Orson Card - The Gate Thief

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.”