by L. J. Hatton
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 L. J. Hatton
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skyscape, New York
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Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Skyscape are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503946569
ISBN-10: 1503946568
Cover design by Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design
CONTENTS
START READING
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
When they came, it wasn’t with flying saucers or rockets. They weren’t hulking monsters or Roswell Greys. They were more like jellyfish—bioluminescent blobs of goo that spread out across the sky. They brought the rain . . .
CHAPTER 1
The Show opened at twilight, when anything was possible.
It was the time of not quite day or night when the promise of something unexpected shimmered in the wonder light, and the mundane turned to magic, if wielded by a master’s hand. Magnus Roma was a master; The Show was his dominion. He was my father, and it was my home.
Forecasts had called for storms that night. We held our breath, but they never came.
My father said that people once danced in the rain, that they chased lightning and rode the wind, but not anymore. Not where others might see and suspect, and not since the Great Illusion made rain a bad omen. The only weather that crowds would tolerate now was the kind that came with the price of admission, and that we were happy to provide.
Lightning struck the apex of a fence around our circus grounds, brilliant against the darkening sky. Nothing but Tesla coils and a large-scale Faraday cage, but the effect was mesmerizing. Blue current swirled the lines, touching the earth as another bolt crackled off the fence peaks, illuminating our field with St. Elmo’s fire. So many people were used to looking up in fear of what they might find among the clouds that it took a while for them to do anything other than startle, but eventually, those who had crowded the gates forgot they were in a hurry. They shed their worries and watched, awe flickering in their eyes like candles lit with ideas they’d never dared dream.
The Show was a mad scientist’s paradise: Creatures long extinct zipped overhead, and wire-walkers lilted along live cables that should have electrocuted them. Jugglers tossed metal rods pulsing with energy, while swarms of mechanical sprites filled the air with bubbles and glitter and the scent of hope. High above it all rose our magnificent big top, an explosion of quilted color held aloft by suspension wires attached to balloons, rather than posts. The largest, at the center peak, caught the fading daylight so that sunset turned it rosy at the gathers, and metal bands forced the balloon into its shape. It drifted slightly with each change in the wind, clinking tiny bells along the bottom hem. A song of The Show that could only be heard if you were close enough to listen.
Pay attention, not merely admission, read a sign above the gate.
“Mommy, look!” a child squealed and pointed to a pair of hand-built unicorns milling between the props of a radiant tent maze inside the electric field. She ran forward, giving chase when the creatures shied away.
At The Show, fantasy and reality shared common ground, and technology served to dazzle and delight. Danger was as much an illusion as a magician’s card trick.
But then the warden came.
Most people didn’t recognize wardens on sight. The Commission wasn’t like the military; they weren’t even police with conventional uniforms. Theirs was a civilian operation, with offices in every capital of the industrialized world, plus outposts in places that didn’t have words to translate as “industry.” This warden wore his insignia—an ankh crafted from a splitting double helix—embroidered on the pocket of a black shirt, like a company logo. There was another on his ball cap, speared through with a clover-shaped pin that marked him as a survivor of the riots that engulfed Brick Street before I was born.
He was taking in the sights same as everyone else, smiling at the right things and meandering through the exhibitions. It was possible that he was there for nothing beyond the obvious, but, living in a circus, you get accustomed to not taking things at face value. Menace trailed him like cologne. His applause and smile were as fake as my Y chromosome. This man was both a warden and trouble, and I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. Of all the things meant to draw scrutiny and dare people to figure out their secrets, I wasn’t one of them. The Show had been built for me to hide behind.
An angry shout drew my attention from the warden to a star-encrusted tent belonging to Zavel the Mystic, our magician. The backmost corner began to twitch, and the tiny, dark-skinned face of Birdie Jesek wriggled out from under the muslin. She smiled brightly as she ran past me, a fresh pair of nicked sparklers in one hand. Close behind came Jermay, Zavel’s son and apprentice, determined to get them back.
He snatched at Birdie as she scampered, barefoot, up one side of a tall tent-prop and ran along the lantern strings to another, hopping sparks as she went. She crossed the entire tent village out of reach, snapping the ends off her sparkler wands to stick in her hair.
Watching Jermay was dangerous, because I was supposed to take precautions. Playing it safe meant keeping up the appearance of a boy who didn’t stare at other boys, or find their frustrated scowls endearing. But I wasn’t always cautious when it came to Jermay; I liked to watch him.
