The Shimmers in the Night (18 page)

“What are you
doing?”
she asked.

“Looking for them. The ants. I just remembered that all summer, whenever I opened this, there was this line of red ants along the window sill. Right here.”

He pointed, then shrugged.

“Of course, they're all gone now. Anyway. It's not like they would do anything, individually. They're still ants. But if you got enough of them…”

“So—wait,” said Cara, and he pushed the window down again. “When Mom gave us that message for Dad, was that what she was talking about?
The animals aren't what they seem.
She told me it was a line they both knew; she said it was mostly meant to let Dad know we'd really been in touch with her. Like, proof. But if the line about that—that some animals are on the other side, though most of them are with us—does that mean Dad
does
know about some of this? About the Carbon War?”

“I can read him, if you want. We'd just have to figure out the right question to ask.”

The conversation she'd had with her mother while they traveled to the nether space—about how the Cold was an alien, how he and his allies were responsible for global warming—had faded in her memory, as though a gauzy film had been thrown over the parts that weren't the most dramatic. She struggled to bring back the details. About the animals, what had her mother said, exactly? She'd said the sea turtle was really a sea turtle, but the flying beast that seemed like an extinct Quetzalcoatlus wasn't actually one….

“She did say there are animals
and
shapeshifters on our side,” she said. “And that the flying dinosaur thing is one of the shapeshifters. It's a she, I guess, and they call her Q.”

“Not flying dinosaur,” corrected Jax. “Just
pterosaur. Azhdarchidae:
advanced, toothless—”

“But my point is, she
isn't
that,” broke in Cara. “Mom said that shapeshifters—like her—well, some of them can take ancient forms. That's what Q does. Mom can only take the forms of things that exist now, I guess. So she was the sea otter. And when they threw her into the basin beneath the cooling tower, she turned into a fish.”

“So there are human shapeshifters and ones that aren't human, I guess,” said Jax. “I mean, in their first forms.”

Her mother had said that, too: “first form.”
If I were in my first form
….

“But, um,” said Cara, “Mom's
first
form is human. Right?”

“I think so,” said Jax. “But…”

“But what?”

“Well, it's obvious. But if she's human, then some humans are shapeshifters, which implies…”

He trailed off again.

“
What
, Jax?”

“That human doesn't really mean what everyone thinks it does.”

A few minutes later, both of them still hungry from missing breakfast and lunch and hardly sleeping the night before, they went down to the kitchen to forage. Cara stuck her head in their father's study door to say hi, then closed the door when she withdrew. She and Jax were standing in the kitchen eating the rest of the cinnamon-swirl loaf, slathered with butter, when Max's voice rang out behind them.

“Homes!”

They turned and looked down the front hallway as their older brother dropped his backpack on the floor and plucked his earphones out of his ears.

“Good to have you back, small man. Cara. So what's the 411 on Zee? You find out anything more for me?”

Jax glanced at Cara.

“Long story,” she said.

Ten

They told Max everything—ending with Cara thinking she
saw Zee. The three of them crowded into Jax's room, scarfing pretzels and talking fast.

“I can't believe this,” said Max, crumpling the bag and lobbing it into the already-full trashcan beside Jax's desk. (It bounced off and hit the floor.) “It
can't
be her. I can't believe someone actually messed her up in this. I didn't even
tell
her about the summer. I didn't want to freak her out. Are you sure? You could have imagined it. Right?
Easily
”.

“I know,” said Cara. “I could have. But shouldn't we find out for sure?”

“You're saying you can take this book—this book that lets you go wherever you want to—and use it to find Zee? Just by thinking of her?”

“Well,” said Cara. “I hope so. I don't know for sure. When we used it before, I had to have Jaye
and
Hayley to make it work. Because they're both…so close to me, I guess. You can't use the windowleaf alone; you need your friends for it to work right. A circle of them. Now Hayley's mad at me. But if you and Jax take her place—maybe.”

“And if we do find her, Jax plans to do some ESP thing to get her head on straight again? If she
is
messed up by these… Cold Ones?”

“There's only one Cold One,” corrected Jax.

“I guess so. Basically,” nodded Cara.

“But that would be just a big experiment, with Zee as the guinea pig! Jax, you
admitted
you don't have a clue what you're doing. It'd be a total shot in the dark!”

“But Max,” said Jax, “if she
is
a hollow, and the other option is leaving her that way…you don't want that for her. I promise.”

“Listen. If we do find her, and there's something messed up about her eyes—which, by the way, I'm not saying I believe there's gonna be—then no offense, kid, but I'd want to call Mom in on that. I'd want to leave it up to the professionals.”

