Shadows (14 page)

There was a shadow rappelling down the wall behind Val. It hooked my eye away from his feet, and as I looked up again I saw the clock.
Drog me.
I had to do time-warping things if I was going to make it to school, and Mongo was going to have the fastest sprint around the block of his life.

• • •

Jill hadn’t been paying attention to any news reports.
“Well?”
she said when I climbed into her car.

I was only slightly breathless from racing Mongo. And I still had a shadow around my neck. I’d checked in the mirror and there wasn’t anything to see—I didn’t think—but then I didn’t know if shadows—
gruuaa
—showed in mirrors or not. Maybe my hair looked a little thicker and darker at shoulder level. Maybe I was losing my charge fast.

“What’s that smell?” said Jill. She sniffed. “I like it. New perfume?” Fortunately she didn’t wait for an answer. “So—
well
?” she said again, louder.

“What?” I said. I’m not a morning person anyway, and a lot had happened since she’d dropped me off last night. I wasn’t even thinking about the cobey—or Val. I was wondering if anyone at school would notice there was a
gruuaa
around my neck. Mongo had certainly noticed that she wasn’t getting shut up in the kitchen with him when I left. “What’s got into him?” Ran had said. I hoped Mongo wasn’t going to take it out on the curtains. Or the furniture.

Jill smacked her forehead with a flourish that would have got her a lead in the autumn term play if Ms. Gratton saw her. “
Casimir,
you moron. Have you figured out a campaign?”

“Oh,” I said. “No.” It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about him—I’d thought about him kind of a lot after I was in bed in the dark but still too wired up from everything. Including Casimir himself. And including wondering if you rolled over on a shadow if you’d squish it. I’d finished up sleeping with a pillow over my head so I couldn’t see the shadows the streetlamp made out of the tree outside my window. It had been windy last night. But there wasn’t really any way I was ever going to ask Casimir to go for a romantic river walk, even when it wasn’t raining. I’d expect him to say, Who? if I phoned him up. I wasn’t going to put it to the test.

“Well, you have to,” Jill said decisively. “He’s foreign. He’s from—um—wherever he’s from. It’s up to you to help him feel welcome.” She started telling me that Diane was having a party at her house next weekend, and she was sure Diane would be happy to invite him, but really I should see him a couple of times before I risked him in a group. Yeah right. I tuned out. There was a silverbug at the intersection between Zorca and Laburnum. I pointed my phone at it and clicked the coordinates on to Watchguard. Let them deal with it. If the niddles were taking over the big stuff Watchguard would have plenty of time for silverbugs. Jill was still talking. One of the banner boards was streaming about the cobey, but Jill wasn’t paying attention.

We got to school just in time, before being mildly annoyed with each other for each other’s dumb attitude escalated into a real fight. Eddie was standing with the rest of our crowd and flirting like mad with Becky. Ginevra was hesitating at the edge of the group looking confused and unhappy. I thought, Right, Jill, you’re so clued in about romance.

Nobody seemed too stressed about the cobey, although I heard “Copperhill” a couple of times and Laura had also seen a silverbug on her way to school, not the one I’d seen. That made two on this side of town this morning. That was at least one too many.

I saw Takahiro coming through the school gates as the first bell rang. I waved and he waved back. He lived on the far side of town and wasn’t a morning person either and usually caught the bus after the bus he should have caught. (I didn’t know why he didn’t have a car. Taks and his brainiac friends did computer stuff for money and Taks’ dad could’ve just bought him a car. But Taks used the bus.) Maybe I could get him to invite me over for an origami evening so I could tell Diane I had other plans. You never knew with Takahiro: sometimes he was almost human. Sometimes you might as well try to be friends with a cobey box. That was how Jill and I had started using Japanese phrases—to try and get some kind of reaction out of him when he reverted to dead-battery mode. It didn’t work, but Jill and I liked saying stuff our teachers couldn’t understand so we kept doing it. Also, isn’t
sumimasen
just
better
than boring old “excuse me”? It sounds more like “excuse me” than “excuse me.” Also we were pretty sure it wired Takahiro. Probably because we got it wrong. But if he wouldn’t help us, how were we going to know any better than what we got off the webnet?

