Spirits that Walk in Shadow, page 1
BOOKS BY NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN
Spirits That Walk in Shadow
A Stir of Bones
A Fistful of Sky
Past the Size of Dreaming
A Red Heart of Memories
The Silent Strength of Stones
The Thread That Binds the Bones
Child of an Ancient City (with Tad Williams)
Unmasking
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2006 by Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Copyright © Nina Kiriki Hoffman, 2006
All rights reserved
Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data is available
ISBN: 0-670-06071-2
Printed in the U.S.A.
Set in Berling
Book design by Kelley McIntyre
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
This one is for Sharyn,
for cuts, capers, and encouragement.
It’s also for my nephew Connor,
who reads my books to pieces.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Kim
CHAPTER 1: Jaimie
CHAPTER 2: Kim
CHAPTER 3: Jaimie
CHAPTER 4: Kim
CHAPTER 5: Jaimie
CHAPTER 6: Kim
CHAPTER 7: Jaimie
CHAPTER 8: Kim
CHAPTER 9: Jaimie
CHAPTER 10: Kim
CHAPTER 11: Jaimie
CHAPTER 12: Kim
CHAPTER 13: Jaimie
CHAPTER 14: Kim
CHAPTER 15: Jaimie
CHAPTER 16: Kim
CHAPTER 17: Jaimie
CHAPTER 18: Kim
CHAPTER 19: Jaimie
CHAPTER 20: Kim
CHAPTER 21: Jaimie
CHAPTER 22: Kim
CHAPTER 23: Jaimie
CHAPTER 24: Kim
CHAPTER 25: Jaimie
CHAPTER 26: Kim
CHAPTER 27: Jaimie
CHAPTER 28: Kim
CHAPTER 29: Jaimie
CHAPTER 30: Kim
CHAPTER 31: Jaimie
CHAPTER 32: Kim
CHAPTER 33: Jaimie
EPILOGUE, SIX MONTHS LATER: Kim
PROLOGUE: Kim
When I was small, my thoughts and feelings were all visual. The taste of chocolate might be a smear of deep, warm yellow, with gold sparkles. Hot water was a warm, blue blanket, but really hot water had prickles and spikes like shiny silver needles, and cold water, the kind that froze your hand when you dipped into it, looked like sheets of gray ice with bright light shining through.
Images came all the time. Sometimes the pictures were jumpy, like a slide show, images flashing fast, overlapping; sometimes smooth and fluid, like Chinese calligraphy.
One day after I had learned to read, I had a mental click. I was wandering the playground during recess. I watched kids on swings, scraps of color arcing up and down against the chill blue sky, and I wondered if I could think about this in words.
It wasn’t easy. It was the good kind of hard, puzzling and compelling, with the same pull I got from computer solitaire. I felt like I was solving something, and I didn’t want to stop.
Words were slower in lots of ways, more linear. I couldn’t just leap from thought to thought.
The better I got at thinking in words, the fewer pictures I saw. My brain was all noises weighted with meaning and hooked together in strings.
One morning after a dream of ocean and sky, swimming and flying melting into each other, I woke up and the pictures faded. I thought, Time to get up. Better get ready for school.
I felt like I had lost my native language.
I wanted the pictures back.
My parents kept art supplies in a cupboard where my older brother Don and I could grab them any time we wanted, and they sent us to an art teacher two afternoons a week after school.
Our art teacher always put something on the table in front of me and Don and told us to sketch it, but I wasn’t interested in drawing fruit, or a stupid sculpture of a robin, or a vase.
Don did our teacher’s assignments. He got good at representational art and branched out into illustration. He drew hot, big-breasted manga girls, which made him popular at school. All the guys wanted him to do notebook covers and pictures for them.
I wasn’t interested in drawing an object the way a camera took a photo. I made pictures of how I felt.
After I lost my pictures to words and had to work to get them back, I was less inclined than ever to paint what was in front of me. I laid down colors on paper, dripped and drizzled other colors, mooshed things together, tried different brushes and pressures. My hands could still make pictures, even if my head wouldn’t.
In pursuit of my lost language, I used up reams of scratch paper, jars of poster paint, and cakes of watercolors. Brushes lost their bristles, left hairs in my pictures. I made images on paper until I could summon them in my head again. Getting them to flow without defining them in words was another big job. I finally did it, though. I forced the flow until it came back.
Now that I could think in pictures again, I used art to capture them. Once I’d made the pictures, I had them for good, even if I threw the paper version out. In the process of traveling from my head out my hands and onto the paper, the pictures printed themselves in my memory, fixed there so I could summon them at will.
