Jenny wasn’t faring any better. Almost as soon as they entered, she was distracted by a tent that seemed to be made entirely of silver smoke.
“What on earth?” she muttered as she walked around it, looking for the entrance. “How did they . . .?”
When Micah reached out to touch the smoke, it drifted away from his fingers. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”
Jenny nodded, and they set off again only to pause when they passed a woman in green striped overalls who was handing out different kinds of candy. A flock of children had surrounded her. Most of them were chewing on jelly cubes that lit up whenever they bit down on them, and the candy glowed right through the skin of their cheeks. One girl had so many stuffed in her mouth that she looked like she was trying to swallow a strand of Christmas tree lights.
“Want one?” the candy lady called to Micah and Jenny.
They did of course, but she didn’t wait for them to tell her so. She sent two of the cubes spinning up into the air, and they raced toward Micah and Jenny like comets. Micah caught the orange one, and Jenny caught the pink.
Jenny examined hers like she was trying to turn her eyes into microscopes, then popped it into her mouth. Her cheeks lit up. “It tastes like rose petals,” she mumbled thoughtfully while she chewed.
Micah wrinkled his nose. “I’m sorry.”
“I like it.”
Micah nibbled his own as they headed deeper into the circus and found that his was mango-flavored. Like the ones Grandpa Ephraim tasted, he reminded himself. He had to stay on track.
They wove their way through a crowd of children who were watching a man on a stage put on a funny play. All by himself.
First he was a baker in a chef’s hat and coat. Then, in the time it took to blink, he transformed into an old lady with a crooked spine, ordering a cake for her “beloved Jojo’s” birthday. Then he shrank down to become “beloved Jojo,” who was a white rat the size of a watermelon. All of these changes happened so quickly that Micah couldn’t follow them.
He took another bite of his candy and shook his head. “Come on, Jenny.”
They moved more quickly as they approached their goal, and they were only distracted for a moment by a swarm of glittering fairies and butterflies. Dozens of them flitted past Micah’s nose, and when he looked closely, he realized that it wasn’t butterflies and fairies together. It was a group of fairies that could turn into butterflies. Their wings hummed in the night air.
They darted toward Micah and then away again, as though they were trying to tease him into following them. He smiled, remembering that Grandpa Ephraim had done just that.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got somewhere else to go.”
The Lightbender’s tent appeared around the next bend. It was black with a pattern of gold suns, and it was in the quietest part of the circus they had been to so far. No other children stood near the tent, and if not for the distant shouting and laughter, Micah might have thought the circus was closed. It seemed like there ought to have been more fanfare surrounding the place he had wanted to see for so long.
A Strongman with a bowler hat stood guard over the tent. He was bare-chested except for a pair of suspenders, which Grandpa Ephraim had never mentioned. Micah guessed it was hard to find shirts that fit if your shoulders were as wide as Aunt Gertrudis’s old Buick.
He and Jenny walked up to the tent to read the sign next to the entrance. The next showing for the Man Who Bends Light wasn’t until 2:00 A.M.
“So late,” Micah groaned.
“So early,” Jenny corrected.
The dark entrance to the tent had a bright golden rope hanging across it. Micah thought it looked like it would be easy to slip underneath, but then he glanced at the guard. The Strongman tipped his bowler hat down over his eyes and shook his head once.
“I need to see him right away, though,” said Micah. “I think I have an appointment?”
The Strongman didn’t reply. He also didn’t move away from the entrance.
“It’s not that long of a wait,” Jenny said. “Don’t you want to see anything else?”
Micah didn’t want to see anything else, but he also didn’t want to get into an argument with any of the circus people when he was trying to make a good impression. He remembered that Grandpa Ephraim’s second favorite part of Circus Mirandus had been the flight show.
He took a tentative step closer to the Strongman. “Excuse me,” he said as politely as he could. “Where’s the Bird Woman’s tent?”
The Strongman slowly pushed his bowler hat back up and stared. “What do you know about the Bird Woman?”
Micah thought it sounded like a trick question. “My grandfather came to Circus Mirandus when he was my age. He liked her show.”
The Strongman didn’t seem to need to blink. “Victoria,” he said. “The Bird Woman. She left.”
A jolt of electricity crackled up Micah’s back. But Victoria was a common name, he reminded himself. Of course it was just a coincidence.
“Oh.” He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to leave this place.
“You’re the Tuttle boy,” the Strongman said.
Jenny turned to Micah. “The man at the gate knew your name, too. Why does everyone know your name?”
Micah didn’t have an answer for her. He had thought that the Lightbender would be expecting him, because of Chintzy, but not everyone else. He held out his hand to the Strongman. He wasn’t sure he wanted to shake hands with someone who might accidentally squash him, but the importance of good manners was the only thing Grandpa Ephraim and Aunt Gertrudis had ever agreed on.
“I’m Micah.”
A calloused hand four times as large as Micah’s shook his gently. “Geoffrey should have told you to stop by the menagerie,” said the Strongman. “The manager wants to have a look at you.”
Mr. Head’s menagerie was at the center of Circus Mirandus in the largest tent of all. The entrance was extra-wide, as if it had been made for things much bigger than humans, and the air around it smelled sweet and warm. Micah stood outside for several minutes, trying to muster his courage.
