A Wizard Alone

Investigations

Circuses — even just the thought of them — had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she had felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children — all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the processions of elephants parading along trunk-bytail, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns.

Yet it hadn’t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn’t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer… nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light — all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she’d begged her parents to take her home. Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.

That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent support couldn’t do anything about the nightmares that followed, nightmares full of leering clown faces and the musky smell of big cats. Finally the nightmares faded away and left Nita wondering what in the world had been the matter with her. Yet she never went to another circus. And even now, sometimes the mere sight of a spotlight aimed at an empty floor, with darkness lying silent beyond it, was enough to induce in her a feeling of tremendous foreboding that would darken her soul for hours.

Sometimes she tried to work out in more detail why she’d been so scared. She kept coming back to the clowns. To Nita, there was a fake quality about them, nothing genuinely humorous. It was strange to think that someone seriously thought that makeup could make you funny. But there was no question in Nita’s mind that makeup could make you scary. The stylized clown face, too generic, too cartoony: That really bothered her. The baggy, motley costume, disguising the real body shape so that it could have been a bare steel skeleton underneath instead of flesh and bone. The slapstick jokes, endlessly repeated, which were supposed to be amusing because of the repetition — all these left Nita cold. There was something mechanical about clowns, something automatic, a kind of robot humor; and it gave her the creeps.

It was doing so again, right now, because here in the darkness, followed around by one of those sinister spotlights, was a typical clown act — the clown riding around and around in circles on a ridiculously small bicycle, in ever decreasing circles. There was nothing funny about it to Nita. It was pitiful. Around and around and around, in jerky, wobbling movements, around and around went the clown. It had a painted black tear running down its face. The red-painted mouth was turned down. But the face under the white greasepaint mask was as immobile as a marble statue’s, expressionless, plastered in place. Only the eyes were alive. They shouted, I can’t get off! I can’t get off! And, just this once, the clown didn’t think it was funny, either.

The drumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building, came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.

The drumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more. “Stop it,” Nita yelled. “Stop it!

Can’t you see it’s killing him?”

“As often as possible,” growled the tiger. “And never often enough.”

The crowd roared louder. “Stop it!” Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too.

“Stop it!”

“STOP!”

She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.

Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn’t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn’t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn’t anyone in the house who’d been sleeping well for a while now.

She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she’d really thought about it. Dairine, when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn’t take a wizard to figure out that he’d been afraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again, not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. The reasons were the same, and just thinking of them made Nita want to cry all over again.

She lay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream. It’s just me, she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been, Since Mom

— And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita’s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing: “Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.”

Like I have a choice

, Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others’ pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one’s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.

But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she’d lie there and wait for dawn.

Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut. It’s just my pain in disguise

, she thought. Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality.

I wish this were over with. I wish life were normal again

… But she knew that the old kind of normal was never going to come back. Somehow she was just going to have to make a new one.

Nita turned over to try to go back to sleep, but it took a long while: From the shadows of dream, those eyes kept watching her…

The next day was Tuesday. Kit went through his early classes more or less mechanically. The problem of Tom’s “lost wizard” was on his mind. Tracking him down and identifying him wouldn’t be a problem — the manual would be able to localize him and point him out when Kit was close enough. But what then? he thought as the bell rang for fourth period. He picked up his backpack and walked out of his math class on his way to history. Do I just walk up to him, say, “Hi, there. I’m on errantry and I greet you. What’s the problem?” Is it better to just take a good look at him from a distance, maybe?

“Hey, KF, don’t say hi or anything!”

Kit glanced around and found Raoul Eschemeling walking along next to him. Or rather, he glanced over and then up, because Raoul went up a good ways. He was a skinny, pale blond guy, tall enough to be a basketball player — the kind of person for whom the word gangly originally could have been coined. Friendly and gregarious, Raoul was constantly inventing bizarre nicknames for the other kids in the advanced history class, a motley crew of crazies of various ages, all fast-tracked together into a single advanced unit. “KF” was short for “kit fox,” and this nickname had stuck longer than any of the others Raoul had hung on Kit at one point or another.

