I had been thinking that the gruuaa network left a lot to be desired as a way of guiding solid people over solid ground as I stumbled in the dark, trying to keep the flashlight beam nearly straight down in case anyone from the base happened to be looking out an ordinary window in this direction. And then simultaneously Takahiro said, “Maggie—” and Bella, walking in front of me, stopped. She had her hackles raised, which made her look almost as big as the huge ugly block of building that had appeared just ahead of us. On the far side of a complicated, clearly unclimbable fence, chain link and barbed wire. The high-voltage-with-extra-lethal-kick sensation beat out at us like wind from a wind tunnel.
I stopped. Takahiro and Jill and Casimir stopped. The rest of the dogs stopped too, most of them with one foot raised and ears stiffly pricked, as if they were expecting interesting and dangerous prey to burst out at them. There seemed to be no windows and no lights on this side. Just the fence. And the punch of extra-muscular voltage.
“Whew,” said Takahiro, except it was more like a growl.
We stood there. I waited to feel my pathetic plan disintegrating. But the gruuaa web was brighter than ever. “Can you see that?” I said in this insanely calm voice.
“Yes,” said Jill, just as insanely calm.
“Good,” I said. “You’re in charge. Um.” Someone—some gruuaa—ran down my leg, disappeared in the dark, and then reappeared in Jill’s flashlight beam, swarming up her leg. “Oh,” she said, slightly less calmly.
“That’s Whilp,” I said. “Um—”
. . . She . . . drifted to me from somewhere.
“She’ll help you.”
Jill nodded, put her flashlight in her pocket and made the collarbone-patting gesture I knew so well with her free hand. Hix was still around my neck, and there were two or three more gruuaa wrapped around various bits of me too, separate from the network, focused uncomfortably on me: anxious, insistent, determined. The real-world wind was cold but I was feeling, if anything, increasingly warm, like bread in a toaster someone has just turned on. Even if Jill and the rest managed to create a diversion, what was I supposed to be doing for them to be diverting from? I clutched my algebra book, and I swear it wriggled, like a critter you’re holding too tight.
My algebra book.
“Okay,” I said, back to the insane calm. “I’ve just decided this is where we split up. Which way is the front door, do you suppose?”
There was a pause, like they thought this was a rhetorical question, and then Casimir said hesitantly, “That way, I think,” and pointed.
“Fine,” I said. “You take the dogs, and Jill’s got one—at least one—gruuaa, as—as translator, because the network is going with you, and you’re going to try and create a—a disturbance that they’ll want to check out but that turns out just to be some loose dogs, okay? Mongo,” I said to my dog, who knew something was up and had reattached himself to my leg, because whatever it was it was up to him to protect me and maybe there would be sandwiches at the end of it, “you go with Jill.”
Mongo didn’t move. “Mongo,” I said, and repeated the go-to-that-person gesture. He knew Jill; he even sometimes obeyed her. He wasn’t moving. Jill walked over to me and took Mongo’s collar. “Come on, loophead,” she said. “The magdag wants us to go save a different part of the universe.”
Mongo had never bitten anyone in his life, but he gave a wild despairing whine as she dragged him away. It made my heart rip loose and turn over; I felt like I’d betrayed my best friend. I hoped that wasn’t what I’d just done. I took a deep breath and held my algebra book hard enough to hurt. Taks kissed the top of my head and murmured, “Ganbatte.” “Do your best.” I wanted to cry. I wanted to run home, where Mom’s hot chocolate would make it all better. I listened to my friends moving away from me. I took another deep breath, and it hurt worse.
I knelt down and put my algebra book on the ground, propping my flashlight to give me a little light. The gruuaa who had stayed with me swarmed down and poured over the book, patting it in their faint, fuzzy-hazy, too-many-footed way. Even all together they wouldn’t have been able to heave the cover open. And I didn’t want them with me. Go, I said, I hoped I said, and did a sort of wave at the network, which did seem to be moving away in a this-world direction similar to Jill’s. Go with them, help them, I said, I may have said, or I may have said, Urgly flump duzzy blah, in gruuaa language—or I may have said nothing at all.
