Can You See That Young Star Overhead? That's the One That Designed My Undoing

Time Fix — December 2012

Nita’s whole day had been a mad scramble: cleaning out the minifridge she shared with her roommate, packing up all of her last-minute essentials, shouting goodbyes to all her friends and acquaintances as they headed out one by one down the echoey and stiflingly hot dorm hallway, and running through the slushy snow to catch the shuttle that would take her from her college to the train station to home. She had barely had time to think, and even the couple hours’ train ride hadn’t given her much space to do so. She was fighting off the tail-end of a cold, and it made her fatigued enough that the moment she sat down in the train and rested her head against the cool glass window, her breath fogging it up enough that she couldn’t even see the grey scenery outside, she passed out completely, only woken up when the conductor came around to make sure she got off.

It was pitch dark when she finally arrived at her home station, and gentle snowflakes were fluttering down through the hazy yellow light provided by the overhead lights in the parking lot. She shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around her, dragging her suitcase over patches of ice while she looked around for her father. She didn’t have to look far. Her father was a little way down the first row of cars, standing with the trunk open to receive her suitcase. He was waving at her, a broad smile on his face. Nita broke into a jog, avoiding ice with as nimble leaps as she could manage, and crashed into him with a hug that made him lose his breath in a great ‘oof.’

She had last seen him just a few weeks ago at Thanksgiving, but that didn’t make her want to hug him any less, or his returned hug feel any less comforting.

“Finals treat you that rough, hunh?” her father asked with a laugh as she released him.

“Just glad to be coming home,” Nita said. She hoisted her suitcase and dropped it with a thump in the trunk, and her father slammed it closed.

“Let’s get a move on, then. I left some lasagna in the oven so we can eat as soon as we walk in the door.”

“Oh, good,” Nita said, her stomach growling in sudden hunger. “I don’t think I can even explain how tired I am of Commons food.”

Her father just laughed, and they got in the car. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he asked, “So, how were finals?”

“They were fine,” Nita said. She was looking out the window at the snow falling and splatting against the glass. “About what I expected, but I’m glad they’re over.”

“You think you did well?”

“Oh, yes,” she said with a little laugh. “I think I’ve got Physics I down pat.”

“Good.” Her father glanced over at her. “You haven’t been too busy this semester, have you?”

“With wizardry?” she asked. “No. Nothing major.”

“You sound almost disappointed.”

“No, I’m not,” Nita said. “I love doing consulting work, and I’m glad that the Powers have decided I should get a chance to focus on school. It’s just different.” She leaned her head on the window.

“Consulting work… Like Tom and Carl?”

The back of Nita’s neck prickled with the implication. She was surprised her father had noticed and was pointing it out, her potential path towards becoming a Senior, or even a Planetary. “Yeah,” she said in a rather non-committal tone. “I guess.” She decided that he deserved a bit more of an explanation from her. “It’s partly my previous experience, and I think I proved myself as a mentor during the Invitational, and partly the visionary stuff…” She trailed off. “It’s good to feel like someone that other wizards can reach out to for advice.”

“But?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, do you have to pry it out of me?”

“My daughter misses the danger and the derring-do of active service, I see.”

“No,” Nita said hastily. “It’s not really that.” Not entirely, anyway.

“Really?”

She took a breath. “I don’t really know how Tom and Carl do it,” she said. “I hate the feeling after I’ve given someone the advice that I can— what if they follow it and I’ve led them down the wrong path?” The windshield wipers gave a particularly pronounced screech as they feebly swiped away the snow. “It’s one thing when it’s just me and Kit, relying on ourselves and dealing with the consequences. It’s another watching somebody else go out, and there’s nothing you can do…”

Her father made a little noise of acknowledgement, but nothing more.

“What?” Nita asked.

“I hate to think you’re getting a taste of your own medicine,” he said. It wasn’t intended to cut, and he looked at her with a wry smile, glancing away from the highway for a second. “Your mother and I had to learn very quickly that we couldn’t protect you from what you chose to do. I know it’s not really the same thing, but—”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “I know.”

