The Gate Thief

2



THE MORNING AFTER


It was early morning, and Coach Lieder was still at home, Danny had run here from the tiny cottage where he lived alone. He could have created a gate, but that would have made a mockery of his decision the night before, after confronting his family, not to make any more gates at the high school. Technically, Coach Lieder’s house wasn’t the school, but since his promise had been made only to himself, who would he be fooling?

Besides, he had hardly slept last night. He needed the run in the brisk—no, cold—morning air. It was better than coffee, when your goal was to become alert rather than jittery.

He knocked lightly on the door, avoiding the doorbell in case someone in the house was still asleep. He also waited patiently before giving another couple of raps. Then the door opened.

Coach Bleeder—sorry, Coach Lieder—stood there in all his half-dressed glory. Apparently he slept in boxers and an old tee-shirt—no one would change into such an outfit first thing in the morning. And he looked bleary-eyed, tense, worried. This surprised Danny, since at school Bleeder usually showed only two emotions: contempt and anger. Now Lieder seemed vulnerable somehow, as if something had hurt him or might hurt him; as if he were grieved, or expected to grieve.

“You,” said Coach Lieder. And now the contempt reappeared.

Danny expected Lieder to say something about the rope ladder incident yesterday in the gym. But he just stood there.

“Sir, I know it’s early,” said Danny.

“What do you want?”

Well, if he was going to act like nothing happened, that was fine with Danny. Only now he had to have a reason for being there. Instead of doing damage control from showing off his godlike powers in the gym, what else could plausibly have brought Danny here? “I wondered if you could time me.”

Lieder looked puzzled, suspicious. After all the months in which Danny had taunted him by never letting Lieder time his fastest runs, it was natural that Lieder would suspect a trick.

“I’m tired of the game,” said Danny. “I’m in high school. I should care about high school things.” And even as Danny said the words, they became true. It might be fun to be a high school athlete, even if Lieder was a complete jerk.

“Like waking up your teachers?” asked Lieder coldly.

Had Lieder really still been asleep? It was early, but not so early that someone coaching the first team of the day at seven shouldn’t already be up and dressed.

“I stepped off a hundred yards,” said Danny. Actually, part of his gift was a very good sense of distance, with reliability down to a foot in a hundred yards, or a twentieth of an inch in a foot. “Do you have a watch?”

Lieder held up his left wrist. “I’m a coach, I wear a stopwatch.”

Danny jogged easily down to his starting place. “Ready?” he called.

Lieder, looking annoyed, put his finger to his lips. Then he put his right hand to his watch, looked at Danny, then nodded.

Danny took off at a sprint. A hundred yards wasn’t that much—it’s not as if he had to pace himself. He gave it everything—or at least, everything he had at six-thirty in the morning after a night of no sleep.

When he came parallel to the walkway leading up to Lieder’s door, Danny burst through imaginary tape and then jogged to a stop and faced Lieder expectantly.

“Can you do it again?” asked Lieder.

“Do you want a couple of miles?” asked Danny.

“Just those hundred yards again.”

So Danny jogged back to the starting point, waited for the nod, ran again. This time he let his after-race jog take him up to Lieder’s porch.

“Do I make the track team?” asked Danny.

“On probation,” said Lieder.

“Because I’m only marginally fast?” asked Danny. “Or because you want me to suffer a little for being such an a*shole so far this year?”

“Everybody starts out on probation, till I see whether you’ll listen to a coach.”

“So I’m not fast after all?”

“Even the fastest can get better,” said Lieder. “The fast ones are worth the time you spend working with them.”

“Just tell me. Am I any good?”

“You’ll be starting for us,” said Lieder. “Now can I finish my breakfast?”

Danny grinned. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

Lieder closed the door behind him.

As Danny headed back down to the street, Lieder’s door reopened. “Have you had breakfast?”

“I don’t eat breakfast,” said Danny.

“From now on you do,” said Lieder. “My athletes eat.”

“I’m not an athlete,” said Danny. “I’m a runner.”

Lieder stood there, looking angry, but hesitating.

“I have to stay light if I’m going to be fast,” said Danny.

“You’re either on the team or you’re not.” Lieder glanced into the house, then faced Danny again, looking like he wanted a fight after all.

Danny could see that Lieder wanted to yell at him. Something was keeping him quiet. There was someone in the house he didn’t want to wake. Or someone he didn’t want hearing him yell at a kid.

