Jill was last. The machine beeped again. I put my hands up to where Hix was leaning against my cheek. “Go,” I whispered. Hix disappeared—I may have seen a little scamper of shadow from me to Jill. She looked at me, frightened, and put her own hand to her face. “If you’d walk back through, please, miss,” said the soldier on the right. Jill turned and stumbled through the archway and then turned around again and walked slowly through, joining Takahiro and me. The machine was silent. The soldier on the left sighed again. I saw Jill twitch and then there was Hix around my neck again, tickling my chin.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said the soldier on the right.
“Sure,” said Takahiro. I noticed he was standing up straighter—as straight as Takahiro ever stood, and his voice sounded normal. The gruuaa had turned themselves into a kind of jacket. Taks wore a lot of black anyway. Usually he looked really good in it. We moved down the corridor toward our homeroom. My heart was slowing down to normal. “What?” I said to him.
“The school’s shielded,” he said softly. “You can feel it, can’t you? It’s better in here. I’d forgotten. This morning I was just thinking, more people around to soak up all that buggie crap in the air. But the school’s shielded because it’s a designated relief shelter, you know? If there ever was a cobey around here they couldn’t immediately contain, this is one of the places they’d tell us to go. That means it’s shielded from armydar too. Which is why they were running us through that thing. I wonder if the machine beeped for anyone else?”
“It better have,” I said, “or somebody is going to notice it was two out of the three of us.”
“What were they looking for?” said Jill, still upset.
Takahiro shrugged—a nice normal Newworld shrug. “Dunno. Contamination, probably. They probably graph it out on a map.”
Senior homerooms were all over the place. It was supposed to help traffic flow in the corridors. Used to be senior homerooms were all near the front so seniors could stroll in after the rush. But we had to hurry. Jill dropped back to walk beside me, lumbering along with my algebra book. “What was that,” she said flatly. “At the archway.”
“Gruuaa,” I said.
She looked at me, and then we went through our door, and there was Mrs. Andover glaring at us.
• • •
I spent the rest of the day worrying about what to do about Takahiro after school. We nodded to each other at lunch like everything was normal, although I noticed him folding paper instead of eating or talking—okay, that was still pretty normal for Taks. Jeremy and Gianni were waving their arms around and pushing a ’top back and forth at each other and not eating much either. But that was normal for them too. When they weren’t redefining the universe they were inventing ’tronic games about redefining the universe.
There were a lot of shadows under Takahiro’s table but I couldn’t tell if any of them were gruuaa. You’d better be there, I thought. We have to leave the school again this afternoon. Although you could go home long enough to check on Val. I frowned. Val didn’t need checking on, did he? Besides, there were still gruuaa at home, just not as many.
I had left my algebra book in my locker. I had told it to stay, but the long down had never become Mongo’s best trick either. I had no idea what I was going to do or say if it suddenly materialized on the lunch table—or I saw it waddling across the floor on its edges. I decided I wasn’t hungry either. I pulled some paper out and started folding too, but I couldn’t settle to anything. Everybody else at the table was full of whatever had happened at the park yesterday. There were some pretty wild theories. None of them wilder than the truth though. I saw Jill glancing at me occasionally, but she didn’t mention that I’d told her I’d been at the park while it was going on. She was the kind of friend who knew when to keep her mouth shut.
What was it I’d folded yesterday, with that awful wind trying to gouge bits out of me, and the universe falling to nothing around me? My fingers had seemed to know what they were doing. Well, but it was some cousin or close personal friend of the figure Taks had given me—I hadn’t done it consciously, but I often tried to figure out one of Taks’ new figures without asking him how he’d done it. Although I almost always did have to ask.
I had put the new one back in my knapsack this morning. I took it out and looked at it for a long time. Her. She’d gone stiff and sharp again, like she’d been re-energized by a good night’s sleep. If an algebra book could regenerate pages and follow me around, why couldn’t an origami figure feel better after a good night’s sleep? I wasn’t thinking about it. If I was thinking about it, which I wasn’t, I could think that I’d imagined her being limp last night. (I wasn’t thinking about the algebra book at all.)
