by David Khalaf
It suddenly roared to life. Chaplin slammed his foot on the accelerator, but Atlas lifted the back of the car with one hand. The wheels spun futilely in the air. Atlas wrapped his other hand around Gray’s neck.
“The Eye,” he said.
Gray nodded ever so slightly. He reached down as if going for the Eye, but instead grabbed a sharp steel rod that had been part of the support structure for the throne.
He lifted it up and plunged it toward Atlas’s chest. The crystalline energy that encrusted Atlas’s skin resisted him, and the pointed end of the rod hovered a millimeter above.
The skin ain’t the problem. It’s his talent.
Gray felt the blood in his neck pounding against Atlas’s grip, demanding passage to his brain. Desperate to breathe, he dropped the iron and ripped at Atlas’s giant hand. Gray’s eyes bulged and he saw flashes of light until, all of sudden, Atlas dropped him. Gray gasped for breath.
When his eyes could focus again, he saw Atlas scrutinizing his hand. There, on the backside, was broken skin in the shape of four distinct fingernail marks.
“How did you do that?” Atlas asked.
The Phaeton slipped from Atlas’s grip, and it rocketed down the empty street.
Atlas stared at Gray as they sped off, his hands balling into fists.
I’ve only made him angry.
CHAPTER
F ORTY-SEVEN
PANCHITO WAS ABOUT to push over the nearest clown when a human body came hurtling down at him from the sky. It was a police officer. Panchito could only give the man a soft thrust upward so that he flipped awkwardly away, a football bouncing down a field.
Atlas cut through a line of police as easy as tall grass in a meadow, clearing his way toward the Grand Marshal car. Panchito needed to follow, but Horace blocked him.
Panchito plucked a cattail from the float and wielded it like a fencing sword.
“Don’t make me hurt you.”
“With what?” Horace asked. “Flowers?”
There was nothing in the way of a weapon for Panchito to use. There were only tens of thousands of rose petals littering the parade route. He got an idea.
Panchito crouched down and thrust outward all about him, sweeping up the rose petals like a giant broom. They flew up in a flurry of pink and red and white, making a kind of smoke screen. He made a run for it.
Just as he was feeling confident he had escaped the clowns, something heavy and sharp dug into his back and knocked him face forward to the ground. He turned and saw the female clown take the handle of her belt whip and yank. Panchito cried out as the spiked ball pulled out of him, bloody with small bits of flesh.
“You run like a fat penguin,” she said.
Panchito rolled over onto his back.
“And you look like an ugly duckling.”
He grabbed the dangling end of her belt whip and pulled it. She stumbled upon him and he lifted his feet to stop her.
“Now fly!”
He thrust upward as he kicked her in the chest. She shot into the air like a cannonball, landing high in a ficus tree down the street.
“Hey, that’s my girlfriend!” Horace said.
Panchito got to his feet.
“Weird place for a date.”
He picked up the woman’s whip and threw it at Horace, who easily ducked and rolled under the float.
“Get him!” Horace yelled. “And hold on to your dang weapons!”
The two clowns ran at him. He heard the bald one cock his pistol and aim. Panchito focused carefully on the weapon and thrust with all of his might. The gun flew out of the man’s hand, taking his trigger finger with it. It landed somewhere up on the float. The bald clown screamed and rolled to the floor, holding his bloody hand.
The hook-nosed clown charged him with the lead pipe. Before he could get within striking distance, Panchito balled his hands into fists and thrust a punch at the man’s face. The clown’s face cracked to the side as if he’d just gotten jabbed by an invisible boxer. He shook it off and charged again. Panchito thrust with a cross, then an uppercut to the clown’s stomach.
Horace popped out from under the float and swiped low at Panchito. The dagger sliced him along his outer thigh. Panchito jumped away from the float, stumbling to his side. This gave the hook-nosed clown time to reach him. He lifted the lead pipe high in the air but paused, half expecting Panchito to thrust it out of his hands. When nothing happened, the clown swung down as hard as he could. Panchito waited for the split second when the pipe was in-between them, then thrust. The pipe slammed into the clown’s forehead, knocking him out cold. He dropped to the ground.
