The third soldier had been doing something I couldn’t see, behind the glare of the second soldier’s flashlight. I had only a sudden writhe from Hix, and heave from the gruuaa on the floor, as warning. I let go of Taks’ hand and flung myself back in my seat just before this searchlight big enough to light up the Marianas Trench blazed in at us. I could see gruuaa plastered around the window frame next to Taks, over the dashboard, along the strip of seat left empty by Taks’ narrow butt (although there was some hairy black and white Mongo tail in the way too). I thought maybe it was a good thing that the inside of Mom’s old car was a weird swirly pattern of black and grey, even if it meant it always needed vacuuming. Mongo yelped, Takahiro jerked, and Val sat like a stone, his head still a little turned toward the soldier with the box.
The light went out. I slithered around again and felt for Taks’ hand. Although even if they’d caught us holding hands, so? But I was glad they hadn’t.
“That dog shouldn’t be loose in the front seat,” said the soldier with the box, but now he sounded angry.
“No, he shouldn’t,” said Val. “Margaret?”
“Mongo,” I said, and my voice sounded funny, but the soldiers didn’t know what I usually sounded like. “Mongo, come on.”
Taks gave Mongo a last pat and a little push—and let go of my hand again. I reached between the seats and grabbed Mongo’s collar. He let me drag him into the back seat again, and clip on the harness strap.
“You’ll pardon us if we keep an eye out for you when you come back, I’m sure, sir,” said the first soldier, still angry. “For your own good, of course.”
For our own good? I thought, chewing on the insides of my lips.
“Of course,” said Val. “Good evening, sir.” His “sir” sounded like “zir.” He pressed the button and the window glass slid up again. Then he waited patiently for a break in the traffic—there were a lot of people out late on a school night—and drove calmly across the intersection. The critter smell was fading, so I assumed Takahiro was all right. I reached forward again and patted his shoulder.
“What was that?” said Takahiro. He still sounded a little muffled.
I could see, under the flash of passing streetlights, that Val was frowning. “I’m not sure,” he said. “They certainly pulled us over because they were getting readings off their—whatever it was—that made them want to look at us more closely. I didn’t recognize it, but Orzaskan technology is different and I’m several years out of date. I doubt it was generating random numbers. That dazzle at the end was full of assessment radiation: the light was just a, er, blind. They didn’t find what they were hoping for, however, or they would not have let us go so quickly.”
“You told the gruuaa to protect Takahiro,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
Val shrugged. “He’s the most vulnerable of us. If they care to look me up, or if my name is already on their list, they will know who I—was. You, Maggie, have Hix, and through her the other gruuaa will also serve you.”
Takahiro said, “I can’t see them—the gruuaa—but I can feel them, or . . . the wolf can. It’s—it’s a little like someone putting a wet washcloth on your face when you have a fever. It’s better and you relax a little even though you know you’re still sick.”
Val nodded. “Good,” he said.
We were silent till Takahiro had to give Val directions. Sunrise Court was this huge non-development development—all the houses had like twenty bedrooms and eight-car garages and cottages for the staff, and the lots they were on were the size of football fields. You wouldn’t know they had anything to do with each other except that there was this gigantic gate that said Sunrise Court and then once you were through it you had to choose the private drive you wanted. There were only five of them but I still couldn’t imagine five families in Station wanting houses like that. The gate to Takahiro’s drive had to read his palm print before it would let us in.
Taks’ house was dark when we got there except for a porch light. “S’okay,” said Taks. “I told you. Kay’s left the porch light on. That means she got my text.”
“Taks—” I began.
“I’m fine,” he said quickly. “Really. You guys are great. Including Mongo. Thanks. See you tomorrow, Mags,” and he got out. I did too, so I could sit in front. To my surprise he gave me a quick hug—and then sprinted to the house. Well, I don’t think it was a sprint, it’s just his legs are so long. He didn’t look back. “Ja, mata,” I said softly. See you later. But I saw . . . I thought saw . . .
