Shadows

CHAPTER 5

IT WAS NEARLY ONE A.M. BEFORE WE ALL GOT TO bed. Ran kept falling asleep, but he still managed to eat three sandwiches. But I think both Mom and I were so glad that some of the wall that had grown up between us was (maybe) coming down that we kind of wanted to keep on hanging out, even if it was a school night. I tried not to flinch when Mom patted Val’s hand or he put his arm briefly around her, when he said something quietly in her ear that made her giggle as she was peeling carrots at the sink, when she dropped a kiss on the top of his head after he sat down while she was setting the plate of sandwiches on the table (lettuce, cheese, and tomato or peanut butter, bean sprout and carrot—the second a house specialty, and I made them because I knew how to squish the sprouts and the grated carrots into the peanut butter so they didn’t all fall out again). They’ve been married less than two months, I told myself. I also told myself: and this is the way they are when I’m not around. I tried not to startle when Val turned toward me a little too quickly (for me: I don’t think he was turning quickly), as if he was one of his own shadows. As if he hadn’t told us . . . what he had told us. And I tried to remember that the shadows were only his . . . I didn’t know what they were, familiars? Did real magicians have familiars, like a witch in a fairy tale? I only knew that one of them was friendly. And that I was already starting to take her word (um, “word”) for it that Val was a good guy. In spite of what he had told us. The baseboards were black with shadows as we sat down to eat in the kitchen, and more of them hung from the curtain railings like swags.

I wondered how long ago it was, since his best friend died. I wondered what the friend had done that was so awful and dangerous.

There were so many more shadows than there had been all those months ago, when I opened the door and saw Val for the first time. As if Station had suddenly become a popular shadow vacation spot. As if the first ones had written back to all their friends and relations and said, Come join us here! It’s really nice, and we’re having a great time freaking out this girl who can see us!

And Val has got married! they might have added. If shadows knew about married. Had Val had a wife before? Did magicians have wives? I tried to remember what he’d told me on all those trips to the grocery store, the couple of times we’d gone to the zoo. But I’d always tried to forget anything Val told me, or not to listen in the first place. I remembered some of what he’d said about Orzaskan indigenous wildlife. I didn’t remember anything about family or friends.

Mom didn’t say anything when I didn’t shut Mongo in the kitchen after I took him out for his last pee. We went upstairs very quietly, as if we were shadows trying not to be noticed. I was exhausted but I found it hard to get to sleep. I had way, way too much to think about . . . and Casimir’s face started drifting across my mind’s eye and that made my heart beat even faster than thinking about Val’s shadows did.

Funny, I thought vaguely, that Takahiro’s face appeared a few times too. Takahiro was my friend, even if he was annoying a lot of the time, but he was too tall and too solemn to crush on.

I was almost asleep when the air in my bedroom did a tiny, funny, indescribable shift. I felt Mongo’s tail lift once and slap down gently across my ankles as he lay along my legs. I smelled her as—I guess—she settled down on the bed. Do shadows sleep? I thought about freaking out but I was tired and finally beginning to relax into comfort . . . and Mongo liked her . . . and it was a nice smell, like pine trees at the beginning of your vacation.

She was gone in the morning. I woke up late and still tired—the way you do after you’ve really tapped yourself out, even if you’ve had enough sleep and should be ready for the next thing. Not only wasn’t I ready, I didn’t want any next things. There were too many things already and I hadn’t been ready for them either. I also woke up stiff—stiff and sore, as if I’d been on a real battleground swinging a real sword or a real rocket launcher.

Pretty much my first thought was, She’s gone. I wasn’t even sure how I knew she was gone—how do you look for an absence of a shadow? It reminded me of those horrible proofs in math class—you couldn’t ever say, this is right or this is wrong, you could only say, we’ve done this a hundred gazillion times and it’s always worked out so far. But I knew she was gone, even though I thought fuzzily that there was still a faint trace of her smell . . .

Of course my second thought was, You made it all up, you pathetic broken tool. But Mongo was still here (watching me with eyes open just a slit, ready to turn into Two Ton Dog if I tried to move him) and Mom only let me take Mongo to bed with me if something really traumatic had happened. Well, but there were all kinds of traumas. It didn’t have to be about shadows with too many feet. Or terrible things that had happened to other people. Maybe it was about having flu.

