A Wizard Alone

Reconstructions

The mirrors went on forever.

Kit and Ponch stood in a brittle glory of reflected light. Overhead was a bright gray sky, featureless. All around them, mirrors stood, as many mirrors as trees in a forest, set at a thousand different angles: tall ones, small ones, mirrors that reflected clearly, mirrors that bent the reflection awry; shadowy mirrors, dazzling ones, mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors, until the mind that looked at them began to flinch and sicken, hunting something that wasn’t just another reflection of itself.

Kit and Ponch wandered among them, searching for something, but Kit had forgotten what it was they were looking for, along with everything else. Ponch wasn’t sure what his master wanted—

wasn’t even all that sure, anymore, why they were there. Together the two of them wandered through the glittering wasteland, seeing their shapes slide and hide in the mirrors, images chasing images but never meeting, never touching, fleeing one another as soon as any got close enough to make contact. “—don’t want to—” “—when do you think he might—” “—that hurts, why do you have to—” Splinters of conversation and fragments of personality hid in the reflections and fled from mirror to mirror. Kit and Ponch moved slowly among them, looking in some, avoiding others.

Some had too many eyes to look into comfortably. Not all the eyes seemed human. It was as if alien logics looked out of some of them, either irrational or briefly revealing rationalities that were more painful than the human kind, and these were the glances that made Kit and Ponch shy away most hurriedly, looking for somewhere to hide. But there was nowhere. Light and merciless reflection filled everything; and everywhere the two of them walked, a soft rush of sound ran under all other sensation, like water running under the mirrored floor, a river of words and noises trapped there under the unforgiving ice. All they could do was walk and walk, the thoughts in their minds being washed away as fast as they formed by the relentless flow of sound. They could hear the voices of other wanderers, elsewhere in the maze, but there was no way to find them, no way even to tell where they were.

“—have to get out, if they don’t they’ll—” —find him, and when I do find him I’ll—“ They walked for a long time, seeking those other voices but never finding them. Finally, exhausted, Kit sat down against the ”trunk“ of a mirror-tree, leaned back, and closed his eyes. His mind was full of the painful rush of voices and noise; it was a relief just to sit here, his eyes closed so that he didn’t have to see the eyes in the mirrors, his body rocking a little and letting the motion distract him from the myriad other distractions around him that were fraying the fabric of his mind. Ponch sat down next to him, on guard and frightened, but not so frightened that he would leave his friend.

Finally someone came. Kit didn’t open his eyes; every time he did, he saw other eyes staring at him, and he couldn’t bear the invasiveness of their gaze. But he heard the footsteps even through the rush of noise.

Whoever it was stood there, not looking at them straight on — that much Kit could feel on his skin, even without looking.

“I asked you not to come,” it said.

But he had to

, said Ponch. And so I had to.

“I’ve filled this whole place with one version of what happened to me,” said whoever was speaking. “The Other followed me right in here, the way It always does… and now what happened to me has happened to It.” There was a kind of sorrowful amusement about the speaker’s voice. “I did a really good job this time. I don’t know how long It’ll be stuck in here. But no one can get out from inside: It’s sealed.”

We have to stay here forever, then

, Ponch said.

“I don’t know about you,” the voice said. “Your eyes aren’t anything like his, or the Other’s.

You’re something different. But me, and him, and the Other… yes, we’ll have to stay forever.“

If he has to stay forever

, Ponch said, then I’m not leaving.

And he lay down beside Kit, huddling close to him, and started to wait for forever.

Nita got her dad up at the usual time. She was already dressed for school at that point, having been unable to get to sleep. “Anything?” he said.

Nita shook her head. “I’ll call you,” she said, and she couldn’t bring herself to say much of anything else. Her dad hugged her and went to work.

She made her own breakfast and ate it, thinking over what had happened the night before. If Darryl put up that wall

, she thought, who’s he shutting out?

Or shutting in? There was always that possibility— that the Lone Power was in there with him again, right then, trying to destroy him one more time. And Kit and Ponch are stuck in there with them

…

Nita shuddered. But another problem had occurred to her, one that kept nagging at her now, though it wasn’t specifically about any kind of danger. How’s Darryl getting the kind of power he needs to do this kind of wizardry? Nita wondered. Especially since he’s not even a full wizard yet? Is it something to do with being an abdal — with the fact that there can be two of him? If there really are

It was a good question, whether co-location really did mean there were two of you, or just one of you in two places at the same time.

Even the manual hadn’t been as clear as Nita would have liked on the subject; the terminology got very dense. Or maybe I did…

She drank about half of a mug of tea, put it down. Anyway, that universe seemed farther away than the last one, somehow. He’s withdrawing. He’s doing it on purpose.

Why?

Nita mulled that over, but no clear answer suggested itself. Well, she thought at last, even when I do get in again this afternoon, it’s possible that brute force won’t work against that wall. I may have to try to get myself directly in sync with Darryl, the way I did before, when he was a clown.

The danger, of course, is that if I get too well synced with Darryl’s mind, then what’s happened to Kit will happen to me, too. And neither of us will ever get out…

That thought left Nita morbidly considering what would happen afterward in such a case. Both of them would simply have disappeared without a trace. What remained of their families would wind up going through endless anguish as the police investigated the disappearances… and they would never be able to share with anyone that they all knew exactly what had happened to their kids—

Nita pushed that idea away hard. That’s not an option, she thought.

Fine. So what is?

That endless wall was very much on her mind. If I’m going to do anything about it, anything that’ll let me get through it in time to find Kit, I’ve got to find a way to get there without walking forever and ever

! The problem was that, from the feel of it, Darryl’s interior space wasn’t allowing quick transits — just long slogs through forbidding or sterile terrain. It might even be intentional, Nita thought. Maybe he’s set it up that way so that every time the Lone Power comes after him, It gets drained by the effort… has to stay in there longer, and take longer to find him —

There Nita stopped abruptly, staring at her mug of tea, which was rapidly going cold. In either a real physical universe or an interior space, there were ways to briefly change the laws that ran that space. And the best of these was to get your hands on the universe’s “kernel,” the little tight-wound wizardly construct that encapsulated that universe’s physical laws. Lately Nita had had entirely too much experience manipulating those. Her work with the kernel of her mother’s personal universe had bought her mom a few extra months of life.

A stab of pain answered that thought almost immediately: It wasn’t enough to buy her anything else

But Nita pushed the pain aside for the moment. If she could get into Darryl’s interior world and find its kernel, she could at least temporarily make changes to the way its physical characteristics worked… enough to get her where she needed to be in a hurry: the wall. Maybe even beyond it.

Other changes would probably require Darryl’s permission before she could make them. But this would do for a start.

Nita glanced up as Dairine came downstairs, showered and dressed for school, but still looking fairly terrible.“Did you sleep at all?” Nita said, going to the fridge to get Dairine a glass of milk and a banana.

