Mr. Mack looked at his watch. “Possibly one of the shortest bursts of gratitude on record,” he said. “Kit, I had no choice. You misspelled ‘Pyongyang.’”
Kit was so torn between relief and completely unreasonable disappointment that all he could do was say “Oh.”
“One ‘o,’ one ‘a,’” Mr. Mack said. “I checked. Sorry about that. But your essay was terrific. Best I’ve seen in a long while. You’re showing at least a few of the warning signs of falling in love with history.”
Kit said nothing, partly from embarrassment at being praised, and partly because he suspected Mr. Mack was right, and he didn’t know what to make of that.
“So you can tell your mother, who I know was giving you grief,” Mr. Mack said, “that whatever else you’ve done in your other subjects this spring, you’ve passed history with flying colors, and I’m really pleased with you. She should be, too. Tell her to get in touch if she wants any more details.”
“She will,” Kit said.
Mr. Mack smiled slightly. “So did mine,” he said. “Mothers. What can you do?… Go on, get out of here. And enjoy your summer.”
Kit stuffed the paper hurriedly into his book bag and shouldered it. Mr. Mack closed his briefcase with the air of a man shutting a whole year into it, and good riddance. Then he glanced up. “Unless there was something else? Of course there was.”
Kit gave up any hope of ever being able to put anything over this particular teacher. “Yeah. Uh— How do you not sweat like that?”
Mr. Mack looked briefly surprised, and then laughed out loud. “The phrasing’s unusual,” Mr. Mack said. “I take it you mean, how do I not sweat? And the answer is, I don’t not sweat.”
Kit raised his eyebrows.
“But I do waterproof the insides of my clothes,” Mr. Mack said.
Kit stared at him. Mr. Mack laughed again, then, the sound of a sneaky magician giving away the secret to a really good trick. “It’s a Marine thing,” Mr. Mack said. “We used to do it on parade. We spray our shirts with that anti-stain waterproofing stuff you use on upholstery. It’s good for giving other people the impression that you’re not quite human.”
His voice as he said this was so dry that Kit burst out laughing. But a moment later he stopped. “You were in the Marines?” Kit said, suddenly seeing Mr. Mack with entirely new eyes. This little guy, just barely taller than Kit’s mama, with his bald head and his red tie with little blue galloping ponies on it, a different tie every day—“Korea?”
Mr. Mack shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “A lot of other places. But Korea was well before my time.”
Kit looked at him; this time it was his turn to look thoughtful. “The way you talked about it, though. The dark, the light—”
Mr. Mack shook his head. “If a historian needs anything,” he said, “it’s an imagination. The dates, the place names, the battles… they’re not what’s most important. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them— their sky, their sea. Their tools. Their houses. Their troubles. That’s how what they did starts to make sense. Along with what we do in the same situations…”
He paused, looking surprised at himself. “Sorry. It’s a passion,” Mr. Mack said. “But I can recognize the signs in someone else. Watch out: it’ll eat you alive. Other lives, other minds …there’s no getting enough of them.” He gave Kit a cockeyed look. “Why are you still here? Go away before I give you a quiz.”
Kit grinned and left with as much dignity as he could manage. The dignity broke down about three yards down the hall, as he caught sight of Raoul, trying to look like he was leaning casually against a locker, waiting for Kit. Kit didn’t know whether to try to look cool or to scream out loud. Screaming won. He pulled the paper out again, waved it in Raoul’s face.
Raoul snatched it out of Kit’s hand. “Do you believe this, Pirate?” Kit yelled. “Do you believe this?!”
They started jumping up and down together like the acrobatically insane. “Ninety-nine! Ninety-nine!” Raoul promptly turned it into something like a sports chant. “Nine-ty-nine! Nine-ty-nine!”
People wandering down the hall that crossed this one stared at them, vaguely interested by the actions of the certifiably mad— meaning anyone who would still willingly be in the building after the end of the last period. “But what did you get?” Kit said as they headed toward the doors at the end of the hall.
“Eighty,” Raoul said.
Kit suddenly felt bizarrely disappointed. “How’d that happen?”
“I messed up the essay,” Raoul said. “But I did okay on everything else. It’s not a bad grade. My mom’ll get off my case now.”
“Mine, too,” Kit said, “I hope. But wow, what a relief. I thought I was dead!”
“I thought you were dead!” Raoul laughed that crazed laugh of his as they went down the hall to the paired doors that led to the parking lot. They each hit one door and burst out into the hot, humid summer air, laughing.
“This day could not possibly get any better,” Kit said.
“Oh, come on,” Raoul said, “stretch your brains. Anything could happen…”
They saw Raoul’s mom’s slightly beat-up red station wagon come swinging in through the parking lot gates. “So listen,” Raoul said, “my dad says we’re having a big barbecue next week, for his birthday. Next Thursday. You and your folks and your sister, you’re all invited. Can you make it?”
“I’ll find out.”
“Okay,” Raoul said, as his own mom pulled up. “Text me later!”
Kit nodded, waving at Raoul’s little blond mom as he got into the car. The first thing Raoul did was fish around in his pack and show his mom the test paper: she grinned, and Raoul flashed a grin of his own at Kit as his mom drove away.
Kit let out a long breath as he glanced down at his own paper one more time, then put it away. His nerves were finally settling down, which was a good thing, as he was also still tired from doing that spell. He wasn’t so tired, though, that he wasn’t going to immediately call the wizard with whom he worked most closely and do a little gloating.
He pulled his wizard’s manual out of his backpack, flipping it open to the rearmost pages, the messaging area. Some pages were covered with stored messages, all seemingly printed in the graceful curvilinear characters of the wizardly Speech; but any one Kit touched with a finger would seem to rise up out of the page, the writing increasing in size for easier reading. He flipped through the back pages until he found one that was blank, ready to take a message— and then stopped. In the middle of a page that had been blank earlier in the afternoon was a single line of text, and it was glowing fiercely blue and pulsing alternately brighter and fainter— the sign of a message that had just come in and hadn’t yet been read.
Kit peered at it. There was nothing there but a time stamp— JD 2455367.11685— and these words:
We’ve found the bottle. Meeting this afternoon. M.
The breath went right out of Kit.
Holy cow …Raoul was right!!
“Yes!” Kit shouted. He slapped the manual shut, shoved it back in the book bag, and jumped up and punched the air some more. And then, because right in front of the school would have been a bad place to do a teleport, he ran off across the parking lot, grinning, to find a more private spot.
2: Gili Motang
Nita Callahan sat on the flat, warm stones at the edge of the koi pond, her eyes closed, looking for something.
After a moment, she saw it. Shadow, she thought. A shadow across the Sun. Just for a few seconds. But when?
She waited: and then she knew.
“Now,” she said, and opened her eyes.
The water rippled at her in the summer breeze, the surface of it dazzling in the bright and uninterrupted sunlight. Nita winced.
“Oh, come on,” she said under her breath. “Come on!” She looked up at the sky overhead. It remained stubbornly clear.