Mechanique (20 page)

Stenos crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you afraid I’ll finally equal you?”

The trailer went silent. I looked down at Bird, whose eyes were closed, but there was a shallow rise and fall of her chest, so she was listening, she was holding on.

(I didn’t know why I had looked down at her in that moment; I didn’t yet know how quickly you became connected to your children; how, whenever they sorrowed, your heart ached.

Poor Boss.)

Finally Elena said to him, more tenderly than I’d ever heard her, “No, you fool. The wings are made of bone; when you get them you’re strapping yourself to the dead.”

Now she was looking at Bird, looking finally at me. “It drove Alec mad,” she said, and it was like I had swallowed a stone, so I knew it was true.

“I’ve never minded the dead,” said Bird. “I only want to be free of the ground.”

Elena lunged for her; then she was locked in the cage of Stenos’s arms, still reaching for Bird, fingers straining at the air.

“Don’t you understand?” she said, her voice rising. “I dropped you to spare you the wings!”

In two steps Stenos had her at the door to the workshop; then he was letting go of her (no, he was throwing her), and she unfurled in the air and landed lightly on the balls of her feet, her face alight. Stenos leapt down the stairs after her. Past the doorway the others were gathering, one at a time wandering into the thin circles of light coming from the open trailer doors.

“How could you?” he was shouting, the words carrying like a bell. He advanced on her. With each step he took she moved, weightless, just out of his reach.

“Boss doesn’t give favors she can’t control,” Elena said.

He lunged, she moved; a moment later, her shadow followed.

“She learned her lesson with Alec,” Elena said. “You don’t know what the wings do to you, you never saw Alec at the end. Bird would have stayed on that trapeze, until wanting the wings drove her to do what Alec did. At least when I dropped her she survived.”

“But she still wants the wings!” Stenos spat. “It’s all she wants!”

Elena’s face was a mask of grief. “I did what I could. I can’t help it if people are fools.”

“And what about me?”

Elena flinched, glanced around at the gathering crowd before she turned back to Stenos. She fixed him with a glare she must have summoned from the grave.

“I’d never have looked at you,” she said, “if I’d known it would come to this.”

I was watching, rapt (the faces I could see were silent, too, and fixed on Elena), and it startled me when Bird said my name, softly. She was struggling to sit up, her legs dangling off the edge of the workshop table; she was watching them argue, too.

“Close the door,” she said. “It won’t take long.”

I did, and when we were alone she said, “You have to decide. Now.”

“Or what?” I said. It was supposed to come out bold, but instead it sounded like the truth, which was me scared to death and not knowing what to do.

“No one else will go back for Boss,” Bird said. “I will.”

“Stenos would.”

She smiled thinly. “Stenos left her to bring me back to you. You’re so sure he’d go back for her, once he had what he wanted?”

With Stenos there was no telling (he had been a thief first; thieves did as they pleased).

“Elena says they’ll make you mad,” I tried. “That’s why Boss never gave them to anyone after Alec.”

Bird shrugged, winced at the exertion. “I don’t think I can get any madder,” she said.

I bit back a smile.

Outside, Jonah was calling out to Stenos not to be stupid. I wondered what was happening (whatever it was, I was afraid of it), but under Bird’s eye I was rooted in place, being dragged into making a choice that would ruin someone. (Only one, if I was lucky. If I wasn’t, who knew how bad it would get.)

Bird lay back on the table, turned her head to look at the buckled wings on the butcher’s hook. Their edges caught the lamplight, little winks of bronze and gold, and even I had to admit they were beautiful.

“I knew they were here before I ever came to Tresaulti.” She closed her eye. “As soon as I saw them, I knew what they were,” she said, so quiet I could hardly hear.

My arm ached to help her. I reached out without thinking and rested one hand on her forehand, one on her chest.

I felt like the earth was tilting, that I was being swallowed up, that there was nothing around us but the darkness and the void, and I realized I was being carried with her into death. I resisted, straining, begging her to fight it for my sake.

There was a sickening rush, and then we were back in the workshop. I was sweating from exertion. She was coughing up blood.

In my years at the circus (and by now I knew I’d been here longer than I had thought, that the circus had kept me young and hidden from time), I had only ever wanted a real place; a need—any need—that only I could fill.

Boss had given it to me as a parting gift. Now I had the choice to use it, or stay who I had been, Little George who relayed choices other people made.

(I had made my choice as soon as Bird opened her eyes under my hands and spoke, but sometimes you delay something that has no resolution. Even Boss had delayed this choice, and I had learned all her habits long ago; habits that old were hard to break.)

Finally I said, “Turn over,” and reached behind me for the wings.

66.

Outside the trailer in the dark, Elena danced out of the way of Stenos’s reach as he closed in on her. His face was grim, and he didn’t even seem to notice they weren’t alone—his eyes were fixed on her.

