Shadows

CHAPTER 4

JILL WAS STILL PUNCHING THE AIR WHEN SHE dropped me off. I went up to the front door smiling—and then noticed that the light was still on in the living room. Shimatta. And toxic pond slime. Margaret Alastrina, I said to myself, pull the circuit breaker. It’s not even eleven yet (quite. It better not be, or I’m in big trouble). They’re just watching television or something.

As Mongo hit me going at full escape-earth’s-atmosphere velocity—oof—my mother appeared at the end of the front hall. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Yabai. Crap zone. I’d forgotten about our conversation earlier. Casimir was suddenly a figment of my imagination. This was reality.

“Hi sweetie,” she said. “Good evening?”

“Yeah. Except for the school-tomorrow part,” I said, petting the ecstatic Mongo (he had to have kangaroo blood, the way he could leap around on his hind legs), and hesitated. If it had just been Mom, I might have told her about Casimir. But I knew she wasn’t alone. Val was in the living room.

I had a moment to think, oh, come on, I don’t know that, I’m just guessing, they’ve been married less than two months, of course they’ve been smooching on the sofa after Ran went to bed. But I did know. I could feel him there as clearly as if I heard him cough. Or maybe it was his shadows I was picking up.

“I was about to make hot chocolate,” said my mother. “Can I make you some?”

It was a peace offering. I knew it was a peace offering. I didn’t want hot chocolate—well, no, I always want hot chocolate, but I didn’t want to drink it with Val, and I did want to go to bed and think about Casimir. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone. I could feel my head start to throb and I wanted to scream and throw things. But I hadn’t had a tantrum in about fifteen years and this probably wasn’t a good time to recharge that old skill.

I felt thirty years old. No, forty.

“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.”

Mom turned to go into the kitchen and I braced myself to join Val in the living room. I could do this. It was okay. Five minutes for Mom to make the hot chocolate. Two minutes to drink it—all right, five. Then I had to walk Mongo. It was a school night. I really did have to go to bed soon.

Where I was standing, about halfway down the front hall (next to the dining room that used to be a garage and the blank wall where the quilt should be), you can see the back of the sofa that faces the TV. You can’t see anyone sitting on it unless they tip their head back or hang an arm over it or something. I couldn’t see Val. He might be sitting in the big chair. Mom might have been sitting on his lap before I came in. It was a good chair for that. Jill used to sit in Eddie’s lap in that chair while Takahiro and I folded little paper things, sitting on the floor next to the coffee table. Eddie used to say things like, Hey, that’s amazing, what you guys can do with paper, that’s a . . . potato chip! I can tell! And that’s . . . Mr. Grass-ass’ ass! Wow!

Eddie always was a broken tool. But he didn’t have shadows.

As I was standing there in the hallway taking deep breaths and telling myself I only had to stay ten minutes, this shadow appeared over the back of the sofa—this long narrow snaky shadow—except it was too fat to be a snake, and it had this jagged outline like feathers or spiky plates or something—it drizzled along the top edge of the back a little ways, waggling back and forth, leaving a trail, or something, dark and shiny as a beetle’s back except as long as your arm. It looked like maybe it was trying to catch my attention, but I was bent over and holding onto Mongo like a drowning person hanging onto a piece of broken boat. Disappointed, I guess, when it reached the end of the sofa, it slithered or unrolled or something down the front, and then oozed across the seat and fell or dripped to the floor. . . .

I’d had it. I’d had it.

I could have done one of two things. I could have screamed, run back out the front door and never come back. I could have become the Phantom of the Shelter, only coming out at night to clean kennels. Or I could get so furious I forgot to be frightened, thinking this monster, this magic user, living in my house, married to my mom—and run forward, straight at the snake-shadow thing, and screamed at Val.

I chose the second.

“What the gods’ holy engines is it with you?” I shouted. “I’m sick of your stupid horrible shadows crawling around! What are they! What are you? What are you doing out there in the shed? What are you? What are you doing here?”

He had started to get up—he was sitting in the big chair—when I came in. It was one of those weird things he did, he stood up when Mom or me or Jill or any woman came into the room. But he kind of froze halfway when I started screaming at him.

There was a crash from the kitchen and Mom appeared in the archway looking like the end of the world, only madder. “Margaret Alastrina, what do you—”

Val finished standing up and said, “Elaine, it is all right.”

Mom said furiously, “It is not all right that she should—”

But Val shook his head and held up his hand. Both hands. And then spread them out. I knew what he meant but it made him more alien. No one in Newworld did stuff like that, any more than Newworld guys stood up when women came in the room. “Maggie—Margaret—will you please tell me what you see?”

I turned my head to look at the sofa. The shadows were gone, of course. There weren’t any on the wall behind Val either. They probably didn’t like being yelled at. (Mongo had followed me and was pressed up against the backs of my legs. He knew I wasn’t yelling at him.) “There’s nothing there! And now you’re going to say that teenage girls are sometimes like this, and it’s okay, I’m just crazy, and then my mother won’t hate me any more, she’ll just have me locked up!” It had been kind of a stressful day. I burst into tears.

