Worldweavers: Spellspam (3 page)

“Typo for ‘Net’? ‘Terranet’?” Tess suggested.

“No, that’s over here, I know the icon for that. And besides, Twitterpat would not have kept an obvious misspelling on his screen. It would drive him nuts.”

Thea was staring at the icon, frowning. “It looks…like a dreamcatcher.”

Magpie shot her a startled look, but Terry was concentrating too hard to pay attention, opening directories as though he were pursuing prey.

“It’s some sort of internal network,” Terry
said. “It shows up in the network menu. But no details.”

“Can you get in?”

“
That
is probably what you need the real password for,” Terry said.

“Terry, why would anyone have left anything of value here?” Ben said. There was a real edge in his voice, close to panic. “You don’t even know what you’re looking for.”

“Oh, yes I do,” Terry said softly. “Something called the Nex, which doesn’t exist outside the local school network. Bring me the laptop case, would you, Mag? There’s a cable in there….”

Magpie obediently scurried off to fetch the case, her eyes alight with interest. Terry dug around in a side pocket until he came up with a tangled cable and dropped to his knees, heedless of the dust on the floor, peering at the back of Twitterpat’s machine. He found the socket he needed, plugged in his cable with a grunt, and surfaced again, wiping his hands on his dusty jeans.

“I’ll find out,” he said. “Give me just a few more minutes…”

“What’s that?” Magpie hissed suddenly.

“Lock,” said Tess, at the same time as Terry
whispered, “Office door! Shut the office door!”

Ben reached out and pushed the office door shut with the lightest of clicks.

“Busted,” he said mournfully.

“Damn! Just a few more minutes!” Terry said, frustrated, the other end of the cable plugged into his laptop, fingers flying on his keyboard.

“You’re all out of minutes,” said Magpie.

The office door opened as she spoke, and Assistant Principal Chen stood framed in the doorway. She stood looking at them for a moment, shaking her head. Terry was the first one to actually move, closing his eyes and letting his head fall back in frustrated defeat.

“Not good,” Mrs. Chen said. “The principal will see you now. All of you.”

It was rare to have so many students at once in the principal’s office—a couple of extra folding chairs had to be brought in. Tess sat staring at her hands; Magpie was looking thoughtful; Ben’s face hinted at a dull and persistent tooth-ache; Terry was sitting bolt upright in one of the principal’s three comfortable guest chairs, his hands gripping the armrests, his eyes glinting with a guarded defiance; and Thea sat in a second chair, suddenly very calm, her eyes resting
with a steady dignity on the two adults in the room.

Principal Harris sat hunched in his own chair, elbows on his desk, his chin balanced on his hands, staring at the miscreants; Margaret Chen stood beside the principal’s desk, one hand resting on the polished oak, looking grave.

“You do realize that this is very serious?” Mrs. Chen said.

“Under ordinary circumstances, grounds for expulsion,” John Harris said. “That classroom was out of bounds, something that should have been obvious to you by the simple fact of its being locked against student entry. Thea, you broke your word to me. Terry, I am astonished that you would hack into a school computer, let alone one that belonged to a teacher you claim to admire and respect.”

“Those are the very reasons I believed that he might have an answer for the current situation, sir,” Terry said.

“You hacked into a staff member’s computer,” Principal Harris said. “What could you have been hoping to find?”

“I needed to talk to my father,” Thea said, at almost the same moment.

The principal favored Terry with a long glare, and turned to Thea. “Did it not occur to you to come to me first, Thea?” he asked. “Or even to try telephoning your father?”

“There was no time,” Thea said, “and the phone…I couldn’t do that. It might not have been safe.”

The principal and Mrs. Chen exchanged a glance.

“Very well,” said the principal. “You may explain. I take it this is all connected with what happened earlier to LaTasha Jackson?”

“I was there,” Thea said. “I saw what happened. And I saw the message on her computer….”

She was watching both the principal and Mrs. Chen as she related the events she had witnessed in the library, and although both paid attention to what she was saying and both wore expressions of concern, neither appeared particularly surprised. Thea had expected surprise, even shock. But they were reacting as though—

“But you already knew all this,” Thea suddenly said, breaking off her account, and staring at the principal. “Did you…did you think it was
me
?”

“And your aunt said that she thinks she had
received some of this…this spellspam…herself?” the principal said, giving no indication that the sudden shift had in any way disconcerted him.

“The ‘free gift’ thing. Yes.”

“Margaret,” the principal said after a brief pause, turning to Mrs. Chen in a way that briefly excluded the five students, “our perimeter has been breached.”

“I know,” Mrs. Chen said in a low voice. “I have already spoken to the nurse, but all she could do was to give LaTasha a sedative until the effect wears off.”