“I’ll kill you for what you did,” he said.

She said, “Go ahead if you want. It doesn’t take.”

The little assembly around them was still sleep-addled, but one or two of the performers were quicker to wake and realize what was happening, and they were glancing back and forth with sharp eyes.

“Stenos, welcome back,” called Jonah, jogging up to the circle. “And where’s Ayar? I had no idea you’d be back so soon.”

Stenos’s face went taut, and he glanced up at Jonah, didn’t answer.

Elena knew what that face meant, knew it as sharply as if she had been kicked; Stenos had played two sides against the middle. Ayar and Ying and the others didn’t even know he was gone. He had abandoned them all their first night, for Bird’s sake.

(That was the problem with softhearted people. No control.)

While Stenos was distracted, she took two running steps and leapt for the trailer. The wings weren’t affixed yet, the little silver thread had yet to pull at her, it wasn’t too late if she could only reach—

Stenos caught her out of thin air like she was no better than the javelin and locked her in his grip. He wasn’t metal, but in his anger he was a cage, and Elena twisted uselessly in his arms.

(She knew these arms so well; it was cruel.)

“Let me go,” she said. “She can’t have the wings.”

“You’ll kill her,” he said, quietly enough that the people around him couldn’t hear.

“I’ll kill
you
,” Elena said, wondered how hard she could push before she broke his back. “Don’t you want them? Won’t you help me?”

“I do,” he said, but it was like a man speaks in a dream—unsure, resigned.

“They’re yours by right,” she said, “you can’t give them up. Set me down and let’s stop this.”

For a moment there was hope, his eyes went sharp and narrow; but then came a metallic scrape from inside the workshop like a warning bell, and he looked mournfully at the trailer for a moment, then shook his head at the door, at Elena.

“It’s too late,” he said, and Elena watched him look around at her as if he was just now realizing the wings would never be his; that his dream was over.

(For a moment Elena’s heart betrayed her, and pitied him. Then she came to her senses and tried to use it to advantage. It was too late for anything else; she would use him until it was over.)

“Help me,” she said. “Let me go in and talk to George—he doesn’t understand what it means to have the bones, he could kill her, surely you don’t want her to die?”

(There was a knot in her stomach that she recognized; she must have been this way before, in some other life—desperate and powerless, losing ground against one bully or another, striking at anything she could see and hoping to draw blood.)

“Put me down, Stenos,” she said, and her face was hot, tears stinging the backs of her eyes, “you have to let me go, it’s my bones in the wings—I get a voice, I get a voice in what happens—George can’t just give them away to her like this, he doesn’t know what they do to you, Stenos, please, please.”

Her voice gave out at last; she gasped for air, pushed against him until his shoulder dislocated, hoping for mercy that never came.

(She didn’t say, Alec was a better man than you and even he was a coward at the end. She didn’t say, Alec was my brother, because no one else would understand.

She didn’t say, I reached for him when he fell, and he pulled his hand away from my hand, and for that I can never forgive him.)

For a moment Stenos was stunned, caught short by the idea of Elena’s bones wrapped up in the wings.

Elena felt the infinitesimal slack in his arms and took her moment—she twisted and pulled, doubled and stretched and tried to break out.

(From somewhere far away, Jonah made a quiet sound, like he was just now seeing that something was really the matter.)

She made it far enough out that he had to scrabble after her, drag her back against his chest by her ankle and one wrist to keep her from flying free of him—but Bird was the only thing Stenos couldn’t keep hold of if he wanted to, and he held fast against Elena even when her bones began to wail from the stretch.

He had pinned her leg up behind her, clasping the foot and the thigh so she couldn’t get leverage against him, and his other arm was around her chest, his hand cradling her neck. It was an impossible hold—she was trapped.

Her body was shaking now; from the strain, from anguish, from the cold and from being half-asleep, from knowing something terrible was happening ten feet away that Elena was powerless to stop.

(She had never promised Alec anything, not once from the first time he spoke to her, but she would have; if he had only asked her, she would have promised anything.

He had pulled his hand away from her reach as he fell beyond her help; in the split second she could see him, he was looking at her with sad eyes, already knowing she would never understand what he had done.

It wasn’t true.

When she had let go of Bird, in that long moment before the ground rose up to meet her, Bird had looked at Elena with something like gratitude.

How could you explain the relief of finally falling to anyone who didn’t love the air?)

When Elena gave up at last, Stenos sank to his knees with her (he was panting, she must have put up a long fight). When he cradled her head against his neck so the others wouldn’t see her tears she cried harder, pressed her fists to his shoulders to protest against this kindness from him, when it was already too late for anything.

When he rested his face against her face his breath warmed her skin; she had gone cold from sleep and from terror.

