Chaos Choreography (31 page)

“Gonna pretend you haven't started parodying the Bible and just keep walking, if that's all the same to you.”

“As you say, Priestess.”

It was sometimes difficult to tell when Aeslin mice were joking. They
did
have the capacity for humor, and could be amused by the damnedest things. I resisted the urge to turn and eye the mouse. If it was still holding my earring when I moved my head, I could wind up knocking it off my shoulder, and that would make the remainder of my descent a lot more interesting than it needed to be.

The stairs were in reasonably good shape, considering that I was now at least two levels below the street and still going down. The air was damp and tasted of mildew. “How did you find the hallway if it wasn't on the map?”

“The wall appeared intact, Priestess, solid as stone and capable of withstanding any attempts to breach it. But the air flowed through it all the same, as from a crack the size of a valley.” The mouse's whiskers tickled my ear. “We sent the juniormost priest to see what was on the other side, and she stepped through the stone, and was gone. When she returned, she reported a great, wide hall, lit with these same bulbs, filled with these same shadows.”

“Was the false wall still there for her after she came
back through? I mean, could she still see it when she looked?”

“The false wall never rippled or changed, Priestess. It was like smoke—visible to the eye, but invisible to the nose or paw.”

The mouse was describing hidebehind work. It had to be. They were experts at hanging an illusion on the smallest available hook, spinning scenes like spiders spun their webs. It was part of what kept them so well hidden. In a world where even the most secretive cryptids were being dragged, one by one, out into the light, most cryptozoologists had never actually
seen
a hidebehind. So far as I was aware, there were no pictures of them, only paintings and sketches done from rare eyewitness accounts. I'd spoken to the hidebehinds of Portland at great length—had even served as an impromptu marriage counselor for a couple who used to live under the supermarket downtown—and I couldn't say for sure whether I'd ever seen one. They were that good at what they did, and what they did was disappear.

That left me with one big concern. “Will you be able to find your way back to the false wall when we get there?”

The mouse's whiskers tickled my ear again, this time in quick, staccato bursts: it was laughing. “It can be easy to forget, Priestess, that you are in some ways less attuned to the world around you than we are, for you do not need to be: in your divinity, you may face all challenges without flinching, without need to be prepared to scurry and hide. The air passes through the wall, and will ruffle my fur and carry the scent of such dangers as might await us beyond the veil that is no veil. I will lead you true, Priestess. You will be Proud of Me.”

“You're riding my shoulder into the dark below a theater, where no one can hear us scream. Trust me, mouse, I'm already proud of you.”

I couldn't see the mouse on my shoulder, but I could feel it puffing out its fur with satisfaction and delight. Sometimes it was easy to keep the Aeslin happy.

Sometimes it was incredibly hard.

My foot hit the bottom of the stairs as I passed outside the sphere of the last of the overhead lights. Darkness fell, surprisingly profound, especially considering how close I was to the stairway. Glancing upward, I could see the naked bulbs glittering like beckoning stars, offering an escape from the certain death that waited up ahead. That, too, was hidebehind work. They were good at all sorts of illusion, from visual to emotional, and they never missed a trick.

“Now where?”

“Walk forward, Priestess, and do not be afraid; the wall will not harm you.”

Being afraid of a wall was only common sense, considering I was walking blindly into the dark. The mice were good about not steering us wrong. I took a deep breath and kept going, taking three long steps into the black—

—and into the light. One second I was in the dark underground hall, and the next I was in another, much brighter hall. The overhead lights were equipped with small button shades that distributed their illumination smoothly over the entire area, putting the mold-speckled walls and linoleum floor on full display. It was clear no one had done any cleaning down here in quite some time.

It was equally clear that people had lived here, once. The linoleum was the sort usually installed in low-rent apartment buildings and public kitchens, places where mud might be tracked in from the outside, where children played and messes were made. It didn't look industrial or cold. It looked like the front hall of a community center, one that had been inexplicably abandoned by its residents.

Or maybe not so inexplicably. The entry was hidebehind construction, and the hidebehinds had been a part of the original community. They must have left with the rest, either because they no longer felt safe, or because they couldn't bring in the supplies they needed without passing through the human-controlled parts of the building. I
looked up, following the exposed wiring between the lampshades. It vanished into the corner of the hall. I was willing to bet that this hallway, and any others like it, had been illicitly wired into the city power grid, providing a low drain so constant that no one had ever noticed it.

“This is where you left the other group, right?” I asked.

“Yes, Priestess,” squeaked the mouse. “They were to continue searching the rooms until their shift passed, or one came seeking them.”

