Games Wizards Play

Canberra

THEY WERE NERVOUS. They were both nervous. Maybe that was the source of the problem.

“Why’s it doing that, Mehrnaz? I thought we fixed this!”

“Yes, well, I’m not sure it was actually broken,” Mehrnaz said.

It was raining and humid outside the flat, and inside the air-conditioning wasn’t functioning as it should, and they were on edge. This was now the fourth of the five extra days the restructuring of the Invitational schedule had provided to the new semifinalists. Two of those days had been schooldays for Dairine, and she’d spent all her evening and homework time here. The other two had been weekend days, and she’d spent both of them here, too. She was tired, she was frayed, she was seriously time-zone-lagged, and (to her horror) she was getting bored with onion bhajis.

She was also getting sick of looking at Mehrnaz’s spell. The complexities of it were significant to begin with, as might be expected when you were trying to keep two very large pieces of the Earth—each one fragmented into hundreds or sometimes thousands of smaller pieces, subtly or chaotically balanced against each other—from grinding one another into powder and killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the unfortunate humans who lived on top of them. And as she tried to keep all the particulars straight, every now and then Dairine found herself falling into that sort of hazy state where one group of symbols or set of diagrams looked exactly like the one right next to it—interchangeable if not meaningless.

And no sooner had Dairine snapped herself out of one of these states than she would find that Mehrnaz had moved something away from a place in the spell where it was working perfectly well, and had been doing so since they started. And here we go again . . . “But you were the one who suggested that the main slipstrike routine needed to be subdivided. And so we subdivided it. You had a lovely reason for that, it stood up under scrutiny, we did the role-playing thing and tried to pick it apart the way the panel will, and we couldn’t do it. And now you want to go back to the way it was to begin with, which was frankly kind of vulnerable to failure if any of the other major working parts of the spell got deranged?”

“Yes,” Mehrnaz said, standing on the far side of the diagram with her hands on her hips. She was actually managing to look belligerent. I wonder if all the tea she’s been drinking is getting to her, Dairine thought. “It was starting to look . . . I don’t know . . . unnecessarily complicated. I think a more straightforward approach might be smarter.”

Dairine was tempted to throw her hands in the air and tell Mehrnaz what she really thought of her indecisiveness. This had been getting especially bad over the last day or so. At one point she had been trying to get Dairine make the changes herself, until Dairine suddenly noticed a very odd little smile that popped out briefly on Mehrnaz’s face when she was about to shift a spell’s subroutine into a less effective position. It was like something naughty at the back of Mehrnaz’s mind had peeked out at Dairine and smirked at her, amused that it was getting its way. At that point Dairine had started to dig her heels in and resist all these changes, some of them genuinely sweeping.

It makes no sense, she thought as she started to marshal her arguments against this newest change, or rather, rollback. The whole purpose of the initial round is to get the big changes dealt with in front of an audience that wants to help and isn’t interested in marking you down. And we’ve done all that. Who wants to make more work for themselves? Why would anyone want to tire themselves out and screw up all the good work they’ve done so far?

Dairine’s frustration level was increasing so much that she started thinking out loud. “It’s almost like what already works isn’t good enough, like you have to find the perfect solution and so merely good won’t do, almost like . . .” She fumbled for words, turned away.

Like you’re sabotaging yourself, said something in the back of her brain. Like you truly don’t want to go any further. Like you’re planning to have things come undone now.

And in a horrified split second it all laid itself out in front of Dairine, clear as crystal, like a chess problem written down, like a maze solved. “Something didn’t go right” was what Mehrnaz had said at the end of the first round. But that, as Nelaid had warned her, was code. What Mehrnaz really meant was, I won when I was supposed to have lost. And more to the point: I want to lose.

She has some reason to want to fail this, Dairine thought, not for the first time. It’s something to do with the family, I know it is. And thinking this, Dairine started to get angry. We like each other, yeah, but she doesn’t trust me enough to tell me. That started to make her angry too.

Well, there are a couple ways to handle this . . . But Dairine knew instinctively that one of them was not going to be confronting Mehrnaz directly. Not yet, anyway. I’ve got to let her play it out, and just refuse to let her screw it all up. Who knows, she might give in to the idea of winning if I wear her down. But after all this work I’ve done, I will not lie back and let her screw it up on purpose!

“Like what?” Mehrnaz said.

“Sorry,” Dairine said, “lost my train of thought. Let me see the fault analysis routine again. There was something on the power-feed segment of that routine that got me confused.”

But wow, this is going to be a long, long day or two. Remind me again why I signed up for this?

On the morning of the semifinals, Nita sat up in her bed, gasping again. It was dawn.

It took her several minutes to get control of her breathing. “I’m starting to hate this,” she said silently to Bobo. “I can’t remember when I had a stupid meaningless dream anymore. Like being in school and suddenly realizing I haven’t studied for a test.”

Or that strange one where your teeth fall out.

Nita shuddered. “Why’d you have to remind me? I was just forgetting about that one.”

Sorry . . .

“Never mind,” Nita said.

Have you got context for me?

“Yeah,” Nita said. She had to take an instant to swallow—her mouth was dry at the memory of her dream from last night.

The imagery had been arresting, because when the dream started, it had seemed like one of those ordinary inconsequential dreams. She’d been heading over to Kit’s house because his mom was going to be making that chicken dish she did so well. And she got to the house, and she went in the back door, and Kit was there in the kitchen, getting something out of his refrigerator. He turned to her . . .

And his eyes were empty. There was no one there, no one inside. It wasn’t as if the stare was blank or zombielike. It was just that Kit was missing somehow. None of the expressions that normally lived in his eyes were there.

She shivered. That was not something she ever wanted to see again. And what was worse, in the dream she could hear echoes of that earlier dream with Carmela, where Kit’s sister had begged her “not to let them get Kit.” In this morning’s dream, she remembered being overtaken by a wave of utmost dread, because she realized that it was too late, they had gotten Kit, and there was nothing she could do about it. The sheer horror of it had snapped her awake and upright in a flash of hot and cold adrenaline.

Anything else? Bobo asked.

Nita shook her head. “Not sure I want anything else, frankly. It’s made me feel a little sick to my stomach.”

Probably you should have some of that peppermint tea.

“Better let my insides settle first,” she said.

Nita got up and got dressed. What’s this all about? she thought as she put the kettle on. Is this something to do with The B Word? Is my subconscious terrified that Kit won’t be Kit anymore if he’s my boyfriend instead of just my friend? Because there was no avoiding the whispers and rumors and suggestions, at school, in books, on TV shows, that if you took that extra step too far you could “ruin it” and never ever get back again what you had before. Usually, before this, she’d have scoffed at the idea. She and Kit had been through way too much trouble together, and though there’d been misunderstandings and disagreements along the way, they’d always come out okay on the other side.

