A Wizard Alone

Quandaries

When her alarm went off at about a quarter after six, Nita dragged herself out of bed, showered, and got ready for school with that fierce, small sword-sound still repeating itself in her memory.

When she woke her dad up, it was still very much on her mind. She found him a little later in the kitchen, having the coffee she’d made for him when she’d finished dressing, and saw him looking thoughtfully at her manual, which Nita had carried into the kitchen with her earlier and had left open and facedown on the counter.

“I thought you seemed a little distracted this morning,” he said, pouring milk into his coffee.

“You look like you’re working hard on something. Harder than usual.”

He means, harder than usual lately, Nita thought. “Yeah,” she said. “First-contact problem.”

“As in first contact with an alien species?”

“I think so,” Nita said. “We’ve been having some trouble communicating.”

Her dad shook his head. “I should get you to talk to my cut-flower distributor,” he said. “If you can get through to something from another planet, maybe you could even get through to him.”

Nita had heard enough stories about her dad’s troubles with this particular supplier in the past couple of years to make her uncertain. “I might need more power than I’ve got at the moment,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” her dad said. “”What exactly did you do to your sister yesterday?“

Nita raised her eyebrows. “I got her to see sense,” she said.

Nita’s dad gave her a loving but skeptical look. “Using what kind of nuclear weapon?” he said.

“Just so I know when the government calls.”

Humor

, she thought. When was the last time I heard Daddy make a joke? Since… well. Since then.

“I moved her bedroom furniture around,” Nita said. “Did a couple of other things… nothing lifethreatening.”

She looked at her dad over the rim of her mug of tea as she took a drink. “Not that I didn’t think about it.”

Her dad sighed. “You wouldn’t have been the first one,” he said, rinsing out his coffee cup. He got his coat off the hook by the door and shrugged into it. “Keep an eye on her, though, will you?”

“Sure, Daddy.”

Her dad came over and gave her a hug that lingered for a moment. He put his chin down on the top of her head, something else he hadn’t done for a while, and said, “You’ve been the one holding everything together.

And that’s not fair to you. I feel like I haven’t been doing everything I could…“

Nita shook her head. “I’m not sure I see it that way, Daddy,” she said, and that was all she could get out.

He squeezed her, let her go. “The shop’s open late tonight,” he said. “I won’t be home till nine.

You have anything planned?”

Nita shook her head. “I need to do some research,” she said. “If I have to go out, it won’t be for long, and nowhere far.”

“Okay. Bye…”

She leaned against the counter again, leafing through her manual, while the sound of her dad’s car faded off down the road. She thought she knew how he felt: as if he was the weak link in the family. But she often felt that way herself, and she knew Dairine did, too — and they couldn’t all be right. This was something that had come up in one of her earliest talks with Mr. Millman, a simple piece of logic that had completely eluded Nita until then — probably her first sign that Millman was not just some “good idea” wished on her by the school, but was someone genuinely worth listening to. Nita knew now that all you could do was try to let the sense of inadequacy pass over you, or the other person, and dissipate. Arguing too hard about it was likely to make the other person think you were trying to hide the truth from them.

She sighed and turned another page. The size of her manual’s linguistics section had nearly tripled since she got up with the day’s research in mind, and she was left now with the realization that her own knowledge of the Speech was even more basic than she’d thought it was. I can’t believe how dumb I’ve been about this

, she thought. The quick vocabulary test she’d taken before her dad came down for his coffee had suggested that Nita was readily familiar with about 650 terms in the Speech… out of a possible 750,000. And more words were being rediscovered or coined every day by wizards of every species. There were even regional dialects and variants, alternate recensions used by species whose physiologies or brain structure, or sometimes even the structure of their home universe, meant that the most basic forms of the Speech had to be altered to make sense. I’ve been treating this like it was a dead language

, Nita thought. But it’s alive. It’s the language of Life Itself: How could it not be?

And then, no matter how many of the words you might know, there was always the question of context… the way a species used the Speech. Some species understood it clearly, but meant very different things by their usage of it than other species did. Some members of other species, too, whether wizards or not, might have only a beginner’s acquaintance with the Speech, a most basic understanding of how to use it. Like it looks like I have, Nita thought, turning the manual’s pages ruefully.

So the question is: Was I the one being incompetent the other day, or was the robot? Or the clown

? Because of the way she felt lately, Nita thought the incompetence was a lot more likely to have been on her side. And how come I got so little from the knight? Nita remembered Dairine’s line about the robot, about how the species contacting Nita seemed to have no plurals, possibly even no personal pronouns. What she’d heard last night seemed to confirm the idea. He never said “we,” she thought. But then, he never said “I,” either. There was something so…I don’t know…so limited about the way he was expressing himself. Was that just because I was having trouble dealing with the way he used the Speech? Or was he hiding something?

And why?

She leaned there on her folded arms for a while, looking rather glumly at the manual, and didn’t even bother looking up when Dairine came padding in wearing one of their dad’s T-shirts, hunting her breakfast. “Morning.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, turning over another page covered with necessary vocabulary that she didn’t know.

Dairine stuck her head in the refrigerator. “My bed creaks now,” she said.

“It’s always creaked,” Nita said as Dairine came out with the milk. “That’s because you jump on it.”

“I think it’s because it just spent the better part of a day down a crevasse full of liquid nitrogen,” Dairine said, getting a bowl for her cereal.

“If it spent any time in liquid nitrogen, it wouldn’t just creak,” Nita said. “It’d shatter.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking your wizardry wasn’t temperature-tight,” Dairine said, pouring first cereal and then milk. “I think you dropped a variable.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I bet you did.”

“Didn’t.”

Dairine gave Nita a look that said, Yes, you did, you idiot, and went out into the dining room with her cereal.

Nita smiled slightly as she turned another page. At least Dairine seemed to be back to normal for the moment. Of course, it might be a ploy to lull me into a false sense of security. But Nita thought her sister knew better than to bother trying to mislead her just now, when Nita’s fuse was shorter than usual. Next time, it might not be just Dairine’s bed that wound up down a crevasse… and Dairine’s present power levels weren’t what they had been a while ago. Nita’s couple of years’ more experience as a wizard might be enough temporarily to keep Dairine in line.

She raised her eyebrows and went back to the vocabulary list. I really wish there were ways to just magically make all this information go into my head

, Nita thought. Oh well…

Dairine finished her cereal and went to get dressed, and Nita kept reading, turning page after page in the manual, looking for a hint as to what she might have been missing. It was at least an hour later when Dairine came by again, dressed, with the backpack she used as a book bag over her shoulder; Nita glanced up just long enough to see Dairine putting her coat on, and to notice the small, glowing, rose-colored eye looking at her from inside the bag.

