Shadows

CHAPTER 6

I FOUND I WAS SMILING, AND MY KNAPSACK DIDN’T weigh quite as much as it had a minute ago (maybe). I glared around as if daring any bad shadows to give me a hard time and then tottered up over the hill and down the other side and dumped my knapsack and algebra book on the riverbank. It was probably just the effort of climbing the hill with all this extra weight that was making the edges of my vision sparkle like everything was silverbugs. There weren’t any silverbugs. I stopped a couple of times to look around carefully.

I sat down on the bridge and put my feet over the edge and swung my legs back and forth and got my breath back. And tried to think up a few things to say to Casimir when he got here and then memorize them for when my mind went blank. Although probably the stuff I memorized would blank out too. I was staring dreamily into the water when there was a shadow moving at the edge of my vision. . . . I jerked my head up and it was Casimir walking toward me.

He had an amazing walk, or maybe it was just that I was already hopelessly crushing on him. You know that sort of half roll, half stalk that long-distance runners and tigers have? He had it too. As he walked toward me it was like the trees were framing him not because he was on the ordinary normal park path that had been cut through the trees, but because the trees were leaning back to give him space, like a crowd parts for a king.

At the same time . . . weren’t the trees framing him a little too well? They were just ordinary trees lining an ordinary path, right? Then why was it like he was walking down a tunnel of light through darkness—snaky, writhing, shadowy, bottom-of-the-abyss darkness. . . . No.

I yanked my eyes away from him and leaned down to haul up my knapsack. As I straightened again, Casimir was beside me, reaching out for the shoulder straps. I looked into his face and for a moment his eyes glinted like running water, like the surface of the river I’d just been looking at—like silverbugs—and his long curly hair seemed full of shadows.

He smiled, and his eyes were brown again, and his hair was just curly. Little springy bits of it had escaped the ponytail. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said, briefly riveted by his gorgeousness. He took the knapsack—swinging it up over his shoulder like it weighed nothing—and reached for my algebra book. I couldn’t let him carry everything while I minced along beside him like a . . . girl. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll stick to this one.” He looked surprised.

“I have a new theory about algebra,” I said. “I’m going to learn it by osmosis.”

His face lit up in a fantastic grin and then we were more comfortable with each other. We turned and walked beside the river without saying any more. I knew my knapsack was a torture device but Casimir didn’t seem to be aware of it. I kept surreptitiously trying to rearrange the algebra book so he wouldn’t notice I was struggling with it, but it didn’t want to rearrange, or anyway however I held it there was some corner that was digging into my ribs or my arm or my stomach. In another minute I was going to leave it for the squirrels.

What do you say to a gorgeous boy you’re trying not to look like a moron in front of? One of the things I’d thought of while I was sitting on the bridge was that I could ask him if he’d heard about the cobey in Copperhill. An interest in current events is a sign of a mature mind, right? And he hardly could not have heard about it, by now it was everywhere, first header on your pocket phone local news and the live billboard ribbons too, but it was better than saying, Gods, I could die for your dimples. So I asked.

He nodded. “But it is only one so far, right?”

Only? So far? I thought, clutched my shield-like algebra book, and didn’t think about deep lines like the one that ran between Copperhill and Station. I swallowed. “Only—one?”

“In Ukovia, we have them more often than you do here. You know this, yes? Oldworld has many more than you do.” He looked at me, but my mind had gone blank just like I’d been afraid it would.

“Nazoku, we call them,” he said. “Cobeys.” He looked at me again, expecting me to behave like the other half of a conversation. When I didn’t say anything he went on. “Eh, I was taught in school that they are something like bulges, like bulges into our world from another, like hands beating against a curtain, and we do not worry unless they appear as a series, eh, we say toruna, too many, too many strong hands against an old curtain which may tear if the hands beat too hard. Yes? This is the fear, that the boundaries between worlds may become weak in that gron of space. This is why you have your Overguard and your cobey regiments, and we have our tesra torontona. The new textbooks have decided that flow is a better word for the energy pattern of a nazok; not bulges but surges. What you see as the nazok is the crest of a wave; there are many waves because there are many worlds which interrupt the flow of the bransti siir domnoor; I am sorry, I do not know how to say this, the energies from which the worlds come. You hope that this nazok that troubles you in your world is the unusually tall one, and the others will pass without your noticing.”

I had stopped to stare at him better.

“Do they not teach you this?” he said, stopping too. “I do not translate these concepts easily.”

I made an effort to unblank my mind. “You translate fine. We’re not taught—not that we’re—what—a lot of little rafts on an ocean of—” Chaos, I was going to say, but I didn’t want to say it aloud. A shield-sized algebra book and a humming shadow seemed like very poor protection. Plus a new paper mascot in the knapsack over Casimir’s shoulder and a lot of probably by now pretty beat-up second-rate kami.

He shook his head. “It is only another part of life,” he said. “We need certain qualities in the air we breathe and certain qualities in the food we eat—and certain qualities in the earth that bears us. The wrong air, the wrong food can harm or kill us. It is no different.” He looked at me again. “What do they teach you about—cobeys?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “That we should leave it up to Watchguard and if it’s too big for them, then Overguard will send the niddles—NIDL. We’re allowed—encouraged—to squash silverbugs, but anything bigger or weirder, we Run and Report.” I hesitated. “We have specially trained units to deal—”

He was nodding. “Yes, of course. We do too.”

