Work Text:
Summer vacation, as far as Joanne Virella was concerned, couldn’t arrive fast enough.
She glanced dully around the stifling confines of the Astronomy classroom as though looking for a way to escape, but she was all too aware that she wouldn’t find one. Beneath its thick coating of dust, the clock ticked blearily away, the hands stubbornly showing that a full half-hour remained in the class period.
And the worst of it was, Joanne knew that she needed to do well on this group project. Without it, she didn’t have a prayer of passing this class and fulfilling her sciences requirement. There was no way around it—she was stuck.
She just wished the teacher had stuck her with anyone other than Callahan and Rodriguez.
All of her friends were either all the way across the room, part of other groups that looked like they were having a lot more fun than she was--or else they’d taken Biology instead like sensible people. Meanwhile, she’d drawn the short straw, and now she was going to have to spend weeks hanging out with the sophomore class’ resident losers.
She glanced back over at the two of them. They were poring over the assignment sheet Mrs. Harrington had given their group, pointing at all the charts and numbers, laughing and talking a million miles an hour. Typical. Word on the grapevine had it that they were finally actually dating now—Joanne was just amazed that it had taken them this long to make it official. It had been obvious to her for months now that the two of them had huge crushes on each other. Nerds of a feather flock together, after all.
And for the next few weeks, she was part of that flock, whether she liked it or not.
Time to interrupt their giggling fest. “Okay, tell me again,” she cut in. “What are we supposed to do for this thing?”
Callahan turned around and sighed dramatically, rolling her eyes. Joanne hadn’t expected anything else—she was sure Callahan had never stopped hating her ever since sixth grade, when they used to fight almost every day. She narrowed her eyes right back, and the two of them just stared each other down in silence for a moment.
Rodriguez awkwardly broke the silence. “Um, so, they gave us a couple of different star-forming nebulae to choose from, and a lot of different data for all of them. We’re supposed to pick one and calculate average rates of star formation using that stuff from chapter fifteen last week. Magnitude converts to flux, flux converts to luminosity…”
“I wish they would let us just gather our own data, but the school telescopes are total crap,” Callahan put in. “We’ve had the same ones for years. It looks like they just gave up and pulled these numbers off of online space-agency databases. Look at those numbers they’ve got on the Orion Nebula, that can’t be right…seriously, can we just go get our own numbers on this stuff instead? I’ll explain to Mrs. Harrington, and she can double-check everything we come up with. She knows how interested in astronomy we are…well, me and Kit, I mean. I bet she’d go for it.”
And with that, she got up and flounced off across the room to talk to the teacher.
Joanne gave Rodriguez a Look. “Listen, if your girlfriend wants us to do more work so this is scientifically accurate or whatever, I swear, I’m gonna…”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about it; I’m sure we’re going to end up doing most of the heavy lifting no matter what happens. We’ll just show you what numbers to crunch.” She hadn’t been expecting him to be nearly so assertive about it, but he waved her comment away without so much as blinking. He looked almost…bored. What the hell had happened to scrawny, quiet little Rodriguez lately?
She had to laugh. “Damn. Okay, that’s fair.”
“Good news!” Callahan was back, a huge grin stretching across her face—it was the first time she’d actually smiled in proximity to Joanne, so this had to be something good.
“I asked Mrs. Harrington if I could gather my own data for the project, and she said she’d want to double-check the numbers, but that we could maybe even get extra credit for it,” Callahan told them breathlessly, still grinning ear to ear. “I say we go ahead and do it!”
Joanne just barely stifled a groan. Something good in her opinion, anyway, she corrected herself. Mine…not so much.
Joanne stopped Callahan as they left the classroom a few minutes later. There was something else that had been bothering her ever since the groups had been assigned, something besides the obvious annoyances of the project itself. She figured it would be for the best to get it all out in the open and dealt with sooner rather than later.
“Look, Callahan…” she started, then took a deep breath: there was no way to do this that wasn’t going to be painfully awkward.
Callahan stared back at her coolly and Joanne found herself needing another deep breath. She could barely find a trace in Callahan’s expression of that nerdy little girl who always used to cry so easily. That was the Nita Callahan Joanne was used to dealing with, and she had no idea what to do with the person who stood in front of her now. I guess we all have to grow up sooner or later, she mused.
