Chapter 5: In Character

Call time was eight, doors at ten, and we were in the loading bay behind the hall by seven-thirty with Jo, getting sealed in while the morning was still gray through the roll-up door.

Jo had handled us for three years and she ran the suit-up like a liturgy. We stripped down first, the part she’d stopped seeing years ago. Eight hours of foam meant going in with as little as the suit would let us and sweating through that: Reese skinned to a thin tank and thinner panties, me to the compression top and nothing under it, bare below — a stitch down there in that heat and I’d be raw and limping by noon. Jo held our water out and didn’t so much as glance, bored, three years past finding anything on our skin worth a second look. She wasn’t going to catch us by looking, then — she’d run out of that two years ago. She’d catch us by how we moved. Water first, both of us, hard — “you drink through a straw in there and never enough, I’m not scraping you off the floor at noon.” Then the frame onto my shoulders, the hip-belt cinched, Reese in ahead of me, the shell lowered over the two of us, the arms, and last the head. Jo wore the tamer’s rig over her own clothes — a harness, a coil of chain clipped to the ring at the creature’s throat, a wrangler’s hat she hated — because a monster this size needs a keeper to walk it through a crowd, and that was the act: Jo led the beast, the beast followed Jo. She had no idea the act was also the only thing holding the leash on what the beast was actually doing.

That was what we’d fought about the whole drive. Not whether Jo came — that wasn’t a question. I was blind in the back, Reese had only her slot of vent and both hands up working the creature’s arms, and a thing our size couldn’t find its way across a packed hall alone. Jo on the chain was our eyes, our only path through the crowd. Jo wasn’t the question. The question was that the same hands cinching us in were the hands that would peel us out — every break, all day, her face right at the soaked, reeking heart of what we’d been doing — and there was no telling her we’d handle it ourselves, because we never had, not once in three years, and saying so on con morning was its own kind of confession. So we’d settled nothing, which was the only place to settle when every answer was worse than the quiet, and we’d driven the last hour without talking at all.

“Phone,” she said, and I handed it out through the back seam before she zipped it, and that was the last I’d see of it or anything else all day. The seam closed. The dark came down. The heat started its slow climb, and Reese settled her spine into my chest, and Jo thumped the shell twice over where my head was — our all-clear — and said, through the foam, from very far away, “you two are being weird again.”

“We’re nervous,” Reese said, out the vent, in her bright voice. “It’s a big day.”

“Mm.” A pause I couldn’t read, because I couldn’t see her face or Reese’s or anything. “Keep it together out there.”

“Always do.”

Then the roll-up door went up somewhere and the sound of the con came in, and Jo clipped the chain, and she led the monster out onto the floor.

I’d done this blind a dozen times and it never stopped being like stepping off a ledge. The hall hit as a wall of noise with no edges — a thousand people talking at once, flattened and boomed back by the foam over my ears into a single roar with a heartbeat in it, PA announcements folded in, somewhere a panel letting out, somewhere a bass line. No light. No horizon. Just the chain’s little tugs telegraphing through Reese to me — Jo saying left, slow, stop with her hands a room away — and the heat, and my sister, and a smell I’d never once gotten off us in all the garage runs: the two of us going sharp and close in the sealed air by the first turn, thick already, with hours of it still ahead and nowhere to breathe that wasn’t it. It would only get worse. That was the one thing in there I couldn’t build a fix for.