“Wait . . . what?” Shannon asked.
Liv had just finished laying out the basics of her plan, and now everyone in the Malibu house was staring at her blankly. Shannon, of course, was the first to speak what was on everyone else’s mind.
“I mean . . . what?”
“It’s our only option,” Liv said. “Or at least, the only one I can think of. It’s basically this or run and hide and wait for the world to slowly fall apart for good.”
She looked around at everyone in the room—Cedric, with his eyebrows raised; Kat, skeptical with her arms crossed; Merek and Rafe, who were both covered in ash like they’d just stepped out of a forest fire; and Peter . . . poor Peter, who’d been quiet and withdrawn since Liv first explained, in a halting, breaking voice, why Joe wouldn’t be coming back with them.
“Liv,” Shannon continued. “Maybe we should just take a moment to recover from . . . what happened.” Shannon’s voice was gentle, filled with pity and something else . . . fear? Yes, Liv thought, looking into her best friend’s eyes—Shannon was definitely afraid. But of what? Her?
Liv glanced over at the mirror on the wall. She barely recognized the girl looking back at her. Soot covered her from head to toe, staining her pajamas a gray-brown. Tear tracks ran down the ash that covered her face, and her hair stuck out from her head at all angles. There were red marks on her wrists and ankles from where she’d struggled against the ropes. And her eyes looked . . . drained.
She looked shell-shocked. Crazy. Definitely not like someone anyone should be taking direction from.
Liv took a deep breath and looked back at her friends.
“We don’t have time to recover. Malquin is building his army up more every day. Every minute we waste is another potential person he might turn into . . .” Her voice faltered, and she closed her eyes to compose herself.
“He will need some time to regroup,” Cedric said. Liv opened her eyes to see him shaking his head. “The fire burned down his base, and the wraths scattered—”
“We have no idea how much the fire set Malquin back,” Liv said, standing up straight and once again trying to gather a strength she didn’t feel. “But we can’t assume he’s down for the count. Remember months ago, Cedric, when you said Malquin was one step ahead of us? That hasn’t changed. He’s looking to tear the wall between the worlds down even more. He wants magic to come here, wants the Earth to keep fighting it. He wants the destruction. He’s building an army and using innocent people to do it.”
“I thought you said he was only using Knights,” Merek put in.
“Okay . . . mostly innocent. But what do you think will happen when he runs out of Knights and their families to turn? Do you think he’s just gonna stop? We have to do something now.”
Shannon cleared her throat. “If we do this—plan—will it bring Joe back? Will it make him . . . Joe again?”
Liv’s breath caught in her throat. Once again she saw Not-Joe coming toward her, his eyes dark, bent on hurting her without a second thought. She wanted so badly to believe he could come back, but . . .
“I don’t know,” Liv said truthfully. “Even if the plan works, even if we restore magical balance to our worlds, Joe might be . . . gone.”
Shannon cleared her throat. “About that . . . plan. Maybe you can run us through it one more time?”
“Yes, because not a single part of it makes even a bit of sense,” Kat added.
Liv took another deep breath, looking around the room. It suddenly seemed like a huge feat to get everyone on board with her idea. Her plan had two key elements: moviemaking and magic. Half the people in the room had never even heard of movies before a few months ago, and the other half had never seen real magic outside of movies.
Liv took a deep breath, ready to plead her case.
“Henry Martin told us it’s impossible to get rid of magic now that it’s back on Earth. The only way to save our world—worlds—is to restore balance. To get our world to stop fighting this magic surge, right?”
“He said it was a theory,” Cedric responded carefully.
“Well, let’s just assume, because we have no better option, that his theory is true. That there’s a way to allow magic to flow between our worlds for good in a way that doesn’t burn up the whole sky or drain Caelum to nothing. To do that, we’d need power. The kind of power that hundreds of Knights had all those years ago when they opened the very first portal.”
“Yeah, but—” Shannon started.
“But we don’t have access to Knights anymore, I know. Even if Malquin wasn’t killing and turning them, it would take us forever to track them all down. But remember, Mathilde told Cedric that the Knights weren’t just important because they knew about magic, but because they believed in it. That’s why their spell worked.”
Liv moved her hands wildly as she talked, anxious to make them see. “That part’s not just a theory. I saw it with my own eyes. Malquin needed a spell to turn humans into wraths, so he got his other wraths to do it. Not Knights, wraths. Believers. It didn’t even matter what the words of the spell were—they just had to focus on what they wanted to happen. They just had to believe.”
Cedric nodded. “I think I understand what you’re trying to say, Liv. But it took hundreds of Knights to open that first portal. To get the whole world to stop fighting magic? It would take so many more of these . . . believers.”
