Mechanique (16 page)

57.

This is what happened to Boss:

She was in a room alone with him. He sat opposite her, and looked at her very seriously, so seriously she might have liked him except for the blood in the beds of his nails. His hair was grey, like he was her father.

“I want you to understand something,” he said, and there was no trace of the false gentleman; it was the voice of an honest man.

He watched her, and when she stayed silent he went on, “I’m not some petty tyrant out to nag you for a share of the winnings. I don’t want to kill anyone in your circus, unless you give me a reason to use them against you. What I want,” and here he sat forward a little, his eyes as eager as a boy’s, “is to make this city like the old world.”

(Boss didn’t breathe; couldn’t.)

“I want to make every city like the old world,” he said, “one by one. For that I need lieutenants who won’t die from gunshots. I need soldiers who can leap over the city walls and drag everyone into a world that isn’t just animal colonies snapping at one another.”

His eyes were blue and steady, as if he had swallowed the sky.

“I need,” he said, “to live as long as this takes.”

When Boss had a voice again, she said, “Good luck.”

He frowned, sat back. “I know you’re against me,” he said. “I know you don’t want to give up your little show. But you have a great gift, and I’ll make use of it one way or another. There’s no point in fighting me.”

“You can’t make someone do this against their will,” she said. “What’s to keep an immortal soldier from turning on you?”

Here he smiled. “What’s kept yours so close to you?” he asked. “There must be something they’re afraid of that’s greater than you. Everyone’s afraid of something.”

Boss didn’t give him an answer; there was none to give.

He stood up, adjusted his jacket absently. “You can decide how far I have to take this,” he said. “The one in the other cell should last a few more days, and then I’ll send for the others, if we’re both still waiting.”

At the door he paused. “It was a mistake to leave them human,” he said, looking back at her. “I was disappointed to see they can bleed.”

She sat alone all that night, thinking about the last night of her real life, when she had stood in front of hundreds and waited for her chance to sing.

She was terrified, terrified beyond sleep, beyond tears, and when Bird came to rescue her, Boss stood up from the chair for the first time and found that the fear had knocked her legs out from under her. (She crawled the last few feet to the door of her cell.)

This is what happened to Boss:

She began to understand the government man.

58.

I made it through the crowd with my head up, as if I knew what I was doing, until I got to the trailer.

Then I sank down in Boss’s chair, shaking. My face in the mirror was gaunt; I had gotten ten years older.

I had never had illusions about what it took to manage any kind of hold on a group of people who scrabbled and squabbled as much as we did, but Boss had always seemed equal to it, as if her body had grown tall and wide just to make room for her authority. Even Elena, who was a tyrant in her trailer, gave in when Boss said the word. Boss was someone people followed.

And I was the barker who had received her last order. That was all.

How soon before the circus became just another war? What would I do when they were shouting me down instead of waiting for me to explain? What if Elena rose against me and mutinied? She wasn’t liked, but she was clever and hard to oppose. Stenos, out in the yard just now, was the first one who had ever put up a fight against her for that long, and even then . . . well, the circus was leaving, even after all of his fighting, wasn’t it.

I knew when the knock came that it would be him on the other side. Some people never knew when to give up. Bird, now Stenos. (Acrobats were mad.)

“I’m staying behind,” he said.

“Sorry, no,” I said, like it was someone else giving the order. “The whole circus goes.”

Stenos’ face pulled tight. “No one’s named you the ringmaster yet,” he said. “I’m telling you as a courtesy, not asking you for permission.”

“Stenos, if you go, what’s to stop others from staying behind?”

“Why stop them?” Stenos shrugged. “If you try to be a tyrant they’ll plot against you. If you let people feel they can come and go, you have a better chance at being ringmaster for the ones who stay.”

Stenos had it wrong, all of it. I didn’t want to be ringmaster. I wanted to be plastering posters on city walls. I wanted to be handing out tickets, pointing rubes toward the beer, sneaking into the tent the back way under the parade of yellow umbrellas that guided the performers back and forth to the camp. And the others who stayed were doomed—Elena was rarely wrong about how vicious people could be, and I had seen the gleam in the eye of the government man as he shoved Bird’s body into his car. I didn’t want anyone left behind. I couldn’t be half-leading a fractured circus in fits and starts, trapped between two dangers, suffering either way.

