Lost Kingdom

by Matt Myklusch

  “Remember?” Joey asked. “Janelle told us about it the first day we came here.”

  “He’s right, she did,” Joey’s father said. One of the first things they had learned about Janelle was her upcoming trip to the California Institute of Technology to work on a cutting-edge renewable-energy project.

  “I remember,” Joey’s mother said. “I was very impressed. I still am. I just didn’t think you’d be going with Janelle. I don’t know how her parents do it. A month?”

  “They’re going out there next week to visit,” Joey said.

  “Maybe we should do that too,” Joey’s mother suggested. “Make a vacation out of it?”

  “You know I can’t,” Joey’s father said, apologetic. “With the company getting acquired, I’m swamped at work. It’s the worst possible time.” He was a partner at a small accounting firm that was in the process of being swallowed up by a big one. Long term it was going to be a good thing for Joey’s dad career-wise, and a good thing for the family financially, but in the short term it meant a lot of work and a lot of late nights. “When this is over, I promise we’ll do a real family vacation. Something big. Hawaii maybe. Trust me, I’ll need it more than anyone.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Joey said. “I’ll be all right,” he reassured his mother. “Really.”

  His mother made a “hmmph” sound. “Sure, you’ll be fine. What about me?” She opened her arms. “One more hug.” Joey groaned, but he leaned in like a good son and his mother wrapped him up tight. “You’re growing up so fast.”

  “In a good way, though,” Joey said.

  “That’s true,” his mother admitted. “I’m really proud of the work you guys are doing. Who knows? Maybe you can get us off fossil fuels by Wednesday and come home early.”

  Joey chuckled. “We’ll do our best.”

  “Got everything you need in here?” his father asked, tapping the top of Joey’s rolling luggage.

  “Just about.” Joey flipped his lucky coin—formerly his father’s lucky coin—into the air and caught it. Added to the long list of things his parents didn’t know was the fact that the coin was a magical item, enchanted by Redondo to help recruit children into the Order of the Majestic. His father didn’t remember it fully, but he had gotten the call back when he was Joey’s age. Unfortunately, Grayson Manchester had seen to it that he never got the chance. Joey didn’t know how much magic was left in the coin, but he kept it for sentimental reasons. It was one of the two magical artifacts he had with him at all times, the other being Redondo’s deck of cards.

  “Call us when you land,” his father said.

  “I’ll text you.”

  “Call us,” Joey’s mother stressed. “Every night.”

  “We’re going to be working crazy hours,” Joey said, doing a little bargaining. “I’ll call you, sure, but sometimes we can just text each other too, right?”

  “I want to talk to you at least once a day,” his mother said.

  Joey backed away toward the school entrance without committing to anything. “I better get in there. Bye, guys!” He waved, a big smile on his face. “Love you!”

  “I’m serious, Joey,” his mother called after him. As Joey turned around to pull his bag through the door, he saw his mother miming a telephone, holding up her hand with her pinkie and thumb extended.

  Joey returned the gesture with a slight tweak. Pretending not to understand, he shook his hand with his thumb and pinkie stuck out in a Hawaiian, “hang loose” kind of way. “That’s the spirit, Mom! Aloha!”

  “Not funny!” his mother said, trying to suppress a grin. Joey’s father did the same, with less success.

  Inside, Joey made a quick stop at the school cafeteria and picked up breakfast to go. One of the things he liked about going to school at Exemplar Academy was that they had the best of everything. State-of-the-art facilities, brilliant teachers, top-of-the-line lab equipment, and even the food was great. Every morning there was a big buffet set up with an omelet station, waffles, pancakes, fruit, fresh-baked muffins, and more. Joey grabbed some bagels and went up to a laser science lab on the fourth floor, where he found Janelle hard at work, as usual.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked as he came in.

  Struggling with the door, his backpack, luggage, and a carry-out bag from the cafeteria, Joey checked his watch. “It’s nine o’clock. You didn’t stay here again last night, did you?”

