Dressed, she let Lala secure her with chains and shackles that didn’t really lock. Then when Mirela slid her paperback novel beneath the table and gave them a nod, Lala led Rommily out the tent onto the midway, where she would serve as a living advertisement for the wonder customers would find inside.
Overhead, static blared from a speaker mounted on a tall pole, then organ music poured forth, its playful notes dancing up and down the oracle’s spine, spinning around and around in her head like the stylized mermaid and unicorn seats on the carousel. The music was calming, some nights, because it signified a routine she knew well. But tonight the notes made her dizzy.
The oracle’s gaze lost focus. Her eyes closed as she chased the melody in her head, winding down mischievous paths and around dark corners. She didn’t notice when the carnival gates opened or the crowd appeared. She didn’t notice when Lala launched into her spiel.
The music felt odd tonight.
Laughter broke into the oracle’s thoughts and her eyes flew open as a father passed by the fortune-teller’s tent, tickling a toddler whose hair was fixed in blond pigtails.
“Cradle and all...” Rommily mumbled, her gaze glued to the child as terrifying images flickered deep in her mind. The crowd seemed to blur as her focus skipped from face to face, searching for another piece of a puzzle she would never be able to fully assemble.
Minutes later, a man and woman pushed a stroller down the midway. Rommily stared into it as it passed, and her eyes glazed into solid white orbs. “Out with the bathwater!” People turned toward the oracle and her petite female handler, intrigued by what they assumed to be part of the show. “Wednesday’s child! From the cradle to the grave!”
Parents pulled their children closer. The crowd began to murmur, and the whispered word reaping met Rommily’s ears.
Lala’s sales pitch ended in midsentence as she tried to shush her sister. But Rommily’s message—unclear as it was—could not go unheard.
“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world!”
Calliope music shrieked from the speakers just off the midway, its grating notes bouncing around my head like the ricochet of a whimsical bullet. Night after night, the iconic circus music managed to overwhelm all the other sounds of the menagerie, no matter how loud the cries of the barkers and buzz of the crowd grew.
Not that there was much of a crowd on the midway, after 10:00 p.m. The main event drew most of the customers into the big top for the last two hours of every evening, leaving only stragglers to knock down mermaid-shaped cutouts with water guns and toss rings onto an inflatable minotaur’s plastic horns. Or to visit the exhibits.
“Delilah!”
I turned toward the sound of my name to find Lala at her post in front of the fortune-teller’s tent. Folding my arms over my clipboard, I crossed the sawdust-strewn path toward her, sidestepping a little boy eating a melting ice-cream cone while his father threw darts at the balloon breasts of a cartoon-style siren. My head throbbed from the music and my feet ached from another eighteen-hour workday, but I put on a smile for Lala.
She was living her dream.
“How’d we do?” the youngest of the three oracles asked, crossing her arms over a red Metzger’s Menagerie polo. She’d filled out a bit with proper nutrition, since our coup of the menagerie, but the true source of her newfound confidence was the hours she spent watching television and listening to the radio while she worked, immersing herself in human culture. Despite her youth—she was barely nineteen—Lala had become one of our most self-assured and dependable liaisons with human society, and it certainly didn’t hurt that she looked completely human when she wasn’t in the grip of a vision.
“Um...” I checked the figure at the bottom of the form clipped to my clipboard. “Fifty-one thousand, two hundred seventy-two dollars.” Gross. In one night.
“That’s almost a thousand dollars more than last night.” Lala’s brown eyes shone in the light from a nearby pole. “That’s good, right?”
“It’s very good.” That was nearly twice what I’d made in a year as a bank teller, before I was “exposed” and sold into the menagerie. I should have been thrilled, especially considering that at $104 per ticket, admission wasn’t exactly affordable for the nine-to-fivers and minimum wagers who made up most of our customer base. Yet people kept paying night after night, in town after tiny, rural town.
“We’ll be near Tucson in a couple of days, right? I know we have bills and things, but do we have enough?” Her wide-eyed optimism made me feel guilty for being the bearer of bad news.
“Lala, we don’t have any. The money’s spent before we even make it.”
“What? All of it?” Unshed tears seem to magnify her eyes. “But we’re going to be within a few miles of Gael’s son.”
Like most of us, Lala got invested in every cryptid we tried to buy from the other menageries, preserves and labs that owned them. But this one was personal for her. She was the one who’d found the berserker’s son, in a vision.
“We have to buy him, Delilah. That’s the whole point of this, right?” She spread her arms to take in the entire menagerie, and our perilous, secret possession of it. “So pay something late. We only need twelve thousand dollars.”
Right after we’d taken over the menagerie, I would have paid it in a heartbeat to free one of our fellow cryptids from captivity. In fact, I’d done just that, before I had a handle on the menagerie’s finances. Before I’d realized how dire our financial situation really was.
I’d handled tens of thousands of dollars in cash nearly every night since we took over the menagerie, but the vast majority of it went to paying our operating costs. Taxes. Licenses and permits in every single town. Fairground rental fees. Inspections. Food. Fuel. Maintenance. And insurance. That was the big one. Insurance alone cost Metzger’s Menagerie more than a million a year. And we were only getting off that easily because Rudolph Metzger hadn’t reported most of our recent “incidents” to the insurance company—some, because the old man was trying to cut corners, and some because he was no longer in a position of authority at the menagerie.
We’d shipped him south of the border in one of his own menagerie cages, as a peace offering to the marid sultan, whose only daughter had died during our revolt.
If the insurance company knew about everything Metzger had covered up, our coup of the menagerie would have been exposed long ago, not because a customer saw through our masquerade, but because of simple, stupid bankruptcy.
Even so, we sat on the verge of that very catastrophe on a nightly basis.
“Lala, we’re already paying bills late. If that gets any worse, they’ll start foreclosing on things.” Old man Metzger had bought much of his equipment on credit. Ironically, we no longer needed most of it, since we were running our own show now and only selling the illusion of captivity. But we couldn’t return any of it without explaining why our creatures and hybrids no longer needed to be restrained or sedated.
“There has to be a way,” the young oracle insisted, heartbreak shining in her eyes.
“Maybe there is. I don’t want everyone to get their hopes up, but I was thinking about asking Renata if she’d be willing to help.”
“Oh!” Lala jumped and clenched her fists in excitement.
“Shhh!” I stepped in front of her, trying to shield her delight from the man running the funnel cake stand. The game booths and food stands—everything other than the actual menagerie—belonged