Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Read online

  Ayar was leaning against the door of the trailer he shared with Jonah and Stenos, and I wondered why until I heard the thud of something against the wall. Ayar caught my eye and spread his hands.

  “What could I do?” Ayar asked me. “He can’t get hold of himself, and I can’t strike him.”

  If Ayar struck someone, they didn’t get up again.

  “Let him fight until he tires,” I said. “If you can wait that long. Then let Elena in—she’ll talk some sense into him.”

  He half-smiled, nodded, and as I walked away I wondered why he had sought my council. I was the person who relayed orders, not the one who gave them.

  Panadrome was inside the workshop (he didn’t need a key), picking up nails and bolts from the floor with his nimble fingers and sorting them into their jars and cans, his face a mask. He could have been feeling anything, or nothing. Panadrome was barely human; he was hard to read.

  My stomach turned sour watching him. I felt more alone now than I had standing at the edge of camp watching Boss disappear, and I didn’t know why.

  I circled the camp twice before I realized why I was restless: I hadn’t seen Ying. Ying, whose friendship had faded every year I hadn’t gotten the bones—and thinking about Boss’s face in the shadows, I felt like a fool for never seeing. I should have guessed; I should have known.

  It was important, suddenly, for me to know that she was within the camp and accounted for, safe from the grip of whatever horror was planning to visit us next.

  Ying was inside the tent, under the bleachers, and though she was quiet, I knew before I saw her that she had been crying. (Over the years Ying had found strange places to grieve, because no one cried in the aerialists’ trailer; Elena didn’t allow it.)

  The secret she had been keeping all this time was a fence between us. Even now I kept my distance, waiting to speak until she sensed me there.

  “Ying,” I said, softly.

  She looked up. Her face, too, was different now that I had the griffin on my shoulder. She was no older, but I saw at once how she had changed, how the years had settled into the hollows under her cheeks and the line between her brows, like she had been drawn in ink a hundred years ago and the detail had faded away.

  How much time had passed outside the circus since I came along, in all those years when I was only half-awake?

  “Is Elena looking for me?”

  Were we so distant now that she thought I wouldn’t seek her out if something was wrong?

  “No,” I said, “I am.”

  Her face grew still, and she watched me with bottomless eyes. I looked at her secret face, wondered if I had changed for her the way she had for me. Maybe there was something different because of the griffin; maybe there was something she could take as a sign of what I understood.

  There must have been, because when I held out my hand to her she leapt up and embraced me, her arms locked around my shoulders, her tears warm on my face.

  It was the only part of her that was warm. The rest of her was cold as the grave.

  Gently I wrapped my arms around her to pull her closer, rested my cheek on her hair. I felt her warming under my touch, watched my hands move up and down on her spine as she breathed.

  (There were things about the circus I was just beginning to understand.)

  50.

  This is what happens when you enter the capital city in a government sedan:

  You have been driving since before dark. (It’s a miracle he found you in the first place; you make it a point to stay as far from this city as you can.)

  You wait in the shadow of the city walls—mostly intact, filled in with shrapnel wherever bombs have carved holes in the rock. The soldiers at the gates glance inside at you, then turn their attention to making way for this year’s master.

  The city gates are wood, covered with metal sheets, and when they open it looks like the inside of your performers, who each seem awake and alive until you hit the center and realize that this is no real person—this is an armor skeleton with a human wrapped around it.

  You wonder if anyone in the other car is tending to Bird’s ankle.

  The guards don’t look at you as you drive through them, which means they don’t expect to see you again on your way out.

  The city is locked-down and quiet in the dark, tidy avenues and tidy businesses building a monument to the competence of the government man who keeps them safe from the screaming hordes.

  (By now the circus will be packing—maybe by now they have already gone. You fold your hands in your lap, slowly, so the government man does not see them shaking.)

  The capitol is a beautiful building, the most beautiful thing you’ve seen inside the gates. As the guards walk you through the front doors (funny, you thought prisoners usually went in some other way), you recognize the architecture of the audience chamber, the rings of seats, the domed ceiling, like a dream someone explained to you a long time ago.

  Bird’s broken ankle creaks. When you glance behind you to see how badly she’s been shot, one of the guards politely presses a pistol to your shoulder blades, in case you were thinking of stopping.

  It takes you too long to remember (it has been a long time between your beginning and now), but all at once the memory strikes you: this was a theatre, before.

  (Annika looked at you over her shoulder, because the sound of the falling bomb was just within your pitch.)

  This is when you are closest to weeping.

  “It was a theatre,” you say.

  The government man says, “Yes,” mournfully.

  Then he draws himself up, says, “And will be again. Any decent world needs art.”

  (Here you are closest to loving him.)

  They walk you across, and as you step backstage you know that no prisoner ever comes this way if they expect to let her out again.

  You hope George listened when you told him not to wait. You hope all of them are miles away, that they never come back to this country. There are other, safer places. A circus always finds a home; everyone wants a show.

  The warren of backstage hallways gives way to a door that locks only from the outside, another staircase. When the two soldiers try to negotiate Bird down the stairs, they stumble and argue.

