“What?” Penn said, yawning and scrubbing one hand through his hair. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that, it’s just me here and they’re all out at work.”
He looks like he just got out of bed, Kit thought. If I was expecting company, I’d at least be up for a while before they showed up! But it was early to start getting so judgmental. They’d barely met. There was no telling what kinds of pressure he was under at home.
“So where are we going to be working?” Nita said.
Once again, Penn looked at her as if he had no idea what she was doing there. “Uh, downstairs in the media room. Come on,” he said, and led them down a spiral staircase to the lower level of the house.
They followed him down the polished oak steps into a room with some large plush sofas and easy chairs over in one corner and a huge entertainment center up against the wall across from them, with a gigantic screen and a wet bar off to one side. The fourth wall was nothing but a huge picture window looking out across that glorious northern vantage of the Golden Gate and the sea.
“Wow,” Nita said. “That is some view.”
“Thanks,” Penn said, smiling at her for the first time. “We like it. You guys want something to drink? Beer? Wine? Soda?”
It occurred to Kit that it was early to be offering them wine or beer, both in terms of their drinking ages and the time of day—not to mention that the very concept of drinking while doing any kind of wizardry gave him the shivers. You might as well juggle loaded guns. “Uh, if you’ve got something like mineral water, that would be nice. Neets?”
“Yeah,” she said, “same for me, please.”
Penn went to the wet bar, got a couple of plastic spring water bottles out of the small refrigerator below it, and handed one to each of them. “There you go. Listen, sorry about yesterday—” He looked briefly sheepish. “I have a problem with crowds sometimes.”
“It’s all right,” Kit said. “It got a bit intense there.” And for Kit, so it had: he wasn’t used to wizards in such large numbers. Or rather, I kept thinking about the Moon . . . went through his mind.
He pushed the thought aside for the moment. Someday it’ll get easier. It may take a while. But someday . . .
Meanwhile Nita was carefully cracking the cap off her bottle of mineral water. “Would it be overstepping to ask what your folks do?” she said to Penn.
“They own a small supermarket chain,” he said. “Asian groceries, sundries, that kind of thing. Import-export.”
“Not wizards, then,” Kit said.
Penn laughed out loud. “Oh God, no, that would be one of the last things they’d want. One of the reasons they left China, as a matter of fact. Too much magic in our neighborhood.” He had picked up a mineral water of his own; now he swigged from it. “Anyway, don’t worry, you won’t be seeing them. Even if they do get home early, they won’t come down here while I’m working.”
“You’re out to them?” Nita said.
“Yeah. My dad always knew it might happen to me, and my stepmom got over the shock pretty quick.” He smiled. “They were hoping I wouldn’t be a wizard, to tell you the truth . . .” He shook his head. “But the tendency’s strong on my grandfather’s side of the family. My dad thought of it as such an old-country kind of thing: he was glad it skipped him, and he thought it might skip me, too. When we immigrated over here and my Ordeal happened anyway, they were pretty disappointed.” Penn shrugged. “But they got past it.”
An old-country kind of thing. Kit tucked that concept away for future examination. He knew that because of China’s great age as a nexus of cultures, the concept of wizardry had had a very long time to become embedded into it, and as a result, in places China was much more accepting of the concept of magic than many other parts of the world. It hardly meant that you could run down the street throwing wizardry around without consequences. But the thought that magic could exist, did exist, was apparently working in the background for a lot of people. It hadn’t occurred to him that this might create more problems than it solved.
“Well,” Kit said, “why don’t we get to work? The thing for us all to do, now, is figure out how we can best be of help to you. Help you structure your research . . . assist you with implementing the wizardry you’re working on. Or if you’ve got some logistical or ethical issues that you want to flesh out around your project.” While going through his own orientation pack, Kit had been surprised to discover that the part of the presentation that dealt with spell justification and intervention rationale was something that a lot of candidates didn’t spend enough time on. There were plenty of people who simply thought a hot new energy spell was a great idea and didn’t deal with the emotional and ethical impact statements surrounding it until it was almost too late. When they were standing up in front of a panel of Senior Wizards, having to defend their rationale from attack on all sides, those who had neglected this part of the project soon wished they hadn’t.
