Free Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine, Kiri Moth Page A

now. There are some acrobats, looks like, a juggler with clubs in each hand, and a couple of haughty girls in pretty rags.
    “A magician?” says a woman from the edge of the crowd, and without looking up he says, “Yes, sir,” because he knows what authority sounds like.
    “Well,” she says. “Go on and show us.”
    He unhooks the birdcage, sets it on the ground at the far end of his tricks, and stands up, taking a step back and throwing his arms wide to introduce the act.
    Someone says, “Don’t.”
    It’s not the boss, so he shouldn’t pay it any mind (there are always hecklers), but he glances over at the woman who spoke and is struck dumb.
    She has an iron plate bolted over some peach fuzz on her skull, and one glass eye that’s looking blankly at him. The other eye is dark and fixed on the cage at his feet.
    “Ladies and gentlemen,” he begins.
    “He’s going to kill it,” the woman with the glass eye says, not really to anyone. No one speaks.
    “Go on,” says the woman in charge.
    He nods and clears his throat and starts his act.
    The handkerchiefs materialize in his ears, and the hoop makes his legs vanish, and the silver balls slide into invisibility in his hands. All the while, the circus people watch him, neither applauding nor drumming him out.
    At last he says, “For my final disappearing act,” and fiddles in his sleeve for the bird that’s inside his cuff, waiting.
    “No,” says the strange woman, and in two steps she’s reached the cage, stepping between him and it.
    He reaches to snatch it out of her grasp, but she catches him by the throat, an iron grip. Her eye burns.
    The illusionist knocks her arm away, staggers backwards. A man is already waiting behind him and catches his arm, flipping the illusionist neatly onto his back. (The sky is pale blue and flat, like glass.)
    Someone is opening the latch of his cage, and the illusionist watches the small dark silhouette of his bird as it shoots past all of them and sails out of sight.
    After a moment there’s a scuffle, and his arm is freed. When he stands up he sees a man with a set of brass ribs holding the other man back, shoving him into his place in the circle.
    The strange woman is standing a few feet away, gripping the empty cage in her hands, her gaze fixed on the sky where the bird can no longer be seen. The others in the circle seem to have drawn back, as if the cage is poisoned and she’s picking victims.
    “Bird,” says the woman in charge, “give the man back his equipment.”
    She sets the empty cage on the ground, turns away, walks into the crowd without another look around her.
    “Not bad,” says the woman in charge, not unkindly. “We’d have to make some changes to the act if you stayed.”
    He can imagine.
    He looks around at the impassive crowd. It’s not the quiet that bothers him. It’s that they didn’t hold back the one-eyed woman, like they felt she had a reason for doing it, like this is just the sort of thing that happens here.
    He wants a circus troupe to belong to so he can have a roof and some steady meals; if he wants to be worried about war, he can stay where he is.
    “Thank you for your time,” he says finally, and no one seems surprised when he kneels and packs up his tricks.
    Halfway back, he shakes the dead bird out of his sleeve; the other man crushed it, and there’s no point in carrying a dead thing all the way home.

28.
    When Bird fell, it was Stenos who Boss called to come carry her out.
    It was Stenos who lifted Bird from the ground, who watched the blood oozing in sticky rivulets through the dirt. He looked at her face, what was left of it, and down her body, where her chest had caved in under her shirt. The few ribs that had pierced her skin gleamed in the dark.
    He looked away from the human wreckage. He looked up past the empty trapeze to the very top of the rigging. There was a little tear in the ceiling of the tent, and through it there was the night sky, a smattering of