Shadows

  But a cloud of silverbugs is amazing to see and although if it’s a really big cloud the army’ll be along at peak forecast to zap it, they’re usually happy to have some ordinary members of the public around to step on the ones that get away because some always do get away, and there doesn’t seem to be a fancy army gizmo that works any better than people’s feet. But the other thing about silverbugs is that if you step on a lot of them one right after another you get high. It varies from person to person, how many you have to step on. Jill says one is plenty for her, but Takahiro says he’s never noticed any effect at all—and he stepped on eight or ten at the outbreak in June, which should have made him as off his head as a triple-fried. So while the army is happy to have company, they’ll have a few spotters keeping an eye on how everybody’s doing.

  (Everyone was really curious about Taks’ invulnerability, but when Steph tried to ask him about it he did the Patented Takahiro Silence so everyone rolled their eyes and gave up. It might have been something about being half Japanese, but none of us had ever heard that Farworlders are any more resistant than anybody else.)

  One more thing about silverbugs. Big explosions of them might mean there was a cobey coming. One outbreak, okay, it happens. Two outbreaks . . . But it was like earthquakes. Sometimes you got tremors and sometimes you didn’t. Sometimes the tremors didn’t mean anything. Sometimes they did. But after a second big silverbug mob they’d probably be sending a few cobey troops to the local Watchguards. If there was a third they might even reopen the big old cobey unit camp, Goat Creek, out in the barrens. They’d put a cobey base there at all because a couple of generations ago this area had been kind of a hot spot for medium-sized cobeys—and Newworld mostly doesn’t have cobeys, not like Oldworld, which has them everywhere all the time—but they closed it down after the cobeys stopped. At the moment the only thing that lived at Goat Creek was a lot of feral sheep. So Jill was right, it probably didn’t mean anything. But . . .

  “Let’s go indoors,” said Jill. “At least there’s cake. And I think your mom would let us have a little champagne if we asked really politely.”

  Ran went home with one of his friends and I went home with Jill that night so Val and Mom could have one night alone with each other, although he’d been sleeping over for a while by then and I could (mostly) not think about it. But they couldn’t afford a honeymoon: this was it. I tried to think of something nice to say to Mom before we left but I couldn’t. The last thing I said was, “Don’t forget to put Mongo out. I’ve walked him already. You can just put him out in the back yard. And bring him back in again.”

  She gave me a lopsided smile. Seven and a half years ago she’d been giving the A Dog Is a Big Responsibility lecture and here I was telling her what to do. “I won’t forget,” she said.

  “And you have to close the kitchen door really tight or—”

  “Or he gets out and sleeps on your bed,” she said. “I know.”

  I hugged her. Val was standing behind her. I gave him a stiff little nod. If he tried to touch me I’d scream. He didn’t. He just nodded back. It was so dark in the hall I couldn’t see his shadows.

  I watched Arnie that night. I actually looked for any weird shadows on the wall behind him and there weren’t any. Arnie did look like he was carrying a little too much charge, but all of our teachers look worse by the end of the school year. Some of them look worse at the beginning.

  Arnie was not a big thing in my life. When I went back to Jill’s we usually went straight to her room. That night neither of us was very interested in supper after all the cake (and a little champagne) although we shared a bowl of broccoli and gravy to make Jill’s mom happy about vitamins. Arnie and Jill’s brothers all wanted to watch football so we had the perfect excuse to flee to her room as soon as possible. She closed the door like she was shutting something out (besides brothers) and sat down on her bed like she was falling. “I keep thinking—it’s almost like he’s under a spell,” she whispered.

  I gave a violent shiver. “There is no magic in Newworld, baka, stupid,” I said, louder than I meant.

  “Keep your voice down,” said Jill. “I know. There’s no magic in Newworld—which is why your lawyer aunt who defends magic users works seven and a half days a week.”

