“I thought the quality of the disturbance was rather extreme for any standard scanning device,” said Val. “Takahiro, are you—?”
Takahiro shivered. “The—the pressure is off now, for a while. I won’t change again. I don’t think. But I don’t know. In Japan—my mom took me out of school, the one time a cobey opened really near us. Nothing happened, but I think that’s because she was there. . . .” He shivered again. “But I guess if this goes on for very long I probably won’t be able to stay—me.”
“You are still you as a wolf,” said Val. “It is the stupidity of the people who make rules that is your problem, not what you are.”
I felt like saying, you haven’t been in school with a mean stupid teacher in a long time. But I didn’t say it. It was a horrible grown-up version of mean stupid teachers that was the reason Val was here in Newworld at all.
Val went on: “I would expect that this—er—special armydar will not last long. Your Newworld cobey units are very efficient.”
“I don’t know,” said Takahiro. “According to the geek webnet meetspaces they think they’re onto a way to stop the series thing—stop more cobeys from opening. And if they’re bothered about what happened in the park today—they may keep it running for a while.”
There was a little silence. Takahiro reached out a very long arm and swept my algebra book back toward the center of the table. Then he picked it up, gently, like it was an injured animal. “This is what you used,” he said. “This afternoon, in the park.”
“Yes,” I said, startled. “How did you know?”
“Deductive reasoning,” said Takahiro. He laid it down again. “I can’t think of anything but an emergency that would make you tear pages out of a book.” He ran his fingers lightly down the slightly collapsed spine, like stroking a sleeping puppy. “Then it was another cobey. This afternoon. In the park.”
There was another thick silence. Val was looking fixedly at his hands. Never stare into the eyes of a dog who doesn’t trust you; she will find that threatening. I tried not to growl. “Yes,” I said. Val exhaled: a long, long, long breath. He kept looking at his hands.
After a shorter thinner silence Taks said, “I’ve been—well, I’ve been working on an origami figure for a cobey.” He raised his eyes from my algebra book and looked straight at me. He smiled. Faintly, but it was a smile, and it didn’t fall off his face immediately either. It was the first smile I’d seen since I’d met what I’d thought was a big dog, out in Val’s shed. “I wasn’t trying to find a way to stop one from opening or anything, uh, useful. I was just trying to get my head—and my fingers—around a shape in paper that would reflect the reality of a cobey. . . .” He tailed off. Maybe he knew how loopy he sounded.
“You gizmoheads,” I said. “You’ve got too much charge.” But I understood better than I wanted to. There was something a little freaky about origami, about what it could do. About the way folded paper could explode into something else.
“My mother believed . . .” he said and stopped. “My mother almost . . .” and he stopped again. “It—origami for a cobey—was my project this summer at camp. I almost didn’t get it accepted—neither the physics teacher nor any of the math teachers liked the idea. They thought it meant I was nutso. But the headmaster likes my dad’s money. So he passed it on to the art department and they said fine. You’re allowed to be crazy if it’s art.
“Since you know the rest . . . I’ve been trying to figure it out since my mom died. It was like if I could crack it I could crack me. Never mind that almost everybody who ever wrote an equation—or folded a piece of paper in half—has been looking for the same thing. And this summer it felt close. But what was coming was a lot more like an animal than like physwiz—but if it was an animal, it must be for you, Maggie. The art department gave me an A because I spent so much time on it. But you felt it too, didn’t you? That it wasn’t just—paper?”
“Yes,” I said. “And Hix liked it. Hix thought it was a—a colleague or something.” I got up, stepped over Mongo, and knelt beside my knapsack, feeling for the right little pocket. I pulled out several of my ordinary kami before I found her. The kami looked strangely dull and crooked—my folding isn’t that mediocre—and Takahiro’s new figure was . . . limp. You need paper that will hold a crease properly to do origami with. You’d never use anything soft. I carried her carefully to the table and laid her down. She’s just tired, I thought. Like Hix. I looked at my algebra book again. Looked away.
“I wouldn’t have thought of it if it hadn’t been square,” I said. “I know you can—well, Taks can—make origami out of any shape of paper, but I’m pretty stuck on classical square. And I’ve done so much of it that if you show me square paper I think origami. I know about as much algebra as Loophead here,” I said, looking down at the sleeping Mongo, “but this afternoon I had to do something and—and—oh, I can’t explain! It sounds so girlie to say it felt right. But I was carrying this like warehouse of square paper, and Taks, you’d just showed me your new figure. It—she—was in my knapsack with a lot of paper kami. I’ve been making kami all summer, like—” I stopped. I’d been making kami against Val and his shadows. “And the pages were big enough—I’m nowhere near as good at microscopic folds as you are—and strong enough. I think the wind would have ripped ordinary paper to pieces before I finished folding. It was—it was something to do besides sit there and wait to disappear forever.”
Val had drawn the book toward him and put his hands—gently, as Takahiro had—on the cover. “I’d bandage it, if I were you,” he said.
“Bandage it?” I said. I looked at it again and felt another pang—of conscience. It was a book. It wasn’t a wounded soldier.
“Yes,” said Val. He looked up at me and smiled. “Go on, humor a mad old man.”
He wouldn’t have dared to say that to me two days ago. I smiled back, hesitantly. “Okay.” I picked the book up and—yes, I cradled it, like I would a half-grown puppy at the shelter who doesn’t understand that its ghastly ex-owners dumped it on the street for the crime of being a puppy.
We heard Mom coming in the door then, making crackling noises as her shopping bags bumped each other and the walls—and then there was the unmistakable sound of Ran talking about cars. The smell of the deli’s fabulous chickpea and tomato stew reached us first. I took my knapsack and my algebra book upstairs and then pelted downstairs again before the rest of them ate everything.
Ran’s obliviousness was comforting. I don’t think he even noticed that Takahiro was wearing a dressing gown, let alone Val’s dressing gown. Mom handed Takahiro most of the shopping bags and he went off to the bathroom to change. The gruuaa seemed to stay in the kitchen. Maybe they were interested in the stew too. I ran after him a minute later, with scissors for the tags: “Thanks,” he said, reaching a long bare arm around the door. “The nail clippers weren’t working so well.”
The way he was standing I could see his reflection in the mirror over the sink: that golden-pearl skin gleaming on a long naked back and butt. Oh. Wow. Great butt. Not that I’d seen a lot of other teenage boys’ naked butts to compare it with . . . but I was pretty sure this one would still rate. I don’t think he knew, but I still turned away really fast, giggly with embarrassment.