Dairine’s initial urge was to take offense . . . but she caught Mehrnaz looking at her with a pleading expression that said Don’t, please don’t, I’m so sorry . . . ! So Dairine took another drink of her tea, and when Dori did too—as even for a wizard it was a challenge to talk while drinking—Dairine said, “You must be so proud! To be invited to one of these is a compliment from the Powers. To Mehrnaz and to you.”
“It is, isn’t it? Though naturally we only agreed to let her go along to this event with the understanding that she’d be very careful not to get in trouble somehow . . .”
The very slight emphasis on the word trouble was the giveway. It was amazing how once you’d kicked yourself into this mode of thinking, you started seeing what someone truly meant underneath the verbal output, as if there were subtitles. Trouble? No. Danger. From being alone in an unfamiliar place. Probably because of being a girl. Cultural stuff too. Ethnic? Religious? Hard to tell—
“—and though we have the greatest confidence in her—”
No you don’t. In fact, for some reason, you’ve got none whatsoever. What’s that about?
“—and of course she’s been properly brought up and knows exactly how to take care of herself—”
When she’s locked up safe in the house where nothing bad can happen.
“—we wouldn’t want her to get in any difficulty—”
Because you’re absolutely sure that she will, somehow.
“—or make any problems of any kind for anybody—”
Because you have absolutely no idea what she might get up to, and you’re terrified to let her out of your sight.
“—and make sure she has all the help she needs when she’s away in a strange place!”
God, poor Mehrnaz, I bet you have to put up with this all day when you’re by yourself with her. You must be about ready to chew through the walls!
At this point Dori stopped for breath long enough for Mehrnaz, who was fidgeting where she sat, to manage to say, “Mama, seriously, everything’s going to be fine! There’s nothing whatsoever to worry about.”
“Well, let’s be reasonable, dear—”
Dairine held her face very still, as in her experience any time a conversation with a parent included the phrase “let’s be reasonable,” it usually indicated they were about to stop being that way.
“—it is after all an unfamiliar city, and there are all kinds of people running about with their own agendas, and if you’re someplace where you can’t find help quickly if you need it, or a way to leave when you’re with people you don’t know . . .”
“But Dori, you do know from the orientation pack that the whole Invitational venue has manual visioning access,” Dairine said, copying her own mom’s inimitable calm-yourself-down tone of voice and phrasing. It was very reassuring, and very grown-up, and implied that anyone who was wasting time being concerned about this was silly—but it did it in the kindest sort of way. “The system will help you have a look at Mehrnaz anytime you like.” At least, any time when she’s told the system that she doesn’t mind being surveilled. “And it’s not like it’s exactly a private space. They’re holding the spell presentation and evaluation event in the big convention center over by the river. The Javits Center, it’s called.”
Dori looked astonished. Which tells me that you didn’t read the orientation pack very closely. Or at all. Either you couldn’t be bothered, or for some reason you didn’t think she was going to go. “But my goodness,” Dori said, “how can they possibly do that? Surely there’d be a dreadful commotion if nonwizards could walk right in there and see wizardry happening!”
Dairine laughed. “Well, half the people wouldn’t notice. You know how people are when they see something happening that they can’t believe! Half the time they forget all about it. But no nonwizards are going to get into the secure areas. They’re being spell-shielded so that people who have no business there don’t want to go in, and don’t notice anything happening. The organizing committee could have staged this part of the Invitational someplace out of the way, but New York’s convenient for everybody because of the worldgating complex, and of course it’s historically fascinating.” Dairine had another sip of tea. “They like to do this stage in a shared space, since it’s not dangerous. Last time they did the Cull—the initial deselection—in the Sydney Opera House, and nobody batted an eye. They’re in Australia again this time for the semifinals. Canberra.” She shrugged as if it was all no big deal.
Dori sat there blinking for a moment and put two more sugars in her tea than she’d been planning to. “Well, that’s good to hear,” Dori said. “Though still, even in a protected place like that—there will, after all, still be a lot of unfamiliar wizards—”
“Seniors,” Dairine said with a put-upon expression, “and Advisories all over the place, peering over our shoulders all the time . . .”
