A Wizard Alone

Conversations

Nita looked up out of darkness at the giant robot that was staring down at her.

At the time this seemed like the most natural thing in the world. There she stood, barefoot, in her long, pink-striped nightshirt, and there stood the robot, glittering in the single spotlight that shone down on the dark floor. The gleam of the downfalling light on the metal of the robot’s skin was nearly blinding. What kind of metal is that, I wonder? Nita thought, for the skin sheened a number of colors, from a hot blue through magenta to a greenish yellow, depending on how the robot moved.

Right now it was shifting idly from foot to foot, as if it was waiting for something to happen.

Titanium

, Nita thought, recalling some jewelry she’d seen one of her classmates wearing to school recently; it had had the same hot-colored sheen as the robot’s skin.

Or was it palladium? I forget

. “Hello?” Nita called up to the robot.

There was no reply. But the robot did hold still, then, and incline its head a little to look down in Nita’s general direction. There was no telling whether it was actually looking at her: Where eyes normally would have been, there was a horizontal slit, which probably had sensors behind it. The robot strongly resembled the kind of giant robot that kept turning up on Saturday morning television, and Nita found herself wondering whether this one might suddenly start breaking apart into jet fighters and tanks and other such paraphernalia. But for the moment, it just stood there.

Nita started to get a strange, repetitive, ticktock feeling in the back of her head — an emotion or thought recurring, again and again, as regular and inevitable as clockwork, but recurring at a distance, in a muffled kind of way. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, either — it was a kind of thought or emotion that you would suffer from, rather than experience with any particular pleasure. Fortunately, it wasn’t so acute that Nita had to pay much attention to it, though she felt vaguely sorry for the robot, if this weary feeling did, indeed, belong to it.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” Nita called, more loudly this time. There was no question of speaking to the robot more conversationally: Its head was at least fifty feet above the ground. This is like having a conversation with a flagpole

, Nita thought.

The robot took a clunky step toward her, then another, then suddenly hunkered down in front of her with a great groan and screech of complaining, over-stressed metal. Nita thought at first that it might fall over, it looked so unsteady, and it wobbled and leaned from left to right to left again. It was intent on her, though again Nita couldn’t be sure how she knew that: The metal face was blank, and it had no way to change its expression even if one had been there.

“So what is it?” Nita said. “Give me a clue!”

It loomed over her, possibly considering what to say. As machine intelligences went, the robot already seemed pretty reticent: Nita’s limited experience with mechanical life-forms suggested that they were big talkers, but this one didn’t seem to be so inclined. It just leaned over her, the size of a small apartment building, and a tongue-tied one at that.

“Oh, wait a minute, now I know what it is,” Nita said. “You want to talk to my sister, right? I’m really sorry, but she’s asleep right now.”

No response from the shining form. “Asleep?” Nita said. “Temporarily nonfunctional? Offline?”

The robot suddenly began emitting what Nita thought at first were more metal-stress sounds, but after she got past how deafening they were, she found she could catch the occasional word through them, and the words were in the Speech. Oh good, Nita thought, for there were quite a few alien species scattered throughout the Local Group of galaxies who knew the Speech, using it as a convenient common tongue.

“[Grind, groan, screech] difficulty [screech-moan-crash] entropy [moan, moan, clunk-crash] communications,” the robot said. And then said nothing more, but just wobbled back and forth amid a whine of gyros, trying to keep its balance.

Nita was getting confused. Why can’t I understand it? “Uh, okay,” she said in the Speech, “I think I got a little of that. Something’s interfering with your communications. What exactly did you want to communicate about? Do you have some other kind of problem that needs to be solved?”

The robot just crouched there, wobbling, for several moments. Then it said, “Solve [scream-ofmetal, grind, ratchet] problem [moan, moan, much higher moan, crash] cyclic-insoluble [grind, grind] time [extremely long-duration whirly-noisemaker sound, crash, clunk] no solution [screeeeeeech, crash crash crash] trap [boom].”

Nita revised her original opinion about having conversations with flagpoles. This was more like a dialogue with a garbage truck, that being the only other thing in her immediate experience that sounded anything like this. “I’m really sorry,” she said, “but I’m having a lot of trouble understanding you. It’s my fault, probably. Can you tell me more clearly how I can help you? Just what is it that you need?”

The huge shape crouched there for a few more moments, then, wobbling, it got up. For a long, long moment it stood over her, seeming to gaze down at her from that great height… but Nita still couldn’t be sure. Then the robot turned, and slowly and clumsily went clanking off into the darkness, out of the spotlight where it and Nita had been standing.

Nita broke out in a sudden sweat, feeling that she’d missed something important. “Look,” she called after it hurriedly, feeling incredibly inadequate and useless, “I really am sorry I can’t help you! If you come back later, when my sister’s awake, she should be able to figure out what it is you need. Please, come back later!”

But it was gone. — and Nita found herself staring at the dark ceiling of her bedroom. The sun wasn’t yet up outside, and she was still sweating, and feeling stupid, and wondering what on Earth to make of the experience she’d just had.

At least it wasn’t a nightmare, like that other one

, she thought.

But on second thought, considering how spectacularly dumb she felt right now, Nita wasn’t so sure…

There was no chance of getting back to sleep, so Nita showered and got dressed for school, ate a cereal bowl’s worth of breakfast that she didn’t really feel like eating, and then dawdled over a cup of tea until it was time to wake her dad. This was an addition to Nita’s morning routine that she heartily wished she didn’t have to deal with, but her father really needed her to do it. Recently he’d been turning off his alarm clock and going back to sleep without even being aware of having done so.

She knocked at the bedroom door. “Daddy?”

No answer.

“Daddy… it’s six-thirty.”

After a few seconds came the sound Nita had been bracing herself for, the sound she didn’t think her dad knew he made: a low, miserable moan, which spoke entirely too clearly of how he felt, deep down inside, all the time now. But this was the only time of day that sound got out, before he was completely awake. Nita controlled herself as strictly as she could, absolutely intent on not making things any worse for him by sounding miserable herself.

“Do you want me to make some coffee?” Nita said.

“Uh,” her dad said. “Yes, sweetheart. Thanks.”

Nita went down to the kitchen and did that. She had mixed feelings about making her dad’s coffee: That had always been what her mother did, first thing. Nita also wasn’t sure if she was making it strong enough — her mom had always joked that her dad didn’t want any coffee that didn’t actually start to dissolve the cup. Nita, being new at this, was still experimenting with slight changes to the package directions, a little more each morning, and secretly dreading the day when she would get it right, and it would most forcibly remind her dad of who had not made it.

