The friendly robot’s eyes glittered a happy green. “Don’t worry about her, Lenora,” he said. “By the way, I did find my chip. It was buried in the sands in front of the Sphinx, just like you said! Now, keep moving forward and do not be afraid. Your friends are all around you.” He had a kind of wand in his hand, which he pointed at the floor and moved in a circle. A hole appeared, just large enough for Lenora, and from it burst a strong scent of ancient decay. “This way, quickly! I’ll lower you down.”

With her lantern in one hand and Bendigeidfran’s strong hands gripping the other, Lenora was lowered into … whatever it was. “What is this?” she asked the robot as her feet touched a dirt floor.

“Oh, it’s just the tomb of Genghis Khan,” said the robot. Lenora looked up in alarm, but Bendigeidfran was gone.

A tomb? Lenora shivered and wished she’d known that before she got herself lowered into it. Not that she had much of a choice, but she would have liked to have been prepared. She swung the lantern around and noted there was very little in the spacious tomb, which was lined with walls of dirt, besides a coffin—she left that alone—and strangely enough, what appeared to be the skeletons of six cats. She could not stop herself. G. Khan, tomb, cats. Why? she scribbled in her notebook. Then she wondered what to do next, for there appeared to be no way out of the tomb. For the moment, she was trapped.

And then she heard a thud. And another. On the third thud, earth burst from one wall of the tomb, and through it charged another of the bowler hat robots. It raised its flashing swords and charged at Lenora.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Lenora Leaves

Trapped in Genghis Khan’s tomb with a killer robot, Lenora had nowhere to run.

The robot churned forward, and she saw that this one did not have wheels but treads like a tractor that made it perfectly suited for the dirt floor.

She looked wildly around, wishing that whoever had buried Genghis Khan had thought to leave a few weapons lying around, or maybe a shovel to dig a hole through the wall, or—

And then she saw that something was digging a hole through the wall opposite the charging robot. The dirt wall crumbled, then fell away in chunks, and suddenly there was a hole just Lenora’s size, with millions of ants pouring out, all of them rushing straight toward the robot, which turned on its treads and fled the way it had come. But it was not fast enough, for the industrious ants had it buried up to its neck before it could make a getaway.

On the wall, a few hundred ants assembled to form a message, and the message said:

GO LENORA GO