Chaos Choreography

by Seanan McGuire

  Dominic didn’t take it quite so calmly. He stood up straighter and asked, “How could you tell?”

  “The air.” We all looked at her blankly. Alice shrugged. “Most Earth-type dimensions have a breathable atmosphere. Getting access to the ones that don’t is surprisingly hard. The spells have all these countermeasures and protections built in and anyway, you can’t do it without more prep than my attackers had. They just shunted me to the nearest place they had access to, which hadn’t had an industrial revolution on the continent corresponding to North America yet. Everything smelled and tasted different. You develop a palate for that sort of thing once you’ve been dealing with it for long enough.”

  Malena was the first to speak: “Lady, you need better hobbies.”

  “I knit,” said Alice.

  There was a knock at the door. I put my carton of shrimp down and moved to open it, letting a flustered-looking Brenna into the increasingly cramped motel room.

  “Sorry I’m late to the party,” she said. “I had to circle a few times before I found a parking space.”

  “There’s a garage across the street,” said Malena.

  Brenna shrugged out of her coat, expression unrepentant. “It charged five dollars an hour. That’s highway robbery, and I’d never be able to explain the expense to my sisters. They’re only all right with the size of my car because the studio pays for half my gas, and we can use it on our Costco runs.”

  Dragons bought in bulk. Of course they did. If there was something that could be done to pinch a penny, they would do it, and so well that it made human coupon clippers weep and beg to learn their secrets. I closed the door.

  “How much did Malena tell you?” I asked.

  “Just that she wanted a ride,” said Brenna.

  I looked to Malena. She shrugged. “I figured you were going to do the debrief and I didn’t want to take the bus. I’m intrinsically lazy.”

  “Right.” I took a deep breath. Brenna loved her dancers. This was going to suck. But the best way to deal with it was quickly. Turning to Brenna, I said, “All the dancers who’ve been eliminated are dead. There’s a snake cult operating inside the building, and they’ve been using the eliminated couples as sacrifices to try and manifest their god.”

  Brenna blinked. She didn’t say anything.

  “I have pictures of the bodies, if you don’t believe me. Please, try to believe me. You don’t want to see these.” I didn’t want to have seen them, and I had a lot more experience with death than Brenna did. She was a sheltered dragon princess from an established Nest. There was a good chance she’d never seen a dead body in her life.

  Finally, she spoke. “You can’t be serious,” she said, voice quavering. “We would have noticed. I would have noticed. They’re my babies. You’re all my babies.”

  “The snake cult has confusion charms tucked all over the theater,” said Alice. “Once someone was added to the forgetting portion of the spell, you would have just stopped caring. It’s not your fault.”

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” Brenna rounded on Alice, appearing to notice her for the first time.

  “It’s cool, Brenna, she’s my grandmother—that never stops sounding weird.” I shook my head. “Brenna Kelly, meet Alice Price-Healy. Grandma, meet Brenna. No one is stabbing, shooting, or immolating anyone in this hotel room.”

  “Please,” added Dominic. “I have to sleep here.”

  “HAIL!” rejoiced the mice. “HAIL THE LACK OF STABBING, SHOOTING, AND FLAME!”

  I wasn’t sure whether they couldn’t pronounce “immolation,” or whether it just hadn’t fit into their chant. It wasn’t worth arguing about. Besides, I had something else to worry about: Brenna, who was staring, open-mouthed, at the colony. This was the usual response to the mice, especially from people who hadn’t been warned about them in advance.

  We just didn’t have time for it. “Yes, they’re Aeslin mice, yes, they’re supposed to be extinct, and yes, they’re with me,” I said, before she could say anything. “They’re good at keeping other people’s secrets, although most family secrets do sort of tend to get worked into the colony’s religious rites. Please don’t shout.”

  “Aeslin mice,” said Brenna, and for a moment, she smiled. “I never thought I’d see the day. We live in a glorious time, Verity. A glorious, glorious time.”

  “A glorious time filled with corpses,” said Malena, bringing the mood in the room crashing back to the ground. Brenna’s smile faltered before fading altogether.

  She turned back to me. “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “I am,” I said, with a quick nod. “I’m so sorry. The confusion charms must have been there from the start of the season. We might not know what was happening to the eliminated dancers even now, if it hadn’t been for Pax catching the scent of blood on his way to the car.”

  “They’re cleaning up after themselves so completely that even I can’t smell anything after they vacate a room,” said Malena.

  “I think I may know how,” said Alice. We all turned to look at her. “If their magic-user has the equations for dimensional shifts, they could easily be moving the bodies to a nearby level of reality, then leaving the blood behind when they take the rest of the body to a permanent resting place.”

  “The fuck you say?” said Malena.

  Alice leaned over and picked up my abandoned carton of prawns. “This is one thing. If I dumped it out on the bed—which I won’t do, Dominic, so there’s no need to give me that look—would it still be one thing, or would it become many things?”

  “That’s semantics,” said Brenna.

