The soldier on the left sighed. “That machine is a total waste of electricity and palladium.”
“Shut up,” said the soldier on the right. “If you’d come back through again, miss.”
“May I put my algebra book down?” I said, laying it on the hall monitor’s desk. “It weighs a ton.”
“Sure,” said the soldier on the left.
“No,” said the soldier on the right.
“Get a grip, Sherston,” said the soldier on the left. “It’s a textbook.”
“Keep your knapsack,” snapped the soldier on the right. “And come back through.”
Hix seemed to have unwound or unrolled or something, like she’d done yesterday in the park. I could feel her against my face and hands, but I was pretty sure she had taken a loop around my waist and was brushing against my legs too. Unless that was one or more of Takahiro’s gruuaa. No, I thought at them. If any of you are his, don’t. Go protect Taks. I walked back through the archway, turned, and came through it a third time. The machine remained silent. My heart was still hammering away and I felt a little ill. One down and two to go. I put my hand on my algebra book.
Takahiro was next. I swear the archway turned black with shadows as he went under it. But the machine didn’t say anything.
Jill was last. The machine beeped again. I put my hands up to where Hix was leaning against my cheek. “Go,” I whispered. Hix disappeared—I may have seen a little scamper of shadow from me to Jill. She looked at me, frightened, and put her own hand to her face. “If you’d walk back through, please, miss,” said the soldier on the right. Jill turned and stumbled through the archway and then turned around again and walked slowly through, joining Takahiro and me. The machine was silent. The soldier on the left sighed again. I saw Jill twitch and then there was Hix around my neck again, tickling my chin.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” said the soldier on the right.
“Sure,” said Takahiro. I noticed he was standing up straighter—as straight as Takahiro ever stood, and his voice sounded normal. The gruuaa had turned themselves into a kind of jacket. Taks wore a lot of black anyway. Usually he looked really good in it. We moved down the corridor toward our homeroom. My heart was slowing down to normal. “What?” I said to him.
“The school’s shielded,” he said softly. “You can feel it, can’t you? It’s better in here. I’d forgotten. This morning I was just thinking, more people around to soak up all that buggie crap in the air. But the school’s shielded because it’s a designated relief shelter, you know? If there ever was a cobey around here they couldn’t immediately contain, this is one of the places they’d tell us to go. That means it’s shielded from armydar too. Which is why they were running us through that thing. I wonder if the machine beeped for anyone else?”
“It better have,” I said, “or somebody is going to notice it was two out of the three of us.”
“What were they looking for?” said Jill, still upset.
Takahiro shrugged—a nice normal Newworld shrug. “Dunno. Contamination, probably. They probably graph it out on a map.”
Senior homerooms were all over the place. It was supposed to help traffic flow in the corridors. Used to be senior homerooms were all near the front so seniors could stroll in after the rush. But we had to hurry. Jill dropped back to walk beside me, lumbering along with my algebra book. “What was that,” she said flatly. “At the archway.”
“Gruuaa,” I said.
She looked at me, and then we went through our door, and there was Mrs. Andover glaring at us.
I spent the rest of the day worrying about what to do about Takahiro after school. We nodded to each other at lunch like everything was normal, although I noticed him folding paper instead of eating or talking—okay, that was still pretty normal for Taks. Jeremy and Gianni were waving their arms around and pushing a ’top back and forth at each other and not eating much either. But that was normal for them too. When they weren’t redefining the universe they were inventing ’tronic games about redefining the universe.
There were a lot of shadows under Takahiro’s table but I couldn’t tell if any of them were gruuaa. You’d better be there, I thought. We have to leave the school again this afternoon. Although you could go home long enough to check on Val. I frowned. Val didn’t need checking on, did he? Besides, there were still gruuaa at home, just not as many.
I had left my algebra book in my locker. I had told it to stay, but the long down had never become Mongo’s best trick either. I had no idea what I was going to do or say if it suddenly materialized on the lunch table—or I saw it waddling across the floor on its edges. I decided I wasn’t hungry either. I pulled some paper out and started folding too, but I couldn’t settle to anything. Everybody else at the table was full of whatever had happened at the park yesterday. There were some pretty wild theories. None of them wilder than the truth though. I saw Jill glancing at me occasionally, but she didn’t mention that I’d told her I’d been at the park while it was going on. She was the kind of friend who knew when to keep her mouth shut.
What was it I’d folded yesterday, with that awful wind trying to gouge bits out of me, and the universe falling to nothing around me? My fingers had seemed to know what they were doing. Well, but it was some cousin or close personal friend of the figure Taks had given me—I hadn’t done it consciously, but I often tried to figure out one of Taks’ new figures without asking him how he’d done it. Although I almost always did have to ask.
I had put the new one back in my knapsack this morning. I took it out and looked at it for a long time. Her. She’d gone stiff and sharp again, like she’d been re-energized by a good night’s sleep. If an algebra book could regenerate pages and follow me around, why couldn’t an origami figure feel better after a good night’s sleep? I wasn’t thinking about it. If I was thinking about it, which I wasn’t, I could think that I’d imagined her being limp last night. (I wasn’t thinking about the algebra book at all.)
Taks made a lot of critters, and then usually gave them to me. Everyone knew I worked at the shelter and that if you said the wrong thing to me I’d start spouting about proper care and feeding and the right environment to let the critter be itself and natural behavior blah blah blah. It was like flicking a switch. I couldn’t help it, any more than a light bulb could. Takahiro had started officially making me critters in seventh grade, when someone, probably Eddie, he’s always been warugaki, wanted to know what to feed an octopus and said I didn’t know anything. Because I’m like that I looked it up (on my ’top in my lap in math class) and made sure to tell Eddie in front of as many people as possible: mollusks, mostly. Takahiro made me an octopus that day.
I looked at the new critter. I started to fold . . . and then had a kind of vision of a kind of movement inside my locker . . . and hastily turned the little paper thing into a dragon. I was good at dragons, and usually someone wanted it afterward. Laura picked this one up, got out her green pen (green was Laura’s thing), and gave it eyes with long eyelashes. Oh well.
I put Taks’ away and started on another one. This one was not going to end up with long eyelashes. But it kept refusing to fold into a dragon. I would position the paper for a perfect crease and my hand would slip and the crease would go somewhere else. My hands don’t slip when I’m folding paper. I knock over full mugs of coffee on a regular basis, but I’m good at folding paper. I’m just not as good as Takahiro. I turned whatever it was over to make the same (wrong) fold on the other side.