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  The room he had taken above the restaurant was another world. His suitcase was there, untouched, and as the sky opened with rain, Jackson watched the patterns the water made through the window onto the lid of the metal box containing Sister Jerome Grace’s hand.

  What had become of the rest of her?

  He opened the box, slow and torturous work with his healing hands. He sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, watching the rain play over that hand, its curled fingers. The sky played with the cross, brightening and darkening it by turns. Shadows crept into the palm and then out. And always, the threads of life poured from the severed end.

  Jackson touched them only once. He expected them to be cold, but they ran with warmth. Cressida had meant to kill the sister. Judging by the hand, it didn’t seem she had succeeded. The threads spiraled around his fingers as gentle as air; perhaps they had more presence, but Jackson could not feel it, not beyond the low lick of constant pain.

  Mae did not come to him, so he went to her. It took days by the method he chose. He went over the roofs, quickly discovering he wasn’t yet well enough to do it. How simple the streets would have been.

  He called himself a fool, but wanted to master the roofs again, wanted to force his body into it. His hands no longer gripped the fire escape rails well, nor the gutters. He had also never taken the roofs from this deep inside Chinatown, so finding a path was one of the first challenges.

  When at last he did, the accomplishment rested warm around his shoulders. It took too much time, but night after night, Jackson grew more adept at travelling this way, hands regaining their strength as he found the path north to Bell’s.

  Bell’s remained a flood of light amid the city, people flocking to its graceful theater. On the surface, nothing had changed. The massive gargoyles remained at their posts. Jackson wound farther north, to the back of the building, where he could leap across and crouch on the roof. He imagined he could feel the music in the stones. He imagined Mae on the stage, the desire of every man in the room, though she wanted none of them, would allow none of them. Imagined her mouth on his, dark and soft, and —

  He was in the theater before he realized he had gone. Had climbed down all those fire escapes to hit the street, pay his coin. His heart was a foolish bastard he thought, but he didn’t care, because in this room were things better than opium, better than fizzing soda.

  When Mae strode onto the stage, something had changed. Whether it was within her, or within him, he wasn’t sure, but he could see into her in a way he hadn’t before. Threads coursed through her, from head to toe and back again. They reached through the floor and ceiling both, but none of them anchored her. She moved without restriction, like air or water, going where she would. And then the light shifted and these threads vanished as if they had never been. Jackson almost sensed their weight inside himself, but refused the idea as ridiculous.

  Playfully the lions mauled Mae and she vanished into the understage. The lions knew their place; they turned on the audience, to roar as if they meant to eat them too. Everyone leaped back, gasped, and fear only turned to delight when the lions padded away. As they did so, Jackson slipped backstage, down the stairs with the lions who regarded him with solemn eyes. The carousel girls were back, flooding the stage in the lions’ wake.

  One lion moved toward Jackson and his heart caught. The beast lifted its head, taking a long smell of Jackson. As if it could smell the months spent in the opium den, the lion’s nose wrinkled. It gave him a gentle nudge, granting permission. Jackson caught the edge of the understage door with his boot and eased it open enough to slip inside where Mae crouched on the thin mattress. She didn’t move.

  “Did you go out of guilt?”

  Her question surprised him. It spurred him into motion, until he kneeled with her on the mattress. He didn’t touch her, not because his hands ached — some part of him knew they always would — but because she was not entirely his. Arrogant, that. No person belonged to any other person — people were as changeable as the weather. But when at last Mae did move, she lifted her head and pinned him with her black gaze and he knew, knew the way he knew so much else he couldn’t explain, that she was his and he was hers, as much as they could be.

  He laughed, a ragged sound. “Not a shred of guilt,” he said. It was a simple admission, but lifted something from his shoulders. He should have felt guilty, for Cressida hadn’t been a stranger at a sideshow. She was known to him, had clothed him and fed him and took him in when no other family would. She had dared him to believe in himself and he had killed her.

  “Would have swallowed her had you and Beth not come,” he said. “Is easy to say …” He exhaled, not looking from her eyes. “She meant to kill Foster. She broke my fingers. She used all of us to further her own ends, but … Everyone does.” He reached for her now, one crooked finger whispering over a curl of hair. “Lachesis.”

  At the sound of her true name, she came apart. Jackson thought he had killed her too, but the sweetest pleasure he had ever seen crossed her face a split second before she dissolved and then …

  Thread, everywhere thread. She spilled until she filled the understage, until Jackson could swim in the mass of them. He pushed his aching hands through the threads and knew her hum with a pleasure so fierce it flooded into the building and set it to shaking.

  The harder he stroked the thread, the harder the world itself moved, skewed and off-balance, and when he gathered them in bunches and clumsily braided them together, she surged between his legs. She slid around his waist, throat, and across the open gap of his mouth.

  It was a slow devouring, one in which his broken hands did not matter. Mae rose up through these threads, keeping coiled tight around him. Jackson drew a breath and let himself fall apart the way she had. Her eyes were black and on him and she did not look away.

  Acknowledgements

  The idea for Jackson’s Unreal Circus and Mobile Marmalade arrived during a winter where the snow piled itself up to the windowsills. I wanted to get away and started dreaming about trains cutting paths through tall snow, high grass, black tunnels. Of course they weren’t ordinary trains.

  Jackson was insistent from the first, if elusive — and I suspect he’s cross with the revelations I’ve shared here. Jackson is the private kind, and was slow to tell his own story when there were so many others to share first. Others he found more worthy than his own.

  My thanks to Ellen Datlow, who published the first traveling circus story I ever wrote in SciFiction, and to Scott H. Andrews, who published the most recent in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. To A.C. Wise, who always wanted a circus novel, and still dreams of a collection (me, too). To Beth Wodzinski, who never ceases to cheer my writing endeavors, no matter how weird they get. To my spoon-shaped muse, whom I cannot explain and could not do without.

  This book stands alone, as do all other circus stories, but I hope that if you explore them as a whole, you will find something magical indeed.

  Author Bio

  E. CATHERINE TOBLER has never run away to join the circus — but she thinks about doing so every day. Among others, her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and on the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award ballot. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, launched the Folley & Mallory Adventures. Senior editor of Shimmer Magazine, you can find her online at www.ecatherine.com and @ecthetwit.

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  Front Matter

  Copyright © 2016 by E. Catherine Tobler

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  The Kraken Sea

  ISBN: 978–1–937009–40–3 (TPB)

  Cover Art © 2014 by Mągdalena Pagowska

  Title Design © 2016 by Mekenzie Larsen

  Published by Apex Publications, LLC

  PO Box 24323

  Lexington, K.Y. 40524

  www.apexbookcompany.com