Young Wizards 
New Millennium Edition
Book 6:

A Wizard Alone

Diane Duane

Errantry Press
County Wicklow
Republic of Ireland

Copyright page

A Wizard Alone
New Millennium Edition

Original edition copyright © 2002 by Diane Duane

New Millennium Edition copyright © 2012 by Diane Duane

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:

Donald Maass Literary Agency
Suite 801, 121 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
USA

Publication history

Harcourt Trade Publishers hardcover, 2002

Harcourt Trade Publishers / Magic Carpet Books mass-market paperback, 2003

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade Publishers ebook edition, 2010

Errantry Press International ebook edition, 2011

Errantry Press New Millennium ebook edition, 2013

Publisher’s note:

This 2013 Errantry Press New Millennium ebook edition is derived from the text of the 2011 Errantry Press International Edition ebook. It has been revised and augmented to bring it into line with the new timeline established in the New Millennium edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard and its subsequent volumes.

Dedication

For all the friends from Payne Whitney

and all the other voices newly heard

Time fix

January 2010

Rubrics

Life:
          more than just being alive (and worth the pain)
but hurts:
           fix it
grows:
          keep it growing
wants to stop: 
          remind check / don’t hurt
be sure!
         One’s watching: get it right!
later it all works out,
          honest
meantime, make it work now 
          (because now is all you ever get: 
          now is)

—The Wizard’s Oath, excerpt from a private recension

Footsteps in the snow 
suggest where you have been,
point where you were going: 
but where they suddenly vanish, 
never dismiss the possibility 
of flight….

—Book of Night with Moon, xi, v.3

Chapter 1: Consultations

In the living room of a suburban house on Long Island, a wizard sat with a TV remote control in his hand and an annoyed expression on his face. “Come on,” he said to the remote. “Don’t give me grief.”

The TV showed him a blue screen and nothing more.

Kit Rodriguez sighed. “All right,” he said, “we’re on the record now. You made me do this.” He reached for the wizard’s manual on the sofa next to him, paged through it to its hardware section—which had been getting thicker by the minute this afternoon—found one page in particular and scanned down it. Then he keyed into the remote a series of characters that the designers of both the remote and the TV would have found unusual.

The screen stayed mostly blue, but the nature of the white characters on it changed. Until now they had been words in the Roman alphabet. Now they changed to characters in a graceful and curly cursive, the written form of the wizardly Speech. At the top of the screen they showed the local time and the date expressed as a Julian day, that being the Earth-based system most closely akin to what the manual’s managers used to express time. In the middle of the blue screen appeared a single word:

WON’T.

Kit let out a long breath of exasperation. “Oh, come on,” he said in the Speech. “Why not?”

The screen remained blue, staring at him mulishly. Kit wondered what he’d done to deserve this. “It can’t be that bad,” he said. “You two even have the same version number.”

VERSIONS AREN’T EVERYTHING!

Kit rubbed his eyes.

“I thought a six-year-old child was supposed to be able to program one of these things,” said a voice from the next room.

“I sure feel like a six-year-old at the moment,” Kit muttered. “It would work out about the same.”

Kit’s father wandered in and stood there staring at the TV. Not being a wizard himself, he couldn’t make sense of the Speech displaying there, but he understood the meaning of the blue screen well enough from the way Kit was glaring at it. “So what’s the problem?”

“Looks like they hate each other.”

His father made a rueful face. “Software issues,” he said. He’d been a pressman for one of the bigger newspapers on the Island for most of his adult life, and having lived through the process of the company converting from hot lead to electronic and laser printing, he’d learned more than most people cared to know about the problems of converting from truly hard “hardware” to the computer kind.

“Software? Nope,” Kit said. “I wish it were that simple.”

“What is it, then?”

Kit shook his head. Once upon a time, not so long ago, getting mechanical things to see things his way had been Kit’s daily stock-in-trade. Now everything seemed to be getting more complex by the day. “Issues they’ve got, all right, They just don’t make sense to me yet.”

His father squeezed his shoulder. “Give it time, son,” he said. “You’re a brujo; nothing can withstand your power.”

“Nothing that’s not made of silicon, anyway,” Kit said.

His father rolled his eyes. “Tell me all about it,” he said, and went away.

Kit sat there staring at the blue screen, trying to sort through the different strategies he’d tried so far, determining which ones hadn’t worked, which ones had worked a little bit, and which ones had seemed to be working just fine until without warning they crashed and burned. The manual for the new remote indicated that the DVD player was supposed to look for channels on the TV’s native tuner and the TiVo box once they were plugged into each other, but the remote and the DVD player didn’t even want to acknowledge each other’s existence so far, let alone exchange information. Neither the DVD’s manual nor the remote’s was any help. The two pieces of equipment both came from the same company, they were both made in the same year, and (as far as Kit could tell) in the same place. But when he listened to them with a wizard’s ear, he heard them singing two different songs—in ferocious rivalry—and making rude noises at each other during the pauses, when they thought no one was listening.

“Come on, you guys,” he said in the Speech. “All I’m asking for here is a little cooperation—”

“No surrender!” shouted the remote.

“Death before dishonor!” shouted the DVD player.

Kit covered his eyes and let out a long, frustrated breath.

From the kitchen came a sudden silence, something that was as arresting to Kit as a sudden noise, and that made him look up in alarm. His mother had been cooking. Indeed, she was making her arroz con pollo, a dinner that visiting heads of state would consider themselves lucky to eat. When without warning it got quiet in the kitchen in the middle of that process, Kit reacted as he would have if he’d heard someone say, “Oops!” during the countdown toward a Space Shuttle launch: with held breath and intense attention.

“Honey?” Kit’s mom said.

“What, Mama?”

“The dog says he wants to know what’s the meaning of life.”

Kit rubbed his forehead, very much tempted to hide his eyes. “Give him a dog biscuit and tell him it’s an allegory,” Kit said.

“What, life?”

“No, the biscuit!”

“Oh, good. You had me worried there for a moment.”

Kit’s mother’s sense of humor tended toward the dry, and the dryness sounded like it was set at about medium at the moment, which was just as well. His mother was still in the process of getting used to his wizardry. Kit went back to trying to talk sense into the remote and the DVD player, but they were having none of it. The DVD player blued the TV’s screen out again, pointedly turning its attention elsewhere.

“Come on, just give each other a chance.”

“Talk to that thing? You must have a chip loose.”

“Like I would listen!”

“Hah! You’re a tool, nothing but a tool! I entertain!”

“Oh yeah? Let’s see how well you entertain when I turn you off like a light!”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Will you two shut up and listen to me for a moment? You can’t get hung up on the active-role-passive-role thing. They’re both just fine, and there’s more to life—”

“Like what?!”

Kit’s mama came drifting in and looked over Kit’s shoulder as he continued to speak passionately to the remote and the DVD player about the importance of cooperation and teamwork, the need not to feel diminished by acting, however briefly, as part of a whole. But the remote refused to do anything further, and the screen stayed blue. Kit started to think he must be turning that color in the face.

“It sounds like escargot,” his mother said, leaning her short, round self over him to look at the TV.

“What?”

“Sorry. Esperanto. I don’t know why the word for snails always comes out first.”

Kit looked at his mother with some interest. “You can hear it?” he said. It was moderately unusual for nonwizards to hear the Speech at all. When they did, they tended to hear it as the language they spoke themselves—but because the Speech contained and informed all languages, being the seed from which they grew, this was to be expected.

“I hear it a little,” his mother said. “Like someone talking in the next room. Which it was…”

“I wonder if the wizardry comes from your side of the family,” Kit said.

His mother’s broad and pretty face suddenly acquired a nervous quality. “Uh-oh, the chicken broth,” she said, and took herself back to the kitchen.

“What about Ponch?” Kit said.

“He ate the dog biscuit,” his mother said after a moment.

“And he didn’t ask you any more philosophical stuff?”

“He went out. Think he had a date with a biological function.”

Kit smirked, though he turned his face so she wouldn’t see it if she came back in. His mother’s work as a nurse expressed itself at home in two ways: either detailed and concrete descriptions of things you’d never thought about before and (afterward) desperately never wanted to think about again, or shy evasions regarding very basic physical operations that you’d think wouldn’t upset a six-year-old. Ponch’s business seemed mostly to elicit the second response in Kit’s mama, an effect that usually made Kit laugh.

At the moment he just felt too tired. Kit paused in his cheerleading and went rummaging through the paperwork on the floor for the DVD’s and remote’s manuals. We’re in trouble when even a remote control has its own manual, he thought. But if a wizard with a bent toward mechanical things couldn’t get this kind of very basic problem sorted out, then there really would be trouble.

He spent a few moments with the manuals, ignoring the catcalls and jeers that the recalcitrant pieces of equipment were trading. Then abruptly Kit realized, listening, that the DVD did have a slightly different accent than the remote and the TV. Now, I wonder, he thought, and went carefully through the DVD’s manual to see whether the manufacturer actually had made all the main parts itself.

The manual said nothing about this, being written in a slightly odd English that assumed the system was, indeed, being assembled by the proverbial six-year-old. Resigned, Kit picked up the remote again, which immediately began shouting abuse at him. At first he was relieved that this was inaudible to everybody else, but the DVD chose that moment to take control of the entertainment system’s speakers and start shouting back.

“Oooh, what a nasty mouth,” said his sister Carmela as she walked through the living room, wearing her usual uniform of floppy jeans and huge floppy T-shirt, and holding a wireless phone in her hand. She had been studying Japanese for some months, mostly via watching anime, and had now graduated to an actual language course—though what she chiefly seemed interested in were what their father wryly called “the scurrilities.” “Bakka aho kikai, bakka-bakka!”

Kit was inclined to agree. He spent an annoying couple of moments searching for the volume control on the DVD—the remote was too busy doing its own shouting to be of any use. Finally he got the DVD to shut up, then once again punched a series of characters into the remote to get a look at the details on the DVD’s core processor.

“Aha,” Kit said to himself. The processor wasn’t made by the company that owned the brand. He had a look at the same information for the remote. It also used the same processor, but it had been resold to the brand-name company by still another company.

“Now look at that!” Kit said. “You’ve got the same processors. You’re not really from different companies at all. You’re long-lost brothers. Isn’t that cool? And look at you, fighting over nothing! She’s right, you are idiots. Now I want you guys to handshake and make up.”

There was first a shocked silence, then some muttering and grumbling about unbearable insults and who owed whom an apology. “You both do,” Kit said. “You were really disrespectful to each other. Now get on with it, and then settle down to work. You’ll have a great time. The new cable package has a lot of new channels.”

Reluctantly, they did it. About ten minutes later the DVD began sorting through and classifying the channels it found on the TV. “Thank you, guys,” Kit said, taking a few moments to tidy up the paperwork scattered all over the floor, while thinking longingly of the oncoming generation of wireless electronics that would all communicate seamlessly and effortlessly with one another. “See, that wasn’t so bad. But someday all this will be so much simpler,” Kit said, patting the top of the DVD player.

“No, it won’t,” the remote control said darkly.

Kit rolled his eyes and decided to let the distant unborn future of electronics fend for itself. “You just behave,” he said to the remote, “or you’re gonna wind up in the Cuisinart.”

He walked out of the living room, ignoring the indignant shrieks of wounded ego from the remote. This had been only the latest episode in a series of almost constant excitements lately, which had begun when his dad broke down after years of resistance and decided to get a full-size entertainment center. It was going to be wonderful when everything was installed and everything worked. But in the meantime, Kit had become resigned to having a lot of learning experiences.

From the back door at the far side of the kitchen came a scratching noise: his dog letting the world know he wanted to come back in. The scratching stopped as the door opened. Kit turned to his pop, who had just come into the dining room again, and handed him the remote. “I think it’s fixed now,” he said. “Just do this from now on: instead of using this button to bring the system up, the one the manual tells you to, press this, and then this.” He showed his pop how to do it.

“Okay. But why?”

“They may not remember the little talking-to I just gave them—it depends on how the system resets when you turn it off. This should remind them … I hardwired it in.”

“What was the problem?”

“Something cultural.”

“Between the remote and the DVD player? But they’re both Japanese.”

“Looks like it’s more complicated than that.” There seemed to be no point in suggesting to his pop that the universal remote and the DVD were both unsatisfied with their active or passive modes. Apparently doing what you had been built to do was a prospect no more popular among machines than it was among living things. Everything had its own ideas about what it really should be doing in the world, and the more memory you installed in the hardware, the more ideas it got.

Kit realized how thirsty all this talking to machinery had made him. He went to the fridge and rummaged around to see if there was some of his mom’s iced tea in there. There wasn’t, only a can of the lemon soft drink that Nita particularly liked and that his mom kept for her.

The sight of it made Kit briefly uncomfortable. But neither wizardry nor friendship was exclusively about comfort. He took the lemon fizz out, popped the can’s top, and took a long swig. Neets? he said silently.

Yeah, she said in his mind.

There wasn’t much enthusiasm there, but there hadn’t been much enthusiasm in her about anything for some weeks. At least it wasn’t as bad for her now as it had been right after her mother’s funeral. But clearly Kit wondered whether the bitter pain she’d been in then was, in its way, healthier than her current gray, dull tone of mind, like an overcast that showed no signs of lifting. Then he immediately felt guilty for even being tempted to play psychiatrist. She had a right to grieve at whatever speed was right for her.

Busy today?

Not really.

Kit waited. Normally Nita would now come forth with at least some explanation of what “not really” involved. But she wasn’t anything like normal right now, and no explanation came—just that sense of weariness, the same tired why-bother feeling that kept rearing up at the back of Kit’s mind. Whether he was catching it directly from her via their private channels of communication, or whether it was something of his own, he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if he didn’t miss Nita’s mother, too.

I finished fixing the TV, Kit said, determined to keep the conversation going, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. Someone around here had to try to keep at least the appearance of normalcy going. Now I’m bored again, and I feel like getting out of here before something happens to break the mood. Wanna go to the moon?

There was a pause. No, Nita said. Thanks. I just don’t feel up to it today. And there it was, the sudden hot feeling of eyes filling with tears, without warning; and Nita frowning, clenching her eyes shut, rather helplessly, unable to stop it, determined to stop it. You go ahead. Thanks, though.

She turned away in thought, breaking off the silent communication between them. Kit found that he, too, was scowling against the pain, and he let out a long breath of aggravation at his own helplessness. Why is it so embarrassing to be sad? he thought, annoyed. And not just for me. Nita’s overwhelming pain embarrassed her as badly as it did him, so Kit had to be careful not to “notice” it. Yet there wasn’t anything he seemed able to do for her at the moment. He felt like an idiot—unable to think of anything useful to say, and just as idiotic when he was tempted to keep saying the same things over and over: “It’ll pass,” “You’ll come out of it eventually.” They all sounded heartless and stupid. And besides, how quick would I come out of it if it were my mama who died?

Kit let out a long breath. There was nothing to do but keep letting Nita know that he was there, one day at a time. So he’d taken care of today’s responsibility.

The phone rang, mercifully relieving Kit of his guilt for thinking that doing the right thing for his best friend was some kind of awful burden.

“Igotitlgotitlgotit!” Carmela shrieked from upstairs. “HolaMiguelque—” A pause. “Oh. Sorry. Kit!!”

“What?”

“Tomás El Jefe.”

“Oh.” Kit went to get the portable phone from its cradle in the kitchen. His mother, deep in the business of deboning a chicken, glanced at him as he passed and said nothing, but her smile had a little edge of ruefulness about it. She was still getting her head around the concept that a man she routinely saw at hospital fund-raisers, a successful writer for commercial television and a pillar of the community, was also one of two Senior wizards for the New York metropolitan area. Ponch, Kit’s big black Labrador-cum-Border-collie-cum-whatever, was now lying on the floor with his head down on his paws, carefully watching every move Kit’s mother made that had anything to do with the chicken. As Kit stepped over him, the dog spared him no more than an upward glance, then turned his attention straight back to the food.

Kit smiled slightly, picked up the phone and hit the “go” button. His sister was saying, “And so then I told him—Oh, finally! Kit, don’t hog the line; I’m expecting a call. Why can’t you two just do the magic telepathy thing like you do with Nita? It’d be cheaper!”

“Vamos,” Kit said, trying not to sound too severe.

“Bye, sweetie,” Tom Swale said on the other end.

“Bye-bye, Mr. Tom,” Carmela said, and hung up the upstairs phone.

Kit grinned. “‘Magic telepathy,’” he said. “Like she cares that much about the phone bill.”

Tom laughed. “Explaining the differences of communications between you and me and you and Nita might make more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Better let her get away with it just this once. Am I interrupting anything?”

“I just finished dealing with a hardware conflict,” Kit said. “Handled now, I think. What’s up?”

“I wouldn’t mind a consultation, if you have the time.”

He wants a consultation from me? That’s new. “Sure,” Kit said. “I’ll be right over.”

“Thanks.”

Kit hung up, and saw the look his mother was giving him. “When’s it going to be ready, Mama?” he said. “I won’t be late. Not too late, anyway.”

“About six. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little late… It’ll keep.” She gave him a warning look. “You’re not going anywhere sudden, are you?” This had become her code phrase for Kit leaving on wizardly business.

“Nope,” Kit said. “Tom just needs some advice, it looks like.”

His father wandered back into the kitchen. “The TV working okay now?” Kit said.

“Working?” his pop said. “Well, yeah. But possibly not the way the manufacturer intended.”

Kit looked at his pop, uncomprehending. His father went back into the living room. Kit followed.

Where the TV normally would have shown a channel number, the screen was now displaying the number 0000566478. The picture seemed to be of a piece of furniture that looked rather like a set of chrome parallel bars. From the bars hung a creature with quite a few tentacles and many stalky eyes, none of these in the usual places. The creature was talking fast and loud in a voice like a fire engine’s siren, while waving around a large, shiny object that might have been an eggbeater; except that, in Kit’s experience, eggbeaters didn’t usually have pulse lasers built into them. Characters flashed on the screen, both in the Speech and in other languages.

Kit stood and looked at this with complete astonishment. His father, next to him, was doing the same. “You didn’t hack into that new premium movie channel or something, did you?” his pop said. “I don’t want the cops in here.”

“No way,” Kit said, picking up the remote and looking at it accusingly. The remote sat there in his hand as undemonstratively as any genuinely inanimate object might … except that Kit was less certain than ever that there really were any such things as inanimate objects.

He shook the remote to see if anything rattled. Nothing did. “I told you to behave,” he said in the Speech.

“But not like what,” the remote said in a sanctimonious tone.

His father was still watching the creature on the parallel bars, which pointed the laser eggbeater at what looked like a nearby abstract sculpture. This vanished in a flare of actinic green light, leaving Kit uneasily wondering what kind of sculpture screamed. “Nice special effects,” Kit’s father said, though he sounded a little dubious. “Very realistic.”

“It’s not special effects, Pop,” Kit said. “It’s some other planet’s cable.” He hit the reveal control on the remote, but nothing was revealed except, at the bottom of the screen, many more strings of characters flashing on and off in various colors. “Shopping channel, looks like.” Kit handed the remote back to his father.

“This is a shopping channel?” his pop said.

Kit headed for the coat hooks by the kitchen door and pulled his parka off one of them. “Popi, I’ve got to get to Tom’s. Be back in a while. It’s okay to look at that, but if any phone numbers that you can read appear—do me a big favor? Don’t order anything!”

Kit opened the back door. Ponch threw one last longing look at what Kit’s mama was doing with the chicken, then threw himself past Kit, hitting the screen door with a bang! and flying out into the driveway.

Kit followed him. At the driveway’s end, he paused, looking up briefly. It was almost dark already; the bare branches of the maples were showing black against an indigo sky. January was too new for any lengthening of days to be perceptible yet, and the shortness of the daylight hours was depressing. But at least the holidays were over. Kit could hardly remember a year when he’d been less interested in them. For his own family’s sake, he’d done his best to act as if he was, but his heart hadn’t been in the celebrations, or the presents. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the one present Nita most desperately wanted, one that not even the Powers That Be could give her.

Kit sighed and looked down the street. Ponch was down there near curbside in the rapidly falling dark, saluting one of the neighbor’s trees. “Back this way, please?” he said, and waited until Ponch was finished and came galloping back up the street toward him.

Kit made his way into the backyard again, with Ponch bouncing along beside him, wagging his tail. “Where did the ‘meaning of life’ thing come from all of a sudden?” Kit said.

I heard you ask about it, Ponch said.

The question had, indeed, come up once or twice recently in the course of business, around the time Ponch started talking regularly. “So?” Kit said, as they made their way past the beat-up birdbath into the tangle of sassafras at the back of the yard, where they were out of sight of the houses on either side. “Come to any conclusions?”

Just that your mama’s easy to shake down for dog biscuits.

Kit grinned. “You didn’t need to start talking to her to find that out,” he said. He reached into his pocket, felt around for the “zipper” in it that facilitated access to the alternate space where he kept some of his spells ready, and pulled one out—a long chain of strung-together words in the Speech that glowed a very faint blue in the swiftly falling darkness. “I’d keep it in the family, though,” Kit said to Ponch. “Don’t start asking strangers complicated philosophical questions … It’ll confuse them.”

It may be too late, Ponch said.

Kit wondered what that was supposed to mean, then shrugged. He dropped the spell-chain to the ground around them in a circle. The transit wizardry knotted itself together at the ends in the figure-eight wizard’s knot, and from it a brief shimmering curtain of light went up and blanked the night away as displaced air went thump! and Kit’s ears popped. A moment later he and Ponch were standing together in Tom’s backyard, behind the high privet hedge blocking the view from Tom’s neighbors’ houses. Across the patio, lights were on in the house, and banging noises were coming from the kitchen.

Kit and Ponch made their way past the stucco koi pond toward the sliding porch doors, Ponch shaking his head emphatically. “Are your ears bothering you?” Kit said, as the sound of barking came from further inside the house.

Only lately, Ponch said.

“Sorry. I’ll have a look at the spell later.” Kit pushed the patio door to one side and went into Tom’s dining room. That space flowed into the living room area, where Tom’s desk sat in a corner, past the sofas and the entertainment center. But at the moment all the action was in the kitchen, off to the left, where big, dark-haired Carl, Tom’s fellow Advisory wizard, was doing something to the strip lighting that ran below the upper kitchen cupboards. Tom was leaning against the refrigerator, holding a cup of coffee, with the expression of a man who wants nothing to do with whatever’s happening.

“Hi, Kit,” he said, as Ponch ran through the kitchen and out the other side, heading toward the bedrooms, where the sheepdogs Annie and Monty were barking at something. “Something to drink? Just got some orange smoothies in…”

“Yeah, thanks.” Kit sat down at the table and watched Carl, who was bent over sideways under the upper cupboards and making faces.

“I told him to call an expert,” Tom said as he fished a carton of pre-mixed smoothie out of the fridge and a glass out of a cupboard by the sink, and having poured it full sat down with Kit at the dining room table, where a number of volumes of the Senior version of the wizard’s manual were piled up.

“We’re expert enough to change the laws of physics temporarily,” Carl muttered. “How hard can wiring be?”

With a clunk! all the lights in the house went out.

Carl moaned. Kit could just see Tom make a flicking motion with one finger at the circuit-breaker box near the kitchen door, and the lights came back on again. “You should stick to physics,” Tom said.

“Just one more time,” Carl said, and went down the stairs to the basement.

“This will be the sixth ‘one more time’ in the past two hours,” Tom said. “I’m hoping he’ll see sense before he blows up the transformer at the end of the street. Or maybe the local power station.”

“I heard that!” said the voice from the basement.

Kit snickered, but not too loudly.

“Anyway,” Tom said, “thanks for coming over. Briefly, one of our wizards is missing, and I’d like you to look into it.”

This was a new one on Kit. “Missing? Anybody I know?”

“Hard for me to tell. Here’s the listing.” Tom pulled down the topmost manual and opened it; the pages riffled themselves to a spot he had bookmarked. It was a page in the master wizards’ address listing for the New York area, and one block of information glowed a soft rose. Kit leaned over to look at it. In the Speech, it said:

McALLISTER, Darryl 
18355 Hempstead Turnpike 
Baldwin, NY 11568 
(516) 555-7384 
power rating: 5.6 +/- .3 
status: on Ordeal 
initiation: 2455116.9625 
completion: 
duration to present date: 90.3 
resolution: nil

Kit stared at the duration figure for a moment: there was something wrong with it. “That doesn’t look right,” he said at last. “Did a decimal point get misplaced or something? That looks like months.”

“It is months,” Tom said. “Just a whisker over three, which is why it came up for attention today. The manual normally flags such extended Ordeals to be audited by a Senior.”

“I thought nobody was allowed to interfere with a wizard’s Ordeal,” Kit said. “It’s what determines whether you ought to be a wizard in the first place. Whether you can run into the Lone Power and survive…”

“Normally that’s true,” Tom said. “But Ordeals aren’t always so clear-cut; they do sometimes go wrong. A resolution can get delayed somehow, or there can be local interference that keeps the resolution from happening. An area’s Seniors are allowed a certain amount of information about Ordeals among probationary wizards who’d be in their catchment area if things went right, especially if something goes wrong in a specific sort of way—a stuck Ordeal, or a contaminated one. We have some latitude to step in and try to kick that Ordeal back into operation again. While interfering as little as possible.”

Kit nodded, glancing to one side as Carl came up from the basement with a very large roll of duct tape. “Ah,” Tom said. “The substance that binds the universe together.”

“We’ll see,” Carl said, and bent himself over sideways again.

“It’s a brute force solution,” Tom said. “Inelegant. The phone’s right there!”

Carl ignored him and started doing something with the duct tape.

“So now we come to this kid,” Tom said, indicating the highlighted listing again.

Clunk! went the circuit breaker, and the house went dark again; only the text on the page in front of them continued to glow, while in the back bedroom the dogs paused, then went on barking. Tom gestured once more at the breaker box, and the lights came on. “It’s not like he’s been physically absent from the area for all this time, as far as I can tell,” Tom said. “If he were, certainly there’d have been something about it in the news; there’s been nothing. But at the same time, this isn’t a normal duration for a human Ordeal. We need to find out what’s going on, but quietly. Do you or Nita know him well enough to look in on him and see what’s happening? Or do you know anyone who does?”

Kit shook his head. “I can check with Neets, but she’s sure never mentioned him to me,” Kit said. “Why bring me in on this, though? You’re a Senior; you’d probably be able to tell a lot better than I can what’s going on with him.”

“Well,” Tom said, “let’s put it this way. How come you chose to do a direct transit here rather than just walk over and knock on the front door?”

Kit was briefly surprised that Tom would bother asking so obvious a question. “It’s not exactly like you’ve got any kids of your own,” he said. “And if the neighbors keep seeing kids wandering in and out of here every five minutes—”

“Say no more,” Tom said. “We’re on the same wavelength. It’s just another facet of the way wizards have to behave in our culture. Attracting attention to yourself is usually unwise. In this particular situation, if people start noticing you in the neighborhood around the object of our mutual interest, they won’t think too much about it—it’s not far enough from your own stamping grounds to provoke suspicion. Whereas if Carl or I went to investigate personally, notice might be taken. This kind of initial fact-finding is better suited to a wizard of your age.”

“Besides,” Carl said, peering up at the bottom of the cupboard, “lately you’ve been evincing a certain talent for finding things.”

“Well, Ponch has,” Kit said.

“I’m not sure he’d be producing these results without you as part of the team,” Carl said, as he applied duct tape liberally to the cupboard’s underside. “Let’s not get overly tangled up in details at the moment.”

“From a man in your position, that has a hollow ring,” Tom said.

“Sure, go ahead, mock me in my torment.”

“Anyway, are you willing?” Tom said. “To go over there during the next couple of days? See what the kid’s doing, physically, talk to him if you can, try to get a sense of what his state of mind is.”

“Sure,” Kit said. “Am I allowed to tell him I’m a wizard, if he asks?”

“I’ll leave that up to you,” Tom said. “Normally I would suggest you try to avoid it if possible. You don’t want to take the chance of altering his perception of his Ordeal, maybe even making him think you’re supposed to be involved in it somehow. But if you can come by any sense of why his Ordeal’s taking him so long, I’d be glad to hear it.”

Carl straightened up. “Okay,” he said. The strip lights under the cupboards were now actually on. He looked at the light they cast on the counter with some satisfaction. “At least now I’m going to be able to see what I’m cooking without getting blinded.” He went over to the wall, turned the dimmer switch.

Clunk!

“I could stop by the supermarket on the way home and get you some candles,” Kit said as he got up. “Fire still works.”

“Very funny,” Carl said. “I hope that someday, when duct tape is sticking to your gray hairs—”

“Kit,” Tom said, “ignore the whimpering from the sidelines for the moment… You just be careful not to get sucked in, all right? This youngster may seem very, very stuck when you meet him, and you’ve got to resist the temptation to give him help he doesn’t need. You could end up endangering yourself, not to mention altering the focus of his Ordeal… which could make him fail it. Or worse.”

“I’ll watch out.”

“Okay. Go see what you can find out. You may want to leave your manual on record when you’re talking to him; it may pick up some nuance that you miss at first.” He paused. “Listen to that,” he said.

Kit listened, puzzled. “I don’t hear anything.”

“What the master of sarcasm over there means is that the dogs have stopped barking,” Carl said. “They’ve been having some kind of metaphysical discussion for days now. And they’re loud about it.”

“Have they been asking you about the meaning of life?” Kit said.

Both Tom and Carl gave Kit a look. “Uh, yes,” Tom said.

Kit covered his face. “It’s my fault,” he said. “A new kind of blackmail, and I know where they got it. They probably want dog biscuits.”

“New tactic,” Tom said wearily, getting up. “Old problem. I’ll bear it in mind.”

Ponch came lolloping back into the dining room. Kit got up, too. “I’ll get in touch as soon as I find anything out,” Kit said, opening the patio door to let Ponch out.

“Thanks, fella,” Tom said. “Dai stihó.”

“Yeah, you go well, too. Well enough not to electrocute somebody, anyway!”

***

Kit and Ponch headed back the way they’d come, Kit pausing briefly in Tom’s backyard with the spell-chain in his hands to adjust the variable that determined how much and how fast the air displaced around their transiting mass when they “came out of nowhere.” Ponch was bouncing up and down around him, making it difficult for Kit to remember where in the structure of the spell the variable actually was. “Would you sit down?” he said under his breath to Ponch, while passing the softly glowing chain of words through his hands until the little barbed bit sticking out from the variable scratched his skin. Kit held the word up in front of his eyes, squinting at it like someone threading a needle, and managed to catch the delicate outward-hooked tail of the spell character between finger and thumb.

Chicken! Ponch was shouting in his head. Hurry up! It’s chicken!

“And philosophy goes right out the window, huh?” Kit said as he twiddled the mass-displacement variable; it shaded down from a bright blue to a darker one. “You’re a bad influence on those guys, you know that?”

Me? Never. Chicken!

“Right,” Kit said, folding the variable’s tail back in and shaking the spell through a quick sine wave to unkink it. It fell smoothly to the ground and knotted itself. “Now sit down or you’re gonna wind up in two different places, and not in one piece!”

Ponch sat down but still managed to bounce a little. The spell flared up, its blue a little darker this time. A second later they were standing in Kit’s backyard again, without the ear-popping effect this time, and the light faded out of the spell.

“Better?” Kit said, winding the spell-chain up and sticking it back in his “pocket.”

It’s fine. I’m hungry! Ponch shouted, and ran for the house.

Kit breathed out, feeling hungry, too, and tired. This, at least, had nothing to do with the emotional climate. No wizardry is without its price, and this was the normal reaction to a transit wizardry: a small but significant deduction from Kit’s personal energy supply. It was one of the reasons why, as they got older, a lot of wizards spent as much time as they could making sure they were in decent physical shape.

Kit went after Ponch and was surprised not to see his mama and pop eating in the kitchen, as they usually did. He wandered into the living room and found them there on the sofa. Kit’s pop was finishing the last of what must have been a second helping of arroz con pollo, watching the TV screen, while Kit’s mama sat next to him, cross-legged, punching the scan button on the remote and looking at the TV with an expression of extreme bemusement.

His father looked up. “Five billion channels and nothing on,” he said in a kind of horrified astonishment.

“Life in the real world,” Kit said, resigned, and headed to the kitchen to get himself a plate. “Believe me, just because a species is more scientifically advanced than us doesn’t mean its TV’s any better.”

His father absorbed this assessment with a thoughtful look. “Maybe I should find that reassuring. I’ll let you know. What did Tom have to say?”

“It’s complicated,” Kit said. “A missing persons case.”

“And are you likely to go missing?” his pop said.

“Not right away,” Kit said. “I have to do some detective work here first.”

“Oh, my god,” Kit’s mama said, “what are they doing?”

Anything that could so seriously gross out Kit’s mama, the nurse, was worth a look. Kit grabbed a plate and ducked back into the living room, looked at the writhing, thrashing, stridently colored image for a moment, then took the remote away from his mama and punched it for subtitles. “Oh, okay, thought so,” he said, reading them. “It’s a soap.”

“Not of any brand I recognize,” his mother said. She looked scandalized.

“It’s real basic, Mama,” Kit said. “Boy meets girl meets thing meets other thing. Boy loses girl loses other thing finds thing. Boy loses thing gets girl loses thing. Then thing gets thing. Happily ever after…” He tossed the remote back to his mother.

She fielded it badly as she studied the screen for any signs of boys or girls, and looked like she was having trouble finding any, though there were plenty of “things.” “Basic, you said?”

“Old, old story, Mama. You should see some of these guys’ literature. Shakespeare’d have loved it.” Kit considered that briefly: his lit class had been doing the late Shakespeare comedies, and suddenly a whole set of opportunities opened out before him. “Just imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream with ten or twelve extra genders…”

His mother raised her eyebrows, gave up on the soap, and started changing channels again. “Doesn’t this thing have an online channel guide?” she said.

“I’ll have a look at it later and let you know,” Kit said.

He saw the look she threw at his pop. “Are there cooking channels?”

“Oh, yeah.” Then Kit paused, having a horrible thought. “On second thought, it might be smarter to avoid those. Some of them feature humans. Well, humanoids, anyway. But not as the cooks.”

The look on his mother’s face made Kit wish he’d kept quiet. She began changing channels with unusual speed. Kit raised his eyebrows and went back into the kitchen with the plate.

He was spooning out rice when his dad came back in and began rooting around in the silverware drawer in an aimless way that didn’t fool Kit for a moment. “Son,” he said, very quietly, “is there really a cooking channel, uh, ‘about’ us?”

“Pop, there’s lots of them.”

His father looked shocked. “How is something like that permitted?!”

Kit shrugged. “It’s not about ‘permitted.’ It’s the way things are, some places. And if you go those places without precautions, you find out stuff you shouldn’t find out.” Kit couldn’t help grinning. “Like how you taste in a sweet-and-sour sauce with galingale. The universe is full of little surprises.”

“I always have the feeling that there’s a lot about this wizardry you’re not telling me,” his father said. “Sometimes it worries me. Then come times like this when I’m horribly glad about my ignorance. Just don’t go places where you shouldn’t go, okay?”

“I try to avoid it,” Kit said. “Is it okay with you if I go to Baldwin in the next couple of days, though?”

His pop looked surprised. “Baldwin? No problem with that.”

“Thanks.”

Kit brought his plate into the living room, where he sat down on the floor and watched his mother change channels one more time. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, sounding relieved.

Kit glanced up at the screen, chewing. “Uh, Mama,” he said, “I’m probably too young to be watching anything that explicit.”

Her eyes widened. “But, honey, it’s just a big cloud of gas, or smoke, or…” She stopped, her eyes widening even more, then changed the channel six times in a row without stopping.

Kit grinned and turned his attention back to the chicken.

Chapter 2: Investigations

Circuses—even just the thought of them—had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she’d felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children—all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns.

Yet it hadn’t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn’t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer… nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light—all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she’d begged her parents to take her home. Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.

That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent support couldn’t do anything about the nightmares that followed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.

Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she’d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita’s mind that makeup could make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, too cartoony: that really bothered her. So did the baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. And the slapstick jokes, endlessly repeated but supposedly amusing because of the repetition—all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.

It was doing so again, right now. Because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act—the clown riding around and around on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever-decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can’t make it stop! I can’t make it stop! And, just this once, the clown didn’t think it was funny, either.

The drumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building, came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.

The drumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more. “Stop it,” Nita yelled. “Stop it! Can’t you see it’s hurting him?”

“Not nearly enough,” growled the tiger. “Never enough.”

The crowd roared louder. “Stop it!” Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too. “Stop it!”

“STOP!”

***

She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.

Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn’t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn’t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn’t anyone in the house who’d been sleeping well for a while now.

She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she’d really thought about it. Dairine, when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn’t take a wizard to figure out that he’d been afraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again, not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. The reasons were the same, and just thinking of them made Nita want to start crying all over again.

She lay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream. It’s just me, she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been, Since Mom— And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita’s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing: “Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.”

Like I have a choice, Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others’ pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one’s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.

But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she’d lie there and wait for dawn.

Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut. It’s just my pain in disguise, she thought. Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality.

I wish this was over with. I wish life was normal again… But she knew that the old kind of normal was never going to come back. Somehow she was just going to have to make a new one.

Nita turned over to try to go back to sleep, but it took a long while: From the shadows of dream, those eyes kept watching her….

***

The next day was Tuesday. Kit went through his early classes more or less mechanically, for Tom’s “lost wizard” was on his mind. Tracking him down and identifying him wouldn’t be a problem—the manual would be able to localize him and point him out when Kit was close enough. But what then? he thought as the bell rang for fourth period. He picked up his backpack and walked out of his math class on his way to history. Do I just walk up to him, say, “Hi, there. I’m on errantry and I greet you. What’s the problem?” Is it better to just take a good look at him from a distance, maybe?

“Hey, KF, don’t say hi or anything!”

Kit glanced around and found Raoul Eschemeling walking along next to him. Or rather, he glanced over and then up, because Raoul went up a good ways. He was a skinny, pale blond guy, tall enough to be a basketball player—the kind of person for whom the word gangly originally could have been coined. Friendly and gregarious, Raoul was constantly inventing bizarre nicknames for the other kids in the advanced history class, a motley crew of crazies of various ages, all fasttracked together into a single advanced unit. “KF” was short for “kit fox,” and this nickname had stuck longer than any of the others Raoul had hung on Kit at one point or another.

“Hey, Pirate,” Kit said. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.”

“Saw that. You almost walked into a locker there. You ready for Machiavelli’s quiz?”

“Oh, god, no,” Kit said as they turned the corner and headed down the corridor toward their classroom. “Machiavelli” was Mr. Mack, their history teacher, and, in his case at least, the nickname was justifiable: he had a twisty, calculating mind that made learning history from him a pleasure. “I forgot. Well, I did the reading. Maybe I’ll survive.”

Raoul looked at him closely. “You got stuff on your mind?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“She doing okay? I haven’t seen her around a lot lately.”

“Huh? Oh, Nita.” They went into the classroom together and took seats near the back wall. There was no assigned seating in Mack’s class, which meant there was always a rush for the rearmost seats, everybody’s desperate attempt to be somewhere that would make Machiavelli less likely to call on them… not that sitting in the back ever seemed to work. “She’s okay, pretty much.” Kit paused, watching the room fill up hurriedly—no surprise, since Mack made the lives of latecomers a question-filled hell. “I mean, as okay as she can be under the circumstances.”

Raoul looked at Kit with interest. “So if you weren’t going all vague about her just now, then what’s on your mind?”

“Oh, just home stuff…”

The bell rang. Saved! Kit thought. With the bell came Machiavelli, moving fast, as always, five feet tall and balding, in a blue suit and wearing a red tie ornamented with the images of many tiny yellow rubber duckies. The suit never changed, but the tie changed every day, and in the few seconds of fascination it produced, Mr. Mack would always pick the unfortunate student who looked most off guard and start peppering him or her with questions. “Rodriguez,” he said, and Kit’s heart sank. “You ready for our little quiz today?”

Wizards do not lie; too much depends on the words they use seriously for them to play fast and loose with the less serious ones. “I don’t know, Mr. M., but I think I’m about to find out.”

Machiavelli grinned at him. Kit restrained the urge to groan out loud, and once again wished it wasn’t unethical for a wizard to use his powers to read the closed textbook in his backpack. All he could do now was pray for the bloodshed to be over with quickly.

Forty-five minutes later, Kit and the rest of the class walked out, mostly looking like they had been run over repeatedly by the same steamroller. “Remind me never to go to sub-Saharan Africa in the eighteen hundreds,” Raoul muttered. “After today, just seeing it would make me come down with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Kit theoretically could have gone to that time and place if he wanted to and was willing to pay the price, but right now he felt about the same as Raoul did. “Still, it could have been worse. At least we passed.”

“Yeah. Not sure I have any appetite left for lunch … I guess we can go look, though.”

Kit grinned, privately thinking that it would take a nuclear war to ruin Raoul’s appetite. “Let me know how it was. I have to go home for lunch.”

“God, I wish I lived as close to school as you do,” Raoul said. “When I think of all the cafeteria food I wouldn’t have to eat…!”

“Go on, Pirate,” Kit said. “Suffer a little. I’ll see you later.”

He made his way back to his locker, chucked his backpack into it, locked it up again, and headed out the school’s back door, jogging across the parking lot, through the gate, and around the corner onto Conlon Road.

Ponch was bouncing around in the backyard, jumping almost to the top of the chain-link fence, as Kit came down the driveway. “Okay, okay, give me a minute,” Kit said. He pulled the screen door open and poked the lock with one finger. “Hey, Chubbo…”

The lock obligingly threw its bolt back for him. Kit patted the lock, opened the door, loped into the kitchen, very hastily threw together a ham sandwich on rye with some mustard, and ate it. For his mother, who was still asleep because she had been working night shifts at the hospital over the past week, he left a note scribbled on the pad on the refrigerator: “I had lunch. See you later.” He thought of adding the code phrase “Out on business now” to let his mama know that there was wizardry work afoot, but then he changed his mind. He’d have no more than his lunch period minus the time to eat the sandwich before he would have to be back at school again, anyway.

Kit cleaned up the crumbs from his sandwich and went out, pulling the door softly closed behind him so as not to wake his mama. “See you, big guy,” Kit said to the lock. “Keep her safe.”

I’m on it!

He went around the back, opened the gate softly, and closed it again, grabbing Ponch by the collar and roughing him up a little by way of saying hello. “And you weren’t even barking,” Kit said. “Good for you.”

She’s asleep, Ponch said. I don’t want her to yell at me.

“Neither do I. Good for you for thinking of it.”

Are we going out?! Ponch began chasing his tail in delight.

“Just for a quick look at our guy. I want to see if he’s okay before I come barging in on him. We’re going to have to be stealthy, though.”

Ponch finished his running around and sat down, his tail sweeping the sparse grass while Kit reached into his “pocket” and came out with the long chain of his transit spell, and another spell, more complex, that he had prepared earlier. There were several different ways for wizards to be invisible, and this one was probably the most comprehensive of them: even if someone bumped up against Kit, the person would feel nothing, and the spell would incline him to think he’d just stumbled somehow. Building this spell had required half an hour’s careful reading from the manual at a time of morning when Kit would rather still have been in bed, followed by fifteen or twenty minutes on his back, as exhausted as if he’d run around the school track about ten times. But now, as he shook the cloaking spell out onto the air in a cloudy web of woven Speech, he had to admire his handiwork. The basic spellweb would last a good while, as long as he remembered to recharge it at intervals.

“Okay,” he said to Ponch. “You ready?”

Yeahyeahyeahyeah!

“Good. Stay close to me. This thing’s only got about a six-foot radius.” He draped the invisibility spell over his shoulder for a moment, stuck the chain of the transit spell into the belt of his parka, and reached down into the “pocket” for his wizard’s manual.

“Now then,” Kit said. He flipped the manual open, and pages riffled to the spot he’d bookmarked. He ran a finger down the listing of functions on that page. “Location and detection… cross-reference to personnel listings… Right.” The locator spell blocked out on the page rearranged itself to include Darryl’s listing, and the listing itself pulsed to indicate that it was “in circuit” with the rest of the spell and ready to go.

“This is a temporal-spatial locator routine with sync to an existing transit nexus now balanced for two,” Kit said in the Speech. “Purpose: Locate and identify the wizard in the listing. Additional info: Linkage to stealth routine referenced on page…” He stopped and had to check his other bookmark, on the cloaking spell’s page, because the manual’s pagination was constantly changing, depending on Kit’s needs (and sometimes its own). “Three-eighty-nine. Ready?”

The whole spell pulsed bright on the page as he turned back to it. Slowly Kit started reading, making sure of his pronunciation, and that his and Ponch’s names were correctly entered. The usual waiting silence—of the universe leaning in around them to hear the Speech spoken, and implement it—now started to build. Ponch sat there with his big eyes glinting and his tail thumping as the power of the spell built all around them. Kit felt a brief pang because of the absence of the other voice that usually would have been there, reading her half of the work, but there was no time for the feeling right now. Kit finished the spell, snapped the manual shut, and in the moment before the spell worked, flipped the cloaking routine over himself and Ponch.

The power washed up over and around them, blotting out the backyard. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing in a parking lot two towns away, looking at another school building.

It was considerably smaller than Kit’s junior high, though this place shared the same kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keeping Ponch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.

Kit wasn’t overly concerned—even if anyone had been there, they wouldn’t have been able to see him and Ponch. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.

Two hundred meters, Kit thought, could definitely include at least part of the school building. He walked toward it, looking for any sign of the characteristic aura that would surround the object of his search once he got within visual range. Beside him, Ponch paced along, looking at everything, his nose working.

From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up. Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn’t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, found himself looking at office space, not classrooms. “Okay,” he said, “so we’ll go in. Don’t start barking at anything, whatever you do!”

Please, Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn’t have been quite so focused during a wizardry, but lately, since Ponch had started actively finding things—like other universes—this had changed.

They went up to the doors together. These were all closed—no surprise, in this weather—and Kit was unwilling just to pull one of them open: someone might be watching. Never mind. We can just walk through the glass, he thought. But then, through the glass of the door, Kit saw the van driver coming back toward them. “Okay,” Kit said softly to Ponch, “he can let us in. Just step back and don’t let him bump into you. We’ll slip past before the door closes behind him.”

Fine.

The van driver, a small, slender man in a big parka, pushed the door open right in front of Kit’s nose, and then reached up to the closing mechanism to pull down the little toggle that would hold the door open. Convenient, Kit thought, and slipped through the door with Ponch close behind him.