“Listen, Mr. Lieder,” said Danny. “I want to do my bit for the team. But I won’t belong to you. You just timed me. If the speed you clocked for me is good enough for me to compete, then I’ll compete for you. I’ll listen to your advice and I’ll try to get better. I’ll try to get stronger and build up stamina. Stuff that makes sense. But you don’t control what I eat, and you don’t control my time. I come to practice when I can, but when I can’t, I don’t, no questions asked.”

“Then forget it,” said Lieder. “I don’t need a defiant little a*shole like you.”

“Your call,” said Danny. “I offered, and you turned me down. Now I don’t have to hear any more complaints from Mr. Massey.”

“You didn’t offer shit,” said Lieder, getting even quieter as he took a step down from the door. “If you’re on the team, then you have to play by the same rules as the other kids.”

So Lieder still wanted him. Danny must have been pretty fast.

“I can see how you wouldn’t want to have one student getting special treatment,” said Danny. “But I don’t have any choice. My time isn’t my own. I sometimes have to pick up and be somewhere. It’s not my call, and I don’t want to have to put up with crap about it if I miss practice.”

“So go, then. Thanks for waking me up, you little prick.”

“Cool,” said Danny. He turned away, headed back to the street.

“You haven’t heard the last of this,” said Lieder.

Danny turned around and came right back up to the porch. “Yes I have,” said Danny.

“You’re a student. Unless your parents provide you with a note for each and every absence, you aren’t going to get away with disappearing whenever you want.”

“I stay throughout the school day,” said Danny. “I don’t miss classes. But before and after school, there’s stuff I have to do. I offered to share that time with the track team, as much as I can. That wasn’t enough for you. I get it—I even agree with you. I shouldn’t be on the team. But that’s it. No more crap about it. I let you time me and you didn’t want me enough to take me on the only terms on which I’m available.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” asked Lieder, the bully in him at last coming out, his voice rising. “You sound like you think you’re some world-class star, negotiating with a pro team. You’re a minor, and a student, and the law says you belong in school, and the school says I’m a teacher with authority over you.”

“What is it?” asked a weak voice from behind Lieder. A woman’s voice—barely. It was such a husky whisper that it would have been hard to tell, if Lieder hadn’t whirled around, revealing a little old woman in the doorway.

A small woman—just the right size for bullying, thought Danny.

But no, Lieder had been trying not to disturb her. And now that Danny looked closely, he saw that the woman wasn’t old, just faded and sagging. Not his mother, as he had first supposed. Nor was she small—or at least, she wasn’t short. Average height, and since Lieder was no giant, they looked about right together as man and wife. Except that she was wasting away. Something was seriously wrong with her, her robe hung on her as if she were a child wearing a woman’s dress.

Cancer, thought Danny. At home Lieder deals with a wife dying of cancer or something just as bad. Then he comes to school and takes it out on the kids.

On Danny’s tall and skinny friend Hal. It was because Lieder was humiliating Hal that Danny had made a series of gates to help Hal get up the hanging rope to the ceiling of the gym yesterday. A series of gates that intertwined and turned out to be the start of a Great Gate.

It was too easy, to think that a dying wife was the reason Lieder was a bully. It came too naturally to Lieder, a habit, an aspect of his personality. He was probably always a bully. Only now he’s a bully with something else to worry about.

“It’s all right, Nicki,” said Lieder.

“Why don’t you invite this boy inside?” asked Nicki. “He looks cold.”

“I’m fine,” said Danny.

“He’s fine,” said Lieder.

“Come in and have some cocoa,” said Nicki.

“He has to get to school,” said Lieder, “and so do I.”

Danny had been willing to shrug off the invitation before, but the woman was insisting, and the trickster in Danny couldn’t help but enjoy the fun. Plus, he was tired and cold and pissed off at Lieder. “Actually,” said Danny, “I don’t have to be there till eight-thirty. I’m not on one of those teams that practices before school.”

“But cocoa’s not good for my athletes,” said Lieder.

“I think of it as an energy drink,” said Danny. “And I could sure use some warming up.”

“Come on in, then,” said Nicki.

As Danny came past him, heading for the door, Lieder gripped him harshly by the shoulder and whispered fiercely in his ear, “You’re not coming into my house.”

“What?” said Danny loudly. “I couldn’t hear you.”

Lieder didn’t let go. “You heard me,” he whispered.

Danny gated himself just an inch away. Yesterday morning he couldn’t have done that—created a gate and passed it over himself so tightly that it took only his own body and clothing, and not Lieder’s hand. But the gates he had stolen from the Gate Thief last night consisted of the outselves of hundreds of gatemages, and every one of them had been a trickster during his life, and every one of them had had more skill than Danny. He had managed to contain them in his hearthoard—his stash—but wherever that was kept inside him, he was able to access some of their knowledge, or at least some of their experience and reflexes and habits and talents.

