by Faye, Audrey
His body swept into a series of level changes that had me dizzy—and realizing that Euphoria hadn’t been the only dimmed talent on the dance floor. “You’re very good.”
He inclined his chin. “I know.” He finished with a leap that would have done a wildcat proud. “I waited three years for a chance to come here. She waited even longer.”
Walking away from that was a really big deal. Even in the art-appreciative Federation, there were always more creatives than there were funds to support them. “Have others left?”
He nodded quietly. “Yes. People here shrug it off. Lack of fit, no shared artistic vision.”
Dying dreams—and it wasn’t only the artists. I thought of Gloria and her little boy, Nate, both of them filling in a vital role here, underappreciated and under-supported.
I looked at the man in the clearing with me, considered his strong legs, strong lines, strong heart. “I know why Euphoria isn’t fighting back.” A heart too timid, one who didn’t trust that her own genius was worth the battle yet. “Why aren’t you?”
It bothered me. Another story too much like Gerhart and his sax. Too many good people willing to walk away from the fight for what they needed.
“I’m new here. I can’t take on a whole town of people who are stuck.” His arms told more of the story than his words. “A few have tried, but it’s only ever one or two people at a time.”
Bad odds. Maybe. “You don’t look like a guy who needs a big group backing him up.”
He grimaced and came to a stop, mopping an arm across the sweat on his forehead. “Look, this part’s hard to say, but my call is to dance, not to save cute, stuck villages. That’s probably weak of me, but I can’t do that and stay true to what I really need to do.” His fingers flashed frustration—a man who wasn’t proud of himself, but didn’t know what to do about it.
That made two of us. “The world needs you dancing.” And fighting, but I knew exactly how much other priorities could get in the way of a calling.
He looked over at me. “You gave it up.”
Fifteen-year-old me would have agreed with him. “I found a different way to be a dancer.”
“You could have been one of the best. Prestigious stages, galactic audiences falling at your feet.”
That was a lot to read into my little dandelion dance the other day. “That’s never certain, even when the talent is there. And needing to dance and needing a stage are two different things.”
He looked around at the forest and grinned. “What, you can’t hear them clapping?”
I snorted and flicked my toes at him, and tried not to let my sadness show. He was here, pretending trees were his audience, when a thousand people had walked the streets this weekend and been denied the joy of watching him move. That was tragic, for him and them and for the next dancers who would stand on a dance floor here and not feel the echoes of this particular brand of greatness that had come before them.
The trees would know, and that wasn’t a small thing—but it also wasn’t enough.
He took a seat against a tree, picked up a bottle of water, and waved grandly at the clearing. “Yours, if you want it.”
I hadn’t come to dance for an audience—I’d come to let my Talent blast free for a while and help me find some clarity, and I couldn’t do that if he watched.
I could wait for him to leave, but that would be taking the easy way, and nothing in me had woken up seeking ease this morning. I bent down into a swooping, swirling sequence that would warm me up and get the stuck places in my head shaking out a little. Sweat has always been the very best way for me to work things out, and if Baron wanted to lean against a tree and watch, so be it.
That lasted almost a complete rotation around the clearing, spotting off trees so I didn’t mow one of them over and contemplating what messages I might put out there with my feet. I had a little gem of a village that was refusing to shine in all the ways it could, and there was great art and vibrant beauty and self-confidence and hope and moments of infinite possibility dying on the vine because Thess was satisfied with being pretty.
I hadn’t been able to convince Elena with my words—perhaps I could convince Baron with my dance.
I let everything rise in me—the frustration, the aching sadness at missed moments that would never happen again, the yearning to leap and run and open cage doors and yank some people out of them and throw some other people in long enough to see what was possible.
I snorted as I hurled myself into yet another a spin. My feet were feeling pretty damn feisty today. I indulged them in a series of cat leaps that would have broken something on a harder floor and asked my toes very nicely to help me broadcast this message because right now they were preaching to my personal choir of one, and that wasn’t going to get the job done.
And then my feet answered, and I nearly ran smack into the nearest tree.
My entire body shaking, I leaned against its rough bark, trembling and sad and scared and eyes finally wide open—and then I pushed away from the tree and let my legs pull me into the dance they had known I needed and I was finally willing to let happen. The dance that wasn’t for Baron or Greta or a small boy with his fire truck or the village that had chased me out here.
It was for me.
For the layers of Imogene Glass that were more than happy to be just like Thess.
I could feel tears and sweat streaming down my face and drenching me in clarity. The trembling, naked knowing that I wasn’t angry at a village—I was angry at me. At the slow, wilting consequences of letting ease and smoothness drive my walk through life one small choice at a time.
My chest constricted, ached. I liked my life. I liked who I was.
My feet pushed air into my tight ribs. Reminded me that the genius in Euphoria and Baron and a little girl who wanted to twirl lived in me too. That Kish wasn’t the only one who could throw a punch, and Tee wasn’t the only one who could apply stinky stuff as needed, and Raven wasn’t the only one who saw the hard things and said them.
