Shadows

by Robin McKinley

  And now he was unconscious on the floor of some stupid horrible military warehouse thing and Val was in the same room wearing chains. And, oh by the way, my dog was having a nervous breakdown and my new boyfriend was in his wolf shape. I could feel a bubble of either tears or hysteria rising in my throat. I scooched Mongo a little farther so I could touch Paolo’s face. I could see he was breathing.

  “He fainted,” said Val behind me. “He stood up from his desk when the—doorway you made opened, and fainted. You cannot blame him,” he added as if apologetically.

  I didn’t blame him. I just wished none of this had happened. Well, duh. When Paolo’s wife had brought their two little kids to the shelter to pick out a dog a couple of years ago, I’d helped them choose. I saw them out walking Goldie sometimes.

  I couldn’t deal. I was a senior in high school. I’d only just passed my driver’s test this summer. I’d be eighteen next month. There was no magic in Newworld, and the army were the good guys, keeping us safe.

  I had to deal.

  I looked at the desk. Maybe the key to the chains was in one of the drawers?

  “The key will not be in the desk,” said Val.

  I turned my head to glare at him. “Don’t do that,” I said. “This is—weird—enough.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” said Val mildly. “It is an obvious thing to be thinking. But I am in chains because they are afraid of my magic, and because they don’t understand it they have some poor fellow in here with me, with a panic button to press if he is able to do so before my secret miasma of evil overcomes him. They will not have left the key with him.”

  “Secret miasma of evil,” I said admiringly, but I knew I was stalling. I had no idea what to do next. But whatever it was . . . “Sweetie,” I said to Mongo’s butt, “do you suppose you might be ready to come out from there?”

  I felt a familiar light pressure against the sole of one foot as I sat with my legs now folded under me. I felt behind me for my algebra book, and dragged it as gently as I could around to one side.

  It flopped open at once, and presented one rigidly upstanding page, which again pulled free as easily as tearing a page off a memo pad. I looked at the little shred of paper lying on the floor that had fallen away from Mongo’s collar. Folding this new page on and around Mongo’s back was awkward but it so wanted to be folded I was barely keeping up with it. It was clearly a border collie, head down, tail straight out behind, intent as anything. Border collie kami.

  I felt around under my T-shirt for Mongo’s collar, and tucked it underneath. Then I wrapped both arms around him, put my face in his fur, and waited.

  He came out looking embarrassed—gnawing on narrow chewy things like belts, long woolly scarves, shoes, coat sleeves, chair legs and knapsack straps had been one of the things I’d had the hardest time convincing him to stop doing, back in the days when he was learning to be a dog rather than a weapon of domestic demolition. He plastered himself belly-down on the floor and looked at me up through his eyelashes, judging how much trouble he was in. I reached out and curled the little paper collie another turn around his collar to make it more secure, and he immediately leaped up, licked my hand, licked my face, and then raced around the room twice while I tried to unfold my legs and find out if I could stand up. Ow. Sort of. When I bent over my algebra book again it flew open and another page presented itself, which I drew out softly.

  I stood staring at it a minute. I held it stretched lightly between my two hands. I could vaguely see equations scrawled on it, tangled up in the leaf-vine flower-stem pattern of the ornamental paper. It was like one of those Can You Find? games in kids’ magazines. Here was a numeral two, which was also the little nobbly green thing that the petals of a flower unfurl from, and one of the petals of that flower was bent over in a square-root sign. I hadn’t noticed the bees before, which were also number eights, or maybe they were infinity signs.

  “Maggie—” said Val, who was way too bright for his own good. My own good anyway.

  “Shut up,” I said. “I mean, please don’t talk.”

  I knelt (stiffly) down on the floor again. The algebra book immediately clunked over to lean against my hip and Mongo stopped cavorting like a loony and threw himself down on my other side. He had at least two gruuaa along for the ride: one of them climbed up my leg to tickle my forearm. Carefully I made the first fold. I wasn’t sure how many legs this one was going to need. . . . By the time my fingers couldn’t find anything left that wanted to be folded I had a thundering headache, and the many-legged, spiky-backed thing in my hands glittered like an oncoming migraine.

