Shadows (10 page)

Little quiet clinks and then footsteps moving from the bare kitchen floor to the hall and living room carpet. The footsteps paused, and an indrawn breath as Mom saw Mongo on the sofa. Footsteps started again (the floor in the hall creaked just there), and then Mom silently set a tray on the table in front of me, pushing the box of tissues to one side. She poured, put one mug in front of me, handed one to Val (murmur of “thank you”), and sat down with a third. She was sitting in the other chair—neutral territory. Not close to me, not close to Val.

The hot chocolate smelled wonderful (my mom makes the
best
hot chocolate) but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to let go of Mongo long enough to pick up my mug. Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.

“Margaret,” said Val at last. “Can you talk?”

I nodded. And then I wanted to be
totally
sure I was being polite, so I added, “Yes.” Except it came out a croak, so I had to say it again: “Yes.” But totally polite probably meant looking at him, and I couldn’t. I was still staring at the top of Mongo’s head.

“Will you please tell me what you mean about—shadows?”

I thought I was going to tell him—him and Mom—about the snake thing, but what I heard myself saying was: “That first night you came to dinner, last winter. I opened the door and there were like
forty
of you. You and your shadows. They
loomed.
They made you look huge. It was like inviting an army in.” They’ll eat all your food and ruin your carpets and you don’t even know whose side they’re on. “And . . .” I trailed off. I couldn’t think of a good adjective. Mom wasn’t yelling at me but I thought she probably wouldn’t like it if I said “scary” or “gruesome” or “some kind of monster.”

“Do you see them often?” said Val in the same calm voice, like he was asking me to pass the salt or the salad.

“Pretty much any time I see
you,
” I said, a little too quickly. “And there are more and more of them.” I looked up at last, looked at him. There were like
hundreds
of shadows stuck around the room, mostly behind him, with lots of what looked like twisted legs and distorted heads—except how did I know where one stopped and another one started? Maybe there were only a few that happened to be the size of giant elephant-swallowing anacondas. They were curling around the windows and Mom’s geraniums and Takahiro’s and my paper things, perched on the picture frames, half-tucked behind the legs of furniture, lying raggedly along the gap between the tops of books and the shelf above them. I think I whimpered. I’d never seen them this bad before—never seen
this
many of them—although they weren’t moving around much, and Val’s shadows usually moved.

These weren’t still though. They wiggled. There were so many of them it was like there was something wrong with my eyes. Have you ever thought about the darkness between a row of books and the top of the shelf? Of course not. You don’t, until it goes all loopy, and little things like legs or tails or tongues hang down over the spines.

Oh gods. Oh
gods.

I had my arms around Mongo, and he was leaning against me. I could feel something sharp digging into my breastbone—the broken cog that hung from his collar with the tag that had his pet-registry number on one side and our ground phone number on the other. The scientists cut magic out of us in Newworld two generations ago but they haven’t quite eliminated superstition, and even Station has a charm shop where you can buy stuff like Mongo’s cog. Some charm shops would sell you fetishy things with feathers and twigs and dried flowers, but if you sold too many of those the Overwatch goon squad would probably shut you down. If you stuck to broken chips and dead batteries they left you alone. Mom had bought Mongo’s charm, to my amazement, when he stopped growing and got his first adult collar. She’d laughed a little—that funny non-laugh she had for years after Dad died—and said something weird and grown up about it being a good thing to be normal when you could. I thought of this comment a lot. Mom was not into charms. And her grandmother had been a magician. And one of her sisters had disappeared while she was working for a brain bureau.

I’d always thought most of the physwiz stuff was some kind of grown-up paranoia. The usual rumor around any high school was that the two weeks of physwiz we had to take was some brainwashing thing to make sure we weren’t ever tempted to start making charms out of feathers and twigs and dried flowers or try to wake up the genes for magic we didn’t have any more so what was there to wake up? Newworld was
all
about science. We were stronger than Oldworld and Midworld and Farworld and the Southworlds and everywhere because we’d got rid of magic, and science had all the important answers.

