Shadows

by Robin McKinley

  Takahiro, to my surprise, took a moment to answer. “I don’t really know how to say this,” he said. “I’ll tell you anything I can tell you.” He flicked another sideways glance at me and fiddled with his mug. “So, yeah.”

  Val bowed his head briefly in one of his funny not-from-around-here gestures. “Do you know how your father got you into this country?” said Val.

  Takahiro looked up at that. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, no. I’ve wondered about that. At the time I didn’t think anything. Eh . . . My cousins told me, once, when my mom was still alive and the rest of the family hadn’t completely cut us off yet, that I wouldn’t be able to visit my dad in Newworld even if he wanted me to, which he didn’t, because the border police would know I was a ’shifter, and kill me. That was about eleven years ago. I had to have about a million tests before they let me in, including blood work and scans and stuff, and I was kind of waiting for them to kill me.”

  “Oh, Taks,” I said.

  He looked sort of in my direction but not quite at me, and away again. “It was a long time ago. And then they didn’t kill me after all. So I had to figure out how to stay alive. At the time I just thought they’d missed it somehow, which was almost comforting, you know? It meant I might manage to—pass. It wasn’t till later, when I was older and more suspicious, that I began to wonder. There’s not a lot out there about ’shifters that the ordinary public can access, and I didn’t want anyone tagging me because I was too interested in this weird subject. But I don’t see how all the border tech can have missed what I am. There’s a lot about my dad I don’t know,” he added.

  “What is your father’s employment?” said Val.

  “He buys stuff for museums. He’s an expert on all kinds of stuff. Especially Farworld stuff. So he keeps being called in to make decisions.”

  “He travels a great deal,” said Val.

  “Yeah. All over the world. Over lots of national borders. Newworld, Oldworld, Farworld, Midworld, the Southworlds. He ought to be so suspect—with a ’shifter son. Who did he pay off—or something—to get me through? Why doesn’t whoever it is have him totally at the end of a hot wire?”

  Val finished cutting the sandwiches in halves and put the plate on the table. “We don’t know,” he said. “But the world does not work in some ways we are taught to believe that it works.”

  Takahiro grunted. “Dreeping,” he said. “Crap zone.” This was seriously bad language for Taks.

  Val sat down, smiling a humorless smile. “It is inevitable at your age—yours and Maggie’s—that you should still be learning how the world works. It is a little embarrassing that I should be learning the same things now. I should not be here with my shadows—”

  “Gruuaa,” I said. “Casimir also called them gruuaa, although he’s from Ukovia.”

  “Most terms concerning the use of magic are the same throughout the Commonwealth,” said Val. “I fear then that Casimir may be yet another person who is not as the world says he should be. Yes. Gruuaa. If there is a Newworld word, I don’t know it. My masters said they were stripping me of my magic and that, naked, the best place for me was Newworld. And so I came here, obedient little dokdok that I am.”

  “You probably mean clueless drone or dead battery,” I said.

  “Dead battery. Yes. Very apt. Except that I am not. But I have no idea how the gruuaa managed to protect me both through the lengthy dispossession process in Orzaskan and the intensive examination at the Newworld boundary.”

  Val and I each ate half a sandwich so it didn’t look like it was all for Takahiro—and Takahiro ate the rest. You might almost say wolfed. Like he couldn’t help himself. There were now a lot of gruuaa around Takahiro—looping over his chair, hanging from the picture frames on the wall behind him—and I figured the mob under the table were probably clustering around his feet. The armydar was still going unh unh unh so he probably needed them worse than Val or I did.

  “Val,” I said. “The gruuaa. They, uh—”

  “They ground, protect, stabilize. And hide. I did not know their gift for concealment was so great.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They hid Casimir and me this afternoon. . . .” I tailed off. I’d nearly died this afternoon—or anyway been disappeared to nobody-knew-where. It had been awful and horrible and terrifying and also amazing and thrilling in a sort of sick way. Also there was Casimir. And yet it seemed almost a no-story after what had happened to Takahiro. After finding out what Taks lived with every day.

