As he stared at the bedroom, part of Fort wanted to step through the teleportation circle, find his aunt, and tell her that everything was going to be okay, that he’d be bringing her brother-in-law back soon. But instead, he canceled the spell and sighed deeply.

Either she’d see her brother-in-law soon, or she was better off not knowing. And he still had a teleportation issue to work out.

Reading the spell again, Fort considered the problem. Clearly the magic was still functioning okay. The only time a circle hadn’t opened was when he tried to jump into Fort Knox. But why would that one in particular not work?

Or was he thinking about this the wrong way? Maybe it wasn’t something about Fort Knox that didn’t work, but something about the other two places that did. What did the Empire State Building and his aunt’s apartment have in common? He’d never actually been to the Empire State Building, even though he’d seen pictures of it, so it couldn’t be that he needed to have visited a place first. But he’d also seen photos of Fort Knox, and—

Wait. Had he?

Fort frowned, trying to remember. Was there ever a time he’d actually seen pictures of Fort Knox? Thinking back, he realized instead of photos he’d just been imagining random piles of gold inside a huge vault, and that didn’t seem likely to be what it actually looked like. And now that he was searching his memory, he couldn’t remember what the outer building looked like, what color it was, or even where it was located.

Could that be the answer? He could only open a teleportation circle to somewhere that he’d seen, either in a photograph or in person?

There was only one way to find out.

Fort whispered the words and pictured in his mind what he imagined Jia’s hometown in China looked like.

Nothing happened.

Next he tried to open a portal to Dr. Opps’s office at the school.

Nothing.

The Oval Office.

Noth… wait, no, that one worked!

Fort’s eyes widened as he watched the president of the United States reading over some papers at a huge brown desk. He immediately canceled the spell, closing the teleportation circle as his heart threatened to explode out of his chest. That had been close! If the president hadn’t been reading at that exact moment, Fort might have been seen. And that would have been the end of everything.

And why had he even tried the Oval Office? Of course he’d seen pictures of it. He’d seen it thousands of times, probably! For some reason, he’d lost track of what he was doing and just started focusing on places he’d never visited. He needed to be a lot more careful in the future. Teleportation was just too powerful to mess around with.