“Hey, Pirate,” Kit said. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.”

“Saw that. You almost walked into a locker there. You ready for Machiavelli’s quiz?”

“Oh, god, no,” Kit said as they turned the corner and headed down the corridor toward their classroom. “Machiavelli” was Mr. Mack, their history teacher, and, in his case at least, the nickname was justifiable: He had a twisty, calculating mind that made learning history from him a pleasure. “I forgot. Well, I did the reading. Maybe I’ll survive.”

Raoul looked at him closely. “You got stuff on your mind?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“She doing okay? I haven’t seen her around a lot lately.”

“Huh? Oh, Nita.” They went into the classroom together and took seats near the back wall. There was no assigned seating in Mack’s class, which meant there was always a rush for the rearmost seats, everybody’s desperate attempt to be somewhere that would make Machiavelli less likely to call on them… not that sitting in the back ever seemed to work. “She’s okay, pretty much.” Kit paused, watching the room fill up hurriedly — no surprise since Mack made the lives of latecomers a question-filled hell. “I mean, as okay as she can be under the circumstances.”

Raoul looked at Kit with interest. “So if you weren’t going all vague about her just now, then what’s on your mind?”

“Oh, just home stuff…”

The bell rang. Saved! Kit thought. With the bell came Machiavelli, moving fast, as always, five feet tall and balding, in a blue suit and wearing a red tie ornamented with the images of many tiny yellow rubber duckies. The suit never changed, but the tie changed every day, and in the few seconds of fascination it produced, Mr. Mack would always pick the unfortunate student who looked most off guard and start peppering him or her with questions. “Rodriguez,” he said, and Kit’s heart sank. “You ready for our little quiz today?”

Wizards do not lie; too much depends on the words they use seriously for them to play fast and loose with the less serious ones. “I don’t know, Mr. M., but I think I’m about to find out.”

Machiavelli grinned at him. Kit restrained the urge to groan out loud, and once again wished it wasn’t unethical for a wizard to use his powers to read the closed textbook in his backpack. All he could do now was pray for the bloodshed to be over with quickly.

Forty-five minutes later, Kit and the rest of the class walked out, mostly looking like they had been run over repeatedly by the same steamroller. “Remind me never to go to sub-Saharan Africa in the eighteen hundreds,” Raoul muttered. “After today, just seeing it would make me come down with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Kit theoretically could have gone to that time and place if he wanted to and was willing to pay the price, but right now he felt about the same as Raoul did. “Still, it could have been worse. At least we passed.”

“Yeah. Not sure I have any appetite left for lunch… I guess we can go look, though.”

Kit grinned, privately thinking that it would take a nuclear war to ruin Raoul's appetite. “Let me know how it was. I have to go home for lunch.”

“God, I wish I lived as close to school as you do,” Raoul said. “When I think of all the cafeteria food I wouldn’t have to eat…!”

“Go on, Pirate,” Kit said. “Suffer a little. I’ll see you later.”

He made his way back to his locker, chucked his backpack into it, locked it up again, and headed out the school’s back door, jogging across the parking lot, through the gate, and around the corner onto Conlon Road.

Ponch was bouncing around in the backyard, jumping almost to the top of the chain-link fence, as Kit came down the driveway. “Okay, okay, give me a minute,” Kit said. He pulled the screen door open and poked the lock with one finger. “Hey, Chubbo…”

The lock obligingly threw its bolt back for him. Kit patted the lock, opened the door, loped into the kitchen, very hastily threw together a ham sandwich on rye with some mustard, and ate it. For his mother, who was still asleep because she had been working night shifts at the hospital over the past week, he left a note scribbled on the pad on the refrigerator: “I had lunch. See you later.” He thought of adding the code phrase “Out on business now” to let his mama know that there was wizardly work afoot, but then he changed his mind. He’d have no more than his lunch period minus the time to eat the sandwich before he would have to be back at school again, anyway.

