A Wizard Alone

Entrapments

Kit and Carl were sitting together in Tom and Carl’s dining room, later that afternoon.

“Kit,” Carl said, “it’s all very interesting what you’ve told me. It throws a lot of light on Darryl's problem. I’m going to look into this myself, as far as possible. In the meantime”—he frowned—“I want to know why it took you so long to get in here and tell Tom or me about this. We’ve been working together on power-sensitive issues long enough that you ought to know better than to let a situation of this kind go for so long without a debrief.”

“I’ve had the manual on record-and-report,” Kit said.

Carl shook his head. “Not good enough,” he said. “The manual, powerful as it is, is context-poor when reporting on experiences like this. Especially considering that what you’ve been doing with Ponch is unique as far as I can tell. For maximum effectiveness in assessing Darryl’s status, I need to know how things looked and felt to you after the fact, as well as during it. So you’d better start getting serious about this, Kit. It’s not like you to let things slide.“

“Okay,” Kit said.

Carl looked at him with an expression that suggested he was expecting to hear something else.

At last he said, “Which brings me to the next thing on the list. The Powers certainly don’t expect you to work on a project so hard that you neglect your own well-being. Neither do I. You look terrible; you’ve been spending too much time chasing around outside of your home space, and it’s affecting you. I appreciate your efforts, believe me… but I want you to take a couple of days off.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Carl said.

Now it was Kit’s turn to frown. Possibly Carl read the expression as rebelliousness. “Kit,” he said, “as a Senior, it’s not beyond my abilities to put a freeze on your wizardly exertions for the next day or three. I would prefer not to have to do that: It’s undignified for both of us, and it also sends a signal to the Powers that there might be a problem with the way you’re using the Art. I would much prefer to hear you tell me that you won’t do any further exploration of Darryl’s inner worlds until Tom and I have had some time to work out what seems to be the best way to proceed. This may sound cruel to you, but he’s been holding his own for the past three months, at least; I would guess he’ll hang on for a day or two more. You, on the other hand, need to leave his problem with me for the next couple of days.”

Kit let out a long breath. “So,” Carl said, “do I have your word?”

“Mmf,” Kit said.

Carl gave him an exasperated look. “Even among nonwizards,” Carl said, “it’s considered impolite to grunt.”

“I promise,” Kit said.

“Good,” Carl said. “Thanks.” He relaxed a little. “Kit, go home, get some rest. It’s not that you did a bad job… it’s just that you got a little too wrapped up in this one. Take two days or so and get your objectivity back. Then you and Tom and I will sit down and work out what to do next.” And he saw Kit out the sliding doors into the backyard.

Kit used his transport wizardry to get home, then walked slowly down the driveway to the side door, with Ponch trotting along behind him. He was feeling rather bruised. But to a certain extent, bizarrely, part of him felt grateful. Carl’s very understated annoyance had shaken Kit a little way out of the feeling that had been creeping up on him that nothing particularly mattered. However, that was the only good thing about it. Kit felt very much as if he were in disgrace.

You look sad

, Ponch said.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I think I’m just tired.” Even as he said it, though, Kit wondered how true this was. Ever since he woke up from his jungle dream, he had been moving through a world that seemed oddly dulled around the edges. The daylight seemed to be reaching him through some kind of filter; sound seemed distant, and he didn’t even seem able to feel his clothes properly — they seemed to bother his skin where they rested on it. The feeling was like what he got sometimes when he was coming down with a cold. Maybe Mama was right…

He went in the back door, took off his coat and hung it up, while Ponch trotted over to his dog food bowl and started to chow down on dry food. Kit’s mama, in the kitchen in her nurse’s pinks, looked up at him from the business of making a sandwich. “How are you feeling, sweetie?”

“Maybe a little better,” Kit said, thinking that possibly this was true. “Getting out in the air was nice. Where’s Pop?”

“He’s lying down reading a book, waiting for the basketball game.”

“Okay.”

His mama gave Kit a glance as he went and flopped down on the dining room sofa. At first Kit thought she was going to bring up once more the subject of the discussion she and Kit’s pop had had with him earlier. “I meant to thank you, by the way,” his mama said as she opened a drawer to get a plastic bag to put her sandwich in. “It’s been so much quieter.”

