Games Wizards Play

5

San Francisco

KIT HAD NEVER BEEN to the City by the Bay, as much because of a lack of time and opportunity as of power. It was surprising how busy a wizard could get, between errantry and school and family business; you might think you had infinite power to go anywhere you liked—just build the transport spell and go—but then you found that it didn’t work out that way. Everything took energy, and sometimes what with one thing and another there wasn’t enough to spare.

Now, though, standing here on the high point Nita had chosen for their long jump from Grand Central, he was sorry he’d put it off this long. They had come out “high on a hill,” the kind of place where the song suggested you were supposed to leave your heart. The view of the ocean alone would have been enough to make the trip worthwhile for Kit. Way ahead of them, way past the Bay and the famous orangey bridge, the Pacific Ocean stretched out vast and quiet and glittering, dappled with shadows and patches of light left by the low clouds sliding over it. It was an ocean Kit could look at without feeling the slight chill up his spine that the sight of the Atlantic at home always gave him. Not that we didn’t do good things there, Kit thought. But there were a lot of bad things that could have happened . . . and some of them got way, way too close.

He sighed. This, though, was different. “I can see why people would want to live here,” he said, “even with the earthquakes.”

Next to him, Nita rubbed her arms a little. It was cold up here in the wind, colder than either of them had expected. “I don’t know about the earthquakes,” Nita said, looking northward at the San Francisco skyline. “I’d rather the Earth held still.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, “it’s probably preferable. So where is he exactly?”

She gestured with her chin. “Right down there,” she said. Houses climbed a good way up the hill where they stood, following the curves of the narrow streets from side to side as they angled steeply up the slope. It looked like an old, well-established neighborhood. And, from what Kit knew about the area, probably an expensive one. “High-rent district,” he said under his breath.

“It looks that way,” Nita said. “We’ll find out.” She glanced down at the transit circle glowing on the ground at their feet. “You ready? I’ll jump us down. There’s a park nearby with some ornamental plantings where we won’t be seen.”

“This is what happens when your dad’s a gardener, isn’t it?” Kit muttered. “We always wind up in the shrubs somewhere.”

Then he cursed himself silently. What is it? Kit thought. What’s going on with me that makes everything I say in the last couple few weeks come out sounding like it means something dirty?

Nita threw him an amused look. “Stop it,” she said.

“I know. I know. I just can’t seem to—”

“I don’t mean that!” she said. “Stop freaking out about it.” And she snickered. “Because it’s happening to me too.”

“Oh,” Kit said. “Okay . . .”

“So let’s jump now,” she said, “because the shrubs have nothing to fear from us. Right?”

“Right.”

She reached down toward the transit circle; a line of light ran up from it to the charm bracelet on her wrist. Nita wound her fingers around the bracelet, tugged.

A second later, they were indeed in the shrubbery. It was so thick and overarching a patch of rhododendrons that there was no possibility anyone could have seen them. But there was a trampled-down patch in the middle. “I have a feeling wizards use this a lot,” Kit said.

“Or somebody does,” Nita said, and grinned at him.

It was beginning to occur to Kit that the changed circumstances that the two of them were dealing with were going to have the side effect of giving them a whole lot more things to joke about. And that can’t be bad . . .

They made their way cautiously out of the undergrowth, Nita pausing at the edge to look around before she waved Kit out behind her. “Don’t want anybody thinking we were doing what you’re afraid they might think we were doing,” she said, giving him a sidewise glance.

“No, of course not . . .”

Together they headed across a carefully groomed park with swings and slides and a graveled running path through it, and finally down into a street lined on both sides with two- or three-story houses painted in bright colors. “I swear I’ve seen this street on TV,” Kit said. “In some commercial. Or on a postcard somewhere.”

“It could be,” Nita said. “Or on some old TV show . . .”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “What’s the house number again?”

“Thirty-five.”

“There it is, then,” Kit said. It was across from where they stood; a white house with a slight overhang over its garage, a red-tiled roof, and a broad picture window looking out on the street.

They crossed over and went up the steps to the front door, and rang the doorbell. A few moments later it opened for them, and there was Penn, dressed in a floppy T-shirt and surfer jams and sandals, his hair rumpled, as if he’d been asleep. “Hey,” he said. “Dai. Come on in.”

