Meeting (22 page)

“She went into it,” Maya said.

“Oh. Yeah, it wasn’t set up for that. Guess I better build in that parameter.” He retrieved the propeller from the floor and fitted it back onto the shaft. It spun toward Maya again. “All right, now I just have to clean it up.”

“What kind of range do you think it’ll have?” Columba asked.

“No way to tell until we field test it.”

“Maya,” Columba said.

“I guess we could go outside and I could walk away and see how far I go before the detector stops pointing toward you,” Evren said. “That would be good data.”

“Once you establish that,” Columba said, “I’d really like Maya use the detector to sense that Sibyl girl’s
sissimi
. If we could track her that way—”

“Maya can’t do that,” Evren said. “She has Rimi.”

“Oh, right. Maybe we can get Rowan or Benjamin to try it in school. Maya, you were the answer to my mind’s prayer, but maybe you had some other reason for stopping by?”

Maya slumped into the kitchen chair opposite Evren’s. “Sarutha said . . .”

Columba sat next to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “What is it?” she asked gently.

Maya put her hands over her face. “I can’t learn principles of magic, and I can’t sing things into doing what I want. I can pronounce things and gesture and sing right, but they don’t work.”

“Not all of us can use those disciplines,” Columba said. She rubbed her hand up and down Maya’s upper arm and shoulder.

“I’m not like
any
of you. I don’t have magic inside me.”

“You do,” said Columba. “You have the magic of observation and recall. You see things, and you can summon their images afterward.”

Maya lowered her hands and stared at Columba.

“That’s a wonderful magic,” Columba said, “and Rimi has other skills, no? Look what she did to the detector. She can pick things up at a distance, too, and bring them to you. I wonder what the weight limit is on her lifting ability . . . we could test.... You two have the makings of a terrific criminal.”

“I don’t want to be a criminal,” Maya said, and thought,
You don’t know the half of it.

“Well,” said Columba, “it’s not a crime if you do it as part of our security force.”

Maya crossed her arms and stared at the floor. Then she closed her eyes.
Rimi, what about this? What about having Columba for our teacher instead of Sarutha? What about our doing this kind of sneaking?

I love anything that will give me more information,
Rimi thought.
Sarutha has been good to you, but lately all she does is tell you what you can’t do. And she doesn’t know what we
can
do. She’s not even asking the right questions. At least Columba notices
me
.

Okay, I like that part of it, too, although it might make it harder for us to keep our own secrets.
“I don’t want to do things that are wrong,” Maya said aloud.

“I can work with that,” Columba said. “As long as you understand that protecting our family and the portals is right.”

“I—I want to be able to say no if you ask me to do things that feel wrong.” Maya hated how Harper had been able to force her to do things. She didn’t want another Harper in her life.

Columba reached for Maya’s hand. Columba’s hand was large and rough and warm. Her grip was comforting and strong. “
Akala
, you will always be able to say no. Sometimes we won’t respect your no, but I will do my best to try. We will open that portal when we come to it. Join my force. We have cake.”

“Really?” Maya asked.

Evren lifted a cake plate out of the refrigerator. It held half a round of brown two-layer spice cake, covered on top with creamy frosting, and smelling of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and palta. “Dr. Porta baked this morning. Want some?”

Maya gripped Columba’s hand and released it. “Yes,” she said, to everything.

 

 

 

After cake, the promise of a meeting after school on Monday, a request from Columba that Maya walk past Dreams & Bones sometime over the weekend and sketch what she saw through the window as her first security assignment, and a strange settling inside as Maya adjusted her expectations, Maya thought,
Now let’s go to the woods and work on our Halloween costume.

Yesss!
Rimi low-fived, slapping an invisible hand against Maya’s.

Maya watched for Travis as she left Janus House, but he was still in class, apparently. She headed to the park.

People were walking their dogs along the bike path. Rimi practiced spreading calm to dogs who sensed her and started barking. She was a pro now at getting them to accept her.

They reached the woods, checked for possible watchers, and plunged in. The hideout in the middle of the blackberry vines was undisturbed since their last visit. Maya settled on the damp ground.

Halloween
, Rimi thought.
I’ve never been there, but I like everything about it already. How are you going to dress as me?

A head!
Rimi pressed invisible hands all over Maya’s head, pushing Maya’s hair flat to her skull, gliding her hands over Maya’s cheeks, nose, forehead, cupping the ears, patting the mouth.
Different from an arm. Not as useful!

Sure, sure, mock my brains
, Maya thought.
Anyway, you wouldn’t have to put a brain in it, just make it
look
like a head. Though I was thinking it would be really cool if it could function. Like, what if you could talk out loud? You could talk to Peter!

Tempting
, Rimi thought.
Where would I put it?

Maya patted her shoulder.

“The thing about Halloween is it doesn’t matter if it works, just how it looks,” Maya said.

Maya got out her sketchbook and two pencils.

 

 

 

Saturday morning Maya went down to the kitchen to look for her mother, who was drinking coffee and reading a novel, wearing her relaxed weekend clothes: jeans and a baggy green T-shirt with WILLAMETTE VALLEY FOLK FESTIVAL on it above a sketch of a fiddler.

“What is it, honey?” Mom asked.

“I know it’s really, really late, Mom, but I finally figured out my costume, and I wondered if you could help me make it.”

“Sure! What did you come up with?”

“I want to be a warrior. Like, an ancient Greek, with a shield and some armor.” She put her sketchbook on the table and flipped to the most recent pictures she and Rimi had worked on. They had stopped at the library before they ran into Friday afternoon curfew, and studied some pictures in books. “I thought I could make a kind of tunic thing out of sheets and then use pieces of cardboard for the armor on top of it. I need to get some silver spray paint.”

“A warrior, Maya?” Mom sounded uneasy.

