Mirandus Head had suspected from the beginning that the answer to Ephraim’s final request wouldn’t be the one he’d hoped for. He had come to Peal to appease the Man Who Bends Light and to see if there was any outstanding reason to change his mind.

It hadn’t been easy for him to refuse. He had watched Micah carefully during his visit to the circus. He had liked the boy right away, just as he had Ephraim, and in his own way, he was sympathetic to their plight. But his first responsibility was always to Circus Mirandus. He couldn’t afford to make emotional decisions.

The answer was no.

The manager thought that Micah would accept that. He felt sure that he had the boy’s measure. With the difficult decision made, he turned his thoughts to other matters, and Circus Mirandus went back to business as usual.

As if anything could be usual when Micah Tuttle’s grandfather had given him a mission.

Circus Mirandus was every bit as beautiful in the daylight, but there seemed to be fewer people around, maybe because of school. Other than Micah, only two children waited in front of Geoffrey’s stand to have their tickets examined. Neither of them was Jenny. Micah knew it wasn’t fair to expect her, but he was so surprised not to see her that he realized he must have been counting on her even more than he’d thought.

Geoffrey let the other children in. He squinted at Micah through his monocle, looking just as alert as he had last time. Micah wondered when he slept.

“Ticket?” Geoffrey asked, as though he had never seen Micah before that moment.

“I’m Micah Tuttle. I have an invitation.”

“Oh, an invitation,” he said. “Let’s see it then.”

Micah frowned at him. “You saw it just the other night. Don’t you remember?”

Geoffrey drew himself up to his full height and pointed at the entrance sign over his head. “I’ve been here since the very beginnin’,” he announced. “The very beginnin’. And I remember everythin’.”

“Right,” said Micah. He didn’t have time for this. “So I can go in?”

“If you have a ticket.” Geoffrey had a bored look on his face, but there was something in his eyes that was paying close attention to Micah.

Micah stared at the tents. They were so close. “Was the invitation only good for one night?”

Geoffrey scowled so that his monocle looked like it was cutting into his eyebrow. “The invitation is good for as long as Mr. Head wants it to be,” he said. “And Mr. Head doesn’t want it to be anymore.”

No. Micah’s stomach dropped all the way to the soles of his feet. “I need to come in. I’ll apologize to Mr. Head. I’ll do anything you want.”

The ticket taker looked unimpressed, and Micah suddenly knew that he wasn’t the first person who had begged. How many people must have tried, over thousands of years, to be let in once their tickets had expired? How many had succeeded?

“More’ve tried than you can imagine,” Geoffrey said, as though Micah had asked the question out loud. He switched his monocle to the other eye. “And none get one minute more than they’re given. That’s my job.”

He pointed again at the sign over his head. “And I’ve got a perfect record.”

A teenage girl holding a jack-o’-lantern appeared behind Micah. Geoffrey didn’t even blink. “Two hours,” he said without looking at her.

To Micah, he said, “No ticket, no entry.”

Micah shook his head stubbornly and stepped forward. Before he could take a second step he heard a low growl. Something white flashed at the corner of his eye.

Bibi.

Micah backed away, but the growling didn’t stop. It got louder. Micah kept walking.

The invisible tiger didn’t go quiet until he reached the edge of the recreation complex. There, he stopped to think. Knowing that nobody had made it past Geoffrey and Bibi since 500 B.C. was the opposite of encouraging. On any other day, Micah might have given up, but this wasn’t any other day.

He looked around for inspiration. There had to be something that would turn all of the noes into yeses. There had to be a way to make things right, if only he could find it.

And he did.

Micah had three things that none of those other people trying to break into Circus Mirandus had ever had—orders from Grandpa Ephraim, Jenny Mendoza for a friend, and a really big gorilla.

It shouldn’t have been easy for a kid to steal a giant gorilla balloon in broad daylight, but to Micah’s surprise, getting to the big ape was simple. It wasn’t as if the park had full-time balloon guards. Micah ignored the locked gate and climbed right over the short fence onto the ball field.In the sunshine, the balloons looked much less mysterious. He checked the knots that held the gorilla’s ropes to metal stakes in the ground. They weren’t secure by Tuttle standards. So the problem wasn’t getting the balloon; the problem was attaching himself to the balloon. Micah didn’t want to be stuck floating through the air for hours, but he also didn’t want to fall.

He thought about Bibi’s fangs and shivered. Grandpa Ephraim’s counting on me, he reminded himself. I have to risk it.

It took several minutes to undo three of the four ropes, and Micah’s hands were sweaty with nerves. The gorilla had tipped onto its side in the air overhead, and it would be pretty noticeable even from a distance.

Micah took the laces out of his tennis shoes. Not long enough, but maybe . . . He took off his pajama shirt and rolled it into a long tube. He wrapped it around his chest and tied it, using a shoelace to secure the ends with the strongest knot he knew. Now he had his own pajama harness. Well, actually it was more like a pajama sash, but Micah decided that thinking of it as a harness made it feel safer. He attached the harness to the gorilla’s final tether and bent to unknot the rope from its stake.

It was tighter than the others had been. Micah jammed his finger while he was loosening it, but it came undone for him just like the others had. For an instant, he was excited that he’d done what he’d set out to do. Then, his pajama harness caught him under the armpits and yanked him off the ground. He yelped and clamped his eyes shut.

Micah stretched his toes down and felt nothing. The wind was at his back. It’s okay, he told himself. You can do this for Grandpa Ephraim.

