Worldweavers: Spellspam (5 page)

“I’m going crazy,” Thea announced to the ceiling.

“Urngh?” Magpie said sleepily, turning her head a little. “What do you mean,
going
?”

Thea glanced at the clock on her bedside table. “We’re late,” she said. “I didn’t hear the alarm.”

“It’s
Saturday
,” Magpie said patiently.

Thea rubbed her eyes. “Crazy,” she repeated, and swung her legs out of bed. She froze as her gaze fell on the crack in the drawn curtains, which was letting in a cold gray light.

She got up and padded to the window, flinging the curtains open, heedless of Magpie’s squawk of protest. Outside, the weather had worsened,
and what had been a gentle drizzle had turned into a full-fledged storm with rain lashing down and trees swaying in the wind.

“Just as well we weren’t planning on any expeditions today,” Magpie said as she raised herself on one elbow and cast a glance out the window.

Thea shook her head. “Just as well,” she muttered. “If I told you just how much farther I went last night than the garden shed, you’d probably tell me I was losing it.”

“Anyone else, probably,” Magpie said. “You promised you’d do no more solo flights, but it isn’t as though I believe you. So, are you going to tell me about it?”

“When I wake up,” Thea said. “Talk to me after breakfast. I really hope we have a nice, quiet day. I don’t think I could handle much more excitement right now.”

“Perhaps we should drop in on LaTasha, if they’re letting her have visitors,” Magpie said, getting out of her own bed. “It’s funny, but there’s been very little talk about it. You’d think that anyone who was actually there would—”

“Magpie, people don’t particularly want to sound like complete nuts, even to their own best friends. People who saw LaTasha yesterday
probably preferred to think they hadn’t. But it won’t be too long before even the kids in here realize that what happened to LaTasha wasn’t an isolated incident.”

“Do you think other stuff might get through? More spellspam?” Magpie asked, running her hands through her tangled hair. “Will they shut down Terranet completely in here?”

“They’d probably find it harder to do than they think. Most of us at this school depend far too much on e-mail. And parents will want to know their kids are okay. If they shut down those avenues of communication, they may as well shut down the school.”

“There’s always telephones,” Magpie protested, but without much conviction.

“Sure, until people start getting annoyed that the phone is always busy. Which it will be, if everyone in this school starts phoning home.”

“There’s always
cell
phones,” Magpie said obstinately.

“Okay, you win—there’s cell phones! But they can carry only so much—and you
know
how much we all depend on e-mail for real information. The Nexus is the center of operations for Terranet access from the Academy—and if the
principal keeps it shut down for much longer…Well, I guess we’ll find out what happens when chaos breaks loose.” She paused. “I need to talk to Terry.”

Magpie looked at her beadily. “About what?”

“About how to stay safe,” Thea said. “I had an idea.”

She actually felt the blood rush to her cheeks at that, the blatant claiming of Grandmother Spider’s inspiration, but somewhere deep inside her, she heard Grandmother Spider chuckle softly.
It’s quite all right. It was your idea. I just helped you put it all together.

T
HE “IDEA” ARRIVED IN
a manila envelope later that morning.

Mrs. Chen waved Thea down in the entrance hall as she and Magpie raced down the stairs.

“You’ve got mail,” Mrs. Chen called out, diverting Thea into her office. “Who on earth,” she added, peering at the return address before handing Thea the envelope, “is Arachne Yiayia?”

“A grandmother,” Thea said with a grin, “of sorts. Thanks!”

Mrs. Chen hesitated, and Thea looked up with wide eyes that were pools of innocence. “Do I have to open it now?”

“No-o-o, but…”

“Trust me, Mrs. Chen,” Thea said. “What’s in here may solve a lot of problems.”

“Why is it that sentences that begin with
trust
me
usually wind up being trouble?” Mrs. Chen murmured, relinquishing her hold on the envelope. “I’m not sure I should—”

“I will do absolutely nothing without talking to the principal,” Thea said. “I promise.”

