“Another roast chicken, Miss Lane?”

I glanced at the line stretching out of the entrance to the big top tent and my stomach tightened.

“Better make it six,” I said.

“Coming right up.”

The carny who had flirted with me all those months and a lifetime ago, ran off to the food tent, which was packed to the gills just for yours truly.

It had been the carnival owner’s idea. After he’d crawled out of the rubble of the roller rink, the laser from the flying saucer having barely singed off his eyebrows, he had seen the wreckage of his carnival and collapsed to his knees. “I’m ruined. Ruined.”

But then he saw me, bigger than life, wandering in from the desert—Ma and Lear, a Pomeranian and a leopard in my arms—without a place in the world to be. He said the sun was shining above my giant head, and it gave him one whopper of an idea. Ma and I didn’t have much choice but to officially join the carnival. After we found out Connor and Calvin were okay, of course. And that Rhoda and her father hadn’t survived the roller rink attack.

I needed to walk out my nerves before our first show started. I stayed low along the back side of the tents so no one would see me before the big reveal. It would be my first time onstage, and while throwing up in front of a live audience would be embarrassing, vomiting all over every person in that audience would end my career before it began.

I came to a tent that glowed with flickering light. The calming guitars of “Sleep Walk” played over the radio.

“Knock, knock,” I said.

“Come in.”

I parted the flap with my pinkie and found Lear hunched over a gas lamp, sitting on a booster seat, inking the pincers on a picture of a gigantic ant. The carnival poster read COME HEAR THE TALE OF THE BATTLE OF PENNYBROOKE! 75¢! Lear had caught up with the carnival a ways down the road, having left his mom in the care of the general. He made a deal with the carnival owner to draw promotional posters for the show and was sending every dollar he earned back home. I gave him extra to replace his mom’s food storage.

“How’s it coming?” I said.

“Like I never want to look at another antennae again,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“How are you feeling?”

I put a hand to my stomach. “Like I swallowed a lawn mower.”

He smiled, a swipe of ink across his cheek. “You’ll forget all about it the moment they start whistling at you.”

“Not if they start screaming instead,” I said.

Lear rubbed his face. He looked tired. And while he always looked small to me, he seemed more so these days. Like he might be shrinking. His shirt hung loose around his shoulders, his belt was cinched to the last notch, and the brush was much too big in his hand. I’d stopped growing months ago, but every night when we cuddled, he took up less space in my palm.

What had Peak done to him in the desert? I remembered Lear’s insistence on being zapped. I remembered his skin sparkling in the desert sun and the room in the haunted hallway, twining with sparkling mist.

I sighed and tried on a smile. I didn’t want to ask about it until Lear brought it up.

“I’ve been thinking,” Lear said, tapping the inkpot. “About your dad.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, sitting cross-legged in front of the tent.

“If he’s had a remote since your Ma could see him, but remotes weren’t invented until 1954, and the one he has doesn’t have a cord . . . what if he’s from the future?”

I looked up at the sky. Daddy had been gone a long while now. Months. His La-Z-Boy stood empty, like a throne waiting for its king. At least he’d left the television on.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I dunno,” Lear said, shrugging. “Maybe he doesn’t like this futuristic world, and he’s looking back on a simpler time. It was just a thought.”

These thoughts were too much for me. The world Daddy lived in. Whether Beth was alive there. How long our world would last. As Liz had said, sometimes it was best not to think about your insignificance in the universe. Besides, with rebuilding the carnival and rehearsing for the traveling show, I hadn’t had much time to think about these things. Or the fact that Liz and the rest of the lab were still out there somewhere.

A finished poster lay drying on the floor. It showed Lear and Marsh, the five Navajo children, and me standing in the inked carnival before the lights popped on. The caption read “The Quiet Before the Swarm.”

“You made my boobs bigger,” I said.

Lear scratched behind his ear with the brush handle. “Sorry about that.”

“I didn’t say I was mad.”

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS, WELCOME TO THE WONDROUS, THE GLORIOUS, THE MOST JAW-DROPPING TRAVELING SHOW YOU HAVE EVER LAID EYES UPON!”

The lawn mower in my stomach started to rev. “That’s my cue,” I said.

“Knock ’em dead,” Lear said. “Not literally.”

“You coming to watch?”

Lear started tracing pincers with his too-big brush again. “I’ve gotta ink this before it goes to the printers tomorrow. I’ll catch the next one.”

I nodded and let the flap fall shut.

On the way to the big top tent I passed Alexandrea snoozing in her cage. The leopard was no longer skin and bones, but she was still having a hard time finding her way back to her human form.

The carny ran up with a platter of six roast chickens, and I gulped them down, bones and all.

“You water Pan-Cake?” I asked, trying to hide my nervousness.

“Soaked her,” he said. “Especially that little flower sprouting at the tip of her tail.”

“Thank you.”

I reached the big top tent.

Shit. Here we go.

I was numb from stem to stern. I couldn’t feel my toes and stared down fifty feet to make sure they were still there. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore, I reminded myself. Not even the staring eyes of an audience of thousands.

Now that I’d grown used to my crane-size limbs and tank-like feet, I had no one to compare myself to. Ook was dead and also a gorilla, and all the women I met were no bigger than my pinkie. Even Ma was just Ma.

As old Phoebe, I’d always felt like my space was not mine. But I’d outgrown that feeling now.

I slipped under the back flap of the big top tent. Ma was standing behind the closed curtain in her iconic torn dress, looking radiant.

“Ready to show ’em what we’ve got?” she said.

“I think I’m going to pass out,” I said.

“Try not to, sweetie,” Ma said. “I won’t be able to catch you, and you’ll bring the whole tent down.” She met my eye. “Remember, if anyone heckles you, you can toss them out. You’re your own bouncer.”

That made me feel a little better.

“Cleavage,” Ma said.

I looked down and readjusted the silken top made by the carnival’s seamstress. It was comfortable enough, but it didn’t have that same feeling of love and care as the piece Beth made. I still wondered if I’d ever see her again.

I stood to my full fifty feet behind the curtain with Ma standing by my side. The carnival owner had requested that we re-create Emperor Ook carrying Ma to the top of the Chrysler Building, with me hauling her up the support pole to the top of the big top tent. But we had nixed that idea and come up with a show of our own.

“AND NOW, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO,” the announcer said, “I ASK YOU TO TURN YOUR EYES UP-UP-UPWARD TO SEE THE BEAUTIFUL, THE SUBLIME . . . PHOEBE LANE!”

“Breathe,” Ma said through smiling teeth.

I put on a smile of my own and took a giant breath as the curtain started to rise.

The End.