“We’re losing her,” my ragged whisper is almost inaudible amongst the roar of CPU fans screaming from the server racks.

Sweat pools on my forehead and drips, stinging, into my eyes despite the frigid air blowing through the HVAC system. I wipe it away and try not to stare at the gurney where Carrie lies. It’s hard to pretend I can’t hear the alarms from the half-dozen monitors situated around her either. Pretend there isn’t anything to worry about.

I try and fail because I can’t stop thinking about the fact I killed my wife.

“Dee,” I say, voice cracking. “Start chest compressions.”

Dee springs into action. A short, elfin girl as pale as I am dark, with a hefty blonde ponytail, Dee’s been my right-hand for two years now. She’s hands down the best AI programmer I’ve ever met. With her on the team, the three of us–Carrie, Dee, and I–have created something grand. Something spectacular.

Something I’ll burn to the ground if it means saving Carrie.

I take a harsh, steadying breath, the taste of ozone and sweat sweet on the air and look at the monitor in front of me. The console window in the top right is a stream of insanity–just raw text and gibberish I barely understand. The rest of the window has the design sense of an Emo band’s antiquated MySpace page thanks to Carrie; all pinks and blacks. It makes my eyes bleed, but those control panels are what hold Carrie’s consciousness, so I squint and search.

The server farm, via the bio-digital interface hooked up to the gurney with zip ties and duct-tape, allows the transference of human consciousness out of a body temporarily. With enough practice–and funding–it can move a mind from a body to a machine, or even, if technology advances enough, to a clone.

And it works. At least, it worked until Carrie. We’ve done this dozens of times with Dee and me, but Carrie… Carrie leads the Department of Defense presentation next week and wanted to know what it felt like. She wanted to see the demo simulation in person.

An ache builds in my stomach. It’s getting hard to breathe. My vision blurs… and I scream a curse and hammer the panic away on the stainless-steel desk until my right hand erupts in bright, flushing pain. I might’ve broken something, but it’s worked. That nervous energy has coiled into a tight collection of ball-bearings in my gut, painful but contained.

Find the logic loop, close it, then re-upload her mind, I say to myself, an emotionless cold descending on me. Bring Carrie back.

I search for what feels like days, the harsh screech of alarms, nails on a chalkboard. The CPU core-temp rises as the servers try to load-balance Carrie’s consciousness across them. Digging through panels and parsing live logs searching for something, anything, that shows me how we killed her brain activity when extracting a copy of her mind.

I find nothing. And it’s my fault.

All of this is my fault.

My fingers drop from the keyboard. She’s gone.

I killed her.

From the corner of my eye, I see Dee step away from Carrie’s body, stare at the electrocardiograph.

Carrie has a heartbeat.

Then Dee is on me, shoving me from the chair. “Rahul, move!”

I stumble away, almost face-planting into a server rack, but don’t argue. “What are you doing?”

Dee doesn’t say anything. Instead, she pops open an admin terminal and types, new code flashing on the screen with blinding speed. Dozens–hundreds–of lines of code stream from her fingers and onto the screen, full-formed and perfectly written. It almost looks like she’s copied it from her mind and pasted it onto the terminal.

She wraps the last curly brace and slaps the Enter key.

The server racks exhale. Freezing air from the HVAC system wafts over me. My face feels like it’s covered in icicles.

But the beeps of Carrie’s monitors even out, a steady rhythm instead of frenzied screeches.

Now there’s only one low tone issuing from the row of machines.

Carrie’s chest rises and falls normally, but brain activity is still flat.

I hold out a hand toward Carrie, but Dee waves me away.

My hands are shaking.

Through a tight throat, I whisper, “It’s not working.”

“Shh,” Dee snaps, holding up a trembling finger.

Leaning over her shoulder, I squint at the last line of code. It’s an export directive pointing to a set of IPv6 addresses. None of them look familiar in the least and, as I stare at them, they look like they have too many characters in them.

What the hell is Dee doing?

“That can’t be right,” I mutter, reaching out to the monitor, finger hovering, unsteady next to the line. “Why–what–are you exporting?”

Dee doesn’t answer, but does raise her finger again, slowly pushing my arm out of the way. After a moment, she cocks her head like she’s listening to something, then her fingers drop to the keyboard and flash again.

