Story Thieves (14 page)

Owen's mind raced frantically through the books. It was a huge part of their friendship, and came up at least once a book. Why couldn't he remember a single—

“The ruins of that magical school!” he shouted. “Remember? I said something like, ‘I guess school's out,' and you snorted! Okay, it's not really a laugh, but it's pretty close, and I bet you thought it was funnier than you let on.”

“You'd lose that bet,” Charm said, just as the scanner chimed. “Looks like the results are in. Move even an inch, and you get rayed.”

Owen watched her glance over the scan results, his eyes wide. Could he cast a spell? Not without the spell book, which still hadn't let go of his hand. But if he got called out as not being the real Kiel in front of everyone reading the book, it'd change the whole story, and Bethany would kill him.

Not to mention the fact that Charm might shoot him.

Charm raised her eyes from the screen. “This is interesting,” she said. “Apparently, you're allergic to peanuts.” Then she slowly lowered her ray guns. “Something's off. The
Scientific
Method
claims you're Kiel down to your core, but I'm not sure.”

Owen let out a huge breath. “But it's science, so you have to believe it. The computer said so. I'm Kiel! I'm just acting weird because of, you know, the Magister. I'm sad!”

She gave him a careful look. “The ship's never been wrong before. But I'm going to keep an eye on you. And if you keep messing up, scan or not, I'm leaving you on some deserted planet until I find the Seventh Key. There's no more time for grieving. Get it together. We've got a war to win.”

Owen dropped his hands, wanting to laugh or shout or just pump his fist in an awesome victory celebration. The scan hadn't seen through his disguise. Apparently, magic was a lot more thorough than he'd thought.

For a moment there, he'd actually been worried she was going to shoot him, and suddenly everything had seemed a lot less fun. But he had to remember that as far as the book was concerned, he really was Kiel Gnomenfoot. And that meant nothing really bad was going to happen to him. The hero always made it through.

“You did laugh at the school comment,” he told her, his heart slowing back down to normal.

“Prove it,” she told him, sitting back down in the pilot's seat. “Repairs are just about through. Are you ready to go on, or do you want to talk more about your feelings or something dumb?”

“I just miss him,” Owen told her. “The whole thing just really threw me. It'd throw anyone. Even unfeeling half robots.”

One of her hands rested on her ray gun again. “I can still shoot you, you know.”

He smiled, hoping she was kidding. “I'm sure he's still out there somewhere. Maybe in some other world, watching over us, reading about our adventures, so proud that we're saving the world.” Or maybe on his way back with Bethany and Nobody. What was taking them so long, anyway?

Charm snorted. “No one would bother reading about us. We never do anything exciting.”

“We just saved ourselves from a whole bunch of attacking spaceships!”

She shrugged, turning back to her pilot controls in midair. “I guess we have different ideas of exciting. Now, where is this Seventh Key?”

“The Magister said that we had to go somewhere called the Original Computer, and that'd tell us more about it,” Owen said.

“WHAT?” Charm said, spinning around. “No. Not the Original Computer. That's a
bad idea
.”

“Why?” Owen asked. “It can't be worse than almost getting blown up by Science Soldier ships.”

“It can, and
will
.”

Owen shook his head. “That's where the Magister said to go, and he spent the last six . . . the last year looking for even this much information.”

Charm growled in frustration. “This is
such
a bad idea. Promise me that you'll do everything I say
when
I say it while we're in there, or I leave you here. Got it?”

“Gotten,” he told her. “Why is this place so bad?”

“You'll see,” she said, then touched a panel in front of her, sliding something off of it. “Here.” She held out one finger to him. “Put this in.”

He bent forward and stared at the tip of her finger, where a tiny, almost microscopic square of metal lay. Owen touched one finger to hers, pushed down, and took the metal square up off her finger. “Um, what?
What
am I doing with it? Other than losing it?”

“Don't lose it,” she told him. “Plug it into your brain stem, and we'll get going.”

