Mechanique (6 page)

22.

When they parade through the cities, Little George and the aerialists go first. (People are less likely to shoot at women and a kind-looking boy with brass legs.)

Next come the dancing girls, grinning and waving with bracelets jangling over their bare arms; they make sure that wary men will stop thinking of their guns.

Panadrome walks with them, playing lighthearted music with the one-armed accordion and the tinny brass keys, and the girls smile and pick up their skirts and wave their metal-gloved hands.

Next come Ayar and Jonah walking side by side (and here the men shrink back from the doorways, looking around for a weapon; there is nothing you can do to sweeten Ayar). The jugglers appear behind them, tossing clubs and knives back and forth.

(“Just in case they’re thinking of trying us,” says Boss, “let them know we have blade-throwers.”)

After the jugglers come Stenos and Bird. Stenos carries her sitting on his shoulder like a parrot, her good eye scanning the crowd, or she curls into herself, folded up like a sack of flour, and Stenos carries her tucked into the curve of one arm from one end of the city to the other. Her feet never touch ground.

Next come the Grimaldi brothers, who flip and twist and cause a commotion among the kids.

The parade ends with Boss in a painted wood throne on the smallest flatbed truck, which is apple-red and covered with banners proclaiming: C
IRCUS
T
RESAULTI.
Big George and Big Tom (their daytime metal arms the length of a normal man’s) are driving; Boss sits in her sequin cape, waving and calling out, “The show begins at sundown!” in that voice that carries over the roofs.

The trailers wait just outside the city center, on any road that can’t be gated shut. The rest of the crew drives the supply trucks along the back roads and parks outside the city, waiting to set up camp. If the performers walk out of the city limits, the crew starts to unload the tent. If the performers come out running from the city square, they leap into the trailers’ open doors and make a run for it. Boss, in her own truck already, will regroup with them outside gun range.

This is a habit learned from a close call; this is a rescue they still sometimes need. No matter how much time passes, there are some people who don’t like a crowd made of metal, no matter how much they smile.

23.

Stenos and Bird practice away from the others. Neither one of them likes closed spaces.

(Sometimes they practice in the rain rather than go inside the tent, her feet wrapped in canvas strips to give him something to hold on to.)

He kneels, his hand extended; she steps into his waiting palm. He lifts her with one hand, his fingers tight around the sole of her foot. She stands over his head, looking out over the circus yard, unconcerned. Her balance has always been perfect.

She did not slip from the trapeze.

Suddenly she bends in half, her head to her knees; he is almost late in raising his other hand, but he is never too late, and by the time her legs are straight above her in a handstand and she is pressing her hands into his palms, he has found his footing and does not tremble.

She splits her legs front and back, a line so straight you could rest a table on it. He holds the heels of his hands together and watches her.

(Sometimes, during practice, she will hold a position as long as she can, as if she can punish him by forcing him to bear her weight until he folds.

He waits for her. She must know it’s no trouble to him to carry her; she’s made of hollow bone. He can hold her as long as it takes.)

When she gives in, she shoves her arms apart; his arms follow hers, and in the open space she has created her body plummets toward the ground.

He braces himself and grips her wrists—not a sound out of him, never a finger out of place—and she jerks to a stop with her legs curled over her back like a shrimp’s tail, her face four inches from the ground.

She does this often.

He has never dropped her.

(She keeps hoping.)

He leans back, pulling her with him; as she rocks back up she opens her legs around his waist, presses her feet into his spine. Later, he will have two marks below his shoulders, angled out like wings.

He keeps hold of her right wrist as he wraps his left arm around her to keep her from sinking, his palm splayed over her sternum, his fingers just touching her throat.

His hand burns through to her bones.

24.

First, I loved Fatima.

I’d loved her since the moment she walked out of the workshop when I was just a boy. I worshipped her dark eyes, her brown skin, the way she rolled her feet heel-to-toe as she walked from the workshop to the tent, even though the first days of walking on the pipe-bones were never anything but agony and she must have wanted to faint. She was out to prove everything, and I loved her.

I was young.

