Games Wizards Play

7

Hempstead / Elsewhere

IT WAS JUST BEFORE eight in the morning, and Nita was standing in the kitchen doing the dishes. Partly this was because there weren’t enough of them to bother putting in the dishwasher. Or there are, Nita thought, but they’ll sit there all day waiting for a full wash to build up, and what if somebody wants to use them?

The real reason, though, was that she wanted time to think. Since she and Kit had agreed to get involved in the Invitational, things seemed to have gotten very hectic—more so than could be accounted for by what they’d done. She and Kit had had two more sessions with Penn—Or rather, Kit had spent a total of nearly eight hours over two days getting him to fill in the multiple sketchy, incomplete, or half-baked parts of his coronal management spell, while Nita prowled around the edges ignoring Penn’s smart remarks and inept attempts to get on her good side.

The trouble is, she thought, that he has no idea where my good side is. Or why he’s on my bad side. For someone who saw himself as a very cool dude, it was surprising how Penn’s attempts to present himself that way kept backfiring. I still can’t believe that he actually kissed my hand. She rubbed it against her jeans in slightly grossed-out memory, something she’d caught herself doing before. If he tries that again, I’m going to have to explain things to him.

. . . Ideally, before Kit does.

She considered that notion, then laughed at herself. Not really his style, Nita thought. What is this, the Middle Ages? But all the same, she kept running up against behaviors of Penn’s that came across as immature. And he’s almost the same age as us. Doesn’t he have enough friends at school to help him get a sense of what works with people? Or does he not have enough friends, period?

. . . Or the wrong kinds of friends, it occurred to Nita after a moment. It was easy enough for things to go either way at school. Often enough she’d caught herself sitting through a long afternoon’s classes and thinking, I can’t wait for my senior year. Because once I’m there, I will be able to look at most of these people and think, ‘In just nine months I’ll be done with you and I’ll never have to see you again!’

It wasn’t that she disliked a lot of her fellow students. It was simply that for the most part she had so little in common with them that she might as well have been going to school with members of an alien species. In fact, generally speaking, I get along better with alien species than I do with a lot of these guys.

Nita laughed at herself as she picked up another small sandwich plate and started scrubbing at it with the abrasive side of the dish sponge. Then she sighed yet again and wondered what she and Kit were going to do about Penn. It’s not that he’s not a fairly competent wizard, she thought. He made it through his Ordeal, he goes on errantry when he’s sent, and he gets the job done. But beyond that, he didn’t seem to be much of a self-starter. Nita had checked her manual with an eye to having a look at Penn’s independent projects. What surprised her was that there weren’t any.

That had left her shaking her head. What does he do for fun? The answer seemed to be, not wizardry. He liked baseball, and ice hockey, which was slightly remarkable for someone from California; he sang with the choir at his church; he listened to a lot of rock and jazz. And all of these things he would talk about endlessly if you didn’t stop him. There were times when you’d be working with him and Penn would want to talk about anything except the wizardry you were debugging.

Or, Nita thought, times when Kit will be working with him. She was still having trouble trying to understand what possible reason Penn might have for not wanting to engage with her except as a girl. Or his image of a girl, Nita thought, and put the plate she was washing on the dish rack. Someone kind of sweet and friendly but not particularly dangerous. And as she picked up another dish and started scrubbing it, she had to snicker, because if that was Penn’s image of her, he was delusional. It’s not like I go around menacing people, exactly. But I’ve been dangerous enough on occasion. Does that bother him for some reason? And if it does, why?

She shook her head, rinsed the plate, and added it to the rack. Then she paused, having heard a floorboard creak in the upstairs hall. Dairine’s up . . . Or wait, maybe she’s just back. Her sister’s normal working hours had been badly thrown off by her own Invitational work: she’d been in India until nearly breakfast time today.

Nita heard the bathroom door upstairs shut, and reached out to grab the kettle, then filled it up and put it on the stove. From nowhere in particular Dairine had manifested a yen for coffee, and had even gone to the supermarket herself to buy it. Something her mentee’s got her onto, maybe? I should ask.

Nita went back to the sink and picked up the last dish. Meanwhile . . . Penn. They had another meeting set up with him for this afternoon, his time. On this side of things, thank heaven. I’m getting bored with being three hours out of whack half the time. Going off-world is so much easier, you don’t have to worry about zonelag . . . Nita stood there scrubbing, and sighed. There must be some spells that are good against that . . . I’ll look it up.

Don’t bother, Bobo said. There are several. But they’re energy-intensive, and I don’t recommend you start using them unless it’s an emergency. Fiddling around with your melatonin levels is dicey business.

Dairine came thumping down the stairs and leaned against the kitchen door, looking blearily at Nita. She was dressed in jeans and a long T-shirt—again, or still? Nita wondered. “Water’s about to boil,” she said.

“Thank you,” Dairine said, sounding like she’d prefer to go to sleep right where she stood.

“Go sit down before you fall down,” Nita said.

Dairine did that without discussion, which shocked Nita more than almost anything else her sister could’ve done. Then Dairine put her head down on her arms and blinked at Nita like someone who was finding it too much strain to think, let alone talk.

“You want some of your coffee?”

“Yes.”

Nita put the last dish on the rack, pulled two mugs down from the cupboard, and turned off the burner under the kettle. “How much sugar?”

“A lot. Two. Three if you’re using a small spoon.” She didn’t even look up. “Is Daddy here?”

“Nope, left for the shop around seven,” Nita said as she got herself a teabag and dropped it in one mug.

Dairine rolled her head on her arms and groaned. “Why do I feel like this?” she said to the table. “I’ve fought the Lone Power and I haven’t felt this tired.”

“Working hard, maybe?”

Dairine sighed. “Some. Not so much, really, my mentee’s smart. But I keep getting the feeling she’s keeping something under wraps that’s going to pop up at a bad moment.” She pushed herself upright, leaned against the back of the dining room chair with her head lolling back.

