“—just out back,” I finish, waving and slipping out before any of them can stop me. There’s less commotion in our neighborhood than near the Menagerie and Skull Gate. Plus, I have my illusions to obscure me. I’m not worried.
The night air is sticky, yet refreshing compared to the tension with the others inside. Thankfully, Gill has disappeared—skulked back to his tent, where he’ll probably keep to himself the rest of the night, reading another one of his boring novels, where nothing exciting or romantic ever happens, and the reader always learns some righteous lesson in the end.
Lightning bugs blink within clouds of gnats, circling my face. The smoke that envelops Gomorrah utterly blocks out any view of the sky. The smoke is part of Gomorrah’s legend: once upon a time, we were burned to the ground. But we did not die. Instead we kept burning, kept moving, kept growing. The smoke surrounds us, even if we no longer burn. There is no fire, but sometimes, if you catch yourself around Gomorrah’s edges, the air thickens from stifling heat and the lanterns glow a little bit brighter. It reminds me of walking into the city’s memory—a very ancient memory.
This section of Gomorrah is lit by white torchlights and paper lanterns, which wear golden halos in the gray fog. Everyone in the Festival seems like a silhouette, a shadow of an actual person. It makes it easy to get lost and, depending where you are in Gomorrah, never be found again.
I scan the area beside my tent—a small clearing that serves as the back of two other tents, which house a family of fortune-workers and a silk salesman. Jiafu is nowhere. We usually meet outside after jobs, so why isn’t he here? If he’s skipping out on me, I swear, he’ll wake up tomorrow thinking there are dung beetles crawling out of his nostrils. I have a hard time believing Jiafu, the master of all crooks, would be scared of a few officials.
I sit on the grass, facing toward the thousands of tents that make up the Gomorrah Festival, the tallest being the Menagerie at the center. The family-friendly attractions—if you could call anything at Gomorrah family-friendly—are closest to the entrance, like games, circuses and my freak show. The majority of the Festival is in the back—private tents for prettymen and prettywomen, bars and gambling. We call that area the Downhill. Of the thousands of people who live in Gomorrah, I know the fewest from there.
Jiafu has five minutes before I get angry.
To the left, something catches my eye. A golden centipede wriggles down a tent post, and I suck in my breath and examine it. It’s the size of my pinky but twice as wide, with beady black eyes and soft fuzz. I gently pick it up and let it tickle my palm with its hundred feet.
I don’t remember when my bug collection began. I have over three hundred insects, gathered from various regions where the Festival has taken me, both in the Up-Mountains and Down-Mountains. A charm-worker down the way preserves them for me in glass vials, which I keep for decoration in my room—both for the aesthetics and to ensure that Nicoleta rarely comes in to nag me. Occasionally Villiam will gift me a book of local insects so I can learn about the ones in my collection. I like to consider myself an expert on all creepy crawlies. Probably because they make other people uncomfortable, but I see just how unique and fascinating they are. Highly underrated creatures. The bugs and I have this in common.
A horn blares across Gomorrah. Followed by screams.
“What the hell is that?” I wonder aloud. The centipede crawls up my wrist and arm, unperturbed. It sounded like a city horn from Frice. Maybe the officials are leaving.
I tiptoe around our three tents—the two where we sleep, and the Freak Show’s tent—wishing I wasn’t alone, in case I do need to face an official. Wishing we, like most of Gomorrah’s residents, lived near the Festival’s perimeter, not along a main path.
Across from the Freak Show tent lives another fortune-worker, and she—always determined to be the first on Gomorrah’s lengthy grapevine—slips out down the path to investigate the commotion approaching our neighborhood. I creep near one of the torch poles to be closer to the light.
An official on horseback trots down our path. By the way he scans the area, he’s looking for something or someone. Perhaps he’s rounding up the Frician citizens and marching them back to their city. The noise covered his approach, so I haven’t had time to prepare an illusion. I’m exposed.
The official stares at me, his face contorted in disgust. The centipede drops from my arm into the grass, but I don’t dare move to search for it. After a few tense moments, the official passes. I let out a sigh of relief.
I head back inside my tent, thinking I’ll just cut through the stage area to the back. It’s safer to be out of sight. And clearly Jiafu isn’t coming.
The show tent is empty, all the audience chairs vacant and the ground littered with kettle-corn kernels. I squint in the darkness. There’s something on the stage, but I can’t tell what it is.
“Hello?” I say, in case it’s a person. No one answers.
I creep closer to the stage and then climb up the steps. Something cracks under my sandal. The floor glistens. I’m standing in a mess of water and glass.
A figure lies on the floor, unmoving and limp. My eyes slowly adjust, so I can tell it’s a man lying facedown. He lies on a bed of broken glass and a puddle of water in the dead center of the stage.
I scream and then root around my pockets for a match, my hands trembling. I find one, strike it and bend down to the man’s body, bracing myself for my worst suspicions to be confirmed. I instantly recognize his dark hair, the grooves on both sides of his neck and his webbed hands.
It’s Gill.
I scream his name and then drop to the floor and roll him over. The back of his shirt is covered in blood. I shake him a few times, but he never responds. I rest his head on my lap, and blood dribbles from his mouth down his chin. “Gill. Gill,” I plead. I check his pulse, but find none.
None.
“No. No. No.” This is impossible. Gill can’t be dead. He’s my illusion. His body, though it feels solid, is only a figment of my imagination. No one can kill him, because he doesn’t truly exist.
Hesitantly, I lean him on his side and lift up his shirt, exposing the half dozen stab wounds across his back. They are a jagged, messy and oozing contrast to the smooth and translucent silver of his skin. My stomach wretches. I roll him onto his back once more and hug him closer.
I’m struck with a sudden inspiration; a flicker of hope. I can fix this. I can make him disappear. I can make him disappear and he’ll come back, just like before.
I grasp for my Strings and find Gill’s tethered among them. I gather them into a ball and toss them into his Trunk, a section of my mind I rarely visit except to make the illusions disappear. His Strings are lighter than usual, as if strands of hair rather than proper threads. Though the Trunk is open and full of Gill’s Strings, he doesn’t vanish from the stage as he should. I cry out in frustration. Why won’t he disappear?
His body remains in my arms, dead.
None of this makes sense.
I run my hands down his limp arm to his fingertips, to a shard of glass on the stage floor. The wheeled platform of the tank lies a few feet away. This glass couldn’t have broken by accident—it’s thick, made especially for Gill’s act during the show. Someone shattered it on purpose and then, afterward, stabbed him while he suffocated.
Someone, somehow, murdered him.
The