He must have absorbed these things unconsciously, because he hadn’t thought of doing it, he had simply done it.

If I had known how to do this last year, in Washington, I wouldn’t have had to drag that murderous thug with Eric when I gated him out of the back room of that convenience store.

But there was something else that happened, something Danny hadn’t expected. When he gated himself an inch without moving Lieder’s tight-gripping hand, it moved his own body into space that Lieder’s fingers occupied. Lieder’s fingers were ejected from that space at such speed that the bones didn’t just break, they were pulverized.

Danny heard the gasp of pain, then saw the limp and empty-looking fingers and realized at once what had happened. Before Lieder had time to turn the inhaled gasp into an exhaled scream of agony, Danny passed a gate over Lieder’s body, which healed him instantly.

That meant Lieder no longer felt the pain, but he still remembered it, very clearly.

“Don’t ever touch me like that again,” said Danny.

“Come in and join us, daddy,” said Nicki from the other room. Apparently they were one of those married couples who still called each other mommy and daddy long after their children were grown. “You have time. The kids will just run laps till you get there.”

Danny knew that the kids would sit around chatting or napping, but he had no reason to disabuse Nicki of her fantasy. He had to deal with Lieder, whose face was still showing the shock and horror of that pain.

“Don’t you learn anything?” asked Danny softly. “When I tell you that there are some things I’m going to do, whether you like them or not, it’s a good idea to believe me and step aside.”

“This is my home,” whispered Lieder.

“And that was my shoulder you were gripping,” said Danny. “Boundaries, Coach Lieder.”

Danny walked into Lieder’s house.

Lieder stayed outside for a while. No doubt trying to figure out what it was, exactly, that Danny had done. What had it felt like to him? Agony, yes—but had he understood that for a moment, his fingerbones had become tiny shards inside limp sacks of skin? Had he felt Danny move by an inch, instantaneously, or had he registered it only as Danny pulling away with incredible strength?

Danny walked into the house and quickly found the kitchen, where apparently the cocoa was already made, for Nicki was pouring it into three cups. She moved slowly. She held the pitcher with two hands. It trembled in her grip—if it could be called a grip. Danny half-expected it to slip out of her fingers at any moment. No wonder Lieder didn’t want his wife trying to show him hospitality.

It was not deliberate, not planned. More of a reflex, as if Danny had seen the pitcher slipping from her grasp and lunged out to catch it. Only the pitcher was not slipping, and he didn’t lunge with his hands. Instead, he sent out a gate, passed it over her, around her, and brought her out of it without having moved her more than a hairsbreadth from where she stood.

She seemed to register it as a shudder. “Oh, someone stepped on my grave,” she said, with a tiny laugh, and then flinched as if she expected to cough, only she didn’t cough.

Because passing a gate over her had healed her. It always did. Whatever was wrong with a person, passing through a gate always healed it, as long as their body parts were still attached and they weren’t fully dead.

Not that she immediately became strong and hale—she looked completely unchanged. Except that her hand didn’t tremble holding the pitcher, and there was color in her cheeks and she didn’t seem so fragile as she continued pouring. “Isn’t that odd,” she said. “I felt a chill, and yet now I’m suddenly warm. I’m never warm anymore, but I am right now.”

“Furnaces are like that,” said Danny. “One minute you’re cold, the next you’re hot. But remember, you’re holding a pot of hot cocoa.”

“Of course,” she said. “No wonder I’m warm! I should feel downright hot.”

“It’s nice of you to give this to me,” said Danny. “I don’t usually eat breakfast, but it’s cold enough today that even a good run didn’t warm me up the way it usually does.”

She laughed as she set down the pitcher. The cups were full. Then covered her mouth. “I don’t know why I laughed,” she said. “Nothing you said was funny.”

“But I said it in a funny way,” said Danny.

“You say everything in a funny way,” she said.

“I lived in Ohio for a while, but I didn’t think I picked up an accent.”

“No, not an accent,” she said. “You talk as if you got the joke, but didn’t really expect me to get it. Only just now I think I did get it. Isn’t that funny?”

Danny smiled. And as he looked at her, he realized that the hand to the mouth, the way she was looking at the cups instead of at him—this woman was shy.

Not really shy. Just sort of generally embarrassed. He saw this all the time, but not with adults. No, he saw it at high school. He saw it with girls when some guy talked to them. A guy she kind of liked, or maybe liked a lot, and she couldn’t believe he was paying attention to her.