“Not because I want to fight, Mom, just because it’s neat. I can wear my black waffle-weave shirt and jeans under the tunic chiton thing, and—”

Mom frowned. “There’s no magic in it.”

Maya didn’t understand at first. She looked at her sketch. This was a working sketch, showing all the boring parts of the costume. Simple sheets, pinned together along the tops of the arms, belted at the waist; cut-out cardboard shapes tied on with twine—

Oh. Every previous year, Maya and Stephanie had chosen magical costumes.

“I’m going to draw Medusa’s head on the shield,” Maya said. Stephanie had been crazy about Greek myths. “And my friend is letting me borrow the coolest helmet ever.”

Mom studied the sketch. “This is seriously what you want, honey?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then. We’ve got all those moving boxes in the garage we can cut up, and I have a pair of sheets on their last legs. You want some nice white flannel sheets with red hearts on them?”

“No,” Maya said.

Mom laughed. “I figured. We have those dark blue ones with light blue stars. How about those?”

In the pictures they’d studied, the Roman guys wore red tunics under their armor, and the Greek guys wore white tunics, but those were just speculations, Maya guessed, and anyway, she wasn’t going for accuracy. “Sounds great.”

“I’ll warm up the sewing machine. There’s a couple of box cutters in the tool drawer. Let’s do this thing.”

 

 

 

Later that afternoon, Maya stood against the wall outside Dreams & Bones, then leaned over to peek through the wide front window. People, a mix of kids and grown-ups, sat at tables in the café, some talking with each other, others reading or laptopping or netbooking. The pastries lined up in front of the window looked delicious, shiny glazed sugar swirls over the baked brown and gleaming jewel jelly of the Danishes, the bear claws wide and resplendent with slivered almonds and whip lines of white frosting, all kinds of doughnuts, cookies, scones, brownies, even some thick slices of heavily frosted cake.

Maya straightened, leaning against the building’s brick wall, and lifted her sketchpad.
Could you hold this for me?
she thought.

Sure.
Rimi rippled down Maya’s arms and slid under the sketchbook, supporting it while Maya penciled a quick drawing of the interior.
Thanks
, Maya thought. She glanced both ways along the sidewalk, ready to grab the sketchbook if anybody looked her way. Cars passed in the street, but no one was paying attention to her.

Maya leaned in for another peek. She had the foreground; now she needed the depths of the store.

The owner was staring at her from behind the pastry display.

“Ulp.” She ducked back. She grabbed the sketchpad from Rimi and hugged it to her chest.

Something
, Rimi thought.
Something, Mayamela. Something I remember. Let’s go inside.

Yes,
Rimi thought.
A girl looking in a window. He has probably seen such a thing before.

Maya hugged her sketchbook and took three deep breaths, huffing them in and out through her nose. She sighed and stepped away from the wall, stowed her sketchpad in her backpack, and headed for the store’s entrance.

Yes,
Maya thought. She pulled on the handle, a wroughtiron dragon whose twisted tail formed the grip. Bells jangled as she opened the door. Well, she’d get a better view of the place from inside, and maybe she could snag one of the tables and do her sketching without enlisting Rimi’s help.

“What can I help you find?” said a warm, deep voice from her left. It sounded furry, and had a faint accent, though Maya wasn’t sure if it was French or Spanish or Other.

She glanced up. It was the proprietor, and he was smiling faintly. “I don’t—” she began.

I know this person!
Rimi thought.
It is the one who troubled my other Other. Maya! He is the one who talked to Bikos and told him to look otherwise than to the Thrixa for help when we were so sick.

This one?
Maya looked carefully at the proprietor’s face, stared into his eyes even as she felt her attention trying to shift. There was a flutter in his irises, which had looked black to her before. Now she saw silvery sparks there, surrounding pupils that were diamond-shaped.

“Ah,” he said. He cocked his head, the movement strange, as though his neck had a few extra vertebrae.

“I think you knew my friend Bikos,” Maya said in a low voice.

“Yes,” he said, “and his friend who is with you now.”

Maya backed up, her hand reaching for the door handle.

Please
, Rimi thought.
Please don’t run away, Maya.

“Tea,” said the man.

“What?”

“I have a spice tea called Dragon’s Fire. I think you’ll like it. There’s a room in the back where I practice the fortune-telling arts. We could talk in private.”

Maya tightened her grip on the dragon door handle, a match to the one on the outside of the door. The iron was cool and hard against her fingers and palm. Rimi flowed a little across her back, waiting.

“All right,” Maya said.

The man turned his gaze from her. “Stuart,” he called, “could you watch the register?”

“Sure,” said a tall, stocky guy with black-framed glasses and a pirate’s smile. He set down the manga he had been reading and moved behind the bookstore counter.

The proprietor went behind the coffeeshop counter, poured steaming water into a teapot, assembled a tray, and carried it toward the back of the store. Maya followed him. Mindful of her security job, she looked everywhere, noting the shelves, the patrons, the goods. Kids lounged, sprawled, sat on the floor, absorbed in comics and books. At a table near the back wall, kids rolled many-sided dice and played cards with anime characters on them. People looked comfortable here.

The door the man led her through was thick wood painted burgundy red. It had steel rivets on it in a Greek key pattern. As Maya stepped over the threshold into the room beyond, she felt an electric tingling. She stepped back into the store. It stopped.

“Oh,” said the man. “Sorry.” He tapped the door’s edge and muttered, then nodded.

Maya stepped over the threshold again, and this time nothing happened.

The room had a round table in its center, covered with a dark purple velvet cloth. A crystal ball rested on a wooden stand in the middle of the table. One red, upholstered chair sat on the far side of the table, and another stood with its back to Maya. The light was dim. The walls were papered with dark patterns. There were no windows. The scent of incense lingered.