In the main tile-and-terrazzo corridor of the school, a number of people were moving around; some of them were coming toward the doors—some students, Kit thought, heading for the van with a few teachers. Field trip? he wondered. Then Kit paused, for the locator spell said in his head, Proximity alert—subject of search within fifty meters. Forty meters—

That’s them, Kit thought. “Ponch, come on,” Kit whispered. “Over here—” Together they moved off to one side of the hallway as the group approached. Kit started examining them for signs of that faint, glowing halo.

There were five kids in the group. Three of them were girls of different ages, one quite short and round, the other two taller and thinner; they went by Kit in silence, not speaking to each other, though one of them was smiling a placid smile. Two teachers followed close behind, then came the two boys and a third teacher.

One was a thin, small, blond guy, who went past with a very uneven gait. But Kit’s attention was on the boy behind him. Visible only to Kit and Ponch, the locator halo clung to him. He was perhaps eleven years old, an African American kid with a handsome, sharp little face. He was slender, and was dressed in jeans and a bright T-shirt and beat-up sneakers. Handsome his face was, but also very still, almost immobile right now, and somehow tight, as if held under harsh control. His eyes seemed to be fixed on the van, and he went past Kit fast with his body leaned forward, breaking almost into a run as he headed through the doors out into the cold, gray day.

Kit turned and followed him back outside. The teachers helped the other kids into the van: Darryl was the last one in. One of the teachers was helping him with his seat belt. This took some moments. And while the teachers were sitting down, while the van driver came back to let the school door close again, Darryl began, very slowly and steadily, to bang his head against the window of the van.

Kit’s heart seized. Next to him, Ponch stood looking. The driver started up the van, and slowly drove away.

That was him, Ponch said.

“That was him,” Kit said softly. But what’s the matter with him? Though he thought perhaps he had a clue. The manual would be able to confirm it … now that Kit knew what kinds of questions he needed to ask.

“Did you get a scent on him?” Kit said.

Yes. I can find him again, wherever he goes. Even when he’s not here, like a few moments ago, Ponch added.

Kit gave his dog a look. “What? He was right in front of us.”

Some of him. Not all.

Ponch wasn’t given to making cryptic statements without reason: he was still developing the language skills to tell Kit what he was perceiving, and there were sometimes misunderstandings as a result. “Okay,” Kit said. “We’ll figure out what that means later. For the moment, at least we know what he looks like … and we can start making a plan to find a way to talk to him.”

If he can talk at all…

He glanced at the timekeeper inside the front cover of the manual. “Come on,” Kit said. “I have to get back to school.”

And you have to feed me.

Normally Kit would have laughed at this, yet another of Ponch’s stratagems to get an extra meal. But the laughter had been knocked out of him by the unexpectedness of what he’d just seen. Since when do the Powers That Be dump an autistic kid into an Ordeal?

“Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. They went home.

***

After school Kit went straight to Tom and Carl’s, the discreet way, to tell him what he’d found.

“Physically, he’s present all right… mostly,” Kit said, sitting at the table with Tom again. “Or so Ponch says. I’m still working on what he meant by that conditional description he gave me. But why didn’t the manual say anything about what else is going on with him?”

“Any number of reasons. Need-to-know restrictions, possibly,” Tom said. “Or it may not have been germane—wizardry’s hardly limited to the neurotypical. Or it may simply be the manual’s preference for letting you find some things out for yourself, rather than just telling you about it. That approach can keep you from prejudging a situation.” He paged through his own manual to Darryl’s entry. “Certainly it confirms that he definitely is an autistic: diagnosed after he was four, the manual says. But his ability to cope with his environment really seems to have gone downhill over the last six months or so, as if something in his life’s gotten a lot harder to deal with.”

“And his Ordeal hasn’t had anything to do with that? It’s been going on for three months…”

“I don’t think there’s any way for us to know for sure. For all I know, it could be the other way around.” Kit wasn’t sure what to make of that. “But because the manual doesn’t say anything further, it suggests that the Powers That Be don’t think we need any more detail on that particular facet of the situation. Or else They think that what you discover during investigation may be more valuable than what They already know.”

“It doesn’t seem fair somehow,” Kit said after a moment, trying to find words for what was making him so uncomfortable. “Why’s he been stuck in the middle of an Ordeal, on top of everything else that’s going on with him?”

Tom shook his head. “If he’s been offered wizardry, that means that there’s some problem to which he is the solution… so fairness doesn’t come into it. In whatever form was right for him, the Wizard’s Oath found its way to him, and he understood and accepted it. Our only business now is to find out how we can assist… without interfering with the basic challenge.”

Kit nodded. “It makes you wonder, though,” he said. “Is he going to be able to get through this all right?”

Tom sighed. “Kit, not all Ordeals are world-shaking events; at least, as seen from outside. Whatever struggle he’s caught up in, by definition he’ll have at least a fighting chance at winning through it; and it’ll be proportionate to his gifts… which may not seem obvious at first glance. Yours certainly weren’t.”

Kit made a face. “And if he seems unlikely as a candidate, well… think how often, because of our own preconceptions, we miss the obvious and it takes the people we assumed were unlikely to be of any help to get us back on the rails, or show us something we completely missed. ‘The stone rejected by the builder becomes the cornerstone.’” Tom got a wry look then. “Which happens way too often to be accidental. Is the universe trying to tell us something important about the way it works, I wonder? That sometimes even what we call fate has an element of unpredictability?”

Kit nodded. “Or maybe the One’s just saying, ‘Don’t be so sure you know it all.’”

Tom stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Could be…” And he smiled. “See that? Being a wizard makes philosophers out of most of us eventually. As long as that’s not all it makes of you, you’re okay. Anyway, now you have to plan how to approach Darryl.” Tom chewed one lip briefly. “You may have to go to his home, secretly. But maybe you’d have better luck at his school.”

“I’m not wild about sneaking around in his house,” Kit said. “School, yeah. I’d thought about that, too. But there are still too many ways to be noticed. I was considering another option.”

“Oh?”

“Ponch has been able to treat someone’s interior landscape like an exterior universe before,” Kit said. “He can go into Darryl’s head and take me with him … and maybe Darryl will find it easier to talk to me that way.”

Tom brooded over that for a moment. “My initial reaction,” he said, “would be to say no. We’re uncertain enough about how the heck Ponch does what he does. Add that set of imponderables to whatever’s going on inside Darryl’s head…” He shook his head. “It starts getting uncomfortably complex.”

“We’re wizards,” Kit said. “We’re supposed to learn how to get comfortable with the uncomfortably complex.”

Tom gave Kit a look that would have seemed annoyed if there hadn’t been a resigned quality to it as well. “In theory,” he said, “of course, you’re right. But turning theory into practice without taking due care and attention can screw things up big-time.”

Kit sat quietly, knowing better than to argue his case too hard with a Senior: that was a sure way to make it seem like he had some kind of ulterior motive.

Tom looked off into the middle distance, pondering. “Yet here’s this atypically prolonged Ordeal,” he said, “and we can’t just let the kid go on suffering unnecessarily for the sake of caution and correctness. Some more information gathering, at least, seems prudent. But I want you to be very, very cautious, and watch yourself at least as carefully as you’re watching him. Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity’s subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it. This Ordeal, where the candidate is an autistic—” He shook his head. “He’ll very likely have unique coping mechanisms in place that it might not be easy to recognize as such, at first glance. I have to be concerned about the possibility of disturbing those, or adding to whatever trauma he may already be suffering secondary to the Ordeal.” Tom rubbed his eyes. “I really hate this kind of judgment call. It’s tough to know whether anything you do might be dangerous.”

“If you don’t judge, though,” Kit said, “or at least decide to do something, nothing gets done!”

Tom sat still and looked out the window, where a cold wind was rattling some brown, unfallen beech leaves in the hedge beside his house. “There you’re right,” he said. “Not that that makes me any happier. But judgment calls are one of the other things we’re here for: the One has better things to do than micromanage us.”

He looked back at Kit. “So go do what you can,” Tom said. “Let me know how it comes out. But I want to really emphasize that you need to stay in the observer’s role. An Ordeal this prolonged is strange enough to get extremely dangerous, especially if you stray out of your appropriate role.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Tom’s expression got slightly less severe. “I’ve heard that one before,” he said. “From myself, among many others. But, particularly, I want you to watch yourself when you’re inside his head. Talking to Darryl is a good idea… but getting too synced to his worldview may make that more difficult, not less. Especially since when you’re inside someone else’s head and using wizardry, no matter how careful you are, there’s always the danger of rewriting his name in the Speech. Do that in such a way that Darryl buys into the rewrite, and you take the risk of excising something that makes the difference between him passing his Ordeal and him never coming out of it. Walk real softly, Kit.”

“We will.”

***

Kit left Tom’s by way of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He located a few useful-looking books and checked them out, then went home and got on the computer in the living room and started websurfing, pulling up weblogs written by autistics and their families. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was hunched over the desk lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.

“You know much about it?”

She shook her head. “It’s not a specialty,” she said, which he’d suspected: his mama worked mostly in med-surg. She drank some coffee and sighed. “There are a lot of categories strung all along a long spectrum of neural issues and deficits. There’s a lot of argument about the causes—differences in brain chemistry, rogue antibodies, God knows what all—but I really think we know more about what isn’t responsible than what is.” She raised one hand in a “who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “But it’s definitely nothing to do with vaccines, or raising your children wrong. …What’s this about? Is this something for school?”

“No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”

His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, my God. His parents must be out of their minds with worry. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”

“I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”

“What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d vanished. So how is he missing?”

“Just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have been giving them a lot more, if only to keep them from worrying. “When the wizardry first comes to you, it doesn’t come all at once. You get a test first: your Ordeal. If you pass, you’re a wizard. If you don’t…”

Immediately, the look on his mother’s face suggested to him that he might have misstepped. “You die?” his mother said.

“Not always,” Kit said. “Sometimes you just lose the power that was given you to take the test with.” His mama was looking at him rather narrowly now, and Kit realized that she would immediately detect any attempt to soften this. “But it’s true that some kids don’t come back,” Kit said. “Some disappearances are failed Ordeals. Maybe a few percent.”

His mother sat, quietly digesting that, and had another drink of her coffee. “So this Ordeal,” she said. “He’s having some kind of problem with it?”

“He’s been in the middle of it for a long time,” Kit said. “He may need help. And I can’t help thinking the autism has something to do with it.” He sighed. “I’ve been reading all kinds of stuff, but it’s all been written by nonwizards, and they’re not much help for working out what might be going on with him. And he might not be able to tell me… in which case I’m going to have to get in there and take a look myself.”

“In his head?” His mother looked alarmed. “Kit, my love, I don’t claim to understand the details of what you’re doing… but wouldn’t that be a violation of his privacy?”

“It might be,” Kit said. “But couldn’t you make a case that CPR is, too, if someone’s in a dangerous condition and they can’t tell you to go ahead? You’d do it anyway.”

“To save a life, yes.”

“That’s what this might be,” Kit said. “I have to find out. Ordeals are crucial by definition, Mama. I had some help on mine. Maybe now I get to pay those favors forward.”

“So you get inside his head how, exactly?” his mama said. “Is this what Carmela keeps describing as ‘magic telepathy’?”

Kit shook his head. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “I’m still working out how to describe it. Ponch sees it as making a new world to go to… or finding that world ready-made. Once you make it, or find it, you go there.”

“Ponch sees it…” His mother shook her head, sloshed the coffee around in her cup, drank some, and made a face: it was going cold.

“We’ll go there and look around,” Kit said. “We’ll see what his world looks like to him. Assuming we can get in. If that doesn’t work … I’ll have to think of something else. But at least this is a place to start.”

His mother put the cup down and pushed it away. “If you do actually get to talk to him,” she said, looking thoughtful, “I seem to remember that there’s a theory about some autistics having trouble with interactions, not because they’re out of contact with what’s going on around them, but because they’re too much in contact, because it’s too intense to take. And structure’s really important to them then… the structures they’ve built up over time to deal with the pressure. If theirs has been violated by recent events, communication might be tougher than usual. There might be a lot of ways the communication could look that you wouldn’t necessarily be expecting, so you’d need to be willing to dump your preconceptions about that.”

Kit nodded. “This is all kind of strange…”

“Not as such,” said his mother. “Different, yes. But the difference, maybe that’s key, in its way. There are so many different ways that autism affects people: it’s a spectrum, after all. I wonder if a lot of the trouble with helping them is caused by trying to pigeonhole them into narrow categories to make it easier. When there are probably as many kinds of autism as there are autistics.”

That was a theme that Kit had already spotted in the reading. “Well… I don’t have to do anything instantly. But as soon as I can…” He sighed. “I just don’t want to take the chance of screwing him up somehow.” And then he remembered something. “One thing, though. I really need to take tomorrow off to work on this. Can you call school and get me off?”

She scowled at him. “You don’t have a test or anything tomorrow?”

“Huh? No.”

“I’m not going to make a habit of this…”

“I’m not asking you to, Mama! But it’s going to take more than just lunch hour to make a start on this, and I don’t want to have to run off all of a sudden in the middle of something that’s going to make a difference.”

His mother sat thinking. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. You can have a stomach bug or something.”

“No, Mama! Don’t lie to them. Just tell them I need a personal day.”

She gave him a slightly approving look. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Mama. You’re the best.” He got up and kissed her, and took her coffee cup. “Want some more?”

“Yes.” His mother leaned back on the sofa. “Two sugars. And then I want you to explain to me why I can hear the DVD player and the remote yelling at each other in Japanese in the middle of the night.”

Kit shut his eyes briefly in horror, and went to get the coffee.

Chapter 3: Pursuits

Quite early the next morning, Kit came downstairs to find his sister sitting in front of the TV with a plate of half-finished toast, and a most peculiar expression on her face. “Brother dear…” Carmela said.

This tone of voice usually meant that something bad was going to happen. And I haven’t even had my cornflakes yet, Kit thought. “What?”

“I need to talk to you about the TV.”

“Uh … what about it?” He went into the kitchen to make a start at least on the cornflakes, before she really got rolling.

“Why did Pop tell me not to watch it?”

“Uh,” Kit said, “maybe I should ask you first—if Pop told you not to watch it, then what’re you doing?”

If he hoped that taking the offensive with his sister would help him even a little, the hope was misplaced. “Why do what they say until you can figure out why?” Carmela said from the living room. “And with Pop at work and Mama asleep, there’s no way I’m going to find out the whys from them for hours. So I ask you, instead … while having a look myself.”

Kit said nothing, just rummaged enthusiastically in the fridge for the milk.

“Most of the shows don’t make much sense,” Carmela said. “And a lot of others are in weird languages. This has to do with all the yelling in Japanese the other day, am I right?”

“To a certain extent,” Kit said, getting a bowl out of the cupboard and then opening a drawer for a spoon.

His sister sighed. “You know,” she said, “you’re bad at covering your tracks when you’ve busted something. Hey, that’s a local phone number!”

Kit’s eyes widened with shock. He hurried in to find his sister goggling at a screen full of billowing white smoke and a number with a 516 area code … both of which, to his vast relief, then dissolved into whangy guitar music and an offer for cut-rate Elvis CDs.

Carmela looked up at Kit, registering his reaction, and shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re into this retro stuff,” she said, changing channels to her more usual morning fare, the channel with all the cartoons. “It’s a good thing you’ve got Nita, because it’s gonna be a long time before anybody else wants to date you, the taste you’ve got.”

“I have not ‘got’ Nita,” Kit said through gritted teeth. “And as for taste, you shouldn’t be talking. Tom and Jerry cartoons? Give me a break.”

“I’m waiting for the Road Runner,” Carmela said, managing to sound both pitying and incredibly stuck-up. “A symbol of innocence endlessly pursued by the banality of evil.”

Kit went back to his cornflakes. “I wish the evil I keep running into was a little more banal,” he muttered as he picked up his bowl and started eating. The Lone Power’s favorite tool, entropy, had already struck locally: his cornflakes had gone soggy.

Resigned, he sat down and ate them anyway. Shortly Carmela came wandering into the kitchen and stuck her head in the refrigerator. “You got today off, huh?”

“Yeah. ‘Business’ stuff.” He ate the last spoonful of cornflakes and went to rinse the bowl. “And I didn’t ‘bust’ the TV, either.”

“Well, it has a gigabillion new channels, looks like,” his sister said. “The one before this one looked pretty neat. They were selling some kind of eternal-youth potion.” She paused to primp herself unnecessarily in the dark glass of the microwave. “Might come in handy.”

“You have to grow up first before the fountain of youth’s going to do you any good,” Kit said, putting the bowl and spoon in the dishwasher, “and anyway, what you need is the fountain of brains.”

Kit spent the next few minutes running around the house while his sister, in pursuit, whacked him as often as possible with a rolled-up boy-band fan magazine. He could have teleported straight out of there, but it was more fun to let her chase him, and it would keep her in a good mood. Finally eight-thirty rolled around, the latest time when she could leave and still get to homeroom on time, and Carmela got her book bag and headed out. “Bye-bye,” she said as she went out the back door. “Don’t get eaten by monsters or anything.”

“I’ll try to avoid it.”

The door closed. Kit went off to get his manual, reflecting that things could be a lot worse for him. A resident sister who found wizardry freaky or annoying could cause endless trouble, forcing him to live like a fugitive in his own house, hiding what he was. But so many human wizards have to do that, anyway, he thought, going into his room to get the manual off his desk, and carefully walking around Ponch, who lay on the braided oval rag rug beside his bed, still asleep. They have families they can’t trust, or who can’t cope… The thought of telling someone you loved that you were a wizard, and then discovering that he or she couldn’t handle it and would have to have the memory removed, made Kit shudder. I was lucky. Not that it wasn’t a little traumatic at first, with Mama and Pop. But they got past it. And so did Helena, sort of.

His older sister had been the cause of some worries for Kit when he’d told her he was a wizard. Helena had at first been dismissive, in an amused way: she hadn’t believed him. But when Kit had started casually using wizardry around the house, Helena had actually gone through a short period when she’d thought he’d done some kind of deal with the Devil. Finally she calmed down when she saw that Kit had no trouble participating at church along with the rest of the family, and when Kit got Helena to understand that the Lone Power, no matter which costume It was wearing, was never going to be any friend of his. But Helena’s moral concerns had died down into a kind of strange embarrassment about Kit, which was as hard to bear, in its way, as the accusations of being a dupe of ultimate evil. When she went away to college and didn’t have to see what Kit was doing from day to day, their relationship got back to normal, if a rather long-distance kind of normal. What would it have been like if she’d stayed around, though? Kit had found himself thinking, more than once. How would I have coped? It was a question he was glad not to have had to answer. And if that makes me chicken, fine. I’m chicken.

He glanced down at Ponch. He was still asleep, his muzzle and feet twitching gently as he dreamed. Kit sat down to wait until the dog finished the dream. The wizard’s manual lay on his desk; he flipped it open to Darryl’s page again and considered that for a few moments.

He’s only eleven, Kit thought, looking over the slightly more detailed personal information that had added itself to Darryl’s listing since Kit had become involved. Eleven wasn’t incredibly young for a wizard—Dairine had been offered the Wizard’s Oath at eleven—but it was still a little on the early side: a suggestion that the Powers That Be needed Darryl for something slightly more urgent than usual. All we need to do is try to figure out what it is … try to help him find his way around whatever’s blocking him. Without getting in the way of whatever his Ordeal’s supposed to do for him.

That’s likely to be a tall order…

Ponch had stopped dreaming and was breathing quietly again. Kit hated to wake him, but free days like this weren’t something he got often. He nudged his dog’s tummy gently with one sneaker.

“Ponch,” he said. “C’mon, big guy.”

Ponch opened one eye and looked at Kit.

Breakfast!

His dog might be getting a little strange, as wizards’ pets sometimes do, but in other regards Ponch was absolutely normal. Ponch got up, stretched fore and aft, shook himself all over, and then headed for the hallway. Kit grinned, picked up the manual, stuck it into the “pocket” of otherspace that he kept things in for his wizardly work, and went after him.

In the kitchen, Kit opened a can of dog food and emptied it into the bowl. Ponch went through it in about five minutes of single-minded chowing down, then looked up. More?

“You’re only supposed to get one in the morning. You know that.”

But today’s a workday. Today we go hunting.

“So?”

I have to keep up my strength.

Kit rolled his eyes. “I’m being had here,” he said.

Boss! Ponch looked pained.

“Oh, all right,” Kit said after a moment. “But if all this food makes you want to lie down and have a big long sleep all of a sudden…”

It won’t.

Kit sighed and opened the cupboard to get out another can of dog food. Not that one. The chicken this time, Ponch said.

Kit looked at his dog, then at the label on the can. “When did you learn to read?”

I don’t have to read. I can hear you doing it, Ponch said. Anyway, the color’s different on the food with chicken in it.

Kit grabbed a different can and popped the top, shaking his head, and emptied it into Ponch’s bowl. “The color?” he said after a moment. “I thought dogs saw only in gray.”

Ponch paused in his eating. Maybe we do, he said. But important things look different.

Kit shook his head. Whatever color his dog saw his food in, it didn’t matter much, as it all swiftly went inside him, where theoretically everything was the same color, especially after it was digested.

When he was finished eating, Ponch circled around a couple of times and lay down to start washing his paws.

“You’re not going to go to sleep, are you?” Kit said.

Ponch looked at him with some mild annoyance. If you’re going to hunt, he said, your feet have to be clean. He went back to nibbling his paws again.

Kit sighed and sat down to wait. When Ponch was finished, he got up, shook himself again, and said, I have to go out.

“You’ll be ready then?”

Yes.

Kit opened the door and let the dog out. He put on his jacket, picked up his house keys from the hook inside the back door, and got one more thing from the place where the coats hung—the wizardry “leash” that he’d made for Ponch when they were working together in other worlds. For those who could see it, it looked like a slender, smooth cord of blue light, a tight braid of words in the Speech that had to do with finding things, remembering where you found them, and not losing what had helped you find them in the first place—namely Ponch. Kit coiled up the leash and stuffed it in his parka pocket, then locked up the house and went up the driveway to the gate in the chain-link fence. There Ponch was dancing with impatience. Kit opened the gate, and Ponch shot through and into the yard, straight to the back where the trees and bushes grew thickest.

Kit paused for a moment in the frosty morning air. It was one of those cold gray days, but the wrong kind of gray for snow—the kind of day that made you wish that spring would hurry up, but also a day when going to another universe, any other universe, would be a relief from the gloominess of your own. He reached into his pocket for the transit spell he’d used the other day to get to Darryl’s school, and ran the long glowing chain of it through his fingers while Ponch did his business back in the bushes. A moment later Ponch bounced out of the underbrush again, and ran back to Kit, bounding up and down around him.

You ready?

“Yeah. Here’s your leash.”

Kit managed with some difficulty to get Ponch to hold still long enough to slip the leash-spell around his neck. Should Ponch’s search for Darryl take them into some space where there wasn’t air, or something else humans and dogs needed to survive, the leash would make sure Kit’s fail-safe spells temporarily covered Ponch, until Kit could improvise something else. It would also keep them from getting separated in any hostile environment.

Where to first?

“Darryl’s school,” Kit said. “Let me get us invisible first. I want a closer look at him when we get there.”

Kit reached out to one side and traced his finger down the air, “unzipping” his claudication pocket, then reached in for the wizard’s manual. When he bounced it in his hand, it fell open at the spot Kit had previously marked, the invisibility spell. The wizardry was as he’d left it, in a partly activated state, waiting for the last few syllables to be pronounced.

Kit said them, and felt the wizardry take, expanding to fold around him and Ponch and then snug in close. This was one of the simpler ways to be invisible; the wizardry “looked” at what was behind you and made anyone in front of you see that instead of you. This light-diversion type of invisibility wasn’t good for use in large groups, because it tended to break down under the strain of servicing too many viewpoints, but Kit thought this would be good enough for this morning; he didn’t think he and Ponch were likely to wind up in a crowd.

Ponch shook himself as the wizardry settled in around them, then sat down and scratched. It itches!

“I know,” Kit said. “It has to fit tight to work. Try to bear with it—we won’t need it for long.”

Kit dropped the bright chain of the transit spell on the ground around them. It knotted itself closed, and the sound of the words and the power of the spell reared up around them in a roar of light. When the brilliance and the noise faded down again, they were standing where they’d been the previous day: in the parking lot, looking at the bland front of Centennial Avenue School.

Kit picked up the transit spell, tucked it away in his claudication pocket. We’d better keep it silent from here on, he said. Have you got his scent?

Sure. He’s in a room over on the left side of the building. He’s close.

Show me where.

Together they padded quietly onto the sidewalk outside the school doors, and up onto the lawn on the left side, making their way down the length of the one-story building. About half a minute later, they were standing outside the schoolroom where Darryl and his classmates were working. Kit peered in.

It didn’t look much like the classrooms at Kit’s school, but he wasn’t expecting it to: these kids had special needs. The furniture was sofas and cushions and soft mats rather than the desk-chairs that Kit was used to, with a scattering of low tables suitable for working either from a chair or while sitting on the floor. Four teachers, men and women both, casually dressed, were working with the same group of kids Kit had seen getting into the van the day before. Some of the kids were sitting and working with books at one or another of the tables; one was lying on a mat doing exercises with the help of a special-ed teacher. Off to one side, Darryl sat, dressed in T-shirt and jeans and sneakers again, his dark head bent over a large soft-cover book. He was rocking very slightly, while next to him a young male teacher sat and read to him from the book.

There he is.

But still not there, Ponch said.

Then where, exactly?

It’s hard to tell from here. I need to get a better scent. We should go in.

Kit nodded. No point in going all the way back to the doors, he said, and flipped through the manual for yet another spell. This spell, too, Kit had prepared the night before, knitting both his and Ponch’s names and descriptions into it. The wizardry included a variant of the Mason’s Word, which involves a very detailed description, in wizardly terms, of the structure of stone. As both wizards and physicists know, even the densest stone—indeed, almost all “solid” matter—is mostly empty space. Now as Kit and Ponch walked toward the wall of the school, all the atoms in their bodies and the atoms of the wall engaged in a brief, complex, stately little dance, carefully avoiding one another in droves as wizard and dog passed through brick and mortar and reinforcing metal. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing inside the classroom.

The room was carpeted, which made it easy to walk softly. Kit and Ponch made their way carefully around the edge of the room, toward the side where Darryl sat on the floor, looking at the book. Or is he really? Kit thought, as his point of view changed and he could see more clearly that though Darryl was looking at the book, the expression was abstracted; if he was intent, it was on something else. His face was wearing the shadow of a smile, but it was hard to tell what he was smiling at.

They paused near him, behind him, while the teacher kept reading something about the seven wonders of the ancient world. Ponch stood looking intently at Darryl, his nose working, while Kit looked over the boy’s shoulder, trying to make something of that remote expression. Definitely his body’s here, Kit said. But as for the rest of him…

Far away, Ponch said. I can show you where now, though. The scent’s strong.

Okay—

In a moment. Ponch sat down and started scratching.

Unfortunately, in this small quiet space, a sound that Kit heard all the time, so often that he didn’t pay attention to it anymore, suddenly made itself apparent. It was Ponch’s dog-license tag and name tag, on his collar, jingling together. Just about everybody in the classroom, except for Darryl, looked up in surprise, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from.

Uh-oh, Kit thought. That was dumb! To Ponch he said hurriedly, and silently, Now would be a good time!

Right—

Ponch stepped forward, pulling the leash tight, and vanished, just as Darryl’s teacher got up from the floor with a mystified look and headed toward them. Kit stepped forward after Ponch and vanished, too, relieved—

The wind hit him then, so that Kit staggered, staring around him, half-blinded by the sudden blazing light after the soft fluorescents of the classroom.

“Where are we?”

Inside his mind. He’s here somewhere, Ponch said.

Here was a landscape right out of the depths of the Sahara. Kit and Ponch were perched precariously on the crest of a dune so sharply wind-sculpted that its edge could have been used for a razor… except that every second, the wind stripped grains off it, eroding it, and whipping sand off the other dunes that stretched out all around them. A hard blue sky came down to the horizon on all sides, featureless; it held not a wisp of cloud, only the fierce sun… yet there was something mysteriously indistinct about that sun, as if, even in that sky, dust obscured it.

“Just look at all this,” Kit said, gazing around him. “Is this just the way his inner world looks to him? Or did he build it this way for some reason?”

I don’t know.

Kit shook his head. “I’ve seen an interior landscape or two in my time,” he said, “but wow, this one… This is huge. Look at it, it goes on forever…” He scanned the horizon. “Where is he, you think?”

Busy with something? Or maybe hiding?

Kit thought about that, and about what his mother had said about autistic people who might find the rush of data around them just too intense to bear. “No way to tell till we talk to him.”

He is here, though. Look! Ponch said. Kit looked where Ponch’s nose pointed. Footsteps led down from the dune-crest, dug in deep where someone had had to dig his heels in to stop sliding, and then had kept on sliding anyway. Down at the bottom of the dune, in the space sheltered from the wind, the footsteps were better preserved, better defined. They reminded Kit of certain footsteps left in the moondust of Tranquillity Base, except that those were now being eroded by micrometeorites. These footsteps were still sharp, and they had a familiar sneaker company’s logo scored across them, one that Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s boot soles had definitely been missing.

“Weird,” Kit said softly. The footsteps led away across that blazing wilderness, up the next dune and into the unremitting day. “Where’s he going?” Kit said.

Away from the Other One, Ponch said. Can’t you feel It? It’s here, too. It’s following him. Ponch scented the air. It’s been following him for a long time.

“Three months?” Kit said.

I think much longer.

“How can that be?”

I don’t know. But Its scent’s strong in Darryl’s neighborhood. No way to mistake it: I’ve smelled it often enough when It’s been chasing after you. Ponch shook himself all over … and this time it had nothing to do with feeling itchy; it was his version of a shudder. He flees—It pursues. Ponch’s nose worked; he looked bemused. And not just here.

“Then where?”

I’m not sure. Come on.

The sand they slid down was more pink than golden. Kit looked at it and thought of the book that Darryl’s teacher had been reading him. “That book was open to a page about the Pyramids,” Kit said.

Was it? Ponch looked around him as they slid down the dune. If it was, then it’s something he’s seen before. None of this is new.

The heat from the sun was oppressive. Kit pulled off his parka, rolled it up, and stuck it into his otherspace pocket. Then he and Ponch reached the bottom of the dune and started the climb up the side of the next one. “We could airwalk it…,” Kit said.

He didn’t, Ponch said. His trail’s down here. For now we need to go the way he went.

Kit nodded, put his head down to try to keep the wind-whipped sand out of his eyes, and went up the next dune in Ponch’s wake. That way, Ponch said as he came up to the top of the dune.

Kit looked across the sand, following Ponch’s gaze. Maybe eight or ten miles away, almost obscured by the height of the farther dunes and the haze of sand and dust in the air, a low line of jagged stone rose against the horizon. “Are those hills?” Kit said.

I think so. He’s there somewhere. Come on.

Ponch led, and Kit followed. Once or twice, Ponch was certain enough of the trail to let Kit use a transit spell to cover some distance, but more often he insisted on doing it on foot, so Kit simply had to slog after him, for the time being unwilling to use any spells to protect him from the wind and the sand, on the off chance that they would somehow interfere with Ponch’s tracking sense. The sand seemed to get into everything—down Kit’s shirt and up his pants, into the bends of his knees and elbows. It rubbed him raw around the neck and even under his socks. I can barely stand this, Kit thought as he toiled up yet another dune after Ponch. And if I can’t, what’s it doing to Darryl?

Ponch reached the top of that dune and looked ahead of them. From here the low, jagged hills that had shown earlier near the horizon finally seemed within reach, no more than a few miles away. They looked taller than they had, harsher and more forbidding; they cast long, dark shadows at their feet, under that unforgiving sun, which hadn’t moved in the sky the whole time they had been there. Kit glanced up toward it, then away. “This is incredibly detailed,” he said softly. “So very real.”

Maybe it has to be, so that it’ll be real to What’s chasing him…

Kit shook his head at that. Tom’s warning not to get caught up in Darryl’s Ordeal had been straightforward enough. Yet was it going to be possible to stand to one side and let another wizard handle the Lone Power by himself? And what if It doesn’t want just to concentrate on him? Kit thought. What am I supposed to do if It decides to try to do something about me? Just cut and run, just leave him there?

I wish Neets was here. I could really use some backup.

Ponch stood panting in the heat, gazing down. That looks sort of like a building, he said.

Kit squinted. Down among the rock-tumble at the foot of the steep, jagged hills, there did seem to be something that looked built, and in it was a vertical, oblong darkness that could have been a gigantic door. “Is that where he went?” Kit said.

I think so. Do you want to take us down there?

Kit looked at the dark patch in the long ominous shadows thrown by the hills. Want to? he thought. Wow, I can’t wait. Nonetheless, he pulled out the transit spell. “Let’s go,” he said.

A few moments later, they stood at the foot of the biggest cliff. Kit looked up at it, and up, and up, and hardly knew what to think. The whole side of the cliff was a dark red stone, carved, deeply, for at least three hundred feet up. The red stone must have been the source of the pink tint in all the sand they’d been toiling through. Someone had carved the cliff into pillars and arches, galleries and balconies, reaching back into solid stone that looked as if it had been laboriously hollowed out, chip by chip, by gloriously detail-minded artisans. Niches and pedestals were carved into the stone; in them and on them stood statues, of people and animals and creatures not native to Earth, some of them not native to any planet Kit knew. Some of the poses, some of the expressions, were very creepy, indeed; all the statues, human or not, were staring down at the space in front of the oblong opening with stony blind eyes—staring at Kit as if, stone or not, they could still see. And it all looked brand-new, as if whatever or whoever had done this work might still be here, somewhere inside the gigantic gateway that loomed, dark and empty, in front of Kit and Ponch right now.

It wasn’t an idea that made Kit particularly happy. What a great place to have a cozy chat with Darryl about what’s giving him trouble, Kit thought. “Can you smell anybody else here?” he said to Ponch. “Besides us, and Darryl, and you-know-who?”

No. Ponch stood there with his nose working. But I’m not sure that means that nobody else can be here…

I’ve got to stop asking him questions when I know the answers are going to make me more nervous than I already am, Kit thought. “In there?” he said, breaking his resolution immediately.

In there.

“So let’s go.”

Ponch stalked forward into the darkness. The way he was walking made Kit almost feel like laughing a little, even through his nervousness. It was the way Ponch stalked squirrels out in the backyard: stealthy, a little stiff-legged. That’s all we need in here, he thought as he followed Ponch into the dimness. To be attacked by millions of evil squirrels. Then he hastily squashed that thought: all he needed was for it to come true.

As the darkness around them got deeper, Kit pushed that thought away as one it was probably smarter not to encourage. “Can you see all right?” he said very softly to Ponch.

I can smell all right. Seeing doesn’t matter so much.

Kit swallowed as the darkness got deeper. To you, maybe, he thought. He started to reach into his otherspace pocket for his manual, to pull out a “virtual flashlight” spell he sometimes had recourse to. Then he paused. Maybe not a smart idea to do wizardries in here unless absolutely necessary: might screw up something Darryl has going. He reached into his pocket, pulled out his smartphone, and brought up the flashlight app that made the whole screen go bright. When it came on, he turned it toward another immense carving set into the wall to their left. Kit held the light on it for a few seconds and quickly turned the phone’s light elsewhere, reminded much too clearly of the alien with the laser eggbeater. The carving could have been one of that alien’s relatives in a very bad mood, and it seemed to be looking right at him—not only with all its eyes, but also with all its teeth.

Kit shook his head and moved away, using the phone-flashlight to look around as Ponch led him further into the hill. There was no dismissing this space as just a cave. It was a long hall, a vast corridor of a dwelling of some kind, as intricately carved inside as it had been outside—as if thousands of creatures with a passion for strange statuary had been working here for centuries. Where the walls were lacking actual statues, they were wrought in weird but wonderful bas-reliefs, vividly colored, touched here and there with the glint of gold or the glassy sheen of gems. Kit moved past them in a mixture of nervousness and admiration, his light flicking past stern creatures with vast, spread wings; tall, rigid humanoid shapes with arms held in positions ungainly but still somehow expressive; strange beast shapes whose expressions were peculiarly more human than those of the man-shapes that alternated with them. The place made Kit think of the set of some kind of adventure movie about exploring ancient tombs, but realized in a hundred times more detail—every chisel mark accounted for, the backs of the statues as perfectly executed as their fronts, everything sharp and clear, down to the last grain of sand or dust.

This is absolutely amazing, Kit thought. And I’ve been amazingly dumb about this whole situation from the start. He’d rarely thought much about autistic people except to feel vaguely sorry for them, and he’d never given any thought to what they might or might not be able to do. That was changing now. Whatever else might be going on inside of Darryl, he could see things—possibly more clearly than Kit had ever seen them, except under the most unusual circumstances. If that was any kind of hint to what Darryl’s talents as a wizard might eventually become—

Ponch stopped, and growled.

Kit stopped, too, looking around, a little more nervously now. It had occurred to him that one of the other things Darryl had managed to include in this space, if he had, indeed, created it for himself, was a sense of it being haunted. And only now, alerted by Ponch’s growl, did Kit start to see the dark shapes moving beyond where his little light could reach, beyond the statues, in the gloom through the archways that opened here and there off the great main hall. And—Kit looked up, unsure whether he had heard wings flapping way up above them, under the soaring shadows of the unseen ceiling.

What are they? he said silently to Ponch.

Ponch sniffed, let out a long whoosh of breath, as if smelling something bad. Fears.

Kit frowned, seeing more of the dark shapes gathering in the path he and Ponch had been taking toward the heart of the hill. Even when he tried to look straight at them, they stayed vague, like the things you see or half suspect you see out of the corner of your eye, the things that creep up on you from behind in the dark. Point the light at them, and they’re gone, flitting to either side; but let the light slide away, and they gather there again, seen better by averted vision than straight on. The glint of eyes, of teeth, showed in the dark: the flailing, skittering motion of too many limbs—

Ponch growled again. It’s here. Ahead, to the right, then left again. In the center of it all.

From ahead, further into the hill, came a low rumble of thunder. The sound of it went right up to that unseen ceiling, echoing, and went right through the floor; Kit could feel it through his feet.

The shadowy fears crowded closer. Ponch bared his teeth and growled more loudly, and the closest of the fears skittered away. Kit looked all around them, reaching out with a wizard’s senses to try to tell if whatever avatar the Lone Power was using here was particularly close by. It seemed to him that It wasn’t, that Its attention was elsewhere, closely centered on someone else.

Darryl…

They came to the end of that immense hallway, a T-junction; the wall just ahead of them held another of the immense carvings, reaching up and out of sight into the gloom. It showed a tangle of human and alien bodies that seemed to struggle and push against one another, trying to go in one direction or another, but that seemed unable to get much of anywhere, like a stone rush hour in some otherworldly subway station. Kit shook his head at it as Ponch pulled him to the right. A faint mutter of sound was coming from that direction, and from far away, reflected on the endless carvings, a gleam of light.

The corridor through which they moved got narrower, the much-carved walls of it seeming to press slowly together, like another gimmick from a bad adventure movie. Kit tried to convince himself that the effect was just a trick of perspective, but no matter how he tried, he wasn’t sure that when he wasn’t looking, those walls didn’t actually creep inward, just a little bit. And off to either side of him and Ponch, slightly more visible now that there was a little light up ahead, the fear-shadows paced them, flitting in and out among the carvings, skittering, chittering softly to themselves with, every now and then, the occasional little chattering laugh. In the way they moved, and in the way they avoided being seen, they began to remind Kit very unpleasantly of cockroaches … and he longed for the leisure to pause and stomp on some of them, just for the fun of it. But there wasn’t time for that now. Ponch was intent, his head down, in full tracking mode, growling softly again. The sound ahead of them started getting louder, and louder still—a repetitive, thundering noise. Somehow I don’t think this place is going to be conducive to a relaxed conversation with Darryl, Kit thought.

Ponch turned a corner to the left; Kit followed him. The light up ahead was cold and flickering, like something glimpsed through the doors of a movie theater while the feature was showing. But no theater on Earth would have had a sound system capable of producing the thunder-rumble that accompanied the light. They turned down yet another carved corridor, this one a tall, narrow slit that Kit soon realized was two doors, easily several stories tall, that weren’t quite shut.

Kit stopped at another of those earthshaking, wall-shaking rumbles of noise, louder than ever, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up because he could sense the Lone Power nearby. If Darryl and the Lone One or Its minions were having it out up ahead, some kind of protection would probably be a good idea. You stick close to me from here on, he said to Ponch as he turned his smartphone’s light off and shoved it back in his pocket. All we have to do now is figure out what’s going on, and what to do about it.

Let me know when you do that, Ponch said, because right after that, I want to go home. He sounded unusually definite.

You’re not alone there, believe me. Kit wondered if Ponch was feeling what he himself had started to feel—a wearying pressure that made him too tired to look at things, too tired to pay attention to what was going on around him. And just when I need to pay attention the most.

There was a spell that Kit had been keeping ready in the back of his mind, twenty-six words of its twenty-seven already spoken. Now, under his breath, Kit said the last word of the spell. Nothing visible happened around him and Ponch, but the silent sizzle of a wizardly force field flicked into being there, a half-sphere of protection against sudden violent force. The field wasn’t anything that would hold off the Lone Power for very long if It decided to get really aggressive, but it would buy Kit and Ponch time enough to think of something else, or to get away.

Kit reached just above his head and felt the expected bump and slight shock of touching the field, like the shock you get from walking on carpet and then touching something metallic. It’s running, he said. You ready?

No, but let’s get it over with, Ponch said.

His dog’s nervousness surprised Kit a little… but then he wasn’t exactly calm himself. Kit slowly went forward toward the partway open doors, Ponch keeping close beside him. The increasingly bright light spilling out of the doors showed some of the carvings on them, another tangle of the strange half-man, half-beast creatures, but the crescendo of thunder coming from inside the doors distracted Kit from them. Light flared again and again from inside, blue-white, blinding.

Kit moved a little to one side, so that he and Ponch would be sheltered by the right-hand door, and wouldn’t immediately be seen by whoever was inside. They crowded up against the writhing shapes carved into the great brazen doors, the force field complaining softly in the back of Kit’s mind about having to press up against something solid. Kit ignored the complaint and had a good long look into the darkness, back the way he and Ponch had come, to make sure they weren’t being followed by anything that might be capable of breaching the force field. Then he turned and peered, very carefully, around the edge of the door.

His view was somewhat limited, but he could see enough of what was going on to have to catch his breath in astonishment. Beyond the door was a huge open space—enclosed, Kit thought from the way the sound echoed in there, but with a ceiling so high up that he couldn’t even see it. Well below that point, the awful blinding light contained in that space started to give way to gloom. For what looked like about half a mile in front of him, and off to either side, stretched a huge pit of the red stone, carved into endless rings of bleacherlike seats—an amphitheater, its upper walls crowded with more of the creepy statues, their gazes turned down toward the central stage, watching. In the stands of the amphitheater were hundreds of the shadows that Kit had seen in the outer darkness, maybe even thousands of them, all as intent as the statues on what was happening down in the space in the middle.

The fury of light concentrated there should have washed all those shadows away to nothing. The center of the amphitheater was crowded with writhing whips of lightning, ropes and sheets of lightning, whole curtains of it, such as Kit hadn’t seen since he was last deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter. All of the deadly fire was striking at one spot, washing over it again and again as if trying to obliterate the single small shape that stood alone in the middle of it all, arms up around his head, twisting from side to side. With every crack of lightning, the air was torn with a great havoc of thunder, a shattering drumroll that never stopped. Ponch, peering around the door and squinting into the lightning, crowded close to Kit, growling softly, and Kit hung on to him as together they peered down into the heart of that riot of fire and destruction, trying to make out what was happening.

For just a few moments, the lightning died back a little, and Kit was able to make out what stood on the far side of it, beyond the small shape that the lightning was tormenting. It was a tall form, dark, somewhat human at the moment, and wearing a deeper darkness around it like a cloak or a shroud—looking like an abyss into which everything must invariably fall and be devoured, a chilly, light-hating vacuum that would have made a black hole seem outgoing and generous by comparison. The Lone Power stood there, looking down on Its present handiwork and finding it good.

The darkness around It rose up, and from it more lightning lashed down into the center of the arena at the slim staggering boy-shape that now turned and twisted and cried out, writhing and falling to its knees, clutching at its head, tearing at itself in a frenzy of trying to be somewhere else. Yet escape seemed impossible. The boy kneeling there was bent double now, impotent, rocking back and forth, rocking. Kit thought in pity and horror of the slight rocking motion that Darryl had been making in the classroom as he looked at the book.

The unfairness of all this, the cruelty of it, was making Kit furious, even as the crowding pressure of weariness in the air left him more and more uncomfortable and tired. Beside him, Ponch never stopped growling. I wish I could do something! Kit thought. But I don’t know what to do. And anyway, this isn’t my Ordeal. My job’s to hold still and watch.

And so he held still, and watched—though he got angrier all the time—while the Lone One whipped the small crouching shape with lightnings, and Its laughter, the earthquake, rumbled through all the stone around them. In the stands, the fear-shadows hissed and whispered and heaved with amusement, and Kit stood there and held his peace until he felt like he just couldn’t keep quiet anymore. He started to stand up and shout, He’s not alone!

But Ponch shouldered Kit to one side, behind the door again, and Kit sat down hard. Ponch put his nose up against Kit’s ear, cold, his own style of wake-up call, and said, He’s not here!

What?? Kit said.

Darryl. He’s not here.

What? What do you mean? You can see him, he’s right there —

The scent’s changed! Watch.

Kit shook his head, got up, looked around the door again. There was the small, dark shape, crouching in the center of that huge lightning-scarred space, rocking, rocking, hiding its head in its arms, while the Lone Power scourged it with lightnings and laughed, the hissing of the watching fears a soft, evil accompaniment. It went on for a long time, a little eternity… but Kit held still. The lightnings descended with more and more violence every moment, until even that last faint glimpse of Darryl was washed out in their fury.

Watch, Ponch said again, sounding perplexed but somehow also amused. The air stank of ozone, the stone of the floor began to run and go molten in places, and there was nothing at the center of things anymore but a ferocious knot of pale, blue-white fire, lightning that unnaturally endured for breath after breath, washing and burning through this one last stubborn spot that it had not been able to abolish—

—until it faded away, and all that huge amphitheater rustled with the satisfied hissing of a thousand fears.

But there was one sense of satisfaction that was missing. The greatest, deepest darkness—the tall one now moving down into the center, to where a young boy’s body should have lain—was not at all satisfied. All the shadow-fears that looked on slowly stilled their hissing, becoming afraid themselves, as that master darkness towered over the place where Darryl should have been … and wasn’t.