  “No, I came in early,” Janelle said as she checked the connections on some wires. “You think my parents would let me pull an all-nighter right before I go away for a month? Not a chance. And it’s 9:06, by the way.”

  “Sorry, Professor,” Joey said, making light of Janelle’s minor scolding. “I brought food.”

  Janelle’s eyes brightened as Joey held up the bag of bagels. “Cinnamon raisin?”

  “Toasted with cream cheese.” Joey knew that Janelle often got so lost in her work that she forgot to eat. One time she had gone eighteen hours in the lab with nothing but water and some Altoids.

  “I guess we can take a break,” Janelle said, pretending that Joey was twisting her arm.

  “Let’s eat it over here,” Joey said, dumping out the contents of the bag at an empty workstation. “Suhash won’t like us eating anywhere near his laser. Especially now that he’s finally got it working again.”

  “That’s not his laser,” Janelle said, joining Joey at the table. She peeled off the tinfoil he had used to wrap her bagel and took a bite. “Suhash’s laser is over there under the tarp.” She pointed to a separate lab station in the corner of the room. “I replicated his design over the weekend.”

  “What?” Joey put his breakfast down and went to the back of the lab. Sure enough, there was another laser apparatus there, identical to the one Janelle had just been working on. “You built another laser?”

  “Just in case ours doesn’t work,” Janelle explained in a tone that said it was no big deal. “I don’t want to wreck Suhash’s project if this thing blows up in our faces. Also, I want to be able to take everything with us to Caltech if it does work.”

  Joey looked back and forth between the two lasers in disbelief. “I don’t understand how you did this over the weekend. It took Suhash a month to rebuild this thing after the last one melted down.”

  “That’s true, but it’s not a fair comparison really. I didn’t have to come up with the design. I just followed the instructions on his blueprints.”

  “In that case, forget it. I’m not impressed,” Joey said sarcastically. “It’s just like a fancy Lego set.” Joey put the tarp back in place and returned to his bagel, wondering why he was even surprised that Janelle had done something incredible. She was exactly the kind of person Exemplar Academy was created for. It was a school for supergeniuses, where every kid had their own individual curriculum based on their personal area of expertise. Joey’s classmates displayed a wide range of talents, including robotics, math, laser science, physics, art, athletics, music, and more. Everyone at Exemplar excelled at something specific and spent their school days getting better at it—making their brand of magic. Joey didn’t have a clear specialty like the other students. Ledger DeMayne had arranged for his placement tests to state that he could do anything he wanted. That was the way the Invisible Hand went through life. DeMayne had said it could be that way for Joey, too. It had been part of his sales pitch to get Joey to join up with them.

  Joey had told him to get lost.

  At the moment, Joey’s school schedule was to sample a wide range of subjects, tagging alongside every student and doing everything they did. His favorite study partner, for a couple reasons, was Janelle. First of all, she was awesome, and second, she knew what his secret specialty was. Her ideas about how to use it were exciting, too. Together they made a great team—magic and science joining forces. Shazad and Leanora didn’t think the two could work together, but Joey had a different opinion. He wasn’t entirely sure where magic ended and science began. The way he saw it, both scient
ists and magicians had the potential to do the impossible. He had seen it up close. After all, it was Janelle’s science project that had saved everyone’s life a month ago.

  Shazad and Leanora had first met Janelle when Joey got the idea to use her mini Hadron collider—and the Frisbee-size black hole it had created—to dispose of Grayson Manchester. Shazad and Leanora had taken Janelle for a fellow magician that night, and she had been working to prove them right ever since. Rather than breaking down when faced with the fact that magic rendered the laws of physics obsolete, Janelle embraced the challenge of learning something new and incorporating it into her research. That was her way, relentlessly optimistic in the face of any challenge. A passionate environmentalist, Janelle’s project at Caltech revolved around sustainability and clean energy sources. In her mind, magic had the potential to be the biggest scientific breakthrough of all time. It was the definition of alternative energy. That was what she and Joey were working on that morning. Figuring out how to use magic to change the world.

  “What time are Leanora and Shazad coming?” Janelle asked. “Did you talk to them this morning?”

