Owen’s bedroom was where books went to die, Bethany realized. Every shelf in the room overflowed with books without covers or with splitting spines, and even, every so often, just collections of pages held together with rubber bands.
She gestured toward the books, raising an eyebrow, and Owen turned red. “Uh, my mom brings them home,” he said, sitting down on the floor with Kiel Gnomenfoot and the End of Everything in front of him. “Whenever a library book gets too beat-up to lend out anymore, she gives it to me.”
“So you live in a book graveyard,” Bethany said, sitting down across from him.
Owen’s eyes widened. “Ooooh, that’d make a fun story! Have you ever been to a graveyard in a book? Like Pet Sematary or something?”
“No horror books,” Bethany said quickly. “That’s rule number one! Horror is a good way to get yourself killed. And speaking of rules, let’s go over them while we can still back out of this.”
“Bring ’em on!” Owen said a bit too loudly.
Bethany shushed him, despite the fact that no one was home. Owen’s mother was still at the library, so they weren’t exactly going to be caught doing anything they shouldn’t be. Still, Bethany half believed her own mother would pop in and yell “AHA!” at any moment, so the more quiet they could be, the better she’d feel.
“There are five rules total,” she whispered, giving Owen an annoyed look. “Rule number one: MAKE NO NOISE. Either here or in the book. Quiet is key.”
“Got it,” Owen mouthed silently.
She rolled her eyes. “Rule number two: NO TALKING TO CHARACTERS. No matter what. Talk to a main character, you might show up in the book, and that’s the absolute last thing we want to happen. Even if it doesn’t change the story, everyone who ever read the book would see our names. That cannot happen.”
Owen nodded, but his eyes lit up with excitement in a way that fundamentally disturbed Bethany, so she quickly continued. “That brings us to rule number three: WE DO NOT CHANGE THE STORY. No way, no how. If we touch something, it goes back exactly the way we left it. This is maybe the most important rule, except that all the rules are the most important. Do you understand?”
“Sure, but you’ve eaten chocolate and taken gobstoppers. How did that not change the story?”
“Because they’d never notice a little chocolate missing from a chocolate river, or a gobstopper that I took from the gobstopper machine while the Oompa-Loompas were teaching the kids a lesson,” Bethany said, feeling a little guilty since she really shouldn’t have done either thing. But that had been a really bad day. “Anyway, these are my rules for you. If you want to come, you follow them. Got it?”
“Got it,” Owen said, nodding again.
She gave him a suspicious glance, then grabbed the book. “Okay. Are we ready?”
“What about the last two rules?”
Bethany wrinkled her nose. “I really only had three. So the last two are LISTEN TO ME AT ALL TIMES and DON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID. That work?”
“I’ll do my best on the last one,” he said, and laughed.
Bethany stared at him without cracking a smile, and he slowly stopped laughing.
“Now, you’ve got a chapter where Kiel and his teacher aren’t around?” Bethany asked him.
Owen reached over and opened Kiel Gnomenfoot and the End of Everything to a marked page. “Yup, the spell book is just sitting out. Kiel’s off beyond the edge of the universe, where he just found the Sixth Key, but he hasn’t gotten back to existence yet. The Magister is distracted, casting a spell to locate the Seventh Key. It’s the perfect time to sneak in and learn the location spell. No one will ever know.”
Bethany glanced at the page.
It wasn’t easy sifting through the past, especially for things deliberately mislaid. The Magister carefully wove one thousand and eleven spells together into an elaborate tapestry, threading them in and out of one another. Some showed his life, or his children’s, his children’s children’s, or the school he once ran, or even old enemies.
Other spells went back further, to the very beginning. The Seventh Key hadn’t been seen since the locking of the Source inside the Vault of Containment. To find the key meant finding the location of those who had been present, which meant only two: the original president of Quanterium, Favora Bunsen, and a figure lost to history: the very first magic-user.
The spells pushed hard against the curtains of time, straining to part them. But something kept him out. Something from the very beginning.
He banged his fist down. There was no time left! Dr. Verity had an infinite army from a multitude of alternate dimensions ready to attack Magisteria, and citizens were being rounded up and jailed for even owning spell books, let alone using the now-illegal magic. And if the hints Kiel had heard were true, the entire planet might be in even more danger than they’d thought.
And all the Magister could do was search desperately for the seventh and last key and do what he could to help the boy who was never meant to be.
Suddenly, the nine hundred and tenth spell opened a blazing portal, revealing President Bunsen, only much more elderly, recording her memories into a computer of some sort.
The Magister gasped. This was it, the first clue to the location of the Seventh Key, the one most hidden, the one designed to keep any and all from ever opening the Vault of Containment hidden beneath Quanterium and unleashing the greatest power known to all of mankind: the Source of Magic.
Kiel would have to know!
Over the hills of Magisteria, through the Forbidden Space separating Quanterium from the magic planet, and into the Cities of Science traveled a new spell, searching for Kiel. The spell passed beyond Quanterium’s atmosphere, back into the nothingness of space, then beyond even that, to true nothingness, to the end of space itself, to Charm’s ship, the Scientific Method, and then past, to whatever lay beyond everything, and into Kiel’s mind.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” the Magister said through the magic, directly into Kiel’s thoughts, “but I found a clue to the Seventh Key’s location. You must locate the Original Computer on Quanterium.”
“The original what?” Kiel thought back. “Sorry, I’m having a bit of trouble thinking, since I’m beyond the edge of existence. I’m not even really sure that I’m existing myself right now.”
The Magister smiled to himself. “You are thinking, therefore you are existing,” he said. “Do what you need to, but you must find the very first computer ever created. Listen closely, as this information is of the utmost importance!”
Owen reached over and grabbed the book from her hand before she could turn the page. “See?” he said. “It’s the perfect time to sneak in. He’ll never even know, because he’s doing all kinds of magic and talking to Kiel. In and out, five minutes. Ready?”
“Ready,” Bethany said, inwardly terrified. This was such a bad idea.
But maybe . . . maybe things would go better than she expected. Maybe it’d even be fun to do a little magic, and they’d laugh and have a good time, and maybe—probably not, but maybe—she’d find that Owen really could be trusted, might even be a friend. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? To have someone to hang out with in books? To talk about things? Maybe even help her look for her father?
She smiled, strangely optimistic. Could this be the first time in her life where things actually went well?