“I suppose,” Mr. Slider drawled. He and Jennifer had spent a great deal of time looking each other up and down since their meeting in the house this afternoon. As strange as Jennifer no doubt seemed to him, his appearance was no less stunning—not only because he stood tall, without a wheelchair, and walked as easily as if he had been doing it all his life. (Which, for all Jennifer knew, in this universe, he had been.) But also because his face was partially mutilated. His elegant, tanned European features crumbled into a mess of scar tissue that dominated where his right eye, temple, and ear would have been. From the left, he looked like a Hollywood star; from the right, a Hollywood monster.
“We have got to get you down to the mall and into some new clothes!” Tavia would not hear of any argument. “You can’t be wearing Skip’s dreary stuff while you’re staying with us. Just a few outfits, something that will really cling to that lovely shape of yours. Come on, Skip. Edmund, are you coming with us? It’s a nice evening for a walk about the mall.”
“I’ll stay here, dear. I’ve work to do.” His tone was distant. His hand was working through his slick blond hair as usual, as if he were distracted by other, grander ideas. Maybe he’s trying to figure out how to get his face back to normal, Jennifer thought with some suspicion. Had he started this sorcery? Was this mutilation the price he paid to get his legs back?
How did he end up in that wheelchair, anyway?
It frustrated her that she had no real way to ask him.
Pinegrove Mall was an encouragingly familiar sight, with all of the stores Jennifer remembered from Winoka Mall, and in the right order. There was the sports clothing outlet, and the place with overpriced shoes, and the upscale maternity dress shop, and the pet store…
Her thoughts trailed off as she looked into the pet store windows. Where once had been two large entryway displays where Daniel’s Pets had showcased the “puppy and kitten of the week” was now a series of smaller displays, separated from each other by a series of glass walls.
In each small cubicle was a different eight-legged surprise, each one plumper and uglier than the last. mini-arachnid’s on special, the sign read.
“Ugh, will you look at that! Disgusting!” Tavia spat as she came up behind Jennifer’s stricken face. “They’ve spelled the plural with an apostrophe! Skip, I swear, if you do that on so much as a birthday card, I will drain your blood myself…Oh, Jennifer, look at that sun spider! It really seems to like you!”
Jennifer had no preconceived notion what a sun spider looked like, but she guessed that the beige, naked, spindly, grotesque, melon-sized creature humping the glass near her face was it. Reading the sign, s. s.: $240, she found the thing a bit overpriced.
“Let’s check out sweaters,” she suggested as its legs wriggled for better position.
The clothing stores held no unpleasant surprises. There were no slacks with more than two legs and no eight-lens sunglasses. Like dragons, Jennifer supposed, arachnids kept their fashion needs limited to their human shapes. This was good, because it removed a source of possibly uncomfortable questions. What’s your abdomen size? Pincers or no? Hairy gross body, or smooth gross body?
Giggling madly to herself in the solitude of the dressing room, she took her time with about a dozen sweater-skirt outfits and let herself think once more. The primary question on her mind: How long should I stay here in Pinegrove, before striking out for somewhere else?
The answer, she decided while shrugging into something slinky and electric blue, depended on where “somewhere else” meant. She had at least two options: Eveningstar, which seemed the most likely place her parents would be since they had lived there before moving to Winoka, or her grandfather’s farm on her way to Crescent Valley. The two places were in somewhat opposite directions, so she would have to choose which one she investigated first.
Fabulous, she praised herself while looking in the dressing room mirror. Then she frowned at the bulges her daggers made in the tight skirt. Damn. Won’t work.
Of course, she realized while exchanging the electric blue for a looser violet wool outfit, I don’t have to visit Eveningstar, do I? I can just research it. Then she could take her cues from there.
“Hey, Ms. Saltin.” She came out of the dressing room and spun around a bit for her new benefactor, who clapped her wiry hands. “Do you have an Internet connection at home? I’d like to check on some news sites for school assignments tonight.”
