A Wizard Alone New Millennium Edition Read Online Free PDF Page A

whole set of opportunities opened out before him. “Just imagine A Midsummer Night’s Dream with ten or twelve extra genders…”
    His mother raised her eyebrows, gave up on the soap, and started changing channels again. “Doesn’t this thing have an online channel guide?” she said.
    “I’ll have a look at it later and let you know,” Kit said.
    He saw the look she threw at his pop. “Are there cooking channels?”
    “Oh, yeah.” Then Kit paused, having a horrible thought. “On second thought, it might be smarter to avoid those. Some of them feature humans. Well, humanoids, anyway. But not as the cooks.”
    The look on his mother’s face made Kit wish he’d kept quiet. She began changing channels with unusual speed. Kit raised his eyebrows and went back into the kitchen with the plate.
    He was spooning out rice when his dad came back in and began rooting around in the silverware drawer in an aimless way that didn’t fool Kit for a moment. “Son,” he said, very quietly, “is there really a cooking channel, uh, ‘about’ us?”
    “Pop, there’s lots of them.”
    His father looked shocked. “How is something like that permitted?! ”
    Kit shrugged. “It’s not about ‘permitted.’ It’s the way things are, some places. And if you go those places without precautions, you find out stuff you shouldn’t find out.” Kit couldn’t help grinning. “Like how you taste in a sweet-and-sour sauce with galingale. The universe is full of little surprises.”
    “I always have the feeling that there’s a lot about this wizardry you’re not telling me,” his father said. “Sometimes it worries me. Then come times like this when I’m horribly glad about my ignorance. Just don’t go places where you shouldn’t go, okay?”
    “I try to avoid it,” Kit said. “Is it okay with you if I go to Baldwin in the next couple of days, though?”
    His pop looked surprised. “Baldwin? No problem with that.”
    “Thanks.”
    Kit brought his plate into the living room, where he sat down on the floor and watched his mother change channels one more time. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, sounding relieved.
    Kit glanced up at the screen, chewing. “Uh, Mama,” he said, “I’m probably too young to be watching anything that explicit.”
    Her eyes widened. “But, honey, it’s just a big cloud of gas, or smoke, or…” She stopped, her eyes widening even more, then changed the channel six times in a row without stopping.
    Kit grinned and turned his attention back to the chicken.

Chapter 2: Investigations

    Circuses—even just the thought of them—had always scared Nita when she was little. Later on, she’d felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children—all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns.
    Yet it hadn’t worked that way for Nita the first time she actually went to one. Where the other kids in the audience had laughed and clapped, she sat amid all the raucous noise feeling terribly unnerved. It wasn’t so much being afraid that an acrobat would fall, that a lion would eat the lion tamer… nothing so concrete or obvious. But the darkness, the gradually strengthening smells of sawdust, animal sweat, greasepaint, and canvas, the spotlighting that left too many other things purposely obscure while half-seen forms moved in those shadows, themselves concealed by the light—all these slowly combined to suggest that something unexpected, something unavoidable, was going to happen. And that looming unknown frightened Nita badly. At intermission she’d begged her parents to take her home. Dairine had cried at the thought of leaving, and so their mom had stayed with Dari while her father drove Nita back to the house.
    That her dad had never pressed her for details about this was still one of the things Nita thought about when counting up the reasons she loved him. But even his silent