Chaos Choreography

by Seanan McGuire

  “I’m telling you; my nose doesn’t lie. There’s no blood in this room. Before you ask, no, I didn’t smell any blood on anyone last night, or on Adrian and Lindy this morning. Either they’ve got the best cleaning crew in the business, or they weren’t involved.”

  Slowly, I sank into a sitting position on the stairs, holding onto the rail with one hand for balance as I looked down at the spotless concrete floor. There was no blood. There were no bodies. If not for Pax being as confused as I was and the pictures in my phone, I might have taken it for a very vivid, very terrible dream.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I asked.

  Pax didn’t answer.

  We had to get back to our partners before they noticed anything amiss. After a few more moments of staring at the empty basement, we’d returned to our respective rehearsal rooms and done our best to make it seem like nothing was wrong. That was where my Valerie persona gave me a thin advantage. I’d been treating her like someone completely distinct from myself for so long that all I had to do was shove my own concerns to the background and let her have the wheel. Valerie didn’t care about dead people. Valerie just wanted to dance.

  Our group number for the week was a lyrical jazz number, where Lyra floated like a leaf and the rest of us struggled to get our legs to bend in places that didn’t usually come with joints. I left Valerie in charge, allowing her to follow the steps while I tried to puzzle through the situation. Two dead dancers, and no outcry, not even from their former roommates. I could see Jessica not caring that Poppy had never come to collect her things, but Reggie? He and Chaz had been pretty close. And what about the other eliminated dancers? Someone needed to check their social media accounts. If they’d gone completely silent, we’d know they were gone.

  But first I had to survive rehearsal. Our choreographer was a punk rock Tinker Bell that I suspected of being a succubus, although I didn’t have any proof. Artie would have known in a second—Lilu always recognize their own kind—but as that would have required getting him out of his basement and bringing him to a rehearsal space full of sweaty females, it was never going to happen.

  (None of my cousins are exactly what I’d call “normal.” Cousin Artie was the winner of our private weirdness armada, being a reclusive half-incubus comic book nerd with a supposedly secret crush on our telepathic cousin Sarah. I say “supposedly” because everybody in the family knew he was in love with her—everyone except Sarah, who somehow managed to be as oblivious as he was. For a couple of really smart people, they could be remarkably dense sometimes.)

  The thing about working with anyone who can be described using the phrase “punk rock Tinker Bell” is that they’ll work you to death while exhorting you to “dig a little deeper” and “reach your true potential.” Sasha was the sort of natural disaster every dancer dreams of working with, right up until they get the opportunity. After an afternoon in her studio, I was exhausted, and my dreams were a lot more focused on the idea of smothering her with a pillow. Not to death. Just into a peaceful unconsciousness from which she’d wake in a year or two.

  Rehearsal finished at seven o’clock, and we dragged ourselves out to the town cars, where we collapsed like so many boneless puppies. I wound up with Lyra half in my lap. She had more experience with the steps Sasha was drilling into our heads, but that just meant she’d been expected to master more, faster, while the rest of us were forgiven for our occasional bouts of clumsiness.

  I needed to go see Dominic. My legs felt like they’d been hollowed out and filled with cicadas in place of the bones. The thought of running across the rooftops of Los Angeles made my stomach flip.

  “Is she a robot?” asked Anders. He’d allowed his head to flop backward, apparently lacking the strength to hold it up any longer. “You can tell me. She’s an alien robot, here to soften us up for the invasion. Let’s destroy her.”

  “I don’t think she’s a robot,” said Pax.

  “But she doesn’t sweat. Have you noticed that? She throws us around like we’re toys, and she never sweats. I think she’s a robot.”

  “You’re a robot,” said Lyra.

  We all fell quiet, considering her words with the seriousness that only comes naturally to the truly exhausted.

  “Nah,” said Anders finally. “But Jessica’s probably a robot.”

