Chapter 20: Light up the night

The shop announced me with a copper bell above the door.

Small place, shelved to the ceiling on both sides. Crisps, energy drinks, lottery scratch cards fanned out behind the counter. A refrigerator hummed somewhere at the back. The kind of shop that smells like cardboard and whatever the staff had for lunch.

The clerk looked up from his phone. Young, maybe nineteen. He put the phone face-down.

“Evening.”

“Hi.” I moved to the counter. “Do you sell SIM cards?”

“Yeah, just here.” He turned and swept a hand along a rack of prepaid cards behind him. Three networks, two price points each. I picked one at random, something called MoarTwo, which I’d never used.

“That one, please.”

He pulled it off the peg and set it on the counter, and I noticed he hadn’t looked away yet. Not rude about it, just… present. His eyes kept returning.

A month ago, that would have registered as something to manage. Now it registered as nothing in particular. After twenty-nine days in Ardorkeep, where every gaze had weight and agenda, a nineteen-year-old in a corner shop barely moved the needle. If anything it was almost restful. No hunger behind it, no calculation. Just a boy looking.

“Ten pounds,” he said.

I reached into my pocket. Or tried to. The fabric sealed around my fingers like a decorative suggestion, barely deep enough for two knuckles. I withdrew my hand, switched to the other side. Same result. The coat had its own ideas about storage.

I turned slightly and pressed my fingers together, feeling the ring respond. The note appeared in my palm and I smoothed it against the counter without drawing attention to the motion.

He gave me the change. A fiver and some coins. I pocketed those, which at least worked for small items.

“Can you help me put the SIM in?” I set the spare phone on the counter. “I can never get the tray out.”

He found the ejector pin on a small keyring by the till, pressed it into the side of the phone, and the tray slid free in one motion. Neat. He handed me the tray and I snapped the card in, slid it back until it clicked.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” He still hadn’t stopped. “You visiting, or…?”

“Just passing through.”

The phone booted while I stood there, screen lighting up through the cycle of network logos and setup screens. I waited until the signal bars appeared in the corner, three of four, then powered it off and slipped it back into the ring.

The bell rang again as I left.

Outside, the pavement held long amber reflections. Saturday evening traffic. I set off east at a pace that would reach the meeting point in twenty minutes.

I was four blocks along when a car came fast through the gutter.

The sheet of water left the road in a grey arc, and I was already moving before I’d processed the sound. Two steps back, weight shifted, the spray passing close enough that I felt the cold of it without taking a drop.

I straightened.

Checked left and right. A man across the street had his head down in his phone. A woman ahead was focused on the pram she was pushing.

Nobody had seen anything worth seeing.

I smoothed the front of the coat and kept walking.

* * *

The meeting point was a stretch of pavement near the river, close enough to the arena that the building’s blunt geometry filled the sky to the south. I got there first, which surprised me less than it probably should have. Aria moved fast when excited and slow when distracted, and London was all distraction.

I stood with my back to a railing and watched the foot traffic. Saturday evening, the waterfront busy with couples and groups making their way toward restaurants. A busker somewhere nearby. The Thames smell, low tide, diesel, old stone. Familiar in a way that sat awkwardly in a body that had never been here before.

Twenty-nine days. The number had stopped feeling dramatic and started feeling like a commute that had run long.

I heard Aria before I saw her.

She came around the corner with Isabella half a step behind, still moving like she was mid-sentence, one hand gesturing. When she spotted me her face broke open.

“Lily.” She grabbed my arm before she’d fully stopped walking. “Lily. Okay. So. There’s a place that sells only boots, and there’s a street that’s apparently all just food, and Isabella found somewhere that does scented everything, like candles but also oils and also other things—”

“You don’t have any money,” I said.

She paused. “Obviously we get money first.” A brief look like I’d suggested something obvious. “I’m just telling you where we’re going after. Isabella already has somewhere in mind for the money part.”

