15. Frankenstein's Successor (9)
Betty Brice. She was regarded as one of the greatest tamers of her generation — hailed by many as the second coming of Ursus, a member of the legendary Five-Person Gang.
Ursus was famous for helping the animals he tamed unlock their own Inspira. Betty was famous for teaching hers to master human language. Plenty of tamers could hold a rough conversation with their animals, but that was less about the animals truly understanding words and more about reading voices, gestures, and glances to divine intent.
Betty's animals were different. They genuinely grasped language at a human level. Their vocal apparatus made speech difficult, of course, but they could explain concepts, express opinions, and answer questions by writing in the dirt with their claws.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I scarcely believe it myself. A wild beast that understands human speech? Surely such a feat is reserved for clever fowl such as ourselves."
That line was delivered fluently on stage by her pet parrot. The bird went beyond reciting scripted lines — it bantered with the audience and cracked witty, improvised rejoinders on the spot.
Some whispered that this had to be her Inspira. But no one could sustain a hoax using Inspira for years on end. It was a power bestowed by the Demon God of performance and amusement. Any attempt to conceal it and keep it hidden would cause it to weaken and fade away. Which meant her repeated success in rearing articulate animals and putting them on stage was entirely her own doing.
Fraud and crime involving Inspira were rare for the same reason. In theory, if you wanted to keep using Inspira for criminal ends, you would have to flaunt it before an audience and stage something resembling a performance — shouting technique names, acting flamboyant. You would have to treat your crime as a show.
Unsurprisingly, such criminals were few. Without that constraint, the world would have been flooded with people recklessly wielding the unpredictable power of Chaos.
Betty dashed across the stage for a solid hour, her brown curls bouncing. Starting with Billy the bear, her oldest partner, she brought out a parrot, a tiger, an elephant, a gorilla, a leopard — each performing its own tricks in sequence. The finale was a choral performance: dozens of animals under her direction blending their disparate cries into a single, exquisitely harmonized composition.
"Goodbye, everyone — until we meet again!"
Betty blew her flute, and every animal mirrored her movements at precisely the same instant. That was the only Inspira officially acknowledged as hers: through the sound of her flute, she could control the motions of the animals she had tamed.
Thunderous applause poured onto the stage. Everyone seemed deeply impressed by her show.
No one reacted more fervently than Ella. Even after the performance ended, she couldn't contain her excitement. She latched onto Reina beside her and kept rattling off every detail of how magnificent the show had been. She even started imitating Betty's mannerisms before prodding her friend to play the part of one of Betty's animals.
"Come on, come on! There's a good girl! Our Reina, roar..."
"Knock it off, you taming fanatic!"
"Gyaah!"
Reina, having endured enough, grabbed Ella's cheeks and pulled them in opposite directions. Ella flailed to escape her grip and barely managed to halt her runaway enthusiasm — but only for a moment. Inside a minute she was off again. "Remember when the gorilla said it wanted to try being a tamer and did that impression of a human? That prop, you see, the original bit came from Ursus's monkey act..." Reina looked utterly drained.
Ella knew she was making more of a commotion than usual. Part of it was a genuine desire to flaunt her fandom for Betty. Part of it was a desire not to reveal anything that went beyond fandom.
She remembered the first time she saw a poster of Betty as a child. The moment she looked at it, something like fate had stirred inside her. She'd told her grandfather she wanted to dress exactly like Betty. Her grandfather had smiled, half in admiration, and answered.
"That outfit, of all things. It's almost like fate."
"Fate? What do you mean, Grandpa?"
"I mean... no, never mind. It's just that you dream of being an acrobat, like your mother did."
"Hehe, I told you. I want you to teach me acrobatics, Grandpa."
"Very well. Shall we make that outfit your birthday present this year? I'm sure it'll suit you."
"Yes! Absolutely!"
Fate. From that day on, Ella had nursed a vague fantasy that Betty might be her mother. Her grandfather had told her that her mother passed away, but storybooks were full of twists in situations like this.
The age gap between her and Betty was seventeen. Not an impossible age to bear a child. Betty had also been present at the Second Circus Grand Prix — the very place where her grandfather was said to have taken charge of her as an infant. What if her grandfather had assumed Betty was dead under the rubble and taken Ella away?
She had carried that secret hope since childhood. She had never once spoken it aloud.
Her grandfather had told her that her mother had given everything she had to bring her into the world and died from the strain. If Ella — the daughter — went through life regarding some stranger as her mother, that would be a betrayal of the woman who had actually died for her. So she tried all the harder to prove that what she felt for Betty held nothing beyond simple fandom.
Caught up in her chatter, she barely noticed the line shrink until their turn arrived. Ella exchanged brief greetings with the animals that had performed in today's show and then stood before their master. Betty looked at her, registered a flicker of surprise, then smiled warmly.
"Hmm. I assumed you were just another fan of mine, but I see that's not all. It never occurred to me we'd meet like this, Ella."
In that instant, her heart dropped.
Could it really be...?
"Deputy Leader of the Monster Circus Troupe. You made quite the splash at Rekachev, I heard. I've been told a great deal about you."
Ella felt a wave of crushing disappointment. There was no other reason Betty had recognized her. This was simply a greeting for a junior in the industry. The look in her eyes, the tone of her voice — none of it was an act. Betty offered Reina, standing behind her, a similar response.
