by Kim Smejkal
Marco continued. “He tried to rescue a stranded cat and fell out of the damn tree.”
Anya snorted and laughed. A few others joined her, momentarily slicing through the tension. The plague doctor didn’t laugh. Neither did Celia.
Anya stopped abruptly. “Seriously?”
The plague doctor bowed low. “I did save the cat.” He bowed exactly as Diavala had bowed to Celia that first night. Or he bowed the way everyone bowed. It could mean everything, it could mean nothing. “See? There’s madness all around. It’s inescapable.”
Inescapable madness that someone close had a skeleton ringing like a struck tuning fork. They felt the beginning of the end. Maybe, whoever’s bones sang now was lying low, trying to survive. Maybe they’d curled in on themselves, determined not to anger the beast lurking within them, stretching their time out like taffy, holding on.
Fear was a powerful silencer.
And if you already knew what death looked like, all the more reason to dread it.
By that point, most of the Mob had grudgingly accepted the plague doctor’s decision, the stately bow and talk of the world’s madness diffusing their fight. Vincent was as safe as possible, what harm could come from one more show? But Marco sighed and looked toward the gates. “Maybe we can reason with them—”
“No, Marco.” The plague doctor’s voice, so deep and final, was like hitting bedrock. “Don’t bother.”
The plague doctor looked at Celia while delivering those words.
Pinned in place, her stomach churning violently, Celia might have ignored the coincidence—she desperately wanted to—but beside her, Anya inhaled sharply.
A whimper clamored its way out of Celia’s throat. Had she expected that the devil wouldn’t play dirty? Only one person here isn’t on your side; I can’t suffer my ink being so bastardized; a personal tempest I find regrettably relatable . . .
The Divine order of don’t bother had been a poke from Diavala. The biggest hint of all.
Don’t bother. I’ll be using this one next.
It hadn’t been a mindscrew for the plague doctor after all. It had been one for her.
Anya’s expression—soft-eyed and heartbroken on Celia’s behalf—stabbed like a blade. Celia pressed her palms to her stomach, then against her eyes, unsure which would betray her first. “All right, everyone, just shut up.” Take control. Diavala might suspect something, but she didn’t know. Their plan could still work. The rest of the Mob could be free, if the show continued at least one more night. Celia thought the plague doctor had been lobbying as an ally, but apparently not. Still, for the moment, both their wishes lined up.
If Anya didn’t stop looking at her with such a crestfallen expression, Celia was going to scream.
Marco raised an eyebrow to the clouds. “Did you just tell me to shut up?”
“Simmer down until nightfall,” Celia answered, “and then you can confirm everything with Kitty Kay.”
Marco blinked. Then, when he couldn’t poke a hole in her simple logic, his face rearranged itself into its previous scowl. Celia walked away, leaving him to his muttering.
It took a second, and then, behind her, the plague doctor began laughing. That long, terrible laugh of lost control, of the floor caving in. Celia was almost tempted to join him.
Or the plague doctor’s bones sang, and it was Diavala laughing, full of glee that her plan was working so well and everything was a disaster.
* * *
Anya spent the day saying goodbye to the friends she’d made.
Celia should have joined her, but instead she sat drawing. Alone. She understood pictures because they could be anything, mean anything. Maybe a teardrop today could be rain tomorrow. Or even something good: a fresh pear or a cheery mandolin. And maybe, one day, something so lovely it breaks your heart: paisley on your child’s dress the day they whisper their name for the first time.
Pictures stayed the same but changed with you. They were the past, the present, the future, all at once.
When the plague doctor approached, Celia didn’t look up through the blur of pale blue smoke around her. “The shisha’s sad too,” he said.
“Ah, finally someone understands the shisha’s moods like I do.” She kept drawing, the lantern flickering with the soft breeze.
The plague doctor’s plague-doctor smile loomed, ready for his crowd. When he made to sit down, Celia waved him away. “Go away, plague doctor. It’s almost showtime, and I’m sure you have things to do.”
