Shadows (34 page)

CHAPTER 12

WE’D BEEN ON THE ROAD ABOUT HALF AN HOUR when Jill pulled over onto a sandy, gravelly spot that looked like other cars had stopped there too, but why? I doubted there were enough people who tried to break into Goat Creek to need a parking space. She turned the car off and we sat there listening to the
ting
of cooling metal and the noises of dogs hoping this meant they were getting out of this jiggle factory soon. She said, “We need a plan.”

Nobody said anything, but both Jill and Casimir turned around and looked at me. Taks’ arms tightened around my waist again, Hix many-footed up my chest and wrapped herself back around my neck—and Mongo started wagging his tail, till I grabbed it and held on. He looked at me reproachfully.

“It’s not a very good plan,” I said.

“Good would be too much to ask,” said Jill. “Although if I wreck this car I’d better have Arnie to show for it, or I’ll be in so much trouble I probably won’t see you again till I’m eighty.”

“I don’t think wrecking the Ma—the car is part of the plan,” I said. “Do you know how much farther to the gate?”

“Nearly two miles,” said Casimir at the same moment that Jill said, “Two miles, give or take,” and Takahiro said, “About two miles.”

“What?” I said. “Have you all been here or something?”

They were looking at each other. “No,” said Jill. “It’s the picking-up thing I do. More of it lately.”

“The wolf knows,” said Takahiro. “The rest of me just translates.”

“It is one of the little skills my mother sewed into the hem of my coat,” said Casimir.

“It’s a pity we couldn’t have spread all this talent around a little more,” I said. “Like one of you could rip chain-link fence apart with your bare hands and somebody else could hypnotize army guys into opening the doors and letting everyone go.”

“We’d still have a transportation problem,” said Jill, giving Dov’s butt a shove back through the gap between the seats. Dov’s entire butt didn’t anything like fit through that gap, but you could almost see the edges of the seat bowing under the strain. He shifted forward again, had nowhere to go, and collapsed on Bella. Bella sighed.

“And a winged chariot drawn by flying horses in your pocket,” I said.

“I’ll work on it,” said Jill.

“Okay,” I said. “Does anyone’s radar tell them when the army guys are going to start noticing our car?”

“No,” said Casimir. “But not yet. There is little to make an unremarkable car—”

“Unremarkable!” said Jill.

“Their scans will not care that it is large and full of animals,” amended Casimir. “They will not think it remarkable till it comes too close.”

“Okay,” said Jill. “Less far to walk.” She started the car again. “Keep talking,” she said over her shoulder.

“Don’t hit any sheep,” I said.

“That this road is being left to go to pieces is bogus,” said Takahiro. “There’ve been a lot of vehicles over it recently.”

“Wolf?” I said.

“Wolf,” he agreed.

“Do you always know this stuff?”

Takahiro hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s not usually very relevant. Mostly I try to ignore it. It’s harder to ignore when I’ve been wolf lately.”

I was starting to feel seasick as the car jolted over the increasingly bumpy road past the perimeter fence—despite the fact that the armydar pressure dropped off abruptly and there were fewer silverbugs. Which told you something, although I wasn’t sure what. I should have felt better, not worse. But it wasn’t the road, it was the plan. It was bad enough that I was putting my human friends in danger. I was putting the critters in danger too, whose only crime had been a willingness to trust me and get in the car. But we were going to need the distraction—just as Taks had needed them for a different kind of distraction.

“It depends on if I
have
figured out how to talk to the
gruuaa,
” I said. “Or . . .” I pulled a little on the glowing network in my mind, and there was a kind of chirrup, as inaudible as the
gruuaa
were insubstantial, in reply.

“Okay,” said Jill. “Then what?”

I was watching the network. There was a shimmer, like Hix’s wiggle only more so—and it was getting stronger, or I was getting more able to pick it out. Something, like the way Whilp’s name had, drifted across my mind. The shimmer was Val, I guessed. Val surrounded by a lot of
gruuaa.
Now if only I knew what was left and right out here in the real world. “Hey, can you stop again? A minute,” I said, staring at the
gruuaa
web.

The Mammoth stopped. “What—” began Jill.

“Wait,” I said.

