Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Read online

  “Ten says he hauls off first,” said Brio.

  Barbaro smiled. “I’ll take that bet,” he said, and snatched the little bag from Brio, who looked suddenly nervous at the bet he’d made.

  (Brio had never been the cleverest. You didn’t bet against Elena.)

  I slipped inside the tent and tried to look invisible as I got my bearings.

  Stenos and Elena were the only others inside. Stenos was pacing. Elena was standing still, arms crossed; she might as well have been picked up from the edge of camp and carried here in the dark, she looked so little changed from the way she had stood and watched the government cars drive away. Underneath the sound of Stenos’s feet, I could hear the high thin groan of the copper pipes as she pulled the skin tighter across her shoulders.

  “We can’t just leave them there,” he shouted. “What are we, animals?”

  “Boss wouldn’t want us to wait,” Elena said. She wasn’t shouting, but her voice was pitched to carry—she wanted everyone outside to hear. “The government men have her now, they’ve had her for nearly twelve hours, and any minute they’ll figure out what Boss does one way or another. How long do you think they’ll be satisfied with just dissecting Bird?”

  Stenos spat, “Don’t talk about her,” just as Barbaro threw the door flap aside and stalked in. Brio was behind him (looking for black eyes, probably), and as the flap dropped I saw that the others were closing in.

  “You’re one icy bitch,” Barbaro said, half a compliment.

  Brio cut him off. “He doesn’t mean it,” he said, “we’re just—Elena, we don’t know if our bodies will fail us if we leave. If we go too far from Boss, who knows what could happen to us?”

  “The same thing that happens if we stay,” she said, looking at Barbaro.

  Brio was looking back and forth, pushing for a truce. “But if we could only wait a little while for Boss—”

  Elena cut him off and told Barbaro, “Then if the government men don’t get you, you grow two hundred years old and get so brittle your bones snap in a cold wind, and when you finally fall to pieces I’ll dance on your grave.”

  Stenos was looking at her the way the wolf had looked at her, a long time ago—narrowed eyes, shoulders down, betrayed.

  It was nice to see that someone else hadn’t known about everything the bones did to you.

  (“We are the circus that survives,” Boss had told me, and I had been young and blind. Only now was I standing on solid ground. At least Stenos hadn’t waited long for his revelations.)

  I wondered if Stenos was going to ask her anything about how she knew what she knew—of all of us, he was maybe the only one who could get a real answer out of Elena—but all he said was, “We’re not moving.”

  Elena turned and walked out. We followed her outside. I already had a knot in my stomach, guessing what was coming. (What would Boss say? I knew her orders, but how could I go? How could I go?)

  “Just a day or two,” Mina said to Elena as she came out of the tent. Ying stood beside Mina, nodding, and a few of the other aerialists were gathering closer, silently agreeing.

  “They might come back,” Mina added.

  Elena shot Mina a look. Mina took a step backwards.

  “There’s no use in waiting,” Elena said. Her voice carried. The crewmen were leaving their packing behind and wandering over one by one, trying to get a better view of what was happening. The Grimaldi brothers had gathered off to one side, and the aerialists were converging on the other, like two militias about to face off.

  My arm burned. I felt the ground tilting under us, but part of me was still at the edge of camp watching Boss disappearing into the black sedan, and I couldn’t think long enough to stop the disaster I knew was coming.

  “There’s no use in running!” Stenos said. “You think that government man can’t find us again if he wants to? We’re of more use here in case they come back. We can protect them here.”

  Elena’s face was incredulous. “You keep dreaming that somehow they’re coming back,” she said. “They’re marked for dead. We can only hope that if we run, they’ll last long enough for him to get bored with it all and not come after us one by one.”

  Fatima swayed like she was on the verge of blacking out. I sympathized.

  “Boss knew what was coming,” Elena said to the crowd. “So did Bird. They made their choice. We need to make ours. We shouldn’t wait.”

  I said, “We waited for you.”

