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“Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea”

Seanan McGuire

If there’s one thing seventeen years of traveling with the Miller Family Carnival has taught me, it’s that harvesttime is carnival time.

Spring is good, if what you want is young lovers cluttering the Ferris wheel like clinging burrs, moon-eyed and drunk on the wonder of learning that lips can be used for kissing. Summer brings in the families, screaming children with fingers that smell like cotton candy and mischief, wistful parents who remember their own turns around the Ferris wheel. Springs and summers are profitable. We’re hopping like scalded cats all through spring and summer. The midway lights never go out, and my throat feels like twenty miles of bad road by the time we get to August from all the cheering and cajoling and calling for the townies to step right up and see the wonders of the world.

Springs and summers pay for new equipment, for repairs to the old equipment, for fresh ponies in the paddock and good bread on the table. Winters are for resting. That’s when we retreat to the family’s permanent home outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and take stock against the year to come. But autumns . . .

Autumns are harvesttime, and harvesttime is carnival time.

Even the trees know it, and they dress themselves up in reds and yellows and kiss-a-carnie gold. Especially in the South, where the pulse of the seasons runs right under the skin of the world. Alabama met us at the border with a celebration, and the mood spread through the carnival like a rumor. Everything was going to be good here. The ticket sales would be fantastic, the marks would be easy, and the people would be easy to please.

But first, we have to get them to come. There’s where I come in: me, and the rest of the scouts. I ride into Huntsville on the roof of Duncan’s pickup truck, sitting with my legs dangling and my face turned toward the road behind us. It falls away like a secret no one cared to keep. My heels drum against the glass with every bump and pothole, setting up an uneven tattoo that says Carnival’s-coming, carnival’s-coming, carnival-is-almost-here.

It’s a perfect day.

I should know by now that perfect days can’t last.

The pickup rattles to a stop in front of a convenience store. The storefront is plastered with flyers and faded advertisements so thick that no trace of the original paint remains. I slide into the bed of the pickup, retrieving my shoes from where I dropped them among the piled-up posters that will tell the town that we’re coming. They’re old sneakers, a size too large for me, loose on my feet with the laces untied. I don’t tie them.

Shoes are a necessary evil, reserved for the company of townies, after seventeen years spent running barefoot along the midway.

Duncan walks around the truck and holds out his hands without a word. I pick up the nearest stack of posters and hand them to him. “Do you want to wait here, or do you want to come inside and meet the locals?” he asks.

He’s been asking me that since I was old enough to come on town runs, and I always give the same answer: “I don’t know that I care much about the locals, but I’d love something to drink.” Duncan laughs, bundles the stack of posters up under his right arm, and sweeps me down from the bed of the pickup with his left arm. He holds me so that I’m still facing behind myself, still watching where I’ve been, and he lets my denim-clad behind serve as my herald to the world as he walks toward the store.

A bell chimes when the door is opened, just before the rush of too-cold air-conditioning hits us. My skin lumps itself into fat knots of gooseflesh, making the scales around my collarbone burn. I squirm against Duncan’s arm, hoping he’ll get the hint and put me down. Being carried in is part of the tradition, but I’d rather walk than freeze.

Duncan ignores me—Duncan always ignores me—as he focuses on the store’s unseen inhabitants. “Good afternoon, sirs and ma’am,” he says. He’s using his friendly midwestern accent, the one that can pull in townies from miles away if they let him keep talking for a few minutes. That’s why he’s head scout and I just carry posters. “I’m Duncan Miller, and this is my cousin Ada.”

“H’lo,” I say, waving vaguely at the air behind me.

“We’re with the Miller Family Carnival, and we were just wondering if it would be all right for us to drop off a few posters for you to hang outside your lovely establishment.” There’s a pause while he flashes a smile at the sirs and ma’am. I don’t need to see it. I’ve seen this routine before. “We’d also be happy to hang them ourselves, if that would be easier for you.”

“The carnival’s coming to town?” It’s an older man’s voice, with a disbelieving tone. I close my eyes, trying to picture him. He’ll be a thin man, weathered and drawn, without nearly enough hair to cover his head. He’ll smoke—not inside, of course—and the tips of his fingers will be stained yellow.

Guessing people’s faces from their voices is a parlor trick, and it’s one I’m good at, probably because I’ve had so much practice. I squirm again, trying to get Duncan to put me down and let me see whether I’m right.

“Yes, sir, it is,” says Duncan.

“But the carnival never comes to Huntsville,” says a woman. She sounds younger than the man. I picture her as larger, too, not fat, but soft and rounded like Eglantine, who teaches math to us carnie kids and trains the dancing girls in the hoochie tent. “Not for going on twenty years.”

“Well, ma’am, the carnival is coming now,” says Duncan. He finally yields to my squirming, bending down to set my feet on the floor. “I’m delighted to hear it’s been so long since you’ve had the opportunity to enjoy the wonders of a proper midway. Why, I’ll expect to see each and every citizen of Huntsville pass through our gilded gates.”

“I can’t say you’ll see everyone, but a carnival will be a nice change of pace around here,” says the second man. He sounds big.

