She raised her head. We picked ourselves up off the floor. I started to open my mouth and froze, unsure what I was supposed to call her. “Grandma” wasn’t going to go over very well with my companions, or be something that I could readily explain.

Fortunately, she solved the problem for me. “I was wondering when you’d get home,” she said, and stood. “Sorry to break in like this, but the security guys were starting to give me the stink-eye for sitting on the curb. I had to come over the wall or risk being arrested.”

“Who the hell are you?” demanded Anders, pushing himself forward, putting himself between her and the rest of us. I don’t think protecting Pax was the goal, not from the way he positioned himself directly in front of Lyra, but he was gallant enough to stick an arm across my chest, barring me from the potentially dangerous intruder.

Well, not “potentially dangerous.” She was my grandmother. She was definitely dangerous.

Alice grinned. It was a wry, lopsided thing. My grin would look like that if it ever got dragged down a hundred miles of bad road, and through more than fifty years of fruitlessly searching for my one true love. I’d pass, if I had the choice. No one should have to smile like that.

“I’m her sister,” she said. “My name’s Elle.”

“You have a sister?” said Lyra, head whipping around as I suddenly became a lot more interesting than an intruder in our living room.

“You have a punk rock sister who picks locks?” demanded Anders.

Pax didn’t say anything. He was the only one from my season who knew about my family, and when I glanced back at him, I could see him running through the possible candidates for the role of “Elle.” He reached his conclusion while I watched, turning white.

“Oh,” he said.

“Okay, break it up.” I ducked under Anders’ arm. “Nice to see you, ‘Elle,’ but what are you doing here? You know my contract doesn’t allow unmonitored contact with my family while I’m on the show.” Thank God there weren’t cameras in our apartments. Adrian would have filmed us twenty-four/seven if he’d been able to get away with it, but he didn’t want to pay the insurance fees for putting cameras in our kitchens. That, and we were dancers: many of us had a tendency to wander around completely nude. None of that footage could be used, or even kept, for fear of a pornography charge.

“Sorry, Val, but I got thrown out of my latest apartment,” said Alice, calm as anything. She raised an eyebrow, daring me to challenge her. “There were noise complaints from the neighbors.”

“Loud music?” guessed Lyra.

“Gunfire,” said Alice.

Lyra didn’t say anything.

“So I figured you’ve got room, right? There’s a whole bunch of empty apartments downstairs. No one’s even going to notice that I’m here.” She turned and flashed her most winsome smile at my roommates.

It’s weird. Grandma Alice is a heavily tattooed dimension-hopping marauder who regularly carries grenades clipped to the belt of her cut-off jeans, but for some reason, people want to like her. Lyra and Anders smiled back immediately. Pax, who was still pale and wide-eyed, did not. He also didn’t run out of the room, which would have been a perfectly reasonable reaction under the circumstances.

“Look, if security catches me, I’ll say I was squatting when the dancers arrived, and stuck around for the anonymity and free grub,” said Alice, turning back to me, like I was the one she had to convince. “I won’t get you in trouble, I promise.”

“All you do is get people in trouble,” I said. “It’s like a holy calling with you.”

Alice’s eyes widened. Too late, I realized my mistake, and managed not to compound it by slapping my hand over my mouth—although it was a near thing.

Every priestess is important to the Aeslin, but they have their hierarchy. The longer a priestess has been alive, the more rituals she’ll have, and the more excited the colony will be when they see her. Normally, this is balanced out by the fact that people die and their catechism ends, becoming a fixed loop in the Aeslin year. Unfortunately, Grandma Alice was too busy to settle down and get old like a normal person, and the Aeslin have been maintaining her worship for almost eighty years without a break, making her the senior priestess of our family. So far as I knew, she was the only priestess to have two separate liturgical lines. She was the Noisy Priestess when she was home and the Pilgrim Priestess when she was off looking for Grandpa Thomas, which meant she had double the usual number of rituals and catechisms focused on her. And now she was in my apartment, and I had mentioned holy callings.