She started the coffee machine and went quietly back up to her room. By then her dad was already in the shower. Nita sat down at her desk, picked up her book bag from beside it, and shoved in the textbooks she’d be needing today. She had a chemistry test that afternoon, so she picked up the relevant book from beside her bed and started reading.

It was hard to concentrate, even in the early morning stillness. In fact, it was hard to concentrate most times, but this was something that Nita had been pushing her way through by dint of sheer stubbornness. The rest of her life might be going to pieces, but at least her grades were still okay, and she was going to keep them that way. What Nita missed, though, was the sheer effortless enjoyment she had always gotten from science before. This stuff was harder than the science she’d loved as a kid. That by itself isn’t so much of a problem. I’m learning it. Though I’m not used to having to work at it

But the shadow of pain that hung over everything was also interfering… and about that, there wasn’t anything she could do.

“Sweetie?”

Nita looked up. Her dad was standing in her bedroom doorway, looking at her with some concern. “Sorry, Dad, I didn’t hear you.”

He came over and gave her a hug and a kiss. “I didn’t mean to distract you. I just wanted to make sure you’ll see that Dairine gets out.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t let her sweet-talk you.”

Nita raised her eyebrows at the unlikeliness of this. “I won’t.”

“Okay. See you later.”

He went out. Nita heard the back door lock shut behind him, heard the car start. She glanced out the window into the gray, early morning light, and saw the car backing out of the driveway, turning in the street, vanishing from sight. The engine noise faded down the street.

Nita sat there and thought of her dad’s still, pale face as he spoke to her. Sad all the time; he was so sad. Nita longed to see him looking some other way… yet for so long now she’d routinely felt sad herself, because she could understand his problem. It’s only been a month, she thought, and already I can’t remember what it’s like not to be sad.

The school shrink had warned her about that. Mr. Millman, fortunately, had turned out to be very different from what Nita had expected, or dreaded, when she’d been sent to see him after her mom had died. The other kids at school tended to speak of “the shrink” in whispers that were half scorn, half fear. Having to go see him, in many of their minds, still meant one of three things: that you needed an IQ test — probably to prove that you needed to be put in a slower track than the one you were in; that you were crazy, or about to become so; or that you were some kind of closet boozer or druggie, or had some other kind of weird thing going on that was likely to make you a danger to yourself or others.

Nita had been surprised that the crueler mouths around school hadn’t immediately started to spread one or another of these rumors about her. But it hadn’t happened, apparently because her mother was well known and liked in town by a lot of people, and this attitude had spread down to at least some of their kids. It seemed that those kids at school who knew her at all thought that though Nita was a geek, it was a shame about her mother, and counseling after her mom died so young wouldn’t count as a black mark against her.

So nice of them, Nita had thought when she first heard about this. But she had to admit to a certain amount of relief that mockery wasn’t going to be added to the whispers of pity that she’d already had more than enough of. Not that she wasn’t used to half the kids she knew making fun of her as an irredeemable nerdette. But having to deal with a new level of jeering, as well as the pain, was something she could do without right now.

She still had no energy to speak of. Sleep never came easily anymore, and she kept waking up too early. But once she was awake, she didn’t really want to do anything. If Nita had had her way, she’d have stayed home from school half the time. But she didn’t have her way, especially since Dairine was already in trouble with the principal at her school for all the time she’d been losing — so much so that their dad had to go see the principal about it this afternoon. Nita was completely unwilling to add to his problems, so she made sure she got to school on time — but she found it hard to care about anything that happened there.

Or anywhere else

, she thought. Even though she was up before dawn half the time, the predawn sky, even with the new comet passing through, didn’t attract her as it used to. Nita leaned on the sill of the window by her desk, looking out at the bare branches of the tree out in the middle of the backyard. She could see the slow words its branches inscribed against the brightening sky in the wind, but she couldn’t bring herself to care much what they said. She felt as if there was some kind of thick skin between her and the world, muffling the way she knew she ought to feel about things… and she didn’t know what to do to get rid of it. What really frightened Nita were the times when she clearly perceived that separation from the world as something unnatural for her, and still didn’t care if the remoteness never got better — the times she was content to just sit and stare out at the world, and watch it go by.

She found herself doing that right now, staring vaguely at the clutter on her desk — pens and pencils, school notebooks, sticky pads, overdue library books, a few CDs belonging to the downstairs computer. And her manual, closed, sitting there looking like just one more of the library books. Overdue, she thought, glancing past it at the other books. That’s not like me, either. I’m so obsessive about getting them back on time, usually…I should take them back after school today.

But taking them back just seemed like too much trouble. It could wait another day, or two, or three, for the little fine it would cost her. Maybe I’ll feel more like it over the weekend.

Nita let out a long breath as she looked at her manual. It wasn’t as if it was alive in any way, as if it had anything with which to look at her…

…but it was looking at her, and she wasn’t sure what to make of its expression.

She flipped it idly open to the back section, where the status listings were. Turning a few pages brought her to Kit’s listing, which she scanned with brief, weary interest. Then she paged along to her own.

CALLAHAN, Juanita L.

243 E. Clinton Avenue

Hempstead, NY 11575

(516) 555-6786 power rating: 6.76 +/-.5 assignment status: optional Nita stared at that for a long moment, never having seen anything like it on her listing before.

“Optional”?

Since when am I “optional”?!

She sat there looking at the listing for a few seconds longer. Jeez, she thought, that sounded more like Dairine than me

…

It was still a strange listing. And the longer she looked at it, the less she liked it.

But that brought her to her next order of business for the morning. Reluctantly, Nita got up and went across the hall to Dairine’s room. “Dari…” she said, knocking on the door and knowing what was going to come next.

“Ngggg, said a voice from inside.

“Get up.”

“In a minute.”

“Don’t make me laugh, Dari. Say it in the Speech.”

Nita grimaced. Dairine was twisty and shifty in all kinds of ways, but even now, even angry and upset with life as she was, she would not dare say anything in the Speech that wasn’t true.

“Dairiiiiiiiiine…”

A pause. “Must you be so disgustingly responsible at this hour of the morning?”

“Yes,” Nita said, unimpressed by either the volume or the sentiment. “Get up, Dairine. I have things to do besides deal with you all morning.”

“Then go do them, and give them my regards.”

“Not a chance. Get up.”

“No.”

