Games Wizards Play

8

Hempstead / Mumbai

IT WAS AN HOUR or so later before Dairine saw Nita again. To her credit, Nita had peered into Dairine’s room as quietly as she possibly could, opening the door just a crack. But all the same it was enough to snap Dairine out of the doze she’d fallen into, propped up against the pillows at the head of her bed. She’d skipped dinner and hadn’t bothered to get undressed—there was no point in it. I’ll do it after I get back from seeing Mehrnaz, she’d thought. Right then, nothing had been so attractive as the prospect of stretching out and being horizontal for a while. Even the weight of Spot, hugged to her chest as they communed before she dozed off, hadn’t bothered her.

“You asleep?” Nita said, barely above a whisper.

“I wish,” Dairine said, while Spot sprouted a couple of bleary-looking stalked eyes out of his lid to gaze at Nita.

“Did you even eat?”

Dairine rolled her head back and forth against the pillows as Nita slipped in and sat on the edge of her bed. “Too tired right now,” Dairine said. “And if I eat and fall asleep, it’ll lie there inside me like lead.” She sighed and pushed herself up straighter against the pillows.

“You shouldn’t get up,” Nita said. “You should sleep.” She started to stand up. “We can do this in the morning, when you get back.”

“No no, wait,” Dairine said, rubbing her face. “Let’s get it done now. There’s some chance your guy might have time to fix it tonight. Assuming he’s willing to take direction.”

Nita sighed. “Not sure my chromosomes are arranged in the right order for him to do that willingly,” she said. “He seems to have this ‘why should I listen to you, girly’ thing going on to the point where it interferes with his reasoning processes.”

Dairine groaned. “God, what year does he live in?”

“I don’t know,” Nita said, “but I think he has a rude awakening coming if he makes it past the Cull.”

“Well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it,” Dairine said. She yawned and stroked Spot’s lid. “Virtualize the space for us, would you?”

Instantly the walls, the ceiling, even the floor of Dairine’s room all went away, replaced by the appearance of a broad, smooth, pale plain, all airbrush-hazed with soft colors, and overarched by the gentle fire of a gigantic barred spiral galaxy.

She caught the sound of Nita taking a sudden breath, and smiled. “That’s a new trick,” Nita said, craning her neck to look around.

“Think of it as a 3D desktop,” Dairine said. “The Mobiles hooked it up for me. They’re experimenting with thoughtspeed communications; they need it for the backup they’re building.”

“You mentioned that a while back,” Nita said. “They’re trying to back up . . . the whole universe?”

“Only this one to start with,” Dairine said. “Right now the two main problems are speed and storage space. But at the communications end, they’ve built me an experimental signal tunnel. My end goes through a wormhole somewhere in local space, and the signal comes out at their end, umpty billion trillion light-years away. Then they encode it for storage on individual electrons in a spare universe full of hyperdense matter, I think they said.” She waved her hand. “Don’t ask me how the engineering works—I’m just the beta tester.”

Nita shook her head in amazement. “As long as they’re not asking you for help with their math homework, I guess you’re doing okay . . .”

Dairine snickered. “Yeah. Anyway, here’s what Spot got from your guy.”

Penn’s spell appeared spread out over the glassy superstrate a few yards away, the spell circle enlarged to about twenty feet across to bring up the detail. She pointed at one particularly troublesome spot in the spell construct that Penn planned to drop into the surface of the Sun. “Here’s his real problem,” she said, and as she pointed at the diagram, a representation of the actual matter/energy structure that the spell would build rose up in front of them: a long, thin, tubular structure with a sort of finny dumbbell head at one end and a trumpet-shaped opening at the other.

“The subsurface structure,” Dairine said, and the dumbbell end enlarged, “that’s where the trouble is. All those little pinwheely things sticking out of it . . . He wants to install those only a few thousand miles under the surface? Near the boundary layer, where the subsurface convection movement is nearly supersonic? Complete waste of time, because those are way too fragile to take plasma currents at that speed. They’d flame out within the first fifteen minutes or so . . . rip themselves up like windmills in a hurricane, and the whole thing would come to pieces.”

Dairine yawned again. “The basic idea he’s proposing doesn’t need to be so depth-specific. Or anything like so sensitive, either. I don’t know who he’s trying to impress—”

“The judges?”

“If they work with the Sun on a regular basis, they’ll just laugh. What you need to get him to do at the very least is redesign these pinwheels to be more robust. Cut their wings back by about half, you’d still get plenty of input off them. But better still, he should pull the fancy fiddly things off and retailor the wizardry to dump the power structures in way deeper.”

Nita nodded, reaching up to pull her manual out of the air.

“Don’t bother with that,” Dairine said. “I’ll have Spot copy it to you.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. She didn’t put her manual away, though; she sat with it in her lap, looking at Dairine. “You’re being very helpful.”

“And you’re wondering why.”

Dairine looked at Nita for a moment and opened her mouth.

“You don’t want me and Kit to look bad, do you,” Nita said.

Uh oh, Spot said silently.

Fortunately Nita had already seen sufficient yawning from Dairine in the past few minutes for Dairine to think it wouldn’t look suspicious to shut her eyes and lean back against the pillows, rather than meet her sister’s eyes and possibly let Nita see what was going through her mind. Ideas such as Things are weird enough for you and Kit right now. No point in making them even weirder or more stressed. “Since it seems your guy is a jerk,” Dairine said, “no point in letting you have trouble dealing with him at the technical end, too. Not when I can make a suggestion or two, anyway.”

