Ronan produced an expression of exaggerated innocence. “Mine?”
“My money says she’s secretly trading the chocolate to some wizard she’s working with for diamonds or transuranian isotopes or something,” Nita said. “So you’d better hope she doesn’t trigger some kind of diplomatic incident.” She leaned her shoulder against Kit’s, and her head against his. “I’m awake now,” she added, giving him a most pointed look. “So you can tell me whatever you were supposed to tell me as soon as you got up.”
“Forgive me for wanting to pee first!” Kit said.
Nita waved a hand at him. “Too much info way too soon,” she said, reaching out for the espresso that Ronan handed her. “Is there sugar in this?”
“Yes, your royal highness and ruler of all you survey, there is sugar in it for feck’s sake, pray allow your servant to go on living and drawing breath in your service, at least until you’re carbed up enough,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes.
Nita snickered and drank about half the espresso at a gulp. “It’s okay,” she said to Kit. “I use the toilet here too. The one over by my gates is really basic, and they don’t have a shower—they’ve got an automated dust bath. Great if you’re Tevaralti, but for humans—” She shook her head. “If you stumble into one by accident, you’d better like sneezing.”
They went off to lean against the plate-glass wall of the building where Kit had been using the facilities. Kit juggled his croissant around, ready to unwrap it but not sure what to do with the espresso in the meantime.
“You should just levitate it,” Nita said, looking out at the feeder gates. “For the time being you’ve got the power to burn…”
That was something that Kit kept forgetting. “…Still,” he said, and tucked the croissant into the crook of his arm until the espresso was gone.
“Old habits are hard to break,” Ronan said, looking where Nita did, toward the unending flow of the crowds.
Nita nodded. “You see something like this,” she said, “and you start thinking we’ve been really lucky.”
Kit glanced at her. “How do you mean?”
“Well, think about it. Since we got started, most of the jobs we’ve been sent on have been pretty easy to solve.” Kit and Ronan both turned incredulous expressions on her, which Nita ignored. “Relatively speaking, okay? Mostly we’ve been sent on errands that we could handle by ourselves. Sometimes we haven’t known we’ve been sent, but we were still able to work out what we needed to do to fix the problems, and then we did that. Without help, or sometimes with it. We haven’t always had happy endings, as such….”
She trailed off, and Kit knew that Nita’s mother was on her mind, even though neither of them had any doubts that her mom was okay. “But things have always worked out,” she said. “This ending, though? It’s not going to be happy no matter what we do, not really. Even if all those Tevaralti there—” She gestured at them with her chin. “Even if all of them right this minute said, ‘Hey, you know what, we’ve been all wrong about this, shove over because we’re going too’… we still don’t get a happy ending. We still get a destroyed planet, and millions of people really unhappy because their home that they loved is gone forever. All we can do is the job we’ve been given until the Powers or whoever tell us we’re done, and then go home.”
Ronan blew out a frustrated breath. “Yeah,” he said, “there are things about this that aren’t ideal. And yeah, the thing about being just another cog in the machine… Go here, do that—”
“A little too much like school,” Kit said.
Nita threw him a dirty look. “Please. You had to remind me? You’re not the only one who has a test coming up.” Kit smiled slightly: in between trying to get him and calculus to make friends, she’d spent a lot of time lately ranting about the upcoming test on her modern history unit. (“Asia! No more Asia! I want to bang all those people’s heads together.”) “And another thing: no matter how this ends up, the minute we go home, tomorrow will still be a school day.”
“Ugh,” Kit said under his breath. “Thanks, we’re even now.”
“I know you hate letting me suffer alone,” Nita said. “Could be it’s mutual.”
Kit almost smiled. “Problem is, I keep having this idea…”
He trailed off. Ronan threw him a look. “Sounds like it’s an idea you don’t much like.”
Kit folded his arms, leaning against the glass wall behind them. “I’m wondering whether we’re going to start getting more of this kind of job because the Powers think we’re grown up enough to take it. And I start wondering if most of wizardry might be like this. If we’re being eased in slowly to a kind of errantry that isn’t—” Kit stopped himself.
“Isn’t going to be as much fun?” Ronan said.
The three of them were quiet for a moment. Kit wasn’t sure what was going on in their heads, but right now he was hating the idea.
“Might be too soon to jump to that conclusion,” Nita said. “But we’ve done group work with other wizards before, and sometimes lately it’s definitely been kind of edgy. Maybe the Powers, or whoever handles assignment logistics for them, are thinking we’re ready to expand our boundaries?”
“Or that it’s time they pushed us out of our comfort zones, you mean,” Ronan said.
Kit threw a glance eastward past the buildings that surrounded them. Thesba wasn’t yet visible, but he could just feel it there, creeping up towards the horizon. “Alaalu and Mars and the Pullulus War,” he muttered, “those comfort zones? Terrific.”
Nita looked at him sidelong. “Wow, listen to that blood sugar. Eat your croissant.”
Kit snorted softly and unwrapped the croissant, which turned out to be surprisingly good and flaky for something cellophane-wrapped. “Seriously,” he said to Ronan, “this comes from a grocery store?”
Ronan shrugged. “You should come along shopping sometime,” he said. “Be a nice change from wee Darryl. He always makes me push him in the trolley.”
Kit sprayed crumbs everywhere. “I want in on that!” Nita said, grinning.
“We’ll discuss it later.” Ronan turned his head to regard the gating complex on the other side of the complex, and briefly got an unfocused look: probably consulting his internal manual to see how his gates were behaving. “Very quiet at the moment,” he said. “I wonder if they’re plotting something. Or maybe this just has something to do with you being here.” He looked at Kit.
Nita shot Ronan a bemused look. “What?”
“He seems to have a calming effect on gates. I was looking at his intervention logs this morning.”
“Now wait a minute,” Kit said, “isn’t that stuff supposed to be privacy-locked?”
“Not when we’re all on the same intervention,” Ronan said, “and when gates’ behaviors tend to get interlinked. I take it you got the lecture from Rhiow on portal contagion.”
Kit nodded, getting busy with what remained of the croissant. Nita rolled her eyes. “Well, we should be grateful almost all the rest of the gating’s done,” she said, “the heavy-duty stuff—”
“Oh bollocks,” Ronan said. “As if moving however many million people doesn’t count as heavy-duty.”
Nita laughed at him. “Compared with moving the biosphere? Half the planet’s been scraped bare over the last month, right down through the lithosphere. Huge populations and communities of animals, plants… whole big chunks of the ecology already transplanted to the refuge worlds. You want to look at the logs for that—they’re something else.” Nita shook her head. “But you know what’s really interesting? The further down the biological hierarchy you go, the more eager life is to get out of here. The plants, especially, aren’t arguing the point. They can feel the change in the local gravity, the magnetic fields. They know what’s coming. So do most of the animals.” She frowned. “What’s weird is the way the ones closer to the Tevaralti, the domesticated ones and the animals in their food chain… they’re a lot less eager. There’s more conflict about going, and when you ask them what’s going on, they can’t tell you.”