Meeting (9 page)

“I’ve only got twenty minutes,” Maya said.

“Me, too.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Who’s timing?”

“I’ll watch the watch,” said Travis.

The park was a broad expanse of lawn, marshy now with the fall rains, with stations for Frisbee golf scattered here and there, and many different kinds of trees. Tall chainlink fence caged a set of four tennis courts along one edge, and a basketball court was at the far end. Concrete paths wandered around the edges and across the grass. The woods were toward the side bordered by the creek, a ragged-edged patch of overgrown land with a few trails winding through it and lots of oaks and maples and encroaching blackberry vines and other underbrush. They were very tame woods compared to some Maya had known in Idaho, but they were dense enough. Rimi had figured out how to tighten her shield down to nothing around blackberry canes and snip them off, so she and Maya had made a nest in the heart of a sticker forest, far enough from the path that no one could see or hear them. With Rimi acting as a shield, Maya could push through the blackberry vines to the hideout without a scratch.

Travis had come with them before on days when he and Maya didn’t have Janus House training after school. If he crouched and followed right behind Maya, Rimi’s shield spread enough to guard him from the vines, too.

When they had settled in the hideout sitting cross-legged and facing each other, Travis said, “So what really happened?”

Maya fished her sketchbook and some colored pencils out of her pack. She opened to a blank page and drew Kachik-Vati. “We fused. Whatever that is.”

“Sounds electrical,” said Travis. “Or nuclear! Are you really okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I guess. I don’t really know what happened, except part of it was beautiful, but now Kachik’s going to tell a bunch of other people about us.
Sissimi
people, but still.”

“Sure. He gets to talk, and we’re still stuck with silence.”

Rimi darkened her shadow form and walked around the clearing, snipping vines that had poked in since the last time she and Maya had been here. She looked like an independent entity, except for a line of shadow that stretched from her left foot to Maya’s left foot. If Maya narrowed her eyes and peered through her lashes, Rimi almost looked solid.

“Rimi, what did you learn?” Maya asked.

One thing was how Vati hooks to Kachik
, Rimi said. She sat in front of Maya and stretched out a shadow arm to the center of Maya’s chest.
He says this is a way many
sissimi
bonds behave.
Her shadow self drew tighter in on itself, losing its human shape, until it was a dense tube of darkness about two feet long. Maya felt pressure against her chest, then varying touches, as though fingertips pressed against her, and then a flurry of stabs that shocked more than hurt her.

Rimi turned solid.

A new limb had sprouted from Maya’s chest, a snaky limb like Vati had been, only with a hand on the end instead of a cluster of tentacles. Its skin was the color of Maya’s skin.

The limb rose, moved itself in a jerky circle, and Maya
felt
it, as though her nerves extended along this limb. She clenched her eyes shut, then opened them, and tried to move the new arm. It jiggled. She felt that, too.
Bend
, she thought, and the arm bent. It bent in crazy directions an arm shouldn’t go, but it didn’t hurt, and she could almost control it. She felt the little bones and muscles working together, a strange, sinuous rippling.
Wow, Rimi!

I’ve been thinking about how human bodies work. There are better ways
, Rimi thought.
This way is good for manipulation, but not for strength, maybe. I’ll have to test different things.

Can it attach anywhere on me?
Maya looked down at her three arms. She turned her original arms so that her palms were up, then down. She touched the new arm with her right hand—smooth skin, warm. The central arm moved under her touch. She felt a shifting of hard bits under a padding of skin and muscle.

Rimi thought, then said,
For you to be able to use it, there has to be a confluence of—
the hand wavered, trying to finish a thought Rimi didn’t have words for.
If it’s just me using it, I guess I could—I don’t even know if it would have to be attached, as long as some of me is attached to you somehow. But that
—

Maya thought the hand into a fist and it responded.
Wow, Rimi. This is us being together in a whole new way.

I like it
, Rimi thought.
See what you can do with us.

The hand picked up one of her pencils and sketched another arm onto Kachik’s pictured body. The control of the pencil was crude to begin with, but as Maya worked at it, it got better.

“That is just
so
wrong,” Travis said.

Now me,
Rimi said, and the hand was no longer in Maya’s control. It picked up three pencils at once, sprouted extra fingers—such a strange, pushing sensation, as though she were a plant under the earth shoving out roots and shoots—and shaded in Kachik’s surface, making tiny strokes that showed his fur.

“Even wronger!” Travis said.

The new hand dropped the pencils and rose. The many fingers wiggled a wave at Travis. He flinched, then settled. “Hi, Rimi,” he said. “Is that all you now?”

The hand waved up and down, like a nod.

“Freaky, dudette. You don’t want to go out in public like that.”

The hand shook side to side, a negative.

“Well, all right. As long as you know. You’re making Maya into an alien.”

Yes, I am,
Rimi thought. The hand snaked around and patted Maya’s cheek.
Well, enough of that.
Rimi let the arm and hand unspin itself back to shadow.

Maya pulled out her T-shirt front and studied the new oval hole in it. She poked a finger through. “Huh.”

Oops
, thought Rimi.
Gotta watch that. Sorry.

“Doesn’t matter,” Maya said. “Only where did it go?”

I probably made it into part of me
, Rimi thought.

Travis looked at his watch. “Yikes! Rise and run, kids!”

Rimi expanded her shield bubble to include Travis as they pushed out of the thicket in a different direction from the way they had come in. Before, she had made Maya into a shield Travis could hide behind. This time she stretched far enough around him that he could walk upright through the thorny blackberry canes instead of crouching. “Way to go, Sis-sis,” he said. “Way cool. Liking the new skills.”

