"Well. Wasn't that fun?" Iris calls from across the studio.

I can do nothing but bark a laugh. "Yeah. Fun."

My feet went numb a while ago, so I don't feel much as I pull off my pointe shoes and the bandages wrapped around my toes. In lieu, I fish out a pair of ordinary socks from my bag to cover my blisters and calluses, cringing just a little at the sight of my feet. I try not to look at them too often.

It's just about six o'clock now, and every second of rehearsal rings clear in my muscles, that ring either pain or euphoria. Maybe both. I had forgotten until today what it felt like to dance to actual choreography that Elara didn't make up just to toy with us. The Corps plays the part of the Wilis along with the villagers in Act One, and smiling like some festive town fool . . . glowering like a betrayed maiden . . . it's the best feeling in the world.

Today, under the instruction of Rane Arven, choreographer extraordinaire, I learned the first dance of the Wilis. He's a smaller, almost unassuming man with his white hair and wrinkled skin, yet as fierce and cold as Elara when it came to drilling out step after step. One of the big gun choreographers the Academy brings in for its shows, brilliant beyond his years, trained in Paris, Elara boasted of Rane Arven before she took a seat at the room's edge and left us to his devices.

And what devices he had. Even in the Corps, where twenty-four women will dance on stage as the Wilis together, Arven still managed to conceive the most exhaustive steps. Then there were the moments of standing still, foot pointed behind me and threatening to cramp up while imaginary Principal dancers performed in the imaginary spotlight.

Arven didn't yet assign actual places, only cutting the Corps in half between left and right stage. I wonder where I'll end up in the end.

Regardless, in eight weeks all of the grand movements and minuscule footwork I sweated through today will culminate into a masterpiece. I see it already in the blinding stage lights that'll put the Academy's theatre to shame and the gloomy forest set that the Calores will commission Broadway architects to design. Top-notch seamstresses will sew gorgeous costumes that have such a tendency to turn me into a girly-girl. And of course, the Met Orchestra will play every night, the sounds of the piano and strings enough for me to think that all the sore muscles and feet are worth it.

"Will you miss the jazz classes?" Iris calls again from the other end of Elara's studio. She stayed late after class with me today, taking her time with cool down stretches.

I look up from the hand I had massaging over my calf to debatedly the only other friend I've made at the Academy: Iris. She's standing now, towering over me on her tall legs while I sit on the floor.

Iris is like me in the way that she's reserved and doesn't talk most to the other dancers. Why she bothered with me on that first day, I don't know, but ever since we've formed a quiet sort of friendship, if it can be called that. Whenever we see one another, namely at the barre and between classes, neither of us talks much about our lives. I'm grateful for it. We'll complain over Blonos's work at the barre and Elara's sweet voice, laugh over an awful combination or the occasional fall from a dancer, but nothing more.

It's the kind of friendship I need. Especially now.

"A little." I shrug as she tilts her head, narrowing her intuitive dark eyes at me. Though I don't know her well enough in the ways that count, she has this . . . perceptiveness about her. She's always watching, glancing around the halls and studios as if there's something to be found. "Jazz and hip hop . . . not exactly my thing. What about you?"

Iris shrugs right back at me. "I think I will. I love ballet to death, but I suppose it's a good thing to get outside of your comfort zone once in a while."

I only nod, having no good argument against it but nothing to agree with either.

"You'd dance ballet every second of your life if you could, wouldn't you?"

Again. That perceptiveness that even I don't have, despite my years of reading people to weigh the risks of pickpocketing them. I still laugh, though, and the sound is genuine. "I'm fairly certain I already dance ballet every second of my life." Aside from sleeping and eating and walking to the post office and going out with Maven and joining terrorist gangs, I do little besides dance these days. And I hardly mind it. "What about you? What do you do with the seconds of your life not dedicated to dance?"

It's a strange question, considering the circumstances. I've known Iris for six weeks, and yet I can't say what a single hobby of hers is. When I haven't been any more forward, I can't exactly blame her, but . . . she's the one who spoke to me that first day and the first few times after that. I was the one who had every reason to keep my head down and every detail about myself under lock and key.

Though I could never be certain, I can guess one thing about her easy enough. Iris might be quiet, but she has that same confidence I've seen in Cal. She comes from a wealthy family that has her back, so she doesn't have to worry about the mundane issues of money. But like the Calores, she doesn't parade around her family name or wealth. I don't even know her last name.

At that moment, Iris laughs to herself. She's angled towards the windows that display Times Square, but I don't think her eyes take in the shadowed streets or traffic lights.

"Doing this . . . becoming this . . . it offers little time for anything else, you're right. Though they were never dancers themselves, my parents have dreamed of me dancing here since I was number five runner up at that Swiss ballet competition everyone makes such a fuss over." Iris shakes her head as if it sounds beyond ridiculous to her. "Though I do enjoy swimming. For a while I was certain I would be an Olympian, but that was a decade ago and my parents wouldn't have it."

