Nita lifted her right wrist and shook it. Her charm bracelet, every charm standing for a spell nine-tenths ready to be used and needing only a few words’ worth of activation, jingled gently. “Seemed smart to be ready for anything on this run,” she said. “But you are, too.” She glanced up above them at the surface of S’reee’s force field; to a wizard’s eye, it swirled with faint characters in the Speech, the way a bubble’s surface swirls with colors. “That’s some spell,” Nita said. “It almost seemed to do that inclusion by itself.”
“I’m not sure it didn’t,” S’reee said. “I’ve been doing things I used to think were impossible these past few days, since it all started to change.”
“S’reee!” Kit said, as he came up beside Nita, free of his own force field, and Ponch danced briefly on his hind legs near S’reee’s nose, getting her scent. Kit thumped S’reee’s broad side in a friendly way. “I didn’t know you did space!”
The whale chuckled, a long, slow, bubbly noise that finished in an upscaling whistle like a boiling kettle. “Why not? It’s just another Sea.” S’reee angled her head very slightly to one side, as Ponch lost interest and ran off underneath her. “And here come your excursus guests! Dai stihó, cousins. Welcome to the Moon,” she said to Filif and Sker’ret and Roshaun as they came in behind Dairine. Then she glanced past them again, and bent her head as if looking down at the moondust … and kept on bending until her nose almost touched it.
Belatedly Nita realized that what she was seeing was a bow. She looked over her shoulder and saw Ronan coming toward them, bouncing a little. “You know each other?” Nita said.
Ronan stopped his bounce just short of S’reee, waited until he got settled a little, and then put up a hand to rest it on her hide. He smiled, then, an unusually open look for him.
“Both of them,” S’reee said. “Rhoannann ‘took in the Sea,’ once. It was a notable Ordeaclass="underline" those of us who live there couldn’t really have missed it. And as for the Other—I’m wizard enough these days to know the Finned Defender when I see him, whatever or whoever he’s wearing at the time. Elder brother, well met in the current that bears us!”
Ronan nodded back. “Dai,” he said. “And he greets you too.”
“It’s good you all got here before I had to leave,” S’reee said. “There’s a lot to do back home, for I, too, have been ‘upgraded.’ I am now Wetside Supervisory Wizard for Earth.”
Nita’s mouth dropped open. “S’reee, you’re kidding. The whole planet!”
“The oceans, at least. When we first met, and I’d been promoted to Senior so young, I hated it. But now the experience seems like it’s going to come in handy.” She swung her tail in a thoughtful way. “It almost makes me think—”
“That Someone or other might have planned it this way in advance?” said a rather young voice from the far side of S’reee.
Kit glanced up. He started to grin. “Is that who I think it is?” he said.
A small human shape came ducking underneath S’reee’s floating broad, barnacled belly: a little dark-skinned kid, slender and slight in jeans and T-shirt, maybe about eleven years old, with a short afro and quick, bright eyes. “Hey,” he said, “dai stihó, everybody!” And then he saw Kit, and laughed that peculiarly joyous laugh of his, and went to throw his arms around Kit in a big hug.
Nita looked hurriedly at Ronan. Listen, she said, about Darryl—
He’s a lot more than he seems, Ronan said.
A whole lot. And we don’t mention it.
Of course not.
“Darryl, my man, look at you!” Kit said as they broke the hug, and Nita headed over. “Are you taller? Are you actually bulking up?”
“Just eating more,” Darryl said. “Yeah, I’m growing all of a sudden. Guess I’ve got the energy to spare now. Don’t get into it with my mom—she says that these days I cost too much to keep. Almost too much.” He grinned, turning away from them and S’reee toward the others as the visitors merged their bubbles with S’reee’s big one. “Hi, guys, who are you all?”
Introductions got under way. As they did, Nita saw Dairine giving Roshaun an unusually intense look. Roshaun put his eyebrows up, and then took them right down again. Any wizard in Darryl’s vicinity would notice an atypical intensity of power. But once you realized what it meant, it wasn’t something you discussed with Darryl, ever. He didn’t know about it, and wasn’t meant to. The situation was like knowing a superhero with a secret identity. But the difference here was that everybody else knew about the secret identity, and the superhero didn’t… which was a good thing, because if Darryl ever found out he was a direct channel of the One’s power into the world, the discovery would kill him.
Darryl turned back to Kit after a few moments. “I looked you up in the book, saw you were off joyriding halfway across the galaxy.” Darryl looked Kit over approvingly. “Got yourself some tan.”
“Nearly got myself a scorched hide,” Kit said. “Our old ‘friend’ again.”
Darryl nodded, his grin fading a little. “Well, we’re just going to have to screw up Its plans one more time.”
“Yeah, and then we can get back to business,” Kit said, and looked up at the sky. “Like the M—”
“The Martian thing!” Nita and Dairine and Darryl more or less shouted in chorus, leaving Sker’ret and Filif and Roshaun and Ronan all looking confused.
“You crack me up,” Darryl said, and whacked Kit in the shoulder in a friendly way. “Here we’ve got the whole universe going to pieces around our ears, and all you can think about is going hunting for ancient Martian princesses in skimpy clothes.” He guffawed.
“Will you cut it out? It’s not about princesses! That’s just in a book!” Kit said, but no one was listening. There was too much laughing going on. “Come on, Darryl, give it a rest!”
“Okay, never mind,” Darryl said, “you’re off the hook till we get present business sorted out. I can’t believe how full my manual’s gotten in the past few days. Just look at it—”
To Nita’s surprise, Darryl reached not into a nearby space pocket for his manual but into the front pocket of his jeans. Dairine stared at what Darryl brought out. To all appearances it was a sleek rectangular white-and-silver MP3 player, but as he turned it toward them, Nita could see that the apple on its little blue-glowing screen had no bite out of it.
“That is too slick!” Dairine said. Spot came up from behind and put some eyes up to goggle in a friendly way at the WizPod.
“Yeah,” Darryl said. He pulled it open—which shouldn’t have been possible—until it looked like a little book, and then opened it out again, and again, and yet again, until it was more like a flat-screen monitor than anything else, but one you could hold in your hands. Manual data started scrolling down its surface, imagery and spells together. “It’s got all the usual spell-storage and display options,” Darryl said. “And it carries my tunes. Like I’ve got time for music when this thing’s got twenty times the content, all of a sudden…” He grinned as he folded it up again.
Nita looked over at S’reee as a thought occurred to her. “Are there any other Seniors on Earth who were Seniors before but’ll still be functioning when things go bad?”
“No,” S’reee said.
“Oh, wow,” Nita said. “How that must be making you feel…”
“Yes. And just when I was starting to relax about being a Senior,” S’reee said, sounding briefly mournful. “But all we can do now is dive deep and do the best we can on short notice, even if we’re not sure we have enough data. That said”—S’reee looked less troubled—”we’ve been given access to a lot more power than we’ve ever had. It’s hard to feel so uncertain when you do a wizardry and it just jumps out of you like a waterspout.”