“Saving it for a special occasion,” Lissa said, and did a twirl.
The skirt had a glittery belt hanging down from it, a chain of dark ovals that turned out to be faceted gems. Nita realized she could feel a slight burn of wizardly power from it. “Have you got spells packed in there?” she said, admiringly.
“Saw what you did with your charm bracelet,” Lissa said. “That was such a great idea. I got hold of some black quartz crystals and encoded some wizardries into the crystal lattices, you’d be amazed what you can fit in there, there’s so much storage space . . . Oh, thanks Kit, don’t mind if I do!”
Nita burst out laughing as Lissa deftly relieved Kit of his soda while he was in the act of handing Nita hers. Kit looked briefly chagrined, but not particularly surprised. “Hey!”
“You’ve gotta move faster, Kit!” Lissa said, and giggled.
Kit regarded his empty hand with a half smile. “Looks like it,” he said, resigned, and headed back to the table.
They watched him go. “I hear that last session on the Moon was really something,” Nita said.
“Yeah. Ronan’s still crowing about it. And daring Kit to design something better. But poor Matt! The bitching’s not over yet . . .”
They stood there chatting about the doings of the rest of the gaming group that Ronan had put together from the team of wizards that had been investigating Mars and some of their friends and associates. Lissa had been one of the wizards who’d spent months doing image analysis on the planet, combing live imagery of Mars’s surface for any sign of artifacts of the ancient species who’d died out there millennia before. There’d been no keeping her out of the gaming group once Ronan started it—not that anyone would have wanted to: she had an eagle eye for detail and a clever aggressive streak that made her the person to have at your back when trouble started.
Lissa was in the middle of giving Nita a deliciously shocking play-by-play about one of the scandals of the day—competitors who’d been revising their project while it was on display, and almost got thrown out of the Invitational for it—when Nita suddenly caught sight of somebody waving at her from the river side of the room. It was Dairine. Nita waved back.
She lost sight of her sister in the crowd for a moment, but then Dairine came sliding along between the dancers. “It’s Dair,” Nita said to Lissa. “Looks like she’s got something on her mind . . .” Whatever it was, it didn’t look good; Nita could see as Dairine got closer that her frown was set in, hard.
“Sounds like a smart time to hit the dance floor,” Lissa said, and started off in that direction. “Later, Neets. Hi, Dairine!”
“Lissa,” Dairine said as they passed, and nothing more.
Uh oh, Nita thought, this is bad: she likes Lissa and she barely gave her the time of day . . . Never mind. Start somewhere neutral. “So how’d your mentee do?”
“She’s in.” But Dairine’s expression lightened only a little.
Nita hugged Dairine. “That’s so great! And even after a Cull like that.”
“Yeah, everybody’s talking about it. There’s hardly any point to the quarter-finals stage now. The numbers are so small, they might as well go straight to the semis.”
“Yeah. Tom said there’d be a final call on that in the manuals tomorrow. But where’d you vanish to? Thought I was finally going to get a chance to meet your mentee when she wasn’t onstage.”
Dairine scowled harder. “‘Vanish’ is absolutely the word. Mehrnaz transited out right after the announcement. Spot’s targeted her and he’s going after; when he finds her, he’ll hold her still and I’ll follow.”
Nita was confused. “But what happened?”
“Knowing her, something complicated,” Dairine said, and turned the word “complicated” into a curse. “I’m not sure yet . . . I have to find out more. But I’ve got my suspicions.” She shook her head. “Neets, Mehrnaz’s family . . . there’s some odd stuff going on with them. This isn’t the place to get into it. But my God, you should have seen her mother.”
“What? Why?”
Dairine was shaking her head, but her expression was grim. Nita’s heart clenched. “Wait. You’re not saying—she’s not being abused or anything—” She trailed off, horrified. Not even wizardry necessarily made you proof against that kind of thing.
But Dairine was still shaking her head. “What? Oh, no. Nothing like that. Or at least not from her mom, I don’t think. There’re just things going on there that . . .” Dairine rubbed her face. “I’ve got to find out if she needs help somehow, because her home life, seriously . . .”
