Wizards At War

4: Engagement

At the far left edge of the face of the Moon, as it’s seen from the northern hemisphere, about halfway between the Moon’s equator and its south pole lies a vast triple-ringed crater—the remnant of a huge impact in ancient times when the Moon’s surface was still just a thin crust of stone over seas of seething lava. Whatever hit the Moon did so with such awful force that three consecutive ripples of lava, each as tall as Everest, roared hundreds of kilometers outward across the surface before they froze in place. They became the Inner Rook, Outer Rook, and Cordillera mountain ranges, all surrounding Mare Orientale—the Eastern Sea.

The mountain rings have themselves over time become pocked with countless big and little craters. One of these, at the one o’clock position on the Cordillera ring, is too small and unremarkable to have a name on any astronomer’s map. But others familiar with the Moon know it for its unusually dark crater floor, its spectacular view across the vast expanse of the Sea, and the short, sharp impact spike sticking up sheer out of the middle of it; and today it was remarkable for other reasons, too.

“Wow,” Nita said under her breath. “It’s full of wizards.”

The normal darkness of the crater floor’s basalt was obscured by what, in the pale blue-white light of the setting near-full Earth, could have been mistaken for gigantic soap bubbles. But they were really force fields full of air—hundreds of them, big and small, scattered right across the near-perfect kilometer-wide circle of the little crater that wizards call Lake View, after the nearby basin of Lacus Veris, Spring Lake. The force-field wizardries gleamed blue on one side with Earth-light, where the crater’s Earthward shadow fell over them, and on the other with the light of the Sun, now nearly halfway up the jet-black sky over the Eastern Sea; and about them all was a little shimmer or tremor of a most delicate silvery fog, as the force fields shed out frozen “waste” carbon dioxide into the lunar dusk.

Inside their own bubble of air, which Kit was handling for the moment, Nita looked down at that gathering with a strange feeling that was half excitement, half reluctance. “Anybody down there we know, you think?” she said to Kit.

He glanced at her and laughed. “Like it matters,” he said. “We’d better get to know at least some of them, and fast, if we’re going to pull this off.”

Nita glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, Ronan and Roshaun and Sker’ret were already separating off their own smaller force fields to make the passage through vacuum less of a chore. Filif stood looking down at the gathering, his fronds rustling all over, so that even his baseball cap jiggled.

Nita gave him a look. “You okay, Fil?”

Filif kept on rustling, gazing down with all those red eye-berries at the wizards massed there down in the crater, human and otherwise. “So many,” he said at last.

Nita let out a long breath. “I just hope it’s enough,” she said. Following Filif’s gaze, she spotted a force field down below that seemed a lot larger than many of the others, and it didn’t seem to be a group field, either. I’ll bet I know who that is!

Nita reached out to her group’s force field, rotated her own part of the field-spell around to her in a whirl of glowing symbols, and bounced forward as she spun off her own part of the spell. The sphere of air budded out in front of Nita, closed up behind. She paused for a moment to make sure that this smaller segment of the main wizardry had her personal information correctly laid into it.

As she did, Ronan came up behind her and paused with his own “bubble” touching Nita’s. Knowing she could be heard while their two fields were in contact, she said, “What do we tell the other wizards about what we’re really going to be doing?”

“Nothing,” Ronan said. “The odds are better than usual that at least a few of them are overshadowed.”

He might be right, Nita thought, uneasy. But what’s going on inside his head? “But we can at least find out what some of them are doing.”

“Sure.”

Ronan headed down the slope. Nita looked over her shoulder at the others, who were now clustering their own force fields up against hers and the one that contained Kit and Ponch. “Come on down,” she said to them. “Houseguests, watch the gravity, it’s about a sixth of what it is back home—” She turned and started to astronaut-bounce down the slope, kicking up silvery moondust behind her. The others followed after.

Kit caught up with Nita quickly, which was no surprise: he was expert in light gravity. As he bumped his bubble back up against hers, Nita got a look at the expression on his face. It was strange. “What’s up with you?”

“Oh, you know. Carmela…” Kit was looking downslope at the bottom of the crater with an expression that suggested his ears were still ringing; their departure from his house had not been a calm one. Carmela had taken it very badly that she was being left behind.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Kit, relax. She’ll get over it.”