Maybe it was just the fading smell that meant it wasn’t the first day of vacation. . . drog me. School. I looked at the clock. It wasn’t un-catch-up-ably late—probably. I mean, I’d had worse mornings. Mongo’s morning walk would be at full speed though.

I could hear people moving around in the kitchen. I wanted to go back to sleep, but that was more about not wanting to find out what had happened yesterday than how tired I still was. Why hadn’t Mom banged on my door? Maybe she thought I was ill. Maybe I was ill. Maybe I really had flu.

Maybe I didn’t. I sighed and swung my legs out of bed. I found my jeans and pulled out the little piece of paper with Casimir’s phone number on it. Okay, that had happened. Maybe I could face the rest. Whatever it was. Once I was up and dressed Mongo agreed to accompany me downstairs. He was trying to decide whether to be unhappy about having to get off my bed or happy about the prospect of his walk. I wished I was a dog with this kind of choice to make.

The radio news was just finishing as I walked past the sofa and across the hall. I was looking at the sofa like there was going to be a big sign on it telling me what had happened there last night. I was thinking about last night hard enough that I wasn’t paying attention to the radio. Quack quack quack, it said, the way it always does. I let Mongo out into the back yard and headed for the coffeepot. Ran, oblivious to everything, was eating cereal, with a book propped up against the box, which was going to fall over as soon as he turned a page. When the cereal box went over, the sugar bowl behind it was going to go over too. I picked up one of Mom’s African violets in a stoneware pot and replaced the sugar bowl with it. Ran turned a page and the box quaked.

Having swallowed my first half a mug of coffee, I began to register that it was too quiet in the rest of the kitchen. Mom and Val were just standing there. Val must have students this morning; he wasn’t a morning person if he could help it. I had an ingrained, seven months’ habit of not looking directly at Val, but checking the immediate vicinity for shadows when I knew he was nearby. There was a clump of them under the radiator and the sideboard. I sighed, and reminded myself they—and Val—weren’t the enemy any more. I hoped. There was a faint, something-like-whiskery touch against my bare foot and I looked down: Hix. Eeep. Wait, can you say “eeep” about something who’s been sleeping on your bed with you? Un-eeep. If she’d been a dog, I’d’ve bent down to pat her. I knelt down, and she unrolled suddenly and was a shadowy, slightly weaving column in front of me again, except this time she was as tall as I was as I knelt on the floor next to her. I bit down on the gasp, or do I mean scream, and hastily put a hand down to the floor before I rocked too far backward and fell over.

The hand went down right in front of her, and she must have thought it was an invitation, because she dove forward—I bit down again, and this time tasted blood—but she was now swarming up my arm. . . . I shut my eyes and sucked (gently) at my wounded cheek. She slithered around the back of my neck—my hair blew aside and came down again, like when you pull your hair up from under your collar and let it drop—and stopped on my other shoulder. The rest of her finished shooting up my arm and stopped (I thought) on that shoulder. Accordion shadow? There was a little of her trailing down against my chest, but she was only about half the length she’d been when she stood up in front of me. Shawl shadow. Feather boa shadow. I could smell her again. It was still a nice smell. She weighed totally nothing, but you—I—were still kind of aware there was something there. Someone. I warily put a hand up. I could, I thought, just feel her—that whiskery feeling again, against the tips of my fingers, and that lovely, first-day-of-vacation smell fanned delicately against my face. I wiggled my fingers, trying to, well, pet her, and there was this faint hum or vibration—almost like she was purring.

Finally I looked up. Both Mom and Val were staring at the radio, even though all it was saying now was that it was going to rain tomorrow. Okay, I wouldn’t invite Casimir for a romantic riverside walk then. I stood up slowly, as if I were balancing something heavy and fragile across my shoulders. “Mom?” I said. “Er . . .” Before last night I would have ignored Val unless he said something directly to me, but now, with one of his shadows draped around my neck, humming . . .

Val made it easier. He looked at me. “Val?” I said.

“There is a cobey in Copperhill,” said Val.

“Copperhill?” I said. “Copperhill?” Copperhill was like two towns over—less than ten miles. Most of the kids in Copperhill came to our school—a few of them went to Motorford Tech on the other side of Longiron. “I mean—confirmed?”

“Yes,” said Mom. “NIDL has just issued a statement.”

The niddles were the practical branch of Overguard. If they were involved it was too big for the Watchguard, which was definitely bad news. I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “But . . .” But probably everyone who ever had a cobey open up near them said that, so I didn’t say anything.

