Thresholds

by Kiriki Hoffman, Nina

  “What do we do with it?” asked Harper.

  “Leave it alone.” Loostra almost sang her answer.

  “But the child is not a traveler,” said Harper. “She didn’t step into this risk with knowledge. This pairing is wrong.”

  “Leave it alone,” Loostra sang. “There is nothing you can do. They are bonded now, and nothing can change that.” Its head turned, aiming its eye spots toward her wrist, one at a time. “Child, may I touch it?”

  “You won’t hurt it?”

  “I won’t hurt it.”

  Maya lifted her wrist higher. One hard-shelled limb drifted down until the very tip touched her so lightly she couldn’t feel it. Lemon yellow color formed on the egg and rayed out across all the other colors. Maya felt a weird click under her skin.

  Loostra gasped and jerked her leg away.

  “Of course it can already defend itself and its host. I should have known,” she said. “Thank you, Maya.” She turned to Harper. “This answers one part of a complicated question.”

  Harper nodded. “One sissimi we have found. Two more are still lost. And this invasion and theft was orchestrated by the Krithi, or so we believe.”

  Loostra hissed. “So I had heard—it travels on the info web—but I had hoped the rumor was wrong.”

  Harper nodded to Maya. “You heard the boy say ‘Krithi’?” he asked.

  “You know I did,” Maya said. He was the one who had forced her to repeat Chikuvny Boy’s words.

  “It’s the first we’ve heard of them escaping the interdict,” Harper said.

  “The monitors are checking the nurseries for evidence, and the Force has been alerted,” said Loostra. “You will tell us when you learn more. For now, I am ready to go home.”

  “How do we handle this situation?” Harper asked, waving toward Maya.

  “With reason. With friendship. With family.” She dropped her front end and coiled into a spiral. “Thank you for showing me your friend,” she said to Maya.

  “Have you seen one before?” Maya asked.

  “Never in its embryo state.”

  “What is its other state? What happens when it hatches?” Maya cupped her right hand over the egg.

  “It is always different. You will be the first to know.”

  “Oh,” said Maya. “Thanks.” Thanks a lot. Very helpful.

  Loostra uncoiled and clattered back into the center of the circle of six, the portal team. “Farewell.”

  The team lifted their arms. The hum started again, low and drumming under their feet, and the colors danced in the air. Maya watched, entranced, snapping one mental picture after another.

  The colors brightened, then faded, and Loostra was gone.

  SIXTEEN

  They wound their way back up to the solar room. Harper took the central cushion again, flanked by the Tree Sisters. He gestured to the five young people, who dropped to the carpet in front of him.

  Maya unpacked her sketchpad, thinking about Loostra and how to draw her, then checked her watch. Past five o’clock. “Excuse me,” she said. “I know things are still messy, but I have to go home now.”

  “That is not possible,” said Harper.

  “What? ” Maya jumped up, panicked. She grabbed her pack and turned toward the door.

  Rowan caught her shoulders. “He doesn’t mean you can’t ever go home,” he said.

  Heat gathered at Maya’s left wrist, arrowed up her arm, cloaked her shoulders. Something crackled. Rowan cried out and released her. His palms were bright red. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

  Maya, ready to run, glanced at her wrist. The egg had gone dark again, with red streaks across it. It was almost growling, an agitation under her skin like water boiling.

  “Shh, shh, shh,” she whispered, and pressed it against her cheek, her eyes closed. It felt hotter than before, but as she crooned to it, the bubbling against her cheek subsided.

  Gwenda had jumped up. She clasped one hand with the other, maybe to stop herself from trying to touch Maya the way Rowan had. “Maya. Tell the sissimi we’re not threatening you. What the Elder means is we can’t let you go until we explain a little more. You’ll get home soon. I promise.”

  Maya lowered her hand and studied her egg bump. The color had softened to a dark, velvety blue, with no red streaks. “We’re listening.”