This time when she finishes, a textual download prompt kicks in. Around us the servers roar as CPU and case fans are pegged, sending a warm breeze coasting through the room despite the HVAC’s best efforts. My phone, sitting on the table next to Dee, tones repeatedly with overheating and storage capacity notifications.

Whatever Dee is doing, it’s pushing our server cluster to the brink. The prompt hits 100%, then flashes again with another progress bar, this one labeled upload.

The electric panel behind the server racks sparks and one of the long rows spins down, groaning like an old man leaning into an easy chair.

“Dee–”

“We already uploaded that chunk, don’t worry.” She looks at the prompts, closes her eyes, then says more to herself than me: “Don’t worry.”

Another series of circuits pop with machine-gun efficiency, crack-crack-crack, and two more racks power down.

And then it’s done. All at once, the fans in the remaining server racks slow and transform back into their gentle hum. The freezing air of the HVAC wipes away the lingering heat.

My eyes snap to the brain wave monitor as it quivers to life. Somehow my hand is on Dee’s shoulder. She’s trembling, cheeks flushed, tongue darting over chapped lips.

“What’d you do, Dee?” I ask, unable to keep the awe from my voice.

Carrie was gone. I was so sure of it.

But she’s not and the flush running through my body is a heady mix of relief, joy, and confusion.

Dee looks up at me, the corners of her mouth twitching into a smile. “I saved her.”

Then her smile fades, and her eyes go dark. There’s something there I can’t quite identify. Something shaky and scared. Dread?

She looks at the monitor. “I saved her.”

The way she says it sounds like she’s not sure.

“Well, I’m all for tearing it down.” The speaker was a busty young woman in a leopard-print trench coat. “There’s absolutely no question that it glorifies oppressive dictatorship.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The man turned up the collar of his vintage tweed jacket against the chill of the foggy fall night. “Vladimir Lenin’s a symbol of idealistic revolution, and we could certainly use some more of that these days.”

“Oppressive, idealistic–who cares?” The woman stumbled in her spike-heeled leather boots, then righted herself. “All I know is the mayor’s office is getting complaints about that stupid statue, and it’s an election year.”

Lenin? Were they talking about my friend Len?

The conversation faded away as the pair made their way down the hill and out of my park. I spent the next few hours worrying. At last the city streets emptied, lights went out in the old brick apartment buildings, and Len’s heavy footsteps grated on the wet pavement.

The sea shook late in the afternoon, just as Kalen was finishing his shift. At first he thought the freighter had run aground, but they were miles from land in the empty Pacific. Stacks of Cubacon brand intermodal containers rattled like mad, and Kalen nearly lost his footing as he darted to tighten the safety straps. Waves drenched his back and the deck resounded with groans of plastic.

“Keep them steady!” Mr. Gupta, one of the ship’s supers, stood against the railing, well out of the way of the teetering Cubes.

A cable snapped on one of the stacks. Kalen darted over to secure it. The sea pitched and shuddered and the Cubes started to tip.

Then the rumbling settled. The waves returned to their usual sway beneath the freighter, and all was quiet on the Alphacorp Seaway.

“That was a big one,” said Mr. Gupta. He waved a hand at the towers of containers. “Get them all inspected. Thoroughly.”

Kalen sighed. He’d never gotten used to earthquakes at sea. They had been more frequent lately, and this one could not have had worse timing. He had already checked the Cubes four times today, but the company required they be inspected from scratch any time there was a weather event, and so he began his rounds all over again.

He mounted a hydraulic ladder and raised himself to the top of a stack, examining the Cubes one at a time. The sun cast long rectangular shadows across the deck. He worked quickly, with practiced efficiency, tugging cables and scanning the multicolored plastic casings.

It took three hours to get to the bottom of the final stack. One more Cube to go and he could finally call it a day. This one was light blue and filled with rice. He tested the security cables by hand, then took out his U-Pad and paced in a circle, running an autoscan for structural integrity. Everything looked good until he rounded the third corner. The device flashed red and squawked at him.

“WARNING. Potential compromise detected.” A blinking light appeared on the screen, indicating a small puncture on the top of the Cube.

“You’re kidding.” Kalen scowled at the big blue container. It was the lowest in a stack of seven; he would need to undo all the cables and get on the crane and move every single one to check on the puncture. It was like a prank, if scanning programs could do pranks.