 

 

 

“Hey,” Peter said when Maya ran into the kitchen just in time for the five P.M. curfew, “I want to talk to you.”

“Have to set the table,” Maya said. “Hi, Mom.” Her mother was chopping lettuce for a salad and frying corned beef hash on the stove; the kitchen smelled good. Her father sat at the table, buttering bread and sprinkling garlic powder on it.

Maya shrugged out of her backpack. She washed her hands, grabbed a rag, and wiped off the dining room table, then set out the sunflower place mats. Peter followed her around the table.

“This morning your shadow waved at me,” he muttered when Maya reached the far end of the table from the kitchen.

“Sure,” said Maya. “Wanna see it happen again?” She turned on the overhead light and waved at Peter, and her shadow waved, too.

“Come on. You know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t like that.”

Maya turned away from him. She collected napkins and silverware from the sideboard and walked around the table, laying out places.

“Maya,” Peter said from right behind her.

She jumped and knocked a fork off the table.

Rimi caught it.

Maya and Peter
stared at the fork floating in the air. Then Maya grabbed it and put it back on the napkin where it belonged.

“Don’t pretend that didn’t happen,” Peter said.

“I can’t talk to you about this.”

“Sure you can. It has something to do with all the time you’re spending with those people next door, right? Right?”

“What does?” asked Candra, breezing in. “Peter, are you getting the dirt? Maya, you’re such a danged clamshell about Janus House. Sure, I saw Gwenda’s closet, but that didn’t tell me much. It just made me more curious! What’s up with Benjamin? What do you know about Fiona? What about that crazy old lady who’s always watching us from the porch?”

“Namdi Sarutha’s not crazy,” Maya said.

“Hah! You
can
talk about them! Spill!”

“Why don’t you ask your own questions? That guy Evren seemed interested in you yesterday. He might be able to tell you something.”

“I tried calling over there. Do you know there’s like, only one phone number listed for a Janus? How many Januses live in that pile? How can they all share one phone? The woman who answered wouldn’t even take a message for Evren. ‘You don’t find Evren, he finds you,’ she told me. What’s up with that?”

“I don’t know,” Maya said. “I guess he’s around a lot, but I never saw him before yesterday.”

“Don’t you think that’s peculiar?” Candra asked.

“No. I see some people over there a lot, and there are bunches of them I never run into.”

Candra pondered, then said, “You thought Evren liked me? I thought he did, too.”

“Sure seemed like it,” Maya said. “Even though you were snoopy and rude.”

“I was not either rude to him.”

“You attacked him with questions.”

“That’s what I do to everyone,” said Candra.

“Well, anyway, he seemed like he wanted to get to know you better.”

“Exactly. That’s the message I got, too. So I’m trying to see him, but I apparently don’t have the clout to get hold of him. You’re all I’ve got until I make contact with him again. So give. Do they have their own religion? Is that why they won’t help me travel? They only help people who belong to their religion?”

“I can’t tell you, Candra,” Maya said. “No matter how many times you ask, my answer will be the same.”

“You make me so mad!” Candra said, and showed her clenched teeth.

“Like that’s hard to do,” said Maya.

Peter tugged on her sleeve. “Maya,” he said, his head coming forward, chin first, like a turtle about to chomp some lettuce.

“Yes, all right, let me finish and then we can go to your room.” She got glasses and plates from the kitchen and set them on the table.

“What are you going to do in Peter’s room, huh?” Candra asked.

“Nothing,” said Maya.

“Nothing,” said Peter. They stuck their tongues out at their older sister and raced for the stairs.

“Mo-om!” Candra cried behind them.

They dashed into Peter’s room and shut the door.

Maya hadn’t been in Peter’s room since moving day, when she had helped carry any boxes anyone handed her off the back of the moving van. The boxes had all been labeled. She had brought several to Peter’s room. It used to be a clean, bare place with nice windows looking toward the street.

Now it smelled like wood shavings and animal pee and rotting orange peels.

Peter had two cages set up on his desk under the windows. Blond hooded rats lived in one of them, and a couple of guinea pigs, one short-haired calico and one long-haired beige, lived in the other. The guinea pigs meeped. Peter went over to their cage and dropped a few cherry tomatoes in, and they squealed in delight and settled down to munch.

The pet cages were fairly clean—much cleaner than the rest of the room.

Peter had piles of comic books stacked around the room, and he hadn’t made his bed in who knew how long. Dirty clothes lay in twisted tangles on the floor and draped over the desk, the dresser, and the chair. Plates with driedup food and not-dry-enough orange peels on them lurked under the desk and on the bedside table.

“Gah, Peter, you’re worse than I am,” Maya said.

Peter leaned his back against the closed door to the hallway and surveyed his room. “Yuck,” he said. “I guess I haven’t been paying attention.” He grabbed a laundry bag from the floor of his closet and stuffed clothes in it. “Have a seat,” he said when he had cleared off the desk chair.

“Thanks.” Maya settled on the chair and studied the rats.

What are those?
Rimi asked. She sent out exploratory arms toward the cages on the desk.

You haven’t met the pets yet?
Maya wondered.

The rats congregated near the cage wall closest to Maya. She saw their fur moving.
What are you doing?
she asked.

They are soft, and they like this. I
lizzer
it. It makes a glow. What is a pet?

Rimi twanged a couple of the bars on the cages.
Pets live in enclosures they can’t get out of when they want to,
she said.

Huh. A curfew is like being a pet?
A curfew kept Maya from running around loose anytime she wanted to, but she didn’t think it made her a pet. For one thing, she could disobey the curfew. Then she’d have to live with the consequences. She could still do it.