Games Wizards Play

New York: The Losers’ Party

IT TURNED OUT NOT to be a party for the losers, as it happened, but one in their honor: a general celebration of what had happened that day, and a place for those who’d attended the Invitational to relax and let off steam.

Everyone was welcome, which was a good thing, because everyone would certainly have tried to get in on account of where it was being held—the beautiful glass-walled upstairs atrium space that was the jewel of the convention center, with gorgeous views of the Hudson River and the cliffs of the Palisades beyond. Huge amounts of food and all kinds of drinks were laid out, and there were wizards DJ-ing a madly eclectic mix of music from Earth and other worlds entirely. But the main attraction was the atmosphere of sheer unbridled relief—hundreds of wizards and guests recovering from the day’s business in a large, very casual gathering in which even the unusually large number of losers couldn’t feel very lost.

Regardless of the competition’s results, none of the competitors would be leaving the Cull without a keepsake of their participation. Along with each detailed project-and-results report in the participants’ manuals came a token about the size of a quarter, rather like the markers that Nita and Kit used for the Mentors’ Picks event. These glowed green for those who had passed through and blue for those who hadn’t, and when held in the hand they silently communicated the name of the competitor’s project and any special notes or commendations from the judges, along with the participant’s final ranking at the Cull.

As she and Kit headed toward the refreshment tables, Nita saw a lot of these tokens changing hands: groups of people who had been positioned close to each other on the exhibition floor were trading them to remember each other by. Others were simply giving them away to friends or acquaintances. “I bet somebody’s going to start collecting these things,” she said to Kit.

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Kit said. He was looking ahead of them to where Penn was more or less dancing his way through the crowd, singing in time with the music: “We are not the losers, we are the winners, all the babes love a winner—!”

He was still fist-pumping as he boogied, and being (as far as Nita was concerned) obnoxiously happy. Babes, Nita thought, and kept her various other thoughts to herself as Penn found a dance partner to start hip-bumping with. “What are we going to do with him?”

“For the time being,” Kit said with a sigh, “let him do his thing. Too many other great people here to focus on him the whole time . . . we’ve got enough of that ahead of us.” He glanced around. “Look, they’ve got that sour lemon soda of Carmela’s.”

“You mean the one you’re always stealing?”

Kit grinned at her. “Yeah. Make it two?”

“Sounds good.”

He headed off toward the nearest drinks table, while Nita breathed out and concentrated on letting herself relax. The feeling of other people doing the same, letting go of the tension, was almost palpable. Everybody’s shoe dropped, but it didn’t drop too disastrously: no getting called up in front of the room and embarrassed, like something out of a bad reality show . . .

She went back to watching the crowd and paused as she thought she saw someone she recognized among the people who’d started dancing, though she couldn’t be sure. A girl, tall, dark curly hair . . . Wait. Lissa?? She waved. “Lissa!” she shouted over the escalating roar of laughter and shrieking and music.

No response: too many bodies between them, too much noise. “This is ridiculous,” Nita muttered, and reached for her phone, then had another idea. “Bobo?”

You rang?

“Beep Lissa’s manual for me, will you? Tell her I’m over here and I almost didn’t recognize her without the orange jumpsuit.”

I live to serve.

The sound kept scaling up around her as Nita saw Lissa’s head turn from side to side, her face wearing a broad grin. Nita waved again.

A few moments later Lissa came bouncing out of the crowd and jogged over to Nita. She looked fabulous in sparkly leggings, a very short silver skirt, and a very low-cut sparkly top, and they swapped a big hug.

“What a look! Where’ve you been hiding this stuff?”

“Saving it for a special occasion,” Lissa said, and did a twirl.

The skirt had a glittery belt hanging down from it, a chain of dark ovals that turned out to be faceted gems. Nita realized she could feel a slight burn of wizardly power from it. “Have you got spells packed in there?” she said, admiringly.

“Saw what you did with your charm bracelet,” Lissa said. “That was such a great idea. I got hold of some black quartz crystals and encoded some wizardries into the crystal lattices, you’d be amazed what you can fit in there, there’s so much storage space . . . Oh, thanks Kit, don’t mind if I do!”

Nita burst out laughing as Lissa deftly relieved Kit of his soda while he was in the act of handing Nita hers. Kit looked briefly chagrined, but not particularly surprised. “Hey!”

“You’ve gotta move faster, Kit!” Lissa said, and giggled.

Kit regarded his empty hand with a half smile. “Looks like it,” he said, resigned, and headed back to the table.

They watched him go. “I hear that last session on the Moon was really something,” Nita said.

“Yeah. Ronan’s still crowing about it. And daring Kit to design something better. But poor Matt! The bitching’s not over yet . . .”

They stood there chatting about the doings of the rest of the gaming group that Ronan had put together from the team of wizards that had been investigating Mars and some of their friends and associates. Lissa had been one of the wizards who’d spent months doing image analysis on the planet, combing live imagery of Mars’s surface for any sign of artifacts of the ancient species who’d died out there millennia before. There’d been no keeping her out of the gaming group once Ronan started it—not that anyone would have wanted to: she had an eagle eye for detail and a clever aggressive streak that made her the person to have at your back when trouble started.

Lissa was in the middle of giving Nita a deliciously shocking play-by-play about one of the scandals of the day—competitors who’d been revising their project while it was on display, and almost got thrown out of the Invitational for it—when Nita suddenly caught sight of somebody waving at her from the river side of the room. It was Dairine. Nita waved back.

She lost sight of her sister in the crowd for a moment, but then Dairine came sliding along between the dancers. “It’s Dair,” Nita said to Lissa. “Looks like she’s got something on her mind . . .” Whatever it was, it didn’t look good; Nita could see as Dairine got closer that her frown was set in, hard.

“Sounds like a smart time to hit the dance floor,” Lissa said, and started off in that direction. “Later, Neets. Hi, Dairine!”

“Lissa,” Dairine said as they passed, and nothing more.

Uh oh, Nita thought, this is bad: she likes Lissa and she barely gave her the time of day . . . Never mind. Start somewhere neutral. “So how’d your mentee do?”

“She’s in.” But Dairine’s expression lightened only a little.

Nita hugged Dairine. “That’s so great! And even after a Cull like that.”

“Yeah, everybody’s talking about it. There’s hardly any point to the quarter-finals stage now. The numbers are so small, they might as well go straight to the semis.”

“Yeah. Tom said there’d be a final call on that in the manuals tomorrow. But where’d you vanish to? Thought I was finally going to get a chance to meet your mentee when she wasn’t onstage.”

Dairine scowled harder. “‘Vanish’ is absolutely the word. Mehrnaz transited out right after the announcement. Spot’s targeted her and he’s going after; when he finds her, he’ll hold her still and I’ll follow.”

Nita was confused. “But what happened?”

“Knowing her, something complicated,” Dairine said, and turned the word “complicated” into a curse. “I’m not sure yet . . . I have to find out more. But I’ve got my suspicions.” She shook her head. “Neets, Mehrnaz’s family . . . there’s some odd stuff going on with them. This isn’t the place to get into it. But my God, you should have seen her mother.”

“What? Why?”

