Mechanique (18 page)

62.

This is what happens when you are about to die:

You lose, slowly, your muscle control. At first you’re only a little sluggish. Then you think the ditch beside the road must be full of rocks that trip you up. But it’s your body shutting down, turning off what you don’t really need (it remembers more than you do about the practical process of death), and eventually you start to stagger. You stumble. You crash.

Your blood is oxygenated (you’re hyperventilating—the panic has set in, that wordless animal fear of death that gets its teeth in you), and it takes all your energy to move from where you have fallen to the copse of trees beside the road. They were bombed out once, but they’ve started to grow over, thin green branches breaking free of the corpse.

The lethargy comes on the heels of the panic, when your body has burned up the last of the adrenaline, and there’s no reserve of strength; now there’s nothing left for you to do but drop dead.

Your body temperature sinks. This effect is worse if you’re bleeding, and it comes faster; the body can’t compensate for the sudden lack of circulation, and if you ever bleed to death, your last real memory is one of pain and cold.

Then the dementia sets in, and things get worse.

You forget where you are. You think it’s spring. You have not run from a city full of soldiers and liars and left your ringmaster behind. You have never even seen a circus. You are on patrol, resting by this tree until your watch is up. You are a child, hiding in already-bombed buildings where the soldiers will be less likely to look for you. Something cold and metal is resting against your leg—a pipe from the broken building, maybe. Your rifle.

(Your leg, you think, struggling for consciousness, it’s just your leg and the metal is inside, but that’s worse, that’s dementia creeping in; who has metal bones?)

You run along the edge of the opera house roof over and over again, too frightened to jump, knowing it’s too far to run, knowing that if you jump you’ll fall short, and you need your other eye. You race around the cupola, with the bells strapped into cages so they don’t make a sound, enormous birds with their wings folded, and how can you leave Boss here, how can you leave her?

But you jump, and after that, you don’t remember what happens to you.

It’s night when you open your eyes, so it must have been hours (you’re resting), and the cold has set in (is it winter?), and the shadows are rising up to meet you.

(When Boss laid you on the metal table the first time, you felt all the corner shadows sinking lower, pulling greedily at you, and you looked at her, marveling and fiercely certain. Unafraid.

“I wonder what you did to get this kind of power,” you said, a compliment, just before all the light in the world was snuffed out.)

You were cold, then, too. You wonder if you have ever been warm since.

This is what happens when you are about to die:

You only dreamed that you were resting.

You are still running, staggering along behind trees and bushes near the road, and if it weren’t a moonless night you’d have been spotted by one of the soldiers sent on rounds to find you.

You want to give up—you
want
to rest, you want it to be over—but you can’t. Fighting is too old a habit. You drag one foot in front of the other, fumbling, shoving yourself up again with one hand, bloody as the rest of you. (You used to slice through the air.)

You will keep moving forward until your ankle groans and snaps, until the last of your blood is drained, until your lungs give out, until you fall into the dirt and the worms start work.

Then you are in someone’s arms—you’re taken, the soldiers have found you, after all this you will die a prisoner—and you lash out to slice his neck (you still have the knife in your hand, old habits are hard to break, you can’t rest, you keep fighting), but you’re being caught up carefully, cradled too close to do harm, and you know how this feels; this is home.

“Bird,” he says, and his voice cuts through you, “Bird, stop.” (You’re surprised you recognize the name.)

You think, He knows my name; you think, I must have had a friend.

(You’ve been this way before, you remember; this is the second time you’ve died and he has carried your body home.)

Home is the tent; home is the workshop with the wide table, with your mother’s hands sewing her up again.

Your mother. You made a promise.

“Find George,” you say. You don’t remember what it means; it doesn’t matter any more.

He lifts you closer; his skin is burning hot and you close your eyes, press your face to his throat (your eyelid is about to freeze). Your hand is pressed tight between your lungs and his.

He hasn’t taken your knife away; your fist is still closed tight around it. If you turned your wrist an inch you could slide the blade into his heart.

Your friend runs carefully, wherever he’s taking you; the darkness swallows you whole, and after that you don’t feel a thing.

63.

As soon as the truck stopped Ying had the doors open (she was cold all over, she knew something was wrong), and she jumped down to the ground, ran around the back of the truck, and watched Stenos jump from the driver’s seat and run into the dark like the wolves were after him.

The truck’s working headlight shone out feebly into nothing—Stenos appeared in the light for only a moment before he disappeared—and she couldn’t imagine what he had seen. Had he lost his mind? How close were they to the city by now?

(Oh god, she thought, if we’re close to the wall, don’t let the soldiers see you, Stenos, please.)

