“Where is…bracelet?” Осовец asks, a touch of cinnamon joining his cloud.

  “Oh, someone…brought in a kid. She didn’t have one.”

  “She would…have been…provided for…he is not heartless…”

  “She was provided for. By me.”

  Patchouli streams from his mask.

  Looking at the vapor, I realize I haven’t seen him stop and drink anything. He passed out water in the restaurant, even making sure Isaac and I had some, but the only time I’ve seen him sit down is when he was trying to intimidate the soldiers.

  I’m about to ask if he’s thirsty, or wants what’s left of my water, when, moving in formation with Lance in front and the other two soldiers behind, we come back to the loading dock. The soldiers move with precision, ordered by Lance to focus on the bayonets and conserve ammo in an enclosed space.

  It’s a grim sight. The two people on the circus props are still there, covered in blood, checked out immediately. The one on the leash is gone, but there’s oversized pawprints and track marks that look like hands and knees through blood. The popcorn machine is long empty and cold, overturned on its side.

  The man on the wheel has a blindfold, knives skewered through his hands, and a bicycle horn stuffed into his mouth. He whimpers when Isaac takes out the gag.

  “What was that?” the eyeless man asks, going pale.

  “…still…here…”

  The clown that descends from the ceiling on a silk scarf smash’s Lance’s ocular implant with the hammer from the test-of-strength, sending the young soldier flying, his remaining soldiers snapping into action as more clowns rain from above in a surreal storm of hammers and smiles.

  One of the clowns makes a go for my snake, which dodges and bites deep into her wrist, but the primary use of cobra venom is in the eyes. The second one, swinging for my head, gets a face-full of it, sprayed across my teeth like from a sprinkler. Distracted by the burning in his eyes, he doesn’t notice Ozzy with the shovel, dropping like a stone.

  Outnumbered, outguned, outmanned, the clowns run away in a fit of compulsive giggles, dragging their wounded, leaving us bleeding and shaking, but alive.

  At least some of us.

  Lance lies spread-eagle on his back, fingers twitching in a grasping motion, like a wind-up doll, mouth working on repetitive words he can’t speak. He twitches at even intervals, but doesn’t get up. The light in his laser eye has gone out, but his human eye is wide, panicked, darting from face to face, which means I’m wrong and I can let out the breath I’ve been holding.

  I wipe my nose on the back of my hand, having nothing else, and step forward, but I don’t know what to do for him. The plague doctor and Isaac have him, doing something, while I stand here sniffling, the soldiers cutting down the two from the circus equipment.

  I feel like I’m outside my body looking in. I guess I didn’t…I had hoped they’d be more lucid than that, that they’d have come to their senses. I didn’t know that they would…they laid a trap. Just for the fun of it.

  I should have stayed behind.

  I’m coughing into my palms when Ozzy, against the far wall near the closed shutters, closes his shovel and holds it with his tail, back against the wall, sliding down it using the wheels on his modified boots, wisps of something green and noxious emitting from his mask.

  “Ozzy!”

  The rest of them, tending the wounded, look up, but since Ozzy doesn’t seem to be in any immediate trouble, they go back to whatever is they’re doing, the haunt slider on flesh and Isaac on mechanisms. The man from the wheel is whimpering and begging not to be touched, not realizing that we’re not…we’re not like the clowns.

  Ozzy’s hands are shaking, his back against the wall, hat scooted over his face, left leg at a right angle along the floor, right one stretched out in front of him, tail holding his shovel across his lap, noticeably stained with blood across the smooth, silver bowl.

  I kneel beside him, taking one of his hands in mine. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t push me away or ask me not to touch him, little scalpel-like metal claws protruding from the narrow slits in his finger sheathes. Whatever’s coming out of his mask burns my throat and eyes, coming out in spurts and puffs, mixed with shaky gasps of nervous breath.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, looking him over for injury, trying to move his hands away from his chest so I can see. “Osoweic, can you hear me?”

  His mask inclines slightly in my direction.

  Quickly, like I’m burning him, he grabs at the circular side filters of his mask and the greenish smoke coming out, his head hung low, fingers arching in terrified swirls around the fittings.

  “Don’t!” he hisses, pushing me away and getting to his feet, brandishing his shovel to keep me at bay.

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  By now they’re staring, and the vulture-faced slider is miming deep breathing at me, before returning to Lance, kicking his mechanical feet spasmodically. Ozzy is on his feet and backing away, shovel brandished, greenish smoke puffing from his mask, interspersed with lavender and chamomile.

  I don’t know how to help him.

  My eyes are burning, my noses in running, and it’s getting hard to breathe. Whatever he’s making, he’s trying to reign in it, trembling all over, spewing puffs of lavender, chamomile, synthetic banana, candy corn—anything that isn’t the faintly pineapple green mist.

  Isaac and the others are still trying to fix Lance.

  I don’t know what to do.

  “Sodas!” I practically shriek, looking into a corner by the shutters. “Someone left sodas. Let’s go get them.”

  Ozzy trembles, following my pointing hand, to the shrink-wrapped pallet of bottle sodas, evidently delivered sometime before things got real. Slowly, I can see him giving in, the pineapple smell giving way to vanilla, the shaking in his body easing, his terror giving way to the need to collect and hoard.

  “You’re probably thirsty,” I tell him as he puts his shovel away with his tail. “All that soda…all sweet and bubbly…I wonder what people would be willing to trade for it?”