Kit cleaned up the crumbs from his sandwich and went out, pulling the door softly closed behind him so as not to wake his mama. “See you, big guy,” Kit said to the lock. “Keep her safe.”

I’m on it!

He went around the back, opened the gate softly, and closed it again, grabbing Ponch by the collar and roughing him up a little by way of saying hello. “And you weren’t even barking,” Kit said. “Good for you.”

She’s asleep

, Ponch said. I don’t want her to yell at me.

“Neither do I Good for you for thinking of it.”

Are we going out

?! Ponch began chasing his tail in delight.

“Just for a quick look at our guy. I want to see if he’s okay before I come barging in on him.

We’re going to have to be stealthy, though.”

Ponch finished his running around and sat down, his tail sweeping the sparse grass while Kit reached into his “pocket” and came out with the long chain of his transit spell, and another spell, more complex, that he had prepared earlier. There were several different ways for wizards to be invisible, and this one was probably the most comprehensive of them: Even if someone bumped up against Kit, he would feel nothing, and the spell would incline him to think he’d just stumbled somehow. Building the spell had required half an hour’s careful reading from the manual at a time of morning when Kit would rather still have been in bed, followed by fifteen or twenty minutes on his back, as exhausted as if he’d run around the school track about ten times. But now, as he shook the cloaking spell out onto the air in a cloudy web of woven Speech, he had to admire his handiwork.

The basic spellweb would last a good while, as long as he remembered to recharge it at intervals.

“Okay,” he said to Ponch. “You ready?”

Yeahyeahyeahyeah!

“Good. Stay close to me. This thing only has about a six-foot radius.” He draped the invisibility spell over his shoulder for a moment, stuck the chain of the transit spell into the belt of his parka, and reached down into the “pocket” for his wizard’s manual. “Now then,” he said. He flipped it open, and the pages riffled to the spot he’d bookmarked. He ran a finger down the listing of functions on that page. “Location and detection… cross-reference to personnel listings… Right.”

The locator spell blocked out on the page rearranged itself to include Darryl’s listing, and the listing itself pulsed to indicate that it was “in circuit” with the rest of the spell and ready to go.

“This is a temporal-spatial locator routine with sync to an existing transit nexus now balanced for two,” Kit said in the Speech. “Purpose: Locate and identify the wizard in the listing. Additional info: Linkage to stealth routine referenced on page…” He stopped and had to check his other bookmark, on the cloaking spell’s page, because the manual’s pagination was constantly changing, depending on Kit’s needs (and sometimes its own). “Three-eighty-nine. Ready?”

The whole spell pulsed bright on the page as he turned back to it. Slowly Kit started reading, making sure of his pronunciation, and that his and Ponch’s names were correctly entered. The usual waiting silence — of the universe leaning in around them to hear the Speech spoken and implement it — now started to build. Ponch sat there with his big eyes glinting and his tail thumping as the power of the spell built all around them. Kit felt a brief pang because of the absence of the other voice that usually would have been there, reading her half of the work, but there was no time for the feeling right now. Kit finished the spell, snapped the manual shut, and in the moment before the spell worked, flipped the cloaking routine over himself and Ponch.

The power washed up over and around them, blotting out the backyard. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing in a parking lot two towns away, looking at another school building.

It was considerably smaller than Kit’s junior high, though this place shared the same kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keeping Ponch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.

Kit wasn’t overly concerned — even if anyone had been out there, they wouldn’t have been able to see Ponch and him. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.

Two hundred meters

, Kit thought, could definitely include at least part of the school building. He walked toward it, looking for any sign of the characteristic aura that would surround the object of his search once he got within visual range. Beside him, Ponch paced along, looking at everything, his nose working.

From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up.

Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn’t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, found himself looking at office space, not classrooms. “Okay,” he said, “so we’ll go in. Don’t start barking at anything, whatever you do!”

Please

, Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn’t have been quite so focused during a wizardry, but lately, since Ponch had started actively finding things — like other universes — this had changed.

