Wizards At War

6: Collateral Damage

Nita looked around her as they materialized inside the vast space of the Crossings Worldgating Facility. It was night there; as usual after sunset, the vast, remote ceiling had apparently vanished, and the milky turbulence of the upper atmosphere had cleared, letting the extravagant night sky of Rirhath B show through.

Automatically Nita did the first thing you do in the Crossings when appearing out of nowhere: she looked down to check whether the transport surface they were all standing on was “dedicated” or not. Fortunately, it wasn’t. “Come on, guys,” Nita said, “everybody out of the zone.”

Filif followed Nita over the line as Kit and Ponch and Ronan were crossing over in a slightly different direction. Ponch bounded past them, lolloping off down the wide central corridor of this part of the Crossings. “Don’t run!” Nita called after him, concerned that he would go crashing into some unsuspecting alien; but there wasn’t much point. They were easily a quarter mile from the nearest other beings who were catching late (or early) gates to their destinations. Ponch galloped along, oblivious, tail wagging, and no one paid him any attention.

Nita looked at her watch as Sker’ret poured past her, heading for one of the many bluesteel information kiosks that rose ten or twelve feet from the floor at intervals all along the length of the concourse. It really is later than we’ve usually been in here before, Nita thought. To her watch, she said, “Crossings time, please?”

The face of the watch restructured itself to show her the thirty-three-hour Crossings day. It’s nearly twenty-nine o’clock, Nita thought. Probably no surprise that traffic’s a little down.

Ronan had stopped just the other side of the line and was standing there staring up at the vast starry darkness overhead. Rirhath’s neighborhood of space was full of variable stars that slowly but visibly shrank and swelled while you watched. “It’s like they’re breathing,” Ronan said.

Beside him, Kit nodded. “You haven’t been here before?” Kit said.

“Once,” Ronan said. “It wasn’t anything like this then.”

Kit smiled. “The daytime view’s interesting, though I always wonder what’d happen to all that levitating stained glass up at ceiling level if they had a power failure. This is a lot less tense.”

He looked after Ponch as Nita and Filif came over to them. “You know what he’s after,” Nita said, looking after Ponch.

Kit shrugged. “Give him a moment to run,” he said. “When he comes back we’ll get down to business.” Then he yawned.

“You and me both,” Nita said, rubbing her eyes. “It’s getting late back home. We ought to think about where we’ll stop for the night.”

“Wherever Ponch leads us,” Ronan said. “My passenger’ll stand guard while we’re sleeping. Everybody’s got their pup tents with them, so they’ll be comfortable enough.”

“And I’ve got my cellphone,” Nita said. “If my dad needs to get in touch, he won’t have any trouble: Tom enabled his for the manual network ages ago.” Or at least at the moment it seemed like ages. She sighed. “I still wish we could sleep at home… I’m getting nervous about what’s going on there.”

“Going back and forth wouldn’t be smart,” Ronan said. “For one thing, it’d make us a lot easier to track. Might as well just send the Lone One an invitation to follow us straight to wherever we’re going.”

“Yeah, I know.” Nita knew he was right; she just hated to admit it.

Sker’ret was reared up against the nearby kiosk, using numerous upper legs to work its controls. Nita went over to him and looked over a couple of his topmost shoulders. Below the kiosk’s translucent surface, in which Sker’ret’s topmost two pairs of legs were partially embedded, several layers of patches of light flowed with characters in the Speech. “Find what you’re looking for?” she said.

Sker’ret curved a couple of eyes backward to meet hers. “Not yet,” he said.

He’s never this terse. What’s going on? She rested a hand on that beautiful candy-glazed metallic-purple carapace, just behind the head segment. “Sker’, are you okay?”

He sagged a little. “Not entirely.” He turned some eyes up to gaze at the deep red charactery now running up and down the kiosk-pillar’s length.

“If you need help—”

“Not at the moment. But thank you.” Sker’ret curved back another couple of eyes toward her. “What about Ponch?”

Down the concourse Nita could see the shiny black shape wandering along toward them, still wagging his tail. “I’ll see if he’s ready to start work,” she said.

Kit was standing there with his arms folded, shaking his head, watching Ponch head toward them. You were trying to overhear what he was smelling, Nita said privately. Any luck?

