Carmela emerged from the upstairs bathroom and brushed past him. "Looking lonely, little brother," she said, flopping down on her stomach and putting the earphones back in. "Where's Miss Juanita been lately?"
"Good question," Kit said, and headed down the stairs. "Where ya goin'?" she shouted after him.
He smiled. "Out to walk the dog."
Monday Night, Tuesday Morning
NITA WOKE UP AFTER midnight. She felt a flash of guilt for having fallen asleep straight after coming home from the hospital. But no matter how much she might have felt that precious time was slipping by, she'd been completely worn out, and there was no point in trying to do anything wizardly. Now the charm bracelet was satisfyingly heavy around her wrist, glinting in the light of the lamp on her desk, and she was rested and ready. So let's get to work...
She went downstairs to check where people were, and found that her dad had gone to bed. Nita made herself a sandwich and brought it back upstairs with her, pausing by Dairine's door to listen.
Silence. Softly Nita eased the door open, peered inside. In the darkness she could make out a tangle of limbs, pillows, and T-shirt on the bed—Dairine, in her usual all-night fight with the bedding. Nita shut the door and went into her room again.
She ate the sandwich with workmanlike speed and changed into jeans and sneakers and a dark jacket. Then she went to her desk to pick up the few small standalone wizardries that she thought would be useful for this exercise. One at a time she hooked each of them to a different link of the charm bracelet: a small gold house key, a little silvery disc with the letters GCT intertwined on one side and the number twenty-five on the other, a tiny stylized lightning bolt, a pebble, a little megaphone.
Nita pulled out her transit wizardry and changed its time-space coordinates, triggering the fail-safe features that would abort the spell if anyone was standing in the target area. Then she dropped the circle to the floor and stepped through, pulling it after her as she went.
The side doorway into which Nita stepped normally serviced one of the food stands in the Graybar Passage on one side of the terminal. Now there were only some black plastic garbage bags there, and Nita stepped over them and came out into the big archway dividing the passage from the Main Concourse. It would be a while before Grand Central shut down; a few trains were still moving in and out... and so was other traffic. Nita made her way to the right of the big octagonal brass information center, heading for the doorway that led to track twenty-five.
No train stood at the platform this late. Nita paused under the archway at the bottom of the platform, behind some iron racks and out of view of the control center far down the track on the right. She felt around in the back of her mind for another wizardry she'd prepared earlier, lying there almost ready to go. Nita said the thirty-fifth word, and the air around her rippled and misted over in a peculiar half-mirrored way. Whoever looked at her would see only what was directly behind her; she was effectively invisible now.
Nita walked on down the platform. Grand Central's most-used worldgate was down here, hanging in the space between tracks twenty-five and twenty-six, and accessible from either side for those who knew how to pull it over to the platform. Quite a few wizards used it for long-distance transport in the course of any one day—
Nita stumbled. "Auuw!" said someone down by her feet.
She recovered herself and stood still, looking around but unable to see what she'd tripped on. "Uh... sorry!"
"Oh," a voice said. "I see what you're doing. Wait a minute."
Suddenly there was a small black cat standing down by her foot, looking up at her. "Better," the cat said in the Speech. "Sorry about that. We were invisible two different ways."
"Dai, Rhiow," Nita said. Rhiow was the leader of the Grand Central worldgate supervision group, all of whose members were cats, since only feline wizards can naturally see the hyperstring structures on which worldgates are constructed. "I'm on errantry, and I greet you—"
"Aren't we all?" Rhiow said. "Nice to see you, too." She was looking at the opening in the air, filled with an odd shimmering darkness, which had manifested itself at Nita's approach. "Now, there's a configuration you don't see every day." "Carl okayed it."
"Of course he did. It wouldn't be here otherwise. Good timing on your part, though." Rhiow looked back toward the scurrying people in the Main Concourse with a put-upon expression. "This gate's been getting three times the usual use while the others are moving around."
"Moving!" Nita's eyes widened. She'd seen more than once now what happened when a worldgate dislocated itself improperly. The results could vary from simply disastrous to extremely fatal.
"No, it's all right; it's our idea, not the gates'!" Rhiow said. "But Penn Station is being moved into a new building, across Eighth Avenue, and the gates have to go, too. We've had our paws full."
"It was nice of you to take the time to see me off."
"Not a problem, cousin," Rhiow said. "I wanted to make sure this behaved itself when you brought it online. Meanwhile, watch how you go, and watch how you handle what you find. We can bring danger with us even to a training session, so you be careful."
"I will."
"Dai stibo then, cousin."
Dai...'
Manual in hand, Nita stepped through.
At first there was only a second's worth of darkness and the usual feel of the brushing of the worldgate across and through her, a feathers-on-mind feeling— strange as always but swiftly over. And then she broke out into light again, as if through the surface of water...
... and found herself on the opposite platform, next to track twenty-six.
Nita glanced around, confused. Uh-oh. Am I still invisible? She was. But then she realized that she needn't have worried. There was no one in sight at all.
She walked slowly back up the platform under the long line of fluorescent lights, going softly to avoid attracting any attention in this great quiet. Now where'd Rhiow go? Nita thought, glancing back at the platform to make sure she hadn't missed her somehow. But there was no sign of her, no movement, no sound anywhere—nothing but the soft cool breath of the draft coming up out of the dark depths of the tunnel through which the trains came into the station from under Park Avenue.
In the archway that led out into the Main Concourse, Nita paused, looking around her cautiously. There was no one out there, and all the lights were low. That was really bizarre, for even when the station was closed in the middle of the night, the lights were always up full, and there were always some people here: cleaners, transit police, workers doing maintenance on the trains and tracks. The lightbulb stars still burned, distant, up in the great blue backward sky of the terminal's ceiling, but below them the terminal was empty, drowned in a silence even more peculiar than the twilight now filling it.
Nita stood there and listened hard... not just with the normal senses, but with those that came with wizardry and were sharpened by its use. She tried to catch any hint of something wrong, the influence of the Lone Power or other forces inimical to a wizard. But there was no glimmer of danger to be sensed, no whisper of threat. Okay, she thought. Mere weirdness I can handle.
Softly Nita went out across the huge cream-colored expanse of the Main Concourse floor and up the ramp to the doors that led out onto Forty-second Street. She pushed one brass door open, stepped out onto the sidewalk.