I had his features memorized—olive skin like mine, with the dark hair common to most who lived the traveler’s life. But unlike my sisters’ brown eyes, or my green ones, his were a startling blue that looked painted on. They were an anomaly so extreme that passing strangers stopped for a second look.
Jermay had been my best friend for as far back as I could remember. Long enough to say that if there was any real magic in the world, he was where it hid, pretending to be a sixteen-year-old boy who refused to accept that he couldn’t catch a little girl half his age.
Birdie was the youngest member of the Flying Jeseks, our acrobats, and even though she’d only been with them for two years, she�
��d taken to the high wire like she was born to it. Mother Jesek insisted that Birdie only stole Zavel’s sparklers because she wanted to shine.
My oldest sister, Evie, shined; it never did her any favors.
Beyond beautiful, Evie’s skin didn’t just reflect light—she glowed, like a lantern drawing moths. A young man had her cornered near the train, by the exterior paddocks used to house the exhibits that were too large to contain inside. He was the sort one might find handsome, but otherwise unremarkable, except for a tingling suspicion at the back of my head. He was too unremarkable. More than nondescript, he was literally unnoticeable. The harder I tried to get a look at him, the more out of focus and distant he appeared, like watercolors running in the rain.
He was one of them, and that was worse than a warden. He shouldn’t have been real, even at a circus, and especially not at The Show.
Unnoticeables, and the stories about them, were supposed to be urban legends. A fanciful fringe tacked on to the end of things said about the Medusae and the Great Illusion.
Maybe I should back up and start there—everything else did.
“Back then,” people are fond of saying, as though speaking vaguely is safer than saying it plain, but everyone knows they mean that year. One single year in which the world both ended and began again.
The clouds came first, pressing through the atmosphere on every continent, like a massive storm system had covered the planet. It rained—everywhere. Death Valley. The Sahara. The Gobi. Even Antarctica. Science called it atmospheric agitation; humanity called it a miracle. Soon, details came from the international space stations: hysterical screaming about things they called “space nettles” because there was no word for what had settled above us. They weren’t ships the way we’d been taught to think of flying saucers. They were organic. Alive. These nettles floated on solar currents like Portuguese men-o’-war on the tides, stretching their tentacles into a grid cast over the Earth.
They sealed us off. Their presence interfered with nearly every satellite in orbit, causing communications to go dark in 90 percent of the world.
Then our visitors showed themselves, imprinting their images on our atmosphere.
That’s all they ever did. They never communicated; they never attacked. They never even told us their names. Some newscaster started calling them Medusae because they looked like jellyfish, and it stuck. The Medusae hung in the sky while humanity went insane below. Riots and mass suicides, attempts to dislodge the ships with military force because the world was certain that silence equaled provocation. We almost choked ourselves with the aftermath of ordnance, and that was before the UN managed to coordinate a six-continent nuclear strike that included half the total payload of the United States, China, India, and the European Union. Russia, Pakistan, and a few countries that weren’t even supposed to be nuclear capable agreed to be the second wave, but we didn’t get that far.
Eerie, glowing tentacles dropped down and vaporized every warhead in midair, more than a mile from the Medusae themselves. That was the only move they ever made.
A year passed and the sky was never blue. It warped into pink and violet where the light passed through. No one understood how we survived without a “majority-species die-off” because of it, but the plants kept blooming, and the birds kept migrating. For that year, the Medusae watched, and then they left, leaving no evidence of their existence beyond the memories of those who lived through their time here. The news still broadcasts video of them on the anniversary. This is number twenty-four. I’ve heard next year, there’ll be a parade.
Things stabilized, and after a while, people began to question if it had happened at all. There were fingers pointed, and a lot of talk about coronal eruptions, high-altitude radiation clouds, and mass hysteria brought on by aerial chemical tides. It wasn’t a total denial, but most of the explanations left out any mention of off-worlders and gave people a pile of sand to hide their heads in. That year became the Great Illusion in our history books, but its legacy was very real, and despite their lack of willingness to speak the word aloud, most people still believed aliens had made contact.
Half the planet rebelled against technology, certain that satellites and space probes drew them to us in the first place. Like there’s an entire alien race out there tuning into reruns of old sitcoms and chowing down on space junk like potato chips. People sought solace in the old ways and hid behind a Luddite banner of inconvenience.
The aerial view of the world changed. While Paris stayed the City of Lights, and there were still a few other bright spots, major cities the world over cut power, rationing it to blackout conditions at night, eager to believe that doing so would cloak us from outside interest. D.C. and Moscow moved their essential facilities underground. London and New Delhi turned Neo-Victorian, starting a domino effect of backpedaling pop culture that swept the world and created The Show. People wanted the old world, or at least a sanitized version of it with medicine and plumbing.