  The old-timers froze like the words had stupefied them; even Fatima and Ying looked at me as if they guessed what kind of trouble I was in for.

  Slowly, Elena turned to face me. We weren’t far apart—I had been close on her heels coming out of the tent, and had only moved to the side to watch the crowd—and I knew she could cover the space between us with one jump (not even trying) and snap my neck like Bird would have snapped the Prime Minister’s. I could hear Ayar’s spine creaking as he moved into place behind me, where he could reach over my head to catch her before she did anything.

  But the anger coiled in her didn’t seem like it was for me. We stood in silence for a while; she looked at me as if she pitied my stupidity.

  Finally, she cocked her head to the side and said, as if we were alone, “Little idiot, who ever said I wanted to be woken?”

  Her voice slid over everyone like the first shovelful of dirt in a grave. Most of the crew shoved their hands in their pockets. Ying shuddered.

  Stenos stayed where he was. He seemed to have relaxed now that the fight was in earnest, his hands loose at his sides and his eyes fixed on her, and I thought suddenly (strangely) what a good thief he must have been before Boss caught him.

  “What do the rest of you say?” he called, glancing from group to group of the performers with the bones. His voice was light, as if this was a call for drinking songs and not a battle. “I can’t imagine the rest of you are willing to risk your lives by putting yourselves too far from Boss.”

  The performers looked at each other, nervous and torn. Behind me, Ayar let out a heavy breath.

  Elena looked around and snorted. “You can’t be serious.”

  “There’s no way I went through all this just to drop dead because I ran scared,” put in Spinto.

  “But it’s foolish to sit here and wait to be taken,” said Fatima.

  Moto said, “So what are we going to do, drive up there and get them back?”

  “Sure,” said Ayar, “because the first thing we should do is declare war on ourselves.”

  Ying said, “But we can’t go far from her, not with what’s happened to us—”

  “No,” Elena snapped. She looked around the camp at each of the performers. “The war happened to us. This—” she swept a hand down her body “—is a choice you made. Don’t for one moment pretend Boss never told each of you what the dangers were.”

  Ying dropped her gaze. I wondered what Boss could have told her, to make such a case that Ying had agreed to the bones, and where I had been that Ying hadn’t told me—I had been blind for so long it was hard to tell when we had grown apart.

  (It didn’t matter; sooner or later, you agreed to anything Boss asked of you. My arm still ached where she had tattooed the griffin.)

  Stenos had the crowd’s attention now; they were waiting to be convinced.

  But Stenos wasn’t shouting. He stood with his hands in his pockets like the crewmen, like he hadn’t just been arguing for everyone to be brave enough to wait for Boss.

  He had to argue for it, I thought, my muscles aching. He had to. My hand was tight against my arm.

  “I’ll stay myself, then,” he said. “Give me a truck, and I’ll go as close as I can to the city. I’ll wait for them to come out, or . . . ” He faltered. “Or. I’ll find them.”

  He’d find their heads on sticks and he knew it, I thought, going cold all over. Maybe Elena knew what she was doing; maybe Boss had been right.

  “No,” I said, too loud. “We’re all moving on.”

&nbs
p; The Grimaldi brothers stopped their arguing and blinked at me, shocked and pleased. The crewmen seemed surprised I had spoken. Fatima looked at me like I had finally screwed my head on straight.

  Ayar said, “We know you loved her, but who are you to lead us, Little George?”

  “Boss gave me her last order before she was taken away,” I said, taking advantage of the momentary hush, trying to sound certain. “She said we shouldn’t wait for her. I think, as orders go, that one’s pretty clear. Does anyone feel like arguing her last words?”

  Elena looked at Stenos; Stenos looked away from us, down the hill and out toward the road.

  From his place at the back fringes of the crowd, Panadrome turned away from us and walked toward Boss’s trailer.

  I swallowed hard, once, but the circus and the crew were looking at me, and I couldn’t back down or I’d lose them all.

  “Load up,” I called. “We leave as soon as the camp is packed, and we drive straight through until nightfall, no stopping.”