That ought to hold them. That only leaves…
Panchito turned around and saw Horace on the float. He held Carole next to him, pressing his dagger against her soft, fleshy side. She must have hidden in the rocks of the float when the fracas broke out.
“Give yourself up,” Horace said. “Or I’ll make ancient history of this cave girl.”
“What makes you think I care what you do with her?” Panchito asked.
Horace raised an eyebrow.
“You probably don’t. But you’ll care what people think about you if they find out you failed to save her.”
Panchito didn’t show it on his face, but the words rang true. He didn’t care much about what happened to Carole. Maybe that was his problem. His courage, it was self-serving. When he chose to save someone, it was only to demonstrate how great a hero he was.
A real hero doesn’t choose who he saves.
An unexpected wave of compassion washed over him. He felt sorry for Carole, even though she had been nasty to him. He even found himself feeling sorry for Horace, a dwarf who was probably forced to join the circus. This compassion, it was unlike him. And then he realized it wasn’t him.
Elsie.
Wherever she was, Elsie had pulsed him with the emotion. He didn’t know why she did it, but it was exactly what he needed. It was the one thing he was missing. All this time he worried about rescuing people—Pickford, Gray, and now Carole—without really caring about the people themselves.
“Let her go,” Panchito said. “Take me.”
He climbed up on the float.
“I knew it,” Horace said. “You’ve got hero syndrome if I’ve ever seen it.”
But he didn’t know. Panchito wasn’t surrendering to be the hero; he was swapping places because Carole looked terrified and didn’t deserve to get caught up in this. As soon as Panchito was within arm’s reach, Horace gave the actress a little shove. She stumbled off the float and ran away. The clown grabbed Panchito from behind and brought the knife under his neck, then clamped Panchito’s head down so that the dagger was pinched between his chin and his chest. Any direction Panchito tried to thrust at the knife would only slit his own neck or jaw.
“Now what?” Panchito asked. “You take me to Atlas?”
“No,” Horace said. “It’s your body I’ll bring to Atlas. Your courage. I’ve heard rumors about how to take it.”
“From who?”
“It doesn’t matter. There are advantages to being small. Eavesdropping is one of them. Now, goodbye.”
Panchito felt the blade sliding across this throat. He thrust in the opposite direction to stop it. But Horace merely changed the direction and pushed the dagger up against the bottom of his jaw instead. Again, Panchito thrust against it in the opposite direction. This couldn’t go on for long.
A few feet away the pistol was lying on a bed of moss. Panchito reached for it, but it was still a good foot away. He could thrust the gun farther away, but he couldn’t pull it closer to him.
Panchito felt the dagger dig into his throat, and felt the ooze of blood run down his neck. This was it. He had lost. But he felt content he had done the right thing. Courage didn’t mean fighting all of the time. Sometimes, courage was about submitting. The way his father had submitted his life to save his family. Like Panchito had submitted himself to save Gray and Pickford.
Coura
ge fights, but sometimes it also surrenders.
Panchito reached for the gun one last time.
And then it happened: He tugged.
The gun flew toward him, into his hand. He bashed Horace on the side of the head. The clown lost his grip and Panchito scuttled backward, aiming the pistol at him.
“Back off!”
The clown growled and leapt at Panchito with his dagger. Panchito could have shot him point blank in the chest, but he restrained himself. He remembered his compassion for Horace, even then as the man was trying to kill him.
Instead, Panchito thrust him backward, sending him flying up and into the volcano at the back of the float. He heard a loud thud and scrambled up the incline to look inside. Horace had dropped a good twelve feet down into the hollow center that was still smoking from the remains of dry ice.
“You’re a coward,” Horace said. “Come down and fight me.”
“I’m not a coward,” Panchito said. “I’m letting you live. That’s true courage.”
