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kind of late-seventies institutional architecture: a lot of plate glass, a lot of brick. Kit looked around them through the slight heat-haze shimmer of the invisibility spell, keeping Ponch with him for the moment simply by holding on to his collar. The school was surrounded by suburban housing and, off to one side, what looked like the back of a strip mall; maybe about fifty cars were parked around the school. It had a small playing field, but nobody was out there.
    Kit wasn’t overly concerned—even if anyone had been there, they wouldn’t have been able to see him and Ponch. Now the point was to find Darryl. The structure of the locator spell mandated that Darryl was somewhere within a two-hundred-meter radius: All Kit had to do was look around.
    Two hundred meters, Kit thought, could definitely include at least part of the school building. He walked toward it, looking for any sign of the characteristic aura that would surround the object of his search once he got within visual range. Beside him, Ponch paced along, looking at everything, his nose working.
    From around the side of the school, a white van drove toward the front entrance and pulled up. Kit gave the van a wide berth, having no desire to be run over by something that couldn’t see him. A moment later, the driver got out and went in through the front doors. Kit looked through the front windows of the school, found himself looking at office space, not classrooms. “Okay,” he said, “so we’ll go in. Don’t start barking at anything, whatever you do!”
    Please, Ponch said in a somewhat offended tone. Kit smiled in slight amusement as they headed for the doors. Once upon a time, his dog wouldn’t have been quite so focused during a wizardry, but lately, since Ponch had started actively finding things—like other universes—this had changed.
    They went up to the doors together. These were all closed—no surprise, in this weather—and Kit was unwilling just to pull one of them open: someone might be watching. Never mind. We can just walk through the glass, he thought. But then, through the glass of the door, Kit saw the van driver coming back toward them. “Okay,” Kit said softly to Ponch, “he can let us in. Just step back and don’t let him bump into you. We’ll slip past before the door closes behind him.”
    Fine.
    The van driver, a small, slender man in a big parka, pushed the door open right in front of Kit’s nose, and then reached up to the closing mechanism to pull down the little toggle that would hold the door open. Convenient, Kit thought, and slipped through the door with Ponch close behind him.
    In the main tile-and-terrazzo corridor of the school, a number of people were moving around; some of them were coming toward the doors—some students, Kit thought, heading for the van with a few teachers. Field trip? he wondered. Then Kit paused, for the locator spell said in his head, Proximity alert—subject of search within fifty meters. Forty meters—
    That’s them, Kit thought. “Ponch, come on,” Kit whispered. “Over here—” Together they moved off to one side of the hallway as the group approached. Kit started examining them for signs of that faint, glowing halo.
    There were five kids in the group. Three of them were girls of different ages, one quite short and round, the other two taller and thinner; they went by Kit in silence, not speaking to each other, though one of them was smiling a placid smile. Two teachers followed close behind, then came the two boys and a third teacher.
    One was a thin, small, blond guy, who went past with a very uneven gait. But Kit’s attention was on the boy behind him. Visible only to Kit and Ponch, the locator halo clung to him. He was perhaps eleven years old, an African American kid with a handsome, sharp little face. He was slender, and was dressed in jeans and a bright T-shirt and beat-up sneakers. Handsome his face was, but also very still, almost immobile right now, and somehow