56

Taking a deep breath, your grandma addresses you again with a new look of determination.

"Well. Now that we know our options—this will make our choice much simpler."

She licks her lips—and almost at once, she swings around in her chair to face the computer monitors on the desk.

"In fact," she says, pulling a keyboard towards her and beginning to type something with slow and careful fingers, "it makes our choice very simple indeed. We don't know what this company that's planning the developments has to hide—so all we can do is go back to my original plan. We pull what we can of our magic out of the forest and keep it safe in storage."

For a while, the click of plastic keys fills the room. All you can do is watch as new lines of code grow on the screen in front of you, thinking—trying to process the speed at which this is all happening.

After a few minutes, your grandma hits one last key and turns towards you in satisfaction. For the first time at the bottom of the screen, a button has lit up that reads in bright red letters: Click to Execute Code.

"I think this should be it," your grandma tells you—and as her hand hovers over the keyboard, there's an almost hungry look in her wide eyes. "I only had a little left to finish off after the last test, and I think by now I've managed to calibrate it. That's why it's taken so much time; I had to set up receivers all over—all over the area. Now, the computer should be able to send out a signal—a magical signal, that is—to all of those receivers, and then they'll send a signal to each other, and it'll be like it's casting a net over the whole forest. And if everything goes right—then it should be able to extract all of its magic and draw it back here to us."

She takes a moment to catch her breath. Now that the time for action is getting so close, your grandma seems to be growing more impatient, more excited.

You're not sure you've ever seen her like this before—and as you watch her, you start to feel: