Games Wizards Play

9

Manhattan: Javits Center

GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL at midmorning, for Nita at least, had a surprisingly restful feel. The worst of the morning rush hour was over, the Sun shone in beautifully through the big windows, and lots of people strolled casually or purposefully across the bright, echoing space without there being too much of a feeling of stress or hurry. Nita was quite aware that her own history with this place tended to affect her perceptions; any space tends to look serene when it’s not full of angry dinosaurs or about to be trashed by the Lone Power in a bad mood. But that didn’t stop her from enjoying the slower pace.

She and Kit transported as usual into the commuter-free “safe space” at the far end of Track 23 just off the Main Concourse—where the onsite worldgating team had the terminal’s security cameras permanently spoofed, and a simple on-demand light-bending stealth-spell operated 24/7 to keep any unexpected nonwizards in the area from noticing when the emplaced worldgate operated. As it happened, Nita and Kit arrived during a brief quiet period between train arrivals, and it took only a moment or two for them to make sure no one on adjacent platforms could see them. They were heading toward the edge of the stealth field some meters away when something down low near the floor passed through it and faded into visibility, trotting down the platform toward them: a small black cat with its tail held cheerfully in the air.

“Rhiow!”

“Well, look what the Queen dragged in!” said the most senior of Grand Central’s worldgating team as she came up with them in mid-platform, rubbing against one of Kit’s shins and then rearing up against Nita’s.

“Yeah, and dai stihó to you too!” Nita said, reaching down to scratch her between the ears.

Rhiow dropped to all fours again and gazed up at them with big golden eyes. “Cousins, I can’t stay, the Lexington gate got stuck in the middle of its maintenance cycle again and I have to go debug it. But it’s fine to see you! You’re on your way over for the Invitational?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “I saw that Penn Station’s gate’s down, though. That must be a nuisance for you with all the people coming through . . .”

“Oh no, it’s because of the Invitational that it’s down! Just a temporary service reconfiguration. We can’t leave a set of short-term gates operating so close to the permanent gate structures at Penn: they’re too territorial, they’d start making trouble for each other. So all the Penn Station worldgate traffic’s being rerouted through here for the day. Not such a big deal.”

“Oh, that’s okay then, I guess,” Nita said. “We were worried something was broken.”

Rhiow’s ears went flat for a moment. “Powers That Be, don’t even think it! Things are busy enough as it is.”

“Too busy for you to stop by Javits later?” Kit said.

“This evening? Most likely there’ll be time. Tell them to save me some of that upstate milk.” And she flirted her tail at them and headed briskly on down to the end of the platform again, leaping off of it and vanishing into the dark.

“No problem,” Nita called after her. “See you later!”

“Upstate milk?” Kit said as they headed on down the platform in the other direction and the stealth field released them into visibility.

“There’s this dairy farm in the Catskills that’s been selling milk in one of the city farmers’ markets on weekends,” Nita said. “She and Hwaith have it bad for this stuff. They keep going on about the cream on top, apparently it’s not homogenized . . .”

They made their way up the ramp from the Grand Concourse and out through the bright brass doors into the sunshine, turning right on Forty-second and heading west. Cabs blared horns, trucks rumbled by, a fire engine honked its way past in a blur of red and white, lights flashing and siren yipping as it braked at the intersection of Forty-second and Lex, then slid through against the lights, still yipping. People going both ways on the sidewalk pressed in around them, brushed past them, trailing fragments of conversation over them. “But then I thought, why in the world would I—” “—not going to do that—” “I never made that bet with you!” “—starts making fun of my hat and I said, ‘You know nothing, and anyway this isn’t a fedora, it’s a trilby—’”

“You thought he was going to give you trouble?” Kit said as they paused at the intersection of Forty-second and Madison, waiting for the light.

“Who?”

“Penn. About the chat.”

Nita let out an annoyed breath. “Or I was going to give him some, yeah.”

The light changed: they headed across. “Not that he wouldn’t have had it coming,” Kit said.

“Yeah. It’s just that—I don’t know, I keep getting the feeling that every time I try to have a conversation with him, he’s saying one thing and meaning something else.” Nita made a face. “Possibly something creepy. Or else he’s writing me off as too girly to listen to. No middle ground with him.”

Kit looked amused. “You know,” he said, “we could turn Lissa loose on him.”

She looked at him in surprise. “Wait, is she going to be here?”