He blinked. “Into my who?”

Charm sighed. “Do I have to do everything for you? Here!” She turned him around until his back was to her, then pushed his hair up over his neck. “It's right . . . huh?”

“What's right huh?”

“You don't have a brain stem input.” She grunted. “You people are so backward.”

“Since when was I supposed to have a brain stem?”

“Brain stem
input
. And since you were born. How do you ever learn anything without just plugging it right into your brain stem for uploading?”

“It's a rough life,” he told her. “So what was that thing
supposed
to do?”

“We have to get into the Original Computer,” she told him. “And that means we need to become something that'll actually exist within it. That takes digital avatars. This chip was supposed to connect you directly to the ship's computer, which will download everything about you and spit out your avatar into the Nalwork.”

“The what?”

“It really is like talking to a child, isn't it? The Nalwork? Short for interNAL netWORK? It's what connects the citizens
of Quanterium to every computer on the planet.”

Owen gave her a confused look. “Don't you mean INTERnal NETwork? The Internet?”

“The NALWORK. It's not complicated.”

Even when she was annoyed, Owen just wanted to do things for her. Maybe clean her ray guns or give her an upgraded arm as a present or something. “Okay, the Nalwork. So how do I get in, then?”

She shrugged. “The chip's going to need to get into your brain one way or another. I guess we'll just have to do some surgery.”

Owen laughed. Charm didn't. Owen laughed again, just to see if she needed some encouragement. Apparently, that wasn't the problem. He tried one more laugh, and she slapped his face.

“NO!” he said.

“Sit down,” she told him, pushing him into one of the chair's seats. “Don't be such a baby.”

“IT'S NOT BEING A BABY TO NOT WANT YOU DOING SURGERY ON ME!”

“I won't be the one doing it,” she said, then tapped something in the air. The chair's arms spit out straps that covered Owen's wrists, then yanked them down, holding him still. He
squirmed and tried to break free, but the chair wouldn't let him so much as move.

Since when did this kind of thing happen in the Kiel Gnomenfoot books? They were kids' books! Surgery? “Charm, let me go! I don't want this! We'll figure out another way to get into the Original Computer. Like, say, use a keyboard and a monitor, like a normal person.”

“You sound like you're two thousand years old when you talk like that,” she said, then touched the air again, and his chair went shooting backward toward the wall. It slammed to a stop right before it hit, and robotic arms popped out from the wall to hold his head in place.

“I'll magic you if you don't stop!” Owen said. “
Charm!
I can turn you to gold! I'm warning you!”

“Kiel, you have my word that if this hurts, I'll try to keep a straight face,” she told him, then nodded at the robotic arms. “Do it.”

The next thirty seconds were the weirdest of Owen's life. First, a fictional spaceship held him in place to give him brain surgery. Second, somehow, he didn't actually feel a thing, not after an initial pinch in his neck, which was probably some kind of shot to numb it. Despite all his screaming, the arms
quickly released him, and he jumped up from the chair, frantically touching at his neck. “AAH!” he shouted. “There's a thingy there now!”

And there was! The ship had implanted some kind of thingy right into his neck!

“I'd hope so. That was the whole point,” Charm said. “Now we can get going.”

“That was the
worst
thing anyone's ever done to me,” Owen said, pointing a finger at her accusingly.

She smacked his finger aside. “If it is, be thankful.”

He made a face, gently touching the uploader thing on the back of his neck. “At least that's the worst part done. I guess it wasn't so bad. . . .”

“That?” Charm snorted. “That was the easy part! The worst part's coming next.” And with that, she turned him around again. She touched the tiny circuit to his neck and pushed. Something clicked. . . .

And just like that, the world turned to digital billboards, millions of glowing people, and
TRON
.

I
'm surprised that worked,” Kiel said as Bethany took his cloak and folded it up. “If the Magister hadn't been so angry, he would have felt me use magic to teleport us away. We'll have to be more careful next time.”