“Have you been upgrading Spot again?” Nita said.

“He’s been upgrading himself,” Dairine said. “Wireless, optical… some other stuff.” She looked affectionately at the bag as she shouldered it, and the little eye on its silvery stalk disappeared back down between the backpack and its flap.

“I wouldn’t let anybody see him, if I were you,” Nita said.

“They can’t. But he can see them. Gotta go, Neets.”

“See you…”

Dairine left. Nita spent some moments more reading the manual in the quiet, until suddenly she realized that if she didn’t get out of there, she was the one who was going to be in trouble for being late. She ran off to get her own backpack, and her manual went floating after her.

The rest of the day went by fairly quickly, partly because Nita’s concerns about the communications between her and “her aliens” kept bringing Nita back to the manual in every free moment that wasn’t taken up with class work. She hardly thought seriously about anything else until just before her lunch period, when Nita suddenly remembered that today was when the time and day for her next session with Mr. Millman would be posted.

When the bell rang, she made her way down into the corridor in the south wing of the school, where the administrative offices were, and from there into the main office, where the bulletin board for the special services messages was located. Nita found the pinned-up folded message that said N.

CALLAHAN, pulled it off the board, and headed out into the corridor, opening it.

The message said, “Dear Nita: 7:30 A.M., Monday. Hope the magic’s going okay. Don’t forget to bring some cards. I want to find out how to keep them from falling out of my sleeve. R. Millman.“

Nita looked at this and was tempted to shred the note right down to its component atoms. What in the worlds made me say that to him, she thought, shoving the note into the pocket of her jeans and stalking off down the hall.

By the time she got to the cafeteria, though, she’d shrugged off the annoyance and was once again worrying at the clown-robot-knight problem. Nita got herself a sandwich and a fruit juice, sat down by herself off to one side, and spent another half hour studying how species that didn’t understand plurals handled the Speech. It was complex. Mostly they wound up repeating singular forms with a redactive or “virtual” plural, which—

It’s sounding a little dry in there, Neets…

Nita smiled. You have no idea, she said, and shut the manual. Nita disposed of her lunch tray and went out of the cafeteria, into the small side parking lot. Kit was leaning against the chain-link fence on the far side, hugging himself a little against the cold, watching a boys’ gym class out in the athletic field running easy laps to cool down after soccer practice.

Nita went to lean against the fence beside him. “You know any card tricks?” she said under her breath.

He looked at her oddly. “No. Why?”

“I did something incredibly stupid. I mentioned magic to Millman at our last meeting. He thought I meant magician stuff, though, the sawing-people-in-half kind of magic. Now he wants me to show him some.”

Kit stared at Nita, then burst out laughing. “You should do some wizardry, and let him think it’s magic. I bet you can do all kinds of fancy card tricks when you can really make them vanish.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Nita frowned. “I’m not sure I like the idea, though. Making the real thing look like something fake…It’s too much like lying.”

Kit nodded. “What made you mention magic to him at all, though?”

“I wish I could remember. It was an impulse, and I felt like such a dork afterward.” She sighed.

“Never mind. Now I have to learn card tricks in my endless free time.”

Kit raised his eyebrows. “You make any headway with your aliens?”

“Yeah. Or rather, I’m not sure.”

“Not sure they’re aliens?”

“Not sure they’re aliens, plural. Then again, let’s not get into the plural thing. I’m having enough trouble with it.” Nita rubbed her face. “I seem to have been talking to the same one at least twice.

I’m not sure if I was talking to him, or it, the first time, the time with the clown on the bike.”

“But you understood him this time, anyway.”

“I’m not sure of that, either. I think I did… but I keep thinking he was holding something back, or having trouble saying something. And it could have been important.” She sighed. “I’m just going to have to keep trying. What about you? Did you have time to go after your Ordeal kid again?”

“Not yet. Ponch is still worn-out from the last time. I’m going to try to get in touch with Darryl again tonight, maybe tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come along?”

He sounded almost wistful. Nita gave it a moment’s thought, but then shook her head: She might feel more like working today, but she still wasn’t sure of her ability to be of use in a crisis situation.

“Give me a little more time,” she said. “I want to work on this Speech problem for the moment. I think if I bear down on it hard enough, I may make a breakthrough.”

“I wouldn’t want to derail you,” Kit said. “But keep me posted.”

“You okay?” Nita said.

Kit looked at her a little strangely. “Why?”

“You look kinda worn-out yourself.”

He looked surprised at that, then shrugged. “What Ponch does,” he said, “it takes a lot out of me, too, maybe more than I realize. I do feel a little run-down. It’s okay: I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight and be fine tomorrow.”

“What is going on with Ponch?” Nita said. “You were still looking for answers to that…”

Kit shook his head. “I think I’m going to be looking for answers for a while. Trouble is, every time I try to settle down to work it out with the manual, something new goes wrong with the TV. Or something else interrupts me.”

The bell rang. “See that? The story of my life,” Kit said.

“Not just yours,” Nita said. “Look, call me later.

You ought to take a look at what I’m working on from the ‘inside’; maybe you can make some sense of it.“

“Right,” Kit said.

They parted company and went off to their classes. Nita more or less sleepwalked through her afternoon algebra and statistics class, grateful not to be called on. Her mind was still tangled up in virtual plurals, non-pronominal pronouns, and the question of what could be that wrong with Kit’s TV that it would prove a distraction to him. The second-to-last period that afternoon was a study hall, and Nita got no more than three sentences into an essay on the abandonment of the gold standard before ditching the essay to return to the manual again; the gold standard made even virtual plurals look good by comparison.

Toward the end of that period, though, and during the next one — a music appreciation class full of jangly, early twentieth-century twelve-tone music, which Nita found impossible for anyone to appreciate — she started wondering exactly what was going on with her. Sure, she might occasionally detest her homework— more than occasionally, especially in the case of her present social studies class: Her teacher had a great love of saddling her students with essays on apparently useless subjects. But detesting the homework didn’t mean Nita didn’t get it done.

Oh, come on. It’s not like the universe is going to come apart because I’m less than excited about the gold standard and feel more like working on wizardry.

Yet the excuse sounded hollow. More to the point, it sounded like an excuse. When the bell rang for the last time that day, at two-forty-five, Nita walked out through the exuberant Friday afternoon rush to the lockers in a somber mood. She looked for Kit in the parking lot, didn’t see him, and wasn’t surprised: He had quicker, quieter ways of getting home than the other kids here.