Dairine was shaking her head, but her expression was grim. Nita’s heart clenched. “Wait. You’re not saying—she’s not being abused or anything—” She trailed off, horrified. Not even wizardry necessarily made you proof against that kind of thing.

But Dairine was still shaking her head. “What? Oh, no. Nothing like that. Or at least not from her mom, I don’t think. There’re just things going on there that . . .” Dairine rubbed her face. “I’ve got to find out if she needs help somehow, because her home life, seriously . . .”

Dairine spent the next few minutes describing to Nita what essentially sounded like a gilded cage, one alternately overcrowded and bleakly empty. Her first thought was that there might be cultural stuff going on that she didn’t understand. But Dairine sounded as if she didn’t think that side of things was entirely to blame—that other things were happening. “There hasn’t been time to find out what, though. At least now that she’s gone through, I have an excuse to find out. We’ll have a ton of work to do to get ready for the next round . . .”

And so will we, Nita thought. With a mentee who now has what he’s going to take as proof of his belief that he’s the best thing since sliced bread. “So what’re you going to do?”

“Tomorrow? I haven’t thought that far ahead. Tonight I want to find her and try to settle her down. Afterward, assuming she’s not already there, we’ll probably go home.”

“Home home or Mumbai home?”

“Mumbai,” Dairine said. “Her mom’s kind of a mother hen . . . don’t think she’s going to rest easy until she has her baby under lock and key again.”

Nita frowned. “You’d better not be speaking literally.”

Dairine sighed. “Oh, if Mehrnaz wanted to be out of there, no question, she could be out in a moment. But they’ve got her not wanting to be out of there. Whatever . . . I need more data before I can work out what she needs, and what to do.”

Nita sighed. “If you need to stay with her, I can let Daddy know—”

“No, it’s okay,” Dairine said. “She might just need a dose of normal, or what passes for her as normal, before anything else happens. She’s got a few days to relax before we have to start putting together her advanced presentation for the panel assessment stage. Not that she’ll have any trouble with that. She knows what she’s up to.”

“You like her, don’t you,” Nita said under her breath.

Dairine looked sharply at Nita, as if she expected to be made fun of. “Yeah,” she said. “So?”

“Don’t look at me like that!” Nita said. “I’m not on your case. For you to like her, she must be nice.”

“Yet also somehow completely different from me,” Dairine said, sounding both grouchy and amused.

Nita held still and considered that for a moment. “You might have a point,” she said. “Suits your personal trend, though. Sentient trees and giant centipedes and alien princes . . .” And Nita laughed. “Kings,” she said, absolutely in unison with Dairine’s voice as she corrected her. “I keep forgetting . . .”

“I don’t,” Dairine said.

“I know you don’t,” Nita said, very quietly. “But at the same time . . . It’s so unexpected. On the surface, anyway, and from what you’ve told me, you and he are unalike in every major way.”

Dairine just looked at her. “Opposites attract?” she said. “Meanwhile, thank you for not saying ‘were.’”

Nita shrugged. “It’s not if he’s a was. He’s an is . . . we know that for sure now. Just not where, or when.”

“Or possibly how . . .” Dairine suddenly gave Nita a curious look. “Neets, have you ever . . .” She trailed off.

“Ever what?”

“Tried to see him. Where he is.” And Dairine made a finger-wiggling gesture in front of her eyes to indicate that she was talking about Nita’s visionary talent.

Nita blinked. It had been difficult enough checking the manual, the first time, to discover for sure whether Roshaun was alive or dead. Her relief at finding that he was something else—though not even the manual seemed sure exactly what—had been huge. But she’d left further investigations strictly to Dairine, whose ideas of who had the right to be doing what were sometimes fierce. “I . . . no,” Nita said. “But Dair, this isn’t something I’ve had great results with. Or a lot of luck controlling. Mostly at the moment the ‘seeing gift’ spends its time running me around in circles and showing me things that make no sense. Then Tom tells me to try harder, and Bobo laughs at me.”

“Well, fine, I get it, you need more practice. But would you try?”

“Sure!” Nita said. “But I may not get anything for days, or weeks. Or till after you solve the problem yourself.” She snorted and drank some soda. “It’s a good thing I have a reputation for blowing things up . . . I can always fall back on that. Juanita the Destroyer of Stuff.”

Dairine stared at her. “Is he still calling you Juanita? Why?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m afraid to ask.” Nita rolled her eyes. “He might tell me.”

Dairine shook her head in amazement. “Seriously, he hasn’t looked at his manual to see what normal people call you?”

Nita snickered. “He’s kind of a selective reader.” Then she grinned. “And I’m pretty sure he’s never seen the page that people keep asking me to autograph.”

“That’s happening to you too, huh?”

“Yeah. Callahan’s Untoward Instigation seems to have a lot of fans. Or a lot of people want other people to think they know the spell’s inventor.”

“Or the person who shot up the Crossings when it was full of hostiles, and got away with it,” Dairine said. “You know, you should be proactive about this. Change specialties! Dump the visionary thing and go into weapons design.”

“Bad idea,” Nita said, with a grim smile. “Going to be dealing with somebody I’d be tempted to test the designs on . . .”

“If he gives you too much trouble,” Dairine said, “let me know.”

“No,” Nita said, “I think I’m up for this. Did you see his latest outfit, though?”

Dairine covered her eyes briefly with one hand. “Please. The top hat. I nearly died.”

Then her head came up suddenly. “Wait. He’s found her.”

“Where is she?”

“As I thought . . . Mumbai.”

“I’ll tell Dad you might be late.”

“Thanks.” And Dairine was off in the direction of the room’s roped-off gate hex without another word.

Nita stood there considering with some amusement (mostly at herself) that it was possible the Powers That Be actually knew what they were doing. She and Kit might be stuck with a would-be solar specialist when they thought Dairine ought to have had him . . . but Dairine had plainly been put together with someone who needed something she had. And she’ll go to the ends of the Earth, or a lot farther, to get it handled.

. . . Meanwhile. Nita finished her soda and realized she was still thirsty. But then it’s so hot in here with the dancing, and with this crowd. Already a lot bigger than it was, people from all over are coming in. She glanced around to search for Kit: she’d bring him one this time. But there was no sign of him. Maybe he went to get another one, too. Let’s see . . .

She wandered over to the nearest of the drinks tables to find out what was “on ice” there—part of the interest being that absolutely no ice was involved. The top of each table in that row had been equipped with a force field with foot-high walls, and wizardry was maintaining the temperature of everything inside the field at a steady four degrees above zero. The only exception was down at the end of the area shielded by the force field, where a plastic bin full of ice cubes was being maintained at ten below.

Inside the field, bottles of all shapes and sizes and colors were ranked up neatly. One of them didn’t seem to be representative of any of the local major brands; the bottle was dark green with a bright green label, and Nita’s first thought was that maybe it was beer . . . except that all the other drinks on this table were nonalcoholic.

Curious, she picked up the bottle. Behind the table, the wizard who was managing it—a shaven-skulled guy in his late teens, wearing designer sweats over a Black Widow T-shirt—said to her, “Need help with anything?”

Nita was trying to read the bottle’s back label, which was not making a lot of sense. “This is—what’s Cel-Ray?”

