A Wizard Of Mars

Save Bookmark

Young Wizards

New Millennium Editions

Book 9:

A Wizard of Mars

Diane Duane

Errantry Press

A department of

The Owl Springs Partnership

County Wicklow

Republic of Ireland

Copyright page

A Wizard of Mars

New Millennium Edition

Errantry Press

County Wicklow, Ireland

Original edition copyright © 2010 by Diane Duane

Revised edition copyright © 2012 by Diane Duane

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:

Donald Maass Literary Agency

Suite 801, 121 West 27th Street

New York, NY 10001

USA

Publication history:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt North American hardcover edition, April 2010

Magic Carpet Books paperback edition, August 2011

Errantry Press International ebook edition, 2012

This Young Wizards New Millennium Edition of A Wizard of Mars follows the text of the 2012 Errantry Press International Edition, and has been revised and updated to reflect the new timeline that begins in the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard.

Dedication

For Kim and Ben and Greg

and Jules and ERB,

and, most affectionately, for Ray and Robert:

…because (one way or another)

we are all Martians:

— and for Peter Murray,

much-missed moderator of

the Young Wizards Discussion Forums,

something he’d really have liked:

that pesky timeline, sorted at last

Rubrics

…Mars, why art thou bent

On kindling thus the Scorpion, his tail

Portending evil and his claws aflame?…

Why planets leave their paths and through the void

Thus journey on obscure? ’Tis war that comes,

Fierce rabid war: the sword shall bear the rule…

(Pharsalia, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus: Book 1)

The one departed | is the one who returns

From the straitened circle | and the shortened night,

When the blue star rises | and the water burns:

Then the word long-lost | comes again to light

To be spoke by the watcher | who silent yearns

For the lost one found. Yet to wreak aright,

She must slay her rival | and the First World spurn

Lest the one departed | no more return.

(The Red Rede, 1-8)

Truth is always late, always last to arrive, limping along with Time.

(The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Baltasar Gracián, §146)

Time fix

Late June, 2010

1: Terra Cognita

The problem, Kit thought, scowling at the paper, isn’t the basic shape, so much. It’s what to do with the legs…

He briefly glanced up from the pencil sketch he’d been doing in the margin of his notebook and looked wearily up at Mr. Machiavelli, his history teacher, as if he’d actually been paying attention to anything the Mack was saying. It was hard enough to care, this time of year. One more week till school’s out. One more week!— and especially late on a Friday afternoon, when the air-conditioning was broken.

Again! Kit thought. He was sweltering, along with everyone else in the place. Only little, balding Mr. Mack, strolling back and forth in front of the blackboard and holding forth on Asian politics of the 50s, seemed untouched by the heat and humidity. He paused to write the word “Pyongyang” on the board, pausing in the middle of the process to stare at the word as if not sure of the spelling.

Oh, come on, Mack, give us a break: who cares about this stuff right now?! But the Mack, as the whole class knew too well by now, was unstoppable; the heat slowed him down no more than cold or rain or dark of night probably would have. People names and place names and endless dates just kept on rolling out of him, and now he turned to the blackboard and started writing again…

Kit let out a sigh and glanced at the air vents at the back of the room. Cold air should have been coming out of them, but right now they were emitting nothing but an occasional faint clunking noise as somewhere in the system a feeder vent kept trying and failing to open. The school system was having budget troubles, which meant that some equipment that needed to be completely replaced wasn’t even getting maintenance. But knowing this didn’t make the heat any easier to bear.

People in the back of the room were fanning themselves with paperwork and notebooks. Kids sitting by the open windows were leaning toward them, courting any passing breath of air, and (when Mr. Machiavelli wasn’t looking) panting obviously, as if that would help. Without stopping what he was saying, Mr. Mack had paused to flip open a book on his desk and peer down at it: he shoved a bookmark into it and turned back to the blackboard, starting to write something else. How can this not be bothering him when he’s got a whole suit on? Kit thought. Doesn’t he have sweat glands??

The cooling system clunked several times more, to no effect. Kit made a face, glanced at the clock. It seemed hopelessly stuck at twenty past two, and the class wasn’t going to let out until quarter of three…which from where Kit was sitting felt like at least a year away. I can’t stand it anymore. And anyway, none of them’ll notice—

Very quietly Kit reached down into the book bag beside his desk and pulled out his wizard’s manual. At the moment, the manual looked like his history textbook— which was perfectly normal, since earlier this year Kit had stuck a chameleon spell on the manual’s exterior, causing it to imitate the proper textbook for whatever class he happened to be in.

Kit turned idly through the manual’s pages to the one that held the spell he’d first crafted to do repairs on the school’s cooling system, back when it broke down during the unseasonal heat wave back in April. He’d had to use the spell several times since, and he’d had to rework it every time, because engineers from other schools kept coming over to work on the system— and every time they did, they disrupted whatever quick fix Kit had managed to implement the last time he’d done the fix-it spell. Gotta get in here sometime during vacation and do a real fix on the whole system, Kit thought. Otherwise things’ll get even worse when the cold weather comes around…

The words of the spell, in the long, curved strokes and curlicue hooks-and-crooks of the wizardly Speech, laid themselves out before him on the manual page. Hovering above them, faint and hardly to be seen, was the shadow of the camouflage page that any casual, nonwizardly observer would see if he or she looked at the book.

There was of course no question of saying the spell out loud in a situation like this. Gonna be kind of a strain doing it on the quiet, Kit thought. But this heat’s just too much. And what’s it like on the other side of the building, where the Sun’s hitting? The kids over there must be dying. Let’s just call this my good deed for the day.

He closed his eyes for a moment, working to make the requisite “quiet zone” inside his mind, and then opened his eyes again and started silently reading the words of the wizardry in the Speech. Slowly the wizardry started to work: a silence started to fall around Kit as the universe seemed to lean in around him, listening to the spell.

In the growing silence, Kit watched the room around him seem to fade, while the normally invisible layout of the cooling system now started to become visible, glowing like a wireframe diagram stretching out and away from the history classroom. Kit didn’t need to go hunting through the system to find the source of the problem. He knew where it was, and anyway, the locator functions of the spell would have shown him the duct near the heart of the building, just this side of the heat pump in the school’s engineering center.

Kit peered at the duct in his mind, concentrating on the source of the problem— a vent shutter that looked something like a small, boxy Venetian blind.

“Okay,” he said silently in the Speech. “What is it this time?”

The guy came again, said the vent shutter buried deep in the duct, and he tightened those bolts up too much…

“Said” was of course not the best way to put it— inanimate objects don’t communicate the way organic ones do— but to a wizard like Kit, who was good at communicating with such objects, the way the information passed was enough like talking and listening to think of it that way.

The wizardry showed Kit the bolts that the vent shutter meant: a series of them, up and down each side of it, fixing its shutter hinges to the inside of the duct. “Got it,” Kit said silently. “Okay, here we go—”

He turned his attention to the bolts. “Come on, guys, lighten up. You don’t need all that tension. Just let yourselves unwind…”

Half of wizardry was persuading people, creatures, or objects to do what you wanted them to. The rest of it was knowing what words in the Speech would get the intention across… and by now, Kit knew the words entirely too well. Slowly, the wizardry showed him the bolts loosening up one by one. “Not too much,” he said in his mind. “We don’t want the shutter to fall out. Yeah, that’s it… just like that.”

The last bolt rotated a quarter turn. “That’s the ticket,” Kit said in his mind. “That should do it. Thanks, guys.”

With one finger Kit traced a series of curves on the desk, the “unknotting” routine to undo the Wizard’s Knot that fastened most spells closed and started them working. The wizardry obediently unraveled: the glowing wireframe of the duct structure faded out as the classroom faded in around Kit again. And from far away in the building, echoing down the air vents that led into the room, Kit heard something go clunk, just once— the vent’s shutters, locking into the correct position. After a few moments, a breath of cooler air started sighing out of the vent.

Kit let out a breath of his own. It was tough to conceal the effects of doing a spell, even a minor one like this. He felt as if he’d just run up a few flights of stairs, and it was now taking some effort to keep his breathing regular. For the moment, all Kit could do was shut his manual and pick up his pencil, his hand shaking with a fine muscle tremor born of the brief exertion. But the air was cooling already. Worth it, Kit thought, even for just twenty minutes… He glanced again at the sketches in his notebook’s margin, the topmost of which showed a single slender tower rising from a forest of smaller ones, all surrounded by a barren, otherwordly landscape. The tower in particular was fuzzy around the edges, with erasures and redrawing: rendering architecture wasn’t Kit’s strong suit. But the figures he’d drawn farther down the page were better, especially the—

“Not too bad,” said a voice over his shoulder. “Better put some more clothes on her, though, or you’ll lose your PG-13 rating.”

Kit froze as the laughter of his classmates spread around the room.

Mr. Mack’s hand came down and picked up the notebook. “Actually, as regards the draftsmanship, not bad at all,” his history teacher said. “I’d rate her babe quotient at, oh, an eight or so. Make it eight-point-five for her, uh, attributes.” More snickering went around the class. Kit’s face went hot. “But as for the content…” Mr. Mack gave Kit a disapproving glance. “Not sure what it has to do with the aftermath of the Korean War…”

“Uh. Nothing,” Kit said.

“Nice to see that you realize that, Mr. Rodriguez,” Mr. Mack said, wandering back up to his desk and dropping the notebook on it. “So maybe you’ll exculpate yourself by filling us in on the continuing significance of the thirty-eighth parallel…”

Kit swallowed hard. This kind of thing was so much easier to do on paper: the shufflings and mutterings and under-the-breath comments of his classmates routinely filled him with more dread than being locked in a closet with the Lone Power. “It’s the border between North and South Korea,” he said. “Both sides have it heavily fortified. It’s also one of the few land borders you can see from space, because there’s normal city light on the southern side of the line, and it’s almost pitch-black on the north…”

Slowly his throat got less dry. Kit went on for a minute or two more about famines and political tensions, trying to remember some of the really good stuff that would have been just a couple of pages back in the notebook right in front of him if he hadn’t been drawing in it. Finally Mr. Mack held up a hand.

“Enough,” he said. “Ms. Simmons, maybe you’d pick up where the artistic Mr. Rodriguez left off. What effect is the UN’s food-aid effort likely to have on the North in view of the present political situation?”

“Uh—”

Kit had little amusement to spare for poor Delinda Simmons’s ensuing struggle to find an answer. Between doing the spell, trying to hide it, and then having to try to recall notes he’d taken two weeks before, he was now stressed to breathlessness. He concentrated on acting like he was paying attention, while being grateful Mr. Mack had let him off the hook so soon— he’d seen some of his classmates go through scenes of torment that had lasted a lot longer.

At last Mr. Machiavelli held up a hand, with just a glance at the clock. Kit glanced at it, too. Somehow it was still only two thirty. Boy, you don’t need wizardry to get time to run slow, sometimes …“All right,” Mr. Machiavelli said. “Were this an ordinary day, you’d all have to sit here and suffer through me doing a recap of what the work required for next Friday was going to be. But, lucky you, for you there is no next Friday! Where you’ll all be by then, since classes end on Tuesday, I neither know nor care. Me, I’ll be up on the North Fork, wearing a really beat-up straw hat and helping an old friend prune her grapevines— not that any of you will care. What you will care about, of course, are your final grades.”

A great stillness settled over the classroom, broken only by the sighing of cool air from the vent. Mr. Mack turned toward his desk, flipped his briefcase up onto it, and opened it. “These exams,” he said, “as you know, are sixty percent of your final grade. As usual, there’ll probably be questions and comments from some of your parents.” Mr. Mack drew himself up as tall as was possible for him: maybe five feet two. “But you, and they, should know by now that there aren’t going to be any changes. Whatever you’ve got, you’ve brought on yourselves. So, those of you who have recourse to inhalers, get them out now…”

He brought out a pile of papers stapled together in six-sheet bundles, and started to work his way up and down the aisles, starting from the leftmost row. Kit sat there with his palms sweating, grateful that at least Mr. Mack wasn’t one of those sadists who called you up to the desk in front of everybody to get the bad news.

In the first row, subdued mutters of “Yes!” or “Oh, no…” were already going up. A couple of seats behind Kit and to the left, his buddy Raoul Eschemeling got his paper and looked at the back page, where Mr. Mack usually wrote the grade. Then he raised his eyebrows at Kit, grinned at him, at the same time making an “OK, not bad …!” gesture with one hand.

Kit swallowed as Mr. Mack came to his row, gave Gracie Mackintosh her paper, gave Tim Walenczak, in front of Kit, his… and then glanced down at Kit, shook his head slightly, and walked on by. “I’ll see you after class,” Mr. Mack said.

The sweat all over Kit went cold in a flash. Some kids in the class broke out in either a low moan of “Uh-oh…” or some really nasty laughs that were badly smothered, on purpose. Kit went hot again at the laughter. There were some junior boys and a senior in here who resented being tracked into this class with the smart younger kids; these guys were constantly ragging Kit about his grades being too good.

As if something like that’s possible where my folks are concerned! Kit thought. But nonetheless, he could just hear them: He’s a geek, just a nerd, it comes naturally, he can’t help it. Or else: teacher’s pet, little brownnoser, who knows what he’s doing to Mack to get grades like this… They were just the normal jeers that Kit had long ago learned to expect, and it didn’t take mind reading or any other kind of wizardry to hear them going through those kids’ brains right now.

Kit could do nothing now but sit there as students all around him got their papers while his own desk remained terrifyingly empty. Oh, no. Oh, no. What’s going on? What have I done now? And the tragedy was that he had no idea. He racked his brain for anything that made any kind of sense, as the last papers in the right-hand row went out.

Mr. Mack made his way back to his desk. “Not a brilliant result, all told,” Mr. Mack said as he closed his briefcase and put it aside. “Workmanlike, in many cases. Dull, in a lot of others. You people need to get it through your heads that spitting a teacher’s exact words back at him in an essay, or adding material that’s plainly been plagiarized from encyclopedias and online sources, won’t cut it… with me, or the much tougher teachers to follow, who’ll get really offended at you insulting their intelligence with such lackluster output. None of your result exactly shone, and none of your results were utter disasters. With a very few exceptions.”

The silence was nearly as profound as the one that had leaned in around Kit earlier, but this one was far more unnerving. Kit felt eyes all around the room resting on him in scared or amused conjecture.

He glanced over his shoulder. Raoul hunched his tall, blond, gangly self down against his desk and rolled his eyes at the others’ reaction. The look he threw Kit was sympathetic. Raoul, too, had had a grade slump earlier in the year, and his own dad and mom had taken turns tearing strips off him about it ever since, invoking not getting into college and “a ruined résumé” and other dire threats if he didn’t shape up. Ever since, he and Kit had been studying together, and they’d both thought they had the course material down pat. Well, one of us did, anyway…

Mr. Mack glanced at the clock. It suddenly said two forty-three, and now Kit found himself wishing desperately that time would slow down again. “Well,” Mr. Mack said, “I’m sure you’re all thinking we’ve all seen enough of each other for one year. For the moment, I’m inclined to agree with you. So all of you just get yourselves the heck out of here!”

This invitation was immediately followed by a muted cheer and the concerted shriek of chairs being pushed back as the bell went. Everybody who hadn’t already leapt to his feet did so now and plunged toward the door: the classroom emptied as if it had been turned upside down and shaken. Kit stood there and watched everyone go… then finished stuffing his manual and other books into his book bag and went up to Mr. Mack’s desk.

“Well,” Mr. Mack said, glancing up from Kit’s notebook. “Any thoughts?”

This gambit was one of the Mack’s favorite ways to get a student to say something dumb, allowing him scope to verbally torture the unfortunate victim for many minutes thereafter. Kit was determined not to let this happen. “Okay, I shouldn’t have been drawing,” he said. “I should have been paying attention.”

Mr. Mack put his eyebrows up as if resigned at so quick a surrender. Kit had seen this maneuver, too, and what came of it: he refused to rise to the bait. For a few moments there was silence as each of them concentrated on outwaiting the other.

Then Mr. Mack glanced at the notebook. “It’s a thoat, isn’t it,” he said.

Kit followed his glance, surprised. “Uh, yeah.”

“Not a lot of people still read those books,” Mr. Mack said. “Burroughs’s style has to seem antiquated these days. But you can’t fault his imagination.” He looked down at Kit’s sketch of what had to be a very large creature, to gauge by the scale of the humanoid being standing next to it. “What made him decide to put so many legs on these things, I can’t imagine. I could never assemble a clear picture of a thoat in my head no matter how I tried.”

“If you sort of divide the legs into two sets—” Kit said.

“Six and two, huh?” Mr. Mack said, studying the drawing. “With the six in the back grouped for better traction? You may have a point.” Mr. Mack glanced up at him again. “But it’s possibly still an effort that might better have been saved for your art class.”

“Uh, yeah.”

He glanced across the page. “And that would be the calot, I guess. Another nice solution for the multiple legs. Nice tusks, too. You wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of that thing. And as for her…” Mr. Mack said, glancing down at the sketch again with a critical eye. “Well, you’ve put more clothes on her than Burroughs did. This rendition owes more to Victoria’s Secret than the descriptions in the original… so let’s let the inappropriateness issue ride for the moment.”

Kit blushed fiercely. “Now about your test,” Mr. Mack said. “You and Mr. Eschemeling have been working together. Pretty hard, I believe. So I was curious about… let’s call it a discrepancy in your performance on the final.”

What have I done to deserve this? Kit thought in despair. I worked so hard! I really studied for this, it should have been all right, I should at least have passed—

“Especially since there’s nothing wrong with your ability to discuss the material, even in front of your admittedly unsympathetic classmates,” Mr. Mack said. “That was a nice touch, by the way— that bit about being able to see the border from space. Saw that picture myself, some months back. It brings you up short.”

Kit didn’t feel inclined to mention that he hadn’t seen the image as a picture: the difference was clearly visible from the surface of the Moon when the weather on Earth was right. “The light on one side, and the darkness on the other…” Mr. Mack said. “A striking image. Too bad things aren’t usually quite so simple, especially over there. Anyway, no question that your work’s improved the last couple of months. You’ve been trying a whole lot harder than you were before.”

And this was true… which was why Kit couldn’t understand why he was standing here alone without a test paper in his hand. Mama’s going to go so ballistic with me, we’ll be able to use her to launch satellites! I can’t believe I—

“The problem might lie in the way your concentration comes and goes without warning, kind of like it did just then,” Mr. Mack said. “But we’ll chalk that up to end-of-term antsies, huh?” Then he grinned— an expression that Kit had rarely seen on Mr. Mack’s face before. Kit didn’t know if this was cause for alarm, but he was alarmed enough already. “Now, then—”

Mr. Mack popped his briefcase open and pulled out one last test paper. Kit instantly recognized his own handwriting on it.

“I thought I’d spare you the embarrassment of dealing with this in front of the class…” Mr. Mack said softly. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that some of our older participants have issues.”

If Kit thought he’d been sweating before, he now found that his pores had been holding out on him. Mr. Mack looked at him with a thoughtful expression.

“And so,” he said, “because for all I know you may see some of them socially, I didn’t really want to give them a chance to make your life uncomfortable all summer because of—” and he held up the test paper— “this.”

Kit gulped and reached for the paper, shaking slightly. At the bottom of the front page, circled, was a number: 99%.

Kit’s eyes went wide. “Ninety-nine?” he said. “Ninety-nine!”

“Best mark in the class,” Mr. Mack said. “Congratulations.”

Then it hit Kit. “Ninety-nine??” he said, flipping the pages to look at them one after another. “Why not a hundred!?”

Mr. Mack looked at his watch. “Possibly one of the shortest bursts of gratitude on record,” he said. “Kit, I had no choice. You misspelled ‘Pyongyang.’”