But those eyes, those empty eyes . . . The memory of them creeped Nita out. They made her feel like the solutions that had worked in the past might not be good enough for the present, let alone the future . . .

She eventually managed to push the image away. But she wasn’t going to be terribly happy with life until Kit came over later in the morning and she saw his eyes, and that he was inside them.

She’d just finished making herself some of the peppermint tea and was halfway down the mug when her dad came in, found himself a mug, and started going through the cupboards. Nita was paging through her manual and not paying much attention to him until it occurred to her that the rummaging was taking a lot longer than it usually did for him. It’s not like he doesn’t know where the coffee is. Or else—“Coffee or tea?” Nita said.

“Coffee.”

“Did she drink it all already? Wow, she must really be having trouble with the zone lag.”

“What? Oh.”

Her dad was staring straight at the glass jar of Dairine’s coffee, but it was as if he couldn’t see it. Nita reached into the cupboard past him, grabbed it, and handed it to him. “Here,” she said. “I won’t let her know you had any. Just grab another jar of it from the store when you go by there.”

Her dad made himself some coffee, and then once it was made, leaned against the counter and stood staring into his mug for a while as he stirred. He looks so concerned, Nita thought. What’s going on with him?

“Nita,” he said. “You have a moment?”

“What? Sure.”

“Okay. Good.” And he took a breath. “You and Kit—”

With a shock Nita realized what was coming. Oh no, she thought. Not right now. Not on top of everything else!

Nita held her breath.

“How’s it been going?” her dad said.

She had no idea where he’d been planning to start, but this was so low-key, even for her dad, that Nita was tempted to laugh out loud. Except that would probably throw him right off his stride when he needed to talk to her about this, and she didn’t want to do that. This was going to be weird and difficult enough for them both as it was.

In any case there was no point in trying to pretend she didn’t know what subject he was trying to broach. “We’re fine,” she said. “A little freaked, maybe.”

“Both of you?” he said, giving her a curious look. “Kit’s been playing it pretty calm.”

“Playing it, yeah,” said Nita.

Her dad smiled half a smile. It was an expression that Nita remembered her mom wearing a lot, and now she found herself wondering which of her parents had come up with it first and how long it had taken to rub off on the other one. After a moment he said, “Has anything. . .”

“. . . Happened?” Nita gave him a look that she hoped would be dry without being too snotty.

Her dad had the grace to look embarrassed at asking so baldly. “Uh. Maybe I, uh . . .”

Nita simply leaned on the counter and regarded him, wondering how deep a hole he was about to dig for himself and how long he’d take to stop digging.

“Um.” He looked up. “In baseball terms?”

Nita paused to give this some consideration. “First base?” she said.

Her dad made a face that suggested this was probably okay.

“Might have stolen first a few times,” Nita said. “And thought about stealing second . . .”

At that, unexpectedly, he laughed. “Um. All right. But you do know . . .”

“Almost certainly, Daddy.” She was wishing that he’d get the hint and let the subject drop, but there didn’t seem to be much chance of that.

“That there are parts of what you’re getting into that are, uh . . . they have life consequences . . .”

“Dad,” Nita said. “We had all this in school. It’s okay.”

“Yes,” her dad said, “about the mechanics, I know you know about that—”

Nita had to smile. “You remember that time when Kit was getting the TV set up for PeculiarSat . . . ?” This was the household code for GalacNet and the other major extraterrestrial image and data feeds to which wizards had access. “. . . And Mom was playing around with the remote and she stumbled across the TentaclErotica channel?”

Her father put down the coffee mug and covered his face. “Oh God,” he said.

“You knew then that I already knew everything I needed to know about this,” Nita said.

“Excuse me,” her father said, and picked up the mug again, and he was actually blushing, “I knew that you already knew everything anybody possibly needed to know about tentacly things from alpha Centauri doing it! Because the explanations—”

“Aldebaran VIIa, actually,” Nita said.

“—Nearly gave me a coronary!”

“They’ve got a lot of sexes,” Nita said. “They have a lot of sex. If you go there on business, you have to be prepared. But everybody in that was consenting, Daddy! That’s the important thing. Hvurkh means hvurkh!”

Her dad started laughing. “Okay,” he said, “fine. That’s about a third of the talk I wanted to have . . .”

“Oh good,” Nita said, unable to stop dreading whatever the other two-thirds were going to be.

“So, beyond the, you know, the just doing it . . .” Her dad stopped, cleared his throat. “Look, wizardry aside—you’re just getting started in life. College is coming.” Nita winced and groaned softly: too well she knew it. “And even though you’re as strong and smart as anyone could hope for their daughter to be . . . it’s going to be a good while yet before you’ve got the emotional maturity to deal with parenthood.”

“Please,” Nita said. “I have exactly zero plans for that for the next ten years. Or twenty.”

“Well,” her dad said, “planning is kind of the issue, isn’t it? And not forgetting to have the planning in place when, um, when things do happen. If they do.”

His embarrassment was so profound that Nita would have done almost anything to spare him this. It didn’t seem the time, though, to get into the various management strategies available to a wizard who wasn’t ready to reproduce. “We know what we need to do,” Nita said. “Or not do. Honest, Daddy. You don’t need to worry.” She stopped herself before she could have a chance to say We’ll be careful or any other of about twenty other reassuring phrases that could be terribly misunderstood.

“Okay,” her dad said. “Most of the rest of it . . .” He actually shrugged. “It was going to be about keeping your options open. A lot can happen in ten years. Or twenty.” He looked up, favouring her with an expression that was a bit challenging.

This was harder to cope with, harder to be reassuring about. At the moment Nita was equally torn between not being able to define what was going on with her and Kit, and not being able to believe that the way they were with each other could ever possibly happen with anyone else. Knowing this in the abstract was completely different from the inextricably intertwined senses of fluttery nervousness and total certainty that she got when she looked at Kit. She couldn’t explain it to herself, and she despaired of explaining it to anyone else, especially her father.

“Because you can’t always be sure,” her dad said after a moment. He drank some coffee and looked at something over the top of the cup: not Nita. “I wasn’t sure with your mom for a long time.”

Nita blinked at that. “Really?” It seemed impossible, somehow. And certainly impossible that the two of them had ever been with anyone else.

Her dad shook his head. “We met a fair number of times before we started getting serious,” he said. “At first she thought I was a jock. Well, I was, then.” He grinned a little: his college-football time, to hear him tell it, had been one of the best parts of his life. “And at first I thought she was a snotty stuck-up elitist. Ballet . . .” Her dad snorted. “. . . But then after a while things shifted, and it all made sense. We made sense—when I’d have sworn just a few months before that it never could. We never could. Just . . .” He shrugged. “Give things room to move if they need to.”