  “We talked yesterday.”

  “Why don’t you text them? Tell them you’re here.”

  “They don’t text.” Joey finished eating and gathered up the remnants of his breakfast. “Don’t worry, they’re coming.” Just then there was a specific knock at the lab door. The first half of a simple but memorable rhythm. “What’d I tell you?”

  Joey went to the door and gave the return knock, finishing the tune and signaling that he and Janelle were alone. They had to take precautions like that whenever they used magic in public, just in case anyone was watching. Leanora and Shazad were using the same door Joey had used to enter the lab, but they weren’t coming from the same place. Only after Joey had given the “all clear” did the door open to reveal the two young magicians.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing stuff like that,” Janelle said, shaking her head in wonder.

  Joey stepped back to take in the impossible sight. Through a lab window on the wall, they could see the school’s conventional, nondescript hallway on the other side of the glass. Through the open doorway a foot to the left of the window was not the hallway, but the Majestic Theatre’s grand lobby. Leanora and Shazad said hello and stepped across the threshold, trading plush red carpeting, crystal chandeliers, and palatial decor for linoleum, fluorescent lights, and clinical functionality.

  “It is pretty wild,” Joey agreed as Leanora reached back into the Majestic to collect a golden doorknob with a red ruby handle from the other side of the door. It had been in her family for years, and enabled her to go wherever she pleased, turning any door into a supernatural gateway. It was an extraordinary magical object that bent reality to her will, but even more extraordinary was the fact that, for Joey, seeing it in action was starting to feel normal. Commonplace even. He was grateful Janelle was there to share these “magic moments” with him. She kept him grounded, reminding him to appreciate the miracles he witnessed on a daily basis and not take them for granted.

  As the friends greeted each other, Joey couldn’t help but feel that Janelle met Leanora and Shazad’s arrival with more enthusiasm than she had his own. Sure, he saw her every day, but still. “How come you don’t ask them why they’re late?” Joey asked.

  “They’re allowed. They come bearing gifts.”

  “I brought bagels,” Joey said in his defense. “You guys hungry?” he asked Leanora and Shazad.

  “I could eat,” Leanora said.

  Joey slid the bag across the table. “Help yourself. I got enough for everyone.”

  “No thanks,” Shazad said, passing on the food. “And I wouldn’t exactly call this a gift.” He held up something wrapped in a blue quilted silk blanket. He guarded it closely, cradling it in one arm like a football with his free hand covering it on top.

  “It’s just an expression,” Joey assured Shazad. “We know the deal.”

  Janelle held out her hands. “Can I see?”

  Shazad looked at Joey as if he had reservations about handing the bundle over, which was funny considering it was the reason he was there.

  “Dude, we talked about this,” Joey said. “You’re doing the overprotective thing again.”

  “Is something wrong?” asked Janelle.

  “Don’t take it personal,” Leanora told Janelle. “He’s always like this. You’ve got to learn to let go,” she told Shazad, patting him on the shoulder.

  Shazad grimaced, but he gave in. “I can’t help it. It’s how I was raised. Be very careful,” he said, passing the wrapped object to Janelle as if it were a delicate newborn baby.

  “I promise,” Janelle said.

  Leanora toasted Shazad with her bagel. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Me too,” Joey said, hoping the gesture was a symbol of things to come and that Shazad would be open to more creative uses of the magic items they had going forward. If today’s experiment went well, it would certainly help with that.

  Janelle set the bundle down on a lab table and carefully unwrapped it. “Wow. Look at that.”

  Inside the blanket was a hand-carved stone mask the size of a hardcover book. It was forest green, streaked with white marbling, and had a smooth, polished texture. A few chips and scratches aside, the mask showed no physical signs of age, but it clearly belonged to another time. A lost time. There was something about it… an energy it gave off… an aura. Everyone felt it. Joey was convinced that even if he had not known that magic was real, he would have sensed it. He wouldn’t have understood it, but he would have had a funny feeling about the mask. The face carved into the mysterious green mineral was formidable. More than human. Most likely it was the image of an ancient deity. The idol of some forgotten, vengeful god. Joey felt like it was the kind of thing Indiana Jones would try to find before the bad guys did.

