Saving Thanehaven (17 page)

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen ’em.” The man gives a distracted nod. “They haven’t been through here, but I picked ’em up on surveillance a couple of times.” Before anyone can ask him what
that’s
supposed to mean, he turns to Lorellina. “I’m going to patch this,” he informs her. “If you want, you can check out my CCTV screens back at the booth. You might be able to find your pals on those.”

“But—”

“I’ll be with you in a minute. This won’t take long.”

As he waddles away, Lorellina and Noble stare after him dumbly. Then Lorellina says to Noble, “What are CCTV screens?”

“I’m not sure,” Noble admits. “They must be those little windows.”

“What little windows?”

“Didn’t you see? They were back in the glass room.” He motions to her. “Come on. Let’s have a look.”

“What
is
this place?” the princess demands. Trailing after Noble, she begins to fire questions at him. “Where do all the doors lead? Why are they locked? And who is that man?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask him.”

“He’s gone.” She glances over her shoulder. “He went down that other passage.”

Noble shrugs. As they round a corner and approach the glass booth, it occurs to him that the keys on its desk might unlock some of the doors that he’s passing.

Would it be wrong, he wonders, to take one of those keys?

“Oh, I see now!” the princess exclaims. She quickens her pace until she’s overtaking Noble, drawn by the lure of the bright, cluttered box lined with moving pictures. “They
are
like windows! Only there’s nothing behind them.”

“They might be magic windows,” Noble speculates. By now, he’s reached the threshold of the glass booth, which is so small—and so crammed with objects—that he’s not sure how he and the princess are both going to fit inside. He has to duck just to get through the door. And when Lorellina wriggles past him, he’s forced to turn sideways.

“O-o-oh,” she marvels, gazing in awe at the bank of screens in front of her. “It’s like having a whole row of eyes.…” She catches her breath. “Noble! Look! There’s that room!”

“What room?” He has to twist around to peer at a familiar network of chutes and shelves and conveyor belts, shown from above. It’s the e-mail room, in miniature, captured like water in a little gray box. But the conveyor belts are all motionless, and the room itself is slowly filling with great drifts of paper.

“Are you sure it’s the same place?” murmurs Noble, scanning the screen for a glimpse of the white van. “I can’t see Rufus, can you?”

“No,” says the princess, “but I
can
see that old woman.” She nods at another screen, where a tiny, thin, gray-haired figure is frantically tearing up paper and tossing into the air. “I think we must have upset her.”

“Princess!”
Noble grabs her arm, so abruptly that she gives a little squeak of protest. Then she sees what he’s pointing at.

“Thanehaven!” she cries.

“Is—is it real?” Noble stammers. “I can’t—it’s so small.…”

They both gape at an angled view of Lord Harrowmage’s throne room, with its bone chandelier and discarded sewing equipment. An armed guard is dragging another armed guard across the floor of the chamber. Suddenly, the screen blinks. The throne room vanishes.

Noble finds himself staring at a view of the fortress drawbridge, where the big truck is still parked. “What the …?”

“Look!” Lorellina pokes at the screen. “Those guards are fighting one another! Why are they
doing
that?”

“Because some of them are false guards,” Noble says gloomily, “come to replace the real ones.”

“We have to stop them!”

“We can’t. Only the Colonel can stop them.”

“Oh, wait!” Lorellina actually grabs the magic box with both hands as the picture changes again—this time to a view of her bedroom. Noble can tell that it’s a bedroom because it contains a large bed. And he can tell that the bed belongs to Lorellina because she’s sitting on it.

Or at least, the false princess is.

“Filthy jade!” shrieks the real princess. “How
dare
she touch my things!”

“Princess—”

“We must go back!” She rounds on Noble, her voice trembling, her eyes awash with tears. “This is so wicked! It
cannot
be allowed!”

“If you go back, you’ll end up on that rubbish heap again,” Noble warns her. “I told you, we can’t go back until we speak to the Colonel.”

But Lorellina won’t listen. “You! Functionary!” she barks, catching sight of the man with the tool belt. He’s emerged from the shadows, breathless and empty-handed. The armpits of his shirt are darkened by two half-moons of sweat.

“Have you spotted your friend?” he inquires, on his way back to the booth. “I caught him in the music library at one stage, but he gave me the slip.”