“Yeah,” Dairine said miserably. “I couldn’t help it.”

She stared at the milk. “Drink it,” Nita said. “I’ll be back home at three-thirty. We have to try again.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said.

“Will you have enough power?”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “But— Neets, it should have worked last night! We were all set.”

“We didn’t realize how far there was to go to the wall,” Nita said. “I missed a trick last time: I’ll make better time today. And I’ll go more heavily armed. Now finish that stuff up and then go on.

You’re going to be late.”

Dairine nodded, finished her breakfast, and left. Nita was left in the quiet again, alone, a state that she preferred for the one task she had to do before she left: call Kit’s mother.

The phone there rang only once before someone answered. “Hello?”

“Mr. Rodriguez,” Nita said. “Hi.”

“Nita. Have you got any news?”

She had been hoping against impossible hope that Kit’s pop would tell her that Ponch had brought Kit home. Hearing the carefully controlled desperation in his voice, Nita felt even lower than she’d felt when she’d picked up the phone. “Not yet,” she said. “I tried to find him last night. I know sort of where he is, but I couldn’t get through to him. I’m going to try again this afternoon.”

Kit’s pop paused for a long moment. “Are you able to tell anything about whether he’s all right?” he said.

“Not yet,” Nita said. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you right away this afternoon, as soon as I know something. Bye.”

She hung up, heartsore, put on her boots and her coat, and headed off for school.

Nita went to her Monday morning meeting with Mr. Millman full of dread. He’s not blind: He’s going to see that something awful’s wrong with me

, Nita thought, and I’m not going to be able to tell him what it is. And then I’m going to have to do stupid card tricks. Can anything be worse than this?

She found him in the little bare office, on time as usual, stuffing a magazine back into his briefcase. In front of him were the remnants of the bagel with cream cheese that he’d brought along for his breakfast before their appointment. “Nita,” he said, “good morning.”

She didn’t answer immediately. He glanced up from closing his briefcase.

“I hate to say this,” he said, “but you look awful. I won’t insult your intelligence by asking if you’re all right.”

Nita raised her eyebrows in mild surprise at this opening gambit. “Thanks.”

“Dairine acting up again?”

“No, actually, she’s fine,” Nita said.

Mr. Millman just looked at her quizzically. Abruptly Nita wondered if near-total honesty might possibly be of some use.

“I really don’t feel like talking to you this morning,” Nita said. “I wish I could make up some dumb story and tell you that, instead.”

Mr. Millman shrugged and sat back in his chair with his arms behind his head. “Everyone else does. Why shouldn’t you?”

Entirely against her will, Nita had to smile at that. “Just as long as you don’t expect me to come up with something original.”

Mr. Millman allowed himself just a breath of laughter. “That’s the last thing I’d expect. Ten or fifteen billion of us, now, must have lived on this planet, and the more you look into the stories we tell one another, the more like each other they look. Everybody repeats the same basic themes.”

Nita said nothing.

Mr. Millman raised his eyebrows. “But maybe that’s how we know humanity is still in its childhood. You know how it is when you’re little, you want to hear the same story over and over again?”

“My sister used to do that.”

“So did mine. Partly it’s because they know how the story ends. There’s always tension when you’re not sure about the ending, and little kids don’t want too much of that tension… but they do want some. So this is a solution to the problem. When you know the ending, you get the tension of the middle and the relief at the end… theoretically. Did you have a book like that, that you kept wanting to hear at bedtime?”

Nita nodded. “It had a horse called Exploding Pop-Tart in it,” she said. “My dad said he wanted to explode every Pop-Tart he saw after a while, because he was so tired of that book.“

Millman nodded. “Mine was the one about the bat that wouldn’t go to bed,” he said. “My mother told me she hated bats for the next twenty years. Fortunately she didn’t see a lot of bats in her line of work.”

“What was her line of work?”

“She was a concert violinist.”

Nita had to laugh.

“One laugh, one smile,” Millman said. “Not bad for the way you looked when you came in.

Look, don’t bother to tell me any story if you don’t want to. You’d probably just repeat one of the favorite themes. Life, love, death…”

“Death,” Nita said softly.

The image of the Lone Power was suddenly before her eyes. She glanced at Millman then, wondering if she’d had time to cover over her expression.

“The same story,” Millman said. “And the only one we all know the end of, once we’re older than about three. But, boy, the way people behave, you wouldn’t think so! Adults refuse to talk about it… even with people your age, who really want to hear about it, and about the other important things — the beginning of life, the relationships in the middle. We try to distract ourselves by wasting our time on all the other less important stories, the incidentals — who ‘failed,’ who ‘succeeded.’ It’s a pity.” He shook his head. “We hardly ever do right by kids. All you want from us is to tell you how life works. And one way or another, the issue of life and death makes us so uncomfortable that we find a hundred ways to keep from telling you about it, until it’s too late.”

Nita swallowed. “My mom was good about telling me the rules,” she said. “She— My mom said…”

Nita stopped, waiting for her eyes to fill up. But it didn’t happen. And for a weird, bitter moment, that it wasn’t happening felt strange to her.

She looked up. Mr. Millman was simply looking at her.

“My mom said it was important to die well,” Nita said at last, “so she wouldn’t be embarrassed later.”

Mr. Millman just nodded.

For a few moments they sat there in the quiet. “She had it right, I think,” he said. He paused, then, looking at Nita. “Now it makes sense to ask. Are you all right?”

Nita thought about it. “Yeah,” she said. “For the time being.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s cut it short for today. One thing, though.”

“What?”

“What about the card tricks?”

In the face of the more important things that were presently on her mind, the question seemed so annoying that Nita nearly hollered at him, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than card tricks

?” But she caught herself.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got one here…”

She fished around in her book bag and got out the deck of cards. Nita slipped it out of its packet and began to shuffle, hoping that the motion would help her hide the fact that her hands were actually trembling with rage. Okay, she thought. Calm down. You knew he was going to ask.

But Kit—!

“Am I supposed to pick a card or something?” Mr. Millman said.

“In a minute,” Nita said. She shuffled, then said, “Okay, name one.”

“The five of clubs.”

Nita knew where that one was because the deck had been stacked when she took it out of its little packet. She put the shuffled deck down on the desk, wondering whether she’d protected the back end of the deck well enough. Then she realized she should have asked him what card he wanted before she started shuffling. The trick wasn’t going to work.

I don’t care if it does or not

! Nita thought, I should make him play Fifty-Two Pickup with the whole deck.

She controlled herself, though with difficulty. She finished the shuffle and cut the cards into three piles. Then she narrowed her eyes and did a single small wizardry that she had sworn to herself she wasn’t going to use.

Mr. Millman turned over the third card. It was the five of clubs.

