“Oh,” Kit said. “Okay . . .”
“So let’s jump now,” she said, “because the shrubs have nothing to fear from us. Right?”
“Right.”
She reached down toward the transit circle; a line of light ran up from it to the charm bracelet on her wrist. Nita wound her fingers around the bracelet, tugged.
A second later, they were indeed in the shrubbery. It was so thick and overarching a patch of rhododendrons that there was no possibility anyone could have seen them. But there was a trampled-down patch in the middle. “I have a feeling wizards use this a lot,” Kit said.
“Or somebody does,” Nita said, and grinned at him.
It was beginning to occur to Kit that the changed circumstances that the two of them were dealing with were going to have the side effect of giving them a whole lot more things to joke about. And that can’t be bad . . .
They made their way cautiously out of the undergrowth, Nita pausing at the edge to look around before she waved Kit out behind her. “Don’t want anybody thinking we were doing what you’re afraid they might think we were doing,” she said, giving him a sidewise glance.
“No, of course not . . .”
Together they headed across a carefully groomed park with swings and slides and a graveled running path through it, and finally down into a street lined on both sides with two- or three-story houses painted in bright colors. “I swear I’ve seen this street on TV,” Kit said. “In some commercial. Or on a postcard somewhere.”
“It could be,” Nita said. “Or on some old TV show . . .”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “What’s the house number again?”
“Thirty-five.”
“There it is, then,” Kit said. It was across from where they stood; a white house with a slight overhang over its garage, a red-tiled roof, and a broad picture window looking out on the street.
They crossed over and went up the steps to the front door, and rang the doorbell. A few moments later it opened for them, and there was Penn, dressed in a floppy T-shirt and surfer jams and sandals, his hair rumpled, as if he’d been asleep. “Hey,” he said. “Dai. Come on in.”
They stepped into a long, quarry-tiled hall with various big heavy oak doors leading off it, white stuccoed walls, and pale oak beams crossing the ceiling at intervals: down at the end of the hall they could see into a bright north-facing room with a large table and some chairs in it, possibly a kitchen. “Is there anybody here we should know about?” Kit asked.
“What?” Penn said, yawning and scrubbing one hand through his hair. “Oh, no, don’t worry about that, it’s just me here and they’re all out at work.”
He looks like he just got out of bed, Kit thought. If I was expecting company, I’d at least be up for a while before they showed up! But it was early to start getting so judgmental. They’d barely met. There was no telling what kinds of pressure he was under at home.
“So where are we going to be working?” Nita said.
Once again, Penn looked at her as if he had no idea what she was doing there. “Uh, downstairs in the media room. Come on,” he said, and led them down a spiral staircase to the lower level of the house.
They followed him down the polished oak steps into a room with some large plush sofas and easy chairs over in one corner and a huge entertainment center up against the wall across from them, with a gigantic screen and a wet bar off to one side. The fourth wall was nothing but a huge picture window looking out across that glorious northern vantage of the Golden Gate and the sea.
“Wow,” Nita said. “That is some view.”
“Thanks,” Penn said, smiling at her for the first time. “We like it. You guys want something to drink? Beer? Wine? Soda?”
It occurred to Kit that it was early to be offering them wine or beer, both in terms of their drinking ages and the time of day—not to mention that the very concept of drinking while doing any kind of wizardry gave him the shivers. You might as well juggle loaded guns. “Uh, if you’ve got something like mineral water, that would be nice. Neets?”
“Yeah,” she said, “same for me, please.”
Penn went to the wet bar, got a couple of plastic spring water bottles out of the small refrigerator below it, and handed one to each of them. “There you go. Listen, sorry about yesterday—” He looked briefly sheepish. “I have a problem with crowds sometimes.”
“It’s all right,” Kit said. “It got a bit intense there.” And for Kit, so it had: he wasn’t used to wizards in such large numbers. Or rather, I kept thinking about the Moon . . . went through his mind.
He pushed the thought aside for the moment. Someday it’ll get easier. It may take a while. But someday . . .
Meanwhile Nita was carefully cracking the cap off her bottle of mineral water. “Would it be overstepping to ask what your folks do?” she said to Penn.
“They own a small supermarket chain,” he said. “Asian groceries, sundries, that kind of thing. Import-export.”
“Not wizards, then,” Kit said.
Penn laughed out loud. “Oh God, no, that would be one of the last things they’d want. One of the reasons they left China, as a matter of fact. Too much magic in our neighborhood.” He had picked up a mineral water of his own; now he swigged from it. “Anyway, don’t worry, you won’t be seeing them. Even if they do get home early, they won’t come down here while I’m working.”
“You’re out to them?” Nita said.
“Yeah. My dad always knew it might happen to me, and my stepmom got over the shock pretty quick.” He smiled. “They were hoping I wouldn’t be a wizard, to tell you the truth . . .” He shook his head. “But the tendency’s strong on my grandfather’s side of the family. My dad thought of it as such an old-country kind of thing: he was glad it skipped him, and he thought it might skip me, too. When we immigrated over here and my Ordeal happened anyway, they were pretty disappointed.” Penn shrugged. “But they got past it.”
An old-country kind of thing. Kit tucked that concept away for future examination. He knew that because of China’s great age as a nexus of cultures, the concept of wizardry had had a very long time to become embedded into it, and as a result, in places China was much more accepting of the concept of magic than many other parts of the world. It hardly meant that you could run down the street throwing wizardry around without consequences. But the thought that magic could exist, did exist, was apparently working in the background for a lot of people. It hadn’t occurred to him that this might create more problems than it solved.
“Well,” Kit said, “why don’t we get to work? The thing for us all to do, now, is figure out how we can best be of help to you. Help you structure your research . . . assist you with implementing the wizardry you’re working on. Or if you’ve got some logistical or ethical issues that you want to flesh out around your project.” While going through his own orientation pack, Kit had been surprised to discover that the part of the presentation that dealt with spell justification and intervention rationale was something that a lot of candidates didn’t spend enough time on. There were plenty of people who simply thought a hot new energy spell was a great idea and didn’t deal with the emotional and ethical impact statements surrounding it until it was almost too late. When they were standing up in front of a panel of Senior Wizards, having to defend their rationale from attack on all sides, those who had neglected this part of the project soon wished they hadn’t.
“Well, theoretically you’re supposed to be helping me sort out any problems with the spell,” Penn said. He ambled over to a nearby coffee table that had a few books on it, including one with a leather binding and Chinese characters embossed and gilded on the front of it. This he flipped casually open and glanced down at a two-page spread that Kit could see was covered from side to side with the graceful curlicued script of the Speech. “Except that there aren’t any problems.”