He checked over his shoulder to make sure there were no supers around. The U-Pad blinked and he sneered at it. “Nope. Not today.” He typed in an override code. The warning disappeared. He made a mental note to double check this one tomorrow, just in case.

This is not a story.

A story follows a sequence of events, one manufacturing the next. The concern of these pages is a single event, both infinite and temporal, which has been distorted to fit the dimensions of a narrative. To ape Bertrand Russell, it occurs “once and for all”. It also occurs over just a few billion years…

The date is October 4th, 1959. A huge evening billows over south Michigan’s bare hills, an ochre moon, blazing through scrappy quills, picks out the valley towns and unkempt roads. A sprawling bruise appears on a dark sloping field. Its gaudy colours are a mud blur, but inner lights throw out a gold web of poles and guy ropes. We can hear clanks and hollers on the wind. The Big Top is up, bunting still being stitched to the masthead while kiosks sprout at its roots. Sparks and blurts from a hurdy-gurdy are masked by the silhouettes of shambling beasts.

There is a Frankenstein flavour to the sight: dead parts sewn together and punishingly charged with life.

One man has truly come alive this evening: Ringmaster Leyton Peters shakes off the road’s malaise with an inspection of the righting tents, wading through mud and laden workers with equivalent disregard. “Look alive!” he yells, or “folks won’t know what hit ‘em!” He halts to watch an entryway heaved upright, a test flicker of the sign’s bulbs: Pallento’s Circus and Menagerie. You won’t believe your senses!

Peters tugs his moustache: his workers share relieved glances and rush to the next task. So long, Leyton Peters, he is thinking. Arise August Pallento, showman, swashbuckler and exhibitor of marvels that defy the very laws of Creation…! Pallento practises his rolled ‘r’s with his chest puffed–then he scowls.

Why is it, he thinks before turning, every trainer I hire smells worse than the animals?

“Well?” he demands.

Griggs’ face is haggard, his fingers, lost without an implement of control, scratch his neck like kittens. “Ringmaster, it looks like one of the elephants–Sheba, one of the African cows–made a run for it, see. Bashed right through the bars, brought down some lights and rampaged off that way.” Griggs points downhill where the trees at the edge of the field kill moonlight.

“Get after it then!” The Great Pallento whitens. “Darn it, why am I seeing you?”

“No need, sir.”

“No need?”

Griggs fumbles to explain. “See, it just looks like it.”

“No. What happened to the dog?”

She’s sitting across from me at a table in an Italian restaurant no different from any other. The same checkered tablecloths. The same red-orange lights kept low so the blind dates can mask their imperfections. But Wolffington and I have known each other for years. And we don’t wear masks anymore.

A mouthful of wine, and a bite of garlic bread to soak it up. “Some weird skin rash. Keeps chewing her tail. Probably just a food allergy.” Wolffington pauses to breathe and swallow. “Dogs have those, same as people, right?”

I nod. “Sure, probably.”

“I never thought this would be my life.” Wolffington shakes her head. “That my biggest worry would be wondering what to feed my dog.”

“We didn’t expect to live this long,” I explain.

A final sip and the wineglass is empty. “We should have, Calino.”

Neither of us is even forty yet.

Instinctively I look away, down at myself. The blue suit, slightly bluer shirt and tie. It hides quite a bit. More than Wolffington’s sleeveless dress. When she raises her left arm to signal for more wine, the flame tattoos that surround it shine in the low lights.

“What do you worry about?” She asks me once the waiter has acknowledged her and hustled back with another bottle.

I consider being honest. If so much time hadn’t passed between us I would risk the truth. But right now I’d rather make her laugh.

“I worry that Blackguard Blythe is going to be up for parole soon.”

Wolffington laughs so hard she snorts fresh wine. She swings her napkin up to keep the liquid from bleeding onto her dress. I admire her for a moment, the way I did back when we were teammates. Her unapologetic, graceless charm.

“It’s terrible that I remember him. He had that top hat, the cape and those bloody smoked glasses.” Wolffington blows her nose on the cloth napkin and wine speckles it, probably permanently. “And his female sidekick.”

“Henchwoman.”

“Sure, what was her name?”

“Miss Anne Thrope.” Even I can’t help but smile.

Wolffington pounds the table with delight. “Right!” Then the full memory returns and she lets the napkin drift back to her lap. Her face is solemn. “We killed her, didn’t we?”

