Read Online Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine, Kiri Moth - Free Book Online

girl.
    Her black hair is cut close to her scalp, like all the soldiers, and her golden skin is sallow from hunger, but her dark eyes are sparkling.
    She hops nimbly down the back of the scaffold and walks to the edge of the ring.
    “I want to join you,” she says to the strongman.
    She doesn’t say she wants to audition. It doesn’t occur to her that there can be a question of her merit. She knows she can do anything they ask of her. It’s a matter of routine. The thing Tresaulti has that she wants is a home.
    (She’s an excellent soldier for shimmying through iron grates, but she has a tendency to hang behind when the fighting starts, like she’s not sure if the battle is worth it, and nobody has time for a hesitant soldier. She’s been passed around assignments more times than she can count, for not wanting to die.)
    “I see,” says the strongman. “What for?”
    “Trapeze,” she says.
    From his position on the rig, one of the trapeze men grins and flexes his feet. “Want to step up, girly?”
    She holds out an arm to the strongman.
    He lifts her one-handed and deposits her onto the trapeze (“Name’s Big George”), who has laid out flat and made himself into a table again, a knot of immovable muscle; she is standing on his shins, arms behind her, wrists tight around his long brass arms for balance.
    She pushes back and forth until she has the speed and height she needs; she is embarrassed at first to be standing on a living thing instead of a bar or a rope, until she looks over her shoulder and sees that George doesn’t seem to mind. He looks strangely content, smiling absently like any child on a swing. Then she pushes like she means it, her heels digging in for leverage.
    She waits for the apex of the swing, lets go and jumps; she tucks in on herself once (touches her toes, then dives, her feet trailing like a comet’s tail), grabbing George’s feet just in time, letting her legs swing around and behind her as they soar backwards.
    “Again,” she says, mostly to herself, already hooking her feet around his ankles so she can swing by her feet for the next jump.
    The tent is quiet after that—just the creak of Big George’s hands against the rigging and the sound of skin on skin when she catches herself on his feet, and once on his shin, from underestimating the speed of the pendulum swing.
    “Sorry,” she says.
    Big George smiles and says, “I don’t even notice.”
    A woman says, “How old are you?”
    Ying looks up—she had been about to jump, but she stops at the last second, wrenching her shoulder to grab at George’s arm to steady herself.
    “Fourteen,” she says. (It sounds old enough to do something like this, anyway.)
    “Come down from there,” says the woman.
    The strongman is standing at the far end of the tent, with the woman, and is making no move to help her. She glances up for a few seconds—then she shimmies up George’s arm, across the rigging to the support pole, slides quickly down. (She sees the strongman smiling; she must have done right.)
    When Ying’s on the ground, the woman says, “I’ll take you to the aerialists’ trailer. Do you have anything?”
    She’s wearing all she owns. She shakes her head.
    The trailer looks like it’s been cobbled together from a dozen other trailers and nailed at the last second to a truck bed. It’s painted gold and green, and the windows have cheap shades in them. (That night, she sees the shades are just paper; when they’re on the road and they want to look out, they have to peel away the dingy tape first.)
    The inside of the trailer has a small open area near the door, studded with tables and a few rickety chairs and some open shelves bolted to the walls. Behind that is the narrow tunnel of bunks stacked three high.
    There are three women inside. Two of them are playing cards at one of the tables bolted to the floor. The third is standing in the back, stretching one foot on the topmost bunk, resting her cheek on her knee.