As Roy approached the gift shop, he took another look at the big fiberglass wizard head. That kind of backdrop would offer a big resonance boost for the wizards inside.

  The front and sides of the building were surrounded by parking lots, sidewalks, and roads, but the back was closer to the trees.

  Like most places, the back of the building was a weak point. Nobody was ever supposed to see it, so there was no theming there. The light from the staff and stars didn’t extend to it, nor did the red light strips, and the moon above was a mere crescent.

  It all added up to near-total darkness.

  Roy stepped forward slowly, careful not to trip over downed power lines and fallen branches.

  The night air was refreshingly cool against his face, and a tingly buzz of anticipation was building within him. They could get their stuff back, including the gold disc, but maybe they could also find some new items, ones with interesting magical effects. Maybe they’d get away clean, running off into the night with their prizes. Or maybe they wouldn’t. A perfect heist or a dicey fight. Win-win.

  He fought the urge to rush ahead and kept pace with the others. Bastion and Kyle flanked him while Cate veered off to their right and Samantha hunched behind them for cover. Her costume turned out to be glow-in-the-dark. Candy-white painted on bones gleamed against the night, and the surrounding dark fabric vanished into it, creating a perfect skeletal outline.

  Roy kept looking back to admire it. So cool. He didn’t even care that it made them easier to spot.

  A twig snapped underfoot, and Roy hopped to keep his balance. Bastion raised a hand in a halt gesture and pointed to the outline of a door, illuminated by Samantha’s costume.

  Faint voices approached their side of the rooftop, growing louder every second.

  They made a break for it. Roy’s shadow stretched out as he ran ahead of Samantha. His muffled footsteps turned to thuds as he stepped from grass to concrete.

  Crunch.

  What was that?

  Crunch. Crunch.

  When they arrived at the door, Roy lifted the bottom of his boot to check.

  “Snails,” he whispered, with a pang of guilt. “We killed them.”

  “If they don’t want to get splattered, they shouldn’t be on the sidewalk,” Bastion whispered back. “How are we getting inside?”

  “With this,” said Samantha. She pulled out her skeleton key, which was just a random key on a skeleton key chain. “Back in West Town, I used this to open the jail cells, and none of those locks were real in the first place, so it’s gotta be magic.”

  As she pressed it to the lock, it shrank down from a long car key into the kind of jagged flat-key that looked like it belonged in a gift shop’s back door.

  Click. It worked perfectly, first try.

  When she tried to push the door open, it barely moved. They all had to work together to shove it, and it turned out there was a set of shelves leaning against the other side.

  It wasn’t heavy enough for a barricade; it was more like the wizards had never considered this door being used at all. Probably because there wasn’t a key for it.

  They stepped into a small, dark room filled with similar shelves: stacks of glass sheets with thin metal frames, loaded up with stylish leather purses.

  Roy doubted there were enough women in the whole place to use all of them, much less the kind of idle, fancy women who’d still carry one of those instead of a backpack full of survival supplies.

  Bastion immediately began rusting inside them. “Let's see if our discs are in here.”

  No dice. Instead, when they dumped out the contents they found a variety of other stolen goods.

  Rusty machetes and dull-bladed butcher’s cleavers. Split baseball bats and flickering laser swords. Stringless crossbows and bent-barrelled revolvers.

  A melted carnival mask, a leather jacket with a big hole punched through the back of it, a tricorn hat caked in blood.

  “Junk,” said Bastion

  “Trophies,” said Roy, pulling out a water-damaged Polaroid of a couple in retro ski suits. “From the treasure hunters they’ve murdered.

  “Man, that’s dark,” said Kyle.

  Samantha’s eyes went wide. “We knew people were going missing, but this is just sickening.”

  Bastion emptied some plastic bags from another shelf next. Canned foods, bags of chips, toilet paper.

  “They must be keeping the valuable stuff somewhere else,” he said.

  “The tower,” said Roy. “It makes sense to keep it in the hardest place to get to.”

  “Hey, look.” Cate pulled bundles of blue and purple fabric from another shopping bag. “Robes and hats. We can use them as disguises and sneak up there.”

  They changed quickly, throwing the robes over their costumes. Roy’s helmet and Bastion’s cowboy hat had to be crammed into backpacks, while Samantha folded her fabric mask into her pocket.

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  There were a lot of things that could still give them away. Samantha’s eye make-up for one, or maybe there weren’t female wizards at all, and both her and Cate’s height would be a problem. Maybe Roy’s build was too bulky for a wizard.

  As the doorway to the rest of the store creaked open, Roy scanned the room and smiled. Minor details like that weren’t going to be a problem.

  It was dark in there. None of the strip lights that lined the ceiling worked. Instead, candlelight came from a few corners at the back of the store. The exterior had made it look like this place had working power, even the tower windows had light glowing from them, but it looked like that was only for the themed elements.

  One area had been turned into a kitchen, with lawn chairs looted from some nearby garden center next to it. Another was filled with barracks-style bunk beds. Most of the wizards were either asleep on them or passed out on the floor, surrounded by empty cans of Krazee-8.

  A few were standing around near the seating area, entertaining themselves with colored lights from cheap wands, but none of them paid their group any notice as they crossed the room.

  Most of the floor space was taken up by a blue carpet covered with crazy geometric designs. Roy had heard of these. They were designed that way so you’d look at the merchandise on the shelves instead of the floor. Except here, the merch was on the floor instead.

