“How you should be.”
“God, yeah.”
“But we don’t have to do it the normal way.”
“Normal,” Kit said. “Us?” And he laughed.
Nita smiled. He gets it. “Exactly.”
Kit snickered. “Just do me one favor. Don’t let Michaela hear that you’re breaking me in.”
It was the kind of remark that she normally would have punched him in the arm for. Well . . . breaking this in too, then. Now Nita quietly laced her fingers through his and squeezed his hand.
Kit grinned at the sidewalk as they came up to the corner of Forty-second and Seventh, then tipped his chin up to regard the traffic. “Where is it again?” Nita said. “Eleventh?”
“And sort of Thirty-sixth: by the Hudson. Not that much farther.”
The Sun was bright and the air was warm and there wasn’t any need to hurry for a change; they were going to be early for the prejudging anyway. “Not a problem,” Nita said, swinging Kit’s hand in hers. “Nice day.”
“Yeah. We don’t get a chance to do this so often when we’re not being chased by something.”
She chuckled. “Yeah.”
“Is it stupid,” Kit said, “to think that when everything’s going nice like this, something’s probably going to happen?”
“With us?” Nita laughed. “Smartest thing is just to say ‘Let’s hurry up and go see what it is.’”
They grinned at each other and started walking faster.
Shortly they were crossing the street in front of Manhattan’s great convention center, the huge gleaming frontage of it almost impossible to look at in the sunshine—like three gigantic green-glass boxes set down side by side next to the river, the middle one the tallest. Nita made without hesitation for the center set of doors.
“Upstairs?” Kit said.
“Level three,” Nita said, “Hall 3D.”
They went up several escalators and came out in a broad, bright metal-and-glass atrium with a food court on one side and some business-oriented stores on the other. On the rear side of the building was the entrance to a huge, high-ceilinged room that stretched in the direction of the river. The view of the room itself was blurred by what seemed to be a translucent curtain hung straight across the entry from the industrial lighting fixtures in the ceiling; and in front of the curtain was a line of five or six tables covered with gold-colored drop cloths, arranged so that they guarded the access to the doors. Out in front of them, and to one side of the gap between a couple of the tables, stood a sign on an easel. It said:
IDAA PRELIMINARY SELECTION SESSION
WELCOME
The amazing thing was that looking at the sign did not make one feel at all welcome. It made you feel as if you first wanted to yawn very hard, then go away and do something else, anything else, because standing here was such a waste of time. The font in which the sign was printed was desperately dry, cold, and offputting. Kit found that the mere sight of it made his eyes feel gritty and tired.
Next to him, Nita yawned, and then laughed out loud, impressed. “Wow!” she said. “Can you feel that?”
“Spell,” Kit said. He started feeling the need to rub incipient sleep out of his eyes. “Really powerful. Directional, too!” He turned sideways, experimenting, and then turned back again toward it, a little at a time. “When you’re not looking at it, it’s way less. But when you start turning back toward it—”
“That is such great work,” Nita said, and rubbed her own eyes. “Somebody knows what they’re doing.”
Kit grinned: even knowing it was a spell didn’t help much—he still felt the urge to go home and take a nap. “Let’s get in past it before we fall asleep on our feet.”
It took only the few steps in past the sign and toward the tables for the effect to wear off. As they got close, a slim, dark-haired guy in jeans and a white shirt, with a neat little beard, popped out through a slit in the curtain and started rummaging around among some paperwork as if he’d lost something. He glanced up as they came to the table. “Dai stihó, cousins! How can I help?”
“We’re here for the pre-judging,” Nita said.
He smiled at them. “And nice and early, thank you for that, though if you were hoping for peace and quiet to do your picks in, I’m sorry to tell you that the competitors are way ahead of you.” He kept turning over papers on the table. “Bear with me a second if you would, seems like nothing’s ever where you leave it around here . . .”
Kit looked over his shoulder. “That’s an amazing sign.”
“It is, isn’t it? Sarima Okeke did those for us.” The guy paused, apparently surprised at their blank faces. “You don’t know Okeke’s work? She’s a graphics wizard—best there is, if you ask me. Specializes in fonts. Every one of the letters in that sign is a microprinted spell in the Speech. Embedded diagram, condensed phrasing . . . just a work of art. Fuel the spell and print out a few words, and any nonwizard who views it gets the overwhelming urge to take themselves someplace more interesting. The font on that one there—Ennui Sans? Brand new, Okeke designed it for this event. But after this they’re putting it in the manual for anyone who needs to use it to keep nonwizards out of things.”
“It works really well,” Nita said.
“You haven’t seen anything,” the guy said. “That’s the light version. If we’d printed that sign in Ennui Overextended, you’d be asleep right now, wizard or no wizard. One of the Planetaries actually dozed off looking at one of those this morning; had to take it down. Okeke has a gift.”
The guy went back to his rummaging around, this time starting to take apart another pile of paperwork. “Wait, there are Planetaries here?” Kit said. “I mean besides Irina?”
“Yeah, unusual to see them so early, but seems like some people in this round have aroused a bit more curiosity than expected.” The table guy, whose nametag said J. W. BYNKIJ, kept on pushing papers around on the table. Some kind of Slavic name maybe? Kit thought.
Then Mr. Bynkij straightened, having found what he was after. “Aha! Usual thing, people borrow things and don’t put them back where they found them . . .”
It was a WizPad, to judge by the Biteless Apple on the back. Mr. Bynkij tapped at it briefly, and in mid-tap looked up thoughtfully at Kit. “Hey, don’t I remember you? . . . Of course I do. You were shooting up aliens on the Moon. Great to see you here.” He glanced down at the tablet, apparently scrolling up and down a list. “Right! So you are Callahan—” He reached elbow-deep into the empty air beside him and pulled out a plastic laminated badge on a long blue woven strap, which he handed to Nita.
“Hey, nice,” she said. “And we get lanyards too.”
“Lanyards for all,” said Mr. Bynkij as he turned back toward the hole in the air and shoved his arm into it up to the shoulder, groping around. “Aaaand Rodriguez.” He pulled out another and handed it to Kit. “Do not lose the lanyards. The badges are what always fall off, even with wizardry, seems to be some kind of natural law about that, and therefore the access routines and nothing-to-see-here spells are woven into the lanyards instead. Please be aware that while you’re wearing these, almost all nonwizards will find you boring to the point of attempting to avoid you. Only exceptions to this rule locally are the center’s concession staff, who have the effect dialed back about eighty percent so they won’t care about you particularly but also won’t fall asleep in the middle of making you a latte. If you’re expecting a nonwizardly guest, let me or whoever’s working up here know and we’ll get them a waiver pin for their lanyard. Need one of those now?”
They both shook their heads. “Fine.” Mr. Bynkij looked at his pad again. “The only other thing is to make sure you’ve received your mentor’s-picks tokens . . .”