Nita nodded. It occurred to Dairine that she looked tired, too. “Is this strictly legal?” she asked after a moment.

Spot made ratchety noise: mechanical laughter. Dairine opened her eyes again, meeting his stalky ones. “I win,” he said aloud.

The look Nita gave him was bemused. “Win what?”

Dairine snickered. “Spot bet me that you’d want a rules check before you decided to do anything with the advice.”

Nita swatted at Dairine’s head, missing on purpose. Dairine didn’t even bother moving. “As long as I’m not mentoring him solo, as long as one of you two is directly present in the loop, you’re fine,” Dairine said. “I checked.”

“Okay,” Nita said, looking over at the spell again. “Tell me. Without this being fixed . . . what do you think of his chances of making it through the Cull?”

“Without the fix? Not so great. With the fix? Could be better than even.”

They both spent a few moments more regarding the spell’s general structure. To Dairine’s way of thinking, it was nowhere near as tidy as something she or Nita or Kit might have built. And especially, while she was thinking of it, the lovely rigorous structure of Mehrnaz’s spell made this one seem shabby by comparison. This looks lumpy, somehow. Even after being worked over in line with Nita’s suggestions, there were still places in which too much wizardry was crammed into too small a space, and there were barren spots that made no sense. One or two of them reminded her vaguely of the “lacuna” nonstructures that Mehrnaz had built into her anti-earthquake spell. Here, though, the resemblance was accidental: just empty places left that way because the designer hadn’t thought ahead.

Dairine yawned again, rubbing her eyes: they felt grainy. “God, I’m sorry . . .” she said.

“Don’t be!” Nita said, getting up. “The second opinion’s useful.”

“But look, you did good with this, for someone who hasn’t been working on stellar stuff as much as I have.” Dairine pushed herself up against the pillows, as while looking the spell over again she’d slid down. “You’re seriously going to make him stay up late and fix this?”

“Thinking about it real hard . . .” Nita shook her head. “Don’t know that I can make him do anything, but I can strongly suggest it.”

“It’ll be his fault if he ignores you and gets his butt deselected. Though I get a feeling with the attitude he’s got, you might not mind that.”

Nita looked somewhat shocked at the suggestion. “Because I think he’s a pain in the ass? No.” Though then her gaze dropped, and Dairine found herself wondering whether this thought had indeed crossed Nita’s mind, to her embarrassment.

But a second later Nita looked up again. “Fifty-fifty,” she said, looking over at the spell, “honestly?”

Dairine shrugged. “Well, yeah. In terms of the spell itself. But from the reading they gave us, it looks like whether you pass or fail isn’t always about the project, is it? Sometimes it’ll be about the wizard. When Seniors and above are doing the judging, you have to assume that the Powers are whispering in at least some of their ears. And when Irina’s the prize—can you imagine she’s going to let herself be tied down to someone she can’t make a big difference for?”

“No,” Nita said. “I see your point.” She shoved her manual back into her otherspace pocket, then stretched. “Well, I’m not going to be his favorite person in a few minutes.”

“Don’t think you’ve been his favorite person since you met,” Dairine said.

Nita laughed once, a momentary, sour sound. “You should have seen him trying to fake it, though. The hand kissing.”

“Surprised he didn’t pull back a bloody stump.”

“So am I,” Nita said, and headed for the door. “You need a wake-up call?”

“No, Spot’s got it handled.”

“Want coffee before you go?”

“If you want to make some, sure. Thanks.”

Nita paused in the doorway as Dairine waved a hand at the floor and banished the Mobile-world landscape. With the hall light on behind her, it was hard to see her sister’s face clearly: but the shadow of a smile was there. “Is it that obvious,” Nita said in a low voice, “what’s going on with Kit and me right now?”

“It can probably be seen from space,” Dairine said. “But don’t let that bother you.”

Nita shook her head—the smile definitely betraying itself as the light caught it. Then she pulled the door mostly closed behind her and headed off down the hall.

Dairine lay there for a moment more in the near dark. Spot, she said then, let me see that diagram again.

It reappeared in the darkness, in reduced form to fit her bedroom floor, and she cocked an annoyed eye at it.

This Penn guy’s structure is sloppy, but he’s got a flair for this, she thought. Without even working at it. Which is kind of unfair. She considered how long it would have taken her to build something like this without Nelaid coaching her through every step, a couple of months ago. And I am not a stupid person. But this guy burps this up in the space of a couple of days?

Dairine scowled. Two thoughts were warring in her. One of them was, If he did this in a hurry, I’d like to see what he could do if he took some time. The other: If he did this in a hurry, I’d like to punch him in the nose.

But why was he in such a big rush? I don’t get it. If this is a specialty for him, and he’d been thinking about it for a while, why not start sooner? Why stress himself out?

She sighed and let her head flop back against the pillow, waving the diagram away into darkness again. Not my problem, she thought. Got enough of my own. Mehrnaz’s certainty that she was going to fail out of the eighth-finals was still on Dairine’s mind.

She lay there smiling about it, convinced that Mehrnaz was completely nuts as far as this went. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she goes through to the quarter-finals, Dairine thought. Because I really think she’s going to.

Dairine sighed, closed her eyes.

Midnight?

“Yeah.”

She fell asleep.

This time when Dairine was ready to transport in, she decided not to bother with the scenic route. She had Spot check the downstairs lobby in Mehrnaz’s house to make sure that no one was there, then texted her through the manual’s communication system: Be with you in about two minutes, okay?

