“You think.” Carmela looked bemused. “Since when do you not know everything about something like this? You are the queen of research and you’ve known about this Invitational thing for days, and this guy for nearly as long! But instead you’re standing here overthinking yourself into a hole in the ground about how the way you dress might make people think about Kit! Aren’t you?”
Nita couldn’t find a single way to refute this line of reasoning. Which frankly doesn’t look good . . . she thought. Am I such a total wuss? This is awful.
“Well, forget that,” Carmela said. “Because why would you dress for him? You dress for you, and let the boys or whatever fall where they may. Here, this flowery dress with the V-neck—” She pushed her way to it and seized it out of the air. “You know you like this one! It does the swirl thing when you spin around. Add those leggings under it, that lace camisole thing, put on some flats in case you’re planning on falling down a crevasse or something, and then finish this up.”
Nita hesitated. “I’m wondering if it makes me look too . . . girly.”
Carmela’s eyes went wide. “How are we even having this conversation? I remember you standing there in the Crossings with that magic gun thing and picking off nasty aliens one after another like Clint Eastwood—”
Nita could remember it too, and the memory was not pleasant. “I hated that.”
“I know, you kept apologizing. Okay, maybe not something that Eastwood would have done. But still! Very you, and your reactions didn’t ruin your aim, either. And now you’re standing here worrying that a flowery dress is somehow going to damage your intergalactic image?! Wow, have you got the wrong number.”
Nita slumped against the cool of the window. “It’s just that there’ve been a couple of, I don’t know, strange moments with Kit lately—”
“When you’ve been around my little brother as long as I have, you’ll see that most of his moments are strange. The wizardry’s just been a blip.”
Nita put her eyebrows up at that, but still had to smile. “I thought he might come out with me to check out this whalesark—I told you I was working on that?—and he comes out with this line about ‘No, don’t have time, but you know, I’ve been thinking I should get out there again, get back in touch with my nature side . . .’”
“His nature side!” Carmela snorted with laughter. “What is he talking about?”
“Well, look where he was just the other day when the news came down. Off shooting up the Moon . . . His gaming group’s into this very tech-wizardly stuff at the moment. Though the last session might not have gone as smoothly as he was expecting. I hear one of his team’s been giving him trouble.” Nita laughed under her breath and then assumed someone else’s face and voice. “‘Where’s Nita, are you excluding her from this, don’t tell me you see this as some kind of boy thing . . .’” She grinned. “Lissa’s like a buzz saw. All edges and spinning. You don’t mess with Lissa . . .”
“Yet Little Brother keeps doing that,” Carmela said. “Could be a sign that he’s as confused as you are right now? But seriously: ‘his nature side’? Like the Moon’s not nature.”
“Yeah, well, you know how some of the guys at school are. They talk like worrying about how the planet’s doing is stupid, like it’s . . .”
“I can hear the world ‘girly’ hovering in the air.” Carmela rolled her eyes. “Idiots.”
“But it wasn’t just that one thing.” Nita sighed. “Every now and then it seems like stuff that never bothered him before is becoming an issue. Roles . . . what people think . . .”
Carmela narrowed her eyes. “The only people whose opinions matter here are your fellow wizards’, yeah?” Nita opened her mouth. “And not about your clothes! We’re past that now. There’re going to be a lot of people at this thing who think of you as famous. Your dress is not going to be the issue. Nita Callahan is going to be the issue! The only thing you have to worry about is how to smile graciously while not tripping over the bodies of everybody who wants to worship at your feet.”
“That’s . . . an interesting image.”
“Yeah. As I said, wear flats. No point in injuring them with heels while they’re abasing themselves.”
Nita pushed away from the window with a smile and started pulling her clothes back down out of the air, the ones on hangers first. “Seriously, though . . .” She shook her head. “You think things’ll get easier when you finally break down and say it. ‘Boyfriend.’ And then you find your troubles have just begun . . .”
“Oh, Neets! ‘Troubles’!”
Nita laughed too. “Too grim?”
“You should hear yourself.” Carmela started pulling down some of the floating clothes and folding them neatly over one arm. “You’re having a crisis of confidence. That’s all.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve ever had one of those.”
“Yeah. I thought I was wrong about something, once. I got over it.”
Nita burst out laughing. “It’s just . . . This is when I’m supposed to be giving someone else advice about how to do stuff. Not the best time for a crisis, you know?”
“Knowing the way your life runs,” Carmela said, folding another top over her arm, “something much more gripping and involved will come up almost immediately and you’ll forget all about this.”
“Good.” Nita let out a breath. “Because the idea that I’m getting cold feet embarrasses me.”
Carmela waved a hand again, dismissive. “That’s not where you are. I think maybe your feet are just now warming up. You know what I mean? The two of you have been through a lot. And now suddenly it happens that you’re in this part of your life where everybody starts paying so much attention to Life Plans and what you’re going to do with yourself from now on until the end of time, and everything starts feeling so permanent.”
“Or not permanent,” Nita said very softly.
Carmela went quiet and just looked at Nita for a moment. “You’re afraid that just saying it has jinxed it somehow. That what you had was perfect, and you’ve screwed it up.”
Nita paused, then nodded. “Even though he said ‘about time.’”
“And he hasn’t said it since, I bet.”
Nita shook her head. Then she laughed at herself. “I must sound so needy.”
“No. You know what the problem is? You two are too used to reading each other’s minds in a crisis. You hit the talking part and you choke. And here I thought wizardry was all about, you know, Speech.”
They looked at each other and then both burst out laughing at the same time. “Come on,” Nita said. “We ought to get out of here in the next hour or so. Your worldgate or mine? I’ve got a subsidy.”
“Let’s take mine. As it happens, I know the entity who’s in charge of your subsidy, and you want to make sure he’s got you hooked up to the VIP handling routines.”
Nita grinned and picked up the camisole and leggings Carmela had pointed out to her. “Is Sker’ret going to be there himself, you think?”
“In the later stages, yeah. It’s a big deal, and the Earth worldgates are kind of special in the master gating system: he’ll be wanting to make sure that Chur doesn’t get overloaded again.”
“Let’s go, then. Can’t keep the talented new intake of wizards waiting.”
“Are you kidding?” Carmela said. “They can’t start till we get there.”
They popped out together into an area that looked suspiciously like a gating cluster at the Crossings—a shining white floor, patterned with glowing blue hexagonal shapes, each one big enough to hold five or six people comfortably. Nita glanced around, trying to get a grasp of the space around them. The central part was roughly circular, about the size of the main concourse in Grand Central Terminal; the ceiling was much higher, and translucent. It let in the light of the bright Antarctic day, and it was intricately carved with shapes whose fine details were mostly lost at this distance. But somebody had plainly spent a whole lot of time doing those carvings. Figures of animals and aliens and heaven knew what else were spread out over it in groups and clusters, while between them the ceiling surface was delicately patterned with geometric shapes and what might have been long sentences in the Speech, carved into the ice. “Holy cow,” Nita said under her breath. “Somebody’s got a lot of time on their hands . . .”