“Please,” Fifer added earnestly. “It’s very important. We’re trying to save Artimé.”

“From pirates?”

“No,” said Fifer, faltering. “From… ourselves. Or so it seems.”

The old captain statue snarled obstinately, then seemed to soften. After a moment he lowered the sword, then stumped over to Sky and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” said Sky earnestly. “We’ll bring it back.”

“And we’ll tell Spike you asked about her,” said Fifer. Sky and Fifer filed out, with Fifer switching off the light and closing the prop room door before the captain could growl at them again.

“Where is Spike, anyway?” asked Sky as they carefully retraced their steps in the dark.

“Lhasa told me that Spike spotted Issie’s baby in our world again. So she and Talon and Issie have gone searching for her. If they can’t find her in our sea, they’re going to try the volcano network.” She frowned and reached for the opening in the curtain. “It would be nice to have Talon’s help right now, but I guess I can’t blame them for going after Isobel since she’s been lost for seven hundred years.”

“Brave to go into the volcanos,” murmured Sky. “Can you picture Spike Furious being spit out of a volcano and doing a big belly flop in a different world?”

“I just hope all the volcanos are in water,” said Fifer, “or she’ll be in trouble.” As they went through the curtain opening, the painting of the giant set of doors on the back wall, which was mostly just for decoration, pushed out slightly and became a three-dimensional, usable door. That meant that someone had just put up Ms. Octavia’s magical 3-D drawing to allow one of the large statues access to the theater. Three-D doors were very difficult to produce, but they were crucial for statues like Simber and Florence, who couldn’t fit inside the tube.

Fifer and Sky squinted from the overhead spotlight’s glare and watched to see who was using it. The door opened and Simber appeared.

“I’ll be back shorrrtly,” the stone cheetah said over his shoulder as he entered.

“Search everywhere!” called Frieda Stubbs from the other side, but Fifer couldn’t see her. She and Sky scrambled back behind the curtain in case the new head mage was following Simber inside.

Simber growled low, annoyed, and kept coming. The 3-D door swung shut behind him, and he lumbered down the aisle. “Anybody in herrre?” He sampled the air. “If so, you might not want to tell me.” He stopped and sniffed again. “Fiferrr? Is that you?”

Fifer and Sky emerged from behind the curtain and went down the stage steps.

Simber spotted them and started toward them. “What arrre you doing in herrre? You’rrre in dangerrr!”

“Hi, Simber,” said Fifer, moving swiftly up the aisle with Sky coming behind her. “What’s going on here? Everything is in an uproar! Sky and I returned from Warbler and saw the fighting on the lawn. And we heard Frieda saying some pretty horrible lies. We snuck inside to get Sky a sword—”