Shadows (33 page)

At last Mom nodded, a stiff little jerk. “Gods’ holy engines,” she said grimly. “I don’t think I can stop you, much as I think I should. And it’ll be easier afterward for both of us if I say okay now. But I also think the usual systems have broken down. That’s the cobey, perhaps—or the armydar. And I find Casimir’s version of events rather compelling.” She smiled at me; it was not a happy smile. “You are so much like your grandmother,” she said. “It doesn’t really express it to call her stubborn. When she made up her mind about something . . . she made granite look soft and pliable.” She paused. “Your grandmother—like your great-grandmother—was also a powerful magician.”

“And you, Mom?” I whispered.

“I’m the sister who gave it up,” she said. “I’m the one of the four of us girls who wanted to be normal. I’m the one who fell in love with someone whose family had never been gene-chopped because there was no gene to chop, who went to secretarial school so I could get a job sooner, because Ber was going to graduate from Runyon in a year and we could get married. And then I went to accounting classes in the evenings before you were born, because I liked arithmetic. You know where you are with addition and subtraction.” She leaned forward, over Mongo, still attached to my leg, and put her arms around me. Hix (and perhaps Whilp) did her bodiless-shadow thing: I felt her patting my face and I think Mom’s too, not at all dismayed by there being no space between us for her to
be.
I thought I felt Whilp making a nest in my hair. I have bad hair most days; a
gruuaa
couldn’t make it much worse.

“Go with love and luck,” said Mom. “And with magic. I send you with all that I can offer you.” She kissed me on the cheek—and there was a funny little tingly feeling, almost
gruuaa
-like.

“Giving up magic didn’t work so well for Val,” I said.

“No, it didn’t,” she agreed. “Which is probably why I’m not shutting you up in a closet right now. But you’d better leave before I break down entirely—before I remember that I’m your mom and you’re seventeen years old. Ran and I will go to Gwenda as soon as he gets home, which had better be soon. Come . . . come after us . . . as soon as you can. That house is not called Haven idly. There is still magic there—Gwenda will help us. I wish I were taking you and Val there now.”

I turned and nearly ran out the door. I also nearly tripped over Majid. “Come on,” said Jill, grabbing my arm. “No falling down. I’m sure we need you in one piece.”

We went down the sidewalk together while I said to myself, I am
not
going to cry, I am
not
going to cry. It will be fine, Val will like Haven, and he’ll figure out how to get along with Gwenda (my dad used to call her
formidable
). Takahiro appeared on my other side carrying Majid, who was (astonishingly) purring again. Mongo had come out with us and then shot ahead and had his forepaws up on the rear door of the Mammoth (this was not allowed, of course: dog claws scratch paint) and was wagging his tail so hard it was in danger of coming off, while Bella strained to get her muzzle through the quarter-open window to touch noses with him. “That’s a yes then,” said Jill. “If I open the door, will he get in, or will everyone else come out?”

“He’ll go in,” I said, “if we make it obvious enough that that’s the plan.” By the time this had been achieved, not without a certain amount of swearing and being hit in the face by wagging tails, Casimir had joined us. “If we put this end of the rear seat up, I can get in the back,” I said, pulling dog hair out of my mouth. “It’s either me or the dog food—that’s an easy one. And it’s dumb to take two cars. Then Casimir can get in front.” It was nearly dark; the streetlights had all come on and there were shadows everywhere. Some of them were
gruuaa.

“I’ll come in the back with you,” said Takahiro. “You can sit on my lap.” I didn’t quite laugh, remembering how crowded the three of us had been on the drive over—and Casimir was a lot wider than either Taks or me.
Shoulders.
Yes, I know, I’d been
kissing
Taks and liked it a lot. And I wasn’t minding the idea of sitting in Taks’ lap at all either. But Casimir totally won on the shoulders and a girl can look. And if Taks was in back with me we could stuff everybody’s knapsacks under Casimir’s feet. He’d brought one that looked like he was going camping for a week. I didn’t want to think about what he imagined the magdag was going to need.

