Helena sniffed, that specific sound of scorn that made Kit realize suddenly how long it had been since he’d heard it. “Huh,” Helena said, amused. She craned her neck, looking up and past him, hearing the sound of Kit’s mama going downstairs to put the laundry in the washer.
“Look,” she said, in a lower tone. “While you’re here, there’s just something I wanted to clear up.”
Kit swung around and sat down in the chair he’d been leaning on. He thought he knew what was coming and was now wondering whether it would be smarter to just cut and run. But this was his sister, not some monster from another world. Theoretically.
“When I was home last, I was giving you a hard time about, you know.” Helena winced. “The weird things you were doing.”
Kit wasn’t sure where she was going with this and didn’t want to accidentally help her in the wrong direction. “And?”
“Well.” She straightened up, let go of the present piece of laundry, and sat there with her hands clasped in her lap, staring down at them as if they were unusually interesting. “For a while, before I went off to school, I was really worried about you, Kit. Seriously worried. I thought you were... you know.”
The Spawn of Satan? Kit thought. In league with the Forces of Darkness? But he said nothing out loud. If Helena was finally seeing sense, he wasn’t going to derail her.
“But I spent a while thinking about it, and finally I started to understand. I can’t believe it took me as long as it did, but you know how it can be, you hit something that you can’t really get to grips with, and you back away and dance all around it? Till you realize that maybe you misunderstood the situation from the very beginning. And once I understood that you weren’t doing anything, you know, evil, then it was all right. I just didn’t understand. I do now.”
And Helena looked at him with an expression of not just understanding, but— bizarrely— pity. “Why didn’t you just tell me that you’re a mutant?”
Kit sat perfectly still.
That... I’m... a what??
He turned slowly to Carmela, who was still sprawled on the couch, though she’d now propped herself up on one elbow to observe the proceedings. “Please tell her I am not a mutant,” Kit said, a lot more calmly than he needed to.
Carmela’s eyes glittered with mischief. “I don’t know,” she said. “It would explain a lot.”
It was more than Kit could bear, as it always had been when his sisters ganged up on him. There was something intrinsically unfair in having two of them who were older and more in control than he was. He still had the photo of the time when he was four and they’d all been playing soldiers, and Carmela had stuck a saucepan on his head, telling him it was a helmet. Then Helena had snuck up on them to take the photo, one Kit’s mom thought was incredibly cute and refused to get rid of. No one seemed to care that Kit winced every time he saw the thing, and the thought of some friend from school somehow seeing it occasionally kept him up at night. Unfortunately, even with extensive usage of wizardry, he had never been able to locate the negative.
And now here again was one of his sisters trying to saddle him with another image that was going to stick for years if he didn’t do something now. “I,” Kit said, “am not… a mutant!!”
“But you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Helena said with some compassion as she grabbed an armload of the laundry scattered around her and stood up. “It’s all right: I understand now.” As she headed out of the room, Helena paused by the chair, looking down at him affectionately, and mussed his hair again. “I can cope with you being a mutant,” Helena said. “Actually, it’s kind of cool. So don’t worry: your secret’s safe with me.”
And she went after their mama. “Mama? Did you start it yet? Don’t start it yet!”
Kit stood staring after her, openmouthed and fuming. Then he rounded on Carmela. “Are you going to let her get away with that?”
“Are you?” Carmela said.
Kit let out a long breath, thinking. Infuriating as Helena’s new attitude was, it was possibly preferable to the way she’d been acting when she thought that Kit’s wizardry meant he’d sold his soul to the devil. He shook his head. “But it’s not true!”
“The more you tell her so,” Carmela said, “the more she’s going to think you’re in denial. And she’s just going to feel more sorry for you. She might even start worrying again.”