“Gone!” the Lone Power cried. “Gone again!” It whirled around in fury.

“Find him!!”

With a vast wind-rush rustling of terror, the shadows vanished. The Lone One, furious, swept Its darknesses about Itself. They writhed like an angry cloak, wrapped in close around their master. A second later, It was gone.

And Kit and Ponch stood there at the edge of it all, behind the door, in the dark, shaking.

It didn’t even notice you, Ponch said, confused but relieved. That’s good.

No argument. But what about Darryl? Kit was seriously confused. How could he be there and not be there at the same time?

I don’t know, Ponch said. But I want to go home now. And when we get home, I want a biscuit.

Five biscuits, Kit said. Maybe ten. Let’s get out of here.

They started making their way back through the carved corridors of the hill. “Where did he go?” Kit said after a while, when he started to get his breath back, for he’d held it again and again.

The Lone One? He didn’t “go” anywhere. He’s still where he always is: here. One side of Ponch’s mouth curled again in a soft growl.

“No, I meant Darryl.”

Oh. Might take me a little while to find out. Ponch’s nose was working again. But I don’t think this is the first time he’s done this maneuver; he did it too quickly. I can scent the change. I can find where he goes next.

They came out of the dark, back into that pitiless day. “What I don’t get is, why’s he doing it?” Kit said, looking out across the endless, scorched, barren waste. “Why doesn’t he get it over with? Not that he didn’t look like he was having a bad time. But running away from the Lone One is no way to end an Ordeal. Sooner or later you have to tackle It head-on … before It catches you from behind, when you’re not looking, and finishes you off.”

I don’t know. I’m not a wizard. But I know what it’s like to be scared.

Kit heard the pity in his dog’s voice, and was slightly surprised. Normally Ponch saved his concern for members of the family, or friends. “You’re sure you can pick up the trail again?”

Any time. But not right now. Ponch trotted away from the bottom of the cliff, purposeful, not looking back. I’m tired.

But Ponch is sad, too, Kit thought. And that makes it worse. “Come on, big guy,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Together, they vanished.

Chapter 4: Conversations

Nita looked up out of darkness at the giant robot that was staring down at her.

At the time this seemed like the most natural thing in the world. There she stood, barefoot, in her long, pink-striped nightshirt, and there stood the robot, glittering in the single spotlight that shone down on the dark floor. The gleam of the downfalling light on the metal of the robot’s skin was nearly blinding. What kind of metal is that, I wonder? Nita thought, for the skin sheened a number of colors, from a hot blue through magenta to a greenish yellow, depending on how the robot moved. Right now it was shifting idly from foot to foot, as if it was waiting for something to happen.

Titanium, Nita thought, recalling some jewelry she’d seen one of her classmates wearing to school recently; it had had the same hot-colored sheen as the robot’s skin. Or was it palladium? I forget. “Hello?” Nita called up to the robot.

There was no reply. But the robot did hold still, then, and incline its head a little to look down in Nita’s general direction. There was no telling whether it was actually looking at her: Where eyes normally would have been, there was a horizontal slit, which probably had sensors behind it. The robot strongly resembled the kind of giant robot that kept turning up on Saturday morning television, and Nita found herself wondering whether this one might suddenly start breaking apart into jet fighters and tanks and other such paraphernalia. But for the moment, it just stood there.

Nita started to get a strange, repetitive, ticktock feeling in the back of her head—an emotion or thought recurring, again and again, as regular and inevitable as clockwork, but recurring at a distance, in a muffled kind of way. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, either—it was a kind of thought or emotion that you would suffer from, rather than experience with any particular pleasure. Fortunately, it wasn’t so acute that Nita had to pay much attention to it, though she felt vaguely sorry for the robot, if this weary feeling did indeed belong to it.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Nita called, more loudly this time. There was no question of speaking to the robot more conversationally: Its head was at least fifty feet above the ground. This is like having a conversation with a flagpole, Nita thought.

The robot took a clunky step toward her, then another, then suddenly hunkered down in front of her with a great groan and screech of complaining, overstressed metal. Nita thought at first that it might fall over, it looked so unsteady, and it wobbled and leaned from left to right to left again. It was intent on her, though again Nita couldn’t be sure how she knew that: the metal face was blank, and it had no way to change its expression even if one had been there.

“So what is it?” Nita said. “Give me a clue!”

It loomed over her, possibly considering what to say. As machine intelligences went, the robot already seemed pretty reticent: Nita’s limited experience with mechanical life-forms suggested that they were big talkers, but this one didn’t seem to be so inclined. It just leaned over her, the size of a small apartment building, and a tongue-tied one at that.

“Oh, wait a minute, now I know what it is,” Nita said. “You want to talk to my sister, right? I’m really sorry, but she’s asleep right now.”

No response from the shining form. “Asleep?” Nita said. “Temporarily nonfunctional? Off-line?”

The robot suddenly began emitting what Nita thought at first were more metal-stress sounds, but after she got past how deafening they were, she found she could catch the occasional word through them, and the words were in the Speech. Oh good, Nita thought, for there were quite a few alien species scattered throughout the Local Group of galaxies who knew one or another of the recensions of the Speech that weren’t usable for wizardry; these functioned as a convenient common tongue.

“[Grind, groan, screech] difficulty [screech-moan-crash] entropy [moan, moan, clunk-crash] communications,” the robot said. And then said nothing more, but just wobbled back and forth amid a whine of gyros, trying to keep its balance.

Nita was getting confused. Why can’t I understand it? “Uh, okay,” she said in the Speech, “I think I got a little of that. Something’s interfering with your communications. What exactly did you want to communicate about? Do you have some other kind of problem that needs to be solved?”

The robot just crouched there, wobbling, for several moments. Then it said, “Solve [scream-of-metal, grind, ratchet] problem [moan, moan, much higher moan, crash] cyclic-insoluble [grind, grind] time [extremely long-duration whirly-noisemaker sound, crash, clunk] no solution [screeeeeeech, crash crash crash] trap [boom].”

Nita revised her original opinion about having conversations with flagpoles. This was more like a dialogue with a garbage truck, that being the only other thing in her immediate experience that sounded anything like this. “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but I’m having a lot of trouble understanding you. Pretty sure it’s s my fault. Can you tell me more clearly how I can help you? Just what is it that you need?”

The huge shape crouched there for a few more moments, then, wobbling, it got up. For a long, long moment it stood over her, gazing down at her from that great height… but Nita still couldn’t be sure. Then the robot turned, and slowly and clumsily went clanking off into the darkness, out of the spotlight where it and Nita had been standing.

Nita broke out in a sudden sweat, feeling that she’d missed something important. “Look,” she called after it hurriedly, feeling incredibly inadequate and useless, “I really am sorry I can’t help you! If you come back later, when my sister’s awake, she should be able to figure out what it is you need. Please, can you come back later?”

But it was gone.

—and Nita found herself staring at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. The sun wasn’t yet up outside, and she was still sweating, and feeling stupid, and wondering what on Earth to make of the experience she’d just had.

At least it wasn’t a nightmare, like that other one, she thought.

But on second thought, considering how spectacularly stupid she felt right now, Nita wasn’t so sure….

There was no chance of getting back to sleep, so Nita showered and got dressed for school, ate a cereal bowl’s worth of breakfast that she didn’t really feel like eating, and then dawdled over a cup of tea until it was time to wake her dad. This was an addition to Nita’s morning routine that she heartily wished she didn’t have to deal with, but her father really needed her to do it. Recently he’d been turning off his alarm clock and going back to sleep without even being aware of having done so.

She knocked at the bedroom door. “Daddy?”

No answer.

“Daddy … it’s six-thirty.”

After a few seconds came the sound Nita had been bracing herself for, the sound she didn’t think her dad knew he made: a low, miserable moan, which spoke entirely too clearly of how he felt, deep down inside, all the time now. But this was the only time of day that sound got out, before he was completely awake. Nita controlled herself as strictly as she could, absolutely intent on not making things any worse for him by sounding miserable herself.

“Do you want me to make some coffee?” Nita said.

“Uh,” her dad said. “Yes, sweetheart. Thanks.”

Nita went down to the kitchen and did that. She had mixed feelings about making her dad’s coffee: that had always been what her mother did, first thing. Nita also wasn’t sure if she was making it strong enough—her mom had always joked that her dad didn’t want any coffee that didn’t actually start to dissolve the cup. Nita, being new at this, was still experimenting with slight changes to the package directions, a little more each morning, and secretly dreading the day when she would get it right, and that would most forcibly remind her dad of who had not made it.

She started the coffee machine and went quietly back up to her room. By then her dad was already in the shower. Nita sat down at her desk, picked up her book bag from beside it, and shoved in the textbooks she’d be needing today. She had a chemistry test that afternoon, so she picked up the relevant book from beside her bed and started reading.

It was hard to concentrate, even in the early morning stillness. In fact, it was hard to concentrate most times, but this was something that Nita had been pushing her way through by dint of sheer stubbornness. The rest of her life might be going to pieces, but at least her grades were still okay, and she was going to keep them that way. What Nita missed, though, was the sheer effortless enjoyment she had always gotten from science before. This stuff was harder than the science she’d loved as a kid. That by itself isn’t so much of a problem. I’m learning it. Though I’m not used to having to work at it. But the shadow of pain that hung over everything was also interfering… and about that, there wasn’t anything she could do.

“Sweetie?”

Nita looked up. Her dad was standing in her bedroom doorway, looking at her with some concern. “Sorry, Dad, didn’t hear you.”

He came over and gave her a hug and a kiss. “I didn’t mean to distract you. I just wanted to make sure you’ll see that Dairine gets out.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t let her sweet-talk you.”

Nita raised her eyebrows at the unlikeliness of this. “I won’t.”

“Okay. See you later.”

He went out. Nita heard the back door lock shut behind him, heard the car start. She glanced out the window into the gray, early morning light, and saw the car backing out of the driveway, turning in the street, vanishing from sight. The engine noise faded down the street.

Nita sat there and thought of her dad’s still, pale face as he spoke to her. Sad all the time; he was so sad. Nita longed to see him looking some other way … yet for so long now she’d routinely felt sad herself, because she could understand his problem. It’s only been a month, she thought, and already I can’t remember what it’s like not to be sad.

The school shrink had warned her about that. Mr. Millman, fortunately, had turned out to be very different from what Nita had expected, or dreaded, when she’d been sent to see him after her mom had died. The other kids at school tended to speak of “the shrink” in whispers that were half scorn, half fear. Having to go see him, in many of their minds, still meant one of three things: that you needed an IQ test—probably to prove that you needed to be put in a slower track than the one you were in; that you were crazy, or about to become so; or that you were going alcoholic or doing hard drugs, or had some other kind of weird thing going on that was likely to make you a danger to yourself or others.

Nita had been surprised that the crueler mouths around school hadn’t immediately started to spread one or another of these rumors about her. But it hadn’t happened, apparently because her mother was well known and liked in town by a lot of people, and this attitude had spread down to at least some of their kids. It seemed that those kids at school who knew her at all thought that though Nita was a geek, it was still a shame about her mother, and counseling after her mom died so young wouldn’t count as a black mark against her.

So nice of them, Nita had thought when she first heard about this. But she had to admit to a certain amount of relief that mockery wasn’t going to be added to the whispers of pity that she’d already had more than enough of. Not that she wasn’t used to half the kids she knew making fun of her as an irredeemable nerdette. But having to deal with a new level of jeering, as well as the pain, was something she could do without right now.

She still had no energy to speak of. Sleep never came easily anymore, and she kept waking up too early. But once she was awake, she didn’t really want to do anything. If Nita had had her way, she’d have stayed home from school half the time. But she didn’t have her way, especially since Dairine was already in trouble with the principal at her school for all the time she’d been losing—so much so that their dad had to go see the principal about it this afternoon. Nita was completely unwilling to add to his problems, so she made sure she got to school on time—but she found it hard to care about anything that happened there.

Or anywhere else, she thought. Even though she was up before dawn half the time, the predawn sky, even with the new comet passing through, didn’t attract her as it used to. Nita leaned on the sill of the window by her desk, looking out at the bare branches of the tree out in the middle of the backyard. She could see the slow words its branches inscribed against the brightening sky in the wind, but she couldn’t bring herself to care much what they said. She felt as if there was some kind of thick skin between her and the world, muffling the way she knew she ought to feel about things … and she didn’t know what to do to get rid of it. What really frightened Nita were the times when she clearly perceived that separation from the world as something unnatural for her, and still didn’t care if the remoteness never got better—the times she was content to just sit and stare out at the world, and watch it go by.

She found herself doing that right now, staring vaguely at the clutter on her desk—pens and pencils, school notebooks, sticky pads, overdue library books, a few CDs belonging to the downstairs computer. And her manual, closed, sitting there looking like just one more of the library books. Overdue, she thought, glancing past it at the other books. That’s not like me, either. I’m so obsessive about getting them back on time, usually … I should take them back after school today.

But taking them back just seemed like too much trouble. It could wait another day, or two, or three, for the little fine it would cost her. Maybe I’ll feel more like it over the weekend.

Nita let out a long breath as she looked at her manual. It wasn’t as if it was alive in any way, as if it had anything with which to look at her…

…but it was looking at her, and she wasn’t sure what to make of its expression.

She flipped it idly open to the back section, where the status listings were. Turning a few pages brought her to Kit’s listing, which she scanned with brief, weary interest. Then she paged along to her own.

CALLAHAN, Juanita L. 243 E. Clinton Avenue Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 555-6786 power rating: 6.76 +/- .5 assignment status: optional

Nita stared at that for a long moment, never having seen anything like it on her listing before.

“Optional”?

Since when am I “optional”?!

She sat there looking at the listing for a few seconds longer. Jeez, she thought, I sounded more like Dairine just then than me…

It was still a strange listing. And the longer she looked at it, the less she liked it.

But that brought her to her next order of business for the morning. Reluctantly, Nita got up and went across the hall to Dairine’s room. “Dari…,” she said, knocking on the door and knowing what was going to come next.

“Ngggg,” said a voice from inside.

“Get up.”

“In a minute.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Dari. Say it in the Speech.”

“Ngggg.”

Nita grimaced. Dairine was twisty and shifty in all kinds of ways, but even now, even angry and upset with life as she was, she would not dare say anything in the Speech that wasn’t true. “Dairiiiiiiiiine…”

A pause. “Must you be so disgustingly responsible at this hour of the morning?”

“Yes,” Nita said, unimpressed by either the volume or the sentiment. “Get up, Dair. I have things to do besides deal with you all morning.”

“Then go do them, and give them my regards.”

“Not a chance. Get up.”

“No.”

And so it went for another fifteen minutes or so. Nita’s temper started fraying. I might have seen the day break, she thought, but I’m still going to be late for Millman, thanks to Dairine. Again.

I’ve had about enough of this!

Nita held out her hand for her manual, which obligingly picked itself up off her desk and came cruising along into the hall. She plucked it out of the air and began paging through it. Okay, today’s the day, she thought. Today I actually use that spell instead of just thinking about it. But I have to add something fast. Nita spent a moment wondering under which category she would find the addition she was contemplating for the wizardry she had in mind. Well, it’s a teleport, but now it’s complex rather than strictly inanimate… “Dairine,” Nita said. “This is just another cheap attempt not to go to school.”

“It’s not an attempt.”

“Uh-huh.” We’ll see about that. Okay, here we go. The shape of the wizardry’s a little weird now, but if I constrain the feeder end of the spell like this—and this— Yeah. Quick and dirty, but it’ll do the job. “You really ought to think about the consequences of your actions,” Nita said, “especially insofar as they affect what Dad’s gonna have to say to you when school calls him at work to find out where you are.”

“Nita, that’s my problem, not yours, so why don’t you just butt out for a change instead of trying to run everybody’s life. You’re no replacement for Mom, no matter what you may think you’re doing, and—”

A tirade, Nita thought, already halfway through the spell. Good. She paused just long enough to admit to herself that the remark about their mom did, indeed, really hurt, and then went on with the spell. Dairine was meanwhile still in full flow. “…when you come to your senses again, some time in the next decade if we’re lucky, you may discover that—OW!”

From inside Dairine’s bedroom came a loud thump, the sound of a body hitting the floor—or, more accurately, parts of a body hitting the floor, and parts of it coming down hard on some of the many and varied things that Dairine routinely shoved underneath her bed. One-handed, Nita snapped her manual shut with a feeling of profound satisfaction.

“Where’s my bed?!” Dairine shrieked.

“It’s on Pluto,” Nita said. “On the winter side, somewhere nice and dark and quiet, where you won’t find it if you look all day—which you’re not going to have time to do, because you’ll be in school.”

“Hah! I’ll sleep in your bed!”

“You hate my bed,” Nita said. “My mattress is too hard for you. And what’s more, my bed and every other piece of furniture in this house have been instructed that after I leave, they’re to teleport any living creature they touch right into the part of school where you’re scheduled to be at that particular moment in time. How you explain your appearance there is going to be your problem.”

“I’ll take the wizardry apart.”

“I’ve password-locked it. If you want, you can spend all day trying to unlock it from outside the house … and then still have to explain to Dad why you weren’t in school again. After he’s just spent an hour discussing the same subject with your principal. Meanwhile, if you want to sleep anywhere, you can do it on Pluto, if you like—but you’re not doing it in this house till after you get back from school.”

The bedroom door was flung open, and Dairine stormed through it, past Nita and toward the bathroom, head down, in a fury, refusing to give her sister so much as a glance. The severity of the effect was somewhat lessened by the dust bunnies that parted company with Dairine’s pajamas along the way, floating gently in the air behind her.

“I wish I knew what alien force has kidnapped my sister and left this vindictive thug of a pod person in her place,” Dairine said to the air, slamming the bathroom door shut. “Because when I find out, I’m going to hunt it down and kick however many rear ends it has from here to Alphecca!”

Nita stood there for a moment, watching a final dust bunny float toward the floor. “Enjoy your day,” she said sweetly, and went to get her book bag.

***

Her meetings with Mr. Millman were always about an hour before homeroom, so that they were finished ten or fifteen minutes before other students started to arrive for the day. The covert quality of the meetings was enhanced by the fact that Mr. Millman didn’t even have his own office, because he traveled from school to school in the district every day. Neither he nor anyone else in school knew where he was going to be from one session to the next. Nita most often found him in a spare office down in the administrative wing of the school, a room furnished with a metal desk and a few wooden chairs and not much else. Today he was there, sitting behind the old beat-up desk with the office door open, and working intently on one of those metal-ring puzzles in which the five constituent rings have to be interlaced.

This kind of behavior was typical of Mr. Millman, and was one of the redeeming features of having to deal with him. Whatever you might imagine a school shrink as being like, or looking like, he wasn’t that. He was young. He had a large, frizzy black beard that made him look more like an off-duty pirate or an escaped Renaissance artist than a psychologist, and his long lanky build and loose-limbed walk made him look like a refugee from a Cheech and Chong movie. Though he wore a suit, he did so as if it had an invisible sign on the back of it saying, THEY MADE ME WEAR THIS: DON’T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. He looked up at Nita from the ring-puzzle with a resigned expression. “Morning, Nita. You any good at these?”

“Morning, Mr. M.” She sat down in front of the desk and took the rings he offered her. Fortunately Nita knew how the puzzle worked, and she handed the rings back to him, braided together, in about fifteen seconds.

He looked at the puzzle with helpless amusement. “Halfway to a doctorate,” he said, “and I still have no grasp of spatial relationships. Remind me not to go into rocket science. How’ve your last couple of days been?”

“Not the best,” Nita said. “I had to throw my sister out of bed this morning. She didn’t want to go to school again.”

“That seems to be turning into a routine,” Mr. Millman said. “And from your expression, I get the feeling she didn’t appreciate it. She try the line about your mother again?”

Nita nodded.

“And you didn’t punch her out?”

Nita allowed herself a slight smile. “The temptation was there…”

They talked for maybe twenty minutes. Millman’s style wasn’t so much that of a shrink as that of a coach, Nita had decided: no long silences, no mmm-hmms that transparently tried to draw you out and get you to talk about things. You talked or not, as you pleased, and Mr. Millman did the same. You asked questions or answered them, or didn’t answer them, also as you pleased. It was all very leisurely and casual, and Nita was sure that Mr. Millman was getting a lot more out of what she said than she suspected. But, possibly because of the way he handled their sessions, she found that this wasn’t bothering her. “Any more of those nightmares?” Mr. Millman said at one point.

“Some weird dreams,” Nita said.

“Scary?”

“Not the one this morning. I felt more useless than anything else.” Nita wasn’t going to go too far into the specifics.

“Goes along with the rest of the symptoms at this point,” Mr. Millman said. “The loss of appetite, the sleep troubles, and the mood swings—”

“Depression,” Nita said.

Mr. Millman nodded. “That feeling of weight,” he said. “Or of being weighted down … of feeling like your face’ll crack if you smile.”

“I wish I could make it go away,” Nita said.

“Fighting it probably won’t make it go away faster. May prolong it, in fact. Let it be there, and do your best to work around it, or through it, and do what you usually do. Work on things you would normally enjoy.” Mr. Millman leaned back in the chair and stretched. “I would say play, but no one wants to hear that word at a time like this: it makes them feel guilty, even if it’s what they need. If you have projects you work on, hobbies, keep them alive. You’ll be glad you did, later—the work you do at a time like this is likely to be worth keeping. You do have hobbies?”

“Astronomy,” Nita said. “Gardening—I help my dad.” And then she added, “Magic.”

And instantly panicked. Now why did I say that?

Millman raised his eyebrows.

Oh, god, no. What have I done?! Nita thought. I’m gonna have to wash his brains now! And that’s a bad thing to do to your shrink—

“Ah, legerdemain,” Millman said. “An interesting field. Not enough women in it. Some kind of gender bar there; don’t ask me why all the famous magicians have been men. Anyway, it has to be good for your hand-eye coordination. Show me some card tricks, someday.” He looked at his watch. “Not now, though—someone else will be here shortly.”

“Thanks, Mr. M.,” Nita said, and escaped from his office as quickly as she could, wondering if, despite all Mr. Millman’s casual reassurances, she was actually going crazy.

***

Kit had spent most of the previous day recovering from the exertions of following Ponch into the interior otherworld where they’d found Darryl. It wasn’t as if he’d actually done so much wizardry himself, but it seemed to Kit that Ponch drew on his own power somewhat. And then there’s the leash, Kit thought, as he headed into the kitchen to snatch a hurried breakfast. He’d overslept, partly in reaction to maintaining the leash-wizardry and the shield-spell, partly just because of physical tiredness from toiling up and down all those dunes. His calf muscles certainly ached badly enough. But just as wearying, in their own way, were the events he’d seen taking place.

And also tiring, in a different way, was the amount of time he’d had to spend comforting Ponch afterward. The dog had seemed all right when they first got back, and had gone through the promised dog biscuits as if he hadn’t eaten anything for days. But as the afternoon passed, Ponch started to look unhappy. And just after dinner, when Kit was helping his mama clear the table, they were both startled by a sound coming from outside. Ponch was howling.

Kit’s mama gave him a peculiar look. “What’s the matter with him?” she said. “Did the fire siren go off or something? I didn’t hear it.”

Kit shook his head. “I’ll go find out,” he said.

By the gate to the backyard, near the garage, Ponch was sitting in the grass of the yard, howling as if rehearsing for a part in The Call of the Wild. Kit opened the gate. “Ponch! What is it? You want to come in?”

No. Ponch kept on howling.

Kit was mystified. He went to sit down by his dog, who ignored him and howled on. “What’s the matter?” Kit said in the Speech, after a few moments more.

Ponch finished that howl and sat looking at the ground for a moment. How could It do that to him? Ponch said then. He couldn’t even do anything! And he was good.

Kit blinked at that. “It’s the Lone Power,” he said. “Unfortunately, It likes to hurt people … and likes to see them hurting. Which is why we keep running into It, since it’s our job to stop It from doing that whenever we can.”

It’s not fair, Ponch said. And he put his head up and howled again.

Down the street, Kit could hear one of the neighbors’ dogs start howling, too, in a little falsetto voice that would have made him laugh if he wasn’t rather concerned about Ponch. Soon every dog in the street was howling, and shortly there were some human shouts to go along with the noise: cries of “Shut up!” “Would you please shut your dog up?” and “Oh yeah, well, you shut yours up!”

Kit had no idea what to make of it all, and couldn’t think of anything to do but sit with Ponch. Eventually the dog stopped howling, and one after another, slowly, the other dogs in the neighborhood got quiet. Ponch got up, shook himself, and walked out the still-open gate into the driveway. He made his way to the back door, waited for Kit to open it, and then went in and trotted up the stairs to Kit’s bedroom.

Kit’s mother had looked at him curiously as he came back in and closed the door. “What was that about?”

“Ponch was upset about what we were doing this morning,” Kit had said. “I’d try to explain it to you, but I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

Now, the next morning, as he went looking for his cereal bowl, he wasn’t any closer to an answer. Ponch had been asleep when Kit had gotten up to his room, and he was sleeping still. I’ll talk to him about it later, he thought, opening the cupboard over the counter.

There were no cornflakes. There was one box of his pop’s shredded wheat, which Kit detested—whenever circumstances forced him to eat it, it always made him think he was eating a scrubbing pad. The only other box contained one of the cereals his sister liked, some kind of frosted, fruit-flavored, multicolored, marshmallow-infested, hyperpuffed, vitamin-reinforced starch construct, which was utterly inedible due to its being ninety-eight percent sugar—even though the word appeared on the box only once, in letters small enough for anyone without a magnifying glass to miss. “Mama,” Kit said, aggrieved, “we’re out of cereal!”

“Your kind, anyway. I know,” his mother said, coming into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, with the TV remote in her hand. “Take it up with your pop: he had a fit of wanting cornflakes late last night, and he finished the box. He said he’d get some more on his way home from work. Have some toast.”

“It’s not the same,” Kit muttered, but all the same he closed the cupboard and went to get the bread out of the fridge.

“Is Ponch all right now?” his mother said as she poured more coffee and reached past Kit into the fridge for the milk.

“I think so. Still sleeping, anyway.”

His mama shook her head, and then smiled slightly. “All that noise last night… it reminded me. Is it just me, or has down-the-street’s dog been louder than usual the past week or so?”

“You mean Tinkerbell?” That was not the dog’s real name in the dogs’ own language, Cyene, and possibly reason enough for the down-the-street dog’s incessant barking. “I dunno, Mama. I’m so used to hearing him bark all the time, I don’t notice anymore.”

“Do you think you could talk to him, sweetie? You know.” She wiggled her fingers in what she imagined was a vaguely wizardly gesture.

Kit raised his eyebrows while he put the bread in the toaster. “I can try. But, Mama, just because I talk to him doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to listen. The dog’s a head case. He thinks I’m a crook. But then he thinks everybody who doesn’t live in his house is a crook.”

“Dogs get like their owners, they say…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, sweetie,” his mother said, looking suddenly guilty.

Kit kept the smile off his face while he waited for the toast to come up. It was going to be fun to be middle-aged, someday, and be told the things his mother was really thinking, with no more need for the kid-filter that parents routinely seemed to self-install.

“What about the youngster whose head you were going to get into?” his mother said. “Were you able to talk to him?”

Kit shook his head. “He was real busy,” Kit said. “Ponch and I are going to have to try again when things are quieter.” If they get any quieter, he thought. And what if they don’t?

Then something else occurred to him. “Mom, you have any more trouble with the TV?”

“What?” She looked at Kit as if she couldn’t understand what he was talking about, and then blinked. “Oh. No, it’s been all right.”

“Good,” Kit said, and started buttering the toast.

“Except now that you mention it…”

Kit braced himself.

“Your dad told me you weren’t joking. About the cooking shows…”

Kit sat down with his toast and tried desperately not to look as if he was about to have a panic attack. “Yeah.”

His mother sat down across from Kit, looking thoughtfully at her coffee cup. “Honey, none of these people have ever tried to eat you, have they?”

“Aliens? No.” That, at least, was the truth. “They might have thought about it, though. But so far it’s not a crime to think about it. At least, not most places.”

His mother’s expression relaxed a little. “No, I guess I can see where it might not be. I just worry about you, that’s all.”

Kit finished one piece of toast. “Mama, it’s kind of like crossing the street. You know you have to watch out for traffic. So you look both ways before you cross. In some parts of the universe, you know that the locals think of you as a potential snack food, and you’re just careful when you visit them not to act like a snack. But mostly”—and Kit grinned—“wizards are nobody’s snack. Dealing with those species mostly isn’t any more dangerous than crossing the street. Also, some of them owe us.”

His mama looked surprised. “What, humans?”

“No, wizards.” Kit took a bite of the next piece of toast. “One of those species, the—” He paused; he wasn’t used to saying their name except in the Speech, since their own word for themselves was hard to say. “Let’s call them the Spinies, because they’ve got a lot of spines. They had a problem a while back: their sun was going to go nova. One of us went in there and kept that from happening. It’s not like they don’t have their own wizards—they do. But a wizard from another species was passing through, caught the problem before any of them did, and fixed it.” He shook his head. The story ranked as a hero-tale even among wizards, who, because of their line of work, were more or less used to saving the world, or worlds. “It was real time-critical stuff. The one who saved them came from one of the species that they normally would have thought of as food: humanoid, like us. The wizardry was a big one, complex—messing with the carbon cycle inside a star isn’t for beginners. Doing the wizardry killed her. And the word got out. Now all the Spinies have something else to think about. ‘Be nice to your food; it might save your life.’”

Kit worked on the second piece of toast while his mother thought about that.

“She was how old?” his mother said suddenly.

Kit had been hoping this wouldn’t come up. “If you did it in human years,” he said, “she’d have been about my age.”

His mother’s gaze rested on him as if a suspicion had been confirmed. “Does this kind of thing happen often?” she said.

It was so tempting to lie… but no temptation was more fatal for a wizard. “Every day, Mama,” Kit said. “There aren’t enough of us to do the job. Probably there never will be. Lots of us die of old age, in our beds.” He sighed. “But not all.”

His mother looked at him, and her expression changed. It became less confused, but the look that replaced it troubled Kit more, for reasons he couldn’t understand. “I don’t know why this surprises me,” she says. “I’m a nurse, after all. It looks like we’re both in a service profession. I just keep thinking you should have been offered a choice when you were old enough to understand what you were choosing.”

“I was,” Kit said. He pushed the plate away. “You told me you decided to be a nurse when you were eight.”

His mama’s expression turned first shocked, then annoyed: the look of someone who doesn’t expect to have her own revelations turned against her. “Yes, but—”

“You’re gonna say that you didn’t know everything that’d be involved in being a nurse, when you were eight,” Kit said. “And right then being a nurse mostly looked to you like a pink plastic kit with a toy stethoscope and a toy thermometer in it. But you decided, anyway, because you wanted to help people. So when you were old enough you went to nursing school, and look, now you’re a nurse. And it’s not so bad. Right?”

His mother looked at him.

“That’s what it’s like to be a wizard,” Kit said. “I promise, I’ll keep letting you know what it looks like as I get older. But when I ‘signed up,’ I knew this was what I wanted to do. I knew right away. Sure, it gets more complicated as you go on. But doesn’t everything?”

His mama gave him a long look. Then she smiled again, very slowly, and just half a smile: the kind of expression she gave his pop when she was admitting he’d been right about something, but didn’t want to admit it out loud. “You should finish up your last piece of toast,” she said. “And don’t forget to rinse the plate.”

She went to get dressed. Kit smiled nearly the same slow half smile, pulled the plate back, finished his toast, and then left for school.

***

At lunchtime, after he’d finished eating, Kit headed out to the front of the school for a breath of fresh air, and was irrationally pleased to see Nita out there waiting for him, in the parking lot, not too far from the doors.

He walked over to her, and together they strolled off some distance through the parking lot, away from the crowd of kids who always seemed to be standing around the main doors, watching who came in and went out, and who seemed to be doing what with whom. It was a game that Kit found both boring and dumb, but a lot of his classmates seemed to spend most of their time at it, so Kit enjoyed frustrating it as much as he could.

“How’re you doing?” he said.

Nita frowned. “Okay,” she said, “but something weird’s going on.”

Kit couldn’t recall Nita having said that she felt “okay” for weeks now, and the sound of it encouraged him, but at the same time he didn’t dare get too excited about it. “Like what?”

They paused by the chain-link fence that defined the school’s boundary on the north side of the parking lot. On the other side of the fence was a cypress hedge too thick to see through, thick enough that it put hopeful green fronds through the fence; Nita idly took hold of one of these and ran it through her fingers while she told Kit about the strange robot-dream she’d had. “Everything’s supposed to understand the Speech,” she said at last, when she’d given him all the details. “At least in theory…”

“I don’t think it’s theory,” Kit said. “Everything that was made, was made using the Speech. Not being understood when you speak it is about as likely as matter not understanding gravity. Or light not understanding light speed.”

Nita shook her head and looked out into the day as if seeing something at a great distance. “I know,” she said. “But knowing the Speech also usually helps you understand what’s being said… and it’s sure not doing the job for me at the moment.”

“Really weird,” Kit said. “You have any idea what’s going on?”

Nita heaved a long sigh and bounced her shoulders idly against the fence a couple of times. “I think that dream at least, and maybe another one I had a few days ago, were alien intelligences trying to get hold of Dairine.”

Kit had to blink. “That happen to her a lot?”

Nita nodded. “On and off,” she said. “It’s mostly to do with her relationship with the mechanical sort of wizards—the computer intelligences and so on. She keeps getting feelers from life-forms that are half machine and half organic, and from a lot of the silicon-based types… some that I can’t make anything of. She told me she’s been doing a lot of work mediating between organic and inorganic lifestyles, and it’s specialized stuff. It even gives her trouble sometimes, translating between the ways they see life and the way we see it.” Nita sighed. “So it’s no surprise that I don’t understand contacts from these guys right off the bat—I mean, as a species, in terms of their feelings and motivations and so on. But I should at least be able to understand them when they communicate about very basic things. And until now, I’ve always been able to. This last one, though…”

Kit waved a hand to stop her. “Time out for a minute. Why didn’t Dairine take this contact, if it was her they were trying to reach?”

“Dairine wasn’t up for it last night,” Nita said. She let out a long breath. “Or most nights lately. Kit, she and my mom were even closer than Mom and I were, in some ways. She’s taking everything way harder than I am. She’s been missing a lot of school, and my dad’s really worried about it.” Nita’s expression was that of someone purposefully putting a painful subject to one side. “Anyway, she was asleep when the ‘call’ came, and she didn’t wake up to take it, the way she usually would. She was too tired, or else she just didn’t want to. So I got it, somehow or other. But I couldn’t understand it.”

Kit shook his head. “You mean, whoever was on the other end wasn’t using the Speech?”

Nita shook her head. “No, it was. But not the usual way. It was almost like it didn’t know it was speaking: there was something … I don’t know … accidental about the communication. Like whoever it was hadn’t actually meant to call. Except it also felt kind of urgent.”

Kit shook his head. “Were you able to get a location, a place of origin?”

“Just a sense that it was somewhere way out at the edge. I didn’t have time for a proper trace,” Nita said. “It didn’t last long enough. Besides, I was asleep myself. Maybe the message got garbled with something I was dreaming. But normally I would have woken up when something like that came in.”

“You were tired, too,” Kit said.

Nita sighed. “I’m tired all the time,” she said. “It’s just part of the depression, the shrink says. It’ll go away someday.”

“What a big help,” Kit muttered.

Nita laughed then, an oddly wistful sound that startled Kit. “No,” she said. “Really, it is a help. Knowing that someday it will go away makes it a little easier now. Not a lot … but every little bit helps, at the moment.”

“So you got a call from the outer limits,” Kit said. “And you’re not sure what it was about … But at least a little of its message got through.”

“Not a whole lot,” Nita said. “I’m just hoping it ‘calls back’ and either gets Dairine this time, or gets me when I’m awake and can make something out of what it’s saying.” She leaned against the fence. “If the first message was from the same person, or people, it didn’t make sense, either. At least not beyond ‘I can’t get off.’”

“‘I can’t get off…’” Kit thought about it, then shook his head. “Maybe it’s just one of those situations where your brain takes a really alien concept and makes the best translation it can until you have more information.”

“I really don’t know,” Nita said. “I’m going to sit down with the manual later and see if I can find something that’ll throw some light on why I’m not able to understand more clearly what’s coming through.”

“It couldn’t have anything to do with—You know.”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think this is just something different that I need to grow into learning how to do. It’s not like even people who’ve been wizards for a long time know every word in the Speech. I may just need to do some vocabulary building.” She shrugged, glanced absently at her watch: the lunch period would be over shortly. “More research… How about you, though?” She looked up again. “I saw your listing, and Tom’s note on it. You found the kid you were looking for?”

“Yeah, but not so that I could make any real contact with him. Another weird situation.”

He told Nita in words, and a few images shared mind to mind, about where he had found Darryl and lost him again. At the sight of the indistinct shape twisting in a halo of lightnings, and the Lone Power standing there watching in the shadows, Nita sucked in a soft, concerned breath, and shook her head. “Poor guy,” she said.

“Poor him, yeah, and poor me, if our ‘old friend’ had decided to shift Its interest elsewhere,” Kit said. “I could have used you there, if only for moral support.”

Nita looked at the ground for a few moments. “Are you sure I’d do you much good at this point?” she said. “I’m not exactly… stable right now. If I lost my grip in the middle of something important, don’t know what I’d do afterward.”

Kit wasn’t sure what to say to that. Nita was too good a wizard to understate or overstate the problem. If she wasn’t confident enough to work actively at the moment, maybe she was wiser to sideline herself somewhat until she felt more sure of herself. That certainty of what to do and how to do it had saved them both more than once. If her certainty should fail at a crucial moment…

“Your call, Neets,” Kit said. “I don’t want to push you.”

“If you really need me,” Nita said, “all you have to do is yell. You know I’ll be there in a second, if I can figure out how to get to where you are.”

“Ponch can find you,” Kit said. He grinned. “I’m beginning to think there’s not much he can’t find… if I can just figure out how to ask him for it.”

Nita nodded. Over at the school building, the end-of-period bell rang. “Let me know when you’re going to go looking for him again,” Nita said. “At least I can keep the time free for you if you do need me for something.”

“Right. And let me know what you find out about your mystery messages.” The two of them started to walk back toward the school doors. “Be funny if it’s some rogue intelligence trying to figure out whether it’s okay to invade the Earth. Whatever you do, don’t give them our address.”

“The way things are going in my life at the moment,” Nita said, “it’s more likely to be some alien kid making crank calls, or trying to order a pizza.” And she actually smiled slightly.

Kit knocked his fist against hers, and went to his next class.

***

Nita walked home from school that afternoon with the “robot” problem still very much occupying her mind. She found Dairine sitting outside on the back steps, staring idly down the driveway.

“Dad didn’t come back early?” Nita said.

Dairine shook her head as Nita got out her house key. “What’re you doing out here?” Nita said.

Her sister gave her a look. “Didn’t seem to be much point in going into the house when you’ve left a live teleport spell going.”

Nita opened the door. “Dair,” she said, “maybe I’m cruel, but I’m not a sadist. Besides, why waste energy? The spell expired at the end of your school day.”

They went in. Nita hung up her parka and went to the fridge to find something to eat. Dairine stood there looking out the back door as she took off her own coat. “Close the door. You’re going to let all the heat out,” Nita said. “So how did the meeting with the principal go?”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “I made an agreement with him and Dad to stop cutting, if that’s what you’re asking about,” she said, closing the door. She went through the kitchen toward the living room.

“That’s not exactly what I was asking about,” Nita said. “What about Dad? How did he handle it?”

“He was okay,” Dairine said from the living room.

There was something about her sister’s tone of voice that made Nita forget about food for the moment. She went into the living room after her. “Was he upset?” Nita said.

“No,” Dairine said.

“He should have been,” Nita said.

“If things were normal, he probably would have been. But nothing is normal.”

Dairine sat down very abruptly on a hassock in front of one of the easy chairs. “Neets,” she said, so softly that Nita could barely hear her, “school sucks. It sucks so completely that even the Speech barely has words for it. It doesn’t feel like any of it matters anymore. And everyone who looks at me is thinking either ‘Aww, poor little kid’ or ‘She’s just trying to get sympathy by looking so sad; why doesn’t she just get over it?’ If I can’t actually hear them thinking it, I can see it in their faces. Every day of this is like Chinese water torture. The seconds just fall on your head one after another, and every one is just like the last one. The minutes just crawl by, and nothing gets better. Everything just keeps hurting. And you have to sit there, in the middle of all this meaningless junk, and put up with it, and act like it matters. Like anything matters.”

Nita found herself thinking of the weary, repetitive feeling she’d sensed in the robot when she’d been confronted with it. Moment following moment, all of them the same… There were similarities. She sighed, shook her head sadly. “Dair—”

“I’ve thought of leaving,” Dairine said, barely above a whisper. “Running away.”

Nita flushed first cold, then hot. “It would kill Dad,” she said. “You know it would.”

Dairine was quiet for a few moments. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t done it. But it doesn’t make it any easier, Neets. And just when I could actually use some help dealing with … with stuff, the woman they’ve got assigned as my counselor is a complete waste of time. She’s some girl just out of college who’s more nervous about the kids at school than they are about her. What kind of good can she do anybody? Least of all me. She doesn’t even have a clear memory of what it’s like to be a kid anymore. I know she doesn’t: That part of her brain might just as well have a big sign on it saying, ‘Your message here.’ She’s completely relieved not to remember what it was like to be one of us poor, powerless creatures.” Dairine’s expression went fierce with contempt. “Just having to look at her makes my brain hurt.”

“I wonder if they could give you Millman, instead,” Nita said. “He’s good.”

“I don’t care,” Dairine said. “I’ll put up with her, with school, with whatever. For Dad’s sake. And I will not let this break me. But I am going to hate every single water-torture-drop second of it, and I may just let you know about that every now and then.”

She looked up at Nita in defiance.

“Come here and gimme a hug,” Nita said.

Dairine gave her a look. “You’re just saying that because Mom would say it.”

“I’m saying it,” Nita said, furious, “because right now I need a hug.”

The nature of the look Dairine was giving Nita changed. She got up off the hassock, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard. Nita hung on to Dairine, not saying anything for a few moments, then let go of her and went back into the kitchen.

She assembled a sandwich, hardly paying attention to what went into it, put it on a plate, and started to take it up to her room. “By the way,” Nita said as she went, and Dairine went after her, “I think your machine buddies have been trying to reach you.”

“Huh?”

“Got a call from one of them this morning. At least I think that’s what it was.”

Nita went into her room and sat down at the desk. Dairine followed her in and sat on the bed. “I haven’t been expecting anything.”

“Then what was this?” In her mind, Nita showed Dairine the image of the clown, going around and around. “And this?” She showed her the image of the robot.

Dairine looked at the two images carefully, especially the second one, and shook her head. “Not for me, Neets,” she said. “Neither of those are any of my guys. These are organic in origin.”

“How can you be sure?”

“The silicon life-forms and the machine intelligences have a specific flavor,” Dairine said. “A couple different flavors, actually, but they’re similar. Like fudge ripple and rocky road.”

Nita gave her sister an amused look. Only Dairine would think of classifying other life-forms’ telepathic signatures in terms of ice cream. “Whatever got in touch with you is organic, all right,” Dairine said. “I’m not sure about the distance, though. But it feels really alone.” She sat silent for a moment, pondering. “Might be stuck in some kind of pinched-off space. It’s trying to reach out, anyway.”

“Trying to get out, maybe?” Nita said.

Dairine shook her head again. “No idea,” she said. She got up, stretched a little listlessly. “Anyway, Neets, that call wasn’t for me,” Dairine said. “It’s all yours.”

“Great,” Nita said. “All I have to do now is figure out what it wants.”

Dairine wasn’t even listening anymore, though. She was already wandering out the door. Nita watched her go, and let out one more of many quiet, worried breaths. Wandering anywhere wasn’t her sister’s style. Dairine, when she went somewhere, went full tilt, focused like a laser.

Until a month ago, Nita thought. Until the world changed.

She gulped, feeling the tears rise. No, Nita thought. I am not going to do that right now. I am going to sit here with the manual, have a look at the tutorials in the Speech, and see if there’s something obvious I’m missing. Which is entirely possible, because there’s always more of the Speech to learn. But when whoever this is calls again, this time I’m going to understand it.

“Oh,” Dairine said. “By the way…”

Nita looked up to see Dairine standing in the doorway again. “Sorry about this morning,” Dairine said.

“Uh, okay,” Nita said.

“Really, Neets. Very sorry. I was being incredibly stupid.”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, unwilling to agree too forcefully with this sentiment, no matter how true it was. “Thanks.”

“So would you kindly get off your butt and bring my bed back from Pluto?”

Nita smiled slightly and reached for her manual.

***

That night, when the call came again, while she was asleep, she was ready for it.

Nita had spent the better part of four rather frustrating hours buried in her manual after her talk with Dairine, and had been forced to realize that no matter how she might cram, she wasn’t going to be able to make a big difference in her vocabulary in the Speech in a single night, or for that matter, a single month. Like any other serious language study, it was going to take time. In the short term, it made more sense to concentrate on being able to make as much sense as possible of the next dream, when it came. That meant being in control of the dream, instead of just wandering around in it.

What people had come in recent years to call lucid dreaming had always been a useful tool for wizards. In some ways the mind was at its most flexible when unconscious, and therefore not insistently trying to make sense of everything. Human logic wasn’t the only kind, and it could get in the way. The dream-state’s ready acceptance of just about everything was often handy for understanding and getting comfortable with the thought processes of a species you didn’t know well.

The spell to induce lucid dreaming was easy to construct—hardly more than an instruction in the Speech to one’s own brain to handle some of its chemistry, but only some, as if it were still awake. It took Nita about ten minutes and about the same effort as running up and down stairs a few times to knit the appropriate words of the Speech into a loose, glowing chain about a foot and a half long. This she fastened around her throat, necklace style, though the actual fastening took her several minutes: it was hard to do the wizard’s knot with both hands out of sight behind her neck. Oh, the heck with this, Nita finally thought, giving up. She pulled the loose ends of the spell out in front where she could see them, did the “knot” up that way to clasp the “necklace” shut, and got into bed.

After that, it was just a matter of getting to sleep.

This took longer than usual when she was expecting something to happen. But it was becoming so normal for it to take a long time, lately, that Nita was beginning to just accept this. Gradually, enough of the tension and anticipation slipped away to let the fatigue of the day do its job on Nita, dropping her over the edge of consciousness into sleep.

It was the nature of the spell not to activate until dreaming actually began. How long she actually spent in the preparatory space between falling asleep and dreaming, Nita had no idea. But the activation seemed to come very quickly.