Dairine spent the next few minutes describing to Nita what essentially sounded like a gilded cage, one alternately overcrowded and bleakly empty. Her first thought was that there might be cultural stuff going on that she didn’t understand. But Dairine sounded as if she didn’t think that side of things was entirely to blame—that other things were happening. “There hasn’t been time to find out what, though. At least now that she’s gone through, I have an excuse to find out. We’ll have a ton of work to do to get ready for the next round . . .”
And so will we, Nita thought. With a mentee who now has what he’s going to take as proof of his belief that he’s the best thing since sliced bread. “So what’re you going to do?”
“Tomorrow? I haven’t thought that far ahead. Tonight I want to find her and try to settle her down. Afterward, assuming she’s not already there, we’ll probably go home.”
“Home home or Mumbai home?”
“Mumbai,” Dairine said. “Her mom’s kind of a mother hen . . . don’t think she’s going to rest easy until she has her baby under lock and key again.”
Nita frowned. “You’d better not be speaking literally.”
Dairine sighed. “Oh, if Mehrnaz wanted to be out of there, no question, she could be out in a moment. But they’ve got her not wanting to be out of there. Whatever . . . I need more data before I can work out what she needs, and what to do.”
Nita sighed. “If you need to stay with her, I can let Daddy know—”
“No, it’s okay,” Dairine said. “She might just need a dose of normal, or what passes for her as normal, before anything else happens. She’s got a few days to relax before we have to start putting together her advanced presentation for the panel assessment stage. Not that she’ll have any trouble with that. She knows what she’s up to.”
“You like her, don’t you,” Nita said under her breath.
Dairine looked sharply at Nita, as if she expected to be made fun of. “Yeah,” she said. “So?”
“Don’t look at me like that!” Nita said. “I’m not on your case. For you to like her, she must be nice.”
“Yet also somehow completely different from me,” Dairine said, sounding both grouchy and amused.
Nita held still and considered that for a moment. “You might have a point,” she said. “Suits your personal trend, though. Sentient trees and giant centipedes and alien princes . . .” And Nita laughed. “Kings,” she said, absolutely in unison with Dairine’s voice as she corrected her. “I keep forgetting . . .”
“I don’t,” Dairine said.
“I know you don’t,” Nita said, very quietly. “But at the same time . . . It’s so unexpected. On the surface, anyway, and from what you’ve told me, you and he are unalike in every major way.”
Dairine just looked at her. “Opposites attract?” she said. “Meanwhile, thank you for not saying ‘were.’”
Nita shrugged. “It’s not if he’s a was. He’s an is . . . we know that for sure now. Just not where, or when.”
“Or possibly how . . .” Dairine suddenly gave Nita a curious look. “Neets, have you ever . . .” She trailed off.
“Ever what?”
“Tried to see him. Where he is.” And Dairine made a finger-wiggling gesture in front of her eyes to indicate that she was talking about Nita’s visionary talent.
Nita blinked. It had been difficult enough checking the manual, the first time, to disc
over for sure whether Roshaun was alive or dead. Her relief at finding that he was something else—though not even the manual seemed sure exactly what—had been huge. But she’d left further investigations strictly to Dairine, whose ideas of who had the right to be doing what were sometimes fierce. “I . . . no,” Nita said. “But Dair, this isn’t something I’ve had great results with. Or a lot of luck controlling. Mostly at the moment the ‘seeing gift’ spends its time running me around in circles and showing me things that make no sense. Then Tom tells me to try harder, and Bobo laughs at me.”
“Well, fine, I get it, you need more practice. But would you try?”
“Sure!” Nita said. “But I may not get anything for days, or weeks. Or till after you solve the problem yourself.” She snorted and drank some soda. “It’s a good thing I have a reputation for blowing things up . . . I can always fall back on that. Juanita the Destroyer of Stuff.”
Dairine stared at her. “Is he still calling you Juanita? Why?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m afraid to ask.” Nita rolled her eyes. “He might tell me.”
