Story Thieves (26 page)

As Owen watched, the buildings grew more and more elaborate, though he noticed that they were all basically the same design, just with more or fewer features. There wasn't much creativity here; everything had a similar look, as if the magic-users had taken all the imagination with them when they left Quanterium. Everything just felt so similar. Everything,
that was, except for the Presidential Palace, which they now approached.

Carefully cultivated gardens surrounded the palace, kept in untouchable condition by a coating of plastic over all the plants, frozen in time at the peak of perfection. No animals or birds roamed these grounds, though, and no people sat on the benches that popped up every few feet.

Instead, Science Soldier units paraded up and down the glass pathway to the palace. As they drew closer, more and more soldiers appeared. When his troop transport finally ground to a halt, Owen looked out to find thousands of other transports on every side of him, each one filled with Science Soldiers. Some were gigantic, hundreds of feet tall, probably from a reality where everything was huge. Others floated along like bumblebees. Here, there were humanoid-looking robots, and there, lizard-shaped ones.

The armies of an infinite multiverse, that Dr. Verity had gathered to wipe out Magisteria.

Owen nodded to himself, then stood up with the rest of the Science Soldiers.

For Charm's sake, for Bethany's sake, to make up for his
own
mistakes, it was time to finish this story already.

T
he Magister roared in anger at Bethany's disappearance, then leaped right into the page after her. He landed easily on a world with three moons and one burning green sun. All around him, people gave him looks as they went about their business, all wearing clothes so fine and weightless they could have been made of clouds.

“What is this place?” the Magister asked.

Then something hit him hard enough to send him plowing through a nearby building.

“
This
is Argon VI,” Bethany said, standing over him with a hard look and her fists raised. “A world light-years from Earth.”

The Magister, a bit surprised he wasn't hurt, started to murmur a spell, so Bethany picked up a hovering car and slammed it into him over and over. “You see,” she said as she hit him, “Earth was about to explode . . . for some reason or
another, I forget. A couple of scientists decided to save their baby daughter, Gwen, so they put her in a rocket and sent her here.”

She picked the Magister up by his robes, swung him in a circle a few times, then launched him into the air.

He came down miles away in a desert, and Bethany landed just behind him. “You wouldn't know, but it's the reverse of something called Superman,” she said. “Argon VI has less gravity than Earth, so it makes Earth people superstrong.” Then she punched him into the sand up to his shoulders. “And the green sun apparently gives you the power to fly. I don't entirely get it, but that's
EarthGirl
for you.”

The Magister stopped his struggling for a moment. “That would mean that we both share these powers, then?”

Bethany grinned. “Yup.” She punched him farther into the ground, far enough so that sand poured in on top of him, blinding his eyes. When the Magister finally dug himself to the surface using his new-found superspeed and strength, Bethany was gone.

“You can't hide from me, Bethany!” he shouted into the nothingness. A quick retrieval spell sent a page from another book flying into his hands, and he leaped in after her.

This time he emerged right in the middle of a crushing waterfall.

The Magister quickly cast a flying spell, which kept him steady beneath the torrent of water. Unfortunately, he still couldn't breathe as thousands of gallons poured over him. Just as he tried to cast a breathing-under-water spell, two men plowed into him, sending him falling down into the river below.

A little ways downriver, the Magister floated to the surface, one of the men on his back. The other appeared to have hit the river too hard to survive, not having the benefit of a semi-floating magician to land on.

“Sherlock Holmes was supposed to die, falling off that waterfall,” Bethany said from the shore as the Magister floated by. “It was a whole thing with his nemesis, Moriarty. But you just saved him. Millions of readers will thank you. He's
very
popular.”

And with that, she leaped into another page, which floated away on the breeze.

The Magister dragged himself out of the river and grabbed the page with another spell as quickly as he could. The farther ahead Bethany got, the more of these traps she could lay for him.

He poked his head in more carefully this time, to see what awaited him. . . .

Only to quickly pull it back out as a dragon's mouth snapped shut around the spot where his head had just been.

