He had started to get up—he was sitting in the big chair—when I came in. It was one of those weird things he did, he stood up when Mom or me or Jill or any woman came into the room. But he kind of froze halfway when I started screaming at him.
There was a crash from the kitchen and Mom appeared in the archway looking like the end of the world, only madder. “Margaret Alastrina, what do you—”
Val finished standing up and said, “Elaine, it is all right.”
Mom said furiously, “It is not all right that she should—”
But Val shook his head and held up his hand. Both hands. And then spread them out. I knew what he meant but it made him more alien. No one in Newworld did stuff like that, any more than Newworld guys stood up when women came in the room. “Maggie—Margaret—will you please tell me what you see?”
I turned my head to look at the sofa. The shadows were gone, of course. There weren’t any on the wall behind Val either. They probably didn’t like being yelled at. (Mongo had followed me and was pressed up against the backs of my legs. He knew I wasn’t yelling at him.) “There’s nothing there! And now you’re going to say that teenage girls are sometimes like this, and it’s okay, I’m just crazy, and then my mother won’t hate me any more, she’ll just have me locked up!” It had been kind of a stressful day. I burst into tears.
I’d’ve stopped if I could—I hated crying in front of Val—but I couldn’t stop. I put my hands over my mouth and made hysterical gagging noises. I saw Val make a move toward me, and then stop before I ran away. Then Mom had her hands—not too gently—on my shoulders, and she pushed me sideways and down, till I sat on the sofa. Probably where the shadow snake had been crawling. I cried harder. My senior year had started, I’d met the most beautiful boy in the world, he liked me, then he turned out to be a physwiz loophead—and not quite two months ago my mother had married a hairy freak with a shadow zoo.
I bit down on my hand and poked my fingers in my eyes till I could finally stop crying. By then I also had most of a medium-large dog in my lap, licking my elbows and trying to get at my face and whining. Mongo wasn’t allowed on the furniture.
When I opened my sticky eyes there was a box of tissues on the coffee table. Since I could hear banging and clattering noises from the kitchen—some of them sounded like something broken being swept up—I assumed it was Val who’d put the box there. Would one of his shadows bite me if I took a tissue? I’d been passing him the salt or the salad for the last seven months, but then I’d never admitted I could see his—friends either. They might not like being seen. Or maybe by admitting I could see them I’d catch them, like a monster virus. I was now shivering. I wrapped my arms around Mongo. Mongo liked this. His tail started thumping against my leg.
I leaned around Mongo and took a tissue. I didn’t see any shadows. I took several more tissues, blew my nose so hard I nearly started crying again, and tried to dry my face off. This wasn’t easy because Mongo was now trying to help. I petted him, putting off looking at Val, and watched Mongo’s black and white hairs drifting away and attaching themselves to Mom’s pale-gold-and-sage-green sofa cushions.
Little quiet clinks and then footsteps moving from the bare kitchen floor to the hall and living room carpet. The footsteps paused, and an indrawn breath as Mom saw Mongo on the sofa. Footsteps started again (the floor in the hall creaked just there), and then Mom silently set a tray on the table in front of me, pushing the box of tissues to one side. She poured, put one mug in front of me, handed one to Val (murmur of “thank you”), and sat down with a third. She was sitting in the other chair—neutral territory. Not close to me, not close to Val.
The hot chocolate smelled wonderful (my mom makes the best hot chocolate) but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to let go of Mongo long enough to pick up my mug. Dogs are very comforting when your world has exploded.
“Margaret,” said Val at last. “Can you talk?”
I nodded. And then I wanted to be totally sure I was being polite, so I added, “Yes.” Except it came out a croak, so I had to say it again: “Yes.” But totally polite probably meant looking at him, and I couldn’t. I was still staring at the top of Mongo’s head.
“Will you please tell me what you mean about—shadows?”
I thought I was going to tell him—him and Mom—about the snake thing, but what I heard myself saying was: “That first night you came to dinner, last winter. I opened the door and there were like forty of you. You and your shadows. They loomed. They made you look huge. It was like inviting an army in.” They’ll eat all your food and ruin your carpets and you don’t even know whose side they’re on. “And . . .” I trailed off. I couldn’t think of a good adjective. Mom wasn’t yelling at me but I thought she probably wouldn’t like it if I said “scary” or “gruesome” or “some kind of monster.”
“Do you see them often?” said Val in the same calm voice, like he was asking me to pass the salt or the salad.
“Pretty much any time I see you,” I said, a little too quickly. “And there are more and more of them.” I looked up at last, looked at him. There were like hundreds of shadows stuck around the room, mostly behind him, with lots of what looked like twisted legs and distorted heads—except how did I know where one stopped and another one started? Maybe there were only a few that happened to be the size of giant elephant-swallowing anacondas. They were curling around the windows and Mom’s geraniums and Takahiro’s and my paper things, perched on the picture frames, half-tucked behind the legs of furniture, lying raggedly along the gap between the tops of books and the shelf above them. I think I whimpered. I’d never seen them this bad before—never seen this many of them—although they weren’t moving around much, and Val’s shadows usually moved.
These weren’t still though. They wiggled. There were so many of them it was like there was something wrong with my eyes. Have you ever thought about the darkness between a row of books and the top of the shelf? Of course not. You don’t, until it goes all loopy, and little things like legs or tails or tongues hang down over the spines.
Oh gods. Oh gods.
I had my arms around Mongo, and he was leaning against me. I could feel something sharp digging into my breastbone—the broken cog that hung from his collar with the tag that had his pet-registry number on one side and our ground phone number on the other. The scientists cut magic out of us in Newworld two generations ago but they haven’t quite eliminated superstition, and even Station has a charm shop where you can buy stuff like Mongo’s cog. Some charm shops would sell you fetishy things with feathers and twigs and dried flowers, but if you sold too many of those the Overwatch goon squad would probably shut you down. If you stuck to broken chips and dead batteries they left you alone. Mom had bought Mongo’s charm, to my amazement, when he stopped growing and got his first adult collar. She’d laughed a little—that funny non-laugh she had for years after Dad died—and said something weird and grown up about it being a good thing to be normal when you could. I thought of this comment a lot. Mom was not into charms. And her grandmother had been a magician. And one of her sisters had disappeared while she was working for a brain bureau.
I’d always thought most of the physwiz stuff was some kind of grown-up paranoia. The usual rumor around any high school was that the two weeks of physwiz we had to take was some brainwashing thing to make sure we weren’t ever tempted to start making charms out of feathers and twigs and dried flowers or try to wake up the genes for magic we didn’t have any more so what was there to wake up? Newworld was all about science. We were stronger than Oldworld and Midworld and Farworld and the Southworlds and everywhere because we’d got rid of magic, and science had all the important answers.