In another hour, they arrived at the outskirts of what seemed like a deserted town. Andrew wondered if there were cowboys inside. Peering in from afar, he could see several sandy brick houses but they all seemed to be empty. However, if one stayed still and quiet long enough, one could catch the buzz of life in the town. It was inhabited, but made to seem like it wasn't.

  "This is where you come in, kid," Silver said as he turned to face Andrew. "The first line of houses are empty storehouses. Oz has occupied the entire town. It's gonna be filled with people as we venture in."

  That didn't explain to Andrew what his purpose was.

  "We need you to find out where the witches are being kept. We plan to go there directly, attracting as little attention as we can. Hopefully get out before they can gather enough of their forces to stop us. So we need you to pinpoint their exact location," Silver continued without a single doubt that Andrew could do it. Except he couldn't. "What's wrong?" he asked, tensing up from the look on Andrew's face.

  "Wish you told me that earlier..." Andrew mumbled.

  "You can't do it?" he asked incredulously. "What have they even been teaching you?"

  "What would they teach me? They were cats!"

  He stared at Andrew, the annoyed look back on his face. "You mean 'cats'? Like regular cats?! Not even talking cats?!"

  'At what point did I ever mention that I had talking cats?' Andrew thought. He held back the urge to yell at Silver. Panic was rising up inside him. The whole plan would fail because of him! Well, it was Silver's oversight, but it would still be him who let them down. He was scared to look Silver in the eye. Silver's fists were balled and he looked furious.

  "Have you never tried locating anyone before?" Esther asked.

  "I have but..." Andrew didn't remember the spell. "Wait! I think I can do it. But I'll need a bit of time."

  "We can hide out in that warehouse. But you can't take more than an hour," Silver said with an edge in his voice.

  "No problem, it shouldn't take that long anyway. I just need somewhere to sit and concentrate." It was impossible for Andrew to memorize every single spell and its purpose. But he remembered a nifty trick, a loophole he found. He often forgot a lot of the spells he needed. So he put his heart and soul into memorizing just one. A memory spell.

  As he sat on the cold warehouse floor mumbling it, he felt his consciousness drift away. He had to trust Silver and Esther to take care of his body while he ventured into his own mind. He had to look into the day he tried to locate Zen. He didn't remember the exact date. There wasn't enough time to dawdle. Someone put an arm on his shoulder. He turned.

  He was greeted by... himself. From a few weeks ago. "Can I help with anything?" Past-Andrew asked. "I need the location spell," he told himself. "Oh... I didn't do that yet," he said with a hand on his chin. "Wait, let me ask another me." He went off and came back with another past version of him. "Location spell, huh?" he said. "Come right this way." He led himself to a small puddle and pushed himself into it. His consciousness faded to a distant voice. He saw himself, flipping through his spell notebook, looking for a spell. He saw himself reading it out loud, repeating it a few times before trying it out for good. Okay, done.

  Andrew's eyes shot open. He looked up at Esther's face, devoid of expression. His head was resting on her lap. With a jolt, he sat upright.

  "You were swaying really weirdly," said Silver. "You're lucky Esther was there to catch you."

  "Thanks" Andrew mumbled, feeling his cheeks go warm. "Just a bit more."

  He mumbled the spell he re-learnt from his past self. One of the important parts of the spell was clearly thinking of the person one was finding, and hearing their voice. It did not work on someone one had never met or heard. Andrew didn't really know Scarlet or Madelaine. His interaction with them was rather short. He didn't think it would work if he tried it with his memory of his cats, so that one night was all he had to go on. He tried to concentrate. He thought of the two witches from that night but nothing happened. Panic rose within him by the second. He needed to be able to do this. He recalled the moment when they turned to him right before they left. He remembered a sudden flash and seeing two different people, his memory of those faces surprisingly clear now.

  It was a long shot but he tried it. He pictured a witch with short dark hair, lightly tanned skin, downcast eyes, and many piercings on her ears. He pictured another witch. Her skin was an almond brown and her jet black hair was tied in a braid. She had a button nose and intelligent eyes. They had spoken to him before they'd left. It was only then that he realized that their voices were completely different from the intimidating voices of the witches and it was possible the words had floated straight to his head without them actually being spoken.

  "Goodbye Andre," said the short-haired witch. "Be good," said the other. And then he knew. He chanted the spell again under his breath and drew lines on the floor with his fingertip. The lines glowed a brilliant blue, green, and gold.

  "Assuming this big blue box is the entire area, and the green circle is where we are now." Andrew paused. "The golden triangle is where they should be."

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  Silver took out his cube remote. The cube itself was nowhere to be seen. A holographic light came out of the remote which now said "Dronebot". The hologram depicted an aerial view of the entire area. "So then if we are here," Silver pointed to the bottom right corner of the picture, glanced at Andrew's floor map, looked at the picture again and thought for a moment. "Then they should be here." The other two nodded.

  "Good job!" Silver finally smiled again, and Andrew exhaled the breath he was holding in.

  "Doesn't tell us how many people are in this place, or their security measures." Esther shrugged.

  "No, it doesn't," Silver nodded thoughtfully. "But you can."

  Andrew was about to argue that he couldn't do that, when he realized Silver was talking to Esther. She sighed and got down on one knee. She put a palm against the floor and it cracked. She closed her eyes and concentrated. "Okay, got it," she declared after a few minutes.

  'That was fast,' Andrew thought.

