Games Wizards Play

4

Antarctica / Knox Coast

“WHAT DO YOU WEAR for Antarctica?”

Carmela stood in the doorway of Nita’s bedroom, looking in with considerable confusion at the clothes hanging about in the air. In some cases they were literally hanging—like the ones that were floating about on their hangers because Nita hadn’t bothered to remove them before the clothes emerged from her closet. Tops and pants and skirts were so thick in the space between her and Carmela that Nita could hardly see anything of Carmela but her feet.

“Would it be out of bounds for me to pass a comment here?” said Kit’s partially unseen sister.

“You can pass a comment, you can pass go,” Nita said, pushing through a tangle of tops of various colors. “You can pass anything you like—and maybe you can pass me those pants. Yeah, those right there . . .”

Carmela moved among the floating garments like someone making her way through the down-hanging branches of a thickly grown forest. “These ones?” She plucked a pair of white Capri pants out of the air and held them up between her hands, turning them back and forth. “These are from last year, Neets.”

“I know.”

“And are you sure about wearing white to Antarctica this time of year? It’s getting on toward fall. We must be close to their version of Labor Day. Assuming they have that down there. But then again, no one owns the place, do they?”

Nita had to stop and laugh, pushing her hair back out of her face. “Antarctica? They say they don’t. Or at least, international law says they don’t. But all the big countries spend their time working around that one. Everybody’s got a scientific base somewhere down there, and while there are people doing science, sometimes they’re accidentally acting as cover for some secret weapons thing or some such . . . And everyone pretends it’s not happening and quietly spies on each other every way they can.”

“And probably nobody pays any attention to Labor Day. Well, you still don’t get to wear these pants. Your legs aren’t the same length they were last year. And besides, Dairine is having a Capri-pants phase right now, and the last thing you want to look like at a party is your little sister.”

“Oh, God,” Nita muttered, “this is turning into a nightmare. I can’t make up my mind about anything.”

Carmela chucked the white pedal pushers onto Nita’s bed, then flopped down on it herself and watched Nita push her clothes around in the air. “Why the stress levels?” she said. “You’re going to be there for—it’s not even a day, is it?”

“Afternoon until evening,” Nita said.

Carmela rolled over on her back and looked at her upside down. “So throw a few things in a bag and go! This fussing is atypical for you.”

Nita rubbed her face, then dropped her hands helplessly and sat down on the windowsill. “Everything’s so different all of a sudden,” she said. “And it makes no sense, because nothing is that different.”

“Well,” Carmela said, with the air of someone walking on eggshells, “one thing. The B word.”

Nita moaned. “There are moments,” she said, “when I wake up and it’s the truest thing in the world. And there are others when I wake up and think, What the hell have I done? I don’t know how to be, I can’t think what to say, I freeze up.” She made a disgusted face. “I blush.”

“Saves on makeup,” Carmela said.

Nita snorted. “Only if you can get it to stay in the same place all the time.”

“And you’re going to tell me,” Carmela said, “that my baby brother is just cruising right along as if nothing’s happened.”

By and large, this was entirely too true. Nita sighed. “Look. I need a baseline. How many boyfriends have you actually had?”

Carmela waved a hand airily about. “Many have auditioned for the position,” she said. “Very few have achieved that lofty status.”

Nita couldn’t restrain the snicker. “Possibly because their having achieved it still doesn’t stop you from flirting with everything else that moves.”

“What, I should limit my options? Flirtation does not necessarily imply a lesser level of commitment.”

“And this is why you’re in demand for interstellar negotiations,” Nita said. “Because you can come out with a sentence like that, and people believe it.”

Carmela simply smiled and didn’t deny anything. “So how many?” Nita said.

“Three, maybe four. No, three, I’ve stopped counting Bill, he turns out to have just been a self-obsessed dork.” Carmela let out a long sigh that suggested she was more disappointed with herself than with him. “I was way too much for him to handle.”

Nita refrained from sharing the opinion that for most beings in their local universe, Carmela fell into that category. “Did any of them ever make you spin your wheels like this?”

“That was usually the signal to get rid of them,” Carmela said. “I don’t mind butterflies in the stomach, but when they start getting big enough to be mistaken for helicopters, I believe in cutting my losses and getting out while I can.”

“Well. With Kit—”

Carmela waved her arms. “There’s a sentence that’ll go on and on. Leave it for now. You need to get yourself together or you’re going to be late for this thing. Worse, I’m going to be late for this thing, and I refuse to miss a chance to see people treating Kit like a superhero. Why’re you having so much trouble deciding?”

“Well . . . there are going to be so many other people there. And I don’t know who they’re going to be! Or I know in a general way, but I don’t know how they’re going to be dressed. I don’t want to make a bad first impression, but I’m not sure what a good first impression’s going to look like! There’ll be kids there from all over the planet, all ages, wearing all kinds of things, and I just—I don’t know!” Nita waved her arms. “Should I look serious? Should I look playful? Should I try to stand out? Should I try not to stand out? I don’t want anyone thinking I’m a showoff—”

Carmela shook her head and bounced off the bed, pushing the floating clothes off to one side and another. “Forget this stuff,” she said. “We can both spare half an hour. Let’s go to the Crossings and buy you something completely new. Stuff from the Crossings is always classy, and new is always good for taking your mind off yourself when you’re nervous.”

“Oh, God, ’Mela, are you kidding? No way there’s time—”

Carmela flung her arms wide. “Will you listen to her, Universe? She has no time to go a few thousand light-years to buy some clothes. There are so many things wrong with that sentence, I scarcely know where to begin.” Then Carmela sighed. “But you know what? This isn’t about the other kids, or the weird new people, or how you’re going to look in front of them. This is about him, isn’t it?”

That was a thought that brought Nita up short. She opened her mouth, then realized she wasn’t sure what to say.

“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Because otherwise, if things were what we laughably think of as normal around here, you’d be completely busy obsessing over whoever this new kid is you’re mentoring and how the two of you are going to keep him in line.” She paused. “Is it a ‘him’?”

“Yeah. I think he’s from San Francisco.”

“You think.” Carmela looked bemused. “Since when do you not know everything about something like this? You are the queen of research and you’ve known about this Invitational thing for days, and this guy for nearly as long! But instead you’re standing here overthinking yourself into a hole in the ground about how the way you dress might make people think about Kit! Aren’t you?”

Nita couldn’t find a single way to refute this line of reasoning. Which frankly doesn’t look good . . . she thought. Am I such a total wuss? This is awful.

“Well, forget that,” Carmela said. “Because why would you dress for him? You dress for you, and let the boys or whatever fall where they may. Here, this flowery dress with the V-neck—” She pushed her way to it and seized it out of the air. “You know you like this one! It does the swirl thing when you spin around. Add those leggings under it, that lace camisole thing, put on some flats in case you’re planning on falling down a crevasse or something, and then finish this up.”

