My fingertips started heating up. I shook them until they stopped. The mice were rustling around in their little house, which was more . . . concrete . . . than temporary Aeslin mouse dwellings tended to be. I wondered whether Mindy’s quest for the missing colony hadn’t also been about bringing in some new blood. Our colony was stable, but they hadn’t had any newcomers in generations, thanks to that whole “functionally extinct” thing. The Aeslin mice in England were distant cousins, emphasis on distant. If Mindy wanted to take advantage of that, I wasn’t going to interrupt her. At least one of us had a love life to speak of.
It’s not that I don’t date. It’s that I don’t date. I am an essentially misanthropic person: I don’t like people much, and they usually reward me by not liking me either. Which doesn’t mean I hate everyone. I like the girls I skate with. I love my cousins. I even like my siblings, when I’m not hating them. It’s just that none of those people are good romantic prospects.
The clock on my phone ticked over to 10:17 PM. I opened a group chat to “Sue” and “Tom” and typed “LOL having best time, food great, wish you were here.” I signed it with three smiley faces and a heart, supposedly for veracity, but really because I knew it would irritate Robert. Anything I could do to get on his nerves without putting myself in danger was a-okay by me.
A minute passed. The phone buzzed. “Tom” had messaged me back, saying, “Glad to hear it, talk tomorrow.” No smiley face. No hearts.
“Because that doesn’t look like a secret message at all,” I muttered, dropping the phone on the bed and standing. The carnival was open until midnight. I wanted to see it. I wanted to see it all.
The air in the bone yard smelled like charcoal and burnt marshmallow, a camp-out bonfire scent that I remembered from the few autumns I’d been able to spend with the Campbell Family Carnival. I wasn’t hungry enough to trade precious midway time for the mess tent, and besides, I had a few bucks in my pocket; if I needed food, I could always throw some cash at the show and pick up a hot dog. Sacrilege, really—if I was pretending to be a carnie, I needed to be a proper skinflint about giving money to the carnival—but this was my first night, and I figured I’d be forgiven, if it came to that.
I walked across the bone yard, taking note of the larger tents and where the conversational clusters had formed, before letting myself through the tarp and into the shadow of the rides. Screams greeted me as the roller coaster went whizzing by. Small as it was, it was still a novelty here, and people enjoy novelty. The history of the human race has been one long quest to find new, novel things, and then kill, eat, or enslave them. There’s a reason the aliens haven’t made an appearance yet, is what I’m saying.
The Scrambler was scrambling and the Bumper Cars were bumping, but I ignored them both, heading for the first and most important goal a girl can have at the carnival: the Ferris wheel. It was a tall, glowing monument to the show, and from the top, I’d be able to see absolutely everything, from the shape of the bone yard to the movements on the midway. I couldn’t think of a better way to officially start my stay.
There was a short line at the ride. The townies who had to work the next day were drifting out, and many were stopping to blow their last few ride tickets on the big wheel. (Many, but by no means most. The majority would wind up taking a fistful of tickets home, to act as the most expensive useless souvenirs in the whole place. There are many ways to make a profit, if the people running the show know what they’re doing.) I stepped into place, waiting patiently until it was my turn to step up to the ride jock and say, “Excuse me, I’m—”
“I know who you are,” said Sam, turning and scowling at me. “If I let you on the ride, will you not talk to me anymore?”
“For at least ten minutes, sure,” I said.
“Then get on.” He jerked his chin brusquely toward the swinging seat that had just descended into place.
Staying and arguing with him about whether I was going to leave seemed counterproductive. I flashed him a sickly sweet smile and skipped over to the ride, climbing up and pulling the safety bar—such as it was—into place. The Ferris wheel began to spin. I relaxed into my seat and watched the carnival unfold before me like a beautiful picture.
The midway had been a ghost in the daylight, gray and waiting for the night. It was alive now, resurrected in lights and sound and the moving feet of carnies and townies alike. From up here, as the Ferris wheel took me higher, there was no difference between the two. Most of the people I’d known from both camps would take offense at that, but that didn’t make it any less true. Seen from a great enough distance, all the little differences smooth away, and only the big picture remains.
The big tent was a striped shadow behind me, and the lights of the bone yard twinkled past the carnival bawn, turning the field into a spray of stars. It was beautiful, and it was fragile, and it was up to me whether this place would be protected or have the Covenant fall upon it like a ton of bricks. That was more responsibility than I’d ever wanted.
Speaking of responsibility . . . “Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse,” I muttered, as the Ferris wheel moved toward its highest point.
The seat rocked, hard, from the extra weight of Mary appearing next to me. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that way,” she said, words doing nothing to conceal her relief. Her arms were around my shoulders a second later, pulling me close. “I was so worried about you. When did you get back to North America? And what are you doing . . .” She seemed to register her surroundings for the first time. “. . . on a Ferris wheel?”
