Elysium Summoner Saga Complete

Rain hammered the carnival in thick, relentless sheets, turning the pathways between tents into rivers of brown sludge. A crack of lightning split the sky and for a half-second the whole grounds were white—the scrambling workers, the whipping canvas, the Ferris wheel standing rigid against the storm—before the thunder rolled through and rattled every loose bolt and rusted hinge on the lot. Then, slowly, the downpour thinned to a drizzle. In one of the trailers near the back, a teenage boy with red hair sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, his forehead almost touching the fogged window glass.

Rain taps the window in uneven bursts. Inside, a tower of cardboard boxes lists against the wall beside a mound of clothes that may or may not be clean. Beer cans cluster near the foot of the couch like a small rusted city. The smell is stale and sharp. Dev sits with his knees pulled to his chest, his blood-red hair hanging loose around a face that is swollen on one side, the skin beneath his left eye deepening from yellow-green to something darker. His shirt has a tear along the collar. His blanket, draped over his shoulders, is thin enough to see light through.

Dev sat alone by the window, his slight frame folded against the cold glass. Outside, the rain came down in sheets, pooling in the cracks of the pavement below. He watched a raindrop trace a crooked line down the pane, then another, then another, until his breath fogged the glass and he lost them both. He pressed two fingers to the fog. The window was cold enough to ache. Somewhere behind him, the sounds of the circus camp carried on without him—canvas snapping, someone’s radio, a horse shifting its weight in the mud.

Dev pressed his face into the couch cushion and tried not to make a sound. Across the room, Gary’s belt hung over the back of a chair. It was a thick one, the leather gone dark and soft from use. Dev had learned to read the room by sound alone: the particular weight of Gary’s footsteps, the way the floorboards answered differently depending on how many beers in he was. Tonight the footsteps were slow and deliberate. Dev kept his breathing shallow and stared at the wall, willing someone—anyone—to knock on the door.

Gary’s boots hit the floor hard enough to rattle the empty cans underneath the couch. Dev pulled the pillow over his face. The fridge opened, and the pst of a bottle cap cut through the dark behind his eyelids, followed by the long pull of someone drinking like they were putting out a fire. Dev lay still until the boots moved away. When he opened his eyes, pale morning light was coming in sideways through a gap in the trailer wall. He sat up slowly, folded his blanket into a rough square, and tucked it behind the couch cushion where Gary wouldn’t see it. He pulled on his muscle shirt, black and full of holes, then his jeans, then his boots—both a size too big, both someone else’s.

The smell of bacon fat and coffee reached Dev before anything else did, pulling him in the direction of the breakfast area, though he had somewhere else to be first. He cut through the camp toward the dancers’ trailers, hands in his pockets, keeping his head angled down and to the right out of habit. Before he could knock, the door swung open. The woman filling the frame was small, almost architecturally so—white hair, peachy skin, the slightly pointed ears that marked her as Elven.

At the sight of Dev, she rolled her eyes and jerked her head toward the inside. He ducked through the doorway into the cramped trailer, where the smell of old cigarette smoke had settled into the upholstery and the carpet and the curtains. She took a final drag and pressed the butt into an ashtray already bristling with them, then exhaled a long breath through her nose. “When are you going to stop antagonizing him?” The cherry of her cigarette dimmed and died. “Every time you talk back, you end up getting hurt.” Her eyes moved over the bruise forming under his eye the way you’d look at a weather forecast you’d already known was coming.

Dev sat in front of the cracked mirror, its fracture splitting his reflection into two slightly misaligned halves. Beneath his left eye, the skin had gone deep violet at the center, bleeding out into yellow-green at the edges—last night’s disagreement with his father made visible. He knew the shape of these things by now: he would say something, and Gary would find whatever was closest. This time a fist. Last time a belt. Dev dipped a small sponge into the palette beside him, its cheap foam already stained from previous mornings like this one, and began working the concealer into the bruise in slow circles.

”You’re right,” Dev said, addressing the sponge in his hand as if it were a person, squeezing it until the grey water ran down his wrist. “I should just let him be the alpha and keep my mouth shut.” He scrubbed at a pan that wasn’t getting any cleaner. “I’ll accept that my needs don’t matter as much as his beer. I’ll make sure to thank him after each beating.” He set the pan down and stood there with both hands in the water, staring at nothing. Then he pulled the drain and watched it go. “What else can I do?” he said, still looking at the sink. “It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.”

