Wizards At War

2: Force Support

Kit sat there and came to terms with what it felt like when all the blood drained from your face. It was a feeling he really didn’t like.

“You’re kidding, right?” he said after a moment.

Tom shook his head. “I know this is a terrible thing to dump on you,” he said. “But in a very short time—certainly within a couple of weeks, possibly within days—we adult wizards are not going to be able to do our jobs anymore.”

“We hoped we could head it off,” Carl said. “But even a mass intervention involving more than two thousand Seniors from this part of the galaxy couldn’t stop what was happening in our neighborhood, or deal with the cause.”

“But you said it was the dark matter,” Sker’ret said.

“That’s the ‘what,’” Carl said. “But we’re still missing the ‘why’…and there’s no point in treating the symptoms. We need to find the cause… and we haven’t.” Carl raised his hands, let them fall again. “We have hints and possibilities—”

“It’s the Lone Power again, isn’t it?” Dairine said.

“That’d be an easy first assumption,” said Tom. “But the early indications are that something different from the Lone One’s usual pattern of attack is going on. We’re continuing to investigate…”

“Not with a lot of success,” Carl muttered.

Kit squirmed in discomfort, for some of the good-natured humor that was always there when Tom and Carl talked to each other was missing. They’re scared, he thought. And they’re trying not to show it, because they don’t want to frighten the kids…

“We should start at the beginning,” Tom said. He looked over at Carl. “Do you want to do the run-through this time? Wouldn’t want to deprive you.”

Now the humor was back, but Kit was still unnerved. Carl, though, just raised his eyebrows, resigned. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll have plenty of chances to do it by myself over the next few days.”

Tom took a deep breath, then reached into the air and brought out his wizard’s manual. It was, as usual, larger and thicker than Nita’s—more like a phone book than a library book. He put it down on the table and opened it to about the halfway point. “Go ahead,” he said, and the manual’s pages began riffling by themselves to the place he was looking for.

When the page-riffling stopped, Tom ran his finger down one column of the print on the right-hand page. “Okay,” he said, “here we go.” He began to speak, very quietly and conversationally, in the Speech. As Kit watched, the manual and its pages seemed to spread out more and more widely across the table—or maybe it was the table underneath it shrinking. But, no, that couldn’t be true; Kit was leaning with his forearms on the table, and it wasn’t moving, and neither was he.

Nonetheless, the room darkened, the yellow-flowered wallpaper fading down and out as if someone had turned off the day. The pages of the book darkened; the table darkened, too, and kept on spreading out into the darkness, somehow seeming to avoid everyone who was sitting around it. Farther and farther that flat darkness spread, though Kit and Nita and Dairine and Roshaun and Filif and Sker’ret were all still illuminated, as if by an overhead light that nobody could see.

Across the table from them, illuminated in the same way, Tom leaned back in his chair, his arms folded, his gaze cast down as he watched the ever-spreading pages of the book. There on the surface of the page, as it grew, Kit could see the previously prepared spell diagram that Tom had been working from—a blue-glowing, densely interwritten circle of characters in the Speech, the outer circle containing the basic parameters of the spell, knotted with the wizard’s knot, and the inside of the circle containing the variables.

As they sat there, the outer circle of the spell rotated up around them out of the horizontal, leaving a hemisphere of incandescent blue filigree overhead, in which various characters of the Speech sparked and glittered as the wizardry worked. For a few moments, as everything got more and more silent except Tom’s voice speaking in the Speech, they seemed to be sitting inside an elaborate blue-burning globe, a glowing wire frame. Then, without warning, the globe expanded outward in all directions, as if heading for infinity.

Where it passed, first stars flared into being, and then galaxies. Within a few breaths’ time, the kitchen table was at the heart of a viewpoint on the Local Group, the thirty-odd galaxies closest to Earth’s Milky Way spiral, which Tom had placed at the center of the view for reference purposes. Close by hovered the ragged irregular patches of starfire that were the Greater and Lesser Magellanic clouds; a little farther off, the great golden-tinged spiral of the Andromeda galaxy hung in its majesty, with the other associated galaxies scattered in various directions around it and the Milky Way. The imaging wizardry’s blue sphere shot out past the Local Group, sowing more and more galaxies and groups of galaxies in its wake, until it was as if the eight wizards—and the dining room table—were floating free in a near-infinite volume of space.

