Mechanique (8 page)

30.

After Alec died, we drove for two days without stopping. Nobody knew where we were going but Boss, who drove the lead truck alone.

I had meant to go the first leg with the tumblers, and then switch to the other mens’ trailer when we stopped for the night, but we ended up trapped in there for two days together.

The first night we got drunk, so drunk that Molto and Brio wept into their sleeves about Alec, and the rest of us blinked at the ceiling. The second night we tried to dry out, so that if we ever stopped we’d be good for something besides the guillotine.

The morning of the third day, our truck stopped. After a moment, Barbaro said, “Well, fuck,” and opened the door as if it didn’t matter to him whether he died or not.

We were all pulled over; the crewmen who had driven the trucks were already asleep in the bunks above their cabs, and the rest of us staggered out into the morning like a pile of cave rats.

“We’ll stop here tonight,” Boss said. “He can be buried here as well as anywhere.”

We were on a grassy flat outside the ruins of a town that had been long abandoned. Good place for a final rest, I supposed, though I didn’t see why we had taken two days to get there instead of any other place.

(It reminded me of the city where Boss had found him, though this place was grown over with weeds, empty for a hundred years, so it couldn’t have been.)

“Rest here,” Boss said, and then, “except Ayar and Little George. Let’s get the body out of the workshop and dig a grave before day’s gone.”

As I passed the women’s trailer I looked at Ying, who was like a wraith after two days locked up with Elena and the rest of the women. She couldn’t even manage a smile when she saw me; she looked across the grassy plain at a little grove of trees and shoved her hands in the pockets of a jacket five sizes too big.

(It was one of Elena’s things. I would have pegged Elena as the last person to notice someone else was cold, but I guess you never know.)

The coffin was strapped where we had left it, and we dragged it out to the trees for the protection from the sleet and wind, and Ayar broke ground on the grave.

“I want it proper deep,” Boss said. “God knows what people do out here when they’re desperate. I don’t want him to be easy to find.”

Ayar and I looked at one another, wondering what sort of people she was expecting. Finally Ayar said, “Sure thing, Boss.”

He dug that whole grave himself, of course—he could dig a hundred graves without getting tired. I was there to get him water and bring lamps for a little warmth and to tell him jokes, just to keep him working.

It still took until nightfall, and when he was finished and had hauled himself out of the grave he said, “I don’t have it in me to cover him tonight.”

“I’ll tell Boss,” I said.

Turned out there was no need (Boss knows the lay of the land). When I found her and told her the grave was dug, she picked up a lamp and went out before I could tell her a thing, but as soon as she reached Ayar she said, “We’ll leave it for now. Thank you, Ayar, for your work. In the morning we’ll bury him.”

It was winter, so the coffin stayed out. Boss acted like it hardly mattered, and stayed in her trailer, lights on and the sounds of sharpening tools, until everyone else had gone to sleep.

Then she opened the door and looked for me.

When she saw me, I ran to her (old habit), and she took my arm and knelt so we were eye to eye. I was still a boy, and hated being reminded how small I was, but she only took my shoulders like she was the queen and I was the questing knight, and I felt how it really was—that she had come down to me.

“Watch him,” she said, her face pinched and blue in the moonlight. “I don’t want him to be alone his last night. Bad enough to have been locked away for so long.”

It was winter, I wanted to say. I could freeze. He’s dead now, I wanted to say, I don’t know why it matters.

I nodded.

“Good,” she said, with the worst attempt at a smile I’d ever seen from her. Then she cleared her throat and went inside, where she wound up the little radio Jonah had found for her in a junk heap a dozen cities back. The crackle of a broadcast cut through the camp; a government station, it sounded like, from the casualty reports.

I took up a seat on one of the flatbeds, cradled between two rolls of canvas. I could see the coffin from where I was, and at least in the canvas I wouldn’t freeze to death overnight.

For a while I dozed amid the comfortable smells of wax and oak and old beer.

At some point I woke. The camp was silent except for the crackle of the radio, and for a while I looked at the far-off lumps that in the daylight had been a city, and now looked like a snoring beast. Funny how things change depending on the light.

Later, when it was full dark except for the moon, Elena came to the coffin.

I thought about scaring her off (what does a sour bitch like that care for anything?), but she had given Ying her jacket to ward off the cold. I let her be.