This isn’t Coach Lieder’s wife, thought Danny. This is his daughter.

She called him daddy, not by the habit of a husband and wife, but because he really was her father.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” asked Danny.

“How old do you think?” she asked. But her face showed that she hated the question.

“I’m deciding between sixteen and eighteen,” said Danny.

“What’s wrong with seventeen?” she asked. But there was relief in her voice. Nobody had guessed so young an age in a long time. How could they?

“Seventeen is a nothing age,” said Danny. “Sixteen is driving and eighteen is voting.”

“You can get into R-rated movies by yourself at seventeen,” said Nicki. “Not that I go anywhere.”

“Not that there’s a theater worth going to,” said Danny.

“Not in BV,” said Nicki. “But there’s a theater in Lexington. I just … don’t go out much. I don’t even watch movies on TV anymore. I lose interest, somehow. I fall asleep. No point in renting a movie just to sleep through it.”

“You’ve been sick.”

“Oh, I’m dying,” she said. “There are ups and downs. Right now I think today might be a good day. A very good day. But probably that’s just because of the company.”

“This is very good cocoa,” said Danny.

“Daddy buys me only the best. There’s not much he can do for me, but he can get me first-rate cocoa. He’s so gruff with other people, but he’s really very kind to me. I like to think that only I get to see who he really is.” She looked at him over the cocoa cup as she took a sip. “I know he was angry with you. That’s why I came to the door.”

“Thanks for saving me,” said Danny. “I think your father has a low opinion of my team spirit.”

“He cares so much about his teams,” said Nicki. “He wants everyone to do their best, but Parry McCluer High School isn’t noted for the ambition of its students.” Then she touched her mouth again. “I can’t believe I said that. I haven’t … I haven’t been sarcastic in years.”

“Then you’re probably overdue,” said Danny. “I think everybody needs to say something sarcastic at least once a week. Of course, I’m years ahead.”

“And I’m years behind,” said Nicki. “But it’s getting late. I don’t want you to be called in to the vice-principal’s office on account of me and my cocoa.”

“I’m far more afraid of Coach Lieder than of any vice-principal. Besides, when I get in trouble I end up talking to Principal Massey.”

“Only the best for you,” she said.

“Or else it’s only the worst for him,” said Danny.

She laughed. So did he; but he also got up and carried both their cups to the sink. Coach Lieder’s cup remained untouched on the table.

“I’m sorry you only know my father in his grumpy moods.”

“I’m glad to know that he has any other. I’m assuming you’ve seen nongrumpy moods yourself, and aren’t just repeating a rumor.”

“That would be gossip,” said Nicki. A moment’s hesitation. “Will I see you again?”

“I doubt it,” Danny answered truthfully. “I think your father is very unhappy that I accepted your invitation this time.”

“But if I invited you again?”

“Does your father own a gun?”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know how to use it. I think he bought it to make a political statement.”

Or because he was afraid of some student coming to assassinate him some dark night, thought Danny. “Thanks for the cocoa. I’m very warm now.”

“Me too,” she said.

He made it to the door unescorted, but Coach Lieder was waiting outside by his car. Danny expected to be yelled at, but instead Lieder only said, “Get in. I’ll drive you to school.”

Danny tried to assess what Lieder was planning—was he only speaking softly because he was afraid Nicki could hear him? But then he thought: If I don’t like what he says, I can always gate away.

Then he rebuked himself. I’ve already made three gates today, and it hasn’t been a full day since I vowed never to make another here in BV.

Except the one that would take him to Marion and Leslie in Yellow Springs, and the one that Veevee used to get back and forth between his house and Naples, Florida. He’d reconstructed those last night, when he got his gates back from the Gate Thief.

Inside the car, Coach Lieder was strangely silent. But when he spoke, he sounded as menacing as ever. “What do you plan to do with my daughter?”

Danny wanted to say, You mean besides healing her of whatever was killing her? Instead, he answered, “I don’t plan to do anything. She invited me in for cocoa. I drank cocoa. We talked. That was it.”

“She likes you,” said Lieder.

“I liked her,” said Danny. “But no, in case you’re worried, I don’t like her that way, she’s just nice and we had a nice conversation and that’s it. Nice. So you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Lieder was silent for a long time. Not till they were going up the last steep hill to the school did he speak again. “I’ve never seen her talk so freely with anyone.”

“I guess she was having a good day,” said Danny.

Silence again until the car came to a stop in Lieder’s parking place. Apparently even coaches who didn’t have a lot of winning seasons still got their own named parking space.