Fixing my talking-to-townies smile firmly in place, I turn and see the people behind the counter. The first man is old, and thin enough to pass for a scarecrow, in the right clothes. He has a full head of hair, but it’s too thick, and the color isn’t right: he’s wearing a toupee. The second man is both younger and larger, with arms almost as big around as Duncan’s and a gut like one of the silent potbellied twins who run the pony ride.

Only the woman doesn’t match her voice. She’s too small, with that crumpled-up look people get when they lose more weight than they should. Her eyes are cloudy with some old sorrow, and I know just by looking at her that whatever hurt her is more than even a Ferris wheel ride in the moonlight can heal.

The woman blinks when she sees me, clouded eyes going wide and a little bit clearer as she raises a hand to cover her mouth. The older of the two men hits her in the arm.

“M-my,” says the woman, almost sounding like she’s hiccupping in the middle of the word. “Aren’t you a pretty thing. What did you say your name was again, sugar?”

“Ada Miller,” I say, still smiling. “We surely would appreciate seeing you all at the carnival. We have a midway that’s second to none in this half of the country, and the best sideshows you’ll see anywhere.”

“You the ones who have that mermaid?” asks the younger man.

Everything seems to stop. It feels like the whole store is holding its breath along with me. Then Duncan smiles and says, “The Alabama Mermaid? Three shows a night. Be sure to buy your tickets early or you might not get in. Thanks for hanging those posters, now.” He drops the posters on the counter and turns, smile dying the second the townies can’t see his face.

He doesn’t need to tell me why. I turn quickly, and together we walk through the arctic chill to the door and out into the hot autumn afternoon, where the truck is waiting. I start automatically for the back. He grabs my arm.

“Not this time, Ada.” The friendly midwestern accent is gone, replaced by his normal New Jersey sharpness. There’s no need for pretend among family. “We need to get back to the lot.”

I blink at him. “But the posters—”

“Plenty of people can pass out posters,” says Duncan. “Now, get in.”

I get.

—

THE VIEW FROM the cab of the truck is disorienting, all forward and no back. I try watching the road behind us in the rearview mirror but that just gets me a headache and a vague impression of where we’ve been. By the time we turn off the main road and into the field we’ve rented for the next three weeks, all I want to do is go back to my own trailer, chew some candied ginger, and sleep.

“Ada.”

I freeze with my hand halfway to the door handle and look back at Duncan. He’s looking at me solemnly, brow furrowed. He looks worried. Not just worried: worried about me.

“What?”

“Don’t run off. We need to talk to your mother.”

I blanch.

“Are you sure?” I try to make the question sound casual. I fail. It’s midafternoon. Mama will be out in her tank, enjoying her few days of sunlight before the carnival starts up and we have to erect a tent around her, stopping prying eyes in favor of paying customers. She never gets more than half a week in the sun, and she hates to be disturbed when she’s sunbathing, even by me. Especially by me.

Duncan sighs. “Unfortunately, yes. Come on. We need to talk to Uncle Chester, and then we need to go see your ma.”

I can’t think of any arguments that he would listen to. “All right,” I say, and slip out of the truck, my head still pounding like a drum. We walk into the camp together. I take his arm. He doesn’t stop me.

The camp will be a carnival in a few more days. But like a caterpillar needs to spend time as a cocoon before it can be a moth, a caravan needs to spend time as a camp before it can be a carnival. Camp time is when we throw down roots, transitory as they are, building foundations and frames to hang dreams and nightmares from. The Ferris wheel is half-constructed, a skeletal assemblage of uncovered bars that rises against the sky like a strange new kind of spider’s web. The midway is taking shape, wooden stalls and games of chance blossoming up from the mud. The bone yard sits just outside the circle of rides and games of chance, our trailers still looking like a part of the landscape. We’ll move the yard further away when the trailers start to seem small and shabby, allowing the townies to believe that we never sleep, that we live on ticket stubs and midway dreams.

The air smells like sawdust and sweat. This is home.

Everywhere we walk we’re met with silent waves and companionable nods from the family. Everyone at the carnival is kin, by marriage, blood, or adoption, and we look out for one another. Mama was adopted. I was born on the midway. “Better than a Kewpie doll” is what Uncle Chester always said when I asked him, and that was good enough for me.

It confuses the townies when we say we’re all family, because we come from so many places, and we look nothing alike. Duncan is broad and dark-skinned, with hair that’s well on its way to being completely gray, even though he’s not much older than I am. I’m fish-belly pale and slim as a slip, with long dark hair that curls like wood shavings and eyes the color of deep water. We’re family all the same.

Uncle Chester is standing by a plywood structure that will be the Haunted House, in the fullness of time and another few dozen coats of paint. He’s a tall, thin man with hair the lacquered black of the cars on the kiddie coaster. When I was little, I used to pretend he was my father. He frowns when he sees us coming. “You hang five hundred posters as fast as all that, Duncan?”

“Not quite, Uncle. We may have a problem.”

“Someone ask about our permits? They’re all square.”

“No.” Duncan looks toward me, then back to Uncle Chester. “One of the men at the first store we stopped at asked whether we were the ones had the Alabama Mermaid. And I think his friend recognized our Ada.”

That’s the last straw. I step away from Duncan, crossing my arms. “Someone want to tell me what you’re talking about?” They turn to look at me, expressions saying what their voices won’t: they’ve been so wrapped in worrying about me that they’ve nearly forgotten I was there. “Well?”

