“Phone!”
Nita raised her eyebrows. At this hour of the morning? Not Kit; he wouldn’t bother with the phone, or he’d just text instead of calling the house phone. “Thanks!”
The word for “phone,” at least, she knew perfectly well. Nita held out her hand. “If you would?” she said in the Speech to the handset in question.
The portable phone from the kitchen appeared in her hand, its hold button blinking. She hit the button, meanwhile balancing her manual on the edge of the sink while she kept paging through it. “Hello?”
“Nita,” Tom Swale’s voice said. “Good morning.”
“Hey, how are you?” Nita said.
“A little pressed for time at the moment,” said her local Senior Wizard. “How was your holiday?”
“Not bad,” she said. “Listen, what’s the Speech word for ‘pimple’?”
There was a pause at the other end. “I used to know that,” Tom said.
“But you don’t anymore?”
“I’ll look it up. You should do that, too. How are your houseguests doing?”
“They’re fine as far as I know,” Nita said. “Probably having breakfast. I was just going to get some myself.”
“You should definitely do that,” Tom said. “But can you and Kit and the visiting contingent spare me and Carl a little time afterward?”
“Uh, sure,” Nita said. “I was going to call you anyway, because I heard some really strange things from Dairine about what went on here while we were away… and the manual wouldn’t say anything about the details. Where did you guys vanish to? Assuming I’m allowed to ask.”
“Oh, you’re allowed. That’s what I’m calling about. I have a lot of people to get in touch with today, but since you two and your guests are just around the corner, we thought we might drop by and brief you in person.”
“Sure,” Nita said. “I’ll let everybody know you’re coming.”
“Fine. An hour or so be all right?”
“Sure.”
“Great. See you then.”
Tom hung up, leaving Nita staring at the phone in her hand. She pushed the hang-up button and just stood there.
“Wow,” she said. She looked down at the manual, which now lay open to one of its many glossaries, and was showing her fourteen different variations on the “aposteme” word. “Kit?” Nita said.
A slightly muffled reply came seemingly from the back of the manual, along with the sound of barking somewhere in the Rodriguez household. “I can’t believe we’re out of dog food,” Kit said. “I leave for a week and a half, and this place goes to pieces.”
“We were doing just fine without you,” said another voice from two blocks away: Kit’s sister Carmela. “It’s not our fault you forgot to put dog food on the shopping list before you left. Neets, is it true he destroyed a whole alien culture in just ten days?”
Nita snorted. “Wouldn’t have been just him, ‘Mela. And we didn’t destroy it. We just happened to be there when they were going on to the next thing.”
“‘Just happened’?” Carmela said. Her tone was one of kindly disbelief. “You’re so nice to try to share the blame! See you later on…”
After a moment Kit said, “Am I allowed to think about teleporting her to Titan and dumping her in a lake of liquid methane?”
“No,” Nita said, feeling around under her bed for her sneakers. “It’d upset those microbes there … the ones Dairine’s been coaching in situational ethics.”
“The thought of Dairine coaching anybody in ethics…,” Kit said. “No offense, but sometimes I wonder if someday our solar system is going to be famous for having entire species made up of criminal masterminds.”
“Well, if the Powers That Be have slipped up, it’s too late to do anything now. And speaking of the Powers, you should get over here in about an hour. Tom and Carl want to talk to everybody.”
“We’re not in trouble, are we?”
“I don’t think so,” Nita said. “In fact, I think maybe they are.”
“And here I thought we were going to have a few quiet days before spring break was over,” Kit said.
Nita shook her head. “Guess not. But now we get to find out why nobody could find them anywhere.”
From down the hall, toward the front of the house, she could hear voices in the dining room. “Sounds like they’re having breakfast out there,” Nita said.
“Should I wait to come over?”
Nita shrugged and turned away from the mirror. “What for?” she said. “Might as well come have some breakfast, too, if you haven’t had anything.”
“I have, but another breakfast wouldn’t kill me. Give me ten minutes, though. I have to talk to Ponch.”
“Why? Are all the neighbors’ dogs sitting around outside the house again?” This had been a problem recently, apparently due to what Tom and Carl had described as some kind of wizardly leakage. Diagnosing its source had been difficult with so much wizardry happening around their two households lately… and with the present houseguests in residence, the diagnosis promised to get no easier.
“Nope,” Kit said. “Everything’s perfectly quiet. He just has more questions about life.”
Nita smiled. “Yeah, who doesn’t, lately,” she said. “Take your time.”
Nita paged briefly through the manual, looking at the pimple words. There are too many ways to have this conversation, she thought. And I’m still pooped. If Tom hadn’t called, I’d just go back to bed. She yawned—
In the moment when her eyes closed during the yawn, the darkness reminded Nita of something. Another darkness, she thought. I had a dream… She’d been standing somewhere on the Moon, and it had been dark. Bright lights were scattered all around her, throwing strange multidirectional shadows across the rocks and craters, but the sky was as blank of stars as if the whole thing was a stage set. And something was growling…. Nita suddenly got goose bumps.
She opened her eyes. The bathroom, the morning light, the mirror, all the things around her were perfectly normal. But the memory left her feeling chilly.
It means something, of course, Nita thought. Lately, what doesn’t? Every wizard has a specialty, but the specialty can change. Nita’s initially straightforward affinity to living things was now turning into something more abstract—an ability to glimpse other beings’ realities and futures, or her own, while dreaming or in other similar states. She was struggling to master it, but in the meantime all she could do was pay attention and try to learn as she went along.
Great, she thought. News flash: It was dark on the back side of the Moon. I’ll make a note. Meanwhile, as for the zit…
She looked one more time at the way-too-extensive pimple vocabulary in the manual, shrugged, and shut it. Later, Nita thought, and headed out of the bathroom.
“All right,” her dad was saying from the kitchen as she passed through the living room, and Nita started walking a little faster as she caught the smell of frying bacon. “How many are we for dinner tonight?”
“The usual,” came the reply. “Three humans, one humanoid, one tree, one giant bug—”
“Humanoid king,” said another voice.
“Yeah, fine, whatever.”
“And who were you calling a bug?”
“Or a humanoid? I am the human. You’re the humanoids.”
Nita came around the corner from the living room and paused in the dining room doorway. The room’s slightly faded yellow floral wallpaper was bright in morning sun, and the polished wood of the table was covered with cereal boxes, empty plates and bowls, various cutlery, the morning paper, and several teen-girl-oriented magazines of a kind that Nita had sworn off as too pink and clueless a couple of years ago. At the head of the table, poring over the international-news section of the newspaper, was a slender young man with the most unnervingly handsome face and the most perfect waist-length blond hair Nita had ever seen. He was dressed in floppy golden-colored pants and high boots of something like glittering bronze-colored leather, unusually ornate—but over it all he was wearing a very oversized gray T-shirt that said FERMILAB MUON COLLIDER SLO-PITCH SOFTBALL, and he was sucking on a lollipop. Sitting at the right side of the table, turning the pages of one of the too-pink magazines and eyeing it with many, many red eyes like little berries, was what appeared to be a small Christmas tree, though one without any ornaments except a New York Mets baseball cap. Across the table from the tree was Nita’s sister, Dairine, in T-shirt and jeans, her red hair hanging down and half concealing her freckled face as she paged through the paper’s entertainment and comics section from last weekend. And at the end of the table opposite the blond guy was a giant metallic-purple centipede, reading several different columns’ worth of classified ads with several stalked eyes.