“But some of the training is about—er—resisting the effects of being close to a cobey.”

He was still nodding. “Yes, of course.”

“Mental effects,” I said.

He stopped nodding. “It is very disorienting—”

“No, it makes you nuts,” I said. “According to the big guys. Overguard. Which is why we have the niddles. That’s why they ripped the gene for magic out of us a few generations ago. Using magic makes you more susceptible.” They say. Until last night I’d never doubted it. Or wanted to doubt it. Now I did. Poor Casimir. A little more forcefully than I meant to I went on: “They decided that having magicians going loopy all over the landscape was bad for business, and all their wires and beams and boxes did it better anyway.”

“Magicians are trained—trained for many years—to withstand the risks they take. There are other dangerous jobs. Members of the ordinary police force are sometimes injured performing their duty. Having no magic to use leaves you totally vulnerable,” Casimir said. “You cannot be sure of a—niddle—being close enough to protect you. It is like you take a first-aid course so that you can stop the bleeding while you wait for the doctor.”

“That is what Watchguard is for,” I said. “There’s always a Watchguard around the corner. And why we Run and Report. You have to know this—that it’s all tech and gizmos here. They wouldn’t have let you in if there was any magic in you.” I wondered if he could hear the jittery edge to my voice. He was probably used to women getting a little manic when they talked to him. “So you’re totally vulnerable while you’re here. Like us.”

He looked troubled. “I took many tests to be allowed to come here, yes. But the arrangements were made by the trust which is paying my scholarship. My country—all of Oldworld—wants to know more of your science, that it appears to keep your people safe without magic. That is why I am here—that is why my trust exists. There are other people like me here, and other organizations in Oldworld like my trust. And yes, I was told I could not use magic here, which did not disturb me, but also that I had to leave my talismans behind.” He smiled a little wryly. “I was not happy about this. But I will take some risk to help my country, you see? But I have been surprised at the—at the vehemence against magic here. People recoil, as if someone were telling them to walk into fire.”

Ask me about my mom’s new husband, I thought. Or about humming shadows that smell nice. “That’s supposed to be one of the side effects of the gene-chopping,” I said. “At a cellular level we all have post-traumatic shock.”

“But your system works.”

I hesitated again. “Some people think that instead of having magicians going crazy right and left we have physwiz engineers and philosophers going crazy. That engineers are easier to organize, and the philosophers are all locked in the brain bureaus. Or that it’s easier to see the signs that they’re going doolally—magicians are halfway there all the time. Maybe engineers and philosophers go crazy more tactfully than magicians do.”

“This is why everyone goes silent when I say that I am here to study the physics of the worlds,” he said.

“Except Jill,” I said. “Yes.”

“I will not go mad,” he said.

“That’s what they all say,” I said. “I have an aunt who may be crazy, but since we never see her I can’t be sure. But it’s why even the two weeks of physwiz in your senior year of high school is the worst-attended class, year after year. There are doctors who pretty much earn their living finding excuses to give kids passes to miss it, because their parents are freaking out. They say that all you have to know is to Run and Report, and who needs to take the chance?”

“And yet you go for a walk when a cobey large enough to call out two specialist units to ensure containment has opened less than ten miles away.”

Two? I thought. That hadn’t been on the radio this morning, or the billboard updates. “You’re here too,” I pointed out.

“I am trying to behave as you would,” he said. “I am not—totally at ease. I miss my chabeled,” and he touched the base of his neck, where perhaps a protective medallion used to hang. Gwenda had some of my great-grandmother’s old medallions—carefully denatured of course. “When the restaurant rang,” Casimir continued, “I said that perhaps I would go for a walk. They said, it is a beautiful day, that is a good idea.”

I thought about the two cobey units and the deep line between Copperhill and Station and didn’t say anything. Well, there had been no public announcements about anything—your pocket phone was supposed to ping at you if there was an emergency—and that’s what authority is for, to know stuff, right?

“Also . . .” he said. And smiled at me again. How could anyone’s smile be that perfect? How could anyone’s eyes be that huge and deep? How could . . . Margaret Alastrina, hit the circuit breaker.

“I wanted to see you again,” he said.

My heart or my stomach or my blood pressure or something did something not humanly possible and I almost had to sit down. There were sparkles everywhere I looked and I didn’t think they were silverbugs. I blinked. They weren’t silverbugs but I didn’t think they were my brain exploding either. And there were more and more of them. I almost didn’t notice when Casimir reached out and took my hand because by then the wind—when had the wind started?—was wailing around us with this awful squealing edge to it, that kind of noise when you think I really can’t stand this it has to stop—I couldn’t hear anything else and it felt like being stuck with hot wires. The silverbugs—or the things that weren’t silverbugs—were joining up like pictures of fractals on the cover of an Enhanced Algebra book, only they seemed to shake themselves and every time one of these chains shook more chains splintered off and glittered away into an infinity that was stretching out in every dizzying direction—in more directions than there were directions—

Just before I totally lost my sense of up and down, my sense of beingness, of a human body with arms and legs and feet on the ground, on a ground that was there, and a brain unmelted by hot wires, I closed my eyes.