Nita rummaged in another cupboard for the coffee. “Family stuff?”

“I don’t know,” Dairine said, her eyes closed. “Haven’t seen any of them, it’s hard to tell. But I get a feeling it’s complicated.” She sighed. “I’m not used to family being complicated . . .”

“Maybe we’re too nuclear,” Nita said, prying the lid off the coffee jar.

Dairine made a slight puff of air that Nita recognized as a substitute for a laugh. “Yeah, but fusion, not fission,” she murmured.

Nita snickered. “How much of this do I use?” she said, squinting at the coffee jar.

“Sort of a big teaspoon . . .”

Nita measured it out, poured steaming water. “Lots of milk,” said the muffled voice from the table.

Nita took care of that, then put the mug down by Dairine’s head and sat down herself with her tea. “What’s on the agenda today?” Dairine said, reviving enough to sit up and slurp at her coffee.

“Penn’s coming over this afternoon,” Nita said. “He’s been doing more work on his spell, and we’re going to look it over at this end of things.”

“In the house?” Dairine said, sounding dubious. “There’s not a lot of room.”

“No,” Nita said, with a slight smile, “not in the house.”

Dairine looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “I know that look,” she said. “What’re you plotting?”

“Well . . .” Nita turned her tea mug around a couple times on the table. “You know, from back when we were working with Mom, I still have access to the aschetic spaces.”

Dairine’s eyes widened. “The practice universes? No, I didn’t know.”

Nita nodded. “Had a look at the manual to learn more about Penn, and you know . . . he doesn’t seem to have gotten out much. I mean, the High Road isn’t to everybody’s taste. There’s no law that says it has to be. But for someone who acts like he’s such a big deal—”

“Or thinks he has to act that way?”

“Whichever.” Nita shrugged. “Either way, it’s a pain in the butt. Anyhow, he doesn’t seem to have any circle or group of wizards he works with, not even as casual partners; he doesn’t get involved in joint wizardries. And the stuff he has done has all been on Earth. Not that that’s a hanging offense either.” She sighed. “It’s just that—Well, with most of the wizards you and I know, the minute they found out there were other planets with life on them, and that you could get at them—they were out there like a shot. At least once or twice, if only to see what it was like! But Penn?” She shook her head. “Not once, as far as I can tell.”

“Maybe he went on his Ordeal,” Dairine said, “and ran into something he didn’t like.”

“Maybe. But as usual, that’s sealed data. No way to find out about it unless he decides to say something, and I won’t be asking.” Nita took a sip of her tea. “Anyway, I’m going to open up a doorway into the Playroom. At least that’ll be a little interesting for him, if not exactly off-planet. And we can work without being interrupted. Also, it’ll give him a chance to put his spell through a dry run in a place where he can’t hurt anything.”

“Smart.”

“I hope so. I got a segment of the Playroom’s space booked for exclusive use late this afternoon—that’s the soonest he can get over, which is fine, we’re not done with school till around then. I’m going to stealth-shield that whole area way in the back where the sassafras trees are, and anchor the portal there.”

“Yeah, I know the spot.”

Nita looked at Dairine with slight concern. “I just didn’t want you to come back from something and find the energy signature back there had gone peculiar, and then get panicky.” At the thought that somehow, someone had come back without warning, someone you’ve been missing . . .

“Like I’ve got the energy to get panicky about anything right now . . .” Dairine said, gulping down some more coffee.

“It’s when you’re bleary like this that I start worrying what you might do if you did get panicky,” Nita said. “Make a note, though, and let Spot know about it, okay? And if you’re not busy, stop in, if you want to. I wouldn’t mind you looking him over . . . seeing what you think.”

“Okay.” Dairine guzzled some more of her coffee.

Nita shook her head. “You’re really getting into that stuff, aren’t you?”

“Yup. Tom’s full of good advice,” Dairine said.

“Oh, is that who got you started. No wonder the jar looked familiar.”

Dairine nodded, got up, and headed out with the mug. “You have school this afternoon?” Nita called after her.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I’ve got a couple of classes starting at three. I’ll see you there, then . . .”

No answer; Dairine merely went stomping back up the stairs.

Nita sighed, reached for a dish towel and picked up the first of the dishes from the rack while starting to review the Playroom portal spell in her mind. “Bobo,” she said, “text function to Kit’s manual?”

Open now. Go . . .

In the upstairs bathroom, Kit was just out of the shower, drying himself off and listening to absolutely nothing.

The house was blessedly quiet. His pop had left for work half an hour ago; his mama was working nights in ICU and wouldn’t be home for another half-hour or so. Carmela was asleep, as she too had gone over to afternoon classes at school and on weekdays steadfastly refused to greet the day before ten. Only time that worldgate in her closet gets any downtime . . . Kit thought.

He sat down on the toilet lid and sighed, then scrubbed his hands through his hair and tried to stroke it into some kind of shape that wouldn’t make him look like an idiot later in the day. That last haircut . . . Kit thought. Not sure it’s what I wanted. It keeps sticking up in all the wrong ways.

Yet at the same time, he remembered turning up in Antarctica the other day after sort of fluffing it up the way the barber had told him to, with some hair gunk, and when he finally tracked her down in that crowd and headed for her, Nita had looked at it and . . . Kit swallowed. He could still see that look. It made his stomach flip.

Is it insane to be still remembering something like that—how she looked at me two days ago?

Nothing’s normal anymore.

And then he started laughing at himself, there in the quiet. Like my life’s been any kind of normal since I picked up that weird book in the secondhand store a few years ago . . . But he had to admit, as the laughter ran out, that it was still bizarre how just one word could change everything.

Tell the truth, though, Kit thought, I dared her into saying it. He’d known that the word had been hanging in the air between them unspoken for a long time. And also to tell the truth, I was incredibly chicken about it.

