There was a brief furry river of brown and black and white, and then the dogs were weaving around me (while I tried to avoid being tied in a granny knot by leads) and Majid was standing a little distance away looking around in what was probably lone-conquering-hero mode. I didn’t think even the gruuaa would have much luck persuading him to be a member of a team.
“We can start off together,” I said. The other three humans took four dogs, leaving me with Bella and an off-lead Mongo. I retrieved my algebra book and my knapsack, as if Jill and I had just driven into the school parking lot for a long day of extreme boredom with occasional brief shocks of learning something. I had a flashlight in my knapsack because I was that kind of girl. Tonight it was going to be useful.
Everyone else had shouldered their own knapsacks. Jill and Casimir were getting something out of the trunk, and then I heard Jill locking the car. “Don’t want the dog food stolen,” she said.
They didn’t seem to be running the armydar at all out here, which gave me less excuse to be this confused and blurry-brained. If we did, by some miracle, get Val and Arnie away, they’d probably turn on something even worse. And then we’d need a regiment of grizzly bears to damp it out. Maybe we could just ask the bears to eat anyone who got too close.
The gruuaa network was showing me what I guessed was the layout of the army base. Jill had the car flashlight; the boys were following us, although I doubt Takahiro was paying much attention to my feeble little beam. I glanced up at him once, and he was looking up at the sky, and his eyes gleamed golden. Taks’ eyes are so dark brown they’re almost black. And while you could hear us humans and the dogs crunching through the undergrowth I swear Takahiro made no more noise than the gruuaa. I had no idea where Majid was.
I had been thinking that the gruuaa network left a lot to be desired as a way of guiding solid people over solid ground as I stumbled in the dark, trying to keep the flashlight beam nearly straight down in case anyone from the base happened to be looking out an ordinary window in this direction. And then simultaneously Takahiro said, “Maggie—” and Bella, walking in front of me, stopped. She had her hackles raised, which made her look almost as big as the huge ugly block of building that had appeared just ahead of us. On the far side of a complicated, clearly unclimbable fence, chain link and barbed wire. The high-voltage-with-extra-lethal-kick sensation beat out at us like wind from a wind tunnel.
I stopped. Takahiro and Jill and Casimir stopped. The rest of the dogs stopped too, most of them with one foot raised and ears stiffly pricked, as if they were expecting interesting and dangerous prey to burst out at them. There seemed to be no windows and no lights on this side. Just the fence. And the punch of extra-muscular voltage.
“Whew,” said Takahiro, except it was more like a growl.
We stood there. I waited to feel my pathetic plan disintegrating. But the gruuaa web was brighter than ever. “Can you see that?” I said in this insanely calm voice.
“Yes,” said Jill, just as insanely calm.
“Good,” I said. “You’re in charge. Um.” Someone—some gruuaa—ran down my leg, disappeared in the dark, and then reappeared in Jill’s flashlight beam, swarming up her leg. “Oh,” she said, slightly less calmly.
“That’s Whilp,” I said. “Um—”
. . . She . . . drifted to me from somewhere.
“She’ll help you.”
Jill nodded, put her flashlight in her pocket and made the collarbone-patting gesture I knew so well with her free hand. Hix was still around my neck, and there were two or three more gruuaa wrapped around various bits of me too, separate from the network, focused uncomfortably on me: anxious, insistent, determined. The real-world wind was cold but I was feeling, if anything, increasingly warm, like bread in a toaster someone has just turned on. Even if Jill and the rest managed to create a diversion, what was I supposed to be doing for them to be diverting from? I clutched my algebra book, and I swear it wriggled, like a critter you’re holding too tight.
My algebra book.
“Okay,” I said, back to the insane calm. “I’ve just decided this is where we split up. Which way is the front door, do you suppose?”
There was a pause, like they thought this was a rhetorical question, and then Casimir said hesitantly, “That way, I think,” and pointed.
“Fine,” I said. “You take the dogs, and Jill’s got one—at least one—gruuaa, as—as translator, because the network is going with you, and you’re going to try and create a—a disturbance that they’ll want to check out but that turns out just to be some loose dogs, okay? Mongo,” I said to my dog, who knew something was up and had reattached himself to my leg, because whatever it was it was up to him to protect me and maybe there would be sandwiches at the end of it, “you go with Jill.”
Mongo didn’t move. “Mongo,” I said, and repeated the go-to-that-person gesture. He knew Jill; he even sometimes obeyed her. He wasn’t moving. Jill walked over to me and took Mongo’s collar. “Come on, loophead,” she said. “The magdag wants us to go save a different part of the universe.”
Mongo had never bitten anyone in his life, but he gave a wild despairing whine as she dragged him away. It made my heart rip loose and turn over; I felt like I’d betrayed my best friend. I hoped that wasn’t what I’d just done. I took a deep breath and held my algebra book hard enough to hurt. Taks kissed the top of my head and murmured, “Ganbatte.” “Do your best.” I wanted to cry. I wanted to run home, where Mom’s hot chocolate would make it all better. I listened to my friends moving away from me. I took another deep breath, and it hurt worse.
I knelt down and put my algebra book on the ground, propping my flashlight to give me a little light. The gruuaa who had stayed with me swarmed down and poured over the book, patting it in their faint, fuzzy-hazy, too-many-footed way. Even all together they wouldn’t have been able to heave the cover open. And I didn’t want them with me. Go, I said, I hoped I said, and did a sort of wave at the network, which did seem to be moving away in a this-world direction similar to Jill’s. Go with them, help them, I said, I may have said, or I may have said, Urgly flump duzzy blah, in gruuaa language—or I may have said nothing at all.
There was a brief, even peremptory hum from Hix and a faint sharp explosion against my neck like a butterfly losing its temper. Several of the remaining gruuaa scampered away. Something like a hmmph from Hix then, which I translated as, Okay. Your turn.
I refocused on my algebra book. The cover opened and the pages fanned themselves out. The oddness of the regrown pages seemed to have spread; most of the pages now were that too-flexible, almost-muscular substance with the faint pattern that resembled the decorative paper Jill had given me for Christmas last year. “I’m sorry,” I said, and ripped a page out—a page standing straight up from the spine, like a kid in a classroom waving her hand and saying, Me, teacher! Choose me! The page came out easily, like untucking a bookmark, not like tearing a bound page. I held it up in front of me and briefly I saw the shape I needed in a kind of shimmer, like a tiny private aurora borealis.
I laid the algebra-book page on the ground, thinking about Casimir’s comment that I’d folded a piece of the cobey. Of course the cobey had come to us; the ground here, so far as I knew, was just ground—unless the inaudible thump of the barrier was doing more than guard. Carefully I took a page corner between my fingers and put the tips of the fingers of my other hand in the center of the page. As the pressure of my fingers made it settle farther into the dead leaves and grass and dirt it seemed to quiver like the skin of an animal. I tugged ever so gently on the corner and of course nothing happened, because paper is paper even when it’s weird paper . . .