Mechanique (7 page)

26.

This is what they understand:

After the audition, Boss takes them to the workshop, sets out her bone saw. She says, “I’ll have to operate. You might die.”

Some have turned her down at that. The idea of this woman performing surgery is no comfort, and though a lot of people are dying these days, it’s one thing to go down in a firefight and another to throw yourself away.

The rest stay.

(These are circus folk; these are the ones who have nothing to lose.)

She sets out the pipes and the wrenches. Then she says, “You’ll die.”

This is their first measure. Everyone feels something; no one is that resigned.

Ayar cried. It was a horrible thing to tell the friend he’d carried two miles to save.

Elena had said, “Well, that’s one thing over with,” and stretched out on the table.

After the worst of their terror is over, Boss says, “You can never leave the circus. It will keep you alive after I finish fixing you.”

After they have accepted this, they each, eventually, lie down on the table and have their last moments of fear. Then Boss touches them, and they sink into the dark, waiting to be made new, waiting to be woken.

(When her turn came, Bird blinked up at the ceiling for several seconds, fighting the dark without knowing it. “I wonder what you did to get this kind of power,” Bird said, just before sleep took her.

She did not live long enough to see Boss’s hands shaking.)

It is no secret to the circus who has the bones, who has the lungs or the springs. When they come out of the workshop, when they stagger finally in their new skeletons from the trailers out to the practice yard, they are welcomed back without comment. Even the living, who have not been asked for their bones, can imagine what it takes to lie down on a table and agree to suffer.

But those who have gone into the workshop, those who are dead, look at one another and know.

For some it is worth it. (Ying is allowed to sleep through the night at last; with her copper bones, Elena is satisfied). For some, there is only the knowledge of time sliding past them, a sense of being nailed to the ground.

Those who have gone into the workshop glance from one to another, looking for signs of aging that never appear. None of them wanders far from camp; magic this deep should not be tested, and no one wants to be the first to fall down dead because he wandered too far from Boss’s keen eye.

(She says it’s the circus, but they know what she means; they know Boss is the thing keeping them from falling to pieces.)

Little George was slated to be fixed, but Boss keeps him out of the workshop even after he asks, and so he keeps moving slowly through time until he’s older than Ying, until he’s nearly as old as Jonah, who has been twenty-five since the day he came to the circus and was gifted with his clockwork lungs.

Slowly, Little George begins to wake up to the world in a way he cannot name.

He does not know that Ying will never be older; he does not know why he takes such care not to anger the Grimaldi brothers. He is not aware, only awake.

He knows nothing for certain; he only sees that when the government man is gone, the circus gathers in two groups to see what Boss will do: those who are alive, and those who have survived the bones.

27.

The illusionist has no truck of his own. He follows the Tresaulti parade on foot, walking in the tracks of the red-painted trailers after they pull away from the city borders, and out to the top of the hill two miles out from town. He can see them forming a half-circle on the far side of the hilltop; he can see the first tent poles going up against the flat grey sky.

On his back is the heavy bag with his tricks in it, and he carries the hoop around his shoulders. It bangs the backs of his legs with every step, but that’s the price you pay for walking. The little cage with the bird in it dangles from his belt. The bird protests at first, but after the first mile it just clings to its perch and waits.

From their position on top of the hill they can see him coming, so the illusionist is not surprised when there’s a knot of people waiting for him when he reaches the top.

He sets the hoop down on the ground and slings the bag off his shoulders, crouching to unpack it. Out comes the pack of cards, the scarves, the silver balls that flatten out when they hit his palms so it looks like they disappear. (A lot of his act is about things disappearing. People don’t put much faith in a beautiful transformation these days; a disappearance, they believe.)

The crowd is bigger now. There are some acrobats, looks like, a juggler with clubs in each hand, and a couple of haughty girls in pretty rags.

“A magician?” says a woman from the edge of the crowd, and without looking up he says, “Yes, sir,” because he knows what authority sounds like.

“Well,” she says. “Go on and show us.”