They went up to the doors together. They were all closed — no surprise, in this weather — and Kit was unwilling just to pull one of them open: Someone might be watching. Never mind. We can just walk through the glass

, he thought. But then, through the glass of the door, Kit saw the van driver coming back toward them. “Okay,” Kit said softly to Ponch, “he can let us in. Just step back and don’t let him bump into you. We’ll slip past before the door closes behind him.”

Fine.

The van driver, a small, slender man in a big parka, pushed the door open right in front of Kit’s nose, and then reached up to the closing mechanism to pull down the little toggle that would hold the door open. Convenient, Kit thought, and slipped through the door with Ponch close behind him.

In the main tile-and-terrazzo corridor of the school, a number of people were moving around; some of them were coming toward the doors — some students, Kit thought, heading for the van with a few teachers. Field trip? he wondered. Then Kit paused, for the locator spell said in his head, Proximity alert — subject of search within fifty meters. Forty meters—

That’s them

, Kit thought. “Ponch, come on,” Kit whispered. “Over here—” Together they moved off to one side of the hallway as the group approached. Kit started examining them for signs of that faint, glowing halo.

There were five kids in the group. Three of them were girls of different ages, one quite short and round, the other two taller and thinner; they went by Kit in silence, not speaking to each other, though one of them was smiling a placid smile. Two teachers followed close behind, then came the two boys and a third teacher.

One was a thin, small, blond guy, who went past with a very uneven gait. But Kit’s attention was on the boy behind him. Visible only to Kit and Ponch, the locator halo clung to him. He was, perhaps, eleven years old, an African American kid with a handsome, sharp little face. He was slender, and was dressed in jeans and a bright T-shirt and beat-up sneakers. Handsome his face was, but also expressionless, flat and as still as a mask, his eyes looking only at the ground. He held his body tilted slightly forward, and he went past Kit fast, breaking almost into a run as he headed through the doors out into the cold, gray day.

Kit turned and followed him back outside. The teachers helped the other kids into the van: Darryl was the last one in. One of the teachers was helping him with his seat belt. This took some moments. And while the teachers were sitting down, while the van driver came back to let the school door close again, Darryl began, very slowly and steadily, to bang his head against the window of the van.

Kit’s heart seized. Next to him, Ponch stood looking. The driver started up the van, and slowly drove away.

That was him

, Ponch said.

“That was him,” Kit said softly. But what’s the matter with him? Though he thought perhaps he had a clue. The manual would be able to confirm it… now that Kit knew what kinds of questions he needed to ask.

“Did you get a scent on him?” Kit said.

Yes. I can find him again, wherever he goes. Even when he’s not here, like a few moments ago

, Ponch added.

Kit gave his dog a look. “What? He was right in front of us.”

Some of him. Not all.

Ponch wasn’t given to making cryptic statements without reason: He was still developing the language skills to tell Kit what he was perceiving, and there were sometimes misunderstandings as a result. “Okay,” Kit said. “We’ll figure out what that means later. For the moment, at least we know what he looks like… and we can start making a plan to find a way to talk to him.”

If he can talk at all…

He glanced at the timekeeper inside the front cover of the manual. “Come on,” Kit said. “I have to get back to school.”

And you have to feed me.

Normally Kit would have laughed at this, yet another of Ponch’s stratagems to get an extra meal.

But the laughter had been knocked out of him by the unexpectedness of what he’d just seen. Since when do the Powers That Be dump an autistic kid into an Ordeal?

“Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. They went home.

After school Kit went straight to Tom and Carl’s, the discreet way, to tell him what he’d found.

“Physically, he’s there all right… mostly,” Kit said, sitting at the table with Tom again. “Or so Ponch says. I’m still working on what he meant by that conditional description he gave me. But Darryl’s problem… Why didn’t anything about it turn up in the manual before?”

