The kitchen was starting to smell of chocolate. It was probably my favorite smell in the whole world, and all I could think of was that we’d just had it last night, and I’d thought last night had been serious-enough-for-an-emergency-hot-chocolate-ration enough. I looked down along the floor. There were gruuaa everywhere. I could see them more and more easily even when they were hidden by normal furniture-and-people’s-legs shadows. I didn’t know if that was Hix’s influence, or that I’d stopped trying to ignore them—or stopped hating Val—or what. There was a heap of them in the shadows under the table and a coil of them wrapped around and through the bottles in the tall skinny bottle rack between the edge of the cupboard and the refrigerator. There were several more of them winding around Mom’s flour-sugar-coffee-tea canisters at the back of the counter by the sink. (Which contained, of course, two kinds of pasta, rice and dried beans.) I wasn’t going to mention this. Mom was kind of a hygiene freak and I didn’t know if shadow feet could carry germs or not. Hix had moved slightly to between Mongo’s front legs and he was dementedly trying to lick the top of her head. If that was her head.
It was. Her three eyes blinked open to look at me. “Hey, sweetie,” I murmured, which tended to be what I called all friendly critters. All the long-term residents at the shelter knew their name was “sweetie.” Hix’s eyes still glittered but they didn’t look like silverbugs to me any more.
Mom brought the tray with four steaming mugs and a plate of cookies to the table. She picked up her mug and chugged it. “I’d better get going,” she said. “Takahiro, can you stay for supper? I’m stopping by the deli.”
“Buy twice as much as you think you need,” said Val mildly. “Changing is hard work.” Takahiro gave another wild shiver, almost a spasm, looked at Val and away again, but he didn’t say anything.
“I’ll do that,” said Mom. “Er—do you need—er—meat? Our usual from the deli is their tomato and chickpea stew.”
“It’s just calories,” Takahiro muttered to the table. “It doesn’t matter what kind.”
Mom patted Takahiro’s arm and my shoulder, dropped a kiss on the top of Val’s head, and left.
The cookies disappeared in about forty seconds. Val got up and started making sandwiches. “A question, Takahiro,” he said. “May I ask?”
Takahiro, to my surprise, took a moment to answer. “I don’t really know how to say this,” he said. “I’ll tell you anything I can tell you.” He flicked another sideways glance at me and fiddled with his mug. “So, yeah.”
Val bowed his head briefly in one of his funny not-from-around-here gestures. “Do you know how your father got you into this country?” said Val.
Takahiro looked up at that. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, no. I’ve wondered about that. At the time I didn’t think anything. Eh . . . My cousins told me, once, when my mom was still alive and the rest of the family hadn’t completely cut us off yet, that I wouldn’t be able to visit my dad in Newworld even if he wanted me to, which he didn’t, because the border police would know I was a ’shifter, and kill me. That was about eleven years ago. I had to have about a million tests before they let me in, including blood work and scans and stuff, and I was kind of waiting for them to kill me.”
“Oh, Taks,” I said.
He looked sort of in my direction but not quite at me, and away again. “It was a long time ago. And then they didn’t kill me after all. So I had to figure out how to stay alive. At the time I just thought they’d missed it somehow, which was almost comforting, you know? It meant I might manage to—pass. It wasn’t till later, when I was older and more suspicious, that I began to wonder. There’s not a lot out there about ’shifters that the ordinary public can access, and I didn’t want anyone tagging me because I was too interested in this weird subject. But I don’t see how all the border tech can have missed what I am. There’s a lot about my dad I don’t know,” he added.
“What is your father’s employment?” said Val.
“He buys stuff for museums. He’s an expert on all kinds of stuff. Especially Farworld stuff. So he keeps being called in to make decisions.”
“He travels a great deal,” said Val.
“Yeah. All over the world. Over lots of national borders. Newworld, Oldworld, Farworld, Midworld, the Southworlds. He ought to be so suspect—with a ’shifter son. Who did he pay off—or something—to get me through? Why doesn’t whoever it is have him totally at the end of a hot wire?”
Val finished cutting the sandwiches in halves and put the plate on the table. “We don’t know,” he said. “But the world does not work in some ways we are taught to believe that it works.”
Takahiro grunted. “Dreeping,” he said. “Crap zone.” This was seriously bad language for Taks.
Val sat down, smiling a humorless smile. “It is inevitable at your age—yours and Maggie’s—that you should still be learning how the world works. It is a little embarrassing that I should be learning the same things now. I should not be here with my shadows—”
“Gruuaa,” I said. “Casimir also called them gruuaa, although he’s from Ukovia.”
“Most terms concerning the use of magic are the same throughout the Commonwealth,” said Val. “I fear then that Casimir may be yet another person who is not as the world says he should be. Yes. Gruuaa. If there is a Newworld word, I don’t know it. My masters said they were stripping me of my magic and that, naked, the best place for me was Newworld. And so I came here, obedient little dokdok that I am.”
“You probably mean clueless drone or dead battery,” I said.
“Dead battery. Yes. Very apt. Except that I am not. But I have no idea how the gruuaa managed to protect me both through the lengthy dispossession process in Orzaskan and the intensive examination at the Newworld boundary.”
Val and I each ate half a sandwich so it didn’t look like it was all for Takahiro—and Takahiro ate the rest. You might almost say wolfed. Like he couldn’t help himself. There were now a lot of gruuaa around Takahiro—looping over his chair, hanging from the picture frames on the wall behind him—and I figured the mob under the table were probably clustering around his feet. The armydar was still going unh unh unh so he probably needed them worse than Val or I did.
“Val,” I said. “The gruuaa. They, uh—”
“They ground, protect, stabilize. And hide. I did not know their gift for concealment was so great.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They hid Casimir and me this afternoon. . . .” I tailed off. I’d nearly died this afternoon—or anyway been disappeared to nobody-knew-where. It had been awful and horrible and terrifying and also amazing and thrilling in a sort of sick way. Also there was Casimir. And yet it seemed almost a no-story after what had happened to Takahiro. After finding out what Taks lived with every day.