“There was one in Greenwire when you were just a baby,” said Mom, trying to be brisk. “It was pretty serious at the time, but they cleaned it up and I don’t think there’s even a scar. There wasn’t any fuss about reclassifying land use. Most of our milk still comes from Greenwire.”

And the niddles were nothing if not paranoid. I tried to breathe easier. I heard Ran pouring more cereal so I went to check on the African violet, and let Mongo back in, who was beginning to wail at the back door. He knew there was breakfast going on and he didn’t want to miss anything.

I had to reach past Val to open the cupboard where Mongo’s kibble lived (on the highest shelf and so relatively bad-breaking-training-moment-proof) and as he moved aside I got a better look at his face. He looked even older than he had last night, and haunted. “Val?” I said, and my reaching hand, almost without my awareness, fell on his arm instead of grabbing the cupboard handle. “Are you all right?”

He smiled at me. I didn’t think I’d ever really looked at him—without looking away again immediately—when he smiled. The lines on his face looked like they went in a long way. Mom was thirty-nine (and said crisply when asked that forty was just a year like any other year and your point was?). I knew vaguely that he was older than Mom but this morning he looked as old as a magician in a fairy tale telling you how the world began, which he knew about because he’d been there. “A cobey in the area is never all right,” he said. I was trying to decide if he was blowing me off when he added: “And last night—I spent the dark hours listening to the voices of things I thought were gone forever . . .” He paused.

Things, I thought. I wondered if he’d heard the voice of his best friend. Or of the beginning of the world.

“It will take me more than one night to adjust. I cannot even see the gruuaa—the shadows—as you can at present. And—if this were Orzaskan, I would be a—a niddle.”

“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

“No,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. The truth is usually to be preferred—especially in matters concerning magic, where untruth can be fatal.”

Magic was fatal for your friend, I thought.

“And I never wished to distress you. That, at least, is better now, I hope?”

“Yes,” I said, Hix still humming in my ear, although if I were one of his students I’d have trouble looking at that shirt for a whole tutorial hour. And—holy electricity—not just socks with sandals, but plaid socks with sandals.

There was a shadow rappelling down the wall behind Val. It hooked my eye away from his feet, and as I looked up again I saw the clock. Drog me. I had to do time-warping things if I was going to make it to school, and Mongo was going to have the fastest sprint around the block of his life.

Jill hadn’t been paying attention to any news reports. “Well?” she said when I climbed into her car.

I was only slightly breathless from racing Mongo. And I still had a shadow around my neck. I’d checked in the mirror and there wasn’t anything to see—I didn’t think—but then I didn’t know if shadows—gruuaa—showed in mirrors or not. Maybe my hair looked a little thicker and darker at shoulder level. Maybe I was losing my charge fast.

“What’s that smell?” said Jill. She sniffed. “I like it. New perfume?” Fortunately she didn’t wait for an answer. “So—well?” she said again, louder.

“What?” I said. I’m not a morning person anyway, and a lot had happened since she’d dropped me off last night. I wasn’t even thinking about the cobey—or Val. I was wondering if anyone at school would notice there was a gruuaa around my neck. Mongo had certainly noticed that she wasn’t getting shut up in the kitchen with him when I left. “What’s got into him?” Ran had said. I hoped Mongo wasn’t going to take it out on the curtains. Or the furniture.

Jill smacked her forehead with a flourish that would have got her a lead in the autumn term play if Ms. Gratton saw her. “Casimir, you moron. Have you figured out a campaign?”

“Oh,” I said. “No.” It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about him—I’d thought about him kind of a lot after I was in bed in the dark but still too wired up from everything. Including Casimir himself. And including wondering if you rolled over on a shadow if you’d squish it. I’d finished up sleeping with a pillow over my head so I couldn’t see the shadows the streetlamp made out of the tree outside my window. It had been windy last night. But there wasn’t really any way I was ever going to ask Casimir to go for a romantic river walk, even when it wasn’t raining. I’d expect him to say, Who? if I phoned him up. I wasn’t going to put it to the test.

“Well, you have to,” Jill said decisively. “He’s foreign. He’s from—um—wherever he’s from. It’s up to you to help him feel welcome.” She started telling me that Diane was having a party at her house next weekend, and she was sure Diane would be happy to invite him, but really I should see him a couple of times before I risked him in a group. Yeah right. I tuned out. There was a silverbug at the intersection between Zorca and Laburnum. I pointed my phone at it and clicked the coordinates on to Watchguard. Let them deal with it. If the niddles were taking over the big stuff Watchguard would have plenty of time for silverbugs. Jill was still talking. One of the banner boards was streaming about the cobey, but Jill wasn’t paying attention.

