Broken People (12 page)

“And how do you solve the pain problem?”
Rake asked. “Do you disconnect her head completely?”

“Hmm … Yeah, too complicated,” Spinner
said.

During the silence that fell between them,
Dale wondered why the kid didn’t look horrified and start throwing
up already. The facial reconstruction must have been a terrible
experience for her, making her believe she could survive anything.
Maybe she could.

“Okay, the way I see it, we have two
options,” Spinner said. “Either we get Nicholas to put her in a
light state of hypnosis, or we have the Nightingale sing to—”

“Or we use the menzataxor!” Cielo
interjected.

Spinner frowned, then reluctantly nodded.
“
That
might work.”

“And we freeze the arm. She’s too young to
use anything else.” Rake put the cup down. “I’ll go and get the
cooling system running.”

“Damn, my joints ache each time we use it,”
Spinner grumbled to himself. “All right.” He rubbed his hands
together. “Cielo, bring the menzataxor while we get her ready. Come
with me, little miss.”

Once he picked up the prosthetic and took it
away with him, Rose followed Spinner out of the room like a
puppy.

“Can you help me bring it here?” Cielo
turned to Dale with a shy smile. “The cage is heavy.”

Dale nodded for her to lead the way.

“What’s a menzataxor?” Dale asked while they
walked along the tracks, heading to a car at the end of the
train.

“Oh, there are no words to explain it!”
Cielo laughed. “It’s better if you see it for yourself. The
menagerie is over there.” She pointed at the yellow car at the end
of the train.

“Just one car?” Dale’s eyebrows showed his
surprise.

“We had to cut back on regular animals.”
Cielo climbed the steps in front and placed her hand on the door.
“Times are tough, and the feeding costs were getting too high.
What’s left … well, you’ll see…”

The door opened.

Rows of cages spread along the entire car,
separated by narrow aisles. Dale didn’t recognize any of the
animals, but paws of various colors, shapes, and sizes stretched
out to greet Cielo, and she answered with playful tugs.

“Where are the dogs and the monkeys?” he
asked. Were those
toys
by any chance?

“They share the car with their trainers.”
Cielo squeezed easily between the cages, proving she’d practiced
this many times. “They don’t get along well with these guys. Here
it is.” She stopped in front of a rectangular cage made of metal
bars doubled by transparent plastic walls. “This is Uffi.”

The creature she called Uffi resembled a
horse with a beautiful flowing mane … only the horse was missing.
Long tresses of pink, light blue, and shiny white hair swirled
around, constantly on the move, hiding an elastic, narrow body the
length of a man’s arm underneath.

“I feel pretty dumb here, but how are
electric shocks going to help Rosie?” Dale asked after he read the
warning attached to the front of the cage. At the same time, part
of him wondered whether they were all insane.

“Ignore that.” Cielo waved a hand. “It’s for
the public so they keep their hands off. This little guy is the
source of a strong hallucinogen. The drug is perfect, with low
addiction and toxicity rates. Unfortunately, it’s also impossible
to harvest. The only way to get the drug is by touching Uffi, and
if we reveal the source, there’s bound to be someone foolish enough
to try and steal it. So we can’t commercialize it. The whole
experiment was a bust, but we can’t kill him.” She sighed. “The
poor thing loves to be petted and cuddled, but … well, we obviously
can’t.”

“You don’t … use it?” Dale detached the
clasps that kept the cage connected to the ones around it.

“Did you see the kind of life we live?”
Cielo helped him by catching a furry paw that extended towards him
from a cage at the right, and gently pushed it back through the
bars. “We can’t afford to let our guard down and … be happy!” Her
laughter sounded less serene this time. “But if you care to hear
colors and chase smiles for a couple hours, be my guest. I’m sure
Rosie won’t mind having a playmate. I heard people can even
experience the same things.”

Smiling, Dale shook his head and picked up
the cage. His muscles strained. It
was
heavy, but not too
heavy for him. With Cielo walking ahead and clearing the way, they
made it back to the factory in no time.

“Can we enter?” Cielo asked from the
doorway.

“Yes, she’s locked in,” Spinner said. “No
need to worry about infection hazard.”