Lynda tapped a cigarette out of her pack and set it between her lips. The pack’s red label caught the light as she set it down—SMOKING KILLS, it said, in the blunt way that warnings do when nobody is listening. She thumbed her lighter twice before the flame caught, and for a moment the shadows on her face rearranged themselves into something older and more tired than usual. She took a long drag before she spoke. “Dev, I’m just trying to protect you,” she said, exhaling the words along with the smoke. “I’m afraid that one of these days, your smart-ass comments will land you in a situation you can’t joke your way out of.”

”I guess that’s why they call me the devil boy,” Dev snickered, gesturing at the bruise darkening along his jaw. “I always come back for more punishment.” Lynda set down her needle and thread and pressed a damp cloth to the corner of her eye. Dev watched her do it. “Maybe I’ll try finding a new audience for my jokes,” he said, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. “Give Gary some space for now. But no promises—if the moment’s right, I’ll take it.” He glanced up at her. Lynda looked back at him the way a person looks at a door they know leads somewhere cold.

Dev had just finished getting ready. He stood up from the makeup table and gave himself a quick once-over in the cracked mirror propped against the wall, tilting his chin to check that everything was covered. Satisfied, he headed toward the breakfast area. A folding table sat wedged in the corner, its surface a topography of old burns and ring stains. A few dented tin foil pans held the picked-over remnants of the morning’s spread—a heel of pancake going stiff at the edges, a streak of scrambled egg, two strips of bacon so overcooked they had curled into black parentheses. The syrup had congealed around the lip of a nearly empty bottle. Dev moved from table to table, leaning over shoulders, scraping what he could onto a paper plate.

Dev shoveled the last of his bacon into his mouth—rubbery, overcooked, rimmed with black—and washed it down with a long pull of coffee. He grabbed a broom from a nearby barrel and ducked into his tent, where the morning light came through the flap in a single slanted beam, illuminating a constellation of empty cans, crumpled wrappers, and a bottle of whiskey lying on its side, a dark stain spreading out from its mouth into the dirt. He started sweeping from the back. Through the open flap, maybe thirty feet away, Kristy was pressed up against one of the grunt workers, her brown curls falling across his shoulder. She pulled back from the kiss just long enough to catch Dev’s eye. Her smile widened slowly, deliberately. She mouthed something at him. He looked back down at the broom.

The man kissing Kristy was broad and soft, with hair combed flat against his skull and small eyes that found Dev immediately. He crossed the distance between them in a few easy strides and lifted the broom straight out of Dev’s hand. “Oh, Kristy,” he said, in a voice pitched high and swooning, and began waltzing with it, pressing his lips to the handle in long, theatrical kisses. Dev watched him. Then he stepped forward and reached for it. Bruce stopped waltzing. He planted one hand flat against Dev’s chest and shoved. “What makes you think,” he said, dropping the voice, “you can just have her back?” Kristy pulled the broom free without looking at either of them. “That’s enough, Bruce.” She walked away. Bruce watched her go and didn’t move until she had rounded the corner and disappeared. Then he reached into his pocket, produced a fistful of wrappers and cigarette butts, and let them fall at Dev’s feet. He looked down at them, then up at Dev. “Looks like you missed a spot.”

Dev made sure to clean up the mess of the disrespect from Bruce before returning to Gary’s trailer. He looked inside and saw that Gary was missing. As Dev stepped into Gary’s trailer, he was hit with a strong odor of old food and unwashed garments. The living room area was small and cluttered, with empty beer cans, crumpled magazines, and fast-food wrappers scattered across the floor. The sofa looked worn out and stained, evidence of Gary’s heavy drinking. In the kitchen, dishes were piled high in the sink and a layer of grime coated the stove and countertops. The fridge was decorated with magnets and postcards, but inside it held moldy leftovers and expired milk. The bedroom was no better; clothes and shoes lay strewn about, making it difficult for Dev to navigate through. The unmade bed was covered in wrinkled sheets and a lumpy comforter, with cockroaches scurrying along the baseboards.

Stepping into the bathroom, Dev was hit by the smell of mildew and stale urine. The toilet seat was up, the bowl ringed yellow and streaked brown. Around the sink, a tube of toothpaste lay uncapped and flattened, a disposable razor sat in a puddle of its own rust, and a bar of soap had gone soft and gray in its dish. Wet towels sagged from the shower rod. Dev picked through the pile of clothes on the floor until his fingers found the familiar weight of his black robe. He pulled it over his head and smoothed it down over his chest.

