Story Thieves (18 page)

“Of course I have!” he said indignantly. “I'm Kiel Gnomenfoot, hero to your people! I've handled . . . well,
a
dragon before. Not ever two at once, but how hard can it be? Twice as hard? Three times? One of those.” He stepped forward, then sort of swooned. “Whoa, how are the dragons making the ground spin? The fiends!”

The dragon on top of the tower spread its wings wide and
expelled a huge spout of fire straight into the sky, while the dragon at the bottom of the tower slinked out into the sunlight, its eyes focused on Kiel.

Wait a second. These weren't just some random dragons, created from magic. These were dragons from
books  
! The golden one on the ground looked like the Dragon King from
Dimension of the Dragons
while the other had to be an Albino Red from
The Mystery of the Missing Dragon Tamer.

This wasn't the Magister using magic. This was the Magister using
her
power to free other fictional creatures!

“This is
so
bad,” Bethany whispered, backing away from the golden Dragon King as it shuffled toward them on its sixteen feet. “He's releasing fictional—”

“Don't call them that,” Kiel pointed out automatically.

“He's releasing
fictional monsters
into the world!” Bethany screamed. “And I don't have any books to throw them back into!”

“Psh,” Kiel said, turning to look at her. “Let me handle this. You just sit back and pretend you're reading a real, live Kiel Gnomenfoot book, while I go do the hard stuff.”

The ground shook again, just like it had when the tower appeared, and the tower's front doors exploded open. Then a
hand the size of a small car pushed its way out of the tower.

“Hmm, is that a giant?” Kiel asked. “That adds a little difficulty, but nothing I can't—”

Little red eyes flashed all over the tower, crawling from every window. For a second the sunlight on the silver lines in the tower blinded Bethany, but it quickly cleared, revealing the outside of the tower covered in tiny goblins made almost entirely out of teeth.

“Oh, and now there are . . . those things,” Kiel said. “Okay, I
may
not have this.”

And that's when the golden Dragon King snapped out, grabbed Kiel's cloak in its teeth, and swallowed him whole.

I
sn't this where you'd normally say some inane comment meant to be funny?” Charm asked as the hordes of robotic computer viruses began to pick away at the firewall.

It was, wasn't it? But somehow the idea of having his brain overwritten by robots made everything seem less fun. “I don't know,” he said. “I guess it just doesn't seem like a laughing moment.”

Charm actually turned to look at him. “Whatever's wrong with you, I hope it stays that way.”

Ugh, he kept forgetting to act more Kiel-like. Why was he so worried about the robot viruses, anyway? There was no way they'd be in serious danger, not at this point in the story. They had to make it through to the end, after all. These robot viruses were just an empty threat designed to make it
look
like they were in danger, probably until the very last moment when
Charm would come up with something and save them.

That thought made Owen feel a bit better, and he gave the marching horde a condescending look. Stupid robot viruses.
Nice try.

“Why don't we just search our way out of this or something?” Owen asked, feeling a bit better but still preferring to be back on the ship as soon as possible. “Use those tubes to escape?”

“The Original Computer is way too old for that,” she said, throwing a look over her shoulder at the robots staring at her from the top of the wall. “We have to go out the way we came in. That's the only input
or
output.”

Owen turned back to the firewall. “We're not going anywhere without taking out a
lot
of robots.” In fact, were there even more than before? And less of the ones and zeros. “Hey, I think they might be multiplying.”

“Of course they are,” Charm snapped. “They're taking over the computer. Should only be a matter of time before everything in here is the virus. That's why I need you to
be quiet
for the foreseeable future, if I'm going to find the Seventh Key's location before it's overwritten.”

As Owen watched, a few robots touched one of the remaining
streams of ones and zeroes, and the stream sort of blipped, then glitched into an exact copy of the robot.

“Why is this taking so long?” Charm shouted. “There shouldn't even
be
this much memory in the computer!”

“I could start attacking them or something,” Owen said, looking around inside the firewall for a computer rock or something to throw.

“No weapons,” Charm said. “In here, all a ray gun will do is connect you to it, giving it a way to overwrite you. The only thing that'd work on those viruses is an antivirus program, and I didn't bring that kind of gun. The firewall's the only protection we have.”

The wall shook harder, all the way up from the foundation. Charm glanced over her shoulder and frowned.

All this wall shaking made Owen less confident in his whole
we're fine, the book won't kill us this early
theory. “Can't you make another firewall or something?” he said, backing away a bit. “Before this one falls down?”

“I could, if you want me to lose the Seventh Key's location forever,” Charm said, typing frantically.

“Yeah, but we're not going to be able to use that if they overwrite our brains, right?”

No,
stop
. That wasn't going to happen. They were going to be fine! Owen repeated this to himself over and over, before a completely out of nowhere idea derailed his train of thought.

What if because he wasn't
actually
Kiel, Owen had done something just slightly . . . different? And that slight difference ended up throwing the entire plot off, meaning he and Charm were going to suffer some kind of horrific, awful, grotesque death that was never meant to happen in the story?

No.
No.
That couldn't happen. Jonathan Porterhouse would never put them in a situation that they couldn't get out of.

That
Kiel
couldn't get out of.

Uh-oh.

“We need to get out of here, Charm,” Owen said, backing away from the shaking firewall. “They're going to break through any second. I
really
don't want to be a robot.”

“So
do
something,” Charm said. “Cast a spell and distract them.”

“I don't have my spell book!”

“MAKE ONE!”

“MAKE—?” Owen shouted, then stopped midyell. Make
one? Could he? He concentrated on his hand, thinking about a spell book instead of a notebook, and . . .

And a tablet appeared in his hand with the words spell e-book scrolling across the screen.

