There was an odd little change of air—no, of air pressure, like I was a tire being pumped up—and again I felt Hix stir against my neck. When I noticed that there was a new gentle weight leaning against my ankle I knew what it was. I kept folding.
The bell rang and I picked up my new critter. “Nani, what’s that?” said Laura, waving her dragon like a fan.
“It’s a baku,” I said at random. I had no idea what it was.
“A what?” said Laura.
“A dream eater. If you have nightmares, you put a baku under your pillow.”
“Remind me to ask you to make me one the night before our first algebra test,” said Laura, who was in my class. She stared at it a moment and then shook her head, got to her feet, and picked up her knapsack. I bent down and picked up my algebra book, which was now under my chair. I tucked my new paper critter inside the front cover.
“You brought your algebra book to lunch?” said Laura. “Magsie, you are a sick woman.”
“It doesn’t fit in my locker,” I said, almost truthfully.
“Isn’t it the worst?” said Laura. “Whoever designed the dreeping thing really wanted to punish us. You know calculus doesn’t even have textbooks? It’s all on their ’tops.”
“If you’d let me help you last year,” said Jill, “you too could be in textbook-free calc.”
“Thanks, I’d rather carry around a book almost as heavy as my car,” said Laura. “See you.”
Jill said quietly, “I saw you put—well, wedge—your algebra book in your locker before lunch. And I walked here with you.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Is your algebra book a—um—gruuaa?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I remembered Hix trying to protect the algebra book too when we went through the soldiers’ scanner.
The cafeteria was emptying out. “You said you had a lot to tell me,” said Jill.
“Yes, and a lot of it isn’t mine to tell,” I said. Without meaning to I reached up and touched Hix. It should have looked like I was patting myself on the collarbones for some reason but Jill said, “That’s your gruuaa. Isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” I said.
“And it’s what got me through the soldiers’ thing this morning.”
“She,” I said. “Yes.”
The second bell rang. “We’re going to be late,” I said. “Can you take Takahiro and me to the shelter after school?”
“Only if we don’t get detention,” said Jill, and we sprinted for the door. The late bell was just going when we burst into Mr. Jonadab’s classroom. Mrs. Andover would have marked us down, but he just smiled.
CHAPTER 10
THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR ARCHWAY WERE STILL there when we left, but we didn’t have to walk through it again. I didn’t like the way they were looking at us, but that was probably my guilty conscience. I was standing close enough to Takahiro that I felt him quiver when we opened the front door and spilled out onto the concrete. “Taks,” I said.
“I’m okay,” he said quickly. “It’s not as bad as it was this morning.”
“Yes it is,” I said, fighting the urge to brush myself off, as if it was something you could brush off. It was nothing like the soft tickliness of Hix. And despite Hix and Taks’ shadow coat we were still feeling it. I glanced around, wondering if I’d catch any of the other students uncomfortably or absentmindedly trying to sweep invisible crawling things off themselves. I saw Jeremy with his shoulders up around his ears, scowling so hard his eyes had disappeared under his eyebrows and his hands clawing at the opposite shoulders, but that was just Jeremy in the throes of game invention.
Takahiro sighed. “Okay. Yes, it’s just as bad. But your—things—are really helping. Thanks.”
“Gruuaa,” I said. “But don’t thank me. Thank Val.”
Jill pulled up in the Mammothmobile and I opened the front door and shoved Taks in in front of me and climbed in after him. “Where are you taking me?” he said. “Should I be worried?”
“Yes,” said Jill, staring at the road. “You’re—he’s—covered in—in gruuaa. I can see them better when I’m not looking at them. They look kind of like feather boas. Only they sparkle. Sort of. And they have too many eyes. And I think those are legs. Too many legs. Maggie, what is going on?”
She saw them better than I did. “A cobey opened in the park yesterday and we’re being taken over by niddles,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“No. Then it was a cobey,” said Jill.
“Yeah,” I said. “Um.”
Jill said carefully, “How do you know it was a cobey? And why wasn’t there an announcement?”
I tried to think of some other way to say it. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her. But I always told her everything. And it was bad enough I couldn’t tell her about Takahiro. “I closed it down,” I said.
Jill exhaled rather hard. “You. A cobey,” she said. “You closed a cobey?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was, except Casimir told me.”
“Casimir?” said Jill. “You didn’t know what it was and you closed it? It takes a regiment to close a cobey. According to the board banners we’ve got two cobey units in this town now!”
I looked down at the floor of the car where the algebra book was leaning lovingly against my leg again. “Yeah. Well,” I said. “Maybe Casimir was wrong.”
“Talk to me, damn it!” said Jill.
“I don’t know, okay?” I said. “I don’t dreeping know! I pulled some pages out of my algebra book and folded them up and threw them into this big—big—wind and it went away!”