The principal paused for a moment. “Have we isolated what was involved?”

“All I know right now is that it’s a very simple spell. It will wear off,” Mrs. Chen said. “From what I can tell, it’s likely a twenty-four-hour thing. Like the flu. It’s already starting to fade. The worst aspect of this is that there were so many witnesses. That will be a problem.”

“It’s a symptom,” the principal said. “But we have a far larger problem on our hands.”

Terry looked up sharply, opened his mouth, shut it, and glanced over at his sister.

As before, she completed his thought, and said
it out loud for him—because he couldn’t. It was a word with magic in it. It would have choked him.

“
You
got a spellspam?” Tess said slowly, with Terry watching the principal’s expression through narrowed eyes.

Thea couldn’t help a startled look at the twins. That offhand word of hers had certainly gathered currency in a hurry.

“That’s a symptom, too—but for the record, yes, I did,” the principal said. “But that isn’t even the worst of it….”

He crossed the room again and stood at the window, staring out at the rainy afternoon, his right hand closed around his left wrist on his back, the fingers on his left hand drumming the air in a manner which suddenly reminded Thea painfully of Twitterpat.

“I’ve shut down the Nexus,” the principal said at last.

Thea suddenly looked up and caught Terry’s eye. Nexus.
Nex
. The strange icon on Twitterpat’s computer.

Terry dropped his eyes, his fingers clenching over his knees. “You reacted to it. You shut down the computer; you’ve just let them know that
they got a hit,” he said faintly. “You’ve opened a vulnerability—if you’d realized what was happening, if you’d set up a filter in time…”

The principal was staring at Terry, his expression slowly changing from astonishment to something very different.

“John,
no
!” Margaret Chen whispered. “They are
children
! You can’t…!”

T
HE PRINCIPAL DID NOT
show them the Nexus. Not then. He muttered something about too much curiosity and impatience having gotten the five of them into trouble in the first place, and abruptly dismissed them.

Thea hesitated at the door of the principal’s office as they all filed out. “Just before we left…I couldn’t hear it all, but my father said something about sending help,” she said.

“He might, and I will make contact with him on my own terms,” the principal said sternly. “But, Thea, this must stop. You have an extraordinary and hard-to-control gift, and until things settle down, I would very much like to
trust you out of my sight. There is far more riding on this than any of you can possibly realize.”

Thea flushed, hanging her head. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t forget what I said. I am actually giving you
permission
to lie about what went on in this office. Use the privilege well. Terry…and Tess…I would like a word with you, please. The rest of you may go. Margaret, would you make sure that the situation in the halls is under control?”

Margaret Chen knew that she was being dismissed along with the students, and her eyes flashed with something that was suddenly dangerous, a light that changed her face and made Thea see the mage that Margaret had once been. Before she came to the Academy. Before she “retired.”

She shook her head, once, decisively, and turned to Thea, Magpie, and Ben. “You three…you heard the principal,” she said, and her voice was brittle and hard-edged, like broken glass. “Stay quiet and stay out of trouble. I will check in on you later. John…if you insist on doing this, I stay.”

“Very well,” said the principal.

Thea, Magpie, and Ben knew better than
to ask questions, given the expression on Mrs. Chen’s face. They filed out of the office, with the door closing softly but firmly behind them, and then out of the administrative building, pausing on the top of the five shallow stairs that led down to the graveled path.

“Well,” Ben breathed. “Who knew what a hornet’s nest we’d kick over?”

“You did,” Magpie said. “Or at least you kept on saying so, back in the computer lab. Well, you were right about the hornet’s nest—but
we
didn’t kick it over. It’s this whole spellspam thing.” She snorted, pushing her hair back behind her ears, glancing back into the building. “What do you suppose he wants with Terry and Tess? And what’s this Nex—”

Thea flung out a hand. “Walls. Ears.”

“Oh,” said Magpie. “Right.”

“The skunk hospital. Tonight,” Thea said.

“You think they’ll let us wander around at night, with all this going on?” Ben said, sounding genuinely appalled. “And what’s a skunk hospital, anyway? I wouldn’t be surprised if they locked down the—”

“Doing your laundry late at night means there aren’t any crowds,” Thea said innocently,
and was rewarded by a sudden irrepressible grin from Magpie and a stubbornly skeptical look from Ben. “We’d better go,” she said, glancing around, “or they
will
be coming after us.”

“But he said not to talk…”

“Not to other
people
,” Thea said, tossing the words over her shoulder as she skipped down the stone steps, followed by Magpie. A couple of passing students had stopped to stare, and Thea paused to turn her head briefly, glancing back at Ben. “You’d better get moving,” she said, “before the audience gets any bigger.”

