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.’
The crowd went crazy.
So did Volta.
When all explanations but the impossible were eliminated, the secret to all of Volta’s escapes was simple: He dematerialized his body; disintegrated; vanished into air. The steel cube was empty before it touched the river. But as Ravana’s mother had warned, with each disappearance, returning became more difficult. He almost hadn’t returned the last time, had barely escaped the escape. With a cellular certainty that both terrified and compelled, Volta knew if he ever entered the mirror again, he would not return. The next day he announced his retirement.
But though he’d returned to his flesh, his spirit had snagged on the threshold – he was physically intact, but not quite coherent; dull to sensation; emotionally hollow. He couldn’t find a material essence powerful enough to silence the siren-song beyond the mirror, its promise of ecstatic oblivion, final surcease. He couldn’t find that binding essence in Ravana’s flashing eyes, couldn’t feel it in the wind or sense it in the shimmer of salmon moving upstream in the moonlight, couldn’t touch it in petals or flesh. Ravana brought her powers to bear but she couldn’t reach him. As his desperation drained into depression, Volta realized he could no longer love her as she needed and deserved; to honor Ravana, he forced himself to leave.
AMO provided him with a new identity, a small apartment in New York, and a job as a sensori, the Alliance designation for freelance investigators who identified and assessed useful information. The only information Volta wanted was a way to wrest his spirit from the mirror. He found it in a New York museum displaying the Treyton collection of precious stones. Saw it in the brilliant center and irreducibly dense reality of the Faith Diamond, fourth largest on Earth. Needed to touch it, hold it, feel its clarity. He smashed the display case glass with his forearm and was gently lifting the diamond in his cupped hands when a guard clubbed him from behind.
Released from the hospital three days later, Volta was taken directly to jail and booked on grand theft. A squat, pug-faced sergeant with a child’s pink skin uncuffed Volta in front of an open cell, punched him in the kidneys, and shoved him inside. Volta grabbed the rust-stained wash basin to keep from falling. When he looked up, he saw himself in the steel mirror bolted above the basin and instantly spun away from the glittering hunger in the mirror’s eyes. He used a washcloth to cover the mirror.
Volta was dreaming of sensuously interlocked loops of diamonds when he was slammed awake by a long shuddering waiclass="underline" ‘Nooooooo!’ As two guards wrestled the new prisoner past Volta’s cell, he glimpsed a skinny, pimpled kid, not more than eighteen, throw his head back like a coyote and howl again – ‘Nooooooooo,’ a cry at once a denial and a plea.
For an hour after he was locked up and the guards had left, the kid continued wailing, at ten-second intervals, that single, anguished ‘Nooooooo!’ oblivious to the other prisoners’ curses to shut up.
The double metal doors at the end of the cellblock banged open and the pug-faced sergeant, his pink skin florid with rage, shambled down the corridor, lightly slapping a blackjack against his pudgy thigh. The cellblock fell instantly silent; then the kid, as if understanding what that silence meant, screamed ‘Nooooooooo!’
As he unlocked the kid’s cell, the sergeant said thickly, ‘You know what your problem is, son? You need something to plug that little pussy mouth of yours. Now you get down on your knees here for me.’
‘Nooo,’ the kid moaned, but his cry had lost its haunting denial. He was begging.
Volta screamed, ‘Noooooooo!’ He heard the two quick blows from the blackjack and the kid’s sharp cry slurring into a whimper.
The sergeant panted, ‘I said, on your knees, fuck-face.’
When Volta heard the kid gag, he tore the face cloth off the mirror. If he vanished and reappeared quickly in the kid’s cell, he might be able to stop it – but only if he could reappear. The eyes looking into his own – wild, inviting – urged him to try. Volta looked through them into the mirror. ‘No,’ he said. And he stood there watching himself weep until the kid’s choked sobs and the sergeant’s thin, rapid wheezing finally ceased.
Stood facing himself as the sergeant, humming, swaggered out, leaving the kid lying on his cell floor, vomiting.
Stood looking at his own haggard, mortal face, his tears, the spittle on his chin. Stood listening through the long desolate silence suddenly broken by three quick sounds: the tiny shriek of springs as the kid leaped from the top bunk; a strangled gasp as the noosed belt cinched; the soft, moist pop of the neck bone breaking.
Volta closed his eyes, leaned back, and, drawing every shred of power from nerve, meat, and bone, howled, ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ And when he looked in the mirror again he saw a large spherical diamond – perfect, radiant, real. He was looking for the light in the diamond’s center when the sergeant bellowed, ‘Which motherfucker was it?’