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… ”
    Tom got up as Nita put her head around the living room door into the dining room. “News travels fast, huh?” Tom said to her as the back door shut behind Kit.
    “Uh, yeah,” Nita said. She picked up Tom’s jacket, which was still wet, and shook it off before handing it to him. Residual water went everywhere. “Why didn’t you keep the rain off you when you came over?” she said.
    “I don’t always do wizardry just because I can ,” Tom said, smiling slightly and shrugging into the parka. “An attitude toward errantry that you’ll understand better when you’re my age. Besides, I like the rain. By the way, how’s the reading coming?”
    When Tom asked Nita this, she knew it didn’t have anything to do with fiction. Nita had been spending a lot of time with the manual over the past months, starting to explore for herself the kind of “research” wizardry that Tom did. In particular, she had been studying the Speech more closely, mostly for its own sake—there was always something new to find out about the language in which the Universe had been written—but also with an eye to finding other ways to deal with the Lone Power than just brute force. “I’ve been doing some more research on the Enactive and pre-Enactive modes,” Nita said. “Ancillary Oaths and bindings.”
    “Oho,” Tom said. “That’ll keep you busy for the next couple of years… A lot of finicky material there. A lot of memory work, too. Hit the Binding Oath yet?”
    “Some references to it,” Nita said. “But I haven’t seen the Oath itself.”
    “It’s worth a look,” Tom said. “Our own Oath is based on it. Or maybe I should say closely related. Worth studying for etymological purposes, even if the uses are limited. Meanwhile, we’ve got more immediate problems than research.” He glanced back toward the stairs. “Talk to her, will you?”
    “I did.”
    “Good. See you later. See you, Kit.” Tom went out the front door and closed it behind him.
    “Honey,” Nita’s dad said, “I need to change out of my work clothes. Give me a few minutes.” He headed for the back of the house.
    Kit flopped into one of the dining room chairs. “Such a pleasure to get out of the house. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing all afternoon.”
    “Why?”
    “Carmela. Every five minutes it’s yet another of her slavering horde of boyfriends.”
    “I didn’t think she’d gotten up to the ‘horde’ level,” Nita said. “She told me she was just planning to test the wonderful world of dating.”
    “Test?” Kit said. “It’s more like she’s holding auditions. There’s a new one on the phone every ten minutes. And I really don’t want to be around when she narrows them down to the ‘short list.’ Being here is a relief… even just for a little while. So are you coming over for dinner?”
    Nita sat down and reached across the table for a pen and a pad of sticky notes, pulling off the top note and starting to jot down a list of needed groceries. “We have to go shop first. I’ll come over when we get back. We’ve really got to talk about the next couple of weeks.”
    “That business on Mars,” Kit said as he sat down across from her. “We need to get that taken care of before it gets out of hand. And those depth charges in Great South Bay… Way past time to get together with S’reee and the rest of the deep-side team to deal with those before they get any more unstable. Then there’s that gate-relocation thing in the city… ”
    Kit paused, glancing toward the back of the house as he heard the bedroom door close. “It was Dairine, yeah?” Kit whispered.
    “Yeah.”
    “What did she do? What did Tom do?”
    “He grounded her. She can’t leave the system.”
    Kit whistled softly. “What about your dad?”
    “I thought he was going to lose it completely,” Nita said, under her breath. “He sent her to her room. I can’t even remember the last time he did that.”
    “What did she do!” Kit