Fortune's Dance (The Fixers, book #4: A KarmaCorp Novel)

by Faye, Audrey

  My belly protested as I stretched deeper. I’d left my berries with Greta in trade for a sack supper she’d been happy to provide. The sandwich inside the bag had been delicious and clearly built with dancer appetites in mind. Which was great, except that this kind of warm-up wasn’t meant to happen on a full stomach. I kept stretching, backing off on each movement just enough to stay comfortable. I wasn’t here to prove anything—just to watch.

  I let my gaze drift to the work happening on the main studio floor. A group of dancers were finishing up some kind of fusion piece. Modern work with folk roots. Not my thing, but it had some interesting energy, and the drum music was catchy. Raven would like it. I watched as they ran through the final bars several times, the drummer changing his beat to work better with the realities of eight people trying to get their legs in the air at the same time. Three or four of them had the skill to do it in time with the original tempo, but the rest needed the adjustment.

  It pleased me to see the final sequence gel, smoothing and finding the beauty as awkwardness and uncertainty cleared away.

  Sweaty, happy dancers cleared the floor, and three others stepped out to take their places. I didn’t move from my tendu sequence on the barre, but I could feel the energy shifting in the studio. I recognized the new vibes easily—the sparking of both awe and resentment from the people watching. Anyone with as much dance experience as I had knew what that meant.

  Someone on the floor was very good.

  I didn’t focus on the threads—not yet. I wanted to see the trio move first.

  Or rather, see how they got moved. It was obvious in a dozen heartbeats that the small, sturdy dancer with the wild curls was the choreographer, and the other two were her stand-in moving parts. They went where she said, bent and jumped and pivoted on command. Choreography in the early stages, and clearly evolving in front of our eyes.

  “That’s Euphoria,” the man on the barre beside me said quietly.

  I could feel the same thing twitching in him that itched in me. We both wanted to be out there, getting a chance to be her moving parts, to be a part of the greatness of what was slowly coming to life under her hands and her quiet commands and her breathtaking vision.

  I’d worked with some very good choreographers. I knew in two minutes that she was in a league very few ever reached.

  They’d just gotten to a particularly tricky part, where vision and body parts were doing the hard work to find something honest and possible and stunning, when the blonde who had originally approached me stepped out onto the floor and clapped her hands. “Thank you, dancers. Time’s up—Francie, I think your group is up next.”

  I stared, horrified, at the woman who had dared to tip over a pot that had just reached creative boil. Five more minutes and they would have had something really incredible. All they had now was leaking mush.

  Artistic travesty.

  I fumed through half a dozen heartbeats, and then my Talent pulled my attention back to the undercurrents. The seething watchfulness of the man beside me. The total lack of surprise from anyone else in the studio. The quiet acceptance of the three on the floor as they headed for a wall, a barre, and water. The scurrying of Francie’s group, complete with the blonde terrorist who had just killed the thing I was mourning.

  Someone went over and put an almost motherly hand on the choreographer’s shoulder. Euphoria ducked her head, obviously shy in the extreme when she wasn’t bossing bodies around.

  I wanted to step up and shake her. With what I had just seen on the dance floor, she should be holding her head high and proud and demanding every bit of the time and space and respect to work that was her due. She had the kind of genius that stomped footprints on history that didn’t get forgotten—and she was letting the energy in this room close her down.

  I wanted to kick them all in the knees, or fling Talent until they recognized the error of their ways and gave her a studio of her own and endless bodies to work with.

  But this was an observational mission. I didn’t get to kick anybody, and I probably wasn’t here to identify a brilliant choreographer with a shyness problem. There were ways to help Euphoria, and I’d do what I could once I got home, but in the meantime, all I could do was keep my eyes open. Being thoroughly offended on her behalf didn’t get to blind me to the other things I was here to notice.

