Thresholds by Nina Kiriki Hoffman Page B

asked.
    “Never in its embryo state.”
    “What is its other state? What happens when it hatches?” Maya cupped her right hand over the egg.
    “It is always different. You will be the first to know.”
    “Oh,” said Maya. “Thanks.” Thanks a lot. Very helpful .
    Loostra uncoiled and clattered back into the center of the circle of six, the portal team. “Farewell.”
    The team lifted their arms. The hum started again, low and drumming under their feet, and the colors danced in the air. Maya watched, entranced, snapping one mental picture after another.
    The colors brightened, then faded, and Loostra was gone.

SIXTEEN
    They wound their way back up to the solar room. Harper took the central cushion again, flanked by the Tree Sisters. He gestured to the five young people, who dropped to the carpet in front of him.
    Maya unpacked her sketchpad, thinking about Loostra and how to draw her, then checked her watch. Past five o’clock. “Excuse me,” she said. “I know things are still messy, but I have to go home now.”
    “That is not possible,” said Harper.
    “What? ” Maya jumped up, panicked. She grabbed her pack and turned toward the door.
    Rowan caught her shoulders. “He doesn’t mean you can’t ever go home,” he said.
    Heat gathered at Maya’s left wrist, arrowed up her arm, cloaked her shoulders. Something crackled. Rowan cried out and released her. His palms were bright red. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
    Maya, ready to run, glanced at her wrist. The egg had gone dark again, with red streaks across it. It was almost growling, an agitation under her skin like water boiling.
    “Shh, shh, shh,” she whispered, and pressed it against her cheek, her eyes closed. It felt hotter than before, but as she crooned to it, the bubbling against her cheek subsided.
    Gwenda had jumped up. She clasped one hand with the other, maybe to stop herself from trying to touch Maya the way Rowan had. “Maya. Tell the sissimi we’re not threatening you. What the Elder means is we can’t let you go until we explain a little more. You’ll get home soon. I promise.”
    Maya lowered her hand and studied her egg bump. The color had softened to a dark, velvety blue, with no red streaks. “We’re listening.”
    Harper sighed, and glanced at the Tree Sisters. They nodded. “Maya,” he said quietly, “if we cannot return you to your normal life, we have another way to help. Will you let us make you part of our family?”
    “But I have a family already.” She thought longingly of them, remembered how everybody had been at breakfast. Harried, together, irritated, used to each other. It all seemed so far away now, oddly precious.
    “You have new problems now, things your other family won’t know how to handle.”
    “I don’t even know you. All I know is you keep ordering me around, and I don’t like it.”
    Gwenda touched Maya’s sleeve. “Let us make you part of our family. Then we can tell you everything.”
    “Let us make you part of our family,” Benjamin said. “Then you can travel .” He glanced toward the floor as though he could see all the way down to the portal cavern.
    “But I just got here,” she said. She had just been uprooted from the place she had spent her entire life and moved to Spores Ferry, which was proving more different from Catspaw, Idaho, than she had ever imagined. She felt totally unready to leave anybody she loved. She just wanted to hold on to her family tighter, stop them from slipping away the way Stephanie had. “I don’t want to travel.”
    Although . . . to go through the light—the portal—to other places? Places where skies came in other colors, cities grew spikes, and things that weren’t human locomoted over strange streets.
    So much to draw.
    “You don’t have to go anywhere until you’re ready,” said the moon-pendant Tree Sister. She had a beautiful smile.
    Maya stared at her feet, moved them back and forth on the carpet. The shushing noises helped her think. She would have