He fussed over Rosie, who sat on a
half-reclined armchair. Her left arm disappeared from the shoulder,
trapped inside a one-by-one meter rectangular, glass box. Two pairs
of gloves built into the box provided access on opposite sides. The
frosted wall facing her forced Rosie to look the other way, and her
eyes zeroed in on the menzataxor. She tilted her head, a pale smile
twisting her lips.

Rake placed a low table at her right and
elevated it to her level. He signaled Dale to put the cage there.
Leaning over his shoulder, Cielo lifted the glass panel from inside
the bars.

“Okay, she knows it will hurt when it’s
over,” Spinner said, “but it won’t be too bad.”

Rosie nodded, her gaze fixed on the swirl of
colors inside the cage.

“We injected her with the coagulant agent,
and now we’re waiting for the freezing to complete,” he told
Dale.

Meanwhile, Uffi had pressed himself against
the bars and tried to get as much of his fur out as possible. Given
the way the fur moved, all that hair wasn’t hair at all, but a mass
of long, fine cilia.

A whiff of sweet-scented air reached Dale’s
nose, and he blocked his air paths so his system could isolate the
toxin before it entered his blood stream. The others continued
their work, undisturbed. They had to be used to it since they paid
no mind. So it wasn’t the drug.

Rosie’s fingers twitched, but she didn’t
dare make any move towards the menzataxor.

“You can touch him,” Cielo said with an
encouraging smile. “Uffi loves to be petted.”

Hesitantly, but full of curiosity, Rosie
stretched out her right arm and her fingers brushed the cilia. The
colors sparkled brighter wherever she touched them, and a low
rumble vibrated the cage. Uffi was purring.

Instead of getting a glazed look common for
most drug users, Rosie’s entire face lit up. So this was how she
looked when she was smiling.

On her other side, Spinner and Rake slid
their hands into the long gloves. Rake picked up a needle and
pricked the girl’s upper arm. No blood flowed out. “Did you feel
anything?”

Rosie shook her head. Her eyes followed
something that wasn’t there before returning to Uffi.

“We’re good to go,” Spinner said.

Cielo brought over a chair, and with her
elbow propped on the table and her chin in her hand, she watched
the interaction between the child and the menzataxor.

From his elevated position, Dale supervised
them all. On one side, Rosie played with the manzataxor, chuckling
quietly to herself from time to time. On the other side, Rake and
Spinner cut the lifeless limb’s wrist open and stripped it bare.
Inserting the prosthetic and aligning it with the bones was tedious
work, and the entire process lasted forty-five minutes. Dale timed
it. Putting everything back together and closing the incision took
another half-hour.

“It’s done,” Spinner said with a satisfied
grin. “We need to wait for her to defrost so we can test it, but
then she can go. I predict a full recovery.”

Rake grunted in approval and removed his
hands from the gloves. At his press of a button, the floor of the
box loaded with surgical instruments slid out. They collected them
and went to clean them in the sink. Rosie was too engrossed with
her new pal to notice the time passing.

With Rake’s help, Spinner dismantled the
freezing box, releasing Rosie’s arm, and then Rake gave her another
shot. Several moments later, her little finger twitched. The tiny,
metal clasps holding the skin together looked better than stitches,
but there was an eeriness to them.

Spinner tapped her wrist with a black stylus
fitted with a power cord plugged into the wall. “Try to move
it.”

At first, nothing happened. Then Rosie
rolled her shoulder and brought her arm into her lap. While holding
it up with the other hand, she tentatively flexed each finger
independently. The movement was slow, but they reacted as
intended.

“Wonderful,” Spinner said. “No hard
exertions until the skin heals, and then you have to practice every
day to strengthen the muscles and regain the ligament elasticity.
Other than that, you’re all set.”

“Take these twice a day for the pain.” Rake
gave her a handful of small vials filled with a green liquid.
“They’re mint flavored.”

“And that’s sugar glass on the outside so
you can chew them whole,” Spinner said.

Cielo pulled open one of the pockets in
Rosie’s dress, and Dale helped her put the vials in.

Rake and Spinner checked their watches. The
circus would open soon.

