ground, propping my flashlight to give me a little light. The gruuaa who had stayed with me swarmed down and poured over the book, patting it in their faint, fuzzy-hazy, too-many-footed way. Even all together they wouldn’t have been able to heave the cover open. And I didn’t want them with me. Go, I said, I hoped I said, and did a sort of wave at the network, which did seem to be moving away in a this-world direction similar to Jill’s. Go with them, help them, I said, I may have said, or I may have said, Urgly flump duzzy blah, in gruuaa language—or I may have said nothing at all.

There was a brief, even peremptory hum from Hix and a faint sharp explosion against my neck like a butterfly losing its temper. Several of the remaining gruuaa scampered away. Something like a hmmph from Hix then, which I translated as, Okay. Your turn.

I refocused on my algebra book. The cover opened and the pages fanned themselves out. The oddness of the regrown pages seemed to have spread; most of the pages now were that too-flexible, almost-muscular substance with the faint pattern that resembled the decorative paper Jill had given me for Christmas last year. “I’m sorry,” I said, and ripped a page out—a page standing straight up from the spine, like a kid in a classroom waving her hand and saying, Me, teacher! Choose me! The page came out easily, like untucking a bookmark, not like tearing a bound page. I held it up in front of me and briefly I saw the shape I needed in a kind of shimmer, like a tiny private aurora borealis.

I laid the algebra-book page on the ground, thinking about Casimir’s comment that I’d folded a piece of the cobey. Of course the cobey had come to us; the ground here, so far as I knew, was just ground—unless the inaudible thump of the barrier was doing more than guard. Carefully I took a page corner between my fingers and put the tips of the fingers of my other hand in the center of the page. As the pressure of my fingers made it settle farther into the dead leaves and grass and dirt it seemed to quiver like the skin of an animal. I tugged ever so gently on the corner and of course nothing happened, because paper is paper even when it’s weird paper . . .

. . . and at the same time it lengthened, as if it was made of something like an Ace bandage or crepe paper, and my pulling hand . . . disappeared.

I froze. My ordinary hand, clutching the tip of the torn-out paper page, was still there, in front of my kneeling knees, against a background of dirt and slightly crushed autumn grass. But I could feel the other hand, the one that had disappeared, also holding the tip of a torn-out page, which, by my feel of it, was almost a hand’s breadth farther out in that direction. What do I do? I thought in a panic. Are there now two of me? If I keep folding is all of me going to disappear—or double? Will there be some other me wandering around some other where? Where will I be?

I felt Hix unwind from my neck, slip lightly down the arm(s) that was (or were) holding the tip (or tips) of the page and . . . when she got to the place where there were two choices, chose the invisible hand holding the stretched-out corner. Against that hand she was suddenly solid, and, having been licked by more animals than I could remember over the years, I immediately recognized the sensation of a tongue on the back of my hand—scratchier than a dog’s, less scratchy than a cat’s—and kind of frilly, like it had extra edges. Is this the gruuaa home space? I thought confusedly. I could feel the pads of her tiny feet. They were warm and soft and, I thought, very slightly sticky, like a gecko’s feet. They pattered down the length of my forearm and stopped and clung. I was pretty sure there were at least ten of them.

But I still didn’t want to go there, or unravel brand-new bits of me there, even if some of the natives were friendly. What if I couldn’t breathe or something? If the other me can’t breathe, will I die?

I folded the corner over, and as I creased the edge, my other hand came back from wherever, and there was only one hand and one piece of paper again. I felt a little sick, but that could just be . . . everything. When I took hold of the opposite corner of the page with my other hand, I hesitated and then tugged it gently too. That hand too developed an identical twin, and an invisible corner of that page stretched into gruuaa space. I felt Hix move (in the dark, unreliably sort-of lit by my flashlight on my ordinary hands, I couldn’t see her, whatever space she was or was not occupying) and then I felt her ruffly tongue on the back of that hand too.

I kept folding. As I did, the other remaining gruuaa scrambled up higher, hooking themselves over my shoulders, and reached around with—what? Small slightly sticky feet?—to pat my face and forehead. One of them was humming: a much deeper note than Hix’s. There was a faint sweet smell like strawberry jam.

I turned the almost-paper figure over and kept folding. And folding. The figure was beginning to throw off little crinkly gleams along its creased edges—or maybe that was something to do with the narrow beam of the flashlight, and the shadows my fingers made. I turned it off and stuffed it into a knapsack pocket. I took a deep breath. This was better, even if I couldn’t see very well. Because I couldn’t see very well. Last fold went in with an almost-audible tap like the last bang of a hammer against a nail already flush with the wall. I picked the little thing up, pulled its two extended ends, and . . . it bloomed.

