The New World

by Matt Myklusch

  “You guys are the best friends I’ve ever had.” Joey waved the wand. “Godspeed.”

  A light appeared at Leanora’s and Shazad’s feet. It swirled around them as if it were alive, growing brighter with every revolution until it was so intense that Joey and Janelle had to shield their eyes. When the light blinked out and they lowered their hands, Shazad and Leanora were gone. The world’s last night without magic had officially begun.

  2 The Thirteenth Floor

  “How do you feel?” Janelle asked Joey.

  He checked his arm. The green power meter glowed as it went down a tiny, almost imperceptible amount. “I’m fine. See?” He held his arm out for her to see. “That was hardly anything.”

  “Good.” Janelle rubbed her hands together, eager to follow in the others’ footsteps. “Our turn now.”

  “Right.” Joey tucked the wand up his sleeve and strapped his backpack on his back. Rather than use the wand to send them on their way, he used a cane to hook a latch in the attic door above their heads. A set of stairs folded out from behind it. Joey and Janelle went up through the opening and came out through a trapdoor in the stage floor down below. After that they lowered themselves into the orchestra pit and walked up the aisle toward the lobby. When they got there, Joey paused a moment, struck by the sight of the old posters of Redondo that still hung on the walls. He needed a second to psych himself up before he took another step. At that moment, Shazad was hiking across a city-size iceberg in the Arctic Ocean and Leanora was climbing an active volcano in the North Pacific, but he and Janelle had the most perilous journey of all. They had to cross the street.

  For Joey, it meant going back to where it all began. The place where he had first encountered magic and the Invisible Hand: the headquarters of the National Association of Tests and Limits. Joey’s life had changed in so many ways since that fateful day. He had learned about the world and how it really worked—or didn’t work—and what the people in the building across the street had to do with it. Joey had extensively researched Ledger DeMayne’s day job at the NATL, where he went by the alias Mr. Black. In the course of his investigation, Joey discovered that the NATL was not a private company, but rather a subsidiary of a much larger entity called Consolidated Global Interests. CGI was a sprawling corporate empire, the biggest and most powerful company in the world. It was also a front for the Invisible Hand, which explained why it was almost impossible to find anything written about it anywhere. What Joey was able to find confirmed that the NATL building was actually the CGI building, and the man in charge of it all was responsible for a lot worse than manipulated test scores. Joey and Janelle were going to break into his office, and the plan couldn’t have been simpler: They were going to walk in the front door.

  “It’s funny,” Joey said as they approached the dark tower. “The first time I saw this place, it made me think of a supervillain’s fortress.”

  “Very perceptive of you,” Janelle replied, reaching for the door.

  “Comic books taught me well.”

  The main entrance of the CGI building was locked, which came as no surprise. There was a security guard at a desk behind the glass doors. She wasn’t terribly interested in Joey or Janelle and barely looked up from her phone when they tried to get in. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to use this thing,” Joey said, making a face as he took the Hand of Glory out of his backpack. It was the severed left hand of a thief, mummified and bloodless, but no less disgusting for all that. Joey had first come across the item in Transylvania a year ago. He and his friends had gone back to retrieve it after their quest for Camelot had ended. Joey hated it there, but going through Dracula’s castle was much easier the second time around, once they knew there were no real vampires inside. Unfortunately, touching the Hand of Glory never got any easier for Joey. It was wrapped in a cloth. He had wanted to use a ziplock bag for it, but Janelle was dead set against single-use plastics with no exceptions. “Ugh,” he said, wrapping his fingers around the wrist like a handle. “So gross.”

  Suddenly, he could see as clearly as if it were 10:00 a.m., but that wasn’t why Joey needed the hand. In addition to granting its holder the ability to see in the dark, a Hand of Glory had the power to unlock any door. Joey tapped the fingers of the hand against the pane of glass in front of him and heard a latch click. He and Janelle pushed through the revolving doors and strolled into the lobby.