Uncle Chester sighs. “I suppose we ought to go and see your mama.” He turns and barks an order at the cousins setting up the Haunted House. Then he starts across the field, leaving us to chase after him.

“I hate you all,” I mutter darkly.

Duncan laughs—but there’s no joy in the sound, and that’s the most frightening thing of all. Together, we follow Uncle Chester.

—

MAMA IS STRETCHED out on the rock at the center of her tank, naked as a jaybird and face turned toward the sun. Her eyes are closed, and they stay closed as we climb the ladder to the platform fitted against the tank’s edge. I spent countless nights curled up on that platform when I was a little girl, too afraid to be away from my mother for a whole night.

I stopped coming when she stopped singing me to sleep. There didn’t seem much point, after that.

Uncle Chester crouches, placing a hand against the surface of the water. “I’d like to talk to you, Martha, if you don’t mind.”

His voice is mild, but its effect on Mama is electric. She rolls off her rock, becoming a blurry streak of motion in the tank. Uncle Chester straightens just before her hands burst from the water next to the platform. She slaps them down against the wood, and the Alabama Mermaid, pride of the Miller Family Carnival, pulls herself up next to me.

No one could look at her while she’s this close and see a human woman in a carnie costume. Her tail’s too real, for one thing, and her bones and the skin stretched across them are subtly wrong, shouting her alien heritage to anyone who cares to look. She’ll be plastered down with pancake for the show, until she doesn’t gleam amphibian-wet in the light, until the minds of the townies no longer instinctively try to make them turn their eyes away. It’s hard to look straight at mermaids. There’s too much about them that shouldn’t be.

She smells like fresh fish and salt water, and it’s all I can do not to recoil from the fear that she’ll touch me.

“Hello, Uncle!” she says. She looks inhuman, but she sounds pure Alabama native, born and raised within the shadow of Birmingham. The water hasn’t taken that from her. Not yet, anyway. “Cousins,” she adds, with a nod to me and Duncan. I swallow the lump in my throat. So this isn’t going to be one of the days when she knows me. I don’t know whether I’m grateful or not. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Do you know where we are, Marti?” asks Uncle Chester.

Mama frowns. “Well,” she says, after a long pause to consider, “I can’t rightly say I do. Are we in Indiana again? I liked Indiana.”

“Indiana was six months ago,” says Uncle Chester. He takes one of her hands in his own. The webbing connecting her fingers looks like a veil over his rougher, work-chapped skin. “Think, Marti. Where does the sky look like this? Where is the ground the color of drying blood?”

Her frown deepens. “But we can’t be in Alabama, Uncle.” There’s a note of petulance in her voice. “Alabama is where we started. We can’t be back where we started. I’ve been here too long.”

“I know.” He pats her hand. “Marti, do you remember what happened the last time we were in Alabama? It was a long time ago. Almost twenty years. Remember?”

“No,” she says guilelessly, and pulls her hand away. “I’m cold, Uncle. I’m cold.” Then she’s gone, slipping back into the water. She doesn’t surface again, but retreats to the far corner of the pool, a dark, sullen splotch against the blue.

I don’t want to. I have to. “I can go in after her, if you want,” I offer uneasily.

Uncle Chester looks up, narrowing his eyes. “How are your scales?”

“They haven’t spread these last few months. I’ve been keeping dry, showers only, and eating less meat. Seems to be working well enough.” They itch constantly. Sometimes they break off in the night, leaving my bed full of splinters formed from my own body. But they aren’t spreading.

“Then no, I don’t want you to go in after her. If your scales aren’t spreading, we’re going to keep it that way.” Uncle Chester and Duncan exchange a look so laden with meaning that I can’t even start picking it apart. “Go back to the bone yard. You look peaked. I’ll have the cousins come and fetch you for supper.”

“But—”

“You’re excused from setting up for the rest of the day. Rest, Ada. You need it.”

I take a breath to argue. Then I swallow it, nodding. “Yes, Uncle.” Forcing my shoulders to slump, I turn and descend the ladder. I keep my head low as I walk away, until the edge of the camp hides me from their view. Then I turn and run through the maze of half-built rides and piles of plywood until I find another path into the field.

Low to the ground, I creep toward the tank. The sound of voices drifts down and across the water: “We could move.” That’s Duncan. “Pull up stakes and go.”

“We can’t afford that and you know it. The spring’s take repairs the rides, the summer’s take pays the wages, and the fall’s take sees us through the winter. We’re not living hand to mouth yet, but we will be if we get a reputation for running out on shows we’ve already committed to.” Uncle Chester now. “We’re going to have to see this through. And damn you, Martha, for making us do it.”

I stay where I am until I see them climb down the ladder and walk back toward the skeleton that will become a carnival. Then, silently, I turn and creep back to my trailer, leaving the field, and the tank, and my mother behind.

—

I’M THE ONLY girl in the bone yard with her own trailer: most of us have to share with at least one other person, and the cousins who don’t want to bunk with their parents wind up stacked like cord-wood in trailers that were never meant for more than two. Uncle Chester says I have “environmental needs,” and since his word is law, I get a little privacy to go with my jury-rigged collection of dehumidifiers and open jars of silica gel. No matter where we go, from Seattle to Georgia, the inside of my trailer is dry as the Arizona desert.

