Mehrnaz shivered. “It sounds so impossible . . .”
“‘Impossible’ is a dangerous word around our neighborhood,” Dairine said. “Look, we’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you have a fair shot at getting into the finals. After that . . .” She took a breath. “One thing at a time.”
Mehrnaz nodded slowly. “Why is this next stage being held in Canberra?” she asked after a moment. “Was it their turn or something?”
Dairine shook her head. “You know, I looked that up,” she said, “and there was nothing but a note that described it as ‘mandated.’”
Mehrnaz blinked. “Meaning that the Powers told them to do that.”
“I think so.” Dairine shrugged. “You could always ask Irina. I assume she knows.”
The look Mehrnaz turned on her was shocked.
“What?” Dairine said.
Mehrnaz sat there quietly for a few seconds before lifting her head. “You speak of her so casually,” she said. “It’s so odd. Like saying you’ll have a word with a thunderstorm, or ask the incoming tide to run down to the shops.”
“Well, we’re wizards, aren’t we? We have words with thunderstorms all the time. I don’t know that I’d ask the tide to do much of anything—mostly it seems to know about going in and out. But seriously, Mehrnaz, this whole thing is about winning a one-year apprenticeship with Irina. She’s powerful, yeah, but she’s not a force of nature. She’s about managing them. There’s a difference. Irina’s a housewife with a baby and a parakeet, and people walk up to her and talk to her every day! And if that’s something you don’t think you can do, your apprenticeship’s going to be kind of uneventful . . .”
Mehrnaz sat blinking at that. Then, slowly, she smiled. “You might have a point there.”
“Good,” Dairine said. “So what time should I come by tomorrow?”
“Well . . . if you’re not too tired right now, I had some thoughts about the intervention plan . . .”
Dairine wasn’t quite satisfied that she’d gotten to the bottom of what was bothering Mehrnaz, but at least this was a start. She smiled. “Let’s go.”
“Shanghai?” Nita stared at Penn. “What do we need to go to Shanghai for?”
“To see my Baba,” Penn said matter-of-factly. “He wants to see my winner’s token.”
Nita sighed. Okay, it is just after the Cull . . . But Penn had been using the word “winner” approximately once every ten minutes since she’d first laid eyes on him this morning.
It had occurred to Nita that things could be a lot worse. She’d been dreading this meeting, but she’d had no choice but to take it alone. It was a school day, and this was one of the two days in the week when her schedule and Kit’s got out of sync. But much to her relief, whatever had got into Penn last night—and it occurred to Nita that beer might have had something to do with it—he seemed to have left the oh-my-God-aren’t-you-gagging-for-me mood behind. This morning, downstairs in the working basement of his parents’ place in San Francisco, he was merely insufferably cheeky. That I can cope with. God knows, I’ve been getting it for long enough from Dairine.
She shook her head and got back on track. “I thought you weren’t wild about your grandparents.”
Penn waved a hand as he went rummaging around in a chest over to one side of the recreation room. “My folks aren’t,” he said, “but they’d die rather than admit it. They’re still all hung up on the old-fashioned filial piety thing. Baba, though, he doesn’t care what they think of him. Come to think of it, he mostly doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him. Which makes him kind of cool, even though he’s not trying.”
Penn straightened up from the chest, letting its lid slam down. In his hands he was holding something that looked like a tube made of bamboo slats. He shook it open and dropped it to the floor. As it fell, Nita could see that it was a mat lined with paper and tightly written all over its interior surface both in the Speech and Chinese. It spread itself out on the floor, and from it a worldgating diagram flooded right out to the walls.
“There’s a place over there for your name,” Penn said, pointing at an empty circular stance locus near the spell’s far edge. “Climb on in, add all the detail you feel the need for. It’s pretty generic . . .”
“Right,” Nita said, and made her way around to where she would stand. My, aren’t we businesslike this morning, she thought. Is someone a little nervous about this meeting? I wonder.
She turned her charm bracelet around on her wrist and felt for the charm that was a capital N. From it she pulled out, in a line of Speech-curlicues burning with pale golden light, the template version of her name that she kept for such off-the-cuff transits. This she dropped into the circle, and then bent over to do a careful double-check. Even though it was her own boilerplate, it was always smart to check it once it was in place in someone else’s spell. Sometimes unexpected spell elements could alter your own name’s parameters, and if you came out of the other end of a transit with an extra head or something because you hadn’t checked, you had nobody but yourself to blame.
“Ready?” Penn said, already in his own locus, and impatient.
“Yeah, yeah,” Nita said, and was about to add “Keep your pants on” until she stopped herself. There were too many responses Penn might come up with that she didn’t want to hear. “Ready.”
Penn shoved his hands in his pockets—jeans pockets, this morning, and just a T-shirt over the jeans with some Chinese characters—and began to read the spell. Swiftly the room around them went quiet as the universe leaned in to hear. A moment later came the slam of air as the transit spell activated—
And then another slam as they came out on the far side. Penn bent down to pick up the little bamboo mat as Nita looked around her. Concrete, a lot of it: concrete ceiling, concrete pillars, concrete floors . . . “What is this, a parking structure?”
“Yep,” Penn said, rolling up the mat and sticking it in his back pocket. “We’re right under the Hyatt on the Bund—that’s the big shopping street on this side of the river. Come on—”
He headed for a stairwell and Nita followed. A few moments later they were up at ground level and out on the street, and she gazed around in unease and amazement.
Nita had of course seen images of Shanghai before. They turned up all the time on TV and in movies, the splendid upward-spearing skyline glowing jewel-bright in many colors by night and neon-blue down among the feet of the skyscrapers, where the highways ran like rivers. She knew in a general way that the hypermodern downtown was just one side of a very complicated picture in which old shabby-seeming neighborhoods crouched and sprawled in the shadow of the sheen and gleam of plate glass and the glow of a superilluminated downtown. But here, on the Bund, both sides lay right up against each other, seemingly a little hostile. It unnerved Nita.
And the other thing that amazed her as the two of them started walking away from the Hyatt was the color of the air, and her ability to see the air in the first place. “Penn, my God, the pollution! What are people doing about it?”
“Not enough,” he said, sounding relatively unconcerned. “Too many people here and not enough wizards, I guess. The amount of energy spent dirtying it up is more than anyone wants to spend cleaning . . .”
Nita shook her head. “Seriously, it reminds me of Titan.” Penn threw her a look. “Well, it does! The same shade of brown, almost.”
“Never wanted to get involved with this myself. Seems hopeless, like shoveling out the ocean . . .”