And speaking of which…
“I know we haven’t always really…gotten along in the past,” Joanne continued after a moment. “But we can’t screw up on this project; it’s worth too much of our final grade. So we’re going to need to look past all of that for a few weeks, and I can do that if you can. Okay?”
“Okay,” Callahan shot back immediately, her tone downright frosty, and she turned and disappeared into the crowd without waiting for a response. Joanne watched her go and bit her lip nervously. She’d expected that conversation to clear the air and make everything easier, but instead, it seemed to have made things even more complicated than they already were.
“This is just going to be so much fun,” she muttered, and stalked off to her next class.
“Okay, so this is the site I thought we should use,” Rodriguez announced, bringing up a picture on his computer that vaguely reminded Joanne of a coral reef. “The Pillars of Creation.”
Callahan immediately chimed in and started rattling off statistics about what the Pillars were made of and how many light-years tall they were—she and Rodriguez were such a double act that Joanne had started just thinking of them as Geek One and Geek Two.
“Yeah, yeah.” Joanne waved away the explanations. “There were like five different places to choose from on that assignment sheet. How come you two get to tell me which one we’re using?”
In truth, she didn’t care in the slightest, but she was in an argumentative mood. Here it was, a gorgeously sunny late-spring day, and she was stuck inside the Rodriguez house, all set to spend hours wrestling with pages of incomprehensible numbers that described dust clouds billions of miles away that she’d certainly never see in real life. If there was any more pointless way to spend an afternoon, Joanne hadn’t found it yet.
She pulled out her phone and idly checked it for messages. She was still waiting to hear back from Jacquelyn Turner about whether she was invited to that end-of-year party or not. I hope she doesn’t think she’s too cool for me now that I’m hanging out with the nerd herd…I mean, come on, I’m not even doing this by choice.
Rodriguez was infuriatingly patient. “Oh, sure, sorry. Would you rather we work with one of the other choices?”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Joanne muttered. “Let’s just get to work, okay?”
“Right.” Callahan passed her a battered notebook; it was open to a page filled with hastily scribbled numbers. “So I did some data-gathering on the Pillars of Creation, and I’m pretty sure these are the magnitude figures we’ll need to be using. Way more accurate than that stuff the school gave us.”
Joanne took a quick look at the data—she’d been paying enough attention in class for at least some of it to make sense, but just the thought of doing the math was already giving her a headache.
“Okay, so now that we have the raw data, let’s get started doing some of those conversions,” Rodriguez told her.
Joanne stole another look at her phone (still devoid of messages) and the window (a beautiful summer’s day still just a little bit too far away), and heaved a heavy sigh. “Okay, let’s do this.”
“This is ridiculous!” Joanne shouted aloud. A number of curious heads turned in her direction—it was a beautiful day and there were a lot of people out and about—but she was long past caring at this point.
She glared at her phone again, as though trying to will a message into existence, but her inbox remained as resolutely empty as it had been when she first checked it.
“I just don’t get it,” she muttered as she started walking again, hands shoved in her pockets, heels stabbing into the sidewalk with every step. In the hallways after school, she’d overheard several of her “friends” laughing and chattering about that end-of-year party, but in defiance of all her expectations, she still hadn’t received an invitation.
It’s just a stupid party, she berated herself, taking faster and faster strides. It doesn’t even matter--it probably won’t be all that great anyway--why are you letting yourself get all bent out of shape about it?
She didn’t convince herself for a second. Joanne knew perfectly well why this was bothering her so much. Over the course of the past year, she’d watched her old gang slowly drifting apart—Kayla had moved, Brittany had a new boyfriend and spent all of her time with him now, and Beth just didn’t really seem to have time for the rest of them anymore. If there was one thing Joanne had always relied on, it was her ability to make friends, to understand people and figure out social situations to her best advantage, but everything felt so much more complicated and confusing lately.
I might as well just go over and meet up with freaking Callahan and Rodriguez half an hour early, she concluded bitterly. They’re the only people who are actually going to be happy to see me, even if it’s just because I’m doing half of their math for them.