And so it went for another fifteen minutes or so. Nita’s temper started fraying. I might have seen the daybreak

, she thought, but I’m still going to be late for Millman, thanks to Dairine. Again.

I’ve had about enough of this!

Nita held out her hand for her manual, which obligingly picked itself up off her desk and came cruising along into the hall. She plucked it out of the air and began paging through it. Okay, today’s the day

, she thought. Today I actually use that spell instead of just thinking about it. But I have to add something fast

Nita spent a moment wondering under which category she would find the addition she was contemplating for the wizardry she had in mind. Well, it’s a teleport, but now it’s complex rather than strictly inanimate

… “Dairine,” Nita said. “This is just another cheap attempt not to go to school.”

“It’s not an attempt.”

“Uh-huh.” We’ll see about that. Okay, here we go. The shape of the wizardry’s a little weird now, but if I constrain the feeder end of the spell like this — and this— Yeah. Quick and dirty, but it’ll do the job

. “You really ought to think about the consequences of your actions,” Nita said, “especially insofar as they affect what Dad’s gonna have to say to you when school calls him at work to find out where you are.”

“Nita, that’s my problem, not yours, so why don’t you just butt out for a change instead of trying to run everybody’s life. You’re no replacement for Mom, no matter what you may think you’re doing, and—”

A tirade

, Nita thought, already halfway through the spell. Good. She paused just long enough to admit to herself that the remark about their mom did, indeed, really hurt, and then went on with the spell. Dairine was meanwhile still in full flow. “… when you come to your senses again, some time in the next century, you may discover that— OWl”

From inside Dairine’s bedroom came a loud thump, the sound of a body hitting the floor — or, more accurately, parts of a body hitting the floor, and parts of it coming down hard on some of the many and varied things that Dairine routinely shoved underneath her bed. One-handed, Nita snapped her manual shut with a feeling of profound satisfaction.

“Where’s my bed?!” Dairine shrieked.

“It’s on Pluto,” Nita said. “On the winter side, somewhere nice and dark and quiet, where you won’t find it if you look all day — which you’re not going to have time to do, because you’ll be in school.”

“Hah! I’ll sleep in your bed!”

“You hate my bed,” Nita said. “My mattress is too hard for you. And what’s more, my bed and every other piece of furniture in this house have been instructed that after I leave, they’re to teleport any living creature they touch right into the part of school where you’re scheduled to be at that particular moment in time. How you explain your appearance there is going to be your problem.”

“I’ll take the wizardry apart.”

“I’ve password-locked it. If you want, you can spend all day trying to unlock it from outside the house… and then still have to explain to Dad why you weren’t in school again. After he’s just spent an hour discussing the same subject with your principal. Meanwhile, if you want to sleep anywhere, you can do it on Pluto, if you like — but you’re not doing it in this house till after you get back from school.“

The bedroom door was flung open, and Dairine stormed through it, past Nita and toward the bathroom, head down, in a fury, refusing to give her sister so much as a glance. The severity of the effect was somewhat lessened by the dust bunnies that parted company with Dairine’s pajamas along the way, floating gendy in the air behind her.

“I wish I knew what alien force has kidnapped my sister and left this vindictive thug of a pod person in her place,” Dairine said to the air, slamming the bathroom door shut. “Because when I find out, I’m going to hunt it down and kick however many rear ends it has from here to Alphecca!”

Nita stood there for a moment, watching a final dust bunny float toward the floor. “Enjoy your day,” she said sweetly, and went to get her book bag.

Her meetings with Mr. Millman were always about an hour before homeroom, so that they were finished ten or fifteen minutes before other students started to arrive for the day. The covert quality of the meetings was enhanced by the fact that Mr. Millman didn’t even have his own office, because he traveled from school to school in the district every day. Neither he nor anyone else in school knew where he was going to be from one session to the next. Nita most often found him in a spare office down in the administrative wing of the school, a room furnished with a metal desk and a few wooden chairs and not much else. Today he was there, sitting behind the old beat-up desk with the office door open, and working intently on one of those metal-ring puzzles in which the five constituent rings have to be interlaced.

This kind of behavior was typical of Mr. Millman, and was one of the redeeming features of having to deal with him. Whatever you might imagine a school shrink as being like, or looking like, he wasn’t that. He was young. He had a large, itizzy black beard that made him look more like an off-duty pirate or an escaped Renaissance artist than a psychologist, and his long lanky build and loose-limbed walk made him look like a refugee from a Cheech and Chong movie. Though he wore a suit, he did so as if it had an invisible sign on the back of it saying, THEY MADE ME WEAR THIS: DON’T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY. He looked Up at Nita from the ring-puzzle with a resigned expression. “Morning, Nita. You any good at these?”

“Morning, Mr. M.” She sat down in front of the desk and took the rings he offered her.

Fortunately Nita knew how the puzzle worked, and she handed the rings back to him, braided together, in about fifteen seconds.

He looked at the puzzle with helpless amusement. “Halfway to a doctorate,” he said, “and I still have no grasp of spatial relationships. Remind me not to go into rocket science. How’ve your last couple of days been?”

“Not the best,” Nita said. “I had to throw my sister out of bed this morning. She didn’t want to go to school again.”

“That seems to be turning into a routine,” Mr. Millman said. “And from your expression, I get the feeling she didn’t appreciate it. She try the line about your mother again?”

Nita nodded.

“And you didn’t punch her out?”

Nita allowed herself a slight smile. “The temptation was there…”

They talked for maybe twenty minutes. Millman’s style wasn’t so much that of a shrink as that of a coach, Nita had decided: no long silences, no mmm-hmms that transparently tried to draw you out and get you to talk about things. You talked or not, as you pleased, and Mr. Millman did the same. You asked questions or answered them, or didn’t answer them, also as you pleased. It was all very leisurely and casual, and Nita was sure that Mr. Millman was getting a lot more out of what she said than she suspected. But, possibly because of the way he handled their sessions, she found that this wasn’t bothering her. “Any more of those nightmares?” Mr. Millman said at one point.

“Some weird dreams,” Nita said.

“Scary?”

“Not the one this morning. I felt more useless than anything else.” Nita wasn’t going to go too far into the specifics.

“Goes along with the rest of the symptoms at this point,” Mr. Millman said. “The loss of appetite, the sleep troubles, and the mood swings—”

“Depression,” Nita said.

Mr. Millman nodded. “That feeling of weight,” he said. “Or of being weighted down…of feeling like your face’ll crack if you smile.”