They stepped into a long, quarry-tiled hall with various big heavy oak doors leading off it, white stuccoed walls, and pale oak beams crossing the ceiling at intervals: down at the end of the hall they could see into a bright north-facing room with a large table and some chairs in it, possibly a kitchen. “Is there anybody here we should know about?” Kit asked.

“What?” Penn said, yawning and scrubbing one hand through his hair. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that, it’s just me here and they’re all out at work.”

He looks like he just got out of bed, Kit thought. If I was expecting company, I’d at least be up for a while before they showed up! But it was early to start getting so judgmental. They’d barely met. There was no telling what kinds of pressure he was under at home.

“So where are we going to be working?” Nita said.

Once again, Penn looked at her as if he had no idea what she was doing there. “Uh, downstairs in the media room. Come on,” he said, and led them down a spiral staircase to the lower level of the house.

They followed him down the polished oak steps into a room with some large plush sofas and easy chairs over in one corner and a huge entertainment center up against the wall across from them, with a gigantic screen and a wet bar off to one side. The fourth wall was nothing but a huge picture window looking out across that glorious northern vantage of the Golden Gate and the sea.

“Wow,” Nita said. “That is some view.”

“Thanks,” Penn said, smiling at her for the first time. “We like it. You guys want something to drink? Beer? Wine? Soda?”

It occurred to Kit that it was early to be offering them wine or beer, both in terms of their drinking ages and the time of day—not to mention that the very concept of drinking while doing any kind of wizardry gave him the shivers. You might as well juggle loaded guns. “Uh, if you’ve got something like mineral water, that would be nice. Neets?”

“Yeah,” she said, “same for me, please.”

Penn went to the wet bar, got a couple of plastic spring water bottles out of the small refrigerator below it, and handed one to each of them. “There you go. Listen, sorry about yesterday—” He looked briefly sheepish. “I have a problem with crowds sometimes.”

“It’s all right,” Kit said. “It got a bit intense there.” And for Kit, so it had: he wasn’t used to wizards in such large numbers. Or rather, I kept thinking about the Moon . . . went through his mind.

He pushed the thought aside for the moment. Someday it’ll get easier. It may take a while. But someday . . .

Meanwhile Nita was carefully cracking the cap off her bottle of mineral water. “Would it be overstepping to ask what your folks do?” she said to Penn.

“They own a small supermarket chain,” he said. “Asian groceries, sundries, that kind of thing. Import-export.”

“Not wizards, then,” Kit said.

Penn laughed out loud. “Oh God, no, that would be one of the last things they’d want. One of the reasons they left China, as a matter of fact. Too much magic in our neighborhood.” He had picked up a mineral water of his own; now he swigged from it. “Anyway, don’t worry, you won’t be seeing them. Even if they do get home early, they won’t come down here while I’m working.”

“You’re out to them?” Nita said.

“Yeah. My dad always knew it might happen to me, and my stepmom got over the shock pretty quick.” He smiled. “They were hoping I wouldn’t be a wizard, to tell you the truth . . .” He shook his head. “But the tendency’s strong on my grandfather’s side of the family. My dad thought of it as such an old-country kind of thing: he was glad it skipped him, and he thought it might skip me, too. When we immigrated over here and my Ordeal happened anyway, they were pretty disappointed.” Penn shrugged. “But they got past it.”

An old-country kind of thing. Kit tucked that concept away for future examination. He knew that because of China’s great age as a nexus of cultures, the concept of wizardry had had a very long time to become embedded into it, and as a result, in places China was much more accepting of the concept of magic than many other parts of the world. It hardly meant that you could run down the street throwing wizardry around without consequences. But the thought that magic could exist, did exist, was apparently working in the background for a lot of people. It hadn’t occurred to him that this might create more problems than it solved.

“Well,” Kit said, “why don’t we get to work? The thing for us all to do, now, is figure out how we can best be of help to you. Help you structure your research . . . assist you with implementing the wizardry you’re working on. Or if you’ve got some logistical or ethical issues that you want to flesh out around your project.” While going through his own orientation pack, Kit had been surprised to discover that the part of the presentation that dealt with spell justification and intervention rationale was something that a lot of candidates didn’t spend enough time on. There were plenty of people who simply thought a hot new energy spell was a great idea and didn’t deal with the emotional and ethical impact statements surrounding it until it was almost too late. When they were standing up in front of a panel of Senior Wizards, having to defend their rationale from attack on all sides, those who had neglected this part of the project soon wished they hadn’t.

