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  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.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Kiel?” 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!

  She weakly backed away from the Dragon King, who was licking his lips. Dragons, a giant, goblins, not to mention magic towers and good-turned-evil magicians . . . This was a dream! That was the only possible explanation. This was all a dream because she’d said no to Owen and felt guilty!

  The had-to-be-a-dream Albino Red dragon caught sight of her from the air, then dove down, its talons spread in anticipation.

  The roar of the attacking dragon tore through her body, and almost without thinking about it, she leaped out of the way a moment before those enormous claws ripped through the earth where she’d been standing.

  The dragon screamed in rage, then pulled back up into the sky again, circling around for another pass. The golden Dragon King finally noticed her as well, and began to gallop toward her, all sixteen legs moving at once. And the teethy, creepy little goblins kept swarming off the tower.

  RUN! her mind screamed at her. Get out of here! This is real, you idiot! Whether you want it to be or not, this is real and you’re going to get eaten, just like Kiel! If you die, Owen will be stuck in that nowhere prison forever!

  She pushed herself to her feet and began to run from the Dragon King, only to throw herself out of the way of the diving Albino Red again as the goblins raced after her in an ever-growing swarm. Where was she supposed to go? For now, this was all behind the invisibility curtain, but if she ran away from the tower, the entire town would see what was happening.

  Wait, the invisibility curtain. Wasn’t that supposed to have disappeared if Kiel had . . . fallen asleep? Wasn’t being eaten worse than sleeping?

  She dodged an Albino Red dragon strike, only to get tossed to the ground by one of the Dragon King’s sixteen clawed feet. It roared, raising its
head over her to attack.

  And then it froze, an odd expression on its face.

  “I . . . hate . . . being . . . eaten!” shouted a muffled voice. And then, slowly, the Dragon King’s jaws began to push apart, revealing a very slimy, very annoyed Kiel Gnomenfoot. “You have no idea how many times this has happened,” he told Bethany in disgust. “You always forget the smell.” With that, he leaped out of the dragon’s mouth a step ahead of the jaws snapping closed, landing right beside her on the ground. “I’ll tell you what: Nothing in the world wakes you up like the smell of a dragon’s stomach. Nothing.”

  Bethany just stared at him as he gestured with both hands, and new magic wands appeared in them. He quickly aimed one at the golden dragon, which shrank to the size of a mouse. The other wand shot some sort of magical energy into the sky, wrapping the Albino Red’s wings around its body and sending it crashing to the ground.

  “Kiel?” she said. “You’re alive?”

  “Forty-two,” he said with a grimace. “That’s how many times I’ve been eaten. Well, forty-three now.” He grinned. “Don’t let me have all the fun here, Book Girl! Get in on this!”

  Despite the dragons, the tower, the Magister, the giant, everything . . . Bethany just had to smile. “You are insane, Kiel Gnomenfoot.”

  “That’s why everyone loves me,” he said with a wink. “Now do that fiction thing you do! It’ll be fun!”

  “I don’t have any books!”

  “Weren’t there a whole bunch in that house right there?” Kiel said, then ran over to the crashed Albino Red dragon, which was trying to right itself. Kiel climbed onto its back and kicked its sides with his heels. “Up, dragon! I need a better view of things.”

  The dragon roared and snapped its jaws at him, but immediately stopped, a red glow surrounding its head. Instantly the dragon calmed down, then leaped back into the air, a laughing, still slimy Kiel on its back.

  Bethany watched him take off for a second, then gasped as a wave of goblins came barreling toward her. She turned and sprinted in the opposite direction, toward Jonathan Porterhouse’s mansion, just hoping the front door was unlocked.

  It wasn’t, but when she turned around to find another way in, three goblins leaped at her, missed, and hit the door instead. The door collapsed inward, giving her a way in. “Thanks,” she told the goblins as she jumped over them, feeling a weird surge of energy, like she’d had too much caffeine. Where was this coming from? This was the worst thing that’d ever happened to anyone ever, and part of her was enjoying it!

  The entryway still had a large blackened spot where the Magister had blown up the empty journal he thought they were jumping into. She skidded around the spot, then ran as fast as she could for the library. There wouldn’t be time to find the correct books that the dragons, goblins, and giant all came from, and it was altogether possible that the Magister had those in his tower anyway, since he’d freed the characters to begin with. Still, with as many books as the library had, there would have to be enough good ones to find something useful.

  She threw open the doors of the library and came to a complete stop.

  The shelves were empty. Of the thousands and thousands of books, Bethany saw just two scattered on the floor, forgotten.

  The magnitude of what that meant hit Bethany like a rock, and for a brief second she considered just lying down and giving up. Then she remembered the teeth of the goblins chasing her and she slammed the door instead, focusing on the remaining two books.

  She quickly grabbed her only options and spread them out on the library’s desk in front of her.

  This had to be a joke.

  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and a large leather-bound copy of Emma, by Jane Austen. A book about a submarine fighting a giant squid and one about an English matchmaker in the 1800s. . . . Seriously?

  The library doors burst open, and a horde of goblins scrambled through, coming right at her, their spittle leading the way. She ducked behind the desk, but they leaped over it, arms outstretched for her.

