Irina laughed softly. “Not that you can’t have fun at the same time, of course. What’s that famous line from the sports show on one continent? ‘The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat’—well, we hope the agony can be kept to a minimum. To assist you in that regard, we have acting as mentors some of the best and most effective younger wizards of recent years. They come here unified in the intention to help you produce results that will mean other wizards won’t have to go through the crap they did.”
At that a much louder ripple of laughter spread through the group, and Irina joined it. “So if the next three weeks seem cutthroat to some of you, and if you feel your mentors and your fellow competitors are driving you hard, that’s exactly the way it should be. Our oldest competitor, the One who’ll be here and whom you will not see—that One, too, is cutthroat in Its habits. That’s the One whose actions and intentions we can never afford to turn our backs on. The next three weeks are designed to get right in Its face.”
Irina looked around at the crowd, the smile on her face a touch feral now. “No matter what the final result at the end of this proceeding, for the competitors and their support teams, you need to know that our always-present invisible friend—and greeting and defiance to you,” she said, her gaze sweeping around the group—“will be constantly infuriated by what you do. If you choose to frame some of what will happen here as Its fault, well, you wouldn’t be wrong. Some of you will go home bruised. No one will blame you for taking your annoyance out on It later. Indeed, we encourage it.
“But those of you who make it into any one of the finals stages may assume that Its attention will be on you in somewhat increased amounts from here on in. That’s one of the reasons the winner will be working with me for the following year. Anyone who displays such a level of accomplishment so publicly in a wizardly gathering of this kind is entitled to protection after the fact. And we, the Seniors and others involved in the assessment and oversight structures of the Invitational, want you to know that we’re not going to hang you out to dry after you win.”
There was a soft murmur at that. “So,” Irina said. “The thing for you to do now is get to know each other. Some of each other anyway: there are so many of you here! Some of you will know members of the mentor group, having heard of their work. Some of you won’t have a clue and are here to make friends—and that’s fine too; friendship is a thing of incalculable power. There are times it’ll keep you going when you can’t find anything else in the manual that seems to do any good. I hope to greet as many of you as I can before other duties call me away. In the meantime, on behalf of the supervisory structure of the wizards of Sol III, known as Earth and by many other names among our own kind and others, I declare this event, the twelve hundred and forty-first Invitational, to be in progress. Enjoy yourselves, stir around, and I’ll see you all at the finals!”
Irina received a patter of applause as she stepped out of the circle. It sounded somewhat subdued, but Nita strangely could understand that; applauding Earth’s Planetary seemed almost too obvious a gesture. And then, as she turned to Kit, Nita noticed with some surprise that nearly all the wizards in the center of the ice-cavern had little glowing lights hovering over their heads.
Kit started to laugh, as did various other people in the room, possibly for the same reason. “Look,” he said under his breath, “we’re all in The Sims . . .”
“And these lead us to whoever we’re supposed to be meeting?” Nita said, cocking an eye up at her own glowing light, which like Kit’s was faintly blue. It was wobbling rhythmically in the air with a little thataway, thataway, thataway kind of movement that seemed to be indicating a spot past the buffet tables.
“Yeah, looks that way. Shall we?”
Together they started in that direction. The whole crowd scene had turned from a jumble of bodies standing mostly still to a seething confusion through which kids were pushing every which way, everyone wearing that searching-for-a-face expression familiar at airports and train stations. Occasionally one of these people would come up against a red light that matched it in shape and size and the two parties would pause; hands would be shaken, or there would be bows or other styles of greeting, and both parties would look at each other with interest, though (it seemed to Nita) also, in a lot of cases, a certain wariness. Because who knows what they’re getting in one of these situations, at least right at the beginning?
“Getting warmer,” Kit said, glancing up at Nita’s floating indicator: it was flashing faster now, “pointing” more emphatically.
“Yeah,” Nita said, looking at Kit’s. “Is that—Wait, he must have moved. Left, I think.”
“Yeah, over by the buffet again . . .”
They made their way farther through the crowd. “Funny,” Nita murmured, “I think he stopped again.”
“Yeah. Still, we’re close. See how bright these are getting now, he must be—”
“Right there,” Nita said, pointing toward the end of one of the buffet tables, where a tall young man was standing.
He really was tall, Nita thought: right up there with Ronan, despite being a couple of years younger. Pushing six feet, easy . . . and so lean. It was odd how the impact of both the height and the leanness was so much greater in person. She’d seen an image of him in the manual when going over his précis, and the usual height/weight hard data, but it hadn’t made anything like the same kind of impression on her as he was making at the moment. His dark hair was longish and shaggy, covering his ears; his carriage a little slumped, but at first glance it looked like an attitude thing rather than something chronically postural. Stress, Nita thought. Well, why not? All of us are twitching.
He watched her and Kit approach with a much more overstated version of that wary look Nita had seen on some of the people here. She searched briefly in memory for what his stance and affect reminded her of, and then thought of the guys she’d seen on one of the websites she sometimes caught Dairine secretly drooling over, a site devoted to Asian boy bands. Photogenic, sullen, definitely trying to look hard to get. And then there are the clothes, Nita thought. Not that you expected him to be in some kind of traditional gear, why would he be, but—He was wearing designer jeans, a white V-neck T-shirt, a bright floral shirt over that, and a black leather jacket over that, cut high to let as much of the Hawaiian shirt show as possible. Big boots, something like patent-leather Doc Martens, and—Is that lace on the tops of his socks?
It was lace. Neon orange lace, even more blindingly orange than some of the flowers on his Hawaiian shirt. Better keep Tuyet away from this one, she found herself thinking. Too much competition on the clothes side. Come to think of it, better keep Carmela away from this one, too. Because their mentee was definitely quite handsome, though not in the usual ways: his face was slightly longer than it looked like it should have been for its width, but the tilt of his eyes made it all work, and also the depth of their color, a dark, deep brown.