I watched her for a long time as she stood still beside the wooden box. Her shabby coat hung off her thin shoulders; when the wind blew, the coat flapped against her, showing flashes of white that had rubbed off on the lining from running to the tent in the winter with her coat wrapped over her powdered legs.

I couldn’t see her face, so I didn’t know if she was crying, or praying, or spitting on the grave.

No. That last thought wasn’t fair, I knew it even as I thought it. Out of all of them, Elena wouldn’t do that to Alec. Elena was the one who had almost caught him.

She bent to the coffin; her head was a warm silhouette against the mountain of black earth Ayar had dug up. For a moment her lips moved—prayer, then, after all.

At last she kissed the rough wood, as if waking him, as if she was the prince in a fairy tale.

Then she stood and turned back, her feet crunching gently in the frost all the way back to the trailer where the women lived. She didn’t look around her, didn’t see me at all.

I sat up all the rest of that night, wide awake without knowing why.

31.

This is what Elena said to Alec, before she pressed her lips to the coffin to wish him good journey:

“Coward.”

32.

According to Elena, the aerialists are sexless.

They say it’s because of the bones. You get sewn up again and something isn’t quite right. Some pieces don’t work like they should. The girls end up light and strong, and utterly without the sort of thing a man can enjoy.

The rubes don’t know, of course. It’s for the crew and the jugglers, who flicker in and out of their lives; even when the worst of them are three sheets to the wind, the aerialists still get the sort of treatment that men give little girls or old women.

It’s not true, of course—Alto, who’s sleeping with Nayah, and Altissimo, who’s sleeping with Mina, know differently, but they keep their peace; they can guess what Elena would do if they spoke out of turn.

Elena is fond of the lie. She knows that in times like these a troupe leader must look out for her own, and she does what she can with what she has. You can’t trust anyone to be clever or kind; you can trust them almost to the last to be gullible and afraid.

(Almost. Elena thinks differently about Bird. That glass eye goes right through you.)

The first time Elena sees Stenos, she thinks (to her surprise),
He’s for me.

God knows why—she’s always preferred handsome men—but when he says, “It was the circus or prison for me,” she doesn’t tell him to piss off to prison, like she should.

Instead she looks past him as if he isn’t there.

“You must be Elena,” he says.

She tries not to smile. Boss told him, then. Boss will try any dirty trick just to get a rise out of her. Elena knows better than to bite; it’s not worth it. If he doesn’t have the bones, he’ll be gone before she can bother to remember his name.

Still, she watches him go. On his way to wherever it is outsiders sleep, he passes the strange woman; they look at one another, take a wide step apart like two dogs facing off. Then the strange woman keeps walking into the tent, and after a moment of looking after her, he shrugs it off and turns away, the sharp lines of his face visible for a moment as he disappears into the maze of trucks.

Elena learns his name.

She waits for him to get his new bones.

For fifteen cities she locks the trapeze in place, watches the girls flying back and forth, and keeps one eye on the trailer where Boss molds them into survivors. For fifteen cities she waits, for nothing. Stenos hauls canvas and lumber and dredges beer glasses out of wash barrels for Joe the cook to dry, and is so ordinary it makes her ill.

“Doesn’t he
want
anything?” she asks one night as they walk back from the fire, as if it’s funny and it doesn’t matter what the answer is.

“Food and sleep,” says Nayah, “that’s all he ever asks for.” She knows from Alto; it’s probably true.

“Too bad that’s all he wants,” says Penna with a wink at Ying, who’s smart enough to get interested in taking off her makeup, burying her face in a towel.

Elena looks at Penna, who has managed to stay stupid all these years, and says, “No fucking the crew, Penna. What are you, an animal?”

Penna flushes and skitters into the trailer.

Elena finds herself walking beside the strange woman as they approach the trailer. (The strange woman has a name, but Elena’s never used it. The woman answers to anything—“Hey,” “You there,” a snap of the fingers. She’s answered to anything for so long that Elena has swung past contempt and is starting to be impressed.)

The woman says, “He wants the wings.”

Elena stops walking. “Liar.”

The woman shrugs, and Elena realizes with a start that she has misjudged the strange woman, thinking she was beaten and locked onto the bars of the trapeze.

She is docile only because she does not care, because she does not intend to stay where she has been placed.

She’s after the wings.

Elena wants to say something, but her throat is dry.

The woman eventually closes the trailer door. Inside come the sounds of laughter and shushing and the creaking of the girls slipping into their bunks.

Long after the lights have gone out, Elena is standing outside, trembling.