I said, “If you go near that city they’ll kill you.” I already sounded older, too. Tired.

Stenos shrugged. “They’ll still need someone to bring them back to the circus.”

He was looking at me like he could read my mind, and I scowled, shoved my hands in my pockets. No matter how good he was at reading people, he couldn’t read the future. He didn’t know what could happen any more than I did.

Except I knew some things Stenos didn’t know; I had a crisping tattoo burned into my shoulder, and a last order that was feeling more and more like a weight dropped into my arms by someone who was about to die.

“You can have Ayar hold me prisoner if you don’t want me going,” Stenos went on, “but it’s the only way you’ll keep me with you, and I imagine Ayar will eventually start to feel a little sympathetic.”

I had forgotten how convincing Stenos could be when he had his wits about him—he must have been persuasive to get a place in the circus after Boss had caught him red-handed—but now he was half-smiling like he was sympathizing with me, like he was here on behalf of the person who was really the trouble, and I found myself thinking just the way he wanted me to before I got the better of it. I couldn’t believe him; I couldn’t understand him at all.

“What are you staying for?” I asked, marveling.

Stenos flinched like I’d struck home, and too quickly, too sharply, he said, “Boss owes me a pair of wings.”

I thought about Boss dealing for years with Stenos’s wolfish glare on one side of her and Bird’s glassy eye watching her from the other. Boss must have had a stone heart just to get to sleep at night.

When I didn’t answer, he frowned, snorted, said, “What other reason would I have?”

It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment that he would be thinking of Bird. I had imagined they were cut apart, once Bird was shot. (I had been quick to imagine Bird a goner, quicker even than Elena.) But looking at Stenos scowling at me in the middle of the yard, asking to leave the circus and stay where the government men could find him, I had my doubts about Stenos letting go of Bird.

“Stay if you want,” I said. “Take your trailer. Ayar and Jonah can stay with the brothers.”

That meant I would stay in Boss’s trailer, where the ringmaster slept. I felt sick. How could I sleep in her bed knowing she was probably dying behind the city walls?

“What if others want to stay?”

I blanched. “Who else would be as stupid as you?”

If Stenos was offended he didn’t show it. He only said, “You never know,” watching me for my answer.

“Look, I’m not the ringmaster,” I said, bristling under his gaze. “Don’t try to turn me into a tyrant just to drive people to your useless cause. I’m here just until Boss gets back or we can elect someone for the job. Just—take anyone. Anyone who wants to stay here and get killed, that’s fine with me. What do I care?”

(I believed it when I said it; I didn’t care about anyone who didn’t care enough to stay, because that was simple enough.

I didn’t know yet who would ask to go with him.)

“If you want the trailer, start moving Ayar and Jonah out,” I said. “We’re leaving as soon as the crew is finished. Get whatever food you can from Joe before he’s tied everything down.”

“Where are you heading?”

To Death, more slowly than you, I thought. Then I realized I hadn’t thought about it. I tried to remember the circuit we’d made the last time we’d been here—it felt like a hundred years ago, suddenly. (Had it been?)

I said, “Straight north for two days. Then we’ll catch a vein east if we can, but if we can’t I don’t know where we’ll go. You might never find us.”

“Boss will know where you are,” Stenos said, and when he smiled I smiled back, only because it was nice to pretend Boss was still alive.

Across the camp, Elena was standing next to the aerialists’ trailer, watching us with the expression of someone resigned to knowing every strange and terrible thing they had foreseen would come true at last.

59.

This is what the fruit seller sees when she comes in the early morning light to set up her stall in the square outside the capitol building:

The empty square stretches out in front of her, the towers and dome of the capitol building casting shadows on the ground. Everything is quiet. No feet but hers have touched the ground since curfew.

She sets up her tables with the ease of long practice. The produce truck is on its way in from the government farm an hour south, so she works slowly; she has time. (She thinks this whole thing is an act, an appearance of some quaint life no one even remembers, but at least here there are no gunshots, and almost half the people who come can pay with coin money instead of barter. She had it a lot worse before she came to this city, so she just shuts up and sells whatever they tell her to sell.)

