Page 49 of Magic for Nothing

A woman sat outside the reptile trailer, a small, spade-nosed snake twined around the fingers of her right hand and a cigarette clamped between the fingers of her left. She was wearing a pink-and-red sari over hot pants and what looked like a sports bra, and her long black hair was a tangled mess containing at least three more snakes, if the variously colored scales peeking through were any indication.

I let myself into the supply tent, dropping my box of plush toys next to the disinterested man whose job it was to check them back in. He grunted acknowledgment. That was all he did: he didn’t even look up from his clipboard as I turned and walked back out again.

The woman with the snake took a long drag off her cigarette, blowing it out slowly before she turned to look at me. “Morning, new blood,” she said.

“Morning,” I said carefully. “I’m Timpani. You are . . . ?”

“Ananta,” she said, returning her attention to the snake on her hand. “What are you running from, little drum girl?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Life, I guess. I grew up with the carnival. Not having it anymore didn’t make sense. So I’m running away from figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.” All of that was technically true, even if it was mostly bullshit at the same time. I thought. I hoped.

When the hell did everything get so complicated?

“Well, this is a great place to run away to,” she said, and took another drag off her cigarette. “Nobody’s going to come looking for you here.”

“I hope that’s true.”

“Has been so far for me.” She held up her hand so I could see the snake she was holding. “This is a hognose. He’s venomous but good-natured and short-toothed, which makes him unlikely to bite. He can’t be out of his tank when we have townies here, for insurance reasons, so I wanted to let him get some air before we opened.”

“He’s beautiful.”

“All my snakes are beautiful.”

An awkward silence fell between us—awkward on my part, just silent on hers. I wanted to ask whether she was a wadjet, based on the scrambled cues she was putting off. I couldn’t do it. The girl I was pretending to be wouldn’t know what a wadjet was, much less that they could be identified by a laissez faire attitude about poisons, being immune to essentially all of them.

I’d never stopped before to consider how much of an advantage my family name was in the work we did. Back home, I could walk up to cryptids, or to people I suspected of being cryptids, and count on my family name—the weight of it, the history of it—to pull me through. Now, without the word “Price” to open doors for me, I was left standing on the outside, trying to figure out how I was supposed to get myself in. If Ananta was a wadjet, I had no way of making her trust me enough to say so.

Finally, I coughed, and asked, “How long have you been with the show?”

“Six years and counting,” she said. “Emery has been good to me. I own the RV where you’re sleeping, drum girl, did you know that? It’s my storage space. When we’re on the road, that’s where I sleep.”

“In the room where I’m currently staying?”

“No.” She sounded amused. “On the other side, among my snakes. I hope you don’t snore. You’ll be a poor bedfellow, if you do.”

The image of sleeping completely surrounded by snakes was enough to make me shiver. I suppressed it and said, “I don’t snore, but I do scream when something slithers under the covers unexpectedly.”

Ananta’s smile was swift and sharp. “Then we’ll do fine. You might want to move along. I’m about to air out my rattlesnakes.”

I moved along.

The midway was coming alive, but I didn’t have a part in any of it. The stuffed animal job had been a sop, something Emery threw at me to keep me busy while Sam did his morning workout and she planned the night’s show. This whole carnival was an odd hybrid of past and present, blending archaic traditions with modern ideas about layout and design. And, like any show, it had the capacity to keep its own counsel.

I tried to breathe normally, to relax into the moment as I walked through the shadow of the Ferris wheel and into the corridor of slumbering rides, their mechanical arms reaching for the sky like giants praying to some unknowable god. Please let us have another good night; please let us continue to operate smoothly, without needing repairs or replacement or anything else so expensive as to run the risk of pushing us into the red; please let the townies go home happy, telling their friends to come and see the wonders of the carnival.

Please let the townies go home at all.

I might have missed the hand, if I’d been walking with someone else; if I hadn’t been looking at everything around me with quite so much focus, quite so much simple longing for answers. It was a small thing, pale and almost hidden by the base of the Scrambler, which was raised nearly three feet off the ground by the mechanisms that kept it spinning. The fingers were curled inward, like the legs of a dead or dying insect, and there was no way in the world for it to be anything other than what it was. All the tricks of light in the world couldn’t have made it look any less like a hand.

My mouth went dry and a wave of dizziness washed over me as the blood drained from my head. I caught myself on the nearest railing, careful to touch it only with my palm, which would leave no fingerprints; if this was about to become a crime scene, the police wouldn’t be able to place me here with any certainty. It wasn’t much. It was, under the circumstances, the best that I could do.

“Hello?” My voice sounded weak, querulous; it broke at the end of the word.

The owner of the hand did not respond.

I took a step toward the Scrambler. When the hand didn’t move, I took another, until I was next to the ride. I crouched. The hand was attached to a woman, and the woman was lying on the ground, eyes closed. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she could have been a townie, and she could have been someone with the carnival who I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet yet, and it didn’t matter either way, because I couldn’t see her breathing.

Antimony Price wouldn’t scream. Antimony Price would assess the situation calmly, figure out her next steps, and begin putting her plan into action. It was sort of nice not to be Antimony Price for a change. My scream was loud enough to send the crows roosting atop the ride scattering into the sky, and the echoes of it lingered. Just me, the maybe-dead girl, and the scream.