“Val, wait.” Lyra sat up enough to meet my eyes. “I know I’m the one who said this was okay, but I’m worried. It’s cool that your sister’s here and all—it sucks that your family doesn’t support you—and I don’t have any problem with her squatting until the show’s over, but you already sneak out the window most nights, and now you’re going downstairs to hang out with her. Is this going to affect your work?”
It was such a reasonable question, about such an unreasonable situation, that it was all I could do not to start laughing. Instead, I forced my smile to get a little wider, and said, “With my sister here, maybe I won’t feel the need to sneak out as much. I’ll be fine, Lyra. I’ve never gotten so little sleep that I couldn’t dance the next day.”
“I know. But I want it to come down to the four of us again, you know? Let’s prove we were the best season, and take home the grand prize for ourselves.”
“Easy for you to say,” grumbled Pax good-naturedly. “You already won once.”
“Lo says the audience probably won’t vote for one of the previous winners to take it all again,” I said. “Something about the perception that their favorites got robbed. So if it came down to the four of us, I think your chances would be really good, Pax.”
“Let’s get there and see,” said Lyra. She closed her eyes and lay back down, wiggling her toes as a signal for Pax to continue the massage. “Just be careful.”
“I will,” I said, and let myself out of the apartment.
As was customary on a night following a Sasha rehearsal, the party in the courtyard had devolved into quiet conversation and people working the kinks out of each other’s shoulders, calves, and feet. There was nothing sexual about it. Massage might be an erotic thing for some people, but for dancers, it was a necessity of life, keeping our muscles from rebelling in the middle of the night and reducing us to wobbling knots of pain. No one looked my way as I padded down the stairs and let myself into the apartment that Alice had claimed as her own.
She was gone. The living room was spotless, giving no sign that my grandmother, or her gear, had ever been there. I stopped in the doorway, blinking.
Then I realized I could smell cookies.
“Gra—Elle?” For all I knew, she had company, and I didn’t want to need to explain why I was calling my sister—my apparently younger sister, and don’t think that didn’t make my head hurt—“Grandma.”
“In here, sweetie,” she called, from the direction of the kitchen.
I stuck my head in, and sure enough, she had produced a practical white apron and a pair of oven mitts from her cavernous backpack and was baking chocolate chip cookies. This seemed somehow natural and completely bizarre at the same time. So I asked the most pressing question I could think of:
“Where did you get the eggs?”
“The nice thing about this dimension—apart from the gravity; you should never take gravity for granted, dear, you never know when it’s going to be taken away from you—is the availability of things called ‘grocery stores.’” Alice opened the oven and pulled out a cookie sheet covered in perfect, golden brown cookies. She’d been baking cookies for decades, and had somehow mastered the arcane art of getting the exact right ratio of chocolate chips to dough.
My mouth watered. I swallowed, frowned, and said, “You’re supposed to be keeping a low profile. How is baking cookies keeping a low profile?”
“I’m going to make noise by being in here: it’s inevitable,” she said, beginning to transfer the cookies to a cooling rack with a spatula. I was starting to wonder whether her backpack was so large because she carried a full pastry kitchen with her at all times. “This way, if someone hears the noises coming from the apartment that always smells like cookies, they’ll be more likely to assume that I’m harmless, and not kick the door in. Plus, cookies make excellent bribes. Especially fresh-baked cookies.”
“Some of the dancers are gluten-free and vegan,” I said.
Alice looked at me blankly.
“It’s a whole new world, Grandma,” I said. “Dominic wants to meet you.”
“Dominic—that’s your boyfriend, yes? Your father told me about him. He seemed to think I’d be angry because you’d started dating someone from the Covenant.” Alice shook her head, a small smile painting her lips. “As if I’m in any position to judge? Your grandfather was still officially a member when I fell in love with him.”
“I hope that non-judgment extends a little past ‘boyfriend,’” I said. “I married him.”
Alice blinked. “You did what?”
“I married him. We went to Las Vegas, and got married.” I braced myself for the shouting that was sure to follow.
Instead, she picked up a plate of cookies from the counter and thrust it in my direction. “Oh, darling, that’s wonderful! Congratulations to you both. Have a cookie.”