“Okay,” Nita said. “I’ll try.”

He nodded, then, and drank some more coffee.

“So,” Nita said. “And . . . you’re okay with everything?” Because she suddenly realized that it was important that he was: surprisingly important.

“Do I have a choice?” her dad said.

Nita didn’t have an answer for that.

He was looking down into the coffee mug again, swirling the coffee. “There was a time,” her dad said, “when I realized . . .” He sighed. “It was that night at the beach, when you told us the truth about what you and Kit were up to. And at first we were just too shocked to believe it. Because honestly, how could we? Magic? Come on.” He shook his head. “But after it started sinking in, I had just the worst possible moment. It was something Kit said that triggered it. And I realized—and so did your mom—that no matter what we said or did, if you were intent on doing this dangerous thing, there was nothing we could do to stop you. Nothing.”

“It was hard,” Nita said after a moment, and wasn’t certain whether she was thinking more about the effect of that night on her mom and dad, or on her. “But I knew you’d be okay with it sooner or later.”

“It was hard,” her dad said, sounding very somber. “But we did get our brains wrapped around it, finally.” He looked up from his coffee. “This is like that, in a way. Even if you weren’t a wizard and you wanted to get it on with somebody, realistically there’s no way we could—I could stop you. What, am I supposed to keep you in a cage? And probably there’s no way I could even know about it if you absolutely set your mind on keeping it secret.”

This struck Nita as the wrong moment to agree with him. She kept quiet.

“But there comes a point where you have to just decide to trust people,” her dad said. “No matter what age they are. And in your case, yeah, you have a set of priorities that your mom and I never could have predicted. But you’re still our daughter, and I know how we brought you up, and I think you’ll do the right thing without me having to watch you day and night.” He laughed a little helplessly. “Even if I could.”

In the face of a vote of confidence like that, there wasn’t much Nita could do but put her cold tea down and go hug him.

Her dad smooched her on the top of her head and hugged her back. “There,” he said. “Wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Good.” Nita grinned at his relief, let him go, and shoved her tea in the microwave, pushing the button that would give it a minute to heat up. “So are we okay?”

“For the moment,” her dad said.

Nita threw him an oh no, what now? look.

“Well, I’m not sure it’s responsible to have this talk just once,” her dad said. “The whole idea that you can just get it over with . . . As if conditions might not change in the future, for you, for me . . .” He shrugged. “Remember when you were six or so and we had that talk about you not crossing the street without looking both ways?”

Nita had no memory of that at all. “It was kind of a long time ago . . .”

Her dad gave Nita a look that suggested her attempt to deflect his question without hurting him had been noticed, appreciated, and was being allowed to pass without comment. “But it’s not like, having given you that long talk, I was just going to stop worrying forever about whether you were crossing the street safely, right? What kind of sense with that make? Of course I’m going to keep worrying about it. And we might need to talk again some time when you have more data. Or things change some other way. But I’ll leave that with you.”

“Okay,” Nita said.

Her dad finished the last of his coffee, ran some water into the mug and left it in the sink. “Gotta go,” he said. He felt around in his pockets for his car keys. “Seeing Dairine? I keep missing her, her hours are so strange right now.”

“Yeah, probably I will.”

“Thank her for getting the garbage out, okay?”

“Sure.”

Her dad kissed her again and headed out the back door: it slammed behind him.

Ten minutes of the birds and the bees, Nita thought as the microwave pinged at her. Just before I get ready to gate halfway around the planet. What is my life . . . ? She’d calmed down a bit by the time Kit turned up: though her dream of this morning was still very much on her mind as he came in and she spent a few moments looking carefully into his eyes.

The look he gave her in return was bemused. “Is there something on my face?”

“One of your normal expressions,” Nita said. “Which I’m glad to see.”

“Another of those dreams . . . ?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. She turned away.

“Pancakes?” Kit said.

“Not today,” Nita said. “Sticking to toast. Want some tea?”

“What’s that, the peppermint stuff? Yeah.”

She made him a cup and they sat. “So,” Kit said. “Tonight’s the night.”

“Yeah. We’re due at Penn’s when?”

“Four o’clock, our time. Then over to Canberra.”

Nita nodded. “You know,” she said, “I’m thinking those unworthy thoughts again.”

“What? Wishing that he’ll get knocked out?”

“Well, the odds are a lot better this time . . .”

“For us, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

Kit sighed. “True. You want to know what’s kind of embarrassing?”

“Tell me.”

“That I’m wishing that too.”

“So it’s not just my nerves he’s getting on more and more . . .”

“Not so much him,” Kit said. “But you know, I’m not so excited about going to the far side of the Moon.”

Nita reached out and stroked Kit’s arm. “I know. And you know what? Neither is Dairine.”

“Similar reasons, I guess,” Kit said.

“Yeah.” Roshaun’s terrifying disappearance had come mere minutes before Ponch’s climactic battle with the Wolf That Ate the Stars.

“But if she’s going,” Kit said, “I need to go too. If only to remind her that happy endings are possible . . .”

All Nita could do was sit there for a moment regarding him in shameless admiration. “You know,” she said, “you’re not only a terrific wizard, but you’re a nice person.”

Kit threw her a look that was skeptical on the surface of it, but he was still smiling. “So,” he said. “Onward to the semis.”

“Yeah. But I’m betting that before that, we’ll have at least a few other things to distract us.”

“Such as?”

“Penn being a jerk,” Nita said. “Again, and again, and again . . .”

“And if I can get you lovely ladies to turn your ever-so-fickle attention to the unique power control segment—”

“Penn!” Nita said.

He looked at her brightly. “And there’s a question from one of them now!”

Dear Powers That Be, give me strength. “Penn, I truly almost hate to break this to you,” Nita said, “but even though more than half of the people judging you today are going to be female, an even more significant portion of them, say a hundred percent or so, are going to be more experienced than you. And another significant percentage, kind of hard to evaluate but let’s be kind and just say most, are going to be smarter than you as well. So you need to amend your attitude right now or you are not going to do well.”

“You’re taking this way too seriously, way too personally! But it’s not your fault you can’t see how easy this is going to be for me.” Penn’s tone was almost pitying. “I know you’ve always had to try hard, it’s written all over your service history, but some of us just don’t have to go down that road. It’s going to be okay, Juanita, seriously, you’re worrying way too much about this—”

“Penn,” Kit said sharply, “it’s not funny, and it’s not cute. They’ll laugh you out of there. If you call Irina Mladen a ‘lovely lady’ to her face, after she’s done with you you’re going to wind up wishing that the Earth would open up and swallow you. In fact, considering her specialty, the odds are better than even that it will.”

