Nita spent a few moments glancing around to see where Penn had gone. Probably looking for someone else to compare token numbers with, she thought. At least he’d had the sandwich and the smoothie, and was coming down somewhat from the buzz of his final hour of presentation, as she had hoped. But he’d really gotten into the swing of his presentation toward the end. And if nothing else, he’ll never be afraid of hecklers again. If I thought we’d given him a hard time . . . Nita shook her head. There were people who’d picked up on the prescripted quality of Penn’s delivery and started asking him questions in exactly the same tone of voice. Which was when he completely dropped it and started sounding like a normal person. Didn’t think he had it in him . . .
It was then that she noticed that the sound level in the room had changed—all the conversations going increasingly muted. Irina was in the middle of the room.
She was standing in an empty space at the center of things, and quiet was spreading out around her through the crowd like a single ripple in a pond. That quiet spent a few moments becoming deeper, finally turning into a silence broken only by the faint rustle of a few people still moving around. Then they too were still.
“Well,” Irina said into the silence, “we’re ready. I want to thank everyone for having done a tremendous job. You know you all have—otherwise you wouldn’t have made it even this far. To those of you who won’t be going along with us any further in this journey, I want to thank you for committing yourselves to make the effort even though you had no certainty of the result, and were very likely to suffer pain if things didn’t go your way. You committed yourselves anyway—and that is the heart of errantry.” She sounded somber, but not sad. “So: time to reveal the results.”
And almost before she’d finished speaking, the room started to fill with every possible kind of audio alert as those who had such things hooked up to their manuals heard them go off.
It was lower-key than Nita had expected. There was no big list posted, no dramatic calling of names. And (as she saw when people near them started comparing results in their manuals) there was no big deal made over the issue of rankings, or where anyone stood in the standings of those who had made it: only the bare fact of whether or not they’d gone through. All through the room, cries of excitement or moans of disappointment began filling the air at the same time as people’s manuals, or whatever instrumentalities they used to manage their wizardry, gave them a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Here and there, groups of friends started to cluster, jumping up and down or commiserating with sad hugs.
Nita looked around to see if she could find Penn. From behind her, Kit leaned in to say very low by her ear, “Just look for the one making a big fuss.”
And sure enough, there, past a couple of small groups of hugging teenagers, was one guy, all by himself, leaping and whooping and waving his manual in the air. “We should go congratulate him,” Nita said.
“He should be congratulating you,” Kit said. “Care to bet on that happening?”
Nita laughed. “Wouldn’t waste my money,” she said. “Come on.”
As Penn spotted them coming toward him, he assumed an expression that was impossible to describe in any other way than smug. “Did I tell you?” he shouted. “Did I tell you how it was going to go?”
“You did,” Kit said, and bumped fists with him. “Now we start the heavy lifting.”
“Not right now,” Penn said. “Tonight we celebrate!” He held out his hand to Nita. “Well?”
She took it. “You did good,” she said.
He started to lift her hand. Nita gave him a look. He stopped, but he didn’t let it go. “Don’t get cute,” Nita said. “You’ll spoil it.”
Penn dropped her hand and grinned. “But I am cute,” he said. “By definition.”
“We’re using such different dictionaries,” Nita said, and turned away. “Come on . . . let’s go to the losers’ party.”
On the far side of the room, Dairine and Mehrnaz were standing quietly together, watching the crowd.
Dairine had been carefully controlling her own excitement. When the end-chime had rung and she’d turned to Mehrnaz to congratulate her on the latest of a final series of presentations, each one better than the last, she’d caught a look on Mehrnaz’s face that was more than relief. It was fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” Dairine had said. But Mehrnaz’s face hadn’t dropped that terrified look. “Whatever happens, you’ve done great. Seriously!”
“I think I could use some water,” Mehrnaz said, sounding a little faint.
They’d made their way down into the crowd and each of them had grabbed and quickly downed a whole bottle of water. “Even though it’s not hot in here, the air-conditioning makes it so dry . . .” Dairine said. “You forget how much sometimes.”
“I guess so,” Mehrnaz said, sounding flat and distracted. She was looking into the middle distance at nothing in particular.
“Mehrnaz,” Dairine said, and was moved to put an arm around her and hug her one-armed. “Come on. You got the job done. Now we just have to wait for the result, okay? Don’t act like the world’s ending. You did a brilliant job.”
“I did my best, anyway,” Mehrnaz said, sounding dubious.
“Which is all anyone’s expecting,” Dairine said.
That was when silence fell over the room. From where they were standing, their view of Irina wasn’t very good, but her voice carried perfectly. And then the audio alerts started going off.
Mehrnaz nearly jumped out of her skin when her little pink diary-manual began playing a music-box version of “Anitra’s Dance.” Her eyes went wide and round. She yanked the diary open.
And she stared at it and froze.
“What?” Dairine said, and looked over her shoulder. “What—Wait! You made it! You made it!”
Dairine would have started jumping up and down with delight, except that Mehrnaz was still standing there immobile. “Wow, look at the numbers,” she said, “way more people got culled than—since when do they cull more than half the participants? They hardly ever—”
But Mehrnaz still wasn’t moving. The face she finally turned to Dairine was stricken.
“You made it!” Dairine said. “Look, that was the worst Cull in the last ten Invitationals and you survived it!”
She trailed off as Mehrnaz closed her manual. “You’re upset?” Dairine said. “Why are you upset?”
Mehrnaz finally found her voice. “I didn’t—It didn’t go the way I wanted it to go.” She sounded wretched.
Dairine was flabbergasted. “You made it through the Cull, girl, how could this not be the way you wanted it to go?”
“It’s just that now things are going to get really difficult.”
“That’s kind of the whole idea,” Dairine said, with a sinking feeling in her gut. What have I missed here? What’s the matter?
“Yes, but not the way it’s going to get, Dairine. You don’t understand. You don’t get it at all.”
She turned and walked away with a terrible rigidity to her spine: away from the crowd and down toward the doors that led out of the room.
“Mehrnaz? Wait!” Dairine yelled.
She wasn’t waiting. She simply disappeared into thin air.
“Spot!”
He was there already, having caught her concern.
“Find her,” Dairine said, snatching him up. “We’ve got a problem.”
Together, they vanished.
11
New York: The Losers’ Party