That’s great! the answer came back. My mama’s here and she wants to meet you before she goes out.

“Oh great, parents,” Dairine muttered, and dashed back down to her room to have one last look at herself in the mirror. She’d dug up another longish tunic like the one she’d worn the other day, this one dark blue, and had wound her mom’s scarf around her neck again in case she needed it. Better keep it conservative, she thought. But this looks okay. She made one concession to her own preferences and rolled the tunic’s sleeves up to below the elbow, then wondered if she should roll them down again.

No one is going to care about your sleeves, Spot said.

“You can never tell,” Dairine said. “Especially when you’re not sure you’ve done enough research yet.” She made a face and rolled the sleeves down. Then she picked Spot up. “Do the circle and let’s go.”

Their transport diagram flared blue around them and they vanished.

It was an entirely different kind of day in Mumbai this time. The sky was a misty, unrelieved gray, and a faint damp drizzle spattered the big windows. But the heat was almost certainly the same outside. Even in here, with the air-conditioning going, Dairine could feel the stickiness in the air as she climbed up the stairs into that great acreage of marble and greeted Mehrnaz. “Sort of a change from last time . . .”

“Yes it is,” Mehrnaz said, leading her over to the table in front of the entertainment center; tea was waiting on a tray. “And a surprise. We don’t normally get much rain this time of year. But when June comes . . .”

“There’s a monsoon, isn’t there? You get most of the year’s rain at once.”

“Hundreds of millimeters every month,” Mehrnaz said, “until the season’s over. We’re not there yet, though! Which is good. I hate that time of year, nothing ever dries out . . .”

“Then you should go somewhere else,” Dairine said. “You want dry? There’s always the Namib Desert. Or that one in Chile. Even, I don’t know, Arizona or New Mexico . . .”

“Um, well,” Mehrnaz said, “I don’t go off by myself that much. The family doesn’t like it.”

Dairine put up her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything for the moment. “Well,” she said, “we’ve got more to keep us busy right now than the weather. Though the weather report says it’s going to be nice and dry in New York the next few days.”

“This is going to be so wonderful,” Mehrnaz said, dropping her voice to a confidential murmur. “I simply can’t wait to go. I’ve never been to New York before!”

“You’ll like it,” Dairine said. “If we can find time to get out. There’ll be so many super people there, and so much going on—and that’s just around the Invitational itself. Wizards from all over are coming in to see the pre-Cull judging, and all the presentations. It’s a big deal! So we should get started . . . But I want to make sure you’re good on the verbal presentation, because everything else is in great shape.”

“You truly think so?”

“Do I have to say it in the Speech? What did I tell you about me not wasting my time saying stuff to you that wasn’t true?”

“I know,” Mehrnaz said, looking shamefaced. “It’s just that . . . I’m used to hearing a lot about it when I get things wrong. Not so much when I get them right.”

Dairine shook her head, put Spot down on the floor, and let him get out of the way of where the spell circle was going to wind up. “Well, we’re changing that, aren’t we. So come on—let’s get it out there.”

Mehrnaz’s pink diary-manual was on the back of the sofa in front of the entertainment center. She caught it up, twirled around, flipped her manual open, and pulled the spell diagram off the page. Once again Dairine shook her head to see that smooth and elegant cast of the beautiful, tightly structured array of glowing Speech-words and symbols across the floor, like a fisherman gracefully throwing a net. “I’ll never get tired of watching you do that,” Dairine said, seeing no point in disguising her admiration as the diagram spread itself out faultlessly one more time. “That is so cool. I’m trying to think of a way we can make sure there are judges around when you do it.” She snickered. “We need a name for that move.”

“If you like,” Mehrnaz said, “I could pick it up and put it away at the end of every presentation, and then wait for people to come around before I put it out again.”

“Spell casting,” Dairine said. “That’s the name for it. Once people see it, they’re gonna start asking you to do it.”

Mehrnaz suddenly looked concerned. “Isn’t that kind of, I don’t know, like showing off?”

Dairine laughed. “You’re kidding me, right? The Invitational is showing off. You’ve been invited to show off.” She grinned. “And I mean, sure, flinging a spell out there like that’s kind of stagy, but getting people to notice the wizardry is part of the business here. There’s all this competition to be noticed; you have to stand out! And it doesn’t mean the spell’s any worse for being shown off. It’s not like anybody can make a shoddy spell better by doing a big song and dance over it.” Dairine looked over the beautifully structured diagram. “Anyway, you’ve done such a great job on this, it deserves to have people pay attention to it! That way word’ll get around about it; people will look for it in their manuals to use it. Wizards with more experience will have a chance to improve on it. It’ll have a chance to save more people’s lives.”

“That would matter so much,” Mehrnaz said softly. “To have a chance to do that . . .”

Her intensity made Dairine shiver: that intention she understood. “You’re going to have more than a chance,” Dairine said, but before she could finish the thought, the door next to the entertainment system opened. Through it a small, pretty woman came hastening in: dark-haired, dark-eyed, round-faced and round-bodied, with a sweet smile and a button nose. She had a big, brightly patterned paisley scarf over her head and around her shoulders, and she was wearing long, soft shimmery cream-colored trousers and a tailored, amber-colored coat-tunic like Mehrnaz’s that went down to the knee. The effect was made more interesting by the Nikes she was wearing under the pants.