The Magister caught his breath, then murmured a spell of protection and pushed in again. The dragon bit down once more, only to stop in place as it hit a blue bubble of magical safety. “Tell me where the girl went,” the Magister asked the surprised dragon in its own language.

“The key is gone. Why must you torment me!” the dragon shouted, and sent a flame that could melt rock exploding into the blue bubble.

Even as the Magister realized where he was, the heat from the flame began to seep through the protective spell, and he soared into the air to get a better look, the flying spell he'd cast previously still in effect. Below him were vast piles of gold, enough to fill an ocean.

The dragon's tail plowed into his protective spell from behind and sent him careening into the gold hard enough to send incalculable riches spraying. Though he wasn't hurt, the Magister was starting to lose track of where he was, let alone where the girl might be hiding.

Enough was
enough 
!

“STOP!” he commanded, unleashing the full power of his
magic on the dragon. “I do not want your key. My apprentice already took it, did he not?”

“Yes, the Gnomenfoot!” the dragon shrieked, writhing in pain from the force of the Magister's magic. “Please, let me be! I just want to be left alone, now that I've failed in my protection duty!”

“Tell me where the girl went,” the Magister demanded.

As the dragon opened his mouth to speak, something yanked on the Magister's foot, pulling him down into the piece of paper that he'd been unknowingly standing right on top of.

He found himself floating in nothingness, surrounded on all sides by metal spaceships, much like the ones in Dr. Verity's fleet, only larger and more dangerous-looking.

As he quickly cast a spell to ensure he could breathe, one of the spaceships sent out an enormous orange glowing light, streaking toward the largest of the other spaceships. The targeted spaceship sent out a light of its own, with both on course to collide right where the Magister floated.

One glow hit another just feet away from him, and the entire universe began to explode.

“BETHANY!” the Magister shouted into the nothingness, his voice not traveling at all in space, even as his magical spell of
protection quickly peeled away beneath the force of the bomb. Everything turned to bright white, and the Magister closed his eyes, awaiting his end.

Except nothing happened.

He opened his eyes, and found himself on a white plane of nothingness, surrounded by arrows, lines, and numbers.

“You're lucky,” Bethany said from behind him. “I thought about leaving you there in that last one. It's pretty intense science fiction, and they don't mess around with their endings. If I remember right, that bomb started a second big bang. Even
your
magic wouldn't have survived that.”

The Magister pushed himself to his feet, and instantly attacked, casting the spell Paralyzed With Fear straight at Bethany.

Bethany, however, just smiled.

The Magister's mouth dropped in surprise, and he quickly cast another spell. Nothing again. “What is this place?!” he shouted.

“I found this in the books you took. Probably from Jonathan Porterhouse's school days. This is where I'm leaving you. You can't do any harm here, since your magic won't work. And if your magic won't work, that means you can't keep stealing my power. And that means you're not jumping back out after me.”
She shrugged. “Should have looked before you leaped, I guess.”

“Where have you brought me?” the magician demanded. “Why does my magic no longer work?”

She grinned wider. “The entire point of this place is that there's no such
thing
as magic. Everything here? All the graphs and numbers and equations? It all adds up to you not going anywhere. Maybe I'll let you out someday.
After
you pass a test, to show what you learned.”

“You can't do this!” the Magister shouted. “You're no different from the rest of your kind, taking my freedom while you laugh. Enjoy yourself, girl! Enjoy yourself at my expense!”

Bethany's grin faded, and she sighed. “Here's what you don't understand about the fictional world,” she told him. “I don't know if authors watch what you do on some kind of television in their brain, or make the stories up purely from their imaginations. But we don't read about you because we're bored, or just to amuse ourselves. We read about you to be
with
you, to walk in someone else's shoes, to experience another life. Some of those lives are hard, and others are easy, but we're with you every step of the way. We read about people in impossible situations because
we're
dealing with horrible things ourselves, in
our
lives. And you going through your story helps us with ours,
no matter how yours ends. Though I do think we both like a happy ending, don't we?”

