Kit rolled his eyes. "Being a fire hydrant may be too good for her." Nita went down the stairs. "Dari?" she called, annoyed. "Come on before they lock us in."It was considerably cooler down here. Nita turned right at the bottom of the stairs and walked quickly through the Venus exhibit, rubbing her upper arms at the chill, which went right through her thin T-shirt. Someone had turned off the sluggishly erupting Venerian volcano behind its murky glass wall; no one was to be seen anywhere else, all the way down to the temporary plasterboard wall with the sign that said mars closed for renovations."Don't tell me she's still in the toilet," Nita muttered, annoyed. Reading, probably. One of these days she's gonna fall in. She went back the way she had come, past the stairs, to the ladies' room. It was not only cold down here, there was a draft. She grabbed the handle of the door and pulled; it resisted her slightly, and there was a faint hoo noise, air sliding through the door crack as she tugged. "Dari? Come on, we're leaving!" Nita pulled harder, the door came open— Air blew hard past her and ruffled her hair into her eyes. Bitter cold smote the front of her, and in it the humidity in the air condensed out instantly, whipping past Nita through the sucking air as stinging, dust-fine snow. Nita was looking through the doorway into a low rust-red wasteland: notn-353HIGH WIZARDRYjn g but stones in all sizes, cracked, tumbled, piled, with dun dust blowing between them. Close, much too close to be normal, lay a horizon hazed in blood-brown, shading up through translucent brick color, rose, violet, a hard dark blue, and above everything, black with stars showing. Low in the crystal-line rose burned a small pinkish sun, fierce, distant-looking, and cold. Nita flinched from the unsoftened sight of it, from the long, harsh shadows it laid out behind every smallest stone. She slammed the ladies' room door shut. Air kept moaning past her, through the cracks, out into the dry red wasteland. "Mars," she breathed, and terror grabbed her heart and squeezed. "She went to IMlars. . . \"