“Well, I still feel like pond scum. I didn’t have all day to stand around being oh so tactful.” He sighed. “Now I wish I had.”

Nita let out a breath. “Look, before we go away, see if you can find time to sit her down and explain it all in detail.”

“You’ve never had to explain something to Carmela,” Kit said. “The universe’s life span might not contain enough time…”

The others caught up with them. They continued down the slope into the flatter area of the crater floor. The biggest of the bubbles was not far ahead of them, and inside it a huge long figure floated, slightly curved, graceful; the long double-lobed tail of a humpback whale swung upward in greeting as she spotted them, and the tiny eye came alive with a smile to match the artificial one of the great long mouth. Nita bumped her own bubble up against the bigger force field, felt the wizardry that ran it analyze her own and adjust itself to include her personal parameters for oxygen requirements and respiration rates. A moment later she was inside. Nita trotted over, bouncing a little, to throw her arms as far as they’d go—not very far—around S’reee. “Dai, big sister!”

“And dai stihó to you, hNiii’t!” S’reee said, folding a long forefin partially around her in a friendly gesture, one that made her bob up and down a little where she hovered. “Didn’t think you’d have too much trouble finding me.”

“With the kind of air supply you need for a run like this,” Nita said, “it wasn’t going to be that hard.”

The humpback glanced toward the others following in Nita’s wake. “Busy up here today. And everyone’s well loaded with spells, I can feel.”

Nita lifted her right wrist and shook it. Her charm bracelet, every charm standing for a spell nine-tenths ready to be used and needing only a few words’ worth of activation, jingled gently. “Seemed smart to be ready for anything on this run,” she said. “But you are, too.” She glanced up above them at the surface of S’reee’s force field; to a wizard’s eye, it swirled with faint characters in the Speech, the way a bubble’s surface swirls with colors. “That’s some spell,” Nita said. “It almost seemed to do that inclusion by itself.”

“I’m not sure it didn’t,” S’reee said. “I’ve been doing things I used to think were impossible these past few days, since it all started to change.”

“S’reee!” Kit said, as he came up beside Nita, free of his own force field, and Ponch danced briefly on his hind legs near S’reee’s nose, getting her scent. Kit thumped S’reee’s broad side in a friendly way. “I didn’t know you did space!”

The whale chuckled, a long, slow, bubbly noise that finished in an upscaling whistle like a boiling kettle. “Why not? It’s just another Sea.” S’reee angled her head very slightly to one side, as Ponch lost interest and ran off underneath her. “And here come your excursus guests! Dai stihó, cousins. Welcome to the Moon,” she said to Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun as they came in behind Dairine. Then she glanced past them again, and bent her head as if looking down at the moondust … and kept on bending until her nose almost touched it.

Belatedly Nita realized that what she was seeing was a bow. She looked over her shoulder and saw Ronan coming toward them, bouncing a little. “You know each other?” Nita said.

Ronan stopped his bounce just short of S’reee, waited until he got settled a little, and then put up a hand to rest it on her hide. He smiled, then, an unusually open look for him.

“Both of them,” S’reee said. “Rhoannann ‘took in the Sea,’ once. It was a notable Ordeal: those of us who live there couldn’t really have missed it. And as for the Other—I’m wizard enough these days to know the Finned Defender when I see him, whatever or whoever he’s wearing at the time. Elder brother, well met in the current that bears us!”

Ronan nodded back. “Dai,” he said. “And he greets you too.”

“It’s good you all got here before I had to leave,” S’reee said. “There’s a lot to do back home, for I, too, have been ‘upgraded.’ I am now Wetside Supervisory Wizard for Earth.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open. “S’reee, you’re kidding. The whole planet!”

“The oceans, at least. When we first met, and I’d been promoted to Senior so young, I hated it. But now the experience seems like it’s going to come in handy.” She swung her tail in a thoughtful way. “It almost makes me think—”

“That Someone or other might have planned it this way in advance?” said a rather young voice from the far side of S’reee.

Kit glanced up. He started to grin. “Is that who I think it is?” he said.

A small human shape came ducking underneath S’reee’s floating broad, barnacled belly: a little dark-skinned kid, slender and slight in jeans and T-shirt, maybe about eleven years old, with a short afro and quick, bright eyes. “Hey,” he said, “dai stihó, everybody!” And then he saw Kit, and laughed that peculiarly joyous laugh of his, and went to throw his arms around Kit in a big hug.