That was a little better. Up and down resolved themselves, and I was still standing on something although . . . it was quivering. More like a little raft on a sea of chaos than like the earth I thought I knew.

Cobey, I thought, distantly. The Copperhill cobey has moved along the deep line and opened up in a park in Station. The park where Casimir and I happen to be.

The wind howled. I tried to think about what I knew. But what do you still know when everything is wrong? I thought I could still feel Hix around my neck; she was doing her Elizabethan-ruff trick even more tightly, so there was a little hairy-ish band of almost-warmth against my skin. As I thought about her . . . there seemed to be more of her. One of her accordion ends was elongating, creeping—slowly, like a person feeling her way—down my sternum. Slowly it groped around my waist, sidled across my pelvis and slid down one leg. Eventually it—she—reached the ground. The moment she slipped over my foot and touched earth I was real again. I hadn’t noticed that I’d become unreal. Only that everything else had.

The wind was still doing its unhinging howl but I cautiously opened my eyes. Mistake. I closed them again. I couldn’t see anything but a kind of wild, broken craziness like the three-dimensional version of a two-year-old scribbling with a crayon. But I could feel two things that I’d forgotten when I became unreal: Casimir’s hand holding one of my hands, and my other hand clutching my algebra book. Hix had outlined one edge of the algebra book on her way down my body and maybe that’s what made the book feel so weirdly real. Live. Like it was alive and scared to death like the rest of us. Or maybe it was exhilarated. It was hard to tell.

Margaret Alastrina, you’re talking about an algebra book.

I’m in a cobey. I think I’m supposed to die. This is better, okay?

Slowly I knelt down on the little patch of quaking earth that Hix was keeping real for me. I held onto Casimir’s hand and pulled him down too. I didn’t have any hands left. But Hix seemed to understand about Casimir and she unreeled herself even further—I felt her edging past my ankles, and I felt Casimir—I don’t know how else to explain it—become real again when she touched him. So I could let go of his hand.

I was crouching at the edge of a cliff. When I laid the algebra book down I kept it as close to me as possible; I laid it so that it was touching my knees. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to open it against the wind, but as I tried, a little place of quiet cleared itself as if by the act of opening it. . . . I was looking at an explanation of how logarithms are the opposite of exponentials. About balance.

I tore a page out and began folding. I didn’t know what I was folding, but my fingers seemed to know. Back, forward, turn, turn over, keep folding. Open out, keep folding. Turn over, keep folding. Keep the edges sharp, no matter how shaky and sweaty your fingers are, however hard the darkness at the bottom of the cliff is pulling at you. Keep the edges sharp like your life depends on it. Keep folding. I was Hands Folding Paper.

I knew when she was done—when she began to move faintly against my fingers, like she was breathing—and without looking up (don’t look over the edge of the cliff don’t look over the edge of the cliff) I flicked her into the maelstrom around me. Since I didn’t look up I couldn’t possibly have seen her stretch long silver wings and soar like an albatross over this awful sea. I tore out a second page and began folding again. And then a third page, a fourth, fifth, sixth. Seventh. I looked up when I sent the seventh after her sisters, and I saw the long, long wings I couldn’t possibly have made, and a shining silver crest erect from the top of her head down her long unexpectedly sinuous body, studded with tiny feet: very like a silverbug fractal, and nothing at all like.

I thought of Takahiro saying: It was like she was trying to get through to me. I thought of those nights when I slept better sitting up folding paper than lying down in bed.

I pulled out an eighth page and began folding. And then a ninth page.

I hadn’t realized I had a headache till it began to ease. I hadn’t realized that the hairy, whiskery, spider-footy, tickly band around my neck had extended its other end (but did gruuaa shadows only have two ends?) up around my face and wrapped itself, or herself, around my forehead like a pirate headband. Perhaps that was why when I looked up again the world I knew had begun to reshape itself around me.

The shrieking yowl of the wind dropped to the crackle of a thunderstorm that was still a little too close. The trees were re-becoming trees. The insane silverbug sparkle was no worse than when you stand up too quickly and briefly feel dizzy. The sun came out again; the only shadows belonged to things I could see, like trees and benches and the railing of another little footbridge. And Casimir. He was staring at me like he’d never seen a human girl before.

“Casimir—” I said, or croaked.

To my astonishment—and a cross between horror and maybe the biggest thrill of my life—he picked up the hand he had been holding earlier and kissed it. He said something in a language that wasn’t English, and then flung himself down and over onto his back, flinging his arms out to either side. Which was a pretty good description of the way I was feeling too.

My knapsack had made it through—whatever had just happened—too. It sat a little behind where Casimir and I had been kneeling, all sort of hunched up, like someone sitting with her legs drawn up and her arms around them, her shoulders as high as they’d go and her face pressed down hard against her knees. I reached out and stroked it gently, over the pockets where the kami and Takahiro’s new mascot were.

Casimir’s pose reminded me a little of my algebra book. I looked at it, lying flopped open where I’d left it. I’d torn out twenty pages or so. It looked like more. I was so dead for mutilating a schoolbook.

On the other hand, we were in fact both alive, Casimir and I. One of the top still-attached pages of the book curled up briefly, which wouldn’t have been surprising except that it was curling against the mild breeze, which was all that was left of the wind. Okay, maybe all of us were still alive. Margaret Alastrina, I started to say to myself . . . and stopped.