I got back in the car and closed the door. “A lot of the gruuaa are going with Takahiro,” I said.
“Yes,” said Val. “As I said, he’s the most vulnerable of us.”
“What . . .” I said. And then didn’t know how to go on.
Val said, “They respond to fear and anxiety—not perhaps unlike how Mongo does. He may be hoping to sleep on your bed instead of in the kitchen, but he also wishes to comfort you—to stay near his person in her distress. Hix is important in the hierarchy of the company of gruuaa who befriended me many years ago—the rest will have accepted you because she so clearly does.”
I thought, Some day, some other day when there isn’t anything else going on, I want to hear about gruuaa society.
“We have demonstrated Takahiro is important to both of us. They will have drawn their own conclusions. I have some authority by long association, and I can say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ I said ‘yes’ to their staying near Takahiro. Which is not to suggest that they always do what I ask them—rather like a dog again, perhaps, although gruuaa plan and conjecture more than dogs. They are neither domestic nor domesticated. But right now they are so pleased to have me recognize them again they are eager to do what I ask.”
“That’s really nice of you,” I said after a pause. Here I was doing something alone after dark with Val. And with his shadows. And saying “nice” to him. He’d called me his stepdaughter to the army creep. I suppose it made us sound more united or something.
Val glanced at me. “Takahiro will be all right once the military leave the area again, taking their equipment with them. Then the gruuaa will come back to us. Unless one of them develops an individual bond with Takahiro and decides to stay.”
“Do they all have names?” I said.
“Oh yes,” said Val. “But I do not know all of their names. I had—have wondered if the names they give us to use are the same as the ones they use to each other. Indeed I am not sure they use names among themselves.”
“But . . .” I said, and then couldn’t think how to go on. “But . . .”
“I was trying to be what I had promised to be,” said Val. “What I believed myself now to be.”
“How long?” I said. I didn’t know how to ask what I was really asking: How long ago was it that you killed your best friend? How do you—what do you do after that? Did your government just—knock you out somehow, like a zoo vet with a trank gun knocks out a tiger? Did they tie you up for two months, two years?
But he heard me anyway. “Seven years,” he said. “It took my government five years to . . . some of it was for their safety, but some of it was for mine.”
He was silent a minute, and then went on: “It has been a somewhat full two years, at last, when they let me go . . . since I came to Newworld. My old habits and instincts have no place here; and I had been out of the ordinary world entirely for five years. That there was a great swathe of my old skills and—facilities simply gone did not seem any more surprising or difficult than much else I found here. That I dreamed of much I had lost—including the gruuaa—that I imagined even that I saw them sometimes—did not seem surprising either. I still see my friend’s face. . . .” He was silent for another moment. “And then there was Elaine.” He shrugged again, that very un-Newworld shrug. “I suppose I will sound old and foolish to you when I say that Elaine has made my new life worthwhile, whatever I have lo
st.”
No, I thought, I think it’s about the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard anyone say who wasn’t in a book or a movie. For just a flash I was seeing Casimir’s grin in my memory. But then it faded, and it was Takahiro, looking at me levelly over a bowl of chickpea and tomato stew, and then looking away. Saying ee, sugoi, and smiling into his coffee. I barely knew what Takahiro’s smile looked like. I was pretty sure I’d like it if I got the chance to develop a relationship with it.
We stopped at a red light. When the light turned green Val added, “And now I am discovering—I must discover—what I have not lost.”
“And not get screwed up by Kleinzweig’s goons while you’re at it.”
“Yes.”
“Loophead,” I said.
“Yes,” said Val, who had (fortunately) caught on to my Mongo-nickname routine. You want your dog to react to the sound of his name, so you need to call him something else when you don’t want him to react. “I think it is a very good thing you brought him tonight,” Val continued. “We have proven that the army do not have a reading for werewolf, but Takahiro will have been emitting something that their meters might have read, if it weren’t for the gruuaa and—er—Loophead.”
“But they didn’t.”
“They did not, or we would be in three little rooms being asked questions,” said Val grimly. He glanced at me again. “I apologize. Perhaps it is not that way here.”
