Shadows

  I could feel my mouth pulling itself into that “I don’t understand and I’m sure I don’t want to” smile. Jill and I used to see it on the face of our first-grade teacher a lot. “Whatever you’re talking about—it’s nothing to do with me. Jill calls me Magdag when she wants to be especially annoying. I don’t know what happened just now. I don’t even know if that was . . .” I couldn’t say “cobey,” as if saying it out loud would bring it back. I didn’t want to admit that that part of what he was talking about might be true. But none of the rest of it was. None.

  He began to look unhappy and confused, which would make two of us. “I don’t . . .” And then his face changed again: dismay, disappointment. “Is it that you may not speak to me of these things because I am not a citizen of your country? I did wonder, some of the questions they asked, before they would issue me a visa. I don’t know—”

  “What?” I said. “Citizen? Country? What are you talking about? I have no idea what just happened—I can’t even squash a silverbug, it makes me sick! I don’t know why I wrecked my algebra book! I mean—not to—know, not like I can tell you. I—I just—” I reached up and touched Hix, and felt that almost-but-not-quite imaginary flicker against my cheek in response. Meeting her last night for the first time had almost been too much for me—this morning I almost ran away when she climbed up my arm for the first time—and now here I was using her for reassurance.

  Casimir’s eyes had followed my hand and his expression softened a little. “Ah,” he said.

  “Can you see her?” I said. This entire conversation was so far off my radar I didn’t know what galaxy I was in any more. And I was getting farther away from the one I knew with every word. Especially the words I didn’t know.

  “I can see the edge of a darkness,” he said. “A shadow that is not quite your body or my body or the trees. I would not see—her?—if I were not thinking of the mgdaga, who I would expect to have attendant guldagi—and whose gruuaa indeed held me here while you addressed the nazok. But I believe the gruuaa cannot fully appear in this wo—here,” he said. “They are one of the guldagi.”

  “In this world,” I said slowly. “You started to say in this world.”

  “Yes,” said Casimir. “But I did not know if . . .”

  He trailed off again. I was so not enjoying this conversation with the most beautiful boy I had ever met. Aside from the fact that he had been interested in me for reasons other than, uh, me. Not that this was a surprise. I took a deep breath. “Let’s go back a little. Let’s, uh, pretend that I’m totally stupid and clueless, okay? Tell me what just happened. With the wind and the weirdness and everything.”

  Now he was wearing that “I don’t understand” smile. Apparently it was the same smile in Ukovia. It looked a lot better on him than it had on my first-grade teacher. “It was a nazok. What you call a cobey. Since it is the second, we must consider the likelihood there will be a third.”

  I didn’t want to consider anything. Except for the sitting-alone-with-Casimir-in-the-park-on-a-beautiful-day part, I wanted all of this to go away. The all of the rest of it that was ruining the alone-with-Casimir part. The rest of it would include that he only wanted to be here with me because I was this historical thing. “But—it’s gone. It’s gone, isn’t it? They—cobeys—don’t do that.”

  He made another odd gesture with his hands—a kind of folding over and winding together gesture. “They do if they are properly bound. And it is much likelier they will be properly bound if someone who can do this is present as the nazok opens. Which is why foreseers are so important to us. My mother is a foreseer. In Eruopa and the Slavic Commonwealth if everywhere that had been disrupted by a nazok was lost, there would be very little human land left.”

  I was silent a moment. I knew that about binding, of course; I was forgetting my basic history. Oldworld was pretty much a patchwork quilt of shut-down cobeys; most of Newworld was more like your favorite jeans with mends on the knees and the butt and one or two where you’d torn yourself up on your mom’s rosebushes or a particularly badly placed nail. They were still mostly jeans.

  But it had been kind of an overexciting few minutes, just now, and it was easy to forget stuff, like your name and what day of the week it was. And here in Newworld we were taught to Run and Report. There hadn’t been time to run. And it didn’t look like there was anything left to report.

  He glanced at me. “Usually a team is sent when a foreseer predicts a nazok. But a mgdaga could perhaps bind a nazok alone.”