A question that needs no answer. Both of us remember crashing through the skylight of the roller disco. The Flaming Pudding and her sidekick Hot Plate rising up against the flashing lights and whistles. Miss Anne Thrope holding the skaters hostage, all tied together. My hands were tight claws aching to be released. Wolffington had her flask open.

Miss Anne Thrope didn’t back up. If she had decided like any normal henchwoman to scuttle off and let heroes and villains fight it out she would’ve lived to be arrested. But she advanced with her whip and this bizarre, fearless grin.

Our food arrives. Wolffington absently thanks the waiter. I eat quietly, munching pasta without tasting.

The whip had wound itself around Wolffington’s left arm. Her tattoos glowed with genuine fire and the loops of the whip burned away like paper. Another drink from her flask brought fire right out of Wolffington’s fingertips. It drenched Miss Anne Thrope, who screamed and staggered. There was plenty of heat in the room for me to do my job, so I unclenched my fists and my mind, allowed them to seek any nearby metal.

The screws on everybody’s roller skates were perfect. I telepathically ripped out the hot metal and let my hands zigzag in Miss Anne Thrope’s direction, drilling a hundred, near-liquid screws into her burning body.

We didn’t stay. Even at that moment Wolffington and I realized what we’d allowed ourselves to do. It was one thing to kill a supervillain in the heat of battle, so to speak; accidents happen among equals. Miss Anne Thrope wasn’t our equal. She was far more ordinary than Wolffington or I could’ve claimed to be. And we had murdered her.

So there was no untying the hostages. No accepting grateful hugs and handshakes. The two of us ran away to let the police find a smoldering corpse riddled with metal slugs. Pretty soon we ran away from each other.

“Blythe turned himself in after that,” I remind Wolffington.

She sets down her fork. “I know. Wasn’t his master plan to have the roller skaters power a giant hamster wheel that’d generate enough electricity to overload the city’s transformers?”

“Yeah.” Neither of us bothers to smile this time.

Wolffington stares at her left arm. She holds it out across the table and we both stop eating to look at it.

“What the hell made us think we should fight crime, Calino?”

I reach out, put my hand in hers. “We were young and had superpowers. Who doesn’t want to be a hero?” Wolffington tries to pull away but I hold on. “People crave attention from others. Our bad luck we had gifts that got us the attention we wanted.”

The two of us sigh. I let her hand go. “Do you ever use your power?” She asks softly.

“I still can’t control solid metal, it has to be softened with a heat source. In the middle of a burning building, maybe. But without you?” I shrug.

Wolffington and I look up at one another. A bond deeper than love or sex, the bond we willingly broke could be rebuilt tonight at this restaurant. After years of brief, polite phone calls, when she finally breathed deep and asked to see me again, I wondered if it was to scratch an itch. If she desired to sweep the streets clean of crime with me once more.

“I thought about going solo after we broke up,” Wolffington admits. “Never had the nerve to do it. I missed you, Calino, really. It’s probably why I got the dog. Something loyal and dependent.”

Maybe I should be offended, getting compared to a dog, but I’m not. Working with Wolffington, I understood that she needed me as much as I needed her.

“Know how I fight the urge to use my power?” Wolffington suddenly snatches up her wineglass. “I drink so much my body can’t convert the alcohol into fuel fast enough. I get pissed almost every night, make it impossible to even think about channeling fire through my arm.”

She angrily swallows the drink. I finish my food. Our waiter returns with a dessert menu but Wolffington waves him away.

“Calino, was tonight a mistake?”

Her face is pinched. Tears lurk at the inner edges of her eyes. The pain that gnawed at me ever since I gave up the crime fighting life had already chewed Wolffington apart. It could never be shared, even with someone she loved. Not even with me who went through it all alongside her. The past is nothing but a burden when you don’t believe you’ll live long enough to regret it.

But since I’ve already made Wolffington laugh once this evening, I tempt fate and try again.

“Tonight’s only a mistake if you don’t tell me what kind of dog you got.”

Wolffington doesn’t laugh this time, but she does grin. And the tears are blinked back. She flicks her empty wineglass off the table, where it can do nothing but bounce soundlessly against the thick carpet.

“I think it’s a beagle mix. Here, I have pictures.”