At first Dad didn’t get my art at all, but Mom liked it. She used the fridge as my gallery, swapping out paintings every week when I brought them home. Later she convinced Dad to attach corkboard to a whole wall of my room. I tacked up big sheets of paper all across it. Finally, I could paint as large as I wanted.
I had just finished a big piece—Delight, a green core streaked with gold, lots of little yellow explosions around the edge, red dots, and blue-green spirals—when Dad knocked and came into my room. He stared at the picture. Then he went and got the digital camera.
After Dad photographed Delight, I ripped it down and started on Sadness, not deep sadness, but the melancholy of Nobody really gets what I think. It had a lot of squiggles like question marks, so it was more puzzled than the melancholy I set out to do, and there was some lavender in it, and orange like the inside of a ripe mango, and light pink. Not depressing enough, but maybe it was a picture of something else. That happened—part of the confusion between words and pictures. I would think I understood my thoughts in words, and the pictures would tell me a different truth.
“Kim,” Dad said when I was still working. “Come here a sec.”
He took me to his office and showed me how he’d put my artwork on the computer. He’d done it in layers—a yellow layer, a green layer, a layer for the spirals—so he could move the elements around.
At first I hated it. My picture was perfect the way it was. Then I got intrigued. I could make some parts bigger and other parts smaller, change the placement, blow the whole thing up so big I could see the brushstrokes and the paint that had flicked off when I lifted the brush.
Dad put the art program on my laptop and gave me a digital camera. I still painted giant art on my bedroom wall, but then I worked on my pictures in new ways.
I promised Dad I’d photograph all my pictures and store them on the hard drive. He asked permission to use them in the computer games he designed, and I thought, Why not? He copied my files once a week and sent them to his graphics guy, Henry.
Henry and Dad came up with great games, but they didn’t get along very well. You could see it in their work. Dad’s characters destroyed a lot of Henry’s scenery, and sometimes Henry’s scenery killed or crippled Dad’s characters. Dad had given Henry some of Don’s manga babes, too, and Henry got rid of them in the first ten seconds. My pictures survived, woven into the fabric of Henry’s worlds.
The next year, I discovered science. In biology, what I saw in the microscope astonished and delighted me. After that, I took astronomy.
I never figured out if it was my art that kept me from making friends at school or my lack of friends that made me focus on art. Whatever the reason, I had lots of time to work on art after school because I didn’t have anyone to do things with.
Then, a few weeks into tenth grade, Shaina Darnell walked into homeroom.
Shaina had just moved to Oregon from southern California, she said loud enough for everybody to hear. To me, she looked like California: a slender figure in a pale green dress, with a glory of golden hair and tanned skin, gold bangles on her wrists, and strappy gold sandals on her feet. She smiled at us.
The picture in my head had yellow-green streaks of envy along one side, and bubbling delight in pale turquoise and apple green, with silver sparkles. There was something so appealing about Shaina. I added orange for warmth, because her smile seemed to say, “I like you all,” and her eyes were amber. I knew Shaina was about to be the popular girl, displacing Amy Singleton, who had been the most popular since fifth grade and was totally mean with it.
Shaina smiled. Boys sat up straight. She looked around the room, and then her gaze stopped at me. Her eyes got wider and so did her smile. She came straight down the aisle toward the back where I sat, and dropped into the desk next to mine.
Everyone was watching. I was sure they were as stunned as I was.
Gold shot into my picture, along with fishhooks of dark purple, the suspicion that my delight was about to be punctured. Nothing this good could last.
“What’s your name?” asked the beautiful Californian.
I swallowed and managed to say, “Kim Calloway.”
“Shaina Darnell.” She held out a hand. Her fingernails were polished sparkly pale pink.
I put my hand in hers. I was interested in the contrast between her slender, perfect fingers and my paint-stained, calloused ones, but only for a second. Something happened when we touched. Shaina stared at me with wonder. It was almost as if she could see the picture in my head. I added a dusting of golden pollen, and she blinked, smiled, whispered, “Wow. Kim, please say you’ll be my best friend.”
First time somebody asked to be my friend. The picture I saw then was too big and bright to fit on a wall.
Having Shaina changed everything. Everybody wanted her at their parties, and she never went anywhere unless I came, too. We weren’t glued to each other, but she made people be nice to me; she made sure I felt safe. At first, I sat in dark corners and watched, but then one or two people talked to me, and then a few more. I learned how to talk to them, how to joke. How to relax.
Shaina talked me out of wearing my paint-spattered overalls all the time, and into wearing regular clothes. She and I went to the earring store and got matching ear-piercings, adding new ones to celebrate major triumphs, like good test scores, my artwork getting into the yearbook, her poem being published in the school newspaper.