I thought if it just got said . . . then the tension would go away. Because the tension between them had been getting tougher and tougher to bear, for Kit at least. It wasn’t as if people at school hadn’t been noticing for a long time that there was something going on with them. There were kids who were sure it was sex, and (when they hadn’t been able to dig up any evidence to confirm this) who then split further into two camps: those who were sure Kit and Nita were doing something secret and kinky (because why would they hide even being girlfriend and boyfriend otherwise?) and those who were certain that one or the other of them was a virgin who was using the other one as cover.

Gossip, oh God the gossip, you get so sick of it, Kit thought. How is this any of their business? But all around them was the pressure to be something that fit into a category everyone could understand—crushing, dating, messing around, platonic, religiously celibate, whatever. And the endless stares and the whispers and the knowing laughter, they got so old. The urge to stand in the middle of the hall and shout Yes, yes we are doing something together: we save the world! We’ve done it a bunch of times now, and I think we’re getting the hang of it!—it got strong sometimes, when Kit was feeling particularly tired or goofy. At such times he considered that it was probably a good thing that at least one of the school shrinks knew about wizards.

And he knew Nita felt the pressure as well. Unfairly, it seemed worse for her. The kids who thought she wasn’t hooking up with Kit thought she was frigid. The ones who did think she was hooking up with him thought she was an easy lay—though so far no one had worked up enough courage to say so in Kit’s hearing, which was just as well for them.

Problem is, he thought, sometimes I want to step in between her and these jerks but I can’t tell for sure when she wants that. Or even if. Certainly they’d saved each other from trouble often enough in the past. And he laughed again at the bland cover-all term “trouble.” Chased around Ireland by stone drow-trolls? Check. Stuck in the middle of a wizards’ civil war on Mars? Check. Nearly nuked by Ultimate Evil at the far edge of the visible universe? Been there, done that, got his ’n’ hers T-shirts . . . In fact it was getting to be sort of a joke that he and Nita should work out a schedule to make sure that each of them got an equal opportunity to be the hero, or alternately to be the person who got to feel idiotic about needing to be saved. But everything’s changing, Kit thought. Things we might have done six months ago and never thought twice about aren’t always the right things to do now.

And reactions to what we do aren’t the same either. Kit remembered how after he and Nita had been at Penn’s the other day, on the way back to his house he’d found himself reflectively rubbing the hand she’d held. His first thought on realizing what he was doing had been Oh stop it, you’re pathetic! But it had been kind of shocking at the time how automatically she’d reached for him after her annoyance at Penn grabbing her hand and getting all smoochy-smoochy with it. Kit had gone quite warm, blushing, and then, feeling humiliated, had thought, Oh please don’t let her see me doing that. Don’t let him see me doing that! And as it happened, no one had seen . . . which had been a relief.

Sometimes, though, seeing wasn’t the issue. You still knew. And more, you suspected that others knew. In particular, Kit kept catching Dairine looking at him . . . just looking in an unsettling way. When he’d mentioned Dairine’s expression in passing, Nita had laughed it off. “She gets protective of me, you know how she is sometimes . . .” and Kit had very nearly said, Yeah, and can I have some of that action please? But he’d kept quiet because he didn’t know if that was too much or how Nita would take it, and this was all too new and strange now that they were actually talking about it . . .

Except we aren’t actually talking about it much. Mostly we’re still dodging it.

And things are going to keep getting worse for a while. Because in a couple of weeks I’ve got to go back to where I didn’t think it could get any worse . . .

It was an odd thing to contemplate, and uncomfortable. Kit had always loved going up to the Moon and sitting there and enjoying the view—either homeward toward Earth, or (on earlier visits to the “dark side”) out into the farther universe. Turning his back on the world, occasionally turning his attention outward, as far outward as possible, had been a pleasant thing—challenging without being scary.

Now, though . . . “Scary” did creep in. It was difficult for Kit at the moment, when he was on the side where Earth didn’t show, not to start reliving the events that (locally at least) had ended the Pullulus War. The death of that terrible darkness, the safety of the world, of all the worlds, had been worth it. But there had been awful losses among the wizards and others who’d held the final line. And one loss in particular had left Kit in serious pain.

He looked over at the empty braided-rag rug by the bed, where no one lay upside down with all his feet in the air, snoring. Your dog, he kept telling himself, is not dead. He is in fact the next thing to a god. But it was one thing knowing Ponch to be immortal, invulnerable, and now present in every dog who lived. It was another thing entirely to have to stand by helplessly watching a terrible battle of powers and spirits that Ponch might not have survived . . . and then, Ponch having beyond belief won that battle, it was a worse thing still to have to watch him go. The friend who had been with Kit since he was little, almost before he could remember . . . Now that space was empty. And all the other dogs in existence, nice as they were, couldn’t fill it the way Ponch had done.

Kit remembered how, sometimes when you were small, it was possible to get scared over what later turned out to be nothing. You’d hear your parents fighting, or you’d have done something stupid and gotten yelled at particularly hard, and you’d go to bed so terrified that your stomach tied itself in knots, while you twisted and turned and were sure that the world was over and everything was ruined, never to be right again. But even when Kit was scared and upset and feeling horribly alone because of something like that, Ponch had always been there with his nose in Kit’s ear, or licking his face, or looking at him with big worried eyes that said, Don’t be sad; if you have to be, then I have to be sad too! And all the time Kit was growing up, when Kit was happy, then Ponch was ready to play; and when Kit was unhappy Ponch always knew somehow, and would be with him, just there.

And then Ponch was gone, and for the first time Kit had a referent for the way Nita felt when her Mom died. Except he couldn’t say that to anybody, because he could imagine how it’d be taken when it came out. You’re comparing losing your dog to somebody’s mom dying? How can you even think of doing that? How stupid are you? Yet the feelings had to be alike, in some ways—the horrible twist of the gut and the heart as again and again you came up against the absence of that unwavering companionship and acceptance that had always been within call: the love that you knew could be depended on for better or worse, that you knew would never abandon you. Suddenly it was missing, but the habit of it wasn’t. You kept reaching for it and finding nothing, and over and over feeling the sickening impact of the wrongness of that, like a missed step on the stairway of the heart.