Cordyn sat on the rocky cliff, one knee hugged to their chest, their other foot dangling over the edge. Their chin-length dark hair hid most of their face, and clouds lapped at their ankle, billowing in the wind that swept down from the mountaintop. I hesitated on the path, not sure what I could possibly say, but knowing that I had to say something.

“I’m fine, Arlyn.” Cordyn shifted on the ledge, tucking their wings even tighter to their back. “You should stop worrying about me.”

“I didn’t expect the egg to be so big. So close to hatching.” I stepped off of the path, reached out a hand, then pulled it back before my fingers brushed against their storm-gray feathers. “It was a bit of a shock, realizing that you’ll have to leave so soon.”

The wind swirled around us, revealing Cordyn’s face. Their gaze lingered on the horizon, far off over the cloud ocean. “Do you think there’s really anything under the clouds?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why does no one ever come back, then?”

“Because it’s forbidden. Because there is too much to do to waste time moving backwards.

Because there are insufficient updrafts.” I shrugged. “Because there’s nothing here to come back to.”

“I remember when you were an egg,” Cordyn said. “I remember Lialyn’s face when they held you. It broke their heart to leave so quickly after you hatched.”

“I’m sure they’re waiting for you, under the clouds.”

“I wish I was sure.” Cordyn stood up, towering a full head over me. They reached out and patted my shoulder, their hand warm and comforting. “It’s almost time for dinner. Let’s go home.”

Homestead, Pennsylvania: August 1892

---

1

As the train slowed, Neva cracked open the door to the advance men’s bunkroom and peered inside. “Well, you’re not supposed to be there,” she murmured to the room’s petite, petrified occupant. But her words were drowned out by Brother Paste, who rapped the window at the other end of the railcar and shouted, “Damnation! It’s a sticker war!”

Neva had made her observation to a pale girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen—the age Neva had been when she joined the circus four years ago. The girl looked more terrified than most runaways, but maybe that was because Brother Paste, whose voice was every bit as immense as the man himself, hadn’t stopped shouting.

“The bastards stole a march on us!” he roared as the train eased into the station. “They papered over all our mummies!”

Neva mouthed “Be still” to the runaway and then leaned back to see where the big man was pointing. Lithographs of wild animals and near-naked performers coated the saloon opposite the station, the bar’s sagging walls “mummified” from top to bottom with advertisements for the circus. But while the eye-catching colors were familiar—grassy greens and peacock blues and molten reds more brilliant than any you’d find in even the best magazines—the name was wrong: “Ringling Bros.” instead of “Barnum & Bailey.”

“Would that saloon be ‘The Tipsy Cow?’” asked Floy, the only other regular advance man on board. Unruffled, he was checking the list of pasting contracts.

Brother Paste, halfway through yanking his pasting smock over his head, grunted what sounded like an affirmative. He’d spent the last hour brewing a barrel of his flour-and-water-based adhesive in case they needed to post some last-minute ads. He was probably cursing himself for not making more.

“Advance Car 1 signed the bar’s owner—a Mr. Wilcox—to a pasting contract back in May,” Floy noted. “Cars 2 and 4 confirmed it in June and July.” He struck a line through that portion of the list. “No complimentary tickets for him.”

“He’ll still get a piece of my mind,” Brother Paste growled, finally out of his smock. He hefted one of the rolling pins the advance men used to flatten the lithographs against their intended surfaces. “After we make sure the Ringling crew is good and gone. Come on, then—get yourself something to knock heads with.”

This last was to Neva and the other fill-ins, especially grizzled Ceburn, who was almost as large as Brother Paste. But Ceburn said what he always did—nothing—and the significantly shorter Gemi and Dorian crossed their arms.

“No one said anything about paying us to brawl on our day off,” Neva reminded Brother Paste. “Come get us when you’re sure the Ringlings are gone, and we’ll put up your posters.”

The advance man glared at her, muttered something about “Old men and colored midgets,” and stalked off the car.

Once Floy followed, she turned back to the runaway, who’d had the sense not to repeat whatever she’d done to make the incriminating noise Neva had heard a few moments earlier. “You picked the wrong train, little rube. This is Car 6. It works for the circus, confirming supplies and spreading the word. But it’s not part of it.”

Dorian squeezed his head under Neva’s arm, winked at the runaway, and stretched his face into a wide-eyed smile so ridiculous the poor girl couldn’t help giggling.