I was Thess—and I was more. The danger came if I forgot that.
By the time I came to rest again against my rough-barked tree, I’d sweated a bucket of Imogene Glass—and every drop of it had cleansed something I hadn’t even known was dirty.
I squished my toes into the moss under my feet and sighed. I was going to have bark imprints on my cheeks, but I didn’t have the strength to move. Which was fine. It was going to take the rest of me some time to catch up with my feet.
17
I pushed my toe gently off a conveniently placed sculpture and set my hammock to rocking again. My body was very happy to be lazy a while longer, and it was giving my head time to process the earthquake in the trees.
Which was mostly a really big helping of humble pie.
Raven believed that when people got all riled up or critical about something, it was usually because they needed to look in the mirror. Apparently my feet agreed with her. I was frustrated with Thess for not living up to its potential, angry when the people here made choices that limited themselves and their visitors.
I could so easily see where they valued smooth and pretty surfaces over what mattered. I hadn’t wanted to look at how deep that lived in me, too.
But my feet had seen truth. I had been one of four for so long, and what I brought to my tightest tribe was ease and light, grapes and chocolate, henna-painted flowers and dancing in the gardens. There was a place for that—a vast and needed place for that, and I wasn’t rocking in my hammock and saying anything different.
But there were times when I leaned too hard on that as my role in the universe.
I smoothed Camellia’s edges instead of making her look at the consequences of them, cuddled homesick tadpoles instead demanding that KarmaCorp face the loneliness they created, put on a gauzy dress and a vacant look so people could more easily dismiss me, tugged on threads from the shadows so the people I tugged on didn’t have anywhere to aim if they wanted to fight.
Ye
senia had seen it, even if she hadn’t called it quite right.
I saw the danger now. The risk that I would manipulate the rough spots of the world not for the highest good, but so I could stay in this role I found the most comfortable. Keep being the light, the smoothness, the sweet bowl of fruit and the graceful dance, because I loved being those things and I was good at it and I was a little too convinced that it was always my best answer.
Which, one slow step at a time, could easily turn me into Thess.
I had managed to make it through my first days here believing the arrogance that I was different than Thess because I had a backbone underneath all my love of smoothness and ease. But a backbone only matters if you’re willing to use it, and willing to use it for the right things.
And there was a spine that held the current Thess together, even though I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. This place was too true to a particular vision, too carefully manicured, to be truly weak. It had guardians, and it wouldn’t change unless they chose it. Unless they saw the problem and chose to do something about it.
Because a backbone doesn’t mean you’ve got everything right, either.
Tee would have seen the right problem sooner than me, but I had it now that my eyes weren’t so blurred. This community had the gloss, but not the Lightbody roots. Not the toughness, not the single-minded guardianship that would find crap and dig it up and compost it until it was useful.
And that’s where I wasn’t the same as an arts colony. I liked ease and beauty and I smoothed things almost instinctively—but I had dirty, sweaty, bloody toes that knew how to work hard and take risks and embrace people who weren’t like me and know they were the very best part of my life.
I wasn’t fragile in the most important way that Thess was fragile, and I’d spent way too much of this assignment letting the ghost words of Yesenia Mayes convince me that I was. My dance in the forest had reminded me of that too.
Thess was art with no depth, beauty without survival skills, dance without discipline. I might look fairly similar on the surface—and heck, if I’d stayed with Madame Tsarnova, I might have ended up similar deep down, too. But fifteen years ago fortune had smiled on my dance. I’d made three friends, and that had changed everything.
Thess needed that kind of friend.
The kind who would tell you the raw, honest truth and love you anyhow.
I’d gone about it all wrong with Elena. I’d tried to fix the problem, to give her my ideas about how they could open Thess to its visitors, engage them more, give those who lived here more chances to innovate.
I needed to let the people of Thess sweat for themselves.
I slid my foot through the dirt, drawing parallel lines with my toes that might have been claw marks somewhere way back in my evolutionary chain. That was my job this time—to scratch up the dirt. To hold up a mirror so people could see a little differently. To help them observe. They might not see what I saw, but I needed to ask them to look.
Some would because they loved this place—and some because they didn’t like me. Some would because they had truth beating in their souls, and some because they were artists, and we’re born with an obligation and a need to look more deeply than most.
My toes traced long, curving lines in the dirt. This was way outside my comfort zone. I’d been a mirror on assignments before, but I’d done it quietly, a person or two at a time—and I’d had my Talent backing me up.
But Thess didn’t need to hear from me. I needed to get them hearing from each other, even if it meant locking them all in a room and keeping them there until their ears bled.
Or I could bribe them with baked goods.
I paused, grabbing that stray thought with both hands. That would totally work, and it would keep me from having to write a really uncomfortable report about holding several hundred people hostage. A Fixer had done that once, and it had worked, but Yesenia still leaked steam when that one came up in the senior trainee classes.
And there was more potential in baked goods than just bribery. Messages. Layers. Ways to hold up a mirror that didn’t involve speaking or the very prohibited use of my Talent.