The volcano wouldn’t hold him forever, but long enough for Panchito to get out of there. Long enough to find out what had happened to the others.
CHAPTER
F ORTY-EIGHT
JACK SIEGEL GRABBED Elsie by the hair and pushed her face into the ground, zapping her with fear. He was a master of terror; he knew instinctively how to wield the emotion. It was, after all, how he ran his entire business empire.
“But you have empathy, just like me!” Elsie screamed as she tried to push him away. “How can you treat me like this?”
“I have empathy,” Siegel said, “but I lack sympathy. I know what you’re feeling; I just don’t give a damn.”
She tried to pull him off her but his grip on her hair was ironclad. Little rocks of asphalt dug into her face.
He’s a psychopath.
No one noticed Siegel grabbing Elsie because a police car had just flown through the air and crashed onto the parade route ahead. Spectators began screaming and tried to clear the bleachers as Atlas took to the street, but they were slowed by the bottleneck at the bottom.
While Siegel held her hair, Max and Enzo each had a hand around one of her wrists.
“Pulse her with everything you’ve got,” Siegel said.
Fear shot up both arms and down through her head. It was everywhere, all through her. Her heart pounded so hard it felt as if it might skewer itself on one of her ribs. The fear had no object, no purpose, but it was electric and all consuming. It rippled through her chest and pounded in her brain like the heavy tread of some horrible monster coming for her.
Elsie couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t reason. She knew she was dying. The terror pressed upon her chest, heavy as a ten-ton boulder. Her body wouldn’t even allow her to gasp for breath. All she could do was suffer. Somewhere amid the torment was a voice swirling around in her head.
Let go.
It was all she had to do. Give into the fear, let it consume her completely, and this would all be over. The pressure would crush her completely and her breath would simply stop. The neurons in her brain would pop like the filaments in a dying light bulb and everything would go black. It would be so easy.
“I think we’re killing her, boss.”
It was Max. His voice was muted and far away, as if Elsie were underwater.
“Shut up,” Siegel said.
Even so, Elsie felt a drop in the fear pulsing through the arm on Max’s side. She managed a gasp of air.
“I said pulse her!” Siegel said to Max.
But it wasn’t fear coming from Max anymore. There was something else—a trickle of emotion. Elsie grasped for it. It was compassion.
She followed it, like a speck of light in a cavern of blackness. And suddenly the all-consuming fear, with its overpowering sense of self-preservation, wasn’t her only feeling. She thought of Lulu, who would be lost in the world without her. She thought of her mother, who was left to fight her illness alone back in England. She thought of Gray, who pushed people out only because he was afraid to let them in.
“Fear, Max!” Siegel shouted.
“I am!”
But Max was lying and Siegel knew it. Siegel stepped on Elsie’s neck as he leaned toward Max and walloped him hard. Max let go of Elsie and stumbled to the ground. Elsie opened her eyes just enough to see Max lying beside her, writhing as Siegel hit him.
Elsie latched on to the compassion. Seeing Max suffer for trying to help her only fed it. She guarded this kernel of feeling and breathed life into it. Like a light, it cut through the darkness of her terror. Fear was self-focused. It was self-preservation in its most primitive form. Compassion, however, was outwardly focused. There was simply no room for the two feelings to exist together.
Elsie pushed hard against the fear by thinking of everyone Jack Siegel had ever harmed. The taxi dancers he had hit, the gambling addicts he had taken advantage of, the employees he had quietly disposed of when they ceased to be useful.
“Pulse, Enzo!” Siegel barked.
But it was no use. The layer of fear containing her compassion was wearing thinner by the second. In that moment, Elsie realized two things. First, just as Jack Siegel was born to wield fear, Elsie’s strongest weapon was her compassion. Second, compassion was a far superior weapon. Fear paralyzed the senses, but compassion activated the heart. And the heart always won.
Elsie burst.
