Free Call Forth the Waves by L. J. Hatton Page B

move. I walked to the entry we’d used. Previously, it had been a square arch with no door, only a foot from a pass-through window. Both openings were now blocked by a seamless metal plate. The living room was gone, shunted out of the way to accommodate the larger kitchen.
    “Where did it all go?” Jermay asked. “There was furniture in there, shelves, stuff on the walls.”
    “It’s no different than the golems when they lose mass. It’s gone, but still there,” I said.
    My father had tried to explain it once, but it was over my head. Pocket dimensions and quantum displacement involving equations he used entire notebooks to work out by hand.
    “It’s magic.”
    Calling it that was easier than trying to understand it.

    Twenty minutes later, things had calmed. The house was still. The knocking had stopped. Most importantly, Birdie was functional, seated at the table, and eating her breakfast—the first meal she’d sat still for since we reached the Hollow. Before Baba’s house, she’d reverted to her old habit of snatching food and running with it, nibbling hastily in the shadows, wherever she could find a space small enough that no one could follow her or force her out.
    She still wasn’t completely visible—the blocked doorway to the living room and one corner of the stove were lightly etched across her skin and clothes where they showed through—but she was with us. All forward motion counts, as my father was fond of saying.
    Of course, he only moved forward to avoid the things chasing him.
    We’d eaten at tables like this on the train. Me and Jermay sitting together on one side, Anise and Birdie on the other. Everyone else scattered around us wherever they found a space when Mother Jesek signaled that a meal was ready. It felt familiar and homey, and it felt safe. All that was missing were bowls filled eight inches above the rim with food and Smolly slapping Squint’s hands away because he always managed to fill his plate with nothing but potatoes before she could stop him. Nagendra would have been seated near my father at the head of the table, and if the atmosphere was right, he would have blurted a random recitation from a play he’d learned at university because to him it fit the setting and the mood. I could hear his voice, precise, clear, and as enthralling as any of the snakes he considered his children. But now, when I thought of Nagendra, he was wearing the black polo shirt from the dossier photo in Warden Nye’s computer file. He was smiling, proud to have the Commission’s ankh embroidered on his chest. I’d never been afraid of the man who walked with serpents and had so many tattoos that his blood had likely turned to ink, but the younger version of him made me shiver. He was proof of how easily someone could fall for the propaganda, even someone as intelligent as Nagendra.
    That thought changed the familiarity of the room and the table into something counterfeit. The people were wrong, merely arranging themselves to look like friends and family. There was no easy, empty chatter about the day to come. We were ragged and beaten strays taken in off the street.
    The kitchen suddenly had more in common with the dining room in Nye’s Center than it did the train.
    “Aren’t you hungry?” Baba asked politely. I still hadn’t figured out if the man’s blindness was a farce or if he had another means of telling who was where and doing what.
    “Sorry,” I said. “Just thinking.”
    I scooped some jam onto a piece of toast and shoved it in my mouth, thankful that the gooey sweetness gave me an excuse to chew long enough that no more questions came my way.
    “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” Jermay leaned in close to whisper. “I’m thinking that I haven’t seen or heard a single animal up here, and I’m highly suspicious of things that look like bacon when there aren’t any animals involved. Especially when it won’t stay still long enough for me to stab it.”
    He chased a