Kit gave her a resigned look. Motor oil, he said. Cocoa.

Motor oil? Nita turned to look up the concourse at Ponch again; he had paused to sniff at another of the information kiosks. I guess for him those smells symbolize what Ronan and the Champion are after?

That’s my guess, Kit said. He thinks he’s on the right track. All we can do is let him get on with it.

Ponch came ambling over to Kit, looked up at him, and nosed his hand. I’m hungry!

Ronan came back to them and looked down at Ponch. “So when do you get started?”

Ponch gave Ronan a slightly scornful look. I’ve been working ever since we got here. But I’ll need a little more time to sort the scents out. For the time being, you just talk among yourselves.

What amused Nita was that he was looking only at Ronan while he said it. Ronan looked a little taken aback.

Ponch turned his back on him. And while I work on the scent-sorting, he said to Kit, wagging his tail, we might as well get something to eat!

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “Maybe it’s not good for some people to be full of food when they’re supposed to be really sharp and heading out on the trail.”

Ponch gave Kit a very cool look. Oh, I get it. Deprive me and I’ll function better? Let’s see how that works. He sat down. Hmm, I feel strangely weak… Ponch fell over on one side with his tongue hanging out one side of his mouth; one eye looked pitifully at Kit. Can’t… seem… to move…

Kit looked over at Nita. “Blackmail,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged.

“Oh, all right,” Kit said. “Come on, let’s see what we can find.”

Ponch sprang to his feet, spun around in three fast, tight circles where he stood, and then shot off down the concourse. Kit jogged after him. Behind them, ostentatiously by himself, Ronan strolled away.

Filif came up next to Nita, also looking after them, but mostly at Ronan. “And to think that the One’s Champion is hiding in there.”

“One version of it,” Nita said. “An avatar, I guess we’d say, sort of a splinter of the whole Defender. As much as could fit inside a human being, anyhow.” She reached out to readjust Filif’s baseball cap. “The concept doesn’t seem to surprise you much.”

“Why should it? The One’s Champion does that kind of thing all the time, the Wind says. Seems like It loves to dress up.”

Nita grinned. “Well, you haven’t seen it the way we have,” she said. “It lived at Tom and Carl’s for a long time, disguised as a bird.” She rubbed one ear thoughtfully. “It had some issues then, too. Kind of a temper.”

She could feel Filif’s amusement. “Such was the Defender’s way with us, as well. It was the Great Tree, the Star-Reacher, that first caught the Wind in its branches and shared the sound of it with us.” Filif turned most of his eye-berries to look down the other end of the concourse, and upward toward the vast and splendid Rirhait sky. “Before that, the Wind was just another noise. After that, it became the sound of words and wizardry, the power to change our world…”

Nita glanced around them. “Fil, did you see where Sker’ret went?”

“Uh, no.” Filif rotated in place. “He was working at that kiosk.”

“We can always message him,” Nita said. “Come on, let’s see what they’re up to.”

The two of them headed in the direction that Kit and Ponch had gone. The Crossings might have been quieter than usual, but Nita didn’t mind that, since it meant that you had less chance of being run over by aliens and their luggage while rubbernecking. The place was nearly half the size of the island of Manhattan, and besides the actual worldgates—set into the floor all down the length of the concourse, as their entry gating area had been—it was also full of endless haphazardly stacked modular bluesteel “cubes” containing shops, lounges, living areas, food courts, and every other kind of facility necessary to cater to the needs of the thousands of species that used the Crossings as a vital transportation link among several major galactic and transgalactic civilizations. Even at a “quiet” time like this, there were any number of fascinating beings to look at as they wandered from place to place, gazing into the windows of stores or restaurants. Though not as many as usual, Nita thought.

“Is that Kit coming back?” Filif said to Nita. “Who’s he with?”

Nita peered down the concourse. “Doesn’t look like him.” She took another look. “But they’re human.” There were three people there, heading in their direction—two boys and a girl, Nita thought.

“Other wizards,” she said to Filif, as they got closer and it became plain that the approaching three were Earth-human and not some other variety. One of the boys, with shaggy fair hair, was wearing dark pants and a matching dark sweater that might have been some kind of school uniform; the other one, a dark-haired kid, was in jeans and a windbreaker, close enough to what Kit was wearing and close enough to his height that Nita could see why Filif might have made the error. The girl, who had short brown hair, was wearing what seemed to be a short, richly patterned silk kimono over leggings and low-heeled boots, a look that Nita admired as soon as she saw it.

