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  “But where can we hide it?” I ask.

  “In plain sight?” TD says.

  “What do you mean?” Rory asks.

  “Put it inside the other trash can,” TD says.

  “In the trash icon on Cassie’s desktop screen?” I ask.

  “Exactly! A trash can within a trash can.”

  “Brilliant!” Eli shouts. I see a little kindling flicker between Eli and the wireframe of TD where his eyes might be. Eli knows that he is the secret version of Prince Thunderdolt Lowenbrow.

  The secret trash can becomes our Trojan horse. We pick a secure password. But I’m still worried. It seems risky.

  A shadow flickers by. “What’s that?” Rory asks as a scan of one of the sketches of the owl lands on her shoulder.

  “Constance! I nearly forgot. Eli, can you take these scans and figure out how to wireframe her?”

  “Sure, we have a few of the original codes your mom worked on.”

  “I’m still not sure how she’ll help us.” Rory lifts a wireframe hand to her shoulder to pet the shadowy owl.

  “Here’s the code,” Eli says. He works silently, studying my scans as he rewires the shapes.

  “What are you doing?” TD asks. “Remember, our eyes are mostly off duty.”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. Wireframing is taking something flat, like Ryder’s sketches, and turning it into a 3-D object. Sort of like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. When I complete the rewire, the image of Constance the owl will appear to have volume.”

  I can’t stay much longer. I need to get back to Cassie’s office. As I turn to leave, I trip over a file called Product Projections.

  “Just one second,” I say. There are some numbers: 36—22—41. Hmmm. Is this a code or a password? No. I see a chart with “Doll Figure Analogs” written at the top. It shows a picture of Bliss in a skintight dress and then a miniature Bliss in a princess outfit. It’s the brand-new Princess Rory doll! It all comes back to me—the Sugar Babe store and the banner announcing a Bling Blast that would help release your inner princess. Well, this inner princess was going right back inside, never to come back, I hope.

  Suddenly there’s a crackling sound. I feel a current pass through me. My cowlicks stand up and then everything goes black. I’m dead!

  —

  Okay. Not quite dead. I smell pizza, and I’m sitting in Cassie’s desk chair as she comes in.

  “Eli, when did you pop in?”

  He looks at the clock and blinks. “Oh, a little while ago,” he says. He must have thought we were gone for hours.

  Cassie sets down the pizza. “Power outage,” she mutters. A little bell rings. “That’s the computer switching over to the battery and restarting.”

  “How was your meeting?” I ask.

  “Oh, fine,” Cassie says. She looks down and concentrates on the pizza as she opens the lid. “Your dad hasn’t talked to you about the movie or anything yet?” she asks nervously.

  “Nah, you know he’s busy.”

  Dad walks in.

  “How you doin’, sweetheart? Ah, Eli! Glad you could come over. You two having fun with Cassie? Whatcha been up to?”

  “Oh, nothing, really,” I lie. I’m back in the real world. So of course I lie here.

  “Before I left for the meeting, I was showing Ryder the texturing we’re doing on the dinosaurs,” Cassie says.

  “Grrrreatt!” Dad says a little too enthusiastically. I look at him. Unhinged, I think, just slightly unhinged. “Unhinged” was a favorite word of Mom’s, but as far as I know she never used it about Dad.

  The overhead lights come on and I glance at the computer. It’s back on regular power. The screen looks the way it did when Cassie left, not a trace of the wireframes or of my sketches of the owl Constance. But my eyes linger on the trash can. I hope and pray it’s all still there.

  Cassie’s showing Dad the texture for the T. rex that I had helped her work on.

  Dad pats me on the back. “You’ll be an old pro in no time! Just like your mom!” I wince, but as I watch the screen I sense something behind the stippling texture of the dinosaur skin program. It’s them! Rory and TD and Constance! Looking out at me! Listening just the way Rory said they could when they spy on the animators.

  I can almost hear their whispers. The owl hoots softly as if to say, “If only…” If only what? I wonder. Then a thrilling quickness stirs inside me. “Hey, Dad, I was just thinking, since Constance—”

  “Who?”