I patted delicately at my shoulders. I wasn’t sure how far Hix had extended or retreated. Something moved. Something rubbed ever so gently down the side of my face. I didn’t think it was a foot. It might have been another face. I thought, I want to say her scent shimmers, but how does a smell shimmer? “Hix?” I murmured, and the light almost-weight around my shoulders gave a faint acknowledging shiver. “Thank you,” I said, and the patting thing against my face felt briefly like tiny kisses.

Casimir sat up. “I am sorry,” he said. “There is no excuse for my carelessness. I must plead that I have only been in your country for a fortnight, and everything about it is still strange to me—including the air, the wind, the ground under my feet, the sound of a river in its bed. It is all a language I do not speak, and do not understand what I am hearing.”

“Sorry?” I said. “Why are you sorry?” I thought, I should be apologizing to him that almost the first thing my country does to him is try and kill him. And if he hadn’t had this dumb idea about seeing me again, he would be somewhere else. I looked up at the sky. It looked like the sky always looks on a clear autumn day.

“I should have recognized the approach of a nazok,” said Casimir. “Nor did I sense your gruuaa. I am more dependent on my chabeled than I knew.” Now he looked up at the sky. I wondered if clear autumn days in Ukovia looked the same. “I am as dislocated here as if—as if—” He made a gesture with one hand. “It is much stranger here than I was expecting, so much stranger I was becoming afraid that studying at Runyon might teach me nothing I can use.” He looked down, and at me, again. “I thought, the other night, when I heard the word from the old prophecy, that it was a fault of my hearing—the foreigner who mistakenly believed he spoke your language. But I could not help being curious—and in Ukovia we are taught not to believe in coincidence. And you . . .”

He tailed off and I thought, You what. “Prophecy,” I said slowly and carefully.

“Yes,” he said. “When you came into the restaurant the other night, and your friend called you mgdaga. It is an ancient prophecy in Ukovia: the mgdaga is a young woman who can”—he murmured a few more words in what I assumed was Ukovian—“who can mend the breaks between universes. Who has a natural affinity for the physics of the worlds.”

“No,” I said.

“Most are legendary but a few have been identified as historical persons. There were never many, and there has not now been one in hundreds of years; our magicians say perhaps it always was only a tale, there were merely a few young women who seemed to fit the description. I was puzzled that I would hear of a mgdaga in Newworld, and more puzzled that the name should apparently be used so casually. I still do not understand—but—but it does not matter. The guldagi—spirits—of the between-worlds manifest and proclaim you.”

What?

“It is the equations of this world that gives the strength, yes? This is an acceptable art in Newworld? Who taught you? They cannot have known it would be so harshly tested, but then if mgdaga is a casual epithet they will perhaps not have known whom they taught. I would very much like to learn—if perhaps some scrap of it can be taught. It is exactly to learn such practical tools that I am here.” He touched my poor book gently. “Perhaps we—you—we if you will allow—should carry some pre-marked pages after this. If this is a true toruna I fear there will be more use for them.”

I could feel my mouth pulling itself into that “I don’t understand and I’m sure I don’t want to” smile. Jill and I used to see it on the face of our first-grade teacher a lot. “Whatever you’re talking about—it’s nothing to do with me. Jill calls me Magdag when she wants to be especially annoying. I don’t know what happened just now. I don’t even know if that was . . .” I couldn’t say “cobey,” as if saying it out loud would bring it back. I didn’t want to admit that that part of what he was talking about might be true. But none of the rest of it was. None.

He began to look unhappy and confused, which would make two of us. “I don’t . . .” And then his face changed again: dismay, disappointment. “Is it that you may not speak to me of these things because I am not a citizen of your country? I did wonder, some of the questions they asked, before they would issue me a visa. I don’t know—”

“What?” I said. “Citizen? Country? What are you talking about? I have no idea what just happened—I can’t even squash a silverbug, it makes me sick! I don’t know why I wrecked my algebra book! I mean—not to—know, not like I can tell you. I—I just—” I reached up and touched Hix, and felt that almost-but-not-quite imaginary flicker against my cheek in response. Meeting her last night for the first time had almost been too much for me—this morning I almost ran away when she climbed up my arm for the first time—and now here I was using her for reassurance.

Casimir’s eyes had followed my hand and his expression softened a little. “Ah,” he said.

“Can you see her?” I said. This entire conversation was so far off my radar I didn’t know what galaxy I was in any more. And I was getting farther away from the one I knew with every word. Especially the words I didn’t know.

“I can see the edge of a darkness,” he said. “A shadow that is not quite your body or my body or the trees. I would not see—her?—if I were not thinking of the mgdaga, who I would expect to have attendant guldagi—and whose gruuaa indeed held me here while you addressed the nazok. But I believe the gruuaa cannot fully appear in this wo—here,” he said. “They are one of the guldagi.”

“In this world,” I said slowly. “You started to say in this world.”

“Yes,” said Casimir. “But I did not know if . . .”

He trailed off again. I was so not enjoying this conversation with the most beautiful boy I had ever met. Aside from the fact that he had been interested in me for reasons other than, uh, me. Not that this was a surprise. I took a deep breath. “Let’s go back a little. Let’s, uh, pretend that I’m totally stupid and clueless, okay? Tell me what just happened. With the wind and the weirdness and everything.”