  I ignored this. “Is this the way they usually happen?” Was there a “usually” about cobeys? “Like—” Like what? Like a spider being washed down the kitchen sink? “Like a storm out of nowhere?”

  He shook his head. “Not one big enough to swallow two people. That is why I don’t understand why I did not sense its approach. My Oldworld instincts are of even less use here than I had begun to realize.

  “Little ones may happen unexpectedly—ones like what you call silverbugs, only bigger. It is not wise to step on them, however; when they burst, they will throw you down, and the earth will not be where you expect it, when you fall down in the ordinary way.” He smiled. “Every small boy discovers this. Myself included.”

  I wasn’t crazy about big ordinary bugs—beetles and spiders and things, although the next spider I found in the sink I’d catch in a glass and put outdoors. The idea of big silverbugs made me totally queasy. “Big enough to swallow two people,” I repeated, like it was a lesson I was trying to learn. I didn’t want to learn it.

  He looked at me again. Steadily, without glancing away. I had to look away. It was funny in a way because Run and Report, with the “don’t think about it” that goes with it, always made me a little cranky, but I assumed it was either because I was a control freak or because I had a mad aunt (maybe) from her knowing too much about physwiz. “People disappear when big cobeys open,” said Casimir. “No one knows where they go. But there has been work done on trying to find out. My trust thinks Professor Hlinka, at Runyon, is close to a discovery about this; it is why they placed me here.”

  Several things jostled for position in my poor bewildered brain. The first one was: his trust must think a lot of him. But, wearily, this thought also came: someone is always close to a breakthrough. The breakthrough never arrives. I knew people occasionally disappeared. Gwenda said it happened oftener than was reported. Not one of them has ever come back but they’ve never found any bodies either. I remembered this. With my name and what day of the week it was: Thursday. One more day till the first weekend of my senior year. The longest short week of my life.

  I was still dazed from—whatever had happened—but I had a weird sense of uneasiness. A weird increasing sense of uneasiness. I looked around. Not that I knew what I was looking for. Another cobey? Please the holy electric gods not. Would I know what one looked like after this? I didn’t want to find out. The afternoon was still clear and sunny and the breeze mild and smelling of leaves and that sharp clean smell of fast-running river water.

  To me the breeze also smelled of Hix. She shifted a little and I thought, I’m picking it up from her. She’s worried about something. Her anxiety was spilling over me like pizza sauce over your last clean shirt. “I—I think maybe we should get going,” I said, and began to struggle to my feet. I was suddenly so tired that the weightless Hix felt like an iron chain. I picked up my algebra book and looked sadly at my gigantic knapsack . . . and if I wasn’t already in desperate unrequited love with him (to him I was a historical figure like a statue or a chapter in a book) I’d have fallen in love with Casimir when he picked it up as if it was totally his problem (in Ukovia they teach you to be polite to little old ladies and historical figures).

  “Yes,” he said. He was frowning slightly. It made his eyebrows arch more and his eyes looked bigger and darker than ever. Aaaugh. As I stepped toward him, dropping each foot back to the ground again like I wasn?
??t sure it belonged to me, he reached out and grabbed my hand again. Whoa. That wasn’t why I was walking like a little old lady who had come out without her cane (how did historical figures walk?) but hey, whatever. And we did move a little faster that way. He wasn’t exactly dragging me but I was walking a little harder to keep up. Some of the long sinuous Hix had moved to the top of my head again, to her lookout point. I could still feel her on my left shoulder, but not my right, and I thought I could feel feet on my forehead again. It was like wearing a fuzzy invisible crown.

  Casimir and Hix were right. We were out of the trees and crossing the meadow when the army arrived. I was having to concentrate on walking and carrying my algebra book at the same time—I felt like “I” was a committee arguing among themselves: the keeping-head-upright part was arguing with the algebra-book-carrying part, which was also snarling at the one-foot-after-the-other part. (Nothing was arguing with the holding-Casimir’s-hand part.) The I part was trying to keep them all doing what they were supposed to be doing instead of lying down and not doing anything. We’d’ve done lying down together really well.