The newcomers were a hundred feet or so away from Nita and Filif when Kit and Ponch appeared from one of an array of cubicles over to the left. Over here, Nita said silently to Kit. We’ve got company.

Ponch came bouncing up to Nita, who reached down to ruffle up his ears. “So how was it?” she said.

We didn’t even go to a restaurant, Ponch said, in profound disappointment, throwing a reproachful look over his shoulder at Kit. He just went to a machine and put words from his manual in it and food came out. But there was only one blue thing. That was hardly enough. Look at me! You can see my ribs.

“Later,” Kit said. “We need to find Ronan and Sker’ret. And talk to these guys, I think.”

“Dai stihó!” the girl said, as they got close.

“Dai,” Nita and Kit and Filif said more or less in unison.

“You just up from the Moon?” said the boy in the school uniform, in a broad Australian accent. “The gate there still open?”

“It was a few minutes ago,” Kit said.

“Great,” said the boy. “We’re heading back.”

“Where’ve you been?” Nita said. “If it’s not private.”

The second boy shook his head. “Edge of the Local Group,” he said. “Over by IC 1613.”

“How are things there?” Nita said.

The first boy looked grim. “That galaxy was always kind of thin and spread out to begin with,” he said. “But it’s a lot thinner now. You know the Katahn empire there?”

Nita and Kit both shook their heads. Filif said, “I know of it. How does it fare?”

“Badly. Its systems are being pushed away from each other so fast that the empire’s falling apart,” said the boy in the jeans. “The big crowd of blue-white stars in the middle of that galaxy is being ripped up; the whole thing could turn into a blazar.”

Nita sucked in her breath. The boy shook his head. “We’re going back to get some help. There are a few really young kids back on the Moon right now. Might be we can get together enough raw power to slow down the expansion.”

“Even if we can’t do that right away, we should be able to keep the blazar from igniting,” the girl said.

“We think,” said the Aussie-sounding boy.

All of them trailed off. They looked terrified, but determined. Nita thought, And that’s how we look to them, I’ll bet.

“Good luck,” Kit said.

“If there is such a thing,” said the girl. Her look was defiant. “But we’re not waiting to find out. Dai—”

The three of them waved and went back the way Nita’s and Kit’s group had come.

Nita turned to watch them go as Ronan came out of another of the cubicle shops over on the right and rejoined them. “So,” he said, “the big gut here finish stuffing himself?”

Ponch gave Ronan a dry look. I wouldn’t talk if I were you, he said. That greaseball hamburger you were eating was nearly strong enough to drown out the scent of what we’re tracking.

“Which you’ve finally got nailed down?” Kit said.

The scent’s faint, Ponch said, but I can find the way from here, or at least get us headed in the right direction. How do you want to go?

“Using a fixed gate would be better right now,” Ronan said.

Then I can show you the way in my head, Ponch said to Kit.

“And I can use the manual to convert those into coordinates the Crossings gating system can use,” Kit said. “But we’ll need to go talk to the station staff to get them to allocate us a gate.”

“Yeah. Let’s message Sker’ret.”

I can smell where he is, Ponch said. This way.

Ponch galloped off down the concourse toward the great intersection where the secondary concourse wing met the major one they were in. In the center of it rose an open structure of blue-green metal, looking like a cross between an office cubicle and a set of monkey bars. Around it a number of Rirhait people were gathered, making a noise like a lawn mower having an argument with a rock it had found hiding in the grass.

Sker’ret was there, the front half of him reared up off the floor as he worked at one of the subsidiary kiosk-columns that made up the body of the structure. The column had extruded a control console covered with patches of embedded light, which Sker’ret was tapping at with great speed. Three of the gathered Rirhait were looking over one or another set of his shoulders; two others were rushing around the cubicle as if they were looking for something. With a wizard’s ear, Nita could hear Sker’ret saying to one of the Rirhait looking over his shoulder, “See, this is all you need to do. It’s easier than you think. If you just make sure that the equations for the hypersphere balance have the same asymptotic expansion variables laid in—”

He looked up as Nita and Kit and Filif and Ronan stepped up to the cubicle. “Oh,” Sker’ret said.

