26

Before you can really start to take in what you just read, you hear your grandma calling you from upstairs. Like so many other recent days, the only thing you've heard from her since the morning has been footsteps in her study; but now, there's no mistaking the slight ring of urgency in her voice.

Moving up the quiet stairs, you glance down the hallway to see the study door standing ajar. As you approach it, you start to notice a noise like the faint humming of machinery—and inside, you hear the unmistakeable sound of typing on a keyboard.

"Huknock? Are you there?"

The door cracks open a little wider, and then your grandma appears in the gap, her anxious eyes finding yours after a moment.

"Oh—good, I thought I'd heard you. I'm not sure if you're busy at all, but—if you do have a free moment, then there's something I'd like to show you."

Stepping back, she beckons you inside the small room—and almost as soon as you cross the threshold you feel warm, dense air wrap itself around you, more humid than it was outside. Then, as you watch your grandma lower herself into an old chair, you recognize the source of the heat: the row of computers your grandma brought back from the treehouse, all of them lined up under the desk your grandma has been working at.

At last, she shifts in her seat to face you—and quite suddenly you're struck by the way her brow is so tightly furrowed in concentration. For the first time, it occurs to you that if she did leave her study while you were out, then she almost certainly must have seen the headline downstairs too.

"Remember when I asked you if my old computer was still working?" she asks slowly. "Well—it was really only ever in case this setup failed. I don't think it's very likely, but you never want to be without a backup. But the reason I asked was—it was after you told me how you spoke to my old friend Dolores a little while ago. How she told you about something I had said to her about a warning I had left her. See, a very long time ago I realized that—there may at some point come a time when the existence of our magic was more dangerous than it was desirable. And you know how I hate leaving things to chance; so even if it was a very remote possibility, I came up with a sort of contingency plan. A computer program, not very different from the one you helped me to run. It was very rushed, and it was never tested, but the idea behind it was that—if ever our magic was discovered—then this program could, in theory, cut it off altogether. Like our code, expect instead of storing the magic, the program would essentially—erase it."

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