Story Thieves (16 page)

“ruN!” someone shouted in a chat bubble. “he'S goNna kill us!”

“Magisterian criminals are so played out,” someone else said. “It's all about the alternate-reality vampire Magisterians now. That's where the buzz is.”

A third person just stood with some kind of camera, filming
the entire thing. “Thumbs-up if you hate magic!” he said into the lens.

“WHAT DID I SAY?” Charm shouted. “This is what happens when you respond to a Nalwork ad!”

“VOICE RECOGNIZED,” said the same robot. “QUANTERIAN WAR CRIMINAL CHARM MENTUM IDENTIFIED.”

“No talking,” Owen whispered back to Charm, unable to stop himself from grinning at her.

She smacked him, her digital hand apparently still solid enough to hit him. “We need to get out of here!” she hissed. “NOW.”

“What's so bad?” he asked as the crowd thinned around them, all but the one guy who kept his camera running. “What can they do?”

Tubes all around them began to slam shut, like prison cells locking. One by one, the Nalwork closed off their escape routes. “That,” Charm said. “Now jump, or we're going to be stuck here until security shows up!”

“Security?” Owen said. “Like virus protection?”

“You better hope we don't need protection from viruses,” Charm said, grabbing his hand and yanking him toward the
only still-open tube. It began to close on them, but Charm jammed her robotic arm in and held the tube open. “GO!”

The man with the camera groaned. “Wait! Security isn't even here yet! I wanted to get that on film!”

Charm pulled out a digital ray gun and shot the camera. It exploded right in his hand, not harming his digital form at all. He glared at her, then gave her a thumbs-down. Weirdly, a tiny thumbs-down appeared on her shirt with a number one, right over her heart.

“That's . . . odd,” Owen said, then got pushed into the tube. Charm jumped in a second later, letting the tube slam shut behind her.

For a moment they both just hung there in the middle of the tube, nothing above or below them. Owen gave Charm a look. “How do you make it go?”

“You have to tell it what you're looking for,” she said, then looked up. “ORIGINAL COMPUTER!”

“SEARCH INPUT,” said a computerized voice. “SEARCH COMMENCING.”

And then Owen's stomach hit his feet as they shot up into the tube, faster than the speed of screaming.

E
veryone saw the tower.
Everyone.
There was no missing it.

Bethany found herself outside the bookstore, not even remembering leaving. She looked around at all the people pointing and shouting about the Magister's tower, and couldn't speak, almost couldn't breathe, like she couldn't remember how.

“I'd never actually seen it from the outside before,” Kiel said from beside her. “It's usually hanging off the bottom side of a cliff, so it's not the easiest thing to sightsee. The actual one, I mean.” He paused. “Or maybe this is the only actual one, if the other one is made-up. You did make my life a bit more confusing, didn't you.”

“I . . . I don't—”

“I know,” Kiel said, patting her on the shoulder. “This isn't going to be fun for you. But look at the bright side. When things are as bad as they can get, what's there to worry about?”

She slowly turned toward him, fighting off the extremely strong desire to strangle him where he stood. “This . . . this is going to be
everywhere
. The news will cover it. The police are going to come. And your teacher—”

“Magister.”

“—will not be too happy when those things happen!” Bethany's voice got louder and louder as she went. “And I can't even imagine what that means. I never even thought he'd do
this 
! So how much worse is this going to get?” She grabbed Kiel's black shirt and pulled him close. “
You have no idea
how much more I can worry about.”

Kiel took a step back, his eyes wide. “That was impressive,” he told her. “But I really do think you're going about this all wrong.”

Two news vans sped past them on the street, heading toward the mansion. Bethany just waved her hand at them, giving him a “See?” look.

“Forget that for now,” Kiel said. “Do you remember when Charm and I were trapped in the future?”

Bethany shook her head impatiently. “I've never read your books, and
now isn't the time
—”

“And do you remember how—wait, what?”

“I've never read your
books
!” Bethany shouted. “I don't know what happened to you in book two, I have no idea what you saw in book three, and I couldn't care less about whatever went down in book five!”

“You're angry,” Kiel told her calmly, “so I'm going to forgive what you just said. Anyway, when Charm and I were in the future—”

“What did I just
say
?”

“Our time machine had been destroyed by Dr. Verity's great-great-grandson, and we realized there was no way back,” Kiel continued. “Things looked dark, and this was all after we learned that, well, my own personal future hadn't turned out so great either. But that's when I decided that sometimes you have to embrace the bad to find the good.” He winked at her. “Think about it.”

She slapped his arm over and over. “THAT. DOESN'T. MEAN. ANYTHING!”

“We got home,
Bethany
, because we realized that if we changed the
future's
future, someone would eventually come along to stop us. So we started messing up everything we could, and soon enough, along came the future's version of time police
to fix things. As soon as they were distracted, we stole
their
time machine and used it to get back to the present!”

Bethany stopped slapping him to stare at him openmouthed. “Do you have any idea how little sense that makes?”

“So?” Kiel said with a grin. “It worked. And it worked because I embraced the problem and made it work for me. That's
real
magic.”

“
No.
Real magic is when you make something happen that's physically impossible.”

“Well, sure, that too. That's real magic. But this is real
er
magic.”

“No, it's not that either. That word doesn't even exist.”

“So in a way, that word is magic, by your definition.” He winked again. “Now, do you want to argue some more, or do you want to fix this?”

She glared at him, then looked back at the tower. Fix this?
Fix this 
? They'd passed “fix this” when Owen had started talking to fictional characters! This was so far
beyond
“fix this” that there was no fixing this at all!

A man stepped up next to them, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, despite the coolness. He lifted his camera to
take a picture, then grinned at Bethany. “You know, Jonathan Porterhouse keeps saying he won't make a movie, but I bet that's what this is. Looks like a set to me, doesn't it?”