“It’s a long story, and we only have until we make it back to the ground; someone might notice that I’ve suddenly acquired a passenger,” I said. “Can you let my parents know that I’m not in Europe anymore, but that it’s not safe to look for me or try to make contact?” Asking Mary for things has to be done carefully, to avoid triggering her connection to the crossroads. Fortunately, she’s been a babysitter longer than she’s been a ghost, and checking in with the parents is almost always allowed.
Mary’s eyes widened. “The Covenant still has eyes on you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” I laughed mirthlessly. “They’re the reason I’m here. They have me undercover with this carnival, to find out whether it’s, quote, ‘harboring monsters,’ unquote. My life is a Shakespearean comedy.”
“Wait.” Mary leaned away, eyeing me. “You’re telling me the Covenant is watching you right now?”
“Yes. Hence my calling you while I was at the top of a Ferris wheel. The lights will screw up anyone watching me with a telephoto lens, and if I was under that kind of scrutiny, I’d already be dead. They would have noticed the mice.”
“Wasn’t there someplace more private?”
“I have a room in an RV, but I don’t know how secure it is, and I can’t risk the carnival hearing me say the word ‘Covenant’ in mixed company. Not unless I want to find myself buried behind the bone yard.”
Mary shook her head. “And here I used to think your grandmother was trouble.”
“We get better at complicating things with every generation. Which, speaking of, I set myself on fire earlier tonight. Do you know a way to make this stop?”
“Honey, we’ve talked about this. If you’re a magic user—”
“Yeah, the ‘if’ is off that sentence. Now it’s more ‘if I’m going to survive learning to control this crap.’ Isn’t there a way to put it on hold until I get home and can safely work on it?”
“I’m sorry. Not that I’ve ever heard of. Just try to stay calm, and it should be all right.” The Ferris wheel was gliding into its downward arc. Mary pressed cool lips against my temple. “I’ll tell your parents you’re alive.”
Then she was gone, and I was alone when the motion of the wheel carried me back to ground level. Sam was still manning the ride. I nodded to him, and he scowled to me, and I went around again, back up into the star-spangled car
nival sky. All my troubles were on the ground. If it had been up to me, I would have stayed up there forever.
Thirteen
“They called me the Flower of Arizona. A name like that, it never dies. It just keeps moving forward, into legend. If you’re lucky, it’ll take you along.”
—Frances Brown
The Spenser and Smith Family Carnival midway, the following afternoon
THE SUN WAS WARM on my shoulders as I carried boxes of stuffed animals down the midway, pausing at each open game to check their stock. There were subtle differences in the prizes offered by the various pitches, but most were variations on a theme: brightly colored plush toy, great for your girl, make a memory for your kids. Some rotation was necessary during the week, to make it look like things were being won. The pie-in-the-sky prizes could stay—the giant teddy bears, the crystal unicorns, the things virtually no one ever expected to win—but the little day-to-day things had to move around. Otherwise, someone who came to the show often enough might start to do the math and come up with an answer they didn’t care for.
The pitch men and games operators were strangers. Most of them didn’t take the time to introduce themselves, just rooted through my box of toys, snatched a few they thought might earn a dollar, and tossed in the requisite number of returns to keep the numbers up. About half the midway games were privately owned, rather than part of the carnival proper: their operators were parked on the far side of the bone yard, and while they mingled with the rest of us when necessary, they also kept to themselves a surprising amount, cooking in their own RVs and gossiping with each other, rather than the rest of the show. It made sense. Better not to get attached if you weren’t planning on staying.
After I was done with the games, I made for the supply tent next to the reptile trailer. That was where the pythons that roomed next to me were displayed during the day, for the delight and edification of the masses. Alex would have been in heaven. I didn’t really see the point—you can find a wide assortment of snakes at most pet stores, to say nothing of zoos—but there were kids dragging their parents into the tent whenever the show was open, so it must have held a certain appeal for some people.
A woman sat outside the reptile trailer, a small, spade-nosed snake twined around the fingers of her right hand and a cigarette clamped between the fingers of her left. She was wearing a pink-and-red sari over hot pants and what looked like a sports bra, and her long black hair was a tangled mess containing at least three more snakes, if the variously colored scales peeking through were any indication.
I let myself into the supply tent, dropping my box of plush toys next to the disinterested man whose job it was to check them back in. He grunted acknowledgment. That was all he did: he didn’t even look up from his clipboard as I turned and walked back out again.
The woman with the snake took a long drag off her cigarette, blowing it out slowly before she turned to look at me. “Morning, new blood,” she said.
“Morning,” I said carefully. “I’m Timpani. You are . . . ?”
“Ananta,” she said, returning her attention to the snake on her hand. “What are you running from, little drum girl?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Life, I guess. I grew up with the carnival. Not having it anymore didn’t make sense. So I’m running away from figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.” All of that was technically true, even if it was mostly bullshit at the same time. I thought. I hoped.
When the hell did everything get so complicated?
“Well, this is a great place to run away to,” she said, and took another drag off her cigarette. “Nobody’s going to come looking for you here.”
“I hope that’s true.”