  Harper sighed, and glanced at the Tree Sisters. They nodded. “Maya,” he said quietly, “if we cannot return you to your normal life, we have another way to help. Will you let us make you part of our family?”

  “But I have a family already.” She thought longingly of them, remembered how everybody had been at breakfast. Harried, together, irritated, used to each other. It all seemed so far away now, oddly precious.

  “You have new problems now, things your other family won’t know how to handle.”

  “I don’t even know you. All I know is you keep ordering me around, and I don’t like it.”

  Gwenda touched Maya’s sleeve. “Let us make you part of our family. Then we can tell you everything.”

  “Let us make you part of our family,” Benjamin said. “Then you can travel.” He glanced toward the floor as though he could see all the way down to the portal cavern.

  “But I just got here,” she said. She had just been uprooted from the place she had spent her entire life and moved to Spores Ferry, which was proving more different from Catspaw, Idaho, than she had ever imagined. She felt totally unready to leave anybody she loved. She just wanted to hold on to her family tighter, stop them from slipping away the way Stephanie had. “I don’t want to travel.”

  Although . . . to go through the light—the portal—to other places? Places where skies came in other colors, cities grew spikes, and things that weren’t human locomoted over strange streets.

  So much to draw.

  “You don’t have to go anywhere until you’re ready,” said the moon-pendant Tree Sister. She had a beautiful smile.

  Maya stared at her feet, moved them back and forth on the carpet. The shushing noises helped her think. She would have more family, these Janus House people, if they adopted her. She might not make friends with the other kids at school, but she could travel in the JH pack.

  She glanced at Rowan, a guy she wasn’t sure she’d want for a cousin after seeing the way he treated his family. She didn’t think he’d want her for a cousin, either, so she was surprised when he said, “Let us make you part of our family. You’re gifted.” He nodded toward her sketchpad, which she’d dropped when she jumped to her feet. “We can use that.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. Rowan sounded grumpy, but he also sounded sincere.

  “Though you have to leave those sketches here, the stuff that shows our secret side.”

  “What?” she said.

  “You have to help us keep our secrets. That’s what family does.”

  “If we make you part of our family, it doesn’t mean you lose your own family,” said the moon-pendant Tree Sister. “It only means you add ours.”

  “Does it mean you’ll order me around even more than you already have?” she asked Harper.

  He smiled. “Probably,” he said. “We’re the Elders. We have that power. We try to use it only when necessary.”

  Maya paused, then said, “If people in your family can’t travel farther than thirty miles from the portal—I don’t—Will I be trapped, too?”

  “That won’t happen to you, child,” said the star-earring Tree Sister. “You are not of our blood. You don’t have our restrictions knitted into your bones. You will be our choice child, not our blood child.”

  “Can’t I do the giri thing, like Travis? Find out what’s going on here and just not talk about it?”

  “That’s not enough,” Harper said. “You have been touched and changed by something that came through a portal, though it wasn’t one of ours. Portals are our business. We can’t abandon you unhelped. A family tie will give us extra ways to aid you.” He sighed and said, “Well, give it some thought. In the
meantime, I will take another precaution.” He came and knelt in front of her. “Maya, Travis,” he said, “stick out your tongues.”

  They did it. He was being an Elder again: Maya didn’t know how not to do it. Travis, beside her, opened his mouth, too, and stuck his tongue out, his face a picture of surprise, changing to panic. It was the first time Harper had used command power on Travis, Maya thought. No wonder he was surprised.

  Harper tapped each of their tongues with his thumb.

  A taste of licorice crossed Maya’s tongue, and she felt a prickly shock shoot through her. Harper’s hand lifted before the egg could strike back. “There’s your silence,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Neither of you can speak about what you’ve seen to outsiders now. Maya, Rowan is right: draw all you like, but leave the pictures here. Travis, we will have a more formal meeting and lay out the articles of giri agreement soon. Maya, if you let us make you part of our family, we’ll introduce you to all of us and have a welcoming celebration for you . . . after we have a full council meeting about the Krithi, which I will call tonight. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “What’s with these Krithi, anyway?” Maya asked. “Why is everybody so mad at them?”

