by Kim Smejkal
“The rest of the camp won’t wake until well after noon.” As Lilac strode away, she whispered to Sky, “One day is better. At least when they implode, the aftershock will be small.”
Caspian cartwheeled ahead—his long black hair rippling free and loose—moving so fast his skirt didn’t have time to get confused with all the upside down.
* * *
Lilac, Caspian, and Sky helped them prepare their act while the shadow of the temple loomed in their peripheral vision.
At one point in the blur, Lupita found them, smiling out from under her bright teal eye scarf. “I’ll be right there, front and center. If you get nervous, shout out ‘Hollyberry Jam!’ and I’ll feign heart failure in the most spectacular fashion to give you a diversion.” She laughed, adjusting Anya’s white feather boa into disarray, then patted Celia’s shoulders before hobbling away. The sun went down, and the torches lit up. The gates opened, and people streamed in, the sound of their collective delight swelling loud.
Backstage, Celia and Anya, their masks disguising their faces, but not their trepidation, stood like two boulders in a fast-moving river as performers swooshed past.
Celia forced her words out in a low whisper. “If this works and we get away, how hard do you think they’ll look for us?”
“Hard.” Anya could comfort with her bluntness or slice with it. “But we’re not running from a divinity. All we have to do is outrun a bunch of self-righteous people in robes.”
Profeta was so finely tuned, everyone had a part to play: cogs on a perfect wheel, rolling along as a self-sustaining automaton. The ink kept the people in line, made believers flock to the temple. It was the fuel, and Celia and Anya would cut off a sliver of the source by disappearing. “True. But those robes won’t let two rogue inklings set a precedent.”
Stone-faced, Anya stared at Celia. “Sometimes I wish you’d tell your pissy bees to shut up. I’m trying so hard to be optimistic here.”
One of the performers swooshing around them stopped to examine their trembling forms. Lilac. Maybe Celia’s horrid mask distorted her view, but for a moment this strange theater creature looked like a regular person. Her eyes, nearly the same shade of deep blue as Anya’s, lulled Celia with familiarity.
“You’ll be fine,” Lilac said. “If you fall on your ass, it’s not like we’ll eat you.” Celia had no idea if Lilac’s words were a light joke or a dark threat. The plague doctor had mentioned a blood price. “If you do okay, you’ll have nowhere to go but up.” She smiled at them both, the rings in her lips shining. “Or, in our case, west. Out of gloomy Illinia and toward the high plateaus of Kinallen. You can actually see the sky there. The stars! You should see the stars . . .”
Celia exhaled hard after Lilac left them, swept away again by the moving color and costume. Stars. Sunlight. Another world.
“So.” What else could she say?
“So,” Anya replied.
They fell into a hug. Celia’s horns got in the way, but they made it work.
Celia wanted to say something poetic and meaningful. Something like, Hey, this is the last part of a game we started playing when we were six. No, ten, at our final inkling test. Together. Always. They’d passed their final inkling trial because of a loophole; they never should have been inklings, despite the thin bands around their ankles.
But instead she said only what she had to. “Remember, your quill nub is small enough to swallow. If you have to, don’t you dare hesitate, Anny.”
Anya swallowed, as if the small slice of quill were already on her tongue. “Let’s do this.”
Interlude
That night, Celia Sand and Anya Burtoni tuck themselves behind a veil.
A darkened stage. No torches, gas lamps, or candles. Complete blackness, impossible to peel back.
Illumination appears around a pale figure dressed all in white. She moves through the crowd with angelic grace. People crane their necks trying to get a better view. As she walks, the radiance grows to encompass more and more of the audience, bringing them into the light with her.
“She walks among us. She’s one of us,” the people murmur. But for all her pristine appearance, veins of black lace her dress. This seems significant, but the crowd doesn’t know why.
Then the torches lining the stage spring to life, extending the angel’s world even further.
A horror lurks onstage. Under a tall domed glass container—a bell jar that should have held treasure—stands a hideous devil. The devil is everything the angel is not: sharp like obsidian, jagged and evil.
Gasps settle. They’re relieved that she’s trapped.
Thick, curled horns loop from her head. The beast’s face is a hideous mix of fur, teeth, and beady eyes. Those eyes never leave the angel—tracking her every movement. The beast stands coiled as if ready to spring.
The angel leaps onto a stool, hovering over the crowd, and speaks, telling them a short tale of how that devil has haunted her for years. It’s strange to their ears, to hear the angel speak their language. Commedia’s universal tongue of nonsense is gone, and instead, this one speaks sense.
“Invisible, but somehow always there,” she says, tapping her temple. “Knowing my thoughts, weighing me down.”
A few people in the crowd understand. Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like, they think.
“I trapped her, but she haunts me still. The weight may be off my back, but she’s still in my head. Always! See how she watches me, waiting for weakness!” She points to the devil, her long, loose sleeves fluttering, exposing her bare arms. “But I’ve learned to make a game of this curse. Otherwise I will go mad.”
She jumps from the stool. “Let me show you.”
As she weaves through the crowd once again, people part for her. Something is coming.
As the angel addresses the crowd, the devil moves for the first time. A shower of red lights dance around her and glint off the bell jar.