Kit was so torn between relief and completely unreasonable disappointment that all he could do was say “Oh.”

“One ‘o,’ one ‘a,’” Mr. Mack said. “I checked. Sorry about that. But your essay was terrific. Best I’ve seen in a long while. You’re showing at least a few of the warning signs of falling in love with history.”

Kit said nothing, partly from embarrassment at being praised, and partly because he suspected Mr. Mack was right, and he didn’t know what to make of that.

“So you can tell your mother, who I know was giving you grief,” Mr. Mack said, “that whatever else you’ve done in your other subjects this spring, you’ve passed history with flying colors, and I’m really pleased with you. She should be, too. Tell her to get in touch if she wants any more details.”

“She will,” Kit said.

Mr. Mack smiled slightly. “So did mine,” he said. “Mothers. What can you do?… Go on, get out of here. And enjoy your summer.”

Kit stuffed the paper hurriedly into his book bag and shouldered it. Mr. Mack closed his briefcase with the air of a man shutting a whole year into it, and good riddance. Then he glanced up. “Unless there was something else? Of course there was.”

Kit gave up any hope of ever being able to put anything over this particular teacher. “Yeah. Uh— How do you not sweat like that?”

Mr. Mack looked briefly surprised, and then laughed out loud. “The phrasing’s unusual,” Mr. Mack said. “I take it you mean, how do I not sweat? And the answer is, I don’t not sweat.”

Kit raised his eyebrows.

“But I do waterproof the insides of my clothes,” Mr. Mack said.

Kit stared at him. Mr. Mack laughed again, then, the sound of a sneaky magician giving away the secret to a really good trick. “It’s a Marine thing,” Mr. Mack said. “We used to do it on parade. We spray our shirts with that anti-stain waterproofing stuff you use on upholstery. It’s good for giving other people the impression that you’re not quite human.”

His voice as he said this was so dry that Kit burst out laughing. But a moment later he stopped. “You were in the Marines?” Kit said, suddenly seeing Mr. Mack with entirely new eyes. This little guy, just barely taller than Kit’s mama, with his bald head and his red tie with little blue galloping ponies on it, a different tie every day—“Korea?”

Mr. Mack shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “A lot of other places. But Korea was well before my time.”

Kit looked at him; this time it was his turn to look thoughtful. “The way you talked about it, though. The dark, the light—”

Mr. Mack shook his head. “If a historian needs anything,” he said, “it’s an imagination. The dates, the place names, the battles… they’re not what’s most important. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them— their sky, their sea. Their tools. Their houses. Their troubles. That’s how what they did starts to make sense. Along with what we do in the same situations…”

He paused, looking surprised at himself. “Sorry. It’s a passion,” Mr. Mack said. “But I can recognize the signs in someone else. Watch out: it’ll eat you alive. Other lives, other minds …there’s no getting enough of them.” He gave Kit a cockeyed look. “Why are you still here? Go away before I give you a quiz.”

Kit grinned and left with as much dignity as he could manage. The dignity broke down about three yards down the hall, as he caught sight of Raoul, trying to look like he was leaning casually against a locker, waiting for Kit. Kit didn’t know whether to try to look cool or to scream out loud. Screaming won. He pulled the paper out again, waved it in Raoul’s face.

Raoul snatched it out of Kit’s hand. “Do you believe this, Pirate?” Kit yelled. “Do you believe this?!”

They started jumping up and down together like the acrobatically insane. “Ninety-nine! Ninety-nine!” Raoul promptly turned it into something like a sports chant. “Nine-ty-nine! Nine-ty-nine!”

People wandering down the hall that crossed this one stared at them, vaguely interested by the actions of the certifiably mad— meaning anyone who would still willingly be in the building after the end of the last period. “But what did you get?” Kit said as they headed toward the doors at the end of the hall.

“Eighty,” Raoul said.

Kit suddenly felt bizarrely disappointed. “How’d that happen?”

“I messed up the essay,” Raoul said. “But I did okay on everything else. It’s not a bad grade. My mom’ll get off my case now.”

“Mine, too,” Kit said, “I hope. But wow, what a relief. I thought I was dead!”

“I thought you were dead!” Raoul laughed that crazed laugh of his as they went down the hall to the paired doors that led to the parking lot. They each hit one door and burst out into the hot, humid summer air, laughing.

“This day could not possibly get any better,” Kit said.

“Oh, come on,” Raoul said, “stretch your brains. Anything could happen…”

They saw Raoul’s mom’s slightly beat-up red station wagon come swinging in through the parking lot gates. “So listen,” Raoul said, “my dad says we’re having a big barbecue next week, for his birthday. Next Thursday. You and your folks and your sister, you’re all invited. Can you make it?”

“I’ll find out.”

“Okay,” Raoul said, as his own mom pulled up. “Text me later!”

Kit nodded, waving at Raoul’s little blond mom as he got into the car. The first thing Raoul did was fish around in his pack and show his mom the test paper: she grinned, and Raoul flashed a grin of his own at Kit as his mom drove away.

Kit let out a long breath as he glanced down at his own paper one more time, then put it away. His nerves were finally settling down, which was a good thing, as he was also still tired from doing that spell. He wasn’t so tired, though, that he wasn’t going to immediately call the wizard with whom he worked most closely and do a little gloating.

He pulled his wizard’s manual out of his backpack, flipping it open to the rearmost pages, the messaging area. Some pages were covered with stored messages, all seemingly printed in the graceful curvilinear characters of the wizardly Speech; but any one Kit touched with a finger would seem to rise up out of the page, the writing increasing in size for easier reading. He flipped through the back pages until he found one that was blank, ready to take a message— and then stopped. In the middle of a page that had been blank earlier in the afternoon was a single line of text, and it was glowing fiercely blue and pulsing alternately brighter and fainter— the sign of a message that had just come in and hadn’t yet been read.

Kit peered at it. There was nothing there but a time stamp— JD 2455367.11685— and these words:

We’ve found the bottle. Meeting this afternoon. M.

The breath went right out of Kit.

Holy cow …Raoul was right!!

“Yes!” Kit shouted. He slapped the manual shut, shoved it back in the book bag, and jumped up and punched the air some more. And then, because right in front of the school would have been a bad place to do a teleport, he ran off across the parking lot, grinning, to find a more private spot.

2: Gili Motang

Nita Callahan sat on the flat, warm stones at the edge of the koi pond, her eyes closed, looking for something.

After a moment, she saw it. Shadow, she thought. A shadow across the Sun. Just for a few seconds. But when?

She waited: and then she knew.

“Now,” she said, and opened her eyes.

The water rippled at her in the summer breeze, the surface of it dazzling in the bright and uninterrupted sunlight. Nita winced.

“Oh, come on,” she said under her breath. “Come on!” She looked up at the sky overhead. It remained stubbornly clear.

“That won’t help,” said a small voice from the water.

She frowned and refused to answer. Above and beyond the trees that surrounded Tom Swale’s yard, very slowly, a single little puffy cloud could be seen cruising toward the low, late-afternoon Sun. It seemed to be in no hurry. If clouds had feet, it would have been dragging them.

Nita scowled harder. Hurry up! she thought in the Speech. Come on, get a move on!

But merely thinking something in the Speech doesn’t turn the idea into a spell… especially since wizardry is mostly about persuading creatures and things to do what you want, not ordering them around.

The cloud actually seemed to slow up. Then, finally, almost reluctantly, it started to pass in front of the sun.

Nita grinned. “Awright!” she said, looking down into the fishpond. “That’s the best one yet! I only missed it by half a minute.”

One of the koi, the one with the silver-coin scales, looked up out of the pond at her. “Fifty seconds,” Doitsu said.

“Or about fifty-five seconds too long,” said another voice, a human one, from behind her. “Doesn’t count. Try it again.”

Nita let out an annoyed breath and turned. “You guys are just being mean!”

“An oracular who predicts the future a minute late is possibly even less effective than one who gets it wrong all the time,” Tom Swale said, straightening up with a groan from the flower bed where he’d been working. “And will probably get a lot more frustrated.”

“Hey, thanks loads,” Nita said, and slumped against the fishpond’s rockwork.

“You’d hardly expect me to start lying to you at this late date,” Tom said, amused.

Nita gave him an annoyed look. “Let’s see you do any better!”

“Me? Why should I?” Tom frowned down at the next flower bed. “This is your gift we’re trying to sharpen up.”

“And, anyway, it’s too hot!”

“True,” Tom said, “but nothing to do with the business at hand. Come on, give it another try.”

Nita wiped her forehead; she was sweating. “It’s no use. I need a break.”

Another koi, a marmalade-colored one, put its head up out of the water. “You need to concentrate harder,” said Akagane. “You can’t be in that moment unless you’re in this one.”

“Blank your mind out first,” said Doitsu.

A third head came up, splotched in red and black on silver-white. “Pay more attention to the news,” said Showa.

Nita rolled her eyes. “None of you are helping!”

“It’s not help you need,” Tom said. “It’s practice. You think anybody learns to see futurity overnight?”

“Forget the future!” Nita said. “I can barely see the present!” She leaned back against the rocks behind the koi pond, rubbing her eyes: beams from the low sun piercing through the trees were glancing off the pond’s surface, and the glitter of them made her eyes water.

“The news’ll help with that, too,” Tom said. He was sweating; even in a T-shirt, the humidity that day was enough to make anybody miserable.

“And it’s not the future,” said Showa, backfinning toward where the rocks overhanging the pond made a small waterfall. “A future.”

Nita sighed. “But how can you tell you’ve got the right one?”

“You can’t,” said Akagane as she rose to the surface in Showa’s wake. “At least, you can’t tell for sure, or very clearly.”

“You can get a feeling,” said Doitsu, just hanging there in the water and fanning his fins. “Or a hunch.”

“But what if you’re wrong?”

Doitsu made a kind of shrug with his fins. “You try again. Assuming you haven’t blown up the world or something in the meantime…” And he submerged.

The other two koi sank down into the water as well. Nita sighed and leaned back, watching Tom as he walked over to another of the plant beds, squatted down beside it, and then let out a long, annoyed breath. He reached down in among some of the plants, pushed broad green leaves aside, and sighed.

“Guys,” Tom said in the Speech, “how many times do we have to have this conversation?” He picked something up, looked at it. It was a slug. He shook his head and tossed it off to one side, into another leafy bed. “Those are your strawberries—” fling— “over there! These are my strawberries—” fling— “over here!”

Nita gave him a crooked smile. “That can’t be real good for them.”

“Slugs are resilient,” Tom said.

Nita watched another one fly through the air. “Yeah. I see how they bounce…”

“Do I hear a criticism coming?”

Nita restrained herself, but wasn’t quite ready to stop teasing Tom yet. “Isn’t it weird that a Senior Wizard can talk the sky into hitting things with lightning but can’t talk a bunch of slugs out of eating his strawberries?”

Tom sighed. “Lightning’s a lot easier to talk to than slugs,” he said. “Not that you’re so much talking to the slug as to its DNA… which has been the way it is for about a hundred million years. Strawberries are a relatively recent development, to a slug. But then, so are human beings.” He grinned. “Anyway, I live in hope that they’ll get it eventually. But enough of you being on my case. Or just you. Kit’s running late. Where’s he gotten to?”

Nita rolled her eyes. “That’d be the question, the last couple weeks.”

Tom glanced up. “He’s missing Ponch, huh?”

Nita shrugged, not sure how to describe what was going on. Kit’s dog had been getting increasingly strange for a long time, but in the complex and disruptive events of the last month he had gone way beyond strange, right out of life and into something far greater. Kit wasn’t exactly sad about what had happened, but he was definitely sad at not having his dog around anymore. “It’s complicated,” Nita said. “I don’t think it’s just about Ponch. But he’s been away from home a lot.”

Tom straightened up again and gave Nita a look that was slightly concerned. “A lot of that going around right now…”

Nita sighed. “Tell me about it. But his sister Helena’s coming home from college in a couple of weeks. That has to be on his mind. And then there’s Carmela. He’s having trouble dealing with her lately.”

Tom pulled off his gardening gloves and tossed them up into the air: they vanished. “Yeah, well,” he said. “First time off the planet, and what does she do but stride out into the universe like she owns the place and blow up the Lone Power? For what that’s ever worth in the long term. Still, I could see where it might make Kit feel a little surplus.” Tom strolled back to her, his hands in his pockets. “Does Carmela seem any different?”

“No. Or yes,” Nita said. “But that might just be because of her PSAT scores.”

Tom put his eyebrows up. “Worse than expected?”

“Better,” Nita said. “It’s screwed up her college plans. She thought she was going to take it easy and go to the community college in Garden City. Now all of a sudden her pop and mama and her guidance counselor are giving her all this stuff about CalTech and Harvard.”

Tom gave Nita a wry look. “Interesting problem. But otherwise it sounds like you’re telling me that, though her PSATs might be an issue, shooting up a major interstellar transport center and being dragged halfway across the known Universe hasn’t particularly cramped her style.”

“No. And that’s what has me worried. Tom, tell me she’s not turning into a wizard!”

He laughed one big laugh. “Would it break your heart if she was?”

“Mine? Not really. Kit’s? That’s another story.”

“Not that I could do anything one way or the other,” Tom said. “If the Powers offered her the Oath and she accepted it. It’d be out of our hands. But wouldn’t you think it’s kind of late for her to become a wizard? You know how it goes. Onset in humans is usually between twelve and fourteen…”

“Except for people like Dairine,” Nita muttered.

“Yes, well,” Tom said, straightening up with a groan and massaging the small of his back, “your sister’s the exception to most of the rules I know. How’s she coping, by the way?”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to work out what’s going on with her sometimes. All she’ll say is that she’s looking for Roshaun.”

Tom nodded, heading for the French doors at the back of the house. Nita got up from the edge of the pond and followed him in. “What’s your take on that?” Tom said.

Nita shook her head as she stepped into the relative cool of the living room. That he vanished in a cloud of moondust while he was doing a wizardry that had one end stuck in the core of the Sun, and he’s probably dead, and my sister’s in denial? she thought, but refused to say out loud.

On the kitchen table, Tom’s version of the wizard’s manual was stacked up several volumes high. “What’s it say about him in there?” Nita said.

Tom put up his eyebrows. “You haven’t looked in your own manual?” he said.

“Well…”

“Scared to?”

Nita gave him a look. She had of course been scared to. Finding out the truth would have forced her into a position where she would have had to start working out what to do about Dairine.

Tom shook his head. “You know,” he said, going over to the sink to wash his hands, “if I looked in there for an answer, and then told you what I was shown, it might not be data that from your point of view would necessarily be definitive. Or even useful. Has that occurred to you?”

“No,” Nita said.

“Well, when you do get around to looking, tell me what you see.”

Nita rolled her eyes, as she’d been hoping to get Tom to do the scary thing for her: she’d had more than enough of being scared in the last month or so. Great. Now I get to go back to being just too chicken to look…

“And by the way,” Tom said, turning off the faucet and reaching for a dish towel hanging over the door of the cupboard under the sink, “you’re blinking.”

“Huh?” Nita said, and then glanced to her right. “Oh, yeah, right.”

There in midair beside her, a little pinpoint of blue light like a star was flashing on and off. “I really should hook up a sound to this,” Nita said, reaching out to the little light and pulling it straight down in the air. “I did this wizardry the other morning real early, and I didn’t want to wake anybody up while I was testing it.”

A vertical slit of darkness opened in the air, exposing the inside of the otherspace pocket in which Nita kept her wizard’s manual and various other useful objects while she was out and about. She reached into the darkness, felt around for a moment, and then came out with her manual.

Nita started paging through it while Tom opened the fridge and rummaged around. “Message?” he said, coming out with a couple of cans of cola.

“Yeah. Uh, got any fizzy water in there?”

“Sure. Thought you were the big cola fan, though…”

“I’m off the sugar for a while.”

“Don’t tell me,” Tom said, coming out with a bottle of mineral water, “that you’re starting to worry about your weight! Completely inappropriate for you at your age—”

“Huh? Oh, no, no, it’s just that I keep getting these… Never mind.” Nita trailed off, partly on purpose, as she flipped the manual open to the back pages where the messaging wizardries and messages were stored. No way she was going to get into acne-and body-image issues right now with a wizard of a completely different sex, seniority, and order of importance.

On the rearmost page of the manual, one block of text was alternately glowing dark and fading. Nita peered at it. Then she snickered. “Kit’s getting ready to go to Mars,” she said, putting down the manual for a moment and opening the mineral water to take a swig. “What a surprise!”

Tom chuckled as he popped open his can of cola. “Kind of the flavor of the month with him, isn’t it?”

“More like the flavor of the year.” Nita read down the message and tapped the reference link at the bottom of it: another message, the one that had caused Kit to send her the first, appeared in the first one’s place. “He’s got Mars posters up in his room, and little Mars crawlers on his desk, and half the Mars books in the school library aren’t there: they’re stacked up on his bed…”

She grinned. “Hey, this is great. Mamvish got in just now! We’ve been talking to her a lot by manual this last year, but we’ve never seen her in person. Kit’s gonna be buzzed to meet her finally.”

Nita shut her manual and put it away in the otherspace pocket again, “zipping up” the little blue light to close it again. She pinched the light; it went out. “Which is probably why he ran straight over to Gili Motang without waiting for me.”

Tom smiled at Nita’s annoyed expression. “Well, maybe it’s understandable,” he said. “Mamvish is heavily in demand all over this side of the galaxy: normally we don’t get to see so senior a wizard out this way unless it’s something to do with worldgates. If the Powers’ own Species Archivist has come out to our neighborhood in person to check up on something, that’s definitely a hot topic. So if Kit wants to go do the fanboy thing, well, so will half the other wizards on the planet.” Tom paused. “And now that I think of it…” He got up and went back to the fridge.

Puzzled, Nita watched Tom open it again and start rooting around. “I guess there really are no accidents,” he said, coming out with a very large plastic bag full of tomatoes. Tom shut the fridge and handed the bag to Nita.

She looked at the bag, and then at Tom again. Tom grinned at her. “When you catch up with Kit,” he said, “make sure you take that with you. It’s been so hot so early this year, the backyard’s getting overrun with these.” He sighed. “And in another week it’ll be the zucchini. I’ve really got to check in with the global warming intervention group…”

“Tomatoes??” Nita said. “What kind of spell uses tomatoes?”

“And tell Mamvish we send our best,” Tom said. “I’d love to go see her myself, but I have to get back to work. Carl and I and all the other Seniors are still hip-deep in the on-planet cleanup from last month’s business.”

“I feel for you,” Nita said, not entirely sincerely. “Tom, there are a ton of these! My arms are breaking!”

Tom just laughed. “So levitate them.”

The spell to make them float would have cost as much energy as just carrying them, or more. Nita just gave Tom an annoyed look, boosted the overstuffed bag up from the bottom, and shifted it to her other arm. Tom picked up his cola again and went over to the table, gesturing at the stack of manuals. Several of them picked themselves up off one in the middle of the stack: Tom pulled it out, and the others settled back onto the stack once more.

“Obviously our manuals will update with a précis of what you all decide to do about whatever she’s here for,” Tom said, sitting down. “Especially since Mamvish won’t have come all this way just for fun. But do me a favor and drop me a note to fill in any details you think we should know about.”

“Okay,” Nita said, and shifted the bag to the other arm again. Tom was already paging through his own manual, wearing a distracted look… which frankly didn’t surprise Nita, considering what all the wizards on the planet had been through of late. So why hang around and pester him? Let’s go find out what the tomatoes are good for.

She hefted the bag again to resettle it over her hip, then wandered out of the house and over to the fishpond again, peering in. One of the koi came drifting up to the surface: it was Doitsu. “Hey,” Nita said. “I forgot to ask you:

“Wha’d you think of the mealworms?

