“Working hard, maybe?”
Dairine sighed. “Some. Not so much, really, my mentee’s smart. But I keep getting the feeling she’s keeping something under wraps that’s going to pop up at a bad moment.” She pushed herself upright, leaned against the back of the dining room chair with her head lolling back.
Nita rummaged in another cupboard for the coffee. “Family stuff?”
“I don’t know,” Dairine said, her eyes closed. “Haven’t seen any of them, it’s hard to tell. But I get a feeling it’s complicated.” She sighed. “I’m not used to family being complicated . . .”
“Maybe we’re too nuclear,” Nita said, prying the lid off the coffee jar.
Dairine made a slight puff of air that Nita recognized as a substitute for a laugh. “Yeah, but fusion, not fission,” she murmured.
Nita snickered. “How much of this do I use?” she said, squinting at the coffee jar.
“Sort of a big teaspoon . . .”
Nita measured it out, poured steaming water. “Lots of milk,” said the muffled voice from the table.
Nita took care of that, then put the mug down by Dairine’s head and sat down herself with her tea. “What’s on the agenda today?” Dairine said, reviving enough to sit up and slurp at her coffee.
“Penn’s coming over this afternoon,” Nita said. “He’s been doing more work on his spell, and we’re going to look it over at this end of things.”
“In the house?” Dairine said, sounding dubious. “There’s not a lot of room.”
“No,” Nita said, with a slight smile, “not in the house.”
Dairine looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “I know that look,” she said. “What’re you plotting?”
“Well . . .” Nita turned her tea mug around a couple times on the table. “You know, from back when we were working with Mom, I still have access to the aschetic spaces.”
Dairine’s eyes widened. “The practice universes? No, I didn’t know.”
Nita nodded. “Had a look at the manual to learn more about Penn, and you know . . . he doesn’t seem to have gotten out much. I mean, the High Road isn’t to everybody’s taste. There’s no law that says it has to be. But for someone who acts like he’s such a big deal—”
“Or thinks he has to act that way?”
“Whichever.” Nita shrugged. “Either way, it’s a pain in the butt. Anyhow, he doesn’t seem to have any circle or group of wizards he works with, not even as casual partners; he doesn’t get involved in joint wizardries. And the stuff he has done has all been on Earth. Not that that’s a hanging offense either.” She sighed. “It’s just that—Well, with most of the wizards you and I know, the minute they found out there were other planets with life on them, and that you could get at them—they were out there like a shot. At least once or twice, if only to see what it was like! But Penn?” She shook her head. “Not once, as far as I can tell.”
“Maybe he went on his Ordeal,” Dairine said, “and ran into something he didn’t like.”
“Maybe. But as usual, that’s sealed data. No way to find out about it unless he decides to say something, and I won’t be asking.” Nita took a sip of her tea. “Anyway, I’m going to open up a doorway into the Playroom. At least that’ll be a little interesting for him, if not exactly off-planet. And we can work without being interrupted. Also, it’ll give him a chance to put his spell through a dry run in a place where he can’t hurt anything.”
“Smart.”
“I hope so. I got a segment of the Playroom’s space booked for exclusive use late this afternoon—that’s the soonest he can get over, which is fine, we’re not done with school till around then. I’m going to stealth-shield that whole area way in the back where the sassafras trees are, and anchor the portal there.”
“Yeah, I know the spot.”
Nita looked at Dairine with slight concern. “I just didn’t want you to come back from something and find the energy signature back there had gone peculiar, and then get panicky.” At the thought that somehow, someone had come back without warning, someone you’ve been missing . . .
“Like I’ve got the energy to get panicky about anything right now . . .” Dairine said, gulping down some more coffee.
“It’s when you’re bleary like this that I start worrying what you might do if you did get panicky,” Nita said. “Make a note, though, and let Spot know about it, okay? And if you’re not busy, stop in, if you want to. I wouldn’t mind you looking him over . . . seeing what you think.”