She was standing in the dark again, in a place where light fell in one spot from some source she couldn’t see. The darkness was not entirely quiet; from outside it came a faint sound, blurred and confused, like traffic noise outside a closed window, or voices in another room with the door closed—a hum, a mutter that both sounded and felt remote. Alone in that faintly humming darkness, under the single source of light, lay a big slab or dais of some kind—and there was some kind of figure on it.

Slowly, Nita made her way through the darkness toward the patch of light. The feeling of this dream was entirely different from that of the previous ones. She could still taste metal in the air, somehow, but it now seemed to her less mechanical, less impersonal a flavor. Maybe I’m just getting used to it, Nita thought, as she passed through the immense darkness pressing down all around, heading slowly for the light.

It was a dais there, under the white radiance that seemed to fall on it from nowhere; and the figure kneeling there, in the center of the stone, glittered blindingly silver in the light. It was a knight, kneeling there on the pure white stone, completely covered from head to foot in plate armor, and holding before him, with its point resting on the stone, a sword in a metal scabbard that gleamed even more brightly than the armor did.

Nita tried to remember in what book she had seen this image, a long time ago. Yet at the same time she also thought of the robot she’d seen the previous night, for the knight’s helmet was the same in front—a perfectly smooth, blank surface, with just a single dark opening crossing it, for the eyes to look out through.

Quietly she stepped around in front of—him? There was no telling.

“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”

There was a long silence.

“Greetings also,” the answer came back. Though it was a human-sounding voice, it didn’t come from inside the armor. It was omnidirectional, and seemed to come out of nothing, the way the light did. And the armor did not move in the slightest, as Nita would have expected it to, at least a little, if there was someone inside it.

Nita was relieved. At least the spell was working insofar as it was making communication possible, or a lot more possible than it had been the night before. “Were you trying to talk to me last night?” Nita said.

“Many times,” the voice said.

“I couldn’t understand a lot of what you were saying to me then, but I think that may be fixed now,” Nita said. “What can I do for you?”

There was another long pause. “Nothing,” the voice said. “This is the vigil. There’s nothing to do but wait for the fight to begin again.”

“What fight?” Nita said.

“With the Enemy,” the knight said. “What else is there? Outside of the fighting, nothing exists but this.”

Nita glanced around her. There was no sign of anything else but the two of them in this whole place, which seemed to stretch away into a dark infinity “When will the fight start again?” she said.

“Soon.”

“What happens when you win?”

“There’s no winning this battle. But also no losing it, because for the Enemy, for the shadow that stalks this darkness, there’s no winning the fight, either.”

For the first time, the knight moved, lifting his head up into the light. There was no telling how she knew it, but Nita knew that inside the helmet, the knight was smiling. All the darkness sang with the force of his resolve, and with his amusement—a grim but good-natured cheerfulness that seemed very strange when taken together with what he’d just said.

That good cheer in the face of what sounded like a hopeless situation struck a chord somewhere in Nita, even in her sleep. The sense got stronger and stronger in the dark air around her—of a great strength being hoarded in this place for the oncoming battle, of an unusual bravery. Valor: that was the word that described what Nita felt seeping into this space from the glittering form at its center. It made her feel like she had to do something to be of use. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?” Nita said.

The silence that followed stretched out much longer than the other two had.

“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here,” the knight said. “That It will have to fight here, again and again. But that It won’t pass.” And again Nita could feel the fierce, amused smile inside the armor.

“I can’t stay,” Nita said. That was one of the only drawbacks to lucid dreaming: even when reinforced by wizardry, a dream’s duration was very limited. “But I know where this place is now. I can come back if you need help, or I can bring someone else with me who can help you better—”

“No help will avail here,” the knight said, kindly enough, but sternly, too. “This fight must happen only as it has happened, or it will be lost. And if it’s lost, everything else will be—”

Without warning, darkness fell. Nita, uncertain where she was or what had happened, tried to see, but in that complete blackness, there was no way to see anything at all. Briefly, she heard the sound of laughter, challenging and cheerful, and the ringing scrape of a sword being drawn—

***

And then Nita was sitting up in her bed, open-eyed and startled in the less unnerving darkness of her own bedroom. She wasn’t frightened, even though she’d caught a taste, in the dream’s last moments, of what had been coming toward the knight out of the newly fallen blackness. She knew that Enemy too well to be shocked by Its appearance anymore. But the thought of leaving that glad, tough presence to fight all by itself irked her. And though she’d at least been able to make out what it was saying this time, that wasn’t the same as understanding it.

She glanced over at the hands of her bedside clock glowing in the darkness. They said two-thirty. Nita sighed and lay down again, feeling more determined than ever to figure out what was going on. In fact, she felt more determined than she had about anything for weeks.

“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here…”

Eventually Nita fell asleep again, and down the corridors of dream, she heard the sword come scraping out of its sheath again, and again, and again….

Chapter 5: Quandaries

When her alarm went off at about a quarter after six, Nita dragged herself out of bed, showered, and got ready for school with that fierce, small sword-sound still repeating itself in her memory When she woke her dad up, it was still very much on her mind. She found him a little later in the kitchen, having the coffee she’d made for him when she’d finished dressing, and saw him looking thoughtfully at her manual, which Nita had carried into the kitchen with her earlier and had left open and facedown on the counter.

“I thought you seemed a little distracted this morning,” he said, pouring milk into his coffee. “You look like you’re working hard on something. Harder than usual.”

He means, harder than usual lately, Nita thought. “Yeah,” she said. “First-contact problem.”

“As in first contact with an alien species?”

“I think so,” Nita said. “We’ve been having some trouble communicating.”

Her dad shook his head. “I should get you to talk to my cut-flower distributor,” he said. “If you can get through to something from another planet, maybe you could get through to even him.”

Nita had heard enough stories about her dad’s troubles with this particular supplier in the past couple of years to make her uncertain. “Might need more power than I’ve got at the moment.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” her dad said. “What exactly did you do to your sister yesterday?”

Nita raised her eyebrows. “I got her to see sense,” she said.

Nita’s dad gave her a loving but skeptical look. “Using what kind of nuclear weapon?” he said. “Just so I know when the government calls.”

Humor, she thought. When was the last time I heard Daddy make a joke? Since… well. Since then.

“I moved her bedroom furniture around,” Nita said. “Did a couple of other things… nothing life-threatening.” She looked at her dad over the rim of her mug of tea as she took a drink. “Not that I didn’t think about it.”

Her dad sighed. “You wouldn’t have been the first one,” he said, rinsing out his coffee cup. He got his coat off the hook by the door and shrugged into it. “Keep an eye on her, though, will you?”

“Sure, Daddy.”

Her dad came over and gave her a hug that lingered for a moment. He put his chin down on the top of her head, something else he hadn’t done for a while, and said, “You’ve been the one holding everything together. And that’s not fair to you. I feel like I haven’t been doing everything I could…”

Nita shook her head. “I’m not sure I see it that way, Daddy,” she said, and that was all she could get out.

He squeezed her, let her go. “Shop’s open late tonight,” he said. “Won’t be home till nine. You have anything planned?”

Nita shook her head. “I need to do some research,” she said. “If I have to go out, it won’t be for long, and nowhere far.”

“Okay. Bye…”

She leaned against the counter again, leafing through her manual, while the sound of her dad’s car faded off down the road. She thought she knew how he felt: as if he was the weak link in the family. But she often felt that way herself, and she knew Dairine did, too—and they couldn’t all be right. This was something that had come up in one of her earliest talks with Mr. Millman, a simple piece of logic that had completely eluded Nita until then—probably her first sign that Millman was not just some “good idea” wished on her by the school, but was someone genuinely worth listening to. Nita knew now that all you could do was try to let the sense of inadequacy pass over you, or the other person, and dissipate. Arguing too hard about it was likely to make the other person think you were trying to hide the truth from them.

She sighed and turned another page. The size of her manual’s linguistics section had nearly tripled since she got up with the day’s research in mind, and she was left now with the realization that her own knowledge of the Speech was even more basic than she’d thought it was. I can’t believe how dumb I’ve been about this, she thought. The quick vocabulary test she’d taken before her dad came down for his coffee had suggested that Nita was readily familiar with about 650 terms in the Speech … out of a possible 750,000. And more words were being rediscovered or coined every day by wizards of every species. There were even regional dialects and variants, alternate recensions used by species whose physiologies or brain structure, or sometimes even the structure of their home universe, meant that the most basic forms of the Speech had to be altered to make sense. I’ve been treating this like it was a dead language, Nita thought. But it’s alive. It’s the language of Life Itself: how could it not be?

And then, no matter how many of the words you might know, there was always the question of context … the way a species used the Speech. Some species understood it clearly, but meant very different things by their usage of it than other species did. Some members of other species, too, whether wizards or not, might have only a beginner’s acquaintance with the Speech, a most basic understanding of how to use it. Like it looks like I have, Nita thought, turning the manual’s pages ruefully.

So the question is: Was the clown the one being ineffective the other day, or was it me? Because the way she felt lately, Nita thought the incompetence was a lot more likely to have been on her side. And how come I got so little from the knight? Was that just because I was having trouble dealing with the way he used the Speech? Or was he hiding something?

And why?

She leaned there on her folded arms for a while, looking rather glumly at the manual, and didn’t even bother looking up when Dairine came padding in wearing one of their dad’s T-shirts, hunting her breakfast. “Morning.”

“Yeah,” Nita said, turning over another page covered with necessary vocabulary that she didn’t know.

Dairine stuck her head in the refrigerator. “My bed creaks now,” she said.

“It’s always creaked,” Nita said as Dairine came out with the milk. “That’s because you never just get into it: you fling yourself onto it. And don’t get me started on the jumping.”

“I think it’s because it just spent the better part of a day down a crevasse full of liquid nitrogen,” Dairine said, getting a bowl for her cereal.

“If it spent any time in liquid nitrogen, it wouldn’t just creak,” Nita said. “It’d shatter.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking your wizardry wasn’t temperature-tight,” Dairine said, pouring first cereal and then milk. “I think you dropped a variable.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I bet you did.”

“Didn’t.”

Dairine gave Nita a look that said, Yes, you did, you idiot, and went out into the dining room with her cereal.

Nita smiled slightly as she turned another page. At least Dairine seemed to be back to normal for the moment. Of course, it might be a ploy to lull me into a false sense of security. But Nita thought her sister knew better than to bother trying to mislead her just now, when Nita’s fuse was shorter than usual. Next time, it might not be just Dairine’s bed that wound up down a crevasse… and Dairine’s present power levels were no longer quite what they’d been a while ago. Nita’s couple of years’ more experience as a wizard might be enough temporarily to keep Dairine in line.

She raised her eyebrows and went back to the vocabulary list. I really wish there were ways to just magically make all this information go into my head, Nita thought. Oh well…

Dairine finished her cereal and went to get dressed, and Nita kept reading, turning page after page in the manual, looking for a hint as to what she might have been missing. It was at least an hour later when Dairine came by again, dressed, with the backpack she used as a book bag over her shoulder; Nita glanced up just long enough to see Dairine putting her coat on, and to notice the small, glowing, rose-colored eye looking at her from inside the bag.

“Have you been upgrading Spot again?” Nita said.

“He’s been upgrading himself,” Dairine said. “Wireless, optical … some other stuff.” She looked affectionately at the bag as she shouldered it, and the little eye on its silvery stalk disappeared back down between the backpack and its flap.

“I wouldn’t let anybody see him, if I were you,” Nita said.

“They can’t. But he can see them. Gotta go, Neets.”

“See you…”

Dairine left. Nita spent some moments more reading the manual in the quiet, until suddenly she realized that if she didn’t get out of there, she was the one who was going to be in trouble for being late. She ran off to get her own backpack, and her manual went floating after her.

***

The rest of the day went by fairly quickly, partly because Nita’s concerns about the communications between her and “her aliens” kept bringing Nita back to the manual in every free moment that wasn’t taken up with class work. She hardly thought seriously about anything else until just before her lunch period, when Nita suddenly remembered that today was when the time and day for her next session with Mr. Millman would be posted.

When the bell rang, she made her way down into the corridor in the south wing of the school, where the administrative offices were, and from there into the main office, where the bulletin board for the special services messages was still located, an old-fashioned system that seemed not to have been supplanted by text messages even though apparently this was supposed to happen “real soon now”. Nita found the pinned-up folded message that said N. CALLAHAN, pulled it off the board, and headed out into the corridor, opening it.

The message said, “Dear Nita: 7:30 A.M., Monday. Hope the magic’s going okay. Don’t forget to bring some cards. I want to find out how to keep them from falling out of my sleeve. R. Millman.”

Nita looked at this and was tempted to shred the note right down to its component atoms. What in the worlds made me say that to him, she thought, shoving the note into the pocket of her jeans and stalking off down the hall.

By the time she got to the cafeteria, though, she’d shrugged off the annoyance and was once again worrying at one aspect of the clown-robot-knight problem: specifically, that he hadn’t used any personal pronouns in their conversation at all. Nita got herself a sandwich and a fruit juice, sat down by herself off to one side, and spent another half hour looking into what recensions of the Speech were built this way. There were five, and mostly species that used them preferred for cultural reasons to imply personal interaction rather than indicating it directly by way of a a redactive or “virtual” pronoun, which—

It’s sounding a little dry in there, Neets…

Nita smiled. You have no idea, she said, and shut the manual. Nita disposed of her lunch tray and went out of the cafeteria, into the small side parking lot. Kit was leaning against the chain-link fence on the far side, hugging himself a little against the cold while he watched a boys’ gym class out in the athletic field running easy laps to cool down after soccer practice.

Nita went to lean against the fence beside him. “You know any card tricks?” she said under her breath.

He looked at her oddly. “No. Why?”

“I did something incredibly stupid. I mentioned magic to Millman at our last meeting. He thought I meant magician stuff, though, the sawing-people-in-half kind of magic. Now he wants me to show him some.”

Kit stared at Nita, then burst out laughing. “You should do some wizardry, and let him think it’s magic. I bet you can do all kinds of fancy card tricks when you can really make them vanish.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” Nita frowned. “I’m not sure I like the idea, though. Making the real thing look like something fake … It’s too much like lying.”

Kit nodded. “What made you mention magic to him at all, though?”

“I wish I could remember. It was an impulse, and I felt like such a dork afterward.” She sighed. “Never mind. Now I have to learn card tricks in my endless free time.”

Kit raised his eyebrows. “You make any headway with your aliens?”

“Yeah. Or rather, I’m not sure.”

“Not sure they’re aliens?”

Nita shook her head. “Not sure they’re aliens plural, anyway. I’m starting to wonder if think I was talking to the same guy both times.”

“But you understood him this last time, anyway.”

“I’m not real sure about that, either. I think I did… but I keep getting the idea he was holding something back, or having trouble saying something. And it could have been important.” She sighed. “Just gonna have to keep trying. What about you? Did you have time to go after your Ordeal kid again?”

“Not yet. Ponch is still worn out from the last time. I’m going to try to get in touch with Darryl again tonight, maybe tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come along?”

He sounded almost wistful. Nita gave it a moment’s thought, but then shook her head: She might feel more like working today, but she still wasn’t sure of her ability to be of use in a crisis situation. “Give me a little more time,” she said. “I want to work on this Speech problem for the moment. I think if I bear down on it hard enough, I may make a breakthrough.”

“I wouldn’t want to derail you,” Kit said. “But keep me posted.”

“You okay?” Nita said.

Kit looked at her a little strangely. “Why?”

“You look kinda worn out yourself.”

He looked surprised at that, then shrugged. “What Ponch does,” he said, “it takes a lot out of me, too, maybe more than I realize. I do feel a little run down. It’s okay: I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight and be fine tomorrow.”

“What is going on with Ponch?” Nita said. “You were still looking for answers to that…”

Kit shook his head. “I think I’m going to be looking for answers for a while. Trouble is, every time I try to settle down to work it out with the manual, something new goes wrong with the TV. Or something else interrupts me.”

The bell rang. “See that? The story of my life,” Kit said.

“Not just yours,” Nita said. “Look, call me later. You ought to take a look at what I’m working on from the ‘inside’; maybe you can make some sense of it.”

“Right,” Kit said.

They parted company and went off to their classes. Nita more or less sleepwalked through her afternoon algebra and statistics class, grateful not to be called on. Her mind was still tangled up in virtual and non-pronominal pronouns, and the question of what could be that wrong with Kit’s TV that it would prove a distraction to him. The second-to-last period that afternoon was a study hall, and Nita got no more than three sentences into an essay on the abandonment of the gold standard before ditching the essay to return to the manual again; the gold standard made even virtual pronouns look good by comparison.

Toward the end of that period, though, and during the next one—a music appreciation class full of jangly, early twentieth-century twelve-tone music, which Nita found impossible for anyone to appreciate—she started wondering exactly what was going on with her. Sure, she might occasionally detest her homework—more than occasionally, especially in the case of her present civics class: Her teacher had a great love of saddling her students with essays on apparently useless subjects. But detesting the homework didn’t mean Nita didn’t get it done.

Oh, come on. It’s not like the universe is going to come apart because I’m less than excited about the gold standard and feel more like working on wizardry.

Yet the excuse sounded hollow. More to the point, it sounded like an excuse. When the bell rang for the last time that day, at two-forty-five, Nita walked out through the exuberant Friday afternoon rush to the lockers in a somber mood. She looked for Kit in the parking lot, didn’t see him, and wasn’t surprised: he had quicker, quieter ways of getting home than the other kids here.

She could have taken that same way home, but didn’t. She walked home slowly, thinking. Nita paused only long enough in her house to dump her books and change out of her school clothes into something more comfortable—looser jeans, a floppier sweatshirt—and to check on Dairine. Her sister was lying on her stomach, on her bed, with Spot lying on the bed next to her; the little computer had put out a couple of stalky eyes to look at a book Dairine was reading.

“School okay?” Nita said.

Dairine gave Nita the kind of look that someone in the Middle Ages might have given a relative who asked if the black plague was okay. Her only other answer was to bounce herself up and down on the mattress a little. The bed creaked loudly.

“Did not,” Nita said, and went downstairs again to get her parka.

“Where you going?” came the voice from upstairs.

“Tom’s.”

***

Tom and Carl’s backyard was already going twilit, this time of year, even so soon after school. Nita paused there a moment, looking up at the sky, which was clear for a change after several days’ worth of cloudy weather, and wished that spring would hurry up—she hated these short days. She meandered over to the koi pond and glanced down into it. The pond wasn’t heated, but it didn’t freeze, either; into the pond and the ground beneath it, Carl had set a small utility wizardry that acted on the same general principle as a heat pump, keeping the water at an even sixty degrees Fahrenheit. All the same, at this time of the year the koi were naturally a little sluggish. Right now they were mostly gathered together under the weeds and water lilies down at one end of the pond. Nita peered down, able to see nothing but the occasional flick of tail or fin, and once a coppery eye glancing back up at her.

“Hey,” she said. “Got any words of wisdom?”

The single koi that had looked back, a white one with an orange patch on its head, drifted up to just beneath the surface and regarded her. Then it stuck its mouth up into the air.

“Seen in plain daylight the firefly’s just one more bug; but night restores it—”

Nita raised her eyebrows. The koi gave her a look that suggested she was a waste of its time, and drifted straight back under the lily pads again.

“If you listen to them for too long,” Tom said as he pushed open the patio door, “you won’t be able to say anything that takes more than seventeen syllables.”

“I should send Dairine over,” Nita said.

“Even their powers have limits,” Tom said, as Nita came in. “I just made tea. Can I interest you?”

“Yeah. It’s cold.” Nita slipped out of her parka, draped it over one of Tom’s dining room chairs.

“They’re predicting snow,” Tom said, pouring each of them a mug of tea and bringing them over to the table.

“That’s funny. It’s clear.”

“For the moment. There’s a storm working its way up the coast, though. Four to six inches, they said.”

Nita gave him a wry look. “Why couldn’t this happen on Monday and get us a day off from school?” she said.

“There are about thirty different answers to that, from the strictly meteorological mode down to the ethical,” Tom said, looking equally wry, “but they all factor down more or less to mean, ‘Just because. So cope with it.’”

Nita nodded and smiled a little, but the smile fell off almost immediately. “I need to ask you something.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Tom said, “though Annie and Monty doubtless have a different opinion. Anyway, what’s up?”

She looked at him across the table. “Am I using wizardry to avoid life?” Nita said.

Tom raised his eyebrows. “Wizardry is Life,” he said. “Or, at the very least, in service of Life. By definition. So, equally by definition, the answer to that question is no. Want to try rephrasing?”

Nita sat for a moment and thought. “I’ve been spending a lot of time with the manual.”

“So do we all.”

“No, I mean a lot of time. For me, anyway.”

“And this means—?”

Nita paused, wondering how to phrase this. “My last really big wizardry,” she said, “didn’t work.”

“Uh, there we’d have to disagree.”

“I don’t mean in terms of wizardry,” Nita said. “I mean in terms of what the pissed-off places in the back of my brain think about it. My mom still died.”

“Mmm,” Tom said. His expression was noncommittal.

“What I want to know is—is it possible to use research as a way to put off doing other stuff you should be doing?”

“Again, anything’s possible. What is it you think you should be doing?”

Nita shook her head, pushed her teacup back and forth on the table mat. “I don’t know. Something more … active.”

“You think research is passive?”

“Compared to what I’ve been doing up until now, yeah.”

Nita reached sideways into the air for her manual, came out with it, opened it to the listings area, and pushed it over to Tom, tapping on her listing. “‘Optional,’” Nita said. “I’m not real wild about that.”

“I’m not sure I read that construct the same way,” Tom said. “I’d translate it more as meaning your options are open: that you’re not concretely assigned to anything at the moment. Maybe a better rendering would be ‘freelance.’” He glanced at her manual. “But then you seem to be taking a look at the vocabulary end of things at the moment.”

“Please,” Nita said. “I feel so ignorant. Me and my six hundred and fifty words.”

“Maybe it’ll be some consolation to you that the average English-speaking person’s day-to-day vocabulary is only a thousand or fifteen hundred words,” Tom said. “But I understand how you feel. And the Speech is so much more complex than English in terms of specialized vocabulary. It has to be, if you’re going to name things properly. And so that means doing vocabulary-building all the time.”

He knocked one knuckle on the tabletop a couple of times. Immediately his version of the manual appeared on the table—seven or eight thick volumes like phone books. “This one,” Tom said, pulling a single volume out of the stack—while the ones above it considerately remained hovering in place over where the middle one had been— “this one is my vocabulary work for this year.”

Nita looked at it in horror as Tom dropped it to the table and flipped it open. “Remind me never to become a Senior,” she said.

“Like you can avoid it when it happens,” Tom said, sounding resigned. “Nita, you wouldn’t be the first wizard to get confused about the apparent differences between active and passive work in wizardry. But the Powers That Be don’t see the distinction—or They see it as largely illusory.” He paged through the book, stopping about halfway through to glance at something. “If you go through this, you’ll see often enough where it says that wizards are told only what they need to know ‘for the work at hand.’ Which leaves you with the question: What do they find in it when there is no work at hand—no official assignment? You’d be surprised. But it’s never anything that goes to waste. Sooner or later, every wizard’s work, however minor, does someone, somewhere, some good. It’s an extension of the ‘all is done for each’ principle.”

“So what I’m doing isn’t like… withdrawal or anything?” Nita said.

“Oh, no. Don’t forget, there are wizards who do nothing but read the manual.” Tom looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t be that far down the road. My job tends more toward focused research. But I still spend maybe seventy percent of my theoretically ‘inactive’ time reading these things. It’s a big universe out there. Just this planet, for example: think how much you can discover about it just by going to the library or rummaging around on the Web. Then imagine you have access to a book that contains most of the salient facts about your universe. Wouldn’t you spend a lot of time between the covers?”

“Uh,” Nita said. “Well, I guess I have been.”

“So, at the very least, even if you didn’t have a goal you were working toward, which I think you have, I wouldn’t consider your time wasted,” Tom said. “As for you not being on active assignment, that’s between you and the Powers. They value the work we do sufficiently to avoid pushing us to function when it wouldn’t be appropriate to the wizard’s own best interests. Emergencies do come up; but routinely, if being on duty would impair your own status, you’re not called up.” He eyed Nita. “If you’re starting to feel the need to get back into the saddle, of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be the one to tell me.”

Nita examined the floor in some detail for a few moments before she said anything. “It’s not like I actually feel all that much better,” she said, hardly above a whisper. She was watching herself with great care to see if she was going to start crying again; she couldn’t have borne it right this minute. “Every now and then I forget to hurt. But the rest of the time… I keep seeing those last few hours with my mom, over and over.” Then she frowned. “But I can’t just sit around. It’s not bringing my mother back. And I keep getting the feeling she’d be annoyed with me for, I don’t know, for indulging myself in just sitting around and feeling bad when I should be busy with something important. Because this is important.”

Tom nodded. “I don’t think I can argue with that,” he said. “Meanwhile, tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Nita spent a few minutes describing the contacts she’d been having from the aliens, especially the last one—the knight—and the cryptic message he, or it, had left her.

When she was finished, Tom shook his head. “‘What fights the Enemy…,”’ he said. “You’re right, the phrasing’s interesting.”

“You think this alien’s a wizard?”

“Hard to tell,” Tom said. “There are lots of creatures all over the universe who both use the Speech and work to oppose the Lone Power without being wizards.” He shrugged. “For the time being, I’d keep trying to get through, I suppose, and see if you can work inward to a mode where there’s more clarity.”

“Yeah. I’m going to try the lucid dreaming again tonight, I think. So far, that’s where I’ve had the best results.” Nita frowned. “I guess that’s the other thing that’s worried me. The possibility of getting stuck in a dreamworld…”

“I’m not sure I see that as a danger for you,” Tom said. “I’d almost suggest the danger would lie in too much hardheaded practicality… in being too tough on yourself. For the time being, you seem to be okay. Let me know how you progress with your ‘alien,’ anyway.”

“Yeah.”

Nita got up and slipped into her parka, glancing at Tom’s stack of manuals again. “You have to learn that whole thing this year?”

“And keep Carl from blowing up the house,” Tom said. “Even wizardry may be insufficient to the task. See you later.”

***

“Kit, querido,” Kit’s mama said, “if you feed that dog so many dog biscuits, you’ll spoil his appetite for dinner.”

In the kitchen, adding a last few seasonings to what would shortly be a pot of minestrone soup, Kit’s father laughed out loud. “Impossible.”

Kit was sitting on the dining room sofa, trying to read one of the books on autism from the library: this one having to do with art by autistics. He’d picked it up on a hunch, and was finding it more useful than he’d thought, as what he was seeing and reading made some sense to him in terms of what he’d been getting from Darryl. Some of the art in the book was very architectural, preoccupied with scale and stillness: some of it very “representational”, mostly images of people or animals, some of these quite symbolic and some exquisitely detailed. The artists interviewed talked about their attempts to create and express beauty while also communicating the desire for relief from the world’s never-ending assault on their senses, or their understandable anger at a world that put so much stress on “being yourself” but refused to allow them to be who they were.

That whole thing, Kit thought, that desert: it wasn’t Darryl’s mind as such. It was something he’d made. Maybe even as a work of art — but either way, something built for a purpose. Ponch was right: he wouldn’t be inside that, except the way an artist gets ‘into’ his painting. The creator’s outside it, surrounding it…

And I still have to find out why. Is this part of his Ordeal, all this interior building? Ponch said it wasn’t new. Is that whole construct maybe one big communication, a really detailed message? Impossible to tell as yet: he was going to have to get back in there, track Darryl down when he wasn’t suffering the Lone Power’s attentions and get to the root of this.Meantime he was trying to finish the book, but unfortunately the reading was being made difficult, if not impossible, by the large black muzzle that kept insinuating itself between Kit and the open pages, and the big brown eyes that looked beseechingly up into Kit’s. Just one more, Ponch said.

“You’re gonna turn into a blimp,” Kit said.

I’ll be a happy blimp, Ponch said. What’s a blimp?

Kit’s mama laughed. Kit glanced up at her.

“He’s loud sometimes, honey,” his mama said, handing Kit’s papa the pepper shaker as he held his hand out for it. “I don’t know why you can’t hear it.”

Kit’s pop shook his head as he looked down into the pot, grinding pepper in. “From what Kit says, I don’t know why you can hear it at all. None of us should be able to.”

“Maybe it’s because I usually feed him in the mornings,” Kit’s mama said. “I’m used to hearing him complain that he’s not getting enough.” She made a kind of rrrgh noise that went up into a whine at the end, a fair imitation of Ponch’s reaction to an empty dish when there was someone around who could give him the rest of the can of dog food.

Ponch’s eyes moved at that, a sideways glance. Her accent’s not bad. I could teach her Cyene.

“Let’s not deal with this right now,” Kit said. He could just see his mom going down the street to try to talk sense to Tinkerbell.

One more! Ponch said.

“One,” Kit said. He gave Ponch the last dog biscuit in the box, put the book aside, and got up to throw the box away.

“The onions done yet?” his mama said.

“Nearly,” said Kit’s pop, as Kit stomped the box flat to make it take up less room in the recycling. Behind Kit, the emphatic crunching noises by the sofa came to an end, and Ponch ran into the kitchen. Out?

“Sure,” Kit said, opening the door. A fierce cold wind came in as Ponch shot out.

“Shut that, sweetie. It’s freezing!” Kit’s mama said.

“Gonna snow tonight, they said on the TV,” said Kit’s pop, picking up the frying pan in which the onions had been sizzling, and scraping them out into the soup as Kit shut the door.

“A lot?” Kit said.

“Six to eight inches.”

Kit sighed. It wouldn’t be anything like enough to make them keep school closed on Monday. That would take at least a few feet. Not for the first time he wished that it wasn’t unethical to talk a snowstorm into dumping three feet of snow onto his immediate neighborhood. It was fun to think about, but the trouble he would have gotten into with Tom and Carl, not to mention the Powers That Be, would have made the pleasure short-lived.

Still, if I told the snowstorm to dump, say, twelve feet of snow just on the school, and then only enough everywhere else so that everybody could have fun for a day; say six inches or so…

Kit sighed again. Though such a course of action would be less trouble to the snowplow crews, the emergency services, and everybody else who wanted to go on about their lives, something like that would cause a whole lot of talk, and still get him in trouble. But the image of his school completely buried under a giant snowdrift made him smile. “By the way, Pop,” Kit said, “is the TV still okay?”

“Seems fine,” his pop said. “Every now and then the thing insists on showing me a news program from some other planet, but…” He shrugged. “As long as nothing happens to interfere with the basketball over the weekend, I don’t mind seeing who’s grown a new head or whatever. Darlin’, you know what I need?”

“Less time on the couch watching basketball?” Kit’s mama suggested.

“Dream on. Celery seed.”

“We’re out of it.”

“You’re just saying that because you hate celery.”

“I know celery seed is different from celery, or celery salt. But we’re still out of it. Look for yourself.”

Kit’s pop went to the cupboard to look. Kit, looking at his mama, thought that her expression was far too innocent. She caught him looking at her, and said, “Isn’t Ponch a long time out, Kit? He hates being out this long when it’s cold. But he hasn’t scratched.”

She had a point there, though Kit thought she was more intent on him not saying anything incriminating about celery seed. Kit grinned. “I’ll go see what he’s doing,” he said, and got his parka off the hook.

He went out, shutting the door hurriedly behind him, and looked up and down the driveway for Ponch. To his surprise, Ponch was sitting at the street end of the driveway, looking up at the sky.

Kit walked down to him, looking up, too. The clouds were, indeed, coming in low and fast from the south on that wind. Past and above the houses across the street, only a few streaks and scraps of the low sunset remained in the west, a bleak, bleached peach color against the encroaching stripes of dark gray. Westward, the reddish spark of Mars could just be seen through the filmy front edges of one of the incoming banks of cloud.

Ponch looked over his shoulder at Kit as Kit came to stand next to him. “You okay?” Kit said to him in the Speech.

Pretty much.

Kit wondered about that. “I mean, about what happened the other day.” He reached down to scratch the dog’s head.

I think so.

The clouds drew together in the west, blanking Mars out, slowly shutting down the last embers of the sunset. “What did happen?”

I saw something.

“Yeah? What was it?”

Not that way, Ponch said. I mean, I noticed something. I never really noticed it before.

Kit waited.

You get hurt sometimes, Ponch said. That makes me sad.

“Yeah, well, I get sad when you’re hurt, too.”

That’s right. And your dam and your sire and your littermates, they hurt sometimes, too. So does Nita. I noticed that. But it didn’t seem to matter as much as you hurting.

Ponch paused for a long time. But then I saw him: Darryl. And what That One was doing to him, and how it hurt him. And he didn’t do anything to deserve that. It was awful, the way he was hurting. And that started to hurt me. And then I thought, Why doesn’t the others’ hurt make me feel like this? And then I felt bad about myself.

Kit hardly knew what to say. It wasn’t that it was a bad thing for his dog to learn about compassion, but that the lesson would come all at once, like this, came as a surprise.

And the others didn’t deserve to be hurt, either, Ponch said, looking up at Kit. Nita didn’t do anything bad, for her mother to die. Why should she be hurt like that? Why should Dairine? Or your sire or dam? They’re good. Why do they have to suffer when they haven’t been bad? It’s not fair!

Kit bowed his head. This line of reasoning all too closely reflected some of his own late-night thoughts over the past couple of months. And all the easy answers—about the Powers That Be and the Lone Power, and all the other additional theories or answers that might be suggested by either religion or science—suddenly sounded hollow and pathetic.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I really don’t know.”

I felt sad for them all, Ponch said. Sad for everything, because it shouldn’t have to be that way. All of a sudden I had to howl, that’s all. He looked embarrassed.

Kit couldn’t think of anything to do but get down on one knee and hug Ponch, and ruffle his fur. After a moment Ponch said, I’m not going to howl now. It’s all right.

“I know,” Kit said. But he wasn’t sure that it was “all right.”

Ponch looked at him again. So what do we do? he said. To make it right?

That answer, at least, Kit was sure of. “Just get on with work,” he said. “That’s what wizards do.”

And their dogs.

“And their dogs,” Kit said. “After dinner tonight, huh? We’ll go looking for Darryl again. We’ll see if we can’t get a word with him… find out what’s going on. Then he can get himself out of there, and we can get back to doing what we usually do.”

Right.

They walked back up the driveway together, and Kit let Ponch into the house, hurriedly shutting the door. The wind outside was beginning to rise. He ditched his coat in a hurry, because his pop had already carried the soup pot to the table, setting it on a trivet, and his mama was putting out bowls and spoons. “No Carmela tonight?” Kit said, because there were only three bowls.

“No, she’s over at Miguel’s with some of the other kids. A homework thing.” His mama sat down, took her spoon, and tasted the soup as Kit’s pop sat down.

“Oh, honey, that’s so good!” his mama said. “Even without the celery seed. Who’d believe most of it came out of a can? What else did you put in there?”

“Genius,” Kit’s father said, and grinned.

Kit was inclined to agree. He finished his first bowl in record time, and reached for the ladle to serve himself some more.

“Another satisfied customer,” his pop said.

Kit nodded, already working on the second bowl.

“You’ve got that fueling-up look,” his pop said, as he chased the last few spoonfuls of soup around his own bowl. “You going out on business tonight, son?”

“Yup.”

“How long?”

“Not late,” Kit said. “I don’t think, anyway. Back by bedtime.”

“Yours, or mine?”

“Mine, Pop.”

“Good,” his dad said. “What you’re doing is important … and so is getting your rest.” His father gave him what Kit usually thought of as “the eye,” a faintly warning look. “You’re looking a little pooped, this past day or so. Try to relax a little over the weekend, okay?”

“If I can,” Kit said.

His pop looked like he was going to say something, then changed his mind, and reached for the ladle himself. “Hey, who took all the beans?”

“That would be me,” Kit’s mama said.

“Now I’m going to have to make another pot of this!”

“How terrible for us all,” she said.

Kit finished his own bowlful and, smiling, got up and put his bowl in the sink. Then he went to get his parka and Ponch’s “leash.”

***

They stood out in the backyard a little while later, in the near darkness, and Kit looked down at Ponch. “Ready?” he said.

All ready.

“You’ve got Darryl’s scent?”

It’s faint, Ponch said. We’re going to have to walk for a while.

Kit checked the force-field spell, which he had integrated into the leash-wizardry, and saw that it was charged, up and running; it would keep hostile environments out for a good while, and protect the two of them from deadly force for at least long enough to come up with a better, more focused defense. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Ponch pulled the bright leash of wizardry taut, stepped forward, and vanished into a darkness deeper than anything in Kit’s backyard. Kit stepped after him; the blackness folded in all around.

They did, indeed, have to walk for some time. Kit kept a careful eye on the line of wizardry stretching between him and Ponch, watching to make sure that it was drawing power correctly, and that the faint “diagnostic” glow of light running up and down it was doing so regularly. Beyond that, there wasn’t much for Kit to do for a long while except keep walking through the dark, watching the ever-so-faintly illuminated shape of his dog as Ponch led the way.

A whispering sound—very faint, seemingly very far away—was the first thing that Kit started to notice as differing from the darkness and silence surrounding them. It was incessant, a soft white-noise hiss at a high frequency, but every now and then Kit thought he heard words in it. Am I just imagining that? he thought as the hiss got louder around them. “You hear that?” he said to Ponch.

The wind? Ponch said. Yes. It’s up ahead, where Darryl is. We’ll be there soon.

“I mean, do you hear something besides the wind? The voices?”

Ponch paused a moment, cocked his head to one side. No, he said. Not right now, anyway. Let’s get there and see if I hear it then.

They started walking again. Quite suddenly, as if they’d walked through a curtain, Kit and Ponch were surrounded by blue-white light. Kit stopped, looking around him, blinking. After the darkness, this brilliance was dazzling.

At least there was gravity, though it felt lighter than Earth’s; and he knew there was an atmosphere, because Kit could hear sound from outside his force field: the hiss of the wind. But he wasn’t convinced that the atmosphere was breathable, especially because he could feel the cold outside, even through the force field. The air on the far side of the force field was full of blue-white smoke, or fog, moving fast, blown by the wind, and there was more blue-white stuff underfoot. “It’s like being inside a lightbulb,” Kit said.

If it is, then I’ll avoid it in the future, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. It smells bad here.

The wind dropped off briefly, and Kit was able to look out of the lightbulb and see that the two of them had stepped into a snowfield. Except that snow isn’t blue, Kit thought. Ponch, though insulated from the cold around them by the force field, nonetheless shifted uncertainly from foot to foot in the robin’s-egg blue stuff. Kit felt the odd soft squeak of it under his sneakers, and understood Ponch’s confusion. It feels more like talcum powder than snow. Or, no, more like cornstarch—for that strange squeaky sensation persisted no matter how the stuff packed under Kit’s feet.

The wind rose again, reducing the visibility to nothing as it picked the snow up and started blowing it around in the air. The snow was as fine as powder on the wind, finer than any powdery snow that Kit had ever seen, even in blizzard conditions. The stuff piled and drifted in spherical sections around Kit’s force field, gathering like swirls of smoke, abruptly dissipating again like smoke blown away. Suddenly Kit realized what he was seeing, and realized, too, why the snow’s texture was so strange. This isn’t water snow. It’s too cold here for that. This is methane…

The wind howling around them gusted for a few breaths more, blowing the blinding snow shrieking past Kit and Ponch, and then dropped off once more, just briefly giving Kit the wider view again as the snow drifted back out of the air to the ground. We might as well call it air, Kit thought, though he knew that if he tried to breathe it at this temperature, it would freeze his lungs to solid blocks of blood and water ice. He popped his manual open to a premarked page for reading environmental conditions and let it take a moment to do its sensing while he turned in a circle, looking at the landscape.

There wasn’t much of it. Nearby, black crags of stone stood up here and there, shining with blue ice that seemed almost to glow on its own in this fierce sourceless light. Kit glanced up at the sky, wondering whether there was a star up there somewhere, on the far side of what might be a “greenhouse” layer like Venus’s upper atmosphere. But there was always the possibility that this wasn’t a planet at all—just some kind of Euclidean space, another dimension that just went on eternally in all directions. Whichever it is, he thought, it has weather, and the weather’s bad. Even Titan’s weather is better than this.

Kit glanced at the manual page again, read the words in the Speech that began to spell themselves out there. Nitrogen atmosphere. No oxygen. Methane and some other hydrocarbons frozen out to make the snow… Kit shivered despite the force field: the temperature outside was about two hundred degrees below zero centigrade. “Glad I brought a coat,” he said softly.

I wish I could grow mine thicker, Ponch said, looking around him with distaste. I didn’t like that other place, the hot one, but it was better than this.

“Believe me, we won’t stay long,” Kit said. “Just long enough to talk to Darryl.” The contrast between the room-temperature range that the two of them needed to function and the temperature of the space around them was as extreme as the difference between room temperature and a blowtorch … and this meant that keeping his own environment and Ponch’s tolerable would require Kit to spend a lot of energy in a hurry. He was going to have to keep a close eye on the energy levels of the force field; this was no kind of place to have it fail suddenly. Whether they were genuinely in some other universe or just inside Darryl’s mind, the cold would kill them both in seconds if their protection failed. “Let’s get going. Where in all this is he?” Kit said to Ponch.

That way, Ponch said, turning. The contrast in temperatures stands out. But so do other things. There’s company here.

“The same company as last time?”

The same. A heart of cold.

“Great,” Kit said under his breath. “Well, let’s head that way. I’ll put the stealth spell up around us again, though in these conditions, it may not work a hundred percent.”

If you could make the wind drop…

It was worth a try. Kit paged quickly through his manual to the environmental management section and looked for the spells that involved short-term weather control. He found one that looked likely, started to recite it—

And then stopped, shocked. Something that had accompanied every spell he’d ever done, that growing, listening silence—as the universe started to pay attention to the Speech used in its creation—was suddenly missing.

Blocked, Kit thought. But how?! Not even the Lone Power Itself should have been able to keep a wizardry from executing. Once executed, of course, it might fail, but—

Kit tried the spell again, and again got no result. Yet his force field was working fine. If it hadn’t been, he and Ponch would both have been frozen solid by now.

“Weird,” Kit said, closing the manual for the moment. “Looks like this environment’s been instructed not to let itself be altered.”

Could the Lone One have done that?

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Never mind, Ponch said. I don’t need to see, to lead us. And as for the Lone One… Ponch’s nose worked. It’s distracted, Ponch said. And Darryl’s moving. Come on.

Ponch pulled on the leash, and Kit followed him across the squeaking blue snow, while every now and then a new and ferocious gust of wind blue-whited everything out. “Snow tonight,” a voice said from somewhere immeasurably distant.

“You heard it that time, right?” Kit said.

I heard something, Ponch said. And then he paused in midstep. I hear something besides that, too.

Kit waited.

Wings—

Kit listened, but couldn’t make anything out except that the wind was rising, the hiss scaling up to a soft roar. The last time he’d heard a wind like this was when the hurricane had come through three years ago. The hurricane, though, had at least sounded impersonal in its rage. The sound of this wind had a more intimate quality, invasive, as if it was purposely pointed at Kit. And the voices were part of it.

“—won’t be able to—”

“—and in local news tonight—”

“—wish I could understand why, but there’s no point in even asking, I guess—”

“—come on, love, we need to get this on you. No, just give me a hand her, it’ll only take a minute—”

The voices somehow both spoke at normal volume and screamed in Kit’s ears, intrusive, grating, maddening. He couldn’t shut them out. He opened his manual and hurriedly went through it to the section that would allow him to soundproof the force field, for the voices were scaling up into the deafening range now, an ever increasing roar. The noise wasn’t just made up of voices, either. Music was part of it, too, but music gone horribly wrong, screeching at him, and also sounds that might have come from Kit’s own house, a door closing, someone opening a drawer, sounds that were magnified past bearing, intolerable—

Kit recited the wizardry, having to do it nearly at the top of his lungs to hear himself think. To his great relief, it took; he could tell that the sound all around him outside the force field was still rising, but now at least it was muted to a tolerable level. “Wow,” he said to Ponch, who was shaking his own head, also troubled by the noise.

I lost him, Ponch said. He moved again. He moves very fast sometimes. He—

Ponch’s head whipped around. Kit looked the way his dog was looking, through the blowing blue snow, just in time to catch sight of the thin young shape running past them, dressed in nothing but jeans and a T-shirt, running through the terrible cold and wind, running headlong, a little sloped forward from the waist as Kit had seen him running for the van at school.

“Darryl!” Kit shouted. “Hey, Darryl, wait up!”

Darryl turned his head for just a flash, looking toward Kit. For a fraction of a second, their eyes met.

Darryl ran on. Kit reeled back as if someone had hit him across the face, staggering with astonishment. The power—!

Kit had sometimes found it hard to look into someone else’s eyes when things got emotional, but that was nothing like this. Right now he felt as if he’d just been looked at and seen, very completely, indeed way too completely: and the shock of it was as much his own as the other’s. Darryl, though, seemed to have responded to Kit’s shock before Kit had even felt it. And the response… Surprise, yes: pain, yes, some, at something out of the ordinary, something unexpected and disruptive. But also—was that excitement? What had that been about?

Like something’s about to happen. Not me: something else—

Kit shook his head. “Where’d he go?”

That way.

“Come on!”

Kit and Ponch ran after him. But it seemed as if, in this world, Darryl could run a lot faster than they could. “The wind’s filling in his tracks,” Kit gasped.

I don’t need them. Listen, though!

Kit could hear very little now that he’d turned the sound down inside the force field.

“What?”

The wings! They’re here—

The first of them roared overhead, trailing noise like a passing jetliner. Kit looked up and saw, dimly, through the blowing snow, what Ponch had been talking about. He was tempted to duck. The thing wasn’t big, maybe only six feet long or so, but it looked deadly. It was as if someone had taken the three-finned symmetry of a standard paper plane and brought it to life, but with wings that were clawed on the forward edges. The creature was a furry blue-white, just paler than the snow, and eyeless, though it had a long, nasty, many-fanged mouth that ran down the length of its body between two of the wings. And it brought the terrible noise with it as it shot overhead and past, dragging behind it still more of the torrent of voices and sounds that threatened to drown whatever lay in their wake. It tilted one wing, and started to circle Kit.

