Mechanique (24 page)

77.

Elena watches from the tree above the square until she sees where she’s needed.

She is close to the city roofs; she hears the shouts of Alto and Altissimo when they cannot wake Barbaro, and long before they give up trying, Elena guesses what has happened. (Boss has to be close to take hold of you, the moment you go. She remembers that.)

Then she drops from the tree and leaps through the battle, snapping one neck every time she lands, until she’s taking the capitol steps. They crumble underneath her; she was never a soldier, not like the rest, but she knows how to kill as well as anyone.

The mass of soldiers are beginning at last to fall back, before an army which must seem immortal, an army designed to terrify, and the last few yards of her way are clear, except for the bodies.

She and Stenos reach the doorway at the top of the stairs at the same time, ready to face the government man and the soldiers holding Boss.

But the soldiers inside have vanished, and only Boss is left, standing with her hand outstretched over the government man’s fallen body. Boss looks ill, as if she’s eaten something rotten, and Elena wonders what happens when Boss takes a life she doesn’t plan to give back.

Stenos gets closer, points his rifle at the body as if there’s a chance the man is still alive, and looks at Boss for orders.

Elena hangs back. She still remembers the moment before she died the second time, Boss holding out her hand this way and Elena not believing what Boss meant to do until the world went black.

Stenos looks impressed by Boss’s skill; he half-grins up at her as he says, “Did you wait to kill him until he saw we were coming?”

But Elena knows better. Elena recognizes Boss’s expression just before she speaks; it’s regret.

(Boss regrets things so rarely that it takes Elena longer than it should. Elena was never a soldier, not like the rest.)

“I should have killed him before you came,” she says, as if to herself. “I was waiting for the soldiers to give way and run, so he would know he was without help. But it was too long; it was too late.”

For a moment Stenos doesn’t understand what she means. Elena waits for him to realize; when he does, his face gets set and grim. He looks down at the body; the gun trembles in his hands, and he doesn’t speak again.

(Elena knew, as soon as Boss spoke, what the matter was.

In the moment before Boss killed him, the government man had seen Boss’s army come to her rescue. Before he died, he had a glimpse of the circus performers descending on his soldiers and fighting as viciously as he’d always dreamed they could.

Just before he died, he had seen that he was right.)

Around them the battle rages, but in the marble vestibule where the three of them are standing, it is as safe and dark and quiet as a tomb.

78.

The two hours I spent under guard in the workshop trailer were the longest I remember. With the griffin on my arm I was too valuable to lose, but it was agony to be trapped without a thing to do. I could only listen to the bustle of the camp as they prepared for the casualties; covering trailer tables in canvas, setting out wrenches and nails and bandages for the living, and needle and thread for the shrouds.

At last Fatima climbed down from the walls and came through the woods to the workshop, and quietly we laid out what copper pipe was left, and marked with grease pencil the lengths of a finger bone, an ulna, a femur.

After a long silence I asked, “Could you see Ying from the wall?”

“I couldn’t see any fighting,” she said, and something about the way she said it (relieved, maybe) kept me from asking any more.

(Once I pulled down a copper bowl and frowned. “What’s this for?”

“A pelvis,” she said, and placed my hand on her hip so I could feel where the rim would curve out and around her, and I thought, I must be a different person than I used to be, for her to be at ease.)

We worked until we heard the first shouts from the camp.

They were driving out of the city in the truck—too slowly to be in retreat. They were dangling from the sides if they were well, stacked up in the open bed if they were injured, and Boss standing in the center of them all like the captain of a ship that’s coming home at last.

As soon as she was on the ground again I ran towards her without thinking and embraced her for the first time in my life; for a moment she was pressing me back, her cheek against my hair, and then she was stepping away and walking for the workshop trailer. I fell into step beside her (I was home again).

“How many are injured?” I asked. I saw Fatima running with supplies from the workshop to one of the trucks with an empty bed, so both Boss and I could work at once.