“Celery soda.” The wizard looked indignant at the incredulous expression on Nita’s face. “I’m not kidding!” he said. “It’s traditional.”

“Where’s it come from?”

“Brooklyn.”

Surprised, Nita shook her head. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Long Island and I’ve never heard of this.”

“Must’ve been a pretty sheltered life so far,” said the young wizard. He flicked a finger at the bottle and its cap vanished. “Go on, live a little.”

Cautiously, Nina drank some. It tasted like . . .

Celery. But fizzy.

Okay. I like celery . . .

“Thanks,” Nita said, glancing around once more to try to spot Kit. Well, no rush, I’ll walk around the room once and see.

So she strolled around the cavernous space in the early evening light, taking a moment by the floor-to-ceiling western windows to watch the Sun going down behind the Palisades, and doing some people watching. It was unusually pleasant to have no need to do anything in particular when surrounded by so many wizards. And others . . . Because there were all kinds of nonwizardly guests there too, family members and friends of competitors and judges and so forth, snacking and drinking and chatting and laughing.

And it all feels so normal. Yet Nita knew perfectly well that the sense of normalcy was an illusion. Outside—in the streets of the city on the near side of the river, in the suburbs across the river and beyond—that was what the world she’d grown up in took for normalcy: a world where magic was a myth, something that might be lovely if it were true, but had nothing to do with hard cold reality.

Nita looked up over the dance floor—where some of the dancers, in reaction to being packed too closely together, had used wizardry to harden the air ten feet up into a broad round platform, and were dancing on that—and thought, I think I like this reality better.

She started strolling again, making her way between the crowd watching the dancers and the people who were now boogying to something from the nineteen-seventies. For a brief moment, as the last gleam of sunlight shot through the room from across the river, Nita thought that through the crowd and off to the far side of the room she caught a glimpse of a magenta carapace. Sker’ret? Did he come in to have a look at the gates? She turned to start making her way in that direction, when from behind her someone grabbed her by the hand and pulled her onto the dance floor.

The next few moments were spent being confused and concentrating on not losing her balance as she was twirled around several times, but after the twirling stopped, Nita found that the person holding her by the hand was Penn. “You’re just in time! Lose the bottle, Juanita, I’ve got an opening on my dance card and you fit in it just right.”

Nita sighed at the typical overstated delivery. Okay, I may prefer this reality but even this one has parts I’m not wild about . . . “Penn, it’s been a long day, don’t get cute.”

“Why not? Your sister says I’m cute! Even Kit’s sister says I’m cute!”

Nita’s first impulse was to quiz him about when and where Dairine had said any such thing, but she discarded it instantly. Because he’s a legend in his own mind, and this is probably another part of it. Her next thought was Oh, Carmela’s here finally, maybe Kit’s with her. The thought after that was And as for you, our sisters think tree-shaped aliens are cute. In fact, our sisters think six-foot-long metallic centipedes are cute. And in their cases, they’re right! You, however . . .

She restrained herself. “It’s possible they might not mean that the way you think they do,” Nita said. “Sorry, Penn, better cross me off.”

“Aww, you’ll break my heart!”

She shrugged, waggled her Cel-Ray bottle at him in what she hoped was an amiable if otherwise noncommittal manner, and did her best to vanish into the crowd. Fortunately that wasn’t too difficult. But when she came out the other side, to the gate hex’s roped-off section, she found that Sker’ret had disappeared. Maybe literally, she thought. He’s got a lot to keep his eyes on, all of them, no matter where he is. Never mind . . . Any sign of Kit?

She glanced around but couldn’t see him anywhere. On this side there were some chairs and cushioned benches, and kids were relaxing on them, drinking and chatting. Nita wandered along down through the seating area, pausing to take a swig of the celery soda. As she lowered the bottle, her gaze fell on one bench nearby that was empty except for the single guy sitting there, a very average-looking sort—jeans, sneakers, a striped sweater, dark blond hair, a bit stocky and round-faced and carrying some extra weight around the tummy. Don’t know if I’d wear horizontal stripes if I was him, she thought, but he seems to pull it off. He had one of those cheerful faces.

He caught the look and grinned at Nita. “Cousin,” he said in the Speech, “I greet thee.”

It wasn’t the usual salutation, and more to the point, the recension was very formal, very . . . old. It wasn’t Enactive: Nita had had a good while to get to grips with that version of the Speech while she was doing her first kernel studies. Wonder where this guy came in from, she thought: there were people from so many different places onsite that Nita had simply stopped guessing their origins.

“Well, I greet you too, cousin,” Nita said. “Taking it easy for a while? Can’t blame you.” She smiled and wiped her forehead. Even with wizardry helping out the air-conditioning, it was hot in here. “Need a drink of something?”

“Oh, thou needst not serve me, cuz!”

“No problem, I’ll be done with this in a moment and I was thinking about another.” Which was true enough: the slightly bitter taste of the Cel-Ray had caught her by surprise at first, but it grew on you. “They’ve got the usual sodas and fruit juice. If you’re of drinking age in your jurisdiction and you feel like indulging, there’s harder stuff . . .”

“Harder?”

“Well, alcoholic.”

“I am not averse to such molecular structures,” the guy said, musing. “Yet . . . Would there be water?”

“A bunch of kinds. Get you one?”

“Pray do. With gas, possibly?”

“Fizzy it is.”

Nita went off to the nearest drinks table, finished her Cel-Ray, and swapped the empty bottle for a full one. Then she found a sparkling water bottle and wandered back to sit down next to the guy in the striped sweater. She handed him his drink. “Your health,” Nita said, holding up her bottle.

He looked at it in slight confusion.

Nita laughed. “Uh, you clunk them together. At least some of us do that around here.”

“Oh! I see. Na’gekh emeirsith, then.”

“Yeah, mud in your eye too, my Advisory always says.”

The young guy’s mouth quirked up in amusement. They both drank. “So what do you make of the results so far?” Nita said.

“’Tis all a wonder and a confusion, thus far. So many names, so many gifts.”

“They’ve got a postevent analysis app running in the manuals,” Nita said. “What’s the old saying? ‘You can’t tell the players without a scorecard’? Something like that. Or you could hunt down one of the wizards who was doing sideline analysis today. They’re all in here relaxing now that this round’s action is over.”

“Nay, I’ve no wish to trouble them now in their repose. I’m but late-come myself: on me their expertise would be naught but ill spent. Enough it is to look on the gathering as thou dost, at ease.”

Nita had to laugh. “You know, cousin, you can loosen up a little, you’re among friends . . .”

“Loosen up?”

“The recension,” Nita said. “I mean, I get that you’re serious about the older language structure, but . . .” She waved a hand. “Way too formal! Give the tough grammar the evening off.”

He giggled. “Oh, okay. I wasn’t sure I had permission.”

His giggle made her want to laugh too: there was just something generally funny about him. “Honestly,” she said, “it’s not a problem. No one in this crowd’s going to stand on ceremony.” She looked out over the dance floor as one of the couples up on the hardened-air platform stage-dived out over the surrounding crowd, drifted down onto them as slowly as falling leaves, and were crowd-surfed off to one side.

“Seems you’re right,” the young guy said, and chuckled. “Those folks over there—what’re they doing?”

