Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original (6 page)

Grandpapa sighed. “No,” he said. “And I can’t even remind you that she isn’t human, because she has voting rights in the eyes of many of the city-states we travel through, even if she’s never chosen to exercise them. Her citizenship belongs to a country of two.”

And I was her other half. “Do you agree with what he’s doing?”

He looked away. My heart sank. When he looked back, his eyes were hooded, and he spoke with a painful honesty: “I do, and I do not, and I am gladder than you can know that the choice isn’t in my hands. I can’t stop him, and that means that I am not the one who holds the final responsibility for breaking your heart. Do I think the fortune your cousin is scrabbling for will save my wife, or that he seeks it out of love for her, and not out of the desire to have revenge on you for old slights? No. I have long since come to terms with the fact that we live in a time where everything we build works better than we need it to, and that includes the diseases we design for our own destruction. But I have loved her longer than you’ve been alive, my crow girl, and I can’t give her up without a fight.”

I bit my lip, looking at him, and whispered a final question: “What do you want me to do?”

He smiled faintly. “You were never going to be happy with us forever,” he said. “You refused to come to the Bone Yard before you had earned it, and you’re not a Big Man. You never had the drive for that, or the heartlessness to do what is required to be a Big Man in this world and survive. But you’re not the type who can learn to take orders just because they come from someone who stands above you in a pecking order you didn’t agree to obey. You were always going to need to find your own road through the days between here and Heaven.”

I looked at him, my shoulders slowly relaxing as my body tried to go limp and my mind refused to let it. He looked back at me, that faint smile still clinging to his lips.

“You have a question,” he said. “What is it?”

“The brown-haired cousin who works the gate,” I blurted. “What’s her name?”

“Nicole,” he said. “Is that really all you have to ask me?”

Will you hate me for running away? Will you blame me for Grandmamma’s death, even if you say you know that selling Billie wouldn’t help? Would my parents forgive me for this? Am I betraying you? Am I betraying myself?
There were too many questions; they swarmed like townies all trying to grab the same ball at a ring-toss game, and they were just as meaningless. Lips pressed into a tight line, I shook my head and held my silence.

This time, his smile was as wide as the sunrise, and twice as welcome. “You look very much like your mother,” he said. “I love you, my crow girl.” With that, he cut the connection and left me staring at an empty screen. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t need to.

After only a few seconds, I turned away. There was work to do, and I didn’t have much time.

*   *   *

Packing my things took less time than I felt it should have, given how long I’d been traveling with the carnival, given how much of my life I had spent devoted to its well-being and growth. A few vacuum bags of clothing shoved into a duffel; another of toiletries and jewelry, including the few small pieces I had left from my mother’s dowry, which had been remarkable, once upon a long damn time ago. Half of it was in coinage that had no value anymore, except in the eyes of a daughter.

But that’s what family is, isn’t it? It’s traditions and trinkets that only matter when we hold them up against the mirrors of our lives, lending them meaning, lending them weight, until they become heavy enough to endure without us. We create the past in the things that we choose to remember about it. We turn everything into stories, and those stories matter because we say that they do. It’s all a wheel, and ours are the hands that turn it.

I was heading toward the door when the flap was thrust open without my permission or invitation. Davo stood there at the threshold, his eyes dark with anger.

“You were supposed to be at the gate,” he said coldly.

“Nicole released me,” I replied, straightening, slinging the bag I carried over one shoulder. “She knew the work better than I did. I felt she had the right to let me go.”

“Then you should have come to me. I could have given you more work.”

“We’re not between shows right now, Davo. You’re not the one who is responsible for making sure that I have work to do.” It felt strange to talk back to him like this—like it didn’t matter, like it was just something that I was allowed to do. My decision really had been made. If I had still been unsure while I was packing, Davo had chased that uncertainty away. I was leaving.

And I was taking what was mine.

“I’m still the Big Man here,
cousin
,” he said softly.

“Yes,” I said. “You are. May you live long and gladly in your teacup kingdom.” I took a step toward the door, intending to push past him and out into the night.

His palm struck my chest in the space between my breasts, hitting hard enough that it knocked the wind out of me and shoved me a solid half step backward. I gasped for air, casting a wide-eyed, startled look in his direction. He was regarding me calmly, an almost analytical look on his face.

“I asked for your hand and you refused me,” he said, shoving me again. “I asked for your loyalty, and you refused to let me have it. You have never been willing to let me have anything that I asked from you. Time and again, you have raised yourself up against me, purely out of spite. Why would I let you leave this tent now, when you so clearly have not yet learned respect?”

“You can’t hit me,” I gasped, as stunned by the act as by its consequences. “You’re not
allowed
to hit me.”

“The laws of physics say I can,” said Davo, and swung at me again, this time with his hand balled into a fist. That would hurt, I knew; hurt like nothing else I had ever experienced at the hand of a cousin. I ducked away, and his wild blow clipped my shoulder, still hard enough to hurt a little, but nothing like the pain that he had intended for me to feel.

“Stop it!” I danced back, out of his reach, trying to force my thudding heart to calm itself. “This isn’t how we behave!”

“No, we live like migrants until we earn a place under a fixed roof where old men and old women will make up our minds for us! We let the future march on and we refuse to take our places in it, because we’re too interested in traditions that should have died a century ago!” Davo stood where he was. He didn’t swing at me again. That didn’t make him any less terrifying. “I would have taken you away from all this, Ansley, if you’d only agreed to be my wife. We could have been equals, instead of my needing to be your better.”

