Shadows (17 page)

My knapsack had made it through—whatever had just happened—too. It sat a little behind where Casimir and I had been kneeling, all sort of hunched up, like someone sitting with her legs drawn up and her arms around them, her shoulders as high as they’d go and her face pressed down hard against her knees. I reached out and stroked it gently, over the pockets where the
kami
and Takahiro’s new mascot were.

Casimir’s pose reminded me a little of my algebra book. I looked at it, lying flopped open where I’d left it. I’d torn out twenty pages or so. It looked like more. I was so dead for mutilating a schoolbook.

On the other hand, we were in fact both alive, Casimir and I. One of the top still-attached pages of the book curled up briefly, which wouldn’t have been surprising except that it was curling
against
the mild breeze, which was all that was left of the wind. Okay, maybe
all
of us were still alive.
Margaret Alastrina,
I started to say to myself . . . and stopped.

I patted delicately at my shoulders. I wasn’t sure how far Hix had extended or retreated. Something moved. Something rubbed ever so gently down the side of my face. I didn’t think it was a foot. It might have been another face. I thought, I want to say her scent shimmers, but how does a smell shimmer? “Hix?” I murmured, and the light almost-weight around my shoulders gave a faint acknowledging shiver. “Thank you,” I said, and the patting thing against my face felt briefly like tiny kisses.

Casimir sat up. “I am sorry,” he said. “There is no excuse for my carelessness. I must plead that I have only been in your country for a fortnight, and everything about it is still strange to me—including the air, the wind, the ground under my feet, the sound of a river in its bed. It is all a language I do not speak, and do not understand what I am hearing.”

“Sorry?” I said. “Why are you sorry?” I thought, I should be apologizing to him that almost the first thing my country does to him is try and kill him. And if he hadn’t had this dumb idea about seeing me again, he would be somewhere else. I looked up at the sky. It looked like the sky always looks on a clear autumn day.

“I should have recognized the approach of a
nazok,
” said Casimir. “Nor did I sense your
gruuaa.
I am more dependent on my
chabeled
than I knew.” Now he looked up at the sky. I wondered if clear autumn days in Ukovia looked the same. “I am as dislocated here as if—as if—” He made a gesture with one hand. “It is much stranger here than I was expecting, so much stranger I was becoming afraid that studying at Runyon might teach me nothing I can use.” He looked down, and at me, again. “I thought, the other night, when I heard the word from the old prophecy, that it was a fault of my hearing—the foreigner who mistakenly believed he spoke your language. But I could not help being curious—and in Ukovia we are taught not to believe in coincidence. And you . . .”

He tailed off and I thought, You
what.
“Prophecy,” I said slowly and carefully.

“Yes,” he said. “When you came into the restaurant the other night, and your friend called you
mgdaga.
It is an ancient prophecy in Ukovia: the
mgdaga
is a young woman who can”—he murmured a few more words in what I assumed was Ukovian—“who can mend the breaks between universes. Who has a natural affinity for the physics of the worlds.”

“No,” I said.

“Most are legendary but a few have been identified as historical persons. There were never many, and there has not now been one in hundreds of years; our magicians say perhaps it always was only a tale, there were merely a few young women who seemed to fit the description. I was puzzled that I would hear of a
mgdaga
in Newworld, and more puzzled that the name should apparently be used so casually. I still do not understand—but—but it does not matter. The
guldagi
—spirits—of the between-worlds manifest and proclaim you.”

What?

“It is the equations of this world that gives the strength, yes? This is an acceptable art in Newworld? Who taught you? They cannot have known it would be so harshly tested, but then if
mgdaga
is a casual epithet they will perhaps not have known whom they taught. I would very much like to learn—if perhaps some scrap of it can be taught. It is exactly to learn such practical tools that I am here.” He touched my poor book gently. “Perhaps we—you—we if you will allow—should carry some pre-marked pages after this. If this is a true
toruna
I fear there will be more use for them.”

