CHAPTER ONE #3
“If you’re offering to model the girdle for us, I’m afraid it wasn’t big enough to fit your ego,” I reply, stepping forward to run my finger through the edge of time.
I’ve never enjoyed the feeling, like cold electricity.
Still, it’s a necessary test to verify the carousel’s health.
Kind of like I’m checking its vitals. The carousel normally hums during my assessment, sending waves of ice coursing through my bones, but it’s quieter today.
Strange, but a welcome reprieve from its all-powerful, omniscient presence. We all need our rest, I suppose.
I narrow my eyes in Everest’s direction. “And if it were up to you, we would have gotten stuck there. I told you that you gave us too little string.”
Ender shrinks away. Coward.
Everest, on the other hand, loves riling me up. “It was a small rot. I gave you the same amount as last time.”
This argument has been wrung out more than an old rag. “It wasn’t enough last trip, either. We were this close to losing Beam back then because she wandered off too far from the line. Ender had to manifest himself and be carried back.”
“Did not,” Ender mutters, still looking faint.
Everest sports a goofy smile and leans forward in a reminder of how much I have to crane my neck to look up at his face. Light brown freckles smatter his cheeks. “Maybe I just enjoy keeping you on your toes, doc.”
“Maybe you’re just a–”
“Sadistic, masochistic control freak,” someone interrupts in a sing-song voice.
Everest and I both turn to see a pale grey Chinese woman gliding through a cluster of cedar trees. She’s wearing a high-waisted floral skirt that swishes around her hips, paired with a frilly blouse and a dramatic feathered hat.
“Come on, Geneva, she hasn’t called me that in nearly two-hundred years,” Everest says, nudging my shoulder.
I cross my arms. “It’s never too late for a reprisal.”
Geneva doesn’t look impressed. “It may be twilight, my lovelies, but your ruckus is waking everybody up.”
“You don’t actually sleep,” I remind her. But my eyes dart across the horizon, noting the places where the air shimmers as the fair stirs to life.
The evening paints the sky a luscious baby pink, casting the main circus tent, with its rippling sapphire and silver bands, in a rose hue.
The cinched drapes of the entrance glisten as silver bodies emerge from the darkness and voices of curious residents chime with the whistle of the wind.
Right outside lies a bright-blue, banana-shaped cart sitting stagnant on golden wheels.
A long, grey tightrope extends above it, all the way to the other tents, over the toy train tracks, and to the rows of vendor booths filled with food, plush toys, and games.
All this is tucked into the lush lap of a range of snow-capped mountains, carpeted with evergreen trees.
This place sprawls far beyond what the eye can see, but it’s actually quite small once you’ve lived here for four hundred and eighty-six years (eighty-seven today, but who’s counting?) with no one but ghosts for company.
Even smaller when you can’t leave.
“We do not sleep, traditionally,” Geneva corrects me. “We don’t like being outside in the daylight because–”
“The sun makes you more invisible,” I interrupt, looking longingly in the direction of my tent.
The gold button weighs heavy in my pocket, and I’d like to examine it during the few moments of peace and quiet before dusk turns to night and this place comes alive.
That’s a figure of speech, of course. “You’ve been dead for centuries; get over it. ”
Geneva tuts at me. “Such a foul mood today, Ryka.”
“Did the carousel pull you in somewhere unpleasant again?” Everest asks, tapping his fingers along his elbow. “Remember when you got sucked into the underwater cave in–”
“Do I look like I was underwater?” I grit out.
“That was not fun,” Ender says, nodding glumly. “Ryka scared me. You really should know how to swim.”
“She knows how to swim,” Beam says. My heart warms as she soars to my side.
“She was paddling in the wrong direction!” Ender says. Everest and Geneva chuckle, and I smile despite the horrific memory of diving into deeper, darker waters before Beam and Ender turned me around.
“You try standing in front of a carousel one second and drowning the next,” I argue half-heartedly.
“Which is why you prepare for all possibilities,” Everest replies, his eyes twinkling. “Isn’t that rule number three?”
“Two,” Beam and I say together just as a strange sensation creeps over me, like the tip of a blade run along my spine.
A gasp ripples through a crowd of ghosts that wander in close proximity to us. I’m so disoriented that it takes a moment to realize they’re gaping in our direction.
Geneva stumbles backwards, and Ender’s face turns an even more ghostly white.
“What is it?” I ask.
Ender points behind me.
I turn, and my stomach plummets like a boulder tipped off a cliff.
The carousel is still spinning, except there’s another string that’s turned black.
But instead of running in a straight line, as it normally does when rot occurs, the darkness splinters into webs, tendrils violating the swath of silver.
We can only watch in dismay as it grows, until the fabric of time looks more like a cracked vase.
The sun dips behind the farthest mountain peak, plunging us into a searing cold.
“Well,” Everest says quietly, his cheery tone noticeably tempered. “That’s certainly not supposed to happen.”