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

by Faye, Audrey

  Magda, across the circle from me, fluttered her eyelashes beatifically.

  I kept a straight face, well aware this evening had just strayed a long way from anywhere I had expected it to go—but it had pumped life into Gerhart’s anemic, timid thread.

  Gloria clenched the stick tight enough to turn her knuckles white, and then she looked at her son, sound asleep on Harold’s lap. “And for my wish—I wish Nate was really welcome here. I know he can be loud and rambunctious and sometimes he doesn’t listen very well, but he loves music and he wants to paint with a brush just like the big people do, and he could be part of what is good about Thess instead of just being an annoyance.”

  The fear streaming off her was easy to see. I hoped people could also see the raw mama-bear courage. She was one of the people with the least standing in this room, and she’d just had the guts to say her truth.

  A long, pregnant silence, and then there were hands lifting to shoulders all around the room.

  Gloria stood up, visibly trembling, and took the stick over to an older woman I didn’t know—one who laid a hand on the younger woman’s arm that was full of apology, and maybe even the beginnings of a promise.

  “I love that we move slowly here and take time to breathe,” said the person with the stick. “I wish that I didn’t feel like I had to dress up in my nice clothes and make sure there isn’t dirt in my hair before I go to the grocery store.”

  That got laughter—and after a moment, a lot of agreement.

  The stick moved through three or four more people, all telling little bits of their truth. Nothing as raw as Gloria’s plea for her son, but people taking a good, clear, unglossed look at Thess, one sentence at a time.

  Then someone stood up and handed the stick to Euphoria, even though her hand was nowhere near her shoulder.

  I didn’t intervene—rules were sometimes made precisely so they could be broken.

  I willed the young choreographer with everything in me—besides my Talent—to step into the light.

  Her smile was shaky, but real. “I love that I can say I’m an artist here, a dancer, and nobody asks what my real job is.”

  I could see the threads around her bulging. Waiting.

  She blew out a slow, quiet breath. “And I wish I felt like my work belonged here. Most days I don’t feel any more welcome than Nate.”

  The blonde lady who did all the clapping at the dance studio nearly levitated. She started to speak, and then glared at me and slapped her hand on her shoulder.

  Euphoria stood up and quietly, decisively, handed the stick to Baron.

  The energy in the room fairly crackled.

  He grinned at me. “I love the people who come to Thess. They always manage to surprise me.”

  I managed not to roll my eyes.

  “I wish,” he turned and looked straight at Euphoria now, “that the most brilliant choreographer I’ve ever had the chance to work with wasn’t in a cage. And I’m really sorry I haven’t been brave enough to help her get out.” He let his gaze sweep the circle. “She’s going to be ridiculously famous one day, and this is going to be the village that decided her work was too risky to let visitors on the street see more than two minutes of it on a holiday weekend.”

  Ooph. I hadn’t known that.

  The murmuring rose to the level of mutters. I kept an eye on the threads. Some people agreed with Baron, but he’d just put a whole pile of people on the defensive.

  Baron stood up and took the stick over to Harold.

  The man with the sleeping toddler in his arms didn’t miss a beat.

  “I love that Thess is a haven of beauty and serenity and loveliness, and I can carry that with me when I travel to places that are very short of those things.” The diplomat paused, reading the room and snuggling the boy on his lap, both with the skill of long experience. “I wish that I felt more certain that this place had the strength it needs to still be here for my children and my grandchildren when they need such a haven.”

  Outside, I didn’t move a muscle—but inside, I saluted the move of a master diplomat who had just laid the problem on the table and done it so gently that half the room was agreeing with him before they’d actually thought through what he meant.

  And then I watched as he carefully shifted a sleeping boy to his shoulder and stood up and began to walk—and realized his best move was still coming.

  Or the one that was going to totally blow this thing up.

  Elena stared at Harold like he’d grown octopus arms and tried to give her a hug.

  He smiled and placed the talking stick in her hand. “I’d like to hear what you have to say.”

  She held the stick gingerly and didn’t so much as look at it. “Had I gone first, I would have said that the thing I loved the most about Thess is how everyone feels like they belong here.” Her face was getting paler as she spoke. “I’m sad to hear that’s not the case.”

  She paused, looking over at my questions, and something in her firmed. “To be very honest, I’m wishing right now that I hadn’t come to this meeting, and that KarmaCorp hadn’t sent us a Fixer to break something she clearly doesn’t understand.”

  She stood up, set the talking stick down on her chair, and walked out.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  I watched the crashing, slashing energies of the threads as dispute, attack, defense, chaos slammed into the circle from all sides.

  A quiet hand descended on my shoulder. Harold, with Nate still tucked into his shoulder, and not by a hair did he give any indication of what he thought. He only pushed me, none too gently, toward the door. “Go. Before you become the enemy they can unite against.”

  I cursed, seeing exactly that forming in the threads. “I thought you said that was one of the ways to get this done.”

  “It is.” He huffed out a chuckle. “But in this case, it’s not the way I recommend.”

  I was out the door before he finished speaking—horribly afraid that my little campfire ritual had just set a good and happy place on fire.