“Most of them,” she said. Her face was drawn. “Two are on the edge; I don’t know if I can save them. It will have to be you.”

“Why?” I asked without thinking, but when she looked at me I saw that glimpse of the graven image that had frightened me when I first had the tattoo; she looked shaken and cracked, and I didn’t know what she had done in that city to be so drained of her power.

“Is anyone gone?” I asked, already dreading.

“Barbaro,” she said, and I stopped walking and looked back at the truck. (I thought I had seen him, but there were only seven brothers; I had seen what I wanted to see, because I couldn’t yet imagine that Barbaro had died.)

But mourning would come later, and as Jonah and Minette leapt off the truck to unload the others, I called, “Bring the worst to the workshop.”

When Ying was helped down from the truck (her leg looked wrenched, but she was here and that was all I needed), my heart smacked twice against my ribs.

As I motioned the truck to drive Ayar to the workshop, I did a quick count, frowned. There were fewer, too few—Moonlight and Sola were gone, and more of the crew then I could even look for.

I saw a silhouette far off on the edge of the wall, and even in the thin light I recognized Elena’s profile. She must have come over the roofs, making sure there were no last-ditch fighters hiding in the alleys. Nayah and Mina came after her, flickering at the top of the wall like shadows, appearing moments later at the end of the ropes, feet hardly touching the ground.

“And Stenos?”

Boss’s mouth went even tighter. “Bird is missing.”

My skin went clammy. I thought, No, she’s all right, because if she was dead I’d know.

But Boss was too far ahead of me, her shoulders sloped for the first time I could remember, and they only lifted when she opened the flap of her half-made tent and Panadrome stood waiting for her. He spoke, and she spoke, and they stood together for a long time before the flap dropped closed behind them, and the work began.

I tried to hold on to the idea that Bird was alive like it was something I’d have to prove, but I was choked with so much loss and relief and emptiness that I could hardly notice a little more. The ache increased as I worked on Ayar and on Brio and Ying, and long before Stenos came out of the city (his eyes haunted and his hands empty), I had accepted that Bird was gone.

Stenos was the last of us, and we took all our dead with us when we drove away from the walls; this city was no place for a performer.

When we stopped for the night to bury the dead, we lit fires and gathered to keep warm, because even though we were still too close to the city we were a free circus now, and who did we fear?

(Boss didn’t join us. She closed the door of her trailer every night for a long time.

Later, she and I would talk about what sort of government springs up in the void. She never got over the death of the government man. He had been cruel, but it was another hundred years before anyone else made half the progress he made.

“This world is so fractured and so slow,” she said. “It’s why we can go so long without growing old.”

As if to prove it, the griffin on my shoulder never healed; the edges stayed singed and raw, and it ached until I learned to ignore it.)

That night Stenos was apart from the fires, as always, but he seemed so stricken that I left my seat beside Ying and followed him into the dark.

He was sitting on the trailer steps. I saw what must have driven him out; in the lamplight, the table was stained the purple-red of old blood.

I wanted to say, She might be all right, but I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t want to insult him with the lie. He had suffered enough without false hope.

Instead I said, “Why don’t you come to the fire.”

“So you’re still the little ringmaster,” he said, glancing up at me.

I grinned. “Not if I can help it,” I said.

He asked, “What will I do now?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that he was without a partner, that there was no place for him without an act.

“We’ll find something,” I said. “Now come on to the fire. You need to eat something, at least.”

All that night he sat at the fire as if he’d been ordered not to leave. No one spoke to him; Elena didn’t even look his way, as if she was afraid to catch his eye.

She needn’t have worried. His whole attention was on the sky, as if he was just waiting for the first notes of the wings.

79.

Panadrome greeted Boss, under the flap of the medic’s tent, with, “I was afraid we’d lost a good alto.”

(He can’t say what he wants to say. There are no words invented yet.)

She says, “I killed the man who could have brought the opera back.”

