So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane

Author:Diane Duane [Duane, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

Entropics:

DETECTION AND AVOIDANCE

(HOW CLOSE ARE WE?)

(Uh ... this is Madison and Forty-ninth. Three blocks north and a long one east.)

(Can we rest? This air burns to breathe. And we've been going fast.)

(Yeah, let's.)

They crouched together in the shadow of a doorway, two wary darknesses and a dim light, watching the traffic that went by. Mostly cabs prowled past, wearing the same hungry look as the one that had wounded Kit. Or a sullen truck might lumber by, or a passenger car, looking uneasy and dingy and bitter. None of the cars or trucks had drivers, or looked like they wanted them. They ignored the traffic lights, and their engines growled.

Nita's eyes burned in the dark air. She rubbed them and glanced down at Kit's leg, bound now with a torn-off piece of her shirt. (How is it?)

(Not too bad. It feels stiff. I guess it stopped bleeding.) He looked down, felt the makeshift bandage, winced. (Yeah ... I'm hungry.)

Nita's stomach turned over—she was too nervous to even consider eating—as Kit came up with a ham sandwich and offered her half. (You go ahead,) she said. She leaned against the hard cold wall, and on a sudden thought pulled her pen out of her pocket and looked at it. It seemed all right, but as she held it she could feel a sort of odd tingling in its metal that hadn't been there before.

(Uh, Fred—)

He hung beside her at eye level, making worried feelings that matched the dimness of his light. (Are you sure that light didn't hurt you?)

(Yeah. It's not that.) She held out the pen to him. Fred backed away a little, as if afraid he might swallow it again. (Is this radioactive or anything?) Nita said.

He drifted close to it, bobbed up and down to look at it from several angles. (You mean beta and gamma and those other emissions you have trouble with? No.)

Nita still felt suspicious about the pen. She dug into her backpack for a piece of scrap paper, laid it on her wizards' manual, clicked the point out, and scribbled on the paper. Then she breathed out, perplexed. (Come on, Fred! Look at that!)

He floated down to look. The, pen's blue-black ink would normally have been hard to see in that dimness, no matter how white the paper. But the scrawl had a subtle glimmer about it, a luminosity just bright enough to make out. (I don't think it's anything harmful to you,) Fred said. (Are you sure it didn't do that before?)

(Yes!)

(Well, look at it this way. Now you can see what you're writing when it's dark. Surprising you people hadn't come up with something like that already.)

Nita shook her head, put the paper away, and clipped the pen back in her pocket. Kit, finishing the first half of his sandwich, looked over at the scribble with interest. (Comes of being inside Fred, I guess. With him having his own claudication, and all the energy boiling around inside him, you might have expected something like that to happen.

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