Free Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine, Kiri Moth

something; no one is that resigned.
    Ayar cried. It was a horrible thing to tell the friend he’d carried two miles to save.
    Elena had said, “Well, that’s one thing over with,” and stretched out on the table.
    After the worst of their terror is over, Boss says, “You can never leave the circus. It will keep you alive after I finish fixing you.”
    After they have accepted this, they each, eventually, lie down on the table and have their last moments of fear. Then Boss touches them, and they sink into the dark, waiting to be made new, waiting to be woken.
    (When her turn came, Bird blinked up at the ceiling for several seconds, fighting the dark without knowing it. “I wonder what you did to get this kind of power,” Bird said, just before sleep took her.
    She did not live long enough to see Boss’s hands shaking.)
    It is no secret to the circus who has the bones, who has the lungs or the springs. When they come out of the workshop, when they stagger finally in their new skeletons from the trailers out to the practice yard, they are welcomed back without comment. Even the living, who have not been asked for their bones, can imagine what it takes to lie down on a table and agree to suffer.
    But those who have gone into the workshop, those who are dead, look at one another and know.
    For some it is worth it. (Ying is allowed to sleep through the night at last; with her copper bones, Elena is satisfied). For some, there is only the knowledge of time sliding past them, a sense of being nailed to the ground.
    Those who have gone into the workshop glance from one to another, looking for signs of aging that never appear. None of them wanders far from camp; magic this deep should not be tested, and no one wants to be the first to fall down dead because he wandered too far from Boss’s keen eye.
    (She says it’s the circus, but they know what she means; they know Boss is the thing keeping them from falling to pieces.)
    Little George was slated to be fixed, but Boss keeps him out of the workshop even after he asks, and so he keeps moving slowly through time until he’s older than Ying, until he’s nearly as old as Jonah, who has been twenty-five since the day he came to the circus and was gifted with his clockwork lungs.
    Slowly, Little George begins to wake up to the world in a way he cannot name.
    He does not know that Ying will never be older; he does not know why he takes such care not to anger the Grimaldi brothers. He is not aware, only awake.
    He knows nothing for certain; he only sees that when the government man is gone, the circus gathers in two groups to see what Boss will do: those who are alive, and those who have survived the bones.

27.
    The illusionist has no truck of his own. He follows the Tresaulti parade on foot, walking in the tracks of the red-painted trailers after they pull away from the city borders, and out to the top of the hill two miles out from town. He can see them forming a half-circle on the far side of the hilltop; he can see the first tent poles going up against the flat grey sky.
    On his back is the heavy bag with his tricks in it, and he carries the hoop around his shoulders. It bangs the backs of his legs with every step, but that’s the price you pay for walking. The little cage with the bird in it dangles from his belt. The bird protests at first, but after the first mile it just clings to its perch and waits.
    From their position on top of the hill they can see him coming, so the illusionist is not surprised when there’s a knot of people waiting for him when he reaches the top.
    He sets the hoop down on the ground and slings the bag off his shoulders, crouching to unpack it. Out comes the pack of cards, the scarves, the silver balls that flatten out when they hit his palms so it looks like they disappear. (A lot of his act is about things disappearing. People don’t put much faith in a beautiful transformation these days; a disappearance, they believe.)
    The crowd is bigger