“You know what I notice about everything you’re saying, Valorie, aside from the whole ‘you’re insane’ thing?” Maya asked.
“What?”
“You’re making it all about me. Sex requires at least two people, last time I checked. It ever occur to you that he pursued me? I’m the one with fucking slave cuffs on my wrists here.” Every word that came from her mouth made her situation worse and worse, but in her defense, the knife and murderous spark in Valorie’s eyes, coupled with the creepy carny jingle, did nothing for her nerves. “I didn’t take him from you. He left.”
“Y-you…” Valorie pointed the knife at her, her lean arm trembling with restraint. “You seduced him. You lured him.”
“There’s a succubus in the cast, not to mention you, and I lured him?” Maya asked incredulously. “With what? My unwise rapier wit or my incredible self-centeredness?”
“I don’t know how, but you did. You wanted him for yourself from the first moment you met him. And you’ve fooled Bell into thinking you belong in my place,” Valorie said, her voice rising to a shriek.
“Geez, I’ll give you back your bed. Just stop putting venomous snakes in my couch, and we’ll call it even,” Maya said. She surreptitiously checked her surroundings, using the corners of her eyes. She bent her knees a little, ready to jump. “For the record, the man can read minds. If I were fooling him into doing anything, don’t you think he’d know about it?”
As soon as her part of the carousel had circled away from the center of the circus, Maya leaped off in the opposite direction than the turning carousel. With Valorie’s advantages, she needed any head start she could get, and this way, Valorie would start at least twelve feet behind her.
Maya had planned for the discomfort of her bare feet on well-trodden grass and stretches of dirt. She hadn’t anticipated how Valorie’s longer stride would factor into the pursuit. Also, Maya had to hold her breasts with one arm to keep them from painfully knocking about while she was running, which slowed her down even further. She didn’t have enough air to scream, but she prayed that someone would see her running from the homicidal madwoman who had taken Valorie over.
The woman had cracked, but not for nothing. Yet another albatross to add to Maya’s growing, burdensome collection. It occurred to Maya as she prayed to God to save her that she did so in a state of disgrace. A demon’s penance wouldn’t purge her any more than a fire-blackened cloth could polish silver.
But Maya also couldn’t spare too much of her energy bemoaning the condition of her soul. She couldn’t spare too much energy focusing on the condition of her soles either. Or the way her back still hurt where the needles had been. She just needed to run.
Maya didn’t bother weaving through Oddity Row. Valorie had a knife, not a gun.
There was nowhere she could hide that Valorie wouldn’t know better, but she doubled around the big top and burst through the back entrance. Among all the props in the back, she had an iota of a chance. She dove behind a collection of chairs, knocking a few over. She quickly righted them, but their clatter would have alerted Valorie to where Maya had gone.
Maya crawled through the sawdust to a collection of empty crates in which all this backstage debris would be packed in another week and put into a large truck trailer for the next venue.
Backstage was dark, only one of the lanterns glowing, which worked to Maya’s slight advantage. It wasn’t pleasant, hiding with sawdust tickling her nose and getting in places sawdust shouldn’t be, not knowing when Valorie was going to make it into the big top and find her. The place she had chosen was excellent for hiding but not excellent for getting away when she was found. She darted her gaze around.
The lion and tiger in their cages had become human sometime in the night, and they were now both in Jason’s cell, where Jason had awakened because of her clamor. He stared straight at her. In a random, half-hysterical thought, Maya realized that they must have witnessed her behaving very badly with Ciarán, Moss and Bell.
Maya pressed a finger to her lips. Jason nodded and lay back down. She could only hope that Jason still sympathized with her—although if Bell was a sore spot with him, Valorie probably wouldn’t be high on his list of people to help either.
She returned to looking around for a better hiding spot. Maya glanced up and noticed the catwalk. That might be her best bet, being as high as possible. People tended to stay close to the ground and focus their attention on other things close to the ground like them. Now if only she could find the ladder to the catwalk…because all this time at Arcanium, she had focused most of her attention close to the ground like a normal person.
There was no ladder to be seen from her vantage point, even though Maya knew for a fact that Seth and Lars exited backstage.
A sound like a strong wind startled her as the tent flap violently blew open. Hurricane Valorie had arrived. Maya immediately stilled. Even her breathing sounded too loud to her, in spite of Valorie’s panting.
“Really, playing hide and seek? You know I’m going to find you. And don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you. From what else I hear, that’s kind of what you’re looking for, isn’t it?” Valorie said.
No escape out of the back. Valorie would be expecting that. Maya peeked up slightly. There was a space of about a foot between the tower of boxes and the red curtain. She would have to wait until Valorie was looking the other way. Maya could try to shift the boxes closer to the curtain, but the shuffling noises would be a dead giveaway, and Maya guessed that the boxes, though empty, were heavier than they looked, especially stacked as they were.
“I sympathize with your misery. I really do,” Valorie continued. “There’s not a soul here who doesn’t know misery in one way or another. It connects us all together. But that’s no excuse for what you’ve done. What you think, Jason? You seen a naked slut run in here in the last few minutes?”