“Oh, Jennifer, that’s a lovely set! You have to put that in the ‘yes’ pile. Of course we have an Internet connection; the computer’s right in the living room. We can check the sites together. I’d be happy to help you. Why, I’ll bet you’ve never had a parent or guardian truly take an interest in your schoolwork, have you?”
Jennifer chose not to answer. The Internet connection did her no good if Tavia would be hovering over her the entire time. She would have to research things the old-fashioned way—traveling and poking around.
The remainder of their shopping trip went well enough. Tavia was generous enough to pay for seven outfits—one for each day, she insisted, though Jennifer had no interest in staying around here a full week—and a couple pairs of lovely flats that went with all of them, since Jennifer was a few sizes bigger than her hostess and couldn’t borrow.
It’s not real money, Jennifer told herself as she watched Tavia pay with a credit card. The real Tavia hasn’t paid a cent, and there won’t be any imposition once I’ve gotten everything back in order.
The logic made her pause. If lying to Tavia and taking advantage of her generosity wasn’t wrong because this universe didn’t matter, would she rationalize hurting this woman if she ever got in the way? For that matter, why not get her alone and torture her for information? She had to know something about that big, ugly domed building behind the high school…
Before she could untangle the morality of it all, Skip took her elbow and whispered in her ear. “You want to get ice cream at our favorite place?”
Jennifer tensed. “‘Our favorite place’ is nowhere near here. Remember?”
“You know what I mean,” he said with a sigh. “Can you loosen up just a tiny bit?”
“No. Skip, if you’re not going to get to the bottom of things, I will.” She shrugged off his hand. “So, Ms. Saltin, whatever happened to Skip’s parents?”
Tavia Saltin stopped short in the middle of the mall and turned slowly. For a moment, Jennifer was sure the woman would suddenly burst into evil laughter and reveal herself as behind it all. But instead, there were tears in the slight woman’s blue-green eyes, and she directed her first words to Skip.
“Oh, the sacrifices your family has made, my dear boy!” she said to him softly. Then she did look at Jennifer. “A long time ago, they asked Edmund and me to watch over Skip. We’ve done so gladly. But I know it’s hard on him, isn’t it, Skip? And you’ve already given up so much.”
Then the werachnid began to cry.
Back in the privacy of Tavia and Edmund’s guest room, Jennifer chewed her tongue thoughtfully while taping the pieces of her father’s note together.
She had not pressed Tavia for any more detail on Skip’s parents at the mall. For one, if they weren’t raising Skip, then it made sense they weren’t around. And if they weren’t around, then they weren’t useful to her.
Second, Skip had turned white as a sheet when Jennifer had broken open the topic like that. Tavia had recovered well enough, but her nephew remained furious the entire drive home. After dumping her bags full of new clothes in the guest room, he had wordlessly left and slammed the door behind him.
Stay as strong as stone. Stay as beautiful as fire. Stay alive.
“Poor Skip,” she mumbled at the note’s last few words while pressing down a new piece of tape. “What a horrible day this must have been for him, not getting ripped apart from his family.”
It felt good to say something cruel like that, and she wished he were in the room so he could hear it. While weighing the wisdom of walking dow
n to his bedroom to share the sentiment, she noticed a tiny movement above.
A lone box elder bug was crawling across the ceiling, moving from some unseen crack in the bedroom window toward the warmer interior of the house.
“You look lonely,” she told the insect. “And in a world of spiders, I’ll bet you’re not too happy.”
The beetle continued its near-mindless meandering, working a slow but eventual route toward the wall opposite the window. Once it rattled its black and red wings, considered taking flight, and then settled down into a crawl again.
The tiny buzzing sound it had made reminded her of a much bigger noise, from a much bigger insect—the fire hornet queen of Crescent Valley.