I’d’ve stopped if I could—I hated crying in front of Val—but I couldn’t stop. I put my hands over my mouth and made hysterical gagging noises. I saw Val make a move toward me, and then stop before I ran away. Then Mom had her hands—not too gently—on my shoulders, and she pushed me sideways and down, till I sat on the sofa. Probably where the shadow snake had been crawling. I cried harder. My senior year had started, I’d met the most beautiful boy in the world, he liked me, then he turned out to be a physwiz loophead—and not quite two months ago my mother had married a hairy freak with a shadow zoo.

I bit down on my hand and poked my fingers in my eyes till I could finally stop crying. By then I also had most of a medium-large dog in my lap, licking my elbows and trying to get at my face and whining. Mongo wasn’t allowed on the furniture.

When I opened my sticky eyes there was a box of tissues on the coffee table. Since I could hear banging and clattering noises from the kitchen—some of them sounded like something broken being swept up—I assumed it was Val who’d put the box there. Would one of his shadows bite me if I took a tissue? I’d been passing him the salt or the salad for the last seven months, but then I’d never admitted I could see his—friends either. They might not like being seen. Or maybe by admitting I could see them I’d catch them, like a monster virus. I was now shivering. I wrapped my arms around Mongo. Mongo liked this. His tail started thumping against my leg.

I leaned around Mongo and took a tissue. I didn’t see any shadows. I took several more tissues, blew my nose so hard I nearly started crying again, and tried to dry my face off. This wasn’t easy because Mongo was now trying to help. I petted him, putting off looking at Val, and watched Mongo’s black and white hairs drifting away and attaching themselves to Mom’s pale-gold-and-sage-green sofa cushions.

Little quiet clinks and then footsteps moving from the bare kitchen floor to the hall and living room carpet. The footsteps paused, and an indrawn breath as Mom saw Mongo on the sofa. Footsteps started again (the floor in the hall creaked just there), and then Mom silently set a tray on the table in front of me, pushing the box of tissues to one side. She poured, put one mug in front of me, handed one to Val (murmur of “thank you”), and sat down with a third. She was sitting in the other chair—neutral territory. Not close to me, not close to Val.

The hot chocolate smelled wonderful (my mom makes the best hot chocolate) but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to let go of Mongo long enough to pick up my mug. Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.

“Margaret,” said Val at last. “Can you talk?”

I nodded. And then I wanted to be totally sure I was being polite, so I added, “Yes.” Except it came out a croak, so I had to say it again: “Yes.” But totally polite probably meant looking at him, and I couldn’t. I was still staring at the top of Mongo’s head.

“Will you please tell me what you mean about—shadows?”

I thought I was going to tell him—him and Mom—about the snake thing, but what I heard myself saying was: “That first night you came to dinner, last winter. I opened the door and there were like forty of you. You and your shadows. They loomed. They made you look huge. It was like inviting an army in.” They’ll eat all your food and ruin your carpets and you don’t even know whose side they’re on. “And . . .” I trailed off. I couldn’t think of a good adjective. Mom wasn’t yelling at me but I thought she probably wouldn’t like it if I said “scary” or “gruesome” or “some kind of monster.”

“Do you see them often?” said Val in the same calm voice, like he was asking me to pass the salt or the salad.

“Pretty much any time I see you,” I said, a little too quickly. “And there are more and more of them.” I looked up at last, looked at him. There were like hundreds of shadows stuck around the room, mostly behind him, with lots of what looked like twisted legs and distorted heads—except how did I know where one stopped and another one started? Maybe there were only a few that happened to be the size of giant elephant-swallowing anacondas. They were curling around the windows and Mom’s geraniums and Takahiro’s and my paper things, perched on the picture frames, half-tucked behind the legs of furniture, lying raggedly along the gap between the tops of books and the shelf above them. I think I whimpered. I’d never seen them this bad before—never seen this many of them—although they weren’t moving around much, and Val’s shadows usually moved.

These weren’t still though. They wiggled. There were so many of them it was like there was something wrong with my eyes. Have you ever thought about the darkness between a row of books and the top of the shelf? Of course not. You don’t, until it goes all loopy, and little things like legs or tails or tongues hang down over the spines.

Oh gods. Oh gods.

I had my arms around Mongo, and he was leaning against me. I could feel something sharp digging into my breastbone—the broken cog that hung from his collar with the tag that had his pet-registry number on one side and our ground phone number on the other. The scientists cut magic out of us in Newworld two generations ago but they haven’t quite eliminated superstition, and even Station has a charm shop where you can buy stuff like Mongo’s cog. Some charm shops would sell you fetishy things with feathers and twigs and dried flowers, but if you sold too many of those the Overwatch goon squad would probably shut you down. If you stuck to broken chips and dead batteries they left you alone. Mom had bought Mongo’s charm, to my amazement, when he stopped growing and got his first adult collar. She’d laughed a little—that funny non-laugh she had for years after Dad died—and said something weird and grown up about it being a good thing to be normal when you could. I thought of this comment a lot. Mom was not into charms. And her grandmother had been a magician. And one of her sisters had disappeared while she was working for a brain bureau.

I’d always thought most of the physwiz stuff was some kind of grown-up paranoia. The usual rumor around any high school was that the two weeks of physwiz we had to take was some brainwashing thing to make sure we weren’t ever tempted to start making charms out of feathers and twigs and dried flowers or try to wake up the genes for magic we didn’t have any more so what was there to wake up? Newworld was all about science. We were stronger than Oldworld and Midworld and Farworld and the Southworlds and everywhere because we’d got rid of magic, and science had all the important answers.