  Smashed snow globes had strained it with glittery water and strewn about the small, broken limbs of dragon and manticore figurines. Key chains gleamed in the candlelight. Towels and t-shirts piled up. The piles included a lot of Lightner world knock-offs. Maybe the wizards were planning on exploring within the rabbit’s range and didn’t want to risk it.

  Fitting the tacky feel of this shop’s wares, some of the beach towels had pornographic imagery, including one of the Rabbit itself. The depiction was anthropomorphic, with long eyelashes and a curvy body.

  “This was what you guys flew away from in your hovercraft?” asked Kyle.

  “It didn’t look like that,” said Bastion. ‘If they made it look accurate, kids at the beach would get nightmares. Not that this is really appropriate for them either,” he gestured to the Rabbit’s large chest.

  Upturned shelves filled most of the floor space. Not wanting to risk tripping on them, they stuck to the shiny tiled area that snaked through the carpet.

  Eventually, the path brought them to a wide central pillar with a wooden archway set into it. This had to be the way up to the tower. Roy gave the door an optimistic shove, but it held fast.

  “Samantha, do your thing,” he said.

  “OK,” she pulled the key from her pocket and rattled it around in the oversized hole. “Uh, problem.”

  “What?” asked Bastion.

  “The magic won’t work without my costume. You know, the one these robes are covering right now.”

  “Hmm. OK,” said Roy. “Everyone huddle around Samantha and try to look like the rest of these wizards while she does her skeleton thing.”

  The four of them surrounded her in front of the arch while she disrobed, each doing their best impression of drunken wizards. Bastion slumped against the wall. Cate pretended to stumble. Roy made do with a few sleepy nods and was quickly mimicked by Kyle.

  As soon as the outer robes were off, the light from Samantha’s costume started glowing again.

  “Hey,” someone shouted from over in the kitchen.

  Damn.

  “You got the arch-mage’s reward?”

  “Yeah, bro.” Bastion gave a shaky thumbs-up and pretended to stumble around against the pillar.

  “Good for you guys.”

  Roy waved in response, and the wizards returned to their wand play.

  “We got so lucky with that one,” Bastion whispered.

  The key turned, and they hurried through the door.

  Inside, the floor was covered in bean bags. Four wizards lay sprawled across them, wearing oversized VR headsets wired into a humming black box in the corner. They were surrounded by more soda cans and candy wrappers, and had all passed out.

  Bastion raised an eyebrow. “This is what Walter gives out as a reward? Escapism?”

  Roy kicked an empty can on the floor. “That and more Krazee-8. At least they won’t wake up and give us away.”

  Samantha quickly moved to lock the door again. “Should we barricade it too?”

  “No,” said Bastion. “That looks too suspicious. We want to get out of here without being noticed.”

  “Are we moving up to the next floor then?” asked Cate.

  “Yes. If Walter lets his men in here, there’s no way it’s where he keeps his best loot.”

  Samantha hurried over to the spiral staircase on the other side of the room and opened the next door, then turned to lock it behind them after they’d all stepped through.

  The next floor up was the only room in the building with AC. Cables went out of one window, presumably to a generator, while the pipe for a portable air conditioner dangled out of another. Strewn around the floor space were the luxuries Walter had considered too good to share.

  Bastion whistled. “Looks like it’s good to be the arch-mage.”

  Roy enjoyed the cool air and examined a few of them.

  A throne, obviously taken from the photo area of a Kino Kingdom, was pressed against the curved wall. That certainly said something about the room’s owner. The entire point of a throne was to hold court, but from the two locked doors, it seemed Walter didn’t invite people up here often, and this one was more about how it made him feel to sit in it.

  The four-poster bed was made of plastic poles and shower curtains. He must have really wanted that particular design to make do with a makeshift one. Commitment to theming, even in a place where he didn’t expect to fight.

  More of those free-standing shelves from the shop downstairs, decorated with strings of fairy lights and filled with intact versions of the snow-globes smashed all over the shop floor.

  Oddly, an empty cereal box was given pride of place. Magic Gems, they were called, with a stage magician mascot on the front, and a speech bubble promising the “Enchanting Taste of 100% Sugar.”

  “Roy, over here. This could be what we’re looking for.” Bastion was standing over by the TV. It was a huge set, at least fifty inches to a side.

  Kyle was trying to work the popcorn machine next to it, but Roy offered him some from his endless bucket instead to avoid the noise. Samantha and Cate took some too, but Bastion waved it away, and focused on the stack of discs below the television.

  Roy left him to it, and noticed there was a Mega-Tape player, but no tapes in sight. He pressed eject on the machine, and sure enough, it spat one out. The handwritten label read “The Saturday Sorcerers.”

  “I’ve never heard of that one. Maybe if we watch it, we can find out something about how the wizard theme works?” said Roy.

  They’d need a working machine for that though, and this one was far too heavy for them to sneak away with.

  “These are our discs all right,” said Bastion, showing Roy the covers.

  Either he hadn’t watched any last night, or he was the kind of guy to always put them back in the box afterwards.

  “Pirates of Pendor one through four. Ringo. Future Knight: Part 2…” Bastion said.

  But no glint of gold. No Virtua World Championship 2006. Sir Protagonist wouldn’t be satisfied with that, and neither would Roy.

  Bastion looked just as frustrated. “Hmm. There’s no way he could have carried that TV up all those stairs by himself, and if he lets his men up here at all, then it’s not the real treasure room. We need to keep going. There’s at least one more floor above this one. That has to be where he keeps the good stuff.”

  Samantha was already unlocking the door.

  The final flight of stairs led up to an attic. There were only two things up there: a man-sized crystal wizard statue, and a literal treasure chest.