There was silence, except for a lot of breathing. The eleven of us weren’t breathing anything like together or to any kind of pattern, but as I stared at the invisible glowing web the breathing began to make sort of
chords
with the subtle pulse of the network. It was something like what the passing wash of streetlights did to a black and white border collie’s fur, which was creepily a little like the checkerboard of a mass of silverbugs.

. . . Um . . . Hix?

Then there was the worst rubbing-your-tummy-and-patting-the-top-of-your-head-at-the-same-time exercise that you can imagine—with your other arm (what other arm) you’re slaying a dragon with a rubber sword, and I think you’re probably juggling a hoop around one ankle. Or maybe there’s a pogo stick involved. I felt like a piece of origami paper being folded by clumsy hands. . . .

But for a moment something—something distracting and confusing—flickered into
this
world.

“Sugoi,”
murmured Jill.

“Holy hot electricity,” said Takahiro.

“Yeah,” I said, and it all snapped off again . . . or slid back where it belonged. I was panting worse than any of the dogs. “Val is being held—somewhere—I
think
off to our right. I hope I’ll know better as we get closer. . . .” and I plucked at the web like a guitarist who’s lost her A string. Or her magic-loophead-other-world string. “But that disappearing thing the
gruuaa
do . . . it’s variable.”

“That was
gruuaa,
just now?” said Jill.

“Yes,” I said. “So the idea is that while the army guys are all falling out the front door to see what the giant glowing weirdness on their doorstep is, we’re, or some of us, are going to be having a look around the side where they’re holding Val. And maybe one of you will suddenly discover an ability to melt holes in the sides of buildings by pointing your finger.”

“That’s your plan,” said Jill.

“Yes.”

There was a pause. I listened to all the breathing.

“This is probably a good place to leave the car,” said Jill eventually. “It might even be here when we get back.”

I could have gone upstate with Mom and Ran. . . . But I knew I couldn’t. And the
gruuaa
would have prevented me if I’d tried. I held onto that thought, and tried not to think of the ten other people (two- and four-legged) that I’d dragged into my dangerous insanity. The feeling in my stomach was familiar. This was how I felt when I had been the last kid chosen for the volleyball team in seventh grade. Or when I’d seen that
F
on that pre-algebra exam.

We were so squashed up in the back that when Casimir opened our door Mongo and I
spilled
out. Takahiro unfolded himself behind me and stood up straight, like he never did at school, and sniffed the air.
Sniffed the air.
I turned back to the car. Bella was holding them in check, but looking at me hopefully. I groped for leads, and snapped them all on. I didn’t want to lose anybody, and things were only going to get more confusing from here. “Okay, you guys. Out.”

There was a brief furry river of brown and black and white, and then the dogs were weaving around me (while I tried to avoid being tied in a granny knot by leads) and Majid was standing a little distance away looking around in what was probably lone-conquering-hero mode. I didn’t think even the
gruuaa
would have much luck persuading him to be a member of a team.

“We can start off together,” I said. The other three humans took four dogs, leaving me with Bella and an off-lead Mongo. I retrieved my algebra book and my knapsack, as if Jill and I had just driven into the school parking lot for a long day of extreme boredom with occasional brief shocks of learning something. I had a flashlight in my knapsack because I was that kind of girl. Tonight it was going to be useful.

Everyone else had shouldered their own knapsacks. Jill and Casimir were getting something out of the trunk, and then I heard Jill locking the car. “Don’t want the dog food stolen,” she said.

They didn’t seem to be running the armydar at all out here, which gave me less excuse to be this confused and blurry-brained. If we did, by some miracle, get Val and Arnie away, they’d probably turn on something even worse. And then we’d need a regiment of grizzly bears to damp it out. Maybe we could just ask the bears to eat anyone who got too close.

The
gruuaa
network was showing me what I guessed was the layout of the army base. Jill had the car flashlight; the boys were following us, although I doubt Takahiro was paying much attention to my feeble little beam. I glanced up at him once, and he was looking up at the sky, and his eyes gleamed golden. Taks’ eyes are so dark brown they’re almost black. And while you could hear us humans and the dogs crunching through the undergrowth I swear Takahiro made no more noise than the
gruuaa.
I had no idea where Majid was.

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.