Shadows

CHAPTER 8

WE HEARD THE SHED DOOR OPEN, FOOTSTEPS—one pair with shoes, one pair without—and then a hand turn the kitchen door handle. Val’s dressing gown went nearly twice around Takahiro but didn’t quite reach his knees. He’d wrapped the belt round and round and tied it in front, like a samurai’s obi. He looked almost as unhappy as he had as a wolf: all curled in on himself like he used to be eight years ago, and it made my heart ache. I wanted to believe that it didn’t make any difference that he might turn into a wolf any time he was stressed out—but it did, you know? It meant he was in danger all the time. Which meant that his friends were also in danger all the time. There was no way the niddles wouldn’t believe we all knew. I said I didn’t know Takahiro at all. But I did in some ways. I knew that was one of the things he was thinking about right now. Because now some of us did know. No wonder he’d never really finished becoming one of us. We just thought it was because he was half Japanese, and lived in a huge house on the other side of town with a dad who was never home and who none of our parents had ever met. And possibly because he was an arrogant moody stuck-on-himself creepazoid. And here he wasn’t even a real gizmohead. He was just a grind. And a werewolf.

The kitchen was starting to smell of chocolate. It was probably my favorite smell in the whole world, and all I could think of was that we’d just had it last night, and I’d thought last night had been serious-enough-for-an-emergency-hot-chocolate-ration enough. I looked down along the floor. There were gruuaa everywhere. I could see them more and more easily even when they were hidden by normal furniture-and-people’s-legs shadows. I didn’t know if that was Hix’s influence, or that I’d stopped trying to ignore them—or stopped hating Val—or what. There was a heap of them in the shadows under the table and a coil of them wrapped around and through the bottles in the tall skinny bottle rack between the edge of the cupboard and the refrigerator. There were several more of them winding around Mom’s flour-sugar-coffee-tea canisters at the back of the counter by the sink. (Which contained, of course, two kinds of pasta, rice and dried beans.) I wasn’t going to mention this. Mom was kind of a hygiene freak and I didn’t know if shadow feet could carry germs or not. Hix had moved slightly to between Mongo’s front legs and he was dementedly trying to lick the top of her head. If that was her head.

It was. Her three eyes blinked open to look at me. “Hey, sweetie,” I murmured, which tended to be what I called all friendly critters. All the long-term residents at the shelter knew their name was “sweetie.” Hix’s eyes still glittered but they didn’t look like silverbugs to me any more.

Mom brought the tray with four steaming mugs and a plate of cookies to the table. She picked up her mug and chugged it. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Takahiro, can you stay for supper? I’m stopping by the deli.”

“Buy twice as much as you think you need,” said Val mildly. “Changing is hard work.” Takahiro gave another wild shiver, almost a spasm, looked at Val and away again, but he didn’t say anything.

“I’ll do that,” said Mom. “Er—do you need—er—meat? Our usual from the deli is their tomato and chickpea stew.”

“It’s just calories,” Takahiro muttered to the table. “It doesn’t matter what kind.”

Mom patted Takahiro’s arm and my shoulder, dropped a kiss on the top of Val’s head, and left.

The cookies disappeared in about forty seconds. Val got up and started making sandwiches. “A question, Takahiro,” he said. “May I ask?”

Takahiro, to my surprise, took a moment to answer. “I don’t really know how to say this,” he said. “I’ll tell you anything I can tell you.” He flicked another sideways glance at me and fiddled with his mug. “So, yeah.”

Val bowed his head briefly in one of his funny not-from-around-here gestures. “Do you know how your father got you into this country?” said Val.

Takahiro looked up at that. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, no. I’ve wondered about that. At the time I didn’t think anything. Eh . . . My cousins told me, once, when my mom was still alive and the rest of the family hadn’t completely cut us off yet, that I wouldn’t be able to visit my dad in Newworld even if he wanted me to, which he didn’t, because the border police would know I was a ’shifter, and kill me. That was about eleven years ago. I had to have about a million tests before they let me in, including blood work and scans and stuff, and I was kind of waiting for them to kill me.”

“Oh, Taks,” I said.

He looked sort of in my direction but not quite at me, and away again. “It was a long time ago. And then they didn’t kill me after all. So I had to figure out how to stay alive. At the time I just thought they’d missed it somehow, which was almost comforting, you know? It meant I might manage to—pass. It wasn’t till later, when I was older and more suspicious, that I began to wonder. There’s not a lot out there about ’shifters that the ordinary public can access, and I didn’t want anyone tagging me because I was too interested in this weird subject. But I don’t see how all the border tech can have missed what I am. There’s a lot about my dad I don’t know,” he added.

“What is your father’s employment?” said Val.

“He buys stuff for museums. He’s an expert on all kinds of stuff. Especially Farworld stuff. So he keeps being called in to make decisions.”

“He travels a great deal,” said Val.

“Yeah. All over the world. Over lots of national borders. Newworld, Oldworld, Farworld, Midworld, the Southworlds. He ought to be so suspect—with a ’shifter son. Who did he pay off—or something—to get me through? Why doesn’t whoever it is have him totally at the end of a hot wire?”

Val finished cutting the sandwiches in halves and put the plate on the table. “We don’t know,” he said. “But the world does not work in some ways we are taught to believe that it works.”

Takahiro grunted. “Dreeping,” he said. “Crap zone.” This was seriously bad language for Taks.

Val sat down, smiling a humorless smile. “It is inevitable at your age—yours and Maggie’s—that you should still be learning how the world works. It is a little embarrassing that I should be learning the same things now. I should not be here with my shadows—”

“Gruuaa,” I said. “Casimir also called them gruuaa, although he’s from Ukovia.”

