That was a lie, too. For the sake of my heart, I had to remain positive. If I let my positivity fade, I would lose my grip on Valerie: she would collapse like the house of cards she was, and I would have to face the fact that I didn’t belong here, I never really had, and everything was going wrong around me.
“You are Wise,” said the lead mouse solemnly. “We have searched three more of the chambers below the ground. Dark they are, and vile, and filled with scuttling creatures.”
“They were delicious,” piped another mouse.
“Assuming you mean the scuttling creatures, there; go on,” I said. “What did you find?”
“No sign that anyone had walked in those dark places for many days and nights, Priestess,” said the lead mouse, shooting a glare at the mouse that had dared to interject. The Aeslin enforced a fairly strict hierarchy among themselves. It was possible for a mouse who wasn’t part of the priesthood to go years without speaking directly to a family member. It had always seemed a little unfair to me, but since I wasn’t a part of the colony, I figured it wasn’t my place to say anything. “There was neither trace nor track of the Noisy Priestess.”
“Okay,” I said, despite the fact that this was anything but okay. “How many rooms do you have left to go?”
The mouse slicked back its whiskers, looking despondent. “Truly, we Do Not Know,” it said. “Each time we think we have reached the end, we find another door, another chamber. Two of the rooms we have searched so far were not present on the Helpful Map.”
“Which means you’re starting to find the hidebehind areas, which were never on the map to begin with,” I said. “Great. Do you need me to do any annotating?”
“Please,” said the mouse, with all the solemnity of someone who had just had a great and unexpected favor bestowed upon them.
I fished the map out from behind the wardrobe rack and spent five minutes making notes to match the things the mice told me. Here was a door, here was a staircase with two treads missing, here was a good place to hunt centipedes. Dominic’s handwriting was large and spidery and reassuring. Mine was tight and compact, filling in the space between his notes.
When I was done, I handed the pencil back to the lead mouse, said, “Come find me if you find any trace of her,” and left to the sound of muted rodent cheering, fleeing back to the rehearsal room, where Marisol was just starting to get impatient waiting for me.
Thank God for the Argentine tango. Any other dance form and I would have been falling on my ass. As it was, Marisol kept snapping corrections to my form and ordering me to get my face under control. After the third time I’d mechanically performed the same piece of footwork, she clapped her hands and shouted, “Stop!”
We stopped.
Marisol turned off the music before turning on me and demanding, “You! What is wrong with you? A broken heart? A broken ankle? Tell me you have broken something, and that you’re not making a mockery of my rehearsal without an excellent reason!”
“I’m not feeling well,” I said, without hesitation. The trick to a good lie: keep it simple, keep it consistent, and for the love of God, keep it unprovable if you possibly can. The second people start demanding proof, you’re done.
“Valerie, I have seen you dance with walking pneumonia. You slid yourself across that stage like you were the rightful queen, and everyone else your subjects. Do not stand there pleading a little stomach flu and pretending it justifies the performance I’m seeing out of you today.” Marisol’s expression changed, turning calculating. “Unless you’ve got a secret . . . ?”
For a single panicked moment, I thought my wig had slipped. Then I realized she was looking speculatively at my midsection. “No!” I yelped. “No, I’m not pregnant, I’m just . . .” Anders was in the room. Anything I said would be relayed by him to Lyra and Pax, which meant—given Lyra’s fondness for swapping stories with the other dancers—that it would be relayed to the rest of the show by the end of the day. Dammit. I took a breath, and said, “I’m not feeling well, and I didn’t really sleep last night. My grandmother isn’t doing so good. I guess when you combine the two, I’m not up to my usual standards. I’m sorry.”
Marisol blinked. “Your grandmother? I thought—” She stopped herself. It was too late: I already knew what she thought, because I was the one who’d told the original lies. Little Valerie Pryor, whose family didn’t want her. Too obsessed with dance to be a good girl, too obsessed with winning to be a bad girl. To have me saying I was upset because my grandmother wasn’t well probably made about as much sense to her as a gorgon going vegan would make to me.
I didn’t have to work to bring the tears to my eyes. The real challenge was keeping them contained. Once summoned, they threatened to overspill and overwhelm me. “She’s always been happy for me to be whoever I want to be. She’s just one of those people, you know? But we don’t get to see each other much, because she lives really far away. I got the call last night.”
Even Anders looked sympathetic. I was all too aware of the cameras rolling. Adrian would get this footage before the show next week, and he’d play it, even if America’s vote put me solidly in the bottom three. This was the last time the judges could save someone. A story about a sick grandmother might be enough to make them save me.
The thought made me feel ill. I didn’t want to use my grandmother as a rope to pull myself to safety; I wanted to save her. More, I wanted to cling to the idea that she was still alive, somewhere in the dark beneath this building. I wanted her to be fine and furious with the world, kicking and biting and gnawing through her own chains if that was what it took. Grandma Alice was a constant. She was going to outlive the rest of us, because that was the way the world worked, and now here I was, proving to the world that I was the weakest of her grandchildren. This was going to be on television. My parents would see me using her as an excuse.