“Need-to-know restrictions, possibly,” Tom said. “And often enough the manual’ll let you find out something for yourself, rather than just tell you about it. That approach can keep you from prejudging a situation.“ He paged through his own manual to Darryl’s entry. ”Certainly it confirms that he has an individualized type of autistic disorder. The manual says it’s a fairly recent development. He hasn’t been autistic from a very young age: It seems to have come on him suddenly, shortly after he turned eight.“

“So the Ordeal itself didn’t have anything to do with it?”

“I don’t know that for sure. It wouldn’t seem to be connected… but we could be wrong there. At any rate, because the manual doesn’t say anything further, it suggests that the Powers That Be don’t think we need any more detail on that particular facet of the situation. Or that what you discover during investigation may be more valuable than what They already know.”

“It doesn’t seem fair somehow,” Kit said after a moment, trying to find words for what was making him so uncomfortable. “You’d think he has enough problems. Why’s he been stuck in the middle of an Ordeal, on top of everything else?”

Tom shook his head. “If he’s been offered wizardry, that means that there’s some problem to which be is the solution. But he can’t merely have been offered wizardry; he also has to have been able to agree to the offer. He found the Wizard’s Oath, in some form or another, and he accepted it.

Now we have to find out how we can assist…without removing the basic challenge.”

Kit nodded. “It makes you wonder, though,” he said. “If he’s the answer, what’s the question?”

“I think I know what you mean,” Tom said. “He does seem an unlikely candidate. But even in what we laughably refer to as ‘normal’ life, all too often the unlikely people turn out to be the ones who have the answers; the objects you would have thrown away are the ones you find you can’t do without. ‘The stone rejected by the builder becomes the cornerstone.’” Tom got a wry look then. “It happens too often to be accidental. Is the universe trying to tell us something important about the way it works — that sometimes even what we call fate has an element of unpredictability?”

Kit nodded. “Or maybe the One’s just saying, ‘Don’t be so sure you know it all.’”

Tom stretched and leaned back in his chair. “Could be. There are people in our world who’ve made a tremendous difference but who would have died in another time. In this time, people every day are making choices of who should live and die on the basis of criteria like whether you’re going to be the ‘right’ sex, or whether your whole body is going to work perfectly. Who knows how we may damage ourselves if we insist too hard on what, this week, looks like perfection.”

He stopped, a somewhat rueful expression coming over his face. “Sorry,” Tom said. “But being a wizard makes philosophers out of most of us eventually. As long as that’s not all it makes of you, you’re okay… Anyway, now you have to plan how to approach him.” Tom chewed one lip briefly.

“You may have to go to his home, secretly. But maybe you’d have better luck at his school.”

“I’m not wild about sneaking around in his house,” Kit said. “School, yeah. I’d thought about that, too. But there are still too many ways to be noticed. I was considering another option.”

“Oh?”

“Ponch has been able to treat someone’s interior landscape like an exterior universe before,” Kit said. “He can go into Darryl’s head and take me with him… and maybe Darryl will find it easier to talk to me that way.”

Tom brooded over that for a moment. “My initial reaction,” he said, “is to say no. We’re uncertain enough about how the heck Ponch does what he does. Add that set of imponderables to whatever’s going on inside Darryl’s head…” He shook his head. “It starts getting uncomfortably complex.”

“We’re wizards,” Kit said. “We’re supposed to learn how to get comfortable with the uncomfortably complex.”

Tom gave Kit a look that would have seemed annoyed if there hadn’t been a resigned quality to it as well. “In theory,” he said, “of course, you’re right. But turning theory into practice without taking due care and attention can screw things up big-time.”

Kit sat quietly, knowing better than to argue his case too hard with a Senior: That was a sure way to make it seem like he had some kind of ulterior motive.