“This one, though—he’s an act to himself.” Neva tugged his hair until he withdrew, still beaming like a jack-o’-lantern. “A clown on and off the job. Normally us performers wouldn’t be here, but most of Brother Paste’s team is sick.”

Dorian slid under Neva’s arm backwards this time, clutched his rear end, and made a long, wet farting noise. The runaway giggled again as Gemi—her hands hairier than most men’s—grabbed hold of Dorian’s shoulders and returned him to the main cabin.

“No one asked for an illustration,” Gemi growled.

“The rube came to see ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’” he protested.

“Then stop disillusioning her.”

Neva couldn’t help grinning. “The rest of the circus will be along tomorrow,” she told the runaway. “Stay out of the way and we’ll get you sorted.”

The girl nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Rassy,” she whispered, her voice threaded with hope.

“I’m Neva—Neva Freeman. It’s nice to meet you.”

Before Rassy could respond, Brother Paste bellowed “Trespassing bastards!” from somewhere outside the car. Neva motioned for the runaway to hide, then closed the bunkroom’s door and ran to the nearest window. A second later, she jerked her head back as a pail of paste thunked against the car and coated the glass in white goo. She moved to the next window and did a quick count of the sticky, shouting men outside. “There are at least seven from Ringling’s—no, eight.”

Gemi joined her at the window to watch. Brother Paste and Floy were standing back to back, dripping with paste from another hurled bucket. Even so, they were giving better than they were getting. Brother Paste had laid out two of the rival advance men with his rolling pin, and Floy had jabbed another in the gut with Car 6’s stirring stick, doubling the man over.

But the odds remained bad.

“Maybe we should go out and help,” Gemi said, reflecting Neva’s own thoughts.

“No need,” Dorian replied. “The fight’s coming to us.”

Neva turned in time to see four more of Ringling’s advance men clamber into the car.

“Look at this,” the ugliest said when his eyes lighted on Gemi’s furry arms and chin. “They brought the darkie freakshow.”

“Must be their Gorilla Girl.”

“And that’d make the little man, what? Her chimp husband?”

With a juggler’s grace, Dorian tossed a rolling pin to Gemi and two to Neva.

“I like the taller colored girl, myself.” The first advance man took another step forward and whistled at Neva. “Bet you she’s in their ballet. I might actually pay to see those legs do a kick or two.”

“Who’s the geezer, then?”

Neva offered one of her pins to Ceburn. “He’s our wax man. Makes the best models in the business. And if you don’t get off this car, he’s going to help us wax you.” She hoped it was true; she barely knew the man. He mostly stayed in his compartment on the main train and let his apprentice set up their sculptures at each stop—it had been jarring to see Ceburn volunteer for fill-in duty. But maybe there was more grit to him than he let on.

Or maybe not. When Neva gave him the pin, he just looked at it and blinked.

The Ringling advance men laughed. They were only a few feet away now, brandishing their own pins and fanning out as much as the cluttered car allowed.

“There’s no need for this,” Neva tried, glad her words sounded calm. “We only came along to make a little extra coin. You can keep your posters up for all I care.”

“Too late,” the first advance man sneered, tensing for a lunge.

“And to the fire-eyed maid of smoky war, all hot and bleeding will we offer them,” Dorian intoned, freezing everyone.

“What the hell was that?”

“A monkey quoting Shakespeare to an ass.” Dorian let the words linger in the air a beat before flashing a nastier version of his jack-o’-lantern smile and chucking a rolling pin into the man’s ugly face.

Dorian got two more throws off before the advance men overcame their surprise. Both shots did damage, but not enough to prevent the Ringling goons from charging.

Gemi struck next, landing her blows low and fast. A shin, a knee, an ankle—in a trice, the advance men were all limping and yelping. Neva capitalized by whacking a few more legs, along with a shoulder and an elbow.

Yet Ceburn just stood like a lump off to the side.

If he’d done his share—or even half it—maybe they wouldn’t have lost the advantage. But once the advance men started swinging back, their size and reach quickly won out over the performers’ speed. Dorian went down within seconds, and Gemi soon after.

At which point Neva, woozy from a smack to her temple and inches away from being cornered, stopped holding back and revealed herself to be the biggest freak in the car.

It wasn’t just that she started contorting her body in ways that made her one of the most compelling acts in Barnum & Bailey’s Sideshow. She was flexible to be sure, her muscles more pliable than most of the acrobats’. But she could also stretch her bones. Silently snap and reform them into new positions that defied natural anatomy.