“Yeah, I saw her on the incoming visitor list in the manual this morning.” Kit grinned. “After ten minutes or so of Lissa in I’m-talking-tech-to-you,-stupid mode, he’ll be so grateful for you.”

The notion made Nita smile, though there was a slightly sour edge to it. I should be able to do that to him myself, she thought. As they came up to the next light at Fifth Avenue, Nita gazed across and leftward at the New York Public Library and the great couchant lions guarding the doors. She was briefly distracted by the idea of them leaping off their pedestals and roaring down Fifth Avenue in the darkness years ago. Then she realized that Kit was watching her with a worried expression. “What?”

“You look pissed off.”

“I am,” Nita muttered.

“Look—” Kit’s expression was slightly nervous. Nita stared at him, confused. “Lissa’s not . . . I mean, there’s nothing you should—”

Nita thought of what Carmela had said to her a while back: You two get so used to reading each other’s minds that you forget how to talk. She had to smile: there was truth in it. But she didn’t see why she couldn’t still tease Kit about it. “For someone who’s usually all about finding the right words, you sure get tongue-tied sometimes.”

“What I mean is . . .” Then Kit caught Nita’s tone and knew that everything was okay, and laughed. “I don’t know what I mean.”

She realized that Kit was looking down at her hand, hanging beside his. His was twitching a little. Nita looked up at him and said, “I know what you mean about not knowing what you mean.”

Then they both cracked up. “Do you even listen to yourself?” Kit said.

“Been trying not to, lately.”

The light changed. Kit reached out and took her hand, and they crossed Fifth together a little awkwardly. You’d think crossing the street while holding someone’s hand would be easier, Nita thought. Not the other way around . . .

“With Penn, though . . .” Nita said after a moment, jumping back a subject as they headed on down Forty-second and past the side of the library. “Who needs any more of that? With all the crap at school—”

“Yeah.” Occasionally it seemed as if sometime during the last year or so in school, somebody had thrown a switch, and suddenly talk about sex was everywhere (though as far as Nita could tell, there was a lot more talk going on about it than action). And not talking about it was as fraught with trouble as talking about it was. If you got into such discussions even as protective coloration, there could be an ugly backlash. Nita had learned the hard way that some people took her refusal to talk about it either as proof she and Kit weren’t doing it, or proof that they were. Being hit with both insinuations at once had recently caused Nita to completely forget for several minutes about years of being committed to not increasing entropy. She’d been within a breath of increasing it (generally) all over the athletics field in back of the school, and (specifically) all over Michaela whose-last-name-she-could-never-remember-and-now-didn’t-want-to.

“You didn’t kill her,” Kit said. “That was a good thing.”

Nita stared at him, then flapped her free hand helplessly in the air. “See that?” she said. “You don’t even have to know what I’m thinking to know what I’m thinking.”

Kit started laughing again. “Kind of hard to miss what your face is doing.”

“God, am I that transparent? How am I any possible use if everybody can tell what I’m thinking all the time?”

“I don’t know. Might have saved Michaela deVera’s life that you were that transparent. Because word has it that nobody’s heard a peep out of her about you since she saw the look on your face while you were standing over her on the track.”

DeVera. Okay. But it’ll probably be ten minutes before I forget her name again, because God I can’t stand her. “Oh great, thank me for that by all means,” Nita muttered. “Just don’t blame me if now she lives long enough to reproduce.”

Kit started whooping with laughter, laughing so hard that he had to stop walking and pull Nita over with him to one side, so he could lean on one of the big, sloping, squared pillars of the building they were passing and regain control of himself. “Oh God, oh God,” was all he could say for nearly a minute. And then finally, when he had the strength to push himself upright and wipe his eyes, Kit gasped, “Who would—who would even be a part of that? Seriously!”

Nita had to admit that Kit had a point. Michaela had left Nita (and various others) utterly astonished by bragging about Doing It with Mike Kavanagh, when it was well known around school that (a) Mike was totally out of play due to being deep in a Skype-fueled Internet affair with some girl in the south of England, to the point where he wasn’t even interested in putting up the usual playing-the-local-field smokescreen, and (b) Michaela’s cruel, foul mouth was so well known and disliked that nobody wanted to take the chance of hooking up with her for fear of what would be said about it, by everyone, afterward—starting with Michaela.

It took another minute for Kit to fully recover enough breath to say, “Has she ever even done it with anybody?”