“Well, theoretically you’re supposed to be helping me sort out any problems with the spell,” Penn said. He ambled over to a nearby coffee table that had a few books on it, including one with a leather binding and Chinese characters embossed and gilded on the front of it. This he flipped casually open and glanced down at a two-page spread that Kit could see was covered from side to side with the graceful curlicued script of the Speech. “Except that there aren’t any problems.”

Kit kept himself from throwing Nita the look he wanted to. Give him the benefit of the doubt . . . “That’s a great state to be in,” he said. “Especially so early on in the process. Why not spread out the basic diagram for us and we’ll have a look.”

Penn’s expression went profoundly suspicious. “Yeah, sure. How do I know you’re not interested in swiping some of the sensitive elements?”

Kit glanced at Nita in astonishment. Nita gave him an “I saw this coming” look, with a smile, and said nothing.

Kit turned back to Penn. “To use for what, exactly?” he said.

“Yeah,” Nita said, and chuckled. “It’s not like I run out the door in the morning thinking Ooh, wow, I really feel the need to divert the solar wind today!”

Penn smiled at her skeptically. “Good one,” he said. “But, realistically, this is going to be kind of technical for you, wouldn’t you think? I thought you were more into the birds-and-bees kind of wizardry. The nature end of things.”

Nita’s mouth quirked up on one side. “There’s quite a lot of nature,” she said softly. “And quite a lot of it is . . . technical.”

Kit kept still, as he didn’t think he’d ever before heard Nita put a twist on the word “technical” that practically turned it into a drawn knife. “But go ahead,” she said, and there was more humor in her voice now. “Let’s see how much technicality you’ve got packed away in this thing.” She stuffed her hands in her jeans pockets and looked unconcerned.

Kit swallowed as inconspicuously as he could. He had a very strong feeling that something quite untoward had just barely missed happening. What worries me, though, he thought, is that Penn didn’t even see it . . .

For the moment, though, it didn’t matter. “Right,” Penn said, “here it is!”

He waved his arms in a grandiose gesture. The burning blue lines and circles and angles of a spell diagram flooded out from his manual on the side table. The diagram covered the floor and then reared upward into the upper half of a sphere that closed over all their heads like a diminutive dome.

The first thing Kit noticed was that large parts of the spell diagram were missing. The wizardly construct arching over and around them was sketchy, more of a schematic than a full diagram. There was a large, empty core-sphere at the heart of the thing, the spot where the routines meant to handle interaction with the Sun’s distant surface would go. The core had big spell-powering receptor sites faired into it all over its surface, and some time had been spent on the multiple energy-scoop wizardries associated with them.

“Okay,” Nita said, before Kit could even get his mouth open, “I see where this is going.” She walked into the heart of the spell, reached out for the core-sphere—about the size of a big beach ball—and picked it up in her hands. “Now this has some possibilities. You take this construct, shove it from wherever you are into a small temporospatial tube, and drop it out the other side of that into the Sun’s chromosphere. So you can implement it from anywhere, which is good.” She turned the “beach ball” over in her hands. “All these receptors pull raw energy straight out of the solar atmosphere, so the spell, except for the verbal Speech parts and the intentional components, is powered by what you’re using it to control. That’s elegant. And all you have to do is bootstrap it with the basic spoken wizardry and your own intention, then turn it loose.”

She paused, then, and turned slowly once in a complete circle, looking over the rest of the visible spell diagram that was drawn on the dome over and around them. “So far, so good. But after that the spell’s got a whole lot of work to do, and you haven’t yet indicated how you intend to power that. What you’re planning to do is to warp the prestorm coronal structure into a kind of funnel shape over the area where you’re working, and then shoot the high-speed energy particles of the wind off in another direction, like water out the neck of the funnel. Which is fine. Now, I see the control sectors over here—”

She walked over to one side of the dome, pointing at and tracing with one finger a number of fairly complex angular structures, densely interwritten with the Speech. “And these are a nice idea, too. But you’re not going to be able to power them directly off the Sun, as you’ve already got one set of directives doing that in the spell; you can’t run them both at once in such tight quarters. At the very least, you’ve got to spin off another entire core for the control structures. It’s going to cost you more energy: maybe fifty percent more than what you thought you were originally going to spend. A solo-working wizard who has to do this spell on short notice and without prep is going to be useless for anything for a day or so afterward. So you’ve got to either repurpose this spell for group work or scale it back. If you scale it, it won’t be able to handle as much of the corona as you’re indicating you’d like to do here, but it’ll still be useful as sort of a fire extinguisher that a wizard can deploy while waiting for the heavy assistance, the fire trucks, to arrive.”

