Ten

Wishes, wishes, wishes.

Maxwell’s head was spinning. He was back in DC with his new world-class security detail. He was now in control of over half the world’s oil. He was probably the richest man alive. But it wasn’t enough. It also wasn’t easy, or fun. For one thing, there were still crowds of people yelling to be let into Black Gold, yelling to be given a chance to buy into Maxwell’s cooperative.

“Ugh,” Maxwell said, looking at the teeming mass of people from his office window. They looked like ants. Like cockroaches. He shuddered. “Like I’d want those losers in the club anyway. Can’t we tell them they’re not invited?”

His new assistant, Emerson, shook his head gravely. “No, sir,” he said. “The regulators say so. Also, the FBI called, asking for proof of permits for the security team. And the state department is asking about their visas. Oh, and the tax board called—”

“They’ll bury us in red tape!” Maxwell exploded, striding away from the window and wringing his hands. Being rich and powerful wasn’t fun at all! It was just bringing him a whole new kind of pain. “It’s a conspiracy! Against my success! They’re jealous.”

“And the DC police are here,” Emerson finished nervously. “They’re challenging the jurisdiction of your security team.”

“That’s it,” Maxwell said, throwing his hands into the air. “There has to be a better way.” He looked around his office wildly. Emerson had already made his wish. He was useless. Maxwell strode past him and hurried onto the floor of the main office space of Black Gold. He grabbed a new aide and held him tightly by the arm.

“You,” Maxwell said impatiently. “I know you wish I could have an audience with the president.”

“You bet I do!” the aide said enthusiastically.

Nothing happened.

“Wait, did I ask your wish already?” Maxwell said suspiciously.

“Yesterday,” the aide said.

Maxwell dropped the kid’s arm and looked around. He now had hundreds of employees. But he couldn’t remember which of these drones he’d already used.

“God,” Maxwell muttered. “This is so tiresome.” Doing things one wish by one wish was hopelessly inefficient. What he needed was a way to touch hundreds—millions—of people at once. A way to mass-produce wishes. To touch the entire world and take care of everything once and for all.

But in the meantime, he grabbed another young employee at random. “You,” he said. “You new here?”

He was.

Minutes later, Maxwell was striding through the furious crowd outside, his new Egyptian security guys shielding him as he stepped into his waiting car. He had an audience with the president to attend.

The car started moving forward and then stopped with a jerk. Maxwell looked impatiently over his driver’s shoulder. They were in the middle of a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam. Maxwell leaned forward and put his hand on the driver’s shoulder.

“Don’t you wish this traffic would clear up? And that everywhere you drove, the traffic parted like the great Red Sea?” he asked.

“Sure,” the driver said.

And that took care of that.

As Maxwell Lord was sailing unimpeded through the otherwise jammed streets of DC, Barbara Minerva was fighting her way through scenes of public panic, trying not to panic herself.

“Go inside,” a woman told her elderly neighbors as Barbara walked by. “Go inside and don’t come out again. It isn’t safe out here. I heard there’s a riot on the east side of town. For some reason the streets are full of cows! And the subway has turned into a river of glitter. I know, that sounds fun. But it’s horrible.”

Barbara hurried away from them. She didn’t need to hear more to know that the whole world had gone crazy.

And she knew why.

Barbara wasn’t stupid. She had connected the dots from her research, just the way Diana had probably connected them by now. That stone had been the common factor in the downfall of every major world civilization. The stone granted wishes, and the more wishes it granted, the more the world fell apart.

Barbara also knew that Diana was going to go after Maxwell next. After all, Maxwell was obviously the person who was granting all these wishes that were making the world go crazy. So Diana was going to try to stop him. She was going to try to reverse all the wishes.

She was going to try to reverse Barbara’s wish along with them.

Barbara shrieked in fury as she walked and tore a tree out of the ground by the roots just to vent. She understood why Diana would do that. Diana was a good person. She wanted to make a difference in the world. And she was already extraordinary. She didn’t need the stone’s wishes. Not like Barbara did.

Barbara caught a glimpse of herself reflected in a shop window. She looked sinewy, beautiful, dangerous. She looked like some kind of big cat, the kind of animal that could kill you with one blow and eat you whole. And she liked it. She felt stronger, uncontrollable, and more powerful than ever before. Nobody could resist power like this.

Barbara scowled. She wasn’t going to let Diana reverse the wishes. She was going to stay like this—even if it meant stopping Diana herself.

