He went around the back, opened the gate softly, and closed it again, grabbing Ponch by the collar and roughing him up a little by way of saying hello. “And you weren’t even barking,” Kit said. “Good for you.”
, Ponch said. I
“Neither do I Good for you for thinking of it.”
?! Ponch began chasing his tail in delight.
“Just for a quick look at our guy. I want to see if he’s okay before I come barging in on him.
We’re going to have to be stealthy, though.”
Ponch finished his running around and sat down, his tail sweeping the sparse grass while Kit reached into his “pocket” and came out with the long chain of his transit spell, and another spell, more complex, that he had prepared earlier. There were several different ways for wizards to be invisible, and this one was probably the most comprehensive of them: Even if someone bumped up against Kit, he would feel nothing, and the spell would incline him to think he’d just stumbled somehow. Building the spell had required half an hour’s careful reading from the manual at a time of morning when Kit would rather still have been in bed, followed by fifteen or twenty minutes on his back, as exhausted as if he’d run around the school track about ten times. But now, as he shook the cloaking spell out onto the air in a cloudy web of woven Speech, he had to admire his handiwork.
The basic spellweb would last a good while, as long as he remembered to recharge it at intervals.
“Okay,” he said to Ponch. “You ready?”
“Good. Stay close to me. This thing only has about a six-foot radius.” He draped the invisibility spell over his shoulder for a moment, stuck the chain of the transit spell into the belt of his parka, and reached down into the “pocket” for his wizard’s manual. “Now then,” he said. He flipped it open, and the pages riffled to the spot he’d bookmarked. He ran a finger down the listing of functions on that page. “Location and detection… cross-reference to personnel listings… Right.”
The locator spell blocked out on the page rearranged itself to include Darryl’s listing, and the listing itself pulsed to indicate that it was “in circuit” with the rest of the spell and ready to go.
“This is a temporal-spatial locator routine with sync to an existing transit nexus now balanced for two,” Kit said in the Speech. “Purpose: Locate and identify the wizard in the listing. Additional info: Linkage to stealth routine referenced on page…” He stopped and had to check his other bookmark, on the cloaking spell’s page, because the manual’s pagination was constantly changing, depending on Kit’s needs (and sometimes its own). “Three-eighty- nine. Ready?”
The whole spell pulsed bright on the page as he turned back to it. Slowly Kit started reading, making sure of his pronunciation, and that his and Ponch’s names were correctly entered. The usual waiting silence — of the universe leaning in around them to hear the Speech spoken and implement it — now started to build. Ponch sat there with his big eyes glinting and his tail thumping as the power of the spell built all around them. Kit felt a brief pang because of the absence of the other voice that usually would have been there, reading her half of the work, but there was no time for the feeling right now. Kit finished the spell, snapped the manual shut, and in the moment before the spell worked, flipped the cloaking routine over himself and Ponch.
The power washed up over and around them, blotting out the backyard. A moment later, Kit and Ponch were standing in a parking lot two towns away, looking at another school building.
It was considerably smaller than Kit’s junior high, though this place shared the same kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keeping Ponch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.
Kit wasn’t overly concerned — even if anyone had been out there, they wouldn’t have been able to see Ponch and him. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.
, Kit thought,
From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up.
Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn’t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, found himself looking at office space, not classrooms. “Okay,” he said, “so we’ll go in. Don’t start barking at anything, whatever you do!”
, Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn’t have been quite so focused during a wizardry, but lately, since Ponch had started actively finding things — like other universes — this had changed.
They went up to the doors together. They were all closed — no surprise, in this weather — and Kit was unwilling just to pull one of them open: Someone might be watching.
, he thought. But then, through the glass of the door, Kit saw the van driver coming back toward them. “Okay,” Kit said softly to Ponch, “he can let us in. Just step back and don’t let him bump into you. We’ll slip past before the door closes behind him.”
The van driver, a small, slender man in a big parka, pushed the door open right in front of Kit’s nose, and then reached up to the closing mechanism to pull down the little toggle that would hold the door open.
In the main tile-and-terrazzo corridor of the school, a number of people were moving around; some of them were coming toward the doors — some students, Kit thought, heading for the van with a few teachers.
, Kit thought. “Ponch, come on,” Kit whispered. “Over here—” Together they moved off to one side of the hallway as the group approached. Kit started examining them for signs of that faint, glowing halo.
There were five kids in the group. Three of them were girls of different ages, one quite short and round, the other two taller and thinner; they went by Kit in silence, not speaking to each other, though one of them was smiling a placid smile. Two teachers followed close behind, then came the two boys and a third teacher.
One was a thin, small, blond guy, who went past with a very uneven gait. But Kit’s attention was on the boy behind him. Visible only to Kit and Ponch, the locator halo clung to him. He was, perhaps, eleven years old, an African American kid with a handsome, sharp little face. He was slender, and was dressed in jeans and a bright T- shirt and beat-up sneakers. Handsome his face was, but also expressionless, flat and as still as a mask, his eyes looking only at the ground. He held his body tilted slightly forward, and he went past Kit fast, breaking almost into a run as he headed through the doors out into the cold, gray day.
Kit turned and followed him back outside. The teachers helped the other kids into the van: Darryl was the last one in. One of the teachers was helping him with his seat belt. This took some moments. And while the teachers were sitting down, while the van driver came back to let the school door close again, Darryl began, very slowly and steadily, to bang his head against the window of the van.
Kit’s heart seized. Next to him, Ponch stood looking. The driver started up the van, and slowly drove away.
, Ponch said.
“That was him,” Kit said softly.