Nita looked hurriedly at Ronan. Listen, she said, about Darryl—

He’s a lot more than he seems, Ronan said.

A whole lot. And we don’t mention it.

Of course not.

“Darryl, my man, look at you!” Kit said as they broke the hug, and Nita headed over. “Are you taller? Are you actually bulking up?”

“Just eating more,” Darryl said. “Yeah, I’m growing all of a sudden. Guess I’ve got the energy to spare now. Don’t get into it with my mom—she says that these days I cost too much to keep. Almost too much.” He grinned, turning away from them and S’reee toward the others as the visitors merged their bubbles with S’reee’s big one. “Hi, guys, who are you all?”

Introductions got under way. As they did, Nita saw Dairine giving Roshaun an unusually intense look. Roshaun put his eyebrows up, and then took them right down again. Any wizard in Darryl’s vicinity would notice an atypical intensity of power. But once you realized what it meant, it wasn’t something you discussed with Darryl, ever. He didn’t know about it, and wasn’t meant to. The situation was like knowing a superhero with a secret identity. But the difference here was that everybody else knew about the secret identity, and the superhero didn’t… which was a good thing, because if Darryl ever found out he was a direct channel of the One’s power into the world, the discovery would kill him.

Darryl turned back to Kit after a few moments. “I looked you up in the book, saw you were off joyriding halfway across the galaxy.” Darryl looked Kit over approvingly. “Got yourself some tan.”

“Nearly got myself a scorched hide,” Kit said. “Our old ‘friend’ again.”

Darryl nodded, his grin fading a little. “Well, we’re just going to have to screw up Its plans one more time.”

“Yeah, and then we can get back to business,” Kit said, and looked up at the sky. “Like the M—”

“The Martian thing!” Nita and Dairine and Darryl more or less shouted in chorus, leaving Sker’ret and Filif and Roshaun and Ronan all looking confused.

“You crack me up,” Darryl said, and whacked Kit in the shoulder in a friendly way. “Here we’ve got the whole universe going to pieces around our ears, and all you can think about is going hunting for ancient Martian princesses in skimpy clothes.” He guffawed.

“Will you cut it out? It’s not about princesses! That’s just in a book!” Kit said, but no one was listening. There was too much laughing going on. “Come on, Darryl, give it a rest!”

“Okay, never mind,” Darryl said, “you’re off the hook till we get present business sorted out. I can’t believe how full my manual’s gotten in the past few days. Just look at it—”

To Nita’s surprise, Darryl reached not into a nearby space pocket for his manual but into the front pocket of his jeans. Dairine stared at what Darryl brought out. To all appearances it was a sleek rectangular white-and-silver MP3 player, but as he turned it toward them, Nita could see that the apple on its little blue-glowing screen had no bite out of it.

“That is too slick!” Dairine said. Spot came up from behind and put some eyes up to goggle in a friendly way at the WizPod.

“Yeah,” Darryl said. He pulled it open—which shouldn’t have been possible—until it looked like a little book, and then opened it out again, and again, and yet again, until it was more like a flat-screen monitor than anything else, but one you could hold in your hands. Manual data started scrolling down its surface, imagery and spells together. “It’s got all the usual spell-storage and display options,” Darryl said. “And it carries my tunes. Like I’ve got time for music when this thing’s got twenty times the content, all of a sudden…” He grinned as he folded it up again.

Nita looked over at S’reee as a thought occurred to her. “Are there any other Seniors on Earth who were Seniors before but’ll still be functioning when things go bad?”

“No,” S’reee said.

“Oh, wow,” Nita said. “How that must be making you feel…”

“Yes. And just when I was starting to relax about being a Senior,” S’reee said, sounding briefly mournful. “But all we can do now is dive deep and do the best we can on short notice, even if we’re not sure we have enough data. That said”—S’reee looked less troubled—”we’ve been given access to a lot more power than we’ve ever had. It’s hard to feel so uncertain when you do a wizardry and it just jumps out of you like a waterspout.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “I noticed.” Thirty minutes or so ago, when they’d built the wizardry to transit the group to the Moon, it had gone together in record time, and had left no one even slightly tired—unusual for a fairly complex spell. Nita’s first reaction had been exhilaration. But then she’d started feeling uneasy, as if something she’d always been used to paying full price for was now suddenly on sale. What if it’s actually a sign that the thing you’re buying is about to go permanently out of stock?