I nearly snort. But at least it's something that makes Iris a little more three-dimensional to me. "What's the difference between being a professional swimmer and ballerina? Were you fast at eight years old?"

She smiles broadly, though it's rimmed in sadness. "Very."

I'm halfway under my bed cover when somebody knocks on my door in three rhythmic taps.

My fingers paused in midair with a handful of sheets, I glance across my loft. A thin bar of golden light shines through the gap between the carpet and the door, yet I see no shadow of feet along with it.

Inside of my chest, my heartbeat turns thunderous in an instant.

Already? How did they get into the building? How do they know my room number?

Fireworks in Midtown. Vandalizing and robbing the offices of billion-dollar companies.

This would've been fool's play.

Throwing back my sheets, I heave myself off my bed. It's a soundless motion, so different from the creaks and groans my mattress at home would make. I still quiet my breath and settle my weight on my toes.

But I cross the room quickly, for fear that whoever's in the hallway will vanish if I take too long.

I pull back the chain on the door guard, and before I can regret it, I twist down on the handle and fling the door open.

My heart plummets in anticlimactic anger.

"What do you want?" I say to Cal, raising an annoyed eyebrow in the process.

Cal crosses his arms and raises his brows right back at me. He's propped himself up against the wall that adjoins with my room, hence the lack of a silhouette under my door. "Somebody's exhausted."

Indeed I am. I slept like shit last night, only to go through six hours of mind-numbing choreography today. Had he knocked a minute later I would've been out like a light.

"Yeah," I breathe. "Choreography kind of killed me today."

"It does that sometimes."

Cal doesn't look much better off. His hair's half-pasted to his forehead and otherwise sticking up at odd angles, and his face is drawn into a tired, impartial expression. Though his eyes are alert, bright and bronze as ever.

I run a hand through my hair, suddenly feeling self-conscious in my T-shirt and short shorts. While I might be ready for bed, Cal's changed into jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, and it makes me look entirely under dressed.

Yet I still give him a frank look as I settle against the doorframe. "Why are you still here? Rehearsals ended hours ago."

"Contemporary just ended. Julian always keeps us late."

"Ah." He knows that I have nothing else to say about that.

One edge of Cal's mouth quirks upward.

"So what do you want?"

I can't help the words as they tumble out of my mouth. Along with my still-pounding heart, the lights of the hallway are bright enough to keep me on the offensive.

Cal tilts his head back, resting it against the wall. He releases a breathy laugh, as though he himself doesn't know why he's here and finds my words amusing. "What did you think of Julian's jazz and hip hop class?" He says it casually. But he's here at my door when it's nine o'clock, and he's not Iris either.

My eyes narrow. Where the hell is this going?

"It was fine," I mutter. "Trying to recruit me for contemporary, Cal? I'll have you know it's a lost cause."

We've already had this conversation on the day he walked me upstairs with my grotesque heap of shopping bags. A genre of dance that never should've been invented, there are few things in the world worse than contemporary and its stupidly modern style, all feelings and throwing yourself to the floor and no actual technique.

"Really? You didn't enjoy getting out of pointe shoes even one of those days?" He gives me one of those looks. I don't buy it.

This couldn't wait until tomorrow? I sigh, tempted to tell him that much, turn around, and slam the door. But for everything there is about Cal that would make other girls stay rooted in place, I don't turn my back for an entirely different reason.

Searching his face, I see none of her in him. Just about erased from history, save for Will's photocopy of her driver's license, Coriane Jacos even fails to make an impression in Cal's DNA. It was one of the many things that kept me awake last night as I recalled that photo of her, an impossibly ordinary woman who won Tiberias Calore's heart. I wondered if Coriane died of her own volition or if somebody killed her. I wondered which reality Cal would hate more.

So I tell Cal what he knows and what he wants to hear. "I'm an uptight ballerina who can't loosen up to save her own life. I don't like modern dance because I'm not good at it."

I'm lucky Julian lives by a policy of letting his dancers fix their own mistakes during his combination class. Not that I had any trouble with the choreography or made mistakes often, but . . . I couldn't put the same passion into it as Cal and the full-time modern dancers did.

Julian was a magnificent teacher, though. His choreography was like nothing I had ever seen before in a jazz and hip hop class, with its ruggedness that somehow meshed into cohesive dancing. The man might be growing older, but he never failed to impress me with his own dancing, his movements sharp and full of feeling as he taught us night after night. A kind of feeling that goes beyond the stage faces of ballet. Dare I say Julian Jacos nearly convinced me to loosen up and forget the ways of pointe.

Nearly.

"Blonos and Elara are impressed with you, you should know," Cal says. He stares at the tiled ceiling above, boring in its elegant pattern.

My forehead creases. "Because of that stupid contest I had with your partner?"

"I wouldn't call it stupid." Cal's eyes stay trained on the ceiling, but his lips turn up again. "It was kind of epic, actually. You humiliated Evangeline, and not many people can say that."