After I met Shaina, I stopped working things out on my art wall. I still had my mental picture side—anything could spark a flood of images—but I just let them flow through my head, not through my fingers. Mom got mad when she noticed I wasn’t bringing her anything new for the fridge. I slapped down a few of my best moods for her every once in a while, but I had lost the drive to capture everything.
Shaina’s arrival started two and a half of the best years I had ever lived. Then, in the middle of senior year, things changed.
If I had still been painting, those spring and summer pictures would have been black, relieved by occasional dark purple splotches and starved faces staring up from the bottom of a dark pit.
I hardly even noticed high school graduation.
In the fall, I ran away to college.
CHAPTER 1: Jaimie
“Jaimie, you know how to get in touch with us?” my dad asked. We grabbed satchels from the back of the pickup and headed toward my dorm, Fernald Complex. Other Sitka State freshmen and their parents were milling around or carrying things up the wide steps into the brick building. The leaves on the trees were still green in late September, and the lawns that spread between the buildings were green, too. Looked like fall came later to Spores Ferry, Oregon, than it did to Arcadia, where Dad and I had driven from.
The air was full of hope and fear, dust and sunlight. The other students looked young, but that made sense; I’d decided to go to the university after I’d been out of high school two years.
“Dad.” A day and a half on the road, a stopover in my first hotel ever, and he had already asked me six or eight times if I knew how to call home. I never had a good answer.
“Jaimie,” he said. Then he smiled. “I know, I know. I should let go of it. But you’re my youngest daughter, and you’re leaving home. I can’t help worrying.”
Rugee, the Presence who had decided to come with me, stuck his green-and-orange head out of the open outer pocket of my smaller satchel. At present, he was in the form of a really big salamander. He stuck out his wet, white tongue to taste the air. I took a sniff. Autumn, even though the leaves hadn’t changed yet. The air smelled like transition.
“If you guys would just get a phone, everything would be easier,” I said. I’d been living away from my family’s home complex, Chapel Hollow, for a while—most recently in Arcadia, the nearest town, with Trixie, a normal human being whose house had all kinds of things we didn’t have, starting with electricity. Television, radio, a CD player. A computer. An automatic dishwasher, washing machine, and clothes dryer. Water you didn’t have to heat using spells.
Trixie had a telephone. Simple, handy! Used by nearly everyone in the world except a bunch of snotty Ilmonishti—my family.
“Who needs easy?” said my dad as we climbed the dorm steps.
“It would be nice if something was easy.” I opened one half of the double door, and we went inside.
“Lots of things are easy for you. You’re full of talents. You’re Sign Air. I don’t know why Wordwaft doesn’t come easily to you.”
I’d learned a lot since I had left home, mostly about the gaping holes in my magical education. My generation had been taught by someone who, we learned too late, wanted us to grow up warped and ignorant of much of our heritage.
Unlike some of the others, I wanted to change. I knew some of the ways I had been twisted, and I’d worked against those twists in my own fashion, but I also knew I had damage I didn’t even know about. I was still learning about right and wrong. That was one of the reasons I wanted to go away to college. Maybe here, Outside, among normal people, I’d find a new perspective.
I glanced around the dorm’s entrance. Strong cleansers edged the air, blurred by the scent and presence of unknown humans. To the left, double doors opened into a big room with ragged chairs, couches, a TV, and some vending machines. Straight ahead was a broad hall.
Everywhere I looked, strangers.
We had my dorm and room assignment—Fernald, room 214. Dad had helped me fill out the paperwork for it way back in March, but the university hadn’t sent a key or a dorm map.
People were especially thick around something across the hall. I straightened my shoulders under the straps of my satchels and headed over. Dad followed. Rugee ducked back into his pocket. I shifted the satchel so he wouldn’t get bumped.
Like me, Dad was Sign Air, only he’d been at it a lot longer and had more effective training. I noticed that people parted in front of us, and when I trelled—a Sign Air sense that combined taste, touch, smell, and something else—I sensed Dad was using air to push people just a little sideways. I wished I knew how to do that! So elegant! So useful!
There was a bulletin board with room assignments listed on it alphabetically by last name. Next to it stood a person wearing a red button that said R.A. She was answering anxious parents’ questions, handing out brochures, and smiling the kind of smile you get when you have a headache.
I glanced lower on the bulletin board and saw a map of the building, its three stories laid out one above the other. There were two wings branching out from the ends of the front hall, forming a giant U. Each length of building had its own name. The front section was Spangler, the left wing was Ellis, and the right wing was Light. My room, 214, was on the second floor in the center of Spangler.