"And you must be Reina. I heard you were extraordinary at the Rekachev Exam as well. It's been a long time. Ah, but of course you wouldn't remember. I met your father once, when you were three years old."
Ella felt her excitement cool. She was still glad to meet someone she had long admired, but the thrill from moments ago was gone.
What had she been hoping for? Despite all her denials, had she still been expecting Betty to turn out to be her real mother?
Her grandfather had said her mother was gone for certain. He had said he cut open her lifeless belly to deliver Ella. She should have simply taken those words at face value. Instead, she had let herself harbor foolish hopes....
"So it really is an imitation of my outfit, isn't it? Fufu. Ella, I'd love to have a longer chat with you. What do you say? Would you visit our troupe sometime later?"
"Yes! I'd love to!"
Ella caught herself forcing a bright, animated reply. A senior she had admired for so long had personally invited her over, yet she felt no real joy.
Just then, a figure flickered through her mind. Memories of the afterlife were notoriously volatile — just as the records of those who had journeyed through the Abyss described, her recollections of Wonderland were quickly fading. But there was one person whose face she could never forget.
'Mr. Scarecrow.'
Three months ago, when Charlie had died, she had contemplated suicide. She had thought, perhaps it would be better for everyone if things simply ended. But the thought of someone who would grieve if she left the world that way had stopped her.
"I may forget my own name, but I shall never forget the name of Miss Elphi! Not even if thirty, forty years pass! So come when you are old! I shall be waiting!"
"Really? Promise!"
A scarecrow in rags and a worn straw hat.
The man who had come to greet her when she crossed into the next world.
The man who saw through her alias and knew her true name as if he had always known her.
She had made him a promise. That she would never take her own life.
Yes. That's right.
If she had done something like that — died in hatred and bitterness — she might not have been drawn into Wonderland's current. She might have stayed on the surface, bound to the earth like a restless ghost.
That, more than dying itself, was unbearable. Because there was someone she longed to see again in that place after death.
'For some reason, I miss him today.'
This summer, he had said he would briefly return to the surface to take part in the fairies' festival. Oberon, the leader of the fairy circus troupe, had promised to invite her as well.
Would she be able to meet him again there?
Would she be able to ask him, then, the questions she couldn't ask in that other place?
Standing in the light of a midwinter afternoon, she waited for the night of midsummer.
***
In a narrow, out-of-the-way alley in Kaldir, Nika reviewed the intelligence Natasha had gathered. Deploying a large number of Intelligence Department agents had allowed them to collect a significant amount of information in a short time. The festival had made the influx of outsiders routine, which helped the operatives move freely.
This region had never normally hosted so many spies. Governance here had stabilized rapidly after the annexation. Starting about twenty years ago, the number of operatives had been steadily reduced until the network was little more than a couple of local newspaper journalists filing reports.
That scaling-down had made inserting new agents difficult, but once they were in, moving around proved easy. Decades without a shadow war had dulled the opponent's vigilance. The most elite intelligence operatives had exploited that gap and swiftly extracted the core secrets.
"A man with a hundred vipers coiled in his belly."
That was Nika's assessment of Duke Amur after reviewing everything. Most conspirators preparing a rebellion built walls of secrecy around their inner circle, cultivated a small, trustworthy armed faction, and tended to push things forward with reckless haste. Intelligence operatives were trained to detect exactly those movements.
But the picture Duke Amur had drawn was far larger. Over decades, he had focused on building the region's capacity for total war. He had carefully drawn in key industries capable of turning the entire region into a logistics base at a moment's notice. He had used education and culture to weave an independence-minded identity among everyone from serfs to low-ranking nobles as "people of Amur." He had cultivated ties with various power brokers across the empire — people too ambiguous to classify as straightforward dissidents.
This was information that would have been difficult to detect even with a permanent large-scale agent presence. They had only managed to extract it by operating under the premise that Duke Amur was behind the attempted poisoning of the emperor. And even then, there had been several junctures where his team would have floundered if Nika hadn't taken direct command.
"What shall we do about Duke Amur?"
"First, send this information to Pelebin's side and solicit his opinion. My own judgment — and I suspect my teacher's will be similar — is that we're better off joining hands with him. The intelligence we've obtained isn't enough to put him on trial. At most, it might implicate one of his close associates. But drawing the world's attention that way is probably not what the Duke wants, either. We should use this information to extract as much from him as we can. What he wants is chaos in the empire. If we propose an alliance, he'll likely grasp the hand of our reformist faction."
With that, Nika closed the matter. Natasha looked at him, a bright smile surfacing on her face.
From the very beginning, she had been less than thrilled about the Crown Prince going undercover with a circus troupe. There was the question of face, the issue of security, and the nagging doubt about whether any practical benefit would come of it.
Today, the Crown Prince had delivered a definitive answer — at least on the matter of practical benefit. Without the thread he had pulled from Wonderstein, they would never have unearthed the truth about Duke Amur.
His work finished, Nika feigned disinterest and posed a question in a carefully casual voice.
"Ah, right. Who did the Troupe Leader go out with today?"
Watching the Crown Prince do his best to hide his embarrassment as he asked, Natasha suppressed a laugh and answered.
"He went out with Yurakne today."
"Yurakne. I see..."
A hint of color rose to Nika's face. He shared a room with Wonderstein. He possessed the ability to read people's hearts. He had long since noticed that the two of them shared a physical relationship.