We got to school just in time, before being mildly annoyed with each other for each other’s dumb attitude escalated into a real fight. Eddie was standing with the rest of our crowd and flirting like mad with Becky. Ginevra was hesitating at the edge of the group looking confused and unhappy. I thought, Right, Jill, you’re so clued in about romance.

Nobody seemed too stressed about the cobey, although I heard “Copperhill” a couple of times and Laura had also seen a silverbug on her way to school, not the one I’d seen. That made two on this side of town this morning. That was at least one too many.

I saw Takahiro coming through the school gates as the first bell rang. I waved and he waved back. He lived on the far side of town and wasn’t a morning person either and usually caught the bus after the bus he should have caught. (I didn’t know why he didn’t have a car. Taks and his brainiac friends did computer stuff for money and Taks’ dad could’ve just bought him a car. But Taks used the bus.) Maybe I could get him to invite me over for an origami evening so I could tell Diane I had other plans. You never knew with Takahiro: sometimes he was almost human. Sometimes you might as well try to be friends with a cobey box. That was how Jill and I had started using Japanese phrases—to try and get some kind of reaction out of him when he reverted to dead-battery mode. It didn’t work, but Jill and I liked saying stuff our teachers couldn’t understand so we kept doing it. Also, isn’t sumimasen just better than boring old “excuse me”? It sounds more like “excuse me” than “excuse me.” Also we were pretty sure it wired Takahiro. Probably because we got it wrong. But if he wouldn’t help us, how were we going to know any better than what we got off the webnet?

I started to wait for him, but then I saw one of his gizmohead friends beetling toward him so I didn’t bother. I’d catch him during morning break and check what kind of mood he was in, not that that would mean anything about how he’d be next weekend. To give the warumono credit, he kept his promises. If he had promised you something—like that he’d give you an origami lesson—he’d do it. It’s just that if he was in one of his moods when you showed up you wouldn’t want to stay.

There was an announcement over the PA system in homeroom about the cobey in Copperhill. How it was no big whizzy deal but just in case it was a deal and the niddles weren’t admitting it we were supposed to keep an extra-sharp eye out for anything unusual. They didn’t say what unusual was, of course. Two silverbugs on the same side of town in the same morning? And, added the PA system, if we didn’t have to go to Copperhill, don’t. Huh. That almost certainly meant the niddles weren’t telling us everything. A whole town shouldn’t shut down because there was a new cobey. That’s why we had cobey units and the Overguard.

If it hadn’t been for the announcement we probably wouldn’t all have looked around and started counting Copperhill kids. So I wasn’t the only one who noticed that probably half of them weren’t here today. Big cobey then. Like maybe the kind that ran along deep lines. There was a deep line that ran from Copperhill to Station. But we didn’t even have regular scans any more because this area didn’t have cobeys or any of the weird pre-cobey stuff that scans supposedly pick up. We didn’t have silverbug swarms either—like we’d had two of this summer.

First class was geography and Mrs. Tarrant isn’t nearly as anal retentive as Mrs. Andover, so we could sit where we liked. I was staring resentfully at my gigantic algebra book when Takahiro dropped down next to me. He dumped his shiny new geography textbook on the desk, but his hands were busy with a little piece of paper, folding and folding and folding. Taks was amazing. I’d been watching him fold for nearly eight years and he was still amazing. He got more amazing.

Even I remember that when he first moved here he was folding origami all the time, and I wasn’t noticing anything right after Dad died. Taks was the shortest kid in the class that year, so there was this tiny boy crouched over these almost tissue-thin sheets of colored paper, his long-fingered hands going so fast you could hardly see them. I knew about origami, although I’d never tried it, but a lot of the kids had never heard of it, which made him even more exotic. Station has lots of Southworlders and almost as many Midworlders but not many Farworlders.