Now he was wearing that “I don’t understand” smile. Apparently it was the same smile in Ukovia. It looked a lot better on him than it had on my first-grade teacher. “It was a nazok. What you call a cobey. Since it is the second, we must consider the likelihood there will be a third.”

I didn’t want to consider anything. Except for the sitting-alone-with-Casimir-in-the-park-on-a-beautiful-day part, I wanted all of this to go away. The all of the rest of it that was ruining the alone-with-Casimir part. The rest of it would include that he only wanted to be here with me because I was this historical thing. “But—it’s gone. It’s gone, isn’t it? They—cobeys—don’t do that.”

He made another odd gesture with his hands—a kind of folding over and winding together gesture. “They do if they are properly bound. And it is much likelier they will be properly bound if someone who can do this is present as the nazok opens. Which is why foreseers are so important to us. My mother is a foreseer. In Eruopa and the Slavic Commonwealth if everywhere that had been disrupted by a nazok was lost, there would be very little human land left.”

I was silent a moment. I knew that about binding, of course; I was forgetting my basic history. Oldworld was pretty much a patchwork quilt of shut-down cobeys; most of Newworld was more like your favorite jeans with mends on the knees and the butt and one or two where you’d torn yourself up on your mom’s rosebushes or a particularly badly placed nail. They were still mostly jeans.

But it had been kind of an overexciting few minutes, just now, and it was easy to forget stuff, like your name and what day of the week it was. And here in Newworld we were taught to Run and Report. There hadn’t been time to run. And it didn’t look like there was anything left to report.

He glanced at me. “Usually a team is sent when a foreseer predicts a nazok. But a mgdaga could perhaps bind a nazok alone.”

I ignored this. “Is this the way they usually happen?” Was there a “usually” about cobeys? “Like—” Like what? Like a spider being washed down the kitchen sink? “Like a storm out of nowhere?”

He shook his head. “Not one big enough to swallow two people. That is why I don’t understand why I did not sense its approach. My Oldworld instincts are of even less use here than I had begun to realize.

“Little ones may happen unexpectedly—ones like what you call silverbugs, only bigger. It is not wise to step on them, however; when they burst, they will throw you down, and the earth will not be where you expect it, when you fall down in the ordinary way.” He smiled. “Every small boy discovers this. Myself included.”

I wasn’t crazy about big ordinary bugs—beetles and spiders and things, although the next spider I found in the sink I’d catch in a glass and put outdoors. The idea of big silverbugs made me totally queasy. “Big enough to swallow two people,” I repeated, like it was a lesson I was trying to learn. I didn’t want to learn it.

He looked at me again. Steadily, without glancing away. I had to look away. It was funny in a way because Run and Report, with the “don’t think about it” that goes with it, always made me a little cranky, but I assumed it was either because I was a control freak or because I had a mad aunt (maybe) from her knowing too much about physwiz. “People disappear when big cobeys open,” said Casimir. “No one knows where they go. But there has been work done on trying to find out. My trust thinks Professor Hlinka, at Runyon, is close to a discovery about this; it is why they placed me here.”

Several things jostled for position in my poor bewildered brain. The first one was: his trust must think a lot of him. But, wearily, this thought also came: someone is always close to a breakthrough. The breakthrough never arrives. I knew people occasionally disappeared. Gwenda said it happened oftener than was reported. Not one of them has ever come back but they’ve never found any bodies either. I remembered this. With my name and what day of the week it was: Thursday. One more day till the first weekend of my senior year. The longest short week of my life.

I was still dazed from—whatever had happened—but I had a weird sense of uneasiness. A weird increasing sense of uneasiness. I looked around. Not that I knew what I was looking for. Another cobey? Please the holy electric gods not. Would I know what one looked like after this? I didn’t want to find out. The afternoon was still clear and sunny and the breeze mild and smelling of leaves and that sharp clean smell of fast-running river water.

To me the breeze also smelled of Hix. She shifted a little and I thought, I’m picking it up from her. She’s worried about something. Her anxiety was spilling over me like pizza sauce over your last clean shirt. “I—I think maybe we should get going,” I said, and began to struggle to my feet. I was suddenly so tired that the weightless Hix felt like an iron chain. I picked up my algebra book and looked sadly at my gigantic knapsack . . . and if I wasn’t already in desperate unrequited love with him (to him I was a historical figure like a statue or a chapter in a book) I’d have fallen in love with Casimir when he picked it up as if it was totally his problem (in Ukovia they teach you to be polite to little old ladies and historical figures).

“Yes,” he said. He was frowning slightly. It made his eyebrows arch more and his eyes looked bigger and darker than ever. Aaaugh. As I stepped toward him, dropping each foot back to the ground again like I wasn’t sure it belonged to me, he reached out and grabbed my hand again. Whoa. That wasn’t why I was walking like a little old lady who had come out without her cane (how did historical figures walk?) but hey, whatever. And we did move a little faster that way. He wasn’t exactly dragging me but I was walking a little harder to keep up. Some of the long sinuous Hix had moved to the top of my head again, to her lookout point. I could still feel her on my left shoulder, but not my right, and I thought I could feel feet on my forehead again. It was like wearing a fuzzy invisible crown.