“Okay.” Dairine guzzled some more of her coffee.
Nita shook her head. “You’re really getting into that stuff, aren’t you?”
“Yup. Tom’s full of good advice,” Dairine said.
“Oh, is that who got you started. No wonder the jar looked familiar.”
Dairine nodded, got up, and headed out with the mug. “You have school this afternoon?” Nita called after her.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ve got a couple of classes starting at three. I’ll see you there, then . . .”
No answer; Dairine merely went stomping back up the stairs.
Nita sighed, reached for a dish towel and picked up the first of the dishes from the rack while starting to review the Playroom portal spell in her mind. “Bobo,” she said, “text function to Kit’s manual?”
Open now. Go . . .
In the upstairs bathroom, Kit was just out of the shower, drying himself off and listening to absolutely nothing.
The house was blessedly quiet. His pop had left for work half an hour ago; his mama was working nights in ICU and wouldn’t be home for another half-hour or so. Carmela was asleep, as she too had gone over to afternoon classes at school and on weekdays steadfastly refused to greet the day before ten. Only time that worldgate in her closet gets any downtime . . . Kit thought.
He sat down on the toilet lid and sighed, then scrubbed his hands through his hair and tried to stroke it into some kind of shape that wouldn’t make him look like an idiot later in the day. That last haircut . . . Kit thought. Not sure it’s what I wanted. It keeps sticking up in all the wrong ways.
Yet at the same time, he remembered turning up in Antarctica the other day after sort of fluffing it up the way the barber had told him to, with some hair gunk, and when he finally tracked her down in that crowd and headed for her, Nita had looked at it and . . . Kit swallowed. He could still see that look. It made his stomach flip.
Is it insane to be still remembering something like that—how she looked at me two days ago?
Nothing’s normal anymore.
And then he started laughing at himself, there in the quiet. Like my life’s been any kind of normal since I picked up that weird book in the secondhand store a few years ago . . . But he had to admit, as the laughter ran out, that it was still bizarre how just one word could change everything.
Tell the truth, though, Kit thought, I dared her into saying it. He’d known that the word had been hanging in the air between them unspoken for a long time. And also to tell the truth, I was incredibly chicken about it.
I thought if it just got said . . . then the tension would go away. Because the tension between them had been getting tougher and tougher to bear, for Kit at least. It wasn’t as if people at school hadn’t been noticing for a long time that there was something going on with them. There were kids who were sure it was sex, and (when they hadn’t been able to dig up any evidence to confirm this) who then split further into two camps: those who were sure Kit and Nita were doing something secret and kinky (because why would they hide even being girlfriend and boyfriend otherwise?) and those who were certain that one or the other of them was a virgin who was using the other one as cover.
Gossip, oh God the gossip, you get so sick of it, Kit thought. How is this any of their business? But all around them was the pressure to be something that fit into a category everyone could understand—crushing, dating, messing around, platonic, religiously celibate, whatever. And the endless star
es and the whispers and the knowing laughter, they got so old. The urge to stand in the middle of the hall and shout Yes, yes we are doing something together: we save the world! We’ve done it a bunch of times now, and I think we’re getting the hang of it!—it got strong sometimes, when Kit was feeling particularly tired or goofy. At such times he considered that it was probably a good thing that at least one of the school shrinks knew about wizards.
And he knew Nita felt the pressure as well. Unfairly, it seemed worse for her. The kids who thought she wasn’t hooking up with Kit thought she was frigid. The ones who did think she was hooking up with him thought she was an easy lay—though so far no one had worked up enough courage to say so in Kit’s hearing, which was just as well for them.