But, as it turned out, Joanne was wrong about even that. When she got to Rodriguez’s house, his parents welcomed her and waved her upstairs (they were just too nice for their own good), saying Kit and Nita were waiting for her. When she actually got there, however, it was to find a closed door with the sound of raised voices behind it.
Nita’s cool-calm-and-collected act was completely gone—she sounded close to angry tears, if anything. “A nightmare, a complete and total nightmare, and Powers only know how we’re going to fix it…”
Then Rodriguez’s voice, lower, placating—Joanne had to make an effort to catch all of the words. “Neets, seriously, calm down, we can work it out…”
“Enough with the soothing-boyfriend tone! Wizards aren’t supposed to lie, so can you please just level with me?”
Ouch. Joanne took a step back from the door. The last thing she wanted was to wade right into the middle of a messy boyfriend/girlfriend argument. She was getting the feeling she’d better go away and come back later.
Great. Even the King and Queen of the Nerds are too busy for me right now.
Except…
She paused with one foot on the stairs, suddenly uncertain. What had that been about…wizards?
Before she knew what she was doing, she found herself back at the door.
“Look, okay, it’s not as bad as…”
Nita’s response was delivered all in a shout, rising in volume with every word. “Not as bad? Listen. I have to work with the girl who made my life a living hell for years, and I have no idea how long I can manage that before I explode, or just stick her on a moon of Saturn until this is all over with. And not only that, and not only is she probably way too close to figuring out a lot more than she needs to know, but our data’s way off in the first place! I’ve checked and double-checked all my wizardries, and they should all be working perfectly! This project is a disaster, Kit.”
“Well…okay, you might have a point. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves—the first step is to go take a firsthand look at…”
The voices trailed off until Joanne could no longer hear them. She stepped back from the door and took a long, deep breath. She had absolutely no idea what to think—or even what to consider first. Thinking about what Nita had said about her sent a hot, dizzying rush of shame through her, but it was still a better option than contemplating the other thing.
The thing where Kit and Nita were apparently both…wizards. Or thought they were. Or something.
“Typical of them, really.”
Joanne whipped around, flinching automatically—even though she was pretty sure at this point that she was the one who had been wronged, getting caught eavesdropping still sent a jolt of panicky adrenaline through her system.
The newcomer—Joanne was pretty sure she was one of Kit’s sisters—leaned against a nearby doorway and smirked broadly, clearly relishing the dramatic first impression she’d made.
Joanne had to admit that the first impression would have been a pretty strong one even without the element of surprise to consider. Kit’s sister was dressed in a striking, supremely fashionable ensemble—the neon green scarf took a little getting used to, sure, but the overall effect was remarkable. And beyond that, she had an air of effortless confidence about her that suggested she could probably wear any outfit and make it look fantastic.
I’m not sure if I want to ask her where she buys her clothes, or ask her out on a date. Or both, Joanne pondered, feeling her face getting a little warm. Okay, probably both, if I’m being honest with myself.
“Sorry, what?” was all she said aloud.
Kit’s sister strolled a few steps closer, grinning even more broadly. “I’m Carmela, since we never got properly introduced earlier. Okay, so the first thing we need to settle is: exactly how much did you hear?”
Joanne felt her face getting significantly redder. So much for pretending it didn’t happen, then. Not to mention that this means owning up to the fact that I had no idea what the hell they were talking about most of the time, anyway…
“Um, I don’t know,” she muttered evasively, looking at the floor. “They were complaining about the project and arguing, and …it sounded like they decided to go off somewhere…”
She had quickly resolved that not to mention anything about what Nita had said about her. Just thinking about that still made her deeply uneasy. I mean, we were just kids…I thought we’d both grown up and gotten past it…it wasn’t THAT bad, was it?
…was it?
“Okay, sure, yeah,” Carmela was saying airily. “They’re always sneaking off somewhere. Planets to be saved, justice to be served, awkward making out to sneak in now that they’re finally an official couple, that kind of thing. But I’m guessing you also heard the stuff about wizardry?”
Joanne, feeling utterly lost for how to properly react by this point, simply nodded.