“We’re about ready,” Kit said. “Can you finish up here?”

“I’m trying,” Sker’ret said. He cocked about three eyes each back at the two other Rirhait who were looking over his shoulders. “So are we clear about this, sibs? This is going to hold you just fine for the meantime.”

“I’m not sure exactly where to go after that, though,” said one of the Rirhait who was watching whatever he was doing at the console. She sounded nervous.

“What about the spin foam variables?” asked the other Rirhait.

Sker’ret reached out some spare legs to the column on the other side of him. It extruded another floating keyboard structure toward him, which he poked until it displayed the keying pattern he wanted, and started tapping on while still typing into the first one. “You do it like this,” he said. “Let the software handle the brane issues; it’s built for that. Ignore the zonotope and the polar sine relationships. All you have to do is intuit the way the spin foam variables are sliding, and add about a radian and a half—”

“You following this?” Kit said to Nita under his breath.

“You kidding?” Nita muttered. “It’s math, Kit, but not as we know it.”

“—and then you pull in the last twenty sets of figures from the leech-lattice version of the hypersphere-packing readings, paying special attention to the kissing number. Then you just massage the string density quotient—”

Sker’ret was too intent on simultaneous input at both consoles to notice the sudden frantic wreathing of eyes of all the Rirhait surrounding him, and the way the two who had been pacing now froze in place with all their eyes pointing over Sker’ret’s shoulders. “And that’ll hold you for the next two standard periods at least.”

“Good,” said another Rirhait voice from behind Sker’ret—and now it was Sker’ret’s turn to freeze. All his eyes held quite still, looking at what he had been keying in. Then, very slowly, one of them curled up and around to look behind him.

The Stationmaster of the Crossings, a Rirhait somewhat bigger than Sker’ret and of a lighter, more silvery-blue shade, poured into the cubicle and arranged himself among and over some of its interlocking rails and bars, peering with various eyes at the keypads where Sker’ret had been working. “So you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve come to your senses. We need you here.”

Nita wasn’t sure how someone so smooth-carapaced could seem to bristle, but as Sker’ret curved some more of his eyes around in the Stationmaster’s direction, he was managing it. “Unfortunately, you’re wrong,” Sker’ret said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”

“What?” The Stationmaster pointed all his eyes at once at Sker’ret. The other Rirhait around him all pulled their eyes in close to their bodies.

“You need me more where I’m going,” Sker’ret said. “I’ve spent all the time I can here. This fix will deal with the problem at hand. And now we’re going to head out.”

“Are you insane?” the Stationmaster said. “Look at this place!”

Nita looked. She couldn’t see anything wrong with it, except that it did seem much emptier than usual.

Sker’ret glanced around with various eyes. “This is only a symptom,” said Sker’ret, “of what’s coming. And no one with all their brains in place wastes time treating symptoms. A cure’s what’s needed … and that’s what we’re dealing with now.”

The Stationmaster flowed a little closer to Sker’ret and did something that Nita found briefly alarming: it reared up and grasped Sker’ret’s front end with some of those many little clawed legs. “Listen to me, broodling,” the Stationmaster said. “What’s happening out there is far too big for any species to cure. The world is changing! And there’s nothing we can do. How do you seriously expect to keep space from expanding?”

“But wizards—”

“If wizards could have stopped it, they’d have done that already,” the Stationmaster said. “We’ve just got to teach our mechanisms to handle the new distances and vectors in the long term … or all this is going to come to a halt, and with it the transport and commerce of three galaxies!” More of the Stationmaster’s legs waved around them at the travelers of many species who were hurrying by, ignoring them.

“Your sibs have better sense,” the Stationmaster said. “They’re not running off on some fool’s errand at a critical time. But you’ve been hard to reason with lately.” The Stationmaster glared with many eyes past Sker’ret at the gaggle of humans and others who were uncomfortably watching all this unfold, and one eye stared straight at Nita. “Something to do with the company you’ve been keeping.”

Nita went very hot and opened her mouth. Before she could say anything, Sker’ret shook off his ancestor’s forelegs and bent every eye on him. “I’ll thank you not to malign wizards of goodwill and friends of mine,” he said. “And as for the long term, there’ll be no long term for anyone or anything if we don’t move to alter what’s happening.”

