The Wizard's Dilemma, New Millennium Edition (34 page)

“Kit, you’ve got to believe me. It’s not like that. You don’t really understand what’s going on here.”

“I understand that you’re messing around with the Lone Power, and you’re going to get burned! What makes you think It has the slightest intention of doing what It says It’s going to? It’s gonna find some loophole to exploit, just the way It always does, and leave you out in the cold.”

He stopped. There was a long, long silence as he and Ponch watched her.

Nita discovered that she was actually starting to shake.
He’s right. But I’m right, too. What do I do—?
“Look,” she said. “I can’t take much more of this right now. Tomorrow morning is getting closer every minute, and I’m not sure I’m ready yet.”

“When are you going to start work in the morning?” Kit said.

Nita rubbed her eyes again. “Around eight. The doctors said that’s when they’re starting.”

“I’ll be here,” Kit said. “Neets, please. Get some rest. And get your brains straightened out.
Because you are not doing this alone.
”

He got up and headed out hurriedly, almost as if something was making him nervous. Ponch licked her hand and trotted out after Kit.

Nita sat there for a long while.
There’s no way I’m going to be able to keep him from coming along…

…if I wait for him.

But Nita
did
want to wait for him. She knew his help would be invaluable. At the same time, she knew that the minute Kit set eyes on Pralaya, there’d be trouble. She would lose Pralaya’s help. And she needed that, too, regardless of who might live inside Pralaya from time to time.

And at the end of it all, if she could not cure her mother herself, then Pralaya had to be there to implement the bargain.

There were no answers, and time was running out The only consolation was for Nita to keep telling herself that tomorrow around this time, it would all be over. Her mother would have been saved or else she wouldn’t have been, and if she hadn’t, Nita wouldn’t be in any position to worry about anything else.

It was not much consolation at all.

***

The rest of the day was a waking nightmare. Nita was tempted to go back into the practice universes one last time, but she wasn’t sure what difference that would make—and she was tired,
tired.
She needed her rest but couldn’t seem to get any. Details of the spells she would need to take with her, last-minute ideas, and the constantly returning thought that Kit might be right and she might be completely wrong, all kept going around and around in her head, and gave her no peace.

It seemed like about five minutes after Kit had come over that Nita’s dad came home from work, and they all went to the hospital together. Her mother hadn’t had any more seizures, for which Nita was profoundly thankful. Except the thought kept creeping in:
Is this the Lone One just giving me more time to think… and to be grateful to It?
The idea made her shudder.

When they went into Nita’s mom’s room, Nita saw that more machines had been moved in by the bed. One apparently was to make sure there was warning if she had any more seizures—there were ugly little pink and blue contact pads glued all over her head, with the hair held down around them in a hopeful sort of way by one of the wraparound turbans Nita had seen some of the nurses wearing. Her mom looked unnatural, drawn, more tired than ever, and her smile was wearing thin at the edges.

“Oh, honey, don’t look at me like that,” her mom said, seeing Nita’s expression. “I look like the bride of Frankenstein, I know that. It’s all right. I was due for another haircut, anyway.”

Two things hit Nita at once. The first thing was that, as always, her mother was trying to take care of her, even when she herself was sick. The second, which struck Nita with a terrible inevitability, was that what her mother was saying was not true: It would never be all right, never again. Her mom was really going to die.

For several long seconds, Nita could find nothing at all to do or say, and she didn’t dare look her mom in the eye; she knew her mother would see instantly what was the matter. Fortunately, Dairine got between her and her mom, and Nita disentangled herself and turned away, never more grateful for her sister’s inborn ability to get in the way.

But the moment decided her. Kit or no Kit, Lone One or not, she would do anything she had to do to save her mother: give up her wizardry, agree to whatever had to be agreed to. She was lost.

But at least I know now,
she thought. The rest of the visit passed in a kind of cheerful fog of small talk, all of it forced; none of them felt much like discussing what was going to happen the next day. After a while Nita’s dad asked Nita and Dairine to give him a few moments alone with their mom.

Nita went down the hall, down by the soft-drink machine, and Dairine followed her slowly.

