Nita nodded, reaching up to pull her manual out of the air.
“Don’t bother with that,” Dairine said. “I’ll have Spot copy it to you.”
“Thanks,” Nita said. She didn’t put her manual away, though; she sat with it in her lap, looking at Dairine. “You’re being very helpful.”
“And you’re wondering why.”
Dairine looked at Nita for a moment and opened her mouth.
“You don’t want me and Kit to look bad, do you,” Nita said.
Uh oh, Spot said silently.
Fortunately Nita had already seen sufficient yawning from Dairine in the past few minutes for Dairine to think it wouldn’t look suspicious to shut her eyes and lean back against the pillows, rather than meet her sister’s eyes and possibly let Nita see what was going through her mind. Ideas such as Things are weird enough for you and Kit right now. No point in making them even weirder or more stressed. “Since it seems your guy is a jerk,” Dairine said, “no point in letting you have trouble dealing with him at the technical end, too. Not when I can make a suggestion or two, anyway.”
Nita nodded. It occurred to Dairine that she looked tired, too. “Is this strictly legal?” she asked after a moment.
Spot made ratchety noise: mechanical laughter. Dairine opened her eyes again, meeting his stalky ones. “I win,” he said aloud.
The look Nita gave him was bemused. “Win what?”
Dairine snickered. “Spot bet me that you’d want a rules check before you decided to do anything with the advice.”
Nita swatted at Dairine’s head, missing on purpose. Dairine didn’t even bother moving. “As long as I’m not mentoring him solo, as long as one of you two is directly present in the loop, you’re fine,” Dairine said. “I checked.”
“Okay,” Nita said, looking over at the spell again. “Tell me. Without this being fixed . . . what do you think of his chances of making it through the Cull?”
“Without the fix? Not so great. With the fix? Could be better than even.”
They both spent a few moments more regarding the spell’s general structure. To Dairine’s way of thinking, it was nowhere near as tidy as something she or Nita or Kit might have built. And especially, while she was thinking of it, the lovely rigorous structure of Mehrnaz’s spell made this one seem shabby by comparison. This looks lumpy, somehow. Even after being worked over in line with Nita’s suggestions, there were still places in which too much wizardry was crammed into too small a space, and there were barren spots that made no sense. One or two of them reminded her vaguely of the “lacuna” nonstructures that Mehrnaz had built into her anti-earthquake spell. Here, though, the resemblance was accidentaclass="underline" just empty places left that way because the designer hadn’t thought ahead.
Dairine yawned again, rubbing her eyes: they felt grainy. “God, I’m sorry . . .” she said.
“Don’t be!” Nita said, getting up. “The second opinion’s useful.”
“But look, you did good with this, for someone who hasn’t been working on stellar stuff as much as I have.” Dairine pushed herself up against the pillows, as while looking the spell over again she’d slid down. “You’re seriously going to make him stay up late and fix this?”
“Thinking about it real hard . . .” Nita shook her head. “Don’t know that I can make him do anything, but I can strongly suggest it.”
“It’ll be his fault if he ignores you and gets his butt deselected. Though I get a feeling with the attitude he’s got, you might not mind that.”
Nita looked somewhat shocked at the suggestion. “Because I think he’s a pain in the ass? No.” Though then her gaze dropped, and Dairine found herself wondering whether this thought had indeed crossed Nita’s mind, to her embarrassment.
But a second later Nita looked up again. “Fifty-fifty,” she said, looking over at the spell, “honestly?”
Dairine shrugged. “Well, yeah. In terms of the spell itself. But from the reading they gave us, it looks like whether you pass or fail isn’t always about the project, is it? Sometimes it’ll be about the wizard. When Seniors and above are doing the judging, you have to assume that the Powers are whispering in at least some of their ears. And when Irina’s the prize—can you imagine she’s going to let herself be tied down to someone she can’t make a big difference for?”
“No,” Nita said. “I see your point.” She shoved her manual back into her otherspace pocket, then stretched. “Well, I’m not going to be his favorite person in a few minutes.”
“Don’t think you’ve been his favorite person since you met,” Dairine said.
Nita laughed once, a momentary, sour sound. “You should have seen him trying to fake it, though. The hand kissing.”
“Surprised he didn’t pull back a bloody stump.”
“So am I,” Nita said, and headed for the door. “You need a wake-up call?”
“No, Spot’s got it handled.”
“Want coffee before you go?”
“If you want to make some, sure. Thanks.”
Nita paused in the doorway as Dairine waved a hand at the floor and banished the Mobile-world landscape. With the hall light on behind her, it was hard to see her sister’s face clearly: but the shadow of a smile was there. “Is it that obvious,” Nita said in a low voice, “what’s going on with Kit and me right now?”
“It can probably be seen from space,” Dairine said. “But don’t let that bother you.”
Nita shook her head—the smile definitely betraying itself as the light caught it. Then she pulled the door mostly closed behind her and headed off down the hall.
Dairine lay there for a moment more in the near dark. Spot, she said then, let me see that diagram again.
It reappeared in the darkness, in reduced form to fit her bedroom floor, and she cocked an annoyed eye at it.
This Penn guy’s structure is sloppy, but he’s got a flair for this, she thought. Without even working at it. Which is kind of unfair. She considered how long it would have taken her to build something like this without Nelaid coaching her through every step, a couple of months ago. And I am not a stupid person. But this guy burps this up in the space of a couple of days?
Dairine scowled. Two thoughts were warring in her. One of them was, If he did this in a hurry, I’d like to see what he could do if he took some time. The other: If he did this in a hurry, I’d like to punch him in the nose.
But why was he in such a big rush? I don’t get it. If this is a specialty for him, and he’d been thinking about it for a while, why not start sooner? Why stress himself out?
She sighed and let her head flop back against the pillow, waving the diagram away into darkness again. Not my problem, she thought. Got enough of my own. Mehrnaz’s certainty that she was going to fail out of the eighth-finals was still on Dairine’s mind.
She lay there smiling about it, convinced that Mehrnaz was completely nuts as far as this went. I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she goes through to the quarter-finals, Dairine thought. Because I really think she’s going to.
Dairine sighed, closed her eyes.
Midnight?
“Yeah.”
She fell asleep.
This time when Dairine was ready to transport in, she decided not to bother with the scenic route. She had Spot check the downstairs lobby in Mehrnaz’s house to make sure that no one was there, then texted her through the manual’s communication system: Be with you in about two minutes, okay?