  "We'll leave it up to you to find the best path for us," Silver told Esther as he handed her the drone's remote. Esther looked at the area's layout for a few minutes before tracing a line through them. "This is the path we'll take."

  They moved along the back of the storehouses, in a narrow lane against a long wall that served as a border for the town. Esther stood stiffly on her shotboard as it shot through the alley. Silver and Andrew followed on their feet, moving sideways with difficulty. They turned to a less narrow alley between two buildings. They stood quietly and watched as Esther peeked her head from the corner of the building into the main street. She signaled them to follow as she shot across the empty road. They followed at a run and ducked into the shadows. They sped about the town, sticking strictly to the alleyways. For the most part, the places they passed were empty, save for the buildings further inside.

  About 15 minutes of sneaky running later Silver and Andrew fell against the wall of a building, panting heavily. Esther looked down piteously at them. Silver seemed quite able when he was riding his shotboard but put him on his own two legs and he wasn't that much better than Andrew.

  "We're still pretty far," Silver said, checking the dronebot's image map. Andrew peeked at it from the side and found to his utter dismay that the last 15 minutes of running hadn't brought them nearly as close to the destination as he'd imagined. He thought that they were at least halfway there already.

  "I told you to go workout more," Esther muttered under her breath.

  Silver pretended to neither hear nor comprehend her. "This is getting us nowhere," he declared.

  "Of course not," Esther said through gritted teeth. "If you two would pick up the pace-"

  "I guess we have no choice." Silver declared again, cutting off Esther. He called back his dronebot, and took Andrew's cube and his own cube and looked expectantly at Esther. She seemed to be holding on by a thread, but she complied- stepping off her shotboard, switching it back to cube form, and handing it to Silver. Andrew watched with intrigue as Silver stacked all three, took their remotes and pressed a few buttons. Immediately, they began to expand. With the greatest of expectations, Andrew watched them mold into one another, like snakes eating other snakes, and finally become... a tandem bicycle. He looked from the bicycle to Silver and back to it again. Then he looked at Esther. She was equal parts horrified and disgusted.

  "Don't worry!" Silver smiled reassuringly at Esther. "This time you won't have to pedal for two again!"

  Andrew felt kind of bad for the girl at that point.

  "Because they no longer require any pedaling!" announced Silver. "But we have to adjust our weights accordingly-"

  "Give me back my board," cut in Esther. "You two can tandem."

  "Now now," Silver waved a hand carelessly, ignoring the murderous glare he was on the end of. "Teamwork's the key! We can't afford to get separated."

  "Someone's coming," Esther informed them. Silver and Andrew hopped on the two back seats and looked expectantly at her. Despite the approaching danger, Esther did not budge. She looked at the bike with the sort of dismay and embarrassment one with a previous bitter experience would be apt to feel.

  "Come on, Es! You're the only one who can guide us safely!" Silver egged. She took the time to sigh, hopped on, and leaned forward. The bike shot off through the alley and just as they turned a corner, Andrew looked back over Silver's shoulder to see a man walk into the alley. He missed spotting them by seconds. Milliseconds maybe. Esther's timing was too precise to be true. Andrew wondered if she were a witch as well.

  Being stuck in the middle seat of a tandem bike was one of those experiences Andrew had personally never considered that he would ever be experiencing. At least not with total strangers, in dark alleyways, being commanded to lean sideways by an unsocial possible witch, with an annoying inventor behind him, on the way to save two possibly evil witches who also happened to be his cats. Andrew's wildest imagination would not be able to conceive something such as that. And yet there they were.

  Esther was doing all of the leg work. Occasionally she told them to shift their balances to the left or right, which Andrew tried his best to comply with but Silver didn't seem to even be doing that. He couldn't spare enough time to even glance back at the other boy but from the sounds of it, it seemed like he was napping. The ride was like a roller coaster and Esther, more than once, drove up the walls and jumped the roofs discreetly, only to sink back into the shadows.

  It made no sense to Andrew how the embarrassing bike could go so fast but the more comfortable bikeboard could be so slow. Apparently it had something to do with the extra shift in weight from the extra people. In that case, he wondered about how fast it would go if Silver had actually assisted them. But in no time, they'd arrived outside the building that the witches were kept hostage in.

  Andrew slid himself off and Silver woke with a start and rubbed his eyes. "Oh, we're here already?" he said, yawning. Esther collapsed off the bike. She rubbed her sore arms. Gripping those handles and maneuvering the three of them hadn't been easy.

  "Es, why don't you stay back and take a break? Call the ship here, we might need to make a clean break. It doesn't matter if they notice us by then cause we'll be gone in a flash. Security seems super lax here though I don't know why."

  "It does seem suspicious, doesn't it?" Esther momentarily forgot her pain and annoyance. "It shouldn't have been that easy, not that I'm complaining. But to think, the security of the two most evil and dangerous witches-"

  "Maybe it's because they surrendered themselves?" Andrew added hopefully. They turned simultaneously to him. "Didn't I mention that?" It was a pretty important detail to have forgotten.

  Silver sighed and slid against a wall. "Well, that explains a lot. They didn't mention that in their report." He scoffed. "Of course, they wouldn't."

  "If they surrendered on purpose, should we be here...?" Esther asked with uncertainty.

  "I don't care what their reasons are." Silver's eyes flashed. "This is the first and only lead we got in years. We can't waste it." And with that he got up and began to walk to the door.

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