Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“Best reason to keep it quiet,” Ronan said. “I feel for you. Glad I don’t have to deal with that stuff.”

“You never told your family?”

Ronan shook his head. “Tried it once or twice,” he said. “It never felt right. Might have been something to do with the classified stuff the Champion was up to when he was stuck in my head. But now that he’s gone, I’m not sure I want to rock the boat…”

Bang! Darryl appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing loose savannah-camo baggies, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and one of those many-pocketed vests favored by photographers. “Sorry I kept you waiting,” he said. “I had to feed my turtle.”

Ronan eyed him with amusement. “Looks more like you were feeding the lions. What, are we going on safari? I should get you a pith helmet and an elephant gun.”

“Stop envying my style,” Darryl said.

“Envying?” Ronan snorted. “It is to laugh.”

“You’re not fooling anybody.” Darryl grinned at Kit, then looked around. “We all set? Where’s Miss Neets?”

Despite how eager he was to see her, this kind of question from the others was beginning to grate on Kit’s nerves. “Sleeping in,” he said. “She had a long day dealing with her dad. And she was muttering about something she was doing with Carmela, probably some girl thing…”

Darryl’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Kit, don’t let her hear you say stuff like that! She’ll pull your head right off and beat you over the shoulders with it.”

Ronan rolled his eyes in agreement. “Miss Tough-Mouth Neets doing girly stuff?” he said. “Not usually on her program.”

“Can we worry less about her program and more about ours?” Kit said.

“Right away, O mighty one,” Darryl said, wandering over to the bowl of fruit off to one side and picking up an apple. “Hey, these look nice—” He glanced at Kit.

“Go ahead. Why should a little errantry keep you from eating?”

“I assume you’ve got a plan ready,” Ronan said.

Kit nodded. “Darryl, did he tell you about the signals to the other craters?”

Already three bites into the apple, Darryl paused long enough to give Kit a look. “I read your précis between the second and third bowls of sugar bombs,” he said. “You want to keep up with me, Your Kitness, ‘cause I may be autistic but I’m not dyslexic. You have a preferred target we should investigate first, or should we just flip for it?”

“If there’s any flipping-for to be done,” said a voice from the living room, “it’s going to be by Ronan over me.”

All heads turned as Carmela walked in. She was wearing a short blue dress with a peach-colored tank top underneath it, leggings, and little high heels of the kind Kit had heard her call “kitten heels.” The clothes were the same kind of thing you might see a lot of girls her age wearing somewhere casually, say to the mall. But there was nothing casual about the way Carmela wore any of her clothes anymore—not since last year, when she suddenly discovered she had a figure. The pigtails of ten minutes ago were gone. She had pulled her long hair off to one side, so that it flowed down in a raven sweep over one shoulder, and she carried herself with the gracious queenly condescension of a supermodel who had descended for a time from her usual starry height to walk among the lowly paparazzi. What Kit found strange was that this lofty carriage didn’t look preposterous on her. “Good morning, Darryl,” Carmela said, smiling sweetly at him; then turned her head. “And Ronannnn…”

Kit could only roll his eyes as Carmela stalked over to Ronan with that smile turned right up. It’s got to be an act,was all he could think. She’s just messing with him because he thinks he’s hot—! For Kit had seen her pull this stunt with egotistical alien royalty in the past. After he worked out what was being done to him, the prince in question had eventually recovered sufficiently to take nourishment and walk around. For a while…

“Carmela,” Ronan said in what Kit was beginning to think of as the Tone of Great Forbearance, “don’t you think I’m a little— old for you?”

His tone of voice suggested that Ronan expected no answer but “yes.” Carmela, however, just looked at him brightly and said, “That’s okay. In ten years you won’t be.”

Ronan opened his mouth and closed it again.

Kit didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But right now the laughter was threatening to win. “Ronan, don’t we have places to be?”

“Oh,” Ronan said, “uh, yes.”

Carmela just smiled. “Nice save, Kit,” she said, “but it’s just temporary.” She waved the fingers of one hand at them in a toodle-oo gesture as she wandered back into the living room.

Kit watched her go with slight relief. Then again, why am I relieved? She’s got a worldgate in her closet. The sooner we’re out of here, the better. “Let’s go out back,” Kit said. “It’s shielded there; the neighbors won’t see us.”

They headed out the back door together. Under his breath, Ronan said, “Your sister—” He shook his head. “We have a word for her where I come from—”

“Maybe I don’t want to hear it,” Kit said. “She is my sister.” Not that Kit wasn’t finding it peculiar to suddenly be concerned about how Carmela dressed or acted around other people. He wasn’t used to thinking about how girls looked in their clothes— except what about Janie Lowell in chemistry the other day? said one eager and interested part of his brain from the background. That skirt she was wearing, it hardly even covered her—

Kit made a face. Other girls were a different matter. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be seeing his sister that way, and he wasn’t sure he wanted anybody else seeing her that way, either. And just a few months ago, I wouldn’t have cared one way or another. This is so weird…

Ronan was shaking his head as they headed into the backyard. “Leaving words about her out of it,” Darryl said to Ronan, “they have any words where you come from for the expression on your face when she said that?”

“Probably they do,” Ronan said as they made their way down through the yard. “‘Gobsmacked’ would be one. Carmela”— Ronan shook his head— “is a whole bucket of gobsmack.”

Kit grinned. “Cousin, I hear you there!”

“When’s she going away to college?” said Darryl as they came to the weedy, tree-screened rear of Kit’s backyard.

“Not a second too soon for me,” Kit said. “No— that’s not true. I don’t know…” He and Carmela had always gotten along better than he and Helena did. And it wasn’t just that Carmela hadn’t completely blown a gasket when she found out he was a wizard, or that later she’d started indepedently picking up the Speech. There’s something else going on. Maybe we’re just closer in age…

In among the trees, Kit had a spell circle laid into the ground under the carpet of leaf mold. “I need to make a couple of changes to this before we go,” he said to the others. “I don’t want her tracking us.”

“We don’t need that,” Darryl said. “I’ll transit us the way I brought Ronan in from Dublin. I doubt she can track my kind of transit: it’s real atypical.”

“If you can go transatlantic on a personal transit without even breaking a sweat,” Kit said, “‘atypical’ would be the word.”

“It’s to do with that bilocation stunt I stumbled onto during my Ordeal,” Darryl said. “Seems I don’t need the usual spells to gate around in the neighborhood. I can go a long way without needing a spell, as long as I leave one of me on Earth and have coordinates to work with.” He rolled his eyes. “Tom said he didn’t understand it, and shoved me off on Carl. Carl gave me five different theories and then wound up saying he thinks I’m bypassing string-structure issues by selectively shredding the interstitial structure of local space-time.” Darryl grinned. “Whatever that means! I don’t think he understands it, either. Shredding—” He shrugged. “He wants to call it that, it’s fine by me.”