Worldweavers: Spellspam Read Free Page B

,” Magpie said. “Are you sure she’s even in sickbay?”
    “They can’t exactly let her run around likethat, not looking like…”
    “Terry,” Tess said softly, ignoring the other girls.
    “That’s done. They won’t find a trace of it on the hard drive,” Terry said, looking up from the laptop. “What, Tess?”
    “Look. The office.”
    The room that had been Patrick Wittering’s office led off the computer lab, and its door had been left ajar. Thea glimpsed a desk, now clear of Twitterpat’s usual untidy mound of paperwork…but still bearing a computer monitor.
    Terry and Tess exchanged a swift glance.
    “Might not mean the computer is still there,” Terry murmured.
    “Why would they take the computer and leave the monitor behind?”
    “You think it’s worth it?”
    “What on earth are you hoping to find?” Ben demanded.
    “Answers, maybe,” Terry said. But still he hung back, hesitating.
    “Terry,” Magpie said in her most practical voice, “when Twitterpat left, none of this computer stuff was even a question. What kind of answers could you hope to find?”
    “They wouldn’t have sent an unarmed man to fight the Nothing,” Tess said.
    “And he was good, he was really good,” said Terry. “If anyone knew what was going on, he would have. The man lived half a step into the future.”
    “And you really think he would have left it all just lying around like this…? Or that the school would have allowed it?” Ben said.
    “Anything could happen,” Terry said. “But I wish I felt less like a cat burglar.”
    “He might have wanted you to know,” Tess said. “Someone else might need to know.”
    “Cracking the door code was one thing,” Magpie said. “What makes you think you could crack Twitterpat’s computer?”
    “And Terry”—Thea had subsided into one of the chairs and was now staring up at Terry—“if you thought he might have rigged the door, what might he have done to booby-trap the computer?”
    “There are ways,” Terry said. “There are always ways. Look, nobody else might have known where to look….”
    “Like for instance in a computer left sitting in the middle of an empty office?” Ben said, a littlesharply. “Don’t you think it’s far more likely that, if they left that computer dumped there like that, there might have been nothing of value on it for anyone to find?”
    “Ben,” Terry said, “I’m probably better than anyone else they have on staff right now. They haven’t even made an attempt to replace Twitterpat. Everyone else still treats computers as no more than glorified electronic filing cabinets. But now there’s Thea…and then this new thing….” He paused. There were things that he could not utter. “What you called it, back in your father’s study,” he said, glancing at Thea.
    “Spellspam,” Thea said, shrugging. “It was the first thing that came to mind.”
    Magpie giggled. “ Spellspam . Thea, that’s brilliant.”
    “What did your parents say?” Ben asked.
    “My aunt thinks she might have received one of them herself,” Thea said. “My dad said he’d check it out.”
    “What if it’s worse than we thought?” Terry said. “One might be a joke—two, a coincidence—but what if we just haven’t heard of any more as yet, isolated out here as we are? What if this was just the first symptom in a full-scalecyber-epidemic? I don’t think they have the first idea about how to deal with something like that.”
    “They dealt with it when the libraries went feral,” Thea said. “Spells escaped from grimoires in the stacks and everything suddenly turned to mush and chaos. I know the stories—my father used to do that for a living.”
    Terry shot a desperate look at Tess, unable to articulate what he was thinking—the conversation was straying into what were, for him, dangerous waters. Tess thought for a moment, and then began speaking, keeping her eyes on her brother’s face.
    “Feral libraries were localized,”