A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition (29 page)

“Okay,” she said. “I’ve got one here…”

She fished around in her book bag and got out the deck of cards. Nita slipped it out of its packet and began to shuffle, hoping that the motion would help her hide the fact that her hands were actually trembling with rage.
Okay,
she thought.
Calm down. You knew he was going to ask.

But Kit—!

“Am I supposed to pick a card or something?” Mr. Millman said.

“In a minute,” Nita said. She shuffled, then said, “Okay, name one.”

“The five of clubs.”

Nita knew where that one was because the deck had been stacked when she took it out of its little packet. She put the shuffled deck down on the desk, wondering whether she’d protected the back end of the deck well enough. Then she realized she should have asked him what card he wanted before she started shuffling. The trick wasn’t going to work.

I don’t care if it does or not!
Nita thought.
I should make him play Fifty-Two Pickup with the whole deck.

She controlled herself, though with difficulty. She finished the shuffle and cut the cards into three piles. Then she narrowed her eyes and did a single small wizardry that she had sworn to herself she wasn’t going to use.

Mr. Millman turned over the third card. It was the five of clubs.

“That was fairly obvious,” Mr. Millman said, “that anger. And fairly accessible. We were talking about the stages of grieving earlier, how they don’t always run in sequence. Let me just suggest that when anger runs so close to the surface that it’s easily provoked by unusual circumstances, you’re quite possibly not done with it yet.”

Damn
straight
I’m not,
Nita thought.

“It’s not a good thing, not a bad thing, just what’s so,” Millman said. “But you might want to think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past. Or might produce again in the future.”

“Right,” Nita said. Whatever good humor had come and gone during the course of the morning’s session, it was gone for good now. She picked up the cards, got up, and stalked out, making her way to her first-period class.

Right through history class, and right through the English literature class that followed it, Nita stewed. She was furious with herself for having lost her temper over Millman and the card tricks. She was furious that she had let him see how furious she was. She was furious over the maddeningly calm and evenhanded way he had dissected her anger. She would almost have preferred that he yell at her. At least she would have had an excuse to walk out of there ready to, as her mother used to put it, “chew nails and spit rust.” She was so mad—

Nita stopped, literally, in midthought.

“What result this kind of emotion has produced in the past…”

She thought of the fury and desperation that had driven her, in the time before her mother’s death, to try the most impossible things to stop what was happening.
And they still didn’t stop.

But some amazing things happened anyway
…

She had gone from world to world and finally from universe to universe, learning to hunt down and manipulate the kernels that controlled those universes’ versions of natural law. And now she had to admit that it had been her grief and anger at what was happening to her mother that had made her as effective as she’d become.

The thought unnerved her. Nita wasn’t used to thinking of anger as a tool. It had always seemed like something you didn’t want to get accustomed to using, in case it started to become a habit, or started twisting you and your wizardry in directions you didn’t want to go.
But if you’re careful,
she thought,
if you stay in control, if you manage it carefully enough—maybe it’s okay to use it just every now and then. Maybe managing it, rather than letting it manage you, is the whole idea—

Nita sat there staring fixedly at the blackboard. Her English teacher was illustrating the scansion of a sonnet there, but Nita wasn’t really seeing it.
Okay,
she thought.
I forgive Millman his dumb card tricks. He’s given me something useful here. Now I just have to
use
it
…

The bell rang, and her English class filtered out, muttering about the pile of sonnets they’d been given to analyze by the end of the week and cursing Shakespeare’s name. Nita’s next class was statistics; she shouldered her book bag and wandered out into the hall, unfocused. Her anger was still running high, but it was strangely mixed with a sense of readiness. Nita couldn’t get rid of the feeling that time was suddenly of the essence, that she had to make the best of her present emotional state—in which she had been given a weapon that was primed and ready to go, a weapon too good to waste.

I don’t want to lose this,
Nita thought, making a sudden decision.
This is important. I’m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don’t care if they call Dad. He’ll know what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.

Nita hurried for the girls’ room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls’ rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.

Well,
this
is one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art,
Nita thought, resigned. Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy … then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang.
Okay,
Nita thought, standing up,
here’s my opportunity.

The door to the hallway pushed open a little. “Room check,” said an adult voice.

Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of-class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or popping pills.
Who needs this?
Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.

The teacher—it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms. Delemond, a tall, blond, willowy lady—stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible: nothing fancy, just bending light. A second or so later, Ms. Delemond turned away, went to check the next stall, and the next. Finally she went outside again, and Nita could hear her footsteps going down the hall.

Nita got down off the toilet and let out one small breath of annoyed laughter. Then she reached into her claudication pocket, came out with the long chain of the ready-made transit spell she kept there, and dropped it on the floor around her. The chain of words knotted itself closed and blazed with light…

Nita came out in a sheltered part of her backyard, ankle-deep in snow, and the air-pressure change caused by the air she had brought with her from school made snow fall off the trees above her and onto her head. She spluttered as the snow got down her collar, not finding it funny and getting angrier by the second.
Good. Use it. It’s a tool—

Nita’s house keys were inside her locker at school, along with her coat and her boots.
Forget it,
she thought as she went around into the driveway and up to her back door. She pulled the screen door open and put her hand against the wood of the inside door. “I need to walk through you, if you don’t mind,” she said in the Speech, while she reached down to the charm bracelet for another wizardry she’d been keeping there, this one with a charm like a little cloud. “Is that okay? Thanks, just bear with me.”