Both my hands disappeared as they pulled, and the figure boiled over where my hands and wrists ought to be—my heart was thundering like a stampede—let me tell you it is terrifying when a piece of you disappears—although I could feel the figure against my invisible skin the way I could feel Hix, and the invisibleness was solid enough to be a darker darkness.

Hix streamed back up one arm and around my neck; the other few gruuaa were holding onto my hair and tucking themselves down the back of my collar as if preparing for the worst. This was not helping my state of mind. At least yesterday in the park Casimir had been there too. I wondered, wildly and frantically, as if I was never going to see them again, what the others were doing. I was rapidly losing track of up and down and there and here and sound and silence—and me and not-me or extra-me or super-me. I saw my algebra book flopping, no, clapping its covers open and shut almost like it was applauding; briefly I saw my baku, still tucked in against the front cover. I’d only used one page, but there was a huge rent out of the middle.

I shifted my (invisible) grip on my new figure, which seemed to be still unrolling and unrolling and unrolling like an infinitely long reel of some thistledown fabric—a swell of it touched my face and blew back over my head—I clutched at it as if it was real fabric, yanked a billow of it forward, till it caught around my algebra book too—

—And then as the invisible, inaudible, intangible other thing began to lift me up out of the world there was a frantic flurry of feet, a thump, and a tiny anxious yelp as something only too my-world real slammed into me. “Mongo! I told you to—” But the other thing was pulling me away. No. No. I can’t—I heard the even-more-frantic scrabbling of those feet and a don’t-leave-me-behind whine, and I writhed, half in and half out of the world I knew and the world I didn’t, grabbed for his collar, wrapped an arm around as much of his body as I could reach—

—And dissolved into not-me. Mongo was gone with everything else. Mongo, I thought. If you’ve killed yourself because you’re too stupid to obey orders—

I was pretty sure I was crying, if not-me had tear ducts.

Maggie? said a shocked, familiar voice with a thicker-than-usual Orzaskan accent. Is that you? Don’t do it! Go back! It’s much too dangerous!

Shut up, I said. We’re rescuing you.

Mongo, I thought. Where are you? But there was no answer: no not-Mongo not-yelp or not-whine. No not-tail whumping against my not-legs.

I banged into something hard and found myself sprawling—on a rough cold cement floor. My knapsack slammed painfully into my back. Even through my jeans I lost some skin as I skidded across that floor. But at least they were my legs, my jeans, and a cement floor I could understand. There was a shout—a way-too-audible shout—and then confusion, and something big and silvery-grey seemed to bound over me and toward the shouting—and then there was a thud, like a heavy body hitting the floor, and silence.

But as I pushed myself painfully up to a sitting position there was a sense again of something blooming against my hands—no, in my arms—pressing against my bruised chest—something furry—“Mongo!” I wrapped my arms around him so tightly I managed to get nearly all of him on my lap as I sat with my legs bent under me on the cement floor of . . .

A tattered little paper thing that had somehow inserted itself under Mongo’s collar came loose, and floated to the floor.

Mongo was shivering and panting and making tiny frightened noises—even while he was licking my face he was whining, unhappy little anh anh anh noises, and I didn’t know what to do: I’d had a hard enough time being not-me, and I could guess that a dog, with no semi-comforting intellectual concept of a division between body and mind, would have found the experience of not-me even worse than I had. But here was Hix, pattering down my shoulder, onto Mongo, winding herself around his neck. She began to hum. Mongo put his head under my arm and I got an arm around his butt. This was about the most uncomfortable position I had ever been in in my life, and I was going to be able to stand it for about a second and a half. But I could feel him beginning to relax. In a weird way he seemed to get heavier, as if he was finishing the journey, bringing the rest of himself through to this place.

The billows of non-fabric thinned like cloud wisps and disappeared, and my eyes cleared, and I was looking at half a dog and a very-stretched-out T-shirt that would never fit me again. I began to notice the dusty, shut-in, windowless feel of the air that went with the cement floor. The other gruuaa who had tied themselves up in my hair untied themselves and scampered down to the floor . . . to throw themselves ecstatically into whatever the equivalent of “arms” is for gruuaa: there were a lot of them already here. I registered their presence, raised my eyes slowly up, and . . . met Val’s eyes.

