I felt a familiar light pressure against the sole of one foot as I sat with my legs now folded under me. I felt behind me for my algebra book, and dragged it as gently as I could around to one side.
It flopped open at once, and presented one rigidly upstanding page, which again pulled free as easily as tearing a page off a memo pad. I looked at the little shred of paper lying on the floor that had fallen away from Mongo’s collar. Folding this new page on and around Mongo’s back was awkward but it so wanted to be folded I was barely keeping up with it. It was clearly a border collie, head down, tail straight out behind, intent as anything. Border collie kami.
I felt around under my T-shirt for Mongo’s collar, and tucked it underneath. Then I wrapped both arms around him, put my face in his fur, and waited.
He came out looking embarrassed—gnawing on narrow chewy things like belts, long woolly scarves, shoes, coat sleeves, chair legs and knapsack straps had been one of the things I’d had the hardest time convincing him to stop doing, back in the days when he was learning to be a dog rather than a weapon of domestic demolition. He plastered himself belly-down on the floor and looked at me up through his eyelashes, judging how much trouble he was in. I reached out and curled the little paper collie another turn around his collar to make it more secure, and he immediately leaped up, licked my hand, licked my face, and then raced around the room twice while I tried to unfold my legs and find out if I could stand up. Ow. Sort of. When I bent over my algebra book again it flew open and another page presented itself, which I drew out softly.
I stood staring at it a minute. I held it stretched lightly between my two hands. I could vaguely see equations scrawled on it, tangled up in the leaf-vine flower-stem pattern of the ornamental paper. It was like one of those Can You Find? games in kids’ magazines. Here was a numeral two, which was also the little nobbly green thing that the petals of a flower unfurl from, and one of the petals of that flower was bent over in a square-root sign. I hadn’t noticed the bees before, which were also number eights, or maybe they were infinity signs.
“Maggie—” said Val, who was way too bright for his own good. My own good anyway.
“Shut up,” I said. “I mean, please don’t talk.”
I knelt (stiffly) down on the floor again. The algebra book immediately clunked over to lean against my hip and Mongo stopped cavorting like a loony and threw himself down on my other side. He had at least two gruuaa along for the ride: one of them climbed up my leg to tickle my forearm. Carefully I made the first fold. I wasn’t sure how many legs this one was going to need. . . . By the time my fingers couldn’t find anything left that wanted to be folded I had a thundering headache, and the many-legged, spiky-backed thing in my hands glittered like an oncoming migraine.
I stood up again, not realizing till then that I had developed a billowing, quivering gruuaa cape—I could see it, dark and dazzling, skittering out on either side of me. I wondered if Val might be seeing me now as I had seen him, that first night he came to dinner—in my old life, where things (mostly) made sense. I walked over to him and, wordlessly, he held his hands out toward me. There was a lock, unnervingly rather like a bicycle lock except for the little flashing lights that looked creepily like a tiny scowling red-eyed troll face, between his wrists. Now what? Don’t think about it. I grabbed one of Val’s hands and slapped my paper figure down on the troll face.
There was a brief, queasy, up-is-down-and-down-is-nowhere-and-I-really-hate-nowhere-here-we-are-again moment. There was a kind of whistling gasp, and then Val’s hands were holding onto my wrists, and he said, “Maggie!” I blinked, and I was standing in the awful little grey cement room at the back of the Goat Creek Military Base.
“Well done,” said Val, smiling faintly.
CHAPTER 13
I LOOKED DOWN (NOW THAT I KNEW WHERE DOWN was again). There, of course, was my algebra book, although it was half-buried in . . . “What?” I said. Whatever it was, it looked a little like the compost heap in Mom’s garden and a little like the remains of a fire in a ’tronic factory. “Ex-chains,” I said, kneeling to pick up my algebra book. “Really ex.”
“Really ex,” agreed Val, standing up cautiously.
I looked at my book. I had only used three pages, but better than two-thirds of it was gone. The covers were still there, still saying Enhanced Algebra in big stupid letters, and there were some pages left inside, but not many. Val was right: we weren’t leaving the way I had come in.
Val knelt beside Paolo, who hadn’t stirred. “Do you have a torch?”
I set my algebra book down on a clean part of the floor and wiggled out of my knapsack, fending Mongo away from helpless-person-lying-on-floor-meant-to-be-licked while I fished for my flashlight. Val finished taking Paolo’s pulse and then gently peeled his eyelids back one after the other and shone the light in them, gave the flashlight back to me, and ran his hands lightly over Paolo’s skull. Then he rolled him over tenderly in what I recognized as the recovery position from the yearly-once-you-reach-high-school required first-aid class. I’d only ever done any of this stuff on my classmates and even with them cooperating wrestling someone else’s body into any position was difficult. I wondered if there had been a lot of unconscious people in Val’s life in Orzaskan since it didn’t seem to faze him at all. “I guess he hit his head when he fell,” said Val. “But what I can easily check is all normal.” I went around to the chair behind the desk. There was a cushion on the seat, and a jacket over the back of it.
Val slid the cushion under Paolo’s head and I knelt to put the jacket over him. One of the things they taught us in first aid is that unconscious people can sometimes hear you. I awkwardly patted Paolo’s shoulder and said, “It’s me, Maggie. I’m sorry you hurt your head. I hope you’re okay.” I looked up at the wall opposite the desk. There was no trace of the gateway my little origami figure had opened.
Then Val and Takahiro and I turned toward the door. “We can’t just leave,” I said, and Val laughed. “Indeed, I doubt it,” he said.
“No,” I said, glaring at him. “Not like that. Well, worse,” I added reluctantly. “We also have to rescue Arnie.”
“Arnie?”
“Jill’s mom’s partner. He owns Porter’s—the hardware store.”
“Ironmongery,” said Val thoughtfully. “He is here too?”
“Well,” I said uncomfortably. “I hope so. You were.”
“Ah,” said Val. He put his hand on the doorknob. I held my breath. He turned it.
The door opened. I let my breath out.
Hix was around my neck again, but the rest of the gruuaa skittered out in front of us, turned right, and raced down the corridor like some bizarre tide. The corridor was only dimly lit and the gruuaa might almost have been black water, their leading edge ragged like it was pouring over pebbles, and occasionally splashing up the walls like they were piers. Val, Takahiro the wolf and I followed, me holding Mongo’s collar with one hand and my much thinner algebra book (it still wouldn’t fit in my knapsack) in the other arm. We passed two doors on one side and one on the other, but the gruuaa were still on the trail, so we followed. At last they piled up in front of a fourth door.
We stopped too. “I will go first,” said Val quietly.
“You will not,” I said, annoyed. “The minute anyone sees you, they’ll know something has gone wrong.”
“I feel that a seventeen-year-old girl in torn and bloody jeans will be just as easily recognized as not a standard member of staff,” said Val.