by L. J. Hatton
She blew across her fingers so the flame drifted off their tips into Bijou’s snout. It was blown back out as a fire spurt that brought nearby children running and cheering for more.
By the time the sparks had faded, I was gone.
CHAPTER 2
Behind the big top, The Show’s train sat braked on the tracks, swirling with reflected lantern light. No plain engine would do for my father—he’d created a three-level city on rails to accommodate our numbers. And then he’d fixed it so that we could travel anywhere, whether there were railways in place or not. The Show carried its own, laying track and picking it up as the train rolled. It was the perfect mix of old school and new age.
These wheels have tasted the air of a thousand towns, my father said, in the same way he claimed to have seen sunrise from every angle. Never sunset, though. Beginnings were far more interesting than endings. One held promise, the other only darkness.
We have mapped this world across the skies. Its boundaries are marked by the ebb and flow of smoke from our stack. For Magnus Roma, there was no meeting of strangers, only reunions with friends he’d once passed and promised to revisit.
I let myself in through the last car and made my way down the corridor. Under my breath, I counted steps, recited rhymes, did all the things my father had taught me to keep myself in check, but still the chandeliers rattled overhead.
“Stop it!” I shouted, and they did, but frustration kept breaking surface in my thoughts—the first bubbles in a pot about to boil.
I brushed aside the curtains of beaded scarves to enter as always, ran my hands over the same carved wooden trunks, and threaded my fingers through the same meticulously crafted wigs, but there was no sense of “same.”
Just before my sixteenth birthday, when Papa disappeared, I thought he’d gone on one of his deliveries. He bought our safety with the tech he developed for the Wardens’ Commission, and several days a year were dedicated to demonstration and delivery, but this felt different. He’d been gone too long. Without him, the walls he’d built between our circus and the outside world would crumble. The cracks had already begun to show—the warden, and Evie’s unnoticeable. Soon we wouldn’t be able to pretend anymore. Everyone would know that my sisters’ abilities weren’t a matter of creative lighting and mechanics. They’d know that Penn was really Penelope. My family was touched—the kindest way of saying contaminated, though saying it wasn’t kindness at all. Since the Great Illusion, anything different was in danger of being called alien. To be touched was to be more than human, but somehow less than human, too.
Blue sparks crackled between my fingers. I made a fist to cage them, but fear had started a chain reaction, and I wasn’t sure I could stop it.
The official stories told us that the Medusae hadn’t done anything other than watch, but there were changes. Pockets of people all over the world were suddenly blessed or cursed with abilities that had never been seen outside children’s stories. The first gifted girl was born the day the Medusae disappeared. More followed, all girls. Always girls.
It began with fire, and crying infants who were inexplicably at the center of an inferno with no cause. Parents trying to save them would be burned by the flames, but the babies were not. There weren’t many in the first wave, and they were spread out over the globe, so no one put it together, but others were born, and with them, more fires.
In families that survived one touched girl, their next child was another kind of nightmare. Rather than spawning flames, she would cry over a dirty diaper, and sprinklers would go off; showerheads would burst. Families would wake to find bubbling fountains had erupted in the night, even in the desert.
By this point, neighbors were talking and the families considered moving to stop the gossip, but things didn’t get really strange until a few of them had their third daughter. This one, they would believe normal, or as the more desperate said, human, but that only lasted a few days. By then, the parents noticed that their floors were always dusty and their planters overflowing with earth. Lay the infant on the ground, and she’d soon be surrounded by rocks. Sometimes those rocks were diamonds. Her tantrums could shake the house, if not the block.
The Medusae had altered Earth’s children, but only some of them. Everyone else was left mundane and scared.
Of course no one ever met a gifted girl, or saw one use her power in person. They were always tales from other towns, overheard and passed along by friends and distant relatives. Try to find one, and you’d discover that the girl in question had moved, at night—leaving no trail, almost like she’d never existed in the first place. There would always be a helpful warden on hand to assure the neighborhood that there was nothing to worry about.
If my sisters were discovered, we’d disappear, too—only our father refused to run. He built The Show to hide his girls in plain sight and prove to everyone who ever saw them that there was no need to be afraid. The plan had worked so well that we couldn’t be blotted out of common memory. We had to be ruined. The Wardens’ Commission would make sure our fall was seen, maybe even fatal. That night, there could be no mistakes. I absolutely could not lose my temper.
I set about readying my sisters’ costumes.
Nieva—Evie—wore a heavy dress of glass and metal ribbon, gathered above her knees in the front. It had to be polished so her flames would make it shine.
Nim’s was made from the stuff they use to build weather balloons. A gown that flowed like water, light and cool, but she called it cold as dead skin.
Anise hated her dirt-laden dust coat and high leather boots. She hated being on display, period, but she bore her part, as they all did.
That left only Vesper. I always left her for last.
So many people were terrified of having touched children that it was rare to have a third daughter in the same family. Girls like Vesper, who came fourth, seemed impossible. She could play the winds like a harp. Her costume was beautiful, bright white silk that floated around her when she moved. I could smell the sunshine trapped in the fibers, and it nearly made me cry.