His mama’s voice had a strange grating quality to it, which Kit couldn’t remember having heard before. Is she coming down with a cold, too? Kit thought. It wouldn’t be great if we all got sick at once

. “Sorry?”

“The little dog down the street.”

Kit was bemused. “Tinkerbell, you mean? I haven’t talked to him.”

“You haven’t?”

“Sorry, Mama, I’ve been busy.”

“Well, he got quiet again. Relatively quiet, anyway. There was some howling earlier, but it didn’t last long.”

“That’s good,” Kit said. He stretched, but far from making him feel more comfortable, it made him feel less so; he felt very out of sorts, as if his skin didn’t fit him, as if his bones weren’t fastened together correctly. “Mama, I think I might go lie down again for a while.”

That got her attention. She finished wrapping her sandwich and came over to feel his forehead.

“Do you feel hot, sweetie?” she said.

Kit shook his head. If anything, he felt chilly, though not to the point of shivers — he felt a strange kind of still numbness that left him unwilling to talk about what was bothering him. Indeed, talking about anything seemed more trouble than it was worth. When his mother took her hand away, Kit got up and went to his room. There, as he lay down on his bed, he reached out for his manual and started paging through it to find a diagnostic to run on himself. I won’t be any good to anybody if I just lie around feeling like this

But, shortly, Kit was lying on his back again, gazing at the ceiling, the manual lying open, pages down, on the bed beside him. He didn’t even hear Ponch come in and circle around once to lie on the braided rug by the bed, looking up at him with troubled eyes. And after a while Kit turned over on his side again and just stared at the wall…

The next afternoon, Nita was sitting at her desk, cutting a deck of cards. She had reached the point where what she really wanted to cut them with was a meat cleaver, but that would simply have meant that she’d have to get another deck of cards from somewhere.

Nita cut the cards again. There’s an art to this, she thought. The only problem is, it isn’t my Art.

And no matter how I do this, when I think of why I’m learning it in the first place, it feels like cheating.

She was working on her false shuffle. From what she’d been able to find out on the Web, many of the simplest card tricks depended on shuffling the cards in such a way as to make the card you wanted come up in the right place. This, in turn, involved protecting some of the cards with one of your hands while you shuffled. So far, Nita had gotten to the point where she could protect about a third of the deck, keeping the cards stacked there from being shuffled out of order. In about three hundred years

, she thought, I'll be ready to let some other human being see me do a trick. Why did I ever mention magic to Mr. Millman?

The only good thing about having to sit here doing this was that it gave Nita something to occupy her hands while she worried about Kit. She’d called him late yesterday afternoon to make sure he’d gone to see Carl, and had been very concerned about the tone of his voice. It had acquired a strange monotonous quality, one that made her think of…

A robot? she thought, unnerved. She stopped shuffling for a moment and thought about that. It occurred to Nita that the more contact they’d all had with Darryl, the better his ability to express himself had become… and the more adverse effect it seemed to be having on Kit.

If he goes in there again

, she thought, he’s going to lose it.

And he’s going to go in there again. I’m sure of it.

Nita cut the cards again, looking to see if the ace of hearts, the card she had been protecting, came up. What she got was the three of clubs. She made an annoyed face and pushed the cards away. It wasn’t just a matter of Kit’s stubbornness now — not that that couldn’t be formidable when he was in the right mood. She was also dealing with something else she was less familiar with: Darryl’s stubbornness. He had been holding off the Lone Power all by himself for a long time now, and Nita didn’t think he was going to stop for their sakes. And why should he? she thought. From his point of view, or what’s been his point of view for a long while, he’s all there is. He might as well be the only wizard alive. He may briefly realize there are more of us… but it doesn’t last.

Because he keeps making himself alone again every time

Nita thought about what that must cost him. Such loneliness would have crippled her a long time ago. But he bears up under it, she thought.

He just keeps fighting.

That stubbornness had found a resonance in Kit. He and Darryl had become linked in more ways than one.