He reached over and rubbed her shoulder. “Do you think I stepped on you too much, when I tried to keep you safe?”

“Hmm? Oh, no, not really.” She was looking out the window again. “I mean, there wouldn’t have been much you could have done, even if you had tried.”

“I couldn’t have extracted promises from you?”

Nita frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe.” Her breath steamed up the window. “Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For not stepping harder,” Nita said.

Her father chuckled. “It was an exercise in restraint, I suppose. You’re not still mad about getting sent to Ireland that summer, are you?”

“No,” Nita said. She wasn’t entirely sure that was true. In hindsight, she would have wanted that summer with her mother, but that was hindsight, and nobody could have known at the time. And she had been useful in Ireland. 

“Every time, it’s more difficult than I expected to watch my baby grow up and become a different person where I can’t keep watch. That’s where the temptation to step comes from. It’s out of love, anyway.”

She was silent for a second. “Am I really that different?”

“Since when?” he asked, voice wry. “Since six years ago? Since you went to college?” He chuckled. “You’re who you are,” her father said. “And if every time I let you out of my sight, you become a little bit more of yourself, even if I know you less… That can’t be anything other than a good thing.”

She wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. “Thanks.” He glanced over at her and smiled, though he had to return his eyes to the road pretty quickly.

They rode in silence for a little while.

“You seem down,” he said. “Everything alright with Kit?”

“Oh, no, Kit’s great,” Nita said. “I think I’m just tired.”

“You see him a lot?”

“We talk basically every night,” she said. “And when we’ve got the time, we do see each other. Kit and Ronan are still running their games, and I stop in when I can…”

“You’ll Beam-Me-Up-Scotty over to California, but you made me pick you up at the train station?” her father asked, voice wry.

“Usually it’s the moon, actually,” Nita said.

“Oh, right, that one’s much closer.”

“If there was a train to get there, I’d take it.” She slid down further in the car seat, pulling her jacket around herself. “Half my energy budget is going to transportation these days, since I’m not on active assignment. Better to take public transit, when I can.”

He laughed. “I’m just teasing you.”

“I know.”

They were pulling up to the house now, the lights in the kitchen windows a beacon through the snow. Dairine’s shadow passed across the curtains; she must have heard the car pulling into the driveway, because she flung the door open to greet them as Nita and her dad climbed out of the car.

“You’re letting all the heat out,” her dad said. “Did you set the table?”

“Of course,” Dairine said, holding the door open so that he and Nita could come inside. Nita nearly knocked Spot with her suitcase, since he was crouched behind Dairine in the doorway, looking up at her with his stalked eyes, but he ducked and scurried just out of the way.

“Smells delicious,” Nita said. The house was warm and smelled like home underneath the lasagna baking.

“Right,” her dad said. “Go put your things upstairs, while I get that out of the oven.”

Nita headed to her bedroom, suitcase knocking on her legs behind her. She was tailed by Dairine, who leaned in her doorway, not giving Nita a chance to settle back into her room.

“How’s Albany been treating you?” Dairine asked as Nita tossed her backpack on the bed. There was the potent whine of jealousy in her voice, though she was doing her best to cover it up.

“Fine,” Nita said, pulling her coat off and hanging it up on the back of her desk chair. “And it’s Troy, not Albany.”

“Close enough.”

“How’s high school?”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “Same as it ever was,” she said, sounding nothing like David Byrne.

“You’ll be free soon enough,” Nita said. “Besides, the manual tells me you’ve been busy.”

“Eh,” Dairine said. “Nothing that exciting.” She fingered the sunstone at her neck.

“Probably for the best,” Nita said, meaningfully nodding at the motion. “How’s Roshaun?”

“Don’t tell me you want to give me a talk about him, too.”

Nita raised an eyebrow.

“You’d think everyone would have gotten it all out of their systems with you and Kit,” Dairine grumbled. “I wish everyone would stop— augh.” Dairine had worked herself up over the course of the few sentences. “I cannot wait until I do not have everyone breathing down my neck about it. I’m an adult .”