Nita hesitated. “I’m wondering if it makes me look too . . . girly.”

Carmela’s eyes went wide. “How are we even having this conversation? I remember you standing there in the Crossings with that magic gun thing and picking off nasty aliens one after another like Clint Eastwood—”

Nita could remember it too, and the memory was not pleasant. “I hated that.”

“I know, you kept apologizing. Okay, maybe not something that Eastwood would have done. But still! Very you, and your reactions didn’t ruin your aim, either. And now you’re standing here worrying that a flowery dress is somehow going to damage your intergalactic image?! Wow, have you got the wrong number.”

Nita slumped against the cool of the window. “It’s just that there’ve been a couple of, I don’t know, strange moments with Kit lately—”

“When you’ve been around my little brother as long as I have, you’ll see that most of his moments are strange. The wizardry’s just been a blip.”

Nita put her eyebrows up at that, but still had to smile. “I thought he might come out with me to check out this whalesark—I told you I was working on that?—and he comes out with this line about ‘No, don’t have time, but you know, I’ve been thinking I should get out there again, get back in touch with my nature side . . .’”

“His nature side!” Carmela snorted with laughter. “What is he talking about?”

“Well, look where he was just the other day when the news came down. Off shooting up the Moon . . . His gaming group’s into this very tech-wizardly stuff at the moment. Though the last session might not have gone as smoothly as he was expecting. I hear one of his team’s been giving him trouble.” Nita laughed under her breath and then assumed someone else’s face and voice. “‘Where’s Nita, are you excluding her from this, don’t tell me you see this as some kind of boy thing . . .’” She grinned. “Lissa’s like a buzz saw. All edges and spinning. You don’t mess with Lissa . . .”

“Yet Little Brother keeps doing that,” Carmela said. “Could be a sign that he’s as confused as you are right now? But seriously: ‘his nature side’? Like the Moon’s not nature.”

“Yeah, well, you know how some of the guys at school are. They talk like worrying about how the planet’s doing is stupid, like it’s . . .”

“I can hear the world ‘girly’ hovering in the air.” Carmela rolled her eyes. “Idiots.”

“But it wasn’t just that one thing.” Nita sighed. “Every now and then it seems like stuff that never bothered him before is becoming an issue. Roles . . . what people think . . .”

Carmela narrowed her eyes. “The only people whose opinions matter here are your fellow wizards’, yeah?” Nita opened her mouth. “And not about your clothes! We’re past that now. There’re going to be a lot of people at this thing who think of you as famous. Your dress is not going to be the issue. Nita Callahan is going to be the issue! The only thing you have to worry about is how to smile graciously while not tripping over the bodies of everybody who wants to worship at your feet.”

“That’s . . . an interesting image.”

“Yeah. As I said, wear flats. No point in injuring them with heels while they’re abasing themselves.”

Nita pushed away from the window with a smile and started pulling her clothes back down out of the air, the ones on hangers first. “Seriously, though . . .” She shook her head. “You think things’ll get easier when you finally break down and say it. ‘Boyfriend.’ And then you find your troubles have just begun . . .”

“Oh, Neets! ‘Troubles’!”

Nita laughed too. “Too grim?”

“You should hear yourself.” Carmela started pulling down some of the floating clothes and folding them neatly over one arm. “You’re having a crisis of confidence. That’s all.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve ever had one of those.”

“Yeah. I thought I was wrong about something, once. I got over it.”

Nita burst out laughing. “It’s just . . . This is when I’m supposed to be giving someone else advice about how to do stuff. Not the best time for a crisis, you know?”

“Knowing the way your life runs,” Carmela said, folding another top over her arm, “something much more gripping and involved will come up almost immediately and you’ll forget all about this.”

“Good.” Nita let out a breath. “Because the idea that I’m getting cold feet embarrasses me.”

Carmela waved a hand again, dismissive. “That’s not where you are. I think maybe your feet are just now warming up. You know what I mean? The two of you have been through a lot. And now suddenly it happens that you’re in this part of your life where everybody starts paying so much attention to Life Plans and what you’re going to do with yourself from now on until the end of time, and everything starts feeling so permanent.”

“Or not permanent,” Nita said very softly.

Carmela went quiet and just looked at Nita for a moment. “You’re afraid that just saying it has jinxed it somehow. That what you had was perfect, and you’ve screwed it up.”

Nita paused, then nodded. “Even though he said ‘about time.’”

“And he hasn’t said it since, I bet.”

Nita shook her head. Then she laughed at herself. “I must sound so needy.”

“No. You know what the problem is? You two are too used to reading each other’s minds in a crisis. You hit the talking part and you choke. And here I thought wizardry was all about, you know, Speech.”

They looked at each other and then both burst out laughing at the same time. “Come on,” Nita said. “We ought to get out of here in the next hour or so. Your worldgate or mine? I’ve got a subsidy.”

“Let’s take mine. As it happens, I know the entity who’s in charge of your subsidy, and you want to make sure he’s got you hooked up to the VIP handling routines.”

Nita grinned and picked up the camisole and leggings Carmela had pointed out to her. “Is Sker’ret going to be there himself, you think?”

“In the later stages, yeah. It’s a big deal, and the Earth worldgates are kind of special in the master gating system: he’ll be wanting to make sure that Chur doesn’t get overloaded again.”

“Let’s go, then. Can’t keep the talented new intake of wizards waiting.”

“Are you kidding?” Carmela said. “They can’t start till we get there.”

They popped out together into an area that looked suspiciously like a gating cluster at the Crossings—a shining white floor, patterned with glowing blue hexagonal shapes, each one big enough to hold five or six people comfortably. Nita glanced around, trying to get a grasp of the space around them. The central part was roughly circular, about the size of the main concourse in Grand Central Terminal; the ceiling was much higher, and translucent. It let in the light of the bright Antarctic day, and it was intricately carved with shapes whose fine details were mostly lost at this distance. But somebody had plainly spent a whole lot of time doing those carvings. Figures of animals and aliens and heaven knew what else were spread out over it in groups and clusters, while between them the ceiling surface was delicately patterned with geometric shapes and what might have been long sentences in the Speech, carved into the ice. “Holy cow,” Nita said under her breath. “Somebody’s got a lot of time on their hands . . .”

“Not that anybody’s paying much attention to it,” Carmela observed. She waved an arm. Nita turned toward the center of the big space—the gating hexes having been emplaced well off to one side, where they wouldn’t interfere with people socializing—and saw that a whole lot of that was going on under the highest part of the ice dome. There were easily a thousand people milling around, the cacophony of their voices rattling off the ice in the enclosed space. “Wow,” Nita said again. “This is a big deal, isn’t it?”

