The water stopped right where it was in the air, frozen in mid-spray like something caught by strobe photography.
“Come on, let’s get this out of here,” Nita said, and headed out the portal with the bottle and all the stasis-held water. Kit followed her, trying hard to make sure he wasn’t walking strangely enough for her to notice. “Boy,” she was saying, “somebody must have been in a real hurry when he was packing!”
Kit gulped as he followed her out into the cool darkness and around behind the standing stone. Oh thank you, he said to the night, thank you for being dark! Because sometimes no matter how carefully you tried to walk, things just got worse. “Well, weren’t you?”
Nita released the water-stasis spell and let the bottle finish fizzing enthusiastically over the grass. “Yeah, but I didn’t shake my drinks up! I bet you just brought the portal interface down into the kitchen and started firing things into it…”
“Um,” Kit said. While this was true, it wasn’t worth even breathing the suggestion that the way Nita’d been hanging onto the bottle when she flapped her arms around might also have had something to do with it.
“Yeah, there you go,” Nita said, and took a swig out of the now much calmer bottle. “Thought so.” She gave him a sidewise look. “You didn’t bring any of Carmela’s soda, did you?”
“What? Of course not.”
“Shame,” Nita said, “I like that…” She took another drink, sighed, handed Kit the bottle.
He drank, ever so glad to have something to do to take his mind off things. After several long swallows Kit sighed at the realization that personal matters were now subsiding to more manageable levels, and allowed himself to look at Nita again.
Which was of course exactly the moment she caught him at it. “What’re you looking at?”
“You,” he said in the Speech.
She spent a long moment looking at him the same way, and opened her mouth.
Then her shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth and twisted it into a very annoyed expression. “I don’t believe this,” Nita said. “Bobo says I’ve got to get back. The gate I yelled at before is acting up again; they need me to settle it…”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay.”
She looked at him shyly. “Hug?”
Kit went nearly white-hot as the reason not to want Nita to get any closer, the reason he’d thought had stood itself down, now stood itself right up again. Yes! one part of his mind was yelling, and Bad idea, bad idea, shouted another—
But it was too late, Nita was already turning toward him, reaching for him. And, But I need a hug! some idiotically needy part of him was yelling.
Oh God. Okay, maybe if I turn a little bit, that might be enough to—
Too late. Nita’s face was against his neck. And she was shaking.
Kit instantly started to get upset, which on top of the blushing was hard to take. “Wait, what’s the matter, are you—what’re you—”
“Why,” Nita said, taking a breath as if she needed to get some control of herself, “why… do you even bother?”
“What?”
And then Kit realized she was laughing.
“We are such idiots,” Nita said, pulling away. And her eyes were wet, but they were tears of laughter. “Look at us!”
It was just as well there was no one else around to witness the moment, because Kit would have simply died. …Yet it was also funny, impossibly funny. There they stood in the middle of an alien mass migration, under a moon that was so far from being romantic that it was genuinely ridiculous, and they were having a physiology-based personal-crisis moment. At least Kit was. It was hard to work out what Nita was having, and he was both chagrined that he couldn’t read her mind and desperately glad that she couldn’t read his. At least I don’t think she can…
She was still shaking with laughter, though. “Kit. Do you honestly think I don’t notice this stuff?”
“Uh,” Kit said in a desperate moment of honesty, “I was kind of praying for that, yeah.”
“Well I hate to tell you this, but plainly the One is on another call at the moment.”
Kit burst out laughing. And then Nita was laughing again too, and…
“Uh, that hug. Can I have one not contaminated by…”
“Undue boner action?”
“Oh shut up.”
“Besides,” she whispered in his ear after as she slipped her arms around him again, “…could be it’s kinda late for that.”
Kit’s eyes widened.
“Because it’s not like you’re the only one who—”
And that was when the cry came from behind them:
“Oh no! Wait! Is this impregnation event? Didn’t want to miss it!”
Kit froze as he realized there was something really important he had forgotten to tell Nita about. Completely forgotten. Cheleb. Biology. And the candy hearts.
Oh God!
Cheleb stopped where hae was as hae saw that they’d stopped what they were doing and both had their gazes fixed on haem. “Chel,” Kit said, and couldn’t for the life of him work out where to go from there.
Nita pulled back and gave Kit a look. “Is this conversation one I should be part of?” she said.
“Uh, no. Well, yes. Not now okay?” he whispered desperately in her ear.
“Wow,” Nita murmured, plainly impressed by a display of truly world-class ambiguity and indecisiveness.
Kit groaned softly to himself and turned his attention to Cheleb again. “Cheleb. You were saying?”
“Ah. Well.” Cheleb shifted from one clawed foot to another. “Didn’t have time to tell you earlier. After you left for Nita’s gate complex, had… an incursion here.”
“Oh brother,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me…”
“Well, all right,” said Cheleb, “but failing to do so will leave you in data vacuum—”
“No, it’s an idiom,” Kit said, just a touch exasperated, because he was afraid he knew what was coming. “Do tell me. Sibiks?”
“Many,” said Cheleb. “Among other things, very interested in place where food got dropped around Stone Throne. Took a while to get rid of them but were almost all gone and then found that portal on your puptent had been open a while, maybe since you left…”
Kit covered his eyes.
“Couldn’t find command interface to shut portal interface right away, had to go in and then chase some of them out.” Kit blinked: Cheleb was practically babbling. “Was looking for last one to get rid of it, hiding under some boxes, and then found this—”
Embarrassed, Cheleb proffered the empty heart-candy box.
Kit took the box and immediately understood what had happened. One of the sibiks had found the open box and eaten all the hearts. But Cheleb didn’t know that. Hae thought that Kit had eaten them, and of course that would mean—
Kit stopped, because Nita was looking at him very strangely. He was trying to come up with some creative excuse for having a box of candy hearts at all when Nita simply reached out and took the box away from him.
“They’re all gone,” she said. It was astonishing how she could make a simple declarative sentence sound so much like it meant about five other things, all at once.
“Yeah,” Kit said, “they are.” He swallowed. “And that’s really terrific.”
Nita looked at him carefully and then started nodding. “Yes it is!” she said. “Isn’t it!”
“And Cheleb is really excited for us,” Kit said, “because hae’s pretty sure that since all these are gone, that means…”
“That we really like each other in a very special way!” Nita said. Her eyes were had gone theatrically wide in a way that Kit recognized, and both made him nervous and made him want to laugh.
“And that because of that,” Kit said, “we’re going to do something about it—”
“Right this minute!” Nita said, with increasingly terrifying enthusiasm.
Kit just kept quiet after that and waited with some trepidation to see what would happen.