Wizards At War

Nita wasn’t sure how effective this was going to be, bearing in mind what the Lone One had said to them before the Hesper had embodied. “You try anything a little more proactive?” Kit said.

Nguyet looked frustrated. “Are you kidding? Three or four times. We tried a couple of long-range transports, but you might as well bail out a leaky boat with a sieve. More of the Pullulus just flowed right back into the same space. Then we tried just frying it, a wholesale denaturing of the dark matter out to about the orbit of Mars—”

Tuyet shook his head. “We didn’t have anything like enough power. Leave even a grain of that stuff and it starts regenerating itself. And the kids who tried to channel that much power are just one big mental bruise. Seems like even though the Powers That Be can hand us nearly infinite power, the very biggest spells still have to be handled in groups to keep people from burning themselves out. They can change the rules, I guess, but not the way our brains work.”

“Listen,” Nita said, “do you have anybody else down here who’s sensing the peridexis directly?”

Nguyet looked at her. “The what?”

“Oh, great,” Nita said. “I guess it’s just me, then.”

“If I had the slightest idea what you were talking about, I’d be happier,” Tuyet said. “Anyway, check the manual and see if anybody else here has what you need. Then find a place to plug your name in so you can feed the spell power, because we need to get it running. The main body of the Pullulus is already just outside Mars’s orbit, and we really don’t want to let it get any closer. Its mass is already starting to screw up the Sun.”

Nita glanced back at Roshaun. He had been standing and gazing, not at the spell, but at the ground. Now he looked up and nodded. “I thought that was what I was feeling when I arrived,” he said. “You are right, and the effect is increasing every moment.”

“That’s right,” Nguyet said, “you’re one of the team who settled it down before when it started to act up. Can you do anything about it now?”

“I can try,” Roshaun said.

“We can try,” Dairine said, somewhat more forcefully than usual.

“Great,” Nguyet said.

“Okay, pay up,” said a voice from behind her.

Nguyet turned. “What?”

Darryl McAllister was standing behind her, with something folded and glowing in his hands. “You owe me a quarter,” he said.

“I owe you a smack in the head,” Nguyet said, “if you start bothering me with small stuff right now!” Nonetheless, she fished around in her pocket and handed Darryl a coin.

He stared at it. “What’s this?”

“That’s a whole two hundred dong, and right now you should count yourself lucky that our money doesn’t come any smaller. Now tell me you’ve got the appendix for that spell ready!”

“Had it five minutes ago,” Darryl said, flashing Kit the briefest grin. He opened the WizPod he was carrying, pushed it into Nguyet’s hands, and turned to the others. “I had a feeling you’d be back around now.”

“Should you be making money off that kind of thing?” Kit said.

“It wasn’t a Feeling,” Darryl said. “Just a feeling.” He glanced at Ronan and bit his lip. “Sometimes I don’t like being right, though.”

“It’s okay,” Nita said. “It could have been a lot worse. And what you told us helped. How’re you doing?”

“Busy,” Darryl said. “I’m not as good as some people at writing new spells from scratch, but I’m getting good at taking them apart and putting them back together in new ways if they’re not working.”

“Troubleshooting,” Kit said as they moonwalked around the spell, carefully avoiding stepping or bouncing on the many other kids who were kneeling around the rim of the diagram and adding, or checking, their names in the Speech.

“Yeah. And this one’s needed it, because we’ve been artificially increasing the spell’s output.”

Nita had already noticed the two large circles enclosed within the main one, each smaller circle bumped up against the outside of the diagram. “Nguyet goes in one,” she said. “Tuyet goes in the other. And then they take the power that everybody else puts into the pool, and bounce it back and forth.”

“You got it. Took us a few times to get it right when someone came up with the idea.”

“‘Someone’?” Kit said, looking at Darryl with good-natured skepticism.

“Oh, okay, it was me,” Darryl said.

“I’m beginning to think you were worth the trouble,” Kit said, sounding impressed.

“It’s the way a laser works,” Nita said. “But with all these separate power sources, it must get complicated.”

“It did,” Darryl said. “It does. Which is why I gotta go give them a hand with the final setup.”

“Got any ‘feelings’?” Kit said.

Darryl looked at him, and that small sharp face that was almost always smiling now lost its smile. He shook his head. “We’re on our own,” he said. “Later.”

“Dai,” Kit said. Darryl headed off.