Shadows (6 page)

If Val had been a friend I’d’ve said
shut up.
Don’t talk about
energy.
Maybe someone dropped a ’top on you when you were a baby and it bent a little piece of your brain. There’s nothing wrong with groundlines and electricity. The rumor about those sealed-off brain-bureau areas was that they were trying to discover where science meets magic. Where the boundary is. And how they could cross it. But they got
rid
of magic because it made people crazy.

If Val was a magic
user,
instead of some kind of monster, he would make sure he
didn’t
have shadows, wouldn’t he?

And why didn’t everybody see them? What was
my
problem?

I had kept my eyes on my plate. All my life Mom had been making us have dinner together at least two or three times a week. This had survived Ran’s throwing-up phase when he was about two years old. It had survived Dad’s job, although there were nights when Mom gave Ran and me most of our supper at the usual time and then we had dessert with Dad, who’d come home, yank his tie off, and sit down at the table immediately, his briefcase leaning against the wall below the quilt.

Dinner together had even—just—survived those months after he died, when Mom was working three jobs. When she was super late I used to put Ran and me to bed on the sofa (heads at either end and feet in the middle. He kicked, of course) and I’d get up and stagger into the kitchen and turn the skillet on for scrambled eggs when I heard the car. She didn’t like this much and tried to tell me I should go to bed (Ran could sleep through the end of the world, and he was still little enough for Mom to carry him upstairs) but I said
we eat dinner together in this family
and I could see she didn’t know what to do. I didn’t dare tell her I was afraid of the dark when it was just Ran and me: I already knew she couldn’t afford a babysitter and I was ten pretending to be thirty. I’d make scrambled eggs and heat up a roll and get the salad out of the refrigerator and sit at the table with her and drink a glass of milk and listen to Ran snore. It won’t be for long, she’d say. I’ll get a real job soon.

And she did. And we got Mongo. And P&P opened. And we all got older.

And then Val happened.

Dinner together two or three times a week was apparently also going to survive Val. I was careful to be out as many of the other nights as I thought I could get away with. This would be easier as soon as school started again. Val had only been around about half the time when it ended at the beginning of the summer. But the kind of thing you’re out late for when it’s school-related takes less explaining to your mom.

So anyway. If Mom wanted to say anything to Val when he was in his shed she had to go out there. Or send a messenger. Occasionally she managed to send me. Sometimes she just sent me out there with a mug of coffee because she was making coffee (all of us except Ran drank a lot of coffee). Because unfortunately I liked watching TV on the big screen in the living room instead of my weeny ’top up in my room and I’d decided this was something I wasn’t going to let Val totally wreck. So there I was when Mom wanted someone to go. Although I guess this was part of her Make Maggie and Val Friends project.

I can’t remember what message I was supposed to be delivering that day. I’d been out there a few times before and it was always creepo, but that’s all, and I’d learned to say whatever I had to say, or hand him the note or the mug, and run away. That day I’d knocked on the shed door and he’d said “Come” so I had to go in.

When I went in that day it was like . . . I don’t know what it was
like,
but whatever it was that made Val bigger in the dark was
living
in there, not just the shadows—suddenly the shadows seemed tame and harmless—this huge awful
unimaginable
thing—something like a combination of the silverbug checkerboard where all the little black void holes were gaping jaws with glinting silver teeth and a monster out of a fairy tale with too many eyes and too many claws as well as too many mouths with too many teeth. . . . I may have screamed.

Then Val had
his hands on my shoulders
like he was holding me up and he was saying, “Maggie, Maggie, it’s all right,” when it was anything
but
all right, and he led or dragged me out of the shed and kicked the door closed, which cut off some of the worst of it. But there was a breeze that day, and it was late in the afternoon and all the ordinary leaf shadows were running around madly anyway, as well as all the stuff following Val, because
yes it was still there
and dreeping
rioting
over the garden. I would probably have gone completely doolally in another minute, frothing at the mouth and biting his hands (
ewww
) but he let go of my shoulder with his right hand and made some weird twisty gesture where his hand seemed to
disappear
under a great dizzy-sparkling swirl of shadows, and at the same time breathing out some phrase I didn’t understand, in Orzaskan or something I suppose.

It all fell away—whatever it was—like taking a coat off, and I was okay. Shaken—and
furious
—but okay.

He dropped his other hand and for a moment we stood looking at each other. I would have run away instantly except my knees were rubber. I noticed he looked weirdly shocked. That was my job in the circumstances. I was about an inch taller but I felt like unmown grass next to a bull: the grass may be taller, but . . . Val
loomed,
even if he was shorter than me.

“Maggie—” he began, but with the sound of his voice I stumbled away from him. I can’t remember if I gave him the message or not, whatever it was. I turned and rubbery-kneed raced back to the house like there were devils (with mouths full of glinting silver teeth) after me.
Magic user,
I was thinking.
Magic user.

How had he got across the border? They
never
let magic users across the border anywhere in Newworld, even if they’d been legal wherever they came from.

“Maggie?” Mom said as I blundered into the house, trying not to cry or gasp or be weird any way she’d notice. I failed. Mongo rushed up to me and whined.

“Maggie, what’s wrong?” she said.

“Ask Val,” I said in a squeaky voice nothing like what I usually sound like, and bolted upstairs, Mongo so close to my heels I nearly tripped over him. I ran into my bedroom and slammed the door. I don’t know what Val told her, but Mom left me alone that night. After everyone else had gone to bed I crept downstairs again and made Mongo and me a giant platter of scrambled eggs. Ran, who had the teenage boy’s radar for food, followed the smell of coffee and toast downstairs, so then I had to make an even more gigantic platter of scrambled eggs. Ran and I had ours on toast and Mongo had his on dog kibble. Nobody else came down and asked us what we were doing.