“Is it gonna be all right?” Dairine said. Suddenly she didn’t sound like her usual competent self. Suddenly she sounded very young and scared, really wanting her older sister to tell her that things were going to work.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “One way or another.”

And there was nothing else to say and nothing else to do but wait for the morning.

HOW NITA SLEPT THAT night she never knew; she assumed it must have been exhaustion. At six that morning, her dad, fully dressed and ready to leave, awakened her.

“Dad,” Nita said, and got out of bed.

He looked at her with a terrible stillness. She would almost have preferred him to cry or yell; but he was now reduced to simply waiting.

“Are you ready?” he said.

There was almost no way to answer him and still tell the truth. “I’m going to start work when they do,” Nita said. “It may take me as long as Mom spends in the OR, or even longer, so don’t panic if I’m not here when you get home.”

“All right,” her father said.

He reached out and put his arms around her. All Nita could do was bury her face in his shoulder and hang on, hang on hard, trying not to cry, much though she wanted to; she was sure it would frighten him if she lost her control now.

“Be careful, honey,” he said, still with that terrible control. “I don’t want to—” He stopped.
Lose you both,
she clearly heard him think.

“I’ll be careful,” Nita said. “Go on, Daddy. I’ll see you later.”

She let go of him and turned away, waiting for him to leave. He went out the back door; a moment later, Dairine came into her room.

“Did you hear from Kit?” she asked.

Nita nodded.
Oh, please, don’t ask me any more.

Dairine didn’t say anything. “Look,” she said then, as outside, their dad started the car. “Come back,” Dairine said.
“Just come back.”

Nita was astonished to see tears in her sister’s eyes. For a split second she wanted desperately to tell Dairine that she was afraid she might
not
come back; or that she might come back and not be a wizard anymore. Nita wasn’t sure which possibility was more awful. But she didn’t dare say anything. If Dairine got any real sense of what was going on inside Nita’s head, there was too much of a danger that she might interfere— and Tom and Carl had been emphatic about what would happen then.

Nita just nodded and hugged Dairine. “You ready to give the surgeons whatever energy they need?”

“All set.”

“Then go on,” she said. “Dad’s waiting. Keep an eye on him, Dari.” She swallowed. “Keep him from getting desperate. It’s going to matter.”

Dairine nodded and went downstairs.

Nita waited to hear the car drive away. Then she got herself ready, checking the charm bracelet one last time for the spells stored there. A couple of openings remained, and she spent a few minutes considering what she might add. Finally, thinking of that first meeting with Pont and the other wizards, she added the subroutine that let the wizard using it walk on water.
If there was ever a day I needed to believe I could do that,
she thought,
it’s today.

Then she opened her manual to the pages involving access to the practice universes.

Let’s go,
she said to the manual.
The playroom first. Then the main event.

The page she was looking at shimmered, and then the print on it steadied down to a new configuration, a more complex one than she’d seen so far. It flickered, and then said:
Secondary access to nonaschetic “universe” analog has been authorized. Caution: This “universe” is inhabited. Population: 1.

Nita pulled her transit-circle spell out of the back of her mind, dropped it to the floor, took one last deep breath, and stepped through.

***

At seven-fifteen that morning, Kit was sitting on the beat-up kitchen sofa, eating cornflakes out of an ancient beat-up Scooby-Doo bowl in a studied and careful way. It was partly to steady his stomach—cornflakes were comfort food for him, inherently reassuring on some strange level—and partly his standard preparation for a wizardry. All your power wouldn’t do you much good if your brains weren’t working because your blood sugar was down in your socks somewhere.

He finished the bowl he was working on, contemplated a second one, and decided against it. Kit took his mom’s favorite bowl to the sink and washed it out carefully, going over his preparations one last time in his head. He knew as much about the aschetic universes as the manual would tell him without approval from a Senior. He knew that Nita’s authority and agreement would be enough to get him inside her mother with her; and beyond that, he had every power-feeding technique he could think of ready to go in the back of his head.

“I want to come along,” Ponch said from behind him.

