Page 22 of Carnival’s Playground

"They're laying low," Carnival steadily says, pulling his leads back and clicking the multimeter off. "They saw Dutch shut the gates last night. They know the entire crew is on high alert."

"Which means they're smart," I grimly counter, pulling my knees up to my chest. "They're not some pissed-off amateur throwing rocks through windows. They know how to wait until we get comfortable again. Until we convince ourselves that we fixed the problem, open the gates, and let our guard down."

"Then we don't let our guard down," he flatly states, his voice dropping into that dark, possessive timbre that makes my skin prickle. "Not today. Not tomorrow. Not when the gates open."

We move to the north generators at one in the afternoon. Dutch is already there, his reading glasses perched on the end of his crooked nose while he compares our fuel logs against the engine run-times. Frank is sweating through his flannel shirt despite the cool breeze, double-checking the fuel filters for water contamination or sugar.

"Anything on your end?" Dutch gruffly demands as we walk up.

"Clean as a whistle," I wearily report, handing him our signed inspection sheets. "Midway lines, haunt feeds, and auxiliary breakers are all green. If there's a gremlin out here, he took the day off."

"That's what Frank said about the fuel lines," Dutch heavily mutters, staring across the quiet carnival lot with a grim set to his mouth. "Not a trace of dirt anywhere."

"Maybe the bastard packed his shit and ran when he saw the gates stay locked," Frank hopefully suggests, leaning on his pry bar. "Maybe we scared him off."

"Saboteurs don't just get scared off and vanish into thin air, Frank," I sharply argue, the frustration boiling over in my chest. "They're patient. They're sitting out there right now, watching us crawl through the dirt with clipboards, laughing their asses off while we lose three thousand dollars a day in ticket sales."

"Avery is right," Carnival quietly agrees, crossing his thick arms over his chest, his gaze slowly scanning the thick pine woods bordering the western fence line. "Whoever did this has a grudge against this outfit. You don't go through the trouble of filing down a tension clamp just to walk away because the target postponed the show for twenty-four hours."

"So what do we do, Dutch?" Petey anxiously asks, jogging up from the big top with a greasy rag stuffed in his back pocket. "Do we open tomorrow or what? The ticket vendors in town are blowing up my phone asking if they should issue refunds for the weekend."

Dutch stands there for a long, agonizing minute, the wind whipping the gray strands of his hair across his forehead. He looks at the silent Ferris wheel, the dark big top, and then down at the clipboard in his hands.

"One more day of hard checks," Dutch finally decides, his tone leaving no room for debate. "We run full-load diagnostics tonight with the lights blazing and no public on the grounds. If the generators hold and the high rig checks out under weight bags tomorrow afternoon, we open the gates at six tomorrow evening. But we do it on double security."

"Double security how?" Frank skeptically grunts.

"Paired patrols," Dutch sharply answers. "Nobody walks the grounds alone, day or night. We keep the trail cameras live on the fence perimeters, and every crew member carries a radio on channel one. If a light bulb flickers funny, I want to hear about it."

The rest of the afternoon crawls by in an agonizing, heavy silence. We inspect the food stalls, the funnel cake fryers, the ticket booths, the sound boards, and the emergency exits. We test every fire extinguisher on the property. We weigh down the aerial cables with two-hundred-pound sandbags and drop them repeatedly to test the new hardware. Everything holds. Everything works perfectly.

It's infuriating. Finding a problem gives you something to fix, something to fight. Finding nothing just leaves you waiting for the invisible knife to slide between your ribs.

By the time the sun drops below the horizon, bleeding streaks of bruised purple and dark orange across the Texas sky, the entire crew looks completely spent. Dutch calls the diagnostic check at eight, confirms the load holds, and orders everyone to get hot food and turn in early.

Carnival and I take the final perimeter walk along the western fence line before heading back to the trailers. The dry grass crunches beneath our boots, the beam of his heavy Maglite cutting a wide circle through the darkness.

"You really think they're watching us right now?" Carnival quietly asks, his voice barely carrying over the rustle of the wind in the mesquite trees.

"I know they are," I tell him, pulling my jacket tighter around my neck. "I can feel it right between my shoulder blades. It feels like someone holding a match near dry tinder, just waiting for the wind to pick up."

"Then we stand between the match and the tinder," he calmly says, his arm brushing mine as we walk in sync.

I look up at him in the moonlight, studying the hard, unyielding angles of his face, the scar cutting through his left eyebrow, the stubborn line of his mouth. "You don't even belong to this show, Wyatt. You could hop on that Harley of yours and be three hundred miles down the highway before breakfast. Nobody would blame you."

He stops dead in his tracks, turning to face me so fast I almost bump into his chest. His gray eyes lock onto mine, intense and unblinking.

"I'm not running, spitfire," he roughly says, his voice thick with a conviction that steals the air straight out of my lungs. "Not from a fight, and sure as hell not from you."

Something tight and aching in my chest snaps loose, replaced by a sudden rush of heat that has nothing to do with fear. "You're an idiot, Carnival."

"Probably," he dryly agrees, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Now let us finish this damn fence line so you can get some sleep."

We walk the rest of the perimeter without another word, but the silence between us is no longer heavy with dread. It's charged with something dangerous, magnetic, and completely undeniable.

When I finally crawl into my narrow bunk inside my trailer an hour later, the whole world outside is quiet. No screams, no alarms, no sirens. Just the steady, distant hum of the single security generator.

I lie there in the dark with my boots off, staring at the aluminum ceiling, waiting for the silence to break, knowing damn well that tomorrow night, when the gates unlock and the music starts, the real storm is going to hit.