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she'd come so far to find was something she badly needed.
The novelty took a while to wear off. Finally Nita banished the storm, sweeping the clouds away and right out of the sky with a couple of idle gestures—exactly the kind of thing a wizard normally couldn't do in the real world, where storms had consequences and every phrase of every spell had to be evaluated in terms of what it might accidentally harm or what energy it might waste. It'd be great if wizardry were like this all the time, Nita thought. Find the heart of power, master it, and do what you like; just command it and it happens; just wish it and it's done...
But that was a dream. Reality would be more work. And it would be more satisfying, though not all that different—for bioelectricity was just lightning scaled down, after all, and every cell in the body was mostly water. Now Nita stood there in the cool air, as the sun started to set in the cleared sky behind the skyscrapers, and looked again at the tangle of power that she held, this whole universe's soul. On a whim as she looked down at it, Nita altered its semblance, as she'd altered the look of the spell matrix she wore. Suddenly it wasn't a tight-packed webwork of light she was holding, but a shiny red apple.
Nita looked at it with profound satisfaction, and resisted the urge to take a bite out of it. Probably blow me from here to the end of things., she thought. She brought the kernel back over to where she'd found it, and held it up to the stone wall. It didn't leap out of her hand back to its place, as she'd half expected it would;
Monday Night, Tuesday Morning
it was reluctant. It enjoys this kind of thing, she thought. It likes being mastered... being used. It likes not being alone.
Nita smiled. She could understand that. Carefully she said the words that would briefly dissolve the stone, and slipped the kernel back in.
Wait till Kit sees this, she thought, pulling her hands out of the stone and dusting them off, when it's all over and Mom is better at last. He's gonna love it.
She checked her watch. Half an hour to spare; not too bad. I'll do better next time. She turned the charm bracelet on her wrist to show the little disc that said GCT/25, her quick way back to the ingress gate. "Home," Nita said, and vanished.
She came out on the platform at Grand Central, invisible again; a good thing, for just as she stepped out of the gate, a guy went by driving a motorized sweeper, cleaning the platform for the rush hour that would start in just a couple of hours. Nita glanced at her watch. It was three in the morning; as predicted, the return gating routine had dropped her here two hours after she'd left. But she was six hours' worth of tired. She fished around in her pocket and came up with her transit circle...
...and couldn't bear to use it for a second or so yet. Nita walked off the platform out into the Main Concourse—where a guy with a wide pad-broom was pushing some sweeping compound along the shiny floor—and out past him, invisible, and up the ramp, to push open the door and stand on Fortysecond Street
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again. This time there was traffic, and garbage in the gutter, and horns honking; this time the streetlights were bright; this time the sidewalks were full of people, hurrying, heading home from clubs or a meal after the movies, hailing cabs, laughing, talking to each other. As Nita dropped her transit circle onto the sidewalk, out of the way of the pedestrians, the wind coming down Forty-second flung a handful of rain at her, like a hint of something happening somewhere else, or about to happen.
Nita grinned, stepped through her circle, and came out in her bedroom. She pulled the circle up after her, and had just enough energy to pull her jeans off, crawl into bed, and pull the covers up before the darkness of sheer exhaustion came down on her like a bigger, heavier blanket.
"Nita?"
"Huh?!" She sat up in bed, shocked awake. Her father stood in the doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel, looking at her with concern.
"Honey, it's eight-thirty."
"Omigosh!!" She leaped out of bed, and a second later was amazed at how wobbly she felt.
"Don't panic; I'll drive you," her dad said. "But Kit was here ten or fifteen minutes ago. I thought you'd gone already—you don't usually oversleep—and then he went so he wouldn't be late." Her dad looked at her alarm clock. "Didn't it go off? We'll have to get you another one."
"No, it's okay," Nita said, rummaging hurriedly in
Monday Night, Tuesday Morning
her drawer. "What time are we going to see Mom today?" "When you get back from school."
"Good. I've got something to tell her." And Nita smiled. It was the first time in days that she'd smiled and it hadn't felt wrong.
It's going to work. It's going to be okay!
ornng and Afternoon
NITA'S FATHER TOOK THE blame for her lateness when he delivered her to the school's main office, and when her dad left, Nita went to her second-period social studies class feeling more or less like she'd been rolled over by a steam shovel—she was nowhere near recovered from the previous night's exertions. She waved at Jane and Melissa and a couple other friends in the same class, sat down, and pulled out her notebooks, intent on staying awake if nothing else.
This was going to be a challenge, as the Civil War was still on the agenda, and the class had been stuck in 1863 for what now seemed about a century. Mr, Neary, the social studies teacher, was scribbling away on the blackboard, as illegibly as ever. He really should have been a, doctor, Nita thought, and yawned.
Neets?
She sat up with a jerk so sudden that her chair scraped on the floor, and the kids around her looked at
Tuesday Morning and Afternoon
her in varying states of surprise or amusement. Mr. Neary glanced around, saw nothing but Nita writing industriously, and turned back to the blackboard, talking about Abraham Lincoln at his usual breakneck speed while he wrote.
Nita, for her own part, was bending as far over as she could while she wrote, trying to conceal the fact that she was blushing furiously. Kit—was starting to think you were avoiding me!
No,I—
Where've you been? Don't you answer your manual anymore?
She could have answered him sharply... then put the urge aside. That was what had started this whole thing. Look, she said silently. I'm really sorry. It was all my fault.
All of it? Kit said. Wow. Didn't think you were gonna go that far. The Lone Power's gonna be real surprised when It finds out you let It off the hook.
His tone was dry but not angry... as far as she could tell. Please, Nita said. I'd like to be let off it, too. There was a pause at Kit's end. Where've you been? I've got some stuff to show you. It's, ub, it's been busy. I—
Look, Kit said, save it for later. Wait for me after school, okay? Okay.
She felt him turn away in mind to become engrossed in the test paper that had just been put down in front of him. Nita turned her attention back to what her social studies teacher was doing at the blackboard... and was
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astonished to find that she could. Just that brief contact had suddenly lifted from her mind a kind of grayness that had been hanging over it since before her mom went into the hospital. And now, she thought, even if Dairine can't help, maybe Kit can.
But could he? And what even makes me think that after the pain in the butt I've been, he's going to want anything to do with what I'm planning? She desperately wanted to believe that he would want something to do with it, but she'd been pretty good at being wrong about things lately. And even if I asked him, would he think I was just asking because—