“I wish I could make it go away,” Nita said.

“Fighting it probably won’t make it go away faster. May prolong it, in fact. Let it be there, and do your best to work around it, or through it, and do what you usually do. Work on things you would normally enjoy.” Mr. Millman leaned back in the chair and stretched. “I would say play, but no one wants to hear that word at a time like this: It makes them feel guilty, even if it’s what they need. If you have projects you work on, hobbies, keep them alive. You’ll be glad you did, later — the work you do at a time like this is likely to be worth keeping. You do have hobbies?”

“Astronomy,” Nita said. “Gardening — I help my dad.” And then she added, “Magic.”

And instantly panicked. Now why did I say that?

Millman raised his eyebrows.

Oh, god, no. What have I done

?! Nita thought. I'm gonna have to wash his brains now! And that’s a bad thing to do to your shrink—

“Ah, legerdemain,” Millman said. “An interesting field. Not enough women in it. Some kind of gender bar there; don’t ask me why all the famous magicians have been men. Anyway, it has to be good for your hand-eye coordination. Show me some card tricks, someday.” He looked at his watch.

“Not now, though— someone else will be here shortly.”

“Thanks, Mr. M.,” Nita said, and escaped from his office as quickly as she could, wondering if, despite all Mr. Millman’s casual reassurances, she was actually going crazy.

Kit had spent most of the previous day recovering from the exertions of following Ponch into the other-world where they’d found Darryl. It wasn’t as if he’d actually done so much wizardry himself, but it seemed to Kit that Ponch drew on his own power somewhat. And then there’s the leash, Kit thought, as he headed into the kitchen to snatch a hurried breakfast. He’d overslept, partly in reaction to maintaining the leash-wizardry and the shield-spell, partly just because of physical tiredness from toiling up and down all those dunes. His calf muscles certainly ached badly enough.

But just as wearying, in their own way, were the events he’d seen taking place.

And also tiring, in a different way, was the amount of time he’d had to spend comforting Ponch afterward. The dog had seemed all right when they first got back, and had gone through the promised dog biscuits as if he hadn’t eaten anything for days. But as the afternoon passed, Ponch started to look unhappy. And just after dinner, when Kit was helping his mama clear the table, they were both startled by a sound coming from outside. Ponch was howling.

Kit’s mama gave him a peculiar look. “What’s the matter with him?” she said. “Did the fire siren go off or something? I didn’t hear it.”

Kit shook his head. “I’ll go find out,” he said.

By the gate to the backyard, near the garage, Ponch was sitting in the grass of the yard, howling as if rehearsing for a part in The Call of the Wild. Kit opened the gate. “Ponch! What is it? You want to come in?”

No

Ponch kept on howling.

Kit was mystified. He went to sit down by his dog, who ignored him and howled on. “What’s the matter?” Kit said in the Speech, after a few moments more.

Ponch finished that howl and sat looking at the ground for a moment. How could It do that to him

? Ponch said then. He couldn ‘t even do anything! And he was good.

Kit blinked at that. “It’s the Lone Power,” he said. “Unfortunately, It seems to like to hurt people… and to like to see them hurting. Which is why we keep running into It, since it’s our job to stop It from doing that whenever we can.”

It’s not fair

, Ponch said. And he put his head up and howled again.

Down the street, Kit could hear one of the neighbors’ dogs start howling, too, in a little falsetto voice that would have made him laugh if he wasn’t rather concerned about Ponch. Soon every dog in the street was howling, and shortly there were some human shouts to go along with the noise: cries of “Shut up!” “Would you please shut your dog up?” and “Oh yeah, well, you shut yours up!”

Kit had no idea what to make of it all, and couldn’t think of anything to do but sit with Ponch.

Eventually the dog stopped howling, and one after another, slowly, the other dogs in the neighborhood got quiet. Ponch got up, shook himself, and walked out the still-open gate into the driveway. He made his way to the back door, waited for Kit to open it, and then went in and trotted up the stairs to Kit’s bedroom.

Kit’s mother had looked at him curiously as he came back in and closed the door. “What was that about?”

“Ponch was upset about what we were doing this morning,” Kit had said. “I’d try to explain it to you, but I’m not sure I understand it myself.”

Now, the next morning, as he went looking for his cereal bowl, he wasn’t any closer to an answer. Ponch had been asleep when Kit had gotten up to his room, and he was sleeping still. I‘ll talk to him about it later

, he thought, opening the cupboard over the counter.

There were no cornflakes. There was one box of his pop’s shredded wheat, which Kit detestedwhenever circumstances forced him to eat it, it always made him think he was eating a scrubbing pad. The only other box contained one of the cereals his sister liked, some kind of frosted, fruitflavored, multicolored, marshmallow-infested, hyperpuffed, vitamin-reinforced starch construct, which was utterly inedible due to its being ninety-eight percent sugar — even though the word appeared on the box only once, in letters small enough for anyone without a magnifying glass to miss. “Mama,” Kit said, aggrieved, “we’re out of cereal!”

“Your kind, anyway. I know,” his mother said, coming into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, with the TV remote in her hand. “Take it up with your pop: He had a fit of wanting cornflakes late last night, and he finished the box. He said he’d get some more on his way home from work. Have some toast.”

“It’s not the same,” Kit muttered, but all the same he closed the cupboard and went to get the bread out of the fridge.

“Is Ponch all right now?” his mother said as she poured more coffee and reached past Kit into the fridge for the milk.

“I think so. Still sleeping, anyway.”

His mama shook her head, and then smiled slightly. “All that noise last night… it reminded me.

Is it just me, or has down-the-street’s dog been louder than usual the past week or so?”

“You mean Tinkerbell?” That was not the dog’s real name in the dogs’ own language, Cyene, and possibly reason enough for the down-the-street dog’s incessant barking. “I dunno, Mama. I’m so used to hearing him bark all the time, I don’t notice anymore.”

“Do you think you could talk to him, sweetie? You know.” She wiggled her fingers in what she imagined was a vaguely wizardly gesture.

Kit raised his eyebrows while he put the bread in the toaster. “I can try. But, Mama, just because I talk to him doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to listen. The dog’s a head case. He thinks I’m a crook. But then he thinks everybody who doesn’t live in his house is a crook.”

“Dogs get like their owners, they say…”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, sweetie,” his mother said, looking suddenly guilty.

Kit kept the smile off his face while he waited for the toast to come up. It was going to be fun to be middle-aged, someday, and be told the things his mother was really thinking, with no more need for the kid-filter that parents routinely seemed to self-install.