“Is this your friend?” she said to Mehrnaz as she hurried toward them. To Dairine she said, “I’m so glad to meet you! Isn’t your hair wonderful!”

That hadn’t particularly occurred to Dairine, but she smiled. Mehrnaz looked embarrassed, but not mortified. “We don’t get a lot of redheads around here,” she said. “Mama, this is Dairine Callahan—she’s my mentor.”

Mehrnaz’s mother bowed slightly to Dairine, with her hands folded in front of her. “Salaam alaikum!”

Dairine bowed back a little more deeply, having been used to this kind of thing for a while now with Nelaid. “Alaikum salaam,” she said, knowing enough to do that at least. Mehrnaz’s mother positively beamed at her.

“This is my mama, Dairine,” Mehrnaz said. “Dori Farrahi.”

Nelaid’s constant insistence on getting the greeting right on meeting another, possibly more senior wizard suddenly came up for consideration. He did keep saying, It may seem worth nothing initially, but politically it can make a difference later . . . “Elder sister,” Dairine said, “our paths crossing here on errantry’s business, I greet you!”

“And such lovely manners! Come sit down now and have some tea.” She paused as Spot clambered up onto the sofa cushions beside Dairine. “And who’s this?”

“My colleague Spot,” Dairine said.

Spot trained some eyes on Dori and then did a kind of squat on all his legs, his approximation of a bow or curtsy. “Charmed,” he said out loud.

Mehrnaz’s mama beamed at him too. “And aren’t you handsome,” she said, admiring the stark matte black of his carapace and the Biteless Apple glowing on his lid. “Wouldn’t you like something like that, Mehrnaz? Or someone, I should say!” And Dori giggled. It was a funny sound coming out of a woman her age, but cute in its way.

Mehrnaz threw a slightly apologetic look at Dairine and said, “He’s a one-off, Mama; Spot is unique. A being and a manual.”

“That’s so wonderful,” Dori said. “And how marvelous that he should come here! Come now, let’s have some of this lovely tea.”

That was the way things went for a while. Everything was lovely, or gorgeous, or wonderful, or so tremendous, or very exciting—that was the Invitational—and so on, endlessly. Dairine was beginning to wonder if it was possible for Dori to run out of superlatives, especially at the speed with which she spoke. Assessments and opinions fired out of her as if out of a machine gun. A very sweet machine gun, Dairine thought. But it’s like she thinks that if she talks fast enough, and doesn’t stop, she can keep everyone else from saying anything she doesn’t want to hear . . .

“. . . and this is all so exciting—would you like another biscuit? Try one of these pink ones, they’re lovely—but of course you know we would have had some concerns about Mehrnaz taking part, very general ones of course. It’s not exactly that we have any worries about her—”

Yes it is exactly, Dairine found herself thinking.

“—she’s been very strictly brought up, she always knows the right thing to do, but she’s led, well, something of a sheltered life here and of course even though there are so many wizards in our own family, she hasn’t got out that much into the wider community . . .”

And why’s that, I wonder? For the moment Dairine kept on smiling and nodding through the stream of chatter, occasionally making useful or encouraging neutral noises. But something about the way Dori’s monologue had started was bringing a submerged part of Dairine’s mind to an alert state.

All kinds of things routinely came up for discussion while she was doing her stellar management training with Nelaid. Some of these issues Dairine hadn’t mentioned to her dad, as she didn’t know how far down that road Nelaid had gone with him yet—notably the ones revolving around how, in a place like Wellakh, where a planet’s people were in an uneasy and ambivalent relationship with the wizards they’d chosen to lead them, life wasn’t necessarily always safe.

So much of what people say is coded, Nelaid had told her one evening while they leaned on that high baluster before Dairine went home at the end of the day’s work. They know what they mean, but unless in great danger or stress will not say it to you straightforwardly. People will couch their meaning in such a manner that you will never be able to say to them, when their truth is finally revealed, ‘You never told me that.’ They will be able to say, ‘But I did tell you, just not in so many words! I can’t believe you didn’t understand what I was talking about!’ And in their own eyes they will be blameless, while you are not. So always look for the code to see what it is truly saying. It will always be there.

Now, as she kept on nodding and held her cup out to have more tea poured for her, Dairine was realizing that nearly every word that came out of Mehrnaz’s mother’s mouth meant something else. And what it’s all about is that she’s not sure that I’m a safe person to take her baby away. She wants me to prove that I am!

Dairine’s initial urge was to take offense . . . but she caught Mehrnaz looking at her with a pleading expression that said Don’t, please don’t, I’m so sorry . . . ! So Dairine took another drink of her tea, and when Dori did too—as even for a wizard it was a challenge to talk while drinking—Dairine said, “You must be so proud! To be invited to one of these is a compliment from the Powers. To Mehrnaz and to you.”

“It is, isn’t it? Though naturally we only agreed to let her go along to this event with the understanding that she’d be very careful not to get in trouble somehow . . .”

The very slight emphasis on the word trouble was the giveway. It was amazing how once you’d kicked yourself into this mode of thinking, you started seeing what someone truly meant underneath the verbal output, as if there were subtitles. Trouble? No. Danger. From being alone in an unfamiliar place. Probably because of being a girl. Cultural stuff too. Ethnic? Religious? Hard to tell—

“—and though we have the greatest confidence in her—”

No you don’t. In fact, for some reason, you’ve got none whatsoever. What’s that about?

“—and of course she’s been properly brought up and knows exactly how to take care of herself—”

When she’s locked up safe in the house where nothing bad can happen.