“Yeah,” Nita said, though looking at Dairine’s small but tense sixteen year-old frame, she wasn’t entirely sure she agreed, though she might have said the same thing herself just two years ago. She didn’t have anything to say to Dairine that would help her feel less stifled, not when she had just had her first semester away from home. Maybe she would have to mention to her father to lay off Dairine a little bit, but as much as they had a good conversation in the car, she doubted that he would want her advice on how to parent her younger sister.

Her stomach growled again, and she abandoned the task of pulling her chunky laptop out of her backpack, especially as Dairine silently laughed at how black and bulky it was in comparison to Spot. “Let’s go eat,” Nita said. “I’m starving.”

---

Later that night, Nita sat in her room in her pyjamas with the door shut, listening to the sounds of the house that had somehow become unfamiliar in her few months away. The wind creaked past the windows, and the bare branches of the rowan rattled. The world outside glowed eerily with the snow albedo, somehow looking just as well lit as her bedroom with its light on. The room itself, though it was unchanged since she had left, also felt odd. Whittling down her possessions to what she needed to bring to school made everything left behind feel distant and childish, even much-loved books crammed onto her bookshelf, and familiar posters and pictures left on her walls.

It was as though the whole room had abruptly grown too small for her, even though she couldn’t have said specifically what had changed. She didn’t feel different.

What she wanted was to talk to Kit, but when she pulled out her manual to message him, Bobo conveniently said, “He’s asleep right now.”

“Augh,” Nita said, and flopped backwards on her bed. “Kit…” She knew his flight home was at seven the next morning, and he would need to be out of his own dorm room at a disgustingly early hour, so it wasn’t surprising that he was turning in early tonight, even with the three-hour lag between them, but it still frustrated her.

With nothing else to do, she settled down in bed and began answering various messages— some email, some manual— from people she had been helping as a consult with various problems, as well as liking and responding to a few of her friends’ posts on the wizardly social media site, wizblr. Ronan was asking about her and Kit’s schedules over their winter break, and Nita supplied hers. She would have ample free time, and was beginning to suspect that she would like any excuse to get out of the house. There was an odd feeling of it being too tight on her skin, though perhaps that would be alleviated as soon as Kit was back, and they could fall into their usual patterns.

Eventually, she ran out of things to respond to, and trying to do research for the most thorny problems she had been asked for help with only ended with the graceful characters of the Speech in her manual blurring in front of her eyes with tiredness that she hadn’t been acknowledging. She sighed and turned off the light, settling down under her sheets and quilt. The wind creaked the house. Shadows from the tree branches danced across her ceiling. Without the sound of her roommate snoring, Nita felt strangely alone.

She rolled onto her side and hugged her pillow to her chest. Before she left school that morning, she hadn’t felt any different than she had in August when she moved into her dorm room. But now, trying to be at home, she felt she must have changed, invisibly. 

Her dad was right, of course. She thought back to the previous spring, when she and Kit had had their— had it been an argument? — disagreement over going to different schools. There had been the fear that when she closed her eyes and looked away from Kit, he would turn into a different person while she wasn’t watching. He had felt the same way about her. It was a very human fear to have, and she had to forgive herself for it, and her dad, and Kit. 

It didn’t trouble her, exactly, but she couldn’t help but roll the thoughts over and over in her mind. Change was just an inevitable part of being alive. 

She knew it was dangerous to think so loudly right before she went to sleep, as it was the kind of thing that attracted the attention of her visionary talent. It was almost annoying: rather than sleep letting her thoughts settle down into new configurations with mundane dreams and restfulness, feeling clearer in the morning, she would get new information dumped on her lap that she then had to process. 

But if that was the cost of training her visionary power to be useful, she would have to take it. So she let herself think, and then she closed her eyes.

It wasn’t difficult to fall asleep.

She knew she was in a dream right away. For one thing, it was a late spring day, bright and green, and she was standing on the street outside her house. There was none of the fearsome potentiality that Nita associated with her visionary dreams; this scene simply was . It was solid and beautiful and realer than it had any right to be.