Kit leaned his head back against the medicine cabinet above the toilet and stared at the shower tiles, unfocused. Yeah, I know it’s all right. I know he’s all right. Impossibly all right! . . . But it’s not the same as having him here. And the Moon’s gonna bring all this up again, hard.

He sat there a while longer. Then Kit sighed, got up, knotted the towel around him after about the third try, and and reached for his toothbrush. One thing at a time, he thought. If I take my time with this, maybe I can get myself to a place where I won’t freak out when I’m up on the far side of the Moon. That’ll be good enough.

Meanwhile . . . Penn. What do we do about Penn? Because if he tries that stunt with Neets again, she’s gonna increase entropy all over his butt. Don’t think the organizers’ll like it if we kill our mentee . . .

Kit started considering ways to prevent that from happening as he headed out of the bathroom and down the hall to his room. No sooner had he gotten in there, though, than he caught sight of something glowing softly and rhythmically on his desk: the page-edges of his manual, pulsing with bluish light. Oh. Something from Neets—

He went to the desk, flipped the manual open, and riffled through the pages to the messaging section. One part of it he’d set aside for the Invitational—which had been a smart move, as all the texts and support material tended to pile up pretty quickly—and at the top of the first page, he found a text from Nita: Got the Playroom booking sorted out, it said. 5:30 p.m., my backyard.

“Got that,” Kit said, and watched as the words appeared on the page beneath Nita’s text. “5:30 it is.”

Send? the manual asked a few lines down.

“Send it,” Kit said. The page grayed itself out while the Sending herald displayed, then darkened down again, listing Kit’s text as sent.

He walked over to his dresser, pulled a drawer open, and started rummaging through it for underwear. “So go to audio,” he said to the manual, “and let me take another run at the judging structure for the eighth-finals. How many judges? . . .”

When Penn popped out of nowhere later that afternoon into the shielded space at the end of the backyard, he looked surprised to find himself apparently in the center of a small forest, through which not even the low Sun was managing to shine. “Um,” he said, turning around in a circle and taking in the nonview, “we having some kind of field trip?”

Nita smiled, amused, as even without wizardly shielding it was almost impossible to see the neighbors’ houses through the undergrowth or past the taller trees. If you hauled a lawn chair out here in nice weather you could feel astonishingly distant from suburbia and the general troubles of the world. But with the shielding up, what little view was visible past the trees was blurred and uncertain—the shield-spell’s way of verifying that it was up and working. “You could say that,” Nita said. “How’s your day been so far?”

“Uh, okay. Thanks. Where’s Kit?”

It’s going to be so much fun breaking you of this, Nita thought. Possibly too much fun. “He’ll be along in a few.”

“And am I supposed to be laying the spell out here?” Penn stared at the leaf-littered ground. “Kind of, uh, untidy. And cramped.”

“The trees don’t do active art installations back here anymore,” Nita said, “but even so, you’re right, there’s not a lot of space to stretch. I’ve got something roomier set up.”

“Oh,” Penn said, “okay.” He folded his arms and leaned against a tree. “Before he gets here—can I ask you a question?”

Nita reached into the otherspace pocket that always hung near her while she was working, and pulled out her manual. “Sure,” she said. Especially since it’s probably going to be more words than you’ve said to me since we met.

“Why does Kit let you do so much stuff?”

Let me? Nita thought. This just gets more bizzare all the time . . .

“I mean,” Penn said, “isn’t he afraid you’re going to get in trouble?”

“All the time,” Nita said. And she grinned. “But he knows not to interfere with that, since the job keeps getting done. That’s how we work.”

“It seems—dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous for him, too,” Nita said. “And believe me, I’ve got nothing on him when he gets in trouble. That’s when I get my worrying done. But somehow we come out all right. At least so far . . .” She flipped through her manual, found the spot she needed, and scanned down the page. All the necessary permissions were there. “One thing I need you to do,” Nita said, and handed him the manual. “Check your name here and make sure I’ve got all the other details right.”

Penn took the book and looked curiously at the subdiagram that contained his name. He stood quietly for a moment, tracing the long curve of Speech-characters with one finger. “Yeah,” he said, “it looks fine.”

“You sure?”

“It’s fine,” Penn said, and passed Nita back her manual with an expression that looked faintly uneasy. It was the first time she could recall the cocky expression falling off his face. She liked him a lot better without it; he had nice eyes, and they were nicer still when that set expression of certainty wasn’t squeezing them small. “Okay,” Nita said, and was even more amused by Penn’s look of concern as she slapped the manual shut.

“Wait, aren’t you going to—”

“Not with that,” Nita said, tucking the manual under her arm and taking hold of one of the charms on the bracelet she was wearing. In it, the activator phrase of the spell she needed was stored; at her touch it awakened, waiting for her to speak the trigger phrase. “Ready? Here we go.”

She began to speak the long trigger phrase, and glanced around her with satisfaction to see things darkening down around them, to hear that silence settling over the space where she and Penn stood—the sound of the world listening to a wizardry, getting ready to make it come true. When all sound had fallen away, when the light and the trees around them seemed to be dissolving into darkness, Nita spoke the last word of the spell—the one she’d said often enough, when her mother was ill, that she didn’t need to read it from her manual anymore.

And with that one word, light flooded back everywhere except in one wide, vertically poised circle of darkness right before them. Through that circle, a shining white surface stretching away into the distance could be seen: nothing else.

Penn was staring. “Here’s where we’ll be working,” Nita said. “Come on.”

She stepped through and stood there once again on that surface that could have been mistaken for a floor, except that it reached seemingly to infinity, as far as the eye could see, and was a condition of that space rather than any made or built thing. Even that place’s horizon, out at the edge of vision, was peculiar—the air was perfectly clear, so there was no haze to obscure the distance.

Penn stepped through the doorway behind her, staring around him. “Where is this?”