“That was fairly obvious,” Mr. Millman said, “that anger. And fairly accessible. We were talking about the stages of grieving earlier, how they don’t always run in sequence. Let me just suggest that when anger runs so close to the surface that it’s easily provoked by unusual circumstances, you’re quite possibly not done with it yet.”

Damn straight I’m not, Nita thought.

“It’s not a good thing, not a bad thing, just what’s so,” Millman said. “But you might want to think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past. Or might produce again in the future.”

“Right,” Nita said. Whatever good humor had come and gone during the course of the morning’s session, it was gone for good now. She picked up the cards, got up, and stalked out, making her way to her first-period class.

Right through history class, and right through the English literature class that followed it, Nita stewed. She was furious with herself for having lost her temper over Millman and the card tricks.

She was furious that she had let him see how furious she was. She was furious over the maddeningly calm and evenhanded way he had dissected her anger. She would almost have preferred that he yell at her. At least she would have had an excuse to walk out of there ready to, as her mother used to put it, “chew nails and spit rust.” She was so madNita stopped, literally, in midthought.

“What result this kind of emotion has produced in the past…”

She thought of the fury and desperation that had driven her, in the time before her mother’s death, to try the most impossible things to stop what was happening. And they still didn’t stop.

But some amazing things happened, anyway.

She had gone from world to world and finally from universe to universe, learning to hunt down and manipulate the kernels that controlled those universes‘ versions of natural law. And now she had to admit that it had been her grief and anger at what was happening to her mother that had made her as effective as she’d become.

The thought unnerved her. Nita wasn’t used to thinking of anger as a tool. It had always seemed like something you didn’t want to get accustomed to using, in case it started to become a habit, or started twisting you and your wizardry in directions you didn’t want to go. But if you’re careful, she thought, if you stay in control, if you manage it carefully enough — maybe it’s okay to use it just every now and then. Maybe managing it, rather than letting it manage you, is the whole idea—

Nita sat there staring fixedly at the blackboard. Her English teacher was illustrating the scansion of a sonnet there, but Nita wasn’t really seeing it. Okay, she thought. I forgive Millman his dumb card tricks. He’s given me something useful here. Now I just have to use it…

The bell rang, and her English class filtered out, muttering about the pile of sonnets they’d been given to analyze by the end of the week. Nita’s next class was statistics; she shouldered her book bag and wandered out into the hall, unfocused. Her anger was still running high, but it was strangely mixed with a sense of readiness. Nita couldn’t get rid of the feeling that time was suddenly of the essence, that she had to make the best of her present emotional state — in which she had been given a weapon that was primed and ready to go, a weapon too good to waste.

I don’t want to lose this

, Nita thought, making a sudden decision. This is important. I’m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don’t care if they call Dad. He’ll know what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.

Nita hurried for the girls’ room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls’ rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.

Well

, this is one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art, Nita thought, resigned.

Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy… then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang. Okay, Nita thought, standing up, here’s my opportunity.

The door to the hallway pushed open a little. “Room check,” said an adult voice.

Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of-class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or doing something even less healthy. Who needs this? Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.

The teacher — it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms. Delemond, a tall, blond, willowy lady— stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible. A second or so later, Ms.

Delemond turned away, went to check the next stall, and the next. Finally she went outside again, and Nita could hear her footsteps going down the hall.

Nita got down off the toilet and let out one small breath of annoyed laughter. Then she reached into her claudication pocket, came out with the long chain of the ready-made transit spell she kept there, and dropped it on the floor around her. The chain of words knotted itself closed and blazed with light…

Nita came out in a sheltered part of her backyard, ankle-deep in snow, and the air-pressure change caused by the air she had brought with her from school made snow fall off the trees above her and onto her head. She spluttered as the snow got down her collar, finding it funny and getting angrier by the second. Good. Use it. It’s a tool—

Nita’s house keys were inside her locker at school, along with her coat and her boots. Forget it, she thought as she went around into the driveway and up to her back door. She pulled the screen door open and put her hand against the wood of the inside door. “I just need to walk through you, if you don’t mind,” she said in the Speech, while she reached down to the charm bracelet for another wizardry she’d been keeping there, this one with a charm like a little cloud. “Is that okay? Thanks, just bear with me.”

She said the three words that turned the low-level dissociator loose. Nita waited a moment for the itching to set in — the sign that every atom in her body was willing to move aside for atoms of other substances. In this case, Nita wanted to walk through the atoms of the door. She went through it like so much smoke, itching fiercely all the way, and when she was standing inside the back door, she let the wizardry go, then just stood there and scratched for a few seconds until she felt like all her molecules had settled themselves back into place.

She headed upstairs to her room, got her manual, and lay down on the bed. This had better work, Nita thought, because Dad’s probably going to go intercontinental when he finds out I cut school.

But I can’t help it. What’s the use of behaving myself and losing my best friend?

She lay there and realized it was just too bright for her even to think about going to sleep. Nita opened her manual, went to the energy-management section, and turned pages until she found the wizardry she wanted.

She recited it, feeling the universe leaning in around her, paying attention, slowly muting down the light in her room as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch. Anyway, this is all my fault, she thought as the room got darker and darker. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own troubles, I’d have been with Kit on this job from the start. Yeah, okay, I have a right to grieve. But do I have a right to dump my friends until I’m finished with it, until it’s convenient to listen to them, to care about them again? If I’d listened to Kit—

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Nita had said. And “Now you know how he felt before,” Dairine had said to her, as blunt as always, and accurate. Kit had come right out and said that he wished he had backup on this job. She’d ignored him, and he’d gone ahead with what he was doing and gotten in too deep. I should have been paying attention to what was going on around me, no matter how awful I felt. I’ve been indulging myself. I’ve almost been having fun hurting. That’s so stupid.

Nita stopped herself. There was no point in rerunning the “guilt movies.” They always ended the same way. And a new guilt movie was no better than the old ones.

But she was still left with her anger at herself. Nita lay there just breathing, just feeling it, letting it build. Well, she’d been in too deep herself, not long ago, unable to see the trouble she was getting into… and Kit had pulled her out. Now she was going to be able to return the favor. But it wasn’t about scorekeeping at all; there were much more important issues. I’ve already lost one of the most important people in my life. I’m not going to lose another!

Nita was briefly distracted by the burning at her wrist and throat.

She glanced down in surprise. All the charms on her bracelet, the symbols for all the prefabricated spells she was carrying, were glowing considerably brighter than usual. And the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was running hot, too.

“Think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past,” Millman had said. “Or might produce again in the future.”

Nita smiled a small angry smile.

I could get to like this

, she thought. Maybe it’s better if I don’t But today… today, I’m going to like it a lot.

She closed her eyes and pushed all her available power into the lucid-dreaming spell.

