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than what you pay for it.”
    She laughed and swiped idly at me, and the four of them smiled all the way down the hill toward the city.
    Boss never went into the city herself until the parade (she thought it looked common), and she wouldn’t let me go except to put up the poster (“You’ll go into the city and wind up your mouth and the next thing we know we’ll be in for it,” she said, every time I asked).
    She was in the workshop, fixing something on Panadrome. They stopped talking when I knocked, and there was a little pause before she opened the door.
    “They’ve gone to the city,” I said. “Should we send the brothers?”
    A pair of Grimaldis sometimes followed the dancing girls. They were stronger than the crew, and faster, if it came to it.
    “No,” Boss said, looking out towards the city. (Maybe she could see the dancing girls; with Boss, you could never tell.) “What did you think of it?”
    “Not bad,” I said. Sometimes we set up outside cities that were little more than rubble and tents, but here the dirt paths were clean, and there had been only one soldier guarding the open square where I pasted the poster.
    Boss nodded. “Let’s hope they don’t tear anyone apart for looking at them sideways, and leave it at that.”
    Panadrome said, “I don’t like it.”
    “You don’t like anything,” Boss said as she closed the door, and then it was just the muffled sounds of the two of them arguing it back and forth.
    When the dancing girls came back, they weren’t smiling any more, and Sunyat went right to Boss’s trailer.
    “What happened?” I asked, but Moonlight only shook her head and handed me a burlap bag of slightly rotten fruit.
    By the time I got back from Joe at the food wagon, the crew was taking down the tent poles, rolling up the canvas for Ayar to throw into the trucks, and Boss was standing outside her trailer talking with Elena. Elena had her arms crossed over her chest, and once or twice she cast dark glances over her shoulder, down to the city.
    I hung back until Elena was gone, and went inside.
    “What’s happened?”
    “We’re going,” Boss said, “don’t you have eyes?”
    “Did something happen in the city?”
    Boss looked into her mirror, then sighed as if she’d lost an argument and said, “Someone was asking about us.”
    I wanted to laugh, but something about the way she said it made me nervous, so I shut my mouth and waited.
    But Boss only said, “Make sure we all go on to the next city. No crew stay behind this time.”
    I frowned. “Fuck, who was asking about us?”
    “Probably no one,” Boss said. “And watch your mouth.”
    I caught Minette outside the dancers’ trailer just as the engines were starting.
    “I heard about what happened,” I said (half the truth will get you everywhere). “Are you all right?”
    She shrugged. “I still don’t think it was a government man; some people are nosey, is all.” She shot me a smile that was meant to reassure, and I closed the door and ran to give the driver the Go signal.
    I took that leg of the trip in the trailer with the Grimaldis. I didn’t know what to make of it yet, and I was afraid Boss would find me out if she saw me. She had a way of guessing what your game was just by glancing at you.
    (I didn’t believe anything else terrible could ever really happen to us after Alec died; you think strange things, sometimes.)

17.
    Every performer in the Circus Tresaulti has a costume. The show must deliver real showmanship even in hard times; mechanical people are never as marvelous as mechanical people in suits.
    Ayar and Jonah wear dark pants and high leather soldiers’ boots, and nothing else. Their costumes are their bodies; their adornments are the brass hump and the gleaming ribs, the clockwork lungs and the spine.
    The tumblers dress in red pants and jackets. (Spinto and Altissimo look sick in theirs—too blond to fight the color.) Boss has had the jackets lined in yellow; when they jump or