Takahiro held the little paper thing out to me. “She’s for you,” he said. “I’ve been working on the pattern for her all summer and couldn’t get it right. I was going to show you and ask you to help me—maybe you could see something I was missing. But it was like seeing you this morning, I suddenly knew what to do. So I knew she was for you. But it’s been like she was trying to get through to me all summer. Nice perfume,” he added. He moved his hands to hold either end of his figure, pulled gently, and it—she—flattened out. “You can keep her in your knapsack,” he said.
It still took me about half a minute to raise my hand and touch her. I was pretty sure there was an almost-invisible something pattering down my arm—or some of an almost-invisible something de-accordioning down my arm—to meet her too. If Takahiro noticed anything funny about the shadows on my sleeve he didn’t say anything.
“Domo arigato,” I said faintly.
He nodded once as if whatever was happening was perfectly normal, hung his own knapsack over his shoulder, and left while I was still staring at my new mascot. I’d have to get Taks to show me how to make her. Maybe with him helping me I could do it while I was awake. Slowly I tucked her into another one of those sixty-seven weirdly shaped pockets you (usually) don’t need that every knapsack has, that I’d stuffed a lot of kami into earlier. Maybe I’d just discovered something. They’re all for holding origami. I should have thought of that before.
When I looked up from zipping my knapsack closed, trying to make myself think about algebra (ugh—and if I didn’t hurry now I was going to be late) . . . maybe it was that third mug of coffee again, or my natural resistance to thinking about algebra. But for a second—half a second—the quadratic exponential thingy of a second—everything went dark. At the same time that I knew it all happened in a fraction of a fraction of a second, I was also hovering, hanging, in the darkness for as long as it took half the stars in the universe to pull themselves together, shine like crazy, and blow up into nothingness again. There were other flashes in the darkness—like meteors or comets or something maybe—I don’t know. And. And something. Something shadowy in the darkness. While I hung, and there was nothing under my feet, and nothing holding me up.
I came back to myself with a little invisible hairy thing fanning my face like I’d had a touch of heatstroke. Not likely: it was cold enough this morning to see your breath outdoors. My first thought was that the lights must have flickered off and on again—which made me feel a little sick and scared because while there are lots of reasons for electrical outages, one of them is that a cobey is maybe opening somewhere near you. That was still preferable to anything else I could think of about what had just happened—including that Hix appeared to have noticed whatever it was.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and the sun was streaming in the big windows. Even if the lights had gone out you’d have barely noticed.
Mrs. Tarrant was standing beside me, frowning a little. “Are you all right?”
“Er—the lights didn’t just flash off and on, did they?” I said.
The frown deepened. “No. Maggie, don’t worry. NIDL are in Copperhill, the cobey has been contained, and they’re working to shut it down. By tomorrow everything will be back to normal.”
I could see her making her face stop frowning. She tried semi-successfully to smile. No, she hadn’t liked the news reports this morning either.
“It must have been that third cup of coffee at breakfast then,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll have orange juice.”
“You do that,” she said. “Er—do you want a pass for the nurse?”
I thought about it. Yes. No. Algebra would still be there tomorrow. I sighed. “No. Thanks. It’s algebra next. I’d better get used to it.” She smiled. It was a better smile this time.
I picked up my knapsack—sliding the strap carefully onto my shoulder so I didn’t pinch anyone’s toes—and my monster algebra book, and left. There were a bunch of strange grown-ups wandering through the halls. They could have been new teachers I didn’t know but I didn’t think so. They didn’t walk or look around the right way for teachers—and they were too interested in the students. Most teachers get enough of students in class. They looked like plainclothes army goons to me. One of them stared right at me, like he was hoping I was carrying stolen goods so he could arrest me. Nope, just my algebra book.
And a shadow thing brought into the country by my mom’s new husband who had had all his magic taken away from him, except that he hadn’t.
There was another silverbug quivering a couple of feet from the ground under the tree outside the office. I could see it through the corridor windows. I aimed my phone at it and sent the coordinates in although half the school probably already had. Maybe the goons were watching to see how many of us were good citizens, and clicked it through. Did I get a point for responsibility, or minus a point for paranoia? Did the niddles have a scan for shadows?
I worried about my blackout the rest of the day. (Shadowy-darkness-out?) I pretty much missed algebra class without involving the nurse. I could see Ms. Dane’s mouth going and hear words like “polynomial” and “vector” but nothing got as far as my brain. (Not that my brain would know what to do with them even if they did.) I didn’t think the blackout had been the third mug of coffee. But then what was it? Shadowy had developed a whole new meaning in the last seven months—and a whole whole new meaning since last night. I put my hand up to my collarbone again, where something was tickling me. Had the big blackout thing been like one of Val’s shadows? Only a lot bigger? I didn’t think this one was friendly. He’d given them a name—gruuaa—but he’d avoided explaining what they really were, hadn’t he? He just said that Hix was friendly. I put my hand to my collarbone again. I caught Ms. Dane looking at me, and moved my hand to fiddle with my necklace.
And, speaking of what things were, what was Val? Was he still a magician? (How could you not know you were a magician? Or still a magician? It wasn’t like getting back on a bicycle and finding out you still could, was it?) I pulled my necklace a little too hard; if I wasn’t careful I’d break the cord. The tickle on the back of my hand got longer and slower, more emphatic and more rhythmic. Hix was (maybe) saying, There, there, it’s okay. Mom said the only suspicion she’d had about me was the way I got along with animals. Possibly including invisible shadowy animals with too many feet.
By the end of the day I was the kind of exhausted that I just wanted to go home—except that’s exactly what I didn’t want to do, because Val was there, and I didn’t know what I thought about him any more, except that everything was so complicated with him around. Him and his shadows, one of which had cleared off from the shadow mob and was now coiled around my neck. It had been easier hating him, and being sure the shadows were some kind of bad guy. As I pulled my jacket out of my locker Hix was humming again.
That Val had killed someone—that he’d killed his best friend—should have made him easier to hate. But it didn’t. I remembered his face, when he told us. I didn’t understand—I didn’t understand anything—but I understood how he’d been willing to have his magic taken away after that. How he’d wanted it taken away.
And how he was having a bad time too. And how some of it was my fault.
Jill wanted to hang out and I didn’t so I said I’d take the bus home. But I got to the bus stop and without realizing I’d made some other decision, kept walking. The park was not so far away that I would die carrying one million books and an old ’top (the new ones weighed less) in my knapsack plus my dreeping algebra book in my arms.