“What about the youngster whose head you were going to get into?” his mother said. “Were you able to talk to him?”

Kit shook his head. “He was real busy,” Kit said. “Ponch and I are going to have to try again, when things are quieter.” If they get any quieter, he thought. And what if they don’t?

Then something else occurred to him. “Mom, you have any more trouble with the TV?”

“What?” She looked at Kit as if she couldn’t understand what he was talking about, and then blinked. “Oh. No, it’s been all right.”

“Good,” Kit said, and started buttering the toast.

“Except now that you mention it…”

Kit braced himself.

“Your dad told me you weren’t joking. About the cooking shows…”

Kit sat down with his toast and tried desperately not to look as if he was about to have a panic attack. “Yeah.”

His mother sat down across from Kit, looking thoughtfully at her coffee cup. “Honey, none of these people have ever tried to eat you, have they?”

“Aliens? No.” That, at least, was the truth. “They might have thought about it, though. But so far it’s not a crime to think about it. At least, not most places.”

His mother’s expression relaxed a little. “No, I guess I can see where it might not be. I just worry about you, that’s all.“

Kit finished one piece of toast. “Mama, in one way it’s like crossing the street. You know you have to watch out for traffic. So you look both ways before you cross. In some parts of the universe, you know that the locals think of you as a potential snack food, and you’re just careful when you visit them not to act like a snack. But mostly”—Kit grinned—“wizards are nobody’s snack. Dealing with those species mostly isn’t any more dangerous than crossing the street. Also, some of them owe us.”

His mama looked surprised. “What, humans?” “No, wizards.” Kit took a bite of the next piece of toast. “One of those species, the—” He paused; he wasn’t used to saying their name except in the Speech, since their own word for themselves was hard to say. “Let’s call them the Spinies, because they’ve got a lot of spines. They had a problem a while back: Their sun was going to go nova. One of us went in there and kept that from happening. It’s not like they don’t have their own wizardsthey do. But a wizard from another species was passing through, caught the problem before any of them did, and fixed it.” He shook his head. The story ranked as a hero-tale even among wizards, who, because of their line of work, were more or less used to saving the world, or worlds. “It was real time-critical stuff. The one who saved them came from one of the species that they normally would have thought of as food: humanoid, like us. The wizardry was a big one, complex — messing with the carbon cycle inside a star isn’t for beginners. Doing the wizardry killed her. And the word got out. Now all the Spinies have something else to think about. ‘Be nice to your food; it might save your life.’“

Kit worked on the second piece of toast while his mother thought about that.

“She was how old?” his mother said suddenly.

Kit had been hoping this wouldn’t come up. “If you did it in human years,” he said, “she’d have been about my age.”

His mother’s gaze rested on him as if a suspicion had been confirmed. “Does this kind of thing happen often?” she said.

It was so tempting to lie… but no temptation was more fatal for a wizard. “Every day, Mama,” Kit said. “There aren’t enough of us to do the job. Probably there never will be. Lots of us die of old age, in our beds. But some of us…”

His mother looked at him, and her expression changed. It became less confused, but the look that replaced it troubled Kit more, for reasons he couldn’t understand. “I don’t know why this surprises me,” she says. “I’m a nurse, after all. It looks like we’re both in a service profession. I just keep thinking you should have been offered a choice when you were old enough to understand what you were choosing.”

“I was,” Kit said. He pushed the plate away. “You told me you decided to be a nurse when you were eight.”

His mama’s expression turned first shocked, then annoyed: the look of someone who doesn’t expect to have her own revelations turned against her. “Yes, but—”

“You’re gonna say that you didn’t know everything that’d be involved in being a nurse, when you were eight,” Kit said. “And right then being a nurse mostly looked to you like a pink plastic kit with a toy stethoscope and a toy thermometer in it. But you decided, anyway, because you wanted to help people. So when you were old enough you went to nursing school, and look, now you’re a nurse. And it’s not so bad. Right?”

His mother looked at him.

“That’s what it’s like to be a wizard,” Kit said. “I promise, I’ll keep letting you know what it looks like as I get older. But when I ‘signed up,’ I knew this was what I wanted to do. I knew right away. Sure, it gets more complicated as you go on. But doesn’t everything?”

His mama gave him a long look. Then she smiled again, very slowly, and just half a smile: the kind of expression she gave his pop when she was admitting he’d been right about something, but didn’t want to admit it out loud. “You should finish up your last piece of toast,” she said. “And don’t forget to rinse the plate.”

She went to get dressed. Kit smiled nearly the same slow half smile, pulled the plate back, finished his toast, and then left for school.

At lunchtime, after he’d finished eating, Kit headed out to the front of the school for a breath of fresh air, and was irrationally pleased to see Nita out there waiting for him, in the parking lot, not too far from the doors.

He walked over to her, and together they strolled off some distance through the parking lot, away from the crowd of kids who always seemed to be standing around the main doors, watching who came in and went out, and who seemed to be doing what with whom. It was a game that Kit found both boring and dumb, but a lot of his classmates seemed to spend most of their time at it, so Kit enjoyed frustrating it as much as he could.

“How’re you doing?” he said.

Nita frowned. “Okay,” she said, “but something weird’s going on.”

Kit couldn’t recall Nita having said that she felt “okay” for weeks now, and the sound of it encouraged him, but at the same time he didn’t dare get too excited about it. “Like what?”

They paused by the chain-link fence that defined the school’s boundary on the north side of the parking lot. On the other side of the fence was a cypress hedge too thick to see through, thick enough that it put hopeful green fronds through the fence; Nita idly took hold of one of these and ran it through her fingers while she told Kit about the strange dream she’d had. “Everything’s supposed to understand the Speech,” she said at last, when she’d given him all the details. “At least in theory…”

“I don’t think it’s theory,” Kit said. “Everything that was made, was made using the Speech. Not being understood when you speak it is about as likely as matter not understanding gravity. Or light not understanding light speed.”

Nita shook her head and looked out into the day as if seeing something at a great distance. “I know,” she said. “But knowing the Speech also usually helps you understand what’s being said… and it’s sure not doing the job for me at the moment.”

“Really weird,” Kit said. “You have any idea what’s going on?”

Nita heaved a long sigh and bounced her shoulders idly against the fence a couple of times. “I think that dream at least, and maybe another one I had a few days ago, were alien intelligences trying to get hold of Dairine.”