  I grabbed a water bottle I didn’t need and slid down a wall, watching the much less creative piece that was happening on the studio floor. Unequal talent has been an issue for as long as there have been dancers. Madame Tsarnova had worked all of us mercilessly, but we’d always known who were the best—and we’d known she loved us more.

  The garbage that had just happened in this building was one of the ways people tried to address that, but it wasn’t any healthier than the problem it was trying to solve. In the end, if Euphoria’s genius wasn’t welcomed along with her shy heart and lightning smile, this community lost something and so did the brilliant woman they were dimming.

  It grated deep in my soul. Fixers weren’t all at the same level of Talent and we knew it—but KarmaCorp worked incredibly hard to make each of us feel valued for who we were. Some of us got workshops with Camellia, but all of us heard the stories of Fixers with mere sneezes of Talent who had done some of the most important work of the last three hundred years. We were butterfly wings, tiny players in the enormous energy of the galaxy, and we were expected to develop and honor and use our wings to the very best of our ability.

  Euphoria’s wings were being clipped, and that irritated the heck out of my Dancer. And perhaps what irritated me most was that she was letting it happen.

  The movement in progress on the floor came to the kind of ending I remembered from awkward primary school days, with fractured energy and at least half the dancers disconnected from the core of what was supposed to be happening. A perfectly acceptable outcome in a class of eight-year-olds, but not anything that should be happening with dancers of this caliber.

  The seeds of my discomfort sown in the painting studio and watered in the community garden were blooming into something a lot more tangible. Art was being hampered here, despite all surface evidence to the contrary.

  What I didn’t know was whether that mattered, at least at the scale that needed a KarmaCorp Fixer to notice. There were probably billions of people in the Federated Commonwealth not living up to their potential, allowing the full glory of who they were to be dimmer than it should. It was entirely possible that was only bothering me here because they were fellow artists—because they rubbed something inside of me the wrong way.

  But I wasn’t here to be Imogene Glass, amateur artist. I was here looking for a galactic hiccup, one big enough that the StarReaders had been able to see it from way off in their ivory tower. That didn’t mean it was anything very big or very obvious, even on the ground and in close—but it should at least be visible.

  Assuming I wasn’t distracted by the rumblings of my artist heart.

  A pair of delicate feet came to rest close to the spot on the floor where I’d taken my seat. I looked up into arresting blue eyes and a face that had been around a lot longer than my twenty-six years.

  “Hi, I’m Evie. My piece is up next, and it’s a work in progress—we’re still sorting out the choreography and such.” She glanced at my stretched-out limbs and then back at my face. “You’re welcome to join us, if you’d like a chance to move around a bit.”

  I was on my feet before she finished asking. I was just tired of being an audience, and a grumpy one. “Sure. One live body to put wherever you need me.”

  She eyed me with something that looked almost like mischief. “I’ll take you at your word, Dancer.”

  Ah—someone had figured me out. This might get interesting.

  -o0o-

  A flailing arm bumped against me and I jerked back to awareness, knowing I’d been asleep on the job. Evie had us on the floor in some kind of pattern that looked random but probably wasn’t, with light, airy music play
ing in the background.

  “So let’s start with what we did last time, exploring your movement options while keeping your feet anchored.” Evie sounded like she’d done this before, so I put most of my attention into my fellow dancers and enough into my own limbs to have fun with what we’d been asked to do. I imagined myself a dandelion seed that had somehow managed to get itself tufted into the bark of a tree. A little lost, a little frustrated, my lighter-than-air self suddenly denied what it intrinsically knew it needed.

  It felt lovely to let some of those energies crunch in my body and find a way out, and I got a little lost in it, enough that it took a moment to realize that the threads in the studio had intensified again. I kept moving, but dialed my Talent into what was going on around me.

  Euphoria had stepped in to join us, and the man who had been warming up at the barre with me. It didn’t take long to realize they’d just jacked up the talent in the group quite substantially, and not because of their technical skills. Like me, both of them knew how to tell a story with their body, to improvise movement that spoke of flow, emotion, need.