Problem is, he thought, sometimes I want to step in between her and these jerks but I can’t tell for sure when she wants that. Or even if. Certainly they’d saved each other from trouble often enough in the past. And he laughed again at the bland cover-all term “trouble.” Chased around Ireland by stone drow-trolls? Check. Stuck in the middle of a wizards’ civil war on Mars? Check. Nearly nuked by Ultimate Evil at the far edge of the visible universe? Been there, done that, got his ’n’ hers T-shirts . . . In fact it was getting to be sort of a joke that he and Nita should work out a schedule to make sure that each of them got an equal opportunity to be the hero, or alternately to be the person who got to feel idiotic about needing to be saved. But everything’s changing, Kit thought. Things we might have done six months ago and never thought twice about aren’t always the right things to do now.
And reactions to what we do aren’t the same either. Kit remembered how after he and Nita had been at Penn’s the other day, on the way back to his house he’d found himself reflectively rubbing the hand she’d held. His first thought on realizing what he was doing had been Oh stop it, you’re pathetic! But it had been kind of shocking at the time how automatically she’d reached for him after her annoyance at Penn grabbing her hand and getting all smoochy-smoochy with it. Kit had gone quite warm, blushing, and then, feeling humiliated, had thought, Oh please don’t let her see me doing that. Don’t let him see me doing that! And as it happened, no one had seen . . . which had been a relief.
Sometimes, though, seeing wasn’t the issue. You still knew. And more, you suspected that others knew. In particular, Kit kept catching Dairine looking at him . . . just looking in an unsettling way. When he’d mentioned Dairine’s expression in passing, Nita had laughed it off. “She gets protective of me, you know how she is sometimes . . .” and Kit had very nearly said, Yeah, and can I have some of that action please? But he’d kept quiet because he didn’t know if that was too much or how Nita would take it, and this was all too new and strange now that they were actually talking about it . . .
Except we aren’t actually talking about it much. Mostly we’re still dodging it.
And things are going to keep getting worse for a while. Because in a couple of weeks I’ve got to go back to where I didn’t think it could get any worse . . .
It was an odd thing to contemplate, and uncomfortable. Kit had always loved going up to the Moon and sitting there and enjoying the view—either homeward toward Earth, or (on earlier visits to the “dark side”) out into the farther universe. Turning his back on the world, occasionally turning his attention outward, as far outward as possible, had been a pleasant thing—challenging without being scary.
Now, though . . . “Scary” did creep in. It was difficult for Kit at the moment, when he was on the side where Earth didn’t show, not to start reliving the events that (locally at least) had ended the Pullulus War. The death of that terrible darkness, the safety of the world, of all the worlds, had been worth it. But there had been awful losses among the wizards and others who’d held the final line. And one loss in particular had left Kit in serious pain.
He looked over at the empty braided-rag rug by the bed, where no one lay upside down with all his feet in the air, snoring. Your dog, he kept telling himself, is not dead. He is in fact the next thing to a god. But it was one thing knowing Ponch to be immortal, invulnerable, and now present in every dog who lived. It was another thing entirely to have to stand by helplessly watching a terrible battle of powers and spirits that Ponch might not have survived . . . and then, Ponch having beyond belief won that battle, it was a worse thing still to have to watch him go. The friend who had been with Kit since he was little, almost before he could remember . . . Now that space was empty. And all the other dogs in existence, nice as they were, couldn’t fill it the way Ponch had done.
Kit remembered how, sometimes when you were small, it was possible to get scared over what later turned out to be nothing. You’d hear your parents fighting, or you’d have done something stupid and gotten yelled at particularly hard, and you’d go to bed so terrified that your stomach tied itself in knots, while you twisted and turned and were sure that the world was over and everything was ruined, never to be right again. But even when Kit was scared and upset and feeling horribly alone because of something like that, Ponch had always been there with his nose in Kit’s ear, or licking his face, or looking at him with big worried eyes that said, Don’t be sad; if you have to be, then I have to be sad too! And all the time Kit was growing up, when Kit was happy, then Ponch was ready to play; and when Kit was unhappy Ponch always knew somehow, and would be with him, just there.