“Mom said you were sick,” Ran offered, around a mouthful of eggs. I’d dropped a handful of peas into the eggs so there was a green vegetable involved and Ran was separating them out and making a little pile on the edge of his plate. Mongo ate his.

“Yeah,” I said. “More or less.”

“She was worried about you,” said Ran. “Val too.”

I succeeded in not snorting my scrambled eggs out through my nose. I said, “You mean mad at me, don’t you? Mom doesn’t really think I’m sick.” And I have no idea what Val thinks, I added silently.

“No,” said Ran, distinctly, having swallowed his mouthful. “Worried. You know. . . .”

“Don’t make me sorry I scrambled some eggs for you,” I said.

Ran shoveled some more in and chewed. “Okay,” he said. “But he’s really not so bad. Val,” he added, like I might not know who he was talking about.

“You can wash the dishes,” I said. I took Mongo out, and then we both went back to my room again, and Mom never said a word about what happened with Val, or about Mongo spending the night in my room. Or about how she was married to an illegal magic user monster. Worried? Yeah. They could be worried. I could go down to our local Watchguard and tell them I suspected my mom’s new husband of being a magic user. They would check him out—especially after they found out he’s a Commonwealth emigrant. And then . . .

This was so bad. Awful.
Hidoi.
The worst.
Saiaku no jitai.

I didn’t know what I should do.

Oh, and Ran did do the dishes that night. Not necessarily so that you didn’t have to do them again, but he had definitely used soap.

CHAPTER 3

SCHOOL STARTED SIX WEEKS AND THREE DAYS after the wedding—and nine days after the last message I took out to the shed. I never thought I’d be glad about the start of a school year but nobody was going to argue with me that I
had
to go to school and any break was better than endlessly trying to figure out where the line was I had to walk at home. All lines were obscured by
shadows.

At least I had Mongo. He liked everybody, including Val, but I was always his first choice. I might have had Bella and Jonesie too but I thought Mom would probably notice if I tried to smuggle a wolfhound and a Staffie cross the size of an ice-cream van upstairs to my room as well as Mongo. (Not to mention the dog food. Bella didn’t actually eat all that much. Jonesie was an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.)

The first day of school I stuffed my new paper notebooks and my old ’top in my knapsack and wished I was on my way to the shelter. I’d thought more than once this summer about trying to convince Clare to take me on full time and then I could not bother to finish high school, but I knew she’d tell me to come back when I had my first PhD and she’d be happy to hire me at minimum wage (she had about six PhDs in stuff like molecular biology, very useful for cleaning kennels), and that Mom would have kittens if I tried. No, pterodactyls. But if I lived at the shelter (there was a sort of staff apartment over Clare’s office: it was pretty awful, but I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping Mongo) it would solve brooding about living under the same roof as an illegal magic user
bakemono
—monster.

I knew that the stuff they teach you in school about magical hygiene and how all magicians are psychopaths is just grown-up nonsense like if you never kiss anyone you won’t get pregnant (you have to wonder about adults sometimes; it’s not the kissing that does it). But some of the deep Newworld distrust of magic must be for good reason or why did they go to so much trouble neutralizing the genes for magic in my grandmother’s day? How was I supposed to know which was the little bit that was true? I worried a lot about Mom. She was married to the
bakemono.

I hadn’t been sleeping too well since that last message to the shed. I kept thinking that I should go to Watchguard and rat on Val. They’d probably throw him out of the country. But it’s not like we’d go back to the way we were before—Mom would be totally miserable and I’d be the bad guy. And the idea of ratting out another human being—even Val—felt totally
kusatta.
Slime mold behavior.
Toxic
slime mold behavior. Especially ratting him out to Watchguard. Our local watch guys were mostly really nice, but they still sent their reports on to the big military Overwatch, and then if it was important Overwatch sent it to the niddles, NIDL, the National Invasion Defense League, and somewhere along the chain of command the sense of humor went out and the guns and zappers and the armored transport vehicles that looked ready to take on a galactic strike force came in.

I have a little trouble with authority anyway but when the army comes to town you get out of the way and that yanks my wiring. I don’t like big ugly guys who think they’re better than you are because they’ve got a cobey badge on their hats. (Cobey units are the elite of the up-themselves division. Yaaaaaawn. My uncle Darnel isn’t so much up himself, but he’s still a kind of a jerk.) Some state-level Watchguard gizmohead comes to every school once every year to give the standard lecture on reporting silverbugs and doing anything that a member of a cobey unit tells you to do and doing it fast. The major we’d had every year since I’d been in high school was so delighted to be himself that he could hardly stop smiling and throwing his chest out at us and
stroking
his medals and ribbons and the stuff on his uniform while he talked. (Jill said it was because the medals weren’t his, he’d hired them for the day from Central Costume.) I couldn’t hand anyone over to these bugsuckers, not even Val. I admit when I saw Val across the dinner table I wavered. But I didn’t waver long enough to do him (and Mom) any harm.

But I was getting short of sleep. Takahiro had taught me to make
kami
guardians out of paper, and I’d folded so many the last nine days, or rather nights, when I couldn’t sleep that every time I turned around or Mongo wagged his tail a few blew off wherever they were and fell on the floor. I had them along both windowsills and over the door to the hall and the closet door, and I’d run strings through more of them so I could tack them up near the ceiling and around the lampshade and anywhere else I could think of. I’d got pretty sharp at folding
kami.
There were different kinds of protective
kami
: earth, wind, sun, moon—and critters. I of course totally specialized in critters.