Everywhere had silverbugs—and everywhere had cobeys, Old, New, Mid, Far and South—but I’d never seen a live one and I didn’t know anyone who had. I knew about the famous ones, of course, the ones even science couldn’t make close up and go away, but since in Newworld the military always had them epically guarded I figured they could be anything. Uncle Darnel was in a cobey guard unit, and he said he had no idea what they were. You got special gear and you did what you were told, he said. It was just a job.

I knew the double R of course—Run and Report—because that was drummed into you from the beginning, with “please” and “thank you” and “don’t throw your oatmeal on the floor if you want to go on living.” But exactly what you were supposed to run and report was always left a little vague. It would look odd. It would be clearly out of place. Apparently you would know it if you saw it—it was maybe like a lot of silverbugs all stuck together. Which made me particularly sure I never wanted to see a real cobey. A mob of silverbugs not all stuck together was too much for me.

But I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been worried enough by an oil spot on the road or a puddle of water where no water should be or a cobweb sparkling with too many prisms to run and report it, although I knew people did occasionally. Well, and there were people like old Mrs. Githers, who ran and reported about once a week. When the local Watch shift were having a slow day they gave her a cup of coffee before they walked her home again.

There was never anything to report around here. Before this summer the last silverbug outbreak had been four years ago in Birdhill, which was nearly thirty miles from here. Jill was right: No Town, No Where, although some of the stories about the old Goat Creek base in the barrens were pretty extreme, and Station got its name from when it used to be mostly the train terminus and where the soldiers went when they were off duty. But they closed Goat Creek down because they didn’t need a big army base here. Station didn’t even have a regular scan any more. The mayor used to make a fuss about getting the sweepers here once a year. Fine. That was the sort of thing mayors were for, with kissing babies at the Fifth of July town gala. The sweepers never found anything and the last few scans had been canceled. We were a low-risk area: the anti-cobey boxes were enough for us.

I sneaked another look at Val, over the top of Mongo’s head. He was wearing another of his ugliest-ever-seen-in-a-civilized-country shirts. He had a lot of them. He’d sat forward in his chair, his forearms on his thighs and his big hairy hands hanging between his knees. I thought magicians were supposed to have long slender fingers to write mystic runes in the air and twiddle wands and things. His hands looked like they’d be good at strangling people and hammering nails without a hammer. His head was bowed and his shoulders slumped. He looked really tired. Or overwhelmed. Or sad. He looked like someone who’d just heard some bad news he wasn’t expecting. Or maybe he was expecting it, just a little, but it was worse now that he’d heard it.

I was trying to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth and for possibly the first time ever say something to Val voluntarily (that didn’t involve shouting). But my mother beat me to it. “Val?” she said, hesitantly, in this little splintery voice.

I heard way too much in that one syllable. I heard how glad she was to have him in her life. How lonely she had been before she met him. How much she loved him. I remembered how much more often she’d laughed in the last few months than she had in all the years since Dad died. In spite of me.

I put my face down on the top of Mongo’s head.

I heard Val stir. “I didn’t know,” he said, so quietly it was almost a whisper. His voice always sounded kind of rough and hairy too, although maybe it was just his accent. “I didn’t know. I did what they told me; I let them . . . Maggie, I have wondered, because . . . but . . .”

I didn’t look up; I didn’t want to see.

He went on: “They told me to go to Newworld. It would be easier here, they said. I already spoke the language. There were jobs for such as I . . . now was. They did not tell me they would let the government steal my money, or that I would not be able to teach, because the schools here would not accept my papers.”

“Joanna”—Joanna was principal of the high school and a friend of my mother’s, which was kind of a pain—“nearly broke a leg leaping over her desk to shake your hand when you said you could tutor science and math,” said my mother, and I recognized this voice: this was the one she used when your best friend told you she didn’t want to be your friend any more. (Jill and I had had our ups and downs when we were younger.) “You have more referrals now than you have time for.”

It worked on Val too. I looked up to see him sit back and smile at my mother. Then he looked at me. We stared at each other till my eyes were drawn to the bookshelf behind his head. One of the legs or tails or tongues began to waggle harder when I looked at it. Maybe it was the thing that had been on the back of the sofa. I remembered that I’d occasionally thought one of the shadows was following me around. I stared at the waggling thing. It had moved to a relatively empty bit of shelf and was now bouncing up and down like it knew I was staring at it. If that was all of it bouncing, then it was not the size of a giant elephant-swallowing anaconda. I wasn’t going to admit it, but it reminded me of a puppy hoping for action. In another minute it would bring me a ball to throw. “One of your shadows is waving at me,” I said in a strangely calm voice.

There was a silence. “It might be Hix,” Val said at last. “She would have come with me if any—could. Did. And she has always been friendly, and interested in—humans.”

“She?” said my mother, taking the word out of my fallen-open mouth. “Friendly? All right, I’m glad she’s friendly, but . . .”

Her voice trailed away, but it was a long minute before Val said anything. “I do not know where to begin or what to tell you,” he said. “It was in the conditions of my visa that I tell no one anything . . . about my previous life. Indeed I thought they had laid a geas on me, so that I could not. But then I believed—I knew—that I had left everything behind. I had certainly left my—my—what Maggie calls my shadows behind me in Oldworld. They were very much a part of my old life. . . .”

