“You’ve only got one stomach.”
“You’d hardly know that from the way they eat,” Gill mutters. He jokingly flicks Unu on his ear. Flicking is his way of showing affection.
“We should leave now, or we’ll be late,” Nicoleta says. As if anything in Gomorrah starts on schedule, or our family is ever on time.
We march out of our tent into the dense smoke of Gomorrah and head north, toward the games neighborhood. It’s a bit of a detour, but the food in that neighborhood is better than anywhere else—sticky buns that melt on your tongue, nuts dipped in honey like beetles preserved within amber, saltwater taffy you can buy by the yard. Plus, most of us can’t resist wasting a few of our coins on a game or two. Unu and Du get a kick out of having people guess their weight with their two heads. Crown has a special gift for ring toss. Nicoleta, when she’s feeling up to it, can make the bell chime when she smashes the airbag with the hammer.
My family does not go anywhere quietly. Tree’s steps thunder as if we’re walking with a crowd of one hundred rather than nine. Hawk squabbles with Unu and Du, who keep rubbing her feathers against the grain. Venera and I walk, arms linked and chatting about the yogurt face masks we might try tonight. The paths of Gomorrah are narrow and winding, sometimes only wide enough between tents for a single person to slip through. But we don’t care about stopping traffic. The residents let me pass because I’m the proprietor’s daughter, an association that brings me an uncomfortable amount of notoriety and weighty expectations. The visitors nearly lunge out of our way after one look at Unu and Du’s heads, Crown’s curling yellow scalp of nails or Tree.
We approach our favorite vendor of licorice-dipped cherries—Gomorrah’s signature treat—and Unu and Du steer us aside.
“How many bags am I buying?” I ask.
Each of them shouts how many they want.
“I’m not buying fourteen bags.” I hold up my flimsy coin purse. “You guys are milking me dry.”
Crown fishes in his pocket for change before Du stops him. “You can’t help her. She lost. Rules are rules.”
Lucky coins is a sacred game in my family.
I curse under my breath and thrust my entire savings—one week’s worth, since I can’t save anything more than a few days—into the vendor’s hands. His eyes light up as he hands us a full quarter of his stock.
Afterward, with our teeth sticky from black licorice and our lips stained red from cherry juice, we head toward the Menagerie singing one of Gomorrah’s folk songs.
Wicked, wicked to the core. The city will burn forevermore.
Or mostly singing. Unu and Du shriek to drown out Hawk, who, as always, is trying to show off her vocal range and make everyone else sound bad.
The Menagerie’s spires tower into the smoke that covers the Festival like an endless expanse of storm clouds. Its tent is so black it appears like a hole, seeping the color away from its surroundings. Pink, red and violet streamers—Gomorrah’s colors—ripple in the breeze at its peak.
The line outside snakes around the tent, and we grab a place at the end. Because the Menagerie is such a popular attraction, stands for kettle corn, palm readers and charms salesmen clutter its perimeter.
“Care for some coins?” a man asks Hawk. He bites the coin, and his teeth clack against the bronze. She turns her back to him, a pro at dealing with persistent vendors, but he continues, “Solid. Good quality. I have the Handmaiden, the Red Jester, the Harbinger—”
“We have enough coins,” Nicoleta tells him. We all know the coins sold in this part of the Festival attract more tourists than actual players. The gambling neighborhood sells the characters of real and rare value.
Perhaps it is the stern edge in Nicoleta’s voice, or perhaps the vendor knows a lost cause when he sees one, but he doesn’t pester us again, even though we remain next to his stand for several more minutes. He moves on to the Up-Mountain patrons behind us, who marvel at the thin coins and ask the vendor how to play.
“It’s your face,” Hawk tells Nicoleta. “He can see the lack of fun and warmth in your eyes.”
“I resent that,” she says.
Unu and Du tug on the sleeve of my night cloak. “Will you buy us some spiced wine?” Du whispers eagerly, his hazel eyes sparkling in the white torchlight. Unu, on the other hand, stares at their feet.
“You’re eleven,” I say.
“That’s an arbitrary number you made up.”
“Arbitrary is a big word for you.”
Du gives me one of his classic Du expressions. He leans his head back and scrunches his entire face together like he’s eaten a whole mouthful of sour-cherry drops. He uses this to feign being insulted.
Normally, I might say yes, but the spiced wine in this area of Gomorrah is highly potent—meant to get guests drunk and happy to spend. “Sorry, kiddo.” I pinch his cheek. “I’m too responsible a sister for that.”
The Menagerie tent opens three minutes later, and the queue of guests shuffles inside at an excruciatingly slow pace past the ticket booth. The entrance is a hallway lit by iron lampposts on either side so that our shadows stripe across the grass floor. In between the lamps stand taxidermied animals from the Down-Mountains. We pass an Eberian snow tiger, its pelt winter-white and its stripes hooked and curled at the points. A chimera hunches to our left, its goat and lion heads frozen in midhowl.
“You’re the goat for sure,” Du whispers to Unu.
There’s a leopard dragon, a few falcons and exotic birds, and one panda—all previous performers at the Menagerie. As a child, Villiam took me to the shows to watch the panda, who now watches us with vacant eyes.
The Up-Mountain guests point and gawk at the creatures we’ve seen a hundred times. They chatter incessantly and fan themselves, occasionally turning around to sneak peeks at us. I hear a woman say we must be in some kind of costumes. Hawk hugs her arms and her wings close to herself. Gill flicks her on the shoulder, and she manages a smile.
We have all learned—or tried to learn—to ignore the comments that follow us.
We enter the main part of the Menagerie, a huge open room with a circus ring, several trapezes and a collection of balls and hoops. My family slides into benches toward the back—we can never afford front row. The air smells of stale manure and kettle corn.
“Happy family night,” Venera says, and we raise our bags of licorice cherries in a sort of cheers.