In turn, Penn threw Kit a sly look. “I see what the problem is,” he said. “She’s been getting to you.” He glanced at Nita. “It’s okay . . . I know what you’re really thinking.”

Kit covered his face.

Nita waved her arms and pushed herself away from the wall at the side of Penn’s downstairs rec room where she’d been leaning. “Nope,” she said. “Nope, nope, nope. Kit? You mind if I go ahead?”

The slightly wistful look he gave her suggested that he wished he’d thought of it first. “No, go on,” Kit said.

“Mmm,” Penn said to her, “can’t stand the heat?”

“Don’t go there, Penn,” Nita said. She pulled her transit circle out of her charm bracelet—preloaded with the coordinates for the venue in Canberra—and dropped it, glowing, to the floor around her. To Kit she said, “A couple hours?”

“Yeah.”

Nita breathed in, breathed out very hard, and said the activation word for the transit circle before she could be tempted to stick around and reduce the number of semifinalists by one.

The arrangement for the wizardly space at the convention center in Canberra was much the same as it had been in New York: a spell-shielded area to keep the nonwizards at bay, various meeting rooms, and a big, beautiful, airy public space conducive to a large number of people getting together after the business of the meeting was done. It was a smaller space, though, than the New York venue had been. With only fifty or so participants presenting projects privately to a panel of judges instead of out in the open, there wasn’t any need for a huge space that would resemble a carnival fairway.

With all the appealing outdoor terraces around the convention center where people who felt inclined could bask in the sunshine, and with the lovely warm weather then prevailing, the whole feeling of the event seemed to Nita to have taken a more leisurely turn. This struck her as a good thing, as the tension level had ratcheted up a great deal. Quite a lot of people, especially Australian wizards, had come in to take part in the proceedings and see who went through to the finals. These attendees had started arriving early to learn how the initial rankings stacked up. But there was no mistaking the casual guests for the competitors, who all had a twitchy look to them that instantly set them apart.

There was a good reason for this: the drastic results of the previous round had led a lot of people to suspect that the trend toward unusually hard judging was likely to continue. And when the four core judges were announced, this theory was instantly confirmed. One of the core group was naturally Irina Mladen. Another was Jarrah Corowa, possibly one of the most famous wizards of Aboriginal origin on the planet, and an expert in spells that had to do with materials technologies. A third was the venerable Yi Ling Harrie from Singapore, at ninety-three one of the oldest and best-known aeromancers still in active practice; and the fourth was Malak Marouane, Moroccan-born but practicing mostly in animal communications in Central Africa. Nita, looking over their images in her manual, thought with anticipation of the response should Penn call any one of them a “lovely lady.” It’d be memorable . . .

The problem was that she wouldn’t get to see it, as mentors were not permitted in their mentees’ judging sessions. Penn and his spell would stand in front of the four core judges and three others selected for their expertise in the field of wizardry in which his spell was positioned. He and that spell would stand or fall together on their own merits—which suited Nita entirely.

Nita was wandering down the long concourse that faced onto the nearby lakes when about halfway toward the end she spotted a familiar orange jumpsuit. “You’re kind of early,” Nita said as she came up behind Lissa and patted her on the back. “What time is it in Toronto?”

“Don’t ask me,” Lissa said. “I’ve been here for three days.”

Nita looked at her in bemusement. “No tan?”

“I don’t do tan,” Lissa said. “I hate the beach, it gets you full of sand. But there are lakes here, and I like to row and talk to the fish.” She glanced around. “Where’s Kit?”

“Not here yet,” Nita said. “In a couple of hours.”

“Zone lag?”

Nita shook her head. “Annoying mentee syndrome.”

“Yeah, you’ve got a hard case with that one,” Lissa said. “Well, never mind him. Come on out to the terrace! It’s full of wizards.”

“Nobody else?”

“Nope, they put up signs with that boring font out there and then they had to fine-tune where the signs were pointing, because we started having sleeping kookaburras fall out of the trees on people.” They went out through automatic doors into blinding sunshine. “A lot of the local crowd’s here. Some of the game group, too. Matt’s here, but he lives down the road, why wouldn’t he be, and his boyfriend, that little guy in the duster. And there’s Adele, and those German twins—”

Nita paused to try to figure out who in the crowd had a dust cloth, and the only little guy in sight was wearing a long coat—Then she blinked. “His boyfriend?”

“Yeah, name’s Daki or Doki or something, I always get it wrong when I try to remember. Did I mention Adele? She . . .”

“Yeah, Adele,” Nita said, losing the thread for a moment while the back of her brain shouted at her, Yes, here I am again, your old friend the universe, and I’m stalking you and making everybody talk about sex things all of a sudden! And how did you not know Matt had a boyfriend? Were you purposely not noticing because thinking the word made you nervous? Were you—

“Shut up,” she said under her breath to the universe.

“What?”

“Oh! Sorry! Not you.”

“Oh, your invisible friend?”

Nita started to say yes, more or less out of habit, and then stopped herself. “Might as well be.”

“Well, let’s get you and him a smoothie or something, you look parched!”

And within a few minutes Nita was sitting on one of a circle of loungers under the shade afforded by the projecting eaves of the building, stirring a mango smoothie with a straw and looking at a wizardly projection of the morning session’s results so far. The quiet interlude was welcome, as she was still reacting to what Lissa had told her about Matt. How did I never realize he was gay? She took a long drink. I feel like an idiot. And then she laughed at herself. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve missed something like that. Guess it’s too much to hope it’ll be the last . . .

“Well, this looks sybaritic,” said a familiar voice from overhead.

Nita looked up in surprise. “Carl!” she said. And sure enough, there was her other Supervisory wizard in a white linen shirt and khaki shorts and Ray-Bans and sneakers, and carrying some kind of orange-creamsicle-colored drink with a little umbrella in it. “Are you proctoring?” Then Nita thought again. “No, wait, they don’t need to do that for this round, do they?”

Carl sat down on the lounger next to hers. “No, the judging panels handle any security that the spells need when they’re examining them. Today I’m here for the networking.” He smiled slyly at her. “And because of neighborhood interest.”

“Oh, okay.”

“But also, I meant to look you up,” Carl said.

Nita found herself wondering guiltily if a Supervisory could hear you thinking about killing your mentee. “Uh—”

“You’re not in any trouble,” Carl said.

She gave him a suspicious sideways glance. “How do you do that?”

“By having been your age once,” Carl said, “and being able to see your face.”

Nita snorted. “Okay.”

He took a long pull on the straw in his drink. “I was curious, after the first round, to ask you whether you were contemplating a change of focus.”

She was mystified. “Focus? . . . And I didn’t see you at the first round.”