Jax looked downcast. The confidence he'd shown just instants before Max got home seemed to shrink, which made him seem younger.

“Easier said than done,” said Cara. “Calling in Mom, I mean.”

“I tell you what,” said Max. “Cara, if you get that book back from Jaye, then I'll go along with you. We'll leave Jax here, since he's a target. Inside the so-called wards. He'll be safe, right? And you and I can take our chances and see if that window thing can bring us to Zee. Because other than these stories you guys are telling me, I got nothing. And, yeah, she cuts class sometimes, but when she does it's usually with me. So this is weird. But if we find her, and if there is something seriously wrong, like, physically, all I'm saying, I'm not going to rely on a little dude to fix it.”

“Jax's instincts are better than you give him credit for,” said Cara, defensive. “Better than mine, anyway.
Or
yours.”

“Except only yesterday he was taken over by aliens and had to be locked up in some kind of futuristic pod deal, am I right? So he doesn't exactly keep himself safe 24-7. Does he.”

“That was
my
fault,” said Cara. “I handed him the poison pen. Or whatever you want to call it.”

Jax shook his head.

“Max is right,” he mumbled, and picked pieces off a Lego crane, not meeting her eyes. “It was my fault. I was distracted, and I messed up.”

“Listen,” said Max, and elbowed Jax softly. “I didn't mean to run you down. But you're ten years old, Jax. Even if my whole brain
would
fit in your frontal lobe. And if Zee's—if something's happened to her…I mean this summer,
I
screwed up. I got the car totaled because I wasn't taking stuff seriously, and I left you guys on your own. I still feel guilty. I don't want to make a mistake like that again.”

They sat there in a silence that wasn't so bad. It was comforting to hear Max say he felt—well, anything.

An hour later Jaye's mother stopped the car outside the
Sykes's house on their way to Jaye's play rehearsal. Jaye had told her the windowleaf was an atlas from the school library that Cara needed for homework, so Mrs. Galt talked away on her headset, paying no attention to the girls as she idled in front of the lawn and Jaye and Cara met halfway up the walkway, Jaye clutching the book.

It was chilly in the fall sunset. A sharp wind had sprung up, moving the mostly bare limbs of the trees and sending dry leaves skittering here and there over the street, scratching papery sounds on the pavement. The girls stood shivering, neither of them wearing a coat. Cara remembered how hot it had been when she was raking leaves over the weekend; suddenly she wondered if that heat wave had had anything to do with the Burners.

They carry microclimates with them
, Mrs. Omotoso had said.

Or maybe it was just global warming. Them but not them.

“So what are you going to do with it?” asked Jaye.

When Cara called to ask Jaye to bring the book, her dad had come into the room, so she hadn't been able to explain.

“We're going to try to find Zee,” she said now. “And bring her back.”

Jaye froze for a second. Then she turned and ran back down to her mother's waiting car. She tapped on the window and then leaned in when her mother rolled it down; after a short discussion, the car was pulling away again.

“Where's she going?” asked Cara when Jaye came back. “What about—don't you have to go to your play practice?”

“She'll pick me up later. I told her we had a big test tomorrow that I'd spaced on. I said you and I needed to cram for it together.”

“You're missing rehearsal?”

“You need your friends to make that book work, don't you? So I'm coming.”

“Are you sure?” asked Cara. “Last night, because of what I got you into, some man practically
strangled
you. Last night! Are you really OK with going through again?”

“Well, you got hurt, too,” said Jaye. “Worse than I did. And you still want to try to help Zee, don't you?”

“But I know her more than you do. And Max is my brother.”

Jaye nodded and then spoke slowly.

“It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, that guy having his hands around my neck. For sure. But the rest of it—stepping through that book and being somewhere else—that was the
best
thing that ever happened to me. I mean, the world isn't what I thought it was. Now—life could be anything. The
world
could be anything. It's amazing.”

They smiled.

“What does the ward do, exactly?” Cara asked Jax when she and Jaye and her two brothers were gathered in her room.

It was dinnertime, but Lolly had turned out to have the evening off, since Cara's dad hadn't expected her or Jax home yet; their dad had his nose buried in papers in his study.

He'd said they could forage for lasagna in the fridge.

“Ward lines protect against the old ways—both the Cold's and our own. A ward wouldn't cover guys like Roger, though—unless he was using an old way. It wouldn't do anything to stop a regular person from, say, walking into a regular place and pulling out a regular gun. Far as bad guys like Roger go, it's safe as it ever was. Or wasn't,” said Jax.