  Now the security guard took an interest in them.

  “Excuse me! The building’s closed. You kids can’t come in here,” she said, striding toward them. As Joey wrapped the hand back up, the guard pushed past him to inspect the door. “How’d you even get this open? It was locked. I know I locked it.”

  She was a tough-looking woman who clearly took her job seriously and would have been intimidating under normal circumstances, but these were anything but normal circumstances.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Janelle told her. “We’re just here to pick something up.”

  “Pick something up? What are you talking about?”

  “We’ll be in and out. Ten minutes tops.”

  The security guard snorted out a laugh. “Try ten seconds tops. Play time’s over kids. Let’s go. You can’t be here right now.”

  “Yes, we can,” Janelle said, polishing a red ruby brooch that was pinned to the lapel of her jacket. A crimson glow appeared on the guard’s face. “It’s okay, really.”

  The more the guard stared at the jewel, the more her eyes went blank. Eventually, a red glow appeared in the center of her pupils, and she said, “It’s okay.” Her voice was completely monotone. Any trace of confrontation had been drained out of it.

  “We have an important meeting on the thirteenth floor,” Janelle told her.

  “You… have a meeting upstairs.”

  “And we don’t want to be late.”

  The guard nodded slowly, staring at the jewel. “You’d better hurry,” she said. She gestured toward the elevator bank with a sweeping motion. “This way, please.”

  Joey and Janelle followed the guard to the elevators. She kept looking back at Janelle’s red ruby brooch as she walked, unable to take her eyes off it for more than a few seconds at a time. The enchanted crystal, which made people very susceptible to suggestion, was another new addition to the Order of the Majestic’s arsenal. It had previously belonged to a woman called Scarlett, who had been part of the Invisible Hand. She had used the sparkling relic against Shazad in Transylvania, but lost it after a confrontation in the Amazon on the road to Camelot. By the time that adventure was over, Scarlett would suffer more grievous losses, including the ability to do magic altogether. She had no further use for the ruby, so Joey, Shazad, Leanora, and Janelle had made a special trip to South America to find it. It took the better part of a week and an exhaustive grid search of the area surrounding a village that had been completely swallowed up by the jungle, but in the end, they’d reclaimed the magic item from the rain forest. Janelle was the one who had found the gem, and she had taken quite a shine to it. So had the guard, but in a very different way, and not one that she would ever understand.

  When they reached the elevator, Janelle told the guard to stay in the lobby. “You’re doing an excellent job,” she added.

  The guard lit up, clearly very proud of herself. “I’m doing an excellent job.”

  “As soon as these doors close, you’re going to forget about us and go back to your desk.”

  The security guard nodded as if accepting an order. “As soon as these doors close, I’m going to—”

  The elevator doors shut, cutting her off midsentence. Joey hit the button for the fourteenth floor. “Nice work with the Jedi mind trick. That couldn’t have gone any better.”

  “I’m not using the Force,” Janelle said with a little side-eye. “It’s hypnosis. I did the research on this. The induction phase—flashing the ruby—quiets the part of the brain involving sensory perception and emotional response. The suggestion phase—telling the guard what to do�
�counteracts unhelpful and unwanted behavior.”

  “Janelle, just admit it. You’re using a magic ruby.”

  “I’m using it as a catalyst for a well-studied and legitimate form of treatment by medical doctors and therapists.”

  Joey had to laugh. Despite everything Janelle had seen and been a part of, her scientific instincts died hard. Over the last year, she had been able to use a variety of magical objects, but only when she was able to view them through the lens of some kind of scientific principle. “You might have to rethink the way you look at magic before this is all over.”

  “I don’t have a limited view of magic,” Janelle argued. “If anything, I have a bigger view. My view includes science. I don’t see them as opposites. Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”

  Joey put his hands up. “If that helps you.” He had heard this argument before. “Go with it until it stops working.”