  “That’s magic,” said Alice. “I could use a spell to shift ‘Verity’s order of salt-and-pepper prawns’ into another dimension, and then use another spell to shift just the carton, or the carton and its contents, back. It’s all in how you word it. The whole topic honestly makes my head hurt, but that’s why I’m the blunt instrument. Thomas was always the scalpel.”

  Bringing my family history into an already tense situation wasn’t going to do any of us any good. Quickly, before someone could ask who Thomas was, I said, “So we have eight dead dancers, we have confusion charms all over the theater, and we have a magic-user or users good enough at what they do that they can move people and corpses into other dimensions without a lot of prep work.” That last statement earned me some blank looks. I explained: “Even if they came prepared to move the bodies, they wouldn’t have been expecting Alice. Since she didn’t come back covered in blood, I’m assuming she was placed in a different dimension than all that blood they’ve been moving around. That means a magic-user who can access multiple dimensions, without having put in a lot of prep work toward doing it.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily imply a lot of strength,” said Alice. “They could be very good at doing one specific thing. It’s our bad luck that the thing in question is basically a fight-ender when used correctly. It’s hard to punch something that’s in a different dimension altogether.”

  “This gets better and better,” I said. “Next up, they actually summon the snake god, and we have to deal with it.”

  “That might be true,” said Brenna hesitantly. “They can’t let the show make it to the finale. They just can’t.”

  Malena and I stared at her, matching expressions of dawning horror on our faces. Alice and Dominic looked confused.

  “I’m missing something,” said Alice. “What am I missing?”

  “The finale is where they crown America’s Favorite Dancer,” I said. “The judges and the top four always get to pick their favorite routines from the rest of the season, and then those dancers come back and perform them one more time.”

  “If all the eliminated dancers are dead, they won’t be able to have a reunion show,” said Brenna. “It would make people notice the disappearances. Either these people expect to have their snake god by then
. . .”

  “Or they’re going to disappear if they haven’t succeeded by the time the call is going out for people to return,” I said. “So we’re looking at what, we hit the top four and a bunch of people just disappear? That’s still a lot of deaths between here and there. It has to stop.”

  “They’re killing based on the elimination cycle, which gives us until Thursday,” said Malena. “You have any big monster-hunter genius ideas?”

  “We get the confusion counter-charms from Bon, and make sure we’re all watching carefully when we’re in the theater,” I said. “We have a map to the subbasement. We know where they’re keeping the bodies. We can find them.”

  “They have to be someone close to the show, or they wouldn’t be able to come and go freely—and they definitely wouldn’t be able to get the eliminated dancers to go anywhere with them,” said Brenna. “I don’t care how many confusion charms you put in the theater. A dancer who’s just been eliminated isn’t going anywhere with a stranger.”

  “So we’re looking for one of our own, and we need to look fast,” I said. “We’re running out of time.”

  No one said anything for a moment, not even the mice. Finally, Dominic broke the silence.

  “Would anyone like an eggroll?” he asked.

  It was as good a way to move forward as any.

  Brenna’s big car came in handy for more than just Costco runs: it was big enough, and empty enough, that she was able to give me, Malena, and Alice a ride back to the apartments. Dominic remained behind, with half of the mice. It would make sleeping complicated—since they were assigned to me, not him, they weren’t in the habit of obeying him when they didn’t feel like it—but it would also mean he could get to the theater early, before first call, and make his way down into the basement levels while the rest of us were still getting out of bed.

  (Was I thrilled by the idea of my husband venturing into the basement of the building with only the mice for company, when there were confusion charms on the place to keep us from noticing right away when somebody disappeared? Hell, no. It was still the best plan we had, and stood a halfway decent chance of getting him inside without trouble from security. We knew we had time before anyone else was killed. That didn’t mean we could afford to sit around twiddling our thumbs until the deadline arrived. We needed to move.)

  As for moving . . . Brenna stopped at a light, casting a glance in my direction before she said, with forced joviality, “It’s early yet. Mind making a stop before I drop you lot off?”

  “Depends,” said Malena. “Will there be an ambush?”

  Brenna looked at the rearview mirror, eyebrow cocked inquisitively. “If there was going to be an ambush, would I tell you?”

  “You might. I mean, if I were planning an ambush, there’s a chance I’d be so surprised by someone coming right out and asking that I’d just tell them.”

  “But then it wouldn’t be an ambush anymore, dear,” said Alice. “You’d need to call it something else.”

  “No ambushes,” said Brenna, an air of desperation creeping into her voice. I guess we could be a bit much to deal with, when you weren’t expecting us. “I just want to swing by the Nest and warn my sisters about what’s been going on. I figure it’ll be more believable if I show up with the lot of you.”

  “They’ll be okay with you bringing humans around?” I asked.

  Brenna shot me a quick, amused glance. “It’s you. They’d be all right if I invited you to come shopping in their closets, at least right now. Until we have our meeting with the dragons of New York, you can do no wrong that doesn’t end in bloodshed.”

  “Well, okay, then.” I twisted in my seat to look back at Malena and Alice. “You two all right with a stop? Keeping the dragons up to date can’t hurt anything.”

