Moving gently, a tin man in fear of rusting, he helped Nim out of her clothes.
“Look at me,” Nim demanded. Hellequin had retracted his eye’s zoom to give Nim her modesty. “See me now,” she told him, and he glanced up, taking in the creamy skin, the spill of breasts, each long thigh, the triangle of down in-between.
She grasped one of his hands and guided it over her like a wash rag. Under her will, his hand passed from the bud of each nipple to her secret, swollen places.
“I’m underneath the lights,” she told him.
He unbuckled and stooped over her, arms braced either side of her head. His frock coat had been discarded, bathed in his blood. The wound to his shoulder was an angry web of stitches. Beneath it, the regimental tattoo of the HawkEye branded him like any other member of a flock.
He eased inside Nim, his breath stolen by the encompassing heat of her sex around his. “Is this where you are?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and tugging her down, and himself further in. “Are you in the darkness?”
She caught his mouth to hers. He bucked, a match to the rhythm of her hips. The coarse fabric of his loosened pants rubbed his lower spine. His boots were an awkward weight on the mattress.
He gasped and felt the sweet, metallic flow as he came.
The light worked up beneath their sweat and static. Nim began to burn with a saintly purity of light. Hellequin shut his natural eye against it. The HawkEye implant filled with brilliance.
Tension filtered through the zoo platform. Hidden in their city of pipes, the roo rats whittled at one another in their soft strange mews. The wrinklenecks kept their heads tucked under their wings and stayed still as carved sandstone. Usually impassive and lumbering, the clothhods were restless. They pawed at the sage that carpeted their stall, interwove their long necks and tossed their heads.
The disturbance woke Rust. Her eyes widened, pupils retracting to slits. She raised up onto her fingertips and listened. Just as any other animal in the zoo, she sensed something off kilter in her surroundings. The motion of the circus in flight was more exaggerated than usual; her stomach rose and fell away on waves of movement. But that wasn’t what put the animals on alert. A new scent was detectable – dry and toasted like beet chips – and she had an instinctual impression of danger.
“Lie down, Rust. If I’m to heal, I need to sleep some,” mumbled Pig Heart from his nest.
She hissed to hush him. Her eyes glinted in the half-light.
“Moody dog.” Pig Heart eased back in his sleep. The pig genes from his borrowed heart hadn’t heightened his awareness.
Rust moved to the front bars of her cage. She peered out into the gloom, breath heavy in her lungs. Listening past the distress of the roo rats and the clothhods pacing in their stall, she heard the sound of something being dragged. Also a dry click-clack, and in reply, a rasping. Two voices, thought Rust. Communicating with alien mouthpieces in sucks and whistles of breath.
“There’s blood in the air,” she whispered.
“What’s that?” Pig Heart grumbled, not quite conscious.
“If not now, soon will be.” Rust cocked her head. Who else would see what was afoot? Not the pig with his keelhauled spine. Not the roo rats in their tunnels, not the stone-still wrinklenecks or the dull-brained clothhods. There was only she – a lone wolf sent ahead of the pack.
Picking her way over the sage, she slipped out of the door. She slid the bolt across, less to cage Pig Heart in than to protect him from what lay without.
The sounds were coming from the hoppers’ wagon, parked a few metres to the right of Rust’s. Slowly she approached the cage, which was shuttered up behind its ornate screens. She flinched at a small swish of movement from inside and, again, the long drag of something pulled across the floor. Crouched in front of the screen, Rust listened intently. The click-clack utterances from inside definitely suggesting some level of communication.
Her hands and feet grew cold as the blood channelled to her heart, preparing for fight or flight. A dribble of calcified spit oozed under the screen. It teased down to the ground in a long drip.
The cage inside was in semi-darkness. Rust returned her hands to the floor to assume her preferred position. Her nose twitched. She stuck out a tongue and tasted the air. The scent of the nymphs lingered in their droppings and calcified bedding. Otherwise they might as well have been shipped out and replaced with very different beasts – which, in effect, they had.
A lone gas lamp hung off a nail alongside the clothhod stable. By its dim glow, Rust made out two great hulking shadows that traipsed and swayed about the cage. She brought her face closer.
Down below, the lift rig suddenly ground into motion. The sound tore through the tight atmosphere like a knife. A huge black wing razored out from the semi-dark of the cage, clattering against the bars. Rust leapt back. Crouched on all fours, she retracted her lips and snarled. She knew about self-preservation and all of her senses told her that there were bad things coming out of that cage.
The wing whipped out again, smooth like a beetle’s wing case, but with a jagged outer edge tipped with a long thin barb. Rust glimpsed purple webbing at the underside of the wing. Then came the head of the thing, solidifying out of the dark as it moved closer to the bars. While the hopper nymphs had oval-shaped heads, this new form had protracted skulls and a large neck-frill the texture of calcified bone. A ‘cap’ of iridescent purple exoskeleton fed down between the eyes – which were the same black pustules that belonged to the nymph form, but greatly enlarged. Head feathers spiked out from the neck-frill, exotically pinkish. Mother Nature’s poison signifier. Filamentous antennae fluttered through the bars. The pincers were bowed tusks of shimmering black.
A second head loomed alongside the first. Rust kept her fangs on display. She backed slowly away from the cage. What had happened to the divide bars that separated the cage in two and kept the hoppers apart? Rust’s gaze zigzagged between the ooze at the rim of the cage and the stumps of the dividing bars, wilted like wax. Her brow swelled. Were the front bars also thinning at their base, liquidised by the new drip of mucous?
Below, the elevator rig started up again. The huge bugs rounded on their surroundings, kicking out with tremendous long hind legs that thwacked the floor so the whole wagon vibrated.
“Nasty crawlers.” Rust maintained eye contact while making her retreat. Passing out of view, she scampered noiselessly back to her cage.
Hauling back the bolt, she bounded inside.
“Pig!” She pawed the robust shape of the sleeping man.
“Let me sleep some, woman!” Pig Heart adjusted his position and fell back asleep, snores breaking out one side of his mouth in spit bubbles.
“The shitter must drag itself out my stink bed now.” She kicked him. “Hoppers have grown big and black. Real ugly.”
Pig Heart’s watery weak eyes shot wide. “Hoppers gone black, you say?” He struggled to sit upright, face twisting against the pain, and rested his elbows on his knees. He stayed still and appeared to listen. The noises came again – the distinctive click-clack accompanied by the heavy drag of razored wings through the sage.
“We gotta warn the others,” he said in a sharp whisper.
“Bring us in real quiet, Das.” D’Angelus shifted his trekker’s hat further back on his head. He squinted up at the huge circus tent billowing in the air overhead. His lips tucked back.
But Jaxx caught the sense of something dangerous. He’d tracked Cyber Circus on instinct, but now he detected a new scent – fustiness which reminded him of animals in close quarters.
“Something’s amiss.” His gaze snatched every which way. The desert was empty except for the dirigible, the strengthening dust cloud and the burrower, which sledged on, spraying dust either side and leaving a deep trench in its wake.
“Time to shoot that bird from the sky!” exclaimed D’Angelus, all smiles.
“Stretch string’s all out, plus we’re better off maintaining speed to keep up with the circus rather than offloading the men to work the cannons,” Das offered. He kept a tight hold on the burrower’s steering rod, the red- lensed goggles he wore giving him an insectile appearance.
