“But why can’t I be both?” I whisper.
“Because then Wonderhouse would starve,” he answers without hesitation.The circus needs your emptiness.The thought sits inside me like a stone dropped into a well.
He tells me that Milo's presence unsettles the balance and might compel the circus to take more from me than I can give. “If he asks you for nothing, you still must give him nothing.”
My breath catches. I think of Milo’s quiet presence and the way his emptiness felt lighter near me. “I don’t want him to feel alone,” I whisper.
The Ringmaster steps close, his voice a whisper of steel wrapped in velvet. “Joy, you are not meant to rescue the emptiness. You are meant to light the world around it. But if you feed the void directly… the circus will collapse.”
“Stay away from Milo,” he says. “For tonight.”
As he walks away, the fireflies blink nervously overhead. For the first time in my life, I am afraid—not of what my gift can do, but of what it might cost to ignore it.
Chapter 8
Milo’s Confession
The circus fattenson evening light. As the sun dips, the tents stretch their seams, swallowing the gold glow like warm soup. Fireflies pulse harder along the rope lines, their tiny bodies brightening with a kind of nervous anticipation. Dusk is always the hour Wonderhouse begins to whisper—but tonight, the whispers feel sharper, hungrier, restless in their bones.
I am supposed to avoid Milo. I try. I walk the long way behind the animal pens, and help the cook peel potatoes until my fingers wrinkle, just to stay busy. But emptiness has a way of finding those who understand it.
When I slip out to the quiet patch behind the carousel—the soft place where the sparks from last night still sleep in the grass—I find him. He is sitting on the wooden platform, elbows on his knees, juggling pins forgotten beside him.
“Joy.”
His voice is so gentle it almost breaks something inside me.
“I wasn’t…” I swallow, backing up a step. “I shouldn’t?—”
“You shouldn’t be near me,” he finishes. “I’m not blind. The Ringmaster watched me today like I was a lit fuse.”
“You don’t explode,” I say, a sad, thin laugh escaping me.
“No,” he agrees. “I implode.”
I step closer despite the warnings. Standing near him is like looking at a world without soft blue—his presence is a bruise on the air that refuses to reflect even a single spark of discovery. Where he sits, the wood is duller. Where he breathes, the air hangs heavier.
“Why did you come here?” I ask.
“Because I felt… nothing,” he says, a quiet, embarrassed laugh following. “But the nothing was different this time. It wasn’t empty. It was pulling. Like something wanted me to follow it.”
He lifts his eyes and stares straight into me. “You. Or something shaped like you. Something gentle and bright and unbearably sad. And I walked until I found it. Found you.”
The carousel hum deepens, as if listening. Milo tells me that standing near me makes the emptiness feel less like a void and more like a question: whether he can be fixed, whether feeling is something a person can relearn.
“You’re not broken,” I whisper.
He looks at me with eyes shimmering with something I cannot name. “Joy, when you gather Joy… do you ever wish any of it was yours?”
A quiet sound, between a laugh and a sob, escapes me. “I don’t know what it feels like to want something that strongly. Because if I ever did, the wanting would hurt too much.”
“Does it hurt to be alive without it?” he asks softly.
“…yes,” I whisper. “It does.”
For a fragile, trembling heartbeat, I see a spark twitch above him. Not real. Not formed. Just the possibility. And that possibility is enough to break every warning the Ringmaster etched into my ribs.
“Milo,” I say, my voice shaking, “you are not alone in the dark.”