Mechanique (10 page)

39.

These are the songs that Panadrome plays:

For the jugglers he plays a march in four-four time, so fast he can hardly keep up with the notes. He changes the song whenever the jugglers change; it gives him a chance to compose something new, and the jugglers will hardly notice.

For the dancing girls, it’s a song in a minor key, rolling and swaying. The melody snakes slowly through the tent and, on the right night, can make everyone there think the dancing girls are better than they are.

The strongman gets “The King Enters the Hall,” from
Haynan
and Bello.
The music suits Ayar, and Panadrome likes the song itself. He’s been playing it so long he should hate it, but how can he? This is the music he was born to play, and it’s easier to have music sound the way you want it to if you play all the instruments.

For Bird and Stenos, Panadrome plays what he likes; watching them meet and part is a comfort that reminds him of singers falling silent before the knife is handed to them in the final act. Every so often he wishes he could play Tresaulta’s theme, but every time he starts, the song bends into something else, and he lets the new notes happen, follows the melody where it leads him.

Some parts of the past cannot be reclaimed, he knows. Better not to raise ghosts.

The tumblers get no song at all, merely a play-along of sounds and scales, where he slides out this note or that one to emphasize how far they’re jumping, how fast they flip backwards, to heighten the tension as they crouch and wait.

The aerialists perform to an intricate waltz, a majestic one-two-three one-two-three, timed to the length of the pendulum swing. (“Don’t play us the halfpenny oompah those other horrors get,” Elena said.)

He plays it the same every night, without thinking. He never has to adjust the tempo of this song; Elena’s girls are better trained than most musicians. They do not falter; Elena’s girls do not fall.

When Alec had his wings and swooped from the ceiling at the end of the circus, Panadrome fell silent. Alec’s wings sang as he flew, each feather a note, and the chord always carried over the gasps and the cheers of the crowd. Every night was a triumph.

Panadrome was forgotten, and when he looked across the tent at Boss, her face upturned to see her lover spiraling down over the adoring audience closer and closer to reaching her, no one thought to look at Panadrome, to see why he was watching his maker.

Maybe it’s just that she had been on the road with him for a long time, so long that only the two of them knew, so long that she had gone from treating him like a conductor to treating him like a brother to treating him like one of her own limbs. He looked at her in those invisible moments because he was used to looking at her; because out of them all, she was the only thing that really lasted. That was his reason; that was all.

Better not to raise ghosts.

40.

After Little George has dropped the news about the government man and clanged away, casting resentful glances over his shoulder, the camp seems quieter, as if the worst is already over. The sound of Panadrome playing for the tumblers is muffled by the canvas and applause.

In the distance, Stenos can hear little bell-sounds of the cooking cart being packed away. Mistake; they’ll just have to unpack it all again, if they stay.

Stenos carries Bird to one of the trucks, where they can sit alone. She prefers to be away from the others when she can. He has never stopped hating her, but still, better to be alone with her than with the rest of them.

(By now he knows her well enough that hating her is the same as knowing how tall she is; it’s a true thing about her; it just exists. He lives around it.)

They sit side by side at the edge of a truck bed, their backs pressed up against the wooden crates where the light bulbs are packed. She’s overworked herself; he can see three angry marks on her tunic where the blood has seeped through the scars on her ribs, the black stains on the fabric like bullet holes.

(When he holds on to her he can feel the raised skin where she had been sewn back together, a mountain range sliding under his thumbs.)

One of the crew men passes them and spares Stenos a disapproving look. Stenos ignores it. He used to be one of them, but as soon as Boss saddled him with Bird the crew began to turn their shoulders to him, as if he has the bones by association.

(Boss hasn’t said anything about the bones, as if she’s waiting for him to prove himself. He hopes she’s not going to be too much longer in offering; he hopes she’s only waiting until he’s earned the wings. No point in suffering more than once.)

The rain has plastered down the dirt, and while she looks at the tent he watches the moon, a white sliver out of his reach.

“What do you think the government man will do with us, when he has us?”