“Most terms concerning the use of magic are the same throughout the Commonwealth,” said Val. “I fear then that Casimir may be yet another person who is not as the world says he should be. Yes. Gruuaa. If there is a Newworld word, I don’t know it. My masters said they were stripping me of my magic and that, naked, the best place for me was Newworld. And so I came here, obedient little dokdok that I am.”

“You probably mean clueless drone or dead battery,” I said.

“Dead battery. Yes. Very apt. Except that I am not. But I have no idea how the gruuaa managed to protect me both through the lengthy dispossession process in Orzaskan and the intensive examination at the Newworld boundary.”

Val and I each ate half a sandwich so it didn’t look like it was all for Takahiro—and Takahiro ate the rest. You might almost say wolfed. Like he couldn’t help himself. There were now a lot of gruuaa around Takahiro—looping over his chair, hanging from the picture frames on the wall behind him—and I figured the mob under the table were probably clustering around his feet. The armydar was still going unh unh unh so he probably needed them worse than Val or I did.

“Val,” I said. “The gruuaa. They, uh—”

“They ground, protect, stabilize. And hide. I did not know their gift for concealment was so great.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They hid Casimir and me this afternoon. . . .” I tailed off. I’d nearly died this afternoon—or anyway been disappeared to nobody-knew-where. It had been awful and horrible and terrifying and also amazing and thrilling in a sort of sick way. Also there was Casimir. And yet it seemed almost a no-story after what had happened to Takahiro. After finding out what Taks lived with every day.

“Tell us,” said Val.

“Oh. Well, after—um.” I still wasn’t going to talk about the cobey if I didn’t have to. I’d shoved my wounded algebra book down to the end of the table where it was a little less obvious. “At first it was just Hix, but then there were too many of them—army guys—and they had brought all this gear—and Hix was tired. This big army guy had this wand thing and was about to nail us. Then the gruuaa arrived—I don’t know, did Hix call them somehow?—Loophead, I mean Mongo, broke the army guy’s concentration just long enough and the invisibility curtain dropped over us, I guess. It was pretty electric though, seeing the army guy suddenly not seeing us.” I hoped no one was going to ask me why Hix was tired. It was probably okay about wanting to hide from the army. It was like you felt guilty when you saw a cop car. Even if you didn’t have any reason, you just did.

Mongo, hearing his name, came out from under the table and presented himself hopefully. Mostly I was careful only to use his name when I wanted him to do something—which he would then get a treat for. I made him give me both front paws (one at a time) and roll over (in both directions) and then he got a piece of sandwich. “That’s all,” I said firmly—or he’d run through all his other tricks, including a few, like jumping over the sofa, that I didn’t really want any grown-ups to know about. When dogs jump over things, they tend to push off with their hind legs at the top. I was always careful to check Mongo’s feet when he came indoors. Still. Also it’s a small living room. “But what are they—the gruuaa?”

“We don’t know.”

I stared at Val. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Val laughed, a real laugh. It was a nice sound. “You are too quick. We don’t know what they are, or where they come from, or why they seek us out—perhaps I should say we don’t know who or what else they seek out. But they are parasites—energy parasites. They are attracted—they seem to be attracted—particularly to magical energy.

“Mostly they take what we do not or cannot use—like the pilot fish around the shark—but they will sometimes tap you in a way you will sense.”

I put my hand up to Hix, who was wrapped around my neck again. Not just magical energy. Not. Hix began to hum, as if responding, either to my hand or to my sudden emotional spike of dismay. Could she pick up emotional spikes? Could she sense if they were happy spikes or unhappy spikes? She’d tapped into me today—but that was also when she was hiding Casimir and me all by herself. “Pilot fish and their sharks are sometimes pretty good companions,” I said. If it was about animals, I’d probably have read up on it.

“Yes,” said Val. “Symbiote is perhaps a better word than parasite, and a gruuaa or group of gruuaa and their human or humans are stronger and more flexible and resilient in—er—many situations than those humans alone. Those whom the gruuaa befriend are generally considered lucky. But I have seen old, experienced, commonsensical magicians disturbed when they learn that we are, in effect, the gruuaa’s food.”

I looked down. Mongo hadn’t quite given up on the possibility of more sandwich. He was sitting beside my chair with his head pressing down rather heavily on my thigh. When he saw me looking at him his tail, of course, began to swish back and forth. “Trombone,” I said, and he leaped up and shot away to look for his rubber trombone. It wasn’t a fair command: I should know where it was before I sent him after it. You want to reinforce your training with success. But I wanted my parasitic dog to show off how clever he was. I heard him scurrying around the living room. Not there. He made a quick pass down the hall to the front door, but the dining room door was closed. It wouldn’t be in the dining room. He scampered upstairs. I heard him nudging the door to my bedroom open. It might be under the desk or the bed. No. Not in the bathroom either. (Dog toys occasionally got in the bathroom as a result of the drama of baths.) Bugsuck. It was probably in the back yard then. Leaking dead battery. Use your brain, Margaret Alastrina, not your stupid emotions. He’s not going to find it and he’s going to be unhappy and feel that he’s failed. Which will be your fault.

Mongo flung himself downstairs again. I might be giving up hope but he wasn’t. I was just about to get up and open the back door, which was better than not doing anything, but dogs have a strong sense of fairness and Mongo would know I hadn’t played fair with him, even if he forgave me, which he would. But he went to the back door himself without looking at me. And reared up on his hind legs, took the handle in his mouth and pulled down. The door snicked open.

