A Circus of Ink

by Lauren Palphreyman

  But I also want to see what she will do.

  I want her to surprise me.

  ‘There once was a man,’ she says, ‘and he had a clock instead of a heart, just like everyone else in his world.’

  ‘Another story.’

  ‘Close your eyes . . . It beat to the pulse of Time. He could hear it always, a deafening pulse that rumbled through the land, through his body, and through his heart.’

  Th-thump, th-thump. Th-thump, th-thump. She taps my chest in time with her words.

  ‘So loud was the pulse that he could not hear past it. He could not think. He could not imagine anything beyond it.’

  Th-thump Th-thump. Th-thump Th-thump. Again, she taps my chest. It stokes a heat inside of me.

  ‘The man, however, had a secret. He kept the key to his clockwork heart on a chain around his neck. Every night, at the stroke of midnight, he took his key and wound up the clock in his chest to make sure it continued to beat along with the pulse of Time.

  ‘Because his clockwork heart was faulty, you see. It was not like the others. Without maintenance, it beat a moment too fast—’

  Th-thump. Th-Thump. Her taps quicken.

  ‘—or a moment too slow.’

  Th—thump. Th—thump.

  ‘This troubled him greatly.’ She lets silence hang between us, so all I can hear is my own heartbeat. ‘He thought he was broken.’

  What did she say before? That I wasn’t broken. I open my eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘One day,’ she says, ‘at the stroke of midnight when he was supposed to wind up his clockwork heart, he collided into someone instead . . .

  ‘A woman. She was not bound to Time like him—she was bound to no one. She was Chaos. And while a clock beat in his chest, a hurricane raged in hers.’

  Her eyes meet mine, and something feels dangerous. Because even though I do not have a clock for a heart, and she does not have a hurricane in her chest, I think she’s talking about us. And it’s all wrong. This is not part of the story that was written by the Creators. A part of me wants to stop it. But a bigger part of me wants her to keep going.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to show you.’

  ‘How can I see with my eyes closed?’

  ‘You’ve had your eyes closed your entire life, Jay.’

  I don’t know if I’m feeling light-headed from being shot or if it’s because she’s so close to me. But I do it. I submit to her again. I’m fucking pathetic. I told her I could make her do anything I wanted, and yet here I am doing everything she asks of me.

  ‘And so,’ she continues, ‘at that stroke of midnight when he collided with the girl, he didn’t use the key to wind up the clock in his chest. And something changed.’

  I didn’t kill Elle at midnight and something changed. I am certain now she is making something up about me, about us, and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what comes next. I should make her stop.

  But I want to know what happens.

  ‘The pulse of Time he had heard for all of his life grew a little quieter. There were longer gaps between the seconds. Cracks. And through them, he heard something he had not heard before.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Music.

  ‘It was quiet at first. An elongated note carried through the air. An echo of a tune once loud but now forgotten.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I can hear something. I can fucking hear something.

  ‘But then it got louder. Clearer. A soft melody to compete with the deafening roar of Time.’

  My skin prickles as somewhere in the distance I hear a song. It gets louder. And this isn’t right. But I don’t want it to stop.

  ‘As he listened, it got louder still. He heard the stroke of a stringed instrument. And then another. And then another. The music surrounded him. It was music he had never heard before. It built up inside of him, a wild and harmonious crescendo. He felt it. Each pluck of a note reverberating through his being.’

  My breathing deepens. I can feel it. I can feel the music as sure as I can feel her body close to mine. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘He heard all the sounds of a magnificent symphony. It flowed through him. Music that had always been there, but that he’d never known.’

  One of her hands rests on my chest and she moves the other to my neck. Her breath tickles my collarbone. My hands move to her waist, slipping through her open jacket and resting on the small of her back, pulling her closer to me. Her hair brushes against my chin.

  ‘And he didn’t want it to stop. He didn’t want to hear the deafening beat of Time that pulsed through the land. He wanted to hear the music.’