“I don’t know what way it is, any more,” I said. “But—you said you did have weres in Oldworld.”
“We do,” said Val. “But any not known to the government will be in a great deal of trouble if discovered.” He glanced at me a third time. “It is, as Takahiro said, stress that causes involuntary change. A properly trained and mentored were will not change, even under extreme stress. But the myth lingers that weres are untrustworthy and unpredictable. Therefore the government can do what it likes with you, or your boss or your neighbors will come to learn what you are.”
“That’s—blackmail,” I said, appalled.
“It is,” agreed Val.
When we got to Jebali Lane the soldiers were still there. Still waving their box. The same one strutted over to the corner as Val made the turn. Val stopped and slid the window down again.
“All well, sir?” said the soldier.
“I believe so, zir,” said Val.
The soldier glanced across Val to me. “Glad you’ve got that dog in the back seat,” he said, and patted the roof of the car like giving us permission to live.
“Bugsucker,” I said under my breath as Val slid his window closed and drove on. Val laughed.
Mom was opening the front door before we were out of the car. I thought: Elaine has made my new life worthwhile, whatever I have lost, and looked the other way when he put his arm around her. I slowly clipped Mongo’s lead on and then (quite a lot faster) took him for a walk.
CHAPTER 9
I PICKED MY ALGEBRA BOOK OFF THE KITCHEN table and took it and Mongo upstairs with me again. He threw himself on the floor and then bounced on and off the bed several times. “Hey,” I said in my best dog-trainer voice. “Stop that.” Usually he jumped onto the bed immediately and lay flat, trying to look invisible, in case I changed my mind and made him sleep in the kitchen after all. (Note that I wouldn’t dream of bringing him upstairs at bedtime and then taking him back to the kitchen. In the first place it’s totally unfair and in the second place he has a heartrending poor-sad-dog routine that would make a stone weep. Or possibly General Kleinzweig.)
Mongo looked confused for a moment, standing stiffly, tail up . . . and then I realized Hix was caroming around the room, very much like a dog inviting another dog to play chase-me. She was making a tiny half-imaginary sweet-smelling breeze. I had no idea what a gruuaa-trainer voice sounded like—or to what extent gruuaa would accept “training” from a mere human. “Stop that,” I said.
Hix collapsed. I could only see her because I had been looking straight at her when she went from lightning strike to stain on the carpet. “Bedroom rules,” I said to the stain on the carpet. “You lie down and be quiet. Or you sleep in the kitchen.” Like she had a collar and I could drag her downstairs. And she could probably slide under closed doors. The stain on the carpet roused itself and twinkled. “You’re allowed on the bed,” I said, and patted it, “as long as there’s still room for me.”
I didn’t see her move, but I knew she was now behind me—and the (new) stain on the carpet was gone. Mongo fell on the bed with a happy sigh. No one does a happy sigh better than a dog.
Quiet.
I looked at the algebra book. I was supposed to bandage it. Right. Um. I had some really pretty origami paper Jill had given me last Christmas that I was still waiting for the right moment to use. I got it out and started folding a chain. It took a while, but I finally had a long enough chain to wrap once completely around the book and enough left over to tuck in the space where the pages had been torn out, like a bookmark. I made those links extra-thick so when I closed the book the covers were almost parallel again. I laid it gently on the desk.
I got into bed gingerly. It’s one thing to wake up with a semi-visible, mostly intangible gruuaa having joined you some time in the night. It’s something else to worry that you’re lying down on top of her. Mongo gave another happy-dog sigh and I thought there was almost an echo to it, like the noise a semi-visible, mostly intangible critter might make. Her smell and the smell of clean dog went rather well together, like chocolate and vanilla. As I drifted to sleep I heard her start to hum.