I had never taught him to do this.

He ran outside and found the trombone under a rosebush. He came dancing back in with it again (I admit he didn’t close the door behind him) and laid it proudly at my feet. “You are wonderful and amazing,” I said. “Sugoi. Double sugoi. Good dog. Good dog.” I got up and fed him the last slice of chicken from Val’s sandwich-making. I also closed the back door. Then I put the plate that had had the sandwiches on it on the floor so he could lick up the crumbs.

“I can live with ‘parasite,’” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

I sat down again and Mongo fell over on his side, sighed deeply, and went to sleep. With his head what should have been really uncomfortably on his trombone. Usually a sleeping Mongo is soothing—it means he isn’t running around looking for something to eat/destroy—and he’d also so totally showed off how clever he really is I should have been happy for a week on the memory. But I wasn’t going to be. I wasn’t. And it wasn’t just Takahiro—or the cobey—

I snapped my head around. There was something behind me. No there wasn’t. I looked at the gruuaa on Taks’ chair, on the wall behind him. They were restless, but then in my experience so far they usually were a little twitchy. But there were sudden little bursts of sparkles in the corners of my vision—there was another one. With that icky silverbug resemblance. Ugh. So far as I knew silverbugs only ever appeared outdoors any more, since they figured out how to wire buildings against them, fifty years or so ago. The company my maybe-crazy aunt (maybe) worked for had done that, long before she was hired, if she was. Our house was only about twenty years old.

“That’s the armydar,” said Takahiro. “That’s making you see stuff that isn’t there.”

“What?” I said intelligently.

“It’s well known that if you have one cobey in an area, you’ll probably have another. It’s one of the reasons the army guys mobilize so fast.”

“It—is?” I said, expanding on my theme of intelligence. Why did people keep telling me this? Was I the only person who didn’t know? “I thought that was just Oldworld.”

“Well, you have to look for the info, if you live in Newworld,” said Takahiro. “Because they don’t want you to know. They want you to think they’re just being thorough. But the information is out there. And the latest is—this. It’s got a fancy name. It’s still armydar. I’ve been hoping I wasn’t going to find out about it first-hand.”

“I thought the quality of the disturbance was rather extreme for any standard scanning device,” said Val. “Takahiro, are you—?”

Takahiro shivered. “The—the pressure is off now, for a while. I won’t change again. I don’t think. But I don’t know. In Japan—my mom took me out of school, the one time a cobey opened really near us. Nothing happened, but I think that’s because she was there. . . .” He shivered again. “But I guess if this goes on for very long I probably won’t be able to stay—me.”

“You are still you as a wolf,” said Val. “It is the stupidity of the people who make rules that is your problem, not what you are.”

I felt like saying, you haven’t been in school with a mean stupid teacher in a long time. But I didn’t say it. It was a horrible grown-up version of mean stupid teachers that was the reason Val was here in Newworld at all.

Val went on: “I would expect that this—er—special armydar will not last long. Your Newworld cobey units are very efficient.”

“I don’t know,” said Takahiro. “According to the geek webnet meetspaces they think they’re onto a way to stop the series thing—stop more cobeys from opening. And if they’re bothered about what happened in the park today—they may keep it running for a while.”

There was a little silence. Takahiro reached out a very long arm and swept my algebra book back toward the center of the table. Then he picked it up, gently, like it was an injured animal. “This is what you used,” he said. “This afternoon, in the park.”

“Yes,” I said, startled. “How did you know?”

“Deductive reasoning,” said Takahiro. He laid it down again. “I can’t think of anything but an emergency that would make you tear pages out of a book.” He ran his fingers lightly down the slightly collapsed spine, like stroking a sleeping puppy. “Then it was another cobey. This afternoon. In the park.”

There was another thick silence. Val was looking fixedly at his hands. Never stare into the eyes of a dog who doesn’t trust you; she will find that threatening. I tried not to growl. “Yes,” I said. Val exhaled: a long, long, long breath. He kept looking at his hands.

After a shorter thinner silence Taks said, “I’ve been—well, I’ve been working on an origami figure for a cobey.” He raised his eyes from my algebra book and looked straight at me. He smiled. Faintly, but it was a smile, and it didn’t fall off his face immediately either. It was the first smile I’d seen since I’d met what I’d thought was a big dog, out in Val’s shed. “I wasn’t trying to find a way to stop one from opening or anything, uh, useful. I was just trying to get my head—and my fingers—around a shape in paper that would reflect the reality of a cobey. . . .” He tailed off. Maybe he knew how loopy he sounded.

“You gizmoheads,” I said. “You’ve got too much charge.” But I understood better than I wanted to. There was something a little freaky about origami, about what it could do. About the way folded paper could explode into something else.

“My mother believed . . .” he said and stopped. “My mother almost . . .” and he stopped again. “It—origami for a cobey—was my project this summer at camp. I almost didn’t get it accepted—neither the physics teacher nor any of the math teachers liked the idea. They thought it meant I was nutso. But the headmaster likes my dad’s money. So he passed it on to the art department and they said fine. You’re allowed to be crazy if it’s art.

“Since you know the rest . . . I’ve been trying to figure it out since my mom died. It was like if I could crack it I could crack me. Never mind that almost everybody who ever wrote an equation—or folded a piece of paper in half—has been looking for the same thing. And this summer it felt close. But what was coming was a lot more like an animal than like physwiz—but if it was an animal, it must be for you, Maggie. The art department gave me an A because I spent so much time on it. But you felt it too, didn’t you? That it wasn’t just—paper?”

