She climbed up onto the cracked guano-stained concrete beside him and looked down over the edge, where the rocks fell steeply away. "What're you doing "

Nita said. "The barnacles complaining about the water temperature again "

"Nope, I'm just keeping a low profile," Kit said. "I don't feel like spending the effort to be invisible right now, with work coming up, and there've

been some boats going through the inlet. Might be something happening at the Marine Theater later. It's been a little busy."

"Okay." She sat down next to him. "Any sign of S'reee yet "

"Nothing so far, but it's only a few minutes after when we were supposed to meet. Maybe she got held up. Whatcha got "

"Here," Nita said, and opened her manual. Kit sat up and flipped his open, too, then paged through it until he came to the "blank" pages in the back

where research work and spells in progress stored themselves.

Nita looked over his shoulder and saw the first blank page fill itself in with the spell she had constructed that afternoon, spilling itself down the

page, section by section, until that page was full, and the continued-on-next-page symbol presented itself in the lower right-hand corner, blinking

slowly. "I had an idea," she said, "about the chemical-reaction calls. I thought that maybe the precipitates weren't going to behave right "

"Okay, okay, give me a minute to look at it," Kit said. "It's pretty complicated."

Nita nodded and looked out to sea, gazing at the blinding golden roil and shimmer of light on the Great South Bay. These waters might look pretty, but

they were a mess. New York and the bedroom communities around it, all up and down Long Island and the Jersey shore, pumped terrible amounts of sewage