This particular section of field was separated from the rest by a steep slope, its isolation precisely why Celia had chosen it, but he still made a big show of looking over his shoulder before he took his mask off. “You’re endlessly stubborn,” he said.
She gestured to where Griffin had dropped his creepy, soulless mask. “You know I have no interest in him.”
He removed his hat and his gloves and his winged jacket, too. Celia didn’t know whether to sigh or scream that he wasn’t leaving.
His hands looked as if they could form a fist and demolish something or catch a butterfly without harming it. As he swept his coat off, a sliver of skin peeked at her from above his well-fitted pants. His loose shirt opened enough to show an inviting V of chest.
It infuriated Celia that he could make her flush so easily. I shouldn’t have any interest in you, either. She settled on a combination of sigh and scream, and she assessed him as he sat on the grass in front of her, adjusting his shirt and endlessly fidgeting. “You know you’re far from naked right now, right?” she asked.
It took a moment, but then he laughed. “There you go, doing that thing. I hate being so disarmed.” Funny, he used the same word Celia would have. Her butterflies responded. So did her bees. Enough! Shut up! she chastised. You don’t even know if that’s him!
She began another sketch. Her body was uncomfortably there. She’d wanted to disappear, not be so aware of her lungs and her heartbeat, her skin and her lips. She didn’t trust anything anymore.
A splat of salty water spoiled the picture, and she ripped it out of the book.
“If you have nothing important to say, how about telling me what Kitty Kay really looks like?” The pile of discarded half sketches beside her fluttered in the breeze. “And don’t say ‘As she does,’ or ‘Like herself.’”
He sifted through her drawings, then leaned over and tapped the top paper of the sketchpad in her lap. “This.”
Celia almost flung the sketchbook in his face. “It’s blank.”
“Yes.”
With measured words and clenched teeth, Celia tried to respond reasonably. “So your mother has three sides: night, day, and nothing.”
He shook his head. “Not nothing, no, but she hasn’t had a clear reality for years. Her character was Lilliana, based around the phoenix: death to rebirth and back again. At some point it took over. No one knows what she looks like anymore, but it’s there, somewhere—her third side. It has to be, right?”
“No, Griffin. Maybe she’s broken.”
Everyone’s breaking was inevitable. Shouldn’t he, above all, understand that best? Instead of responding, he adjusted his shirt for the hundredth time. A surge of pity rose up for him, and Celia wondered if ten years from then he wouldn’t be the same as his mother: the mask fused to his face, all feathers and talons with nothing left of Griffin underneath.
“Doesn’t it bother you that no one knows what you look like anymore?”
He blinked, tilting his head up as if confessing to the clouds. “Well—it didn’t.” The words he left out hung in the air. Maybe it does now.
He helped himself to a swig of rum from her flask, his jaw working as if chewing a brick of stale bread instead of drinking liquid. “I know what you’re trying to do.” He looked at her. Took another drink. “You got a little too honest with me. Putting a wall back up between us is safer, isn’t it, Lalita?”
Falling from his lips for the first time, her endearing nickname sounded like the sl
ur it was. Fragile Bird. Something so easily broken it demanded pity. In that moment, she hated him. If there’d been nothing between them, Diavala might not have been interested and he might have stayed safe. He tilted his head to the left, innocently, sweetly, and she wanted to claw that beautiful tattoo right off his face.
She took her rage out on a fresh blank page. He watched her draw, quiet again, so that she heard the roar of blood in her ears. Until the stutter in his breath told her he recognized what her hands were drawing.
She looked from the drawing to his lips, searching for a quiver in the smile . . . and there it was. For someone who pulled eyes to him onstage every night, he had little idea how to handle being seen.
Bolstered, Celia kept going with the sketch. He leaned in to watch, so close to her they were nearly cheek to cheek. His unruly hair brushed against her skin, making her quill stagger like a drunken fool.
