Story Thieves (17 page)

Charm got to her feet before Owen did, then leaned down and yanked him up with her robot arm so hard he actually flew for a moment. “We're here,” she said. “The Original Computer.” She made a face. “It even smells out of date.”

Owen sniffed loudly and nodded. There
was
an odd sort of sour-milk odor, weirdly.

“See all these?” Charm said, pointing at the zeroes and ones. “Can you believe computers ever actually ran like this? Binary? I mean, c'mon. We're up to centidecimal at this point in modern computers.” She frowned at the streams of ones and zeroes. “It's like visiting prehistoric times.”

Owen glanced around, seeing nothing but numbers. “So how do we find the location of the Seventh Key in all of this?”

“These numbers here don't mention anything about it,” Charm told him, glancing around. “We could use an interface, but I don't see one anywhere. There should be one farther in, though. Come on.”

With that, she led Owen off into the stream of ones and zeros, parting it like a curtain.

“What
are
these numbers, anyway?” he asked, dipping his hand into a bunch of zeroes. They felt cold to the touch, kind of like water, only less wet. Which was really all water was, but still. He reached for a one, then yanked his hand back as a tiny jolt zapped him.

“Ones and zeros are actually all a computer understands, at its core,” she told him as they walked. “They're not even that, one or zero. It's actually just a different way of saying ‘on' and ‘off.' ‘On' means there's electricity, and ‘off' means there isn't. Everything else here is built off of those two ideas. On, off, one, zero. Get it?”

“So don't touch the ones,” Owen said, and stuck his hand into another stream of zeroes, letting them flow over his hand. It actually felt kind of relaxing.

“Be careful,” Charm told him, pointing at a different flow of numbers that looked exactly the same as the one he was
touching. “That's the Original Computer's avatar software over there. Touch it, and you'll glitch us right into nonexisting.”

“It looks exactly the same,” he said, glancing between them quickly to see any difference.

Charm snorted. “So read the numbers before you touch them. Quanterian children learn to read binary in primary school.”

Owen rolled his eyes. “Who cares if I
did
touch those specific numbers, the avatar software? What's the worst that could happen? We stop existing here and end up back in the ship?”

“I have no idea,” Charm said. “But that's definitely not the worst that could happen. Enough of this. We're running out of time. Dr. Verity's armies are going to attack Magisteria in less than twenty-four hours, and we still don't even have the Seventh Key. I'm going to hack my own user interface, or we'll be here all day.”

“Hack?”

She pulled something out of her glowing pocket and dropped it to the ground. The object instantly expanded into what looked like a desk, a chair, and a keyboard. She sat down and immediately began typing, and the air in front of her lit up like a computer screen. “One second,” she said. “I have to make sure we're hidden.”

“Hidden?” Owen asked, feeling like an idiot with all his questions. Though that's what Kiel always did whenever they were in Quanterium, so at least he was playing his role correctly.

“Hacking sets off alarms,” Charm said, then nodded. Owen turned around to find a wall rising up to just about eye level in a wide circle around them. “There, I've set up a firewall. We should be safe now.”

Owen touched the top of the maybe four-foot-tall wall in front of him. “Uh, really? This is hiding us?”

“Things don't work by sight here,” Charm said. “Now stop talking.”

“You need quiet?” Owen asked, looking out over the firewall. Something fluttered in the streams of ones and zeroes, and Owen stood up on his digital toes to get a better look.

“No, your voice just irritates me.”

Fair enough. He glanced around at the number streams, but the flutter seemed to have disappeared.

“This is odd,” Charm told him, typing away. “Yes, it's the very first computer. But there's history in here that goes back further than anything I've ever seen. Almost to the very beginning.” Her eyebrows raised. “What? This isn't right. It says that magicians originally came from Quanterium.”

Something caught Owen's eye far to the left, and he circled around. “Who cares? Concentrate on the key.”