His promises to Carl aside, Nita had a feeling that Kit was going to find himself in Darryl’s mind again shortly. At which time, Nita thought, I’d better be ready.

She picked up the deck again, took a couple of minutes to find the ace of hearts, repositioned it, and reshuffled, carefully protecting the back third of the deck. Then she put the deck down, cut it twice so that she had three piles, reached out to the leftmost pile, and turned the top card over. It was the four of diamonds.

I hate this, Nita thought. She stood up from her desk and went across the hall to Dairine’s room.

Her sister was sitting at her own desk, which was still completely covered by the papier-mache version of Olympus Mons. It was no longer gray-white; Dairine had done a fairly credible job with her wizardly airbrush. Now the mountain lay there nicely colored in shades of red and pink, its huge crater looking entirely ready to spill out lava. Spot was sitting up on one of the bookshelves, peering down at the volcano with his little stalky eyes.

“Dair?”

Dairine looked up at Nita with a weary expression.

“I think I’m going to need some help,” Nita said.

“As long as it doesn’t involve me painting anything,” Dairine said, “you’re on.”

Nita came in and sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked.

Dairine looked at her.

“Don’t start,” Nita said. “You know what’s on my mind.”

“Darryl,” Dairine said. “Or the ace of hearts.”

“Please,” Nita said. “Dair, I need to ask you a favor.”

Her sister gave her a slightly suspicious look.

“He’s going to go in there again,” Nita said.

“Kit?” Dairine put her eyebrows up. “I thought he promised Carl he wouldn’t.”

“Dairine, I don’t think he’s entirely in control of what’s going on with him. Darryl is very, uh, single-minded. And that single-mindedness strikes me as really likely to affect Kit. I think we need to be ready for that.”

“‘We’?” Dairine said.

“Dairine, he’s sure not listening to me right now—”

“I guess you know what he felt like with you over the past month, then,” Dairine said.

Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. “So we’ve got to arrange some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me — for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure that there’s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.”

Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position for Dairine; usually, even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. “Are you sure you want my help?” Dairine said.

Nita looked at her strangely. “Are you crazy?” she said. “Of course I do.”

“I just wasn’t sure,” Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset about her face, but all the same, Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. “I warned you, Neets. Right now I’m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would not so long ago. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything really high-powered—”

She shook her head. “I don’t know if you want to be depending on me right now.”

“I will depend on you any time,” Nita said.

The look Dairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it. She opened her mouth. “Do I have to say it in the Speech?” Nita said.

“Nita,” Dairine said then, very softly, “Mom couldn’t depend on me.”

Nita shook her head. “If you mean you couldn’t just make a wish and save her life,” Nita said, “then you’re right. If you really thought that it was going to be that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn’t depend on you. Or that I won’t.”

“You may be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now,” Dairine said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I’m exactly a model of stability right now myself,” she said, “but I can’t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net? Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl is apparently…”

Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tell Dairine about why Darryl was special.

“Something unusual,” Dairine said. “A lot of power… or something else. He would have to be unusual, to have attracted so much attention from Tom and Carl.“

Dairine sat quietly for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll work something out for you,” she said.

Nita nodded. “Thanks,” she said. She turned away.

“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Dairine said. “Asking me for help.”

Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. “Better it should kill me than Kit,” she said.

Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.

We have to go.

Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon. Where did the day go? part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to get him out of there. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.

He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather, he had changed it, Darryl had changed it, to put the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always realized what had happened eventually — that Darryl had It trapped — and then Darryl had to change everything again, making a new world, a new self, in which the Pursuer would once again be confused. Each new world was better than the last, with new rules to impede the Lone One’s power and to keep him occupied longer. He wished, sometimes, that Darryl didn’t have to do it again and again. It gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for. If it was for anything else…

We have to go

, Kit thought, and got out of bed—

— and tripped over Ponch, who was lying on the rug, watching him. Boss! Ponch yelped. Where are you going?

“We have to go,” Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn’t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.

You promised you wouldn’t

! Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down. You told Carl you’d stay here!