“Yes,” I said. “And Hix liked it. Hix thought it was a—a colleague or something.” I got up, stepped over Mongo, and knelt beside my knapsack, feeling for the right little pocket. I pulled out several of my ordinary kami before I found her. The kami looked strangely dull and crooked—my folding isn’t that mediocre—and Takahiro’s new figure was . . . limp. You need paper that will hold a crease properly to do origami with. You’d never use anything soft. I carried her carefully to the table and laid her down. She’s just tired, I thought. Like Hix. I looked at my algebra book again. Looked away.

“I wouldn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t been square,” I said. “I know you can—well, Taks can—make origami out of any shape of paper, but I’m pretty stuck on classical square. And I’ve done so much of it that if you show me square paper I think origami. I know about as much algebra as Loophead here,” I said, looking down at the sleeping Mongo, “but this afternoon I had to do something and—and—oh, I can’t explain! It sounds so girlie to say it felt right. But I was carrying this like warehouse of square paper, and Taks, you’d just showed me your new figure. It—she—was in my knapsack with a lot of paper kami. I’ve been making kami all summer, like—” I stopped. I’d been making kami against Val and his shadows. “And the pages were big enough—I’m nowhere near as good at microscopic folds as you are—and strong enough. I think the wind would have ripped ordinary paper to pieces before I finished folding. It was—it was something to do besides sit there and wait to disappear forever.”

Val had drawn the book toward him and put his hands—gently, as Takahiro had—on the cover. “I’d bandage it, if I were you,” he said.

“Bandage it?” I said. I looked at it again and felt another pang—of conscience. It was a book. It wasn’t a wounded soldier.

“Yes,” said Val. He looked up at me and smiled. “Go on, humor a mad old man.”

He wouldn’t have dared to say that to me two days ago. I smiled back, hesitantly. “Okay.” I picked the book up and—yes, I cradled it, like I would a half-grown puppy at the shelter who doesn’t understand that its ghastly ex-owners dumped it on the street for the crime of being a puppy.

We heard Mom coming in the door then, making crackling noises as her shopping bags bumped each other and the walls—and then there was the unmistakable sound of Ran talking about cars. The smell of the deli’s fabulous chickpea and tomato stew reached us first. I took my knapsack and my algebra book upstairs and then pelted downstairs again before the rest of them ate everything.

Ran’s obliviousness was comforting. I don’t think he even noticed that Takahiro was wearing a dressing gown, let alone Val’s dressing gown. Mom handed Takahiro most of the shopping bags and he went off to the bathroom to change. The gruuaa seemed to stay in the kitchen. Maybe they were interested in the stew too. I ran after him a minute later, with scissors for the tags: “Thanks,” he said, reaching a long bare arm around the door. “The nail clippers weren’t working so well.”

The way he was standing I could see his reflection in the mirror over the sink: that golden-pearl skin gleaming on a long naked back and butt. Oh. Wow. Great butt. Not that I’d seen a lot of other teenage boys’ naked butts to compare it with . . . but I was pretty sure this one would still rate. I don’t think he knew, but I still turned away really fast, giggly with embarrassment.

Mom had turned the radio on and clicked it to the local station. Every time an announcement-type voice came on the conversation faltered as everyone but Ran stopped to listen. But it was only ever about weather and traffic reports and big bargain sales at the mall. With the armydar still thumping away this began to seem kind of surreal. Or maybe . . .

“Hey, Ran,” I said. “You can feel the armydar, can’t you?”

Ran gave me one of his little-brother looks. The one that says, You are so clueless a creepazoid, but Mom’ll get mad if I say so. “You think it’s some kind of critter, and you want to take it to the shelter?” And then he laughed like only a thirteen-year-old boy can laugh.

I was very good. I didn’t say anything that would make Mom mad either. I said, “So you can’t feel it.”

“What do you mean, feel,” said Ran. “It’s airwaves. It’d be like feeling the radio signal.” He reached his hands out and made clutching gestures like a zombie in a horror movie.

Takahiro rejoined us and ate and ate and ate and ate and kept eating. Finally even Ran noticed this, probably because Ran believed himself to be in a permanent state of semi-starvation due to grown-up stinginess. “Holy electricity,” he said to Takahiro, half-admiringly and half-resentfully. “You’re really hungry.”

“Hard day,” Takahiro said offhandedly, and poured more stew into his bowl. Mom had bought the feeds-twelve size and it was almost gone. Val got up and began slicing more bread. I fetched the peanut butter. Val hadn’t adjusted to the Newworld addiction to peanut butter, and Mongo had had the last slice of chicken. I wondered what Casimir thought of peanut butter. I thought of Casimir with both a thrill and a flinch. Already what had happened in the park seemed to have happened to someone else in another century. And I’d only met Casimir yesterday.

Takahiro had been my friend for nearly eight years. I looked up and Taks’ eyes were on me. He looked back at his bowl immediately.

The radio eventually reported blandly that a cobey unit was making a sweep through our town as part of the standard backup procedure after a cobey has been successfully contained. “General Kleinzweig has declared the all clear for the Copperhill event, but further states that a military presence will remain in the area for a few more days.”

Takahiro waited till Ran was “helping” Mom do some mid-meal cleaning up to say quietly, “I bet General Kleinzweig isn’t happy about whatever happened in the park today. Which may be why the fancy armydar is still on.”

“Which might mean another round of knocking on doors and asking innocent civilians difficult questions,” said Val. “Yes.”