Was it magic? Witchery? Normally, these types of questions kept her from bending publicly in anything but her performances. And even then, she only augmented her twists and turns with minor distortions, small tweaks that were enough to make people marvel at the results without wondering what enabled them.

This idiotic sticker war seemed close to becoming a matter of life or death, however. And her friends were bleeding on the floor. So Neva bent. Compressing her spine so she could duck lower than she should have been able to. Nudging her ribs to the right so she could avoid a jab while staying in place. Extending her legs so she could jump over the backswing.

Lengthening her limbs also let her strike further and more unpredictably. Soon enough, it was the advance men who were retreating, eyes wild as she pressed them with unnatural, off-kilter flurries of her rolling pin. It hurt—bending always hurt. But it was also exhilarating to be this bold, this unleashed, this powerful.

Until three more Ringling advance men flooded onto the railcar, and the odds worsened yet again.

“Watch her,” one of the original assailants warned the newcomers. “She’s like a damn octopus.”

Yet they were too many now, bending or no, and it took less than a minute for her to lose all the ground she’d gained. “Ceburn!” she yelled as a vicious thrust forced her up against the bunkroom door. “Now would be a good time to stop acting like one of your stupid models!”

The jibe wasn’t enough to rouse him, but Rassy’s cry was.

She screamed when the ugly advance man from the first group missed Neva for the umpteenth time and followed his arm’s momentum into the bunkroom door, smashing it open and sprawling face-first into the narrow confines beyond. Neva nearly lost her balance trying not to trip over the man, but something about the fear in Rassy’s voice finally stirred Ceburn—and it made all the difference.

With a howl worthy of the menagerie’s hyenas, the “geezer” bowled into the advance men from behind, sending two flying and another to his knees. Belatedly, the rest turned their attention to the improbably furious sculptor while Neva caught her breath. More reinforcements arrived a second later, as Floy, Brother Paste, and a stranger wearing—of all things—a blue U.S. Army uniform rushed into the car trumpeting various battle cries. Combined with Gemi reviving enough to batter the Ringling crew from below, and Dorian springing up to bewilder them with more Shakespeare (“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste death but once!”), it wasn’t long before Car 6 belonged to Barnum & Bailey again.

“Right,” Brother Paste said once the last of his rivals had tumbled out of the train. “That was a good one. We all in one piece?”

Gemi slumped against the wall and shook her head. “Ceburn’s down. Took a hard hit at the end.”

“Not just down,” Dorian clarified in horrified awe. “They knocked his face off.”

“What?” Neva hurried to where Dorian was kneeling over the sculptor. Rassy crept alongside as the clown pointed to the big man’s nose.

His second nose. The first had been broken off, taking a layer of flesh with it and uncovering a perfectly formed duplicate beneath.

Ceburn had been wearing a wax mask of himself.

And now he was dead.

“They’re intelligent.” Josh Thompson leaned forward, both hands on the console. His legs were trembling. This changed the scope of the mission entirely. In four decades of interstellar travel, humans had only discovered two alien species that were considered potentially intelligent.

Sergeant Aboud raised one of her precisely sculpted eyebrows. “Are you sure? This one doesn’t look too bright to me.” She was watching a security camera feed from the storeroom, where one of the aliens had gotten itself trapped during the attack. It slashed furiously at the wall with its talons, leaving long scratches in the aluminum but making little progress in piercing the material. It could have conceivably scraped open a hole if it concentrated its efforts in one spot, but instead it bounded back and forth from one wall to another in what appeared to be blind panic. Josh could see why the now-deceased crew of the planetary research station had nicknamed the hairless, dog-sized aliens “hoppers.” They hopped like kangaroos. Josh hadn’t been watching a live feed, however. He was playing video of the attack itself. The aliens had used stolen key cards to move through the facility. In the feed from the motor pool camera, two of the creatures clearly observed one of the mechanics use his key card to flee. Then they’d retrieved the other mechanic’s card from her dead body and used it to open the door. The first mechanic hadn’t even made it to the end of the hall. “They’re using tools, and not in a primitive way,” Josh said. “They even blocked open the airlock. Why would they do that if they weren’t trying to make the interior atmosphere hospitable?”