There was a brief, even peremptory hum from Hix and a faint sharp explosion against my neck like a butterfly losing its temper. Several of the remaining gruuaa scampered away. Something like a hmmph from Hix then, which I translated as, Okay. Your turn.
I refocused on my algebra book. The cover opened and the pages fanned themselves out. The oddness of the regrown pages seemed to have spread; most of the pages now were that too-flexible, almost-muscular substance with the faint pattern that resembled the decorative paper Jill had given me for Christmas last year. “I’m sorry,” I said, and ripped a page out—a page standing straight up from the spine, like a kid in a classroom waving her hand and saying, Me, teacher! Choose me! The page came out easily, like untucking a bookmark, not like tearing a bound page. I held it up in front of me and briefly I saw the shape I needed in a kind of shimmer, like a tiny private aurora borealis.
I laid the algebra-book page on the ground, thinking about Casimir’s comment that I’d folded a piece of the cobey. Of course the cobey had come to us; the ground here, so far as I knew, was just ground—unless the inaudible thump of the barrier was doing more than guard. Carefully I took a page corner between my fingers and put the tips of the fingers of my other hand in the center of the page. As the pressure of my fingers made it settle farther into the dead leaves and grass and dirt it seemed to quiver like the skin of an animal. I tugged ever so gently on the corner and of course nothing happened, because paper is paper even when it’s weird paper . . .
. . . and at the same time it lengthened, as if it was made of something like an Ace bandage or crepe paper, and my pulling hand . . . disappeared.
I froze. My ordinary hand, clutching the tip of the torn-out paper page, was still there, in front of my kneeling knees, against a background of dirt and slightly crushed autumn grass. But I could feel the other hand, the one that had disappeared, also holding the tip of a torn-out page, which, by my feel of it, was almost a hand’s breadth farther out in that direction. What do I do? I thought in a panic. Are there now two of me? If I keep folding is all of me going to disappear—or double? Will there be some other me wandering around some other where? Where will I be?
I felt Hix unwind from my neck, slip lightly down the arm(s) that was (or were) holding the tip (or tips) of the page and . . . when she got to the place where there were two choices, chose the invisible hand holding the stretched-out corner. Against that hand she was suddenly solid, and, having been licked by more animals than I could remember over the years, I immediately recognized the sensation of a tongue on the back of my hand—scratchier than a dog’s, less scratchy than a cat’s—and kind of frilly, like it had extra edges. Is this the gruuaa home space? I thought confusedly. I could feel the pads of her tiny feet. They were warm and soft and, I thought, very slightly sticky, like a gecko’s feet. They pattered down the length of my forearm and stopped and clung. I was pretty sure there were at least ten of them.
But I still didn’t want to go there, or unravel brand-new bits of me there, even if some of the natives were friendly. What if I couldn’t breathe or something? If the other me can’t breathe, will I die?
I folded the corner over, and as I creased the edge, my other hand came back from wherever, and there was only one hand and one piece of paper again. I felt a little sick, but that could just be . . . everything. When I took hold of the opposite corner of the page with my other hand, I hesitated and then tugged it gently too. That hand too developed an identical twin, and an invisible corne
r of that page stretched into gruuaa space. I felt Hix move (in the dark, unreliably sort-of lit by my flashlight on my ordinary hands, I couldn’t see her, whatever space she was or was not occupying) and then I felt her ruffly tongue on the back of that hand too.
I kept folding. As I did, the other remaining gruuaa scrambled up higher, hooking themselves over my shoulders, and reached around with—what? Small slightly sticky feet?—to pat my face and forehead. One of them was humming: a much deeper note than Hix’s. There was a faint sweet smell like strawberry jam.
I turned the almost-paper figure over and kept folding. And folding. The figure was beginning to throw off little crinkly gleams along its creased edges—or maybe that was something to do with the narrow beam of the flashlight, and the shadows my fingers made. I turned it off and stuffed it into a knapsack pocket. I took a deep breath. This was better, even if I couldn’t see very well. Because I couldn’t see very well. Last fold went in with an almost-audible tap like the last bang of a hammer against a nail already flush with the wall. I picked the little thing up, pulled its two extended ends, and . . . it bloomed.
