Mechanique (21 page)

68.

The government man isn’t fool enough to leave a prisoner where others can find her. As soon as the report comes in that the man sent to relieve the prison guard found the poor idiot dead and the acrobat’s cell empty, the government man gives the order for Boss to be handcuffed and brought to him.

(He doesn’t know why he gives the order for her to be handcuffed when she has never been unwilling, and her cell was found as locked as ever, so he knew she hadn’t even tried to escape.

He doesn’t yet know that quietly, deeply, he is beginning to fear her.)

He meets her on the empty stage. He has brought two guards with him, and the two guards he sent down to the cells are flanking her. Her dress is torn a little at the hem from tripping much on rough stone, and the handcuffs have been shut too tightly.

She is looking out at the empty chairs, a wistful expression on her face as if she’s remembering better times (though he can’t imagine how). It’s a good trick, but he’s seen it before, and it can’t hide that she’s made her trembling hands into fists.

The sight of her this way does the government man a little good, and as he approaches her (not too close, one never knows with her) he gives her a smile, decides to skip the pleasantries.

“I think,” he says, “you had better tell me how you make your toys.”

She raises her eyebrows. “I’ll show you anything you’d like to know, Minister.”

The way she says it makes him wonder, but he only says, “You’ll have to demonstrate on someone soon, since our living specimen is gone.”

It’s her turn to smile. “Is she? Good for her.”

He ignores it. All prisoners scramble for hope near the end. “I need to know how, exactly, you make them. What do you put inside them that lets them move like they do?”

“You know the answer,” she says. “You cut her pretty well open before she flew away.”

For a moment his curiosity threatens to take over—he
needs
to know how the copper gets wrapped so tightly around the bones—if there are any bones at all under the metal—how many of these hollow bones there are. (Had there been a metal spine under that acrobat’s dull skin? If he had broken her in half to find out, would there have been nothing but a copper casing and a tangle of wires spilling out?)

But a good government man knows the wrong times to be curious, and now is not the situation in which he wants to be asking questions. It’s too public; they are too equal.

She needs to be forgotten for a while. She needs to be a little colder; a little closer to the grave. When he asks her again, he wants her unable to stand, blind from days of full sun. He wants her to beg to be allowed to tell him what he needs to know.

Winter is coming, but he can risk this gambit for a while; she can do her work with eight fingers just as well as with ten.

(You must break them utterly. He learned this lesson early; it is why he has survived so long.)

“Take her up to the bells,” he says.

The flicker of terror on her face as they take hold of her arms makes him feel as close to happiness as he has been since he went back to the circus, when he had been delighted to see the same performers, just before the acrobat turned that empty glass eye on him and it felt that he would never see a happy time again.

In the flush of his triumph, and wanting to close up a lingering doubt, he says, “When we find your friend, I’ll let you know.”

She watches him for a moment longer than he likes. Then she says, “Good hunting.”

He lets them drag her backstage, listens to the thump and clang as she’s shoved up the stairs. After the stairs will come the catwalk, then the ladder, and by the time she’s locked among the bells he hopes she’ll have been well repaid in bruises for her last answer to him.

He had been too curious, right at the end. It was his worst habit. He should have known by now when it wouldn’t pay to be curious.

(He doesn’t know that he is beginning to doubt.)

Outside the capitol building he glances up at the tower. The tower was built after the wars began as a lookout and a clarion for the soldiers defending the city, and the government man always imagines that the shadow it casts on the open square is somehow darker, newer than the rest. The bells and cages cut the light into filigree, and he wonders which of the shadows is Boss, trapped like a pigeon in the rafters.

But even as he thinks it, the government man feels a pang of pity. He trades in loyalty, and he would have bet his money that out of so many acrobats of her own making, there would have been more than one willing to come with her to the city gate.

He would not have thought that she would end up so alone.

69.

Four of Boss’s performers are in the rickety trailer parked among the trees, just off the road, and they wake up before it’s light.