Taks made a lot of critters, and then usually gave them to me. Everyone knew I worked at the shelter and that if you said the wrong thing to me I’d start spouting about proper care and feeding and the right environment to let the critter be itself and natural behavior blah blah blah. It was like flicking a switch. I couldn’t help it, any more than a light bulb could. Takahiro had started officially making me critters in seventh grade, when someone, probably Eddie, he’s always been warugaki, wanted to know what to feed an octopus and said I didn’t know anything. Because I’m like that I looked it up (on my ’top in my lap in math class) and made sure to tell Eddie in front of as many people as possible: mollusks, mostly. Takahiro made me an octopus that day.
I looked at the new critter. I started to fold . . . and then had a kind of vision of a kind of movement inside my locker . . . and hastily turned the little paper thing into a dragon. I was good at dragons, and usually someone wanted it afterward. Laura picked this one up, got out her green pen (green was Laura’s thing), and gave it eyes with long eyelashes. Oh well.
I put Taks’ away and started on another one. This one was not going to end up with long eyelashes. But it kept refusing to fold into a dragon. I would position the paper for a perfect crease and my hand would slip and the crease would go somewhere else. My hands don’t slip when I’m folding paper. I knock over full mugs of coffee on a regular basis, but I’m good at folding paper. I’m just not as good as Takahiro. I turned whatever it was over to make the same (wrong) fold on the other side.
There was an odd little change of air—no, of air pressure, like I was a tire being pumped up—and again I felt Hix stir against my neck. When I noticed that there was a new gentle weight leaning against my ankle I knew what it was. I kept folding.
The bell rang and I picked up my new critter. “Nani, what’s that?” said Laura, waving her dragon like a fan.
“It’s a baku,” I said at random. I had no idea what it was.
“A what?” said Laura.
“A dream eater. If you have nightmares, you put a baku under your pillow.”
“Remind me to ask you to make me one the night before our first algebra test,” said Laura, who was in my class. She stared at it a moment and then shook her head, got to her feet, and picked up her knapsack. I bent down and picked up my algebra book, which was now under my chair. I tucked my new paper critter inside the front cover.
“You brought your algebra book to lunch?” said Laura. “Magsie, you are a sick woman.”
“It doesn’t fit in my locker,” I said, almost truthfully.
“Isn’t it the worst?” said Laura. “Whoever designed the dreeping thing really wanted to punish us. You know calculus doesn’t even have textbooks? It’s all on their ’tops.”
“If you’d let me help you last year,” said Jill, “you too could be in textbook-free calc.”
“Thanks, I’d rather carry around a book almost as heavy as my car,” said Laura. “See you.”
Jill said quietly, “I saw you put—well, wedge—your algebra book in your locker before lunch. And I walked here with you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Is your algebra book
a—um—gruuaa?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I remembered Hix trying to protect the algebra book too when we went through the soldiers’ scanner.
The cafeteria was emptying out. “You said you had a lot to tell me,” said Jill.
“Yes, and a lot of it isn’t mine to tell,” I said. Without meaning to I reached up and touched Hix. It should have looked like I was patting myself on the collarbones for some reason but Jill said, “That’s your gruuaa. Isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” I said.
“And it’s what got me through the soldiers’ thing this morning.”
“She,” I said. “Yes.”
The second bell rang. “We’re going to be late,” I said. “Can you take Takahiro and me to the shelter after school?”
“Only if we don’t get detention,” said Jill, and we sprinted for the door. The late bell was just going when we burst into Mr. Jonadab’s classroom. Mrs. Andover would have marked us down, but he just smiled.
CHAPTER 10
THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR ARCHWAY WERE STILL there when we left, but we didn’t have to walk through it again. I didn’t like the way they were looking at us, but that was probably my guilty conscience. I was standing close enough to Takahiro that I felt him quiver when we opened the front door and spilled out onto the concrete. “Taks,” I said.
