“Yes,” Mehrnaz murmured.
“So forgive me if I don’t waste any more time buttering you up, okay?”
“Okay.”
“So why are you in this, then? Because it might help if I understood.”
“Well.” Mehrnaz looked embarrassed, but not terminally so. “It was the endgame, really. Irina.”
“Yeah,” Dairine said, “I could see the point.”
“No, not just that,” Mehrnaz said. “It was—You don’t understand. It was Irina a long time before this.”
Oh no, Dairine thought. Is this some kind of crush issue? Not that there’d be anything wrong with that, but—
“How much do you know about her?” Mehrnaz said.
“Well, she’s the Planetary—”
“No, no. Not that.” Mehrnaz’s eyes went wide. “You don’t know, do you? Not what she does: what she’s done. You don’t know about San Francisco. You don’t know about La Paz. Or Sydney Marianas.”
“Wait, how do you mean—?”
“You don’t know about the earthquakes. The ones she stopped. By herself.” And Mehrnaz’s voice dropped. “You don’t know about Mazandaran! That’s the one that hit where I used to live, when I was little. It’s why we moved here from Iran. So much was destroyed, our whole town was flattened. It broke windows all the way to Tehran. But it could have been so much worse, it could have spread and set off half the faults in the East. But it didn’t, because of Irina! She is so amazing. You have no idea what kind of wizardry that was, what kind of wizard she is.”
Oh God, Dairine thought, it’s worse than a crush, it’s a hero-worship sandwich with gratitude filling. And I thought when we met the other night that I was getting it bad from her!
. . . So possibly this is not the time to tell her that Irina was in my backyard not long ago, wheedling my dad for his burger recipe. “Well—” Dairine said.
“You don’t understand.” The tremor in Mehrnaz’s voice was impossible to mistake for anything but real passion. “I’d do anything, anything at a chance to study with her, to work with her. I want to do what she did, I want to keep people’s lives from being destroyed like that! Because I’ve been there.” Mehrnaz stared at the floor. “You have no idea what it’s like when you wake up in the dark and have to run, run out, and things start falling, and when the shaking stops all you want to do is sit down on the couch and cry. But there’s no couch, and no house . . . nothing but a pile of bricks and tiles with your whole life buried under them. And past that, nothing but roads twisted up and thrown around like toy car-racing tracks. And then the screaming starts.”
Mehrnaz fell silent. “It took me a long time to get the dreams to go away,” she said. “The sounds, the aftershocks. The way things smelled afterward.” She swallowed. “Not until after my Ordeal. I did some work on my head.” She looked grim, but very satisfied, and the expression made her face look completely different: younger, fiercer. “But once that was over, I knew what I wanted to do. This. And when I found out about the Invitational . . .” She shrugged. “Here I am.”
There’s something else going on, though. Dairine thought, something that scares you more than earthquakes. And that’s what the problem is. You’re going to fail yourself out of this somehow, fail yourself out of a chance at getting something you seriously want, because you’re so scared of whatever that other thing is that you’re going to make sure you’re pushed to one side.
Well, not if I can help it.
“Okay,” Dairine said. “Look. If you’ve come this far, then you need to stay in, okay? Because it’s not just you at stake here: it’s other wizards. If you last through the Cull, this spell—” she pointed at the floor—“will go into everybody’s manuals as a positively rated prospective intervention. Even if you never take it any further, other people will be able to. You’ll have a good chance at saving lives even if you get Culled, because your presentation will get heard. If you give yourself half a chance and work like you think you’re going to make it through, the spell will get even more attention, and that’s that many more lives you have a chance to save. So you have to stay in, Mehrnaz. It’s what you swore to do. It’s serving Life.” She sighed. “Not always easy . . .” God, I’m starting to sound like Nita. Let’s see if she swallows it, though . . .
Mehrnaz spent a few moments simply looking at Dairine. “Okay,” she said at last.
“Good.” Dairine sighed, and Spot, off to one side, shifted and made a soft muttering noise. “Then let’s talk about these few rough spots I noticed. I want to make sure I understand everything that’s going on before I make you start a polish . . .”
7
Hempstead / Elsewhere
IT WAS JUST BEFORE eight in the morning, and Nita was standing in the kitchen doing the dishes. Partly this was because there weren’t enough of them to bother putting in the dishwasher. Or there are, Nita thought, but they’ll sit there all day waiting for a full wash to build up, and what if somebody wants to use them?
The real reason, though, was that she wanted time to think. Since she and Kit had agreed to get involved in the Invitational, things seemed to have gotten very hectic—more so than could be accounted for by what they’d done. She and Kit had had two more sessions with Penn—Or rather, Kit had spent a total of nearly eight hours over two days getting him to fill in the multiple sketchy, incomplete, or half-baked parts of his coronal management spell, while Nita prowled around the edges ignoring Penn’s smart remarks and inept attempts to get on her good side.
The trouble is, she thought, that he has no idea where my good side is. Or why he’s on my bad side. For someone who saw himself as a very cool dude, it was surprising how Penn’s attempts to present himself that way kept backfiring. I still can’t believe that he actually kissed my hand. She rubbed it against her jeans in slightly grossed-out memory, something she’d caught herself doing before. If he tries that again, I’m going to have to explain things to him.
. . . Ideally, before Kit does.
She considered that notion, then laughed at herself. Not really his style, Nita thought. What is this, the Middle Ages? But all the same, she kept running up against behaviors of Penn’s that came across as immature. And he’s almost the same age as us. Doesn’t he have enough friends at school to help him get a sense of what works with people? Or does he not have enough friends, period?
. . . Or the wrong kinds of friends, it occurred to Nita after a moment. It was easy enough for things to go either way at school. Often enough she’d caught herself sitting through a long afternoon’s classes and thinking, I can’t wait for my senior year. Because once I’m there, I will be able to look at most of these people and think, ‘In just nine months I’ll be done with you and I’ll never have to see you again!’