Play dead

ONE HUNDRED

5:54 AM

Graciella stood on the stage beneath hot, glaring lights. To her left was the Fire Grotto, a steel and smoked-glass cage about three feet by three feet by four feet high. The front had a door that opened out toward where the audience would be, if there had been an audience. The entire apparatus was on a short four-legged steel table with caster wheels. Hanging from the back was the hoop, a three-foot- diameter aluminum hoop attached to a cone of silk fabric.

It looked exactly like the drawings Karl Swann had shown her.

Remember the hidden latch.

Joseph Swann-dressed like his father, in full costume and makeup-emerged from a small room next to the stage. He stepped onto the stage, reached into his pocket, took out a small remote control of some kind, clicked it, then returned it to his pocket. Graciella looked across the room. She could barely make out the silhouette of a small camera on a tripod. She wondered if Karl Swann-the Great Cygne himself-was upstairs watching all of this.

His son Joseph waited a few seconds, then looked out into the darkness.

"Behold the Fire Grotto," he said. He turned to look at Graciella. "And behold the lovely Odette."

He reached over, opened the front of the glass-and-steel cage. He gestured to Graciella. She was supposed to get in. She looked inside, her memory overlaying the schematic drawing on the box itself. She glanced to the lower left corner. There, painted the same color as the smoked glass, was the hidden latch.

She stepped into the cage. In her hands was the item the old man had given her. She'd held on to it so long, so tightly, she'd almost forgotten she had it.