(She had loved him once, and now it was all over; it was cruel, it was cruel.)

67.

Jonah stood in the pockmarked circle surrounding Stenos and Elena, even after Elena had stopped fighting and the others had begun to wander away, in search of a quick bath or another hour of sleep.

Jonah was watching Stenos, frozen in place by his own frightened guesses about what had happened, and long after he wanted to be gone, he hadn’t moved. (He had to know what had happened to them. He would wait as long as it took for Stenos to answer.)

Shortly after the sun rose, so did Stenos, unfolding Elena from his arms and setting her carefully down on the grass. Elena looked grizzled and worn out from her fight, and Jonah wondered why she had been so hysterical about the wings, when there was no danger of anyone getting anything until Boss got back.

If Boss got back.

Elena wobbled as Stenos set her down; when he moved to help her, she knocked his hand away. The move threw her off-balance, and she went down on one knee, crashing onto her weak and bloodless leg, but she turned her back on Stenos and crawled away from him until she could stand enough to stagger, and all the way back to the aerialists’ trailer she didn’t look back at him.

(Jonah thought: It’s the worst thing in the world, to grow as heartless as Elena.)

Finally Jonah and Stenos were alone, and Jonah approached Stenos—carefully, it was never smart to surprise Stenos—and asked, “What happened? Where’s Ayar?”

“Alive, when I left him,” said Stenos, and with no more answer he walked back to the workshop trailer and posted himself like a guard on the stairs.

Jonah went cold all over; Stenos was hiding something awful from him. He approached and pressed on, “But is Ayar all right? Are they in danger without you? How did you get here by yourself?”

“Ayar’s still alive,” Stenos snapped, “which is more than Bird was when I made it here, all right, Jonah? Let me carry one corpse at a time.”

Oh, God. Jonah’s heart sank. Poor Bird, to have died after all that trouble.

Finally he said, “But you all got Bird out of the city, then?” Even that much would be good news; it would mean the city could be breached, which was more than Jonah believed was possible. (He had seen the capital city once, on a poster announcing the institution of a Chief Governor. The drawing had looked like a prison with a road slicing through it, not like a city at all, and Jonah had looked quickly at something else. It was always a shame to see a standing city used that way.)

“Bird got herself out of the city,” said Stenos, as if that would be obvious. “We met her on the road. It was already too late to save her. She died before I found you.”

Jonah thought about the extra miles they had driven, beside the river, too far away for Stenos to reach them in time.

Jonah didn’t dare ask any more about Boss with Stenos leveling that gaze on him. “I’m so sorry about Bird,” he said instead. He couldn’t imagine what that drive had been like for Stenos.

(Ayar would know better how Stenos felt. He had made a journey like that himself, once. Jonah was luckier; he didn’t remember a thing from the time the fever took him until he woke up on the workshop table with his clockwork bellows easing air into his lungs, and Boss standing over him to welcome him home and tell him not to stand around in the rain.)

Stenos said, “Save your grief for when we need it.”

Jonah frowned, wondered about the meaning, and finally turned from Stenos without another word. Stenos had always been odd, and Jonah had bigger problems; the whole camp now needed to reach a consensus about how far they could make it once the sun went down.

As he walked from trailer to trailer, taking the votes, he smiled and shook hands as always, but inwardly he was empty, faltering; behind his eyes flickered the image of Ayar and Ying and the others sitting in the little trailer he used to live in, looking like an old box with broken dolls inside, all of them lifeless and waiting for Stenos to come back.

The consensus in the camp was that they could clear another hundred miles overnight if it didn’t rain. Most of the crew seemed to hope for more, like they were making a push for the other side of the world and there was no time to lose.

But this time, he saw, there was a little more doubt that the day before, when they had been in the grip of panic. Now the crew peered at the horizon and snuck a glance at Stenos in front of the workshop trailer before they answered.

Spinto and Alto looked at one another and shrugged and said, “If that’s what the others say,” and Jonah wondered if the idea of someone bringing back their brothers’ corpses had cautioned them against too hasty a retreat.

The aerialists, who looked up in unison when he opened the trailer door, had no answer for him except determined, tight-jawed looks. When he said, “How far could you make it tonight, do you think?” they looked right through him for a long time before Penna finally said, “We’ll go as far as we have to.”

“Fine,” Jonah said, angry at them without knowing why (nothing today was the way it should be). “The crew thinks we can do another hundred miles if we don’t blow an engine along the line. We leave at sunset.”

Fatima followed him out to the trailer doorway, and she leaned in at the last moment and said, “Would we really go so far, so soon?”

That was a surprise. Jonah said, “Would you have us turn back instead?”