There was someone sitting on her front step. He stood up when he saw her arrive, smiling at her beatifically. She didn’t recognize him: redheaded, tall, her age or close to it, with sharp blue eyes and a knowing tilt of his head. He was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt emblazoned with a graphic image of a rising sun (or a setting one?) silhouetting a farmer standing in a field of grain. Despite not recognizing his face, Nita knew him.

“Fairest and fallen, greetings and defiance,” she said.

Although Nita had addressed him in English, the Lone Power responded in the Speech. “Only that first one,” he said. “Unless it’s too vain of me to admit to it.”

He couldn’t have been lying, not in the Speech, and when Nita prodded at the words in her heart, she knew that they were true. Even without the Speech, something whispered to her that he couldn’t have lied, not here. She took another look around, and the too real feeling of Timeheart came over her more thoroughly, pusing all feelings of being asleep and dreaming out of her brain.

“Oh,” Nita said. “I see.” She studied him more closely, and he watched her watching him, the smile not leaving his face. “I didn’t think I’d see you here.”

“Why not?” He held out his hand. “Walk with me?”

She threw a glance at her house. “Where do you want to walk to?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.” 

They started off down the street together. There were no cars anywhere. He and Nita might as well have been the only people in the universe, and they walked right down the center of the asphalt. The Lone Power seemed to have no desire to say anything, and Nita was struggling to put her own thoughts together. This was nothing like the last time she had spoken to the Lone Power face to face, or as close to it as these things usually got.

“The last time?” he asked. “This is the first time I think we’ve met properly. At least for you.”

“I’m thinking too loudly, aren’t I?”

“Deafeningly.” His smile was so funny that Nita couldn’t find herself angry with him for listening to her thoughts. That was just the kind of thing that happened in Timeheart.

“Why am I here?” Nita asked. “The Powers don’t usually let people take jaunts through Timeheart for fun.”

“Not while they’re alive, anyway.”

“I don’t feel like I’ve died in my sleep,” she said, suspicious. “That would be a little anticlimactic, after everything we’ve been through.”

The Lone Power laughed. “No,” he said. “You can wake up any time you like.” He hadn’t stopped talking in the Speech, and when Nita tugged on the thought, she could feel her own body somewhere else, sluggish and unresponsive— and dull, too dull to want to go back into right now. She didn’t want to leave the blazing overhead illumination of Timeheart. It glinted off something inside her, made her reflect the light in her own way.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Nita said.

“ I didn’t bring you here. You came here yourself. Only you can know why.”

“This has to be some sort of prophecy thing ,” Nita said, only half annoyed. “I wish things could be a little less cryptic sometimes.”

“I’m never cryptic,” the Lone Power said. He said that in English, though, and it made him laugh.

She looked at him, then. Really looked, though he was suddenly radiant in her sight, so much that it almost (almost) hurt to look directly at him. In him, she could see the fierceness of a young star, tightly burning. “Fairest but not fallen,” she said, in the Speech, this time, and her words rang true.

“That’s right.”

“Not fallen and then risen again.”

He cocked his head at her. “Somewhere else, maybe,” he said. “But not here.”

“Why?” she asked. “How?”

He spread his arms. “Isn’t this Timeheart? What’s loved is preserved as it was loved.”

“And you were the most beloved…”

“I am ,” he said. “But the One doesn’t play favorites.” English again, with a cocksure smile. There was something relentlessly charming about him, beautiful in a way that his physical form couldn’t capture. That obscuring of his true nature only made it more captivating, like the blazing rim of the sun peeking out from behind the moon during a total eclipse, the only time it could be looked at directly.

“So this is what you were at the beginning of time,” Nita said, tentative.

“No,” he said. “No, there’s no time with me. Not here.”

“Where all our sundered times are one,” Nita muttered.

“Yes.” He looked around. “Preserved as I was, as I am.”

