A Web of Air Read Online Free

audience fell silent as he began his first speech.
    Fever and Ruan, crouched in the crawl space beneath him, had other surprises in store. Tall jars full of salt water surrounded them, each with an electric terminal in its base and another dangling into it on a wire. Electricity flowed from one terminal to the other through the water, completing a circuit which kept the lamps alight. But night was meant to be falling in the play, so while Cosmo Lightely entered and started to tell Sir Niall of his plan to conquer the Moon, Ruan pulled a cord which raised the dangling terminals higher and higher up inside the jars. With more water to flow through, the current grew weaker, partly spending itself as heat. The jars steamed. Up onstage the light grew dimmer and dimmer. Cosmo raised one rhinestone arm and told the astro-knight, “So go you, good Sir Niall, to the Moon / And tell its guardian goddess even she / Must to Good King Elvis bend her knee.” Then Fever flipped a switch that turned on a masked spotlight and threw a perfect crescent moon on to the sky above the cardboard parapets.
    Crouched between the simmering jars, she heard the audience’s sigh and knew that she’d astonished them again. That pleased her. Unlike Ruan, she’d never fallen for the magic of the theatre, and still thought that plays were so much silly nonsense. But she hoped that maybe there would be someone out there in that crowd who would be more moved by the brilliance of her lights than by the silly love story unfolding under them, and would look into electricity for themselves and come to see how simple it was, really, to generate and harness. Then she would have played a small part in restoring science and reason to this backward portion of the world.
    Or maybe that was just an excuse, a kindly lie she told herself to help her deal with the fact that Fever Crumb, trained in the ways of science and reason by London’s Order of Engineers, had spent two years travelling across Europa on a mobile theatre and helping its crew of actors stage their foolish shows.
    She switched on her torch to check her crumpled copy of the playscript, even though she knew the show by heart. There was a short scene front-of-curtain with Max Froy as the clown before Niall Strong-Arm climbed aboard the fiery chariot, when the red spotlight and the fire effect would be required. Time to fetch a cup of water from the pail in the corner. If the Maydans liked her moon then the fiery chariot should really please them…
    Yes, it was an unlikely job for an Engineer, but she liked to think that she did it rather well.

     
     
    3
     
    STRANGE ANGELS
    fter the show there was a party. There was always a party, after every show. When she first came aboard the Lyceum, a refugee from London with two newly orphaned children in her care, Fever had been shocked at the way the crew stayed up so late after each performance, drinking and laughing and telling again their well-worn stories of previous shows. But like so many irrational things, she had been forced to accept it. Something about the performances left the Persimmon company elated and filled with energy. If they had gone to bed they would not have slept. They needed to meet their audience, and be told how wonderful the play had been. They needed the praise and approval of strangers the way that ordinary people needed food.
    Fern and Ruan loved those gatherings. They liked to listen in on grown-up conversations which they only half understood, and play excitable games with their friends from other barges or the local children, new friends whose languages they might not even speak, and whose names they would forget tomorrow or next week when the theatre packed itself away again and Bargetown moved on. But Fever always stayed at the edge of the talk, a little apart, careful not to meet anyone’s eye in case they assumed that she was inviting them to praise her (which she found embarrassing) or just to talk to her (which was worse).