The Lost Gate (43 page)

20

L
OCKS

Danny was glad that he had never gated from his little house in Buena Vista up to the school or back again, even in the rain, because otherwise the Greek girl would be able to go from there to Veevee's house in Florida or the Silvermans' in Ohio or Stone's house in DC. Yet she had found and followed him from somewhere, and she would no doubt follow him now.

His first jump had been by reflex, to the place up in the woods above the school where as a child he used to sit and watch the high schoolers. From there, he gated to a rest stop on the road to DC where he and Eric had waited for three hours before they could find a ride, though they did get a couple of lunches and a lot of nearly-finished bags of snack food. Danny had made no gate there.

He thought he might have a moment of safety in which to think about what had just happened and what he had just learned. But he had only been at the rest stop for about a minute when the Greek girl was right there beside him.

“Please wait!” she said.

If she said any more, he didn't know what. He created a gate to the spot in front of the Library of Congress where Eric had confronted him and where he had mooned the security guards. Now that he understood the difference between locked and unlocked gates, he could see that these were locked. What did he know about the Greek girl? She knew how to lock gates. Could she unlock them?

Danny passed through his own gate into the restroom alcove inside the library. He felt through all the gates in the library—all locked. If Lockfriends could unlock gates as well as lock them, then she would be inside the library in no time.

But she didn't come.

Was it that easy to lose her?

Did it even matter? Now that she had found Parry McCluer High, he could not remain there. Not that he hadn't already ruined everything himself, with his stupid spiral gate that took people a mile higher than he ever meant to, and which was public even though he didn't do any of the things that he thought making a public gate required.

No time to think about that, to regret the high school years he wouldn't have after all. All that mattered was staying alive, period.

And that would require that he learn how to take conscious control of the locking and unlocking of his gates.

The gates he had made ever since meeting Veevee were open; all the gates before that were locked. Why had he changed?
How
had he changed? Did Veevee's mere presence suddenly reshape the gates he made? Or did she deliberately change them, opening all his gates without his realizing it?

No. Veevee wasn't changing them—he'd know it if she were, just as he knew when the Greek girl closed the spiral gates at the climbing rope in the gym. They were already open for her when he made them.

Danny made a gate between the bathroom alcove and a spot right in the middle of the catalog room. It was a gate he never meant to use. He just had to see how gates came out of him now.

It was unlocked. If the Greek girl were inside the library, she could find it and use it.

But what was it about the way he shaped it that left it open, when before he had made all his gates pre-locked? What changed when Veevee came on the scene?

It wasn't just that she unlocked his gates when she used them. He hadn't even noticed the difference. Maybe it was the way Veevee changed his
attitude
toward gatemaking. Her exuberance. Her enthusiasm. She made gatemagery fun.

And before it had always been something fraught with peril. Escaping from the Family compound, knowing he'd be killed if he were caught. On the run with Eric, getting into the library, doing burglaries—those gates were about survival. Or crime. But once Veevee came on the scene, and he realized he was making the gates as much for her as for himself, it became a pleasure. But how did his mood change the way he shaped the gates? And how could he control his mood for gate-shaping purposes?

He made gate after gate to various points around the library, trying to refine his mood. The trouble was, it
couldn't
be the mood he was in, because at this exact moment he was terrified, and yet none of the gates was locked.

To judge from my gates, he thought, I'm having all kinds of fun.

He remembered the pinching feeling that he experienced when the Greek girl was closing the gates.
That
was what he needed to duplicate, not his emotional state.

He tried to feel the pinch as he made his gates, but nothing happened.

There were now thirty gates leading from the alcove all over the library. Fortunately, none were public, though all were unlocked.

Stop making gates, you idiot, Danny told himself. Start trying to lock the ones you have. If a Lockfriend can do it, then a Gatefather like Danny should be able to do it in his sleep.

When Danny had started gatemaking, he wasn't even aware it was happening. He wasn't even conscious of the fact that he knew the location of every one of them, mouth and tail. Once he realized that he was a gatemage, however, and started making new ones, he had become aware of his map of all his gates. It had been there all along; he'd been sensing them all along. Likewise, before Veevee came, he hadn't been aware of whether gates were locked or unlocked, because he had nothing to compare them to, and
he
could go through any gate he made without unlocking it. After she came, he had noticed the difference unconsciously; it changed his gatemaking, though he still didn't realize it until now. So there were things he knew that he didn't know that he knew. Somewhere inside himself, he knew how to lock a gate.

He calmed himself and thought through his entire map of gates scattered from Virginia to Ohio to DC to Florida. Not a very large swath of the world, he realized. He wasn't exactly ready for the jet set. But regardless of distance, he was aware of every one of them. He could
move
any of them, as well.

Move them! Of course. If he moved all the gates so they no longer began or ended where they used to, then the Greek girl couldn't use them to follow him.

He reached out to the gates outside the library, one of which had just conveyed him inside, and pulled the mouth ends in.

In where? He hadn't really thought of
where.
Just … in.

But when he went to look for the gates he had just gathered, they were nowhere to be found.

And he gasped and leaned against the wall. He had just eaten his own gates. The thing that felt like “gathering in” was actually the long wished-for command to erase a gate. He had pulled them back into his—what, his inner satchel of potential gates? His outself.

What I thought of as “in” must be what it feels like for other types of mages to pull in their outself, stranding whatever clant they had made, or leaving their heartbeast to itself. And it had been as natural as breathing, just as the Silvermans had told him. Just as Uncle Poot had said.