She could have taken that same way home, but didn’t. She walked home slowly, thinking. Nita paused only long enough in her house to dump her books and change out of her school clothes into something more comfortable — looser jeans, a floppier sweatshirt — and to check on Dairine. Her sister was lying on her stomach, on her bed, with Spot lying on the bed next to her; the little computer had put out a couple of stalky eyes to look at a book Dairine was reading.

“School okay?” Nita said.

Dairine gave Nita the kind of look that someone in the Middle Ages might have given a relative who asked if the black plague was okay. Her only other answer was to bounce herself up and down on the mattress a little. The bed creaked loudly.

“Did not,” Nita said, and went downstairs again to get her parka.

“Where you going?” came the voice from upstairs.

“Tom’s.”

Tom and Carl’s backyard was already going twilit, this time of year, even so soon after school.

Nita paused there a moment, looking up at the sky, which was clear for a change after several days’ worth of cloudy weather, and wished that spring would hurry up — she hated these short days. She meandered over to the koi pond and glanced down into it. The pond wasn’t heated, but it didn’t freeze, either; into the pond and the ground beneath it, Carl had set a small utility wizardry that acted on the same general principle as a heat pump, keeping the water at an even sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

All the same, at this time of the year the koi were naturally a little sluggish. Right now they were mostly gathered together under the weeds and water lilies down at one end of the pond. Nita peered down, able to see nothing but the occasional flick of tail or fin, and once a coppery eye glancing back up at her. “Hey,” she said. “Got any words of wisdom?” The single koi that had looked back, a white one with an orange patch on its head, drifted up to just beneath the surface and regarded her.

Then it stuck its mouth up into the air.

“Seen in plain daylight the firefly’s just one more bug; but night restores it

—”

Nita raised her eyebrows. The koi gave her a look that suggested she was a waste of its time, and drifted straight back under the lily pads again.

“If you listen to them for too long,” Tom said as he pushed open the patio door, “you won’t be able to say anything that takes more than seventeen syllables.”

“I should send Dairine over,” Nita said.

“Even their powers have limits,” Tom said, as Nita came in. “I just made some tea. Can I interest you?”

“Yeah. It’s cold.” Nita slipped out of her parka, draped it over one of Tom’s dining room chairs.

“They’re predicting snow,” Tom said, pouring each of them a mug of tea and bringing them over to the table.

“That’s funny. It’s clear.”

“For the moment. There’s a storm working its way up the coast, though. Four to six inches, they said.”

Nita gave him a wry look. “Why couldn’t this happen on Monday and get us a day off from school?” she said.

“There are about thirty different answers to that, from the strictly meteorological mode down to the ethical,” Tom said, looking equally wry, “but they all factor down more or less to mean, ‘Just because. So cope with it.’”

Nita nodded and smiled a little, but the smile fell off almost immediately. “I need to ask you something.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Tom said, “though Annie and Monty doubtless have a different opinion. Anyway, what’s up?”

She looked at him across the table. “Am I using wizardry to avoid life?” Nita said.

Tom raised his eyebrows. “Wizardry is Life,” he said. “Or, at the very least, in service of Life.

By definition. So, equally by definition, the answer to that question is no. Want to try rephrasing?”

Nita sat for a moment and thought. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the manual.”

“So do we all.”

“No, I mean a lot of time. For me, anyway.”

“And this means—?”

Nita paused, wondering how to phrase this. “My last really big wizardry,” she said, “didn’t work.”

“Uh, there we’d have to disagree.”

“I don’t mean in terms of wizardry,” Nita said. “I mean in terms of what the pissed-off places in the back of my brain think about it. My mom still died.”

“Mmm,” Tom said. His expression was noncommittal.

“What I want to know is — is it possible to use research as a way to put off doing other stuff you should be doing?”

“Again, anything’s possible. What is it you think you should be doing?”

Nita shook her head, pushed her teacup back and forth on the table mat. “I don’t know.

Something more… active.”

“You think research is passive?”

“Compared to what I’ve been doing up until now, yeah.”

Nita reached sideways into the air for her manual, came out with it, opened it to the listings area, and pushed it over to Tom, tapping on her listing. “ ‘Optional,’” Nita said. “I’m not real wild about that.”

“I’m not sure I read that construct the same way,” Tom said. “I’d translate it more as meaning your options are open: that you’re not concretely assigned to anything at the moment. Maybe a better rendering would be ‘freelance.’” He glanced at her manual. “But then you seem to be taking a look at the vocabulary end of things at the moment.”

“Please,” Nita said. “I feel so ignorant. Me with my whole six hundred and fifty words.”

“Maybe it’ll be some consolation to you that the average English-speaking person’s day-to-day vocabulary is only a thousand or fifteen hundred words,” Tom said. “But I understand how you feel.

And the Speech is so much more complex than English in terms of specialized vocabulary. It has to be, if you’re going to name things properly. And so that means doing vocabulary-building all the time.”

He knocked one knuckle on the tabletop a couple of times. Immediately his version of the manual appeared on the table — seven or eight thick volumes like phone books. “This one,” Tom said, pulling a single volume out of the stack — while the ones above it considerately remained hovering in place over where the middle one had been—“this one is my vocabulary work for this year.”

Nita looked at it in horror as Tom dropped it to the table and flipped it open. “Remind me never to become a Senior,” she said.

“As if you can avoid it when it happens,” Tom said, sounding resigned. “Nita, you wouldn’t be the first wizard to get confused about the apparent differences between active and passive work in wizardry. But the Powers That Be don’t see the distinction — or They see it as largely illusory.” He paged through the book, stopping about halfway through to glance at something.

“If you go through this, you’ll see often enough where it says that wizards are told only what they need to know ‘for the work at hand.’ Which leaves you with the question: What do they find in it when there is no work at hand — no official assignment? You’d be surprised. But it’s never anything that goes to waste. Sooner or later, every wizard’s work, however minor, does someone, somewhere, some good. It’s an extension of the ‘all is done for each’ principle.”

“So what I’m doing isn’t like… withdrawal or anything?” Nita said. “Not… unhealthy?”

“Oh, no. Don’t forget, there are wizards who do nothing but read the manual.” Tom looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t be that far down the road. My job tends more toward focused research. But I still spend maybe seventy percent of my theoretically ‘inactive’ time reading these things. It’s a big universe out there. Just this planet, for example: Think how much you can discover about it just by going to the library, or rummaging around on the Web. Then imagine you have access to a book that contains most of the salient facts about your universe. Wouldn’t you spend a lot of time between the covers?”

