I breathed in deep and let that breath out. The near constant fluttering in my chest suddenly stilled. My shoulders relaxed.

Hope. A thing I had never truly felt. Real hope that everything was going to work. Hope that I would be able to do this borderline impossible job.

Everything was going my way.

All the numbers were coming up seven.

You might be asking how I knew I was even standing in a lab at all. Well, it was clear: there were test tubes. Lots of them. None of them held liquid. Instead, most of them held witchstones of varying colors. The tubes were everywhere, and it seemed clear: lab.

There was something else about the place I couldn't quite place my finger on.

There was a smell. A smell that I recognized. It wasn't the smell of my father, either. It was something else. Something familiar that from my childhood.

Have I been here before?

Have you ever I been in another room that smelled like this?

I thought back to the chemistry lab in high school, but that was quite different. That was an almost medicinal smell, whereas this one smelled almost like… what, a fair? A county fair?

No…

That was close, but not quite right.

Shaking my head, I pushed my semi-obsession with the smell away as the pressure of the task at hand started to weigh down on me.

I could feel the witchstone in my pocket. I could feel it reflecting my own heat, reminding me it was there and that it was my key to getting everything that I wanted in my life.

Sitting on a table off to my right was a strange little device that looked like a cell phone. It was in the shape of a phone, but it was a solid piece of slate-black rock. It weighed almost nothing and, when, I picked it up nothing happened.

Maybe it was a tiny cutting board of some sort?

I turned it over and saw a tiny seal at the center. A clear seal.

Please be what I think you are. Please be what I think you are.

Smiling, I placed my thumb over the seal and light blossomed from the opposite side. I flipped it back over and realized my guess had been correct.

A handheld Lumadex.

My eyes grew wide and a grin broke across my face. I finally had what I'd been looking for: a portable device that could tell me about the magick world.

Whatever I wanted.

Whenever I wanted.

I took in a deep breath and let it out. I couldn't believe my luck.

I flipped the Lumadex back over, pressed my thumb to the seal, and the light died. I would come back to it. There would be plenty of time later to examine all the secrets the magick world held, all the secrets the Lumaverse contained.

Three bowls sat atop another table. The bowls were matte black and felt porous, almost as though they were made from volcanic rock. They were rough to the touch and reminded me of the feel of dry skin against a microfiber cloth.

Gag.

I immediately wanted to go moisturize my hands.

On another table was a pair of bright blue gloves. Eye-wateringly blue.

I avoided touching these as I didn't know what sort of residue might be on the fingertips.

Those vanisher goggles would come in handy right about now.

I would come back to them at another time.

On the far side of the lab, I found a closet. When I pulled the door open, I just about jumped out of my skin.

The back wall of the closet was a floor to ceiling mirror.

Relax. It’s just your reflection.

The closet was empty save for an old, musty parka hanging from a peg on the right. It took only a moment to realize that more of that same smell I recognized from earlier was emanating from the closet.

The layout of the closet didn’t make sense.

There were no clothing racks, no shelves, nothing. It was just a tiny empty room with a mirror. I stepped in and closed the door behind me.

I’m still not sure why I did it. Maybe I thought that if I closed myself inside that small space, the smell would intensify, and I would remember what the smell was.

Faint light filled the closet from behind me. I slowly and cautiously turned back from the door to face the mirror and my mouth fell open. I was staring out into a lobby I knew all too well.

The smell immediately hit home.

The smell was stale popcorn.

Mingled with a slight mustiness.

And age.

It was the smell of a theatre.

A movie theatre.

The theatre.

Through the mirror, which appeared to be two-way glass, I could see into the lobby of the theatre. Blackhart had a direct connection to the stick world.

The lobby doors of the theatre were off on the left, mostly boarded, but through a window covered in mesh I could see a bird was perched just outside. I watched it for several moments, but it never moved.

Is the bird some sort of illusion, some sort of magickal painting?

Nothing moved on the other side of the mirror, though.

I could just make out the roof a car in the street directly outside. Farther away, there was a person mid-stride on the opposite sidewalk. Frowning, I put my hand up to the glass and my hand slipped right through.