Thinking of that day—it had been just yesterday!—made her think of Ned Brownfoot, and then of Ember and Xavier Longtail. The Longtails had opposed Jennifer’s work to bring weredragons and beaststalkers together. Had they been right?
“No,” she told the bug that crawled over her head. “They were wrong. If dragons and stalkers had been working together better, they could have stopped this! And if more dragons had been reaching out to more people like Skip, something like this may not ever have happened to begin with!”
The insect did not answer. Instead, it made a slight right turn.
Her thoughts turned to her mother and her father. Her father had told her to stay put and live with this new reality. Would her mother agree?
“She wouldn’t,” she told the bug. “And not just because she’s smarter than Dad. It’s because she’s not afraid to change the world, and Dad is. She stood up to Mayor Seabright and all of Winoka, when everyone wanted to kill Evangelina. She apologized to the Longtails the moment she met them, even though she knew they’d want to kill her. And she got mad at Dad for lying to the other dragons, just so he and Grandpa could keep the peace. She wouldn’t stand for this. She’d know it’s sneaky and wrong.”
“Jennifer, dear?” Tavia’s voice came from beyond the closed door. “Are you all right? Is someone else in there?”
She scrambled to shove the newly reconstructed note under the bedsheets. “I’m okay, Tavia, I’m just—”
The door opened, and Tavia’s thin skull pressed through the opening. She scanned the room and Jennifer resting on the bed. “Just coming up to let you know that dinner’s ready. Oh, you look tired, dear.”
“I guess I am. Sorry about the noise. I’m just talking to the bug.” She pointed to the ceiling. “I know, pretty weird.”
Tavia glanced up and saw the beetle. Her lips thinned a touch. “It’s no problem at all, dear. Dinner will be ready in a few minutes. And don’t worry about that bug. It won’t last long.”
“I guess not. Not this time of year.”
But the door was already closed, and Jennifer was no longer sure Tavia meant anything about box elder bug seasonality.
“Man, this place is creepy,” she whispered to the beetle after a few moments. “Are you sure you want to stick around?”
With new resolve, she got up, left her room, and strode down the hall to Skip’s room. He was at his desk, sketching various spider shapes with headphones on.
“Skip,” she called out. “Skip.”
He finally heard her and removed the headphones. “What.”
“Skip, I don’t want you to be mad at me. I want your help getting out of here.”
He leaned back and flipped his pencil down. “I don’t blame you for asking about my parents. But I already knew the answer. I never even had to ask my aunt. I just didn’t want to deal—”
“It’s okay,” she said with a step forward. “I’m sorry, you’re sorry, let’s just move on. Skip, I need to learn if anything’s happened at Eveningstar. I need to know if my parents are there.”
“There is an Eveningstar,” he answered with a nod. “And we can learn more about them this Saturday afternoon. Their soccer team comes to play Pinegrove then. You up for sticking around that long?”
She shrugged. “My other option is to get to Crescent Valley and see who’s left.”
“But you think your parents might still be alive and in Eveningstar, right?”
The very thought made her heart buzz with excitement. “Let’s be ready for Saturday. If that doesn’t work out, then you’ll come with me to Crescent Valley?”
He stood up and held her, making her shiver. “Jennifer. I traveled to a whole new universe with you. I’ll go wherever you want. Just take the time to think it through.”
She hugged him back, the only link she had to the world she used to know.
CHAPTER 8
Wednesday
The next morning got off to as nearly a bad start as the previous one. She woke up early and thought to summon a bird of some sort, beaststalker-style. Maybe she would get a golden eagle like her mother could, she reasoned, or at least the snake eagle that seemed to favor her. Something like that could fly high, scout things out. And most important, send a signal to other beaststalkers who might be near.
But what came out of her summoning ritual was a mere kestrel, which had upon the command of its mistress flown out the window and made it about two hundred yards before something gray and hairy leapt out of the trees in the nearby park and brought it down with a deathly shriek.