Nita shook her head. “Maybe not . . .” But Michaela desperately wanted people to think she had. Nita had come into the girls’ room one afternoon unnoticed and heard one long brag session spinning itself out in excruciating, too-much-information detail, while the group surrounding Michaela down by the sinks at the far end of the room made encouraging (though not necessarily impressed) noises at the graphic stuff. But when they’d noticed Nita coming out of a stall, Michaela had turned their attention to her, and the jeering started. And then in gym class when they were outside . . .

She sighed. It hadn’t been her proudest moment, but at least Michaela hadn’t gotten hurt when she “tripped” in the middle of a hundred-yard dash—just got the wind knocked out of her so hard that she had nothing left to call anybody names with for a while. Nita had been very careful about the placement of the shock-absorbing barrier that cushioned Michaela’s spill on the track; it was a variation of what she used to use to protect herself from bullies. “But that’s why it’s so stupid for her to be in everybody’s face about whether they’ve done it,” Nita said. “Or haven’t.” It was amazing the way the taunts still rang in her ears. He can’t be worth much as a boyfriend if you won’t even talk about him. Maybe he can’t do it, huh? Or else he won’t, he’s never going to. Maybe you’re making it all up so people will think you’re normal. Good luck with that. Nita concentrated on rhythmic breathing and not getting herself riled up again. Maybe I need to grow a thicker skin.

“Your skin is fine,” Kit muttered.

She looked at him sidewise.

“Okay, that one I heard,” he said. He looked vaguely guilty, which was all wrong.

“It’s been coming and going for me too lately,” Nita said. And somehow, never at times when I want it to. “Sorry.”

Kit shook his head. “Don’t be. Same here.”

They did another half block or so in silence. It was odd, Nita thought, that it seemed easier to talk here, out among all these hundreds of people who were passing them by. But they don’t know us. Even though the people standing or walking nearest to them might hear what they were saying, it didn’t matter; they’d never see any of these people again. And it was also, oddly, more comfortable to talk about this stuff out here than someplace more quiet and private, where things might change suddenly.

“You’re irritated again,” Kit said.

“I’m not.”

There was a short silence, but somehow it wasn’t uncomfortable. “You know,” he said, “if ‘boyfriend’ is the wrong word . . .”

“It’s not! It’s just . . .”

She laughed. Kit looked confused. “What?”

“Got a really stupid idea . . .”

“It’s probably not.”

“Is it possible that, sometimes, with a word . . . you might need a while to break it in? Like new shoes.”

Kit gave her a look that suggested he was waiting for more of an explanation.

Nita shrugged. “Just think what we’ve been through the last few years. The dangerous stuff. We’ve saved each other’s lives how many times now? As friends. And now this . . . it’s different. But it’s there.”

She held her breath again. Not that there’s any real doubt, come on, you know there’s not . . .

“Yeah,” Kit said after a moment. “It does take some extra getting used to. Because normally it comes with all these expectations.”

Nita nodded, letting that breath out. “How you should look. What you should sound like when you’re around each other.”

“Or when you’re not.”

“How you should be.”

“God, yeah.”

“But we don’t have to do it the normal way.”

“Normal,” Kit said. “Us?” And he laughed.

Nita smiled. He gets it. “Exactly.”

Kit snickered. “Just do me one favor. Don’t let Michaela hear that you’re breaking me in.”

It was the kind of remark that she normally would have punched him in the arm for. Well . . . breaking this in too, then. Now Nita quietly laced her fingers through his and squeezed his hand.

Kit grinned at the sidewalk as they came up to the corner of Forty-second and Seventh, then tipped his chin up to regard the traffic. “Where is it again?” Nita said. “Eleventh?”

“And sort of Thirty-sixth: by the Hudson. Not that much farther.”

The Sun was bright and the air was warm and there wasn’t any need to hurry for a change; they were going to be early for the prejudging anyway. “Not a problem,” Nita said, swinging Kit’s hand in hers. “Nice day.”

“Yeah. We don’t get a chance to do this so often when we’re not being chased by something.”

She chuckled. “Yeah.”

“Is it stupid,” Kit said, “to think that when everything’s going nice like this, something’s probably going to happen?”

“With us?” Nita laughed. “Smartest thing is just to say ‘Let’s hurry up and go see what it is.’”

They grinned at each other and started walking faster.