She’s attaching the last awning to the support poles when she sees a flicker of grey in the corner of her vision, like a scrap of material caught in the wind. She turns—one of her awnings has come loose again—

Someone is moving along the edge of the capitol roof.

The figure is thin and pale, running unevenly, and where the mouth should be there is only the glint of metal. There’s not enough space left to turn—she wonders what this person is going to do at the edge of the roof.

Don’t jump, she thinks. It’s a waste.

Then she thinks about the prisoners who walk into the capitol for trial and don’t come out again. She decides maybe it’s just as well for the poor man to jump.

The runner on the roof speeds up.

There’s nowhere for the runner to go—no roofs close enough, it’s just the open square and a few bombed-out trees, and rows of squat houses much too far away. The woman’s lungs seize up. She doesn’t want to clean up any blood today.

The figure takes three pumping steps as it reaches the edge of the roof. Then the figure disappears for a moment (crouching? fallen?), bursts back into sight as it jumps.

The woman covers her mouth, steps back so the blood doesn’t hit her when the poor soul lands.

But the figure is flying, legs together, arms out, hands pointed towards the great black tree.

Impossible, the woman thinks, it’s too far, but the figure’s reaching out, catching the branch out of thin air. The figure twists, folds, seems to float from that branch to the next even though the woman hears the crack of wood when the figure catches hold, the groaning protest at receiving so much momentum at once.

Something bangs open inside the vestibule of the capitol building; there’s the sound of a man calling out, of boots on the marble floor.

The figure has leapt to a second tree, farther off; she’s swinging around once, twice, to gather speed; she lets go blind (impossible, impossible) and twists in midair, arms already out to catch whatever she can. She grabs the awning of the nearest building (the woman hears the canvas tear), scuttles up to the roof. The woman sees a glimpse of a silhouette with a pointed mouth before the figure disappears.

The woman stands in the middle of the square, her heart pounding, until she hears the doors opening and drops to her knees, lashing the awning cords tight around the supports, pulling the knots tight, keeping her head down.

She sees a pair of soldiers’ boots stop next to her and looks up. Behind the soldier, the sky is moving from grey to blue; it’s almost morning.

“Did you see a woman come this way?”

She shakes her head. “No, sir.”

“She’s a prisoner,” he says. “Escaped acrobat. Dangerous. You don’t want to be caught hiding her.”

She sits back on her heels and gives him half a smile. “I don’t think I’d want to try hiding anything from anyone in this city.”

The soldier’s grim face softens a little. They’ve seen each other before; he’s bought fruit from her (everyone does), and once when she had to examine apple blight he was the soldier who checked her out of the city, reminded her to have her papers ready at the gate. (“Some of the guys get antsy when you reach into a bag,” he said as he shouldered his weapon, stepped back, waved the truck out into the road.)

“Be careful if you see her,” he says. “She tried to kill the Prime Minister.”

He sounds less than outraged—admiring, if she didn’t know better. She doesn’t know if she should smile, or if it’s a trap. She doesn’t want to risk it.

“I’ll be careful,” she says sincerely, and after a moment the soldier seems satisfied and moves down the street. Others join him—they come out of every alley at once, they’re worse than the rats. They confer quickly, spread out again, and then she’s alone on the street.

An acrobat tried to kill the Prime Minister. The world is strange.

When she hears a roar she looks up, but it’s only the morning truck, and the farmer gets out to help the farm-soldiers unload the truck. She carries flats of peaches and green beans, arranges the stacks of corn, points where the last of the apples should go.

“Has something happened?” the farmer asks, when they’re close.

There must be more guards outside.

“Looking for someone,” she says. “Someone tried to kill the Prime Minister.”

He raises an eyebrow, turns back to the truck, never answers her.

All day as she sells the fruit to the same people who always come asking, as she nods to the soldiers and watches pairs of them skulking in and out of the alleyways, the woman keeps one eye on the black tree.

She imagines the acrobat dropping out of a tree on the side of the road, folding and spinning and striking the Prime Minister like an arrow with her pointed hands, driving him straight into the ground.

She hopes the soldiers never find her.