  Joey stared at a digital screen on the wall in front of him. It was installed just above the buttons for each floor and cycled through images, stats, and corporate slogans while he and Janelle debated the fine line between magic and science. It was all public-friendly PR stuff from the many businesses CGI owned and operated. As usual, there wasn’t a single mention of CGI to be found in any of it. Even in their own building the company kept a low profile. CGI was a massive conglomerate that spanned every major industry on earth, including financial services, energy, media, education, transportation, aeronautics, technology, and arms manufacturing. They were so big that in some countries, it was hard for Joey to tell where the national government ended and CGI began, but somehow, they managed to fly almost completely under the world’s radar. Consolidated Global Interests was not a name people knew. It was a holding corporation that owned a lot of other companies, including the bank that had acquired the accounting firm where Joey’s father worked. When Joey thought about the motives behind that transaction, he was grateful that Ledger DeMayne no longer knew who he was. There was no business reason for an enterprise the size of CGI to buy Joey’s father’s tiny firm. It could only have been done to gain leverage and influence over Joey. That was how Ledger DeMayne stayed on top of the world—by exercising influence from the shadows. He was always two steps ahead, pulling strings from behind the scenes to manipulate events to his advantage. CGI was a far-reaching spiderweb that covered the globe, and DeMayne sat at the center, connected to everything. Wherever and whenever magic appeared in the world, he and his Invisible Hand cronies would skitter across the web to get there first, wrap it up, and vanish before anyone knew what had happened.

  Ironically, it was the acquisition of his father’s firm that had tipped Joey off to CGI’s existence. That and the fact that the company’s corporate headquarters had the same address as the NATL. Once Joey started digging, he even found an article that mentioned Ledger DeMayne by name, or more accurately, his fake name. It was buried in the middle of a news story about another one of CGI’s curious acquisitions. The article had credited “John Black” as the force behind several unconventional business decisions that had paid off surprisingly well and noted that he was rarely seen outside his thirteenth-floor office, where he was always hard at work plotting the company’s next big move.

  The elevator bell dinged, announcing the fourteenth floor. It was an unwritten rule that no building in New York should have a thirteenth floor. The numbers in every elevator Joey had ever been in skipped from twelve to fourteen because of pure superstition, and everyone just accepted it as normal. Joey viewed it as proof that people still had the capacity for magical thinking. Even the most pragmatic, fact-based designers and architects understood that no one wanted to live or work on a floor with such an unlucky number, and they constructed the world accordingly. At least, that’s how it was in Western culture. Joey wondered if buildings in China skipped the fourth floor, which was an unlucky number in Chinese culture. Either way, Joey understood that a belief in unknowable, unprovable things impacted people’s lives and behavior every day all over the world, and that knowledge gave him hope.

  When the elevator doors parted, Joey and Janelle stepped out into a dark and quiet space. The lights flickered on, triggered by motion sensors, revealing an open office floor plan with rows of empty desks and blank monitors. Private offices and conference rooms lined the perimeter of the floor. They all had glass walls that offered no privacy. Joey and Janelle took a moment to survey the scene. It was all very corporate, sterile, and boring. “I expected something different,” Janelle said.

  “Me too,” Joey said. “I was here before, back when this was a testing center. It didn’t look anything like this.”

  “They could have renovated.”

  “Maybe.” Joey pictured the floor filled with employees during the day. He couldn’t imagine Ledger DeMayne spending any amount of time crowded in with the people who worked here. He was the kind of guy who would have wanted his space. And the glass-walled offices were a non-starter. DeMayne was allergic to transparency. Joey knew right then and there he was in the wrong place. DeMayne’s office, assuming he really had one, would be something fancier. More exclusive. Special. He returned to the elevators and hit the call button.

  “What’s wrong?” Janelle asked as the doors opened up.

  “This isn’t it.”

  Back in the elevator, Joey hit the button for the lobby, taking the car down. “Don’t worry. We’re not leaving. I’ve got an idea.” As soon as the digital display with the floor numbers started to change, he activated the emergency brake. Joey did it right after the number fourteen dimmed out but just before the number twelve lit up, effectively halting the car in between the two floors. He hit the “doors open” button a few times, but nothing happened.