• • •
When I woke up groggily the next morning to my alarm going NOW NOW NOW NOW my algebra book was on the bed. Mongo had his chin on it. I was sure I’d left it on the desk. I was pretty out of it last night but I wasn’t out of it enough to take the textbook from my least favorite subject to bed with me, even if it had saved my life yesterday. Was I? Maybe I was. I stared at it. The paper chain was gone. I blinked, trying to convince myself my eyes would focus before my first cup of coffee. Mongo had been a terrible paper shredder as a puppy (he’d been pretty much a terrible everything shredder as a puppy) but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t stoop now to eating an origami paper chain. Besides, if he’d tried, it should have woken me up.
Could a barely visible, semi-intangible critter have a taste for three-dimensional paper? I wasn’t sure if Hix was still here or not . . . and then a shadow on the wall moved in a way that nothing else in my room could have made a shadow of. Barely visible semi-intangible critters might very well be able to eat a paper chain silently and without making the bed shake. I wondered vaguely if there were any house-training issues with gruuaa. I didn’t think there’d been any weird stuff in the corners since Val moved in—well, any more weird stuff. Neither Mom nor I was big on housecleaning, Ran was hopeless and Val fit in with the family pattern very well. If gruuaa, uh, excreted, what was it? Nobody would notice more dust.
I climbed out of bed awkwardly, carrying my algebra book, and set it on the desk, feeling a bit like a dog trainer taking her dog back to the place she’d put him the last time she’d said “stay.” “Stay,” I murmured, thinking there was something funny about how it looked. Or rather there was something funny about the fact that it didn’t look funny . . . The covers were parallel. The top one didn’t slant down over the empty space in the middle. Okay, maybe that’s where the chain was. It must have got folded up inside somehow.
I opened the book. No chain slid into view. I couldn’t remember exactly where the ripped-out place was, so I fanned the pages, looking. It was toward the back—I thought. It should have been obvious. It had been very obvious last night. I yawned. Maybe I should get the coffee first. No, this was dumb. There was a dreeping great hole where I’d torn all those pages out.
No hole. There was, however, about two-thirds of the way through the book, a big clump of some rather odd pages. There was
algebra stuff written on them—awful-looking equations with lots of letters and squiggles, but I wasn’t going to think about that now—but the paper was strangely shiny and there were faint patterns printed on it, as well as the textbook stuff. Colored patterns in a range of mostly pastels and some deep violet. Very like the pretty paper Jill had given me for Christmas, which I’d folded into a chain to make a bandage for a wounded algebra book. I flipped the strange pages back and forth. They were (apparently) bound into the spine with the rest of the ordinary pages, although if I ran my fingers over them they were slightly textured, like Jill’s paper had been, but the patterns were much fainter than they’d been on Jill’s paper. I thought, since the entire situation is totally screwloose and doolally, what’s a little more? Who cares?
The new pages were also more flexible than paper—either than algebra-book paper or fancy origami paper. I riffled them again. And while I was having my it’s-all-screwloose-so-who-cares attack, I looked at them waving back and forth and thought that it wasn’t me that was providing all the waving, and the way one of those pages felt between your fingers was almost muscular. Well, the book had to have got to my bed somehow. . . .
What was I saying?
I had to sit down kind of abruptly. Fortunately my desk chair was right there. I slapped the book shut and stared at it. It lay as still as a dog who knows you mean it this time. I kept staring at it. Of course it lay still. It was a book. And the shadows on the wall were just shadows. I kept my eyes averted from where Hix was playing with the pull cord of the curtain. I didn’t want to think about any of it—which included Takahiro’s secret—I wanted everything to be like it had been two weeks ago—two months ago—before Val—before Dad died. Especially before Dad died. I grabbed the edge of the desk and held on hard for a moment.
One of the great things about dogs is they don’t do regrets and what-ifs and all that useless human-thinking stuff. Mongo got off the bed and put his nose under my forearm and gave it a heave. It meant, Hi, I’m here, and, by the way, it’s morning, and I want a pee and breakfast. If Dad hadn’t died it might have taken me a few years longer to convince Mom to let me have a dog. And I’d rather not hate Val. And Hix was a friend. And Casimir. And Takahiro . . .
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