“Well, we’re going to need that extra power, because things are already happening out there,” S’reee said. “The effects of the unnatural expansion are spreading fast.” She looked across the crater at the jumble of bubbles of air. They were splitting and moving around, bumping into each other and merging, as wizards got together to lay their plans. “There are already pockets of space where wizardry isn’t working, and it’s only a matter of time before those pockets start occurring here. About half these people are heading off-planet, following various leads toward ways to stop the expansion. The rest will head back home to try to keep things running steadily for as long as we can. We’re going to be spread pretty thin.” She sounded wistful. “I don’t suppose you’re going to be staying?”

“No,” Nita said, “we’re outward-bound, in two different directions. Right now we just wanted to check in and see what people up here were doing.”

“It’s all in your manuals,” S’reee said. “Check those to see if anything comes up that has any bearing on what you’re about to do.”

Kit turned to Darryl. “What about you?” Kit said. “You gonna sit tight?”

Darryl nodded. “I’m too new at this,” he said. “I’ve got lots of power, but I’m not real sure what to do with it yet.” He hesitated a little. “Or how to fit it in with being an autistic: a lot of adjusting to do, still. Might be smart for me to be careful for the moment. Anyway, S’reee’s taken me under her fin. I’ll be OK.”

“You’d be OK anyway,” Nita said. “But yeah, she’s full of good advice.” Privately, Nita was pleased, for the thought had occurred to her that the Earth might be safer if this one of its precious few abdals stayed home.

When she looked back at Darryl, though, he was eyeing her a little strangely. “Listen, though,” he said. “I saw something the other day, just when I was waking up.”

“Lucid dreaming?” Nita said. It was one of a number of techniques that visionary wizards used to more clearly hear what the universe was trying to tell them.

“Not like that,” Darryl said. “I just get these hints, you know? Like something whispering in my ear. So far it’s turned out to be smart for me to pay attention. But I don’t think this hint was for me.”

“Why? Do you get ‘wrong numbers’?” Nita said. “I get them sometimes.”

Darryl shook his head. “First time,” he said.

Nita found that interesting, in an uncomfortable way. “What did you see?”

“Bugs,” Darryl said. “Giant bugs.”

Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Like him?” Nita said, nodding past S’reee. Over that way, Sker’ret and Filif were deep in discussion of something or other.

Darrell gazed over at Sker’ret for a moment. “No, not really. He’s a nice guy; you can feel it from here. These bugs—” He shivered. “I don’t know where they are, but running into them wouldn’t be fun. Our ‘old friend’ owns them, body and soul. They’re deadly. And I think if you hang around where they are, somebody’s going to get killed.”

“No problem,” Kit said. “If we see any giant bugs, we’ll give them a miss.”

Nita swallowed. “Now,” she said to Darryl, “you’re going to tell us a way to beat this, right?”

Darryl’s expression was stricken. “Don’t know for sure that there is one,” he said. “Like I said, it was just a hint. It felt like someone could have said more… and wasn’t saying.”

“Okay,” Nita said. “Thanks. We’ll keep our eyes open.”

She looked around again, out toward the center of the crater, where hundreds more wizards were milling around. “Ronan?” she said.

“Yeah,” Ronan said, and glanced over at Kit. “We should get started. Where’s your adjunct talent?”

Kit looked around, then ducked to look under S’reee. “Playing with rocks, as usual,” he said. “Hey, Ponch!”

Moondust flew up in a cloud as Ponch ran underneath S’reee to Kit. I’m here!

“Let’s go hunting.”

Oh boy!

“You going to be here later?” Kit said to Darryl.

“I’ll be one of the last ones out,” Darryl said. “Somebody has to clean up all the footprints when we’re done.”

Nita squeezed his shoulder. “Later,” she said, and went off to where Dairine and Roshaun were deep in conversation and, to judge by their expressions, having one more disagreement. As Nita bounced over, they looked up at her almost in relief.

“You heading out now?” she said.

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “Roshaun’s carrying his subsidized portal; we’ll use that. We’re going back to his place on Wellakh first.”