“I’m okay,” he said quickly. “It’s not as bad as it was this morning.”
“Yes it is,” I said, fighting the urge to brush myself off, as if it was something you could brush off. It was nothing like the soft tickliness of Hix. And despite Hix and Taks’ shadow coat we were still feeling it. I glanced around, wondering if I’d catch any of the other students uncomfortably or absentmindedly trying to sweep invisible crawling things off themselves. I saw Jeremy with his shoulders up around his ears, scowling so hard his eyes had disappeared under his eyebrows and his hands clawing at the opposite shoulders, but that was just Jeremy in the throes of game invention.
Takahiro sighed. “Okay. Yes, it’s just as bad. But your—things—are really helping. Thanks.”
“Gruuaa,” I said. “But don’t thank me. Thank Val.”
Jill pulled up in the Mammothmobile and I opened the front door and shoved Taks in in front of me and climbed in after him. “Where are you taking me?” he said. “Should I be worried?”
“Yes,” said Jill, staring at the road. “You’re—he’s—covered in—in gruuaa. I can see them better when I’m not looking at them. They look kind of like feather boas. Only they sparkle. Sort of. And they have too many eyes. And I think those are legs. Too many legs. Maggie, what is going on?”
She saw them better than I did. “A cobey opened in the park yesterday and we’re being taken over by niddles,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“No. Then it was a cobey,” said Jill.
“Yeah,” I said. “Um.”
Jill said carefully, “How do you know it was a cobey? And why wasn’t there an announcement?”
I tried to think of some other way to say it. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. But I always told her everything. And it was bad enough I couldn’t tell her about Takahiro. “I closed it down,” I said.
Jill exhaled rather hard. “You. A cobey,” she said. “You closed a cobey?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was, except Casimir told me.”
“Casimir?” said Jill. “You didn’t know what it was and you closed it? It takes a regiment to close a cobey. According to the board banners we’ve got two cobey units in this town now!”
I looked down at the floor of the car where the algebra book was leaning lovingly against my leg again. “Yeah. Well,” I said. “Maybe Casimir was wrong.”
“Talk to me, damn it!” said Jill.
“I don’t know, okay?” I said. “I don’t dreeping know! I pulled some pages out of my algebra book and folded them up and threw them into this big—big—wind and it went away!”
“And now your algebra book won’t stay in your locker and is following you around,” said Jill.
“Yeah,” I said. “At least you saw that.”
There was a pause. “At least I saw that,” said Jill. Another pause. “Why am I taking you to the shelter like it’s some safe place? None of us is a homeless lost animal, are we?”
The silence that followed this remark was so deadly that Jill took her eyes off the road for a second and looked at us. “What? Now what? What else? What else?”
“I’m a werewolf,” said Takahiro matter-of-factly.
The car did a tiny zigzag, but only a tiny one. “A werewolf,” Jill said cautiously. “This isn’t a joke, right?”
“No,” said Taks. “It’s not a joke. And stress makes me turn. This armydar stresses me hard.”
“Yeah,” said Jill. “The scans were never like this. It makes me feel like a silverbug with the zapper turned on. The animal shelter?”
I had a headache. Maybe it was the armydar. Maybe I was going to turn into a turkey or a mutant chipmunk. “I don’t understand how any of this works, okay? But the gruuaa suck up random energy or they block the fact that stuff the niddles aren’t going to like is present or something like that. Oh, Val’s a magician,” I added, and the car did another zigzag.
“He can’t be,” Jill said, sounding increasingly stressed herself. “They’d’ve never let him into the country.”
“Gruuaa,” I said. “He came with a lot of gruuaa.”
“Those shadows on the shed,” said Jill, remembering.
“Yeah,” I said. “He didn’t know. He didn’t know they were there till—till night before last.” Jill shot me a look but didn’t interrupt. I went on: “He’s been teaching dead batteries that the square root of ninety-six is double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”
Jill snorted.