“Not sure the question means anything in terms of location,” Nita said. “It’s another dimension. A space where wizards come to practice dangerous spells without endangering other people’s lives. Thought you might find it useful. Once we’re started I’ll show you what I made you.”

“How big is this place?” Penn said from behind her as Nita headed farther into the space.

She spun around once as she walked, considering. “Not sure. Probably the question has an answer—I mean, the space isn’t infinite, I don’t think. But you’d be a long, long time trying to find the other side. If there is another side; if there’s anything but horizon out past the horizon.” Nita smiled. “I’d pack a lunch.”

“It’s really . . . flat.”

“Perfect Euclidean surface,” Nita said. “I keep wanting to bring a bike in here sometime and just ride. You’d never have to worry about hills. It’s funny, though, the way when you look at it you keep trying to see some kind of bump or rough spot. But there aren’t any. It’s not like our space. No curvature at all.”

When they were about a hundred yards in through the portal, Nita paused and took the opportunity, as she turned again, to glance at Penn. He wasn’t exactly green around the gills, but his look of overconfidence was gone.

Almost against her will she felt sorry for him. “This can be a little weird visually,” Nita said. “How about if I do a kind of tile floor thing in here? It’ll make it easier to focus.”

“Okay,” Penn said.

There was a strained tone to his voice that made Nita think hurrying up would be a good idea. The physical eccentricity of this space had made her feel ill once or twice when she’d been working here for long periods. It didn’t surprise her that Penn might be having a similar response. And is there the slightest possibility, she thought as she reached out to the air for the otherspace pocket in which the Playroom’s kernel was stored, that I was sort of hoping that would happen? Shame on me.

“Here we go,” Nita said, finding the spot she wanted and plunging both arms in it up to the elbow. Sometimes habitués of the Playroom hid the kernel from each other as a combination exercise and game—kernel management being one of the main reasons they came here in the first place. But the last user had left the kernel in its default position, convenient to whatever ingress the next user employed to get into the space, and immediately available on demand. Nita pulled the cantaloupe-sized kernel out of the otherspace pocket where it was stored and turned it over in her hands, feeling with slight satisfaction the faint burn and tingle of the energy involved in confining this place’s physical laws to one tightly interlaced and exceedingly complex bundle of phrases and statements in the Speech. It looked like a big tangle of yarn made of burning light, and in a hundred colors. Everything a space required in terms of physical constants was here—gravity, mass, distance, time, the control structures for all of them arranged in one handy management bundle.

She turned the kernel over until she caught sight of the one command-strand she wanted, then reached two fingers in and teased it out. The strand had a number of minuscule nodes dotted along it, like beads on a string: presets, some of them featuring bumps or scratches as tactile indicators of what they held. Nita ran her fingers down the strand until she found a node she wanted, on which she could feel the tiny crosshatch markings that indicated the “tiled floor” routine. She squeezed the node, gave it a half twist.

Immediately, the floor right out to the horizons was covered in perfectly symmetrical black and white tiles, glowing in the Playroom’s sourceless light. Penn, who had been standing hunched over, now straightened up tentatively and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s better.”

“No problem,” Nita said. She tucked the kernel under one arm and felt around in her jeans pocket for her smartphone. “Funny, though, Kit should be here by now. What time is it?”

Penn pulled his iPhone out, and Nita turned away to hide her smile. He’s got a watch, but why would he look at that . . . But then Penn’s expression turned surprised. “I’ve got service. Five bars . . . !”

“Why not?” Nita said. “This space is very malleable: it’ll do exactly what the managing wizard tells it. And why would I want to disable that nice suite of networking-spell apps that the Invitational gave us? Especially when we’re so close to the Cull. What if somebody needed to get hold of us?”

“Yeah, I guess . . .”

“There you are,” Kit said as he stepped in through the portal from Nita’s backyard. “Hey, Penn. How do you like it?”

“It’s very nice.” Penn turned slowly, assessing everything in an amused way. “Kind of minimalist, I guess.” His tone of voice suggested that as a decorating strategy, “minimalist” had been declared to be over.

About a minute and a half’s worth of off balance, Nita thought. Not too bad for Penn, I guess. “I got rid of the furniture for the time being,” she said, pulling open the empty air beside her and pushing the kernel into it, out of sight. “Most of it’s not for humans, and we can use the extra space.”

Kit nodded as he came ambling along and stood next to her. “Thought maybe you’d started without me.”

“I thought maybe you’d stopped for dinner.”

“Not tonight,” Kit said. “Tonight’s pizza night. Mama’s cooking tomorrow, though.” He sighed. “Arroz con pollo. She would do it when we’re busy.”

Nita sighed. Kit’s mama didn’t cook that much because her work hours were irregular and left her too tired. But a few things, when she had the energy, she cooked brilliantly, and the arroz was one of them. “You couldn’t get her to change the day?”

“I tried. No.”

They shook their heads more or less in unison and turned back to Penn. “So,” Kit said. “This is our last chance for a close look before tomorrow. There were a lot of blanks to fill in when we last sat down, day before yesterday. How do you like where you are now?”

“I like it fine,” Penn said, folding his arms. Nita was beginning to loathe that pose; it was a sign that Penn was about to get indignant about something.

Kit waved one arm out at the space. “So let’s have a look, then. The floor’s yours.”

Penn reached into the pocket of his leather jacket, pulled out his manual, flipped it open, peeled a layer of diagram and Speech-charactery off the revealed double-page spread, and dropped it to the floor. The complex diagram that flowed out across the floor from what he dropped did so in flat format, this time, and in a tangle of multiple colors indicating successive revisions and additions.

Nita glanced at Kit out of the corner of her eye, noting without comment that he had finally gotten Penn to stop using 3D versions of the spell diagram for debugging. While they were handsome and impressive, it was too easy to turn your back on some part of one and miss something important—particularly something missing that, when the spell executed, would blow up in your face. “So this is the version you’re going to use for the walk-by judging?” Nita said, beginning to stroll around it.

“Yep,” Penn said, sounding very pleased with himself.

