The first kami Takahiro had ever showed me how to fold was a fox—kitsune—and I’d adapted it so I could have a dog too, although it might have been a wolf. (Eventually I redesigned it further and created a border collie.) There were lots of others: badgers, otters, sika deer, cranes, doves, koi, hares, dragons. It was soothing, folding something familiar, over and over and over, and my stupid brain would settle down and everything would slow down and focus on the piece of paper in my hands, till I became Hands Folding Paper. I’m not sure I didn’t fall asleep like that sometimes. I probably slept better sitting up folding than I did lying down in bed. And sometimes when it was like I’d woken up to find that I was still folding paper I’d find that I’d folded something I didn’t recognize. I began to recognize it, though, because it always seemed to be the same thing: long, sinuous, with a big spiky crest on its head and neck and plates or feathers or something both down its back and along its belly. Unless the jags underneath were legs. I might have worried more about the legs except that I always felt better when I’d folded one of these things; they gave off a funny mix of both peace and strength. I could never do one when I was thinking about it though. I had to be in that Hands Folding Paper space, turn off, and let it take over.
When I picked up my knapsack for the first day of school, it weighed too much, of course, and as I dragged it across my desk about a dozen little paper critters headed for the floor. I don’t like leaving kami on the floor—it’s not polite—so I bundled them up and stuffed them in one of those useless little pockets knapsacks always have and ran (joltingly) downstairs, thinking that maybe I could stop at Porter’s for more origami paper on my way to the shelter that afternoon. (Another of Arnie’s virtues is that he doesn’t mind kept-under-ruthless-control dogs in his store. He’s even been known to have dog biscuits under the cash terminal.) I could hear Jill’s (latest) car crunching on the gravel of our driveway as I chugged my coffee. Mongo had already guessed what his early walk and my unusual level of activity meant and was in tragic mode.
“Don’t eat anything I wouldn’t eat,” I said to him. Mom was in the shower and Val and Ran were still asleep. At least I didn’t have to say any complicated good-byes on the first morning of my senior year. I kind of felt that if Val had wished me a good year I’d have a bad one. No, wait, my knapsack was full of kami. They’d protect me. Maybe I should get a kami tattoo. Speaking of things that would give Mom pterodactyls.
If you’re asking me, school pretty much sucks. It wasn’t going to suck less because it was our last year, except that we could finally see the end of it. But a year was still a long time. And it wasn’t the end because we were supposed to go to college after. I wasn’t bright enough or didn’t take tests well enough (you choose) so I hadn’t been offered any scholarships that would have made it possible for me to go away to school. I’d been thinking I’d go to Runyon, which was near enough I could commute from home, and Dad had gone there, which didn’t mean they had to take me but it helped. I could just about do it by bus, but I was—had been—trying to rewire the board for enough graduation money that with the money I earned at the shelter I could buy some kind of car. Jill’s brothers would find me a cheap one that ran. But now . . . there was no way I was going to live another four years at home. With Val.
I also thought, what if someone else finds out he’s a magic user? (Gods’ holy engines. What if he’s a magician. No. Too gruesome to consider. Also supposedly the anti-cobey boxes wired in all over the landscape would pick up magic use of that level. Since there wasn’t supposed to be any serious magic or magicians in Newworld I’m not sure how they thought they knew this, or why it was supposed to be a good idea to waste the tech on something that didn’t exist.) But even if she didn’t have to hate her own daughter Mom would still be miserable if they took him away. And what if they decided Mom had been damaged or short-wired somehow? What about Ran and me? If we got put into care . . . I’d be eighteen next month. Maybe they’d let me be Ran’s guardian. Maybe Mongo would find a hundred gazillion dollars under a tree and I could bribe someone to leave Mom alone. Maybe they just wouldn’t find out.
Did Mom know? How could she not know? Was I supposed to tell her? What was I supposed to tell her? But she knew I hated Val—wouldn’t she think I was making stuff up to be a creepazoid? She obviously didn’t see the shadows and I didn’t suppose Val kept a jar of powdered dragon’s blood on his shelf (at least not with a label on it) or a spell book written on human skin or anything. (Could you tell human from any other vellum? And what did spells look like? If it was in Orzaskani it might look like a cookbook. Boiled Rival Magician. Manticore Liver Pâté.)
What had Val told her about what happened nine days ago? I had thought things around home this last week were a bit lower watt than they had been with all the newlywed la-la-la stuff going on, but maybe that was everybody trying to avoid me. I’d been trying to make this as easy as possible for the last six weeks and three days with the result that I was beginning to feel as if I might as well go live with strangers, because I was already.
“Chotto, Mags, lighten up,” said Jill. “This is our last year. All we have to do is not fail.” Jill had accepted a place with enough of a scholarship that she could afford to go. I didn’t want to get a job waiting tables—which paid better than the shelter: everything paid better than the shelter—and a horrible little studio apartment with cockroaches and two-hundred-year-old clanking radiators and a toilet that dripped all night and a No Pets rule so I’d be smuggling Mongo in under my coat, which would not be fun for either of us.
I had to let Runyon know what I was doing by the end of September. I didn’t know what I was doing.
“Easy for you to say, oni face,” I said. Oni are the bad spirits like kami are the good ones.
“Oni butt,” said Jill. “Your problem is that you won’t get off yours except for something with four legs and fur.”
Jill parked and we strolled toward the main entrance. Most of the other students were smiling and talking animatedly about the summer (some of them more convincingly than others). I heard a lot of people saying stuff about Longiron and Hyderabad and the silverbug mobs. There were a few faces reflecting the range from resignation to dread. I figured I fit into that group. Jill got me by the arm and hustled me, shouting at the people we knew: “Hey, Becky-Ashley-Ryan-Keisha-Dena-Zach-Hadar-Hanif-Jamie-Laura”—she faltered—“Eddie-Jason-Steph. How was your summer? How many silverbugs did you step on? Are you ready to torture Mr. Grass-ass this year?” Mr. Garcia was head of the history department and deserved to be tortured. Jill took Mr. Garcia personally because history was her favorite subject.
We’d seen all of them some time over the summer except Ashley, who’d been with her dad in Spain. “Hey,” she said to me. “I hear your mom’s remarried.”
I stiffened without meaning to—I was going to have to get used to this question—but before I thought of something to say, Ashley wrinkled her nose and said, “Sorry. That bad? I sympathize.” She didn’t like her stepdad either, but he was a super-plugged-in, rubber-soled type, a mechanical engineer who stopped people from building bridges that would fall down. And her dad was still alive, even if he was in Spain.