  I gaped at all these guys in uniform running toward us—bright orange cobey badges bobbing on their hats. I was retroactively aware that there’d been some kind of uproar at the gates as we started walking—and stopped. “No, don’t stop,” said Casimir, and tugged me on.

  Most of the other people in the park were stopping and gaping too, although I had a faint sense that they’d been sort of standing there dazed already. I sympathized. But guys in uniforms were halting to talk to the other people—in an in-your-face, we’re-the-army kind of way. Some of the people the army guys were talking to looked like they were then being escorted somewhere—with two or three or four guys in uniforms at their elbows. Oh, drog me. This didn’t look good at all. Without meaning to I stopped again. “No,” said Casimir, “don’t stop,” and he didn’t stop, so he nearly pulled me over when our linked hands came to the ends of our arms. I staggered forward and he let go of my hand to put his arm around me. I wished I was enjoying this more. Also, the algebra book . . . Okay, pay attention.

  The army guys were streaming past us. Like they didn’t see us. They were stopping everybody else. Not us. They broke and slid past us like water around a rock. The water doesn’t care.

  Casimir said, “Your gruuaa is hiding us. But there is only one of her, I think, and she is tired: she kept both of us here and—eh—steady, while you bound the cobey. She is tapping you now, which is why you feel disoriented. I thought she might be able to tap me too if I am touching you.” Of course. He had his arm tightly around me because he wanted my gruuaa to be able to use him. I was almost too dizzy to notice what it was like, having his arm around me: the clean soap-and-skin smell of him, the way our hips brushed as we walked, the feel of his arm against my back. . . . I had a vague idea I would want to remember all the details later. Maybe I could manage to forget about my algebra book, when I was remembering everything else, which at the moment was digging a hole in my stomach. Carrying it was always a pain, but I couldn’t blame it if it was mad at me for ripping a big hunk of its middle out.

  There I go again, I thought distantly, thinking about my algebra book as if it was alive. Tell that to Ms. Dane, when you explain about the missing pages. It was getting heavier, I suppose as I was getting feebler. The feet on my forehead were going cold, like Hix was coming to the end of what she could do too.

  We made it to the gate. I think Casimir was nearly carrying me. We made it out the gate and Casimir turned and marched us toward the bus stop. We lurched inside the bus shelter and collapsed on the bench—even Casimir. So maybe Hix had been using him after all. Fortunately there wasn’t anyone else waiting, so we could sprawl. One boy, one girl, one knapsack, one algebra book, one long fluffy invisible thing. The army guys were still going into the park, but slower now, and fewer of them, although these last guys were carrying more equipment—big weird folded-up angular machinery with little red and white flashing lights.

  The front end (I assumed it was the front end) of Hix slithered off my head and back onto my shoulder. I could feel how tired she was, not the way I’d been picking up her anxiety, but by how limp she was. If she’d been a feather boa a few minutes ago she was now a feather boa that had been dropped in the river, run over by a bus, and then used as a chew toy by a Saint Bernard. One or two of the army guys looked sharply into the bus shelter but no one said anything. I tried to look surprised and clueless. I should have been able to do that really well. Maybe I did.

  I flopped my head over—I was leaning against the back wall of the shelter—to look at Casimir. He was slumped against the wall too, with his eyes closed. He looked exhausted. Perhaps he felt me looking at him, because he opened his eyes and smiled. Even with everything that had happened in the last half hour that smile made my heart grow two sizes and bang against my ribs. Then he reached out and took my hand again like it was the most normal thing to do. . . .

  Hey, he started it. What would a mgdaga do if the cutest boy she’d ever met put his hand around hers? I closed my fingers and gave his hand a squeeze. “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t know what any of that was—I’m saying that a lot, sorry—but the mgdaga stuff is a nonstarter, okay? We do believe in coincidence in Newworld.”

  My eyes strayed to a big army van—big enough to carry a lot of soldiers to a park where someone had Run and Reported a cobey—or where a cobey had opened up that was big enough to set off all the cobey boxes in town. Or an army van big enough to carry a lot of ordinary people who had had the bad luck to be in a park when a cobey broke, to be taken away somewhere. Nothing to worry about, they taught you in school. If a cobey ever happened here, which it won’t. The attending cobey unit would take your statement and maybe give you a decontamination pill and send you home.