Nita’s intention and the force of her anger briefly turbocharged the spell, and it drowned her consciousness in dream. The effect wouldn’t last, she knew, as she opened her eyes in a different darkness; the spell would relapse to its normal levels momentarily, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d stay asleep. The important thing was that she was dreaming now.

She stood there again by herself in that great dark space inside Darryl. Far off to one side, somewhere, she knew that the infinitely obstructive white wall was waiting. But this time she wasn’t going to waste her time: There was more important business.

For a long few moments Nita quieted herself, opening her mind to listen, as she’d been taught.

Then, eyes closed, self-blinded, she turned, waiting for the sensation she knew would come.

It took less time to find it than she’d hoped it would. Nita had been banking on the idea that Darryl’s grasp of worldbuilding was instinctive, not studied, and that if he even realized the heart of his universe for what it was, he wouldn’t have thought to hide it. And he hadn’t. When she finally sensed what she was looking for, Nita took the time to actually walk to it, not wanting to attract any possible unwanted attention by using a transit spell. She was glad that the spot she was hunting was only a couple of miles away, not a couple of light-years.

She knew it by feel when she reached it, which was just as well; physically and visually it was indistinguishable from any other part of that tremendous darkness. Nita grinned, though, as she came close, feeling up close the faint, lively, burning, buzzing sensation she’d been seeking. She rolled up her sleeve, thrust her arm elbow-deep into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and came out with a bright, tight, surprisingly large tangle of silvery light.

“Will you look at this,” Nita said under her breath, turning the kernel over in her hands and looking closely at it to identify its major structural elements. The complexity of this kernel was by and large on a par with other personal kernels Nita had seen before. A couple of its sections were devoted to the mere physical business of running a human body. One of them seemed oddly augmented. Maybe this is how an abdal does his co-location, Nita thought. He’s got an extra set of

“body software” in here. Interesting.

But the power conduits were the real surprise. They were huge, far bigger than a physical universe’s own conduits would have been, and they pulsed silently and blindingly with such force that Nita found it hard to look at them. This is what an abdal uses. Or doesn’t even have to use; just has. There’s enough power in here, of enough kinds, to do… incredible things.

Even to keep the Lone Power shut up inside for a while…

Nita shook her head. This much power could be used for a lot more important things than that, though. And she noted one more thing, now that she had the kernel in her hands. She teased some of the power strands out a little and looked closely at one tightly braided chain of characters that glowed calmly right at the heart of the kernel. It was the core representation of the Wizard’s Oath, the heart of an Ordeal; and it was complete.

Nita grinned with sheer pleasure at having been right, remembering her earlier thought that Darryl didn’t have that tentative quality about his use of his wizardly abilities. So, she thought, he’s already passed his Ordeal. Let’s get moving!

She turned the kernel over in her hands once more, finding the little strand of light that was the spell Darryl had, however unwittingly, enacted to create the wall. Nita pulled it a little way out of the kernel, like someone teasing loose one strand from a ball of knitting wool, and twisted it in such a way as to cause that spot to become this one.

Instantly the internal laws of that universe changed accordingly, so that Nita looked up and found herself staring at the wall.

She walked right at it as if it wasn’t there. And when she touched it, it wasn’t. It evaporated in front of her. The wall knew that the key to the physical structure of its universe was right in front of it, in the possession of a living being. Cooperatively, it got out of her way.

“Thank you,” Nita said. She placed the kernel in her otherspace pocket and kept walking. In front of her the view opened up, distant and glittering, a view of what appeared to be a forest of glass trees, shining in that sourceless light she’d come to recognize.

Nita walked toward the forest, listening to the voices that she’d heard before in Darryl’s worlds, and that were here, too, louder than they’d been before, an endless rush of them. If she let them, they blended into a white-noise sound like wind or water, indecipherable. But if she concentrated, they did make sense.

“—get tired of waiting sometimes, you know?” said one of them, a man’s voice, Nita thought.

“Sometimes I wonder whether any of it matters at all.”

“Of course it matters,” said another voice, a softer one, sadder, but more certain of itself. “We have to keep doing what we’re doing. Someday…”

The voices got steadily more distinct as Nita got closer to the forest. Soon she saw that it wasn’t a forest of trees, but of mirrors. “Someday! But no one can tell us when that day’s going to be. No one has the slightest idea! And we’re the ones who know him best. We’re the ones who ought to be able to tell. For a while there it looked like it was working. A little. But since autumn, it’s like we’ve hit a brick wall or something. No change. I can’t help but think… can’t help but think that maybe there’s not going to be any more change. That this is as good as it’s ever going to get. That he’s going to be this way forever—”

The voice broke off, choked with pain.

“You know they told us this was likely to happen,” said the other voice. “That there’d be plateaus… times when nothing would seem to happen for a long time.”

“But this long?”

“Every case is different, they said. You know that, too.” A long pause. “We have to have faith, honey. If we don’t, if we lose it, no one else’s faith is going to help.”

The voices sounded two ways to Nita. On one hand, they were like any conversation she might have heard on the street. On the other, there was a terrible poignancy about them. Hearing their words was like being thrust through the heart with knives. I’m hearing this not just as I would, Nita thought, but as Darryl would. And possibly seeing his inner world as he does, too. Far from drawing her into Darryl’s trap for the Lone Power, this seemed to be giving her a kind of immunity. Good. If that just lets me see a way out

…

As she came closer to the fringes of the “forest,” Nita saw that the trees weren’t exactly just mirrored, either. They were half-mirrored. She could see partway through them, out their other sides, to the shapes that walked among them. And there were only four of those.

Two of them she knew instantly: Her heart seized at the sight of them. Ponch and Kit were wandering, sightless — or rather, it was Kit who looked and walked like someone blind, or like someone afraid to look at what he saw around him. Ponch walked ahead of Kit like a Seeing Eye dog, seeing for both of them. But something about the way the light fell on him made Nita wonder whether Ponch somehow saw more, in this chilly and sterile landscape, than any of them. What is it with him

? she wondered. He hadn’t been able to tell her the other day. Nita remembered Carmela telling her what Kit had said, that there was some kind of “wizardry leakage” going on in his household. Suddenly she felt sure that what was happening with Ponch was more than just a symptom of this.

She paused, watching the other two figures wander around separately in the light shining on and reflecting from the half-mirrored trees. One of them was small and dark, in jeans and a polo shirt. He looked less lost than Kit and Ponch… or the final figure.

That last figure was tall and looked human. He was slender, well-built, and extremely handsome.

Nonetheless, Nita couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of the Fairest and Fallen, the Lone Power, looking, in the dark suit he was wearing, like a businessman lost in a strange city and doomed to wander around because he was too proud to ask for directions.

The shudder passed, though. Nita’s anger was still running high enough to wash it out and leave her mind clear. All right, she thought. Nothing bad has happened yet. Let’s think about what to do.