“You’re impossible,” Ben muttered.

“So they all seem to think,” Thea said agreeably. “See you later, then.”

“Ben was right, you know,” Magpie whispered to Thea. The halls of the residence were quiet and deserted; once they froze at a sudden muffled noise before realizing it was only someone listening to music after lights-out. “Chen will come checking. Particularly you and me.”

“They might be fooled,” Thea said. They had left rolls of sweaters and spare blankets tucked under their bedclothes, with the fringe of a black silk shawl spread upon Magpie’s pillow to
impersonate her hair.

“Not for long,” Magpie said. “Thea, couldn’t we have talked about this tomorrow…? Like…in daylight? Somewhere
warm
?”

“Where? A place where we can’t be overheard…?”

“We could always break into a classroom again,” Magpie said, her teeth flashing white in the shadowed stairwell.

“Quiet!” Thea said, flattening them both against the wall. They held their breath, but there was silence, and Magpie finally turned her head a fraction.

“What?”
she demanded.

“Nothing. Thought I heard a noise. Come on.”

At first, the back door leading out of the laundry area would not open. It gave suddenly with a muffled crack that made both Thea and Magpie jump. But nobody came to investigate, and they slipped outside onto the small concrete porch.

“Ew,” Magpie said. “It’s raining.”

They both uttered small, smothered shrieks as another shivering figure stepped out of the shadows and joined them on the concrete.

“Where
were
you?” Tess demanded waspishly. “I had to actually bribe my roommate to shut up,
and then you guys show up
late—
”

“We’re not late,” Thea said. “Do the guys know exactly where…?”

“I told Terry,” Tess said. “He’ll bring Ben. Now come
on
, already.”

They all wore hooded parkas, and on Tess’s word, they pulled the hoods low over their eyes and raced off across the lawn into the wooded area beside the residence hall. They reached the gardening shed without incident.

Magpie inched open the door, and they slipped inside; Thea brought up the rear and pulled the door shut behind her.

In the darkness, someone sneezed loudly.

“Ow! Watch it!” said someone else.

“Hey, that wasn’t me,” Tess said, flicking on her light.

“That was me,” Ben said, sniffling, his nose wrinkled up in anticipation of another sneeze.

“Do you smell something interesting?” Thea asked, remembering Ben’s predilection to sneeze in the presence of magic.

“Not that I can tell,” Ben said. “My hair is wet,” he added after a moment, as though further explanation was required. “I catch cold easily when my head gets wet.”

“Terry?” Tess said. “You there?”

A shadow detached itself from the far wall. “All present and accounted for, I think,” Terry said, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his parka. “The war council can begin.”

“You guys first,” Thea said. “What did the principal want with you?”

“I’ll talk,” Tess said. “Thea, this is far more dangerous for Terry than you realize.”

“I know,” Thea whispered. “The allergy…Terry can’t actually say anything, can he? Even that
spellspam
word I just made up. It’s got magic in it, and it would stick in Terry’s throat like a fish bone. If the principal wanted to talk to Terry about spellspam, then he had to talk to
you
, Tess.”

“He could have written things down…couldn’t he?” Magpie said.

“That could get old real fast,” Ben said. “The thing is, he
can
talk about the computer stuff, and that’s what the principal really wanted to talk about.”

“But it’s risky,” Thea said slowly. “That’s why Mrs. Chen insisted on staying. If anything happened, she could at least try and reverse it, right there. Mage First Class.”

“Retired,” Magpie said. “So she keeps on saying.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Thea said. “I’m not sure about a lot of things anymore. So—then—what’s this Nexus thing?”

“That’s what he wanted to talk to me about,” Terry said. “That’s what this whole place is about.
Really
about.”

“The school?” Magpie said. “I thought the idea was to educate magidims like us for somehow making a living in a magic-run world.”

“Except that it turns out we aren’t all ’dims,” Tess said, “and that the teachers are far more than meets the eye.”

“They did take rather a lot of them from here, when the Nothing came,” Ben said. “I thought that was odd. Nobody said anything other than that it was a magical threat, and yet the people they kept on sending to face it were all from a school without magic….”

“Firewalls within firewalls,” Thea murmured.

“What?” Terry said, his head whipping around to face her.

“I had to come clean to my parents, after the Nothing,” Thea said. “I was afraid they’d never
let me back here—the Academy was supposedly the one place where magic was not supposed to be able to enter—and there I was…but Mrs. Chen said something odd…”

“About this place?” Magpie asked.

Thea nodded. “Protection always has two sides, she said. What is warded against a thing may also be warded to keep that same thing safe. She said…that the safest place to hide anything is right behind a mirror.” She grinned suddenly, and shot Magpie a quicksilver grin. “She knows all about your animal hospital, by the way, Mag.”