“Okay, that's good. That means we're not totally alone down here.” I started walking forward. Either the hidebehinds hadn't made any effort to conceal the doors on the other side of their clever gate, or there were more rooms down here than made sense, strictly speaking. It seemed like I passed a room every five or six feet. Most of the doors were closed, but the space between them and the floor was enough for a determined Aeslin mouse to squeeze through.

“Shall I call them for you, Priestess?”

“Yes, why don't you d—” I stopped mid-word. “Wait.”

There were footsteps coming down the hall, sharp and quick and unmistakably bipedal. They were coming toward us from around a corner up ahead.

The hall was effectively featureless, leaving me nowhere to hide except the obvious. I whirled and tried the knob of the nearest door. Locked. I tiptoed as quickly as I could back down the hall, my heart hammering against my ribs. I wasn't unarmed—I hadn't voluntarily gone anywhere without a weapon since my eleventh birthday party—but if this came down to a fight, I couldn't be sure that I was going to win. I didn't know what was coming down that hall, and my parents didn't raise me to charge in blind when there was any other option.

The second knob turned under my hand. I pushed the door open, not letting go of the knob, since I didn't want it to bang against the wall, and ducked inside. The room was dark, but that didn't matter as much as getting out of the hall.

Easing the door most of the way closed, I braced myself against it, ear to the wood, and listened.

The footsteps got louder. A female voice, muffled by the semi-closed door and distorted by the hallway, said, “I thought we'd be done by now.”

I couldn't recognize the speaker, not with the way the environment was working against me, but I could pick up on her tone. She was
pissed
.

“I told you, this isn't an exact science.” The second voice belonged to a man. Apart from that, I couldn't say. “Sometimes it takes four, sometimes it takes fourteen. There's a reason we brought back the last five seasons.”

“Yeah, ratings, and that arrogant bitch insisting we had to stick to the Top Twenty format even when we weren't having auditions. Why does she have so much pull with the network?”

“She's the face of the show. They need to keep her happy.” The man's voice was calm, even reasonable: he was clearly the one in charge, and doing his part to manage his companion's mood.

I was glad I was hidden, and no one could see the relief in my expression. The only person who could be described as “the face of the show” was Brenna—even Adrian wasn't as recognized as she was, and wouldn't be identified as quickly on the street. Brenna had been instrumental in putting together the All-Star season, but she hadn't been part of the plan to sacrifice us to the snake god. I'd already been pretty sure of that. Having it confirmed was still reassuring. For one thing, it meant there wasn't an entire nest of dragons arrayed against me.

“This is all pointless. We could use anybody.”

“This particular snake god prefers talented sacrifices. Young people at the height of their powers. We give it what it wants, and it will give us what we want. Feeding it the staff would just anger it. You just need to have patience.”

“I don't want to have patience. I want to have results.”

“Soon,” said the man.

Their footsteps faded off down the hall, leaving me and the mouse alone in the dark. I started to ease the door open, to look after them, and froze as I realized that it wasn't that dark anymore.

The wall behind me was glowing. Nothing that glows—apart from stars on a ceiling, or glow sticks at a rave—has ever been a good thing.

Well, crap.

“The difference between a last stand and a Tuesday afternoon is all in how many bullets you had at the start.”

—Frances Brown

Somewhere below the Crier Theater, woefully underprepared for whatever's about to burst through that glowing wall

T
HERE WAS TIME TO
RUN:
I was at the door, and a step would see me in the hall, putting more distance and some barriers between me and whatever was coming through the wall. But there'd be nothing to stop it from following me out, and more, something that could pass through solid stone might be the answer to the question that had been gnawing at us all. Where were the bodies going?

I was about to find out.

“Get down,” I hissed, pulling the pistol from the small of my back. The mouse obeyed without hesitation, tiny claws digging into me as it ran down my front. The light from the wall got brighter. I tensed, readying myself for whatever happened next.

The light began consolidating into straight lines, one about seven feet up from the floor, the others descending from its ends. I realized what it was a bare second before the middle went black and someone stumbled into the room.

The semi-spectral door continued to glow, but it
wasn't enough for me to see what I was aiming at. I took aim anyway, clicking off the safety with a swipe of my thumb. The newcomer straightened, head snapping toward the sound. Then it spoke, calm and clear and far more collected than I was feeling at the moment.

“Verity Alice Price, if you shoot me, your father is going to tan your hide.”

“Grandma?!” I started lowering my gun. Then I stopped, eyes narrowing, and took more careful aim. “Prove it.”

