“It’s a 15-shot, nine mill Browning. Want to hold it?”
Leeloo nodded enthusiastically.
Dean dumped the staggered-row magazine onto his palm. Then he cracked back and checked the breech for a chambered round. After making sure the weapon was safe, without a second thought, he handed over what she knew had to be his most prized possession in all the world.
Leeloo very carefully took the Browning Hi-Power from him and held it in both hands, making a shaky, wavering attempt to aim. “Oh,” she said in dismay, “it’s heavier than I thought.”
Dean stepped around behind her and helped her raise the blaster to firing position. “You want to hold it about here,” he said.
Something new happened to Leeloo Bunny as young Dean reached his arms around her, enfolding her. In kindness. She felt suddenly safe and protected; she felt the urge to lean back against his chest, to feel the strength and the energy he gave off.
It was an urge she didn’t allow herself to give in to.
With great patience, Dean showed her how to work the Hi-Power’s safety. He made her adjust her stance to brace herself for the recoil. And he showed her how to hold her finger outside the trigger guard until she was ready to fire.
Nobody had given her any blaster training before. And certainly not with such a sophisticated and deadly predark weapon. She wasn’t old enough. Dean Cawdor, whose long, dark hair tickled the back of her neck as he leaned over her, thought she was. He cocked back the hammer with his thumb and told her to dry-fire the Browning.
“Go ahead,” he said, “squeeze the trigger.”
The firing pin made a twig-snap sound.
“Does it make a lot of noise when it really shoots?” she asked him.
“Sure does.”
He took back the blaster, lowered the hammer with his thumb, put the safety on and reholstered it.
“My ma got chilled,” Leeloo told him.
Dean looked at her for a long minute. She wasn’t sure whether she had said something bad without meaning to. Something that would make him not like her anymore.
She was about to apologize when he said, “Mine, too. She died of cancer. She was sick a long time. What happened to your ma?”
“My ma got choked in the gaudy while she was wrestling.”
“Wrestling?” Dean said, puzzled.
“On the bed.”
“Oh,” Dean said.
Leeloo stared at him closely, and as if she could read his mind—or heart—said, “Did your ma wrestle in the gaudies, too?”
“Sometimes,” the dark-haired boy said, staring down at his dusty boot tops. Though his lips moved, his face was expressionless. “But only when we didn’t have anything to eat, or nowhere safe to sleep. She was so pretty she could always find work in a gaudy.”
“They strung up the geezer who chilled my mom,” Leeloo told him. “I saw them do the whole thing. They yanked his pants down first. When his neck broke, it made a loud crack and his willy stuck out, like in wrestling. One time, before they cut him down, I clonked it good with a rock.”
“What about your dad?” Dean asked.
“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