Supposing we found Val and Arnie and wanted to take them away from wherever they were, where were we going to put them? On the roof?

“And Mongo, Majid, and Bella will sit on us,” I said loudly, to drown out my thoughts.

“Odoroku beki,”
said Takahiro. “We’ll cope somehow.”

We were pretty cozy in the back. It had been crowded back here
before
Takahiro, me, Mongo, and Majid. I settled down—trying to be less heavy is not really very constructive—and Takahiro put his arms around me. Hix and a few of her friends redraped themselves around both of us. I was way more comfortable than I should have been. Briefly. Till Mongo ricocheted off one of the front headrests and ended up in my lap. Bella put her head over his back, and I could feel Jonesie whuffling in one of my ears. Oh well. At least Majid didn’t seem to be killing anyone. Yet. Casimir got in the front, and Jill last. I could see the bag of dog food through the gap in the headrests. Bags of dog food can’t laugh, can they?

Jill put her hand on the key and then sat back. “Er—where are we going?”

Good question. Suddenly I wasn’t comfortable at all.

Casimir turned around so he was looking out past us through the rear of the car—or would have been, if there hadn’t been a lot of hairy bodies in the way. “There,” said Casimir, pointing.

I looked at him. “What?”

He smiled at me. It was a better smile than it had been earlier, and I felt Taks’ arms tighten—just a little. “There are a few small things that my mother gave me,” Casimir said.

“That got through the border guards,” I said.

“Like sewing your money into the lining of your coat,” said Jill. “So maybe the robbers won’t notice.”

“Good attitude,
manuke,
” I said. “I wonder if it’s generally known that the Newworld border is as full of holes as this car is full of dog hair.” But Jill wasn’t listening to me; she was trying to pick up what Casimir knew. Our eyes met. I could see that she was succeeding. And then . . . I began to pull it too, or it to pull me. It was a bit like a loop of
gruuaa
tugging in their insubstantial way. Maybe that’s what it was. Jill nodded, turned to face the front again, and started the car. It roared to life as befitted a giant hairy thing with tusks.

“Oh!” I said as Jill backed the Mammoth around in a deliberate, star-pupil-driver-ed way that said she was every bit as frightened as I was. “My algebra book! It had better come with us—”

“I’m sitting on it,” said Takahiro.

I relaxed again (sort of). I supposed it really wasn’t going to let itself be left behind now. I reached down past Takahiro’s skinny butt and gave its spine a pat.

“How close are we going to be able to come?” said Jill conversationally a minute later, negotiating the main street, which was unusually empty—and there had been no soldiers on the corner of Jebali. We were the only car at the midtown stoplight, which never happens except in the middle of the night. Two cars passed in front of us—both of them loaded to the roof with suitcases and boxes. Leaving town. Heading north and west, which was where Mom and Ran would be going soon too. With a car full of suitcases and boxes.

The newsboard banners were empty. There were silverbugs everywhere I looked—clustered in dizzying little clumps on the overhead power lines, glinting on storefront windowsills, and scattered apparently at random on the sidewalks. And ironically every one of the big metal anti-cobey boxes had a crown or swirl of silverbugs. So much for
you,
I thought at them. They didn’t reply. Two days ago I wouldn’t have expected them to. Today . . . today it was probably just the throb of the armydar making me spacey. I was almost getting
used
to the armydar. This couldn’t be good.

My stomach felt funny. I hoped we didn’t drive over any silverbugs.

We went our solitary way across the intersection. “To wherever,” said Jill.

“I am not sure,” said Casimir at the same time I said, “Probably not very.”

Takahiro said, “Even if we could drive up to the front door, we don’t want to, do we? It’s not like we’re coming to the local lockup for official visiting hours.”