Kit rolled his eyes. If worrying were an Olympic event, Helena would have effortlessly qualified for any U.S. team. “You’ve told her the truth now,” Carmela said. “Isn’t that enough? Isn’t honor satisfied?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Kit,” Carmela said. “Let her be. Let her think her life’s actually the way she wishes it was. Don’t make her follow you places she’s just not built to go.” His sister’s voice was suddenly full of not only disappointment, but a pity entirely different from Helena’s.
“But you’re going to follow me there?” Kit said.
Carmela raised her eyebrows. “‘Follow’?” she said, and grinned. “Like I follow people! ‘Chase,’ maybe.” She stretched, then got up off the couch and started picking up more of the scattered laundry.
“Yeah,” Kit said quietly. “Okay.” He got up, too, and started helping her, and a few moments later the two of them followed Helena downstairs.
***
Having spell-transited into the shielded part of her backyard from Mars, Nita came into the house and realized that she was itching all over. Mars dust! she thought, trying to brush it off herself, and failing as usual: the stuff was aggressively static-charged due to the dryness up there. I need to change
She started heading upstairs to her room to do that but was distracted by finding her dad sitting in his lounger in the living room, looking at his phone. “Lunch hour?” she said to him as she passed.
“Yeah,” her dad said. “It’s quiet in town today I’m taking an extra half-hour.” But he looked distracted and didn’t glance up as he spoke.
Nita could guess what he was looking at: Dairine. “What’s she up to?” she said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs.
“That’s actually an artificial sun they’re playing around with,” her dad said. “She keeps getting in and out of it.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, “I saw her doing that. It’s a simulator.”
“Something else weird about this—”
He pointed at the screen. Nita went to look over his shoulder. Her dad was indicating a text window on the little screen. Inside it, text— initially in the Speech, but translating itself on the fly— was rolling downward at considerable speed.
She squinted at it. Don’t know what to do about this— oh, wait, now I see— no, that’s all wrong. I wish he wouldn’t stare like that. I can’t concentrate when he’s looking at me all the time; don’t want him to think I’m not in control here! What was that reading? No, back off—
“Wow,” Nita said. “That’s Dairine thinking.” She smiled slightly. “Streaming consciousness...”
Her dad chuckled at the pun. But then he shook his head and put the phone down. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nita, when you said I might get more information than I wanted? I didn’t think that was likely. But now—” Her dad glanced at the phone’s screen. “I don’t know that this is the kind of thing I want to be seeing, no matter how concerned I am about her. I feel like I’ve been going through her diary. Worse than that.”
Nita stepped back behind her dad to lean against the nearby breakfront dresser, attempting to hide the fact that she was blushing red-hot with guilt. There had been a time, years before she’d become a wizard, when after a fight with her sister, Nita had found out where Dairine’s diary was hidden. Still furious enough that she didn’t care what Dairine or anyone else would think about what she was doing, Nita stole the diary and read it cover to cover. There hadn’t been anything in the diary that had been all that interesting ...which at the time had made Nita even angrier.
Understanding that this ne
w anger wasn’t at Dairine, but at herself, had taken Nita a while. And then the anger had turned to shame. She could now never think of that horrible episode—hunkered down in the corner of her bedroom before Dairine got home from school, turning the pages of the little pink-plastic-covered Barbie-splashed book—without feeling a hard, hot stab of shame and disgust with herself. And now she was stuck in it again.
But her dad didn’t notice. He was staring at the phone. “I had no idea what the inside of her head was like,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting something that was both so—adult—and so—” He stopped, shook his head. “So, I don’t know, fierce. And so absolutely focused. I keep thinking, have I just forgotten how it is to be thirteen? How immediate everything seems, how life-or-death? Or is it that Dairine’s just different? The inside of my brain was never anything like that, as far as I can remember. The only kind of thirteen-year-old I’ve ever been was a boy. Thirteen-year-old girls—”
He shook his head again. “When you’re a dad, you see them one way. Your baby daughter. But when I was thirteen, if I thought about them at all, I thought maybe they were some other kind of species. They didn’t do the things I did, act the way I did. They were a nuisance, mostly. Good for getting me in trouble.”