Let’s…

Nita’s head jerked up, looking for the source of the word, and her hand went to her bracelet again. A second later she was holding the linac weapon, ready to discharge.

I am on errantry

, she thought, glancing around, and I greet you. Wherever you are…

I am errantry, the Silence said.

Nita held very still. There was something familiar about that voice… though it wasn’t a voice as such.

Then she remembered her earlier thought. “The Silence told me about that,” the clown-Darryl had said to her. You are the manual, she thought. Darryl’s version of it.

The Silence sang agreement.

Right

, Nita said, lowering the weapon again. Sorry, you startled me. How can I hear you now? I couldn’t before.

You are fully inside him now

… because you have the heart.

Nita wondered about that phrasing, and then smiled. The heart of Darryl’s universe: the kernel.

Yes, I do

, she said. Now all I have to do is figure out what to do with it.

He will know. He has full access now, as you’ve discovered.

Nita nodded and watched the four figures walking among the trees for a few minutes… She was looking things over, assessing where the weak point in this scenario might be. That was how she saw something start to happen, something that initially scared her — an encounter that she normally would have done anything to prevent. The Lone Power in Its dark majesty came striding down between the mirrored pillars, to Nita’s eye looking very much like someone who’s trying to act like he knows where he’s going when he doesn’t. Toward It, ambling, unhurried, maybe even unseeing, came Kit and Ponch. Nita sucked in her breath and lifted the linac weapon into an aiming line, pointing it at the Lone One.

She watched with profound unease as Kit and the Lone Power got closer and closer to each other. They were no more than a few paces apart when the Lone One made a single sudden move.

It looked at Itself in a mirror as It passed, and smiled faintly. And Kit walked right on by It, unnoticing, unnoticed.

Nita had to just stand there for a few moments, calming herself down, nearly lost in admiration at the sheer power of the otherworld Darryl had created. It’s like that fairy tale about the guy who does some magic creature a good turn

, she thought, and as a reward it gives him a bag that nothing can get out of. The guy lives a bad life, and when the devil comes for him, he tricks it into the bag, and it’s stuck there until he lets it out

But in this case, Darryl was in the bag, too — and apparently thought this a reasonable price to pay to keep part of the Lone Power out of circulation for days or weeks or even years at a time.

Carl had been completely right. If that’s not a saint, Nita thought, I don’t know what is.

I need to get them out of here

, she said to the Silence.

You will have to break this paradigm

, the Silence said. Break the mirrors. That will release them.

But it will also release the Lone Power back into Its full potency.

For just a breath of time, Nita weighed the pros and cons of the problem. Keeping It stuck in here, even just a fragment of It, couldn’t be a bad thing.

But keeping Kit here as well, and Ponch? And Darryl?

The price was much too high. Especially, Nita thought, putting aside her personal concerns for the moment, in Darryl's case.

Nita sighed. Besides, she thought, like in the fairy tale, the Powers That Be will make them let the devil out of the bag eventually. It’s still one of the Powers, and part of the world. Keep the Lone Power in here forever and It’ll never be able to change

…

Nita stuck the linac weapon under her armpit and held it there against her side while she reached into her “pocket” again, found that tangle of light, and spent a few careful moments adjusting several of its properties. She altered the universe’s time flow first, so it matched their home universe, then made a few additional changes that might come in handy later. When that was done, she put the kernel away and considered the maze of half-mirrored trees. It was vast, possibly even infinite, but Nita didn’t let herself worry about that. All these mirrors, the Silence whispered to her, were clones of another one. At the center of the maze was the key to the secret, the way out.

We’re short on time here, Nita said silently. Tell me.

In her mind’s eye, she saw it.

Nita grinned.

She unlimbered the linac weapon again and started to make her way toward the spot she’d been shown. If she’d tried to search for it by sight, she might have passed it many times. But she closed her eyes again, so as not to be bewildered by the reflections, and found it the way the Silence showed her — by walking slowly, bumping into things sometimes, feeling her way. Once she bumped into a tall shape that burned her to be near. Out of reflex, she said, “Excuse me,” to the Lone Power, and slipped on past It toward the heart of the maze.

It should be near here, shouldn’t it

? Nita thought.

You’re close. Keep going

…

She walked now through the darkness behind her eyes, slowly, taking her time. A few minutes later Nita came to the place she’d been looking for, and opened her eyes. They’d been closed so long now that she had to blink a little in the light as she looked at the one mirror — among however many uncounted millions in that place — that had no reflection in it at all, not even of any other mirror.

This one was a plain bathroom mirror about three feet by two, hanging on a taller mirror-pillar and held in a steel frame — one that probably had a medicine cabinet behind it in the real world. Nita walked up to the rectangular mirror and waved at it, then jumped up and down in front of it. In the mirror, nothing showed at all.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be with vampires

, Nita thought, intrigued. But, here, the mirrors themselves were vampiric, sucking up fragments of personality, snatches of conversation, the glances of eyes, leaving the originals devoid of words and glances afterward. Nita once more shook her head in admiration. Darryl had done a fantastic job constructing this trap. Even the Lone One, once inside this universe that so perfectly mirrored Darryl’s autism, was vulnerable to it, slowly losing moments of Its vast existence, being worn down.

Okay

, Nita thought. Here we go. The one thing she made certain of was that her other weapons were all ready to use as soon as she was finished with the linac. I'll only get one shot with this, she thought. If it’s a good one, all I have to worry about is what’s handy to use next, when all hell breaks loose

…

Nita glanced around her to make sure no one was about to come wandering through one of the many openings of the maze that led into this central area. Then she lifted the linac weapon again, narrowed her eyes, took careful aim at the bathroom mirror, and fired.

The blast of energy that came out of the linac weapon didn’t radiate in the visible spectrum, but the air in its path did, ionizing and spitting blue lightnings where the particle beam passed. The mirror leaped and split into thousands of fragments as the blast hit it, and the fragments in turn went white-hot and vaporized in the air—

— and as they did, every other mirror in that world shattered.

The noise was deafening, terrifying. Tons of razory glass exploded into millions of pieces and came raining down on the glassy floor. The fragments vanished as they hit it, as if falling into water.

Moments later there was nothing remaining inside that whole space but five figures, standing on a dark floor and looking around in various degrees of surprise.

Nita stood there and chucked away the linac weapon, which vanished as soon as she let go of it, its wizardry now spent. She walked over to Kit and Ponch while reaching to her charm bracelet and activating one of the charms.

Ponch was shaking himself all over, as if he were wet He turned and saw Nita, and began wagging his tail so furiously that it was mostly wagging him. He jumped up and put his forepaws all over her and started jumping up so that he could lick her face.

“Yeah, yeah, big guy, how you doing?” Nita said, sort of holding him by the ears and scratching them at the same time, in a mostly futile effort to keep his tongue out of her nose. “Kit? Give me a hand with this guy, will you?”