Val. A small mean frightened part of me said, None of this would have happened without Val. A slightly larger but just as frightened part of me said, Yeah, that’s right. Especially the part about not dying in the park yesterday when the cobey swallowed you.

Val looked really bad in the fluorescent light. Bad and stressed. Well, duh. But there was something about the look on his face. The pro-Val part of me said, He’s worried about you. About you.

He was trying—again, I guess, helplessly, the way you can’t not try, sometimes, even when you know you can’t do something—to stand up out of the chair he was chained to. Chained. I felt like I was seeing him being tortured. Chained. We don’t chain people—that was something they did in the Middle Ages, when Charlemagne was caroming around Oldworld knocking the creepy human heads off manticores, and in Newworld the witch doctors ruled. These were big thick heavy chains—like the meanest, toughest bicycle lock you ever saw. Like too big and heavy to carry on a bicycle: your wheel rims would sag like rubber bands.

He couldn’t do it and dropped back to his seat. Clank. He must have read the expression on my face, because he said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.” He held up his hands. “It’s just to stop the mighty Oldworld magician from turning this place into a garden shed full of rusty tools, with a broken lock on the door.”

Still holding onto my dog, who had now pulled one of the knapsack strap ends under my shirt and was chewing on it, still sitting on the very uncomfortable floor of the cell where they were keeping Val chained, I said, “Which otherwise you would have done at once, of course.”

He started to smile. I don’t think he meant to. I smiled back as a way not to start crying again. I had my dog, wasn’t that enough? I tried to concentrate on Val’s shirt. Most horrors would pale in comparison, but the chains came top here.

“If we get out of this,” Val said, “which I very much fear we won’t, I am going to find someone to apprentice you to, if I have to smuggle you into Orzaskan.”

“I don’t think I’d like the big guys in Orzaskan,” I said. “Why don’t you just apprentice me yourself here?”

He was smiling now as if his face hurt. “Very well. That is what we will do. Unless we discover that Gladonya the Great has emigrated recently too.”

Gladonya the Great? No, I didn’t want to know. Maybe it was an Orzaskan joke.

“Maggie, no one should be able to do what you just did.” Another Commonwealth accent saying that. This could get boring. I wished it would get boring. Anything was better than being this frightened. “But you should not have done it.” The smile disappeared and he was completely a stern, responsible grown-up. Who happened to be chained to his chair. “There is nothing you can do here, and it is unlikely you can leave as you came.”

However it was, exactly, that we came. I looked to my left, which I thought was more or less the direction we’d arrived from, and there was a big ugly grey cement wall. I could still see some kind of maybe-cobey-like swirling running under the rough cement skin but I could also see that it was getting weaker and fainter. It would be gone completely in another minute. Leaving me here.

I looked back at Val, but he glanced over my shoulder and so finally did I. There was a gigantic silver-grey wolf—wolf—standing over what seemed to be a rather small unconscious man. As I looked, the wolf stepped delicately over the body and sat down beside him, wrapping his tail neatly around his front feet.

Wolf.

I made a little squeaking noise, rather like the noise Mongo had been making when we first arrived here. Anh. Anh. I took a deep breath and held it, like you do against hiccups, till I stopped making that noise. “Takahiro?” I said. “Takahiro?”

“I doubt he could have come through your gate in his human form,” said Val.

The wolf bowed his head, but continued watching the man. The man looked familiar. . . . I crawled a little way toward him and Takahiro. This was a complicated maneuver, involving, as it did, the knapsack I was still wearing and a large traumatized dog chewing one of its straps while in my lap with his head under my shirt. I did it on two knees, one hand, and Mongo’s butt. “Oh, gods’ engines,” I said, horribly conscious of the huge wolf who was also Takahiro, “that’s Paolo. His wife works at Jill’s mom’s hairdresser’s shop. He’s the nicest of our local Watchguard.”

And now he was unconscious on the floor of some stupid horrible military warehouse thing and Val was in the same room wearing chains. And, oh by the way, my dog was having a nervous breakdown and my new boyfriend was in his wolf shape. I could feel a bubble of either tears or hysteria rising in my throat. I scooched Mongo a little farther so I could touch Paolo’s face. I could see he was breathing.

“He fainted,” said Val behind me. “He stood up from his desk when the—doorway you made opened, and fainted. You cannot blame him,” he added as if apologetically.