Basilisk! Kit thought, having seen the creatures’ images in the manual more than once, and having thought every time that he’d rather not see them in the flesh. They weren’t the heraldic beasts that went by the name, but a worse thing that the Lone Power had constructed from spare parts in Its spare time—a minion-creature that served as mindless messenger and doer of small dirty deeds. And it sees me. The stealth spell’s not working, either—

There were three kinds of basilisk: hot, cold, and starry. It was plain enough to Kit which kind he was dealing with here, and he knew the remedy for them if they got too close. Heat—

Kit flipped his manual open to its notes and storage area. Some time back during the summer, his pop had been having a lot of trouble keeping the barbecue lit, and Kit—unnerved by the overconfident way his pop sprayed the lighting fluid around in his attempts to relight it—had started working with some of the wizardries that temporarily “set” air solid and selectively reflective, so that it could be used to produce laser beams. When the barbecue season had come to an end, Kit had stored those wizardries in his manual for the next year. Now he hurriedly pulled one of them out, shook the long chain of characters out until it solidified into a rod, and twiddled its end to reset the air variable. Fortunately it didn’t take long: all he had to do was deduct the oxygen and add some hydrocarbons. Right. Here we go—

Kit stuffed his manual into his parka pocket, shouldered the bright-glowing rod of the laser, and waited for the basilisk to swoop at him … and then was disappointed when it didn’t bother, but just went screaming on past. Several others followed, all heading in the direction Darryl had gone. Kit stood there for a moment and let out a long breath that was as much frustration as relief. It was annoying to have something to shoot with, and something worth shooting at, and then not have an excuse to shoot at it.

He’s stopped running, Ponch said suddenly

“What?” Kit said. “They’ve caught him!”

I’m not sure, Ponch said.

“Come on!”

They ran the way Darryl had gone. As they ran, something occurred to Kit. I was right, I’m onto something. The way the stealth spell wouldn’t work, but this stuff does? Can’t be accidental. Darryl didn’t just build this scenario: he’s engineered it to work exactly the way it’s doing. And it may not even be an interior universe at all. This could be a genuine alternate universe, custom-made, the kind of places Nita had been working with to help her mother—the kind of thing Ponch had started creating on his own. Places where even the way wizardry works can be changed—

As Kit ran, he found his endurance wasn’t what it normally would have been. He was tiring. He couldn’t get rid of the sense that, whether real or inside Darryl’s mind, this universe was much farther away than the last one. There was something inherently wearying about this space itself, as if its structure sapped the energy of anyone unfortunate enough to stray into it. Or maybe it was just the noise—the wind, the roaring of the voices outside, getting louder again—

Kit stopped for a moment to readjust the force-field wizardry, then went on again at a dogtrot behind Ponch. “You doing okay?” Kit said.

So far, no problems.

“You feel all right?”

So far…

Ahead of them, dimly, through the blue-smoke swirling of the methane snow, Kit thought he could see the basilisks diving and swooping at something, fluttering at it. Kit couldn’t make out what it was.

Then, as he got a little closer, he could.

Darryl was standing there with his arms up over his eyes, twisting, turning from side to side … and then he let his arms drop and just stopped. Between one breath and another, he had become encased in what looked like a solid block of ice. The basilisks were scrabbling at it with the claws on their wings, screaming, and the thunder up in the sightless, coldly burning sky beat in the air like a heart, deafening.

Suddenly the basilisks flapped away up into that blue-white haze, as a shadow approached them out of the blowing snow. Kit gulped and put the laser away in his otherspace pocket as the form became distinct, gathering Its darknesses together out of the snowy air.

The Lone Power came striding up to that block of ice, looking as Kit had seen It a long time ago—like a young-looking human, red-haired, handsome, but with cruel, cold eyes and a smile you did not want to see. It was wearing the same dark suit Kit had seen It wear on his own Ordeal, but this time with a long, black winter coat over it, and a scarf wrapped around Its throat, dark blue as the shadows under the methane drifts would be at nightfall. The Lone One’s eyes were still angry and chill, but right now they also held an oddly weary and annoyed expression that intensified the closer It got to Darryl. A few feet away from the block of ice, It paused and put out Its hand, which was suddenly filled with the hilt of a long, black-bladed sword.

The Lone Power stood there in silence for a moment, gazing at Darryl’s silent form with narrowed eyes.

“So it comes to this,” the Lone One said. “For a while, at least, you tried to fight. I’ll give you credit for that. But now you’ve given up. What were you thinking of? That I’d be merciful now, that I’d let you off easy because of your ‘condition’? You should know better. When people give up around me, the poor fools pay the price.” It took a step forward, slow, menacing, savoring the moment. “Not that not giving up helps them, either, of course. Even for those who pass their Ordeals, there’s no escape; I get them later. All they ever manage to do is delay the inevitable.”

A chill that had nothing to do with the local weather went down Kit’s back as the Lone Power took another step forward, and another, hefting the sword, lifting it in slow preparation to strike. “In your case, though,” the Lone One said, amused, “there won’t be any further delay. You should never have accepted the power if you weren’t willing to use it. And you weren’t… so now you lose it.”

I can’t stand it, Kit said silently to Ponch.

But I thought Tom said—

I don’t care. I’m not going to just stand here!

Kit had already made sure the shield around him was secure. Now he was paging hurriedly through the manual to a section he looked at fairly often but had very rarely used, the offensive weaponry. It was the Lone One Itself he was going to be dealing with here, so Kit chose a quark-level dissociation tool—the wizardry equivalent of a directed low-yield tactical nuke—hooked his “canned” description of himself into it, told the wizardry to take as much of his power as it needed for one good shot, and then swallowed hard, because this was scary stuff. You ready to get us out of here in a hurry if you have to? he said to Ponch.

Say the word.

I may not have time—

I’ll be ready.

Kit took a deep breath—then dumped the stealth spell. He took a step forward, and another, and then walked right up to It, where It stood.

“Fairest and Fallen,” Kit said, trying hard to keep his voice even, “greeting and defiance.”

It didn’t even look up.

Kit stood there breathing hard. “I said, greeting and defiance—”

No answer. The Lone One was intent on Darryl. It lifted that black blade high. Darkness ran down it, sweeping after in a trail as It brought the sword swinging around. Kit swallowed one more time and spoke the first of three words that would activate the dissociator, as the sword struck the middle of that block of methane ice—

—and shattered.

Kit stared.

The Lone Power straightened up from the stroke—and It too stared, suddenly dumbfounded, at the broken stump of a sword in Its hand. The block of ice wasn’t marred, not even scratched.

If It was astonished, so was Kit. That power of his—! He’d only felt it brush past him with the glimpse of Darryl’s eyes and it had dumped him on his butt. Any wizardry that could simply break one of the Lone Power’s own weapons like a dry stick was a power to be reckoned with… especially considering that Kit hadn’t heard Darryl use the Speech or even invoke a physically constructed spell like one of Kit’s.

Kit looked at the Lone Power, still confused as to why it hadn’t reacted to him. Could it be that the Lone Power can’t see you when you’re in someone else’s Ordeal? he wondered. But Tom would’ve said something. Or is this something else Darryl is doing somehow? Because his control of this space is something else!

There was no way to tell, and Kit was thrown back on wondering in a scared way what was going through the Lone One’s mind at being stymied this way. It regarded the broken sword for a moment, then flung it furiously away. Where the hilt-shard came down in the blue snow, there was a brief and noisy explosion. But the Lone One ignored that. It put Its hands up against the front of the block of ice and spoke softly to the small shape entombed there.

“Are you really stupid or crazy enough to think I’m just going to walk away?” the Lone Power said, and the menace in Its voice made Kit’s hair stand up all over him. “I have centuries, aeons at my disposal. I can hound you from life to life if I choose, until for the sake of a moment’s peace you beg me to destroy your soul! Is this what your precious Powers gave you your wizardry for? To stand here inactive as a statue, refusing the inevitable? Well, it won’t help you. Coward! You can’t come out the other side of this until you confront me. And you won’t confront me! You’ll just stay in here like the pitiful reject that you are, while outside in reality your darling mother and father secretly grieve over you every day. You’re not being very considerate of them, are you? After everything they’ve gone through? Now you have a chance to stand up, to conquer me, to come out the other side of your power, and you won’t take it.”

Kit was having trouble believing what he was hearing. The Lone Power was frustrated. He saw the unbelievable—saw the Power that invented death start hammering with Its fists on the upright coffin of ice. “Come out!” the Lone One cried, and thunder cracked in response, high up in the wind-torn air. The snow blew around again, hiding nearly everything but that relentless, furious, stymied darkness. “Come out and let’s finish it! Come out!”

The thunder of Its voice started to drown out even the thunder up in the turbulent atmosphere. How long this went on Kit wasn’t sure, but finally It fell silent, looking once more at the small, unmoving shape in the ice.

“It doesn’t matter,” the Lone One said. “I can wait. I have all the time in all the worlds. Sooner or later, you’ll drop this ploy and try another that’s less effective. Sooner or later, in life or after, you’ll be forced to face me. And when you finally do, you’ll wish your soul had never been created. For that day, I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

It turned and walked away into the blue-white snow. Kit lost sight of It within seconds, and a few seconds after that, by a lightening of the spirit that was impossible to mistake, Kit knew that It had left this space. Next to him, Ponch was shivering with a combination of nervousness and amusement.

“Wow,” Kit said.

Yes. Let’s get him out of there! Ponch said.

“Absolutely.”

Kit dismantled the dissociator, and he and Ponch hurried over to the block of ice. But the closer Kit got to it, the stranger things started to seem. That weariness that Kit had been feeling, to a certain extent, since he got here, now got stronger with every step closer to Darryl.

He rubbed his eyes, staggered over to the block, put a hand on it. It was frozen methane, but the force field protected him from its touch. “Darryl,” Kit said. “Dai stihó, guy. I can’t believe you held It off like that. Nice going.”

But Darryl didn’t so much as twitch an eyelid. And as Kit bent over the block, trying to figure out how to get rid of it, or at least how to rouse Darryl, he found himself having more and more trouble believing in any of this. It started to seem as if none of it was real: not the cold, not the wind, not the single small, still, cold shape standing there rigid in the ice, expressionless, unmoving, unseeing. And as for the concept of the Lone Power banging on the block of ice, not only frustrated but powerless—that couldn’t have happened, either.

“Darryl,” Kit said. “Come on, buddy, this is no place for our kind of people.”

But the feeling began to grow in Kit that this wasn’t really Darryl, that he wasn’t here—which was something Ponch had said the last time. Now, though, Kit could feel for himself what Ponch had meant. Darryl’s presence here was illusory. None of this was real. What a relief, because this is all just too weird—

Kit straightened up, passed his hand over his eyes. He was incredibly tired, and there was nothing he could do here. Outside the force field, the noise was scaling up again. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter, though.

Kit.

“What?”

We have to go.

“Go where?”

Kit! We have to go home. The wizardry’s failing. Come on!

“What?”

Ponch turned, leaped at him, knocked him over. For a moment the two of them fell through darkness. Kit flailed for balance, found none, cried out—

And came down, wham, into something cold and wet. At first Kit panicked, because with a terrible suddenness his mind became clear again about two things: that the force field had failed, and that he was lying in the snow, which meant that in about another five seconds he would be dead. But then Kit realized that this snow was so much warmer and wetter than the snow where he’d just been that it might as well have been steaming; and the silence surrounding them was so complete, compared to where they had been, that Kit’s ears rang with it.

Ponch was lying on top of him, licking his face in apology and fear. Are you all right? Boss! I had to get us out of there. Are you all right? Kit!

“Oh, wow,” Kit whispered. “Okay, yeah, I’m okay.” He pushed himself up on his elbows with some difficulty, dislodging Ponch in the process. Kit was lying in his driveway, in approximately three inches of snow, and as he looked over at the corner streetlight, he saw that more snow was falling, in big flakes, through still and silent air.

He turned around to look at his house and saw that all the lights were off except for the one in his parents’ bedroom. “Oh, no,” he said. “What time is it?”

Kit looked at his watch. It was two-thirty in the morning.

“Oh, god, the time flow in there wasn’t what I was expecting. I’m going to get it now,” he muttered as he staggered to his feet. “I’m completely wrecked. And they’re going to kill me.”

Not if I can help it, Ponch said.

“Buddy,” Kit said, “I don’t think even the Powers That Be could prevent the massacre at this point. Let’s go in and get it over with.”

Together they made their way up the driveway.

Chapter 6: Elucidations

Nita looked up from her reading and glanced out the window into the darkness to see that snow was just beginning to fall. She sat still in the pool of light at her desk, for the first time in hours really paying attention to the silence that had been settling down outside—that particular muffling effect, possibly something to do with the low clouds, that always seemed to accompany a heavy snowfall from the very first.

Nita sighed at the sight of the big flakes coming gently down. The first really decent snowfall of the winter, and her mother wasn’t here to see it. First snowfalls had always been an event for her mom. She would bundle herself up and go out and play in the snow like a crazy thing until she was worse soaked than either Nita or Dairine ever let themselves get. Over the past few years, Nita had heard her mom complain more than once to her dad that the greenhouse effect was screwing up the winter weather. “We just don’t get snow like we used to, Harry,” she would say. “We have to do something, or future generations won’t know what it’s like to get slush in their socks.”

Nita held still a moment longer, listening to the quiet of the house around her. Her dad and Dairine were both in bed, and outside the snow kept on falling. After a few moments, Nita sighed again and pushed her manual away. For hours now she had been up to her eyes in more research on the contextual variations of the Speech—in noun paradeclensions, and judicial imperatives, and the history and use of the Enactive Recension. It was all fascinating, and she had no idea how she was going to stomp all this information into her head soon enough to be of any use. At any rate, it was late, and she wasn’t going to get any more of it into her head tonight.

Nita got up… and her bedroom went away, fading around her into a darkness through which, bizarrely, snow continued to fall.

Standing there in jeans and one of her dad’s big sweatshirts, Nita looked all around her in shock, and then realized what had happened. Her hand went to her throat, where the “necklace” of the lucid-dreaming wizardry rested. I forgot about this. I turned it on, and then I fell asleep while I was reading, she thought. I’m dreaming already. Isn’t that wild?

Nita glanced around at the endless dark stretching away from her on all sides. Off in the distance she saw light coming from somewhere to fall on the dark surface on which she stood. The source of the light was itself invisible, but in its beam she could see more snow gently falling.

Okay, she thought, and for lack of anything better to do, she started walking toward the light. As she went, Nita became aware of a low mutter of sound out in the further reaches of the darkness. It took some minutes of walking through the dark before she recognized it as human voices speaking: a slow, muted sound of conversation, coming from somewhere else, but not seeming to matter, particularly. It was as if Nita was hearing these voices through someone else, filtered, and the filter made it all seem like something that couldn’t be allowed to interrupt you right now because something else really important was going on. It was like having the TV on in the background with a show you’d have liked to watch, but something had come up and you couldn’t pay attention right now…

The sound of the voices began to dwindle, just as Nita thought she was about to understand what they were saying; so she kept walking. The light was a little closer now, and she could see the white spotlight it made on the black floor. The snow kept gently falling through the light, though as far as Nita could see, it vanished as soon as it came in contact with the ground. “Hello?” she said. “Anybody here?”

No answer came back. She kept on walking. That spot of light had been about a quarter mile away when she noticed it. Now it was maybe a short block away, and as she peered at it, Nita thought she saw something sitting in it, a starkly illuminated shape—mostly white and black and red, with discordant splashes of other colors—sitting there in a pool of its own shadow.

It was the clown.

How about that, Nita thought.

She didn’t hurry. That was a good way to wake up prematurely. She just kept on walking, and when she was about ten yards away, what seemed like a polite distance to her, Nita stopped.

“Hello?” she said again.

The clown sat in the middle of the spotlight and didn’t look up.

“I talked to you the other night, right?” Nita said. “Or you tried to talk to me, anyway.”

The clown just sat there. Its face was immobile. The big red nose, the bizarre purple wig sticking out from under the absurd little derby hat, the painted tear, all were exactly the same as they had been before. The clown sat there cross-legged in brightly patched, baggy pants, rocking very slightly in the stillness, while the snow falling all around began to taper off.

“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”

Nothing. The clown sat there, didn’t even turn its head toward her.

What’s the matter with you? Nita thought. I’m going out of my way to help you get through to me, here. She thought for a moment, and then tried the on-duty wizards’ identification phrase in another of its commoner forms. “I am on the Powers’ business,” Nita said, “walking the worlds as do They; well met on the common journey!”

The clown just sat there with its head turned away, rocking. Nita started to get annoyed. Okay, she thought. Let’s try this. Nita thought for a moment about what she was about to say in the Speech, wanting to make sure she got it right the first time, as she wasn’t sure what would happen if she mispronounced it.

“In Life’s name and the One’s,” Nita said, “I adjure you to speak to me!”

It was astonishing how just uttering the phrase made a kind of shocked silence after it. The manual had said there was no resisting such an injunction. Nonetheless, there followed one of the longest silences Nita could remember hearing. It took a long time before the clown looked up. Its eyes met Nita’s—

She staggered a step back, caught her breath. It was hard, for in just that flash those eyes had taken her in and known her, instantly, impossibly, unnervingly. Another longer glance, Nita felt, and the being who owned those eyes would know all her secrets, everything that was wrong with her. And the thought of the rejection that might well follow was surprisingly painful: a lancet of pain, a jab, a very different sensation from the slow grey ache that her days had increasingly become.

“You’re so sad,” the clown said. “I wish you wouldn’t be.”

You and me both, would normally have been her first bitter thought. But to her absolute shock, Nita realized that she suddenly absolutely was not sad. The sudden lack of something that had been with her waking and sleeping for many long terrible weeks made Nita feel competely imbalanced: as if a literal weight was missing from inside her chest.

“Wow,” she said softly.

The clown merely nodded.

“I’m sorry,” Nita said. “It’s kind of… something I’ve been going through at the moment.”

“I’m sorry too. It hurt.”

That made her blink. It somehow hadn’t occurred to her that her own pain could be painful to someone else from just such a brush of contact. “I didn’t mean to hurt you with it,” she said. “Please pardon me.”

“All right,” the clown said after a moment. “Who are you?”

“I’m a wizard.” Her thoughts went back for a moment to her dream of the knight. “I’m one of the ones who fight the Lone Power. The One who invented entropy.”

The clown still didn’t look right at her. But Nita felt a change coming over the darkness around the clown, or in the way she saw it. Instead of feeling frightening, now the shadows outside the light were starting to fill with potential and promise.

“What’s the point?” said the clown.

Nita sighed, as that was a question that had been coming up a lot for her lately. “Well,” she said finally, “if we don’t, the world won’t last. And if it doesn’t, well… at least we tried.”

The eyes in the painted face widened.

The painted mouth went wide, and a great cry of anguish burst out of the clown. Nita took a breath, terrified that she’d screwed up, despite her caution.

Then she caught her breath again, because without warning there was suddenly another clown there, identical to the first one. It was standing, not sitting, and with an interested expression it was watching the first clown scream. “I heard about the whole heat-death thing,” said the second clown. “The Silence told me. What exactly went wrong?”

Nita was finding all of this unusually weird, even for a dream. The Silence? What’s that supposed to mean?

And wait. Did he just speak to me in the Enactive Recension? Because— She shook her head. Enactive might be the oldest recension of the Speech, and was possibly the most powerful; supposedly it was what the One had used to create the universe. The joke had it that the One once miscontrued a verb in Enactive and the result was the asteroid belt. So…just wow. It seemed like a really good time to hold still and take stock of whatever was going on here.

Nita sat down outside the circle of the spotlight, not far from where the second clown stood in the “twilight zone,” halfway between the light and the shadow. “There are a lot of answers to that one,” Nita said. “But in the end it all comes down to somebody inventing Death.”

As she mentioned It, Nita heard that low menacing growl coming from somewhere out there in the shadows. Invoking the Lone Power, however obliquely, and even in dream, always had its dangers. But the growl seemed to have no real teeth in it here. It sounds almost tired, Nita thought. Weird.

The second clown turned to look at her, and Nita almost flinched, remembering the impact of their eyes’ first meeting. But this was different: the second clown was restraining himself for her sake, and all she could see in his eyes for the moment was a quick lively reaction to the growl—a flash of recognition, a scowl of rejection.

“That much of the story I know,” the second clown said. “It’s got itself inside most things, hasn’t it.”

“Yes it has,” Nita says. “Just keeps on finding ways to make life something that you wish was over with….”

“Oh yeah,” said the second clown. He gave her one more brief glance and Nita was splashed with a quick flicker-rush of images and sounds: dawns and sunsets running confusedly together, people rushing hither and yon, daily life like something that flogged you with too much light and color and detail and noise, speech that read as shouting… everything tangled in a rush of painful, hard-to-manage perception. But for the clown the pain was welcome, a lifeline of sorts. Things aren’t perfect, but I’m here. I’ve hung on this long because I knew something was coming. And now it’s arrived, I’m not going away without a fight —

The storm of pictures and feelings faded, leaving Nita staring out into a roiling, scary darkness. But the darkness was oddly ambivalent, as filled with possibility as with terror.

And I’m the one who finds that strange, not him, Nita thought. Whoever this was, however different from hers his view of the universe might be, he was braver about it than she was. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” said the clown. “It’s what I’ve got. And I’m going to keep making the most of it, because it really has its moments.”

The screaming of the other clown had tapered off now, and he was now sitting still and simply looking distracted. “So listen,” Nita said, “what’s all this about? Do you need help with something?”

The second clown looked away. The first one stared at her, shocked, and began to scream again.

This could make you start feeling really reluctant to say anything, Nita thought as the volume increased. After a few moments, though, as her own shock wore off, the noise began to remind Nita of her earliest encounters with Dairine… or rather, with Dairine after she’d first become aware that Nita might possibly be in competition with her for their parents’ attention. Dairine’s lung power at the age of two had initially caused Nita some innocent wonder, but this was a phase that had lasted about five minutes, and now, as the scream just kept on going, Nita let out a long breath and invoked the remedy she’d learned way back then. “All right,” she shouted in the Speech: not Enactive, maybe, but it’d do. “Shut up!”

The first clown fell silent in complete amazement.

“Thank you. And sorry.” She turned back to the second clown. “What’s his problem?”

“His? Same as mine. But then he’s me. And ‘problem’ may not be the right word.”

Nita blinked. “Wait. You’re him—? Okay, wait, that can keep. All I asked was if I could give you a hand with something…”

“It’s, uh. Unnerving. To have someone else offer, anyway. I’m all alone in here.”

Just a touch of sadness there? “Well, screaming’s not going to stop that kind of thing, if you start letting other wizards in.”

The clown gave her an amused look that the greasepaint had no power to interfere with. “Apparently not. Ignoring the visitors doesn’t seem to have worked work either.”

“Why would you ignore them?”

“Because you’re a distraction.”

“From what?”

The clown looked around at the darkness. “This.”

“Meaning what?”

Out of the darkness, ever so softly, came that growl again.

Nita glanced out into the dark, slightly unnerved. But this is still my dream, she thought. If It tries something cute, I can just slip out. I hope. “Now there’s a contradiction to what you’ve been saying. Didn’t you just say you were all by yourself?”

“I am.” This time the phrase, in the Speech, was identical with the Self-declaration of Life. Nita, even more unnerved now, half expected to hear thunder, but none came. The One was either otherwise occupied, or not particularly concerned about having Its lines stolen. “But That, out there? That’s different.”

“I won’t argue that,” Nita said. “But, look, why do you have to stay here?”

The spotlit clown said, “This is all there is.”

The one standing in shadow said, “If I try to leave… That’s waiting.”

One more tiger growl sounded from out in the darkness: Nita’s dream-image of the Lone Power, patient, hungry, willing to wait. But still a little tired, Nita thought. Interesting…

“Yeah, well, so is What’s a whole lot older,” Nita said. “And doesn’t die, no matter what one of Its older kids intended for the rest of creation.”

This time the screaming from the seated clown didn’t surprise Nita when it started. The other one looked at Nita in genuine shock. “Where exactly did you come from?” it said.

“Don’t ask me,” Nita said. “Theoretically, I’m asleep. Look, now that he’s over not being alone in here —or you’re not, rather—” The screaming scaled up. “Assuming I haven’t spoken too soon…” And then she actually laughed, because the second clown was grinning ruefully. “Do you wear that costume all the time?”

The clown looked at her in pleased surprise. “You can tell it’s a costume?”

“Under the costumes,” Nita said, “even clowns have lives. Outside the circus, anyway.”

The clown stood quiet for a moment. Nita waited, untroubled; this far along in her practice, she had learned that a lot of wizardry wasn’t speech, but silence. “It seemed right,” the clown said. “Sometimes the body I wear gets clumsy… makes people laugh. Might as well laugh for a good reason as for a bad one.”

And suddenly it wasn’t a clown standing there, but a boy of maybe eleven. He was handsome, in a little-kid way, skinny and sharp-faced, with a short, restrained Afro cut high in the back. But his eyes were both younger and somehow older than his body: an effect that made you stop and think. Nita’s surprise at the change of clown-into-kid was also muted a little by what he was saying, because she knew what he meant. Some of the kids at school and family friends who’d tried over the past month to treat her as usual, as if nothing had happened, had hurt her far worse than those who’d let their discomfort show. “Well, listen,” she said, “the ones who laugh at you and not with you? They’re idiots.”

“They’re all That, in their way,” the little kid said, pointing with his chin into the darkness. He didn’t move much; he stood with his hands hanging down by his sides, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them, and his face was fairly immobile. “The Thing out in the darkness That’s been chasing me forever.”

Nita wasn’t sure what to make of this.

The kid looked at her with an expression that wasn’t entirely convinced. “It looks out of everybody’s eyes, doesn’t it? I could always see It, from when I was really young, though I didn’t realize it at first. Sometimes it would get too tough, seeing It all the time, and I’d need to pull back.” He looked away from Nita again. “And it’s tough to re-engage after that. Hurts a lot.”

Nita said nothing. Finally, after what seemed ages of silence, he turned toward her. He didn’t quite look at her as he said, “It’s looking out of your eyes, too. It’s always been close to you, hasn’t It? And lately, closer than ever.”

Nita swallowed hard. This would not be the moment to break down. “Well, you’re not the only one It chases around,” she said. “It’s after everybody else, too, one way or another. Eventually It gets us all. But if we pay attention to what we’re doing, we can make a whole lot of trouble for It along the way.” And Nita couldn’t help grinning a little. If she had one satisfaction in her life these days, it was the knowledge that the Lone Power found her a personal pain in the butt, annoying enough to try to do one of Its crooked deals with.

The kid looked over at Nita again, full force, grinning back. “I know,” he said.

Nita actually had to brace herself again. Meeting his gaze was like being hit over the head with a brick, but a good brick—an abrupt, concentrated, overwhelming onslaught of cheerful power with a slight edge of mischief in it. Nita had hardly ever felt so intense a wash of emotion or attitude from any being, human or otherwise.

“I definitely know,” he said again. “I’m doing just that. I do it all the time, now.” If anything, his grin got more jubilant, though he looked away again. “And it’s a whole lot of fun.”

Nita was on the point of saying, Don’t start enjoying it too much—and then stopped herself as she saw his smile go a touch rueful. “That’s why I’m spending so much time in here,” he said. “It keeps coming along to try to deal with me once and for all.” That smile went sly. “It can’t stop doing it… and I never let It close the deal.” Then he glanced away once more, his eyes going sad. “Only problem is, when it gets easier to function out there, because sometime it does, I keep having to… I don’t know… pry myself away. Step back from a world that has so much going on in it. And then it starts seeming like too much again. Too much of other people’s stuff…”

“Don’t step too far back!” Nita said. “Being out and about in a world full of cool people is the best part of being a wizard.” She swallowed. “Or just a person.”

“Am I a wizard?” he said, a little sadly.

Nita shook her head in admiration. “Are you kidding? If you can speak in the Enactive Recension, you’re sure on the right track!”

The growl out in the dark sounded more annoyed now, and it prolonged itself, not fading away. “Things got a lot worse lately,” the boy said, “and real fast—all at once. I think It was trying to take me out of the game before something happened.” He frowned. “But I think that might have backfired, because It’s been following me around,” he said, his tone lightening, that edge of humor coming back into it. “Around and around… It’s really funny.”

I can’t get off, Nita remembered the clown crying in the dark. And it hit her that the despairing voice hadn’t been the boy’s. Her eyes widened. The Lone Power’s been chasing him, all right, and he’s been running… but not because he’s scared…!

He started to fade out. “Wait! Don’t leave yet!” Nita cried.

“If I stay with you much longer, it’ll realize the equation’s changed. Gotta go.”

“Just make sure you come back!”

“That’s the plan,” he said. “But I can’t stop till this is settled, or all this hard work’ll have been for nothing. Can’t let that happen!”

He smiled that slightly wicked smile again as he turned away. Then he was gone.

There Nita sat alone in the darkness, while nearby a spotlight out of nowhere shone on the dark floor: just a pool of light. What briefly had made the light special was now gone.

Oh my god, Nita thought.

It really is him—the kid Kit’s been hunting. It’s Darryl!

And now I think I understand “the Silence”! she thought. Wizards got their information from the universe in many different ways. On Earth alone, the manual in either its printed or online versions was merely one of many methods. Whale-wizards heard the Sea speak to them; the feline wizards had told Nita about something called the Whispering. What Darryl’s got has to be like that…

But she was still left with entirely too many mysteries to solve. Nita stood there wondering what in the worlds to do next… then shook her head.

Waking up would probably be a good idea.

It took Nita a few seconds to remember the way to break the dream without waiting for a normal awakening. When she opened her eyes, she was looking sideways at the wall beside her desk, having put her arms down on the desk and her head down on her arms as she initially slid into sleep.

Nita rubbed her eyes, blinked, stretched. I’m completely wiped out, she thought. I’ve got to get some real sleep, now, or I’ll be useless tomorrow. But Kit’s got to hear about this.

She glanced down at her manual. “What time is it?” she said.

The page cleared and showed her the time in every zone on Earth, as a Julian date, and on all the planets in Sol system.

“Show-off,” she said softly, glancing at the local time for New York. The readout said, “0223.”

It was late, but this was important. Kit? Nita said silently.

Nothing. But it wasn’t the “asleep” kind of nothing: Kit was missing.

“Message him,” she said to the manual.

The page blanked itself, then showed Nita the words, “Subject is out of ambit.”

That “error” message she now recognized. Kit and Ponch were off world-walking somewhere, out of this universe proper. Nita sighed. I’ll have to catch him in the morning, she thought. But bed first…

***

She slept hard and deep, and for a change woke up not in the dark, but just after dawn. I still wish spring would hurry up, Nita thought as she swung her feet out of bed and rubbed her eyes. This winter seems to he lasting forever. But at the same time, it was hard to dislike a morning like this, when there was what looked like six inches of new snow outside, and it was Saturday as well. The snow was wet, clinging delicately to the bare branches of the trees out in the backyard, and everything was very still, the sky a pure, clean blue behind the white branches. Who knows? Maybe I’ll sneak out there, make a snowball or two, and stick them in Dairine’s bed. Give her about three seconds of thinking I’ve had second thoughts about her and the bed and Pluto.

Nita threw last night’s sweatshirt and jeans on and went downstairs to the kitchen, manual in hand. Her father was there, making his own coffee for a change. He looked at Nita with some surprise when she came in. “You’re up early for a Saturday,” he said.

“Not that early. I got some sleep for a change.”

“You don’t look like it.”

Nita yawned and stretched. “Don’t feel like it, either.”

“Just a long week at school, maybe?”

“I don’t know.” She went over to put the kettle on for herself. She ached all over, as if she’d had a particularly bad gym class, and she just felt generally weary. As if I was a long, long way away last night.

But if that really was Darryl, then I was only two towns away, in his mind.

Or possibly in an alternate universe he created, one a whole lot further away than that—

“How are you coming with what you were working on yesterday morning?” Nita’s dad said. “Any progress?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, “but I don’t understand it.” She opened a cupboard and tried to decide what kind of tea she wanted. She finally decided on mint, and got the tea box down, fishing around in it for the right tea bag.

“Your alien, or the progress?”

“Both. And it looks like it wasn’t even an alien, if I’m right. It’s a little kid who lives over in Baldwin.”

Her father looked surprised at that as he went to get his coat from the rack by the door. “Another wizard?”

“Theoretically, not yet,” Nita said. “Assuming this is the person who I think it is. I have to check with Kit.” But that brought up another odd problem for Nita to consider. From her own experience, Nita knew that being on Ordeal imparted a certain tentative feel to your wizardry, even when your power levels were at their highest. Even Dairine’s use of wizardry, when she was on Ordeal, had exhibited that new-and-uncertain quality. But it was completely missing in Darryl. Something else to ask Tom and Carl about.

Her dad put on his coat. “Well, that sounds encouraging, anyhow,” he said. He came over, gave her a hug and a kiss. “Leave me a note if you have to go anywhere. Is Dairine going to be getting involved in this?”

“Jeez, I hope not,” Nita said. “Things are confusing enough already.”

“Okay,” her dad said. “She has some school project she’s supposed to be working on this weekend. If you want to just have a look at one point or another and make sure she’s staying on track…”

This was, in fact, the last thing Nita wanted, but she nodded. “I will.”

“Thanks, baby girl. See you later.”

Nita wasn’t sure, as her father went out, whether to bristle or smile. When’s the last time he called me “baby girl”? she thought. It was one of those nicknames that Nita had complained about forcefully for years when she was younger, until her dad finally stopped using it. And now I’m not even sure I mind anymore, she thought. I wonder if somehow he’s trying to remind himself of how things were when Mom was still here.

After a moment she laughed at herself for thinking such “shrinkly” thoughts. Millman’s affecting me, Nita thought.

She made a face then, as the kettle came to a boil. Oh god. Millman and his card tricks. …But how long can it take to learn a card trick? I’ll do it later. Got some other things to think about right now.

Nita glanced at the digital clock on the stove. It read 7:48. A little early, but then Kit did tend to get up early on the weekends. Kit? she said.

For a moment there was no response.

Hnnnhhh?

I’m not sure, but I think I may have found your guy.

A pause. When he answered, he still didn’t sound incredibly awake. When?

Last night. Time’s hard to judge, but I think it would’ve been around two-thirty.

There was a much longer pause that made Nita think Kit might have gone back to sleep. Finally he said, It couldn’t have been. I was with Darryl around then.

Nita blinked at that. You sure? she said.

Yes I’m sure. He sounded cranky. Neets, look, I’m completely wrecked, and I had big trouble with my folks last night. I want to go back to sleep. Call me back, okay?

Uh, sure, but—

The connection between them didn’t so much break as dissolve in a returning wave of sleep. Nita stared at the tea bag in her hand, bemused. “Well,” she said.

She made her tea and sat down at the dining room table with the mug, the manual, and a banana. Nita didn’t go straight into the manual, partly because she wasn’t yet clear on where she should start looking. She was still trying to sort out some things about her experience last night.

There had just been something about Darryl. Nita kept coming back to the impact she’d felt when their eyes had met. It wasn’t strength, or not in the usual sense. And if it was power, it had something else added that made it more significant than usual. She was well down the cup of tea before she found the word she was looking for.

Innocence…

Talk about the innocence of childhood tended to make Nita roll her eyes. Her own childhood was behind her—mostly to her relief, because of all the beating up. And her memory of Dairine’s childhood was way too fresh. Anyone putting that whole set of experiences and the word innocence together in the same sentence would simply have made Nita laugh. Her sister’s behavior aside, Nita knew perfectly well that most kids were no innocents.

But then most of the talk you heard on the subject came from adults, most of whom had some bizarre concept of childhood as this pure, untroubled thing that Nita wasn’t sure had ever existed. Plainly, like the counselor that Dairine had been complaining about, too few of them really remembered what it was like to be seven, or nine, or twelve.

Nita could understand that perfectly. Large parts of childhood hurt, and adults did with that remembered pain exactly what kids did when they could: let whatever good memories they had bury it. Oh, the moments of delight, of pure joy, they were there all right, but what adults seemingly couldn’t bear was the idea that their whole childhoods hadn’t been that way: that the trouble and sorrow that were the result of the Lone Power’s meddling in the worlds weren’t something they’d always had to deal with, right from the start. So despite whatever kids tried to tell them, adults just kept on reinventing childhood as something that was supposed to be happy all the time, a paradise lost in the past.

Yet in very small children, there was something that Nita had to admit she’d seen … even, occasionally, in Dairine. Last night, in her dream, Nita had looked at Darryl and had seen flashes of the same thing in his eyes, unalloyed—a sense of living in the morning of the world, a time or place either uncorrupted or redeemed; unafraid, and with no reason to be afraid; a person grounded immovably in the sense that the world worked, was just fine, would always be fine….

Poor kid, Nita thought. Wait till reality hits him. Yet, remembering the look in those fearless eyes, she found herself having an unaccustomed second thought. Reality might hit him; might, indeed, have hit him hard already—but he wasn’t the one who’d shatter.

Boy, would I like to be there to see that.

Nita began to peel the banana. But all that aside, Kit said he was with Darryl when I was, Nita thought. So if he’s right, then who was I with?

She took a bite of the banana and considered. And that’s not the only thing about this that’s strange. It’s Kit who’s been looking for him. If this really is Darryl, then why’ve I been seeing him, too?

But now she thought she had an answer to that. We’ve both been holding the world at arm’s length...though for way different reasons. Trying to get it to leave us alone. She shook her head. And making ourselves more alone while we did it. But the wizardry knew what it was doing better than we did. One wizard alone found another one…

Nita sat there for a moment, staring at the banana without really seeing it. Fine. But still… if this is Darryl, then why’re my visits to his world so different from Kit’s?

She had another bite of the banana, reflecting. Unless it’s just that I didn’t know that the person trying to contact me was an autistic. So maybe I got something that was more like Darryl’s own ideas about himself … just translated into my own idiom. Whereas Kit’s known from the beginning that Darryl’s an autistic, and so maybe he’s been projecting his own ideas about that onto what’s been happening.

To Nita this sounded so commonsense that it might be true. It’s worth checking out. Now I just wish I could figure out how Darryl can be with both me and Kit at the same time. Maybe he’s time-slipping somehow?

But that would take the kind of wizardry that would need a ton of power to fuel it: not to mention (as a rule) authorization from above. Though maybe not always. Didn’t Ronan timeslide a little when he was in the middle of his Ordeal? Maybe on-Ordeal status itself functions as authorization sometimes. And the only thing Nita was now certain about, as far as her dream went, was that Darryl hadn’t actually been doing any wizardry at the time.

No. Something else was going on…

Nita finished the banana, got up to dump the skin in the kitchen garbage can, and came back to her tea and the manual again. What other ways are there for someone to be in two places at one time?

She had to laugh at herself a little as she reached for the manual. Be a great trick if you had a busy schedule, Nita thought. Or you could be in school taking a test while you were also lying on the beach with a good book, working on your tan.

She started paging through the manual again, idly at first, then with more concentration. After about fifteen minutes of this, as the sun got brighter on the snow outside and the dining room filled with its light, Nita realized that she still wasn’t sure exactly how to find what she needed. She went to the back of the manual, to the page that handled search functions.

“I need all the references that have to do with being in two places at one time,” she said.

The page cleared itself, and new words appeared. “Apparition or co-location?”

There it was, yet another word Nita hadn’t ever heard of before today “Apparition first,” she said.

“See highlighted section,” the page said, and her manual was abruptly about an inch thicker.

“Oh, no,” Nita said. “I think I need another banana.”

***

In the end, it took three more. Nita was grateful that Dairine seemed to be sleeping late, as she was the big banana fan in the house and would not have been pleased that Nita had made such inroads into the supply. The extra bananas gave Nita time to discover, mostly by skimming the material as fast as she could, that there were a truly unnerving number of ways to appear in two places at once, if you felt like spending the energy.

But that was the factor that kept everyone from doing it all the time. The universe had a deeply ingrained bias against the same thing being in more than one place at once—this singularity of location being one of the ways that matter defined itself to begin with—and if you wanted to bend that bias in your favor, you would be heavily penalized, in terms of having to use a huge amount of effort to build a very complex spell.

It doesn’t matter, Nita thought as she turned over the last twenty pages of the section, doing little more than glancing at them. I’m sure he wasn’t doing a wizardry last night, so none of this stuff applies. She turned back to the search page again. “Give me the co-location stuff now,” she said, not seeing any great point in it, but unwilling to stop until she’d read everything that could have a bearing on the problem.

The manual reduced itself to something more like its normal size, and laid itself open at a much shorter section. Nita glanced at the title page and table of contents for the section, momentarily confused. It was a classifications section on the Orders of Being.

Huh? she thought. Nita had been through this section every now and then. The time she’d been most interested in it was just after passing her Ordeal, when she was trying to sort out some of the finer details of how wizardry was organized. That version of the information had been thinner than this one, a sort of beginner’s guide; this one was considerably more detailed.

Nita turned the pages, glancing at the master classification listing of created beings in the universe. The listing didn’t go by species, but by type. Good old-fashioned mortals naturally had all the other types outnumbered, but there were still a surprising number of modified mortals and other conditionals. Then came wizards, of which there were hundreds of different types, even within single species. Among her own species, with which Nita would have thought she was moderately familiar by now, there were more classes of wizard than she’d realized.

The standard classes—probationary, mid-Ordeal, full wizard, expert wizard, Advisory/Senior, Regional, Planetary, Sector—those she’d known about for long enough. But there were also splinter classifications, some categories that didn’t quite fit among either mortal wizards or the Powers That Be. The Transcendent Pig, of course, Nita knew. She smiled slightly as she turned past his page. The picture doesn’t do him justice. Maybe it’s old. But there were many other classifications in this section, too, some of them most obscure. Principalities, Thrones, Dominations— She raised her eyebrows. ‘Thrones?’ Who wants to be a chair? But maybe I’m missing something here. Who knows? Maybe it’s fun to be furniture.

Nita turned the page over. Pillars? What is this? First furniture, now architecture…

Abdals / “Pillars” — This state or condition of created being does not necessarily imply wizardly status but is still routinely included as associated with the classification because of the sharing of various functions and qualities across species and eschatological barriers. The sobriquet “Pillars” refers to the immense supportive strength inherent in these beings wherever they appear. The physical and spiritual structure of the Universe and its contents is strengthened against the assaults of evil by the Pillars’ presence, and weakened by their loss. While they occasionally may also be wizards, abdals display no unusual aptitude for the Art: their value lies elsewhere. Their status comes from direct endowment by the One; their power is derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality. Some have unusual abilities of perception reaching into other universes, or are able to so clearly perceive details of the innate structure of their home universe that the entire physical world can seem a mirage by contrast. Some have sufficient control over their physical natures to change their bodies at will without recourse to normal wizardry, or to travel great distances or appear in two places the same time….

Certainty went straight through Nita like a lightning bolt, and not only because of the two-places-at-once line. It was everything else in combination with that. She thought of the knight, of the strength and bravery she’d sensed in that version of Darryl, and of the power inherent in the robot. All those experiences were fragments of this bigger picture, pieces of the jigsaw. Nita glanced on down the page.

The Pillars are rarely recognized as such by their contemporaries. Should they become conscious of their own status as abdals, the realization itself renders them ineffective in their role, which is to channel the One’s power without obstruction into the strengthening of the world. Their portion of that power is then lost to the Worlds, and with its loss, the abdal dies.

Nita slapped the manual shut and sat there, actually sweating, for a few moments. The language of the manual could be obscure sometimes, but this time Nita was sure she knew perfectly well what it was talking about when it said the Pillars’ power was “derived strictly from the incorrupt nature of their personality.” It means what Darryl’s got, she thought. Innocence. That plain, straightforward innocence that just goes right through whatever comes at it, like a knife, or bounces any attack off it, like a shield. And that really, really pisses off the Lone Power, so that It just keeps coming at him again and again. Which is just the way Darryl wants it—

Nita pushed back from the table a little, leaning back in the chair and considering. Normally when the Lone Power turned Its attention to destroying a wizard during his or her Ordeal, It would lay out no more energy than It absolutely had to. The tendency not to waste energy unnecessarily was one It still shared with the other Powers. It didn’t waste Its time spending a lot of power on one wizard unless It knew that person was going to be something really special. Dairine, for example, Nita thought. It gave her a lot of grief because she was so young when her Ordeal hit. The kind of power she was going to have, even just for a while, was worth trying to knock out. But Darryl didn’t give Nita the same impression of huge and abrupt power that Dairine had, and the manual confirmed his power levels as being, while not unusually low, not unusually high, either.

So these repeated attacks suggest that the Lone Power knows Darryl’s one of the Pillars, Nita thought. And taking out an abdal slowly and painfully has to be worth more to the Lone Power than just killing some wizard on Ordeal. Though the chance of getting two for the price of one must strike It as an awful lot of fun. A nasty game.

But that’s not the game that’s actually being played. Because Darryl’s not really the stuck one here!

Nita sat looking out into the front yard, watching the maple tree there shed little sparkles of snow into the air as a faint breeze moved its branches. If the Lone One realizes what’s happening, It’s going to go ballistic, Nita thought. It’s been having so much fun toying with Darryl that It doesn’t realize he’s turned the tables on It.

The Enemy will fight and fight again. I will hold It here, he said. He’s prolonging his Ordeal on purpose, running the Lone Power ragged—

But that can’t last forever. If there’s one thing the Lone Power hates worse than anything else, it’s someone laughing at It. The minute It discovers that Darryl’s yanking Its chain, It’ll just kill him outright in the nastiest way It can.

Nita bit her lip. Which would be for It to make Darryl find out that he’s one of the Pillars. He loses the power; he dies. And the Lone Power gets back at the One, too, through Darryl’s death.

Her eyes narrowed as she remembered that mischievous smile, the courage in those dark eyes—and thought of how long Darryl had been alone there in one or another of his worlds, fighting an endless battle with no hope of relief, no real way to win … but with that valor always there, like shining armor.

Well, It’s not getting Its way this time, Nita thought.

She got up and started picking up the banana skins lying around the dining room table. There’s been enough dying around here, she thought. No more of it! As soon as Kit gets up, we’re going to sit down and figure out how to give Darryl whatever he needs so he can push his way through this and come out the other side. Got to be a way…

She headed upstairs to get dressed.

Chapter 7: Complications

Kit stopped in the middle of the jungle path and looked around him. “We’re lost,” he said.

I don’t know if I’d say we, Ponch said, sounding ever so slightly reproachful.

Kit wiped the rain off his face and turned to look back the way they’d come. It was nearly impossible to see where that was, for the path they’d been following was scarcely any wider than he was. The jungle all around them was a tangle of dark reds and dark greens, huge trees and undergrowth, vines and creepers and strange-looking plants. High above, the upper canopy of broad leaves held away the burning whiteness of the sky. Down here, precious little of that light reached; all the plants were in mud and blood colors, depressing… and the shadows in between them were worse. There were creatures in this jungle that had messy eating habits, and Kit had stopped looking into the shadowy places at the bases of the immense trees unless he absolutely had to.