She turned around where she stood, looking at the other diagrams and annotations in the Speech that were written over the surface of the dome. “It’s a start,” Nita said. She wandered back toward Kit and Penn, and casually tossed Penn the beach ball of his spell-core. He caught it and staggered, not expecting the extra ten pounds’ worth of gravitational force that Nita had quietly imparted to it on the fly while he wasn’t paying attention. “Now all you have to do is fill in the rest of this stuff,” she said, waving her hands at the dome, which was about two-thirds empty space. “It’s interesting, though, even though generally this is more in my sister’s line of work.”

“Your sister’s a wizard?” Penn looked surprised. “Older than you? Younger?”

Oh, God, Kit thought, he doesn’t even know.

“Younger, yeah.” Nita produced a cockeyed smile full of meaning that Kit suspected Penn was completely unequipped to parse. “You two should meet.” The smile got a touch more feral. “It’d be fun.”

“So that’s the structural side,” Kit said. “Looking at it simply as a concept, I can’t see any problems. It’s a great idea, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t work. In fact, you have to wonder why no one’s done it before! Which I guess is a good sign.”

Penn preened himself a little. “I thought so,” he said, “you know? It had that feeling of . . . inevitability about it.” He grinned.

Oh, Powers That Be, Kit thought, lend me your bucket that I might stick my head in it and not have to listen to this guy’s ego parading itself around the room! He was surprised by how much this was getting to him. Have I simply not noticed how lucky I am not to have a life full of people who all think they’re the best thing since sliced bread? Even Carmela seems low-key next to this guy.

Aloud, though, Kit merely said, “Well, what’s not inevitable yet is that this is going to be ready for you to perform it in front of thousands of people in a couple of weeks. You’re short on structure right now. I know you’re, well, concerned about the sensitive aspects. Fine. You don’t know us, we don’t know you—or at least we didn’t before a day ago. But at the same time, the Powers That Be sent us to you. I’d hope that would suggest to you that your content’s safe with us. We are not just some random wizards you met in the street.”

Kit watched Penn’s face work as he thought that over. I can’t believe, Kit thought, that he’s genuinely wondering whether the Powers That Be are screwing him over.

“All the same,” Penn said, “before the Cull stage, why do more diagramming than to the proof-of-concept level? If I go through, I’ve got five days or a week before the eighth-finals. Plenty of time to fill in the holes. Why knock myself out? No one else is going to.”

“I wouldn’t put any money on that,” Nita said. “Better do the work early and have time to fix it if something goes wrong.”

“Don’t see how much could,” Penn said. “But maybe you’d like to backstop me.” He looked at Nita admiringly.

The look she gave him back was one of amused pity. “Oh, Penn,” she said, “if you want me to do your homework for you, you’re going to have to ask me way more nicely than that. The soulful look hasn’t worked on me since—second grade? Maybe third. But meantime? Not a chance. You’re going to want to get started the minute we walk out the door, because you’ve got a lot to do before Cull Day.”

Penn smirked and turned away. “You had your chance,” he said. “Guess you’ll have to watch and learn.”

“Guess I will,” Nita said. “Is there a bathroom down here somewhere?”

“First door on your right.”

“Thanks.” She left the room.

After a few moments Penn said, “Just one question real fast. You passed her all that stuff, didn’t you? You’re just giving her a boost.”

Kit stared at him. “What?”

“None of that stuff was in her specialty. I looked that up! She does—” He waved his hands around. “Visiony stuff. And whales, lately. I don’t think we need her around for that.”