  Jill sounded maybe a little more stressed than just about Arnie. But Jill did something a little freaky herself. We called it the f-word. F for “foresight.” She said I was the only person in the universe she’d ever told about it. And probably anyone could have seen that her mom and dad were going to break up, so that she knew it just meant she had been more plugged in than your average eight-year-old. But not anyone would have been home throwing up the day her best friend’s dad was going to get killed in a stupid road accident. She didn’t know that was why. She just knew it was her foresight, telling her something really bad.

  She should probably have reported herself. But who needs trouble, you know? It’s not like she ever tried to use it, like Gwenda’s clients (mostly) had. After my dad died, Jill tried to figure out a way to deactivate it, but it was a little like deactivating breathing. You can hold your breath only so long and then your body makes you breathe. Nothing as horrible as Dad’s death had happened to either of us since and she mostly managed to ignore it, like burying that really dreeping sweater you bought on sale during a brain malfunction in the bottom of the drawer. If you’re careful you never have to see it, let alone get it out and put it on. There mostly wasn’t so much of Jill’s f-word that it was too creepo, but it was still more than waking up in the morning with a sense of doom because you knew you were going to flunk your algebra test (besides, Jill got As in algebra) and every now and then it did bug her. And she’d had the scan and the blood test like everyone else.

  I didn’t mention the f-word tonight. But I wondered.

  “Keisha said Gazzy’ll even get you spells if you have enough money.” Gazzy sold what the local crazydumbs needed to get fried. Everyone knew about Gazzy. Even the cops knew about Gazzy. But he was still out there across the street from the high school nearly every day.

  “Spells?” This was Newworld. Even if maybe the gene-chopping hadn’t been quite as thorough as the big posters all over the walls in your local Watchguard office said, and even if Gwenda had more clients than she could handle. “But who would want to put a spell on a hardware store owner?” I objected, more to make Jill feel better than because that’s what I thought. I didn’t know what I thought. Spells? But since I’d seen Val’s shadows, anything was possible.

  “I guess,” said Jill. She got off the bed and knelt on the tiny patch of clear space between it and the door. Since Jill was the only girl in her family she had her own bedroom but it was about the size of most people’s bathrooms. We’d been sharing her single bed when I stayed over since we were little kids and fortunately neither of us had grown up to be a kicker. Jill pulled a box out from under the bed. “Hey, look what Mom brought us. She told me I had to wait till after the wedding though.” Jill’s mom was a beautician, and the shop she worked in was pretty amazing. Jill opened the box. There were about twenty little sample-sized bottles of nail polish, all of them in shades of blue and green and purple. “Oh, big bang,” I said, feeling better than I had all day. Maybe they were just shadows, you know? Maybe Arnie had heartburn.

  “Can I do yours?” said Jill. “You know I’ll do it better.”

  “Yes please,” I said. “Thanks.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I PHONED MOM THE NEXT DAY AFTER WE WERE already most of the way to Longiron. (In a house with five guys who were all machineheads, there were always spare cars.) My excuse was that you didn’t ring the honeymoon couple early in the morning but I should have gone home first and taken Mongo for a walk. But I was having trouble with the Mrs. Val concept and Mongo did occasionally miss his morning walk (now that he was a calm, mature adult dog) and all that meant was that I’d have to pick up the back yard
as well as the sidewalk. And we’d work extra-hard on herding at the shelter this afternoon to make up. He probably wouldn’t do any worse indoors than eat a curtain. He was still kind of a perpetual mouth machine. I didn’t like the kitchen curtains much anyway.

  The noise the car was making (some cars were past saving, even by Jill’s brothers) was a good excuse to keep the conversation short. Mom sounded a little distracted, which was fine, and she agreed to give Mongo breakfast, and she and Val were going out in the afternoon, which was finer, because they wouldn’t be there when I got back. The reprieve was only for a few hours, but I’d take what I could get.