“—and people like Taks that—that science can make the square root of ninety-six be double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”
“For the record,” said Takahiro, “my project is about how we define the integrity of one world as differentiated from another.”
“Holy electricity,” said Jill. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“—and back wherever Val is from he was . . . I guess he was a pretty big machine.”
“Not machine,” said Jill. “Magician.”
“Whatever,” I said. “But the gruuaa are working really hard and Taks is still not happy, you know? Neither am I. And I didn’t like that scanner thing at all, and the way it almost . . . And Mongo really liked Taks . . . um . . .”
“As a wolf,” said Takahiro. “Yeah. I noticed that. Kay’s cat avoids me like—well, avoids me for weeks after, but she would, wouldn’t she? She’s a cat.”
“As a wolf?” squeaked Jill. I could see her clutching the steering wheel but the car didn’t zigzag this time.
“Yeah,” said Takahiro. “Yesterday. Val saved my life. And after . . . these are his gruuaa.” He did that vague touching thing you do when you’re groping in the dark for something that is probably fragile, if you can find it. “He sent them home with me.”
“And when we took him home, the soldiers at the corner stopped us, but Mongo sat in Taks’ lap and I think that helped too,” I said. “Val has tutorials till about six tonight. So we go to the shelter first. Where I’m hoping whatever—er—the armydar either puts out or picks up may be a little more confused. If it works we might even adopt someone.”
“Do you have a wolfhound?” said Takahiro.
“Yes, actually,” I said. “Her name’s Bella. She’s one of the Family. They have to turn the armydar off eventually, don’t they?”
“Mom says it can be weeks if it’s a big cobey,” said Jill unhappily. “First there was Copperhill and now—well, whatever they think happened, they’re slapping u
s down hard with this new amped-up armydar.”
“What’s it supposed to do?” I said. I think I may have howled.
“It’s supposed to stop it—them—from spreading. Cobeys. They run in series,” said Jill. “I guess they think yesterday was trying to be a second cobey.”
“Does everyone but me know that cobeys run in series?” I said. Takahiro’s hands had found something and were cradling it. It was liking this: it twinkled. But I was pretty sure he’d heard “weeks.” Maybe he already knew.
“Everybody who doesn’t zone out and end up in Enhanced Algebra with the biggest textbook on the planet, yes,” said Jill.
Jill turned in through the shelter gate. Rob Roy and Gertrude were barking, but Rob Roy and Gertrude were always barking. Clare came out of the office but her face cleared when she recognized us. “I could really use some help,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re all here to work? The army have been here half the day—it’s an animal shelter, are they expecting me to be hiding a cobey generator in an empty kennel?—and nothing’s done.”
“Sure,” said Jill. “I can spare a couple of hours.”
“Cats don’t like me much,” said Takahiro. “I’m okay with dogs.”
“Can you face cleaning kennels?” said Clare, looking up at him and smiling.
He smiled back. Good. Maybe the shelter had been one of my better ideas. “Can’t be worse than Mrs. Andover,” he said.
Clare laughed. “Joan Andover? She was a dead battery when she was your age and still Joan Ricco. I’d rather clean kennels too.”
• • •
It was better at the shelter. Clare was completely obsessed, and spent all her spare time getting grants from various animal charities and papering downtown with posters for volunteer dog walkers and special critter-education events—that’s human education about critters, you know, not the other way around—and open days, and as a result the animals at the Orchard Shelter were a lot happier and better socialized than in most shelters. (Or a lot of people’s homes, but we won’t go there.) The turnover for all the standard adoptable critters was high but Clare managed to sort of solder the ones that were too old or too ugly or too large or too cranky or too something into a kind of on-site family—the Family—which sometimes made them so charming to susceptible visitors a few of them got adopted after all. (Some of these also got brought back. Clare never refused a returnee.) But the soldering thing—I think it made a kind of critter-energy net. You felt it—okay, I felt it—as you turned up the driveway and through the gate that had Orchard Shelter on the left-hand post. I was hoping that even the armydar would have trouble punching through it.
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