At that point she simply couldn't stand it any more. She waved, a weak gesture, and turned her back on them all, and slung her rucksack over her shoulder, and her warm jacket that her mother had insisted she bring, and she walked down the long, cold hall of the airport, towards the plane. It was a 747. Her sensitivity was running high –perhaps because of her own nervousness and distress at leaving – but the plane was alive in the way that mechanical things usually seemed to her as a result of working with Kit. That was his speciality – the ability to feel what a rock was saying, reading the secret thoughts of a lift or a freezer, the odd thing-thoughts that run in the currents of energy which occur naturally or are built into physical objects, manmade or not. She could hear the plane straining against the chocks behind its many wheels, and its engines thinking of eating cold, cold air at thirty degrees below, and pushing it out behind. There was a sense of purpose about it, of restraint, and of eagerness to get out of there, to be gone.It was a reassuring sort of feeling. She absently returned the smile of the stewardess at the plane's door, and patted the plane as she got in; let the lady help her find her seat, so as to feel that she was doing something useful. Nita sat herself down by the window, fastened her seat belt, and got out her manual.For a moment she just held it in her hand. Just a small beat-up book in a buckram library binding, with the apparent title, so YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD?, the supposed author's name, Hearn, and the Dewey Decimal System number, all written on the spine in white ink. Nita shook her head and smiled at the book, a little conspiratorially, for it was a lot more than that. Was it only two years ago, no, two and a half now, that she had found it in the local library? Or it had found her; she still wasn't too sure, remembering the way something had seemed to grab her hand as she ran it along the shelf where the book had been sitting.