I throw myself down on the bed, trying to shut out the pounding in my head as I breathe in the dust-dry air. It hurts my lungs, but in a good way: in a human way.

Maybe if they’d thought to give Mama a few dehumidifiers, she’d still know who I was.

She had legs when I was a little girl; she wore flowing skirts that didn’t pinch the fins growing down the sides of her thighs, and she hated shoes, just like I do, because her toes were webbed, just like mine. Fine scales grew in the hollows of her collarbone and on her lower belly, and in all the soft places where her joints bent.

“Don’t you worry, Ada-love,” she used to say as she tucked me into bed, all cotton sheets and mismatched blankets. “The sea wants me awful bad, but it won’t have me while you’re still here needing a mama.” Then she’d go to her own bed, a scavenged hot tub filled with salt water, and take one more step away from me.

The first time I woke up to find her all the way under the water, I screamed my throat raw. I was only eleven. Uncle Chester nearly broke the trailer door down getting inside, and when he saw my mother at the bottom of the tub, he reached in with his shirt still on. She was limp when he hauled her to the surface, propping her head against the little shelf she used as a pillow.

And then she opened her eyes, and blinked at him, and asked, in a tone so reasonable it hurt, “What’s that child shrieking about? Can’t a body get a moment’s peace in this place?”

Uncle Chester took me for a walk that day, after he had her settled. We sat on the fence outside the pony ride and he told me everything he knew about mermaids, everything he’d learned and guessed and worked out for himself. “When your mama came to live with us, she was six months pregnant and she looked almost human, as long as you didn’t mind the webs between her fingers. She could hold her breath a long time. She could swim like a fish. But she was a human lady, or close enough to pass for one. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You’re saying she’s changed.”

The look on his face then . . . I think that was the moment he knew he’d lost her. I didn’t realize until years later that it was also the moment when he knew he was going to lose me too. “Ada, I think your mama is going to need to move out of the trailer soon. She’s not walking as well as she used to. Has she been complaining in the mornings?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. Everyone had seen the way her knees had started giving out on her, dropping her into the midway dust without a bit of warning. She laughed it off every time, but still. Her balance was going, and there was something . . . something wrong about the way her legs moved, like her bones were going soft, and she was holding them straight only through force of will.

Uncle Chester sighed. “Don’t you worry, Ada. We’ll take care of her, and we’ll take care of you. This carnival is your home. We’ll always, always take care of you. You understand me? Always.”

I said I believed him, because what else was I supposed to do? Mama was my future, written in blood and bone and scale and salt. The carnival was my home. The carnival will always be my home.

I fall asleep still holding fast to that thought, my face pressed into the pillow: the carnival will always be my home.

No matter what.

—

SOMEONE IS KNOCKING on my trailer door. I peel my face off the sweat-stained towel, wipe the grit from my air-dried eyes, and call, “Who is it?”

“It’s your uncle. You good for company?”

I want to tell Uncle Chester no; I want to say I’m naked, that my head still hurts, that he needs to go away and not come back until I’m ready for him. But I also want to know what’s going on. I sit up and say, “Come in.”

Uncle Chester opens the trailer door and steps inside, looking out of place here, confined inside four walls. He’s supposed to be outside on the midway, making the carnival come together, moving us toward opening. “How are you feeling?”

“Better.” My head doesn’t hurt anymore. That’s close enough to “better” that I’m not quite lying. “Uncle Chester, what’s going on? Why do those people know who Mama is, and why’s that enough to worry everyone?”

“Ada . . . it may be that we never told you the full story of how your mother came to travel with us. I’m sorry about that, but we felt it was better if you didn’t have to grow up knowing.” He sits on the edge of my bed. I pull my feet up to make room for him. “Didn’t you ever wonder why we didn’t come to Alabama, with your mother being the Alabama Mermaid and the biggest draw in our sideshow? We should have been here regular as clockwork, but we stayed away. For eighteen years, we stayed away.”

“No.” I’m almost ashamed to admit it. I tilt my chin up and say, “I didn’t even realize Alabama was a place until the year you turned us back at the Tennessee border. I thought it was made-up, like Atlantis, or England.”

“Ah.” Uncle Chester shakes his head. “Well, that’s my fault. I should have found a way to insist you pay more attention in your studies.”

“I paid as much attention as the state said I had to.” Like all the carnival kids, I’ve been homeschooled since I was six, and every year I take and pass another standardized test full of things I’ll never need to know. Not one of those tests has asked me how to assemble a Ferris wheel, or rig a game, or talk a mark out of his money.

Or say good-bye to a mother in the process of turning into something alien.

“Don’t talk back,” says Uncle Chester, but there’s no heat in it; he’s just going through the motions. “Ada, your mother was adopted, to start with. The family that took her in found her in a place called Okaloosa Island when she was a baby. It’s near the very bottom of the state, where Alabama meets Florida on the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Lots of people are adopted.”

“Are lots of people found lying on beaches, wrapped in kelp, not even a week into the world? She was just a baby. They didn’t know who her people were or where she’d come from. So they picked her up and took her home, to raise as their own.” Uncle Chester shakes his head. “Townies.” There’s a world of scorn in that word, and it’s an emotion I can understand. Carnival folk are great scavengers, and we’d never leave a baby to starve on the beach, but we wouldn’t take it. We’d look for its people. We’d find where it belonged.