Somehow, without Nita noticing, they had left the town streets and walked all the way to the park, where a walking trail of a few miles length circled the reservoir. She could see clear across the bright water. The Lone Power pointed to the other side of the reservoir, and Nita looked. There she was, walking with him still. She could see herself as she was, or is, or will be— time and causality felt slippery right at that moment, in a way that made her itch.

He saw her discomfort. “It only feels strange because you’re used to time.” He offered a rueful little smile that did nothing to stop her from feeling like she was somehow the butt of a cosmic joke. “What is it that they say? The inventor of the clock poisoned the human heart.”

“Mirror,” Nita said. “Not clock.”

“Right, that too. Perhaps I should apologize for either. Or both.”

“No,” Nita said. “If you aren’t the one who made them…”

Like a mirror, she watched herself and the Lone Power on the other side of the reservoir make the same motions that she was, walking placidly side by side. She wondered, if she turned around, would she see a ghost-trail of herself that she was leaving behind? She didn’t look back, and kept her eyes forward, stepping one foot at a time along the dirt trail, never tripping over roots in the path despite the joyous twining of tree roots that crossed and wiggled towards the water.

“Not exactly me,” he said. “Someone I have the potential to be.”

“Is it really potential if you are always going to be here, like this?” Nita asked.

“That’s the beauty of potential, isn’t it? You never have to live up to it.” He looked distant. “You can see what it is, but you never have to reach out your hand and take it.” He illustrated with a gesture, his hand curling around nothing in the air in front of himself. She admired his fingers, how graceful the movement was.

“Do you want to?”

“Want?” he asked. “Now, that’s something that there isn’t much of in Timeheart.”

For some reason that she couldn’t have possibly explained, this made Nita unbearably sad. He stopped in his tracks and turned towards her. 

“Don’t feel that way,” he said. “Not for my sake.” He offered her a radiant smile, which only made the odd twisting of her heart stronger, and he reached out towards her. She stood still, and his fingers stroked her cheek. “Not ever for my sake.”

She wanted to weep, a strange and inexplicable sense of injustice rising up within her, the kind of feeling that burned her from the inside, an impotent anger that could only be expressed through tears. She couldn’t have explained at all why she felt so strongly, it was something that she lacked words for, even in the Speech. Especially in the Speech. 

But his hand was gentle, and his smile was genuine. “Please,” he said. “How could I be anything other than happy? This is what I was made to be. The way I am loved.”

She looked at him. She was looking at him across the table. She was looking at him across the chessboard. And she wasn’t seeing her opponent, not the one she had grown to know.

Nita steadied herself. He smiled at her, still holding her cheek. She would miss the touch when he withdrew his hand, but wouldn’t there always be the two of them, standing here? She looked across the water, saw them both still standing there, forever.

She nodded at him, and his hand fell back down to his side.

“Are you going to wake up?” he asked. “Have you had enough of me yet?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

He started walking, and she walked by his side. They eventually left the park and headed back towards town. They turned back towards her house, and Nita looked at him curiously. “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“It’s Timeheart. Don’t you want to do some sightseeing?”

Her breath caught in her throat. “Yes.”

They turned the corner towards her house. There, on the lawn, she could see her mother, young and radiant. She was humming some pop song that Nita distantly remembered from her childhood, and she was watching as two young children played with toy trucks there on the lawn. Nita saw herself at age six or so, and Dairine at four, laughing with childish glee as she managed to use the excavator to dig up some blades of grass and deposit them on Nita’s lap. The young Nita was leaning sideways and picking at a patch of clover, patiently looking through the plants one by one to find the perfect one: four-leaved.

“Why am I here?” she asked the Lone Power. “And Dairine?”

“Because she loved you. And you loved her.”

The young Nita smiled in triumph and pulled one clover out of the ground, standing up and shaking dirt off her chubby little legs. She walked over to her mother and proudly presented her find.

Her mother scooped her up in her arms and planted a kiss on her nose.

Nita stood down the road and just watched. “She never got to love me as I am now,” she said.

“She would have.” He looked at her. “You can go talk to her. She would understand. And she would love you.”

