Mechanique Read Online Free PDF Page B

same again.
    Even Ayar’s back tells the right time twice a day, and it was my turn to be right.

14.
    The women start calling her Bird while she’s still on the ground, before they even know how badly she landed.
    (Before this she had another name, but she wore it like a bad suit, and as soon as the words are uttered, the old name dies.)
    “Poor bird,” one of them says (Elena), and one of them laughs (Penna), and one of them is biting back a scream (Mina), and one of them is running for Boss.
    The one who runs is Ying; she moves so fast that she scrapes the skin off her palms sliding down the tent pole. She performs in bandages for two weeks after.
    Bird has never thanked her. No point; it would only make Ying somebody’s enemy.
    “She fell,” Ying calls, which is a lie.
    Bird wants to give over—it’s easier, surely, just to die—but she can’t. Her eyes are nothing but blood, and she feels sick, presses her face to the dirt, but her lungs are pushing in and out, sucking up blood and dust and whatever air is left.
    Around her, muted, people are applauding. The tent goes dark.
    When everything is quiet again, someone picks her up; she feels strong hands shaking under her. She thinks, Soon it will all be over.
    (But she knows better; Boss told her what would happen when she gave her the bones, and so Bird knows this is not the end. She must wait, and bear it. Someone is holding her.)
    In the workshop, Boss’s hands pass over her body. She feels the motion (it’s pain, it’s all pain, the air is beating against her), but doesn’t move. One eye is gone; she doesn’t want to open the other. Best not to move. Best just to die.
    (She can’t die; she fights; she pulls breath through the holes in her copper ribs.)
    “I should have known better,” says Boss, like an apology. “Elena can tell about this kind of thing.”
    Her throat is too full of blood to answer. The pain is like a brand.
    Boss says, “Stop fighting it,” and there is the ring of a hammer on copper, then nothing.
    Bird doesn’t wake up until the next night, and knows from Panadrome’s waltzes that the show is happening without her. She sits on top of one of the lighting crates, her legs folded under her, and listens to the rubes shouting and stamping until the ground shakes.
    After the show, Little George tells her that Elena performed with a black eye.
    “It was Boss’s present to Elena for letting you fall,” he says, making fists at his sides and rocking on his heels. His metal casts creak. “She slapped Elena right in the face.”
    The other one says, “Some people have all the fun.”
    His name is Stenos; Stenos whom she has never believed about anything. But he was holding her when she woke up, carrying her through the camp like a dangerous animal that had been found asleep.
    Now he is sitting beside her, on her left side; she cannot see him. The heat of his leg bleeds through her skin, warms the metal in her left hand where she grips the edge of the crate.
    (The wings. He is after the wings.)
    They have managed, so far, never to speak to one another. But now she does not try to break away from him. She lets the heat of his skin fan out through her hand, soak into her wrist. She leaves her hand where it is.
    You must live in the place that has been carved for you; this much, now, she understands.
    You must live in the wagons with the aerialist girls and their slippery hands. You must sleep in an upper bunk with your face close enough to the roof that the rain leaks onto your neck, with Elena lying across the narrow aisle, sleeping the sleep of the just.
    You must live in the crook of the man’s arm when you walk through the towns, giving the illusion that you are a pair; when you are not ready to jump and he is gathering the strength to throw you; when you are tired from practice and cannot walk.
    You must live on the ground.
    Now, she is Bird. If she remembers some other name, she wouldn’t think to answer to it.
    She must live