“Who, your sisters?”
Her dad smiled. “Them and their friends,” he said. “Funny how you never think about such things when you’re older. Like when your aunt Annie fell out of the tree when she was six, and told your grandpa I pushed her.”
Nita was still recovering from her own embarrassment, and wasn’t able to give this all the attention she would have at some less unnerved moment. “She didn’t?”
Her dad laughed, rueful. “She was the one with the Superman towel around her neck, not me! Grandpa was sure I did it, but your Gran made him see reason. Always her specialty.”
He sighed, looking back at the phone. “But... I don’t know. I don’t want to be seeing the inside of Dairine’s head. That’s just wrong. You need to find a way to turn that off.”
“I’ll have a word with Bobo,” Nita said. “He and Spot set it up. They can filter it.”
“And I’ve been seeing how Nelaid is with her,” her father said. “He’s stern. Maybe better at ‘stern’ than I am. I might be able to pick up a trick or two from him.”
Nita didn’t say anything, though inside she felt like smiling. It was not the kind of admission you usually expected to hear from your dad, and was all the more sweet because of it. “Aw, you do good stern!” Nita said. “Don’t knock yourself.” And she reached around to scratch her back. The Mars dust was getting to her again. I don’t just need to change: I need a shower.
“I wonder if that’s true,” her dad said, looking vague for a moment. “I wonder if I’ve done too much of the wrong kind of stern in the past, and now she’s looking for the right kind. Because...” He trailed off for a moment, then looked up at Nita again. “Sweetie, she’s away all the time.”
“But you know why,” Nita said. “She’s looking for Roshaun.”
“And about that,” her father said, looking actively troubled now. “There is— let’s just say there’s a certain age difference between them. I know what you’re going to say: he’s from another planet, there are cultural differences—”
Nita waved a hand. “Daddy, you’re reading too much into it. Sometimes a girl can have a best friend who’s a boy.”
Her father’s eyes dwelt on her, thoughtful.
Nita started to sweat, but decided that it was too late to stop now. “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. But besides that—”
“And that you’re both wizards—”
Nita laughed one helpless laugh at a dad who could both tease her and be serious at the same time. “Besides that— she’s not like me.”
“Somehow,” her father said, “over the years, I’ve picked up on that.”
“And she’s never going to be. She’s not that much like you or Mom, either. And she doesn’t fit any of the family stereotypes. Sometimes it’s like she’s from another planet—”
There Nita stopped, astonished at what had fallen out of her mouth.
“It is, isn’t it?” her dad said.
Though Nita heard what he said, she didn’t really have time to react to it, because of the completely bizarre idea suddenly occupying her entire mind.
Did she take a wrong turn?
From a casual conversation with Carl and some follow-up reading in the manual, Nita knew that there were always a certain number of wizards who cropped up on one world and seemed to spend their whole lives yearning for, and dealing with, some other one. The Powers That Be were notably silent on such subjects: privacy issues were a big deal with Them, and They didn’t go into detail on what made a wizard uniquely him- or herself. But there was an unspoken understanding among those out on errantry that some wizards who were born in one place but mostly lived and worked in another were meant to be bridge builders... or, more simply, to themselves be the bridges, with a foothold in each world, bearing a most unusual burden— sometimes consciously.
There was an abbreviated word-phrase in the Speech for this kind of profound involvement with another place and people: taraenshlev’. It didn’t translate well, like many words in the Speech: but there were curious and uncomfortable resonances with English words like expatriate and exile. “Took a wrong turn” was one shorthand phrase that attempted to express the tension: as if someone originally “supposed” to be born in one place had hung a left instead of a right and wound up somewhere else.
Nita stood up straight, aware that her dad was looking curiously at her. Kit, she was thinking. I never thought about him this way. But I never had reason to. Could it be that this is more than just some thing with Mars? Could it be that Mars has a thing with him? And why in the world..?
“What?” her dad said.