There was an almost sucking sort of feeling, like I was being pulled into the theatre, and before I knew it, I was standing on the other side of the glass.

The bird in the window chirped, its head twitched in my direction. The car drove past. The man on the sidewalk continued on his way, moving out of my sight.

My breath came in quick fits.

What’s going on? Why is everything that was frozen now moving?

I took a deep breath and turned back to face what I'd walked through.

The door was nothing more than a nondescript column off to one side of the lobby.

I lifted my hand and watched as it slipped into the column. Again, I felt that same strange pull, felt myself pulled into the column, into Blackhart, into my father's secret lab.

Once again, before I knew what was happening, I was back in the closet.

I turned around to look through the double-sided glass and saw the roof of a new car out on the street, completely frozen. I inspected everything else I could see through that mirror, trying to understand what I was looking at, trying to figure out the trick.

I could see a man on the opposite side of the street pushing open the door of the very same convenience store I’d bought all the scratch offs from in my attempt to win enough money to buy the theatre. He had the door halfway open and was staring out the glass, but he wasn't moving. A thought flashed that this all must be a practical joke, people making some funny video. That thought vanished when I then saw, directly above the car, something that made my mouth fall open.

A bird in midflight. Just hovering there, its wings outstretched.

I swallowed hard and turned my back on the mirror to open the closet door. After stepping out, I looked back in at my reflection, no hint at all about what lay on the other side of the glass.

I strode toward the Lumadex, powered it on, and stared at it.

What do I even look up? Time? Frozen time? Halted time?

I didn't even know. I didn't have the words to describe what had happened in the closet. I didn't have the magickal vocabulary to describe what I'd seen, what I'd experienced.

If you buy the theatre, you’ll own a permanent gateway…

My mouth fell open.

You didn’t need a pass.

The gateway that existed at the back of that closet connected from the magick world to the stick world. I hadn’t needed a pass to move in between the two worlds. I could exist in both, if only I owned the theatre.

I felt the pressure ramp up.

I could figure out the time thing later.

Does the magick world pause as well?

I could figure out why the stick world on the other side of the two-way mirror seemed to pause whenever I was on one side, but not the other.

Focus.

I swallowed hard and set the Lumadex on the table after powering it down.

That’s why the theatre was so important to him. That’s why he kept even though he talked about how much money it was losing. It’s a permanent gateway.

It allowed him to move between both worlds with ease. He essentially owned his own gateway, a private gateway, and he didn’t need anyone else’s help. I wondered how many people owned private gateways.

Mr. Carson owned one.

That’s not true.

Mr. Carson owned a gateway, but the thing that connected Blackhart to the theatre was different. It was a gateway that only went to one place. Mr. Carson's gateway was a regular gateway. It went wherever a pass granted access to. I frowned, considering what sort of mechanics had to be involved.

I would have to ask Flin about this. It was right up his alley. Gateway theory, right?

Later. You need to get to work on the witchstone and get the money right now.

As the excitement of what I was about to do built, I searched my father's lab for anything I could find that might help me with my task. It didn't take long.

There was a drawer connected to the table those strange bowls sat upon. When I pulled it open, I recognized my father's handwriting immediately on a notebook inside.

Penciled on the cover, in my father's handwriting, were the words:

Stonebreaking: A Primer

By Darren Covington

First Draft

I placed the notebook next to the bowls on the table and flipped it open. I leafed through the pages, skimming over the introduction and the bits about the ethics of stonebreaking. I also skimmed over the warnings, trying to find the meat, trying to find the how-to’s.

I was raised on the Internet. Typically, I would just want to know what steps I needed to do the thing, not really caring where the steps came from.

But there was something about this that made it feel like my father was essentially walking me through this process, step-by-step, in person. Like he was there beside me.

I flipped through the pages and found the one I was looking for.

Step one: Place the witchstone on a grounded table within the containment area.

I smiled. It was time. It was time to take the theatre. It was time to take what was rightfully mine. I squeezed the crystal hanging from the silver chain around my neck.

I’ll make you proud, dad.

I started stonebreaking the witchstone.