Kit had to blink. “That happen to her a lot?”

Nita nodded. “On and off,” she said. “It’s mostly to do with her relationship with the mechanical sort of wizards — the computer intelligences and so on. She keeps getting feelers from life-forms that are half machine and half organic, and from a lot of the silicon-based types… some that I can’t make anything of. She told me she’s been doing a lot of work mediating between organic and inorganic lifestyles, way out at the edge of the universe, and it’s specialized stuff. It even gives her trouble sometimes, translating between the ways they see life and the way we see it.” Nita sighed. “So it’s no surprise that I don’t understand contacts from these guys right off the bat — I mean, as a species, in terms of their feelings and motivations and so on. But I should at least be able to understand them when they communicate about very basic things. And until now, I’ve always been able to. This last one, though…”

Kit waved a hand to stop her. “Time out for a minute. Why didn’t Dairine take this contact, if it was her they were trying to reach?”

“Dairine wasn’t up for it last night,” Nita said. She let out a long breath. “Or most nights lately.

Kit, she and my mom were even closer than Mom and I were, in some ways. She’s taking everything a lot harder than I am. She’s been missing a lot of school, and my dad’s really worried about it.”

Nita’s expression was that of someone purposefully putting a painful subject to one side. “Anyway, she was asleep when the ‘call’ came, and she didn’t wake up to take it, the way she usually would.

She was too tired, or else she just didn’t want to. So I got it, somehow or other. But I couldn’t understand it.”

Kit shook his head. “You mean, whoever was on the other end wasn’t using the Speech?”

Nita shook her head. “No, it was. But not the usual way. It was almost like it didn’t know it was speaking: There was something… I don’t know… accidental about the communication. Like whoever it was hadn’t actually meant to call. Except it also felt kind of urgent.”

Kit shook his head. “Were you able to get a location, a place of origin?”

“Just a sense that it was somewhere way, way out at the edge. I didn’t have time for a proper trace,” Nita said. “It didn’t last long enough. Besides, I was asleep myself at the time. Maybe the trouble was that the message got garbled with something I was dreaming. But normally I would have woken up when something like that came in.”

“You were tired, too,” Kit said.

Nita sighed. “I’m tired all the time,” she said. “It’s just part of the depression, the shrink says.

It’ll go away someday.”

“What a big help,” Kit muttered.

Nita laughed then, an oddly wistful sound that startled Kit. “No,” she said. “Really, it is a help.

Knowing that someday it will go away makes it a little easier now. Not a lot… but every little bit helps, at the moment.”

“So you got a call from the outer limits,” Kit said. “And you’re not sure what it was about… But at least a little of its message got through.”

“Not a whole lot,” Nita said. “I’m just hoping it ‘calls back’ and either gets Dairine this time, or gets me when I’m awake and can make something out of what it’s saying.” She leaned against the fence. “If the first message was from the same person, or people, it didn’t make sense, either. At least not beyond I can’t get off.‘”

“‘I can’t get off…’” Kit thought about it, then shook his head. “Maybe it’s just one of those situations where your brain takes a really alien concept and makes the best translation it can until you have more ‘nformation.”

“I really don’t know,” Nita said. “I’m going to sit down with the manual later and see if I can find something that’ll throw some light on why I’m not able to understand more clearly what’s coming through.”

“It couldn’t have anything to do with— You know.”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think this is just something different that I need to grow into learning how to do. It’s not like even people who’ve been wizards for a long time know every word in the Speech. I may just need to do some vocabulary building.“ She shrugged, glanced absently at her watch: The lunch period would be over shortly. ”More research… How about you, though?“ She looked up again. ”I saw your listing, and Tom’s note on it. You found the kid you were looking for?“

“Yeah, but not so that I could make any real contact with him. Another weird situation.”

He told Nita in words, and a few images shared mind to mind, about where he had found Darryl and lost him again. At the sight of the indistinct shape twisting in a halo of lightnings, and the Lone Power standing there watching in the shadows, Nita sucked in a soft, concerned breath, and shook her head. “Poor guy,” she said.

“Poor him, yeah, and poor me, if our ‘old friend had decided to shift Its interest elsewhere,” Kit said. “I could have used you there, if only for moral support.”

Nita looked at the ground for a few moments. “Are you sure I’d do you much good at this point?” she said. “I’m not exactly… stable right now. If I lost my grip in the middle of something important, I don’t know what I’d do afterward.”

Kit wasn’t sure what to say to that. Nita was too good a wizard to understate or overstate the problem. If she wasn’t confident enough to work actively at the moment, maybe she was wiser to sideline herself somewhat until she felt more sure of herself. That certainty of what to do and how to do it had saved them both more than once. If her certainty should fail at a crucial moment…

“Your call, Neets,” Kit said. “I don’t want to push you.”

“If you really need me,” Nita said, “all you have to do is yell. You know I’ll be there in a second, if I can figure out how to get to where you are.”

“Ponch can find you,” Kit said. He grinned. “I’m beginning to think there’s not much he can’t find… if I can just figure out how to ask him for it.”

Nita nodded. Over at the school building, the end-of-period bell rang. “Let me know when you’re going to go looking for him again,” Nita said. “At least I can keep the time free for you if you do need me for something.”

“Right. And let me know what you find out about your mystery messages.” The two of them started to walk back toward the school doors. “It’d be funny if it’s some rogue intelligence trying to figure out whether it’s okay to invade the Earth. Whatever you do, don’t give them our address.”

“The way things are going in my life at the moment,” Nita said, “it’s more likely to be some alien kid making crank calls, or trying to order a pizza.” And she actually smiled slightly.

Kit punched her lightly in the arm, and went to his next class.

Nita walked home from school that afternoon with the “robot” problem still very much occupying her mind. She found Dairine sitting outside on the back steps, staring idly down the driveway.

“Dad didn’t come back early?” Nita said.

Dairine shook her head as Nita got out her house key. “What’re you doing out here?” Nita said.

Her sister gave her a look. “Didn’t seem to be much point in going into the house when you’ve left a live teleport spell going.”

Nita opened the door. “Dairine,” she said, “maybe I’m cruel, but I’m not a sadist. Besides, why waste energy? The spell expired at the end of your school day.”

They went in. Nita hung up her parka and went to the fridge to find something to eat. Dairine stood there looking out the back door as she took off her own coat. “Close the door. You’re going to let all the heat out,” Nita said. “So how did the meeting with the principal go?”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “I made an agreement with him and Dad to stop cutting, if that’s what you’re asking about,” she said, closing the door. She went through the kitchen toward the living room.

