Nita and Kit looked at each other, unnerved by the second part of the job description. S’reee moaned. “I hate the formalities,” she said in a long unhappy whistle. “I’m too young to be a Senior: I’m only two! But with Ae’mhnuu gone, I’m stuck with it! And we’re in trouble, the water people and the land people both, if we don’t finish what Ae’mhnuu was starting when he died!” She huffed out a long breath. “I’m just a calf; why did I get stuck with this?…”
Kit sighed too, and Nita made a face at nothing in particular. On their first job, she and Kit had said something similar, about a hundred times. “I’ll help,” she said, and “Me too,” said Kit, in about the same breath.
“But you’re tired,” Nita said, “and we’re tired, and it’s late, we ought to go home…”
“Come tomorrow, then, and I’ll fill you in. Are you living on the Barrier?”
Nita didn’t recognize the name. “Over there,” Kit said, pointing across the water at Tiana Beach. “Where the lights are.”
“By the old oyster beds,” S’reee said. “Can you go out swimming a couple hours after the sun’s high? I’ll meet you and we’ll go where we can talk.”
“Uh,” Kit said, “if the sharks are still around—“
Out on the water there was a splash of spray as a silvery form leaped, chattering shrilly, and hit the water again. “They won’t be,” S’reee said, sounding merry for the first time. “Hotshot and his people are one of the breeds the sharks hate worst; when there are enough of them around, few sharks would dare come into the area. Hotshot will be calling more of his people in tonight and tomorrow — that’s part of the work I’m doing.”
“Okay,” Nita said. “But what about you? You’re stuck here.”
“Wake up!” Kit shouted playfully in Nita’s ear, nudging her to look down at the sandbar. She found herself standing ankle-deep in salt water. “Tide’s coming in. She’ll be floated off here in no time.”
“Oh. Well then…” Nita opened her book, found the word to kill the wizard’s-wall spell, and said it. Then she looked up at S’reee. “Are you sure you’re gonna be all right?”
S’reee looked mildly at her from one huge eye. “We’ll find out tomorrow,” she said. “Dai’stiho.”
“Dai,” Nita and Kit said, and walked slowly off the sandbar, across the water, and toward the lights of home.
A Song of Choice
Nita got up late, and was still yawning and scrubbing her eyes even after she’d washed and dressed and was well into her second bowl of cereal. Her mother, walking around the kitchen in her bathrobe and watering the plants that hung all over, looked at Nita curiously.
“Neets, were you reading under the covers again last night?”
“No, Mom.” Nita started to eat faster.
Her mother watered another plant, then headed for the sink. On the way, she put a hand against Nita’s forehead. “You feel okay? Not coming down with anything, are you?”
“No, I’m fine.” Nita made an annoyed face when her mother’s back was turned. Her mom loved the beach, but at the same time was sure that there were hundreds of ways to get sick there: too much heat, too much cold, too much time in the water; splinters, rusty nails, tar… Nita’s little sister Dairine had kicked off a tremendous family fight last week by insisting that the blueness of her lips after a prolonged swim was actually caused by a grape Popsicle.
“Is Kit having a good time?” her mother said.
“Wow, yeah, he says it’s the best,” Nita said. Which was true enough: Kit had never been at the beach for more than a day at a time before. Nita suspected that if he could, he’d dig into the sand like a clam and not come out for months.
“I just wanted to make sure. His dad called last night… wanted to see how his ‘littlest’ was.”
“ ‘El Nino,’ “ Nita said, under her breath, grinning. It was what Kit s family called him sometimes, a pun — both the word for “the baby” and the name for a Pacific current that caused storms that could devastate whole countries. The name made Kit crazy, and Nita loved to use it on him.
“Be careful he doesn’t hear you,” Nita’s mom said mildly, “or he’ll deck you again. — How have you two been getting along?”
“Huh? We’re fine. Kit’s great.” Nita saw a slightly odd look come into her mother’s eyes. “For a boy,” she added hurriedly.
“Well,” her mother said, “be careful.” And she took the watering can off into the living room.
Now what was that about? Nita thought. She finished her cornflakes at high speed, rinsed the bowl and spoon in the sink, and hurried out of the house to find Kit.
Halfway across the sparse sandy grass of the front yard, another voice spoke up. “Aha,” it said. “The mystery lady.”
“Put a cork in it, Dairine,” Nita said. Her sister was hanging upside down from the trapeze swing of the rusty swing set, her short red hair ruffling in the breeze. Dairine was a tiny stick of a thing and an all right younger sister, though (in Nita’s estimation) much too smart for her own good. Right now entirely too much smart was showing in those sharp gray eyes. Nita tried not to react to it. “Gonna fall down and bust your head open,” she said. “Probably lose what few brains you have all over the ground.”
Dairine shook her head, causing herself to swing a little. “Naaah,” she said, “but I’d sooner”—she started pumping, so as to swing harder—“fall off the swing — than fall out the window — in the middle of the night!”
Nita went first cold, then hot. She glanced at the windows to see if anyone was looking out. They weren’t. “Did you tell?” she hissed.
“I — don’t tell anybody — anything,” Dairine said, in time with her swinging. This was true enough. When Dairine had needed glasses, when she’d started getting beaten up at school, and when she was exposed to German measles, nobody had heard about it from her.
“Y’like him, huh?” Dairine said.
Nita glared at Dairine, opened her mouth to start shouting, then remembered the open windows.
“Yeah, I like him,” Nita said, and turned red at having to make the admission. The problem was, there was no lying to Dairine. She always found out the truth sooner or later and made your life unbearable for having tried to hide it from her.
“You messing around?” Dairine said.
“Dairiiiiiiiine!” Nita said, quietly, but with murder in it. “No, we are not Kessing around!”
“Okay. I just wondered. You going swimming?”
“No,” Nita said, snapping the strap of her bathing suit very obviously at her sister, “I thought I’d go skiing. Wake up, lamebrain.”
Dairine grinned at Nita upside down. “Kit went west,” she said.
“Thanks,” Nita said, and headed out of the yard. “Tell Mom and Dad I’ll be back for supper.”
“Be careful,” Dairine called after Nita, in a perfect imitation of their mother. Nita made a face.
“And watch out for sharks!” Dairine added at the top of her lungs.
“Oh, great,” Nita said to herself, wondering if her mom or dad had heard She took off at a dead run in case they had.
She found Kit waiting about a mile down the beach, playing fetch with Ponch to tire him out, as he’d told her he was going to. “Otherwise he gets crazy if I go away. This way he’ll just lie down and sack out.” And sure enough, after some initial barking and dancing around Nita when she arrived, Ponch flopped panting on the sand beside them where they sat talking and finally rolled over on one side and began to snore.
They grinned at each other and headed out into the water. It was unnerving at first, to swim straight out into the ocean, past the breakers and the rollers, past the place where the bottom fell away, and to just keep going as if they never intended to come back. Nita had uncomfortable thoughts about undertow and how it might feel to drown. But just when she was at her twitchiest, she saw a long floppy fin tip up out of the water. S’reee was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward.
The night before, when S’reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell much of anything about