  I stood up again, not realizing till then that I had developed a billowing, quivering gruuaa cape—I could see it, dark and dazzling, skittering out on either side of me. I wondered if Val might be seeing me now as I had seen him, that first night he came to dinner—in my old life, where things (mostly) made sense. I walked over to him and, wordlessly, he held his hands out toward me. There was a lock, unnervingly rather like a bicycle lock except for the little flashing lights that looked creepily like a tiny scowling red-eyed troll face, between his wrists. Now what? Don’t think about it. I grabbed one of Val’s hands and slapped my paper figure down on the troll face.

  There was a brief, queasy, up-is-down-and-down-is-nowhere-and-I-really-hate-nowhere-here-we-are-again moment. There was a kind of whistling gasp, and then Val’s hands were holding onto my wrists, and he said, “Maggie!” I blinked, and I was standing in the awful little grey cement room at the back of the Goat Creek Military Base.

  “Well done,” said Val, smiling faintly.

  CHAPTER 13

  I LOOKED DOWN (NOW THAT I KNEW WHERE DOWN was again). There, of course, was my algebra book, although it was half-buried in . . . “What?” I said. Whatever it was, it looked a little like the compost heap in Mom’s garden and a little like the remains of a fire in a ’tronic factory. “Ex-chains,” I said, kneeling to pick up my algebra book. “Really ex.”

  “Really ex,” agreed Val, standing up cautiously.

  I looked at my book. I had only used three pages, but better than two-thirds of it was gone. The covers were still there, still saying Enhanced Algebra in big stupid letters, and there were some pages left inside, but not many. Val was right: we weren’t leaving the way I had come in.

  Val knelt beside Paolo, who hadn’t stirred. “Do you have a torch?”

  I set my algebra book down on a clean part of the floor and wiggled out of my knapsack, fending Mongo away from helpless-person-lying-on-floor-meant-to-be-licked while I fished for my flashlight. Val finished taking Paolo’s pulse and then gently peeled his eyelids back one after the other and shone the light in them, gave the flashlight back to me, and ran his hands lightly over Paolo’s skull. Then he rolled him over tenderly in what I recognized as the recovery position from the yearly-once-you-reach-high-school required first-aid class. I’d only ever done any of this stuff on my classmates and even with them cooperating wrestling someone else’s body into any position was difficult. I wondered if there had been a lot of unconscious people in Val’s life in Orzaskan since it didn’t seem to faze him at all. “I guess he hit his head when he fell,” said Val. “But what I can easily check is all normal.” I went around to the chair behind the desk. There was a cushion on the seat, and a jacket over the back of it.

  Val slid the cushion under Paolo’s head and I knelt to put the jacket over him. One of the things they taught us in first aid is that unconscious people can sometimes hear you. I awkwardly patted Paolo’s shoulder and said, “It’s me, Maggie. I’m sorry you hurt your head. I hope you’re okay.” I looked up at the wall opposite the desk. There was no trace of the gateway my little origami figure had opened.

  Then Val and Takahiro and I turned toward the door. “We can’t just leave,” I said, and Val laughed. “Indeed, I doubt it,” he said.

  “No,” I said, glaring at him. �
��Not like that. Well, worse,” I added reluctantly. “We also have to rescue Arnie.”

  “Arnie?”

  “Jill’s mom’s partner. He owns Porter’s—the hardware store.”

  “Ironmongery,” said Val thoughtfully. “He is here too?”

  “Well,” I said uncomfortably. “I hope so. You were.”

  “Ah,” said Val. He put his hand on the doorknob. I held my breath. He turned it.

  The door opened. I let my breath out.

  Hix was around my neck again, but the rest of the gruuaa skittered out in front of us, turned right, and raced down the corridor like some bizarre tide. The corridor was only dimly lit and the gruuaa might almost have been black water, their leading edge ragged like it was pouring over pebbles, and occasionally splashing up the walls like they were piers. Val, Takahiro the wolf and I followed, me holding Mongo’s collar with one hand and my much thinner algebra book (it still wouldn’t fit in my knapsack) in the other arm. We passed two doors on one side and one on the other, but the gruuaa were still on the trail, so we followed. At last they piled up in front of a fourth door.

