Devouring Light

Mischievous Mercurio guards the planet Mercury-his sacred charge-with quirky devotion. He loves the oddball chunk of rock, with its illusion of retrograde motion and its out-of-sync orbit and spin.

Almost as much as he loves playing pranks.

But when Earth's guardian Gaia bids Mercurio to organize a circus act for Sol's birthday celebration, the joke's on him.

While Mercurio wangles his way around the captious refusals of his would-be stilt-walkers and clowns-"No, no, and no!"-the somber guardi...