Kingston and the Magician's Lost and Found

by Rucker Moses

  She’s through the Mirror and gone behind me.

  The other Urma starts drawing a flash of blue light to her behind the curtain.

  If memory serves, Maestro is next.

  From this angle, I can see the panic in his face. I guess he didn’t expect Urma to go through the Mirror. He doesn’t hesitate. He jumps through the Mirror now, too. He doesn’t even seem to notice me. Am I that hard to see, somehow? He passes through me and I feel the force of it again as my vision gets cloudy.

  Now it’s Dad’s turn.

  I always remember him giving me that wink in the audience. The one so quick you barely know you saw it, like the flap of a wing. But I don’t think he winks at me in my seat.

  He sees me in the Mirror.

  He’s on the stage and he makes eye contact with me in the glass. He looks concerned. Then he jumps in.

  Only he doesn’t go right through me like Urma and Maestro. He catches me by my left hand, and I hold on and pull him toward me, like I’m saving him from falling through an open door. He stands beside me like he’s joined me in the reflection.

  “King,” he says. Dad is just as he was four years ago, to a T. I know he’s a Realm echo. He’s not my real dad. But he looks just like him. Acts just like him. Probably thinks just like him. And he says, “What’re you doing here?”

  “I’m here to rescue you.”

  “Rescue me? I’m here to rescue you,” he says, and knocks on the glass surface in front of us, testing its strength.

  “You saw me,” I say.

  “In the reflection,” he confirms.

  I’m wondering, Did he see me, back then? Did the real Pops see me when he leapt through? Is that even possible? Did I somehow show up in the Mirror four and a half years ago? Is that the logic of the Realm? Look forward and backward, it’s all the same.

  “Pops, did you jump through to break the Mirror and close the portal? Or to save me?” I ask.

  He seems surprised by the question. “It’s a twofer, I guess.”

  I realize he couldn’t possibly know what my real dad saw or didn’t see. He only knows what he sees.

  He’s staring over my shoulder. “What’s that behind you?”

  What is behind me? I’ve been staring at the stage this whole time. I turn around and see.

  There’s the blue outline of a portal, only it seems far away. Inside the portal, I see the Mercury of now. In real time. With Urma Tan drinking Realm energy. With V and Tall, with my uncles and mom, with Sol and Sula, all trapped in crystal. The portal is getting smaller, almost like looking through a telescope. It’s fading away with each tick of the clock.

  I turn again. There’s the Mercury of then. There’s the packed house erupting in flames. Everyone panicking. My four-years-ago self holds my mom’s hand and runs down the aisle.

  My dad and I—we’re inside the portal, straddling these two realities. In the far distance, there’s the reflection of my reality, the Mercury of now. My family encased in crystals, Urma lit up like a blue goddess. Slowly pulling farther and farther away.

  I look at the Lost and Found in my hands. The watch clicks four minutes away from the 13.

  “King?” says my dad.

  “That’s my time,” I say. “That’s Mom. That’s our family. They’re really trapped. They’re in trouble.”

  “King, don’t be scared,” he says.

  “How do I help them?” I ask.

  “What went wrong?” he asks.

  “Did you know there’s a second Urma Tan? A Realm copy?” I ask. I realize I can ask him all the questions I want to ask my real dad. Their answers would probably be exactly the same.

  “Yes,” he says, amazed. “I just found out. Maestro confessed about the double-Urma act. He told me that the Realm Urma was draining the life from his kids. He convinced me to help him open this portal to send her back to the Realm. Only, something went wrong, and I’m the failsafe. I have to make sure the Realm is closed. I wish we had time for you to tell me all about your life now. But you’ve got your own emergency.”

  “Urma. The Realm Urma. She’s opened a portal.”

  “I see it,” he says, looking over my shoulder. “It’s fading fast.”

  He glances at the Lost and Found in my hands. “Good. You’ve got my box, and my watch.” He looks closer at the Watch of 13. “Not much time left at all. King, you and I have the same problem.”

