look nervous at that, and at the slow breeze beginning around them when everywhere else the summer air was still. The breeze got stronger, dust around them whipped and scattered in it, the sound scaled up until it blotted out almost everything else. And despite her annoyance, Nita suddenly got lost in the old familiar exhilaration of magic working. From memory-for she and Kit had worked this spell together many times-she lifted her voice in the last chorus of it, where the words came in a rush, and the game and skill of the spell lay in matching your partner's cadence exactly. Kit dropped not a syllable as Nita came in, but flashed her a wry grin, matching her word for word for the last ten seconds; they ended together on one word that was half laugh, half shout of triumph. And on the word, the air around them cracked like thunder and struck inward from all directions, like a blow.
The wind stilled and the dust settled, and they found themselves in the last aisle of a small chain bookstore, next to a door with a hand-lettered sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. Kit put his manual away, and he and Nita were brushing themselves off when that door popped open and a small sandy-haired man with inquiring eyes looked out at them. 'Something fall down °ut here? No?. . You need some help?'
'Uh,' Nita and Kit said, still in unison. 'X-Men comics,' said Dairine, not missing a beat. 'Up front on the right, in the rack,' said the small man, and vanished through his door again.
'Hope they have the new annual,' Dairine said, brushing dust off her shorts and Admiral Ackbar shirt, and heading for the front of the store.
Kit and Nita glanced ruefully at each other and went after her. It looked like it was going to be a long day.
Passwords
Like so many other human beings, Dairine had made her first major decision about life and the world quite early; at the age of three, in fact. She had seen Nita (then six years old) go away to kindergarten for the first time, and at the end of the day come back crying because she hadn't known the answers to some of the questions the teacher asked her.
Nita's crying had upset Dairine more than anything else in her short life. It had instantly become plain to Dairine's three-year-old mind that the world was a dangerous place if you didn't know things, a place that would make you unhappy if it could. Right there she decided that she was not going to be one of the unhappy ones.
So she got smart. She started out by working to keep her ears and eyes open, noticing everything; not surprisingly, Dairine's senses became abnormally sharp, and stayed that way. She found out how to read by the time she was four. . just how, she never remembered: but at five she was already working her way through the encyclopedias her parents had bought for Nita. The first time they caught her at it-reading aloud to herself from a Britan-nica article on taxonomy, and sounding out the longer words-her mom and dad were shocked, though for a long time Dairine couldn't understand why. It had never occurred to her that you could use what you knew, use even the knowing itself, to make people feel things. . perhaps even to make them do things.
For fear of her parents being upset, and maybe stopping her, until she was s'x or so she kept her reading out of their sight as much as she could. The thought of being kept away from books terrified her. Most of what moved Dairine was sheer delight of learning, the great openness of the world that reading offered her, even though she herself wasn't free to explore the world yet. But there was also that obscure certainty, buried under the months and years since the decision, that the sure way to make the world work for you was to know everything.
Dairine sat home and busied herself with conquering the world.
Eventually it came time for her to go off to kindergarten. Remembering Nita, her parents were braced for the worst, but not at all for Dairine's scowling, annoyed response when she came home. 'They won't listen to what I tell them,' Dairine said. 'Yet.' And off she went to read, leaving her mother and father staring at each other.
School went on, and time, and Dairine sailed her way up through the grades. She knew (having overheard a couple of her mother's phone conversations with the school's psychiatrist) that her parents had refused to let her skip grades. They thought it would be better for her to be with kids of her own age.
Dairine laughed to herself over this, since it made school life utterly easy for her: it also left her more free time for her own pursuits, especially reading. As soon as she was old enough to go to the little local library for herself, she read everything in it: first going straight through the kids' library downstairs at about six books a day, then (after the concerned librarian got permission from Dairine's parents) reading the whole adult collection, a touch more slowly. Her mom and dad thought it would be a shame to stifle such an active curiosity. Dairine considered this opinion wise, and kept reading, trying not to think of the time-not too far away-when she would exhaust the adult books. She wasn't yet allowed to go to the big township library by herself.
But she had her dreams, too. Nita was already being allowed to go into New York City alone. In a few years, she would too. Dairine thought constantly of the New York Public Library, of eight million books that the White Lions guarded: rare manuscripts, books as old as printing, or older. It would take even Dairine a while to get through eight million books. She longed to get started.
And there were other dreams more immediate. Like everyone else she knew, Dairine had seen the Star Wars movies. Magic, great power for good and evil, she had read about in many other places. But the Star Wars movies somehow hit her with a terrible immediacy that the books had not; with a picture of power available even to untrained farmboys on distant planets in the future, and therefore surely available to someone who knew things in the present. And if you could learn that supreme knowledge, and master the power that filled and shaped the universe, how could the world ever hurt you? For a while Dairine's reading suffered, and her daydreams were full of the singing blaze of lightsabers, the electric smell of blasterfire, and the shadow of ultimate evil in a black cloak, which after terrible combat she always defeated. Her sister teased her a lot less about it than Dairine expected.
Her sister. . Their relationship was rather casual, not so much a rela five-relationship as the kind you might have with someone who lived close enough for you to see every day. When both Dairine and Nita were little, they had played together often enough. But where learning came in, for a while there had been trouble. Sometimes Nita had shown Dairine things she was learning at school. But when Dairine learned them almost immediately, and shortly was better at them than Nita was, Nita got upset. Dairine never quite understood why. It was a victory for them both, wasn't it, over the world, which would get you if you didn't know things? But Nita seemed not to understand that.
Eventually things got better. As they got older, they began to grow together and to share more. Possibly Nita was understanding her better, or had simply seen how much Dairine liked to know things; for she began to tutor Dairine in the upper-grade subjects she was studying, algebra and so forth. Dairine began to like her sister. When they started having trouble with bullies, and their parents sent them both off to self-defense school, Dairine mastered that art as quickly as anything else she'd ever decided to learn; and then, when a particularly bad beating near home made it plain that Nita wasn't using what they'd learned, she quietly put the word out that anyone who messed with Nita would have Dairine to deal with. The bullying stopped, for both of them, and Dairine felt smugly satisfied.
That is, she did until one day after school she saw a kid come at Nita to 'accidentally' body-block her into the dirt of the playground she was crossing. Dairine started to move to prevent it-but as the kid threw himself at Nita, he abruptly slid sideways off the air around her as if he had run into a glass wall.
No one else seemed to notice. Even the attacker looked blank as he fell sideways into the dust. But Nita smiled a little, and kept on walking. . and suddenly the world fell out from under Dairine, and everything was terribly wrong. Her sister knew something she didn 't.
Dairine blazed up in a raging fire of curiosity. She began watching Nita closely, and her best friend, Kit, too, on a hunch. Slowly Dairine began to catch Nita at things no one else seemed to notice; odd words muttered to empty air, after which lost things abruptly became found, or stuck things came loose.
There was one day when their father had been complaining about the crabgrass in the front lawn, and Dairine had seen an odd, thoughtful look cross Nita's face. That evening her sister had sat on the lawn for a long time, talking under her breath. Dairine couldn't hear what was said; but a week and a half later their father was