“For your sixth birthday I got you a ballerina Barbie and a bear trap. A real bear trap. No bear, though. Your mother thanked me for the thought, but said a real bear would have been a bit much, given you were no bigger than a whisper, and she didn't want you getting eaten.”

“Grandma!” This time I clicked the safety back into place before lowering my pistol and shoving it into the waistband of my yoga pants. “Are you hurt? What are you doing down here?
How
are you down here?”

“Can I ask one?” For the first time, I heard the weariness in her tone. “
Where
is down here? I've been trying every door and egress charm I had on me, and most of them opened on dimensions you don't want to visit. I was down to my last three options. If this hadn't worked, I would have needed to go back to Naga for another set, and that could have taken months.”

No one in the family really understood how Grandma managed her particular brand of dimensional transit, not even Mom, who sometimes joined her on her journeys. (Mom used a more traditional blend of door-opening herbs, supplied by a Letiche she'd known since college.) Uncle Naga was involved. The rest was more than she'd ever been willing to tell us.

“We're in the subbasement of the theater, behind a set of hidebehind illusions,” I said. “I got a map from those ghouls you're renting the garage from.”

“How did they—”

“The theater was built on the top of their old home, and Adrian didn't bother to fill in the underground
levels. I don't think he realized most of them were
here
. Not all the rooms are on the map, and some of the ones that are have illusions blocking the door.”

There was a prickling on the front of my shirt as the Aeslin mouse accompanying me ran back up to my shoulder, clung, and jubilantly cried, “Hail and welcome! Hail to the return of the Noisy Priestess, who was missing, but not on Pilgrimage!”

“Hello, mouse.” Alice managed to inject a note of warmth under the exhaustion in her tone. “Thank you for helping my granddaughter look for me.”

“It was an Honor,” said the mouse, virtually vibrating with joy.

The light from the wall guttered and went out, leaving us in darkness. There was a pause before Alice asked, “Do you have a flashlight?”

“No, but I have a door.” It had been long enough since the footsteps in the hall had passed that I wasn't worried about running into their owners—and if I did, well. I wasn't outnumbered anymore. Even exhausted, Alice was worth her weight in pissed-off badgers.

Opening the door flooded the room with light from the hallway. I squinted. Alice walked forward until she was standing beside me, her own eyes narrowed against the glare.

“This isn't hidebehind work,” she said. “The construction is pure bogeyman.”

“It was a composite community,” I said. I was trying not to stare.

The tattoos on her left shoulder were gone. Not covered in dirt, or scarred—cutting a charmed tattoo could sometimes release whatever effect it had been designed to contain—
gone
. The skin was smooth and clean, like it was never tattooed in the first place. There were clear places on her arm as well, cutouts shaped like birds or eels or strange, twisty things from the bottom of the sea.

Alice saw me looking and smiled wryly. “I told you, I've been burning charms as fast as I could. It leaves a mark.”

“I always wondered how you got your tattoos to change.” It was an inane comment. It was the best I could do in the moment.

“They're one-use only, and they don't do subtle; whoever grabbed me didn't come with a damn glowing door,” said Alice. She looked around the hall, expression calculating. “How far underground are we? And what time is it? There were some temporal distortions in there.”

I didn't want to ask what that meant for her—how long she'd been trying to get back to us, or how long it had been since she'd slept. Those were questions for later. “It's Friday morning. Around eleven, I think? You only went missing last night.”

“Thank heaven for little favors,” she said.

The mouse on my shoulder, not to be outdone, proclaimed gleefully, “HAIL!”

“That, too,” said Alice.

“As for how far underground we are, I went down two flights of stairs, each about twenty feet long. So we're deep enough to be a problem if an earthquake hits. And there's more.” I took a quick breath, gathering my thoughts, before I launched into a summary of what I'd overheard while I was hiding in the room where Alice had emerged.

When I was done, she was frowning, and so was I. Another thought had occurred while I was speaking, and this one was unsettling, to say the least. “Grandma, if you were trying all night to get back to us, how is it you came through in the room I was actually
in
? That seems like a pretty big coincidence.”

“Coincidence is just another word for an accident that doesn't kill you,” said Alice. “My transit charms are set to drop me as close as possible to a family member, if there's one in the area I'm traveling to. It wouldn't do me any good to finally find the dimension where your grandfather is and wind up on a different continent, now would it?”

Reminding her that Grandpa Thomas wasn't likely to
be anything more than bones and memory by this point didn't seem like a good idea. I just nodded.

“As to why I came out down here . . .” Alice's frown deepened, turning pensive. “Which direction did you say they came from?”