  His claws begin to recede into his finger sheathes, but he’s still a bit jittery, which starts to calm more as I use mine to claw into the plastic, beginning by handing him the bottles until he tears into them like a starving man at a feast.

  Or a dehydrated man at a pallet of soda, I think, watching how he seems to discreetly look at the flavors with a higher sugar content a little longer. All that vapor has to come from somewhere.

  I can still feel the clown’s white flesh against my fangs, the way my venom squeezed from the glands at the roof of my mouth. I didn’t know I could do that. Cobra venom can blind people, can’t it? There’s one clown on the loose with a cobra bite, another with their eyes melting, and I did that…

  Ozzy places a bottle into my hands. It’s the limited edition Witch’s Brew flavor, blackberry green apple, and the most delicious thing I’ve seen all day.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him, handing it back. “See what you can get for it.”

  He pushes it back to me with both hands, shaking his head. His vapor smells like green apple, reminding me how dry my throat is after all that. I finish what’s left of my water before cracking into the soda.

  From across the loading dock, Isaac thrusts his hands in the air, cheering, “Praise be my noodly appendage!” The plague doctor keels over laughing, and Lance sits up, blinking his good eye.

  After what they’ve been through, the two uncostumed employees are having a hard time wanting to talk to us, shaking and whimpering and begging to be let go. Their eyes linger on the bayonets, the serrated shovel, the trail of clown blood, to say nothing of the scales and claws and tentacles and mechanical implants that were, just a few hours ago, plastic and latex. The one on the wheel, the one Isaac said he knew, needs to be held down so “Medicum Scud” can stop the bleeding in his hands. The one with the large gash on his head, from repeated impact to the strength test bell, nurses one of the sodas Ozzy couldn’t or didn’t fit inside his coat, somehow no larger or heavier now than before I drew his notice to them.

  Lance is still twitchy, having developed a mechanical stutter, and the red light in his eye hasn’t come back on, but he’s able to move and isn’t dead, so that’s a plus. He’s leaning on his rifle, sometimes needing the barrel pulled away from his sightless mechanical eye, but he’s still able to give orders and walk on his own.

  Isaac leans against a wall, hand on his chest, eyeless face turned upward, in a distinctive pose of demanded tranquility, where I settle in next to him, trying to give himself space but also wanting to ask how he’s doing.

  “Just catching my breath,” he insists. “You okay?”

  “Um…yeah, I think so…” I mumble, fumbling with the hem of my skirt. “I can spit venom.”

  “That’s new.”

  Naturally, Ozzy claimed the rarer or more desirable flavors from the pallet, but anything he didn’t take he disperses to the group, even Scud who, like Ozzy, won’t take off his mask, but tucks it into his coat for later. One of the soldiers remarks he was never one for sweets, but sugar is all he’s been able to think about for hours now.

  The jack o’lantern moon, the cravings for sugar and seasonal food…it’s all very specific. The animatronics and props from the rides coming to life is a bit confusing, but it’s almost like whatever did this doesn’t distinguish between Halloween decorations and regular decorations. Makes me wonder what garden gnomes are doing.

  Or the Statue of Liberty.

  Or the giant statue of Ghandi with the laser eyes.

  There’s a clown out there with the bite from an exotic snake not native to this continent. I did that.

  “Is Lance going to be okay?” I ask, watching him twitch as he tries to calm the two tortured men.

  “I…don’t know…” Isaac replies softly. “It depends on if I can get the right parts and tools…we might have to go deeper into Steampunk Singularity to get them.”

  I wince.

  “Can the Master Computer control you?”

  Isaac doesn’t answer, his face fixed forward to the knot of soldiers and haunt sliders, Ozzy leaning on his shovel, spewing lavender and chamomile. The mist seems unsteady, less voluminous than usual, sputtering in spurts of either lavender or chamomile, less of an even mix.

  “Does he seem alright to you?” I ask, changing the subject.

  “Does anyone?”

  I bite my lip, away of the grooved fangs poking my skin. There does seem to be an increasing sense of desperation as the reality of the situation becomes more and more apparent, a survival situation mixed with a spectrum of a loss of humanity, figurative and literal. None of the haunt sliders, masked, tailed, and high-heeled, have taken off their slider gear and shown what’s underneath. They could be anything, but only Ozzy, true to the name Isaac gave him, spews toxic gas when he’s scared.

  Lance, using his unloaded rifle as a cane, steps toward us. The damage is localized to his eye, but the wiring must go deep into his brain, because there’s something stroke-like about the way half his face doesn’t respond, the way he leans and favors his blind side.

  “Sarge is g-going to es-escort the c-c-civilians b-back to the r-restaurant,” he explains. “T-the r-rest of us ar-re moving o-out.”

  The stutter isn’t organic, the result of a faulty tongue or nerve connection in the speech center of the brain. It’s…very robotic, the sound of a broken animatronic caught on a loop, an engine backfiring. Even his good eye seems to roll and focus on a predetermined path.

  “Are you in any shape to keep going?” Isaac asks kindly, rising to his feet.

  “H-he’s f-fine,” Lance stammers defensively.

  Scud, the vulture-faced slider, is watching intently. Strangely, it seems as though he’s okay with Lance continuing. It’s not like he can help defend the smaller group if the clowns come back, but the larger group might be able to cover for him.

  I’m just not sure if anyone told Lance that.