Everywhere had silverbugs—and everywhere had cobeys, Old, New, Mid, Far and South—but I’d never seen a live one and I didn’t know anyone who had. I knew about the famous ones, of course, the ones even science couldn’t make close up and go away, but since in Newworld the military always had them epically guarded I figured they could be anything. Uncle Darnel was in a cobey guard unit, and he said he had no idea what they were. You got special gear and you did what you were told, he said. It was just a job.
I knew the double R of course—Run and Report—because that was drummed into you from the beginning, with “please” and “thank you” and “don’t throw your oatmeal on the floor if you want to go on living.” But exactly what you were supposed to run and report was always left a little vague. It would look odd. It would be clearly out of place. Apparently you would know it if you saw it—it was maybe like a lot of silverbugs all stuck together. Which made me particularly sure I never wanted to see a real cobey. A mob of silverbugs not all stuck together was too much for me.
But I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been worried enough by an oil spot on the road or a puddle of water where no water should be or a cobweb sparkling with too many prisms to run and report it, although I knew people did occasionally. Well, and there were people like old Mrs. Githers, who ran and reported about once a week. When the local Watch shift were having a slow day they gave her a cup of coffee before they walked her home again.
There was never anything to report around here. Before this summer the last silverbug outbreak had been four years ago in Birdhill, which was nearly thirty miles from here. Jill was right: No Town, No Where, although some of the stories about the old Goat Creek base in the barrens were pretty extreme, and Station got its name from when it used to be mostly the train terminus and where the soldiers went when they were off duty. But they closed Goat Creek down because they didn’t need a big army base here. Station didn’t even have a regular scan any more. The mayor used to make a fuss about getting the sweepers here once a year. Fine. That was the sort of thing mayors were for, with kissing babies at the Fifth of July town gala. The sweepers never found anything and the last few scans had been canceled. We were a low-risk area: the anti-cobey boxes were enough for us.
I sneaked another look at Val, over the top of Mongo’s head. He was wearing another of his ugliest-ever-seen-in-a-civilized-country shirts. He had a lot of them. He’d sat forward in his chair, his forearms on his thighs and his big hairy hands hanging between his knees. I thought magicians were supposed to have long slender fingers to write mystic runes in the air and twiddle wands and things. His hands looked like they’d be good at strangling people and hammering nails without a hammer. His head was bowed and his shoulders slumped. He looked really tired. Or overwhelmed. Or sad. He looked like someone who’d just heard some bad news he wasn’t expecting. Or maybe he was expecting it, just a little, but it was worse now that he’d heard it.
I was trying to unglue my tongue from the roof of my mouth and for possibly the first time ever say something to Val voluntarily (that didn’t involve shouting). But my mother beat me to it. “Val?” she said, hesitantly, in this little splintery voice.
I heard way too much in that one syllable. I heard how glad she was to have him in her life. How lonely she had been before she met him. How much she loved him. I remembered how much more often she’d laughed in the last few months than she had in all the years since Dad died. In spite of me.
I put my face down on the top of Mongo’s head.
I heard Val stir. “I didn’t know,” he said, so quietly it was almost a whisper. His voice always sounded kind of rough and hairy too, although maybe it was just his accent. “I didn’t know. I did what they told me; I let them . . . Maggie, I have wondered, because . . . but . . .”
I didn’t look up; I didn’t want to see.
He went on: “They told me to go to Newworld. It would be easier here, they said. I already spoke the language. There were jobs for such as I . . . now was. They did not tell me they would let the government steal my money, or that I would not be able to teach, because the schools here would not accept my papers.”
“Joanna”—Joanna was principal of the high school and a friend of my mother’s, which was kind of a pain—“nearly broke a leg leaping over her desk to shake your hand when you said you could tutor science and math,” said my mother, and I recognized this voice: this was the one she used when your best friend told you she didn’t want to be your friend any more. (Jill and I had had our ups and downs when we were younger.) “You have more referrals now than you have time for.”
It worked on Val too. I looked up to see him sit back and smile at my mother. Then he looked at me. We stared at each other till my eyes were drawn to the bookshelf behind his head. One of the legs or tails or tongues began to waggle harder when I looked at it. Maybe it was the thing that had been on the back of the sofa. I remembered that I’d occasionally thought one of the shadows was following me around. I stared at the waggling thing. It had moved to a relatively empty bit of shelf and was now bouncing up and down like it knew I was staring at it. If that was all of it bouncing, then it was not the size of a giant elephant-swallowing anaconda. I wasn’t going to admit it, but it reminded me of a puppy hoping for action. In another minute it would bring me a ball to throw. “One of your shadows is waving at me,” I said in a strangely calm voice.
There was a silence. “It might be Hix,” Val said at last. “She would have come with me if any—could. Did. And she has always been friendly, and interested in—humans.”
“She?” said my mother, taking the word out of my fallen-open mouth. “Friendly? All right, I’m glad she’s friendly, but . . .”
Her voice trailed away, but it was a long minute before Val said anything. “I do not know where to begin or what to tell you,” he said. “It was in the conditions of my visa that I tell no one anything . . . about my previous life. Indeed I thought they had laid a geas on me, so that I could not. But then I believed—I knew—that I had left everything behind. I had certainly left my—my—what Maggie calls my shadows behind me in Oldworld. They were very much a part of my old life. . . .”
I knew I didn’t want to know, I thought.
“I admit I have wondered. I have wondered particularly—I know that it is not uncommon for a child to dislike a parent’s new spouse but—I have told myself that it was my vanity that insisted that Maggie was reacting to something more than myself—”
The shirts, I didn’t say aloud. The shoes.
After another pause Val went on. “Cohesion breaks—what you call cobeys—are much commoner in Oldworld than they are here—as you know. I will not repeat the tired old arguments about whether Oldworld would do better to embrace science as Newworld has; Oldworld has been plagued by cobeys for hundreds of years, long before Newworld turned away from magic. It is enough to say that at present Oldworld depends more on its magicians than its scientists. In Orzaskan a town this size would contain a dozen people trained to deal with cobeys. They would all be magicians.