  Nothing to worry about.

  There were three soldiers unfolding the legs on a box like the ones we’d seen other soldiers carrying into the park. It was long and thin and had too many legs, although these legs were long and spindly. It didn’t look friendly. I bet it didn’t smell good either.

  “How do you come to have a gruuaa companioning you?” said Casimir. “They are not common anywhere, but I thought—well, I would have thought—there were none in Newworld.”

  “She—she has been—er—companioning—er—my mother’s husband.” That sounded awful, and I was probably only still here because of Hix. I was probably only here twice because of Hix. Which meant I was only here twice because of Val. “My stepfather,” I amended reluctantly. “She—um—he introduced her to me.” Electric gods, was it only last night? “And she seems—um—to like me.”

  “It is a great honor,” he said. “You are very fortunate.”

  Yes. That was simply true. I put my hand up to where I knew Hix was, wrapped around my throat but also trailing in my lap. I felt that faint wispy not-fur-not-feathers-not-scales something against my fingers. It moved. Even in an invisible unknown creature I thought I recognized the “pet me” response. I stroked gently with the tips of my fingers. She was humming again. . . .

  Except it wasn’t a hum. Or it wasn’t Hix. It was something big and bullying, trying to overwhelm both of us—something like the army tank rolling down the street toward us.

  Army tank?

  Now I could hear—feel—something—the crackles and frizzles and—something-going-wrong-with-the-air—as all the unbent unfolded steel-legged things made contact with whatever was in the tank. I knew about armydar. You got a few days of standard armydar with a standard scan. Our last scan hadn’t been so long ago that I’d forgotten. This wasn’t that. This was big. Something the army thought needed to be in a tank to keep safe. What were they protecting, the thing or us?

  They were chugging it out, the something-wrong-with-the-air, in these big ugly disorienting throbs, the tank thing and the boxes on legs. I could see two of the boxes from where I was s
itting. There were almost-visible ripples wandering, weaving down the road, past our bus shelter. I closed my eyes, but I could still feel them, like you feel a boat heaving up and down on a long slow queasy-making swell. I didn’t like it. It made me feel heavy and slow. This wasn’t anything I could lob little bits of folded-up paper at. I opened my eyes again.

  There was a fancy kind of armydar that was supposed to have a squashing effect on an area around a cobey—or some kind of pre-emptive squashing over an area that might throw out a cobey. Like flinging a blanket or a bucket of sand over a kitchen fire. It may not put it out, but it slows it down. And if this was some big, super-whammy armydar . . .

  There was an army guy—in fact, several army guys—and the one in front had more stuff on his cap and his shoulders than the other ones, and he was looking grim and maybe angry—and he was coming toward the bus shelter. He saw us all right. One of the guys with him was holding a sort of gun-wand thing out in front of him—oh, her—and she was pointing it at us. There were three little red flashing lights at the tip. The flashing was kind of hypnotic. It looked like it was saying, Ha ha ha, got you.

  And suddenly the bus shelter was full of gruuaa. I was looking at the big angry army guy and as the gruuaa poured into the bus shelter I saw a medium-sized hairy black and white cannonball arc immediately in front of the army guy. Mongo. I wasted half a second thinking, no, it can’t be Mongo, there’s nobody home now, which is to say Ran, to forget and leave the door open. But you know your own dog. It was Mongo.

  Mongo dived across the road immediately in front of the army guy staring at me, and broke his gaze. He looked at the dog, gestured to one of his aides, and looked back at me—

  Except that he didn’t look back at me. He looked toward the bus shelter and then he looked confused. His eyes skated right over the open front of the shelter where Casimir and I (and a very large knapsack and a very large algebra book) were sitting. He stopped and looked around like he was searching for something he had dropped. He looked up again, straight at the bus shelter like he was sure whatever it was was in that direction. Then the woman with the wand-gun said something to him, and I noticed the blinking lights had gone clear. Ha ha ha yourself. He scowled at the lights, he turned away . . . he was missing out the bus shelter, and heading toward the gate into the park.