Give up, Penn, Kit said silently.
No!
Kit squeezed tighter. The shell collapsed smaller and thicker every moment: the size of a beach ball, the size of a basketball. Say it!
No—
Penn’s voice was weaker, the fire was almost entirely out now, he was gasping—
—the size of a softball, and there was hardly a spark of plasma left burning in it now. Say it!
A final desperate gasp, and then—The ground’s yours! Penn whispered. The ground’s yours, let me—
Kit let the spell go and called his matter back to make up his body again.
The force field vanished. Kit was lying there on top of Penn in clothes that were acid-burned and sandblasted and very much the worse for wear. Penn’s clothes were scorched and stained and his flipflops were melted. Kit started getting up—
To find himself staring up into the furious face of Irina Mladen, and the outraged parakeet on her shoulder, which was flapping its wings and shrieking at him. The baby, surprisingly, was asleep.
“Up,” Irina said, “both of you.”
Kit and Penn struggled to their feet.
“Your team is suspended until I decide whether you should be allowed to compete further,” Irina said. “Go home. I want to see you both tomorrow. I’ll send for you.”
And she disappeared.
Penn threw Kit a withering glance, turned his back on him, and took a few steps toward Nita. “Did you see what I—”
“Don’t,” Nita said in a voice like someone contemplating murder. “This is your fault.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t do anything, he started it, everyone here saw it—”
“Penn, shut up! This wasn’t about you, don’t pretend this was about him, this was about me somehow. Why are you so damn fixated on me?”
“Because you have something I need!”
It was a cry of pure rage and anguish that froze Kit where he was, it was so unexpected.
Nita didn’t sound impressed. “Well, what?”
“I don’t know!”
And a dead silence fell.
Nita seemed powerless to do anything but stand there and shake her head. “Look,” she said, “I’m done with you for today. Actually I’m done with both of you at the moment, but him I’ll forgive. I guess,” she said, pointing at Kit. Then she glared at him. “When I get over being fought over like some prize out of a bubblegum machine!”
She swung on Penn. “And as for you! I made a promise, and if Irina lets me keep it I’ll keep mentoring you with Kit if it kills me. If it kills both of us, because all this crap has to be about something. Now go the hell home and don’t let me see either of you until you’re done with Irina!”
And she vanished, too.
Kit and Penn stood there staring at each other, then sullenly turned their backs on each other and walked away.
I don’t get it, Kit thought. That was for her. Why doesn’t she get it?
. . . Girls!!
15
Antarctica and Daedalus
“TO DESCRIBE THIS WHOLE EVENT as unbelievably witless and profoundly distasteful would probably be an understatement of considerable magnitude.”
The Planetary Wizard for Earth lived in a third floor apartment in a very average suburb of Prague. The flat had beautiful high ceilings and a hardwood floor and five or six rooms that opened in and out of one another through tall double doors. The living room had six tall windows, a fireplace in the far wall, and shag rugs and brightly colored baby toys scattered across the floor. Over on one side was a crib, in which a baby in a diaper and a T-shirt with a picture of Donald Duck was lying on his back, sound asleep. The rest of the room was filled with comfortable furniture, none of which Kit or Penn was sitting on. They were standing in the middle of that hard wooden floor, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, while the woman who was arguably the most powerful wizard on Earth glowered at them from across the dining room table where she was working.
She sighed the exasperated sigh of someone with too many chores to do in too short a time. All around her on the table were piles of paperwork, books that might or might not have been wizards’ manuals, and empty coffee cups. With one hand Irina was rubbing her forehead. With the other she held a pen she was using to tap more or less constantly on a legal pad, where many notes were written in a tiny, neat hand.
“You,” Irina said, pointing at Kit. “I’m sure I don’t know why I need to keep having these talks with you. You came to me very highly recommended. Tom Swale, whose opinion I trust implicitly, spoke very highly of you. But now I have to go back to Tom and say, ‘How can you be sending me this person to work with when he behaves the way he behaved last night?’ You’ve embarrassed Tom, you’ve embarrassed me, and as for what the Powers That Be make of it—” She stared at the ceiling as if begging for help.
“And about you,” she said, pointing at Penn, “I’ve no particular reports at all. You do your work, you go on errantry when it’s required of you, and generally speaking you do an okay job! But the problem seems to be that when you’re not on errantry, you feel yourself at liberty to share your opinions about things. And some of these opinions . . .” She shook her head rather helplessly. “I’m not sure what century they come from. They remind me more of ancient Babylon than anything else. And the Babylonians may have had some terrific wizards, but as a civilization they had a long way to go before they started treating people like human beings.”
Irina glared at them both again. “Wizards are in general expected by the Powers That Be to exhibit good sense. Courteous behavior. Intelligence! But I’m looking in vain for any sign of any of those from you two after—” and she glanced at the legal pad she’d been writing on—“9:48 Canberra time last night. You could’ve done serious damage to the convention center. You could’ve done serious damage to each other. The spell you were using, yes, it’s very well known, and if you’re familiar with it and careful with it one can usually recover from it even under fairly dire circumstances, but I question whether either of you was being careful last night. At least you had the smidgen of good sense to ask for a force field. I wish that Ronan had exerted more pressure on you to to stop what you were doing, but it’s possible he correctly perceived that at that point there was no stopping either of you, short of dropping the roof on your heads.”
She dropped the pen on her legal pad so that she could rub her forehead with both hands. “There’s no point in asking either of you what you were thinking, as you plainly weren’t thinking,” Irina said, as with a whirr of wings the parakeet flew onto the table, wobbled over to the pad, and picked up the pen in its beak. It started to walk off with it, and Irina reached out and took the pen back, then dropped it on the legal pad again. “Thought was in fact the furthest thing from either of your minds. Other organs appear to have been in play that are not very useful for thought. Yes, I know that at your age everyone gets very hormonal, there’s no way to avoid it. But combining that particular set of hormones with wizardry can be as irresponsible and counterproductive as combining wizardry with alcohol or drugs.” And she glared at Penn. “Understand me: We have room for passionate wizards, we have room for sexual wizards, we have room for wizards who act on impulse—because sometimes impulse is the right thing to act on. But we have no room, none, for idiotic wizards. And you two have somehow managed to combine cleverness about the way you use spells and manage your wizardly practice with occasional flashes of the most extraordinary idiocy. I really begin to wonder if it might not be smartest to take you out of circulation for a while.”