Fatima never gave me the time of day. She spent most of her time in the air, practicing under Elena’s sharp eye, and she spent her time on the ground inside the trailer with the others, fighting whatever little battles a group of false siblings have. (The Grimaldis seldom fought that way, but then, they didn’t have to live with Elena.)

Ying didn’t like Fatima. “Too much like Elena,” she said, whispering—we were unloading the trapezes, and she was at the far end of the long bars.

“I think she’s beautiful,” I said.

Ying didn’t like her chances of being overheard, I guess, because she didn’t answer me.

Fatima came to us in better shape than most. The only scars on her were the small ones Boss makes when she’s putting in new bones: behind the knee, the small of the back, the top of the neck, the wrists. Back at the beginning, I thought Fatima must have had a pretty easy life until she came to us, to be without any scars.

I was young.

I was in love with Fatima for years before I got up the nerve to speak with her.

I waited outside the tent for her to leave practice; Elena walked ahead, and I ran to catch Fatima while she was alone (I would never speak in front of Elena). The words were out of my mouth before I could even greet her.

“I love you.”

Fatima looked over her shoulder, lowered her gaze from her full height down, down, down until she met my eyes.

“I’m sure you do,” she said, and while I was still blinking through her answer she had caught up with Elena and was out of hearing.

I thought she was being cruel. I found Barbaro and Focoso and nagged them for a real drink until they gave me one, and they toasted me for going above my station.

“A woman like her,” said Barbaro, “a woman like her . . . ” and when his words gave out he made a low, half-afraid whistle.

“A man must look to his own kind,” added Focoso, and nodded over at the mens’ trailer, where Ayar and Jonah lived together. “Don’t aim above your head, boy. Water finds its level.”

It wasn’t the kindest advice I ever got. I only took it because it came with drink, and the advice burned more than the gin.

Of course, like most unkind advice, it was correct, eventually, somehow.

I don’t speak much to her now. “Will it hold?” when she’s testing the lock on the trapeze. “Look out, it’s snowing,” when she leaves the tent in winter.

She’s as beautiful as ever, has hardly aged, but I long ago stopped thinking of her as mine, thank goodness. I see men on the road who do it, and it’s never pretty.

(“No one is anyone’s,” said Boss, when I told her, but it was a lie, and we both knew it. She had a pair of wings tied up in her workshop that gave her away.)

Fatima at least believed I loved her, which was more than I deserved.

I fell in love with Valeria when the knife thrower cut off her hair.

Something about her unconcern touched me as much as Fatima’s pride had done; when the knife sliced through the ponytail Sarah only blinked and sighed, as if she wasn’t looking forward to growing it back.

When Boss offered her a job, she changed her name to Valeria. She didn’t get less shy, but she seemed to open her eyes to the world once she was away from the knives and had a fresh name. She painted her short hair with bootblack and wove her lost locks into a thick braid of hair and ribbons that she tied to what was left of her ponytail.

Boss fashioned Valeria a shoe of brass and copper that fastened at the ankle—it was a pointed foot, so she limped when it was on, but it peeked out from her skirts and she looked like a clockwork coquette. It was a good effect even if, up close, she always smelled faintly of boots.

Not that I ever minded what she smelled like. She was sweet, and I was young—sixteen, by then, I thought. By then, I was the one with something to prove.

(I was not sixteen. The circus was making an enemy of time, but I was young, and blind, and all I saw was Valeria’s dark braid swinging as she walked.)

“I love you,” I told her. We were piled together in the canvas-haul truck, our feet dangling over the back. We were kissing, and I had one hand crushed against her hair. (It would take days to wash off all the bootblack.)

“All right,” she said, and kissed me.

“She loves me,” I told Ying.

She brushed the chalk off her hands and stood up from her squat. “Well, there you are,” she said.

I grinned. “Let those Grimaldis tease me now,” I said, and flexed my arms.

Ying smiled tightly. “Yes,” she said, “now they’ll just tease Valeria.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I frowned. “They wouldn’t do that to the woman I loved.”

“If you say so,” said Ying, examining her hands.

“Ying,” snapped Elena from up on the trapeze, “if you’re done gumming the sweat off your palms, we need to practice.”

