A grave. That’s what this is like.
It was a freaky image, one he pushed away. It’s only if I accept it that I’m going to be stuck here, he thought. Yes, it was hard to think: there was pressure all around him to give it up, let it go, no way out… And the darkness itself seemed to have weight. But time’s weight wasn’t enough to keep a wizard down, not unless he let it. And the weight of intention wasn’t enough, either. I’ve got some intention of my own—
As if in response, the darkness pushed down harder on him. But Kit had something to hold up against it: the image he’d just caught, the glimpse of Nita. She’s hot, Kit thought in surprise. Just how exactly have I failed to notice that Neets is hot?
Maybe it was because she didn’t throw it around or make a weapon of it, the way some of the girls at school did, or tried to. Maybe it was because Kit was so busy just being her friend and not wanting to add anything extraneous to the equation. When the spell was already balanced, you didn’t go hanging extra elements on it just because you could—
And maybe I was just a little bit chicken about it? Kit thought. Because this admission would complicate things, no question about it. Maybe life was nice and comfy and safe without this complication, at a time when a lot of things had not been comfy or safe for either of them… so that Kit hadn’t wanted to rock the boat. And maybe that’s why I’ve been giving Darryl and Ronan so much grief.
But the sight of her there, looking deadly— and extremely competent and wizardly and pissed off and, well, frankly, kind of magnificent—
Kit blushed. Then he swore at himself. Later for that. Right now we’ve got problems! And there was somebody else besides Khretef who was part of the “we.” The realization was strangely exciting. Now all I have to do is get the hell out of here so I can be some use to her. Because I got her into this.
“You can’t!” said a gigantic voice that was both Khretef’s and his own—and for that reason, strangely difficult to argue with. “Too much is riding on it! The fate of our people, their past and their future—”
He’s trying to drown you out, Kit thought. Don’t let it happen. Stand up; get real; get focused. You still have a body. Even if you don’t, fake it that you have a body!
Kit felt around him. For a scary few seconds there was nothing to be felt in the darkness. Nothing’s here, I’m not here…
Cut that out! Yes, I am!
And slowly he felt a floor under him— or talked himself into believing there was one. Which is it? Doesn’t matter. Wizardry’s about persuasion, and sometimes the one you’ve got to persuade is yourself. Let’s go, floor!
It was there: he could feel it against his hands. He was sitting on it. Kit got his feet under him, got up. “Khretef?” he shouted. “This has got to stop!”
“Yes, it does. At your end! Stop fighting it: let what’s fated happen!”
Kit clenched his fists as the pressure of the darkness came down on him again, and he braced himself against it. It was tough: he felt strangely hollow, as if he had no access to wizardry.
“You don’t,” said that weird dual voice. “Your power is mine now. And it’s being passed to someone who can make the best use of it.”
Kit’s eyes narrowed. There were ways to do that legally: any wizard could act as power source for someone else’s spell. But the procedure required consent. “No way!” he shouted. “I’m not playing this game!”
“You consented when we blended a little while ago,” said the voice. “Too late now. Why fight with yourself? It’s over.”
The darkness kept pressing down, a physical force, hard to resist. But Kit flashed on something else— one of his gym teachers, Mr. Thorgesen, who’d been coaching him on weights this last semester. Kit had started out hating this part of gym but had suddenly realized that there was a skill involved, a matter of balance and leverage very like some acts of wizardry, and almost against his will he’d started to get into it. And will’s the issue. “It’s not just a dead weight,” Mr. T. kept saying. “Work out where the leverage is and use it to your best advantage.”
“I’m not fighting with myself!” Kit said, pressing up, feeling for the points of leverage in the other’s mind. And suddenly, in bizarre alliance with his gym teacher, it was Mr. Mack helping him here, too, helping Kit find the leverage point. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them! Their lives, their troubles. That’s how what they do starts to make sense. “I’m me! And Nita’s Nita! We are not just little fragments of you guys, like the Shard’s a fragment of the kernel! We’ve got our own lives, and they’re not yours! But you people are all about being fragmented and broken up. You see everything that way! And you really need to get past the blind spot, because you’re ruining any chance for your own lives to be whole things that aren’t broken!”
For the first time Khretef didn’t seem to have an answer ready. Kit could feel his uncertainty, like a splinter of light piercing the gloom. It actually was a splinter of light: the room in the Tower, right now, where Nita stood challenging the furious Aurilelde, and then vanished. “You’ve got it backwards!” Kit said as Aurilelde vanished too. “We’re not the ones who’re like you: you’re the ones who’re like us! We’re what you could be if you weren’t stuck in the past and in the middle of this stupid thing where your people hate each other! And your two sides have been hating each other so long, I bet you don’t even remember what started it in the first place!”
“That’s nonsense!” Khretef shouted.
And then for just a shocked second he was silent. The silence told Kit that Khretef couldn’t find anything to say, and however screwed up he might be, Khretef was still wizard enough not to want to lie—
“It’s true, and you know it is!” Kit said, both sad for Khretef’s people’s sake and yet triumphant to know that his guess was true. “Whatever got you guys fighting, it’s so long ago that you can’t remember. Which means it also shouldn’t matter anymore! And you’ve got the sense to see that. But Aurilelde doesn’t. She’s the one who scared you into trapping me in here, isn’t she? And now she’s going to take this mess through to its illogical conclusion. Lots of people on Earth will die when our world’s status quo gets destabilized by what’s happening here. The Eilitt and the Shamaska will keep right on killing each other. Everything will get worse. This isn’t your dream of everything working out for the best. This’ll be a nightmare. Put a stop to it, Khretef! Let me go!”
There was a long, unhappy silence. “It’s too late now,” the voice said. “It’s started…”
***
The skywalking Nita had in mind didn’t involve actual walking, as in the various exploits using hardened air. From the manual Nita had pulled a spell that persuaded local gravity to ignore her for a while, wrapping it around her like a blanket so that it dissolved into her body. Another price to be paid later— and not too much later.
I’ll worry about that in half an hour, Nita thought as she more completely undid gravity’s effects on her mass and drifted ever more quickly upward. Normally this kind of spell was a fair amount of work, which was why wizards didn’t overdo it. But she was in a hurry, and the effort would have a specific use in what she was doing; so Nita soared, and enjoyed it. Since who knows how much time I’m going to have to enjoy afterwards?
She reached an altitude of about thirty thousand feet above Argyre Planitia and just hung there, savoring the view. High above her, Mamvish’s cloaking spell was holding: it was too far above the planetary kernel’s range for Aurilelde to interfere with it, and too powerful for Khretef or Iskard to alter, even if they wanted to. Down below, though… water was everywhere. It was stunning. Nita thought of how it would be someday when people from Earth or wherever started terraforming this terrain slowly and responsibly. When there was an atmosphere again, when there was enough heat held in to keep water liquid, enough to grow plants …she could imagine what it would look like. But even now the huge flow and rush of water across the landscape was beautiful. Chains of crater lakes flashed in the sunlight: water was rushing down the sides of Valles Marineris in waterfalls six miles high. The southern polar basins were flooding, flashing the Sun back in a bloom of light—