Takahiro’s eating was finally beginning to slow down (perhaps because there wasn’t anything left to eat) as Mom put a big platter of deli brownies on the table. “Mom, you’re the best,” I said, and she grinned at me. I felt like I hadn’t seen her grin in years. It made even the armydar less gruesome for a couple of minutes.

She said to Takahiro, “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, but shouldn’t you call your dad or someone and tell him where you are?”

Takahiro said in that blank, flat voice he’d used when he told us about being a werewolf, “Dad’s not home. I don’t know where he is. He hasn’t been around in a few weeks.” He glanced up and I guess we were all staring at him. “It’s all right,” he said. “Kay says he’s phoned a few times. And I call her if I’m going to be really late, and she leaves the porch light on.”

Okay, we were really retro, we’d had these sit-down-and-talk-to-each-other dinners at least twice a week my entire life—which had been fine till Val happened—but I was aware that not everybody did this. Steph used to say she didn’t recognize her mom after she had a haircut, she saw her so rarely, even though they lived in the same house. Becky said that it was really a good thing she had to watch her weight because there was never any food in her house. So my family was weird. But I could see the shock on Mom’s face and Ran even stopped talking.

Mom hastily passed the brownies around again (like any of us needed reminding) and the moment passed. And then we played Scrabble. On a board you take out of a box and unfold, and little plastic tiles with letters on them. Val really liked Scrabble. He said it helped with his English. He’d been totally language-school and academic-seminar fluent when he came here, but living in it is different. It was Val, Takahiro, Ran and me. Mom had brought work home but rather than locking herself away in the Lair she propped her ’top and her cardboard folders at one end of the kitchen table. We had to fish under papers for lost tiles.

I was almost embarrassed. But I didn’t want Takahiro sitting around by himself right now, and if we took him home that was what he’d be doing. I’m who got the Scrabble board out. I knew Val would play, and Taks would be polite, and Taks was Ran’s new hero because of how much he could eat. There’d been a couple of years after Taks started teaching me origami that I’d brought him home pretty often, but that had mostly stopped when we got older and started hanging with different people—and Takahiro had turned into a moody jerk. But now I knew he had reason.

About halfway through the game—while Ran was agonizing over his turn, which involved a j and a z—I got up to make coffee. I’d been pulling Takahiro’s chain for so long I didn’t think about it: I sang out, “Taks-san, kohi ka?” Do you want coffee? He’d say yes or no or he’d ignore me, and then I’d pretend I’d scored another point against all those times he’d looked through me at Peta’s. There’s another joke about this—the English adjective much in Japanese is takusan, which is pronounced “Taks” plus the standard honorific san. Jill started calling poor Taks that when he cracked six feet in ninth grade.

There was a pause, and I remembered what I was doing, and then I was really embarrassed, and promptly made it worse, the way you do, by saying sumimasen, and then I was so embarrassed I wanted to die, and couldn’t remember any words in any language.

“Hai, arigato,” Takahiro said. “Kohi kudasai.” Yes thanks. Coffee please.

I gaped at him. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him say even one word of the language he’d grown up in. My few words of Japanese instantly deserted me, of course. I wasn’t up to conversation. Jill and I just used a bunch of words and phrases we’d looked up on the webnet. I also had a paper copy Japanese dictionary in my bedroom, but I didn’t admit to it. “Oh—um,” I said. “Daijobu.” All right. I probably made more noise with the coffee machine than was strictly necessary.

“Dozo,” I added—the one word I’d managed to remember eight years ago when I gave him my first good crane—and put the mug down in front of him.

“Arigato,” he said. His voice sounded rusty, as if Japanese was a door that hadn’t been opened in a while. “Ii nioi ga shimasu,” he said thoughtfully, as if listening to himself. He looked up at me and smiled. “Smells good.”

Mom only had a vague idea of the Japanese thing. You don’t really discuss winding your semi-friends up with your mom. But she’d raised her eyes from her ’top screen and was looking at us. And Val, who didn’t, or anyway shouldn’t, know anything about it at all, was watching us carefully. Maybe it was just the Japanese words. I didn’t think so. Grown-ups, so clueless most of the time, occasionally catch on at really the wrong moment. (Ran was still going “Zaj. Jaz. Zja.”) I said, “Sorry. Jill and I learned a little—really a little—Japanese a long time ago. Because—er—”

“I’m Japanese,” said Takahiro. “Half.” He was enjoying this. For about a third of a second I was furious. And then I thought, Okay, I guess he’s earned it.

“Wa’,” I said tentatively, which maybe meant “wow,” and he laughed.

“Ee, sugoi,” he said. “Yeah, amazing.” And picked up his coffee mug.

By the end of the game (he won and Val was second by three points) Taks was beginning to look and move more like himself again. His shoulders had dropped by at least two inches and he no longer looked like he was sitting on the edge of his seat because he was expecting to have to run away somewhere. As I put the game away Ran was telling him unbelievably lame thirteen-year-old-boy jokes and Taks wasn’t offering him even minor violence, which is pretty sugoi.