“Where is he?” Kit said.

Ponch stood there with his nose working. I’m not sure, he said.

“You’re not sure?”

We didn’t do this the usual way, Ponch said. For one thing, neither of us is awake. For another, you went in first, and I followed you because I didn’t want you going in here alone. And you didn’t bring the leash.

Kit sighed and put out his hand. “Leash,” he said.

Nothing happened.

You tried that before, Ponch said, and it didn’t work then, either.

Kit sighed and wiped the rain out of his eyes again. At least the rain was warm, which was a good thing because it never really stopped; even when the hot sky above it wasn’t actively raining, the jungle floor got more or less constantly dripped on.

So which way? Ponch said.

“We might as well keep on down this path,” Kit said. “We’re bound to run into Darryl eventually.”

A high-pitched scream came out of the gloomy creeper-hung darkness ahead of them. Assuming that doesn’t run into him first, Ponch said. Or that it doesn’t run into us first.

“Come on,” Kit said. He slogged down the muddy path, and Ponch padded along behind him, glancing nervously into the shadows of the trees and the undergrowth on either side of the path.

The path made a curve around one unusually large tree. Kit paused, looking at it, and went slowly around the curve. “Darryl?” he shouted. “Where are you?”

There was no answer but another of the bloodcurdling screeches from up in the canopy. Kit knew, in a general sort of way, that there was no guarantee that what he was hearing up there was a carnivore … but there was no guaranteeing that it wasn’t, either. He reached sideways to his otherspace pocket, thinking about the barbecue-lighting laser … and couldn’t find the pocket, let alone the laser.

You tried that before, too, Ponch said.

“I forgot,” Kit said. He wiped his face again. It wasn’t rain he was wiping away this time, but sweat. The heat here was terrible—stifling, muffling, like wearing a portable electric blanket—but far worse was the humidity. If there was anything in the normal world that Kit really hated, it was hot, humid weather. In this place, though, it seemed like all the spare humidity from any number of jungle planets had been gathered up and dumped here. The sweat was running into his eyes, making them burn. Kit paused long enough to wipe his face again, then continued around the tree, looking at it suspiciously. “I keep expecting Darth Vader to come out of one of these and chase me with a light saber.”

I don’t think that’s a good thing for you to be imagining, Ponch said, sounding unnerved. Let’s stick to Darryl for now. And once we’ve found him, let’s get out of here!

They went on under the trees. Not far ahead, trees shorter than the gigantic two-hundred-footers were gathered together in a cluster, and the path wound through them. It seemed to Kit that this looked like a perfect place for some kind of ambush… yet somehow he felt unable to take the prospect seriously: there was a vague sense of unreality hanging about it all. He slowed down a little, but kept walking.

Something smells bad here, Ponch said.

“Everything smells bad here,” said Kit. The whole jungle had a smell like wet laundry that had been left in the washing machine too long, a stagnant scent. Some of the creepers were even festooned with something that might have been mistaken for wet laundry, though the growth was actually some kind of nasty, flabby fungus. Kit looked now with some loathing at the vines hanging from the red-trunked trees ahead of him; they had that fungus all over them, curtaining away the view of whatever might be further down the path.

“You smell anything?” Kit said.

Mold, Ponch said, his nose wrinkling. And other things. I don’t want to talk about it.

Kit walked forward a little more slowly, looking at those trees, then looked over his shoulder again, back down the path. “I wish Nita were here,” he said.

I don’t! Ponch said. I wouldn’t want anyone I liked to be here. And I don’t want us to be here, either! We’re not going to find him this way, boss. Let’s go home!

“Just a little while more,” Kit said. He was beginning to agree with Ponch, though. He was so tired. I should have walked out of here the minute I found myself in here, he thought, except I don’t remember how I got in here.

No, wait. I do remember. The dream. I dreamed I saw Darryl running into the jungle. I went after him…

There was a rustling among the trees that lined the path ahead of them. Kit reached sideways for his otherspace pocket. Then, as he was feeling around for it, he remembered that it didn’t seem to be there in the dream. I keep forgetting things, he thought. I guess it’s just that I’m so tired. After yesterday, and the days before. But I can’t help it. We can’t leave him stuck in this. We have to find him!

There was definitely something moving around in those trees, though Kit couldn’t see what it was, and he didn’t want to go any closer without some kind of weapon. He had a memory that there should have been wizardries that he could use for self-defense, but he was just too tired to think of any of them right now. Kit looked around him, saw a fallen log to one side of the path. There was a branch sticking out of it that looked big enough to use as a club. He got down on one knee and struggled with the branch for a few moments until it snapped off the log. It was covered with dark brown goo, yet more mold of one kind or another. Kit made a face as he rubbed it off the branch as best he could, rubbed his hands more or less clean on his pants, and then got up. “Come on,” he said to Ponch.

High up in the jungle canopy, one of the invisible monsters started screaming again. Kit wanted to hold his ears against the noise of it, though that would have meant dropping the branch. Shortly the screamer was joined by a second, and they screamed at each other more and more loudly as Kit got closer to the trees.

One big creeper was hanging down over the path. It was well draped with the dirty-laundry fungus, and looked almost like a curtain. They were going to have to push through this. There was no avoiding it. Kit reached out one hand to the creeper, while above him in the trees the intolerable screeching got louder and louder. If there is something in there, Kit thought, I’m not going to he able to hear it if it’s coming for me.

Yet he felt he had to go in. “You ready?” he said to Ponch.

I’m right behind you. Be careful!

Kit pushed the creeper aside. The gloom beyond the curtain of fungus was even worse than that out in the shadow of the trees; it was danker, more stifling and breathless. Kit edged into it, let the curtain fall—

Darkness. Ponch was close behind him, crowded up against his legs. Any hope that Kit had had that being in this closed-in place might somewhat muffle the awful screeching from outside was in vain; if anything, it seemed worse. He moved softly among the trees, brushing past the down-hanging loops and rags of fungus, trying not to touch them more than he had to. Where the fungus brushed him, he got an uncomfortable itchy feeling even through his shirt.

Kit started to move faster, though the weariness that had started to bother him when he came into this place was getting worse all the time. He was sure he could see shadows moving just beyond the trees that hemmed in the path. It might just have been more of the fungus, shifting in the wind, except that there was no wind. Something was moving there. Then, even over the screaming from above, Kit thought he heard a breathing sound—

He couldn’t bear it anymore. He broke into a run, and Ponch plunged along behind him. The awful fungus slapped him in the face and upper body as he ran; Kit swatted it aside as best he could, but somehow it always seemed to get him anyway. Once he nearly throttled himself by running into a creeper that was hanging exactly at throat height. Kit reacted just in time to grab it, and used it to swing himself a little sideways—but then he banged into one of the closer trees and fell, and from above he could hear the screaming, louder than ever, sounding like laughter now.

Kit staggered to his feet and wobbled down the path again. His body didn’t seem to be working right, and he couldn’t understand why, unless it was just the weariness that was getting to him. His legs almost seemed to belong to someone else. His brain was full of noise that he couldn’t stop. He knew Ponch was behind him, but he had to keep reminding himself of that. He couldn’t get rid of the idea that he was all alone here, had been alone forever…

…except for something that hated him. It was hiding in the shadows. It was up in the furious brightness above the trees. It was dripping from every leaf, underfoot in every square inch of mud, looking at him with cruel, small, burning eyes from up among the branches of the trees. Kit ran, but his body wouldn’t obey him, wouldn’t let him run fast enough; he staggered along like some broken mechanical thing, and the screaming voices up above all laughed at him, and there was no escape from the regard of the unseen eyes staring at him from all around in the dark. He would come out into the open again in a moment, but there would be no respite for him then, either, no escape. What owned the eyes would be there, waiting for him, in the shape of what was going to kill him at last.

Kit tried to stop, but he couldn’t. Ponch blundered into him from behind. Kit’s own momentum combined with the push from Ponch sent him forward, through the last curtain of creeper and fungus, sprawling down nearly spreadeagled onto the path, and he was helpless in front of the merciless thing that waited.

Hands came down, grabbed him by the arms. “No!” Kit cried—

—and then realized that nothing had happened to him, and that he was facedown in the mud, and that the screaming above him was just screaming again—and that the hands were Darryl’s.

Darryl was stronger than Kit would have expected. He hauled Kit nearly upright, but Kit didn’t have the strength to stay that way; he collapsed down onto his butt again in a most undignified manner, and stayed there for a few moments, just panting and trying to get his breath back.

“Come on, hurry up, get up now!” Darryl said. “It’s coming!”

Kit tried, and had trouble. Once again Darryl reached down to him and took Kit by the forearms. This time he swung him right up to his feet and kept him there. Kit staggered a little, but managed to stay upright, marveling again at how strong the youngster was. “Thanks,” Kit said as Darryl rather hastily let go. “Darryl, I’ve been trying to catch up with you for a long time. I’m on errantry, and do I ever greet you! Now can we go somewhere quiet and have a talk, because—”

“No,” Darryl said.

“You don’t understand,” Kit said, getting his breath again, but only slowly. “You have to get out of here while you’ve got the chance. It’s not here yet, but—”

“That’s just why I can’t leave,” Darryl said. “There are still things I have to do here, and in the other heres I’ve made. It doesn’t matter whether—” He stopped, scowling, as if searching for words: as if something was trying to keep him from finding them. “It doesn’t, it doesn’t, doesn’t matter—” a sudden flush of intention, and of fierce satisfaction at a barrier pushed through— “if there’s a way out now. I can’t take it yet. I have to find the thing that still needs to be done before I can go.”

Kit had been tired enough to start with, but now the exhaustion was coming down on him hard.“Darryl, buddy, I don’t get it. Why can’t you—”

“I promised I wouldn’t. I said I’d stay until what I came to do was done,” Darryl said. He breathed out, glancing away, but not in any vague way: as if he was looking at something clear and concrete—a moment or a person. “When things got so bad all of a sudden, it started getting so hard to hear things. But finally I heard the Silence, even through all the noise. And it said, ‘So here’s what it’s all about. Here are the words. What’re you going to do about them?’ And it kept being so hard to hear them as things got worse… but finally I got them all together and said them. ‘In Life’s name…’”

Kit sat there listening to the words. Part of him knew them better than he knew almost anything else. But another part of him thought, wearily, Why does that sound familiar? And the bizarre roaring and screeching in his head were once again making it hard to pay attention, hard to care about anything.

“…I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way…”

It was amazing the way the incessant howling of the world could weary you, until you wanted to do anything to distract yourself from the noise of it, even scream back to drown it out. That noise got into your head and wouldn’t let you alone, wouldn’t let you be. In the face of the torment, you quickly got to the point where the pain was itself reassuring, something less stressful than trying to think anything or do anything through the cacophony of life—especially when the life around you started looking and feeling somehow fake, as if whatever reality existed was elsewhere, far away, and all your surroundings were just some kind of skin over it. And when you come right down to it, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing’s really worth the fuss, the struggle….

“…To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life…”

Not that any of those matter. The world seemed dim and far away—this world, any world. Kit was wavering, trembling with weariness now. He folded down where he stood, sat down in the mud again, blinking.

Darryl looked at him with alarm. “I have a feeling this isn’t the time for anyone else to be here, though,” he said. He reached down to Kit and started to pull him upright again; and he was grinning, as if there was something that mattered, impossible though that seemed to Kit at the moment. “What you’re doing, believe me, I get it. It’s really great. But you’re here the wrong way, the dangerous way. You’re a link. If you stay much longer, it’ll get so the link can’t be broken. You’ll keep getting sucked back into the trap I’ve set—”

Kit was wobbling on his feet, wavering, as Darryl once more finished hauling him upright. “So go on, go,” Darryl said, pushing at him. “Go!”

From behind him Kit could faintly catch a whimpering noise: Darryl’s gaze went to it. Kit turned, almost robotically following the look.

Ponch was there, and Darryl was looking at him, and their gazes locked. Ponch was standing there with his head up, his tail wagging. It was a speculative look on Ponch’s part.

“Oh no,” Darryl said, and looked around him in genuine alarm. “You definitely can’t take the chance you might get stuck in here with It. You both really have to go right now!”

Up in the trees, the screaming was starting to scale up again. “Go on,” Darryl said—not to Kit, now, but to Ponch. “Hurry up! I know you, I know what you’re becoming. But you can’t stay as you are. You’re here the wrong way too, right now, and if you stay It’ll see the two of you for sure. So go on!”

All right, Ponch said. We will.

Above them, the gloom started abruptly to get darker. But we won’t leave you here, Ponch said. We’ll be back.

Ponch turned around and grabbed Kit by the wrist, gently, with his teeth. He pulled Kit back into the dimness of the stand of trees that surrounded the path.

The darkness increased behind them, and the screaming. Finally the blackness became total, and Kit staggered through it, blinded, deafened, being led by the hand, aware of nothing except that he was being led, and hoping it was to somewhere better.

Eventually Kit found that he was sitting on his bed, staring at the wall. He’d been looking at it for a long time; there was no telling how long. Ponch was up on the bed by him, licking his ear, and there was no way to tell for sure how long that had been going on, either, except that the side of his head felt pretty wet.

I don’t think we should go there like that again, Ponch said.

It took Kit a long time to collect his thoughts enough to answer. I think maybe you’re right about that, he said. But at the same time, he found it hard to get excited about the concept. It just didn’t seem to matter that much. Nothing seemed to matter that much.

Kit lay there for a long time, staring at the wall.

***

As Nita came through the dining room again, the phone rang.

She hurried over to answer it before it woke Dairine. “Hello?”

“Nita, it’s Carl.”

“Hi, Carl. What’s up?”

“Uh, have you seen Kit today?”

He sounded reluctant to be asking. “Haven’t seen him,” Nita said. “Heard from him, though. I think he had a late night last night.”

“Tom was expecting him for a debrief,” Carl said. “That hasn’t happened yet, though, and Tom was called away, so I need to handle it. You have any idea where Kit is at the moment?”

“I think he’s still asleep.” She paused a moment, checked to see if that was true. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s still out of it.”

“Okay,” Carl said, but he sounded uncomfortable to Nita. “It can wait a few hours, I suppose. But when he wakes up, make sure he gets in touch with me, all right?”

“Sure. I want to talk to him, too, because I found Darryl last night, and I think he’s an abdal.”

“You think he’s a what?”

“An abdal. You know. One of the Pillars.”

There was a brief silence at that. “Would you mind coming over here and telling me how you came to that conclusion?” Carl said.

There was something peculiar about his tone of voice. “I’m not in trouble, am I?” Nita said.

“What? No. But do me a favor? Bring your manual with you.”

“Okay. See you in a while.”

Nita pulled on her boots and parka and then made her way over to Tom and Carl’s house the quick way, popping out into six inches of untouched snow, and was very glad she’d remembered the boots. Carl was standing inside the door, looking out at the backyard, as Nita came up to the sliding doors. He pushed one aside for her. “It’s pretty out there, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But cold.” She came in and stomped her boots on the tile floor of the kitchen to get rid of the snow as Carl closed the door. “Where’d Tom go? Anything important?”

“He’s meeting with the Sector Advisories,” Carl said. “Administrative business… something to do with reorganizing some planets’ worldgating systems. Nothing wildly exciting, but he’ll be gone for a couple of days.”

Nita went to the table, taking off her coat and hanging it over one of the chairs. “You’ve got some wires hanging down there,” she said as she sat down, noting the tangle extending from underneath the cupboards.

“Yeah. I’ve made a mess, and now I have to clean it up. Does your mom or dad know a good electrician?” Carl said wearily. And then stopped, and looked at Nita in shock, and passed a hand over his eyes.

“Oh, Nita,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Habit…”

“I know,” she said. “I know.” She swallowed. “It’s okay. I’ll ask Dad. He just had a guy doing some stuff to our garage. Dad thinks he’s pretty good.”

“Thanks.”

Nita reached into the empty air beside her and pulled her manual out of the claudication that followed her around. “Here,” she said. “Is something wrong with it?”

Carl sat down. “I don’t think so,” he said, “but there’s something I want to check. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

Carl opened Nita’s manual, turned to one particular page, and spoke to it softly under his breath. Nita watched this curiously. The page filled up with characters in the Speech, cleared itself, and filled again, while Nita told Carl about the dreams she’d started having, how she’d decided to look into them more closely, and what she’d found. Well before she was finished, Carl had pushed her manual to one side and was giving Nita his undivided attention. When she finished, he let out a long breath.

“Well,” he said.

“What were you looking for?” Nita said, feeling slightly nervous.

“It’s all right. It’s nothing bad.” Carl folded his arms and sat back in the chair. “It’s just that the information you’ve been given normally isn’t made public.”

“Been given?” Nita said.

Carl nodded. “But someone at a higher level has seen to it that you got it. So I see from the authorization logs.”

Nita thought about that for a moment. “So he is an abdal?” she said.

Carl got a brooding look. “Tell me how he seemed to you, in twenty-five words or less.”

“Innocent,” Nita said. “He’s absolutely innocent. But he’s fierce about it. It just rolls off him.” She shook her head. The impact of his personality was difficult to describe without sounding silly. If it was light, it would have been blinding. “And it’s not just the innocence. Even with the screaming, I still liked him a lot. He’s really good. And he just doesn’t notice, doesn’t seem to get it…”

“That would seem to clinch it, wouldn’t it?” Carl said. “The definition out of the manual, practically word for word.”

“That’s what I thought. But you know what was weird? The way Darryl was, even though it was good… It scared me somehow.”

Carl smiled a little. “Possibly a healthy response,” he said. “And one that convinces me you’re right. You met him out of the flesh, without the protective coloration that a body provides for a spirit like that. At such times you’d get the full impact. And I imagine it’s an eye-opener.”

Nita nodded. “I never thought goodness could be so tough,” she said. “So strong. But then again, I guess goodness isn’t something I’d think about a whole lot, anyway. Nobody uses the word much unless it’s in a commercial, and then they’re just trying to convince you that something has a lot of milk in it.”

Carl nodded, looking wry. “Virtue,” he said. “The real thing. It’s not some kind of cuddly teddy bear you can keep on the shelf until you need a hug. It’s dangerous, which is why it makes people so nervous. Virtue has its own agenda, and believe me, it’s not always yours. The word itself means strength, power. And when it gets loose, you’d better watch out.”

“Something bad might happen…?”

“Impossible. But possibly something painful.” And Carl fell silent for a moment, his eyes gone thoughtful and a little distant.

“The manual makes the abdals sound like saints,” Nita said.

“Oh, they are saints,” Carl said, looking at her again. “That aspect of their power doesn’t have anything to do with wizardry as such, though it can coexist with it, the same way you could be, say, a mathematician and a really nice person at the same time.”

Nita made a face. “You haven’t met my statistics teacher.”

“I hear you. I still hate anything more complex than long division. But the trouble with sainthood these days is the robe-and-halo imagery that gets stuck onto it.” Carl got that thoughtful look again. “People forget that robes were street clothes once. Still are, in a lot of places. And halos are to that fierce air of innocence what speech balloons in comics are to the sound of the voice itself. Shorthand. But most people just see an old symbol and don’t bother looking behind it for the meaning. Sainthood starts to look old-fashioned, unattainable… even repellent. Actually, you can see it all around, once you learn to spot it.”

“You make it sound like there are saints all over the place.”

“Of course there are. You don’t think it’s just wizards that keep the universe running, do you? But saints tend not to be obvious. For one thing, they don’t want to draw the Lone One’s attention to them. Also, they tend to be too busy. Mostly sainthood involves hard work.”

Carl leaned forward to pick up Nita’s manual again, paging through it. “Anyway, I think you can understand why information about the abdals would be pretty carefully controlled, most of the time. The whole point of the way they function is that they’re not supposed to know what they are. And the more mortals who do know, the more might let it slip. Darryl is important. Far more important, in the larger scheme of things, than you or I, or than just about anybody else I know, or am likely to know. Abdals don’t exactly grow on trees.”

Then Carl looked briefly amused. “Well, actually, some places they do. I mean, they’re not commonplace. The One invests a lot of power in them. There wouldn’t be many of them on any given planet at any one time… and we want to keep the ones we’ve got. Or the one we’ve got, because as far as Earth goes at the moment, Darryl may well be it. And his presence here, even when he doesn’t seem to be doing anything in particular, is important for the world, because through him, the One channels into the world some of the power we use. If you’ll pardon the plumbing analogy, think of us as faucets and Darryl as the water main that feeds water down from the reservoir. Cut that off, and—” Carl shook his head.

Nita was silent for some moments, digesting this. “So what do I do now?” she said. “I don’t want Kit to think I’m horning in on his assignment or something because I’m worried about him. But I think maybe I am. He was okay when he started this, pretty much… as far as I was able to tell anything clearly about his state of mind when I was so stuck in my own. But now he doesn’t feel like he usually does. And I can’t tell for sure whether that’s good or bad.”

“I wouldn’t be sure, either,” Carl said. “Well, the first thing you can do, when he gets up, is tell him I want a word with him, pronto. I don’t like to lean on my wizards as a rule, but Kit’s been less careful than usual, and with what you’ve discovered about the situation, he’d better sharpen up. The stakes have been raised.”

***

Nita came back from Tom and Carl’s the quick way, popping out into the backyard. The snow there was untouched, rather to her surprise, as Dairine was as much a snow fiend as their mom had been. It was unusual to find that she hadn’t been out here at least long enough to make a couple of angels. Under more normal circumstances, there would have been a whole snowman by now. But the circumstances aren’t normal…

Nita went in, shucked her parka off and left it by the back door, and went up the stairs to see what Dairine was up to. She found her in her bedroom, staring at her desk. Spot was sitting in her lap, also staring with its little stalky eyes at the construction sitting there.

Nita looked at the desk. It was covered with tinfoil. On the foil and on a subsidiary bed of newspaper rested what appeared to be a model volcano sculpted out of wet papier-mâché. The volcano was extremely broad and flat, of the shield type, and Nita recognized it immediately.

“How does it look?” Dairine said.

“Not bad,” Nita said. “What’s it for?”

“Science class geology unit.”

Nita raised her eyebrows. “Bending the rules a little, Dair?” she said. “That’s Olympus Mons. It hardly counts as geology.”

“Okay, areology, then.” Dairine sat there wiping her hands on a towel.

“Looks a little bare right now,” Nita said.

Her sister turned a look of withering scorn on her. Spot cocked one eye in Nita’s direction as if to suggest that she’d asked for this. “Of course it looks a little bare,” Dairine said. “I have to paint it first. My real project for today is constructing an airbrush out of nothing but wizardry.”

“Sounds like a moderate challenge,” Nita said.

“And when the volcano’s done, I’m going to make it blow up in class,” Dairine said.

Nita’s eyes widened slightly at the first image that occurred to her.

“With lycopodium powder,” Dairine said, more scornfully than before, if that was possible. “Sheesh, Neets.”

“Just checking,” Nita said.

“Yes,” Dairine said, “I know you were.” She rolled her eyes. “Tell Dad I’m being good.”

“If you’re good enough, I won’t have to tell him anything.” Nita turned away.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to do it with real lava, though?” Dairine said from behind her as Nita headed to her room.

“There are times,” Nita said, “when I think a nice big lava flow would improve that school a lot. You know any card tricks?”

The silence in answer to that question was unusually eloquent.

Nita sighed and sat down in her room. You awake yet? she said silently to Kit.

She waited for a few seconds.

Huh? Kit said.

Well, that’s half my question answered, Nita said. You sound wrecked. You okay?

I guess so.

Nita raised her eyebrows. This wasn’t exactly a normal response for Kit. Either he was okay or he wasn’t, but the middle ground wasn’t usually an option for him, in Nita’s experience, especially when he sounded as dulled as he did. I’m coming over in a while, she said. There’s some stuff I have to show you.

Okay.

And that was it: he dropped the connection.

Nita blinked. Either he’s really exhausted, or there’s something really wrong…

She knew what her present hunch suggested, though. She was seriously getting worried about him now. He’s been hitting this problem with Darryl so hard, Nita thought, that he’s just been wearing himself down. That’s one possibility.

So why don’t I think that’s what’s really going on?

Nita headed downstairs to make herself a sandwich. “By the way,” Dairine said in a piercing voice as Nita went past her door, “someone seems to have eaten all the bananas.”

Nita sighed. “I’ll stop by Brazil on my way home. Or Panama.”

“Costa Rica.”

“Please,” Nita said as she went down the stairs. She had never been any good at remembering which exports came from which countries. It struck her as information that, for someone in junior high, was about as useful as dissecting the history of the gold standard. When I get a job at an import-export firm, Nita thought, turning the corner into the kitchen, then I’ll worry about who exports bauxite and who exports tin. Not before.

She rummaged around in the cupboards to find a can of tuna fish; opened it, drained it, mashed it in a bowl with mayonnaise and Tabasco sauce, made herself a sandwich with it, and ingested the sandwich without paying it much attention, for Darryl was on her mind. He’s more important than all of us, Carl said. The thought was sobering. She and Kit had done some moderately important and useful things in their time working together, but what Carl seemed to be describing was a different level of function—one in which just being there, just being alive and breathing, could be more important to the world than any amount of running around doing things. It made a strange kind of sense when Nita put it together with what Tom had been saying about the Powers finding the difference between active and passive work “illusory.” If just by being here, Darryl is channeling the One’s power into the world, then if something were to happen to him suddenly…

It was a scarier thought than any Nita had had in quite some time. Whatever else I do, she thought, I’ve got to find a way to help him. Because he doesn’t know it, but he’s helped me…

Nita went to get her coat, and then went out to walk over to Kit’s.

***

“Hola, Carmela. ¿Qué pasa?” Nita said as she came in Kit’s back door.

“Watashi wa ureshii!” Carmela said, more or less dancing past Nita into the living room, with the TV remote in her hand.

Nita blinked as she slipped off her coat and dropped it on the floor beside the dining room sofa. The Japanese thing was something Carmela had been working on for a while, and now that she was getting good at it, you never quite knew which language you were going to get from her. “Let me guess. You’re saying you’re going to turn into a giant robot?”

“No,” Carmela said, “that would be, Watashi, imakara sugo-ku o-kina robotto ni naruno!”

“I’m impressed,” Nita said.

“If I really did turn into a giant robot, I bet you would be,” Carmela said, heading back into the living room.

Nita followed her. “Oh,” she said. “Is this the new entertainment center?”

“Ohayō gozaimas’!” shouted the TV and the DVD player together.

“Oh,” Nita said. “Hi, cousins. Nice to meet you.”

“Dōzo yoroshiku!”

“Uh, yeah.” To Carmela she said, “Don’t you find that a little unusual?”

“I’m used to it now. Kit says he thinks we’re having some kind of wizardry leakage in the house,” Carmela said, very matter-of-fact. “Mama can hear Ponch. And Pop and I can hear the TV when it shouts at the DVD. Mostly it’s friendly shouting now, since Kit fixed the remote.” Carmela plunked herself back down on the sofa, stretching out her legs.

“Fixed it,” Nita said, still having some trouble with this concept.

“Oh, it was way worse before, believe me! He said he was going to ask Tom what was going on. Meanwhile, in case you’re wondering, Kit’s in his room. Mama and Pop are out shopping, and they did not take Kit with them because they are annoyed with him.” She lowered her voice. “But also because he slept real late, and he looks like hell. Mama thinks he’s coming down with something.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Nita said. “Uh, have you been having any trouble with—?” She glanced in the general direction of the TV and DVD while turning enough to conceal the look.

“Trouble? Not at all. Weird stuff turns up sometimes, but all the regular TV’s there, the cable and all. I don’t care how many aliens I see, as long as I’ve got my MTV and the shopping channels.”

Nita grinned. This was Dairine’s attitude as well, though it was the music channels that interested her more than the shopping. “Half the time, with some of those videos, you can’t tell what planet they’re from anyway,” Nita said.

Carmela snickered. “Later,” Nita said, and went back to Kit’s room.

He was lying on the bed, his manual open and facedown on his chest, looking up at the ceiling. Ponch was lying next to him on the bed, his head on Kit’s chest. Ponch’s eyes shifted to Nita as she came into view, but he didn’t move or say anything.

Nita paused in the door and knocked on the door frame. “Hey,” she said.

Kit glanced over at her. It was the least-interested glance that Nita could remember seeing from him in some time. Why doesn’t he just come out and say that he wishes I wasn’t here? Nita thought, shocked. But it occurred to her then that she’d been distant enough with him lately. Maybe he was giving her a taste of her own medicine. That wouldn’t normally he his style, either. But if he’s really feeling sick, maybe he’s just saying what’s on his mind, stuff he’d keep to himself otherwise.

Nita felt briefly guilty, then put the feeling aside. “You look kind of out of it,” she said.

“Yeah,” Kit said. “I feel that way, too. I didn’t sleep real well after I got in last night.”

“Late?” Nita went to sit in the chair by his desk.

“Yeah.”

She waited a moment to let him tell her what he’d been doing, but he just turned his head away and looked up at the ceiling again. He wasn’t going to tell her. “You have any luck with Darryl?” she said.

“Not really.”

Nita started feeling around for something sarcastic and angry to say to Kit, and then she stopped herself. He didn’t push me when I didn’t want to talk, she thought. I’m not going to push him now.

But there’s still something that needs saying. “Kit,” she said, “about Darryl … I’m getting the feeling that you going after him the way you are isn’t doing you any good.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nita pursed her lips. That was the same “uh-huh” that she used on Dairine, as code for the message, “I am not listening to you. Bug off.”

He doesn’t mean to be rude. He just doesn’t want to tell me what’s on his mind, or hear what’s on mine.

Did I sound like this? He should have hit me on the head with something until I paid attention.

Nita let out a breath. “Okay,” she said, “forget about it for now. But I have a message for you. You need to go see Carl.”

That finally made Kit look at her again. “How come?”

“Tom’s out of town,” Nita said. “Some Advisory or Senior thing. Carl’s handling his interventions for the next day or so. You owed Tom a debrief on what’s up with Darryl, and Carl wants to know where it is. Just between you and me, I think he’s steamed. So if I were you, I’d get over there and take your medicine.”

“I’ve taken enough medicine for one weekend,” Kit muttered.

“After you got in late?”

“Yeah. My pop didn’t say much, but my mama did.”

“Tore a few strips off you, huh?”

“It wasn’t my fault, Neets,” Kit said. “The timing got blown, that’s all.” He sighed. “But it doesn’t really matter.”

Nita looked at Kit with concern. That was a theme she’d been singing too much herself lately, and Nita wasn’t going to be indifferent to it when someone else started in on it.

“They didn’t ground you or anything?”

“No. Anyway, they would have done that how, exactly?” Kit said.

Nita had to smile, despite her worrying. It was extremely difficult to ground a wizard without the wizard’s consent. Still, you had to live with your parents … and rubbing their noses in the fact that they couldn’t control you no matter how much they wanted to wasn’t a great way to make that life an easy one.

Kit sighed. “Neets, I’m sorry, I’m just…” He trailed off. It wasn’t that he was too tired to pursue the thought. It was just that he didn’t care.

“Okay,” Nita said, and got up. At least he talked to me a little. It’s possible he really is coming down with something … Well, we’ll see. “Look, call me when you feel better, okay? There’s stuff we have to discuss about Darryl.”

“Sure.”

“But go see Carl first.”

Kit turned his attention to the ceiling again.

Nita gave him one last look as she turned away. As she did, Ponch glanced up at her. His eyes had been all for Kit until now, but the look Ponch gave her had even more concern in it than Nita was feeling.

Nita met the gaze, glanced fractionally at the door, and went out.

That could have turned into an argument, Nita thought, if he had enough energy to bother. But he didn’t. She passed through the living room; there Carmela was curled up on the sofa watching the TV, where models in frilly things pounded up and down a catwalk. Nita paused briefly, eyed the things the models were almost wearing.

“Not for me,” Carmela said, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Drafty. How is he?”

“He looks tired,” Nita said. “Anyway, tell your mama and pop I said hi.”

“Sure, will do.”

Nita got her coat and headed out the back door. She didn’t shut it right away, because after about half a minute, Ponch came trotting out of the dining room and headed outside, past Nita.

She closed the door, brushed some stray snow off the back steps, and sat down. Ponch sat down next to her.

“Ponch,” Nita said in the Speech. “What’s with the boss?”

He’s sad, Ponch said. But there’s more to it than that.

Ponch looked down the driveway toward the street. I’m sad, too, he said. And I’m afraid. Something’s happening to him, and I don’t know how to stop it.

Somewhere down the street, a dog began to howl in a high little voice, like something out of a cartoon.

“It’s about Darryl, isn’t it?”

We were there again this morning.

“Again? I thought you went last night.”

We did. I took him there. But the second time we went, he started to go by himself. I had to follow him. Ponch licked his nose nervously. It wasn’t easy. He wasn’t going the way I go.

“Was he dreaming?”

Yes.

“Lucid dreaming, though? The guided kind?”

No. He was worried. His dream took him there without him wanting to he there, at first. Then he couldn’t get out. They were getting alike…

Nita pondered this. Her own nonlucid dreaming had brought her to Darryl, or Darryl to her, and those dreams hadn’t been good, either. But this experience, at least as Ponch described it, sounded slightly different. I bet their minds are starting to get locked together because of all the time Kit’s spending in there, Nita thought. This is not good…

And reality doesn’t feel the same way to Darryl as it does to Kit, Ponch said. The boss is starting to feel it the way Darryl does, and he doesn’t know how to do it right.

Nita shook her head. “Ponch, I don’t think you should take him back in there for a while. At least not until he’s feeling better. And when you go, I want to go with him.”

I want you to do that, too.

Nita lifted her head, listening, realizing that the howling of dogs down the street had increased. Three or four more dogs had joined the first one. “What’s the matter with the dogs?” Nita said. “Is someone using one of those silent whistles or something?”

No. I think it’s because I’m afraid, Ponch said. I think they hear me being that way, and they’re upset for me.

“But that’s not all, is it,” Nita said, looking thoughtfully at Ponch. “Something else is happening to you besides just being afraid for the boss. Isn’t it?”

There was a long pause. I don’t know, Ponch said. I don’t know what it means. I don’t have the words. But I’m frightened for me, too. He licked his nose again.

The howling down the street got louder, and Nita suddenly found herself thinking that it wouldn’t be smart right now to press the question any further. She put an arm around Ponch and roughed his fur up a little. “We’re both nervous about a lot of things, big guy,” she said. “I’ll be glad when the boss is better. But listen. Kit needs to go see Carl right away. He’s not in the mood to listen to me right now. But he needs to go, anyway. Will you nag him? Get him to go over there?”

I will.

“That’s my boy.” She rubbed Ponch behind the ears and pulled the door open for him. He went back into the house.

Nita shut the door and headed home. She was almost halfway there before, as she went over the conversation with Ponch in her mind, she realized that at least once Ponch had answered a thought in her mind—not something she’d actually said out loud.

Nita shook her head, sighed, and walked in the direction of the neighborhood deli, to see if they had any bananas.

Chapter 8: Entrapments

Kit and Carl were sitting together in Tom and Carl’s dining room, later that afternoon.

“Kit,” Carl said, “it’s all very interesting what you’ve told me. It throws a lot of light on Darryl’s problem. I’m going to look into this myself, as far as possible. In the meantime”—he frowned—”I want to know why it took you so long to get in here and tell Tom or me about this. We’ve been working together on power-sensitive issues long enough that you know better than to let a situation of this kind go for so long without a debrief.”

“I’ve had the manual on record-and-report,” Kit said.

Carl shook his head. “Not good enough,” he said. “The manual, powerful as it is, is context-poor when reporting on experiences like this. Especially considering that what you’ve been doing with Ponch is unique as far as I can tell. For maximum effectiveness in assessing Darryl’s status, I need to know how things looked and felt to you after the fact, as well as during it. So you’d better start getting serious about this, Kit. It’s not like you to let things slide.”

“Okay,” Kit said.

Carl looked at him with an expression that suggested he was expecting to hear something else. At last he said, “Which brings me to the next thing on the list. The Powers certainly don’t expect you to work on a project so hard that you neglect your own well-being. Neither do I. You look terrible; you’ve been spending too much time chasing around outside of your home space, and it’s affecting you. I appreciate your efforts, believe me … but I want you to take a couple of days off.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Carl said.

Now it was Kit’s turn to frown. Possibly Carl read the expression as rebelliousness. “Kit,” he said, “as a Senior, it’s not beyond my abilities to put a freeze on your wizardly exertions for the next day or three. I would prefer not to have to do that: it’s undignified for both of us, and it also sends a signal to the Powers that there might be a problem with the way you’re using the Art. I would much prefer to hear you tell me that you won’t do any further exploration of Darryl’s inner worlds until Tom and I have had some time to work out what seems to be the best way to proceed. This may sound cruel to you, but he’s been holding his own for the past three months, at least; I would guess he’ll hang on for a day or two more. You, on the other hand, need to leave his problem with me for consideration over the next couple of days.”

Kit let out a long breath. “So,” Carl said, “do I have your word?”

“Mmf,” Kit said.

Carl gave him an exasperated look. “Even among nonwizards,” Carl said, “it’s considered impolite to grunt.”

“I promise,” Kit said.

“Good,” Carl said. “Thanks.” He relaxed a little. “Kit, go home. Get some rest. It’s not that you did a bad job; it’s just that you got a little too wrapped up in this one. Take two days and get your objectivity back. Then you and Tom and I will sit down and work out what to do next.” And he saw Kit out the sliding doors into the backyard.

Kit used his transport wizardry to get home, then walked slowly down the driveway to the side door, with Ponch trotting along behind him. He was feeling rather bruised. But to a certain extent, bizarrely, part of him felt grateful. Carl’s very understated annoyance had shaken Kit a little way out of the feeling that had been creeping up on him that nothing particularly mattered. However, that was the only good thing about it. Kit felt very much as if he were in disgrace.

You look sad, Ponch said.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “I think I’m just tired.” Even as he said it, though, Kit wondered how true this was. Ever since he woke up from his jungle dream, he had been moving through a world that seemed oddly dulled around the edges. The daylight seemed to be reaching him through some kind of filter; sound seemed distant, and he didn’t even seem able to feel his clothes properly—they seemed to bother his skin where they rested on it. The feeling was like what he got sometimes when he was coming down with a cold. Maybe Mama was right…

He went in the back door, took off his coat and hung it up, while Ponch trotted over to his dog food bowl and started to chow down on dry food. Kit’s mama, in the kitchen in her nurse’s pinks, looked up at him from the business of making a sandwich. “How are you feeling, sweetie?”

“Maybe a little better,” Kit said, thinking that possibly this was true. “Getting out in the air was nice. Where’s Pop?”

“He’s lying down reading a book, waiting for the basketball game.”

“Okay.”

His mama gave Kit a glance as he went and flopped down on the dining room sofa. At first Kit thought she was going to bring up once more the subject of the discussion she and Kit’s pop had had with him earlier. “I meant to thank you, by the way,” his mama said as she opened a drawer to get a plastic bag to put her sandwich in. “It’s been so much quieter.”

His mama’s voice had a strange grating quality to it, which Kit couldn’t remember having heard before. Is she coming down with a cold, too? Kit thought. It wouldn’t be great if we all got sick at once. “Sorry?”

“The little dog down the street.”

Kit was bemused. “Tinkerbell, you mean? I haven’t talked to him.”

“You haven’t?”

“Sorry, Mama, I’ve been busy.”

“Well, he got quiet again. Relatively quiet, anyway. There was some howling earlier, but it didn’t last long.”

“That’s good,” Kit said. He stretched, but far from making him feel more comfortable, it made him feel less so; he felt very out of sorts, as if his skin didn’t fit him, as if his bones weren’t fastened together correctly. “Mama, I think I might go lie down again for a while.”

That got her attention. She finished wrapping her sandwich and came over to feel his forehead. “Do you feel hot, sweetie?” she said.

Kit shook his head. If anything, he felt chilly, though not to the point of shivers—he felt a strange kind of still numbness that left him unwilling to talk about what was bothering him. Indeed, talking about anything seemed more trouble than it was worth. When his mother took her hand away, Kit got up and went to his room. There, as he lay down on his bed, he reached out for his manual and started paging through it to find a diagnostic to run on himself. I won’t be any good to anybody if I just lie around feeling like this. But, shortly, Kit was lying on his back again, gazing at the ceiling, the manual lying open, pages down, on the bed beside him. He didn’t even hear Ponch come in and circle around once to lie on the braided rug by the bed, looking up at him with troubled eyes. And after a while Kit turned over on his side again and just stared at the wall….

***

The next afternoon Nita was sitting at her desk, cutting a deck of cards. She’d reached the point where what she really wanted to cut them with was a meat cleaver, but that would simply have meant that she’d have to get another deck of cards from somewhere.

Nita cut the cards again. There’s an art to this, she thought. The only problem is, it isn’t my Art. And no matter how I do this, when I think of why I’m learning it in the first place, it feels like cheating.

She was working on her false shuffle. From what she’d been able to find out on the Web, many of the simplest card tricks depended on shuffling the cards in such a way as to make the card you wanted come up in the right place. This, in turn, involved protecting some of the cards with one of your hands while you shuffled. So far, Nita had gotten to the point where she could protect about a third of the deck, keeping the cards stacked there from being shuffled out of order. In about three hundred years, she thought, I’ll be ready to let some other human being see me do a trick. Why did I ever mention magic to Mr. Millman?

The only good thing about having to sit here doing this was that it gave Nita something to occupy her hands while she worried about Kit. She’d called him late yesterday afternoon to make sure he’d gone to see Carl, and had been very concerned about the tone of his voice. It had acquired a strange monotonous quality, one that made her think of…

A robot? she thought, unnerved. She stopped shuffling for a moment and thought about that. It occurred to Nita that the more contact they’d all had with Darryl, the better his ability to express himself had become… and the more adverse effect it seemed to be having on Kit.

If he goes in there again, she thought, he’s going to lose it.

And he’s going to go in there again. I’m sure of it.

Nita cut the cards again, looking to see if the ace of hearts, the card she’d been protecting, came up. What she got was the three of clubs. She made an annoyed face and pushed the cards away, knowing perfectly well what was interfering with her concentration.

It wasn’t just a matter of Kit’s stubbornness now—not that that couldn’t be formidable when he was in the right mood. She was also dealing with something else she was less familiar with: Darryl’s stubbornness. He’d been holding off the Lone Power all by himself for a long time now, and Nita didn’t think he was going to stop for their sakes. And why should he? she thought. From his point of view, he’s got a job to do, and he’s doing it… and the place where he’s been hasn’t left him with any sense that he doesn’t have to be the only one fighting this fight. Nita shook her head as she thought about what that must cost him. Such loneliness would have crippled her a long time ago. But he bears up under it, she thought. And he just keeps fighting.

That stubbornness had found a resonance in Kit. He and Darryl had become linked in more ways than one. His promises to Carl aside, Nita had a feeling that Kit was going to find himself in Darryl’s mind again shortly. At which time, Nita thought, I’d better be ready.

She picked up the deck again, took a couple of minutes to find the ace of hearts, repositioned it, and reshuffled, carefully protecting the back third of the deck. Then she put the deck down, cut it twice so that she had three piles, reached out to the leftmost pile, and turned the top card over. It was the four of diamonds.

God I hate this! Nita thought. She stood up from her desk and went across the hall to Dairine’s room.

Her sister was sitting at her own desk, which was still completely covered by the papier-mache version of Olympus Mons. It was no longer gray-white; Dairine had done a fairly credible job with her wizardly airbrush. Now the mountain lay there nicely colored in shades of beige and faint rust-red, its huge crater looking entirely ready to spill out lava. Spot was sitting up on one of the bookshelves, peering down at the volcano with his little stalky eyes.

“Dair?”

Dairine looked up at Nita with a weary expression.

“I think I’m going to need some help,” Nita said.

“As long as it doesn’t involve me painting anything,” Dairine said, “you’re on.”

Nita came in and sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked.

Dairine looked at her.

“Don’t start,” Nita said. “You know what’s on my mind.”

“Darryl,” Dairine said. “Or the ace of hearts.”

“Please,” Nita said. “Dair, I need to ask you a favor.”

Her sister gave her a slightly suspicious look.

“He’s going to go in there again,” Nita said.

“Kit?” Dairine put her eyebrows up. “Thought he promised Carl he wouldn’t.”

“I don’t think he’s entirely in control of what’s going on with him,” Nita said. “Darryl’s very, uh, single-minded. And that single-mindedness is affecting Kit. We need to be ready for that.”

“‘We’?” Dairine said.

“Dair, he sure isn’t listening to me right now—”

“So I guess you know now what it’s been like dealing with you over the past month, then.”

Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. “Different reasons, as it turns out,” she said. “But, well, yeah.” It would have been all too easy to immediately add, And you haven’t exactly been a picnic to be around either! — but she restrained herself.

“And?”

Nita shifted where she sat, a little uneasily. The bed creaked.

Dairine just tilted her head a little and kept looking at her.

Nita let out a long exasperated breath. “Can I do the groveling and apologizing thing later, please? Because there’ll be a whole lot more time.”

Dairine rolled her eyes; but it was an accepting expression. “What do you need?”

“Some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me—for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure there’s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.”

Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position for Dairine. Usually even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. “You sure you want my help?” Dairine said.

Nita looked at her strangely. “Are you nuts?” she said. “Of course I do.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset about her face, but all the same Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. “I warned you, Neets. Right now I’m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would a while back. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything really high-powered—” She shook her head. “I don’t know if you want to be depending on me right now.”

“I will depend on you any time,” Nita said.

The look Dairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it.

“Do I have to say it in the Speech?” Nita said.

“Nita,” Dairine said then, very softly, “Mom couldn’t depend on me.”

Nita shook her head. “If you mean you couldn’t just make a wish and save her life,” Nita said, “then you’re right. If you really thought it was going to go that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn’t depend on you. Or that I won’t.”

“You may be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now,” Dairine said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I’m exactly a model of stability at the moment either. But I can’t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net? Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl’s apparently…”

Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tell Dairine about why Darryl was special.

“Something unusual,” Dairine said. “With a lot of power. Or something else. He’d have to be special, to be getting so much attention from Tom and Carl.”

“Yeah.”

Dairine sat quietly for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll set something up for you.”

Nita nodded. “Thanks,” she said, got up and turned away.

“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Dairine said. “Asking me for help.”

Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. “Better it should kill me than Kit.”

Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.

***

We have to go.

Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon. Where did the day go? part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to help him. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.