Nita followed his gaze. “Oh. I think they call that pogoing. It was big a long time ago. Looks like it’s coming back . . .”

They sat there chatting for some minutes while Nita split her attention between watching for Kit and trying to figure out where her companion’s accent came from. I don’t know why, but he reminds me of somebody, Nita thought. He hadn’t offered a name, and that wasn’t a big deal: some wizards were sensitive about personal names, feeling (not without reason) that some aspects of their power might be closely associated with them. Or do I know him from somewhere else? And if I do, what’s the matter with me, because how would I ever meet this guy and not remember him? He’s such a trip.

It was like meeting someone on the street but not knowing who they are because you’re seeing them in a different context from usual. Like that one lady who works over at the big supermarket in Freeport, the time she came into Daddy’s shop to buy some flowers, and we just couldn’t identify her because she didn’t have the store’s uniform jacket and the name tag on. Now, in the same mode, Nita sat there racking her brains. Did we meet him on the Moon during the Pullulus situation? Or maybe I’ve seen him somewhere else, dressed differently? Something more formal, not jeans and stripes and . . .

Wait. Stripes?

It hit her all at once. Planetaries. Mr. Bynkij said there were Planetaries here.

“Oh my God,” Nita said.

Her companion looked at her in slight confusion, but even so, he was smiling. “It’s been a while since anyone’s made that mistake,” he said.

Nita felt like an idiot, and didn’t care. The humor, the laughter: the joviality. Oh God. Do I even listen to myself? “I can’t believe it. You’re Jupiter.”

Her companion looked down at his sweater with vague concern. “Was it this?” he said, pulling the sweater out a little from his middle. “Please tell me it wasn’t the stripes.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “I told Saturn this was too much.”

I told Saturn. I can’t cope with this . . . !

Nita tried to get a grip. “What do I call you?” When the wizard mediating for a planet was of another species, that Planetary was often called by his or her or its planet’s name: the way European kings or queens used to be called formally by the names of their countries. But this was also a matter of identity, because Jupiter was a being.

“Well,” he said after a moment. “Some of your people used to call me Jove . . .”

“Jove,” Nita said, trying it on. “Jovie . . .”

He giggled once more, a ridiculously contagious sound. “I don’t think anyone’s ever put a diminutive on it,” said the largest planet in the Solar System. “Jovie, then. And as for you, nondiminutive cuz—for today, wonder of wonders, you’re the size of a planet—”

“Nita. Nita Callahan. And please,” she said, grinning. “Size jokes? Too many ways to take those wrong. And here I went all the way over to that table to bring you bottled water! You be nice.”

Jupiter laughed and drank his water. Nita drank her soda, wondering how much congruency the concept “his” had with what was going on with him. Or anything else. How do you have a gender when you’re made of hydrogen and helium?

Then again, carbon doesn’t come with an automatic gender either . . . In any case, gas giants didn’t seem to have all that much trouble becoming sentient. Sometimes they developed extra species to keep them company, but just as often they sailed along their orbits in uncounted millennia of splendid solitude, thinking thoughts no human could easily understand. They had a bent for philosophy, and also for math and physics, given that they were living the physics of their lives on a scale that few other sentient beings did.

“So,” Nita said finally, about halfway down her Cel-Ray bottle, “you came all the way up here, and did this—” she waggled her bottle at his shape change, unquestionably a work of art in terms of displacement of mass alone—“just to see what the new intake looks like?”

“Indeed. Sorry, I meant ‘yeah.’ It’s hard, you know, just changing recensions all of a sudden!”

“I know,” Nita said. “I’ve been there.” She rolled the bottle back and forth between her hands.

“We work often enough with Earth’s wizards, all of us,” Jupiter said. “It’s wise to know them better as they come fully into their practice.” He gave Nita a look. “For you were busy with Mars not too long ago, weren’t you?”

Nita blushed. “I was one of the team.”

“But it was your work that reforged the planet’s kernel,” Jupiter said, “and I stood guard over that while the species who’d come to live on Mars slowly found their way back to the One. That’s why you seemed familiar to me. The name I knew, and the being; but the shape, only at second hand. Because you were in on that group debrief, weren’t you, when the intervention was finally finished.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. She was nervous about admitting that her memories of the debrief were sketchy. Bad enough that Irina had been dissecting their performance, but the presence of an outer Planetary in the conversation, vast, massive, and old, had left her feeling very small, nervous, and ephemeral at the time.

“So that explains it,” Jupiter said. “The familiarity. At any rate, when all that was handled, I said to myself, ‘They did very well on little notice and in a situation they weren’t sure how to handle.’ So when the Invitational schedule was settled, I thought it might be wise to drop by.” He shifted his shoulders a bit. “Though the business of handling the visitation can be a bit complex in terms of the physics . . .”

Nita watched him stretch, with a slight air of discomfort that reminded her of someone wearing jeans that were a size too tight. “Does it hurt for you?”

“What? How do you mean?”

“You’re so big, usually. And . . . there are so many different kinds of matter involved in you. Does it hurt being crammed down so small?”

“Oh!” He laughed. “No, not at all! So much of my matter’s empty space anyway, after all . . . I’ve just packed things down tighter than usual, locally. And left the rest at home. I mean—” He pulled the striped sweater away from him again, looked at it. “Clothes, that’s what you call these?”

“That’s right.”

“And you have others.”

“Sure.”

“But you wouldn’t normally wear them all at once.”

“Uh, no!” Nita laughed. “No, that wouldn’t work too well.”

“This is like that,” Jupiter said. “You wear one thing at a time. If I’d worn all my monatomic hydrogen to this do, there wouldn’t be anyplace for anyone else to sit down . . .”

Nita had to work at controlling her laughter again. “You said Saturn said something to you about—” She waved her bottle at the shirt. “Are you buddies? Well, wait, of course you would be, you’re only an orbit away from each other . . .”

Jupiter smiled. “A bit more than that. We’re dating.”

“Really? Wow.” Nita let out a breath of amusement, because since she’d said the B word to Kit, the whole issue of relationships seemed to be stalking her most of the time. “What does that look like for planets?”

He blinked. “Look like?”

“I mean, when you’re close. When you . . .” I’m about to discuss sex with a planet. Yes, this is my life. But her curiosity was getting the better of her, as usual. Nita cleared her throat. “I don’t even know what I’m . . . When you want to express it. Do you, I don’t know, get physical somehow? Get together . . .”

Jupiter’s eyes went wide. “You mean . . . touch each other?” His mouth opened, and closed, and opened again, until Nita was reminded of one of Carl’s koi. “Oh no. No, no, no, we don’t do that.” And then he looked embarrassed. “I mean, forgive me, I didn’t mean to sound judgmental, I know it’s normal for a lot of you, of course I know that, but the whole, uh, reproduction thing . . .”

“Sorry,” Nita said, “sorry, Jovie, didn’t mean to put you on the spot!” She was blushing harder than he was.

It was almost as if he hadn’t heard. “And as for touching, physical touching, oh no, no that would be very problematic, if we—you know, if our orbits—started to, you know, coincide at all, it would get incredibly messy, the gravity and the tidal effects and the radiation and . . . No.”