“Right, we should go,” Dale said, then
hesitated. Did Rosie still have enough drugs in her system for him
to risk coming in close proximity to her teeth? There was no need
for her to leave the train on her feet, and they had a car waiting
for them at the train station. “How long will the prosthetic last?”
He leaned over and picked Rosie up. The kid weighed as much as a
feather and, other than tensing, she didn’t protest.

“With some tweaking, about four years,”
Spinner said and turned to Rosie. “You should come when we return
next fall to have it recalibrated. Free of charge!”

Rosie nodded, but she was staring mournfully
at the menzataxor.

“You can come back to visit him.” Cielo slid
the glass panel back down, sealing Uffi inside the cage. “We’ll be
in town for at least another week.”

Rosie smiled and laid her head on Dale’s
shoulder, holding her hand protectively against her chest. She was
still smiling when they passed by the trampoline jumpers, and
became more alert at the sight of Rocket Girl demonstrating her
flying abilities, but she had fallen asleep by the time they
reached the car.

People said night was a good adviser.
Nicholas begged to differ. For as long as he could remember, bad
decisions had been made at night. Most recently, they included him
pretending to be the circus owner, accepting to put on the show at
the big theater hall, and deciding to break into the Hrad. The last
one was particularly insane. He didn’t see how they could achieve
that. No one needed that much money. Nicholas, who had grown up
with money and liked his comforts, appreciated his freedom more.
And this little adventure could go wrong in so many ways, it gave
him nightmares.

He rubbed his eyes, tired from staring at
the blueprints for so long, and leaned back in his chair. The fair
had closed at midnight, and a heavy silence surrounded him, broken
only by the random cries of the beasts in the menagerie. Focused on
his work, a quiet knock on the door startled him.

“Yes!”

The door opened, and Anya slid in, carrying
a tray with a pink porcelain bowl on it. She danced on the tips of
her toes towards his desk, where she set it down.

“Pink?” Nicholas arched an eyebrow, holding
back an amused smile. He wasn’t one of those men who felt
threatened by a girly color, but he liked to tease her about
it.

“That’s what you get for not showing up for
dinner.” Anya slid the tray towards him, careful to avoid the
blueprints. “It was the only one left.”

“I don’t care that much for pudding,”
Nicholas said, just to be difficult. Besides, the brown crust
didn’t look appealing at all, and he had a headache. “It’s a
British dish.”

“Good. Because it’s crème brulée.” She
handed him the spoon.

Well,
that
he could eat. And the
sugar overload might give him some new ideas. With that in mind, he
dipped the spoon into the bowl. He suppressed a sigh, disappointed
to discover it tasted good. The cook was worth her weight in gold,
and that was a lot of gold.

Anya let Nicholas enjoy his snack as she
strolled around the room, pretending to study everything in sight.
When he first arrived at the circus, Nicholas couldn’t afford to
rent an entire car like some members of the crew. He settled for
one cabin that he split in half with a velvet curtain, separating
the sleeping area from the rest of the room, which he mainly used
for storage as his acts required plenty of props.

Magic didn’t pay well, not even close to
what the aerialists and gymnasts made, and whatever he gained each
month went toward designing better numbers, hopefully more
appealing to the audience, and requiring less use of his power.
He’d get there one day, but he still had a long way to go. After
years of practicing, he was confident it wasn’t an impossible task,
but he was also aware of how hard it was. As Anya flowed from one
shelf to the next, near-pirouetting as she avoided one item after
another on the floor, Nicholas couldn’t help feeling
inadequate.

He neglected his personal space, and other
than a wide, comfortable armchair, a sturdy table with steel legs
that also served as workbench, and a huge dresser, there was
nothing valuable in the room. The tricks were worthless if you
didn’t know how to do them, and while his fancy clothes might be
worth something, these people wouldn’t be caught dead wearing them.
Anya’s short skirt swayed gently as if it agreed with his
deprecation.

“Don’t you like it?”

Yes, he did. He liked her legs very much.
“Hmm?” Nicholas raised his eyes to meet Anya’s gaze. He’d stopped
eating while watching her. “No, it’s fine.” He frowned while he cut
paths with the spoon through the cream to let the burned sugar
sauce invade it. “Anya, why did you come?”