Nothing thrives where it isn’t meant to be. That’s why we’re so careful with our classes, no matter how useless they are. Fail the tests and the government takes you away from the carnival, to suffocate in airless rooms that never move. Being found by the water didn’t make Mama a sea-baby, but they should have been more careful. They shouldn’t have taken her.

“They did as right by her as they could; I don’t want you to think otherwise,” says Uncle Chester. “She was happy, and she was dry, mostly. She hated to be wet when I met her. Took showers instead of baths, wouldn’t go outside when it was raining. Said the water made her head fuzzy. That was at the start of the summer.” His gaze is far away. He isn’t with me. Oh, he’s still here, but it’s a here that happened eighteen years ago, before I even existed. “She asked if we’d come back when the leaves turned, give them a proper autumn carnival. Maybe it was wrong of me—you shouldn’t change the schedule to suit your own whims; I knew that then, and I know it even better now—but you didn’t see her. She was perfect. Smart as a con and pretty as a midway morning. I said I’d see her in August.”

“And you did,” I say. I don’t want to hear the rest of this story. It doesn’t belong here, in my small dry room where mermaids are myths and mothers, not bright-eyed teenage girls who ask friendly carnies if they’ll be coming back through town. “You came back, and she came away with you, and everything was happy ever after.”

Uncle Chester eyes me sternly. “Ada Miller. Does this look like ‘happy ever after’ to you?”

I don’t have an answer for that.

“You’re right about one thing: we did come back. I was new to running this show, and everyone was a little slow to listen, but my daddy taught me well, and my brothers vouched for me before they split off with their own shows, and eventually, everyone listened. We turned around, and we came rolling back into Huntsville, looking for profits, looking for marks . . . and looking for that teenage girl who’d smiled at me so bright when she was standing in the shadows of the midway.” He sighs again. For the first time in my life, I realize that Uncle Chester is getting old. “I found her. She came to the carnival the first night we were open, and her stomach was already starting to swell up under the dress she wore, and the scales . . . the first time I saw her, I thought she was wearing body glitter. They’d been so small, and so easy to overlook. Not that time. They were the size of my pinkie nail, and they were all along her collarbone. ‘I can’t stay out of the water anymore, Mr. Miller, and I don’t know who I am when I go under,’ that’s what she said. She asked if we’d take her with us. She didn’t want her baby born here.”

“But what about—”

“We’ve never talked about your father, Ada, and I know you’ve wanted to. I know you’ve guessed at who it might be.”

I blush, feeling my cheeks turn hot and red. “I thought it might be one of the cousins,” I say.

“I wish it were. But your mama was pregnant when she came to us, and whoever got her that way . . .” He takes a breath before he says, as slow and measured as a man pulling nails out of a board, “The Marti I met on the midway would have done almost anything to stay out of the water, and the Marti who was waiting for me when I brought the carnival back around had gone to the water of her own free will. That tells me she had some things she wanted to forget, and she’d already figured out what the rest of us had yet to learn: to a mermaid, every body of water is the River Lethe. All she had to do was go under and she’d forget whatever happened to her. Only, once she started drowning, she couldn’t stop. You pulled her out of it for a few years. She tried so hard for you. In the end, I suppose she was too tired to keep swimming.”

He stops speaking. I don’t say anything. I’m trying to wrap my mind around the size of what he’s said, and I can’t, I can’t. I can’t be here, thinking these things; I can’t be the reason Mama chose to go into the water and forget the girl she’d been, the one who was sweet enough to pull the carnival off schedule and back to Huntsville. I can’t.

Uncle Chester puts an arm around my shoulders. “Stop it,” he says sternly. “I can see what you’re thinking, and you need to stop right now. Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault. We just have to deal with what we have to deal with now.”

“And what’s that?” I ask bitterly.

“I think you know what that is. Someone recognized you; someone was asking after your mama.” Uncle Chester shakes his head. “We have to tread careful, that’s all. We don’t want someone getting clever and deciding they have a right to you just because they want you.”

“Why can’t we leave?”

He looks at me calmly, and I know he knows I eavesdropped on them, just as surely as I know he’ll never call me on it. I’m expected to do things like that. If I can’t sneak around on my family, how am I supposed to sneak around on a bunch of strangers? Still, even as I’m expected to do my share of spying, he’s expected to pretend I’d never stoop so low. “We can’t afford it,” he says, and there’s something bone-dry and adult about those words. They’re bleaker than they were when he said the same thing to Duncan. There it was a secret; here it’s a confession. “We’re at the end of the season, and we still have some bills to cover. The big coaster needs repairs, and the Haunted House has to be completely rebuilt before spring. Your mama’s tank . . . the cost of the water alone is something that has to be thought of whenever we set a route. We’re here because we can’t afford to cross the South without stopping, and we can’t afford to pull up stakes and head out. Not without making some gate. If it were almost any other reason, we’d already be rumors and dust, and damn what it would do to our reputation.”

Numbers don’t lie. People lie—townies, especially, to us, and us, especially, to townies—but numbers are the faith by which a carnival lives and dies. I swallow and force myself to nod. “I understand, Uncle,” I say. “I’ll be careful.”