“Right. Probably kind of hard to miss it with the way Juanita Louise was shouting, there,” Carmela said. “Okay, get ready for this: it’s all totally real. I know how it sounds—I mean, seriously, my own sister still thinks Kit is a minion of Satan or one of the X-Men. Or maybe both. But the point is: I’ve been to other planets, I’ve had lovely conversations with a sentient tree and a humpback whale, and I’ve almost been arrested by aliens in a different galaxy for illegal possession of Hershey’s kisses. So you don’t need to worry that they’ve lost their marbles.”
Joanne stared. Involuntarily, as though Carmela’s words had kicked off an automatic process in her brain, a memory rose to the surface: the last time she and her gang had ever chased after Nita, a couple of years ago. For some inexplicable reason, they hadn’t been able to hurt her at all, and before anyone knew what was going on, she had been the one chasing them. There had been something strange about that day, but until now, Joanne had never really thought about it too much…
…oh my God. Was she using…uh, magic? She was, wasn’t she?
Joanne felt her stomach twist oddly; she still had no idea how she was supposed to process this. But one thing, it least, was clear: If Nita felt like she needed to do something…well, supernatural to get away from me and my friends, that means…it really was that big of a deal to her.
I thought we were all just kids messing around, I never really thought about how she saw it…oh God.
I guess…I really kind of owe her an apology, huh?
Carmela had been happily babbling on, going into a lot of detail about what wizards did—Joanne wasn’t really listening, but from the bits and pieces she picked up, it sounded like some crazy combination of science fiction and fantasy, with more than a little math involved. She had to admit, it all sounded pretty perfect for Kit and Nita.
“…so I bet they went off to the actual nebula you guys have been studying just to see what was up,” Carmela eventually concluded. “Like I said, totally typical of them. And they didn’t even wait so I could give them a shopping list! I mean, have you seen some of the designer exoskeletons they’re making this year in that part of the galaxy?...um, I guess you probably haven’t.”
Finally, she caught sight of the look on Joanne’s face, and came to a halt. “And I’m guessing you don’t appreciate being left behind, huh?” she asked, her voice a lot softer and more concerned than it had been before.
Joanne threw up her hands. “It’s probably for the best. I can’t do magic or anything, what the hell am I gonna do in outer space?”
“Aww, don’t be like that!” A wicked-looking glitter appeared in Carmela’s eyes. “I’m not a wizard either, but I never let that stop me for a second. Oh, sure, people go on about “you can’t” and “you don’t understand” and “it’s too dangerous,” but you can figure pretty much anything out with a little determination. You’re their lab partner, right?”
Joanne nodded silently. She felt dizzy, like she was standing in front of the human equivalent of a windstorm, and she wondered if Carmela had this effect on everyone.
“Well then,” Carmela said, and clapped her hands together like everything had been settled. “Rather rude of them to leave you behind, don’t you think? You should go catch up with them and tell them that.”
Joanne stared at Carmela in general, and at the expectant grin stretching across her face in particular, wondering if she’d missed something. “Um…you did hear the part where I said I’m not a wizard or whatever, right? I can’t just…wiggle my fingers and zap over into another solar system.”
“Sure you can!” Carmela told her brightly. “Through my closet.”
Joanne stared even harder. Is that supposed to be an innuendo or a metaphor or did she read my mind and catch that thought about wanting to ask her out…what the hell am I missing here?
Carmela blinked back at her in confusion for a split second, then burst out laughing. “Oh, sorry! I keep forgetting how that sounds. It’s literally true, though. A couple of months ago, I kind of helped save the universe, and one of the perks I got out of it was a free worldgate in my bedroom closet. We can just program it to lock on to Kit and Nita’s last known coordinates, and that should get you to wherever they’ve snuck off to. Sound like a plan?”
The staring was probably getting really rude by this point, but Carmela just kept pulling the rug out from under her. Joanne’s brain felt like it was running overtime to try to catch up. “So you’re seriously suggesting I should just…teleport off into space, with no magic or anything, and go find Kit and Nita?”
Carmela nodded eagerly and shot Joanne a devilish grin. “Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”
Joanne found herself nodding back. “Well, okay, yeah. It kind of does. But, I mean…this is crazy. I’ve never even left the country, and now you want me to leave the planet?”
Carmela shrugged. “Well, the way I see things, if you’re gonna do something like this, you might as well start big, right?”
