Then it was time for the change of the guard. Barbaro watched to see who headed out for the gates, and so he found himself on watch at sunset (perfect), and took his place on the wall with the others.
The other soldiers didn’t keep to the line as much as he would have guessed for a city run by someone like the government man. As soon as it was full dark and they couldn’t be seen from the capitol, the soldiers wandered this way and that way, passing a single cigarette back and forth along the line. Barbaro held his drag as long as he could. It was real; whatever evil this government man was doing, he had gotten tobacco up and running somewhere, and for Barbaro that was something.
As night set in, the soldiers sniped back and forth about anyone who had scrambled to get the inside watch. Their voices carried on the thin air.
Barbaro didn’t join them. He cradled his gun and tried to look sullen. He wanted them to keep their distance, so that when the others came back they could climb over the wall unnoticed, and he couldn’t talk all night about how cold it was; he didn’t know how to talk without his brothers there.
“I’m freezing,” the soldiers muttered back and forth, shivering and grinding their teeth.
(Barbaro really was freezing; he stamped his feet and crossed his arms to keep his bones from frosting over.)
They started to nod off at their posts an hour after that, and five hours after Barbaro had taken the wall, he was alone.
At first he was pleased, all his attention bent on the wall as we waited for his comrades, but as the minutes ticked by with no company but the wind and his own teeth rattling, the hair on his neck began to prickle.
(This is what happens when you have seven brothers all your own, when your nights are filled with applause and your days with the roar of engines; when solitude creeps up on you, it terrifies.)
It was so silent that, when the wind blew across the roof of the capitol building and out to the gates, Barbaro heard someone moving inside the bell tower, and he knew without doubt it was Boss.
(“Barbaro,” she had whispered, “he knows you’re here, get out,” but his name was all that reached his ears.)
The road of rooftops stretched out ahead of him almost to the capitol, and even across the open square Barbaro saw some hope; he was no aerialist, but he had strength and power enough to make the jump from the tree, if he tried.
He disappeared from the wall and over the roofs without a sound, his gun strapped tight to his back.
(The problem with a man alone is that time slows down for him in his solitude. Because he is unchecked, he thinks there is time to reach Boss and come back with her; because he is restless, he thinks there is enough time left before the others reach the city walls and start the climb.
When the others reach the top of the wall, the soldiers haul them over the crest and hold them with guns to their temples while they wait for word on where to bring the prisoners.
From the rooftops, between one leap and the next, Barbaro sees the messenger running for the capitol building, and for a long moment before he remembers, he wonders what the matter is.
Then he runs.
He has to catch the messenger before he reaches the building, he has to keep the alarm from being sounded, he has to isolate the soldiers on the wall until he can get there and do something—
But he’s too late, too late, and the soldiers spill like ants from the capitol into the streets below, and above him Barbaro sees the glinting of the gun barrels as soldiers emerge one by one onto the roof, taking up places around the bell tower.
Barbaro glances from the capitol rooftop—he’s closer to Boss than to the others—and down to the swarm of soldiers below—where he can be anonymous, where maybe he can follow where they’re going and wait for a moment to free them. He looks back and forth, but doesn’t move from where he stands. There is no road for him now; there’s nowhere he can go that doesn’t condemn him.
It’s easy to trap a man alone.)
72.
Panadrome secured everything he could in Boss’s trailer; they would be driving over rough road to get to the city, and if Boss came back (when she came back, he corrected) he didn’t want her to open the door and find a roomful of broken things.
The knock startled him, and he opened the door to find Elena carrying a handful of pipes as tall as she was.
“If you have any aim left, you can put those arms to some use,” she said, shoved them into his hands. Her arms were trembling, and she didn’t meet his eye, and he understood what it must be like to meet old ghosts.
He said, “How bad is it?”
She looked on the verge of bolting, but they had known each other a long time, and after a moment she stepped inside, and he closed the door behind her.
(For years it had been the three of them, Boss and Panadrome and Elena. He knew Elena’s favorite songs by heart. He knew how she walked when she was tired.
He could never forgive her for turning her back on Boss this way.)
“It’s worse,” she said, not quite looking at him. “It’s her, I know it, I’m not stupid, but when I feel the pull it’s like,” she took a breath, “it’s like home, and I can’t help but think it’s Alec.”
(Panadrome has never talked about being tied that way to someone; there’s nothing about it that he wants to say out loud.)
He said instead, “How does she feel about the wings?”
Elena looked up with a thin smile. “Worships them,” she said, and then with no smile, “She doesn’t expect to have them long, you know.”
Panadrome was impressed with Bird’s foresight, and felt a little pang for Elena, to be so sharply tuned to something so empty of comfort. He sighed a minor chord.
“What if Boss is dead when we get there?” she asked.
It was Panadrome’s turn to put his hand to his chest (not where his heart was; he forgot his human body long ago. He put his hand over the clasps that fasten across his chest like a soldier’s coat).
“I would know if that moment had come,” he said.
