“Almost ready to go,” Janelle said, checking the connections one last time as Joey set up a cinder block target in front of the laser. Janelle gave everyone a pair of goggles and asked them to go stand behind a pane of safety glass before she fired the laser.
“You really think this is going to work?” Leanora asked, putting on her goggles.
“I wouldn’t get my hopes up,” Shazad said.
“Too late,” Joey said.
“Too late for a lot of things.” Janelle joined the group behind the glass and opened the laser control program on her laptop computer. “It has to work. We’re running out of time. The world has about twelve years before we pass the point of no return on climate change. If we don’t do something, we’re going to cause irreversible damage to the planet. Rising sea levels, food shortages, drought, wildfires… not that we don’t have all that stuff right now, but it’s going to get worse. Everyone just argues about it like it’s a political issue.… We have an opportunity to change that. Magic is clean, renewable energy. Maybe limitless energy. If we can tap into it? We could literally save the world.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Joey said, meeting Leanora’s and Shazad’s doubts with optimism. Janelle’s passion was infectious, and he was fully on board. The school motto at Exemplar Academy was “Our Students Change the World.” Joey had previously thought it was ridiculous to expect such a thing of children, but here they were on the verge of actually doing it.
Janelle typed in a keystroke command on the laptop, turning on the laser. Out on the table, it powered up with a rising hum. “Here we go,” Janelle announced. “Activation in three… two… one!”
The laser made a noise like a car that wouldn’t start. It was the strained, whining sound of an engine that refused to turn over for lack of fuel.
“Hang on,” Janelle said, not giving up just yet. She typed in fresh commands on the keyboard, adjusting the power levels for a second attempt. “Okay. Firing laser in three, two, one… go.” She hit the enter key hard. Nothing happened. The mask didn’t light up and the laser didn’t fire. Not even a fizzling spark. She slumped her shoulders and stared at the idle laser. “I don’t understand.”
To their credit, neither Leanora nor Shazad said “I told you so” after Janelle’s anticlimactic countdown.
“I’m sorry,” Shazad said, trying to be supportive. “It was a good effort.”
“A good effort and an… interesting idea,” Leanora added, searching for something positive to say.
“Maybe one of the wires came loose?” Janelle wondered aloud, speaking more to herself than to anyone else. She came out from behind the safety glass to do a manual systems check on the laser.
“I don’t think that’s the problem,” Leanora said, following her out. “It’s technology, Janelle. Technology is the opposite of magic. They don’t mix well.”
“No.” Janelle shook her head. “I don’t believe that. Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”
Shazad disagreed. “Magic isn’t science. It’s more nuanced than that. It’s an art.”
Joey’s nose wrinkled involuntarily. The mention of art had made him think of Scarlett and her paintbrushes. He hadn’t run into her or DeMayne since the fight outside the Majestic a month ago, but they were still out there, and the thought of them gave him the chills.
“You want art? I could show you algorithms that qualify as works of art,” Janelle said. “Don’t sleep on science, you guys. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clarke’s Third Law.”
“Clarke’s what?” Shazad furrowed his brow. “Who’s Clarke?”
“Arthur C. Clarke. He was a British science-fiction writer and inventor. He co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“Is that a book?” Shazad asked, a blank expression on his face.
“A movie,” Joey said.
Shazad shook his head. “I never saw it.”
“It’s not one of my favorites,” Joey said. “I know, it’s a classic,” he added, heading off a rebuke from Janelle. He turned back to Shazad and Leanora. “Stanley Kubrick directed the movie. Everybody says he’s a genius, but I don’t know. If you ask me, it’s kind of slow.”
Janelle rubbed her temples as if she had a headache brewing. “Joey, can we focus? The point is, if you went back in time two hundred years and showed someone my computer or smartphone, they’d think it was magic. Would they be wrong?”
“Yes,” Leanora said. “They would.”
“I don’t know,” Joey said. “If you go back far enough people probably thought magnets were magic. Or rainbows and fireflies. Just because we have a scientific explanation for those things… that doesn’t make them any less magical.”