“—and some of those wizards will be boys—”
Mehrnaz suddenly became fascinated by the plate of biscuits to her right on the table, so that her face was turned away from her mama’s while she considered which one to pick next. Dairine, though, was positioned to see her mentee’s panicked expression through Spot’s eyes, as he was sitting on Mehrnaz’s far side.
Uh huh, Dairine thought. There we go. “Boys?” she said, incredulous, and laughed. “Dori, both of us are going to be way too busy with this to be thinking about boys. We’ve got work to do.”
“Well, yes, but it’s always when we’re thinking about other matters that things happen, isn’t it?”
Dori looked away while saying this, and Dairine became absolutely sure she was thinking, Because it did with me.
“That is not going to be allowed to occur,” Dairine said. “Boys have their place in life, but not for the next two weeks.”
“Ah. And you don’t have a boyfriend either, then?”
Dairine looked Dori straight in the eye, and said in the Speech, “I have absolutely no interest in any guy on this planet.”
Mehrnaz’s mother’s eyes widened at the sudden change of language. Then she looked very relieved. “Oh well, that’s all right then,” she said.
“And I am not going to let her get in any trouble,” Dairine said, once more in the Speech. “I promise you that.”
“Well of course you’re not, my dear, would the Powers have set you two up otherwise? I’m so glad we understand each other.” And the subtext then quieted down enough for that to seem to be the only thing Dori was saying. Except possibly, I really am relieved. “Do you girls want some more tea?”
“Not right now, Mama,” said Mehrnaz. “We’ll ring for Lakshmi if we need anything.”
“All right then,” her mother said, and smiled fondly at both of them. “I’m keeping you from being busy, aren’t I? I’ll get out of your way, then; I had some shopping planned for this morning anyway. You two have fun now. It was so interesting to meet you, Dairine!”
“You too,” Dairine said. You have no idea.
Dairine shot Mehrnaz a sideways look and didn’t say a thing more until the door closed behind her mentee’s mother. Then she spluttered with laughter. “‘Have fun!’ What’s she think we’re going to be doing, going halfway around the planet to play with our Barbie dolls?”
Mehrnaz giggled too. “Truly, I don’t mean to mock her. She’s a wonderful mother.” Dairine held her face still: she was having some of her own thoughts about that. Perhaps Mehrnaz suspected as much; her tone went embarrassed again. “Though I am sorry she started to give you the Inquisition there. Half the time she treats me like I’m about six. The rest of it, she gives me grief about not acting grown-up enough. And when I do, she scolds me.”
Dairine sighed and shook her head. “We all get that, wizards or not.”
“But, mostly she’s good. Our family is, well, kind of complicated. In some ways, she’s sort of the eye of the hurricane.” But then Mehrnaz smiled. “And as far as wizardry goes, no one, no one can do what she does with food. People talk
about magic in the kitchen—well, she is the magic. Give her half a chance and she’ll cook for you and stuff you until you have no choice but to teleport afterward, because the only other way you can move is to roll.”
Dairine’s stomach chose that moment to growl. “Oh God,” she said, “it keeps doing this to me. My body clock is so messed up.”
Mehrnaz grabbed the remote. “I’ll send for something,” she said. “These little biscuity things are never enough, they just make you hungrier . . .”
Her stomach growled again, and Dairine couldn’t do anything but laugh. “You know, when I was coming up the street the other day, I smelled—someone was frying onions . . .”
“You went by the bhaji shop,” Mehrnaz said with a grin. “Oh, you wait. I’ll send for a bag. Two bags.”
Dairine grinned and bounced up off the couch to go look at the spell diagram again. Mehrnaz joined her. “Look how this came down,” Dairine said. “Not a line out of place. We are going to make spell casting the hot thing of this Invitational. Mehrnaz, I’m telling you, half the people in the quarter-finals are going to be doing it.”