Vesper and I were two years apart, but we could have passed for twins, aside from the color of our eyes. For me, she was a reminder of the life I would always be denied.
Fourth daughters were rare, but fifth were unheard of. If the Commission even suspected that I wasn’t a boy, it wouldn’t matter what my father offered them in exchange. They would stop turning a blind eye to our unnaturalness; all of his inventions combined weren’t worth the oddity of me.
I lifted Vesper’s wig reverently, and set it on my head in front of the mirror. Piles of gold ringlets covered the short chestnut tragedy of my own hair, while longer bits curled around my face. She was scared of the wig, fearing it would catch on something and drag her down, but without it, we looked too similar. She wouldn’t risk me being mistaken for myself.
I slid my feet out of my boots and into her shining white heels, then slipped her dress from its hanger. Like this, I looked the way I was supposed to—like Penelope, youngest daughter of Magnus and Iva Roma, rather than Penn, the son who was never born. Maybe my hair wasn’t blonde, but I would let it grow as long as Vesper’s wig. I could walk beside Jermay, even hold his hand or steal a kiss, and no one would care.
Penelope hated Penn.
“You can’t do this, Penn. Not tonight,” Evie said from the door. She’d entered quietly, but I heard her. She snatched at the wig, pulling it from my head so fast that I fell off Vesper’s shoes.
“Can’t you use my name when there’s no one else here?” I asked.
When she reached down to help me up, there was another scent on her besides her apple shampoo. Bitter and sooty as a freshly doused campfire. Dealing with the unnoticeable had tried her temper, nearly to the point of flaming out.
“Penn is your name.” Evie put her fingers in my hair and tried to smooth down the bits that had caught in the wig, then unceremo
niously whisked the dress off my shoulders.
“I’m tired of hiding—I don’t want to be a coward anymore!”
“Nim’s been whispering in your ear again, hasn’t she?”
“She’s right.”
“You walked away rather than doing something foolish, Chey-chey.” Evie’s voice softened. “If Papa doesn’t return—”
“Don’t say that!”
“I must say it.” The whites of her eyes turned red with tears. “We create illusions for others, but cannot afford to believe them ourselves. If they come for us, Nagendra will be lucky to see a prison cell. Birdie would be homeless again, and you—” Evie placed her hands on my face. “It’s too much to risk for a daydream. All right, little brother?”
I nodded, trying not to shiver in the chill air without Vesper’s costume.
“We’re leaving tomorrow, I swear. But for now, Penn Roma must prove himself to be his father’s son.”
The irony was that my parents had had a son. He was born the same night as I, only second rather than first. Had we been born in the opposite order, then he might still be alive and I might be Penelope proper—but I was impatient, and charged ahead. If there had been any doubt that I was touched, it died with my first cries, when my newborn temper shook the stars from the sky. Burning hail struck my brother dead.
No matter how important my father or his creations, my curse was something new. My mother christened it “singing down the stars” to make it sound like a gift, but what I could do was fearsome and dangerous and powerful, so my parents buried my brother nameless, claiming only one child had been born. For extra protection, they claimed that child was male. I became a ghost in my own body, hiding behind the boy I killed. They’d waited so long to have a son, and I stole him from them; the sorrow of it took my mother shortly after.
Evie opened a small case on the table and pulled out a roll of bandages to reinforce the ones I already wore.
“Arms up,” she ordered, but her voice was no longer angry. “You should have been born with Nim’s figure, then we wouldn’t need these.”
She winked at me, but I wasn’t in the mood for jokes.
“Me with her figure, and her in my place.”
“No.” Evie shook her head.
She wrapped the bandages around my chest, over layers that the day’s movement had loosened. She tugged them as tight as possible, until the pain of it made me forget how hard it was to breathe. When I was small, I thought getting to dress like my father made me special, but all that being special had ever won me was misery.
“We’re all fortunate that you’re our little sister, little brother,” Evie said. “Were it Nim in your place, this family would have known only darker days. Her temper wouldn’t stay so simply hidden.”
True. If Nim could have done it, she would have called the heavens down at the first flash of a Commission patch, and likely burned us all before she realized what she’d done.
“And that’s why you’re not going to mention any unusual guests to Nim or anyone else until we know there’s reason to worry. Say it, Penn.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I promised. But a forced promise was the kind I’d never had a problem breaking, if I had to.
Evie snapped her fingers to brighten the room by the strength of the glow she hid among outsiders. It was a parlor trick that had enchanted me as a child, when I was foolish enough to ask if I’d shine when I was grown. She said I was born brighter than she could ever hope to be, but no one could see their own light.
Such a lovely lie.
Tears hit and ran down my cheeks, but I didn’t have the air to truly cry. Evie didn’t stop wrapping until she had covered my entire torso, changing my silhouette against the wall, and burying Penelope deeper inside Penn. She reached for the lime trousers I had discarded. I fumbled with the buttons of my shirt, finding she’d wrapped me tighter than usual. She knocked my hands aside and finished for me, snapping our father’s suspenders into place and straightening the ugly purple stripe on my trouser legs. My feet, which seemed so delicate inside Vesper’s heels, disappeared into grotesque, flat boots, while Evie hung a pinstriped coat over my shoulders.