How can anyone be this clueless? And what use is a wizard who doesn’t read? “I don’t need to pass her anything, Penn. For one thing—” There were about thirty things, but Kit was controlling himself hard, aware that his annoyance if let loose could make him get rude with someone in whose house he was a guest. “Besides a ton of brains, she happens to have the spirit of wizardry stuck in her head.”

Penn put his eyebrows up. “Ahhh. No wonder she’s so fast at working out what makes a spell tick.”

Kit frowned. “She’s fast at working out spells because she’s smart.” His thoughts went back suddenly to a round patch of ground inside a freeway exchange, a long time ago, and the image of the girl looking silently down at him. Out of the memory he said, “And she’s also really good at making friends.”

“I bet she is,” Penn said softly.

Kit didn’t quite know how to take that. Half of Penn’s utterances were accompanied by a smirk, as if he considered everything that came out of his mouth to be at least potentially funny. Well, Kit thought, you’re not half as funny as you think you are.

“She made friends with a hundred-foot-long great white shark once,” Kit said. “That looks like the gold standard of friend making to me. But if you’re going to stand there making what-do-we-need-her-for noises, well, better check with the Powers That Be, because they’re the ones who insisted she be here. Theoretically, to give you a fighting chance of winning. Want to cut us loose and go it alone? Say the word.”

He pointedly turned his attention back to the spell diagram on the floor, half wishing that Penn would say, Yeah, I don’t need you. But instead Penn hurriedly came around in front of him, saying, “Hey, Kit, listen. No offense, right? It’s just important to shake out who’s doing what early on. Easy to get confused about something like that.”

Because you’re assuming I’m doing the heavy lifting in this team, Kit thought. It’s going to be so much fun to watch you keep making that kind of mistake . . .

“So easy to get confused,” Kit said. Down the hall, a toilet flushed; a door opened.

A few seconds later, Nita brushed through the dome of the spell diagram. “So,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

“I’d say we need to meet at least a couple times this week,” Kit said, “to see how Penn gets along with filling in these blanks. Tuesday?”

Penn pulled out an iPhone, did a few thumb-touches to its screen. “Tuesday’s good,” he said. “Your time zone or mine?”

“Ours sounds good,” Nita said. “About point three suit you?”

“Sounds excellent.” Penn put his phone away, reached out to Kit for a handshake. Then he held his hand out to Nita.

Kit watched Nita look thoughtfully at the hand for a second. Then she took it.

Penn lifted her hand, bowed over it, kissed it. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I misjudged you.”

“Yes, I’d say you did,” Nita said. She recovered her hand without any undue show of haste, and unexpectedly offered the other one to Kit.

He hesitated only a second before taking it, hoping the uncertainty didn’t show. Nita looked at him. “Shrubbery?” she said.

“Shrubbery,” said Kit.

They vanished from Penn’s house with less air displacement than might have been caused by a passing butterfly.

A few moments later they were in among the rhododendrons, and Nita was scrubbing the hand Penn had kissed against her jeans. She was also laughing in sheer disbelief. “What—the hell—was that?” she gasped.

“The cheesiest line ever uttered by a living being?” Kit said, laughing too. “Listen, the next time we see the Powers, we absolutely need to knock them on their butts. What have they stuck us with here?”

“An ego on legs,” Nita said, still laughing helplessly. “That spell had better be useful for something, because if I come down with the chronic cooties because of that—” She flapped the offended hand around in front of her. “Oh, God, Kit, I need antiseptic. What a waste of time!”

The two of them laughed a while more until they ran out of breath. “But not a waste of power, I guess,” Kit said. “Because here we are, on Their business. And we wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t for something useful.”

“Yeah . . . yeah.” Nita sighed and leaned against the exposed trunk of one of the rhododendrons. “While I was in the bathroom, I heard what you were saying.”

Kit flushed hot. “Okay,” he said, “but I had to, right? What kind of person would I be if I’d stood there and let him trash-talk you?”

“You shouldn’t feel like you have to protect me,” Nita said. “This is like being out in the playground again, except this playground’s full of wizards. Believe me, if I needed to tear Penn a new one, I would.”

“You almost did,” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said, “and I would’ve had reason. Oh, God, Kit. ‘The birds and the bees’ . . . !”

They laughed again together for a moment. Kit felt some of that uneasy tightness go out of his chest. “But honestly, this guy exhausts me,” Kit said. “Everything he says is a brag, an insult, or an innuendo. What is his problem?”