He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed again, or rather, he had changed it, Darryl had changed it, to keep putting the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always caught up with him eventually, always just before It realized that Darryl had It trapped. And then, just this side of that crucial tipping point, Darryl would change everything again, constructing a new world, a new inner self, in which the Pursuer, whipsawed by Its own rage and pride, would once again lose the plot—wasting energy chasing him that would otherwise have been used to wreak Its habitual destruction on the world. Each new world was better at distracting the Lone One than the last, with new rules to impede Its power and to keep It occupied for longer. Each new scenario sucked more energy from It, and fueled the rage that blinded the Lone One to what was actually happening.

It was brilliant, what Darryl was doing. And it was beyond brave. But Kit wished Darryl didn’t have to keep doing this again and again, for it gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for. If it was for anything else…

We have to go, Kit thought. He got out of bed—

—and tripped over Ponch, who was lying on the rug, watching him. Boss! Ponch yelped. Where are you going?

“We have to go,” Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn’t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.

You promised you wouldn’t! Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down. You told Carl you’d stay here!

But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone different had made it: another person, in another place… the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself in its newest form around him. The last time, he’d gotten a little careless, and the dark Other had found Its way in and out again too easily. This time the place to which It found Its way had to be more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what caused him pain every day—his own gaze, helpless to make itself free of the dark Other looking out of it and mocking him. But this is just a weapon It’s purposely using against you, the thought had come to him, the knowledge of Its presence at the bottom of your soul. So use the weapon It’s put in your hand: turn the weapon against It…

That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly into it, such was the other’s power and his need for help. Distressed, Ponch said, The leash! Boss, let me get the leash! Wait for me—

The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.

Stay there, boss! Kit—stay! Stay!

The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other’s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for—to befuddle It, wear It down until he had time to rest and construct a better plan. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence worth clinging to.

The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, urgent, desperate. Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist.

Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told. As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world—or rather the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too…

***

“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”

No reply.

“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”

No reply.

Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”

She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

***

At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a salami on rye, reached out for the handset lying on the table beside him.

“Hello? Oh, hi, Marina… No, he’s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute.”

Nita’s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple “guess the card” trick to work. “Nita?” her dad said. “Is Kit here?”

Nita was surprised. “No.”

“His mom’s looking for him.”

Nita’s heart went cold inside her. “He was going to be home all day today.”

“He’s not there, his mom says.”

Nita sat still for a moment. Kit?

There was no answer.

She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly “I don’t hear him nearby,” she said. “Wait a minute, Daddy.”

She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it, “Kit, where are you? Urgent!”

Send message? the manual page said.

“Send it!”

Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.

Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn’t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.

She took the phone from her dad. “Mrs. Rodriguez? It’s Nita. I just called him, but I don’t get any answer. And the manual says he’s not in this universe. He’s gone again.”

There was a long, frightened pause on the other end. “He said he wasn’t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,” Kit’s mama said. “But he hasn’t been himself, these past couple of days.”

That was exactly Nita’s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn’t himself, but halfway to somebody else. She’d started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect an abdal’s ability to be two places at one time might have on someone who’d been inside his head a few times. A non-abdal’s soul won’t be able to handle that kind of thing for long: it’s just not wired for it. It’ll get hung up in finding some way to make sense of it when there is no sense, and the brain attached to the soul is going to twist itself out of shape trying to cope. And maybe not be able to twist back again—

She held still. Got to keep my cool here, she thought. It’s the only way I’m going to find Kit. “I’m going to go look for him,” Nita said. “It may take me a while to find him. I can’t do it the way he does it with Ponch; I’ve got to be asleep.”

She heard Kit’s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone controlling herself as tightly as Nita was doing right now. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me? I think Kit gave you my work number.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Mrs. Rodriguez, please… don’t worry.” It’s going to be all right, Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn’t say it. It might not be true.

“Okay,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.”

Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her in distress.

“Where is he?” he said.

Nita shook her head. “I don’t have a name for it, Daddy. It’s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it’d be easier to get to. It’s inside Darryl’s mind somehow… so it’s closer than another world or continuum, but a lot more dangerous, in its way. If Kit’s stuck in there, and I can’t get him out…”

She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she’d been most afraid of—a crisis she was afraid she couldn’t handle. And you’re all y yourself on this one, she thought. Dairine may be able to support you, but you’re going to be the one who has to figure out what to do with what she adds to the equation. And if you can’t figure it out…

Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her. “Nita,” he said. “Listen to me.”

She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.

“You’re tough,” her dad said. “Tougher than you think. You have to hand onto that now. That’s what I’ve been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don’t let the idea go. You have to take one thing at a time now. Don’t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do? Call them.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. She picked up the phone again, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Carl,” Nita said, “Kit couldn’t hold it. He’s gone again.”

Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. But Nita distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl’s silence. “When did he leave?”

“Might have been just a few minutes ago.”

“Okay. Wait a second.”

Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table where his version of the manual usually lay hidden, then flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.

A moment later he picked up the phone again. “He’s out of ambit, all right,” Carl said. “And the energy signatures are too vague to track him. But this much we do have in our favor. Ponch went with Kit.”

“I bet Ponch made Kit take him,” Nita said, feeling sure of this without knowing why. “Carl, I’ll go try to find them.”

“I wouldn’t do that right this minute,” Carl said. “They might still be in transit. I can’t tell. Give the situation an hour or two to settle.”

Nita could see his point, but she didn’t like it. “Carl, he’s been really spaced since he came back from his last time in Darryl’s universe. Anything could happen to him in a few minutes, let alone an hour!”

“Nita,” Carl said, “take a breath or two and get a grip. I know how you feel. But even if you’d already done the presleep preparation you need to do for a lucid dreaming session, which I don’t think you have, you’d still need to get to sleep after that. And you know you can’t induce it with a sleep spell when you’re going lucid. You’re going to have to relax a little, enough to doze off, or you won’t be able to do anything.”

She let out a long breath. “I hate it when you’re right,” Nita muttered.

“All right, there’s the wizard I know.”

She had to grin, for Carl had taken to teasing her about her temper lately. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call you later and let you know what I find.”

“Do that. And if I’ve got something you need, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll be up late.”

“Thanks.”

Nita hung up, looked at her father. Dairine had come downstairs and was leaning in the dining room doorway, looking alert, with Spot peering into the kitchen from behind her legs. To Dairine, Nita said, “He’s gone. Let’s start building that power-feed spell; I’m going to need it in a couple of hours.”

She and Dairine headed up the stairs.

***

It took Nita nearly four hours to get ready to go after Kit, and even then she couldn’t sleep. Part of the problem was that she was very much a daytime person and found it tough to get to sleep before eight in the evening. The rest of the problem was her nerves.

When Nita first lay down, Dairine was still sitting in the chair by Nita’s desk, looking over the lifeline spell she’d constructed. At any other time, Nita would have been annoyed enough by the elegance and speed with which Dairine had constructed it to try to find at least some fault with it. But there wasn’t time for that, and right now she was simply grateful that Dairine was so talented in this kind of work. The bed was surrounded by a long, tightly knitted cord of blue-glowing words in the Speech, rather like Kit’s leash for Ponch, but both more intricate and thicker. The wizardry had to handle much higher power levels than the leash did, and had no life-support functions as such—those Nita would be carrying with her on her charm bracelet, in a suite of interconnected shielding and atmosphere-maintenance spells.

Nita was also more heavily armed than usual, not knowing how many friends the Lone Power might have skulking around the borders of Darryl’s mind, intent on keeping enemies out and friends in. From Nita’s bracelet dangled a number of charms, each of which represented a spell almost ready to go, needing only one thought or pronounced syllable to set it going. It was wearying to carry this much nearly released power around, but Nita was beyond caring how much energy she had to expend. Her fear for Kit was growing by the minute.

After she’d finished looking over the lifeline wizardry and lay down on the bed, Nita took a last moment or three to check out the weaponry—the lightning bolt of the quark-level dissociator, the little closed spiral of a pinch-off utility that could seal a designated attacker or group of attackers into a “pocket” space, the little “magic wand” charm that contained a one-off terawatt particle-beam generator. Even in her present nervous state, Nita looked at that one with slight relish and wished she might have a chance to use it—the manual had been explicit about how dangerous it was, and how effective. The manual itself was slipped into her own otherspace pocket, inside the lifeline wizardry with her. Last of all she checked her throat, where the thin fine chain of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was fastened, and made sure it was charged and active. It buzzed slightly against her fingers, acknowledging that it was ready to go.

Nita settled herself back against the pillows. “How long’s the lifeline good for?” she said to Dairine.

“You get six hours. Then it’s got to be dismantled and rebuilt, and I have to recharge it. It’s…” She glanced at Spot, who was sitting on the desk with his screen up, running manual functions, among them a Julian date clock. “It’s just past three-oh-three-point-three. You get until point-fifty-five, then you snap back here, no matter what you’re doing. So keep an eye on your manual.”

Nita nodded. She wiggled against the pillows a little and closed her eyes.

After about five minutes, she opened them again, and sighed. “Dair…”

“Is there something wrong with the spell?”

Nita made a face. “This is really dumb, but I can’t fall asleep with you sitting there watching me. You need to go stay in your room, for a while anyway.”

Dairine shrugged. “No problem,” she said, and reached down to pick up one of the lines of light that was trailing away from the lifeline spell. Dairine walked out the door with the power-feed line in her hand. The line of light, the single character for connection in the Speech, stretched and stretched after her as she went.

Then Dairine stuck her head back in the room. “Hey. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. I may need it…

***

At first Nita concentrated on doing the breathing exercises that often helped her get to sleep when she was having trouble doing so, but tonight all they seemed to do was make her uncomfortably aware of her breathing. Finally she gave up on that and just stared at the ceiling, fixing her attention on one spot, the little flawed place where Dairine once bounced a Superball too high and flaked off the ceiling paint. After a while, as Nita had expected, her eyes started tiring.

Eventually she found herself standing in the dark. That darkness was nearly complete: there were no spotlights now, no signs of anything being in this universe but her, and only the faintest, not-quite-black “background” radiance from the sky above. Did I miss them? Nita wondered. Have they gone somewhere else?

She looked around. It did no good standing still in one of these dreams, she’d found. You had to walk around to get anywhere worth being. So Nita reached into her otherspace pocket and came out with a favorite tool, a moonlight-steeped rowan wand lent her by Liused, the tree in her backyard. This one was getting close to its “use by” date—such wands routinely lasted for only three full moons and an intercalary day, unless burned out by overuse before then—and wasn’t much good for anything but light at this point. But light was all Nita needed. As she touched it and pulled it out, the wand came afire with a blaze of secondhand moonlight, enough to show Nita that she was standing on the same plain black surface that she’d seen here before, when meeting the clown, the robot, and the knight. But there was nothing else to be seen at all, in any direction.

“Okay,” she said softly. “Let’s see.”

One of the ready-made spells on her bracelet had a charm that looked like a miniature radar screen. Knowing before she left who she was going to be looking for, Nita had wound Kit’s name in the Speech into it. Now she reached down to that charm and, touching it, saw in her mind the single word needed to activate the spell.

She said the word. Immediately Nita was standing in the middle of a pool of faint green light, a giant version of the sort of round radar screen that air traffic controllers once used. It was a life-sign detector, one that would tag any specific personality it had been keyed to. It lay there around her glowing steadily, but it was hard to make out any specific indication from it.

Nita whispered the light of the rowan wand down to nothing and stared at the detector for many long moments, until her eyes watered. But finally she spotted what she was looking for: a faint, faint patch of light, off in the two o’clock direction. The curling tracery of Kit’s initials in the Speech were beside it.

A long way off, Nita thought. But he’s definitely here.

The trouble was that he seemed to be all by himself; there didn’t seem to be any indication of Darryl on the radar screen. He might still be by himself, Nita thought. Or if he has found Darryl, then Darryl’ might have himself cloaked somehow. Either way, at least now Nita had a direction to walk in.

She spoke the light of the rowan wand back up and spent what seemed like the better part of the next fifteen minutes walking toward Kit. But my time sense may be off, too, Nita thought, pausing briefly at about the fifteen-minute point to check her manual.

She was shocked to find that it was nearly .40. It’s been nearly three hours outside! she thought. This is the problem Kit ran up against the other night. Time flow in here is getting strange.

Nita walked faster. After what seemed like another five minutes or so, she started to see something right against the very edge of the dark horizon, like a very faintly seen thread or line of some different color. The closer she got to it, the more distinct it became; it was starting to pick up the light of the rowan wand.

Within a few minutes she found that the line was growing thicker and taller with every step, and brighter, too. Shortly she was close enough to start to make out what it was.

It was a wall. Perfect, white, featureless, stretching away from her—seemingly to infinity—in great curves on either side, the wall towered over Nita as she approached it. A few feet away from it, Nita stopped, tipping her head way back to look at it.

It was not a physical thing, she knew, but a representation of some power or force that had been put here to stop any intruder. And there was no telling who’d put it here. Darryl? Or the Lone Power?

Nita stepped forward and cautiously touched the wall with a fingertip, like someone gingerly testing an electric fence. The touch told her immediately that the Lone One had nothing to do with this construction; there was no trace of the inimical burn she’d have expected.

Okay, she thought. Nothing else happened—no force attacked her—but Nita could tell by the feel of the wall that it was meant to be infinitely obstructive. She could try to levitate over it, but it would simply stretch up and up and up to match the height at which she attacked it; she could try to dig down under it, but it would extend that way, too. The only way to deal with this wall was to go through—if she had time.

Fine, Nita thought. Let’s see what works.

She said the twelve words of a small-scale antigravity wizardry, wrapped them around the rowan wand, and hung it on the air to give her some light to work by; then turned the charm bracelet on her wrist. One of the charms, looking like a little lasso, was the representation of the lifeline spell. Touching it, Nita could feel the power feeding down it, and could faintly feel Dairine, in circuit with it back at home.

You okay? her sister said.

So far. I need some power now.

Take what you need. The wizardry’s fully charged.

Nita held the charm between her fingers and said the two words that released the clamp on the power flow at her end. Her right hand started filling with a hot white glow, the representation of what Dairine’s wizardry was sending her. Nita let it flow, squeezing the power down to compact it a couple of times and make room for more. Finally, after about a minute, she cut off the flow and stepped toward the wall, using pressure of hands and mind and a few sentences in the Speech to shape that power into a small, concentrated explosive charge of wizardry. She pushed it up against the bottom of the wall, like so much plastic explosive, instructing it to vent all its force away from her, and then retreated to a safe distance.

Nita spoke the air in front of her dark, and then said the explosive’s actuator word in the Speech.

The result was a dazzling flash and impact like lightning striking six feet away. Dark though the air had been, Nita still had to shake her head and blink a few times, trying to get rid of the afterimages. When she managed it, she looked up…

…and saw that the wall was standing right where it had been, without so much as a dent in it.

Nita stared. What?!

The amount of power she’d planted in that explosive had been huge. She felt somehow cheated and really angry at the same time. “Okay,” she said, “no more Miss Nice Girl. Let’s try something a little more emphatic.”

She reached down to the bracelet again and found the charm for the particle-beam accelerator. As she touched it, the accelerator wizardry sprang into being in her hands, ready to fire—a long, narrow conical shape with a blunt stock. Nita snugged the stock of it up against her shoulder, and carefully took aim again at the base of the wall. She had invested a great deal of energy in this wizardry; now she would see what it was worth—

The world flickered, went abruptly bright. What? Nita thought.

Don’t shoot! someone shouted into her mind. It was Dairine.

Nita looked around her in complete confusion. She was lying in bed, aiming the linac weapon at her ceiling.

Oh my god, Nita thought. She hurriedly lowered the accelerator and let the wizardry relapse. She lay there for a few moments while her pulse got back to normal, and then sat up and looked over at the small figure slumped in the chair by her desk.

“Dairine, what am I doing here?!” Nita whispered.

“Giving me grief,” Dairine said, looking ragged. “I told you to watch your time. You spent a real long time getting wherever you were going.” She let out a long breath. “And you didn’t find any trace of Kit at all?”

Nita sagged against the pillows again, and shook her head. “I know he was there, but I couldn’t get near him. We’re going to need more power in that thing this time, Dari. Charge it up. I’m going out again.”

Dairine shook her head. “Neets, it’s nearly three in the morning. And I’m wrecked. It’s a strain holding that thing open.” She looked miserable at having to admit such a thing. “I have to get at least some sleep, because I have to go to school tomorrow morning. Of course I’d rather blow school off, but I promised Dad. You know I did. You know what’ll happen if I don’t go, or if I fall asleep in class.”

Nita was so angry that she had to put her hands over her face to keep from screaming, or otherwise letting Dairine see how she felt. After a few seconds she felt sufficiently in control to uncover her face again.

“Okay,” she said. “You’re right. I have an early morning, too. We’ll try it again tomorrow.” And she let out a long breath. “But thanks, Dair. You did good.”

“We’ll do better tomorrow,” Dairine said. “We’ll find him then, and get him home. G’night.”

She wandered off toward her room, closing Nita’s door behind her.

Nita lay there for a while more. Kit? she said silently, out of desperate hope, nothing more.

Of course, no answer came.

She tried to sleep again, normally, but that was impossible for her now. All Nita could do was think about what Kit’s parents must be going through, and wait for six-thirty to come….

Chapter 9: Reconstructions

The mirrors went on forever.

Kit and Ponch stood together in a brittle glory of reflected light. Overhead was a bright gray sky, featureless. All around them, mirrors stood, as many mirrors as trees in a forest, set at a thousand different angles: tall ones, small ones, mirrors that reflected clearly, mirrors that bent one’s reflection awry; shadowy mirrors, dazzling ones, mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, until the mind that looked at them began to flinch and sicken, hunting something that wasn’t just another reflection of itself.

Kit and Ponch wandered among them, searching for something, but Kit had forgotten what it was they were looking for, along with everything else. Ponch wasn’t sure what his master wanted—wasn’t even all that sure, anymore, why they were there. Together the two of them wandered through the glittering wasteland, seeing their shapes slide and hide in the mirrors, images chasing images but never meeting, never touching, fleeing one another as soon as any got close enough to make contact.

“—don’t want to—”

“—when do you think he might—”

“—that hurts, why do you have to—”

Splinters of conversation and fragments of personality hid in the reflections and fled from mirror to mirror. Kit and Ponch moved slowly among them, looking in some, avoiding others. Some had too many eyes in them to look into comfortably. In others, the gazes looking outward were fringed with alien-seeming thought as if with distortion-rainbows, irrational and unnerving, impossible to figure out. From these mirrors Kit and Ponch increasingly shied away, sometimes upset enough to want to find somewhere to hide.

But there was nowhere. Light and merciless reflection filled everything; and everywhere the two of them walked, a soft rush of sound ran under all other sensation, like water running under the mirrored floor, a river of words and noises trapped there under the unforgiving ice. All they could do was walk and walk, the thoughts in their minds being washed away as fast as they formed by the relentless flow of sound. They could hear the voices of other wanderers, elsewhere in the in the maze, but there was no way to find them, no way even to tell where they were.

“—have to get out, if they don’t they’ll—”

“—find him, and when I do find him I’ll—”

They walked for a long time, seeking those other voices but never finding them. Finally, exhausted, Kit sat down against the “trunk” of a mirror-tree, leaned back, and closed his eyes. His mind was full of the painful rush of voices and noise; it was a relief just to sit here, his eyes closed so that he didn’t have to see the eyes in the mirrors. He rocked his body a little so that the motion would shift his attention away from the myriad other distractions around him that were fraying the fabric of his mind. Ponch sat down next to him, on guard and frightened, but not so frightened that he’d leave his friend.

Finally someone came. Kit didn’t dare open his eyes, afraid to see the awful blank sheen of the mirrors again, as bad when something showed in them as when nothing did. But he heard the footsteps even through the rush of noise, and heard when they stopped close to him and Ponch.

Kit could feel the onlooker’s regard right through his skin, like the heat of sunlight, not that there was any sun here. “I did ask you not to come,” said the one standing there.

But he had to, said Ponch. And so I had to.

The onlooker sighed. “I’ve filled this whole place with a really nasty version of what I’ve been going through, the last few months,” he said. “And sure enough, It followed me in.” There was a sorrowful amusement about the speaker’s voice. “I’m telling you, though, I did a really good job this time. The outside’s sealed: no one else can get in — none of Its little minions can smuggle It energy. And no one can get out from inside, either; the barrier’s sealed. It should stay stuck in here with us for…” He sounded grimly satisfied. “A real long time. Could be forever.”

Then we have to stay here forever too? Ponch said.

“I don’t know about you,” the voice said. “You’re something different. But me, and your friend, and the Dark Other… yes, we might have to, to get this job done. Because I promised, and the promise is wound into the walls and the ground and the sky.”

Well, if he has to stay forever, Ponch said, then I’m not leaving.

And he lay down beside Kit, huddling close to him, and started to wait for forever.

***

Nita got her dad up at the usual time. She was already dressed for school at that point, having been unable to get to sleep. “Anything?” he said.

Nita shook her head. “I’ll call you,” she said, and she couldn’t bring herself to say much of anything else. Her dad hugged her and went to work.

She made her own breakfast and ate it, thinking over what had happened the night before. If Darryl put up that wall, she thought, who’s he shutting out?

Or shutting in? There was always that possibility—that the Lone Power was in there with him again, right then, trying to destroy him one more time. And Kit and Ponch are stuck in there with them…

Nita shuddered. But another problem had occurred to her, one that kept nagging at her now, though it wasn’t specifically about any kind of danger. How’s Darryl getting the kind of power he needs to do this kind of wizardry? Nita wondered. Especially since he’s not even a full wizard yet? Is it something to do with being an abdal—the thing about being a direct conduit for the One’s power? Or is it more to do with the way there can be two of him? If there really are. It was a good question, whether co-location meant there were actually two of you, or just one of you in two places at the same time. Even the manual hadn’t been as clear as Nita would have liked on the subject; the terminology got very dense. Or maybe I did…

She drank about half of a mug of tea, put it down. Anyway, that universe seemed farther away than the last one, somehow. He’s withdrawing. He’s doing it on purpose.

Why?

Nita mulled that over, but no clear answer suggested itself. Well, she thought at last, even when I do get in again this afternoon, it’s possible that brute force won’t work against that wall. I may have to try to get myself directly in sync with Darryl, the way I did before, when he was a clown.

The danger, of course, is that if I get too well synced with Darryl’s mind, then what’s happened to Kit will happen to me, too. And neither of us will get out…

That thought left Nita morbidly considering what would happen afterward in such a case. Both of them would simply have disappeared without a trace. What remained of their families would wind up going through endless anguish as the police investigated the disappearances… and they would never be able to share with anyone that they all knew exactly what had happened to their kids—

Nita pushed that idea away hard. That’s not an option, she thought.

Fine. So what is?

That endless wall was very much on her mind. If I’m going to do anything about it, anything that’ll let me get through it in time to find Kit, I’ve got to find a way to get there without walking forever and ever! The problem was that, from the feel of it, Darryl’s interior space wasn’t allowing quick transits—just long slogs through forbidding or sterile terrain. Might be intentional, Nita thought. Maybe he’s set it up that way so that every time the Lone Power comes after him, It gets drained by the effort. Has to stay in there longer and longer, takes longer and longer to find him—

There Nita stopped abruptly, staring at her mug of tea, which was rapidly going cold. In either a real physical universe or an interior space, there were ways to briefly change the laws that ran that space. And the best of these was to get your hands on the universe’s “kernel,” the little tight-wound wizardly construct that encapsulated that universe’s physical laws. Lately Nita had had entirely too much experience manipulating those. Her work with the kernel of her mother’s personal universe had bought her mom a few extra months of life.

A stab of pain answered that thought almost immediately: It wasn’t enough to buy her anything else. But Nita pushed the pain aside for the moment. If she could get into Darryl’s interior world and find its kernel, she could at least temporarily make changes to the way its physical characteristics worked—enough to get her where she needed to be in a hurry: to the wall. And maybe beyond it. Other changes would probably require Darryl’s permission before she could make them. But this would do for a start.

Nita glanced up as Dairine came downstairs, showered and dressed for school, but still looking fairly terrible. “Did you sleep at all?” Nita said, going to the fridge to get Dairine a glass of milk and a banana.

“Yeah,” Dairine said miserably. “I couldn’t help it.”

She stared at the milk. “Drink it,” Nita said. “I’ll be back home at three-thirty. We have to try again.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said.

“Will you have enough power?”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “But— Neets, it should have worked last night! We were all set.”

“We didn’t realize how far there was to go to the wall,” Nita said. “I missed a trick last time: I’ll make better time today. And I’ll go more heavily armed, and with a better plan. Now finish that stuff up and go on! You’ll be late.”

Dairine nodded, finished her breakfast, and left. Nita was left in the quiet again, alone, a state that she preferred for the one task she had to do before she left: call Kit’s mother.

The phone there rang only once before someone answered. “Hello?”

“Mr. Rodriguez,” Nita said. “Hi.”

“Nita. Have you got any news?”

She had been hoping against impossible hope that Kit’s pop would tell her that Ponch had brought Kit home. Hearing the carefully controlled desperation in his voice, Nita felt even lower than she’d felt when she’d picked up the phone. “Not yet,” she said. “I tried to find him last night. I know sort of where he is, but I couldn’t get through to him. I’m going to try again this afternoon.”

Kit’s pop paused for a long moment. “Are you able to tell anything about whether he’s all right?” he said.

“Not yet,” Nita said. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you right away this afternoon, as soon as I know something. Bye.”

She hung up, heartsore, put on her boots and her coat, and headed off for school.

***

Nita went to her Monday morning meeting with Mr. Millman full of dread. He’s not blind: he’s going to see that something awful’s wrong with me, and I’m not going to be able to tell him what it is. And then I’m going to have to do stupid card tricks. Can anything be worse than this?

She found him in the little bare office, on time as usual, stuffing a magazine back into his briefcase. In front of him were the remnants of the bagel with cream cheese that he’d brought along for his breakfast before their appointment. “Nita,” he said, “good morning.”

She didn’t answer immediately. He glanced up from closing his briefcase.

“I hate to say this,” he said, “but you look awful. I won’t insult your intelligence by asking if you’re all right.”

Nita raised her eyebrows in mild surprise at this opening gambit. “Thanks.”

“Dairine acting up again?”

“No, actually, she’s okay,” Nita said.

Mr. Millman just looked at her quizzically. Abruptly Nita wondered if near-total honesty might possibly be of some use.

“I really don’t feel like talking to you this morning,” Nita said. “I wish I could make up some dumb story and tell you that, instead.”

Mr. Millman shrugged and sat back in his chair with his arms behind his head. “Everyone else does. Why shouldn’t you?”

Entirely against her will, Nita had to smile at that. “Just so you don’t expect me to come up with something original.”

Mr. Millman allowed himself just a breath of laughter. “That’s the last thing I’d expect. Ten or fifteen billion of us, now, must have lived on this planet, and the more you look into the stories we tell one another, the more like each other they look. Everybody repeats the same basic themes.”

Nita said nothing.

Mr. Millman raised his eyebrows. “But maybe that’s how we know humanity is still in its childhood. You know how it is when you’re little, you want to hear the same story over and over again?”

“My sister used to do that.”

“So did mine. Partly it’s because they know how the story ends. There’s always tension when you’re not sure about the ending, and little kids don’t want too much of that tension; but they do want some. So this is a solution to the problem. When you know the ending, you get the tension of the middle and the relief at the end… theoretically.” He smiled slightly at nothing: some memory, perhaps. “Did you have a book like that, that you kept wanting to hear at bedtime?”

Nita nodded. “It had a horse called Exploding Pop-Tart in it,” she said. “My dad said he wanted to explode every Pop-Tart he saw after a while, because he was so tired of that book.”

Millman nodded. “Mine was the one about the bat that wouldn’t go to bed,” he said. “My mother told me she hated bats for the next twenty years. Fortunately she didn’t see a lot of bats in her line of work.”

“What was her line of work?”

“She was a concert violinist.”

Nita had to laugh.

“One laugh, one smile,” Millman said. “Not bad for the way you looked when you came in. Look, don’t bother to tell me any story if you don’t want to. You’d probably just repeat one of the favorite themes. Life, love, death…”

“Death,” Nita said softly.

The image of the Lone Power was suddenly before her eyes. She glanced at Millman then, wondering if she’d had time to cover over her expression.

“The same story,” Millman said. “And the only one we all know the end of, once we’re older than about three. But, boy, the way people behave, you wouldn’t think so! Adults refuse to talk about it. Even with people your age, who really want to hear about it, and about the other important things—the beginning of life, the relationships in the middle. We try to distract ourselves by wasting our time on all the other less important stories, the incidentals—who ‘failed,’ who ‘succeeded.’ It’s a pity.” He shook his head. “We hardly ever do right by kids. All you want from us is to tell you how life works. And one way or another, the issue of life and death makes us so uncomfortable that we find a hundred ways to keep from telling you about it, until it’s too late.”

Nita swallowed. “My mom was good about telling me the rules,” she said. “She— My mom said…”

Nita stopped, waiting for her eyes to fill up. But it didn’t happen. And for a weird, bitter moment, that it wasn’t happening felt strange to her.

She looked up. Mr. Millman was simply looking at her.

“My mom said it was important to die well,” Nita said at last, “so she wouldn’t be embarrassed later.”

Mr. Millman just nodded.

For a few moments they sat there in the quiet. “She had it right, I think,” he said. He paused, then, looking at Nita. “Now it makes sense to ask. Are you all right?”

Nita thought about it. “Yeah,” she said. “For the time being.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s cut it short for today. One thing, though.”

“What?”

“What about the card tricks?”

In the face of the more important things that were presently on her mind, the question seemed so annoying that Nita nearly hollered at him, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than card tricks?” But she caught herself.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got one here…”

She fished around in her book bag and got out the deck of cards. Nita slipped it out of its packet and began to shuffle, hoping that the motion would help her hide the fact that her hands were actually trembling with rage. Okay, she thought. Calm down. You knew he was going to ask.

But Kit—!

“Am I supposed to pick a card or something?” Mr. Millman said.

“In a minute,” Nita said. She shuffled, then said, “Okay, name one.”

“The five of clubs.”

Nita knew where that one was because the deck had been stacked when she took it out of its little packet. She put the shuffled deck down on the desk, wondering whether she’d protected the back end of the deck well enough. Then she realized she should have asked him what card he wanted before she started shuffling. The trick wasn’t going to work.

I don’t care if it does or not! Nita thought. I should make him play Fifty-Two Pickup with the whole deck.

She controlled herself, though with difficulty. She finished the shuffle and cut the cards into three piles. Then she narrowed her eyes and did a single small wizardry that she had sworn to herself she wasn’t going to use.

Mr. Millman turned over the third card. It was the five of clubs.

“That was fairly obvious,” Mr. Millman said, “that anger. And fairly accessible. We were talking about the stages of grieving earlier, how they don’t always run in sequence. Let me just suggest that when anger runs so close to the surface that it’s easily provoked by unusual circumstances, you’re quite possibly not done with it yet.”

Damn straight I’m not, Nita thought.

“It’s not a good thing, not a bad thing, just what’s so,” Millman said. “But you might want to think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past. Or might produce again in the future.”

“Right,” Nita said. Whatever good humor had come and gone during the course of the morning’s session, it was gone for good now. She picked up the cards, got up, and stalked out, making her way to her first-period class.

Right through history class, and right through the English literature class that followed it, Nita stewed. She was furious with herself for having lost her temper over Millman and the card tricks. She was furious that she had let him see how furious she was. She was furious over the maddeningly calm and evenhanded way he had dissected her anger. She would almost have preferred that he yell at her. At least she would have had an excuse to walk out of there ready to, as her mother used to put it, “chew nails and spit rust.” She was so mad—

Nita stopped, literally, in midthought.

“What result this kind of emotion has produced in the past…”

She thought of the fury and desperation that had driven her, in the time before her mother’s death, to try the most impossible things to stop what was happening. And they still didn’t stop.

But some amazing things happened anyway…

She had gone from world to world and finally from universe to universe, learning to hunt down and manipulate the kernels that controlled those universes’ versions of natural law. And now she had to admit that it had been her grief and anger at what was happening to her mother that had made her as effective as she’d become.

The thought unnerved her. Nita wasn’t used to thinking of anger as a tool. It had always seemed like something you didn’t want to get accustomed to using, in case it started to become a habit, or started twisting you and your wizardry in directions you didn’t want to go. But if you’re careful, she thought, if you stay in control, if you manage it carefully enough—maybe it’s okay to use it just every now and then. Maybe managing it, rather than letting it manage you, is the whole idea—

Nita sat there staring fixedly at the blackboard. Her English teacher was illustrating the scansion of a sonnet there, but Nita wasn’t really seeing it. Okay, she thought. I forgive Millman his dumb card tricks. He’s given me something useful here. Now I just have to use it…

The bell rang, and her English class filtered out, muttering about the pile of sonnets they’d been given to analyze by the end of the week and cursing Shakespeare’s name. Nita’s next class was statistics; she shouldered her book bag and wandered out into the hall, unfocused. Her anger was still running high, but it was strangely mixed with a sense of readiness. Nita couldn’t get rid of the feeling that time was suddenly of the essence, that she had to make the best of her present emotional state—in which she had been given a weapon that was primed and ready to go, a weapon too good to waste.

I don’t want to lose this, Nita thought, making a sudden decision. This is important. I’m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don’t care if they call Dad. He’ll know what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.

Nita hurried for the girls’ room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls’ rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.

Well, this is one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art, Nita thought, resigned. Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy … then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang. Okay, Nita thought, standing up, here’s my opportunity.

The door to the hallway pushed open a little. “Room check,” said an adult voice.

Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of-class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or popping pills. Who needs this? Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.

The teacher—it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms. Delemond, a tall, blond, willowy lady—stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible: nothing fancy, just bending light. A second or so later, Ms. Delemond turned away, went to check the next stall, and the next. Finally she went outside again, and Nita could hear her footsteps going down the hall.

Nita got down off the toilet and let out one small breath of annoyed laughter. Then she reached into her claudication pocket, came out with the long chain of the ready-made transit spell she kept there, and dropped it on the floor around her. The chain of words knotted itself closed and blazed with light…

Nita came out in a sheltered part of her backyard, ankle-deep in snow, and the air-pressure change caused by the air she had brought with her from school made snow fall off the trees above her and onto her head. She spluttered as the snow got down her collar, not finding it funny and getting angrier by the second. Good. Use it. It’s a tool—

Nita’s house keys were inside her locker at school, along with her coat and her boots. Forget it, she thought as she went around into the driveway and up to her back door. She pulled the screen door open and put her hand against the wood of the inside door. “I need to walk through you, if you don’t mind,” she said in the Speech, while she reached down to the charm bracelet for another wizardry she’d been keeping there, this one with a charm like a little cloud. “Is that okay? Thanks, just bear with me.”

She said the three words that turned the low-level dissociator loose. Nita waited a moment for the itching to set in—the sign that every atom in her body was willing to move aside for atoms of other substances. In this case, Nita wanted to walk through the atoms of the door. She went through it like so much smoke, itching fiercely all the way, and when she was standing inside the back door, she let the wizardry go, then just stood there panting with the exertion of the spell, and scratched for a few seconds until she felt like all her molecules had settled themselves back into place.

She headed upstairs to her room, got her manual, and lay down on the bed. This had better work, Nita thought, because Dad’s probably going to go intercontinentally ballistic when he finds out I cut school. But I can’t help it. What’s the use of being a good little girl and losing my best friend?

She lay there and realized it was just too bright for her even to think about going to sleep. Nita opened her manual, went to the energy-management section, and turned pages until she found the wizardry she wanted.

She recited it, feeling the universe leaning in around her, paying attention, slowly muting down the light in her room as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch. Anyway, this is all my fault, she thought as the room got darker and darker. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own troubles, I’d have been with Kit on this job from the start. Yeah, okay, I have a right to grieve. But do I have a right to dump my friends until I’m finished with it, until it’s convenient to listen to them, to care about them again? If I’d listened to Kit—

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Nita had said. And “Now you know how he felt before,” Dairine had said to her, as blunt as always, and accurate. Kit had come right out and said that he wished he had backup on this job. She’d ignored him, and he’d gone ahead with what he was doing and got himself in too deep. I should have been paying attention to what was going on around me, no matter how awful I felt. I’ve been indulging myself. I’ve almost been having fun hurting. That’s so stupid.

Nita stopped herself. There was no point in rerunning the “guilt movies.” They always ended the same way. And a new guilt movie was no better than the old ones.

But she was still left with her anger at herself. Nita lay there just breathing, just feeling it, letting it build. Well, she’d been in too deep herself, not long ago, unable to see the trouble she was getting into … and Kit had pulled her out. Now she was going to be able to return the favor. But it wasn’t about scorekeeping at all; there were much more important issues. I’ve already lost one of the most important people in my life. I’m not going to lose another!

Nita was briefly distracted by the burning at her wrist and throat.

She glanced down in surprise. All the charms on her bracelet, the symbols for all the prefabricated spells she was carrying, were glowing considerably brighter than usual. And the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was running hot, too.

Think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past, Millman had said. Or might produce again in the future.

Nita smiled a small angry smile.

I could get to like this, she thought. Maybe it’s better if I don’t. But today … today, I’m going to like it a lot.

She closed her eyes and pushed all her available power into the lucid-dreaming spell.

***

Nita’s intention and the force of her anger briefly turbocharged the spell, and it almost instantly drowned her consciousness in dream. The effect wouldn’t last, she knew, as she opened her eyes in a different darkness; the spell would relapse to its normal levels momentarily, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d stay asleep. The important thing was that she was dreaming now.

She stood there again by herself in that great dark space inside Darryl. Far off to one side, somewhere, she knew that the infinitely obstructive white wall was waiting. But this time she wasn’t going to waste her time: There was more important business.

For a long few moments Nita quieted herself, opening her mind to listen, as she’d been taught. Then, eyes closed, self-blinded, she turned, waiting for the sensation she knew would come.

It took less time to find it than she’d hoped it would. Nita had been banking on the idea that Darryl’s grasp of worldbuilding was instinctive, not studied, and that if he even recognized the heart of his universe for what it was, he wouldn’t have thought to hide it. And he hadn’t. When she finally sensed what she was looking for, Nita took the time to actually walk to it, not wanting to attract any possible unwanted attention by using a transit spell. She was glad that the spot she was hunting was only a couple of miles away in Darryl’s internal topology, and not a couple of light-years.

She knew the spot by feel when she reached it, which was just as well, for physically and visually it was indistinguishable from any other part of that tremendous darkness. Nita grinned, though, as she came close, feeling up close the faint, lively, burning, buzzing sensation she’d been seeking. She rolled up her sleeve, thrust her arm elbow-deep into the seemingly empty darkness before her, and felt around for a moment.

The burning against her fingers alerted her. She grinned a small angry grin and took a step backwards, and out of the darkness puled free a bright, tight, surprisingly large tangle of silvery light.

“Will you look at this,” Nita said under her breath, turning the kernel over in her hands and looking closely at it to identify its major structural elements. The complexity of this kernel was by and large on a par with other personal kernels Nita had seen before. A couple of its sections were devoted to the mere physical business of running a human body. One of them seemed oddly augmented: bent back on itself and half-twisted in a way she recognized. A Mobius strip, though more than just that, Nita thought; there’s another dimension or so layered in. Maybe this is how an abdal does his co-location? Looks like he’s got an extra set of “body software” in here; and the soul conduit’s doubled over, and way heavier-gauge than usual. Interesting.

But it was the kernel’s power conduits that were the real surprise. They were huge, far bigger than a physical universe’s own conduits would have been, and they pulsed silently and blindingly with such force that Nita found it hard to look at them. This is what an abdal uses. Or doesn’t even have to use; just has. There’s enough power in here, of enough kinds, to do incredible things.

Even to keep the Lone Power shut up inside for a while.

Nita shook her head. This much power could be used for a lot more important things than that, though. And she noted one other thing, now that she had the kernel in her hands. She reached into the tangle of coiled light and hooked a finger under one tightly braided chain of characters that glowed calmly right at the kernel’s heart: then pinched it between thumb and forefinger and teased it a little ways out of the kernel’s main structure. It was the core representation of the Wizard’s Oath, the heart of an Ordeal; and it was complete.

Nita grinned with sheer pleasure at having been right, remembering her earlier thought that Darryl didn’t have that tentative quality about his use of his wizardly abilities. So, she thought, he’s already passed his Ordeal.

Then let’s get moving!

She turned the kernel over in her hands once more, finding the little strand of light that was the spell Darryl had, however unwittingly, enacted to create the wall. Nita pulled the strand of light representing that wizardry a little way out of the kernel, like someone pulling one strand loose from a ball of knitting wool. Then she twisted it in such a way as to cause that spot to become this one.

Instantly the internal laws of that universe changed accordingly, so that Nita looked up and found herself staring at the wall.

“Right,” Nita said under her breath, and walked right at the wall as if it wasn’t there.

And when she touched it, it wasn’t. It evaporated in front of her. The wall knew that the key to the physical structure of its universe was right in front of it, in the possession of a living being; and cooperatively it got out of her way.

“Thank you,” Nita said. She paused long enough to tuck the kernel safely away in her otherspace pocket, and then went on walking. In front of her the view opened up, distant and glittering—a view of what appeared to be a forest of glass trees, shining in that sourceless light she’d come to recognize.

Nita walked toward the forest, listening to the voices that she’d heard before in Darryl’s worlds, and that were here, too, louder than they’d been before, an endless rush of them. If she let them, they blended into a white-noise sound like wind or water, indecipherable. But if she concentrated, they did make sense.

“—get tired of waiting sometimes, you know?” said one of them, a man’s voice, Nita thought. “Sometimes I wonder whether any of it matters at all.”

“Of course it matters,” said another voice, a softer one, sadder, but more certain of itself. “We have to keep doing what we’re doing. Being there for him. Someday…”

The voices got steadily more distinct as Nita got closer to the forest. Soon she saw that it wasn’t a forest of trees, but of mirrors. “Someday! But no one can tell us when that day’s going to be. No one has the slightest idea! And we’re the ones who know him best. We’re the ones who ought to be able to tell. For a good while there things seemed to be going so well. But then come autumn—” A pained gulp for air. “It all went to pieces. No matter what they keep telling us about burnout, that it may get better, that he may find a way to cope again, I can’t help but think … can’t help but think that they have no idea. That maybe this is the way he’s going to be from now on. That this is as good as things are ever going to get.—”

The voice broke off, choked with pain.

“You know they told us this might happen,” said the other voice. “And that there’s a very good chance he’ll find a new coping level as he gets older. But that things could look very bad for a while...”

“But this long?”

“Yes, if necessary. There’s no way to tell how much time he needs. His situation’s unique, Like everyone else’s.” A long pause. “We just have to have faith, honey. If we don’t, if we lose it, no one else’s faith is going to help.”

The voices sounded two ways to Nita. On one hand, they were like any conversation she might have heard on the street. On the other, there was a terrible poignancy about them. Hearing their words was like being thrust through the heart with knives. I’m hearing this not just as I would, Nita thought, but as Darryl would. And possibly seeing his inner world as he does, too. Far from drawing her into Darryl’s trap for the Lone Power, this seemed to be giving her a kind of immunity. Good. If that just lets me see a way out…

As she came closer to the fringes of the “forest,” Nita saw that the trees weren’t exactly just mirrored, either. They were half-mirrored. She could see partway through them, out their other sides, to the shapes that walked among them. And there were only four of those.

Two of them she knew instantly: her heart seized at the sight of them. Ponch and Kit were wandering, sightless—or rather, it was Kit who looked and walked like someone blind, or like someone afraid to look at what he saw around him. Ponch walked ahead of Kit like a Seeing Eye dog, seeing for both of them. But something about the way the light fell on him made Nita wonder whether Ponch somehow saw more, in this chilly and sterile landscape, than any of them. What is it with him? she wondered. He hadn’t been able to tell her the other day. Nita remembered Carmela telling her what Kit had said, that there was some kind of “wizardry leakage” going on in his household. Suddenly she felt sure that what was happening with Ponch was more than just a symptom of this.

Nita paused, watching the other two figures wander around separately in the light shining on and reflecting from the half-mirrored trees. One of them was small and dark, in jeans and a polo shirt. He looked far less lost than Kit and Ponch. His progress was more an amble than a wander—unlike that of the final figure.

That last figure was tall and looked human. He was slender, well-built, and extremely handsome. Nonetheless, Nita couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of the Fairest and Fallen, once the greatest and most senior of the Powers that Be, the Lone Power Itself, as It passed by at a distance—looking, in the dark suit he was wearing, like a businessman lost in a strange city and doomed to wander endlessly from street to street because he was too proud to ask for directions.

The shudder passed, though. Nita’s anger was still running high enough to wash it out and leave her mind clear. All right, she thought. Nothing had has happened yet. Let’s think about what to do.

And then something spoke her word in the air.Let’s…?

Nita’s head jerked up as he looked for the word’s source, and her hand went to her bracelet again. A second later she was holding the linac weapon, ready to discharge.

I am on errantry, she thought, glancing around, and I greet you. Wherever you are…

I am errantry, the Silence said.

Nita held very still. There was something familiar about that voice, though it wasn’t a voice as such.

Then she remembered her earlier thought. “The Silence told me about that,” the clown-Darryl had said to her.

You are the manual, Nita thought. Darryl’s version of it.

The Silence whispered agreement.

Right, Nita said, lowering the weapon again. Sorry, you startled me. How can I hear you now? I couldn’t before.

You are fully inside him now, because you have the heart.

Nita wondered about that phrasing, and then smiled. The heart of Darryl’s universe: the kernel. Yes, I do, she said. Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with it.

He’ll know. He has full access now, as you’ve discovered.

Nita nodded and watched the four figures walking among the trees for a few minutes, while looking things over, assessing where the weak point in this scenario might be. That was how she saw something start to happen, something that initially scared her—an encounter that she normally would have done anything to prevent. The Lone Power in Its dark majesty came striding down between the mirrored pillars, to Nita’s eye looking very much like someone who’s trying to act like he knows where he’s going when he doesn’t. Toward It, ambling, unhurried, maybe even unseeing, came Kit and Ponch. Nita sucked in her breath and lifted the linac weapon into an aiming line, pointing it at the Lone One.

She watched with profound unease as Kit and the Lone Power got closer and closer to each other. They were no more than a few paces apart when the Lone One made a single sudden move.

It looked at Itself in a mirror as It passed, and smiled faintly. And Kit walked right on by It, unnoticing, unnoticed.

Nita had to just stand there for a few moments, calming herself down, nearly lost in admiration at the sheer power of the otherworld Darryl had created. It’s like that fairy tale about the guy who does some magic creature a good turn, she thought, and as a reward it gives him a bag that nothing can get out of The guy lives a bad life, and when the devil comes for him, he tricks it into the bag, and it’s stuck there till he lets it out. But in this case, Darryl was in the bag, too—and apparently thought this a reasonable price to pay to keep part of the Lone Power out of circulation for… How long? Weeks, months at a time. And how much longer? Years? A whole life?