He unhooks the birdcage, sets it on the ground at the far end of his tricks, and stands up, taking a step back and throwing his arms wide to introduce the act.

Someone says, “Don’t.”

It’s not the boss, so he shouldn’t pay it any mind (there are always hecklers), but he glances over at the woman who spoke and is struck dumb.

She has an iron plate bolted over some peach fuzz on her skull, and one glass eye that’s looking blankly at him. The other eye is dark and fixed on the cage at his feet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins.

“He’s going to kill it,” the woman with the glass eye says, not really to anyone. No one speaks.

“Go on,” says the woman in charge.

He nods and clears his throat and starts his act.

The handkerchiefs materialize in his ears, and the hoop makes his legs vanish, and the silver balls slide into invisibility in his hands. All the while, the circus people watch him, neither applauding nor drumming him out.

At last he says, “For my final disappearing act,” and fiddles in his sleeve for the bird that’s inside his cuff, waiting.

“No,” says the strange woman, and in two steps she’s reached the cage, stepping between him and it.

He reaches to snatch it out of her grasp, but she catches him by the throat, an iron grip. Her eye burns.

The illusionist knocks her arm away, staggers backwards. A man is already waiting behind him and catches his arm, flipping the illusionist neatly onto his back. (The sky is pale blue and flat, like glass.)

Someone is opening the latch of his cage, and the illusionist watches the small dark silhouette of his bird as it shoots past all of them and sails out of sight.

After a moment there’s a scuffle, and his arm is freed. When he stands up he sees a man with a set of brass ribs holding the other man back, shoving him into his place in the circle.

The strange woman is standing a few feet away, gripping the empty cage in her hands, her gaze fixed on the sky where the bird can no longer be seen. The others in the circle seem to have drawn back, as if the cage is poisoned and she’s picking victims.

“Bird,” says the woman in charge, “give the man back his equipment.”

She sets the empty cage on the ground, turns away, walks into the crowd without another look around her.

“Not bad,” says the woman in charge, not unkindly. “We’d have to make some changes to the act if you stayed.”

He can imagine.

He looks around at the impassive crowd. It’s not the quiet that bothers him. It’s that they didn’t hold back the one-eyed woman, like they felt she had a reason for doing it, like this is just the sort of thing that happens here.

He wants a circus troupe to belong to so he can have a roof and some steady meals; if he wants to be worried about war, he can stay where he is.

“Thank you for your time,” he says finally, and no one seems surprised when he kneels and packs up his tricks.

Halfway back, he shakes the dead bird out of his sleeve; the other man crushed it, and there’s no point in carrying a dead thing all the way home.

28.

When Bird fell, it was Stenos who Boss called to come carry her out.

It was Stenos who lifted Bird from the ground, who watched the blood oozing in sticky rivulets through the dirt. He looked at her face, what was left of it, and down her body, where her chest had caved in under her shirt. The few ribs that had pierced her skin gleamed in the dark.

He looked away from the human wreckage. He looked up past the empty trapeze to the very top of the rigging. There was a little tear in the ceiling of the tent, and through it there was the night sky, a smattering of stars.

When he glanced down again, Boss was looking at the woman’s body, lifting her hair to look at the skull, brushing the blood away from her remaining eye, as if cleaning off a toy that had fallen in the mud.

“Can you help her?”

He didn’t know why he asked. It wasn’t like he wanted her helped.

After a long time, Boss said, “I don’t know what will happen.”

Stenos remembers that it was cold that night; he shivered, holding her.

This is what he sees when he looks at her that night:

He sees the empty tunnel of her eye socket. He sees into her; he falls through and through the tunnel until he is swallowed up by the emptiness there, until he sees the night sky.

Even after the ground has crushed her she is gasping for air, her ribs heaving through the skin as she fights the inevitable, though everyone knows Death is following close on her heels.

His only thought is, If she dies, I get the wings. I get the wings.

