“‘Just human beings’?”
“You know what I mean.”
Looking bemused, Nita watched the argument roll on. “Maybe it’s true that the worst brings out the best in everybody . . .”
“Yeah. And now I’m beginning to think, also vice versa. You wouldn’t have seen any of this while the Pullulus situation was going on.”
Nita snickered. “Well, the universe was about to end! Kind of a different situation . . .”
“Not to judge by some of these guys . . . It’s like that saying about football.”
“What?”
“Something of Ronan’s. ‘Football isn’t a matter of life and death. It’s way more important than that.’”
“The winning thing.”
“The being-seen-to-be-winning thing . . .”
Nita shook her head again. “I always thought wizards didn’t do this kind of stuff.”
Kit shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the numbers? We haven’t worked with all that many other wizards really. Maybe we needed a bigger statistical sample.”
Nita’s expression was amused. “Maybe somebody thinks it’s important that we all find out that other wizards are just people.”
“Then maybe this should happen more than once every eleven years.”
She laughed. Right on the end of the laugh came a second chime, louder. “That’s it,” Kit said, as the room started to break out in applause. “Should we go find Penn?”
“Probably a good idea, if it’s going to get as crowded down here as Tom thinks.”
They made their way down the long concourse, mostly against the stream of wizards and other attendees who were gravitating toward the relaxation area (or in some cases, levitating toward it). “Did you see Dairine at all while you were going around?” Kit said.
“Once at a distance, but she was busy,” Nita said. “There were about a hundred people around her mentee. It was a real crush, she was answering questions or something . . . I let her be. She didn’t look like she needed help.”
Kit nodded. Penn’s project had attracted a fair amount of attention, too. But does that even mean anything? he wondered. “Do we have a plan now?” he said.
“For what to do if he gets culled?” Nita said. She exhaled in a way that suggested she was annoyed at herself. “Resist the urge to celebrate?”
“Yeah,” Kit said, “mostly.”
“And if he makes it past . . .”
It was Kit’s turn to shake his head. He’ll be insufferable, he thought, twice as bad as before. Three times.
“We’re going to have to spend a while thinking about how to handle that,” Nita said. “Because I’m wondering if in some ways we’ve been too hard on him.”
Kit blinked. He stopped and stared at her. “What?”
“You saw him,” Nita said. “Yeah, sure, Mr. I’m a Tough Guy, I Can Handle Anything? When somebody put a real sun underneath him, that changed real fast. What was that about?”
“Him forgetting to treat you like you were the wizardly version of arm candy, for one thing,” Kit said. “I remember that.”
Nita gave him a look that was both surprised and perplexed. Kit swallowed. Uh oh, did I sound too angry just then?
“Yeah,” Nita said, “okay. No argument. But the other thing still worries me. If he goes through to the next round, he’s going to be exposed to a lot more examination, a lot more pressure. We need to find out what was going on with that before one of the judges does, and fails him on it. Because if he passes this, he’ll be building himself up and up in his head until the next round . . .”
Kit sighed as the still-rotating globe of Penn’s spell diagram came into view. He was fairly sure he knew what she was thinking: And when he gets dropped out, which is likely, he’ll fall hard. This was as much about Nita not wanting the two of them to look bad as anything else.
At least I sure hope it is . . .
He didn’t have a chance to take that thought any further. Penn was heading toward them, grinning, pumping one fist in the air. Kit found himself half wishing that in the excitement Penn would knock that ridiculous top hat off himself.
“A hundred and eighty-three tokens!” Penn shouted at them. “Are we brilliant or what?”
“It’s not what we think we are—” Kit said.
“For certain values of ‘we,’” said Nita, sounding a bit dry. “The question’s going to be how brilliant the judges think we are. Or you, rather.”
“But you saw me out there! No one else came close to that level of class.”
“That’s so true,” Nita said in that innocent tone of voice that Kit had been hearing way too much lately. “Penn, have you had anything to eat all day?”
“Aww, that’s so nurturing of you!” Penn said. “Better watch out, can’t have you getting Kit nervous!”
Kit closed his eyes for a second. He doesn’t just have a gift for saying the wrong thing, he thought, he’s got a superpower. He opened his eyes and was surprised to see Penn still standing there and not scorched to a crisp.
Nita was regarding Penn the way someone might look at an incompletely housebroken puppy who miraculously hadn’t yet made a mess on the rug. “You have half an hour to get down to the far end and eat a sandwich and have a smoothie or something,” she said. “If you pass out from blood sugar issues in front of all these people when the results come out, you don’t want them thinking you fainted from shock.”
“Wow, of course, you’re absolutely right. As my lady commands,” Penn said, and bowed deeply to Nita, sweeping his hat off. He reset it at a jaunty angle and set off down the concourse, nodding regally at everyone he passed.
Kit and Nita watched him go. Then Nita looked up at Kit.
“The Powers That Be,” she said, “seriously owe me for this one.”
“Let me know when you figure out how to collect,” Kit said, and they headed after their mentee.