(He did not say, I would have dropped dead if she had. He and Elena were made early, before Boss’s powers were honed. They are held together by joined will, Elena and he, by the animal desire to live; he doesn’t think, if they fall in this fight, they could be raised again by any skill the circus possesses.)
Elena nodded (she’s always known what he really means, she’s never been slow to catch the direction of the wind).
“Take care of yourself,” she said. “Whoever doesn’t die will need some music later.”
It was the closest to praise she’d ever given, the most concern for him she’d ever expressed.
“You as well,” he said.
She shrugged. “I have to tell women who swore off fighting to pick up weapons or run for shelter and hope they’re not slaughtered,” she said. “After that, the fight should be nothing.”
“Nor should it,” said Panadrome, roughly. “She deserves our fight. Without her, who of us would still be living?”
There was a little silence. Then Elena said, “They’ll start without me,” and moved past him, and was gone.
In the open yard, Jonah and George and the crew were raiding the tent truck and the props truck and the workshop for anything that could be a weapon. Into the cabs and the trailers went everything that could be used in defense. Even the strings of light bulbs were handed off; even the wrenched-apart pieces of the trapeze.
The first of the trucks were already rolling out, pulling away from the camp and back onto the road, mud spraying under their wheels as they turned. There would be no rest, Panadrome knew, from now until when it was over.
Elena leapt lightly into the trailer from the ground just as the truck lurched forward.
Panadrome’s crewman knocked on his wall, and a moment later he too was rattling through the camp and out onto the packed-dirt road.
Panadrome sat at the dressing table and looked at the spears that Elena had gifted him, so he would have some means to pr
otect himself that didn’t require him to lock his hands around someone’s throat.
(One thing Boss had never questioned about Elena was her ability to tell who had the heart for something and who didn’t.)
She had always been of her own particular kind, Elena. There was never knowing what she meant, unless she was out to be cruel; anything else wasn’t worth thinking about.
If Elena had brushed Panadrome’s hand on her way out, it might well have been an accident; if she had grasped his metal fingers in her soft ones for a moment before she kept going, it wasn’t for him to say.
73.
Ying was the first one over the wall (she was lightest and most nimble, and the others wanted her safe inside the walls, just in case), and the first caught, and after the reinforcements had come she was the last one dragged down the stairs three at a time, nearly carried aloft by the soldiers who held her arms. She banged her ankles on the stones, slipped on the pavement of the courtyard.
She looked around for Barbaro (maybe he was hiding among them), but everyone was a stranger, and one of them slapped her, snapped, “Head down.”
(I was a soldier too, she thinks. Is this how you treat a brother? Don’t you know who you’re fighting for?)
Ayar kept wrenching his head around to look back at her, like he wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to disappear from the end of the line. The soldiers shoved his head each time, amid barked orders: “Look forward!” and “Keep going!”
One of the blows caught Ayar’s shoulder, and the fist bounced off harmlessly; the soldier looked, for a moment, as afraid as he should have been.
At the door of the capitol building, the rest of the guards were waiting for them.
Halfway up the stairs, Brio balked and shouted and struck out at the two holding him, but after the first blow that took out one of his guards, a soldier struck him with the flat of his rifle butt and Brio slumped forward. Another soldier shouldered his rifle and took his place on Brio’s unguarded side.
Ayar and Ying glanced at one another, and when Ayar shook his head, for the first time Ying despaired; so it was the two of them now with Barbaro gone, Brio helpless, Boss trapped in the city, and no help coming.
She thought dimly, At least we’ll find Boss when they take us to the prison.
She thought dimly, Maybe they’ll kill us right now, and we won’t have to give way for the government man. Maybe Brio had been fighting to die before the government man got hold of him, she thought, and for a moment she went slack all over from horror. She wanted anything but what had happened to Bird; Ying would fight until they killed her rather than go into the dark of the cells.
The guards at the door were motioning them to the alley. “Take them down,” said one, and the other said, “And stay with them until he comes, for fuck’s sake!”
The soldiers dragged at Ayar as if at a bull, turning him away from the door and toward the tiny alley. Ying looked around for a tree, a fence, a wire, anything she could swing from.
Then the soldier in front of her collapsed.
There was a moment of confusion as they all looked to Ayar, who seemed as surprised as anyone.
A second later, the soldier closest to the alleyway choked and toppled.
“Sniper!” a soldier called (Barbaro, it was Barbaro), and the soldiers staggered back and shouldered their guns in that moment before retreat that Ying knew was the tipping point.
Without thinking, she struck.
The soldiers had loosened their grip on her (fear has strange effects), and once she was moving she knew they would never catch her. She wrenched backwards and cartwheeled twice, out of the center knot of soldiers; behind her the gunfire trailed as Barbaro clipped them down one at a time as soon as she was beyond harm. Now that there was nothing to lose, Ayar was wreaking havoc amid the soldiers, mowing through them to reach Brio. They flew from his swinging arms like rag dolls, knocking back the oncoming crowd.
(There were so many soldiers, the four of them would never make it out.)