  The argument about whether Sasha or Jessica—or both—were robots occupied us all the way back to the apartments, where we rolled out of the town car and slouched dolefully toward the stairs. Halfway there, Lyra perked up.

  “Dibs on the shower,” she said, and broke into a run.

  Lyra was the first to reach the apartment, with the rest of us close on her heels, clamoring about our need to use the shower before she did. She unlocked the door, and the four of us virtually fell inside, where we stopped, all of us, and stared at the woman sitting on our living room couch. She was writing in a leather-bound journal, looking utterly relaxed.

  She wouldn’t have looked out of place in the new edition of Tomb Raider: early twenties, with short, ragged blonde hair, cut-offs, and a tank top. Tattoos covered the exposed skin on the left side of her body, wrapping around her collarbone and running partway up her neck. The family resemblance between her and me was unmistakable, even with my wig.

  She raised her head. We picked ourselves up off the floor. I started to open my mouth and froze, unsure what I was supposed to call her. “Grandma” wasn’t going to go over very well with my companions, or be something that I could readily explain.

  Fortunately, she solved the problem for me. “I was wondering when you’d get home,” she said, and stood. “Sorry to break in like this, but the security guys were starting to give me the stink-eye for sitting on the curb. I had to come over the wall or risk being arrested.”

  “Who the hell are you?” demanded Anders, pushing himself forward, putting himself between her and the rest of us. I don’t think protecting Pax was the goal, not from the way he positioned himself directly in front of Lyra, but he was gallant enough to stick an arm across my chest, barring me from the potentially dangerous intruder.

  Well, not “potentially dangerous.” She was my grandmother. She was definitely dangerous.

  Alice grinned. It was a wry, lopsided thing. My grin would look like that if it ever got dragged down a hundred miles of bad road, and through more than fifty years of fruitlessly searching for my one true love. I’d pass, if I had the choice. No one should have to smile like that.

  “I’m her sister,” she said. “My name’s Elle.”

  “You have a sister?” said Lyra, head whipping around as I suddenly became a lot more interesting than an intruder in our living room.

  “You have a punk rock sister who picks locks?” demanded Anders.

  Pax didn’t say anything. He was the only one from my season who knew about my family, and when I glanced back at him, I could see him running through the possible candidates for the role of “Elle.” He reached his conclusion while I watched, turning white.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Okay, break it up.” I ducked under Anders’ arm. “Nice to see you, ‘Elle,’ but what are you doing here? You know my contract doesn’t allow unmonitored contact with my family while I’m on the show.” Thank God there weren’t cameras in our apartments. Adrian would have filmed us twenty-four/seven if he’d been able to get away with it, but he didn’t want to pay the insurance fees for putting cameras in our kitchens. That, and we were dancers: many of us had a tendency to wander around completely nude. None of that footage could be used, or even kept, for fear of a pornography charge.

  “Sorry, Val, but I got thrown out of my latest apartment,” said Alice, calm as anything. She raised an eyebrow, daring me to challenge her. “There were noise complaints from the neighbors.”

  “Loud music?” guessed Lyra.

  “Gunfire,” said Alice.

  L
yra didn’t say anything.

  “So I figured you’ve got room, right? There’s a whole bunch of empty apartments downstairs. No one’s even going to notice that I’m here.” She turned and flashed her most winsome smile at my roommates.

  It’s weird. Grandma Alice is a heavily tattooed dimension-hopping marauder who regularly carries grenades clipped to the belt of her cut-off jeans, but for some reason, people want to like her. Lyra and Anders smiled back immediately. Pax, who was still pale and wide-eyed, did not. He also didn’t run out of the room, which would have been a perfectly reasonable reaction under the circumstances.

  “Look, if security catches me, I’ll say I was squatting when the dancers arrived, and stuck around for the anonymity and free grub,” said Alice, turning back to me, like I was the one she had to convince. “I won’t get you in trouble, I promise.”

  “All you do is get people in trouble,” I said. “It’s like a holy calling with you.”

