Everything should be clear. He should simply take Niko—the
machine’s
head off and sell his body to a smith to be melted down. Yet that thought made him sick, and he felt guilty for thinking it, and he didn’t understand why he felt guilty. The mishmash was all very odd, and he felt out of sorts. Someone else had slid a sword down his throat, and he didn’t dare move.
He sat down on the bed, pulled a brass key from a chain around his neck, and inserted it into Dante’s back, hoping the familiar task would steady him. Silence filled the room, heavy as molten iron. Thad abruptly noticed the boy was standing with his back to the wall of dismembered souvenirs, almost as if he were one of them. An image of Nikolai’s arm nailed to the wall invaded Thad’s head.
“Let’s go back outside,” he said abruptly, and ushered the boy down the short steps to the ground. The cloudy sky still threatened rain.
“Hungry,” Dante said in Thad’s hands.
“How…how often do you need to eat?” Thad asked, winding Dante’s key. Perhaps he should take a nip himself.
Nikolai pulled his scarf back up, and he looked like a normal boy again. “It depends on how much I use. If I am quiet, I use very little. If I run or jump, I use more.”
“What happens if you don’t get any…er, food?”
“It’s very painful. Then I become tired. Then I just stop. I don’t like it. Do you like it when you can’t eat?”
“I don’t think anyone does.”
“Done,” Dante announced. “Done.”
“You don’t like me,” Nikolai said. “Did I do something bad to make you not like me?”
Thad kept on winding, uncomfortable. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”
“You called me a machine and you said I don’t mean anything to you.”
Thad wanted to say that the boy
was
a machine, that he
didn’t
mean anything. The sight of the boy’s inhuman face inevitably twisted something inside Thad’s gut and made him want to back away, or reach for a weapon, or both.
He said, “I don’t—”
“Done!” Dante shrieked. “Done!”
Thad was overwinding the parrot. He pulled the key out and Dante scurried about on the crushed grass in a furious circle.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nikolai asked.
“Too much energy,” Thad said. “He’ll be all right in a minute.”
“Why doesn’t he fly away?”
“He can’t fly. He’s damaged. And anyway, I don’t think he could ever fly. He
is
made of brass, you know.”
“It would be nice to fly,” Nikolai said wistfully. “Then I could go anywhere I pleased.”
Thad gave him a strange look. “You’re an automaton. How can you want anything?”
“I don’t know. I just do. How do
you
want anything?”
“Coo coo!” Sofiya came around the corner of the
wagon at that moment leading Kalvis, her brass horse. “All the other wagons are loaded on the train and the stable tent is down. You are behind, and I have come to catch you up.”
“You.” Thad rounded on her, simultaneously angry at the woman and glad she gave him a change in subject. “I want to talk to you.”
“Hitch up the horse while you talk. I do not want to miss the train.”
Thad folded his arms. “You owe me information.”
“I
owe
you nothing, Mr. Sharpe.”
“Applesauce, applesauce,” blurted Dante, still scurrying about the ground. “Doom, defeat, despair. Darkness, death, destruction. Applesauce.”
“I’m tired of dancing, Sofiya,” Thad said, deliberately switching to her first name. “You’ve sucked me into this little game without telling me why or wherefore. I don’t know why or what you’re playing at, but you’re going to tell me what’s going on or—”
“Or what, Thad?” Sofiya replied. “You will threaten me with your knives? Point your pistols at my head? Tell your parrot to squawk in my direction?”
“Or you’ll keep suffering the way you have been.”
That stopped her. “I do not understand.”
“Griffin has a hold on you, just like he has one on me,” Thad said. “His spiders watch your family, which is why you do what he says. Am I right?”
Sofiya’s eyes strayed to the top of Thad’s wagon. No spiders. In the background, shouts and cries from the fading circus continued. Kalvis waited near Sofiya with brass patience, not even stomping a hoof. A wisp of steam curled from one nostril.
“He watches my sister,” she said softly. “This is what he says. She lives in a village not far from here in Saint Petersburg, but always Mr. Griffin’s spiders watch her and wait for his command. Mr. Griffin pays me very well and I send the money to her so she does not need to work, but that does not make it feel much better.”
Thad studied her. Sofiya’s face was stoic, but there was pain behind the mask. He could hear it in her voice, see it in the way she held herself. He wanted to know more, but couldn’t bring himself to pry. Later, he decided.
