Kit half-turned to the manual on his desk and carefully read out the long password phrase; then turned back to the pitch-black circle and pushed a hand up against it. The hand sank in to the wrist.
Right, Kit thought, turning to the bed and pulling off the topmost blanket and the pillow and chucking them through the portal. Reading material…? Am I going to have time to read? There was no way to tell. Kit shrugged and pulled down the copies of The Guns of August and Longitude and The Eagle of the Ninth he was reading at the moment, and tossed them in after the bed linens. Okay.
He turned to his desk. More books, some that he hadn’t had time for over the last few weeks and absolutely none of them having anything to do with math. Drawing pad, a few pencils, rubber-banded together. His antenna-wand, because why not, it might be useful. Earbuds for his phone in case he felt like music.
Then his dresser. Sweats, underwear, socks. Tshirts. A couple of sweaters. Spare jeans. A backpack in case I need to tote anything small around… All these were chucked into the portal.
Kit pulled his closet open, yanked out a down vest and his hiking boots, shrugged into the vest, sat down on his bed and pulled the boots on; then kicked the closet door closed again, yanked the portal off the closet door, grabbed his manual and his phone off his desk and headed downstairs.
The next ten minutes or so were predictable, but he’d gone through this before and his Mama and Pop knew the drill. Nonetheless he had to put up with the inevitable comments as he opened up the portal again in the kitchen, and opened the door of the fridge.
”Kit. Everything in the fridge?”
“Mama, no, just these cold cuts… and that cheddar spread… and the cream cheese, yeah, and the soda… no I won’t take Carmela’s, stop hovering… Canned cappucino. Milk. Yeah, and those chilies…”
“Kit, won’t this go bad? Or do you have a fridge in your puptent?”
“Nope, there’s a stasis-capable partition. In there this stuff couldn’t go bad if it tried. Right.” He turned his attention to the cupboard next to the fridge. “That cereal… This half loaf of bread, that’ll be enough…”
“It wouldn’t be if you didn’t just eat the cold cuts with your fingers.”
“…Which breakfast bars are those?”
“The oatmeal ones.”
“Okay. Pretzel nuggets, yeah… And the ketchup. Aw, Mama, isn’t there any regular ketchup?” The squeeze bottle he was holding contained the less-sugar-than-usual kind: his mother was on some kind of take-no-prisoners crusade against corn syrup.
“What you see is what we’ve got.”
Kit rolled his eyes and tossed it into the portal. “And bottled water. There’s a few sixpacks down in the bottom cupboard, yeah? And crackers, I need crackers. Where are my saltines?…”
He found two boxes of those, and chucked them both into the portal. And the Ritz, too, he thought, throwing in a box of those even though they weren’t his favorite. Then he spent a while more rifling the next cupboard along: plastic cups, a bag of potato chips he’d hidden from himself, along with a couple of Three Musketeers bars. Right at the back of that shelf he came across a box of candy hearts that he’d grabbed on impulse at the grocery store last week, thinking he might do something Valentine-ish with them for Nita—but by the time they got the groceries in the back door he’d already dumped the idea as too boring. Can’t throw them out, Mama’ll yell that I wasted them… I’ll eat them for a sugar hit when I need one. He chucked them through the portal after the crackers and candy bars, then went digging in the cupboard again. Paper plates, some mismatched plastic cutlery…
Finally his mama just sighed and kissed him. “Some of us have to go to work,” she said.
“No no no, just wait!” Kit said, throwing an arm out to stop her, then hugging her one-armed. “Fifteen minutes and you can smooch me goodbye when I get back. Or hello. Where’s Popi?”
“He went to change.”
“Okay, I’ll see him then too.” Kit pulled the portal off the pantry door where he’d stuck it and recited the passphrase again to deactivate it; then rolled it up and stuffed it in his pocket, aching at the memory of the time he’d done this last, when they’d had to go to Rashah. Then he’d packed almost more dog food and dog biscuits than regular food for himself…
No time for thinking about that now. Gotta get moving. He’d laid the manual out on the kitchen counter, and now flipped through it to the dedicated messaging pages in the front.
A message from Nita was already flashing for his attention there. Kit prodded it with a forefinger. “You ready?”
“Yeah, been waiting for you,” her voice said from the page.
“Where are we meeting?”
“My back yard. Transit circle’s ready.”
“Right, be right there.”
Kit kissed his Mama again, grabbed his manual and trotted out the back door. He could have done a beam-me-up-Scotty spell to transit over to Nita’s, but he felt the need for a few minutes’ physical exercise to calm him down. “Okay,” he said under his breath. “Time marker…”
The manual vibrated slightly in his hand, acknowledging that it had logged the exact hour, minute and second he’d left the house.
“Right,” he said. “Let’s hit the road…”
Down the street, past the patches of melting snow and through the dirty slush his Pop had been complaining about, up the driveway of Nita’s house and through the gate into her back yard, down along the muddy path through the snow that led to the small jungle of barren sassafras trees at the far end of the garden. Through the mud and the slush the electric blue of a transit circle could be seen faintly shining on the ground, and in the middle of it stood Nita in a short winter jacket and jeans and boots, wearing a faintly annoyed expression and with half of one arm apparently missing.
Kit slowed down and stopped beside her. The illusion of the missing arm was due to her standing there and feeling around in her otherspace pocket with an abstracted look. “You ready?” she said.
“All set. Any trouble with your dad?”
“Huh? Oh, no. He saw the alert come through on his phone—since I had Spot put the Let Dad Snoop wizardry app on Dairine’s manual, I did it on mine too; he loves to know too much about what’s going on. Thinks he’s keeping a better eye on us.” She laughed under her breath. “But this time he just looked at the formal written notification from Mamvish and went kind of quiet, and then said, ‘I guess you have to go.’” She shook her head, kept feeling around.
Kit sighed, thinking it would be nice when his own folks got to that point. Still, they could have been a lot worse about it than they had been. “You know what’s weird?” he said. “I still can not get used to them actually getting used to this.”
“What? Oh. Yeah.” She was still groping around in the pocket, but for just a second she flashed Kit an amused look. “But sometimes I just want to say ‘Listen, aren’t you more worried about this? Because I am!’ And then I realize what would happen if I ever said that, and I just shut up…”
But her mind was plainly less on what she was saying than on whatever it was she was feeling around for. After a moment, “What?” Kit said.
Nita scowled. “I just know I’ve forgotten something. You know how it is, when you’re going away on a trip and you know you didn’t pack something that you’re gonna need, but can’t put your finger on it, and everybody sitting in the car is all impatient and saying ‘If it’s important you’d have remembered it by now…!’”
“I’m not impatient,” Kit said.
“Well I am!” Nita muttered. “Bobo, what did I forget?”