Mechanique (17 page)

60.

As soon as he was free of George, the little ringmaster apparent, Stenos ran to Ayar and Jonah’s trailer.

It was his trailer too—he lived in it when they were on the road, he slept in the bunk opposite Jonah—but it was their home, not his. He slept there only because the crew didn’t want him after Boss made him an act, and the Grimaldi brothers hadn’t wanted any strangers, period.

The trailer was clean and spare, three fresh-made bunks and three bare ones. The only thing Ayar and Jonah really possessed was a haphazard collection of books and half-books they had scavenged. Those would have to be boxed and handled carefully. Even in his rage, Stenos had left the books untouched.

Stenos had come into the circus with nothing, and he had collected nothing. (He didn’t live in the circus yet; all these years he had only been waiting.)

Ayar found him while he was packing the books into a crate lined in canvas. Stenos thought about apologizing for the trouble, but he couldn’t be sorry, so he only nodded and kept working. Ayar would forgive him for taking the trailer if he understood.

“Don’t do that,” Ayar said, looking at the books.

Stenos said, “Don’t try to stop me. I’ve had enough trouble today.”

“I mean, there’s no need to pack my things. I’m not going with the rest of them.”

That, Stenos hadn’t expected. He stood up, a book still in one hand. “Are you sure?”

Ayar shrugged, his metal ribs squeaking. “I owe Boss a debt. It’s time I repaid it.”

“And Jonah?”

Ayar’s smile slid. “He should know better than anyone how sometimes you have to pick the losing battle.”

After a moment, Stenos handed Ayar the book.

“Let’s hurry and finish,” he said.

Ayar came back with a scowl, a box of supplies from Joe’s food truck, and Barbaro and Brio in tow.

Stenos crossed his arms. “You’re staying, too? This is turning into a party.”

Brio said, “We should all be staying. I’m hoping my brothers realize that before the circus goes.”

If all the brothers realized that, the trailer was going to be a tight fit.

As Brio and Ayar took supplies inside, Stenos glanced over at Barbaro, who was smoking the last inch of a flattened cigarette. It was hard to believe Barbaro was going on a softhearted mission; he had been a machine of a soldier, though he’d never said much about it. When you carried yourself the way Barbaro did, no one had to ask.

Barbaro looked over and shrugged like Stenos had asked him a question. “When we run off to die, I’ll take a few out for you before you get shot,” he said, examining the horizon just over Stenos’s shoulder. “At this point, a few more on my head won’t matter.”

“No one’s running off to die,” Stenos said.

Barbaro looked at him and raised his eyebrows, took a drag off the cigarette. The smoke snaked through his nostrils, and for a moment Stenos saw what Barbaro’s enemies must have seen—his expressionless face, eyes like two pistol sights.

“Sure thing,” Barbaro said. “My mistake.”

He pinched the cigarette between his fingers, snuffed the fire out.

Stenos snuck last into Boss’s workshop. He had guessed right—no one had come to lock it up yet. (Without Boss, only Panadrome or George would think of the workshop at all; George was too scattered to think of it, and Panadrome was too grieved to remind him.)

Stenos scooped up anything that looked like a weapon and wouldn’t be missed: wrenches, a handful of nails, a half-circle of cog that looked like it had been wrenched out of Ayar’s shoulder. It was so sharp Stenos cut his finger picking it up and had to wrap it in a curled sheet of tin just to carry it out.

“I figured I’d find you at the scene of the crime,” Elena said from behind him.

He didn’t stop packing. “Then I’m slipping in my old age.”

“You don’t know a thing about old age,” she said, but she stepped inside. The workshop shrank around them; when he turned to face her he felt like they were standing together in a coffin.

“You know it’s foolish of you to stay here and die,” she said.

It was hard to argue.

She stepped closer, so close that her shoulder brushed his. He looked down without moving; she filled his vision, her cool skin, the smooth expanse of her hair knotted behind her.

(He wondered how blinded with need for her he had been, to be this close to her so many times and not to realize something was wrong, not to realize what was different about anyone who had the bones.)

“Bring them back,” she said low, and it startled him so much that he looked her in the eye. He must have misheard.

She never blinked, and her voice was steady. “Bring them back,” she said, “if you live.”

This close, he could lean in and kiss her.

He bared his teeth. “Even Bird? Why not just let the government men finish your work?”

Elena’s face shifted, and for a moment he wondered if he had hurt her. (How? How could you hurt someone who had a knot of metal where a heart should be?)