  Alice’s eyes widened. Too late, I realized my mistake, and managed not to compound it by slapping my hand over my mouth—although it was a near thing.

  Every priestess is important to the Aeslin, but they have their hierarchy. The longer a priestess has been alive, the more rituals she’ll have, and the more excited the colony will be when they see her. Normally, this is balanced out by the fact that people die and their catechism ends, becoming a fixed loop in the Aeslin year. Unfortunately, Grandma Alice was too busy to settle down and get old like a normal person, and the Aeslin have been maintaining her worship for almost eighty years without a break, making her the senior priestess of our family. So far as I knew, she was the only priestess to have two separate liturgical lines. She was the Noisy Priestess when she was home and the Pilgrim Priestess when she was off looking for Grandpa Thomas, which meant she had double the usual number of rituals and catechisms focused on her. And now she was in my apartment, and I had mentioned holy callings.

  We stayed frozen for several seconds, staring at each other and waiting for the cheering to begin. When it didn’t—when merciful silence, broken only by the shouting from the people who were starting to gather in the courtyard, reigned—we relaxed, in the sort of familial unison that was just going to make her claim to be my sister more believable.

  “Fine,” I said, more harshly than I meant to. “As long as no one’s going to rat you out, you can stay.” I turned to my roommates. Maybe one of them would save me. Maybe one of them would object, and Alice would have to go stay somewhere else. I could call Brenna. Maybe there was room at the Nest for my occasionally murderous grandmother and her collection of grenades.

  Instead, Lyra broke from the pack and slung her arms around my neck, pulling me into a tight, exuberant hug. “Oh, Val!” she squealed. “I’m so happy for you!” She turned to Alice and said, “It’s always been really upsetting to me how Valerie’s family doesn’t support her dancing. Your sister’s a genius, you know. She’s amazing, and your whole family should be coming out to watch her dance.”

  “That’s what I’ve always said.” Alice was clearly amused, eyes glinting with barely-contained mischief. “So I’m here for the rest of the season.”

  “Thanks,” I said, through clenched teeth.

  “Any time,” said Alice. “I’m going to take the apartment right downstairs. Give me a few minutes, and then come down to talk to me? We should catch up, sis.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said, and watched my grandmother—regularly named the most dangerous human woman in four dimensions—pick up her backpack and walk out of the living room.

  Lyra hugged me again. “I changed my mind, you can have first shower. This is amazing!”

  Was it my imagination, or did I hear muffled cheers from behind the couch?

  It probably wasn’t my imagination.

  Lyra let me go. “You and your sister must have so much to catch up on!”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”

  So very much . . . like murder.

  Nine

  “I didn’t start out with a lot of family. One thing I’ve learned is that people who love and accept you are worth their weight in silver bullets. You hold them fast, and you never let them go.”

  —Frances Brown

  The Crier Apartments, privately owned by Crier Productions, about fifteen minutes later

  LYRA WAS RIGHT: I felt better after a shower and a wig change, although my scalp still itched. I changed into a pair of yoga pants and a jogging top, rubbed a layer of Tiger Balm into my calves, and went bounding outside. There were no cameramen in evidence, giving us a rare moment of peace.

  An impromptu rehearsal circle had formed at the center of the courtyard, which explained the yelling. About half the season was bending, swaying, and stretching their way through Sasha’s lyrical jazz routine. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve felt obligated to join them. The thought made my thighs ache. Fortunately for me, I had something more pressing to attend to.

  I slipped down the stairs and headed for the apartment under ours, glancing nervously around. No one looked my way. I opened the apartment door and stepped inside. Alice—who was sitting on this couch just like she’d been sitting on ours—looked up from the rifle she was field-stripping and smiled.

  “There’s my girl,” she said. “Shut the door and come talk to me. It’s been too long since we’ve had a nice talk.”

  “Grandma, what are you doing here?” I shut the door. “I’m not supposed to have guests. I’m definitely not supposed to have guests with grenades.”