A moment later Ying had vanished, and all I saw before she reappeared on the rigging were a few flour-white handprints on the support pole where she had pulled herself up into the sky.

Valeria left that year.

The dancing girls all leave; they come in and out like the tide. Sometimes they leave between one performance and another, if they find a cause to fight for or a job to hold down. Nobody blames them—no one is here because the work is easy—but it’s hard on Ayar when he steps into the ring and sees only three dancers waiting for him.

When Valeria left the circus, it was to become a baker in a civil-governed city that was still mostly standing. (Nice work if you can get it.) She kissed me goodbye.

She left her name behind. The next girl who joined up with us liked the sound of it when she saw the name taped on the bunk, and this new Valeria slid on the same skirts and strapped on the metal cast and took her place in the ring. She answered to Valeria for two years, until she went, too. (She found a man and married him; the only one I knew who left for love.)

The Grimaldi brothers said it was bad luck to take the name of the departed to start with.

“You should tell her where to get off,” said Altissimo, jerking his thumb at the other Valeria. I looked over. She was practicing with one of the other dancers (Malta, long gone), both laughing at how silly it looked to shake your hip and smile.

“Let it be,” I said.

It was the first time I had ever opposed them, and Moto and Barbaro exchanged glances.

“He loves this one, too,” Moto said, and Barbaro laughed.

I didn’t love her, never did, but I couldn’t find it in me to dislike the new Valeria; it was a pretty name for anyone, and she wasn’t the same girl. The new Valeria was sharp-witted and had rough hands from years of hauling ropes at one of the port cities. Sometimes she carried canvas with me, and we laughed about the rubes, but it wasn’t as though she replaced the Valeria I’d loved. It wasn’t as though I would see her silhouette in the window of the women’s trailer and mistake her for my Valeria.

“You worry too much about names,” I said.

Altissimo said, “You worry too little.”

When Bird fell, Ying came running out of the tent, stumbling and choking and calling for Boss to come and help, but she looked so guilty that instead of running inside to help Bird, I grabbed Ying’s hand.

“What happened?”

After a little pause Ying said, “She fell.”

She wasn’t a good liar. I frowned. “Like Alec?”

“No,” she said, shuddering, “no, no,” and when she started to cry I wrapped her in my arms—more to muffle the sound than anything.

I had never been so close to her before, so close to the chalk smell of her skin and the pulled-tight knot of black hair and the gold makeup that had started to run from her crying.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Boss will fix her.”

“I know,” said Ying, and then a fresh storm of tears.

I didn’t understand her. I held her closer.

25.

When the group of soldiers clears out, what’s left behind is a pair of glass mugs, and the girl.

Her black hair is cut close to her scalp, like all the soldiers, and her golden skin is sallow from hunger, but her dark eyes are sparkling.

She hops nimbly down the back of the scaffold and walks to the edge of the ring.

“I want to join you,” she says to the strongman.

She doesn’t say she wants to audition. It doesn’t occur to her that there can be a question of her merit. She knows she can do anything they ask of her. It’s a matter of routine. The thing Tresaulti has that she wants is a home.

(She’s an excellent soldier for shimmying through iron grates, but she has a tendency to hang behind when the fighting starts, like she’s not sure if the battle is worth it, and nobody has time for a hesitant soldier. She’s been passed around assignments more times than she can count, for not wanting to die.)

“I see,” says the strongman. “What for?”

“Trapeze,” she says.

From his position on the rig, one of the trapeze men grins and flexes his feet. “Want to step up, girly?”

She holds out an arm to the strongman.

He lifts her one-handed and deposits her onto the trapeze (“Name’s Big George”), who has laid out flat and made himself into a table again, a knot of immovable muscle; she is standing on his shins, arms behind her, wrists tight around his long brass arms for balance.

She pushes back and forth until she has the speed and height she needs; she is embarrassed at first to be standing on a living thing instead of a bar or a rope, until she looks over her shoulder and sees that George doesn’t seem to mind. He looks strangely content, smiling absently like any child on a swing. Then she pushes like she means it, her heels digging in for leverage.