“All right,” Nita said. “Message me when you’re done there. But meantime, listen—”

“Yeah, I’ll be careful,” Dairine said. She turned away.

Nita took her sister gently by the arm, turned her back toward her. “Dair,” she said. “Giant bugs.”

“Huh?” Dairine turned to glance over at Sker’ret.

“Not cute bugs. Nasty ones,” Nita said. “Darryl says they’re bad news, and some of us are probably going to run into them. If you do, avoid them. Understand?”

Dairine gave her a dry look. “With all this extra power we’ve suddenly got, I think can handle it.”

Nita let out an annoyed breath and turned to Roshaun. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “Watch your backs, okay?”

“We will do nothing obviously foolhardy,” Roshaun said. “But under the circumstances, no situation any of us goes into is likely to lack its dangers.” He looked down at Nita from that regal height of his, an effect still somewhat altered by the big floppy T-shirt he hadn’t changed out of yet.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.” She glanced at Dairine. “Take care of yourself.”

“You, too,” Dairine said. She hesitated, and then she came over and gave Nita a hug.

Nita hugged her back, then pushed her away, trying to make it look casual. S’reee was now talking to Filif and Sker’ret; Nita turned back to them. “What about you guys?”

“We’ll go with you and Kit and Ronan,” Sker’ret said.

“Great. Let’s move out…”

Kit stood just past the boundary of S’reee’s force field, having detached his own; inside it, beside him, Ponch was gazing upslope. At first Kit thought Ponch had seen someone coming, but then realized that it was the setting Earth that held his dog’s attention. Ponch was staring at the world the way he might watch a tree after he’d seen a squirrel go up it.

“What?” Kit said. “What’s the matter?”

It’s small, Ponch said. I never thought it was small before.

Kit nodded. “That’s the way the astronauts saw it,” he said. “Like a little thing. Fragile. I never thought the world was small until I saw it that way myself. It surprises everybody when they see their own world that way for the first time, all by itself in the dark.” Kit looked curiously at Ponch. “But you’ve been here before.”

I didn’t notice it then, Ponch said. Now I do.

He sounded concerned. “It’s okay,” Kit said. “It’s a point-of-view thing. You get used to it.”

I wonder if that’s wise…

Kit wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. He looked up and saw Ronan heading over to bump his own now-detached force field against Kit’s.

“You two ready?” Ronan said.

Kit nodded. Ronan stepped through the interface between their two force fields and went over to Ponch. “So, big fella,” Ronan said. “You ready for it?” He got down on one knee by Ponch. Kit hunkered down across from him.

Ponch sat down, his tail thumping. Show me what you want me to find.

Ronan and Ponch locked eyes.

Since the time that Ponch began to reveal his ability to find things—stepping between realities, even sometimes out of his own home universe to track them down—Kit had started trying to use the wizardly link between them to “overhear” what Ponch was seeing and hearing. It wasn’t always easy. Even a dog who had become much less doggy than usual—because of the frequent use of wizardry in his neighborhood—still sometimes had trouble explaining to Kit just what was going on with him. Now, as Ronan looked into Ponch’s eyes, Kit listened hard.

What flowed into Ponch’s mind—tentatively at first, and then with more assurance as the Winged Defender became clearer about how to communicate—affected Kit in two different ways at once. Half the message came through as a blinding, confusing series of images overlaying one another: light forms and dark ones, strange shapes that seemed to have too many sides, colors Kit couldn’t name. But the rest Kit experienced as Ponch was experiencing it—as scent. And this perception left Kit half dazzled, for Ponch’s sense of smell was endlessly more powerful and complex than any human’s, making Kit feel like a blind person who’s suddenly been given new eyes. The complex of scents was a strange mixture, and Kit could make nothing of it. Against a, unusually strong background of the unique dry gunpowder-smell of moondust, now Kit thought he smelled metal, flowers, strange green scents like those of growing things, a smell like dry cocoa and another one like old motor oil, those two aromas strongly overlaying many more.

