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

tradition. Davo does what he feels is right for the family. He sees an opportunity to bring home a fortune.”
    “Billie is family too,” I said, raising my head. “She’s my family. Would you sit back and let him sell Bay?”
    “Bay is family by blood, not by adoption,” said Grandpapa.
    “I don’t care. Half the cousins aren’t related to any of us by blood. They’re from other families, other shows that we absorbed. Does that make them worth less? Some of our Big Men aren’t blood relations!” Or they hadn’t been, when they came to us. Marriage and children had solved the lack of ties, binding them to us in the slow and subtle way that we had always practiced. Slow and subtle won more races than most people realized.
    Grandpapa sighed. “No,” he said. “And I can’t even remind you that she isn’t human, because she has voting rights in the eyes of many of the city-states we travel through, even if she’s never chosen to exercise them. Her citizenship belongs to a country of two.”
    And I was her other half. “Do you agree with what he’s doing?”
    He looked away. My heart sank. When he looked back, his eyes were hooded, and he spoke with a painful honesty: “I do, and I do not, and I am gladder than you can know that the choice isn’t in my hands. I can’t stop him, and that means that I am not the one who holds the final responsibility for breaking your heart. Do I think the fortune your cousin is scrabbling for will save my wife, or that he seeks it out of love for her, and not out of the desire to have revenge on you for old slights? No. I have long since come to terms with the fact that we live in a time where everything we build works better than we need it to, and that includes the diseases we design for our own destruction. But I have loved her longer than you’ve been alive, my crow girl, and I can’t give her up without a fight.”
    I bit my lip, looking at him, and whispered a final question: “What do you want me to do?”
    He smiled faintly. “You were never going to be happy with us forever,” he said. “You refused to come to the Bone Yard before you had earned it, and you’re not a Big Man. You never had the drive for that, or the heartlessness to do what is required to be a Big Man in this world and survive. But you’re not the type who can learn to take orders just because they come from someone who stands above you in a pecking order you didn’t agree to obey. You were always going to need to find your own road through the days between here and Heaven.”
    I looked at him, my shoulders slowly relaxing as my body tried to go limp and my mind refused to let it. He looked back at me, that faint smile still clinging to his lips.
    “You have a question,” he said. “What is it?”
    “The brown-haired cousin who works the gate,” I blurted. “What’s her name?”
    “Nicole,” he said. “Is that really all you have to ask me?”
    Will you hate me for running away? Will you blame me for Grandmamma’s death, even if you say you know that selling Billie wouldn’t help? Would my parents forgive me for this? Am I betraying you? Am I betraying myself? There were too many questions; they swarmed like townies all trying to grab the same ball at a ring-toss game, and they were just as meaningless. Lips pressed into a tight line, I shook my head and held my silence.
    This time, his smile was as wide as the sunrise, and twice as welcome. “You look very much like your mother,” he said. “I love you, my crow girl.” With that, he cut the connection and left me staring at an empty screen. He didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t need to.
    After only a few seconds, I turned away. There was work to do, and I didn’t have much time.
    *   *   *
    Packing my things took less time than I felt it should have, given how long I’d been traveling with the carnival, given how much of my life I had spent devoted to its well-being and growth. A few vacuum bags of clothing shoved