“So here’s the neighborhood,” Tom said. As he spoke, the utter blackness between the galaxies paled to a sky blue, and the light of the stars paled as well. “I’m lightening up the black of space a little, so you can see where our part of the trouble first started—”

He pointed off to one side. Faintly, in the depths of the space between the Andromeda galaxy and its neighbor, the smaller loosely coiled spiral in Triangulum, a dim patch of darkness started to grow in the blue. At first Kit wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but it became more and more distinct.

“We first spotted that dark patch about three years ago,” Tom said. “Back then it seemed as if it was just an anomaly, a dark-matter aggregate that was in the process of popping out and would stabilize after a while. Space is always springing little ‘surprises’ or accidents in interstellar structure that seal themselves up over time. Intervening too soon, or too energetically, can make them worse.”

“Like when you keep picking at something,” Kit said, “and it doesn’t heal.”

Carl chuckled.

“Something like that,” Tom said. “At any rate, the wizards over in Andromeda kept an eye on it. The dark-matter area grew, but not much, and not quickly. There came a point where it seemed to have stopped. But then another one appeared…”

They saw it fade in, very gradually, on the opposite side of the Local Group, over by the small irregular galaxy known on Earth as GR8. “And after that, the dark-matter aggregates started appearing more quickly,” Tom said. “In rapid succession, over the past couple of years, concentrations of dark matter appeared near 30 Doradus and M32.”

The dark splotches were spreading fast, popping up seemingly randomly in every direction. “It’s getting closer,” Nita said. “There’s one right by the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. That’s really close; just next door, almost.”

Kit didn’t know the names or locations of the galaxies as well as Nita did: the fine details of astronomy were her department. But right now what troubled him most was the rate at which the darkness seemed to be spreading. “Did you just speed up the simulation?” he said to Tom.

Tom shook his head. “No, the spread began accelerating last year,” he said. “That was when the Powers That Be first asked wizards to start doing local interventions.” He let out a breath. “The early wizardries, which were large-group workings like the one we just came back from, seemed at first to work. The aggregates of dark matter froze, even began to retreat in a few cases. As you see here—”

The assembled wizards watched the twilight-colored virtual space between galaxies and groups of galaxies continue to undergo a bizarre and splotchy nightfall. After a few moments, the darkness grew no darker, but there was still too much of it. And to Kit, the galaxies burning in the simulation-wizardry began to look small and threatened.

“That’s how the situation stood until a few days ago,” Tom said. “That spot over there”—he pointed at one side of the simulation, and the view of that area leaped closer—”that’s where Carl and I were last week. Two thousand Seniors and Planetary-Supervisory Wizards from all over our own galaxy, along with groups from Andromeda, the Sagittarius and Canis Major Dwarfs—we went there to reverse the effect in that one spot. We defined a local control structure, a temporary ‘kernel’ for that part of space, and operated on it to force the dark matter back out of our space.”

“And the intervention did not work,” Roshaun said softly.

“No,” Tom said. “Instead, this happened.”

The darkness began to spread again—and this time, much faster.

“It was as if someone was waiting to see whether we’d be able to pull it off,” Carl said. “When it was plain that we couldn’t, the expansion took off again at twice the speed. And this is what the projected result looks like.”

Kit looked up into what was left of the blue of intergalactic space as the simulation ran. In a frighteningly short time, the blue was all gone. Then, the blackness began to intrude among the stars of the galaxies themselves. Their stars pushed apart; the galaxies started to lose shape.

“But how can it be happening so fast?” Kit said. “That has to be a lot faster than the speed of light. Matter can’t go that fast in space.”

Nita was shaking her head. “But space can,” she said. “Sit an ant on a balloon and blow up the balloon really fast, and the ant winds up moving a lot faster than it could ever move by itself. If something’s stretching space out of its usual shape, then everything inside space—matter and light and gravity and time—gets distorted, too.”