Shortly they were crossing the street in front of Manhattan’s great convention center, the huge gleaming frontage of it almost impossible to look at in the sunshine—like three gigantic green-glass boxes set down side by side next to the river, the middle one the tallest. Nita made without hesitation for the center set of doors.

“Upstairs?” Kit said.

“Level three,” Nita said, “Hall 3D.”

They went up several escalators and came out in a broad, bright metal-and-glass atrium with a food court on one side and some business-oriented stores on the other. On the rear side of the building was the entrance to a huge, high-ceilinged room that stretched in the direction of the river. The view of the room itself was blurred by what seemed to be a translucent curtain hung straight across the entry from the industrial lighting fixtures in the ceiling; and in front of the curtain was a line of five or six tables covered with gold-colored drop cloths, arranged so that they guarded the access to the doors. Out in front of them, and to one side of the gap between a couple of the tables, stood a sign on an easel. It said:

IDAA PRELIMINARY SELECTION SESSION

WELCOME

The amazing thing was that looking at the sign did not make one feel at all welcome. It made you feel as if you first wanted to yawn very hard, then go away and do something else, anything else, because standing here was such a waste of time. The font in which the sign was printed was desperately dry, cold, and offputting. Kit found that the mere sight of it made his eyes feel gritty and tired.

Next to him, Nita yawned, and then laughed out loud, impressed. “Wow!” she said. “Can you feel that?”

“Spell,” Kit said. He started feeling the need to rub incipient sleep out of his eyes. “Really powerful. Directional, too!” He turned sideways, experimenting, and then turned back again toward it, a little at a time. “When you’re not looking at it, it’s way less. But when you start turning back toward it—”

“That is such great work,” Nita said, and rubbed her own eyes. “Somebody knows what they’re doing.”

Kit grinned: even knowing it was a spell didn’t help much—he still felt the urge to go home and take a nap. “Let’s get in past it before we fall asleep on our feet.”

It took only the few steps in past the sign and toward the tables for the effect to wear off. As they got close, a slim, dark-haired guy in jeans and a white shirt, with a neat little beard, popped out through a slit in the curtain and started rummaging around among some paperwork as if he’d lost something. He glanced up as they came to the table. “Dai stihó, cousins! How can I help?”

“We’re here for the pre-judging,” Nita said.

He smiled at them. “And nice and early, thank you for that, though if you were hoping for peace and quiet to do your picks in, I’m sorry to tell you that the competitors are way ahead of you.” He kept turning over papers on the table. “Bear with me a second if you would, seems like nothing’s ever where you leave it around here . . .”

Kit looked over his shoulder. “That’s an amazing sign.”

“It is, isn’t it? Sarima Okeke did those for us.” The guy paused, apparently surprised at their blank faces. “You don’t know Okeke’s work? She’s a graphics wizard—best there is, if you ask me. Specializes in fonts. Every one of the letters in that sign is a microprinted spell in the Speech. Embedded diagram, condensed phrasing . . . just a work of art. Fuel the spell and print out a few words, and any nonwizard who views it gets the overwhelming urge to take themselves someplace more interesting. The font on that one there—Ennui Sans? Brand new, Okeke designed it for this event. But after this they’re putting it in the manual for anyone who needs to use it to keep nonwizards out of things.”

“It works really well,” Nita said.

“You haven’t seen anything,” the guy said. “That’s the light version. If we’d printed that sign in Ennui Overextended, you’d be asleep right now, wizard or no wizard. One of the Planetaries actually dozed off looking at one of those this morning; had to take it down. Okeke has a gift.”

The guy went back to his rummaging around, this time starting to take apart another pile of paperwork. “Wait, there are Planetaries here?” Kit said. “I mean besides Irina?”

“Yeah, unusual to see them so early, but seems like some people in this round have aroused a bit more curiosity than expected.” The table guy, whose nametag said J. W. BYNKIJ, kept on pushing papers around on the table. Some kind of Slavic name maybe? Kit thought.

Then Mr. Bynkij straightened, having found what he was after. “Aha! Usual thing, people borrow things and don’t put them back where they found them . . .”

It was a WizPad, to judge by the Biteless Apple on the back. Mr. Bynkij tapped at it briefly, and in mid-tap looked up thoughtfully at Kit. “Hey, don’t I remember you? . . . Of course I do. You were shooting up aliens on the Moon. Great to see you here.” He glanced down at the tablet, apparently scrolling up and down a list. “Right! So you are Callahan—” He reached elbow-deep into the empty air beside him and pulled out a plastic laminated badge on a long blue woven strap, which he handed to Nita.