Stepping through the closet worldgate was a strange experience. Joanne was expecting something dramatic, up to and including being violently dissolved down into individual atoms and reassembled on the other end, but the actual transit happened in the blink of an eye. Halfway through a single stride, Carmela’s helpful parting advice (“Have fun! Don’t die!”) disappeared in mid-word, and then all of her surroundings were abruptly different. The cramped and slightly dusty confines of the closet seamlessly gave way to a strange white room with a high ceiling. Joanne stopped in her tracks, took a deep breath, and started to look around.
The room was dominated by an enormous, cylindrical glass chamber, surrounded by an array of blinking consoles and colorful tangles of wire and cable. And contained within that chamber was…something, something dark and cloudy and amorphous, a pulsing, flickering, twisting chunk of substance that made Joanne’s eyes hurt just to look at.
It wasn’t just her eyes that were suffering. Everything around Joanne at the moment was so violently different than anything she was used to—and nothing more so than the contents of the great glass chamber. The phrase ‘culture shock’ was starting to feel uncomfortably literal—she could feel her heart hammering, and the floor beneath her feet had stopped feeling solid some time ago.
It didn’t take her long to spot Kit and Nita—thank goodness for small mercies—who were crouched behind a nearby bank of consoles, surveying the contents of the chamber with concern. Both of them were leafing through big, old-fashioned-looking books—which, come to think of it, Joanne had seen them carrying pretty often before. Magic books? Is that still how it works? Okay.
She felt a little awkward about going over and talking to them now that the whole magic thing was out in the open, but it still felt like a better option than being on her own in the middle of a huge alien whatever-the-hell-this-was. So she didn’t waste much time making her way over to their hiding spot.
“Okay, so what the hell is that thing?”
There followed the most undignified shrieking noise Joanne had ever heard Nita Callahan make, up to and including the time Joanne had snuck up on her and nailed her with a water balloon back in fifth grade. Kit made a noise that might have been a weak attempt at shushing her, or it might have been a strangled gasp of his own, but either way, it didn’t work too well when his own mouth was hanging wide open in shock.
“What…but I don’t…Joanne…no…how…Joanne?!?”
And it went on like that for a while, and Joanne crossed her arms and let them work through the shock. She had to admit that she needed the time herself—more than a few parts of her brain were still busy screaming in uncomprehending terror at everything in the alien lab where they now stood.
“How did you get here?” Nita finally choked out, her face unusually pale.
Joanne smirked—even here of all places, she wasn’t going to let go of the opportunity to mess with Nita just a little bit. “I’m part of this group project just the same as you two. We’re all lab partners together here. And you were just going to leave me behind when you got to the fun part? That’s rude.”
She took one look at their faces after that one and relented. “Okay, seriously? Carmela. That’s how. And her crazy teleporting closet.”
The reaction was immediate. Nita let out a long breath and smacked her forehead with the back of a palm, while Kit looked off into the distance with the air of a person who was watching a nightmare come true live and in person.
“I know, I know, you weren’t expecting to see your Muggle lab partner turn up here all of a sudden,” Joanne said, laughing a bit unsteadily. Somehow, she was barely holding on to a thin veneer of composure, despite her subconscious still tapping her on the shoulder every few seconds and saying, hello. Still completely terrified over here. How’re you doing?
“But okay, since we’re clear now that I really don’t have any idea what the hell is going on, could you please tell me”—she pointed at the thing in the glass chamber, all too aware of how violently her hand was shaking—“what that is, exactly?”
“That,” Kit said grimly, “is the reason our numbers keep getting screwed up.” He pointed to something in his magic book—an illustration was moving, showing some sort of star formation expanding and collapsing. “Our instruments were fine, it turns out—someone here is using this thing to mess with the formation rate of the stars in this part of the Pillars of Creation. New stars are being born, and old ones are going nova, totally at random—the whole shape of this Pillar is changing, and way faster than it should.”
“Yeah, but what is it?” Joanne demanded, looking at the dark thing roiling and surging on the other side of the glass.
Nita’s voice was quiet, almost…what was the word? Reverent? No, not exactly—it was the kind of tone you’d use next to a sleeping tiger. “It’s a piece of the Pullulus.”
