Carter tried not to think about what would happen if the man caught him. Instead, he focused on the locomotive. Light glinted off the heavy wheels below as they rolled upon the tracks. The problem with trains is that they are made of metal and each car weighs a literal ton, if not more. Once they’re moving, they move quickly. If Carter got too close—if he tripped—it would all be over.
A bright yellow train car was now edging past him. Yellow reminded Carter of a bird he once saw locked up in a cage in the window of a pet store. Weren’t birds designed to fly free? Carter took it as a sign that this was the one to reach for, the one that would take him far away from here. Its ladder was just out of reach.
Jumping a train in motion may have been hard or even scary for some—but Carter had done it so many times, it came as naturally as plucking a coin from behind someone’s ear or shuffling a deck of cards with only one hand.
Unfortunately, the man who was chasing Carter found it easy too. As Carter was about to clasp the ladder, the man grabbed Carter’s satchel and dragged him to the ground.
“No!” Carter yelled.
They both tumbled across the gravel, rolling beside the wheels of the yellow car that went bump-bump, bump-bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump-bump over the rickety tracks, echoing the flutter of Carter’s panicked heartbeat. He didn’t want to imagine what would happen if the train left without him.
So Carter didn’t stop moving. He twisted his body until the rolling turned into a somersault. As he pitched himself forward, head over heels, Carter yanked his bag away from the man’s grip, planted his feet on the shifting gravel, then leapt toward the train’s last car. A ladder hung down from the rear, next to an open door. Carter’s fast hands grabbed the bottom rung, his taut tendons holding him tight. Climbing up and onto the ladder, he pulled his feet up and clung to the back of the now-racing train.
After catching his breath, he moved all the way to the top, taking a seat on the car’s roof. The wind whipped his hair around. The train’s horn cried out again from up ahead.
Looking back, he saw the man kneeling by the tracks, arms raised in anger, screaming into the night and quickly shrinking into a dot that eventually disappeared in the murky distance. Carter waved good-bye. To the town. To Ms. Zalewski. And to the man who was chasing him—though if it had been possible to wish the man a bad-bye, Carter would certainly have done that instead.
The sky turned a beautiful blue as the sun came up. After some time, the familiar rocking and loud metal-churning of the train calmed Carter’s heart and brought a yawn to his jaw. So he climbed down and into the train car. Inside, hundreds of boxes were stacked on wooden pallets. Plopping himself on the floor beside one such stack, Carter placed his satchel underneath his head like a pillow, then drifted off to sleep, dreaming about hope and fate and destiny and adventure, as well as a fleeting thought or two about the possibility of magic.
TWO
Surprise! It’s time for a little flashback!
I understand how frustrating it is to pause a story right in the middle of the action, but there are a few things you should know about Carter before I tell you what happens next. Things like: Who is this kid? And why was he running? And who is the man he was running from? I promise we’ll get back to Carter’s escape soon enough. And if we don’t, I’ll let you lock me up in a tight straitjacket with no key. Oh, the horror!
But anyway… onward!
Carter learned how to do magic tricks from his uncle. And they were just that: tricks. There was no magic involved. How could there be? Everyone knows there is no such thing as magic—or so Carter believed.
At a very early age, Carter stopped trusting in wonderful, happy, fantastic things. It wasn’t his fault. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.
You see, Carter was born to two lovely people. His mom had a smile that shone like the sun on a perfect day at the beach. And his dad could pull coins out of ears and make a deck of playing cards vanish into thin air. They all lived in a tiny red cottage with white trim on a wooded and winding road outside a small northern city. One afternoon when Carter was only a few years old, both of his parents failed to come home.
They also failed to come home the next day. Or the day after that. When the babysitter called the police, Carter hoped it was only one of his father’s tricks. But after another day passed with no word, Carter had to face the cold hard truth: His parents were not coming back. It was their final vanishing act.
Young Carter was taken in by a distant relative named Sylvester “Sly” Beaton. For the sake of convenience, we will call him Carter’s uncle.
Uncle Sly was a wiry little man who always dressed in a brown tweed suit with frayed seams and patches that covered moth-eaten holes. He wore his long, greasy hair tied back in a messy ponytail, and the whiskers of his patchy beard barely covered his pointy chin. Uncle Sly told people he got his nickname because he was like a fox, but Carter always thought that his uncle looked more like a weasel, which made sense because Uncle Sly often acted like a weasel too.
The man was not thrilled to have to look after Carter. And Carter was not thrilled to live with this weasel. But that’s what the circumstances were, and so Carter made the best of them.
Like Carter’s father, Uncle Sly knew magic tricks. He could hold a tissue up to Carter’s nose and make him sneeze a waterfall of coins into a glass. Then, one by one, Uncle Sly would make the coins disappear again. This blew Carter’s mind—well, his mind and his nose.
Carter begged his uncle to show him how to do magic. Eventually, Uncle Sly saw that there might be a benefit in having an assistant, and so he taught Carter everything he knew. It turned out Carter was a natural-born magician.
Soon enough, Carter was doing all of Uncle Sly’s tricks—only better. Carter had a special talent. His fingers were long and his tendons were taut, which gave him fast hands and expert card-shuffling skills. He could make coins vanish and reappear across the room. He could materialize playing cards out of thin air. He even revised Uncle Sly’s sneeze trick, using ice cubes instead of coins (which was rather impressive, given the size of the average human nostril).