Алекс Калер - The Immortal Circus (Cirque des Immortels)

How long has this been going on? But that’s not what I really want to ask her.

“So how long is your contract?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer right away. She looks at me for a long moment, seeming to study whether or not I’m worthy enough for the answer.

“Life,” she finally says, her voice filled with a resolute sadness. The word fills the room.

“But I thought…I thought we couldn’t die? It’s in the contracts.”

“Now you’re finally catching on to the way Mab works.” She looks back down at the computer.

“So…you’re here forever.”

“Perhaps,” she says. “There’s always an exit clause.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“If you’re trying to keep your head down after being accused of murder, my dear, asking about the termination of people’s contracts isn’t the way to go about it.”

I blush and look back to my screen. I start tapping in Miss Meyers’s name, apologizing for the horrible inconvenience, and saying we’ve booked her a ticket for the ballet that’s coming through next month. I can feel Penelope’s eyes still settled on me.

“Besides,” she finally says. She goes back to typing. “What you should really be worried about is your own exit clause. No one wants to run away forever, not really.”

“I don’t know it,” I say. “I don’t remember what I signed, or why I even did it. It must have seemed worth it at the time.”

Another pause.

“You remember nothing at all?” she asks.

“No. But apparently it was enough to make Mab suspect me of killing everyone.” I hadn’t said it aloud before this, but the words spill from my lips and hang in the air like bloodstains. It’s like signing my own death warrant, and I can’t help but wonder if telling this to the gossip queen of the troupe is a terrible mistake.

“Interesting,” she says. She gives me a considering glance. “You don’t strike me as the murderous type.”

“Try telling her that,” I say. I lean back in the chair and try to block out everything swarming around in my head. There’s no way in hell I’ll be able to get a juggling act together for Friday, no way I’ll be able to clear my name even if I do. The only way around it is to find the real killer, which isn’t going to happen with Penelope as my new guardian. And there’s another reason I need to find the killer. I need to make sure it’s not me. I mean, I know I overheard the Summer Court dude talking to someone else. It can’t be me. But a small part of me is saying that stranger things have been happening.

“Mab wouldn’t listen to me,” Penelope says. “You know how she is.” A brief pause. “We all have pasts we wish we could run from, Vivienne. The trouble is, they always manage to catch up with us in the end, no matter the magic attempting to keep it at bay.”

“What are you saying?” I ask. There’s a nervous quake to my heart, like maybe she knows more about me and my history than I do, which, I’m starting to realize, wouldn’t take much.

“I’m just observing,” she says. “As I said, I’ve been with the troupe from the very beginning. I’ve seen numerous performers come and go, their past sins atoned for. But not one of them left happy, I can tell you that.”

“Why?”

“Because what they were running from — all of them — was something from within. They may have joined to escape incarceration or execution, but their demons never left.”

“I don’t have any demons,” I say. I’m not liking where the conversation turned. Mainly because I’m not convinced anything I say is true.

“Darling, everyone has demons. Yours have just gone quiet.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it was part of the contract.”

“Perhaps,” she says. “But where has that gotten you?” She gestures to the room. “You might not know, but Mab does. And it sounds like your demons need reconciliation rather than ignorance.”

I don’t say anything to that. Her words sink down into my bones, binding themselves to memory. She has a point. Whatever I was running from is still there, still haunting my movements. I rub my hands together and try to force out the uncertainty. For the first time since I came here, when I think back to my past, deep inside I feel unclean.

Mab wasn’t lying when she said I’d be put under Penelope’s custody. I’m not allowed to leave her trailer except to use the Porta-Potty on the edge of the grounds, and even then, Penelope goes outside her trailer to keep an eye on me. It weirds the hell out of me the first time I go to pee and realize she’s timing me, but when I get back to her bunk she acts entirely nonchalant, as if she was just outside enjoying the sunshine. She even opens the trailer door for me and waits a bit before coming in herself. That said, there’s one freedom I want that I’m strictly denied. I’m not allowed to go check in on Melody.

“She’s fine,” Penelope assures me as she boils the electric kettle for afternoon tea. “If anything was amiss, we would know.” She smiles warmly. “Trust me, in a company this small, it’s impossible for the welfare of another to slip through the cracks. Now, English Breakfast or Earl Grey?”

By the time the tent’s been torn down and packed away, I’ve emailed all of the refunded tickets and spent a good chunk of time staring at the Internet, hoping it would entertain me. Any other day, I’d have been overjoyed having an afternoon of sitting in the AC, wasting time online.

Except now, I’m realizing that I can’t really enjoy myself online because all these little things are adding up in ways that make my skin crawl. I don’t know what my email address is. There aren’t any blogs I know I read regularly. I don’t remember my Facebook account or anything else. Did I even have an email address? I take a deep breath and try to stay calm, try not to worry. Maybe I was just too cool to use social networking. Maybe I’d grown distant from all my friends and stopped communicating with them. I try to think back, try to remember chatting with someone — anyone — online, but the memory doesn’t come. I stare at the home screen and try not to have a panic attack. With a calculated slowness, I type my name into the search bar. Hit enter. Nothing comes up. Nothing whatsoever. Somehow, the search is completely, entirely blank. I stare at the white screen and wonder how no one in the world shares my name, how there is no trace of me out there whatsoever. Something about the wrongness of it makes me want to gag, or throw the laptop out the window. My hands are shaking.

When Penelope closes the lid of the laptop, I’m almost relieved to be torn away from the damning screen. I blink a few times and stare up at her. What was I just looking at?

“Time to hit the road,” she says.

By the time we’re in the cab of one of the trucks — just her and me, this time — I can’t even remember what I’d been worrying about.

We reach the next site at midnight. We’ve driven halfway across the Midwest, down interstates clogged with cars and back roads that seemed more mud than concrete. Now, we’re somewhere in Nebraska, on a plot just off the edge of the highway. As our truck heads down the dirt road toward our site, I catch a glimpse of a farmhouse and a few tractors. We really are in the middle of nowhere this time. How the hell does Mab expect to sell tickets all the way out here? The caravan stops at the edge of the cleared field and Penelope parks. The cars are parked facing the same way, lights still on and many engines still running. There’s a crowd of people assembling in the headlights, a mob of performers silently staring at the dark field.