by L. J. Hatton
Hurried feet scratched the ground behind me as I carried on, leading them closer to the phantom hiss. We stopped, and an animated hanging light snapped on overhead, swaying slowly.
There’s a very peculiar sound that comes from a person when they mean to cry out, but their voice dissolves in their throat. A strangled hitch, as though unseen fingers have wrapped around their mouth. That nameless, invisible something spread through my audience as they tried to scream from the revelation of the hiss’s source.
“Nagendra,” I announced with a flourish. “King of All Serpents.”
He sat on a black chair inside his enclosure, his long, thin limbs stretched at odd angles. It wasn’t the tattoos that covered his skin from the tips of his fingers to the top of his bald head that made the crowd gasp and back away in horror, and it wasn’t the rows of pierced loops in his ears or the chains threaded across his face that they shrank from. Nagendra’s enclosure was filled with dozens of live and writhing snakes. They coiled through his legs and dripped from his arms as living jewelry.
“Nagendra came to us from the East,” I said. “Reared in a viper’s nest, he cannot speak as a man, but prefers the company of snakes to those who cast him off.”
Only the last part of that had any truth to it. Nagendra did prefer his snakes to most people, but he was an excellent speaker. He’d been educated at Oxford.
Nagendra stood, lifting a boa constrictor from the back of his chair to drape around his shoulders. Smaller snakes moved out of his path as he stalked the enclosure, pausing only to give a menacing hiss with a pierced tongue.
We both pretended it wasn’t directed at the warden.
The group’s allotted time ended, the light faded, and my lantern whooshed back to life.
“Moving on,” I said, and ushered them into a tent containing a pebbled-glass tank. Inside, a girl my age lay sleeping with her head on her folded arms.
The crowd gasped.
Just below her navel, where human hips should flare to form the tops of human legs, she had a tail, and she was completely submerged in pond water. Rows of stacked and glittering scales attached to her torso, fin meeting flesh with a protruding dorsal skirt of translucent copper. The murky water gave her skin an inhuman tint, and patches of mosslike lichen and algae clustered over her arms.
“Behold Winifred Singh, the Siren of legend, captured on holiday in Greece.”
Another half-truth. Her name was Winifred Singh, but she’d never been to Greece.
“She’s asleep,” whined the little girl who had taken to the warden.
“Be grateful,” he said, inviting himself into my script in a way that suggested he’d heard it before. “Were she awake, her voice would steal your breath.” Those should have been my words.
“Siren songs only work on boys,” the girl protested.
Children always raised the first challenge to the boundaries we set. My father called that both a terrifying and hopeful observation.
“There were few women at sea for the ancients to speak of,” I said. “But she’s every bit as deadly to a girl as she is to a boy.”
The warden smiled, and I felt a shiver all the way to my feet.
“That’s hardly polite conversation.” My sister Nimue appeared from behind the tank, flowing into view, as graceful as the water she could command. “And it’s no way to talk in front of company.”
Nim was twenty-three, a year younger than Evie, and two older than Anise. She stood tall and thin, with black hair piled high on her head, secured by glittering pins. Cool as a river, and just as able to adapt, she took notice of the warden and kept going.
“No need to let our Siren scare you, little brother,” Nim said. “Fishy’s hibernating.”
“Then we should let her be, and not try our luck.”
My words had two meanings: For the crowd, they were part of the act, but to my sister, I hoped they conveyed something more. It was her nature to beat against an obstacle until it broke or disappeared, but wardens weren’t as easily removed from one’s path as a dam from a stream, and she didn’t know about the unnoticeable.
“Good idea,” Nim said. “No need to make any of you orphans today, or turn your mothers into mourners.”
Her answer came as layered as mine, and sharp as a knife in my back. Sometimes Nim wasn’t just cool, she was cold. She was goading me, but I had a life’s worth of lessons from my father to push her voice out of my ears:
Water is no match for earth, which soaks it up. Earth can be scattered by the wind. Wind gives itself to fuel the flames, which water will in turn consume. Balance, Penn. That’s the key. Keep your balance and no one can knock you off your feet.
Each spiteful word Nim spoke became a balloon on a string. I could let them float away.
“Let’s move along,” I said.
But that one little girl wasn’t ready to go. She dropped the warden’s hand and tapped the glass with her finger.
Tap . . . tap . . . tap . . .
Angry, dark eyes popped open, and the little girl froze. On with The Show, it was.
“Get back!” I shouted, regaining the momentum of my performance. The warden grabbed the girl and yanked her away, while Winnie went into motion.
She flicked her metallic tail, so its tip struck the glass, then darted toward the front of the tank. Webbed fingers, draped with seaweed, pressed against the glass as she narrowed her eyes hatefully, churning the water with an incessant swish that swirled her hair like spilled ink. Her fists beat the tank’s inner wall before she set her hands to clawing at an intricate metal plate fastened over her mouth.
The crowd took a collective step back. Parents swung their children into their arms, no longer certain that their eyes were lying to them. Several reached for phones, only to find that they still wouldn’t work. Ragdoll-boy was shaking a camera furiously, but it refused to take a picture.