Casimir and Hix were right. We were out of the trees and crossing the meadow when the army arrived. I was having to concentrate on walking and carrying my algebra book at the same time—I felt like “I” was a committee arguing among themselves: the keeping-head-upright part was arguing with the algebra-book-carrying part, which was also snarling at the one-foot-after-the-other part. (Nothing was arguing with the holding-Casimir’s-hand part.) The I part was trying to keep them all doing what they were supposed to be doing instead of lying down and not doing anything. We’d’ve done lying down together really well.

I gaped at all these guys in uniform running toward us—bright orange cobey badges bobbing on their hats. I was retroactively aware that there’d been some kind of uproar at the gates as we started walking—and stopped. “No, don’t stop,” said Casimir, and tugged me on.

Most of the other people in the park were stopping and gaping too, although I had a faint sense that they’d been sort of standing there dazed already. I sympathized. But guys in uniforms were halting to talk to the other people—in an in-your-face, we’re-the-army kind of way. Some of the people the army guys were talking to looked like they were then being escorted somewhere—with two or three or four guys in uniforms at their elbows. Oh, drog me. This didn’t look good at all. Without meaning to I stopped again. “No,” said Casimir, “don’t stop,” and he didn’t stop, so he nearly pulled me over when our linked hands came to the ends of our arms. I staggered forward and he let go of my hand to put his arm around me. I wished I was enjoying this more. Also, the algebra book . . . Okay, pay attention.

The army guys were streaming past us. Like they didn’t see us. They were stopping everybody else. Not us. They broke and slid past us like water around a rock. The water doesn’t care.

Casimir said, “Your gruuaa is hiding us. But there is only one of her, I think, and she is tired: she kept both of us here and—eh—steady, while you bound the cobey. She is tapping you now, which is why you feel disoriented. I thought she might be able to tap me too if I am touching you.” Of course. He had his arm tightly around me because he wanted my gruuaa to be able to use him. I was almost too dizzy to notice what it was like, having his arm around me: the clean soap-and-skin smell of him, the way our hips brushed as we walked, the feel of his arm against my back. . . . I had a vague idea I would want to remember all the details later. Maybe I could manage to forget about my algebra book, when I was remembering everything else, which at the moment was digging a hole in my stomach. Carrying it was always a pain, but I couldn’t blame it if it was mad at me for ripping a big hunk of its middle out.

There I go again, I thought distantly, thinking about my algebra book as if it was alive. Tell that to Ms. Dane, when you explain about the missing pages. It was getting heavier, I suppose as I was getting feebler. The feet on my forehead were going cold, like Hix was coming to the end of what she could do too.

We made it to the gate. I think Casimir was nearly carrying me. We made it out the gate and Casimir turned and marched us toward the bus stop. We lurched inside the bus shelter and collapsed on the bench—even Casimir. So maybe Hix had been using him after all. Fortunately there wasn’t anyone else waiting, so we could sprawl. One boy, one girl, one knapsack, one algebra book, one long fluffy invisible thing. The army guys were still going into the park, but slower now, and fewer of them, although these last guys were carrying more equipment—big weird folded-up angular machinery with little red and white flashing lights.

The front end (I assumed it was the front end) of Hix slithered off my head and back onto my shoulder. I could feel how tired she was, not the way I’d been picking up her anxiety, but by how limp she was. If she’d been a feather boa a few minutes ago she was now a feather boa that had been dropped in the river, run over by a bus, and then used as a chew toy by a Saint Bernard. One or two of the army guys looked sharply into the bus shelter but no one said anything. I tried to look surprised and clueless. I should have been able to do that really well. Maybe I did.

I flopped my head over—I was leaning against the back wall of the shelter—to look at Casimir. He was slumped against the wall too, with his eyes closed. He looked exhausted. Perhaps he felt me looking at him, because he opened his eyes and smiled. Even with everything that had happened in the last half hour that smile made my heart grow two sizes and bang against my ribs. Then he reached out and took my hand again like it was the most normal thing to do. . . .

Hey, he started it. What would a mgdaga do if the cutest boy she’d ever met put his hand around hers? I closed my fingers and gave his hand a squeeze. “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t know what any of that was—I’m saying that a lot, sorry—but the mgdaga stuff is a nonstarter, okay? We do believe in coincidence in Newworld.”

My eyes strayed to a big army van—big enough to carry a lot of soldiers to a park where someone had Run and Reported a cobey—or where a cobey had opened up that was big enough to set off all the cobey boxes in town. Or an army van big enough to carry a lot of ordinary people who had had the bad luck to be in a park when a cobey broke, to be taken away somewhere. Nothing to worry about, they taught you in school. If a cobey ever happened here, which it won’t. The attending cobey unit would take your statement and maybe give you a decontamination pill and send you home.

Nothing to worry about.

There were three soldiers unfolding the legs on a box like the ones we’d seen other soldiers carrying into the park. It was long and thin and had too many legs, although these legs were long and spindly. It didn’t look friendly. I bet it didn’t smell good either.

“How do you come to have a gruuaa companioning you?” said Casimir. “They are not common anywhere, but I thought—well, I would have thought—there were none in Newworld.”

