That had the sound of something that Tom or Carl might have said, and for some reason that annoyed Nita even more. “You know,” she said, “nobody with a brain would trust anything you say. You’re all about the lies. The smartest thing might be to do the opposite of everything you’re saying. And to assume that this is all some attempt to lead me off into the wrong direction.”
The Lone Power in Roshaun’s shape actually rolled Its eyes at Nita. This, too, was an expression she’d seen on the original, frequently when the royalty in question had a lollipop stick hanging out of his face. “The reverse psychology argument?” It said. “Truly, I thought better of you. You’re the one eager to throw it into my face that I’ve been given a chance to change. If you’re not willing to at least entertain the possibility that I might honestly be trying to be of assistance to you, then what’s been the point of this whole exercise? You’re the one keeping me stuck in the old role. And if you won’t avail yourself of available help, then I can’t be blamed. I did my best . . .”
It didn’t sound wistful; It didn’t sound smug. It sounded blasé. And something about that tone caught Nita’s attention. She wasn’t about to give up being alert for her old enemy’s trickery, but she did have to give It a chance.
“Okay,” she said, doing her best to sound as blasé as It had. “What have you got for me?”
They walked along again quietly for a few steps. Then, in an altered tone, as if suddenly dealing with an entirely different subject, the Lone One said, “What’s the old saying—that every wizard is the answer to a problem? And that every intervention, every wizardry, solves not only its own problem but others that you may never even know about?”
“‘All is done for each,’” Nita said. She hadn’t quite known what to make of that concept the first time that Tom mentioned it to her. Later, the more she’d thought about it, the more it had unsettled her, even as she came to understand that it was a simple expression of a quantum reality: that all events in the universe, at least theoretically, were interconnected on levels that beings functioning only in three or four or five dimensions were ill-equipped to grasp.
“Sheer laziness, that’s all it is,” said the being walking beside her. It was a growl of pure irritation. “The One may try to pretend that It simply hates wasted motion, but It’s not fooling anyone. All this finagling around with the structure of reality to have everybody possible be happy when they don’t even particularly deserve to be—”
Nita cleared her throat. “Less bitching, please?” she said.
The Power that invented death stopped in mid-stride and looked at Nita out of Roshaun’s eyes with the strangest expression of appreciation. “You have no idea,” it said, “how disappointing it is that you chose the side you did to work on. We could’ve been so good together.”
This struck Nita as some of the most backhanded flattery she’d ever received. At least until Penn came along . . .“I know this is a dream, but try to focus, okay?”
It heaved a sigh and started walking again. “Right. Problem solving. There probably ought to be some irony in the concept that while you’re being the solution to someone else’s problem, they’re being the solution to yours.”
“As long as the problems get solved,” Nita said, “I can cope with that.”
“Actually, no, you can’t. And that’s where I get my fun. So very often, humans who’re wizards and humans who aren’t get so intent on having the solution come out their way that they mess up what the other side is doing, and nobody gets what they want.” It smiled a lazy smile at her.
“So you’re telling me that’s something that might start happening . . .”
“Oh no. I’m telling you that it’s something that’s happening right now.”
Nita frowned. “And of course you’re not going to tell me exactly how this is happening.”
“Where would be the fun in that? For either of us.” It smiled more broadly. “Besides, you like to think of yourself as a smart person. I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”
“But ideally,” Nita said, “not before I screw it up.”
The Lone One bowed Its head to her to indicate she’d got that right.
Nita took a deep breath and let it out again. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks for that.”
The being walking beside her in Roshaun’s body threw Nita a rather testy look. “You know,” it said, “you’re a lot more fun when you’re less controlled.”
“It’s funny you should say that,” Nita said. “Because normally when we’re playing the game, you and I, and I lose my temper, things don’t always go real well for you.”
“Yes, well,” the Lone One said, “at least there’s someone to play the game with. Nonwizards don’t even know they’re playing, half the time. And wizards . . .” It shrugged. “Even they forget. They get into their day-to-day practice and the minutiae of problem solving—do a spell to move this piece here or that piece there—and they stop bothering to look up, across the board, and remember who they’re playing with.”
And that time it was Nita who stopped walking. She stood still, and looked down at the dusty, rocky ground; and for that moment didn’t need to glance up to see the butterscotch sky. Mars, she thought, on one level; how did we wind up here? But there was something else going on, something she hadn’t been meant to hear, or to understand, about the one who walked in the shape beside her. A long time ago . . . Nita thought. Who did you think wasn’t noticing you enough when you made things, did things? When did you start getting the idea that Somebody thought others were more important than you? And so you did something that would get everyone’s attention once and for all . . .
It was the most bizarre concept. Far away in the depths of time, a great Power, one of the very greatest, moving through the darkness and thinking thoughts that were eccentric and terrible and profound—yet also feeling so alone, sure that others thought It was lesser than they and wouldn’t include It in their games. And so It went away and invented a new game, one with unending pain and danger at its heart, a level of threat that no other Power had ever contemplated, and a terrible prize for the losers.