  The silverbugs were even more amazing than they’d been in June. A big outbreak takes a while to reach its peak and the army posts observers to calculate when that’s going to be because that’s when they want to take it out. The big zapper was just rolling off its flatbed transport when we arrived. The area had been cordoned off with the orange-striped rope that meant “cobey units” to the rest of us—that and the big orange cobey logo on trucks and uniforms. But there were quite a few people already in an advanced state of hilarity, which was probably the result of stamping too many silverbugs. I recognized several kids from our class . . . including Eddie. Which was probably why Jill parked on the far side of the green.

  A mob of silverbugs tends to like an open space, which they’ll fill up like a gigantic swarm of glittering silver bees. Longiron had a town green with a bandstand and a wishing well at one end and a softball field taking up most of the rest. The silverbugs were curled up, or maybe I mean spread out, over about three-quarters of the available area, hanging in the air like a kind of self-perpetuating firework only a lot more confusing. I couldn’t look at a big silverbug display for long or I started getting sick and dizzy, but that first thirty seconds of staring was exhilarating in a way that was almost frightening—your mood rushed upward with the swirl of the silverbugs, and you felt like you were about to be told the ultimate secret of the universe, or at least how to fly by turning your feet into rocket blasters. “Come on,” said Jill. “Don’t sit here. I’ll protect you,” meaning she wouldn’t let me step on any bugs. Reluctantly I climbed out of the car, but I was having a kind of f-word moment myself, which was that Jill’s was bothering her.

  We made our way slowly toward the orange rope. There were other cars and other people, but they were mostly (sober) grown-ups on this side. The bug center was toward the other end of the green from us—silverbugs like open areas, but they always collect off center. They were looking rather galactic today, with long, slowly spinning arms like your science textbook’s artist’s conception of the Milky Way. But the way the light reflected off them made me start to forget which way was up and which way was down. . . .

  I looked away. There was a tree and I put my hand on it. I was seeing a kind of after-image, like a tiny checkerboard, where the black squares were pinholes into nowhere. “I think I’d better go back to the car,” I said.

  “I’ve seen enough too,” said Jill.

  “You okay?” I said. I’d’ve expected Jill to want to watch the light show a while longer. When they turned the zapper on, the air would tighten up like your skin when you get goose bumps and then there were great jagged anti-flashes—I don’t know what else to call them, if you’ve never seen it, and lots of people in Newworld have never seen a silverbug mob—as the bugs popped or squished or whatever it was they did in great sweeping swathes. (We’d been there when they turned it on at Hyderabad in June. But our moms didn’t know that one of Jill’s brothers had also taken us to the last big outbreak in Birdhill four years ago.) They were moving the zapper into position now. I wanted to be back in the car when they flipped the switch. The silverbugs that didn’t get zapped would dart out through the crowd of onlookers, almost like they were deliberately fleeing annihilation. Almost like they were alive.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I feel more like the way you describe it. Up and down are all . . . peculiar. And I don’t think I want to step on any bugs.”

  So after all I got back to our house sooner than I wanted. We were mostly silent on the drive, although not wanting to shout over the car helped. But I didn’t like Jill looking all low amp and shut down like this. She’s not the low amp and shut down type. It might just have been seeing Eddie acting loopy and even more of a bakayaro than usual, but I didn’t think so. Finally I said, or shouted, “What’s wrong?”

  She hitched up a shoulder and let it drop, still staring at the road. “You know, or you wouldn’t be asking,” she said (unreasonably but accurately). “F-word.”

  “It’s bad?” I felt slightly sick.

  She looked at me quickly and away again. “Nothing like your dad. But . . . yeah. Something big and ugly and dramatic. And—public.”

  My stomach unclenched a little. Really not like my dad then. She might have just said that to make me feel better though. “A cobey, say.”

  “I don’t know. But yeah. It might be.” She was silent a moment and then added: “I don’t mind knowing who Laura is going to fall for next. Or what Peta’s Café is going to have on special next week. But big stuff—no. It feels wrong and bad. Maybe the wrong is making it feel bad.”

