Nita shook her head. “Intimidated by us?”
“If you were young and not real sure of yourself . . .”
“The way he’s not sure of himself? Give me a break.”
“I’ve seen stranger coping methods . . .”
Nita sighed. It wasn’t fair to let their first impressions of Penn get in the way of what they’d all come here to do. And the Powers were behind their assignment: there had to be something about them that this kid needed. “You’re probably right,” she said. “This is stressy for everybody, there’s all this—” She waved a hand. “Frustrated wizardry in the room. Or maybe ‘frustrated’ is the wrong word. Eager.”
“Competitive,” Kit said.
Nita nodded slowly, because he was right. And it was something she wasn’t used to seeing where wizardry was concerned. Almost since she’d been called to the Art, all the wizards Nita had ever found herself working with were intent on getting the job done, whatever it took—very often at the expense of their own egos and their own stress. This is already looking like a different kind of scenario, she thought, and I’m not sure I’m going to like it much.
“Still . . .” she said.
“Thinking out loud, Neets?” Kit said. “Or talking to Bobo, maybe?”
“No,” she said, “just myself.” She threw a sidelong look at him, then glanced back to look for Penn in the crowd, but he had finally vanished. “But I have a feeling you’re going to be hearing a lot of that in the next few weeks . . .” she said, with a sigh. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go have some pitanga juice.”
“Some what?”
“It’s over by the blue food.”
“What? You’re on!”
Dairine stood off to one side, listening to Irina’s speech and trying not to get too impatient as she waited for the payoff: the moment when she’d get a sense of how much of a winner or loser her mentee was going to be.
The manual had given her little besides the bare facts: Merhnaz Farrahi, Mumbai, India, specialty: geomancy, seismics. Dairine’s initial reaction had been approval. Good specialty for that part of the world . . . there are never enough earthquake wranglers who’ve got the skill and smarts to stop the worst ones. But beyond that . . . who knew? The manual was not going to give you personality data. Dairine had tried to get it to do that, once or twice, when looking over the précis of a few of the other competitors. Some of their spells were so unusual that they made her want to know them better. And who knows, Dairine thought, if I meet my mentee and she’s boring, then afterward I’ll go hunt some of those guys up. At least the networking might be productive.
It was odd, though. The flush of excitement she’d felt in her dad’s shop on learning she would be included in this—after the inevitable annoyance at being thrown into it on such short notice—was fading. It was always good to meet other wizards when there wasn’t a calamity under way. There were some nice people out there on errantry, and hearing from them personally about the places they’d been and the cool things they’d done was endlessly more fascinating than just reading about it in the manual.
She thought again of the hectic, edgy excitement and camaraderie of the great gathering on the Moon at the beginning of the Pullulus War. Everyone had been terrified but up for it. Having to save the universe, Dairine thought, tends to put you on your best game . . . assuming it doesn’t also make you want to dig a hole and hide. In any case, there had been no leisure for hiding at that point. Everyone had thrown intervention groups together the best they could, headed out into space, and started tracking down the weapon that would bring the Lone Power’s plans to an end.
This was a much different business; more structured, more leisurely, and less deadly. It was going to be engaging enough, but probably not all that exciting, except with the manufactured sort of stimulation that comes with staged competitions everywhere. Which was just as well, because she had other things to be thinking about right now. So funny, Dairine thought. There are probably kids on the planet who would give anything to be here right now. And where do I want to be?
She smiled to herself. No matter how much of a pain in the butt her dad and Nelaid could be when they were tag-teaming her, if there was anywhere she wanted to be right now, it was in Sunplace, on Wellakh, on the terrace of that high spire of stone, leaning over the rail there . . .
And not alone.
In memory she leaned there again, and Roshaun was next to her. The interlude they’d shared before the terrible events on the Moon at the conclusion of the Pullulus War had been so brief that at times Dairine had to go back and check her manual to see whether one thing or another had actually happened. Did I really lean here with you, with our elbows banging together, so that you kept nudging me and I kept nudging you, and we were both doing it to annoy each other, and it didn’t do anything but make us both laugh? That bus ride we took to the mall, did you really have one of those lollipops sticking out of your face then? When we were sitting on the steps that one evening, and the lilacs were out . . . were you really looking at me the way I thought you were?
And then came their time on the Moon. Not the Moon on the day when everything went wrong: but the Moon when she took him there, after first pointing it out to him in the sky. That whole thing got splashed out of the Earth, a long time ago. And it was just the right size to form up . . . Really? By how small a chance you had a Moon at all, then . . . Yeah, we use it as a paradigm for how sometimes you get incredibly lucky. The way things do go right sometimes.
Except that things had then gone most spectacularly wrong.
My best friend. Truly the best friend: the one who couldn’t be mistaken for anything else—the one who had to be your best friend because there was simply no other way you could be putting up with him on a regular basis. The infuriating, hilarious, smart, ignorant, stuck-up creature with his ridiculous snotty bearing and his formal ways and flashy clothes; the young King who (once he got the position) didn’t want to be a king at all, but who resigned himself to doing it as well as it could be done because that was the way he handled things. The terrifyingly competent wizard, the guy who refused to take anyone’s crap but would laugh at her with that supercilious look when she delivered it to him by the truckload. The one who never took her seriously. The one who always took her seriously.