When she finished the portrait, he stared down at it, his face hidden behind his hair. Because she’d aimed to disarm him, she didn’t expect a whispered confession: “You’re good at finding him.” As if he were lost and she held the only map. “Me,” he amended.
She’d drawn Griffin in profile to get the Leonus constellation right. No smile on his lips, no trace of plague doctor at all. He gazed off the page at something in the distance. Whatever his dark eyes saw, he wanted to swallow it, his expression one of awe and anticipation.
If she’d held her portrait up beside him, it would have been a mirror image. No bullshit in either likeness. Raw. The face on the page looking into the distance: anticipating, wanting.
The face in front of her looked at her the same way.
They watched each other. The only plague doctor nearby was the tattoo on his calf.
It was too much that he understood her. And too much that he liked her anyway, despite what he understood.
“No,” she said. “Don’t. You’re not allowed to do that.” This is torture, go away!
“Tell me what you’re planning for tonight so I can help.” He grabbed her hand, making her drop her quill, and his fingers lingered on her wrist. The way he’d taken her hand after she’d inked Marco’s tattoo. As Vincent had done before becoming Diavala.
She yanked her hand away. “You know I can’t tell you anything more when Diavala can win any conversation with one well-placed lie.”
Or with touches, confessions, intimacy.
“The problem isn’t her lies. I’m asking how you plan to fight something immortal alone!” Griffin’s voice shook hard. “Her win is bloody inevitable, Celia!”
She slammed her hands to his chest to get him out of her face. As if that hadn’t occurred to her! “Stop it! I’m playing your game exactly how you want. Stop threatening me!”
Griffin balked, his shock stretching his next words out like a soft lullaby. “Threatening you?”
Then his dark eyes narrowed, swallowing her as always, but this time, spitting her out. His new understanding of their conversation created something harder, firmer, a tangible thing between them as large as a mountain. “You hear me threatening you.” He shifted backwards, giving the mountain between them the space it needed.
She met his gaze.
He shook his head slowly, disbelief etched into every line on his face. “If someone who’s not me comes inside me, Celia Sand, you’ll be the first to see it. You’ll see it even before I do.”
Which might have been true, but it wasn’t what she needed to hear right then. “Can’t you stop with the Riddlish and say, ‘No, my bones aren’t humming’?”
He raised his hand with an overabundance of care, as if afraid of startling a bird, and tucked her hair behind her ear. She needed to read it as condescending, but all she saw was a tender, infinitely sad resignation. “No,” he whispered.
No, his bones weren’t humming, or No, he couldn’t stop with Riddlish?
His lips did that thing, that thing where they waited. Waited for her. But Celia’s stomach felt hollow, every butterfly inside lying dead in an unmoving pile. He took her hand, fitting her palm inside his with the fluid grace of an underwater dance. Then, watching her face for her reaction, slowly moved it under his shirt. Her palm met his hip: taught, smooth, warm.
“Let yourself trust me, Celia.”
Her butterflies stirred, telling her This does’t feel like a lie. The long grass swayed. The lantern flickered. With her palm against his skin, she felt the slight movement in his hips as he shifted, knew what he would do before he did it. Wanted it.
He moved closer, pushing his fingers under her hair and pulling her in. So close, his lips grazed against hers, a hint of cloves and lemon, softness creating lightning.
Languishing underwater, their gazes pulled up at the same time and met, dark on dark. “We don’t feel like a lie.” She whispered it against his lips.
But she didn’t claim them.
She wouldn’t remember how long she hesitated—whether they were pressed together, breathing with exaggerated calm, lips hovering and waiting, fingers on skin, for a second or for a year—only that it was too long.
The spell broke.
Griffin pulled away, cleared his throat, and stood. “You know, you’re so good at seeing.” With sadness, he gazed down at his portrait. “You’re so good at peeling back something to its core and finding its meaning. But you’re terrible, terrible at listening.”
