Chaos Choreography (30 page)

“I know, I'm sorry,” I said. “I haven't been feeling well. I had to stop by the bathroom for some cold water.”

As I'd hoped, Adrian's expression shifted, becoming concerned. It was nothing to do with me: even if I hadn't been one of his specific favorites, the show's insurance insisted all medical issues be taken with the utmost seriousness. “Are you well enough to dance today, darling? We can provide a fill-in for your partner, if you're not.”

The responsible thing to do would have been to say that no, I wasn't well: I needed to go back to the apartments and sleep off whatever virus I'd managed to pick up. Sadly, it wouldn't have been that simple. The show's medics would have been required to get involved, and by the time they finished filling me with fluids and lecturing
me on nutrition—two things that seemed to happen for everything from food poisoning to broken toes and concussions—I would have lost even more time than I was going to waste dealing with the choreographers. I shook my head.

“I think I'm all right. I promise to say something the second I feel otherwise, but after last night, I don't think I can afford to miss the first day of choreography.” I didn't have to fake the crack in my voice. Let them assume I was worried about my place on the show, and not about the life of my grandmother and my friends. The best lies were always built on a foundation of truth.

“All right, dear, all right,” said Adrian. He waved me to my place on the stage, and didn't say another word about my tardiness.

The drawing of our dance styles from the hat went quickly after that. Anders and I got the Argentine tango, to my immense relief. I—or rather, Valerie—had been nationally ranked in that style more than once, and I could handle the rehearsal in my sleep, no matter how difficult our choreographer tried to make it. Pax and Lyra got hip-hop, while Malena and Troy pulled contemporary. Malena looked unhappy about that, but there wasn't time to reassure her before we were all being hustled off to our individual rooms to get to work.

It was more than an hour before I could duck away, making a vague excuse about needing to go to the bathroom. We were with Marisol Bustos again, the show's go-to for the Argentine tango, and she seemed relieved to have me stepping out of the room for a few minutes. It would give her time to focus her attentions on Anders, who frankly needed them much more than I did.

(Which wasn't to say that she was going to go easy on me in the days ahead. I knew Marisol, and worse, Marisol knew what I was capable of. I could underperform today, since I had the whole “I don't feel well” excuse going for me, but come tomorrow, I'd either need to step up my game or see the show's medics. That meant I needed to take care of this
today
.)

I hurried down the hall, bypassing the restrooms on my way to the dressing room. Luck was with me, maybe for the first time since I'd decided to come back on the show: there was no one else there. Quickly, I made my way to the main wardrobe rack, crouched down, and whispered, “I seek audience.”

“HAIL!” The cry was muted—the mice were making an effort—but loud enough that I glanced over my shoulder, waiting for a PA or stagehand to stick their head in and ask what I was shouting about. When no one appeared I relaxed, marginally, and turned back to the wardrobe rack.

The mice were starting to appear, lining themselves up neatly as they bristled their whiskers and waved their paws in the air, jubilant over my appearance. Only about half the colony was present; the rest must have been running around in the basements, looking for signs of Alice. They'd been making the most of their time in the theater: fully half of them had strings of beads or sequins wrapped around their necks, and one was clutching a bag made from an ankle sock, stuffed to its absolute limit with feathers.

“Have you been chewing on costumes?” I asked.

“No, Priestess,” said the mouse at the front of the group. “All we have Taken, we have Found, for did not the Well-Groomed Priestess say unto us, What Has Been Discarded, You May Have, But Don't You Little Monsters Nip My Embroidery?”

“I'll believe it,” I said. “I'll try to find you a shoebox to put everything in. I can sneak it back to the apartment, no problem.”

The mice cheered again. Then they sobered, and the lead mouse said, “We have not found the Noisy Priestess. We have failed you.”

“Woe,” moaned the mice, in unnerving unison.

The last thing I needed to deal with was a crisis of faith on the part of my Aeslin mice. “You haven't failed me,” I said hurriedly. “Anything worth doing is worth working for, right? We're being challenged right now.
That means we have to stick with it, and we'll find her.” Whether or not we'd find her alive . . .

No. I couldn't dwell on that, or on the fact that maintaining my cover meant I was dancing while my grandmother was missing and potentially dead somewhere underneath the theater. For the sake of the mice, I had to remain positive.

That was a lie, too. For the sake of my heart, I had to remain positive. If I let my positivity fade, I would lose my grip on Valerie: she would collapse like the house of cards she was, and I would have to face the fact that I didn't belong here, I never really had, and everything was going wrong around me.

“You are Wise,” said the lead mouse solemnly. “We have searched three more of the chambers below the ground. Dark they are, and vile, and filled with scuttling creatures.”

“They were delicious,” piped another mouse.

“Assuming you mean the scuttling creatures, there; go on,” I said. “What did you find?”

“No sign that anyone had walked in those dark places for many days and nights, Priestess,” said the lead mouse, shooting a glare at the mouse that had dared to interject. The Aeslin enforced a fairly strict hierarchy among themselves. It was possible for a mouse who wasn't part of the priesthood to go years without speaking directly to a family member. It had always seemed a little unfair to me, but since I wasn't a part of the colony, I figured it wasn't my place to say anything. “There was neither trace nor track of the Noisy Priestess.”

“Okay,” I said, despite the fact that this was anything
but
okay. “How many rooms do you have left to go?”