“So Jax,” said Cara, “when Max and Jaye and I go through the windowleaf—if it lets us without Hayley—you stay here. We'll step through the book, and the book will be gone, too. You need to hang tight and stay safe till we get back.”

“But before you go,” asked Jax, “can you ask the ring where Zee is? Her address? Because I should know it. In case you don't come back. And I have to come after you.”

“You
don't
come after us,” warned Max. “If we don't come back, you get Dad. You tell him where we went. Tell him what we were trying to do. You hear me?”

Jax nodded stiffly.

“I still need the address,” he said.

Cara sat down on her bed, feeling a little self-conscious, since no one had really watched her before except in a crisis situation where she didn't have
time
to feel watched. She closed her eyes, touching the ring with her other hand—which was, she realized, almost completely healed from last night's burns. She asked a question about where—
which town, which road, which house
, was how she phrased it in her head—and thought of Zee.

She saw a sign, W
ELCOME TO
O
RLEANS
, and then another sign, a light blue one sticking out of an expanse of dried-up grass—B
LUEBERRY
H
OLLOW
. Finally she saw the flash of a front door marked fifty-five. It looked like a newer, cookie-cutter-type neighborhood, the kind where all the houses were built at the same time and were the same color.

She opened her eyes again.

“If the ring is right—my vision with the ring—she's near here!” she said, surprised. “In Orleans. A neighborhood called Blueberry Hollow, number fifty-five.”

“I can't believe you can do that,” said Max. “Really? You just looked up my girlfriend in your head?”

“I could be wrong, Max,” she said. “It's mostly the ring.”

Max shook his head—half admiring, she thought, and half disbelieving.

“So far so good,” said Jax. “Then I can google you. If
that's
allowed by Big Brother.”

“Are you ready?” Cara asked Jaye, who'd spread the windowleaf open on the bed.

“Wait!” said Max. “Ask if there's a ward, too. Because from what you told me about last night, we have to land outside it, right?”

“Plus,” said Jax, “the ring or the book can't give us data from
across
the ward. That's what the ward's
about.
Protection from objects like this. It's why you could see Mom was at the power plant, but not where she was
inside
it till you stepped past the line. Same here: the book may tell you where Zee is generally, but then you have to cross the ward line to find her.”

“So the elementals can't cross them at all?” asked Cara. “Even if it's their side's ward in the first place?”

“Right,” said Jax. “Elementals can't cross wards at all, because the wards repel both our works and the enemies, and elementals are purely the Cold One's work. Nonliving. But once you're inside, you should be able to use the ring again.”

“So if those elementals can't cross.does that mean once we cross the line, the Burners can't get us?” asked Jaye. Jax shook his head.

“I wish. But they could be inside
already.
Guarding her. Like they were guarding Mom at the cooling tower.”

“Great,” said Max.

Before, Cara had leapt before she looked, she thought—and to be impulsive on her own behalf was one thing, but now other people were at stake, too.

“Thanks for that, Jax,” she said. “Thank you.”

Again she closed her eyes and touched the ring. This time she asked to see the ward line in Blueberry Hollow. And it was hard to see what she was looking at, at first, in the descending dark of twilight. But when she finally made it out, it was surprisingly beautiful: a kind of thin wall of distortion that seemed to rise from the curb up into the air, half reflecting and half absorbing the scenery around it—bushes, houses, telephone wires, and sky. Images stretched and compressed, softened into blurs and then came clear again.

They should land on the street, then step onto the grass. After that they'd find out more.

“OK. So I guess I know where we need to be,” she said, opening her eyes.

She and Max and Jaye stood close together beside the bed, where the book was spread open, Max grimacing to cover his embarrassment. Cara repeated the question ritual, and beneath them the pages lost their whiteness as the scene came up: the sign, the curb, the dry grass, and the light blue sides of houses and gray-shingled rooftops.
It was working.
The sky wasn't too visible from this angle, but there was a purple hint of it at the top.

“Holy crap,” said Max. The semi-permanent skeptical look was wiped off his face, Cara saw, and felt a surge of pride.

The picture was dizzying to look into, she realized—it was so jarring that this space yawned at their fingertips, this depth and air and world where really, beneath the book, all there should be was a coverlet and sheets and a mattress, and beneath that the floorboards, and so on downwards, in three simple dimensions, through the normal strata of the old house….

“Let's go,” she said, and grabbed the hands on each side of her.

They stepped awkwardly up onto the bed, springy beneath their shoes, around the sides of the book with their arms stretching over it. And then they stepped in.