  “Your father called me. Fortunately, I was in a place with phone service, or he’d have summoned your Uncle Mike.” Alice raised an eyebrow. “Far be it from me to criticize Mikey—he’s a good kid—but do you think he would have fit in with your new friends better than I will?”

  “You don’t fit in with my new friends at all,” I protested. “They’re in their twenties, and they dance for a living. You’re . . . not in your twenties, and you kill things for a living.” And for food, and sometimes, I suspected, for fun. It was hard to tell with Grandma Alice. She was the only human I knew who lived primarily off-dimension, and that sort of thing had to be bad for her sense of social norms.

  “No, but I look like I’m in my twenties, and I’m believable as your semi-estranged sister who wants to mend some bridges.” Alice began reassembling her rifle, still looking at me. “I know this isn’t ideal, Very. I’m not here to blow your cover or get you into trouble. I’m just here to make sure that you’re safe. Snake cults aren’t something to mess around with.”

  “I already handled a snake cult in New York,” I said.

  Alice’s expression turned hard. “No, you handled a bunch of amateurs who’d been lucky enough to stumble across a sleeping dragon. They were working out of the pop culture version of the snake cult bible, and they had no idea what they were doing. What kind of forces they were playing with. Do you honestly think I crossed three dimensions because I thought you couldn’t handle yourself? Please. Your father sent me the pictures you took. The people you’re dealing with here, the people who killed those poor children, they have a much better idea of the rituals they’re trying to enact.”

  My knees felt suddenly weak. I allowed myself to fold to the floor, settling cross-legged as I stared at her. “You think it’s going to be that bad?”

  “I think some of those runes were things I’d never seen before,” said Alice. “Some of them I’d only ever seen in Thomas’ notes. Even he didn’t know what they all meant. There have been snake cults as long as there have been people, Very, and some of them had the chance to get extremely good at what they did before their neighbors sensibly rose up and slaughtered them.”

  “I don’t think the words ‘sensible’ and ‘slaughter’ belong in the same sentence,” I said.

  “They do when it’s that or watch your children get swallowed by a snake the
size of a freight train,” said Alice. She snapped the last piece of her rifle back into place. “What did you find at the theater today?”

  I shook my head, chasing off the image of snakes big enough to have their own SyFy Channel franchises. “Nothing,” I said.

  She blinked.

  “I mean it literally: there was nothing.” I explained the situation, from the empty basement to the lack of blood trace evidence.

  By the time I finished, Alice was frowning. “You’re saying an Ukupani couldn’t find any signs that someone had been killed there?” I nodded. Her frown deepened. “Ukupani are some of the best long-range hunters in the world. They can scent a drop of blood in the water from up to a mile away. If he couldn’t detect any signs of blood . . .”

  “They bought a lot of bleach,” I concluded.

  “No,” said Alice. “You would have been able to smell that much bleach. But there are spells and charms that absorb blood, use it to power things. Whoever drew those runes on the bodies was an actual magic-user, not just someone screwing around.”

  I stared at her. “Oh,” I said, after a moment. “Crap.”

  Alice nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Crap.”

  Magic is real, in the sense that sometimes the world does things that can’t be explained using science as we currently understand it. Magic isn’t real, because once something becomes explainable, we start thinking of it as “science,” and we no longer pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s sort of like cryptids. Creatures that were once considered impossible and mythological become completely plausible as soon as someone figures out how to explain them. The wheel turns, and the world changes.

  Here is what we know about magic:

  There are people who, for whatever reason, can affect the world on a molecular level. They can convince things to appear out of thin air, open portals between places, or—yes—tear holes between dimensions. Most of the time, it’s the symbols that matter. You don’t have to be a mathematician to copy an equation, and the answer will be the same whether you did the work in real time or wrote it down from memory. Most so-called “wizards” and their ilk are working from copies of copies of copies of the original crib sheets, sketching out spells and charms that they don’t really understand. They’re not harmless, but they’re not as dangerous as they could be, either.