Did they satisfy

That deep-down desire for ‘yum’?”

Doitsu gave her a look and just hung there in the water, fanning his fins and saying nothing.

“Okay,” Nita said. “See if I go out of my way to bring you stuff from the bait shop again.”

Doitsu eyed Nita from under the water. “The mealworms were lovely,” he said. “But your scansion’s execrable. ‘Wha’d’?”

Nita rolled her eyes. “I’m just getting the hang of this! Cut me some slack.”

“When you can construct a haiku without apostrophes, sure,” Doitsu said. “And not a moment sooner. If you’re going to be an oracular, you’ve got standards to maintain. So get out there and make me not want to spit in your eye.” And he vanished down into the water again.

Nita shifted the bag of tomatoes to the other arm. “I’m getting trash-talked by fish,” she said under her breath. “Something’s wrong with this picture.” She sighed and took the flagstone path around the side of the house, heading for home.

It wasn’t too long a walk, which was a good thing: though she kept shifting the tomato bag from hand to hand, both her arms were still killing her by the time she got close to her house. As Nita came down the sidewalk in the early sunset light, she looked at her front yard— all covered with ground ivy, and with the single big maple tree standing up out of the middle of it, shading everything— and thought, Why does it look so little these days? And the house, too. It was a standard enough bungalow for this neighborhood— white-shingled, black-roofed, two stories, with the attic partly converted—but lately it had seemed much smaller than it had this time last year. As Nita walked up the driveway, the memory of the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility came back to her unbidden: that vast main concourse illuminated with its strange sourceless night lighting, its tremendously high roof-sky seemingly absent and the whole concourse open to the huge, pulsating, many-colored stars of its home planet’s neighborhood. After you’d been there as much as I have this last month, anything’d look small, Nita thought. That place has got to be the size of New Jersey. Well, Rhode Island, anyway…

She went up the stairs to the back door, expecting to have to let herself in: but the inside door was open. Nita opened the screen door, braced it behind her so it wouldn’t slam, and dumped the bagged tomatoes on the drainer by the sink as she went through the kitchen. “Daddy?”

“He had to go back to the shop for something,” came a voice from inside, and Nita grinned, because it wasn’t her sister’s voice coming from the living room, but someone else’s entirely. “He’ll be back in an hour, he said.”

Nita went through the dining room into the living room. There Kit’s older sister Carmela was sitting on the floor amid a heap of cushions and a scatter of TV remotes. Nita looked at the remotes in bemusement, as she couldn’t remember their TV having quite that many. There was the VCR remote, sure, and the one for the TV, and the—

“Ohaiyo gozaimas’!” the TV yelled at her as she entered.

Nita stopped still. Oh no… she thought. “Mela,” she said, “you didn’t—”

“I brought our remote over,” Carmela said, and stretched her fluffy-sweatered self out among the cushions, toying with her single long dark braid. “Dairine said it might be smart to train your TV to get the alien cable channels, the way Kit did with ours. This is bargain-shopping season, after all! And we don’t want to freak out the visitors at home…”

Nita perched briefly on the arm of her dad’s easy chair behind Carmela and looked at the TV. It wasn’t nearly as fancy or new a model as Kit’s new entertainment-center TV was, but all the same it was showing a channel-listing page as sleek and modern as anything Kit’s set could boast. And as Carmela punched the “scroll” button, the online guide shifted through page after page after page of channels that didn’t exist anywhere on this planet. The entries on the scrolling pages were all in the curving, curling characters of the wizardly Speech, which many worlds used as a common language of discourse. “Wait a minute,” Nita said. “What visitors?”

“Ooh,” Carmela said, “you mean you haven’t heard? Guess who’s coming home from college!”

“No, I did hear,” Nita said, easing herself down off the easy chair to flop down among the cushions, “but I thought that wasn’t till July…”

Carmela shook her head until her braid flopped around. She punched the remote, which immediately changed the TV Guide channel to one of the many thousands of alien shopping channels available to users of GalacTrans or whatever other unearthly “cable” provider Carmela had hooked them into. “Nope,” she said, watching absently as some alien being apparently made entirely of wreathing chartreuse smoke did its best to demonstrate the virtues of what Nita thought was some kind of household appliance, maybe a food processor. It picked up one indecipherable “accessory” after another with tendrils of green smoke, waving them around. “That whole thing blew up,” Carmela said, leaning back and briefly looking at Nita upside down. “Helena had a fight with her boyfriend, so no Paris for them! She’s already cashed in the plane tickets. She’s going to come back next week and stay here until her college choir’s trip to Romania or wherever they’re going…”

“Slovenia, Kit said,” Nita said.

“Whatever. At least she’ll have fun with the vampires!”

Nita shook her head. “No vampires,” she said. “Some undead, yeah, and some confused Goth wannabes. But there haven’t been real turn-into-a-bat-and-flap-around vampires since 1652.”

“Really? What happened in 1652?”

“Some other time, okay?” Nita said, increasingly distracted by the chartreuse-smoke creature, which was now pouring itself rapidly into what looked like the container of the food processor and pulling a lid down over it. A second later, a tentacle of green smoke came curling out of the container and punched one of the buttons on the processor’s front. The tendril was abruptly sucked back into the main mass of the creature as many peculiar things started happening inside the container at that point, including small lights flashing like sparks inside an outraged microwave.

“So when’s Helena’s trip?”

“August the first,” Carmela said, shaking her head.

“Gonna be tough at home till then, Neets.” She raised her eyebrows, looking at Nita out of the corner of her eye. “I know,” Carmela said. “Let’s do a road trip. Let’s go over to Ireland and see your buddy Ronan!”

Nita rolled her eyes. “He is not my buddy!”

“Yeah, and isn’t it wonderful,” Carmela said. Her real intentions, Nita thought, couldn’t possibly be as predatory as her smile made them appear. I hope! “But isn’t it August when everything gets crazy in Ireland? It did last time…”

“Believe me,” Nita said, “what happened then is not a regularly scheduled event.” She sat there for a moment more watching the TV, where the “blender” seemed to have stopped— at least the flashing and smoking going on inside it had. The mist creature came out, not yellow-green now, but pink, and waved its tendrils around: a long line of number-characters in the Speech, probably the “food processor’s” details, started flashing on the screen. Nita shook her head. “I came in late,” she said. “What’s this about?”

“It’s a portable wanjaxer,” Carmela said. “On sale, it looks like. Which is all right, except I don’t know if I really want to get into wanjaxing. I mean, I’m as broad-minded and tolerant as the next girl, but there are all these hue issues…”

Nita rolled her eyes. Carmela had been spending a lot of time lately studying alien lifestyles, and her attempts to explain some of the finer points could take hours. “Forget it,” Nita said. “You see Kit before he left?”

Carmela looked at Nita in shock. “You didn’t? You mean he just ditched you and ran off halfway around the world?” She paused. “Is it halfway?”

Nita frowned, considering. “I’d have to look it up. How’d you know where he went?”

“The remote told me,” Carmela said. “It loves Kit, but it’s no good at keeping a secret. Are you, cutie-bunny?” She reached down to the remote on the cushion beside her and tickled it under its infrared emitter. Nita was startled to see it arch its little “back” and emit a small electronic purr. She thought back to her conversation with Tom, and then put aside the thought that Kit’s original specialty had been getting inanimate objects and mechanical things to do what he wanted.

And now Carmela… Naah, it’s probably still just something to do with Ponch. Everything here got really strange because he was getting really strange. It’ll take a while for things to calm down.

“Anyway,” Carmela said, “he’s kinda forgetting his manners, if you ask me.” She leaned back among the cushions. “You two’ve been working on this Mars thing for months and months now.”

“Well,” Nita said, “it’s really been more him. Not that I’m not interested. But I have stuff of my own to take care of.” She stretched her legs out.

“Yeah,” Carmela said, “I’ve noticed. And not your water-based project that you’ve been so sneaky about, either. Oh, yeah, I noticed… don’t give me that look. All those magic conference calls all of a sudden with you and Miss Thunder-Fins the Humpback! But this is how many times now that you were ‘too busy’ to come shopping with me? Three? Four? And you looked cranky, not happy like when you’ve been working with S’reee.”

Nita looked briefly morose. “Dairine…” she said. “She’s been out a lot lately, and my dad’s been giving me grief about keeping tabs on her. Suddenly I’m supposed to be my sister’s keeper.”

“You’ll need a whip and a chair for that,” Carmela said.

Nita made a face, since this was true. “How much did Kit tell you about the Mars thing?”

Carmela rolled her eyes most expressively. “Nothing, as usual. He’s started acting like he owns all the wizardy stuff in the world, Neets! You’d think there wasn’t enough to go around.”

Nita laughed, maybe just a little evilly. “Don’t think that could have anything to do with you, could it?”

“Me?” Carmela actually batted her eyelashes. “However could that be? He’s just jealous because he never got a chance to blow up a worldgating facility. First Dairine, now me— he’s just feeling like he’s missed an opportunity.”

Nita grinned, for that thought had crossed her mind. “Come on,” she said, getting up. “I need to change.”

She headed up the stairs: Carmela came after her. “But anyway,” Nita said at the top of the stairs, turning down the hall toward her bedroom, “you know how he keeps going up there.”

“Kind of hard to ignore,” Carmela said, following Nita into her bedroom and flopping down on her bed while Nita went to her dresser and started pulling open drawers. “He sheds all this beige dust all over the place when he comes back. It’s all staticky: it gets all over the CDs and the DVDs. They get scratched. And he’s always wrecked the next day. He’s started using it as an excuse not to do his chores.”

“Tell me about it,” Nita said, rolling her eyes. She came out with a pair of very worn and faded floppy jeans, and then with a short-sleeved pink top that she held up against her while looking in the mirror. “Dairine again?”

“Same problem, different story,” Nita said, chucking the pink top back into the drawer: it was the wrong shade to work with what little was left of her spring tan. “Those big transport wizardries really take it out of you unless you can get somebody to go halves with you on the energy debt. Anyway, Mars— Kit’s not the only one who’s had Mars on the brain for a long time.” She picked up another top, a white one, and held it up against her.

“Why? Are they going to invade us?” Then Carmela paused for a moment, getting a curious look. “Now that you mention it— who lives there?”

“Nobody,” Nita said, shaking her head and dumping the white top back in the drawer. “So isn’t it funny that you think somebody there might invade you?”

Carmela looked surprised. “Well, you know how it is. All the movies and old stories and stuff about invaders…”

“‘From Mars,’” Nita said, looking over her shoulder. “The words almost seem to go together for a lot of Earth people. Weird, huh?”

“I guess,” Carmela said. “Are you saying it shouldn’t be weird?”

Nita shrugged, turning back to the drawer and rummaging through it. “Well, think about it. ‘Invaders from Venus’? ‘Invaders from Jupiter’? You don’t take them seriously. The language itself is giving you some kind of hint.” She came upon another top, a light green one, and held it up against her. “And it’s not just because Mars is the most Earthlike planet in our solar system, either. There’s just something about Mars. People have been interested in it for a long time, because of that. So wizards have been interested in it for a long time, too. There are all kinds of things about it that’re weird.” She picked another top out of the drawer, another pink one, and held it up against her, too. “For one thing, it doesn’t have a kernel.”

Carmela blinked. “What?”

“A kernel. Everything’s supposed to have one. People, things, atoms, planets. It’s like, if a body’s or a thing’s the hardware, the kernel’s the software: the rules for how it runs.”

Carmela considered this. “So a kernel’s kind of like a soul?”

“No. But souls can get hooked up to them. Anyway, a planet’s kernel usually just bops around inside the planet, doing its own thing and keeping the gravity and such working right. If there are wizards on the planet, one of the strongest ones gets told to keep an eye on the kernel and make sure it keeps working right.” Nita dropped the pink top back in the drawer.

“But there’s no people there, you said. So no wizards—”

“Not now,” Nita said. She put the green top down on the dresser and shut the drawer. “But once upon a time…”

“There were people?”

“We don’t know,” Nita said. “But everybody feels like there should have been.”

“Whoa!” Carmela said, sounding both amused and skeptical. “Sounds kind of vague for you, Miss Neets. You’re usually Hard Science Girl.”

“Yeah, well, everybody’s vague about this,” Nita said, sitting down on her desk chair and pulling off her shoes. “Mysterious stuff, and nothing in the manual to tell us what happened.” Then she wrinkled her nose and got up again, opening a different dresser drawer to get at the socks. “But when a species feels the effect of a neighboring planet this strongly, it usually means they’ve got past history.”

“What? Like somebody there invaded us before?”

Nita pulled off her old socks, put on a new pair. “Not necessarily. Maybe they could have …or they meant to. But it never happened.” Then she grinned, looking up. “Or else it did happen …and we’re all Martians.”

Carmela gave Nita a very wide-eyed look. “¿Que?”

“There are lots of meteorites from Mars lying around on Earth,” Nita said, getting up and feeling around under her dresser for her favorite beat-up sneakers. “Some people think that life here might have been started by some little bug on a shooting star that survived the ride in through the atmosphere. Splashed down into a nice warm sea… and then umpty million years later…” She grinned, gestured around her: her bedroom, her clothes, her teen magazines. “Us.”

“And what do wizards say about that?” Carmela said.

Nita shook her head. “Jury’s out,” she said. “The manual doesn’t normally tell much about a species’ origins until the species has already discovered a lot of the truth itself. Culture-shock issues.”

“I wouldn’t be shocked,” Carmela said, sitting up and folding her legs under her. “As far as I’m concerned, half the people in school act like Martians already.”

Nita snickered, wandering over to the door of her room and chucking the used socks out at the laundry basket in the hall. They bounced off the wall and went in. “But lots of people would be bothered,” Nita said. “Worldview stuff, religious stuff… Hey, look, even wizards are only human. We’re not all perfect at having both the real and the true in our heads at the same time without them blowing each other up! Especially since both the real and the true keep changing all the time.” She headed back to the dresser to pick up the jeans and the top she’d decided on. “But some people think that finding the truth for themselves is cooler than just sitting around with what people tell them is true. They think it’s okay to find out where you really came from, even if at first it gets you upset.”

Carmela sat quiet for a moment. “You know,” she said, “if people here found out there really were Martians…”

Nita bent down for her sneakers. “They’d freak,” Nita said, heading for the door. “And they’d do it big! Even if the little probes we’ve sent there don’t find anything bigger than germs, some people will still freak, because they think we’re—they’re— the most important things in the universe, all the life there is.” She snorted.

“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Sker’ret would laugh all his legs off at that one.”

Nita put her eyebrows up, leaning against the doorsill. “How is our favorite centipede?”

“Busy,” Carmela said. “The Rirhath B government’s still cleaning up the Crossings, and Sker’s having himself a party being King of the Alien Worldgates while his Esteemed Ancestor grows in his new legs and claws and brains and things.” She grinned. “Sker’ret says he needs me to come help get their shopping mall cleaned up.”

“Cleaned out, you mean,” Nita said. The planetary government of Rirhath B had settled a considerable reward on Carmela for “services rendered” in the liberation of the Crossings Worldgating Facility…and Carmela had chosen to take her reward as shopping vouchers. Nita guessed that a whole lot of the Crossings’ shopkeepers were rubbing their hands, claws, or tentacles together at the prospect. “That trip I’m taking with you, no matter what Dairine does. But anyway, the freaking’s gonna happen eventually, no matter what we do…because no matter who goes looking for life, sooner or later they’ll find it. And as far as wizards here go, it looks like the Powers That Be have decided that if we’re old enough to be asking serious questions about the fourth planet, we’re old enough to be told. But only because we didn’t just ask and then run away to play. We started going there and digging around.”

“How long has this been going on?” Carmela said.

“Since the 1770s…”

Carmela banged the side of her head with one hand a couple of times in a my-ears-are-malfunctioning gesture. “Sorry! I thought you said since the Revolutionary War…”

“Melaaaaa…!” Nita said, laughing, and headed out of her bedroom, making for the bathroom just down the hall. “There were wizards here then!” She pushed the bathroom door shut enough to change clothes in privacy.

“What, in New York? And they went to Mars?”

Nita pulled off her school pants and pulled on the jeans. “There were wizards all over the world, just like now. And sure they went to Mars! Everybody here was all hot on Mars around then, not just wizards. William Herschel started it. It was in all the papers. There were drawings and everything.” Nita snickered. “Though most of them were of completely made-up stuff that was never there…”

“Okay,” Carmela said with a sigh, as Nita sat down on the edge of the tub to put on her sneakers. “I am very weirded out now. Not that this is even slightly unusual, but no one has any pity on my mental health…”

Nita grinned as she pulled off her old top, for Carmela’s mental health was more robust than most people’s. She put on the lighter top, bent down to retie one loose sneaker-lace, then straightened and glanced at herself in the mirror. And paused, startled, for there was another figure behind her, looking at her over her shoulder in the mirror: taller, as slender as she was, but extremely pretty, far more so than—

Nita blinked. The other reflection was gone.

Now what the heck was that? Nita thought. And who has hair that color? For the long, flowing, waving hair of the person she’d thought she’d seen had been the richest and most vivid sky-blue imaginable.

Nita stared into the mirror for a second more. There was nothing to be seen but her and the black and white tiles of the wall on the far side of the bathtub. I’ve been watching too much anime, she thought.

“You fall in, in there?” Carmela called.

“No…” Nita said, and reached for the mouthwash, looking suspiciously at the mirror. This was one of the unfortunate aspects of changing wizardly specialties…assuming that she was actually changing one, not just adding something on. Everything got so unsettled: you saw things, heard things, sensed things that at first didn’t make any sense. Later they did, but usually too late to help you sort out whatever the present problem was. Nita took a gulp of mouthwash, rinsed, spat, turned the faucet on to rinse the sink, and looked in that mirror again. Nothing but herself, and the memory, the shadow of a shape, fading already. Sapphire-blue hair, black eyes, profoundly deep. A fierce look: uncompromising, alien.

And afraid…

File it away, Nita thought. Stick it in Nita’s Big Book of Odd Oracular Imagery, and have a good long look at it later. Bobo?

Got it, said the voice she was only slowly getting used to hearing in the back of her head, and even then not every time she spoke to it. There were unnerving, ambivalent silences sometimes when Nita spoke to the peridexis, her own personal “online” version of the wizard’s manual. It didn’t always answer. Nita wondered if this was because it knew she wasn’t entirely happy with it being inside her… though she’d been happy enough a month or so ago, when for a little while it was all the evidence of wizardry she’d had left. And if I don’t trust it completely… does it trust me? And if not, why not? This is all so bizarre.

“You did fall in!” Carmela said from the bedroom.

“No!” Nita said, briefly annoyed, and put the cap back on the mouthwash. She smoothed her top down and went out of the bathroom, leaning against her bedroom’s doorsill again.

“Come on,” Nita said. “I’ll show you. Anyway, Kit’s over there, and you know you want to go make him crazy.”

“It’s what I live for!” Carmela said. “Let’s go.” She stood up and stretched. “What’s summer wear for Mars look like?”

“A force field. But that’s my problem. Anyway, we have another stop first.” She eyed the sweater Carmela was still wearing, a leftover from an unusually cool morning. “Better dump the angora,” Nita said, pulling open one more drawer, rummaging again, and coming up with a T-shirt that was too big for her, but about the right size for Carmela. She grinned and waved it like a flag. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”

Carmela gave her a look, got up off the bed, and grabbed the T-shirt out of her hand. She vanished into the bathroom: a few moments later she was back in Nita’s room again, though she was still fussing with the T-shirt in a dissatisfied way. “So now what?”

“Just come stand over here by the window.” Nita snapped her fingers, and her otherspace pocket popped open in the air beside her. She reached into it and felt around.

