Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

by Genevieve Valentine

  I rolled my eyes. I didn’t know why I bothered asking her anything. “I’ll think twice before I pitch the tent and order a command performance for the fish, how’s that?”

  As I was turning to go she said, “We went an extra leg after we hit the river. We’re too far for them to reach us before morning. That’s what’s wrong.”

  I walked back to my trailer feeling like my pockets had been stuffed with stones.

  I woke up to Stenos with his hand over my mouth.

  If I had even thought to fight (and there was no fighting Stenos unless you had metal ribs), I gave it up when I saw his face. He looked like I felt.

  When he saw I wouldn’t raise the alarm, he sat back on the bed, balanced on the balls of his feet at the edge of the footboard. In the dark (the last of the dark, it was almost morning, we were too far for him to reach us before dawn) he was little more than a silhouette with two gleaming eyes. He seemed to have grown; his shadow on the wall was twice as large as he was, as if his purpose had made him grander than before.

  “I’ve brought Bird,” he said quietly. “She’s dead. Two hours ago.”

  My heart seized.

  “Boss told her to look for you as she escaped,” Stenos said, watching my face. “Can you help her? Is that why Boss told her that?”

  The griffin on my arm felt like a second skin.

  “I can try,” I said. “But I can’t—I don’t even know what Boss gave me. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Try, then,” Stenos said, and I had never heard such a warning.

  I knew I couldn’t do it. I prayed Stenos wouldn’t kill me when I failed.

  Stenos stood up and motioned me outside. The camp was quiet, the river louder than any of the noises from inside the trailers, and I wondered how late it must be that everyone was finally asleep.

  I looked around for Bird, but when I turned behind me to ask what had happened to her, Stenos was walking down the stairs, and I saw that what I had thought was his shadow behind him was only Bird, draped over his shoulders.

  He had folded her legs under one of his arms, and her head was tucked between his shoulder and his neck, as if she had for a moment gotten shy. One arm hung down Stenos’s back. She looked like a lash of crooked branches on its way to the fire. But it was the limp fingers (the nails crusted with dirt) that terrified me.

  (Poor Bird, I thought, wondering what she must have done to get out from behind the city walls. Then, going cold to the bones, I thought—Poor Boss, who must still be behind them.)

  “Follow me,” I said, and turned for the workshop.

  The inside of the workshop smelled like metal and earth and the patchwork of perfume oils that Boss used whenever we could come by them, and for a moment I was five years old again, skittering along the floor of the workshop between the table legs, plucking up the screws and nails that had rattled loose during the day.

  I turned on the little generator and clicked on the nearest table lamp. The light was harsh and hopeless; I wished for a lantern, as if soft light would make any of this easier.

  Stenos laid Bird down along the table, and I looked at her face (one closed eye, the blue glass one staring up at nothing), and all the bandages pulled tight around her and stained with red, and felt sick.

  “What happened to her?”

  “Some of it was from running,” Stenos said. Then he fell silent, which meant that the rest of her wounds were from the government man cutting her open to see how she worked.

  I close my eyes. The griffin burned. I hoped it was a good sign; did it wake up to help or to warn?

  The air got thick, as if there was an electric current just under the table, like Bird’s body was made of a million filaments and I had magnets in my hands. I held my palms a few inches above Bird’s body, hovering back and forth, trying to follow the feeling, to find whatever I could draw to myself.

  I thought about the first time I had seen Bird walking up the hill to the camp, how she had come out of the tent with powdered hands, how her gaze had never wavered.

  From under my hands, Bird croaked, “Give me the wings.”

  I jumped and yanked back my hands. I’d done it. I’d done it, I’d woken the dead, Boss hadn’t warned me—I couldn’t breathe, I clenched my fists to my chest. I didn’t feel any different, I didn’t know what I had done.

  (Later, I knew what I had done would fix me tighter and tighter to the circus, that by passing my hands over her and using what power Boss had lent me, I had turned the lock but good.

