The only good thing about having to sit here doing this was that it gave Nita something to occupy her hands while she worried about Kit. She’d called him late yesterday afternoon to make sure he’d gone to see Carl, and had been very concerned about the tone of his voice. It had acquired a strange monotonous quality, one that made her think of…
A robot? she thought, unnerved. She stopped shuffling for a moment and thought about that. It occurred to Nita that the more contact they’d all had with Darryl, the better his ability to express himself had become… and the more adverse effect it seemed to be having on Kit.
If he goes in there again, she thought, he’s going to lose it.
And he’s going to go in there again. I’m sure of it.
Nita cut the cards again, looking to see if the ace of hearts, the card she’d been protecting, came up. What she got was the three of clubs. She made an annoyed face and pushed the cards away, knowing perfectly well what was interfering with her concentration.
It wasn’t just a matter of Kit’s stubbornness now—not that that couldn’t be formidable when he was in the right mood. She was also dealing with something else she was less familiar with: Darryl’s stubbornness. He’d been holding off the Lone Power all by himself for a long time now, and Nita didn’t think he was going to stop for their sakes. And why should he? she thought. From his point of view, he’s got a job to do, and he’s doing it… and the place where he’s been hasn’t left him with any sense that he doesn’t have to be the only one fighting this fight. Nita shook her head as she thought about what that must cost him. Such loneliness would have crippled her a long time ago. But he bears up under it, she thought. And he just keeps fighting.
That stubbornness had found a resonance in Kit. He and Darryl had become linked in more ways than one. His promises to Carl aside, Nita had a feeling that Kit was going to find himself in Darryl’s mind again shortly. At which time, Nita thought, I’d better be ready.
She picked up the deck again, took a couple of minutes to find the ace of hearts, repositioned it, and reshuffled, carefully protecting the back third of the deck. Then she put the deck down, cut it twice so that she had three piles, reached out to the leftmost pile, and turned the top card over. It was the four of diamonds.
God I hate this! Nita thought. She stood up from her desk and went across the hall to Dairine’s room.
Her sister was sitting at her own desk, which was still completely covered by the papier-mache version of Olympus Mons. It was no longer gray-white; Dairine had done a fairly credible job with her wizardly airbrush. Now the mountain lay there nicely colored in shades of beige and faint rust-red, its huge crater looking entirely ready to spill out lava. Spot was sitting up on one of the bookshelves, peering down at the volcano with his little stalky eyes.
“Dair?”
Dairine looked up at Nita with a weary expression.
“I think I’m going to need some help,” Nita said.
“As long as it doesn’t involve me painting anything,” Dairine said, “you’re on.”
Nita came in and sat down on Dairine’s bed. It creaked.
Dairine looked at her.
“Don’t start,” Nita said. “You know what’s on my mind.”
“Darryl,” Dairine said. “Or the ace of hearts.”
“Please,” Nita said. “Dair, I need to ask you a favor.”
Her sister gave her a slightly suspicious look.
“He’s going to go in there again,” Nita said.
“Kit?” Dairine put her eyebrows up. “Thought he promised Carl he wouldn’t.”
“I don’t think he’s entirely in control of what’s going on with him,” Nita said. “Darryl’s very, uh, single-minded. And that single-mindedness is affecting Kit. We need to be ready for that.”
“‘We’?” Dairine said.
“Dair, he sure isn’t listening to me right now—”
“So I guess you know now what it’s been like dealing with you over the past month, then.”
Nita grimaced at that, taking the point. “Different reasons, as it turns out,” she said. “But, well, yeah.” It would have been all too easy to immediately add, And you haven’t exactly been a picnic to be around either! — but she restrained herself.
“And?”
Nita shifted where she sat, a little uneasily. The bed creaked.
Dairine just tilted her head a little and kept looking at her.
Nita let out a long exasperated breath. “Can I do the groveling and apologizing thing later, please? Because there’ll be a whole lot more time.”
Dairine rolled her eyes; but it was an accepting expression. “What do you need?”
“Some kind of connection, ideally with an integrated power feed, from you to me—for when he goes in again. Think of it as a lifeline. I need to make sure there’s somebody on the outside who can yank us both out of there if we get stuck too deep.”
Dairine, sitting there with her hands in her lap, looked up at Nita. It was an unusual position for Dairine. Usually even when she was talking her hands were doing something. But now she sat quite still, looking at Nita steadily, but a little bleakly. “You sure you want my help?” Dairine said.
Nita looked at her strangely. “Are you nuts?” she said. “Of course I do.”
“I wasn’t sure,” Dairine said, and looked at the floor. There was nothing overtly guilty or upset about her face, but all the same Nita saw there was trouble underneath the expression. “I warned you, Neets. Right now I’m paying the price for a big showy start, just as Tom said I would a while back. I can do basic wizardries well enough, but as for anything really high-powered—” She shook her head. “I don’t know if you want to be depending on me right now.”
“I will depend on you any time,” Nita said.
The look Dairine gave Nita had a certain amount of good-natured scorn about it.
“Do I have to say it in the Speech?” Nita said.
“Nita,” Dairine said then, very softly, “Mom couldn’t depend on me.”
