“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.