  “More importantly, I can invite them all to this week’s show, once they know what they’re getting into, and we can use them as extra eyes,” said Brenna. “Adrian will never object to a sudden influx of pretty women in the audience. They don’t directly impact ratings, but you’d never know that to hear him rave after we’ve had a good night.”

  “I thought people had to pay for tickets to the live show,” I said.

  Brenna looked amused. “They do, up until there are seats going wanting. If we hit day of show without selling out, then there are people who get paid to come and cheer. My sisters have made a pretty decent sum off of showing up and pretending to be excited on camera.”

  Another illusion shattered. And here I’d been thinking all this time that I was performing for packed houses because people wanted to see us dance. “Oh,” I said.

  “Buck up: they usually don’t get to come,” said Brenna, turning down a side street. “There’s still a loyal audience for the show, and people honestly do enjoy the live performances. There’s an electricity in the air that just doesn’t come across on the screen.”

  “My whole family watches,” said Malena. “My grandfather insists. Once a week, everyone gets together in his living room, and then they all vote for me, even when I’m awful.”

  “Isn’t family great?” asked Alice.

  I snorted.

  The drive to the Nest took about twenty minutes, passing through dark residential neighborhoods and only slightly better-lit commercial ones, until we came to a small, ratty looking motel with a “No Vacancy” sign flashing in the parking lot like a blind eye. It was a prime example of 1950s Southern California design, with neon and exposed balconies accented by dead grass and battered cacti. Brenna pulled into one of the few open spaces, a beatific expression on her face.

  “Be it ever so humble,” she said blithely.

  “Humble?” asked Malena, craning her neck to see the second floor. Nothing moved behind the curtains, but there were lights on; either someone was home, or the dragons had decided that wasting a little electricity to maintain their cover was okay. “This place isn’t humble. This is where people go to get themselves murdered. To death. By white dudes wearing hockey masks.”

  “Why specifically white dudes?” asked Alice. Brenna was getting out of the car and so we all followed suit, closing our doors behind us. The car beeped once as Brenna pressed the button to lock it. She might live here, but even she didn’t trust the neighborhood.

  “You ever see anybody else slap on a fucking hockey mask and run around filleting coeds for no good reason? It’s always some bored white guy. It’s like Scooby-Doo. People think it’s teaching you all these big lessons about how monsters aren’t real, when really it’s just showing kids over and over again that when something seems out of whack, there’s probably some old white dude behind it.”

  Alice looked thoughtful. “You know, you may have something there.”

  “I do not have the spare brain to have this conversation right now,” I said, and hurried after Brenna, accompanied by the faint cheers of the Aeslin mice riding in the hood of my sweatshirt.

  We were taking Aeslin mice to visit a Nest. May the heavens have mercy on our souls.

  The lobby of the motel was as small and shabby as the exterior. A lovely woman in her late twenties sat behind the desk, poking listlessly at a smartphone with tape on one corner to hold the screen in place. She didn’t look up as we entered, just said, “You’re late,” without any heat or rancor. I would’ve known she was a dragon even if Brenna hadn’t been the one to lead me here. There was something about her combination of perfect hair, perfect skin, and secondhand sweatshirt that screamed “secretly a princess, not here for you to save.”

  “I had to help Verity with some things,” said Brenna sweetly.

  The woman’s head snapped up, eyes suddenly wide. She scanned us all in a quick, economical gesture before settling on me. “Verity?” she asked. “Verity Price? Is she—I mean, are you Verity Price?”

  “Yeah, I am,” I said. There was no point in stretching out the suspense of the mom
ent. It would have been cruel, given the circumstances and the power imbalance between us. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  She put down her phone. “I—I mean, I—I mean—” She stopped. “I don’t know how to have this conversation.”

  “That’s because we’re not having it yet, Chantelle. I’m sorry,” said Brenna, before her Nest-sister could embarrass herself—or me—any further. “Verity isn’t here because the dragons of New York have agreed to see us. She’s here because of problems on the show, and we need to talk to Osana.”

  “Sorry,” I said, when Chantelle looked to me for confirmation. “I’m working on it, but I’ve been sort of busy appearing on national television for the last few weeks. I’ll let you know as soon as I have some sort of answer.”

  “Please make them answer ‘yes,’” said Chantelle. The raw need in her voice was startling. It’s rare to hear a dragon beg for anything—not even mercy. Chantelle was begging. “Please. I want my daughters to have sons. I want to die knowing my species isn’t going extinct within my children’s lifetimes. Please make them understand why they should sell us a baby boy. We’ll be the best aunts any dragon ever grew up with. We’ll teach him everything he needs to know, and he’ll be loved. No one will ever be more loved than he will, because he’ll be our future. Everyone deserves a future.”

  There was a moment of uncomfortable silence when she finished speaking, like none of us knew how to react. Even Brenna was quiet, maybe because she understood what Chantelle was saying a little too well. I was essentially in control of the future of their species, or at least the future of this Nest; without me to make their case and help them move the baby across the country, they’d have no more chance of getting a mate for their daughters than anyone else, and less chance than many. They needed me, and they didn’t know what to offer in exchange for a favor that could quite literally change their lives forever.