“Uh,” Nita said. “Well, I guess I have been.”

“So, at the very least, even if you didn’t have a goal you were working toward, which I think you have, I wouldn’t consider your time wasted,” Tom said. “As for you not being on active assignment, that’s between you and the Powers. They value the work we do sufficiently to avoid pushing us to function when it wouldn’t be appropriate to the wizard’s own best interests.

Emergencies do come up; but routinely, if being on duty would impair your own status, you’re not called up.“ He eyed Nita. ”If you’re starting to feel the need to get back into the saddle, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be the one to tell me.“

Nita examined the floor in some detail for a few moments before she said anything. “It’s not like I actually feel all that much better,” she said, hardly above a whisper. She was watching herself with great care to see if she was going to start crying again; she couldn’t have borne it right this minute.

“Every now and then I forget to hurt… but the rest of the time… I keep seeing those last few hours with my mom, over and over.” Then she frowned. “But I can’t just sit around. It’s not bringing my mother back. And I keep getting the feeling she’d be annoyed with me for, I don’t know, for indulging myself in just sitting around and feeling bad when I should be busy with something important. Because this is important.”

Tom nodded. “I don’t think I can argue with that,” he said. “Meanwhile, tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Nita spent a few minutes describing the contacts she’d been having from the aliens, especially the last one — the knight — and the cryptic message he, or it, had left her.

When she was finished, Tom shook his head. “‘What fights the Enemy…’” he said. “You’re right, the phrasing’s interesting.”

“You think this alien’s a wizard?”

“Hard to tell,” Tom said. “There are lots of creatures all over the universe who both use the Speech and work to oppose the Lone Power without being wizards.“ He shrugged. ”For the time being, I’d keep trying to get through, I suppose, and see if you can work inward to a mode where there’s more clarity.“

“Yeah. I’m going to try the lucid dreaming again tonight, I think. So far, that’s where I’ve had the best results.” Nita frowned. “I guess that’s the other thing that’s worried me. The possibility of getting stuck in a dreamworld…”

“I’m not sure I see that as a danger for you,” Tom said. “I’d almost suggest the danger would lie in too much hardheaded practicality… in being too tough on yourself. For the time being, you seem to be okay. Let me know how you progress with your ‘alien,’ anyway.”

“Yeah.”

Nita got up and slipped into her parka, glancing at Tom’s stack of manuals again. “You have to learn that whole thing this year?”

“And keep Carl from blowing up the house,” Tom said. “Even wizardry may be insufficient to the task. See you later.”

“Kit, querido,” Kit’s mama said, “if you feed that dog so many dog biscuits, you’ll spoil his appetite for dinner.”

In the kitchen, adding a last few seasonings to what would shortly be a pot of minestrone soup, Kit’s father laughed out loud. “Impossible.”

Kit was sitting on the dining room sofa, trying to read one of the books on autism his mom had brought home for him. The language was pretty technical sometimes, but he was more than willing to struggle through it; the analysis of autism in this book was making some sense to him in terms of what he’d been getting from Darryl. There were apparently autistic people who found the complications of life and emotion so threatening, the book said, that when they did artwork, it often featured landscapes that looked sterile and empty to a casual viewer — but the artists’ intent was to express a desire for a little peace, for relief from the assault on their senses that caused them such pain. Since coming across this idea in the book, Kit had been doing his best to get the whole thing read, mining it for ways to make sure that he actually got some good out of his conversation with Darryl, when it finally happened.

Unfortunately the reading was being made difficult, if not impossible, by the large black muzzle that kept insinuating itself between Kit and the open pages, and the big brown eyes that looked beseechingly up into Kit’s. Just one more, Ponch said.

“You’re gonna turn into a blimp,” Kit said.

I‘ll be a happy blimp, Ponch said. What’s a blimp?

Kit’s mama laughed. Kit glanced up at her.

“He’s loud sometimes, honey,” his mama said, handing Kit’s papa the pepper shaker as he held his hand out for it. “I don’t know why you can’t hear it.”

Kit’s pop shook his head as he looked down into the pot, grinding pepper in. “From what Kit says, I don’t know why you can hear it at all. None of us should be able to.”

“Maybe it’s because I usually feed him in the mornings,” Kit’s mama said. “I’m used to hearing him complain that he’s not getting enough.” She made a kind of rrrgh noise that went up into a whine at the end, a fair imitation of Ponch’s reaction to an empty dish when there was someone around who could give him the rest of the can of dog food.

Ponch’s eyes moved at that, a sideways glance. Her accent’s not bad. I could teach her Cyene.

“Let’s not deal with this right now,” Kit said. He could just see his mom going down the street to try to talk sense to Tinkerbell.

One more

! Ponch said.

“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.

“The onions done yet?” his mama said.

“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it go in the trash can. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen. Out?

“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.

“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.

“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.

“A lot?” Kit said.

“Six to eight inches.”

Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday.

That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.

Still, if I told the snowstorm to dump, say, twelve feet of snow just on the school, and then only enough everywhere else so that everybody could have fun for a day; say six inches or so…

Kit sighed again. Though such a course of action would be less trouble to the snowplow crews, the emergency services, and everybody else who wanted to go on about their lives, something like that would cause a whole lot of talk, and still get him in trouble. But the image of his school completely buried under a giant snowdrift made him smile. “By the way, Pop,” Kit said, “is the TV still okay?”

“Seems fine,” his pop said. “Every now and then the thing insists on showing me a news program from some other planet, but…” He shrugged. “As long as nothing happens to interfere with the basketball games over the weekend, I don’t mind seeing who’s grown a new head or whatever.

Darlin‘, you know what I need?”

“Less time on the couch watching basketball?” Kit’s mama suggested.

“Dream on. Celery seed.”

“We’re out of it.”

“You’re just saying that because you hate celery.”

“I know celery seed is different from celery, or celery salt. But we’re still out of it. Look for yourself.”

Kit’s pop went to the cupboard to look. Kit, looking at his mama, thought that her expression was far too innocent. She caught him looking at her, and said, “Isn’t Ponch a long time out, Kit? He hates being out this long when it’s cold. But he hasn’t scratched.”

She had a point there, though Kit thought she was more intent on him not saying anything incriminating about celery seed. Kit grinned. “I’ll go see what he’s doing,” he said, and got his winter jacket off the hook.

He went out, shutting the door hurriedly behind him, and looked up and down the driveway for Ponch. To his surprise, Ponch was sitting at the street end of the driveway, looking up at the sky.