  I do want to hear it. This is impossible. It’s not written. It can’t be happening. But it is, and I don’t want it to end.

  ‘So he did not wind up his clockwork heart.

  ‘No longer bound to Time, he went to find the woman with whom he had collided. The girl with the hurricane in her chest.’

  I open my eyes and rest my forehead against hers. Her face is bright in the glare of the spotlight. The ghostly music is all around us.

  ‘What happened when he found her?’ I ask.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me the next part?’

  I cannot tell stories. My power is not in words.

  But I know what happens next.

  I slide my hand into her hair, and I kiss her. Her lips part, inviting me in. She digs her fingers into my shoulders and pushes her body into mine, and I groan. She feels so warm, so soft, so right in my arms. I’ve never wanted someone like this.

  I move my hand up her back while her fingers hook into the waistband of my jeans. I think the music might still be playing, but I can’t tell. All I can focus on is the sound of her breathing, quick and shallow, as her mouth moves urgently against mine.

  I want her to move her hands farther down, but I think I’ll explode if she does. So I grab her wrists, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. I pull them behind her back and hold them there.

  She tilts her head, and our lips part. Both of us are breathing hard. I need to get a hold of myself. I move my good hand up to the back of her neck.

  ‘I told you you’d have to ask me, little Twist,’ I say.

  A breath catches in her throat. ‘And I told you I wouldn’t do as you told me.’

  I run my thumb along her cheek. ‘We’ll see.’

  She opens her mouth to reply, but I kiss her again. I tighten my grip around her wrists. And then someone coughs behind us.

  ‘Am I interrupting?’ says Raven.

  I pull away and look over my shoulder. Raven’s eyes are narrowed, her nose turned up in disgust. She’s no longer wearing her jacket, and her muscular arms are tensed.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking you, Blotter,’ she says as Elle lightly brushes me aside.

  Her cheeks are red, and her neck is flushed. It takes the edge off the frustration that’s building up inside of me. She can make impossible music play, but I have an effect on her too.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Is everything okay?’

  ‘Sylvia wants to see you,’ says Raven as she walks away.

  Elle straightens her jacket, then she nods and follows. She looks over her shoulder at me.

  ‘Jay, grab a new top from the rack backstage. I’ll meet you back at the shipping container. Okay?’

  I raise an eyebrow. Seriously? She’s thinks she can just leave me here? She thinks she can tell me what to do?

  ‘You coming?’ she says.

  I swallow the rising frustration. Then I follow her.

  She may think she can tell me what to do now. But once we’re back at the shipping container, things are going to change.

  Chapter Twenty

  Elle

  I step under the flap of fabric that leads backstage. I do not look back. I can hear his footsteps behind me though—strong, slow, steady.

&
nbsp; I touch my chin. The skin feels rawer than usual, sore where his light stubble brushed against it. It is a new feeling. Different. When I lick my lips, I can taste him on them. There is something hot beneath my skin, lingering in my veins and twisting with the stories and the conflict inside of me.

  I kissed a Blotter. Blotters killed my father. He is different.

  Why do I want him so badly?

  He ducks under the material a moment later. When I turn, my face comes close to his chest. Heat radiates off him, mingling with the scent of sweat and the alcohol I poured onto his wound. My gaze slowly travels up, tracing the tattoo that curls up his neck.

  When I reach his face, his jaw is etched into a hard line, and his eyes are cold. I can’t hold them for long. I gesture at the clothes rack.

  ‘You can grab something from there,’ I say. ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Right.’

  I need to be strong, invulnerable, when I talk to Sylvia. What I need to do will be hard without her. Yet if Raven tells her what she just witnessed, I don’t think it will strengthen my story. I think it will tarnish it—tarnish me. A Twist in the arms of a Blotter. I think she will see it as an ink stain; an imperfection.

  I like imperfections. I like the black mark in his left iris, and the faint scar across his eyebrow, and the dandelion seed on his skin. But this world does not. Sylvia does not.

