When they’d first found it, the wizardry in the place had been worn down to nearly nothing, almost extinguished by the passage of millennia during which it was never repowered. The words engraved into the walls had been silent, drowned in shadow. But now every character, every diagram carved into those great curved walls burned hot and bright like a light bulb’s wire filament, and the place was flushed with their light, a fierce emerald green.
Nita stood in the middle of the huge green-metal design let into the floor of the Chamber—a calligraphic image of an ancient Martian scorpion-guardian, all wrought about with the curves and tangles of a massive data storage spell. But it was dead now, the last of its embedded power long gone out of it.
She was standing there wondering why this made her feel concerned when someone fled past her toward the walls: ran so closely by her that Nita’s hair lifted in the breeze of the person’s passing. “What—” Nita started to say, but then she recognized the tall slim shape, the long dark braid whipping to one side as the runner slammed up against the far wall, ramming into it with arms outspread as if trying to catch something. “’Mela? ’Mela! What’s the matter?”
“Gotta find the answer and then get out of here before they find me!” Carmela gasped, feeling her way along the wall. “All the answers are here, all the secrets, I have to find the right one. But I have to do it now or they’ll find me, Neets. Gotta get out of here first!”
“Who’ll find you? What’s the matter?”
“One of them’s like Kit. Oh God, he looked at me, you can’t let them look at you, Neets, they’ll kill you inside. They’ll pull the heart right out of you; you can’t look them in the eyes! Don’t look in their eyes, whatever you do!”
Nita’s hair stood up on the back of her neck. Carmela was the one who was always gaily unafraid, who set her jaw and went in with a grin when things looked bad. But now she was rushing down the length of that wall, skidding to a stop, clutching at the characters and boxy phrases written there, then pushing herself hurriedly away when she didn’t find what she wanted. “’Mela, who? Whose eyes? What’s it about! Slow down, hold still, just tell me!”
Carmela was nothing but a cartoon cutout now, black against the sharp, fierce brilliance of the character she obscured. She twisted away from Nita and kept working her way down that wall in panicky haste, shaking her head, gasping with fear. “Can’t slow down, can’t hold still, they’ll get you and your eyes’ll fill up with lies like theirs. Don’t let them get Kit, Neets, please don’t let them get him, he won’t be the same afterward! Either they’ll kill him and you’ll lose him that way or he’ll live but he won’t be Kit anymore and that’ll be even worse—”
Nita’s desperation was growing in tandem with Carmela’s. “’Mela, stop for a minute, you have to tell me what this is about! Who’ll get you, what’s going on?”
But Carmela wouldn’t stop. “The answer’s here somewhere. If we can just find it—” And then she stopped, staring at the wall. “Wait! Wait, this is it—”
“What is?”
“There!” Carmela swung around, for the first time sounding less terrified. She pointed past Nita, pointed at the floor.
Nita swung around. Behind her the green-metal design embedded in the floor was coming to life, glowing softly at first, then burning brighter and brighter. It went beyond a glow to a blaze, the details of the design lost now in the overall fierce burning of it. The light paled out of green toward white and started to spread, running across the floor at them like lava. It splashed harmlessly past them ankle-high, and ran up against the walls of the Cavern behind them, extinguishing the fire of the carvings above it as if it had sucked all the light and power out of them.
And then the light sank into the floor, through it, left them standing on a surface clear as glass while the burning dropped away below them, the color of it starting to shift. Not white any more but faintly yellow-white, and then more golden. And then Nita and Carmela were standing together over the surface of the Sun as Nita had been yesterday in the practice universe.
“This isn’t practice,” Carmela said. “This happens first, and it’s the real thing. You’ll find her, and she’ll find him, and it’s going to look as if everything’s all right, because everyone’s going to be so happy! But right after that they’re coming for me, Neets, and when they do they’ll come for Kit too. You cannot let them have him, you hear me? You can’t.” And Carmela came to Nita and grabbed her by her upper arms and actually shook her. Her fingers bit into Nita’s biceps so hard they hurt. “Do whatever you have to do to keep him safe. I don’t care if they get me instead.”
“Nobody’s going to get Kit, and nobody’s going to get you!” Nita said, grabbing Carmela in turn. She was no longer scared but angry, simply furious at anything that could turn Carmela into this alternately scared and desperate thing. “I’m not going to let them, whoever they are! Stay with me, we’ll fight them!”
And then Carmela dropped her hands and looked sadly at Nita.
“Too late,” she said. “They’re here.”
Under their feet the Sun had begun swarming with dark sunspots, like a mass of black bees, buzzing, clotting over the light, shutting it out. With horrible speed the Sun went almost totally black, the only light able to escape from it shooting upward between the sunspot-clumps like rays of Sun through closed curtains. It can’t do this, Nita thought in growing panic, if the Sun goes out again we won’t be able to get it to relight, not like the last time—
All around them the Cavern of Writings filled with a frightening low rushing noise like something vast drawing its last breath, a breath of fire. In the growing rush of sound an awful, tremulous darkness fell. And the thought came to Nita in horror: No, it can’t do that, the Sun’s too small to end that way, it can’t go n—
Everything went violently and terminally white, an unbearable onslaught of light like a scream. Except the scream was Carmela’s . . .
And then Nita was sitting up in bed and gasping as if there was no air left in the world.
Everything was normal. Outside the venetian blinds of her bedroom window, the light of dawn was growing. Everything was perfectly quiet, perfectly peaceful.
Except for her. Nita wrapped her arms around herself and hung on for dear life, and concentrated on breathing.
This, she thought, completely sucks.
An hour or so later, Nita was in the kitchen at the stove, making pancakes to try to take her mind off things. It wasn’t working.
Carmela, she thought as she poured a few more circles of batter into the frying pan. The way she was in that dream . . . it was all wrong. But something else was off about it, too. Something about the emotional context struck Nita as overstated. It’s like she was acting. Why would she do that?
. . . Though of course this was a dream-Carmela, so why would anything she did necessarily be strange? Nita scowled as the pancakes started to cook on one side, and she shook the pan to jar them loose. They kept sticking, which was an irritation, because when they stuck they burned within seconds, and at this rate there wouldn’t be enough for both her and Kit when he got here.
And then there was the bit with the Sun, and the voice that had whispered to her before but that now had roared in frustration and long-suppressed rage. . . . Boy, that was freaky. But of course the Sun’s on my mind right now. How could it not be? And not just because of Penn. She sighed. Dairine . . .