When she knocks at Boss’s trailer, Boss opens right away. (Boss doesn’t sleep much.)

“You wouldn’t,” Elena accuses. “You wouldn’t do that. Not after what happened to him.”

Boss is quick to catch up. “They’re not Alec’s. They’re mine. I made them. I’ll give them to whoever I want, and if you dare to question me again I’ll pull out your bones for a crown on my head.”

“Which one will get the wings? Him or her?” The tears are two hot streaks on Elena’s face; she digs her fists into the tops of her legs.

“I haven’t decided,” Boss says at last. Her voice is kinder now, which is worse, Elena knows. “Something will make up my mind.”

Elena feels smaller, feeble, as if Boss is pressing against her from across the room; she stumbles out without farewell and staggers back toward the green trailer where a madwoman is waiting.

Stenos is coming back from the tent (has he been practicing? Is he preparing to be one of them? Oh, God, the wings), and he looks up and sees her.

He smiles.

“Lost?” he says, and his eyes are two dark insects.

She turns into the trailer without a word, sets the latch like she can lock out what she knows is coming next.

In the dark, she listens to the madwoman breathing and thinks, You fool, you fool, don’t you know?

33.

The city where they buried Alec had, for a long time, fared better than most. It wasn’t important enough to be bombed out at the beginning, and then the long line of governments stayed in it as they traveled, rather than rolling over it. It had a series of names that meant as little as any name Boss had given a dancing girl: New Umbra, Zenith, Praxiteles, Johnsonia (only for a year—he was quickly deposed), Haven.

The Tresaulti people don’t know the names, for this city or for any other. Boss discourages it. “Our circuit is wide enough,” she says. “We might not come back to a city in your lifetime.”

The crew scoff.

The ones with copper bones get very quiet.

They buried Alec outside the city where Boss had first found him, the city he left behind as soon as he heard Boss’s voice.

Boss would never have come back, would have left it alone until the world cracked to ash, except that he died, and she didn’t know where else to bury him. Some unmarked grave along the road was not for him. For him mausoleums were made; for him they carved angels from stone.

(She had tried to carve what she could for him, always. She would not shirk now just because he was dead.)

The city had fallen in, but it was still itself. Thankfully the ones with the bones knew better than to say, and the others were too tired from two days’ drive to look around them and recognize anything.

Boss worried when Little George looked at the city and frowned, rubbing the back of his neck, tilting his head at the skyline like a listening dog.

“Come along,” she said, and like a listening dog, he came. “Rest here,” she said to everyone, and then, “except Ayar and Little George.”

Ayar would dig the grave; George would have something to do besides wonder.

She cannot bring herself to change George. She means to; he wants to be a tumbler so badly she can hear him dreaming. Someday she will. He’s still young. He can get a little older before she fixes him.

(He isn’t broken. She does not know what to do.)

But when she thinks about changing him—when she catches his shoulder to turn him the right way to a task, and he goes away laughing and batting her hand off him—her hand goes cold.

Before Alec fell, she would have already done it. Before Alec fell, she thought this was the kindest thing you could do for anyone.

It is. It is the kindest thing.

But she sends George to the gravedigging, away from the shadows of the city, so he does not have time to think about where they are, and how long it’s been since they were there last.

Once, she looks back at the center of the camp to see Elena watching her, her eyes flat and merciless in the milky winter light.

Boss looks at her until Elena drops her gaze.

“Ying,” Elena snaps, “you may be able to freeze to death, but the rest of us are useful enough to be missed. Get some wood, or throw yourself on the fire to give us something to burn.”

It doesn’t carry the venom it used to (now Ying has the bones, and she’s in as much danger of cracking and freezing as any of the rest of them), but it’s comforting for some people to hear cradle stories told again, Boss thinks.

(Ying was too young, Boss thinks, stops.)

As Ayar digs, Boss watches the ruins.

She’s not much impressed by cities, these days. The ancient cities lasted a thousand years. Alec’s fell in a hundred, with only some bombs to blame. He’d be ashamed of it, too, she thinks, if he had lived. He understood weakness, but he liked things that were sturdy or strong. He liked Ayar, and cities, and Elena, and the wind.

Boss can see that the tall buildings had fallen first; their iron girders had groaned and bent and sent their towers crashing onto the low roofs, bringing the whole city to the ground.

That’s what happens, she thinks, if no one cares for the bones of a thing.