“Okay,” Nita said. And then she had to laugh again, because it was the only way she could think of to break the tension. While she’d understood that putting an alien psychology inside a human form could be exciting, because the form inevitably invokes its own psychology and tries to impose that on the indwelling mind, she’d never seen such an emphatic version of it before. “Are you okay? I didn’t want to freak you out!”

“No,” Jupiter said, calming down. “No, it’s just . . . well.”

“You should have seen me the first time I was in another body,” Nita said. “I was a wreck half the time, it seems like. Maybe because I wasn’t paying enough attention to it.”

“What happened?”

She took a moment to think where to start the story, and told him about her first times in whaleshape while being involved with the Song of the Twelve. Nita stuck to the technicalities of running a new body in a crisis situation, but soon enough she had to at least mention the emotional contexts, the blood and the breath of a new body, the feelings that came with it, the different ways in which it reacted to excitement and dread and desire.

Jupiter shuddered a little, the kind of shiver you might get during the middle of a really good horror movie when you saw the Slimy Scary Thing From Wherever sneak up through the darkness on the scientists . . . especially when you were safely out of reach of its ickiness. “That’s so . . . biological.”

The way Jupiter used the word sounded like someone trying out an evil term for a particularly kinky physical act. “Well, okay,” Nita said, “guilty as charged. But you must have a way to go about it that’s less biological.”

“Well, yes.”

Her curiosity was up and running. “So what do you do, then?”

“We resonate.”

It was naturally a word in the Speech: nothing in English could have produced the huge shiver of force and meaning that ran down Nita’s spine as Jupiter pronounced it. The single word bore with it a terrible weight of meaning, a long harsh deep whisper of what would have been sound if there had been any medium besides interplanetary space to carry it. Even through that, attenuated, distant, it throbbed, far-separated molecules nudging one another as its message transmitted itself through them. Nita felt like a gong that had been struck: the vibration, the message, the meaning shaking her, flesh and bone and brain, the blood in her veins and the air in her lungs, all vibrating together.

But not just with the vibrations of that one note. There was another note, somebody else’s, huge and message-freighted like this one. Bandwidth, Nita thought, dazed. Huge bandwidth. Radiation at a distance, heat, light, gravity, color: it all communicated, it all . . .

Resonated. He’s not kidding. She was still trembling with it and couldn’t seem to stop, had to put her hands up to her ears, then over her eyes when covering the ears didn’t help. Inside the darkness behind closed eyes she could still feel it shaking her, immense, long, old. But how could something that had been going on for billions of years feel so young? There was laughter in it, so much laughter! The agreement was laid down in curtains of radiation and reaffirmed across hundreds of millions of miles in slight orbital aberrations and gravitational perturbations that not even the most eagle-eyed human astronomer (except for those who were wizards) would ever recognize for what they were—two planets delicately and immaterially poking each other, stroking each other, fields interlacing at the greatest possible distances. Surface patterns changed, features appeared and disappeared as the two worlds wrote each other notes in their upper atmospheres, joked broadly by copying spots and stripes from each other, announcing their relationship across vast distances, uncaring if other planets saw it and rolled their eyes. Some features—the Great Red Spot, the Hexagonal Jet Stream—hadn’t gone away since an initial early declaration of relationship, around the time humans first started paying close attention to the sky with instruments better than the naked eye. Now the features were more complex than they had been, true. The dance of hydrogen atmospheres and organic chemistries around the borders of the markings had grown fainter and more nuanced: but each of the two great planets was still more or less wearing a tattoo of the other one’s name on its forehead.

Nita regained enough self-awareness to shake her head as the vibration of the two worlds’ relationship inside her head began to die back a little and she found more room to breathe. “You guys,” was all she could say at first. “Wow.”

“We have fun,” Jupiter said.

It was a staggering understatement. She could still feel echoing in her body the shadows of the complex dance that Jupiter and Saturn performed with and around each other every second (“How can you be dancing around Saturn when her orbit’s outside yours?” “It’s a simple topological inversion. Turn your back on the Sun and the inner orbits and include Saturn and everything else, and they’re all inside your orbit—”)

And how did I even hear that? Nita thought, dazed.

Resonances, Jupiter thought, and giggled. There’s always room for one more in the dance.

“Wow,” Nita said again, because it was all she could think of to say.

“But you know, they laugh at us, the other planets,” Jupiter said. “They say, ‘You two have been going around together for how long? And you’re only now noticing it? Are you ever obtuse.”

At that Nita started laughing again, though this time there was a slight edge to it. “Yeah,” she said, recalling various recent conversations with both Dairine and Carmela, “well, don’t be embarrassed, you’re not the only one who gets that.”

“Oh good.”

And without any warning the crowd in front of them seemed to part, and Kit came through it in a hurry. He headed over to Nita and stood in front of her with barely a glance at the guy sitting next to her, and bent down toward her with worry written all over his face. “Are you okay? I felt—something—right across the room.”

“Oh no, no,” Nita said. “I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?” Kit said. And now he turned his head toward Nita’s companion. “And who’s your friend?”

Nita grinned. “Kit, Jupiter,” she said. “Jupiter, Kit.” She paused. “Wait a minute, I think I got that backwards. The older one should come first, right?”

Kit’s eyes went wide as the full impact of the other’s persona hit him. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“Better sit down,” Nita said. “This is going to take some explaining . . .”

It did. It was dark by the time they left Jovie to his own devices and headed across the room. “That,” Kit said, “was . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t even know how to begin describing that.”

“Me either,” Nita said. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some ordinary. And something to eat.”

“Yeah,” Kit said.

There were buffet tables in all four corners of the big room. The burritos on offer had a lot of appeal for Nita, and she went through several of them one after another, with another bottle of the Cel-Ray soda. “Your appetite’s plainly okay,” Kit said, looking suspiciously at the soda, “otherwise I’d start worrying. That stuff smells like metal polish.”

“No it doesn’t!”

“Yes it does,” Kit said. “God only knows what it’s doing to your insides.”

“Only what it does to the insides of thousands of other New Yorkers,” Nita said. “Otherwise they’d have the Board of Health after them. Anyway, if you’re worrying about insides, you shouldn’t keep putting that habanero relish on your burgers. You won’t have any stomach lining left.”

“Come on, it can’t hurt your stomach lining. That’s a myth.” Nonetheless, Nita observed that he changed over to a ballpark mustard relish for his fourth burger.

“You’re going to roll home after that,” Nita said.

“Look,” Kit said. “I’ve been on my feet all day! And so have you. And these burgers are small.”

Nita smiled. “You’re just trying to make up for the lack of blue food,” she said. “You don’t fool me.”

Kit sighed. “I was kind of hoping Sker’ret might’ve brought something in from the Crossings, but I guess it wouldn’t have made sense for him to be doing the catering too . . .”

They wandered back into the main part of the room, where the divide between dancing Invitational guests and nondancing ones was becoming more pronounced as the evening wore on. A lot more people were now sitting or lounging around the walls, the sound of conversation and laughter scaling up into a low roar that competed very successfully with the dance music in the middle of the room. Nita and Kit wandered in a long arc around the room, saying hi to various people they recognized.

“What’s going on over there?” Nita said to Kit at one point. “There’s a whole bunch of people in a circle on the floor—”

Kit shook his head. The two of them set off in that direction: and then Nita saw Kit register something that made him break out in a grin. “What?”

