Free The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) by Orson Scott Card Page A

have been Marion and Leslie trapped there as well.”
    Stone appeared at the tail of the gate to his house in Washington, DC. “Hello, Veevee,” he said.
    “‘Veevee’?” she said indignantly. “Not ‘My darling’ or ‘My love’ or—”
    “O glorious Gatemage,” said Stone. “O most admirable of women. O thou wife.”
    “There we go,” said Veevee, preening playfully. “It may take a little prompting, but you know how to make a girl feel all princessy.”
    “It’ll be interesting to see what a Meadowfriend becomes after passing through the Great Gate. I have visions of being able to make every lawn in America grow so rapidly, with grass so tall, that people can’t find their houses.”
    “And the buffalo herds return to roam all over North America, consuming lawn grass at a prodigious rate, and yet the grass leaps ever higher,” said Veevee.
    “Grass growing from cracks in the sidewalks and asphalt tears it all into little chunks,” said Stone. “In this profuse jungle of life, no vehicle can move; even helicopters can’t land for longer than a minute or two before grass grows up so thick that the blades can’t turn again.”
    “And three hundred million people die of starvation,” said Danny dryly.
    “But the vast lawns make such a lovely cemetery,” said Veevee.
    “Don’t worry, Danny. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t,” said Stone. “Lawns are the least interesting plants in the world. Everything interesting has been bred out of them. A true meadow has at least a hundred different species of grass, clumping here and there, with a thousand wildflowers and bulbs and tubers and mosses and ferns and—”
    “Day lilies,” said Veevee. “I do love day lilies.”
    “The poodles of the plant world,” said Stone scornfully.
    “So pretty,” said Veevee. “Alone or in great fields of them. Don’t leave them out of our meadow, darling.”
    Stone looked at Danny and rolled his eyes.
    “I saw that, Peter,” said Veevee. “Eyerolling is rude.”
    “Rude but necessary,” said Stone. “For your own good. Make your gate, Danny. The longer I stay here talking with Veevee, the more extravagant the trouble I’ll get myself into.”
    “I’ll tell Hermia we’re ready,” said Danny.
    Because his gatesense already told him exactly where the gate he had made for her in Rio was—her latest hiding place, the theory being that if she had to keep moving around, at least she could go to warm and interesting places—he was able to make a new gate straight there.
    She wasn’t in her hotel room. That was a surprise. She knew that it was nearly time for the making of the Great Gate. She was supposed to be waiting.
    Danny immediately made a return gate and stepped toward it just as the shotgun blast went off. He felt the pellets tear through his body and then … no pain at all, because he had passed through the gate back to the barn. He still gasped from the pain he no longer felt, and the others turned toward him.
    “They found Hermia,” said Danny. “She wasn’t there, and they weren’t waiting around to talk about it.”
    “Are you hurt?” asked Veevee, fingering his tattered shirt.
    “I was, for a moment,” said Danny. “I may still have all the pellets in me. I can work on that later. The gate healed the wounds, and I have to find Hermia.”
    “It can’t be her own people,” said Stone. “The Greeks may do many terrible things, but they wouldn’t kill the world’s only living gatemage.”
    “But they’re the only ones who could track her,” said Danny.
    “They might be tracking the trackers,” said Marion.
    “Or they might have a sniffer of their own, whoever they are,” said Stone. “The Greeks track Hermia, but a sniffer could simply have found your gate and then waited for you.”
    “Some fanatic group that really thinks we shouldn’t go back to Westil?” asked Veevee.
    “Or some minions of the Gate Thief,” said Marion.
    “I’m going to look,” said