Kit was aware that to Ponch, these scents weren’t evidence of concrete things but of conditions, thoughts, emotions. The acrid taste of fear, a distant smoky frustration and anger mingling with that fear, concealing itself within it. It’s not so much that he can smell emotions, Kit thought. From his point of view, emotions are scents. There was information of all kinds buried in the miasma of odors—particularly in one that got stronger by the moment. Kit was unnerved to realize that Ponch had classified this scent as being very like dried blood. But blood on the surface of an old wound. Something that’s not over with yet. Something that’s waiting… Whatever was waiting sizzled behind it all like electricity: powerful, dangerous, yet also suppressed, muzzled—

Kit blinked himself back to the here and now: the powdery gray soil underfoot, the Earth setting over the rim of Spring Lake crater. He looked down at Ponch. Ponch had his head cocked to one side; he was whuffling at the air. Ronan sat back on his heels. “Can you track that?”

Ponch glanced up once more at the Earth hanging low by the crater’s rim. I can find what you’re looking for, he said, craning his neck back to look at Kit and Ronan. But we have to go closer to where it comes from, and get away from where there are so many people.

“How come you can’t just ‘walk’ us there?” Kit said.

Ponch stood up and shook himself. Because it’s a real place with life in it, he said, looking across at Kit. Finding a place that’s already there is different from just making one up. And it’s inside the same universe with us. There are a lot of other places that smell sort of the same way: I have to make sure I find the right one. Once we’re away from here—Ponch looked around and down at the wizards —I can do a lot better.

“Okay,” Kit said. He thought for a moment; then said to Ronan, “I have an idea.”

“Yeah?”

Let’s hear it, said the other version of Ronan’s voice, the one both older and edgier.

Ronan, Kit said silently, you said your ‘partner’ was going to be able to protect us from being overheard. Are you both sure?

“Yes,” and Yes, they said.

Okay. A custom worldgating from here would be pretty easy for You-Know-Who to trace. Let’s lay a false trail and go out through the Crossings. Some of the wizards here’ll be going that way. And if Ponch’s problem is that all the life here and on Earth is drowning out the scent, then Rirhath B will be a good place for him to try again. Their population’s a lot smaller.

“Makes sense,” Ronan said. He looked down at Ponch. “That suit you?”

Ponch was already wagging his tail. Blue food!!

Ronan looked at Kit, confused. “Am I missing something?”

Kit had to laugh. “Uh, he thinks that when we hit the Crossings he’s going to get a treat.”

Ronan nodded and stood up. “All right. Well, let me know when you’re ready.” He disengaged his force-field bubble from theirs, and headed off toward the center of the crater.

Nita came up behind Kit and bumped her bubble into his. As she slipped into his bubble, she glanced the way Kit was looking. “Got a problem?”

“I don’t know. Does Ronan seem kind of abrupt to you sometimes?”

Nita laughed silently. “More like always. But more now than before. Probably something to do with his passenger.”

“I guess so.”

“Look, we should think about where we’re going, and how. Dairine and Roshaun are heading off by themselves, so it looks like our group is you, me, Ponch, Ronan, Sker’ret, and Filif.”

“Okay. Did S’reee mention if anybody around here has a gate to the Crossings running already?”

“No,” Nita said. She reached into her otherspace pocket for her manual. “Let’s do a scan…”

“In a minute. Did you ask anyone else to meet us here?”

Nita looked surprised. “No.”

“Then who’s that?” Kit looked toward the center of the crater. One force-field bubble was moving toward them. As the bubble got closer, Kit could see that the occupants were two kids of maybe twelve or thirteen, a boy and a girl. The girl was wearing a dark off-the-shoulder top splashed with a bright tropical pattern over a miniskirt and leggings and ballet shoes, and had very long, straight, dark hair worn loose; the boy’s hair was cropped very short, and he was wearing something that at first glance looked like a suit—though as they got closer, Kit saw that it was actually one of those dark Far Eastern collarless jackets, worn somewhat incongruously over boot-cut denim. Both of the kids looked lean and perhaps a little small for their ages. They were Asian, delicately featured, handsome, though there was something a little fierce about both their faces.

They bumped their common bubble up against Kit’s. “Can we come in?” the girl said.

“Sure.”

Their bubble merged with Kit’s. “You’re the ones who did the Song of the Twelve, right?” the girl said. “Dai stihó!”

“Dai,” Nita and Kit both said. And Kit laughed, and said, “Well, maybe you both know who we are—”

“I’m Tran Liem Tuyet,” said the boy.

“I’m Tran Hung Nguyet,” said the girl.

“We’re a twychild,” they said together.