“What?” Magpie roused, distracted. “I was
so
careful. She couldn’t—”

“She said it was her hall, and she knew about everything that went on in there,” Thea said.

“Hey,” Ben said, sounding a little aggrieved, “we didn’t come here to talk about Magpie’s skunks.”

“Firewalls,” Terry murmured. “They were hiding the truth behind that mirror all the time.
We
, the students, are a firewall. The ’dims. Who would look for the heart of magic in a place where magic is forbidden by decree…?”

It appeared as though he had simply petered
out, but Tess turned with sudden, frightened speed.
“Dammit!”
she said. “I knew this would happen!”

“What?” Ben said, startled, as Tess reached for the collar on her brother’s shirt, scrabbling desperately for something underneath.

“What can we do to help?” Thea said, stepping closer, helpless, watching Terry’s mouth open and close and realizing that no air was getting through at all.

“He has the emergency antidote,” Tess said, fishing out a small vial and unstopping it with frantic speed. “Terry, swallow,
now
!”

The vial contained no more than a mouthful of liquid. For a ghastly moment they all thought that it had come too late, but Terry suddenly drew a gasping breath and sagged against his sister, gulping down air, his eyes streaming.

“I’m sorry,” Thea said. “I should have woven us a safety net…I should have
thought
—”

“You could have woven us a safe place where nobody would overhear, tomorrow, in the daylight, too,” Magpie said. “And we would have had someone to call if he needed help.”

“You okay?” Tess said, her arm around her brother’s shoulders.

He straightened, his breathing still a little ragged. “Fine,” he said, his voice oddly hoarse. “I’m fine. Thanks, Tess. You can let go now. Really. I won’t keel over. What were we talking about…?”

“Probably not something we should go back to discussing,” Ben murmured.

“So what
did
the principal want?” Magpie asked. “If you can talk about it…?”

“I can, it’s indirect,” Terry said. “You heard him mention this Nexus….”

“I’d better,” Tess said, not looking entirely convinced that Terry was back to normal. “We don’t have another dose of the antidote handy. We’d better make sure you have more than the usual emergency supply, Terry. Under the circumstances. But about the Nexus…you know what computers are to the users of magic. Storage. Archives. The Nexus is a level above that, a supercomputer. It’s hidden right here, at the school. Twitterpat maintained it. After he was gone, it was the principal himself who worked on it, pending the authorities sending him a replacement for Twitterpat. The principal said he’s rejected at least two candidates since Twitterpat was lost. And it gets harder and harder for
him to do it himself because he doesn’t have the training to do it long-term.”

“They should offer you the job, Terry,” Magpie said with a grin.

“They…kind of…did,” Terry said faintly.

Thea, now perched uncomfortably on the other side of the wheelbarrow from Ben, sat up sharply. “They what?”

“I’m a natural,” Terry said. It was said with no smugness, very matter-of-factly. “I’m already here, so they can stop looking for someone with a good cover story; I would have no teaching obligations to distract me….”

“Just graduating high school,” Thea said. “Piece of cake.”

“It
is
,” Terry said, flashing her a quick grin. “And then there’s the other beneficial side effect.”

“Such as?” Magpie said.

“We’re a political family,” Tess said. “Mom works at the Federal Bureau of Magic, and Uncle Kevin
runs
it, and apparently their stamp of approval is required on any candidate who the principal decides is good enough to consider for this job. And besides, they wouldn’t even have to administer an oath of confidentiality—he can’t
talk about this to anybody, not in any meaningful way, not without endangering his life. It turns out that this wretched allergy of his is extremely convenient, didn’t it?”

“And besides…,” Terry said.

They all turned to him.

“It would seem that Twitterpat had me in mind all along,” Terry said. “Apparently he spoke to the principal about me. About this.”

“But what happens during summer holidays? When you graduate? When you leave here? If you go to college…if you get a job somewhere?” Ben said.

“Logistics,” Terry said. “Besides, I’ll already
have
a job.”

“But Terry…” Thea hadn’t taken her eyes off Terry’s face. “How useful are you if someone always has to be there as backup, just in case you forget yourself and start saying some word that has a magical underlay? What would happen if you were alone and you did that?”

“I told you it was dangerous,” Tess said. “I’m scared.”

“Are you supposed to be with him whenever he’s working on this Nexus thing?” Thea asked. “Because then it’s
both
of you who are bound
by it. Is it that essential, that it needs to swallow two lives?”

“Has he shown you the actual Nexus?” Ben asked.

“No,” Terry said. “And you’re right, Thea. It would mean supervisory duty for someone, constantly, all the time. It’ll always be a sword hanging over my head.”