But Glenda either didn’t hear or didn’t care. The mechanical came after them with implacable determination. The horses were slowing, tired, allowing Glenda to make up the lost time. Gavin listened. The streets here were nearly empty and the calliope music was growing louder. He pulled the horses to a stop and jumped out of the cab.
“Jump!” he said as Glenda brought both mechanical hands down. Feng and Alice leaped free as the mechanical smashed the cab to pieces. The panicked horses galloped away, dragging the remains with them. Glenda turned to face the trio, her expression stony.
“What are you doing?” Feng demanded, but Gavin was already moving.
“Come on!” He dashed down a side street, giving Alice and Feng no choice but to follow. There were still no people in evidence, but the narrow street was cluttered with front stoops, carts, piles of coal, and other street detritus. The trio leaped and twisted around it all, but Glenda was forced to slow a little.
“I’ll catch you eventually,” she shouted. “You can’t keep running!”
Gavin burst out onto a main street and into a crowd lining it. The calliope music leaped into full volume. Coming up the street was a man in a red top hat and a red-and-white striped shirt with garters just above the elbows. He wore a cloak flung back over his shoulders and he carried a silver-topped cane. Behind him lurched a great brass elephant, puffing steam from its tusks. Its gait was oddly uneven. Scarlet signs on the animal’s sides spelled out
Without a pause, Gavin shoved through the crowd and made for the ringmaster at the front of the parade. He snatched the man’s hat off, revealing sandy hair.
“What the hell?” the ringmaster said, then blinked.
“Great to see you, Dodd.” Gavin flicked the cloak free. “Just go with this and I’ll explain later.”
“Gavin, what are you—?” Alice began, but he shoved the top hat on her head, tossed the cloak around her shoulders, and ran around the other side of the lurching elephant without looking to see if Feng and Alice followed him. They did, however, and that was fortunate. Glenda reached the mouth of the side street, but her view of her quarry was blocked by the elephant, who bumbled along as if the people didn’t exist. Up top, the mahout looked down at them warily.
“Take off your goggles and scarf and your shirt,” Gavin whispered to Feng, keeping pace with the elephant. “The circus has Chinese. You’ll look like an acrobat. Give me the rucksack.”
“What about you?” Alice buttoned the cloak and drew it around herself, hiding her body and Gavin’s fiddle case. “And how do you know these people?”
Feng handed Gavin the rucksack, pulled off his shirt, and wrapped it around his head in a crude turban. He had a build that could pass for acrobatic, at a distance. Several people in the crowd had noticed Glenda’s mechanical, but they seemed to think it was part of the parade. They pointed and gasped with amazement. Glenda was momentarily stymied. She couldn’t move forward without crushing people or sweeping them aside and hurting them, which Gavin didn’t think she’d be willing to do.
A clown in white makeup, orange wig, and blue nose hurried up with a broom and a bucket. “What are you three doing? Do you speak English?”
“Bonzini!” Gavin said. “Remember me?”
“Gavin?” the clown gasped. “What in—?”
“That’s torn it,” Alice said.
“No,” Feng said. “The crowd speaks French and German.”
“Thanks, Bonzini.” Gavin plucked the wig and nose from the clown, jammed them onto his own head and face, and grabbed Bonzini’s broom and bucket. The pack with the firefly cure in it went on Gavin’s back.
“Hey!” Bonzini protested.
But Gavin was already moving farther back, now using the calliope wagon and then a lion cage for cover. Alice and Feng came with. Glenda gave up on the crowd and was now nudging people aside so she could move onto the street. The calliope continued to hoot out something in D-major.
“Split up,” Gavin said.
“Why can’t we just keep hiding behind the calliope?” Alice hissed.
“The wagon’s high enough for her to see our feet.” Gavin brandished the broom. “Hide in plain sight. Smile and wave and tell anyone who asks that Dodd said it was all right.”
Gavin followed the lion cage with the broom over his shoulder, taking care that the bristles blocked Glenda’s view of his face. Behind Gavin, a pair of jugglers tossed clubs and balls. Alice and Feng dropped farther back into the parade, smiling and waving as they went. The parade moved ahead with aching slowness. The horse drawing the lion cage dropped manure onto the street right in front of the spot where Glenda had finally worked her way through the parade audience to the curb. Gavin swallowed hard and kept his head down as he paused and swept the smelly stuff into the bucket. Glenda scanned the street with flat, hard eyes. Gavin felt her gaze rest on him for a moment, and he forced himself to put a jaunty spring into his step, though tension dried his mouth and tightened his knuckles on the bucket. He was just a lowly sweeper clown. Not worth examining closely. Glenda narrowed her eyes and her mechanical took a step forward. Gavin held his breath. Then Glenda turned and stomped away. The crowd cheered and pointed at her, still sure she was part of the parade. Gavin let out his breath and stole a glance over his shoulder. Alice and Feng smiled and waved near a troop of acrobats. The automaton on the calliope finished its song and swung into another one. Gavin continued on his way with the bucket full of manure.
Eventually the parade made its way to a field at the edge of town. The big striped tent—called the Tilt, Gavin remembered—rose up among a number of smaller tents and circus wagons. Off to one side waited the red locomotive and bright boxcars Gavin had seen from the airship earlier just before a clockworker fugue had taken him away. If not for the clockwork plague and the unexpected memory of his father, he might have recognized the train