“You haven’t asked me what’s wrong with her,” said Lieder as Danny opened the car door.

“Nothing’s wrong with her,” said Danny, letting himself sound puzzled.

“She’s obviously sick,” said Lieder, sounding annoyed.

“It wasn’t obvious to me,” said Danny, lying deliberately, since by the time he got home tonight she would be markedly improved, and in a week she would probably look fantastic, compared to before, and Danny wanted Lieder to think it had already been happening before Danny even got there.

“Then you’re an idiot,” said Lieder.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure of that,” said Danny. “Thanks for the ride.” Then he was gone.

It occurred to him as he walked into school that Lieder was thinking that Danny might be useful to brighten his daughter’s spirits during her last weeks of life. While it might be amusing to watch Lieder try to be nice to him—it was clearly against the man’s nature—it wouldn’t be fair to Nicki. Especially because Nicki was not going to die. At least not of her disease, whatever it had been. When Lieder realized this, when the doctors told him she was in complete remission, he’d very quickly want to be rid of Danny. So Danny would spare them both the trouble and never go back there again.

The real problem today was going to be dealing with the kids in gym class, who had no doubt spent the whole evening last night telling everybody they knew about the experience of going up the magical rope climb and ending up viewing the whole Maury River Valley from a mile high. Whatever Lieder had seen yesterday, he hadn’t mentioned it today. Yesterday, he had seemed to blame Danny for the whole thing. “They’re riding it like a carnival,” he had said. “You did this,” he had said. But today he hadn’t mentioned it at all.

And as Danny walked through the halls and went into his first class, he didn’t see any unusual excitement and didn’t hear any mention of the magical rope. It bothered him—how could high school kids not talk about such a weird experience? But he wasn’t going to bring it up himself.

It wasn’t till he saw Hal in his next class that Danny was able to ask about it.

“Are you kidding?” asked Hal. “Nobody’s telling anybody about it because they’ll all think we’re crazy. Hallucinating. On something.”

“But you know it really happened.”

“I do now,” said Hal, “cause you apparently remember it. What was that, man? What happened?”

This was so weird. People claimed miraculous things happened all the time, even though nothing happened at all. But this time, when it was something real, they weren’t talking about it. It’s as if when something really scares people, the blabbermouth switch gets turned off.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” said Danny. One of the gifts of gatemages was that they were good tricksters, which meant they were good liars, since it’s hard to bring off any kind of trick if you can’t deceive people.

Hal looked hard at him. “You look like you’re telling me the absolute truth, but you’re the one who told me to hang on to the bottom of the rope and spin, and then I shot up to the top. You’re the one Coach Bleeder told to get me up the rope, and so what am I supposed to think except that you did whatever it was.”

“And if I did,” said Danny, “what then? Who would you tell? How far would the story go?”

“Nowhere, man,” said Hal. “You saved my ass all over the place, you think I’m going to do anything to hurt you? But you took off yesterday, you went outside when the rope trick stopped working, and when I went out after you, you were gone. Vanished. What are you, man? Are you, like, an alien?”

“A Norse god,” said Danny.

“What, like Thor?” Hal laughed.

“More like Loki,” said Danny.

“Is this your final answer?” asked Hal. “Am I really supposed to believe this one?”

“Believe what you want,” said Danny. “Class is about to start.” He went to the door and Hal followed him into the classroom.

* * *

HERMIA WAS SITTING in the Applebee’s on Lee Highway, looking out the window at cars pulling in and out of the BP next door, when her mother slid into the booth across from her.

“Have you already ordered?” Mother asked.

Hermia felt a thrill of fear. She was too far from the nearest gate to make any kind of clean escape. Mother was a sandmage, which should have meant she was powerless in a place as damp as western Virginia, but as Mother often pointed out to her, her real affinity was for anything powdered or granulated, from snowflakes to dust, from shotgun pellets to salt and pepper and sugar. The table was full of things that Mother could use.

Besides, wherever she was, Father would not be far away, and he was a watermage—a Damward, able to choke her on her own saliva, if he chose. If they wanted Hermia dead, to punish her for running off and not reporting to them about the gatemage she had found, she could do nothing to stop them or avoid them.

So apparently they didn’t want her dead. Yet.

“They’re getting me a hamburger,” said Hermia. “There’s not much you can do wrong with a hamburger.”

“They could leave it on the counter for twenty minutes, letting it get cold while the bacteria multiply,” said Mother. “And then they bring it to you, without apology, assuming that you’re the mousy little thing you seem to be and won’t utter a word of complaint.”

