Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (18 page)

“You can’t just go out in a city like Reno at night,” Sophia Hayworth said. “There are people who go about at night who aren’t the sort a little girl ought to meet—and, yes, that includes little girls who have been taught by Prosperion elves how to defend themselves, do you hear?”

Pernie heard her, all right. But mostly she heard the alarms. It was like being in prison. But fortunately, she did have Don on her side. Don Hayworth was not fixated on danger and safety all the time like Sophia Hayworth was. In fact, the very next morning, while Pernie was putting on her scratchy clothes getting ready for school, she heard Don and Sophia arguing over what Pernie had done.

“She’s not like other kids,” Don said. “And she’s definitely not like Angela. You can’t just stuff her in her room and expect her to be content devouring books.”

“But she is!” Sophia Hayworth said. “She’s already through the third grade material. That’s a whole grade level every week. She’ll be ahead of them all in two months if she can stay on course.”

“I didn’t say she isn’t smart. I said she isn’t Angela. She’s an outdoor girl. You’ve got to let her run sometimes. Let her look around. You read Angela’s last email from Calico Castle. That’s not an ordinary kid in there.”

“I did read it, and that only makes it more important we keep her where we can see her.”

“You need to trust her, honey. She needs to be free to make some mistakes.”

“Angela didn’t need to make mistakes.”

“Yes, she did.”

Pernie didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he said it in a weird way, and the kitchen got pretty quiet downstairs for a while. Pernie was putting her hair up in the requisite ponytail—because apparently she was supposed to look just like all the other dumb little horses in the herd—when she heard Sophia say, “Fine. So what do you want me to do? Just open up all the doors at night? Should I get her a gun, so if she wanders all the way downtown, she can defend herself?”

“Honey,” came Don’s reply, part empathy, part exasperation. “How about you just let her walk home from the bus by herself? How about just that to start? None of the other kids her age have parents walking them back and forth. I think she can handle that.”

More silence followed. Pernie decided she definitely liked Don Hayworth the best. They’d played baseball last weekend, and Pernie hit every ball he threw at her. She could see how he was going to throw it before he even let it go. It was like watching sugar shrimp, and she paid attention to his fingers on the ball. And he was much slower than an elf when it came to the rest of him. His body gave away what he was doing well before any motion was complete. So Pernie “dinged” every one of them, as Don had said. He said she could make a hundred million credits a year as a professional baseball player one day, playing for one of the NTA corporate teams.

Pernie thought that sounded pretty weird. Why would anyone pay people to play a game? Besides, money was boring. Everyone on this planet talked about money all the time. Talking about money had made Jeremy cry, although Pernie still didn’t quite know why. Nobody talked about money when she was growing up, and the people at Calico Castle had more of it than almost anyone.

But today was the day she was going to walk home from the bus stop by herself, so none of that other stuff mattered at all. She just had to get through lunch, and a few more hours of class. Then she was finally going to explore her neighborhood, maybe even go up into the mountains rising up so temptingly all around. She wondered what kind of creatures lived up there. She hoped there was something she could tame like she had tamed Knot.

She missed Knot a lot. Djoveeve had told her she wasn’t supposed to use any magic, not even telepathy, but twice now, late at night, she’d sent a bare little flicker to her bug back on String, just to make sure he was okay. He was. He was doing his bug thing, under the low clouds of the wispy ferns, running around in the powdery yellow dust, sucking dry the eyeballs of any creature that grew weary and slept, laid low by the dust’s effect. Pernie was glad he was happy, and she’d let the sounds of the jungle calm her, heard through the vibrations he sensed in all those tiny feet of his. She could listen to the jungle, to the rustle of the other bugs, and forget about the frustrations of her long, book-learning days.

She didn’t think there would be any creatures quite like him in the woods, because Sophia Hayworth said there weren’t any animals—or people—on Earth that had any magic at all. But Don had been quick to point out that, technically, nobody actually knew that for certain. He told Pernie that there might be creatures on Earth with magic; people just didn’t know how to tell. He told her that long ago the native inhabitants of Reno and surrounding areas used to believe that animals had magic. He said that it still might be so.

Sophia Hayworth had rolled her eyes and said, “Don, you’re going to confuse the poor girl. She just got here. Can we stick to the facts for now?”

He’d shrugged across the dinner table at Pernie after that one, and it was then that she’d begun to see him as something of an ally.

“Miss Grayborn?” asked Mrs. Beckman, apparently for the second time. “I don’t see you working. Are you having trouble, or do you have the answer already in your head?”

What answer? She must have drifted off. Pernie looked up at the big board monitor at the front of the class. Mrs. Beckman had written a math problem up there. A missing-number problem. Pernie still couldn’t figure out the purpose of making math problems with letters in them, being that letters were supposed to be for spelling, but the answers were always obvious anyway. “Seventeen,” she said. “The X is seventeen.” She sounded bored, because she was bored. The other kids all looked up from their desktops at her. She shrugged.

Math was the worst. She thought it was boring. Not because she thought doing it was boring, she actually kind of liked that part, but because they moved through it so slow. Sophia Hayworth had already gotten her through the math program for the whole year. She said Pernie was as good as her own daughter, Angela, at math. “Now if you would just put more effort into reading, writing, and history,” she would say. Pernie didn’t care about history, and she didn’t have anything to write about. She didn’t mind reading, though. She just only liked reading stuff that wasn’t boring.

Mrs. Beckman grinned a big smile at her. “That’s correct. Very good, Miss Grayborn.” She did that a lot.

There followed two more problems, but Pernie was looking out the window at the mountainside. She wished she were there. She wished she were flying over it in one of the NTA fighter planes, dropping bombs on the orcs that came to invade the town. She wished she could go that fast. Faster than Knot. Faster than Taot. Faster than “the speed of sound” Jeremy had told her. That’s how fast Pernie wanted to go.

