“Never had one that I know of. You’re lucky ’cause you’ve got one. And a good one, too. I can see that from the way he looks out for you.”
“Who takes care of you, then?”
“Fat Melchior, the headman of the ville. He took me in after Ma got chilled.”
“Is he nice to you?”
“Sure. But there’s not enough nice to go around. He has too many other kids of his own and the cabin is small.”
“You sound sad, Leeloo. Are you sad a lot?”
“I try not to be. I do things that make me happy, mostly by myself.”
“Me, too,” Dean said. “I like scouting ahead for the others when we’re on the move. Jak, he’s the one with the white hair, he’s teaching me how to read signs. He doesn’t say much, but I think I’m starting to get good at it.”
“You must have wonderful adventures with your dad and your friends. I’m still too young for adventures, I guess.”
“You’ll have some, though. Mebbe even better ones.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
From the other side of the compound came the sound of her name being called. “Leeeee-looooo Bunny!”
“Dinnertime,” she said, destroyed at the prospect of being pulled away from something so exciting and extraordinary by something so boring and ordinary.
“You’d better go, then,” he told her. “Don’t want to be late, not with all those other kids at the table. You won’t get anything to eat.”
“Are you staying for the carny?” she asked him.
“Sure.”
“Then mebbe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
He smiled at her. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll look for you in the morning.”
With a totally mystifying combination of pain and joy sitting upon her heart, Leeloo Bunny descended the berm. She had never had a crush on a boy before. Had never wanted to kiss a boy before. In part, this was due to the awakening of her physical self; in part it was due to the fact that none of the ville boys interested her in the least. And for good reason. After watching the goings-on through the gaudy windows, the older ones got all panting and grabby handed, trying to insinuate their dirty fingers into very private places. Other girls in the ville, some even younger than Leeloo, let them do that, and more. Not Leeloo, though. The younger boys in Bullard ville were even more dismal crush prospects. They all had snot caked on their cheeks, and their breath smelled like creamed corn.
When she got back to Fat Melchior’s cabin, the chaos of dinner for ten was well under way. She didn’t compete for food, hardly ate any to speak of, and later, when she finally curled up on her tiny cot, she found she couldn’t sleep a wink. And the cause, strangely enough, wasn’t her excitement over the carny.
Chapter Seven
With Jackson trotting at the heels of his jackboots, the Magnificent Crecca headed back to the rear of the big wag, down the narrow, windowless, low-ceilinged corridor.
As the carny master approached the closed metal door at the far end, he felt a wave of the familiar, powerful unease he always felt just before entering the Magus’s lair. Gert Wolfram had been afraid of the Magus, too. At the time, Crecca had thought it hysterically funny to see that huge mountain of blubber tiptoeing around, trying to avoid even the most incidental contact. Wolfram had never shown his fear to the Magus’s face, if what he had could even be called a face—more like the jumbled contents of butcher and machine shop trash cans. The Magus loved to induce terror. And when he saw its first tender sprout, he nourished it and made it grow. Crecca was much more comfortable when the puppet master wasn’t along for the ride. The carny picked him up and dropped him off at different locations on the route. No explanation was ever given. They never knew where he went or how he got back. All they knew was that he was privy to ultrasecret, predark whitecoat technology, and that he had developed some unique refinements of his own.
The Magus had a distinctly unpleasant smell. Crecca had always figured it had something to do with the unnatural combination of flesh and stainless steel. The worst thing by far, though, were the eyes. Like a pair of chromed hen’s eggs, with pinhole pupils. You could never tell for sure what they were looking at Crecca ordered Jackson to sit and stay outside the door. The Magus had been known to bite the heads off baby stickies on a whim, and Crecca had put in far too much time on this one to start over. He raised his balled fist and pounded on the door.