“I’m sorry,” he said instead.
“Spaceeba.
But in the meantime—”
“In the meantime, we need to formulate a way out of this.” Thad curled a fist. “I don’t like being lied to, I don’t like being manipulated, and I definitely don’t like being enslaved to a filthy clockworker.”
Sofiya didn’t respond.
“He’s not like other clockworkers I know,” Thad continued. “Clockworkers don’t get along with normal people well enough to hire them. Not for long, anyway. There’s something wrong here. What do you know about him? Is he hiding in one of those boxcars or is he coming later? Tell me everything you know.”
She shook her head. “I cannot.”
“Sofiya.” Thad’s tone was gentle now. “We can beat him. I don’t like this any more than you do. I’ve convinced my friend to bring a monster into the circus. We can make a plan together and—”
“I can tell you nothing more.” She smoothed her dress. “He watches my sister, and he may be watching us now.”
“That’s how they win, Sofiya. They get inside your
head and make you think they can do anything. They can’t. They’re only human.”
Sofiya barked a small laugh. “I wish it were that simple. Nothing ever is.”
“Exactly what does he need me for?” Thad pressed.
“That I do not know, and it is the truth.” She sighed. “I am sorry you were pulled into this, and I am sorry your friends are in jeopardy. Truly so.”
“I didn’t like it when the horse died,” Nikolai put in. He had edged up next to Thad. “It made me unhappy.”
“I don’t work for clockworkers,” Thad said. “Not for money or anything else.”
“That is why he makes threats,” Sofiya said. “No,
threats
is the wrong word. He will definitely hurt or kill your friends if you don’t do as he says. And he will do the same to my sister if I move against him. Those are not threats, they are facts. So for now, we must hitch my dreadful horse to your very nice wagon and bring it to the train, or the ringmaster will be very unhappy with his sword swallower and his new automaton.”
Thad blinked. “Sorry. New automaton?”
“Kalvis.” Sofiya patted the brass horse’s withers. “The big flood in Kiev left no automatons for the Kalakos Circus of Automatons and Other Wonders. Ringmaster Dodd was quite happy to have him.”
“Do you think Mr. Griffin might loan us some spiders?” Thad said dryly.
“Applesauce,” said Dante from the ground.
“Can I ride him?” Nikolai asked.
“We should hitch up the wagon,” Sofiya said.
S
aint Petersburg wasn’t even eight hundred kilometers away. If nothing went wrong, the circus train could travel all night and arrive there by late morning the following day. Mr. Griffin would arrive at his destination in plenty of time.
Thad leaned back against the cracked red leather seat in the last row of the passenger car. Ahead of him, the circus performers occupied most of the other seats, sleeping or conversing or sewing costumes or playing small games with the children. Thad, for his part, always sat in the back so no one would feel obliged to talk to him. He stared fixedly out the window at Russian countryside. Trees were shedding their leaves and the fields were stubbly, stripped of every grain of wheat and rye, every head of cabbage, every single potato. Soon it would be time to slaughter the animals, but for now there was a lull between the two harvests. Normally, it would be the perfect time for a circus to play, but this was also tax time, and taxes had gone up yet again, creating the economic hardship that made the peasants unhappy.
At the knife shop, Thad had always been aware of difficult times—people bought fewer new blades and were more likely to ask for older ones to be sharpened. When things got really bad, they didn’t come to the shop at all. Circuses were even more at the mercy of hardship. People always needed knives, but they could live without sword swallowers. Now that winter was coming, the circus should be heading south to a warmer, wealthier country like Italy or France. They shouldn’t be moving into the teeth of winter, towing a monster behind them. It made Thad tense and restless, despite his fatigue.
A small head leaned against his arm. Thad’s jaw went tight. Nikolai refused to budge from Thad’s side, and Thad had no method of keeping him away, short of physical force, and even though he knew full well Nikolai was just a machine, he couldn’t bring himself to use force, not against something that looked and talked like a little boy.
And now the machine in question was snuggling against him, simulating mechanical affection for him. What demented mind had created such a thing?