I could feel my mouth pulling itself into that “I don’t understand and I’m sure I don’t want to” smile. Jill and I used to see it on the face of our first-grade teacher a lot. “Whatever you’re talking about—it’s nothing to do with me. Jill calls me Magdag when she wants to be especially annoying. I don’t
know
what happened just now. I don’t even know if that was . . .” I couldn’t say “cobey,” as if saying it out loud would bring it back. I didn’t want to admit that that part of what he was talking about might be true. But none of the rest of it was.
None.

He began to look unhappy and confused, which would make two of us. “I don’t . . .” And then his face changed again: dismay, disappointment. “Is it that you may not speak to me of these things because I am not a citizen of your country? I did wonder, some of the questions they asked, before they would issue me a visa. I don’t know—”

“What?” I said. “Citizen? Country? What are you talking about?
I have no idea what just happened
—I can’t even squash a silverbug, it makes me sick! I don’t
know
why I wrecked my algebra book! I mean—not to—
know,
not like I can tell you. I—I just—” I reached up and touched Hix, and felt that almost-but-not-quite imaginary flicker against my cheek in response. Meeting her last night for the first time had almost been too much for me—this morning I almost ran away when she climbed up my arm for the first time—and now here I was using her for reassurance.

Casimir’s eyes had followed my hand and his expression softened a little. “Ah,” he said.

“Can you
see
her?” I said. This entire conversation was so far off my radar I didn’t know what galaxy I was in any more. And I was getting farther away from the one I knew with every word. Especially the words I didn’t know.

“I can see the edge of a darkness,” he said. “A shadow that is not quite your body or my body or the trees. I would not see—her?—if I were not thinking of the
mgdaga,
who I would expect to have attendant
guldagi
—and whose
gruuaa
indeed held me here while you addressed the
nazok.
But I believe the
gruuaa
cannot fully appear in this wo—here,” he said. “They are one of the
guldagi.
”

“In this world,” I said slowly. “You started to say
in this world.
”

“Yes,” said Casimir. “But I did not know if . . .”

He trailed off again. I was so not enjoying this conversation with the most beautiful boy I had ever met. Aside from the fact that he had been interested in me for reasons other than, uh,
me.
Not that this was a surprise. I took a deep breath. “Let’s go back a little. Let’s, uh, pretend that I’m totally stupid and clueless, okay? Tell me what just happened. With the wind and the weirdness and everything.”

Now he was wearing that “I don’t understand” smile. Apparently it was the same smile in Ukovia. It looked a lot better on him than it had on my first-grade teacher. “It was a
nazok.
What you call a cobey. Since it is the second, we must consider the likelihood there will be a third.”

I didn’t want to consider anything. Except for the sitting-alone-with-Casimir-in-the-park-on-a-beautiful-day part, I wanted all of this to go away. The all of the rest of it that was ruining the alone-with-Casimir part. The rest of it would include that he only wanted to be here with me because I was this historical thing. “But—it’s gone. It’s gone, isn’t it? They—cobeys—don’t do that.”

He made another odd gesture with his hands—a kind of folding over and winding together gesture. “They do if they are properly bound. And it is much likelier they will be properly bound if someone who can do this is present as the
nazok
opens. Which is why foreseers are so important to us. My mother is a foreseer. In Eruopa and the Slavic Commonwealth if everywhere that had been disrupted by a
nazok
was lost, there would be very little human land left.”

I was silent a moment. I knew that about binding, of course; I was forgetting my basic history. Oldworld was pretty much a patchwork quilt of shut-down cobeys; most of Newworld was more like your favorite jeans with mends on the knees and the butt and one or two where you’d torn yourself up on your mom’s rosebushes or a particularly badly placed nail. They were still mostly jeans.

But it had been kind of an overexciting few minutes, just now, and it was easy to forget stuff, like your name and what day of the week it was. And here in Newworld we were taught to Run and Report. There hadn’t been time to run. And it didn’t look like there was anything left to report.

He glanced at me. “Usually a team is sent when a foreseer predicts a
nazok.
But a
mgdaga
could perhaps bind a
nazok
alone.”