“Trouble at home, maybe? There’s some evidence for that. Hormonal junk? Nerves?” And she rolled her eyes. “Or maybe he’s just an asshole.”

Kit laughed again. “Have we been living a sheltered existence, or something? Because this isn’t the kind of wizard we normally run into . . .”

“It’s true,” Nita said, in a musing sort of way. “We don’t know that many asshole wizards.”

“Ronan.”

“Oh, come on! Ronan is not an asshole.”

“All right, he’s just annoying. But he still gets the job done.”

“Problem is, I think Penn has a chance of doing that, too.”

“Being annoying?”

“Of course, but I meant getting the job done.”

Kit tilted his head back and blew out a thoughtful breath. “Assuming he can do what he spends most of his time claiming he can do . . . But now you’re standing up for him?”

“And why not?” Nita said. “We’re mentors; isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing? This guy has talent. I don’t think there’s any doubt of that. If there was, he wouldn’t be in this at all—the Powers would never have invited him! And he’s got something to contribute here: a good idea. So far, though, that’s pretty much all he’s got. Good spell execution is more than just the outlines.”

“Yeah. If he’s going to make it past the Cull, even, he’s gonna have to fill in a lot more of those holes.”

Nita nodded. “If today’s any indication, then what we’ve got to do is help him learn to navigate around his jerk tendencies. Keep him appropriate, keep him focused. Which is going to be a full-time job.” She shook her head. “But I wasn’t kidding. I’m trying to work out why the Powers even wanted me in on this. Seems like a waste of time.”

“What? Why do you think? Because we’re a team.”

“Well, for one thing, it’s more Dairine’s specialty. Why didn’t they hook him up with her?”

“Because he wouldn’t have survived kissing her hand?”

Nita laughed, but she also rolled her eyes. “If I find out that the Powers That Be have sent me along on this thing to cure somebody of their sexism, they and I may have words afterward. Because this is going to get on my nerves.”

“Well,” Kit said, more quietly, “you know the principle. ‘All is done for each . . . ’”

“Yeah, well,” Nita said. “It sounds good in theory. But when you find out that you’re the tool being used to do the ‘all,’ your perspective changes.” She frowned. “Penn needs serious education. At the very least, he needs to be socialized with other wizards so he doesn’t come off like an idiot! And I don’t know about you, but I was looking at the base schematic for his spell and it was all over the place. I don’t know who taught him to compose . . .”

“Well, we’ve both got the advantage of working with someone who specializes in spell composition. Tom’s been doing that . . . how long now? Decades. Since he wasn’t too much older than us, I think. If Penn is self-taught—working only with the manual and the general style guides in there—maybe it’s no surprise he’s sloppy around the edges.”

Nita sighed. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. Let’s go. I want to wash my hand.”

Kit hesitated, hoping it wouldn’t show. Then he held his hand out to her. “Grand Central?” he said.

Nita looked thoughtfully at Kit’s hand: then took it, with the smallest smile. “Grand Central,” she said.

They vanished.

It was night, and Nita was standing all by herself in the middle of a big, dark field. She could smell grass; fresh-cut, so fresh that a lawnmower might have been by in the last few minutes.

So that’s interesting, Nita thought. But where the hell am I?

The silence around her, though, that got her attention. If I’m outside, she thought, if there’s a lawnmower, then why can’t I hear anything else? If it was nighttime, and there was a lawn to be mowed, then there would be insects. But she couldn’t hear anything of the kind.

Nita held still, and closed her eyes. All right, she thought, one thing at a time. This is a vision. Let’s see where it goes.

You think that’s going to help? said a voice nearby in the darkness. The real problem is that you’re trying to treat this rationally.

And since when is being rational a problem? Nita asked.

It’s not the rationality by itself, the voice said. It’s where it leads you.

Fine. Where should I be going, then?

The way you fear to go, the voice said.

The chill that ran down the back of Nita’s neck had nothing to do with the night, or the dew falling on the cut grass. “Bobo,” Nita said, looking around her, “is that you? Thought we had an agreement that you weren’t going to get into one of these. It gets too confusing.”

As she spoke, she suddenly became aware of a faint light out at the edge of things. She turned to try to get an idea of where it was coming from, and realized that she was completely surrounded by it. She couldn’t see any source, either—it was as if the light was downhill from her in all directions.