“Well, theoretically you’re supposed to be helping me sort out any problems with the spell,” Penn said. He ambled over to a nearby coffee table that had a few books on it, including one with a leather binding and Chinese characters embossed and gilded on the front of it. This he flipped casually open and glanced down at a two-page spread that Kit could see was covered from side to side with the graceful curlicued script of the Speech. “Except that there aren’t any problems.”
Kit kept himself from throwing Nita the look he wanted to. Give him the benefit of the doubt . . . “That’s a great state to be in,” he said. “Especially so early on in the process. Why not spread out the basic diagram for us and we’ll have a look.”
Penn’s expression went profoundly suspicious. “Yeah, sure. How do I know you’re not interested in swiping some of the sensitive elements?”
Kit glanced at Nita in astonishment. Nita gave him an “I saw this coming” look, with a smile, and said nothing.
Kit turned back to Penn. “To use for what, exactly?” he said.
“Yeah,” Nita said, and chuckled. “It’s not like I run out the door in the morning thinking Ooh, wow, I really feel the need to divert the solar wind today!”
Penn smiled at her skeptically. “Good one,” he said. “But, realistically, this is going to be kind of technical for you, wouldn’t you think? I thought you were more into the birds-and-bees kind of wizardry. The nature end of things.”
Nita’s mouth quirked up on one side. “There’s quite a lot of nature,” she said softly. “And quite a lot of it is . . . technical.”
Kit kept still, as he didn’t think he’d ever before heard Nita put a twist on the word “technical” that practically turned it into a drawn knife. “But go ahead,” she said, and there was more humor in her voice now. “Let’s see how much technicality you’ve got packed away in this thing.” She stuffed her hands in her jeans pockets and looked unconcerned.
Kit swallowed as inconspicuously as he could. He had a very strong feeling that something quite untoward had just barely missed happening. What worries me, though, he thought, is that Penn didn’t even see it . . .
For the moment, though, it didn’t matter. “Right,” Penn said, “here it is!”
He waved his arms in a grandiose gesture. The burning blue lines and circles and angles of a spell diagram flooded out from his manual on the side table. The diagram covered the floor and then reared upward into the upper half of a sphere that closed over all their heads like a diminutive dome.
The first thing Kit noticed was that large parts of the spell diagram were missing. The wizardly construct arching over and around them was sketchy, more of a schematic than a full diagram. There was a large, empty core-sphere at the heart of the thing, the spot where the routines meant to handle interaction with the Sun’s distant surface would go. The core had big spell-powering receptor sites faired into it all over its surface, and some time had been spent on the multiple energy-scoop wizardries associated with them.
“Okay,” Nita said, before Kit could even get his mo
uth open, “I see where this is going.” She walked into the heart of the spell, reached out for the core-sphere—about the size of a big beach ball—and picked it up in her hands. “Now this has some possibilities. You take this construct, shove it from wherever you are into a small temporospatial tube, and drop it out the other side of that into the Sun’s chromosphere. So you can implement it from anywhere, which is good.” She turned the “beach ball” over in her hands. “All these receptors pull raw energy straight out of the solar atmosphere, so the spell, except for the verbal Speech parts and the intentional components, is powered by what you’re using it to control. That’s elegant. And all you have to do is bootstrap it with the basic spoken wizardry and your own intention, then turn it loose.”