  “It only takes one,” you say.

  “Shut up,” says someone, but the sound of shifting bodies behind you means they’ve listened.

  (It’s good if they think it only takes one man to handle Bird. Let them underestimate.)

  The stairs go down and down and down, until the walls are stone slippery with mold. The only light is from the lines of bare bulbs studded in the walls between metal doors. The bulbs reflect off the doors, throwing light as far as they can before the inky black sucks it up.

  The guards have forgotten you, and they keep their pistol hands close to their sides. Darkness is always frightening if you’ve never really seen it.

  (It took you three days to climb out of the wreckage. You know your way in the dark.)

  Bird is closer behind you now. The man is beginning to struggle with her. (Boss forgets that it’s hard to carry someone when you don’t do it every night.) The open wound smells like a penny.

  “She needs to be tended,” you say.

  You don’t know if you can do to Bird what you did to Elena. You don’t know if Bird would even give in to you enough to die.

  “Then you had better answer some questions for me so I’m inclined to let you help her,” says the Prime Minister. He stops, knocks absently on one of the doors. The sound echoes down the hall. (F sharp.)

  “Here,” he says.

  The pistol presses at your back and guides you inside—you have to stoop to clear the doorway—and then you are locked in.

  There is a slit in the door like in a knight’s helmet, and when you press yourself against the door and look out into the soggy dank, you catch the last glimpse of the soldier carrying Bird; when they pass, there is the gleam of one glass eye fixed on you, bright as a lantern in t
he dark, until they turn a corner and vanish.

  Then you are alone in the cell, and at last, fear closes in.

  51.

  She has not been alone in years; not once, since she made Panadrome.

  Panadrome requires the most work—he falls easily into disrepair. (He was made when she was not quite herself.)

  Every few months he wanders into the workshop or her trailer, knocking gently on his casing.

  “I’ve gone a little sharp in the upper register,” he’ll say, making an abashed face. She chalks it up to a conductor’s habits. It’s tricky to be betrayed by your instruments.

  Today he knocks on her trailer, and when she opens the door he’s already pulling a face. (He never outright complains about how he’s been made, but he finds any other way he can.)

  “D-flat,” he says, and she says, “Let’s have a look.”

  The workshop is Panadrome’s second home, he’s in it so often, and when they come in he looks at the bits of metal scattered over the table and gives Boss a baleful look.

  She grins, pats the table. “Lie back.”

  She doesn’t put him under—he’s so much metal that there’s hardly anything left to fix a life to. There’s no point putting him to sleep and finding he can’t wake up again. Good musicians are hard enough to find.

  They don’t talk—it’s just the soft clinking of his workings, and once in a while the thrum of a string as she tests the tone. But after a while he says, as if he just thought of it, “I think Ying is still struggling with losing Alec, even after all this time.”

  She can get in line, Boss thinks.

  She drops the wrench on the table, closes Panadrome’s casing with a careful click. She says, “She’ll live.”

  He is tactfully silent.

  (“You should have waited,” he said, when he saw that Ying had gotten the bones, but when she said, “No point in waiting any longer,” he didn’t argue. A moment later he ran a scale with one hand and said quietly, “Poor girl.”

  By then they had seen enough children raised up on roots and scrounge-meat to know that there was no bloom of youth worth waiting for. Now children grew like hard little scrub-trees, short and wiry, and skin thicker than bark if they wanted to survive. Ying would have a better childhood on the bars under Elena’s iron hand than she would have anywhere outside.)

  Boss and Panadrome step outside into the late afternoon light, and for a moment Boss feels that the circus is a true home. Sometimes, by accident, they become a family.

  The crew is resting, playing cards in the truck beds with the dancing girls. Elena is drilling her girls in the newly unfurled tent. Jonah and Ayar are sitting side by side against their trailer, passing a badly rolled cigarette back and forth. The Grimaldis are doing whatever counts as practice when they spend most of the time leaping over one another and laughing.

  They can’t find a decent hill in this wasteland, so she can see Stenos and Bird (still a new act) coming back to camp long before they want to be seen.

  It doesn’t look like things went well; from this far away Boss can still see the two red marks on Bird’s thin shirt where the blood has turned tacky. Bird is draped across his shoulders chest-up, like a corpse or the bent wood of a bow.

  “I worry,” says Panadrome.

  Boss knows he worries (she knows every part of him, she made him fresh from nothing), but what can she tell him to do—stop?

  “Too late now,” she says.

  He doesn’t argue with her , but when he opens his mouth a moment later, it comes out a sigh in D flat.

  (Bird stared up at the ceiling as Boss cleaned out her bad eye in preparation for the glass.

  “My lungs are full of smoke,” she said, and Boss didn’t know if it was better or worse to tell her that Stenos had been afraid to see her die, had given her air she didn’t need.

  “Close your other eye,” Boss said. “This will hurt.”)

  Boss holds up her hand against the angling sun and watches the perpendiculars of their joined backs disappearing.

