The hallway beneath us was motionless. The stage techs were gone, and all the other dancers would be home by now. I wondered whether the charms that kept anyone from noticing when the eliminated dancers disappeared would also prevent them from noticing that Malena, Pax, and I hadn’t come back. If we died here tonight, would our friends make up stories to explain why it was perfectly reasonable that we had left our things in our apartments before quitting the show?
The thought of Anders and Lyra trying to explain the number of knives under my mattress was briefly entertaining, but only briefly. The Aeslin mice would have to find their way from Burbank to Portland if I disappeared, and while that might sound like the premise of a children’s book—colony of talking, intelligent rodents travels hundreds of miles to reunite with their human protectors—the reality would be cruel, and bloody, and probably end with the deaths of all the mice who’d volunteered to accompany me. The Aeslin counted on us to protect them. I couldn’t protect them if I was dead.
Seconds slithered by, piling up until they transformed into minutes. The minutes began doing the same, until I had no real sense of time; I just knew my calves ached from holding my position for so long, and that it was getting difficult to keep my eyes open. Carefully, I shifted around to plop my butt down on the rafter and dig my phone out of my pocket. It was almost midnight. We’d been waiting here for more than two hours, and nothing had happened.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean?” asked Malena. She twisted her head at an angle that a human spine would have been hard-pressed to achieve, narrowing her eyes. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“That’s what’s wrong. Grandma’s not an ambush predator. She should have gotten bored by now.” And she hadn’t. The basement door was still closed; Alice had yet to make her reappearance. “Something’s wrong.”
I pressed my knees together, lifting my weight up onto the heels of my hands. Then, without a pause to think about what I was doing, I pushed myself forward, off the rafter and into free-fall.
The descent was exactly what I needed to clear my head, and as I fell, I felt the sleepiness slip away, leaving me awake, alert, and plummeting. The first two were good things: the third, I’d been counting on. Spreading my arms so that I was swan-diving toward the rapidly approaching floor, I snagged one of the guide ropes used to hoist things up into the rafters, pulling myself in and looping my arms around it so as to maximize my drag without ripping all the skin off of my hands. My speed of descent dropped by more than half. I hooked a foot around the rope, and suddenly I was sliding as gracefully as a fireman down a pole.
I tightened my grip on the rope when I was a foot or so above the ground, bringing myself to an abrupt and relatively painless halt. Unwinding my foot from the rope took a second longer—long enough for Malena to race down the wall and step onto the floor, shaking away her lingering reptilian attributes with a rattle of spines that were there when the noise began and gone when it finished.
“What the fuck?” she demanded.
“Gravity and I have an agreement,” I said. “I treat it with respect, and it doesn’t smear me across the nearest flat surface.” The basement door seemed larger now that I was on a level with it—larger, and more dangerous. I took a deep breath, stepped forward, and turned the knob.
The stairs on the other side were empty.
The place where Alice should have been was unoccupied. I stared at it for a moment, trying to process what I wasn’t seeing. Then I bent and touched the concrete. It was cool. She’d been gone for a while.
There was a rustling sound behind me as Malena stepped closer. I didn’t turn. “Go find Dominic and Pax,” I said tightly. My hand found the butt of my gun almost without my consciously deciding to draw it. If Alice was missing . . .
My paternal grandmother was one of the deadliest people I knew. The rest of us were good, but she was the result of Covenant training and techniques combined with decades of doggedly pursuing traces of her lost husband across a hundred hostile dimensions. For our attackers to have taken her without making a ruckus was almost as unbelievable as it was terrifying.
“What are you going to do?” asked Malena.
I looked at the stairs, stretching down into the dark, and swallowed. There was really only one thing I could say, much as I disliked it.
“I’m going to find my grandma.”
Fourteen
“I don’t figure I’ll have a headstone. I don’t honestly figure I’ll have a grave. Just a dark spot on the ground somewhere, and the knowledge that when it mattered, I wasn’t good enough. I guess I never really was.”
—Alice Healy
The Crier Theater, descending a flight of stairs down into the dark, like that isn’t the worst idea ever
I WALKED DOWN THE STAIRS, taking my time, sure with every step that this would be the one where my foot found my grandmother’s body. The door was open behind me, providing enough light that I wasn’t worried about missing a step and falling, but not enough light for me to see what was ahead.
“Grandma?” I didn’t dare shout. I could still hiss, calling down into the dark in the hopes that if she was wounded, she would hear me and respond.