He had thought endlessly of the Lightbender over the past few days, but the manager of Circus Mirandus hadn’t crossed his mind. Grandpa Ephraim had never said much about the menagerie or about Mr. Head, and Chintzy had only mentioned him in passing. Now that he was facing this imposing tent, Micah wondered if he should have asked more questions.
Mr. Head is the Lightbender’s boss, he realized. What if he doesn’t like me?
“I’ve never been to a zoo before,” Jenny said. She sounded eager. “My dad thinks they’re cruel. But since we’re here . . .”
She led the way for a change.
Mr. Head’s menagerie was definitely not a zoo. Or maybe it was a zoo, but the kind where all of the animals were magical in some way, and free from their cages, and very friendly. A hundred strange smells tickled Micah’s nose, and twice as many strange noises pressed against his ears. He could hardly take a step forward without running into a creature more peculiar than any he had ever imagined. Some of the animals had their own habitats, like the miniature hippopotamus in his mud wallow or the bright blue bats hanging upside down from stalactites on the tent’s ceiling, but most of the creatures roamed.
Jenny ran from animal to animal, petting them and feeding them from the buckets of treats that hung from pegs on the walls. Micah couldn’t keep up with her. He didn’t know where to look first. Two long-haired goats and an iguana shared a magazine near the hippo’s wallow while the iguana flipped the pages with its tongue. A girl wearing a raincoat was riding on the back of a two-headed camel. Birds zoomed and twittered overhead, pausing from time to time to rest in one of the convenient trees that ringed the edges of the tent. A tiny gray one landed on Micah’s shoulder, turned into a mouse, and scrambled down his clothes onto the ground.
As he wandered the menagerie, Micah had the feeling that he was being watched. He looked around for the observer, but it was hard to find something out of the ordinary in a place where everything was extraordinary. Micah tried to ignore the creeping sensation, but it grew as he explored the tent. He had almost made up his mind to leave when he spotted the menagerie’s centerpiece—a giant aquarium with a single silver fish swimming in the clear water.
Micah stepped up to it, and his nervousness evaporated. The plaque on the side of the tank said, Fish: A rare specimen courtesy of Ephraim Tuttle. He ran his fingers over the shiny plaque, tracing his grandfather’s name. He looked eagerly around for Jenny and spotted her cooing at a wallaby that could burp the Greek alphabet. He waved her over.
“Wow!” she said. “I guess he really did pay to enter with a fish. What an odd thing to do.”
Micah wasn’t sure what was rare about Fish, except for the fact that he was enormous now instead of tiny. But when he swam by he flipped his tail in a way that might have been recognition.
They admired Fish until a Strongman, this one wearing a bandanna on his head instead of a bowler hat, brought an aqua-colored baby unicorn into the room. Micah wondered why the Strongman looked so nervous. Then the little unicorn made a sweet sound, like chimes, and Jenny’s head whipped around.
“It’s precious!” she squealed.
At least a dozen screaming girls, Jenny in the lead, dashed toward the unicorn foal. Micah shook his head as they tackled the Strongman and his charge. He might have liked to see the unicorn himself, but he wasn’t sure it was safe to be around so many excited girls.
Grandpa Ephraim had asked him to say hello to the elephant, so he went over to her corner of the tent to meet her. Big Jean wore a giant silver medallion on her harness that said she was The World’s Most Intelligent Elephant, and after seeing her solve a math problem on an elephant-sized chalkboard, Micah believed it. He scanned the tent for any sign of Jenny. An elephant who could do math—surely that would be magical enough to convince her. But even though he stood on his tiptoes and craned his neck, he couldn’t find her in the crowd.
Something large and warm tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find Big Jean’s trunk an inch away from his nose. She was holding out her piece of sidewalk chalk. Micah glanced at the chalkboard behind her. Jean had written a new math problem, one that involved triangles and about a million more numbers than Micah had ever seen in his life.
She tapped his nose with her chalk and studied him with patient eyes.
“Um,” said Micah. “I’m not that good at math. Why don’t you show me something else?”
Jean thumped back over to her board and picked up an eraser the size of Micah’s head. The impossible problem disappeared in two swipes, and Jean lifted her chalk again. Quick as blinking, she drew a map of South America. Micah watched while she squiggled in lines for all the countries. In one of them, she wrote PERU. Then she tossed the chalk over her broad rump to Micah.
He managed to catch it before it hit the sawdust. Jean stared at him. Micah stared back.
The girl on the back of the camel was passing by a few feet away. She waved at Micah and shouted something in a foreign language. It sounded like it might be Spanish.
“What?” Micah called back. “I’m sorry! I don’t understand.”
“You gotta teach her something she doesn’t know!” the girl said in English. “In exchange. I taught her a song.”
“How do I know what she doesn’t know?” But the girl was busy trying to dig one of the mouse-birds out of the hood of her raincoat, and she didn’t answer before the camel carried her away.
“Do you know ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat?’” Micah asked Big Jean.
She nodded.
Of course, he thought. That was too easy. Micah racked his brain. “Do you know what a quipu is?”