“And that’s where the real trouble starts,” Carl said. “Physical law is fairly robust, but wizardry is more delicate and subtle. The way this expansion undermines what we do is very simple … very nasty.”

“When you do a spell,” Tom said, “you have to accurately describe what you’re working on in the Speech, or you risk destroying it. And to accurately describe anything, you have to know, and describe, not only what it is, but where it is. Now, your manual normally helps you factor in the adjustments you need for the way things in your location are moving: your planet’s rotation, its orbit around the Sun, and so on. But if all of a sudden, because of this expansion, things are moving unpredictably in directions or speeds they shouldn’t be—”

“Then your wizardry doesn’t work at all,” Kit said. “Or else starts to and then breaks down.”

The thought gave him the shivers. There were so many ways that a failed wizardry could be deadly that he hated to give it much more thought. And what’s worse, Kit thought, is that up until now, the one thing you could always count on was that a spell always worked. If all of a sudden it doesn’t…

“That would be bad enough,” Tom said, “but matters get even worse. The changes in the structure of space then start affecting the thought processes and reactions of all living beings in the area. Their behavior will start to become less and less rational… less committed to Life. This is the point where a wizard whose power levels are below a certain level starts losing the ability to speak or understand the Speech … because you stop believing that you can. Soon you stop believing in the Speech.”

Kit gulped at the awful thought.

“‘Wizardry will not live in the unwilling heart,’” Sker’ret said, quoting one of the most basic tenets of the Art.

“Yes,” Tom said. “And nonwizards will suffer, too. Matters of the heart and spirit will be valued less and less. Shortly only physical things will seem real to people. And when that happens—because most humans will still remember that, once, the heart and the spirit did matter—they’ll get scared and angry. Eventually anger and violence will be the only things that seem to work the way they used to, the only things left that make people feel alive.”

Kit shivered, looking over at Nita. She glanced at him, a sidewise, nervous look.

“Why do I get this feeling,” Nita said, “that on a planet with nuclear weapons, we’ll probably blow ourselves up a long time before light and gravity start to malfunction?”

“Not that the rest of the known universe won’t be just a little way behind us,” Kit said.

Carl cleared his throat. “Exactly.”

They all sat there in silence for a few moments. Then, after a moment—”If that’s all,” Filif said, sounding a little forlorn, “please, may we have the daylight back again?”

“Sure,” Tom said, and put out his hand. The wizardry surrounding them collapsed itself to a little blue-white sphere no bigger than a ball bearing, and dropped into his palm. As the wizardry shrank away, ordinary afternoon sunshine and the reality of Nita’s dining room reasserted themselves: the flowered wallpaper, the dining room table with some of the leftovers of breakfast still on it—a marmalade jar with a knife stuck in it, a couple of crumpled paper napkins.

Tom dropped the imaging wizardry back onto the open page of his wizard’s manual. It flattened itself to the page; he reached out and closed the book again. Kit watched him do it, feeling peculiarly remote from it all. We’re sitting here in Nita’s dining room talking about the end of civilization, he thought, and not in ten thousand years, either. From the sound of it, it’s gonna be more like ten thousand hours … or minutes.

Roshaun glanced up from the table, where his troubled gaze had been resting for a few moments. “Senior,” he said, “why is all this happening now? Surely if this is so simple a strategy, the Isolate Power should have enacted it and made an end of us all ages ago.”

“We don’t know why,” Tom said. “There’s always the possibility that the Lone One might not have known how to do this before. Though they’re immortal, the Powers That Be aren’t omniscient: They learn, though the exact shape of their learning curves is never likely to be clear to us because of the way they exist outside of time, dipping in and out as it suits them. Or the Lone Power could have known for aeons how to produce this result, but for some reason was waiting for the best moment to spring it on an unsuspecting universe.”

“Then, perhaps,” Filif said, “something has happened either to embolden It, or to frighten It.”