  But even if she had told me what it would mean to use the power, even if she had warned me not to act, how could I have held back, looking at Bird laid out on the table, knowing she would go into the ground if I did nothing?)

  Stenos startled at the sound of Bird’s voice, and for a moment he moved forward, reaching for her like he was going to embrace her. (I didn’t understand him.) Then her words must have hit home, because his face clouded over, and he looked at me.

  “You’re not ringmaster yet,” he said. “That’s not your call to make. Boss hasn’t decided. Don’t you try.”

  “I need them,” Bird said. Her voice was dry and cracked, like she’d been dead a week and her lungs were dusty. “He’ll put her in the bell cages, there’s no other way to reach her, no one can jump that far . . . ” She wheezed.

  I wanted to believe it was just a fever speaking, but Bird didn’t sound hysterical, and by the desperate, cunning look on Stenos’s face, he didn’t think she was speaking nonsense, either.

  “Anyone with the wings could do the same,” Stenos pointed out, as if I was going to argue with him, as if he wanted as quickly as possible to seem reasonable.

  (He was very good at sounding reasonable. Not a lot of fools lived to his age.)

  Most things in the circus were unfair; I wasn’t stupid enough to have missed that. Everyone got an equal shot at performing if they passed their auditions and sat quietly for the bones, but more than that was up to luck. If you ended up under Elena then you would never hear a kind word again, and there was nothing you could do about it. Everyone got their chance to perform, sometimes with the person they hated most in the world (even Stenos, especially Stenos).

  And some people had stayed human and handsome and still got to star under the circus lights, and meanwhile their partners got mangled this way and that way with nothing to show for it.

  Stenos was looking back and forth, from Bird’s bone-white face to the wings strapped up and hanging from a butcher’s hook just at the edge of the light, like he was gauging the distance, like he was going to beat her to them if she lunged.

  (He might have beat her to them, but if she had found the strength to reach for them, I’d have stopped him in his tracks if he followed.)

  (Why anyone would want the wings, I never understood. Even Alec must have hated them by the end; he jumped from the trestle just to get away.)

  “It’s not complete,” I said. Stenos wasn’t the only one who knew how to spin a convincing lie. “She’s only back for a little while. I have to concentrate if I’m going to help her. You’ll see her when I’ve finished.”

  He took a step closer—looking at her, not at me. “You’ll leave us the moment you get them, won’t you?”

  Bird opened her eye, focused it on him. “How could I leave such pleasant company?”

  I stifled a laugh, tried to concentrate on the feeling of pulling her back into her body. I held a hand out over her heart and she twitched.

  He said, “You can’t give them away. I’ve been waiting for them.”

  Bird said, “Don’t wake me up again without them. If you’re going to give them to him, just let me go. I’ve had enough of life on the ground.”

  “Stop that,” Stenos said through clenched teeth, but he didn’t back down from his claim.

  Never had I needed so much to know Boss’s mind. Which one was she saving the wings for? Had she ever saved the wings for someone, or were they the memorial of Alec she could carry with h
er?

  (She had probably lied to them both just to keep them in line; it felt the most like what she would do.)

  “Bird,” I said, “don’t make me decide.”

  She slid her good eye to look at me askance. “Boss told me to find you,” she said. “If you won’t decide, who will?”

  “Boss,” I said. “She’ll find a way out. She’ll meet us here, and then she’ll decide.”

  Slowly, once, Bird shook her head, then sighed like it was too hard, like it didn’t matter.

  “The wings are not part of this,” Stenos insisted.

  “Did you bring her all the way back here just to have this little fight?” I asked.

  Stenos closed his mouth over his words, paused like he was deciding why he had brought her back. On the table, Bird was looking from one of us to the other, the one dark eye sliding back and forth.

  I felt her slipping away from me suddenly, like the tide going out, sliding away from my power and back into the dark.