This diagram was far simpler and clearer than the one Penn had shown them first, which was a good thing. Going by her reading of the judging criteria, the Senior and assessing wizards who’d be examining the spell diagrams of some three hundred contestants were not going to be impressed by presentations that suggested a wizard was more concerned with style than substance. Not that style’s not good, Nita thought. But a small, clear, compact spell was going to impress them much more than a big, sprawling, splashy one that made you waste time understanding it.

Kit started walking around the diagram from the other direction. “It looks a lot better than it did,” he said. “You’re still going to want to clean up all these stacked-up revisions, though.”

“Sure. That gets done last. Tomorrow morning.”

Kit nodded. “And you’ve got a short, recorded version of your explanation for when you have to be away from this?”

“Yeah. Let me play it for you—”

“Don’t bother right now,” Kit said. “Let us have it live, because what’s going to count most tomorrow night is your presentation. All kinds of people are going to come up and start asking questions about this when you’ve got it laid out—people our age, people older—and any of them might be judges. The more practice you get, the better. So let’s hear the spiel.”

Penn brushed his sleeves off and stood up straight. He then beamed the kind of smile that Nita had seen on the hosts of late-night infomercials, and started in. “Esteemed Seniors and assessors, thanks for your time. The spell I’ve brought for evaluation today is unique in that it proposes an unusually simple and elegant solution to the problem of plasma storms secondary to the Sun’s active periods. Now that Earth is surrounded with a halo of vulnerable satellites and a permanently manned space station, it becomes more important than ever to attempt to protect them undetectably from radiation storms that could otherwise cause huge disruptions to modern life on Earth and tragic loss of life in space. If I can direct your attention to the core redistribution assembly partition . . .”

And he was off. Nita listened to him rattle out his introduction very comfortably, as if he’d had a lot of time to think about it and was completely at ease with the details. And the first part of that might even be true, she thought. For the moment, though, she turned to a blank page in the messaging portion of her manual as she walked around the spell, and with one finger wrote a note for Kit: If he’s going to work in English instead of the Speech, better make sure he doesn’t use the name of that core part as an acronym . . .

Kit, casually paging through his manual, gazed down, threw Nita a sidelong look, and smiled.

Completely without warning, that smile made her insides squeeze. Oh cut that out, she told herself, annoyed. Do I need to start distracting myself from him now? God, I’m hopeless. Never mind, let’s mix this up a little. “What’s that part over there do?” Nita said, pointing.

Penn stopped and looked at Kit with an aggrieved expression. “Nobody’s going to interrupt me like that, are they?”

“Think you’d better count on it,” Kit said. “Not everybody there’s going to be a judge. Some of the attendees won’t have a clue what this is about, and if they see you standing there, they’re going to ask you. And if a judge is around and hears you fudging an answer, or blowing somebody off, you’ll lose points. Or maybe get deselected on the spot. So better practice being nice to the hecklers.”

Penn grimaced. “So what is that?” Nita said.

“I’m glad you asked me that, Juanita,” Penn said, and turned the infomercial smile on her full force. “It’s a legacy function that has featured in solar intervention wizardries for nearly a thousand years—”

Nita looked at Kit and widened her eyes, mouthing at him, Juanita?!

“—and dates back to the time when there was a fairly major shift in the Sun’s internal dynamics, around the year 1010. That coincides with something called the Oort Minimum. Now you have to understand that the Sun has active periods and quiet periods . . .”

“Sunspot maxima and minima, thank you, I’m perfectly familiar with those,” Nita said. “It’s not the Little Ice Age period we’re talking about, but seven hundred years or so before. I get it.”

“Oh good, that makes this easier. Well, there were some changes in the Sun’s subsurface atmospheric speeds and flow patterns then, and the diagram reflects those and ‘remembers’ them in case those patterns reassert themselves without warning. It’s boilerplate, of course, nothing like that’s happened for a while, but we leave it in as a nod to a legacy state, on the off chance that it might reassert itself.”

Nita nodded. “Okay, good. Let’s move on . . .”

Penn picked up smoothly where he’d left off, and kept talking. I wish we could do something about his delivery, Nita thought. I keep thinking he’s going to sell me car wax, or a revolutionary new food processor. Like he’s afraid to let go and be excited, or enthusiastic in a natural way. But despite the overly slick delivery, Penn spoke very knowledgeably about what his spell was supposed to do, and how it was supposed to do it. Random questions he handled less gracefully; he really did hate being interrupted. For one fifteen-minute period, Kit and Nita took turns being hecklers, and Nita noticed with interest that Penn hated it even more from Kit than he did from her. But she also noticed that he rose to the challenge, and though she and Kit both got more disruptive and abusive than they could imagine anyone being in this situation, Penn not only kept going, but he started treating it as a joke and actually being funny about it. That might wind up helping him . . .

Finally she and Kit ran out of things to pick at, and let Penn finish his presentation. He spoke with such relish about how great it would be to have this thing installed in the Sun and working that when he was done, Nita found herself clapping, and Kit joined in. “Bravo!” Kit said.

Penn bowed theatrically. “Thank you, thankyouverymuch, I’ll be here all week.” He bobbed up again, looking smug.

Nita strolled around the diagram toward him, giving it one last look. “Penn, you actually have me convinced about this thing now.”

He headed toward her in turn, laughing at her with the aren’t-you-a-funny-heckler chuckle that he’d been using, and for the moment Nita didn’t mind. “You weren’t convinced before? I’m wounded.”

“Let’s just say it’s a family thing,” Nita said. “When it comes to tinkering with the local star, I take some convincing. But I think you’ve done a good job here.”

“So do I get some kind of reward for that?” Penn said, grinning.

“Well. Maybe we ought to let you run this spell.”

He laughed as if he thought Nita was joking. “Too soon for that, maybe. How would we do it, anyway?”

“There might be a way,” Nita said. “Though it would probably be kind of technical.”

Kit raised his eyebrows at Nita, the expression saying, You haven’t explained this to him yet? Oh boy.

