15. Frankenstein's Successor (10)
Yurakne knew Nika was a boy. What's more, she saw him as someone who'd be gone in a few months, so she never bothered to be guarded around him. The secret trysts she otherwise took pains to hide from the other troupe members, she let slip in front of him without a second thought.
"Oh my, Nika, you didn't see a thing, hoho—shh!"
More than once or twice, he'd walked in on her slipping into an empty room with Wonderstein for some blatant display of affection. It had gotten to the point where he almost suspected she was using him as an outlet for some exhibitionist urge she couldn't indulge in public.
What bothered him, though, was that every single time, he felt jealousy prick at him.
I've kissed him too, you know! Don't you get all smug about it right in front of me. We've even bathed together—ugh!
As he worked to calm that simmering resentment, an image would flash through his mind: himself, dressed in women's clothes, held in Wonderstein's arms.
The thought startled him. Did he actually want to be a woman? Or was he, as a man, attracted to another man?
After wrestling with it, Nika concluded it was a kind of suspension bridge effect—that phenomenon where the physical arousal caused by fear or danger gets mistaken for romantic attraction.
A month ago, he had stood before a crowd in a woman's swimsuit, been kissed by a man, and even crawled around naked imitating a dog. His body had clearly misread the sheer tension and precariousness of that day as excitement.
The ache that rose from his lower belly whenever those memories surfaced now made sense, too. It must be irritable bowel syndrome, triggered by all that extreme stress.
"If you've gone out with Yurakne... I'm sure you're having a wonderful time."
He forced an indifferent smile and excused himself. Throughout the walk back from the strategy meeting, he fought to keep the image of Wonderstein and Yurakne rolling around naked out of his head. He refused to let jealousy conjure up some fantasy of swapping himself, dressed as a woman, into her place.
As it happened, his two companions were currently arguing about that very topic—him cross-dressing.
"See, that's why Nika should just do the girl's makeup!"
"Hmm... I'm not sure that's a great idea."
"Then who else is going to go out there? Everyone else is busy."
"Even so, dressing him up as a woman..."
They were on their way back from submitting their entry for the Carrying Your Wife Race scheduled for the next day. It was exactly what it sounded like: a race where a man carried his wife on his back. The participants didn't have to be married—any man-and-woman pair over a certain weight could enter.
It was a common event, seen at festivals all across the empire. Kiev had been a land of fierce hunting tribes for centuries, and bride-kidnapping had once been widely practiced in many of its provinces. The Carrying Your Wife Race was a folk-festival adaptation of that old custom.
The three of them had figured Umon's strength would easily secure a victory, so they registered him as the competitor. The problem was who would play the role of the wife.
The other female troupe members all seemed tied up with various things that day. So Mickey had suggested that Nika simply dress as a woman and let Umon carry him.
The moment he heard the word "dress as a woman," Nika felt that familiar twinge in his lower belly.
Damned irritable bowel syndrome!
He glanced at Umon, who was openly broadcasting his dislike for the idea. Nika didn't actually enjoy cross-dressing, but seeing Umon's undisguised revulsion stung his pride. He was reasonably pretty, after all...
"What's your problem with it?"
The red-skinned monster put on his most self-important expression and answered.
"I don't allow men to ride on my body."
"What?"
"Only women are allowed on my body. Among the troupe, only Ella and Maya have ever ridden! I have no intention of letting some boy climb on!"
"You little horndog punk! Then what the hell are we supposed to do? We already paid the entry fee!"
Mickey started hammering the top of Umon's head with the pommel of his dagger. The scene looked genuinely violent, but Umon's expression remained utterly unimpressed, while Mickey's hand grew red and swollen. He let out a yelp, stopped hitting him, and cradled his hand.
"Corporal punishment doesn't even work on this bastard!"
Nika gave a wry smile and turned to his youngest brother.
"So what now? Are we really giving up?"
Their entry fee had been a week's worth of their allowances. Umon smacked his lips, then let out a resigned sigh.
"Fine. I'll carry you, Nika. But if you're going to do the disguise, do it right. None of that half-baked stuff. I hate getting laughed at."
"All right, all right."
"Come to think of it, will you be okay, Nika? You saw the aunties entering this race. They've all got arms like this thick."
The Carrying Your Wife Race wasn't just about the man's strength. The person being carried had to perform various tasks while riding on the man's back, and that required a fair amount of strength from the woman's side, too.
"I may not look it, but I'm still a man. Against a bunch of women—"
Nika loaded his voice with all the confidence he could muster, but his expression didn't match it. At fifteen, even for a boy, he was at an age where a strong adult woman could easily overpower him. And wasn't he smaller and more delicate than most boys his age?
Maybe I should borrow some of the boss's medicine before we compete.
Whenever Wonderstein went out for one of his secret rendezvous with Yurakne, he would take a glass jar from a trunk, scoop out some sparkling powder, and toss it into his mouth. When Nika had asked what it was, the answer had been:
"Haha, a kind of nutritional supplement, shall we say? A handful of this, and your body doesn't tire for hours."
"...So it's a virility drug."