Bethany gritted her teeth. This jerk was a popular character? There was no way she was going to read those books now. “There's not going to be a next time,” she told him, and held out a hand for his now-empty wand-holster belt.

It'd been a huge risk, telling Kiel to use his magic to teleport them away at the last second, making it look like they'd jumped into the book. Especially since the book was a blank journal she'd found in the library. There wasn't far they could have run in all that nothing if the Magister had used the bit of Bethany's power he'd stolen to follow them. But at least the trick seemed to have bought a little time to figure out how to deal with all this.

If there
was
a way to deal with all this. UGH.

“So here's my plan,” Kiel said, now looking a bit more like a normal boy dressed in a black shirt and pants. Or at least like a normal boy dressed up like Kiel Gnomenfoot without the cloak and magic wands. “He's right. There's no way I can beat him at magic. He taught me everything I know. And he already took away the one bit of science tech-o-gee that—”

“Tech
nol
ogy.”

“That Charm gave me,” Kiel continued. “So the new plan is, we find some stockpile of ray guns or laser rifles or whatever it is you people have here. Something big and explosive and entirely made of science. Something that's been set up to specifically fight magic.”

“That doesn't exist. Not in any way.”

“You distract him with those science weapons, and I hit him with a forget spell.” He sighed. “I think that's the best option. He's not a bad person, honestly. He's just . . . angry.”

“Oh yeah? 'Cause I've got it on good authority that your teacher—”

“Magister.”

“—was planning on blowing up the science guys. Once you found the source of whatever it was.”

“The Source of Magic?” Kiel said, giving her a disbelieving stare. “He'd never do that. Who told you this?”

Bethany started to say, then shook her head. Kiel already knew way too much. “No one. I made it up. Sorry. But we're not doing any part of your plan, especially the parts that aren't possible.” She glanced around the corner, holding up a hand to stop Kiel from following just yet. No one seemed to be looking their way, so she pulled him out onto the sidewalk from the alley they'd landed in. “The
real
new plan is: We take you home immediately, I find Owen in whatever prison you two left him in, then he and I come back and figure out a way to get your teacher—”

“Magister.”

“—back home right after you,” Bethany finished. “Then you can do whatever Forget Me Not spell you want on him. But that's it. There's no way I'm letting two fictional characters—”

Kiel winced. “Isn't there another way to say that? Fictional sounds insulting.”

“. . . . Fine. Letting two
individuals
such as yourselves run around and get noticed. Do you have any idea what would happen if someone recognized you?”

“Nice Kiel Gnomenfoot costume!” said a teenage girl
walking by. “Where are your wands? You look like you could be in a movie!”

Kiel grinned and saluted her as she passed. “What's a movie?” he asked Bethany.

She sighed. “Nothing. Hopefully, they'll just think you're a fan or something. A lot of them probably come to this town, since the author guy lives here.”

“More up there a ways,” Kiel told her, pointing up toward the hills in the distance. “I did teleport us a safe distance away. Any closer and the Magister would still feel our presence.”

“So which house was Mr. Porterhouse's?” Bethany asked him. The last thing she needed was to ring doorbells and ask if there were any crazy old men throwing spells around at home.

“Jonathan Porterhouse?” said someone else walking by, a man dressed in vintage clothes with black glasses. “It's that big mansion up on the hill.” He pointed toward what looked like the biggest roof Bethany had ever seen, surrounded by trees. “It's cool, go check it out. He's got a fence up that was built to look like it was made from Science Soldier robots.”

Kiel's face lit up. “That's genius,” he said to Bethany. “Why did I never think of doing that?”

She glared at him, then turned to the stranger. “Thanks,
that's a good idea,” she said to the man in the dark glasses. “Is there anywhere around we can find his books? Like a library or a bookstore?”

“There's Untitled Books just up the street,” the man said, and pointed behind him.