“You’d know better than I would,” Carmela said. “But look who’s here!”

Nita smiled as she caught sight of the low-slung shape breaking away from the crowd, because for a change it was almost easy to see him coming. Normally when you met the Master of the Crossings these days, it was in the midst of thousands of other aliens of every kind. But here there was nobody but the humans, and him. Sker’ret came pouring himself along the white-ice floor toward them, stalked eyes gazing all around him as he came, segmented legs working, and a glimpse of his gleaming segmented magenta carapace reflecting itself in the icy surface. You’d think he’d be slipping around on this more, Nita thought, and scuffed one shoe against the floor. But no, looks like they’ve put a high-friction field on this. Good. Somebody’s thought it through . . .

And then he was in among the hexes with them, rearing up half his body to throw a bunch of those segmented legs around Nita. She laughed, and hugged him back. It was like getting into a clinch with a very friendly coat rack. “Sker’ret, baby,” she said, “are you getting bigger again? Have you had another molt?”

“Two,” Sker’ret said, “but who’s counting?” He chuckled, producing a sound like pebbles rattling in a tin can. “We’ve loosened up dietary regulations at the Crossings for my people since I’ve been running things. And after all, the Stationmaster has to set a good example . . .”

“Well, I’d say you haven’t been slow about that,” Carmela said, taking her turn to hug him. “You have to be twice the size you were this time last year. You’re going to be taller than Filif soon!”

“That’ll take some doing,” Sker’ret said, “because—have you seen him recently?”

“Don’t tell me I need to take him ornament shopping again,” Carmela said, with entirely too much relish.

“But I’m surprised to see you at one of these dos,” Nita said, reaching out to rub the top of Sker’ret’s head between the eyestalks. “Has to seem like the Little League from your point of view.”

“Oh, no,” Sker’ret said. “This is the type of professional engagement that needs serious legs-on handling. When subsidized worldgating transport on a given world picks up for short periods, the way it’s going to pick up here—especially a world with Crossings-legacy worldgates, old naturally occurring ones like Chur that’re finicky to deal with—then I have to be here to keep some eyes on things. At least until I’m sure the ancillary systems I’ve installed, the automation and so forth, are running smoothly.” And then he laughed again. “Besides, I have friends involved in this competition. People whose basement I’ve lived in. Couldn’t miss that for the worlds! Though I can’t let other worlds in our work group know about that, because they’d get jealous and start screaming that I was showing favoritism—”

“Well, let them scream,” Carmela said, looking smug. “Their problem if they can’t cope with the realities of interstellar politics.”

From off to one side, some hard rock started echoing off the roof—something very metal-sounding, with a dark multivoiced rap overlay that sounded like it might have been in French. Beyond the area from which the music was coming, some large tables were spread out—probably the buffet, Nita thought. But her stomach was churning, and the thought of food just wasn’t working for her. Why am I so intimidated by this? she thought. I’ve been in much more dangerous places, seen a lot worse . . .

“Wondered when you were getting here,” came a voice from off to their left. “Did you come via the Galactic Rim or something? Oh, hi, Sker’—”

Nita turned, then stared at the apparition strolling up to them. Over dark leggings and dark flats and a long, silky, unconstructed above-the-knee tunic in a green that was so dark it was almost black, Dairine was wearing an ankle-length shawl-collared open vest—Wellakhit casual wear, in a heavier silky stuff of a more forest-green shade. It did nothing whatsoever to hide the heavy gold torc at her throat with its centered yellow gem, the gleam of it cooler than usual in this icelight. Dammit, Nita thought, and now all of a sudden I look underdressed. She also noted (and tried not to show that she noted) something Dairine was wearing wrapped twice around her narrow wrist as a bracelet. It was a double chain of emeralds strung on what at first glance appeared to be a faintly green-glowing chain. But the second glance showed this to be not a physical thing, but a construct of pure energy: simply a single sentence in the Speech, impossible to read for the smallness and fineness of the characters, and elegantly intertwined through itself like braided wire.

“Nice,” Nita said, glancing at the Sunstone again as Spot came ambling across the floor behind Dairine on his many legs, his lid-carapace burnished shining black and gleaming in the cool radiance from the skylight. “Pulling rank, are we?”

Dairine shrugged. “If you’ve got some pull somewhere, you may as well wear the trappings. It’s a qualification. And a pretty one, so why not?” She looked Nita up and down. “You don’t look too bad, anyway. But then you’ve got the Crossings’ best hominid stylist working you over.”

Nita had to laugh at that, and Carmela preened with the expression of someone who found the assessment accurate. “You didn’t sound last night like you were going to be in that much of a hurry getting here, with all the talk about ‘boring forced socialization.’ Surprised to find you here early.”

Dairine grinned mischievously. “Well, once I found out this was being held in the UFO Caves, no way was I going to be fashionably late . . .”

“The what?” Nita stared around her.

Dairine burst out laughing. “There were these conspiracy guys online . . . you know, the people who see a UFO under every rock . . .”

“And not the real ones.”

“Yeah. They were looking at some Google Earth imagery and decided they thought they saw ice caves down here with UFOs buried in them. Now naturally as soon as you hear something like that, you start wondering, so some wizards from Australia came down to check into it. Who knew, maybe somebody from off planet did get lost or confused and crash here, and need help. You have to check.” Dairine shrugged.

“It probably wouldn’t have been, though,” Nita said. “Who uses ships for interstellar travel if they can avoid it? When worldgating tech’s so widespread, it’s just silly.”

“Yeah, well, no accounting for taste, is there? Anyway, it turned out that the buried spaceship was just an optical illusion. Something to do with the angle of sunlight the day the satellite took the picture. But then the Aussie group thought this would be a great place to come down and party, where no one could see, and it was close to them.”

“A thousand miles is close?” Carmela said.

Dairine shrugged again. “It is if you’re Australian. So they did a tectonics study and an environmental assessment and they checked out the stability of the ice shelf, and it turned out to be okay for use as a temporary facility. So they built this.” She looked around in admiration. “Or hollowed it out, anyway. And then the artists got loose . . .”

“Kind of amazing,” Nita said.

“If you’ve only been in this part, you haven’t seen anything.” Dairine looked as smugly delighted as if it had all been her own work. “There’s a whole laser tag complex a level down. They’ve duplicated some of the sets from Alien, there’s a Hall of Statues . . .”

“I’ll make a note,” Nita said. “Listen, have you seen—”

“Neets?”

The familiar voice brought her head up, and she looked around, not seeing him—

And then she saw him, and her mouth went dry. Kit had broken away from the crowd and was heading toward them. It’s just a blazer, she thought. And he had those jeans on yesterday—But now there was a white shirt open at the neck, and when did he get this tall, how have I been missing this, and he’d done something with his hair, and—

Nita swallowed, dry. “Hey,” she said.