“I’m not mousy,” said Hermia.

“They don’t know that,” said Mother. “And you look so Mediterranean—they know you don’t belong here in this hotbed of Scotch-Irish immigration.”

“So you’ve made a study of American demographics and genealogy?”

“I study everything,” said Mother. “People are like grains of sand—from a distance, they all look alike, but when you really study them, each is a separate creation.”

The waiter came over and Mother ordered a salad. But before the waiter could get away, she said to him, “What do you think of a daughter who suddenly disappears and doesn’t tell her mother and father where she’s going and whom she’s with? What would you call such a girl?”

The waiter, who had flirted with Hermia a little when he took her order, answered instantly: “Normal.”

Mother laughed, one of her seal-like barks. “Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it, dear boy. But I assure you, you’re not her type.”

The waiter, looking a little baffled, muttered something about putting her order in and left.

“You do enjoy toying with them,” said Hermia.

“Observing them,” corrected Mother. “Seeing how they respond to unusual stimuli. I’m a scientist at heart.”

She was Clytemnestra and Medea rolled into one, that’s what was in her heart, thought Hermia, but she knew better than to say it. “So you found me,” she said.

“Oh, we’ve known where you were the whole time,” said Mother.

Hermia didn’t bother to answer.

“I know you think we couldn’t possibly have traced you, with all your jumping through gates, but you see, when we first realized you might have gatemaking talent, we implanted a little chip just under your jaw. We track it by satellite. We Illyrians are truly godlike in our prescience, don’t you think?”

It had never crossed Hermia’s mind that they might have installed a tracking device in her body. She had given Danny away every time she used one of his gates.

Or maybe not. When she made a jump through one of Danny’s gates, it would take time for them to get to where she was. Knowing where she was wasn’t the same thing as being there to observe her.

But last night they’d had plenty of time to get to Parry McCluer High School.

“You spent the night here?” asked Hermia.

“In the Holiday Inn Express,” said Mother. “It has a nice European feel to it.”

“Meaning that the rooms are tiny and have no space to put your luggage?”

“We didn’t make ourselves known during the festivities. But we saw some of the Norths challenge you, and watched as a couple of mere Orphans brought old Zog’s eagle down and then cracked open the earth and swallowed up their truck.”

“They gave it back afterward,” said Hermia. “Or did you fall asleep before the end?”

“From these actions, we cleverly deduced, in our Aristotelian way, that somebody had passed through a Great Gate. I think it wasn’t you who made the gate, because if you were able to make gates, you would have disappeared the moment I sat down.”

“No, I can’t make gates. You know I can’t.”

“I know you have always said you can’t. But now I believe you. Maybe.”

“I’m not telling you who—”

“It’s Danny North who’s the gatemage,” said Mother.

“Don’t you dare lay a hand on him.”

“No habanero powder in his eyes or up his nose?” asked Mother. “Why must you always spoil my fun?”

“He’s not just a gatemage, he’s a Gatefather,” said Hermia. “In all the history of the world there’s never been a gatemage like him.”

“The world has a lot of history. And there are two worlds, for that matter.”

“He beat the Gate Thief,” said Hermia.

“Isn’t that nice.”

“What do you want, Mother?”

“My darling daughter to tell me she loves me, even if it’s a lie, and to pretend she’s glad to see me.”

“I’m not reporting to you anymore.”

“You don’t have to report, as I just explained,” said Mother.

“Danny and I and the other gatemage—”

“So you are a gatemage, and not just a Finder.”

“I’m a Lockfriend,” said Hermia.

“And the other gatemage? Victoria Von Roth?”

“A Keyfriend.”

“How lovely. It’s like you’re twins, born thirty years apart.”

“The next time Danny makes a Great Gate, we’re going to make sure all the Families and the Orphans have equal access to it.”

“Even the drowthers?”

“We aren’t going to let a Great Gate give one Family an advantage.”

“But you already have, silly girl,” said Mother. “That cow Leslie now has the power to snatch other people’s heartbeasts away from them, and Marion can crack open the earth without causing so much as a three point oh on the Richter scale. They could take down every Family right now.”

“And yet they haven’t done it,” said Hermia. “Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Doesn’t the fact that we didn’t kill you tell you something, too?”

“It tells me that your hope of getting through a Great Gate is greater than your desire to keep anybody else from getting through it.”

“It should have told you that we mean to play nice,” said Mother. “We’re going to let you and your boyfriend Danny and his aging mistress Veevee set out the rules, and we’ll play along.”

“Till you see a way to get an advantage,” said Hermia.

