Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

by Genevieve Valentine

  Bird asks, quietly, “Will they kill her?”

  Elena has gone off with a government man before (perhaps Bird knows—Bird listens when you hope she isn’t), but that was a different government. That man felt stupid not knowing how the trick was done, and after Boss showed him he couldn’t get rid of her fast enough.

  This man, she knows, is a different breed. She looks at his impassive face, the anticipation in his eyes.

  “Yes,” Elena says.

  They watch as the government man pulls Boss around to face them, and invites her to lie about where she’s going, as if she’s coming back.

  Bird says without looking, “Can you throw me?”

  Elena glances over at Bird, sizing her up. No reason to go on without the woman who can give her the wings, Elena guesses. Or maybe Bird has the most experience killing people. Some people find themselves very good at killing, once they get started. You do strange things out in the world before you join the Circus.

  “You’ll die too,” she says.

  Bird never looks away from the government man. She says, “All right.”

  Elena doesn’t think any more about it. She crouches and laces her fingers, to give Bird a place to step.

  The crew knows something is wrong, and the ripple of discontent distracts the government men, who don’t know where to look. Elena keeps her eyes fixed on where Bird will fly and knots her muscles around the copper bones; dimly she feels the solid weight of Bird’s foot in the sling of her hands (perfect balance), and then in a single motion so smooth that no one sees, Elena uncoils, stands up, lets go.

  Bird flies five feet over the heads of the crowd, arms like a falcon’s wings, ready to strike, and Elena can’t hear anything but the blood pounding in her ears.

  It’s not fear that makes breathing so difficult. She’s just unused to so much liftoff, is all. Elena has nothing to be afraid of. She’s not the one who jumped.

  (She lowers her hands, so no one sees what happened.)

  When the shot comes, Elena’s the only one who doesn’t jump at the sound.

  Then Mina is screaming, and shots are going off, and Ying has cried out, and Elena has to step forward and grab Ying’s arm to keep her from running to Bird and getting dragged off, too.

  (The problem with softhearted people is that they can’t control themselves in bad circumstances. She doesn’t know why Boss keeps letting them in.)

  Elena watches Bird get shoved into one of the black cars and hopes that Bird is better at planning revenge than she looks, because right now Elena has her doubts.

  (It isn’t true. Bird was born to plan revenge. It’s why Elena offered Bird her hands. Elena doesn’t believe in lost causes.)

  As the crowd begins to disperse, Elena stands where she is, watching the cars as if Bird will fly through one of the windows and wreak havoc on them. Even after the cars are gone, she watches the horizon. It’s the closest she’s come to goodwill for Bird, to hope Bird kills them all.

  Dimly, she hears Stenos and Ayar struggling, but she doesn’t turn to look. If Stenos is hoping to save his chance for the wings, he’s too late, and if he’s racing after his partner, it’s not the sort of display Elena would care to see.

  Why make a fool out of yourself for someone you’re supposed to hate?

  (That’s the problem with softhearted people. No control.)

  46.

  The first government man who asks Boss to follow him comes seventy years before the second one.

  That first one comes for a visit, and even though one of the dancing girls shows him that her copper hand is only a glove, he is suspicious. (He was a fool, but not as stupid as some.)

  He demands that Boss come with him at once to the capital city over the hill. (They’re closer to the capital city than they will ever camp again; after this, Boss loses her taste for capital barter.)

  “And bring someone,” he says, waves an arm to indicate that all her freaks are the same.

  The camp is small back then—maybe ten performers if the dancing girl hasn’t run away, and no crew. Still, Boss doesn’t even look behind her when the order comes.

  “Elena,” says Boss.

  In the audience hall with windows like prison bars (must have been a factory once), he asks how Boss does it. Boss explains politely that she has no idea, that sometimes these things just come upon one.

  “Show me,” he says.

  Elena watches Boss with narrowed eyes, but she stays where she is, at Boss’s side.

  Boss passes her hand over Elena and kills her.

  The body slumps to the floor. Someone runs from the shadows to see if Elena is really dead (someone smarter and less afraid than his master, whose upper lip is sweating).

  “It’s a trick,” he says.

  The man touches Elena’s neck, holds her wrist, puts his hand to her open mouth. He shakes his head.

  At the end of a long quiet, the government man says, “Bring her back.”

  Boss passes her hand over Elena. Nothing happens.

  The government man is sweating now, wiping his hands on his pants. “But—you can bring her back.”

  Boss shrugs. “It comes and goes,” she says, with the air of the long-suffering.

  Twice more she passes her hands over Elena’s body. Then she steps back, clears her throat.

  “Very sorry,” she says, solemn. “I can’t revive her.”

  The government man balks at the words, stares down at Elena’s dead body. (The hollow bones are more flexible than bones that are real; splayed on the concrete of the capitol building, her corpse looks like a flattened spider.)

  He is a government man by accident, anointed for having survived longer than his fellows. He has been told the circus is a source of income, if he can only convince the woman that it’s more than her life is worth to refuse. He is new to war; seeing someone stripped of life is still novel enough to frighten.

  “Go,” he chokes. He feels ill. “Get out.”