  There’s a portal open in his reality, and a portal open in my reality. “I guess we do,” I say. “With the same Urma.”

  “Just let me help get you out of here,” says Dad.

  “You know how I can get home?” I ask.

  “Well, it’s tricky, you might say. But I have an idea.”

  “Wait, Dad—I gotta ask. How do I stop Urma?”

  “I sure wish I’d been able to stop her. But send Urma back to the Realm. Otherwise, she won’t ever stop. She’ll keep drawing the Realm through the open portal until your world, the real world, drowns. She belongs in the Realm.”

  “One more question,” I say. “Will you come with me?”

  “Come with you? Into your reality? I can’t do that, Kingston.”

  “But why?”

  “Don’t you see? What’s happened to Urma could happen to me. I wish we could spend some time together, King. You know I do. But you belong in your world, and me in mine,” says Dad.

  “But you left our world. You never make it back, Pop.”

  “I never make it back?”

  “Not in four and a half years. But I never gave up on you. I came into the Realm to get you.” I want to tell him everything. About my Realm hand, how I can do real magic, about how I met Black Herman, about Mom and the King’s Cup café and V and Tall and I even want to tell him about Sol’s murals and Sula’s universe-size eyes.

  “And that’s why you’re stuck here now?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  Hearing that seems to crush him. “I’m so sorry, Kingston. I’m sorry I had to leave. I’m sorry it’s taking me so long to get back, that you and your mom had to go all these years without me, that you had to come after me.” He lowers his eyes and they land on the Watch of 13. “Ah, King. You’re running out of time. The least I can do is set you free.”

  I look down at the Watch. Sure enough, thirty seconds to go. Thirty more clicks of the big hand and the little hand will hit 13. “But you won’t come?” I ask.

  “I’ll make it back one day, Kingston. No matter what.”

  Pop takes the Magician’s Lost and Found in his hands. He raises the box over his head. “When I say jump, take my hand, and jump toward the portal behind you,” he says. “When I break the glass, that should free you. Your momentum from the jump should take you home.”

  And he smashes the box down, hard, just to my right.

  “Jump!”

  And I take his hand in my left hand and jump.

  I feel the shards of glass falling down, all around me.

  I feel like I’m the shards.

  Like I’m breaking up into bits again, spreading out, traveling like lightning, and forming back together.

  It’s like being in the trunk of a car as it drives over speed bumps and whams into ditches.

  I move through the portal, and spill headfirst onto the crystalized floor of the Mercury.

  I can breathe again. Smell again. Feel again.

  I make quite an entrance, coming back in through the Mirror the way I came, the Magician’s Lost and Found tumbling through the Mirror after me.

  Urma is there, drinking the blue Realm energy with a thirst that has no end. The blue light is glowing from her eyes, and it’s like she can’t even see me.

  I concentrate all of my strength into my Realm hand. I can feel the energy burning through this Mirror. I feel like I can direct it. Control it.


  I close my eyes, and I can sense Urma, hovering above the crystal. She feels light, somehow. As though I can just push . . .

  “Where’s she going?” Mint asks as she sails toward the portal.

  Urma’s eyes snap and she’s suddenly aware of what’s happening around her.

  “No!” she shrieks, and halts in midair right in front of the Mirror, reaching a clawing hand toward me.

  I’m only a couple feet away from her, willing her through. “Go back, Urma,” I say. “You belong in the Realm.”

  “I need to feed,” she says, resisting my effort to push her into the Mirror. This isn’t about her survival anymore. Her appetite is bottomless.

  I realize, Urma in or out, I need to destroy that portal.

  The Magician’s Lost and Found is open at my feet.

  And I think back to what Dad did.

  He used the box.

  He smashed the Mirror from the inside with the Magician’s Lost and Found.

  I turn to the box. With my Realm hand glowing blue, I raise the box in the air, and send it hurling at Urma. It crashes into her chest and carries her through the Mirror with a shout.