Carl had been completely right. If that’s not a saint, Nita thought, I don’t know what is.

I need to get them out of here, she said to the Silence.

You will have to break this paradigm, the Silence said. Break the mirrors. That will release them. But it will also release the Lone Power back into Its full potency.

For just a breath of time, Nita weighed the pros and cons of the problem. Keeping It stuck in here, even just a fragment of It, couldn’t be a bad thing.

But keeping Kit here as well, and Ponch? And Darryl?

The price was too high. Especially, Nita thought, putting aside her personal concerns for the moment, in Darryl’s case.

Nita sighed. Besides, she thought, like in the fairy tale, the Powers That Be will make them let the devil out of the bag eventually. It’s still one of the Powers, part of the world. Keep the Lone Power in here forever and It’ll never be able to change…

Nita stuck the linac weapon under her armpit and held it braced there against her side while she reached into her “pocket” again, found that tangle of light, and spent a few careful moments adjusting several of its properties. She altered the universe’s time flow first, so it matched their home universe’s; then made a few additional changes that might come in handy later. When that was done, she put the kernel away again and considered the maze of half-mirrored trees. It was vast, possibly even infinite, but Nita didn’t let herself worry about that. All these mirrors, the Silence whispered to her, were clones of another one. At the center of the maze was the key to the secret, the way out.

We’re short on time here, Nita said silently. Tell me.

In her mind’s eye, she saw it.

Nita grinned. Darryl, she thought, you are brilliant. You were ready to do this yourself if you could figure out a way not to need this trap any more. And since now you won’t—

She unlimbered the linac weapon again and started to make her way toward the spot she’d been shown. If she’d tried to search for it by sight, she might have passed it many times. But she closed her eyes again, so as not to be bewildered by the reflections, and found it the way the Silence showed her—by walking slowly, bumping into things sometimes, feeling her way. Once she bumped into a tall shape that burned her to be near. “Excuse me,” she said to the Lone Power, and slipped on past It toward the heart of the maze.

It should be near here, shouldn’t it? Nita thought.

You’re close. Keep going…

She walked now through the darkness behind her eyes, slowly, taking her time. A few minutes later Nita came to the place she’d been looking for, and opened her eyes. They’d been closed so long now that she had to blink a little in the light as she looked at the one mirror—among however many uncounted millions in that place—that had no reflection in it at all, not even of any other mirror. This one was a plain bathroom mirror about three feet by two, hanging on a taller mirror-pillar and held in a steel frame—one that probably had a medicine cabinet behind it in the real world. Nita walked up to the rectangular mirror and waved at it, then jumped up and down in front of it. In the mirror, nothing showed at all.

That’s how it’s supposed to be with vampires, Nita thought, intrigued. But, here, the mirrors themselves were vampiric, sucking up fragments of personality, snatches of conversation, the glances of eyes, leaving the originals devoid of words and glances afterward. Nita once more shook her head in admiration. Darryl had done a fantastic job constructing this trap. Even the Lone One, now confined in this constructed world, was vulnerable to it—slowly losing moment after moment of Its vast existence into the mirrored waste, being worn down by the forces that had been wearing away at Darryl since his Ordeal began.

Okay, Nita thought. Here we go. The one thing she made certain of was that her other weapons were all ready to use as soon as she was finished with the linac. I’ll only get one shot with this, she thought. If it’s a good one, all I have to worry about is what’s handy to use next, when all hell breaks loose…

Nita glanced around her to make sure no one was about to come wandering through one of the many openings of the maze that led into this central area. Then she lifted the linac weapon again, narrowed her eyes, took careful aim at the bathroom mirror, and fired.

The blast of energy that came out of the linac weapon didn’t radiate in the visible spectrum, but the air in its path did, ionizing and spitting blue lightnings where the particle beam passed. The mirror leaped and split into thousands of fragments as the blast hit it, and the fragments in turn went white-hot and vaporized in the air—

—and as they did, every other mirror in that world shattered.

The noise was deafening, terrifying. Tons of razory glass exploded into millions of pieces and came raining down on the glassy floor. The fragments vanished as they hit it, as if falling into water. Moments later there was nothing remaining inside that whole huge space but five figures, standing on a dark floor and looking around in various degrees of surprise.

Nita stood there and chucked away the linac weapon, which vanished as soon as she let go of it, its wizardry now spent. She walked over to Kit and Ponch while reaching to her charm bracelet and activating one of the charms.

Ponch was shaking himself all over, as if he were wet. He turned and saw Nita, and began wagging his tail so furiously that it was mostly wagging him. He jumped up and put his forepaws all over her and started jumping up so that he could lick her face.

“Yeah, yeah, big guy, how you doing?” Nita said, sort of holding him by the ears and scratching them at the same time, in a mostly futile effort to keep his tongue out of her nose. “Kit? Give me a hand with this guy, will you?”

Kit was standing there, blinking at her, looking completely astonished. “What are you doing in here?” he said. Then he paused. “Come to think of it, what am I doing in here? I was home! I was lying down—”

The energy bolt came at them from behind.

And it splashed.

Nita looked over her shoulder at the Lone Power and couldn’t restrain a grin. The alterations she’d made in the kernel had worked, and Kit was all right. Now she had backup—and was feeling how good it was to have that again, after she’d been alone. Now then! she thought.

“Well, I guess if you’re going to omit the formalities, so will I,” Nita said, turning to face the Lone One. “Have to say I’d have expected a higher level of function from you! But you’ve been running on half-speed ever since you got in here, poor baby.” She threw It an amused grin. “Take a few moments and try to pull your brains back together. We’ll wait.”

The expression on the Lone Power’s long elegant face set cold, as Nita had known it would; there are few things the Eldest hates more than being made fun of. “Your insolence,” It said, “is going to be short-lived.”

“Compared to the age of the universe, maybe so,” Nita said. “But I think we’re going to walk out of here today, because you miscalculated. You never considered what might happen if Darryl ever realized that the door swings both ways! Or that the door can be locked. Ever since he took the Oath, ever since you decided you had to stop him at all costs from becoming a wizard, he’s been keeping you stuck in here with him on purpose! He’s been getting better and better at it all the time, and you never even suspected, because you thought you were in control. But this is his masterwork, no matter what I did to the fun-house mirrors, which were just a local feature. And you’re still sealed in here until he lets you go.”

The Lone Power looked at Darryl.

Nita looked over at him, too. “Darryl?” she said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded somewhat surprised. “Didn’t know anyone else would be able to see what was going on in here, though.”

“Well, our old buddy here couldn’t,” Kit said. He threw the Lone One a dry glance, and It bristled. “You built this place in such a way that It wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening to it. But you weren’t expecting us inside here too, and we didn’t have enough of It inside us to be fully affected by the spell you built, no matter how much power you pumped into it.”

“A spell’s just an equation,” Nita said. “Or a story. All we did was change the story a little.”

“Rewrote the play a little?” Darryl said, and smiled. “And maybe changed a little of the scenery.” He walking over toward Nita and Kit, with the smile growing on his face rapidly becoming a match for Nita’s: angry, but still very amused. “But the stage is the same. And the doors to the theater? Still locked.”

The Lone Power glowered at him and started to tower up tall and dark and shadowy. “Don’t imagine that you have any further power to confine me —”

Darryl’s eyes narrowed as he met its glare, and Nita felt the air around all of them begin to prickle a little, as if there was lightning stored in it and thinking about breaking free. “I may be autistic,” Darryl said to the Lone One, grim, “but I’m not stupid. So yeah, I do imagine that! And don’t you imagine that you can just scare me out of a real great way of keeping you out of trouble for a long while. After all, think how much fun you’ve had chasing me around the landscapes I’ve built for you these last few months, even after you chucked me headfirst into a burnout to try to keep me stuck! Least I can do is return the favor. Maybe I’ll just amuse myself playing with you for the rest of my natural life. It’s sure been fun so far!”

The Lone One’s expression was becoming an indescribable tangle of frustration and fury. Nita felt like laughing out loud, but it didn’t seem right to break the mood.

“You cannot,” It said after a moment. “Now that I am alerted to this game of yours, it will never work again, even if I did allow you to escape with either life or soul intact.” It raised Its hands, clenched Its fists—

And nothing happened.

Nita smiled gently. From her otherspace pocket, she pulled out the kernel to Darryl’s internal universe.

The Lone One looked at it in sudden enraged surprise.

“You really are running slow today,” Nita said, and then glanced over to Darryl. “You’ve done such a number on his head! I love this.” She tossed the kernel lightly from hand to hand and looked back at the Lone One. “You taught me how to deal with these things when you were inside my old ‘friend’ Pralaya. How to find them. How to manage them. Of course you did it for your own reasons. And because you never imagined I’d he shown a way out of the dirty deal you offered me! Or that I’d survive the consequences. Well, I did. And I remember every single thing you taught me.” She smiled. “Now all I have to do is show Darryl how to do whatever he wants to do with you.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” the Lone One said.

Nita stood there with the universe’s kernel, the heart of the world, in her hand, juggling it like someone juggling a grenade with the pin pulled. “After what you put me through? I’d dare a whole lot, so don’t push me! I’’d be all for killing this avatar of you off completely.” She narrowed her eyes at the Lone One. “Oh, sure, it wouldn’t be the whole you, I know that. Here you’re just a fragment of your greater self. And that’d take enough energy discharged in this space that I’d die, too, and so would Kit and Darryl. But the power that the One has invested in Darryl won’t be lost—”

“That power is lost now! Boy,” and the Lone Power turned Its baleful gaze on Darryl, “you are one of the—”

Then Its face suddenly went white, as if a whole universe had suddenly taken It by the throat and squeezed.

“You’re really running on fumes today, aren’t you?” Nita said. “You can forget about discussing certain subjects: I saw to that before I walked in here.” She turned her back on the Lone One. “What were we talking about before I was so rudely interrupted?”

“Blowing up this pocket universe with him inside it,” Kit said.

“Might be worth it,” Nita said. “The damage done to your wider power by the total destruction of even just this fragment of him… Well.”

“Worth it, you think?” Darryl said, glancing from the two of them to Ponch.

The idea has its merits, Ponch said, and glared at the Lone Power, showing teeth under a curl of lip.

The Lone One’s expression went utterly deadly. “If you did such a thing,” the Lone Power said, “your deaths would be the first price everyone you love would pay—”

“Spare me,” Nita said, eyes narrowed. “You were the one who put me in a place where I didn’t much care if I was alive or dead. If right now I feel like it’d be worth going out if I took you down, that’s your fault. I went out taking you down, yeah, my dad and Dairine would grieve, yeah, but they’d applaud, too… because they’d find out soon enough that what I did lessened your clout in this part of the solar system.” Nita grinned. “These guys know what they’d be willing to do better than I do. But for my part—”

She tossed the kernel one last time, caught it, squeezed.

The Lone One lunged at her. Nita just turned sideways, backing away quickly, tossed the kernel in the air and hooked a fist up under it to volleyball-serve it over to Kit.

He fielded it expertly. “Nice little universe you’re stuck in here,” he said, tossing the kernel up in front of him, and then bounced it into the air a few more times from knee and elbow while the Lone Power came toward him in turn with a look of furious uncertainty on Its face. “Be a shame if something happened to it. Whoa!”

He kneed the kernel into the air and headballed it over to Darryl. Darryl caught it and looked it over, tossing it lightly in one hand. The kernel, which had been glowing only softly while Nita and Kit had been holding it, now blazed like a star in the possession of its rightful master.

“I’ve learned a lot from listening to the Silence for the past few months,” Darryl said. “About wizardry, and a lot of other things. But that hasn’t changed the fact that I haven’t lived long enough to be really attached to life. Maybe this is the other thing that makes wizards so powerful when they’re young. It’s not that we don’t know about death. It’s not that we don’t believe in it. It’s that we’re still able to let life go, if the price is right.” And he looked over at the other two.

Nita nodded. She glanced at Kit.

Kit hesitated a moment … then set his jaw, and nodded, too.

The three of them looked at the Lone Power. It stood in the middle of them, trembling with rage, or something else.

“You want to bargain,” It said.

“Our terms,” Darryl said. “Not yours.”

“What’s the price for my freedom?” It said at last.

“Once they leave, they stay unharmed,” Darryl said. “No more than your usual attentions in the future.”

“And why should I agree?”

“Because if you don’t, you stay in here with me until I die. And with this…” He squeezed the kernel. “With this I can arrange things so you won’t even know why you’re here, or that it’s anything out of the ordinary. Or that there’s anything else you could be doing at all: anything but walking around in whatever new scenario I feel like building for you.” He grinned. “Could there be anything worse than the Fallen not even remembering why It fell?”

It blanched.

“I seem,” the Lone Power said after a moment, “to be at something of a disadvantage in this negotiation.”

“You agree then?” Darryl said.

It stood there and looked at Darryl with the kind of hatred that should have been sufficient to make a star go nova.

“Yes,” it growled at last.

Nita opened her mouth, then shut it again. She looked over at Kit, who was staring at Darryl with a stricken expression.

“Except that was a just little too quick, wasn’t it,” Darryl said, turning the kernel over and over in his hands and then looking up at the Lone One again. “Because you can promise all kinds of things while you’re in here. And once I let you out, you do whatever you like.”

“Um,” Nita said. “There are certain oaths…”

“Yes there are,” Darryl said. “So the Silence tells me. But I’d rather not go that route. I think I’d rather take a hostage.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other, perplexed. The Lone One looked nearly as confused.

“Everybody’s got a little bit of you down at the bottom of their soul,” said Darryl. “A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to get rid of that, don’t they? And they can’t do it. They try walling it up, screening it off, locking it in a little room and not thinking about it. Well, I’ve got news for you. I am really, really good at concentrating on things. So I am going to keep that little reflection of you right here where I can see it all the time.”

There in the air, one final mirror assembled itself out of nothing: a mirror that reflected nothing but the Lone One’s tall dark shape. The reflection looked back at It, its pale eyes empty. “If I catch you starting to misbehave, I’m going to use this—” and he tossed the kernel in the air again— “on that reflection of you in me, and make it pull you right back.”

The Lone One began to snarl something derisory… and then broke off short as it found itself being dragged step by step toward that mirror.

It gasped, trying to resist, and couldn’t: just kept getting dragged toward the mirror, straining against the force that impelled it: until finally Darryl gestured with one hand and the Lone One collapsed to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Of course,” Darryl said a lot more quietly, his gaze dwelling on It, “to make sure I can be sure I do catch you misbehaving, I’ll going to have to watch that mirror pretty much every moment, won’t I. So that means…” He let out a breath. “That I stay in here with you.”

The Lone One had been in the act of slowly getting back to Its feet. Now it straightened and stared at Darryl.

“You stay here?” It said.

“This is my mind,” Darryl said. “Where else would I go?”

Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock.

The Lone Power’s face was expressionless. “On the Oath, and in Life’s name, you say it?”

“Darryl!” Nita cried.

“Don’t!” Kit cried in the same moment.

“On my Oath,” Darryl said, very deliberately, “and in the One’s name, I say it.”

The Lone Power stood there, staring at the floor. Then, slowly, It began to smile.

“Fooled,” It said. “Fooled again.”

It started to chuckle. “And you thought you were being so very clever,” the Lone One said. “You’ve bound yourself to my will after all! Manipulate your little world’s kernel as you please, while you can. I’ve got something far better to manipulate. Entropy’s my oldest tool. Think you’ve had it bad, these last few months? Think you’ve bought yourself a respite?” It smiled a chill cruel smile. “Just wait. There are a hundred other ways to divert your so-wonderful attention. A burnout ten times worse than this one. Physical illness. Personal tragedy. Not just yours: others’. I’ll wear away at your mind and your life till sooner or later you have no choice but to let your guard over the kernel’s parameters drop. I’ll know within milliseconds when you do. Then you’ll still be trapped here forever… and I’ll happily move right in here with you, making your every moment a torment, and reminding you every second of the rest of your life of the price of mocking the Eldest.” It straightened, looking down at Darryl with smug amusement. “Despair now, for you won’t have time later.”

“I’ll get around to the despair thing when I’m good and ready,” Darryl said. “Meantime, get your butt out of my world.”

It gave them an ironic bow. “Once again,” It said to Nita, “despite all the brave words, you’ve gotten someone else to save your little life at his expense. One of these days, someone will refuse you. I’ll be waiting for you then. And for you,” It said, glancing at Kit, “when she betrays you at last.”

“Out,” Darryl said.

It looked from one to another of them. But It looked hardest and most cruelly at Darryl. “Don’t get too comfortable here,” It said. “I’ll be along any day.”

And It was gone.

They stood there, in the sudden silence, staring at each other.

Then, as if by prearranged signal, they all began to laugh.

“Oh, Neets!” Kit said, and he grabbed her and swung her around. “What a bluff! You were terrific!”

Nita was laughing, too, but there was an edge of pain on the laughter. “I’m not sure I was bluffing,” she said. “I was just so angry right then that I believed it.”

“You must have,” Kit said. “There’s no lying in the Speech. But Darryl…”

He turned to Darryl in concern. “That’s the problem for you, guy. You promised to stay here.”

“I did,” Darryl said.

Nita let out a long, unhappy breath.

“But this isn’t the only place I can be at the same time,” Darryl said softly.

Nita’s head jerked up.

“And It doesn’t know that.” Darryl grinned at them both. “I wouldn’t have known it either, without the two of you! When you started coming into my worlds, I was with you both at once.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if this is something most wizards can do—”

“It’s not,” Kit and Nita said simultaneously.

“But it’s real useful,” Kit said after a moment, intrigued. “Just think. If you were—”

“Kit, maybe we should save it for later,” Nita said. This was a line of reasoning she didn’t want him to go too far down just now. “Why don’t we all get out of here first?”

Darryl looked at Nita in shock. “But I shouldn’t leave yet, should I?” Darryl said. “My Ordeal’s not over.”

Nita looked at Kit, wondering if he’d realized the truth yet. From his blank look, it seemed he hadn’t. Looking at Darryl, then, she laughed out loud for sheer delight. “Hand me that, would you?” she said, reaching for the kernel.

Bemused, Darryl did. Once more Nita reached into it, pulled out the “enacture” strand she’d been examining earlier. In a wizard still of probationary status it would have been a bit transparent. But this was solid and bright, and as Darryl reached across Nita to touch it, it sang with light and power like the plucked string of an instrument.

“Look at the date on that,” Nita said. “Two and a half months ago, yeah?”

“Two weeks after things started to get so bad all of a sudden,” Darryl said.

“Two weeks after the Powers that Be offered you the Oath,” Nita said. “And the Lone One spent that whole time trying to make it impossible for you to find the words.”

“Didn’t work, though,” Kit said, and he was grinning too, now. “Not with you. You may have had to fight to get the Oath out, word by word and phrase by phrase, sure, and It may have kept derailing you. But you wouldn’t be derailed. You got it out at last.”

“And passed your Ordeal the minute you managed to finish it,” Nita said.

Darryl was wearing a listening look as the Silence spoke to him, confirming his status. Slowly his face changed, and the joy in it was so dazzling that Nita found it hard to bear, and had to look away for a moment. “That was the real battle, wasn’t it,” Darryl said at last. “And I won it! I won…”

Kit looked thoughtful as he nodded. “Kind of unusual though, isn’t it?” he said to Nita. “Thought the Lone One doesn’t usually notice a wizard-to-be until after he says the Oath.”

“That’s how it is for most of us,” Nita said. “But not all Ordeals are alike.” She was still treading cautiously around anything that would get too close to the subject of abdals. The Lone Power definitely knew Darryl was an abdal. Probably It just wanted to keep him from taking the Oath any way It could, because who could tell how powerful he might become once he was a wizard? “And his was as tough for him as ours was for us.”

“What I’m not getting,” Kit said, “is why your manual and Tom’s and mine all said that Darryl was still stuck in his Ordeal!”

“Maybe because he hadn’t realized it was over,” Nita said. And she laughed again. “Hadn’t acknowledged it! The manuals go by the opinion of the one who’ll know for sure. The one who says ‘That’s it… I’m a wizard.’”

“Uh,” Darryl said. “…I was busy.”

“You really do concentrate totally on one thing at a time, don’t you.”

Darryl raised his eyebrows. “Comes with the territory sometimes,” Darryl said, sounding just a little rueful. “Mine, anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Nita said. “You just got so concentrated on implementing your decision to nail the Lone One down in here that you didn’t take time to realize it what had already happened. So the Silence stayed stuck for you, too, and couldn’t pass your status to the manual network outside.”

Darryl nodded. “I don’t know, though,” he said. “It still feels like maybe I got off easy. Just saying the Oath…?”

Kit looked at him as if he was insane. “You’re kidding, right? When the first thing you do afterwards is not just try to survive what the Lone One’s doing to you, but try to take the Lone One out of the game completely?” He shook his head. “This is nobody’s definition of easy! Come on.”

“The game,” Nita said, “the big game, is where we need you. Let’s get you out of here.”

Darryl turned away, then, looking back at the mirror in which the Lone One’s image stood gazing out at them, pale-eyed, malevolent, completely still. “One thing to do first,” he said.

A moment later there was a second mirror standing there, facing the first. Darryl walked over to it, and as he moved close his own image appeared in it—but not reflecting him exactly as a normal mirror would. His reflection’s regard was fixed on the reflection of the Lone Power in the other mirror, and didn’t move or look away when Darryl stepped away from it again.

“Automated oversight,” he said, pausing to look over his shoulder and make sure the reflection’s gaze didn’t move away from the Lone One’s image. But he looked reluctant to do anything else. “That’s the letter of the promise kept. It is me again.” Darryl bit his lip. “Not sure it’s enough, though.”

“You staying completely shut up in here by yourself isn’t going to help anything,” Nita said.

“I set this situation up,” Darryl said. “No point in making anyone else suffer for it.”

“I understand you’re trying to do the ‘fear for courage’ part,” Nita said. “But believe me, it’s way better not to do it alone.” And she found herself feeling a bit ashamed. “I needed reminding about that. And without you doing that for me, no telling where I’d be right now.”

For a moment, Darryl didn’t look up.

“There’s strength in numbers, Darryl,” Kit said. “Too easy to forget that.” He glanced at Nita, looking embarrassed. She gave him an amused look and raised her eyebrows. He turned back to Darryl. “Too easy to get so fixated on keeping other people out of trouble that you forget they volunteered for the same fight you’re fighting.”

“This has been a pretty cool battlefield,” Nita said, glancing around. “And you won your first fight. But now it gets interesting. Now you’re a wizard, you’ve got a lot more territory to cover. So get on out into the world with the rest of us and give It a run for Its money at least as good as what you’ve been giving it in here!”

Darryl was looking uncertain still. “Not real sure how that’s going to work,” he said. “In here, well, control’s easier. Outside, though…” He sighed. “I’ve got a nervous system that doesn’t act the way a lot of people think it should.”

Kit’s eyes went to the kernel in Darryl’s hands. “There’s a whole lot you could do with that,” he said.

Darryl looked at Nita.

“It’s hardware management as well as software,” she said. “Extremely powerful. In here, maybe infinitely so.”

Darryl held quite still for some moments, looking at the kernel, watching as the pale fires expressing the moment-to-moment business of neural pathways went shifting and flickering through the tangle of light.

“Well…” Darryl said. And paused.

And then he lifted his chin. “No.”

They looked at him.

“No,” Darryl said more strongly. “I’m me. I’m what I’ve got.” And then he looked at Nita a little strangely. “Were you doing something with cards before?”

She stared. “What?”

“Cards. You were thinking about it.”

She wondered how he knew that. Possibly through Kit: they were pretty tightly connected, and Kit could have caught it from me. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t annoying. “Oh God,” Nita muttered, “don’t tell me you want to see me do card tricks!”

Now Darryl looked confused. “What? No. You were playing some card game.”

She blinked. “Oh, right, I was. Just killing time.”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Solitaire…”

Nita smiled. Kit was good at most games, but for some reason he couldn’t keep the rules for solitaire in his head despite having been taught them about twenty times. “Yeah,” she said to Darryl.

“Do you cheat?”

“What?” Nita was taken aback. “No!”

“Didn’t think so somehow,” Darryl said.

She sighed. “I mean, sometimes I want to, but if you’re going to play a game, what’s the point of not playing it by the rules? How’ll you get any good at it?”

“So you play the hand you dealt yourself,” Darryl said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” Darryl said. “The brain and the nerves and the mind I’ve got… even if I don’t have them for some specific reason, they’re mine. They’re me. I’ve got a right to them, and I’m used to them. Besides, who knows what I might mess up if I started fiddling around?” He shrugged.

“And anyway, why fix what’s not broken?” Kit said, quite softly, “just different?”

Their eyes met. “Yeah,” Darryl said. “Thank you.” And that joy simply poured off him again, so that once more Nita had to brace herself against it. Kit wobbled with the impact of it too. Ponch, who had been standing there untroubled and wagging his tail ever since the Lone One left, now started to bark happily spin around in circles.

“So let’s just put this away wherever it belongs,” Darryl said, “and get out of here. Things to do…” He held the kernel out to Nita.

She shook her head. “Doesn’t have to go anywhere specific,” she said. “Just open up some inner space and shove it in. That way you’ll always be able to find it in a hurry if you want to do some minor redecoration some time.”

Darryl swept a hand out through the air beside him, felt around. “Oh!” he said as the hand sunk in, half vanishing. Then he craned his head around to try to see what the seemingly-chopped-through wrist looked like.

Kit snickered. “Has there ever been anybody who didn’t do that the first time?” he said.

“Not that I know of,” Nita said, resigned, as Darryl gave up on the anatomical investigations and stuffed the kernel into his own version of an otherspace pocket, sealing it off. As he did, he looked over his shoulder at the dark shape in the mirror.

“Don’t let It freak you,” Kit said. “It’s not just inside you. We’ve all got It, at least a little bit… and we see It all the time.”

Nita nodded. “In the people we know, the stuff that happens around us: there It is. There’s no escape. That’s life.”

“And Life, too,” Kit said. “Because it also goes the other way. We get to see what we serve. And it’s really worth it.”

Darryl was silent for a moment. “The Lone Power doesn’t make empty threats, does It.”

“Well, we’ve heard It threaten stuff that hasn’t happened yet,” Kit said, looking just a touch uneasy. “But…”

“Point is, It could do the things It was threatening?”

“Could,” Nita said. “But will it?” She shrugged. “It makes Its declarations. We make ours. And then we play out the game.” She looked over at Kit. “We’ve done okay, so far. There’s always the chance of losing, yeah. But the odds slide way over in Its favor if you don’t at least try… and way over in yours if you play hard and smart.”

Darryl nodded. “This has been a pretty bad time for me,” he said. “For so long I was managing okay. Sure, it’s always a challenge. The world can scrape me pretty raw. But I was managing. Then… wham, the burnout, and all of a sudden all the ways I had to cope just weren’t enough.” He scowled. “I think that’s over now. But if it happens again, worse, the way It was threatening…” He looked up. “My folks’ll be a mess.”

“I’m guessing they’re tougher than you think,” Nita said, remembering the voices she’d heard on the way in. “So don’t freak; give them a chance. And give yourself a chance. If it does happen—” She grinned. “You’re a wizard. Listen to the Silence. Pick yourself up and do what it tells you. You’ll get out again, because you’re tough, too. Tougher than you think.”

“Twice as tough, in fact,” Kit said, and glanced back at the mirror. “Maybe more.”

Darryl laughed at that. “And by the way,” Kit said, looking over at Nita, “thanks.”

“For what?”

“Uh, saving my butt?”

Nita waved a hand. “It was my turn, that’s all. In a few weeks it’ll probably be yours. Weren’t we supposed to have stopped keeping track?”

Kit just smiled a crooked smile at her. But then Nita had a thought, and glanced down at Ponch. “Come to think of it, though, I thought you said you weren’t going to take the boss out again without me.”

Ponch dropped his head a little. He went, he said. So I had to go, too. Then he brightened. But you got here when I thought you would, so it’s all right!

Nita gave Kit a look. “Your dog has me on a schedule?” she said.

Kit shrugged. “He has a very well-developed time sense,” Kit said. “Ask him about feeding time, for example.”

Ponch began to jump up and down in excitement.

“Now you’ve done it,” Nita said. “Darryl, better let us out of here before the Gut That Walks here starts ripping the place up.”

“He can if he wants,” Darryl said. “I’m closing this section down for the moment. That redecoration wan wait. But for now…”

Slowly, all around them, the brightness dimmed down. “I left you a space to slip out through,” Darryl said, as the space darkened, like a stage at the end of a play. “Just behind you there.” He pointed off toward a sliver of bright light in the near distance that cast a long beam across the shining floor. “But in the meantime, just in case the Guy in the Suit comes back?” He looked over at Nita, grinning. “This is what he’ll find.”

Through the now nearly-complete darkness, a spotlight shone down. In the spotlight, a little toy clown rode a tiny bicycle around and around, never stopping, never looking up. Nita looked at it and thought of a windup mouse going around and around in little circles, waiting for the cat.

“Boobytrap,” Darryl said. “It’ll trigger the oversight routine if Anyone drops by. And if It does… I think I can find a way to make It sorry all over again.”

Kit nodded. “So let’s get out of here. You sure you know the way back?”

“In my sleep,” Darryl said, and grinned.

Kit held out a hand. “Welcome to the Art, brother,” he said.

Darryl took the hand, then pulled Kit close and hugged him hard. Then he let go, turned to Nita, and hugged her, too.

“Later,” she said. “Go home! But when you’re ready? Come find us.”

Kit nodded. “We’re in the book.”

Darryl rolled his eyes. “The book,” he said, and grinned. “You guys are so rigid! Can’t wait to show you how to swing out and use something a little less concrete.”

And he flashed that astonishing grin at them one last time and vanished with the ease of someone who’s been doing it for years.

Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Your place or mine?” Nita said.

“My folks are going to yell at me,” Kit said, “so let’s do mine first.”

Nita smiled a small wry smile. “You just want me to help you take the heat.”

Mind reader, Kit said. Come on.

They headed for the doorway of light and vanished through it together.

***

Some distance away, in a special-ed classroom in Baldwin, the afternoon routine was proceeding as usual when one of the teachers saw something unusual happen.

Darryl McAllister closed the book in his lap, glanced around, sighed and straightened up..

The teacher went over to the boy, and got down beside him where until now he’d been sitting on the floor, gazing down into the open book and rocking. “Hey there, Darryl,” he said. “What’s up?”

There was a pause. “I think,” Darryl said at last, in a voice that cracked a little with not having been used for words for some weeks, “I think I’m done here.”

The teacher’s mouth dropped open.

There was another pause. “So can I go home now?” Darryl said, and smiled.

Chapter 10: Liberations

The explanations to parents, Advisories and others, as usual, took nearly as long as the events themselves had done, so it was several days before Nita and Kit found time to go off and relax. The chosen spot was a favorite one, by the edge of a crater close to a well-known site in Mare Tranquillitatis. They were leaning back against the very top of the upper crater wall, looking down over at the rising half-Earth, while Ponch lay on his back in the moondust, snoring, with his feet in the air.

A fourth figure suddenly stepped into the vacuum nearby, looking around him.

“Wow,” Darryl said. He wandered over to where Nita and Kit sat, bouncing a little as first-timers tended to do, because of the lighter gravity.

There was a pause. “Are we really allowed to be up here?” Darryl said, looking about half a mile away, toward where the feet and base of Apollo 11’s lunar lander sat.

“As long as we don’t mess it up,” Kit said. “This is a heritage area.”

Hearing that, Darryl burst out laughing, looking in mischievous admiration at the rough sculptures Kit had been doing on this site for some years. After a few moments he said, “This is what you do in a heritage area?”

“I’ll clean it up before they build the hotel here,” Kit said. “After that, I guess I’ll have to amuse myself carving rocks on Mars into faces.”

Darryl snickered.

“How are your folks doing?” Nita said.

Another pause. Nita was getting used to this now: Darryl routinely needed a few moments extra to compose a spoken sentence, though anything that was a joke or that he personally found funny seemed to take less time. “You kidding? They’re in shock,” Darryl said. He sat down on the rock beside Kit. “They were hoping all along that I’d pull through the burnout, but

“I wouldn’t have thought they’d let you out of their sight right now,” Kit said.

“…They haven’t,” Darryl said. “I’m home in bed.”

“Oh,” Nita said, and laughed. “Wow, that two-for-one deal really does come in handy, doesn’t it?”

She’d already had a word with Kit about the genuine source of Darryl’s ability to be in two places at once. They’d agreed that there was no need to be too cagey about mentioning Darryl’s ability to co-locate, as long as they stayed away from discussing the reasons for it. If Darryl just thought it was a personal talent, that was fine.

Darryl nodded. “I looked at the transit spells,” he said after a moment. “But except for the air, they looked like a waste of energy. We’re not supposed to waste. And besides, why go to all that trouble when I can just do this?”

For a moment he was standing behind a large boulder some feet away, while also sitting on the rock beside Kit. Kit shook his head in admiration.

“Slick trick,” Kit said. “I’ll do it my way for the time being, though. Seriously … are your parents coping?”

“They’re coping great.” Darryl’s eyes shone. It was plain to Nita that this was an understatement. “My mom and dad are…” He broke off, shook his head. This was another thing about his speech: strongly emotional content seemed to take a moment longer to compose. “Kind of freaked out, I guess. And I can’t tell them what happened, or why it’d be okay not to be freaked out.”

“Will you ever, you think?” Nita said.

Darryl thought about it. “…Eventually,” he said. “I’m pretty sure. But right now wizardry’d be one shock too many. They’d probably think I was developing some new kind of trouble because of coming out of the burnout so fast.” He produced a wry smile. “They’re still having trouble with that as it is. Not much in the literature about there being any kind of precedent for this.”

“Give them time,” Kit said. “Neither of us came right out to our parents, either. I think you’re probably right, though. Too much strange at once isn’t a good thing for them. There’s going to be enough of that later, once you start getting into your serious work, whatever that turns out to be. For now, just enjoy how happy they are, and take it easy.”

“Well, happy’s good, but the ‘take it easy’ part’s not going to last,” Darryl said, and grinned. “I heard my mom thinking that if I was really going to be this much more functional this fast, she was going to start giving me chores again.”

Nita and Kit groaned in unison.

“But she was still nervous about it,” Darryl said. “I think I get a few weeks of being lazy before they really start expecting me to step up.”

“Take advantage of it while it lasts,” Kit said, and grinned.

Darryl nodded, looked over at the Earth. “So now we get to take care of that,” he said.

“That’s the job,” Nita said.

“I’d better get on with it then,” Darryl said. “You guys come up here often?”

“Often enough,” Kit said.

“I might be needing some advice as I work into this job,” Darryl said.

“Then call any time,” Nita said.

Darryl nodded and threw them a casual salute. “Dai stihó—” And a second later he was gone.

“That is one nice kid,” Kit said after a moment.

“No argument there,” Nita said. “Come on, your mom said dinner was at six.”

Kit was looking over at the Earth. “It really is the best job, isn’t it?” he said.

Nita nodded, and stood up. “None better. And the company’s good, too.”

“The best,” Kit said. “Welcome back.”

Nita smiled. “Come on,” she said. “I want some of that chicken you’re always raving about.”

Kit stood up as well, dusting floury pumice dust off him. “Yeah, well, if you think you’re going to get a bigger portion than I am, think again! C’mon, Ponch.”

Ponch rolled over and bounced to his feet in a cloud of silvery dust. Kit and Nita vanished.

Ponch stood there, looking thoughtfully at the half-Earth for some moments; then wagged his tail.

Chicken! he said silently, leaped up, and vanished.

***

The next morning Nita walked to school quietly by herself, noticing a lot of things that had passed her by recently: the snow, the slush (of which there was a great deal), the icicles hanging down, glittering, from the eaves of people’s houses; the color of the sky, the sound of people’s voices as they said good-bye to each other on their way to work. If it wasn’t for what’s been going on this past week or so, she thought, how much of this would I have noticed? She had been locked up in her grief as surely as Darryl had locked himself up in the landscapes he’d been constructing to confine the Lone Power.

But he was free now. And as for me…

Nita mused as she turned the corner, thinking of Carl’s mention of the concept that right across the fields of existence “all is done for each.” As far as she could tell, that meant that every good thing that happened to everybody had some effect on all the rest of everybody, from here to the edges of the universe. It was like that saying about the chaos-theory butterfly in the rainforest, which, just by waving its little wings, contributes to the hurricane half a hemisphere away—if not actually causing the hurricane. But more specifically, the “all done for each” principle seemed to mean that the Powers That Be had designed the world so that everything that happened in it—every victory, every sacrifice, from the largest to the smallest—was pointed specifically at every separate living thing. At first Nita had found this almost impossible to imagine. Now she found herself wondering if what she’d just been through, besides assisting in Darryl’s self-liberation, had been about helping her find her way out of her own pain as well. And if he was sent to help me, way more than the other way around.

Better concentrate on making sure he didn’t go through all that for nothing, then.

Nita shrugged as she walked in through the gates that led into the parking lot. There was plenty of time to get into the theoretical stuff later. For now, she had work to catch up on. And there was other business to finish.

She went down to the temporary office where she usually found Mr. Millman. There he was, sitting behind the desk and reading something on his smartphone while eating the last couple of bites of a bagel with cream cheese.

He glanced up as Nita came in. “Morning,” he said.

Nita sat down, put her book bag on the floor, reached into her jacket, and came out with the cards.

“Before you start in with those,” Mr. Millman said, “one thing. We left on a slightly jangly note the other day.”

“Did we?” Nita said, refusing for the moment to smile at him, refusing to let him off the hook.

“I think we did. Especially since you cut half your classes shortly thereafter.”

Nita shrugged. Millman’s eyebrows went up as he took note of the gesture. “I just wanted you to know something,” he said. “Whatever the secret is about what’s going on in your life right now—I want you to know that there’s no need for you to tell me, ever, and I have no intention of pressing you.”

Nita looked at him with surprise, because this wasn’t what she’d been thinking. She also looked at him with amused suspicion. “What is this, some kind of reverse psychology?”

Mr. Millman looked at her in shock, and then laughed. “What? Like you’re a three-year-old and you’ll do the opposite of what I suggest? Spare me. This is supposed to have been counseling, not brain surgery. I was merely saying that my intent was just to counsel you—not dig around in your skull for juicy tidbits like something out of a horror movie about bad Far Eastern food.”

Nita snickered. “Okay,” she said. “I thought you were going to say something about my anger.”

“Anything that needs to be said,” said Mr. Millman, “I’m sure you’ll take care of it.”

Nita slipped the cards out of their pack and started to shuffle them. It was surprising how easy the false shuffles were when you were really paying attention to them. “Name a card,” she said.

“Five of diamonds,” he said.

Nita nodded, put the deck down on the desk, and cut it twice, to the right, to make three piles. “Turn one card over,” she said.

Millman reached out and turned over the top card of the leftmost deck. The top card was the five of diamonds.

“Not bad at all,” Millman said. “Do I get to pick another?”

Nita gave him a look. “I wouldn’t push your luck if I were you,” she said.

He grinned a little and sat back. “You look a whole lot better,” he said.

“I feel a whole lot better,” Nita said. “And I think I don’t need to be here anymore.”

“What, school?” Millman said, raising his eyebrows.

“Not school here. Here here,” Nita said.

“Oh, you’re cured then?” he said.

Nita cracked up. “Cured of what?”

“You’d be the one to tell me that,” Millman said.

Nita was quiet for a moment. “Not sure anything’s been going that needed curing,” she said at last. “If you mean, am I over my mom dying? …No way. She’ll always be part of me. It’s going to hurt for a long time that she’s not somewhere I can grab her and hug her. But nothing can take her out of my life. Am I over wanting to just sit and suffer and let life go by?” She swallowed. “Probably. Yeah.”

“Then I would say,” Mr. Millman said, “that my work here is done. Insofar as any of it was my work. Which is debatable.”

He reached out and turned over the top card on the middle pack. It was the ace of spades. “Aha,” he said.

“What?”

“Highly symbolic.”

“Of what?”

“Well, that would be a long story. That little leafshaped thing, the ‘spade’..,” Mr. Millman picked up the card, looked closely at it. “The history of the word is tangled. But it goes back at least as far as the Greek spatha. That was a sword, once upon a time. Of the four suits, that’s the one that has most to do with power. Air, the sound the sword makes in the air, the spoken word; the weapons held by the Power that faces down the Power That Fell…”

He picked up the ace and the three cut packs, shuffling them together again.

Nita looked at him.

“So,” Mr. Millman said, putting the deck down on the desk and doing a credible riffle—much too credible, now that Nita thought of it, for a man who claimed that he couldn’t get the cards to stay up his sleeve. “Any last questions before we finish up here?”

She looked at him, thought for a moment, and found a question it would never before have occurred to her to ask him. The answer would have been in her manual, but she wasn’t going to consult that right now. Considering the question, Nita first made sure that she had the wizardry she wanted ready in the back of her head. If you were going to remove someone’s memory, the less time you spent dithering over it, the better.

“Are you on errantry?” Nita said.

He raised his eyebrows again in that expression she’d learned could mean almost anything but surprise.

“No,” Mr. Millman said. “But I know some people who are.”

Nita sat there, astonished, trying not to exhibit it. Millman sat there and kept shuffling.

“You don’t have to be a wizard to know one,” Millman said, “once you know what you’re looking for. And when you’re willing to see what you’re looking at. Not many people are, but that’s humans for you.” He fanned out the cards for her. “Pick a card, any card.”

Nita picked one, turned it over. It was the joker.

Mr. Millman grinned, folded the hand up, tapped the cards back into order, and pushed the deck back toward Nita, meanwhile glancing at the door. “You know where to find me if you need me,” he said. “And I’ve had a word with your sister’s counselor: she’ll be introducing me to Dairine later in the week. Meanwhile, go well.”

Nita got up and took back her pack of cards, grinning, too. She headed for the door.

There she paused as something occurred to her. “‘Supposed to have been counseling?’” she said.

Mr. Millman shrugged.

Nita shook her head again. “Dai stihó,” she said, and left.

***

That night Nita had a dream. In the dream she stood at the edge of darkness, looking in. Out there in the dark was a spotlight shining on a dark gleaming floor. In the light, something was wobbling around and around, while somewhere off in the near distance a single drum held a drumroll.

The thing in the spotlight was a clown doll on a little bicycle. The doll had purple clown hair, and a little derby hat, and baggy patched pants, and it was riding around and around in circles. It had a painted black tear running down its face, and its red-painted mouth was turned up in a lopsided grin. But the eyes in the doll’s white “greasepaint” face were alive, and pale with fury. The expression in them shouted, I can’t make it stop! I can’t make it stop!

Nita watched this with dry amusement. Just couldn’t resist, could you, she thought. And there you are, so very very stuck! Wonder how long he can get away with keeping you sidelined? Probably not nearly long enough to teach you a lesson.

…Probably not, the answer came back. Got way too much to do right now, and it’s a nuisance to spend the power it takes to bottle even just this avatar up. But who knows… maybe things’ll be just a little quieter around here until I have to turn It loose.

The drumroll went on and on. Beyond the light, a heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. But there was no sound of growling now, no tiger waiting to pounce. Its pouncing days were over, in this tiny territory anyway: and the clown was no longer victim, but cage.

Nita woke up to the bright daylight, reflected from snow onto the ceiling of her bedroom, let out a long breath, and smiled.

***

The doorbell rang. Kit glanced up from the business of throwing books into his book bag and would have started moving to get the door himself, except that his sister plunged past him. “What?” Kit said, looking all around to try to understand why Carmela was suddenly so hot to answer the door.

No answer came back. Kit could do little but shrug and finish packing his book bag. He stood up from the sofa just in time to look out the window and see the UPS truck pull away.

His sister closed the front door and nearly danced past him into the kitchen. “What?” Kit said.

Carmela got a particularly large knife out of the knife rack and began slitting the packing tape on the large box she’d been carrying. Kit fastened his bag and wandered over.

“It has to be clothes,” Kit said, resigned. After a childhood during which Carmela’s major occupation had been ruining the OshKosh overalls that were all their parents dared buy her, Carmela had suddenly discovered clothing as something besides protection from the elements. Now all her pocket money went in this direction, either down at the mall or via various strange mail-order firms. “Nothing but clothes gets you this excited anymore,” Kit said. “Except maybe Miguel.”

And having said that, Kit prepared to protect himself from the explosion that was sure to follow. I can’t believe I said that to her while she was holding a knife!

But the explosion didn’t follow. Carmela, grinning all over her face and singing a little la-la song, put the knife aside, opened the top of the box, and started removing the contents. These seemed to be only a shower of escaping Styrofoam peanuts for the first thirty seconds or so. But then Carmela reached in and lifted out something wrapped in bubblewrap.

“It’s not clothes,” Kit said, astonished.

“Nope,” Carmela said. “Much better.”

This statement left Kit completely confused. Carmela carefully started unwrapping the bubblewrap from around the object.

“It’s some hair thing,” Kit said. “One of those hot curlers.”

Carmela just smiled and kept on unwrapping.

The last bit of wrapping fell away. Carmela held the object up delightedly, admiring it in the morning light, and then thrust it into Kit’s hands.

“Let’s see what the directions say,” she said. She turned back to the box and started digging through the Styrofoam peanuts again.

Kit looked at what he was holding. It looked very much like an eggbeater, except that eggbeaters don’t usually have pulse lasers built into them.

Neets? he said silently.

A moment later the answer came back. What?

Can I please move in with you?

There was a pause … and then laughter.

I’ll be right over…

By the same author

 In the Young Wizards Series

So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad
The Wizard’s Dilemma • A Wizard Alone
Wizard’s Holiday • Wizards at War
A Wizard of Mars

The Middle Kingdoms Series (for adult readers)

The Door into Fire • The Door into Shadow

The Door into Sunset

Other standalone adult fantasy:

Raetian Tales: A Wind from the South
Stealing The Elf-King's Roses

In the Star Trek (TM) universe:

The Wounded Sky • My Enemy, My Ally
Spock’s World • Doctor's Orders
Dark Mirror • Intellivore

The "Rihannsu Quartet"

The Romulan Way • Swordhunt
Honor Blade
(omnibus edition: Star Trek: The Bloodwing Voyages)
The Empty Chair

Collected short fiction:

Uptown Local and Other Interventions
Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales

***

For ebook editions of many books above
and others not listed here,
please visit

EbooksDirect.dianeduane.com

or the Books page at the author's site:

DianeDuane.com

 ***

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@dduane

*****