“It had to happen” was all he said as they made their way over to the group. A shout went up inside the circle, along with cries of “Oh, man, how the hell—” and “Deal me out, I’m done!” And among these, one voice with a sharp, abrasive Australian accent rose highest of all. “That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, read ’em and weep—!”

Nita threw Kit a look. She knew that voice. “Oh, no—”

“Oh, yes,” Kit said. As they approached, Nita saw a thin wiry guy in dark slacks and a shirt plastered with giant Day-Glo flower designs. He was raking toward him a huge pile of the participants’ glowing souvenir tokens, blue and green both, while others in the game were throwing down their cards in resignation or disgust. “Who wants to buy in to the next hand, ladies and gentlemen? Who knows, everybody else’s luck might change . . .”

“Matt,” Nita said, shaking her head. “Only you.”

Matt looked up at her, and a grin of delight stretched across his face. “Nita!” He jumped up and stepped straight through the circle to her, threw his arms around her, and nearly crushed her in a hug. “Long time no see!”

She hugged him back and ruffled his dark hair, which was all over the place as usual. “Lissa was talking about you before—”

He smiled sourly. “I bet she was!”

“But I didn’t realize she meant you were here! Are you mentoring?”

“Not me. My mate Dokes.” He peered up over the circle of card players and past them into the main part of the room. “. . . Never mind, can’t see him. But come on, Nita, you could’ve found me in a minute. There’s an app for that . . .” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a WizPhone, and waved it at her.

“Oh no, don’t tell me Darryl’s got to you too,” Nita muttered.

“Are you kidding? No one can resist him. I’m starting to think he’s on commission.” Matt laughed. “But never mind that. Care to try your luck?”

“I could get into that,” Kit said. And he promptly sat down cross-legged in the circle. “Who’ll stake me a few?”

A tux-clad young African-American gent with glasses and a studious look laughed and handed Kit a few. “Glutton for punishment, huh . . .”

“Randy, hush up, you’ll scare him off!” said a tall brunette who’d made room for Kit on his other side, handing him some tokens as well. She had a small Siamese cat on her shoulder, and Nita found herself suddenly wondering if Irina was around, and exactly where her parakeet was.

“Looks too late for that, Bex,” Matt said. “Kit’s just gonna have to take his medicine . . .”

Kit looked up over his shoulder at Nita. “Neets? Want in?”

She shook her head. “Not me,” she said. It was a matter of embarrassment to her that though she was good at all kinds of things, no matter how many times she tried to master the rules of poker, she always forgot them five minutes after she’d learned them. “You enjoy yourselves . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Matt said, stepping back into the circle and sitting down again, “I’ll clean him out pretty quick if you’re in a rush.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure of that if I were you,” Kit said.

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said to Matt. “I’m going to lounge around for a while and let my dinner settle . . . I’ll come back in a bit.” She raised her eyebrows at Kit. “Don’t let him have it all his way . . .”

Kit grinned. He and Dairine played regularly, and Dairine had pronounced him “pretty competent,” which Nita suspected meant “extremely good.” Matt may get a surprise . . . but then Kit’s surprised him before.

And it was surprisingly restful to wander around and take it easy. For the moment, at least, Penn was not in evidence. Maybe the long day finally caught up with him.

Or he found somebody to go home with . . . Because there was that sense with Penn that the thought of sex in general, or of hooking up in particular, was always imminent. It was as if he thought that all the innuendo made him interesting. When what it mostly makes him is a lot tougher to be around, Nita thought. You hate to say anything to him for fear it’s going to bring something like that up . . . Who wants to hear somebody talking about that all the time?

She stopped by the drinks table. The young wizard who’d served her earlier was still standing there, and he smiled at her.

Nita raised her eyebrows at him. “You know what I want.”

Without hesitation he handed her a bottle of Cel-Ray, and said, “Just so you can thank me later in life, my name is Frank.”

Nita saluted Frank with the bottle and ambled on. It seemed to her that over the last hour or so, the general atmosphere of the party had gone edgier, crazier. She could see that most of the adult wizards seemed to have abandoned the field. That was probably why the tall, dark, shadow-draped shape standing near a padded bench in the room’s most dimly-lit corner caught her attention.

So very tall, she thought. Nobody’s that tall, at least nobody from this planet. And so very dark. Nobody’s that—

As the thought came to her, Nita stopped where she was and stared. For a second she thought she was looking at the Lone Power. Except what would he be doing here?

But a moment’s more inspection disabused her entirely of the idea. About this figure, there was nothing of that sense of nasty evil amusement that the Lone Power normally wore. A great still feeling of deep cold seemed wrapped around it, yes. But the cold was . . . uninflected. It didn’t mean anything: it just was.

Nita swallowed. One of these days this curiosity’s going to get me in trouble, she thought. But she didn’t think this was going to be one of those days. Slowly, casually, she made her way over toward that corner.

She knew from the way it turned slightly that the figure was watching her come. Humanoid, she thought. That much its cloak of shadows couldn’t conceal. But there was no way to tell much more from that distance.

So Nita walked up to it, parked herself next to it, and nodded hello. “Dai stihó,” she said, then leaned against the wall and looked out toward the room while taking a sip of her soda.

“And to you also,” said the shadow-wrapped form, “dai stihó, young cousin.”

Such a very soft voice, such a dark voice; and no way to see the face it belonged to or guess what thoughts were going on behind it. But something in the voice reminded her strongly of Jupiter . . . a quality that said there was much more going on here than just the physical appearance. I think I’m two for two tonight, Nita thought. And is it possible . . . ? Only one way to find out.

“Why’re you over here all by yourself?” She looked into the shadow. “You should come on out and mingle.”

“That’s very kind of you,” the voice said quietly. “But I’m . . . not that much of a mingler. I’m not from around here.”

The words gave her an odd anticipatory feeling in the pit of her stomach . . . though nothing like what Nita felt when Kit was in question, not the always hard-to-analyze stomach flip. It felt a little like fear, yet there was nothing bad about it. Awe, Nita thought. Jovie had this feeling about him too, but you had to sit with him a while to feel it, and his was funnier. This is stronger. More serious.

“. . . You’re a capture,” Nita said.

It was a guess, but an educated one, and the shadow-veiled head bowed in assent. “Insofar as any capture is ever nonconsensual at such a level,” he said. “I knew what I was being captured by.” A glint of very dark eyes, more felt than seen. “Or rather, whom.”

And when he agreed, that clinched it. “Then I know who you are.”

“Do you indeed,” the darkness said, sounding not so much surprised as interested.

“Yes,” Nita said. “Yes I do. And I just want you to know one thing.”

“That being?”

“You’ll always be a planet to me.”

The dark shape looked at her in astonishment. Then slowly it bowed, and its shadows flared outward around it, almost winglike.

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” Nita said. “I sure wasn’t consulted.”

The darkness shrugged, though it was a most understated, fractional shrug. “It was merely a shift in terminology,” Pluto said. “A classification issue. Ontologically it’s not particularly significant: I bear no one ill will for it.”

“Still,” Nita said. “I feel like you were robbed of something. Status, or . . .” She paused. “I don’t know. And though I understood the reasons for it when it happened, it made me sad.”