Shaking her head, Mrs. Chen waved her out of the office.

Magpie craned her head at the envelope across Thea’s shoulder.

“‘Surprise, AZ,’” she read out loud, scanning the return address. “There’s a place called Surprise in Arizona? Somebody made that up!”

“No,” Thea said with a slight smile, “Grandmother Spider doesn’t make things up. She makes them
real
. Even if there wasn’t ever a place called Surprise in Arizona, there is now. You could find it in any atlas. I’d bet money on it.”

“Grandmother Spider sent you
mail
?” Magpie squeaked. “What’s in there?”

“A spellchecker,” Thea said, and burst out laughing at the expression on Magpie’s face. “Come on, we need to find Terry, and then the principal—it’s complicated enough without me having to explain it more than once….”

They ran out into the deluge, pulling hoods over their hair. They found and cornered Terry
in the library entranceway, pausing to shake excess water off himself.

“Terry,” Thea called out as she ran toward him, “have you figured out what you’re going to say yet? To the principal?”

Terry looked at her a little strangely. “Well, good morning to you, too…. If you’re thinking about the job…it’s a no-brainer,” he said. “The big picture is pretty easy to see. It’s the details that are going to be messy.”

“Not necessarily,” Thea said triumphantly, brandishing her envelope. “When do you start? Can you do it this weekend? We can test it out!”

“Thea!” Magpie wailed. “You said you were going to
explain
it!”

“I will. But it will be easiest to show it. It doesn’t have to be on the Ne…on the you-know-what….” She glanced around a little furtively before ripping open the envelope. “Oh! She sent
five
! You get your own, Magpie!”

“My own what?” Magpie demanded testily.

“One of these,” Thea said, brandishing a small but exquisite dreamcatcher, which appeared to be attached to a keyring.
Nice camouflage
, Thea thought.

Terry, to whom she had handed the first
dreamcatcher, was looking at it skeptically. “Okay,” he said, squinting through the web at Thea. “I’ll bite. What is it supposed to do?”

“Let’s go inside,” Thea said, closing the envelope and running inside. Magpie and Terry, exchanging thoroughly baffled glances, followed.

Thea found an empty set of cubicles wedged in a dark corner of the library and posted Magpie as sentry in the nearest aisle, where she could keep an eye out for people who might be paying too much attention to what was going on. It was just as well that nobody was, because Magpie was a terrible perimeter guard—she was far more interested in trying to figure out what Thea and Terry were up to than protecting them from intrusion.

Thea instructed Terry to fire up the laptop.

“I can’t get on Terranet anymore, if that’s what you’re after,” Terry warned as the machine hummed into life. “Not until I figure out how to start up the Ne…the…other thing again. That’s the gateway. All of the ’net is down at the Academy right now.”

“Just as well, but I can still show you how it’s supposed to work,” Thea said. “And you can try
it for real, after. Maybe you can talk to the principal about starting…your project…this weekend.”

“There, it’s up,” Terry said, grinning in spite of himself. “What do you want me to do?”

“Open up an e-mail,” Thea said.

“But I just told you I can’t…”

“It doesn’t have to be
live
,” Thea said impatiently. “Just open up the software, and open up an e-mail. Have you still got the one, you know, that got you into trouble last night?”

“The 3-W one? Not on your life. Some things it’s better not to keep as mementos,” Terry said, tapping at his keyboard. “There. Now what?”

Thea picked up the dreamcatcher. “You had the right idea before,” she said. “Next time you get an e-mail, look at it only through this. If it’s…problematic…you can see that it is without the…problem…affecting you in any way, and you can kill the thing. Before it gets you.” She closed one eye and peered at the sample e-mail Terry had opened through the dreamcatcher web. “Just like that. So that’s the first thing. There’s something else, but that…had better wait until you get into the…other place. It’s hard to have a conversation when you have to
talk in circles around things all the time!”