Maya raised her head above the barricade between her and Valorie. Jason shrugged. “Sorry, Val. I was sleeping. I didn’t see anything.”
Valorie tapped the knife against the metal bars. “Even if you had, you probably like the little girl because she scratches your head while you’re under. It’s not like I hurt your back when I’m doing my show. You realize she only does it because she’s bored, right? She doesn’t have an act yet. Once she does, or once I get my hands on her, say goodbye to the little bit of loving you get from someone who isn’t a tiger.”
“Honestly,” Jason said, lowering himself back down and putting an arm around Lily, who stirred.
“Fine.” Valorie turned back around.
Maya just about kicked herself. That had been her moment.
“Like I said, I got word that you’ve been looking for punishment. Got something to feel guilty about, Maya?”
Well, yes, but being the other woman hadn’t caused nearly as much shame as it might have if Maya had been the pursuer rather than the pursued. Once Bell put his mind to something inside his own circus, Maya doubted anything could get in his way.
“If you’ve got a death wish, maybe I can help you with that,” Valorie continued, twirling the knife in her hands with disquieting aptitude. The blade sang through the air. “If you want a life sentence instead of an execution for your sins, I can help you with that too. Bell’s not the only one who can curse you. Hard to be Bell’s lovely assistant when you’re no longer lovely. You’d have to join the rest of us freaks on the Row, wouldn’t you? How happy do you think Bell would be to keep you around after I’m finished with you?”
Valorie picked up a chair and threw it over her shoulder into the small forest of props and furniture. Maya clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out.
“I’m doing you a favor really,” Valorie said. “You want to be punished? I’ll give you the cuts to balance the scales.”
Maya’s heart raced frantically against the paper walls of her lungs.
Somewhere in time and space, Derrick had felt like this, except each rapid, panicked heartbeat had p
unched broken bones.
Constant pain. Constant morphine, and maybe it wouldn’t be enough. Months or years in a medically induced coma. Months or years in physical rehab. More months or years in rehab for pill dependence. A lifetime cursed, Humpty Dumpty never put back together again.
For a moment, Maya flirted with the idea of stepping out from behind the crates and presenting herself for Valorie’s vengeance. Maybe Maya had thrown her lot in with the wrong member of Arcanium. She’d asked for punishment from someone who inexplicably liked her quite a lot instead of someone who hated her. It made sense that Bell’s heart had never really been into it.
Valorie, on the other hand, could be her salvation. Any pain, any death, would be just. Maya had disfigured Derrick, ruined his life, because he’d betrayed her. It was only right that Valorie do the same to her.
But when it came to Maya actually doing it, actually walking out to meet Valorie, she couldn’t.
Valorie leaped behind the animal cages to try to catch her back there. Maya ran fleet-footed from her crouch and brushed through the curtain. The ring was lit in the center with low lights, none of the ceiling spots, but everything in the room was still visible.
Before Maya kept running, she tried to still the slightly swinging curtain. It was a lost cause. Valorie would no doubt notice it immediately, so Maya had to move now.
She was about to run for the entrance, but then she caught sight of a ladder where a ladder didn’t usually stand. She raised her eyes. It led to a high wire. Seth and Lars must have been working on another aerial act. They did like to switch it up, and if it was for Seth and Lars, there would probably be a way to the catwalk from up there. If Valorie came through the curtain, she might think that Maya had gone out of the ring entrance.
Either way, up was a direction to go, and she didn’t have enough time to make the decision. Out of the big top, there was no cover. She couldn’t even go back to the caravan. That would be like walking straight into a trap. All Valorie would have to do was search them one by one, and there were extra keys for Bell’s RV under the front wheel well.
Maya could run until someone else saved her, or she could climb.
She climbed. She shimmied up the ladder as fast as she could. Her battered soles shouted at her to stop, and when she looked down—thank goodness she wasn’t afraid of heights—she saw with some alarm that she had left slight smears of blood on the rungs.
Might as well have left breadcrumbs for birds.
All the more reason to climb faster and get to the catwalk now that she’d made the huge mistake. Season Twenty-eight, Episode Twenty-one, of Maya Fucks Up Just About Everything. And she was in syndication, so she could reliably expect some repeat fuck-ups if she survived this evening more or less intact.
She was surprised to realize that the reason she climbed so furiously was because she wanted to live. She didn’t have a death wish. She could accept the scars on her back, but she doubted Valorie would limit her knife to areas hidden by costumes. Selfishly, Maya didn’t want to join the oddities. She didn’t want to learn to adjust. She didn’t want to be that kind of strong, even if it would pay back her debt in full.
Maya didn’t deserve what she had, but she’d be damned before she gave it up to anyone else’s madness but her own.
“Hello, rabbit,” Valorie said. “Or should I say, pussycat? Good God, woman, do you have no shame?”
“Bell kind of took my clothes,” Maya replied, still climbing. “What am I supposed to do?”
“There are blankets in the prop section,” Valorie said. She made no move to follow Maya up, which unnerved Maya, because now she wondered whether Valorie knew something that Maya didn’t. Or maybe Valorie was afraid of heights and thought she could wait Maya out. Maya could hope. She couldn’t change anything with a stitch of hope, but it was all Maya had. Literally.