She paused, then, and turned slowly once in a complete circle, looking over the rest of the visible spell diagram that was drawn on the dome over and around them. “So far, so good. But after that the spell’s got a whole lot of work to do, and you haven’t yet indicated how you intend to power that. What you’re planning to do is to warp the prestorm coronal structure into a kind of funnel shape over the area where you’re working, and then shoot the high-speed energy particles of the wind off in another direction, like water out the neck of the funnel. Which is fine. Now, I see the control sectors over here—”
She walked over to one side of the dome, pointing at and tracing with one finger a number of fairly complex angular structures, densely interwritten with the Speech. “And these are a nice idea, too. But you’re not going to be able to power them directly off the Sun, as you’ve already got one set of directives doing that in the spell; you can’t run them both at once in such tight quarters. At the very least, you’ve got to spin off another entire core for the control structures. It’s going to cost you more energy: maybe fifty percent more than what you thought you were originally going to spend. A solo-working wizard who has to do this spell on short notice and without prep is going to be useless for anything for a day or so afterward. So you’ve got to either repurpose this spell for group work or scale it back. If you scale it, it won’t be able to handle as much of the corona as you’re indicating you’d like to do here, but it’ll still be useful as sort of a fire extinguisher that a wizard can deploy while waiting for the heavy assistance, the fire trucks, to arrive.”
She turned around where she stood, looking at the other diagrams and annotations in the Speech that were written over the surface of the dome. “It’s a start,” Nita said. She wandered back toward Kit and Penn, and casually tossed Penn the beach ball of his spell-core. He caught it and staggered, not expecting the extra ten pounds’ worth of gravitational force that Nita had quietly imparted to it on the fly while he wasn’t paying attention. “Now all you have to do is fill in the rest of this stuff,” she said, waving her hands at the dome, which was about two-thirds empty space. “It’s interesting, though, even though generally this is more in my sister’s line of work.”
“Your sister’s a wizard?” Penn looked surprised. “Older than you? Younger?”
Oh, God, Kit thought, he doesn’t even know.
“Younger, yeah.” Nita produced a cockeyed smile full of meaning that Kit suspected Penn was completely unequipped to parse. “You two should meet.” The smile got a touch more feral. “It’d be fun.”
“So that’s the structural side,” Kit said. “Looking at it simply as a concept, I can’t see any problems. It’s a great idea, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t work. In fact, you have to wonder why no one’s done it before! Which I guess is a good sign.”
Penn preened himself a little. “I thought so,” he said, “you know? It had that feeling of . . . inevitability about it.” He grinned.
Oh, Powers That Be, Kit thought, lend me your bucket that I might stick my head in it and not have to listen to this guy’s ego parading itself around the room! He was surprised by how much this was getting to him. Have I simply not noticed how lucky I am not to have a life full of people who all think they’re the best thing since sliced bread? Even Carmela seems low-key next to this guy.
Aloud, though, Kit merely said, “Well, what’s not inevitable yet is that this is going to be ready for you to perform it in front of thousands of people in a couple of weeks. You’re short on structure right now. I know you’re, well, concerned about the sensitive aspects. Fine. You don’t know us, we don’t know you—or at least we didn’t before a day ago. But at the same time, the Powers That Be sent us to you. I’d hope that would suggest to you that your content’s safe with us. We are not just some random wizards you met in the street.”
Kit watched Penn’s face work as he thought that over. I can’t believe, Kit thought, that he’s genuinely wondering whether the Powers That Be are screwing him over.
“All the same,” Penn said, “before the Cull stage, why do more diagramming than to the proof-of-concept level? If I go through, I’ve got five days or a week before the eighth-finals. Plenty of time to fill in the holes. Why knock myself out? No one else is going to.”
“I wouldn’t put any money on that,” Nita said. “Better do the work early and have time to fix it if something goes wrong.”
“Don’t see how much could,” Penn said. “But maybe you’d like to backstop me.” He looked at Nita admiringly.
The look she gave him back was one of amused pity. “Oh, Penn,” she said, “if you want me to do your homework for you, you’re going to have to ask me way more nicely than that. The soulful look hasn’t worked on me since—second grade? Maybe third. But meantime? Not a chance. You’re going to want to get started the minute we walk out the door, because you’ve got a lot to do before Cull Day.”
