Page 29

He flitted over a few aisles and disappeared around the corner.

His teal face poked back around the shelf. “Come on!”

Paige hurried after him, racing down the aisle and pausing at the end. They leaned around the shelf’s edge, searching for the massive feline.

“He’s gone,” Paige said.

“Yeah, let’s make a break for it!” Dewey shot from the aisle, buzzing across the open space and through the doorway into the main archive.

Paige darted behind him, running on her tiptoes to remain as quiet as possible. She breathed a sigh of relief and slowed a tad as they made their way across the main archive to the BookTron.

“Okay, let’s see what we got,” Dewey said as he arrived at the station.

He laced his fingers together, turning his palms away from his body as he cracked his knuckles. He shook his paws before he began pounding on the keyboard. He slapped the enter key and perused the first few entries.

With a shake of his head, he deleted the entry in the search bar and typed something else into it. A set of results populated on the screen. Dewey pressed his lips together, his brow furrowing as he scanned them.

“Here,” he said, clicking on one, “this may help.”

“What does it say? Does it have a cure?”

Dewey clicked back. “No, it didn’t have a cure.”

Paige flopped into the chair at the desk. “Like it said, there isn’t a cure, or it just didn’t list it?”

Dewey clicked another entry and scrolled down. “Here we go! Action!”

Paige straightened, gripping the plastic arms of the chair. “What do we need to do?”

Dewey’s eyes darted down the page in search of the remedy. He jabbed a fleshy digit at the screen. “In the event that both growth serum and growth powder have been ingested, a remedy of Tacloosa will return the oversized user to normal size with limited side effects.”

Paige tugged her lips back into a grimace. “Limited side effects? And what is Tacloosa?”

Dewey scribbled the name on a sticky note, cleared the search bar, and typed in the name. “No idea, but we’re about to find out.”

“I hope we have it, whatever it is,” Paige said as Dewey clicked on the first search result.

He scrolled through the article to the recipe at the bottom.

“Wait,” Paige said, clapping her hand over his paw, “shouldn’t we read that?”

Dewey flicked her hand away. “What for?”

“Knowledge,” Paige answered, tapping her glasses higher on her nose.

“I don’t care what some magical recipe blogger’s life story is. I just want to know how to make Tacloosa.”

“Oh, I thought it would describe the side effects or more information about the remedy.”

Dewey rolled his eyes. “Probably not. Look at the blog. MagicalFarmGal dot com. Basically, some farmer’s kid or husband or friend did something idiotic, and they found or created the recipe for Tacloosa. But first, they’ll tell you about their life on the farm and their seven cats and the one time their cow got sick in the middle of the night. We just want the recipe.”

“Are you sure we should use a recipe from a blog?”

“Why not?” Dewey asked as he jotted down ingredients on another sticky note.

Paige wrinkled her nose as she drummed her fingers on the desk. “I just figured it would come from a magical book or something.”

Dewey froze mid-letter and side-eyed her. “You’d trust a recipe from a magical book but not a magical blogger?”