Everywhere had silverbugs—and everywhere had cobeys, Old, New, Mid, Far and South—but I’d never seen a live one and I didn’t know anyone who had. I knew about the famous ones, of course, the ones even science couldn’t make close up and go away, but since in Newworld the military always had them epically guarded I figured they could be anything. Uncle Darnel was in a cobey guard unit, and he said he had no idea what they were. You got special gear and you did what you were told, he said. It was just a job.

I knew the double R of course—Run and Report—because that was drummed into you from the beginning, with “please” and “thank you” and “don’t throw your oatmeal on the floor if you want to go on living.” But exactly
what
you were supposed to run and report was always left a little vague. It would look odd. It would be clearly out of place. Apparently you would know it if you saw it—it was maybe like a lot of silverbugs all stuck together. Which made me particularly sure I never wanted to see a real cobey. A mob of silverbugs
not
all stuck together was too much for me.

But I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been worried enough by an oil spot on the road or a puddle of water where no water should be or a cobweb sparkling with too many prisms to run and report it, although I knew people did occasionally. Well, and there were people like old Mrs. Githers, who ran and reported about once a week. When the local Watch shift were having a slow day they gave her a cup of coffee before they walked her home again.

There was never anything to report around here. Before this summer the last silverbug outbreak had been four years ago in Birdhill, which was nearly thirty miles from here. Jill was right: No Town, No Where, although some of the stories about the old Goat Creek base in the barrens were pretty extreme, and Station got its name from when it used to be mostly the train terminus and where the soldiers went when they were off duty. But they closed Goat Creek down because they didn’t need a big army base here. Station didn’t even have a regular scan any more. The mayor used to make a fuss about getting the sweepers here once a year. Fine. That was the sort of thing mayors were for, with kissing babies at the Fifth of July town gala. The sweepers never found anything and the last few scans had been canceled. We were a low-risk area: the anti-cobey boxes were enough for us.

I sneaked another look at Val, over the top of Mongo’s head. He was wearing another of his ugliest-ever-seen-in-a-civilized-country shirts. He had a lot of them. He’d sat forward in his chair, his forearms on his thighs and his big hairy hands hanging between his knees. I thought magicians were supposed to have long slender fingers to write mystic runes in the air and twiddle wands and things. His hands looked like they’d be good at strangling people and hammering nails without a hammer. His head was bowed and his shoulders slumped. He looked really tired. Or overwhelmed. Or sad. He looked like someone who’d just heard some bad news he wasn’t expecting. Or maybe he was expecting it, just a little, but it was worse now that he’d heard it.

I was trying to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth and for possibly the first time ever say something to Val voluntarily (that didn’t involve shouting). But my mother beat me to it. “Val?” she said, hesitantly, in this little splintery voice.

I heard way too much in that one syllable. I heard how glad she was to have him in her life. How lonely she had been before she met him. How much she loved him. I remembered how much more often she’d laughed in the last few months than she had in all the years since Dad died. In spite of me.

I put my face down on the top of Mongo’s head.

I heard Val stir. “I didn’t know,” he said, so quietly it was almost a whisper. His voice always sounded kind of rough and hairy too, although maybe it was just his accent. “I didn’t know. I did what they told me; I let them . . . Maggie, I have wondered, because . . . but . . .”

I didn’t look up; I didn’t want to see.

He went on: “They told me to go to Newworld. It would be easier here, they said. I already spoke the language. There were jobs for such as I . . . now was. They did not tell me they would let the government steal my money, or that I would not be able to teach, because the schools here would not accept my papers.”

“Joanna”—Joanna was principal of the high school and a friend of my mother’s, which was kind of a pain—“nearly broke a leg leaping over her desk to shake your hand when you said you could tutor science and math,” said my mother, and I recognized this voice: this was the one she used when your best friend told you she didn’t want to be your friend any more. (Jill and I had had our ups and downs when we were younger.) “You have more referrals now than you have time for.”

