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 t
o 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.