“I knew that was what you wanted: that’s why I said no. I was never going to leave the carnival for you,” I said. “I was only ever going to leave it for myself.”

“I’m selling your pony,” he said. Those words were utterly calm, with no emotion attached to them. This was something he could be sure of. “Maybe you’ll be able to get everyone else to tell me that I had no right, but it won’t matter. The sale will already be finished, and you’ll never get her back. Maybe then you’ll stop cavorting around like you’re better than everybody else. You’ll stop holding on to the past.”

“No,” I snarled, and ducked toward the mouth of the tent.

Davo worked the airway lines, where speed was of the essence, and I worked with Billie, who never moved faster than she had to. He was faster than I was, and his hand caught my ponytail as I ran past, pulling me up short. The pain in my scalp was immediate, and familiar. My hair had been pulled before.

“Yes,” he replied, utterly calm. He let go of my hair. I pulled away, turning so that I could see him, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach, leaving me shaky legged and unsure of my next move.

Davo looked at me without blinking, his grip on the small ceramic pistol he’d produced from inside his jacket unwavering.

“You … you wouldn’t shoot me,” I said. “Not over this. Not over who owns a pack animal.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But I might shoot you over going behind my back to Grandfather. Over complaining endlessly when I just wanted to do right by this show. Over trapping me here when you refused to let me be your ticket to a better life. You’ve given me lots of reasons to shoot you, over the years.”

“Davo—”

“Everyone will just assume you went with your pony. Even Grandfather. And I won’t have to look at you anymore. You won’t defy me. Life will be perfect, once you’re gone.”

Fighting him wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was just making him more and more sure of himself. Time to stop. I pulled myself up straighter, composing my expression. “Then do it. Prove to me that you can be a Big Man for once in your life. Make a
real
decision. Kill your kin.”

“I can,” he snarled.

“So do it,” I said.

I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised when he pulled the trigger: him or me. The bullet flew past my head, the wind from its passage ruffling my hair for an instant before it was gone. I stared at Davo, too stunned to scream. He stared back. Then he adjusted his aim fractionally, shifting to ensure that the next shot wouldn’t miss. I didn’t wait for him to fire. I turned and ran.

This time I made it out of the tent without a hand catching in my hair or a bullet taking me in the back. Davo fired again, the bullet punching a hole in the wall of the tent. Almost without thinking, I grabbed the pull tag that would identify me as the tent’s owner and yanked, dancing out of the way. “Run!” I shouted.

I will never know if Davo even tried to escape.

The tent collapsed in on itself, walls folding and sealing back into the small, tight cube that it became in its storable state. Davo screamed once, the sound quickly cut off by the rustle of fabric and the snapping of bones. I stayed where I was, breathing heavily, and only belatedly became aware of a hot, wet feeling spreading across my upper arm. I turned to look, and was somehow unsurprised to see that Davo’s second bullet had ripped a trench along the outside of my bicep.

There was a medical kit at the ticket booth. Hoisting my bag over my shoulder, I turned and walked toward the lights of the midway.

*   *   *

The music from the rides and the noise of the crowds had covered the sound of gunshots. Nicole helped me patch my arm, and she didn’t ask why she was doing it, or what had happened; she just looked sad and sprayed the quickseal skin substitute into place, keeping infection out of the wound. “I can’t stop the bleeding,” she said. “You need medical care.”

“I know,” I said. “Just do what you can.”

Nicole nodded, and kept to her work. When she was finally done, I stood and hugged her. She hugged me back, seeming startled but not displeased.

“Be well, cousin,” she said.

“I’ll do my best,” I replied.

Bay was waiting at the edge of Billie’s pen when I came walking through the shadows. She perked up and ran toward me, calling, “Davo, are you—” Then she stopped, dismay and distrust washing over her face. “Ansley?”

“I’m here for Billie,” I said, and walked past her. As I had expected, she didn’t stop me. Bay was weak. She was pretty, and she was clever, but she was weak. She didn’t really understand what it was to love something enough to die for it. Maybe they’d forgotten to include that piece of her when they were designing her genotype.

“You can’t,” she said behind me. “Davo said to watch her.”

“You can watch her,” I agreed. “You can watch her walk away.”

Even with the howdah removed, there were ropes draped over Billie’s back, because without them, we’d never get everything put into place when it was time to go. I grabbed the nearest line, careful not to put too much weight on my injured arm, and began pulling myself up her side. She snorted once and kept eating, untroubled by my presence.

“Come down from there right now!” shouted Bay. “I’ll tell!”

“You can tell if you want, but I’m not coming down,” I called back.

When I reached the top of the rope, I pulled it up after me. Then I slid down the length of Billie’s neck, scooting along until I reached her ears. I’d need to come up with a better steering system. Or maybe I wouldn’t come up with a steering system at all. Maybe this would be the way of things from now on; where she walked, I would follow.

“Opre, Billie,” I said, pulling gently on the edge of her ear. “Akima. Time to go.”

The Indricothere raised her head, snorting. There was a pause while she considered my request. I could hear Bay shouting something up at me, but I shut it out, listening to the sound of Billie breathing.

Then, slowly, the Indricothere began to move.

I leaned back on her neck, comfortable and confident that I wasn’t going to fall, and closed my eyes. With every step she took, the midway fell away behind us, the music turning ghostly and unreal. It was a living fossil, and its time would last as long as everyone who worked it cared enough to keep the past alive. I wished them well.

I never wished them anything but well.

Let the future tend to itself. I nestled deep in the fur of Billie’s neck, and rode my own piece of the past onward, into the night that had no certain ending.