gives a signal, and the main curtain drops, cutting off the audience’s view. I can hear them murmuring anxiously on the other side of the curtain.
Onstage, the crew rush in, grab the emergency release levers, and open the dump hatches. Water gushes out of the tank, onto the stage, and into the audience. It’s a tidal wave. It’s a nightmare. The soundstage is flooding.
My mother screams again as my father floats motionless inside the truck.
“Ellie.”
I flinch and look up at Dad.
The memory was almost tangible. I smelled the chlorine, tasted the stage fog.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.” I was afraid to look him in in the eye, so I flipped through the journal instead. Most of the writing was old and faded—but on the later pages, the ink was fresh.
“I’ve replayed it over and over in my mind,” he said. “Trying to figure out where it went wrong. But I always come to the same conclusion.” He looked at me. “I let myself become distracted. I failed the escape. That was all. I just . . . failed.”
He took back the book, closed it with a decisive snap, and sat up straight.
“You’ve located the props,” he said.
I nodded, trying to keep up with the abrupt change of subject. “Ripley helped. But yeah. Higgins agreed to rent them to us.”
Dad raised his eyebrows. “How did you persuade him to do that?”
“I told him the value would double, even if everything went wrong.”
Dad laughed out loud, and my heart swelled. But then his smile faded.
“How much does want?” he asked.
I braced myself for his reaction. “Five grand.”
Dad’s face reddened. “Five thousand—that bastard!” He flexed his fists. “There’s got to be another way.”
“Even if we could rent a tank and tear the engine out of a different truck, it would cost at least that much. And we don’t have time.”
Dad nodded, but I could see the wheels turning.
“Besides, we want the original truck. The one you used that night. They’re going to show the old video—you know they will. And if we use the same truck . . . Think of it. The resonance of the thing.”
He nodded again, stroking his mustache as he always did when he was problem solving. We sat side by side in silence. My heart fluttered in my rib cage like our lost doves.
“If we do this,” he said, “we have to make it better than before.”
“Yes.”
“Bigger,” he said. “More spectacular.”
“We have to play on the failure,” I said. “Give them something they won’t expect.”
Dad pointed at me. “Precisely! A twist. So,” he said, folding his arms, “how do we do this?”
“Why are you asking me?”
He raised his eyebrows. “You masterminded this operation. Signed the contract. Lined up the props. Steered us west. You must have something in mind.”
I shook my head, backing away slightly. “I do close-up. Not the big stuff.”
“You’ve been around grand illusion your whole life. You know what there is to know.”
I threw up my hands. “I was six years old when you did the Truck Drop!”
He gave me an infuriating smile. “Yes, but I’m sure someone has made a YouTube out of it. And I imagine you’ve watched it more than once.”
I tightened my jaw and looked away. After all this—booking the show, finding the props, getting us here—he expected me to fix the illusion, too?
He was right, though. I had watched the video—hundreds of times.
Dad smiled again, as if he could hear my thoughts. “I’m only asking for your ideas.”
I glared at him.
I’d started bugging Dad to teach me magic when I was seven years old, but he had refused. Ten years old, he’d claimed, was the youngest a person could be and still keep a secret—which was important because of rule number two: Never tell them how it’s done.
Then, shortly after my eighth birthday, he caught me lighting one of his playing cards on fire while I was trying to re-create his large-deck production, and he agreed to teach me just to keep me from burning down the house.
Dad had taught me magic in this way: he would perform a trick, and I would have to guess the method. I learned quickly to think before I spoke, because once I posed a theory out loud, he would make me demonstrate it. If I got close, he would nudge me this way or that. If not, he would let me fail and make me tell him why. At the time, I found his method maddening. But it taught me how to think like