  (Sooner or later, you agreed to anything Boss asked of you.)

  56.

  Bird’s ankle burns long after the bleeding has stopped, which means that the bullet has sliced through the bone, and there are little metal splinters grinding into the muscle. The first dark hours she sits alone in the cell, she thinks that when she gets out, she’ll have to have Boss take everything out of the joint, scrape it clean, start again.

  The government man comes back shortly after, and adds to the list of things Bird will need repaired.

  First are the two ribs, which he pushes until the pipe groans and buckles. He slices her forearm open down to the bone. He dislocates a finger and makes a careful cut to see how the joint is constructed.

  He digs out her false eye and rolls it between two fingers, peering like a man who’s never seen anything made of glass. He holds it up to his own eye, as if there’s a mirror in the cell that can tell him how he looks with a milky iris.

  “Lovely,” she says. The word comes out a little higher than she means—the way she’s tied down leaves hardly any room to breathe—and she sounds like she’s trilling, like she’s on the verge of laughter.

  He looks away, tosses the glass eye to the medic he’s brought into the cell. The medic turns and fixes the eye back into the socket without quite looking at her. The glass slides into place with a wet suck, as though her flesh is reaching out for it.

  She doesn’t think about it. It’s not the time. She can worry when she’s home again, in her top bunk in the aerialists’ trailer, the winter wind leaking through the nail holes near the ceiling and Stenos’ heartbeat strong and even through the wall.

  Now she has to pay attention; she has to be focused when she escapes.

  When he slices down to the bone, she sees where he keeps his knife (inside his belt, in a thin sheath that lays nearly flat against his waist). She tilts the blind side of her head to the ground and listens to the clink of tools in the medic’s bag, to see if there’s anything inside that she can use. (She knows, because of her fingers, that he has pliers. Bird hopes it won’t come to that. Once she starts pulling him apart, she might not be able to stop, and time is important. She has to get them out; she can’t get lost in revenge.)

  At some point she stops listening—you can’t keep listening to things like they’re saying, it’s what drives you over the edge—and she drifts.

  The ceilings look too slippery to find purchase; the mold is nearly yellow in the light the government man has brought with him. It’s just enough to see by, but not enough to really examine (the medic he brought grumbles the whole time he’s putting her back together. She doesn’t know why; of course he’s less interested in exploring than in confirming what he thinks already, like most government men. He’s a boy with a bug).

  Bugs have wings, she thinks, and smiles up at the yellow slime that fans out above her like feathers on the wall. In the right light, the metal wings would be yellow, or red in the light of the circus lanterns, or blue, if you spread them wide just before dawn and caught the last of the deep night.

  (“Stop her smiling,” says the government man, sounding afraid, and she feels a needle in her jaw.)

  She dreams that Boss gave her the wings already.

  She dreams that as soon as they went into the workshop and Bird saw them, Boss smiled at her and said, “They’re not bad, if you can handle them,” and unbuckled them, fanning out one wing for inspection.

  “I want them,” said Dream-Bird, and Boss said, “Of course. Come sit on the table while I kill you, and then we’ll get started.”

  As Bird turned over on the table, Boss was pulling the goggles down over her eyes, was reaching for the bone saw and the wrench; Boss looked like the kindest mother there ever was.

  The knob-joints of the wings moved into place under Bird’s skin as if Bird had been made for them, and when she breathed the air coursed through the ribbing.

  Boss said, “That should do it. How do you feel?”

  “Whole,” Bird said, and sighed, and rested her smiling face against the cool metal of the workbench.

  Boss smiled and fixed the joints in place with the sound of a door closing tight, with the sound of a lock sliding home at last.

  When Bird wakes up, she’s alone, and it takes her too long to remember she doesn’t have the wings, that her shoulders are flexing around nothing.

  Then she remembers where she is, and what’s happened. Then the pain comes.

  She wraps her sleeve around her arm to stanch the bleeding, and uses a piece of the canvas wrapped around her feet to hold the wound on her finger shut. It will get infected; Boss will have work to do.