Carl chuckled. “I have my sources. Have you given any thought to whom you’ve spent a significant portion of your time hanging out with so far? I mean, planets. To the exclusion of both Kit and your own mentee, sometimes.”

She shrugged. “Kit’s been wandering around meeting people. We both have; that’s how I ran into Jovie and Pluto.”

“‘Jovie,’” Carl said, and grinned into his drink.

“He didn’t mind.”

“No,” Carl said, “he wouldn’t have.”

“And as for my own mentee, he’s a pain in the ass and doesn’t want to listen to me any more than he has to. I’m the wrong sex or something.”

Carl gave her a resigned look. “Cultural?”

“Personal.”

“Oh well.”

“But Carl, seriously . . . What do you do when your mentee doesn’t want to be mentored? I mean, without breaking the commitment?”

He looked out toward the lake and thought about it. “Why are you so intent on staying in it?”

The question caught her briefly by surprise. “Well, the Powers That Be put me in this position. Normally they’ve got reasons for that kind of thing.”

“That’s true,” Carl said. “But it’s not as if they’re requiring blind obedience of you. There are cases in which a mentor can do the person they’re mentoring more good by walking than they can by staying stubbornly in place. You’re the only one who can make that judgment call, and the Powers trust you to do that.”

Nita sniffed and drank some more of her smoothie. “Don’t make it sound too good,” she said.

Carl laughed. “In our time working together,” he said, “have I ever been shy about giving you bad news when it was necessary?”

An image rose in Nita’s mind: a South Shore beach, with the Sun shining down on the sand and the water and a young girl who was in the process of realizing that she had made a promise that was almost certainly going to be deadly for her to keep. “No,” Nita said. “That hasn’t been a problem.”

“So you can make some assumptions about the good news, then. Assuming it actually is good. Problem is, you’re the only one who can decide that.”

Nita smiled and sucked down the last of her smoothie so that the straw gurgled. “I was about to start complaining about you and the Powers treating me like a grownup who knows the right thing to do,” she said. “Maybe I changed my mind.”

Carl leaned back and stretched out his legs. “The truth is that not all the situations the Powers put us into are optimal,” he said. “They may have great insight and be able to see deeper into causality than we routinely can at our level, but they’re not omniscient and they’ve never pretended to be. They’ll make a judgment call sometimes, as in this case, that a good result is likely if you put a given combination of people together. And since they hate to waste energy, they’ll routinely make sure that it’s the best possible result that can be achieved, and that it will do as many people good as possible. You may be having an effect on your mentee that isn’t obvious to you. The difficulty, of course, is that since we’re not omniscient either, we may sometimes do our jobs and think we’ve failed . . . and still have done massive good to someone that we may never be aware of.”

“I prefer to be aware of it,” Nita said.

“So do we all,” Carl said. “I’d also prefer it to rain chocolate-frosted donuts in my kitchen on Sunday mornings, but I don’t seem to be getting a lot of that. Plainly the universe is mismanaged.”

Nita snickered. “So you’re saying I should keep doing what I’m doing and hope for the best.”

“There’s always the chance that the one who’s being done good by this is you,” said Carl.

She gave him a sideways look. “By being told over and over that no matter how smart I act, I’m really some airhead whose highest purpose is to hang off some guy’s arm?”

“If your mentee’s telling you that over and over,” Carl said, with a very grim small smile, “I think it’s very likely that you may sooner or later respond in a way that changes his mind. If only by repetition.”

Nita’s gaze went to the lake. “Pity that’s not the ocean. I could drop him in it. I’ve got friends out there. With teeth.”

Carl shook his head. “Do what you normally do,” he said. “Leave the rest to the Powers. And if you feel you absolutely must go, trust that that’s what’s needed. You can’t get this wrong.”

And then he sat up straight. “Whoops,” he said, “incoming!”

And just like that he vanished.

Nita shook her head, both because he’d just done that in full view of the road between the convention center and the lake—but then they’ll have this whole side of the place spell-shielded—and because he had done it soundlessly. She sat up a little straighter, looking around. Kit?

No answer. Not that she always got one by silent communications these days, especially since things had begun to shift between them.

The automatic doors to the building opened, and Penn came bursting out in flowered beach jams, some kind of brocaded vest, and flip-flops. As he stood there looking almost frantically from side to side, it was only with the greatest difficulty that Nita kept herself from laughing out loud. The way he dresses, she thought, there has to be a word . . .

Penn spotted her and immediately headed her way. Flamboyant, Nita thought. That’s a good word. But no Kit? Interesting . . .

“Juanita!”

She rolled her eyes. It wasn’t the normal stagy delivery of her name, though. Penn sounded upset.

As he came over to stand by her chair, Nita tilted her head up and did her best to betray nothing more than mild curiosity. “What?”

“I’m, uh,” Penn said. “I’m due in there pretty soon—”

She glanced at her watch. “About ten minutes,” Nita said. “And?” She glanced toward the doors, but there was no action there. “Where’s Kit?”

“Uh,” Penn said, not looking Nita in the eye, and plainly not wanting to. “He, uh, he said he had other things to do.”

Better things to do, Nita’s mind instantly supplied. He got angry at something Penn said, and he dumped him. Did Carl know this was happening? There are no accidents . . .

“You pissed him off, didn’t you,” Nita said. “Penn, one of these days you’re going to stop being so certain you know what people are thinking before they open their mouths, and your life’s going to get a whole lot simpler.”

Slowly and reluctantly Penn sat down sideways on the lounger that Carl had vacated.

“I, uh,” he said, and then seemed to run out of words.

“Yes?” Nita said.

“. . . I’m not sure I can go through with this.”

All right, Nita thought, here we go. There had been something about Penn’s mood the last couple of days that had been ringing alarm bells for her. But whether he was likely to want to talk to her about it now was another question. “What’s going on?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Penn said, bending half over and rubbing his hands through his hair. “I don’t know! This morning, and then later, just now, after Kit left . . . I keep having these times when, I don’t know, I look at the spell and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. And that’s ridiculous! How can it not make sense?”

Nita sighed. “Haven’t you ever had the thing,” she said, “where you look at a sentence after you’ve read it too many times, and it doesn’t mean anything? Or you say your own name too many times, and it turns into this gibberish word. There’s a wizardly version of that too.”

“No,” Penn said miserably. “If only Kit was here!”

If only, Nita thought. He’d love to see this: he’d laugh so hard. “Penn,” she said. “Am I or am I not one of your mentors?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Then be quiet, because I’m about to explain it all to you. You’re getting cold feet.”

Penn stared at his flip-flops in confusion.

