Then again, it was how long before this egg hatched, after we took it out the first time? Eight hours? Maybe the other eggs, or whatever it was signaling to, have time delays set, too. The thought of another eight hours of waiting for something to happen seemed almost unbearable. But wait. If there’s going to be a delay, that’s okay: it gives us time to put extra monitoring wizardries in place nearby.
“Us.” This time he felt better about the idea of someone else being there with him. And a little weird, wasn’t it, to be wanting to keep this all to myself? Where was that coming from? Kit shrugged. Probably the suddenness of the egg’s hatching had freaked him out.
He reached sideways, unzipped the air, and started to stick the manual into his otherspace pocket— then paused. Better deactivate my last-defense gadget first.
With care Kit reached into the pocket, felt for the single thread of characters in the Speech hanging out of the compact little wizardry— its tripwire— and pinched it. The wizardry went inactive like a stick of cartoon dynamite that had had its burning fuse pinched out.
Kit tucked the manual into the pocket, zipped it closed, and glanced west, seeing Deimos’s dimming spark vanish below the horizon: then looked the other way. Blue, bright, growing stronger and brighter by the moment, Earth rose in the east—Mars’s northern hemisphere morning star, this time of year, the herald of the dawn.
Kit’s stomach growled. He grinned. Home, he thought, and vanished.
***
The next two hours were torture for Kit. He forced himself to have breakfast, though his insides were roiling with excitement and anxiety. But every minute that his manual didn’t start flashing with an annoyed message from Mamvish, or worse, Irina, felt like a small triumph. Eventually, as the Sun started coming in the dining room windows around seven, Kit began feeling as if maybe he wasn’t in incredible trouble after all.
His attention was presently divided evenly between two pages in the directory. He had a paper napkin stuck in each one, and he flipped back and forth between them about once every minute as the dining room filled with sunlight. What surprised him was on which one the gray print of unavailability first flashed dark.
Kit pushed his third bowl of cornflakes aside and pounced on the page. “How soon can you be ready to go out?”
There was a pause. “Am I allowed to eat first?” Darryl’s voice said from the page.
Kit grinned. “No.”
“You’re cruel to me, you know that?” Darryl said. “Gonna stunt my growth. Don’t you think I have enough brain issues going on without you messing with my metabolism, too?”
Kit snickered. The only thing wrong with Darryl’s metabolism was that it seemed bent on getting ahead of everyone else’s. The way he ate and drank, Kit routinely expected to see Darryl turn up at a meeting three feet taller than at the last one.
“I am going to sit right here for the next fifteen minutes and finish eating my chocolate-frosted sugar bombs” Darryl said. “Part of my nutritious breakfast. And no, I’m not gonna go sugar-hyper on you, that’s nothing I’ve ever had trouble with and I can just hear you thinking, so don’t start! And then I’m going to put some clothes on, if that’s okay with you. Not gonna go running around Mars in my bathrobe!”
“Okay, okay!” Kit said. “As soon as you can.”
“Fine. Thank you.” There was a pause filled with noisy crunching. “And what’re you doing up so early? Thought I was the only one who liked this time of day.”
Kit wondered how to start explaining. He might as well have saved the effort. “Uh-oh,” Darryl said, “you were up there messing, weren’t you? What did you do, Kit-boy? You broke something, didn’t you.”
Kit rolled his eyes. Darryl could be annoyingly acute, and could hear more about what was going on with you in a moment’s silence than some people could hear in a whole paragraph. “Seriously, you should be kept in a cage,” Darryl said. “Never mind, I’m not gonna make you all bad and wrong for whatever you did. At least not till I help you clean it up.”
“Thanks a heap,” Kit said. “Finish being nutritious and then get your butt over here.” He glanced down at the directory and saw another name go dark. “Aha. Later.”
He touched Ronan’s name; it glowed under his finger. “Hey,” Kit said, “good morning.”
“Oh, listen, Rodriguez attempts to score on irony,” Ronan’s voice came back. He yawned. “But no! It bounces off the goalpost! What a shame.”
“Why is it always sports with you?” Kit said. “Football, rugby, that thing with the weird sticks—”
“Hurling.”
“Yeah, the only sport with a mandatory body count.” Kit had seen the game played once and was glad he didn’t go to school in Ireland: hurling came across like lacrosse on crack, but Ronan loved it and would blather about it for hours. “Forget the playing field for now, okay? We need to go to Mars.”
“Oh, really. What have you blown up now?”
Kit was tempted to bang his head on the table. “Nothing blew up!”
You don’t fool me,” Ronan said. “You went off to be with your friend the superegg in the middle of the night.” He laughed. “The Martian night! You know, some day you may want to reproduce, but you’re never gonna do it if you freeze off your—”
“Ronan,” Kit said. “I can either shoot you a précis from my manual, or you can force me to embarrass myself directly…”
“Always much more fun,” Ronan said, and yawned. “Go.”
Kit spent five minutes or so describing what had happened. Ronan stayed quiet during the explanation, then simply said, “Creepy.”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “But that thing’s yelled for its friends. I don’t think we’re gonna have to wait for long before something happens up there.”
“And when it does,” Ronan said, “it makes sense for there to be wizards there. Okay, sit tight and I’ll have a word with my ride.”
Kit’s eyebrows went up. Irish wizards were restricted from casual long-distance transport due to the buildup of ancient spell residue on the island. Normally they had to go a considerable distance to get to a city-based rapid-transit worldgate, unless they were on active errantry and entitled to a personal transport dispensation. “What kind of ride?”
“Five minutes.”
Ronan’s listing in the manual faded down to gray again, while beside it an annotation came up: In consultation; please wait. Kit pushed his chair back and got up to take his bowl and spoon into the kitchen.
While he was putting them in the dishwasher, he heard someone coming down the stairs. Moments later Carmela wandered in, wearing one of her super-long striped nightshirts. She made for the refrigerator, stuck her head in, and just stood there yawning.
Kit shut the dishwasher and looked with mild interest at his sister, who was still contemplating the fridge’s interior— morosely, he thought. “Looking for something?”
Carmela yawned again and straightened up. “Just thinking that this is the last morning for the next two weeks when I can be sure that if I leave a strawberry smoothie in here when I go to bed, it’ll still be there the next morning.”
Kit headed back for the dining room. “Why? I don’t like your smoothies.”
“I know,” Carmela said. “But Helena does.”
Kit stopped right where he was and stared at her.
“Kit?” said Ronan’s voice from the dining room table. “We’re all set.”
Carmela’s head snapped around. “Is that who I think it is?” She pushed past Kit into the dining room.
“No, wait a minute! I mean, yeah—” Kit went after her. “Carmela, wait! What do you mean, ‘Helena does’? She’s not going to be here until next week!”
Carmela was leaning over his wizard’s manual. “Hiiiii, Ronaaaaaan!”
There was a pause at the other end. “Uh. Carmela, hi. Kit?”