“Good girl.” He leans forward and kisses the crown of my head, the way he’s been doing since I was just a ticket stub of a child. “You’ve always been a good girl.”

Then he stands and leaves me alone in the hot dry air of my trailer. I watch him go, and wonder if being good isn’t its own punishment as much as it’s supposed to be its own reward.

When I sleep, I dream of mermaids.

I wake up screaming.

—

I DON’T HAVE time to dwell over the next three days; they pass in a dizzy whirl of preparations, posters, and a thousand small, half-forgotten tasks that seem to build up in corners, waiting to spring. The rides are assembled and tested; the sideshows are set up, and the attractions are brought, grumbling, to take their places. Mama has the best tent, of course. She’s not the show’s only genuine “biological impossibility”—the modern-day way of saying “freak” without offending anybody—but she’s definitely our high-ticket item, or has been, these last few years. I have to wonder how much longer that’s going to last, with her slipping a little further away from human every season.

Duncan turns on the Ferris wheel while I’m screwing the safety bars into place, and he laughs at me when I shout at him. Classes are canceled for all the cousins young enough to be in schooling, and we swarm like monkeys across the forming landscape of the midway. There’s always so much to do, and we race the bell to opening day.

When it comes, it’s perfect. No place in the world does autumn like the American South, and nothing suits the autumn like a carnival. Even the air tastes like harvest. The sun is neither too hot nor too cold, and the humidity is low enough that I can smear body glitter on my arms and legs and go out in a tank top and shorts, pretending my scales are just a part of the show I’m putting on for the townies.

And oh, the townies. They come by the dozens; they come by the hundreds, flocking to see what wonders we have to offer. I spend the morning shilling for the midway games, sometimes alone, carrying teddy bears three times my size and laughing about how easy they were to win, and sometimes with Duncan, letting him “prove his skill” over and over. Everyone knows the booths are rigged. Everyone plays all the same—and a certain number of people do get prizes, even if almost none of them actually win anything. We want Huntsville to remember us fondly, after all. Towns that remember us fondly tell their friends to watch for our banners, and that can make the difference between a lean year and one where we’re rolling in the clover.

When the sun dips low on the horizon, the tenor of the carnival changes. The families pack it in, heading home with sunburns and sticky fingers and heads full of memories. Some of the younger cousins wait by the gate for the sole purpose of waving and cajoling them to come back before we leave. It’s a fun duty, as long as you can endure a few nasty comments from the townie kids. The cousins aren’t allowed to throw rocks at them. I’ve always considered that unfair.

With the children gone, the midway belongs to the teenagers and the sideshows belong to the adults, all of them looking for an adventure. That’s part of what makes autumn so perfect for carnivals: just the right balance between darkness and daylight.

Uncle Chester sees me heading for the Ferris wheel and waves me over, a mercenary glint in his eyes. “You up for barking?” he asks.

I’m a good barker. One of the show’s best, especially when it comes to the “biological impossibilities.” Maybe it’s my resemblance to Mama, or maybe it’s that I enjoy yelling at townies until they pony up for another ticket. “I’d need to change,” I say.

“That’s fine. I’ve got Eglantine and her girls warming up the crowd, but that just gets the people to the tents. I’m counting on your fine turn of phrase to get the people in the tents.”

I smile. “Happy to.”

“Good girl. Just let me call one of the cousins to walk you to your trailer.”

“I don’t need that,” I say. “This is home, remember?” I turn and run out of the neon brilliance of the carnival, heading into the bone yard before he can tell me to stop. My trailer isn’t far, and it won’t take me long to change—all I’ll need is a sequined jacket, some better shorts, maybe a hat—

I’m so busy thinking about the possibilities that I don’t realize someone is stepping out of the shadows before they’re grabbing me, arms locking around my shoulders in something that feels obscenely like affection. I take a breath to scream for help. A cloth is forced over my nose and mouth, and it’s too late, the inhale has begun and I can’t stop it in time.

The last thing I see before I lose consciousness is the light from the midway, reflecting off the window of my trailer like the ghost of some impossibly distant harbor.

And then even that is gone.

—

WHEN I WAKE up, the room is wrong.

Everything else is wrong, too—the air is too wet, the bed I’m on is too soft, and unlike the contortionists, I don’t usually fall asleep with my wrists and ankles tied. But it’s the room that’s the worst. The walls are wood paneled, the sort of thing you see in townie houses. The ceiling is the same, and the light is too bright, the sort of electric glare you only get when you’re hooked to the city power grid instead of running off an honest gennie.

My breathing must have changed. The woman from the convenience store is suddenly leaning over me. The sorrow in her eyes is gone, replaced by a bright glare that almost hurts to see. “Hello, sweetheart,” she says, and touches my cheek. I jerk away from her hand as best as I can. The ropes they’ve used to tie me down haven’t left much room.

If my movement bothers her, she doesn’t show it. She just smiles, looking away from me as she calls, “She’s awake.” Then she focuses back on my face. She looks hungry. I don’t want to be the thing that fills her up. “I’m sorry about before. We had to get you away from those people, and we didn’t think you’d come willingly. They’ve had too long to twist your mind around.”

“It only took a season with our Marti.” The voice is bitter, and I don’t need to look to know that it belongs to the old man from the convenience store, the one with the bad toupee and the bone-thin arms. “Look at me, girl. You’ve been kept away too long.”