“Come to think of it,” Penn said, “didn’t you say when I came in here that you’d made something for me? Haven’t seen anything yet.”

“You’re right,” Nita said. “Here.” She reached sideways into the otherspace pocket in the air, felt around for the kernel, found that one tagged strand that she’d left hanging out of it, made sure she had the right one, and gently pulled.

Instantly the checkerboard under their feet vanished, leaving the three of them standing above a roiling, roaring sea of fire that stretched from one impossibly distant horizon to the other.

“I made you a Sun,” Nita said.

It was as if they stood no more than a few hundred miles above the solar surface. At this height, vast glowing bubbles of boiling red-golden plasma rose up beneath them, slow, huge, impersonally deadly, shouldering up out of the convection layer to jostle and squeeze against one another, give up their heat, and then be pushed down into the depths again. Between the plasma granules, fountains of terrible fire, straight upward-splashing spicules and broadly curved prominences, reared up again and again out of the solar surface, strained away, and were swallowed back into the near-blinding conflagration. From where the three of them seemed to be poised, the corona was far too high above them to see—but the whip-crack hiss and lash of it through near-solar space echoed deafeningly in the emptiness around them, along with the low, furious roar, unending, of the body of the Sun breathing its heat and light and other radiation out into space. For a second it stirred a brief memory for Nita from a recent dream, a voice like the soft roar of fire, but the sound around her quickly drowned the memory out.

Nita stared down into the maelstrom, shaking her head, fascinated and awestruck as always by the huge, uncaring beauty of it. And this isn’t even a very exciting specimen, as stars go, she thought. But still so cool . . . if that’s the word we’re looking for. She grinned, glanced over at Penn to see his reaction.

He was standing there staring down, frozen, his face blank. It took Nita a moment to realize that the expression was one of terror.

For a moment she couldn’t move either. How’s he frightened by the environment he designed his spell for? Why would you build something that was going to take you someplace that scared you? You build something you like. The way Dairine did with her volcano at school, that time . . .

“How big is that?” Penn said in a hoarse whisper.

“Full size,” Nita said, staying matter-of-fact to see if it would calm him down. “Eight hundred and fifty thousand miles across, give or take . . . Probably about as wide as three and a half trips to the Moon laid end to end. Though I might need to check my math on that.”

“But it’s not real—”

“It is real,” Nita said. “It’s real here. That’s the whole point of the aschetic spaces. I told the space to make me a star, and fed it the necessary qualities and coordinates, and it made it.”

Penn was holding himself still. Anyone who couldn’t see his face might have believed he wasn’t longing to turn and flee out the portal. Nita saw him throw a glance at it. But then he turned his head away, scowling. Hanging on hard, she thought. But why’s he freaking out like this?

She looked over at Kit to see if he saw what she was seeing: but he was still gazing down at the view beneath their feet. “The sound on this is really good,” Kit said, impressed.

“If you could stand there in the coronal medium without a shield,” Nita said, trying to sound casual, “it’s exactly what you’d hear . . . for the fifty or sixty milliseconds before you were burnt to ash.”

Possibly Kit caught something odd in Nita’s voice at that point. He looked over at her, saw her watching Penn staring down into the fire. Well, this is weird, his expression said. Now what?

She shook her head at him, looked over at Penn again. I could kill this, Nita thought. But Penn hasn’t said anything, and I don’t get what’s going on. Is this something he never expected to see, didn’t think through? Sure, his presentation says this wizardry’s meant to be dropped into the Sun from a distance. But a wizard who did a spell like this would have to go there at least once and watch it from up close. Watch it go in, and make sure it was doing what you expected . . .

Never mind. Let’s see what he wants to do. “So Penn,” Nita said. “If you want to do your spell right now and see how it runs, we could do that. Whatever happens here, it can’t hurt us and it can’t do anything to Earth.”

That finally brought his head up, and Penn looked at Nita with an expression that was nowhere near calm, but at least wasn’t frozen in horror. “I, uh,” he said after a moment, “I think I might want to work on it some more first.”

Uncertainty? From him? Wow. But Nita made sure none of her surprise showed. “Okay,” she said. “No problem with that. But when you’re ready, this’ll be a good place to test, and it’s no trouble to bring up—”

“Well,” said a voice from near the portal, “isn’t this an unusual development . . . !”

Oh God, talk about the wrongest moment possible, Nita thought, as Kit’s and Penn’s heads swung around toward the newcomer. Silhouetted against both the daylight shining in through the portal and the much closer and fiercer daylight coming from right under their feet, Dairine and Spot were ambling across the floor of the practice space side by side, Dairine peering down at the duplicate Sun as she came.

“This is nice,” Dairine said. “And not a simulation, either. Real.”

“Cloned,” Nita said, trying to sound casual.

“Such a good idea,” Dairine said. “Gotta talk to Nelaid about this! There could be things you could do with this setup that you could never do with a scaled simulator . . .”

She wandered over to where the three of them were standing around Penn’s spell diagram, the glowing multicolor lines of which were nearly invisible against the blast of light from below. Spot came along behind her, having put up a number of stalked eyes to look over the diagram. Nita held her breath: the last thing she needed was for Dairine to start dissecting Penn’s work at the moment. And what a laugh. Ten minutes ago I might not have minded . . .

“Hmm” was all Dairine said. She turned away toward Nita, digging around in her pockets. “Listen,” she said, “I was over at Tom’s and he asked me to drop these off for you.”

She handed Nita a small, circular token glowing faintly blue on a key ring, then made her way around to Kit. “It’s your marker for the Mentors’ Picks event tomorrow morning,” Dairine said, handing him a twin to what Nita held. “You walk through and drop it into the spells you like the look of. It stamps them with your mentor ID and gives them points toward their selection.”

“Thanks,” Nita said, pocketing hers.

Dairine, meanwhile, had paused by Kit to take in the diagram again, and then glanced up at Penn. “And you are?”