“Cold feet!” Nita said. “It’s finally sunk in for you that you’re coming up against something that a flashy presentation and some fast talking won’t be enough to get you through. This isn’t just about knowing how to handle hecklers or deflect difficult questions, or be flashy or showy or cute. You’re going to be standing in front of seven wizards who’re going to scare you spitless. And you know what? They’ll be doing that to everybody they judge today. Just this once, you’re going to get to act like everybody else. You’re going to be scared.”

He stared at Nita with an expression of utter dismay that suggested he was getting a head start.

“And then you’re going to push through it,” Nita said. “You’re going to walk into that judging room and take a deep breath and say to yourself, I am scared but I’m going to do this anyway. Wizards do this every day. People do this every day. I’ve done it, Kit’s done it, and now it’s your turn.”

She got up off her lounger. “Come on,” she said.

Penn didn’t move.

She glared at him. “Have some dignity, Penn,” she said. “Get up and walk. Don’t make me levitate you. Because under your own power or with assistance, you are going into that room. And what state you’re in when you come out of it is going to be entirely up to you.”

Very slowly he got up and started to make for the doors. Nita waited until he caught up with her. “Stop hanging your head like that!” she said as they walked. “Hold your head up. It makes you braver.”

“What?”

“There are physiological changes,” Nita said. “Not gonna start explaining them now. Take a deep breath. Yeah. Let it out now. Have you got your manual?”

“Uh. In a pocket.”

“Good. Got the basic version of the spell cued up in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Breathe again. Just get in the habit of it, I can’t be in the room with you to remind you.”

He sucked air in, let it out again as they went through the doors into the main concourse. “You’re doing fine,” Nita said. “Once you’re rolling, this will pass. You know your subject, I know you do. The only reason you’re experiencing a panic is that you’ve realized you can’t sweet-talk or swindle these judges into giving you the benefit of the doubt. And you don’t have to. They’ll listen to you if you just talk to them about the spell. Right? Tell them what you built. And tell them why you built it. Remember how you explained the difference it was going to make for people? Tell them about that.”

Nita had passed the judging rooms on the way out to the terrace and knew where they were. Two of them had message boards that said, in the Speech, UNSCHEDULED. The third was blank. Nita stopped by its closed doors, and exactly as she and Penn paused there, the signboard outside the door lit up with Penn’s name in English and Chinese and the Speech.

He stared at his name as if he’d never seen it before. “I, I can’t . . .”

“You can,” Nita said. “You can do this, Penn. And you’re going to. Now remember: always take a breath when somebody asks you a question—it gives you extra time to think. See your spell in your head, now? Good.”

The door opened before him.

“In,” Nita said. “And good luck, cousin.”

Penn hesitated. Then, like someone sleepwalking, in he went.

The door closed.

Nita sagged, passed a hand over her face, and laughed at herself. Poor guy, she thought. Who knew he was going to freeze up like that?

From inside her otherspace pocket, Nita’s manual pinged softly.

She moved off to one side of the doors, unzipped the air, pulled the manual out and checked its messaging section. As she opened up to the section with its edges flashing blue, words were already spelling themselves out across its first page.

Is he there?

Nita laughed. “Yeah.”

Did he go in?

“Finally.”

Under his own power?

“Believe it or not, yeah. Look, get over here when you can . . . we’re going to need to present a united front when he comes out of there.”

Be there in twenty.

“See you,” Nita said. She closed the manual and put it away, then headed for the doors to the outside terrace.

Dairine made her way down to the prejudging area in the convention center where she’d agreed to meet Mehrnaz that afternoon. There were a lot of wizards and other guests hanging around, looking at the results of those coming out of judging and the rankings as they stood. Maybe half of the semifinalists had been through the judging by now, and Mehrnaz was scheduled in about half an hour. It’s a good time to be scheduled: less reason to panic . . .

Dairine put Spot down while she looked through the crowd, and after a moment caught sight of Mehrnaz. But she wasn’t alone. Next to her stood an imposingly tall and darkly handsome woman in a rusty-colored silk hijab and a long below-the-knee tunic, subtly patterned in dun and gold, over dark designer jeans and sandals. She had huge dark eyes and a long pretty face, but her mouth had a set of lines around it on each side that suggested her lips were more normally drawn down in an expression of disappointment.

All right, now what? Dairine thought, and hung back to get a sense of what was going on.

“Why are they making you wait like this?” the woman said. “It’s disgraceful.”

“There are people scheduled ahead of me, ameh,” Merhnaz said. “Everybody has to wait their turn.”

“I don’t see why,” said the woman, sounding most annoyed. “Surely they must know who they’re keeping waiting, who you’re affiliated with; why would you be here otherwise?”

There was a pause at that, and Dairine saw Mehrnaz’s glance go sideways, as if there was something she didn’t want the woman to see there. “Well, the spell, ameh . . .”

“Oh, but you know that’s not the issue at all, because the family doesn’t waste time on these things anymore, do we?” It was a soft, warm voice, but so dismissive, and the woman’s expression suggested that she was amused at how simple-minded Mehrnaz was. “Not that it’s not a nice gesture, I suppose, but there are so many uncertainties in that whole scholium of wizardries. No way to guarantee the results . . . so many ways to fail. And who bothers with anything that they can’t be sure will work? It’s wasted effort, though I’m sure it’s nice of you to make the attempt to keep up the old family tradition, your Uncle Khorazir does love that kind of thing and it’s no wonder you’d want to please him, he knows so many useful people . . .”

That is the stupidest reason to specialize in one kind of wizardry that I’ve ever heard, Dairine thought, folding her arms.

“But ameh, that’s not what it’s about. If someone just—”

The woman looked down at Mehrnaz with affectionate disbelief. “You’re truly going to tell me that you thought you might be able to work out how to do something about the old homeplace’s slipstrike faults when generations of your family weren’t able to do a thing? Even great wizards like your grandfather Bardia? He gave up on it after a year, said the very idea was hopeless. Surely you don’t think you can do what he couldn’t do! Though it’s brave of you to try, but there’s no point in you trying to prove anything to us that way. We know it’s taken you longer than everyone else in the family to find a specialty, there’s no reason for you to wear yourself out over impossibilities. Everybody moves at their own speed, we know you’re a bit slow, but it’s absolutely all right, you have to manage what you can. And even if—”

The woman looked amused at the idea that seemed just to have come to her. “Even if you got somewhere along those lines . . . well, you wouldn’t like to embarrass your grandfather, would you? He’d be so hurt. None of us would want that.”

Mehrnaz turned away again, looked at the ground. “I just . . .” she said, and trailed off.

This is it, Dairine realized. This is why she melted down after the Cull. This is the source of the trouble.