“That’s not exactly what I was asking about,” Nita said. “What about Dad? How did he handle it?”

“He was okay,” Dairine said from the living room.

There was something about her sister’s tone of voice that made Nita forget about food for the moment. She went into the living room after her. “Was he upset?” Nita said.

“No,” Dairine said.

“He should have been,” Nita said.

“If things were normal, he probably would have been. But nothing is normal.”

Dairine sat down very abruptly on a hassock in front of one of the easy chairs. “Neets,” she said, so softly that Nita could barely hear her, “school sucks. It sucks so completely that even the Speech barely has words for it. It doesn’t feel like any of it matters anymore. And everyone who looks at me is thinking either ‘Poor little kid’ or ‘She’s just trying to get sympathy by looking so sad; why doesn’t she just get over it?’ If I can’t actually hear them thinking it, I can see it in their faces. Every day of this is like Chinese water torture. The seconds just fall on your head one after another, and every one is just like the last one. The minutes just crawl by, and nothing gets better. Everything just keeps hurting. And you have to sit there, in the middle of all this meaningless junk, and put up with it, and act like it matters. Like anything matters.”

Nita found herself thinking of the weary, repetitive feeling she’d sensed in the robot when she’d been confronted with it. Moment following moment, all of them the same, and none of them a happy one… She shook her head sadly. “Dair—”

“I’ve thought of leaving,” Dairine said, barely above a whisper. “Running away.”

Nita flushed first cold, then hot. “It would kill Dad,” she said. “You know it would.”

Dairine was quiet for a few moments. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I haven’t done it. But it doesn’t make it any easier, Neets. And just when I could actually use some help dealing with… with stuff

, the woman they’ve got assigned as my counselor is a complete waste of time. She’s some girl just out of college who’s more nervous about the kids at school than they are about her. What kind of good can she do anybody? Least of all me. She doesn’t even have a clear memory of what it’s like to be a kid anymore. I know she doesn’t: That part of her brain might just as well have a big sign on it saying, ‘Your message here.’ She’s completely relieved not to remember what it was like to be one of us poor, powerless creatures.“ Dairine’s expression went fierce with contempt. ”Just having to look at her makes my brain hurt.“

“I wonder if they could give you Millman, instead,” Nita said. “He’s good.”

“I don’t care,” Dairine said. “I’ll put up with her, with school, with whatever. For Dad’s sake.

And I will not let this break me. But I am going to hate every single water-torture-drop second of it, and I may just let you know about that every now and then.”

She looked up at Nita in defiance.

“Come here and gimme a hug,” Nita said.

Dairine gave her a look. “You’re just saying that because Mom would say it.”

“I’m saying it,” Nita said, furious, “because right now I need a hug.”

The nature of the look Dairine was giving Nita changed. She got up off the hassock, went over to Nita, and hugged her hard. Nita hung on to Dairine, not saying anything for a few moments, then let go of her and went back into the kitchen. She assembled a sandwich, hardly paying attention to what went into it, put it on a plate, and started to take it up to her room. “By the way,” Nita said as she went, and Dairine went after her, “I think your machine buddies have been trying to reach you.”

“Huh?”

“I got a call from one of them this morning. At least I think that’s what it was.”

Nita went into her room and sat down at the desk. Dairine followed her in and sat on the bed. “I haven’t been expecting anything.”

“Then what was this?” In her mind, Nita showed Dairine the image of the clown, going around and around. “And this?” She showed her the image of the robot.

Dairine looked at the two images carefully, especially the second one, and shook her head. “Not for me, Neets,” she said. “Neither of those are any of my guys. These are organic in origin.”

“How can you be sure?”

“The silicon life-forms and the machine intelligences have a specific kind of flavor,” Dairine said. “A couple different flavors, actually, but they’re similar. Like fudge ripple and rocky road.”

Nita gave her sister an amused look. Only Dairine would think of classifying other life-forms’ telepathic signatures in terms of ice cream. “Whatever got in touch with you is organic, all right,” Dairine said. “But you’re right about the distance. A long way off… And it’s thinking — I don’t know — more like an organ than an organism. It doesn’t seem to have any plurals in its thoughts, any sense of existing in relationship to a larger world. It’s all alone.“ She sat silent for a moment, pondering. ”I wonder if it even understands the concept of communication, as such. It might be all by itself in its own pinched-off space. Yet now it’s trying to reach out.“

“Trying to get out, maybe?” Nita said.

Dairine shook her head again. “I don’t know,” she said. “If you don’t know you’re by yourself, in your own universe, how do you know there’s anyone else to try to reach… anywhere to get out to? Really weird.”

She got up, stretched a little listlessly. “Anyway, Neets, that call wasn’t for me,” Dairine said.

“It’s all yours.”

“Great,” Nita said. “All I have to do now is figure out what it wants.”

Dairine wasn’t even listening anymore, though. She was already wandering out the door. Nita watched her go, and let out one more of many quiet, worried breaths. Wandering anywhere wasn’t her sister’s style. Dairine, when she went somewhere, went full tilt, focused like a laser.

Until a month ago

, Nita thought. Until the world changed.

She gulped, feeling the tears rise. No, Nita thought. I am not going to do that right now. I am going to sit here with the manual, have a look at the tutorials in the Speech, and see if there’s something obvious I’m missing. Which is entirely possible, because there’s always more of the Speech to learn. But when whoever this is calls again, this time I’m going to understand it.

“Oh,” Dairine said. “By the way…”

Nita looked up to see Dairine standing in the doorway again. “I’m sorry about this morning,” Dairine said.

“Uh, okay,” Nita said.

“Really, Neets. Very sorry. I was being incredibly stupid.”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said, unwilling to agree too forcefully with this sentiment, no matter how true it was. “Thanks.”

“So would you kindly get off your butt and bring my bed back from Pluto?”

Nita smiled slightly and reached for her manual.

That night, when the call came again, while she was asleep, she was ready for it.

Nita had spent the better part of four rather frustrating hours buried in her manual after her talk with Dairine, and had been forced to realize that no matter how she might cram, she wasn’t going to be able to make a big difference in her vocabulary in the Speech in a single night, or for that matter, a single month. Like any other serious language study, it was going to take time. In the short term, it made more sense to concentrate on being able to make as much sense as possible of the next dream, when it came. That meant being in control of the dream, instead of just wandering around in it.