“It says that there used to just be one planet,” she said. “Not two. That's plainly false. Are all computers just failing on me today?”

“Planets don't just pop into existence,” Owen agreed, slowly moving around the wall. What was out there?

“Unless you magicians did something unnatural again,” Charm said. “It can't be right, though. Magicians never lived here. Magic and science together? They'd have killed each other. Trust me, I think about that every day I'm with you.”

Owen grinned, throwing her a look. Magic and science working together
was
sort of the entire point of the Kiel Gnomenfoot books. She didn't notice his look, though, and kept typing.

“Here, something about the Source of Magic. It says the first magic-user and the president of Quanterium jointly locked it away in the Vault of Containment. They each made three keys to lock the door, then together formed a Seventh Key, to ensure that neither scientist nor magician could separately open the door.”

“So what'd they do with it?” Something flickered in the corner of Owen's eye again, and he turned back to the firewall.
“Charm, I think I saw something,” he said, his eyes locked on the spot.

“Good for you,” Charm told him without looking up. “There's lots more about the first six keys. That's useless. We have those.”

Something glitched in a different stream, and Owen shook his head. “Seriously, come look!”

She growled in frustration, then stood up and leaned forward to look over the wall. “You know what I see? You wasting my time.”

“There,” he said, pointing at a new glitch. “Did you see that?”

Charm squinted, then stepped back, her hands on her ray guns. Without a word, she ran back to her computer and typed something in, then turned back to the wall. “All right, this isn't good,” she said quietly. “If they are what I think they are, then the command I just typed in will make them reveal themselves.”

Owen pushed himself up to his tiptoes and looked out, expecting to see streams of numbers.

Instead, the numbers glitched into what looked like old, clunkier versions of Science Soldier robots. And they extended as far as the eye could see.

“Um?” he said.

“The alarm couldn't have worked so fast,” Charm said, backing into her computer, then sitting down and typing frantically. “And the security systems didn't follow us this soon either. The soldiers must have been left here as a trap, to protect the location of the Seventh Key.”

“Why aren't they shooting?” Owen asked as the now-visible robots began to silently march forward toward the firewall from every direction around them.

“They're not actually robots, any more than you're a real person in here,” Charm told him, not looking up as she typed. “They're viruses.”

Computer viruses that looked like robots? Awesome! “Those just affect computers, though, right?” Not that he was scared or anything, but the robots
were
pretty big.

“Right now, you
are
a computer,” she said. “These viruses infect by touch. Here you're just as digital as they are, so they'll overwrite whatever data they find.”

Owen sighed in relief. “So then we'll just get sent back to the ship or something. That's not so bad.”

“You don't get it,” Charm told him, her voice more panicked than he'd ever heard it before. “What do you think happens if they overwrite your brain here, Kiel? It'll get uploaded back
into your head that way, as the robot virus. So anything in your brain—if there
is
anything in your brain—gets written over until the virus is all that's left.”

Owen swallowed hard. This book was turning out to be
much
darker than the last few. “At least we're safe behind this firewall,” Owen told her. “Right?”

The first robot virus reached the firewall and extended a hand to touch it. The entire wall trembled like a leaf in the wind.

Charm's forehead furrowed. “Of course.”

Owen let out a huge breath and smiled.

“We're completely safe until the wall falls, which won't be for at least a minute, maybe two,” Charm continued. “Now, what did I say about you talking?”

B
ethany walked Kiel up to the front gate of Jonathan Porterhouse's mansion, her shoulder under his arm. The boy magician dragged his feet with every step, and his eyes had glazed over at some point, probably when he'd decided to stop casting his forget spell on individuals and to just do one big spell for the entire town.

From the outside, the mansion looked even nicer than it had from within. As promised, a silver fence surrounded the building, designed to look as if it'd been made from discarded robot parts. Mostly just arms and legs, but every few feet a head would pop up, like a warning to any robot thieves.

“We're here,” Bethany told him, and laid him down gently on the ground.