  “Tell us,” said Val.

  “Oh. Well, after—um.” I still wasn’t going to talk about the cobey if I didn’t have to. I’d shoved my wounded algebra book down to the end of the table where it was a little less obvious. “At first it was just Hix, but then there were too many of them—army guys—and they had brought all this gear—and Hix was tired. This big army guy had this wand thing and was about to nail us. Then the gruuaa arrived—I don’t know, did Hix call them somehow?—Loophead, I mean Mongo, broke the army guy’s concentration just long enough and the invisibility curtain dropped over us, I guess. It was pretty electric though, seeing the army guy suddenly not seeing us.” I hoped no one was going to ask me why Hix was tired. It was probably okay about wanting to hide from the army. It was like you felt guilty when you saw a cop car. Even if you didn’t have any reason, you just did.

  Mongo, hearing his name, came out from under the table and presented himself hopefully. Mostly I was careful only to use his name when I wanted him to do something—which he would then get a treat for. I made him give me both front paws (one at a time) and roll over (in both directions) and then he got a piece of sandwich. “That’s all,” I said firmly—or he’d run through all his other tricks, including a few, like jumping over the sofa, that I didn’t really want any grown-ups to know about. When dogs jump over things, they tend to push off with their hind legs at the top. I was always careful to check Mongo’s feet when he came indoors. Still. Also it’s a small living room. “But what are they—the gruuaa?”

  “We don’t know.”

  I stared at Val. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Val laughed, a real laugh. It was a nice sound. “You are too quick. We don’t know what they are, or where they come from, or why they seek us out—perhaps I should say we don’t know who or what else they seek out. But they are parasites—energy parasites. They are attracted—they seem to be attracted—particularly to magical energy.

  “Mostly they take what we do not or cannot use—like the pilot fish around the shark—but they will sometimes tap you in a way you will sense.”

  I put my hand up to Hix, who was wrapped around my neck again. Not just magical energy. Not. Hix began to hum, as if responding, either to my hand or to my sudden emotional spike of dismay. Could she pick up emotional spikes? Could she sense if they were happy spikes or unhappy spikes? She’d tapped into me today—but that was also when she was hiding Casimir and me all by herself. “Pilot fish and their sharks are sometimes pretty good companions,” I said. If it was about animals, I’d probably have read up on it.

  “Yes,” said Val. “Symbiote is perhaps a better word than parasite, and a gruuaa or group of gruuaa and their human or humans are stronger and more flexible and resilient in—er—many situations than those humans alone. Those whom the gruuaa befriend are generally considered lucky. But I have seen old, experienced, commonsensical magicians disturbed when they learn that we are, in effect, the gruuaa’s food.”

  I looked down. Mongo hadn’t quite given up on the possibility of more sandwich. He was sitting beside my chair with his head pressing down rather heavily on my thigh. When he saw me looking at him his tail, of course, began to swish back and forth. “Trombone,” I said, and he leaped up and shot away to look for his rubber trombone. It wasn’t a fair command: I should know where it was before I sent him after it. You want to reinforce your training with success. But I wanted my pa
rasitic dog to show off how clever he was. I heard him scurrying around the living room. Not there. He made a quick pass down the hall to the front door, but the dining room door was closed. It wouldn’t be in the dining room. He scampered upstairs. I heard him nudging the door to my bedroom open. It might be under the desk or the bed. No. Not in the bathroom either. (Dog toys occasionally got in the bathroom as a result of the drama of baths.) Bugsuck. It was probably in the back yard then. Leaking dead battery. Use your brain, Margaret Alastrina, not your stupid emotions. He’s not going to find it and he’s going to be unhappy and feel that he’s failed. Which will be your fault.

  Mongo flung himself downstairs again. I might be giving up hope but he wasn’t. I was just about to get up and open the back door, which was better than not doing anything, but dogs have a strong sense of fairness and Mongo would know I hadn’t played fair with him, even if he forgave me, which he would. But he went to the back door himself without looking at me. And reared up on his hind legs, took the handle in his mouth and pulled down. The door snicked open.

