Last summer, the ascent would have been challenging but not overly taxing. Now, though, in her fatigued and famished state, the climb was exhausting. But whenever quitting became too tempting, she forced herself to relive an instance Augie had discouraged her. Or misled her. Or mocked her.
“If you are caught,” he’d said when they were teenagers, “even for something small—bending in a way you shouldn’t while you hang the wash; marking yourself with freakish scars—what do you think they’ll do to you?”
“You’re stronger than you know,” he’d said at the circus.
“Eventually,” he’d said, just a little while ago, “I know their capabilities better than their original owners did.”
Fuck him.
It was enough. Barely.
By the time she reached the second car, she’d stopped walking her feet up the rim and started squeezing them tight against its sides, scooting skywards in clumsy, diminishing bursts. They brought her to Augie’s level, but only just—thank God he’d chosen the fifth car and not the sixth. She doubted she could have managed another inch.
The last hindrance was the door. Augie had left it open, yet there was no landing for her to swing to: Ferris hadn’t designed his carriages with the idea that passengers would board in midair. With her body strained and failing, the only viable route was to curl around the Wheel’s rim and lunge for the doorframe.
Twisting into position proved relatively easy. Leaping, less so—she missed.
Augie caught her.
He hadn’t left the carriage; Neva had been worried he’d clamber higher as soon as he saw her attempting to reach him. But he’d stayed put, perhaps resigned to the coming confrontation.
Good thing—had he gone elsewhere, Derek and Brin would be peeling her off the ground right now.
Augie didn’t pull her inside the carriage right away, however. For a long moment, he held her by her forearms, letting her dangle above the Midway as he stared at her face—her whitened, blue-eyed face. “I see you finally understand your true abilities.”
“No thanks to you.” Neva had enjoyed her stint as part of the highwire act at Barnum & Bailey’s, so she wasn’t too nervous about being suspended in space. But this was a different kind of height. “Help me in, Augie.”
He studied her for another beat, then raised her up and into the carriage with absurd ease—he must have collected immense strength from someone along the way.
Enough to rip off a man’s leg.
Resisting the impulse to take and expel a deep breath, Neva looked everywhere but at Augie. The carriage seemed to be in good condition—aside from a few tears in the chairs’ upholstery and the odd spot of rust on the frame. But she couldn’t help wondering if it was the same car Wherrit had lost his mind on the year before ... Below them, Pinkertons, soldiers, and policemen clashed with strikers, rioters, and refugees. In the distance, a hundred other flashpoints stitched Chicago into a quilt of conflict.
Closing her eyes, she focused on reverting the changes she’d wrought in her flesh. As before, the transition hurt—badly—but it was slightly more bearable, and she managed it without touching the cowry.
Opening her eyes, she found Augie in his original guise as well, watching her intently, his face a whirlpool of emotion.
“I told you not to look for me,” he said. Was that a hint of hope in his voice?
“You didn’t make yourself all that hard to find.” Neva glanced at the base of the Ferris Wheel. Brin and Derek had moved into the ticketing booth, and the Irishwoman had her rifle trained on Augie.
One shot. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
“I have five more questions for you.”
Augie winced—looking very like Derek for a second—but signaled for Neva to continue.
“One.” She raised her left thumb. “The man who raped me at the circus: did you acquire him?”
“No. I didn’t want his form, not after what he’d done to you. Just his life, and I already had that.”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure why that mattered to her, but it did. Especially given that the rapist’s seed had been inside her, which probably meant his guise was as well ...
No. She wouldn’t think about that now. Maybe not ever. “Two.” She raised her index finger. “Are you Jack the Ripper?”
Augie smiled, but it was about the saddest curving of a mouth she’d ever seen. “I’m worse.”
Neva stopped herself from nodding again. It was probably a true statement, but signaling her agreement wouldn’t accomplish anything. “Three.” She raised her middle finger. “Why did you stay you all these years? Playing with props, and wigs, and fake noses—as what, a joke? Was that just you being ironic? You could have been anyone, gone anywhere.” Her sister’s image flitted across her vision, followed by a glimpse of Mr. DeBell. “Hell, you could have been white. You could have had privilege. Why stay Augie the servant? Augie the circus Negro? Why not choose an easier life?”
“I wanted to be there for you.”
“So why not tell me?” She raised her ring finger, then used it to wipe the tears from her eyes. “Why keep it to yourself? What you could do ... What I could do. Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked away, his gaze passing disinterestedly over Brin and settling on the Turkish Village, where a striker grappled with a gangly Pinkerton. “If I’d told you—told you all of it—you wouldn’t have let me be there for you.”
Neva shook her head. This was probably a true statement as well, but that didn’t make it good enough, not by half. Yet what else had she expected him to say? “Five.” She raised her pinkie. She’d come to the hardest question to ask, the one that would hurt her as much as it did him. Taking that deep breath now, she exhaled it ... and took another. “When you were Wiley,” she began at last, but didn’t finish.
She didn’t need to—Augie had already buried his face in his hands. He remembered.
Remembered what had happened when he’d stumbled to Machinery in