Nita shook her head. “If you mean you couldn’t just make a wish and save her life,” Nita said, “then you’re right. If you really thought it was going to go that way, then, yeah, you made a mistake. But that hardly means that she couldn’t depend on you. Or that I won’t.”
“You may be the one making the mistake, depending on my power right now,” Dairine said.
Nita rolled her eyes. “I don’t know if I’m exactly a model of stability at the moment either. But I can’t afford to just stand around wondering. Will you help, or am I going to have to do this without a net? Because more depends on this than just me or Kit. Darryl’s apparently…”
Nita trailed off. She was uncertain exactly how much she wanted to tell Dairine about why Darryl was special.
“Something unusual,” Dairine said. “With a lot of power. Or something else. He’d have to be special, to be getting so much attention from Tom and Carl.”
“Yeah.”
Dairine sat quietly for a few seconds, then nodded. “I’ll set something up for you.”
Nita nodded. “Thanks,” she said, got up and turned away.
“It kills you, doesn’t it?” Dairine said. “Asking me for help.”
Nita gave her sister a very slight smile. “Better it should kill me than Kit.”
Then she went back into her room to start yet another futile search for the ace of hearts.
***
We have to go.
Kit sat up suddenly on the bed, looking around him. His glance wandered past the clock on his wall; it was around four-thirty in the afternoon. Where did the day go? part of him wondered, but that part seemed very remote. Much more important was the need to go looking for Darryl. Darryl was in trouble, he was stuck, and Kit had to help him. In a world where nothing much seemed to matter, that suddenly mattered a great deal.
He could almost see that other world, here in the room with him, as if he were in two places at once. The world had changed ag
ain, or rather, he had changed it, Darryl had changed it, to keep putting the One who was pursuing him off the scent. It always caught up with him eventually, always just before It realized that Darryl had It trapped. And then, just this side of that crucial tipping point, Darryl would change everything again, constructing a new world, a new inner self, in which the Pursuer, whipsawed by Its own rage and pride, would once again lose the plot—wasting energy chasing him that would otherwise have been used to wreak Its habitual destruction on the world. Each new world was better at distracting the Lone One than the last, with new rules to impede Its power and to keep It occupied for longer. Each new scenario sucked more energy from It, and fueled the rage that blinded the Lone One to what was actually happening.
It was brilliant, what Darryl was doing. And it was beyond brave. But Kit wished Darryl didn’t have to keep doing this again and again, for it gave him no time to find out what else wizardry might be for. If it was for anything else…
We have to go, Kit thought. He got out of bed—
—and tripped over Ponch, who was lying on the rug, watching him. Boss! Ponch yelped. Where are you going?
“We have to go,” Kit said. The bedroom was already beginning to fade a little, like something that didn’t matter. What mattered was elsewhere. The Pursuer was coming again; all his attention now had to be given to the creation of the new illusion, at the expense of the old one.
You promised you wouldn’t! Ponch whimpered, jumping up and down. You told Carl you’d stay here!
But it seemed now as if a different person entirely had made that promise. In fact, someone different had made it: another person, in another place… the only reality that really mattered, now reforming itself in its newest form around him. The last time, he’d gotten a little careless, and the dark Other had found Its way in and out again too easily. This time the place to which It found Its way had to be more challenging. The idea had come to him that morning in the bathroom, as once again he faced what caused him pain every day—his own gaze, helpless to make itself free of the dark Other looking out of it and mocking him. But this is just a weapon It’s purposely using against you, the thought had come to him, the knowledge of Its presence at the bottom of your soul. So use the weapon It’s put in your hand: turn the weapon against It…
That other reality, glassy, gleaming, was becoming more and more real around Kit as he stood there. It was only a matter of moments before he would be able to step wholly into it, such was the other’s power and his need for help. Distressed, Ponch said, The leash! Boss, let me get the leash! Wait for me—
The voice in his head seemed to Kit to come from almost too far away to matter.
Stay there, boss! Kit—stay! Stay!
The urgency of that voice was just enough to keep Kit where he was, to prevent him from taking the single step forward that would bring him into the gleaming maze now being constructed for the Other’s confusion. That was all that could be hoped for—to befuddle It, wear It down until he had time to rest and construct a better plan. There was no telling whether the hope would ever be realized. But it was the only hope in the world, and hence worth clinging to.
The sound of paws scrabbling up the steps was as distant as everything else. Kit watched the shining unreality forming around him, watched his bedroom fade away, a backdrop without meaning. Into that backdrop burst something that shone, a line of blue light around a dark creature’s collar. The creature looked up at him, urgent, desperate. Boss, take the leash! Take it, put it around your wrist.
Kit couldn’t see the point, but the creature’s eyes were so beseeching that he did as he was told. As he looped the other end of the line of light around his wrist, the world in which he was standing finally became totally irrelevant. Kit took the step forward into the real world—or rather the one that had become real, and the black creature beside him stepped through, too…
***
“Kit,” his mama’s voice said from down the hall, “I’m going out now. You call me if anything comes up here. Can I bring you anything back on my meal break?”
No reply.