Dev walked the long way around the back of the trailers, past the generator and the smell of diesel, until the ground began to slope upward and the grass came back. The hill was not much of a hill—more of a rise where the field ran out—but from the top of it you could see the whole layout: the big top, the midway, the trailers arranged in their loose horseshoe at the back. He stood there with his hands in the pockets of his robe and looked down at it.

The tents and rides were faded and lackluster, their vibrant colors dulled by the elements. The clowns’ painted features were cracked and flaking, their formerly joyful expressions etched into eerie grins. Dev couldn’t help but feel a pang of sadness for the state of the place he once called home. Looking down, he could see everyone was starting to get into their positions, preparing for the opening to the public. He could hear the faint sounds of laughter and excitement as people began to trickle in. But for Dev, the magic of the carnival was long gone. It was just a shell of what it used to be, a painful reminder of the past.

Dev sat on the hill as the carnival below him groaned to life—generators coughing, bulbs stuttering on one by one in the thickening dusk. He watched a family push through the front gates and disappear into the lights. The grass around him was dead in patches where the trucks had parked. He was picking at it when he heard footsteps and looked up to find Kristy stepping out from behind one of the old oaks, her arms crossed against the evening chill. “Oh, Dev, it’s you,” she said. “Sorry about before. I didn’t realize he would do that to you.”

Dev looked at her—at the smudge of greasepaint on her collarbone, the sequined hem catching the yellow light. “I would say I’m used to it,” he said, “but today’s a new low for me.” He could hear the pre-recorded message starting up again somewhere behind him. Kristy placed a hand on his shoulder, her sequins pressing cold and sharp through his shirt. “I wouldn’t say it’s completely low,” she whispered, and guided his hand to her breast. The greasepaint smell of her was close and chemical. Then came the sound of boots on gravel, and Dev turned to see two ground workers rounding the corner of the tent, their flashlight beam swinging lazily across the ground toward them.

Kristy snapped toward the approaching flashlight beam and shoved Dev’s hand away in one motion. “What the fuck, Dev?” she hissed, loud enough that the gravel crunching stopped. “How many times do I have to tell you?” The two workers stood at the edge of the tent, their flashlight now fixed on both of them. One of them crossed the remaining distance quickly, and Dev had just enough time to register the man’s expression—not angry, almost bored—before the butt of the flashlight caught him above the ear and the yellow light went out entirely.

Gradually, the small crowd pushed through the carnival gates, which swung open with a long metallic shriek. The air hit them first—a stale sweetness of old cotton candy cut through with something earthier, like wet sawdust and rust. Around them, the rides sat dark and idle: a Ferris wheel with several gondolas hanging at wrong angles, a carousel whose horses had lost their eyes, a Tilt-A-Whirl with a long brown stain down one side. Overhead, strings of bulbs cast a jaundiced yellow light that made everyone’s skin look slightly wrong. Still, the crowd moved forward.

The crowd pushed forward through the carnival grounds, their laughter cutting through the groan of old machinery and the clatter of loose metal joints. Popcorn and axle grease hung in the air. A Ferris wheel stuttered overhead, its gondolas swinging unevenly, paint flaking from the crossbars in long curling strips. Somewhere ahead, a calliope wheezed through a melody that kept losing its place. Still, the line moved forward. A man in a Hawaiian shirt leaned toward his wife and said it looked like a real dump, and she laughed, and they kept walking.

The sideshow was held together by stubbornness alone—paint peeling from the wooden walls in long curling strips, rusted metal supports bowing slightly under the weight of a canvas roof gone gray and ragged at the edges. A crooked sign above the entrance read “Come see the wonders of the world!” in letters that had once been red. In one corner, a tank of water gone the color of pea soup held something with bulging glassy eyes and a scaled tail that drifted without purpose just below the surface. Nearby, a two-headed calf stood tethered to a post, one head chewing, the other hanging low.

A bearded woman sat in a barber’s chair, her dark whiskers oiled to neat points, offering a measuring tape to anyone curious enough to pay. Further down the row, three little jesters hurled knives at each other in tight, glittering arcs, their cackles bouncing off the low canvas ceiling. Nearby, a heavyset woman in a gown of green sequins sat on a velvet throne, her two heads tilted toward each other in quiet conversation until a guest approached. Underfoot, the floorboards groaned with each step, and overhead the canvas walls breathed in and out as if the tent itself were alive and exhausted.