Isabella stepped up beside her, composed as always, not a thread out of place despite having spent the last two hours in a city that smelled like exhaust and river mud. “CrossContinental. Near the hotel district. There is a considerable amount of well-dressed mortals moving in and out. It seemed promising.”

Aria gestured at her. “See? Easy.”

I knew the name. One of those hotels that existed in every major city in roughly the same configuration. Marble lobbies, a bar that charged eighteen pounds for a gin and tonic, business travelers on expense accounts. The kind of place where everyone assumed everyone else belonged there because the alternative was awkward.

“Don’t places like that require reservations?”

“There is always a lounge,” Isabella said.

Right.

I’d been in this body for twenty-nine days. I’d fed twice. I’d stopped pretending the hunger wasn’t real or that the things that came with it weren’t, at minimum, tolerable. I’d made a kind of peace with all of it, the way you make peace with a long layover. You don’t enjoy the airport, but you stop fighting it.

Sleeping with strangers for money was still a different category. Not impossible, just unnecessary if there was another option.

“Actually,” I said, “I already have some money. Local currency. About four hundred and ninety pounds.”

Aria looked at me. “You’ve been playing with mortals on your own.”

“I’ve been handling logistics.”

“While we were doing serious reconnaissance.” She held my gaze for a moment, then waved it off. “Doesn’t matter. I saw prices on some of those shop windows. Four hundred and ninety of whatever they’re called barely qualifies.”

She was right. A single pair of shoes on one of those windows had been three hundred and forty. I hadn’t said anything because she hadn’t asked.

“But,” Aria said, in the specific tone she used when she’d had an idea, “since we’ve got some money.” She pulled out the phone Miriam had given her and started scrolling with a fluency that was faintly alarming. Two hours in London and she’d already mapped the internet. “I found this earlier.”

She turned the screen toward us.

The Golden Lance. The website had a dark background, gold lettering, a photograph of a stage with lighting designed to make everything amber and cinematic. The kind of establishment that described itself as an entertainment venue and meant something specific by it.

“We use your money to buy appropriate clothes,” Aria said, “and then we go here and dance for a bit. Mortals pay to look at us.” She paused. “They’re not allowed to touch, which is genuinely sad for them, but that’s their problem. We could always find one or two afterwards if we’re hungry.”

Isabella looked at the screen, then back at me. “Strange rules.” A beat. “But functional.”

I looked at the page. Then at the two of them.

“We don’t know how to dance,” I said.

Aria lowered the phone. “I watched the moving pictures. Videos, they’re called. It looked very simple.” She tilted her head. “Honestly the mortals should be embarrassed calling it dancing at all. But they’re mortals, so.”

I thought about the Den of Debauchery. The crowd, the heat, what passed for dancing there.

A mortal strip club was, by comparison, practically a library.

“Fine,” I said. “The Golden Lance.”

I let out a breath, slow, and looked back at the river.

The part I wanted to examine less was the part where I didn’t actually mind.

* * *

The shop had been staffed by a woman who’d seen stranger things than three customers who paid entirely in cash and needed everything in under twenty minutes. She hadn’t asked questions. I respected that.

The bag situation resolved itself the moment we stepped outside. Aria passed her folded dress to me without thinking and I tucked it into the ring. Isabella managed her own. Nobody on the pavement noticed two women materialising storage from thin air because nobody on London pavements was looking at anything except their phones.

I looked down at my feet.

Seven inches. I’d been avoiding anything above three since arriving in Lilithiel’s body, defaulting to flats or boots out of some residual principle I hadn’t examined too closely. The burgundy one-piece stopped just past my knee, the neckline sat lower than I’d have chosen, and the heels were the kind that existed as a statement rather than transport.

I took three steps.

The pavement came up to meet my feet exactly as expected. Weight shifted through the ball of my foot, heel barely relevant, spine adjusting automatically. It felt like nothing. It felt, if I was honest, like my weight was distributed correctly for the first time since I’d arrived.

I hated that.

“Finally,” Aria said.