Roshaun. Where the hell are you?
It was the silent cry that started every day and ended every one. Sometimes Dairine heard it in her sleep; sometimes the rawness of it woke her up. She would lie there in the frontier between dream and awakening, knowing she was at home in bed, but also knowing that she was kneeling in the cold dust of the Moon with the Sunstone in her hands, someone else’s Sunstone, the heavy collar and the bright gem that had simply parted company with him somehow and now lay there in the talcum-powdery, gunpowder-smelling moondust. And the stones hurt her knees, but not as much as her chest hurt because he had been there and now he was gone.
Not dead. That much she knew (though her own cowardice had kept her from being sure about that for a long time). But not alive, either. Something had happened to his physical body: it had seemingly been burned away in the terrible wash of coronal energies that Roshaun had tried to turn against the Pullulus as it closed in around Earth. And the worst thing about it, Dairine thought, was that it made no difference, at the end. The power that would end the Pullulus came from another direction entirely.
Well, maybe it’s not true that it made no difference, she thought. He bought Kit and Ponch time to make it happen. But at the end of it, Roshaun was still gone.
But not forever. That resolution, too, came at the beginning of every day and the end of every one. I’ll find you, she thought. I don’t care how long it takes . . .
There was a patter of applause going around the room as Irina finished her speech. Okay, Dairine thought, let’s find out how terrible this is going to be. She put Spot down. “See anybody?” she said.
Not yet.
About a quarter of the way arou
nd the room, Dairine could see Kit and Nita making their way toward the side of one of buffet tables. So they’re taken care of now, she thought as she saw them come to a halt in front of a skinny dark-haired guy even taller than Kit. That’s going to be interesting, she thought. Kit was very proud of his height: sometimes she wondered if Nita had noticed how incredibly happy he’d been when his middle-school growth spurt began, or realized how he’d hated being short—
“Uh, excuse me?”
A very soft voice, very shy sounding, pulled Dairine out of her thoughts. She blinked. Standing in front of her, twisting her hands together, was a dark-haired girl of maybe fourteen. She was wearing long dark trousers with a kind of blue watered-silk overcoat on top, and had a big, geometrically patterned scarf in blue and white wrapped around her head and shoulders.
“Hi there,” Dairine said.
The girl was looking at her with the oddest expression of near astonishment. “Are you Dairine Callahan?”
“Uh, yeah. And you’re—Mehrnaz? Did I pronounce it right?”
“Yes, yes you did—” She said it as if this was an amazing thing. And then she blushed.
“Well, dai stihó.”
The girl opened her mouth, then shut it again, and it took her a moment more to manage words. “Is there some mistake?” she said at last.
Now what in the world does she mean by that—? “Mistake!”
“I mean, are you absolutely sure you were assigned to me?”
What, she doesn’t like the idea for some reason or other? Dairine, already on edge, was just about ready to let her have it. But the girl’s face was so scared, and looked so little like that of someone who was trying to be offensive, that she held her fire for the moment.
“Well,” Dairine said, and pointed above her head. “Little blue light . . .” Then she pointed to the girl’s. “Little red light . . .” She shrugged as both of them went out. “And I think we have to assume the wizardry’s working right, because otherwise a lot more people would be complaining.”
That shy face was suddenly transfigured with laughter. “Oh, Powers,” Mehrnaz murmured. “It’s true, it’s really true, isn’t it? It’s you! The one who wouldn’t move the planet.”
Dairine was confused. Then, suddenly, the memory of a long-ago phone conversation, from after her Ordeal, came back to her. “No,” she said. “It was fine right where it was.” Yet there was no avoiding the stab of frustration that came to her now as she thought of the time when she could have done something like that, even would have done it if the reason had been right. “But seriously,” she said, “since when do they let privileged communications like that out into the manual?” And she had to laugh. “If it’s there, though, I guess it can’t have been that privileged. Maybe I had the comms permissions set up wrong. It was kind of an exciting time . . .”
“And you were so awesome,” Mehrnaz said. “Are so awesome! I can’t believe it! It’s such an honor to be paired up with you.”
“Uh, okay,” Dairine said, astonished. This was not the way she’d imagined this was going to go. She’d expected to be bored by whoever she met. But who thinks I’m amazing? Even Roshaun never . . .
She shook her head. Wrong thing to be thinking about right now. Meanwhile, Mehrnaz seemed content just to stand in front of Dairine in wonder: and the idea struck her as faintly ridiculous. “So you’re the one who wants to take earthquakes apart from underneath,” she said.
“You looked at my spell!” Mehrnaz said.
“I read the précis,” Dairine said. “Spot read the spell, and we discussed it in general terms. Some pretty complex stuff there—”
Mehrnaz’s eyes went wide: she followed Dairine’s glance down. Spot had spidered over to crouch down in front of Mehrnaz, and was looking at her with all his eyes. “This is him!”
“Yes, it is,” Dairine said, and she had to smile, because this was all going so differently from what she’d expected. “Look . . . why don’t we go find someplace to sit down, and you can start telling me more about it, okay?”