“—we wouldn’t want her to get in any difficulty—”

Because you’re absolutely sure that she will, somehow.

“—or make any problems of any kind for anybody—”

Because you have absolutely no idea what she might get up to, and you’re terrified to let her out of your sight.

“—and make sure she has all the help she needs when she’s away in a strange place!”

God, poor Mehrnaz, I bet you have to put up with this all day when you’re by yourself with her. You must be about ready to chew through the walls!

At this point Dori stopped for breath long enough for Mehrnaz, who was fidgeting where she sat, to manage to say, “Mama, seriously, everything’s going to be fine! There’s nothing whatsoever to worry about.”

“Well, let’s be reasonable, dear—”

Dairine held her face very still, as in her experience any time a conversation with a parent included the phrase “let’s be reasonable,” it usually indicated they were about to stop being that way.

“—it is after all an unfamiliar city, and there are all kinds of people running about with their own agendas, and if you’re someplace where you can’t find help quickly if you need it, or a way to leave when you’re with people you don’t know . . .”

“But Dori, you do know from the orientation pack that the whole Invitational venue has manual visioning access,” Dairine said, copying her own mom’s inimitable calm-yourself-down tone of voice and phrasing. It was very reassuring, and very grown-up, and implied that anyone who was wasting time being concerned about this was silly—but it did it in the kindest sort of way. “The system will help you have a look at Mehrnaz anytime you like.” At least, any time when she’s told the system that she doesn’t mind being surveilled. “And it’s not like it’s exactly a private space. They’re holding the spell presentation and evaluation event in the big convention center over by the river. The Javits Center, it’s called.”

Dori looked astonished. Which tells me that you didn’t read the orientation pack very closely. Or at all. Either you couldn’t be bothered, or for some reason you didn’t think she was going to go. “But my goodness,” Dori said, “how can they possibly do that? Surely there’d be a dreadful commotion if nonwizards could walk right in there and see wizardry happening!”

Dairine laughed. “Well, half the people wouldn’t notice. You know how people are when they see something happening that they can’t believe! Half the time they forget all about it. But no nonwizards are going to get into the secure areas. They’re being spell-shielded so that people who have no business there don’t want to go in, and don’t notice anything happening. The organizing committee could have staged this part of the Invitational someplace out of the way, but New York’s convenient for everybody because of the worldgating complex, and of course it’s historically fascinating.” Dairine had another sip of tea. “They like to do this stage in a shared space, since it’s not dangerous. Last time they did the Cull—the initial deselection—in the Sydney Opera House, and nobody batted an eye. They’re in Australia again this time for the semifinals. Canberra.” She shrugged as if it was all no big deal.

Dori sat there blinking for a moment and put two more sugars in her tea than she’d been planning to. “Well, that’s good to hear,” Dori said. “Though still, even in a protected place like that—there will, after all, still be a lot of unfamiliar wizards—”

“Seniors,” Dairine said with a put-upon expression, “and Advisories all over the place, peering over our shoulders all the time . . .”

“—and some of those wizards will be boys—”

Mehrnaz suddenly became fascinated by the plate of biscuits to her right on the table, so that her face was turned away from her mama’s while she considered which one to pick next. Dairine, though, was positioned to see her mentee’s panicked expression through Spot’s eyes, as he was sitting on Mehrnaz’s far side.

Uh huh, Dairine thought. There we go. “Boys?” she said, incredulous, and laughed. “Dori, both of us are going to be way too busy with this to be thinking about boys. We’ve got work to do.”

“Well, yes, but it’s always when we’re thinking about other matters that things happen, isn’t it?”

Dori looked away while saying this, and Dairine became absolutely sure she was thinking, Because it did with me.

“That is not going to be allowed to occur,” Dairine said. “Boys have their place in life, but not for the next two weeks.”

“Ah. And you don’t have a boyfriend either, then?”

Dairine looked Dori straight in the eye, and said in the Speech, “I have absolutely no interest in any guy on this planet.”

Mehrnaz’s mother’s eyes widened at the sudden change of language. Then she looked very relieved. “Oh well, that’s all right then,” she said.

“And I am not going to let her get in any trouble,” Dairine said, once more in the Speech. “I promise you that.”

“Well of course you’re not, my dear, would the Powers have set you two up otherwise? I’m so glad we understand each other.” And the subtext then quieted down enough for that to seem to be the only thing Dori was saying. Except possibly, I really am relieved. “Do you girls want some more tea?”

“Not right now, Mama,” said Mehrnaz. “We’ll ring for Lakshmi if we need anything.”

“All right then,” her mother said, and smiled fondly at both of them. “I’m keeping you from being busy, aren’t I? I’ll get out of your way, then; I had some shopping planned for this morning anyway. You two have fun now. It was so interesting to meet you, Dairine!”

“You too,” Dairine said. You have no idea.

Dairine shot Mehrnaz a sideways look and didn’t say a thing more until the door closed behind her mentee’s mother. Then she spluttered with laughter. “‘Have fun!’ What’s she think we’re going to be doing, going halfway around the planet to play with our Barbie dolls?”

Mehrnaz giggled too. “Truly, I don’t mean to mock her. She’s a wonderful mother.” Dairine held her face still: she was having some of her own thoughts about that. Perhaps Mehrnaz suspected as much; her tone went embarrassed again. “Though I am sorry she started to give you the Inquisition there. Half the time she treats me like I’m about six. The rest of it, she gives me grief about not acting grown-up enough. And when I do, she scolds me.”