He forced himself to look around only to discover that things weren’t going quite the way he had expected. He had thought he would be up a lot higher and moving a lot faster. The gorilla was so big. He’d assumed they would rocket toward space together and toward Circus Mirandus, and at just the right moment, Micah would let go so that he could land in the circus and not go splat.

It sounded ridiculous, now that he reconsidered it.

Since wind always blew toward Circus Mirandus, he was going the right way. The problem was that he was only about eight feet off the ground, and even though he was rising steadily, it didn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. At this rate, Bibi would eat him from the ankles up.

He held on to his harness with both arms as he and the gorilla drifted over a chain-link fence. All right, Micah, he thought. There are a couple of things you can do now.

Should he hang on and hope for the best? Or let go? He probably wouldn’t hurt himself too badly from this height, and he could try to get into the circus some more normal way. His shoulders were already aching. He decided to let go.

Unfortunately, it had taken him quite a while to decide, and when he looked down to see what he would be landing on, Micah realized that eight feet had turned into fifteen feet. Now, letting go seemed like a very bad idea. The wind picked up speed, and Micah gripped his harness tighter.

He lost a shoe as he sailed over the bleachers beside one of the soccer fields. He stared down at it. It was tiny. He drifted higher and higher, until the sight of the ground made him dizzy and he had to look up at the balloon. He tried to swallow his nerves, but his mouth was so dry that they got caught in his throat.

It was the music spiraling up that finally made him look down again. He was passing right over the ticket stand now, and the little man that was Geoffrey never glanced skyward.

Micah soared over Circus Mirandus. He couldn’t see the faces of the people below him, but they were obviously all having a wonderful time. The children were running from tent to tent. Performers were turning somersaults. He was so far away from them and so worried for Grandpa Ephraim and so sure that he had just made the biggest mistake ever by tying himself to a space-bound gorilla. He felt like he was part of a different species.

It’s okay, he told himself. You’ve got a plan.

The plan was for Micah to let go of the harness when he was right over the center of Mr. Head’s menagerie. He would fall through the roof of the tent and land in the giant fish tank. He was fairly sure that Grandpa Ephraim’s fish wouldn’t attack him. He would splash down in all that water, and he wouldn’t even be hurt.

Jenny had said an aerial assault on Circus Mirandus would work. Micah trusted her judgment.

But for some reason, when the time came, Micah couldn’t let go. His arms were cramping, and he passed by Mr. Head’s tent a lot more quickly than he had planned to. He was so high up that it definitely wasn’t safe. Probably Bibi could fly anyway, and the manager just hadn’t mentioned it. Excuses ran through his mind as he watched the scarlet fabric of the big tent pass beneath his feet.

He floated over Rosebud’s wagon.

That was it, he realized. That was my one and only chance, and I missed it.

He knew then, as surely as he had ever known anything, that he was going to die. He was going to die just like all of the other stupid kids who had tried to break into Circus Mirandus probably had. The tiger would use his bones for toothpicks. His eyes stung and blurred. He could barely make out the next tent.

It was black fabric covered with golden suns.

It’s too far down. I can’t.

Bring back the Lightbender, Grandpa Ephraim had said. No is the wrong answer, he’d said.

But Micah still didn’t know what the question was.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but he reached up with one shaking hand. He touched the knot that held his harness together just so. And he fell.

It was so quick that Micah didn’t even have time to scream. He hit taut fabric, and pain shot through him like a lightning bolt. He heard a loud rrriiiiiipp, and he kept falling. He fell right through a burst of fireworks, through a wheel of colored light, and he crashed down onto something that was hard and soft at the same time.

It shouted, and it smelled like a long leather coat that had seen a hundred adventures.

Micah wondered if he was dead. His head felt like it was enormous and full of boiling water. His back throbbed. Someone had definitely stabbed him in the shoulder with a knife.

Yes, he decided. Being dead feels like this.

But then the Lightbender was there, crouching over him. His face was white, except for a streak of blood under his nose, and he reached out with his long fingers to brush Micah’s hair away from his face.

Micah slowly realized that the Lightbender’s mouth was moving. That meant he must be speaking to someone, but he wasn’t making any sound. For some reason, this was funny, and Micah laughed. Only laughing filled his chest with sharp points, so he had to stop right away.

He tried to look around. The whole tent was full of light, plain yellow light, and the stands around Micah were filled with kids. Why did they all look so frightened?

The Lightbender glanced away for a second, and Micah saw him open his mouth wide as if he was calling somebody. The Strongman appeared, his bowler hat askew, and then Micah was rising up into the air.

“Nooo,” he moaned, and the Strongman froze.

“Oh,” Micah said. The Strongman was the one picking him up. It wasn’t the giant balloon. “You’re okay.”

The Strongman still didn’t move. He looked almost as afraid as the children in the stands.

The Lightbender stared into Micah’s eyes, and Micah remembered. “You have to come,” he said. “Grandpa Ephraim. You gave him the wrong answer.”

The Lightbender’s mouth moved again, and Micah was tired of him not making any noise now, because he needed to know what he was saying. He tried to focus on the Lightbender’s lips, and finally, like it was coming from miles away and underwater, he heard “. . . anything . . . be still . . . Rosebud . . .” and then, “. . . what you’ve done to yourself.”

Aha. He’s wondering how I broke into the circus.

“Gorilla,” Micah explained.

Then he passed out.