“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Thinking. Maybe thinking dumb things.”
Her dad gave her a dismissive look. “Whatever my daughters do,” he said, “and whatever planet they do it on, they do not think dumb things.” And then he regarded her with concern. “Have you had lunch?”
“No,” Nita said. “Gonna have that now. But I need a shower first. Jeez, Dad, when you go to Mars, wear a coat or something, because if you don’t the dust gets everywhere!”
“Okay,” he said, as she started up the stairs. “So when am I going?”
Nita paused. “Where?”
“To Mars!” He laughed. “What’s the point of being a wizard’s dad if I don’t get some perks out of it?”
“Uh—” She laughed. “I’ll set it up. Maybe in the next few days, okay?”
“Fine,” her dad said.
And Nita went up the stairs with something itching at her mind that was more than Mars dust.
***
To Kit, dinner seemed to take forever. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy it—he was starving—and the conversation over dinner had been innocuous, even fun. It only became boring when Helena started telling stories about the now-history boyfriend who’d dumped her.
But even during the more interesting parts of the conversation, Kit had trouble concentrating. The things he’d experienced on Mars today kept coming back to haunt him. And something else was bothering him that seemed to have gotten stronger since he’d come home: a sense of someone whispering in his ear, words he couldn’t quite make out against the ongoing conversation.
It wasn’t a new sensation. He’d noticed it a few times over the past couple of months. He’d even mentioned it to Nita once, and had then been surprised when she got a panicked look and said, “Tell me you’re not hearing Bobo!”
He’d been glad to tell her that whatever else was going on, no, he wasn’t hearing Bobo. Nita had looked bizarrely relieved. Kit had wondered about that at the time, and wondered again now. Did she think Bobo was going to start telling me Secret Girl Stuff?
Now, though, Kit found himself repeatedly straining to hear the voice that see
med to be whispering in reaction to things it heard other people say— or trying to get his attention during the silences. The experience made for a peculiar dinner, and Kit was relieved to get home and back to his room where he could shut the door and relax.
He checked his manual for anything from Nita, but she’d left no notes for him. On inquiring about her location, the listing next to her name merely said, Sunplace, Wellakh: transport flagged as family business: please do not contact except in emergency.
Dairine again, Kit thought. Never mind, I’ll catch up with Neets in the morning. I’m bushed. But he had reason to be. Spending the better part of a day being chased around Mars by various peculiar wildlife, not to mention visiting the ancient city of Helium, could kind of take it out of you.
He wrote Nita a note about getting together to exchange notes after the family got back from church in the morning, and then nervously took a look to see if there was any answer to his previous message from Mamvish. But there was none. He felt strangely relieved.
Okay, Kit thought. Either she read what I sent her and it wasn’t a big enough deal to get right back to me, or she’s really busy and hasn’t had time to answer at all. Whatever. I’ll check again in the morning.
He stretched out on his bed and lay looking for a while at the twin discs of the Mars map hanging on the wall. Full with a good dinner, tired, he never really realized when he fell asleep.
***
What took him by surprise was to find himself sitting in the Scarlet Tower, side by side with Aurilelde on the red sandstone bench at the center of it all.
“You saved us before,” she said. “And then you saved us again. You’ll do it a third time now: I see it.” She looked at him with a slight smile. “And anyway,” she said, “you promised you would— and that you would come back for me. And you always kept your promises.”
Kit looked around, somewhat in panic. But they were alone, and Aurilelde’s father was nowhere to be seen. As for Aurilelde—as she turned to Kit, he got something of a shock. The Martian princess he had seen was gone. Now he found himself looking at a slender young female figure, still not much older than him or Nita, but all gray; a handsome, polished-steel gray like stone come to life. Her eyes were dark—that much persisted at least from the previous vision. But the hair, the beautiful flowing dark hair, was hair no longer. It was a waist-length flow of deep sapphire-blue smoke. Kit thought for a moment of the filmy draperies she’d worn before and smiled.