She crumpled the picture and flung it at him. It fell to the damp grass at his feet. “There’s nothing in the world worth hearing. Everything is lies heaped on lies. Don’t give me your shit, plague doctor. Your mask is the biggest lie of all, and look how quickly you reach for it.”
He hesitated before tugging it down over his face. “Point taken.”
Then he nudged the discarded portrait with his boot. “But you keep that. Since it can’t speak, you’ll never have to listen at all.” He walked away, mumbling about how much he hated Malidora, how much he hated rain and lies that poured like rain.
Celia grabbed at the drawing and threw it back at him with a scream. “No, you keep it! So you can remember who you’re trying so hard to forget.”
A few paces away, he stopped and took deep, steadying breaths. Head bent, hands opening and closing at his sides matching the rhythm of his lungs.
Celia swiped at the tears under her eyes and glared at him when he turned around. She’d push him away a hundred times if she had to. The risk to her heart, to their plan, just wasn’t worth it.
He didn’t demand more answers from her. He crouched beside her and tilted his mask away so he could press his lips to her ear.
He left her with a whispered “Sastimos futura.”
Despite how much the Mob chanted it, she’d never known those words to pass the plague doctor’s lips.
Act 3
Chapter 26
The entire Mob stood pressed together backstage as the crowd streamed into the field. No plague doctor greeted them to make their lungs sigh or their hearts stutter, no haloed specters on stilts took their payment.
Kitty Kay stood on the narrow catwalk over the stage so the players had no choice but to look up at her. “As you can tell from the thunder in the field, things have changed. This has stretched beyond a mere Rover show. Somehow what we’ve done here has swelled past our gates and leached into the very soil of Illinia. I know you want to help Vincent. The truth is that to help him, we must first find a way to outrun our fame.”
She took a deep breath and scanned her Mob, memorizing each face, saying her silent goodbyes. “I implore you: Get through tonight. Get through tomorrow. Then the next day. Help each other and help Vincent. Hopefully, soon, Malidora will be a speck in our past.
“We know what the angel has had to deal with already, and now the entire crowd is a wildfire. You must stay in view of each other at all times.”
A boom of cheers erupted from behind the thick curtain, proving the crowd’s volatility.
But that crowd would be the very thing that would p
rotect the Mob from Diavala’s Touch. If anyone fell to the Touch that night, the entirety of the Mob would be canonized. With how rare the Touch was in the general public and considering the way the show had already grown, gossip would explode—but it would center around the Mob itself. That was the last thing Diavala would want, to take attention away from Profeta and focus it on the Mob. Celia had to keep reminding herself of this because the alternative—that Diavala would hop in and out of heads and leave mass madness behind—was unbearable.
Finding loopholes was Celia’s favorite thing, except when they hurt so much.
Kitty Kay swept down from the catwalk and into the middle of the cluster. “Take care of one another. Remember, we’re family.”
The echo of Kitty Kay’s earlier words hummed: You never know, Inklings. Maybe we’ll be able to meet them in Kinallen. Victorious. Celia clenched her fists to hold on to them, as if they could escape through her fingers like grains of sand.
The Mob scattered into formation. After that night, they’d be safe from Profeta, and Diavala would have no use for them.
Celia’s bees hummed their sad, low lament. Except Griffin, except Griffin . . .
And then she put her head down and prepared to transform into the devil of the bell jar one last time.
* * *
Celia had never looked into the crowd while she performed, her concentration had had to be absolute, but that night her gaze, unbidden, kept moving to the people below her.
Caspian, Sky, and Lilac walked the periphery on their stilts. With their bird’s-eye views, they took stock of Anya’s movement through the masses, looking out for trouble. The Devil in the Bell Jar was the one and only act, involving the entire Mob.
Bennetravo, Celia read on her arm.
A staple request. Celia forced her lead feet to move in the lively dance, bumping into the glass on purpose because the crowd always loved being reminded that the devil was imprisoned. The hairline cracks spiderwebbed even more.