  We stopped too. “I will go first,” said Val quietly.

  “You will not,” I said, annoyed. “The minute anyone sees you, they’ll know something has gone wrong.”

  “I feel that a seventeen-year-old girl in torn and bloody jeans will be just as easily recognized as not a standard member of staff,” said Val.

  The army probably wasn’t into denim blood chic, no. I let go of Mongo and put my hand on the door and threw it open, planning to do some kind of heroic first thing, but Takahiro beat me to it: he was through the door in a flash. There was a kind of grunt like the noise you make when the breath is knocked out of you and a sort of strangled scream, and someone, probably the screamer, said, “Gods’ holy engines. Gods’ exploding holy engines.”

  I was through the door too before they’d finished saying it—a hundred-and-sixty-pound wolf is pretty worrying close up, and I didn’t want anyone doing anything radical. But Val nearly dislocated my shoulder when he grabbed me and jerked me back behind him—and Mongo got between most of our legs and we both almost fell down. Someone laughed.

  “Arnie,” I said.

  “Babe,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  It hadn’t been Arnie who screamed. He was the one who’d laughed. There was another man at another desk against another grey cement wall. This one was conscious, however. Conscious and standing up with his hands above his head like we were holding a gun on him. Sometimes I’m too dumb to live. I blurted out, “You’re the one with the gun.” I could see it on his belt, with a weeny little strap holding it in its holster.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “I am so not going to shoot anyone.” But to my horror—and Val’s hands tightened, and Takahiro growled—the man lowered one hand and started fumbling with the strap. I hadn’t seen Taks crouch for the spring but I grabbed him anyway—Val’s hands on my shoulders meant I couldn’t reach very far, but I let go Mongo’s collar again and grabbed Taks’ tail and then I did see him stop crouching . . . at about the same moment as the man behind the desk got his gun free and laid it clumsily on the desk. It skidded a little way and stopped, barrel pointing back toward the man, who had both hands over his head again.

  “All I wanted was a job,” said the man despairingly. He didn’t look much older than me. “And there aren’t many jobs around here, you know? And Paolo told me to try out for Watchguard, silverbugs are no big deal, and you spend most of your time walking little old ladies home anyway. Then there were all those silverbugs last summer, and suddenly we had the military crawling over us. . . . They’re reopening this place, Goat Creek, you know? They aren’t talking about it, but everyone knows they’re doing it.”

  Not everyone, I thought. Bugsuck.

  “I had two hours’ training about use of a sidearm, okay? It was between how to step on a silverbug and how to fill out a form that you’ve stepped on a silverbug. I didn’t join Watchguard to shoot people. I joined to walk little old ladies home.”

  “Aren’t your arms getting tired?” I said.

  He lowered them. “You’ll tell your wolf not to eat me, okay?” he said. “That is a wolf, isn’t it?”

  “Er,” I said. “Yes.”

  He nodded. “You ever been to that wolf rescue place, far side of West Turbine?”

  Of course I had. It’s got critters. After Clare ended up with a bobcat I wanted her to diversify into wolves too.

  “I tried to get a job there but they didn’t need anybody. Your wolf is really huge. I’ve never seen such a huge one. Hey,” he said. Mongo was doing his big-friendly-eyes-wagging-tail thing. Mongo wagged his tail harder, went down on his belly, and began to creep in the man’s direction. I could have called him back, but I didn’t. When Mongo got close enough the man sat down suddenly on the floor and Mongo, immediately ecstatic, sat up, and the man put his arms around him and buried his face in his fur. You so don’t do that with a strange dog, but Mongo’s tail had gone into blur mode and he had found a piece of the man to lick.

  Val walked the few steps to the desk slowly but the man didn’t move. Val picked up the gun, clicked something, and a lot of bullets fell out into his hand. I wondered some more about what Val’s life had been like in Orzaskan.

