Spark(54)

“Nah. Your fans want to see you. That’s enough.”
“Well, that and the extra VirtuMax swag the company will be handing out.” She yawned. The swaying of the tour bus, on top of her pain meds, was making her groggy.
“Here.” Niteesh handed her a pillow. “I’ll wake you up when we get to the next hotel.”
Spark tucked the pillow under her head and tried to get comfortable. Impatience and worry beat through her, throbbing in time with her wrist.
Jennet hadn’t messaged her back yet, and the taste of failure was bitter ash on her tongue. Some Feyguard she’d turned out to be. She dozed as the bus flashed through quiet towns and winter-bare fields.#p#分页标题#e#
Niteesh’s hand on her shoulder roused her from fragmented dreaming.
“We’re almost there,” he said. “Hotel sweet hotel.”
She sat up and rubbed her blurry eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “Do you think you could talk Vonda into letting you have a FullD in your room, for extra practice?”
“So you can sneak onto the system?” Niteesh frowned and glanced at her wrist. “Seriously? You can’t play, Sparky. What’s the big hurry?”
“I have to try.”
“If this is about the Terribles, I don’t think you need to worry about them.”
He glanced to the front of the bus, where it seemed Roc and Cora had been behaving themselves. Spark almost protested that the twins had nothing to do with her need to get back into Feyland. But they provided a good excuse.
“Help me, Nit. Please?”
He blew out a breath. “I’ll ask,” he said. “But no promises.”



Aran woke after sleeping for hours. In the real world, he’d call it morning, but that word didn’t belong in the Dark Realm’s unchanging darkness. He pulled on his clothes, then grabbed his tablet. The dinosaur was a comforting lump in his jeans pocket, though he didn’t plan on contacting the human realm today.
No, he was going to concentrate on that wall between the realms. Soon as he opened that, he could collect his reward from the queen and return to the real world a rich man.
And the first thing he planned to do was find Spark Jaxley. They had all kinds of unfinished business between them.
Without waiting for Thomas, Aran tucked his tablet under his arm and left the tent. He was pretty sure he could find his way back to the clearing Thomas had shown him yesterday. And since the queen wanted him to work on the wall, he figured the magic of the realm would help lead him there.
After one wrong turn that dead-ended in a marsh, Aran backtracked along the path and found the clearing. With a deep breath, he stepped into the mushroom ring. The wind rose around him, and he welcomed its familiar, sharp bite.
When the wind stopped buffeting him, he was even gladder to see he’d arrived at the mirror-image clearings. Slowly, he walked toward the middle clearing, one hand outstretched. He encountered the invisible wall and traced its slight curve until he felt the thin crack under his fingertips.
Time to see if he had the skills. Adrenaline rushed through him—half fear of failure, half excitement at the challenge.
He settled on the soft mosses of the clearing, the wall firmly at his back, and powered up his tablet. It flickered to life, showing the normal menu screen. Now—how to get the tablet to display the code, so that he could modify it?
After a frustrating half hour, Aran set his tablet down. Leaning forward, he rested his head against his bent knees. Nothing he tried worked. Not inputting search terms like “faerie realm computer code,” or holding his tablet flat against the wall, or even wading through the guts of the tablet’s operating system, hoping to find a new, hidden protocol.
Something was digging into his thigh. He shifted uncomfortably, then froze. Oh, he’d been an idiot. The dinosaur was the missing link. He knelt and pulled it out of his pocket. Holding his breath, he set the garish toy on top of the tablet.
The display emitted a bright flash, and for a horrible second Aran thought he’d burned it out. Then the light steadied, forming glowing lines of code marching across the screen. Yes!
Leaning over the tablet, Aran scrolled through, looking for something familiar—a chink he could slide through, a gap in the programming. At last, his vision blurry from staring at the screen, he found it.
Despite the excitement rushing through him, his fingers were steady as he typed out commands. The first two did nothing—just lay there, limp as dead worms. When he ran his third script, he felt the wall beside him shudder. Not only that, it became visible, the code revealed in glowing green rows.
That was the tactic, then: a subversion of the ENOX to PH converter on the back end. He could work with that. A tweak here, a nudge there, mapping to the underlying conversion and adding bigger parameters…