Again one of those bows, though not quite as deep this time. “I appreciate your concern.” The darkness straightened. “At a time when you surely have much else on your mind . . .”

Nita’s glance slid sideways to the spot across the room where she’d left Kit.

“Relationship,” that regal darkness murmured. “So often an issue.”

Nita burst out laughing, thinking about Dairine’s line that what was going on with her could be seen from space. Apparently it could.

“You know,” she said, “forgive me, but this is weirder than usual. With Jupiter, with Saturn—that they can think and talk, and be wizardly, and even that they can cram their consciousness down into shapes like these if they want to—” She flapped her arms a little. “It makes sense once you manage to wrap your brain around it. They’re life forms. But you, you’re—well—you’re a rocky body covered with ice.”

“Well,” Pluto said, “since we’re apparently speaking frankly, as is the wont of good cousins who seek truth together, you’re a sloppy skin-contained sack of carbon compounds and water, slathered all over a silicate frame.” She caught a glint of amusement from the eyes hidden inside those enveloping shadows. “But not just carbon compounds and water. True, you have highly evolved organs in which various structures and chemical processes mediate emotion and intellection. Yet no one has yet succeeded in determining the location of mind. Unless I’m behind in the news . . .”

“Not that far behind, it looks like,” Nita said.

“Good to hear. Your practice has been relatively brief, as your species reckons time, but already you have personal experience of some modes of consciousness that do not map at all closely onto the ones your world commonly knows or accepts. One of these—I would not say a natural law, but certainly a tendency—is for accretions of matter over a certain size or mass to acquire or engender a specific type of consciousness. Such an accretion may remain solitary; it may over many ages become gregarious. But whether or not it ever touches another consciousness, it exists.” There was a thoughtful pause. “The One does love to talk to Itself; this would appear to be another mode in which It does so.”

Nita nodded, trying to think when she had last been so courteously put in her place. “Okay . . .”

“In any case, it’s not unusual for solar systems to have mixed populations—some worlds sentient but without a Planetary, some in which the sentience holds the Planetary position itself, some in which the world’s own consciousness fluctuates cyclically. But again, relationship’s always an issue. Solar systems aren’t simply about orbital mechanics. They’re about who’s doing what with whom, in what emotional context.”

“Like Jupiter and Saturn,” Nita said.

Nita could just imagine eyes rolling inside that cool darkness. “Quite. But not always on that scale. You and I, for example; we have history.”

Nita’s eyes went wide. “Wait, what?”

“Oh, come now, my cousin. How should I not recognize you across a room, no matter how crowded it was?” And she didn’t have to see, or try to see, the smile growing inside those shadows now: it was quite audible in the dark voice. “Many are the wizards of your kind who’ve visited me briefly, and once having seen the sights have gone on their way. But only one has ever dropped her sister’s bed down my very deepest crevasse.”

At that Nita burst out laughing so hard that she had to sit down on the nearby bench. The dark shape beside her simply smiled more broadly inside its shadows—laughter possibly being beneath its ancient dignity—and sat down too.

It took a while before Nita could breathe again. When she was able, she said, “Oh, I am so, so sorry.”

“I’m not,” said Pluto. “It made my day.”

“Meaning about a week around here,” Nita said, and snickered. “Well, good. Because she still blames me every time her bed squeaks.”

“It could be metal fatigue,” Pluto said, as if trying to be helpful.

“Um, you know, probably not. It was there for hours and hours. The cold probably screwed up the crystalline structure of the metal in the springs.” Nita wiped her eyes. “Don’t tell her I said that.”

“It shall remain between us, I assure you.”

It took a few moments more for Nita to get herself to stop feeling like she wanted to burst out in giggles. “Okay. Look, I don’t want to monopolize you.”

“I would say there would have been no fear of that,” Pluto said. “Nonetheless I thank you for your consideration: when one is normally used to a more solitary lifestyle, such gatherings can be wearing.”

Nita nodded, got up, and stretched. “Are you sticking around for the rest of the Invitational?”

“I will be in and out,” Pluto said. “The other Planetaries and I have matters to discuss, and it’s rare enough to have as congenial an opportunity as this—where we can also have a chance to view at close range those with whom our work in this System is so closely associated.”

“And who dump bedroom furniture on you without warning,” Nita said.

“Yes,” Pluto said, “and perhaps we might dispense with that in future? It could adversely affect the neighborhood’s property values.”

Nita burst out laughing again. What is it tonight? Tension relief? Or all these amazing things happening? “No more furniture,” she said. “Cross my heart.”

The dark Planetary rose up in great majesty and bowed to her again, leaving Nita wondering how mere silent motion could be so thoroughly imbued with gentle sarcasm. “Then may the view of the long Night delight your heart,” Pluto said. “And let us meet again before the end.”

“Yes,” Nita said. “Good night to you too.” She bowed in return, then headed back into the room.

She started working her way over in the general direction of the poker corner and took several more slugs of the Cel-Ray, for her mouth had gone dry. Apparently awe could be retroactive. This, Nita thought, has been a most, most unusual day. “Bobo,” she said under her breath, “have you been taking notes this evening?”

Meetings with beings of Planetary level or better normally invoke automatic archival activity, Bobo said, for their reference as well as yours.

“Oh good,” Nita thought. Though she then remembered what Dairine had told her about the Mobiles’ archival project, and had to wonder if the best use of it was preserving for all eternity the story of how she’d dumped her sister’s bed in Pluto’s backyard.

She giggled to herself. What a day. I can’t think when I’ve laughed so much for so many different reasons . . . Nita paused briefly by the dance floor, which was packed even tighter now, though the floating hardened-air platforms had been removed, possibly for safety reasons. She shook her head, amused, turned away—

And someone seized her by the elbow. “At last! At last our schedules coincide.”

Nita’s dentist had warned her at her last checkup about gritting her teeth. I know teenage life is a lot more stressful than it used to be, but seriously, Nita . . . Now she turned toward Penn and forced her jaw to relax.

“Whatever schedule I have,” she said, “I don’t believe I even had you penciled in.”

But his attention was now on the bottle she was carrying. “Don’t tell me you’re still drinking that stuff!” Penn said. “Seriously, it smells like windshield washer fluid.”

“Oh, come on, it does not,” Nita said. “I swear, some people just get so unnerved by anything new and different!”

“Like me!” Penn said, throwing his arms wide. “Come on, Juanita! Come dance with me. Everybody else has!”

“Uh, no,” Nita said. “Seriously, no thanks . . . it’s not my thing.” Even with people she liked, she wasn’t terribly confident about her dancing skills. Except earlier, when a slow dance sequence had started, she’d looked at some of the couples and thought, Kit . . .

“That dreamy look,” Penn said, “I know what that means . . .”

And you honestly think you do, Nita thought. That’s the problem. Or part of it.

“What you want is to loosen up and let the whole place see how you really feel about me—”

Nita swallowed, as this was beginning to get on her nerves. “That could be interesting,” she said, “except we’d probably wind up forfeiting our cleaning deposit.”

He wasn’t even listening. “—instead of wasting your time talking to spooks in the corner!”

“That was not a spook. He was nice,” Nita said. As if that could begin to sum it up.

