She thinks I’m going to violate her. I’m going to set her free.

I push the door open and the wind rushes inside. Her hair flies about like wildfire. She doesn’t look outside. She knows what’s out there.

I give her a push.

Her small body falls out.

Her shoulder hits the wing. Her mouth opens, but no words come out. She vanishes into the darkness.

I’m left with the hum of the propeller and the wind.

I envy her.

Her journey.

Her certainty.

Someday I will know it too. But not now.

I have purpose.

• The Eternicon ^*

1

MURDER IS A WORLD away from me in the children’s hospital as I watch Elsie’s pink fist close around the red sponge ball and squeeze. The scars on her hand turn red from the exertion, but she’s not paying attention to the pain. When she opens her hand again, two large red balls appear and almost roll off her palm. Her eyes light up and she breaks into a smile. It’s a million megawatts of energy in a face half covered in waxy skin still healing from the skin grafts.

My grandfather taught me this trick. It was the first one he ever showed me. We were backstage watching my father entertain a half-full theater in some forgotten town in the Midwest. I remember the glow of Grandfather’s cigar in the dark wings as he muttered and shook his head. Tall, with a ’40s leading man mustache grayed by age and hair slicked to the side, he was always immaculately dressed in a suit and ascot, even when it was his son standing before the crowd.

“Fool doesn’t know his hands from his own ass.” He looked down at me, then took the red sponge balls from his jacket pocket. “Even you could do it better than that jackass.”

I watched and learned. I was five.

Grandfather gave me a pat on the head when the two red balls appeared in my other hand. I gave him a toothy grin. I’d been practicing sleight of hand with balls of cotton after bedtime in the dark.

I got one of his rare genuine smiles. “You’re clever. Too bad audiences would never take to a girl magician.”

It was an offhand comment not meant for me. He leaned back against a road case and puffed away at his cigar, swearing every time my father messed up a trick in his eyes.

To the audience, the show was going fine. But to Grandfather, every little missed subtlety, every less-than-perfect sleight of hand was a disaster. Watching his son, his legacy, fumble through his art was like watching someone burn down the home he spent his entire life building, room by room.

He had a penchant for the overly dramatic, but it wasn’t just his legacy either. Great-Grandfather, a rival of Houdini, really made the name for the family. And in Grandfather’s mind, it was all coming to a crashing end.

Elsie makes the sponge balls vanish and reappear again. Her eyes wait for my approval.