“Thousands, likely,” Liv agreed. “Maybe more.”
Everyone in the room looked crestfallen at this, but Liv felt like she was finally getting somewhere. “And what’s the best way to reach thousands of people? Like, if you had a message you wanted to deliver?”
“The internet,” Peter responded.
“Right!” Liv said. She actually clapped in response. The idea was so clear in her, if only she could make the others see . . .
Without even realizing it, she started talking faster. “But what if you didn’t just want to deliver a message? What if you wanted people to really believe what you were saying? You wouldn’t just tell them. You’d show them. You’d give them a story.”
A collective pause fell over the room, just like it had the first time Liv had quickly explained her plan. But this time, instead of shaking her head, Shannon cocked it slightly—she was listening, thinking.
“That’s how we can reach thousands of people. That’s how we can get them to believe. Think about it, Shannon. When you watch a good movie, what does it feel like? What’s it like when things are happening on screen and you get so caught up in them that you practically forget you even exist? Even if a part of your brain knows nothing you’re seeing is real, you turn that part of your brain off. You imagine what you’re watching is real because it feels real. You believe, even just for a moment, because you want to.”
Shannon’s eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open into a small O of understanding.
One, thought Liv. I’ve got one of them. She turned to her brother.
“Peter, remember when you were a kid, and your favorite movie was Star Wars?”
“Yeah, but what—”
“The whole movie is based on this completely imaginary concept, with intergalactic wars and light sabers and all these fantastic, non-real things. But when you’re watching it, your emotions are real. You care when the characters get hurt, you feel tense when they’re about to fight, and relieved when they live. You believe in them, and you believe in something like the Force, even if just for a little while.”
Peter pursed his lips, thinking. “But that’s not real believing. It wears off as soon as the movie’s over.”
“But what does ‘real’ believing even mean? Whether you believe in God, or your family, or yourself, or in a story . . . doesn’t it all work the same? Belief is there for you when you need it, no matter how long it lasts, no matter what kind it is. If we can get enough people to believe in the magic in our story—even for just a few seconds—how is that any different from what some ancient knights believed in? Peter, isn’t what you feel when you watch Star Wars sometimes just as strong as what you feel in real life?”
“Sometimes,” Peter said, his voice soft. “Sometimes it seems even stronger.”
Liv smiled, triumphant. “Exactly. So?” She looked anxiously around the room. She noticed both her hands were shaking, maybe from anxiety, from lack of sleep, from trauma. Or from just hoping, so hard, that the plan she’d come up with wasn’t just a delusion from her smoke-addled mind.
“But how would it work, exactly?” Shannon asked.
“We tell a story with the spell inside,” Liv responded. “It doesn’t even matter what the spell is, we can make that part up. That’s what Malquin did with the wraths. They chanted some random word, but as long as they believed what they were saying, it worked. In seconds, like . . . like magic.”
“But to get that many people to really believe, it would have to be one hell of a movie,” Peter said.
Liv grinned. “I know.”
Kat looked incredulously between Cedric, Merek, and Rafe. “Does any of this make any sense to you?”
Cedric’s expression was careful, watchful. “A bit.”
Rafe shook his head. “Liar. That was all basically gibberish, and you know it.”
“No, I think I understand, too,” Merek said, looking directly at his brother. “Shannon exposed me to some of these movies—”
“The best of my collection,” Shannon interrupted.
“And I understand what Liv is saying, how watching movies can make you feel . . . amused, sad, scared. I did not understand half of what I was seeing, but—”
“But you still cried during Up.”
Merek’s face went white. “I did not!”
“You did, I totally saw you. Don’t worry, no one here is judging.”
“I am, a little,” Peter said, grinning. But he stopped smiling when he saw the furious look on Merek’s face. “Let’s get started, then.”
Liv nodded enthusiastically. She turned to Cedric again, and for a moment was confused to see him through what seemed like a strange, liquid veil in front of her eyes. Tears. She’d wanted so badly for them to understand her idea, and now they were on the verge of it, and for the first time in a long time, she felt something close to hope.
Cedric smiled. “What do you need us to do?”
Liv exhaled, feeling twenty pounds lighter. As if the hard part were done, and not still in front of them.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Kat nodded in Liv’s direction. “I do not understand any of this, but it is not as though I have a better plan. I will help.”
Kat looked to Merek, who nodded. “Me too.”
Liv clapped her hands together, a director ready to start work. She looked around at her friends in the dim room, her mind already calculating what to do first. Standing across the room, Rafe raised his hand.
“Question. What exactly is a movie?”