Carl shook his head. “We have no idea,” he said. “Another possibility is that something’s going on in our universe that the Lone One doesn’t want us interfering with—and this inrush of dark matter may simply be a distraction to keep us from discovering what’s really happening, and dealing with it.”

“But you don’t have any idea which of these theories might be the right one,” Sker’ret said.

“No,” Tom said.

“What about the Powers That Be?” Dairine said. “What do they say?”

“Right now,” Tom said, “they’re waiting for the experts in this universe to give them some more data.”

“The experts?” Nita said.

Tom smiled just slightly, but once again that smile had a grim edge to it. “Us,” he said. “While They live here, too, They do it on a different level. We’re a lot more expert in the business of actually dealing with physicality, day to day, than They are.”

“It’s like the difference between manufacturing something, say a dishwasher,” Carl said, “and using it every day. You could say that the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we’re the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it’s running. And where to kick it to make them stop.”

Kit spent a moment trying to see the universe as a malfunctioning dishwasher, then put the idea aside; it made his brain hurt. Meanwhile, Tom picked up his manual and put it into the air beside him. It vanished. “Anyway,” Tom said, “right now we need to stop the dark matter from tearing the universe apart—or at least slow down its growth and buy ourselves some time to solve the problem.”

“Or rather, buy you the time to solve it,” Carl said. “Wizards near latency age—near their peak power levels—are the only ones who’ll keep their power long enough to make a difference now.”

Kit saw Dairine swallow hard, and Nita raised her eyebrows at him, while Sker’ret clenched its front four or six legs together, and Filif held very still, and Roshaun looked down at the table again, as if afraid what might show in his eyes if anyone saw them.

And then suddenly, Tom smiled. It wasn’t an angry smile, though it was fierce, and it had a surprising edge of amusement to it. “Now, after all that,” he said, “believe it or not, we have some good news for you. For the duration—for as long as there is a duration—as far as wizardry goes, the lid is off. Any wizardry you can build to fight what’s happening, any wizardry you can figure out how to fuel, is fair game. Normally we all limit our workings carefully to keep them from damaging the universe, or the beings who share it with us. But now the system itself is on the chopping block, along with everything else. If we don’t save that…” He shook his head. “Then not just wizardry, but the Life we’re sworn to protect, is at an end.”

Kit was immersed in a strange combination of shock and excitement, but at the same time practical questions nagged at him. “When you said we were going to be running things on the Earth,” he said, “you didn’t mean just us… did you?”

Tom’s grin became less fierce. “No,” he said, “we didn’t. Forgive us for making absolutely sure we had your attention when we started.”

“Obviously there are a lot of other wizards on the planet who’ll be of use in this crisis,” Carl said. “Not to mention a whole lot of wizards elsewhere in our galaxy. Seniors here and just about everywhere else have been selecting out younger wizards in their catchment areas who’ve shown promise, or have produced good results in the past. You fall into those categories. We’ve been organizing two main intervention groups—those who’ll be staying here, managing the usual problems that come up at home, and those who’ll be going off-planet to look for ways to stop the dark-matter incursion. Shortly we’ll be putting you in touch with the groups you’ll be assigned to. In the meantime, start researching on what we’ve been up to—it’ll all be in your manuals. Anybody you feel will help you handle what’s going on, get in touch with them pronto. But you’ve also got some logistical problems to deal with.”

Kit noticed Dairine beginning to squirm a little in her seat. Uh-huh, he thought. Bet I know what that’s about.

“First of all,” Tom said to Dairine, “you’ve made the best of being ‘grounded’ inside the solar system for the last little while, so—assuming you’ve learned your lesson—the Powers That Be have cleared us to unground you.” Dairine stopped squirming, and started to grin. “But don’t you assume that this automatically means you’re going to be sent off-planet. The team assignments haven’t been thrashed out yet, and you may be of more use here.”

Dairine sat still and assumed an expression that Kit had long since come to recognize as an attempt to look “serious” and “good.” As usual, he had trouble taking it seriously.