A chill ran down Nita’s spine. You can never let on that you suspect this, something whispered in her ear. Your anger, that It can cope with. That It courts. But if It catches you pitying It . . . then for you and everybody around you, it might be better if you’d all never been born. The only way to win this game is to pretend you don’t know what the other player’s thinking.
She looked up into Its eyes, then, and searched them. The expression was unconcerned. Nonchalant again. “Well,” Nita said, “how about this. I won’t forget you. Who looks across the board and tells you that to your face? Sure, it’s sensible to be scared of what you can do. Think what you’ve already done to me. But you know what? That’s no reason to stop playing. Maybe I’ll win the next round. Unless you keep playing, there’s no way to find out.”
For a long moment, the other’s face was unrevealing. “If you’re conceiving of this as some clever plan to get me to treat you more kindly—”
“Oh, come on, reverse psychology again?” Nita gave It a look of kindly scorn. “I thought that was off the table. I’m serious. Let’s play.”
The laughter It forced through Roshaun’s throat at that was appalling, meant to unnerve her. But it had an unexpected effect. Something struck Nita very abruptly, a jolt down her spine like half-expected lightning. In the laughter’s wake, reflections of a thousand possibilities teemed around her, rustling against one another like leaves in a high wind—as if she stood in a forest of mirroring probabilities. A dream within a dream . . . But in this second she surprisingly felt no fear of getting lost among the levels, within the reflections: she was right where she needed to be, utterly centered. “And listen,” Nita said. “That working together thing?”
It turned the most confused expression possible on her.
“Don’t give up on that,” Nita said. “It might happen yet.”
>
The Lone One gaped at her, and Its jaw dropped. “What?”
And just like that Nita was awake, gasping for breath and her heart pounding, her eyes wide open, staring at the window in the wall beyond the end of her bed, and the dawn light seeping through the Venetian blinds.
What did I just tell it? Nita thought in shock. What was that? Yet her feeling in the dream hadn’t been at all one of concern. What she’d said had struck her at the time as funny. It had almost been a joke.
But not entirely. It had also absolutely been the truth.
Nita sat up in bed, still staring at the far wall as if it held some clue to what was going on. Mars. Why does this keep coming back to Mars?
But that’s a minor issue. There’s something more important going on here. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and flopped back down against the pillows. “Bobo?”
On deck, boss.
“Good. That last one—boy, have I got some context for you. Let’s make these notes and get moving.”
13
Canberra
THEY WERE NERVOUS. They were both nervous. Maybe that was the source of the problem.
“Why’s it doing that, Mehrnaz? I thought we fixed this!”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure it was actually broken,” Mehrnaz said.
It was raining and humid outside the flat, and inside the air-conditioning wasn’t functioning as it should, and they were on edge. This was now the fourth of the five extra days the restructuring of the Invitational schedule had provided to the new semifinalists. Two of those days had been schooldays for Dairine, and she’d spent all her evening and homework time here. The other two had been weekend days, and she’d spent both of them here, too. She was tired, she was frayed, she was seriously time-zone-lagged, and (to her horror) she was getting bored with onion bhajis.
She was also getting sick of looking at Mehrnaz’s spell. The complexities of it were significant to begin with, as might be expected when you were trying to keep two very large pieces of the Earth—each one fragmented into hundreds or sometimes thousands of smaller pieces, subtly or chaotically balanced against each other—from grinding one another into powder and killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the unfortunate humans who lived on top of them. And as she tried to keep all the particulars straight, every now and then Dairine found herself falling into that sort of hazy state where one group of symbols or set of diagrams looked exactly like the one right next to it—interchangeable if not meaningless.
And no sooner had Dairine snapped herself out of one of these states than she would find that Mehrnaz had moved something away from a place in the spell where it was working perfectly well, and had been doing so since they started. And here we go again . . . “But you were the one who suggested that the main slipstrike routine needed to be subdivided. And so we subdivided it. You had a lovely reason for that, it stood up under scrutiny, we did the role-playing thing and tried to pick it apart the way the panel will, and we couldn’t do it. And now you want to go back to the way it was to begin with, which was frankly kind of vulnerable to failure if any of the other major working parts of the spell got deranged?”
“Yes,” Mehrnaz said, standing on the far side of the diagram with her hands on her hips. She was actually managing to look belligerent. I wonder if all the tea she’s been drinking is getting to her, Dairine thought. “It was starting to look . . . I don’t know . . . unnecessarily complicated. I think a more straightforward approach might be smarter.”
Dairine was tempted to throw her hands in the air and tell Mehrnaz what she really thought of her indecisiveness. This had been getting especially bad over the last day or so. At one point she had been trying to get Dairine make the changes herself, until Dairine suddenly noticed a very odd little smile that popped out briefly on Mehrnaz’s face when she was about to shift a spell’s subroutine into a less effective position. It was like something naughty at the back of Mehrnaz’s mind had peeked out at Dairine and smirked at her, amused that it was getting its way. At that point Dairine had started to dig her heels in and resist all these changes, some of them genuinely sweeping.