“You look very sweet,” Sofiya said. Her seat faced him, part of a set of four. The fourth seat was empty. Across the aisle was a stack of travel bags and boxes instead of more seats, so no one sat next to them. “Very comfortable. If you are cold, I could probably find a blanket or a shawl to—”
“I’m fine,” Thad interrupted. Since they were at the very rear of the passenger car, the clacking of the wheels was louder back here, and even Tina McGee, who trained poodles and sat in front of Thad, couldn’t overhear. They actually had a measure of privacy.
“I was not speaking to you, Thad,” Sofiya said.
Nikolai yawned. “I’m not cold.”
Now Thad yawned, and hated himself for it. How could watching a machine yawn make him want to yawn? But he’d been up all night and then had a very trying day afterward. This was the first time he’d stopped moving since. The rocking motion of the train served to make things worse, and his eyelids were drooping.
“Aren’t you tired?” he asked Sofiya.
“Of course. But I am also hungry. I did not get a chance to eat at the hotel like you.”
As if on cue, Mama Berloni, a large, round woman in a patchwork dress and a white head cloth, appeared in the aisle with a large basket. Her pink face was unlined, and her arms were as big around as melons. She and her husband had long ago discovered that those who supplied food to the crowds made more money than those entertained them.
“I find you at last,” she said in her bouncy Italian English. “You eat. Sword swallower needs the big belly, like my husband. You all eat now.”
“Pretty lady, pretty lady,” said Dante from his perch atop Thad’s seat.
“Nothing for you,” Mama Berloni tutted at the parrot. “You just pretend to eat and make the big mess.”
She handed out ham sandwiches wrapped in paper, boiled eggs, and slices of apple pie. Nikolai took an egg, but only held it. Sofiya thanked her and introduced herself.
“You call me Mama,” Mama Berloni replied. “You get hungry and have no food, you come see me at the grease wagon. No charge for circus. But you do a favor
for me later if I need, yes? You do for me, I do for you. That is how circus people stay together. Like family. Like you three now. Glad to see Thad has found a good girl. And this is a very sweet little boy. You’re a very nice family. Everyone needs a family.”
“We’re not—” Thad began.
“Now I go see Tortellis,” Mama interrupted. “Without me they eat nothing. Nothing!” And she bustled away.
“Bless my soul!” Dante whistled.
“See?” Nikolai said. “We’re a family. We have a son and a mama and a—”
“I’m not your papa,” Thad said firmly. He unwrapped the generous ham sandwich and took a salty bite. “Stop saying I am.”
“It’s the papa’s job to correct the son.” Nikolai set the egg down and swung his legs against the seat. “So when you tell me to stop saying you’re my papa, you are doing a good job of being a papa.”
Sofiya coughed around her apple pie.
“Now,” Nikolai continued, “you need to tell me a story.”
“What?” Thad was still trying to untangle Nikolai’s first comment. “Why?”
“So I will fall asleep. Or you can sing me a song.”
“I don’t know any songs,” Thad replied shortly. “And I don’t sing.”
“Your mama and papa sang to you when were little. That’s what mamas and papas do.”
“Well?” prompted Sofiya. “Didn’t they?”
“No. Yes. Sometimes.” He tried to get his foggy mind to work, and failed. “Look, I’m tired, and—”
“Why are you keeping this boy with you?” Sofiya
brushed bread crumbs off her cloak. “You claim you dislike automatons made by clockworkers. You claim he means nothing to you. Why not set him aside, then? Walk away.”
“He’s my papa,” Nikolai said firmly. “Papas don’t do that.”
“I’m not going to leave an automaton to wander about. Who knows what trouble that might cause?” Thad finished his food and leaned against the window, arms folded and eyes shut. “Once we arrive in Saint Petersburg, I’ll find a place for him.”
As he drifted off to sleep, he heard Nikolai say, “Papas also keep their sons out of trouble.”
“They try,” agreed Sofiya, “but they rarely succeed.”
* * *
Thad jerked awake. A line of warm drool ran down his chin, and he wiped it away. Blearily, he looked about. Sofiya still sat across from him. Next to her, Nikolai paged through a thick book. Outside the train it was daylight, but heavy and cloudy, so dark it was almost night. The train wasn’t moving.
“Why have we stopped?” Thad demanded. “What’s going on?”
“You know as much as I do,” Sofiya replied. Her scarlet cloak poured over the seat around her.
“You snore,” said Nikolai. He pointed at something on the page and asked Sofiya in Russian,
“What’s that?”