He looks at her. “Soldiers, I suppose,” he says, once the terror of her question has faded.

She nods. “Anyone without the bones will be lucky, then,” she says. Her feet are hooked on the rigging under the truck, and her legs make two pale crescents against the dark.

He thinks about the last city he hid in, before the circus came, and says, “Or we’ll all be shot.”

“Same thing,” she says, drops her eyes to him. “None of us have any heart left for war.”

Us, she says; the ones with the bones.

“If you have any heart left at all,” he says.

She smiles like he made a joke; then her mouth becomes a thin line.

He feels like she’s always on the verge of telling him something important, but she chokes on it whenever they’re alone. Nothing she’s said so far worries him at all; nobody in the circus gives a damn about the war, that’s something Stenos knows for sure, so he doesn’t know what she’s getting at.

“We’ll see what the government men say when I have the wings,” he says.

Her face is suddenly serious, the glass eye gleaming. “Don’t get the bones before the government man comes back for us.”

She’s only saying it because she wants the wings. He can’t trust a word of it, he knows.

Still, when she looks at him he can see hunger and fear and hopelessness, but not cunning. He closes his eyes a moment.

“I need a smoke,” he says.

“Talk to the dancing girls. Moonlight sells them cheap. She’s fair.”

“You just want me to die from the smoke,” he says.

She glances at him; then she stands and goes. He follows a step or two behind her.

It’s strange, always, to watch her walking. Her spine is perfectly straight, her head tilted like her namesake, keeping the tent in the peripheral vision of her good eye. There is a small mark near the small of her back, too, where she’s torn the skin and bled.

(He thinks about holding her in his arms that first night, how he had cradled her and felt the cool ridges pressing against his hands. He had thought she was frail; he hadn’t realized right away how bad it was, that it was metal against his palm.)

She’s light enough that she leaves no footprint in the trampled-down grass.

At the door to the women’s wagon she pauses with her hand on the latch, and says without looking at him, “Shall I tell Elena you’re waiting?”

It’s the first time she’s said Elena’s name to him. He doesn’t know how she knew. There’s no way Elena told her. (What else does Bird see when no one knows?)

“No,” he manages, listens to the click of the closing door before he leans back against the wagon.

He can still hear her as she steps through the noisy wagon full of girls, the splash of water he knows only her hands make.

It terrifies him to know her.

He sees no way out of this, until one of them has the wings. Stenos knows he’s the better choice—he would make a better picture walking at the front of the parade then poor Bird with her one eye. He would know how to make the crowd love him. (He misses applause.)

Looking at Bird, though, he worries; he wonders if she would hesitate to dig the wings out of his shoulders as he slept.

Inside the wagon she has slid into her bed, has turned her face to the wall.

She cuts through him just by breathing.

41.

These are the things Jonah fears:

He fears the government man, who leaves early without explanation. “Bird frightened him off,” Little George says, laughing too much, but Jonah has had some experience with government men. He knows they are hard to frighten, because they do so little fighting of their own; Jonah knows the circus will never be safe from him.

He fears the rain. The others come to terms with it; their bones are under the skin, and the rain is a terror that fades. But Jonah’s workings are exposed, and it would take so little for him to rust from the inside out. He doesn’t know what Boss would do if it happened; maybe she would save him, or maybe she would hold him in between life and death, if she wanted something from Ayar.

(He fears Boss.)

He fears the cold. It makes their bones brittle, and just because they can be repaired doesn’t mean it’s painless to go under Boss’s knife. Jonah knows that more than anyone; she scooped him hollow while he was dead, and when he woke up he was locked for life in a suit that didn’t fit and cracked when the winter wind blew.

He has forgiven Ayar, mostly.

He fears for Ayar. Ayar is the kind of man who does any work that’s put before him without asking questions, but sometimes he forms an attachment to a lost cause, and each time it drags Ayar through the mud as if Ayar has never had his heart broken. (Jonah knows that for certain; he had been half-awake the whole long walk to the circus yard, Ayar bearing Jonah in his arms like a sacrifice.) If the government man comes back for them, Jonah and Ayar might be separated.