She’d fallen into step beside me, violet dress catching the orange of the streetlights, her own heels striking the pavement with easy confidence. She was watching my feet with visible satisfaction.

“Club requirement,” I said.

“Mhm.” She smiled. “Seven inches. I’ve been trying to get you past three for two weeks.”

“And you failed. The club succeeded. Don’t take credit.”

“I’m taking partial credit.”

Isabella came up on my other side, silver fabric clean against the October air. She looked down at the shoes, then at the shop window we were passing. “The cut is acceptable. The fabric less so.” A slight pause. “It would not survive Gehenna. The heat alone.”

“It was the best available,” Aria said, practical for once. “We had what we had.”

“I’m not criticizing the decision. I’m noting the limitation.”

I let them talk. The heels clicked against the pavement and I kept walking and tried not to think too carefully about why it felt natural.

“We still need identification,” I said. “The form required right to work documentation. They’ll check.”

“Done,” Aria said. She held up Miriam’s phone. “I sent her one of the little letter things.”

“A text.”

“Yes. That. I told her the place and the time. She said she’s sending someone directly to the club.” She pocketed the phone with the satisfaction of someone who’d mastered a new technology in an afternoon. “We’re fine.”

We reached the kerb. A black cab sat idling at the junction, its orange light on.

Aria was already at the passenger door before I’d processed she’d moved.

“I’m sitting here,” she announced, to the driver and to anyone else who might have opinions about it.

The driver, a man in his late thirties with the patient expression of someone who’d transported every variety of person London produced, nodded once.

Isabella and I got in the back.

The door closed. The interior smelled like air freshener and old upholstery and something faintly chemical. Through the partition I could see Aria examining the dashboard controls with open interest, then apparently deciding the driver was more interesting.

“This is extraordinary,” she said, to him. “You just sit here and take people where they want to go, and they pay you?”

“That’s the job, yeah.”

“Remarkable.” She turned to look at the partition. Not at me, just at the partition, like she was filing the concept away. Then back to the driver. “Do you enjoy it?”

Isabella looked out her window. I looked out mine.

The city moved past in the particular way it does from the back of a cab at night, all reflected light and pedestrians and the constant low noise of a place that doesn’t fully stop. I knew this stretch. Not from maps, but from the actual memory of standing on this pavement in the rain waiting for a bus that was seven minutes delayed, which was fine, which was normal, which was a Tuesday.

Aria laughed at something the driver said.

I watched a man walk a dog past a fried chicken shop. A group of students in a tight cluster. A woman checking her phone under an awning.

None of them looked up.

* * *

The cab pulled up outside a building with a backlit sign, chrome letters throwing white light across the pavement. I got out first. Isabella followed.

Aria emerged last, laughing quietly to herself, and leaned back through the passenger window.

“Are you completely sure?” she said. “There’s really nothing I can take?”

The driver said something I couldn’t hear.

“So generous.” She straightened, still laughing, and shut the door. The cab pulled away.

“He was very insistent,” she told us. “Kept saying please, just go, please.” She shook her head with genuine warmth. “Different from Bellas. Lighter, I think. Sweeter.”

“Aria.”

“I’m just saying it wasn’t unpleasant.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Miriam. Do you know where she’s sending the contact?”

Aria thought about this. “The little letter thing didn’t say.”

“The text.”

“That one. No location.”

I looked at the entrance. A rope, a bouncer, four people in the queue ahead of us. The sign above the door read The Golden Lance in the same font as the website.

“Lily.”

Miriam was standing six feet away in a dark coat, glasses catching the light, a manila folder held against her chest like a clipboard. She’d materialized from nowhere, or from the shadow of the adjacent doorway, which amounted to the same thing.

I crossed to her. “I thought you were sending someone.”

“I was nearby.” She held out the folder.

I took it. Inside: three sets of documents, names I didn’t recognize, National Insurance numbers, right to work cards, photo IDs with our faces on them. The photos were correct. I didn’t ask how.

“Be careful,” she said.

“We will.”