“Magnets?” Leanora said. “Really?”
“Redondo told us magic exists in every breath we take,” Joey said. “We can find it everywhere, even here.” He gestured to the lab and the laser. “Don’t forget, Janelle’s technology saved our butts from Manchester last month. And he was tracking me through my phone before that.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Shazad asked.
“I’m just saying, maybe magic and science aren’t opposites. They seem more complementary to me. The Invisible Hand uses tech. Maybe we should too.” Joey touched a hand to the jadeite mask, and the laser operated perfectly. Blinding green light shot out of its barrel, burning a hole in the cinder block target at the end of the table.
“Whoa!” Janelle shouted, throwing her arms up in front of Leanora and Shazad to keep them back. “Turn it off! Turn it off!”
Joey lifted his hand away and the light show stopped. Janelle hit him in the shoulder. “Don’t do that!”
“What?” Joey said, not understanding what the problem was.
“Joey! We’re supposed to stand behind the glass when this thing fires. What if I were leaning over the table? You could have burned my hand off.”
“Hey, I’m on your side. I just proved this thing works.”
“Sure, when you do it like that.” Janelle ushered everyone back behind the safety glass and keyed in the firing sequence one more time. “Hit enter,” she told Joey, stepping back from the computer.
Joey did as he was told, and the laser fired again.
Janelle’s eyes bulged. “What the—” She moved Joey out of the way and tried to replicate what he had done, growing increasingly frustrated when she could not fire the laser. “Why does it work for you and not for me?” She opened a new window on the screen to check the test-fire data. “The mask obviously has plenty of power. Everything’s hooked up properly; it should have worked.”
“It definitely works,” Leanora admitted, staring at the simmering hole in the target. “I can’t argue with that. But it didn’t work because you hit a few keys on a keyboard. The mask is a magic object. It needs help to find its power.”
“You have to believe,” Joey clarified. “It’s like Peter Pan.”
Janelle squinted at Joey. “What?”
“You know, the Disney movie?”
Janelle cast her eyes up at the ceiling. “I’m aware of Peter Pan. It was a book before it was a movie, by the way. And a play before that.”
“Whatever,” Joey said, not really caring about the origins of Neverland’s favorite son. “In the story, Peter, Wendy, and the others… They couldn’t fly without Tinker Bell’s help, right? They needed her pixie dust, but that wasn’t enough to get them off the ground. You can’t rely on magic for the whole trick. You’ve got to do the heavy lifting yourself.”
Janelle stared at Joey. “You’re saying I have to think happy thoughts?”
Joey shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“You can’t doubt,” Shazad said, adding helpful specifics. “Nothing kills magic dead like doubt. You can’t be afraid of what’s going to happen. You can’t be afraid it won’t work. You can’t be afraid what will happen to you. You just have to believe.”
“I did believe,” Janelle protested.
“It’s impossible to have a hundred and ten percent of anything,” the scientist in Janelle said automatically, but she saw the look on Joey’s face and realized her mistake. After everything she had seen of magic, the word “impossible” should have been deleted from her vocabulary. That was the problem. Ever since she was a little girl, Janelle had been driven to redefine reality, but always through scientific and technological innovation. She had other tools at her disposal now and no experience using them. She was still constrained by the limits of the world as she had always understood it.
Joey had expected the laser to work using the mask as a power source, but he’d hung back and let Janelle make the initial attempt. First of all, it was her experiment, but second, he wanted to see if someone who wasn’t a bona fide magician could pull it off. Janelle’s inability to fire the laser powered by magical energy was a setback, but it wasn’t a reason to stop trying. Joey had had his own issues making magic happen when he’d started out too. He believed Janelle would get there eventually, but it was harder for her. Joey and Janelle both had big imaginations, but they used them differently. Growing up, Joey had studied comic books, Star Wars, and Marvel movies. Janelle had studied actual textbooks. Joey’s heroes were people who made things up. Janelle idolized people who made things real. His mind-set was more open to magic. Her superior understanding of natural science, math, and things like the laws of matter and energy was harder to dislodge. It was holding Janelle back.