“Has been so far for me.” She held up her hand so I could see the snake she was holding. “This is a hognose. He’s venomous but good-natured and short-toothed, which makes him unlikely to bite. He can’t be out of his tank when we have townies here, for insurance reasons, so I wanted to let him get some air before we opened.”
“He’s beautiful.”
“All my snakes are beautiful.”
An awkward silence fell between us—awkward on my part, just silent on hers. I wanted to ask whether she was a wadjet, based on the scrambled cues she was putting off. I couldn’t do it. The girl I was pretending to be wouldn’t know what a wadjet was, much less that they could be identified by a laissez faire attitude about poisons, being immune to essentially all of them.
I’d never stopped before to consider how much of an advantage my family name was in the work we did. Back home, I could walk up to cryptids, or to people I suspected of being cryptids, and count on my family name—the weight of it, the history of it—to pull me through. Now, without the word “Price” to open doors for me, I was left standing on the outside, trying to figure out how I was supposed to get myself in. If Ananta was a wadjet, I had no way of making her trust me enough to say so.
Finally, I coughed, and asked, “How long have you been with the show?”
“Six years and counting,” she said. “Emery has been good to me. I own the RV where you’re sleeping, drum girl, did you know that? It’s my storage space. When we’re on the road, that’s where I sleep.”
“In the room where I’m currently staying?”
“No.” She sounded amused. “On the other side, among my snakes. I hope you don’t snore. You’ll be a poor bedfellow, if you do.”
The image of sleeping completely surrounded by snakes was enough to make me shiver. I suppressed it and said, “I don’t snore, but I do scream when something slithers under the covers unexpectedly.”
Ananta’s smile was swift and sharp. “Then we’ll do fine. You might want to move along. I’m about to air out my rattlesnakes.”
I moved along.
The midway was coming alive, but I didn’t have a part in any of it. The stuffed animal job had been a sop, something Emery threw at me to keep me busy while Sam did his morning workout and she planned the night’s show. This whole carnival was an odd hybrid of past and present, blending archaic traditions with modern ideas about layout and design. And, like any show, it had the capacity to keep its own counsel.
I tried to breathe normally, to relax into the moment as I walked through the shadow of the Ferris wheel and into the corridor of slumbering rides, their mechanical arms reaching for the sky like giants praying to some unknowable god. Please let us have another good night; please let us continue to operate smoothly, without needing repairs or replacement or anything else so expensive as to run the risk of pushing us into the red; please let the townies go home happy, telling their friends to come and see the wonders of the carnival.
Please let the townies go home at all.
I might have missed the hand, if I’d been walking with someone else; if I hadn’t been looking at everything around me with quite so much focus, quite so much simple longing for answers. It was a small thing, pale and almost hidden by the base of the Scrambler, which was raised nearly three feet off the ground by the mechanisms that kept it spinning. The fingers were curled inward, like the legs of a dead or dying insect, and there was no way in the world for it to be anything other than what it was. All the tricks of light in the world couldn’t have made it look any less like a hand.
My mouth went dry and a wave of dizziness washed over me as the blood drained from my head. I caught myself on the nearest railing, careful to touch it only with my palm, which would leave no fingerprints; if this was about to become a crime scene, the police wouldn’t be able to place me here with any certainty. It wasn’t much. It was, under the circumstances, the best that I could do.
“Hello?” My voice sounded weak, querulous; it broke at the end of the word.
The owner of the hand did not respond.
I took a step toward the Scrambler. When the hand didn’t move, I took another, until I was next to the ride. I crouched. The hand
was attached to a woman, and the woman was lying on the ground, eyes closed. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she could have been a townie, and she could have been someone with the carnival who I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet yet, and it didn’t matter either way, because I couldn’t see her breathing.
Antimony Price wouldn’t scream. Antimony Price would assess the situation calmly, figure out her next steps, and begin putting her plan into action. It was sort of nice not to be Antimony Price for a change. My scream was loud enough to send the crows roosting atop the ride scattering into the sky, and the echoes of it lingered. Just me, the maybe-dead girl, and the scream.
The rides were almost the full length of the midway away from the big tent. I was closer to the bone yard, or to the games that were in the process of setting up. There was no way Sam should have been the first to reach me, but somehow he was, appearing as if by magic. He took one look at what I was looking at, and then he was pulling me back, putting his arms around me, shielding me from what I shouldn’t have needed to see in the first place.
He smelled like hot sweat and chalk dust, the scent of a thousand cheer competitions and childhood gymnastics meets. I relaxed into the aroma more than I relaxed into him, realizing only after the fact that the two were currently indistinguishable, and I was allowing myself to be comforted by a man who didn’t like me one bit.
It was still better than looking at what might be a dead body that I couldn’t do anything about. I didn’t pull away. If Sam thought better of holding me—since I liked him about as much as he liked me—he could be the one to let go.
Footsteps ran toward us, and Emery asked, alarmed, “Sam? What’s going on?”
“Under the Scrambler, Grandma,” said Sam. “Timpani found her.”