“Hey, nice,” she said. “And we get lanyards too.”

“Lanyards for all,” said Mr. Bynkij as he turned back toward the hole in the air and shoved his arm into it up to the shoulder, groping around. “Aaaand Rodriguez.” He pulled out another and handed it to Kit. “Do not lose the lanyards. The badges are what always fall off, even with wizardry, seems to be some kind of natural law about that, and therefore the access routines and nothing-to-see-here spells are woven into the lanyards instead. Please be aware that while you’re wearing these, almost all nonwizards will find you boring to the point of attempting to avoid you. Only exceptions to this rule locally are the center’s concession staff, who have the effect dialed back about eighty percent so they won’t care about you particularly but also won’t fall asleep in the middle of making you a latte. If you’re expecting a nonwizardly guest, let me or whoever’s working up here know and we’ll get them a waiver pin for their lanyard. Need one of those now?”

They both shook their heads. “Fine.” Mr. Bynkij looked at his pad again. “The only other thing is to make sure you’ve received your mentor’s-picks tokens . . .”

“Got ’em,” Kit said. Nita nodded.

“Then go on in and start fulfilling your function.” He looked over his shoulder toward the curtain, then turned back to them. “You want to watch out . . . it’s a little busted loose in there. Some of the youngest ones are bouncing off the walls.” He grinned. “Personally, I think hardhats would do you guys more good than the lanyards, but . . .” He shrugged and waved a hand back toward the curtain.

“Thanks!” they both said, and headed in.

As they passed through the curtain, the sound inside the room burst all around them as if someone had hit the unmute button on a remote. Kit froze for a moment—feeling slightly relieved when Nita did, too—as he found himself looking across the biggest crowd of wizards he’d ever seen when the world wasn’t ending.

The space itself was sixty or seventy feet wide and easily more than a couple of hundred feet long, and almost entirely full of people. Full of wizards! Kit told himself. It was too easy, in normal times, to think of other wizards either in small groups or scattered all over the planet in the abstract, the way you might think of acquaintances on the Internet: mostly invisible and distant. But they’re not distant now! Kit thought. The place was alive with them, and all up and down that huge space, from floor to ceiling, the air glowed and flashed with wizardries laid out on show or now in progress, like a small but very enthusiastic fireworks displays.

Next to him, Nita let out a breath. “My God . . .”

“Yeah,” Kit murmured. “Come on!”

They started making their way through the crowds. There were as many older wizards as young ones there, gathering in groups down the length of the room to watch contestants who were doing presentations, or to examine setups from which the presenting wizards had stepped away. Kit could see some people standing well up over the heads of the crowd, as if they were on ladders. It took him a moment to realize that levitation was being extensively employed by people looking for someone or something in particular.

“What a zoo!” Nita muttered beside him. “And it’s like this now? What’s it going to turn into later?”

“No kidding. If we’re supposed to pick favorite projects, we’d better get going before you can’t even move in here anymore.”

Nita stared around them. “There has to be some kind of directory . . .”

As it happened, a pair of them hung transparently in the air, one on each side of that end of the room—tall, immaterial signs that could have been mistaken for holograms, except that they were constructs of wizardry. Each was densely lettered in two columns, one in the Speech and one that shifted into English as they approached. “It must have felt our manuals getting close,” Kit said.

“Yeah, nice . . .”

Three hundred and twelve names of competitors were listed on the floating directory, along with the names of their mentors’ and their projects. The great majority of these were highlighted with overlaying green bars that (according to the key at the bottom of the display) meant the competitor was onsite. A brighter green meant they were actively presenting. As Kit and Nita watched, a pair of lines flared brighter than all the others, the upper one the brighter of the pair.

“Wait,” Kit said, reading it. “Penn’s here already?”

Nita’s eyes widened. “Mr. Laid-Back, No Hurry? You’re kidding.” Nita peered at the list. “What number is he?”

The directory promptly faded out all the other listings, enlarged Penn’s name and the name of his project, and displayed a map of the floor of the exhibition space with Penn’s spot highlighted. He was about a third of the way down on the right-hand side.

