"Yes," mocked the other voice, the cruel one, "come on, Neets. One more time. For my amusement."
She crouched, wobbling, staring at the bits of bright scarlet scattered all over the pale plain. "Kit," she said softly, "what are we going to tell Tom?…"
"Never mind that now. Neets, snap out of it! Think of Belfast."
She thought of Belfast, and dogs in the backs of cars. She thought of rocket fire in Beirut, and the silence of Chernobyl, plowed rain forests in Brazil, and the parched places in Africa, and all the street corners in America where people were selling crack, and other corners where people begged, or lay hungry on steam vents in the shadow of windows full of gems: she thought of needless fear, and pain, and rage, and prolonged and terrified death; and she thought of ending all of these forever-not right this minute, perhaps, but sooner or later. Somehow or other, everything that happened on this planet was supposed to contribute to that ending. . whether she survived it or not. Slowly, slowly Nita dragged herself to her feet, and leaned on Kit without worrying who would think what about it. "What have you got?" she said.
"Not a thing. I couldn't do enough of a spell to butter my bread. But damned if I'm going out lying on the ground."
"Same here." She sniffled. The tears would not seem to stop. Very unher-oic, she felt, with her nose running and her knees made of rubber. Almost it was funny: almost she could have laughed at it. But there was no time for that now, with that dark regard trained on them like the end of everything, that dark shape moving slowly toward them, smiling.
"Kit," she said, "it's been the best."
"See you in Timeheart," he said.
And another voice spoke; an unfamiliar one-or was it?
"Touch them," it said, "and you're dead meat."
Dairine scrabbled to her knees, looking across the broken waste at her sister, and at the tears on Nita's face as she and Kit stood there holding each other up. Until now, she would have shrugged and turned her thoughts to something else. But now memory was alive in Dairine as it had never been before, and she saw in utter clarity that first time so long ago, and heard herself make that decision. The way to keep from getting hurt is to know things. The resolve had only worked sometimes, before. But now she knew things, in a way no one ever had; and she was going to stop the hurting once and for all. .
Beside her Gigo and some of the other mobiles stirred to help her up. She stood, using one of the big heavy-work mobiles to lean against after she hauled herself back to her feet. Yards away stood a human-like figure. The Lone One turned to gaze at her, that dark regard astonished. "You again?" It said.
"I see I will have to do away with you more quickly than these two. You're getting to be a nuisance."
Dairine grinned, a predatory look that had made more than one kid decide not to bother her on the playground, or in a poker game. "Do your worst, you poor turkey," she said.
She felt Its mind working, readying a bolt like the one that had crumpled Nita's shields, but many times worse, a killing blow that would cause a long lifetime's worth of pain before it snuffed life out. Must still be some connection to it through the motherboard, Dairine thought. I wonder where? Unless the presence of entropy in the board is enough. Wherever entropy is, It is… Oh, well. She turned her mind to hunt a spell to stop the bolt; a millisecond later she had it. She did not need to look in the manual. She was the manual now.
As if in slow motion she watched the bolt head for her, invisible though it was. Effortlessly, Dairine struck it away from her and back at the sender, like a batter hitting a nasty ground ball straight back into the pitcher's gut. The Lone One didn't react physically-the blow was too small to affect It-but Its face grew terrible.
"You think you can match power with me?" It said softly, turning away from Nita and Kit.
Dairine laughed. "Think so? I can wring you out and hang you up to dry. Come on, you poor fool. Take your best shot."
It raised up a wash of power that would fall on the planet's surface and melt every one of the mobiles to magma. Dairine saw it coming, found the spell she needed, caught the incoming tide of death and threw it off to one side, where a large area of the plain began to bubble and seethe. "Naughty, naughty," Dairine said. "Let my buddies be."
The Lone One stood looking at her, Its rage beginning to affect Its physical form. It seemed larger than it had: not so much the young, handsome human shape anymore, but a larger shape, shadowed, burning, its eyes light-less pits of hate. "Insolence," it said, "I will never tolerate. I may not be able to touch you, but I will level your planet. You cannot stay awake to guard it from me forever. One night the sirens will start, and the next morning, only mushroom clouds will grow on Earth anymore. It will not take much doing."
"It wouldn't if I ever intended to let you off this planet," Dairine said, quite calmly. "I'm in the motherboard as much as it's in me. They know all the wizardry there is to know. . and even if my human brain starts to lose it eventually, they won't. Get used to this place. You're not leaving."
"Bets?" said the huge shadowy form, growing huger. Its cold eyes glanced up into the darkness.
High up, the red sun began to waver and pucker. "A significant amount of this planet's energy," said the Lone One, "comes from solar power. More than from geothermal. Much of this plain is solar celclass="underline" surely you noticed. That black hole's orbit can be changed without too much effort. It need no longer transit the star. It can be permanently placed in front of it. . "
The sun's disk puckered in on itself, dwindled, di^d away completely.
The mobiles gazed up in horror.
"Oh, they have a little power stored," Dairine said. "Enough to stop that kind of blackmail." She took a breath: this was going to take some power, but she had that to spare at the moment-the whole motherboard behind her, all the mobiles, all their intent turned toward giving her whatever she needed.
The spell was intricate, but the natural laws being worked with were simple enough: gravity was one of the easiest of all laws to rewrite for brief periods. Dairine reached out without moving, spoke the words that grasped the forces and spun them together, flung them outward. The net found the shape destined for it, the tiny dark mass around which space bent so awry. The mass was snugged into the net, caught.
Dairine described the direction she wanted it to go in, turned the spell loose. The whole business had taken sixteen milliseconds.
The tiny black hole slung into the red sun, which immediately flared up in outrage. None of this was visible, nor would it be for some minutes, until the light reached the planet from the star; but Dairine felt it happen, and so did the Lone One.
"So much for that," Dairine said. "Now you and I are going to talk." At the same time she was thinking furiously about something else that nagged at her, as if it were important. How was it she was able to hear what was going on in Its head
— and she was distracted, for here came something else, a wave of power so awful that she shrank from it, even though it wasn't directed at her or anything on the planet's surface.
All those millions of miles away, she felt the star go dead.
Starsnuffer: she knew the Lone Power was called by that name as well.
"I am through playing," It said. "If it is not you who pay the price, elsewhere others will. Think on it." It looked upward. There was hardly anything human about it anymore-only a great tall darkness, like a tree made of night, no limbs, no eyes, just awful watchfulness and a cold to freeze the heart. Dairine looked up too.
She felt darkness eating at the fringes of the risen galaxy. "Here are your choices," said the Lone Power out of Its darkness, as Dairine and Nita and Kit watched in horror. "Keep on defying me, and watch me kill and kill as the price of your defiance. The blood of all these billions of entities will be on your souls forever. Or give yourselves up to me."