Oh, you don’t need that… said the voice in her head.

Let’s just say I like to check my figures, Nita said silently to the peridexis, riffling through the manual. Besides, I like to be extra certain, because it’s Carmela I’m transiting as well as me. Kit would be cranky if I got his sister stuck in the Earth’s core. Then she snickered. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t…

“And what is so funny?” Carmela said. “Besides the way this tent fits?”

“Everybody should have a few floppy shirts,” Nita said. “Don’t distract me.” She flipped through a few pages and found what she was looking for, the manual’s “persona” utility. “What’s your birthday again?”

“November sixth,” Carmela said, knotting up the T-shirt into a more fashion-conscious configuration above the waist of her jeans. She peered over Nita’s shoulder, watching the way the Speech-characters on the manual page shifted and changed as she spoke. “Look at them jump around! Is that analyzing my voice?”

“And your brainwaves, and a lot of other things,” Nita said. “It makes a shorthand version of your name in the Speech: that gets pasted into the spell. What was the last book you read?”

“Gulliver’s Travels,” Carmela said, watching a new layer of characters appear and nest themselves in among the first group, shoving them around in various directions and changing the colors in which they appeared on the page. “The uncensored one. Hey, what do you mean ‘shorthand’? Is it safe to put shorthand anything in a spell?”

“Safe enough for this,” Nita said, watching the Speech-characters knit themselves into a little thorny circlet on the page, bristling with attachment-spurs that would hook into the larger spell. “We’re not going out of atmosphere, and less than fifty-eight thousand miles total. Not enough for significant error to build up.” Then Nita wrinkled her nose. “Wasn’t that kind of gross?”

“What, the book? Come on. I don’t know why that parents’ group keeps trying to ban it. You’d think school kids had never heard that people pee.” Carmela snickered. “Maybe the grownups are just trying to keep word from getting out.”

Nita smiled slightly as the diagnostic fitted another level of meaning into the long sentence-acronym it was assembling from the data that came with Carmela’s physical presence. A broad spectrum of information about her was being summed up and pulled into the construct: it’d be interesting to analyze it all in detail later on, though some of the information was already giving Nita second thoughts. “Your favorite color is this shade of yellow?” Nita said, putting her finger on one part of the Speech construct and pulling that set of characters off to one side, out into the air. She had to wince at the little bead of light that came to life at the tail end of the character chain. It was a particularly eye-watering shade of citrus yellow-green.

“This week, yeah,” Carmela said. “Next week, who knows?”

Nita shrugged: at least the routine was picking up its data correctly. “Okay,” she said, and let go of the character string: it snapped back into the circlet where it belonged. “Great— we’re set. Two seconds…”

Nita turned back to the center of the manual. “Gating circles, please?” she said in the Speech. The manual fell open at the place where she stored her transit circles. “Thank you.” She reached into the page and pulled one out, an on-Earth transit routine that had her own Speech-name and the transit’s starting location, her bedroom, woven into it already. With a flick of her wrist she dropped it to the floor around the spot near the window where the two of them stood. Then Nita turned back to the page where she’d generated Carmela’s shorthand name. Carefully she lifted the long string of glowing characters out of the page and dropped it near Carmela, where there was a receptor socket ready to take it in the larger transit circle.

Carmela looked down at it all suspiciously. “Are you sure this is safe?” she said.

Nita gave Carmela an amused look. “This from somebody who let a TV remote install a worldgate in her bedroom closet? Come on. You should really have Sker’ret check that, anyway. He’s the expert.”

Nita shut the manual, looked at the spell that lay burning on the floor around them, and started to say the words of the Wizard’s Knot that would fasten the spell closed and start it going.

You’re forgetting something…

Nita’s jaw dropped. “Oh, wow, you’re right!” she said. “Mela, wait right here. Don’t touch anything!”

She jumped over the edge of the spell-circle and ran downstairs. Nita trotted through the kitchen, shut and locked the back door— something else she’d forgotten— and then picked up the plastic shopping bag of tomatoes from beside the sink. You’re welcome, said the peridexis.

Nita rolled her eyes. “Everybody gives me a hard time,” she said, heading back upstairs. “Thanks, Bobo.”

In Nita’s bedroom, Carmela was standing there with her arms folded and an I’m-waiting-patiently,- what-do-you-mean-don’t-touch-anything? expression on her face. “Does your invisible friend possibly have a secret identity?” she said. “A cute one?”

Nita gave Carmela a look. “You behave,” she said, “or I’m going to let your mama and pop know just what they’re trying to turn loose on the poor unsuspecting nerdboys of CalTech.”

“Please,” Carmela said, sounding unusually fervent even for her. “Just do that, and I’ll fall at your feet and kiss them forever.”

“Yet another image I didn’t need,” Nita said. She looked down at the transit spell and began, once more, to speak the words in the Speech.

The world always seems to press in all around to hear a spell being spoken. As Nita said the words, and heard the merely audible sounds of the everyday world go quiet under the pressure of that larger regard, she started to become strangely aware of something else: the sense that the spell itself was reacting strangely to something else in the circle. The peridexis, she thought. She’d noticed this before, recently, when heading out for offplanet work— Carmela’s presence in the spell merely added an unusual edge to the effect, as the peridexis shifted its presence to adapt to her. As the spell pressed in with more force around them, Nita wondered for the umpteenth time how she was going to get used to having what seemed to be wizardry itself in her head with her. It wasn’t all a bad thing: she’d kept a little of the increase in power which all Earth’s younger wizards had experienced during the recent crisis, when others had lost theirs much sooner. But she couldn’t get rid of the idea that there was something about all this she wasn’t understanding yet, and she needed to get to grips with it pretty quick…

The silence leaned in around them, becoming total. Light started fading as well, leaving the two of them, for the long, strange stretch between one breath and the next, marooned in an odd daylight darkness. For that little time, Nita and Carmela were all that seemed to exist: and of the two of them, Carmela seemed much less concerned about it all, standing as casually there in the spell-circle as someone waiting for a bus. Nita turned slightly to read and say the last words of the spell, feeling the world resisting them. It always resisted a little at the end of a gating: no matter how sweetly you persuaded a place to let you stop being where you were while it stayed the same, the local physicality hung onto you and complained to the last. What’s funny, Nita thought, is that I never really noticed it until now. Was I always in too much of a rush? Am I just hypersensitive because of this change-of-specialty thing? Or is it the peridexis? Whatever—

She pushed through the resistance, said the spell’s last word, and added the final syllables of the Wizard’s Knot to make it all come real. Reality, finally becoming resigned to the wizardry, surrendered. Everything went black: then not quite black, but the deepest possible blue—

***

Heat: that was the first thing that made an impression— heat that even at dawn still pressed in all around and briefly took your breath. Nita glanced around to make sure that Carmela was all right, for in the direction they’d been facing, the sky was still fairly dark. Then Nita groaned and put the tomato bag down on the indefinite-colored, sandy ground, massaging the arm that had been holding it for what now felt like about a century.

They were standing on an elevated outcropping of land near the edge of an island in a sea that, in the growing dawn light, was already a surprisingly vivid deep blue. Ahead and to their right, the black basalt cliffs of the island’s northern peninsula dropped sheer down into the water. In those cliffs’ shadow lay a kind of patchy, glowing pallor— the bioluminescence associated with the offshore coral growth. Soon enough, Nita knew, that glow would fade as daylight grew and the native reds and violets of the corals asserted themselves. As she watched, a delta-winged shadow slid across the green-white glow— some passing giant manta, out hunting early.

“Whooo,” Carmela said, turning around very carefully, for they were a good way up from the stony beach below.

“Hold still,” Nita said. “I’ll make a light.” She held out a hand and said the sixteen words of a wizard-light spell. The light popped out of nothing in the air, burning small and hot and blue, and Nita got out her manual. “I need to check that everybody’s where I think they are…”

She glanced at the messaging page in the back of the manual, comparing the coordinates laid into one message to the terrain below. A map came swimming up out of the glowing text, showing the cliffside, the path leading down from it, and the beach on the island’s northwest tip. There Nita saw a little cluster of blue-light pinpricks, one circled in red. “Yup,” she said, and shut the manual, shoving it back in its otherspace pocket. “There he is. Let’s go.”

Nita made a downward-pressing gesture with one hand, and the little sphere of light sank down to shin level, illuminating the path before them. “Down this way. Take your time: you wouldn’t want to slip…”

They made their way down the path, the light going before them and growing paler as the dawn light all around them grew stronger. North of the cliffs, the island’s slope to the water grew gentler, creating a spot that more resembled a beach, though not the kind that would have been pleasant for sunbathers. It was strewn with boulders of every size, though they were smallest down by the water. Here and there some small scraggly tree, scrub tamarind or beechpine, pushed its crooked, wind-twisted way up between the boulders.

“Okay,” Carmela said as the path switched back again, and for a little while they walked more or less toward the swiftly brightening eastern sky. “So geography was never my big thing. I give. Where on Earth are we?”

Nita snickered. “Half the clues are right in front of you,” she said. “I should make you guess.”

“Juanita Louise,” Carmela said, “you are a real pain in the gnaester sometimes…”

“Carmela, what did I tell you about the ‘L’ word?” Nita said, as they turned another switchback curve in the hillside trail. Nita hated her middle name and was still trying to figure out how Carmela had discovered it, as Carmela wouldn’t tell her. “It was Dairine, wasn’t it?” she said. “That little—”

“Not her, Miss Neets,” Carmela said, looking smug. They turned another switchback curve, and Nita, paying too much attention to Carmela’s expression, banged her left sneaker-toe against an unexpected rock. “Ow, ow, ow!” she said, putting down the tomato bag hurriedly and hopping briefly on the other foot.

“See that,” Carmela said. “The world’s punishing you for being cute with me. Ooooh…”

Nita stopped hopping, grinning at Carmela’s reaction to something Nita had seen before when wizardly work had taken her and Kit close enough to the equator— the shortness of the twilight before dawn and after sunset, and the bizarre way that sunrise and sunset just seemed to happen, bang, all at once. The Sun didn’t quite leap up over the horizon, but it seemed a very short time between the moment the first burning splinter of the Sun’s upper limb broke the water and the one when the whole blinding disc, veiled in furiously silver-burning clouds, rose over the eastern sea. The water of the bay beneath them came alive in a storm of glitter.

“Welcome to Gili Motang,” Nita said.

“This is really cool,” said Carmela. “Except for the temperature.”

“It’ll get worse, but I don’t think we’re gonna have time to care.”

The last turn in the path had brought them around to look back the way they’d come, so that they were now gazing straight down into the hot, blue waters of the Molo Strait. From that direction the dry southwest wind was blowing hard, and big waves rolled up the southerly-facing beaches; the crash of the surf could be much more clearly heard when you were facing into it. “Pretty,” Carmela said. “So where is Gili Motang exactly?”

“Indonesia,” Nita said as she put her stubbed foot down, wriggling her toes inside her sneaker. She picked up the bag of tomatoes again. “Our visitor has a project going here. Or not going, and she keeps coming in to work on it. Did Kit tell you who he was coming to see?”

“Some important wizard,” Carmela said. “Kit’s really impressed with her; that’s all I know. ‘Manfish’?”

“Mamvish,” Nita said as they negotiated one last switchback on their way down the hillside. “She’s really old; in our years, anyway. She’s spent three thousand years or so saving species that’re about to be destroyed— getting rid of what’s threatening them, or else moving them to new homes. ‘Rafting,’ it’s called. Some species she’s even been able to save after they’ve been destroyed.”

“That must take some work!”

“She’s got the power to pull it off,” Nita said. “Tons of it. What’s fun is that even though she’s such a big deal, she’s still kind of a goof.”

They came down onto the stony, broken ground at the bottom of the hill. Carmela tsk-tsked at the rocky beach as they made their way along the base of the hillside. “Not much good for swimming…”

“No,” Nita said. “Especially not if you have trouble with sharks.”

Carmela laughed. “Like you wouldn’t!”

“Not these days,” Nita said, smiling. “No.” She changed the tomato bag over to the other hand as they came around the pointy end of the hillside where it dropped to the water.

Another small, half-circle rocky bay was revealed on the right as they made their way down among the fractured sandstone boulders that had rolled down the cliff. The strand of the bay was boulder-strewn too, and small dark shapes— human figures— sat on the biggest rocks near the water. Near the base of the cliff, not far away, stood a long green-golden shape that had to be fifty feet long.

“What is that?” Carmela said. “Hey, it’s a dinosaur!” And she started to head straight downslope toward it.

“Uh, no,” Nita said. Then she caught a motion out of the corner of her eye. “Mela, watch out!”

She flung an arm out in front of Carmela. Carmela stopped so suddenly she nearly fell over forward onto the seven-foot-long Komodo dragon that was suddenly blocking their path.

“Whoa!” Carmela said, and stumbled back. Nita grabbed Carmela’s arm to steady her as that blunt, oblong head swung toward them.

Yum, the Komodo dragon said. Its tongue went out and waved around in the air, tasting it for their scent.

“You really wouldn’t like eating us!” Nita said in the Speech.

“Yeah,” Carmela said, also in the Speech. “We’re probably both full of additives.”

The dragon looked from Carmela to Nita and back again. Its tongue went in and out a few more times. What’s an additive? the Komodo dragon said. Is it nice?

Very carefully, Nita handed Carmela the bag of tomatoes, acutely conscious of how the dragon was following her every move. “No, they’re really unhealthy…” The moment she had both hands free, Nita took hold of one of the charms on her bracelet, the one with her shield spell set up in it. Komodo dragons could move like lightning when they wanted to, and could rip an arm or a leg off you before you knew what was happening. If this guy tries something cute, I’m gonna have to adjust this spell on the fly so it works for two of us—

“You should really go inland,” Nita said. “There are all kinds of nice goats and things for you to eat up there, much nicer tasting than us.”

“Seriously,” Carmela said. “Just go on back there in the forest and take a seat, and your server will be with you shortly!”

The dragon looked peculiarly at Carmela, and its tongue went in and out several times more. Nita held her breath.

Finally the Komodo dragon turned and lurched away, uphill, toward the scraggly forest above the beach. Nita let out a long breath and shot Carmela a look. “You’ve been spending too much time in those restaurants at the Crossings.”

Carmela shrugged. “Being nice never hurts…”

“You’ve got that right, anyway,” Nita said. “Let’s get down there before we have to have that conversation with one of Mister Dragon’s buddies.”

The two of them headed downslope to where the track gave out. Shortly they were picking their way among the cracked yellow boulders toward the group on the beach. “Neets,” Carmela said, “I hate to tell you this, but there’s another dragon down there.”

“Where?”

“Under the dinosaur.”

Nita peered ahead. “It’s okay. Too busy to notice us, I think. Anyway, don’t you see someone familiar?” She took back the bag of tomatoes.

“Who?” Now it was Carmela’s turn to peer.

“Where do you— Ronan!” Carmela took off toward where that tall, slim shape was lounging on top of a big boulder in black jeans and a black T-shirt, and doubtless paying the price for it in this weather; but he looked as casual as if he were sitting on a block of ice.

Nita grinned as she negotiated the rocky stretch between herself and the wizards sitting on the rocks by the edge of the bay. Kit was there in T-shirt and baggies, perched on an even bigger boulder than the one where Ronan Nolan had stretched himself out. Nearby, on a lower, flatter stone, a smaller shape sat cross-legged— younger, much darker, wiry, in swim trunks and a floppy white tank top: Darryl McAllister, one of the newer wizards of Nita’s acquaintance, a neighbor from over in Baldwin. The three of them were watching yet another Komodo dragon, bigger than the one Nita had spoken to, and also keeping an eye on the huge, shimmering, golden-green shape bending down over the dragon: one that, to Nita’s way of thinking, seemed much worthier of the name.

If someone had stood an African elephant next to that great shape, the elephant would have been taller, but the saurian, sheathed in a handsome, pebbly, gleaming hide, would have been much bigger. Though Mamvish’s shoulders stood no more than twenty feet from the ground, they were nearly ten feet apart, and each leg was as thick as the trunk of the forty-year-old maple in front of Nita’s house. Those legs bent twice, in a double elbow— one of them bending backward about eight feet from the ground, and the second one about four feet above it. Each leg ended in a six-toed paw, as broad compared to the leg as the foot of a cat, and each toe had a massive, metallically glinting claw retracted partly into it. The hind legs were like the front ones, though the hip joints were higher than the shoulders, and the tail that trailed away behind them lashed and coiled, gesturing more expressively than any Komodo dragon’s tail could.

At the other end, the saurian’s long, oval head peered down at the smaller one of the Komodo dragon sitting between her huge forefeet. The massive jaws in that huger head opened, exhibiting teeth that gleamed like pale metal, and a broad, black tongue. Around the words that she spoke, like the breath behind them, came a low, moaning hiss like a house’s central heating system complaining of too much pressure in the radiators. But the voice itself spoke the Speech in a surprisingly high register, like a flute’s or clarinet’s.

As Nita got closer, she could see how subtly changing colors ran and shimmered underneath the gemmy bumps and pebbles of the hide, shifting slightly with the words and the volume at which they were spoken. “Let me put it again in a way you can understand,” the voice said… while sounding as if its owner wasn’t sure this could be done. “There’s nowhere else for you to live in these seas! The two-leggers are encroaching on your territory. No matter how well the ones who come here right now are treating you, sooner or later some will come who don’t mean you anything like as well. You’ll have nowhere else to go! And there are much better places for you to be, with no two-leggers, with nothing but people like you—people who’re interested in you and want you to live somewhere safe! If you’ll just let me show you—”

The Komodo dragon between Mamvish’s feet looked up at her and opened its mouth, emitting a similar hiss, though a much smaller one. By way of the Speech, Nita heard it say, I’m hungry.

Mamvish rolled her eyes in frustration. This was worth seeing, since it wasn’t just the eyeballs that rolled; the entire socket containing each one went around in a large and wobbly circle. “You can eat any time,” she said. “Please pay attention. We’re talking about something important here—”

A juicy little deer would be nice right about now, said the Komodo dragon …and it turned ponderously around and lurched away out of Mamvish’s shadow and up the beach, toward the underbrush that sprang up under the eaves of the forest.

Mamvish watched it go. “You stupid, stupid things,” she hissed, “why do I keep wasting my time?” She stamped all her feet in annoyance. “It’s your lives I’m trying to save here! Your whole rijakh’d species’ lives! …And all you can ever think about is food! If you came home with me, you’d be superstars; your species would be comfortable and safe forever! And now I wonder why I’m bothering trying to take creatures home who’re so merthakte dumb! Powers that Be in a bucket, have you ever seen the like of these people? Time after time you come umpteen thousand light-years to make them the offer of a lifetime, and every time they ignore you. They don’t have the brains to come in out of the Sun; they—”

The tirade went on. Somewhat distractedly— for Mamvish was using a completely new and interesting subset of words in the Speech— Nita made her way over to the boulder where Kit was perching. As she scrambled up beside him, Nita found herself wondering whether there was a separate “bad language” section of the wizard’s manual, and why she’d never thought to go looking for it. Am I really that much of a geek? Oh, god. Kit was looking elsewhere, as if embarrassed. Darryl was listening with fascination: Ronan had leaned all the way back on his boulder with his hands under his head, his eyes closed. Because of Mamvish, or Carmela?— for Kit’s sister was sitting there, trying to keep her attention evenly divided between Mamvish and Ronan. For the moment, Mamvish was winning.

“What took you so long?” Kit said under his breath. “You missed everybody. Half the wizards we know have been here, and a lot we don’t.”

