“Tell us,” said Val.
“Oh. Well, after—um.” I still wasn’t going to talk about the cobey if I didn’t have to. I’d shoved my wounded algebra book down to the end of the table where it was a little less obvious. “At first it was just Hix, but then there were too many of them—army guys—and they had brought all this gear—and Hix was tired. This big army guy had this wand thing and was about to nail us. Then the gruuaa arrived—I don’t know, did Hix call them somehow?—Loophead, I mean Mongo, broke the army guy’s concentration just long enough and the invisibility curtain dropped over us, I guess. It was pretty electric though, seeing the army guy suddenly not seeing us.” I hoped no one was going to ask me why Hix was tired. It was probably okay about wanting to hide from the army. It was like you felt guilty when you saw a cop car. Even if you didn’t have any reason, you just did.
Mongo, hearing his name, came out from under the table and presented himself hopefully. Mostly I was careful only to use his name when I wanted him to do something—which he would then get a treat for. I made him give me both front paws (one at a time) and roll over (in both directions) and then he got a piece of sandwich. “That’s all,” I said firmly—or he’d run through all his other tricks, including a few, like jumping over the sofa, that I didn’t really want any grown-ups to know about. When dogs jump over things, they tend to push off with their hind legs at the top. I was always careful to check Mongo’s feet when he came indoors. Still. Also it’s a small living room. “But what are they—the gruuaa?”
“We don’t know.”
I stared at Val. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Val laughed, a real laugh. It was a nice sound. “You are too quick. We don’t know what they are, or where they come from, or why they seek us out—perhaps I should say we don’t know who or what else they seek out. But they are parasites—energy parasites. They are attracted—they seem to be attracted—particularly to magical energy.
“Mostly they take what we do not or cannot use—like the pilot fish around the shark—but they will sometimes tap you in a way you will sense.”
I put my hand up to Hix, who was wrapped around my neck again. Not just magical energy. Not. Hix began to hum, as if responding, either to my hand or to my sudden emotional spike of dismay. Could she pick up emotional spikes? Could she sense if they were happy spikes or unhappy spikes? She’d tapped into me today—but that was also when she was hiding Casimir and me all by herself. “Pilot fish and their sharks are sometimes pretty good companions,” I said. If it was about animals, I’d probably have read up on it.
“Yes,” said Val. “Symbiote is perhaps a better word than parasite, and a gruuaa or group of gruuaa and their human or humans are stronger and more flexible and resilient in—er—many situations than those humans alone. Those whom the gruuaa befriend are generally considered lucky. But I have seen old, experienced, commonsensical magicians disturbed when they learn that we are, in effect, the gruuaa’s food.”
I looked down. Mongo hadn’t quite given up on the possibility of more sandwich. He was sitting beside my chair with his head pressing down rather heavily on my thigh. When he saw me looking at him his tail, of course, began to swish back and forth. “Trombone,” I said, and he leaped up and shot away to look for his rubber trombone. It wasn’t a fair command: I should know where it was before I sent him after it. You want to reinforce your training with success. But I wanted my parasitic dog to show off how clever he was. I heard him scurrying around the living room. Not there. He made a quick pass down the hall to the front door, but the dining room door was closed. It wouldn’t be in the dining room. He scampered upstairs. I heard him nudging the door to my bedroom open. It might be under the desk or the bed. No. Not in the bathroom either. (Dog toys occasionally got in the bathroom as a result of the drama of baths.) Bugsuck. It was probably in the back yard then. Leaking dead battery. Use your brain, Margaret Alastrina, not your stupid emotions. He’s not going to find it and he’s going to be unhappy and feel that he’s failed. Which will be your fault.
Mongo flung himself downstairs again. I might be giving up hope but he wasn’t. I was just about to get up and open the back door, which was better than not doing anything, but dogs have a strong sense of fairness and Mongo would know I hadn’t played fair with him, even if he forgave me, which he would. But he went to the back door himself without looking at me. And reared up on his hind legs, took the handle in his mouth and pulled down. The door snicked open.
I had never taught him to do this.
He ran outside and found the trombone under a rosebush. He came dancing back in with it again (I admit he didn’t close the door behind him) and laid it proudly at my feet. “You are wonderful and amazing,” I said. “Sugoi. Double sugoi. Good dog. Good dog.” I got up and fed him the last slice of chicken from Val’s sandwich-making. I also closed the back door. Then I put the plate that had had the sandwiches on it on the floor so he could lick up the crumbs.
“I can live with ‘parasite,’” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
I sat down again and Mongo fell over on his side, sighed deeply, and went to sleep. With his head what should have been really uncomfortably on his trombone. Usually a sleeping Mongo is soothing—it means he isn’t running around looking for something to eat/destroy—and he’d also so totally showed off how clever he really is I should have been happy for a week on the memory. But I wasn’t going to be. I wasn’t. And it wasn’t just Takahiro—or the cobey—
I snapped my head around. There was something behind me. No there wasn’t. I looked at the gruuaa on Taks’ chair, on the wall behind him. They were restless, but then in my experience so far they usually were a little twitchy. But there were sudden little bursts of sparkles in the corners of my vision—there was another one. With that icky silverbug resemblance. Ugh. So far as I knew silverbugs only ever appeared outdoors any more, since they figured out how to wire buildings against them, fifty years or so ago. The company my maybe-crazy aunt (maybe) worked for had done that, long before she was hired, if she was. Our house was only about twenty years old.
“That’s the armydar,” said Takahiro. “That’s making you see stuff that isn’t there.”
“What?” I said intelligently.
“It’s well known that if you have one cobey in an area, you’ll probably have another. It’s one of the reasons the army guys mobilize so fast.”
“It—is?” I said, expanding on my theme of intelligence. Why did people keep telling me this? Was I the only person who didn’t know? “I thought that was just Oldworld.”
“Well, you have to look for the info, if you live in Newworld,” said Takahiro. “Because they don’t want you to know. They want you to think they’re just being thorough. But the information is out there. And the latest is—this. It’s got a fancy name. It’s still armydar. I’ve been hoping I wasn’t going to find out about it first-hand.”