  I had never taught him to do this.

  He ran outside and found the trombone under a rosebush. He came dancing back in with it again (I admit he didn’t close the door behind him) and laid it proudly at my feet. “You are wonderful and amazing,” I said. “Sugoi. Double sugoi. Good dog. Good dog.” I got up and fed him the last slice of chicken from Val’s sandwich-making. I also closed the back door. Then I put the plate that had had the sandwiches on it on the floor so he could lick up the crumbs.

  “I can live with ‘parasite,’” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  I sat down again and Mongo fell over on his side, sighed deeply, and went to sleep. With his head what should have been really uncomfortably on his trombone. Usually a sleeping Mongo is soothing—it means he isn’t running around looking for something to eat/destroy—and he’d also so totally showed off how clever he really is I should have been happy for a week on the memory. But I wasn’t going to be. I wasn’t. And it wasn’t just Takahiro—or the cobey—

  I snapped my head around. There was something behind me. No there wasn’t. I looked at the gruuaa on Taks’ chair, on the wall behind him. They were restless, but then in my experience so far they usually were a little twitchy. But there were sudden little bursts of sparkles in the corners of my vision—there was another one. With that icky silverbug resemblance. Ugh. So far as I knew silverbugs only ever appeared outdoors any more, since they figured out how to wire buildings against them, fifty years or so ago. The company my maybe-crazy aunt (maybe) worked for had done that, long before she was hired, if she was. Our house was only about twenty years old.

  “That’s the armydar,” said Takahiro. “That’s making you see stuff that isn’t there.”

  “What?” I said intelligently.

  “It’s well known that if you have one cobey in an area, you’ll probably have another. It’s one of the reasons the army guys mobilize so fast.”

  “It—is?” I said, expanding on my theme of intelligence. Why did people keep telling me this? Was I the only person who didn’t know? “I thought that was just Oldworld.”

  “Well, you have to look for the info, if you live in Newworld,” said Takahiro. “Because they don’t want you to know. They want you to think they’re just being thorough. But the information is out there. And the latest is—this. It’s got a fancy name. It’s still armydar. I’ve been hoping I wasn’t going to find out about it first-hand.”

  “I thought the quality of the disturbance was rather extreme for any standard scanning device,” said Val. “Takahiro, are you—?”

  Takahiro shivered. “The—the pressure is off now, for a while. I won’t change again. I don’t think. But I don’t know. In Japan—my mom took me out of school, the one time a cobey opened really near us. Nothing happened, but I think that’s because she was there. . . .” He shivered again. “But I guess if this goes on for very long I probably won’t be able to stay—me.”

  “You are still you as a wolf,” said Val. “It is the stupidity of the people who make rules that is your problem, not what you are.”

  I felt like saying, you haven’t been in school with a mean stupid teacher in a long time. But I didn’t say it. It was a horrible grown-up version of mean stupid teachers that was the reason Val was here in Newworld at all.

  Val went on: “I would expect that this—er—special armydar will not last long. Your Newworld cobey units are very efficient.”

  “I don’t know,” said Takahiro. “According to the geek webnet meetspaces they think they’re onto a way to stop the series thing—stop more cobeys from opening. And if they’re bothered about what happened in the park today—they may keep it running for a while.”

  There was a little silence. Takahiro reached out a very long arm and swept my algebra book back toward the center of the table. Then he picked it up, gently, like it was an injured animal. “This is what you used,” he said. “This afternoon, in the park.”

  “Yes,” I said, startled. “How did you know?”

  “Deductive reasoning,” said Takahiro. He laid it down again. “I can’t think of anything but an emergency that would make you tear pages out of a book.” He ran his fingers lightly down the slightly collapsed spine, like stroking a sleeping puppy. “Then it was another cobey. This afternoon. In the park.”

  There was another thick silence. Val was looking fixedly at his hands. Never stare into the eyes of a dog who doesn’t trust you; she will find that threatening. I tried not to growl. “Yes,” I said. Val exhaled: a long, long, long breath. He kept looking at his hands.

