“Why am I not surprised?”

“My guess is they’ve been planning this for a while,” Nine continued. “Maybe with the help of someone inside Cirque des Étoiles.”

“But those things are huge,” Six said. “Where have they been keeping them?”

Nine shook his head. “How about we ask them when we catch them?” he said. “Speaking of that, are you up for getting going?”

He stood and offered Six his hand. She allowed him to help her to her feet.

“How do you feel?”

“Are you going to ask me that every five minutes, Dad?” Six said.

“Keep that attitude and there’ll be no ice cream for you, little lady,” Nine said, shaking his finger at her.

“I feel fine,” Six said. “Where to now?”

“We should probably follow the fire and the screaming,” Nine said.

They walked back into the arena. In the time that they’d been backstage, the fire department had arrived and was putting out the dozen or more fires blazing around the place. Seeing Six and Nine, one of the firefighters trotted over.

“You can’t be in here,” she said. Then she looked again. “Hey—you’re the Garde! What are you doing in here?”

“Same thing you are,” Nine said. “Trying to get this under control.”

“What the hell is going on?” the woman asked. “People are saying there are monsters running loose.”

“Animatronics,” Nine said. “Built for the show. Something went wrong.”

The woman looked doubtful. She nodded at the dead beast lying by the ruins of the stage. The metal pole still jutted from its body. Sticky black blood oozed from the wound. “That looks pretty real,” she said.

“Hydraulic fluid,” Nine said smoothly. “And don’t touch it. It could be corrosive.”

The firefighter ignored the comment. “There are bodies,” she said, indicating several telltale black bags lying off to one side.

Nine and Six looked at one another.

“Listen,” Six said. “We’re going to contain this. For now, all you know is that those things are robots built for the show. Something went wrong with them and some people got hurt. Okay?”

The woman looked doubtful. She started to say something.

“We’ll take care of it,” Six said quickly. “I promise.”

The firefighter nodded. “Animatronic space monsters,” she said. “You got it.”

“Thank you,” said Six.

“By the way, some of those injured people are pretty famous,” the woman said. “It won’t be long before someone tweets or posts about this to their millions of followers. So you should probably have a plan.”

“I always do,” Nine said, giving the woman his most charming grin.

The woman looked at Six, obviously not enraptured by Nine’s personality.

“We’ll take care of it,” Six said again.

The woman went back to work, ordering the various crews around the arena. Six and Nine left her to do her job, walking into the tunnel connecting the arena to the hotel. It too was in ruins.

Nine took out a phone and started typing.

“What are you doing?” Six asked.