A brief pause, during which Kit felt a bit nervous at the thought of what he might hear but didn’t want to. It wasn’t as if he and Nita didn’t hear each other’s thoughts sometimes, particularly in moments of stress. But Kit hearing Bobo suggested that this closeness might be entering a new stage that Kit didn’t understand and wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to—
“Great, thanks loads,” Nita said, scowling harder as she thrust her arm into her personal claudication right up to the shoulder.
“No good?” Kit said.
“He says he’s the spirit of wizardry, not a to-do list, and I should write things down more often,” Nita muttered. “Somebody really needs his snark settings adjusted.” She closed her eyes and kept on feeling around. “It’s in here somewhere, I know it is…”
“What?”
“What I’m looking for.”
“…Which you can’t remember.”
“If I feel it I will!”
Kit opened his mouth and then shut it again, suspecting that his feelings about this approach to memory management wouldn’t be welcomed right now. After a few moments more Nita sighed and pulled her arm out, and zipped her otherspace pocket closed. “Never mind,” she said, “I’ll remember it when we’re in the middle of something and I can’t come back here for days and days. That’ll teach me…”
She flipped her manual open to the page where she had the full version of the transit circle’s spell stored, waiting to be activated. “Preflight,” she said. “Check your name…”
Kit rolled his eyes. “What for? You know you’ve got it right.”
“Check it,” Nita said, giving him a look.
But of course she was right. It didn’t do to play fast and loose with a language that could change your inner nature—or your outer one—if in a distracted moment you’d misspelled something. Kit glanced down at the small permanent-parameters circle where his name was spelled out in the graceful curling Speech-characters, and looked it over. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”
“Thank you,” Nita said. She closed her eyes and said the three syllables that triggered the partially-executed transit spell, and they vanished.
THREE:
Rirhath B / the Crossings
Grand Central was going to be a madhouse this time of day, but then it was the middle of rush hour; and the two of them weren’t going to have to deal with the rush and press of people out in the Main Concourse, anyway. Their personal gating’s target was off to the right-hand side of the transit-secured area at the far end of Platform 23. There the Grand Central gating team had installed a spell-shielded area at the concrete platform’s end, invisible to ordinary commuters but handy to the worldgate that was usually tethered there.
What really surprised Kit was how incredibly crowded half of that shielded space was when they appeared in it. Normally it would be a surprise if you met one or two other wizards coming or going through this gate at any given time when you were there. But there had to be fifty or sixty other wizards, young and old, gathered down around the furthest end of the shielded area, waiting for the gate to go patent again after the last group of wizards to pass through were clear of the receptor site on the other side. Also, the gate’s transit interface was stretched unusually wide. In normal operation, the gating team wouldn’t allow it to be much wider open then a yard or so. But now the portal interface was dilated to at least ten feet across, and wizards were going through in crowds of five or six instead of by, at most, ones and twos.
“Wow,” Nita said, shaking her head. “I have never seen it like this—”
As their transit circle winked out, the concrete under their feet began buzzing in an ominous way, suggesting strongly that they get off the target spot right now. “Uh oh, let’s move!” Kit said, and they both hurried out of the defining blue hex that glowed in the concrete and onto safer ground.
Right behind them another few wizards popped into the space—a big tattooed man in motorcycle leathers, a business-suited lady with a briefcase, and a skinny black guy in jeans and a puffy parka with three silvery-grey Malamutes straining at their leashes. The skinny guy went by them fast, the Malamutes more or less dragging him; but as they went all three of the dogs turned long enough to grin big dog-grins at Kit, and then pulled their boss away into the crowd of wizards waiting by the gate.
There was a glint in all those dogs’ eyes as they looked at Kit that he immediately recognized. He smiled to see it, though the smile was sad. Once upon a time Ponch had looked at him like that every day. Now a lot of the other dogs he met did: a side effect of what Ponch had become after being exposed to wizardry for some years, and then to a sequence of events that had pushed him out of the categories not only of mere wizardry but mere mortality. As always, Kit wished Ponch could be here with them. But in a way he was—just not the old way—and Kit had to be content with that.
He looked at the wizards milling around the gate, all of them looking and sounding excited but kind of tense. “There are times you realize that there are a lot more of us in this part of the world than you thought,” Kit said under his breath.
“And times that makes you real glad,” Nita said, looking at the gate to the Crossings as another five or six wizards went through it and vanished together. “Like this.”
She sounded grim. Kit suspected that this was because Neets had, as usual, managed to ingest at least three times as much of the mission précis material as Kit had in the same time. ‘How is it fair that you read so much faster than me?” he said as they joined the outer fringes of that crowd.
“Who ever said anything was fair? Or supposed to be.”
“You’re sounding more like Tom every day.”
She gave him an annoyed look. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Nita muttered. For some time now she’d been doing biweekly sessions with their local Supervisory—tutorials intended to sharpen her handling of her visionary abilities. Lately, though, she’d repeatedly been claiming that for all the good it was doing her, she got more mileage out of talking to Carl’s koi. “I know Tom doesn’t mean to get on my nerves, but… He keeps saying ‘You’re making this harder than it needs to be’, and I keep saying, ‘Funny, I was about to say the same thing to you!’ And then he just laughs and starts some story about how hard he had it with his coach when he was studying.” She snickered. “Sometime during the Pleistocene…”
Kit had to laugh at that, while more wizards came crowding in behind them from the transit hex and more vanished away in front. “I bet you didn’t actually say that to him…”
“I was so tempted, though.” She blew a breath out as they edged forward. “How far did you get in the reading?”
“Uh, the bit about the planet’s moon falling down…”
“Tevaral,” Nita said. “The moon’s Thesba. If everything wasn’t going to pieces around there, it’d be kind of an interesting area—”
“Excuse me,” said someone behind Kit.
He turned around and saw a young woman in pink sweats and pink sneakers and pink headphones and a blonde pony tail peering over their heads, looking from the gate to the smartphone in her hands and back again. “Sorry,” she said to Kit, “this is for the Crossings, yeah?”
“That’s right,” Kit said.
“Thanks…” She immediately turned away and started texting someone at great speed.
He and Nita looked at each other. Nita shrugged. “‘Kind of’ interesting?” Kit said.
“Yeah, well, there are a lot of really hot stars in Tevaral’s neighborhood. An OB association, they call it, because it’s mostly made up of stars in those classes. But there’s a landmark star there too, the kind astronomers use as a class definer for the way its light curve changes.” Nita had cracked her manual open and now showed Kit a double-page spread with a long scatter of blue, white and blue-white stars laid out across it, all annotated with symbols showing data about them and arrows showing which way each star was traveling.