It makes no sense, she thought as she started to marshal her arguments against this newest change, or rather, rollback. The whole purpose of the initial round is to get the big changes dealt with in front of an audience that wants to help and isn’t interested in marking you down. And we’ve done all that. Who wants to make more work for themselves? Why would anyone want to tire themselves out and screw up all the good work they’ve done so far?
Dairine’s frustration level was increasing so much that she started thinking out loud. “It’s almost like what already works isn’t good enough, like you have to find the perfect solution and so merely good won’t do, almost like . . .” She fumbled for words, turned away.
Like you’re sabotaging yourself, said something in the back of her brain. Like you truly don’t want to go any further. Like you’re planning to have things come undone now.
And in a horrified split second it all laid itself out in front of Dairine, clear as crystal, like a chess problem written down, like a maze solved. “Something didn’t go right” was what Mehrnaz had said at the end of the first round. But that, as Nelaid had warned her, was code. What Mehrnaz really meant was, I won when I was supposed to have lost. And more to the point: I want to lose.
She has some reason to want to fail this, Dairine thought, not for the first time. It’s something to do with the family, I know it is. And thinking this, Dairine started to get angry. We like each other, yeah, but she doesn’t trust me enough to tell me. That started to make her angry too.
Well, there are a couple ways to handle this . . . But Dairine knew instinctively that one of them was not going to be confronting Mehrnaz directly. Not yet, anyway. I’ve got to let her play it out, and just refuse to let her screw it all up. Who knows, she might give in to the idea of winning if I wear her down. But after all this work I’ve done, I will not lie back and let her screw it up on purpose!
“Like what?” Mehrnaz said.
“Sorry,” Dairine said, “lost my train of thought. Let me see the fault analysis routine again. There was something on the power-feed segment of that routine that got me confused.”
But wow, this is going to be a long, long day or two. Remind me again why I signed up for this?
On the morning of the semifinals, Nita sat up in her bed, gasping again. It was dawn.
It took her several minutes to get control of her breathing. “I’m starting to hate this,” she said silently to Bobo. “I can’t remember when I had a stupid meaningless dream anymore. Like being in school and suddenly realizing I haven’t studied for a test.”
Or that strange one where your teeth fall out.
Nita shuddered. “Why’d you have to remind me? I was just forgetting about that one.”
Sorry . . .
“Never mind,” Nita said.
Have you got context for me?
“Yeah,” Nita said. She had to take an instant to swallow—her mouth was dry at the memory of her dream from last night.
The imagery had been arresting, because when the dream started, it had seemed like one of those ordinary inconsequential dreams. She’d been heading over to Kit’s house because his mom was going to be making that chicken dish she did so well. And she got to the house, and she went in the back door, and Kit was there in the kitchen, getting something out of his refrigerator. He turned to her . . .
And his eyes were empty. There was no one there, no one inside. It wasn’t as if the stare was blank or zombielike. It was just that Kit was missing somehow. None of the expressions that normally lived in his eyes were there.
She shivered. That was not something she ever wanted to see again. And what was worse, in the dream she could hear echoes of that earlier dream with Carmela, where Kit’s sister had begged her “not to let them get Kit.” In this morning’s dream, she remembered being overtaken by a wave of utmost dread, because she realize
d that it was too late, they had gotten Kit, and there was nothing she could do about it. The sheer horror of it had snapped her awake and upright in a flash of hot and cold adrenaline.
Anything else? Bobo asked.
Nita shook her head. “Not sure I want anything else, frankly. It’s made me feel a little sick to my stomach.”
Probably you should have some of that peppermint tea.
“Better let my insides settle first,” she said.
Nita got up and got dressed. What’s this all about? she thought as she put the kettle on. Is this something to do with The B Word? Is my subconscious terrified that Kit won’t be Kit anymore if he’s my boyfriend instead of just my friend? Because there was no avoiding the whispers and rumors and suggestions, at school, in books, on TV shows, that if you took that extra step too far you could “ruin it” and never ever get back again what you had before. Usually, before this, she’d have scoffed at the idea. She and Kit had been through way too much trouble together, and though there’d been misunderstandings and disagreements along the way, they’d always come out okay on the other side.
But those eyes, those empty eyes . . . The memory of them creeped Nita out. They made her feel like the solutions that had worked in the past might not be good enough for the present, let alone the future . . .
She eventually managed to push the image away. But she wasn’t going to be terribly happy with life until Kit came over later in the morning and she saw his eyes, and that he was inside them.
She’d just finished making herself some of the peppermint tea and was halfway down the mug when her dad came in, found himself a mug, and started going through the cupboards. Nita was paging through her manual and not paying much attention to him until it occurred to her that the rummaging was taking a lot longer than it usually did for him. It’s not like he doesn’t know where the coffee is. Or else—“Coffee or tea?” Nita said.