What people had come in recent years to call lucid dreaming had always been a tool for wizards.

In some ways the mind was at its most flexible when unconscious, and therefore not insistently trying to make sense of everything. Human logic wasn’t the only kind, and it could get in the way.

The dream-state’s ready acceptance of just about everything often was a useful tool for understanding and getting comfortable with the thought processes of a species you didn’t know well.

The spell to induce lucid dreaming was very easy to construct — hardly more than an instruction in the Speech to one’s own brain to handle some of its chemistry, but only some, as if it were still awake. It took Nita about ten minutes and about the same effort as running up and down stairs a few times to knit the appropriate words of the Speech into a loose, glowing chain about a foot and a half long. This she fastened around her throat, necklace style, though the actual fastening took her several minutes: It was hard to do the wizard’s knot with both hands out of sight behind her neck. Oh, the heck with this

, Nita finally thought, giving up. She pulled the loose ends of the spell out in front where she could see them, did the “knot” up that way to clasp the “necklace” shut, and got into bed.

After that, it was just a matter of getting to sleep.

This took longer than usual when she was expecting something to happen. But it was becoming so normal for it to take a long time, lately, that Nita was beginning to just accept this. Gradually, enough of the tension and anticipation slipped away to let the fatigue of the day do its job on Nita, dropping her over the edge of consciousness into sleep.

It was the nature of the spell not to activate until dreaming actually began. How long she actually spent in the preparatory space between falling asleep and dreaming, Nita had no idea. But the activation seemed to come very quickly.

She was standing in the dark again, in a place where light fell in one spot from some source she couldn’t see. The darkness was not entirely quiet; from outside it came a faint sound, blurred and confused, like traffic noise outside a closed window, or voices in another room with the door closed — a hum, a mutter that both sounded and felt remote. Alone in that faintly humming darkness, under the single source of light, lay a big slab or dais of some kind — and there was some kind of figure on it.

Slowly, Nita made her way through the darkness toward the patch of light. The feeling of this dream was entirely different from that of the previous ones. She could still taste metal in the air, somehow, but it now seemed to her less mechanical, less impersonal a flavor. Maybe I’m just getting used to it

, Nita thought, as she passed through the immense darkness pressing down all around, heading slowly for the light.

It was a dais there, under the white radiance that seemed to fall on it from nowhere; and the figure kneeling there, in the center of the stone, glittered blindingly silver in the light. It was a knight, kneeling there on the pure white stone, completely covered from head to foot in plate armor, and holding before him, with its point resting on the stone, a sword in a metal scabbard that gleamed even more brightly than the armor did.

Nita tried to remember in what book she had seen this image, a long time ago. Yet at the same time she also thought of the robot she’d seen the previous night, for the knight’s helmet was the same in front — a perfectly smooth, blank surface, with just a single dark opening crossing it, for the eyes to look out through. Assuming there really are eyes in there, she thought.

Quietly she stepped around in front of — him? There was no telling.

“I’m on errantry,” Nita said, “and I greet you.”

There was a long silence.

“Greetings also,” the answer came back. Though it was a human-sounding voice, it didn’t come from inside the armor. It was omnidirectional, and seemed to come out of nothing, the way the light did. And the armor did not move in the slightest, as Nita would have expected it to, at least a little, if there was someone inside it.

Nita was relieved. At least the spell was working insofar as it was making communication possible, or a lot more possible than it had been the night before. “Were you trying to talk to me last night?” Nita said.

“Many times,” the voice said.

“I couldn’t understand a lot of what you were saying to me then, but I think that may be fixed now,” Nita said. “What can I do for you?”

There was another long pause. “Nothing,” the voice said. “This is the vigil. There’s nothing to do but wait for the fight to begin again.”

“What fight?” Nita said.

“With the Enemy,” the knight said. “What else is there? Outside of the fighting, nothing exists but this.”

Nita glanced around her. There was no sign of anything else but the two of them in this whole place, which seemed to stretch away into a dark infinity. “When will the fight start again?” she said.

“Soon.”

“What happens when you win?”

“There’s no winning this battle. But also no losing it, because for the Enemy, for the shadow that stalks this darkness, there’s no winning the fight, either.”

For the first time, the knight moved, lifting his head up into the light. There was no telling how she knew it, but Nita knew that inside the helmet, the knight was smiling. All the darkness sang with the force of his resolve, and with his amusement — a grim but good-natured cheerfulness that seemed very strange when taken together with what he’d just said.

That good cheer in the face of what sounded like a hopeless situation struck a chord somewhere in Nita, even in her sleep. The sense got stronger and stronger in the dark air around her of a great strength being hoarded in this place for the oncoming battle, of an unusual bravery. Valor: That was the word that described what she felt seeping into this space from the glittering form at its center. It made her feel like she had to do something to be of use. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?” Nita said.

The silence that followed stretched out much longer than the other two had.

“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here,” the knight said. “That It will have to fight here, again and again. But that It won’t pass.” And again Nita could feel the fierce, amused smile inside the armor.

“I can’t stay,” Nita said. That was one of the only drawbacks to lucid dreaming: Even when reinforced by wizardry, a dream’s duration was very limited. “But I know where this place is now. I can come back if you need help, or I can bring someone else with me who can help you better—”

“No help will avail here,” the knight said, kindly enough, but sternly, too. “This fight must happen only as it has happened, or it will be lost. And if it’s lost, everything else will be—”

Without warning, darkness fell. Nita, uncertain where she was or what had happened, tried to see, but in that complete blackness, there was no way to see anything at all. Briefly, she heard the sound of laughter, challenging and cheerful, and the ringing scrape of a sword being drawn—

And then Nita was sitting up in her bed, open-eyed and startled in the less unnerving darkness of her own bedroom. She wasn’t frightened, even though she’d caught a taste, in the dream’s last moments, of what had been coming toward the knight out of the newly fallen blackness. She knew that Enemy too well to be shocked by Its appearance anymore. But the thought of leaving that glad, tough presence to fight all by itself irked her. And though she’d at least been able to make out what it was saying this time, that wasn’t the same as understanding it.

She glanced over at the hands of her bedside clock glowing in the darkness. They said two-thirty.

Nita sighed and lay down again, feeling more determined than ever to figure out what was going on.

In fact, she felt more determined than she had about anything for weeks.

“Tell what fights the Enemy that It will be held here…”

Eventually Nita fell asleep again, and down the corridors of dream, she heard the sword come scraping out of its sheath again, and again, and again…