od there in the doorway, looking at her. Are you okay she said. Oh, yeah, Dairine said, not lifting her head. See how okay I am. Thanks for asking. Nita had been practicing ignoring her sister s sarcasm for years and by now was expert at the art. What was the matter with you Nita said, though not nearly as loudly as she d have liked. There was a long silence before Dairine said anything. I needed to get away, she said at last. Just for a while. I needed…I don t know. Not a vacation. I needed to do something else, somewhere else. Millman said a change would be a good idea if I could swing it. And for you, too. She gave Nita a look that was almost fierce. Millman was the school psychologist who had been counseling them both, on and off, since their mom died. I ll bet he didn t tell you to do anything like this, Nita said, annoyed. You know how it has to look to Dad! He s going to think you don t think he s being a good enough dad or something. But it s not like we were going to be away all the time, Neets! Dairine said. It s easy to come home at nights if you want to. There s a protocol all set up the Powers give you an expanded worldgating allowance and everything: You don t have to worry about blowing huge amounts of energy on transport to come back from your host world if you get homesick, or if you need to deal with something else back here. You can be back anytime you need to be, no problem and the rest of the time, you can concentrate on being where you are. Nita let out a long breath. That, she said, kind of looks like the last thing you were doing, Dair. Dairine rubbed her eyes with her hands. It was their dad s gesture, helpless and pained, and Nita s insides seized up when she saw it. I didn t think it through, Dairine said after a little while. Tom got that right. She was quiet for another long time, almost too long, but there was no break in the tension. After a moment, Nita sat down on Dairine s bed. It creaked when she did so. Dairine threw her a look, though not the one Nita was expecting. You ve been toughing it out all the time, Dairine said, and went back to staring at her desk, all cluttered with diskettes and blank CDs and artwork and paperwork, with the flat-screen monitor of her main computer, and also now with Spot, his legs all retracted, looking as muted and unhappy as Dairine did. You think I don t see Dairine said, reaching out to trace some aimless design on Spot s upper case with one finger. And when Dad and I can t connect, you re the one who winds up talking sense to him, and to me, and getting us all going in the same direction. But who s there to make things easier for you …You re getting worn out with it. You need a change of pace, something besides worrying about whether we re okay. We re tougher than you think we are. But you… Dairine fell silent, possibly unwilling to say what she was thinking. Nita looked at her and felt equally unwilling to force the issue, for she was afraid their thoughts were running in tandem. How many times have I had this idea myself in the past couple of months Nita thought. How many times have I thought, I wish I were out of here. I wish that just for a few days a week, I was somewhere I didn t have to deal with helping to put everything back together in some new shape, one that doesn t have Mom in it … Look, Nita said to Dairine after a moment. You meant well. You just have to take these things past the meaning sometimes! Especially when it s Dad. You know what a disciplinarian he is…or thinks he is. Now that Mom s not here, he thinks he has to be twice as much of one. Have you given any thought to trying to be, you know, good for a while Dairine didn t look up, but she snickered, a supremely cynical sound. It was what Nita had been hoping to hear. Yeah, Nita said. Well, think about that, too. You could throw him seriously off balance if you kept at it long enough. Yeah, Dairine said after a moment or so. That might be worth seeing… Do what you can, Nita said. Give him some relief. What about you Dairine said. What about me what Nita said, and then abruptly heard in her head what her present English teacher would say to her if she uttered such a sentence in class. Mr. Neary was fiercer about correct grammar than some people were about the eternal battle between Good and Evil. You could still go, Dairine said. Nita stared at her sister. And you could still take someone else. Say, Kit… After a moment, Nita shook her head. You re crazy, she said. This thing with Dad is going to take some patching up. There s no way he d go for it right now… But Nita was somehow finding it hard to be as energetic about the refusal as she thought she should have been. Dairine just looked at her, straight-faced, for a moment or two. Finally Nita shook her head once more and got up. The bed creaked again. That thing s never recovered from being down that crevasse on Pluto, Dairine said. Its springs are shot. You owe me a new one. Nita threw a look back at the desk, at Spot. How a featureless silvery-dark metal case could look less depressed than it had five minutes ago, Nita didn t know, but Spot s did. This reassured her, too, for Spot was a good reflection of Dairine s genuine moods Dairine might successfully fake what was going on with her, but Spot had no such talent. It was not down any crevasse, Nita said. I left it in the middle of a plain of perfectly good frozen nitrogen, high and dry. But who knows, I might read up on the crystal-reconstruction spells in the metals section of the manual over the next day or so, and talk the steel back the way it