I started to wait for him, but then I saw one of his gizmohead friends beetling toward him so I didn’t bother. I’d catch him during morning break and check what kind of mood he was in, not that that would mean anything about how he’d be next weekend. To give the
warumono
credit, he kept his promises. If he had promised you something—like that he’d give you an origami lesson—he’d do it. It’s just that if he was in one of his moods when you showed up you wouldn’t want to stay.

There was an announcement over the PA system in homeroom about the cobey in Copperhill. How it was no big whizzy deal but just in case it was a deal and the niddles weren’t admitting it we were supposed to keep an extra-sharp eye out for anything
unusual.
They didn’t say what unusual was, of course. Two silverbugs on the same side of town in the same morning? And, added the PA system, if we didn’t have to go to Copperhill, don’t. Huh. That almost certainly meant the niddles weren’t telling us everything. A whole town shouldn’t shut down because there was a new cobey. That’s why we had cobey units and the Overguard.

If it hadn’t been for the announcement we probably wouldn’t all have looked around and started counting Copperhill kids. So I wasn’t the only one who noticed that probably half of them weren’t here today. Big cobey then. Like maybe the kind that ran along deep lines. There was a deep line that ran from Copperhill to Station. But we didn’t even have regular scans any more because this area didn’t have cobeys or any of the weird pre-cobey stuff that scans supposedly pick up. We didn’t have silverbug swarms either—like we’d had two of this summer.

First class was geography and Mrs. Tarrant isn’t nearly as anal retentive as Mrs. Andover, so we could sit where we liked. I was staring resentfully at my gigantic algebra book when Takahiro dropped down next to me. He dumped his shiny new geography textbook on the desk, but his hands were busy with a little piece of paper, folding and folding and folding. Taks was amazing. I’d been watching him fold for nearly eight years and he was still amazing. He got
more
amazing.

Even I remember that when he first moved here he was folding origami all the time, and I wasn’t noticing anything right after Dad died. Taks was the shortest kid in the class that year, so there was this tiny boy crouched over these almost tissue-thin sheets of colored paper, his long-fingered hands going so fast you could hardly see them. I knew about origami, although I’d never tried it, but a lot of the kids had never heard of it, which made him even more exotic. Station has lots of Southworlders and almost as many Midworlders but not many Farworlders.

I guess the teachers had had a memo or something to be nice to him because they didn’t stop him folding even during class. It might have been the uncoolest thing ever—and Taks dressed all wrong at first, of course, and he had too many pens and pencils, which he always lined up very carefully at the top of his desk, just before he went back to his origami—but his paper figures were so fabulous that everyone forgot about cool and wanted one. He must have made hundreds of cranes, and pretty much gave one to anyone who asked, including the teachers. Cranes are the first thing everybody finds out about when they finally learn that origami exists, which is maybe why he made them for us clueless Newworlders. The beaks and wings and tail tips of Takahiro’s cranes are always knife sharp. If you’ve ever made an origami crane you know what I’m talking about.

Takahiro still made cranes, but he mostly made other things. He was making something else today although I couldn’t figure out what it was. When the bell rang he put it down. He was a fully plugged-in member of the senior class and had to pretend to pay attention to the teachers like the rest of us. (He was also now too conspicuously tall to get away with much.) I don’t know if he was paying attention to Mrs. Tarrant or not (it was an Oldworld unit, and Oldworld geography is much harder to study than Newworld, because Oldworld cobeys keep jerking it around), but my eyes were drawn to the little paper thing on Takahiro’s side of the desk. Its body was long and curvy and its neck—supposing that was its neck—was arched like the general’s horse in some memorial statue, and it had a spiky crest a little like a horse’s mane blowing in the wind. I was sure if it was alive, whatever it was, it would prance. It had plenty of legs to prance with. Absentmindedly I put my hand to my neck. Yes. She was still there. I didn’t hear a lot about whatever Mrs. Tarrant was talking about. (Maybe I didn’t want to, with a new cobey in Copperhill.) When the bell rang again Takahiro picked up the little paper thing and kept folding while everyone else was picking up their books and moving toward the door. There were more little paper legs, and the mane got spikier. I found myself thinking of the Hands Folding Paper figures I’d made in my sleep recently. I put my ’top and my notebook in my knapsack really slowly so I could keep watching Takahiro. It was typical of him that he hadn’t said a word to me.