  Evie beamed at the three of us. “Now take the movement you’ve created and let it travel around the floor, interacting with other dancers as you encounter them.”

  My dandelion fluff was happy to extricate from the tree bark and float around looking for a different place to touch down. I laughed as the man from the barre followed me, offering winds to hold me aloft, and set my body into position for a lift if he wanted to go there. He launched me up and set me down again with the skill of someone who had clearly partnered a lot of dandelion seeds.

  Euphoria metaphorically caught me as I landed, and then puffed up her cheeks like a small child and blew. I pushed the energy of giggles into my feet and spun away, amused and pleased, as the two of them joined me in their child and wind personas. The next time I positioned for a lift, it was Euphoria who launched me, and I applauded her boldness with an arch at the top that nearly landed both of us on the floor and got neatly spotted by the third member of our trio even as he shifted into the snapping, annoyed movements of a puff of wind frustrated by a small girl who had stolen his toy.

  Euphoria turned to face him, eyes merry and body moving in the teasing motions of a child who didn’t share well and knew it. I grinned—clearly she knew some littles. She had the expressions and the body language down cold.

  They both turned to look at me, playful flouncing in all their movements. I kept up my oblivious-bit-of-fluff routine and looked around to see if anyone else wanted to join our fun. Evie looked pleased, but dark clouds were gathering elsewhere, both on and off the floor.

  It wasn’t at all hard to read the gathering vibes. Dandelion seeds and their minions weren’t supposed to steal the show.

  I could feel my response heading straight out my fingertips and yanked it back. I was here on an observational mission, which meant passive use of Talent only. Active use, especially in service to my own opinions as an artist, would have me writing a report in triplicate—in my own blood.

  However, the rules said nothing about using my other skills, and in this room, I had ones that mattered. I might not be the prima ballerina assoluta that Madame Tsarnova had once envisioned, but I knew how to use my body to communicate—and I had something I wanted to say.

  I sent my two partners subtle cues that I trusted them to read. This dandelion seed needed a moment in the sun on her own. While I was quite sure they were capable of joining me in my story, I didn’t pull unwitting accomplices into rebellions. I was about to do the dancer equivalent of a protest speech, and I would do it alone.

  I tamped down my Talent, too. I couldn’t do this as a Fixer. I needed to speak as an artist, as a soul who engaged both the beauty and the hardness of the world through her feet.

  I held on to the energy of my dandelion—its soft questing for a place to call home told part of the tale I wanted to tell. But it didn’t tell all. I let my legs stretch now, reaching with strength and sureness for landings that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, but never stopped me from reaching. I blew into a series of quick turns that were definitely something my supper was going to regret, but the rest of me spun with utter abandon. Arms flowing, fingers reaching, head following heart and feet and need.

  And then I took all of me that was beautiful and free and tossed it in a cage. A gentle and pretty one, with whispers about things too orange and movements too bold and truth too abrasive and genius too bright, all tucked away behind cookies and raspberries and the view through hazy windows.

  A cage that felt almost big enough. One that might fit if the artist got just the littlest bit smaller. Danger, of the creeping, polite, well-dressed kind.

  I could feel truth flowing from every cell in my body as I brought my dance to a quivering halt. I closed my eyes for a moment, knowing I wasn’t ready to see reactions. I was too wide open, too lost in the messages my feet had found that were as much pointed at my own soul as at anyone else.

  And then I heard the quick, sharp claps that had cut Euphoria’s piece off at the knees. “Okay, time’s up for Evie’s group.”

  I opened my eyes. The blonde woman I wanted to duct tape to the outside of a shuttle seemed oblivious to what she had just seen, more interested in timers and schedules than artistic expression. And she was very effectively chasing the energies of what I’d just done off the floor, whether that was her intention or not.

  Euphoria gave me a shy smile as we cleared off. The man who had danced with us followed her, and I imagined I saw flickers of sadness in his eyes.

