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“Hurry! Make faster magic, boy. ” Mr. Walkwell sounded grumpy, but that was no surprise: Mr. Walkwell didn’t like Colin much and made that clear to him nearly every day. “The children will be here in a few hours and Gideon wants everything to be ready. ”

Colin Needle made a face but didn’t say anything, only bent closer over his laptop. Thunder rumbled above the distant hills. The sky felt hot, heavy, and close. The children this, the children that -he was so sick of hearing about them! Everybody at Ordinary Farm except Colin and his mother seemed to think Lucinda and Tyler Jenkins were something wonderful, but really the two were nothing but troublemakers. In just a few weeks last summer the Jenkins kids had managed to ruin all of Colin’s careful plans to improve Ordinary Farm, and now they were coming back for another summer’s stay. Lucinda and Tyler, Tyler and Lucinda-he was tired of hearing their names and tired of everyone on the farm making such a big show out of their return visit.

The sky growled again. A single fat drop of rain fell on Colin’s screen. The weather had been strange all spring and didn’t show any sign of changing, the days as hot as they always were at this time of the year but also damp, overcast, and even sometimes stormy. Colin Needle had never been to a tropical country but he imagined it might be a little like the weather around this part of California lately.

The huge Norseman Ragnar had finished installing the complicated new gate on the adobe barn, and now he wandered over, wiping either sweat or rain off his forehead with his wide forearm. “Why aren’t you finished, Needle?” Ragnar demanded. “We have done all the hard part, boy! Just cast your spells so we can go and get ourselves something cold to drink. ”

“It’s not magic and they’re not spells,” Colin said through clenched teeth. “I’m trying to hook the new security gates and fences up to a computer network so we can do everything from a distance. I already explained it all several times. ”

“You told me your flat box makes things work by invisible lightning that flies through the air,” said Ragnar. “What is that if it is not magic?”

Colin scowled. Nobody else at Ordinary Farm knew anything much about electricity or computers, let alone wireless networks-most of them had been born centuries before such things existed. Even his mother, who had learned enough to use the internet and keep her experimental and household records on a computer, still could not come close to what Colin himself could do. Some day Gideon would be gone and Colin Needle would be in charge. Lucinda and Tyler Jenkins would have to do exactly what he said, then-if he even allowed them to visit the farm.