Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original Read Online Free Page B

didn’t know,” I said, my smile echoing his. It was an involuntary response. Even in my darkest moments, my grandfather had always been able to make me smile. “How is Grandmamma?”
    His smile faltered, although it didn’t die completely. “So Davo spoke with you.”
    “He did.” He would have kept the news from me if he could, but being a Big Man didn’t free him from the demands of family. If Grandpapa wanted me to know something, I would know it, although Davo had doubtless put off sending Bay to find me for as long as he possibly could. “I’m sorry he intercepted your call.”
    Grandpapa’s barely perceptible wince told me that I’d guessed right about Davo setting a snoop on my phone. Dammit. “I shouldn’t have called while you were working. I did my turns on the circuit. I know better than a thing like that.”
    “I’m never too busy for you and you know it,” I said, waving his concerns away. “You’re answering everything except for my question, Grandpapa. How is Grandmamma?”
    “Eh.” His bony shoulders rose and fell in a shrug that was half admission of defeat, half exhaustion. “The doctors, they do what they can, and the aunts, they do a little more, but this isn’t a disease her blood knows how to fight. It burns her, and every day she’s a little further gone.”
    I didn’t say anything. I waited. After a few minutes of awkward silence, he sighed.
    “She coughed up blood and froth this morning. She’s been moved out of the Bone Yard and into a hospital clean room, where she won’t have to worry about me when she’s already unwell. She hasn’t infected a one of us, but that doesn’t get to matter now. The virus is most virulent when its host is running out of things to burn. Sixty years my wife, and now that she’s dying, they take her away from me.” For a moment, he looked very small and very frail, a skeleton wrapped in the winding shroud of his own worn-out skin. Not for the first time, I wondered how long he would hold himself to life after she left us.
    Not long, I was sure.
    “Davo said you want us home after the Portland show.”
    “I would want you before that, my little crow, but we have commitments to keep, and those people paid their deposit for a slice of history. Our troubles don’t give us the right to deny them.” He straightened, a bit of the strength coming back into him. “How is Davo?”
    I hesitated. There was every chance in the world that he had taps on this line, or clever little listening devices creeping up the walls of my tent, ready to catch and magnify any hint of insurrection. It was easy to blame it on the fact that I had refused to marry him, but even then, he hadn’t proposed out of love: he’d done it because he wanted to possess me, because I was better with my hands and better with my voice and better in the eyes of our grandparents. He was a Big Man here. Speaking against him would be foolish.
    But this was my grandfather asking, and I had never lied to him. “He’s getting worse,” I said. “He gives orders that don’t make sense. He sets the younger cousins to tasks that they don’t know how to do, and then he blames them when things go wrong, when they get hurt. I’m afraid something’s going to break soon.” I was afraid that it was going to be me.
    “Ah.” Grandfather shook his head, looking honestly sorry. “There was a time when he would never have been made Big Man, and when you would never have been asked to serve in a show where he was a Big Man. I’m sorry, my dear. If there had been any other choice—”
    But Davo’s father had been a Big Man, and my grandfather’s eldest son. To refuse the title to his son would have been the kind of insult that could tear our family, and our carnival, apart. It’s hard to be a living fossil. Sometimes you have to yield, even when everything you have screams at you to hold the line.
    “There wasn’t another choice,” I said, more harshly than I intended to. “He