I didn’t blame him. I just wished none of this had happened. Well, duh. When Paolo’s wife had brought their two little kids to the shelter to pick out a dog a couple of years ago, I’d helped them choose. I saw them out walking Goldie sometimes.

I couldn’t deal. I was a senior in high school. I’d only just passed my driver’s test this summer. I’d be eighteen next month. There was no magic in Newworld, and the army were the good guys, keeping us safe.

I had to deal.

I looked at the desk. Maybe the key to the chains was in one of the drawers?

“The key will not be in the desk,” said Val.

I turned my head to glare at him. “Don’t do that,” I said. “This is—weird—enough.”

“I’m not doing anything,” said Val mildly. “It is an obvious thing to be thinking. But I am in chains because they are afraid of my magic, and because they don’t understand it they have some poor fellow in here with me, with a panic button to press if he is able to do so before my secret miasma of evil overcomes him. They will not have left the key with him.”

“Secret miasma of evil,” I said admiringly, but I knew I was stalling. I had no idea what to do next. But whatever it was . . . “Sweetie,” I said to Mongo’s butt, “do you suppose you might be ready to come out from there?”

I felt a familiar light pressure against the sole of one foot as I sat with my legs now folded under me. I felt behind me for my algebra book, and dragged it as gently as I could around to one side.

It flopped open at once, and presented one rigidly upstanding page, which again pulled free as easily as tearing a page off a memo pad. I looked at the little shred of paper lying on the floor that had fallen away from Mongo’s collar. Folding this new page on and around Mongo’s back was awkward but it so wanted to be folded I was barely keeping up with it. It was clearly a border collie, head down, tail straight out behind, intent as anything. Border collie kami.

I felt around under my T-shirt for Mongo’s collar, and tucked it underneath. Then I wrapped both arms around him, put my face in his fur, and waited.

He came out looking embarrassed—gnawing on narrow chewy things like belts, long woolly scarves, shoes, coat sleeves, chair legs and knapsack straps had been one of the things I’d had the hardest time convincing him to stop doing, back in the days when he was learning to be a dog rather than a weapon of domestic demolition. He plastered himself belly-down on the floor and looked at me up through his eyelashes, judging how much trouble he was in. I reached out and curled the little paper collie another turn around his collar to make it more secure, and he immediately leaped up, licked my hand, licked my face, and then raced around the room twice while I tried to unfold my legs and find out if I could stand up. Ow. Sort of. When I bent over my algebra book again it flew open and another page presented itself, which I drew out softly.

I stood staring at it a minute. I held it stretched lightly between my two hands. I could vaguely see equations scrawled on it, tangled up in the leaf-vine flower-stem pattern of the ornamental paper. It was like one of those Can You Find? games in kids’ magazines. Here was a numeral two, which was also the little nobbly green thing that the petals of a flower unfurl from, and one of the petals of that flower was bent over in a square-root sign. I hadn’t noticed the bees before, which were also number eights, or maybe they were infinity signs.

“Maggie—” said Val, who was way too bright for his own good. My own good anyway.

“Shut up,” I said. “I mean, please don’t talk.”

I knelt (stiffly) down on the floor again. The algebra book immediately clunked over to lean against my hip and Mongo stopped cavorting like a loony and threw himself down on my other side. He had at least two gruuaa along for the ride: one of them climbed up my leg to tickle my forearm. Carefully I made the first fold. I wasn’t sure how many legs this one was going to need. . . . By the time my fingers couldn’t find anything left that wanted to be folded I had a thundering headache, and the many-legged, spiky-backed thing in my hands glittered like an oncoming migraine.

I stood up again, not realizing till then that I had developed a billowing, quivering gruuaa cape—I could see it, dark and dazzling, skittering out on either side of me. I wondered if Val might be seeing me now as I had seen him, that first night he came to dinner—in my old life, where things (mostly) made sense. I walked over to him and, wordlessly, he held his hands out toward me. There was a lock, unnervingly rather like a bicycle lock except for the little flashing lights that looked creepily like a tiny scowling red-eyed troll face, between his wrists. Now what? Don’t think about it. I grabbed one of Val’s hands and slapped my paper figure down on the troll face.

There was a brief, queasy, up-is-down-and-down-is-nowhere-and-I-really-hate-nowhere-here-we-are-again moment. There was a kind of whistling gasp, and then Val’s hands were holding onto my wrists, and he said, “Maggie!” I blinked, and I was standing in the awful little grey cement room at the back of the Goat Creek Military Base.

“Well done,” said Val, smiling faintly.