“You don’t owe me anything: you’re family,” said Alice. “And apparently, she had a feeling someone was going to need this sort of thing, so she had them waiting. I traded her my old hiking boots for the six charms. Nothing expensive. I’ve already replaced them.” She raised a foot, showing off the heavy black leather boots that had taken the place of her brown ones. “As for what you do with it, you keep it with you. Always, period. I don’t care if you have to tape it to the underside of your boob, you keep it with you.”
“Got it.” I tucked the charm into my bra, securing it against my skin. “You okay?”
“I’m good.” Alice slid her thumbs through her belt loops. “Bon and I had a nice chat about what it would take to chuck someone like me through the walls of the world when I didn’t want to go. We also had cake. I’m pretty happy when people want to feed me cake.”
“Cake and chaos, that’s your modus operandi,” I said. The twenty minutes Marisol had given us had to be almost up. I glanced at the theater door behind me, and then back to Alice. “You have a plan for the rest of today?”
“Watch the theater. Watch you. Make sure nobody else gets chucked into a dimension they don’t plan on visiting without a passport.” Alice shrugged broadly. That worried me. The harder she tried to seem unconcerned, the more concerned she probably was. “Dominic will be here in an hour. He’s going to relieve me. You, missy, are going to go back in there and shake your tail feathers like there’s nothing wrong.”
“But—”
“But nothing.” Alice fixed me with a bright-eyed, unforgiving stare. “We’re here because you wanted to dance. Turns out that was a good thing: this snake cult would have been killing people whether you were on the scene or not. Having you on the inside gives us a better shot at stopping them. A big part of that shot depends on you continuing to be on the inside. You have to dance, and you have to make it believable. You’re not just selling yourself to the audience at home. You’re selling yourself to the people in that building. If they don’t believe you’re one of them, you’re never going to close the deal, and we’re all going to wind up in a world of trouble.”
I sighed. “I don’t know if I can. It’s getting harder and harder to pretend that dancing matters more than saving lives.”
“That’s because it doesn’t.” Alice’s tone was matter-of-fact and left no room for argument. “Saving lives matters more than just about anything else you can think of. That’s why we do whatever we have to. That’s why you’re going back in there.”
“But, Grandma—”
“Don’t you ‘but, Grandma’ me. Get back in there, keep an eye on your people, and tell me if you notice anything different now that those confusion charms aren’t clouding your vision.” Alice shook her head. Her mouth was a hard line. I knew that expression very well: I had been seeing it on my father’s face since I was a little girl.
Sadly, that meant I also knew there was no further point in arguing. Once that face came out, I had lost. “I have my phone. Call me if you find anything. I’ll find a way to get out of rehearsal if I need to.”
“You won’t need to,” said Alice, and pointed to the door.
I sighed, and went.
The hallway was still empty, and for the first time, it occurred to me how odd that was. There should have been production assistants and security guards everywhere, even during rehearsals. One of the unexpected truths of reality television was that no one was ever alone. There was always someone there, watching, monitoring, making notes on an endless series of clipboards. Hollywood was a self-perpetuating machine, creating jobs for people who wanted to move up the food chain, while it moved the cousins and nieces and nephews of the elite up in place of the people who fetched the coffee. So where were they?
Maybe this snake cult was taking the employees after all.
I prowled through the halls back to the rehearsal room, not even trying to walk like Valerie. She was a pampered creature, designed for controlled environments and safe spaces, and this wasn’t a safe space anymore. Maybe this had never been a safe space in the first place. Maybe I’d just been imagining it.
The door to the rehearsal room opened before I could grasp the knob, and there was Anders, a hangdog expression on his face. “I’m sorry, Val,” he said. “I shouldn’t have yelled, but when I came back to apologize, you were gone.”
He sounded genuinely anguished. Even if I’d been angry with him, and not disappointed in myself, I would have forgiven him then. “It’s okay. I just needed to take a walk and clear my head. I shouldn’t have said that. You know I didn’t carry you.”
“Yeah, just like I know that without you, I would never have made it to week four in our original season. I’m the only tapper who’s ever made it to the top ten, because the rest haven’t been lucky enough to have partners who’ll prop them up until they get their stage legs.” He offered his hands. “Forgive me?”
“Forgiven,” I said, taking them.