Bobo’s not here, said another voice. It wasn’t one that she was familiar with—which somehow the first voice had been. This one was low and sad, and sounded deeply troubled.

She could understand why it was troubled, because Bobo was always here. In fact the idea that Bobo wasn’t answering her began filling Nita with alarm. In the waking world there were times when she could go days without speaking to him, sometimes even without thinking about him; but when she called on him, he never failed to answer. And now that it felt as if he was needed here—

Well, Nita thought. This is weird. But she wasn’t going to start crying for him like a baby missing her toy. She’d coped without him before, and she would do it again.

“All right,” Nita said. “Is there something you want to tell me? I’m listening.”

A second later the light got brighter, distracting her. Nita looked around and realized that the faint radiance encircling her was just that; a circle, sharp and cleanly drawn. It lay faintly glowing on the grass, right out at the edge of her vision, but the circularity of it was plain to see—as if someone had walked around her with one of those chalking machines they use at football games. There were, however, no irregularities or bumps or wiggles in this circle. It was unnervingly perfect. And as she was continuing a slow turn in which she examined it, the blue-white glow of it, for any slightest wiggle or bend, another voice spoke up.

And this one was strange, strange. It was a hiss, almost, like someone speaking with breath but no voice, the breath a soft roar oddly like the roar of flames up a fireplace chimney. But very low, afraid to be heard, almost unwilling to be heard. It’s late, the new voice said. Very late. Too late, maybe.

“What’s the matter?” Nita said. “Let me help!”

You can’t help, the fiery voice said. He’s the only one who can help, and he’s not here. Why isn’t he here? He was supposed to be here. How else can we be freed?

The hair rose on the back of Nita’s neck. This is bad, she thought, feeling the sense of fear and pain that the other voice was trying to hide, and failing. It was too young, that was the problem. It wasn’t supposed to be by itself. He was supposed to be here. Nita swallowed, unnerved. “Bobo?” she said, and then more loudly, not quite shouting it. “Bobo!”

“Where is he?” said another voice in the darkness, and this one she knew: it was Kit. “We need him now, Neets, can’t you get in here?”

A moment later, another voice chimed in. It was Carmela’s. “Not this time, Neets,” she said. “He can’t help. Kit can’t help. You’re the only one. And you have to help find where both of them are. If you don’t find them both, it won’t be any good, they’ll destroy each other if it’s not done right—!”

Nita tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. As she struggled for words, she suddenly realized that the circle was closer around her, now; closer to her. It had been nearly out to the horizon before, or at least the light associated with it had been. Now it was maybe—what? Fifty yards away? And it was pulsing—buzzing, or humming, making an odd sizzling noise. It was brighter, too.

The cold down the back of her neck felt more like heat now, prickly heat. The darkness about the field where she was standing had somehow got darker. There were no stars in it, none. It was not like it had been when the Pullulus came through, when there were stars on one side of the sky and the darkness on the other side that was trying to eat them. Here there was simply darkness. Even the ugly un-sky of the Lone One’s alternate Manhattan had not been this desolate. This was an emptiness that was chillingly complete. It was not a place from which stars had been disbarred or eradicated; it was a place in which they had never existed at all.

“Bobo’s not here,” said one voice. And, “Bobo can’t help,” said another. Nita’s eyes widened. Was that Penn? What’s Penn doing here?

And then still another voice, much darker, much deeper, spoke. It said, “And you know what the joke is this time?”

At that, Nita went cold all over. She knew that voice entirely too well. “Oh, go on,” she shouted into the dark, in no mood to sound conciliatory. She’d had it up to here with the Lone Power’s jokes. “You know you want to tell me—”

“But I’m on your side this time,” it said, with a sort of sad, wounded sarcasm.

“Oh, tell me another one,” Nita muttered. But that was apparently the wrong thing to say. The circle that had been fifty yards or so away was now maybe five yards away, closer, brighter, buzzing more malevolently. Heard at closer range, the noise it was making had become more uncanny. It sounded peculiarly mechanical, as if tiny racecars were running a deadly serious race around and around it. What do they call those? Nita thought, trying to remember the name of the long, thin cars that go so fast around special tracks, or on big races through many cities. Formula—something. Racing wasn’t something Nita normally paid much attention to, but now she could hear the wasplike whine of miniature cars circling. Except the sound was higher now, fainter, more piercing.