  Once Urma and the Lost and Found have cleared to the other side, I turn my wrist and pull my hand into a fist and will the box to come back to me.

  It shatters the Mirror from the inside into a hundred bits, raining broken glass into the crystal floor like a waterfall.

  The place goes dark. The blue light is gone. The crystals all fade to black.

  I blink and my eyes slowly adjust. I reach to the dark crystals surrounding my family and shatter them with one push of my Realm hand. The crystals pulverize into dust. Then I turn to my uncles. Mint and his goons block the way.

  “It’s over,” I say. “Your bootleg goddess is back where she belongs. Go and be on your way. Unless you want me to send you.” Without realizing it, my Realm hand brightens the stage with a blue glow.

  Mint digs a cold look into me. His nostrils flare. He and I both know he’s got no hand to play. “Okay, boys. Let’s be out.”

  One by one, they peel off and drop down off the stage. They make their way across the crystal-slicked aisles and toward the front entrance.

  “King, that was amazing!” I hear as V tackles me and wraps me up in a hug.

  “You the man, King!” says Tall, taking my hand in his. I feel him stuff something in my palm.

  It’s my glove.

  Very slick. V’s hug turned me just so no one could see.

  “Thanks, guys,” I say, slipping the glove back on my Realm hand. My hand was glowing when I came through the Mirror, so maybe my mom didn’t see that it’s actually invisible now. “But I didn’t get Dad back.”

  “But King,” says V, “you jumped through the Mirror—and you came back!”

  With a little help from a Realm version of the man himself, of course, I think, but I keep it to myself. There’s too much to explain, for now.

  Sol gives me a big high five. He’s got this goofy smile, like he’s drinking a chocolate milkshake or something. Sula smiles at me with those big eyes. I hold out my hand and she takes it. Respect.

  My uncles’ bindings are actually tougher to break than the depowered crystals. My Realm hand doesn’t really work on them. I pick a shard up off the floor and use its edge to cut the layers of twine wrapped around their wrists.

  Uncle Crooked gives me a big, blubbery hug. “My boy, I’m so proud.”

  Long Fingers takes me by the hand and shakes it, looking in my eye and beaming. “I thought she had us.” Then he looks at the shard I’m holding. “You and me got to talk. Boy, do we need to talk.”

  “We will, Unc,” I say with a quick wink. It’s sorta my version of my dad’s wink. “Soon. Got lots to tell you.”

  I turn, and there’s my mom. She’s been hanging back, just watching. There’s so many emotions knotted up in her face, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, hug, or run. I just open my mouth and say, “Mom. I am so sorry.”

  She shudders like she’s about to cry.

  “Did you see him, in that Mirror somewhere?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I saw him. I got to touch him.”

  She hugs me. “I’m sorry, Kingston. I just wanted to protect you,” she says.

  “I know, Ma. I know.”

  “Does this mean he won’t ever come back?” she asks.

  “He’ll come back. One day,” I say. “He told me so himself.”

  I look at the husk of the busted Mirror and the shards piled on the floor. It looks a lot like the last Mirror from four and a half years ago, but no fire this time. All I set out to do was bring him back, and I don’t have him back, once again. Instead, in a weird way, I finished his trick—though it wasn’t ever really a trick. We both jumped through that Mirror, but I’m the only one who made it back. He was almost here, just now, so close. Now he’s back somewhere in that Realm, that series of strange magic places and echoes—that Echoverse, I guess, riding echoes. I have so much to tell him, and now add that an echo of him saved me. And saved us all.

  My pops used to say I’d have to choose my own path someday. That I could only walk with him so far, and then I would have to decide which way to go.

  It’s been three weeks since I saw him in the echo or the Realm, or whatever you call that place. It’s like somewhere I just visited for the day.