“This is a little off topic, but can I ask why you wanted to make a weapon?” Shazad inquired.
“What’s wrong with making a weapon?” Leanora asked.
“It isn’t a weapon,” Janelle said. “This was just an experiment to measure how much power could potentially be drawn from a magical artifact. And the answer is…” She scanned the readout from Joey’s laser demonstration and did a double take at the number at the bottom. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What is it?” Joey asked.
“1.21 gigawatts.”
“Giga… whats?” Leanora repeated.
“Is that good?” Shazad asked.
“Good enough for time travel,” Joey said.
“No, but it is good enough to provide energy for almost a million homes,” Janelle explained. She typed away on her keyboard, checking and rechecking the stats on the laser output. “This is incredible. So much power generated in an instant—like it was nothing! Zero waste, no pollution, totally efficient… What we have here in this lab could power half of New York City. A roomful of these could run the world!”
“Too bad,” Shazad said, drawing confused expressions from the rest of the group. “Even if this device could be operated by anybody—which it can’t—you’d still need a plan to deal with the people who run the world,” he explained. “The Invisible Hand would never let you take magic mainstream like this.”
“That’s why you need a weapon,” Leanora said, raising a finger in the air.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Joey said. “First we have to figure out how to replace fossil fuels with alternative energy sources that work only if you’re in a good mood.”
“I don’t think you can,” Shazad said. “Not enough people believe in magic for that.”
“So we make them believe,” Janelle said. “How do we do that?”
Joey grimaced, daunted by the enormity of the task. “That’s the real trick, isn’t it?” The Order of the Majestic was supposed to keep magic alive and keep people believing. It was their duty. The Order used to put on incredible magic shows that inspired wonder in the world and made good things happen. They shared magic by hiding it in plain sight, but they took a major hit after Houdini died. Redondo tried to pick up where Houdini left off, but he got taken out of the picture too. The world had become a darker place without them in it, one with no room for magic. Now it was up to Joey and his friends to reignite faith in magical possibility, but they had no idea where to start or what the best way to go about it was.
“Can’t we just show people what we have here?” asked Janelle. “Start there?”
“You’re not ready yet.” Leanora motioned to the laser. “This isn’t ready. A trick has to work every time if you want other people to believe in the magic behind it.”
“It works for Joey,” Janelle argued.
“Only because I believed it was magic making it work,” Joey said. “We can’t just tell people to believe in magic and expect to get anywhere when their default state is not to believe. We have to create an environment where they believe on their own.”
Janelle thought about that. “You’re saying we can’t change the world by making people believe in magic. We have to make people believe in magic so that we can change the world.”
“Pretty much,” Joey said.
Janelle looked at Joey. “How?” she asked again.
“I wish I knew,” Joey said. “Even you didn’t believe enough to fire the laser, and you’ve seen magic in action. Plenty of times.”
“I know.” Janelle looked away, disappointed in her performance. “Sometimes I still can’t wrap my head around it. I want to be ‘all in’ like you guys, but it’s just so much to accept. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw you using that wand.”
“Occupational hazard,” Joey said. “Magic can make you question your sanity. You took it better than most people would have. Way better. You’ll crack it.”
Janelle looked up. “I know that,” she said, shaking off the minor funk she was in. Janelle was not the type to waste time moping. “We’ll crack this, too,” she added, pointing to the laser. “I’m not giving up. Not by a long shot.”
“That’s the spirit,” Joey said. Janelle went around the safety glass and disconnected the mask from the laser. She picked it up in her hands, trying to make it glow as Joey had done. Joey and the others stayed where they were. There was a brief, awkward silence that Shazad eventually broke:
“You didn’t tell her.”
Joey looked straight ahead, focused on Janelle and her ongoing attempts to illuminate the mask. “Tell her what? We haven’t decided anything yet.”