I guess the teachers had had a memo or something to be nice to him because they didn’t stop him folding even during class. It might have been the uncoolest thing ever—and Taks dressed all wrong at first, of course, and he had too many pens and pencils, which he always lined up very carefully at the top of his desk, just before he went back to his origami—but his paper figures were so fabulous that everyone forgot about cool and wanted one. He must have made hundreds of cranes, and pretty much gave one to anyone who asked, including the teachers. Cranes are the first thing everybody finds out about when they finally learn that origami exists, which is maybe why he made them for us clueless Newworlders. The beaks and wings and tail tips of Takahiro’s cranes are always knife sharp. If you’ve ever made an origami crane you know what I’m talking about.

Takahiro still made cranes, but he mostly made other things. He was making something else today although I couldn’t figure out what it was. When the bell rang he put it down. He was a fully plugged-in member of the senior class and had to pretend to pay attention to the teachers like the rest of us. (He was also now too conspicuously tall to get away with much.) I don’t know if he was paying attention to Mrs. Tarrant or not (it was an Oldworld unit, and Oldworld geography is much harder to study than Newworld, because Oldworld cobeys keep jerking it around), but my eyes were drawn to the little paper thing on Takahiro’s side of the desk. Its body was long and curvy and its neck—supposing that was its neck—was arched like the general’s horse in some memorial statue, and it had a spiky crest a little like a horse’s mane blowing in the wind. I was sure if it was alive, whatever it was, it would prance. It had plenty of legs to prance with. Absentmindedly I put my hand to my neck. Yes. She was still there. I didn’t hear a lot about whatever Mrs. Tarrant was talking about. (Maybe I didn’t want to, with a new cobey in Copperhill.) When the bell rang again Takahiro picked up the little paper thing and kept folding while everyone else was picking up their books and moving toward the door. There were more little paper legs, and the mane got spikier. I found myself thinking of the Hands Folding Paper figures I’d made in my sleep recently. I put my ’top and my notebook in my knapsack really slowly so I could keep watching Takahiro. It was typical of him that he hadn’t said a word to me.

He stood up finally, holding it in his hand. It almost did prance—if I blinked fast enough: it turned its head toward me, shaking its mane and dancing on too many feet. Okay, maybe I was blinking too fast. Or maybe I shouldn’t have had that third mug of coffee for breakfast. There was a faint breath of sweet-smelling air against my cheek, like a little feathery or hairy foot had just brushed it.

Takahiro held the little paper thing out to me. “She’s for you,” he said. “I’ve been working on the pattern for her all summer and couldn’t get it right. I was going to show you and ask you to help me—maybe you could see something I was missing. But it was like seeing you this morning, I suddenly knew what to do. So I knew she was for you. But it’s been like she was trying to get through to me all summer. Nice perfume,” he added. He moved his hands to hold either end of his figure, pulled gently, and it—she—flattened out. “You can keep her in your knapsack,” he said.

It still took me about half a minute to raise my hand and touch her. I was pretty sure there was an almost-invisible something pattering down my arm—or some of an almost-invisible something de-accordioning down my arm—to meet her too. If Takahiro noticed anything funny about the shadows on my sleeve he didn’t say anything.

“Domo arigato,” I said faintly.

He nodded once as if whatever was happening was perfectly normal, hung his own knapsack over his shoulder, and left while I was still staring at my new mascot. I’d have to get Taks to show me how to make her. Maybe with him helping me I could do it while I was awake. Slowly I tucked her into another one of those sixty-seven weirdly shaped pockets you (usually) don’t need that every knapsack has, that I’d stuffed a lot of kami into earlier. Maybe I’d just discovered something. They’re all for holding origami. I should have thought of that before.

When I looked up from zipping my knapsack closed, trying to make myself think about algebra (ugh—and if I didn’t hurry now I was going to be late) . . . maybe it was that third mug of coffee again, or my natural resistance to thinking about algebra. But for a second—half a second—the quadratic exponential thingy of a second—everything went dark. At the same time that I knew it all happened in a fraction of a fraction of a second, I was also hovering, hanging, in the darkness for as long as it took half the stars in the universe to pull themselves together, shine like crazy, and blow up into nothingness again. There were other flashes in the darkness—like meteors or comets or something maybe—I don’t know. And. And something. Something shadowy in the darkness. While I hung, and there was nothing under my feet, and nothing holding me up.

I came back to myself with a little invisible hairy thing fanning my face like I’d had a touch of heatstroke. Not likely: it was cold enough this morning to see your breath outdoors. My first thought was that the lights must have flickered off and on again—which made me feel a little sick and scared because while there are lots of reasons for electrical outages, one of them is that a cobey is maybe opening somewhere near you. That was still preferable to anything else I could think of about what had just happened—including that Hix appeared to have noticed whatever it was.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was streaming in the big windows. Even if the lights had gone out you’d have barely noticed.