But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone different had made it: another person, in another place… different from this, the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself around him. The last time, he’d gotten a little careless, and the dark Other had found Its way in, and out again, too easily. This time, the place to which he found his way had to be a little more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what he couldn’t face in the mirror on the wall, in which he had to see, every day, human eyes with the dark Other looking out of them. This is Its weapon against you, the thought had come to him. Turn the weapon against It…

That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly into it, such was the other’s power and his need for help. Distressed, Ponch said, The leash! Boss, let me get the leash!

Wait for me—

The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.

Stay there, boss! Kit — stay! Stay!

The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other’s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for — to befuddle It, wear It down until eventually It would stop coming and just leave him alone. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence it was worth clinging to.

The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, the only gaze he could stand, the only eyes that didn’t hurt him. Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist.

Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told.

As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world, or into the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too—

“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”

No reply.

“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”

No reply.

Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”

She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a sandwich, got up and answered it.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Marina…No, he’s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute…”

Nita’s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple “guess the card” trick to work. “Nita?” her dad said. “Is Kit here?”

Nita was surprised. “No.”

“His mom’s looking for him.”

Nita’s heart went cold inside her. “I thought he was going to be home all day today.”

“He’s not there, his mom says.”

Nita sat still for a moment. Kit?

There was no answer.

She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly. “I don’t hear him nearby,” she said. “Wait a minute, Daddy.”

She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it, “Kit, where are you? Urgent!”

“Send message?” the manual page said.

“Send it!”

“Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.”

Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn’t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.

She took the phone from her dad. “Mrs. Rodriguez? It’s Nita. I just called him, but I don’t get any answer. And the manual says he’s not in this universe. He’s gone again.”

There was a long, frightened pause on the other end of the phone. “He said he wasn’t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,” Kit’s mama said. “But he really hasn’t been… himself, these past couple of days.”

That was exactly Nita’s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn’t himself, but somebody else. She had started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect autism might have on an abdal’s ability to be two places at one time. If that ability could start “slopping over” onto another party, one already susceptible to the abdal’s worldview, from having been inside it a few times—

She held still. I have got to keep my cool here, she thought. It’s the only way I’m going to find him

. “I’m going to go look for him,” Nita said. “It may take me a while to find him. I can’t do it the way he does it with Ponch; I’ve got to be asleep.”

She heard Kit’s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone else controlling herself as tightly as Nita was having to right now. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me? I think Kit gave you my work number.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Mrs. Rodriguez, please… don’t worry.” It’s going to he all right, Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn’t say it: It might not be true.

“Okay,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.”

Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her in distress.

“Where is he?” he said.

Nita shook her head. “I don’t have a name for it, Daddy. It’s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it’d be easier to get to. It’s somewhere inside of Darryl, which means it’s closer to us in some ways, but in some ways much further off than anything that would just be way out in conventional space. And it’s a lot more dangerous, in its way. If Kit’s stuck in there, and I can’t get him out…“

She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she’d been most afraid of — a crisis that she was terrified she wasn’t going to be able to handle. And you’re all alone on this one, she thought.

Dairine may be able to offer some support, but you’re going to be the one who has to figure out what to do with it. And if you can’t figure it out…

Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her. “Nita,” he said. “Listen to me.”

She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.

“You’re tough,” her dad said. “You’re tougher than you think. That’s what you need to hang on to now. That’s what I’ve been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don’t let the idea go. What you have to do now is take one thing at a time — don’t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do? Call them.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, and went back to the phone, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Carl,” Nita said, “we’ve got trouble. He couldn’t hold it. He’s gone again.”

Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. Nita, however, distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl’s silence. “When did he leave?”

“It might have been just a few minutes ago.”

“Okay. Wait a second.”

Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table, where his version of the manual usually lay hidden. She heard him flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.

A moment later he picked up the phone again. “He’s out of ambit, all right,” Carl said. “And the energy signatures are too vague to track him with, in terms of getting an ID on a specific universe… even assuming I could do that. The universes Ponch has been finding are nontypical, as is his mode of transit; the normal wizardry-tracking routines won’t work. But this much we do have in our favor.

Ponch went with Eat.”