“Anyway,” Tom said, “whichever way your team assignments go, you’re all either going to have to be on call at a moment’s notice to deal with things here, or you’re going to have to be away for some time.” He glanced from Dairine to Kit to Nita. “Normally, in an emergency, we’d help you deal with your absence from school and ‘real life’ by issuing you with timeslide wizardries, so that you could spend as much time away as you needed to and come back at the same time you left. But this situation’s not normal. Local implementations of wizardry may suffer early on … and if a timeslide fails, you could wind up marooned in the wrong time period, with no way home. So you’re going to have to find other ways to handle your absence. Any way that we can help, let us know as soon as you have a plan.”

Nita just nodded.

“Uh,” Kit said, “right.” I can see it all now, he thought. I go to my mama and pop and say, Hey, I need to take some more time off school. Yeah? How much? Oh, just enough to save the universe. Might be a few weeks. But no more than a few months, because everything that exists may be destroyed by then…

Tom, meanwhile, had turned to Filif, Roshaun, and Sker’ret. “The story’s different for you three,” he said. “Sker’ret, Filif, we don’t have direct jurisdiction over you—your Seniors or Advisories at home have that. But we can advise you while you’re here. Both your species fortunately have long latency periods, so that your worlds have plenty of wizards on hand to deal with the local-level threat. Your people in particular, Filif, have such a high latency age that nearly all the wizards on the planet are still of an age range to be immune to what’s going to happen. Officially, you’re still both enjoying excursus status. The emergency, naturally, supersedes the ‘holiday’. If you feel uncomfortable staying here, you can go home to your people at any time. But there’s no need to rush home unless you feel you must.”

“I am free to come and go as I please,” Filif said, “and have no binding ties to draw me immediately back. I am, after all, just one tree in a forest… and I think I might be of more use here.”

Tom glanced over at Sker’ret, who gave him a casual look in return. “I’m in no hurry, either,” Sker’ret said. “People of my species are legally independent a long time before we’re finished being latent. My esteemed ancestor won’t mind if I stay.”

Kit glanced briefly at Nita, and saw her eyes flick toward him, then away again. She hears it, too, he thought. There was something uncomfortable going on with Sker’ret and his family. Not something that’s going to get us all in trouble while we’re trying to handle this mess, I hope…

Tom nodded. “All right, then. But, Roshaun, unfortunately matters aren’t as simple in your case.”

Roshaun glanced up at Tom with an expression that Kit found totally unrevealing. “Though your species has a longer latency period than ours,” Tom said, “your own situation’s complicated by your family’s unique relationship with your planet, and the way wizardry’s practiced there. Since your father, the Sun Lord That Was, is your Advisory, you’re going to have to go home and sort out your intentions with him.”

Roshaun’s expression didn’t change. “It should not take long,” he said.

“All right. If he’s got any questions about what’s been going on here, have him get in touch with us; we’ll be glad to fill him in on the details. In fact, I kind of look forward to it, because I read the précis in the manual about what you did while we were gone.”

Roshaun nodded graciously, his face adding only the slightest smile of pleasure at the praise … and Kit suddenly found himself really wishing he could somehow eavesdrop on that conversation. His father’s his Advisory? The thought made him boggle. Sure, there were families in which wizardry ran; Nita’s was an example. But to have such a close relative be a wizard, too, and your superior? It’d be like having a father who was also principal of your school. It could be super— if your dad was some kind of saint. But, boy, if he wasn’t…

“So,” Carl said, “now you’re all up to date. Just make sure you understand one thing. You’re not going to be immune from the loss-of-wizardry effect forever. For a while it’ll even seem to be going the other way, because as we lose our power, the Powers That Be are going to make sure it’s not wasted by having it pass to you. But unless you work very fast to find out exactly what it is you need to do with it to save the world, then all that extra power isn’t going to help you for long. You’ll lose it, as we’ll lose it. You’ll lose the Speech, and wizardry, and even the belief that there was ever any such thing. And then the darkness will fall.”

Kit felt himself going pale all over again.

“So work fast,” Tom said. “We’ll do the same, for as long as we can. We’ll set you up with all the automatic manual assistance we can before we become nonfunctional.” His face hardened as he said it, as if he was trying hard not to let his real feelings out. “But after that, it’s up to you.”

