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

disturbing those, or adding to whatever trauma he may already be suffering secondary to the Ordeal.” Tom rubbed his eyes. “I really hate this kind of judgment call. It’s tough to know whether anything you do might be dangerous.”
    “If you don’t judge, though,” Kit said, “or at least decide to do something, nothing gets done!”
    Tom sat still and looked out the window, where a cold wind was rattling some brown, unfallen beech leaves in the hedge beside his house. “There you’re right,” he said. “Not that that makes me any happier. But judgment calls are one of the other things we’re here for: the One has better things to do than micromanage us.”
    He looked back at Kit. “So go do what you can,” Tom said. “Let me know how it comes out. But I want to really emphasize that you need to stay in the observer’s role. An Ordeal this prolonged is strange enough to get extremely dangerous, especially if you stray out of your appropriate role.”
    “I’ll be careful.”
    Tom’s expression got slightly less severe. “I’ve heard that one before,” he said. “From myself, among many others. But, particularly, I want you to watch yourself when you’re inside his head. Talking to Darryl is a good idea… but getting too synced to his worldview may make that more difficult, not less. Especially since when you’re inside someone else’s head and using wizardry, no matter how careful you are, there’s always the danger of rewriting his name in the Speech. Do that in such a way that Darryl buys into the rewrite, and you take the risk of excising something that makes the difference between him passing his Ordeal and him never coming out of it. Walk real softly, Kit.”
    “We will.”
    ***
    Kit left Tom’s by way of another transit spell, one that let him out in a sheltered spot by the town library. He located a few useful-looking books and checked them out, then went home and got on the computer in the living room and started websurfing, pulling up weblogs written by autistics and their families. His mother was up when he got home, showering; by the time she came out, wearing her bathrobe and drying her hair, Kit was hunched over the desk lying on the living room floor with papers and books all around him. His mama paused, looking over his shoulder at one of the printouts he was reading. “Autism?” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    She headed past him into the kitchen to find her big mug, filled it with the coffee that Kit’s pop had left in the pot for her, sugared it, and came back in to sit down on the sofa behind him. “Big subject, son,” she said.
    “You know much about it?”
    She shook her head. “It’s not a specialty,” she said, which he’d suspected: his mama worked mostly in med-surg. She drank some coffee and sighed. “There are a lot of categories strung all along a long spectrum of neural issues and deficits. There’s a lot of argument about the causes—differences in brain chemistry, rogue antibodies, God knows what all—but I really think we know more about what isn’t responsible than what is .” She raised one hand in a “who knows” gesture, then let it fall. “But it’s definitely nothing to do with vaccines, or raising your children wrong. …What’s this about? Is this something for school?”
    “No. It’s what Tom wanted to see me about.”
    His mama’s eyes went wide. “Your missing person? He’s autistic? Oh, my God. His parents must be out of their minds with worry. Do you think you’re going to be able to find him?”
    “I already have,” Kit said, sitting down at the table and tilting his chair back to rock on its rear legs. “He’s at school. Centennial, over in Baldwin.”
    “What? Well, that’s a relief! I thought you’d meant he’d vanished . So how is he missing?”
    “Just a figure of speech, Mama.” Kit had been wondering for a while how much detail he should give his parents about his wizardry. Now it occurred to him that he should have