Tom looked off into the middle distance, pondering. “Yet here’s this very atypical Ordeal,” he said, “and we can’t just let the kid go on suffering unnecessarily for the sake of caution and correctness. Some more information gathering, at least, seems prudent. But I want you to be very, very cautious, and watch yourself at least as carefully as you’re watching him. Even normal Ordeals are subjective, and getting another entity’s subjectivity involved with one, even temporarily, brings considerable dangers with it. This Ordeal, where the candidate is autistic—“ He shook his head. ”It might be an attempt to resolve the autism, which is likely to be incredibly traumatic for Darryl whether it works or not…or it might simply be about some mode of wizardry we haven’t seen before, one that involves Darryl staying autistic. What looks like our idea of ‘normal’ function may not, in the One’s eyes, be the best function. Judgment calls in these cases can get dangerous.“

“If you don’t judge, though,” Kit said, “or at least decide to do something, nothing gets done!”

Tom sat still and looked out the window, where a cold wind was rattling some brown, unfallen beech leaves in the hedge beside his house. “There you’re right,” he said. “Not that that makes me any happier. But judgment calls are one of the other things we’re here for: The One has better things to do than micro-manage us.”

He looked back at Kit. “So go do what you can,” Tom said. “Let me know how it comes out. But I want to really emphasize that you need to stay in the observer’s role. This Ordeal is strange enough to get extremely dangerous, especially if you stray out of your appropriate role.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Tom’s expression got slightly less severe. “I’ve heard that one before,“ he said. ”From myself, among many others. But, particularly, I want you to watch yourself when you’re inside his head.

Talking to Darryl is a good idea… but getting too synced to his worldview may make that more difficult, not less. Talking is something you do to other people; if he has trouble with that concept, you could get in trouble, too. And when you’re inside someone else’s head and using wizardry, no matter how careful you are, there’s always the danger of rewriting his name in the Speech. Do that in such a way that Darryl buys into the rewrite, and you take the risk of excising something that makes the difference between him passing his Ordeal and him never coming out of it. Walk real softly, Kit.“ ”We will.“

Kit left Tom’s by use of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He spent a while there Web surfing, printing out what he’d found, and then located a few books and checked them out. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.

“You know much about it?”

“Enough to get by.” She drank some coffee. “There are a lot of different kinds, and we’re still feeling our way around to the causes. Once they thought autism was caused by being raised wrong, by having parents who were cold or abusive. That theory got thrown out a long time ago. But there are still a lot of possible causes, and some of them seem to include each other. Some autism may be too little of one chemical or another in the brain. Or it may be caused by an enzyme that’s missing, so that certain chemicals build up in the nervous system and damage it, or make it behave erratically.

It may be caused by something wrong with the immune system, or rogue antibodies that attack brain and neural tissue, or even a virus, or pollution, or vitamin A deficiency…” She raised one hand in a

“who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “There’re a hundred answers, maybe all of them right sometimes… Is this for school?”

“No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”

His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, honey, that’s terrible!

His parents must be heartbroken. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”

“I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”

“What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d vanished. So how is he missing?”

“It was just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have been giving them a lot more, if only to keep them from worrying. “When the wizardry first comes to you, it doesn’t come all at once. You get a test first: your Ordeal. If you pass, you’re a wizard. If you don’t…”

Immediately, the look on his mother’s face suggested to him that he might have misstepped.

“You die” his mother said.

“Not always,” Kit said. “Sometimes you just lose the power that was given you to take the test with.” His mama was looking at him rather narrowly now, and Kit realized that she would immediately detect any attempt to soften this. “But it’s true that some kids don’t come back,” Kit said. “Some disappearances are failed Ordeals. Maybe a few percent.”

His mother sat, quietly digesting that, and had another drink of her coffee. “So this Ordeal,” she said. “He’s having some kind of problem with it?”

“He’s been in the middle of it for a long time,” Kit said. “He may need help. And I can’t help thinking the autism has something to do with it.” He sighed. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but I don’t know anything about what’s going on in his head yet. And he may not be able to tell me. I think I’m going to have to get in there and take a look myself.”

“In his head” His mother looked alarmed. “Kit, my love, I don’t claim to understand the details of what you’re doing… but wouldn’t that be a violation of his privacy?”

“Maybe,” Kit said. “But couldn’t you make a case that CPR is, too? Still, you do it.”

