The longer Salla spent on the phone, the louder her voice got. That would have been okay with me, too, except that the walls of our house were made from something with all the sound-baffling qualities of a damp cardboard box. Thin cardboard. So I had the dubious pleasure of listening to one side of a conversation that seemed to consist entirely of, "No way!", "He did?" and "No fucking way, dude!"

"Salla," I called, "are you aware that I can hear every word you're saying?"

"That's okay, Mom," she yelled back, "I only reveal my innermost thoughts on the chat room. Right now I'm online with a nice old man in Copenhagen who likes little girls."

Well. I had to move sometime, if only to go to the bathroom. I hobbled to the study and looked over Salla's shoulder. The chat-room log showed nothing but the usual string of banalities:

SoMch2dI4: blah

FadeSoSlow: oaky

SoMch2dI4: blah

SoMch2dI4: Do u know Y jess is so mad at mark?

FadeSoSlow: no

SoMch2dI4: i c

FadeSoSlow:so are you gonna do the fucking assignment?

SoMch2dI4: Yeah

SoMch2dI4: if I don't my parents will KILL me

SoMch2dI4: they are like totally paranoid about school

"You got that right, anyway," I told the back of her head, "but what happened to the dirty old man from Copenhagen? You enticed me in here under false pretenses."

Salla giggled. "Come on, Mom. You know I wouldn't be dumb enough to chat with anyone like that." She paused and pretended to think for a moment. "Unless, of course, he had candy… "

"So what's the `fucking assignment'? And why aren't you doing it now?"

"Just a minute, Mom!" Salla typed, "got2go, my mom is hassling me," and logged off.

"It's that dumb thing for the ancient Egypt study unit, okay? You know, we gotta do a diorama in an oatmeal box, act in a dumb play, or… hell, where's the damn assignment sheet?" She rooted around in her backpack, tossing several empty juice boxes and a collection of ponytail holders onto the floor, and finally pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. "Or find some other original and creative way of dramatizing ancient Egyptian life and making it real to your fellow students," she read with a sarcastic twist of her lip.

I hadn't seen this piece of paper before, and the decorative markings around the edges made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I took it from her. "Where did you get this?"

Salla sighed again, more elaborately. "From Mr. Kruzak, where else?"

"But these symbols… " An old phrase from my apprenticeship to the wizard Mikhalleviko came to my mind. "Sacred carvings."

"Mom. They're just old Egyptian writing. Hieroglyphs. Nothing to get bent out of shape about. I got a cheat sheet off the Net that says what they stand for and how to pronounce them. See, this one means `star' or the sound `sba,' and this one means… " Salla's eyes drifted to the top of her cheat sheet and she looked confused. "And it says right at the top of the page that the word `hieroglyph,' literally means `sacred carvings.' How'd you know that?"

"I've… seen them before. Some of them, anyway. On Dazau they're… a wizard told me once that they were extremely potent magical symbols from the Old Tongue, only most of them had been lost and nobody knew exactly how to pronounce the ones that are left, so it was dangerous trying to invoke them; you never knew quite what you were going to get." Some of the results Mikhalleviko had gotten while experimenting with Sacred Carvings Magic were enough to wake me up screaming in the middle of the night fifteen years later.

"Way coool," Salla said. "Too bad Dazau magic doesn't work here."

"Thank goodness." I took a deep breath, tried to calm my fluttering nerves, and remembered just how much my feet hurt. "So what are you going to do for your project?"

Salla's three-cornered grin should have warned me, but I was thinking about those peculiar shoes and wondering whether I'd actually be able to stand up on them. "Something original and creative, of course. That's ten points extra."

"Like what?"

"When I figure it out, I'll tell you." Salla sat back in her chair and stared at me with that opaque look she'd developed around her thirteenth birthday. It meant, "Go away, don't bother me, information will be dispensed on a strict need-to-know basis."

So I did. I needed to rest up before tomorrow, anyway. Stephanie had scheduled me a six-hour appointment at Hair Apparent. I had no idea how anybody could spend six whole hours cutting hair, but I figured I was about to find out. What I didn't realize was that I shouldn't have been worried about the remodeling of Riva – I should have been thinking about Salla home alone with the computer for several hours. We'd had Call Trans-Forwarding and a link to Furo Fykrou via Virtual Service Provider for years, ever since I'd been a commuter mom with an address on the Planet of the Paper-Pushers and a day job as swordswoman for Duke Zolkir; and I knew Salla had figured out how to access all that stuff.

I also knew, or thought I knew, that Salla was too smart to get herself in trouble messing with Dazau magic, after her last experience. You'd think having to be rescued from involuntary apprenticeship to Furo Fykrou would make her at least a little wary of doing deals with a wizard. But no… she was thirteen now, and all those exploding hormones were short-circuiting her brain function. At least, that was my friend Norah's way of explaining what happened to teenagers.

I didn't actually see this chat room log until it was all over, but you probably need to know about it now:

SoMch2dI4: helo? FF r u there?

FF2dazau1: is this riva?

SoMch2dI4: no its salla don't logoff I wanta maka deal

JosieLou2: hi this is jess

JosieLou2: what r u wearing 2 the dance fri?

SoMch2dI4: the grey skirt the long one and a cami top

FF2dazau1: u wanna deal or talk to yr little friend? Ima busy wizard.

JosieLou2: way cool ima get a new dress

SoMch2dI4: ever hear of sacred carvings?

JosieLou2: isnt that the new rap group

SoMch2dI4: I wuz talkin 2 FF, jess

SoMch2dI4: allo?

FF2dazau1: so what about SC?

SoMch2dI4: nuthin much, only I got a complete set here. With pronunciation guide!

FF2dazau1: ok, scan them in and ill see if theres anything I cn use

SoMch2dI4: you gotta be kidding I want payment up front

FF2dazau1: how do I know you really got them?

SoMch2dI4: u trns enuf power to invok 1 carving, maybe 2.

SoMch2dI4: if it works you know I got the good stuff

SoMch2dI4: if it doesn't work no loss

FF2dazau1: xcept u wastin my time

SoMch2dI4: wheres yr spirit of adventure?

That happened Tuesday, while I was being chopped, tinted, lacquered, sprayed and waxed in Hair Apparent.

"Waxed?"

"Relax, Riva," Stephanie told me, "she's not going to take your eyebrows off, just shape them."

I've been wounded in battle; I wasn't going to fuss over a little thing like having tiny hairs pulled out of my face. Although I will say this for battle as opposed to eyebrow waxing, at least you're allowed to defend yourself. However, when Stephanie started making noises about my bikini line, I pointed out quickly that when I wore the suit she'd picked out, plus panty hose and all the other junk designed to mold me into an acceptable shape, nobody was going to have any opportunity to inspect that hair.

These Paper-Pushers people have no sense of decency. There are limits to everything.

When the hairdresser got through with me, I stared into the mirror she held up and wondered where Riva Konneva had gotten to. Instead of a proud member of the Bronze Bra Guild, long hair falling loose and unconstrained (as a challenge to the enemy: you're never going to get close enough to me to grab my hair or anything else, so don't even think about it!) I saw a sleek, smooth woman who looked like a dark-skinned copy of Stephanie: close-cropped shining helmet of hair that clearly wouldn't dare lift a strand in any breeze, perfectly arched lines of brows, and a lost look in the dark eyes under the freshly waxed brows.