A Wizard Abroad, New Millennium Edition Read Free

too now. We’ll lose our places and it’ll be years before we can reapply. There won’t be any time to do anything about them before I have to go.”

    Kit stretched and looked unhappy. “We can still Manual-chat. Or overhear each other thinking, when that works.”

    “Mmf,” Nita said.

    “Or I can just call you.”

    “Better not,” Nita said. “Roaming charges.”

    “Not so sure about that,” Kit said. “Did I tell you I was talking to Tom and Carl last week about ways to tweak your phone with wizardry so you get around long-distance problems? There are apps you can install that hook it into the manual…”

    “Oh really,” Nita said.

    “But as for work here… I’ll get the trees finished with pretty soon: you can coach me at a distance—”

    “It won’t be the same! You know that.” Nita had often enough tried explaining to her parents the “high” you got from working closely with another wizard: the feeling that magic made in your mind while working with another, the texture, was utterly unlike that of a wizardry worked alone—more dangerous, more difficult, ultimately more satisfying. But her folks didn’t seem to get it. Or maybe they are starting to get it… and it’s starting to freak them out.

    Nita sighed. “There must be some way we can work around this. How’re your folks handling things lately?”

    At that Kit sighed too. “Variable. My Pop doesn’t mind it so much. He says, ‘Big deal, my son’s a  brujo.’  Sometimes he’s actually kind of proud about it. But my Mama...” He shook his head, sighed. “Half the time she’s okay. Mostly after she’s been talking to my Pop. But other times… She doesn’t really want to say it, but I think she may have the idea that somehow we’re meddling with Dark Forces.”

    “Oh no…”

    “Oh yeah. An idea which Helena put into her head.” Kit rolled his eyes. “Thank you so much, idiot big sister! I caught her looking at some kind of website about exorcisms the other day.”

    “Cute,” Nita muttered.

    Kit shook his head. “When are they making you leave?”

    “Saturday.” Nita rested her chin on one hand, picked up another rock and chucked it away. “All of a sudden there’s all this junk I have to pack, and all these things we have to do. Go to the bank and get Euros. Get me a debit cardBuy new clothes. Wash the old ones.” She rolled her eyes and fell silent. Nita hated that kind of rushed busy-ness, and she was up to her neck in it now.

    “How’s Dairine holding up?”

    Nita laughed. “Hardly heartbroken. Anyway, she’s so busy doing big-scale long-range wizardry that half the time I only see her at meals. Don’t get me started about breakfast.” She snorted. “There she sits shoving cornflakes into her face while she builds these weird half-Speech-half-machine-language wizardries with Spot the magic computer. Or else she sits there having these bizarre voicelink conversations with wizards halfway across the Galaxy through Spot’s manual functions. It’s like watching intergalactic Skype.” Nita fell into an imitation of Dairine’s higher-pitched voice, made even more squeaky by annoyance. “‘No, I will  not  move your planet! What do you want to move it for? It’s fine right where it is!’”

    Kit merely rolled his eyes and produced an expression of general disgust, with which Nita empathized completely. Dairine had come into wizardry at a younger age than most, and at a much higher power level; and she was also (by several months) a newer wizard than the two of them were. As a result she was presently more powerful than Nita and Kit put together, which annoyed Nita incredibly… not that there was a thing she could do about it. All she and Kit had on Dairine right now was experience, and the useful advantage of being two brains against one. Or at least it was useful sometimes . “At least she’s not on your case as much as she used to be, it sounds like,” Kit said.

    Nita