  “Connie. Since she’s staying at our house now, she could come to Starlight with me sometime.”

  “What a nice idea. Glad you and Connie are getting along.”

  Dad’s face breaks into a huge smile. I look at him and sigh inside.

  If not for Bernice, Rory would have never been changed, been made over into the image of Bliss. What spells has Bernice cast on Dad? What an absolute witch she is! But soon Constance will meet up with her secret self. And when she does, she might be able to help us. She’ll know what to do.

  I am holding my breath as Constance sifts through my sketches of the owl on the floor in my bedroom.

  “Ryder, these are beautiful. You’re a true artist, just like your mom.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.” She looks at me with those luminous black eyes. I really did get the flickers of light just right in them.

  “Does the owl remind you of anyone?”

  Constance shakes her head. “The owl is…a she?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s her name?” She looks at me expectantly. “You haven’t named her yet?”

  “Oh, I’ve named her.”

  “Can you tell me? Or is it a secret?”

  “It’s your secret, Constance.”

  She rocks back on her knees. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I named her for you. Her name is Constance.”

  “But…why me?”

  “Because she is you. She is steadfast and loyal and searching, but most of all she is constant to herself.”

  “You really think that about me?”

  “I do. But there’s more….This is going to be very hard for me to explain.”

  “Try, Ryder.” She reaches out and her hand touches mine. It’s as if a feather brushed across it.

  “You know there have been changes made to Rory. She’s older and more like—”

  “Bliss,” she says dully. “You aren’t supposed to know. How did you find out?”

  “Rory.”

  “Rory? How could she tell you? What did she do, pop out of the television screen and say, ‘Hey, they’re changing me’?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what she did,” I say, matter-of-fact.

  She gasps. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  I reach for the remote. The television is connected to the Ethernet port on my computer. Eli devised this. The quickest way to Ecalpon. I turn to Constance. “I’m not kidding.” Reaching out, I take her hand. “Constance, come with me to Ecalpon.”

  As I click the remote her hand turns into a wing and we are off.

  From the high window of the tower of the Lizard Stone, the Witch of Wenham peers through her spyglass. She mutters as she catches sight of four children. Yet another miserable kid from the real world has come across.

  “Those brats! These scrapulous, clapper-clawed miscreants. Beslubbering little toads. Fie! Fie on them, the little sun-ripened pig droppings!” There are not enough words in the Witch of Wenham’s treasury of curses, oaths, and slander for her to fling at the children now scampering around the hills and dales of Ecalpon.

  “And that’s my owl!”

  “Your owl, madam?” Jeeves the lizard looks out the narrow window from the shoulders of his mistress.

  “Yes, my very own. The one I turned into a rock and that vile child Rory turned back into an owl again. Next she was written out of the script and I never had another crack at my alchemy. I came the closest with her, you know.”

  “Whatever you see happening now
with that owl will be off script, madam. There are no plans to bring her back into the series or the movie.”

  “Hrrrumph!” the witch growls, and squints. “Look, she’s got another kid with her.”

  “Ah, yes, Eli of Weck from the real world.”

  “Real world!” the witch growls. It was bad enough, the witch thinks, when it was just Rory and that fool girl Ryder who had somehow slipped through from that world into hers! “I’ll show them what’s real!”

  “Madam,” Jeeves says, “we cannot toy with what is real. We are make-believe!”

  “That means nothing. And furthermore, you are not supposed to disagree with me, you…you revolting little thing. You’re my servant…my…my…”

  “Butler, madam. I’m a butler. I was named for a very famous butler in English literature.”

  “Well, start acting like a butler. Fetch me some tea.”

  “Yes, madam.” The lizard scrambles down from the witch’s arms to the stone floor. With a little bow, asks, “One lump or two?”

  “Fourteen, you numskull, you know how I love sugar.”

  “Yes, of course.” Then he whispers to himself, “That’s why you only have one tooth left.”