She looked at Aria, then Isabella, then back to me, with the expression of someone recalculating a risk assessment in real time. Then she turned and walked back the way she’d come, or possibly into the wall, because I stopped watching.

Aria appeared at my elbow. “So?”

I divided the documents and handed them out. “Now we go in.”

The bouncer was broad, mid-forties, bored in the particular way of someone who’d been standing in one spot for three hours. He looked up as we approached, and his expression shifted slightly. Not surprise. Just recalibration.

“Evening,” he said.

“We’re here for the audition.”

* * *

The bouncer checked the documents without ceremony, glanced up once at each of us, and unclipped the rope.

Inside smelled like expensive cologne and bass frequencies. The lighting was dim and amber, warm in the way that made everyone look like they were lit for a photograph. A floor manager materialized from the crowd almost immediately, mid-thirties, earpiece, clipboard held loose at his side. He said something about the audition and gestured for us to follow without waiting for a response.

Aria fell into step like she’d been doing this for years. Isabella adjusted her coat.

I followed, cataloguing. The main floor opened to our left, a stage at the far end, a handful of men arranged around low tables with drinks they weren’t looking at. The décor was dark wood and leather and brass fittings, everything polished to a shine that suggested significant investment in appearing effortless. Oil paintings on the walls. A fireplace I could see through a half-open door.

It spoke to something. I wasn’t sure what. Something pre-linguistic that recognized the ritual of it, the performance of wealth and desire staged in a room that smelled like cedar and money.

The floor manager led us away from all of it, through a corridor, to a side office. Small, tidy. A sofa against one wall, two chairs facing a desk that nobody was sitting at yet.

“Someone will be with you shortly,” he said, and left.

Aria sat on the sofa and crossed her legs and looked around with the expression she usually reserved for Bellas bringing wine.

“I like this place.”

Isabella took one of the chairs, smoothed her coat across her knees. “I expected worse.” A pause. “The furniture is reasonable.”

I stood by the wall and said nothing. My only reference points for this category of establishment were a half-remembered joke in a film and a throwaway line in a video game. Neither felt like useful preparation.

The room had good ventilation. The lampshade was genuine brass. Someone had put a small plant on the windowsill and was keeping it alive.

The door opened.

She was forty, or presenting forty, with dark hair pulled back and reading glasses hanging from a lanyard. Suit jacket, no tie, a folder under her arm. Professional without being stiff. She smiled at the three of us and sat behind the desk and opened the folder.

“Evening. I’m Rachel.” She uncapped a pen. “Names?”

Aria leaned forward slightly. “Aria. This is Isabella, and Lily.”

Rachel wrote. “Ages?”

“Twenty-one,” Aria said. “All three.”

“Any stage experience?”

Aria considered this with the air of someone selecting from a long list. “Some training. Movement, performance. We’re comfortable with an audience.”

“Formal training?”

“Not… formally formal.” Aria smiled, and something in it landed precisely right, warm and conspiratorial rather than evasive. “More intensive practice.”

Rachel made a note. Her pen paused over Aria’s column. “Where are you coming from? All three of you here together is a bit unusual.”

“We’re friends,” Aria said. “We thought, why not together? More fun.”

“Fair enough.” Rachel shifted her attention to me. “Lily. What brings you to the Lance specifically?”

The question required an answer that sounded like motivation. I thought about what this body knew about desire and performance and the architecture of a room like this, and let some of that surface.

“The reputation,” I said. “It seemed like the kind of place worth working at rather than just working.”

Rachel looked at me for a moment. “Meaning?”

“The clientele have standards. Which means the work gets to have standards.”

She wrote something, moved to Isabella. “And you?”

“Similar reasons,” Isabella said. “Quality of the establishment matters.”

Rachel’s mouth curved slightly at the precision of it. She set her pen down and settled back.