Kit, glancing briefly sideways, saw Nita swallow. He’d seen that sealed-over expression on her often enough lately; he hadn’t ever thought he’d see it on Tom. You get used to thinking the Seniors will always have a way out, Kit thought. That they’ll figure out what to do. But when you see that it’s not going to be that way…

Tom glanced around at all of them. “So,” he said, “any questions?”

He paused as a faint clicking noise came from off to his left, and then watched with interest as Dairine’s laptop walked into the room. A small, rectangular silvery case on many jointed legs, it now hunched itself down on the polished wood floor, put up two stalky eyes, rather like Sker’ret’s, and glanced from Tom to Carl and then to Dairine.

“Wondered when you’d come out from under the bed,” Dairine said, sounding to Kit both annoyed and a little relieved. “Spot, are you okay?”

From Spot issued a small whirring noise, like a cuckoo clock getting ready to strike. Dairine leaned over to peer down at him.

“Three true things await discovery,” Spot said.

“Darkness overspreading,

A commorancy underground:

And the Moon is no dream—”

He sat there for a moment more, silent, and then got up on all his little legs again and spidered off into the kitchen.

They all looked after him. “Uh, excuse me,” Dairine called after him, “but what was that?”

There was a pause, then the sound of little feet on the kitchen floor again, and Spot put several stalked eyes around the doorframe, gazing at Dairine. What was what? he said silently.

“What you just said.”

What did I say?

Kit gave Nita a Huh? look. She gave him one right back, and shrugged.

Dairine looked perplexed. “You’re the computer wizard here,” she said. “You’re supposed to be the one with all the memory! What do you mean, ‘What did I say’?”

Kit said, “You said, ‘Three true things await discovery’—”

“‘Darkness overspreading,’” Nita said.

“And then something about a commorancy underground,” Dairine said. “Whatever a commorancy is—”

“And the Moon is no dream,’” Roshaun said. “Well, I should say not. It’s real enough. Indeed, when we went there—”

Dairine elbowed him. “Ow!” Roshaun said.

Did I say that? I don’t recall. And Spot headed off into the kitchen again. A second later there came a little subdued pop! of displaced air as he teleported outside.

“Oh, great,” Dairine muttered. “Since when does he have memory errors? This is just not the time.”

Tom, however, looked thoughtful. “Has he done this before?” he said.

Dairine shook her head. “Absolutely not!”

Tom looked over at Carl. “That certainly sounded oracular to me. How about you?”

“Sounds a lot like our koi,” Carl said. “Not haiku, though, more like some kind of poetic shopping list. Better start taking notes,” he said to Dairine. “Some of this might turn out to be useful at some point.”

“Well, that’s just great, because he’s what I usually take the notes in!” Dairine said, aggrieved. “If all of a sudden he’s forgetting stuff—”

Nita put her eyebrows up, reached across the table, and pushed a pad of yellow sticky notes over to Dairine.

“Oh, sure! So we’re going to be running all over the place, saving the universe, and I’m going to have to write things down on stickies while I’m doing it?” Nonetheless, Dairine pulled one of the notes off and started scribbling on it furiously. “How do you spell ‘commorancy’?”

“You’re asking me?” Nita said.

“You’re the spelling champ.”

“It’d help if I’d ever heard the word before!”

“Better look it up,” Tom said. “Meanwhile, we have to get moving. We’ve got a lot more people in the area to see today, and some who’re a lot farther away than the Island. Any questions before we go?”

For Kit, there were at least ten or twenty, many of them variants on the theme of How are we supposed to save the world when you don’t know how? One question, though, had pushed its way to the forefront and was going to drive Kit crazy until he got an answer.

“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” he said.

Tom and Carl each let out a long breath. “Because there might not have been any need for you to worry about it, if we’d solved it?” Carl said after a moment. “Because you had enough to deal with in your own lives? Because we were fairly sure we could handle the problem—and so were the Powers That Be?”

