Bran Silber did what he did every night before an illusion, never mind that this was the Last Illusion, the name that had replaced the admittedly dull Fall of the Towers in his head: he stayed up all night. But his mind-set was altogether different. He sat on the balcony outside his bedroom, smoking but not chain-smoking, staring at the glittering skyline of his city — and he did not for one moment even think he was about to alter that skyline. He just looked at it, admired it, and felt okay. That was his first tip-off that something might be different here: he felt relaxed, peaceful, good even.
It was not a feeling to be trusted, he told himself, and yet he could not shake it off.
Before he knew it, he was saying I love you in his head and eventually out loud, to no one in particular.
He would be haunted for ages by those three words that had, like a curse, stamped themselves on his illusion, himself, them, everything somehow, but it would be many more hours until he even had the luxury of recollection.
Because when he walked out of his home that still-dark Tuesday morning, it was like any morning before an illusion. All was well. Silber felt a giant, monstrous confidence — after months of doubt — welling up inside him, gearing to explode. There was no choice but to win, and no one to win for but everyone, no one to win against but himself, he coached himself.
And Bran Silber even mouthed to his reflection as he always did before the big show: You, love, are a god. Now go kill them.
Showtime: Silber inhaled and cued the music. At first it was all wind chimes and drums, and then came the violins, layer upon layer of shrieking violins. It was the most manic dirge he had ever heard, perfect in a way no one could guess for his last illusion.
Everything — and he meant everything—was perfectly in its place, he would insist and insist and insist again until the day he died.
Before he could even consider the inevitable nerve or two, he was spotlit on that already blindingly bright day, on the platform’s platform, waving at more masses than any of them could have dreamed—another record for the records, Silber thought, a bit tearfully. The dirge drowned out by the roars of cheers and applause.
All was as it should have been, he’d tell and retell, cross his heart and hope to die.
At the very most, one aspect possibly could have been interpreted as off: seconds before the illusion, he felt the familiar sense of fate catching up with him, like sensing an earthquake seconds before it hits, and he felt himself go in and out and in and out until he was sure he was gone. But, professional that he was, he immediately went on autopilot and heard himself belt into the mic: “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us! Behold the greatest illusion of our time, New York City, the Fall of the Towers!”
Everything went quiet. No more violins, just the mere twinkling of the wind chimes plus a sparkle or two of xylophonics.
And the moving and blinding, Manning’s key to the illusion, commenced to a stream of genuine steady gasps — no gasp track this time; Silber had been that confident in the end — honest-to-God gasps from the thousands of spectators, who had little idea what was in store for them.
In this way, Silber was also a spectator among his spectators.
The last thing he remembered before the illusion took hold was the rehearsed thumbs-up — plus an extra congratulatory wink — from Manning in the wings.
Green light. A-OK. Ready-set-go, 3-2-1.
He waved his arms to the whole world, and the glitter-infused fog flooded the platform as planned.
And just like that it was gone—
Though not as planned.
There was to be three whole minutes between the disappearance and the reappearance. Silber took his position next to Manning at the wings, where the mirrors would be dropped and the rotation halted and the Towers would, to the relief of the audience, be restored.
But something was impossibly off.
“What the fuck is going on?” Manning growled at the controls. “What did you do? Is this some sort of last-minute addition, you motherfucker?”
But Silber, nowhere near comprehending, just shook his head, suddenly drenched in sweat, shaking like he’d never shaken before. He, like his audience, was gasping to the point of hyperventilating, but still unaware of the true enormity of it all.
By the end of the three minutes there was no denying it, no matter how hard they tried. “Oliver, it’s gone,” he whispered. “The towers are fucking gone.”
They relooped the music, which made little sense, violins flooding nothing but the audience’s multiplying unease and rippling impatience, a desperate cacophony struggling to patch up an inconsolably empty, gaping space, impossibility of impossibilities.
The illusion had not gone right, but it had not gone wrong, either. It had gone real.
For a while they faked it — more and more and more music, praying it could drown out the groans and protests and eventual full-fledged boos—but soon the police and fire trucks were involved. Soon there was yelling and screaming and the threat of riots, men and women insisting their loved ones were inside, and if you don’t bring them and it back, you’ll be gone too; workers protesting the absence of their workplace, their livelihood, you fucking rich-bitch magician; a group of children at the command of their own morbid imaginations, hugging fire hydrants, lying atop the earth beneath them, crying for New York to please don’t away, please; dogs from all corners of the city suddenly howling like agonized women in an opera. And eventually everyone, including Silber Studios and company, was running for their lives.
And Zal — who in that instant of the magic’s reality felt like a character in a video game, one likely designed by his former lover — ran with them, if anything to ensure that no one would suspect his connection to a premonition that alone seemed to have given birth to this most sinister of all possible atrocities.
And he kept running, never stopping, until something fell in front of his face, bringing him to a halt. He jumped back, afraid of any and all possibilities, but he noticed it was simply a feather. A massive white feather, like the feather of a gull, but larger than any gull he had seen. He caught it and noticed part of it was singed.
He held it, held it against his heart.
For a moment he paused the whole scene, tried to write himself in, muscular and massive and a warrior, raised by an avian god, defender of kingdoms and homelands, a hero — but the light went out on the image as quickly as it had appeared. He focused on the freeze-frame of what was actually in front of him, all that was still and frozen, with Zal at the center of it all, thinking one thing: I exist. I am here. I am real.
And it had happened.
Zal had awakened to his own image, as if his own reflection had shaken him to consciousness. It was his face and body, but several stories high and wide and distorted to the point that he looked more monster than man.
He was before a giant mirror. New York was before a giant mirror. Mirror Room was the first thought that whispered itself into his brain. He was trapped in one large Mirror Room.
It was barely light, and there was Silber’s team, fussing with props and chairs and lights and, indeed, huge mirrors, on top of all sorts of foreign, futuristic-looking equipment. Zal had tried to make out Silber or Indigo or anyone else he knew, but he could see no one. Just a lot of efficient, angry, shouting guys, making something, something big, happen.