Free Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine, Kiri Moth Page B

stars.
    When he glanced down again, Boss was looking at the woman’s body, lifting her hair to look at the skull, brushing the blood away from her remaining eye, as if cleaning off a toy that had fallen in the mud.
    “Can you help her?”
    He didn’t know why he asked. It wasn’t like he wanted her helped.
    After a long time, Boss said, “I don’t know what will happen.”
    Stenos remembers that it was cold that night; he shivered, holding her.
    This is what he sees when he looks at her that night:
    He sees the empty tunnel of her eye socket. He sees into her; he falls through and through the tunnel until he is swallowed up by the emptiness there, until he sees the night sky.
    Even after the ground has crushed her she is gasping for air, her ribs heaving through the skin as she fights the inevitable, though everyone knows Death is following close on her heels.
    His only thought is, If she dies, I get the wings. I get the wings.
    He feels them already as if they’re growing out of his shoulders; he sees himself leading the procession through the cities, his wings a fan of knives on either side. He imagines the ground falling away as he rises over the awed crowd. The air seems to shimmer, anticipating him.
    All he has to do is wait this out; as soon as the woman is dead, he will inherit the wings.
    He looks down at the woman in his arms and thinks, Tough luck , and flexes his fingers against her arm, against her knee, like a consolation prize.
    But when she stops breathing, his chest goes tight; he adjusts his hold and pulls her towards him without thinking; he puts his mouth on the blood where he hopes her mouth is and pushes a breath into her lungs. It comes back to him, sick-sweet and dry as dust, and for some reason he can’t name he is terrified, too terrified even to lift his mouth from her mouth.
    This is how Boss finds them when she opens the door.
    “Bring her in,” she says, after too long.
    He lays her out on the table, and then Boss is filling the workshop, pressing him out without ever touching him, and when he is outside she locks the door against him.
    Stenos remembers that the night Bird fell was cold. Her body was cool when he held her; he had walked from the trailer with his arms crossed in front of him; when he passed Elena, she was trembling.
    But this is how memories are—always true, never the truth.
    Elena shrank from the blood on his face, and he crossed his arms in front of him to keep them from shaking, and even though he remembers these things, he does not know the truth of the night when he woke Bird.
    This is the truth:
    The night was warm; Bird had gone cold.

29.
    The government man came back, good as his word, our last night in the city.
    I forced a smile as I handed him his ticket, and when he looked at me I winked and rapped my knuckles once on my right leg, the brass in tune with Panadrome.
    “Welcome, sir,” I said, “to the Mechanical Circus Tresaulti. Jugglers and tumblers and girls in the air, the finest spectacle anywhere!”
    “I’m sure,” he said, and I thought he’d be annoyed, but when he looked down at me his eyes were shining.
    I went cold all over, and didn’t really recover until he had disappeared into the tent and I was sure he couldn’t see me any more.
    One of the nice things about so many governments, I guess, is that people don’t recognize you from the others who have murdered their way to power. His car was nowhere to be seen, and only one bodyguard followed him in.
    I handed out tickets until the last rube was inside, and then I skidded around to the back flap of the tent, close to the trailers, where some of the acts filed in to wait behind the bleachers for their turn.
    The government man took a seat at the edge of one of the benches, with a clear shot to the main entrance of the tent, like any man would if he wasn’t a fool.
    I ran for Boss so fast I slipped in the mud, reached her as a sopping mess.
    She was waiting outside the main entrance of