In front of Dev’s booth, a tinny speaker crackled with a pre-recorded message on loop, its volume turned up just high enough to be heard over the noise of the tent. “In a world consumed by darkness, there emerges a boy who knows no boundaries. Born from the depths of the underworld itself...” The voice was deep and processed, the kind that came stock with cheap audio software. Someone had written the script in a hurry. Dev had read it once and never again. The speaker was mounted to a wooden post with a zip tie, and every few seconds it rattled against the grain of the wood.

Dev came to on the ground, the flashlight’s blow still ringing through his skull. He scrambled to his booth and ducked under the loose flap of canvas at the tent’s edge, taking his position. He droned through his lines, baring his teeth at whoever wandered close enough, his heart not in any of it. A recorded shriek looped from a speaker somewhere behind him. Guests clustered in twos and threes, cutting their eyes at him and muttering. Someone’s cup bounced off his shoulder. A woman buried her face in her date’s jacket. Most just drifted past without slowing. The minute hand did not seem to move.

Suddenly, a woman was there. The tent flap had not moved. Dev had not heard footsteps. She was simply present where she had not been a moment before, standing close enough that he could see the fine silver threads running through the fabric of her robe, and the way the lantern light caught the sharp line of her jaw. Her eyes were a pale, washed-out grey, like sea glass, and they were fixed on him with an intensity that made him want to look away. He did not look away. She reached out and took his hand in both of hers, and her grip was cool and dry and certain.

The woman moved through the space as though the air itself made room for her, her gown trailing behind in slow, deliberate folds of deep violet silk. Her hair was very dark and very long, pinned at the temples and loose everywhere else. She stopped a few feet away, close enough that Dev could see the fine embroidery at her collar—small repeating symbols, the same ones that would later appear on the box. Her eyes were steady and bright. She extended both hands, palms up, fingers slightly curled. “My dear, I’ve found you. My precious child, the one I have chosen. Your potential is being squandered in this place. Let me guide you to unleash your true abilities and make a difference in this world, instead of being hindered by these primitive beings.”

Dev stood frozen as the woman reached down and lifted a small wooden box from the ground. The box was dark and weathered, its surface carved with symbols that seemed to shift when he wasn’t looking directly at them—spirals bleeding into sharp angles, creatures with too many limbs. Something about the way she moved, the particular tilt of her head as she straightened, made his chest feel strange and tight. She held the box out to him. “These are for you,” she said. “They hold great power and will aid you in fulfilling your destiny.”

”But who are you?” The words came out smaller than Dev intended. The box was heavier than it looked—he could feel the weight of it redistributing in his arms as she kept pressing it toward him, her hands not leaving it until his had fully closed around it.

The woman’s smile faltered at its edges, as though it had practiced being sad for a long time. Her eyes moved over Dev’s face the way someone reads a letter they already know by heart. “I am your mother,” she said, “though I have not been able to be by your side until now.” A silence opened up between them, wide and full. “You are special, my child.” Her voice dropped on the last two words, weighted with something older than the conversation. “And it is time for you to embrace your true potential.”

Dev stood frozen, a current of something unnameable moving through him as he took her in—the sharp line of her jaw, the particular way she held herself, as if the air around her had no choice but to make room. He had turned the question of his birth parents over in his mind so many times it had worn smooth, and yet nothing had prepared him for this. “I know this is overwhelming for you,” the woman said, her voice low and careful, “but I have been watching over you from afar all these years. And I have witnessed firsthand how these—“ a pause, her lip curling almost imperceptibly, “—people, have treated my one and only.” She reached out and pressed the tip of her index finger to his forehead—a light tap, barely anything—and he blinked. When he opened his eyes, she was gone.

”As your mother, I want to see you reach your full potential. It’s time for you to accept your powers and strike fear into the hearts of others.” Her voice lingered in the air like smoke before thinning into nothing, and she was gone.Inside the box, carefully folded, was a full outfit. The shirt was threaded with lacework so fine it looked like frost on glass. The linen pants were the color of river sand, worn soft as skin. Even the socks were delicate, thin as paper. And beneath all of it, at the very bottom of the box, lay a sleek smartphone, black and cold to the touch. A note was attached, the handwriting looping and deliberate, each letter leaning slightly forward as if in a hurry.

”These clothes will transform into whatever you desire,” it read, “Any look that my darling wants. Just imagine it and it’s yours.” It was signed Scotia, your loving mother.

Dev picked up the phone and pressed the power button. The screen lit up and his face unlocked it before he could think. One contact: “Biggs”. He set the phone on his stool and laced the tent shut behind him, checking the gap twice. He pulled his cloak over his head and reached into the box. The fabric of the shirt was thin and shapeless, the kind of thing you’d sleep in at a hospital. The pants pooled around his ankles. The sandals bit into the tops of his feet, the straps stiff as dry leather.