We walked down the hallway side by side, pausing only so I could set the Aeslin mouse on the floor near a convenient break in the wall. It scampered off to locate the rest of the colony and pass on the news that Alice had been found. They would keep searching the theater for confusion charms and signs of what the snake cult was up to, but they'd do a better job if they weren't consumed by worry for the family's senior priestess.

The difference in our stride was almost startling. We were roughly the same height, but where I stalked, she prowled, like she was daring something to jump out and have a go at her. It was the difference between a brawler and a technician, and while I wouldn't have wanted to meet her in a dark alley, I was reasonably confident that in a real fight, I would have been able to get out of the way before she could lay a finger on me. Give her a gun or a blunt instrument, and the tides would turn in her favor. Everyone had their own strengths and weaknesses.

That thought brought me back to our snake cultists. What about
their
strengths and weaknesses? Their magic-user must have been the one urging patience, and saying the spells they were using weren't an exact science. Magic was never an exact science; only science got to use that particular label. Magic was more like cheese making than chemistry, depending frequently on “when it feels right.” When the spell felt right, they'd be able to rip a hole in the wall of the world, and their target giant killer snake would come tumbling right through.

If the male had been the group's magic user, the female voice belonged to . . . who? A female cultist, an administrator, a lure? It wasn't Brenna, which was still a relief, but apart from that, I had no real idea who it was or what purpose she would be serving. Lindy, maybe. Lindy never did like the dancers as much as she
pretended to, and there were certainly ways that a snake cult could have appealed to her. But it was hard to imagine her willingly sacrificing her ballroom dancers to a giant snake, no matter
what
she'd been promised.

Alice's thoughts had apparently kept pace with mine, because she asked, voice low, “Have any of the other dancers seemed off to you?”

“Jessica always seems off,” I said. “Doesn't mean I think she's murdering people. I mean, I guess she could be, but it's . . . messy. She doesn't like messy. Anders has been a little touchy-feely lately. He had a crush on me the first time we danced together. He could be testing the waters to see how serious I am about ‘Daniel.'”

“What about Lyra?”

I blinked. “From my season? The one who beat me? That Lyra?”

“Yes.” Alice glanced in my direction, gauging my response. “I don't know much about the competition, but I know enough to check a roster, and your season is the only one that hasn't lost anyone. Season five has been totally eliminated. Pax is in the clear because he's a giant shark. You dance with Anders, which would make it hard for him to sneak around behind your back. It might not be a bad idea to take a good look at Lyra, and see what there is to see.”

“Lyra couldn't kill anybody,” I said doggedly. “Lyra's my friend.”

“Sweetie, if being a friend of the family made you immune to murderous impulses, no one would like us anymore.”

“No one likes us now.”

“That's beside the point.”

The hallway ended at a steel door. It was bigger than the doors around it, with a frame that appeared to have been hammered straight into the wall. “Probably the sewer exit,” I said, and opened it.

We both stopped. We both stared. Neither of us said a word.

The room on the other side was roughly the size of
the theater above—we were probably
under
the stage, considering the direction and distance we had traveled to get here. It was a great cavern of a room, stretching upward into the unbroken dark, lit by bulbs strung like outside Christmas lights along the walls. There was no furniture. There were no decorations.

There were only the bodies of my eight fellow dancers, arrayed at the center of the room like the spokes of a wheel. Smears on the concrete floor showed where they had been rearranged as their number grew, going from a simple cross shape to something more elaborate. Their heads were at the middle, and their hands were joined, one to another, until they formed an unbroken circle. Whatever magic had been used on them was preserving their bodies; Raisa and Graham, who were eliminated in week one, looked as freshly killed as Mac and Leanne, who'd been dead for less than a day.

Something pressed hard against my mouth. I realized it was my hand. I was crying, too, but that seemed to be of little consequence. They weren't going to sweep
this
room looking for bodily fluids. The blood would obscure anything else.

Alice squeezed my shoulder. She didn't say anything. I appreciated that. It was dangerous to stand here in the open like this, but I needed a moment to center myself. Until now, I'd been holding out the hope that the bodies we hadn't found hadn't existed—that maybe a few people really
had
been eliminated and secluded themselves, maybe triggering the idea that “hey, we can kill them without anyone noticing” in our snake cultists. But no. All eight of them were there, silent and unmoving on the floor.

“Okay.” I lowered my hand. My voice was thick with tears. I swallowed them away, squaring my shoulders, and said, “Now we can study the bodies.”

“That's my girl,” said Alice.