  Jeeves the lizard brings the tea. The witch is perched again by the window, watching the children work on their secret project. Well, not so secret to those in Ecalpon, but definitely secret to Starlight Studios. They are clever little devils, thinks the witch. Eli of Weck is uncommonly bright. Put him together with Prince Thunderdolt and it is a dangerous combination. Who would have thought that dull prince was so smart? The witch has always thought he went up into his tower to sulk. Not so. Jeeves, her spy, had reported alarming developments. The most staggering were the changes they had made to the creation of her own long-lost daughter, Byogen, the inspiration for the new Rory.

  If her daughter rose to royalty, the witch would have a much bigger part in the series and the future movies. All this had become possible when Ralph met that new woman she had heard Rory talking about. Bernice is her ticket to success. Fate has planned this. The show could be retitled Super Byogen. Though Super Bliss would be fine. She turns to Jeeves, who is perched again on her shoulder.

  “I had so many hopes, Jeeves. You know, that woman Bernice is a mother just like me. We both have deeply maternal instincts. She’s a woman after my own heart.”

  “But, madam, we’re not real. We don’t have hearts or lungs, or livers or spleens or—”

  “Creature, shut up. I might not have a heart, but I have something here.” She slaps her chest.

  Jeeves hates it when his mistress calls him “creature.” He wants to say, You have nothing there. Some of us, especially characters like Rory, have a flickering of some indefinable tenderness deep in our wireframe souls. But the lizard slinks off.

  The witch squints out the window. The clouds clear and she has a good view of the small farm where Rory’s family lives. She spies Bethilda.

  “God’s teeth, that fool is curtsying to the chickens.” She runs her fingers fretfully through her thin hair, which hovers over her head like a tangle of electrified spider webs.

  Bethilda’s practicing! Practicing for the Princess Rory’s arrival and coronation! The old biddy wants a princess in this kingdom as much as I do, thinks the witch.

  The witch mutters, “She wants to improve her own lot. Just like me! She’s my secret weapon. No more feeding chickens. I need to go among the peasants and have a talk with dear Bethilda.”

  Jeeves shivers.

  “This is just incredible,” Eli murmurs. It’s the first time he has made it all the way into Ecalpon, past the wireframe. It’s also his first time meeting Rory and TD as fully animated characters. “It’s exactly like your mom drew this place, except more. I mean, I can feel the wind.”

  “Me too!” Constance murmurs as the wind stirs the delicate fringe feathers at the edges of her wings.

  “Hey, Ryder,” he says, “I thought Constance the owl wasn’t able to talk.”

  “She’s off script,” Rory and I both answer.

  “She can talk all she wants when she’s off script,” TD adds. “We all do.”

  “Constance, you don’t mind about the nontalking role, do you?” I ask.

  “Not at all. And besides, I get to fly. I’d swap talking for flying any day.” She spreads her wings and sails into the sky.

  I tip my head back and track her flight. It must be beautiful to see Ecalpon from up there—the meadows sprinkled with wild flowers and divided by sparkling creeks; the castle of TD, its towers and turrets poking the clouds. Constance is a beautiful flier.

  “It’s so wonderful to see her.” I sigh. “Eli, you did a fantastic job with the texture. You got the feathers just right—the tawny colors, the white spots melting out of the darker feathers, and the delicate white ones for her heart-shaped face. Just perfect.”

  We have walked out to the Lizard Stone, where the Witch of Wenham lives up in her tower.

  “She’s probably watching us. She spies on everybody,” Rory says.

  I don’t care that much about the witch, but I want to see the lizards scamper on the rocky headland that juts into the water. I have a faint memory of Mom first drawing them. She had all these pictures pinned up in her home office of iguanas and monitor lizards, geckos, all kinds of reptiles with feet. Some of their scales were beautiful. “Like tapestries,” Mom said. But it was their eyes that fascinated me. They have a vertical slit in each eye that flashes when their pupils contract. Just as I’m thinking about them, one scampers across our path, turns, and looks directly at me as if it wants to talk. The yellowish eyes flash and suddenly there’s a familiar electric blue slit. I feel as if it took me in with that one flicker. The lizard scampers off.