“She—she has been—er—companioning—er—my mother’s husband.” That sounded awful, and I was probably only still here because of Hix. I was probably only here twice because of Hix. Which meant I was only here twice because of Val. “My stepfather,” I amended reluctantly. “She—um—he introduced her to me.” Electric gods, was it only last night? “And she seems—um—to like me.”

“It is a great honor,” he said. “You are very fortunate.”

Yes. That was simply true. I put my hand up to where I knew Hix was, wrapped around my throat but also trailing in my lap. I felt that faint wispy not-fur-not-feathers-not-scales something against my fingers. It moved. Even in an invisible unknown creature I thought I recognized the “pet me” response. I stroked gently with the tips of my fingers. She was humming again. . . .

Except it wasn’t a hum. Or it wasn’t Hix. It was something big and bullying, trying to overwhelm both of us—something like the army tank rolling down the street toward us.

Army tank?

Now I could hear—feel—something—the crackles and frizzles and—something-going-wrong-with-the-air—as all the unbent unfolded steel-legged things made contact with whatever was in the tank. I knew about armydar. You got a few days of standard armydar with a standard scan. Our last scan hadn’t been so long ago that I’d forgotten. This wasn’t that. This was big. Something the army thought needed to be in a tank to keep safe. What were they protecting, the thing or us?

They were chugging it out, the something-wrong-with-the-air, in these big ugly disorienting throbs, the tank thing and the boxes on legs. I could see two of the boxes from where I was sitting. There were almost-visible ripples wandering, weaving down the road, past our bus shelter. I closed my eyes, but I could still feel them, like you feel a boat heaving up and down on a long slow queasy-making swell. I didn’t like it. It made me feel heavy and slow. This wasn’t anything I could lob little bits of folded-up paper at. I opened my eyes again.

There was a fancy kind of armydar that was supposed to have a squashing effect on an area around a cobey—or some kind of pre-emptive squashing over an area that might throw out a cobey. Like flinging a blanket or a bucket of sand over a kitchen fire. It may not put it out, but it slows it down. And if this was some big, super-whammy armydar . . .

There was an army guy—in fact, several army guys—and the one in front had more stuff on his cap and his shoulders than the other ones, and he was looking grim and maybe angry—and he was coming toward the bus shelter. He saw us all right. One of the guys with him was holding a sort of gun-wand thing out in front of him—oh, her—and she was pointing it at us. There were three little red flashing lights at the tip. The flashing was kind of hypnotic. It looked like it was saying, Ha ha ha, got you.

And suddenly the bus shelter was full of gruuaa. I was looking at the big angry army guy and as the gruuaa poured into the bus shelter I saw a medium-sized hairy black and white cannonball arc immediately in front of the army guy. Mongo. I wasted half a second thinking, no, it can’t be Mongo, there’s nobody home now, which is to say Ran, to forget and leave the door open. But you know your own dog. It was Mongo.

Mongo dived across the road immediately in front of the army guy staring at me, and broke his gaze. He looked at the dog, gestured to one of his aides, and looked back at me—

Except that he didn’t look back at me. He looked toward the bus shelter and then he looked confused. His eyes skated right over the open front of the shelter where Casimir and I (and a very large knapsack and a very large algebra book) were sitting. He stopped and looked around like he was searching for something he had dropped. He looked up again, straight at the bus shelter like he was sure whatever it was was in that direction. Then the woman with the wand-gun said something to him, and I noticed the blinking lights had gone clear. Ha ha ha yourself. He scowled at the lights, he turned away . . . he was missing out the bus shelter, and heading toward the gate into the park.

By then my arms were full of Mongo. “Mongo, you loophead,” I said, burying my face in his fur, “what are you doing here?” But my stomach was telling me something was seriously wrong. “What are you doing here?” I looked up, still clutching Mongo, who didn’t anything like all fit in my lap. I could feel some kind of greeting going on between Mongo and Hix—Mongo was a licker, and since I could feel Hix, if faintly, maybe Mongo could lick her. I stared around. Even now, knowing the shadows were friendly—well, knowing that Hix was friendly, and since they’d just stopped the army guy I was ready to guess the way-too-many-shadows around us were okay too—it was pretty scary. I remembered that first evening, opening the door to Val and seeing the shadows rearing up behind him like the end of the world as I knew it.

Which it had been, one way or another.

It was normal-shadowy in the bus shelter; it was late afternoon and both the park fence and the first line of trees were between us and what was left of the sunlight. But sun shadows and gruuaa shadows were as different as—oh, as two black dogs from each other—when one’s a Pomeranian and one’s a Labrador.

I looked at Casimir. He was looking a little green, although that might have been the normal bus-shelter shadows: the inside walls were painted seasick green. But Casimir was staring at the gruuaa, so I guessed it was more to do with them. He hadn’t looked green when we first got here. “I have never seen so many,” he said. He made it sound like a question.

I was trying to decide what to answer when I remembered Val saying that most people had to be trained to see them. “You can see them,” I said. “And you knew that Hix was helping us.”

Casimir went on staring at the gruuaa. Did he look a little shifty? I couldn’t decide. But, I thought hopefully, if the border tech didn’t stop him, maybe seeing gruuaa wasn’t going to get me jailed for the rest of my life either. I glanced at my algebra book. I’d worry about cobey-folding later.