Kit was standing there, blinking at her, looking completely astonished. “What are you doing in here?” he said. Then he paused. “Come to think of it, what am I doing in here? I was home… I was lying down—”

The energy bolt came at them from behind.

And it splashed.

Nita looked over her shoulder at the Lone Power and couldn’t restrain a grin. The alterations she’d made in the kernel had worked. And Kit was all right. Now she had backup — and she felt how good it was to have that again, after she’d been alone. Now then! she thought.

“Well, I guess if you’re going to omit the formalities, so will I,” Nita said, turning to face the Lone One. “I have to say, I would have expected a slightly higher level of function from you. But you’ve been running on half-speed ever since you got in here, poor baby. Take a few moments and try to pull your brains back together. We’ll wait.”

The Lone Power’s expression set cold, as Nita had known it would; there are few things the Eldest hates more than being made fun of.

“Your insolence,” It said, “is going to be short-lived.”

“Compared to the age of the universe, yeah, I guess so,” Nita said. “But I think we’re going to walk out of here today, because you miscalculated. You never considered what might happen if Darryl ever realized that the door swings both ways. Or that the door can be locked. Ever since he took the Oath, ever since you decided to stop him from being a wizard, he’s been keeping you stuck in here with him on purpose! He’s been getting better and better at it all the time, and you never even suspected, because you thought you were in control. But this is his masterwork, no matter what I did to the fun-house mirrors, which were just a local feature. And you’re still sealed in here until he lets you go.”

The Lone Power looked at Darryl.

Nita looked over at him, too. “Darryl?” she said. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, though he sounded somewhat surprised. “I didn’t know anyone else would be able to see what was happening.”

“The Lone Power couldn’t,” Kit said. “You built this place in such a way that It wouldn’t be able to tell what was happening. But you weren’t expecting us inside your worldview. You left a loophole.”

“And once we got in — though we came and went— our points of view stayed behind, at least a little,” Nita said to the Lone Power. “While only you were in here, Darryl believed what you believed about this space, and about his Ordeal—”

Darryl had walked over toward Nita and Kit while Nita was speaking… and the smile growing on his face now was rapidly becoming a match for Nita’s: angry, but still very amused. “I may be autistic,” Darryl said to the Lone One, grim, “but I’m not stupid. You’ve invested a lot of energy in your little cat-and-mouse game. Well, I can play this game, too. Maybe I’ll just amuse myself playing with you for the rest of my natural life. It’s sure been fun so far!”

The Lone One’s expression was indescribable. Nita felt like laughing out loud, but this would have been the wrong moment.

“You cannot,” It said after a moment. “Now that I am alerted to this game of yours, it will never work again, even if I did allow you to escape with either life or soul intact.” It raised Its hands, clenched Its fists—

And nothing happened.

Nita smiled gently, and from her pocket, she pulled out the kernel to Darryl’s internal universe.

The Lone One looked at it in sudden furious surprise.

“You really are running slow today,” Nita said. “You taught me how to deal with these things when you were inside my old ‘friend’ Pralaya. How to find them…how to manage them. Of course, you were doing it for your own reasons. Maybe it didn’t occur to you that I was going to walk away after the dirty deal you offered me! Or that I was going to survive the consequences. Well, I did…and I remember everything you showed me, very well.” She smiled. “Now I— excuse me, we — just have to decide what else to do with this besides making you temporarily powerless.”

Nita stood there with the universe’s kernel, the heart of the world, in her hand, juggling it like someone juggling a grenade with the pin pulled. “Make your stay here permanent, maybe?” she said, glancing over at Darryl. “By just wiping the whole place out?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” the Lone One said.

“I’d dare a whole lot at the moment, so don’t push me!” Nita said. “Doesn’t it strike you as likely that I’d have just a whole lot of fun killing you off? Oh, sure, it wouldn’t be the whole you.

Here you’re just a fragment of your greater self; I know that. And I’d die, too. And so would Kit, and Darryl. But the power that the One has invested in Darryl won’t be lost.”

“That power is lost now! Boy”—the Lone Power turned Its baleful gaze on Darryl—“you are one of the—”

Then Its face suddenly went white, as if a whole universe had suddenly taken It by the throat and squeezed.

“You’re not going to be able to discuss certain subjects,” Nita said, “so don’t bother. Now, I think we were discussing what happens when we blow up this universe with you inside it. The damage done to you by the total destruction of even just this fragment of you… well.”

She smiled.

The Lone One trained that deadly look on Nita now. “If you did such a thing,” the Lone Power said, “your father and sister would—”

“Spare me,” Nita said. Her eyes narrowed. “Life hasn’t been so wonderful for me lately that I need to cling to it for my own sake. And if I went out taking you down, my dad and Dairine would grieve, yeah, but they’d applaud, too… because they’d find out soon enough that what I did lessened your clout in this part of the solar system.” Nita grinned. “You’ve underestimated me one time too many. Someone needs to teach you that this kind of behavior isn’t going to get you anywhere. I think today we’re the ones to do it.”

She turned as the Lone One lunged at her and tossed the kernel to Kit. He fielded it expertly.

“Nice little universe you’ve got here,” Kit said, tossing it up in front of him, and then Hacky Sacking it into the air a few more times, from his knee and elbow, and once from his head, while the Lone Power came toward him, a look of furious uncertainty on Its face. “It’d be a shame if something happened to it. Whoa!”

He flipped the kernel to Darryl. Darryl caught it, looked it over, and tossed it lightly in one hand.

The kernel, which had been glowing only softly while Nita and Kit had been holding it, now blazed like a star in the possession of its rightful master and creator.

“I’ve learned a lot from listening to the Silence for the past few months,” Darryl said. “About wizardry, and a lot of other things. But that hasn’t changed the fact that I haven’t lived long enough to be really attached to life. Maybe this is the other thing that makes wizards so powerful when they’re young. It’s not that we don’t know about death. It’s not that we don’t believe in it. It’s that we’re still able to let life go, if the price is right.”

He looked at the other two, looked in their eyes.

Nita nodded. She glanced at Kit.

Kit hesitated a moment… then set his jaw, and nodded, too.

The three of them looked at the Lone Power. It stood in the middle of them, trembling with rage… or with something else.

“You want to bargain,” It said.

“Our terms,” Darryl said. “Not yours.”

“What’s the price for my freedom?” It said at last.

“Once they leave, they stay unharmed,” Darryl said. “No more than your usual attentions in the future. If you refuse, you stay in here with me until I die… and I chase you around and around forever.”

It stood there, silent, brooding. “But you stay here, even if I go?” It said.

“This is my world,” Darryl said. “Where else would I go? I’ll stay here.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock.

“I can still make something of this place, with time,” Darryl said. “Everything has its price. I’ll stay.”