Kit walked down to him, looking up, too. The clouds were, indeed, coming in low and fast from the south on that wind. Past and above the houses across the street, only a few streaks and scraps of the low sunset remained in the west, a bleak, bleached peach color against the encroaching stripes of dark gray. Westward, the reddish spark of Mars could just be seen through the filmy front edges of one of the incoming banks of cloud.

Ponch looked over his shoulder at Kit as Kit came to stand next to him. “You okay?” Kit said to him in the Speech.

Pretty much.

Kit wondered about that. “I mean, about what happened the other day.” He reached down to scratch the dog’s head.

I think so.

The clouds drew together in the west, blanking Mars out, slowly shutting down the last embers of the sunset. “What did happen?”

I saw something.

“Yeah? What was it?”

Not that way

, Ponch said. I mean, I noticed something. I never really noticed it before.

Kit waited.

You get hurt sometimes

, Ponch said. That makes me sad.

“Yeah, well, I get sad when you’re hurt, too.”

That’s right. And your dam and your sire and your littermates, they hurt sometimes, too. So does Nita. I noticed that. But it didn’t seem to matter as much as you hurting.

Ponch paused for a long time. But then I saw him: Darryl. And what That One was doing to him, and how it hurt him. And he didn’t do anything to deserve that. It was awful, the way he was hurting.

And that started to hurt me. And then I thought, Why doesn’t the others’ hurt make me feel like this?

And then I felt bad about myself.

Kit hardly knew what to say. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing for his dog to learn about compassion, but that the lesson would come all at once, like this, came as a surprise.

And the others didn’t deserve to be hurt, either

, Ponch said, looking up at Kit. Nita didn’t do anything bad, for her mother to die. Why should she be hurt like that? Why should Dairine? Or your sire or dam?

They’re good. Why do they have to suffer when they haven’t been bad? It’s not fair!

Kit bowed his head. This line of reasoning all too closely reflected some of his own late-night thoughts over the past couple of months. And all the easy answers — about the Powers That Be and the Lone Power, and all the other additional theories or answers that might be suggested by either religion or science— suddenly sounded hollow and pathetic.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I really don’t know.”

I felt sad for them all, Ponch said. Sad for everything, because it shouldn’t have to be that way.

All of a sudden I had to howl, that’s all

He looked embarrassed.

Kit couldn’t think of anything to do but get down on one knee and hug Ponch, and ruffle his fur.

After a moment Ponch said, I’m not going to howl now. It’s all right.

“I know,” Kit said. But he wasn’t sure that it was “all right.”

Ponch looked at him again. 5b what do we do? he said. To make it right?

That answer, at least, Kit was sure of. “Just get on with work,” he said. “That’s what wizards do.”

And their dogs.

“And their dogs,” Kit said. “After dinner tonight, huh? We’ll go looking for Darryl again. We’ll see if we can’t get a word with him… find out what’s going on. Then he can get himself out of there, and we can get back to doing what we usually do.”

Right.

They walked back up the driveway together, and Kit let Ponch into the house, hurriedly shutting the door. The wind outside was beginning to rise. He ditched his coat in a hurry, because his pop had already carried the soup pot to the table, setting it on a trivet, and his mama was putting out bowls and spoons. “No Carmela tonight?” Kit said, because there were only three bowls.

“No, she’s over at Miguel’s with some of the other kids. A homework thing.” His mama sat down, took her spoon, and tasted the soup as Kit’s pop sat down.

“Oh, honey, that’s so good!” his mama said. “Even without the celery seed. Who’d believe most of it came out of a can? What else did you put in there?”

“Genius,” Kit’s father said, and grinned.

Kit was inclined to agree. He finished his first bowl in record time, and reached for the ladle to serve himself some more.

“Another satisfied customer,” his pop said.

Kit nodded, already working on the second bowl.

“You’ve got that fueling-up look,” his pop said, as he chased the last few spoonfuls of soup around his own bowl. “You going out on business tonight, son?”

“Yup.”

“How long?”

“Not late,” Kit said. “I don’t think, anyway. Back by bedtime.”

“Yours, or mine?”

“Mine, Pop.”

“Good,” his dad said. “What you’re doing is important… and so is getting your rest.” His father gave him what Kit usually thought of as “the eye,” a faintly warning look. “You’re looking a little pooped, this past day or so. Try to relax a little over the weekend, okay?”

“If I can,” Kit said.

His pop looked like he was going to say something, then changed his mind, and reached for the ladle himself. “Hey, who took all the beans?”

“That would be me,” Kit’s mama said.

“Now I’m going to have to make another pot of this!”

“How terrible for us all,” she said.

Kit finished his own bowlful and, smiling, got up and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went to get his parka and Ponch’s “leash.”

They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down at Ponch. “Ready?” he said.

All ready.

“You’ve got Darryl’s scent?”

It’s faint

, Ponch said. We’re going to have to walk for a while.

Kit checked the force-field spell, which he had integrated into the leash-wizardry, and saw that it was charged, up and running; it would keep hostile environments out for a good while, and protect the two of them from deadly force for at least long enough to come up with a better, more focused defense. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Ponch pulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished into a darkness deeper than anything in Kit’s backyard. Kit stepped after him; the blackness folded in all around.

They did, indeed, have to walk for some time. Kit kept a careful eye on the line of wizardry stretching between him and Ponch, watching to make sure that it was drawing power correctly, and that the faint “diagnostic” glow of light running up and down it was doing so regularly. Beyond that, there wasn’t much for Kit to do for a long while except keep walking through the dark, watching the ever-so-faintly illuminated shape of his dog as Ponch led the way.

A whispering sound — very faint, seemingly very far away — was the first thing that Kit started to notice as differing from the darkness and silence surrounding them. It was incessant, a soft whitenoise hiss at a high frequency, but every now and then Kit thought he heard words in it. Am I just imagining that

? he thought as the hiss got louder around them. “You hear that?” he said to Ponch.

The wind

? Ponch said. Yes. It’s up ahead, where Darryl is. We’ll be there soon.

“I mean, do you hear something besides the wind? The voices?”

Ponch paused a moment, cocked his head to one side. No, he said. Not right now, anyway. Let’s get there and see if I hear it then.

They started walking again. Quite suddenly, as if they’d walked through a curtain, Kit and Ponch were surrounded by blue-white light. Kit stopped, looking around him, blinking. After the darkness, this brilliance was dazzling.

At least there was gravity, though it felt lighter than Earth’s; and he knew there was an atmosphere, because Kit could hear sound from outside his force field: the hiss of the wind. But he wasn’t convinced that the atmosphere was breathable, especially because he could feel the cold outside, even through the force field. The air on the far side of the force field was full of blue-white smoke, or fog, moving fast, blown by the wind, and there was more blue-white stuff underfoot. “It’s like being inside a lightbulb,” Kit said.

