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Dewey raised his pen in the air. “Good idea.”

He returned to his work without further comment.

Paige slid her gaze from side to side. “Well, where is it?”

Dewey waved his pen back and forth. “Uh-uh. You go find it. Great chance to practice with Locartifact.”

“Is now the best time to make me practice with that?”

“It’s as good a time as any. If you run into any trouble, give me a holler.”

Paige frowned, and she huffed as she marched to the door. With one final glance at her partner, she wrinkled her nose and pushed into the archive.

Anxiety overwhelmed her as she stared out over the vast space. Shelf upon shelf upon shelf spread out in every direction. She’d never find this thing.

“As good a time as any,” she mimicked, descending the stairs that spiraled around the tower. “I’ll be lucky if I can find my way to the Locartifact machine.”

She hit the cement floor and shuffled through the shelves to the machine. She tapped a key on the keyboard to wake it. A blinking cursor stared back at her, requesting input into the search bar.

Paige narrowed her eyes at the screen. What did she type into the bar? Magical thingy for walking through walls? Did it have a name? Did Dewey tell her the name?

With a shake of her head, she spun on her heel and began to cross the room toward his tower. She crinkled her forehead and slowed to a stop before she spun back toward the Locartifact.

She couldn’t give up this easily. She’d probably walk up all those stairs just to get a lecture from Dewey on learning how to research.

After two more steps toward the machine, she stopped again. Did it matter? She needed help. It would be much faster if she asked him for the name.

She swayed back and forth before she finally decided to try her hand with the machine, hoping to figure something out on her own without needing the snarky dragon.

Paige raised her chin and approached it, rolling her shoulders back and placing her fingertips on the keyboard.

She blew out a long breath. “You can do this,” she whispered to herself.

She flew her fingers across the keyboard and typed a search phrase. As she studied what she'd typed, she hovered her hand over the enter key.

“Should do it,” she assured herself as she scanned the words again.

Magical item that allows user to walk through walls

She bit her lower lip and tapped the key. Results populated on the screen, and her eyes bulged as the number of results ratcheted higher and higher. The numbers finally stopped changing, settling on 20,357 results.

Paige clicked on the first few, then she backed out of them quickly as she realized they only fit the “magical item” part of her search. She’d inadvertently searched for a phrase that covered every item in the archive and in every other magical library in the world.

She rolled her eyes at her own stupidity and deleted the words in the search field. She tapped the keys as she tried to come up with another search item.

She cocked her head and typed “walk through walls.”

She wrinkled her nose when zero results showed on the screen. A curse escaped her lips, and she pounded on the delete key, backspacing to empty the search bar.

She squeezed her eyes closed as she tried to think of how to locate the item in the database. An idea occurred to her, and she popped her eyes open, fingers flying across the keyboard. She slapped the return key, and three results appeared on the screen.

Paige scanned their titles and grinned at her successful search term “seep through walls.”

She clicked the first entry for an artifact titled “wall buster.” With a shake of her head and a frown, she went back to the search results. The so-called wall buster broke walls down by seeping inside and causing them to explode. Definitely not the right artifact.

She tried the second entry entitled “Seepy Sap.” When she read the phrase “allows the user to seep through walls,” her eyes widened.

“This must be it,” she breathed.