  “Need a hand?” Janelle asked. It took a split second for Joey to realize she was talking about the one in his bag.

  He groaned, forced to use the Hand of Glory a second time. Joey took it out and tapped it against the elevator doors. They opened immediately.

  “Whoa,” Janelle said, her lips forming a surprised O.

  “Whoa is right,” Joey agreed. “This is the thirteenth floor.”

  Outside the elevator was an impossibly large space with a fifty-foot ceiling, which was especially noteworthy as the floor they had just left was fifteen feet away at most. A jet-black bridge ran out from the threshold of the door, extending at least a hundred yards. Beneath the bridge, there was darkness, smoke, and as far as Joey could see, no floor. Across the room, a series of massive beams rose out of the abyss, curving over the bridge to form a partial tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a door.

  “Where did all this come from?” Janelle asked.

  “Don’t ask me. All I know is that’s where we’ve got to go.” Joey pointed to the door. “It’s not that far.”

  As soon as they set foot on the bridge, there was a sound like a giant switch being thrown from “off” to “on,” and the whole room lit up with an ominous red glow. Joey and Janelle froze in place.

  “So much for sneaking in unnoticed,” Janelle said.

  Joey looked around to see if anyone was coming to get them. There was no one there, but there was also no way out. The elevator doors had closed behind them and faded away, becoming part of the wall. No turning back, Joey thought. What else is new? In the crimson light, he scanned the room for threats. Joey couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about the walls bothered him. He ran his hand over the smooth, shiny black stones that the elevator doors had transformed into. They were the size of shipping crates. Stacked with geometric precision, they covered the room except for one spot. One of the stones was missing. Joey was so busy staring at the hole in the wall, he almost didn’t see the stone that had recently vacated that space. It was barreling down the bridge, about to run him over.

  “LOOK OUT!”

  Janelle leaped forward and swung the Staff of Sorcero into the giant block. Sparks flew as she cleaved it in two, saving Joey’s life.

  “Ev
ery action has an equal and opposite reaction,” Janelle said, citing Newton’s third law of motion. “This staff, whatever it’s made of, absorbs kinetic energy and redirects it. The more things you hit with the staff, the stronger it gets. Right?”

  “Right!” Joey said distractedly. He wasn’t sure if Janelle’s explanation was scientifically accurate, or just a rationalization on her part, but he wasn’t complaining. “That works. Let’s go with that.”

  He took a deep breath, still processing his narrow escape as Janelle spun the staff around, ready for the next assault. As Joey watched the two halves of the block fall away and disappear into the darkness below the bridge, he shared Shazad’s gratitude that the staff had been returned. He and Janelle were going to need it.

  All around, Joey saw the mighty stone blocks that made up the walls rattling in their sockets, getting loose. This was the building’s real security system, and he had a feeling it was far more effective at stopping intruders than the guard in the lobby, however tough she might have been. They were going to need more than Janelle’s red ruby to cross the bridge. Joey gripped the orange gemstone Leanora had given him tight in his fist, hoping it would be enough.

  “Ready?”

  Janelle moved aside as Joey charged up the firestone. “After you.”

  With his fist glowing like the embers of a fire, Joey stepped forward. He didn’t get two feet before another black stone broke free of the wall and swooped down to the bridge, headed straight for him. Joey planted his feet as the block closed in and fired a blazing punch into its center, blasting it to bits. His fist still crackling with energy, he shuffled to the left and threw his arm out to the right, backhanding a second stone that was already upon him. Rock fragments, big and small, flew out in every direction. Joey had to turn away to shield his eyes, and when he looked back, a third stone was seconds away. He wasn’t ready for it. Fortunately, Janelle was. She darted ahead of Joey, stabbing the end of her staff into the stone, destroying it before it reached him.