“That doesn't give you the
right
—”

“Think about it this way,” she said. “You thought of yourself as alone for so many years, fighting against Dr. Verity. But there were hundreds, even thousands of readers on my world who lived it with you. Who felt every victory, every defeat, and want more than anything for you to win. Who cried, actually cried when they thought you died. Those are the people you're trying to make suffer, the ones who've been on your team this entire time. Just something to think about.”

And with that, she leaped out of the page from Jonathan Porterhouse's old school math book about multiplying fractions, leaving the Magister to scream alone into nothingness.

T
he Science Soldiers pushed Charm's floating stretcher through the halls of the Presidential Palace, and Owen followed, trying not to stare at the wonders around him. Water flowed against gravity in energy fields that transported it to the higher floors. Lights exploded at atomic levels, miniature nuclear bombs that continually formed new atoms, then split those, creating perpetual light without using any energy.

And then there were the holograms.

As far as Owen could tell, the palace was filled with people, unlike the city outside, yet no one was real. Everyone used the same kind of hologram technology that Dr. Verity had used on their spaceship, going about their business while their body stayed home. It was almost like the Nalwork, just with fewer ads.

The Science Soldiers walked right through the holograms, at least the ones who didn't pay enough attention to step out
of the robots' way. Just to test, Owen ran a hand through a hologram of a man in what looked to be a formal uniform of some kind. The man gave him a strange look, and beneath his helmet, Owen blushed. Whoops.

The robots continued on into the palace, finally arriving at the largest, most expensive-looking of all the rooms Owen had seen so far. This seemed to be some kind of audience chamber for the president, and it was empty of people, holograms, and soldiers. The clank of robot feet on glass floor seemed extra loud as the Science Soldiers walked Charm toward an extremely large desk made of brown metal, sculpted to look like wood.

The chair behind the desk turned, and Dr. Verity pushed to his feet, a wide smile on his face. “Welcome, soldiers,” he said, and gestured for them to line up before him.

The soldiers immediately moved to stand at attention, Charm's unconscious body floating just in front of the line. Owen quickly took a spot at the end of the line and tried his best to stand as still as possible in the same pose as the rest.

“Commander, report,” Dr. Verity said, stepping in front of Charm's body. “I see you found the missing daughter of the former president.”

“AFFIRMATIVE,” the commander said in its monotone
voice. “CRIMINAL CHARM MENTUM WAS LOCATED IN THE CRASH SITE OF THE SPACESHIP PREVIOUSLY LICENSED TO HER FATHER, THE FORMER PRESIDENT MENTUM, NOW DECEASED. SPACESHIP IS NOW UNUSABLE, DUE TO—”

Dr. Verity waved his hand. “I don't care. What about the boy?”

“NO YOUNG HUMAN MALE WAS LOCATED—”

Dr. Verity smiled. “Oh, yes, he was. There was indeed a young human male located at the crash site. But we can get into that later. For now, there are more important matters to discuss.” He reached down and touched Charm's cheek, shaking his head sadly. “It didn't need to come to this, Ms. Mentum. You never should have survived the first attack on your family, honestly.”

Owen gritted his teeth to keep still while Dr. Verity turned his back and sighed. “And now you've gone and injured yourself even further, which surprises me. I figured
you'd
survive the crash over the boy. But . . . could it be? Did you protect him?” He began to laugh, then patted her shoulder. “Oh, my dear girl. What a waste!”

“ORDERS, SIR?” the Science Soldier commander asked, but Dr. Verity just waved his hand again.

“I'm not finished, Commander. You see, things are about to change. My armies are even now beginning their attacks on Magisteria. And without the Magister, those pathetic magic-users will have no one to organize them, to lead them against my antimagic robots from all realities.” He stopped, as if considering things. “Still, those spell-eaters will do their best to defend themselves, casting their disgusting magic and such. Why waste the time and energy to fight them? Why not just use our new weapon?”