Then tiny blue shimmers. Then deep burgundy.
The devil makes those colors appear, but why?
The devil cocks her head to the side and, in a flourish, produces a paintbrush from nothing, writing one word on the side of her glass prison in harsh strokes, mirrored toward the crowd: Clementina.
She cocks her head to the other side and writes another name: Lazzaro.
The black paint drips down the glass.
There’s some clapping and cheering, but not everyone understands the significance. This isn’t the Commedia Follia they know: the players aren’t interacting; there’s no language-like gibberish between them, no exaggerated body movements to showcase emotion.
The people look between the angel and the devil, trying to figure out the game. They seek out the few mistico in the crowd, wondering how they’re reacting.
The angel makes sure to touch every corner of the crowd, asking for names, colors, secrets, and then the creature behind the glass immediately reacts.
There’s no way the devil onstage can hear any instruction.
A ripple of understanding spreads among the people.
The devil is reading the angel’s mind.
In the belly of the crowd, someone says, “Tell her my birthday,” and they whisper it to the angel. Even as the angel nods, the devil is already writing: 22 Markon, 14. No one else in the crowd had heard, and it’s an impossible date to guess, but the audience member gasps and nods, confirming it with wide eyes.
A few remain skeptical, thinking the show is rigged. The angel seeks them out, asking open-ended questions: “What would you have my devil do?”
The devil attempts, poorly, to stand on her hands. The devil ties a knot in her tail. The devil butts her head against the glass.
The crowd laughs at the creature’s desperation. The orders come faster, become stranger. People clamor to be the one chosen to suggest another trick. A few cynics go to absurd lengths to uncover how the illusion works. They inspect the angel’s costume, certain that something must be hidden in those long, loose
sleeves. They circle the devil’s glass, examine the stage, seek patterns in the lights or in the sky.
Even the mistico talk among themselves, wondering at this new act.
Still, the devil performs with barely a hesitation: She writes the musical notation for a child’s lullaby. She turns counterclockwise five times, then stomps her feet, then bares her teeth, then bends over and wiggles her behind to the crowd. She writes the names of the dead. She acts like a dozen animals, real and imagined.
Whatever the angel knows, the devil knows too.
Then the angel finds her way to a wailing child, determined to sway everyone in the crowd. “Do you want a turn?” she asks kindly. “Tell me your favorite color, dearest.”
Onstage, the devil stands with her head down, breathing hard. For the first time, her beady eyes are not on her captor.
The child points to the devil and blubbers, “You’re making her cry.”
Faced with an inconsolable child, the angel appears flustered.
The devil snaps her head up, squares her shoulders, and swipes a clawed hand under her coal-black eyes to wipe away stray tears.
“No!” The child shrieks at the angel. “Don’t tell her not to cry. Just stop being mean.”
The people look again at the black veins in the angel’s dress.
They look at a devil who wept: under her glass cage smeared with black paint, exhausted from dancing to their whims.
They’re confused. Everything seems backwards.
“Did we get it wrong, and the child is right?”
“Is the true devil among us?”
“Should we free that poor beast?”
This new act—The Devil in the Bell Jar—confuses and thrills them.
That’s when the veil goes sideways into chaos.
Chapter 8
Celia’s costume had two significant components: slivers of mirrors under the thick brow so she could see down without bowing her head, and black fishnet glovettes to disguise the thin lines of ink swirling on her skin.
When Anya, moving through the crowd, swiped down her arm with that suspiciously long fingernail—her disguised quill—Celia had stopped whatever she was doing. A loop to turn around. Arrows to jump or bend. For specific words and names, Celia had easily deciphered the crooked scrawl. Anya had scratched into her arm without looking—concentrating more on commanding the ink to return to her at exactly the right time—but her letters, numbers, and symbols had still pushed together in a meaningful way.
Celia had had no time to doubt. No time to think. She’d seen and she’d acted, drawing eyes to her so Anya could get to the next command. The hair-thin marks of ink had guided her completely. The ink told her to bow, and Celia bowed. Their underdeveloped code had worked for the basic answers they’d been able to predict: colors, animals, numbers. The rest had been Anya’s clear thinking, how well they knew each other, and the culmination of years of practice under the watchful eyes of the mistico.
But somewhere inside her deep layer of concentration, Celia’s mind had begun to revolt. Little by little it had curled up into a ball, rocking itself, confused, murmuring something like, Enough, Enough, Enough . . .
Celia hadn’t even noticed her tears until another vicious slash told her to stop them.
And stop she did, without question, already anticipating her angel’s next command.
But nothing came.
The quiet lull made Celia aware of herself again: her tears, the heat in her gut, the ache in her throat.
And the pause also made the world come back, but it was a world she didn’t understand. Mouths stretched open, making noises she couldn’t hear. Half of them shouted at her, the other half flung words at Anya. The crowd no longer consisted of observers, but was an active, roiling mass.
“What’s happening?” Celia’s words echoed off the glass. A few people tried to scale the stage to get to her. Scuffles broke out.
Part of the crowd melted toward Anya, enveloping her in their anger, a mistico among them. If they unmasked her . . .