I was beginning to feel that hazy tug more strongly. The
gruuaa,
I thought, had stabilized their line on Val.

“There’s that falling-down army base a few miles out of town in more or less this direction,” said Jill. “Out at the edge of the barrens. Goat Creek. Maybe it’s not as falling down as it looks.”

“There have been rumors for years that it isn’t,” said Takahiro. “Even that it’s completely in use. They’re just not saying for what. I’ve always wondered why—and who—runs the sheep out there, you know? The perimeter fence is from when it was a firing range and special-ops training and stuff, but the fence is still there. And so are a lot of sheep. So like now I’m wondering if they’re using them—like we’re using our guys here.” Mongo was doing one of his I-am-a-spineless-rubber-dog things and had twisted his own head around so he could lick Bella’s face as her head rested on his back. Of course there was a lot of face to Bella.

“Dad used to say that it was a conservation thing, the sheep,” I said. “Managing wild grassland or something.”

Takahiro snorted. “The only stuff that grows on the barrens is what
can
grow on the barrens. They don’t need sheep for that. And they had to import some kind of tough little feral sheep that could survive on what does grow there.”

Jill glanced in the rear view mirror at Takahiro. “The things you know.”

“I have the secret gizmohead insignia tattooed over my heart,” said Takahiro.

“Whatever,” I said. “This feels like the right direction.”

“Good,” said Casimir. “You feel it too.”

“It’s the
gruuaa,
” I said. There were a lot of them in the car with us. They seemed to be twisting themselves into a big, irregular, ever-so-slightly glowing net. I could both (kind of) see them draped all over everything in their usual raggedy globs and clusters of shadow, and also (kind of) see them as this big glowing network thing. It seemed to throb in time with the armydar, and with the flash of the streetlights over Mongo’s back. Light sometimes did strange dimensional things when it hit the dramatically black and white markings of a border collie. Such as the border collie in my lap at the moment. Flash. Flash.

“Perhaps, when this is over, you will teach me to speak to the
gruuaa,
” said Casimir.

I shook my head, but that made the flashing-network thing worse. “I can’t teach you anything,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s not really speaking.” Flash. Flash.

“But I like the idea there’s going to be an after,” said Jill.

The landscape changed as we got closer to the Old Barrens. The big lush trees put in by the town council disappeared and the tougher, scrubbier trees of the barrens took their place. The sourleaf grass that the sheep around the old army station had to live on began to show in clumps, especially in breaks in the paving. The farmland was all on the other side of town, toward Copperhill; this side there was only a polite strip of cultivated public land before it began disintegrating into the barrens. At first there were warehouses and big ugly slabs of grey industrial something or other and then they disappeared too. Now we were in the barrens for real. There were occasional sandpits and increasing stretches of scraggy, grey-green sourleaf grass, turning yellow for autumn, and looking kind of ominous in the twilight. We went
click clack
over the abandoned stretch of auxiliary railroad that had served the army base when Station had been a big town and the base had been open. Officially open.

Jill turned the local radio on. Even the usual burbling sounded subdued. There was still nothing to worry about, said the presenter, trying to sound chirpy and failing, but since the schools and many businesses had decided to close temporarily while the army finished securing the situation—

“Situation?” said Jill.

“Securing?” said Takahiro.

—much of the town had decided to take an unscheduled vacation.

“Vacation?”
Jill, Takahiro, and I all said together.

But if any citizens had any concerns, there was an army presence at the high school, the local Watchguard offices, and city hall, and would be glad to answer any questions.

“Presence?” said Takahiro. “Concerns?”

“Well, at least they all seem to be busy elsewhere,” I said. The road was amazingly empty, except for silverbugs. There were way too many silverbugs. We saw one pickup truck with something like a lawn mower in the back and one closed van, which could have had anything at all in it. A small traveling plastic cobey model for educational purposes. Major Blow-it. Val. Probably not Val, since the
gruuaa
didn’t react.

Jill turned the radio off.