“You wanted to do your best,” the woman said, in that particular sympathetic tone that says someone’s trying to be kind to you while also implying that you’re a fool, and not listening to anything you say or caring about what you want. “I know, I know! And it’s understandable, the way things go so wrong for you most of the time! Well, the whole point now is to make these people hurry up so that you can get this demonstration over with and come home. There are much more important things for you to be doing—”

This attitude, Spot said silently, is not very supportive of function for any wizard, successful or not.

“No kidding,” Dairine said softly, unfolding her arms. “Come on.”

She headed over toward the two of them, not rushing, with Spot ambling along behind her. Dairine could feel Spot’s stalky eyes fixed on the tall dark woman, and it was his regard, interestingly, that first got the woman’s attention as they approached. She gave him a look like someone who’s seen an unusually large bug on the kitchen floor and is considering the best way to step on it.

Dairine noted this. Her eyes narrowed. “Mehrnaz,” she said, ignoring the tall woman and focusing all her attention on her mentee. “Problem here?”

Mehrnaz looked suddenly panicked. “What? Oh, no, it’s all right, Dairine, everything’s fine, we’re just—”

“Waiting for the organizers to get their act together and stop wasting our time,” the woman said in a tone abruptly gone very sharp.

“Well, it’s all kind of hurry-up-and-wait at this point for everyone,” Dairine said.

“Not for everyone,” the woman said, disdainfully. “Don’t you know who I am?” And the implication was as much “Because I’m important and famous!” as “Because I can’t believe she hasn’t told you.”

Dairine simply put her eyebrows up. I could make a pretty good guess, she thought, but let’s see how far into your mouth you’re willing to stick your foot before I have to commit myself.

Mehrnaz’s face was a study in immobility. “This is my aunt,” she said. “Ameh, this is my Invitational mentor, Dairine Callahan.”

The woman looked down at Dairine from her considerable height. Dairine, who before now had been looked down on by experts—up to and including the Lone Power—stood there with her head tilted up, matching her gaze for gaze.

The woman emitted an indignant sniff. “Afsoun Farrahi,” she said, as if that should have been sufficient.

“‘No education is ever complete,’” Dairine said, “‘and enhancement of one’s own is always to Life’s advantage.’” The phrase in the Speech was very neutral, and implied a willingness to receive more data without you having to regret that you didn’t know what was going on, or having to say “sorry” about anything. Because I get a feeling that the only thing I’m going to be sorry about is that we’ve met. Seriously, you look like you just drank a pint of vinegar.

“I am the daughter of Bardia Mazandarani and the wife of Dalir Farrahi,” Mehrnaz’s aunt said, “the granddaughter of Asek Jahanshah and Baharak Gol, the great-granddaughter of Mehredem Khadem; and thereby a member of three of the foremost families of wizardry in all the East.” Dairine noted in passing that she didn’t appear to be in a big hurry to be the aunt of anybody. “So, little one, you ought now to recognize your place, and pay proper respect to your elder wizard.” And she looked haughtily down at Dairine, waiting.

Dairine knew there were traditions of wizardry in which younger ones performed physical gestures of respect to older ones. But right now she had no particular taste for cross-cultural courtesies, as she was concentrating on holding perfectly still while the back of her mind shouted things like You’re not my elder wizard and My place?? and Little one? LITTLE ONE?

Very slowly she let out the breath she’d been holding.

While there were many equivalents in the Speech for “pleased to meet you,” Dairine had no intention of using any of them, especially since right now they wouldn’t be true. So, “Madam,” she said. The word in the Speech was talif’, a polite-enough generic feminine-gender title, and was normally used for nonwizards or Speech-users whose enacture status you weren’t sure of. As such, used on someone you knew was a wizard—and one who was making a big deal of it—the title was as exquisite an insult as the hearer cared to make it.

Afsoun’s eyes had already started to go wide. Good. Hang on, lady, because we’re just getting started. “I hear your asserted ranking,” Dairine said. “Now hear mine. I am the daughter of Harold Edward Callahan, friend and confidant of kings and Planetaries, and of Elizabeth Kathryn Callahan, who walks with the Powers and whose name is known to the Transcendent Pig.” Which is true enough, Neets saw them together . . . someplace . . . and such visions don’t arrive unauthorized. “And in my own right and of my own wizardry I am the Mother of Mobiles, and of the world they have made for themselves.” She used the Speech-name that the Mobile species had after some thousands of seconds’ deliberation chosen for itself, Eles’ha; and am’Merensheh-ta-Eles’havesh rolled very nicely off the tongue, especially when the listener’s annoyed eyes went a little wider against her will.

Then Dairine smiled gently. “But out of regard for my friend and colleague, to whom you have the privilege of being related,” and she tilted her head in a friendly nod in Mehrnaz’s direction, “I permit you to omit the traditional obeisance to one of significantly senior rank or experience. You may continue to stand in my presence.” And her gaze flickered up and down Afsoun in amusement. “Because it’s such a pain when the kneeling gets the knees of such nice jeans all baggy.”

Dairine spent the next few seconds concentrating hard on keeping her face straight as Afsoun’s jaw dropped. “Just who do you think you are?”

“Thought we’d already established that,” Dairine said. “You, we’re still working on.” Then she applied a carefully puzzled look. “Or was the vocabulary in a recension you haven’t mastered yet? You should work on that, someone your age.” Afsoun’s eyes got even bigger, and Dairine smiled in satisfaction, realizing that she’d hit at least one tender spot, probably more. “Either way, I said it in the Speech; you know it’s true. So you can stop trotting out how many generations of wizards you’re descended from, blah de blah de blah. I know people from much older, longer lines who make way less fuss about it.” She could still hear Roshaun saying ke Nelaid am Seriv am Teliuyve am Meseph am Veliz am Teriaust am det Wellakhit: but for him it had been like reciting his credit card number.

Afsoun was working her mouth like a fish out of water. Dairine grinned. “In the meantime, while I’m sure there must be somebody here who’d just looooove to have you hang around and try to pick up a few pointers while pretending to critique wizardries you don’t understand, our prep time for this event is at a premium and so we’re going to have to say goodbye.” She grabbed Mehrnaz’s arm. “So, goodbye!”

And she glanced down at Spot. A short-hop transit circle flared into life around the three of them, and everything winked out, including Aunt Afsoun’s face, gone all blotchy with rage.

They popped out right across the concourse, with Dairine working hard to stifle her laughter, as she didn’t want their position given away. “Spot,” she said, “stealth-field us. I don’t want her able to see us or hear us or figure out where we are until Mehrnaz is in the judging room and you have to kill the spell to keep it from interfering.”

No problem.

Under her hand, Dairine could feel that Mehrnaz was shaking. When she let her arm go, Mehrnaz rubbed at it in a frightened way, as if she thought it might fall off. Her expression, meanwhile, was torn between terror and delight. “Oh sweet Powers—oh Dairine—what did you just do?”

