Mechanique (19 page)

64.

This is what Ayar has forgotten about Stenos:

Stenos can acquiesce to you without giving in.

When Stenos agrees to something, it’s because it’s the politic thing to do. It’s a way to buy time until he can decide what he really believes.

(Boss knew this. It was why she handed Bird to him and gave him his orders, all those years back, without asking him a thing.)

He’s seen what happens when he puts up an open fight (locked inside this same trailer like a child, Ayar keeping watch outside). When you put up a fight you risk being outnumbered. It’s no way to get anything done.

So when Ayar declares the vote, Stenos nods, acquiesces. When Stenos and Ying are alone, he goes to work on Bird’s body, and says nothing against the plan they have to stay and sew Bird up so she looks respectable when she dies in the morning.

His hands are steady as he sews up the wounds, until he reaches her shoulders. The water has pooled between Bird’s collarbones. He can see himself in the reflection, trembling whenever she breathes.

He turns her onto her stomach faster than he means to. He’s glad Barbaro and Ying are sleeping; there’s no one to see him and worry.

When Brio and Ayar come back and Ayar names Barbaro and Stenos as the next watch, Stenos says, “Of course.” (It’s a way to buy time.)

Stenos goes out with Barbaro until the night has parted them and swallowed them up. Then he comes back, slips into the trailer, carries Bird to the cab of the truck. Ayar is asleep, caught in some nightmare, and doesn’t even open his eyes. (Why should he? Everyone in his party has agreed.)

Stenos has wrapped her in his own shirt (it’s all they had to dress her in), but she’s bandaged in so much sheeting that it might as well be clothes, and she doesn’t shiver in the cold.

(He knows why they’re all staying—for Boss, if Boss lives. He knows. But for him, now, it doesn’t matter. He hates Bird, but he can’t let her die on his watch; not twice.

He has, in the last day, thought a lot about that long night holding her, pressing his open lips to her bloody mouth to force air in. He had figured it was a close call to get her into the workshop before she died.

He is guessing, now, that death in the circus is not what he used to think it was. It’s the reason he can leave—Boss is too clever to die before they get there, too clever to give away what anyone wants so long as she has any leverage.

Boss sent Bird away so there was one less thing to hold against her, Stenos knows.)

The trailer hitch comes off without a sound, and if you put the truck into an open gear, it rolls a hundred feet before you ever have to turn it on.

This is what Ayar has forgotten about Stenos:

Before he was a circus man, he was a thief.

65.

The truck drivers were terrified enough to floor it all the way down the main road. We made such good time that we hit the river before nightfall, and we followed the current for miles before it was dark enough for us to pull over for the night.

I hadn’t wanted to go those last ten, and even though nothing had happened, I still walked the line as soon as the engines were off, like we were dragging a demon that no one else could see.

But I went up and down the rows (we parked like soldiers in rank, so that in case of trouble four trucks could be gone before the misfortune had really set on us), and everything was quiet, and I got all the way to the aerialists’ trailer, and still nothing was wrong. It was just a cool night outside, and inside me was the rattling sense of having gone faster than you wanted to from a place you hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place.

(Homesickness, Boss calls it. It happens, sometimes. You get used to it.)

Elena had me by the collar before I knew she was even out of the trailer.

“Was that Ying driving away with the other walking dead?”

I mule-kicked behind me and got her shin; when she let go I danced out of the way, twisted to face her.

“I’m not a jailer,” I hissed, “and Ying knows her own mind.”

Elena snorted. “What little of it there is, apparently.”

“Do you think I wanted her to go?” My voice carried. “But I can’t keep her prisoner! I’m not a tyrant!”

“Not yet,” she said.

It was bait, that was all. She was just looking for a rise. I straightened up, pulled on my clothes to settle them. “Well,” I said, “put in your name as ringmaster. Then you can be the big tyrant, and that’ll show me.”

“I prefer to be a little tyrant,” she said. “They get away with more.”

It was so true of Elena that I almost smiled before I remembered we were fighting. (Fighting with anyone in the circus got confusing; it was hard to come down cruelly on your brothers and sisters when you knew your turn was coming soon.)

“Something’s wrong with the camp,” I said instead. “Do you feel it?”

She looked across the trucks and half-closed her eyes, listening like the engines could tell her something.

“We should never have let them stay,” she said after a moment. “The place is going to fall apart at the seams now that people have the idea they can leave. It’s a house of cards tonight. Try not to make too big a fool of yourself trying to hold us all together, all right, George?”

I rolled my eyes. I didn’t know why I bothered asking her anything. “I’ll think twice before I pitch the tent and order a command performance for the fish, how’s that?”

As I was turning to go she said, “We went an extra leg after we hit the river. We’re too far for them to reach us before morning. That’s what’s wrong.”

I walked back to my trailer feeling like my pockets had been stuffed with stones.

I woke up to Stenos with his hand over my mouth.