Everyone was quiet again. “And then things didn’t turn out the way any of us thought they would,” Carl said, “so it became time to start worrying you. Believe me, we wish we didn’t have to. But right now, wishing’s a waste of time. We’ve got our work cut out for us. So…”

He and Tom got up. “Thanks for making the time for us,” Tom said. “We’ll be in touch.”

They headed for the back door. Nita got up and went out after them, and Kit got up and followed her, while Dairine finished scribbling on her sticky note, and Roshaun, Sker’ret, and Filif watched her.

Nita peered in Tom’s open car window as he settled himself in the driver’s seat and Carl got in on the far side. “If you’ve got all these people to see,” she said, “why don’t you just worldgate it?”

“We’re saving our strength,” Tom said as he started the car. “And, anyway, when all this is done, we still need some groceries.” His smile, though kind of tired looking, had the usual humor about it. “See you later…”

Tom backed the Nissan out of the driveway, turned, and headed up the street. Neither Nita nor Kit said anything until the car was almost down to the traffic lights at Park Avenue.

“They are both completely freaked,” Nita said at last. “I’ve never seen them like that before.”

Kit shook his head. “They’re freaked? What about us?”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know.”

Nita still looked a lot calmer than Kit felt. He envied her composure. “All we have to do now,” he said, “is start figuring out what to do until they get us assigned to these teams.”

Behind them, the screen door banged. They both turned to look. Dairine came out. A moment later she was followed by Roshaun, who stood there, somehow managing to look regal in a floppy T-shirt, and glanced down the driveway as if nothing particularly upsetting had happened. And what about him? Kit said silently. Completely cool. Or so he wants us to think…

I don’t know him well enough to know what’s going on inside his head, Nita said. But Dairine’s another story. The very thought that she might have to stay home again while we’re out in the Great Wherever is driving her nuts. I think she’s got her plans made already…

“You’re gonna love them,” Dairine was saying to Roshaun as the two of them came down the driveway. “They’re unbelievably terrific.”

“Who?” Kit said. “Your little one-celled buddies on Titan?”

Dairine turned a don’t-get-cute expression on Kit. “Them, too,” she said. “But they weren’t who I was talking about.”

“Uh-oh,” Nita said, glancing at Kit. Then she looked back at Dairine. “Something tells me you’re thinking about doing some traveling.”

Dairine looked over her shoulder, back up the driveway. Twenty feet or so behind her, Spot was sitting in the middle of the driveway, staring with all his eyes at the sky. They all looked upward to see what he was looking at, but nothing was immediately obvious.

“It’s a long way there, and a long way back,” Dairine said, looking back at Kit and Nita. “It’s not somewhere I’ve been for a while, except virtually. Not enough energy available for the transit. But now”—she laced her fingers together and cracked her knuckles—”now it’s a whole new ball game.”

“Don’t do that,” Nita said. “You know it’s bad for your hands.”

“Like the state of my finger joints is going to matter if the world comes to an end?!” Dairine said.

Nita made a face. Kit had to admit that Dairine had a point. “Doing your own spell to get there’s going to cost you a lot of power,” Nita said.

“It would if I was going to do one,” Dairine said. “But why should I, when the visitors’ worldgates in the cellar are fully subsidized?” She grinned at Roshaun.

“And on checking mine,” Roshaun said, “I find that as of your Seniors’ talk with us, the subsidy has been extended indefinitely. We’ve retro-engineered those gates before.”

“Yeah, but this is going to be a much longer jump,” Dairine said. “If you’re not careful how you restate the spell’s power statements, you’re gonna make a mess. Better let me handle it.”

Roshaun frowned. “I should remind you that when I restated them last time—”

Kit took Nita by the elbow and steered her casually away; they headed down to the end of the driveway. They’re at it again, he said silently. How many times is this now since we got back?

Don’t ask me. I stopped counting yesterday.

They looked up and down the street, while behind them the argument started to escalate. “What’s your dad going to make of all this?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. “He’s already dealt with the houseguests saving the solar system. After that, maybe saving the universe won’t seem like such a stretch.”