“Tell me about it,” Terry said, with feeling, reaching for the dreamcatcher. “I’ve had that particular problem all my life. Things I
can’t
talk about, without…talking in circles. Don’t worry, you’ve found an expert at it.” He squinted at his laptop screen through the circle of the dreamcatcher, and then past it with his naked eye. “I can’t see anything different,” he said.

“That’s because it isn’t a you-know-what,” Thea said impatiently. “When it matters, you’ll see.”

“Where did you say you got these?” Terry said, turning the dreamcatcher over in his hand.

“From someone who knows what they’re doing,” Thea said. “Are you going to talk to the principal? Tell him that I should be there, too. That first time, anyway. There’s something we need to do, together.”

Terry raised an eyebrow at her. “Just tell him that, eh,” he said. “Maybe I should send
you
to talk to him.”

“He’ll listen,” Thea said, grinning. It was all suddenly solvable, exciting, even exhilarating. “Just
go
, already.”

Terry shut down the laptop, slipped it into its
carrying case, and glanced over at where Magpie stood, riveted, with a book half pulled out of its place on the shelf.

“Watch out,” he said conversationally. “Mr. Siffer’s right behind you.”

Magpie jumped, whipping her head around, and dropped the book, which bounced off her foot and against the stack on the shelf.

“Ow,” Magpie said. “You can be such a
dork
, Terry.”

But he was already gone, only an echo of his laughter left in between the tall stacks. Magpie bent to pick up the book she had dropped.

“Come on,” Thea said, “we’d better follow him.”

“What is this
we
you speak of?” Magpie muttered mutinously, her face hidden in the fall of her dark hair. “You haven’t told me anything about anything—you’ve been on some secret personal crusade all morning!”

“Next time you get an e-mail, you’ll see,” Thea said. “Just hang onto your little dreamcatcher.”

“Nobody sends me e-mail,” Magpie complained. “I get letters. I get phone calls. You computer people. You think you know everything.”

Thea turned around to stare at her friend. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…I get kind of carried away with it all.”

“Yeah. I know. It’s your own sick skunk,” Magpie said, with a helplessly wicked grin. “Lead on, I follow!”

They loitered in the entrance hall of the administration building long enough for the principal to send for them.

Terry, Tess, and Mrs. Chen were waiting in the principal’s office. Principal Harris rose from behind his desk as Magpie and Thea came in.

“These…gadgets,” the principal said, gesturing to the dreamcatcher dangling from Terry’s fingers. “I had half a dozen unwanted messages that arrived before I shut down the system, and which I hadn’t even looked at—Terry tells me these things can identify them, so we tried it out on my quarantined stash—and it works like a charm.” He rolled his eyes at his own choice of words. “Like a charm. Of course it does. The point is, it’s a good monitoring system. If I can have one up here to…”

“Sorry, sir,” Thea said. “She sent me five. One for each of the five of us—Terry and Tess, Magpie, Ben, me. I don’t have any more to give away.”

“Who sent them?” Mrs. Chen said, with an edge to her voice.

“
Arachne Yiayia
means Grandmother Spider,” Thea said.

Mrs. Chen stared at her. “Grandmother Spider,” she repeated.

“Grandmother Spider.
The
Grandmother Spider,” Thea said helpfully. “According to legend, she helped create the world.”

Mrs. Chen looked even more puzzled.

“Thea was sent back to the Anasazi,” the principal said, but did not elaborate. “Frankly, Margaret, nothing has the power to surprise me anymore. The point is, these things aren’t very useful if only the five of you have access to them.”

“Oh, but they are,” Thea said. “Only one is really ever needed here—the one used by Terry, on your Nexus. He can channel e-mail through that, kill anything that is dangerous.”

“But the spell,” began Mrs. Chen stubbornly. “I cannot condone leaving a student alone with the Nexus under the circumstances, particularly Terry, knowing what the side effects could be if he so much as mouthed something with a particle of magic in it. And that would mean round-the-
clock surveillance…”

“No,” Thea said. “I have an idea.”

Sometimes you just need to open a window into another room in your mind.