Dairine sighed and shook her head. “We all get that, wizards or not.”

“But, mostly she’s good. Our family is, well, kind of complicated. In some ways, she’s sort of the eye of the hurricane.” But then Mehrnaz smiled. “And as far as wizardry goes, no one, no one can do what she does with food. People talk about magic in the kitchen—well, she is the magic. Give her half a chance and she’ll cook for you and stuff you until you have no choice but to teleport afterward, because the only other way you can move is to roll.”

Dairine’s stomach chose that moment to growl. “Oh God,” she said, “it keeps doing this to me. My body clock is so messed up.”

Mehrnaz grabbed the remote. “I’ll send for something,” she said. “These little biscuity things are never enough, they just make you hungrier . . .”

Her stomach growled again, and Dairine couldn’t do anything but laugh. “You know, when I was coming up the street the other day, I smelled—someone was frying onions . . .”

“You went by the bhaji shop,” Mehrnaz said with a grin. “Oh, you wait. I’ll send for a bag. Two bags.”

Dairine grinned and bounced up off the couch to go look at the spell diagram again. Mehrnaz joined her. “Look how this came down,” Dairine said. “Not a line out of place. We are going to make spell casting the hot thing of this Invitational. Mehrnaz, I’m telling you, half the people in the quarter-finals are going to be doing it.”

“It’ll be nice to watch them,” Mehrnaz said, her voice very soft.

Dairine gave her a stern look. “I can hear you thinking, and it’s not going to go that way. You are not going to be a spectator. You are going to be in the middle of it, competing.”

Mehrnaz turned, confused. “Don’t tell me you do psychotropic spelling too! Mind reading? That’s so smooth! I never even felt you doing that!”

“It wasn’t mind reading,” Dairine said. “It was prediction.” She thought of Nelaid again, and smiled.

“I thought that was your sister,” Mehrnaz said, sounding dubious.

“She’s a visionary,” Dairine said. “The prediction stuff comes and goes: she’s still working on it. Kind of a sore point with her, so when you finally meet her, I wouldn’t dwell on it. It’s been driving her nuts lately.”

“Is she no good at it?” said Mehrnaz.

“I get a feeling sometimes she’s too good,” Dairine said, “and it’s starting to freak her out. But never mind that right now. Go on, pick a place to stand and let’s hear you present again . . .”

In her dream Nita was standing in the Cavern of Writings on Mars, and the place was afire with wizardry . . . and this was bad.

It had often bothered Nita that when she’d first come there in company with Carmela and S’reee, there hadn’t been time to appreciate the place as the work of art that it was. The vanished people they were seeking had taken this amazing space, the remains of a single giant bubble of gas buried deep in molten lava, and smoothed the jet-black walls of it to a near-perfect truncated sphere. Then they had written those walls full of history and prophecy and knowledge, deep-graven in ancient angular characters whose meaning had fallen out of the body of wizardly knowledge under the sheer weight of time—of past ages during which no living species had seen or read those characters or even heard of the species that had written them there.

When they’d first found it, the wizardry in the place had been worn down to nearly nothing, almost extinguished by the passage of millennia during which it was never repowered. The words engraved into the walls had been silent, drowned in shadow. But now every character, every diagram carved into those great curved walls burned hot and bright like a light bulb’s wire filament, and the place was flushed with their light, a fierce emerald green.

Nita stood in the middle of the huge green-metal design let into the floor of the Chamber—a calligraphic image of an ancient Martian scorpion-guardian, all wrought about with the curves and tangles of a massive data storage spell. But it was dead now, the last of its embedded power long gone out of it.

She was standing there wondering why this made her feel concerned when someone fled past her toward the walls: ran so closely by her that Nita’s hair lifted in the breeze of the person’s passing. “What—” Nita started to say, but then she recognized the tall slim shape, the long dark braid whipping to one side as the runner slammed up against the far wall, ramming into it with arms outspread as if trying to catch something. “’Mela? ’Mela! What’s the matter?”

“Gotta find the answer and then get out of here before they find me!” Carmela gasped, feeling her way along the wall. “All the answers are here, all the secrets, I have to find the right one. But I have to do it now or they’ll find me, Neets. Gotta get out of here first!”

“Who’ll find you? What’s the matter?”

“One of them’s like Kit. Oh God, he looked at me, you can’t let them look at you, Neets, they’ll kill you inside. They’ll pull the heart right out of you; you can’t look them in the eyes! Don’t look in their eyes, whatever you do!”

Nita’s hair stood up on the back of her neck. Carmela was the one who was always gaily unafraid, who set her jaw and went in with a grin when things looked bad. But now she was rushing down the length of that wall, skidding to a stop, clutching at the characters and boxy phrases written there, then pushing herself hurriedly away when she didn’t find what she wanted. “’Mela, who? Whose eyes? What’s it about! Slow down, hold still, just tell me!”

Carmela was nothing but a cartoon cutout now, black against the sharp, fierce brilliance of the character she obscured. She twisted away from Nita and kept working her way down that wall in panicky haste, shaking her head, gasping with fear. “Can’t slow down, can’t hold still, they’ll get you and your eyes’ll fill up with lies like theirs. Don’t let them get Kit, Neets, please don’t let them get him, he won’t be the same afterward! Either they’ll kill him and you’ll lose him that way or he’ll live but he won’t be Kit anymore and that’ll be even worse—”

Nita’s desperation was growing in tandem with Carmela’s. “’Mela, stop for a minute, you have to tell me what this is about! Who’ll get you, what’s going on?”