  The dark cell smells of copper.

  She listens for any signs from Boss. She hears the hush of feet on stone, but the hall echoes so much it could come from anywhere.

  Still, it’s company. She closes her eyes, tries to ferret it out.

  Boss is in the cell to the right of the door, three or four doors down—that incredulous, through-the-nose breathing of someone who has spent time under interrogation and has almost broken. (Bird knows that sound. She was a soldier once.)

  The guard is farther away in the hall, and not moving except to re-shoulder his gun, which scrapes against the stone wall behind him every time he shifts his weight. The sounds come farther apart; he’s falling asleep, starting awake at intervals. Otherwise, Bird and Boss are alone.

  Now, she thinks. Now.

  At the end of the hallway is a door with a lock. The door leads to the stairs (eighty-two, she thinks, or eighty-four—once they jostled her ankle and she blanked out, lost count), and then comes the labyrinth of the halls, the empty stage and the rows of seats and the long, long run from the front door through the city streets to the wall, where Boss will learn to climb if she wants to live long. Then, it’s home to the circus.

  Beyond that Bird doesn’t think. Boss handles the circus like an egg; whatever Boss does then will be the right thing, the safest thing. Still, Bird hopes they make their way east to a port town where they can catch a boat to some other country. She’s always wanted to fly over open water.

  (She’ll get the wings. This is not in question; this cannot be in question, if she is to rescue Boss. Boss has her reasons for holding back on what people want, and she plays one thing against another if it buys her time, but even Boss knows what’s fair. Even Boss has to know that the wings are not meant for Stenos.)

  The scraping sound has not come for several minutes. The guard’s asleep.

  There’s a ragged edge of metal she can just reach if she digs through the hole in her ankle that the gunshot made; she bites back nausea, twists it off. It cuts her fingers as she unscrews the frame of the narrow window set into the door.

  (The buckled ribs help her slide through the tiny space, but the groan of copper echoes through her skull as she drags her hips through and wrenches herself free.)

  She walks on the balls of her feet down the hallway. The pain is like a s
pike being driven into her ankle, straight up her back. She ignores it. She’s sweating cold; she doesn’t have much time left before infection sets in.

  She can’t stand in front of Boss’s door; without the momentum of walking, her ankle buckles. She grips the ledge above her, pulls herself up until she can look through the window into the cell.

  Boss looks whole, but Bird knows that doesn’t mean the government man has been any kinder to Boss. Boss had probably had a worse time of it; at least Bird hadn’t been expected to answer any questions.

  “Boss.”

  From the dark, Boss’s eyes gleam.

  Bird pulls her mouth tight. Did they break Boss’s jaw? “I can pick the lock,” Bird says, “I have a key.”

  “Be quick,” Boss says, so quietly the walls swallow most of the words.

  Bird drops to one knee, starts picking the lock.

  There’s the scrape of the gun against the stone as the soldier jerks awake.

  Boss hisses, “Go.”

  No. No. Bird’s throat goes dry. She can’t have done all this to leave Boss alone in this dank grave. She tries with sweaty fingers to hold the sliver of metal steady inside the lock.

  “It’s you he’s going to kill,” Boss says through the door, “not me. He’s coming back any minute, and that’s the end for you.”

  Boss has always had a sense of when trouble was coming; she always knew when one of her own was broken. She can probably smell the copper, too, and Bird suffers a moment of shame that her maker has seen her this way. The ankle she suffered as a wound of war, but to have lain on the ground, to have been slammed against the wall to make the cutting easier—she should have fought, she should have wrenched the knife right from his hand and slid it through his ribs instead of being weak.

  She works faster on the lock; her face burns.

  Boss rises up behind the door, and faster than Bird can blink Boss is at the window, stretching her fingers to the open space. Bird lurches to her feet and lifts her hand to Boss’s fingers, feels the pain ebbing out of her as her body heals around the wounds the government man has made—one finger, two fingers. A moment later the stabbing pain in her ribs eases enough for her to see straight.