(He fears this most.)

And when he moves through the camp, telling this crewman and that one to pack up the trucks, he realizes he doesn’t know their names. He tried to learn everyone’s names, and argued with Elena that the crew and the dancers were worth knowing even if they would leave someday.

But now he’s worried, and he is thinking only of saving Elena’s girls and the tumblers and Ayar and Bird. He has stopped caring about any of the ones who come in and out and grow old and die. He has become like Barbaro or Alto or Elena, who don’t even bother to look at someone until they have the bones.

If there was ever a reason to be afraid, becoming like Elena is one.

42.

On the night the government man came, as soon as Jonah had signaled that the tent was empty and the crew had set first watch, I unlocked myself from my metal casts and ran to Boss’s trailer.

She was sitting at her dressing table. The last flickering bulbs that hadn’t burned out cast her in a sickly light, but I could still tell she had gone pale. The griffin tattoo stood out like ink on paper, she was so white, and she was so distracted that she hadn’t even taken off her fancy dress. She was staring unblinking into the mirror, as if she could see past it.

I knocked on the wall (I was too far inside to pretend I hadn’t let myself in).

“Come in, George,” she said without turning.

I took a few steps closer and locked my hands behind my back like a soldier.

“Some of us want to pack up and go,” I said. “You should hold a vote, at least, and see who’s for staying and who’s for going.”

In the mirror, she cut her eyes to mine. Her gaze hit me like a punch, and for a second I felt like Stenos must when Bird trained that glass eye on him.

“I’m going to guess that no one with the bones cares to leave,” she said.

(I didn’t know what she meant, and I was too angry to examine what she said.)

“Jonah is frightened,” I said. “I don’t know about the others yet. Elena is scared for sure. Bird doesn’t want to leave, but—” I made a face that showed what I thought of Bird’s opinion.

Boss smiled into the mirror. “I’m not surprised Bird doesn’t want to leave her wings behind,” she said. Then, after a moment with me pinned under her stare, she seemed to come to a decision.

She pointed to the stool beside hers. “Come and sit.”

I lifted a box of her old circus advertisements off the stool and took a seat. I waited, nervous and glowering at her, feeling like she had brought me low by asking me to sit where I would have to look up at her.

(Now I think she asked me to sit because my legs were trembling from the strain of fighting those false brass knees all night, and she wanted to offer me a little relief before she took my measure.)

Finally she looked away from her reflection and down to me, and she wore that expression I loved most on her, where she was planning something and would need me. If there was sorrow there (and there must have been) it was too dark, and I was too foolish to see it.

“George,” she said, “have you decided on the circus?”

I blinked. “How do you mean?”

“Is it what you want, for the rest of your life?”

“Never considered anything else,” I said, proud of myself for having an answer ready. “I want to be a tumbler, if I can.” Or an aerialist, if Elena wouldn’t try to kill me, I thought, but didn’t say. I didn’t want Boss to laugh me right out of the trailer.

She wasn’t laughing. She looked at me, level, like I was her reflection.

“What if you couldn’t be an act? Would you still stay?”

“Yes,” I said, which sounded less brave, but was just as true. Where else would I go? Join Valeria and be a baker in some town that went dark at sundown, until war started again and I was gunned down in the street?

Her eyes wouldn’t let me go. After a long time, she said, “I never wanted you to be like the others. I think that’s why I’ve waited. But now I have something I need to give you, if you’ll take it.”

It was the most confidence in me I’d ever heard from her. It was the first moment I had ever thought she cared for me. I was overwhelmed; I could hardly breathe.

(I should have known the government man was closing in.)

“Yes,” I said.

When she picked up the needle and the little pot of ink, the griffin on her arm leaned forward and shrank back again, trembling, the gears of its metal wings flickering in the guttering light.

“Roll up your sleeve.”

I tore it, I was shaking so hard, but I rolled my sleeve up to the shoulder and laid my arm on her desk without having to be told.

“I hope you never need it,” she said, and then she began to draw.