The fear popped like a balloon and the compassion inside of her exploded outward, a shockwave of emotion. She felt everyone around her: the thousands of frightened families still trying to escape, the confused people on floats further down the route, even pedestrians blocks away who were nowhere near the parade.
Compassion—wide, rolling waves of it.
People stopped when they felt it and turned her direction.
“Hey, what are you doing to that girl?”
A man in a dark overcoat was looking at them. His gaze was fixated upon Siegel.
“Beat it, pal,” Siegel said. He seemed unfazed by Elsie’s compassion. Had he grown too callous to be penetrated by it?
A woman nearby stepped away from her husband and daughter.
“You’re hurting her! Let go!”
She walked right up to Siegel and batted him over the head with her purse.
“You let go of her right now!”
Siegel tightened his grip on Elsie’s hair, and with his other hand pushed the woman as hard as he could. She stumbled backward and hit the ground.
“Hey!” the woman’s husband yelled. He ran to help her up, then started to make for Siegel. But he was beaten out by two other women who had begun pounding on Siegel’s back with gloved fists. A crowd was starting to form around them.
“Back off!” Siegel shouted. “I’ll kill you all! So help me I will!”
He elbowed an elderly woman behind him, prompting her two adult sons to run up. They began beating on him too.
“You asked for it,” Siegel said.
He let go of Elsie and reached inside his coat pocket.
“Watch out!” she yelled. “He has a gun!”
Siegel fumbled around inside his coat pocket for a moment and came out empty-handed.
“No, he doesn’t.”
A boy had pulled the gun out of Siegel’s jacket.
“He was going to shoot that poor girl,” someone said. “Or shoot us!”
The crowd closed in tighter. Elsie ripped free of Enzo and crawled through dozens of legs to get out.
“You’re cockroaches! All of you!” Siegel said. “Enzo, get me out of here.”
But Enzo knew a sea change when he saw one; he began to extract himself from the crowd. The large man walked quickly away from the scene. Elsie dragged Max a few feet away from the crowd so he wouldn’t get trampled.
“What’s going on?” Max asked. “You do this to him?”
Elsie shook her head.
“He did it to himself. Mr. Siegel could have stopped and shown remorse at any time, but he didn’t.
He could probably still apologize right now. But he won’t. He refuses to look weak, and it will kill him.”
Somewhere in the center of the crowd Siegel was cursing at the people, but it was hard to hear what he was saying. People were shouting. Fists began rising and falling. Legs began kicking with all of their might. The people’s compassion had turned to righteous anger. Siegel provoked it, stoking it into a vicious knot of hateful fury.
There on the outskirts of the crowd, Elsie watched the mob pummel him to death. And she’d be lying if she said she didn’t help stoke their anger herself.
CHAPTER
F ORTY-NINE
ATLAS WATCHED THE Phaeton speed away, smoking and rattling like an old jalopy. He and Gray locked eyes the whole time, neither one daring to look away. Whatever Gray was, he was dangerous.
Deda wants him alive.
But I want him dead.
Atlas cut through a narrow alley, scraping off bricks and mortar with his broad shoulders as he ran. He exited onto the next street, near the truck in which they had arrived. It was a large military transport vehicle they had stolen when the circus passed through Fort Sill, Oklahoma. No other vehicle was large enough to carry him. Far up ahead, he saw the Phaeton turn the corner and head in his direction.
The truck driver, a trapeze artist in his circus, was dozing at the wheel. Atlas tapped the top of the car to wake him, denting the roof and sending the driver diving for the floor.
“That convertible. Follow it.”
Atlas opened the metal doors of the cargo hold in back and hopped in. It was empty except for a shriveled little being in the corner, crouched under a cloak of human hair.
“Close the doors,” Deda said. “I’ll catch my death of cold.”
Atlas slammed the doors shut as the truck made a U-turn and sped off. It was now nearly pitch dark inside.
“You’ve lost it,” the old man said. “Haven’t you?”
“I’m on my way to get it.”
“And you’ve lost Pickford.”