Chaos Choreography (InCryptid, #5)(61)
(None of my fellow dancers seemed to realize I wore a wig, except for Lyra, who’d caught me, and Pax and Malena, who’d been told. I was reasonably sure everyone from the wardrobe department knew, and just didn’t care. It made me easier to style than the other dancers, since they had one less dancer yelping every time they hit a snarl, and so they were happy to keep my secret, if only out of enlightened self-interest.)
I got out of the bathroom and plopped down in a seat, where a makeup assistant appeared and used a cloth soaked in a chemical-smelling fluid to remove the rhinestones and makeup from my face. It burned, and I wondered if I was also losing half of my epidermis. Oh, well. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art. They were finished in record time. I yanked my simple black practice dress on and strapped my shoes to my feet just as the bell rang again and the whole group of dancers stampeded for the door. The show was going on.
Since we were still in the couples phase of the show, introductions consisted of one male dancer and one female dancer running onstage and performing roughly eight seconds of steps between them. Anders and I were the first to be introduced this week, courtesy of his name’s place in the alphabet. He tapped. I grabbed his hand and used it to steady myself as I performed an impressive-looking flip that would have gotten me disqualified from any formal competition. Then we fell back, swaying rhythmically as we watched the other dancers go through their paces.
None of them looked calmer or more anxious than I expected. If any of my fellow competitors had been involved in the deaths of Poppy and Chaz, they were good at not showing it. I switched my attention to the judges as much as I could without losing my place in the rhythm. Adrian had his usual expression of faint disapproval. Lindy was smiling—although with as much Botox as she’d had, I wasn’t sure she could do anything else. The third spot at the judges’ table was occupied by a grinning Clint, clapping his hands in time to the intro music. He saw me looking and winked. I winked back, still grooving, and felt better about the show, if nothing else.
Clint genuinely liked the dancers on Dance or Die. Adrian viewed us as a path to better ratings, and Lindy seemed to hate everyone equally, but Clint was second only to Brenna in showing affection and fondness for the dancers. If he was here, the judging would be even-handed and constructive, even if everything else went horribly wrong.
“It’s your fourteen remaining dancers, America!” crowed Brenna, and we walked forward, the boys strutting, the girls sashaying, to strike our pose at the middle of the stage. The crowd cheered like so many supersized Aeslin mice. The lights beat down, hot as a summer sun, and I was home.
It was really a pity I wasn’t going to be allowed to stay there. But then, I never was.
“—hate this part, so let’s go on and get it over with,” said Brenna. She looked down the row of girls, a line of worry etched between her eyebrows. I realized with a pang that we hadn’t told her about the snake cult. Between rehearsals, Alice showing up, and our own attempts at an investigation, there hadn’t been time. How could a week not have been enough time?
Brenna was worried because she might be sending me home, and she needed to stay on my good side if she wanted an introduction to William. I was worried because whoever was eliminated tonight might be in deadly danger . . . and I hadn’t told her. She was right there, and should have been among the first to know.
What else had I missed?
“The girls in danger of elimination tonight are . . .” Brenna opened the envelope, sighed, and read, “Leanne, Malena, and Raisa. Thank you, girls. The rest of you may leave the stage.”
We filed off as she was reading off the names of the boys in danger. I lingered in the wings. Anders and I were up fourth: I had time, and I wanted to know which of the male dancers were on the bottom.
“Pax, Mac, and Will,” said Brenna, and the bottom dropped out of the world. The rest of the boys walked off.
Anders was one of the first to make it clear of the cameras. He stopped in front of me, a bleak, anxious look on his face. “Pax was never on the bottom during the first half of our season. What the hell went wrong?”
“Better dancers, tougher competition,” said Jessica, stepping from behind one of the dangling curtains. She was smirking. “Maybe you’re going to have extra room in your apartment sooner than you thought.”
The urge to slap that stupid smirk right off of her face was almost strong enough to override my common sense—but only almost. Assaulting a fellow contestant would see me eliminated on the spot, and then my friends would be defenseless.
“Not funny, Jessica,” snarled Anders.
“Hysterical,” she said, looking him dead in the eye.
“Break it up,” I said, stepping between them. “Pax isn’t going anywhere. He’s too good a dancer to have pulled the lowest number of overall votes. Now if you’ll excuse me, some of us are interested in staying in this competition.” I slid my arm through the crook of Anders’s elbow, so I was holding him close without clinging, and pulled him with me toward the dressing rooms. We separated at the last minute, him going into the men’s, me going into the women’s. We were all dancers here—none of us actually cared—but the show’s producers needed to at least pretend they were holding to Middle American standards of decency.
Someone grabbed me as soon as I was inside the room, yanking me behind a rack of costumes. I pulled the knife from my thigh holster—worn high enough that it hadn’t been visible during my flip earlier, and low enough that I wasn’t goosing myself in uncomfortable places, and don’t think that hadn’t been a learning experience—and whipped around, ready to stab my assailant in the throat.