used to be. I m getting good with metal, I m told. This airy and overconfident statement elicited another snicker, even more cynical than the last one. Nita grinned. She had been a talk-to-the-trees type in the beginning of her wizardry, a specialist in work with organic life-forms, but everything changed eventually. You sit here and think about stuff, Nita said. Be real contrite in case Dad comes in. And when we re gone, if Dad hasn t done it already, make a little effort to get on his good side by taking that poor lettuce out of the sink and sticking it in the compost heap. It s time it got recycled into something alive to make up for what happened to it in the fridge. Sure. Nita went softly down the stairs and headed toward the dining room. Voices were speaking there. She stopped not far from the stairs, out of sight. I m parenting for two here, Tom, Nita heard her dad say. I know, Tom said quietly. It can t be easy. I don t want to be hard on her. But at the same time, I have to try to keep some semblance of normalcy around here…keep some structures in place that the kids know they can depend on. There was one of those pauses in which Nita could practically hear her father rubbing his face. You re doing the right thing, Tom said, getting up. You know you are. In the meantime, Harry, any time you need a friendly ear, you know our number. One or the other of us is almost always around. Wizardry isn t all about errantry. Mostly it s just talking. I know, her dad said. I see that here a lot There was a knock at the back door. Nita heard her dad s chair scrape back as he went to answer it. Oh, hi, Kit, her dad said. Come on in. I can t get used to it, the times when you walk over: I keep expecting you to just appear out of nothing in the living room, as usual. Her dad laughed then. As usual… Uh, hi, Mr. Callahan. No, I didn t want to, because … Tom got up as Nita put her head around the living room door into the dining room. News travels fast, huh Tom said to her as the back door shut behind Kit. Uh, yeah, Nita said. She picked up Tom s jacket, which was still wet, and shook it off before handing it to him. Residual water went everywhere. Why didn t you keep the rain off you when you came over she said. I don t always do wizardry just because I can, Tom said, smiling slightly and shrugging into the parka. An attitude toward errantry that you ll understand a lot better when you re my age. Besides, I like the rain. By the way, how s the reading coming When Tom asked Nita this, she knew it didn t have anything to do with fiction. Nita had been spending a lot of time with the manual over the past months, starting to explore for herself the kind of research wizardry that Tom did. In particular, she had been studying the Speech more closely, mostly for its own sake there was always something new to find out about the language in which the Universe had been written but also with an eye to finding other ways to deal with the Lone Power than just brute force. I ve been doing some more research on the Enactive and pre-Enactive modes, Nita said. Ancillary Oaths and bindings. Oh ho, Tom said. That ll keep you busy for the next couple of years… There s a lot of finicky material there. A lot of memory work, too. Hit the Binding Oath yet Some references to it, Nita said. But I haven t seen the Oath itself. It s worth a look, Tom said. Our own Oath is based on it. Or maybe I should say closely related. It s worth studying, even if its uses are limited. Meanwhile, we ve got more immediate problems than research. He glanced back toward the stairs. Talk to her, will you I did. Good. See you later. See you, Kit. Tom went out the front door and closed it behind him. Honey, Nita s dad said, I need to change out of my work clothes. Give me a few minutes. It s such a pleasure to get out of the house, Kit said. The phone hasn t stopped ringing all afternoon. Why Carmela. Every five minutes it s yet another of her slavering horde of boyfriends. I didn t think she d gotten up to the horde level, Nita said. She told me she was just planning to test the wonderful world of dating. Test Kit said. It s more like she s holding auditions. There s a new one on the phone every ten minutes. And I really don t want to be around when she narrows them down to the short list. Being here is a relief…even just for a little while. So are you coming over for dinner Nita sat down and reached across the table for a pen and a pad of sticky notes, pulling off the top note and starting to jot down a list of needed groceries. We have to go shop first. I ll come over when we get back. We ve really got to talk about the next couple of weeks. That business on Mars, Kit said as he sat down across from her. We need to get that taken care of before it gets out of hand. Those depth charges in Great South Bay…It s time to get together with S reee and the rest of the deep-side team to deal with those before they get any more unstable. And then there s that gate-relocation thing in the city… Kit paused, glancing toward the back of the house as he heard the bedroom door close. It was Dairine, yeah Kit whispered. Yeah. What did she do What did Tom do He grounded her. She can t leave the system. Kit whistled softly. What about your dad I thought he was going to lose it completely, Nita said, under her breath. He sent her to her room. I can t even remember the last time he did that. What did she do! Kit said. Nita finished with the sticky note, then put the pen down and told him. Kit s eyes slowly went wide. Wow, Kit said. Halfway across the galaxy, he said