  21

  I’d gone to bed torn, shaky, and trying desperately to be hopeful.

  By the time morning rolled around, even an inebriated nitwit could have told me that hope had been overruled. There was yelling out my bedroom window. Yelling. In the streets of Thess. And judging from both the volume and my inability to make out actual words, there was more than one person down there raging.

  I dragged a sundress over my head and stuck my head out the window into full-blown, artistic temper tantrum.

  Gerhart, waving his sax and yelling at a man holding a violin, who was doing a most excellent job of yelling back. If I was catching the drift of it, they were insulting someone’s lead fingers, the terrible musical score, and each other’s mothers. In addition, the violinist seemed to wish he’d never laid sight on the man holding an instrument made of something as undignified as a hunk of metal.

  “They’ve been best friends for the last ten years,” said Greta at my side, carrying fresh towels and holding out a small basket.

  I hadn’t heard her come in. I took the basket silently, and its contents made me want to weep. A pretty candle, a small, red drawing that might be a fire truck, a tiny keychain saxophone, and a card with the silhouette of a dancer on the front and a short, bleak sentence inside.

  Thank you for trying.

  It felt like a funeral eulogy. I looked at Greta and shoved the tears away. “I made a really big mistake.”

  Her eyes weren’t friendly—but they didn’t appear to hate me. Yet. “That remains to be seen. You took a big risk with a place that isn’t your home, aren’t your people.”

  That was pretty much a Fixer’s job description, but generally we did it under orders. “I know.” I let my breath out with a sound that was almost a wail. “I had good intentions, but I pushed way too hard.” Trying to prove I wasn’t the weakling everyone apparently thought I was.

  “Perhaps.” She glanced out the window. “I’m not sure
yet.”

  I waved at the street. “That seems pretty obvious.”

  She turned to face me. “Tell me what your intention was last night. Why do I have a platter of synth-egg cookies sitting on my counter that I can’t so much as give away?”

  I winced. I’d been trying to make a point, a very childish, melodramatic one. “I was hoping people might look at the ingredients Thess is made of.” To see if any synth-eggs might have snuck in, but that part sounded too stupid to say out loud.

  She looked out the window again, and when she looked back at me, her face wore a hint of a smile. “Don’t give up just yet. This place is full of artistic temperaments, and most of them haven’t had much of a chance to shoot off for a while. Keep your head low until the dust settles.”

  It was incredibly tempting, but Fixers didn’t get to hide when the natives were on the rampage, especially when said Fixer had been the one to cause the problem.

  Greta crossed behind me, dropping fresh towels on the foot of my bed as she went. She looked back at me as she headed out the door. “I’ve got a pretty good nose for synth-eggs, but I heard about a few last night that surprised me.”

  I winced. Again. “I wanted people to notice them, not start throwing them at each other.”

  She laughed. “Throwing’s about all they’re good for.”

  I closed my eyes. It was time to go down and face the music. Even if it meant leaving town with my egg-pelted tail between my legs.

  -o0o-

  The two-block walk to get to the dance studio only served to reinforce the impression out my bedroom window.

  Thess was a mess. There were splinters and cracks and ooze everywhere, all right out in plain sight where I could see them. Eyes full of shock and grief and avoidance and things much darker whenever they’d caught sight of me. People in conflict and bitter energies flying in ways that were hurting senders and receivers both.

  And even more alarming, I’d hardly seen any sign of the people last night who had told the most truth. I’d looked for Gerhart and found no further traces of him, or of a sweet, noisy boy and his mother, or a shy choreographer, or even the diplomats who usually shared breakfast with me. Anger and hurt were on the rampage, and those who’d made themselves most vulnerable had gone into hiding.

  I’d miscalculated so very badly. Instead of managing to warn Thess about things that might crack its foundations one day, I’d just gone ahead and set off the earthquake.

  I’d hoped my carefully staged meeting would help them look themselves in the mirror and challenge them to deal with what they saw, because this lovely little village mattered, and they’d left themselves weak and the universe vulnerable to losing who they were and who they could be.

  I’d wanted them to realize that they needed to be better guardians. Instead, I’d turned Thess into something that resembled the Etruscan sector. Mad, wild, stupid overkill. This was why Fixers nudged. Butterfly wings, not hammers. Human hearts could move very quickly when they wanted to, and when they did it from a place of hurt, beauty could get trampled underfoot very quickly.

  I reached the door of the dance studio and let the handle hold me up for a minute. I needed to know just how bad things were, and this was the fastest way. If it was as bad as I thought, my next step would be a message to Yesenia that would get a Fixer on the next shuttle and me reassigned to scrubbing spaceport floors with a toothbrush for the rest of my natural life.

  It was clear as soon as I got in the door that I’d walked in on yet another fight. Baron was toe-to-toe with the blonde woman, and Euphoria was cowering in the background.

  “Her work is brilliant.” Baron nearly glowed with the sizzling energy of his frustration. “And you keep pushing it off the stage and giving it less time and generally making sure nobody gets to see what she can really do. What all of us can do.”

  The woman he was yelling at wasn’t backing down any, and she had compatriots at her shoulders. Defenders of the status quo. “People come here with certain expectations of what they’re going to see.”