Then she leaned in and said, too sweetly, “If you can’t rescue them both, I suggest admitting defeat. You’d look a fool coming back through the city gates twice.”

She was gone as silently as she had snuck up on him, the empty yard spreading ahead of her.

For a moment he felt unsteady, as if he had been pushing her for something without knowing. (Was it Bird? Why did she care if Bird came back?)

Outside the air was crackling with anticipation. The tent was gone, the trucks packed, and even as he knew he wasn’t going with them, he checked the trucks as he passed out of old habit, making sure the ropes were lashed tight enough, that all the locks were thrown.

(“I don’t care who drops it,” Boss used to say. “You all pay together for anything that breaks. Look after things or don’t, your choice.”

Of course they looked after things. They got paid poorly enough as it was without having to pay for the nails to mend the broken benches.)

Someone beside him said, “Take me, too.”

It was Ying. Her face was drawn and pale, but she moved beside Stenos without hesitation. He frowned at her; she was a stranger. Had they ever spoken?

“Go back,” he said. He knew Ying was older than he was (twice as old? A hundred years older?), but she couldn’t have lived very long out in the war before they took her in. Boss would never forgive him for dragging the ones she’d saved back out into the mud.

“No,” she said. She looked around, nervous, but never moved. “No. I’m staying.”

They were at the trailer now, and Ying seemed surprised to see two of the inseparable Grimaldi brothers making themselves at home in the little trailer.

“How many of us are there?” she asked. She sounded pleased. Comforted.

Stenos shot her a look and wondered how often she must have been left behind, to feel so tied to the strangers who were absent, to be hoping for a new group as soon as she was near one.

Ayar was inside, and at the sound of Ying’s voice he stuck his head out the trailer door, frowning.

“No,” he said to Stenos, pointing like Stenos had dragged her over. “She’s not staying. Elena will kill us.”

The government men would probably kill them first, but Stenos only spread his hands. “I’m no one’s master. If she wants to stay, she can stay.”

Ayar’s face seemed to fall in on itself a little, and he fixed sad eyes on Stenos. “How can we let her?”

So Ayar also knew not all of them would come home again. Maybe it was just as well they all suspected the worst. It would make their defeat easier to handle.

“Ying!”

It was George, walking quickly across the lawn. Too quickly for comfort—he wasn’t blind, then. He knew that Ying hadn’t come to say her goodbyes. He was hoping to head off disaster.

“We’re ready to go,” George said as soon as he was close. He stopped on Ying’s other side, and over her head Stenos could see how weary George looked already, after leading them for less than a day.

“You’d better get in the trailer before Elena misses you,” George said. “We’re almost ready.”

Ying looked at him. “Goodbye,” she said.

Under her gaze, George’s face slowly drained of color.

“You can’t,” he said. “You can’t—I only just understand, you can’t stay here when—”

“George!” Jonah called. “We’re ready to roll out.”

“One minute!” George snapped over his shoulder, and turned back to Ying, caught both her wrists.

“If they get hold of you, you’ll suffer,” George said through grit teeth, and again, tight with fear, “You’ll
suffer
.”

Poor George, Stenos thought; lovesick children always oversell. Still, he shivered. (Little George had eyes like plates, and his hands were pulling at Ying’s like he could grow over her in a tangle of vines and keep her with him, safe and hidden.)

“You can’t leave,” George whispered.

She slid her wrists from his grip, slowly, and stepped back. “The circus is a troupe,” she said. “I made a contract. I’m keeping it.”

He looked at her, his eyes pleading. “I can’t stay,” he said. “We have to get everyone out of here. I can’t—”

“Goodbye,” Ying said.

“George!” Jonah’s voice carried like a bell. “Everyone’s ready. If we’re going to reach water by nightfall, we have to go
now
.”

For a moment George tensed, poised on the edge of a decision. Stenos held his breath. (George had to love Boss, didn’t he? This retreat couldn’t be what he wanted—it couldn’t be what he’d choose.)

Then George was kissing Ying’s forehead; a moment later he was running across the camp, dirt flying under his boots.

There was the roar of engines, the whine of wheels grinding on earth, and the trucks were pulling out one by one. Boss’s trailer went first, and then the crewmen’s trailers, the cooking truck, the supplies, the performers, the entire circus disappearing in less than a minute.

Over the rattling bedlam floated one raw sound like a human voice (it might have been Elena calling Ying’s name), and then the five of them were alone on the empty field.

Ayar offered a hand to Ying, who took it to walk up the stairs, even though Stenos knew she could have jumped over the truck without breaking a sweat. Brio followed her into the trailer, glancing behind him at Stenos.

