Show Time

The way Marie saw it, this couldn't have been just some act of malice. It didn't make sense. Circus folk, in her experience with them, were all untrustworthy freaks, but they were all untrustworthy freaks who looked out for each other and silently agreed to only pick normal people's pockets and not each other's. And acrobats, why, they had to be an especially honorable kind of untrustworthy, catching each other from mid-air as they did. Even if she hadn't spent the previous evening smitten with the acrobat boys, it didn't make sense for them to behave so carelessly.

Therefore, there were two possible explanations. One was that this was some part of the show. the threat of danger, carefully controlled, to give the audience a thrill. Even as she thought it, following Asmodeus and Colette as they walked from a safe, hidden distance, it made sense. The crowds would be simply bubbling. Surely news of the circus was even now crashing across the town in waves - the intrigue! The drama! Already it would be reaching ladies in their parlors, who would send messages to their husbands at work asking for tickets - for which show? They would want to see the whole act, the villains and the heroes in their ongoing combat. They would hover around before the show, hardly able to attend their cotton candy, their attentions taken by the story of the disaster, retold by the side shows in whispers. Alexandra would foretell misfortune in the district housing the Hirondelle, Asmodeus would do little tricks with flames, Marguerite would tell of her heroic rescue of the animals in dramatic, angry tones.

The alternative, which occurred to her as she settled in her spot in the bushes, was that God was punishing them for Marguerite's evil science. God, who in Marie's head had a voice identical to one of the nuns at the St. Adelaide Home for Children, did not like science, Marie had always been told, and surely Marguerite's mad machines counted as those violations against Heaven and Nature which Marie had often heard about. The Hirondelle boys might even be demons. It seemed likely.

She was briefly distracted from this train of thought by Asmodeus announcing that Colette was his wife - Marie had, in her musings, missed the beginning of the story. Determined not to let her mind wander again from information that might clear everything up, she scaled a nearby tree, inching onto the branch - a difficult task, wearing so many more clothes than usual.

It was unnerving to see Colette so upset. Not an act, then, or else a particularly good one. Marie shuddered and made a mental note to ask Alexandra about demons later.

At that moment, the branch broke, and Marie tumbled out, landing rather awkwardly on her back. She scrambled to her feet, with an extraordinary lack of grace for someone accustomed to flying through the sky.

"Ah, Mary, you're just who I wanted to see," said Asmodeus, which made Marie's cheeks burn redder - she suspected the magician had known she was there for some time. "If you'd go find Marguerite, and ask if she'd come see me."

Marie's eyes widened. Having decided that Marguerite's experiments were the cause of the whole fiasco, she was in no hurry to be anywhere near the scientist. Still, she nodded and slipped off without a word, back to the center of the circus. The smoke had mostly gone, leaving a vaguely burnt smell and the very wet remains of Marguerite's balloon. The scientist was there, with a few of the stage hands, scavenging things from the mini-laboratory. Marguerite held a notebook, taking stock of what was left.

"Ah, Marguerite," Marie said, from a fair distance away, though mostly because the wreckage was both rather foreboding and surrounded by busy-looking people who seemed to not want to be interrupted. "Asmodeus wants to see you, at his cabin. He sent me to fetch you." She hesitated, shuffling awkwardly - Marguerite looked exhausted when she looked up from her work, and Marie suddenly felt a bit bad for assuming divine retribution - then added, to best convey the seriousness of the situation: "He had his plotting face on."