“Want to understate some more? Half the wizards on the planet have been here!” Darryl said from the next boulder over. “A real mob scene. And some real heavy hitters. Check this out!” He scrambled over toward them, holding out the WizPod he used these days to carry his wizard’s manual. “Jarrah Corowa was here, and she even gave me her autograph!” He pulled a glowing page sideways out of the WizPod and into the air, showing Nita the tracery of Speech characters there.

“Wow!” Nita said, for a wizard’s autograph, depending on how much of the wizard’s personal information it contained, could be worth a lot more than just a keepsake of meeting someone who was famous for their way with a spell. “Nice going!”

Kit rolled his eyes in a good-natured way at Darryl’s excitement. “Fang was here, too,” he said. Nita let out a breath, sorry to have missed an old friend in wizardry, the orca who’d sung the part of the Killer in the Song of the Twelve. “How is he? He came way out of his way to get here.”

“Not all that far. He and his family swim the Pacific this time of year: he’s over here working on typhoon steering or something. He’s fine, and he was asking about you. And her.” Kit threw an annoyed glance in Carmela’s direction. “On another subject, is it just barely possible that we can go anywhere on this planet these days, or any other, without her coming along?”

“Funny,” Nita said. “I was going to ask whether it was possible you might go anywhere that I could come along.”

Kit stared at her. “What?”

“I was late because I was waiting for you! I hung around Tom and Carl’s for half the afternoon!”

Kit looked stricken, as if this had never occurred to him. “But you said you were going to talk to the fish.”

“I was!” Nita said. “But I didn’t go there to talk to the fish! I went there to blow some time until you were going to turn up after school— which you never did! Oh, no, you just heard the word ‘Mars’ and forgot all about everything else, and ran straight off here!”

“Come on, Neets, you know I—”

Would you two ever just take it to telepathy, Ronan said silently, or else save it for later? She’s starting to run out of steam again.

At least the hissing was dying down. “Why?” Mamvish was saying to the sky and the Earth and whatever else might have been listening. “Why do I keep coming out to this dust speck of a not-particularly-interesting world out at the farthest possible edge of all that’s bright and beautiful to talk to these idiotic creatures who make a pt!walnath look assertive and a Zabriskan fontema look smart? I ask you.”

Then she fell silent. Mamvish looked around her, a little guiltily. “I’m sorry,” she said, “very sorry. They’re just so—”

“Clueless?” said Darryl. “Lackwitted? Like you called them the last time you lost it?”

“Dim?” said Ronan. “Pitiful? Like you called them half an hour before that?”

“All right, it’s not kind to describe them so,” Mamvish said, sounding contrite. “They’re as the One made them. If they won’t be saved, they won’t. I just keep hoping they’ll change their minds. Though I’m starting to wonder why I bother.”

“Because you’re a wizard?” Nita said. “And it’s what wizards do?”

Mamvish swung her huge head in Nita’s direction… and then froze. Both those eyes suddenly went forward and trained on Nita with tremendous directness, and Mamvish’s nostrils flared. “Cousin,” she said. “Are you carrying what I think you’re carrying?”

Nita held up the plastic bag. “You mean these?”

Mamvish suddenly lurched toward Nita as singlemindedly as the Komodo dragon had. Nita hurriedly scrambled down off the boulder, headed for Mamvish, and started to carefully empty out the tomato bag onto the stones. “No, no, it’s quite all right,” Mamvish said. “I don’t mind a little roughage…”

Nita dropped the bag and the tomatoes as Mamvish lumbered forward. A second later, the tomatoes and the bag were gone. So were some of the stones— deafeningly crunched up, shattering and splintering. Everyone stared. Mamvish’s eyes rotated in her head in opposite directions in what Nita very much hoped was delight, and the shimmer under her skin ran suddenly tomato-red.

“You are my friend!” Mamvish said, using the Speech-word thelefeh, which was a much closer and cozier usage than hrasht, or “cousin.” Nita was charmed, and began to see some use in having carried that bag halfway across the planet. “And this is unquestionably one of the best worlds in this whole part of the galaxy,” Mamvish said, straightening up after a moment. The place where her jaw jointed pulled back and back into what her species apparently used for a smile; Nita started wondering if Mamvish’s head might actually come apart. “Thank you so much for bringing those: I didn’t think I was going to have time to get any, this trip. Do forgive me; I missed your name—”

“You didn’t miss it,” said a voice from behind her. “She was late.”

“Stow it, Ronan,” Nita said. To Mamvish she said, “I’m Nita.”

“And of course I know you, thelef’,” Mamvish said, lowering her head so that one of her eyes could look into both of Nita’s. “We’ve spoken often enough via manual. I’m sorry if I moved quickly, there! It’s really hard for me to help myself around these things. It’s something to do with the bioflavinoids.”

“You should grow them at home!” Nita said.

“They’re not the same,” Mamvish said, sounding sorrowful as she hunkered down on the rocky beach again. “There’s something in the water here. Or the air. Or the spectrum of this particular sunlight. Tomatoes are just happiest on Earth…” She sighed. “But it doesn’t matter. They’re a tremendous compensation for other slight annoyances.” One eye glanced back toward the Komodo dragon, which was disappearing into the brush up near the cliff. “And, after all, who knows if I’d ever have found out about Mars at all without the tomatoes?”

“Tomatoes are all very well,” Ronan said, sitting up and stretching himself in the sunshine, “but as for these folks, you should just move them. If they don’t have the smarts to agree to leave on their own, then change their minds for them—”

“Don’t tempt me,” Mamvish said, waving her tail in annoyance. “Unfortunately this issue goes right to the heart of the Wizard’s Oath: ‘I shall change no creature unless it, or the system of which it is a part, is threatened.’” She looked around her. “And they are. These are the only ones left of these creatures, except for the few hundred on the other island, and those few others scattered about the planet in zoos. But if I change their minds for them, will they still be the creatures they are?” A long, deep fluting sigh came out of her. “Never mind. They’re a problem for another day… though one that has its resonances with what we’re about to start.”

Nita opened her mouth, but Carmela, sitting up on that boulder, put up her hand and starting waving it around like some back-of-the-classroom kid desperate to be called on. “Excuse me,” she said in the Speech, “but what are we about to start?”

Nita threw a glance sidewise at Kit. He was covering his face and groaning softly. One of Mamvish’s eyes was suddenly regarding Carmela; the other one was looking in what seemed mild confusion from Nita, to Kit, to Darryl, to Ronan. “Has this planet gone astahfrith without my noticing?” she said. “I have been busy…”

Nita snickered, for this was probably an understatement. “No,” she said. “We still have to hide our wizardry, mostly. But there are people who’re in on the secret and aren’t freaked by it. Mamvish, this is Kit’s sister Carmela. Mela, this is Mamvish fsh Wimsih fsh Mentaff.”

“Hey,” Carmela said in the Speech, “Life says, ‘hi there.’”

Mamvish’s eye actually tried to lean farther out of her skull in Carmela’s direction. “And It greets you by me as well. You’re not a wizard, though …”

“Don’t need to be,” Carmela said, sounding utterly certain. “Too much work. I’m just a tourist training to be a galactic personal shopper.”

This was all news to Nita, but she tried to keep her grin restrained and out of Kit’s sight: his reaction to Carmela’s ever-growing ability with the Speech had been becoming increasingly pained. Mamvish looked unfocused for a moment, or as much more unfocused as one could be expected to look when her eyes were already pointing in different directions. Then she said, “Oh! You’re the one who shot up the Crossings during the intervention last month.”

“That would be me,” Carmela said. “But Neets was there first. And our colleague with all the legs.”

“Sker’ret is a great talent,” Mamvish said, “and an invaluable resource. His people have been instrumental in your world’s development, you know that? At least as far as worldgates go. It’s good to see that you’re so well connected.”

One of Mamvish’s rear legs came up to scratch behind where one of her ears might have been, had she had any on the outside. “Meanwhile, I don’t see why you’d need to be excluded from this. Especially since you came with the bearer of the tomatoes.” She beamed at Nita, then turned back to Carmela again. “From your own world’s point of view, Mars is a ‘situational location of interest.’ Wizards here have been trying to find out why for some centuries now. And even the outer worlds feel echoes of something that happened… and have nothing further to say.” She tilted her head, looking thoughtful. “So plainly there’s something going on here that we need to know about before we move forward.”

“And what are we moving toward?” Carmela said.

We. Nita could just feel Kit start fuming quietly. “Waking up the Martians, dummy!” Kit said.

“Well,” Mamvish said, swinging one eye in his direction, “that’s the question we’ll be examining. Local catastrophes have killed too many species in the past— peoples we could ill afford to lose. My job’s to prevent the loss of worlds that have something special to offer the universe, to keep species or planets that have made unusual contributions from being completely lost—and, occasionally, to get back lost worlds that aren’t as lost as we think they are.”

“Like Mars…” Nita said.

“Yes,” Mamvish said. “And sometimes, as seems to have happened in this case, we get a little help from the species in question: they leave us data about what happened to them.”

“A message in a bottle,” Ronan said.

“Yes. In this case, the ‘bottle’ we’ve located seems to have been emplaced some five hundred sixty thousand years ago.”

Nita blinked at that. “Wow. There were just human ancestors around then. It was— what, the really early Stone Age?”

“The Lower Paleolithic, as I understand your usage,” Mamvish said. “Any knowledge or memory your most distant ancestors had of Mars is lost. But worlds have different kinds of memory than the beings that move on their surfaces. Whatever humans know about Mars, the outer worlds have different knowledge about it: troubled recollections. We have to go carefully at first.” The eyes rotated again in the head. “But the risk may be worth it. Some of the most dangerous ‘lost’ species have brought us some of the greatest gifts once they’ve been revived.”

Carmela was looking dubious. “Am I completely misunderstanding you, or are you actually talking about bringing them back from the dead?”

“Well, there’s dead and there’s really dead,” Mamvish said. “Of course we couldn’t do anything about the second kind. However, there are a hundred different kinds of stasis, soulfreeze, matter seizure, and wait-just-a-minute that species across the galaxy have invented to stave off entropy’s Last Word. Many species have seen a catastrophe coming and found ways to archive or preserve not just the news about what happened to them but themselves as well. In Mars’s case, the first steps have been toward finding out whether there were ever Martians—because your whole species seems to have some kind of unfinished business, or unstarted business, with Mars. If Martians did exist, the next step would then be to find out what happened to them. Once we know that, we can start working out how to re-evoke them—in a limited way, just to find out firsthand what happened to them. From there we can make the determination as to whether it’s wise to revive them wholly. And then—”

“We bring them back,” Kit said softly.

“Maybe,” Mamvish said. “We’ve got a lot of steps to go through before that. And the first one will be to—”

Nita suddenly felt as if something had kicked her in the chest. The breath went right out of her, for no reason she could understand, and she gasped in reaction. At the same moment, “I’m so sorry I’m late,” said another voice, a female one, out of nothing. “What did I miss?”

They all turned— Nita last: she was still having trouble finding her breath—and stared. Standing there among the rocks of the beach was what looked like a slender little housewife in her thirties, wearing a flowered housedress and flip-flops. She had boldly highlighted shaggy blond hair, a blinking, placid baby in a patchwork-patterned shoulder sling, and a yellow parakeet sitting on her shoulder.

Mamvish hurriedly put down the scratching foot, stood up, and inclined her head to the woman. “Irina,” she said, “this is more than a pleasure!”

Nita and Kit stared at each other, and Darryl’s eyes went wide, and even Ronan, for all his usual overlay of unconcerned coolness, sat up straight. Is that who I think it is? Nita said silently to Kit.

Look at the way Mamvish’s acting. It has to be—!

“I’m just passing through,” said the Planetary Wizard for Earth, and the baby chuckled and reached up to pull on her hair as she smiled around at them all, then at Mamvish again. “I heard you were going to be in the neighborhood, Archivist. I thought I’d wait until the excitement died down, and then drop by and pay my respects.”

“Planetary,” said Mamvish, bowing her head more deeply, “don’t be respecting me. I’m just migrant labor.”

Irina laughed; the parakeet fluttered its wings and scolded her, a little scratchy noise on the hot, sunny air. “And I’m just a housekeeper!” Irina said, reaching up a finger to the parakeet: it nibbled her nail. “Sure, the house is bigger than some. But it’s the empty house next door that’s really got me interested. I hear you’ve finally found what you were looking for—”

“We were about to go up to the site to look at the find,” Mamvish said. “Do you have time to accompany us?”

“For a few minutes, surely.”

Mamvish put her head up and cocked one eye at the Sun. The other stayed trained on the ground, as if she was looking for something. Nita watched this with interest, suspecting that Mamvish was about to cast some kind of transit circle—

Shadow fled outward from Mamvish and ran swift as a blast wave across the ground, past the rocks on which they were all sitting, out toward the sea and up the face of the cliff. In that shadow, Mamvish glowed. The green-gold shimmer under her hide was replaced by darkness in which burned a great complexity of characters and sentences in the Speech, writhing and coiling about one another, flowing out onto the darkened ground. The shadow beneath them now filled with those words and characters, and as Mamvish stretched her head upward into the air, the sound of the surf behind them was drowned out by what seemed a whole chorus of voices chanting in the Speech, like a great concord of wind instruments: Mamvish’s voice, but seemingly multiplied many times over, as if she was somehow reciting all the different parts of the spell at the same time.

Nita tried to breathe and found she couldn’t. The spell held her in place, and she couldn’t move a muscle, not even to look sideways to see how Kit was taking it. All around them, instead of the inward-leaning, listening silence that normally meant a wizardry was starting to work, Nita started to hear something astonishing— more voices, seeming to join in with Mamvish’s fluting one, all speaking the Speech together with her from out of some great echoing depth, a great chorus of intention, elation, even excitement—

Then the silence fell, abrupt, unexpected: and the sea was gone, and the sky was a dark hazy russet-golden color rather than blue. Nita let go the awed breath she’d been forced to hold, looking around her at a world that had gone a dusty ochre, shading to rusty charcoal at the edges.

Nita slid down off the boulder, took another breath. Since her eyes weren’t boiling out of her head in the hyperthin air, and she hadn’t half frozen since they got there, it was plain that Mamvish had taken care of the group’s atmosphere needs. But Nita still felt wobbly. That huge wash of Speech and wizardly power left her feeling like she’d been run over by a truck, and as if all the spells she’d ever cast by herself or just in company with Kit were weak little things by comparison. She leaned against the boulder, gulping, and tried to get her composure back.

Kit, still up on the boulder, was gasping and trying to hide it: Ronan was shaking his head like someone who’d been punched. Carmela, sitting beside him, had unbraided her hair and was braiding it up again— a sign that Nita had learned to read as meaning that Mela was unnerved. Only Darryl was standing there casually looking around him, seemingly unaffected.

Nita saw Mamvish, noting this, rotate one eye toward Irina, who was fanning herself with one hand like someone who’d broken out in a sweat. Irina said nothing, but Nita suspected that a few thoughts were passing between them concerning why so young and relatively inexperienced a wizard should be untroubled by what had just happened.

Good, Nita thought. Something we don’t have to warn her about. Nita had been concerned about the appropriateness of one of Earth’s precious few abdals getting involved in offplanet wizardly work: but if Irina didn’t do anything about it, then it definitely had to be all right. Nita let out a long breath and looked up at that strange butterscotch-colored daytime sky, which shaded down toward deeper tints of apricot and warm brick red at the horizon. Southward of where they stood, the dust was thick in the sky, softening a horizon that would normally have been much sharper, and hiding the view of the distant foothills.

Nita swallowed, smiled. It had always been wonder enough just to step out of a gating circle onto this ancient and alien soil, to stand gazing up into this unearthly sky and see that smaller, cooler, pinker sun. Nita had been here often enough, over the last year or so, to almost get used to that marvel. But today there was something new that sharpened this view, lent an edge to the feel of the place. The clue they’d been hunting had finally been found. Now every shadow, every rock, seemed to be hiding a secret.

Life…!

3: Syrtis Major

“What time is it here?” Irina said.

“About halfway through the sol,” Mamvish said, glancing around. “Am I right— that’s the name your people use for the Martian day? Excellent. Anyway, it’s late autumn here: we’re just north of the planet’s equator.”

Looking around, Nita smiled wryly. The only way to tell that fall was here was by the angle of the Sun and the slight warmth remaining in the atmosphere— meaning that the outside temperature was only about thirty degrees below zero. Feeling less shaky now, she pushed away from the chilly boulder she’d been leaning against and peered south toward the highlands.

This part of Mars’s northern hemisphere was dominated by flat country, the crater-pitted remnant of old lava flows. Southward the highlands would start to pile up into far more spectacular and mountainous terrain, dotted with terrible crevasses and ancient volcanic peaks. But all that was well over the horizon. Here everything was relatively flat, darkened by the local green-brown sand and dust— except for the features lowering over the site to which Mamvish had brought them. On every side, immense charcoal-dark dunes of windblown basalt sand had piled up— stretched out serpentlike across the plain, half a mile or a mile long, as sharp-edged as any desert dune on Earth. But in the lower gravity, these dunes towered nearly five hundred feet high, casting long, cold shadows across the plain in the light of early morning.

The others were getting down from where they’d been sitting. Nita threw a glance at Kit, saw that he was all right, and went over to where Carmela was standing, gazing around with her hair braided up again, a look of astonishment on her face. “Aren’t we inside a force field or something?” Carmela said. “How come I can feel the wind?”

“I told you,” Nita said, “Mamvish has power to burn…” Whenever Nita and Kit had come here on their own, or to work with the other wizards involved in this effort, they’d both worn personal force fields that hugged them close, keeping the Martian atmosphere out and their own carefully calculated air supplies in. But Mamvish had built her wizardry very differently, so that it matched the temperature and oxygen content of Earth’s air exactly but still transmitted the forces of the thin exterior atmosphere as if they were one and the same. It would have been an incredibly difficult wizardry to structure, and Nita could imagine the kind of power necessary to run it. The same kind of power that can pick you up off one planet and drop you on another between one breath and the next without it even looking hard…

“Why’s everything this khaki color?” Carmela said, as she and Ronan and Darryl came over to join Nita and Kit near where Mamvish and Irina were looking around. “I thought this was supposed to be the red planet.”

“Because we’re in the middle of Syrtis Major,” Kit said. “That big dark eastern-hemisphere blotch that everybody used to think was a sea, with canals running into it. There were a lot of volcanoes here, so the ground’s full of this green stuff, olivine, that formed when the lava cooled.” Kit looked around like someone who just needed to see a few landmarks to be sure where he was. “This isn’t really a crater we’re in: it’s what’s left of one of the calderas where the lava came out. It’s called Nili Patera.” He looked over at Mamvish. “And the bottle is—”

“A few hundred meters south,” Mamvish said. “Síle and Markus get the credit for finding it. They were working this site all this week…”

“Who’re Síle and Markus?” Carmela said, bouncing up and down in place to get the feel of the gravity, which was only about a third of the Earth’s. Each bounce took her several times higher than she’d intended, and Nita kept having to reach up and grab her and pull her back down.

“A couple of the other wizards on the project,” Kit said. “Síle’s from Ronan’s part of the world— she’s at college studying computer science in Paris. Markus is in the German army: he drives tanks.”

“They’re not tanks,” Ronan muttered. “They’re armored personnel carriers, and if he hears you call them tanks one more time…”

Kit gave Ronan a “whatever” shrug. “They were the ones who called me in,” Mamvish said. “Markus’s unit had to go on active service yesterday morning to help with the floods in the south of his country. Síle stayed here and kept running the spell routines that she and Markus had been working on, till something came up that required her to head home and go out on errantry yesterday evening. She called me in just before she went on active status.”

“It’s a shame they can’t be here,” Kit said. “They’ve been working so hard on this for so long…”

“As have about twenty other people from your planet for whom this is a special interest,” Mamvish said. “But they don’t grudge missing the action, as long as there is action.” Her tail swished with excitement. “The rest of your team will get here when work and errantry leave them time. Meanwhile—”

“Where is it?” Kit said. “What is it?”