He stood up finally, holding it in his hand. It almost did prance—if I blinked fast enough: it turned its head toward me, shaking its mane and dancing on too many feet. Okay, maybe I was blinking too fast. Or maybe I shouldn’t have had that third mug of coffee for breakfast. There was a faint breath of sweet-smelling air against my cheek, like a little feathery or hairy foot had just brushed it.

Takahiro held the little paper thing out to me. “She’s for you,” he said. “I’ve been working on the pattern for her all summer and couldn’t get it right. I was going to show you and ask you to help me—maybe you could see something I was missing. But it was like seeing you this morning, I suddenly knew what to do. So I knew she was for you. But it’s been like she was trying to get through to me all summer. Nice perfume,” he added. He moved his hands to hold either end of his figure, pulled gently, and it—she—flattened out. “You can keep her in your knapsack,” he said.

It still took me about half a minute to raise my hand and touch her. I was pretty sure there was an almost-invisible something pattering down my arm—or
some
of an almost-invisible something de-accordioning down my arm—to meet her too. If Takahiro noticed anything funny about the shadows on my sleeve he didn’t say anything.

“Domo arigato,”
I said faintly.

He nodded once as if whatever was happening was perfectly normal, hung his own knapsack over his shoulder, and left while I was still staring at my new mascot. I’d have to get Taks to show me how to make her. Maybe with him helping me I could do it while I was awake. Slowly I tucked her into another one of those sixty-seven weirdly shaped pockets you (usually) don’t need that every knapsack has, that I’d stuffed a lot of
kami
into earlier. Maybe I’d just discovered something. They’re all for holding origami. I should have thought of that before.

When I looked up from zipping my knapsack closed, trying to make myself think about algebra (ugh—and if I didn’t hurry now I was going to be late) . . . maybe it was that third mug of coffee again, or my natural resistance to thinking about algebra. But for a second—half a second—the quadratic exponential thingy of a second—everything went dark. At the same time that I knew it all happened in a fraction of a fraction of a second, I was also hovering,
hanging,
in the darkness for as long as it took half the stars in the universe to pull themselves together, shine like crazy, and blow up into nothingness again. There were other flashes in the darkness—like meteors or comets or something maybe—I don’t know. And. And something. Something shadowy in the darkness. While I hung, and there was nothing under my feet, and nothing holding me up.

I came back to myself with a little invisible hairy thing fanning my face like I’d had a touch of heatstroke. Not likely: it was cold enough this morning to see your breath outdoors. My first thought was that the lights must have flickered off and on again—which made me feel a little sick and scared because while there are lots of reasons for electrical outages, one of them is that a cobey is maybe opening somewhere near you. That was still preferable to anything else I could think of about what had just happened—including that Hix appeared to have noticed whatever it was.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was streaming in the big windows. Even if the lights had gone out you’d have barely noticed.

Mrs. Tarrant was standing beside me, frowning a little. “Are you all right?”

“Er—the lights didn’t just flash off and on, did they?” I said.

The frown deepened. “No. Maggie, don’t worry. NIDL are in Copperhill, the cobey has been contained, and they’re working to shut it down. By tomorrow everything will be back to normal.”

I could see her making her face stop frowning. She tried semi-successfully to smile. No, she hadn’t liked the news reports this morning either.

“It must have been that third cup of coffee at breakfast then,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll have orange juice.”

“You do that,” she said. “Er—do you want a pass for the nurse?”

I thought about it. Yes. No. Algebra would still be there tomorrow. I sighed. “No. Thanks. It’s algebra next. I’d better get used to it.” She smiled. It was a better smile this time.

I picked up my knapsack—sliding the strap carefully onto my shoulder so I didn’t pinch anyone’s toes—and my monster algebra book, and left. There were a bunch of strange grown-ups wandering through the halls. They could have been new teachers I didn’t know but I didn’t think so. They didn’t walk or look around the right way for teachers—and they were too interested in the students. Most teachers get enough of students in class. They looked like plainclothes army goons to me. One of them stared right at me, like he was hoping I was carrying stolen goods so he could arrest me. Nope, just my algebra book.