  “FINE, you get nineteenth-century romance!” she shouted, then smashed the nearest goblin over the head with Emma. Another one jumped at her, and it got some Jane Austen too. “Who’s next?” Bethany shouted, smashing goblins in the face over and over with the book’s cover. “You? You want some of this too?!”

  The goblins circled around her, surrounding her. They swarmed up and over her arms, pulling her down to the ground, teeth everywhere. She kicked and growled, then turned to her other weapon, pulling random pages out of Twenty Thousand Leagues. Instead of jumping in, though, she just stuck a hand in, then pulled out whatever she could feel.

  A gush of water like a fire hose exploded from the first page, right into the nearest group of goblins. Bethany scrambled back to her feet, then pushed her hand into a second page, pulling out more of the ocean. Then a third page, and a fourth.

  Soon the entire room was filled with a good inch or two of water. Though each page immediately stopped shooting water as soon as she dropped it, the force of the ocean spitting out of the tiny pages was enough to send almost all of the goblins flying. There were little unconscious toothy goblins everywhere, and the few remaining ones were easily cleaned up with a little Emma.

  Bethany dropped to the wet floor, breathing so hard she thought she might faint. Was this what it was like being fictional? Doing crazy things just to keep yourself alive? Not even caring about the consequences? She glanced around at the former library, now aquarium, of Jonathan Porterhouse’s mansion. There were even a few fish flopping around.

  Fictional fish. This was all so very, very odd.

  Finally, Bethany took a deep breath and stood back up, grabbed her two weapons, then went back out to see how Kiel was doing.

  As she emerged outside, something enormous with laces slammed into the ground just in front of her. She looked up, then up, and up some more, to where a giant easily as tall as the tower held Kiel and his dragon tightly in a fist, keeping either from moving.

  “Oh, hi!” Kiel shouted down. “I hope you found something good in there, because things took a slight turn out here. Nothing I can’t handle, of course, but I’ll let you help if it makes you feel better!”

  CHAPTER 28

  You were going to sacrifice yourself for me,” Owen told Charm as they walked toward a deep, black, ominous-looking cave on the side of the tallest mountain in all of Magisteria. “Back in the Original Computer. You tried to—”

  “I wouldn’t have, if I’d known you’d bring it up again,” Charm told him. “Can we stop wasting time?”

  “You like me, don’t you,” Owen said, inwardly grinning. Sure, it was Kiel she actually had tried to save, but still.

  She glared at him. “Every minute we waste, more Magisterians suffer. Keep that in mind the longer you spout on about nonsense.”

  “Okay,” Owen said, stopping in front of the cave. “But next time we almost die, warn me before you try to jump in front of any ray guns for me. I’ll just duck instead.”

  Charm narrowed her eyes, both human and robotic. “Trust me, it won’t happen again.” She turned toward the cave and shook her head. “Why don’t your people ever just live in nicely lit places? It’s always towers or castles or dank, dark caves.”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” Owen said, peering into the nothingness.

  “According to the Original Computer, this is it, the last known location of the First Magician,” Charm said, checking a wrist computer to be sure. “So all we need to do is find him and ask where the Seventh Key is. How hard can it be?”

  A chill ran through Owen as he remembered Charm saying those exact words in the previous books. “Could you not do that anymore?”

  “Do what?”

  “Ask ‘How hard can it be?’ Have you not noticed a pattern, whenever you say that?”

  “No.”

  “What’d you say before the dragon’s lair?” Owen said, counting off on his fingers. “Or right before the trip
to that alternate, evil dimension? Or in the future? Or the nothingness at the end of the universe? Or with the ice giants, the ruins of that school for magic—”

  “I’m a positive person!” Charm shouted at him, her robot eye shooting him a death look.

  “No, you’re not,” Owen said, unable to keep from smiling at her. She was just so cute sometimes, what with her tough robot half and her tough nonrobot other half.

  She snorted. “Who cares! Why is it so wrong to say, anyway?”

  “Because you’re asking for bad things,” Owen told her, still grinning. “That’s how this works. You say ‘could be worse,’ and things suddenly are. It’s called irony, and authors—I mean, the universe loves it.”

  Charm snorted. “You magicians. You act like there’s someone out there watching us.” She waved her hand up at the sky. “No one can see us, Kiel. And no one’s going to use what I say against us just because it’d be some kind of ironic situation. Try thinking logically for once.”

  Owen shrugged. “Fine. You go first, then, Ms. Positive Attitude. Just wait and see what eats you.”

  She held up her twin ray guns. “Bring it on.” She turned to the cave, then paused. “Though we could use a little light.” She took out three miniature light balls, then tossed them into the air. The balls glowed with illumination and floated into the cave.

  All three then immediately crashed to the ground and went out.

  “Right,” Owen said. “How hard can it be?”

  She smacked him. “This is a magic cave. It’s probably got some antiscience something or other. This is why you’re along, for times when the laws of nature get thwarted.”

  “Thwarted?” Owen said, then brought up a spell in his head. This time, he was actually ready. Light of My Life had already been looked up, memorized, and was ready to go. The spell filled him with warmth, then passed through him to light the immediate entryway of the cave. It wasn’t much better than the light balls had been, but at least they’d be able to see what they were tripping over.