And the gruuaa weren’t juddering around so much. Hix had dangled over my shoulder for most of the game like she was watching. Mongo had been asleep and was now cruising. He was cruising in that I’ve-slept-long-enough-I-want-something-to-happen way. After I put the game away I went to fetch a few more dog biscuits. I had three choices: I could take him for a walk, I could give him something to do, or I could watch while he started running through his repertoire, hoping for the trick that this time would make praise, petting and dog biscuits appear. If none of his tricks worked, then in his despair at discovering he was no longer loved and appreciated he’d look for something someone—probably Ran—had carelessly left at dog level and destroy it tragically. (I have been known to accuse Ran of leaving something at dog level for Mongo to destroy. Like those fabulously expensive sneakers he then decided he didn’t like. Very old history. But it made my job as dog trainer harder. As I pointed out to Mom when she stopped me from gnawing off all of Ran’s top surfaces.) I usually managed not to let it get this far. And Mongo was a lot saner than he’d been as a puppy but he was still the same dog. It was hard to believe he was almost eight years old. He was already doing pirouettes as I closed the cupboard door.

The radio had been burbling away for the last hour with gardening tips and the health benefits of bicycling to work, and I heard a plug for Clare’s shelter. We had a bunch more kittens to find homes for and usually managed to move a few grown-up cats as well during a kitten rush. And then there was the kind of pause that isn’t supposed to happen on the radio and totally gets your attention, and then a new crisp official voice was saying, “I have an announcement. While General Kleinzweig wishes to emphasize that there is no cause for anxiety, he has decided it would be prudent to leave additional patrols in the area overnight, and to reassess the security of the situation in the morning. Please do not be alarmed if you should see soldiers on your street; they are there in your best interests.”

The radio went back to burbling but we sat in silence. Some of the gruuaa climbed up the wall and started doing their spiky dance—the dance that had so freaked me out that first night Val had come to dinner. I looked at Val: the heavy lines down the sides of his mouth seemed even deeper and heavier than usual. The gruuaa had climbed higher and higher on the wall behind him and were making a kind of pointed filled-in-arch shape. All of it kept moving and seething and little bits of wall flickered through as—I don’t know—legs and bodies and heads moved and left gaps, but the overall shape remained weirdly steady. Usually when the gruuaa threw themselves around they just threw themselves around. Val’s grim face and the dark pointed arch behind him made him look like Evil Cobra Man or something. I didn’t like it. It was only two days ago that Val was still my worst enemy.

Val moved, like someone jerking himself out of a bad dream, and the gruuaa fell back down the wall and made thornbushes over the baseboards. I knew that jerk: Jill did it when her foresight was hurting her. I stopped not-liking and started worrying.

Takahiro stood up and said, “Thanks for”—and his eyes fell on Ran and he finished—“everything. Dinner was great. Sorry I ate the last brownie.”

“You aren’t sorry,” said Ran.

“I’m not sorry,” agreed Takahiro. “Maggie, the bus stops at the end of your street, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll take you home,” said Val, standing up like there was a cobey regiment on his shoulders. There wasn’t, but there were a few gruuaa.

“I can catch a—”

“Yes, you can, but I’m going to drive you home.” Val snagged the car keys off the hook on the wall.

Takahiro hesitated.

“I’ll come too,” I said. “If I stay here, Mom’ll make me clean up the kitchen.”

“Or do your homework,” said Mom, but she didn’t mean it. She was worried about Takahiro too.

I waved to Mongo, and he shot out the door in front of us, trailing gruuaa. I didn’t know what happens if you shut a car door on gruuaa and I couldn’t see them in the dark, so I left my door open while I clipped Mongo into his car harness next to me and put my seat belt on. Then I closed the door so cautiously I had to do it twice. Nothing squealed. I really had to learn about doors and gruuaa. Both Taks and Val had just got in the front and closed their doors.

We were on a corner lot of a street near one edge of town, and we had to go clear across town and out the other side to where Takahiro lived. We saw a car turn and come down our street, and several passed by on the main road as we drove toward it. Val stopped at the intersection.

“Look,” whispered Takahiro.

There were three soldiers standing on the sidewalk, watching the cars pass. They had the big orange cobey unit badges on their hats, and one of them was holding something like a video tablet or ’tronic desk up and looking at it.

All three of them turned their heads and looked at us.

Suddenly the car was full of a smell. I can’t describe it, but anyone who has spent as much time at an animal shelter as I have knows smells like it. It’s a clean smell—it’s not about dirty bedding or food bowls or anything—but it’s a critter smell. I reached forward and put my hands on Takahiro’s shoulders. And squeezed. Hard. “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re here, you’re with us, you’re okay.”

His hands came up and grabbed mine. Really hard. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much,” he said in a muffled voice. “This has never happened before. But if I were still weak and hungry I bet I couldn’t . . .”

“You’re not going to,” I said, trying to remember how Ms. Dunstable—who was also Mom’s friend Joanna—made her voice go all solid-state when she was talking to the full school assembly. “You’re going to stay the way you are right now because while Val and I are okay with you no matter what, these soldiers aren’t.” Takahiro was panting—way too much like a dog. Or a wolf. Mongo whined. The soldiers were sauntering toward us, like daring Val to step on the gas and make a run for it. Val was looking out the window, his hands motionless on the steering wheel. I thought, Oh, gods, he’s performing for them. Mongo whined again. Just before the first soldier leaned down to tap on Val’s window Takahiro let go of my hands. I sat back but twisted around and slid my right hand between the car door and Takahiro’s seat, and his hand dropped and grabbed it. Mongo whined a third time and with him straining toward the front seat I could just reach the snap, and flicked it loose. He was through the gap between the seats in a flash, sitting in Takahiro’s lap. Takahiro’s lap was nearly big enough. I saw Taks’ other hand rise, as if involuntarily, and run down Mongo’s silky head and back.

Val opened the window. “Good evening,” he said.

“Good evening, sir,” said the soldier with a kind of ugly politeness that reminded me of a teacher who is about to destroy you and is enjoying making you wait for it. “Our orders are to stop cars at random and our random-number generator chose you.” He showed his teeth and held up his box.

