Bailey nods.
“I wish you were not so young,” Marco says. Something in his voice sounds profoundly sad, but Bailey is still distracted by his ghostlike appearance.
“Are you dead?” he asks, walking closer. With the changing angle, Marco appears almost solid one moment, and transparent again the next.
“Not precisely,” Marco says.
“Tsukiko said she was the only living person here who knew what happened.”
“I suspect Miss Tsukiko is not always entirely truthful.”
“You look like a ghost,” Bailey says. He can think of no better way to describe it.
“You appear the same way to me, so which of us is real?”
Bailey has no idea how to answer that question, so he asks the first one of his own that comes to mind instead.
“Is that your bowler hat in the courtyard?”
To his surprise, Marco smiles.
“It is, indeed,” he says. “I lost it before everything happened, so it got left behind.”
“What happened?” Bailey asks.
Marco pauses before he answers.
“That is a rather long story.”
“That’s what Tsukiko said,” Bailey says. He wonders if he can find Widget, so he can do the storytelling properly.
“She was truthful on that point, then,” Marco says. “Tsukiko intended to imprison me in the bonfire, the reasons for which are a longer story than we have time for, and there was a change of plan that resulted in the current situation. I was pulled apart and put back together again in a less concentrated state.”
Marco holds out his hand and Bailey reaches to touch it. His fingers move through without stopping, but there is a soft resistance, the impression that there is something occupying the space, even if it is not completely solid.
“It is not an illusion or a trick,” Marco says.
Bailey’s brow furrows in thought, but after a moment he nods. Poppet said nothing is impossible, and he finds he is beginning to agree.
“I am not interacting with the surroundings as directly as you are,” Marco continues. “You and everything here appear equally insubstantial from my perspective. Perhaps we will be able to discuss it at greater length another time. Come with me.” He turns and begins walking toward the back of the tent.
Bailey follows, taking a winding path around the animals. It is difficult to find places to step, though Marco glides ahead of him with much less difficulty.
Bailey loses his balance stepping around the prone figure of a polar bear. His shoulder knocks into a raven hanging in the air. The raven falls to the ground, its wings bent and broken.
Before Bailey can say anything, Marco reaches down and picks up the raven, turning it over in his hands. He moves the broken wings and reaches inside, twisting something with a clicking noise. The raven turns its head and lets out a sharp, metallic caw.
“How can you touch them?” Bailey asks.
“I am still figuring out the logistics of interacting with physical things,” Marco says, flattening the raven’s wings and letting it limp down the length of his arm. It flaps its paper feathers but cannot fly. “It likely has something to do with the fact that I made them. Elements of the circus I had a hand in creating seem to be more tangible.”
The raven hops off by a mountainous pile of paper scales with a curling tail that looks as though it might once have been a dragon.
“They’re amazing,” Bailey says.
“They are paper and clockwork wrapped up in fairly simple charms. You could do the same with a bit of study.”
It has never crossed Bailey’s mind that he could do such things himself, but having been told as much so simply and directly, it seems strangely achievable.