“ ‘Those people’ are my family,” I say, turning to face him. “Untie me. I want to go home.”

“A carnival’s no place for a young girl, and you’ve got no business running around like a barefoot slut in the company of carnies,” says the man, with perfect calm. This is the truth as he knows it. There is no room for anything else in his world. He leans forward, studying me. “You look too much like your mother” is his final verdict. “We’ll have to keep an eye on you.”

“Who are you?” I demand.

His hand lashes toward my face. I expect a blow, but it turns into a caress at the last minute, fingers light against my cheek. I shudder. “I’m your grandfather,” he says. “Mind me, now, and everything will be all right. Patricia?”

“Yes, sir?” asks the woman.

“See she doesn’t go anywhere. She needs to learn to hold her tongue when she’s speaking with her elders.” He pulls his hand away from my face and turns, leaving the room.

As soon as the door closes, I start to demand, “What is wrong with you people? I am not—”

The woman—Patricia—doesn’t pull her blow the way the man did. Her palm strikes my cheek, rocking my head to the side. “Don’t talk back,” she says. There’s no anger in her voice. I almost wish there was. Anger, I could understand. “We tried to save your poor lost mama’s soul, and we failed her. We’ll save you. We won’t fail again.”

Do mermaids even have souls? “I don’t need saving,” I say.

Patricia’s smile is hard, a knife for me to impale myself against. “That’s what all the lost ones say.” She stands, following the man out of the room. She turns the lights out before she exits, and leaves me in the sudden and absolute dark.

No one does dark like city people. They have too much light, and they have walls that are thicker than walls need to be. It’s like they cultivate the darkness even as they try to beat it back. I close my eyes and wait, holding my breath to make it easier to listen for the sound of receding footsteps. Once I’m sure that I’m alone, I start to pull against the rope that holds me to the bed.

That sort of thing only works in the movies. After what feels like an hour, I’m bleeding and sore, and the ropes are still holding me fast. Alone and afraid, I start to cry.

I’m still crying when I fall asleep.

—

DAWN WAKES ME, coming through windows I didn’t know were there. I open my eyes and the old man is waiting for me, standing framed against the window.

“Marti was a gift from God,” he says, no hesitation, no preamble. “She was a test and a challenge, and we failed her. We will not fail you.”

“Let me go,” I say. “This isn’t legal. You can’t just kidnap me.”

“We’re your kin. We can do whatever we like with you.”

I want to protest, to tell him Mama was found, and that means they’re no more my blood kin than the carnival is. Less, even, since I grew up with the carnival. I know those people. I love them. I don’t know this old man at all.

But his eyes are the color of deep water, and my mother chose the water over remembering why she ran away, and I don’t say anything at all.

He seems to take that as agreement, because he smiles, and nods, and says, “I knew you’d be a better girl than she was.”

“Where are we?” It’s barely a whisper. It’s all I can manage.

“We’re home. That’s all you need to know.”

He steps away from the window, walking toward the bed, and behind him I see the sun glinting off a sheet of water that seems to stretch on forever. It reminds me of the few glimpses I’ve had of the ocean, when the carnival was close and I felt daring. My heart lurches, longing and terror tangling around me in a net I can’t shake off. I tear my eyes from the water, and there he is, my grandfather, standing close and looking at me.

“Are you my father?” The question is out before I can call it back.

His expression hardens. “No,” he says, biting the word in half between his teeth. “That would be a sin. You’ll meet your papa later, when you learn how to mind your tongue.”

The other man in the store, the one who asked about Mama first. It has to be. I want to laugh. I want to cry. Of all the places we could have gone, we had to pick the shop owned by the people who’d driven my mother out of Alabama. “Please,” I say. “Please, I want to go home.”

“This is your home, Ada,” he says. “The faster you come to realize that, the faster we can all make our peace with this.”

He doesn’t wait for me to say anything.

He just leaves.

—

THE SOUND OF voices raised in anger wakes me from another unintentional nap. I try to sit up, and the ropes pull me short, keeping me in place. Someone shouts. Someone else shouts back. There are words in that second cry: “They found us!”

And someone—Duncan, I think—is calling my name.

I yank against the ropes. There’s no give to them. I don’t have any other ideas, and so I take a breath, and yell, “Back here! I’m back here! Help! Help!”

The door bangs open and Patricia rushes in, a knife in her hand and the man who’s probably my father close behind her. “Shut your mouth,” she snarls, and grabs my wrist.

This is it: this has to be the end.

But the knife bites into the rope and not my flesh, and the man is ripping the ropes away from my ankles. I’m too weak to walk, and I don’t have the chance to try: he grabs me and slings me over his shoulder, running alongside Patricia for the door.

He carries me down a hall and out another door onto what I presume is the back lawn. The sun is too bright after being inside so long, but I force my eyes to stay open. I’m looking behind myself, my head bouncing hard against his back as he runs, and I can see Duncan’s pickup in front of the house, parked at a diagonal, alongside a dozen other cars from the carnival. They found me, they found me, and all I have to do is get away.

All I have to do.

“Come on, Christopher, run!” shouts Patricia, and the man—Christopher, my father—changes direction, moving toward the sound of water. I hear a car door slam ahead of us, and suddenly it all comes clear. They knew they might be followed; they expected to run with me. So they hid a car down by the lake, where the old man wouldn’t see it, intending to carry me off and disappear.