“Kit? Sweetie, are you asleep?”
No reply.
Kit’s mama came down the hall. “You know, I brought that cold medicine home, the one with the zinc in it,” she said. “I wonder if maybe you should just take some, so you can head this thing off—”
She stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking in at the empty bed.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
***
At Nita’s house, the phone rang. Her dad, sitting at the dining room table and working his way through the Sunday paper with a beer and a salami on rye, reached out for the handset lying on the table beside him.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Marina… No, he’s not, as far as I know. Wait a minute.”
Nita’s dad looked around the corner into the living room, where Nita was sitting on the rug, playing an extremely frustrated game of solitaire as relaxation from nearly an hour of utterly unsuccessful attempts at getting a simple “guess the card” trick to work. “Nita?” her dad said. “Is Kit here?”
Nita was surprised. “No.”
“His mom’s looking for him.”
Nita’s heart went cold inside her. “He was going to be home all day today.”
“He’s not there, his mom says.”
Nita sat still for a moment. Kit?
There was no answer.
She broke out in a sweat. There was no way to be absolutely sure where he was, but she thought she could guess. And it upset her to be right so quickly “I don’t hear him nearby,” she said. “Wait a minute, Daddy.”
She went to get her manual, paged through it to the messaging section, and said to it, “Kit, where are you? Urgent!”
Send message? the manual page said.
“Send it!”
Recipient is out of ambit. Please try again later.
Nita swallowed. She got up and went into the dining room. As she did so, she suddenly started to hear something she hadn’t been able to hear in the living room; the sound of dogs howling a few streets away, more and more of them.
She took the phone from her dad. “Mrs. Rodriguez? It’s Nita. I just called him, but I don’t get any answer. And the manual says he’s not in this universe. He’s gone again.”
There was a long, frightened pause on the other end. “He said he wasn’t going to do that until Tom and Carl gave him the word,” Kit’s mama said. “But he hasn’t been himself, these past couple of days.”
That was exactly Nita’s worry at the moment: that Kit wasn’t himself, but halfway to somebody else. She’d started wondering last night, as she wrestled with the cards, what possible effect an abdal’s ability to be two places at one time might have on someone who’d been inside his head a few times. A non-abdal’s soul won’t be able to handle that kind of thing for long: it’s just not wired for it. It’ll get hung up in finding some way to make sense of it when there is no sense, and the brain attached to the soul is going to twist itself out of shape trying to cope. And maybe not be able to twist back again—
She held still. Got to keep my cool here, she thought. It’s the only way I’m going to find Kit. “I’m going to go look for him,” Nita said. “It may take me a while to find him. I can’t do it the way he does it with Ponch; I’ve got to be asleep.”
She heard Kit’s mama take a long breath, the sound of someone controlling herself as tightly as Nita was doing right now. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’ll be back around midnight. But if you hear anything before then, will you call me? I think Kit gave you my work number.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Mrs. Rodriguez, please… don’t worry.” It’s going to be all right, Nita wanted most desperately to say, but she couldn’t say it. It might not be true.
“Okay,” Mrs. Rodriguez said. “Thank your dad for me, sweetie. Good-bye.”
Nita hung up the phone. Outside, faint but clear, the howling continued. Her father was looking at her
in distress.
“Where is he?” he said.
Nita shook her head. “I don’t have a name for it, Daddy. It’s not another planet or anything like that. I wish it were, because it’d be easier to get to. It’s inside Darryl’s mind somehow… so it’s closer than another world or continuum, but a lot more dangerous, in its way. If Kit’s stuck in there, and I can’t get him out…”
She began to shake. Here it was, full-blown, what she’d been most afraid of—a crisis she was afraid she couldn’t handle. And you’re all y yourself on this one, she thought. Dairine may be able to support you, but you’re going to be the one who has to figure out what to do with what she adds to the equation. And if you can’t figure it out…
Her father saw the look on her face and came over to her, put his arms around her. “Nita,” he said. “Listen to me.”
She looked up at him, rather shocked at his tone of voice. It was unusually stern for him.
“You’re tough,” her dad said. “Tougher than you think. You have to hand onto that now. That’s what I’ve been hanging on to the best I can, and as far as I can tell, it turns out to be true every time if you just don’t let the idea go. You have to take one thing at a time now. Don’t let the stress overload you. Will Tom or Carl know what to do? Call them.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. She picked up the phone again, dialed it hurriedly. A moment later, Carl’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Carl,” Nita said, “Kit couldn’t hold it. He’s gone again.”
Wizards tend not to swear, since the results are likely to be unfortunate if they slip into the Speech while doing it. But Nita distinctly heard several swearwords in Carl’s silence. “When did he leave?”
“Might have been just a few minutes ago.”
“Okay. Wait a second.”
Carl put the phone down. She could hear him going to the table where his version of the manual usually lay hidden, then flip one volume open and start going through it. Listening carefully, she could hear a hiss, the little breath-between-teeth noise that Carl made when there was trouble.
A moment later he picked up the phone again. “He’s out of ambit, all right,” Carl said. “And the energy signatures are too vague to track him. But this much we do have in our favor. Ponch went with Kit.”