Nita shook her head and turned down the street, walking away. “Not today,” she said.

“She’ll always be here.”

“I know,” she said.

They kept walking. The sun was beginning to go down, or perhaps it had always been this low in the sky.

Outside of Kit’s house, the racket of Kit’s family life sounded so normal. Carmella was playing something on TV far too loud, and her mother was shouting to turn it down. Nita just stood outside and listened for a minute.

And then she was nearly knocked sideways by a heavy, furry, slobbery, enthusiastic dog, who jumped up and put his front paws as high on her as he could reach.

“Ponch!” she yelped.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Ponch said in wild, exuberant barking. He dropped back down to all fours and spun around her in a circle, so quickly that she could barely even manage to get her hand on his head to scratch behind his ears.

“Did you miss me, big guy?” she asked as soon as he had calmed down enough to let her get a word in edgewise.

How could I miss you? You’re right here.

She knelt to look at him and pet him, her hands buried in his fur, scratching him and making his tail wag like his whole backside was going to fall right off with the enthusiasm of it. There was something different about him, but at the same time, he was exactly like she remembered. When she figured out what it was, the melancholy threatened to overwhelm her again. 

“You’re not all you could be, are you?” she asked, half to Ponch, and half to the Lone Power. But when she didn’t receive an answer, she looked behind herself and saw that the Lone Power had vanished. Nita sat heavily on the ground and hugged the bouncing Ponch to her. He licked her face, and she didn’t even mind.

She realized why the Lone Power was giving her space when the door of Kit’s house banged open and a familiar voice called, “Poncho! Where are you, big guy?”

Ponch squirmed out of Nita’s arms and barked deafeningly. Kit came around the side of the house, following the sound, and he broke into a grin when he saw Nita sitting there on the ground.

“Hey, Neets! Want to come in? My mama just made dinner.”

Nita struggled up from the ground. She looked at him. He was just as she remembered from the last time she had seen him. And that was where the horror lived. He couldn’t be anything other than what Nita remembered , what she loved. This was Kit, frozen. Not Kit who she had argued with about splitting up to go to school, not Kit who was so stupid and frustrating at times, but Kit, perfect, impossible.

“You okay, Neets?” he asked, concerned.

She looked into his eyes for as long as she could bear, and then she woke up, gasping and shaking in her narrow bed in her childhood home, with the cold winter wind rattling the glass. It was three in the morning.

Nita closed her eyes, rubbing the back of her hand across her face to wipe away or forestall tears. She had wept upon leaving Timeheart before, of course, but this was different. She did her best to steady her breathing.

“Bobo— did you get all that?”

“Yes,” the voice of wizardry said in her head, sounding unusually shaken. “I did. You should give me the writeup.”

Nita draped her hand over her eyes. “I don’t—” She didn’t want to write this down. In the dim light of her bedroom, she glanced over at her manual on the nightstand. “No,” she said. “Don’t log this.”

“Are you sure?” Bobo asked.

“Yes.” Nita stared up at the darkness of her ceiling. It was you who sent me there, wasn’t it? she thought, as loudly as she could. Unsurprisingly, she received no answer, not even the feeling that the universe was laughing at her. The house remained totally dark and quiet, and the creaking wind outside held nothing in it other than the mundane comfort of being warm in bed on a winter’s night. But despite the ordinary comfort of home, Nita was disturbed.

“I need to talk to Kit,” she said. 

“It’s midnight there. He’s asleep.”

“Wake him up. Tell him to meet me at our usual spot on the beach. It’s— urgent,” she finally said. Not an emergency, but she needed to see him. Needed him to talk her out of the strangeness that had gripped her. 

She was already up and out of bed, pulling on a sweatshirt over her nightshirt, yesterday’s jeans over her bare legs. She stuffed her sneakers on her feet without bothering with socks. “Transit. California,” she muttered to herself, fingering her charm bracelet for the well used spell. It needed new coordinates, now that she was at home, and she plugged them in with a haste that made her feel jittery and terrible. She could barely calm down enough to check over her name.