“Right. So here’s how it works. You keep sixty percent of what you earn on the floor, forty goes to the house. Shift rotations are Thursday, Friday, Saturday, mandatory minimum two nights per week for contracted dancers. Tips are yours entirely. You don’t negotiate privately with guests, you don’t arrange anything off-premises, you clear it with floor management if a guest wants extended private time, and we handle the booking.” She paused. “Rules aren’t suggestions here. This is a members’ club. The members are particular about discretion, and we are particular about keeping them happy within certain limits. Questions so far?”

“The earning potential,” Isabella said. “On a strong night.”

“Varies. Experienced dancers on a Thursday can clear several hundred. Friday and Saturday, more. Depends on the room and how you read it.” Rachel closed the folder and looked at the three of us with the practical assessment of someone who’d made this calculation many times. “You’ve got a good look between you. Different enough to be interesting together.” She stood. “I’d like to see what you’ve got. Stage is this way.”

* * *

The stage was small by Hell’s standards. By any standard, really. Black lacquered boards, two poles, lighting rigs angled from the ceiling, a sound system built into the walls. Rachel took a seat at a low table to the left with two others, a man in his fifties and a younger woman with a clipboard. Nobody introduced them.

“Music’s already queued,” Rachel said. “One at a time. Walk out, pose, use the floor, use the pole if you know how. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

Aria was already moving toward the stage.

I didn’t even see her decide. One moment she was beside me, the next she was stepping up onto the boards like she’d been doing it her whole life, which, I reflected, she essentially had. Just not to this particular music.

The track that came through the speakers was something slow and electronic, bass-heavy. Aria stood in the centre of the stage for exactly three seconds, weight on one hip, chin down, and then she moved.

The two observers at Rachel’s table sat up straighter within the first thirty seconds.

Aria didn’t perform so much as occupy. Every shift of her weight was deliberate, every pivot placed. She treated the pole like a conversation partner, leaning against it, spinning off it, wrapping a leg around it at an angle that drew a small, involuntary sound from the man with the clipboard. She wasn’t dancing for the music. She was using the music, the way a good chef uses seasoning, to amplify something that was already there.

Rachel said nothing. The track kept going.

I watched and felt something in my chest that was purely fond. This was Aria in her element, uncontained, doing exactly what she was built to do in a room full of mortals who had absolutely no idea what they were looking at. Her tail would have been moving, I knew that without seeing it. The glamour hid it but the impulse was there, I could read it in the sway of her lower back.

Five minutes and twelve seconds, by the clock on the back wall, before Rachel’s companion cleared her throat. Aria stepped off the stage looking entirely unbothered, like she’d paused mid-sentence.

“Your turn,” Rachel said, looking at me.

I went up.

The music changed. Something with more rhythm to it, a pulse rather than a wave. I walked to the centre and stopped, and let the body take the brief inventory it always took when it arrived somewhere new, weight distribution, ceiling height, distance to the pole.

Then I stopped thinking about it.

That was the thing I hadn’t expected. In the Den, the hunger had been underneath everything, an engine running too hot, and pleasure had been inseparable from the desperate edge of need. Here, in a cool room with cedar-scented air and professional lighting, there was none of that pressure. Just the music and the floor and a body that knew, with precise certainty, exactly what to do.

I moved toward the pole and my hands found it and some part of me that was not Liam and not quite Lily either simply took over the way muscle memory takes over when you’ve done something ten thousand times. I hadn’t done this once. But the body had its own archive.

I found myself halfway up the pole before I consciously registered climbing it. Inverted, weight held entirely in my thighs and one hooked ankle, I looked out at the table upside down. The man had stopped writing. The woman beside Rachel had put her pen down. Rachel herself sat with her elbow on the table and two fingers against her lips, watching with an expression I recognized as someone recalibrating an estimate.

The music kept going. I kept going. I didn’t notice time.

When I stepped off the stage my pulse was elevated and I was, inconveniently, aware of the warmth of it, the physical satisfaction of movement executed cleanly. Aria’s shoulder pressed briefly against mine as I came to stand beside her. I thought, about an evening three days ago at Isabella’s apartment, and then I moved those thoughts to a place marked not now and left them there.