Fatima glanced back down the road. “No,” she said finally, and closed the door, but her face had been mournful, as if she had also seen a little box of broken toys. Maybe some of the girls of the trapeze were quietly changing their minds.

Jonah wanted to ask Little George what he thought, but Stenos was still standing guard, and Jonah figured George’s answer would not have changed, especially after dealing with Bird’s corpse. (What was he doing in there?)

Jonah had an image of George pulling Bird’s bones from under her skin to save for later, and lost his appetite for breakfast.

By the time Joe was preparing the afternoon meal, Little George’s breakfast had gone untouched for so long that Big George and Big Tom finally took it. (You didn’t eat much once you had the bones, but there was still no point in letting a meal go to waste.)

Jonah usually ate with the crew, or with Ayar, but the crew was tense and silent, and Ayar was gone. He found an empty place by eating with the Grimaldi brothers, of all people. They must have been feeling the same loss, too, to make room for him outside their trailer. (A hole in a family circle must be swiftly closed; any open wounds were a weakness in this circus. Jonah knew that was why the crew had never welcomed Stenos back; it was why Stenos carried Bird with him even after she had died.)

“I’d like to know what George plans to do about this,” said Altissimo between bites. “I hope the graveman’s rites don’t turn his heart soft.”

“He’s not ringmaster,” said Alto. “He doesn’t get to make any plans.”

“So what do we do?” asked Spinto. “Do we just go on without one?”

They looked at one another, and even Jonah thought what a useless question that was. They were like a pack of squabbling dogs at the best of times, and no vote would hold sway for long. And worse, which Jonah didn’t dare say, there was no knowing how far they could even go on. He didn’t think the leash as short as Elena must think it, but it still worried him that one day they would go too far from Boss at last, and it would be his turn to fall dead to the ground.

“Depends how long we can even go on,” said Alto, as if he had read Jonah’s mind. (They must all be thinking it, Jonah thought. To anyone with the bones, the whole camp must sound like a ticking clock.)

“We need a ringmaster,” said Pizzicato.

“The new ringmaster should be Elena,” hooted Altissimo, and he elbowed Moto, who collapsed in laughter. After a moment, Spinto joined them, and after him, Pizzicato pretended to laugh, too.

Jonah noticed that Alto wasn’t laughing at all.

Jonah picked at his lunch so long that Moto finally gave up (“It won’t turn into something else, all right, Bellowsair? Give it over”) and scraped it out evenly in each of their tin plates.

There was nothing to do after the meal but wait until the sun set. Jonah hated being idle; he didn’t know what to do with himself when his hands weren’t busy setting something up or breaking it down again.

(Some of the crew hated it, and one day they would stand up and say, “I can’t unpack this circus one more time,” and they would wave him goodbye as they pulled over the crest of the hill down onto the road. Jonah understood. He could afford patience; for them the clock was always moving.)

Fatima found him as the sun was starting to sink behind the edges of the tallest spindles of the forest. Jonah was standing beside the tent truck, watching the door to the workshop; watching Stenos, who hadn’t moved from his post in all that time.

“If you want to go back,” she said, “some of us are with you.”

Jonah glanced over at her, and up (she was so tall, he always forgot; when she jumped from George to Tom she seemed no more than a ribbon in the air).

“Some of us?” he said, and smiled. “Have you changed your mind, Fatima?”

Her face was stony. “I come on behalf of some others,” she said, “so Elena will not know there is dissent.”

He understood that much. “And you speak only for them?”

She didn’t relent. “Ying was one of our best, but I will not walk into danger for anyone’s sake.”

“What about Boss? She made you.”

Fatima shook her head once. “Before I came to the circus,” she said, “I was a captive. I wished every moment that I was dead. When I got out—I can never feel that way again. Not for anyone’s sake.”

Her voice was hard and flat and seemed not her own, and for a moment Jonah could only nod. He had been dead so long that his human life, when he thought of it, felt like an uneasy dream. Jonah’s worst fear had been leaving Ayar behind when he succumbed to the fever, and nothing more than that. Jonah hadn’t thought that people’s first lives would carry over with them, would shape them at all.

(As soon as Fatima spoke, though, he knew it was true; he was still the same as he had been when he caught the fever, no braver and no sharper. Death had not changed him.)

He reached over without thinking and clasped Fatima’s hand, let go again before she had enough time even to look down.

“Keep going,” he said, “if you have to. As far away as you need.”

She watched him, her dark eyes unblinking, her posture guarded. “What will you do?”

He looked back at the workshop, imagined George carefully picking out the little finger bones that Boss rolled in her bare hands, which she pressed into shape against the edge of the table.

It could take George all night to be finished with Bird, if that’s what he was doing to her. They couldn’t move until then.

“It all depends,” Jonah said finally, and shrugged. “We’ll have to see what happens when the door opens.”