“It’s where you said you thought it might be,” Mamvish said. “Hidden under one of these dunes. But time passed, the wind blew, the dune moved …and now it’s not hidden anymore. As for the what— now we’ll find out. Over this way…”

They all headed southward. Nita saw that Carmela seemed to have recovered her composure and had gravitated back toward Ronan, who was gliding along a foot or so above the surface, with only the occasional very practiced and casual bounce: he looked as unconcerned as if he were walking across some park back home. Looks like he and Kit have been up here working in one-third g an awful lot. Maybe more than I thought …But projects of her own had been keeping Nita busy lately, and what she told Carmela had been true: the Martian project had been far more Kit’s passion than hers for some months. Not that she hadn’t come up every now and then to see how things were going. But mostly they hadn’t been. Until now, Kit and all the other wizards he’d been working with had found nothing at all…

He and Darryl and Ronan were now bouncing along together, talking hard as they came up beside Mamvish. Carmela had dropped back, succumbing to the fascination of where she was and looking intently at the sandy ground, the dusty rocks, the alien dune-vista between her and the horizon. Irina, too, had paused to pick up a rough dark-green stone and look closely at it. The baby hanging in front of her patted the rock with one hand and crowed as Nita came up next to the two of them. “Irina—” she said very quietly.

“It’s about Darryl, isn’t it?”

Nita went hot with embarrassment. “It’s all right,” Irina said softly, turning the rock over in her hands. “He can be away from Earth for short periods, and his function as a channel of the One’s power into the world won’t suffer. But I think you’ll find that he won’t care to be away much longer. For those of us who’ve become important at the planetary level, the Earth whispers in our ears when it’s uneasy at our absence. And the whisper’s impossible to ignore.”

Irina tossed the rock to the ground and gestured with her head toward the others. She and Nita started to bounce after them, and the baby shouted with delight as they went, while the yellow parakeet scolded them noisily, finally taking off and flying on ahead, quick as an arrow-shot in the low gravity. “Besides,” Irina said, “while Mamvish is here, nothing’s going to dare interfere with him, or you, or anything else that’s going on.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I couldn’t believe that spell. And she did it so casually. What her power levels must be like—”

“Well, yes, but it’s not just that,” Irina said, even more softly than she’d spoken about Darryl. “She’s unusual even as wizards go. It wouldn’t be in the manuals, but it might be useful for you to know: she’s an Abstainee.”

Nita’s eyes went wide. “She had her Ordeal and the Lone Power didn’t show up?”

Irina nodded, smiled. “It even sent her a message saying It wasn’t going to turn up. She told me once,” Irina said, with a somewhat cockeyed look, “that It said It had a headache.”

Nita shook her head, not knowing what to make of this. “I bet that doesn’t happen often.”

“Galaxy-wide? Eleven times in the last five centuries,” Irina said. She looked ahead toward where the others had stopped in the shadow of one more black-sand dune, a very perfect crescent with the open side toward them. “And as usual, the question is: do her power levels come from being an Abstainee, or did the Lone One decide not to get involved because of her power levels…?” Irina shook her head. “It may not matter. But she’s good to have around for backup… and no wizard alive knows more about this particular kind of work than she does. I’m glad she’s here. Especially since this is such an odd place, some ways…”

Irina gazed toward the northern horizon for a moment as they went. “I have to come up here two or three times a year to make sure the planet’s operating correctly in the absence of a kernel, and afterwards I always go away wondering why the manual’s so short of information about exactly what’s happened here. Now, though, what the Mars team has found may mean the silence is finally about to break a little.”

Shortly they caught up with the others, who were all standing around a little irregular outcropping or bump of dark olive-colored stone, just four feet or so high. It jutted up deep in the shadow of the crescent dune, and just a foot or two clear of where the steep, smooth sweep of dark, gritty sand on the dune’s inner side came down to the ground. “It’s under that?” Kit said as Nita and Irina caught up with the others.

“Inside it,” said Mamvish.

“And you’re sure whatever’s in there isn’t something contemporary?” Ronan said. “Like that alien tourist beacon Nita’s sister found up on Olympus Mons when she passed through on her Ordeal? Not some practical joke?”

Mamvish tilted her head one way and the other, the gesture her people apparently used for “no.” “Many sites that wizards have investigated here over the last three centuries have had a scent of old wizardry about them, but never anything this concrete. And the survey spell identifies what’s emplaced here as being at least five hundred and forty thousand years old. Even Earth’s earliest wizards didn’t venture this far for many thousands of years after that. So I think we’re safe enough from practical jokes. Anyway—” She gestured with her tail at Kit. “Kit is probably the most Mars-crazed of the whole team, and he’s the one who’s always been after everybody to keep on looking here, even after previous searches came up blank.”

“Why, Kit?” Irina said. “What seemed so special about Syrtis?”

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know. It was just a hunch to start with.” He looked around him. “But Syrtis Major was the first feature on Mars that anyone on Earth really noticed, the thing that’s most obvious from space. It just seemed like a good place to start.”

“Hunch or no hunch, Kit seems to have a feel for this place,” Mamvish said. “Why argue the point? No one knows why any wizard’s good at any particular specialty. The Powers may know, but it’s not information They seem interested in sharing.” She shrugged her tail.

“How come all the sensor spells the team was using before didn’t turn this up until now?” Nita said.

“Because it was built to hide its nature,” Mamvish said. “An extremely elegant piece of wizardry, exactly mimicking the structure and composition of its surroundings. For a long time, before the dunes advanced into the crater, all the spell had to pretend to be was this chunk of rock …and it did that perfectly. But then the dunes came in, and the wizardry had to adapt itself to mimicking not only rock, but dust and sand of a different composition and structure. The adjustment took a while, since the spell had only limited running power available to it. And when the dune moved away again, the spell had to adjust again.”

She glanced around. “A dust storm moved through here the other night: in the wind, the dune moved just far enough westward to reveal the outcropping, and the wizardry started to adapt again. But Síle was still here, up north by the canyon valley you call Huo Hsing Vallis, running the new survey spell she and Markus had designed. She detected the chameleon spell and what it was protecting before the wizardry had time to reset and hide it all again.”

“Well done, that woman,” Ronan said. “She always was the stubborn type.”

“Sometimes stubbornness pays better dividends than high power levels,” Irina said. “Well, shouldn’t we take a look at it?”

“This is your job, I think,” Mamvish said to Kit.

Kit suddenly looked abashed and shy. Nita had to hide her smile.

“Go on,” Mamvish said. “You’re the one who predicted the location. Pull it out of there and let’s see what it is.”

Kit nodded, knelt down in front of the outcropping, put his hands up against it, and very slowly and carefully recited the fourteen syllables of the Mason’s Word, which has power over stone and the mineral elements. Then he leaned inward. Slowly Kit’s hands sank in through the surface of the brown stone, up to the wrists, then up to the elbows. He looked absently upward, like anyone feeling around for something he can’t see, and then his eyes widened.

“It’s pretty big,” he said. “Round, I think. Kind of beachball sized…”

Very slowly he pulled his arms back. His face tensed. “It doesn’t want to come,” he said.

“The spell would resist,” Mamvish said. “That’s its job. Keep pulling.”

Nita watched as the sweat popped out on Kit’s forehead. She could feel his nervousness, catch a flicker of stressed-out thought: Please don’t let me drop it, don’t let anything bad happen to this thing, we’ve been looking for so long—!

Then Kit sat back on his heels, hard, gazing down at what he held. For a few seconds the ancient chameleon spell refused to entirely let go, so that what Kit held looked like nothing but a rounded, gritty, green-brown boulder. Then, gradually, the seeming fell away. Revealed in his hands was a shining blue-green metallic object, strangely shaped: a sort of blunt-ended capsule or stretched sphere, about two feet long.

“Wow…” Nita said, and then realized that her heart was pounding. All the others let out breaths of surprise and satisfaction as they peered over Kit’s shoulder. Only Kit was completely silent, kneeling there with the thing braced on his knees and staring at it in wonder.

And, way down in the pocket of her jeans, Nita’s cell phone rang.

Kit looked over his shoulder, his expression surprised and annoyed. Nita said a word that was not one she’d heard Mamvish using earlier and pulled her phone out, checking the ID on its display. It was her home number. If it’s Dairine, I swear when I catch her I’m gonna grab her and shove her head down the— But the phone, having had its caller ID tweaked with wizardry, helpfully added: DAD CALLING.

“Oh, no,” Nita moaned, for she suspected she knew what he was calling about. “Oh, no. I’m sorry, I have to take this…”

She flipped the phone open, acutely aware of everyone watching her, and flushed with embarrassment. “Hello?”

“Nita,” her dad said: and that was an immediate sign of trouble— both in terms of his tone of voice, which was annoyed, and the fact that he’d called her by her name rather than one of the usual nicknames or pet names he used. “Where are you?”

“I’m on Mars, Dad. Please, can this wait a little while? Because I—”

“No. I need you home right now.”

“Daddy, I—”

“Five minutes.”

She knew that tone of voice, and there was no arguing with it, not if you wanted life to continue in anything like a normal way. “Okay,” Nita said.

Her dad simply hung up.

Oh, he sounds so steamed about something, what can have him so mad…?

I bet I know.

She started to get mad herself as she folded up the phone and put it away. “This is so unfair!” she said.

Mamvish gave her one of those amused Senior-like looks that suggested that the concept of “fairness” was something Nita should have gotten past by now. Nita sighed. “I have to go,” she said to Carmela. “I’m really sorry—”

“Don’t be,” Carmela said. “It’s no problem. I’m sure Kit will drop me off as soon as he’s done here. Won’t you?” And Carmela turned on Kit one of those bright of-course-you-will looks that dared him to say anything different.

Nita saw Kit’s face work through annoyance, frustration, and an imposed calm that suggested he didn’t want to look like an idiot by protesting too much. Behind him, Ronan was gazing innocently at nothing in particular, and Darryl was watching all this with acute interest. “Sure,” Kit said.

Nita reached for her charm bracelet, feeling for the single charm, like a thin ring or empty circle, that held the preset transit spell that would take her home in a hurry. She said the few words in the Speech that took the “safety” off the spell, and as she pulled the bright line of light that was the transit spell out of the charm, Kit threw her an apologetic look. “I’ll log everything we do,” he said. “Get back as soon as you can—”

“Depend on it,” Nita said, dropped the transit circle glowing on the dusty brown-green ground around her, and vanished.

***

Kit let out another long breath as the others gathered around to look more closely at what he held. He looked up at Mamvish and Irina. “What is it?” he said.

“Well, as far as the shape goes,” Irina said, peering at the object, “it’s a superellipsoid. A superegg, some people used to call it, or a Lamé solid: the three-dimensional object you get when you rotate a superellipse around its axis. Not as resistant to force as a sphere, but it’s less likely to be mistaken for something natural.” She reached out a hand, touched it.

Bizarrely, Kit flinched, even though he’d touched the object already. But nothing happened. “It’s weird,” he said. “It looks like metal, but it’s not cold. Even with Mamvish’s environment field covering everything here now, it should still be cold…”

Ronan and Darryl and Carmela all came to crouch down around Kit and carefully touch the superegg. Kit got a sudden image of cautious ape relatives reaching out to a tall black monolith, and had to smile.

“Seems like it’s in no hurry to crack open,” Mamvish said. “But then some of these bottles have long-duration time locks on them, or routines that analyze the finders as carefully as they’d like to analyze the find.”

Kit reached sideways into his otherspace pocket, hanging near him in the air as it always was, and pulled out his manual, putting it down on the ground beside him and flipping to one of the sensing-routine pages in the rear section. He was shaking and couldn’t understand why. It’s not as if I’ve never seen anything alien before! Kit thought. But this is different. This is stranger. Isn’t that weird? The closer to home an alien thing is, the harder it hits—

He looked at the manual. It showed him a diagram of the superegg, but very little data appeared beside the image, and no information about whatever might be inside it. “It is made of metal,” Kit said. “But there’s plastic in it, too. And wizardry…”

Irina looked over Kit’s shoulder at his manual. She reached down to touch it, and a few extra lines of information appeared in the Speech, but nothing more. She looked surprised. As Mamvish, too, gazed down at the manual, her huge tongue flicked out, wavering over the superegg as if tasting the air around it. “This object’s cloaked,” Mamvish said.

“Even against someone with our authorizations?” Irina said. “That would take some doing.”

“So it would,” Mamvish said. “But we have little data on how powerful the wizards were who worked on this world.” Her tail lashed. “At least I don’t get any sense of this interference being something of the Lone Power’s doing…”

Irina frowned. “That’s an impression that could be faked.”

“Yes,” Mamvish said, “but as you say, against one of us? What are the odds?”

Irina raised her eyebrows, shrugged. “Admittedly, low. But there’s a first time for everything…”

“I can feel something,” Kit said, turning the superegg over in his hands. “Like there’s just a little fragment of power in there— a splinter.”

Mamvish put her tongue down against the superegg, let the tip of it rest there for a moment. Symbols in the Speech once again whirled and glowed in her hide, but they were faint and vague. “Yes,” she said. “I feel it, too. A fragment of a spell, or a collapsed and compacted sequence of a wizardry, no more. And it’s not active.”

“Like it’s on standby,” Darryl said.

Mamvish tilted her head sideways, a “maybe” gesture. “It could be. If there’s a complete spell held inside, it may have been set to stay dormant for a while after this artifact was found.”

“In any case, I can confirm your surveyors’ results,” Irina said. “This object’s very old indeed, and nothing like the kind of spell that Earth wizards were doing half a million years ago, even at what were then their highest levels of organization. Structurally, and in terms of the complexity of the outer shell alone, this is completely different. It feels alien to me.”

“Aren’t you going to try to get it open?” Carmela said.

“We’d have to have a clue as to how,” Irina said. Once more she reached down to touch the superegg, running her hand slowly across its surface. “To use wizardry to operate on an object, you have to know what it is, what it’s made of …and working that out may take us a while. Come on,” Irina said in the Speech, and the sudden burst of power in the words her soft voice spoke shook Kit as if someone had struck him. But the power was all persuasiveness.“Tell us your secret. You’ve been alone so long already— isn’t telling about yourself what you want to do, what you’re all about? Who set you here? What are you for? We’re here to listen!”

Nothing. Kit shook his head, wondering how anything inanimate or otherwise could be unmoved by such power directed at it. But the egg just sat there in his lap, mute.

“Plainly this is going to take more analysis,” Mamvish said with a sigh. “Well, it’s the usual thing: nothing worth finding out about comes easy.”

“What’s that?” Ronan said suddenly.

Everybody looked at him. “That sound,” he said.

Kit realized he, too, had been hearing something in the background, a low, hissing noise like static from a radio in the next room. But now it was sounding closer, or as if someone was turning that radio up. Everyone looked in all directions.

“There,” Mamvish said, both her eyes swiveling to look almost directly back the way they’d come.

Kit’s view was blocked by her bulk: he stood up to see. Then his eyes went wide. In the distance, maybe half a mile away, a tall, dark, twisting shape was wobbling across the landscape toward them, kicking up dust as it came. It was vague, soft-featured, amorphous— but it was getting less vague every moment as that hissing noise got louder.

“Dust devil,” Ronan said, peering past Mamvish. Beside him, Carmela watched its approach openmouthed, her attention distracted from Ronan at least for the moment.

“Saw one of those on the TV news the other night,” Darryl said. “It looked smaller…”

“They can be a mile high,” Kit said, for the moment almost oblivious to the superegg he was holding. “The winds inside are almost as fast as an Earth tornado’s…”

“Now there’s a question,” Darryl said. “If a tornado hits you here and picks you up, what happens then? Does Mars have an Oz?”

“It’s not very likely to hit us,” Mamvish said… and then trailed off as the dust devil swerved and headed right toward them.

To Kit’s slight satisfaction, Carmela gulped. “Mamvish, your shield thingy’ll keep that out, won’t it?”

“Wouldn’t matter much if it didn’t,” Kit said. “You might get some dust in your hair. The air here’s so thin, it could hit you square on and not hurt you.”

The dust devil was still running right at them, as unerringly as if it was on invisible tracks. Mamvish half turned, lifting her head, and her hide darkened: under it, symbols and phrases in the Speech began to twist and flow. Kit sucked in a breath and held it at the feel of the power building around her. She’s really something, he thought, once more frozen in place as all the others were. But no, not all the others— Irina straightened up and came around Mamvish’s side. The parakeet fluttered away to perch on top of the stone outcropping, and Irina’s baby looked up into her face with a strange, silent composure, as Irina went up to stand by Mamvish’s head. She hadn’t said a word out loud in the Speech, but Kit could see the air around her hands trembling with some force that rippled the air like heat.

The hissing grew louder; the dust devil wobbled only a little from side to side as it came at them, blocking half the horizon away with a whirling russet wall of dust. The Speech-symbols under Mamvish’s hide blazed as she reinforced her shield-spell, but she didn’t otherwise move. Then the whirlwind of dust blew right over them.

For a moment they were caught right in the center of the vortex. The hiss became deafening. Kit, standing there with the superegg in his hands, tilted his head back and found himself looking up at a view that even few wizards would ever have seen—the dark golden radiance of the Martian noontime sky, but just a circle of it, completely walled around by the upward-widening, brick-colored cone of a dust devil’s heart. The breath went out of him in wonder. But he was feeling something else as well, and couldn’t understand where it was coming from. I’ve seen this before! But that’s crazy. Where could I ever have seen this?

The moment passed as the dust devil did. A second later it was behind them, wobbling away across the Martian landscape again. Mamvish’s wizardry released them, and they all turned to watch it go.

“What a mess,” Carmela said. Kit had to admit that she had a point. The outcropping and the ground around it, which had been fairly clean after the dune had been blown back, were now almost entirely buried in the finest possible brown-red dust. Much more of it was piled nearly ten feet up the face of the black dune. Darryl whistled softly. Irina, the air around her hands gone quiet again now, clucked softly to her parakeet, which had taken to the air. It flew back to her, sat on her head, and shook its feathers out, raising a small red dust cloud of its own.

“Well,” Mamvish said, looking after the dust devil as it wandered away toward the horizon, “that was unusual…”

“You really think so?” Irina said. “You’ll be telling me you believe in coincidences next.”

Mamvish tilted an eye back toward Irina. “Not as such,” she said, “of course not. It’s safe to say that we’ve been noticed. But by what?”

“The planet?” Ronan said.

Irina threw a thoughtful look at him. “If Mars had a Planetary, we could ask him, her, or it,” she said, “but it doesn’t.” She sighed. “One more mystery.”

“Best we take them one at a time,” Mamvish said.

Kit hefted the superegg, which was getting heavy. “Let’s start with this one,” he said. “What do we do with it?”

“Well, we’ll have to keep trying to find a way to get it open,” Mamvish said. “Bottles like these usually lead to more of the same: the more of them you can open, the more you can find out about the species that left them for you, and why they left them. Some of them are just memorials. Some are cries for help. And some species foresee their own demise and leave you information about how they tried to stop it. If you can make sense of those, you can start working on a way to bring them back.”

“Assuming,” Irina said, giving Mamvish a wry look, “that bringing them back is a good idea.”

“Well, of course!” Mamvish said. “It’s not a course of action anyone rushes into. You need a lot of information before you reconstitute a lost species. Some of them are lost for good reasons. And you have to think about the effects of a reconstitution on the nearby planets.” She looked at Kit and the others. “Your world’s now technologically of an age to notice what’s happening here. If a new species suddenly turned up here, humans would be asking why.”

“They’d be doing a lot more than that!” Ronan said. “They’d be going completely spare.”