“Not half of what she’s got coming,” Dairine said. “And come on, tell me that you haven’t wanted to do that since you were old enough to talk! Because it’s been going on that long, hasn’t it? Come on, Mehrnaz, say it in the Speech.”

Mehrnaz opened her mouth, closed it again.

“But I get it now,” Dairine said.

“Get what?”

Dairine frowned. Whatever problems she’d had in her home life, one of them had not been having the people around her assuming that she couldn’t do things. Her mom and dad had always been in the “Yes you can, get on with it” department. Sometimes she had shocked them, sure, by how far she’d go to get on with things. But no one would tell her “No you can’t” unless it was things like “No you can’t take the barbecue apart while there are briquettes in it that are on fire!”

Dairine smiled dryly to herself. Not that that stopped me either . . . But what Mehrnaz had here, she now realized, was another problem entirely.

If this woman starts interfering, Dairine thought, I’m gonna get her butt kicked out of here so hard she’ll feel the universe slam on it on the way out, and I’ll laugh for hours while she complains.

For the moment, Dairine simply shook her head. “Leave it for now,” she said. “We’ve got twenty minutes or so, and I want to see what you did with that force-diffusion routine. Let’s have a look . . .”

Mehrnaz was in the judging room for nearly forty minutes. Dairine spent a good while pacing up and down outside it, waiting for any sign of Aunt Afsoun: but there wasn’t any. And maybe she’s gone home. Good riddance, then.

She was just turning around to pace one more leg in front of the doors when the message board changed. JUDGING, it had said over Mehrnaz’s picture and her name in English and the Speech and Farsi. But now it went flick and said PASSED.

“Yes!!” Dairine exclaimed, and waited for the doors to open. A moment later they did, and Mehrnaz walked out . . .

And it was clear that something was terribly wrong, for Mehrnaz was coming out into the concourse with that terrible rigid-spine posture that Dairine had seen before. God, she looks like someone who’s about to get beaten up—

In that instant Dairine remembered Nita’s horrible conjecture. Not even wizards are proof against that . . .

Mehrnaz walked right past Dairine, didn’t even stop. Dairine froze, for a moment, then went after Mehrnaz in a hurry.

“Mehrnaz,” she said, because the girl wasn’t stopping. “Mehr! Wait up!”

It’s not possible, not possible that her own family would do that to her. They’re wizards. And even if they were doing that—she could stop them, she’d—

She caught up with Mehrnaz, caught her by the arm. “Mehrnaz!”

She didn’t shake off Dairine’s hand, but the way she stopped suggested that she wanted to. “What,” she said in a dead-flat voice.

“Mehrnaz,” Dairine said. “I don’t—listen to me! They’re not—What’s the matter? You passed. You’re in the finals!”

“Yes,” Mehrnaz said, very softly. “That’s the problem.”

Dairine found herself trembling. “Nobody at home’s getting physically violent with you, are they? You don’t have to put up with that. If that’s going on, I don’t care who’s doing it to you, I swear I’ll take them apart like Lego!”

Mehrnaz held very still. “Touch me? Of course they won’t touch me. That would speed up entropy.” Dairine didn’t think she had ever heard the phrase used with such bitterness. “But you still don’t get it, do you? None of my family expected me to make it past the first Cull. I was supposed to fail.”

Dairine stood there dumbfounded.

“They don’t have to touch me,” Mehrnaz said. “There’s more than one kind of abuse. If I’d have lost today, that wouldn’t have been so bad. Oh, they’d make fun of me for a few weeks, a month, until they got bored with it. It would be the big joke in the family. How Mehrnaz almost got it right, but then screwed up in front of the whole world. Because she would, wouldn’t she? That’s her style.”

She stood there hunched, her fists clenched. It was a creepy stance for someone who was usually so fluid and graceful, so quick and easy in her movements. “But now, now I’ve done something really bad. Now I’ve made them all look like idiots. Because all my relatives have been telling their friends, and other people in the family, that this was going to be it for me. Everyone’s committed themselves to being sure that this would be as far as I could go. And you know why they say that? My grandfather, the famous one, you remember him? He made it past the Cull when he was in the Invitational, but he never got any further. And this isn’t even the quarter-finals, now. It’s so much worse. It’s the semis. Now I’ve made him look bad. That whole side of the family is cursing me now. They have to. It’s a loyalty thing.” She sounded resigned.

“Oh, God,” Dairine muttered.

“Yes,” Mehrnaz said. She smiled, but there was nothing remotely happy or funny about the expression. “Now on we go to the finals. And the whole family will be saying to everybody outside the family, oh, we’re so pleased, yes, we didn’t think she had it in her, isn’t it wonderful, talent will out, after all! It must be the stress, put one of our people in a crisis situation and they rise to meet it—”

She laughed bitterly. “But inside the house, they’re going to be ripping each other up. My grandfather’s side of the family is going to be all over my mama, saying, ‘You meant for this to happen, didn’t you? You set this up on purpose to make us look bad. Here you were claiming that you never thought she’d make it that far, but now see what’s happened!’ And my mother’s going to deny it, but they won’t believe her. They’ll be furious with her. And she’ll be furious with me . . . Though she’ll never show it in front of them! While I’m around, she’ll support me, to annoy them. But the moment the doors close, when I’m home trying to have some peace, she’ll find a hundred ways to make my life a little hell. And I get to put up with that, without complaining, and to be a good girl, with the pressure getting worse all the time until the finals come. Five days of every look, every word, everything that everybody does around me, being code for ‘You screwed it up. And now we’re going to punish you.’”

Dairine was still shaking all over with her own tension. “You could come live in my basement,” she said. “The last guests we had down there gave it rave reviews.”

“No,” Mehrnaz said. Some of the stiffness and anger went out of her posture when she raised her head and met Dairine’s eyes. It was, however, a more challenging look. “I have to tough it out on my own ground,” she said. “Because this isn’t just about competing in the Invitational proper, is it? This is about handling what goes on outside the competition, around the competition. The strains, and the pressures. It’s a test, all of it . . . another test, another game, that takes place outside the competition space. Isn’t it? The Powers are playing this game with the Lone Power. And we’re the pieces on the board.”

“Not the usual board game, is it?” Dairine said after a moment. “When the pieces have a voice . . .”

“Not at all,” Mehrnaz said. She was standing straighter. “It’s okay. I can play that game. No matter what happens in the competition space, this time I can refuse to let my family browbeat me into doing what I usually do.”

But then she sagged a little. “At least I think I can,” she said. “Because sometimes I get so tired . . .”

“Come on,” Dairine said. “For a while, anyway, let’s go relax someplace where nobody’s going to beat you up.”