The Lone Power’s face was expressionless. “On the Oath, and in Life’s name, you say it?”

“Darryl!” Nita cried.

“Don’t!” Kit cried in the same moment.

“On my Oath,” Darryl said, very deliberately, “and in the One’s name, I say it.”

The Lone Power stood there, staring at the floor. Then, slowly, It began to smile.

“Fooled,” It said. “Fooled again.”

It started to chuckle. “You’ve bound yourself to my will after all,” It said. “What makes you think that just because you cast me out once, you can do it again? Manipulate your world’s kernel as you please. I have something better to manipulate. Entropy is my tool. I’ll wear away at the fringes of this place, at the edges of your life, until sooner or later you let your guard over the kernel’s parameters drop. I’ll be in here again within seconds. Then you’ll still be trapped here forever… and I’ll stay here with you, making every moment a torment, and reminding you every second of the rest of your life of the price of mocking the Eldest. Despair now, for you won’t have time later.”

“I’ll get around to the despair thing when I’m good and ready,” Darryl said. “Meantime, get your butt out of my world.”

It gave them an ironic bow. “Once again,” It said to Nita, “despite all the brave words, you’ve gotten someone else to save your little life at his expense. One of these days, someone will refuse you. I’ll be waiting for you then. And for you,” It said, glancing at Kit, “when she betrays you at last.”

“Out,” Darryl said.

It looked from one to another of them. But It looked hardest and most cruelly at Darryl. “Don’t get too comfortable here,” It said. “I’ll be along any day.”

And It was gone.

They stood there, in the sudden silence, staring at each other.

Then, as if by prearranged signal, they all began to laugh.

“Oh, Neets!” Kit said, and he grabbed her and swung her around. “What a bluff! You were terrific!”

Nita was laughing, too, but there was an edge of pain on the laughter. “I’m not sure I was bluffing,” she said. “I was just so angry right then that I believed it.”

“You must have,” Kit said. “There’s no lying in the Speech. But Darryl…”

He turned to Darryl in concern. “That’s the problem for you, guy. You promised to stay here.”

“I did,” Darryl said.

Nita let out a long, unhappy breath.

“But this isn’t the only place I can be at the same time,” Darryl said softly.

Nita’s head jerked up.

“I thought I was hallucinating at first,” Darryl said. “Now I know it’s no hallucination. When the two of you started coming into my worlds, I was with you both at once.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if this is something most wizards can do—”

“It’s not,” Kit and Nita said simultaneously.

“But it’s real useful,” Kit said after a moment, intrigued. “Just think. If you were—”

“Kit, maybe we should save it for later,” Nita said. This was a line of reasoning she didn’t want him to go too far down just now. “Why don’t we all get out of here first?”

Darryl looked at Nita in shock. “But I can’t leave,” Darryl said. “The Ordeal isn’t over.”

Nita looked at Kit, wondering if he’d realized the truth yet. From his blank look, it seemed he hadn’t. Then she looked at Darryl, and laughed out loud for sheer delight.

“Sure it is!” Nita said. “You passed your Ordeal weeks ago! You passed it the minute you managed to say the Oath.”

“Remember how you had to fight to get it out, word by word, phrase by phrase?” Kit said, slowly starting to grin. “How you kept losing it, forgetting it, having to start over again and again?”

“That was the Lone One interfering,” Darryl said softly. He was wearing a listening look, as the Silence spoke to him.

Slowly, his face changed, and the joy in it was so dazzling that Nita found it hard to bear, and had to look away.

“That was the real battle,” he said. “And I won it! I won…”

Nita had to smile, and for the first time in a long time, the smile didn’t feel like it would crack her face.

Kit looked at Nita in some surprise. “I thought the Lone One only starts noticing a wizard when he first says the Oath.”

“That’s how it is for most of us,” Nita said. “But it looks like not all Ordeals are alike.” She was still treading cautiously around anything that would get too close to the subject of abdals, until she could get Kit somewhere private and give him the lowdown. I’m pretty sure that since the Lone Power knew Darryl was an abdal, It wanted to keep him from taking the Oath any way It could, because who could tell how powerful he might become once he was a wizard? Maybe that’s even why Darryl became autistic in the first place; maybe the Lone One did that to him. But I’d better not get into that just now…

“And just the act of saying the Oath, accepting it, for someone autistic…” Nita looked at Darryl with renewed admiration. “You have to accept the concept of the Other, that there are others, to do it at all. It must have been like eating broken glass.”

Darryl stood there looking as if a whole new world was opening up before him, as if his past pain was retreating into the shadows. “It was hard,” he said. “The whole Oath is about doing things for other people…”

“But, Neets,” Kit said. “Your manual, Tom’s, mine, they all say that Darryl’s still stuck in his Ordeal.”

“Because he hadn’t realized it was over,” Nita said. “And because he just kept hitting the reset button in his brain, and losing his sense of self over and over again to keep the Lone One trapped in here, he never had time to let himself realize it. So his manual, the Silence, stayed stuck, too, and it couldn’t update to the manual network outside.”

Nita nodded. “The ones you couldn’t look at, the ones you were afraid of because you saw It in their eyes, you had to promise the One and the Powers That Be that you would come out and do stuff for them. What could possibly have been harder?”

“This,” Darryl said.

Nita and Kit glanced at each other.

“That,” Darryl said, changing his mind. “In here… it’s been safe. In here I never have to look, never have to be afraid I’ll see what might be there. Rejection. The one who sees me and doesn’t want to look back. Because he’s bored with me, or I’ve hurt him, or…”

“I will put aside fear for courage,” Kit said.

“And death for life,” Nita said, very softly. She swallowed. “When it’s right to do so.” She was silent for a moment, then said, “If it isn’t right now, then when will it be?”

“We need you out in the real world with us, guy,” Kit said. “We need all the wizards we can get…now more than ever. Entropy’s running…”

“But I can’t go out there!” Darryl cried. “It’s in me! If I go out there, It’ll be loose in the world in the worst possible way!”

Nita’s heart squeezed inside her. “It’s loose out there already,” she said. “Your coming out, or not coming out, won’t make the slightest difference to that. You can die with It at the bottom of your heart, out in the world with the rest of us, or you can die with It at the bottom of your heart, in here, alone.”

He stood there, silent, his eyes averted.

“It’s better not to do it alone,” Nita said.

Darryl didn’t look up.

“There’s strength in numbers, Darryl,” Kit said. “It’s easy to forget that.” He glanced at Nita a little shamefacedly. She gave him an amused look and raised her eyebrows. He turned back to Darryl. “There are a whole lot of us out in the world, giving It a hard time.

