A Wizard Alone

The thought unnerved her. Nita wasn’t used to thinking of anger as a tool. It had always seemed like something you didn’t want to get accustomed to using, in case it started to become a habit, or started twisting you and your wizardry in directions you didn’t want to go. But if you’re careful, she thought, if you stay in control, if you manage it carefully enough — maybe it’s okay to use it just every now and then. Maybe managing it, rather than letting it manage you, is the whole idea—

Nita sat there staring fixedly at the blackboard. Her English teacher was illustrating the scansion of a sonnet there, but Nita wasn’t really seeing it. Okay, she thought. I forgive Millman his dumb card tricks. He’s given me something useful here. Now I just have to use it…

The bell rang, and her English class filtered out, muttering about the pile of sonnets they’d been given to analyze by the end of the week. Nita’s next class was statistics; she shouldered her book bag and wandered out into the hall, unfocused. Her anger was still running high, but it was strangely mixed with a sense of readiness. Nita couldn’t get rid of the feeling that time was suddenly of the essence, that she had to make the best of her present emotional state — in which she had been given a weapon that was primed and ready to go, a weapon too good to waste.

I don’t want to lose this

, Nita thought, making a sudden decision. This is important. I’m going to ditch the rest of my classes. I don’t care if they call Dad. He’ll know what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I need somewhere private to teleport from.

Nita hurried for the girls’ room. Between periods it was always full of people who didn’t feel like going through the hassle of getting a hall pass in their next period, and as Nita pushed into the smaller of the two girls’ rooms on that floor, she saw a couple of girls she knew there: Janie from her chemistry class and Dawn from gym. She nodded and said hi to them, found herself a stall, and sat down on the rim of the toilet, keeping the stall door pushed closed with her foot.

Well

, this is one of the less dignified moments in my practice of the Art, Nita thought, resigned.

Nonetheless, she sat and waited. As the five-minute period between classes went by, the room outside the stall door got very briefly busy, then less busy… then the room emptied out altogether. A few seconds later, the beginning-of-period bell rang. Okay, Nita thought, standing up, here’s my opportunity.

The door to the hallway pushed open a little. “Room check,” said an adult voice.

Nita flushed hot with annoyance. It was one of the teachers who checked the toilets after the change-of- class bell to make sure no one was hiding in there and smoking or doing something even less healthy. Who needs this? Nita thought, getting furious all over again. Her hand went to her charm bracelet just as the teacher pushed open the stall door.

The teacher — it turned out to be one of the gym teachers, Ms. Delemond, a tall, blond, willowy lady— stared in at Nita, but saw nothing, because Nita had just climbed up on the toilet seat, to avoid the door, and had availed herself of the simplest way to be invisible. A second or so later, Ms.

Delemond turned away, went to check the next stall, and the next. Finally she went outside again, and Nita could hear her footsteps going down the hall.

Nita got down off the toilet and let out one small breath of annoyed laughter. Then she reached into her claudication pocket, came out with the long chain of the ready-made transit spell she kept there, and dropped it on the floor around her. The chain of words knotted itself closed and blazed with light…

Nita came out in a sheltered part of her backyard, ankle-deep in snow, and the air-pressure change caused by the air she had brought with her from school made snow fall off the trees above her and onto her head. She spluttered as the snow got down her collar, finding it funny and getting angrier by the second. Good. Use it. It’s a tool—

Nita’s house keys were inside her locker at school, along with her coat and her boots. Forget it, she thought as she went around into the driveway and up to her back door. She pulled the screen door open and put her hand against the wood of the inside door. “I just need to walk through you, if you don’t mind,” she said in the Speech, while she reached down to the charm bracelet for another wizardry she’d been keeping there, this one with a charm like a little cloud. “Is that okay? Thanks, just bear with me.”

She said the three words that turned the low-level dissociator loose. Nita waited a moment for the itching to set in — the sign that every atom in her body was willing to move aside for atoms of other substances. In this case, Nita wanted to walk through the atoms of the door. She went through it like so much smoke, itching fiercely all the way, and when she was standing inside the back door, she let the wizardry go, then just stood there and scratched for a few seconds until she felt like all her molecules had settled themselves back into place.

She headed upstairs to her room, got her manual, and lay down on the bed. This had better work, Nita thought, because Dad’s probably going to go intercontinental when he finds out I cut school.

But I can’t help it. What’s the use of behaving myself and losing my best friend?

She lay there and realized it was just too bright for her even to think about going to sleep. Nita opened her manual, went to the energy-management section, and turned pages until she found the wizardry she wanted.

She recited it, feeling the universe leaning in around her, paying attention, slowly muting down the light in her room as if someone was turning down a dimmer switch. Anyway, this is all my fault, she thought as the room got darker and darker. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own troubles, I’d have been with Kit on this job from the start. Yeah, okay, I have a right to grieve. But do I have a right to dump my friends until I’m finished with it, until it’s convenient to listen to them, to care about them again? If I’d listened to Kit—

“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Nita had said. And “Now you know how he felt before,” Dairine had said to her, as blunt as always, and accurate. Kit had come right out and said that he wished he had backup on this job. She’d ignored him, and he’d gone ahead with what he was doing and gotten in too deep. I should have been paying attention to what was going on around me, no matter how awful I felt. I’ve been indulging myself. I’ve almost been having fun hurting. That’s so stupid.

Nita stopped herself. There was no point in rerunning the “guilt movies.” They always ended the same way. And a new guilt movie was no better than the old ones.

But she was still left with her anger at herself. Nita lay there just breathing, just feeling it, letting it build. Well, she’d been in too deep herself, not long ago, unable to see the trouble she was getting into… and Kit had pulled her out. Now she was going to be able to return the favor. But it wasn’t about scorekeeping at all; there were much more important issues. I’ve already lost one of the most important people in my life. I’m not going to lose another!

Nita was briefly distracted by the burning at her wrist and throat.

She glanced down in surprise. All the charms on her bracelet, the symbols for all the prefabricated spells she was carrying, were glowing considerably brighter than usual. And the necklace of the lucid-dreaming wizardry was running hot, too.

“Think about what result this kind of emotion has produced in the past,” Millman had said. “Or might produce again in the future.”

Nita smiled a small angry smile.

I could get to like this

, she thought. Maybe it’s better if I don’t But today… today, I’m going to like it a lot.

She closed her eyes and pushed all her available power into the lucid-dreaming spell.

Nita’s intention and the force of her anger briefly turbocharged the spell, and it drowned her consciousness in dream. The effect wouldn’t last, she knew, as she opened her eyes in a different darkness; the spell would relapse to its normal levels momentarily, but it wouldn’t matter. She’d stay asleep. The important thing was that she was