The drawing of our dance styles from the hat went quickly after that. Anders and I got the Argentine tango, to my immense relief. I—or rather, Valerie—had been nationally ranked in that style more than once, and I could handle the rehearsal in my sleep, no matter how difficult our choreographer tried to make it. Pax and Lyra got hip-hop, while Malena and Troy pulled contemporary. Malena looked unhappy about that, but there wasn’t time to reassure her before we were all being hustled off to our individual rooms to get to work.
It was more than an hour before I could duck away, making a vague excuse about needing to go to the bathroom. We were with Marisol Bustos again, the show’s go-to for the Argentine tango, and she seemed relieved to have me stepping out of the room for a few minutes. It would give her time to focus her attentions on Anders, who frankly needed them much more than I did.
(Which wasn’t to say that she was going to go easy on me in the days ahead. I knew Marisol, and worse, Marisol knew what I was capable of. I could underperform today, since I had the whole “I don’t feel well” excuse going for me, but come tomorrow, I’d either need to step up my game or see the show’s medics. That meant I needed to take care of this today.)
I hurried down the hall, bypassing the restrooms on my way to the dressing room. Luck was with me, maybe for the first time since I’d decided to come back on the show: there was no one else there. Quickly, I made my way to the main wardrobe rack, crouched down, and whispered, “I seek audience.”
“HAIL!” The cry was muted—the mice were making an effort—but loud enough that I glanced over my shoulder, waiting for a PA or stagehand to stick their head in and ask what I was shouting about. When no one appeared I relaxed, marginally, and turned back to the wardrobe rack.
The mice were starting to appear, lining themselves up neatly as they bristled their whiskers and waved their paws in the air, jubilant over my appearance. Only about half the colony was present; the rest must have been running around in the basements, looking for signs of Alice. They’d been making the most of their time in the theater: fully half of them had strings of beads or sequins wrapped around their necks, and one was clutching a bag made from an ankle sock, stuffed to its absolute limit with feathers.
“Have you been chewing on costumes?” I asked.
“No, Priestess,” said the mouse at the front of the group. “All we have Taken, we have Found, for did not the Well-Groomed Priestess say unto us, What Has Been Discarded, You May Have, But Don’t You Little Monsters Nip My Embroidery?”
“I’ll believe it,” I said. “I’ll try to find you a shoebox to put everything in. I can sneak it back to the apartment, no problem.”
The mice cheered again. Then they sobered, and the lead mouse said, “We have not found the Noisy Priestess. We have failed you.”
“Woe,” moaned the mice, in unnerving unison.
The last thing I needed to deal with was a crisis of faith on the part of my Aeslin mice. “You haven’t failed me,” I said hurriedly. “Anything worth doing is worth working for, right? We’re being challenged right now. That means we have to stick with it, and we’ll find her.” Whether or not we’d find her alive . . .
No. I couldn’t dwell on that, or on the fact that maintaining my cover meant I was dancing while my grandmother was missing and potentially dead somewhere underneath the theater. For the sake of the mice, I had to remain positive.
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?”