“I bet Ponch made Kit take him,” Nita said, feeling sure of this without knowing why. “Carl, I’ll go try to find them.”

“I wouldn’t do that right this minute,” Carl said. “They might still be in transit. I can’t tell. Give the situation an hour or two to settle.”

Nita could see his point, but she didn’t like it. “Carl, he’s been really spaced-out since he came back from his last time in Darryl's universe. Anything could happen to him in a few minutes, let alone an hour!”

“Nita,” Carl said, “take a breath or two and get a grip on yourself. I know how you feel, but even if you’d already done the presleep preparation you need to do for a lucid dreaming session — which I don’t think you have — you’d still need to get to sleep after that. And you know you can’t induce it with a sleep spell when you’re going lucid. You’re going to have to relax a little, enough to sleep, or you won’t be able to do anything.”

She let out a long breath. “I hate it when you’re right,” Nita said. “Okay. I’ll call you later and let you know what I find.”

“Do that. I’ll be up late.”

She hung up, looked at her father. Dairine had come downstairs and was leaning in the dining room doorway, looking alert, with Spot peering into the kitchen from behind her legs. To Dairine, Nita said, “He’s gone. Let’s start building that power-feed spell; I’m going to need it in a couple of hours.”

She and Dairine headed up the stairs.

It took Nita nearly four hours to get ready to go after Kit, and even then she couldn’t sleep. Part of the problem was that she was very much a daytime person and found it tough to get to sleep before eight in the evening. The rest of the problem was her nerves.

When Nita first lay down, Dairine was still sitting in the chair by Nita’s desk, looking over the lifeline spell she’d constructed. At any other time, Nita would have been annoyed enough by the elegance and speed with which Dairine had constructed it to try to find at least some fault with it.

But there wasn’t time for that, and right now she was simply grateful that Dairine was so talented in this kind of work. The bed was surrounded by a long, tightly knitted cord of words in the Speech, rather like Kit’s leash for Ponch, but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such — those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.

Nita was also more heavily armed than usual, not knowing how many friends the Lone Power might have skulking around the borders of Darryl’s mind, intent on keeping enemies out and friends in. From Nita’s bracelet dangled a number of charms, each of which represented a spell almost ready to go, needing only one thought or pronounced syllable to set it going. It was wearying to carry this much nearly released power around, but Nita was beyond caring how much energy she had to expend. Her fear for Kit was growing by the minute.

After she’d finished looking over the lifeline wizardry and lay down on the bed, Nita took a last moment or three to check out the weaponry — the lightning bolt of the quark-level dissociator, the little closed spiral of a pinch-off utility that could seal a designated attacker or group of attackers into a “pocket” space, the little “magic wand” charm that contained a one-off terawatt particle-beam generator. Even in her present nervous state, Nita looked at that one with slight relish and wished she might have a chance to use it — the manual had been explicit about how dangerous it was, and how effective. The manual itself was slipped into her own otherspace pocket, inside the lifeline wizardry with her. Last of all she checked her throat, where the thin fine chain of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was fastened, and made sure it was charged and active. It buzzed slightly against her fingers, acknowledging that it was ready to go.

Nita settled herself back against the pillows. “How long’s the lifeline good for?” she said to Dairine.

“You get six hours,” Dairine said. “Then it’s got to be dismantled and rebuilt, and I have to recharge it. It’s…” She glanced at Spot, who was sitting on the desk with his screen up, running manual functions, among them a Julian date clock. “It’s just past three-oh-three-point-three. You get until point-fifty-five, then you snap back here, no matter what you’re doing. So keep an eye on your manual.”

Nita nodded. She wiggled against the pillows a little and closed her eyes.

After about five minutes, she opened them again, and sighed. “Dari…”

“Is there something wrong with the spell?”

Nita made a face. “This is really dumb, but I can’t fall asleep with you sitting there watching me.

You’re going to have to stay in your room, for a while anyway.”

Dairine shrugged. “No problem,” she said, and reached down to pick up one of the lines of light that was trailing away from the lifeline spell. Dairine walked out the door with the power-feed line in her hand. The line of light, the single character for connection in the Speech, stretched and stretched after her as she went.

