It's opening day and everything's all mystical and lovely, and at midnight, the trippy pyrotechnics begin.
Fire performers shoot arrows into the bonfire, changing it from yellow to light blue to pink to orange to red to crimson to wine-color to violet to indigo to midnight blue to black, which, for some reason makes everyone stay.
If you were planning on leaving, meaning what was in the tents was unsatisfying, then how would turning a fire different colors give any more incentive to stay? The things in the tents are at least 3 times better.
Anyway, while the spectators, who are both easily and uneasily impressed, wander around, the assistant and wife to the wild-cat tamer is in labor. They bring in a doctor to help her deliver, but this is the late 1800s, and doctors won't use epidurals for another sixty years, so all I can say is ouch.
She delivers twins within a thirteen-minute period: Winston and Penelope Murray, to the disappointment of Chandresh, because he wanted the circus to have an act with identical twins.
The children both have seriously red hair, a color Tsukiko describes as "auspicious", of course without elaborating. I have to wonder if even she knows what she's talking about sometimes.
"Close to dawn, when the circus is emptying, they are taken for a walk around the tents and into the courtyard. The purpose is ostensibly to lull them to sleep, but they stay awake, watching the lights and the costumes and the stripes on the tents around them, strangely alert for being only a few hours old."
You might not have identical twins, Chandresh, but it appears you've got some Children of the Corn on your hands.
The chapter ends with the two sleeping at dawn in an iron crib, the sender of which is unknown. At some point, the two are nicknamed, and it is here we learn the name the red-haired girl is called (which places her and Bailey at around the same age, by the way): Poppet. Oh, and Widget.
Chapter Seventeen, as well as Chapter Three of Shatter Me should be out before next Monday.
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