Well, maybe I just saved a cow, she reasoned, and got ready for school. She decided upon the violet wool skirt and sweater set, which really had looked smashing when she tried it on at the mall. Even today, when the post-purchase glow had faded, it still felt like an armor of sorts against the insanity she still faced.
Unfortunately, wool was a poor defense against academic ignorance. She had missed the double-math class yesterday…and her first taste of it today was less than savory. Mr. Slider walked briskly up and down the aisles, grinning at his pupils through one good eye and asking questions with a breezy sort of nonchalance. That wasn’t so bad, and it did Jennifer’s heart good to see the man on two working legs—but the questions!
This universe had seemingly abandoned notions of basic geometry and arithmetic and replaced them with something vicious called differential geometry. Differential geometry, according to the introduction in the wicked, weathered textbook Mr. Slider had handed her, involved “differential equations,” “differential topology,” and “differential manifolds.”
Unfortunately, none of the six authors of the book (all Ph.D.’s in various stultifying and probably imaginary realms of academia) thought to define the word differential. The best Jennifer could come up with was “ridiculously different from anything sensible.”
Of course, everyone else in the class had mastered it and answered every question correctly (if Mr. Slider’s smiles and encouragement were any indication).
Can manifolds be embedded into Euclidean space? Apparently so.
Can a ruled surface be unwrapped? Apparently not.
Does orienting a Boy’s Surface involve anything like what Jennifer would have thought? Not even close.
With her head still spinning from this terminological assault, she stumbled into history class, where she found out three disturbing things about modern Minnesota’s history from an earnest teacher named Mr. Cahoon, who had chestnut hair and freckles and looked about twelve:
Minneapolis had the tallest building in North America, an architectural marvel finished less than a decade ago. From the glossy pictures in their brand-new history books, the structure had eight shimmering walls and a unique, funneled roof that spun the wind into glorious melodies for the workers within.
St. Paul had emerged as the arts capital of the world over the past thirty or forty years, as prodigy after prodigy emerged from nearby towns like Pinegrove and settled in the larger city.
Alexandria, a small city in western Minnesota surrounded by lakes, had been the site of considerable civilian unrest sixty years ago. Hundreds of the “instigators” had died. From the grim photographs, Jennifer could make out a few reptilian skulls.
She didn’t have much time to explore these events sinc
e the time given to history was considerably shorter than the time allowed for mathematics, music, or even chemistry. The bell rang before she knew it, and just like that she had to close the textbook, promising to study it later that night.
Music was okay. Andi, the guest star for yesterday’s class, wasn’t there this time. Bobbie was, but something about the blonde Amazon gave Jennifer the creeps. She kept to herself as Tavia turned from the web harp to something a bit more conventional—the piano. She played it with four tarsi, in her spider shape. Like her brother, Otto Saltin, who Jennifer recalled with a shiver, Tavia was predominantly black, with orange and red markings on her abdomen. While four tarsi were not as many as ten fingers, they moved faster and could occupy more ranges on the piano than two hands. The composition, like the player, was striking and disturbing. At the end, Jennifer couldn’t get out of music class fast enough.
Rubbing her temples as she walked past rows of lockers on her way to chemistry, Jennifer bumped into a girl racing down the hallway. They both gasped—the other girl in pain, and Jennifer in utter astonishment.
“Catherine?!”
The girl’s mouth twisted into a skeptical smile as she rubbed her elbows. “Do I know you?”
“Catherine, it’s me! Jennifer! How is this…How did you get here?”
“Get here? I’ve lived in this town my whole life. And my name’s not Catherine. What’s your name again?”
A chill slid into Jennifer’s gut. She’s Catherine, but not Catherine. Like Bobbie isn’t Bob Jarkmand. Like Minneapolis isn’t the real Minneapolis, or my dead parents aren’t really dead.
She composed herself quickly enough to extend a hand. “Um, I’m sorry. You just looked like someone from my old town. I’m Jennifer Scales.”
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