  “Centuries ago, we opened portals to the Krithi home-world. They took over those portals, closed some, and used others to conquer. We didn’t have a very organized council then, and we didn’t discover what they had done until two generations later, when they had killed or enslaved all the people on their conquest planet. When we found out what they had done, we undid it as best we could, shut their portals, and banned their species from ever traveling portalwise again. It’s the worst punishment we know.

  “Now it appears they’ve found a way around our barriers. We need whatever you can tell us about their plans.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “I’ve told you everything,” Maya said.

  “You may know more than you know, and your companion might know things as well.”

  She covered the egg with her hand. How could he question it? He didn’t know it could talk. She didn’t want him to know. If he knew, maybe he would be able to order the egg around, too.

  “We’ll worry about that tomorrow. I have another gift I’d like to give you.”

  Silence was a gift, she supposed, though she still wasn’t sure how it was going to work. “Yeah? I don’t like your gifts. Can I say no this time?” she asked.

  “You may.” He reached into the folds of his orange robe, pulled out something. “It will help if you accept this one, though. Hold out your hand.”

  “Just show me, okay? ” She didn’t want him to tap her hand and cast some other kind of spell on her.

  He showed her a little ring of braided silver, gold, and copper. “This can connect you to us. Choose a finger for it. You can use it to call us when you need us, and it will tell us where you are.”

  “A tracker,” she said. Like the GPS in her phone, only the Janus House protection stopped the phone’s signal from getting out, and nobody could use it to find her while she was inside. If she wore a Janus House tracking device, bossy Elders would know where to find her. Well, if she didn’t want them to, she could take it off, same way she could ditch her phone.

  He nodded. “A tracker. A key to open doors here.” He dropped it into her hand.

  It fizzed against her palm, then went quiet. She held it close to her egg. The egg didn’t spark or turn dark, so maybe it was okay.

  She took a big breath and slid the ring onto the middle finger of her right hand. It fit perfectly.

  “Thank you,” Harper said. “Travis, we will discuss whether you want one of these when we have our formal meeting.” His shoulders relaxed, which made Maya realize he might be as tense about all this as she was. “Maya, this will help until we make you part of our family. After that, we will be connected in other ways. For now, I would like to send Gwenda home with you.”

  “Why?” Maya wasn’t sure how to explain to her parents about bringing a guest home on her first day of school. Nobody in her family did that, although they were a guest-friendly household. Everybody needed time to settle into their new routine.

  Plus, it felt more like Harper was sending a spy, rather than a friend.

  “We don’t know much about sissimi, but we have learned this much: The sissimi has bonded to you. It bonds close to its hatching time. We have no clear information on what the hatching entails, but the event is imminent,” Harper said. “Wouldn’t you like some help when that happens?”

  “Yes,” said Maya. “Oh, yes.” Her right hand covered her egg, a gesture that was becoming a habit. She had forgotten that she wasn’t going to have the egg on her arm forever.

  The egg gave a sleepy purr. She peeked under her hand and saw that it had turned rose red, with small yellow flowers.

  “Gwenda?” Harper said. “Are you ready for this task?”

  “Yes, Uncle. Well, I need my bag.”

  He smiled and stood. He waved a hand. “You may go.”

  At least it wasn’t an order, Maya thought, repacking her sketchpad.

  Rowan stopped her and held out his hand.

  She glared at him.

  “I’ll keep it safe for you. You can have it back as soon as you get here,” he said, and for once he didn’t look mean or angry, just serious.

  She sighed and handed him the sketchpad.

  Gwenda and Benjamin led Travis and Maya back to Benjamin’s apartment.

  Maya was tired and hungry again. It was almost six P.M., way past curfew.

  “I know it’s late. I’ll be right back.” Gwenda left.

