Rodeo

Zan spread the crème carefully over cheekbones, avoiding the delicate skin around the eyes, stroking down into the neck and then up again, to ensure full coverage. The clown under her hand held still, barely breathing, as though afraid to disturb her ministrations.

“This is the story,” Zan said. “This is the story of what a clown must do.”

Her apprentice stood behind her, at enough distance not to jostle her arm, but close enough to see what she did, and hear what she said.

“To be steadfast, and strong; clever and quick.”

Back in the days before the Age, clowns were everywhere. Her own master had told her so, showing faded photos and posters advertising their craft. He had taught her how to wash away her own features and replace them with crème and blackstick, to articulate her joints, and submerge herself into the persona. Into the performance.

Now she was too old. Too brittle. Now she taught others to perform, passing on what she knew into the next generation.

There were three basic faces, although each performer added their own touches. The best were remembered along with Pierrot, Grimaldi, Adler, Blackendorf, Putter; their faces recreated on the wall of memory that led to the dressing rooms.

She added the black diamond this clown preferred around his eye, making the grease crayon lines thick and clear. It brought the attention to his gaze. It also kept the glare of the lights from blinding you while you worked. This clown – Jordan, his name was. He had taken the traditional surname of Tex when he joined their trope, but people called him Jordan. He kept it simple. She appreciated that.

A final stroke of the crayon, and she pursed her pale-pink lips in satisfaction, feeling the dry skin tug itself into even worse wrinkles as she did so.

“You are a clown. The scion of an illustrious line. The keeper of a legacy that goes back before the Burnings. Before the Wicked Times.”

This was ritual. It soothed a stomach tied up with pre-performance knots, reminded a clown of what they did, and why.

“When the spotlight hits you, and you hear the screams, you will remember this. And you will make us proud of you this day.”

Jordan looked up at her, and she nodded once, solemnly, then stepped back to allow him room to rise, her apprentice scuttling out of the way before he was stepped on.

“Go, Tex. They’re waiting.”

“Ma’am.” The one word he had spoken, since he sat down in her chair. Jordan sat down, but Tex was the one who left.

He moved out into the hallway, spurs clinking on the tile as he took each step, the tap-tap of his boot heels a familiar syncopation.

Her apprentice started to clear her materials away, but she sent him off with a quick flick of one hand. Her veins were blue and thick, but her gesture was still steady, and he bowed slightly and left her alone with her thoughts.

He went down the hall, ignoring the others who stopped, watching him as he walked past. He stopped only long enough to take a coil of heavy rope and a crushed-brim hat from a shelf with his name marked on it in thick red pen.

Then further down the hall to the chute, a heavy black door in a steel wall, reinforced over the years until it was impossible to knock down, impossible to slip around.

The scouts waited for him there. Four of them; more than usual, for one clown to cover. But scouts were easy to train. Clowns took longer. And so they were hoarded, used more carefully.

“Everyone got their goals down?” the leader, a middle-aged man with the lean look of a ferret dressed in mesh cammo and heavy-soled boots, asked the others. They nodded, their faces bare and strange-looking to the clown’s eyes.

“Right. You ready, Tex?”

The clown nodded as well, jamming the hat onto his head, careful not to smudge his face. “Let it rip,” he said to the chute-keeper, a young woman with arms like corded steel under flesh.

And then the door was open, and Tex was through the short steel tunnel they called the chute, spinning and rolling like a top, like a madman, the coiled rope over his shoulder, ready to be used at need.

Out into the darkness, a disorienting flash of light from the spotlights on the walls, skimming and scattering away. The lights were less to illuminate than to distract, to confuse.

The mutes – not mute at all, the scarred, screaming things, all wild hair and sunken eyes and claws outstretched – were wise to clowns coming out first, now. They didn’t live long, mutes didn’t, and they didn’t teach each other, not so far as anyone could tell, but they adapted to what they saw.

So Tex went after the nearest, a filthy, smelly thing vaguely female, capering in a mockery of her shambling gait. Three were unable to resist him, this easy prey, following his path away from the chute’s opening. Just as they were meant to. Distracted from fresh meat, they soon turned on each other, and Tex slapped his hat at a fourth, then slid between it and another, hooting and hollering and making a spectacle of himself as the lights caught the white of his face, shining in the darkness.

And the scouts slipped through, one, two, three, four, disappearing into the darkness of the world outside. He didn’t know what their mission was: to raid a previously undiscovered cache, or rescue some idiots trapped in a mute territory, or retrieve a hover that went down outside protected zones. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. His job was to keep them safe until they were out of the chute, that was all.

And then a claw came down on the back of his neck. Red splashed against white, and the hat fell to the muddy ground, and was trampled by narrow, clawed feet.

Someone else would make sure the scouts got back inside.

In the dressing room, Zan dipped two fingers into the still-open jar of crème and slowly spread a swath of white across one cheekbone, staring into the mirror as wrinkles disappeared under the layer of whiteface.

Every clown went out there to die. Only the failures made it back alive.