Dairine, however, burst out laughing. “Kit, come on,” she said, “don’t you think the antenna sort of spoils the line?”

Kit, who had looked very cool and tall and unruffled until then, broke the spell by turning to look over his own shoulder at his own butt, or at least he tried to. His Edsel-antenna wand was sticking out of his pocket. “Yeah, well. Think of it as an icebreaker.” He looked over at Nita. “Didn’t mean to be late. I had the dryer set wrong, had to pull the jeans out and give them some help . . .”

Dairine snickered. “So domestic,” she said, and headed away. “I’m gonna hit the buffet until they start things going.”

“Wait for me!” Carmela said. “I missed my lunch!”

The two of them made their way back toward the crowd, vanished into it. “So how does this go now?” Nita said, eager to talk about something that would get her away from the subject of how tongue-tied she’d nearly gone just now at the sight of someone she’d seen nearly every day for years. I have got to manage this somehow, it’s all gotten so weird . . .

Kit shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels a little. “Well, I saw from my manual that you’d signed off on reading the orientation pack, so I thought you’d be ready to lecture me on what to do first . . .”

“Lecture!” Nita laughed at him. “Don’t push your luck.”

He grinned at her. “Okay. We know his name, we’ve seen his picture, we’ve read the title of his spell project—”

Nita smiled, unimpressed. “Don’t think I’ve seen a longer string of jargon in the Speech since I first cracked the manual,” she said. It had taken her nearly ten minutes of brain-bending effort and a bemused consultation with Bobo The Very Offended-Sounding Voice Of Wizardry to come up with a rough translation of their mentee’s project into English: An innovative approach to subversion of magnetohydrodynamic periodicity spikes in solar peak periods, with attention to robust crisis intervention in coronal oscillatory periods and spectrum tweaking, damage inhibition in Earth’s upper ionospheric layers, and LEO-inclusive derangement prevention. Bobo’s comment regarding some of the compound-word neologisms in the title when they’d finished working it out together had been succinct: You get a feeling he doesn’t think the Speech has long enough words.

Kit made an amused “Hmf” noise. “Like it’s not a tactic everybody tries once when they’re in a science fair. Or maybe twice.”

Nita threw him a look. “You’re never going to let me off the hook about that wind turbine thing, are you?”

“Not after what it did to Mr. Vasquez’s toupee,” Kit said, “nope.”

Nita snickered. “So what next then? Do we go hunt him down and accuse him of overstating his case, or wait till he finds us?”

“I don’t know about accusing him of anything just yet,” Kit said. “But the overview made it sound like they wanted us to wait on the introductions until the Powers That Be had had their say.”

Nita’s eyes widened. “You’re not saying that they’re—”

“What?” Kit grinned. “Going to be here? Hardly. Just the Planetary. After all, she’s the door prize . . .”

“Then come on and let’s go talk to some of these people.” Nita was starting to get her composure back. “Maybe we’ll see someone we know.”

They wandered around and did indeed find here and there a few people they knew: mostly other younger wizards the two of them had run into last year during the Pullulus crisis, when older wizards had lost their power and the business of running and saving the planet had devolved abruptly onto the “next generation.” During this process Nita had briefly misplaced Kit while in the act of picking up a bottle of some mysterious fruit-flavored mineral water from a buffet table (Pitanga flavor? What in the Powers’ name is a pitanga?) when behind her she heard a pair of voices that she recognized immediately both from their extreme similarity to each other and because half the time they were talking over each other and the rest of it they were speaking in near unison.

She grinned and turned. “Is that Tu and Ngu?!” Nita said, turning to find the twychild arguing cheerfully and enthusiastically over a plate of some kind of alien hors d’oeuvres that was hovering in the air between them. (At least it seemed likely these were alien: Earth was short on blue food. And the minute Kit finds these here, it’s going to be even shorter on it . . . !)

Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet had each shot up by about a foot, and where the last time she’d seen them they had been in a sort of tunic-like Vietnamese casual wear, now Nguyet had gone for a hoodie-and-skirt-over-jeans look, and Tuyet was wearing a suit (though apparently just a T-shirt under it, and a tie just vaguely knotted and thrown over his shoulder). Their heads came up in unison and the two of them swung toward Nita with broad smiles on their faces.

“Is that Nita?!”

“Powers That Be in a bucket, are you mentoring?”

“You ancient thing!”

“Look at all her gray hairs.”

“Well, look at yours then,” Nita said, laughing, and there was some truth to it, since Nguyet had installed a prominent and showy silver streak in her long dark hair above her forehead and off to one side of her part. The hors d’oeuvres plate was waved away to drift lonely in the air while the twins grabbed her and hugged her, and Nita hugged them back. “Come on, you two are such babies, I thought you’d be competing!”

“Hah!”

“Nope, none of that for us.”

“We’re mentoring a group—”

“A set of quadruplets from Chile, would you believe?”

“—not twychild-twins, of course, they don’t do the augmentative-wizardry thing—”

“But they’ve got some new take on group work, it’s fabulous, it’s like time-sharing—”

“Holographic spell management—”

“But that’s just cool organizational stuff. Knowing you, you and Kit’ve scored yourself some kind of super-dangerous talent who needs controlling—”

Nita had to laugh. “No,” she said, “as far as we can tell it’s a rabid spacecraft fan who’s mostly interested in keeping communications satellites from being fried. In fact his précis was technical enough that I won’t mind an explanation.”

“Too technical for you?”

“Is the world ready?”

They were laughing together and deep in the midst of further gossip by the time Kit drifted back, and then there was more laughing and hugging and some teasing about height. “I thought I was gonna at least get taller than you!” Tuyet said to Kit in a tone of cheerfully aggrieved complaint, “and now what do I find but you’ve pulled this sneaky trick! There is no justice. None.”

“No one’s gonna care how tall I am next to you,” Kit said, “when you’re doing stuff like that with your tie. Wannabe fashion plate . . .”

“Bean pole!”

“Brain box! Having trouble finding oxygen all the way up here? Come on, breathe deep, assert yourself . . .”

Nita and Nguyet raised their eyebrows at each other as the boys got increasingly creative with their mockery, in the way that only people who’ve lived through life-or-death situations together can. “Do you have any idea . . .” Nita said.

“Who’re being pushed as the hot picks for winning?”

“Actually,” Nita said, “I was going to ask you if you knew what in the world a pitanga is. But seriously, how do you start picking a winner out of three hundred people whose projects the judges haven’t even looked at yet?”