Wow, seriously?

Still, any port in a stormy sea, or whatever that phrase was. He swiped the screen on, then paged through the spell e-book.
I need something that will work on a virus,
he thought at it.

Nothing appeared.

Ugh. What was the problem now? This spell book hadn't existed long enough to hate him. He quickly swiped through spell after spell, finally stopping on a Balls of Flame page. Good enough. He tapped the screen, feeling that warm glow he'd felt the very first time he'd learned a spell, then quickly cast a fireball right at the viruses over the firewall.

The robots glitched as the fireball passed through them, then immediately cleared up and began their infection of the firewall again.

“Magic isn't
working 
!” Owen shouted at Charm.

“It's a digital realm!” she shouted back. “Find something that'll work
here 
!”

“Like what?”
Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic.
It was going to be fine! Next spell . . . nope. Not that one either. Or that one . . . wait. “Frozen in Time?” he asked Charm.

“You want to stop the robots in time? We still can't touch them, and since they're everywhere, that doesn't really help us escape!”

“That's the best I'm finding!” Owen yelled, frantically flicking through spell after spell.

“GOT IT,” Charm shouted, and shoved her palm in his face. There, inside her hand was a glowing light. “It's right there, downloaded to my avatar: the last known location of the very first magician, the one who created the magic keys. All we need to do is upload this to the
Scientific Method
, and we'll be one step away from the Seventh Key.”

“Great?” Owen said. “That's helpful if we ever get out of here!”

“Let me see if I can program something,” Charm said, sitting back down, only to jump to her feet as the computer glitched, morphing into one of the robot viruses. “Kiel, they're in!”

Owen grabbed her arm and yanked her away from the robot, back toward the wall. The robot marched toward them, its hand outstretched. They tried to keep away from it by circling around the firewall, but there wasn't that much room inside the wall to begin with.

“There has to be something else that works on them, other than antivirus ray guns!” Owen shouted at Charm.

“They don't have any kind of physical presence in here. They're just lines of code,” Charm said, her fists held out in front of her like she might punch the robot. “Even the firewall is really just dead space to keep the code from passing over it.”

There had to be something. If they really were viruses, maybe a healing spell? He quickly found one, then cast it at the robots. Each one glitched for a second, then grew a foot taller.

“This is the worst you've ever been at magic!” Charm shouted at him. “When did you get so bad?”

“I'm doing my best!”

Computers! There had to be something else about computers, something that maybe Kiel wouldn't know, but who cared? Right now, he'd use anything he could get! “What was that you said about memory?” Owen asked, the robot inside the firewall getting closer and closer with every circle. “Computers need that to run things, right? The memory's where the programs actually run?”

Charm snorted. “How'd you know that?”

“You probably told me before. Who cares! It's true, isn't it?”

“It's a bit more complicated—”

“So that's a yes. I've got an idea.” He flipped quickly through the spell e-book until he found the spell he was looking for. “Okay, this is a horrible idea, but I'm desperate. The internal logic of this place might finally work
for
us.”

“What spell are you casting?”

Bits of the firewall began to crash in around them. The robot inside stopped, laid a hand on the wall, and began infecting it from the inside. The wall immediately began to glitch out of existence.

“Amnesty of Amnesia,” Owen said with a wince, holding up the spell e-book to show her. “A forget spell.”

Charm just stared at him.

“It's magic, it'll work!” he said. “Magic is about doing the impossible. And right now, if those programs need memory to run, then let's take that memory away!”

“There are
so many
logical issues with what you're saying right now that I don't even know where to—”

The firewall glitched completely, crumbling away into nothingness. Now unstoppable, the Science Soldier robot viruses advanced, marching in unison right at them.

“Cast it!” Charm shouted, backing into him.

Owen quickly absorbed the spell as the robots advanced. The magic filled his body, warming him from his hair to his
toes, then exploded outward, filling the entire universe of the computer.

The robots didn't stop.

“It didn't
work
!” Charm shouted.

“Give it a second!”

“We don't
have
a second!”

The nearest robots extended their arms, their hands just inches from Owen and Charm.

This was not how Owen wanted to die. In fact, he didn't want to die at
all
. But definitely not in a book somewhere, being brain-erased by robots. He'd much rather die from having too much money and too big a house a thousand years in the future.

“It can't end this way,” Charm said. “I won't accept it. No robot is taking over my body, and Dr. Verity is
not
going to win.” She gritted her teeth so hard, veins popped in her digital head. And then she stepped in front of him, her eyes shut, her arms stretched out.

“Stay behind me, Kiel!” Charm shouted. “The viruses overwriting my brain should buy you an extra ten seconds or so. Use them!”

“NO!” Owen shouted.

The nearest robot's hand reached out to grab Charm, and she flinched, closing her eyes.

Which meant she didn't see all the robots glitch out of existence, one by one.

When the last one had disappeared, Owen reached out and tapped Charm so she'd open her eyes. As soon as he touched her, she punched him with her robot arm, sending him flying.

“OW!” he screamed in pain, and her eyes opened.

“Wait,” she said. “That was you? What happened?”

Owen started to say something, then just pointed up at the huge hundred-foot-high letters in the black-and-green sky, blinking like a digital clock after the power went out.

“ERROR,” they said. “OUT OF MEMORY.”

K
iel?” Bethany said blankly, her mind refusing to work.

That hadn't just happened. A fictional dragon from
Dimension of the Dragons
hadn't just swallowed Kiel Gnomenfoot. Fictional dragons didn't eat fictional heroes from fictional books, not in the real world. Not even in fictional books, because heroes were main characters, and that kind of thing just didn't happen to main characters!