Most of the other people in the park were stopping and gaping too, although I had a faint sense that they’d been sort of standing there dazed already. I sympathized. But guys in uniforms were halting to talk to the other people—in an in-your-face, we’re-the-army kind of way. Some of the people the army guys were talking to looked like they were then being escorted somewhere—with two or three or four guys in uniforms at their elbows. Oh, drog me. This didn’t look good at all. Without meaning to I stopped again. “No,” said Casimir, “don’t stop,” and he didn’t stop, so he nearly pulled me over when our linked hands came to the ends of our arms. I staggered forward and he let go of my hand to put his arm around me. I wished I was enjoying this more. Also, the algebra book . . . Okay, pay attention.
The army guys were streaming past us. Like they didn’t see us. They were stopping everybody else. Not us. They broke and slid past us like water around a rock. The water doesn’t care.
Casimir said, “Your gruuaa is hiding us. But there is only one of her, I think, and she is tired: she kept both of us here and—eh—steady, while you bound the cobey. She is tapping you now, which is why you feel disoriented. I thought she might be able to tap me too if I am touching you.” Of course. He had his arm tightly around me because he wanted my gruuaa to be able to use him. I was almost too dizzy to notice what it was like, having his arm around me: the clean soap-and-skin smell of him, the way our hips brushed as we walked, the feel of his arm against my back. . . . I had a vague idea I would want to remember all the details later. Maybe I could manage to forget about my algebra book, when I was remembering everything else, which at the moment was digging a hole in my stomach. Carrying it was always a pain, but I couldn’t blame it if it was mad at me for ripping a big hunk of its middle out.
There I go again, I thought distantly, thinking about my algebra book as if it was alive. Tell that to Ms. Dane, when you explain about the missing pages. It was getting heavier, I suppose as I was getting feebler. The feet on my forehead were going cold, like Hix was coming to the end of what she could do too.
We made it to the gate. I think Casimir was nearly carrying me. We made it out the gate and Casimir turned and marched us toward the bus stop. We lurched inside the bus shelter and collapsed on the bench—even Casimir. So maybe Hix had been using him after all. Fortunately there wasn’t anyone else waiting, so we could sprawl. One boy, one girl, one knapsack, one algebra book, one long fluffy invisible thing. The army guys were still going into the park, but slower now, and fewer of them, although these last guys were carrying more equipment—big weird folded-up angular machinery with little red and white flashing lights.
The front end (I assumed it was the front end) of Hix slithered off my head and back onto my shoulder. I could feel how tired she was, not the way I’d been picking up her anxiety, but by how limp she was. If she’d been a feather boa a few minutes ago she was now a feather boa that had been dropped in the river, run over by a bus, and then used as a chew toy by a Saint Bernard. One or two of the army guys looked sharply into the bus shelter but no one said anything. I tried to look surprised and clueless. I should have been able to do that really well. Maybe I did.
I flopped my head over—I was leaning against the back wall of the shelter—to look at Casimir. He was slumped against the wall too, with his eyes closed. He looked exhausted. Perhaps he felt me looking at him, because he opened his eyes and smiled. Even with everything that had happened in the last half hour that smile made my heart grow two sizes and bang against my ribs. Then he reached out and took my hand again like it was the most normal thing to do. . . .
Hey, he started it. What would a mgdaga do if the cutest boy she’d ever met put his hand around hers? I closed my fingers and gave his hand a squeeze. “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t know what any of that was—I’m saying that a lot, sorry—but the mgdaga stuff is a nonstarter, okay? We do believe in coincidence in Newworld.”
My eyes strayed to a big army van—big enough to carry a lot of soldiers to a park where someone had Run and Reported a cobey—or where a cobey had opened up that was big enough to set off all the cobey boxes in town. Or an army van big enough to carry a lot of ordinary people who had had the bad luck to be in a park when a cobey broke, to be taken away somewhere. Nothing to worry about, they taught you in school. If a cobey ever happened here, which it won’t. The attending cobey unit would take your statement and maybe give you a decontamination pill and send you home.
Nothing to worry about.
There were three soldiers unfolding the legs on a box like the ones we’d seen other soldiers carrying into the park. It was long and thin and had too many legs, although these legs were long and spindly. It didn’t look friendly. I bet it didn’t smell good either.
“How do you come to have a gruuaa companioning you?” said Casimir. “They are not common anywhere, but I thought—well, I would have thought—there were none in Newworld.”
“She—she has been—er—companioning—er—my mother’s husband.” That sounded awful, and I was probably only still here because of Hix. I was probably only here twice because of Hix. Which meant I was only here twice because of Val. “My stepfather,” I amended reluctantly. “She—um—he introduced her to me.” Electric gods, was it only last night? “And she seems—um—to like me.”
“It is a great honor,” he said. “You are very fortunate.”
Yes. That was simply true. I put my hand up to where I knew Hix was, wrapped around my throat but also trailing in my lap. I felt that faint wispy not-fur-not-feathers-not-scales something against my fingers. It moved. Even in an invisible unknown creature I thought I recognized the “pet me” response. I stroked gently with the tips of my fingers. She was humming again. . . .
Except it wasn’t a hum. Or it wasn’t Hix. It was something big and bullying, trying to overwhelm both of us—something like the army tank rolling down the street toward us.
Army tank?
Now I could hear—feel—something—the crackles and frizzles and—something-going-wrong-with-the-air—as all the unbent unfolded steel-legged things made contact with whatever was in the tank. I knew about armydar. You got a few days of standard armydar with a standard scan. Our last scan hadn’t been so long ago that I’d forgotten. This wasn’t that. This was big. Something the army thought needed to be in a tank to keep safe. What were they protecting, the thing or us?
They were chugging it out, the something-wrong-with-the-air, in these big ugly disorienting throbs, the tank thing and the boxes on legs. I could see two of the boxes from where I was sitting. There were almost-visible ripples wandering, weaving down the road, past our bus shelter. I closed my eyes, but I could still feel them, like you feel a boat heaving up and down on a long slow queasy-making swell. I didn’t like it. It made me feel heavy and slow. This wasn’t anything I could lob little bits of folded-up paper at. I opened my eyes again.
There was a fancy kind of armydar that was supposed to have a squashing effect on an area around a cobey—or some kind of pre-emptive squashing over an area that might throw out a cobey. Like flinging a blanket or a bucket of sand over a kitchen fire. It may not put it out, but it slows it down. And if this was some big, super-whammy armydar . . .
There was an army guy—in fact, several army guys—and the one in front had more stuff on his cap and his shoulders than the other ones, and he was looking grim and maybe angry—and he was coming toward the bus shelter. He saw us all right. One of the guys with him was holding a sort of gun-wand thing out in front of him—oh, her—and she was pointing it at us. There were three little red flashing lights at the tip. The flashing was kind of hypnotic. It looked like it was saying, Ha ha ha, got you.