“Once again, we are unanimous. The boy who will be leaving us tonight is Mac. Thank you so much for your time; your journey ends here.”

Mac bowed his head, shedding a single manly tear. Brenna embraced him. The closing music began, inviting us all to mob the stage, hug our departing comrades good-bye, and dance for the cameras.

Pax grabbed me as soon as I came into range, spinning me in until he could murmur in my ear: “What do we do now?”

“We stay on them,” I replied, and spun out again, this time flinging myself at Malena in what I hoped would look like a friendly hug. The fact that we’d never shown any real affection for each other before didn’t matter: we were originally from different seasons, and could be expected to form new bonds during this one. Anders was glaring at me. I did my best to avoid him as I brought my lips to Malena’s ear.

“Follow Leanne,” I whispered.

Malena nodded, and pulled away to dance with Ivan, matching him step for step. The cameras spun around us, capturing every moment, right up until the lights flashed to signal the end of the credits. That was everyone’s cue to get offstage.

It was my cue to get ready for an ambush.

The Crier Theater was built to accommodate all sorts of productions, from the recording of Dance or Die to concerts and theater companies. Consequently, the ceilings were unusually high everywhere backstage, to allow for the movement of stage flats and complicated equipment. Moving through that space was like moving through a dream of the theater, unconfined and smelling always, faintly, of sawdust.

Being a free-runner means I spend my life assessing my surroundings in terms of “how hard would it be to climb that?” Most of all, being a free-runner means I’ve had a long time to figure out the big blind spot that almost all humans share:

Humans virtually never look up.

I was among the first off the stage, and the absolute first to hit the women’s changing room. My Jane of the Jungle costume was simple to shuck off and hang on the rack, and it was a matter of seconds to pull on my street clothes. I swapped my stage wig for my usual loose red ponytail, and filled my pockets with knives. By the time the first of my fellow dancers was coming through the door, I was pushing my way out into the hall, murmuring vague phrases about not feeling well. Some of them looked at me sympathetically, but no one tried to stop me. They all knew I hadn’t danced my best tonight.

As soon as I was alone in the hall, I grabbed the nearest curtain and shinnied up it to the rafters. Once there, I ran along the beams meant to hold our hanging lights to a position above the basement door. I crouched, holding a beam for support, and waited.

Malena arrived a few minutes later, sauntering casually until she saw she was alone. Then she skittered straight up the wall, stopping when she was roughly on the level with me. She blinked. I raised my free hand in a small wave.

“All present and accounted for?” I asked.

“The other seven girls were still getting changed when I left the room, and I don’t smell blood,” she said. “Where’s your grandmother?”

“I have no idea.” Probably in the basement, if I knew Alice. She was good at staying out of sight when she wanted to, and while we hadn’t planned for this moment in excessive detail—having too many variables meant it was better to wing it and play to our strengths than to get tripped up by a plan that wouldn’t work—she’d want to be where she could break some faces, if it came to that.

Dominic was outside, and would stay there until someone signaled him to come in. We’d need to find a better way of getting him into the theater if this continued for another week. Please, I thought, don’t let this continue for another week. Please, let us find the people who killed Poppy and Chaz, and stop them, and move on into a world where I could just dance, and not worry about anybody getting murdered. Please.

There was motion below. Malena and I both went very still, and watched as Pax walked down the hall, looking quickly from side to side. Like the humans, he didn’t look up. That made a certain amount of sense. Ukupani were aquatic in nature. Just being out of the water was disconcerting enough to keep him from looking for an ambush.

He opened the basement door and stepped inside, disappearing.

“He didn’t do it, did he?” whispered Malena.

“No,” I said, with absolute certainty. “If he had, he would never have been stupid enough to involve me.” Ukupani didn’t have a history of worshipping snake cults. I’d needed to explain the concept to him, and Hawaii was too small to have ever sustained anything the size of Titanoboa. Hawaiian terrors tended to come out of the sea. I fully expected that if anyone ever managed to summon Cthulhu or something like that, it would be anybody’s guess whether the squamous terror rose from the waters off Massachusetts or Maui.