Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top by Ekaterina Sedia Page B

took to purring like a cat, like the big lions Jackson kept caged in the car behind mine. To keep me in line, he said, but I could make them vanish with a thought. Still, I didn’t like the idea of where they might end up, so I left them alone, and they did the same for me.
    The girl’s purring took up residence inside my head, worked some kind of magic and made me tumble toward the mattress Opal had snickered at, but had still come to. And where did that memory come from, I wondered as I drowned inside that rumbling sound. I was lost inside it as though it was a maze. Couldn’t find my way out, so I just gave in and eventually it bled into a familiar dark quiet I recognized as sleep.
    Woke to the train slowing again and I wondered if Jackson was stopping for another sprite on the tracks. Stars painted the sky overhead and the air smelled like manure. We’d reached our destination then.
    I untangled myself from the boneless girl. She lay as though dead and I moved away as quick as I could. Before she could latch on again. Before she thought to hold me and purr and make me a lost thing.
    The air outside was cool, smelled like snow would be on the ground come morning. I pulled my coat around me, rubbed my hands together, and approached the first of the weird sisters as they emerged from their own car. I offered up one hand; Gemma took it, but Sombra’s hand was just as quickly there. It seemed one hand around mine, though I knew there to be two.
    The sisters were two halves of the same thing, one light and one dark. Where one was concave, the other was convex. Where one was sharp rocks, the other was smooth water. Sombra’s hair was the night sky while Gemma’s was the stars. And sometimes, they were exactly backwards from that.
    Why, I wondered, couldn’t Jackson have placed the little girl in with them? They were women, they’d had children, countless children or so they said. I’d had plenty of women, but no children. Never would. Didn’t need or want them. Would be all too easy to wish them gone and have them vanish.
    Sombra and Gemma moved like fog across the ground. Their feet never touched the ground as they drifted away. They wouldn’t help with the unloading; they never did and no one ever expected they would. They floated into the night and dissolved into fireflies against the blackness as they swept and blessed the campsite.
    Five long and pale fingers wrapped around my half-warmed hand and I started at the touch. Looked down and found the little girl clutching me, her fingers warmed, water barely contained by skin. She looked up at me and her mouth curled in a crescent moon smile.
    I could see now that her pale hair was drawn into disorganized ropes, like the jumble you’d find on the dusty ground after the tents came down, messy on the ends like they hadn’t been tended in a few years. Her mouth was as pale as her skin; her smile slipped away, but her grip tightened and she looked around, as if to ask where and why we were.
    “Performin’ here,” I said and tried to loose my hand from hers, but she was having none of it. I walked and she fell into easy step beside me, though her little legs shouldn’t have been able to keep up.
    Silas and Lawrence were already unloading the tents. I finally shook the girl’s hand off of mine, swung up into the car, and helped Hunter roll another of the striped cylinders to the door. We maneuvered it around, gave it a swift kick down, and the boys carried it off.
    There were twenty-four tents in all. The girl watched me the whole time, perched like an owl on the fence across from the door. Her eyes were almost blue, but as the last tent came down I decided the color was only from the nearest light. She would move away and her eyes would change, no doubt.
    “Got a name?” I asked her as I came out of the car and headed back toward mine. She watched me as I took a rumpled cigarette from my coat and placed flame against its tip. Drew deep and exhaled once before she