Read A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition for Free Online Page A

with S’reee.”
    Nita looked briefly morose. “Dairine...” she said. “She’s been out a lot lately, and my dad’s been giving me grief about keeping tabs on her. Suddenly I’m supposed to be my sister’s keeper.”
    “You’ll need a whip and a chair for that,” Carmela said.
    Nita made a face, since this was true. “How much did Kit tell you about the Mars thing?”
    Carmela rolled her eyes most expressively. “Nothing, as usual. He’s started acting like he owns all the wizardy stuff in the world, Neets! You’d think there wasn’t enough to go around.”
    Nita laughed, maybe just a little evilly. “Don’t think that could have anything to do with  you,  could it?”
    “Me?” Carmela actually batted her eyelashes. “However could that be? He’s just jealous because  he  never got a chance to blow up a worldgating facility. First Dairine, now me— he’s just feeling like he’s missed an opportunity.”
    Nita grinned, for that thought had crossed her mind. “Come on,” she said, getting up. “I need to change.”
    She headed up the stairs: Carmela came after her. “But anyway,” Nita said at the top of the stairs, turning down the hall toward her bedroom, “you know how he keeps going up there.”
    “Kind of hard to ignore,” Carmela said, following Nita into her bedroom and flopping down on her bed while Nita went to her dresser and started pulling open drawers. “He sheds all this beige dust all over the place when he comes back. It’s all staticky: it gets all over the CDs and the DVDs. They get scratched. And he’s always wrecked the next day. He’s started using it as an excuse not to do his chores.”
    “Tell me about it,” Nita said, rolling her eyes. She came out with a pair of very worn and faded floppy jeans, and then with a short-sleeved pink top that she held up against her while looking in the mirror. “Dairine again?”
    “Same problem, different story,” Nita said, chucking the pink top back into the drawer: it was the wrong shade to work with what little was left of her spring tan. “Those big transport wizardries really take it out of you unless you can get somebody to go halves with you on the energy debt. Anyway, Mars— Kit’s not the only one who’s had Mars on the brain for a long time.” She picked up another top, a white one, and held it up against her.
    “Why? Are they going to invade us?” Then Carmela paused for a moment, getting a curious look. “Now that you mention it— who lives there?”
    “Nobody,” Nita said, shaking her head and dumping the white top back in the drawer. “So isn’t it funny that you think somebody there might invade you?”
    Carmela looked surprised. “Well, you know how it is. All the movies and old stories and stuff about invaders...”
    “‘From Mars,’” Nita said, looking over her shoulder. “The words almost seem to go together for a lot of Earth people. Weird, huh?”
    “I guess,” Carmela said. “Are you saying it shouldn’t be weird?”
    Nita shrugged, turning back to the drawer and rummaging through it. “Well, think about it. ‘Invaders from Venus’? ‘Invaders from Jupiter’? You don’t take them seriously. The language itself is giving you some kind of hint.” She came upon another top, a light green one, and held it up against her. “And it’s not just because Mars is the most Earthlike planet in our solar system, either. There’s just something  about  Mars. People have been interested in it for a long time, because of that. So wizards have been interested in it for a long time, too. There are all kinds of things about it that’re weird.” She picked another top out of the drawer, another pink one, and held it up against her, too. “For one thing, it doesn’t have a kernel.”
    Carmela blinked. “What?”
    “A kernel. Everything’s supposed to have one. People, things, atoms, planets. It’s like, if a body’s or a thing’s the hardware, the kernel’s the software: the