  “She’s dying,” I said, like Stenos could help me. I grabbed at her leg, at her arm, looking for any connection I could force. I didn’t know what to do or how to do it; I hated Boss for putting me here.

  The helplessness pressed on my lungs, I was desperate for answers—answers to anything, from anyone—and I said to Bird, “You, you, the wings are yours.”

  (I meant it, but I would have said anything to bring her back into my care. If I couldn’t look out for them all now, who could?)

  I felt her again, as if a coat of dust over her was being slowly brushed away—I closed my eyes and tried to grab at anything I could to keep her there.

  The door to the workshop burst open.

  Elena stood in the doorway, a thin metal poker held like a javelin in one hand, and without hesitating she launched it.

  I was the first silhouette, I guess, because that’s where she aimed it. She had a steady hand—I wondered wildly if Boss’s power worked if I tried it on myself to keep from dying of a javelin wound.

  Stenos reached out a hand and plucked the poker casually from the air, so fast I didn’t see it—just the glint of the metal, then Stenos standing with his fist closed around it.

  Elena looked at Stenos, and after a long moment of pleased surprise at seeing him, she looked at me, and noticed Bird.

  She went pale. Then her javelin hand dropped. Then finally she murmured, “Oh my god.”

  “Quiet,” Stenos snapped. “She’s alive. George is working on her.”

  She rested one hand on the doorway. “And what can George do, except clean up afterwards?”

  “He brought her back from the dead,” said Stenos.

  Elena looked at me with wide eyes. I’d seen her surprised more often in the last two minutes than in the last several years—I had thought she had moved beyond caring what other people did.

  At last she managed, “You have the griffin? That’s what Boss gave you?”

  It pressed against the skin like it was trying to break loose and meet her; I clasped my arm and glared at Elena, which was all the proof she needed.

  “Nice of you to bring Bird’s carcass back just to satisfy your curiosity,” she said, looking at Stenos.

  He glanced over at her, and for a moment the two of them shared some silent conversation that passed me by. I didn’t want to know what it was. I couldn’t risk Stenos arguing about the wings again.

  Finally I said, “Go outside.”

  Stenos said, “But the wings—”

  “It’s not your decision,” I said. My voice echoed in the workshop. “They go to the person with the greater need. They’re Bird’s.”

  Elena looked from Stenos to me. “No,” she said. She stepped closer. Her eyes swallowed the light. “George, you can’t give her the wings.”

  “They’re mine to give,” I said, “no matter what Stenos might have told you.”

  “No,” she said to me, then paused, looked over her shoulder at Stenos. “No,” she said, softer. “You don’t want them. You don’t know what they do to you.”

  Stenos crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you afraid I’ll finally equal you?”

  The trailer went silent. I looked down at Bird, whose eyes were closed, but there was a shallow rise and fall of her chest, so she was listening, she was holding on.

  (I didn’t know why I had looked down at her in that moment; I didn’t yet know how quickly you became connected to your children; how, whenever they sorrowed, your heart ached.

  Poor Boss.)

  Finally Elena said to him, more tenderly than I’d ever heard her, “No, you fool. The wings are made of bone; when you get them you’re strapping yourself to the dead.”

  Now she was looking at Bird, looking finally at me. “It drove Alec mad,” she said, and it was like I had swallowed a stone, so I knew it was true.

  “I’ve never minded the dead,” said Bird. “I only want to be free of the ground.”

  Elena lunged for her; then she was locked in the cage of Stenos’s arms, still reaching for Bird, fingers straining at the air.

  “Don’t you understand?” she said, her voice rising. “I dropped you to spare you the wings!”

  In two steps Stenos had her at the door to the workshop; then he was letting go of her (no, he was throwing her), and she unfurled in the air and landed lightly on the balls of her feet, her face alight. Stenos leapt down the stairs after her. Past the doorway the others were gathering, one at a time wandering into the thin circles of light coming from the open trailer doors.