I knew I didn’t want to know, I thought.

“I admit I have wondered. I have wondered particularly—I know that it is not uncommon for a child to dislike a parent’s new spouse but—I have told myself that it was my vanity that insisted that Maggie was reacting to something more than myself—”

The shirts, I didn’t say aloud. The shoes.

After another pause Val went on. “Cohesion breaks—what you call cobeys—are much commoner in Oldworld than they are here—as you know. I will not repeat the tired old arguments about whether Oldworld would do better to embrace science as Newworld has; Oldworld has been plagued by cobeys for hundreds of years, long before Newworld turned away from magic. It is enough to say that at present Oldworld depends more on its magicians than its scientists. In Orzaskan a town this size would contain a dozen people trained to deal with cobeys. They would all be magicians.

“I was one of those trained. The training begins young; you learn your letters by puzzling out your first incantations.”

He paused. I was thinking you learn your letters by puzzling out your first incantations. You didn’t use the word “incantation” here unless you really wanted to get in someone’s face. What kind of a dreeping canty is that was rude enough to get you sent to detention if a teacher heard you.

Val sighed. “My country is very old; its history runs deep into the earth; our word for cobeys means ‘hole in the earth.’ ‘Gvazakimu.’ ‘Earth hole.’ ‘Earth . . . bottomless.’ ‘Earth profound.’ It is hard work, weaving the earth together again, across such a chasm.”

He fell silent again. I had been listening to him and not watching the shadows. I glanced at them now and discovered that a lot of them had slid down off the walls and were pooling around his feet, and over the back and arms of his chair. Oh, yuck.

“I have wondered,” he said. “I have wondered from the first. Since I stepped off the plane and joined the immigration queue. There were—shadows—in the airport arrival hall. There were shadows on the hands of the young woman who stamped my new visa. There were many shadows in the small room where I was scanned and scanned again, and questioned, and questioned again. There were shadows on the face of the doctor who clearly did not like me, did not like my kind, and would have refused me entry if he could. This was so plain I knew that there was nothing there, that the shadows were only shadows, that what I was seeing was only the result of having had no sleep in thirty hours.”

“And of leaving your home forever,” said Mom, “and coming to a strange country. A strange world.”

Val nodded. “Yes. I was very tired. . . . I had grown so tired that I had let them take my magic away. I was so tired I let them take everything away.” He shrugged, his odd, dramatic, Oldworld shrug, and it was as though I saw him shrugging off a mountain or half a planet. “I thought it would be worth the loss, after . . . They took it all away, and sent me here.”

“Not everything,” I said. I tried to use my calm voice again, but the memory was making it hard. “They didn’t take everything. That time I came out to the shed and—and—what was that?”

“That was such bad livnyaa,” he said. “You knocking just then. Livnyaa, luck—a kind of magical luck—which is to say not luck, because there is no luck in magic. The—the skha, the web, or mesh of power, is very close—much too close for luck, for accidents. I wondered that that happened—that it happened with you, Maggie. I had brought a few old things with me to this new world—things that had been with me for a long time, but which had been denatured, when they took everything else, to be only what they appeared to be: a stone, a cup, a wooden wand beautiful only for the grain of the wood. I had been increasingly troubled—for a week or a fortnight before that day, Maggie—with a sense that some one or more of those things were . . . stirring. Were coming to life once more. They should not, and they should not have been able to. But I had to admit to myself that I kept them as if they were still tools of magic. Do you remember that you thought me mad that I will not have my ’top or pocket phone in the shed? You do not mix things of scientific power with things of magical power. I told myself it was habit, superstition. . . .

“That day, Maggie, I had been turning those old tools over, searching for any sign of returning power—wondering if I were capable of seeing such a sign, even if it were there. I had picked up the small wooden rod that had once been a very powerful tool when you knocked, Maggie, and it—I do not know how to describe it—blazed. That is what you saw. That is what you interrupted.”

“Why on earth did you say ‘come’ to me?” I said angrily.

“I didn’t,” said Val. “I said ‘nah! Nah!’—no. It sounds much like ‘come,’ heard through a door.”

I goggled at him. But I couldn’t not believe him. I couldn’t. Involuntarily I thought about him tapping out Mom’s fender after I’d dented it. I thought about all the times he hadn’t ratted to Mom when I’d been horrible to him at the grocery store. He had even told me that he had never been to a supermarket till he came to Newworld. In the town he lived in it was all little shops: you bought meat from the butcher who wrapped it up in paper for you, and vegetables—sometimes with the farmyard dirt still on them—from the vegetable stall, and bread from the baker. If you lived in the village you could smell the fresh bread baking every day. I could feel something hard and cold in my chest cracking. It hurt.

“What did you tell Mom?” I said. “After I came screaming indoors? I was expecting to be grounded for a week at least for—for—” I looked at their drawn, anxious faces and didn’t say what I’d been going to say. “For rudeness?”

“I told her as near to the truth as I could without admitting to my history,” said Val. “I told Elaine I had an old charm. I admitted it was illegal. It was one of the few things I had from my old life. I believed it had been destroyed as a charm. That is true: my luggage was examined even more intensively than I was. I did not believe any live thing would have been passed by Newworld’s border scans, which are notoriously thorough. Despite this it had held some grain of power within it somewhere—and this had regenerated. I told her it would not happen again. I was myself very shaken.”

