"This is odd," Charm told him, typing away. "Yes, it's the very first computer. But there's history in here that goes back further than anything I've ever seen. Almost to the very beginning." Her eyebrows raised. "What? This isn't right. It says that magicians originally came from Quanterium."

Something caught Owen's eye far to the left, and he circled around. "Who cares? Concentrate on the key."

"It says that there used to just be one planet," she said. "Not two. That's plainly false. Are all computers just failing on me today?"

"Planets don't just pop into existence," Owen agreed, slowly moving around the wall. What was out there?

"Unless you magicians did something unnatural again," Charm said. "It can't be right, though. Magicians never lived here. Magic and science together? They'd have killed each other. Trust me, I think about that every day I'm with you."

Owen grinned, throwing her a look. Magic and science working together was sort of the entire point of the Kiel Gnomenfoot books. She didn't notice his look, though, and kept typing.

"Here, something about the Source of Magic. It says the first magic-user and the president of Quanterium jointly locked it away in the Vault of Containment. They each made three keys to lock the door, then together formed a Seventh Key, to ensure that neither scientist nor magician could separately open the door."

"So what'd they do with it?" Something flickered in the corner of Owen's eye again, and he turned back to the firewall. "Charm, I think I saw something," he said, his eyes locked on the spot.

"Good for you," Charm told him without looking up. "There's lots more about the first six keys. That's useless. We have those."

Something glitched in a different stream, and Owen shook his head. "Seriously, come look!"

She growled in frustration, then stood up and leaned forward to look over the wall. "You know what I see? You wasting my time."

"There," he said, pointing at a new glitch. "Did you see that?"

Charm squinted, then stepped back, her hands on her ray guns. Without a word, she ran back to her computer and typed something in, then turned back to the wall. "All right, this isn't good," she said quietly. "If they are what I think they are, then the command I just typed in will make them reveal themselves."

Owen pushed himself up to his tiptoes and looked out, expecting to see streams of numbers.

Instead, the numbers glitched into what looked like old, clunkier versions of Science Soldier robots. And they extended as far as the eye could see.

"Um?" he said.

"The alarm couldn't have worked so fast," Charm said, backing into her computer, then sitting down and typing frantically. "And the security systems didn't follow us this soon either. The soldiers must have been left here as a trap, to protect the location of the Seventh Key."

"Why aren't they shooting?" Owen asked as the now-visible robots began to silently march forward toward the firewall from every direction around them.

"They're not actually robots, any more than you're a real person in here," Charm told him, not looking up as she typed. "They're viruses."

Computer viruses that looked like robots? Awesome! "Those just affect computers, though, right?" Not that he was scared or anything, but the robots were pretty big.

"Right now, you are a computer," she said. "These viruses infect by touch. Here you're just as digital as they are, so they'll overwrite whatever data they find."

Owen sighed in relief. "So then we'll just get sent back to the ship or something. That's not so bad."

"You don't get it," Charm told him, her voice more panicked than he'd ever heard it before. "What do you think happens if they overwrite your brain here, Kiel? It'll get uploaded back into your head that way, as the robot virus. So anything in your brain-if there is anything in your brain-gets written over until the virus is all that's left."

Owen swallowed hard. This book was turning out to be much darker than the last few. "At least we're safe behind this firewall," Owen told her. "Right?"

The first robot virus reached the firewall and extended a hand to touch it. The entire wall trembled like a leaf in the wind.

Charm's forehead furrowed. "Of course."

Owen let out a huge breath and smiled.

"We're completely safe until the wall falls, which won't be for at least a minute, maybe two," Charm continued. "Now, what did I say about you talking?"

CHAPTER 25.

Bethany walked Kiel up to the front gate of Jonathan Porterhouse's mansion, her shoulder under his arm. The boy magician dragged his feet with every step, and his eyes had glazed over at some point, probably when he'd decided to stop casting his forget spell on individuals and to just do one big spell for the entire town.

From the outside, the mansion looked even nicer than it had from within. As promised, a silver fence surrounded the building, designed to look as if it'd been made from discarded robot parts. Mostly just arms and legs, but every few feet a head would pop up, like a warning to any robot thieves.