Isabella’s audition was architectural. Everything placed, nothing wasted. She used the pole like punctuation rather than a centrepiece, a thing you returned to for emphasis. The man at the table exhaled once, audibly, and didn’t seem to notice he’d done it.

Seven minutes.

Rachel stood before Isabella had fully descended from the stage.

The simulated lap dances that followed were almost administrative by comparison. Rachel assigned us a seat each, put one of her staff in the chair, gave us two minutes. Aria made the man forget his own name. Isabella made hers sit completely still, hands gripping his knees. And when I was done the man exhaled slowly and looked at the ceiling.

Rachel looked at her two colleagues. Something passed between them wordlessly.

“We had two dancers call sick tonight,” she said. “If you’re willing, we’d treat this evening as a trial, start of a contracted arrangement pending paperwork.” She closed her folder. “Interested?”

Aria looked at me. I looked at Isabella.

“Yes,” I said.

Rachel stood and gestured toward the corridor. “This way, then. Agreements are in the office.”

The office was smaller than the corridor had suggested, a desk, two chairs, a printer that had seen better years. Rachel produced three identical contracts from a drawer and set them down with a pen.

I read mine. Aria looked at hers like it was written in a foreign language, which for her it nearly was. Isabella read hers with the particular stillness of someone cataloguing every clause and finding most of them acceptable.

Self-employed. Independent contractors. House fee waived for the first shift. Standard termination clauses, liability waivers, conduct provisions. Nothing that created complications.

I signed. Isabella signed. Aria signed in a loose, generous hand that looked nothing like any of the signatures she’d produced in Hell.

Rachel collected the pages and slotted them into a folder without ceremony. “Lisa will sort you out from here. Changing room is down the hall, second left.”

We found our own way.

The corridor had the low thrum of a building working at capacity, bass from somewhere below, muffled conversation, the hiss of a ventilation system pushed to its limit. Aria fell into step beside me and bumped my shoulder with hers.

“Time to show them how it’s done.”

“Don’t overexert yourself.”

She smiled, full and unbothered. “I never overexert myself.”

The changing room hit us with warmth and noise before the door was fully open, heat from the mirrors, perfume layered over hairspray layered over something floral from a diffuser someone had plugged into the wall. Fifteen women in various states of readiness occupied every surface. Chairs, benches, the edge of a makeup counter. Conversation ran in three different threads simultaneously.

A woman in her early thirties disengaged from one of them and crossed toward us. Dark hair pulled back, eyeliner precise, the kind of ease in a room that came from having run it for long enough that it ran itself.

“New faces.” Not unfriendly. “I’m Lisa. Rachel lets me keep order back here.” She looked the three of us over, quick and professional. “She doesn’t usually start anyone same night as the audition, especially not on a Saturday. You must’ve given her something worth seeing.” A small pause. “Names?”

“Lily.” I caught myself. “Stage name, Vera.”

“Aria. Jezebel.”

Isabella inclined her head slightly. “Isabella. Isolde.”

Lisa nodded as she filed each name away. “First night, house fee’s waived. After that it’s standard.” She reached past me to straighten something on the shelf behind my head. “Keep it classy in there. The Lance isn’t a dive. Members pay for the full experience, which includes you being worth talking to, not just looking at.” She glanced across the three of us once more. “Questions?”

I had none. Neither did Isabella.

Aria raised her hand, a gesture so instinctively human it almost made me look twice. “Tips. Are they pooled or individual?”

“Individual. What you earn, you keep.”

Aria’s expression shifted approximately two degrees toward satisfaction.

Lisa left us to it, already rejoining the thread she’d stepped out of, and the other women filtered over in the easy, territorial way of people who shared a room most nights, curious but not hostile. Names, a few questions about where we’d come from, whether we knew someone called Natalie who’d apparently worked a club in Soho. Aria answered everything with the cheerful vagueness of someone who had learned that confidence compensated for almost any gap in detail. Isabella offered short, correct responses that somehow left the questioner feeling they’d received more than they had.