"Considering I'm going out with Yurakne, denying it would be pointless. Well, yes, it has that function, too."
Despite his youth, Nika had a keen interest in virility drugs. Those sorts of things were all supposed to promote male hormone production. Self-conscious about his boyish looks—not a single whisker—and his slender build, he'd sought out such medicines for years and had drunk plenty of them. Most had shown no discernible effect.
But from what he understood, Wonderstein was a Madosa whose mastery over biological manipulation was nearly unmatched. A drug prepared by someone like him might produce results Nika had never seen before.
He had been quietly siphoning off small amounts of the powder for some time, transferring it to another bottle in portions too small to be noticed. He'd now gathered enough for a single dose—just enough to test it at the race.
Probably nothing to worry about.
He'd taken this kind of tonic countless times. Plus, Wonderstein had personally demonstrated that it wasn't toxic. There was no real cause for concern.
What Nika didn't know was that the sparkling powder Wonderstein drank was actually "Starlight," a fragment produced during the creation of the jewel Eye of Kirkeus. And he had no way of knowing that it possessed the power to temporarily nullify the genetic alteration effects caused by Devolut.
***
Maya, who had been asleep for most of the afternoon, woke to the noise outside.
"You sons of bitches! I'll kill you!"
It was Minova's voice. Loud as he normally was, he was now bellowing loudly enough to startle people out of the neighboring tents.
"Whoa, whoa, calm down."
"They've always been that kind of scum."
Troupe members rushed in to soothe him. Minova, finally noticing all the eyes on him, lowered his voice but still shouted.
"Those damn clowns!"
He was still fuming, trying to get himself under control, when the older troupe members returned to camp after their own schedules.
"Heh-heh, Minova, your voice carried all the way across the lake."
"Ha-ha, what's happened?"
Minova clamped his mouth shut and slumped onto a nearby rock, while Ben, who had been trying to restrain him, explained the situation.
It had happened a few hours ago. After lunch, they'd gone to see a show at Le Vodvilien. The clowns running that program were the sort who delighted in pointing fingers at the audience and spitting venom.
They grabbed fat spectators, noble spectators, people who had come alone, women in revealing clothes, and teased each accordingly. Everyone knew the nature of the show and laughed it off. Then they reached Minova, and their jokes took on a pointedly malicious edge.
-Well, well, look who it is. Isn't that Rooster Minova, the old chief of the Morning Star Circus?
-Did you switch careers to being a spectator after you ran your troupe into the ground?
Minova belatedly recognized them as people he'd clashed with in the past. They were the kind of people you were better off not tangling with. But before he could slip away, they crossed the line.
-Where's that little daughter of yours? Didn't you shave her head and market her tears because she had some incurable disease?
-Back during "The Five Acrobats," didn't you peddle that same sob story to shove her into Christian's fake script?
-Ha! Pimping out a girl on stage—same old tricks from your days running whores, eh?
In his youth, Minova had drifted through back alleys with his fists. He'd once taken a few street women with nowhere to go under his protection. He'd met Ruelo's mother then, too.
People had always sneered that he'd been a pimp. He'd never much cared. True, he'd helped connect those women to legitimate establishments, but he'd never exploited them in the process, and that let him hold his head high.
But what those clowns had just said—mocking him for making money by parading his daughter on stage—that crossed a line no father of a six-year-old girl should have to hear.
"You bastards!"
Minova had vaulted onto the stage then and there and planted his fist in the clowns' faces. The guard corps had been summoned; a full-blown ruckus had erupted.
"Tch. They were the ones in the wrong."
"Please make sure none of this reaches Ruelo's ears..."
"Of course not."
"Honestly, I've seen some rotten types."
"Clowns and their goddamn mouths, I swear..."
"Ha-ha, w-why are you all looking at me when you say that..."
A calmer mood settled over the camp. Maya sat up in her cot.
Minova's booming shouts had jolted her back to her senses. Without them, she might well have stayed in bed for days longer.
The revelation that their troupe leader was homosexual had shaken her that deeply. It wasn't that she hated homosexuality. She hadn't even been bothered when she'd learned that Karen harbored such feelings toward her.
But the knowledge that Wonderstein would never, for the rest of his life, see her as more than a student was enough to turn her into a more vehement homophobe than any religious fundamentalist. She even felt jealousy flare up over any man who so much as stood near him.
Just because you're men, you possess an opportunity I'll never have. The chance to be loved by him.
-Mrowwrr.
A white cat with red stripes let out a cry. Wally, who had been absent for some time, had reappeared a few days ago, right when Maya's heart had fallen into turmoil.
The Heart Demon. The phenomenon of her magic slipping beyond her control had started again. This time it was so severe she couldn't even feel her own mana draining away.
Maya clenched her fists from the tension. It wasn't because the dead cat had shown itself. Nor was it because the Papilax was returning.
The illusion that had activated to fill the void in her heart had recently produced one more entity—one she had always wanted to create through polygons but had sworn to herself over and over that she would never, ever make.
-Miss Maya.
A voice only the creator of the illusion could hear rang in her ears. A handsome blond man wearing an impossibly gentle smile appeared before her eyes.