  I need to show her I have this under control.

  I do have this under control.

  Stories are true when we believe them.

  I take a deep breath and feel his angry eyes boring into the back of my head as I head out of the tent to catch up with Raven.

  Sylvia is waiting for me when I get to the shipping container she uses to conduct her business. Her pistol lies on the table in front of her, beside a pile of parchment and a bottle of ink. There’s a map on the wall behind. It shows the outskirts of Draft One, and there are ‘X’s scribbled at the spots where The Darlings have been planting seeds about the Circus at the Edge of the World. They do it to keep the story in the tent powered up and to recruit new people who need to escape the Creators.

  It’s better than doing nothing. But it’s not enough.

  When we enter, Raven goes to stand on one side of her, resting her hand on the back of Sylvia’s chair. On the other side of it stands Anna, and I wish she wasn’t here right now.

  She came to the Circus a couple of years after I did. A girl around my age with short black hair shaven close to her head and multiple piercings in her ears. There were stories she killed the factory boss she worked for in Draft Three. Sliced him open with one of the sharp blades that hang from her belt. No one knows what provoked her to do it, but it certainly didn’t fit in with the One True Story.

  That made her a Twist, like me. Maggie, the same woman who helped me escape the Final City, found her before she could be Cut and brought her here. She’s never told us what happened; she lets her knives do the talking whenever she takes the Circus stage.

  Even though we have these things in common, Anna has never liked me. I can’t imagine my bringing a Blotter into her midst will have warmed her to me any more.

  ‘Elle.’ Sylvia assesses me from beneath the rim of the black hat. ‘Hello, sweetheart.’

  ‘Hi, Sylvia,’ I say.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  I have never shied from the spotlight, but with the three of them glaring at me, I think I feel a fraction of what Jay must have felt in that Circus tent.

  ‘I can take down the Creators,’ I say. ‘But I need your help to do it.’

  Sylvia laughs and leans forwards, steepling her fingers beneath her chin. Her shirtsleeves are rolled up, and there’s a smudge of ink on her arm. ‘Honey, you’ve been singing the same song for too long now. The tune’s starting to get a little boring.’

  ‘You know what I can do.’

  ‘Dear little Elle, always thinking she can change the world.’ She gets up, abandoning her cane, and walks around the table. ‘I remember back when you were a child. Of course, I was a Primary back then, over in the Final City. Do you know how rare it is for a woman to be a Primary? Do you know how hard it is?’ She leans back against the table and studies her nails. ‘One mistake, one misunderstanding, one word that you are not fitting in with the Creators’ story—that’s all it takes.’ She meets my eye. ‘I always knew you’d be trouble. You and your crackpot father.’

  ‘Don’t speak of my father in that way.’

  She walks towards me. ‘Why not, honey? It’s true. He was an old fool who got himself killed. And you’re going to end up just like him.’

  Heat rises, and I grit my teeth. ‘Stop. Talking.’

  ‘The old bastard had it coming.’

  I slap her across the face. I don’t mean to do it; it just happens. This isn’t the way this was supposed to go. Raven tenses, and Anna’s hand moves to one of the knives at her belt. Then Sylvia grabs me by the throat and slams me into the metal wall.

  ‘I ought to have you thrown out of here.’ Sylvia brings her face close to mine. ‘See how well you do this time. See how long it takes for the Blotters to rip you apart now your time is up.’

  ‘You won’t do that.’

  ‘Won’t I, honey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Because . . . somewhere inside, you care about me.’

  She lets got of my neck, and I cough, wheezing for breath.

  ‘Care about you?’ Sylvia laughs as she steps back. ‘I couldn’t give two shits about you, darling. And you sure as anything don’t give a shit about anyone here.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I say, touching my throat.

  ‘You left,’ she says.

  ‘I’m back now.’

