Forty-five minutes later, Kit and the rest of the class walked out, mostly looking like they had been run over repeatedly by the same steamroller. “Remind me never to go to sub-Saharan Africa in the eighteen hundreds,” Raoul muttered. “After today, just seeing it would make me come down with post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Kit theoretically could have gone to that time and place if he wanted to and was willing to pay the price, but right now he felt about the same as Raoul did. “Still, it could have been worse. At least we passed.”
“Yeah. Not sure I have any appetite left for lunch… I guess we can go look, though.”
Kit grinned, privately thinking that it would take a nuclear war to ruin Raoul's appetite. “Let me know how it was. I have to go home for lunch.”
“God, I wish I lived as close to school as you do,” Raoul said. “When I think of all the cafeteria food I wouldn’t have to eat…!”
“Go on, Pirate,” Kit said. “Suffer a little. I’ll see you later.”
He made his way back to his locker, chucked his backpack into it, locked it up again, and headed out the school’s back door, jogging across the parking lot, through the gate, and around the corner onto Conlon Road.
Ponch was bouncing around in the backyard, jumping almost to the top of the chain-link fence, as Kit came down the driveway. “Okay, okay, give me a minute,” Kit said. He pulled the screen door open and poked the lock with one finger. “Hey, Chubbo…”
The lock obligingly threw its bolt back for him. Kit patted the lock, opened the door, loped into the kitchen, very hastily threw together a ham sandwich on rye with some mustard, and ate it. For his mother, who was still asleep because she had been working night shifts at the hospital over the past week, he left a note scribbled on the pad on the refrigerator: “I had lunch. See you later.” He thought of adding the code phrase “Out on business now” to let his mama know that there was wizardly work afoot, but then he changed his mind. He’d have no more than his lunch period minus the time to eat the sandwich before he would have to be back at school again, anyway.
Kit cleaned up the crumbs from his sandwich and went out, pulling the door softly closed behind him so as not to wake his mama. “See you, big guy,” Kit said to the lock. “Keep her safe.”
I’m on it!
He went around the back, opened the gate softly, and closed it again, grabbing Ponch by the collar and roughing him up a little by way of saying hello. “And you weren’t even barking,” Kit said. “Good for you.”
She’s asleep
, Ponch said. I don’t want her to yell at me.
“Neither do I Good for you for thinking of it.”
Are we going out
?! Ponch began chasing his tail in delight.
“Just for a quick look at our guy. I want to see if he’s okay before I come barging in on him.
We’re going to have to be stealthy, though.”
Ponch finished his running around and sat down, his tail sweeping the sparse grass while Kit reached into his “pocket” and came out with the long chain of his transit spell, and another spell, more complex, that he had prepared earlier. There were several different ways for wizards to be invisible, and this one was probably the most comprehensive of them: Even if someone bumped up against Kit, he would feel nothing, and the spell would incline him to think he’d just stumbled somehow. Building the spell had required half an hour’s careful reading from the manual at a time of morning when Kit would rather still have been in bed, followed by fifteen or twenty minutes on his back, as exhausted as if he’d run around the school track about ten times. But now, as he shook the cloaking spell out onto the air in a cloudy web of woven Speech, he had to admire his handiwork.
The basic spellweb would last a good while, as long as he remembered to recharge it at intervals.
“Okay,” he said to Ponch. “You ready?”
Yeahyeahyeahyeah!
“Good. Stay close to me. This thing only has about a six-foot radius.” He draped the invisibility spell over his shoulder for a moment, stuck the chain of the transit spell into the belt of his parka, and reached down into the “pocket” for his wizard’s manual. “Now then,” he said. He flipped it open, and the pages riffled to the spot he’d bookmarked. He ran a finger down the listing of functions on that page. “Location and detection… cross-reference to personnel listings… Right.”
The locator spell blocked out on the page rearranged itself to include Darryl’s listing, and the listing itself pulsed to indicate that it was “in circuit” with the rest of the spell and ready to go.
“This is a temporal-spatial locator routine with sync to an existing transit nexus now balanced for two,” Kit said in the Speech. “Purpose: Locate and identify the wizard in the listing. Additional info: Linkage to stealth routine referenced on page…” He stopped and had to check his other bookmark, on the cloaking spell’s page, because the manual’s pagination was constantly changing, depending on Kit’s needs (and sometimes its own). “Three-eighty-nine. Ready?”
The whole spell pulsed bright on the page as he turned back to it. Slowly Kit started reading, making sure of his pronunciation, and that his and Ponch’s names were correctly entered. The usual waiting silence — of the universe leaning in around them to hear the Speech spoken and implement it — now started to build. Ponch sat there with his big eyes glinting and his tail thumping as the power of the spell built all around them. Kit felt a brief pang because of the absence of the other voice that usually would have been there, reading her half of the work, but there was no time for the feeling right now. Kit finished the spell, snapped the manual shut, and in the moment before the spell worked, flipped the cloaking routine over himself and Ponch.
The power washed up over and around them, blotting out the backyard. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing in a parking lot two towns away, looking at another school building.
It was considerably smaller than Kit’s junior high, though this place shared the same kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keeping Ponch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.
Kit wasn’t overly concerned — even if anyone had been out there, they wouldn’t have been able to see Ponch and him. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.
Two hundred meters
, Kit thought, could definitely include at least part of the school building. He walked toward it, looking for any sign of the characteristic aura that would surround the object of his search once he got within visual range. Beside him, Ponch paced along, looking at everything, his nose working.
From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up.
Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn’t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, found himself looking at office space, not classrooms. “Okay,” he said, “so we’ll go in. Don’t start barking at anything, whatever you do!”