Then they both burst out laughing. “Sorry, bad habit!”

“Twin wizards!” Kit said. “Yeah, I guess you would hear each other think most of the time.”

“Constantly,” they both said.

“But twychilding is more than just being twins, isn’t it?” Nita said. “I read about it in the manual a while back. You guys bounce spells back and forth between you, right? And they get stronger.” And then Kit was surprised to see Nita blush. “Sorry, I don’t know which of your names it’s okay to use.”

“The last one’s like the Western first name,” said the girl. “Nguyet’s fine for me. But as for the spells, yeah, that’s how it goes. The output multiplies, sometimes even squares.”

Kit grinned. “You sure you aren’t breaking the laws of thermodynamics or something?”

Tuyet snickered. “Probably,” he said. “Nguyet breaks most things.”

Nguyet glared at him. “I do not!”

“Oh yeah? What about that lamp last week?”

“That was an accident!”

The ground under all their feet suddenly began to vibrate. Kit and Nita looked at each other in alarm. “Guys!” Kit said.

The ground’s shuddering stopped. The twins looked at each other. “Uh, sorry…”

“It’s him doing it,” Nguyet said. “He’s younger.”

“Oh, yeah, right, two minutes younger!” Tuyet laughed. “That makes me more powerful.”

“Are you two going out, or staying in?” Kit said.

“Staying in,” Tuyet said. “That’s what we wanted to check with you. We’re putting together a notification list in the manuals so that wizards who’re staying home can cover for the ones who’re going on the road when the trouble starts. S’reee told us you guys were probably going off-world, so we added you to the list. You going through the Crossings?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ve got a custom gate wizardry set out in the middle of the crater,” Nguyet said. “Been a lot of traffic through there in the past few hours, in both directions. You can never tell … it might confuse Somebody.” She grinned. When she did, that fierce look in Nguyet’s face got fiercer. Kit liked it: it made her otherwise extremely delicate, “porcelain” prettiness look more like the kind of porcelain that’s made into high-tech knives.

“I hope so,” Kit said.

Tuyet’s grin was even more feral than his sister’s. “We’ll keep an eye on things here,” he said. “Get out there and make It crazy.”

“That’s the plan,” Nita said. “Good luck, you two.”

The twychild waved and headed on out of the force field, making their way down toward S’reee. “That was interesting,” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Imagine how it must have been for them. Joint Ordeals. Never having to find someone to help you with a spell…” She shook her head.

“Having another wizard in your head with you all day, instead of by invitation?” Kit said. “A little too weird for me.”

“But if you’ve been used to it all your life,” Nita said, “even before you knew you were wizards, then maybe we’re the ones that would seem weird to them.” She tucked her manual away. “Never mind. Here come the others.”

The center of Spring Lake Crater was empty except for one thing: a large hemispherical force-field bubble. Inside it, laid out on the pockmarked, dusty gray surface, was a huge circle of blue light; and that outer circle was subdivided into about twenty smaller ones of various sizes. The diagram was a duplicate in pure wizardry of the more concrete and “mechanical” gating circles and pads of the worldgating facility at the Crossings. Everyone knew the drill, at this point, and one after another, Filif and Sker’ret and Nita and Ronan went out into the diagram and stood in the middle of one of the subsidiary circles. With Ponch bouncing along behind him, Kit made his way out to an unoccupied circle and stood in it.

“Everybody ready?” Sker’ret said. “I’ll do the master transport routine—”

He began to recite a long phrase in the Speech, rattling it off with the assurance of someone who’d done it many times before. As Sker’ret spoke, and that familiar silence of a listening universe began to build around them all, Kit gazed back the way they’d come for a last look at the near-full Earth, the edge of its globe just touching the edge of Spring Lake Crater. A thought came unbidden: What if this is the last time you see that?

He shook his head. Silly idea. We’ve been in bad places before and made it home, even when we thought we wouldn’t.

But there’s something about this time that’s different, the back of his mind said to him. Everything’s changing. The things you thought you could always depend on aren’t dependable anymore. Maybe it’s smarter not to take anything for granted now.

Kit swallowed as the glow of the working worldgating wizardry rose all around them like a burning mist, beginning to obscure the view.

See you later, he said silently to the fading Earth… and hoped very much, as they all vanished, that he would.