Even in the quiet, cool stillness of her apartment, Diana could hear the sounds of DC tearing itself apart.

She stepped into her apartment and waved her hand self-consciously.

“Well,” she said. “Here we are.”

Steve followed her in and immediately spotted the wall where she’d hung all the photos of the two of them, and their old friends. Everyone on that wall was dead, now. Except for Diana—and except for Steve.

Steve picked up his watch and turned it over in his hands.

“Diana,” he said gently. “I know it’s been hard—”

“You don’t know,” Diana said, more harshly than she had meant to. “You don’t,” she said again, more calmly. Sixty years of loneliness. Sixty years without Steve. Sixty years of watching the best—the only—friends she’d ever have grow old and die.

“How can the world go on like this?” Steve asked quietly. He didn’t explain what he meant—he didn’t have to. Diana knew. And she found she couldn’t reply.

“Diana,” he said, after she’d remained silent for too long.

“I can’t talk about this,” Diana said. She grasped his arms and stared deeply into his eyes, willing him to understand. “You’re all that I’ve ever wanted. For so long. You’re the only joy I’ve ever had—or ever asked for.”

Steve’s face twisted in pain, and he pulled Diana into his arms, folding her into the warmth of his embrace.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered into her ear.

They stood there, motionless, clinging to each other, for a long moment. Then Steve sighed. “But Diana,” he said. “The world is so full of joys. So full of people.”

“I don’t want people,” Diana muttered, on the verge of tears. She sounded like a child and she knew it. But she didn’t care. “I don’t want people, I want you. What if destroying the stone destroys you in the process? I can’t lose you. Not again.”

Diana strode into the secret control room in the back of her apartment. The one she’d built herself—the one nobody knew about. She flipped the lights on. It was a windowless room full of monitors, TV sets, radios, seismographs, and other equipment. She scanned a bank of CCTV feeds, tuning in with half an ear to the radio report about her destroying part of the wall to let water in, rioting in Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia’s unexpected rise to the wealthiest country in the world. Behind her, Steve entered and gave a low, impressed whistle as he looked around the room.

“What an operation,” he murmured. Then: “What is this?”

Diana turned around. Steve was pointing at a large object, swathed in canvas. He lifted a corner of the canvas. Gold glinted from the shadows.

“It’s from my culture,” Diana explained. “There was an ancient Amazon warrior. One of our greatest. She’d fought to hold back the tide of men so the others could escape to Themyscira. But she was lost to our world. Left behind.”

Diana sighed. “I grew up celebrating her image. . . . So, once I came to this world, I sought her out. But I only found her armor.”

Diana glanced back at the bank of CCTV screens. Something strange was happening on the highway. Cars were pulling wildly apart. Some of them were careening off the road. One way or another, they were doing whatever they had to do to make way for a single Rolls-Royce.

It was Maxwell Lord’s car.

“Where’s he going?” Steve asked, coming up behind Diana.

They watched in horror as the car turned off the highway and made its way to the White House.

Diana grabbed her golden lasso and ran for her balcony. But before she could leap off it, Steve grabbed her. “Diana, what are you doing?” he asked urgently.

“I’m going,” Diana said. She tugged on her wrist, but Steve didn’t let go. “You have to stay here,” she told him.

“No,” Steve said firmly. “I’m going with you.”

“But how—” Diana started, then stopped when she remembered something. A way to get a normal mortal into the White House without any trickery at all.

“I have an idea,” she told Steve, a sly smile on her face.

“What?” Steve asked suspiciously.

Diana smiled innocently. “I know someone,” she said.

She reached for the phone.

Ten minutes later, smarmy Carl from the Smithsonian gala was meeting Diana and Steve at the tour-group door of the White House.

“Diana,” he said, with a greasy grin. “What a pleasure.”

Diana smiled politely, and Carl launched right into tour mode. “Now,” he said as he led them into the building, “I consider myself a history buff, but even I didn’t know that these floors were laid by none other than Jan Lincoln! A little-known descendent of Abraham . . .”

Carl droned on, so in love with the sound of his own voice that he didn’t notice Diana and Steve sneaking away.

Elsewhere in the White House, Maxwell Lord was being escorted into the Oval Office. He smiled blandly, but his heart was beating a million beats per minute. This was it. He’d made it into the inner sanctum. All the power he could possibly want was his for the taking.