"We're here," Bethany told him, and laid him down gently on the ground.

"Science Soldiers," Kiel said, pointing at the fence, still a bit unfocused. "Serves them right, becoming a fence. I hate those things."

"Not surprising, if they wanted to kill you," Bethany told him, trying not to grit her teeth. Yes, the tower was invisible, and yes, they'd dodged a bullet with the townspeople forgetting they'd seen it to begin with, but the tower was still there, and the Magister was still doing . . . whatever it was that he was doing. They'd started hearing some kind of odd roaring noise as they'd gotten closer, at which point Bethany had panicked, stopped letting Kiel walk on his own, and basically half carried him the rest of the way.

Making a tower invisible was one thing, but she doubted there was an equivalent spell for making loud roars disappear.

"Wait, who are you again?" Kiel asked her from the ground. "So sleepy!"

"You're hilarious," she told him, then gestured at the gate. "Can you magic this open?"

Kiel groaned loudly. "Are you joking! Just push on it or something! I've never been this completely drained before. What is wrong with your world, anyway? Why is magic so tiring here?"

"The real world doesn't like when people do impossible things," Bethany said as she tried the gate. It didn't budge-completely locked up. That made sense, given how many fans probably came by to see the house. "Nope, no go. Your turn."

"So very evil," Kiel said, and flopped over onto his stomach, then slowly pushed himself to his feet. "Can't you just pop the fence into a book or something? I seem to be doing all the heavy lifting around here."

"Please just hurry," Bethany told him, shifting from foot to foot. Another roar, and her heart jumped. "Seriously, Kiel, they can hear that down in town. Whatever the Magister is doing, we need to stop him!"

"Story of my life," Kiel said, then put his hands on the gate, groaning as he touched the metal. "You have no idea how much I hate using magic on science. It makes my stomach hurt." He closed his eyes, leaning most of his weight onto the fence, then mumbled a spell.

The gate began to glow a bright red, then slowly creaked open, Kiel stumbling with it. Bethany quickly pushed past him, then grabbed his shirt and yanked him inside too, kicking the gate closed behind her. "C'mon!" she yelled, pulling on his arm.

He just glared at her, too tired to even speak at this point. But at least he shuffled forward, letting her drag him to where she remembered the tower had been.

As they reached the base and pa.s.sed through Kiel's invisibility spell, Bethany's stomach dropped again. The tower was just so huge! Even if they brought the Magister and Kiel back into his book, how would she explain this? "How long do your spells last?" she asked Kiel.

"Just until I fall asleep," he said.

She immediately slapped him, and his eyes flew open. "HEY!" he yelled.

"Don't fall asleep!" she hissed. "What about the forget spells? Are those going to go away too?"

"No, those are more of a permanent . . . thing," he told her. "Effect. Whatever you want to call it. This not-seeing spell is . . . it's changing what people's . . . their eyes see, and-"

She slapped him again.

"STOP IT!" he yelled. "I'm awake!"

"You didn't sound it," she whispered. "Now be quiet. The Magister might hear us!"

A roar so loud that it hurt Bethany's ears echoed through the entire tower, and Kiel glared at her. "Really? You think he's going to hear us over that?"

"What is that?" she asked him, her voice shaking as badly as the rest of her.

"Sounded a bit like a dragon," Kiel told her, then shrugged.

"A DRAGON?"

Kiel took a step back and glanced up at the tower. "Oh, yeah!" he said, pointing. "See? It's right there!"

Bethany's eyes widened, and she stepped back too. There, at the very top of the tower, two red, reptilian eyes glowed down.

Then, even worse, a second pair of eyes, these golden but just as reptilian, blinked on the ground to their right.

"Uh-oh," Kiel said quietly. He stepped backward, grabbing Bethany's shirt and pulling her with him. "Maybe we should, uh, back up a few feet."

"Tell me you've fought dragons before," Bethany whispered to him.

"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.

CHAPTER 26.

Isn'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?"