Sometimes, though, seeing wasn’t the issue. You still knew. And more, you suspected that others knew. In particular, Kit kept catching Dairine looking at him . . . just looking in an unsettling way. When he’d mentioned Dairine’s expression in passing, Nita had laughed it off. “She gets protective of me, you know how she is sometimes . . .” and Kit had very nearly said, Yeah, and can I have some of that action please? But he’d kept quiet because he didn’t know if that was too much or how Nita would take it, and this was all too new and strange now that they were actually talking about it . . .
Except we aren’t actually talking about it much. Mostly we’re still dodging it.
And things are going to keep getting worse for a while. Because in a couple of weeks I’ve got to go back to where I didn’t think it could get any worse . . .
It was an odd thing to contemplate, and uncomfortable. Kit had always loved going up to the Moon and sitting there and enjoying the view—either homeward toward Earth, or (on earlier visits to the “dark side”) out into the farther universe. Turning his back on the world, occasionally turning his attention outward, as far outward as possible, had been a pleasant thing—challenging without being scary.
Now, though . . . “Scary” did creep in. It was difficult for Kit at the moment, when he was on the side where Earth didn’t show, not to start reliving the events that (locally at least) had ended the Pullulus War. The death of that terrible darkness, the safety of the world, of all the worlds, had been worth it. But there had been awful losses among the wizards and others who’d held the final line. And one loss in particular had left Kit in serious pain.
He looked over at the empty braided-rag rug by the bed, where no one lay upside down with all his feet in the air, snoring. Your dog, he kept telling himself, is not dead. He is in fact the next thing to a god. But it was one thing knowing Ponch to be immortal, invulnerable, and now present in every dog who lived. It was another thing entirely to have to stand by helplessly watching a terrible battle of powers and spirits that Ponch might not have survived . . . and then, Ponch having beyond belief won that battle, it was a worse thing still to have to watch him go. The friend who had been with Kit since he was little, almost before he could remember . . . Now that space was empty. And all the other dogs in existence, nice as they were, couldn’t fill it the way Ponch had done.
Kit remembered how, sometimes when you were small, it was possible to get scared over what later turned out to be nothing. You’d hear your parents fighting, or you’d have done something stupid and gotten yelled at particularly hard, and you’d go to bed so terrified that your stomach tied itself in knots, while you twisted and turned and were sure that the world was over and everything was ruined, never to be right again. But even when Kit was scared and upset and feeling horribly alone because of something like that, Ponch had always been there with his nose in Kit’s ear, or licking his face, or looking at him with big worried eyes that said, Don’t be sad; if you have to be, then I have to be sad too! And all the time Kit was growing up, when Kit was happy, then Ponch was ready to play; and when Kit was unhappy Ponch always knew somehow, and would be with him, just there.
And then Ponch was gone, and for the first time Kit had a referent for the way Nita felt when her Mom died. Except he couldn’t say that to anybody, because he could imagine how it’d be taken when it came out. You’re comparing losing your dog to somebody’s mom dying? How can you even think of doing that? How stupid are you? Yet the feelings had to be alike, in some ways—the horrible twist of the gut and the heart as again and again you came up against the absence of that unwavering companionship and acceptance that had always been within calclass="underline" the love that you knew could be depended on for better or worse, that you knew would never abandon you. Suddenly it was missing, but the habit of it wasn’t. You kept reaching for it and finding nothing, and over and over feeling the sickening impact of the wrongness of that, like a missed step on the stairway of the heart.
Kit leaned his head back against the medicine cabinet above the toilet and stared at the shower tiles, unfocused. Yeah, I know it’s all right. I know he’s all right. Impossibly all right! . . . But it’s not the same as having him here. And the Moon’s gonna bring all this up again, hard.
He sat there a while longer. Then Kit sighed, got up, knotted the towel around him after about the third try, and and reached for his toothbrush. One thing at a time, he thought. If I take my time with this, maybe I can get myself to a place where I won’t freak out when I’m up on the far side of the Moon. That’ll be good enough.
Meanwhile . . . Penn. What do we do about Penn? Because if he tries that stunt with Neets again, she’s gonna increase entropy all over his butt. Don’t think the organizers’ll like it if we kill our mentee . . .
Kit started considering ways to prevent that from happening as he headed out of the bathroom and down the hall to his room. No sooner had he gotten in there, though, than he caught sight of something glowing softly and rhythmically on his desk: the page-edges of his manual, pulsing with bluish light. Oh. Something from Neets—
He went to the desk, flipped the manual open, and riffled through the pages to the messaging section. One part of it he’d set aside for the Invitational—which had been a smart move, as all the texts and support material tended to pile up pretty quickly—and at the top of the first page, he found a text from Nita: Got the Playroom booking sorted out, it said. 5:30 p.m., my backyard.
“Got that,” Kit said, and watched as the words appeared on the page beneath Nita’s text. “5:30 it is.”
Send? the manual asked a few lines down.
“Send it,” Kit said. The page grayed itself out while the Sending herald displayed, then darkened down again, listing Kit’s text as sent.
He walked over to his dresser, pulled a drawer open, and started rummaging through it for underwear. “So go to audio,” he said to the manual, “and let me take another run at the judging structure for the eighth-finals. How many judges? . . .”
When Penn popped out of nowhere later that afternoon into the shielded space at the end of the backyard, he looked surprised to find himself apparently in the center of a small forest, through which not even the low Sun was managing to shine. “Um,” he said, turning around in a circle and taking in the nonview, “we having some kind of field trip?”