Penn smirked and turned away. “You had your chance,” he said. “Guess you’ll have to watch and learn.”
“Guess I will,” Nita said. “Is there a bathroom down here somewhere?”
“First door on your right.”
“Thanks.” She left the room.
After a few moments Penn said, “Just one question real fast. You passed her all that stuff, didn’t you? You’re just giving her a boost.”
Kit stared at him. “What?”
“None of that stuff was in her specialty. I looked that up! She does—” He waved his hands around. “Visiony stuff. And whales, lately. I don’t think we need her around for that.”
How can anyone be this clueless? And what use is a wizard who doesn’t read? “I don’t need to pass her anything, Penn. For one thing—” There were about thirty things, but Kit was controlling himself hard, aware that his annoyance if let loose could make him get rude with someone in whose house he was a guest. “Besides a ton of brains, she happens to have the spirit of wizardry stuck in her head.”
Penn put his eyebrows up. “Ahhh. No wonder she’s so fast at working out what makes a spell tick.”
Kit frowned. “She’s fast at working out spells because she’s smart.” His thoughts went back suddenly to a round patch of ground inside a freeway exchange, a long time ago, and the image of the girl looking silently down at him. Out of the memory he said, “And she’s also really good at making friends.”
“I bet she is,” Penn said softly.
Kit didn’t quite know how to take that. Half of Penn’s utterances were accompanied by a smirk, as if he considered everything that came out of his mouth to be at least potentially funny. Well, Kit thought, you’re not half as funny as you think you are.
“She made friends with a hundred-foot-long great white shark once,” Kit said. “That looks like the gold standard of friend making to me. But if you’re going to stand there making what-do-we-need-her-for noises, well, better check with the Powers That Be, because they’re the ones who insisted she be here. Theoretically, to give you a fighting chance of winning. Want to cut us loose and go it alone? Say the word.”
He pointedly turned his attention back to the spell diagram on the floor, half wishing that Penn would say, Yeah, I don’t need you. But instead Penn hurriedly came around in front
of him, saying, “Hey, Kit, listen. No offense, right? It’s just important to shake out who’s doing what early on. Easy to get confused about something like that.”
Because you’re assuming I’m doing the heavy lifting in this team, Kit thought. It’s going to be so much fun to watch you keep making that kind of mistake . . .
“So easy to get confused,” Kit said. Down the hall, a toilet flushed; a door opened.
A few seconds later, Nita brushed through the dome of the spell diagram. “So,” she said. “What’s the plan?”
“I’d say we need to meet at least a couple times this week,” Kit said, “to see how Penn gets along with filling in these blanks. Tuesday?”
Penn pulled out an iPhone, did a few thumb-touches to its screen. “Tuesday’s good,” he said. “Your time zone or mine?”
“Ours sounds good,” Nita said. “About point three suit you?”
“Sounds excellent.” Penn put his phone away, reached out to Kit for a handshake. Then he held his hand out to Nita.
Kit watched Nita look thoughtfully at the hand for a second. Then she took it.
Penn lifted her hand, bowed over it, kissed it. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I misjudged you.”
“Yes, I’d say you did,” Nita said. She recovered her hand without any undue show of haste, and unexpectedly offered the other one to Kit.
He hesitated only a second before taking it, hoping the uncertainty didn’t show. Nita looked at him. “Shrubbery?” she said.
“Shrubbery,” said Kit.
They vanished from Penn’s house with less air displacement than might have been caused by a passing butterfly.
A few moments later they were in among the rhododendrons, and Nita was scrubbing the hand Penn had kissed against her jeans. She was also laughing in sheer disbelief. “What—the hell—was that?” she gasped.
“The cheesiest line ever uttered by a living being?” Kit said, laughing too. “Listen, the next time we see the Powers, we absolutely need to knock them on their butts. What have they stuck us with here?”