But Carmela wouldn’t stop. “The answer’s here somewhere. If we can just find it—” And then she stopped, staring at the wall. “Wait! Wait, this is it—”

“What is?”

“There!” Carmela swung around, for the first time sounding less terrified. She pointed past Nita, pointed at the floor.

Nita swung around. Behind her the green-metal design embedded in the floor was coming to life, glowing softly at first, then burning brighter and brighter. It went beyond a glow to a blaze, the details of the design lost now in the overall fierce burning of it. The light paled out of green toward white and started to spread, running across the floor at them like lava. It splashed harmlessly past them ankle-high, and ran up against the walls of the Cavern behind them, extinguishing the fire of the carvings above it as if it had sucked all the light and power out of them.

And then the light sank into the floor, through it, left them standing on a surface clear as glass while the burning dropped away below them, the color of it starting to shift. Not white any more but faintly yellow-white, and then more golden. And then Nita and Carmela were standing together over the surface of the Sun as Nita had been yesterday in the practice universe.

“This isn’t practice,” Carmela said. “This happens first, and it’s the real thing. You’ll find her, and she’ll find him, and it’s going to look as if everything’s all right, because everyone’s going to be so happy! But right after that they’re coming for me, Neets, and when they do they’ll come for Kit too. You cannot let them have him, you hear me? You can’t.” And Carmela came to Nita and grabbed her by her upper arms and actually shook her. Her fingers bit into Nita’s biceps so hard they hurt. “Do whatever you have to do to keep him safe. I don’t care if they get me instead.”

“Nobody’s going to get Kit, and nobody’s going to get you!” Nita said, grabbing Carmela in turn. She was no longer scared but angry, simply furious at anything that could turn Carmela into this alternately scared and desperate thing. “I’m not going to let them, whoever they are! Stay with me, we’ll fight them!”

And then Carmela dropped her hands and looked sadly at Nita.

“Too late,” she said. “They’re here.”

Under their feet the Sun had begun swarming with dark sunspots, like a mass of black bees, buzzing, clotting over the light, shutting it out. With horrible speed the Sun went almost totally black, the only light able to escape from it shooting upward between the sunspot-clumps like rays of Sun through closed curtains. It can’t do this, Nita thought in growing panic, if the Sun goes out again we won’t be able to get it to relight, not like the last time—

All around them the Cavern of Writings filled with a frightening low rushing noise like something vast drawing its last breath, a breath of fire. In the growing rush of sound an awful, tremulous darkness fell. And the thought came to Nita in horror: No, it can’t do that, the Sun’s too small to end that way, it can’t go n—

Everything went violently and terminally white, an unbearable onslaught of light like a scream. Except the scream was Carmela’s . . .

And then Nita was sitting up in bed and gasping as if there was no air left in the world.

Everything was normal. Outside the venetian blinds of her bedroom window, the light of dawn was growing. Everything was perfectly quiet, perfectly peaceful.

Except for her. Nita wrapped her arms around herself and hung on for dear life, and concentrated on breathing.

This, she thought, completely sucks.

An hour or so later, Nita was in the kitchen at the stove, making pancakes to try to take her mind off things. It wasn’t working.

Carmela, she thought as she poured a few more circles of batter into the frying pan. The way she was in that dream . . . it was all wrong. But something else was off about it, too. Something about the emotional context struck Nita as overstated. It’s like she was acting. Why would she do that?

. . . Though of course this was a dream-Carmela, so why would anything she did necessarily be strange? Nita scowled as the pancakes started to cook on one side, and she shook the pan to jar them loose. They kept sticking, which was an irritation, because when they stuck they burned within seconds, and at this rate there wouldn’t be enough for both her and Kit when he got here.

And then there was the bit with the Sun, and the voice that had whispered to her before but that now had roared in frustration and long-suppressed rage. . . . Boy, that was freaky. But of course the Sun’s on my mind right now. How could it not be? And not just because of Penn. She sighed. Dairine . . .

She flipped the pancakes, then under her breath said “Dammit!” They’d burned already. Nita turned down the control for that burner again, but the last time she’d done this the setting had been too low and the pancakes had sat there in the pan refusing to cook except with the residual heat. What is going on with this thing? she thought. Please don’t let the stove be dying. That’s an expense Daddy wouldn’t like right now.

She stood there impatiently tapping the spatula against the edge of the frying pan. As for Penn, she thought, what was going on with him yesterday? Why was he so scared of the Sun?

Unless he didn’t mind the thought of doing things to it at a distance. But when he got close enough to it for it to do something to him . . . She shook her head, because the question brought her back to her earlier one. Why would you purposely build a project that was going to scare you? It still doesn’t make any sense.

Nita was pulled out of the moment’s distraction by the smell of something burning. “Oh, come on now, stop that!” she said. Hurriedly she scooped the four pancakes out of the pan and then put her hand down on the edge of the stove, away from the heat but close enough to the burner for there to be a direct connection between her and the metal. “You could just find a good temperature and hold it,” she muttered to the stove burner in the Speech. “I don’t want to burn any more of these. I’m running out of batter and because somebody forgot to get eggs last shopping, I can’t make any more!”