  This time I didn’t even have to open my algebra book: there was a page sticking out between the covers. I slid it the rest of the way out, set the book down, and started folding. The gruuaa came to help, pitter-patting over my hands, brushing against my face, and, I guess, billowing out into a quivering—I don’t know, maybe like the curtain at the back of the stage, only wigglier.

  “Whoa,” said Arnie. “What is that? The shadows?”

  “Gruuaa,” I said briefly.

  “Of course,” said Arnie. “I knew that.”

  Val gave a little snort of laughter. “They’re Oldworld creatures,” he said.

  There was a tiny pause and Arnie said, “You’ll be Val.”

  “Be quiet,” I said. “Please.”

  This one went much faster, and the headache wasn’t nearly as bad. It was kind of funny in a not-ha-ha way that lock-picking gave me a worse headache than interdimensional travel. I held up another long spiky thing with a lot of legs and—this time—really almost managed not to think, What if it doesn’t work?, slapped it on the lock between Arnie’s wrists and—I hadn’t heard Val come up behind me, but he grabbed me again when I sagged. The sag wasn’t as bad this time either. And then Arnie was free, and there was more weird crumbly stuff on the ground that had been chains.

  “Oh, wow,” said the man with his arms still around Mongo, but he had lifted his face and was watching us. “Oh, wow.”

  “We must leave,” said Val, as if we’d dropped by for a cup of coffee. “What do you want to do?”

  “Run away,” said the man immediately. “I suppose they’ll sue me or court-martial me or something. You couldn’t tie me up, could you? So it doesn’t look so much like . . . at least take the dreeping gun, will you?”

  Arnie stood up and stretched. “Thanks, babe,” he said. “I didn’t know you were one of us.”

  “Us?” I said.

  “Honey, there are so many of us,” he said. “But I’ve never seen anyone do what you just did.”

  “Us?” I said again.

  “Why do you think I run a hardware store?” Arnie said. “It’s a good way to confuse the sweeps. You don’t think it’s all about cobeys, do you?”

  “I—” I said. “Well, I did. But—hardware? I—er—I mean, the last few days, um, animals—”

  “Yeah,” said Arnie. “Animals are good too. It kind of depends on what kind you are. Clare’s one of us. I should have guessed you were, since you’re there all the time.”

  “I wasn’t one,” I said a little wildly. “Till about three days ago.” Year
s. Centuries. Eons.

  “Poor babe,” he said. “It’s rough when you find out like that. Happened to me about your age too. My mom had tried to tell me it was going to, but I didn’t want to hear. But I’m the cold-iron end. Handling a lot of it every day also means I don’t blow up fancy technology so much, which is kind of a dead giveaway. You still don’t want me using your ’tronics.”

  “Maybe I could come with you,” said the man sitting on the floor with his arms around my dog. Mongo had finished with one side of his face and was now working hard on the other side.

  “If you’re a friend of Paolo’s,” I said, “you could see how he’s doing. He—er—fainted.”

  “Oh, man, Paolo,” said the man. “Paolo’s like my best friend. Even if Watchguard was his idea. I walk his dog sometimes. I babysit his kids.”

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Jamal,” said the man. “Where’s Paolo?”

  “We’ll show you,” I said. “We—er—we have to go out that way. I guess.”

  “Good luck,” said Jamal. “If you can blow stuff up, the ’tronics for all the barrier stuff to get out of here are in the front office, on your way out.” He stood up, to Mongo’s sorrow. Mongo settled for nibbling delicately on his fingers. I was ready to intervene but apparently Jamal knew (crazy herding) dogs well enough to realize this was a sign of affection.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “The office may be empty,” said Jamal. “There’s some kind of whiztizz out front. Bill just told me him and Benny were going to go take a look. You guys weren’t supposed to be here at all”—he nodded at Arnie and Val—“but there’ve been like three more cobeys open up on the deep line and they haven’t got the humanpower to cover everything. So they were blasting on with opening Goat Creek up because this was going to be the big central whatever, and they were sending in some kind of shielded truck to take you away but it got sent to one of the cobeys instead.” He shrugged.