Ying is first to open her eyes and see the empty table. After her first silent panic is over, she wakes Ayar and tells him what’s happened.

He’s quiet for a long time; then finally he stands (as much as he can stand in the little trailer, it’s never been the right size for him), and wakes Barbaro and Brio.

“We’re stranded,” he says. “Stenos took her in the truck. We need to decide what to do.”

He doesn’t say that they’re stranded until Stenos comes back, and none of them suggest he might; they can see where Stenos’s loyalties were, and it’s too late to hope for anything better.

“Fuck,” says Barbaro, “I wish I had a gun.”

“We can’t stay here,” says Brio. “It’s full daylight. We’re just asking to be killed.”

“We can’t go back,” Ayar says. “Boss is still prisoner.”

Barbaro snorts. “Where out here did you think we would be safe?”

“The city,” says Ying.

They look at her.

After a moment, Ayar says, “Go on.”

The hardest thing for them is not the wait for someone to drive down the main road (it takes almost until nightfall for a truck to drive past). Nor is it hard to beg for help—they were betrayed by their master, they say, and now only want to see the city (the truth is easy).

The man leans out of the cab, wary, but pulls no weapon. He looks over Ayar and Brio and Ying.

“What do you do?” he says.

“Labor,” says Ayar, as if there was anything else he could say, and Brio says, “Carpentry,” and when the driver looks at Ying, Ayar drapes his arm around her as if that explains why she’s on the road with them.

It does; the man raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t ask.

(“But you’re so young,” Ayar had said, and Barbaro said, “What else is a girl that age supposed to be, out on the road with two men?” and for a moment all of them were very quiet, and their human lives crept over them like smoke and filled the little trailer.)

After a long time, the driver shrugs and says, “We’ll see what the guards say. No going against them.”

They joke with each other as Ying and Brio take places in the back, sitting among the wooden boxes of fruit, and Ayar takes his place near the cab window, and the driver is laughing as he pulls away into the road.

He never sees Barbaro moving around them from behind Ayar’s trailer, wedging himself into the gap, eleven inches high, between the bottom of the truck and the top of his wheel bed.

(All of them were soldiers, first, and some habits come easy.)

The soldiers at the gate refuse them point-blank, and wait with their guns half-raised.

“There’s nothing in the whole city?” Ayar asks. “We have to find work somewhere. I’m a decent soldier, if you need one—are you looking?”

The soldier scowls and waves them off with the tip of his gun. “No standing around waiting for a ride, either,” he says. “Start walking, and keep walking.”

For a moment Ying hesitates, bracing to resist, but Ayar rests a hand on her shoulder hard enough to hurt.

“Where’s the nearest town?” he asks.

The soldier points west, and Ying and Brio and Ayar start down the path, as the truck driver waves them goodbye and drives past the gates and into the city to deliver his fruit.

“What will we do?” Brio asks.

Ayar says, “We wait until nightfall, find Barbaro, and climb.”

Ying walks beside Ayar, and says nothing (what can she say?), but she knows they have made a mistake; the worst thing you can do is leave someone behind.

Barbaro slides from the truck bed under the fruit seller’s table and stands up with an apple in his hand, as if he’d just knelt to retrieve it.

When he looks up, he’s standing in the shadow of the bell tower. For a moment he stops, the hair on the back of his neck rising, knowing that this is where they will find Boss. (You get a sense, after long enough, which buildings are prisons.)

He wanders the square for twenty minutes, watching soldiers weave in and out. There’s a narrow, shaded alley where some of them sneak off for cigarettes.

Barbaro decides that in a city with so many soldiers, there’s room for one more to go unnoticed. He’ll need a uniform, and then he’ll need to be on the gate at night, just in case the other three come looking for him.

(People Barbaro has killed: 89.)

70.

This is what happens when the workshop door opens:

It’s nearly sundown, but no one has yet moved for the cabs of the trucks. There are long looks and half-questions throughout the camp, but nothing has really been answered. Everyone is waiting to see what has happened inside.