She waits for the apex of the swing, lets go and jumps; she tucks in on herself once (touches her toes, then dives, her feet trailing like a comet’s tail), grabbing George’s feet just in time, letting her legs swing around and behind her as they soar backwards.

“Again,” she says, mostly to herself, already hooking her feet around his ankles so she can swing by her feet for the next jump.

The tent is quiet after that—just the creak of Big George’s hands against the rigging and the sound of skin on skin when she catches herself on his feet, and once on his shin, from underestimating the speed of the pendulum swing.

“Sorry,” she says.

Big George smiles and says, “I don’t even notice.”

A woman says, “How old are you?”

Ying looks up—she had been about to jump, but she stops at the last second, wrenching her shoulder to grab at George’s arm to steady herself.

“Fourteen,” she says. (It sounds old enough to do something like this, anyway.)

“Come down from there,” says the woman.

The strongman is standing at the far end of the tent, with the woman, and is making no move to help her. She glances up for a few seconds—then she shimmies up George’s arm, across the rigging to the support pole, slides quickly down. (She sees the strongman smiling; she must have done right.)

When Ying’s on the ground, the woman says, “I’ll take you to the aerialists’ trailer. Do you have anything?”

She’s wearing all she owns. She shakes her head.

The trailer looks like it’s been cobbled together from a dozen other trailers and nailed at the last second to a truck bed. It’s painted gold and green, and the windows have cheap shades in them. (That night, she sees the shades are just paper; when they’re on the road and they want to look out, they have to peel away the dingy tape first.)

The inside of the trailer has a small open area near the door, studded with tables and a few rickety chairs and some open shelves bolted to the walls. Behind that is the narrow tunnel of bunks stacked three high.

There are three women inside. Two of them are playing cards at one of the tables bolted to the floor. The third is standing in the back, stretching one foot on the topmost bunk, resting her cheek on her knee. Her face is tight, her eyes closed like she’s dreaming.

The girl is terrified.

“That’s Elena,” says the woman in charge. Then, with a small wave that shows in what esteem she holds them, “And these are Nayah and Mina.”

Elena opens her eyes deliberately, slowly (they’re green and dark and Ying doesn’t like them), and fastens her gaze on the girl. “What’s your name?”

The girl trembles.

It’s the woman in charge who answers, “Ying.”

Ying’s surprised (she’d had another name), but she decides she doesn’t mind. She’s better off keeping her secrets while she can (she knows what it’s like in close quarters), and besides, there’s luck in a new name.

“You’re kidding,” Elena says at last to the woman, as if Ying isn’t there.

(Ying will get used to this feeling.)

“We’ll wait until she’s older for the bones,” says the woman in charge.

The other two have stopped their game and are looking between Ying and Elena, waiting.

After a long time, Elena says, “I don’t want her.”

The woman says, “That’s not your choice.”

“Well, then she’d better take the open bed,” says Elena at last. She pivots and lowers her leg, looking at Ying as if she’d be a fool to come one step closer. “But she gets the bones. None of us knows how to be that careful any more. We’ll just break her trying to catch her.”

Ying doesn’t know what she means.

“Too young,” the woman says. “Wait four years. She’ll be thirteen then; she’ll have grown enough.”

So much for pretending to be older, Ying thinks.

“She could be dead in four years,” says Elena, like it’s something to look forward to.

The boy who takes her to the costume trailer is named Little George, and he’s as young as she is.

“I’ve been here ages,” he says as they walk. “I’ve already seen three dancing girls come and go, and a juggler. You’ll get used to it if you stick around. Just try to keep the names straight. If you need anything, don’t ask Elena, she’s so cold she could freeze a roach. Come find me. I know everything that happens here.”

“What do you do?”

He stops, frowns. “I work for Boss,” he says, like that’s all the explanation he needs.

She thought everyone here had a special talent. “But I mean—can’t you do anything?”

He looks at her, and she knows what a stupid question it must be. Even people who can’t do anything need a home.

But all he says is, “Well, you’d better hope so,” and when he smiles, she smiles back.

“Tell me about Elena,” she says.