“And so you’ll go off and abandon the place to which you owe the most responsibility.”

“We can’t turn inward now!” Sker’ret nearly shouted. “This is no time to try to find ways to dig our own burrow deeper! Turning outward to solve the bigger problem is the only way for us to save ourselves!”

“I have been Master here for nearly two hundred circuits of our sun,” the Stationmaster said, very quietly. “And it’s amusing to hear someone barely out of his fifth decade claim that he understands better than I how to handle the threat that—”

“You don’t understand a tenth of what you think you do!” Sker’ret said. “You’re too scared to raise an eye or three to peer past the obvious conclusions. And your job description has changed, but you haven’t even noticed—even though the truth’s staring you in the head and waving all its eyes at you. You saw the Station’s stats! Gating across the three major galaxies is down almost thirty percent! Everyone’s turning inward, from fear, and that’s just what our old Enemy wants! To drive us apart, each into his own burrow, to keep us away from the interaction that keeps us in touch with the Prime Mover and makes us one—”

“I don’t have time for metaphysics right now,” the Stationmaster said. “I need to keep this place running. If you’re going to forget where your real place is and go running off Mover-knows-where, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But you’re jeopardizing your positions here. All of them.”

There was an unnervingly final sound to that. Nita swallowed, waiting to see what Sker’ret would do.

He disentangled himself from the support framework and dropped back to the horizontal position. “Perhaps I am,” he said. “But at least, when we succeed in what we’re doing, there’ll still be a place for my replacement to have a position at. And a place for my sibs to learn whether you value them as you do me.”

All his eyes were fixed on all his ancestor’s. There was a terrible silence. Then slowly, one after one, the Stationmaster turned those eyes away.

Sker’ret didn’t flinch. “We need a gate,” he said after a moment.

“The one-seventies are all idle,” said the Stationmaster, in a tone of voice that made Nita wonder how she’d ever thought it sounded rude before. “Use one of them. And don’t let us delay you.”

He turned and swept off down the far side of the concourse. With reluctant backward looks, Sker’ret’s sibs went pouring after him. A few seconds later, only Nita, Kit, Filif, Ponch, and Ronan stood there.

“Wow,” Kit said softly.

Sker’ret glanced over at Nita with some of his eyes; the rest of them were still on his esteemed ancestor and his sibs as they hurried away across the shining floor.

Nita shook her head as Sker’ret flowed out of the cubicle structure, and hunkered down beside him as he paused, still looking down the concourse. She rested one hand on the carapace-segment just behind his head. “What I said about our basement,” she said, “I meant it.”

“Thank you,” Sker’ret said, and the strange eyes that Nita had previously had so much trouble reading now seemed full of gratitude and weariness. “But everything is still all wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

Sker’ret paused. “None of that sounded like what my ancestor would say,” he said at last. “You don’t get to be Stationmaster of the Crossings by saying how things can’t be fixed. You find ways to fix things, no matter what it takes. ‘Broken’ isn’t an option. And the bigger the problem, the more committed you are to fixing it.” Sker’ret shook his head, and the ripple of it went all the way down his body. “That’s the kind of thing he would always say to me. And all of a sudden, to hear him sound like he did just now—” Sker’ret sounded confused. “He’d given up. He didn’t sound … like him, somehow.”

Kit looked at Nita. “Tom warned us,” he said, “that there would be changes because of the way space was stretching. Ethical changes, personality shifts.”

Everyone looked uncomfortable. “It’s going to get worse,” Nita said. “We’ve just got to get on with what we’re doing. Though it really is freaky.” She glanced at Kit. “You see any adult human wizards here while you were on your own? I didn’t.”

Kit shook his head. “Sker’, where are the one-seventies?”

“Hang a right, thirty stads down on your left,” Sker’ret said. “It’s one of the bigger clusters.”

“Let’s go,” Nita said.

Their group left the cubicle and followed Sker’ret as he led the way around the corner and down yet another of those seemingly endless, shining white corridors, all the gate hexes and squares lining either side of it alight… and many of them empty. For someone who knew the Crossings as well as Nita did, the effect was unnerving. It was like going into Grand Central Terminal at what should have been rush hour and finding it deserted.

