“With what? Ronan?”
“Yeah.”
Kit raised his eyebrows. “You mean we should tell her that being hot on Ronan is actually being hot on both a cranky Celto-Goth hottie and a Senior Power-That-Is who spent most of the past ten years living on Earth and wearing a macaw costume?”
Nita looked at him.
“Nah,” Kit said at last. “Let’s not say anything. Let’s just let it play out.” And then Kit broke up laughing.
Nita’s look grew annoyed. “You’re enjoying the idea,” she said.
“Oh yeah!” Kit managed to say. It took a while to get control of his laughter.
“If she realizes that you’re letting her walk into this without a warning just for your own amusement,” Nita said, “the universe being destroyed is going to come as a relief.”
Kit wiped his eyes, forcibly smothering the last few laughs. “Look,” he said, “when we get back, if he hangs around for very long, Ronan’ll have to tell her. Assuming she doesn’t figure it out herself, somehow. She’s been figuring out way too much lately.”
Nita suddenly looked concerned. “You don’t think she’s going to pull a late-onset Ordeal on us?”
Kit shook his head. “She’s too old. But even if she is getting good with the Speech, you won’t find me complaining. I’d rather have her the way she is than like my other sister.”
“Oh, please,” Nita said. “Helena and your ‘deal with the devil.’ What a laugh.”
“I can’t believe she could even think I’d do something like that. You live with somebody all your life and then—” Kit threw his hands in the air, let them fall again, a helpless gesture.
Ronan appeared off to one side of their hardened-space platform. “I’ve got just the thing,” he said, coming over to them. “There’s a big stony outcrop a couple of miles from the end of the tunnels of the biggest city.”
“So what did you find?” Nita said. “Caves?”
Ronan nodded. “A big bubble cavern with no connection to the city tunnels,” he said. “But there’s plenty of room there for all our pup tents, and no surface access of any size; no one’s going to come sneaking up on us.” He glanced over at Nita. “You want to call your dad now?”
“Yeah,” Nita said, and got out her phone. “Feed the cave coordinates to our manuals, huh?”
“And to me,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll want them for the short-term transits.”
Ronan headed over to where Sker’ret was working with Filif on the spell diagrams. As Nita dialed her phone, Ponch got up from where he’d been lying and ambled over to Kit, his tail swinging idly.
We’re going now? he said.
“Yup,” Kit said.
Good. I’m hungry!
Kit reached down to scratch behind Ponch’s ears. “It’s all about dinner or playing or sleep with you, isn’t it?” he said.
Not all, Ponch said in a slightly hurt tone of voice. There are other things. Sometimes it’s about squirrels.
“Oh, great,” Nita said under her breath. “What now?”
Kit glanced over at her. Nita gave him another of those exasperated looks and hit the button that put the call on the speaker.
At the other end—the other end of the galaxy, or the universe, for all Kit knew—the phone was ringing. And ringing, and ringing, and ringing…
“Nobody’s home,” Nita muttered. She started dialing again.
“Maybe your dad’s at work?” Kit said.
“I sure hope so,” Nita said. “Not that I’m sure what time it is there.”
But when the call started to go through, that number, too, just kept ringing. After a few rings someone picked up. Kit saw Nita’s expression go a little less scared. “Hi, this is Harry Callahan—”
“Daddy! What time is it? I thought you’d be—”
“—at Callahan’s Florists,” said her dad’s voice. “Unfortunately there’s no one available in the shop to take your call right now. Our normal business hours are 8:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Monday through Friday—”
Nita hung up. “Okay,” she said. “His own phone—”
She dialed again. But this time all she got was a different recorded message, a digital one. “The party you are dialing is not available at this time. Please try again later—”
Nita hung up again, starting to look upset. “This makes no sense,” she said.
“You could try getting hold of Dairine,” Kit said. “Maybe she’s heard something.”
Nita nodded, pulled her manual out, and opened the back cover, where she kept her messaging routines. “Dairine Callahan,” she said to the manual.
