She flipped the pancakes, then under her breath said “Dammit!” They’d burned already. Nita turned down the control for that burner again, but the last time she’d done this the setting had been too low and the pancakes had sat there in the pan refusing to cook except with the residual heat. What is going on with this thing? she thought. Please don’t let the stove be dying. That’s an expense Daddy wouldn’t like right now.
She stood there impatiently tapping the spatula against the edge of the frying pan. As for Penn, she thought, what was going on with him yesterday? Why was he so scared of the Sun?
Unless he didn’t mind the thought of doing things to it at a distance. But when he got close enough to it for it to do something to him . . . She shook her head, because the question brought her back to her earlier one. Why would you purposely build a project that was going to scare you? It still doesn’t make any sense.
Nita was pulled out of the moment’s distraction by the smell of something burning. “Oh, come on now, stop that!” she said. Hurriedly she scooped the four pancakes out of the pan and then put her hand down on the edge of the stove, away from the heat but close enough to the burner for there to be a direct connection between her and the metal. “You could just find a good temperature and hold it,” she muttered to the stove burner in the Speech. “I don’t want to burn any more of these. I’m running out of batter and because somebody forgot to get eggs last shopping, I can’t make any more!”
The burner silently gave Nita to understand that the heat fluctuations weren’t its problem: there was something wrong with the house wiring, or maybe the circuitry in the stove. It wasn’t to blame. It got power fed to it, it glowed, it did its job, the power settings weren’t its problem—
Nita heard the screen door open. Oh great, she thought, now Kit’s going to think I couldn’t handle this mechanical thing. Or that I was saving it for him to do something about. Like he’s the repairman . . .
He shut the door behind him, sniffing the air, and came into the kitchen. “Got something burning there, Juanita,” Kit said, and started laughing.
“I will kill you to make up for not having killed him,” Nita said, standing there with the batter jug in one hand. “Thought I was going to lose my lunch right then.”
“He is kind of clueless sometimes,” Kit said. “It’s not as if it doesn’t say in the manual what you prefer to be called.”
“Yeah, well, I wonder how much of the reading he’s been doing! Some parts he seems to get all right, and the rest of it—it’s like he doesn’t even bother. Doesn’t think it’s important enough or something.”
Kit shrugged and reached past Nita for one of the pancakes lying on a nearby plate on top of a paper towel. “Maple syrup?” he said, rolling it up expertly.
“Second cupboard over. Assuming that someone remembered to buy some.”
Kit went rummaging for it. “Her turn to do the shopping this week?”
Nita blew out an exasperated breath and poured the last of the batter into the frying pan. “No problem getting her to go to the Crossings,” Nita said. “But the Pathmark? Might as well be halfway across the galaxy.”
Kit shook his head in a resigned way. “I know where she gets the Crossings thing from . . .” He regarded his pancake as he poured maple syrup on it over the plate that was holding the others. “You decide you need more charcoal in your diet or something?”
“No. The heat in this guy keeps jumping around.” She nodded at the burner. “He says it’s not his fault, though.”
Kit’s eyes went unfocused as he ate the first half of his pancake. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Something to do with his connection to the stove . . . I’m not sure what that’s about. Might be a short.”
Nita sighed. “Okay.”
“But today’s really big question is, how late did you have to stay up last night getting Penn to make all those changes?”
She blinked. “I didn’t stay up at all. Did he do a lot? I saw a note in the manual that he’d been working on the spell diagram, but I didn’t check the details right then. I wanted a shower first.”
Kit nodded until his mouth wasn’t so full. “Yeah, he did a lot. He pulled the main core routine apart, the whole energy-scooping part, and put it back together again in a completely different configuration. Must’ve taken him all night.”
Nita shook her head and flipped the last few pancakes as Kit reached past her and rolled up another one. “How about that.”
Kit gave her a slightly sly look. “The manual also said you had a chat session with him.”
Nita hadn’t bothered copying Kit in on that because she’d foreseen the chat getting either inappropriate or angry, and she wasn’t sure she wanted him seeing either result. “It was real short,” she said. “I told him the odds were more in his favor if he fixed it, and I told him what Dairine told me. And sure enough, he tried to wheedle me into doing it for him—” Kit rolled his eyes. “Thought I’d die laughing. I said to him, ‘You think that’s gonna happen, you need your grasp on reality retooled.’ Told him we’d see him sometime after the presentations started later today, and I closed the chat down and that was that. End of story.”
“Well,” Kit said, “he did the job. Or at least he did something. We’ll see how it looks when he lays it out.” He reached for a third pancake.
“You’d better leave some for me!”
“I’m eating the burnt ones.”
“That’s all of them!”
“Better hurry up, then.” Kit grinned at her.
Nita pulled the last pancakes out of the pan and took the maple syrup away from Kit before he started drinking it (which he’d been known to do). She rolled up the least burnt one, poured syrup in the plate and dunked it. “You satisfied with how Penn did on the verbal presentation stuff?”
Kit nodded. “Yeah. I wish we had another session to do heckling with him, though. He’s getting better at handling the interruptions, but he still hates them, and it shows. Wish we could desensitize him.”
“He was worse about that with you than he was with me.”
Kit reached for a fourth pancake and rolled it up. “I don’t know if that’s him being competitive with guys, or competitive with me . . . Though why would he be competitive with me?” Kit shrugged. “Don’t get it.”
“Could be both,” Nita said. “The way he is with girls . . .”
Kit shook his head. “You really have problems with him, don’t you.”
“It’s his attitude. I honestly don’t know what’s going on with him. But it’s as if he thinks girls are some other species. I wish I had some idea where he gets that from.”
“You mean you’re not another species?”
Nita kicked Kit ever so gently in the shin. “Thanks a lot. Maybe he sees guys as being . . . I don’t know, more worthy of competing with? More of a challenge?”
Kit was at that moment finishing his pancake, and shrugged again. Nita grabbed a couple more pancakes, rolled them up together, wiped up what was left of the maple syrup with them and wolfed them down.