Traditional the Grace
Keep dancing, she told herself. Keep dancing and you won't have to think about why you are here, about the way that youma came apart when she hit them, about the watchful and studied gaze of Artemis, the heavy Adidas bag she oft carried, its canvas sides bulging with Wonder Rider Books, Eyecons, and Vistamps—relics and trinkets, anything to channel the old magic in the absence of her true power, the majesty of the past slumbering as deeply as did the heart of the princess to which it was tied.
Keep dancing, no one knows how old you are here, 14, 15 in two hours, the clock crawling towards midnight, older women at the bar offering to buy you drinks, thinking you are 18 or 19, Asian girls always look young, that's what they say here.
Keep dancing, white Converse squeaking on the polished floor, the speakers throbbing with the cheap beats of royalty-free sounding dancing music, the occasional gesture from the crowd, lips mouthing the words of requests to an indifferent DJ.
Keep dancing and it won't matter that you are half the world away from everything that you have ever known, that the only real friend you have here says things that you can't understand, looking away whenever you say something bad about the police, making excuses like, 'They're not that bad.' But they are that bad, Katarina, she wanted to say each time and never did, they're not all like you. And so the distance became something that felt like a weight pulling at them both, until, at last, they were no longer like sisters, not yet like strangers.
Keep dancing, because that was why you came to Dalston, that was something she could focus on, the movement of her body in the crowd on the dancefloor, a movement that was not Alan drawing Katarina into his arms, her uniform stained with dirt, the warehouse behind them filled with acrid black smoke.
It was easier to be dead, to be forgotten; it was easier to let herself move amongst the crowd, to be another face amidst strangers, borrowed powers from holy relics and a sailor suit the echo of armour she had worn such a long, long time ago.
What was there to love in London? In Dalston, in the dirty streets were boys in bands lined the pavements outside kebab shops, where lovers pressed against each other outside the gentle orange of the Overground lights, where the market was filled with faces and friends and strangers, memories waiting to crystallise so that they might be held tight in old age, when she could no longer dance, when she could no longer fight.
Keep dancing, the machine rhythm, the squeak of her baseball boots, hair bunched up in a bun on the top of her head, a tiny drop of sweat down the nape of her neck.
It would get better, it would get easier; when the princess awoke into her true self, when all of the powers of the Moon Kingdom were revived then she would not need this, she wouldn't be alone, fighting an endless war of attrition against old things that had cast such a long shadow over the Silver Millennium.
Keep dancing, and one night soon, you will be bathed in moonlight, and every dawn, the morning star will greet you like an old friend.