Nguyet wiggled her high, slender eyebrows at Nita. “There are a lot of maths freaks and statistics wranglers in this group,” she said. “Some of them, I don’t even know names for what kinds of wizards they are . . . but they’re strong on the predictive end, and they’ve gotten real excitable since the individual prospectuses went up.” She gave Nita a sideways look. “Thought you might have stumbled across some inside stuff while reviewing the material.”

“For this? No, I wouldn’t even—”

A sudden flash of image went across Nita’s gaze, as if someone had swept the lens of a screen projector past her. An image of Carmela, very upset about something, looking at Nita with the oddest expression, almost disbelieving somehow—

“—begin to know how to make a noneducated guess . . .” her mouth kept saying, and then Nita ran out of steam, feeling shocked.

“You okay?” Nguyet said, and looked over her shoulder, then over Nita’s shoulder. “See somebody you know?”

“Uh, no.” Nita shook her head. “Just a weird moment—”

Around them the music started to fade, and the crowd started glancing around expectantly. “Uh oh, here we go!” Nguyet said, and a second or so later Kit and Tuyet were looking over their shoulders at the heart of the crowd.

It was pushing aside, people murmuring and melting back so as to leave a roughly circular space open inside it. A small blond woman stepped into the center of the group.

A silence fell around her. No one called for it—nothing so crass. All that was happening was everyone responding to the sense of sudden power in their midst. The Planetary Wizard for Earth just stood there quietly, looking at the crowd surrounding her at a more-than-respectful distance.

Nita was amused to see Irina Mladen for once not in the kind of floral housedress she’d seemed to favor the couple of times that their paths had last crossed, but in a very businesslike pantsuit, the type of thing you might wear to a job interview; navy blue, low heels, a white shirt. But Irina also had something at her neck, hard to see, that glinted sharply blue—exactly the shade of blue that Earth’s seas would look like from space. In a flower-patterned sling, her baby—must find out what his name is! Nita thought—hung at her side and gazed curiously around at the gathering. On her opposite shoulder perched the little yellow parakeet who seemed to go everywhere with her, peering around as alertly as the baby. It briefly stood on one leg to ruffle up the feathers behind its ear with one claw, made a quiet scratchy sound, and settled down against her neck again.

“Colleagues and cousins,” Irina said, “associates who’ve come from great distances and from just up the road—you’re all very welcome. In the names of the Powers with whom and for whom we work in overseeing this planet, I want to thank you for making the time in your busy schedules to be a part of this proceeding, which is probably the biggest since that famous one in Babylon—the one back ten millennia or so, when Julian dates hadn’t yet been invented and we were still reckoning everything in fractions of a Simurgh year.”

A soft laugh traveled around the room among some of the older attendees. “Your presence here,” Irina said, “is an indication of your commitment to help the rest of us do our work better—the most important work there is: serving Life in this world, and incidentally in others. But, like charity, the best work for others starts at home. Here, on your own ground, those of you who’re competing in the Invitational will have a chance to demonstrate to your peers, and to those working at more central levels, the best of what you’ve learned and engineered to make wizardry better.”

She began to stroll casually around the space that had opened up around her. “Today and tonight we’ll have a chance to get to know one another better. You’ll have an opportunity to meet up for the first time with the wizards you’re going to be working with for the next few weeks, and to get a sense of what others in the community are doing—a sense that we’re hoping will be helpful to you whether you make it through into the later competition stages, or are obliged to step aside due to criterion-based outsorting.”

And then Irina cracked a grin as she looked out into the crowd. “I spent nearly half a day looking for a slicker or at least kinder way to phrase ‘getting chucked out on your butt.’” She smiled. “Because that’s what it felt like to me when I was deselected from the Invitational in 1992. I went down in the eighth-finals, and at the time I didn’t think it was possible for anything worse to happen to me for the rest of my life. Of course, then I got made Planetary.” Another laugh went around the group, but there was a slightly uneasy edge to it. “So if you do get outsorted, please don’t assume that your life is over. A surprising number of our former competitors come back later as mentors . . . or are so busy with other things that happened to them secondary to the Invitational that they don’t have time to waste further angst on it.”

She walked around some more, looking into the sea of faces as she did. “As usual,” Irina said, “you know that the honor the Powers That Be have bestowed on us as wizards is not entirely without its challenges. That old saying that the Powers will not send you any challenge for which you are not prepared—” She shook her head. “Unfortunately that saying was invented by someone who wasn’t a wizard. We know perfectly well that the universe has never worried about sending us challenges for which we are not prepared. But the Powers that manage this universe bloody well expect us to get prepared, if we’re capable. All of wizardry, if looked at one way, is a never-ending game of catch-up. The Invitational, and similar events in other worlds near and far, are all attempts to get ahead of the game.”

Irina paused in her walking. “More to the point, it’s about encouraging you and other wizards like you not only to use the manual, to use the knowledge that we share in many modalities, but to contribute to it as well. We’re all of us together in a business that can wear you down, wear you out, or kill you dead, without a little help from your friends. And though thousands of wizards worldwide do independent networking every day, giving each other help and advice on their own initiative, we’ve found it useful to hothouse the process every now and then. Wizards who work actively with other wizards in a primary role of spell design and implementation need to be accustomed to working fast in crisis conditions—and so, in that sense, the next three weeks, for some of you, are going to read like one long crisis.”

Irina laughed softly. “Not that you can’t have fun at the same time, of course. What’s that famous line from the sports show on one continent? ‘The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat’—well, we hope the agony can be kept to a minimum. To assist you in that regard, we have acting as mentors some of the best and most effective younger wizards of recent years. They come here unified in the intention to help you produce results that will mean other wizards won’t have to go through the crap they did.”

At that a much louder ripple of laughter spread through the group, and Irina joined it. “So if the next three weeks seem cutthroat to some of you, and if you feel your mentors and your fellow competitors are driving you hard, that’s exactly the way it should be. Our oldest competitor, the One who’ll be here and whom you will not see—that One, too, is cutthroat in Its habits. That’s the One whose actions and intentions we can never afford to turn our backs on. The next three weeks are designed to get right in Its face.”

Irina looked around at the crowd, the smile on her face a touch feral now. “No matter what the final result at the end of this proceeding, for the competitors and their support teams, you need to know that our always-present invisible friend—and greeting and defiance to you,” she said, her gaze sweeping around the group—“will be constantly infuriated by what you do. If you choose to frame some of what will happen here as Its fault, well, you wouldn’t be wrong. Some of you will go home bruised. No one will blame you for taking your annoyance out on It later. Indeed, we encourage it.

“But those of you who make it into any one of the finals stages may assume that Its attention will be on you in somewhat increased amounts from here on in. That’s one of the reasons the winner will be working with me for the following year. Anyone who displays such a level of accomplishment so publicly in a wizardly gathering of this kind is entitled to protection after the fact. And we, the Seniors and others involved in the assessment and oversight structures of the Invitational, want you to know that we’re not going to hang you out to dry after you win.”