There is a new ache, suddenly, that Panadrome didn’t know he had room left for. It’s easy not to want what is impossible, but to know that Boss had seen the possibility almost drives him into the city walls, just to see what she had seen.

He wants to put his arms around her, but they’re as cold as the air, and no comfort to her.

Instead, he says, “Who’s first wounded?” and turns to the workman’s table.

(His hands are still a musician’s hands, and when it comes to sewing up wounds, he’s deft with a needle.)

80.

Elena refused, point blank, to be the other half.

“He has no place here without Bird,” Boss said.

Elena folded her arms and said, “I stood on your doorstep and begged you to destroy the wings. You didn’t, and this is what comes of it. Figure it out yourself, or give him to the Grimaldis.”

(They would never take him, Elena knew. Not after what had happened to Barbaro.)

“One of the others might partner him, then,” Boss said. “He needs something to keep him from going mad.”

For one long, nauseated moment, Elena thought about Bird going mad in her hands on the trapeze, about Bird with one eye gone (horrible, horrible), Bird whose madness had never been a worry. How could Boss trust so much in one of them and not in the other?

“Make him some wings,” she said.

Boss frowned and stepped forward, her bulk seeming to fill the air around them, and her voice was at its most commanding when she said, “You’ll partner him.”

“What am I,” Elena said, “an animal?”

(She had loved him, and it was over.)

Fatima was the one who offered, at last.

“He never dropped her,” she said, not looking Elena in the eye. “One could do worse, I think.”

“The more fool you,” Elena said, but she didn’t fight it.

(She was afraid what Boss would do if it went on like this; she imagined Boss turning to one of the dancing girls, passing her hand over Sunyat’s eyes, making whatever she couldn’t find.)

Fatima suits Stenos.

She’s as tall as he is, lithe and strong, and when they walk together into the ring they look like one of the peeling marquees for a romance. Their routine is choreographed; when he throws her into the air she flutters back down like a ribbon, confident and light.

Elena thinks Panadrome must be disappointed; now he has to play the same song every night.

It takes some getting used to that when Stenos gathers Fatima into his arms, she looks like an acrobat at rest and not like an animal in a cage.

Stenos never utters a word about Bird, after that first night. Whenever George mentions her in passing, Stenos looks up as if George has spat on the ground, turns away again.

No one else in the circus mentions Bird, because they don’t think of her. (She can’t have lived long, wounded and so far away from home, and she could not be mourned as much as Barbaro; there were no seven mourning brothers waiting for her coffin to be set into the ground.)

Elena doesn’t mention Bird because she fears that to say her name will pull that little string that ties her to the wings. It lies silent, and that’s all Elena requires. If that means Bird is dead, then that’s what it means; Elena is finished with being compelled.

(Sometimes when it rains, or in the winter, Elena feels a lonely pang along her ribs. She ignores it; you get all sorts of pains in this line of work. There’s nothing else to be done.)

Now the tumblers go after Ayar. Stenos and Fatima take the ring after the tumblers have gone, and on their heels Elena and the others drop from the ceiling onto the trapeze, as soon as the applause has faded.

Now when Stenos leaves the ring, people applaud.

Elena thinks he must be happy.

(It isn’t true.)

81.

This is how you silence a pair of wings:

You find a barren plain on a windy day, and you sink to the ground as low as you can, and you bathe in the dust.

The first time is like resting your hand over guitar strings; you feel the vibration deeper than before, but the sound is softer, humming instead of singing.

The second time you bathe in the dust, it’s like setting down a guitar when you’ve finished playing; there’s the hint of motion, the echo of the song, but if you didn’t know what to listen for, you’d never know.

The third time, they are downy as a sparrow’s, and make as little noise, so no one can hear you passing overhead.

Then you can spread the wings as wide as you like, catch the wind without singing a note, go so high that the ground has no more hold on you.

Then you are the bird, and the bird, and the bird.