Never mind. Let’s see what he wants to do. “So Penn,” Nita said. “If you want to do your spell right now and see how it runs, we could do that. Whatever happens here, it can’t hurt us and it can’t do anything to Earth.”
That finally brought his head up, and Penn looked at Nita with an expression that was nowhere near calm, but at least wasn’t frozen in horror. “I, uh,” he said after a moment, “I think I might want to work on it some more first.”
Uncertainty? From him? Wow. But Nita made sure none of her surprise showed. “Okay,” she said. “No problem with that. But when you’re ready, this’ll be a good place to test, and it’s no trouble to bring up—”
“Well,” said a voice from near the portal, “isn’t this an unusual development . . . !”
Oh God, talk about the wrongest moment possible, Nita thought, as Kit’s and Penn’s heads swung around toward the newcomer. Silhouetted against both the daylight shining in through the portal and the much closer and fiercer daylight coming from right under their feet, Dairine and Spot were ambling across the floor of the practice space side by side, Dairine peering down at the duplicate Sun as she came.
“This is nice,” Dairine said. “And not a simulation, either. Real.”
“Cloned,” Nita said, trying to sound casual.
“Such a good idea,” Dairine said. “Gotta talk to Nelaid about this! There could be things you could do with this setup that you could never do with a scaled simulator . . .”
She wandered over to where the three of them were standing around Penn’s spell diagram, the glowing multicolor lines of which were nearly invisible against the blast of light from below. Spot came along behind her, having put up a number of stalked eyes to look over the diagram. Nita held her breath: the last thing she needed was for Dairine to start dissecting Penn’s work at the moment. And what a laugh. Ten minutes ago I might not have minded . . .
“Hmm” was all Dairine said. She turned away toward Nita, digging around in her pockets. “Listen,” she said, “I was over at Tom’s and he asked me to drop these off for you.”
She handed Nita a small, circular token glowing faintly blue on a key ring, then made her way around to Kit. “It’s your marker for the Mentors’ Picks event tomorrow morning,” Dairine said, handing him a twin to what Nita held. “You walk through and drop it into the spells you like the look of. It stamps them with your mentor ID and gives them points toward their selection.”
“Thanks,” Nita said, pocketing hers.
Dairine, meanwhile, had paused by Kit to take in the diagram again, and then glanced up at Penn. “And you are?”
“Penn Shao-Feng,” he said. And then he gave Dairine one of those smarmy smiles, though to Nita’s eye there was a more strained quality to it now. “Don’t know how much time Juanita’s going to have for upchecking other people’s spells, though. She’ll be too busy getting everyone else to drop their markers on mine.”
Why was I even worrying about how he was? Nita thought. He’s fine. For Penn . . . But Dairine was now looking over at Nita with barely concealed amusement. Juanita? she mouthed.
Nita shrugged. “Penn,” she said, “my sister, Dairine. She’s mentoring too.”
“No kidding!” Penn said brightly. “You don’t look old enough to have even had your Ordeal yet—”
Not quite the worst thing you could say to my sister right off the bat, but a real strong contender, Nita thought, her heart sinking for Penn’s sake.
“You must be quite the powerful one!”
Aaaand he’s two for two. Between the patronizing tone and the significant reduction in Dairine’s power levels since her Ordeal—Oh God, she’ll simply destroy him now.
Dairine looked very deliberately from Penn, to the diagram, to Penn again. “Well, Penn,” she said, with the slow, measured delivery one might use when broaching an advanced subject with a five-year-old, “as far as your spell goes, I sort of think that one of the two wizards who brought back the Book of Night with Moon from where the Lone Power had it stashed has better things to do than run around the Invitational shilling for you, y’know? Especially since she knows perfectly well—though she probably hasn’t told you so yet, she’s so kindhearted—that if people are looking at your wizardry and it’s not generating its own buzz, you’re doing it wrong.”
Dairine turned away again. “A wizardry has to stand on its own merits. And at first glance, this one doesn’t so much stand on its merits as sort of lie there.” She looked up. “Neets, do me a favor and kill the background noise?”
Penn stood there with his mouth open, probably at least partly due to the effrontery of someone who could casually refer to the overwhelming visual and aural splendor dominating the practice space as “noise.”
“Sure, no problem,” Nita said. She reached into the otherspace pocket and turned off the Sun. And look at that. All of a sudden he’s so much more relaxed . . .
“Interesting,” Dairine said, once more starting to stroll around the perimeter of the spell, now laid out as it had been before on the black and white tiles: and as she walked around it, Spot stepped delicately out into the diagram, carefully avoiding any of the lines or Speech-phrases, and looked it over with all his eyes. “Coronal redirection, huh,” Dairine said. “Not easy to do with something this minimalistic. Going to have to pump a lot of power into this for it to function.”
“The star powers it,” Penn said. “If you noticed the accumulators, they’re very—”
“Fancy,” Dairine said. “If structurally fragile. Well, the overall design has some merit. This could possibly make it through to the quarter-finals, who knows? I kind of hope it does . . .” She was coming around to Nita’s side of the diagram now, and she grinned at her sister. “As it’ll give my mentee a chance to whip your mentee’s butt.”
Nita smiled and said nothing.
Penn continued to stand there in shock. “Aren’t you going to defend me?” he said, turning from Nita to Kit.
Kit was hanging his head and pinching the bridge of his nose as if he was trying to stop himself from sneezing, but Nita knew what he was suppressing and was intent on not triggering him by cracking up herself. She shook her head at Penn. “I’ve heard that from everybody from the Lone Power on down,” Nita said. “But where Dairine’s involved, we all get to take our chances.”
Dairine grinned and put her head next to Nita’s. “I don’t want to second-guess you in front of your guy,” she said very softly, “but this thing reinvents the wheel a couple of times, and he’s probably gonna get called on it.”
“That could be my fault,” Nita said as softly. “I did an analysis on this some days back, and a lot of the work he’s done since then has been about doing what I told him . . .”
Dairine shook her head. “I recognize your style in there. But he’s got problems elsewhere. Doubt there’ll be time to fix it before tomorrow, but Spot’s grabbing the design at the moment. I’ll give you some notes later.”