He feels them already as if they’re growing out of his shoulders; he sees himself leading the procession through the cities, his wings a fan of knives on either side. He imagines the ground falling away as he rises over the awed crowd. The air seems to shimmer, anticipating him.

All he has to do is wait this out; as soon as the woman is dead, he will inherit the wings.

He looks down at the woman in his arms and thinks,
Tough luck
, and flexes his fingers against her arm, against her knee, like a consolation prize.

But when she stops breathing, his chest goes tight; he adjusts his hold and pulls her towards him without thinking; he puts his mouth on the blood where he hopes her mouth is and pushes a breath into her lungs. It comes back to him, sick-sweet and dry as dust, and for some reason he can’t name he is terrified, too terrified even to lift his mouth from her mouth.

This is how Boss finds them when she opens the door.

“Bring her in,” she says, after too long.

He lays her out on the table, and then Boss is filling the workshop, pressing him out without ever touching him, and when he is outside she locks the door against him.

Stenos remembers that the night Bird fell was cold. Her body was cool when he held her; he had walked from the trailer with his arms crossed in front of him; when he passed Elena, she was trembling.

But this is how memories are—always true, never the truth.

Elena shrank from the blood on his face, and he crossed his arms in front of him to keep them from shaking, and even though he remembers these things, he does not know the truth of the night when he woke Bird.

This is the truth:

The night was warm; Bird had gone cold.

29.

The government man came back, good as his word, our last night in the city.

I forced a smile as I handed him his ticket, and when he looked at me I winked and rapped my knuckles once on my right leg, the brass in tune with Panadrome.

“Welcome, sir,” I said, “to the Mechanical Circus Tresaulti. Jugglers and tumblers and girls in the air, the finest spectacle anywhere!”

“I’m sure,” he said, and I thought he’d be annoyed, but when he looked down at me his eyes were shining.

I went cold all over, and didn’t really recover until he had disappeared into the tent and I was sure he couldn’t see me any more.

One of the nice things about so many governments, I guess, is that people don’t recognize you from the others who have murdered their way to power. His car was nowhere to be seen, and only one bodyguard followed him in.

I handed out tickets until the last rube was inside, and then I skidded around to the back flap of the tent, close to the trailers, where some of the acts filed in to wait behind the bleachers for their turn.

The government man took a seat at the edge of one of the benches, with a clear shot to the main entrance of the tent, like any man would if he wasn’t a fool.

I ran for Boss so fast I slipped in the mud, reached her as a sopping mess.

She was waiting outside the main entrance of the tent for Panadrome to finish his welcome march. Jonah was holding a wide yellow umbrella over her, to keep off the last of the rain, and when she saw me coming she held out one hand, palm out, to stop me from coming closer.

“Watch the dress,” she said. “I’m on.”

“He’s here,” I said. “The government man.”

Her hand curled into a fist. She dropped her arm to her side, looked at the entrance to the tent. The griffin tattoo peered into the twilight.

“What do we change?” I asked, my mind racing. “I can get Ayar back from the bleachers, no one’s seen him yet, and if Jonah—”

“Nothing,” she said. Her gaze was fixed on the tent ahead of her. Jonah’s hand was shaking a little; the yellow umbrella trembled.

“But he’ll see us,” I said. I felt like I was sinking into the ground, pulled into the mud by my own terror.

She shook her head, her face set. “Being afraid wastes time,” she said, as if to herself.

Jonah said, “The jugglers are ready and waiting for your word, Boss.”

Boss stepped out from under the yellow umbrella and opened the tent flaps with both hands; for a moment she was a dark shape against a flare of lights and noise, and then the flaps fell shut and it was just Jonah and me left in the yard, ankle-deep in the mud and looking at each other like a couple of frightened kids.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Circus Tresaulti!”

Boss’s greeting filled the tent, rolled out past the canvas, over the both of us and out into the darkness, and for a moment I was brave again; Boss’s voice does that to you.

Still, after her voice had faded I pulled a stool up to the tent and waited, slowly sinking into the mud, for Boss to come safely back out again.