I answered what I answered and smiled where smiling was appropriate.

It was only when I caught my own reflection between two other faces in the mirror that I noticed I’d been smiling for several minutes longer than I decided to.

* * *

The street outside the Lance was quiet in the particular way London got at six in the morning, the city between its late-night and early-morning selves, rubbish bags stacked at kerbs, pigeons already working through them. The air smelled of rain that had come and gone while we were inside.

Aria counted her share of the night’s earnings for the third time, lips moving, then looked up with the expression of someone whose hypothesis had just been confirmed by experiment.

“I genuinely didn’t know it could be that easy.” She folded the notes and passed them to me for the ring. “And fun. Like, actually fun. It’s a shame mortal currency is useless back home.”

“A considerable shame,” Isabella agreed. She surrendered her own stack without being asked, already watching the street. “Though the evening had its own compensations regardless.”

Aria tilted her head. “The mortals really can’t help themselves, can they? It’s kind of adorable, honestly. They just… worship.”

I’d had something ready for that. Some mild counterpoint, a small act of distance. I let it go.

The fact was plain and I couldn’t argue with it: I had enjoyed myself. Not endured, not performed adequately, not extracted professional satisfaction from a task completed. Enjoyed. The music, the attention, the specific heat of a room full of people who couldn’t look away. I was a man a month ago. An engineer. Someone who found crowded parties preferable to leave early. And I had spent six hours dancing in a strip club in Mayfair and every minute of it had felt like exactly the right use of my time.

Worse than the enjoyment was the absence of anything resembling guilt about the enjoyment. I’d checked. There was nothing there.

“Rachel’s going to wonder what she did wrong,” I said.

Aria shrugged one shoulder. “She’ll survive.”

“She’ll go through every decision she made. Whether she should have offered us better money, given us a different slot on the rotation.”

“Well.” Isabella’s gaze was still on the street, patient and directional. “She will have the consolation of noticeably improved attendance for the next several weeks.”

Aria laughed, full and genuine, tipping her head back. “Silly mortals. Coming back every Saturday thinking maybe this time.” She dropped back into step beside me and knocked her shoulder against mine. “Speaking of which. Did you notice the other girls weren’t even annoyed? We took basically everything and they just… watched.”

“They asked questions.”

“Asked questions,” she repeated, like the memory was a warm thing. “They wanted to know our technique, Lily. Our technique . Bella, they asked you about your footwork .”

Isabella’s expression shifted approximately one degree. “They were observant.”

The questions had started after the second rotation and hadn’t really stopped. I had stood there while Lisa’s girls asked about posture, about transitions, about how I’d learned to read a room, and I had smiled and deflected because I genuinely did not have an answer. I didn’t know the technique. I just knew. The body knew, same as it had known the summoning geometry and the glamour work and approximately forty other things I had never studied. Aria and Isabella had fielded most of it gracefully, citing training and practice. I had nodded along.

“Speaking of mortals,” Aria said, falling into step beside me as we turned south, “did you want to grab one? Just a snack. Easy night.”

“I’ll pass. Need to decompress.”

“One doesn’t preclude the other.” Isabella’s voice, from my left. Then, after a moment: “Besides. I believe the question may be somewhat academic.”

I looked back.

Five of them, twenty metres behind us. Young, suited, the particular gait of men who had been drinking since ten the previous evening and were still making decisions based on that. They weren’t subtle. They were talking to each other, but not to each other; the conversation was for our benefit, calibrated to carry.

“My mother told me,” Isabella said, facing forward, “that in mortal realms meals frequently come to you unprompted. I thought she was exaggerating.” A pause. “I appear to owe her an apology.”

Aria’s weight shifted, just slightly, a small adjustment to her stride. The kind of shift that meant she’d already decided something and was waiting for the street to confirm it.

I looked at the men. I looked at the distance to the nearest corner. I looked at Aria, who had her hands in her pockets and was smiling at nothing in particular.

I had a very clear sense of how the next ten minutes were going to go.

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