“It’ll be nice to watch them,” Mehrnaz said, her voice very soft.
Dairine gave her a stern look. “I can hear you thinking, and it’s not going to go that way. You are not going to be a spectator. You are going to be in the middle of it, competing.”
Mehrnaz turned, confused. “Don’t tell me you do psychotropic spelling too! Mind reading? That’s so smooth! I never even felt you doing that!”
“It wasn’t mind reading,” Dairine said. “It was prediction.” She thought of Nelaid again, and smiled.
“I thought that was your sister,” Mehrnaz said, sounding dubious.
“She’s a visionary,” Dairine said. “The prediction stuff comes and goes: she’s still working on it. Kind of a sore point with her, so when you finally meet her, I wouldn’t dwell on it. It’s been driving her nuts lately.”
“Is she no good at it?” said Mehrnaz.
“I get a feeling sometimes she’s too good,” Dairine said, “and it’s starting to freak her out. But never mind that right now. Go on, pick a place to stand and let’s hear you present again . . .”
In her dream Nita was standing in the Cavern of Writings on Mars, and the place was afire with wizardry . . . and this was bad.
It had often bothered Nita that when she’d first come there in company with Carmela and S’reee, there hadn’t been time to appreciate the place as the work of art that it was. The vanished people they were seeking had taken this amazing space, the remains of a single giant bubble of gas buried deep in molten lava, and smoothed the jet-black walls of it to a near-perfect truncated sphere. Then they had written those walls full of history and prophecy and knowledge, deep-graven in ancient angular characters whose meaning had fallen out of the body of wizardly knowledge under the sheer weight of time—of past ages during which no living species had seen or read those characters or even heard of the species that had written them there.
When they’d first found it, the wizardry in the place had been worn down to nearly nothing, almost extinguished by the passage of millennia during which it was never repowered. The words engraved into the walls had been silent, drowned in shadow. But now every character, every diagram carved into those great curved walls burned hot and bright like a light bulb’s wire filament, and the place was flushed with their light, a fierce emerald green.
Nita stood in the middle of the huge green-metal design let into the floor of the Chamber—a calligraphic image of an ancient Martian scorpion-guardian, all wrought about with the curves and tangles of a massive data storage spell. But it was dead now, the last of its embedded power long gone out of it.
She was standing there wondering why this made her feel concerned when someone fled past her toward the walls: ran so closely by her that Nita’s hair lifted in the breeze of the person’s passing. “What—” Nita started to say, but then she recognized the tall slim shape, the long dark braid whipping to one side as the runner slammed up against the far wall, ramming into it with arms outspread as if trying to catch something. “’Mela? ’Mela! What’s the matter?”
“Gotta find the answer and then get out of here before they find me!” Carmela gasped, feeling her way along the wall. “All the answers are here, all the secrets, I have to find the right one. But I have to do it now or they’ll find me, Neets. Gotta get out of here first!”
“Who’ll find you? What’s the matter?”
“One of them’s like Kit. Oh God, he looked at me, you can’t let them look at you, Neets, they’ll kill you inside. They’ll pull the heart right out of you; you can’t look them in the eyes! Don’t look in their eyes, whatever you do!”
Nita’s hair stood up on the back of her neck. Carmela was the one who was always gaily unafraid, who set her jaw and went in with a grin when things looked bad. But now she was rushing down the length of that wall, skidding to a stop, clutching at the characters and boxy phrases written there, then pushing herself hurriedly away when she didn’t find what she wanted. “’Mela, who? Whose eyes? What’s it about! Slow down, hold still, just tell me!”
Carmela was nothing but a cartoon cutout now, black against the sharp, fierce brilliance of the character she obscured. She twisted away from Nita and kept working her way down that wall in panicky haste, shaking her head, gasping with fear. “Can’t slow down, can’t hold still, they’ll get you and your eyes’ll fill up with lies like theirs. Don’t let them get Kit, Neets, please don’t let them get him, he won’t be the same afterward! Either they’ll kill him and you’ll lose him that way or he’ll live but he won’t be Kit anymore and that’ll be even worse—”
Nita’s desperation was growing in tandem with Carmela’s. “’Mela, stop for a minute, you have to tell me what this is about! Who’ll get you, what’s going on?”