You were real good at doing that just when you were stuck inside and didn’t have any clues about how the rest of us manage it. Come on out and give It a run for Its money! When you get right down to the bottom of it, that’s nearly all we do. Which wizardries we use to do it… that’s the cool part.“

Darryl was silent for a long while. Eventually he looked up again, and as Darryl slowly started to let himself believe that this was the right thing to do, that innocent joy and delight in life simply poured off him, so that once more Nita had to brace herself against it.

She saw Kit wobble, too. Only Ponch stood there untroubled, wagging his tail.

“All right,” Darryl said. “I’ll come.”

Ponch started to bark for joy.

Nita had to smile. “But one thing,” Nita said, glancing at the kernel, “before you do anything final with that.”

Darryl looked up at her, confused.

“If you have to leave part of you here,” Nita said, “think about which part you might leave.”

Darryl looked at her in confusion. “Which part?” he said. “I know I can be in both places with all of me, but splitting parts off—”

“Don’t make reasons you can’t do stuff, Darryl,” Kit said. “Find reasons you can.”

“You made this world,” Nita said. “That’s powerful stuff. And you can make the rules in here.

You made them so strongly, without even being clear on what you were doing, that the Lone Power Itself got stuck in here with you and couldn’t get out until you let It.

Now It’s gone… and you’re fully conscious, with the operating system for your own universe in your hands. You’re not just inside the game anymore: You’re outside it, too, now — you’re in control of it when you’ve got the kernel. Even from in here, you can make this world anything you want!“

Darryl looked from Nita to Kit, and slowly, surmise dawned in his eyes.

“The autism…”

“Why not? You started ditching it the first chance you got,” Nita said. “You ditched it on Kit, for example.”

Darryl looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to…”

“Darryl, I know you didn’t mean it personally,” Kit said. “It’s okay. You were doing a sane thing, getting rid of it!” Then he glanced at Nita. “I still don’t know why you didn’t get it.”

“It could have been that a lot more boys are autistic than girls,” Nita said. “Or that Darryl and I already had something in common.”

She wouldn’t say it out loud. She didn’t have to.

The pain

, Darryl said silently. The pain of being alone.

Nita had to glance away.

“Yeah,” Darryl said. “But giving it up…” He looked distressed. “I don’t know if I can! It’s part of me.”

“So?” Kit said. “Is it a part you need?”

‘No! Darryl said.

And then he fell silent.

“I hear a but coming,” Nita said.

“I don’t know if I know how to live without it,” Darryl said.

They were all silent for a few breaths.

“It’s how I stood being alive,” Darryl said. “It’s how I didn’t have to see the Lone Power at the bottom of everyone’s soul, all the time. If I go back without it, I’m going to have to see that. Every day. Every time I look at my mom, or my dad…”

“Believe me,” Nita said, very softly, “I’d look at my mom all day and every day no matter how much It looked out of her, if she were here to look at. Some things are a lot more important than others, Darryl.”

“We all see It sometimes,” Kit said. “We all run into It every day, in the people we know, in the things that happen around us. There’s no escape. That’s life. That’s Life: what we serve. It’s worth it.”

Darryl was silent. “I don’t know if I can stand how much it’s going to hurt,” he said. “I might lose it. I might fall back into being that way… and that would kill my folks.”

“I’m guessing your folks are tougher than you think,” Nita said, remembering the voices she’d heard on the way in. “Give them a chance. Give yourself a chance. If it does happen…” She grinned.

“You’re a wizard. Listen to the Silence. Pick yourself up and do what it tells you. You’ll get out again… because you’re tough, too. Tougher than you think.”

Darryl looked at Nita with eyes that were beginning to believe. “Besides,” Kit said, “imagine how funny it’ll be when It finally gets back in here, and locks Itself in, and then discovers that what It’s locked in with isn’t you. It’s your autism.“

Darryl looked from Kit to Nita with that expression of absolute delight, edged again with mischief.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “Let’s do it.”

“I don’t think there’s a lot of ‘let’s’ about this,” Kit said. “I think you get to do this part yourself.

Otherwise, it’s not going to take.”

“Use the kernel,” Nita said. “You set the configuration into it for the way you want this world to behave. The Silence will show you how. I had to take classes to find out, but this is your own world that you made. You’re not going to need authorizations to work with it.”

Darryl nodded, looking down at the kernel for a moment.

Then, “Oh,” he said. “Oh!”

He was quiet for a long time. While he was concentrating, Kit bent his head over to Nita’s and said, “Thanks.”

“It was my turn to save you,” Nita said, “that’s all. Now I want a few weeks off.”

Kit smiled a crooked smile at her.

Nita looked down at Ponch. “I thought you said you weren’t going to take the boss out again without me,” Nita said.

Ponch dropped his head a little. He went, he said. So I had to go, too. Then he brightened. But you got here when I thought you would, so it’s all right!

Nita gave Kit a look. “Your dog has me on a schedule” she said.

Kit shrugged. “He has a very well-developed time sense,” Kit said. “Ask him about feeding time, for example.”

Ponch began to jump up and down in excitement.

“Speaking of time,” Darryl said suddenly, “I think this looks right…”

Nita glanced over at the kernel in his hands, judging the way the tangle of light looked and felt.

“The parameters feel right,” she said. “You ready?”

Darryl nodded, looking nervous and elated.

“Do it!” Nita said.

Slowly, all around them, the brightness dimmed down. “I left you a space to slip through,” Darryl said, as the space darkened, like a stage at the end of a play. “Just behind you there. But this is what’U be left inside.”

Darkness, and a spotlight.

In the spotlight, a clown rode a tiny bicycle around and around, never stopping, never looking up. Its eyes were empty. It was a machine, just a fragment of personality without the soul that had once animated it: hopeless, mindless, animate but insensate. Kit looked at it and thought of a windup mouse going around and around in little circles, waiting for the cat.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kit said. “Darryl? You know the way back?”

“In my sleep,” he said, and grinned.

Kit held out a hand. “Welcome to the Art, brother,” he said.

Darryl took the hand, then pulled Kit close and hugged him hard. He let go, turned to Nita. He hugged her, too.

“Later,” she said. “Go home.”

Darryl vanished with the ease of someone who’s been doing it for years.

Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Your place or mine?” Nita said.

“My folks are going to yell at me,” Kit said, “so let’s do mine first.”

Nita smiled a small wry smile. “You just want me to help you take the heat.”

Mind reader

, Kit said. Come on.

They vanished, too.

Some distance away, in a special-ed classroom in Baldwin, the afternoon routine was proceeding as usual when one of the teachers saw something unusual happen.

Darryl McAllister looked at him, looked at him straight on.

The teacher went over to the boy, and got down beside him where he had been sitting on the floor and rocking. “Hey there, Darryl,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I don’t think,” Darryl said, in a voice that cracked and creaked with not having been used for words for a long time, “I don’t think I need to be here anymore.”

The teacher’s mouth dropped open.

“Can I go home now?” Darryl said, and smiled.