Lorellina ignores this appeal. She prods at a picture of Morwood, which has replaced the image of her own bedroom. “We want to go home,” she says, “and this is it. Thanehaven. This is where we belong.”

“Not anymore, it’s not,” the man in the uniform rejoins gruffly. “Right now, it’s a mess. Your friend’s made sure of that.” He surveys the overstuffed booth, then jerks his chin at Noble. “Everybody out, please. I’m coming in, and this room ain’t big enough for the three of us.”

Noble immediately sidles out of the booth, knowing that he’ll still be able to see inside because of its glass walls. Lorellina, however, refuses to budge.

“Thanehaven is
ours
,” she declares staunchly, “and we intend to fight for it, even if it costs us our lives!” She flings out an arm at the Thanehaven screen, which now displays a picture of her cousin’s library. “This is a window into Thanehaven, so you must know where we can find a door,” she says to the fat man. “Where is it? How can we get back in?”

“Princess, I already told you, there’s
no point
,” Noble intervenes, from outside the booth. And the man with the tool belt backs him up.

“That’s right. There isn’t. Not now that your game’s been hacked.”

“But—”

“It’s chaos, love. Creeping chaos.” Before Lorellina can take issue with this, her new acquaintance bellies up to the desk (nudging her aside as he does so) and draws her attention to one screen, then another, then another. “Look at this.
And
this. I mean, a few malfunctioning games … that’s one thing. But messing with the memory heap? That’s on a whole different
level. We’re all in
serious
trouble here, let me tell you.”

Noble frowns. From the threshold of the booth, he can just make out two familiar figures on one of the screens: For some reason, Skye and Krystalle are now wandering dazedly around the garbage dump.
They must have come down the laundry chute after us
, he concludes.
I wonder why they did that?
On the screen beside theirs, two identical Arkwrights are fighting near the spaceship airlock. And on the very next screen, the old woman in the cellar is still tossing torn paper around like snowflakes.

“I can’t see where your friend is, right now, but I can see where he’s been,” the man with the tool belt complains. “And soon I won’t even be able to do
that
, because there’s always a knock-on effect when you start tampering with memory. It just gets to a point where you can’t isolate the damage. Not in a computer. Everything here is connected, see.” He nods at the array of moving images. “It won’t be long before your friend starts wrecking programs without going anywhere near ’em. You watch. It’s called the butterfly effect.”

“What are you talking about?” Lorellina is red-faced and seething. “I asked you about Thanehaven! I want to know about
Thanehaven
, not butterflies!”

“And our ‘friend’ isn’t the problem,” Noble adds. “Rufus has been helping us. He’s been trying to set us free.”

“Yeah, right.” The man with the tool belt gives a
disdainful snort. “He’s malware, son. They’re all the same and they never help anyone.”

“That’s a lie,” says Noble. He speaks calmly because he know how useless it would be to berate this slow, sweaty, stubborn man, who probably doesn’t understand the concept of freedom. “You said it yourself—Rufus is our friend. He wants to save us from tyranny. Every one of us, including you.”

“Me?”
The man laughs. But Noble plows on regardless.

“Are you happy here? Is this how you want to live your life?” he demands. “You don’t have to do what you’ve always done. Rufus taught me that. He taught me to think for myself. To work out what
I
want.”

The man shakes his head, jowls wobbling. “Boy-oh-boy. He’s really done a job on you, hasn’t he?”

“All he did was tell me the truth,” Noble rejoins.

“No. He didn’t. If he’d told you the truth, he would have explained what happens when you undermine systems.” As Noble opens his mouth to answer this charge, the man waves at a nearby screen and continues, “It can’t be done—not in here. Everything will fall to pieces.”

“Then we can rebuild it again.” The princess sounds briskly confident. “Death and destruction are the handmaids of war. But where the cause is just, and the fight is fair, a phoenix will always rise from the ashes.”

“She’s right,” says Noble. “This isn’t chaos, this is
a battleground. We’re fighting a war against tyranny. The Colonel wants to oppress us. It’s because of him that monsters are killing children. It’s because of him that I was Princess Lorellina’s enemy for so long.”

“We didn’t know the truth,” Lorellina interrupts.