A clear, definitive moment of panic, booming like a struck gong, erupted in Celia’s chest when Anya fell to the ground.
“No!” Celia smacked the glass, pounding on it with her scaled hands. “Get up! What’s happening?” She tried to push the glass dome over, wedged her fingers under the rim to tip it, but its bulk made it a true prison.
Black took over her line of sight. She registered the feathered wings, the hat. One of the plague doctor’s gloved hands gripped an iron hammer, the other gestured to the audience for calm. He glanced over his shoulder, and one beady eye stared at her while his smiling lips said something she couldn’t make out.
The glass exploded. Celia ducked against the shards raining down, knocking her mask askew, but inside the tiny mirrors she saw feet scampering in front of her, stepping on the broken glass with hard crunches.
Someone, two someones grabbed her arms and pulled her backwards. She tried to twist away from them, shrieking for Anya and shouting about hollyberry jam.
“Quiet,” the plague doctor whispered. “The show goes on.”
Celia craned her neck for a glimpse of Anya, of Lupita, of anything that made sense, as two fire-masters took to the stage, working around broken glass that had once housed a devil.
* * *
A woeful Palidon and an ever-smiling plague doctor tossed Celia unceremoniously onto a pile of discarded costumes backstage.
“Where’s Anya?” Her voice cracked, and she had to repeat herself. “Where’s Anya?”
The thick curtain covering a side entryway fluttered, and up near the scaffolding, Lilac poked her head through. A wave of the crowd’s roar blew in with her. “I told you not to fall on your ass and you both literally did just that.” She shook her hovering, disembodied head. “But Marco and Tanith have Distraction Level Red Flame underway.”
The plague doctor and the Palidon continued staring at Celia, both eerily still. She scoured her memory for the Palidon’s name. “Vincent?” The large black teardrop painted on his cheek stood out, shocking amid all the white. Even his clear eyes matched, as if his pale face paint had leached into his irises. He inclined his head in greeting, his stare unnerving in its clarity.
The sad, soulful clown. The naive fool, always pining for love, never fitting in. Celia had always been drawn to that character. Judging by how terribly she’d messed up their one chance at freedom, maybe she was that character. “Palidon’s my favorite.”
Vincent jerked back slightly, as if the compliment were a blow. Then he launched into a pantomime of indelible gratitude, offering her the invisible still-beating heart from his chest as repayment for the compliment. He said nothing, his facial expression didn’t change, but clearly he was pleased.
And Celia appreciated the gesture. It broke through the stalemate of stares, distracting her enough that she could swallow the sobbing gasps threatening to escape from her throat.
The curtain blew open again, this time from the bottom, and Anya worked her way around Lilac’s stilts.
Celia held her arms out like a child wanting to be picked up. “I’m sorry . . .”
“It’s okay, we’ll be okay.” Anya crumpled down beside her, repeating those words, as if trying to convince herself. They laced their fingers together, had a silent What now? conversation, and then faced their inquisitors from the bed of costumes.
Since neither the plague doctor nor the Palidon seemed inclined to use their voices, Celia braced herself to hear it from Lilac. Nice try, but—or maybe a more to-the-point, Get out before we throw you out.
The last thing she expected Lilac to say was “You were fantastic.”
“What?” Celia and Anya chorused.
Vincent shrugged so high his ears touched his shoulders.
Through those too-round, too-tinted lenses, the plague doctor stared.
Neither of them looked all that congratulatory, so Celia concentrated on Lilac’s assessment: fantastic. A shiver
coursed through her, and her heart ka-thumped painfully against her ribs.
Anya gripped Celia’s hand tighter.
Maybe they hadn’t spectacularly messed up. Maybe they were living their escape.
“Sure, the near-riot part was bad,” Lilac conceded. “Bad luck, that Kid in the crowd.” She paused and shrugged. “But they bought into it completely; they helped the angel beat the devil down. But would a devil cry? Would it look so sad and pathetic? That Kid made them feel like they’d chosen the wrong side. But you made them feel. That’s what we do.”
For the first time, Celia thought that those silver hoops in Lilac’s lips didn’t look like fangs or harsh cymbals, but like rare jewels.
The plague doctor nodded again, his beak slicing the air. When he’d smashed the glass, he’d acted on the people’s wants and turned it into part of the show. You were right! Of course the devil will be freed!
As if he hadn’t just been super intense, he turned to Vincent and said something about the fire-masters, making an explosion with his hands that rocked through his shoulders and shuddered down his spine. Vincent mimed heavy laughter.
Celia and Anya stared at them.
The plague doctor swept toward the exit, holding Vincent’s arm. “We’ll find Kitty Kay.” The plague doctor’s first words to them, and Celia didn’t know what they meant.
“What will you say? Can we stay? Does everyone vote?”
He didn’t answer.
Lilac shook her head at the curtain as they disappeared behind it. “Don’t worry about him. He gets muddled sometimes.”
“Who is he?” Someone more important here than just another performer. Someone strange, to smile so brightly while staring at the world from behind a mask of death.
“He’s”—Lilac took a while to find the right term—“second-in-command. Kitty Kay’s his mum.”