The back page blanked. Then a single phrase in the Speech came up out of the whiteness: “Recipient is out of ambit or in transit, and is not available. Record a message for delivery when ambit or transit status changes?”
Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Dair, it’s me,” she said. “Have you heard anything from Dad? Call me back in the book as soon as you can. End message.”
The page flickered, spelled the message out in the Speech, and then blanked it. “Saved for delayed send.”
“Thanks,” Nita said. “Now get me Tom Swale or Carl Romeo, and flag it urgent.”
The back page blanked. Then a single phrase came up: “Messaging in abeyance.”
“‘In abeyance’?” Nita said. “What’s that mean?”
“And not even any ‘Try again later,’” Kit muttered. “What’s going on back there?”
Nita shook her head, closed her manual, and picked up her phone again. She punched in the number for Tom’s house, hit the speaker button again. Once again the dialing tone tinkled through its usual sequence, followed by a long silence.
Nita almost hung up, but at last the phone at the other end started ringing. And it rang, and rang, and rang…
She let out a long breath, hung up.
“Maybe they’re out somewhere,” Kit said.
“Why do I not believe it’s that simple?” Nita covered her eyes with one hand. “They always have a wizardry that forwards calls from wizards to their cells,” she said, looking up. “And they’re hardly ever both not there—”
“They were last week,” Kit said, “and you know what that was about.” He was trying hard to sound calm, but he wasn’t sure how well it was working.
Nita rubbed her face. “Look,” she said. “I’m really freaked now. I’m not going to be any good here until I check on things back home and make sure my dad’s okay. It won’t take me long.”
But we just got here! was the first thing Kit wanted to say. He resisted the urge.
“Look, I know what you’re thinking,” Nita said. “I don’t care. What good am I going to be for anything if I’m not sure what’s going on with my dad?! And, Kit, what if we did just have another of those big time lags? If it’s all of a sudden five days later, we’d better find out about it now—because if Dairine and I have to go back and cover for ourselves before school starts making trouble for my dad…”
She looked furious and frustrated. Kit let out a long breath, because she was right. “Okay,” Kit said. “But how’re you going to do this?”
Sker’ret had finished conferring with Filif, and now came toddling over to them. “You could always send a fetch back home to see what’s going on,” Sker’ret said.
Nita thought about that, then shook her head. “No way,” she said. “It’s not just about what I need to see. If my dad’s upset already, dealing with a transparent version of me that can’t get solid when he needs a hug isn’t going to do him any good at all.”
“Ponch can’t take you,” Kit said. “We’re going to need him here. And even if we didn’t, you’d run into the same time lag problem all over again.”
“I’ll do a direct gating,” Nita said. “The only reason we needed Ponch to get here was because we didn’t know where we were going. Now that we’ve got the coordinates for Rashah, I can gate straight in and out.” She glanced at Ronan. “You can cover for that, too?”
br /> I can, said the Champion, sounding uneasy, but we need to keep this kind of thing to a minimum.
“For once the spell won’t have to be terribly complex,” Nita said. “We’ve all got the power now to push gatings through just by brute force, rather than finesse.”
“I can coach you on how to compensate for any equivalent lag,” Sker’ret said, “now that we know how much of it we’re dealing with. In fact, it’d make sense to take that information back to the Crossings—it’ll help my sibs keep things running there for a little longer.” He glanced over at Kit and Ronan and Filif. “Can you spare me? I won’t be gone any longer than Nita is.”
“While we’re still just doing our first on-the-ground surveys,” Kit said, “sure. And it makes sense for you to go out at the same time as Neets.” He glanced over at Ronan. “It means you’ll have only one transit to cover, instead of two.”
“Let’s get ready for it, then,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll get the gating set up.” He scuttled away in the darkness to start altering one of the transit circles.
“I’ll check your spelling,” Filif said, going after him.
Nita watched them go, then glanced back at Kit. “You’re annoyed at me,” she said.