Dev’s mind wandered back to a teenager he had once seen—the kind of kid who moved through a crowd like he owned it. The outfit had stayed with him ever since: a plain black shirt, worn soft, tucked loosely into baggy pants that hung heavy with chains swaying from the belt loops and pockets. The pants were black with red stripes running sharp along each seam, catching the light. Dev had never forgotten them. He couldn’t remember the shoes, so he gave the boy black combat boots, and felt the sandals on his own feet slowly harden and rise into that shape.

They looked just as he remembered, or maybe even better. He stood in front of the mirror and turned slowly, watching the fabric catch the light. Then his fingers found something stiff in the breast pocket—a wallet, black and thick. The leather gave slightly under his thumb like the cover of a well-worn book. A silver zipper ran along the top, and when he pulled it, it moved without resistance. Inside, the bills were dense and tightly packed, and when he bent them back they made a sound like a card being shuffled into a deck. The smell reached him then—ink and paper and something metallic—and his chest tightened around a breath he forgot to let out.

He counted over five hundred dollars before his fingers landed on something hard and flat at the bottom of the pile. He turned it over. Gary’s face stared back at him from a small laminated card, younger and thinner than he knew him, but unmistakable. Dev’s jaw tightened. His thumb pressed into the card until the edge bit into his skin. He had never had five hundred dollars in his hands before, had never had anything that was Gary’s before, and the combination of the two produced something unfamiliar in his chest—something that did not feel like fear at all.

A bottle of water rolled toward him across the floor, trailing faint distortions in the air around it like heat rising from summer asphalt. From its open mouth, a thin thread of water eased itself out and touched the ground. It gathered itself slowly—first a pale filament, clear as glass, then thickening, darkening slightly as it collected the fine dust of the floor into its body. It moved the way water always moves when it has somewhere to be: without hesitation. By the time it reached Dev’s shoe it had the distinct segments and tapered tail of an earthworm, its skin catching the dim light with the blue-green sheen of a soap bubble. It climbed his ankle. At his shoulder, something shifted in its shape—the body compressing, multiplying, eight legs extruding like fingers spreading open—and then a spider sat there, the size of a half-dollar, its weight almost nothing, each step a small cold pressure against his neck. He raised his palm to it. It crossed onto his hand and moved in quick, exploratory bursts, leaving faint damp tracks across his lifeline.

He commanded it to become a puddle, and it obeyed without hesitation, spreading flat across his palm in a thin, trembling sheet. He thought of cold, and the water stiffened and whitened and became ice, which slipped from his hand and hit the ground and broke apart. He watched the pieces find each other again, crawling back together across the floor of the tent, and rise into the spider shape as if nothing had happened. He felt something loosen in his chest. He dropped the I.D. and walked out.

Behind the curtain, the woman watched him go. She looked down at the card on the ground, which was no longer his. She let out a small, quiet laugh to herself.

Dev ran to Gary’s trailer and eased the door open. Gary was on his hands and knees, hurling aside empty cans and fast food bags, muttering through his teeth. The grey at his temples had spread since Dev last looked closely at him. A wet paper bag had burst open somewhere in the pile, and the smell hit Dev immediately—sour milk and something worse underneath it. Gary shoved a stack of old racing forms off a folding chair and kept going, his thick fingers working through the garbage with the focused desperation of a man who had already checked everywhere twice.

Gary kept digging. His knuckles were dark with grime, and a smear of something orange ran up his forearm. He didn’t look up when the shadow fell across the doorway. When he finally did, he went still. He straightened slowly, the way a man does when he is trying to decide something, and then crossed the trailer in two steps and grabbed Dev by the collar of his shirt, hauling him inside. He stood there breathing hard, looking Dev up and down—the clean fabric, the unscuffed shoes.

“Where did you get those fancy clothes?!” The question came out of Gary like something he’d been holding back all morning. Dev kept his eyes forward. “They were a gift from a woman.” The silence that followed was its own kind of weather. Then Gary’s hand came up and across in one motion, the smack of it filling the small room. Gary’s face was close now, the smell of him close too. “You don’t have any money. Whose pocket did you steal it from, you little shit?”

“They were a gift from my mother,” Dev replied, not looking up. Gary’s hand caught him across the cheek before he had finished the sentence. “Don’t lie to me.” The buckle of Gary’s belt clinked as he worked it free from the loops, the leather making a dry whisper against his jeans. He wrapped it once, twice around his knuckles. “No one gives a bastard like you gets gifts. Tell me the truth, boy.”