“To save a life, yes.”

“That’s what this might be,” Kit said. “Ordeals are crucial by definition, Mama. I had some help on mine. Maybe now I get to pay those favors forward.”

“So you get inside his head how, exactly?” his mama said. “Is this what Carmela keeps describing as ‘magic telepathy’?”

Kit shook his head. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “I’m still working out how to describe it.

Ponch sees it as making a new world to go to…or finding that world ready-made. Once you make it, or find it, you go there.”

“Ponch sees it…” His mother shook her head, sloshed the coffee around in her cup, drank some, and made a face: It was going cold.

“We’ll go there and look around,” Kit said. “We’ll see what his world looks like to him.

Assuming we can get in all right. If that doesn’t work… I’ll have to think of something else. But at least this is a place to start.”

His mother put the cup down and pushed it away. “If you do actually get to talk to him,” she said, looking thoughtful, “there’s possibly something you should keep in mind. Autistic people have trouble, sometimes, predicting what other human beings’ minds are going to do. It’s a skill they have to develop with practice, whereas we take it almost completely for granted, that prediction inside: ‘If I do this, then she’ll do that,’ and so on. So you have to be prepared for the things you say to really upset him, more than would seem reasonable. He may even have trouble believing in you.“

Kit looked at her, wondering what she meant. “It’s not that he’d think he was hallucinating you, exactly,” his mama said. “This isn’t that kind of perceptual problem. But some autistic people have trouble conceiving of anything existing outside the workings of their own minds. The concept of ‘the other’ seems to take a long time forming. That’s part of why so many of them can’t make or keep eye contact with other people. Yet for the same reason, a lot of them seem not to know what fear is.”

“Weird,” Kit said.

“Not as such,” said his mother. “Different, yes. You may not scare him, but you may upset him… so be ready for that.”

“Okay,” Kit said.

His mother sat back and looked sad. “The problem is that there are probably as many kinds of autism as there are people who have it,” she said. “And not enough of them come back from that side of things to tell us how what’s happened to them looks or feels.” She shook her head. “Some of the few who have say that the world just got too overwhelming to be borne. They felt like they were surrounded by sounds that were too intense, sights they couldn’t bear to see. So they had to withdraw inside themselves to get away, or even hurt themselves over and over again as a way to blot out the pain outside. It’s the only way they can control it. Others tell about feeling so sealed away from the world and the things and people in it that they hurt themselves just to be able to feel something. You get kids who are autistic from age two, and others who’re perfectly normal until suddenly they turn ten or twelve and something just goes wrong…and they turn inward and don’t come out again for years. If ever.” Kit’s mama looked haunted.

Kit nodded slowly. “I didn’t know it was this complicated.”

“It is.”

“You know anything that would be good for me to read?”

“There are lots of books,” his mother said. “Some of the ones in the hospital library are going to be too technical for you.” She looked over Kit’s shoulder at the books spread out on the floor. “But some won’t be, and they’re more recent than these. Let me see what I can bring you.”

“Great. One thing, though. I really need to take tomorrow off to work on this. Can you call school and get me off?”

She scowled at him. “You don’t have a test or anything tomorrow?”

“Huh? No.”

“I’m not going to make a habit of this…”

“’m not asking you to, Mama! But it’s going to take more than just lunch hour to make a start on this, and I don’t want to have to run off all of a sudden in the middle of something that’s going to make a difference.”

His mother sat thinking. “All right,” she said. “I’ll take care of it. You can have a stomach bug or something.”

“No, Mama! Don’t lie to them. Just tell them I need a personal day.”

She gave him a slightly approving look. “Okay.”

“Thanks, Mama. You’re the best.” He got up and kissed her, and took her coffee cup. “You want some more?”

“Yes.” His mother leaned back on the sofa. “Two sugars. And then I want you to explain to me why I can hear the DVD player and the remote yelling at each other in Japanese in the middle of the night.”

Kit shut his eyes briefly in horror, and went to get the coffee.