Mrs. Tarrant was standing beside me, frowning a little. “Are you all right?”

“Er—the lights didn’t just flash off and on, did they?” I said.

The frown deepened. “No. Maggie, don’t worry. NIDL are in Copperhill, the cobey has been contained, and they’re working to shut it down. By tomorrow everything will be back to normal.”

I could see her making her face stop frowning. She tried semi-successfully to smile. No, she hadn’t liked the news reports this morning either.

“It must have been that third cup of coffee at breakfast then,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll have orange juice.”

“You do that,” she said. “Er—do you want a pass for the nurse?”

I thought about it. Yes. No. Algebra would still be there tomorrow. I sighed. “No. Thanks. It’s algebra next. I’d better get used to it.” She smiled. It was a better smile this time.

I picked up my knapsack—sliding the strap carefully onto my shoulder so I didn’t pinch anyone’s toes—and my monster algebra book, and left. There were a bunch of strange grown-ups wandering through the halls. They could have been new teachers I didn’t know but I didn’t think so. They didn’t walk or look around the right way for teachers—and they were too interested in the students. Most teachers get enough of students in class. They looked like plainclothes army goons to me. One of them stared right at me, like he was hoping I was carrying stolen goods so he could arrest me. Nope, just my algebra book.

And a shadow thing brought into the country by my mom’s new husband who had had all his magic taken away from him, except that he hadn’t.

There was another silverbug quivering a couple of feet from the ground under the tree outside the office. I could see it through the corridor windows. I aimed my phone at it and sent the coordinates in although half the school probably already had. Maybe the goons were watching to see how many of us were good citizens, and clicked it through. Did I get a point for responsibility, or minus a point for paranoia? Did the niddles have a scan for shadows?

I worried about my blackout the rest of the day. (Shadowy-darkness-out?) I pretty much missed algebra class without involving the nurse. I could see Ms. Dane’s mouth going and hear words like “polynomial” and “vector” but nothing got as far as my brain. (Not that my brain would know what to do with them even if they did.) I didn’t think the blackout had been the third mug of coffee. But then what was it? Shadowy had developed a whole new meaning in the last seven months—and a whole whole new meaning since last night. I put my hand up to my collarbone again, where something was tickling me. Had the big blackout thing been like one of Val’s shadows? Only a lot bigger? I didn’t think this one was friendly. He’d given them a name—gruuaa—but he’d avoided explaining what they really were, hadn’t he? He just said that Hix was friendly. I put my hand to my collarbone again. I caught Ms. Dane looking at me, and moved my hand to fiddle with my necklace.

And, speaking of what things were, what was Val? Was he still a magician? (How could you not know you were a magician? Or still a magician? It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle and finding out you still could, was it?) I pulled my necklace a little too hard; if I wasn’t careful I’d break the cord. The tickle on the back of my hand got longer and slower, more emphatic and more rhythmic. Hix was (maybe) saying, There, there, it’s okay. Mom said the only suspicion she’d had about me was the way I got along with animals. Possibly including invisible shadowy animals with too many feet.

By the end of the day I was the kind of exhausted that I just wanted to go home—except that’s exactly what I didn’t want to do, because Val was there, and I didn’t know what I thought about him any more, except that everything was so complicated with him around. Him and his shadows, one of which had cleared off from the shadow mob and was now coiled around my neck. It had been easier hating him, and being sure the shadows were some kind of bad guy. As I pulled my jacket out of my locker Hix was humming again.

That Val had killed someone—that he’d killed his best friend—should have made him easier to hate. But it didn’t. I remembered his face, when he told us. I didn’t understand—I didn’t understand anything—but I understood how he’d been willing to have his magic taken away after that. How he’d wanted it taken away.

And how he was having a bad time too. And how some of it was my fault.

Jill wanted to hang out and I didn’t so I said I’d take the bus home. But I got to the bus stop and without realizing I’d made some other decision, kept walking. The park was not so far away that I would die carrying one million books and an old ’top (the new ones weighed less) in my knapsack plus my dreeping algebra book in my arms.