“Wasn’t it nice of me to come and inform you? Some of us wanted to kill you and then deal with Danny North separately. We would pretend we didn’t know where you were. They’re very angry with you for betraying us.”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” said Hermia.

“You didn’t tell us anything,” said Mother. “But … water over the dam, isn’t that what they say?”

“You got your physics degree at Stanford, Mother. Don’t pretend to be uncertain of your English.”

“We’re going to station an observer at the high school,” said Mother. “And we’re going to expect you to stay there, too.”

“I’m too old for high school,” said Hermia.

“But you’re such a little slip of a thing, they won’t doubt that this is your senior year.”

“I don’t have to be at the high school. I can gate in and out whenever I want to talk to Danny.”

“As long as he keeps gates available to you,” said Mother. “No, we want you there where we can watch you both.”

“And where you can threaten to do violence to me in order to get him to do what you want.”

“Would that work?” asked Mother.

“I don’t think so,” said Hermia, “but with Danny you never know. He’s not in love with me. I don’t think he particularly likes me. But he’s a compassionate kid. You could probably just point a gun at a puppy, take a picture, and then send it to him along with the threat, ‘Do what we say or we’ll shoot this dog.’”

“Well, we aren’t going to threaten to shoot you or a puppy. We think—some of us think—that now that you know that we’ve known where you are all along, and didn’t interfere with you, you’ll return to us with renewed trust and loyalty.”

“Are you among those who think so?” asked Hermia.

“I’m only one vote among many,” said Mother. “But it’s pleasantly needy of you to ask for my reassurance.”

“You know that whoever you send, Danny can just gate away.”

“Oh, I hope he doesn’t do that,” said Mother. “We’d have to shoot the dog.”

* * *

CEDRIC BIRD STOOD in a circle of tall standing stones on the brow of a grassy hill. Sheep grazed on the gentle slope below him, but Ced saw no sign of a shepherd.

He had meant to do what the others did. Step into the Great Gate, and then, the moment he was in Westil, take the next step and go back to Earth with his power greatly enhanced.

Only in the moment they arrived—in daylight on Westil instead of night the way it was in Buena Vista—he felt a touch of breeze on his cheek. And as a windmage he couldn’t go, not without first feeling the movement of the air, getting a sense of the way the sunlight warmed the air and the grass moved in the breeze.

It was only a moment, a second or two. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the others step forward and disappear. And then he stepped forward—and felt the grass brush against the cuffs of his pants. The Great Gate was already gone, and just like that, Ced realized that he had decided to stay on Westil.

He felt a momentary thrill of fear. All the bedtime stories his mother had told him about the faraway world their ancestors came from. The place where the gods of legend lived. It was a terrifying place where huge storms could be conjured by the anger of a sandmage, where Stonefathers could fashion copies of themselves in stone, where a lake could be swallowed up in stone, or an island be overswept by a Tidefather’s wave.

Yet he could also feel the wind.

He had always felt the wind, even in his sleep, it would wake him by whistling through the eaves and trembling the windows, and he would get up and open the door and go out into the wind. Mother would hear him and rush out after him and gather him up and say, The wind is a terrible thing, Cedric, it carries birds far from shore and sweeps nests out of the trees. But Cedric would say, It never hurts me, Mother. I love the wind.

Yet he had never really felt the wind until now, today, as he stood in this gentle wind on a grassy hill in Westil. He felt it shape itself around the standing stones and sensed all the eddies within the circle. He was aware of the play of the breeze in the wool of the nearest sheep, and the sweep of it through the grass exhilarated him.

It’s not the breeze of Westil that’s different, Ced realized. It’s me. I’ve been through the Great Gate, and now I have all the awareness of the wind that I ever wanted. Now I’m the mage I always was in my dreams.

He couldn’t resist the temptation now; it wasn’t enough to feel the wind. He had to shape it. He had been studying with Norm Galliatti, an Orphan Galebreath in Medford, Oregon, and he had raised his abilities from making tiny whirlwinds and raising a slight breeze on a still day to the point where he could direct a breeze, narrow it like a dart, blow out a candle from a hundred yards, change the flight of a ball in midair.

But here … just by thinking of doing it, it happened. A whirlwind rose all around him, spinning inside the circle of stones, whipping his hair and clothing, and it was so much larger and stronger than anything he’d ever been able to do before that he laughed aloud, then cried in joy. Oh, Mother, can you see me? O Bird of my Youth, O my Hummingbird, Calliope, are you watching now? See what I can do!