There was a soft murmur at that. “So,” Irina said. “The thing for you to do now is get to know each other. Some of each other anyway: there are so many of you here! Some of you will know members of the mentor group, having heard of their work. Some of you won’t have a clue and are here to make friends—and that’s fine too; friendship is a thing of incalculable power. There are times it’ll keep you going when you can’t find anything else in the manual that seems to do any good. I hope to greet as many of you as I can before other duties call me away. In the meantime, on behalf of the supervisory structure of the wizards of Sol III, known as Earth and by many other names among our own kind and others, I declare this event, the twelve hundred and forty-first Invitational, to be in progress. Enjoy yourselves, stir around, and I’ll see you all at the finals!”

Irina received a patter of applause as she stepped out of the circle. It sounded somewhat subdued, but Nita strangely could understand that; applauding Earth’s Planetary seemed almost too obvious a gesture. And then, as she turned to Kit, Nita noticed with some surprise that nearly all the wizards in the center of the ice-cavern had little glowing lights hovering over their heads.

Kit started to laugh, as did various other people in the room, possibly for the same reason. “Look,” he said under his breath, “we’re all in The Sims . . .”

“And these lead us to whoever we’re supposed to be meeting?” Nita said, cocking an eye up at her own glowing light, which like Kit’s was faintly blue. It was wobbling rhythmically in the air with a little thataway, thataway, thataway kind of movement that seemed to be indicating a spot past the buffet tables.

“Yeah, looks that way. Shall we?”

Together they started in that direction. The whole crowd scene had turned from a jumble of bodies standing mostly still to a seething confusion through which kids were pushing every which way, everyone wearing that searching-for-a-face expression familiar at airports and train stations. Occasionally one of these people would come up against a red light that matched it in shape and size and the two parties would pause; hands would be shaken, or there would be bows or other styles of greeting, and both parties would look at each other with interest, though (it seemed to Nita) also, in a lot of cases, a certain wariness. Because who knows what they’re getting in one of these situations, at least right at the beginning?

“Getting warmer,” Kit said, glancing up at Nita’s floating indicator: it was flashing faster now, “pointing” more emphatically.

“Yeah,” Nita said, looking at Kit’s. “Is that—Wait, he must have moved. Left, I think.”

“Yeah, over by the buffet again . . .”

They made their way farther through the crowd. “Funny,” Nita murmured, “I think he stopped again.”

“Yeah. Still, we’re close. See how bright these are getting now, he must be—”

“Right there,” Nita said, pointing toward the end of one of the buffet tables, where a tall young man was standing.

He really was tall, Nita thought: right up there with Ronan, despite being a couple of years younger. Pushing six feet, easy . . . and so lean. It was odd how the impact of both the height and the leanness was so much greater in person. She’d seen an image of him in the manual when going over his précis, and the usual height/weight hard data, but it hadn’t made anything like the same kind of impression on her as he was making at the moment. His dark hair was longish and shaggy, covering his ears; his carriage a little slumped, but at first glance it looked like an attitude thing rather than something chronically postural. Stress, Nita thought. Well, why not? All of us are twitching.

He watched her and Kit approach with a much more overstated version of that wary look Nita had seen on some of the people here. She searched briefly in memory for what his stance and affect reminded her of, and then thought of the guys she’d seen on one of the websites she sometimes caught Dairine secretly drooling over, a site devoted to Asian boy bands. Photogenic, sullen, definitely trying to look hard to get. And then there are the clothes, Nita thought. Not that you expected him to be in some kind of traditional gear, why would he be, but—He was wearing designer jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt, a bright floral shirt over that, and a black leather jacket over that, cut high to let as much of the Hawaiian shirt show as possible. Big boots, something like patent-leather Doc Martens, and—Is that lace on the tops of his socks?

It was lace. Neon orange lace, even more blindingly orange than some of the flowers on his Hawaiian shirt. Better keep Tuyet away from this one, she found herself thinking. Too much competition on the clothes side. Come to think of it, better keep Carmela away from this one, too. Because their mentee was definitely quite handsome, though not in the usual ways: his face was slightly longer than it looked like it should have been for its width, but the tilt of his eyes made it all work, and also the depth of their color, a dark, deep brown.

But the looks aren’t all that’s going on. There was power here: considerable power. Bobo? Nita said silently.

Five point six, said Wizardry itself in her ear, assessing. Plus or minus point six. And on a slow climb. Hormonal, long term. Final status when the hormones settle, somewhere around six point nine, maybe seven.

Nita breathed out. And he’s what? Fifteen going on sixteen? Wow . . . So why’s he looking at us like he thinks Kit might bite him in the leg?

The guy leaned there against the table and watched them come. As they got within chatting distance, their guide-lights went out—confirmation, if any was needed, that their little group’s members had found one another.

He stuck out his hand to Kit. “Penn Shao-Feng,” he said. “Dai stihó—”

“Dai,” Kit said. “Kit Rodriguez. My partner, Nita Callahan—”

“Hello,” Penn said, glancing at her, then back at Kit. “Nice to meet you.”

Not nice enough for me to be offered a handshake, was the first thing that went through Nita’s mind. Don’t I rate a dai?

Or am I just being hypersensitive?

“Want to grab a drink and sit down somewhere?” Kit said, gesturing toward the ice-cavern’s walls, where all kinds of force-shielded seating had been carved into the bodies of numerous niches and cavelets.

“Uh, not right now, thanks though,” Penn said. “Listen, did you see where Irina went?”

“Uh,” Nita said, startled by complete confusion into politeness. “I’m sure she’s still around somewhere. They said she was going to hang out for a while after the introduction.”

“They said? You don’t know?”

Nita stood there trying to make sense of the odd, slightly mocking expression Penn was leveling at her. “If I could read a Planetary’s mind,” she said, recovering, “I don’t know that I’d advertise the fact, because there might be some pushback about spreading that around. So no, I don’t know. But then we’re only two of about a thousand other people who’d love to drag her off somewhere and monopolize her attention. Think you’ve got a shot?”

Kit threw a Did you just say that? look at her. Nita ignored it, waiting to see what Penn would say.

Instead he ran a bored-looking hand through his hair and turned away from Nita toward Kit, as if what she’d said wasn’t even worth engaging with. “Look, why don’t I get in touch with you tomorrow and we can set up a meeting,” he said. “You can come out and see me in San Fran; I’ll put the coordinates in your manuals. I’ve got a nice place, you’ll like it, it’s quiet, and we can take an hour and you can have a look at what I’m doing. Yeah? Kind of busy tonight.”