By the time I got to the park gate my feet and shoulders were both starting to hurt, but I knew I wanted grass and trees and the river, and that it was worth a few blisters (probably). I walked in as far as I had to to find an empty bench beside a tree and collapsed, letting my knapsack drop onto the bench beside me. My algebra book slid off my lap onto the ground. I looked at it. I wondered what the chances were that it had landed in dog pee. Benches are big favorites with dogs. I picked it up gingerly. It now had a slightly bent-in spine corner. Well, the flastic thing weighed too much.

There was a bunch of little kids playing on the grass in the meadow. There were a few moms on a bench near them. I could hear the kids shouting, but they sounded farther away than they really were. I was probably light-headed from my beast-of-burden thing. I hoped that’s all it was. The river was over the little hill from where I was sitting; I’d get up in a minute. I’d come this far; I wanted running water. Running water was the classic protection against bad magic, right? Hix had wrapped herself way high up around my neck—since she didn’t weigh anything, presumably gravity didn’t bother her—maybe to get away from the knapsack straps. But she made me feel like I was wearing one of those Elizabethan ruff things, like in last year’s history of northwestern Oldworld textbook.

I thought about leaving my algebra book in a tree for the squirrels. It had to be the biggest, dumbest textbook ever made, this huge square thing. It looked like it should have legs holding it up and a lamp sitting on top of it. It had pretty fractal pictures on the cover, but it also said Enhanced Algebra in huge letters which wouldn’t go with most people’s décor. I was sure I was sinking into the ground with every step. I would weigh about a third less if I weren’t carrying it.

I worked my way back into my knapsack straps and then picked up Enhanced creepo Algebra and tried to figure out a way to make it ride comfortably against my chest. While I was wrestling with it I started to feel some kind of big solid silence pressing in on me from behind, almost as if attracted by my stupid textbook. Of course I was imagining it. No I was not imagining it . . . and silence was the wrong word anyway: I could hear the trees rustling in the breeze: shhh. Shhh. But the not-quite-silence was crowding up against me, spilling to either side of me, as real as a mugger or a silverbug mob. In a minute it would have reached out its arms far enough to wrap them—

I jumped forward and spun around—well, lurched around—holding my algebra book out like some kind of shield. There was a shadow as big as a forest bending over me—

I gasped and jerked back—and promptly overbalanced with the weight of my knapsack, almost as if it was trying to drag me out of harm’s way. Maybe the shadow bounced off my algebra-book shield too: by the time I stopped staggering and looked up again it wasn’t there any more. Maybe I imagined it? Like I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined the blackout at school. My body thought there had been something: I was shivering with adrenaline. Hix seemed to have gathered herself together onto the top of my head as if on lookout.

And then my phone rang. I stood there with my phone going roop roop from my left hip: it’s the theme song from Sworddaughter. My hands were shaking as I fished for it. I didn’t recognize the number. I almost didn’t answer. As it went roop for the last time I pressed the button. “Hello?”

“Hello?” Casimir’s voice.

“Oh!” I said. I should have been thrilled to hear from him, but I wasn’t sure if I was or not. Had he mixed my phone number up with some other, cuter girl’s? Was he going to figure out his mistake in a minute and I’d have to try and pretend I didn’t notice and let him hang up? “Oh, um, hi!”

“It is a beautiful day,” said Casimir. “And the restaurant phoned me a few minutes ago and said I should come to work late. I thought I would walk along the river. I did not know if you are busy. Would you like to come for a walk? I could perhaps pick you up? I am sorry to give you no warning. I expect you have other things to do.”

He sounded tentative, even a little sad, like he was waiting for me to say no. No, for the other, cuter girl to say no. “I’d love to!” I blurted out before I had any more chance to think about it. To think about how totally intimidated I was going to feel all alone with the most gorgeous boy I’d ever seen (who would by then be being gruesomely polite to the wrong girl) and how I wasn’t going to be able to talk in complete sentences and he’d think I was a moron. And I had all this STUFF with me, which was so uncool as to be totally fatal. “I’m at the park now,” I said hastily, drowning out these thoughts and the pictures that were starting to appear with them, about me falling in the river or breaking his foot when I dropped my knapsack (or my algebra book) on it, or . . . “but my knapsack is full of books and weighs forty tons.”

“I will carry your knapsack,” said Casimir, and his voice was now all bright and shiny (as if I was the right girl). “Where are you?”

“I’m near the Willow Street entrance,” I said. “If you go straight up over the hill and down the other side, there’s the river. I’ll be there, by the red bridge.”

“I will see you in ten minutes,” said Casimir, and hung up.