It worked on Val too. I looked up to see him sit back and smile at my mother. Then he looked at me. We stared at each other till my eyes were drawn to the bookshelf behind his head. One of the legs or tails or tongues began to waggle harder when I looked at it. Maybe it was the thing that had been on the back of the sofa. I remembered that I’d occasionally thought one of the shadows was following me around. I stared at the waggling thing. It had moved to a relatively empty bit of shelf and was now bouncing up and down like it knew I was staring at it. If that was
all
of it bouncing, then it was not the size of a giant elephant-swallowing anaconda. I wasn’t going to admit it, but it reminded me of a puppy hoping for action. In another minute it would bring me a ball to throw. “One of your shadows is waving at me,” I said in a strangely calm voice.

There was a silence. “It might be Hix,” Val said at last. “She would have come with me if any—could. Did. And she has always been friendly, and interested in—humans.”

“She?”
said my mother, taking the word out of my fallen-open mouth. “
Friendly?
All right, I’m glad she’s friendly, but . . .”

Her voice trailed away, but it was a long minute before Val said anything. “I do not know where to begin or what to tell you,” he said. “It was in the conditions of my visa that I tell no one anything . . . about my previous life. Indeed I thought they had laid a geas on me, so that I could not. But then I believed—I
knew
—that I had left everything behind. I had certainly left my—my—what Maggie calls my shadows behind me in Oldworld. They were very much a part of my old life. . . .”

I knew I didn’t want to know, I thought.

“I admit I have wondered. I have wondered particularly—I know that it is not uncommon for a child to dislike a parent’s new spouse but—I have told myself that it was my vanity that insisted that Maggie was reacting to something more than myself—”

The shirts, I didn’t say aloud. The shoes.

After another pause Val went on. “Cohesion breaks—what you call cobeys—are much commoner in Oldworld than they are here—as you know. I will not repeat the tired old arguments about whether Oldworld would do better to embrace science as Newworld has; Oldworld has been plagued by cobeys for hundreds of years, long before Newworld turned away from magic. It is enough to say that at present Oldworld depends more on its magicians than its scientists. In Orzaskan a town this size would contain a dozen people trained to deal with cobeys. They would all be magicians.

“I was one of those trained. The training begins young; you learn your letters by puzzling out your first incantations.”

He paused. I was thinking
you learn your letters by puzzling out your first incantations.
You didn’t use the word “incantation” here unless you really wanted to get in someone’s face.
What kind of a dreeping canty is that
was rude enough to get you sent to detention if a teacher heard you.

Val sighed. “My country is very old; its history runs deep into the earth; our word for cobeys means ‘hole in the earth.’
‘Gvazakimu.’
‘Earth hole.’ ‘Earth . . . bottomless.’ ‘Earth profound.’ It is hard work, weaving the earth together again, across such a chasm.”

He fell silent again. I had been listening to him and not watching the shadows. I glanced at them now and discovered that a lot of them had slid down off the walls and were pooling around his feet, and over the back and arms of his chair. Oh,
yuck.

“I have wondered,” he said. “I have wondered from the first. Since I stepped off the plane and joined the immigration queue. There were—shadows—in the airport arrival hall. There were shadows on the hands of the young woman who stamped my new visa. There were many shadows in the small room where I was scanned and scanned again, and questioned, and questioned again. There were shadows on the face of the doctor who clearly did not like me, did not like my kind, and would have refused me entry if he could. This was so plain I knew that there was nothing there, that the shadows were only shadows, that what I was seeing was only the result of having had no sleep in thirty hours.”

“And of leaving your home forever,” said Mom, “and coming to a strange country. A strange world.”

Val nodded. “Yes. I was very tired. . . . I had grown so tired that I had let them take my magic away. I was so tired I let them take everything away.” He shrugged, his odd, dramatic, Oldworld shrug, and it was as though I saw him shrugging off a mountain or half a planet. “I thought it would be worth the loss, after . . . They took it all away, and sent me here.”