If it is, then I’ll avoid it in the future

, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. It smells bad here.

The wind dropped off briefly, and Kit was able to look out of the lightbulb and see that the two of them had stepped into a snowfield. Except that snow isn’t blue, Kit thought. Ponch, though insulated from the cold around them by the force field, nonetheless shifted uncertainly from foot to foot in the robin’s-egg blue stuff. Kit felt the odd soft squeak of it under his sneakers, and understood Ponch’s confusion. It feels more like talcum powder than snow. Or, no, more like cornstarch — for that strange squeaky sensation persisted no matter how the stuff packed under Kit’s feet.

The wind rose again, reducing the visibility to nothing as it picked the snow up and started blowing it around in the air. The snow was as fine as powder on the wind, finer than any powdery snow that Kit had ever seen, even in blizzard conditions. The stuff piled and drifted in spherical sections around Kit’s force field, gathering like swirls of smoke, abruptly dissipating again like smoke blown away. Suddenly Kit realized what he was seeing, and realized, too, why the snow’s texture was so strange. This isn’t water snow. It’s too cold here for that. This is methane…

The wind howling around them gusted for a few breaths more, blowing the blinding snow shrieking past Kit and Ponch, and then dropped off once more, just briefly giving Kit the wider view again as the snow drifted back out of the air to the ground. We might as well call it air, Kit thought, though he knew that if he tried to breathe it at this temperature, it would freeze his lungs to solid blocks of blood and water ice. He popped his manual open to a premarked page for reading environmental conditions and let it take a moment to do its sensing while he turned in a circle, looking at the landscape.

There wasn’t much of it. Nearby, black crags of stone stood up here and there, shining with blue ice that seemed almost to glow on its own in this fierce sourceless light. Kit glanced up at the sky, wondering whether there was a star up there somewhere, on the far side of what might be a

“greenhouse” layer like Venus’s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a planet at all — just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions. Whichever it is, he thought, it has weather, and the weather’s bad. Even Titan’s weather is better than this.

Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there.

Nitrogen atmosphere. No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow

… Kit shivered despite the force field: The temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade.

“I’m glad I brought a coat,” he said softly.

I wish I could grow mine thicker, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. I didn’t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.

“Believe me, we won’t stay long,” Kit said. “Just long enough to talk to Darryl.” The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch… and this meant that keeping his own environment and Ponch’s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl’s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. “Let’s get going. Where in all this is he?” Kit said to Ponch.

That way

, Ponch said, turning. The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things.

There’s company here.

“The same company as last time?”

The same. A heart of cold.

“Great,” Kit said under his breath. “Well, let’s head that way. I’ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.”

If you could make the wind drop…

It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it— And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he’d ever done, that growing, listening silence — as the universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation — was suddenly missing.

Blocked

, Kit thought. But how?! Not even the Lone Power Itself should have been able to keep a wizardry from executing. Once executed, of course, it might fail, but—

Kit tried the spell again, and again got no result. Yet his force field was working fine. If it hadn’t been, he and Ponch would both have been frozen solid by now.

“Weird,” Kit said, closing the manual for the moment. “Looks like this environment’s been instructed not to let itself be altered.”

Could the Lone One have done that?

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Never mind

, Ponch said. I don’t need to see, to lead us. And as for the Lone One… Ponch’s nose worked. It’s distracted, Ponch said. And Darryl’s moving. Come on.

Ponch pulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now and then a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whited everything out. “Snow tonight,” a voice said from somewhere immeasurably distant.

“You heard it that time, right?” Kit said.

I heard something

, Ponch said. And then he paused in midstep. I hear something besides that, too.

Kit waited.

Wings—

Kit listened, but couldn’t make anything out except that the wind was rising, the hiss scaling up to a soft roar. The last time he’d heard a wind like this was when the hurricane had come through three years ago. The hurricane, though, had at least sounded impersonal in its rage. The sound of this wind had a more intimate quality, invasive, as if it was purposely pointed at Kit. And the voices were part of it.

“—won’t be able to—”

“—and in local news tonight—

“—wish I could understand why, but there’s no point in even asking, I guess—”

“—come on, love, we need to get this on you. No, don’t do that. Remember what we talked about—”

The voices somehow both spoke at normal volume and screamed in Kit’s ears, intrusive, grating, maddening. He couldn’t shut them out. He opened his manual and hurriedly went through it to the section that would allow him to soundproof the force field, for the voices were scaling up into the deafening range now, an ever increasing roar. The noise wasn’t just made up of voices, either. Music was part of it, too, but music gone horribly wrong, screeching at him, and also sounds that might have come from Kit’s own house, a door closing, someone opening a drawer, sounds that were magnified past bearing, intolerable—

Kit recited the wizardry, having to do it nearly at the top of his lungs to hear himself think. To his great relief, it took; he could tell that the sound all around him outside the force field was still rising, but now at least it was muted to a tolerable level. “Wow,” he said to Ponch, who was shaking his own head, also troubled by the noise.

I lost him, Ponch said. He moved again. He moves very fast sometimes. He—

Ponch’s head whipped around. Kit looked the way his dog was looking, through the blowing blue snow, just in time to catch sight of the thin young shape running past them, dressed in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt, running through the terrible cold and wind, running headlong, a little sloped forward from the waist as Kit had seen him running for the van at school.

“Darryl!” Kit shouted. “Hey, Darryl, wait up!”

Darryl turned his head for just a flash, looking toward Kit. For a fraction of a second, their eyes met.

Darryl ran on. Kit reeled back as if someone had hit him across the face, and staggered with shock and pain. He had felt, for that second, what Darryl had felt: the unbearable pain of another person’s regard.

Kit had sometimes found it hard to look into someone else’s eyes, but that was nothing like this.

This pain denied even the existence of the one who looked back. For Darryl, even meeting the gaze of his own eyes in the mirror was impossible, nonsensical, painful. Yet Kit also thought of the blind looks of the statues at the edge of the world of dunes, and suddenly realized that maybe it was only to him that their blindness seemed creepy. To Darryl, in his autism, maybe they were as close as he could comfortably get to the experience of being looked at by another being. It’s something he wants, even though it hurts.

At least he wants it, though. If he didn’t—

Kit shook his head. “Where’d he go?”

That way.

“Come on!”

Kit and Ponch ran after him. But it seemed as if, in this world, Darryl could run a lot faster than they could. “The wind’s filling in his tracks,” Kit gasped.