  I can see the massive obsidian from our street. They’re calling it the Black Rock of BK, formerly the Mercury Theater. Now it’s a dark crystal almost a block long and six stories high. You can see it just peeking over the buildings like a setting black sun. Some news vans showed up, people started selling T-shirts—our neighborhood became a destination. Like Stonehenge or those Easter Island statues or crop circles.

  The new normal—that’s what Ma calls it.

  It’s also been good for business. We officially went with the name King’s Cup. Ma put a King of Hearts on the logo. After everything we went through, she understands that magic will always be a part of our family. She’s got a line of customers. All the worry about the brownstone and “foreclosure”—well, we’re open, and sometimes way past four. Mom seems happy.

  Today, we’ve got a good crowd. Crooked Eye is balancing a plate of fresh pastries.

  “Customers,” he says with a smile.

  I grab some quarters one of the customers left on the table and flip them a few times over my knuckles, looking out the window.

  Too Tall barrels inside. He’s talking before I even get a chance to say hello.

  “King, King—there’s something you gotta see,” he says, and almost runs over V.

  “If it isn’t Bigfoot himself,” Veronica says as she drops off a few coffees to some customers.

  “V, come look,” Tall says. “Miss James, you too. All of you.”

  “We’re a little busy here, Eddie,” Ma tells him.

  “Trust me, it won’t take long,” Too Tall says.

  Long Fingers is ringing someone up at the register. “Go ahead, we got this,” Long Fingers tells my mom.

  He’s been getting out a lot more since that night. He even got himself a haircut. He’s less wolfman these days, but I still hear him in his lab tinkering into the late hours of the night.

  “This way, this way,” Tall says, motioning for us to see the back side of our building. We turn left down the alley and stop cold.

  It’s a new mural. The kid is at it again. And he’s getting better. We haven’t seen a new one of these since that night.

  It’s the inside of the Mercury, every detail just the way I remember it from last month. The pigeons nested near the holes in the ceiling. The charred stage, the broken light bulbs. In the middle of the stage is the Mirror. Inside the Mirror is Pops. Classic Pops, dressed to the nines. He’s holding the Magician’s Lost and Found in one hand. His ot
her hand holds a hand that disappears at the wrist by the edge of the Mirror.

  “It just appeared last night,” Tall says.

  V rests her hand on his shoulder. “Give them a minute.”

  Ma steps forward and stares up at the mural. She doesn’t say a word. She takes my hand.

  I look at her and I look at Pops in the Mirror within the mural.

  He saved Echo City. Saved me, and reality as we know it.

  Then I feel something grab my hand. My phantom hand.

  And I look up at the mural. I swear the painting of him winks at me.

  I look to Ma. Somehow, we’re all here now. All three of us.

  I’m holding both my parents’ hands at once, across dimensions, for the first time in four years, seven months, and eight days.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First, this book wouldn’t have been possible without the original creator and third star in the SunnyBoy constellation, Michael White. Big thanks to Jane Startz, our shepherd; her faith in us and vision for what we had was beyond our own perception. To our editor, Stacey Barney: thank you for taking a shot on us, bringing the band together, making us better writers, and making the world we dreamed up greater than we could have imagined. With gratitude to our parents for putting books and ideas into our heads and hands. Love and endless appreciation to our wives, who carry and support us with their time, love, and energy. Thanks to Uncle Pat, our earliest reader, for sharing your wonderful, creative brain. Thanks to Dr. James and Mary for all the great magic books and space talk. Shout-out to Ted B. for lifting us up and making us believe in our ideas. Thank you to Sienne for the laughs, the drawings, and bringing the happiness all day, every day. To St. Francis College’s MFA program for your creativity, your community, your courage, and all your favorite Cs. Big ups to the SunnyBoy crew for rocking the chairs on the best front porch in the universe. What would we be without the endless magical conversations, friendships, and adventures? To Ant for being a brother like no other. To the great Black magicians: your due will come. Most importantly, thanks to our kids—your lives are our greatest story.