Both my hands disappeared as they pulled, and the figure boiled over where my hands and wrists ought to be—my heart was thundering like a stampede—let me tell you it is terrifying when a piece of you disappears—although I could feel the figure against my invisible skin the way I could feel Hix, and the invisibleness was solid enough to be a darker darkness.
Hix streamed back up one arm and around my neck; the other few gruuaa were holding onto my hair and tucking themselves down the back of my collar as if preparing for the worst. This was not helping my state of mind. At least yesterday in the park Casimir had been there too. I wondered, wildly and frantically, as if I was never going to see them again, what the others were doing. I was rapidly losing track of up and down and there and here and sound and silence—and me and not-me or extra-me or super-me. I saw my algebra book flopping, no, clapping its covers open and shut almost like it was applauding; briefly I saw my baku, still tucked in against the front cover. I’d only used one page, but there was a huge rent out of the middle.
I shifted my (invisible) grip on my new figure, which seemed to be still unrolling and unrolling and unrolling like an infinitely long reel of some thistledown fabric—a swell of it touched my face and blew back over my head—I clutched at it as if it was real fabric, yanked a billow of it forward, till it caught around my algebra book too—
—And then as the invisible, inaudible, intangible other thing began to lift me up out of the world there was a frantic flurry of feet, a thump, and a tiny anxious yelp as something only too my-world real slammed into me. “Mongo! I told you to—” But the other thing was pulling me away. No. No. I can’t— I heard the even-more-frantic scrabbling of those feet and a don’t-leave-me-behind whine, and I writhed, half in and half out of the world I knew and the world I didn’t, grabbed for his collar, wrapped an arm around as much of his body as I could reach—
—And dissolved into not-me. Mongo was gone with everything else. Mongo, I thought. If you’ve killed yourself because you’re too stupid to obey orders—
I was pretty sure I was crying, if not-me had tear ducts.
Maggie? said a shocked, familiar voice with a thicker-than-usual Orzaskan accent. Is that you? Don’t do it! Go back! It’s much too dangerous!
Shut up, I said. We’re rescuing you.
Mongo, I thought. Where are you? But there was no answer: no not-Mongo not-yelp or not-whine. No not-tail whumping against my not-legs.
I banged into something hard and found myself sprawling—on a rough cold cement floor. My knapsack slammed painfully into my back. Even through my jeans I lost some skin as I skidded across that floor. But at least they were my legs, my jeans, and a cement floor I could understand. There was a shout—a way-too-audible shout—and then confusion, and something big and silvery-grey seemed to bound over me and toward the shouting—and then there was a thud, like a heavy body hitting the floor, and silence.
But as I pushed myself painfully up to a sitting position there was a sense again of something blooming against my hands—no, in my arms—pressing against my bruised chest—something furry—“Mongo!” I wrapped my arms around him so tightly I managed to get nearly all of him on my lap as I sat with my legs bent under me on the cement floor of . . .
A tattered little paper thing that had somehow inserted itself under Mongo’s collar came loose, and floated to the floor.
Mongo was shivering and panting and making tiny frightened noises—even while he was licking my face he was whining, unhappy little anh anh anh noises, and I didn’t know what to do: I’d had a hard enough time being not-me, and I could guess that a dog, with no semi-comforting intellectual concept of a division between body and mind, would have found the experience of not-me even worse than I had. But here was Hix, pattering down my shoulder, onto Mongo, winding herself around his neck. She began to hum. Mongo put his head under my arm and I got an arm around his butt. This was about the most uncomfortable position I had ever been in in my life, and I was going to be able to stand it for about a second and a half. But I could feel him beginning to relax. In a weird way he seemed to get heavier, as if he was finishing the journey, bringing the rest of himself through to this place.
The billows of non-fabric thinned like cloud wisps and disappeared, and my eyes cleared, and I was looking at half a dog and a very-stretched-out T-shirt that would never fit me again. I began to notice the dusty, shut-in, windowless feel of the air that went with the cement floor. The other gruuaa who had tied themselves up in my hair untied themselves and scampered down to the floor . . . to throw themselves ecstatically into whatever the equivalent of “arms” is for gruuaa: there were a lot of them already here. I registered their presence, raised my eyes slowly up, and . . . met Val’s eyes.