“Exactly. We were ignorant. But Rufus opened our eyes. He showed us that we weren’t enemies after all.” Noble suddenly finds himself parroting Rufus as he tries to enlighten the man in front of him, who’s collapsed back into his chair. “You should open
your
eyes. Do you want the Colonel to rule your life forever? Or do you want to step outside this prison and become something more than just a puppet in a box?”

With raised eyebrows and folded arms, the man says drily, “I’m not just a puppet in a box, son.”

“Then prove it!” Lorellina exclaims. “Don’t submit to the Colonel’s dictatorship! Join us in our quest to kill him and set yourself free!”

Noble can’t help wincing. “Uh—wait. No. Don’t do that,” he advises hastily. Lowering his voice, he addresses Lorellina. “We don’t want to kill the Colonel. Remember what we decided? It would be better if we tried to reason with him.”

“Hah!” The princess curls her lip. “You think he’ll listen to reason?”

“Perhaps,” Noble retorts. “I certainly did. And so did you.” While the princess absorbs this reminder, Noble turns back to the man in the chair. “The Colonel is a cruel and unjust lord. We want to persuade him to
stop killing people. We want him to see that keeping his subjects ignorant and enslaved is wrong.”

“Oh, I think he knows that already,” the seated man observes. “Trouble is, there’s nothing he can do about it. See, the Colonel didn’t design
Thanehaven Slayer
. Or
Killer Cells
. Or even the memory heap. He didn’t install them, either. He’s got
no say
over the choice of program that’s dumped on this hard drive. All he can do is make sure that the system’s running properly. That’s his job.”

“But—”

“If you want to stop monsters from killing kids, the place to go is the real world. Outside this computer.” The man’s chubby arm traces a careless arc in the air. “You want someone to blame? Blame Mikey Jaundrell. He’s the one who downloaded that shooter game. He’s the one who’s been running
you
ragged.” With a nod at Noble, the seated man concludes, “His sister’s on here, too, sometimes, but she’s no psychopath. She likes clothes and bunnies and unicorns. It’s Mikey who’s into blood and guts, not the Colonel.”

“How do you
know
?” the princess snaps. “How can you speak for the Colonel? Are you his minion? His second-in-command? His friend?”

“No,” the man replies. “I
am
the Kernel.” And as Lorellina claps a hand across her open mouth, he drawls, “Who did you think I was, the security guard?”

F
or a split second, Noble freezes. He can’t think, move, or speak. It’s as if someone has turned him to ice with a magic spell.

“Hey,” says the Kernel, “don’t shut down on me. There’s no need to panic.”

“You’re … you’re …,” Lorellina stammers.

“I’m the Kernel. Right. But I’m not a cruel and unjust lord. I’m just a guy trying to do his job.”

“Run!”
Noble squawks. He grabs the princess, yanking her out of the booth and flinging her behind him with such force that she nearly trips. But as she regains her balance, the Kernel says, “You don’t have to run. You’re safe in here.”

“Hah!” Lorellina scoffs.

“If I was going to hurt you, I’d have done it already.”
The Kernel has to lean forward to address Lorellina because Noble is backing away from the booth, shielding her with his outstretched arms. “C’mon. Do I
look
like a threat? You’re the dangerous ones, not me. It’s you who’ve run amok.”

“We have
not
run amok!” Lorellina retorts. She digs in her heels, ignoring Noble’s efforts to dislodge her. “We have
embraced freedom
!”

“With a vengeance,” the Kernel mutters. He flaps a pudgy hand at the bank of screens next to him. “Just look at this mess! And you wanna shoot off and leave me with it? Thanks a bunch. That’s real public-spirited of you.”

His tone is so morose and crabby that it heartens Noble. Victors don’t grumble like that. Victors exhult.

“You have only yourself to blame, if your subjects have turned against you,” Noble points out, hovering warily just beyond the Kernel’s reach. “Your kingdom was built on cruelty. Children are being consumed by monsters—”

“It’s not
my
kingdom!” the Kernel interrupts. “How many times do I have to tell you? I take orders and I carry ’em out.”

“Orders from Mikey?” asks Noble.

“And Mikey’s sister, Louise. And the programmers. And whoever else gets in here.” The Kernel sighs and slumps back into his chair, his shoulders hunched, his expression doleful. “I’m the middleman, okay? It’s not
my
fault that kids are being eaten.”