But Carmela wouldn’t stop. “The answer’s here somewhere. If we can just find it—” And then she stopped, staring at the wall. “Wait! Wait, this is it—”
“What is?”
“There!” Carmela swung around, for the first time sounding less terrified. She pointed past Nita, pointed at the floor.
Nita swung around. Behind her the green-metal design embedded in the floor was coming to life, glowing softly at first, then burning brighter and brighter. It went beyond a glow to a blaze, the details of the design lost now in the overall fierce burning of it. The light paled out of green toward white and started to spread, running across the floor at them like lava. It splashed harmlessly past them ankle-high, and ran up against the walls of the Cavern behind them, extinguishing the fire of the carvings above it as if it had sucked all the light and power out of them.
And then the light sank into the floor, through it, left them standing on a surface clear as glass while the burning dropped away below them, the color of it starting to shift. Not white any more but faintly yellow-white, and then more golden. And then Nita and Carmela were standing together over the surface of the Sun as Nita had been yesterday in the practice universe.
“This isn’t practice,” Carmela said. “This happens first, and it’s the real thing. You’ll find her, and she’ll find him, and it’s going to look as if everything’s all right, because everyone’s going to be so happy! But right after that they’re coming for me, Neets, and when they do they’ll come for Kit too. You cannot let them have him, you hear me? You can’t.” And Carmela came to Nita and grabbed her by her upper arms and actually shook her. Her fingers bit into Nita’s biceps so hard they hurt. “Do whatever you have to do to keep him safe. I don’t care if they get me instead.”
“Nobody’s going to get Kit, and nobody’s going to get you!” Nita said, grabbing Carmela in turn. She was no longer scared but angry, simply furious at anything that could turn Carmela into this alternately scared and desperate thing. “I’m not going to let them, whoever they are! Stay with me, we’ll fight them!”
And then Carmela dropped her hands a
nd looked sadly at Nita.
“Too late,” she said. “They’re here.”
Under their feet the Sun had begun swarming with dark sunspots, like a mass of black bees, buzzing, clotting over the light, shutting it out. With horrible speed the Sun went almost totally black, the only light able to escape from it shooting upward between the sunspot-clumps like rays of Sun through closed curtains. It can’t do this, Nita thought in growing panic, if the Sun goes out again we won’t be able to get it to relight, not like the last time—
All around them the Cavern of Writings filled with a frightening low rushing noise like something vast drawing its last breath, a breath of fire. In the growing rush of sound an awful, tremulous darkness fell. And the thought came to Nita in horror: No, it can’t do that, the Sun’s too small to end that way, it can’t go n—
Everything went violently and terminally white, an unbearable onslaught of light like a scream. Except the scream was Carmela’s . . .
And then Nita was sitting up in bed and gasping as if there was no air left in the world.
Everything was normal. Outside the venetian blinds of her bedroom window, the light of dawn was growing. Everything was perfectly quiet, perfectly peaceful.
Except for her. Nita wrapped her arms around herself and hung on for dear life, and concentrated on breathing.
This, she thought, completely sucks.
An hour or so later, Nita was in the kitchen at the stove, making pancakes to try to take her mind off things. It wasn’t working.
Carmela, she thought as she poured a few more circles of batter into the frying pan. The way she was in that dream . . . it was all wrong. But something else was off about it, too. Something about the emotional context struck Nita as overstated. It’s like she was acting. Why would she do that?
. . . Though of course this was a dream-Carmela, so why would anything she did necessarily be strange? Nita scowled as the pancakes started to cook on one side, and she shook the pan to jar them loose. They kept sticking, which was an irritation, because when they stuck they burned within seconds, and at this rate there wouldn’t be enough for both her and Kit when he got here.