I remembered his face that day. Yes, he had been very shaken, even if I had misinterpreted why. “Has it?” I said, more sharply than I meant. “Has it happened again?”

There was a pause. “Yes,” said Val. “I’m afraid so.”

“Oh, Val,” Mom murmured.

“Yes,” repeated Val. “But if this had not happened, we would not be having this conversation. For what that is, perhaps, worth.”

“Why not?” I said. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Maggie—” said my mother.

“It is reasonable that she asks these questions,” said Val. “Why is that these things that have happened leave me open to what you are telling me today. I have not seen my shadows—my gruuaa—since I woke up in the hotel room the day after being successfully passed into this country. In hindsight now I think that I have spelled myself not to see them, with some fragment of that skill I should no longer have. But—Margaret—I would not have said that you were crazy, if you had told me this thing I could not believe. I would have thought there was something awakening in you—something I had been emphatically told did not exist in Newworld any more—but that might, perhaps, be roused by my history. I do not know how I would have answered you, however, because the compact was that they took all of my magic. But if I had no magic left, my wand should not have begun to accrue skha strength again. If it did . . . then perhaps the shadows, the gruuaa, were also as you saw them, and not only a reflection of what was happening to you.”

“Anyone who reads fairy tales should know never to let a magician keep his wand,” I said, firmly not thinking about what might be happening to me. I might almost choose being crazy. “Even if you’ve beaten him and taken his magic away.”

“I have wondered about that too,” said Val. “Wondered about that since before the beginning—since before they finished with me, and told me to come here. I am less surprised that your Watchguard and Overguard do not read fairy tales, but my countryfolk certainly do. It is also curious to me that two of my ex-colleagues from the Commonwealth are teaching the physics of the worlds at Runyon University.”

“Runyon?” I said, or squeaked.

“There’s no reason Maggie shouldn’t go to Runyon next year, is there?” Mom said. That wasn’t what I was thinking about, but I didn’t say anything.

He shook his head. “But it is odd. I do not like odd in these circumstances.”

I didn’t mean to say it. “I met someone tonight who—who is here to study with someone at Runyon. It’s why he’s here.”

“What does he wish to study?” said Val.

“Physwiz,” I said reluctantly, wishing I’d had the sense to keep my big mouth shut. “The physics of the worlds. Not magic. You can’t study practical magic at any university here. Just history and stuff.”

“I do not yet understand how it is here,” said Val. “In Orzaskan you would not study what you call the physics of the worlds unless you were to be taught magic. The one balances the other, to the extent that balance is possible. Some of my students here have the most extraordinary lacunae in their education.”

“You can get a degree in physwiz here,” I said. “But only a loophead would, and everyone who does is swallowed up by the government. But there aren’t that many of them—graduates with degrees. Most people stress out by their second year and switch majors.” Or go crazy, I thought. “There are a bunch of required—short—seminars in your senior year of high school about it. But it’s all history and safety and how Genecor was right.” Mom, whose grandmother had taken her children to the Genecor guys, shifted in her chair. I’d noticed years ago that she did this little automatic pro-Genecor sales pitch any time they were mentioned. She didn’t this time. I went on: “And there are still a lot of kids who bring notes from their doctors that they don’t have to take the physwiz one. I won’t have to because silverbugs make me sick, but lots of people who could step on silverbugs forever and never notice anything still manage to get out of physwiz. Worst-attended class ever, year after year. That’s how scared most people are of the whole subject.”

Mongo stirred, and I let go of him. I’d probably been hanging onto him too hard. But he didn’t get off the sofa to do his usual burglar patrol, checking all the windows he could reach, and all the doors (including cupboard doors. Okay, mouse patrol. Also cupboard-door-not-quite-shut-that-clever-dog-could-open-that-might-have-FOOD-in-it patrol). He just lay down and hung his head over the edge of the sofa. I looked down and went “eeeee.”

One of Val’s shadows had detached itself from the wriggly pool around his feet and slithered, or whatevered, over to the sofa. Mongo was—ewwww—doing something like touching noses—noses?—with it. If you can touch noses (or any other body parts) with a shadow. If it was a shadow thing, with a head—then it had too many legs. One of my big problems with Val’s shadows all along: they all had too many things like legs. Eeeee. But Mongo’s ears were half-back in the meeting-friend position, and his tail gave a flop, and then another flop.

“Maggie,” said my mother, and I realized she’d said it a couple of times already. I must have said “eeeee” out loud.

I felt like if I moved or said anything (okay, any words) it would notice me . . . maybe it had only noticed Mongo? I stared at it. If this end was its head, the head was kind of spade-shaped—like a snake’s head. Except it was all blurry and spiky around the edges. Your eyes couldn’t actually handle what they were seeing. You kept checking that the shadow was there at all by the fact that you couldn’t see through it. At the same time that it was scaring you into a pile of rusty bolts.

My pulse was hammering in my ears and I felt like I might throw up. Mongo put his front paws on the floor and began to sniff along the thing’s side—like he might do another dog—in spite of all the legs. In spite of it being a shadow thing. Against Mongo’s black and white side I lost track of where all of the shadow was. I could still see too much tail (and too many legs) but the front end had kind of vanished. Maybe it was sniffing him back.