God, the last thing she wanted right now was to accidentally say her name wrong.

She shivered in the chill of her bedroom, then started speaking. She could feel the universe lean in to listen, the same way it always did. She closed her eyes.

  Oh, yes, you’re listening too , she thought. You’d better be.

The transit spell slammed into place, and then Nita was toppling over onto the gritty sand in between two sheds used to store lifeguard equipment on a chilly, dark, southern California beach. She breathed heavily for a minute, wheezing with the energy expenditure that seemed to hit her harder every day. Eventually, she managed to get to her feet.

The wind was blowing hard here, too, and the incoming tide was roaring, the cold waves whipping up onto the sand, all froth and bubbles and a drowning anger. The moon was shimmying behind a cloud, eager to get away from Nita’s stare, and only Mars was bright in the sky, the stars drowned out by Los Angeles’s light pollution behind her.

Nita scrambled out from between the shacks and made her way on shaking legs over sand that crumbled beneath her feet, until she was standing at the top of one little dune, scrubby grass sticking forlornly out of its side, watching the empty beach for signs of Kit.

There he was, appearing in his own muted thunderclap and looking around for her in confusion.

“Kit!” Nita yelled, and he turned towards her. She slid down the dune on her heels towards him.

“Neets,” he said, still catching his own breath from his much shorter transit. He wasn’t dressed much better than she was: he had only thrown a light jacket on over top his pyjama pants, though he had his antenna wand sticking out of his pocket, just in case. “Are you alright?”

She just grabbed him in a hug, leaning on his solid chest and listening to his heartbeat and breathing as it steadied.

“Jesus, Neets, this couldn’t have waited until I got home tomorrow?” he asked. “Not that I don’t appreciate the sentiment, but I’ve gotta be at the airport in four hours.”

“I love you,” Nita said. “And I needed to tell you that in person.”

“I know,” he said, very concerned again. “I love you, Neets.” It certainly wasn’t the first time they had said that to each other. “What’s the matter?”

“I need to ask you something.”

“What?” he asked, and then gestured for them to sit down on the sand, out of the reach of the encroaching high-water mark on the sand. Nita pulled her knees up to her chest and stared out over the waves. Kit sat next to her, nudging her with his shoulder. 

She struggled to put together the question that he needed advice on. “Do you think you’ve changed?” she asked finally.

“Since when?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Stupid question.” She poked her fingers into the cold sand at her side.

“Since coming here?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably. Do you think I’ve changed?” He yawned, covered his mouth with his hand, and gave her a rueful smile. “Sorry.”

“You must have,” Nita said. “I had this— dream.”

“One of your visions?” His voice was full of concern.

“Not exactly.” She looked out over the ocean. “It was more like the past, if that makes any sense. I saw you in it, and you were just how I remembered you, except that if I closed my eyes or looked away, you would stay exactly the same. You couldn’t change, because I was making you stay how I remembered you, because I loved you like that.” She shivered, and Kit rubbed her back. “I just had to see you.”

“I’m here.”

“Thanks.” She was silent for a minute. “If there was someone…” she finally said. “Someone who was trapped somewhere, somewhere where they couldn’t change, what would you do about it?”

“Guard growth and ease pain,” Kit said, quoting the Oath. “You’re the one who knows about living things,” he said, bumping her with his side.

“What if they were happy to be trapped?”

“Are they really happy?”

She leaned on Kit’s shoulder. “They don’t have a choice but to be.”

“Can you give me any more details?” he asked.

She shook her head. His hand, which had been moving on her back, went to her hair, his fingers running through it and catching on the knots that sleeping had made.

“I think—”

“What?”

“I could let them out,” Nita said. “Or give them the choice to let themself out.” She closed her eyes. “But…”

“But what?”

She shook her head. “I think I’m about to do something extremely stupid,” she said. “Something that you’d yell at me for. Something that you’d want to kill me for. And I love you for wanting to do that.”

“Nita, you’re scaring me.”