If that’s a random-number generator, I thought, I’m a werewolf. That crawly, itchy, something-behind-you feeling was so strong with him standing next to the car shoving his box almost through the window at Val that I thought I might very well morph into something myself—a gopher or a chipmunk maybe. Takahiro was still breathing in little sharp jerks like he wanted to pant—I could feel it through his hand—but he had his mouth closed. Possibly because Mongo was licking his face.

“And you are, sir?” said the soldier with the box. One of the other two soldiers aimed a flashlight in through the window. The blaze gave me the excuse to keep my eyes down.

“I am Valadi Crudon,” said Val. “This is my stepdaughter, Margaret, and her friend Takahiro.”

Val sounded perfectly calm, as if being stopped and cross-examined by soldiers was all a part of daily life, while I was thinking, What the bugsuck is it to do with you, assface! maybe almost loud enough for their hot machine to pick up. The gruuaa were all crammed against the floor of the car—a lot of them had come with us. Hix was between me and the back of the seat. I was at such a peculiar angle, hanging on to Taks’ hand, that if she was trying to stay hidden, there wasn’t that much shadow for her to disappear into. I was sure the soldiers couldn’t see her, but maybe the box could. The rest of the gruuaa, I realized, were eeling forward, to cluster around Takahiro.

“And you live, sir?” said the soldier with the box.

“Margaret”—nobody called me Margaret; it was like he was talking about someone else, which was maybe just as well—“and I live at the end of this street, 87 Jebali Lane. Takahiro lives on Sunrise Court. We are taking him home.”

“Out late on a school night, sir?” said the soldier with the box, smiling a smile as ugly as his politeness.

“Takahiro is an old friend of the family,” said Val, still calm. “And the school year has only just begun. There is little homework yet.”

The third soldier had been doing something I couldn’t see, behind the glare of the second soldier’s flashlight. I had only a sudden writhe from Hix, and heave from the gruuaa on the floor, as warning. I let go of Taks’ hand and flung myself back in my seat just before this searchlight big enough to light up the Marianas Trench blazed in at us. I could see gruuaa plastered around the window frame next to Taks, over the dashboard, along the strip of seat left empty by Taks’ narrow butt (although there was some hairy black and white Mongo tail in the way too). I thought maybe it was a good thing that the inside of Mom’s old car was a weird swirly pattern of black and grey, even if it meant it always needed vacuuming. Mongo yelped, Takahiro jerked, and Val sat like a stone, his head still a little turned toward the soldier with the box.

The light went out. I slithered around again and felt for Taks’ hand. Although even if they’d caught us holding hands, so? But I was glad they hadn’t.

“That dog shouldn’t be loose in the front seat,” said the soldier with the box, but now he sounded angry.

“No, he shouldn’t,” said Val. “Margaret?”

“Mongo,” I said, and my voice sounded funny, but the soldiers didn’t know what I usually sounded like. “Mongo, come on.”

Taks gave Mongo a last pat and a little push—and let go of my hand again. I reached between the seats and grabbed Mongo’s collar. He let me drag him into the back seat again, and clip on the harness strap.

“You’ll pardon us if we keep an eye out for you when you come back, I’m sure, sir,” said the first soldier, still angry. “For your own good, of course.”

For our own good? I thought, chewing on the insides of my lips.

“Of course,” said Val. “Good evening, sir.” His “sir” sounded like “zir.” He pressed the button and the window glass slid up again. Then he waited patiently for a break in the traffic—there were a lot of people out late on a school night—and drove calmly across the intersection. The critter smell was fading, so I assumed Takahiro was all right. I reached forward again and patted his shoulder.

“What was that?” said Takahiro. He still sounded a little muffled.

I could see, under the flash of passing streetlights, that Val was frowning. “I’m not sure,” he said. “They certainly pulled us over because they were getting readings off their—whatever it was—that made them want to look at us more closely. I didn’t recognize it, but Orzaskan technology is different and I’m several years out of date. I doubt it was generating random numbers. That dazzle at the end was full of assessment radiation: the light was just a, er, blind. They didn’t find what they were hoping for, however, or they would not have let us go so quickly.”

“You told the gruuaa to protect Takahiro,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

Val shrugged. “He’s the most vulnerable of us. If they care to look me up, or if my name is already on their list, they will know who I—was. You, Maggie, have Hix, and through her the other gruuaa will also serve you.”

Takahiro said, “I can’t see them—the gruuaa—but I can feel them, or . . . the wolf can. It’s—it’s a little like someone putting a wet washcloth on your face when you have a fever. It’s better and you relax a little even though you know you’re still sick.”

Val nodded. “Good,” he said.

We were silent till Takahiro had to give Val directions. Sunrise Court was this huge non-development development—all the houses had like twenty bedrooms and eight-car garages and cottages for the staff, and the lots they were on were the size of football fields. You wouldn’t know they had anything to do with each other except that there was this gigantic gate that said Sunrise Court and then once you were through it you had to choose the private drive you wanted. There were only five of them but I still couldn’t imagine five families in Station wanting houses like that. The gate to Takahiro’s drive had to read his palm print before it would let us in.

Taks’ house was dark when we got there except for a porch light. “S’okay,” said Taks. “I told you. Kay’s left the porch light on. That means she got my text.”

“Taks—” I began.