  ‘Ah, yes, decided to grace us with your presence. I suppose we should be honoured.’ She raises a finger as if she’s had an idea. ‘Although perhaps not. Perhaps we should be pretty fucking alarmed you’ve brought a Blotter along to our secret camp. All of our lives are in danger now too. But I suppose as long as dear little Elle has a nice time, that doesn’t matter, does it? Had some fun in the real world? Found yourself a good fuck, did you?’

  ‘That’s not—’

  ‘You’ve always been a selfish, ungrateful little brat, but I expected more of you than to roll over and fall at the feet of a Blotter.’

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘You were kissing him, Elle,’ Raven interjects. Her voice, thick and low, is barely audible, but it resonates around the sparse shipping container. ‘His kind killed your father. His kind killed Sylvia’s . . .’ She tails off, and the missing word from her sentence hangs heavily around us. Child. His kind killed Sylvia’s child.

  My throat closes up, and I swallow to try to relieve some of the pressure. ‘He’s different,’ I say quietly.

  ‘Stupid girl,’ says Sylvia.

  ‘I know you’re upset, but—’

  ‘Upset? Ha!’ She walks back to the table.

  ‘You need to hear me out, Sylvia. You owe me that at least.’

  She stills. ‘Owe you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Owe you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you were dead.’ She lets the words hang between us, and as they do, they thaw and leave something heavy and painful in their place. ‘You left. And we thought you were dead.’

  Words and stories are my strength, and yet now they are failing me. I left the Circus because I needed to. It was for the good of the people here. I’m the only one who is trying to do something; trying to change things.

  So why is there a tightness in my chest? Why do I not want to look at the shine in Sylvia’s eyes? Why is there a hard lump in the back of my throat making it hard to swallow?

  ‘I . . . You wouldn’t let me do what had to be done,’ I say. ‘You said if I left, I shouldn’t come back.’

  ‘Stupid girl. I was trying to stop you from leaving. I was trying to stop you from getting killed.
Maggie and I smuggled you across the world. I practically raised you. For four years, I kept you safe while you gallivanted around telling stories and making trouble for yourself. And this is how you repay me? You disappear for nearly a month! No word, no messages, nothing. Do you know how that made me—?’ She presses her lips together. ‘And now you’re here again because you want something. You’re just like your father. We’re all just pawns in your little games, aren’t we?’

  She sits back down at her desk and pinches the bridge of her nose. I search for the right thing to say, but everything catches in my throat and stagnates. I feel hollow, and I can’t find the words to fill the emptiness.

  ‘I didn’t think . . .’

  ‘You never do.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  Sylvia’s shoulders slump, and her head hangs low, and I see what I didn’t see earlier. Exhaustion. Weariness. The fates of the Darlings like a weight on top of her.

  ‘But I did it, Sylvia,’ I press. ‘You said I wouldn’t be able to, but I did. I created. In the Creators’ world. In Draft One. And I can do it again. Faster, with the help of the Darlings. And if you can get me to the—’

  ‘I’m not having this discussion again, honey. You’re putting my people in danger.’

  ‘Your people are already in danger. Look at this place! People are starving. People are being killed. Every day, more citizens get Cut. And it’s getting worse. Have you listened to what they’re saying in the black markets? Have you stopped by a House of Truth lately? Have you felt the earthquakes or seen the fires in Draft One? I have. Every day for the past three weeks. They’re saying the End is coming—the End written by the Creators. And guess what? We don’t survive it. None of us out here do. But I can stop it. We can stop it.’

  ‘ENOUGH.’ She slams her palms against the table, and Raven flinches. ‘That’s the end of this discussion. You can stay the night. You will leave in the morning.’

  ‘I will not.’ I throw back my shoulders and stare her down. ‘You do not have the authority to throw me out. This is my Circus.’

  ‘And these are my people. My responsibility to keep safe. And what is your Circus without them? A dusty old tent. Take it with you. Burn it to the ground for all I care. But you will leave in the morning, and if you refuse, my people will make you.’