“Uh, excuse me?”
A very soft voice, very shy sounding, pulled Dairine out of her thoughts. She blinked. Standing in front of her, twisting her hands together, was a dark-haired girl of maybe fourteen. She was wearing long dark trousers with a kind of blue watered-silk overcoat on top, and had a big, geometrically patterned scarf in blue and white wrapped around her head and shoulders.
“Hi there,” Dairine said.
The girl was looking at her with the oddest expression of near astonishment. “Are you Dairine Callahan?”
“Uh, yeah. And you’re—Mehrnaz? Did I pronounce it right?”
“Yes, yes you did—” She said it as if this was an amazing thing. And then she blushed.
“Well, dai stihó.”
The girl opened her mouth, then shut it again, and it took her a moment more to manage words. “Is there some mistake?” she said at last.
Now what in the world does she mean by that—? “Mistake!”
“I mean, are you absolutely sure you were assigned to me?”
What, she doesn’t like the idea for some reason or other? Dairine, already on edge, was just about ready to let her have it. But the girl’s face was so scared, and looked so little like that of someone who was trying to be offensive, that she held her fire for the moment.
“Well,” Dairine said, and pointed above her head. “Little blue light . . .” Then she pointed to the girl’s. “Little red light . . .” She shrugged as both of them went out. “And I think we have to assume the wizardry’s working right, because otherwise a lot more people would be complaining.”
That shy face was suddenly transfigured with laughter. “Oh, Powers,” Mehrnaz murmured. “It’s true, it’s really true, isn’t it? It’s you! The one who wouldn’t move the planet.”
Dairine was confused. Then, suddenly, the memory of a long-ago phone conversation, from after her Ordeal, came back to her. “No,” she said. “It was fine right where it was.” Yet there was no avoiding the stab of frustration that came to her now as she thought of the time when she could have done something like that, even would have done it if the reason had been right. “But seriously,” she said, “since when do they let privileged communications like that out into the manual?” And she had to laugh. “If it’s there, though, I guess it can’t have been that privileged. Maybe I had the comms permissions set up wrong. It was kind of an exciting time . . .”
“And you were so awesome,” Mehrnaz said. “Are so awesome! I can’t believe it! It’s such an honor to be paired up with you.”
“Uh, okay,” Dairine said, astonished. This was not the way she’d imagined this was going to go. She’d expected to be bored by whoever she met. But who thinks I’m amazing? Even Roshaun never . . .
She shook her head. Wrong thing to be thinking about right now. Meanwhile, Mehrnaz seemed content just to stand in front of Dairine in wonder: and the idea struck her as faintly ridiculous. “So you’re the one who wants to take earthquakes apart from underneath,” she said.
“You looked at my spell!” Mehrnaz said.
“I read the précis,” Dairine said. “Spot read the spell, and we discussed it in general terms. Some pretty complex stuff there—”
Mehrnaz’s eyes went wide: she followed Dairine’s glance down. Spot had spidered over to crouch down in front of Mehrnaz, and was looking at her with all his eyes. “This is him!”
“Yes, it is,” Dairine said, and she had to smile, because this was all going so differently from what she’d expected. “Look . . . why don’t we go find someplace to sit down, and you can start telling me more about it, okay?”
“Yes, absolutely yes!” And without another word Mehrnaz was heading off toward the far side of the ice cave in search of an empty conversation niche, while looking back over her shoulder every few feet with a big grin at Dairine.
I have a fan, she thought. This is truly weird.
We have a fan, Spot said, scurrying past her.
All Dairine could do was laugh and go after the two of them, because the excitement to which she’d said goodbye was rising again. Okay, she said to the Powers. I’m game. Even though You knew I was busy, You got me into this. So let’s see what happens . . .
5
San Francisco
KIT HAD NEVER BEEN to the City by the Bay, as much because of a lack of time and opportunity as of power. It was surprising how busy a wizard could get, between errantry and school and family business; you might think you had infinite power to go anywhere you liked—just build the transport spell and go—but then you found that it didn’t work out that way. Everything took energy, and sometimes what with one thing and another there wasn’t enough to spare.
Now, though, standing here on the high point Nita had chosen for their long jump from Grand Central, he was sorry he’d put it off this long. They had come out “high on a hill,” the kind of place where the song suggested you were supposed to leave your heart. The view of the ocean alone would have been enough to make the trip worthwhile for Kit. Way ahead of them, way past the Bay and the famous orangey bridge, the Pacific Ocean stretched out vast and quiet and glittering, dappled with shadows and patches of light left by the low clouds sliding over it. It was an ocean Kit could look at without feeling the slight chill up his spine that the sight of the Atlantic at home always gave him. Not that we didn’t do good things there, Kit thought. But there were a lot of bad things that could have happened . . . and some of them got way, way too close.
He sighed. This, though, was different. “I can see why people would want to live here,” he said, “even with the earthquakes.”
Next to him, Nita rubbed her arms a little. It was cold up here in the wind, colder than either of them had expected. “I don’t know about the earthquakes,” Nita said, looking northward at the San Francisco skyline. “I’d rather the Earth held still.”
“Yeah,” Kit said, “it’s probably preferable. So where is he exactly?”
She gestured with her chin. “Right down there,” she said. Houses climbed a good way up the hill where they stood, following the curves of the narrow streets from side to side as they angled steeply up the slope. It looked like an old, well-established neighborhood. And, from what Kit knew about the area, probably an expensive one. “High-rent district,” he said under his breath.
“It looks that way,” Nita said. “We’ll find out.” She glanced down at the transit circle glowing on the ground at their feet. “You ready? I’ll jump us down. There’s a park nearby with some ornamental plantings where we won’t be seen.”
“This is what happens when your dad’s a gardener, isn’t it?” Kit muttered. “We always wind up in the shrubs somewhere.”
Then he cursed himself silently. What is it? Kit thought. What’s going on with me that makes everything I say in the last couple few weeks come out sounding like it means something dirty?
Nita threw him an amused look. “Stop it,” she said.
“I know. I know. I just can’t seem to—”
“I don’t mean that!” she said. “Stop freaking out about it.” And she snickered. “Because it’s happening to me too.”