“Won’t work,” Nguyet said. “We’ve got three pairs of identical twins, but if identicals try to bounce a spell back and forth between them, it just cancels out. Only two-egg twins are far enough out of phase to keep the spell from canceling and close enough to make it augment. You ready?”
Nita nodded, and Nguyet headed off for her circle. Nita glanced down to her left along the outer arc, past Kit, and saw Dairine and Roshaun kneeling about a hundred yards down, with Spot crouching just outside the circle, between them. A movement behind her caught her attention, and Nita looked over her shoulder to see Carmela sitting down cross-legged a little ways behind them. “I’ll sit this one out,” she said, looking out across the spell diagram with an intrigued expression.
Kit glanced at Nita with a resigned look. Take my advice, Nita said silently. If any of us walk away from this… at your earliest convenience, get her another curling iron!
He smiled slightly. Yeah. And, Neets—if we don’t walk away from this—
Normally she would have said something reassuring right away. But she was desperately tired, and very nervous… and the darkness above them continued to grow. There’s always Timeheart, she said.
Yeah.
Kit turned to look at Ponch, who was now sitting beside him, looking out alertly over the spell. Big guy, he said silently, you need to promise me something.
Okay!
If something bad happens to us, you need to get Carmela out of here.
Sure. And you, too—
I don’t know about that, Kit said. But make sure you get Carmela out, hear me? Take her home, and then get Mama and Pop, and Nita’s dad, and take them away from Earth. Take them somewhere safe.
Ponch blinked. But why?
Look, explaining’s going to take too long. Just promise me!
Ponch started to look upset. Nita blinked hard at the distress in his face and in his thought. All right, but—
“Okay,” Nguyet said to all the wizards gathered around the circle. She didn’t need to raise her voice: anyone whose name was written into that spell could hear her as clearly as if she were standing next to them. “Let’s do this just like the last time, but let’s have this one work. Start with the knot, end with the knot… now!”
All the voices beginning to recite the spell—either from the manual in front of each wizard’s eyes or from the larger diagram in front of them—made a silence that swiftly drowned out all the lesser sounds associated with so big a group. All the many voices started to sound like one gigantic one, and the universe leaned in to listen, not once but a thousand times, three thousand times, and more. Nita read along with everybody else as far as she needed to, but her attention was on the line of light that ran from where she’d put her hands down on either side of her manual, out into the spell itself. Next to her, she could see the light of donated energy running into the spell from Kit. Responding to the growing silence, Nita could feel the peridexis moving at the back of her mind, growing, pouring energy out into her for her use, and ready to give as much as she asked of it. But remember, if you ask it for too much, it’ll give you too much, and you’ll burn yourself to a crisp…
Nita watched Nguyet over at her side of the circle, and Tuyet at the other. Both of them stood still as statues, their hands held out toward each other. There was no other physical sign of what was going on with them, but Nita could feel the power that she and all the other wizards were pouring into the spell as they spoke, and could feel each half of the twychild taking that power, sending it along to the other one, standing briefly empty to receive what the other sent; then sending it back again, and again.
The power grew. The wizards finished speaking the spell, which was, after all, a fairly simple thing, describing how one wanted something to be farther away. Three thousand voices and minds, or more, said the last words of the wizard’s knot together, and fell silent. But between those two out in the middle of the spell diagram, the power kept going back and forth. Nguyet’s and Tuyet’s outlines began to shimmer as if Nita were seeing them through a haze of heat. The sense of something actively dangerous going on started to build inside Nita, so that she very much wanted to get up and back away. But there was nowhere to back away to, and, anyway, everybody else, no matter how alarmed they looked, was holding very still. She shot a glance at Kit, who was sitting there with his fists clenched, tense but unmoving. Behind him, Ponch had begun to whimper softly.
Back and forth between the twychild the power went, back and forth. Between Nguyet and Tuyet, the air had begun to burst out in small sparks of power, wizardly energy looking for somewhere to discharge itself but not finding any way to escape. The power trapped in the air inside the spell-circle built and built, until Nita’s hair started to stand on end and her skin prickled with it. They can’t possibly hold it in any more! she thought. It’s going to blow! They can’t possibly—
Inside the circle, the reflected and re-reflected power just kept building and building; the sparkles and flares of its attempted discharge got brighter and brighter, spreading away from the corridor between the twychild and right through the circle, beating right up against the boundaries of it like waves against a storm wall. The power climbed the invisible walls, held in by them and raving against them; it arched up and over until it completely filled the spell’s dome. Inside the dome, the fog of concentrated, concentrating power thickened, the discharge flashes filling every cubic foot of air until Tuyet and Nguyet couldn’t be seen at all. Whether she could see them or not, Nita concentrated on not even twitching, not doing anything that might distract the wizards inside the circle.
And then the spell boundary directly above them vanished.
Everything inside the dome went furiously, blindingly white. Nothing could have prepared Nita for the huge flare of wizardly fire that poured up and out of Daedalus crater, up and out into space, and fled, faster than any normal light, out past Earth’s orbit—three thousand wizards’ worth of wizardry, multiplied who knew how many times. Nita sensed rather than saw the wavefront of the wizardry spilling out across local space like the expanding surface of a blown bubble, speeding away, spreading, pushing before it everything it met. A storm of the micrometeorites that followed Earth around in its orbit vaporized as it impacted them; the ions themselves glowed and sheeted across the surface of the outward-speeding sphere like flattened-out auroras.
Nita tried to rub some sight back into her eyes, craning her neck upward. The spell went blasting outward, a rainbow bubble half the width of the sky, growing fainter as it went but not getting any less strong; it was accelerating as it got closer to the Pullulus. All around her, the other wizards were looking up, watching the spell get closer and closer to its target. A murmur of excitement started to go up among them as some of them started to feel what Nita did—a strange roiling out in the darkness, a sense of something that was darkly alive reacting with fear to something threatening that was coming at it faster and faster.
Nita looked out across the spell diagram, saw Nguyet and Tuyet standing there in their circles, shaking with effort, but watching what was happening with all the others. Out in the darkness, something was furious, something was frightened. Come on, Nita thought, come on!
She held her breath. There was a long, long pause, and then the outflung boundary of the wizardry flared as it struck the substance it had been intended for. Everyone who had been connected to that wizardry felt the resistance of that target in their bones. But the wizardry kept going. The light of it flared in all their minds as it hit the Pullulus, pushed it outward, farther outward. A second later, the wizards started to cheer—