If I had even thought to fight (and there was no fighting Stenos unless you had metal ribs), I gave it up when I saw his face. He looked like I felt.

When he saw I wouldn’t raise the alarm, he sat back on the bed, balanced on the balls of his feet at the edge of the footboard. In the dark (the last of the dark, it was almost morning, we were too far for him to reach us before dawn) he was little more than a silhouette with two gleaming eyes. He seemed to have grown; his shadow on the wall was twice as large as he was, as if his purpose had made him grander than before.

“I’ve brought Bird,” he said quietly. “She’s dead. Two hours ago.”

My heart seized.

“Boss told her to look for you as she escaped,” Stenos said, watching my face. “Can you help her? Is that why Boss told her that?”

The griffin on my arm felt like a second skin.

“I can try,” I said. “But I can’t—I don’t even know what Boss gave me. I don’t know what to do.”

“Try, then,” Stenos said, and I had never heard such a warning.

I knew I couldn’t do it. I prayed Stenos wouldn’t kill me when I failed.

Stenos stood up and motioned me outside. The camp was quiet, the river louder than any of the noises from inside the trailers, and I wondered how late it must be that everyone was finally asleep.

I looked around for Bird, but when I turned behind me to ask what had happened to her, Stenos was walking down the stairs, and I saw that what I had thought was his shadow behind him was only Bird, draped over his shoulders.

He had folded her legs under one of his arms, and her head was tucked between his shoulder and his neck, as if she had for a moment gotten shy. One arm hung down Stenos’s back. She looked like a lash of crooked branches on its way to the fire. But it was the limp fingers (the nails crusted with dirt) that terrified me.

(Poor Bird, I thought, wondering what she must have done to get out from behind the city walls. Then, going cold to the bones, I thought—Poor Boss, who must still be behind them.)

“Follow me,” I said, and turned for the workshop.

The inside of the workshop smelled like metal and earth and the patchwork of perfume oils that Boss used whenever we could come by them, and for a moment I was five years old again, skittering along the floor of the workshop between the table legs, plucking up the screws and nails that had rattled loose during the day.

I turned on the little generator and clicked on the nearest table lamp. The light was harsh and hopeless; I wished for a lantern, as if soft light would make any of this easier.

Stenos laid Bird down along the table, and I looked at her face (one closed eye, the blue glass one staring up at nothing), and all the bandages pulled tight around her and stained with red, and felt sick.

“What happened to her?”

“Some of it was from running,” Stenos said. Then he fell silent, which meant that the rest of her wounds were from the government man cutting her open to see how she worked.

I close my eyes. The griffin burned. I hoped it was a good sign; did it wake up to help or to warn?

The air got thick, as if there was an electric current just under the table, like Bird’s body was made of a million filaments and I had magnets in my hands. I held my palms a few inches above Bird’s body, hovering back and forth, trying to follow the feeling, to find whatever I could draw to myself.

I thought about the first time I had seen Bird walking up the hill to the camp, how she had come out of the tent with powdered hands, how her gaze had never wavered.

From under my hands, Bird croaked, “Give me the wings.”

I jumped and yanked back my hands. I’d done it. I’d done it, I’d woken the dead, Boss hadn’t warned me—I couldn’t breathe, I clenched my fists to my chest. I didn’t feel any different, I didn’t know what I had done.

(Later, I knew what I had done would fix me tighter and tighter to the circus, that by passing my hands over her and using what power Boss had lent me, I had turned the lock but good.

But even if she had told me what it would mean to use the power, even if she had warned me not to act, how could I have held back, looking at Bird laid out on the table, knowing she would go into the ground if I did nothing?)

Stenos startled at the sound of Bird’s voice, and for a moment he moved forward, reaching for her like he was going to embrace her. (I didn’t understand him.) Then her words must have hit home, because his face clouded over, and he looked at me.

“You’re not ringmaster yet,” he said. “That’s not your call to make. Boss hasn’t decided. Don’t you try.”

“I need them,” Bird said. Her voice was dry and cracked, like she’d been dead a week and her lungs were dusty. “He’ll put her in the bell cages, there’s no other way to reach her, no one can jump that far . . . ” She wheezed.

I wanted to believe it was just a fever speaking, but Bird didn’t sound hysterical, and by the desperate, cunning look on Stenos’s face, he didn’t think she was speaking nonsense, either.

“Anyone with the wings could do the same,” Stenos pointed out, as if I was going to argue with him, as if he wanted as quickly as possible to seem reasonable.

(He was very good at sounding reasonable. Not a lot of fools lived to his age.)

Most things in the circus were unfair; I wasn’t stupid enough to have missed that. Everyone got an equal shot at performing if they passed their auditions and sat quietly for the bones, but more than that was up to luck. If you ended up under Elena then you would never hear a kind word again, and there was nothing you could do about it. Everyone got their chance to perform, sometimes with the person they hated most in the world (even Stenos, especially Stenos).