  “How could you?” he was shouting, the words carrying like a bell. He advanced on her. With each step he took she moved, weightless, just out of his reach.

  “Boss doesn’t give favors she can’t control,” Elena said.

  He lunged, she moved; a moment later, her shadow followed.

  “She learned her lesson with Alec,” Elena said. “You don’t know what the wings do to you, you never saw Alec at the end. Bird would have stayed on that trapeze, until wanting the wings drove her to do what Alec did. At least when I dropped her she survived.”

  “But she still wants the wings!” Stenos spat. “It’s all she wants!”

  Elena’s face was a mask of grief. “I did what I could. I can’t help it if people are fools.”

  “And what about me?”

  Elena flinched, glanced around at the gathering crowd before she turned back to Stenos. She fixed him with a glare she must have summoned from the grave.

  “I’d never have looked at you,” she said, “if I’d known it would come to this.”

  I was watching, rapt (the faces I could see were silent, too, and fixed on Elena), and it startled me when Bird said my name, softly. She was struggling to sit up, her legs dangling off the edge of the workshop table; she was watching them argue, too.

  “Close the door,” she said. “It won’t take long.”

  I did, and when we were alone she said, “You have to decide. Now.”

  “Or what?” I said. It was supposed to come out bold, but instead it sounded like the truth, which was me scared to death and not knowing what to do.

  “No one else will go back for Boss,” Bird said. “I will.”

  “Stenos would.”

  She smiled thinly. “Stenos left her to bring me back to you. You’re so sure he’d go back for her, once he had what he wanted?”

  With Stenos there was no telling (he had been a thief first; thieves did as they pleased).

  “Elena says they’ll make you mad,” I tried. “That’s why Boss never gave them to anyone after Alec.”

  Bird shrugged, winced at the exertion. “I don’t think I can get any madder,” she said.

  I bit back a smile.

  Outside, Jonah was calling out to Stenos not to be stupid. I wondered what was happening (whatever it was, I was afraid of it), but under Bird’s eye I was rooted in place, being dragged into making a choice that would ruin someone. (Only one, if I was lucky. If I wasn’t, who knew how bad it would get.
)

  Bird lay back on the table, turned her head to look at the buckled wings on the butcher’s hook. Their edges caught the lamplight, little winks of bronze and gold, and even I had to admit they were beautiful.

  “I knew they were here before I ever came to Tresaulti.” She closed her eye. “As soon as I saw them, I knew what they were,” she said, so quiet I could hardly hear.

  My arm ached to help her. I reached out without thinking and rested one hand on her forehand, one on her chest.

  I felt like the earth was tilting, that I was being swallowed up, that there was nothing around us but the darkness and the void, and I realized I was being carried with her into death. I resisted, straining, begging her to fight it for my sake.

  There was a sickening rush, and then we were back in the workshop. I was sweating from exertion. She was coughing up blood.

  In my years at the circus (and by now I knew I’d been here longer than I had thought, that the circus had kept me young and hidden from time), I had only ever wanted a real place; a need—any need—that only I could fill.

  Boss had given it to me as a parting gift. Now I had the choice to use it, or stay who I had been, Little George who relayed choices other people made.

  (I had made my choice as soon as Bird opened her eyes under my hands and spoke, but sometimes you delay something that has no resolution. Even Boss had delayed this choice, and I had learned all her habits long ago; habits that old were hard to break.)

  Finally I said, “Turn over,” and reached behind me for the wings.

  66.

  Outside the trailer in the dark, Elena danced out of the way of Stenos’s reach as he closed in on her. His face was grim, and he didn’t even seem to notice they weren’t alone—his eyes were fixed on her.

  “I’ll kill you for what you did,” he said.

  She said, “Go ahead if you want. It doesn’t take.”

  The little assembly around them was still sleep-addled, but one or two of the performers were quicker to wake and realize what was happening, and they were glancing back and forth with sharp eyes.