  Benjamin, Travis, and Maya stood in Benjamin’s living room.

  “Um,” said Maya.

  “First day of school. Epic,” said Travis. “This year is so going to be different.”

  “I’m sorry you got such a rough start,” Benjamin said to Maya. “It’s probably not what you want to hear, but I’m glad you sat with us, Maya.”

  She tried out a smile. It felt almost natural.

  “Gotta go,” said Travis. “I’m way beyond late, and now I have a ton of things to talk over with Oma. I wonder if that tongue thing the old dude did to us will mess that up. See you tomorrow.” He waved and strode out just as Gwenda returned. She had a bulging tapestry bag over her shoulder.

  “Wait, Travis!” Benjamin called. Travis paused with his hand on the knob of the entrance door. “You have to clean up before you leave. Jump up and down on this.” He pointed to a thick, woven, bristly mat to the left of the double doorway. “You have to do this every time you leave the building, if you’ve been below.”

  “I’ll show you.” Gwenda stepped onto the mat, shuffled her feet, shook out her skirts, shirt, and shawl, then combed her fingers through her hair. Particles of gleaming, fragrant dust dropped to the carpet and vanished. A very localized breeze swept around her, drawing even more gilt dust from her clothing. “Do the stop, stomp, and shake. It’s how we leave the chikuvny at home.”

  Travis looked down at his jeans and T-shirt, shrugged, then stepped onto the mat. The wind lifted his hair. “Stellar,” he said, trying out dance moves or maybe martial arts stances before brushing his hands over his shoulders, chest, and legs.

  Maya looked at the sleeves of her hoodie. Not much fairy dust. She stepped onto the mat when Travis stepped off, and slapped her jeans, shook her backpack. The mat sucked air and gold dust down into itself. “Whoa!” Maya said, dancing.

  “Maya!” cried Mom as Maya and Gwenda came in through the kitchen door, which was unlocked, to Maya’s relief.

  Maya shoved her left hand into her pocket and cradled her egg against her side.

  “Where have you been?” Dad demanded. “We were about to call the police!”

  “Candra’s out looking for you right now,” Mom said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Maya said.

  “Maya got sick on the way home from school and stopped at my house,” said Gwenda. “I�
��m Gwenda, and I live next door.” She waved toward Janus House. “We were closer, and my aunt’s a doctor.”

  “You’re sick?” Mom came and felt Maya’s forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Are you all right now?”

  “I think—”

  “What happened?”

  “I—” Her eyes heated. Tears spilled.

  “Did someone hurt you? What happened?” Mom hugged her. Dad came and put his arms around her, too.

  “I think I’m okay now. I’m so sorry I’m late.”

  “But you’re okay?” Dad asked.

  Maya rubbed her eye with her right fist and nodded. “I’m better now.”

  “When you didn’t call—” Dad said.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “She did try to call. Our house has a tin roof. No cell service, and most of us don’t have phones,” said Gwenda. “If it happens again, I’ll send one of my cousins over to let you know where she is.”

  “Did your aunt say what was wrong with her?” Mom asked.

  “A blood sugar and stress thing, nothing serious or permanent.”

  “Stress? Oh, honey, I thought you were finished with—”

  Maya was stunned by how good a liar Gwenda was. She realized Mom must be thinking about how sad, angry, and distracted Maya had been last spring and summer. Sometimes she slept for twelve or thirteen hours. Other times she would be going along fine, and suddenly she would stagger, remembering that Stephanie was gone. Tears had come when she was in the middle of singing some song Stephanie had loved and used to harmonize with, or in response to a stupid ad on TV. How strange grief had been, ambushing her at random moments.

  The egg purred. She wondered what color it was now, but she couldn’t look. She felt reassured and calmed by the gentle vibration.

  “Guess not,” Maya said to her mother.

  Peter rushed in from the dining room. “You’re here!” he said.

  “Yep. Sorry I’m late.”