Dairine shook her head in amazement. “Seriously, he hasn’t looked at his manual to see what normal people call you?”
Nita snickered. “He’s kind of a selective reader.” Then she grinned. “And I’m pretty sure he’s never seen the page that people keep asking me to autograph.”
“That’s happening to you too, huh?”
“Yeah. Callahan’s Untoward Instigation seems to have a lot of fans. Or a lot of people want other people to think they know the spell’s inventor.”
“Or the person who shot up the Crossings when it was full of hostiles, and got away with it,” Dairine said. “You know, you should be proactive about this. Change specialties! Dump the visionary thing and go into weapons design.”
“Bad idea,” Nita said, with a grim smile. “Going to be dealing with somebody I’d be tempted to test the designs on . . .”
“If he gives you too much trouble,” Dairine said, “let me know.”
“No,” Nita said, “I think I’m up for this. Did you see his latest outfit, though?”
Dairine covered her eyes briefly with one hand. “Please. The top hat. I nearly died.”
Then her head came up suddenly. “Wait. He’s found her.”
“Where is she?”
“As I thought . . . Mumbai.”
“I’ll tell Dad you might be late.”
“Thanks.” And Dairine was off in the direction of the room’s roped-off gate hex without another word.
Nita stood there considering with some amusement (mostly at herself) that it was possible the Powers That Be actually knew what they were doing. She and Kit might be stuck with a would-be solar specialist when they thought Dairine ought to have had him . . . but Dairine had plainly been put together with someone who needed something she had. And she’ll go to the ends of the Earth, or a lot farther, to get it handled.
. . . Meanwhile. Nita finished her soda and realized she was still thirsty. But then it’s so hot in here with the dancing, and with this crowd. Already a lot bigger than it was, people from all over are coming in. She glanced around to search for Kit: she’d bring him one this time. But there was no sign of him. Maybe he went to get another one, too. Let’s see . . .
She wandered over to the nearest of the drinks tables to find out what was “on ice” there—part of the interest being that absolutely no ice was involved. The top of each table in that row had been equipped with a force field with foot-high walls, and wizardry was maintaining the temperature of everything inside the field at a steady four degrees above zero. The only exception was down at the end of the area shielded by the force field, where a plastic bin full of ice cubes was being maintained at ten below.
Inside the field, bottles of all shapes and sizes and colors were ranked up neatly. One of them didn’t seem to be representative of any of the local major brands; the bottle was dark green with a bright green label, and Nita’s first thought was that maybe it was beer . . . except that all the other drinks on this table were nonalcoholic.
Curious, she picked up the bottle. Behind the table, the wizard who was managing it—a shaven-skulled guy in his late teens, wearing designer sweats over a Black Widow T-shirt—said to her, “Need help with anything?”
Nita was trying to read the bottle’s back label, which was not making a lot of sense. “This is—what’s Cel-Ray?”
“Celery soda.” The wizard looked indignant at the incredulous expression on Nita’s face. “I’m not kidding!” he said. “It’s traditional.”
“Where’s it come from?”
“Brooklyn.”
Surprised, Nita shook her head. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Long Island and I’ve never heard of this.”
“Must’ve been a pretty sheltered life so far,” said the young wizard. He flicked a finger at the bottle and its cap vanished. “Go on, live a little.”
Cautiously, Nina drank some. It tasted like . . .
Celery. But fizzy.
Okay. I like celery . . .
“Thanks,” Nita said, glancing around once more to try to spot Kit. Well, no rush, I’ll walk around the room once and see.
So she strolled around the cavernous space in the early evening light, taking a moment by the floor-to-ceiling western windows to watch the Sun going down behind the Palisades, and doing some people watching. It was unusually pleasant to have no need to do anything in particular when surrounded by so many wizards. And others . . . Because there were all kinds of nonwizardly guests there too, family members and friends of competitors and judges and so forth, snacking and drinking and chatting and laughing.