“But you always have money, don’t you Gary?” Dev turned the wallet over in his hands, unhurried, letting Gary watch him do it. “Enough for your beer. Enough for whatever else.” He looked up. “Never enough for me, though. Why is that?” Gary’s face went through several things at once before he landed on rage. “Give me that, you little—“

Between them, the air had gone tight. Dev watched Gary’s eyes move—wallet, then Dev, then wallet again—each glance a small concession. The wallet left Gary’s hand in a hard, flat arc and skidded into the corner. Gary turned his back, and that was when Dev noticed the faucet: a single bead of water gathering at the lip of the spigot, swelling, and dropping. He fixed his eyes on it. The drip became a trickle, the trickle a stream, and then the pipe groaned and water hammered into the basin in a roaring column. Gary went rigid. When he turned around, the color had left his face the way it leaves a cut finger just before the blood comes rushing in.

“It’s funny how scared you suddenly look,” Dev said, watching the dark stain spread down the inside of Gary’s leg. “Almost like you don’t want me near water.” He rubbed his cheek where it still burned and turned the lock.

The water on the floor had gone still and black, reflecting nothing. Then the surface broke—not all at once, but in dozens of small places, as if the floor itself were breathing. They came up through it: water spiders, pale as fish bellies, so thin the light passed through their legs. Hundreds, then thousands, fanning out across the concrete in every direction. Dev watched Gary’s eyes track them and find no end to their numbers.

Dev curled his fingers once, a small and almost casual motion, and the spiders moved. They crossed the floor in a dark rippling sheet, climbing Gary’s boots first, then his jeans, then finding the hem of his shirt. Gary slapped at his own arms and neck, his breathing going ragged and high. Where he crushed them, more came. They found his collar, his ears, the corners of his mouth. The sounds he made stopped resembling words. His hands dropped. A thin red line ran from his hairline down the bridge of his nose, and his eyes went somewhere far away before he went down.

Dev stood frozen, his eyes fixed on Gary’s face. The panic drained from it slowly, like water from a cracked basin, as the screams tapered into silence and Gary’s eyelids fluttered shut. His body followed, hitting the floor with a dull, graceless thud, arms and legs thrown wide. Dev watched as the blue crept in at Gary’s lips first, then spread outward across his cheeks and down his throat, a tide moving under the skin. A thin rime of frost traced the hairs on Gary’s forearms, climbed the ridge of his knuckles, and settled into the creases of his open palms.

Dev snatched Gary’s favorite belt—the one with the brass buckle worn smooth from years of use against him—and brought it down hard across Gary’s face. The mirror behind Gary exploded outward, raining glass across the floor in a glittering sprawl. Dev stood over him, chest heaving, the belt still wrapped around his fist. His own reflection stared back at him from a dozen broken shards at his feet: jaw set, eyes wet, hands shaking. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and did not look away from himself.

The door came off its hinges entirely, the frame splitting down the middle with a sound like a gunshot. In the threshold stood a man Dev recognized—Bruce, the one who had mocked him with the broom earlier. The puddle of water on the floor rose in a single column and drove itself into Bruce’s throat. Bruce’s mouth opened and closed. His hands came up slowly, as though he meant to pull the water out, and then stopped. Dev watched the red spread down the front of Bruce’s shirt and patted him once on the shoulder, the way you would a dog. Dev looked at him for a moment, then walked past him into the open air. The carnival workers had gathered outside in a loose ring, their breath visible in the cold. A dark stain was spreading outward from the doorway across the wooden steps. Kristy stood at the edge of the crowd with her hand pressed flat against her sternum. She looked inside, and her face went the color of old wax. “He’s dead,” she said. “He killed them.”

Dev scanned the faces surrounding him, each one lit by the pale flicker of the circus lights. Their eyes were wide and wet, darting to one another for a reassurance that wasn’t coming. He had seen that look before—had worn it himself, standing small in a doorway while his father’s shadow stretched long across the floor. His hands had shaken then. They were steady now. “Each one of you has done me wrong,” he said, his voice level, almost quiet. “Each one of you could have stopped him. So why didn’t you?” He let the silence sit. “I’ve heard ‘not my problem.’ I’ve heard ‘tough luck, kid.’ My personal favorite: ‘get outta here with that.’ “ The corners of his mouth pulled back slowly into something that had never once, in his whole life, been called a smile.