I’m not very sure. As I remember, he told you that you ought to do this thing.
“Yeah, well. When he and Dad get in one of those tag-teaming moods, sometimes it’s not so easy to figure out what they’re thinking separately.”
She gave the scrunchie one final twist and sat down on her bed while Spot clambered up onto it and looked at her thoughtfully with several stalked-up eyes. Stopping your work with him right now troubles you, he said.
She nodded. “It’s just . . . I don’t know. So much of what he’s teaching me, I started out having to parrot it back to him. Do what he was doing. But it’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to understand the theory.” She reached up and fiddled with her hair again. “I keep seeing something he does, or sometimes I’ll be hearing something Nelaid’s talking about, truly hearing it instead of just listening to it, and it’ll remind me of something or other Roshaun said to me once.”
Something specific?
“No . . . Except yes. Once or twice,” Dairine murmured, her gaze going unfocused as in her mind she saw herself walking around the stellar simulator, staring at it, at its many readouts of the subtle and complex forces in play inside Thahit or Earth’s Sun, and listening to what Nelaid was telling her about them. And something he said would unexpectedly trigger the sound of Roshaun’s voice saying something very similar. Then her insides would flare up with the thought, That, that was something important. But why was it important? And then half the time she’d lose the thread of whatever it was about in a flood of sheer relief that she could remember what his voice sounded like, that she hadn’t forgotten how he sounded. The thought of forgetting Roshaun’s voice woke Dairine up sweating cold, some nights.
But you can’t remember what it was about, Spot said.
“No,” she said, and sighed. “I wonder sometimes, am I imagining it? But I don’t think so.” Dairine frowned. “There’s something . . . something useful that I’ve been missing. Something we’ve been getting close to, when I’m working with the simulator. We’ve been doing a lot of work on stellar kernel stuff, the star’s software . . .” She sighed again. “There’s so much data, though, it keeps piling up, and every time I think I might have time to start reviewing it, something else happens and I get distracted . . .”
You don’t have to do this, you know. They said you didn’t.
“But yeah, I do, because I said I was going to,” Dairine said. “If I was going to pull out, I should have done it before the meet-and-greet the other night . . . I’m in it now. It’s only for a few weeks. And who knows, maybe something’ll happen to jog my memory.”
Dairine got up, looked herself over in the mirror one last time, and on a hunch reached into the top dresser drawer to rummage around. She pulled out a big dark blue scarf in light, cheap silk, something of her mom’s. She kept remembering that Mehrnaz had had her head covered. What religion she might be wasn’t any of Dairine’s business at this point, but if Mehrnaz felt she needed to wear something like that when she was out in public, then Dairine might wind up in the same situation. And it wouldn’t do to differ from her mentee in any way that would attract people’s attention. She wound the scarf around her neck a couple of times, knotted it, shoved the ends down her collar, and then turned to pick Spot up off the bed. “Ready to go undercover?”
Ready.
Down at the bed’s end was one last thing she thought she might need: a plain brown leather messenger bag with a long strap. Her mom had bought it for her some years back thinking it would be good for schoolbooks, but her mother’s concept of what you needed to carry your books to school in was plainly from the distant past, when schools didn’t believe in giving you quite so much homework. Dairine slid Spot into the bag and buckled it shut. “Got those coordinates I selected?”
Located. Ready to initialize.
“Then let’s go!”
They popped out in a place Dairine had carefully preselected with the manual, an alleyway within a few minutes’ walk of Mehrnaz’s family’s apartment. It was a strange sort of halfway-to-Oz moment: the pavement of the alley where she stood all scattered with rubbish, barred doors and screen doors opening off it, walls full of windows reaching up high on either side and blocking out the light, so that it was almost dim here, with the hum of overtaxed air-conditioners drifting down from above. But at the alley’s end, everything was people and vehicles and bikes rushing by in both directions in full sunlight, a gaudy hot morning light completely unlike what morning light far north of here would be.
On target? Spot said in her mind. He could most likely see it through her eyes, but out of courtesy he often acted as if he couldn’t.
“Yeah,” Dairine said.
She walked down the alley and out into the street. But this took her longer than she expected, because that street—which she’d selected because it seemed quiet—was extremely busy and crowded. Dairine had walked New York streets at lunch hour more than once, but this was far worse than anything she remembered. There seemed to be different rules for how you walked here: people seemed willing to be pushed a lot closer together than they’d been even in the worst crush Dairine could remember at rush hour in the subway. The smells here were different, too: car exhaust, of course—the traffic was crazy—but also bizarre scents and unexpected stinks, people’s perfumes and bodies and the smell of food seemingly everywhere. For me it’s the middle of the night, she thought, her stomach growling emphatically as she went by a storefront where they were frying something spicy-smelling, so why am I hungry?
And the whole picture was complicated by the way people stared at her . . . specifically, the way men were staring at her. It wasn’t as if that had never happened before, but the gawking she was experiencing now was different from the usual kind. From some of the guys, there was an unpleasant owning quality to the gaze they fastened on her: as if they felt they had a right to stare.
At first Dairine handled this exactly the way she would’ve handled it at home. As she walked, she stared back to let them know she wasn’t afraid. But shortly she began to notice that this didn’t help. At home, glances would’ve shifted, eyes would’ve looked away. Here a lot of them just kept on looking, and some of the men smiled. Dairine did not find the smiles at all nice.
Her first impulse was to use some wizardry to give them something else to think about—like falling on their faces in the crowded street—and see if they could smile at that. But she could imagine what Tom’s response would be to that kind of behavior. I’m not here to cause trouble, she thought. I’m here to get a job done, and help somebody out, and keep a low profile. If there’s some kind of culture-shocky thing going on, for the moment my job is to cope.
Annoyed, Dairine stepped to one side of the street into the narrow space between a news kiosk and a sweetshop, and said the last few words of the spell she’d been holding ready on Tom’s advice. A second later, she was invisible and moving away from there, while one of the nearest men who’d been staring and grinning at her now blinked and tried to figure out what had happened.
Dairine snickered quietly and kept moving, while at the same time being fairly resentful at having to disappear. It was a challenge, moving in circumstances like these when nobody else could see her, but, she reminded herself, it was a challenge she was up for.