“That’s the problem,” Shazad said. “We can’t keep putting this off. I kept an open mind, but I’m sorry, Joey. I didn’t see anything here today to convince me this is the way to go.”
“Neither did I,” Leanora agreed. Her voice, like Shazad’s, was sympathetic.
Joey sighed. “We just need a little more time.”
“We don’t have it,” Shazad said. “We’re pushing our luck as it is. We’ve got to get the relics out of the theater. All of them.”
“This Invisible Hand came by again this morning,” Leanora told Joey. “Just before dawn.”
Joey’s head turned. “Was it Scarlett again?”
“She’s the most likely suspect,” Shazad said. “There’s fresh paint on the theater door.”
Joey frowned. The marks on the theater door were strange. Joey couldn’t explain it, but he got the same weird vibe off them that he got when he looked at the Finale Mask. There was magic at work there, he was sure of it. They all were. “All right,” Joey said reluctantly. “Janelle and I fly out this afternoon. Let us have the rest of the morning to tinker with the mask and I’ll bring it back. I’ll meet you guys at the Majestic before my flight, and we’ll talk. We’ll figure out a plan for this stuff before it’s too late.”
3 Protect This House
Joey got to the Majestic around noon. As he came down the street with his backpack slung over his shoulder, he scanned the faces of nearby pedestrians for possible threats and checked to make sure he wasn’t being followed. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Joey slowed his pace as he approached his destination. His heartbeat sped up, and part of him wished he had gone with Shazad and Leanora instead of walking to the theater by himself. The reason behind his jitters was right across the stre
et.
Even in broad daylight, the NATL building bothered Joey. It loomed large in his mind, a Dark Tower worthy of Stephen King or J.R.R. Tolkien. Joey kept his distance from the building, wondering if Ledger DeMayne and his cronies were inside watching him. If they were, they didn’t make their presence known. He reached the front door untouched. Just as Shazad had said, the entrance had been tagged with graffiti again. Despite his nerves, Joey paused to get a good look before he went inside. A succession of curious symbols had been routinely spray-painted on the theater door ever since the magical street fight with DeMayne and Scarlett. This was number five in a series. The marks would appear, then grow fainter day by day until they faded away completely, only to be replaced by freshly painted designs at the start of each new week. The old tag was now gone, and the new one had arrived right on schedule. Joey stared at the odd curved letters on the door. He didn’t recognize the characters and could only guess at their meaning, but they felt to him like a bad omen. No other buildings on the block had been targeted by the mystery artist, which made Joey and his friends all the more certain it was Scarlett’s handiwork. She had moved on from pop art to street art. Was she telling them to leave? Warning them not to come back to the theater? Joey wondered why she was being so cryptic and understated about it. That didn’t strike him as her style. Shazad suspected the markings were part of a spell. He thought the weekly tags represented attempts by the Invisible Hand to breach the theater’s defenses. The good news was, their efforts had not yet proved successful. So far Joey, Shazad, and Leanora were the only ones who could get inside the Majestic. Somehow, the theater and the magical artifacts within it were safe from the Invisible Hand. The question was, for how long?
Everybody worried the magical barriers around the theater wouldn’t last, and rightly so. After all, if the Invisible Hand couldn’t physically enter the Majestic, why had Redondo felt it necessary to whisk the theater away to an alternate dimension, the strange place he had affectionately referred to as “Off-Broadway?” It didn’t make sense that he would go to such lengths to keep the theater safe unless he had to. Joey wished they could ask Redondo about it. He didn’t understand the nature of the protected status he and his friends currently enjoyed, and it was hard—even for a talented young magician—to trust what he didn’t fully understand. His concerns were compounded by the fact that the Invisible Hand wouldn’t ever stop trying to force their way in. They had spent twenty years going after Redondo. Could Joey and his friends realistically expect to hold out that long? He hoped they wouldn’t have to, but he felt that pressure weighing down on him. He lived with it every day.
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