IT TURNED OUT NOT to be a party for the losers, as it happened, but one in their honor: a general celebration of what had happened that day, and a place for those who’d attended the Invitational to relax and let off steam.
Everyone was welcome, which was a good thing, because everyone would certainly have tried to get in on account of where it was being held—the beautiful glass-walled upstairs atrium space that was the jewel of the convention center, with gorgeous views of the Hudson River and the cliffs of the Palisades beyond. Huge amounts of food and all kinds of drinks were laid out, and there were wizards DJ-ing a madly eclectic mix of music from Earth and other worlds entirely. But the main attraction was the atmosphere of sheer unbridled relief—hundreds of wizards and guests recovering from the day’s business in a large, very casual gathering in which even the unusually large number of losers couldn’t feel very lost.
Regardless of the competition’s results, none of the competitors would be leaving the Cull without a keepsake of their participation. Along with each detailed project-and-results report in the participants’ manuals came a token about the size of a quarter, rather like the markers that Nita and Kit used for the Mentors’ Picks event. These glowed green for those who had passed through and blue for those who hadn’t, and when held in the hand they silently communicated the name of the competitor’s project and any special notes or commendations from the judges, along with the participant’s final ranking at the Cull.
As she and Kit headed toward the refreshment tables, Nita saw a lot of these tokens changing hands: groups of people who had been positioned close to each other on the exhibition floor were trading them to remember each other by. Others were simply giving them away to friends or acquaintances. “I bet somebody’s going to start collecting these things,” she said to Kit.
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Kit said. He was looking ahead of them to where Penn was more or less dancing his way through the crowd, singing in time with the music: “We are not the losers, we are the winners, all the babes love a winner—!”
He was still fist-pumping as he boogied, and being (as far as Nita was concerned) obnoxiously happy. Babes, Nita thought, and kept her various other thoughts to herself as Penn found a dance partner to start hip-bumping with. “What are we going to do with him?”
“For the time being,” Kit said with a sigh, “let him do his thing. Too many other great people here to focus on him the whole time . . . we’ve got enough of that ahead of us.” He glanced around. “Look, they’ve got that sour lemon soda of Carmela’s.”
“You mean the one you’re always stealing?”
Kit grinned at her. “Yeah. Make it two?”
“Sounds good.”
He headed off toward the nearest drinks table, while Nita breathed out and concentrated on letting herself relax. The feeling of other people doing the same, letting go of the tension, was almost palpable. Everybody’s shoe dropped, but it didn’t drop too disastrously: no getting called up in front of the room and embarrassed, like something out of a bad reality show . . .
She went back to watching the crowd and paused as she thought she saw someone she recognized among the people who’d started dancing, though she couldn’t be sure. A girl, tall, dark curly hair . . . Wait. Lissa?? She waved. “Lissa!” she shouted over the escalating roar of laughter and shrieking and music.
No response: too many bodies between them, too much noise. “This is ridiculous,” Nita muttered, and reached for her phone, then had another idea. “Bobo?”
You rang?
“Beep Lissa’s manual for me, will you? Tell her I’m over here and I almost didn’t recognize her without the orange jumpsuit.”
I live to serve.
The sound kept scaling up around her as Nita saw Lissa’s head turn from side to side, her face wearing a broad grin. Nita waved again.
A few moments later Lissa came bouncing out of the crowd and jogged over to Nita. She looked fabulous in sparkly leggings, a very short silver skirt, and a very low-cut sparkly top, and they swapped a big hug.
“What a look! Where’ve you been hiding this stuff?”
“Saving it for a special occasion,” Lissa said, and did a twirl.
The skirt had a glittery belt hanging down from it, a chain of dark ovals that turned out to be faceted gems. Nita realized she could feel a slight burn of wizardly power from it. “Have you got spells packed in there?” she said, admiringly.
“Saw what you did with your charm bracelet,” Lissa said. “That was such a great idea. I got hold of some black quartz crystals and encoded some wizardries into the crystal lattices, you’d be amazed what you can fit in there, there’s so much storage space . . . Oh, thanks Kit, don’t mind if I do!”
Nita burst out laughing as Lissa deftly relieved Kit of his soda while he was in the act of handing Nita hers. Kit looked briefly chagrined, but not particularly surprised. “Hey!”
“You’ve gotta move faster, Kit!” Lissa said, and giggled.
Kit regarded his empty hand with a half smile. “Looks like it,” he said, resigned, and headed back to the table.
They watched him go. “I hear that last session on the Moon was really something,” Nita said.
“Yeah. Ronan’s still crowing about it. And daring Kit to design something better. But poor Matt! The bitching’s not over yet . . .”
They stood there chatting about the doings of the rest of the gaming group that Ronan had put together from the team of wizards that had been investigating Mars and some of their friends and associates. Lissa had been one of the wizards who’d spent months doing image analysis on the planet, combing live imagery of Mars’s surface for any sign of artifacts of the ancient species who’d died out there millennia before. There’d been no keeping her out of the gaming group once Ronan started it—not that anyone would have wanted to: she had an eagle eye for detail and a clever aggressive streak that made her the person to have at your back when trouble started.
Lissa was in the middle of giving Nita a deliciously shocking play-by-play about one of the scandals of the day—competitors who’d been revising their project while it was on display, and almost got thrown out of the Invitational for it—when Nita suddenly caught sight of somebody waving at her from the river side of the room. It was Dairine. Nita waved back.
She lost sight of her sister in the crowd for a moment, but then Dairine came sliding along between the dancers. “It’s Dair,” Nita said to Lissa. “Looks like she’s got something on her mind . . .” Whatever it was, it didn’t look good; Nita could see as Dairine got closer that her frown was set in, hard.
“Sounds like a smart time to hit the dance floor,” Lissa said, and started off in that direction. “Later, Neets. Hi, Dairine!”
“Lissa,” Dairine said as they passed, and nothing more.
Uh oh, Nita thought, this is bad: she likes Lissa and she barely gave her the time of day . . . Never mind. Start somewhere neutral. “So how’d your mentee do?”
“She’s in.” But Dairine’s expression lightened only a little.
Nita hugged Dairine. “That’s so great! And even after a Cull like that.”
“Yeah, everybody’s talking about it. There’s hardly any point to the quarter-finals stage now. The numbers are so small, they might as well go straight to the semis.”
“Yeah. Tom said there’d be a final call on that in the manuals tomorrow. But where’d you vanish to? Thought I was finally going to get a chance to meet your mentee when she wasn’t onstage.”