Doing what else besides meeting with the people who’re supposed to be helping you win this? Nita thought. She opened her mouth—

“Sure,” Kit said, and Nita had the brief satisfaction of noticing that his voice sounded tight around the edges. “Fine. Tomorrow, then. Dai . . .” And though Nita thought he’d been about to turn and walk away, Kit stood still with a casual sort of look bent on Penn, and waited.

“Yeah, dai,” Penn said after a moment, then turned himself around and stalked off.

Nita and Kit stood there for a moment more, then looked at each other.

“Is it just me,” Kit said, “or were we just not only blown off but totally disrespected by someone wearing that shirt?”

Nita shook her head. “Fashion statement,” she said.

Kit made a sarcastic sound at the back of his throat. “A statement that he thinks fashion beats style.”

“Ooh. A little judgmental, there? Maybe he’s not the blazer type.” She gazed after Penn. “I could be wrong, but I think he’s been through one of those fashion streets in Japan, you know? Where they’re big into mixing and matching everything on the planet.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Kit said. “That’s more ’Mela’s department. But wear a Hawaiian shirt to something like this? When you’re not Hawaiian? I don’t know that I feel that sure of my dress sense. And I’m not sure I ever will . . .”

“You need more coaching from Carmela, maybe.”

“Please, as if she needs to know that. Life with her is bizarre enough already.”

Nita stood there watching Penn push farther into the crowd; his height wouldn’t allow him to vanish completely at close range. Well, maybe it’s nerves . . .

“Come on,” Nita said, “let’s go look for Dairine and see if she drew a better hand than we did.”

Kit gave her a brief look. “Kind of a snap judgment from you . . .”

“Sounds like I’m not the only one, either. But who knows, we might even find someone more mature. Or less self-absorbed.”

Very quietly, Kit started snickering. “He has no idea what he’s in for, does he.”

“What?”

“I know that tone of voice. Like you’re absolutely intending to be kind to somebody, but it’ll be the sort of kindness that’s gonna kill them.”

It was embarrassing to have to admit that killing was somewhat on Nita’s mind. “Seriously,” she said under her breath, “who comes to an event like this and acts like that?”

“Someone who’s sure he’s the hottest thing on the street,” Kit said. “Or thinks he is. And doesn’t mind who gets annoyed by the shade he’s throwing.” He gave Penn a sidelong look, and watched him head off through the crowd.

Nita snorted. “Or else he’s trying to make a strong first impression. Well, he has.”

“Maybe he’s stressed,” Kit said. “Or freaked at meeting us.”

“Us!”

“Yeah, well.” Kit shrugged. “Looked at your précis in the manual lately? The version of it that someone sees when they don’t have the right association levels set? Who knows . . . it could be intimidating.”

Nita shook her head. “Intimidated by us?”

“If you were young and not real sure of yourself . . .”

“The way he’s not sure of himself? Give me a break.”

“I’ve seen stranger coping methods . . .”

Nita sighed. It wasn’t fair to let their first impressions of Penn get in the way of what they’d all come here to do. And the Powers were behind their assignment: there had to be something about them that this kid needed. “You’re probably right,” she said. “This is stressy for everybody, there’s all this—” She waved a hand. “Frustrated wizardry in the room. Or maybe ‘frustrated’ is the wrong word. Eager.”

“Competitive,” Kit said.

Nita nodded slowly, because he was right. And it was something she wasn’t used to seeing where wizardry was concerned. Almost since she’d been called to the Art, all the wizards Nita had ever found herself working with were intent on getting the job done, whatever it took—very often at the expense of their own egos and their own stress. This is already looking like a different kind of scenario, she thought, and I’m not sure I’m going to like it much.

“Still . . .” she said.

“Thinking out loud, Neets?” Kit said. “Or talking to Bobo, maybe?”

“No,” she said, “just myself.” She threw a sidelong look at him, then glanced back to look for Penn in the crowd, but he had finally vanished. “But I have a feeling you’re going to be hearing a lot of that in the next few weeks . . .” she said, with a sigh. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go have some pitanga juice.”

“Some what?”

“It’s over by the blue food.”

“What? You’re on!”

Dairine stood off to one side, listening to Irina’s speech and trying not to get too impatient as she waited for the payoff: the moment when she’d get a sense of how much of a winner or loser her mentee was going to be.

The manual had given her little besides the bare facts: Merhnaz Farrahi, Mumbai, India, specialty: geomancy, seismics. Dairine’s initial reaction had been approval. Good specialty for that part of the world . . . there are never enough earthquake wranglers who’ve got the skill and smarts to stop the worst ones. But beyond that . . . who knew? The manual was not going to give you personality data. Dairine had tried to get it to do that, once or twice, when looking over the précis of a few of the other competitors. Some of their spells were so unusual that they made her want to know them better. And who knows, Dairine thought, if I meet my mentee and she’s boring, then afterward I’ll go hunt some of those guys up. At least the networking might be productive.

It was odd, though. The flush of excitement she’d felt in her dad’s shop on learning she would be included in this—after the inevitable annoyance at being thrown into it on such short notice—was fading. It was always good to meet other wizards when there wasn’t a calamity under way. There were some nice people out there on errantry, and hearing from them personally about the places they’d been and the cool things they’d done was endlessly more fascinating than just reading about it in the manual.

She thought again of the hectic, edgy excitement and camaraderie of the great gathering on the Moon at the beginning of the Pullulus War. Everyone had been terrified but up for it. Having to save the universe, Dairine thought, tends to put you on your best game . . . assuming it doesn’t also make you want to dig a hole and hide. In any case, there had been no leisure for hiding at that point. Everyone had thrown intervention groups together the best they could, headed out into space, and started tracking down the weapon that would bring the Lone Power’s plans to an end.

This was a much different business; more structured, more leisurely, and less deadly. It was going to be engaging enough, but probably not all that exciting, except with the manufactured sort of stimulation that comes with staged competitions everywhere. Which was just as well, because she had other things to be thinking about right now. So funny, Dairine thought. There are probably kids on the planet who would give anything to be here right now. And where do I want to be?

She smiled to herself. No matter how much of a pain in the butt her dad and Nelaid could be when they were tag-teaming her, if there was anywhere she wanted to be right now, it was in Sunplace, on Wellakh, on the terrace of that high spire of stone, leaning over the rail there . . .

And not alone.

In memory she leaned there again, and Roshaun was next to her. The interlude they’d shared before the terrible events on the Moon at the conclusion of the Pullulus War had been so brief that at times Dairine had to go back and check her manual to see whether one thing or another had actually happened. Did I really lean here with you, with our elbows banging together, so that you kept nudging me and I kept nudging you, and we were both doing it to annoy each other, and it didn’t do anything but make us both laugh? That bus ride we took to the mall, did you really have one of those lollipops sticking out of your face then? When we were sitting on the steps that one evening, and the lilacs were out . . . were you really looking at me the way I thought you were?