  After a shorter thinner silence Taks said, “I’ve been—well, I’ve been working on an origami figure for a cobey.” He raised his eyes from my algebra book and looked straight at me. He smiled. Faintly, but it was a smile, and it didn’t fall off his face immediately either. It was the first smile I’d seen since I’d met what I’d thought was a big dog, out in Val’s shed. “I wasn’t trying to find a way to stop one from opening or anything, uh, useful. I was just trying to get my head—and my fingers—around a shape in paper that would reflect the reality of a cobey. . . .” He tailed off. Maybe he knew how loopy he sounded.

  “You gizmoheads,” I said. “You’ve got too much charge.” But I understood better than I wanted to. There was something a little freaky about origami, about what it could do. About the way folded paper could explode into something else.

  “My mother believed . . .” he said and stopped. “My mother almost . . .” and he stopped again. “It—origami for a cobey—was my project this summer at camp. I almost didn’t get it accepted—neither the physics teacher nor any of the math teachers liked the idea. They thought it meant I was nutso. But the headmaster likes my dad’s money. So he passed it on to the art department and they said fine. You’re allowed to be crazy if it’s art.

  “Since you know the rest . . . I’ve been trying to figure it out since my mom died. It was like if I could crack it I could crack me. Never mind that almost everybody who ever wrote an equation—or folded a piece of paper in half—has been looking for the same thing. And this summer it felt close. But what was coming was a lot more like an animal than like physwiz—but if it was an animal, it must be for you, Maggie. The art department gave me an A because I spent so much time on it. But you felt it too, didn’t you? That it wasn’t just—paper?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And Hix liked it. Hix thought it was a—a colleague or something.” I got up, stepped over Mongo, and knelt beside my knapsack, feeling for the right little pocket. I pulled out several of my ordinary kami before I found her. The kami looked strangely dull and crooked—my folding isn’t that mediocre—and Takahiro’s new figure was . . . limp. You need paper that will hold a crease properly to do origami with. You’d never use anything soft. I carried her carefully to the table and laid her down. She’s just tired, I thought. Like Hix. I loo
ked at my algebra book again. Looked away.

  “I wouldn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t been square,” I said. “I know you can—well, Taks can—make origami out of any shape of paper, but I’m pretty stuck on classical square. And I’ve done so much of it that if you show me square paper I think origami. I know about as much algebra as Loophead here,” I said, looking down at the sleeping Mongo, “but this afternoon I had to do something and—and—oh, I can’t explain! It sounds so girlie to say it felt right. But I was carrying this like warehouse of square paper, and Taks, you’d just showed me your new figure. It—she—was in my knapsack with a lot of paper kami. I’ve been making kami all summer, like—” I stopped. I’d been making kami against Val and his shadows. “And the pages were big enough—I’m nowhere near as good at microscopic folds as you are—and strong enough. I think the wind would have ripped ordinary paper to pieces before I finished folding. It was—it was something to do besides sit there and wait to disappear forever.”

  Val had drawn the book toward him and put his hands—gently, as Takahiro had—on the cover. “I’d bandage it, if I were you,” he said.

  “Bandage it?” I said. I looked at it again and felt another pang—of conscience. It was a book. It wasn’t a wounded soldier.

  “Yes,” said Val. He looked up at me and smiled. “Go on, humor a mad old man.”

  He wouldn’t have dared to say that to me two days ago. I smiled back, hesitantly. “Okay.” I picked the book up and—yes, I cradled it, like I would a half-grown puppy at the shelter who doesn’t understand that its ghastly ex-owners dumped it on the street for the crime of being a puppy.

  We heard Mom coming in the door then, making crackling noises as her shopping bags bumped each other and the walls—and then there was the unmistakable sound of Ran talking about cars. The smell of the deli’s fabulous chickpea and tomato stew reached us first. I took my knapsack and my algebra book upstairs and then pelted downstairs again before the rest of them ate everything.