“Yes,” he said. “My mother gave all of us some basic training. I had little aptitude for most of it.” He glanced up at me and smiled, that mental-health-destroying smile. “If I were talking about cooking, I would say that I can boil water. I do not help in the kitchen at the restaurant.” He looked down again and shook his head. “So many,” he said. “So many.”

“They all—er—belong—I guess—er—to my—stepfather,” I said. Belong? Stepfather? I was still having trouble with stepfather.

“Your stepfather?”

“Val,” I said, which was less creepo than going on calling him my stepfather. “He—er—he has a lot of them.”

Casimir blinked.

“He’s from Orzaskan,” I said helpfully. “I think they have more of them there. Like you said. In Oldworld.”

“Orzaskan,” Casimir said thoughtfully. “Val . . .” He blinked again. “You don’t mean . . . Val Crudon, do you?”

“Er,” I said. I should have kept saying stepfather. “Yes.”

“Your stepfather is Valadi Crudon?” repeated Casimir wonderingly.

“He isn’t, any more,” I said defensively. “A—whatever.” I didn’t want to say “magician” out loud. Even though that was maybe exactly what he was, then, now, any more, whenever.

I didn’t want to ask if it had been a huge headline all over the Slav Commonwealth that Valadi Crudon had been his government’s executioner. I didn’t want to ask if Casimir had any idea how you took magic away from a magician. One of the things our mental hygiene class taught us about Genecor was that gene-chopping a young person was neat and clean and complete. On a middle-aged grown-up the magic gene had silted or fuzzed up and got tangled with its neighbors, and trying to chop it then was really dangerous.

Could a magician maybe rust out, like an old car? If he didn’t use his magic any more? If his government had just kind of contained Val for a while? So whatever it was that happened that day out at the shed was maybe like the radio coming on when you twisted the ignition key of your old car, but the engine wasn’t going to turn over?

“There is some great mystery about him,” said Casimir. “He disappeared—years ago. I was still a boy. There were two of them—Valadi and one other. The other is known to have died. No one knows what happened to Valadi. My mother was very distressed. She said he was the greatest magician in the Commonwealth—even greater than his friend who died.”

His friend who died. I rushed to say: “He’s here, okay? Here in Newworld. He’s been here over a year. He has a visa and everything. He tutors really bright kids and really dumb ones in math and science. They made him leave it all behind—like you.”

“Yes,” said Casimir. “But I had very little to leave behind. And his gruuaa came anyway.”

My phone rang, and I was glad of the excuse not to go on with this conversation. Val was famous? Even if what had happened hadn’t been a headline, there was a reason his government had chosen him to . . . I dragged my phone out from under Mongo with difficulty. Mom. I clicked on. “Hi,” I said. “Mongo’s with me.”

“I—oh,” said Mom. “Oh, thank the gods. He got out when—Where are you?”

“I’m at the park,” I said cautiously. “I’ll be home—er.” I didn’t know the drivers on this route, and it was all downtown. They might not let Mongo on the bus.

“I have a car,” said Casimir. “I will take you home. It is not a good car, but it is a car. Your dog and your gruuaa are welcome.” He smiled, and I lost track of my conversation with Mom.

“Maggie?” said Mom.

“Unh,” I said. “Casimir’s here too. He’s got a car, and he’ll bring me home.”

“Casimir?” said Mom. “Is he another senior?”

You could be standing in a burning building and the firemen are all yelling, Jump! Jump! and your mom would still want to know about the person whose name you’ve just said for the first time in her hearing. “No,” I said. “He’s the person I told you about—last night. Going to Runyon. Jill has met him, okay?”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely reassuring,” said Mom. “He’ll bring you straight home?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering what was going on besides Mom being a mom. She shouldn’t be home now, Mongo shouldn’t be out roaming the streets—and I would be totally freaked about this on any other day that I hadn’t almost been disappeared by a cobey—and this conversation should sound more like the standard mom-teenage-daughter face-off and it didn’t. It sounded like we were both really worried and not telling each other about it. I had my mouth open to ask questions and realized I didn’t want to know any sooner than I had to. I looked across the street at the long-legged army things. The human shapes standing stiffly beside them looked more like upright gizmos than like people, and everything looked worse and worse as the light faded toward sunset. In the leaf-shadowy twilight the tank was a monster out of a fairy tale. “See you,” was all I said, and clicked off.

The big army guy who had almost busted us had long since disappeared into the park, but there were still a lot of other guys milling around. I hoped our reinforcement gruuaa could keep us hidden. If Hix had held onto both Casimir and me by herself, surely this gang could disguise half of Station? But that was before these great icky, woozy, loopy weird-air waves had started.

I took my belt off so I had something to use as a leash—fortunately Mongo was still wearing his collar. The little broken cog rubbed at my hand as I fumbled my belt under the collar. You’re working, right? I thought at it. You’re making us safe and—normal. I thought my hands were maybe shaking a little. Casimir picked up my knapsack again. I had Mongo in one hand and my algebra book in the other, but Casimir stayed really close to me—because of the gruuaa of course. He even slid his free arm around my waist again. Because of the gruuaa. Of course. He wasn’t stupidly tall like Takahiro. When he turned his head to look up the street, the end of his ponytail brushed across my cheek. Odorokubeki. Amazing.