  We turn and walk off in another direction and Rory takes us down a narrow dusty lane lined with hedgerows.

  “What’s that?” Eli asks. A sign with an arrow points ahead: EAST GRIEF. Below the top arrow is another sign: THE VALLEY OF DELETIONS.

  “It’s the dump,” Rory says. “Ideas that didn’t work—bits of dialogue, scans of very preliminary sketches, failed special effects.”

  “They didn’t just put them in the trash can?” I ask.

  “Probably,” Eli says. “On the computer, when you finally dump out your trash can, when you open that tab that says ‘Empty Trash’ and click, this is where it ends up.”

  “I see,” I say. The road to East Grief dips down and we continue walking. A cold fog creeps in.

  “This is the foggiest place in Ecalpon.” Rory puts her arm through mine.

  We are silent; we’ve been walking down into the valley for quite a while. Fragments of scripts swirl about our feet. Occasionally Constance flies out ahead to bring back a scrap of something. She has very good vision despite the fog.

  “Look at this!” Constance says, and drops a very rough sketch of a baby.

  “What’s this?” Rory asks.

  “Whoa!” I say. “Rory, it’s us as a baby. Mom thought us up when I was an infant. You know that.”

  “How did our mom ever get inspired changing stinky diapers all day long?” Rory asks.

  “She must have thought ahead, imagined us as middle school kids. I bet these sketches would have been used as a prologue,” I say. “Like ‘Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a very adorable baby was born….’ ” Everyone starts laughing. Constance’s owl laugh is like a snuffy hiccup.

  “You’re calling yourself adorable?” Eli says.

  “First of all, it’s not just me. I’m calling Rory adorable too. And secondly…” I can’t think of what’s second. I just know that I’m suddenly very sad. “Let’s go,” I snap. An idea pops into my brain.

  Rory turns to me. “Ryder, what is it? You’ve thought of something.”

  “I certainly have! Remember the Trojan horse, where we’re hiding all the things until we’re ready and then unlocking it all to work like a time bomb?”

  “Yeah?” Eli says. />
  “ ‘Bomb’ is the wrong word.”

  “So?” Eli and Rory both ask.

  “We’re rebuilding, re-creating what was originally meant to be. I’m worried about the double-trash-can thing.”

  “You mean the double encryption? It’s way better than the double trash cans,” Eli says.

  “What if we hide the Trojan horse here in the Valley of Deletions!” I say.

  Eli’s mouth forms a huge O but no sound comes out.

  “Brilliant!” Rory shouts.

  I rush on. “This is where we can be sure things won’t be found. And I’ll bet anything there is a direct path from here up to the trash can on the computers of Starlight Studios, for where else would trash go when they click on ‘Empty Trash’? Don’t you think so, Eli?”

  “Ryder, this is an awesome strategy!”

  I look at Eli. He’s already had the great idea today of hooking up our home computers to the television through the Ethernet port, which gets us instantly to the trash can on Cassie’s desktop and then directly into Ecalpon. But now we need an even quicker connection to the Valley of Deletions.

  “Eli, could you write some new code that will get us straight to the Valley of Deletions? This is where our work has to be done.”

  “Of course I can write that code. And we’ll call it the Trash Can Trail!” Eli shouts.

  “You’re a genius!” I clap.

  “No, Ryder. It’s your idea. It’s good! Not just good—brilliant!”

  “In real time it’s less than one week until the premiere,” Rory says.

  “I think the Trash Can Trail will speed things up for us,” I say.

  We find the direct trail from the Valley of Deletions to the trash can icon on the computers of Starlight Studios, and then can easily jump to our own computers. As if to confirm this discovery, someone at Starlight Studios dumps their trash and a blizzard of digital garbage pours down on us. Little black bits and pieces of code are swirling about our heads. Eli swiftly pieces together the bits so that we can use the trash can icons to cross over and to keep our trail hidden.

  We wind our way back to Rory’s cottage, where we gather round the table for some bread and honey mead broth. Bread and honey mead broth seem to be all they eat in Ecalpon.