  “So what? Since when is art supposed to conform to what the masses are expecting?” Baron threw up his hands. “It’s like those cookies of Greta’s—the ones with the fake eggs. People would have eaten those right up if they hadn’t known, and they would have thought they tasted just fine.”

  The blonde woman looked ready to deck him.

  Baron kept going. “Most of the people who watch us dance don’t know what synth-eggs look like.” He scanned the group, fire in his eyes, and then stabbed his chest. “But we do. We know what we could be, and what that could feel like, and what it would put out there for people to see.”

  He was saying all the things I had wanted to say. And it was quaking the floor under people’s feet. I could see it in the threads. Deep uncertainty, the kind that glues feet to the floor and throws up shields of resistance as a defense. Which meant that all the other things I could see—little flutters of need, of resonance, of hope, of desire—were having trouble finding a foothold.

  All bathed in the overwhelming fear spilling from those who didn’t feel like they had the skill or the inborn talent to be the kind of dancer Baron was calling them to be.

  Bleeding hearts and scared toes.

  And one forlorn Fixer, unseen in a corner, wanting desperately to tend and hold and smooth and soften and untangle—and to push like hell on the little bits of need and desire that might actually drive this thing where it needed to go.

  I stood, frozen in my own moment of monumental uncertainty because what I was seeing in here was bad—but it wasn’t hopeless. Not quite.

  Someone stepped out from the barre. “If we’re going to do that, we need to stop pretending we’re all equal. We’re not. Some of us are a lot better.”

  I winced. I didn’t recognize the tall, dark woman who had spoken, but she had just declared war on mediocrity. Unfortunately, most of the people in the studio thought they fell in that camp, and I’d been the best dancer on enough floors to know that a hierarchy of skill only works if the people at the top are reaching out their hands to the people everywhere else.

  “We were all born dancers,” said another voice. Male this time, but I couldn’t see who had spoken. “We all have the right to be on this floor.”

  “Yes.” Baron was still setting things on fire. “But not at the cost of pushing brilliance off it.”

  Folded arms and icy glares, and the blonde woman was back to being spokesperson. “And just who gets to decide what is brilliant, what is worthy, what is good? You? You’ve only been here for a year, and you’ll probably leave in another. I’ve been here fifteen, and so have most of the people here. You don’t get to push us off the only stage we have. You want to be brilliant? Go invade someone else’s stage.”

  Gods. They were all right, and all wrong, and all prickly as hell. They had the sharp spikes of the problem out in the open—and no one who could get past their fear and anger long enough to figure out how to weave the thorns together.

  An awful kind of stalemate.

  I could feel my hopelessness rising. They’d seen what they needed to see—Baron had made sure of it. But they didn’t know how to move forward. They were stuck in blame instead of seeing the little flames of possibility in each other that might actually create something worth burning for.

  I’d held up a mirror—but I’d held it up wrong, pushed them too hard into the darkness.

  And Thess was paying the price.

  -o0o-

  I limped into Persephone with some vague idea of finding my orange-splotched painting and drowning it in my tears, or at least keeping my hands busy while I mentally composed the message I needed to send back to Stardust Prime.

  And froze before I made it three steps inside the door.

  The place had looked empty from the outside—lights off and easels still leaning against the walls.

  Except for one. The one smack in the middle of the studio floor, right under the skylight, with a mad artist
slashing color on the canvas as fast as she could load her brush.

  Purples—violent, bruising ones. Reds of wet, glowing fire. The shades of yellow that come right before the explosion. Mad, fabulous color. A painting that moved and breathed and screamed and cried and demanded that you feel what it felt. The kind of art nobody could turn away from, even if they hated it. The kind that insisted that you engage, become part of it, decide how you feel, what you know, who you are.

  The kind that spoke of a brush in the hands of genius.

  Elena hadn’t noticed me. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t notice a troupe of dancing elephants—her concentration was that absolute, her partnership with the painting that melded, that complete. An artist totally at one with the medium and the feelings inside her, and channeling that out into the universe in the form of her very best and highest calling.

  From the woman who painted nostalgic, hazy, entirely non-threatening garden windows.

  I could feel the dance leaping inside me, the need to pay homage to this painting and this artist and this moment and to cover myself in glorious purple and red and orange violence and the messy, unbalanced emergence of truth.

  But this cookie wasn’t done yet, and I wasn’t going to be the synth-egg that marred its perfection.

  Slowly stepping backwards because I literally could not peel my eyes off Elena’s canvas, I backed my way out the door.

  And then I leaned against the outer wall of Persephone for a very long time, for as long as it took for the trembling to stop—and prayed for the thing that just might be rising up from the dark.

  22

  It was the drumbeat I heard first. Loud and long and sonorous, ringing through the streets of Thess with bold, vibrant demand and shaking me out of my bed and my curled-up self-pity and calling me out into the night.

  My feet were already moving to the rhythm as I flew down Greta’s stairs.

  She met me at the front door, eyes wide, Magda and Harold right behind her. Together, we scampered down the short walkway out into the street. People were flooding out of homes and restaurants and doorways, faces full of mystified urgency and curiosity and worry.