“What's a movie?” Kiel whispered to her.

“No,”
she whispered back. “These people can't be seeing this! Can't you use a forget spell on all these people or something?”

“Won't work,” Kiel told her.

“Just try!”

Kiel sighed and mumbled something, and pointed at the man in the Hawaiian shirt. The man's eyes went blank for a moment, and then he shook his head as if trying to clear out a fog. He turned to Bethany to say something, only to abruptly notice the enormous tower of black and silver up on the hill. “What the . . . ?” he said. “Do you
see
that?”

“It didn't work. Do it again!” Bethany hissed.

Kiel pointed at the tower. “He's just going to
keep
seeing—”

“DO IT AGAIN!”

“I can only do magic once without a spell book,” Kiel told her. “Now, it so happens that I
do
have this spell written down in my belt pouches, mostly because—”

Bethany shoved his belt back to him and stamped her foot while she waited for him to find the right page in his pouch,
while he made comments like “Huh, forgot I had this one,” and “Ooh, that reminds me of . . . forget it.” Finally, he pulled out the right page and glanced over the spell. His body began to glow, and he unleashed the forget spell again at the man in the Hawaiian shirt.

The man's eyes blanked out once more, and he shook his head, just like last time. This time, Bethany grabbed his shirt and pulled him around so he wasn't facing the tower. The man gave her an odd look. “Why would you do that?” He took a step away, then noticed the tower out of the corner of his eye. “What the . . . ?” he said. “Do you see—”

“NO!” Bethany screamed. “I don't! It's not there!”

Kiel grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the Hawaiian-shirted man as Bethany kept screaming about how the tower wasn't there. Finally, he raised a hand. “I'm this close to just making
you
forget all of this, if you don't calm down,” he told her. “It'd make my life a lot easier, honestly.”

“How are they supposed to not remember it if they keep seeing it?” Bethany said, her hands shaking. “You need to make the tower invisible! Like a big bubble all around Jonathan Porterhouse's mansion! You can do that, right?” She grabbed his shoulders and looked him right in the eye. “RIGHT?”

“You know, this isn't my world or anything,” he told her, so calm it infuriated her, “but unless me being here somehow makes me much more powerful than usual, that's probably not going to happen.”

“JUST ONE SIDE?” Bethany begged. “The side closest to town? Can you do that?”

He sighed, then looked up at the tower with an appraising look. “Well, I
am
pretty impressive, contrary to what I just told you. I'm sure I could handle at
least
one side. Probably two, if push came to shove—”

She shoved him, hard. “It came to shove when that tower popped up! DO IT! As tall as you can so no one sees it!”

Kiel gave her an annoyed look, then slowly spread his hands, chanting a spell. For a moment she considered making him go do his magic in an alley, but at this point, with the tower and all, a boy in a Kiel Gnomenfoot costume doing magic probably would just make this all look like a publicity stunt for the nonexistent movie.

Kiel finished his spell, and a bright light shot out from both his hands, weaving its way through the streets of the town and up into the hills. It poured over the tower (or at least one side, maybe
two), and then abruptly, tower and light both disappeared.

Kiel, meanwhile, swayed like he was about to faint. Bethany quickly grabbed his arm and steadied him.

“I told you I'm impressive,” he said, sounding completely winded. “Now I'm impressive
and
tired. When did magic get to be so exhausting? What's wrong with this place?”

“That was
amazing
,” she told him. “Seriously, Kiel. Thank you.”

He smiled, and she smiled back.

Then she slowly began to push the forget spell page in his hand up toward his face, so he could relearn it.

“No,” he told her. “Rest now. Tired!”

“You can rest when you've wiped the memories of everyone in town who saw the tower,” she said. “There's no time to wait! The people in those news vans will start filming soon, so we need to make them forget before the story becomes about how the tower not only appeared, but disappeared. Plus, who knows what the Magister is doing!”

“Wait,
what 
?” Kiel said, his eyes widening as he caught up with what she was saying. “
Everyone
in town?”

“Not
everyone
,” she told him, shoving him toward the
Hawaiian-shirted man, who now stared at Kiel with a look of shock. “No, actually, you're right, everyone is better. Let's do everyone.”

“But I'm so
tired
—”

Bethany grabbed his hand and held it out toward the surprised man. “C'mon, you're Kiel Gnomenfoot! When bad things happen, you embrace them, or something!”

“You really
are
pure evil, aren't you,” Kiel whispered, then read over the forget spell again.

Hawaiian-shirted man's look of surprise faded into a friendly smile as his eyes glazed over, then he shook out the fog and continued on his way.

“One down,” Bethany said as Kiel dropped to his knees. “Who's next?”

A
AH!” Owen shouted as the tube shot him and Charm straight up into nothingness, then twisted and jerked them around in a dizzying maze of other tubes and screaming billboards advertising cool science thingers.

“I need to clear our history!” Charm shouted into his ear over the noise of the ads. “The security system is going to catch up with us otherwise. This might scare you a little, so try to stay calm!”

“What does
that
mean?” Owen said, then screamed in terror as Charm shot at the sides of the tube just behind them with her ray guns. The tube instantly shattered, sending pieces of tube off to plow into various ads and other search tubes.

“That won't hide us for long,” she said, putting her guns back in their holsters. “We'll need to be quick.”

“Aah!” Owen told her, hugging her for dear life.

She pushed him off her, and they continued zooming along the tube separately—her looking impatient; him caught between terror and feeling like this was the greatest roller coaster ride ever, though leaning toward the first one, if he had to pick.

Just as Owen began to get used to the ride, or at least everything but his stomach did, the tube spat them out into what looked like a mass of zeroes and ones, the numbers actually breaking their fall.