“Hix,” said Val softly, and the part of the shadow I could see twitched—very much like a dog hearing the recall and deciding to ignore it.

I didn’t mean to say its name—if I meant to say anything I meant to say “go away” or “help” (or possibly even “Mommy”). But what I said was, “Hix.” And then its head reappeared from where it had been invisible against Mongo, and turned toward me. The head wavered a little, and then rose up higher—higher—two little spots of shadow like feet appeared on the sofa cushions barely an inch from my knees, where I was sitting with my legs bent under me. The head floated toward me . . . I was going to throw up. . . .

I think it was the smell. I want to say it was a sweet smell, or something dreeping like that, and maybe “sweet” is almost what it was. Nice. Friendly. Almost soothing. Definitely anti-throwing-up.

The smell reminded me, suddenly and hard, the way smells can, of the first time we went to visit Aunt Gwenda. The old family house where she and Mom and Rhonwyn and Blanchefleur grew up (Darnel was with his dad most of the time) had sat empty for several years after Grandmom died while the sisters argued about what to do with it. Gwenda lost. She moved her law practice to Highmoor and herself into the old house and started doing renovations. (I really didn’t want to go there because Mom had said there was a mangle in the cellar. It was a long time before I found out it was about laundry.) Mom was obviously tense about the trip, which made me tense (I told you I was that kind of kid. Plus the mangle). It was going to be awful. We were staying for a couple of weeks and I didn’t know anybody in Highmoor; my friends were all in Station.

We were in the car all day, going there. We finally got to the mountains about sunset. I’d never been in mountains before either; Station is flat. When we drove through Highmoor it was totally the sort of place where there’d be mangles in the cellars. It was after midnight when we arrived and Ran, who was still a baby, had been asleep for hours. Dad carried him indoors and Mom tried to rouse me enough to walk. All I wanted was to be at home in my own bed.

But as Mom levered me out of the car the smell woke me up. It was a nice smell. I wouldn’t find out till the next day that it was pine trees. But it completely changed my attitude toward everything in one breath, standing there wobbling and clinging to Mom. (The house was still scary though, even when I found out what the mangle was.)

I hadn’t noticed that Val’s shadows had a smell, but then I don’t think I’d ever been this close to one before. (Thinking about the one—this one?—who had maybe been following me around was still too creepo, so I didn’t think about it.) This close she no longer really looked like a shadow, although I couldn’t say that she looked like anything else either. Flat black only has two dimensions, you know? You can’t see around flat black. You can’t see if it has an around. And I still couldn’t see her. And her edges were still blurry. I didn’t want to throw up any more but whatever was happening was still pretty disturbing. If I didn’t have a name (and a gender) for her I’d be wondering if she was some relative of a cobey. But Mongo liked her. That should mean something. Would he like something that could open a door that our world could fall through and shatter into infinite chaos?

Mongo? Yeah. Probably.

For a moment—just a moment—I thought I saw the flash and sparkle of what I guessed were eyes in the gentle weaving shadow in front of me. They looked a little like silverbugs. And there were three of them.

Val said, “Hix.”

This time she listened. She dipped her head, patted several feet—there were at least four of them on the edge of the sofa by then, although there were also a lot of legs and tail left on the floor. But she was snaky—or at least long-bodied and short-legged. How was she getting those extra feet on the sofa? Maybe black cobey-like things handle all their dimensions differently and she could have put even more feet on the sofa and still been snaky to Newworld eyes.

She dropped down to the floor and turned back toward Val. When, if she had been something like a dog jumping off the sofa, her feet should have hit the floor, there was a very odd little shudder in the air. It wasn’t a hearing thing like a thud, and it wasn’t a vibration through the floor like something heavy had just landed. It was something else, like the way she smelled was something else. Like the way she could put two pairs of feet on the sofa in spite of the way she looked was something else.

She walked or crept or somethinged and was swallowed up in the rest of the shadows around Val. But after a second or two there was a new bulge off to one side. I was pretty sure the bulge looked familiar—like I’d now recognize that shadow from any other shadows.

Suddenly I was shivering so hard I thought I might fall off the sofa myself. Mongo climbed back into my lap. And Mom got up from her chair and came and sat down beside me and put her arms around me (and some of Mongo). It was like the first real hug since Val happened. I put my arms around her (and some of Mongo) and burst into tears. Again. “Oh, sweetie,” said Mom. “Oh, sweetie.”

But I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school and this was the second time I’d burst into tears in an hour? Drog me. So I stopped pretty quickly. And then I wiped my face on the top of Mongo’s head because the box of tissues was empty from my last crying fit. Dog hair up my nose. Unh. Never mind.

“Mom,” I said. “What’s the matter with me? There’s no magic in our family. There’s no magic in anyone’s family any more—in Newworld—is there? They gene-spliced it out of existence two generations ago. Didn’t they?”

There was a pause. Mom sat back, but she took my nearer hand and held it. A little too hard. “They tried,” she said.

I didn’t want to hear this. I knew I didn’t want to hear this. Calories, I thought. Aren’t calories good for shock? I leaned around Mongo so I could pick up my mug. I was amazed to discover it was still hot. This conversation felt like it had been going on for hours. Mongo didn’t even try (very hard) to put his nose in my hot chocolate. He recognized some boundaries. In this case it was probably that he knew that if he did a “Mongo, no” thing he’d be put off the sofa.