“I’m fine,” he said quickly. “Really. You guys are great. Including Mongo. Thanks. See you tomorrow, Mags,” and he got out. I did too, so I could sit in front. To my surprise he gave me a quick hug—and then sprinted to the house. Well, I don’t think it was a sprint, it’s just his legs are so long. He didn’t look back. “Ja, mata,” I said softly. See you later. But I saw . . . I thought saw . . .

I got back in the car and closed the door. “A lot of the gruuaa are going with Takahiro,” I said.

“Yes,” said Val. “As I said, he’s the most vulnerable of us.”

“What . . .” I said. And then didn’t know how to go on.

Val said, “They respond to fear and anxiety—not perhaps unlike how Mongo does. He may be hoping to sleep on your bed instead of in the kitchen, but he also wishes to comfort you—to stay near his person in her distress. Hix is important in the hierarchy of the company of gruuaa who befriended me many years ago—the rest will have accepted you because she so clearly does.”

I thought, Some day, some other day when there isn’t anything else going on, I want to hear about gruuaa society.

“We have demonstrated Takahiro is important to both of us. They will have drawn their own conclusions. I have some authority by long association, and I can say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I said ‘yes’ to their staying near Takahiro. Which is not to suggest that they always do what I ask them—rather like a dog again, perhaps, although gruuaa plan and conjecture more than dogs. They are neither domestic nor domesticated. But right now they are so pleased to have me recognize them again they are eager to do what I ask.”

“That’s really nice of you,” I said after a pause. Here I was doing something alone after dark with Val. And with his shadows. And saying “nice” to him. He’d called me his stepdaughter to the army creep. I suppose it made us sound more united or something.

Val glanced at me. “Takahiro will be all right once the military leave the area again, taking their equipment with them. Then the gruuaa will come back to us. Unless one of them develops an individual bond with Takahiro and decides to stay.”

“Do they all have names?” I said.

“Oh yes,” said Val. “But I do not know all of their names. I had—have wondered if the names they give us to use are the same as the ones they use to each other. Indeed I am not sure they use names among themselves.”

“But . . .” I said, and then couldn’t think how to go on. “But . . .”

“I was trying to be what I had promised to be,” said Val. “What I believed myself now to be.”

“How long?” I said. I didn’t know how to ask what I was really asking: How long ago was it that you killed your best friend? How do you—what do you do after that? Did your government just—knock you out somehow, like a zoo vet with a trank gun knocks out a tiger? Did they tie you up for two months, two years?

But he heard me anyway. “Seven years,” he said. “It took my government five years to . . . some of it was for their safety, but some of it was for mine.”

He was silent a minute, and then went on: “It has been a somewhat full two years, at last, when they let me go . . . since I came to Newworld. My old habits and instincts have no place here; and I had been out of the ordinary world entirely for five years. That there was a great swathe of my old skills and—facilities simply gone did not seem any more surprising or difficult than much else I found here. That I dreamed of much I had lost—including the gruuaa—that I imagined even that I saw them sometimes—did not seem surprising either. I still see my friend’s face. . . .” He was silent for another moment. “And then there was Elaine.” He shrugged again, that very un-Newworld shrug. “I suppose I will sound old and foolish to you when I say that Elaine has made my new life worthwhile, whatever I have lost.”

No, I thought, I think it’s about the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard anyone say who wasn’t in a book or a movie. For just a flash I was seeing Casimir’s grin in my memory. But then it faded, and it was Takahiro, looking at me levelly over a bowl of chickpea and tomato stew, and then looking away. Saying ee, sugoi, and smiling into his coffee. I barely knew what Takahiro’s smile looked like. I was pretty sure I’d like it if I got the chance to develop a relationship with it.

We stopped at a red light. When the light turned green Val added, “And now I am discovering—I must discover—what I have not lost.”

“And not get screwed up by Kleinzweig’s goons while you’re at it.”

“Yes.”

“Loophead,” I said.

“Yes,” said Val, who had (fortunately) caught on to my Mongo-nickname routine. You want your dog to react to the sound of his name, so you need to call him something else when you don’t want him to react. “I think it is a very good thing you brought him tonight,” Val continued. “We have proven that the army do not have a reading for werewolf, but Takahiro will have been emitting something that their meters might have read, if it weren’t for the gruuaa and—er—Loophead.”

“But they didn’t.”

“They did not, or we would be in three little rooms being asked questions,” said Val grimly. He glanced at me again. “I apologize. Perhaps it is not that way here.”

“I don’t know what way it is, any more,” I said. “But—you said you did have weres in Oldworld.”

“We do,” said Val. “But any not known to the government will be in a great deal of trouble if discovered.” He glanced at me a third time. “It is, as Takahiro said, stress that causes involuntary change. A properly trained and mentored were will not change, even under extreme stress. But the myth lingers that weres are untrustworthy and unpredictable. Therefore the government can do what it likes with you, or your boss or your neighbors will come to learn what you are.”

“That’s—blackmail,” I said, appalled.

“It is,” agreed Val.

When we got to Jebali Lane the soldiers were still there. Still waving their box. The same one strutted over to the corner as Val made the turn. Val stopped and slid the window down again.

“All well, sir?” said the soldier.

“I believe so, zir,” said Val.

The soldier glanced across Val to me. “Glad you’ve got that dog in the back seat,” he said, and patted the roof of the car like giving us permission to live.

“Bugsucker,” I said under my breath as Val slid his window closed and drove on. Val laughed.

Mom was opening the front door before we were out of the car. I thought: Elaine has made my new life worthwhile, whatever I have lost, and looked the other way when he put his arm around her. I slowly clipped Mongo’s lead on and then (quite a lot faster) took him for a walk.