Stenos, drained of his certainty by the grinding wait, has his head in his hands. A few times he has cast suspicious glances behind him at the workshop; once he ran up and banged on the door, but when there was no answer he didn’t break it down (everyone watching seemed surprised), only raked his fingers through his hair, took back his place, stared at the ground. No one knew what to make of it; no one came near.

(What Stenos hears all day is Bird’s little hisses of pain as George cuts and drills and makes way for the wings.

She cuts through him just by breathing.)

The sun sinks until it’s disappeared under the river with only a smear of orange left on the darkening sky, and even Jonah at last leaves his place, his head bowed. They can’t wait any longer for George to finish his work; they must keep going until they are free from the reach of the government man.

For a little while longer the camp is quiet, except for the creaks and rustles of people sitting down inside their trailers to wait, and Stenos feels as though he’s holding up the weight of the workshop on his back.

He’s lost in thought, and only looks up when Elena runs out from between the trailers and freezes like an animal in the open space, her gaze fixed on the workshop behind him, the heels of her hands pressed against her chest as if she’s been stabbed.

Only after Stenos sees Elena, after his heart has leapt into his throat at seeing her so panicked, does he hear the footsteps coming from inside.

He stands up and staggers away from the door. He has never been so afraid; whatever has happened in that workshop has ruined him, and he let it happen, and he feels for a moment like he does not exist, as if the sun has bleached him out and nothing, nothing remains.

The door opens, and Bird steps through the door and onto the top step.

She looks like herself again, Stenos thinks with relief.

(Later he will realize it was a stupid thought, since of course the wings were new and she looked utterly different, but when he is standing on the grass looking at her, he only sees that she seems, at last, as if she has no more troubles.)

He has never seen the wings before, except laced tight in the workshop, and for a moment he can’t move. They’re more amazing than he dreamed; in the last sunlight they seem to be orange and purple and gold, the edges of the feathers tinted deep blue by the night behind her, and even folded along her back he can hear soft notes as the breeze comes off the river and makes the feathers tremble.

Beside him, Elena makes a small, grieving sound.

But it all happens in a heartbeat, because by the time he sees that Bird has looked at him she has already spread the wings, she’s already in flight, and the music is carried on the wind as if from far away.

The camp hears the chord when she takes off, and all the performers who know what those notes mean run out, tripping on the stairs and shoving out the doors to get a look at her; they know better than to be joyful, they know what happens once you have the wings, but still they come, charging into the empty places and staring up at the sky.

Panadrome is the last of them to emerge. He stands on the stairs of Boss’s trailer, gripping the doorway with his mechanical hands, his eyes half-closed, his face turned up to the music.

(He had always hated that song a little, because of the man who played it; now he listens to the clear, sweet notes with a calm heart. The E flat is too shrill, but the rest of it is beautiful, beautiful.)

In the air, even with her shape, she looks more like a bird than Alec ever did, and almost every one of them looking up at her is already thinking of her that way, so deeply they don’t know it; she is no longer Bird, but The Bird, and some part of them all is thinking how odd it is that the bird should look nearly human.

Stenos is the only one of them not watching the wings; he’s watching Bird’s face. He sees that she is afraid of the music, and of the gathering crowd; she had wanted to disappear with the wings, he knows, not draw them all out for a show. He fights the urge to call out to her that it will be all right (what sympathy has he ever offered her, and why bother now with some lie?), and he feels his lungs will pound out of his chest from the pressure of the unsaid words.

(Elena is silent.)

From somewhere on the ground, someone calls, “Bird, come back!”

(It’s Little George; his voice is rough from a day of disuse, and he speaks with an authority no one recognizes as his, and he sounds like a stranger.)

Stenos, who has met this new George, only hates that George calls Bird home like she was a wayward child, and when Bird looks down Stenos shakes his head and thinks, Don’t, don’t, never come down.

