The flesh in the furnace

than an hour. Sometimes he stayed under for most of a day, not eating or drinking, frightening Sebastian who thought he might be dead, though he never was.
        Sebastian put the lacquer brush down, and after the bristles had registered inactivity for twenty seconds, the tool ceased to secrete its transparent, odoriferous shellac. On the paper laid down to protect the floor, a wet circle seeped outwards from the bristles.
        It had come to him that tonight was the last night that Bitty Belina would be alive, at least for a while, until they moved on to another town and her story could be enacted before fresh audiences. Two days of any single story at a time was the limit. Then the puppets in that show would be returned to the Furnace to call forth another batch. They died.
        He felt an indescribable panic seize him as he realized the full impact of what he had just been thinking. He wanted to leap up and run and kick things and shout, work off this feeling of bursting apart. But he knew that all of that would not keep the blond-haired puppet alive another minute. Did the rain stop if you asked it to?
        Bitty Belina would die.
        Yet tonight she performed a new play, in private, and one longer than any in the puppet master's catalogue. That hardly seemed fair when he was a part of the show. He should get to see the new story.
        She was in a new story. For the first time he understood the import of that concept. What had happened to Bitty Belina's prince? Was he in the new life she was living? And her three suitors? And the good angel? And what of Wissa, the evil stepmother? Would Belina die in this new life rather than be saved for her prince, by her prince, as she always had been before?
        A new life? How was that possible? He, Sebastian, was the assistant. It could never happen that he would wake up one morning as the puppet master with Pertos having taken his placel A person was what he was, and nothing changed about that. You lived your life, over and over, and you accepted and enjoyed it. Bitty Belina played out her story, was almost killed by the evil stepmother, was saved. Over and over again. And he, Sebastian, moved from town to town with Pertos and unloaded the truck and watched creation and waited behind the curtain before each performance and drank some wine and ate and packed the truck and rode on with Pertos and unloaded the truck and watched creation…
        You couldn't change your life!
        The prince wouldn't be there and the stepmother would succeed and she would die. Yet how could she die when she had lived her life so often and always triumphed. How could she want to change her life and maybe die?
        And would she be so dead… so dead that the Furnace would not be able to bring her back again?
        He was whimpering.
        He knew something was awfully wrong. The world seemed to have become unstable, the floor like jelly, the walls shimmering and threatening to change shape and be something different.
        If she did not perform the script, her original life, the machine wouldn't revive her when she died. She had never been meant to die outside of the Furnace. It was written that way. Just as he had not been meant to be puppet master. Or a tree, for that matter. We are what we are. We aren't what we aren't. And anyone who changes it, they die. They must die, or nothing would be solid and real any longer. Belina with a sword through her neck, bubbling blood through her lips while the prince runs away with Wissa…
        Belina with a knife in her belly, bleeding all over his hands and screaming and begging for help and making him afraid.
        Blood, blood, blood on his hands, as before, once, then…
        He looked at his hands.
        No blood.
        He stood up and looked at Pertos.
        Pertos dreamed.
        Sebastian staggered from the room, his legs unexplainar bly weak, his shoulders aching, his arms tired, as if he had dragged some burden across a long and rugged terrain. He was not certain what must be done, but he was determined to do it to save Bitty Belina.
        Blood on his hands.
        Would they think he killed jenny, stabbed her, or would they believe his story?
        He stopped there in the middle of the long corridor behind the stage in the Grande Theater of Springsun, wondering who Jenny was. He could not remember anyone by that name, although he did think of golden hair when he