“I was a bit distracted, hiding from the lady psychopath with a knife,” Maya said. “Survival first, fashion second.”
“You’ve got a real mouth on you,” Valorie said.
“You noticed?”
“And you’re proud of it,” Valorie said, clinking the edge of the knife on the rung like she had on the bars of the cage. It was such a small thing, but it put Maya on edge.
“Not really,” Maya said. “It keeps getting me into trouble, but good luck getting it to shut up.”
“I welcome the chance to do just that,” Valorie said. “Shutting up both ends, actually.”
Jesus H. Christ on a cracker. Maya found the reserves to climb faster.
“Have I mentioned you’re nuts?” Maya shouted down. “They’re going to name a legume after you.”
“I’m just wondering where exactly you think you’re going,” Valorie said.
“Are you blind? I’m going up.”
“And what goes up must come down. Where do you think this ladder goes?” Valorie asked.
Maya reached the platform, clambering on. The metal mesh dug patterns into her knees. Her arms, legs, soles and back felt like someone had dug various-sized hooks into them.
When she looked up, she understood why Valorie was in no hurry to climb up after her.
The catwalk still hovered a good seven feet above her head, with Seth and Lars’ swing set-up hanging from it above the center of the ring. But her fragile hopes dashed to pieces when she saw there was nothing leading from the platform to the catwalk. In theory, she could jump onto the swings from one of the high wire platforms…but not the one she was currently on.
She had three options. Two of them took her in a downward direction and ended badly. The other required a skill she’d never taken time to cultivate in all her years of education, because it had never seemed relevant at the time. After all, when did a person have to walk a tightrope in real life?
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Screaming wildly for help seemed like a better course of action all the time. Even so, she still hadn’t completely healed from the strain on her voice a few weeks ago. All it would take was one bad scream to silence her again. Then she’d have nothing.
The platform shook. Maya peered over the side.
Valorie was climbing toward her. She kept her grip on the knife, which slowed her down, but as before, Valorie was in no hurry. And if Maya took her only real option—walking the high wire without even a net, because Arcanium didn’t do nets—that knife would still be a danger to her. The synthetic rope was about an inch wide with a little give, but a determined series of slices or hacks could cut through the high-tension cord, and the knife Valorie carried might be solid enough for the job.
Now that Valorie was halfway up the ladder and kept Maya from climbing back down, Maya’s choices had been whittled down to two very bad ones. She could leap off the platform and break something, crippling her for Valorie to dissect in peace—possibly killing her if she shattered her skull. Or she could try her hand at tightrope walking then fall and break something or kill herself.
Either end would be fitting for her sins, she thought.
Let’s do this.
Her palms moistened with sweat and her legs shook as she approached the wire. She didn’t see any poles. She could have sworn most tightrope acts involved poles to help with balance. Because physics. She was a health teacher. Physics was back in high school and rarely her friend. At this point, the rules that kept repeating in her mind were, Keep your arms out, look at the rope, not the ground and don’t stop moving.
If her soles would even let her. She checked them. Then she quickly put her foot down. Maybe it would have been better if she hadn’t checked. Now she knew how bad they were. They looked like she had run on glass at one point, adrenaline the only thing keeping her from feeling the initial pain.
Valorie was insane, but Maya couldn’t be much better if she was really going to do this, especially with injured feet.
On the other hand, she didn’t have much choice.
Maya stretched her arms to the side and tried to ignore Valorie’s derisive laughter. Tried to ignore t
he threat of impending violence. Tried to slow the beating of her heart and the trembling weakness of her limbs. Her life depended on being able to walk twenty feet of tightrope at least twenty feet above the quite uncushioned ground.
She stepped onto the rope. Her big and second toe curled to try to grab on, but it was too slippery and her toes weren’t prehensile enough. They gave her a center, however, a position to place her foot.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and you need to correct for it. Move your arms to counter. Find your center. Arrange your weight around it. And whatever you do, keep moving forward.
Maya couldn’t rush it, even with Valorie behind her. But she also couldn’t wait. She crossed her left foot in front of her, adjusting her arms with each slight movement of her uneven gravity on the rope. Right foot in front. Left foot in front. Everything ached, but that wasn’t her focus. Her focus was on the center of gravity somewhere in the cradle of her hips, that place near the small of her back that was tightening, tightening, tightening, so rarely used and now crucial. She couldn’t stop now. As hard as it was to continue forward, it would be harder to try going backward.
She was doing it. Holy shit, she was doing it. Her feet and ankles were killing her on top of everything else, but she was doing it.
When she reached the center, the rope jerked under her feet for reasons other than her own shifted weight, wobbling her.
“Did I ever tell you that I used to do my act on the high wire?” Valorie asked.
Maya just couldn’t catch a break.
“It’s part of the skill set I was given after the curse of my first wish. Too bad I used up all mine years ago, otherwise I could have just done this the easy way. But I’d honestly like to see you fall first—a fall for what they used to call a fallen woman. Then you’ll know what you did to me, how that made me feel.”
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