Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“What, yesterday?”

“No.” Kit paused once again to try to remember what day it was. “Uh, Thursday.”

“Oh.” Nita rubbed her face, looking tired for a moment. “I had to go off site to deal with a flood.”

“What?” He handed her the bottle.

“They were running short of hydromages to do emergency response work, and I was handy to substitute in. But what embarrasses me is that it was kind of a relief. There are times—”

Nita broke off and looked away, as if whatever admission she’d been about to make was painful enough that she didn’t even like sharing it with Kit. “Well, anyway,” she said, looking back again. “There was an earthquake down on the south side of the continent somewhere, don’t ask me where, Bobo knows the coordinates, and it destroyed a local dam, and all the water started flooding the plain around one of the bigger gating complexes. And they couldn’t stop the flowthrough in time—the gates were being really adversarial and kept jamming each other open while all these thousands of people kept moving through. One of the local Supervisories just turned up on my doorstep, literally outside my puptent, a big fluffy guy and honestly he reminds me of a giant chicken, and said ‘Get down here now.’ And so I got down there now.”

“God,” Kit said.

Nita shrugged. “It wasn’t too tough to stop, really. I had to reroute a big reservoir’s worth of water all over the flood plain, but it wasn’t anything like as heavy a job as Mars was. Not that that would have been a big deal either right now, with our power levels the way they are.”

Nita scowled down at the bottle she was holding. “So I got the water out of there, and went down to report off to Big Fluffy Chicken Guy. And while this was happening some Tevaralti people came along to say thank you. You know how that goes.”

“Yeah,” Kit said. Those moments always embarrassed him too. He was so used to keeping wizardry secret, at least at home, that it was hard to get used to being thanked out in the open.

“And a few of them were Tevaralti who didn’t want to move on to the refuge worlds, but they came and said thank you anyway. Which was nice enough, I guess.” He could feel her annoyance growing. “And I think they knew I couldn’t understand it, because one of them said, ‘It’s just that we need to be of one mind, we can’t go unless we’re of one mind—’”

“Yeah, somebody said that to me the other day.”

“And another one said ‘If the One desired us to go, It would have changed all minds so that all minds are one, It would have acted Itself.’ And I just got so mad.” She actually grabbed some of her hair in her fists and waved it around. “I wanted to grab him and say, ‘Well, what are we, chopped liver?’ Like we’re not what the Powers use to fix things.” She let go of her hair and flapped her arms in helpless anger. “Honestly.”

Kit laughed, and the laugh came out a little broken. “I know,” he said. “Though I don’t think they’d get the chopped liver part.”

She laughed at that, which was just as well, because despite the gravity of what they’d been discussing, the reminder of Mars had taken Kit by surprise in a way that had occasionally happened before. Just the image was enough: Nita standing there facing down a scheming Martian vizier and a rebellious and dangerous Martian princess while she held a huge threatening wave of water over their city like a giant attack dog straining at its leash. Nita taut and furious and absolutely in command, looking extremely dangerous as she explained to the people who were more or less holding Kit hostage that if they didn’t do what she told them right now she was going to excuse the whole lot of them from existence.

Actually, Nita looking absolutely smoking hot, Kit thought, realizing that his mouth had gone dry. Though it might have had something to do with the Martian daywear, which tended toward the filmy and skimpy and… Seriously, seriously I need to stop thinking about this right now, Kit thought. Before something… uh, well, yeah, maybe too late—

She’d turned her head aside for a moment, which was just as well, as it gave Kit just enough time to adjust his clothes and make things less visible while she dropped her gaze to the water bottle and started fighting with the top of it. “Ever since they changed the caps on these it takes forever to get them open,” she said, scowling at it. “I swear, you need to be a wizard to—”

The bottletop popped off and fizzy water bubbled up and hissed out of it, spraying everywhere. Nita nearly dropped the bottle, then said, “Oh no you don’t, you stop that!”

The water stopped right where it was in the air, frozen in mid-spray like something caught by strobe photography.

“Come on, let’s get this out of here,” Nita said, and headed out the portal with the bottle and all the stasis-held water. Kit followed her, trying hard to make sure he wasn’t walking strangely enough for her to notice. “Boy,” she was saying, “somebody must have been in a real hurry when he was packing!”

Kit gulped as he followed her out into the cool darkness and around behind the standing stone. Oh thank you, he said to the night, thank you for being dark! Because sometimes no matter how carefully you tried to walk, things just got worse. “Well, weren’t you?”

Nita released the water-stasis spell and let the bottle finish fizzing enthusiastically over the grass. “Yeah, but I didn’t shake my drinks up! I bet you just brought the portal interface down into the kitchen and started firing things into it…”

“Um,” Kit said. While this was true, it wasn’t worth even breathing the suggestion that the way Nita’d been hanging onto the bottle when she flapped her arms around might also have had something to do with it.

“Yeah, there you go,” Nita said, and took a swig out of the now much calmer bottle. “Thought so.” She gave him a sidewise look. “You didn’t bring any of Carmela’s soda, did you?”

“What? Of course not.”

“Shame,” Nita said, “I like that…” She took another drink, sighed, handed Kit the bottle.

He drank, ever so glad to have something to do to take his mind off things. After several long swallows Kit sighed at the realization that personal matters were now subsiding to more manageable levels, and allowed himself to look at Nita again.

Which was of course exactly the moment she caught him at it. “What’re you looking at?”

“You,” he said in the Speech.

She spent a long moment looking at him the same way, and opened her mouth.

Then her shoulders slumped and she closed her mouth and twisted it into a very annoyed expression. “I don’t believe this,” Nita said. “Bobo says I’ve got to get back. The gate I yelled at before is acting up again; they need me to settle it…”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “Okay.”

She looked at him shyly. “Hug?”

Kit went nearly white-hot as the reason not to want Nita to get any closer, the reason he’d thought had stood itself down, now stood itself right up again. Yes! one part of his mind was yelling, and Bad idea, bad idea, shouted another—

But it was too late, Nita was already turning toward him, reaching for him. And, But I need a hug! some idiotically needy part of him was yelling.

Oh God. Okay, maybe if I turn a little bit, that might be enough to—

Too late. Nita’s face was against his neck. And she was shaking.

Kit instantly started to get upset, which on top of the blushing was hard to take. “Wait, what’s the matter, are you—what’re you—”

“Why,” Nita said, taking a breath as if she needed to get some control of herself, “why… do you even bother?”

“What?”