She looked up at him. “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry about that.” She laughed, a strange sound even in her own ears.

“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Tell me.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it would make sense to you. I don’t think it makes sense to me. I just— it’s something I have to do. And I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it without really thinking through the consequences, without reading the fine print, just like I always do. And you should try to stop me.” She laughed again. “It’s really bad, Kit.”

He reached for her and touched her face, just like the Lone Power had, some unknowable time ago. She made a soft sound.

“It can’t be that bad, if you’re doing it. Let me do it with you,” he said. “Tell me what it is.”

That was the Kit she knew and loved, and she loved him for the fact that this moment on the beach would be over, for the fact that she was going to say no to him, and that he would be so angry with her. But not angry enough to actually stop her.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry Kit.”

“This is all because of your vision? The one of me?” he asked. “Is that what this is about?”

“Does it matter if it is?”

“Yeah,” he said, suddenly angry. “You don’t have to make the visions come true, Neets. You don’t have to make things happen like they say.”

She looked into his eyes. “Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. Things don’t have to be the way they’re supposed to be, forever.” 

The seriousness in her voice suddenly seemed to click with him. “Nita—”

“Hey, Kit,” she said, a wry, miserable ring of truth in her voice, falling into the Speech, “if this doesn’t work, I’ll see you in Timeheart.”

“Tell me what it is,” he begged. “Let me help—”

Bobo, Nita thought, I need transit to Timeheart. Help me out here.

That’s… difficult. Bobo said.

But possible.

Yes.

Nita smiled grimly, then leaned forward and kissed Kit, pressing her lips to his for a moment. He tried to hold her, but she pulled away from him and stood, gave him one final look, and turned to walk down the beach. The water roared at her feet. Bobo, with some hesitation, fed her what she needed.

As Nita walked, she began speaking in the Speech, calling upon the universe to listen, just listen, one last time. Or maybe an infinite number of times. Or no time at all. She needed to go to that place where Time simply wasn’t anymore.

Kit’s voice calling after her, his footsteps tagging behind her, faded into nothing, but the sound of the water did not stop rushing. As she walked, the sky filled with stars, an impossible, crazy number of them, studding the sky in layers upon layers, all of them watching her.

She kept walking.

The beach stretched on forever. Nita could have walked it for a thousand years, ten-thousand, ten million. It wouldn’t have made a difference.

Standing off in the distance, there was the Lone Power. He was watching her come towards him. She was always coming towards him. She was always arriving.

“Fairest and fallen,” the Lone Power said, his voice amused. “Greetings and defiance.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “I guess so.”

He was a darkness, rich and vast, against the backdrop of stars. They sparkled around his head, a halo that served to make the blackness visible.

“What did you come back for?” he asked.

“Did I ever leave?”

“No.” She could hear the smile in his voice, though she couldn’t see it. “But you should answer my question.”

“Everyone deserves a Choice,” Nita said.

“Even though mine’s already made?”

“Has it been? Or has it not happened yet?”

“That’s the funny thing about Timeheart…”

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Nita said. She closed her eyes. “ Guard growth ,” she quoted.

“Even when that would threaten the system of which I am part?” the Lone Power asked, a wry twist in his voice. He spread out his hands, the darkness enfolding the stars. Starsnuffer . “Bring time to Timeheart?”

“You could do it,” Nita said.

“I could,” he said. “Shall I accept that barren Gift?”

She wanted to weep, but she didn’t. “You have to be able to Choose,” she said. “You have to be able to be able to Choose to be more than what you are.”

“And if I refuse?” he asked.

I wish you would , she almost said, and though the thought might have been loud enough to hear, she rejected the idea. “It would be a Choice. You could keep making it here forever.”

“And you would be here with me, to offer the Choice, forever?”

“Yes,” Nita said.

He looked at her, and she stood straight under his gaze. “How is it that you always manage to love me for what I could be?”

“Somebody’s got to,” Nita said. With her foot, in the sand of the beach, she traced one symbol in the Speech. Up and out.

She held out her hand.