And it all feels so normal. Yet Nita knew perfectly well that the sense of normalcy was an illusion. Outside—in the streets of the city on the near side of the river, in the suburbs across the river and beyond—that was what the world she’d grown up in took for normalcy: a world where magic was a myth, something that might be lovely if it were true, but had nothing to do with hard cold reality.
Nita looked up over the dance floor—where some of the dancers, in reaction to being packed too closely together, had used wizardry to harden the air ten feet up into a broad round platform, and were dancing on that—and thought, I think I like this reality better.
She started strolling again, making her way between the crowd watching the dancers and the people who were now boogying to something from the nineteen-seventies. For a brief moment, as the last gleam of sunlight shot through the room from across the river, Nita thought that through the crowd and off to the far side of the room she caught a glimpse of a magenta carapace. Sker’ret? Did he come in to have a look at the gates? She turned to start making her way in that direction, when from behind her someone grabbed her by the hand and pulled her onto the dance floor.
The next few moments were spent being confused and concentrating on not losing her balance as she was twirled around several times, but after the twirling stopped, Nita found that the person holding her by the hand was Penn. “You’re just in time! Lose the bottle, Juanita, I’ve got an opening on my dance card and you fit in it just right.”
Nita sighed at the typical overstated delivery. Okay, I may prefer this reality but even this one has parts I’m not wild about . . . “Penn, it’s been a long day, don’t get cute.”
“Why not? Your sister says I’m cute! Even Kit’s sister says I’m cute!”
Nita’s first impulse was to quiz him about when and where Dairine had said any such thing, but she discarded it instantly. Because he’s a legend in his own mind, and this is probably another part of it. Her next thought was Oh, Carmela’s here finally, maybe Kit’s with her. The thought after that was And as for you, our sisters think tree-shaped aliens are cute. In fact, our sisters think six-foot-long metallic centipedes are cute. And in their cases, they’re right! You, however . . .
She restrained herself. “It’s possible they might not mean that the way you think they do,” Nita said.
“Sorry, Penn, better cross me off.”
“Aww, you’ll break my heart!”
She shrugged, waggled her Cel-Ray bottle at him in what she hoped was an amiable if otherwise noncommittal manner, and did her best to vanish into the crowd. Fortunately that wasn’t too difficult. But when she came out the other side, to the gate hex’s roped-off section, she found that Sker’ret had disappeared. Maybe literally, she thought. He’s got a lot to keep his eyes on, all of them, no matter where he is. Never mind . . . Any sign of Kit?
She glanced around but couldn’t see him anywhere. On this side there were some chairs and cushioned benches, and kids were relaxing on them, drinking and chatting. Nita wandered along down through the seating area, pausing to take a swig of the celery soda. As she lowered the bottle, her gaze fell on one bench nearby that was empty except for the single guy sitting there, a very average-looking sort—jeans, sneakers, a striped sweater, dark blond hair, a bit stocky and round-faced and carrying some extra weight around the tummy. Don’t know if I’d wear horizontal stripes if I was him, she thought, but he seems to pull it off. He had one of those cheerful faces.
He caught the look and grinned at Nita. “Cousin,” he said in the Speech, “I greet thee.”
It wasn’t the usual salutation, and more to the point, the recension was very formal, very . . . old. It wasn’t Enactive: Nita had had a good while to get to grips with that version of the Speech while she was doing her first kernel studies. Wonder where this guy came in from, she thought: there were people from so many different places onsite that Nita had simply stopped guessing their origins.
“Well, I greet you too, cousin,” Nita said. “Taking it easy for a while? Can’t blame you.” She smiled and wiped her forehead. Even with wizardry helping out the air-conditioning, it was hot in here. “Need a drink of something?”
“Oh, thou needst not serve me, cuz!”
“No problem, I’ll be done with this in a moment and I was thinking about another.” Which was true enough: the slightly bitter taste of the Cel-Ray had caught her by surprise at first, but it grew on you. “They’ve got the usual sodas and fruit juice. If you’re of drinking age in your jurisdiction and you feel like indulging, there’s harder stuff . . .”