Kit peered around the directory. “Yeah, you can just make him out past that—what is that? Looks like somebody’s got a bunch of scale-model skyscrapers down there. Wonder what that’s about . . .” But sure enough, a couple of spaces past that competitor’s display, there was Penn, his spell set out in its showier spherical 3D configuration, rotating gently into and out of the floor. He was talking animatedly to a group of adult and younger wizards gathered around him, and gesturing at his spell in a very smooth and choreographed manner, like a game-show host indicating the virtues of Door Number One.

“I can’t believe it,” Nita said. “It’s got to be eight in the morning for him. Didn’t think getting up this early was his style. If he’s showing some initiative finally . . .” She shrugged, and turned her attention back to the directory. “As for Dair . . .”

A second later the directory was showing them the space set aside for Dairine and her mentee; but it was dimmed down to show that they weren’t there yet, and a countdown clock over their spot showed an ETA of about an hour later. “Well, who knows,” Nita said under her breath. “Lunchtime’s when they said contestants should plan to be here, and there’s a lot of time zones between here and India. They might be stopping at home first.”

Kit nodded. “So which side first?”

“This one,” Nita said.

Because you want to have a look at Penn right now and get him over with, Kit thought. And if Nita by chance overheard the thought, she gave no sign of it.

They started wandering down the right-hand side of the big room, taking in the competitors’ exhibits. Some of them at first glance looked like the kinds of displays you might see at a high school science fair—a desk- or table-like space with a sign overhead saying what it was supposed to be. But in most of these cases, the signs were floating in the air unsupported, and so were some of the tables. Much more work, however, was being displayed on the beige-and-brown-patterned tile of the floor, or hovering in the air . . . and there, any resemblance to a mundane science fair ended in a hurry. “Is that a mobile meteor shield?” Nita said. “That’s a pick right there!”

“What, the first thing you see?”

“Why not? It’s not like we’ve got a limit on how many of these things we can give.”

“Oh come on, at least wait till you’ve seen a few!”

But soon enough Kit found that holding back from dropping one Mentors’-Picks token after another was harder than it looked. Some of the spells and wizardly projects were amazingly ambitious, all of them were wildly creative, and the young wizards who were presenting them were across the board so cheerfully excited about their work that it was almost impossible for Kit to walk past without stopping. And every time he stopped, he wanted to drop another token.

The names of the projects alone were enough to do it, sometimes. “Burning the Rain: Why Not? Desalinization with a Side of Subterfuge,” for example. That one was about using controlled wizardry-driven ionization and aerosol redirection spells to help make it rain where rain was needed, while also fooling drought-stricken desert countries into thinking that their gradual (and carefully supervised) climatic recovery was an unanticipated, idiosyncratic function of world climate change. The competitor responsible, a dark-skinned blond-dreadlocked twelve-year-old boy in a tank top and surfer jams, stood there laughing and explaining his floor-spread spell diagram to the people gathered around it, while overhead a six-foot-wide cloud like something out of a cartoon continually rained gently down on them all (and an uptake spell underneath the spectators recycled the water and kept it from running all over the floor). Kit saw at least one pair of wizards vanish from in front of the “water feature” and reappear a couple of minutes later in swimsuits.

Then there was “Don’t Look Now!” which was a new take on stealth shielding for wizards who needed to hide some crucial work in progress. The shield spell, once activated, synced up with a very tightly constrained conditional timeslide wizardry and superimposed a perfect 3D “playback” of what that given area had been like at a previous time of one’s choosing—ideally a time when nothing was happening there. But for demonstration purposes the “shielded” area on the exhibition floor was now set to loop back to two minutes before. As a result, spectators were dodging in and out of the project demonstration space like people standing in front of an electronics shop’s window to see themselves in the view of a camera—but they were doing it so they could stand next to themselves as they’d been two minutes previously. There was a lot of laughter and joking (“Didn’t I tell you how those jeans looked from behind? Didn’t I tell you?”), and almost constant flashing from held-up phones as wizards took selfies with themselves. While this went on, the competitor—a calm, smiling Aboriginal girl—leaned against her “stand” with her arms folded, explaining the intricacies of intratemporal visualization manifestation to anyone who’d hold still long enough.

And as for “Taub-NUT Space Seen as an Answer to Practically Everything” . . . The competitor responsible for it, someone called Marit Horowitz, wasn’t minding his or her stand when Kit and Nita passed by. Laid out on a floating table, and flowing over the edges of it to hang down like some kind of glowing lacy tablecloth, was a spell packed so insanely tight with delicate detail that figuring out its major structures at first glance was impossible. The Speech-phrases in it were so fine that they looked like they’d been woven into the structure by a spider with particularly good handwriting and a fondness for heavy theoretical work.