And then Ponch was gone, and for the first time Kit had a referent for the way Nita felt when her Mom died. Except he couldn’t say that to anybody, because he could imagine how it’d be taken when it came out. You’re comparing losing your dog to somebody’s mom dying? How can you even think of doing that? How stupid are you? Yet the feelings had to be alike, in some ways—the horrible twist of the gut and the heart as again and again you came up against the absence of that unwavering companionship and acceptance that had always been within call: the love that you knew could be depended on for better or worse, that you knew would never abandon you. Suddenly it was missing, but the habit of it wasn’t. You kept reaching for it and finding nothing, and over and over feeling the sickening impact of the wrongness of that, like a missed step on the stairway of the heart.
Kit leaned his head back against the medicine cabinet above the toilet and stared at the shower tiles, unfocused. Yeah, I know it’s all right. I know he’s all right. Impossibly all right! . . . But it’s not the same as having him here. And the Moon’s gonna bring all this up again, hard.
He sat there a while longer. Then Kit sighed, got up, knotted the towel around him after about the third try, and and reached for his toothbrush. One thing at a time, he thought. If I take my time with this, maybe I can get myself to a place where I won’t freak out when I’m up on the far side of the Moon. That’ll be good enough.
Meanwhile . . . Penn. What do we do about Penn? Because if he tries that stunt with Neets again, she’s gonna increase entropy all over his butt. Don’t think the organizers’ll like it if we kill our mentee . . .
Kit started considering ways to prevent that from happening as he headed out of the bathroom and down the hall to his room. No sooner had he gotten in there, though, than he caught sight of something glowing softly and rhythmically on his desk: the page-edges of his manual, pulsing with bluish light. Oh. Something from Neets—
He went to the desk, flipped the manual open, and riffled through the pages to the messaging section. One part of it he’d set aside for the Invitational—which had been a smart move, as all the texts and support material tended to pile up pretty quickly—and at the top of the first page, he found a text from Nita: Got the Playroom booking sorted out, it said. 5:30 p.m., my backyard.
“Got that,” Kit said, and watched as the words appeared on the page beneath Nita’s text. “5:30 it is.”
Send? the manual asked a few lines down.
“Send it,” Kit said. The page grayed itself out while the Sending herald displayed, then darkened down again, listing Kit’s text as sent.
He
walked over to his dresser, pulled a drawer open, and started rummaging through it for underwear. “So go to audio,” he said to the manual, “and let me take another run at the judging structure for the eighth-finals. How many judges? . . .”
When Penn popped out of nowhere later that afternoon into the shielded space at the end of the backyard, he looked surprised to find himself apparently in the center of a small forest, through which not even the low Sun was managing to shine. “Um,” he said, turning around in a circle and taking in the nonview, “we having some kind of field trip?”
Nita smiled, amused, as even without wizardly shielding it was almost impossible to see the neighbors’ houses through the undergrowth or past the taller trees. If you hauled a lawn chair out here in nice weather you could feel astonishingly distant from suburbia and the general troubles of the world. But with the shielding up, what little view was visible past the trees was blurred and uncertain—the shield-spell’s way of verifying that it was up and working. “You could say that,” Nita said. “How’s your day been so far?”
“Uh, okay. Thanks. Where’s Kit?”
It’s going to be so much fun breaking you of this, Nita thought. Possibly too much fun. “He’ll be along in a few.”
“And am I supposed to be laying the spell out here?” Penn stared at the leaf-littered ground. “Kind of, uh, untidy. And cramped.”
“The trees don’t do active art installations back here anymore,” Nita said, “but even so, you’re right, there’s not a lot of space to stretch. I’ve got something roomier set up.”
“Oh,” Penn said, “okay.” He folded his arms and leaned against a tree. “Before he gets here—can I ask you a question?”
Nita reached into the otherspace pocket that always hung near her while she was working, and pulled out her manual. “Sure,” she said. Especially since it’s probably going to be more words than you’ve said to me since we met.
“Why does Kit let you do so much stuff?”
Let me? Nita thought. This just gets more bizzare all the time . . .