I don’t need them. Listen, though!

Kit could hear very little now that he’d turned the sound down inside the force field.

“What?”

The wings! They’re here —

The first of them roared overhead, trailing noise like a passing jetliner. Kit looked up and saw, dimly, through the blowing snow, what Ponch had been talking about. He was tempted to duck. The thing wasn’t big, maybe only six feet long or so, but it looked deadly. It was as if someone had taken the three-finned symmetry of a standard paper plane and brought it to life, but with wings that were clawed on the forward edges. The creature was a furry blue white, just paler than the snow, and eyeless, though it had a long, nasty, many-fanged mouth that ran down the length of its body between two of the wings. And it brought the terrible noise with it as it shot overhead and past, dragging behind it still more of the torrent of voices and sounds that threatened to drown whatever lay in their wake. It tilted one wing, and started to circle Kit.

Basilisk

! Kit thought, having seen the creatures’ images in the manual more than once, and having thought every time that he’d rather not see them in the flesh. They weren’t the heraldic beasts that went by the name, but a worse thing that the Lone Power had constructed from spare parts in Its spare time — a minion-creature that served as mindless messenger and doer of small dirty deeds. And it sees me. The stealth spell isn’t working, either—

There were three kinds of basilisk: hot, cold, and starry. It was plain enough to Kit which kind he was dealing with here, and he knew the remedy for them if they got too close. Heat—

Kit flipped his manual open to its notes and storage area. Some time back during the summer, his pop had been having a lot of trouble keeping the barbecue lit, and Kit — unnerved by the overconfident way his pop sprayed the lighting fluid around in his attempts to relight it — had started working with some of the wizardries that temporarily “set” air solid and selectively reflective, so that it could be used to produce laser beams. When the barbecue season had come to an end, Kit had stored those wizardries in his manual for the next year. Now he hurriedly pulled one of them out, shook the long chain of characters out until it solidified into a rod, and twiddled its end to reset the air variable. Fortunately it didn’t take long: All he had to do was deduct the oxygen and add some hydrocarbons. Right. Here we go—

Kit stuffed his manual into his parka pocket, shouldered the bright-glowing rod of the laser, and waited for the basilisk to swoop at him… and then was disappointed when it didn’t bother, but just went screaming on past. Several others followed, all heading in the direction Darryl had gone. Kit stood there for a moment and let out a long breath that was as much frustration as relief. It was annoying to have something to shoot with, and something worth shooting at, and then not have an excuse to shoot at it.

He’s stopped running

, Ponch said suddenly.

“What?” Kit said. “They’ve caught him!”

I’m not sure

, Ponch said.

“Come on!”

They ran the way Darryl had gone. As they ran, something occurred to Kit. The stealth spell hasn’t been working since we got here — otherwise, Darryl wouldn’t have seen me, either. Kit wondered if these places where he kept finding Darryl weren’t just rigorously constructed landscapes of the mind, obeying natural law, but genuine alternate universes, custom-made, the kind of places Nita had been working with to help her mother — the kind of thing Ponch had started creating on his own. Places where even the way wizardry works can be changed—

As Kit ran, he found his endurance wasn’t what it normally would have been. He was tiring. He couldn’t get rid of the sense that, whether real or inside Darryl’s mind, this universe was much farther away than the last one. There was something inherently wearying about this space itself, as if its structure sapped the energy of anyone unfortunate enough to stray into it. Or maybe it was just the noise — the wind, the roaring of the voices outside, getting louder again—

Kit stopped for a moment to readjust the force-field wizardry, then went on again at a dogtrot behind Ponch. “You doing okay?” Kit said.

So far, no problems.

“You feel all right?”

So far…

Ahead of them, dimly, through the blue-smoke swirling of the methane snow, Kit thought he could see the basilisks diving and swooping at something, fluttering at it. Kit couldn’t make out what it was.

Then, as he got a little closer, he could.

Darryl was standing there with his arms up over his eyes, twisting, turning from side to side… and then he stopped. Between one breath and another, he had become encased in what looked like a solid block of ice. The basilisks were scrabbling at it with the claws on their wings, screaming, and the thunder up in the sightless, coldly burning sky beat in the air like a heart, deafening.

Suddenly the basilisks flapped away, up into that blue-white haze, as a shadow approached them out of the blowing snow. Kit gulped and put the laser away in his otherspace pocket as the form became distinct, gathering Its darknesses together out of the snowy air.

The Lone Power came striding up to that block of ice, looking as Kit had seen It a long time ago — like a young-looking human, red-haired, handsome, but with cruel, cold eyes and a smile you did not want to see. It was wearing the same dark suit Kit had seen It wear on his own Ordeal, but this time with a long, black winter coat over it, and a scarf wrapped around Its throat. The Lone One’s eyes were still angry and chill, but right now they also held an oddly weary and annoyed expression that intensified the closer It got to Darryl. A few feet away from the block of ice, It stopped and stood, and put out Its hand, which was suddenly filled with the hilt of a long, blackbladed sword.

The Lone Power stood there in silence for a moment, gazing at Darryl’s silent form with narrowed eyes.

“So it comes to this,” the Lone One said. “For a while, at least, you tried to fight. I’ll give you credit for that. But now you’ve given up. What were you thinking of? That I’d be merciful now, that I’d let you off easy because of your ‘problem’? You should know better. When people give up around me, the poor fools pay the price.” It took a step forward, slow, menacing, savoring the moment. “Not that not giving up helps them, either, of course. Even for those who pass their Ordeals, there’s no escape; I get them later. All they ever manage to do is delay the inevitable.”

A chill, which had nothing to do with the local weather, went down Kit’s back as the Lone Power took another step forward, and another, hefting the sword, lifting it in slow preparation to strike. “In your case, though,” the Lone One said, amused, “there won’t be any further delay. You should never have accepted the power if you weren’t willing to use it. And you weren’t… so now you lose it.”

I can’t stand it, Kit said silently to Ponch.

But I thought Tom said—

I don’t care. I’m not going to just stand here!

Kit had already made sure the shield around him was secure. Now he was paging hurriedly through the manual to a section he looked at fairly often but had very rarely used, the offensive weaponry. It was the Lone One Itself he was going to be dealing with here, so Kit chose a quarklevel dissociation tool — the wizardry equivalent of a low-yield tactical nuke — hooked his “canned” description of himself into it, told the wizardry to take as much of his power as it needed for one good shot, and then swallowed hard once, because this was scary stuff. You ready to get us out of here in a hurry if you have to

? he said to Ponch.

Say the word.