  “The body—”

  “I’ll bury it,” he says, as if it’s an apology.

  “Will you dispose of it promptly?” Boss asks. “It’s my religion.”

  The government man has sunk a little towards the floor as his knees give; he looks up at her, blinks.

  There is no car waiting for her at the gate, so she walks the four miles back to camp. (Never again does she let the circus get this close to the capital city; important people have no manners.)

  She holds on to Elena as much as she can, thinks the name with every step, to tie Elena down to her until they can find her again.

  At the top of the hill Boss passes Star the dancing girl, two jugglers, Nayah and Mina on the practice trapeze. Nayah and Mina freeze when they see her walking alone, but they don’t climb off the trapeze or call out to ask what’s happened to Elena. In days like these, it’s no surprise when someone goes out and doesn’t come back.

  Alec sees her and comes running, the wings humming behind him.

  Boss holds up her hand, stops him in his tracks, keeps walking alone.

  She closes herself in her trailer and pulls the shades. It’s not the same as being thrown in a grave, but it’s close enough.

  Boss closes her eyes and listens, tries to grab hold of Elena. She can’t wake up still buried in the ground (too cruel even for Elena), but if Boss can’t hold on to her until dark, there might be nothing left of Elena to bring back.

  (Boss had done it without thinking; she had only done what she knew would frighten him the most. No government man liked to see that kind of power over something he owned. The whole point of ruling was to not be subject to the same death as the common people.

  Elena, though, had known what was coming. That narrow-eyed accusation hadn’t been for nothing.

  Hold on, Boss thinks. Hold on.)

  Boss ignores the tinny wheeze at the door that means that Panadrome is outside clearing his throat. She ignores, later, the glissando that begins the aerialist number, which he plays over and over, as
if Elena might come looking for the sound.

  Boss keeps her eyes closed and her mind fixed on the memory of Elena’s audition: swinging on the makeshift trapeze with her eyes closed, sliding and spinning in the moment of weightlessness, dropping and reaching out to grab hold without looking, as if the trapeze is a magnet, as if she knows the bar will never fail her.

  Elena was the first person who ever auditioned; back before there was even a proper circus, Elena was the one who knocked on Boss’s door and asked, “Do you have an aerialist? I’m trained.”

  (The first performers who found Boss, that first generation of circus folk, were trained. The ones who came after were only talented—lifetimes of scaling walls and finding things to take hold of to keep from falling.

  It makes no difference to Boss how they come by the skill, so long as they perform. Some of them fight like dogs about it when they’re alone, but people will always find something to fight about.)

  It wasn’t Elena’s audition that impressed Boss, though it was the best audition Boss would ever see for the trapeze. It was that after Elena had made the trapeze (out of a length of old pipe and two ropes that she slung from a tree), she stood on top of the branch and took off her coat, her boots, her socks, her scavenged sweaters, the belt with her knife strapped to it. By the time she slid down the rope to the bar, she was wearing nothing but a thin shirt and her underwear.

  In days like those, the first fever of war, still Elena had left her knife and boots behind for better balance on a homemade trapeze. That’s what impressed.

  Boss had seen immediately that lighter, stronger bones would be the only things that lasted for the aerialists. Left alone, their bodies would crumble and break. The whole time Elena was auditioning, Boss was deciding how to ask Elena if she was willing to die for it. Though, watching her unfold on the trapeze, looking safer and stronger than she had with her boots and her knife, Boss would have taken Elena even if she had refused the bones.

  (In the end it was better to be practical. “You’ll die if I give you a metal skeleton,” Boss said. She indicated Panadrome, who watched from the corner of the trailer. She said, “But then afterwards you might wake.”

  There was a quiet as the “might” filled the room.

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

  Boss lets Elena sit in the ground until nightfall.

  As soon as it’s dark, she opens the door. Alec is standing by the steps, waiting. There is a long, straight groove in the ground where he has paced back and forth.

  Boss says, “Bring her home.”

  Before she’s finished, Alec has spread his wings, and he disappears into the night sky in a gust of air and a hush of notes.

  Boss doesn’t worry if he’ll find her in the graveyard beyond the city. He’ll know where she is. Something about the wings brings him whatever luck he needs.

  Boss brings Elena back as soon as her body is laid out on the table; no point in wasting time.

  When Elena takes her first gasping breath, she chokes up a wet cough of mud, claws at the dirt over her eyes. Boss lets Elena struggle back to life without interfering, trying not to notice the tears drawing clean lines on Elena’s filthy face.

  Eventually Elena is herself again. She sits up, her legs dangling.

  Boss doesn’t say, I’m sorry. She doesn’t say, If I had to choose again it would still be you, because you would work hardest to return.

  “Welcome back,” Boss says instead.

  Elena’s face is pale from a day without blood, and her arms, propping her up, are trembling. She flexes her fingers against the edge of the table, fixes her eyes on Boss. There’s a leaf knotted in her hair, green against the dirt, and Boss wonders how deep they buried her.

  (Years from now, a man will drive a wolf to the top of a hill, and Boss will see this same gaze. Years from now, Boss will rescue the wolf, for old time’s sake.)