“Whether aliens would be reconstituted here is an entirely different question,” Mamvish said, waving her tail. “We’ve got a big galaxy, and plenty of completely uninhabited systems with suitable planets. Relocation is always a possibility. But that’s a question for later in the process.”

“Which you’ll need to continue without me, unfortunately,” Irina said, “as I need to get back to what I was doing at home. Let me know how you do with your analysis on that.” She nodded at the superegg. “What’ll you do with it?”

“Re-emplace it for the time being,” Mamvish said, looking at the outcropping. “If there seems to have been some kind of local reaction to its removal, better to minimize the effect for now.”

Irina nodded. “As for you folks,” she said, glancing at Kit and Ronan and Darryl, “just a word. Our cousin Mamvish is as busy as any Planetary would be, and her expertise is in demand. So you want to pay careful attention to whatever advice she gives you in this intervention. If there’s the slightest chance that you don’t understand or can’t handle any problem that comes up, call her right away.” She looked thoughtfully at Kit. “I’ve been watching this project for some time, from a distance. Tom and Carl have told me that you were to be trusted with it… that you were possibly even vital to it, if only for your commitment and all the time you’ve been spending on it. This development suggests they’re right.”

Kit tried to keep the grin of pride off his face. He was only partly successful. Irina smiled, too, but her look was still serious. “Naturally I trust my Seniors’ judgment,” she said. “But, regardless, since Mamvish seems to think you should be taking a leading role in what starts happening here now, I want you to be very, very careful what you do.” Irina gave Kit a look that suddenly had a slight edge of frown on it. “When Tom and Carl briefed me on what you’ve been working on here, I naturally took a long look at your history as a wizard. All your histories,” she said, glancing at Ronan and at Darryl. Then she turned her attention back to Kit. “So far in your career you’ve shown a certain talent for gambling successfully with your own skin in crisis situations. But this work won’t be like that. This is likely to be one of those extended projects where when things go wrong, they start so small that you miss the early warning signs. Whatever happens here will inevitably affect Earth sooner or later… so I expect you’ll behave accordingly.”

“Yes ma’am,” Kit said, sounding very subdued.

“All right,” Irina said. “And now that all that’s said—” The sudden grin that flashed out was as excited as Kit’s would have been. “You’re on the cutting edge of something very unusual, very special. Enjoy it! And keep us posted.”

She turned away and strolled back over to Mamvish. “Don’t forget, now,” Irina said, “let me know right away if there’s anything you need.”

“Cousin, I’ll do that,” Mamvish said, and bowed her head again. Kit put his eyebrows up, for the word wasn’t quite the casually friendly relationship-word hrasht that one wizard used to another in the ordinary course of business. It still spoke of a close kinship, but it was more nuanced, and echoes of the overshadowing attention of the Powers That Be hung over it.

Irina patted Mamvish on the flank, waved to the rest of them, and then she was gone.

A leading role! Kit thought. A leading role!

“Yeah, well, you heard her reading you the pre-riot version of the Riot Act,” Ronan said under his breath. “So don’t get cocky.”

Kit threw Ronan a smug look that suggested the advice might already be a bit late. Ronan rolled his eyes.

“Is she really the most senior wizard on Earth?” Carmela said. “She doesn’t look old enough.”

Kit winced in embarrassment at someone as sketchily informed about wizardry as Carmela making such judgments… even though the thought had crossed his mind as well. Mamvish, though, cocked an indulgent eye at her. “Seniority,” Mamvish said, “takes many forms. Irina is quite special. No one understands the Earth the way she does: and as a result, it listens to her.” She waved her tail in a way that to Kit somehow communicated a strange level of concern. “If for some reason the Earth needed to be destroyed in a hurry, she’d be the one that the Powers would talk to.”

“She takes care of the Earth’s kernel?” Darryl said, awed.

“She may occasionally be the Earth’s kernel,” said Mamvish. “Certainly she’s the planet’s foremost geomancer. And when you possess and exercise power at so central a level, the difference between what you do and what you are does start to blur.” She waved her tail again, turning as she did so.

Another brief storm of Speech-characters broke out under Mamvish’s hide, and the newly deposited red dust went sliding away sideways from the outcropping and the dune, blown there by a more concentrated and focused wind than the one that had dropped it there. “Let’s tuck the egg back in where we found it,” Mamvish said to Kit. “It’ll be safe enough here. Your manuals, and my version of the Knowledge, have stored all the data we acquired from the egg today. The rest of the investigative team will now have the data, too. Our next task is to work out how to open the egg, or read its interior, so that we don’t lose any potential clues to just what happened on this world.”

“You mean,” Carmela said, “maybe the species that lived here destroyed themselves or something?”

Mamvish waved her tail uncertainly. “It’s too soon to say. When both the planets and the species in a given system have such ambivalences about another of the system’s worlds, it could be an indicator that something catastrophic occurred. But with so little information in the manual to guide us, we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions.”

“Isn’t it kind of weird that there isn’t anything?” Darryl said.

“Not at all. Sometimes the Powers That Be purposely conceal information for one reason or another. But in this case They tell me They’ve done no such thing. Which leaves us with other possibilities. The Lone Power might have interfered, causing that information to be hidden. Or the species in question may itself have found a way to redact the data, for reasons of their own.” Mamvish waved her tail again. “We’ll take our time and find the truth. Meanwhile, I’ve got other business to take care of… so let’s seal this up and call it a day.”

Kit nodded and went to kneel in front of the outcropping again. He put one hand on that cold brownish stone and said the Mason’s Word, feeling the stone go soft under his skin. Then carefully he slipped the egg back into the heart of the outcropping.

When it was completely concealed, he paused for just a moment more with his hands on the smooth alien metal, unwilling to take his hands away: he thought he felt the egg tingling slightly in his grip. Am I imagining that? But a moment later the sensation had faded. Probably something to do with using the Mason’s Word: you always get a little fizz, something to do with the gas atoms in the oxides or nitrates or whatever coming unbound.

Kit pulled his arms out of the stone, stood up, and dusted his hands on his pants. As usual, the gesture was fruitless: there always seemed to be more dust to get rid of. “Yeah,” Carmela said, “and when you get home, make sure you stay away from the DVDs until you’ve washed up…”

Kit silently gritted his teeth. I can’t wait to dump her, he thought. And then we have to find a way to keep her from tagging along everywhere we go, or this thing’s gonna turn into a disaster…

“So,” Mamvish said. “Keep doing what you’re doing, cousins: and keep me informed. I’ll leave the shield here to protect what we’ve found. Dai stihó!”

And she was gone, without the slightest movement of the air inside the shield.

“Now there goes a professional,” Ronan said, shaking his head in admiration. “Irina’s right: we’re lucky to have her around.” He stretched, glanced around. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back myself. Conference call tonight?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Put a note in my manual— we’ll set a time. Big D?” He glanced at Darryl.

“Any time after dinner’s fine,” Darryl said. He waved and vanished, making a careless pop in the air.

Ronan rolled his eyes again. “Sloppy,” he said. “See you later—”

A second later Ronan, too, was gone, more silently. Kit looked at Carmela. “Well,” he said, “let’s get you back.” He reached into his otherspace pocket and pulled out the ready-set transit spell he used to get back to his bedroom from Mars. Uncoiling the long sentence in the Speech, he ran the glowing line of light through his hands until he found the part he was looking for. “We need to put your personal info in this,” he said. “Now, how much do you weigh this week?”

His sister glared at him. “Could you start with a more tactless question?”

“Sure. Your IQ?”

Carmela glowered. Kit grinned as he dropped the spell to the ground, and it stretched into a circle around the two of them and joined one end to another like a snake biting its tail. His hands were still tingling slightly as he started reciting the first part of the transit spell and the world started to go silent around them. It was strange that even as the silence built and the universe leaned in to listen to what Kit wanted, he could still hear that hissing, the dust whirling by…

4: Wellakh

Nita appeared as quietly as she could in the shade of the sassafras trees at the “wild” rear of her backyard. In between the bigger trees were tall thickets of smaller sassafras and wild mulberry scrub, screening the space from any possible view from the houses behind or to either side: but right now, the possibility of any neighbors noticing her was the least of her worries. Nita glanced up through the leaves at the late afternoon light, letting out a long, annoyed breath. Since when do I appear out here like someone who’s afraid to go in the house?

She slipped out from under the trees, heading up between the flower beds of the garden. Close to the house, not far from the chain-link fence and its gate, a tall, broad-crowned rowan tree stood in the middle of the yard, all covered with white flowers: an old rope swing hung from one branch. As she walked under the rowan, a long, leafy twig dropped down toward her: she put up a hand absent-mindedly and highfived it. “Liused…” she said in the Speech.

Sounding a little under the weather, the tree said.

“Ask me in an hour or so and I’ll give you a more detailed weather report.”

She opened the gate to the driveway. Her home life had once seemed so much more casual. Where’s your sister, dear? She’s on one of Jupiter’s moons, Mom… Oh, well. I guess that’s all right. Just as long as she’s not creating life again. After the shock of discovering that their daughters were wizards, Nita’s mom and dad had eventually become almost relaxed about it all. But along with Nita’s mother, those days were now gone. Her dad had become much more the heavy parent in the last six months.

You have to expect some changes, her counselor Mr. Millman had said. People handle their love and their loss in a hundred different ways. The results can be annoying until you understand what’s going on. Though Nita was starting to understand, the annoyance was a long way from abating. In Nita’s dad’s case, she suspected his new sternness about wizardly doings was because he knew the tendency toward wizardry had come down to his kids through his side of the family, and he was feeling as if this was somehow all his fault.

If only I could brainfix my dad and make him think that everything was just fine with Dairine. Well, Nita could brainfix him, but it would be the wrong thing to do, would be in complete contravention of the Wizard’s Oath, and would make her feel like a criminal. Nor was it any consolation that psychotropic spellings, the wizardries that could be used to change people’s minds about things, were such a nuisance to work, had such a horrible backlash on the wizard who worked them, and worked for so short a time before everything went back to the way it had been before. The irony wasn’t lost on Nita that a wizard could so easily change concrete physical matter, but practically had to sweat blood to change something as immaterial as someone else’s thought.

Or if I could only clone my sister. Make an extra one who’d stay home and behave, so Dad wouldn’t notice what was going on with the real one…

Then Nita groaned, not believing she was seriously having this idea. The last time there’d been a cloned Dairine around, during her sister’s Ordeal, the complications had been nearly endless.One of her’s enough for any universe! Or the whole sheaf of them. Besides, a Dairine that hangs around behaving all the time? Instantly identifiable as a fake.

She paused on the back doorstep, trying to devise some kind of strategy for handling her dad. His stern moods could be hard to derail—

“You could come in, you know,” said a voice from the kitchen, through the screen door. “It’s not you I’m going to ground.”

That sounded promising, but it didn’t seem smart to relax just yet. Nita went in.

Her dad was rooting around in a cupboard next to the stove; a full coffee cup stood on the counter. “Are we out of sugar?”

“We just got a whole bag last week,” Nita said, leaning against the counter. “Is sugar why I came all the way back from Mars? We were just getting to the good part!”

“And you can go back,” her dad said, coming down with a crumpled up, near-empty bag of store-brand sugar, “as soon as you sort things out here at home.”

“What ‘things’?”

“Your sister,” her father said, “was missing from school today.”

Thought so. Nita rolled her eyes. “Daddy, there’s only two days of school left before summer. You know that she—”

“I don’t know that she,” her dad said, sounding annoyed, letting the cupboard door fall shut and pulling a spoon out of the silverware drawer, which he hip-slammed shut. “And I really dislike getting these calls from school telling me she’s nowhere to be found, after she promised she’d stop cutting classes to run all over the galaxy!”

Nita went into the dining room and flopped down in a chair. This is not my fault, why am I having to deal with this?

“So where is she?” her dad said. “Did she mention to you where she was headed?”

“No. I have no idea.”

“It’s not just that she wasn’t at school,” her dad said. “She also hasn’t done her chores. The kitchen was a mess when I came in, and the garbage didn’t go out this morning for the guys to pick up, after it was already a pickup late because of her ‘forgetting’ it last week. The thing’s nearly overflowing! And this happens even after I had a big thing with her after that about not leaving the planet before she’s done her work at home! For a few days it looked like she was going with the program. But now…”

Nita buried her head in her arms. This is a disaster. I can see it coming now: here goes my whole summer…

In the kitchen, the spoon clinked in the cup for a few moments: then her dad followed Nita in and sat down beside her. He turned the mug around and around on the table between his hands. “Honey, your mom was always better than I was at knowing what was going on in Dairine’s head. Or at least having a clue.” She could hear from his voice that it cost her father something to make this admission. “I don’t have her to help me out now. So you’re going to have to step into the gap and give me a hand.”

Nita wanted to laugh helplessly, but this didn’t seem to be the moment. “I can check the manual to find out where she is, sure. But as for figuring out why she does what she does day by day, by reading her mind or something, it’s not going to happen, Daddy! It’s easy to keep someone out of your head if you know they’re trying to listen. And even when you can hear somebody’s thoughts, you can’t always tell what the thoughts mean to them.”

Her dad looked frustrated. “Then what use is mind reading?”

“Not a lot,” Nita said. “Talking still works best. Which is what wizardry’s about to begin with.”

“Well, talking’s not working real well with Dairine at the moment,” Nita’s dad said. “She keeps telling me she’ll stay in touch, be back home for meals, and then it doesn’t happen. This has to stop. And you’re going to see that it does.”

“Me? How? I can’t do anything about—”

“Oh yes you can. To begin with, you can find her and get her back here. And then you can find a way to make sure she behaves.” Nita’s father frowned. “I don’t want to play the bad guy here, but I can’t spend every day of the summer wondering where she is and what trouble she’s getting into! I have a right to some time off, too—an afternoon or an evening when I don’t have to be worrying about her. This kind of behavior isn’t fair to me!”

He looked at Nita. She let out a breath. “No,” she said, “guess it’s not.”

“Thank you. So I want to know from you every day where Dairine is, until I can start depending on her to let me know. And you go nowhere on any given day until you’ve satisfied me as to where she’s going to be and whether she’s okay.”

Nita heaved a heavy, exasperated sigh and stood up. “You want her back here right now?”

“Yes.”

“And then I can get back to what I was doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have to do something first,” Nita said.

“Do it. Then bring her home for dinner.”

Nita went slowly up the stairs, wearing a frown that she suspected looked much like her dad’s. I hate this. And it’s not fair to me. But there’s no way out. And he’s kind of right—

At the top of the stairs, she paused, looking out the window that overlooked the next-door neighbor’s front yard. So treat it like a challenge from the Powers… because maybe it is. Figure out what to do, and maybe the rest of the summer won’t turn into a horror story. Nita let out a breath. Think of Dairine as just another intervention, one more problem to be solved.

Then Nita swallowed—because whether she liked it or not, there was one step she had to take before she could start solving this particular problem.

In her bedroom she sat down on the bed and pulled her manual out of her otherspace pocket. For a long moment Nita sat hunched over, holding the closed book in her hands, looking at the scuffed blue buckram cover, then flipped the book open and paged through to the directory that listed wizards and their status.

She didn’t have a bookmark for the page she wanted, but then she’d never had cause to look up information about the world of the wizard in question: he’d just turned up in her basement while she was off on exchange. “I need the pages for the star system containing the planet Wellakh…”

The book in her hands riffled its own pages hastily from right to left, kicking up a little cool breeze. Nita smiled. “Can I get you to do this all the time when it’s hot out?”

The pages instantly laid themselves out extremely flat, open and still. “Okay, don’t get all annoyed,” Nita said under her breath, amused, and glanced at the open pages.

Wellakh’s golden-yellow star displayed in the first of a set of images on the left-hand page. The right-hand page filled with data about the system and its one inhabited planet: a précis of local system history, details about the species inhabiting the one inhabited world, and other general information. Nita read quickly through it, shaking her head; the planet’s history had been difficult. Not that anyone couldn’t tell that from clear out in space, she thought, looking at the image of the planet. Half of Wellakh was dappled with blue seas and lakes, much of its terrain red-golden with the planet’s idiosyncratic vegetation. There were even snowy mountains here and there. But the other half of that world was flat and scorched-looking, a slagged-down desolation. What would it have been like growing up there—knowing that anytime, your sun might get cranky and pull the same stunt again?

Nita touched the listing again. “Show me all wizards native to the planet for the last hundred Wellakhit years.”

The picture of the planet dissolved, replaced by a couple of columns’ worth of listing. Nita glanced down it, turned the page to see two more columns there. But that was all. Just a few hundred wizards. Not a lot for a world with a population of over a billion: mostly a pretty peaceful place. But the troubles they’ve got are big ones. And for the worst ones, they need a very special kind of wizard…

Nita started running down the list. Ke Nelaid, ROSHAUN… ‘See det Nuiiliat’? Oh, I get it, that’s the clan name the whole family’s listed under.

Under det Nuiiliat, a long list of wizards in that wizards in that family went right down the page. In fact, half the wizards on the planet were either in this family or related to it. Nita swallowed as she came to “Nelaid”… then realized this wasn’t the wizard she was looking for, but his father. Ke Seriv, NELAID. Residence— The address initially displayed in the Wellakhit language, then re-rendered itself in the Speech. Sunplace, the Borders, the Scorched Zone, Old Continent. Position: Sunlord-in-Abeyance. Power rating: 28.8 +/-.5. Nita’s eyebrows went up: that was a very high rating, certainly higher than Tom’s or Carl’s. Physical status: Corporate. Mission status: Presently unassigned; political considerations.

But this wasn’t the name Nita was looking for. I missed it: on Wellakh they change their names depending on who their father was. She glanced farther up the column, and a little shiver of pain went through her as she found the name she’d resisted looking up for so long.

Ke Nelaid, ROSHAUN. Former residence: Sunplace, the Borders, the Scorched Zone, Old Continent. Position: Son of the Sunlord, son of the Great King, descendant of the Inheritors of the Great Land, the Throne-Destined. Nita grimaced at the string of weighty titles that Dairine had immediately and somewhat scornfully reduced to “prince.” Then Nita looked down at what she had been avoiding, the single line underneath the description.

Physical status:

And she stared at the blank space after the words. There was nothing else there.

But that doesn’t make any sense—!

Nita scanned up the column again to other older names. The majority of their physical status listings showed the single long, curved-back streak of Speech charactery that meant one thing: Recall. Nita had seen it often enough in the listings of wizards from Earth, both those whose lives had been lost in the line of duty and those who had died in other circumstances. The implication seemed to be that once you were a wizard, maybe you never stopped being one unless you really wanted to— and even after you were dead, or what passed for dead in the Real World, the Powers That Be nonetheless considered you to still be on some kind of duty. It was, in a strange way, reassuring.

But this… this is just strange.

The listing did have some unusual descriptions of physical status. One, attributed to one of Roshaun’s great-great-grandmothers, was Indeterminate. A couple of others said Exhaled. Nita blinked. Whatever that means! But the complete lack of a physical status for Roshaun left Nita bemused. She reached out to the listing and touched a different name, feeling the small sizzle of power that spoke of active wizardry indwelling in a self. All the names had it, dead or alive. But when she touched Roshaun’s name—

No sizzle: a feeling as if the manual page was nothing but ordinary paper. It’s as if not even the Powers That Be are sure what’s happened to him. How can that be? I don’t get it.

And if even They don’t get it—

Nita let the manual’s pages fall forward on the finger that held her place. Whatever it means, it also means that Roshaun’s not dead! Or not dead yet. Or something. And whatever else I might think about what Dairine’s up to, at least she’s not nuts, or in denial. She’s looking for somebody she’s got at least a chance of finding. Maybe the smallest chance imaginable… but still a chance.