Kit gave Nita a look, hoping she wasn’t going to force him to answer. She returned the look, in spades. Finally Kit said, “Not annoyed. But you’re holding out on me. It’s not just your dad, is it? It’s Tom and Carl, too. Isn’t it?”
For a long moment, Nita didn’t say anything. Then she sighed. “Look, I know we had to run with the information that Ronan and the Champion gave us. But I still feel like we’ve run out on our Seniors, and they probably got worried about us when they came looking for us and couldn’t find us anywhere.”
“You’re not going to tell them anything—”
“Of course I’m not going to tell them anything! But they just need to know we’re okay.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“And that’s still not all of it,” Kit said.
Once again, and for a much longer time, Nita said nothing.
“Look,” Kit said, “don’t say anything if you don’t want to; I guess it’s not really important—”
“You’re eavesdropping on my brains again,” Nita said.
Her tone was resigned. “No,” Kit said, and blushed. “I just overheard—You know how it is. More a feeling than a thought.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “I know how it is.”
The look she gave him left Kit embarrassed enough to want to glance away; but he didn’t. “A feeling is all it is,” Nita said. “I wish I had something more concrete to go on than a hunch! But that’s all I’ve got. There’s something back that way that needs doing, and I have to go there and find out what it is, and do it. And I hate acting like being on Rashah is freaking me out enough to make me immediately run away!”
“I know that’s not it,” Kit said.
“Do you?” said Nita.
Now it was Kit’s turn to pause. Is it smart to tell her how seriously scared I am? he thought. Is it going to make her feel worse?
“Yeah, I do,” Kit said at last. “I don’t want to spend a minute more here than I have to. But I don’t have any hunches, and you do. So get out of here and do what you have to. And do one thing for me?”
“Sure.”
“Call my mom when you get there? Let her know we’re okay.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “No problem.”
They turned back to the others. “We’re done here,” Sker’ret said. “Filif’s checked everything over, and we’ve got the coordinates for the cave. We’ll meet you there when we’re finished.”
“Then you two go on,” Kit said. “We won’t do anything too exciting until you get back.”
“Why do I have serious doubts about that?” Nita said. But she smiled, even though the smile was wan. “Look, if Dairine turns up before we get back—”
“I’ll fill her in.”
Nita went over to where Sker’ret was standing in one of the spell diagrams. “You ready?” she said to Ronan.
He lifted the Spear of Light. “Go,” he said.
The Spear flared into life. Nita and Sker’ret began to speak in the Speech together. Under their feet, the spell diagram came alive with light—the spoken words chasing their way around the circle, knotting in the wizard’s knot, then blazing up too blindingly to let a viewer see individual characters.
Nita and Sker’ret vanished. As they did, Kit once again caught what he’d “overheard” before, that strange feeling of fear combined with Nita’s sense of something that absolutely had to be done. And mixed with it, bizarrely, he could hear a sort of buzzing sound, sharp and abrupt, repeating again and again. Kit frowned. Now where’ve I heard that sound before? If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was somebody using some kind of energy weapon…
He didn’t hear anything further. Weird, Kit thought. Never mind. To Filif, who was now standing over Sker’ret’s short-term transit spell diagrams, he said, “How’s everything look?”
“Perfect.”
Ponch, sitting there looking down at the planet, now stood up again and shook himself all over. Are we going finding again?
“Pretty soon,” Kit said. “But we should get to the cave so you can have some dinner first.”
Ponch began to jump up and down excitedly. “Okay, okay, do it over here,” he said, leading Kit to one of the transit circles Sker’ret had set up. Nearby, Ronan and Filif each stepped into one of the others. Ronan glanced over at him. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
They vanished.
***
The darkness and silence of the cave was total, and the air was absolutely still, except for the gentle wavering of the heat they felt rising from the surface on which they stood. The stifling air was slightly tainted with an oily smell that reminded Kit of the last time the repairmen had to be called in to deal with the furnace at home.