I felt my energy swelling and swung my legs out of the hammock. Thinking time had just ended. It was time to move my feet.
18
I stood at the bottom of Greta’s stairs, cuddling stacks of cards and a paper bag, and breathed all the way down to my toes.
It was time to be Thess’s friend, even if a whole lot of people might not see it that way.
I could feel the energy of that choice quivering all over my skin because this was so not how I usually worked. I’d found the threads here in Thess that I needed—but my job this time wasn’t to ease the tangled ones. It was to take the nice, easy, smooth ones and snarl them. Or at least that was the gamble I was about to take, on an observation-only mission where my options for fixing things if I messed them up were severely limited.
I felt like I was about to jump into a black hole naked and blindfolded.
I clutched my cards and snorted. My imagination clearly intended to run wild today. I put my hand on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and pivoted myself around and into the hallway back to the kitchen. Momentum—a dancer’s best remedy for fear.
Greta looked up as I walked into her domain, and then very carefully eyed the outfit that screamed Fixer in every seam. “Good morning. I didn’t know you were still here.”
“I went out after breakfast, but I got back a little while ago.” Preparing, getting things ready for my black-hole leap. I slid onto a high stool tucked under her counter and quietly laid down my two stacks of cards.
She glanced at them and kept wiping down her already spotless stove.
She could have been one of Tee’s aunties. Self-confident wielders of the sword of silence, and in fifteen years, I hadn’t learned the trick of how to counter it. I took another breath down to my toes, a slightly less obvious one this time, and held out the smaller stack of fancy cards I’d bought from a little shop down the street and neatly hand lettered with a few of Tee’s best dessert recipes. “I’m hoping I can bribe you. My friend Tyra is the only person I know who can match your skill with real ingredients. These are hers.”
Greta took the cards, scanned the first one, and then slowly read through each and every one.
I sighed internally. About halfway through, her eyes had started doing gooey things, which meant I’d leave her the recipes whether she acceded to my request or not. I needed to work on my bribery skills. Or my resistance to gooey eyes.
She finally looked up at me, her hands organizing the cards back into a neat stack. “These are an excellent bribe. You must want a very big favor.”
Most of the galaxy wouldn’t see it that way, but I knew my food snobs. “I’d like you to make me two batches of your chocolate chip cookies.”
She was smart enough to stay silent and wait for the other shoe to drop.
“I’d like one to be your regular recipe. For the second one, I’d like you to use these.” I pushed the small paper bag across the counter.
She opened the bag slowly and then looked at me like I’d asked her to join me in my naked space-jumping escapades. “Synth-eggs? Why in the heavens would you want me to do that?”
I couldn’t tell her. “I’m inviting everyone to a meeting tonight at the dance studio.” I’d leaned on my local contact for that. Gerhart had been very puzzled, but he’d delivered. I would have a floor full of chairs set up in a circle. The rest was up to me.
“I’ll make you two batches of my usual cookies—that’s no problem.” Greta was already pulling ingredients out of her cupboards.
I waited until she paused. “I need the batch made with the synth-eggs. It’s important.”
She turned to face me, both hands on the counter. “I know KarmaCorp does very good work, but I’m not at all comfortable with the idea that you’re about to do something to my home and to people I care about.”
She wasn’t
the only one squirming on that account. “I’m here on an observational assignment. I don’t have any authorization to take major action.” Or minor, either, but I couldn’t let her know that.
She glanced at the insignia on my skinsuit again and raised an eyebrow. “So you’re calling a town meeting with terrible cookies and then you’re just going to watch?”
Hopefully, or this report was going to take me the rest of the year to write. “I can’t say a whole lot more, but I am trying to do something good for Thess.”
She looked down at the neatly printed cards I’d given her. “All right. I’ll bake your terrible cookies because you’ve offered a very good bribe, and because I think you have a good heart inside you, even if it’s a little unseasoned yet. But be careful with my town, Dancer. Please.”
For the first time in my Fixer career, that wasn’t a promise I could actually make. I stood up and let her see my eyes, and then I handed her another hand-lettered card from the top of my second stack. An invitation this time. “I hope you’ll come to the meeting.”
-o0o-
I waved at the woman who ran the grocery store and headed back out to the street before she had time to ask me any questions. My goal today was maximum spectacle, minimum explanations.
I thought I’d done a good job of the spectacle part. I had on what passed for KarmaCorp formal dress—a bright gold skinsuit complete with KarmaCorp and Dancer insignia on the shoulders. Not at all subtle, for the rare occasions when Fixers wanted to be highly visible. This was one of those occasions. I needed people to come to this meeting, and I didn’t want to tell them why.
I was pretty sure someone was going to be rewriting the definition of observation-only after this, possibly using tubes of my blood, but I didn’t dare think too hard about that. I squared my shoulders and handed an invitation and a flower to a gentleman walking by with his eyebrows up. If KarmaCorp didn’t want us wearing attention-getting gold skinsuits, they shouldn’t issue them.