  At last, Elena slides off the table and walks outside without a word.

  Outside, Elena’s silhouette walks to one of the rain barrels, and after a moment Boss can see beads of water flickering in the dark, falling into nothing.

  47.

  Elena washed off the worst of the grave, and then she went into the circus tent.

  The bulbs were all out for the night, and the canvas was like a cape thrown over the stars, but Elena sat and waited for Alec to come. She was patient; it was no different from waiting in the ground.

  (Alec’s wings had half-woken her; she remembered being wet and cold, remembered opening her mouth to call for him. That was when the dirt got in.

  Then there was nothing but darkness until she heard Boss welcoming her home again. It was her third time being born. She had hoped it got easier. It had been a disappointment.)

  She knew Alec was coming before she heard his wings, before he pushed the tent flap aside and let the moon flood the space with light.

  When she ran to him, he embraced her so tightly that she cut her hands on his feathers.

  “I felt it,” he said into her hair. “It was like someone had cut off my wings. It must have been terrible. Oh, Elena.”

  Underneath the stink of earth that had invaded her, there was the smell of copper bowls in summer that she knew was his.

  “It’s all right, brother,” she said, and felt him smiling into her neck at the word.

  Brother was the closest name she had for him. Boss gave everyone a name when they woke again, but she really needed to make new names for everything, Elena thought, names that would fit what happened when you were tied together this way without escape.

  “Welcome home,” he said, and she could feel his happiness and worry. (His hands were scraped raw from digging her out.)

  “Let me see,” she said.

  He turned carefully (the edges of his wings could slice through to the bone if he was careless), and even in the pitch-black tent the wings shone, folded tight against his body like dragon scales.

  When she touched the top of each wing, the arch was warm, and it felt like home. Her bones were inside the sculpted brass there, and the heat from his body bled through the marrow. Under her hands, Alec trembled.

  (“She made them from whatever she could find,” he had told her. It meant that Boss had used strangers’ ribs to build her masterpiece, that now Alec carried folded on his back an endless cacophony of the dead.)

  She knew which bones were hers (touching there was like waking up from a dream), and sometimes she touched the petals, to straighten one out where the wind had bent the tip, but she never touched anything else of the frame, where the bones were wrapped. She was afraid what might happen if one dead thing seeped into another.

  (It was already taking its toll on Alec. He couldn’t sleep; he looked around for conversations no one was having, and he folded his wings tighter and tighter along his back as if to cover their mouths.

  “Tell her,” Elena said, and Alec shook his head, said, “How could she understand?”)

  “I’m all right,” she said, and to prove it she smiled, though he couldn’t see. He’d feel it; he was her brother.

  Alec sighed, and the wings moved with him, a single note that seemed to close the space between them and bring her home again.

  Elena rested her forehead on the warm skin below his neck and closed her eyes. Of all of them, Alec seemed to be the only one who brought all his life with him; Alec was the one who never grew cold.

  48.

  This is what Elena sees the first time she meets Bird:

  Hunger.

  Elena sees the darkness of the tent; the darkness of the grave; the shiver of the wings as Alec trembled under her hands, his feathers an armor that would not hold.

  “She won’t last,” Elena says.

  Alec didn’t.

  49.

  I stared after the cars for a long time, as if it had all been a joke and any moment they would turn around and apologize. I felt sick, and once my legs shook like they w
ere going to buckle, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the brown ribbon of road where the cars had disappeared.

  (Part of me was waiting for the sound of a gun, as if there was a thread attaching me to Boss, and that one sharp crack would sever it.)

  At last I managed to turn my head away and look around me. The crowd had vanished. In all that expanse of trampled grass where they had stood there was only Elena left, and she was watching me.

  I had a terrifying moment of imagining we were the only two people left in the world.

  “She might want us to get to someplace safer,” I said. I didn’t sound like I believed it—I couldn’t even think it might be true. I wrapped my left hand around my throbbing right arm. I didn’t have to listen to Boss. It must have been for the benefit of the government man. How would Boss let one day of this circus happen without her?

  “If we’re safe, then once she and Bird are out she can look for us,” I said. I tried to make it sound like the kind of plan a sane person would come up with. “I bet that Boss could find us in a week flat once she comes out of that city.”

  Elena’s mouth went into a thin line.

  “Little idiot,” she said too sweetly, “there’s no coming back from where she’s gone, unless Bird throws you a miracle you don’t deserve.”

  Through my shirt, I could feel the raised scars of the griffin under my fingers. Its mouth was open, as if it was keening for something it had lost.

  I walked back through camp out of habit, making the rounds as always. If it seemed like all the color had been seeped from the circus folk, it was only because my eyes were dry from the dust. If it felt like I was locking them in, then it was only because I had changed, not because they had.

  (Of course they had changed; their ringmaster was gone. They weren’t a circus any more.)

  I passed Jonah and the crew and the dancing girls, who were packing up, rolling canvas and strapping down anything that might break if we had to make a break for it. Moonlight and Minette were crying as they lifted, but they worked in time with the rest. There was a show to move; no one slacked.