Very slowly Ronan allowed the Spear of Light to show itself in a faint ghostly glimmer of blade, while Filif’s eye-berries glowed at their softest. Kit spoke the words of his small wizard-light spell and pushed it loose into the air, where the tiny spark of it hung and made a dim green-blue glow. Around them on all sides, the cavern stretched out, vast, empty, the distant walls glittering faintly. The floor was curved slightly upward toward the far walls, so that the four of them seemed to be standing in the middle of a huge, pale, shallow bowl. In such low light, the ceiling was invisible.
There’s nothing here, the Champion said after a moment. We’re safe enough.
Kit let his light get about as bright as a hundred watt bulb, and the Spear flared up into its full glory; Ronan let the shaft of the Spear sink into the stone of the floor and fasten itself there. Filif’s berries paled down. They could now see the ceiling, at least a hundred feet above them, maybe more. A bristling of tiny thin stalactites, probably the result of many centuries of trickling water, hung from it like a coarse, thick fur. Here and there the floor was bumpy with little walnut-sized lumps of dripped-down mineral salts that crunched underfoot when Kit experimentally stepped on them.
“Was this area volcanic once?” Filif said.
“Could have been,” Kit said. “I think the magma underneath burped out a big gas bubble. Then it all got pushed up toward the surface. The gas got out, the water got in…”
“Not too much of it,” Ronan said, “lucky for us. Otherwise, there might be other ways in.” He looked around, satisfied.
Kit nodded and reached into his otherspace pocket for the pup-tent interface. He hung it in the air and pulled the door down. Ponch dashed through it. “Back in a minute,” Kit said.
He went after Ponch, popped open a can of dog food, and emptied it into one of the waiting bowls. Then he poured some water into another dish from an open bottle. Ponch turned in a few happy circles and then began noisily and happily eating. Kit rooted around in the piles of supplies for one of the prepackaged sandwiches his mot
her had left for him, unwrapped it, and took a moment to stuff it into his face. Then he stepped out through the interface with the second half of the sandwich.
Ronan had vanished into his own pup tent. Filif stood off to one side, looking down at the bright circle of another transport spell, which was now etching itself in burning lines into the stone. “Sker’ret gave me a compacted version of the transport routine,” Filif said, “for transfers from here to the outer surface.” He brought up his own implementation of the wizard’s manual, which manifested itself as a sort of fog that clung about his branches. In that fog Kit could see a schematic of the immediate neighborhood of the planet’s surface, with the main city-hive marked on it.
“There’s a main trail from the city-hive that passes not too far from here,” Filif said. “We can make our way easily enough to it from our transit point. Since these creatures are so scent-sensitive, we should put the outside end of the transit wizardry in a little loop that leads from the path and goes back to it, so that it won’t be obvious to any Yaldiv stumbling on it that our trail goes only so far and stops.”
“It’ll look as if we just wandered off the main path a little and then right back again,” Kit said. “Great.” He ruffled up Filif’s branches a little, affectionately. Filif was such a hardworking wizard, so self-effacing, but so good at what he did, that Kit was coming to admire him immensely. “You hungry? You should get yourself something.”
“I’ll root in a while,” Filif said. “I want to make sure this is in order first. And this—”
A couple of Filif’s branch-fronds reached inward to touch each other, then parted again. Between them stretched a thin filament of green wizardly fire, the most delicate possible chain of characters in the Speech. As Filif stretched the chain out, it became more and more complex, like a single strand of spiderweb becoming the whole web, then a complex of webs in three dimensions, building a shape in the air. Filif drifted backward from where he had originally been standing, and the green-fire construct stayed anchored in the air and grew upward and outward, becoming more and more complex every minute. It resolved into the big oval shape of a Yaldiv’s body, spreading outward into the legs and the claws, the light then filling the innards of the shape as it sketched itself on the air. Shortly the shape of a complete Yaldiv hung there, resting lightly on its walking claws, towering over Filif and Kit. Filif let go of the filament of wizardry, and the spell stood on its own. He drifted around it, looking it over.