I may not have time—

I‘ll be ready.

Kit took a deep breath — then dumped the stealth spell. He took a step forward, and another, and then walked right up to It, where It stood.

“Fairest and Fallen,” Kit said, trying hard to keep his voice even, “greeting and defiance.”

It didn’t even look up.

Kit stood there breathing hard. “I said, greeting and defiance—”

No answer. The Lone One was intent on Darryl. It lifted that black blade high. Darkness ran down it, sweeping after in a trail as It brought the sword swinging around. Kit swallowed one more time and spoke the first of three words that would activate the dissociator, as the sword struck the middle of that block of methane ice—

— and shattered.

Kit stared.

The Lone Power straightened up from the stroke— and looked, suddenly dumbfounded, at the broken stump of a sword in Its hand. The block of ice wasn’t marred, not even scratched.

If It was astonished, so was Kit. Could it be that the Lone Power can’t see you when you’re in someone else’s Ordeal

? he wondered. But Tom would’ve said something.

Or is this space just the way it is because of Darryl being here? If Mama’s right, if some autistic people have trouble with the concept that other people might be or think differently from them, then maybe nothing It does to Darryl here can hurt him… because the things It does aren’t things he’d do—

Kit looked at the Lone Power, wondering in a scared way what was going through Its mind. It regarded the broken sword for a moment, then flung it furiously away. Where the hilt-shard came down in the blue snow, there was a brief and noisy explosion. But the Lone One ignored that. It put Its hands up against the front of the block of ice and spoke softly to the small shape entombed there.

“Are you really stupid or crazy enough to think I’m just going to walk away?” the Lone Power said, and the menace in Its voice made Kit’s hair stand up all over him. “I have centuries, aeons at my disposal. I can hound you from life to life if I chose, until for the sake of a moment’s peace you beg me to destroy your soul! Is this what your precious Powers gave you your wizardry for? To stand here inactive as a statue, refusing the inevitable? Well, it won’t help you. Coward! You can’t come out the other side of this until you confront me. And you won’t confront me! You’ll just stay in here like the pitiful reject that you are, while outside in reality your darling mother and father grieve over you every day. You’re not being very considerate of them, are you? After everything they’ve gone through? Now you have a chance to stand up, to conquer me, to come out the other side of your power, and you won’t take it.”

Kit was having trouble believing what he was hearing. The Lone Power was frustrated. He saw the unbelievable — saw the Power that invented death start hammering with Its fists on the upright coffin of ice. “Come out!” the Lone One cried, and thunder cracked in response, high up in the wind-torn air. The snow blew around again, hiding nearly everything but that relentless, furious, stymied darkness. “Come out and let’s finish it! Come out!”

The thunder of Its voice started to drown out even the thunder up in the turbulent atmosphere.

How long this went on Kit wasn’t sure, but finally It fell silent, looking once more at the small, unmoving shape in the ice.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Lone One said. “I can wait. I have all the time in all the worlds. Sooner or later, you’ll drop this ploy and try another that’s less effective.

Sooner or later, in life or after, you’ll be forced to face me… and when you finally do, you’ll wish your soul had never been created. For that day, I’ll wait as long as it takes.“

It turned and walked away into the blue-white snow. Kit lost sight of It within seconds, and a few seconds after that, by a lightening of the spirit that was impossible to mistake, Kit knew that It had left this space. Next to him, Ponch was shivering with a combination of nervousness and amusement.

“Wow,” Kit said.

Yes. Let’s get him out of there

! Ponch said.

“Absolutely.”

Kit dismantled the dissociator, and he and Ponch hurried over to the block of ice. But the closer Kit got to it, the stranger things started to seem. That weariness that Kit had been feeling, to a certain extent, since he got here, now got stronger with every step closer to Darryl.

He rubbed his eyes, staggered over to the block, put a hand on it. It was frozen methane, but the force field protected him from its touch. “Darryl,” Kit said. “Dai stiho, guy. I can’t believe you held It off like that. Nice going.”

But Darryl didn’t so much as twitch an eyelid. And as Kit bent over the block, trying to figure out how to get rid of it, or at least how to rouse Darryl, he found himself having more and more trouble believing in any of this. It started to seem as if none of it was real: not the cold, not the wind, not the single small, still, cold shape standing there rigid in the ice, expressionless, unmoving, unseeing. And as for the concept of the Lone Power banging on the block of ice, not only frustrated but powerless — that couldn’t have happened, either.

“Darryl,” Kit said. “Come on, buddy, this is no place for our kind of people.”

But the feeling began to grow in Kit that this wasn’t really Darryl, that he wasn’t here — which was something Ponch had said the last time. Now, though, Kit could feel for himself what Ponch had meant. Darryl’s presence here was illusory. None of this was real. What a relief, because this is all just too weird—

Kit straightened up, passed his hand over his eyes. He was incredibly tired, and there was nothing he could do here. Outside the force field, the noise was scaling up again. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter, though.

Kit.

“What?”

We have to go.

“Go where?”

Kit! We have to go home. The wizardry’s failing. Come on!

“What?”

Ponch turned, leaped at him, knocked him over. For a moment the two of them fell through darkness. Kit flailed for balance, found none, cried out—

And came down, wham, into something cold and wet. At first Kit panicked, because with a terrible suddenness his mind became clear again about two things: that the force field had failed, and that he was lying in the snow, which meant that in about another five seconds he would be dead. But then Kit realized that this snow was so much warmer and wetter than the snow where he’d just been that it might as well have been steaming; and the silence surrounding them was so complete, compared to where they had been, that Kit’s ears rang with it.

Ponch was lying on top of him, licking his face in apology and fear. Are you all right? Boss! I had to get us out of there. Are you all right? Kit!

“Oh, wow,” Kit whispered. “Okay, yeah, I’m okay.” He pushed himself up on his elbows with some difficulty, dislodging Ponch in the process. Kit was lying in his driveway, in approximately three inches of snow, and as he looked over at the corner streetlight, he saw that more snow was falling, in big flakes, through still and silent air.

He turned around to look at his house and saw that all the lights were off except for the one in his parents’ bedroom. “Oh, no,” he said. “What time is it?”

Kit looked at his watch. It was two-thirty in the morning.

“Oh, god, the time flow in there wasn’t what I was expecting. I’m going to get it now,” he muttered as he staggered to his feet. “I’m completely wrecked. And they’re going to kill me.”

Not if I can help it

, Ponch said.

“Buddy,” Kit said, “I don’t think even the Powers That Be could prevent the massacre at this point. Let’s go in and get it over with.”

Together they made their way up the driveway.