Shadows

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

  I had stopped to stare at him better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mental effects,” I said.

  He stopped nodding. “It is very disorienting—”

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

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

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

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

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

  “But your system works.”

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

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

  “Except Jill,” I said. “Yes.”

  “I will not go mad,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I wanted to see you again,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Casimir—” I said, or croaked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No,” I said.

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

  What?

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