If he had only known how to do this before the Greek girl came to visit the North compound, he could have left no trace of gatery for her to find.

But that would have required understanding that was beyond him. He could gather in his gates
now.

This was no time for tidying up. He had to learn how to lock …

All the gates he had just made there in the library were locked.

While his attention was distracted, the Greek girl must have locked them. Of course she could sense where they were through the library walls. If she had followed him from the rest area to the mooning spot outside, then been blocked by the locked gate he originally made there, she could still reach in and lock his gates.

Now, though, he had a better idea of what was going on. Gathering in his gates was closely akin to simply moving them. Locking and unlocking were not different in kind from making.

It turned out to be so easy he almost cried with relief. He reached out to one of the gates the Greek girl had just locked, and did a faint almost-making at the mouth, only … wider. There was no muscle involved. There were also no words. It was more like conversing with someone by mental gesture. But the result was that the gate was no longer locked.

I have opened a gate, he realized.

When he tried to close it, nothing happened.

He could do what Veevee did, but not what the Greek girl did. He was half there.

The gate he had just opened closed again. The Greek girl was still at work. He felt once more the pinching off sensation. Only this time, having learned how to sense the opening of a gate, he realized that the closing was not at the mouth, it was at the tail.

The difference was a subtle one, since there was no distance between the mouth and the tail. From the outside there was, of course, but from inside a gate the mouth and tail actually occupied the same space at the same time. They were geometrically adjacent—there was no space between the inside of the mouth and the inside of the tail, no matter how far apart they were.

So until this moment he had not realized that in the making of all his earliest gates, he had inadvertently pinched off all the tails as he made them; but after meeting Veevee, he knew she would be coming after him and so, as automatically as holding a door for one of the Aunts or Mama, he had left the tail open behind him.

He unlocked one of the gates, then locked it again himself.

He unlocked all the gates that began inside the library. Then he locked them all. Now that he understood it, it was easy.

All these years of working to try to master this art, but with nobody to teach me or explain it to me … it's not their fault, or mine either. They had no words to explain it. Maybe even now, if Danny described how locking and unlocking felt to him, Veevee and the Greek girl would look at him as if he were a madman and tell him that it felt
nothing
like that to them.

He sensed something being attempted with one of the locked gates, but he couldn't tell what. It had to be the Greek girl, but what was she doing?

She was trying to see if she could open a locked gate.

He felt another thrill of fear. I just learned how to lock gates by watching her lock them. Have I now taught her how to
un
lock them, by letting her watch
me
?

He calmed his fear: Terror is not conducive to clear thinking, since it moves decision-making from the conscious mind to the limbic reflexes. What matters is not that she's trying to learn to open locked gates. What matters is that she was actively trying to help
me
learn how to lock them.

What else could her locking of all the new gates in the library have been? She couldn't
use
them. She must have understood that he was trying to learn how to lock them, and so she locked them all just to show him. To help him.

Was it possible that she hadn't followed him in order to point him out to assassins?

He made a viewport. He had learned to do this by making gates to push his face through, as he had first done in Rico's office. In the effort to keep his face from being visible, however, he had kept shrinking the gate until the mouth of it was a pinprick in size, and the tail was at the lens of his eye. Now he understood that each such viewport was really a half-made gate, which was locked at both ends, so that only he could see through it.

He looked through the viewport at the mooning spot.

There she was, looking angry and frustrated and, yes, a little scared.

Then she noticed the viewport—not with her eyes, of course, but with her gatesense. She turned, reached out a finger, touched it. The effect was not to block his vision, but rather to include her whole body in it. To let him sense what she sensed.

It was profound and disturbing. It was no longer a visual connection. It was as if he had, not the use of her body, but a glimpse of her selfsense. How her body felt inside itself.

He could also feel her gatesense—how his gates looked to her. Could she feel his? Was he laying himself just as bare to her, his inner map of all the gates that he had ever made? And could she sense that he was sensing her this way? Was that what she intended?

He let the feeling of her selfsense wash over him, through him. He shuddered with a kind of terrifying ecstasy. Would it be this way with anyone who knew where a viewport was, and touched it?

With this kind of intimate contact with her gatesense and selfsense, could he also learn what she was thinking? What she intended?

No. There was no language in this, and it was not, strictly speaking, her mind that he was involved with here. The inself and outself were something quite different from the mind, though they responded to the mind's instructions. It was as if the inself were the skeleton of the puppet that the mind controlled, while the outself was the strings that hung down to animate other puppets.

Could he use this connection to control her?

No. Danny stopped himself without even making the attempt. Even if it were possible, which he doubted, it would be manmagic to do it. A mage did not take control of another mage, even his worst enemy, even if it was in self-defense.

He pulled back the viewport from her finger so that he could see her visually again.

As soon as he did, he saw her double over, then drop down to a seated position on the grass and cover her face with her hands. She was crying. Sobbing, great heaves of her shoulders. What had he done to her?

He widened the viewport and pushed his face through it. “Did I hurt you?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Why are you crying?”

She took her hands from her face, but also turned her face away.

Of course he could move the tail of the viewport wherever he wanted; but if she wanted him not to see her face, he would respect her wish.

“You were teaching me how to lock and unlock gates, weren't you,” said Danny.

She nodded.

“Why?” said Danny. “Where's the rest of your Family?”

“They don't know where I am,” said the Greek girl.