It was the most bizarre concept. Far away in the depths of time, a great Power, one of the very greatest, moving through the darkness and thinking thoughts that were eccentric and terrible and profound—yet also feeling so alone, sure that others thought It was lesser than they and wouldn’t include It in their games. And so It went away and invented a new game, one with unending pain and danger at its heart, a level of threat that no other Power had ever contemplated, and a terrible prize for the losers.
A chill ran down Nita’s spine. You can never let on that you suspect this, something whispered in her ear. Your anger, that It can cope with. That It courts. But if It catches you pitying It . . . then for you and everybody around you, it might be better if you’d all never been born. The only way to win this game is to pretend you don’t know what the other player’s thinking.
She looked up into Its eyes, then, and searched them. The expression was unconcerned. Nonchalant again. “Well,” Nita said, “how about this. I won’t forget you. Who looks across the board and tells you that to your face? Sure, it’s sensible to be scared of what you can do. Think what you’ve already done to me. But you know what? That’s no reason to stop playing. Maybe I’ll win the next round. Unless you keep playing, there’s no way to find out.”
For a long moment, the other’s face was unrevealing. “If you’re conceiving of this as some clever plan to get me to treat you more kindly—”
“Oh, come on, reverse psychology again?” Nita gave It a look of kindly scorn. “I thought that was off the table. I’m serious. Let’s play.”
The laughter It forced through Roshaun’s throat at that was appalling, meant to unnerve her. But it had an unexpected effect. Something struck Nita very abruptly, a jolt down her spine like half-expected lightning. In the laughter’s wake, reflections of a thousand possibilities teemed around her, rustling against one another like leaves in a high wind—as if she stood in a forest of mirroring probabilities. A dream within a dream . . . But in this second she surprisingly felt no fear of getting lost among the levels, within the reflections: she was right where she needed to be, utterly centered. “And listen,” Nita said. “That working together thing?”
It turned the most confused expression possible on her.
“Don’t give up on that,” Nita said. “It might happen yet.”
The Lone One gaped at her, and Its jaw dropped. “What?”
And just like that Nita was awake, gasping for breath and her heart pounding, her eyes wide open, staring at the window in the wall beyond the end of her bed, and the dawn light seeping through the Venetian blinds.
What did I just tell it? Nita thought in shock. What was that? Yet her feeling in the dream hadn’t been at all one of concern. What she’d said had struck her at the time as funny. It had almost been a joke.
But not entirely. It had also absolutely been the truth.
Nita sat up in bed, still staring at the far wall as if it held some clue to what was going on. Mars. Why does this keep coming back to Mars?
But that’s a minor issue. There’s something more important going on here. She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and flopped back down against the pillows. “Bobo?”
On deck, boss.
“Good. That last one—boy, have I got some context for you. Let’s make these notes and get moving.”
13
Canberra
THEY WERE NERVOUS. They were both nervous. Maybe that was the source of the problem.
“Why’s it doing that, Mehrnaz? I thought we fixed this!”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure it was actually broken,” Mehrnaz said.
It was raining and humid outside the flat, and inside the air-conditioning wasn’t functioning as it should, and they were on edge. This was now the fourth of the five extra days the restructuring of the Invitational schedule had provided to the new semifinalists. Two of those days had been schooldays for Dairine, and she’d spent all her evening and homework time here. The other two had been weekend days, and she’d spent both of them here, too. She was tired, she was frayed, she was seriously time-zone-lagged, and (to her horror) she was getting bored with onion bhajis.
She was also getting sick of looking at Mehrnaz’s spell. The complexities of it were significant to begin with, as might be expected when you were trying to keep two very large pieces of the Earth—each one fragmented into hundreds or sometimes thousands of smaller pieces, subtly or chaotically balanced against each other—from grinding one another into powder and killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of the unfortunate humans who lived on top of them. And as she tried to keep all the particulars straight, every now and then Dairine found herself falling into that sort of hazy state where one group of symbols or set of diagrams looked exactly like the one right next to it—interchangeable if not meaningless.
And no sooner had Dairine snapped herself out of one of these states than she would find that Mehrnaz had moved something away from a place in the spell where it was working perfectly well, and had been doing so since they started. And here we go again . . . “But you were the one who suggested that the main slipstrike routine needed to be subdivided. And so we subdivided it. You had a lovely reason for that, it stood up under scrutiny, we did the role-playing thing and tried to pick it apart the way the panel will, and we couldn’t do it. And now you want to go back to the way it was to begin with, which was frankly kind of vulnerable to failure if any of the other major working parts of the spell got deranged?”
“Yes,” Mehrnaz said, standing on the far side of the diagram with her hands on her hips. She was actually managing to look belligerent. I wonder if all the tea she’s been drinking is getting to her, Dairine thought. “It was starting to look . . . I don’t know . . . unnecessarily complicated. I think a more straightforward approach might be smarter.”
Dairine was tempted to throw her hands in the air and tell Mehrnaz what she really thought of her indecisiveness. This had been getting especially bad over the last day or so. At one point she had been trying to get Dairine make the changes herself, until Dairine suddenly noticed a very odd little smile that popped out briefly on Mehrnaz’s face when she was about to shift a spell’s subroutine into a less effective position. It was like something naughty at the back of Mehrnaz’s mind had peeked out at Dairine and smirked at her, amused that it was getting its way. At that point Dairine had started to dig her heels in and resist all these changes, some of them genuinely sweeping.
It makes no sense, she thought as she started to marshal her arguments against this newest change, or rather, rollback. The whole purpose of the initial round is to get the big changes dealt with in front of an audience that wants to help and isn’t interested in marking you down. And we’ve done all that. Who wants to make more work for themselves? Why would anyone want to tire themselves out and screw up all the good work they’ve done so far?