Nita spent the next few moments just getting hold of herself …for she’d been shaking, afraid of what she was about to find. Which just goes to show that I should’ve done this a long time ago. Maybe I could have saved myself this grief with Dairine! The shock of relief was almost as hard to bear as the shock she’d braced herself for, that final awful certainty from which there would have been no retreat.

Finally she flipped the manual open again, riffling through to the section holding the directory for Earth. Nita had a quick-reference “bookmark” page installed at the front, showing names of wizards she knew well or had worked with either frequently or occasionally. The name she was looking for was almost at the top. Callahan, DAIRINE R. Present location: Sunplace, Old Continent, Wellakh. Nita raised her eyebrows. Okay, but doing what? she thought. Arrival time: JD 2454274.10012. Power rating, 5.45 +/- .55… Nita eyed her sister’s power level: it was lower than she’d ever seen it. Then again, what’s this supposed to be? She looked curiously at the listing beside it, one she couldn’t remember having seen before. It said, Under augmentation: augment level 3.2 +/- 2.2. She frowned. That’s a new one. What’s she up to?

She put her finger on the listing. “Coordinates, please?”

They displayed on the page. At the same time, a voice said in the back of her head, You know, if you’d just ask me, I’d do the gating and take you there.

“Bobo,” Nita said, “I appreciate the offer. I just want to make sure I don’t lose the hang of doing it the hard way.”

You’re just a glutton for punishment, the peridexis said.

“You and I are going to have to sit down—as much as you can sit, anyway—and have a long talk about—”

How we can be talking at all? Bobo said. At least he didn’t sound injured. I guess I wonder myself. But go on, do your spell the hard way.

Nita jiggled the charm bracelet on her wrist until the gating charm came up. Out of it she pulled a long, blue-glowing thread of spell, a single word-character in the Speech. This she drew down until it touched Dairine’s entry in the manual, hooking to its location parameters. Then Nita let go of the strand of light. When it snapped back into the charm, it pulled with it a whole new chain of characters, swallowed them up, and blazed, ready to go.

Nita stood up and shoved the manual into the waiting otherspace pocket. Then she pulled on the charm again, and that long line of glowing blue light slid out: she dropped it on the floor, where it went a fierce molten gold and stretched into a circle of Speech-words, ready to knot itself up in the Wizard’s Knot. Nita looked down at the glowing words and slowly began to speak them, turning as she spoke.

The room went silent. Darkness pressed in. As she completed the spell and pronounced the syllables of the Wizard’s Knot, everything went dark.

Moments later she found herself standing on a terrace of some smooth, glittering dark-golden stone. Behind her, in a sheer stone wall, was a series of tall, glassy doors, like the entry to a school or the front of a theater, leading into some dim, hard-to-see interior.

Maybe fifty yards in front of Nita, the terrace ended in a meter-high railing that followed the terrace’s curve hundreds of feet along to either side and out of sight. Out past the rail she got a glimpse of wide gardens far below, fading off into a barer landscape. Glancing from side to side, Nita saw that the terrace itself was cantilevered well out from the surface of the huge, relatively smooth needle of stone behind her, in the base of which the doors were set.

Nita tilted her head back, trying to see the top of the peak above. A few hundred feet, maybe— It was hard to tell. The blue-green sky was full of clouds: as she watched, one drifted straight into and around the top of that needle of stone, obscuring it. More terraces were visible above, staggered around the surface of the uprising spear of stone, up to the cloud and past it.

Nita glanced around, wondering where to go from here. Her transport wizardry had built into it a typical so-called “decent interval” offset; you’d be deposited somewhere within, say, a hundred meters of the person you were seeking, but the wizardry wouldn’t drop you right into that person’s lap. So let’s see …Down the right side of the curve, nothing was visible but featureless, shining stone. To the left, though, maybe fifty yards down, Nita spotted a single small door, all by itself. But wait. Not a door. That’s a gate. It’s got bars—

Nita reached sideways and retrieved her manual from the otherspace pocket— for when a wizard was visiting a world where wizardry was practiced in the open, his manual was his passport— and walked toward that gate.

Above her, that cloud moved away. On the stony spire’s far side, the sun came out, throwing a long path of shadow down the wall, over the gate and Nita, and out to the terrace’s edge. But as she got close to the gate, she saw a light as intense pouring out of it, streaming in a narrow bar-striped ribbon out across the terrace.

Nita stared. Oooookay, she thought. Unusual. She walked slowly to the gate, tucking her manual under her armpit, and reached for her charm bracelet, pinching one small glassy lens-charm between finger and thumb and saying a few words in the Speech under her breath. A fragment of spell-shielding ran up and over her free hand and nearly to her elbow, like an oven mitt of thickened air. She wiggled her fingers to make sure that it felt right, and then stuck the shielded hand into that light.

Nothing happened. Just sunlight? Nita thought. Weird, unless there’s a window on the far side of the mountain. She shook the shield-spell back down her arm: it vanished. Then she peered around through the bars of the gate.

Her mouth dropped open. Sunlight, she thought. Inside the gate was a huge, domed, circular room nearly as wide across as the entire width of the spire of stone. Inside it, floating maybe three feet above the floor, was a sun.

Nita leaned against the gate, staring at the burning, dark-golden globe that hung there. It looked to be about fifty feet in diameter. Blobby black foot-long sunspots sailed slowly across its surface, the fiery red-gold plasma they pushed through getting all torn up by their magnetic fields. Plasma writhed and stretched away from the surface in bright filaments as the sunspots plowed stubbornly through it like inkblots with a mission. Elsewhere, sticking up off the surface like fuzz off a ball of yarn, spiky prominences licked into the upper reaches of the star’s atmosphere, frayed at their ends and fell back again. If you held still, you could just see the star’s rotation, as slow as watching sunrise. As Nita watched, movement off to the right caught her eye as someone walked around the side of the great globe and stood with her back to Nita, looking up at it.

What the heck is she wearing? Nita thought. There was no mistaking Dairine, especially in that small sun’s light: it made her red hair look even redder than usual. When Nita had seen her this morning, Dairine had been been wearing jeans leggings and a flowered T-shirt. She might still have them on, but it was hard to tell, as she also now wore some kind of silky floor-length tunic in a dark honey color.

Dairine half turned, pushed up the sleeve of the tunic— yeah, the jeans and the top are still there; what a strange look!— and thrust her arm into the sun, almost up to the shoulder, where she stood feeling around under the “star’s” surface like someone trying to find something hidden at the back of a dark cupboard. And as Dairine felt around inside the sun, her glance fell on Nita.

Dairine’s eyes went wide: she froze. That’s my cue, Nita thought. Is this open? She pushed the gate experimentally. It swung open under her push. Nita walked in and started across that broad shining floor toward Dairine. Dairine took her arm out of the sun, shook it, folded her arms, and stood watching Nita come.

This was a sure sign that Dairine was in a snotty mood and ready to be tough to deal with. Now it’s just a question of how to handle it. Nita kept walking, letting her attention move to that huge, slowly turning ball of energy. The energy was real; as she got closer, the heat from the “sun” was increasing, though it was nothing like what a star would genuinely have emitted. It’s a simulator, Nita thought. Maybe even a real-time mirror of Wellakh’s own star.

Another shape came out from behind the starglobe: a man. He was taller than all but the tallest human beings would be— slender, narrow-shouldered, wiry, with very long hair as red as Dairine’s. He wore the same sort of long, light tunic Dairine was wearing, though his was several shades darker, with nothing under it but a sleeveless vest and long, loose trousers of a similar silky material, almost exactly the dark fiery amber color of that star.

As Nita got closer she spotted something else unusual that Dairine was wearing besides the tunic. Around her neck was an oversize torc of red-gold metal, with a smooth, egg-shaped, egg-sized stone set in it— paler than the metal, slightly paler than the color of the star. In its depths, as Nita got close, she saw a glow that shifted and moved, echoing the stretch and snap of the prominences on the “star’s” surface. Every now and then the glow dimmed as a miniature sunspot slipped by under the surface of the gem.

Dairine, hostile-eyed, watched Nita coming as the man walked around the side of the “star” toward them. Nita paused and waited for him to approach.

His walk was easy and graceful, but his expression suggested that the outer calm concealed a tremendous tension. Nita found herself being examined by very immediate green eyes, shadowed under heavy brows. The Wellakhit’s face was a sharp one, high-cheekboned, eyes slanted, so that it was easy to get the impression of some cool and thoughtful predator looking at you. As he got closer, Nita picked up on something else: a sense of sheer power that transmitted itself right across the empty air. She concentrated on hanging on to her composure as he came, for she’d never felt anything quite like this before from a being who worked with wizardry and was also mortal. Most immortals spend a lot of effort covering up their power, she thought, so we ephemerals won’t get too freaked. And mortal wizards don’t flaunt their power: it’s rude.

But this wizard possibly had reasons for handling his aura differently. On Wellakh, where there were relatively few wizards, Nelaid ke Seriv was very senior indeed: if not actually the Planetary—for some worlds had none—then the next thing to it on Wellakh, a person of crucial importance to the planet’s well-being and a power to be reckoned with. Which is probably why it annoys him so much that some of his people keep trying to assassinate him. And why he walks around with his aura hanging out, so anybody in range gets reminded what they’re in for if they cross him.

As he came, Nita’s eyes went back to that flaming hair of his. It wasn’t just almost the same shade as Dairine’s: it was exactly the same shade. That is beyond strange! And at the back of Nita’s mind, the thought stirred that, in a wizard’s world, there were no coincidences. When something looked like a connection, it was smart for you to pay attention—

Later. When she judged that Nelaid was close enough, Nita executed the half bow that she’d found worked well with most bipedal humanoid species. “Senior,” Nita said, having considered which of ten or twenty terms of address would be most correct, “in the Powers’ names, and on Their behalf, greetings from another jurisdiction.”

“Young cousin,” he said, a response correct if not precisely comradely, “in Their names, and on Their business as always, welcome.”

“What are you doing here?” Dairine said.

Nita didn’t even spare Dairine a glance. Protocol dictated otherwise: you always greeted and briefed the most senior wizard first. This also left Nita with a perfect way to outflank Dairine’s temper. “Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt whatever’s going on, but we have a family situation that in my judgment overrides what my manual indicates is an elective exercise on my sister’s part. With your permission—”

Nelaid nodded, a gracious gesture of agreement, and turned away as if to examine the star-simulation. Nita went over to Dairine. Under her breath she said, “You look like a Jedi knight who lost the bathrobe’s belt.”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “I live for your fashion bulletins.”

“Your continued life is just what we’re talking about. Your home life, at least. Dad wants you back there right now.”

“You came all the way here to tell me that? Well, you can just go right back, thanks.”

The dismissive, cutting tone made Nita flush hot. As she opened her mouth, “Your pardon,” Nelaid said, “but a matter has arisen that requires my intervention. If I may be excused—”

Surprised by the very status-neutral language, Nita caught the oddest look from Nelaid, a slight narrowing of the eyes. Then he vanished without so much as a breath of wind, the effortless displacement of a wizard who had long since perfected the art of teleporting in or out without anyone being the wiser. Especially whoever’s trying to murder him this afternoon…

Nita turned back to Dairine. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Practicing. Or I was until you butted in.” Dairine turned away.

“Practicing what?”

Shrugging out of her overrobe, Dairine glared at Nita. “Messing with the energy management of a live star,” she said. “What are you, obtuse?”

She’s trying to get me mad, Nita thought, and that’ll be her excuse to blow me off. “Cruel question for someone you know hates geometry,” Nita said.

Her sister’s mouth quirked as she folded up the robe. Nita kept her own face still. “Dair, you ditched school.”

“Like everybody else wasn’t ditching it today,” Dairine muttered, turning away. “Like it’s such a big deal. Some schools are more important than others.”

“Won’t argue,” Nita said. “But you and Dad had an agreement. If you’d let him know what you were going to do first, you might have been in less trouble than you are now. Now you’ve got a mess to clean up. The least you can do,” Nita said as Dairine opened her mouth to say something angry, “is let me help you get out of it so you can get on with business.”

Dairine paused. “What?”

Nita laughed, thinking, This is the way to go, keep her off balance! “You think I enjoy watching you get in trouble? There’s nothing in it for me. And it screws up my schedule. Let’s keep this brief so we can both get back to what we were doing, okay?”

Dairine stared, caught between bemusement and suspicion. “Are you all right?” she said. “Have you flunked something?”

“No! This isn’t about anything but me helping you cover your butt, because it looks like you could use some help with that right now.”

Dairine scowled, but now at least the scowl suggested that they might be on the same side of the argument. “All right, how?”

“We’re going to bug your manual,” Nita said.

Dairine’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no you are not!” she said. “Nobody but me messes with Spot!”

“Of course somebody does!” Nita said. “All the time. Wizardry messes with Spot every second of the day.”

Dairine gave her a strange look.

“All Dad wants is to know where you are, and that you’re okay,” Nita said. “There are two ways that can happen. He can make me run after you constantly and report in on everything you do. I mean everything. If he doesn’t like something you’re up to, I’ll have to haul you out of it… which is probably going to make us kill each other by the end of the summer. You’ll be sick and tired of me butting in on you every five minutes, yeah?”

“Yeah—”

“And I’ll want you dead because having to keep tabs on you will ruin my schedule and drive me berserk. Since killing each other would get the Powers That Be cranky with us, let’s try something else. Remember the translation spinoff we arranged with Tom last month, so Dad would have access to the manual info about Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun when they came to visit?”

Dairine nodded, but couldn’t cover the wince of pain on hearing Roshaun’s name. Nita pretended she hadn’t noticed. “We’ll do the same deal,” Nita said, “but instead we’ll hook the output from your daily manual precís into it. Dad can read it on the computer, or even his cell phone.”

“He won’t understand half of it,” Dairine said, scowling.

“Not my problem,” Nita said. “You get to explain stuff to him when you get home every day. He’ll calm down even more when you’re telling him about what you’re doing.”

“It’s gonna be a nuisance,” Dairine said.

“Not as much a nuisance as being grounded.”

Dairine grinned. “Like he could.”

“He couldn’t. But Tom could.” The amusement fell out of Dairine’s expression. “You know he and Dad talk every few days! One word from Dad to Tom, and unless you’re officially on errantry, your butt’s going to be stuck on Earth till the two of them agree otherwise.” Dairine opened her mouth. “And the Powers That Be wouldn’t countermand Tom unless there was something big going on! Till we hit the local legal age, They’re mostly on Dad’s side.”

Dairine stared at the polished floor. “I don’t know,” she said at last, looking toward the simulation. “This has kind of a Big Brother sound to it…”

“Or Big Sister?” Nita said. “Yeah, it does. But it’s the best deal we’re going to get from Dad right now. And since Bobo is wizardry, and the Powers That Be run him, he can’t do anything bad to you or Spot.” Nita glanced around. “Where is he, anyway?”

Dairine gestured with her head toward the star simulator. To Nita’s considerable surprise, a small shadow, like a rectangular sunspot, materialized near the bottom of the slowly rotating globe: and then a dark oblong shape extruded itself from the shadow and dropped toward the shining floor. The shape put out legs in midair and landed on them, bouncing slightly as it came down. Then it came spidering over to Dairine and Nita.

“Has he had another upgrade?” Nita said. When she’d seen Spot only that morning, he’d looked as he had for the last couple of months—shining black and wearing, set into the back of the closed lid, what could at first glance have been mistaken for the fruity logo of a large computer company, except that this apple had no bite out of it Now, though, he looked significantly thinner, and the black of his carapace had gone matte.

“Scheduled molt,” Dairine said. “He was installing some new firmware and thought while he was at it he’d try one of the new nonreflective coatings on his shell.”

“Sharp look, guy!” Nita said to him. “Suits you.”

Thanks, Spot said. As usual, he was no more verbally forthcoming with Nita than with anyone else but Dairine. But he did sound faintly pleased.

Dairine let out a long breath. “I don’t know about this,” she said under her breath. “Bobo’s kind of your tool.”

Nita burst out laughing. Dairine looked at her strangely. “What? What’s so funny?”

It took Nita a few moments to get the laughter under control. “My tool! Oh, please. Like I can order wizardry around and tell it what to do! Please let that happen.” She got down on one knee. “Spot,” she said, “have you been following this?”

Yes.

“Will this solution work for you? You’re the one who’ll be the source of the raw data. Bobo’ll just be managing the spinoff for Dad: he’ll feed the massaged data to the computer at home.”

Maybe with text-message alerts and tweets when something new comes in, Bobo said at the back of Nita’s mind. And copied to e-mail, of course…

Nita rolled her eyes. Not only do I have the spirit of wizardry living in my head, but it’s a geek spirit. She turned her attention back to Spot.

He turned one eye up to look at Dairine. Okay with you?

She shrugged. “If we’re going to stay on track with what we’re doing here, sounds like it has to be.”

All right, Spot said, and trundled off back under the simulator. There he levitated up into the body of the surrogate sun, vanishing in the glare of its chromosphere.

Nita shook her head. “How hot does it get in there?”

“Not too bad,” Dairine said, and sighed. “A couple thousand degrees K. The temperature’s scaled down, like the exterior, for practice. Wizards here usually scale themselves way up in apparent size to work with Thahit. Seems it perceives us better that way.”

Nita nodded. “Okay. Look… thanks for working with me on this. Why don’t you go get changed and we’ll head home and deal with Dad before he gets too crazy. The sooner we disarm him, the sooner life gets back to what passes for normal.”

Dairine nodded, moved away. Then suddenly she stopped and turned: and the strange, hard look on her face made Nita wonder if she was going to have to do this bout of persuasion all over again.

“One thing,” Dairine said.

Nita tried to stay calm. “Yeah?”

Dairine came back to Nita almost reluctantly. “When you came after me just now,” Dairine said, “you checked your manual first, didn’t you? To see what happened to Roshaun.”

Nita froze. Dairine’s voice had gone expressionless and flat, and hearing it sound that way scared Nita: the last time she’d heard that tone from her sister had been just after their mom had died. How do I handle this? What do I say?

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I did.”

Dairine stared at her. Then she whispered, “What did it say?”

Oh, God, I was afraid of this! Either she hasn’t looked, or she has and doesn’t believe what she saw. And if whatever I say is the wrong answer, now I get blamed for whatever I found. “Uh. It was something weird. Something really— vague.”

Dairine’s face was simply frozen. Nita didn’t dare move. Oh, no, I’m dead now…

But suddenly her sister was hugging her hard, her face buried in Nita’s vest. “Oh, wow,” Dairine was saying, “oh, wow, I was so scared, I thought that he— and then I thought I was crazy; it didn’t make any sense. But if you saw it, too, then it’s true, he’s not, not dead, he’s not—”

Nita was bemused, but for the moment the safest course seemed to be to just hang on to Dairine while her sister got herself under control. “It’s okay,” she said, “it’s okay!” —while very much hoping it actually was.

After a moment Dairine pushed her away, turning her back to wipe her eyes. “Come on,” Nita said, “let’s get moving. Go change.”

Dairine nodded and vanished.

Nita turned away from the slowly rotating star— then jumped. In complete silence, Nelaid had reappeared behind her and was standing with hands clasped behind his back, looking past Nita at the simulator.

That ironic gaze shifted to her now. Nita popped out in a sweat. The effect was similar to being in the principal’s office, except that in this case she hadn’t been called: she’d walked in and told the principal to his face that whatever he was doing, he needed to stop it while she dealt with business. “I’m really, really sorry,” Nita said. “If I could have, I’d have waited till she got home. But my dad—”

Nelaid held up a hand, closed his eyes. It was a gesture Nita had seen other humanoid species use as the equivalent of a headshake. When Nelaid opened his eyes again, his expression was milder, if no less ironic. “She is, I take it, a trial to you.”