“Well, that’s a lucky break,” Nim said. “I guess she’s done sleeping.”
“Looks like,” I said as the last of my sister’s barbs drifted away.
“What are you playing at?” a woman in peach demanded. Like the teens, her style was pseudo-Victorian, but not as dramatic. She looked like a runway model dressed as a laced-up sofa cushion. “You said that thing would kill us.” She gaped, ready to brandish the parasol-purse in her hand for protection.
On her collar was a tricolored pin in the shape of a cloverleaf, just like the one the warden wore on his cap.
Red for honor, the wiki-definition of the clover would say, just like it would tell you that the pins were mementoes for everyone who had lived through the Brick Street uprising. White for peace. Gold for prosperity. In theory these were the Commission’s foundations, but there was another version everyone learned before they were out of grade school.
Red for the blood spilling into the streets. White for the bodies and grief no one speaks. Power is golden, but heavy as lead. Remember the brick street; remember the dead.
On dreary days, when he turned somber, Nagendra’s mealtime recitations bled from Shakespeare into stories of the panic on Brick Street. These thrilled me when I thought they were no more real than the comics I tore apart for a wall collage, but when he told these tales, the adults went silent. Mother Jesek would glare at Bruno until he stood and ushered Nagendra from the room. I was too young to understand that his stories weren’t bedtime adventures; they were memories.
He’d been there the day Brick Street disintegrated. He’d seen the riot and knew the secret things that the Commission had taken such care to eradicate from history. All that blood and destruction had actually happened; it changed and haunted him.
“What a horrible boy you are,” said the woman in peach.
I smiled at that. I had to—thinking of Brick Street would have made me sick, otherwise.
“She’ll kill you right quick,” I said, “but
that plate’s special-made by my father. And no creature of this world or any other can best one of Magnus Roma’s inventions. You’re all wearing your earpieces—turn them on. Even if she screams, you won’t hear it.”
I toggled a switch on the bit of metal protruding from my ear, and a tiny light glowed orange against my skin. Throughout the audience, others did the same. Thin wires wrapped around to form mouthpieces for them, while I made a show of testing a large floral microphone clipped to my lapel.
“Everyone hear me?” I asked, and they nodded. “Good, then we’re safe enough, so long as—”
“She’s got it off!” Nim screamed, resigning herself to the script.
The crowd’s attention shifted to the tank. Winnie had pried one side of the plate from her mouth.
“Lock it down!” The stagehands pulled a lever on the tank’s side, activating a claw from the back. It hoisted Winnie to the top. Smaller manacles clamped her wrists tight to her sides.
“You folks got your money’s worth today,” I said, adding a fake laugh. “We’ll just pull her out of the water a bit, so . . .”
As the claw topped the tank, the last of the metal plate slipped away. Winnie sucked in a deep breath, opened her mouth, and wailed.
Nim and the stagehands grabbed their ears, falling to the ground. The water boiled, and at just the right moment, when a few doubting souls allowed their hands to stray toward their earpieces, the glass façade shattered. A stampede started with the first trickle of water that wet the crowd’s feet.
It didn’t matter that in the three years she’d traveled with The Show, Winnie had never spoken a single word.
“Run,” I shouted into my microphone. “Get out of here! Run!”
No one hung around to see the stagehands help Winnie from the tank, or watch them free her legs from the harness inside her phony tail. They didn’t see anyone give her a towel or retrieve the rebreather that had been concealed inside her faceplate. And they didn’t stay to watch the broken glass reseal itself or Nim raise her hands, conductor-style, to call the spilled water back into the tank.
That was the real magic of The Show. We were masters at making people see what wasn’t there, and hiding things that really were. Our ways had always worked, so perhaps it’s understandable that my stomach clenched at the sight of the warden passing through the curtain without the orange light that said he’d had his earpiece turned on. He tugged the brim of his cap as he passed me, and men don’t tip their hats to boys.
The Caravan’s final leg was the Mech-nagerie, a showcase of my father’s most complex creations.
The children loved the smaller creatures like wind-up mice and ducks, and stayed at a cautious distance from Scorpius, a gargantuan scorpion, with his wicked tail that was as long as a man was tall.
“The Constrictus,” I announced in another tent, pointing to a metal serpent whose body was thick as a tree. He circled himself thrice around the tent, moving along the floor at a slow crawl, occasionally lifting someone up along his back to make them shriek.
I’d seen the Constrictus tear tanks to scrap; he could easily crush a man if I told him to. The warden wasn’t even that big . . .
No! Nim’s aggravation was making me crazy. Thankfully, there was only one curtain left to open.
“Xerxes, Lord of the Sky.”
Reactions to Xerxes were always unpredictable. Some would slip into an awed reverence. Some would hesitate, unable to decide if they wanted to continue on, passing dangerously close to claws the size of their head, or turn back and risk the Siren’s wrath. Once, a man tried to scoot out from under the tent’s side.
I laid my hand against Xerxes’ front flank, where the lion’s body blended seamlessly into the talons of a giant raptor. He was warm to the touch, and even seemed to breathe. His eyes blinked; his head turned, keeping watch over the crowd.
