Irina gave him a dry look. “Go,” she said, and waved a hand.
Kit vanished.
***
He appeared in his kitchen and turned to head toward the back door— and found that standing there, looking at him wide-eyed, with yet another armful of laundry, was Helena.
“Uh—” Kit said.
To his great relief, the look with which his sister was favoring him was more bemused than scared or angry. “So that noise is traditional, then,” she said.
“Huh?”
“When you appear,” Helena said. “It’s in the mutant comic books, too. ‘Bamf!’” And she then started looking even more bemused. “Does this mean the comics people actually know mutants?”
“Uh, they might,” Kit said.
Helena nodded, apparently pleased at having worked this out for herself. She started heading toward the cellar stairs with her laundry, then paused as something occurred to her. “When you appear out of nowhere like that,” she said, “there’s no chance you could appear where somebody else already is, is there? Like, you know, a transporter accident?”
Kit was briefly annoyed, then realized it was a fair question. “No. There’s an automatic offset, it—” He stopped, as there was no point in explaining the safeguards built into the spelclass="underline" Helena was thinking in a different idiom now, and he was just going to have to get used to it. “It can’t happen. Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay.” Helena headed for the stairs and was halfway down them as Kit stepped down onto the landing and reached in among the coats and so forth to pull out what he’d come back for. Helena stopped on the stairs, looked up at the glowing thing that Kit was carefully unwinding from the hook where it had been hanging.
“What’s that? Oh, don’t tell me!” Helena said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Wonder Woman’s magic lasso? Is that real, too?” And then she paused. “I thought it was supposed to be gold.”
Not for the first time when dealing with one of his sisters, Kit was left briefly speechless.
Helena got a musing look. “And if that can be real, maybe other stuff from the comics could be real, too? Like… I can’t remember: what are those guys called who have the green glowy rings? Like them. Wouldn’t it be great if there was this interplanetary brotherhood with all kinds of creatures, you know, banding together and using their powers to fight evil?”
She sighed, then smiled at Kit. “Never mind, I know, it’s probably more secret stuff,” Helena said, turning and heading down the stairs again. “Guess I’ve just got to get used to it. What a world.” She moved out of sight, and Kit heard the clunk of the washer’s lid being opened. “I should really start getting back into comics. My brother the mutant…”
Kit stared down at her, dumbfounded: then heaved a sigh and vanished again.
Back on Mars, Kit went to Irina and handed her what he’d brought from home.
Irina took the long, slender, pale cord from him. Then she started, her eyes going wide. In its sling, the baby woke up. On her head, the parakeet was shocked into the air and fluttered there for several moments before settling again and staring down at what she held.
Irina ran the cord through her hands, noting, as did everyone else, the way the faint bluish glow about it overrode every other light in that great room. As she moved her hands apart while holding it, the cord stretched: the glow got brighter.
“It was my dog’s,” Kit said. “Before he, well, graduated, he really used to get around. Other universes, other times. Sometimes a lot further. This leash was the only way I could keep up with him. Anchor one end of it in one reality, fasten it to something in another— and it’ll pull the other thing through.”
Mamvish came over to look at Ponch’s old leash. It had been powerful enough when Kit had used it for doggie-walking before the affair with the Pullulus earlier in the year. What it would be able to do now, after having been even briefly affiliated with the canine version of the One, even Kit could only guess.
But apparently Irina had some idea. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, letting out a long, surprised breath and glancing over at Mamvish. “This artifact,” she said, “has a power rating even higher than yours. I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”
Mamvish swung her tail. “And it’s built for transits,” she said. “With this, and your power and mine, we can pull it off. I’d say the solution suits.”
Irina turned back to Kit. “You understand that probably it won’t survive this wizardry.”
Kit nodded. “I don’t need it anymore. And Ponch sure doesn’t. If it can do some good here, then let’s go.”
***
After that it seemed to Nita that things happened nearly as quickly as her decommissioning of the passthrough wizardry had. There was a brief consultation about temporospatial coordinates, and then a transit out to the city limits, past the farthest buildings, at the end of the white road. Mamvish and Irina stood there conferring to resolve the last few issues, while Iskard watched from the road.
Kit had taken Khretef off to one side, and together the two of them stood for a good while looking down at Kit’s manual while Kit turned the pages, shifting from section to section as he constructed a spell. After a few moments he pulled a long glowing string of speech-characters out of the manual—a deactivated spell, set for storage and later use by another wizard.
Nita watched Kit checking the center section of the spell one last time before passing it to Khretef, and knew what it was. Her mouth went dry at the prospect of handing another being so much personal information. But it’s his business. And Khretef, too, looked at the spell with some disquiet: but also, Nita thought, with a touch of guilt. He and Kit exchanged a long glance before Khretef took the spell and made it vanish into his own unseen version of the manuaclass="underline" and he bowed to Kit, quite deeply.
Finally Kit headed back to where Nita waited. “He’s got what he needs to build into the Nascence,” Kit said as they joined her. “So the superegg’ll recognize me and behave the way it ought to, and start all this going.” He glanced over at Irina, who nodded at him. “Irina and Mamvish have stoked the Nascence wizardry up so it can’t be cracked by any amount of brute-force wizardry in backtime …and they’ve stuck a heavy-duty cloaking routine on it so they won’t recognize the presence of their own spell routines in the superegg when we find it on the uptime leg.”
Nita realized that Irina was looking at her. For a moment she didn’t understand— and then she realized what was needed. “I have to give her what you did, don’t I?” she said. “Enough of my personal information for Aurilelde to link to her own. So that the congruency between us is complete, and all this works out the way it should…”
Kit didn’t say anything.
But why wouldn’t I? Nita thought. To make all this come out all right. She nodded at Irina. Irina nodded back, turned away as Khretef headed over to join Kit again.
And only then did it occur to Nita, with a shock, that this would mean it hadn’t actually been Aurilelde who Kit had been so attracted to. It was me…
Khretef looked at her apologetically as he came up beside Kit. “It is a great gift you give us,” Khretef said to both of them. “We will not forget you—who helped us when you had little reason to.”
“I had the same reason any wizard had,” Kit said. “You just had, well, a little memory lapse. With some assistance.”
From a little distance away, where she’d been standing looking rather forlorn, Aurilelde now came over to clutch Khretef’s hand. For a long time it seemed as if she wouldn’t look at Kit or Nita. But finally she stole a glance at them. “You know that I had to—” she said: and then she fell silent.
Nita sighed and shook her head. “It all worked out in the end,” she said. “You were scared. At times like that it’s hard to think straight. Don’t be afraid anymore, okay? And you two be happy together.”