Shadows

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

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

  Magic was fatal for your friend, I thought.

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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