I put the mug back on the coffee table empty. “Tell me,” I said.

It still took Mom a couple of minutes to begin. Do you know how long a couple of minutes is when you’re waiting for someone to tell you something you seriously don’t want to hear? And I’d already heard too many things I didn’t want to hear tonight.

“Your great-grandmother was a notable magician,” said Mom at last. “When the government committee presented its report, she was involved in the campaign to change the recommendations from the then rather risky surgery to merely keeping a list of all who tested positive. You studied this in school, didn’t you? It was nearly twenty years before the surgery was finally passed as reliable, but what doesn’t get in the textbooks is that that had less to do with the progress of medical interventions and more to do with your great-grandmother and her colleagues—who were also working furiously on an intervention of their own.

“But by the time your grandmother received the letter telling her when to show up at the hospital for the procedure, she and her sister were ready. She said it made both of them quite ill while science and magic battled it out. The newspapers were full of reports on how the surgery was not as safe as the Science Party and its adherents wanted to make out—that surprising numbers of the young people who were having the “minor” operation to disable the dominant magical gene were very ill afterward, especially those belonging to families known to have a strong talent for magic.” Mom smiled faintly. “If anyone guessed the truth—and I can’t believe they didn’t—there was remarkably little said or speculated about it.

“Your great-aunt liked to say that at one point your grandmother turned a pale rather streaky green and began to grow scales on her elbows and knees and down her spine. Your grandmother always denied it—but on the whole I think I believe Aunt Teresa. At any rate, afterward they tested negative for magic. As do I and my sisters, and your uncle Darnel, although for a week before we went in for the test we had to have these horrible green frothy drinks every day. By the time it was your and Ran’s turn Rhonwyn had figured out how to distill what was needed into simple little pills. It probably wasn’t necessary for Darnel or Ran—magic tends to run down the female line in our family, although your great-grandmother always said there was male magic in our family, but nobody had figured out what it was yet.”

She turned her head to smile at me, but if I hadn’t had Mongo in my lap I might have fallen off the sofa after all. “Mom,” I managed. “You’ve never told me any of this. I remember those pills. You said they were just to stop us from getting sick when we had the tests.”

“I know,” she said. “I should have told you.” She paused. “I’m sorry. But the fact that magic runs in the women of our family doesn’t mean that every woman has it. Your great-aunt didn’t although your grandmother had it very strongly. The four of us sisters . . .”

“You?” I said.

She took a deep breath. “When your father died—when—” She took another deep breath. I wriggled around, pulled my hand free, and put my arm firmly around her. “After your father died—when there had been nothing I could do—I turned my back on all of it. It had always been an uncomfortable secret to have. It was—is—still an uncomfortable secret to have. But it was easier, closing the door on all of it. Blanchefleur was very angry with me . . . but then I was the only one of the four of us who married and had children in the usual way. . . .”

I registered that “in the usual way” as well as mention of mysterious disappeared Aunt Blanchefleur but I was not going to ask. Darnel had a wife and three kids but Ran and I thought they were boring. It was one of the few occasions when Ran and I totally agreed on anything.

“Darling, I’m sorry. But there are signs you look for—the four of us all had them when we were children. You didn’t. I’ve wondered, a few times, because of the way animals love you, but there didn’t seem to be any magic to it. And you’ve trained your maniac dog, it seems to me, by nothing more than love and grim persistence—”

“And food,” I murmured.

“And I felt that Clare trusts you because you are precociously responsible—”

Oh! I thought.

“—not because you have any kind of magical knack. I still gave you the pills—both times—before you had the test; they still don’t really understand how the inheritance works—and it is perhaps not surprising that a gene for magic should not behave quite as science says it should. I thought in our family, better to be careful.”

Magic. I stretched the arm that wasn’t around Mom out in front of me and looked at it. I might have been expecting that if I turned it at just the right angle to the light it would be faintly greenish—and if I turned it farther, the elbow might be a little scaly. I wondered what creature the green scaly thing my great-grandmother hadn’t turned into might have been. I wondered what Hix would look like, if she wasn’t a shadow. And then Mongo, who didn’t feel an outstretched arm was doing him any good, began to lick it vigorously, till it curled (scalelessly) back toward him and the hand began petting him again.

Mom said softly, “I wasn’t at all happy when Val told me about his old charm coming to life again. My mother did not believe in coincidence either.”

“You did not tell me any of this,” said Val.

I stared across the room at Val again. He still felt like the cause of everything that had gone wrong. He was looking at Mom, so I didn’t have to worry about trying to meet—or not meeting—his eyes. His shadows eddied and wrinkled, like a pond you’ve thrown a rock into.

“I know,” said Mom. “Before, it didn’t seem necessary. It was nothing to do with me any more, except for my sisters, and we will see any of them rarely. They behaved themselves around Ber. I would ask them to behave around you too. After . . . after you told me about your charm . . . I still wanted to keep that door closed, you see.”

“Why didn’t your sisters know—about Val?” I said. “Why didn’t they, um, notice anything? Gwenda and Rhonwyn were at the wedding.”

“Probably because they weren’t looking,” said Mom. “They know how I feel about magic—how I felt after Ber died, and how I still feel.”

“I wasn’t looking either,” I said. “I haven’t wanted to see anything that shouldn’t be there!”

