I wonder, she thought. She reached out and touched Darryl’s listing: it blinked.
“Yeah?” his voice said from the page. “Oh, it’s you, Neets! Hi.”
“Hey, Darryl. How’re you doing?”
“Pooped,” Darryl said. “And bruised. What a day.”
“Bruised? What, did you take a spill up there while you were running away from the movie monsters?”
His laugh was rueful. “Wish I had,” Darryl said. “It might ache less. I had a little visit from Tom a while ago.”
Nita blinked. “What?”
“Yeah,” Darryl said. “Looks like he and Mamvish and some of the Upper Ups weren’t real pleased with what we were doing up there. I guess I can understand why, after the fact. But he was really steamed. I don’t get to go up there again without other team members along, he says. Neither does Ronan. And he grounded Kit.”
Nita’s mouth fell open. “No way!”
“Oh yeah,” Darryl said. “Escorted visits only, and no other travel off the planet for the moment—”
But Nita was already paging through the manual to Kit’s listing, and sure enough, there was the red no-travel access flag. She was shocked. “Wow! He must be crushed—”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Darryl said. “I sure feel like an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t think it through while we were up there. Though there didn’t seem to be a lot of time to think; everything kept happening so fast…”
Nita was still shaking her head in disbelief. “Have you talked to him? How is he?”
“No, he wasn’t home. Didn’t he have to go out or something?”
“Yeah. They must still be out.” She rubbed her eyes. “Poor Kit! This is gonna make him crazy.”
“Yeah.” Darryl sighed. “Look, Neets, I’m having some trouble with my own peeps right now. I should get off—”
“Sure,” Nita said. “Darryl, thanks for letting me know. I hadn’t even noticed.”
“Knowing Kit, he might be grateful for that …Don’t beat him up too much, Miss Neets.”
“I won’t. Talk to you later—”
“Yeah,” Darryl said. And his listing grayed out.
Nita closed the manual. Wow, she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. Kit?
It was several moments before the answer came back. What?
Her insides clenched. He sounded sullen and hugely hurt, and there was something else hanging over the back of his mind that Nita couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she wanted to— a strange sense of mingled frustration and fear.
Listen, I heard—
Of course you did, he said. The entire planet has to have heard. Other planets, too. Every wizard who can read, anyway. His anger was simply sizzling under his skin.
Look, Nita said, try not to take it so hard! You’ve been in situations like this before and you’ve come out okay—
Oh, really? When have I ever been banned? Kit nearly shouted. And this is the worst time, the worst possible time. We didn’t hurt anything. Nothing bad happened. I don’t get why I have to be banned now!
Kit, look—
Yeah, but I’m sure you’ve got some good reason. Why don’t you enlighten me?
Nita blinked at the nasty tone. Kit, she said, I don’t have any reasons. I don’t know that much about what happened up there. You’re the one who knows—
Oh, yeah? You know about some stuff, all right. You know about Aurilelde. I saw you looking. I could feel it—
She had half been afraid of that: but she couldn’t let herself be ashamed of what she’d done. Kit, I was just worried about you. I had to make sure that you—
—Weren’t in some kind of trouble I couldn’t get myself out of, is that the excuse? Well, I wasn’t! I was fine! But I can’t do anything by myself without you getting involved, can I? Watchdogging me all the time. Spying on me! Like you’re jealous!
Nita’s mouth dropped open. Kit, she said, no way I would spy on you, I just—
It just sort of turned out that way, huh? Sure, I believe that. You just can’t cope with the idea that there might be somebody else in my life, somebody who’s not a wizard, somebody you can’t control—
She took a long breath, and another long breath, before saying anything further. But Kit said, So just do me a favor and butt out, all right? Now that I’m nice and safe and grounded on Earth, you won’t have to worry about me getting myself in trouble and needing to be rescued! So take a break, all right? Just let me alone!
And he cut the connection.
Nita stared at the manual in complete astonishment.
What… was…that?
It almost didn’t even sound like Kit there in the middle.
Well, like him, yeah.
But not like him saying it. Not really him.
She lay there for some time, in shock. Other thoughts were roiling in her head: ideas that she’d previously dismissed as bad ones were starting to look not only good but necessary.
Yet if I do this, it will be exactly what he’s accusing me of. I’ll be spying on him.
Nita lay there for some moments more. After a while, almost reluctantly, the peridexis said, I have the results of that persona analysis of Kit’s experience with Aurilelde.
Nita raised her eyebrows. “Took you long enough!”
I warned you it would take some while. Even now some of the extrapolation is dubious.
Nita sighed. “Never mind. Show me what you’ve got.” She closed her eyes.
In the dark behind her eyelids, the analysis displayed, laid out like a sector of a spell diagram— not the full circle, but the chord and arc that expressed and described the important physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the subject of the analysis. It was the person’s wizardly signature, expressed in the Speech so that a spell into which it was inserted would include that person properly. Normally working this out could take quite a while: the utility was handy for last-minute work.
Nita looked the signature over. The curved ribbon of it was spotted with dark empty patches, but the main structure was plain enough to read. As she looked it over, Nita felt some puzzlement. “This looks familiar,” she said. “Why does this look so familiar?”
She peered more closely at the particular structure she thought she recognized, an intricately knotted string of Speech-characters. Look at that, it looks just like—
—just like the one in my signature—
Nita stared. The longer she looked, the more obvious it became that there were a lot of parts to this signature that looked like hers.
I would say perhaps forty percent, the peridexis said.
Nita opened her eyes and sat up. “How does that happen?” she whispered.
And the thought came into her head: Somebody’s using things they found out about me to trap Kit.
“Bobo,” Nita said after a few moments, “I hate this.”
That, the peridexis said, closely reflects the sound of all wizards everywhere when making difficult but closely considered ethical choices.
“But I don’t see that I have a choice,” Nita said. “Too many lives depend on it. People on Earth, wizards who might get involved. Even the Shamaska-Eilitt! If this goes wrong somehow, they’re all in danger. At the very least there’s going to be a lot of disruption on Earth. There could be riots. People could get hurt or killed. And there could be other effects I can’t foresee.”
You do have a choice, Bobo said, and you’re about to tell me what it is.
Nita took a deep breath. “Bug him,” she said. “Put a spinoff on Kit’s manual’s log like the one on Dairine’s. I want the same kind of readout on his thought processes that Spot was giving Dad— the streaming consciousness.”
There was a silence. I am required to remind you that there will be a ‘final reckoning’ payment when you decommission this wizardry, and the payment may be personally damaging if oversight determines the wizardry was not successful, or successful in the wrong ways.
“I understand,” Nita said. And she swallowed. “Do it.”