I ignored this. “Is this the way they usually happen?” Was there a “usually” about cobeys? “Like—” Like what? Like a spider being washed down the kitchen sink? “Like a storm out of nowhere?”

He shook his head. “Not one big enough to swallow two people. That is why I don’t understand why I did not sense its approach. My Oldworld instincts are of even less use here than I had begun to realize.

“Little ones may happen unexpectedly—ones like what you call silverbugs, only bigger. It is not wise to step on them, however; when they burst, they will throw you down, and the earth will not be where you expect it, when you fall down in the ordinary way.” He smiled. “Every small boy discovers this. Myself included.”

I wasn’t crazy about big
ordinary
bugs—beetles and spiders and things, although the next spider I found in the sink I’d catch in a glass and put outdoors. The idea of big silverbugs made me totally queasy. “Big enough to swallow two people,” I repeated, like it was a lesson I was trying to learn. I didn’t want to learn it.

He looked at me again. Steadily, without glancing away.
I
had to look away. It was funny in a way because Run and Report, with the “don’t think about it” that goes with it, always made me a little cranky, but I assumed it was either because I was a control freak or because I had a mad aunt (maybe) from her knowing too much about physwiz. “People disappear when big cobeys open,” said Casimir. “No one knows where they go. But there has been work done on trying to find out. My trust thinks Professor Hlinka, at Runyon, is close to a discovery about this; it is why they placed me here.”

Several things jostled for position in my poor bewildered brain. The first one was: his trust must think a lot of him. But, wearily, this thought also came: someone is always close to a breakthrough. The breakthrough never arrives. I knew people occasionally disappeared. Gwenda said it happened oftener than was reported. Not one of them has ever come back but they’ve never found any bodies either. I remembered this. With my name and what day of the week it was: Thursday. One more day till the first weekend of my senior year. The longest short week of my life.

I was still dazed from—whatever had happened—but I had a weird sense of uneasiness. A weird
increasing
sense of uneasiness. I looked around. Not that I knew what I was looking for. Another cobey? Please the holy electric gods not. Would I know what one looked like after this? I didn’t want to find out. The afternoon was still clear and sunny and the breeze mild and smelling of leaves and that sharp clean smell of fast-running river water.

To me the breeze also smelled of Hix. She shifted a little and I thought, I’m picking it up from her. She’s worried about something. Her anxiety was spilling over me like pizza sauce over your last clean shirt. “I—I think maybe we should get going,” I said, and began to struggle to my feet. I was suddenly so tired that the weightless Hix felt like an iron chain. I picked up my algebra book and looked sadly at my gigantic knapsack . . . and if I wasn’t already in desperate unrequited love with him (to him I was a historical figure like a statue or a chapter in a book) I’d have fallen in love with Casimir when he picked it up as if it was totally his problem (in Ukovia they teach you to be polite to little old ladies and historical figures).

“Yes,” he said. He was frowning slightly. It made his eyebrows arch more and his eyes looked bigger and darker than ever.
Aaaugh.
As I stepped toward him, dropping each foot back to the ground again like I wasn’t sure it belonged to me, he reached out and grabbed my hand again. Whoa. That wasn’t why I was walking like a little old lady who had come out without her cane (how did historical figures walk?) but hey, whatever. And we did move a little faster that way. He wasn’t exactly dragging me but I was walking a little harder to keep up. Some of the long sinuous Hix had moved to the top of my head again, to her lookout point. I could still feel her on my left shoulder, but not my right, and I thought I could feel feet on my forehead again. It was like wearing a fuzzy invisible crown.

Casimir and Hix were right. We were out of the trees and crossing the meadow when the army arrived. I was having to concentrate on walking and carrying my algebra book at the same time—I felt like
“I”
was a committee arguing among themselves: the keeping-head-upright part was arguing with the algebra-book-carrying part, which was also snarling at the one-foot-after-the-other part. (Nothing was arguing with the holding-Casimir’s-hand part.) The
I
part was trying to keep them all doing what they were supposed to be doing instead of lying down and not doing anything. We’d’ve done lying down together really well.