Ying came out of the cartwheels already looking for an escape (she had to get above the street, she would climb anything). The soldier nearest her got his neck snapped for his trouble, and as soon as Ying saw the shop awning she was tossing the rifle on top, gripping the edge of the fabric and bending in half, legs up and over the edge of the support beam, then a swing up onto the awning proper and a scramble up the drainpipe, and she was up and safe, pressed flat to the roof.
The soldiers had come to their senses, and had swarmed Ayar and Brio, preventing their escape and keeping Barbaro from getting a clean shot.
Ying rested the gun on the edge of the roof and resented that Boss hadn’t allowed weapons. She was out of practice, and if she couldn’t hold steady for the shot—
They were firing back at Barbaro now; they couldn’t see him, but from Ying’s height she saw him crawling to the next roof, trying to get two more shots from the new vantage point before they caught on.
Beyond Barbaro, Ying saw the clusters of soldiers on top of the capitol roof, guarding the bell tower. She could guess what had happened after Bird escaped; no clever man left a prisoner where there was a known escape.
“Get them inside!” the guards were yelling; the doors of the capitol were open, and the soldiers were shoving Ayar and Brio forward.
Through the open doors, Ying could see a sliver of a cruel face she recognized as the government man, and Ayar and Brio were sinking into the shadows under the lip of the capitol. Another moment and they would be out of reach.
“Brio!”
It was Barbaro calling (he had never cried out like that for anyone, but then Ying remembered they were brothers).
Ying looked over as Barbaro fired the last of his rounds into the crowd; then he was standing up to jump down from the roof, into the knot of soldiers dragging at Brio.
There was the sound of a shot; Barbaro shuddered and sank back, and Ying realized he had been struck.
She had to reach him, she had to, but what now that the government man was in sight?
Ying lifted the rifle. She’d take out the government man—she’d strike Ayar if she had to, but the time was short and the government man was almost too far, she’d have to take the chance and fire—
The night pressed suddenly against Ying, and the air was filled with a triumphant, trumpeting sound, and even as the adrenaline pounded through her she thought wildly, It’s Alec, and then, No, it’s the wings, it’s the wings.
74.
Boss spends the first hour of that long dark night looking over the city, out past the last lights and into the blackness of the wild.
The last time she had been in a city at night, it had been the night of Queen Tresaulta, and she had stood outside the opera house with the last inch of a cigarette, watching the street lights snapping to life one by one down the line, a line of bulbs fighting the dark.
(The wreaths of lights have always been her favorite thing about the Circus.)
The cage they’ve put her in is for a soprano bell; she can’t fully stand, can’t sit, and she knows this position will eventually break her legs, having to bear her weight in this half-bent way. The government man probably teaches his soldiers how to choose these things. There’s no reason to value her comfort; she can do her work just as well without working legs.
She panics a little. (It’s quiet, thank goodness, so they don’t get satisfaction. When you live in the open, you learn that your doubts have to be silent or the whole thing falls to pieces.)
The cold wind numbs her, eventually, which makes her happy. At least she won’t feel her legs give out.
From beside her, Alec says, “They’re coming. It won’t be long.”
“I hope not,” she says, fear seizing her. “The Minister will be looking for them—he’ll know if anyone has come into the city after me.”
“Too late,” Alec says with a grin. “You know who’s come, don’t you?”
She does know; it’s the same as listening
to the camp as darkness falls and the rehearsals end, and knowing the footsteps of everyone coming home for the night.
Ying and Ayar and Brio are near (Bird is gone, near dead), and nearer than all of them is—
“Barbaro,” she says, wrenching her eyes open. Her body is tight with sleep, and her throat burns. “He knows you’re here, get out. Alec,” she says, looking over, “you have to get him out—”
But of course, there’s no Alec. The cold and the fear are pushing her into dementia. She thinks about giving in (she’d be useless to the government man if she was out of her mind), but to give in after all these years, for something like him, seems cowardly. She must push forward; she must find what will make him give way.
She wonders if Panadrome is all right, but she would know if he had died; she would have known. She knows how her children are.
But she is weary and cold and weak with terror, and when she feels Barbaro coming for her she presses herself against the bars (it cuts through the skin on her knees) and wills him to come closer, to climb the tower and break the cage, and it’s only after the fear buffets her does she realize it’s not all her own, that Ayar and Brio and Ying have come too soon (or too late).
She sags against the bars of the cage. The government man will make her work on Ying first, probably. He’ll think Ying can be wasted. He’ll want Ayar whole. Barbaro can make it out, maybe, if he waits, if he’s careful, but for the others it’s too late.
Why did they come back? How could George have let it happen?
He would never have sent them. They must have split; the circus must have fractured.
Her heart breaks.
Below her, there’s a smattering of gunfire, and Boss opens her eyes to look down on the square and see which of her children has been executed. But the soldiers are milling, there’s retaliation from the ground. Boss looks closer (the bars are ice-cold against her forehead) and sees that Barbaro is firing on them, that Ying has broken free of the knot of soldiers, and she thinks fiercely, These are my children, this is my circus they’re fighting; she looks at her children and thinks, Take as many with you as you can.
Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Page 21