Immediately, the floor right out to the horizons was covered in perfectly symmetrical black and white tiles, glowing in the Playroom’s sourceless light. Penn, who had been standing hunched over, now straightened up tentatively and took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s better.”
“No problem,” Nita said. She tucked the kernel under one arm and felt around in her jeans pocket for her smartphone. “Funny, though, Kit should be here by now. What time is it?”
Penn pulled his iPhone out, and Nita turned away to hide her smile. He’s got a watch, but why would he look at that . . . But then Penn’s expression turned surprised. “I’ve got service. Five bars . . . !”
“Why not?” Nita said. “This space is very malleable: it’ll do exactly what the managing wizard tells it. And why would I want to disable that nice suite of networking-spell apps that the Invitational gave us? Especially when we’re so close to the Cull. What if somebody needed to get hold of us?”
“Yeah, I guess . . .”
“There you are,” Kit said as he stepped in through the portal from Nita’s backyard. “Hey, Penn. How do you like it?”
“It’s very nice.” Penn turned slowly, assessing everything in an amused way. “Kind of minimalist, I guess.” His tone of voice suggested that as a decorating strategy, “minimalist” had been declared to be over.
About a minute and a half’s worth of off balance, Nita thought. Not too bad for Penn, I guess. “I got rid of the furniture for the time being,” she said, pulling open the empty air beside her and pushing the kernel into it, out of sight. “Most of it’s not for humans, and we can use the extra space.”
Kit nodded as he came ambling along and stood next to her. “Thought maybe you’d started without me.”
“I thought maybe you’d stopped for dinner.”
“Not tonight,” Kit said. “Tonight’s pizza night. Mama’s cooking tomorrow, though.” He sighed. “Arroz con pollo. She would do it when we’re busy.”
Nita sighed. Kit’s mama didn’t cook that much because her work hours were irregular and left her too tired. But a few things, when she had the energy, she cooked brilliantly, and the arroz was one of them. “You couldn’t get her to change the day?”
“I tried. No.”
They shook their heads more or less in unison and turned back to Penn. “So,” Kit said. “This is our last chance for a close look before tomorrow. There were a lot of blanks to fill in when we last sat down, day before yesterday. How do you like where you are now?”
“I like it fine,” Penn said, folding his arms. Nita was beginning to loathe that pose; it was a sign that Penn was about to get indignant about something.
Kit waved one arm out at the space. “So let’s have a look, then. The floor’s yours.”
Penn reached into the pocket of his leather jacket, pulled out his manual, flipped it open, peeled a layer of diagram and Speech-charactery off the revealed double-page spread, and dropped it to the floor. The complex diagram that flowed out across the floor from what he dropped did so in flat format, this time, and in a tangle of multiple colors indicating successive revisions and additions.
Nita glanced at Kit out of the corner of her eye, noting without comment that he had finally gotten Penn to stop using 3D versions of the spell diagram for debugging. While they were handsome and impressive, it was too easy to turn your back on some part of one and miss something important—particularly something missing that, when the spell executed, would blow up in your face. “So this is the version you’re going to use for the walk-by judging?” Nita said, beginning to stroll around it.
“Yep,” Penn said, sounding very pleased with himself.
This diagram was far simpler and clearer than the one Penn had shown them first, which was a good thing. Going by her reading of the judging criteria, the Senior and assessing wizards who’d be examining the spell diagrams of some three hundred contestants were not going to be impressed by presentations that suggested a wizard was more concerned with style than substance. Not that style’s not good, Nita thought. But a small, clear, compact spell was going to impress them much more than a big, sprawling, splashy one that made you waste time understanding it.
Kit started walking around the diagram from the other direction. “It looks a lot better than it did,” he said. “You’re still going to want to clean up all these stacked-up revisions, though.”
“Sure. That gets done last. Tomorrow morning.”
Kit nodded. “And you’ve got a short, recorded version of your explanation for when you have to be away from this?”
“Yeah. Let me play it for you—”
“Don’t bother right now,” Kit said. “Let us have it live, because what’s going to count most tomorrow night is your presentation. All kinds of people are going to come up and start asking questions about this when you’ve got it laid out—people our age, people older—and any of them might be judges. The more practice you get, the better. So let’s hear the spiel.”
Penn brushed his sleeves off and stood up straight. He then beamed the kind of smile that Nita had seen on the hosts of late-night infomercials, and started in. “Esteemed Seniors and assessors, thanks for your time. The spell I’ve brought for evaluation today is unique in that it proposes an unusually simple and elegant solution to the problem of plasma storms secondary to the Sun’s active periods. Now that Earth is surrounded with a halo of vulnerable satellites and a permanently manned space station, it becomes more important than ever to attempt to protect them undetectably from radiation storms that could otherwise cause huge disruptions to modern life on Earth and tragic loss of life in space. If I can direct your attention to the core redistribution assembly partition . . .”
And he was off. Nita listened to him rattle out his introduction very comfortably, as if he’d had a lot of time to think about it and was completely at ease with the details. And the first part of that might even be true, she thought. For the moment, though, she turned to a blank page in the messaging portion of her manual as she walked around the spell, and with one finger wrote a note for Kit: If he’s going to work in English instead of the Speech, better make sure he doesn’t use the name of that core part as an acronym . . .
Kit, casually paging through his manual, gazed down, threw Nita a sidelong look, and smiled.
Completely without warning, that smile made her insides squeeze. Oh cut that out, she told herself, annoyed. Do I need to start distracting myself from him now? God, I’m hopeless. Never mind, let’s mix this up a little. “What’s that part over there do?” Nita said, pointing.
Penn stopped and looked at Kit with an aggrieved expression. “Nobody’s going to interrupt me like that, are they?”
“Think you’d better count on it,” Kit said. “Not everybody there’s going to be a judge. Some of the attendees won’t have a clue what this is about, and if they see you standing there, they’re going to ask you. And if a judge is around and hears you fudging an answer, or blowing somebody off, you’ll lose points. Or maybe get deselected on the spot. So better practice being nice to the hecklers.”