“I get the point,” said Danny. “I’m attaching the gates to a point on the surface of a spinning, moving object, so there’s no reason I can’t attach it to a pebble except that the pebble is smaller.” Danny gazed steadily at the stone, trying to figure out how to attach a gate to it the way he had attached the gate to a spot in the air above the stone.

Meanwhile, Sin had a question. “How do you wizards or whatever you are, how do you know we don’t have magic?”

“Don’t talk to him, he’s making gates,” said Laurette.

“We don’t know you don’t have magic,” said Danny. “Our blood has been mixing with the rest of the human race for thousands of years, so you probably have some Mithermage ancestry.” He tried to hold the image of the stone in his mind and create a gate solely in relation to the stone, not distracted by any other surrounding feature.

“So send us to Westil,” said Sin. “Maybe we’ll come back with superpowers.”

“Yeah,” said Hal.

“Cool,” said Wheeler.

Danny’s concentration broke. He was impatient with himself, but they only saw that he was annoyed.

“Sorry,” said Laurette.

“Stop distracting him!” said Xena protectively.

“Why don’t you hold it in your hand and really focus on it?” asked Pat. “Disconnect it from the ground.”

Laurette handed him a stone. Danny took it, bent over it, stared at it, made a gate.

He moved the stone a little to the left.

The mouth of the gate moved with it.

It was that simple. Remove the pebble from its context, concentrate a little, and he had an enchanted stone.

“You look happy,” said Xena. “Does that mean you’re thinking of me naked?”

“It means he attached a gate to the stone,” said Pat. “We all try not to think of you naked.”

“So … what now?” asked Hal. “You give us each a stone to use if we need to make a quick getaway?”

“A stone’s a lousy idea,” said Laurette.

“Why?” asked Danny. He had thought it was a pretty good idea.

“First,” said Laurette, “what if we drop our stone? How could we tell which one was ours, except by brushing our hand against it and taking off like Hal just did? And then we still don’t have the stone—but maybe whoever was chasing us finds it and follows us.”

“Don’t drop the stone,” said Wheeler.

“Right, like none of us ever drops anything,” said Pat.

“Second,” said Laurette, “suppose somebody handcuffs us and searches us and finds a stone in our pockets or purses or whatever? How many people our age carry rocks around?”

“Okay,” said Danny, “Not a stone. I was just learning how to do it, and there are plenty of stones.”

“A ring,” said Sin.