She said the three words that turned the low-level dissociator loose. Nita waited a moment for the itching to set in—the sign that every atom in her body was willing to move aside for atoms of other substances. In this case, Nita wanted to walk through the atoms of the door. She went through it like so much smoke, itching fiercely all the way, and when she was standing inside the back door, she let the wizardry go, then just stood there panting with the exertion of the spell, and scratched for a few seconds until she felt like all her molecules had settled themselves back into place.

She headed upstairs to her room, got her manual, and lay down on the bed.
This had better work,
Nita thought,
because Dad’s probably going to go intercontinentally ballistic when he finds out I cut school. But I can’t help it. What’s the use of being a good little girl and losing my best friend?

She lay there and realized it was just too bright for her even to think about going to sleep. Nita opened her manual, went to the energy-management section, and turned pages until she found the wizardry she wanted.

She recited it, feeling the universe leaning in around her, paying attention, slowly muting down the light in her room as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch.
Anyway, this is all my fault,
she thought as the room got darker and darker.
If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own troubles, I’d have been with Kit on this job from the start. Yeah, okay, I have a right to grieve. But do I have a right to dump my friends until
I’m finished with it, until it’s convenient to listen to them, to
care
about them again? If I’d listened to Kit—

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Nita had said. And “Now you know how
he
felt before,” Dairine had said to her, as blunt as always, and accurate. Kit had come right out and said that he wished he had backup on this job. She’d ignored him, and he’d gone ahead with what he was doing and got himself in too deep.
I should have been paying attention to what was going on around me, no matter how awful I felt. I’ve been indulging myself. I’ve almost been having
fun
hurting. That’s so stupid.

Nita stopped herself. There was no point in rerunning the “guilt movies.” They always ended the same way. And a new guilt movie was no better than the old ones.

But she was still left with her anger at herself. Nita lay there just breathing, just feeling it, letting it build. Well, she’d been in too deep herself, not long ago, unable to see the trouble she was getting into … and Kit had pulled her out. Now she was going to be able to return the favor. But it wasn’t about scorekeeping at all; there were much more important issues.
I’ve already lost one of the most important people in my life. I’m not going to lose another!

Nita was briefly distracted by the burning at her wrist and throat.

She glanced down in surprise. All the charms on her bracelet, the symbols for all the prefabricated spells she was carrying, were glowing considerably brighter than usual. And the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was running hot, too.

Think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past,
Millman had said.
Or might produce again in the future.

Nita smiled a small angry smile.

I could get to like this,
she thought.
Maybe it’s better if I don’t. But today
… today, I’m going to like it a
lot.

She closed her eyes and pushed all her available power into the lucid-dreaming spell.

***

Nita’s intention and the force of her anger briefly turbocharged the spell, and it almost instantly drowned her consciousness in dream. The effect wouldn’t last, she knew, as she opened her eyes in a different darkness; the spell would relapse to its normal levels momentarily, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d stay asleep. The important thing was that she was dreaming
now.

She stood there again by herself in that great dark space inside Darryl. Far off to one side, somewhere, she knew that the infinitely obstructive white wall was waiting. But this time she wasn’t going to waste her time: There was more important business.

For a long few moments Nita quieted herself, opening her mind to listen, as she’d been taught. Then, eyes closed, self-blinded, she turned, waiting for the sensation she knew would come.

It took less time to find it than she’d hoped it would. Nita had been banking on the idea that Darryl’s grasp of worldbuilding was instinctive, not studied, and that if he even recognized the heart of his universe for what it was, he wouldn’t have thought to hide it. And he hadn’t. When she finally sensed what she was looking for, Nita took the time to actually walk to it, not wanting to attract any possible unwanted attention by using a transit spell. She was glad that the spot she was hunting was only a couple of miles away in Darryl’s internal topology, and not a couple of light-years.

She knew the spot by feel when she reached it, which was just as well, for physically and visually it was indistinguishable from any other part of that tremendous darkness. Nita grinned, though, as she came close, feeling up close the faint, lively, burning, buzzing sensation she’d been seeking. She rolled up her sleeve, thrust her arm elbow-deep into the seemingly empty darkness before her, and felt around for a moment.

The burning against her fingers alerted her. She grinned a small angry grin and took a step backwards, and out of the darkness puled free a bright, tight, surprisingly large tangle of silvery light.

“Will you
look
at this,” Nita said under her breath, turning the kernel over in her hands and looking closely at it to identify its major structural elements. The complexity of this kernel was by and large on a par with other personal kernels Nita had seen before. A couple of its sections were devoted to the mere physical business of running a human body. One of them seemed oddly augmented: bent back on itself and half-twisted in a way she recognized.
A Mobius strip, though more than just that,
Nita thought;
there’s another dimension or so layered in. Maybe this is how an abdal does his co-location?
Looks like he’s got an extra set of “body software” in here; and the soul conduit’s doubled over, and way heavier-gauge than usual. Interesting.