And I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I stopped holding back my tears and let them run down my cheeks as I gazed miserably at Marisol, waiting for her to say something.
She looked flustered. “My poor dear, I had no idea—I didn’t know you were in contact with any of your family. Why don’t you take some time to compose yourself? I can work with Anders while you’re indisposed, and I know you’ll be able to catch up anything you miss.”
“Yeah, Val,” said Anders, looking equally concerned. “We don’t start learning the group choreo until after lunch. That should give you a couple of hours to put your head together and get back on your feet.”
“Thank you both,” I said, still crying. Now that I’d started, I couldn’t seem to stop. Before either of them could say anything else I turned, grabbed my dance bag off the bench near the door, and left the room.
This was an unexpected reprieve. I was going to do as much with it as I possibly could.
For most people, going from well-lit dance studio to underground labyrinth full of weird smells and damp patches would seem like some sort of punishment. For me, it was a normal day’s work.
I descended the stairs as carefully as I could, wishing I had more for light than the bare bulbs overhead. They were bright enough when I was directly underneath them, but they were spaced out such that there were bands of darkness between them. I’d never appreciated the practical applications of interior decorating so much in my life. A couple of Tiffany lampshades and this whole hallway would have been lit up like Central Park at Christmas.
“Are we almost there?” I asked.
“Very nearly, Priestess,” said the Aeslin mouse on my shoulder. It was clinging to my earring with one paw, keeping itself stable as I descended. “The second search party did say, lo, we are going this way, and the rest of us did say, yea, though you walk through the hallway that was not on the map, you should fear no evil.”
“Gonna pretend you haven’t started parodying the Bible and just keep walking, if that’s all the same to you.”
/> “As you say, Priestess.”
It was sometimes difficult to tell when Aeslin mice were joking. They did have the capacity for humor, and could be amused by the damnedest things. I resisted the urge to turn and eye the mouse. If it was still holding my earring when I moved my head, I could wind up knocking it off my shoulder, and that would make the remainder of my descent a lot more interesting than it needed to be.
The stairs were in reasonably good shape, considering that I was now at least two levels below the street and still going down. The air was damp and tasted of mildew. “How did you find the hallway if it wasn’t on the map?”
“The wall appeared intact, Priestess, solid as stone and capable of withstanding any attempts to breach it. But the air flowed through it all the same, as from a crack the size of a valley.” The mouse’s whiskers tickled my ear. “We sent the juniormost priest to see what was on the other side, and she stepped through the stone, and was gone. When she returned, she reported a great, wide hall, lit with these same bulbs, filled with these same shadows.”
“Was the false wall still there for her after she came back through? I mean, could she still see it when she looked?”
“The false wall never rippled or changed, Priestess. It was like smoke—visible to the eye, but invisible to the nose or paw.”
The mouse was describing hidebehind work. It had to be. They were experts at hanging an illusion on the smallest available hook, spinning scenes like spiders spun their webs. It was part of what kept them so well hidden. In a world where even the most secretive cryptids were being dragged, one by one, out into the light, most cryptozoologists had never actually seen a hidebehind. So far as I was aware, there were no pictures of them, only paintings and sketches done from rare eyewitness accounts. I’d spoken to the hidebehinds of Portland at great length—had even served as an impromptu marriage counselor for a couple who used to live under the supermarket downtown—and I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d ever seen one. They were that good at what they did, and what they did was disappear.
That left me with one big concern. “Will you be able to find your way back to the false wall when we get there?”
The mouse’s whiskers tickled my ear again, this time in quick, staccato bursts: it was laughing. “It can be easy to forget, Priestess, that you are in some ways less attuned to the world around you than we are, for you do not need to be: in your divinity, you may face all challenges without flinching, without need to be prepared to scurry and hide. The air passes through the wall, and will ruffle my fur and carry the scent of such dangers as might await us beyond the veil that is no veil. I will lead you true, Priestess. You will be Proud of Me.”
“You’re riding my shoulder into the dark below a theater, where no one can hear us scream. Trust me, mouse, I’m already proud of you.”
I couldn’t see the mouse on my shoulder, but I could feel it puffing out its fur with satisfaction and delight. Sometimes it was easy to keep the Aeslin happy.
Sometimes it was incredibly hard.
My foot hit the bottom of the stairs as I passed outside the sphere of the last of the overhead lights. Darkness fell, surprisingly profound, especially considering how close I was to the stairway. Glancing upward, I could see the naked bulbs glittering like beckoning stars, offering an escape from the certain death that waited up ahead. That, too, was hidebehind work. They were good at all sorts of illusion, from visual to emotional, and they never missed a trick.
“Now where?”
“Walk forward, Priestess, and do not be afraid; the wall will not harm you.”
Being afraid of a wall was only common sense, considering I was walking blindly into the dark. The mice were good about not steering us wrong. I took a deep breath and kept going, taking three long steps into the black—
—and into the light. One second I was in the dark underground hall, and the next I was in another, much brighter hall. The overhead lights were equipped with small button shades that distributed their illumination smoothly over the entire area, putting the mold-speckled walls and linoleum floor on full display. It was clear no one had done any cleaning down here in quite some time.