Then Dairine stuck her head back in the room. “Good luck, Neets,” she said.

“Thanks,” Nita said. I may need it…

At first Nita concentrated on doing the breathing exercises that often helped her get to sleep when she was having trouble doing so, but tonight all they seemed to do was make her uncomfortably aware of her breathing. Finally she gave up on that and just stared at the ceiling, fixing her attention on one spot, the little flawed place where Dairine had once bounced a Superball too high and flaked off the ceiling paint. After a while, as Nita had expected, her eyes started tiring.

Eventually she found herself standing in the dark. That darkness was nearly complete: There were no spotlights now, no signs of anything being in this universe but her, and only the faintest, not-quite-black “background” radiance from the sky above. Did I miss them? Nita wondered. Have they gone somewhere else?

She looked around. It did no good standing still in one of these dreams, she’d found. You had to walk around to get anywhere worth being. So Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and came out with a favorite tool, a moonlight-steeped rowan wand lent her by Liused, the tree in her backyard.

This one was getting close to its “use by” date — such wands routinely lasted for only three full moons and an intercalary day, unless burned out by overuse before then — and wasn’t much good for anything but light at this point. But light was just what Nita needed. As she touched it and pulled it out, the wand came afire with a blaze of secondhand moonlight, enough to show Nita that she was standing on the same plain black surface that she’d seen here before, when meeting the clown, the robot, and the knight. But there was nothing else to be seen at all, in any direction.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s see.”

One of the ready-made spells on her bracelet had a charm that looked like a miniature radar screen. Knowing before she left who she was going to be looking for, Nita had wound Kit’s name in the Speech into it. Now she reached down to that charm and, touching it, saw in her mind the single word needed to activate the spell.

She said the word. Immediately Nita was standing in the middle of a pool of faint light, very much like the big radar that air traffic controllers use. It was a life-sign detector, one that would tag any specific personality it had been keyed to. Nita looked down at it. Even though the steady glow of it was soft, it was hard to make out any specific indication from it. Nita whispered the light of the rowan wand down to nothing and stared at the detector for many long moments, until her eyes watered.

Finally, though, she spotted what she was looking for: a faint, faint patch of light, off in the two o’clock direction. The curling tracery of Kit’s initials in the Speech were beside it.

He’s a long way off Nita thought. But he’s here.

The trouble was that he seemed to be all by himself; there didn’t seem to be any indication of Darryl on the radar screen. He might still he by himself, Nita thought. Or if he has found Darryl, then Darryl's perception of his own isolation may have affected Kit so that he thinks he’s still alone.

It didn’t matter. At least now Nita had a direction to walk in.

She spoke the light of the rowan wand back up and spent what seemed like the better part of the next fifteen minutes walking toward Kit. But my time sense may be off, too, Nita thought, pausing briefly at about the fifteen-minute point to check her manual.

She was shocked to find that it was nearly.40. It’s been nearly three hours outside! she thought.

This is the problem Kit ran up against the other night. Time flow in here is getting strange.

Nita walked faster. After what seemed like another five minutes or so, she started to see something right against the very edge of the dark horizon, like a very faintly seen thread or line of some different color. The closer she got to it, the more distinct it became; it was starting to pick up the light of the rowan wand.

Within a few minutes she found that the line was growing thicker and taller with every step, and brighter, too. Shortly she was close enough to start to make out what it was.

It was a wall. Perfect, white, featureless, stretching away from her — seemingly to infinity — in great curves on either side, the wall towered over Nita as she approached it. A few feet away from it, Nita stopped, bent her neck back to look at it.

It was not a physical thing, she knew, but a representation of some power or force that had been put here to stop any intruder. And there was no telling who had put it here — Darryl, or the Lone Power.

Nita stepped forward and cautiously touched the wall with a fingertip, like someone gingerly testing an electric fence. She could tell immediately that this construction didn’t have anything to do with the Lone Power: There was none of the inimical burn she would have expected. Nothing else happened — no force attacked her — but Nita could tell by the feel of the wall that it was meant to be infinitely obstructive. She could try to levitate over it, but it would simply stretch up and up and up to match the height at which she attacked it; she could try to dig down under it, but it would extend that way, too. The only way to deal with this wall was to go through — if she had time.