“Penn Shao-Feng,” he said. And then he gave Dairine one of those smarmy smiles, though to Nita’s eye there was a more strained quality to it now. “Don’t know how much time Juanita’s going to have for upchecking other people’s spells, though. She’ll be too busy getting everyone else to drop their markers on mine.”

Why was I even worrying about how he was? Nita thought. He’s fine. For Penn . . . But Dairine was now looking over at Nita with barely concealed amusement. Juanita? she mouthed.

Nita shrugged. “Penn,” she said, “my sister, Dairine. She’s mentoring too.”

“No kidding!” Penn said brightly. “You don’t look old enough to have even had your Ordeal yet—”

Not quite the worst thing you could say to my sister right off the bat, but a real strong contender, Nita thought, her heart sinking for Penn’s sake.

“You must be quite the powerful one!”

Aaaand he’s two for two. Between the patronizing tone and the significant reduction in Dairine’s power levels since her Ordeal—Oh God, she’ll simply destroy him now.

Dairine looked very deliberately from Penn, to the diagram, to Penn again. “Well, Penn,” she said, with the slow, measured delivery one might use when broaching an advanced subject with a five-year-old, “as far as your spell goes, I sort of think that one of the two wizards who brought back the Book of Night with Moon from where the Lone Power had it stashed has better things to do than run around the Invitational shilling for you, y’know? Especially since she knows perfectly well—though she probably hasn’t told you so yet, she’s so kindhearted—that if people are looking at your wizardry and it’s not generating its own buzz, you’re doing it wrong.”

Dairine turned away again. “A wizardry has to stand on its own merits. And at first glance, this one doesn’t so much stand on its merits as sort of lie there.” She looked up. “Neets, do me a favor and kill the background noise?”

Penn stood there with his mouth open, probably at least partly due to the effrontery of someone who could casually refer to the overwhelming visual and aural splendor dominating the practice space as “noise.”

“Sure, no problem,” Nita said. She reached into the otherspace pocket and turned off the Sun. And look at that. All of a sudden he’s so much more relaxed . . .

“Interesting,” Dairine said, once more starting to stroll around the perimeter of the spell, now laid out as it had been before on the black and white tiles: and as she walked around it, Spot stepped delicately out into the diagram, carefully avoiding any of the lines or Speech-phrases, and looked it over with all his eyes. “Coronal redirection, huh,” Dairine said. “Not easy to do with something this minimalistic. Going to have to pump a lot of power into this for it to function.”

“The star powers it,” Penn said. “If you noticed the accumulators, they’re very—”

“Fancy,” Dairine said. “If structurally fragile. Well, the overall design has some merit. This could possibly make it through to the quarter-finals, who knows? I kind of hope it does . . .” She was coming around to Nita’s side of the diagram now, and she grinned at her sister. “As it’ll give my mentee a chance to whip your mentee’s butt.”

Nita smiled and said nothing.

Penn continued to stand there in shock. “Aren’t you going to defend me?” he said, turning from Nita to Kit.

Kit was hanging his head and pinching the bridge of his nose as if he was trying to stop himself from sneezing, but Nita knew what he was suppressing and was intent on not triggering him by cracking up herself. She shook her head at Penn. “I’ve heard that from everybody from the Lone Power on down,” Nita said. “But where Dairine’s involved, we all get to take our chances.”

Dairine grinned and put her head next to Nita’s. “I don’t want to second-guess you in front of your guy,” she said very softly, “but this thing reinvents the wheel a couple of times, and he’s probably gonna get called on it.”

“That could be my fault,” Nita said as softly. “I did an analysis on this some days back, and a lot of the work he’s done since then has been about doing what I told him . . .”

Dairine shook her head. “I recognize your style in there. But he’s got problems elsewhere. Doubt there’ll be time to fix it before tomorrow, but Spot’s grabbing the design at the moment. I’ll give you some notes later.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Hey, can’t have you looking bad out there.” Dairine sighed. “But what I don’t get is how you got this guy and I got Mehrnaz. Seems like a mismatch.”

Nita shrugged. “Take it up with the Powers,” she muttered. “I don’t pretend to get it! And frankly I’d sooner you had him than we did. But there’s no swapping out once you’ve accepted the assignment. I think we’re all stuck . . .”

Dairine nodded. “Right. Anyway, check your manual later,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve gotta go crash for a while. I need to be up at midnight again . . .”

Nita patted Dairine’s back absently as her sister turned around, yawning, and Spot came spidering along to her. “See you tomorrow, Kit,” she said. “Penn . . .” She waved amiably at him without looking at him. “Good luck. ’Cause you’re gonna need it!” And she wandered off toward the portal and vanished through it, Spot clambering after her.

Penn gazed after Dairine, looking both astonished and a bit surly. “Thinks she’s pretty hot stuff, doesn’t she,” he said. He was trying to make it sound like a joke.

“So did the Lone One,” Nita said, shaking her head. “It might have had a point, for once . . .”

Kit was looking at Penn as if he felt sorry for him. “Come on,” Kit said, “if you don’t want to run your spell now then we’ve done all we can for today. Let’s go ’round the corner to my place, have a soda or something, and make plans for tomorrow.”

Penn’s long, smooth face was pinched-looking, and what was left of his smile was anxious. “No, thanks but no, I have to get back home . . . there are some things to do before tomorrow.” The expression that had replaced his sulkiness looked to Nita like it was shading toward panic. “So, listen,” Penn went on, “I’ll message you guys in the morning, okay? And we can figure out where to meet then.”

“Uh, sure,” Nita said, and didn’t know whether Penn had heard her, because he was already out the portal. Barely a second later she heard the Bang! of someone in so great a hurry that he didn’t use his transit spell to control the noise of the air that slammed into where he’d just been.

Nita turned to look at Kit. “What the hell was that?” she said.

Kit shook his head. “The sound of our schedule for the next couple of weeks freeing up?” he said. “Because if he goes into this tomorrow like that, he’s finished. And so are we.”