She gives no answer; one of the wings glints orange for a moment as she changes direction in midair, so sharp and fast no one really sees it, and then she’s gone, the night falling over their vision like a curtain and her shape swallowed up by the black.

(Alec was not an acrobat, and learned the wings as a man learns a machine. She knows the wings as she knows the bars of the trapeze, and she has lived long enough in the air; already she has more mastery of the wings than Alec ever did.)

She seems to take the air with her, and everyone left looks from one to another in the sudden cold, seeking answers.

Finally Jonah says, “Where is she going?”

Elena says sharply, as if the words hurt her, “To find Boss.”

(She would know, thinks Stenos, and pities.)

A few of them look unsatisfied with the answer, like they suspect it’s a trick, but Stenos’s face must be more convincing, because no one argues.

It’s Panadrome who says with admiration, “So she’s keeping her promise to Boss,” and after a moment adds, “We should all be so lucky.”

Stenos and Elena look at George, whose eyes are fixed on the sky as if he can will her to come back. He has rolled up his sleeves for work, and the griffin’s legs are visible under the grimy cuff.

When he stops looking for Bird, Stenos watches George take in the picture of the camp, the shock at what he’s done, the feeling that everything is in the open at last. The crewmen frown and shrug at one another, not really understanding why it should be a worry that Boss had adopted George as one of her clan. But the performers with the bones go very still, as if the griffin has plucked some unknown string inside them.

(They have a ringmaster. They are a circus again. Anything, anything could happen now.)

George, standing in the doorway of the workshop and feeling under their stares like he’s the one who’s got the grafted bones, looks out over the camp at Big Tom and Big George, at the Grimaldis who are left, at the crew and the human jugglers, at the knot of aerialists who are standing as far from Elena as it’s possible to stand. He looks at Panadrome, whose face is empty of hope now that the circus can go as far as it likes without Boss.

Jonah says, “Are you our ringmaster?”

“Yes,” says George, though he sounds surprised at his own answer.

(Here, Panadrome closes his eyes.)

Stenos raises an eyebrow, asks, “Then, Ringmaster, where do we go?”

There is a flicker of terror on George’s face (which Stenos is happy to see, since it means he still has an ounce of sense), and then he looks at the road ahead of them, and behind them.

“Some of us are missing,” he says after a moment. “It can’t be up to a few. We all should put that right.”

Jonah, looking terrified but more relieved than George has ever seen, turns to the crowd. “We roll out now,” he calls, “everyone in the trucks, we are clocking a hundred miles before morning and there won’t be any rest when we get there!”

The crew runs for the engines, and the performers for their trailers, and after a moment Stenos and Elena are standing nearly alone on the grass. Elena is still watching the sky, and doesn’t seem to notice that everyone is leaving.

“Elena,” Stenos says finally, quietly. He steps forward to touch her; the look she gives him stops him in his tracks.

“I didn’t think I’d live so long,” she says. “The war was taking everyone, and I thought maybe with the bones I’d have a chance at a normal span.” She shakes her head.

“You won’t die,” he says.

“I don’t care,” she says, as if he’s taken his place as the fool now that George has gained some sense. “If we’re going, then we’re going.”

Elena’s profile slices the rising moon in his vision. He can’t speak.

“I can hear her,” Elena says. “She sounds so close; she’s so much a part of the wings.” A shudder runs down her back. “This is worse than Alec.”

“We have to go,” says Stenos.

“She won’t last,” Elena says.

She walks straight for the aerialist’s trailer, keeps her eyes on the ground.

Stenos stands on the grass a moment longer, checks the sky one last time.

Bird looked at him, he thinks; in that moment before she turned, she looked at him, and he regrets that he didn’t call her back to him. What if she had come? What if she hadn’t, and he had shouted her name into the wind for nothing?

He’s glad he didn’t call.

(The worst thing about Elena’s cruelty is knowing it’s true; it’s knowing Bird’s days are numbered.)