He hit the rubble ...
“No,” Neva mumbled as the images she’d managed to suppress for a short while resurfaced.
His spine snapped ...
“Please, no.”
The falling tower buried him.
And she was alone.
HER DREAMS, WHEN SLEEP finally came, dredged up memories that hurt almost as much:
“I can’t,” Neva said, eying the curtains: still closed, still shrouding Barnum & Bailey’s secondary stage in shadows.
Augie squeezed her shoulders. “You can.”
She shook her head. “We could go back to Chicago.”
He released her shoulder and pointed to the sliver of audience revealed by the crack between the curtains. “I’ll be out there, the whole time. You’ll do fine.”
She shook her head harder.
“Neva ...”
She could feel the anger in him. He hid it well, masking it with the tenderness and strength she’d always known he’d lend her if she truly needed it. But she could sense the underlying rage, the anguish and guilt that he hadn’t done more—hadn’t been faster. None of it was directed at her, but she shrank from it anyway.
“We can leave,” Augie said upon seeing her reaction. “Go back to the DeBells’ house—if that’s what you really want?”
She nodded.
“But just know that every time you don’t dance—every time you choose to hide your grace—that man will retain his power over you.”
Neva flinched, then raised her hand, hoping to make Augie flinch too. But he didn’t. He was ready to be slapped, if that was what she needed. Ready to leave the circus too—he hadn’t said those words just to say them. He’d meant them.
He’d also been right.
“You’ll be in the audience?” she asked softly, lowering her hand.
“The whole time.” He squeezed her shoulder again. “You can do this, sister. You’re stronger than you know.”
She studied the curtains again. All she had to do was part them and step through—a half-second’s worth of movement between two rumpled sheets of cloth. Just that, and then the rhythms of performance would take over and she could lose herself in dancing and bending.
Except in all her seventeen years, she’d never felt weaker.
Or smaller.
Or lower.
But with Augie watching her ... maybe she could try? “I’ll see you out there.”
He smiled. “You will. And you’ll do great.”
Breathing slowly—evenly—she straightened her shoulders, pulled the curtains to either side, and stepped onstage.
IT WAS HOT WHEN NEVA woke, reeling from past and present pain. Hot and wet: it felt like one of the steam engines had been rerouted to vent inside the storage room.
The effort of standing nearly unbalanced her, and she grew no steadier as she stumbled toward the front of the storage room. At first, she managed to steer clear of its forgotten objects and their corners and edges. But her coordination was gone, seared away by the sweltering heat. And within a few steps she clipped her knee against the tooth of a stray gear.
Limping on, another few steps saw her slumping against the stack of crates that divided the back of the storage room from the front. She steadied herself by lodging her right arm in a gap between two of the boxes. She’d rest here a moment, find the strength to move on, and ...
But there was no strength to find.
Neva couldn’t pull her arm back, couldn’t lean away from the crates, couldn’t work her throat to call out. She was paralyzed, so hot she was frozen. Immobile putty, a whale-oil candle molded into a helpless shape ... Except candles could melt. She could melt.
And she did.
A little at first, and then more, and then all as she let her bones slacken and her body go formless. She’d never deformed herself this much before. But the heat made her pliable, made her wax, and she fairly flowed through the slender corridor created by the unevenly positioned crates.
The heat left her as she pooled out the other side. For a second, as she regained her aspect, she felt comfortable. Then a chill set in; by the time she’d solidified her frame, the air was arctic, as if she’d been transported to the refrigeration room of the Cold Storage Building ... before it burned.
He hit the rubble, his spine snapped—
No.
Neva tried to shake the image from her head, but she couldn’t move it, couldn’t move anything. Again. She was frozen once more—truly frozen now, a fallen ice sculpture frosted to the floor.
Yet she could still hear. Wiley and his friends hadn’t left the main part of the storage room, and Neva had drawn close enough to make out their words above the steam engines and whatever exhibits continued to run in the Hall.
“Chicago Day is almost upon us,” Quill said. He was perched on a box in front of Neva, his back turned to her and blocking her view of everyone else, and theirs of her. “We’re running out of time.”
“So is capitalism,” Brin answered from near the door. “Lazarus Silverman’s failed today. That makes three banks in the last week alone.”
“It’s enough to make a person wonder if we need to do anything but stand back,” Wiley said.
Roland snorted. “Always movin’ at a snail’s gallop, ain’t ya?”
Someone laughed.
Neva tried again to call out, but she was so cold she could barely breathe, much less speak. All she could do was hope someone would turn around and notice her ...
“I just don’t see why you lot are in such a hurry to risk jail when we don’t have to,” Wiley said.
“But revolution is risk,” Quill replied, his voice assuming an intensity Neva recognized from the history lessons he’d given her and Augie at the DeBells’ house. “We can’t have one without the other, and now’s the time for both. No more speeches; no more pamphlets.”
“I see. And how do you know the moment is now? Did Karl Marx come to you in a dream again? Was Proudhon with him?”
“Hear him out, Wiley,” Pieter said.
Quill gestured around the room.