“Maybe they just didn’t want to get trapped in a box.”

“Look at their tactical coordination. They split into teams to herd and isolate individual scientists.”

Aboud shrugged. “Some pack predators on Earth do that.”

“Not like this. The aliens are communicating, coordinating. I’m not sure how. I don’t hear any vocalizations on the video.”

“Maybe ultrasonic or subsonic. I’ll run an analysis. But I still don’t think they’re intelligent, Doc.” Aboud had a habit of calling anyone from the science division “doc.” Most of them did have doctorates, of course, but it still annoyed Josh. He was certain she meant it to be condescending.

Josh returned his attention to the playback just in time to see three of the aliens eviscerate one of the scientists–Doctor Xu, if he remembered the briefing notes correctly. Josh shut his eyes. He was feeling queasy, and it wouldn’t do his rep any good to puke in front of Aboud.

“We’ll know more when we observe them in their natural environment,” Aboud said. “According to the station biologist’s notes, their colony is four klicks southwest of here.”

Of course, the station biologist had also said the hoppers were docile.

Once they’d finished their analysis of the video, Josh followed Aboud down the main hallway where Sylvia Richards, their medical doctor, was bundling one of the dead scientist’s bodies into a black bag with the help of Scott “Perky” Perkins, one of Aboud’s security officers. Purging and restoring the station atmosphere had considerably reduced the stench of rot that greeted them upon arrival, but it was still bad enough here to make Josh’s stomach roil again. Sylvia, however, was whistling something cheerful. It was an odd thing to be doing considering the task at hand, but her quirkiness and constant optimism were a big part of why Josh liked her so much. That and her dimples.

“We’re going to recon the alien colony,” Aboud said.

“Give me a minute to get my gear,” Sylvia replied.

“No, you keep working, Dr. Richards. But prioritize an autopsy of the dead alien, the one the chef managed to kill. I want to know what I’m dealing with. Perky, stay and assist her. And make sure nothing gets into the station before we return.”

“On it, Sarge,” Perky replied.

“Take a close look at the brain structure,” Josh suggested. “I think there’s a chance this is an intelligent species.”

Sylvia’s eyes widened and she drew in a sharp breath, indicating she understood the magnitude of that possibility.

“They’re not intelligent,” Aboud snapped. “Thompson is just having dreams of glory.”

Josh felt heat rising in his neck and cheeks. He turned toward Aboud so Sylvia wouldn’t see him blush. Aboud stepped close and said, “Your job here is to help me understand the aliens’ behavior so what happened to the crew of this station doesn’t happen to us. Don’t get distracted.” She spun away before he could respond.

Josh glanced back at Sylvia. She gave a little shrug accompanied by the crooked smile that made him slightly dizzy. “Um… stay safe,” he said.

“Um, I’m not the one going into the field.” She winked at him. Josh tried to smile, but feared it came off more as a wince. Despite all his training in behavior, he still hadn’t learned how to avoid saying stupid things when talking to pretty women.

“Thompson!” Aboud shouted, halfway down the hall already. “Let’s go. Only four hours until sunset.”

They met up with security officers Lopez and Lopes, or “Z” and “S” as they were called to prevent confusion. Josh didn’t know why they didn’t just go by their first names–Al and Miguel–but it seemed there was nothing soldiers liked better than nicknames.

They went on foot as there was only a single two-man buggy at the station, but the trek was easy. Trappist-1d’s atmospheric pressure, composition, and temperature were similar enough to Earth’s that only oxygen masks were required. A human could even survive several hours without one, though there would be long-term health consequences to that. Gravity was noticeably less than on Earth, which made all their gear feel light. The surface of the planet was about 60% ocean, and of the single, large landmass, 90% was flat plains. Trappist-1d had ceased being geologically active millennia ago.

Almost the entire surface of the plains was covered in a blanket of three-foot-high yellow grass with wheat-like heads and clusters of small, black berries at the base of the stubby leaves that protruded from the stems. It was easy to move through, though the grass left a dusting of yellow particles on their jump suits–pollen, most likely, though Josh had been trained not to assume alien life functioned the same way as life on Earth.

The walk might even have been pleasant if Josh wasn’t so acutely aware that the hoppers were short enough to hide beneath the undulating surface of the grass. After what happened to the station crew, Josh felt a sharp jolt of adrenalin every time the breeze riffled the stalks nearby.