The president was sitting at his desk. He looked up as Maxwell entered the room, but he hardly seemed to notice him. He had the look of a man who was in way, way over his head. I can relate, Maxwell thought.

“Everything okay, Mr. President?” he asked. He strode confidently over to the desk and pulled up a chair for himself.

“Yes . . . ,” the president started. Then he shook his head. “Something very strange has happened. I could have sworn I was somewhere else entirely, and now all of a sudden . . .”

Maxwell kept the bland smile pasted on his face. He knew what had probably happened—the wish that had arranged for him to meet the president had happened. Most likely, the poor man had been in some briefing or eating a sandwich when all of a sudden, Maxwell’s power had zapped him into the Oval Office so they could have their meeting.

The president straightened up, clearly putting the whole thing out of his mind. “Anyway,” he said. “Hectic times, as you know. I have a lot on my mind. In fact, Mr. Lord, I’m afraid I don’t even know what we were supposed to discuss today.”

Maxwell smiled reassuringly. “Exactly that, Mr. President,” he said. “These hectic times. And you, our fearless leader, alone at the top. Making hard decisions for the whole world.”

The president swallowed nervously. Clearly Maxwell had struck a nerve. And he kept going.

“You’re having some troubles,” he said gently. “I want to help.”

“I appreciate your concern, Mr. Lord,” the president said, drawing his authority around him like a cloak. The frightened, vulnerable man who had been confiding in Maxwell had disappeared, stuffed behind the facade of a confident world leader. But Maxwell wasn’t fooled.

“You’re a man of faith,” Maxwell said. “As am I. And recently I have been blessed. As you have perhaps noticed.”

The president nodded.

Maxwell held out his hands, palms up.

“I would like to share my blessings with you,” he said.

As though he was helpless to resist, the president took Maxwell’s hands. Like a moth to a flame, Maxwell thought. He squeezed the president’s hands, hard.

“Now tell me,” he said. “What is it that you need?”

The president didn’t hesitate. “More,” he said. “More nuclear weapons. More than Russia has. Closer to Russia than the ones we have now.”

Maxwell blanched a little. He’d grown so used to learning about people’s darkest desires in the past few days, but this one took even him aback.

The president gripped Maxwell’s hands tighter, pleadingly. “If I just had that, Mr. Lord, then they’d have to listen to us!”

“I can do that, but in exchange I need something from you,” Maxwell said. “Please inform your people that I’d appreciate no more interference of any kind. No taxes, no rule of law, no limits. Treat me like a foreign nation with absolute autonomy.”

The president nodded. “Done,” he said.

Maxwell turned to go. His next move would be to start working on a way to mass-produce wishes. He was done with this one-by-one business. It was inefficient and it was eating up all of his time. He needed to find a way to touch millions of people at once—a way to consolidate his power for good.

As he walked toward the door, he noticed a presentation set up on the side of the room. It showed schematics of a satellite, and an enormous radio dish.

“What’s this?” Maxwell asked curiously.

“GBS,” the president said. “Global Broadcasting Satellite. A top secret project that would enable us to override any broadcast system in the world. In case we need direct contact with the people of an enemy state.”

This is it.

He turned on his heel, facing the president and projecting as much authority as he could. “I need immediate access to this satellite,” he said.

Minutes later, he was being escorted by a Secret Service detail toward a helicopter pad. They strode through the halls of the White House. Maxwell was finally going to do it. He was so close—

WHAP!

Suddenly, a glowing yellow cord hissed through the air and wrapped itself around him. Maxwell stumbled and nearly fell, his arms pinned to his sides, his balance thrown off. He spun around and saw—

It was as though the glowing cord allowed him to see two people at once. One of them was Diana Prince, the oddly hostile curator from the Smithsonian. The other, sharing her face and body, was the mysterious crime fighter the news reporters had started to call Wonder Woman.

They were one and the same person.

Maxwell shook his head, dazed. He had to focus. If Wonder Woman was on to him, that wasn’t good news. He needed to act, and quickly.

“Come with me,” Wonder Woman said. Her voice was stern and authoritative. She was wearing massive, gleaming gold armor. She really looked quite intimidating. “Before you do any more damage.”

Maxwell rolled his eyes. “You’re one to talk,” he said. “But no, I don’t think I will.”

He turned to the Secret Service agents who had been escorting him. “Remove this woman, please,” he said. “Permanently.”