  “What’s it called?” Janelle asked. Joey had told her about a variety of magical items, such as the Staff of Sorcero, the Winged Boots of Fleetfoot, Kadabra’s Cube, and more. “Does it have a name?”

  “Redondo’s ledger listed it as the Finale Mask,” said Shazad.

  “Spooky, huh?” Joey said.

  “What does it mean?” Janelle asked.

  “We don’t know,” Leanora replied.

  “Have any of you tried it on?”

  Joey, Shazad, and Leanora looked at one another. No one had been willing to test out the mask on their own face without knowing what would happen. Redondo hadn’t put it down as an entry in his book for nothing.

  “I don’t think it was meant to be worn on the face,” Joey said. “At least not by the living.” He pointed out that neither the eyes nor the mouth had cutouts to see or breathe through. “I did a little research. Turns out, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a similar piece on display.” He brought up the browser on his phone and checked a web page for details. “Theirs is made of jadeite, a rare form of jade, which is what I think this mask is made of too. The Met traced their mask back to 1500 BC. They think it was a ceremonial item used in funerals.”

  “Funerals.” Shazad grunted. “Sounds promising. Can you explain to me what we are doing here again?”

  Janelle clapped her hands together. “I’d love to.” She laid out the experiment she had planned, trying to fire the laser using the mask as a power source. Her theory was that magic could revolutionize the energy industry and change the way the world worked from top to bottom. “Solar and wind power are great and all, but magic is a game changer—if we can figure out how to harness it at scale.”

  Joey touched a hand to the mask. It lit up with green energy. “We know this artifact is an enchanted mineral, like Leanora’s firestone. Obviously, it’s larger and potentially more powerful. We want to see how powerful.”

  “And what we can use that power for,” Janelle added. She was clearly excited. If this worked, it would be a huge breakthrough for her renewable-energy project. The test with the mas
k was a dry run before the trip to Caltech. She had hinted at a major breakthrough in her conversations with the faculty there, but her “magic bullet” solution to climate change had to make the grade at home before she could even think about bringing it out West. The California Institute of Technology was one of the best universities in the world and home to some of the greatest minds in the fields of science and engineering—in other words, Janelle’s peers. She didn’t want to introduce any radical ideas she couldn’t fully explain if she didn’t know for sure they were going to work.

  “And this isn’t going to damage the mask in any way?” Shazad probed. “You’re sure about that?”

  “We’re sure,” Janelle said.

  “Pretty sure,” Joey hedged.

  That comment earned Joey a minor groan from Shazad and a harsh look from Janelle. “Here,” she said, thrusting a set of wires with sticky gel nodes into Joey’s hands. “Start putting these on the mask.”

  Joey stuck the puttylike nodes on the forehead and cheeks of the jadeite mask, and Janelle plugged the other ends into various ports on the laser. Leanora looked back over her shoulder at the lab window and unlocked door. “What’s our story if one of your teachers comes to check on you? How do we explain who we are and what we’re doing here?”

  “You’re my guests,” Joey said, finishing with the mask. “A couple friends dropping by to say hi, that’s all. I just had you do the secret knock so no one would see you using the magic doorknob to get here. Now that you’re in the lab, we’re fine.”

  “What about that?” Leanora asked, indicating the unconventional science project on the table. She had a point. An experimental laser hooked up to an ancient artifact from a lost civilization would be difficult to explain.

  “Don’t worry,” Janelle said. “No one’s coming to check on us. They treat kids like adults here.” Joey nodded, backing up Janelle’s statement. It was especially true where she was concerned. Dr. Cho and the rest of the teachers gave Janelle a ton of autonomy, drawing the line only at her mini Hadron collider experiment (which she had gone ahead and built anyway). The truth was, the scientists that Exemplar brought in to work with Janelle had a hard time keeping up with her. Also, they knew she was flying out to California today and didn’t expect to see her in the lab.