Mechanique Read Online Free PDF

knife thrower knew because he bought a ticket every night—you have to check out the competition—and the tent was always full.
    People have no loyalty; that’s what it is. That’s the real pity.

13.
    When Bird came to Tresaulti, there was nothing wrong with her.
    “Well, not to look at,” Boss says when anyone mentions it, just to let everyone know something must have been wrong elsewhere. Her spine, they guess. Her innards. Maybe her bones were rotting out.
    It must be something, because Boss says she doesn’t like to put metal into those who are perfectly good. She’s refused me a dozen times.
    (“You just put on your brasses and shut up,” she says, every time I even open my mouth to ask.
    Once I say, “Bird wasn’t broken, but you did her!”
    “The ones I fix were all broken,” she says, and waves her hand. The griffin on her arm flaps its wings.)
    I think Bird must have been mad, and that’s why Boss did it. You’d have to be mad, to ask.
    I think Stenos must be mad now. You’d have to be mad, to keep her.
    Bird let Boss put hollow bones in, like the rest of them, and she trained alone at night to learn the routine; she did the flips close to the ground, the strength work on the bars to get used to the height, swinging back and forth on the trapeze with her feet pointed out, for hours after the shows were over.
    She lasted a few years with them, letting go and spinning, snapping out her arms for the catch, bringing her knees to her chest to be swung up to the rigging. She was elegant, powerful, powder-handed, and weightless. For her, it was the bird and the bird and the bird.
    Then it was the ground.
    Ying slid down the rigging to go warn Boss what had happened, but the act went ahead without her—Boss’s orders are that the act goes ahead, no matter what.
    (“What,” she said, “war without end, and one more body will worry them?”)
    Only after the act had finished and the tent was empty did Boss take Stenos to go scoop Bird up from the sawdust and bring her out of the lantern light to the workshop to see what could be done.
    (It was a good thing about the bones, after all; Boss was able to put her back together, unbending what was mangled, putting in new pipes where they were needed. Now Bird’s got a thin iron plate over the skin of her left temple, and a glass eye, but it could have been worse. She could have been Alec.)
    Sometime after Boss had fixed Bird, while she was still asleep, Boss must have had enough of worrying about people falling. Or she was angry at Stenos about something; there’s never any knowing, with Boss.
    Boss hauled Bird onto her shoulders, banged her way outside the workshop, marched across the yard where we were loading out, and dropped her right in front of Stenos.
    He had to crouch and shove his arms out flat to catch Bird before she hit the ground. He was so tall and carried her so easily that, knocked out in his arms, she looked like a roll of leftover canvas.
    Stenos looked at Boss like Boss had lost her mind.
    “The problem’s yours now,” Boss said, with the air of someone delivering a punishment. “Your duo act goes live in the next city.”
    Boss disappeared into the maze of the camp, lost among the little pools of lantern light.
    Stenos looked down at the sleeping woman in his arms, his gaze unblinking. After a long time, he curled his fingers inwards, holding her tighter.
    I left him alone. There’s no talking to some people.
    But my skin was crawling the whole time I walked away, and at the edge of the camp by the feed truck I stopped and looked back.
    I wondered if they had ever spoken. I remembered their meeting, when they had recoiled from one another, but since then they hadn’t exchanged so much as an angry look.
    I thought Boss had gone mad in putting them together. It wasn’t right, the two of them. I could feel it in the air just looking at them, like winter had suddenly come, like we had fallen into some shadow and nothing would be the