“Not that it’s going to matter to you, or to her, or to him,” said the darkest voice. “Especially not to him. His attention will be elsewhere. So you should make the most of this brief pastorale, because he’s going to come to his senses, and it won’t last long.”

“Who?” Nita said. “Bobo? Kit? Penn? You know, sometimes you get too obscure for your own good.”

“But not this time,” said that very dark voice. And it was laughing at her—laughter that she’d heard before when things had not gone well. As it laughed again, the circle had drawn in even closer, was lying right around her feet, hemming her in. She couldn’t move out, couldn’t step away, couldn’t escape. The whining noise it made scaled up and up. Desperately she reached out for what hadn’t been there before, a hand to hold, and found nothing: just empty air.

“For a change,” the dark voice said, “obscurity is not on my list. My only limitation in communicating with you is your unwillingness to engage. Isn’t it delicious? The only thing that will keep you from saving them is you.”

“I’ll break through,” Nita said. “I will!”

“But will you do it in time?” the Lone Power said. “Not if you don’t become at least somewhat more flexible. But that’s always been your problem, hasn’t it? Stubborn Nita, always so sure of what she thinks, refusing to compromise. Compromise is going to be right at the heart of this one, and you will probably walk right past it because you’re so determined to have your own way.”

A long, thoughtful pause followed. “Because it’s not your style to let somebody else walk into the fire, is it? You’ve still got some guilt about that. But that’ll be a problem for another day. Right now, there’s something closer at hand. And it’s going to be so much fun watching you figure it out. If you can.”

“Well, if you’re going to be on my side, then maybe you should just tell me the answer!” After all, the thought came to Nita out of nowhere, if it works on the Transcendent Pig . . .

The circle was gone from below. It was around her throat now, like a choker necklace, strangling her, stopping the words in her mouth and the breath in her body. Her hands went up to tear at it. But she couldn’t get so much as a fingertip underneath it, and she gasped and her vision started to go, while right under her ears the maddening whine and buzz of the tiny cars became the only sound in the world. “I’m telling you the answer all the time,” the Lone Power said. “But will you hear it?” She could almost hear It shrug. “Doesn’t matter, not really,” It continued. “Or rather, it’ll matter to another. Not to me. You’re stuck with me. If you won’t walk into the fire, he’ll be stuck with me, too.” Then a long, soft laugh. “And if you do get him to walk into it,” It said, “then you’ve just managed to get somebody else to die for you, haven’t you?”

She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. The voice kept speaking to her, but she couldn’t hear it over the excruciating buzz of something going very very fast in circles. Wheezing for breath, Nita tore at her throat, choking, as everything went black—

And she woke up.

She was sitting bolt upright in bed, still panting for air. “Sweet Powers above, below, and sideways, what the hell was that?” she whispered as soon as she had breath enough to do so. “Bobo??”

You told me not to wake you during these, Bobo said calmly. I would’ve liked to, especially since you were calling for me, but you did specifically countermand that. Want to give some thought to rewriting the night-vision routine?

“God,” Nita said, “don’t tempt me.” She tried calming her breathing. It wasn’t easy.

I recorded it, Bobo said, but as usual there’s nothing but sound and imagery. You’re going to have to add subjective context.

“I honestly do not want to do that right now!”

White Queen memorandum . . . Bobo replied.

Instantly, inside Nita’s head, a picture of an engraving from the old version of Through the Looking Glass appeared, with the White King and the White Queen; the White King saying, “The horror of that moment I shall never, never forget!” and the White Queen, completely unconcerned by his distress, saying, “You will, though, if you don’t make a memorandum of it!”

Nita sighed. “Nobody likes a smartass, Bobo . . .”

Your note, not mine . . .

“Fine. Can I go pee first?”

Five minutes, Bobo said, and think about it while you’re there. I’ll take dictation on the context and under-dialogue while you’re brushing your teeth.

She rolled out of bed, groaning. “Wizardry is mean to me,” she muttered. “I’m gonna tell.”

At the back of her head, Wizardry snickered unsympathetically, and Nita muttered to herself and made for the bathroom.