Okay

, Nita thought. Let’s see what works.

She said the twelve words of a small-scale antigravity wizardry, wrapped them around the rowan wand, and hung it on the air to give her some light to work by; then turned the charm bracelet on her wrist. One of the charms, looking like a little lasso, was the representation of the lifeline spell.

Touching it, Nita could feel the power feeding down it, and could faintly feel Dairine, in circuit with it back at home.

You okay

? her sister said.

So far. I need some power now.

Take what you need. The wizardry’s fully charged.

Nita held the charm between her fingers and said the two words that released the clamp on the power flow at her end. Her right hand started filling with a hot white glow, the representation of what Dairine’s wizardry was sending her. Nita let it flow, squeezing the power down to compact it a couple of times and make room for more. Finally, after about a minute, she cut off the flow and stepped toward the wall, using pressure of hands and mind and a few sentences in the Speech to shape that power into a small, concentrated explosive charge of wizardry. She pushed it up against the bottom of the wall, like so much plastic explosive, instructing it to vent all its force away from her, and then retreated to a safe distance.

Nita spoke the air in front of her dark, and then said the explosive’s actuator word in the Speech.

The result was a dazzling flash and impact like lightning striking six feet away. Dark though the air had been, Nita still had to shake her head and blink a few times, trying to get rid of the afterimages. When she managed it, she looked up…

… and saw that the wall was standing right where it had been, without so much as a dent in it.

Nita stared. What?!

The amount of power she’d planted in that explosive had been huge. She felt somehow cheated and really angry at the same time. “Okay,” she said, “no more Miss Nice Girl. Let’s try something a little more emphatic.”

She reached down to the bracelet again and found the charm for the particle-beam accelerator.

As she touched it, the accelerator wizardry sprang into being in her hands, ready to fire — a long, narrow conical shape with a blunt stock. Nita snugged the stock of it up against her shoulder, and carefully took aim again at the base of the wall. She had invested a great deal of energy in this wizardry; now she would see what it was worth—

The world flickered, went abruptly bright. What? Nita thought.

Don’t shoot

! someone shouted into her mind. It was Dairine.

Nita looked around her in complete confusion. She was lying in bed, aiming the linac weapon at her ceiling.

Oh my god

, Nita thought. She hurriedly lowered the accelerator and let the wizardry relapse. She lay there for a few moments while her pulse got back to normal, and then sat up and looked over at the small figure slumped in the chair by her desk.

“Dairine, what am I doing here?.” Nita whispered.

“Giving me grief, apparently,” Dairine said, looking ragged. “I told you to watch your time. You spent a real long time getting wherever you were going.” She let out a long breath. “And you didn’t find any trace of Kit at all?”

Nita sagged against the pillows again, and shook her head. “I know he was there, but I couldn’t get near him. We’re going to need more power in that thing this time, Dari. Charge it up. I’m going out again.”

Dairine shook her head. “Nita,” she said. “It’s nearly three in the morning. And I’m wrecked. It’s a strain holding that thing open.“ She looked miserable at having to admit such a thing. ”I have to get at least some sleep, because I have to go to school tomorrow morning. Of course, I’d rather blow school off, but I promised Dad. You know I did. You know what’U happen if I don’t go, or if I fall asleep in class.“

Nita was so angry that she had to put her hands over her face to keep from screaming, or otherwise letting Dairine see how she felt. After a few seconds she felt sufficiently in control to uncover her face again.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re right. I have an early morning, too. We’ll try it again tomorrow.” And she let out a long breath. “But thanks, Dair. You did good.”

“Well do better tomorrow,” Dairine said. “We’ll find him then, and get him home. G’night.”

She wandered off toward her room, closing Nita’s door behind her.

Nita lay there for a while more. Kit? she said silently, out of desperate hope, nothing more.

Of course, no answer came.

She tried to sleep again, normally, but that was impossible for her now. All Nita could do was think about what Kit’s parents must be going through, and wait for six-thirty to come…