A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online

tight, as if held under harsh control. His eyes seemed to be fixed on the van, and he went past Kit fast with his body leaned forward, breaking almost into a run as he headed through the doors out into the cold, gray day.
    Kit turned and followed him back outside. The teachers helped the other kids into the van: Darryl was the last one in. One of the teachers was helping him with his seat belt. This took some moments. And while the teachers were sitting down, while the van driver came back to let the school door close again, Darryl began, very slowly and steadily, to bang his head against the window of the van.
    Kit’s heart seized. Next to him, Ponch stood looking. The driver started up the van, and slowly drove away.
    That was him, Ponch said.
    “That was him,” Kit said softly. But what’s the matter with him? Though he thought perhaps he had a clue. The manual would be able to confirm it … now that Kit knew what kinds of questions he needed to ask.
    “Did you get a scent on him?” Kit said.
    Yes. I can find him again, wherever he goes. Even when he’s not here, like a few moments ago, Ponch added.
    Kit gave his dog a look. “What? He was right in front of us.”
    Some of him. Not all.
    Ponch wasn’t given to making cryptic statements without reason: he was still developing the language skills to tell Kit what he was perceiving, and there were sometimes misunderstandings as a result. “Okay,” Kit said. “We’ll figure out what that means later. For the moment, at least we know what he looks like … and we can start making a plan to find a way to talk to him.”
    If he can talk at all …
    He glanced at the timekeeper inside the front cover of the manual. “Come on,” Kit said. “I have to get back to school.”
    And you have to feed me.
    Normally Kit would have laughed at this, yet another of Ponch’s stratagems to get an extra meal. But the laughter had been knocked out of him by the unexpectedness of what he’d just seen. Since when do the Powers That Be dump an autistic kid into an Ordeal?
    “Come on,” Kit said to Ponch. They went home.
    ***
    After school Kit went straight to Tom and Carl’s, the discreet way, to tell him what he’d found.
    “Physically, he’s present all right… mostly,” Kit said, sitting at the table with Tom again. “Or so Ponch says. I’m still working on what he meant by that conditional description he gave me. But why didn’t the manual say anything about what else is going on with him?”
    “Any number of reasons. Need-to-know restrictions, possibly,” Tom said. “Or it may not have been germane—wizardry’s hardly limited to the neurotypical. Or it may simply be the manual’s preference for letting you find some things out for yourself, rather than just telling you about it. That approach can keep you from prejudging a situation.” He paged through his own manual to Darryl’s entry. “Certainly it confirms that he definitely is an autistic: diagnosed after he was four, the manual says. But his ability to cope with his environment really seems to have gone downhill over the last six months or so, as if something in his life’s gotten a lot harder to deal with.”
    “And his Ordeal hasn’t had anything to do with that? It’s been going on for three months…”
    “I don’t think there’s any way for us to know for sure. For all I know, it could be the other way around.” Kit wasn’t sure what to make of that. “But because the manual doesn’t say anything further, it suggests that the Powers That Be don’t think we need any more detail on that particular facet of the situation. Or else They think that what you discover during investigation may be more valuable than what They already know.”
    “It doesn’t seem fair somehow,” Kit said after a moment, trying to find words for what was making him so uncomfortable. “Why’s he been stuck in the middle of an Ordeal, on top of everything else that’s going on with him?”
    Tom shook his