A little while thereafter it seemed to Nita as if all three hundred or so of the competitors were milling around down in the chill-out space, talking and laughing and looking relieved that it was all over—though there were also a lot of people standing around quietly with friends or relatives and looking tense. It was like the aftermath of any big test at school, the SATs or something similar; relief, anxiety, people talking about what they’d done well and more often what they thought they’d screwed up.
Nita spent a few moments glancing around to see where Penn had gone. Probably looking for someone else to compare token numbers with, she thought. At least he’d had the sandwich and the smoothie, and was coming down somewhat from the buzz of his final hour of presentation, as she had hoped. But he’d really gotten into the swing of his presentation toward the end. And if nothing else, he’ll never be afraid of hecklers again. If I thought we’d given him a hard time . . . Nita shook her head. There were people who’d picked up on the prescripted quality of Penn’s delivery and started asking him questions in exactly the same tone of voice. Which was when he completely dropped it and started sounding like a normal person. Didn’t think he had it in him . . .
It was then that she noticed that the sound level in the room had changed—all the conversations going increasingly muted. Irina was in the middle of the room.
She was standing in an empty space at the center of things, and quiet was spreading out around her through the crowd like a single ripple in a pond. That quiet spent a few moments becoming deeper, finally turning into a silence broken only by the faint rustle of a few people still moving around. Then they too were still.
“Well,” Irina said into the silence, “we’re ready. I want to thank everyone for having done a tremendous job. You know you all have—otherwise you wouldn’t have made it even this far. To those of you who won’t be going along with us any further in this journey, I want to thank you for committing yourselves to make the effort even though you had no certainty of the result, and were very likely to suffer pain if things didn’t go your way. You committed yourselves anyway—a
nd that is the heart of errantry.” She sounded somber, but not sad. “So: time to reveal the results.”
And almost before she’d finished speaking, the room started to fill with every possible kind of audio alert as those who had such things hooked up to their manuals heard them go off.
It was lower-key than Nita had expected. There was no big list posted, no dramatic calling of names. And (as she saw when people near them started comparing results in their manuals) there was no big deal made over the issue of rankings, or where anyone stood in the standings of those who had made it: only the bare fact of whether or not they’d gone through. All through the room, cries of excitement or moans of disappointment began filling the air at the same time as people’s manuals, or whatever instrumentalities they used to manage their wizardry, gave them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Here and there, groups of friends started to cluster, jumping up and down or commiserating with sad hugs.
Nita looked around to see if she could find Penn. From behind her, Kit leaned in to say very low by her ear, “Just look for the one making a big fuss.”
And sure enough, there, past a couple of small groups of hugging teenagers, was one guy, all by himself, leaping and whooping and waving his manual in the air. “We should go congratulate him,” Nita said.
“He should be congratulating you,” Kit said. “Care to bet on that happening?”
Nita laughed. “Wouldn’t waste my money,” she said. “Come on.”
As Penn spotted them coming toward him, he assumed an expression that was impossible to describe in any other way than smug. “Did I tell you?” he shouted. “Did I tell you how it was going to go?”
“You did,” Kit said, and bumped fists with him. “Now we start the heavy lifting.”
“Not right now,” Penn said. “Tonight we celebrate!” He held out his hand to Nita. “Well?”
She took it. “You did good,” she said.
He started to lift her hand. Nita gave him a look. He stopped, but he didn’t let it go. “Don’t get cute,” Nita said. “You’ll spoil it.”
Penn dropped her hand and grinned. “But I am cute,” he said. “By definition.”
“We’re using such different dictionaries,” Nita said, and turned away. “Come on . . . let’s go to the losers’ party.”
On the far side of the room, Dairine and Mehrnaz were standing quietly together, watching the crowd.
Dairine had been carefully controlling her own excitement. When the end-chime had rung and she’d turned to Mehrnaz to congratulate her on the latest of a final series of presentations, each one better than the last, she’d caught a look on Mehrnaz’s face that was more than relief. It was fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” Dairine had said. But Mehrnaz’s face hadn’t dropped that terrified look. “Whatever happens, you’ve done great. Seriously!”
“I think I could use some water,” Mehrnaz said, sounding a little faint.
They’d made their way down into the crowd and each of them had grabbed and quickly downed a whole bottle of water. “Even though it’s not hot in here, the air-conditioning makes it so dry . . .” Dairine said. “You forget how much sometimes.”
“I guess so,” Mehrnaz said, sounding flat and distracted. She was looking into the middle distance at nothing in particular.
“Mehrnaz,” Dairine said, and was moved to put an arm around her and hug her one-armed. “Come on. You got the job done. Now we just have to wait for the result, okay? Don’t act like the world’s ending. You did a brilliant job.”
“I did my best, anyway,” Mehrnaz said, sounding dubious.
“Which is all anyone’s expecting,” Dairine said.
That was when silence fell over the room. From where they were standing, their view of Irina wasn’t very good, but her voice carried perfectly. And then the audio alerts started going off.
Mehrnaz nearly jumped out of her skin when her little pink diary-manual began playing a music-box version of “Anitra’s Dance.” Her eyes went wide and round. She yanked the diary open.