“This way.” Sker’ret turned off into a large circular area, maybe a quarter mile across, that budded off the transverse concourse. The area was completely surfaced with gate hexes, nested fairly closely together, outlined in many different colors depending on the species intended to use them.

“Here we are,” Sker’ret said. He led them over to the large gate at the center of the hex grouping, went to its kiosk-column, reared up against it, and tapped his uppermost legs against it. The column extruded a console like the ones he had been working with at the central resource station.

The embedded outline of the largest hex came alive with a clear fierce blue. Sker’ret turned to Kit. “What have you got for me?”

Kit looked at Ponch. Nita could feel something of the communication between them; it was like watching someone whisper to someone else, while not being able to hear what they were saying. And still, at one remove, it smelled of cocoa and motor oil. Weird, she thought, as Kit turned to Sker’ret.

“I’m not sure I can handle this keyboard,” he said.

“Just speak it to me in the Speech,” Sker’ret said. “I can do the input.”

Kit recited a long string of words, numbers, and variable statements to Sker’ret. Sker’ret’s little end-of-leg claws danced over the keypad.

“Done,” Sker’ret said. “Everybody into the zone, please. Thirty seconds to the transit.”

He pushed the keypad away from him; it vanished into the column. Sker’ret headed into the middle of the biggest hex, and they all followed. Nita was half amused, half scared to see how everybody put themselves as far into the middle of the hex as they could, so that at the end of the exercise three humans, a dog, a centipede, and a Christmas tree all stood back to back, facing outward against whatever might come at them.

“Twenty,” Sker’ret said. “Ten.”

Nita looked around her at a section of the Crossings that had no one in it but them, no one at all. It gave her the shivers.

“Five.”

Her heart was pounding. She glanced over at Kit.

“Zero—”

Everything went dark.

Nita had to blink a couple of times to get used to the darkness. There was air, at least—Crossings gateways had a vacuum-guard on them, so they wouldn’t dump you out into an inimical or absent atmosphere without warning. As usual, she looked up first at the sky.

There wasn’t one.

They stood on a small, arid, empty world, and Nita had known it was empty the moment they came out of nowhere. The lack of life has a specific feel to which any wizard past Ordeal quickly becomes sensitive, a sensation of something missing that ought to be there, but isn’t, like a pulled tooth. Above them, there should have been stars.

But there weren’t.

Nita tried to make sense of what she was seeing as she looked up. It was like when you stare into the dark for a long time and start imagining that the dark itself is moving. But this movement was real. It was as if the darkness was heaving with small shapes, no bigger than grains of rice—but all darker even than the blackness where they grew.

Nita had a sudden thought of the mealworms she’d once found all through a bag of bad flour—heaving, rustling against each other, like a live thing that was also a lot of little live things. The darkness of space above them stirred and heaved with little darknesses. They were there. And Nita very much did not want to think what they would start to be like when they were bigger.

She swallowed, fighting the thought of being sick, which wouldn’t have helped. Before this, space might have been inimical, bitterly cold, airless, arid, but it was at least clean. Suddenly that innocent, unself-conscious deadliness had been taken from it. Something was trying to squirm through the crevices of reality and fill that calm dark emptiness, void of everything but stars, with something heavier than starstuff, darker than the longest night, and horribly, mindlessly alive … with no interest in any other kind of life except squeezing it out, pushing all the native life more and more apart, filling everything so full with itself that there was no room for anything else. This was what the dark-matter expansion looked like, up close and personal. But the dark matter, innocent enough in itself, had had something added to it… something terrible.

She looked over at Kit: his expression was as shocked and horrified as hers must have been. She wondered how all the wizards there were could possibly stop such a thing. And we don’t even have all the wizards there are. Old age and experience can beat youth and power every time, Dad always says. Now all we’ve got is youth and power. Is it going to be enough?

And what if it’s not?

Kit put out a hand and said a few words in the Speech. A moment later, a small bright spark of wizard-fire materialized above his hand. Nita followed suit, telling hers to hover over one shoulder and just behind her. Around them, the others brought light about as well—Sker’ret’s carapace came alive with it, and all of Filif’s berries blazed. Ronan took that clip-on ballpoint pen out of his pocket and gave it a shake. A moment later he was holding the Spear of Light in its full form—the seven-foot spear shaft glowing softly, the head of the Spear wreathing itself in a chilly white-golden flame.

