Stone Junction

protect his eyes but his hands wouldn’t move.

They were lifting him into the ambulance when his heart stopped. The two attendants clamped a defibrillator to his chest, each jolt shooting a thin stream of blood from Daniel’s temple, flecking their white uniforms. Daniel’s heart fluttered briefly, faded, then weakly started beating again.

Daniel was in a coma when Annalee was buried five days later. Only a few stunned friends from the Random Canyon Raiders attended the brief service. They were photographed from an unmarked car as they left the cemetery.

That night, weeping, Shamus dug far down in the still-loose earth of the grave. He left his black glove, a large gold nugget nestled in its palm gleaming in the moonlight before he covered it over.

Jessal Voltrano was a prodigy of the air. At fourteen, critics were hailing him as a master of the aerial arts, and perhaps the best trapezist who ever lived. For the next five years, he dazzled crowds from Paris to Budapest. He refused to perform or practice with a net. As he explained to one reporter, ‘Nets discourage concentration.’

But two weeks before his twentieth birthday, during a solo performance in Prague, the empty concentration essential to exquisite timing failed him for an instant. He would never forget that disembodied moment when he saw himself open from the plummeting whirl of somersaults, never forget how softly the bar brushed his fingertips as he continued to fall.

One of the clowns reached him first. Jessal was still conscious. ‘I can feel my skeleton,’ he whispered in amazement. ‘I can feel it.’

No doubt. Except for his hands, he’d broken nearly every bone in his body. During his grueling convalescence, Chester Kane, an American intern, introduced him to sleight-of-hand magic. Jessal practiced the tricks with the same diligence he’d brought to the trapeze, absorbing the nuances of each grip, shuffle, slide, and turn. His therapy became his passion, and when he left the hospital nine months later, he was teaching Dr Kane.

Jessal returned to the trapeze, but it wasn’t the same. His brilliant grace was lost forever to damaged nerves, knotted bone. He left the circus and never looked back.

Changing his name to The Great Volta, he wandered through Europe, Africa, and Indonesia, walking by day, sleeping where night found him, performing his magic wherever people would gather to watch, surviving on the coins they tossed in his hat. As opportunity offered, he watched other magicians work, consulted with them, taught and learned; in every town, he scoured the library for useful texts. At the end of four devoted years, he was an accomplished practitioner of sleight-of-hand magic. However, he began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction, as if his craft and knowledge had become a trap.

One afternoon in Athens, as he performed for a crowd of pensioners and street urchins, Volta muffed a simple card trick, turning the queen of hearts instead of the ace. As the audience hooted at his blunder, Volta realized his magic was hollow, a magic of distraction and mechanical deceit, a manipulation of appearances that could never produce the substance he sought. Volta tossed the deck high in the air, laughing with the crowd as the cards fluttered down. He would remember that moment as his first great escape.

His second occurred a month later, summer solstice 1955. He was sailing to America on a Greek freighter, watching the moon rise from the top deck, when a leaky fuel tank exploded, hurling him into the sea. Watching the moon rise saved his life, for another tank detonated a minute later, engulfing the ship in flames and screams. Volta saw a life raft hit the water and swam for it.

Volta found only one other survivor, and he was badly burned. After attending to him as best he could from the meager first-aid kit, Volta propped him in the bow. He checked the raft’s provisions: a week of canned rations, five gallons of water, compass, flare gun, and a steel signal mirror. He set a westerly course and began to row.

When the burned man died five days later, calling deliriously for his mother as Volta held him in his arms, Volta barely had the strength to slip him overboard. A day later he was too exhausted to row. Caught between the punishing sun and the icy moon, he let the raft drift.

The food ran out first. The next night, his throat still aching with the last swallow of water, Volta fired the three flares in quick succession, blooding the sea. He dropped the compass over the side, the first-aid kit, then the flare gun. But when he picked up the signal mirror, he caught an image in the mirror. It wasn’t him. The face was swollen and peeled. In his exhausted delirium, he thought that to see his real face he would have to put his mind within the image in the mirror, look at himself through its burned eyes. With his last speck of concentration, he sent himself into the mirror, surrendered himself. When he opened his eyes, there was no one in the raft. He looked into the mirror. It was empty. As he started to fall, he could hear, distantly, a terrified scream wrenched from his lungs. Just as he returned to his body, Volta dropped the mirror into the sea. He was still following its sliver of light when he heard a woman singing. He listened, then opened his eyes.

Her name was Ravana Dremier, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of a French smuggler and Jamaican shamaness. By general consensus, Ravana was the most gifted healer in AMO. She explained to Volta that they’d found him unconscious in the raft four days earlier. They were on the Pinga del Ray, one of the few boats in AMO’s Caribbean fleet. When he asked her if she’d been singing, she said, ‘Only if it was your song.’

In their four years of travel as allies and lovers, Ravana led him deeper into the magical arts. Ravana’s mother had, like Volta, ‘entered the mirror,’ a practice, according to Ravana, she’d abandoned almost immediately, warning it was solitary magic, a sensational power not worth the risk. She’d told Ravana, ‘Entering the mirror requires a unique combination of gift and circumstance. But entering the mirror is simple compared to escaping it. To escape, you must swim the river of stone or fly into the sun.’

‘Yes,’ Volta said. Near death on the ocean, he’d found his magic – the art of escape.

Having affiliated himself with AMO before the Pinga del Ray reached Haiti – Ravana possessed an eye for talent and persuasive ways – Volta availed himself of Alliance resources, particularly the LUC, its Library of Uncollected Collections, a wildly decentralized network of personal libraries. With a phone call and an access code, a book was mailed the next day. Even better, Volta discovered, was picking the book up in person, because the librarians were scholars of their keep, repositories of distilled information. When they didn’t know the answer, they knew the best place to look. They saved Volta time by keeping his focus precise. Volta supplied the passion and discipline. Less than two years later, he performed his first magical escape.

While each of Volta’s seventeen escapes are renowned, and each culminated in that moment of dramatic astonishment at the heart of magic, his final escape is a legend of the art. It was performed in St Louis, on a barge towed to the center of the Mississippi River. Dressed only in tights, Volta was bound in a straightjacket and then shackled in twenty-gauge chain. Assistants helped place him in a cramped steel cube, each side drilled with a series of one-inch holes. When the cover plate was bolted down, a gas-driven crane swung the shining cube over the side and dropped it into the river. People thronged to the rails. Fifteen minutes later, as their anxious babble faded into a numbed silence, Volta, attired in a tuxedo, his hair dry, stepped from his makeshift dressing room. ‘Forgive my tardiness,’ he said, adjusting the rose in his lapel, ‘but I wanted to change into something more comfortable.’