Clearly, she had meant for that to be a dramatic revelation, but it hardly could have been less so. Joanne just looked at her blankly. “The what, now? Not all of us went to wizard school, remember…”
“We don’t have a…never mind.” Nita bit her lip, clearly searching for words. “Okay, you remember that big nuclear crisis a couple of months ago? A bunch of special news broadcasts, everyone threatening war, that kind of thing?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” She didn’t keep up much with current events, but this one had been impossible to avoid—there were emergency news bulletins on every channel, and their school had even closed down for a day during the worst of it. Nothing had actually happened, but everyone had chosen that particular moment to panic about it being the end of the world, for whatever reason.
Nita gestured at the glass. “Well, that was because of the Pullulus. Long story, but the short version is that it was a weapon that ripped apart space, and affected people psychologically in pretty much the same way. We…” She took a deep breath, clearly recalling something painful—“We stopped it, eventually, and until today, I thought that it was all gone. But it looks like someone here was saving a piece…and experimenting with it.”
Joanne’s stomach turned over as she looked back at the Pullulus fragment. It looked unpleasant, sure, but to think that something so small could tear a whole star cluster apart, or almost cause a nuclear war…
“Okay, that’s not good,” she muttered. “You’ve got a plan to stop it, right, Little Miss Wizard?” Kit shot her an irritated glance. “Or you, wizard-boyfriend?”
He looked like he was about to start arguing about the nickname, but then he sighed and just pointed to a page of his book. “Stasis spell,” he told her. “One of the really major ones, not just your average stopping-raindrops-in-midair kind of thing. The price is going to be heavy, but if the piece of the Pullulus is completely frozen, it can’t react to anything, and that should solve the problem until we bring in the cavalry to figure out something permanent.”
The two of them went back to leafing through their books intently.
Something was bothering Joanne, and it took her a second to realize what it was. “Hang on, what was that about prices? What are we talking here, eye of newt and tongue of frog?”
“Not necessarily,” said Nita, sounding distracted and not looking up from her book. “You can use physical components like that for the big spells, but after enough time on the job, you learn shortcuts. Ultimately, you can’t get anything for free in this business, just like anything else—so usually you just pay for the energy you use yourself.”
Joanne pondered this, and suddenly felt like she’d missed a step while walking down a flight of stairs. “Hang on a second…what do you mean, pay for it yourself?”
Kit shrugged. “Depends on the spell. Sometimes you just feel a little out of breath, like you’ve been running, sometimes you might pass out for a little bit, and sometimes the cost is more like a year of your life. You just have to be careful and not do anything you can’t pay for.” And then he just went right back to reading, like that was nothing.
Joanne tried not to stare at the two of them, but honestly, she couldn’t help it. She was suddenly seeing Kit and Nita in a whole new light, and as much as she hated to admit it, it really sounded like there was more to them than she’d ever realized.
Would I ever be able to just casually pay prices like that? she wondered. If it meant I could do magic in return?
…maybe not. I don’t know.
A harsh clattering noise interrupted her reflections, and immediately set her heart hammering again. By the time she, Kit, and Nita had all leaned out from behind the console to see what was going on, there was an alien standing in the middle of the room.
It was all sharp angles—a slender, almost spindly body sheathed in heavy plates of violently orange armor. Whether the armor was part of its body or not, Joanne couldn’t tell, but the overall effect was impressive either way. Following closely behind the leader came six others, marching in formation and holding elongated devices that were clearly weapons of some kind. The creature in the lead was talking rapidly to the others in a strange, garbled language.
Joanne drew in a deep breath and pressed herself closer against the console. Gritting her teeth together, she tried to will her body to stop shaking. Being in an alien laboratory, surrounded by unfamiliar technology, was one thing, but actually seeing alien beings was turning out to be quite another.
Nita turned to a new page of her book and started silently mouthing something. Seconds later, the unintelligible snarling noises of the aliens abruptly resolved themselves into something Joanne could understand. It wasn’t that it was translated to English, exactly—somehow, she just got the meaning behind the alien words.
Well, that was…unexpectedly thoughtful of her. Joanne turned her attention back to the aliens. It sounded like the one in the lead was doing most of the talking, issuing commands to his (her? Its?) followers.
