The Grimm Legacy

aren’t they?” I pointed out. “And they’re perfectly fine—they’re still magic.”

“The boots are, sure. But dozens of other things are gone or, at least, their magic is. Look at all this! It’s trash! Useless trash!” He hit the pile of unmagical items with the back of his hand. A golden egg wobbled to the edge of the desk, but I caught it before it fell.

“You can’t seriously believe Marc is responsible!”

“You can’t seriously believe he isn’t!”

“What about that page that got fired, the one right before me?”

“Who, Zandra? That ditz? She couldn’t steal candy from a baby, she doesn’t have the brains, and she hasn’t been here for months. Marc, on the other hand . . .”

“Why aren’t you accusing Anjali, while you’re at it? You just said you saw her with the boots too.”

“I know Anjali. She’s not a thief. She just has bad judgment, like the rest of you moronettes. What do you see in that arrogant egomaniac, anyway? Just because he’s tall? Just because he can throw a ball through a ring?”

“You’re just jealous,” I said.

“You can believe what you want,” Aaron said. “But somebody’s stealing from the Grimm Collection. They’re either taking the objects or somehow sucking out their magic. Doc and the librarians are going to find out who, and if Marc is in on it, you’re going to be sorry you were helping him.”

“Marc isn’t in on it. And I love this place too! We’re all on the same side!”

“I hope that’s true,” Aaron said. 

Chapter 14: A forfeit

I found Marc and Anjali in the Preservation Room, sitting rather close together. They didn’t look all that pleased to be interrupted, but they greeted me politely.

“Did you cut your hair?” asked Anjali.

I shook my head.

“Well, whatever you did, it looks great.”

“Yeah, it does,” said Marc, scrutinizing me like he’d just noticed I was an actual female girl—the kind guys look at. The comb must really be magic, I thought.

“Thanks . . . Listen, I’m sorry to barge in, but I thought you guys should know. Ms. Callender had me down in the GC with Aaron, and she gave us a whole list of objects to pull off the shelves for her. She said she wanted to check them because some stuff’s been stolen. It was really weird—I think a lot of the objects on the list are fakes. Half of them smell wrong, and they don’t work.”

“What do you mean, smell wrong?” asked Marc.

“Smell normal, like they’re not magical. You know what I mean?”

“I do,” said Anjali. “Marc’s better with touch.”

“Oh, you mean like how magic objects feel magic,” said Marc.

I nodded. “Aaron couldn’t tell about the magic from the smell either,” I continued, “but he said the objects looked wrong to him. I guess we all have different ways of sensing magic? Anyway, the ones that smelled wrong to me didn’t work. We tested a few of them.”

“That’s weird,” said Marc.

“Yeah, but here’s the really bad part. One of the things on the list was those boots you’re always borrowing. Now Aaron thinks you stole the missing objects—the ones that don’t work, I mean—and replaced them with fakes.”

“Oh. That’s really bad,” said Marc. He rubbed his face with his hand.

“How does Aaron know Marc’s been taking the boots?” asked Anjali. Did I hear a hint of an accusation in her voice?

“I don’t know how he found out.”

“I obviously didn’t tell him, and neither did Anjali, so who did?” said Marc.

“Why would anyone have to?” I asked. “He saw you. You’ve both been running around with the boots for weeks. He’s not blind, and he’s not stupid. And he does have a reason not to like you.”

“What reason would that be?” asked Anjali.

“He’s jealous of Marc, because he likes you.”

“What an unpleasant thought,” said Anjali. “But what are we going to do?”

Marc curled his lip in that haughty, contemptuous way of his.

“Aaron’s fair,” I said. “I’m sure he won’t tell on you unless he really thinks you’re the thief. You just have to convince him you didn’t take the objects.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” snapped Marc.

I hated this. I’d finally managed to make friends, and now they were mad at me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to help.”

“The best thing to do,” said Anjali, “is to find out who really took them.”

“That’s what Ms. Callender and Doc are trying to do,” I said.

“We have to help, before Aaron decides to tell them about Marc. Otherwise they’ll just assume he’s the thief and stop looking.”

“Okay, but how?” I asked.

“Do you have that list?” asked Anjali.

I shook my head. “Ms. Callender didn’t leave us a copy, but I bet she has it on her desk.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Anjali. “Can you guys meet me at the coffee shop on Lexington after school tomorrow?”

When I got to the coffee shop the next day, Marc and Anjali were already there, waiting for me. “Okay, let me show you,” said Anjali, taking her expensive laptop out of her expensive knapsack. She opened a spreadsheet program. “These are all the items on the list, along with the info from the last ten times each one was requested or checked out. I included everything I could think of, in case it helped. Like the other objects the patron took out at the same time, with their recent history. Or the patrons’ affiliations and contact info. Stuff like that.”

“Wow,” said Marc, “you looked up all that info about all those objects in the card file and typed it into your computer? That must have been a ton of work.”

Anjali shook her head. She looked proud of herself. “Copiers and scanners aren’t really good for handwritten card catalogs and call slips—it would have taken all week to do it that way. I used a dereifier from the Chresto. It’s point-and-click. It works instantly.”

“Smart,” said Marc. He sounded impressed.

“What’s a dereifier?” I asked. “What’s the Chresto?”

“The Gibson Chrestomathy, remember? One of the other special collections in the Dungeon,” said Anjali. “A dereifier transforms things from reality-based to virtual. It outputs representations of the input.”

The waitress came by and refilled Anjali and Marc’s coffee cups.

“What does that mean? What kind of input?” I asked.

“Anything,” said Anjali. “An apple. A mouse. An armchair. In this case, a huge pile of call slips, catalog cards, and Ms. Callender’s notes.”

“And what happens to the armchair and the notes?”

“It depends on the settings. I set the dereifier to computer database. But you could use it for all kinds of things. Like, for example, you could make a picture of the apple or a poetic description of the armchair.”

“What happens to the original armchair? Or apple, or whatever?”