It was pitch black and moonless, and he had to have been as blind as the rest of them. There was no telling where on earth he thought he was running to.

“I’ll give him one minute before we go on without him,” called Barbaro from the front cab. Ying didn’t believe he’d give Stenos the full minute, but still she started counting.

After seventy-eight seconds Stenos reappeared in the sputtering light, running with a sack of rags in his arms that Ying realized after too long was Bird.

“Clear off the table,” she said, only it came out as a shout, nearly a scream.

She heard Barbaro shoving his way over into the driver’s seat, and as soon as Stenos had passed the headlight Barbaro was gunning the engine.

(Where were they going? Where could they go?)

Out of habit Ying followed Stenos when he ran past, jumped up after him, closed the door like the troupe was being run out of town and she was the last aerialist in.

(She never had been; Elena always went last, to make sure the rest of them got inside.)

Ayar was dumping the sacks of tools and the tinned food onto the nearest bunk to make room on the table, shouting something at Barbaro that Ying didn’t hear. He had to bend over almost double just to be level with the cab window.

Stenos slid Bird’s body onto the table, and Ayar frowned for a moment before recognition hit and he sucked in a hissing, doubting, “No.”

Ying would have answered him, but when she opened her mouth her throat was too dry.

In the light of their two oil lamps Bird looked even worse than she must have looked in the dark, because Stenos’s face was hard-set, and after he set Bird down he gripped the table on each side of her as if she would fall apart as soon as he took his arms away.

“Where am I going?” called back Barbaro, even though he was already driving forward, closer to the city.

Stenos grit his teeth. “Back to the circus.”

“What?” Ayar shook his head. “Boss is still in the city—”

“Back to the circus,” Stenos said, as if Ayar hadn’t spoken. “She’s going to die if we don’t help her.”

“How can we help her?” Ying stepped closer, peering at the blood-soaked bandages. “These are wounds only Boss can heal.” She tried to smooth away some of the worst of the muck. “I can’t even tell where she’s hurt,” she said to Stenos, half a question. “There’s blood everywhere.”

Ayar moved to Bird’s ankle. “She was shot in the leg, we know that much for sure,” he said, taking hold of her foot to look for it. Then he saw it and stopped short, stared at the wound.

Brio glanced over, and then looked quickly away. He slid around Ayar in the cramped trailer and dropped to his knees, rummaging through the supplies—for water, Ying hoped. They couldn’t even see where to help her with all this dirt on her.

How could Stenos possibly have seen her, camouflaged like this, moving in the dark?

(Bird’s glass eye had reflected the light. Ying never guesses.)

Ayar set Bird’s foot down, but Ying didn’t go any closer. She knew better than to look at an open wound that had been left untreated for that long. (She had been young when she joined the Circus, but she had still been a soldier.)

She stayed where she was and kept her hands on Bird’s bandaged arm, squeezing the wet cloth under her fingers, stanching any blood there was left to stanch.

In the silence, Barbaro glanced back through the open window. “Well? Where are we going?”

Stenos said, “We have to find George.”

Ying frowned, but she didn’t want to ask, because Bird had to get somewhere, anywhere, where they could try to hold off death long enough for someone to help. If it was George and the circus, then let it be George.

But what about Boss? What if Boss was inside the city walls, injured like this, and she came out at last to look for them?

The blood was everywhere, crusted over; it looked like Bird’s skin had been painted purple.

Ayar and Stenos and Brio and Barbaro crowded the window, shouting one another down, fighting for the circus, fighting to stay. Ying watched Bird’s shallow breaths; she hoped Bird wanted to come back.

(Elena’s words still echoed in Ying’s stomach; it was what Ying had been most afraid of, when she was young and alive, that death would be comforting, and then she would have to be woken.

George had gripped his arm when Elena was talking about it, jerking back, as if someone had scorched him and he was favoring the wound.)

As if someone had scorched him.

Ying looked down at Bird, who had escaped from the city. Surely she would have gone to Boss first, to get her out of the city, and Boss would have seen Bird’s wounds—if Boss had told her to get to George, then there must have been a reason. What did Boss know that no one else knew?

And where was Boss? How close were they to the city—if Boss was still in the city at all? What if Bird had gotten her out—what if Boss was out here in the dark, bleeding and stumbling along the road, looking for them?

Ying had left people behind, in her other life. It was the worst thing you could do.

“Ying?”

When she looked up, Ayar was looking at her. They were all looking at her, except Stenos, whose gaze kept dropping to Bird. Bird was unconscious now, her lips drawn back with pain, teeth gleaming like an animal’s mouth.