It was equally clear that people had lived here, once. The linoleum was the sort usually installed in low-rent apartment buildings and public kitchens, places where mud might be tracked in from the outside, where children played and messes were made. It didn’t look industrial or cold. It looked like the front hall of a community center, one that had been inexplicably abandoned by its residents.
Or maybe not so inexplicably. The entry was hidebehind construction, and the hidebehinds had been a part of the original community. They must have left with the rest, either because they no longer felt safe, or because they couldn’t bring in the supplies they needed without passing through the human-controlled parts of the building. I looked up, following the exposed wiring between the lampshades. It vanished into the corner of the hall. I was willing to bet that this hallway, and any others like it, had been illicitly wired into the city power grid, providing a low drain so constant that no one had ever noticed it.
“This is where you left the other group, right?” I asked.
“Yes, Priestess,” squeaked the mouse. “They were to continue searching the rooms until their shift passed, or one came seeking them.”
“Okay, that’s good. That means we’re not totally alone down here.” I started walking forward. Either the hidebehinds hadn’t made any effort to conceal the doors on the other side of their clever gate, or there were more rooms down here than made sense, strictly speaking. It seemed like I passed a room every five or six feet. Most of the doors were closed, but the space between them and the floor was enough for a determined Aeslin mouse to squeeze through.
“Shall I call them for you, Priestess?”
“Yes, why don’t you d—” I stopped mid-word. “Wait.”
There were footsteps coming down the hall, sharp and quick and unmistakably bipedal. They were coming toward us from around a corner up ahead.
The hall was effectively featureless, leaving me nowhere to hide except the obvious. I whirled and tried the knob of the nearest door. Locked. I tiptoed as quickly as I could back down the hall, my heart hammering against my ribs. I wasn’t unarmed—I hadn’t voluntarily gone anywhere without a weapon since my eleventh birthday party—but if this came down to a fight, I couldn’t be sure that I was going to win. I didn’t know what was coming down that hall, and my parents didn’t raise me to charge in blind when there was any other option.
The second knob turned under my hand. I pushed the door open, not letting go of the knob, since I didn’t want it to bang against the wall, and ducked inside. The room was dark, but that didn’t matter as much as getting out of the hall.
Easing the door most of the way closed, I braced myself against it, ear to the wood, and listened.
The footsteps got louder. A female voice, muffled by the semi-closed door and distorted by the hallway, said, “I thought we’d be done by now.”
I couldn’t recognize the speaker, not with the way the environment was working against me, but I could pick up on her tone. She was pissed.
“I told you, this isn’t an exact science.” The second voice belonged to a man. Apart from that, I couldn’t say. “Sometimes it takes four, sometimes it takes fourteen. There’s a reason we brought back the last five seasons.”
“Yeah, ratings, and that arrogant bitch insisting we had to stick to the Top Twenty format even when we weren’t having auditions. Why does she have so much pull with the network?”
“She’s the face of the show. They need to keep her happy.” The man’s voice was calm, even reasonable: he was clearly the one in charge, and doing his part to manage his companion’s mood.
I was glad I was hidden, and no one could see the relief in my expression. The only person who could be described as “the face of the sh
ow” was Brenna—even Adrian wasn’t as recognized as she was, and wouldn’t be identified as quickly on the street. Brenna had been instrumental in putting together the All-Star season, but she hadn’t been part of the plan to sacrifice us to the snake god. I’d already been pretty sure of that. Having it confirmed was still reassuring. For one thing, it meant there wasn’t an entire nest of dragons arrayed against me.
“This is all pointless. We could use anybody.”
“This particular snake god prefers talented sacrifices. Young people at the height of their powers. We give it what it wants, and it will give us what we want. Feeding it the staff would just anger it. You just need to have patience.”
“I don’t want to have patience. I want to have results.”
“Soon,” said the man.
Their footsteps faded off down the hall, leaving me and the mouse alone in the dark. I started to ease the door open, to look after them, and froze as I realized that it wasn’t that dark anymore.
The wall behind me was glowing. Nothing that glows—apart from stars on a ceiling, or glow sticks at a rave—has ever been a good thing.
Well, crap.
Seventeen
“The difference between a last stand and a Tuesday afternoon is all in how many bullets you had at the start.”
—Frances Brown
Somewhere below the Crier Theater, woefully underprepared for whatever’s about to burst through that glowing wall
THERE WAS TIME TO RUN: I was at the door, and a step would see me in the hall, putting more distance and some barriers between me and whatever was coming through the wall. But there’d be nothing to stop it from following me out, and more, something that could pass through solid stone might be the answer to the question that had been gnawing at us all. Where were the bodies going?
I was about to find out.
“Get down,” I hissed, pulling the pistol from the small of my back. The mouse obeyed without hesitation, tiny claws digging into me as it ran down my front. The light from the wall got brighter. I tensed, readying myself for whatever happened next.