“It’s an alien!” a boy shouted, and pulled his hood up to hide his face, but the boy behind him said, “Don’t be stupid. Aliens are squishy.”
“Is that a real mutation?” Ragdoll-girl asked.
“Can’t be,” said her friend. “Tech like that takes a lab and a whole lot of attention.” He backed up a few steps, away from the warden.
“H-how much power does that thing draw?” The warden spoke again, addressing me for the first time with an unexpected stutter that belied his fear of my father’s creation.
“The cage keeps the ambient current under wraps,” I told him. “We look like a thunderstorm from overhead, nothing more, and Xerxes is a machine, like the others. Only a different gen.”
That was only a fraction of his being; my father found a way to give Xerxes a piece of his soul.
When the gryphon glanced down at me, I didn’t see the fierce, blazing eyes of a monster; I saw Magnus Roma. My sisters disagreed, but humored me because they thought I’d made it up to console myself over our father’s disappearance. They just couldn’t see it. Living things had a spark in their eyes that didn’t exist in machines. Xerxes had that spark. He was self-aware, and there was no way to convince me otherwise.
“Now that we’re here, choose your words carefully, if you mean to speak,” I said. “You cannot lie in a gryphon’s presence. If you open your mouth and no words come, everyone will know what sort of person you are.”
“Surely that’s not true if it’s not real,” someone said.
“Never doubt that one of Magnus Roma’s creations will do exactly what it’s designed to do.”
Some of the crowd puffed up, but didn’t risk opening their mouths to test or contradict me. The warden simply stared at Xerxes, his eyes raking from one end of the golem’s body to the other, unable to contain the whole thing with a single glance.
It felt strange, as though I were witness to some ritual deciding supremacy between man and machine, or even this man and my father. Stranger still when the warden’s expression shifted just enough for a brief grin and a dip of his head, like he was bowing out.
Xerxes took the cue. He fanned his wings, raised his head, and sent up a call that left the crowd shivering.
The warden tipped his cap to me again, before crossing in front of Xerxes to the exit. An electric current raised the hair across my neck, and I leaned closer into Xerxes’ flank, like one of those children in the crowd who’d rushed to hide behind their fathers’ legs when they needed shelter from their fears.
But my father wasn’t there to protect me anymore.
CHAPTER 4
Inside the big top, half of the arena was filled with U-shaped riser-benches; the other half was a mirrored wall. The mirrors made the space look twice as big, so The Show was twice as grand. They also hid our preparation area from view.
After my tour, I hurried behind the mirrors to find Evie and Klok.
How to explain Klok . . .
Before I was born, the Wardens’ Commission approached my father with an idea for a metal man who didn’t bleed or question orders. A soldier no one would mourn. My father tried, but reported failure. Like everything else inside The Show, it was a half-truth; he’d not made a weapon, but he had created Klok.
Klok looked like a teenage boy, but beneath his gloves were metal braces that spanned his hands, dipping into the flesh at the joints, and around his neck was a metal band with a display screen to make up for my father’s trouble synthesizing a voice. His fingers could tear through stone like wrapping tissue; his mind was pure computer, but he had a soul, along with the light in his eyes that marked him as more than a machine. And so he became another stray taken in by The Show. As much a son to Magnus Roma as Penn, and just as false.
He worked as a stagehand, and at present, he was winding Evie’s brass corset shut while she hugged a mirror-prop for balance.
Vesper stood beside her, leaning against the prop with a scowl on her face. Her skin had been powdered white, making her look like a ghost with my face.
Up close, the powder caked and cracked. Her image was a mockery of my own, and her foul mood had blown clouds in to cover the big top.
“There’s a warden out there,” she said.
“He’s allowed, same as anyone,” Evie replied. This argument must have been going on for some time.
“He took my tour, but the unnoticeable that cornered you hasn’t shown his face again,” I said. Mentioning him wasn’t an accident.
“Unnoticeable? Where? When?” Vesper fumed.
Nim’s temper was a quiet thing, patient and planned—a river following its set course until it overflowed its banks to cause a flood. Even then, it could be beaten back by better sense. But Vesper . . . Vesper was as unpredictable as a tornado and often left destruction in her wake. Even our father couldn’t control her.
A tempest wind blows where it blows, he said. One cannot steer a gale.
There was a beep and a rat-tat-tat like a printer. Blue words rolled over what should have been Klok’s voice box.
“Should I go and see?”
“Yes,” Vesper and I said as Evie answered, “No.”
Evie glanced over her shoulder. “He isn’t—Ow! Not so tight, Klok.”
She winced from the twist of her corset key. His display flashed.
“Sorry, Nieva.”
“It’s all right.” Evie rubbed her hand across her stomach. “We’re all on edge, but that’s no excuse to go running after rumors.”
“He’s not—” I tried, but she wasn’t listening.
“Vesper won’t be having any accidents at the warden’s expense, and you won’t go seeking out people who can’t be found. Understood?”
“I understand,” Klok beeped.
“Understanding doesn’t mean agreement,” Vesper said sourly.
“And being discreet doesn’t make him unnoticeable. Penn doesn’t know what she saw. He was asking a question. That’s it.”