The whirlwind created so much suction inside it that he rose up into the air, but he was in no danger. This was no tornado, snatching up creatures and flinging them here and there, randomly. No, the air that spun around him knew him, cared for him, carried him. The wind rejoiced in him as much as he rejoiced in it. Here you are, it was saying. We are sheep too long without a shepherd, cows with udders full and no dairyman to ease us, till you came.

Carry me, he thought. Carry me away from here. Show me this world.

The whirlwind raised him higher and he could see now over the nearby groves of trees. There was a shepherd’s hut just beyond the river, and out of it stepped the shepherd, looking upward at Ced as the whirlwind bore him along the river’s course, downstream because that’s what Ced felt like, but the wind might have carried him anywhere.

Now I know why people called us gods, if we Mithermages of Westil could pass through Great Gates and to this. When they painted Hermes with wings on his feet, was it a windmage like me that they remembered?

Ced had only to think of going to the crest of a rocky outcropping, and the whirlwind bore him there and gently set him down. What had once been such a labor to him, just to make a whirlwind go where he wanted it to go, was now effortless, and he could ride within it. Here is how a magic carpet flies. This is the wheel Ezekiel saw in the middle of the air.

But now that he was on solid ground, Ced stretched out his arms and gathered more and more wind into the vortex. He moved it away from himself and made it spin and spin and spin. The top of it rose up, and at the base it began to gather dirt and dust and bits of grass and old leaves and insects from the ground and now the whirlwind became darker, more visible as a column, more like the television image of a tornado, only it wasn’t in the distance, it was here, and he was in control of it.

This is the real god, thought Ced.

No: In his mind he was speaking to the wind itself. Thou art the god, O whirlwind of my making. I have wakened thee.

With the realization that the wind was alive and could hear him, Ced crossed a threshold. His outself went into the wind. It became his clant. It became his heartsblood, and he was riding in the wind the way his mother flew in hummingbirds, riding it and guiding it, both as companion and controller, passenger and pilot.

He never left his body; he still stood watching the tornado from the tor. Yet he also was the tornado, not seeing through it, for tornados have no eyes, but rather feeling it with the kinesthesia of his body, the way a person can sense with eyes closed just where the hands are, and what the fingers are doing. He could feel the location and dimension and speed and strength of the tornado just as he could tie his shoelaces in the dark, the fingers moving smoothly through well-remembered patterns.

He rode the tornado for a hundred miles before he was sated with the joy of it. Enough, enough, enough. He let go of the wind and immediately felt it slacken and fade, the air also rejoicing with the memory of such rapid, powerful flight. His outself returned to him. He stood, whole again, and yet bereft because the wind was just a gentle breeze again. He had been a giant; now he was only a man.

He climbed down from the outcropping of rock. It wasn’t easy—a windmage can fly to a place where a goat can’t climb. But there was a grassy way, a step here, a jump there, that let him get down from peak to riverside.

Then he began to walk downstream, looking for people. But he found none.

Instead, he met the wreckage of a village, the houses torn up by their roots.

He had to raise a little whirlwind to lift him over the tumble of a broken forest, with trees uprooted and cast upon each other like a game of pickup sticks.

And then he came to a city where the trapped cried out from inside collapsed walls, where men and women keened aloud over the bodies of the dead, and children wandered looking terrified and lost.

He could not understand their language, though he recognized that it sounded somewhat like the language his mother sometimes spoke to him in snatches, the language she spoke to the birds that gathered around her when she fed them or sang to them in the yard.

None of them seemed to think anything of this stranger among them. They were too caught up in their own misery and fear, in the struggle to release the victims trapped in the fallen buildings. Ced joined in, helping to pull away the wreckage, to lift the broken bodies, to carry the living to safety.

I need you to heal these people, Danny North. I should not be here alone. I can’t be trusted. It’s too much power. Look what I did without even realizing it. I felt the devastation of this town as a kind of crunching underfoot, like tramping over fallen acorns on the pavement near a city oak. But it was these buildings I was kicking aside, and in the wind of my passing I never heard my victims’ pleas and cries, for the wind sings and screams, but it has no ears and never listens.

I have ears. I have eyes. Yet I was far away on a rocky hill, standing there in the ecstasy of power. It was a drug.

I have been a god for only an hour or two, and look what I have done.

Yet as Ced struggled to save people in the aftermath of his tornado, he also felt a dark and terrible pride. On the one hand, he wanted to weep and beg forgiveness, to take responsibility and bear the consequence: I did this. I will help undo the damage, as much as I can.

But the most powerful feeling deep inside him was much simpler, and filled with the fire of pride:

I did this. Look what I can do!