But she didn’t sound certain, and the uncertainty was catching. Kit looked around at the maple trees, the street with its potholes, the across-the-street neighbor washing his car in the driveway, the front-fender rattle of a kid riding by on a mountain bike—and found that everything suddenly felt peculiarly fragile and undependable, as if something far more solid and deadly might break through at any moment. Kit stuffed his hands into his pockets, hunching his shoulders a little. The day that had seemed mild earlier seemed chilly now, as the spring breeze whistled down the street and rustled the maple leaves.

“Well,” Kit said, “even if our parents don’t completely get what’s happening, it’s not like they can stop us.”

“I know,” Nita said. “But I’m so used to them coping, now. I’m getting spoiled for being open about it … it saves so much time.” She rubbed her forehead for a moment. “Time. What are we going to do about school?”

“Still thinking about that one,” Kit said.

Nita looked around, shook her head. “I can’t think straight,” she said. “I’m in shock. And now I’m wondering if I’m going to lose it totally when it starts to sink in. Dairine’s right for once: They’ve just told us the world might end in—what, a few weeks? A couple of months?”

“Something like that.” Kit’s mouth was dry again.

She looked up and down the street. “Makes everything look different,” she said. “Look, here comes Carmela…”

Kit glanced to the left, down toward the corner, where his street crossed Nita’s. Carmela had just come around the corner lugging a big pile of what Kit could eventually see were more teen magazines, and Ponch was trotting after her. As they came down the block, Nita said, “When she finds out, is she going to be able to cope with this?”

Kit had to laugh. “Carmela? Neets, how would I know? I don’t know if I can cope with it yet.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “You will,” Nita said.

Kit shrugged. Her certainty was reassuring. He just hoped it was justified.

“You guys done with your big meeting?” Carmela said as she came up to them.

“Yeah, we’re done,” Kit said.

“Roshaun still here?”

Ponch jumped up on Kit and started trying to lick his face, as usual. “Having a discussion with Dairine,” Nita said.

Carmela snickered. “I’ll just bet.” She went on up the driveway.

I went home and got some food, Ponch said. Your pop forgot that you fed me.

“Yet another criminal mastermind,” Kit said. “What are we going to do with you?”

Give me enough food that I don’t need to manipulate you. Did you miss me?

“Didn’t even notice you were gone,” Kit said, which was true, if not terribly tactful.

Ponch snapped at Kit’s face playfully. I didn’t think you’d mind if I went. Tom and Carl are nice, but they weren’t bringing their dogs.

“No problem,” Kit said. He looked over at Nita. “Look, I’m gonna go home and give my mom and pop the news. The sooner they find out, the sooner they’ll get over it. I hope.”

“Yeah.” Nita let out a long breath. “Telling my dad’s gonna be fun, too … at least I have a few hours to figure out how to explain it. There should be a stripped-down version of the story in the manuals.”

She reached out to the seemingly empty air and slipped her hand into the otherspace pocket where she kept her own manual. Then her eyes went wide.

“What?” Kit said.

Nita pulled her manual out, and Kit suddenly understood her reaction. Nita’s wizard’s manual normally looked like a hardcover library book—buckram-bound, a little beat up, and the size of a largish paperback. But now it was twice its normal size, and three times its normal thickness. It looked more like a phone book now.

“It looks like Tom’s,” Kit said.

“Yeah,” Nita said, looking both intrigued and troubled. “Great. See you afterward?”

“Yeah. The usual place?”

“Sure.”

He lifted a hand, a half wave, then turned and headed down the sidewalk toward the corner. Ponch followed him, trotting along and looking up at him. So what was it about?

“Look out for the tree!”

I know where all the trees are, Ponch said, just barely avoiding the maple he’d been about to run straight into. What happened? Are you all right?

“Huh? I’m fine,” Kit said. “But we have to save the universe.”

Ponch looked up at him, swinging his tail widely from side to side as they walked along. Oh, Ponch said. Okay.

Kit smiled. He felt weak in the knees at the moment, but there was something about Ponch’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the seemingly impossible that made him feel better—for the moment, anyway. “Come on,” he said. “We need to talk to Mama and Pop. And then I’ve got a couple of calls to make.”