A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition

A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online
Authors: Diane Duane
Tags: Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, YA), Young Adult, an fantasy
turned the faucet on to rinse the sink, and looked in that mirror again. Nothing but herself, and the memory, the shadow of a shape, fading already. Sapphire-blue hair, black eyes, profoundly deep. A fierce look: uncompromising, alien.
    And afraid...
    File it away,  Nita thought.  Stick it in Nita’s Big Book of Odd Oracular Imagery, and have a good long look at it later. Bobo?
    Got it,  said the voice she was only slowly getting used to hearing in the back of her head, and even then not every time she spoke to it. There were unnerving, ambivalent silences sometimes when Nita spoke to the peridexis, her own personal “online” version of the wizard’s manual. It didn’t always answer. Nita wondered if this was because it knew she wasn’t entirely happy with it being inside her... though she’d been happy enough a month or so ago, when for a little while it was all the evidence of wizardry she’d had left.  And if I don’t trust it completely... does it trust  me ? And if not,  why  not? This is all so bizarre.
    “You  did  fall in!” Carmela said from the bedroom.
    “No!”  Nita said, briefly annoyed, and put the cap back on the mouthwash. She smoothed her top down and went out of the bathroom, leaning against her bedroom’s doorsill again.
    “Come on,” Nita said. “I’ll show you. Anyway, Kit’s over there, and you know you want to go make him crazy.”
    “It’s what I live for!” Carmela said. “Let’s go.” She stood up and stretched. “What’s summer wear for Mars look like?”
    “A force field. But that’s my problem. Anyway, we have another stop first.” She eyed the sweater Carmela was still wearing, a leftover from an unusually cool morning. “Better dump the angora,” Nita said, pulling open one more drawer, rummaging again, and coming up with a T-shirt that was too big for her, but about the right size for Carmela. She grinned and waved it like a flag. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”
    Carmela gave her a look, got up off the bed, and grabbed the T-shirt out of her hand. She vanished into the bathroom: a few moments later she was back in Nita’s room again, though she was still fussing with the T-shirt in a dissatisfied way. “So now what?”
    “Just come stand over here by the window.” Nita snapped her fingers, and her otherspace pocket popped open in the air beside her. She reached into it and felt around.
    Oh, you don’t need that ... said the voice in her head.
    Let’s just say I like to check my figures,  Nita said silently to the peridexis, riffling through the manual.  Besides, I like to be extra certain, because it’s Carmela I’m transiting as well as me. Kit would be cranky if I got his sister stuck in the Earth’s core.  Then she snickered.  Then again, maybe he wouldn’t...
    “And what is so funny?” Carmela said. “Besides the way this tent fits?”
    “Everybody should have a few floppy shirts,” Nita said. “Don’t distract me.” She flipped through a few pages and found what she was looking for, the manual’s “persona” utility. “What’s your birthday again?”
    “November sixth,” Carmela said, knotting up the T-shirt into a more fashion-conscious configuration above the waist of her jeans. She peered over Nita’s shoulder, watching the way the Speech-characters on the manual page shifted and changed as she spoke. “Look at them jump around! Is that analyzing my voice?”
    “And your brainwaves, and a lot of other things,” Nita said. “It makes a shorthand version of your name in the Speech: that gets pasted into the spell. What was the last book you read?”
    “Gulliver’s Travels,”  Carmela said, watching a new layer of characters appear and nest themselves in among the first group, shoving them around in various directions and changing the colors in which they appeared on the page. “The uncensored one. Hey, what do you mean ‘shorthand’? Is it safe to put shorthand  anything  in a

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