“We head east,” Stenos said, closed the trailer door.

Barbaro was waiting in the cab, in the passenger’s seat, which suited Stenos. He knew the road to the capital, and they would get there faster if he drove. Behind them, the open window to the living quarters was open, and Stenos heard the little sounds of everyone settling in for a long and uncomfortable journey.

“Good luck,” said Ayar, disappearing behind the flimsy curtains of his bunk. The wood groaned under his weight.

It was the last thing anyone said until dark, when the great stone wall of the capitol city came into sight on the horizon.

Then Barbaro said, “Fuck, I wish I had a gun.”

No one asked for explanations, and they drove straight into the dark, towards the city walls.

Stenos looked at the silhouette, a hulking animal cast in black against black, and wondered where Bird would be.

(He knew she wouldn’t still be in a prison cell. Bird had a way of escaping your grasp, no matter how much you tried to hold her.)

61.

One of the cities they find that year is more civilized than most—regular guards, demilitarized city center, even a school—and Boss extends the gig to a three-week run. The crew pitches some extra canvas and poles over one of the flatbeds to serve as a dressing room for the performers, to give them someplace else besides the cramped home trailers to spend their time, now that they have a little space.

The aerialists still get ready in their own trailer (“Hard enough to get these girls to do anything without the rest of you interrupting,” Elena says), but everyone else crowds into the flatbed, crouching along under the fabric ceiling, jostling for places at the three scraps of mirror they scrounge up the first night as barter for tickets.

(Ayar can’t stoop—his spine doesn’t allow it—so he leans against the side, peers in, makes jokes from there.)

The jugglers paint on their childish faces first, bright eyes and smiling mouths, and pile out into the tent. Jonah usually doesn’t wear any paint. (“Who’s looking at my face?” he asks, laughing, reaching out past the canvas roof as he hands Ayar the charcoal pencil for his eyes.) The brothers tend to stay to themselves, more like the aerialists than any of them would admit, and so for a long time it’s just Bird and Stenos alone in the flatbed.

Bird has poached some greasepaint from the others, and she’s making up her whole face—white skin, an eyelid the color of iron. There’s a pot of red beside her, and Stenos wonders what her mouth would look like if she painted it red. Probably like she was drinking someone’s blood just before going on.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Boss is calling, “we invite you to marvel at the strength of Ayar the Terrible and his Skeleton of Steel!”

The applause rolls out through the tent.

“I wonder what they sounded like when the Winged Man flew down,” Stenos says, half to himself. (He’s only ever wanted applause for his work, and the awed, loaded silences after they perform have begun to grate. He never notices the silence until he’s outside, and the relieved applause that greets Boss’s return moves toward his back like the tide coming in.

He’ll never get anywhere with damaged goods.)

“You’ll never find out,” Bird says, running her hand down her throat, over her neck, to the collar of her tunic.

He stands up and moves behind her. She doesn’t pause; her hands are on her neck, smoothing the greasepaint down and down and down like she’s sculpting a new body from white clay.

He says, “You’re just telling me that because you want them for yourself.”

“Of course,” she says. It’s the first time they’ve spoken of it, but she sounds as though they’ve had this conversation a thousand times.

(They have; every time she twists in his arms, every time he catches her, they’re talking about the wings.)

Stenos glances down at her. “When Boss is tired of punishing me with you and gives me the wings, you’re going to feel like a fool for being so petty with me.”

She pauses, lowers her hand, frowns into the glass.

“Don’t you understand?” she asks the mirror, not unkindly. “She’s never going to give away the wings. It’s just the promise that keeps us from going mad. She wanted an act out of us, and she got one. I’m the wild thing, you’re the cage. We’re cheaper than keeping a pair of animals, that’s all.”

Stenos goes white, his gaze fixed on the mirror. She doesn’t turn to look up at him; her face in the smoky glass is as still as a corpse. Her lips are dry (it must be winter), and she smears them with stolen greasepaint until they disappear into the sea of white.

Her brown eye gleams in the light from the single lantern. He doesn’t see the glass eye, though; he never sees it. He sees only the broken socket from the long-ago night, the film of blood across her face, her one good eye staring up at the stars.

She had gasped shallowly in his arms, her open ribs pressed against his fingers.

He wraps one hand at the back of her neck, pressing down just short of pain.

“I’m not the cage,” he gasps at last, like a drowning man.

She looks at him in the mirror, unblinking.

A long time later, from somewhere far behind them, Jonah pulls back the tent flap, says, “You’re up.”