Circus Summer (Circus of Curiosities Book 1) (9 page)

            “Did she say anything about the circus? Anything about me?”

            I’m not expecting that. “She said that she knew about the circus, and she hinted that she knew you, but she didn’t say more than that. She fell asleep before she could. I… I got the impression that you’ve spent time around Sea Cliff.”

            “I’m from Sea Cliff,” Dr. Dex corrects. “Did your mother say anything else?”

            I shake my head. “You’re from Sea Cliff? You left to join the circus?”

            He smiles. “Something like that. Poor Kinley, I’ve always thought of her fondly. It’s such a pity that it should happen like this.”

            It’s kind of a shock, hearing my mother’s name. To me, she’s just Mom. To everyone else, she’s Mrs. Sinclair. Yet this near stranger is calling her by her first name. I want to ask Dr. Dex about that, and maybe he wants to tell me. At least, he looks like he might. Only there isn’t a chance, because then people start showing up for the day’s training. Zachary is one of the first to arrive, and Banford is there soon after. Pretty soon, we’re all crowded around the table.

            “Help yourselves,” Dr. Dex insists, and most of us don’t need a second invitation. Even with ten of us, this much food is a feast. Normally, we all have to be so careful in Sea Cliff to make sure that what we have will last. I pile more food onto my plate.

            “You sure have an appetite,” Zachary says, sitting down next to me. His own plate is full too.

            “I have to keep my energy up,” I reply.

            Banford and Ellis sit down next to Zachary. They joke with him about some moment at the last football practice they were at, and Zachary laughs. It seems that they’re all old buddies. Everyone else is quieter. We might live in or around Sea Cliff, but that doesn’t mean we know one another well yet. That, or we know that we’ll be competing against one another and we don’t want to get too friendly.

            After breakfast, Dr. Dex stands us up, looking at us. “Zachary, Leela, Banford, Sandy, Ellis, you’ll all be working with our trainers today. The rest of you please come with me.”

            They follow, looking a little confused. They aren’t the only ones. Sandy comes up to me.

            “What do you think is going on?” she asks.

            “I don’t know,” I say.

            “Why would they take one group of us away to do something else? Shouldn’t we all be doing the same things so that it’s fair? Do they think that the five of us need more work, or something?”

            “I don’t
know
, Sandy,” I repeat. “They haven’t told me any more than you. If I have to guess… well, maybe they’ve decided that we all have something in common in our teams. Maybe it’s something Dr. Dex saw when we were training yesterday.” I shrug. “Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

            Sandy looks worried. “Oh, I’m not too sure about this.”

            “Then pull out,” Banford suggests. Trust him to come to that conclusion.

            “It’s too early to tell anything,” I say. I look over at Zachary then, wanting to know what he thinks of all this, but he’s on the other side of the ring. Our eyes meet for a brief moment, and he looks like he wanted to walk over to me.

            Dr. Dex chooses that moment to come back. He’s accompanied by the trainers from last night, Senorita Montalban walking confidently at his side.

            “You five are the Red Team,” he announces. “You’ll be working together until I decide otherwise. For today, that means that you’ll be continuing to work with the trainers. Since there are now more trainers than there are of you, that should mean that you’ll get the kind of one to one training that you’ll need to achieve everything you can.”

            “So who are we working with?” Sandy asks.

            Dr. Dex smiles. “Don’t worry, my dear. You’re going to get the chance to train with everyone. For now, let’s start you off with T. Bone, because I don’t think you got the chance to work with him last night. Zachary, you can go with Michael Nelson. Leela…”

            I start at hearing my name.

            “Leela, you can go with the Senorita here, and hopefully you’ll learn a lot from her.”

            I walk over to Senorita Montalban, not even hearing who he assigns Banford and Ellis to. I’m too busy thinking. Sandy’s right. It’s odd that we’ve been split up like this so early. The others should still be working with us on circus skills, so why are they going off somewhere with Dr. Dex? What has he seen in them that is different? What has he seen in
us
? Does it mean that they’re doing better than us, or that we’re doing better than them? There are too many questions going around in my head, and it doesn’t look like there are going to be any answers, just more training.

            “Come on,” Senorita Montalban says with a smile, her accent warming up the sound of her words. “You are Leela, yes? Good. You can call me Carlita. Now, we have a lot to do.”

Chapter
10

I
don’t have the time to think more about what’s going on, because Senorita Montalban…Carlita as she insists I call her, has me working hard trying to learn the skills of an animal trainer. She calls what she does “whispering”, talking and moving as she works with a kind of giant cat with greyish-green fur, larger than either of us, with two long front teeth that curves into sharp pointy tips like sabers, never actually striking it with that whip of hers, just using it for effect. It’s like the big cat understands her, and she understands it. It looks almost impossible, almost magical, like a talent she was simply born with. She assures me that isn’t the case though.

            “I learned this,” she says, when the cat is safely back in its cage and I’m standing in front of a box containing a horse, “and so will you.”

            She puts it that simply. Apparently, I don’t get a choice in whether I succeed or not. That’s enough to make me smile. I guess Carlita has better communication skills with animals than with people.

            “We will start with a horse,” she says with a smile of her own. “That way, when you get it wrong, we don’t die, yes?”

            She’s definitely better with animals than people, though I seem to recall her getting on well enough with Zachary. Is that a tiny stab of jealousy? I do my best to ignore it as we start working with the horse. I quickly learn that the essence of what Carlita does is a simple idea, but one that’s hard to put into practice. It’s about understanding the natural behavior of even very unnatural animals, and then exploiting that behavior so that they act in the ways she wants.