Yeah, said Nita. That d really be something. You don t get to do a transit like that every day, and this would be a sponsored one! Think of being able to go that far and not have to pay for the energy. Nita had been thinking of it, in an idle way. Halfway across the galaxy was forty-five thousand light-years or so. If you independently constructed a spell to do that kind of distance, it would really take it out of you. And doing such a transit using a previously set-up world-gate had its costs, too you needed a good reason to do it, such as being formally on errantry. It s a shame you couldn t go, anyway, Kit said. Oh, come on, Nita said. I couldn t go now. Why not It s spring break. We ve got two whole weeks off! Nita frowned, shook her head. It wouldn t be right somehow. My dad Your dad wouldn t mind, Kit said. And then his expression went very amused. Come to think of it, my dad wouldn t mind. Nita looked at Kit in confusion. What You haven t been over in the past couple of days, Kit said. Between Carmela and Ponch Oh no, Nita said. What s Ponch doing now Wait till you come over, Kit said, looking rather resigned. It ll be easier for you to see than for me to explain. But when I told my pop that we were going to have to go to Mars, he said, Don t let me keep you. Nita stared at Kit in surprise. I bet your mama didn t say that, though. Kit s grin had a slight edge to it. No. My mama suggested I go take a look at Neptune while I was at it, and not hurry home. Nita snickered. Seriously, Kit said. This would be really neat. If we went to see Tom… They heard the door to Nita s dad s bedroom open. Look, Nita said, let s talk about it later. But I don t think Nita s dad came in from the living room. You ready he said to her. Yeah, Nita said, getting up. Daddy, can I have dinner at Kit s Sure, her dad said. Kit, she ll see you later. Neets, let s get this shopping done. Fifteen minutes later, Nita and her dad walked in the sliding doors of the grocery store. The way things had gone in the old days, on occasions when the whole family went to the store together, it had been Nita s dad s job to push the cart and make helpful suggestions: Her mom had done the choosing. Nita now sighed a little as her dad went for the cart, and she consciously took on the choosing role for the first time. When shopping before, she had been rather halfhearted about it, which possibly had been the cause of some of the trouble. I guess I owe the fridge a little apology, she thought, and got out the sticky-pad page on which she d made her list. They went down the vegetable aisle and got potatoes, celery, tomatoes, and a head of lettuce, which Nita very pointedly handed to her dad. The crisper this time, she said. He s counting on you. He Nita s dad said, turning the lettuce over several times in his hands and looking at it closely. How can you tell If you re a wizard, you can look at the gender equivalent of the word lettuce in the Speech, Nita said. Or, on the other hand, you can just ask him. I d probably prefer to pass on that second option, Nita s dad said as they came to the cold cuts and prepackaged meats. I don t know if I d want to talk to something I might eat. Daddy, this might sound weird to you, Nita said, looking for her preferred brand of bologna, but some things are less upset about being eaten than they are about being wasted. Ouch. Nita looked at her dad in sudden shock. Daddy, I m sorry, I didn t mean it that way. Her dad smiled slightly as they turned into the next aisle. I didn t think you did. But sometimes ouch is a healthy reaction. Or so I hear. You ve been talking to Tom again, Nita said. No, Millman. Never mind. We need some pizzas. Her father paused in front of a freezer case. Yeah. Nita picked a pizza from the freezer compartment. The front of it was full of images of ancient stone ovens. Nita turned it over and started reading the ingredients. This is disgusting, Nita said. Look at all the junk they put in this! That s probably why they call it junk food. Used to be that just meant the empty calories, Nita said. These days… Not even this year s unit on organic chemistry had prepared her to cope with some of the ingredient names on that label. Nita made a face and put the package back. I m not sure I want to be eating so many things I can t pronounce. Home cooking means a lot more work… I know, Nita said. I m beginning to see why Mom was so intense about it. I guess I m just going to have to learn. They turned into the paper-towels-and-toilet-paper aisle, and Nita s dad put a couple of the giant economy-size bundles of toilet paper in the cart. It has been tough, hasn t it her dad said. Nita sighed and nodded. It hurts sometimes, she said after a moment. Hurts pretty bad. Then, having a sudden thought, she added, But not so much that I need to leave the planet for extended periods. Her father looked thoughtful. You sure about that he said. Nita looked at him, uncertain what was going through his mind. What are other kids at school doing over spring break he said. Nita shrugged. Some of them are going away, she said. Among a few of her friends there had been excited talk of family vacations, trips to Florida or even, in one or two cases, to Europe. These by themselves had left Nita unimpressed, for travel by itself was no problem for a wizard. You could be planets or star-systems away from home in a matter of minutes or hours, depending on whether you used private or public transport. But the idea of being able to get away with the family, even for just a few days, had an entirely different attraction.