Everything was cut thick and sharp, creating the illusion of lines that didn’t exist, and replacing the curves that belonged on a teenage girl with the straight planes of her twin. It didn’t seem fair. He only had to die once; Penelope was murdered every night before The Show.
“There,” Evie said, and tried to smile. “You look perfect.”
“I look like a boy.”
“Chey-chey . . .”
“I’m not a child! And I don’t want to be . . . this . . . anymore!” I was shouting. She had squeezed too tight, and the pressure forced the words free.
“You can last these few hours.” Evie plucked a scarf from its place draped over one of the wardrobe doors, used it to wipe my face dry, then folded it into my pocket. “Tonight, Penn will be so perfect a boy that the rich men and women will hide their daughters from him. Then we will get back on the train, and disappear. Once we’re moving, Penelope can cry or put on a pretty dress or use a wig to make her hair longer, and I won’t say a word. We’ll go home to the Hollow and see if Papa isn’t waiting as he promised.”
“What if I make a mistake? It’s more than the unnoticeable; there’s a warden out there, Evie. I doubt he’s here for entertainment.”
“Take this,” she said, reaching into the beaded bag slung across her chest to pull out a small jeweled lizard.
“You collapsed Bijou?”
The miniaturized dragon stretched himself out from snout to tail, shaking off the bits of string that had snagged on his scales inside the bag. Curls of smoke still wafted out of his nostrils, but he didn’t blow fire. He beat his hummingbird wings to lift himself toward my shoulders.
“You need him more than The Show does.”
Bijou tucked his wings against his body, curling his tail into a jeweled choker, which could barely be seen beneath my oversized cravat.
“If you feel yourself slipping, let Bijou’s weight remind you to pull back. You will be strong, Chey-chey, because you are a child of Magnus Roma, and there is no weakness in you.”
She held her palm up flat to mine, allowing hers to ignite against my skin. Fire never burned me when she held it.
“You have more strength than you know—enough to crush them. They don’t need to see it for it to be true. You are Celestine, and they cannot hurt you.”
But they could—they had—and there was no way to forget that. All I could do was nod and pretend to agree with her, adding one last lie to the pile of others balanced on my shoulders.
CHAPTER 3
I stepped off the train and into the night, half-expecting the warden to be waiting, but he was nowhere in sight. This was the last hour before the main event, and I had a tour to give.
“My phone’s not working,” a man was complaining when I arrived. He wore an expensive suit and shoes that had no place in an open field, and was likely in attendance only by force or obligation. “Does anyone have a signal?”
Most of the crowd gave him dirty looks. It was well after the designated time for personal tech to be turned off, though most people didn’t bother to follow that regulation with phones.
A couple of teenagers checked their mobiles, but had no signal either. Unlike the businessman, who had a sleek metal unit that slipped easily in and out of a suit pocket, they wore clunky backpack units with dials and handsets that were part of the local fashion. The girl’s corseted mini-hoop dress looked tighter than my bindings and stopped above her knees, grazing the tops of her boots. Her boyfriend was wearing formal tails with shorts. They both sported capes and a particular shade of aubergine eye shadow that made them look like oversized rag dolls someone had rescued from the trash.
I hopped up the short ladder onto the back of a ticket boo
th–slash–caravan wagon parked beside the tour’s entrance, and tapped a sign bolted to the wall.
NO PHONES ~ NO CAMERAS ~ NO EXCEPTIONS
I could have told them that it was the Faraday cage interfering with their signals, but this was a matter of tradition. Crowds always entered the Caravan of Wonder without the benefit of lights or windows. Darkness set the spectators on edge, replacing the reality they knew with a formless void, easily molded by the right words spoken in the right tone. Screen lights would ruin that.
“Budge up and keep moving,” I ordered in a practiced accent. The man grumbled and shoved his phone into his pocket. The teens stowed the handsets in their backpacks. “Keep your hands on your children, and nothing else. From this moment on, anything you touch may decide to return the favor.”
The younger members of the audience fidgeted at my warning, while the rest rolled their eyes, acknowledging that this was all part of the act. But they were wrong—the danger was very real, and very close. The warden had joined us. He slipped into a space near the front without a word.
On with The Show.
By the time I’d led the crowd a few feet into blindness, with only a dismal lantern to guide their way, the tent had begun to rustle. A disembodied hiss threaded its way through, and all the whispers fell silent; the people bunched close.
A pair of women clutched at their children with one hand. With their other hand, they clung to each other. The two of them had been so eager that they’d pressed their way to the front, just so their kids could see the sights first, but now those same little ones had to be coaxed forward. One tried to hide herself behind the warden, and to my surprise, he obliged.
The lantern flickered, so I tapped the glass, but instead of rising, the flame cut out, plunging us into absolute pitch.
“Light the torch,” a trembling voice begged.
“’Twon’t do no good, Madam,” I said, deepening my voice. “We’ve wandered into Erebus’s territory. This is the World of Shadows; we’ll get light when it’s given. Keep up or get left back.”