Penn clutched his heart histrionically. “Oh, Nita! Are you two-timing me?”

Nita’s jaw dropped. “What? Penn . . . In your dreams.”

“I mean it! I’m wounded! That you could even look at anybody else right now . . .”

Wounded is exactly what he’s going to get if he’s not careful—She took a few seconds to finish the Cel-Ray and turned to drop the bottle in a nearby bin, reminding herself about her teeth again as a brief cool breath from the air-conditioning caught her from behind and helped her settle herself. “Penn,” Nita said. “I hate having to say this in quite this way—”

“But I cleaned those guys out,” said Kit’s voice from directly behind her, “and thought I’d come over to see if you wanted to help me celebrate. You busy?”

Nita’s eyes went wide as he came up beside her. Not the air-conditioning, then. Wow. “Not at all,” she said.

“Good,” Kit said. “Penn, we’re off the clock right now. Was there anything you needed to talk to us about?”

“Nothing,” Penn said, “nothing at all.”

And he sailed off past the dance floor without another word.

“That,” Nita said, “was the quietest beam-in I have ever seen you do. You barely made a breeze.”

“You do a spell for as long as I’ve been doing that one,” Kit said, “and you’re likely to pick up some expertise.”

She sighed, smiling at him. “Well, thanks.”

“I nearly said ‘Is this guy bothering you?’ Except that it’s such a cliché, and also it’s obvious that he is bothering you. You okay?”

“Yeah.” Nita shook her head. “Kit, seriously, you shouldn’t worry about it; I can handle him. Life’s given me way too much experience with idiots.”

“Maybe so,” Kit said. “But you know what? Let’s give the idiot some experience for a change.”

“What?”

Kit reached out and took her hand. When they started moving, it took Nita a moment to realize that he was leading her toward the dance floor as the music cross-faded from the hip-hop beat into something significantly slower.

Nita’s stomach did that flip again. “I might step on you . . .” she said.

“Somehow I think I’ll survive,” Kit said.

It was amazing the noise that could erupt in your head over so short a walk. I look stupid I should have worn something nicer everyone’s going to get the wrong idea everyone’s going to get the right idea but too soon what’s the matter with me I wanted this but I didn’t know if he wanted this or if he wants this for the right reasons and what if I’m bad at it what if he decides this was a bad idea what if what if what if . . .

The introduction to the slow-dance song was already playing, something Nita didn’t recognize: not too slow, with a soft-rock eighties kind of backbeat and a female vocal. But that was all she could deal with at the moment, as they were out there now on the wood-tiled dance floor, and she didn’t know what to do with her hands, and it felt like the entire planet was staring at her, actually several planets, because she was sure both Jupiter and Pluto were still onsite, leaning quietly against one wall or another and watching the humans do peculiar human things. I wonder what they’ll make of this, she thought as Kit lifted up the one hand he’d taken and put his other hand on her waist. He put his head down by her ear and said conversationally, “You might try grabbing hold of my belt to keep me from running away.”

“Yeah, right, makes perfect sense,” Nita said, struggling to sound slightly snarky even though she knew she was babbling. Nonetheless it was a good suggestion, and once she’d managed that, they began to move together. Nita was glad to let Kit handle this part of the process, as she wasn’t entirely sure where any of her limbs were at the moment; her body seemed almost to belong to someone else, she was in such a state of wonder and shock. This is happening. I can’t believe this is happening. In front of all these people. Oh God.

The vocalist had started singing, but Nita couldn’t make head or tail of it right now, because her hands were sweating and she could feel Kit’s muscles moving and it was all a little bit too much and he was looking down at her—

And then she blinked, and laughed.

He was still looking down at her, but the look changed, softened. “Something funny?”

“You’re looking down at me. I can’t get used to it.”

“No?”

“No. Not yet. You were shorter than me for such a long time.”

“Stockier than you too,” he said. “I wasn’t wild about that . . . Didn’t think it was a good sign.” Kit’s smile went very wry. “My dad used to say, ‘Either you’re going to favor my side of the family, where we all get to be six feet tall, or Mama’s side of the family, where they specialize in diminutive-but-fierce.’ And every night when I was praying I would say, ‘Fierce is good. Diminutive, not so good.’” He made a face. “I mean, I didn’t want to order God around or anything, I didn’t think that would help my case . . .”

“I don’t think you have to worry about the diminutive anymore,” Nita said. “You’ve got that handled.”

She was relaxing now, the noise in her head pretty much on its way to dying back to nothing: at least enough to start hearing the vocalist as the two of them rocked gently back and forth. I don’t know why I was worrying about stepping on him, Nita thought; we’re not exactly doing the tango. But they didn’t need to be. This was nice enough . . .

It’s kinda funny,

you were always near,

But who’d have ever thought that we would

end up here?

And every time I’ve needed you,

You’ve been there to pull me through;

Now it’s clear

I’ve been waiting for you—

Could it be you and I?

I never imagined—

Could it be suddenly

I’m fallin’ for you?

Could it be

you were right here beside me

and I never knew?

Could it be, could it be that it’s true . . . ?

Nita gave Kit a look. “You set this up,” she said.

Kit blinked, all innocence. “What?”

“The song. You set it up.”

“Me?”

“One of the most basic principles of wizardry,” Nita said. “‘There are no accidents.’”

After a moment, the corner of Kit’s mouth twisted upward. “It’s possible,” he said, “there was some kind of agreement with the DJ. Who may or may not be part of a gaming group who’s going to be playing Ronan’s group in a couple of months, and wanted to see some of our planning notes for the last campaign.”

Nita’s eyebrows went up.

“They’re not classified or anything,” Kit said. “Ronan knows. In fact, he may have tweaked them a little.”

All Nita could do was shake her head at him. “You have no shame.”

“That’s what the Transcendent Pig said when I ran into it in the practice spaces, back when your mom was sick. Or something like that.” Kit looked thoughtful. “It also called me a twerp.”

Nita laughed. “Did you deserve it?”

“Probably. But I was looking for someone right then, and I needed it to tell me where they were. So maybe I got pushy.”

“Okay,” Nita said. “But that worked out all right.”

“Yep.”

“Good.” She smiled. “Twerp.”

Kit chuckled. Nita put her head down against his shoulder, feeling him hug her a little more tightly, and found that she didn’t mind a bit.

The song was gradually reaching its end, and to her surprise Nita found that though when they’d first started dancing she’d wished it was already over, now she was wishing very much that it wouldn’t stop. Make up your mind, she told herself.

—The rest of our lives,

I can see it in your eyes . . .

And it’s real, and it’s true,

It’s just me and you,

Could it be, could it be

that it’s you? . . .

As the song came to its end, Kit bent his head down to Nita’s, touched the side of his nose very gently to the side of hers. And then he looked at her, not moving; waiting. His eyes weren’t just brown, she saw: there was gold in them. So close.

“Here?” he said.

She breathed out. She could feel him do the same. “Not here,” she said. It was stupid, and she wasn’t going to say it, but somewhere out in that crowd she could feel Penn watching them. “Not the right reason. Not for this.”

But still he leaned his forehead against hers, and they smiled at each other.

“Home?” he said.

“Home,” Nita said.