“Science Soldiers,”
Kiel said, pointing at the fence, still a
bit unfocused. “Serves them right, becoming a fence. I hate those things.”

“Not surprising, if they wanted to kill you,” Bethany told him, trying not to grit her teeth. Yes, the tower was invisible, and yes, they'd dodged a bullet with the townspeople forgetting they'd seen it to begin with, but the tower was still there, and the Magister was still doing . . . whatever it was that he was doing. They'd started hearing some kind of odd roaring noise as they'd gotten closer, at which point Bethany had panicked, stopped letting Kiel walk on his own, and basically half carried him the rest of the way.

Making a tower invisible was one thing, but she doubted there was an equivalent spell for making loud roars disappear.

“Wait, who are you again?” Kiel asked her from the ground. “So sleepy!”

“You're hilarious,” she told him, then gestured at the gate. “Can you magic this open?”

Kiel groaned loudly. “Are you joking! Just push on it or something! I've never been this completely drained before. What is
wrong
with your world, anyway? Why is magic so tiring here?”

“The real world doesn't like when people do impossible
things,” Bethany said as she tried the gate. It didn't budge—completely locked up. That made sense, given how many fans probably came by to see the house. “Nope, no go. Your turn.”

“So very evil,” Kiel said, and flopped over onto his stomach, then slowly pushed himself to his feet. “Can't you just pop the fence into a book or something? I seem to be doing all the heavy lifting around here.”

“Please just hurry,” Bethany told him, shifting from foot to foot. Another roar, and her heart jumped. “Seriously, Kiel, they can hear that down in town. Whatever the Magister is doing, we need to stop him!”

“Story of my life,” Kiel said, then put his hands on the gate, groaning as he touched the metal. “You have no idea how much I hate using magic on science. It makes my stomach hurt.” He closed his eyes, leaning most of his weight onto the fence, then mumbled a spell.

The gate began to glow a bright red, then slowly creaked open, Kiel stumbling with it. Bethany quickly pushed past him, then grabbed his shirt and yanked him inside too, kicking the gate closed behind her. “C'mon!” she yelled, pulling on his arm.

He just glared at her, too tired to even speak at this point.
But at least he shuffled forward, letting her drag him to where she remembered the tower had been.

As they reached the base and passed through Kiel's invisibility spell, Bethany's stomach dropped again. The tower was just so huge! Even if they brought the Magister and Kiel back into his book, how would she explain
this
? “How long do your spells last?” she asked Kiel.

“Just until I fall asleep,” he said.

She immediately slapped him, and his eyes flew open. “HEY!” he yelled.

“Don't fall asleep!” she hissed. “What about the forget spells? Are those going to go away too?”

“No, those are more of a permanent . . . thing,” he told her. “Effect. Whatever you want to call it. This not-seeing spell is . . . it's changing what people's . . . their eyes see, and—”

She slapped him again.

“STOP IT!” he yelled. “I'm awake!”

“You didn't sound it,” she whispered. “Now be quiet. The Magister might hear us!”

A roar so loud that it hurt Bethany's ears echoed through the entire tower, and Kiel glared at her. “Really? You think he's going to hear us over
that 
?”

“What is that?” she asked him, her voice shaking as badly as the rest of her.

“Sounded a bit like a dragon,” Kiel told her, then shrugged.

“A DRAGON?”

Kiel took a step back and glanced up at the tower. “Oh, yeah!” he said, pointing. “See? It's right there!”

Bethany's eyes widened, and she stepped back too. There, at the very top of the tower, two red, reptilian eyes glowed down.

Then, even worse, a second pair of eyes, these golden but just as reptilian, blinked on the ground to their right.

“Uh-oh,” Kiel said quietly. He stepped backward, grabbing Bethany's shirt and pulling her with him. “Maybe we should, uh, back up a few feet.”

“Tell me you've fought dragons before,” Bethany whispered to him.