“So can we use the gate?” asked Pat.
“I told you, nobody can.”
“I thought you said it was wild,” said Wheeler. “Anybody could use it.”
“We’re not letting anybody get near enough to use it,” said Danny.
“Then what’s the big deal?” asked Hal. “Is it, like, the last gate you can ever make?”
“No, I can make as many as I want.”
“So can you take us to that other world?” asked Laurette.
“Why would I do that?” asked Danny. “You’re not mages, it wouldn’t do you any good, and what if you got stranded there? It isn’t a safe place.”
“You’re right,” said Pat. “Here, you can only get run over by cars or catch some hideous disease or get blown up in chemistry class.”
“I didn’t blow anybody up,” said Hal.
“But you tried,” said Wheeler.
“I tried to get them to cancel school for the day,” said Hal.
“Can we stop talking about your failures, Hal?” said Xena.
“Yeah, let’s go back to talking about mine,” said Danny.
Xena gripped his arm and spoke so earnestly and pressed so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek. “You haven’t failed at anything, Danny North,” she said. “You’re, like, a god.”
“The god of screw-ups,” said Danny.
Xena kissed his cheek. “Your screw-ups are better than other people’s successes.”
“So you went to the other world. Westil,” said Laurette. “That was supposed to make you more powerful.”
“I don’t feel any different,” said Danny.
“Well, can you do stuff you couldn’t do before?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?” asked Laurette.
“There isn’t a manual,” said Danny. “They kill mages like me. They don’t exactly provide me with instructions.”
“Who reads the instructions?” asked Laurette. “Haven’t you tried anything?”
“I wouldn’t even know what to try,” said Danny. “I made gates before. I can still make gates.” He shrugged.
“So you can take us to Disney World?” asked Sin.
Danny hadn’t expected that-not from the goth with constantly infected piercings. “You want to go to Disney World?”
“I’d say Paris, but I don’t speak French,” said Sin. “Come on, I’ve never been.”
“Me neither,” said Xena.
“I don’t want to go,” said Pat.
“I don’t like using gates to steal,” said Danny.
“Who said anything about stealing?” asked Sin. “Just get us in.”
“And then get us through all the lines and into the rides without tickets,” said Laurette. “Is that so much to ask?”
“They’ll catch me,” said Wheeler. “I always look guilty.”
“How about Cape Canaveral?” asked Hal.
“You provide the security badges, and I’ll get us in,” said Danny.
“This isn’t even fun,” said Pat.
“What about all those people trying to kill you?” asked Xena. “Are you safe now?”
“I don’t know,” said Danny.
“And what about teaching us how to help you?” asked Hal. “Or is that off, just because you screwed up and made some gate angry?”
“I can’t have you help me,” said Danny. “I’d just screw that up, too, and then you’d get killed.”
“Wow, he’s really down on himself,” said Laurette.
“He needs cheering up,” said Xena. She kissed his cheek. Not a sisterly peck. Her lips brushed his cheek and lingered. It made him feel a tingle in his legs and in his butt. He didn’t know that tingling could be so weirdly dislocated.
“Don’t go there, Xena,” said Hal.
“Even if you are a warrior princess,” said Wheeler.
“Jealous?” asked Xena.
“Yes,” said Wheeler.
Everyone looked at him in surprise.
“It’s just Danny, and all of a sudden you’re getting all kissy with him,” said Wheeler.
“Yeah,” said Laurette. “Just because he’s a god, why would you want to kiss him?”
“You’re right,” said Xena, clinging to Danny all the more tightly. “I want to have his baby.”
At that, Danny pulled away. Joking around was one thing. This was something else. “I just have to think,” he said.
“He can’t think if all his blood has rushed out of his head,” said Laurette.
“I’m just trying to figure out if there’s a way I can keep you guys safe,” said Danny.
“We’d be safe in Disney World,” said Sin. “It’s the safest place on earth.”
Danny thought of what he needed his friends to do. Gate them as emissaries to the Families, to explain the terms they’d have to agree to in order to pass someone through a Great Gate. Danny couldn’t go himself, and he couldn’t send Veevee or Hermia, either. The Families would set traps for them. But what would be the point of trapping drowthers?
That was the problem. Since the Families didn’t regard drowthers as having any value, they wouldn’t hold them as hostages. If they got annoyed, they’d just kill his emissaries.
In fact, as soon as anyone realized that Danny had friends, they might try to use them against him. Threaten them. Follow them. Kidnap them. Kill them. Without waiting for Danny to send them anywhere.
He couldn’t concentrate on all of them at once. He couldn’t keep them safe. “What have I done to you guys?” asked Danny.
“What are you talking about?” asked Laurette.
Danny explained his worry.
“Cool,” said Wheeler. “It’s like being inside a comic book.”
“Except we’re collateral damage,” said Hal.
“We’re the red shirt guys,” said Pat.
Danny made a gate, a very small one, and put it directly above a small stone lying in the clearing. “Hal,” said Danny. “Would you pick up that stone?”
Hal didn’t bother looking to see exactly which stone. He just lunged for the general area, reaching for any stone, and when his hand brushed the gate, he fell into it and he was sitting ten feet away. “That is disorienting,” he complained.
“That wasn’t what I wanted,” said Danny. “I’m trying to see if I can tie a gate to a thing instead of a place. Just move the stone, somebody. Laurette, keep your hand low and move it slowly and I’ll tell you which stone.”
She moved carefully-though Danny also noticed that she bent over at such an angle that her considerable cleavage was aimed right at him. Was that because it was her habit, or because she was thinking the same way Xena was, that because Danny could do magery he was suddenly cool enough to be worth flirting with?
“That one,” said Danny.
Laurette picked up the stone.
The gate stayed in the air above where the stone had been.
“Damn,” said Danny.
“Didn’t work?” asked Laurette.
“I was hoping I could do it because I went to Westil. The enhancement of my powers.”
“Bummer,” said Hal. He was back in the circle now.
“Who cares?” asked Sin. “It’s just a rock.”
“He wants us to be able to carry gates around with us,” said Pat. “So we can stick a finger in a gate and be somewhere else.”
Sometimes she surprised him. Sour as she was, she was always thinking. Maybe when you don’t care whether other people like you, you have more brainspace for analysis.
“Well, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work,” said Hal. “Whether you went through a Great Gate or not.”
“What do you know about magic?” said Xena contemptuously.
“What I know about is physics,” said Hal. “Basic, elementary, pathetic, every-semi-educated-moron-should-know-it-level physics.”
“Xena slept through the physics unit in eighth-grade science,” said Laurette.
“Danny always attaches his gates to small moving objects,” said Hal. “He’s never done anything else.”
Danny looked at the gate he had just made, the mouth and tail of it, and couldn’t figure out what Hal meant.
“The surface of the Earth is spinning one complete revolution per day,” said Hal. “At the equator, that means it’s moving at a thousand miles an hour. Here, it’s about eight hundred miles an hour. The Earth is also moving around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. So when Danny’s gates seem to stay in the same place, they’re really moving incredibly fast-so they’re attached to something.”