  Maybe the wings aren’t worth this, she thinks. She should take them apart. That would settle the question. With nothing to fight over, maybe their dread would bleed out of them.

  “You should dismantle the wings,” Panadrome says, after a while. (They’ve known each other too long.)

  “I should,” she says.

  (She never will. They were Alec’s.)

  52.

  Elena never thought of Alec before he got the wings.

  By then the circus was growing. They had Alto and Altissimo (the Grimaldi Brothers, as if they needed another reason to feel smug—Boss got carried away sometimes with the names), and Nayah and Mina with her on the trapeze, and a dancing girl who was just a dolled-up refugee, letting the circus bring her home by degrees as she draped herself in tattered veils and enticed soldiers into the tent every night.

  Elena hadn’t wanted her (“What’s next, a brothel under the benches?”), but Boss had a soft heart for lost causes.

  Sometimes Boss knocked on her door and asked her to take a look at someone, if it was hard for Boss to get a read through the performer’s desperation to please. (One thing Boss never questioned about Elena was her ability to tell who had the heart for something and who didn’t.)

  But Elena ignored when Boss scooped some kid out of the dirt and raised him as a lap dog, and she ignored when Boss saw a handsome face in the crowd one night and pulled him out to be her favorite.

  He came through the camp every day of their engagement outside that city, with Little George running after him whenever he passed close enough to catch, and the dancing girl setting down her sewing to wave properly at him. After ten days, Elena couldn’t ignore him any more. Boss had kept them near this city twice as long as they’d ever stayed in one place—he was no camp follower.

  He was beautiful (she gave Boss credit for good taste, at least): golden hair and a smile as if he had never seen war. But Elena couldn’t imagine what Boss’s plans would be.

  “Will she give him the bones or not?” Elena asked Panadrome. (There was no point asking Boss anything.)

  Panadrome watched Alec crossing the camp, and spread his human hands on their metal stems. “Could you cut out the bones of someone you loved?”

  Elena thought about the table that had served as a workbench back before Boss had a circus, the little glimpse of the blade before the knife came down, and knowing that whatever came next would have to be better than living.

  “He’ll be better off than any of the rest of us,” she said. “Wait and see.”

  And that was the last she thought of him. Even when they were back on the road, and he had somehow come with them instead of being left behind in the city like any other visitor would be, Elena thought no more about it than that Boss was a fool to be so loving, knowing how the circus ground everything to powder in its teeth.

  Big George came to them with one working arm, asking for work in the crew, and ended up under the knife as a living trapeze.

  “I don’t like it,” Elena said.

  Boss said, “I don’t care. When I wake him up, take him to the rig.”

  “You can’t keep taking everyone,” Elena said.

  Boss looked over. “There’s only one so far that I regret,” she said, and Elena rolled her eyes.

  (Boss had listened, though; after that she was more careful about who she chose.)

  “You’ll get used to me,” George said as they crossed the yard. He kept his arms out in front of him like two battering rams, never quite looking at them, and it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “It’s no different than a trapeze partner.”

  Elena said, “I wouldn’t know.”

  The next time Alec came to her notice, she was rehearsing Nayah and Mina and Big George, deciding the best way to arrange jumps now that their trapeze was alive.

  “It would help us to think of you as alive if you actually put power into the swing,” she said to George. “We usually lea
ve the corpse impressions for the dancing girl. We’ll send you over to her, if you like. There has to be some way you can make yourself useful there.”

  George blinked, frowned. Mina shot him a sympathetic glance. (Mina’s heart bled for everyone. Elena was surprised Mina had lasted long enough to find the circus to begin with.)

  “It might be easier if I held myself lengthwise,” George said, and Mina obligingly took refuge on one of his arms so he could balance himself.

  Elena was on the verge of her decision (horizontal was better, George was right, if he could hold it), but she felt a sudden tug, as if someone had tied a thread around her ribs and pulled it taut.

  When she turned to look for what had happened, Alec was stepping down from Boss’s workshop, spreading his wings for the first time.

  He shook them out in a hail of notes, stretching them wide. Elena couldn’t breathe; the thread around her ribs was painfully tight.

  Alec frowned for a moment and glanced at Elena, but then Boss was saying something, and Alec turned his laugh to her, and Elena was left looking at the dorsal of the wings. They were beautiful—she’d known he’d have it better than the rest of them—but something about them pained her.

  It had pained him, too. Elena had seen Alec’s face when he looked over at her, confused and frightened, as if someone had given him more information about her than he’d cared to know.

  At first she thought what she felt was desire. He was beautiful, that was no secret, and everyone in the circus got lonely enough to find someone attractive, sooner or later. But it wasn’t; she hadn’t thought much of him that way before, and she didn’t now.

  Then she thought it was envy that he merited the last act because of his wings, when she did all the training to make her act remarkable. (Even before the war, their aerial act would have been something to see. She trained them as if there were still an intact world to impress; she refused to let everything go to seed just because some people settled for less.)

  But Alec watched her as much as she watched him, and she knew at heart what it was; she knew what the trouble was the first time he stepped outside and shot her that one glance.