And then came their time on the Moon. Not the Moon on the day when everything went wrong: but the Moon when she took him there, after first pointing it out to him in the sky. That whole thing got splashed out of the Earth, a long time ago. And it was just the right size to form up . . . Really? By how small a chance you had a Moon at all, then . . . Yeah, we use it as a paradigm for how sometimes you get incredibly lucky. The way things do go right sometimes.

Except that things had then gone most spectacularly wrong.

My best friend. Truly the best friend: the one who couldn’t be mistaken for anything else—the one who had to be your best friend because there was simply no other way you could be putting up with him on a regular basis. The infuriating, hilarious, smart, ignorant, stuck-up creature with his ridiculous snotty bearing and his formal ways and flashy clothes; the young King who (once he got the position) didn’t want to be a king at all, but who resigned himself to doing it as well as it could be done because that was the way he handled things. The terrifyingly competent wizard, the guy who refused to take anyone’s crap but would laugh at her with that supercilious look when she delivered it to him by the truckload. The one who never took her seriously. The one who always took her seriously.

Roshaun. Where the hell are you?

It was the silent cry that started every day and ended every one. Sometimes Dairine heard it in her sleep; sometimes the rawness of it woke her up. She would lie there in the frontier between dream and awakening, knowing she was at home in bed, but also knowing that she was kneeling in the cold dust of the Moon with the Sunstone in her hands, someone else’s Sunstone, the heavy collar and the bright gem that had simply parted company with him somehow and now lay there in the talcum-powdery, gunpowder-smelling moondust. And the stones hurt her knees, but not as much as her chest hurt because he had been there and now he was gone.

Not dead. That much she knew (though her own cowardice had kept her from being sure about that for a long time). But not alive, either. Something had happened to his physical body: it had seemingly been burned away in the terrible wash of coronal energies that Roshaun had tried to turn against the Pullulus as it closed in around Earth. And the worst thing about it, Dairine thought, was that it made no difference, at the end. The power that would end the Pullulus came from another direction entirely.

Well, maybe it’s not true that it made no difference, she thought. He bought Kit and Ponch time to make it happen. But at the end of it, Roshaun was still gone.

But not forever. That resolution, too, came at the beginning of every day and the end of every one. I’ll find you, she thought. I don’t care how long it takes . . .

There was a patter of applause going around the room as Irina finished her speech. Okay, Dairine thought, let’s find out how terrible this is going to be. She put Spot down. “See anybody?” she said.

Not yet.

About a quarter of the way around the room, Dairine could see Kit and Nita making their way toward the side of one of buffet tables. So they’re taken care of now, she thought as she saw them come to a halt in front of a skinny dark-haired guy even taller than Kit. That’s going to be interesting, she thought. Kit was very proud of his height: sometimes she wondered if Nita had noticed how incredibly happy he’d been when his middle-school growth spurt began, or realized how he’d hated being short—

“Uh, excuse me?”

A very soft voice, very shy sounding, pulled Dairine out of her thoughts. She blinked. Standing in front of her, twisting her hands together, was a dark-haired girl of maybe fourteen. She was wearing long dark trousers with a kind of blue watered-silk overcoat on top, and had a big, geometrically patterned scarf in blue and white wrapped around her head and shoulders.

“Hi there,” Dairine said.

The girl was looking at her with the oddest expression of near astonishment. “Are you Dairine Callahan?”

“Uh, yeah. And you’re—Mehrnaz? Did I pronounce it right?”

“Yes, yes you did—” She said it as if this was an amazing thing. And then she blushed.

“Well, dai stihó.”

The girl opened her mouth, then shut it again, and it took her a moment more to manage words. “Is there some mistake?” she said at last.

Now what in the world does she mean by that—? “Mistake!”

“I mean, are you absolutely sure you were assigned to me?”

What, she doesn’t like the idea for some reason or other? Dairine, already on edge, was just about ready to let her have it. But the girl’s face was so scared, and looked so little like that of someone who was trying to be offensive, that she held her fire for the moment.

“Well,” Dairine said, and pointed above her head. “Little blue light . . .” Then she pointed to the girl’s. “Little red light . . .” She shrugged as both of them went out. “And I think we have to assume the wizardry’s working right, because otherwise a lot more people would be complaining.”

That shy face was suddenly transfigured with laughter. “Oh, Powers,” Mehrnaz murmured. “It’s true, it’s really true, isn’t it? It’s you! The one who wouldn’t move the planet.”

Dairine was confused. Then, suddenly, the memory of a long-ago phone conversation, from after her Ordeal, came back to her. “No,” she said. “It was fine right where it was.” Yet there was no avoiding the stab of frustration that came to her now as she thought of the time when she could have done something like that, even would have done it if the reason had been right. “But seriously,” she said, “since when do they let privileged communications like that out into the manual?” And she had to laugh. “If it’s there, though, I guess it can’t have been that privileged. Maybe I had the comms permissions set up wrong. It was kind of an exciting time . . .”

“And you were so awesome,” Mehrnaz said. “Are so awesome! I can’t believe it! It’s such an honor to be paired up with you.”

“Uh, okay,” Dairine said, astonished. This was not the way she’d imagined this was going to go. She’d expected to be bored by whoever she met. But who thinks I’m amazing? Even Roshaun never . . .

She shook her head. Wrong thing to be thinking about right now. Meanwhile, Mehrnaz seemed content just to stand in front of Dairine in wonder: and the idea struck her as faintly ridiculous. “So you’re the one who wants to take earthquakes apart from underneath,” she said.

“You looked at my spell!” Mehrnaz said.

“I read the précis,” Dairine said. “Spot read the spell, and we discussed it in general terms. Some pretty complex stuff there—”

Mehrnaz’s eyes went wide: she followed Dairine’s glance down. Spot had spidered over to crouch down in front of Mehrnaz, and was looking at her with all his eyes. “This is him!”

“Yes, it is,” Dairine said, and she had to smile, because this was all going so differently from what she’d expected. “Look . . . why don’t we go find someplace to sit down, and you can start telling me more about it, okay?”

“Yes, absolutely yes!” And without another word Mehrnaz was heading off toward the far side of the ice cave in search of an empty conversation niche, while looking back over her shoulder every few feet with a big grin at Dairine.

I have a fan, she thought. This is truly weird.

We have a fan, Spot said, scurrying past her.

All Dairine could do was laugh and go after the two of them, because the excitement to which she’d said goodbye was rising again. Okay, she said to the Powers. I’m game. Even though You knew I was busy, You got me into this. So let’s see what happens . . .