The burner silently gave Nita to understand that the heat fluctuations weren’t its problem: there was something wrong with the house wiring, or maybe the circuitry in the stove. It wasn’t to blame. It got power fed to it, it glowed, it did its job, the power settings weren’t its problem—

Nita heard the screen door open. Oh great, she thought, now Kit’s going to think I couldn’t handle this mechanical thing. Or that I was saving it for him to do something about. Like he’s the repairman . . .

He shut the door behind him, sniffing the air, and came into the kitchen. “Got something burning there, Juanita,” Kit said, and started laughing.

“I will kill you to make up for not having killed him,” Nita said, standing there with the batter jug in one hand. “Thought I was going to lose my lunch right then.”

“He is kind of clueless sometimes,” Kit said. “It’s not as if it doesn’t say in the manual what you prefer to be called.”

“Yeah, well, I wonder how much of the reading he’s been doing! Some parts he seems to get all right, and the rest of it—it’s like he doesn’t even bother. Doesn’t think it’s important enough or something.”

Kit shrugged and reached past Nita for one of the pancakes lying on a nearby plate on top of a paper towel. “Maple syrup?” he said, rolling it up expertly.

“Second cupboard over. Assuming that someone remembered to buy some.”

Kit went rummaging for it. “Her turn to do the shopping this week?”

Nita blew out an exasperated breath and poured the last of the batter into the frying pan. “No problem getting her to go to the Crossings,” Nita said. “But the Pathmark? Might as well be halfway across the galaxy.”

Kit shook his head in a resigned way. “I know where she gets the Crossings thing from . . .” He regarded his pancake as he poured maple syrup on it over the plate that was holding the others. “You decide you need more charcoal in your diet or something?”

“No. The heat in this guy keeps jumping around.” She nodded at the burner. “He says it’s not his fault, though.”

Kit’s eyes went unfocused as he ate the first half of his pancake. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Something to do with his connection to the stove . . . I’m not sure what that’s about. Might be a short.”

Nita sighed. “Okay.”

“But today’s really big question is, how late did you have to stay up last night getting Penn to make all those changes?”

She blinked. “I didn’t stay up at all. Did he do a lot? I saw a note in the manual that he’d been working on the spell diagram, but I didn’t check the details right then. I wanted a shower first.”

Kit nodded until his mouth wasn’t so full. “Yeah, he did a lot. He pulled the main core routine apart, the whole energy-scooping part, and put it back together again in a completely different configuration. Must’ve taken him all night.”

Nita shook her head and flipped the last few pancakes as Kit reached past her and rolled up another one. “How about that.”

Kit gave her a slightly sly look. “The manual also said you had a chat session with him.”

Nita hadn’t bothered copying Kit in on that because she’d foreseen the chat getting either inappropriate or angry, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him seeing either result. “It was real short,” she said. “I told him the odds were more in his favor if he fixed it, and I told him what Dairine told me. And sure enough, he tried to wheedle me into doing it for him—” Kit rolled his eyes. “Thought I’d die laughing. I said to him, ‘You think that’s gonna happen, you need your grasp on reality retooled.’ Told him we’d see him sometime after the presentations started later today, and I closed the chat down and that was that. End of story.”

“Well,” Kit said, “he did the job. Or at least he did something. We’ll see how it looks when he lays it out.” He reached for a third pancake.

“You’d better leave some for me!”

“I’m eating the burnt ones.”

“That’s all of them!”

“Better hurry up, then.” Kit grinned at her.

Nita pulled the last pancakes out of the pan and took the maple syrup away from Kit before he started drinking it (which he’d been known to do). She rolled up the least burnt one, poured syrup in the plate and dunked it. “You satisfied with how Penn did on the verbal presentation stuff?”

Kit nodded. “Yeah. I wish we had another session to do heckling with him, though. He’s getting better at handling the interruptions, but he still hates them, and it shows. Wish we could desensitize him.”

“He was worse about that with you than he was with me.”

Kit reached for a fourth pancake and rolled it up. “I don’t know if that’s him being competitive with guys, or competitive with me . . . Though why would he be competitive with me?” Kit shrugged. “Don’t get it.”

“Could be both,” Nita said. “The way he is with girls . . .”

Kit shook his head. “You really have problems with him, don’t you.”

“It’s his attitude. I honestly don’t know what’s going on with him. But it’s as if he thinks girls are some other species. I wish I had some idea where he gets that from.”

“You mean you’re not another species?”

Nita kicked Kit ever so gently in the shin. “Thanks a lot. Maybe he sees guys as being . . . I don’t know, more worthy of competing with? More of a challenge?”

Kit was at that moment finishing his pancake, and shrugged again. Nita grabbed a couple more pancakes, rolled them up together, wiped up what was left of the maple syrup with them and wolfed them down.

“So, you ready?”

“Just want to wash my hands and grab a jacket. Where should we pop out? Right at the Javits? They’ve got a dedicated ‘beam in’ spot; Sker’ret installed it yesterday.”

“I don’t know. It’s a nice day. Thought we might go into Grand Central and walk over.”

“Not Penn Station?”

“They’re doing something to the gates, the manual says. Penn’s offline.”

“Oh, great. That has to be driving Rhiow nuts.” Nita laughed. “You know, we’re going to have to have something else to call him if we’re going to talk about him and the station at the same time.”

“Easy. Penn Station is Big Penn. Our mentee is Little Penn.”

“Yeah, in terms of needing to be cut down to size.”

“Looks like it’s gonna take a few minutes for your blood sugar to sort itself out . . .”

“Shut up.” But Nita laughed. “Let’s go.”