Kit sighed as he finished washing the spoon, and he put it in the rack, too. “I don’t think you can,” he said. “It’s going to be complicated enough as it is.”

“I want to be with you. And I want to see her.”

Kit sighed again. Ponch had caught some of his boss’s nervousness about what Nita had gotten herself into. “Look,” Kit said. “You can come over and see her off, okay? Then you have to go home and wait for me.”

Ponch wagged his tail. “And
no
coming after me once I’ve left you,” Kit said. “You have to stay here.”

Ponch drooped his head, depressed that Kit had anticipated what he’d been thinking.

Kit went to get his jacket from the hooks behind the door. He checked his jacket pocket for his manual, though he wasn’t sure how useful it would be inside Nita’s mom.
Better to have it, though.
As he was running through his checks one last time, his mom, wearing what his dad referred to as the “Tartan Bathrobe of Doom,” wandered into the kitchen, looked back at Kit and Ponch, and caught the dog’s sad expression. “He hasn’t been bad again, has he?” she said.

Ponch drooped his head some more and wagged his tail again, an abject look that fooled Kit not at all. “Not in any of the usual ways, Mama,” he said. “Look, I’m going to help Nita, and this is a serious one. I may not be back for a while.”

“Okay,
brujito.
”

He had to smile at that His mom had taken longer than his father to come to terms with Kit’s wizardry; his father had been surprisingly enthusiastic about it, once he got over the initial shock. “Hey, my son’s a
brujo
,” he’d started saying to Kit’s mother. “What’s the matter with that?” His pop wore his pride in a way that seemed to suggest that he thought he was somehow responsible for Kit’s talent.
And who knows? Maybe he is,
Kit thought. So far he didn’t have any data on which side of the family his wizardly tendencies descended from; he’d been much too busy lately to look into it.

At least the situation was presently working in his favor. “Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. As they went out into the backyard together, Kit glanced over in the general direction of Nita’s house and in thought said,
Neets?

There was no answer.

Kit stood still, hoping against hope that she was just distracted for a moment.

Nita!

Nothing.

It was the matter of a second to throw a transit circle around himself and Ponch, and it took no more than another second to make sure it would be silent in operation. A moment later Kit and Ponch were standing in Nita’s bedroom.

It was empty. Kit stood there, listening to the sounds of an empty house, feeling for the presence of other human beings, and knowing immediately that Nita was already gone.

He felt just a flash of anger, replaced almost immediately by fear.
She left early because she was afraid for me,
he thought.

Yet another error in judgment.
Now what
? Kit thought, going cold with fear.
Go over to see Tom and Carl, get permission to follow her—

Why?
I
can find her,
Ponch said in Kit’s head.

Kit looked at Ponch in astonishment.
How?

The way I found the squirrels.

“But that was making a new universe,” Kit said. “Neets is in an old one, a universe that exists already!”

“We can make some of
that
one as if it’s new,” Ponch said, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was surprised this wasn’t obvious. “The part
she’s
in.”

Kit couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I know her scent,” Ponch said, impatient. “We can be where she’s gone. Let’s go!”

Kit was uncertain, but time was short. He reached into his claudication and rummaged around it to find the wizardly leash, then slipped it around Ponch’s neck and said, “Okay, big guy, give it your best shot.”

Ponch stepped forward, and together they vanished.

***

They walked for a long time in the dark, an experience Kit was glad no longer unsettled him. Every now and then would come a flicker of light, and he could just see, or sense, Ponch putting his head out into that light and sniffing, the way he might have put his head out a dog door, then pulling back again, turning away.
Having trouble
? Kit asked silently, the third or fourth time this happened.

No. The world just twists, is all. And something doesn’t want us to be where she is.

Kit swallowed on hearing that. But finally they came out into the light and stayed there, and Kit looked around him in surprise, even though his experience of alternate universes had been expanded a lot lately. It was a huge place, a flat space, and its emptiness made it seem to echo in the mind. The sourceless lighting and the shining floor with the assortment of weird chairs, beds, hammocks, frames, and tables in the middle of it made it all look a lot like a furniture showroom.