And some people had stayed human and handsome and still got to star under the circus lights, and meanwhile their partners got mangled this way and that way with nothing to show for it.

Stenos was looking back and forth, from Bird’s bone-white face to the wings strapped up and hanging from a butcher’s hook just at the edge of the light, like he was gauging the distance, like he was going to beat her to them if she lunged.

(He might have beat her to them, but if she had found the strength to reach for them, I’d have stopped him in his tracks if he followed.)

(Why anyone would want the wings, I never understood. Even Alec must have hated them by the end; he jumped from the trestle just to get away.)

“It’s not complete,” I said. Stenos wasn’t the only one who knew how to spin a convincing lie. “She’s only back for a little while. I have to concentrate if I’m going to help her. You’ll see her when I’ve finished.”

He took a step closer—looking at her, not at me. “You’ll leave us the moment you get them, won’t you?”

Bird opened her eye, focused it on him. “How could I leave such pleasant company?”

I stifled a laugh, tried to concentrate on the feeling of pulling her back into her body. I held a hand out over her heart and she twitched.

He said, “You can’t give them away. I’ve been waiting for them.”

Bird said, “Don’t wake me up again without them. If you’re going to give them to him, just let me go. I’ve had enough of life on the ground.”

“Stop that,” Stenos said through clenched teeth, but he didn’t back down from his claim.

Never had I needed so much to know Boss’s mind. Which one was she saving the wings for? Had she ever saved the wings for someone, or were they the memorial of Alec she could carry with her?

(She had probably lied to them both just to keep them in line; it felt the most like what she would do.)

“Bird,” I said, “don’t make me decide.”

She slid her good eye to look at me askance. “Boss told me to find you,” she said. “If you won’t decide, who will?”

“Boss,” I said. “She’ll find a way out. She’ll meet us here, and then she’ll decide.”

Slowly, once, Bird shook her head, then sighed like it was too hard, like it didn’t matter.

“The wings are not part of this,” Stenos insisted.

“Did you bring her all the way back here just to have this little fight?” I asked.

Stenos closed his mouth over his words, paused like he was deciding why he had brought her back. On the table, Bird was looking from one of us to the other, the one dark eye sliding back and forth.

I felt her slipping away from me suddenly, like the tide going out, sliding away from my power and back into the dark.

“She’s dying,” I said, like Stenos could help me. I grabbed at her leg, at her arm, looking for any connection I could force. I didn’t know what to do or how to do it; I hated Boss for putting me here.

The helplessness pressed on my lungs, I was desperate for answers—answers to anything, from anyone—and I said to Bird, “You, you, the wings are yours.”

(I meant it, but I would have said anything to bring her back into my care. If I couldn’t look out for them all now, who could?)

I felt her again, as if a coat of dust over her was being slowly brushed away—I closed my eyes and tried to grab at anything I could to keep her there.

The door to the workshop burst open.

Elena stood in the doorway, a thin metal poker held like a javelin in one hand, and without hesitating she launched it.

I was the first silhouette, I guess, because that’s where she aimed it. She had a steady hand—I wondered wildly if Boss’s power worked if I tried it on myself to keep from dying of a javelin wound.

Stenos reached out a hand and plucked the poker casually from the air, so fast I didn’t see it—just the glint of the metal, then Stenos standing with his fist closed around it.

Elena looked at Stenos, and after a long moment of pleased surprise at seeing him, she looked at me, and noticed Bird.

She went pale. Then her javelin hand dropped. Then finally she murmured, “Oh my god.”

“Quiet,” Stenos snapped. “She’s alive. George is working on her.”

She rested one hand on the doorway. “And what can George do, except clean up afterwards?”

“He brought her back from the dead,” said Stenos.

Elena looked at me with wide eyes. I’d seen her surprised more often in the last two minutes than in the last several years—I had thought she had moved beyond caring what other people did.

At last she managed, “You have the griffin? That’s what Boss gave you?”

It pressed against the skin like it was trying to break loose and meet her; I clasped my arm and glared at Elena, which was all the proof she needed.

“Nice of you to bring Bird’s carcass back just to satisfy your curiosity,” she said, looking at Stenos.

He glanced over at her, and for a moment the two of them shared some silent conversation that passed me by. I didn’t want to know what it was. I couldn’t risk Stenos arguing about the wings again.

Finally I said, “Go outside.”

Stenos said, “But the wings—”

“It’s not your decision,” I said. My voice echoed in the workshop. “They go to the person with the greater need. They’re Bird’s.”

Elena looked from Stenos to me. “No,” she said. She stepped closer. Her eyes swallowed the light. “George, you can’t give her the wings.”

“They’re mine to give,” I said, “no matter what Stenos might have told you.”

“No,” she said to me, then paused, looked over her shoulder at Stenos. “No,” she said, softer. “You don’t want them. You don’t know what they do to you.”