“…thought this complex was supposed to be completely inaccessible,” one of those followers was muttering unhappily. “Don’t tell me you were exaggerating about the security this whole time…”
“Of course I wasn’t,” the leader snapped. “I have no idea what we’re dealing with, here, but too many of the alarms went off for this to be a simple computer error. We have intruders, and your job is to find them.”
Joanne glanced anxiously over at Kit and Nita, who looked back at her in consternation, their faces pale. We still need more time, Kit mouthed silently.
“Spread out and canvass the room,” the lead alien commanded, to the accompaniment of the sound of echoing footsteps. “We’ll find them.”
Jonane could still feel her heart thumping in her chest. She looked back at Kit and Nita, both of whom had their eyes closed in concentration and were mouthing what she was guessing were the words of the stasis spell. The air around them had almost started to feel…fuzzy, like a TV channel with bad reception.
The sounds of footsteps were getting unnervingly close. Joanne sucked in a deep breath and turned back to Kit and Nita one last time.
“You’d better be grateful you have a lab partner around to handle this stuff,” she said out loud, and stepped out from under the console.
The responding shouts were instantaneous. “You! Stop and put your hands in the air!”
“No, you stop,” Joanne shouted back, and the aliens halted in their advance for a second, probably more out of surprise than anything else.
Don’t let them see you sweat, Virella. Joanne drew herself up to her full height, planted her feet, and stuck out her chest. “I don’t know who you are, but you must be extra stupid,” she told the alien henchmen at the top of her voice. “Letting that guy boss you around? Take a look at what’s going on here.”
She was talking a mile a minute—don’t give them time to stop and reconsider, don’t give yourself time to hesitate—and already her breath was turning ragged. She flung out an arm in the direction of the glass chamber.
“Look at this thing. It’s been messing up stars all over this cluster. It’s almost caused planet-destroying wars. How much is this guy paying you, again? Is it really worth giving him control of something like that? You guys have seen the results—imagine pissing him off somehow and seeing that happen to wherever it is you live.”
The aliens didn’t back off, but they didn’t advance any further, either. Joanne pressed her advantage. “And there’s no way this is legal, either. We saw what you were doing here from a planet millions of miles away. How long do you think it’s going to be before someone else notices and comes to see what’s going on, huh? And I bet they’re gonna bring a lot more guns than we did. Now, when that happens, do you think your great leader is gonna be there to face the music? Or is he just gonna disappear and leave you guys to try to explain?”
The aliens were actively glancing at each other and muttering uneasily among themselves now. “You’ve been played, guys!” Joanne told them. “You’re the biggest suckers in the galaxy. Just think about how easily I got in here. You’re guarding the most dangerous science project ever, in a building that I just proved is easy to break into, working as expendable rent-a-cops for a guy who’s proven he’s willing to blow up anything just because he can. I’d get out now while the getting is still good!”
A long, tense silence stretched out after Joanne finished talking. Breathing heavily, she started counting the seconds. Six…seven…eight…nine…
At the sixteen-second mark, the minion in the lead shook his head violently and elbowed one of the others. “We’re going to be in a lot more trouble if we let this intruder get away with whatever it is she’s doing,” he (She? It?) snarled, and leveled a weapon at Joanne’s chest.
“Well, never let it be said that I didn’t try to warn you,” Joanne said aloud, and bolted for Kit and Nita’s console. Halfway there, she heard a sharp zing, undoubtedly the sound of the weapon firing.
Joanne closed her eyes and took a flying dive, landing in an undignified sprawl next to Nita and Kit. Well, would you look at that, she mused, opening her eyes again and wincing at the painful after-effects of her sudden landing. I’m alive.
More zinging noises filled the air, and Joanne watched as bursts of weapon fire splashed against some sort of invisible barrier just in front of them. Not entirely sure how the shield had gotten there, but not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, she pulled herself in under the console and closer to Kit and Nita.
“You’re welcome,” Nita told her, snapping her book closed decisively. Joanne frowned, looking from the shield to Nita and back again, until she abruptly realized what had been bothering her.
“Hang on, what happened to that big fancy freezing spell you guys were going to use on that…thing?”
“It’s done,” Kit gasped—the guy sounded like he was about to keel over, Joanne noted. “We’re just writing the transit circle back home before we turn it loose, because we’re not gonna have the energy to do it after. On the count of three we’ll drop the shield and activate the transit circle and the stasis spell, and presto, we’re back home with our job done before anyone’s the wiser.”