The wardens were commissioned to great fanfare, tasked with investigating alien life and safeguarding Earth, and at first, it seemed like that’s what they had in mind. They started off with interviews, and tests on water and soil samples beneath the areas that’d had the highest concentration of alien presence. People slept better at night. But the thing about fanfare is that it’s Carnie 101—the easiest form of distraction. Once you understand that, you know to start looking at things from more obscure angles, away from the flash and the noise. That’s where you’ll find the truth behind the trick.
Stories of more sinister things popped up, but as soon as they did, they were silenced. Unnoticeable strangers that no witnesses could ever quite remember. People who now had peculiar abilities. Vagrants and transients who disappeared from their usual haunts and stopped showing up at clinics and shelters, like they’d been snatched straight off the street and hardly missed by anyone. Families swept out of their houses in the middle of the night, leaving nothing behind but empty rooms and confused neighbors.
It was all very efficient. Government efficient. The kind of thing no one risks talking about in company.
Rumors, my father said—bogeymen—but in his eyes I saw something to worry about. He was scared, and that meant they were real.
Now an unnoticeable had come to The Show.
I had always pictured these strange out-of-focus people as puppets wearing dark suits, with vulture eyes behind tinted sunglasses—not as someone young vying for the attention of a pretty girl who couldn’t be bothered. And I knew Evie would want me to keep my distance, but I crept closer while she pretended to listen to the man beside her, using our mechanical dragon, Bijou, as an excuse to ignore him.
She stroked Bijou’s nose, igniting the switch behind his top horn that made him stand on his haunches. The waning sun caught the underside of his wings, burning across rows of jewels set into titanium alloy between the joints. Shafts of light cast off Bijou’s jewels speared through the unnoticeable, so they came out on the other side of his body. He had no shadow.
I could see him, but he was no more than a whisper on the wind.
The unnoticeable ducked his head closer to my sister’s ear and said something that made her look away; that’s when she saw me. Our eyes met long enough for me to understand that I should leave, but without me she had no one to help her. If nothing else, I could claim Evie needed to get onto her mark before she was missed.
Another step closer, and I could hear Evie’s voice.
“This is neither the time nor the place.” She spoke with the rasp that developed when she was afraid.
“There are only a few minutes,” the unnoticeable said.
He stepped forward, and so did I. Evie’s eyes snapped back to mine as she arched her eyebrows. Another signal for me to move along, but this time he wanted to see what had taken her attention.
“Who—” he started, drawing himself up tall and straight, the way
men do when they think they’re being intimidating. “Who are you?”
He wrapped his hand around her arm, now solid enough that his fingers dented her skin, and pulled her back—but he still had no shadow. I felt the first flush of panic burn behind my ears, smelled the crackling ozone in the air around me as small pebbles began to vibrate at my feet. How could someone without substance touch anything?
“That’s my brother being overprotective of the person who changed his diapers,” Evie said lightly.
Brother. Right. I had to keep control of myself, watch my manners and my voice. Penelope had to remain Penn’s secret.
“Off with you, Penn,” Evie ordered, freeing herself from the unnoticeable’s grasp. Annoyed, he pulled a cardboard pack from his jacket and took out a cigarette. “Keep your eyes on things that concern you.”
And make sure official eyes have no reason to find you.
I finished the rest of our father’s warning in my head. Silently, I asked his forgiveness for disobeying. I didn’t trust myself to move; I was too angry.
“I’m already running behind, and I haven’t even lit Bijou for the night,” Evie said.
“Do you need a light?” the unnoticeable asked.
He struck a match.
“I can manage.” Evie laughed nervously. She cupped her hand around the end and stole the flame, so it flourished in her open palm.
Using her gift outside our arena was dangerous for everyone who carried the Roma name. So long as our father was with us, we were protected, but he’d been gone for weeks, and without him . . .
I made her expose herself. To an unnoticeable.
The cigarette tumbled to the ground as he spluttered, “The rumors are true?”
I glanced down, to see if the cigarette was real, but it wasn’t there, either. The ground was smooth dirt, undisturbed. This man was here and not here at the same time. He was as impossible as Evie stealing a flame she couldn’t have touched.
“Never trust your eyes at The Show.” Evie smiled at him coyly, but didn’t quite pull it off. “They’re in on the act, and we’ve convinced them to lie to you.”