If they reach the car, I am never going home.

We’re running alongside the water now; I can smell it, can see it glittering in the sunlight. I have been good for my whole life. I have stayed dry.

Maybe that will be enough.

Christopher isn’t worried about me escaping; he’s bigger than I am, and I’ve been tied to a bed for the last day. I twist around and bite him on the ear, bringing my teeth together until cartilage crunches and hot blood fills my mouth. He bellows, the guttural cry of a wounded bull, and I fall to the ground as he loses his grip on me. The impact bruises my tailbone.

There isn’t time to worry about that. I’m already up and on my feet, running as hard as I can for the mirrored surface of the lake. It’s so close. I can smell the water. A voice shouts in the distance, and I twist around to see Duncan running toward us, Uncle Chester and a half dozen others close behind him. But Patricia and Christopher are with me, between me and any escape, and there isn’t time, there isn’t time.

Please, let me have stayed dry for long enough.

I jump, and the arms of the water open wide and take me home.

—

I DON’T KNOW how long I’m there, in the deep blue wonder of the lake. I swim deep and far, until time is something that happens to other people. Everything is twilight-dark, like the midway when the lights go down. My feet ache, and I twist until I can grab them and rub the hurt away. My clothes make it hard to swim right, and so I shrug them off and leave them floating among the waterweeds. They deck the bottom of the lake like banners deck a carnival midway, fluttering in the wind that moves within the water.

It’s beautiful down here.

Fish dart past me, and crawdads with their ruddy shells. I grab them and shove them into my mouth, greedy greedy greedy, and nothing has ever tasted so good, nothing has ever been so right. I should have done this years ago. But I stayed away from the water. I stayed away—

Why?

I don’t remember why I stayed away from the water. I stop swimming and let myself drift, trying to think. My thoughts are slippery like fish, and they squirm away from me.

Something round falls past me, sending a plume of mud rising from the bottom of the lake. I look up. There’s a boat in the water, and someone on the boat is dropping things. I dive, retrieving the object. It’s a baseball with a weighted bottom. The kind we use in the midway games.

Midway games . . .

I clutch the baseball to my chest and rise, my head breaking the surface beside the boat. A man is sitting there, looking down at me, waiting. His hair is black as the bottom of the lake. Mutely, I offer him the baseball.

“Thank you.” He takes it. Then he takes my hand. The webs between my fingers are pale against his skin. “Do you remember who I am?”

“No.”

He nods. His eyes are sad. “That’s all right. I’m your Uncle Chester. Do you remember your name?”

“I . . .” I stop, and frown. Finally, I venture, “Ada?”

“Good girl.” He reaches down, and because I trust him somehow, I reach up, and he pulls me into the boat. The sunlight glitters off my scales. It’s beautiful. I giggle. He looks sadder. “Ada, I have a question for you.”

“What, Uncle Chester?”

“Those people who took you . . . they won’t hurt you anymore. They won’t be hurting anyone anymore, and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I didn’t keep them from hurting you.”

I smile at him, uncomprehending. Maybe he’ll start making sense soon. Even if he doesn’t, the sun is shining, and it’s nice to be here in the warm autumn daylight.

“Ada. Focus, now.”

I blink, and frown. “On what? You haven’t asked a question yet.”

“I’m sorry.” He shakes his head. “I forgot that you couldn’t . . . I’m sorry. Do you want to go home?”

The baseball is rolling around the bottom of the boat. They’ll be missing it back on the midway. They need the baseballs if they want to play the game, even if I’m not sure what the game is, or why anyone would want to play it. I nod solemnly. “It’s autumn. Autumn’s carnival time.” The words feel right.

Uncle Chester finally smiles, although it doesn’t take the sad away.

“Good girl,” he repeats. Then he starts to row, heading for the shore.

I wonder what a midway is.

I wonder if I’ll like it there.

I don’t look back.

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About the Author

SEANAN MCGUIRE comes from good carnival stock and had her first Ferris wheel–related injury when she was seven years old. Both she and the Ferris wheel recovered nicely and are currently in good health. She attended UC Berkeley, where she majored in folklore and mythology. These two things go a long way toward explaining why she now writes urban fantasy.

Seanan is the New York Times bestselling author of two ongoing urban fantasy series, the InCryptid and the October Daye series, and she also writes under the name Mira Grant. She is a founding member of the Hugo Award–winning SF Squeecast, and her short fiction has appeared all over the place, sometimes including on the floor of her bedroom. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010 and was the first woman to be nominated for four Hugo Awards in a single year.

It is widely rumored that Seanan doesn’t sleep. The rumors are pretty much true. She lives in a crumbing farmhouse, which she shares with her collections of books, horror movies, and creepy dolls, as well as her three ridiculously large blue cats. Seanan is happiest when at a carnival or in a cornfield, and she collects machetes. This tells you everything you need to know. Her online homes are www.SeananMcGuire.com and @SeananMcGuire.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Seanan McGuire

Originally published in the Gallery Books anthology titled Carniepunk.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Pocket Star Books ebook edition December 2014

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Cover illustration by Tony Mauro

ISBN 978-1-4767-9354-2