“I know,” said Mom again. “I’m sorry. I wish you’d told me. . . . No, don’t,” as I opened my mouth. “I know why you didn’t. I’m sorry about that too. You’ll fall in love some day and—and I hope it doesn’t make you stupid about something that matters.”

“It is not a common skill to see the shadows,” said Val. “Usually you must be trained to see them. And still not every magician can.”

“I can’t,” said Mom. “Even watching Maggie and Mongo, I still can’t see what they see.” I wanted her to say “but I’m not a magician.” She didn’t.

She and Val looked at each other. It was like something in a cartoon. I swear I could see the hearts and flowers rushing back and forth between them like on a golden sunbeam. It was kind of cute. It was kind of icky. Mom said, “I knew I should have told you about my family after you told me about—what happened with Maggie. But I didn’t want to think that the magic I’d renounced wouldn’t leave me alone. That I had married someone with—with magic ability. Which my daughter, who I’d been relieved to believe had no magic in her, was apparently sensitive to—sensitive enough to be seriously disturbed by what she had seen. But I was still telling myself perhaps it was just one old charm . . .”

I tried not to sound accusatory when I said to Val, “But—if you’re a magician, if you’re still a magician, why are you here? Why did they let you in? What went wrong? I mean—”

Val laughed, more a kind of cough, with no humor in it. “I understand what you mean. I tested negative. It is a blood test, yes? It is the same test you had.”

Mom nodded.

“Plus all the scans, the forms, the interviews. My tools were dead—I was dead, to magic. And there was no mention of magic in my background. It is not usually possible to—disable—someone’s magic when they are an adult, when they have used it as much as I had done. I was a special case. My government gave me a new life when it took away my magic—a new life on paper, which I had to memorize. When I thought they had taken away my magic. All my magic. I did not want to tell even Elaine the truth. I too wanted—badly—to keep that door closed.”

“Why?” I said. “Why did they take your magic away? Why did you let them? Why were you a special case?”

Mom didn’t try to stop me from asking this time. She was waiting for an answer too.

The shadows around Val exploded. Even after seven months of watching them creeping and twitching and scuttling around, and flaring up huge and collapsing to almost nothing, I’d never seen anything like this. Even Mongo went very still, watching them: his ears were pricked, but he was stiff and tense against me.

Val said, “I killed my best friend. Upon the order of my government. I said that I would do this thing on the condition that afterward they took my magic away so that I could never do anything like it again. They agreed. I was too blind with despair at the time to realize that this was what they wanted: if I killed him then they would see me as potentially the threat he had become.”

I killed my best friend. I heard Mom suck her breath in sharply. Val looked hundreds of years old as he raised his head, first to meet Mom’s eyes and then mine. I had never seen anything so bleak as the look on his face. Not even Mom after Dad died.

I killed my best friend.

I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t stop hating Val in a minute, or stop being afraid of the shadows, even if one of them had come and said hello, and smelled nice, and was a girl and not an it. Even if Val looked like most of him had died with his friend.

But shouldn’t I be afraid of a man who had killed his best friend? Even if his government told him to do it. Even if doing it had made him hundreds of years old.

And he was married to my mom.

Had he grown up with his best friend, like I’d grown up with Jill? I thought of Jill and me getting piggyback rides from Arnie, borrowing each other’s clothes, helping each other with her homework (Algebra I had almost destroyed me, but William Faulkner had almost destroyed her), being there, even when we were mad at each other. I killed my best friend. What . . . what if Jill’s foresight got really powerful, and she could predict everything? What if our government decided she was really dangerous, and . . .

I couldn’t imagine it.

I looked at the shadow lake again so I didn’t have to look at Val. Hix had sidled farther off to one side so that she was detached from the rest. When she saw me looking at her—if saw is the right word, if what I’d seen was eyes—a little ripple went through half a dozen of the feet I could see. Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. It made me smile involuntarily. So what if she had too many legs, or feet, or hands, or paws, or whatever. Whatever it was she did a great wave.

The shadows had been scaring me crazy for seven months. Could I believe they’d come from Orzaskan with Val, despite whatever his government had supposedly done to him, because they wanted to stay with someone so powerfully evil he’d killed his best friend? What did I know about them? I looked at them, sprawled and splashed and dangling around him. If someone was asking me, I’d say they looked like a flock or a pack clustering around the wounded member of their company.

Pat-pat-pat-pat-pat-pat. And Hix, I thought, is trying to bridge the Grand Canyon between him and me.

Maybe I’m just too easily wheedled by anything I start identifying as a critter.

And then—speaking of too many feet—there was a noise on the stairs like a troupe of giants, and Ran appeared. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the big meeting? Maggie”—obviously disapproving—“what’s wrong with you? And Mongo’s on the sofa?”

I sat up straighter, and let my arm drop off Mom’s shoulders. “I have a headache,” I said, which was the first thing I could think of. The idea of telling Ran any of this was way too complicated. Also he told his buddies everything, as I had (horrible) cause to know.

“So?” said Ran. “I smell hot chocolate. I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry,” said Mom, “and if you’re hungry, hot chocolate isn’t what you want.”

“Yes it is,” said Ran. “I want food too.”

Mom gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and stood up. “I think I’m hungry too. Who wants to start the sandwiches while I make some more hot chocolate?”