Kit stopped and read the project’s prospectus—or as much of it as he could, since it was mostly mathematical symbols—and then read what he could of it again. Next to him, Nita was doing the same thing. Kit was intensely relieved when she heaved a sigh and shook her head.

“It’s something to do with diagnosing the status of local hyperspace, right?” Kit said.

There was a pause. “Yeah, I think so.”

Nita’s hesitation made Kit feel better. “Most of it, though, I’m not getting. Tell me it’s just me.”

Nita stood there for the space of a few breaths and then looked at Kit. “Nope,” she said, shaking her head. She leaned over the “table” and read the competitor-wizard’s personal profile, which was embedded in it. “And he’s eight.”

Kit opened and closed his mouth. “How do you even have an Ordeal at eight?”

Nita shook her head again. “As soon as I can find somebody to explain this to me in baby words,” she said, sounding fairly put out, “either him or someone else, I’m giving him a token.” And she wandered off down the exhibition space.

Kit waited until Nita was out of sight behind some people in the crowd . . . then dropped his round, Speech-initialed token, glowing, onto the table. The token twinned itself: the twin vanished into the table and the original leaped back into Kit’s hand. Kit grinned and went after Nita.

This is all so amazing, he thought as he gradually caught up. There were people redesigning ocean currents and tweaking the Jet Stream, there were young wizards playing around with superconductivity and others building microscopic worldgates into computers to act as concrete data transfer mechanisms; there were kids Kit’s age or younger, seriously younger—at least by three or four years—playing with dangerous natural forces as if they were Tinkertoys. Why didn’t it feel so dangerous when I was doing it? Kit thought.

Though maybe having company helps . . .

He wandered past a brawny dark-haired guy in a long white robe who was displaying something that had to do with dynamically changing atmospheric density. It apparently had applications for restoring the ozone layer, but most of the kids gathered around the display were using the custom-redensified air so they could quack-talk like people who’d been breathing helium. Avoiding a couple of these who were doubled over with laughter, Kit bumped into Nita from behind. She was standing there with arms folded at the back of a crowd of people, and she wasn’t making any move to slip through them.

The reason was Penn, who was walking his tall self up and down the front of the crowd and waving his arms as the spectators examined the spherical-structure version of his spell while it rotated gently up out of the floor and down into it. “Absolutely no way it can miss, my cousins! Drop your tokens here and vote for what three out of four passing wizards have already declared to be the best thing since sliced bread, the best way to redirect the solar wind that anyone’s ever come up with, not least because voting for it makes you . . . look . . . great!”

And with a series of grand curving gestures he traced a flaming Wizard’s Knot in the air and started the mockup of his spell running. Its 3D version flared out of view, to be instantly replaced by an underfloor view of the Earth as seen from low Earth orbit. An incoming flood of charged particles from the distant Sun came shooting and sparkling in, blinding-bright as rain caught by lightning—a sudden splendor of inbound solar wind made visible. But at a gesture from Penn the spell went active, and the reality of it as it would appear in operation, rather than the schematic, came burning to life above him. The power conduit between the spell and the Sun started pulling energy into the space around the Earth as the wizardry went fully active. Penn flung his arms up over his head, and an invisible half-dome of repelling power sprang up above him, matching the Earth’s curvature, so that the high-energy particles bounced off it like hailstones off a tin roof in dancing curves of light.

Penn stood there with his eyes squeezed shut and a triumphant grin plastered over his face as the crowd gave him a round of applause. Some of them pushed forward to drop pick-tokens in a hot spot at his feet, a glowing circle with pointing neon arrows and a label that said (first in the Speech, but then switching every second to English and other languages) SHOW YOUR SMARTS HERE!

As the crowd started to move on, Penn bowed effusively to them, and bowed again to the new group that was moving up to see what was going on. “Thank you, thankyouverymuch, I’ll be here all week . . .”

Kit laughed under his breath. “This is so like him.”

“Yeah, it is,” Nita said, very low. It was almost a growl. Kit found himself entertaining two very different thoughts as she moved away from him and toward Penn: If I were him I’d watch what I said to her right now, and Why is it that when she sounds like that it’s kind of hot?