  “Yeah.” But we both knew we didn’t think so.

  • • •

  I heard Mom and Val laughing as I put my key in the lock and then as I opened the door it stopped like . . . like what happens when Mrs. Andover walks into a classroom. Doesn’t matter how great you were feeling a second before. Mrs. Andover is the human version of dropping your ice cream on the ground, a big ugly tick on your dog that you’re going to have to pull out, or getting a D on your algebra homework for the second time and seeing the akuma of summer school looming at you.

  Bugsuck. Iya. Iya na creepo.

  “I’m just taking Mongo out,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes on the floor—they were in the living room, and I had the feeling Mom had been sitting in Val’s lap—“And then we’ll go on to the shelter.” I put the lead on my overexcited dog and pretty much ran out the door. We didn’t get back till it was dark, and even Mongo was (relatively) tired. But we’d been practicing herding both with and without sheep (or alpacas, which are majorly evil from a herding point of view) and he had been absolutely dropping in his tracks when I yelled stop or held my hand up. My brilliant dog. So I had something to be happy about.

  It was a good thing I had Mongo and the shelter. Because it was pretty much keeping my eyes on the floor and running away for the next six weeks. It was too easy to hate Val once he and his horrible shadows were around all the time, even with how unhappy the way I was behaving made Mom. But it didn’t make her as unhappy as being married to Val made her happy, so I hated him for that too. At the time I didn’t think Val gave a bucket of battery acid whether his new wife’s daughter hated him or not. Ran thought he was great, so he and Mom outnumbered me, right? I had to live in the house, but the garden had become a no-go area because of the way the shadows hung out around the shed. The slugs could just eat that end of the garden because I wasn’t going near it. I got desperate enough I even once asked Ran if he’d ever seen anything like what I saw—what Jill had seen—Val’s dreeping shadows. But it got obvious fast that Ran thought either my wiring was coming loose or I was playing some kind of joke on him, so I stopped.

  One day when the shadows were particularly bad and I was totally absolutely sure one of them was following me around and trying to climb up chair legs to get at me so I couldn’t even sit at the kitchen table to do my origami (Val was in the shed), I blurted out that Val had only married Mom so he could stay in Newworld instead of being deported back to Orzi-whatsit, and Mom went rigid with fury and sent me to my room. I was too old to be sent to my room, but I went anyway. I’d never seen her so angry. She didn’t come around later and try to make it up either. So I hated Val for that too.

  I tried to look up Val’s shadows on the webnet, but w
hat was I supposed to look them up under? I half-tried a couple of times to talk to Jill about them—she’d seen full-current weird about the shed, after all—but she wasn’t having a good summer herself. It was like breaking up with Eddie had jerked her off her sprockets and she couldn’t find her own rhythm again. She told me once, trying to laugh, that she had this sort of permanent half headache of approaching doom. “It’s probably just knowing we’ve got Mrs. Andover for homeroom our senior year. How unfair is that?”

  If it hadn’t been for Clare and the shelter I don’t know what I would have done. Run away from home for real and joined the army. (I’d be more likely to jump down one of the silverbug checkerboard pinholes.) Clare had lost a couple of workers over the summer (kids who looooove animals often find they don’t looooove cleaning up after them so much) so she could even pay me for a few extra hours. I was there so much I was totally tight with the Family, which are the mostly reject animals that live at what used to be reception, but Clare’s put a half wall across most of that room so you can sidle along this little aisle from the front door to Clare’s office, although Bella (the wolfhound) can still reach you if she wants to. You can tell a lot about a potential critter adopter by how they react to ten or twelve dogs enthusiastically bouncing off a three-and-a-half-foot barrier in welcome. (There are usually also a few cats in the bay window ignoring the fuss, Suri the parrot screaming, and Sherry the chameleon silently turning blue.)