Fortunately, Mrs. Beckman didn’t call on her for the other math problems, the ones she called
algebra
, and soon enough the drone of the bell marked that it was time for lunch.

As regular as the bell itself, Jeremy was standing beside her while the rest of the class cleared out. She had already shut her desk down, so she got up and led the way out of class. They joined the herd of tablet tappers and visor zombies moving toward the cafeteria. She glanced down at the screen on the tablet of one boy as she swerved around him to get by. He was playing something where two men were depicted, fighting with swords. One of them, wearing red armor with pauldrons that were way too thick and wide to be useful, lunged at the other figure, who was wearing blue pants and black boots but no armor at all, not even a shirt. That was probably better than the bulky, impossible armor of the first.

The red warrior’s lunge was a fake. He followed with a second one that was so slow Pernie wondered why the blue warrior didn’t take his throat out and maybe make a pot of tea in the interim. The blue warrior made a low, sweeping kick instead, which was dumb given the opening he had, and then the red warrior cut off his head.

A boy behind Jeremy shouted, “Hah. Ritchie, you suck. I own you.”

“No, you don’t. You got lucky. I missed my combo.”

Pernie listened to them for a moment and realized the boy behind Jeremy was the one who’d been playing the red-clad fellow with the unlikely armor.

“Is that some kind of fight simulator?” Pernie asked the boy near her. “Like the flight simulators I read about over at the fort?” She’d been reading about pilot training over the last few nights, and found out that there was a huge NTA fortress nearby called Fort Reno. People learned how to fly fighter planes there, and even how to fly spaceships like Roberto did.

The kid beside her stopped, saw who it was, and recoiled. He stepped away from her as if she were about to stab him with a real sword.

The other boy stepped up in his place and smiled winningly. “Kind of,” he said. He was taller than Pernie by almost two full hands—or eight inches in Earth measurements. He had thick, wavy hair, dark and combed back over his head, dark enough that it really set off his very light blue eyes. “It’s a game:
Blades of Death XIV: Return of the Lich
.”

“What do you win?” Pernie asked, stopping to take the tablet he turned toward her so she could see.

“Nothing,” he said, still grinning. “Except telling people that they suck.” He made a face at his friend, who was still standing a step away. Jeremy stopped and waited beside her, shifting uncomfortably.

“You’re that alien girl, aren’t you?” the tall boy asked. “From Prosperion.”

Pernie nodded, but she was looking at the game. “How do you make it work?”

He showed her, quickly going through the controls. “Combinations are here,” he said, showing her how to find the list on the game’s menu screen.

She perused the list and clicked to the second page, then the third. “Are there more, or just these three pages?”

He laughed. “That’s sixty-four combos,” he said. “Most people only use ten or twelve.”

She found an entry called “practice” and opened it. There were several warriors depicted to choose from. She picked the one that looked most like her, even though it was a much older woman with bosoms that were larger than her head. She had blonde hair at least, and she fought with a quarterstaff that wasn’t so much different than a spear.

She went through the motions, getting the feel of the controls. There weren’t that many buttons along the edges of the tablet, and only so many more around the edges of the screen. The image of the warrior woman leaped and spun about. The quarterstaff made very loud noises that didn’t sound anything like reality, but there were nice streaks of color that followed in the wake of spins, cuts, and thrusts.

“Okay, so how do we play?” she said, cutting off something the boy was saying in midstream.

“You want to play … against me?” His brow crinkled to convey the absurdity of the idea, but his smile suggested he was happy to oblige.

“Why not?” Pernie asked.

He laughed, mostly an air sound through his nose. He leaned over and looked at her screen. “Well, don’t use Starfaze. She’s weak, and that quarterstaff sucks until you unlock her fourth power—and even that sucks compared to Raven or Princess Drax, if you want to play a female.”

“I like her,” Pernie said.

“It’s your funeral,” he said. “Ritchie, give me yours.”

Ritchie handed his tablet to his friend.

“Prepare to go down … uh … What’s your name, anyway?”

“Her name is Pernie,” Jeremy blurted. He said it very suddenly, and it sounded odd. He stood beside her now, but then didn’t say any more.

The tall boy looked at him, gave a dismissive sniff, and returned his attention to Pernie. “Okay,” he said. “Accept my request.”

A square appeared over the top of the blonde woman with the huge bosoms and the quarterstaff. Pernie supposed her name must be Starfaze.

The image shifted. She was looking at eight small squares across the screen, each depicting a scene, like the set of a traveling minstrel’s play. “Where you want to fight?” he said. “Arena is easiest. Ghetto has lots of stuff to climb. Desert is good for your quarterstaff because you can flick stones, Mars is fun because—”

Pernie clicked the first one on the list. It looked like some kind of purple street. A moment later she saw her figure, Starfaze, standing there. The man in the oversize armor stood opposite her.

“You ready?” the blue-eyed boy asked.

Pernie directed Starfaze up to him and struck him down. It only required three successive “combos” to do it. The last blow, called “Coup de Grace,” had Starfaze pounding her opponent into the purple street with the butt of the quarterstaff.

Pernie frowned as she watched it, fake red blood spraying everywhere as the body was mashed and pulverized into a pile of intestines and gore. Pernie’s frown deepened as Starfaze put her hands on her hips, her head back, and laughed. The words “You Win” appeared on the screen.

The tall boy was staring at his screen as well, and he looked up with surprise upon his face. One side of his mouth began to turn up into a smile. “Damn,” he said.

She handed him the tablet back and made a face.

“What’s the matter?” the boy called Ritchie asked as she walked away. “Too much violence?”

Pernie turned back long enough to say, “That’s not what guts look like.” Then she and Jeremy went in to eat.