Chapter 5 #2
I told her I’d have something soon. I intend to keep that promise. Even if part of me is hoping the answer is more complicated than she wants it to be. I’m working on that part.
We finish our coffee and head in our separate directions, which is still mostly toward the carnival grounds. Like pretty much everyone in this town, we’re involved in making sure it’s running and a success.
The setup crew is in full morning mode, the last of the heavy infrastructure going in. The smell of Tristan’s test batch from yesterday is still ghosting through the air and mixing with sawdust.
I run into Lola again standing on the outskirts of the carnival grounds. She looks at me for a moment, doing that fast-processing thing, reading me, taking inventory, deciding what category I go in. She doesn’t tell me to go away, which I am counting as an invitation.
“You again,” she says.
“It’s only a small town.”
She’s doing some kind of surveillance on the place as she stands there. Exits, occupants, layout. It’s fast and it’s practiced and most people wouldn’t catch it.
“You do that a lot?” I ask.
“What?”
“Check the room. Count the exits.” I pause. “There are four, by the way. Two main, one service road, one river path. If you need to know.”
She looks at me sideways. “Why would I need to know that?”
“You tell me.”
The pause that follows is a single beat too long. “Habit,” she says. “Crowded spaces.”
“Sure,” I reply, in the tone that means I don’t entirely believe you but I’m not going to push it which is a tone I’ve developed for situations like this one, where pushing would close a door that’s currently slightly ajar.
She drifts toward the game alley, which is still being set up. The pin bowling frames are assembled but the actual pins aren’t out yet, the prize display is half-hung, and someone has left a box of stuffed animals in the middle of the walkway that is an absolute trip hazard.
I move the box without breaking stride.
“You work at the carnival every year?” she asks.
“We all do, more or less. Jack-of-all-trades, pun obviously intended.” I gesture at the alley. “This section’s mine. Games, prizes, general chaos management.”
“You manage chaos?”
“I curate it. There’s a difference.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Managed chaos is controlled. Curated chaos is…” I think about it. “Intentional. You pick the right chaos for the right moment. Let it run exactly as far as it should and no further.”
She’s quiet for a second. “That’s either very wise or complete nonsense.”
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
She creates a sound that is almost a laugh. She converts it into a breath out, but I heard it. I absolutely heard it and I am filing it away because it sounded like something she doesn’t do a lot and I want to hear it again.
We stop at the ring toss frame. She looks at it with the eye of someone doing an automatic calculation of distances, angles, the geometry of games designed to be almost-but-not-quite winnable.
“The toss is rigged,” she says.
“All ring tosses are rigged.”
“That one more than average.” She tilts her head at the bottle arrangement. “The spacing’s off. You’d have to throw at an angle that the booth design discourages.”
I look at her. “You’ve worked a carnival?”
“I’ve been to carnivals.”
“That’s not the same level of analysis.”
She shrugs, one shoulder, the international signal for I don’t want to get into it. “Some people pay attention.”
“Some people,” I agree, “and then there are people like you, who pay attention like it’s a full-contact sport.” I lean against the frame. “The spacing is off because it was set by someone who’d had three drinks. I’ll fix it before opening.”
“How?”
“Move the center bottles two inches left. Changes the throw angle and gives the outside approach a real chance.” I pause. “Still not easy. But fair.”
She looks at me with that expression again, the recalibrating one. Like she keeps encountering a version of me that’s slightly different from the one she’d prepared for. I find this enormously satisfying.
“Why bother?” she asks. “Rigged makes more money.”
“Sure. And people feel cheated, and they don’t come back. They don’t tell their friends the carnival’s worth it.” I shrug. “Short con versus long game. I prefer the long game. Reputation means a lot in this town.”
“You don’t seem like a long game person.”
“I seem like a lot of things I’m not,” I say pleasantly. “You probably know something about that.”
The beat that follows is different from the previous ones. Quieter. She holds my gaze for a second and what’s in her eyes is sharp and real and something I can’t entirely name. It’s not quite a warning, not quite acknowledgment. Somewhere in between.
Then she looks away at the prize display. “What’s the best prize?”
“Depends on your criteria.”
“Assume my criteria is beating the game.”
“The oversized bear is the obvious marker, but it’s also the decoy.
Everyone shoots for the bear, no one wants to carry the bear.
The real prize is that.” I point at a small, battered-looking trophy cup on the top shelf, incongruent among the plush animals.
“It’s from the very first carnival. Sixty years old.
We put it up every year and nobody’s ever asked for it. ”
She looks at it for a long moment. “Because nobody knows what it is.”
“Because nobody asks.”
“I’m asking.”
“It’s not open yet.”
She turns to look at me. “I know it’s not open yet. I’m asking what it is.”
“First prize from the 1964 inaugural carnival. Pie competition, I think, which is embarrassing given what the games have become, but history is history.” I pause. “Why do you want it?”
“I don’t. I just want to know how things truly exist as opposed to how they are shown.
And that sits differently. I look at her looking at the trophy and something that has been running at its usual forward momentum in my chest does a brief, unfamiliar thing, like a gear catching.
She means it generally. She almost certainly means it generally.
But she says it like someone who’s been on the wrong end of that gap—between what’s displayed and what’s real—in a way that has cost her something substantial.
“Yeah,” I agree, after a moment. “Me too.”
She looks at me, and this time the look is quick and a little unguarded, like she didn’t expect that answer and hasn’t had time to prepare a response to it. Then she does the thing where she files it and moves on, that rapid internal adjustment I’ve been watching her do all morning.
“Show me the rest,” she says.
So I show her the rest.
We do the full loop. Game alley, food row, the maze, the river path, the central stage still being rigged with its lighting and speaker towers.
I do not take her to Ryan’s observation point on the upper deck because that feels like too much, too fast. She’d clock it as surveillance the second she saw the sightlines, and she’d be right.
She asks good questions. Practical questions about logistics and setup and crowd flow, and underneath them she’s mapping something.
I’m good at reading people, and I’m reading her.
There’s a purpose to her attention that goes beyond curiosity and sits somewhere in the territory of someone who likes to know where the exits are in every situation.
It should make me cautious. Ryan would be cautious.
Archer is already cautious and suspicious and probably writing risk assessments in his head.
I find it interesting. She is a person with context I don’t have yet, and I want the context, and the way to get it is not to ask directly—she’ll shut it down, I’ve already seen how she handles direct—but to be interesting enough that she keeps talking.
Good thing I’m interesting.
“You’re not from a small town,” I say, at the river path, where the trees come in close, the water sounds change, and the carnival noise drops by half.
“What gave it away?”