“And now your algebra book won’t stay in your locker and is following you around,” said Jill.
“Yeah,” I said. “At least you saw that.”
There was a pause. “At least I saw that,” said Jill. Another pause. “Why am I taking you to the shelter like it’s some safe place? None of us is a homeless lost animal, are we?”
The silence that followed this remark was so deadly that Jill took her eyes off the road for a second and looked at us. “What? Now what? What else? What else?”
“I’m a werewolf,” said Takahiro matter-of-factly.
The car did a tiny zigzag, but only a tiny one. “A werewolf,” Jill said cautiously. “This isn’t a joke, right?”
“No,” said Taks. “It’s not a joke. And stress makes me turn. This armydar stresses me hard.”
“Yeah,” said Jill. “The scans were never like this. It makes me feel like a silverbug with the zapper turned on. The animal shelter?”
I had a headache. Maybe it was the armydar. Maybe I was going to turn into a turkey or a mutant chipmunk. “I don’t understand how any of this works, okay? But the gruuaa suck up random energy or they block the fact that stuff the niddles aren’t going to like is present or something like that. Oh, Val’s a magician,” I added, and the car did another zigzag.
“He can’t be,” Jill said, sounding increasingly stressed herself. “They’d’ve never let him into the country.”
“Gruuaa,” I said. “He came with a lot of gruuaa.”
“Those shadows on the shed,” said Jill, remembering.
“Yeah,” I said. “He didn’t know. He didn’t know they were there till—till night before last.” Jill shot me a look but didn’t interrupt. I went on: “He’s been teaching dead batteries that the square root of ninety-six is double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”
Jill snorted.
“—and people like Taks that—that science can make the square root of ninety-six be double fudge cake with buttercream frosting—”
“For the record,” said Takahiro, “my project is about how we define the integrity of one world as differentiated from another.”
“Holy electricity,” said Jill. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“—and back wherever Val is from he was . . . I guess he was a pretty big machine.”
“Not machine,” said Jill. “Magician.”
“Whatever,” I said. “But the gruuaa are working really hard and Taks is still not happy, you know? Neither am I. And I didn’t like that scanner thing at all, and the way it almost . . . And Mongo really liked Taks . . . um . . .”
“As a wolf,” said Takahiro. “Yeah. I noticed that. Kay’s cat avoids me like—well, avoids me for weeks after, but she would, wouldn’t she? She’s a cat.”
“As a wolf?” squeaked Jill. I could see her clutching the steering wheel but the car didn’t zigzag this time.
“Yeah,” said Takahiro. “Yesterday. Val saved my life. And after . . . these are his gruuaa.” He did that vague touching thing you do when you’re groping in the dark for something that is probably fragile, if you can find it. “He sent them home with me.”
“And when we took him home, the soldiers at the corner stopped us, but Mongo sat in Taks’ lap and I think that helped too,” I said. “Val has tutorials till about six tonight. So we go to the shelter first. Where I’m hoping whatever—er—the armydar either puts out or picks up may be a little more confused. If it works we might even adopt someone.”
“Do you have a wolfhound?” said Takahiro.
“Yes, actually,” I said. “Her name’s Bella. She’s one of the Family. They have to turn the armydar off eventually, don’t they?”
“Mom says it can be weeks if it’s a big cobey,” said Jill unhappily. “First there was Copperhill and now—well, whatever they think happened, they’re slapping us down hard with this new amped-up armydar.”
“What’s it supposed to do?” I said. I think I may have howled.
“It’s supposed to stop it—them—from spreading. Cobeys. They run in series,” said Jill. “I guess they think yesterday was trying to be a second cobey.”
“Does everyone but me know that cobeys run in series?” I said. Takahiro’s hands had found something and were cradling it. It was liking this: it twinkled. But I was pretty sure he’d heard “weeks.” Maybe he already knew.
“Everybody who doesn’t zone out and end up in Enhanced Algebra with the biggest textbook on the planet, yes,” said Jill.
Jill turned in through the shelter gate. Rob Roy and Gertrude were barking, but Rob Roy and Gertrude were always barking. Clare came out of the office but her face cleared when she recognized us. “I could really use some help,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’re all here to work? The army have been here half the day—it’s an animal shelter, are they expecting me to be hiding a cobey generator in an empty kennel?—and nothing’s done.”
“Sure,” said Jill. “I can spare a couple of hours.”
“Cats don’t like me much,” said Takahiro. “I’m okay with dogs.”
“Can you face cleaning kennels?” said Clare, looking up at him and smiling.
He smiled back. Good. Maybe the shelter had been one of my better ideas. “Can’t be worse than Mrs. Andover,” he said.
Clare laughed. “Joan Andover? She was a dead battery when she was your age and still Joan Ricco. I’d rather clean kennels too.”