Jean flapped her ears and nodded again.
Micah was stumped. “Do you know how to make Double Chocolate Brownies?” He wasn’t sure why he asked, except that he’d thought the circus smelled a bit like chocolate cake earlier. To his relief, Jean shook her head.
Micah stepped up to the board and froze with his hand lifted. Was it a pound of chocolate chips or a cup? Grandpa Ephraim’s recipe had been taped to the refrigerator for ages, but Micah hadn’t seen it since Aunt Gertrudis came to stay.
Jean was watching over his shoulder. She reached out with her trunk and brushed it curiously against his wrist. The bootlace was wrapped around it. Micah smiled.
“I know what I can show you,” he said. “Something no other elephant knows.”
Big Jean had learned to tie three different knots by the time Jenny reappeared, and Micah had learned quite a lot about the geography of Peru.
Jenny watched Jean coil rope around a rubber ball. “What’s she doing?”
The being-watched feeling had faded to the back of Micah’s mind while he worked with the elephant, but it returned full force when Jenny distracted him from his lesson. He glanced over his shoulder.
“What are you looking for?”
“Nothing,” said Micah. “It’s called a Monkey’s Fist knot. Sailors use them.”
Micah had only shown Big Jean normal knots. He was still worried that he would tie more of the knots that felt like his grandfather if he tried anything fancy. He turned to Jenny. “You were gone for ages.”
Jenny frowned. “That pony is precious, but I really don’t think they should dye its hair like that. It can’t be healthy.”
“Indeed,” said a deep voice behind them. “Fortunately, Terpsichore comes by that color naturally, as do most unicorn foals.”
Micah turned slowly. He was sure, absolutely positive, that nobody had been standing behind him a second ago, and the man who had spoken was not the sort of person who was easy to miss.
He looked like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus had a buzz cut and sharp eyes and liked to wear his sleeves rolled up to show off his biceps. He had a large tattoo of a compass rose on one arm, and he was carrying two buckets of something that smelled like maple syrup. Big Jean trumpeted with delight when she saw them.
Micah knew at once this must be Mirandus Head. He realized in the same instant that those icy eyes were the ones that had been watching him ever since he entered the menagerie.
He swallowed around a suddenly dry tongue. “I love your circus, sir.” He wondered if he should introduce himself, but he didn’t see the point. He was pretty sure that the boss of Circus Mirandus already knew who he was.
“I see you’ve learned a new trick, Jean, old girl.” Mr. Head’s eyes lingered on the knots the elephant had tied, and then he set down his buckets and turned to face Micah. He didn’t smile, but the lines around his eyes softened. “I am fond of it myself.”
“You’re the owner!” Jenny realized. “I hoped we’d run into you. I wanted to talk to you about your ticket salesman. He was kind of off-putting.”
“Oh, really?” One of Mr. Head’s eyebrows climbed his forehead.
Micah winced. After everything they had seen, he had thought Jenny would understand.
As the next five minutes passed in an agony of awkwardness, he realized she hadn’t understood at all. She meant well. Micah could tell she did. But, even the way she complimented things was all wrong. It was “What a clever trick you’ve used over here to make this torch look like it’s really floating” and “You must have a wonderful team of geneticists working with you to create bioluminescent bush babies.”
Micah wanted to sink into the sawdust and disappear. For the first time, he wished his friend wasn’t with him. “Jenny,” he whispered. “Jenny, please don’t . . .”
But she didn’t hear him, and it got worse and worse, until a low, deep growl cut her off. That growl was the kind of sound that sliced open the place inside of you that still remembered when humans were on the
lunch menu for monsters with ten-inch-long teeth. A white tiger flickered into existence at Mr. Head’s side.
Micah stumbled backward until Big Jean’s legs stopped him.
Jenny took a few steps back as well. “That’s a tiger,” she said. “Only . . . it’s too big.”
Finally, she had said something Micah could agree with, and he wished that he didn’t. He could see his own face reflected in the tiger’s pale blue eyes.
“Where . . .” Jenny sounded uncertain. “Where did it come from?”
“My geneticists,” said Mr. Head in a voice that was almost as dangerous as the tiger’s growl, “must be talented indeed to have invented an invisible tiger.”
“I . . .” said Jenny. “Why isn’t it on a leash?”
The tiger growled again.
“She doesn’t mean it!” Micah said. “She’s just . . .” Rigid, his brain whispered. “She’s just having a hard time with all of this.”
Mr. Head gave Jenny a long look that Micah couldn’t quite decipher. He stroked the tiger behind one furry ear. “Bibi doesn’t approve of leashes,” he said. “She is the circus’s guardian. Not a pet. No danger can make it past her guard.”
Bibi licked his palm, and Micah flinched.
“Well, she couldn’t do much against an aerial assault,” Jenny said thoughtfully. “Unless she can fly, too.”
The manager cut his eyes toward Micah. “Don’t you and your . . . charming . . . friend have a show to get to?” he asked in a voice that suggested if they didn’t, they should find one.
“What’s wrong?” Jenny asked as Micah dragged her outside.
“Nothing.”
“You’re upset. Did I do something—”
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