  My dandelion fluff flopped against a wall, disenchanted and grumpy and well aware that not all seeds find fertile ground. But it hurt, all the same. My heart had lived in those two minutes of dance, and it was painful to see them washing away, a dispersing ripple on Thess’s calm surface.

  There was very little I could do about it. My best tool was outside of mission parameters—and my next-best one had just been clapped into insignificance.

  11

  Sometimes assignments come with some very cushy upsides. I walked into Greta’s kitchen, much cheerier after a decent night’s sleep, following the smells that had woken me up. Clearly I’d landed face-first in food bliss. The cookies yesterday had just been a hint.

  “You’re up early.” The woman responsible for the wondrous smells turned away from her oven, bearing some kind of puffed-up, crusty concoction that made my stomach growl so loudly they could have heard it in the next quadrant.

  I grinned. “I have a friend who will want the recipe for whatever that is. I’ve got good ones to trade.” We all carried Tee’s recipes around with us as an informal form of currency, and there was a long-standing competition to see who could come back with the best trade goods. Kish had seriously raised the bar with the whole apple-pie-and-bacon deal, so I was on the hunt.

  “This is a traditional Dutch dish, a little bit similar to a soufflé.” Greta set it down on a cooling rack, and the center slowly started to deflate. “Good farmer food—lots of eggs and butter and it will stick to your ribs until dinner.”

  Some dancers subsisted on air and rice cakes, but I wasn’t one of them. “It smells fantastic. How can I help?”

  “There are plates in the glass cupboard to your right, and cutlery in the drawer underneath. Two forks, two knives, and a spoon for fruit, please.”

  I raised a surprised eyebrow that she’d taken me literally, but I was more than happy to be useful. Plates were easy, but when I pulled open the drawer she’d specified, the limits of my kitchen knowledge became abundantly clear. “I need a hint—which of these are fruit spoons?” The drawer had at least fifteen different kinds, including a few tucked in the back with sharp little teeth on their bottom edges.

  Greta laughed and reached over my shoulder, pointing at some innocuous medium-sized ones. “Those will do. I keep the rest for when I have guests who care about that kind of thing.”

  I set out spoons and plates and wond
ered how much work it required to cheerfully greet guests with a sumptuous breakfast every morning. Lots of sweat going on here, however easy my hostess made it look.

  She set the Dutch concoction in the middle of the table, sliced into wedges and sprinkled with powdered sugar and raspberries that looked like the ones I’d picked yesterday. “How was your first day here?”

  “It was lovely. I did some painting, spent some time with the dancers, but mostly I just wandered around.”

  “And found the garden.” She gestured to the plump, juicy berries. “Thank you for those—they’re a lovely treat at this time of year.”

  This whole place was a treat. I just wasn’t sure it had the basic nutrition underneath to stay healthy. However, that might be me looking for trouble where none actually existed. In comparison to the Etruscan sector, Thess was a hotbed of tranquility and common sense. I might be squirming a little at things I saw running underneath, fault lines in the tranquility, but I was pretty sure Yesenia didn’t want a report full of little niggles. I was meant to be eyes and ears on the ground, but I hadn’t been sent here to collect pages of petty gossip.

  Talent was a bit like the metal detector I’d seen a couple of old guys using on a beach once. It helped find the important things, even if they didn’t look like a big deal to anyone else. There were definitely things here setting off alarms, but it wasn’t my Talent sending up the alert—it was my artist soul, the part of me that had danced before my Talent had emerged and changed the path of my feet forever.

  That wasn’t the report Yesenia wanted either.

  So I would keep digging. I maybe had a little time now before Harold and Magda showed up and I had to arm wrestle them for the biggest slice of soufflé. I glanced at Greta and raised my eyebrows. “I looked for your lemon oregano in the garden, but I didn’t see it. Gerhart told me it could use a little attention.”

  “It’s not there anymore.” A very neutral look. “It was looking unhealthy. I imagine someone composted it.”