And she stared at it and froze.
“What?” Dairine said, and looked over her shoulder. “What—Wait! You made it! You made it!”
Dairine would have started jumping up and down with delight, except that Mehrnaz was still standing there immobile. “Wow, look at the numbers,” she said, “way more people got culled than—since when do they cull more than half the participants? They hardly ever—”
But Mehrnaz still wasn’t moving. The face she finally turned to Dairine was stricken.
“You made it!” Dairine said. “Look, that was the worst Cull in the last ten Invitationals and you survived it!”
She trailed off as Mehrnaz closed her manual. “You’re upset?” Dairine said. “Why are you upset?”
Mehrnaz finally found her voice. “I didn’t—It didn’t go the way I wanted it to go.” She sounded wretched.
Dairine was flabbergasted. “You made it through the Cull, girl, how could this not be the way you wanted it to go?”
“It’s just that now things are going to get really difficult.”
“That’s kind of the whole idea,” Dairine said, with a sinking feeling in her gut. What have I missed here? What’s the matter?
“Yes, but not the way it’s going to get, Dairine. You don’t understand. You don’t get it at all.”
She turned and walked away with a terrible rigidity to her spine: away from the crowd and down toward the doors that led out of the room.
“Mehrnaz? Wait!” Dairine yelled.
She wasn’t waiting. She simply disappeared into thin air.
“Spot!”
He was there already, having caught her concern.
“Find her,” Dairine said, snatching him up. “We’ve got a problem.”
Together, they vanished.
11
New York: The Losers’ Party
IT TURNED OUT NOT to be a party for the losers, as it happened, but one in their honor: a general celebration of what had happened that day, and a place for those who’d attended the Invitational to relax and let off steam.
Everyone was welcome, which was a good thing, because everyone would certainly have tried to get in on account of where it was being held—the beautiful glass-walled upstairs atrium space that was the jewel of the convention center, with gorgeous views of the Hudson River and the cliffs of the Palisades beyond. Huge amounts of food and all kinds of drinks were laid out, and there were wizards DJ-ing a madly eclectic mix of music from Earth and other worlds entirely. But the main attraction was the atmosphere of sheer unbridled relief—hundreds of wizards and guests recovering from the day’s business in a large, very casual gathering in which even the unusually large number of losers couldn’t feel very lost.
Regardless of the competition’s results, none of the competitors would be leaving the Cull without a keepsake of their participation. Along with each detailed project-and-results report in the participants’ manuals came a token about the size of a quarter, rather like the markers that Nita and Kit used for the Mentors’ Picks event. These glowed green for those who had passed through and blue for those who hadn’t, and when held in the hand they silently communicated the name of the competitor’s project and any special notes or commendations from the judges, along with the participant’s final ranking at the Cull.
As she and Kit headed toward the refreshment tables, Nita saw a lot of these tokens changing hands: groups of people who had been positioned close to each other on the exhibition floor were trading them to remember each other by. Others were simply giving them away to friends or acquaintances. “I bet somebody’s going to start collecting these things,” she said to Kit.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Kit said. He was looking ahead of them to where Penn was more or less dancing his way through the crowd, singing in time with the music: “We are not the losers, we are the winners, all the babes love a winner—!”
He was still fist-pumping as he boogied, and being (as far
as Nita was concerned) obnoxiously happy. Babes, Nita thought, and kept her various other thoughts to herself as Penn found a dance partner to start hip-bumping with. “What are we going to do with him?”
“For the time being,” Kit said with a sigh, “let him do his thing. Too many other great people here to focus on him the whole time . . . we’ve got enough of that ahead of us.” He glanced around. “Look, they’ve got that sour lemon soda of Carmela’s.”
“You mean the one you’re always stealing?”
Kit grinned at her. “Yeah. Make it two?”
“Sounds good.”
He headed off toward the nearest drinks table, while Nita breathed out and concentrated on letting herself relax. The feeling of other people doing the same, letting go of the tension, was almost palpable. Everybody’s shoe dropped, but it didn’t drop too disastrously: no getting called up in front of the room and embarrassed, like something out of a bad reality show . . .
She went back to watching the crowd and paused as she thought she saw someone she recognized among the people who’d started dancing, though she couldn’t be sure. A girl, tall, dark curly hair . . . Wait. Lissa?? She waved. “Lissa!” she shouted over the escalating roar of laughter and shrieking and music.
No response: too many bodies between them, too much noise. “This is ridiculous,” Nita muttered, and reached for her phone, then had another idea. “Bobo?”
You rang?
“Beep Lissa’s manual for me, will you? Tell her I’m over here and I almost didn’t recognize her without the orange jumpsuit.”
I live to serve.
The sound kept scaling up around her as Nita saw Lissa’s head turn from side to side, her face wearing a broad grin. Nita waved again.
A few moments later Lissa came bouncing out of the crowd and jogged over to Nita. She looked fabulous in sparkly leggings, a very short silver skirt, and a very low-cut sparkly top, and they swapped a big hug.
“What a look! Where’ve you been hiding this stuff?”