Joanne tried to keep her voice level—if Kit could sound so blasé about it all, she certainly could too. “Well, when you put it that way…”
A few moments of tense quiet fell, broken only (if you could call it only) by the staccato spattering of weapon fire against the shield.
“Okay, ready,” said Nita. “Three…two…one…”
Joanne looked back at the shield and really, really hoped that Kit and Nita had their timing right. Well, I guess I’m about to find out…
And then there were two voices shouting behind her, strange words in a language she didn’t recognize, but which still gave her a weird feeling of recognition. The roiling mass of darkness in the middle of the chamber stopped pulsing and heaving instantly, and started looking more like a chunk of black ice. An instant later, the shield failed, bolts of lightning speared toward them, and before Joanne even had time to panic, the world flipped upside down and went dark…
As soon as Joanne landed back in Kit’s yard, her phone buzzed. It was a text from Jacquelyn Turner: OMG I’m so sorry! I swear I already sent out your invitation. Maybe it got lost in the mail or something? You can totally come to the party!
Huh, Joanne mused, the corner of her mouth twitching in an almost-grin. Looks like I was worried for nothing the whole time.
She’d expected to feel something—triumph, vindication, excitement—but after everything that had just happened, it all felt more than a little hollow. She glanced back at Kit and Nita—who had stepped out of the portal a second after her and immediately collapsed to the ground, and, she noticed, were now holding hands.
Did I really tell myself that people were going to think I was uncool for hanging out with them?
“Well, I guess we’d better go back to using the numbers Mrs. Harrington gave us,” Kit was saying. “Star formation rates in the Pillars of Creation are going to be kind of up in the air until an intervention team gets that situation permanently fixed, I’m guessing.”
Joanne raised an eyebrow. “Literally up in the air, huh? I mean…space isn’t really air but you know what I…”
After a moment, Nita cracked a grin, and Kit suppressed a snort, and before Joanne knew it, all three of them were shaking with gales of more-than-slightly-hysterical laughter. Joanne’s system was still singing with a heady mixture of nerves and adrenaline, and it took her a long time to get her breath back and stop laughing.
“Seriously, though, Joanne,” said Nita quietly afterward, still breathing heavily between words. “We wouldn’t have made it if you hadn’t bought us enough time distracting those security guys. It was…well…thanks.”
I owe you at least that much, Joanne thought, but bit her tongue before actually saying it. She knew she owed Nita a lot of apologies, but somehow, now didn’t seem to be the moment. “What are lab partners for?” she finally said aloud.
Then a thought struck her. Joanne looked back at that latest message on her phone…and for once, the next step felt completely obvious to her.
“Hey…guys?” she said, and Kit and Nita turned their attention back to her, looking a little startled—apparently they’d been in the middle of another romantic moment. Joanne couldn’t bring herself to feel as annoyed about it as she’d been earlier—sure, they were still the dorkiest couple of all time, but after all, she’d gone to all the trouble of saving them from aliens. It was hard not to feel just a little attached to them.
“I’m going to this big end-of-the-year party next weekend at Jacqueline Turner’s,” she told them, waving her phone for emphasis. “If you want, I could probably get you two invited. Apparently she hired a really good DJ, and there’ll be free food, so…I mean, I don’t know…if you…”
Nita and Kit looked at each other (God, how couple-y can you get? Joanne silently wondered), but they seemed a bit uncertain. All things considered, she didn’t blame them.
Still, she wanted to try again. “Come on, Callahan,” she said, affecting a breezy tone, “I never took you up on that offer to come over and look through your telescope, remember? I owe you one.”
And after a pause, it was Nita who spoke up first. “Well, I mean, I guess I don’t have much going on next weekend.”
“Unless we get sent out on errantry,” Kit pointed out. “There’s no way to predict that—we could be off on another planet this time next week with no warning. But otherwise…”
Joanne grinned. “Text me, okay?” She checked to make sure she still had her copy of the pre-assigned magnitude numbers for the Pillars of Creation, waved, and set off for home.
This summer was looking pretty good. In fact, as far as Joanne Virella was concerned, it couldn’t arrive soon enough.