“Yes, absolutely yes!” And without another word Mehrnaz was heading off toward the far side of the ice cave in search of an empty conversation niche, while looking back over her shoulder every few feet with a big grin at Dairine.
I have a fan, she thought. This is truly weird.
We have a fan, Spot said, scurrying past her.
All Dairine could do was laugh and go after the two of them, because the excitement to which she’d said goodbye was rising again. Okay, she said to the Powers. I’m game. Even though You knew I was busy, You got me into this. So let’s see what happens . . .
5
San Francisco
KIT HAD NEVER BEEN to the City by the Bay, as much because of a lack of time and opportunity as of power. It was surprising how busy a wizard could get, between errantry and school and family business; you might think you had infinite power to go anywhere you liked—just build the transport spell and go—but then you found that it didn’t work out that way. Everything took energy, and sometimes what with one thing and another there wasn’t enough to spare.
Now, though, standing here on the high point Nita had chosen for their long jump from Grand Central, he was sorry he’d put it off this long. They had come out “high on a hill,” the kind of place where the song suggested you were supposed to leave your heart. The view of the ocean alone would have been enough to make the trip worthwhile for Kit. Way ahead of them, way past the Bay and the famous orangey bridge, the Pacific Ocean stretched out vast and quiet and glittering, dappled with shadows and patches of light left by the low clouds sliding over it. It was an ocean Kit could look at without feeling the slight chill up his spine that the sight of the Atlantic at home always gave him. Not that we didn’t do good things there, Kit thought. But there were a lot of bad things that could have happened . . . and some of them got way, way too close.
He sighed. This, though, was different. “I can see why people would want to live here,” he said, “even with the earthquakes.”
Next to him, Nita rubbed her arms a little. It was cold up here in the wind, colder than either of them had expected. “I don’t know about the earthquakes,” Nita said, looking northward at the San Francisco skyline. “I’d rather the Earth held still.”
“Yeah,” Kit said, “it’s probably preferable. So where is he exactly?”
She gestured with her chin. “Right down there,” she said. Houses climbed a good way up the hill where they stood, following the curves of the narrow streets from side to side as they angled steeply up the slope. It looked like an old, well-established neighborhood. And, from what Kit knew about the area, probably an expensive one. “High-rent district,” he said under his breath.
“It looks that way,” Nita said. “We’ll find out.” She glanced down at the transit circle glowing on the ground at their feet. “You ready? I’ll jump us down. There’s a park nearby with some ornamental plantings where we won’t be seen.”
“This is what happens when your dad’s a gardener, isn’t it?” Kit muttered. “We always wind up in the shrubs somewhere.”
Then he cursed himself silently. What is it? Kit thought. What’s going on with me that makes everything I say in the last couple few weeks come out sounding like it means something dirty?
Nita threw him an amused look. “Stop it,” she said.
“I know. I know. I just can’t seem to—”
“I don’t mean that!” she said. “Stop freaking out about it.” And she snickered. “Because it’s happening to me too.”
“Oh,” Kit said. “Okay . . .”
“So let’s jump now,” she said, “because the shrubs have nothing to fear from us. Right?”
“Right.”
She reached down toward the transit circle; a line of light ran up from it to the charm bracelet on her wrist. Nita wound her fingers around the bracelet, tugged.
A second later, they were indeed in the shrubbery. It was so thick and overarching a
patch of rhododendrons that there was no possibility anyone could have seen them. But there was a trampled-down patch in the middle. “I have a feeling wizards use this a lot,” Kit said.
“Or somebody does,” Nita said, and grinned at him.
It was beginning to occur to Kit that the changed circumstances that the two of them were dealing with were going to have the side effect of giving them a whole lot more things to joke about. And that can’t be bad . . .
They made their way cautiously out of the undergrowth, Nita pausing at the edge to look around before she waved Kit out behind her. “Don’t want anybody thinking we were doing what you’re afraid they might think we were doing,” she said, giving him a sidewise glance.
“No, of course not . . .”
Together they headed across a carefully groomed park with swings and slides and a graveled running path through it, and finally down into a street lined on both sides with two- or three-story houses painted in bright colors. “I swear I’ve seen this street on TV,” Kit said. “In some commercial. Or on a postcard somewhere.”
“It could be,” Nita said. “Or on some old TV show . . .”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “What’s the house number again?”
“Thirty-five.”
“There it is, then,” Kit said. It was across from where they stood; a white house with a slight overhang over its garage, a red-tiled roof, and a broad picture window looking out on the street.
They crossed over and went up the steps to the front door, and rang the doorbell. A few moments later it opened for them, and there was Penn, dressed in a floppy T-shirt and surfer jams and sandals, his hair rumpled, as if he’d been asleep. “Hey,” he said. “Dai. Come on in.”
They stepped into a long, quarry-tiled hall with various big heavy oak doors leading off it, white stuccoed walls, and pale oak beams crossing the ceiling at intervals: down at the end of the hall they could see into a bright north-facing room with a large table and some chairs in it, possibly a kitchen. “Is there anybody here we should know about?” Kit asked.