            With the horse, for example, her training methods mostly seem to be about getting it to accept me the way it would accept a dominant member of its herd. I have to approach it carefully, mimicking the right behaviors, being careful not to act in the wrong ways. There’s a lot to take in, and several times I spook the horse by mistake, which makes Carlita tut. She isn’t a very patient teacher, it seems, but she does keep going with me, until eventually I have the horse responding to me exactly as she tells me it should, moving around the ring to my commands.

            “Good,” she says. “You are starting to understand, but there are many more animals to learn.”

            She starts to tell me about some of the mutated creatures she has found on her travels. I’ve already seen the sloth, but she tells me about the re-born mammoths and the winged snakes, the fire lizards and the land squids.

            “And you hunt these things down for the circus?” I ask at one point, barely able to believe it.

            “Of course,” Carlita says. “It’s easy, and it’s fun too.”

            “But when you’re hunting them, the creatures are still wild. Aren’t they incredibly dangerous?”

            She smiles. “That’s
why
it’s fun. Do you think I would have joined Dex’s circus if I wanted a life that is safe and boring? Would
you
have come here if you wanted that?”

            She looks at me, and I know she understands exactly what it feels like to want to be somewhere bigger. Somewhere more exciting.

            “Go on,” she says then. “One of the others will want to do some work with you by now, and I must spread my training around.”

            I go off, looking to see if any of the other trainers are free by then. I see that the others from my team are all working hard. Sandy is walking on the tightrope now, while Banford and Ellis are working on acrobatics under the tutelage of T. Bone Rhodes. Meanwhile Zachary is working with the fire eaters.

            I quickly find myself learning the basics of knife throwing from Michael Nelson. His skills are stunning, so that he can throw almost any kind of knife any distance and hit the target point first. All that, without really looking like he’s even trying. I quickly find that it isn’t quite as easy as it looks.

            “The trick is to throw with your whole body,” Michael Nelson explains. “You want a consistent throwing action so that it goes the same place each time, and you need to get a feel for the way a knife will behave in the air.”

            It’s a lot to take in, and what it comes down to is throwing knife after knife at a target outside, working until I can hit it consistently from one distance, then moving back a little. One of the hardest parts is getting used to the way the knife tumbles in the air, turning end over end so that a lot of my early attempts hit the target hilt first and bounce off. Gradually though, I start to get exactly the kind of feel for the knife Michael Nelson was talking about. I can guess how much it will turn in the air, so that I know how I have to release it.

            “You’re doing better than most people do,” he says after a while with a kind of bluff, grudging admiration. I guess, with how dangerous the Circus of Curiosities can be, the circus folk don’t get close to new performers quickly. “We might make a knife thrower out of you yet.”

            There are other lessons. With a full day, I make my way around all the instructors in turn, and with their one to one lessons, I find myself going over details of skills that I missed the first time I tried them. The Svenkos have me walking the high wire like Sandy did earlier. T. Bone teaches me how to take higher and higher falls. Cecil has me breathing fire again, working on my technique.

            The time passes so quickly that I’m surprised when it’s time for another big feast at lunch, though I’m starving by that point too. I’m even more surprised when it finally comes to the time to stop training. I start at the feel of a hand on my shoulder, whirling in surprise to see Zachary standing there. He looks the way I feel, sweat drenched but strangely satisfied. His shirt is clingy to his chest, outlining his impressive toned and muscular body. He is ripped with hard muscles everywhere from his chest down to the v above his waist. It’s hard not to stare at him, especially when I do, all I can think about is running my hands along his chest, feeling that hard and smooth skin. I gulp. He’s even hotter sweat-drenched than not. It’s a good look for him but then, so is just about anything.

            “Hi Leela,” he says, his grey eyes burning into mine, “did your training go okay today?”

            I nod. “I feel like I’m learning so much.”

            “That’s good,” Zachary says. He frowns slightly. “Earlier, when the other team left, did you want to talk to me?”

            I nod, thinking back.

            “You were going to ask me if I knew where they’d gone, right?” Zachary asks.

            I find myself blushing at the fact Zachary seems to be able to read me so easily. Mostly because if he can guess that, maybe he can guess a few of the things I’ve been thinking about him too, and that would be
so
embarrassing.

            “That’s right,” I say. “I… I thought you might have a better idea than the rest of us.”

            Zachary looks at me for a second or two, like he’s trying to decide something. “Why do you think I would know?”

            That’s kind of hard to put into words, but I try anyway. “I just… I kind of get the feeling that you know a bit about the Circus of Curiosities for some reason. Like the way you seemed to recognize Dr. Dex that first night.”

            “That’s nothing,” Zachary says. “Nothing important, anyway.”

            “Plus, I think I remember you said that your grandfather had told you about the circus,” I say. “I thought that he might have said something about the kind of thing that happens here that would tell us more about what has happened.”

            Zachary laughs. “It’s nice to know someone is paying me that much attention.”

            If only he knew.

            “Honestly though,” Zachary continues, “I don’t know that much about the Circus of Curiosities. Just what I’ve been able to work out by observing what goes on here. Did you see the other team coming back?”

            I shake my head.

            “They came back about a half-hour ago,” Zachary says. “Four of them did, anyway. There was one of them, I think his name was Neil, the guy from the next town over…”