The mouse slicked back its whiskers, looking despondent. “Truly, we Do Not Know,” it said. “Each time we think we have reached the end, we find another door, another chamber. Two of the rooms we have searched so far were not present on the Helpful Map.”

“Which means you're starting to find the hidebehind
areas, which were never on the map to begin with,” I said. “Great. Do you need me to do any annotating?”

“Please,” said the mouse, with all the solemnity of someone who had just had a great and unexpected favor bestowed upon them.

I fished the map out from behind the wardrobe rack and spent five minutes making notes to match the things the mice told me. Here was a door, here was a staircase with two treads missing, here was a good place to hunt centipedes. Dominic's handwriting was large and spidery and reassuring. Mine was tight and compact, filling in the space between his notes.

When I was done, I handed the pencil back to the lead mouse, said, “Come find me if you find any trace of her,” and left to the sound of muted rodent cheering, fleeing back to the rehearsal room, where Marisol was just starting to get impatient waiting for me.

Thank God for the Argentine tango. Any other dance form and I would have been falling on my ass. As it was, Marisol kept snapping corrections to my form and ordering me to get my face under control. After the third time I'd mechanically performed the same piece of footwork, she clapped her hands and shouted, “Stop!”

We stopped.

Marisol turned off the music before turning on me and demanding, “You! What is
wrong
with you? A broken heart? A broken ankle? Tell me you have broken
something
, and that you're not making a mockery of my rehearsal without an excellent reason!”

“I'm not feeling well,” I said, without hesitation. The trick to a good lie: keep it simple, keep it consistent, and for the love of God, keep it unprovable if you possibly can. The second people start demanding proof, you're done.

“Valerie, I have seen you dance with walking pneumonia. You slid yourself across that stage like you were the rightful queen, and everyone else your subjects. Do not stand there pleading a little stomach flu and
pretending it justifies the performance I'm seeing out of you today.” Marisol's expression changed, turning calculating. “Unless you've got a secret . . . ?”

For a single panicked moment, I thought my wig had slipped. Then I realized she was looking speculatively at my midsection. “No!” I yelped. “No, I'm not pregnant, I'm just . . .” Anders was in the room. Anything I said would be relayed by him to Lyra and Pax, which meant—given Lyra's fondness for swapping stories with the other dancers—that it would be relayed to the rest of the show by the end of the day. Dammit. I took a breath, and said, “I'm not feeling well, and I didn't really sleep last night. My grandmother isn't doing so good. I guess when you combine the two, I'm not up to my usual standards. I'm sorry.”

Marisol blinked. “Your grandmother? I thought—” She stopped herself. It was too late: I already knew what she thought, because I was the one who'd told the original lies. Little Valerie Pryor, whose family didn't want her. Too obsessed with dance to be a good girl, too obsessed with winning to be a bad girl. To have me saying I was upset because my grandmother wasn't well probably made about as much sense to her as a gorgon going vegan would make to me.

I didn't have to work to bring the tears to my eyes. The real challenge was keeping them contained. Once summoned, they threatened to overspill and overwhelm me. “She's always been happy for me to be whoever I want to be. She's just one of those people, you know? But we don't get to see each other much, because she lives really far away. I got the call last night.”

Even Anders looked sympathetic. I was all too aware of the cameras rolling. Adrian would get this footage before the show next week, and he'd play it, even if America's vote put me solidly in the bottom three. This was the last time the judges could save someone. A story about a sick grandmother might be enough to make them save me.

The thought made me feel ill. I didn't want to use my
grandmother as a rope to pull myself to safety; I wanted to save
her
. More, I wanted to cling to the idea that she was still alive, somewhere in the dark beneath this building. I wanted her to be fine and furious with the world, kicking and biting and gnawing through her own chains if that was what it took. Grandma Alice was a constant. She was going to outlive the rest of us, because that was the way the world
worked
, and now here I was, proving to the world that I was the weakest of her grandchildren. This was going to be on television. My parents would see me using her as an excuse.

And I didn't have a choice in the matter. I stopped holding back my tears and let them run down my cheeks as I gazed miserably at Marisol, waiting for her to say something.

She looked flustered. “My poor dear, I had no idea—I didn't know you were in contact with any of your family. Why don't you take some time to compose yourself? I can work with Anders while you're indisposed, and I know you'll be able to catch up anything you miss.”

“Yeah, Val,” said Anders, looking equally concerned. “We don't start learning the group choreo until after lunch. That should give you a couple of hours to put your head together and get back on your feet.”

“Thank you both,” I said, still crying. Now that I'd started, I couldn't seem to stop. Before either of them could say anything else I turned, grabbed my dance bag off the bench near the door, and left the room.

This was an unexpected reprieve. I was going to do as much with it as I possibly could.

For most people, going from well-lit dance studio to underground labyrinth full of weird smells and damp patches would seem like some sort of punishment. For me, it was a normal day's work.

I descended the stairs as carefully as I could, wishing I had more for light than the bare bulbs overhead. They
were bright enough when I was directly underneath them, but they were spaced out such that there were bands of darkness between them. I'd never appreciated the practical applications of interior decorating so much in my life. A couple of Tiffany lampshades and this whole hallway would have been lit up like Central Park at Christmas.

“Are we almost there?” I asked.

“Very nearly, Priestess,” said the Aeslin mouse on my shoulder. It was clinging to my earring with one paw, keeping itself stable as I descended. “The second search party did say, lo, we are going this way, and the rest of us did say, yea, though you walk through the hallway that was not on the map, you should fear no evil.”