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“I haven’t changed my mind yet.” He took another drag. His face settled against itself.
I’m not so sure about that. But I didn’t say it. “You realize we can’t interfere down there. Once we step through the gate—”
“I know the rules. You repeated ’em twice. I’m not stupid, Jill.”
“You’re right, you’re not stupid. But maybe I am.” I eyed the layout again. The alleys between the tents looked regular and even, but they also ran like ink on wet paper in the corner of my vision. I had the idea that if I looked away they would move, and snap back together in a different configuration once my gaze returned.
The music halted as the wind veered, then started again. Calliope music, faint and cheery, with screaming underneath. It sounded like a cartoon. The Ferris wheel shuddered again, and another light blinked out. It restarted, creaking, and the music swallowed any sound that might have made its way out.
I blew out between my teeth. Measured off a space on the steering wheel between two index fingers, tapped them both rapidly, a tattoo of dissatisfaction. Time’s wasting, Jill. Get moving.
When I reached for the door-handle he did too. The Pontiac sat in shadows, her paint job glistening dully. It was a cleaner gleam than the cars in the lot below, or the bright winking lures beyond.
The music struggled up to us as we made our way down the hill, my bootheels occasionally ringing against a stone, Saul silent and graceful. Between the rows of cars, windshields already filmed with dust, gravel shifting under our feet. There was no need to be quiet.
There wasn’t much of a crowd milling around the ticket booth. The scattered people were mostly normal, and they looked dazed. I kept my mouth shut, watching for a few moments as a round brunette in her mid-thirties tilted her head, listening. The calliope music sharpened, predatory glee ru
Saul let out a short sigh. We strode through the confused, each of them averting their eyes like we were some sort of plague. A couple Traders milled with the normals, uncertainly. Most of them flinched and drew into the shadows when they saw me.
The Trader in the booth studied us. She opened her mouth, and I saw all her teeth were sharp and pointed, not just the fangs.
I beat her to the punch. “I’m here on business, Trader. Where’s the Ringmaster?”
She shrugged slim, bare flour-white shoulders, her rhinestone-studded Lycra top moving supple over high, perky breasts. Visibly reconsidered when I didn’t respond. “Around and about. Probably in the bigtop. Want your hand stamped?”
I snorted. “Of course not. Come on, Saul.” I took two steps to the side, heading for the turnstile.
Her sloe eyes narrowed. “Just what are you—” The words died as I stared at her. The corruption blooming over her was strong, and I’d bet diamonds she had weapons under the sightline of the flimsy booth. She tried again. “You can come in. But I’m not so sure he can.” She actually pointed at Saul with one lacquered-yellow fingernail. It was amazing—I wondered how she wiped herself with claws that long.
Oh, yeah? Quit pointing at my Were, bitch. “He’s with me. Go back to seducing suicides,” I snapped. We strode past, through the clicking turnstile. Each separate bar of the stile ended in a cheap chrome ram’s head, lips drawn back and blunt teeth blackened with grime. The Trader didn’t say anything else, but the swirl of corruption lying over the entire complex of canvas and wood tightened.
The spider knows the fly’s home.
I didn’t like that thought. I also didn’t like how the air was suddenly close and warm, almost balmy with a slight edge of humidity. It even smelled wrong—no clean tang of dry desert, no metallic ring from the river or any of the hundred other little components that make up a subconscious map of my city. You spend enough time breathing a place and it’ll get into your bones—and when it isn’t what it should be, that’s when the uneasiness starts right below the hackles.
It was also—surprise, surprise—more crowded inside than out. There wasn’t a crush, but it was work threading my way through. The flat shine of the dusted on Trader irises, dazed incomprehension on the shuffling normals, rubbing shoulders and shuffling feet. I saw men in pajamas, a woman in filmy lingerie with her hair in pink curlers, a fiftyish man in work clothes carrying a dripping-wet hammer and wandering walleyed and fishmouthed like he was six again.
The midway bloomed around us. Pasteboard and flashing lights, buzzing strings of electric bulbs.
“Throw the ball, win a prize!” This was an actual ’breed, female in a red cotton peasant dress. A sleepy-eyed teenager stopped in front of her; she licked her pale lips and smiled at him. Her white, white hands touched his shoulders in a butterfly’s caress, but she saw me watching and pushed him aside. He stumbled and rejoined the flow of the crowd.
“Catch a fish!” A Trader in suspenders, a white wifebeater, and a newsboy hat, his ears coming to high hairy points, motioned at a crystal bowl. The fish inside glittered too sharply to be anything but metallic, globules of clear oil bubbling from their mouths. “Win a dream! Lovely dream, freshly colored! Catch a fish!”
A woman hesitated before putting her hand in the bowl. I silently urged her not to, and turned away before she could make her decision. There was a wet, deep crunch. The fish-catcher’s savage cry of triumph rose behind me, and I let out a sharp breath, my stomach turning over.
This was what the Cirque did. It separated the weak and suicidal from the just vaguely disaffected. I caught sight of a young woman, mascara dribbling down her cheeks on a flood of tears, mouthing words that seemed to fit the dim seaweed sound of the calliope. Something like “Camptown Races,” married to a more savage beat.
Doo-dah, dooo dah.… She shivered, and walked slowly toward an open tent exhaling a flood of beeps and boops like a video arcade. God alone knew what waited for her in there.
Fu
The normals didn’t look at me, lost in whatever the calliope was whispering. But the Traders flinched aside, and the ’breed sometimes bared their teeth, or fangs. One, dolled up like a fortune-teller and outside a tent swathed with fluttering nylon scarves, a chipped crystal ball on the round satin-draped table in front of her, actually snarled.
I stopped and stared at her for a good twenty seconds, unblinking, before she dropped her yellow gaze. Her eyes matched her tongue, a jaundiced, scaled thing that flickered past thin lips and dabbed the point of her chin before reeling back into her mouth.
“There’s a lot of them,” Saul murmured. He kept close, the comforting heat of him touching my back. The silver in my hair was shifting, and the carved ruby at my throat spat a single, bloody spark just as he spoke.
“There always are.” And when the sun rises, maybe a third of them will make it home safe. Those who decide they do want to live after all—or those smart enough to run like hell and make no agreements. Even implicit ones.
And here I thought I was such a cynic. Probably a lot less than a third would get home.
Lean four-legged shapes slunk in the shadows. Their colorless eyes flashed, and they followed us through the midway. The Ferris wheel rocked at one end, another light winked out, and I heard a shapeless scream, like a man waking from a nightmare in a cold bath of sweat. The calliope music surged, swallowing it. Paper ruffled at our feet—wrappers still hot from popcorn or sticky with cotton candy, gnawed sticks still holding traces of corn-dog mustard or clinging caramel. A man’s gold Patek Philippe glittered, flung carelessly on the packed, scuffed dirt. Thick electric cables creaked back and forth under the slow warm breeze.