He laughs and says, “I wasn’t joking about the roach,” and after that the stories never really stop.

For four years, Ying trains on the bars alone.

She scurries back and forth along the rigging to set up the trapeze bar or break it down for Big George when it’s his turn to grab the supports; she rolls up canvas with Little George and hauls it out to the waiting flatbed, where the crewmen are waiting to drive it out.

(“Who are the crew?” she asks.

Little George shrugs. “Who cares? They don’t stay.”)

When she is thirteen, Boss shows Ying the workshop and explains what will happen to her bones.

The pipe is paper-thin, and the copper warms up in Ying’s hand, beating back against her pulse like a living thing.

Boss explains what the bones mean to her, if she takes them. Ying is ashamed that it hasn’t struck her before (what is she, a fool?), but as Boss explains what the copper bones mean, Ying goes clammy. She half-listens. She thinks about Little George and the dancing girls and the jugglers who will all come and go, untouched and unremarkable, free and plain.

Ying cries, suddenly overcome. The end of the pipe digs into her palm as she presses the backs of her fists against her eyes.

Boss leaves her alone in the trailer.

It’s Alec who comes back inside.

He smiles, his whole being seeming to understand her, and holds out a hand.

“Let’s take a walk,” he says.

She flushes as if he’s courting her, takes his hand. (She loves Alec. They all do. Any one of them would take Alec’s hand any time he offered it. He was true magic, everybody knew.)

It’s winter. As she walks down the steps beside him, Alec pulls her close with one arm and wraps his wings around them both. The metal warms from the heat of their bodies into a comfortable cocoon, and with every step the wings shake, a little rain of notes.

He doesn’t try to convince her of anything; he just walks with her around the yard like they’re working off a cramp. They pass Jonah, who’s washing the red truck. His head is bent to his work, but his face is stormy.

“Poor Jonah,” Alec says, laughing quietly. “He’s had a fight with Ayar.”

She doesn’t say anything. (“He won’t listen,” Ayar had told her, “he’s going to hurt himself if he strains his lungs like that, and what if one of these days Boss’s magic doesn’t work?”

“Tell him you’ll replace him,” said Ying, because she knew that was the cruelest thing you could do to anyone, replace them.

Ayar looked at her and said, “I forget you’re still a child,” and that was how Ying got the first idea that something would happen soon that would make her no longer young.)

They pass the tent, where through the open flaps Ying can see Elena and Nayah and Mina practicing. (Ying looks at them hard, like she can see their copper bones if she tries.) They pass Ayar, who is dragging the trailers into a smaller half-circle where the trucks nearly touch. It will snow soon; they’ll want the protection from the wind.

After they have walked nearly around the yard, Alec says, “You don’t have to do anything. You can stay with us just as you are.”

“On the trapeze?”

There is a little pause before Alec says, “No. That’s not safe for you.”

What he means is: Elena insists they all have the bones, so they’re all mangled alike. Ying understands; sometimes you have to be one of the troupe, and not yourself. (She wanted a home. She found one.)

“And Little George always needs help,” Alec is saying, and Ying thinks about Little George strapping on the brass legs that are too big for him, thinks about running errands and barking at the gates, staggering from city to city and pasting the Tresaulti posters on any walls that haven’t been blown in.

“I’m frightened of the bones,” she says. Her voice shakes, but it can’t be the cold, because his wings are so warm.

He stops and kneels in front of her; his wrapped-around wings lock them in together, the bottom feathers sinking into the soft ground.

(Ying will never forgive him for doing this now; not after she sees his wings trying to burrow into the ground after he falls, not after being reminded of the cocoon he made for her, once.)

His feathers are so close to her that if she turns her face she can look into their warm, bright mirror. His eyes are a deep clear blue, like chips of glass, and she sees herself in them—eyes wide, face drawn, looking frail and breakable against the metal cage.

Tenderly, as only monsters are tender, he asks, “Are you afraid to be like us, Ying?”

“No,” Ying says. (How can she be afraid of anything, when he is so beautiful?)

She turns her head. Her breath fogs over the copper petals, until nothing is left of her but a dim reflection in his wings.