A break developed in the crowd in front of them and Nita was already slipping forward to where the basic spell, once again in 3D spherical mode, had reappeared and was once more rotating in and out of the floor. “Ah, Juanita,” Penn said, beaming at her, “I see you’ve been getting the vote out for me. Lots of interest, nice to see you’re getting the job done . . .”

“I haven’t done a single thing,” Nita said. “Ask Kit.”

Kit produced the most neutral expression he could manage and focused on the spell diagram, because he knew that tone of voice; it might sound casual, but he knew better. “Looks like you were busy last night, though. Thought you might have decided to sleep in instead . . .”

“Sleep? Sleep is for the weak. Did some light spell work along the lines of some of the stuff you mentioned, watched the Sun come up, decided to come in early and wow the crowds.”

Nita smiled. “Think you’re gonna have enough energy to carry on like that all day?”

“Oh, don’t worry your pretty little head, I’ll be pacing myself.” He turned his back on her, and so missed the way her eyes went wide. “Kit, my man—”

“Penn,” Kit said. If he fist-bumped with Penn, it was reflex. It also distracted Penn from noticing Kit’s glance over Penn’s shoulder at the disbelieving expression on Nita’s face. “That looked pretty good there.”

“Yeah, they’ve been eating it up. Got something like—” Penn picked up his manual, glanced down at one page where a bar graph was showing. “Sixty-eight tokens already. And it’s not even lunchtime! If it keeps going like this, there’ll be three or four hundred by the time the judging’s done. I am gonna sweep this thing!”

“Long time between lunchtime and five p.m.,” Kit said, “but let’s see how it goes.” He glanced at his watch as if he had some reason to. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover . . . we should go. But we’ll look in on you every now and then.”

“Aw, come on, stay for one whole run-through and bask in the reflected glory, huh?”

Reflected. Glory. Kit grinned, and hoped it didn’t look too fake. “We wouldn’t want to distract anyone from the idea that what you’re doing’s all yours,” he said. “Go right on ahead.”

“Wouldn’t want to deprive you of any reflection, either . . .” Nita said, heading down toward the next exhibitor’s space with a slight smile on her face.

Penn turned to watch her go. “Kit,” he said after a moment, with the air of someone asking a delicate question among Just Us Guys, “do you find her kind of . . . hard to understand sometimes?”

“Well, every now and then,” Kit said, “yeah. But you know what? The Lone Power has exactly the same problem.”

And he gave Penn what he hoped would be mistaken for a conspiratorial look and went after Nita.

When Kit caught up with her, Nita was thoughtfully looking over a very compact and elegant spell diagram that was about a tenth the size of Penn’s. Kit quietly leaned over her from behind and whispered in her ear, “I’m so sad now.”

She didn’t turn around. “Sad why?”

“Thought you were gonna pretty-little-head-butt him into another time zone. I was getting ready to put the manual on record.”

Nita gave him a sideways look as they moved on together. “I had something else in mind.”

“Oh?”

“Chilling him out a little. Pluto’s nice this time of year.”

Kit snickered. “That place where you dumped Dairine’s bed that time . . .”

“Nice crevasse,” Nita said. “Dark. Deep. Cold.” Then she sighed. “Kit, he’s not worth it. I want to wander around here and look at all these other wizardries.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “And drop a bunch more tokens.”

Nita nodded, but didn’t say anything else for a few moments. Kit stayed quiet.

“I’m done with him,” Nita said. “Absolutely done.”

“Which could be a problem, since as far as he goes we’ve barely started.” Then it was Kit’s turn to sigh. “You know, though, I just had this awful thought.”

“Yeah?”

“Think what he’s going to be like if he makes it through to the quarter-finals.”

Nita covered her eyes briefly. “It is bad to secretly wish your mentee will get deselected with extreme prejudice,” she said. “So bad.”

“When we’re supposed to be helping him win? I guess.”

“Great. On top of everything else, guilt. I needed guilt so much.”

She rubbed her face, then looked up at Kit almost challengingly. “Never mind. He doesn’t need us hanging around; we’ve done everything we can for him. And we’ve got more things to think about than Penn.”

“Yeah. Like where’s Dairine?”

Nita laughed. “I really am that transparent, aren’t I.”

“Lucky guess. Come on, let’s go admire everyone’s stuff and drop tokens all over them to make up for Elvis back there.”