Val. A small mean frightened part of me said, None of this would have happened without Val. A slightly larger but just as frightened part of me said, Yeah, that’s right. Especially the part about not dying in the park yesterday when the cobey swallowed you.
Val looked really bad in the fluorescent light. Bad and stressed. Well, duh. But there was something about the look on his face. The pro-Val part of me said, He’s worried about you. About you.
He was trying—again, I guess, helplessly, the way you can’t not try, sometimes, even when you know you can’t do something—to stand up out of the chair he was chained to. Chained. I felt like I was seeing him being tortured. Chained. We don’t chain people—that was something they did in the Middle Ages, when Charlemagne was caroming around Oldworld knocking the creepy human heads off manticores, and in Newworld the witch doctors ruled. These were big thick heavy chains—like the meanest, toughest bicycle lock you ever saw. Like too big and heavy to carry on a bicycle: your wheel rims would sag like rubber bands.
He couldn’t do it and dropped back to his seat. Clank. He must have read the expression on my face, because he said, “It’s not as bad as it looks.” He held up his hands. “It’s just to stop the mighty Oldworld magician from turning this place into a garden shed full of rusty tools, with a broken lock on the door.”
Still holding onto my dog, who had now pulled one of the knapsack strap ends under my shirt and was chewing on it, still sitting on the very uncomfortable floor of the cell where they were keeping Val chained, I said, “Which otherwise you would have done at once, of course.”
He started to smile. I don’t think he meant to. I smiled back as a way not to start crying again. I had my dog, wasn’t that enough? I tried to concentrate on Val’s shirt. Most horrors would pale in comparison, but the chains came top here.
“If we get out of this,” Val said, “which I very much fear we won’t, I am going to find someone to apprentice you to, if I have to smuggle you into Orzaskan.”
“I don’t think I’d like the big guys in Orzaskan,” I said. “Why don’t y
ou just apprentice me yourself here?”
He was smiling now as if his face hurt. “Very well. That is what we will do. Unless we discover that Gladonya the Great has emigrated recently too.”
Gladonya the Great? No, I didn’t want to know. Maybe it was an Orzaskan joke.
“Maggie, no one should be able to do what you just did.” Another Commonwealth accent saying that. This could get boring. I wished it would get boring. Anything was better than being this frightened. “But you should not have done it.” The smile disappeared and he was completely a stern, responsible grown-up. Who happened to be chained to his chair. “There is nothing you can do here, and it is unlikely you can leave as you came.”
However it was, exactly, that we came. I looked to my left, which I thought was more or less the direction we’d arrived from, and there was a big ugly grey cement wall. I could still see some kind of maybe-cobey-like swirling running under the rough cement skin but I could also see that it was getting weaker and fainter. It would be gone completely in another minute. Leaving me here.
I looked back at Val, but he glanced over my shoulder and so finally did I. There was a gigantic silver-grey wolf—wolf—standing over what seemed to be a rather small unconscious man. As I looked, the wolf stepped delicately over the body and sat down beside him, wrapping his tail neatly around his front feet.
Wolf.
I made a little squeaking noise, rather like the noise Mongo had been making when we first arrived here. Anh. Anh. I took a deep breath and held it, like you do against hiccups, till I stopped making that noise. “Takahiro?” I said. “Takahiro?”
“I doubt he could have come through your gate in his human form,” said Val.
The wolf bowed his head, but continued watching the man. The man looked familiar. . . . I crawled a little way toward him and Takahiro. This was a complicated maneuver, involving, as it did, the knapsack I was still wearing and a large traumatized dog chewing one of its straps while in my lap with his head under my shirt. I did it on two knees, one hand, and Mongo’s butt. “Oh, gods’ engines,” I said, horribly conscious of the huge wolf who was also Takahiro, “that’s Paolo. His wife works at Jill’s mom’s hairdresser’s shop. He’s the nicest of our local Watchguard.”