Kit was looking up into the darkness, and to Nita’s eye, he looked faintly unwell. “That has to be the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, his free hand resting on his hip, his shadow lying pooled black behind him from the Spear’s radiance. It might have seemed a casual stance at first. But as Ronan gazed up into that unhealthy, seething dark, Nita started to sense how tightly he was controlling himself, like someone working hard not to run away. His face was very still, though, and Nita for the first time actually saw someone else look out of Ronan’s eyes. The expression was one of recognition coupled with a very controlled anger. The one who looked out had seen something like this before.

She went over to him. “Something familiar about this?” she said.

Ronan nodded. “From a long, long time back,” he said. “When the Lone One first revealed that new thing it had invented, entropy. This was one of the early side effects.”

“And the Champion stopped it?” Kit said, coming over with Ponch to join them.

Ronan shook his head. “No. It’s weird, but when the Pullulus first began to occur, it was the Lone Power Itself that stopped it.”

Nita found that bizarre. “Something too dangerous for even It to manage?”

Ronan shook his head. “I used to think I knew My brother’s mind,” said the Champion with Ronan’s voice, “but that issue was never clear to Me or any of the other Powers. Whatever, this perversion of dark matter hasn’t been seen since. To see it again now … I find that troubling.”

“Troubling” didn’t come close to describing Nita’s feelings. “I am really not wild about the idea of sleeping here,” Nita said. She looked down at Ponch. “Couldn’t you walk us a little way, just enough to get us out of here?”

I’m tired, Ponch said. And he lay down and put his head down on his paws, though Nita saw him watching the sky with an expression of concern.

Nita let out an annoyed breath. “Look, we’ve got our pup tents,” Kit said. “We’ll be comfortable enough for a few hours.”

Nita nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Right.” No point in making a scene about it. I’ll cope.

Sker’ret and Filif came over to them, getting out their pup-tent interfaces. Sker’ret reared up on his rearmost legs, hung the silvery rod of the spell interface on the empty air, and pulled on the little string of characters in the Speech that hung down from the rod. A subtle shimmer of wizardry a few feet wide followed it down, like a roller shade following its pull cord. Sker’ret “fastened” down the spell-surface that acted as gateway to the room-sized pocket of space, waggled a few eyes at Nita and Kit, and poured himself inside, vanishing. Past him, Filif was doing the same; he slid in through his own doorway and was gone.

Nita let out a long breath. “Ronan?” she said.

He shook his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “My partner’s got energy to spare. We’ll stand guard.”

Nita set up her own pup tent, then glanced at that awful unstarred sky again. For some time now she had been getting into the habit of trusting her hunches, and her hunch right now was to be worried. What’s going on back home? she thought. What’s going on with Daddy? And Tom and Carl? And Dairine, what’s she getting into? Is she under a sky like this someplace?

And is she as freaked out as I am?

Nita stepped into her pup tent and looked around, checking out the space that had become her home away from home while she and Kit had been away before. Everything was as it should be. There were a few pieces of spare furniture from home—a TV table and a spare desk chair, along with a beat-up old sofa that had been down in the basement until her dad had it recovered and suggested she move it into the pup tent; over the back of the sofa, a multicolored wool throw that her mom had crocheted a few years back; off to one side, some boxes of dry snacks and cereal, some six-packs of fruit drinks and mineral water. A pile of books to read at bedtime, some notebooks and assorted school supplies. It all should have been very comforting … except it wasn’t. She couldn’t get rid of the image of the darkness outside.

Then suddenly Nita got angry. I may be freaked, but I’m not going to just roll over and let the fear run the way I act! She turned around and put her head out through the interface again, staring defiantly up at that evil sky. Above her, the dark Pullulus seethed and heaved against itself, blocking away the stars. Looking at it a second time didn’t make it any easier. It probably isn’t ever going to be easy, Nita thought. And I don’t care.

She glanced to one side and saw Kit leaning out through his own pup-tent interface. Past him, Ronan stood leaning on the Spear, looking up at the darkness. He, too, turned his gaze away from it now, looking at Nita.

“You, too, huh?” Kit said.

Nita looked at him for a moment, then gave him a quick, angry smile, and vanished back into her own space… feeling, once again, not quite so alone.