They were all looking at her; the weight of all those eyes sank into Grandmother Spider’s gentle words.

“I’d like to show you,” Thea said. “I need a computer—any computer—to stand in for your Nexus.”

“Be my guest,” Terry said, offering his laptop. “What do you need? Just word processing?”

“That will do.”

He pulled the computer out of its case, switched it on, tapped a few keys on the keyboard, and pushed it toward Thea on the principal’s desk. “Go for it.”

“Look,” Thea said, and began typing.

Everything stays the same, except Terry can speak freely. What is done here is done in the real world outside this bubble.

She typed the period at the end of the sentence with a small flourish, and then glanced up at her audience. “Hold on to me,” she said. “Just a hand on a shoulder. Anything. Okay?” She felt the weight of two hands—Terry’s light touch
with an encouraging squeeze on her upper arm, Principal Harris’s heavier hand on her shoulder—and hit
ENTER
.

The other two waited a beat.

“Nothing happened,” the principal said after a moment.

Thea looked up. “Terry, say ‘spellspam.’”

“Thea,” the principal began, an urgent warning in his voice, “he could—”

“You know I can’t!” Terry said at the same instant.

“Trust me,” Thea said. “Just say it.”

“Sp…spellspam,” Terry said, stammering, clutching the edge of the desk with a white-knuckled grip. He swallowed hard as the word left his lips, and then drew a deep breath. Without any trouble at all.

It hit them both, at the same moment. Terry’s mouth dropped open, and the principal drew in a sharp breath.

“I said it,” Terry said, astonished. “I actually said it…and I’m still breathing…. Thea, what did you
do
?”

Thea’s smile was luminous.

“Someone told me that it is sometimes enough just to open a window into another room,” she
said. “We’re in the same world, Terry. Our world. Whatever you do here will be echoed precisely back into the room that we just left—you can ‘switch on’ this world, the world in which you are safe, and you can do whatever needs to be done with the Nexus. I’m not sure how long you can stay safely without returning to claim your place in the
other
world, but it doesn’t have to be long; you can do it in short snatches. But you’re safe, and you can do anything here. Anything. It doesn’t matter if it has magic in it; its taste will not kill you. You have the dreamcatcher, and you can deal with things that need to be dealt with here instead of back there, where you can be hurt by them. And when you’re done, you go back.”

“But how do I get back?” Terry said.

“Like this,” Thea said, and added another word to the sentences she had typed on the laptop screen.

“We’re back,” Terry said.

Mrs. Chen was standing by the principal’s desk, clutching at it with both hands. The principal glanced at her and gave her a reassuring nod.

“It’s all right, Margaret,” he said. “This might actually work.”

“John…”

“Margaret, it will be all right, really. Next time, you go—you’ll understand. Terry, are you officially accepting this responsibility? It’s a lot for a young man to take on, but I think Mr. Wittering was not wrong when he told me that the Nexus would be in safe hands if we entrusted it to you.”

“I will, sir,” Terry said, standing with his back straight and his eyes glowing.

“Then it’s time you met the Nexus,” the principal said.

He crossed to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on one of the walls of his study, and pulled a pair of books, apparently at random, out at a forty-five-degree angle. The bookcase clicked, detached from the wall, and then moved slowly, very slowly, on silent runners to reveal a dark doorway beyond.

“Follow me,” the principal said, flicking on a light switch on the inside wall of the hidden passage, revealing a set of spiraling stairs leading toward a faint glow that came from somewhere out of sight down below.

Terry went first, followed by Tess, then Thea, and then Magpie, with Mrs. Chen bringing up
the rear, still mumbling about how all of this was a bad idea.

It didn’t look like much at first sight. The Nexus apparently consisted of little else besides a couple of large monitors on a rather ordinary wooden desk, which also held a headphone set, a keyboard, and a trackball mouse. The monitors were switched off. Everything was dark, except for a single red pilot light on each monitor and a faint opalescent glow coming out of walls that looked half-translucent, barely solid enough to mute a bright light blazing underneath.