Nita transited across the crater a couple more times, effortlessly, the way she’d seen Darryl do, but found no trace of Kit. The transits, though, were enjoyable for their own sake. Pity this is a dream, she thought. It’d be great to be able to do this without having to do a spell and pay the price. The third time, she came out near the ridge at the crater’s edge, where the dust and sand still held some trace of someone’s sneaker prints. She dropped to one knee, touched one print, then reached over beside it to pick up a little stone that lay there. What about it, guy? she said. Who’s been up here recently?
Nobody, the stone said. Just him, and her. The other one.
Nita blinked at that, confused. Well, rocks tended to think of time in the geological sense; they could get confused about shorter periods. I haven’t been up here, though. This is the first time.
No, the rock said. But the last time you came, he had been thinking of her; and he didn’t want to stay. He ran away. And so did you…
Nita shook her head, uncertain what to make of this. An odd feeling of dread was beginning to gather at the back of her mind. Uncertain, she dropped the stone gently to the sandy ground and climbed further up the ridge.
There on the crater’s edge, Nita paused, looking out across the dusty red afternoon toward where the low sun swung. At the edge of that sharply curved, foreshortened horizon, something moved and glittered. You did say you didn’t like the look of that, said the creature crouching at her feet.
Oh, it can’t possibly— Nita said. But then she noticed that the silvery tremor out at the edge of things was getting brighter. It actually seemed to be humping up against the horizon— higher than the hills of the Southern Highlands, impossible though that was. Fear began to rise in Nita, growing more pronounced as a thin, distant sound began to reach her: the rush and roar of water.
There’s no way I can hear that all this way up here, she thought. Her pulse began racing. She stared all around her in growing panic. Where was Kit? He was supposed to be here. But he couldn’t be here. If he was here, and he didn’t get away soon, he’d get caught in this—
All the southern horizon was awash now. Nita could see the foaming onrush of the initial waves, running northward toward her in a flood of ever-increasing speed, over the hills and down into the craters of the lowlands, splashing up around highland hills and making islands of them, rushing inexorably at the mountain where she stood.
The new islands were swiftly drowned as the water raced toward Nita. She stood rooted in horror as the incoming wavefront, hundreds of feet higher in this gravity than an Earth-based tsunami could ever be, came plunging through the southern highlands and down over the edge of their plateau, pouring down into the vast cratery basin of the lowlands at her feet and rushing, uncheckable, toward the mountain where she stood. Within what seemed only moments, the water flowed around her on all sides, splashing up over the immense mesa on which the mountain stood. It drowned it in a matter of a few breaths, began to climb the sides of the mountain—
Nita gulped with fear. She had to get away, fast, before the onrushing water changed the nature of the land where she was standing and made it impossible for her to use her already prepared spell to escape. She raised her hands, the summoning gesture for the transit spell she was carrying.
But no light erupted around her feet. The Speech-characters she was expecting didn’t materialize. Nita began hurriedly speaking the words of an emergency transit spell— and then, shocked, stopped, realizing the words made no sense. I don’t understand! It has to work! It’s a spell! A spell always works—
I told you not to wait so long, said the creature crouching at her feet.
That’s a lot of help now! Nita turned southward again, afraid of what she’d see.
Between her and the pale, pinky sun, something rose up to filter and dim the sky. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, now taller than the mountain, leaning over Nita, leaning farther out. The great sparkling arch of it stretched out over the top of the mountain-crater like a vast, downward-curving, smoked glass roof. The distant sun, caught in it, flickered and struggled to shine.
It was no use. The thickness of the water was putting it out. And Nita couldn’t transit. She was trapped unless she found the right words to say, figured out what to do. But she was never going to figure it out. There wasn’t going to be time. The wave arched, curved more deeply above her, then finally and immensely broke—
Nita had what felt like a lifetime’s leisure to watch the water fall slowly toward her in a massive, incompressible, high-curved slab. Gravity or no gravity, when that wave came down on her, its mass would crush her just as flat as if it was stone and not water. Too much mass at this speed, some dry and terrified part of her brain said in the background, didactic to the end. After all, g equals G times the mass of Mars over the square of the radius, so that would be at least three hundred seventy-two centimeters per second squared, and that means—
The roaring and the blackness smashed down onto Nita.
The world ended.
Nita sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for breath. It took some moments for her to register, as she stared around her, that everything was all right, that she was in her bedroom and all the usual safe, sane, familiar things were there. The posters on the wall, the library books piled up on the desk, the magazines stacked on her dresser, the shopping voucher plaques for the Crossings that Carmela had given her, saying, “I’ve only got about sixty of them; let me know when you need more…”
Nita worked on slowing her breathing down. After that, her first somewhat panicked impulse was to try to completely forget what she’d just seen and try to go back to sleep. But then she thought What, and find myself back in that dream again? Not a chance!
She got up, pulled down her nightdress, and went over to the desk, where she flipped her manual open. “Bobo,” she said, “boy, have I got one for the dream journal today!”
The manual’s pages riffled under her hands, laying themselves open to the section into which she dictated her dreams. General theme? said the voice in the back of her head.
Nita shook her head, sighed. “Water again.” You’ve been getting a lot of that lately.
Nita shrugged. “Probably something to do with the project at hand.” But an echo of an old memory said, Fear death by water…
She shook her head. Picchu had just been quoting some poet at the time. And that had been such a long while ago.Yet Peach’s prophecies were always reliable. Who knows how long they might have been good for?
Unfortunately, prophecy rarely came stamped with a sell-by date. Nita took the manual back to the bed, sat down cross-legged on top of the covers, and hurriedly dictated everything she could remember about the dream. “…And the wave,” she said at last. “I can’t believe I was standing there working out the acceleration of a falling mass on Mars.” She laughed. “And that all mixed up with the water… Kit’s thing is starting to get to me.”
Well, after yesterday, possibly that’s understandable.
“Might be right,” Nita said. She stretched and glanced at the clock. “Where is he?”
Where do you think?
Nita laughed. “Don’t know why I even bother asking.” She got up, tossing the manual to one side. “Did he leave me any messages?”