The Grimaldis were looking at Ying like she was a nuisance, but Ayar was looking at her the way he had when she first walked into the tent all those years ago and asked to try out—he was willing to be impressed as long as she was willing to fight.

“We’re split,” Ayar said. “Two of us want to go back. Two want to stay. What’s your vote?”

Bird sucked in a ragged breath (wet, like the blood was seeping all through her), and Stenos flinched like she’d hit him.

It was the third time in her life that Ying had had the power to decide. The first time brought her to the circus, and the second time brought her the bones. She never knew if she had chosen right; there was no way to ever really know.

Ying’s hands were steady on Bird’s arm, and cold blood pooled between her fingers.

She said, “We stay.”

She didn’t look at Stenos (she couldn’t), but she looked at Ayar, went on before she lost her nerve. “We’ll take care of Bird here, but we can’t leave Boss. We aren’t leaving anyone behind.”

That was the worst thing you could do.

Ayar said, “All right,” in a way that Ying recognized as approval. Then he went on, “Barbaro, park this under those trees for tonight. Brio, Ying, start cleaning Bird up, do what you can for her. Stenos, you and I stand watch. Maybe Boss is out here, too. We’ll move on at dawn.”

Barbaro threw the truck into gear and started the crawl along the road to shelter.

“I’d rather be here,” said Stenos, quietly. He hadn’t looked away from Bird.

Ayar looked at him, over at the brothers. “Brio,” he said, “you and I take watch.”

Brio slid around the table, grabbed a pair of wrenches from one of the bunks, and opened the trailer door.

“Let us know if you find water,” Ying said. She didn’t add,
So we can find her under the blood-and-dirt coat.
It was too much like something Elena would say.

(All her life Ying had assumed Elena was naturally cruel. She wondered now if cruelty just crept up on you when the world was crashing down and there was nothing else to do but fight.)

Brio looked back at her and smiled thinly, like he’d heard what she wasn’t saying. Then Ayar was moving in front of her, and then the door was closing behind them, and she and Stenos were alone in the trailer’s cabin.

(The smell of copper was everywhere; it was worse than in the workshop when Ying had been made.)

Stenos yanked the sheet off his bunk and tore it absently into strips, and then he bent to his work, dragging the fabric gently along Bird’s arms and legs, wiping away the first layers of grime and exposing the skin underneath. He frowned at Bird like she had tricked him into it, moving along the planes of her body with the ease of long familiarity.

(Ying understood. She hated Elena, but after all this time with the circus Ying could tell without looking how much longer Elena’s middle finger was than her first finger, which set of arches was hers in a long line of the aerialists’ pointed feet. It was strange, how much you found you knew.)

Stenos never looked up—he seemed to have forgotten she was even there—but when Ying slid her pocketknife along Bird’s shirt, he peeled back one half as she peeled back the other, and when Ying poured water from the canteen over Bird’s bare arms, Stenos lifted his hands from Bird’s skin for a moment so the water could do its work.

It was worse than Ying had thought, once they got the dirt off. All of the wounds were deeper and more ragged than they had seemed, and the blood still seeping, but Ying tore strips of cloth to bandage Bird up again and never retracted her vote. If Boss was out there in the darkness, they’d have to do the same for her, that was all.

(If Boss would even live through this much. If this much would even bother Boss. No one knew what Boss had done to live so long; whatever it was, Ying hoped it held.

Ying wondered how far the circus had gotten. Maybe it was the circus and not Boss that kept them all alive, and they were all well and strong, and it was Ying and her companions who were doomed.

Or if Boss was really their lifeline, Ying wondered if the circus had gone too far from Boss already and all her fellows had dropped dead, and now they were all waiting for these few of them to bring Boss home and raise them all up again; the dancing girls and the jugglers standing watch, all that was left of the living circus.)

“We can’t go,” she said. Her voice was startling in the quiet trailer.

“I know,” Stenos said, without looking up. “Get me a needle from the kit, and some thread. We need to sew up her arm.”

Stenos opened the glass bottle, and the smell of alcohol mingled with the penny stink from the copper and the greasy smell of the smoke. It was one thing too much, and Ying held her nose as Stenos bathed the wounds with cheap drink, and brought the lamp closer, and sewed Bird up like a come-apart doll.

When the stink and the smoke stung her to tears, Stenos said without looking, “Go rest your eyes,” which was the kindest thing she’d ever heard from him.

When she curled up in the top bunk it was less cold than she’d feared, from the lamp smoke that had gotten caught in the crannies. The sound of thread through skin (less disgusting once you got used to it) was steady, and as she fell asleep she thought how, if Bird survived, it might still be all right.

When she woke up the sun was rising, and they were gone.