Pinching my lips together, I lean into my room's threshold. It was kind of epic, but I'm not about to tell him that. "She deserved it."

In any ordinary situation, Cal would be mad that the Corps dancer beat out his partner. What happened this morning almost makes the decision to pair Evangeline with Cal look like a mistake, after what Blonos said to Evangeline. But Cal's just smiling against the wall.

But his smile fades just a little. "I'm sorry about what she said."

At some point today, Maven probably told Cal all about what Evangeline said to me. Just as he looks to me, I look away. The awful pattern on the carpet becomes fascinating to me. "It's nothing I can change. It's fine."

It's not fine. I wish I could say that I'm proud of where I came from and what I am, but I'm not. It might've been a bitch move, but nothing Evangeline said wasn't true. I'm a high school dropout from East Harlem, and my family is straddling the poverty Whistle reminded me of the exact same thing last night. It's who I am, who I'll always be.

I force myself to look back up. Cal's lips are parted as though he plans on saying something. I stop him. "Now tell me what you came here to tell me."

Cal sees the look in my eyes easily enough and makes the wise decision of swallowing his words. But he can't seem to find any new ones, and his throat bobs again. His eyes go away for a moment, like he's reliving what his brother told him.

It takes me a moment to realize, but Cal's mad. Not at me, but at Evangeline. His partner. He won't say anything, but only because I told him to forget about it. I don't like it, but he got me here. I danced on that stage all by myself, yet he was the one who shoved me all the way from East Harlem to the Calore Dance Academy theatre. And now he feels some responsibility for me. It's written all over his features.

"Out with it then," I say before I might regret it. I can't stand another second of this staring contest.

"They want to promote you and Maven next season."

I would keel over laughing if not for the dead-serious face Cal's expression melts into, that subtle anger vanishing altogether. He's really looking at me now, chin dipped so that his red-gold eyes pierce mine.

"What?" It sounds stupid the second it leaves m mouth.

"You heard me."

It's clear enough that he's referring to a promotion to Principal dancers. Not to soloists, nor to anything else. The hairs on my arms rise.

"I'm seventeen," I state calmly. Evangeline reminded everybody of that today. "Maven's not even graduated." My partner's life sounds busy enough as it is, dancing in the Corps and doing schoolwork every night—all of which is college-level, from what I've heard—not to mention I've been here for all of six weeks. No way. The Academy's hierarchy might be crazy and nonsensical, but not . . . not this. I should spend another five years in the Corps before much of anything else happens, and even then . . . another two before I become a Principal.

Even if that idea of the spotlight sounds addicting. As addicting as it was back at my studio and as addicting as it was when I auditioned. Being the only one out there, all eyes fixed on you . . . there's nothing like it. The thought has my muscles aching all over again.

"So? I'm only nineteen. It's not the most unrealistic thing in the world. But let me guess: you wake up at five-thirty and practice technique by yourself every morning for fun and not because you want more."

"You don't know what I want." I hate it when he does that, acting like he knows everything there is to know about me. The response is just another instinct, shutting him out before he can get a reaction.

He ignores my comment, fire eyes fixed on mine. "My brother's gotten better because of you. He knows how lucky he is to have you as a partner, and I see it every day in technique. So have Blonos and Elara. Today was just a tipping point."

So the mistresses of ballet have been watching me and Maven. A feat, considering how I keep to myself, never in the front of the room or the first to volunteer for a combination. I haven't spoken to Blonos since the day I met her, only nodding at her corrections, and I don't think I've had an actual conversation with Elara in the whole time I've been here. Yet they've been watching.

My heart's picked up again, but I don't allow myself to think about the implications of what Cal's telling me. "And what's your role in all of this?"

I decide very quickly that the smug smile blooming on Cal's face means nothing good. "You've never danced with a partner, right?"

"Boys don't dance ballet in East Harlem."

"Then you'll agree when I say you could use some practice, as prescribed by Bess Blonos."

It's my turn to cross my arms, and I force myself to think over what I say next. I see where this is going, when Blonos or Elara could've told me as much during class and yet Cal's here in their stead. It makes my gut sink.

"What, exactly, did Blonos prescribe?"

"Contemporary lessons with me, twice a week."

My lips part and don't come back together as my worst nightmare materializes before my eyes. Cal's smirk turns triumphant.

While it might require no skill, contemporary demands an intimacy that will never be a part of classical ballet. I'm not especially interested in getting that close to Cal, but it would no doubt prepare me for dancing with Maven as my partner.

"This was Blonos's idea."

"Ask her yourself."

"But I don't like contemporary." I say it anyway.

Cal chuckles. "It's up to you. Get comfortable dancing with a partner or stay in the Corps for a while longer and you and Maven will learn over time."

I scoff, glaring. "That's a stupid ultimatum."

"Do Wednesdays and Saturdays work for you, then? After rehearsal?"

Unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable.

I huff, frowning. "Yeah. I guess so."

"Cleaning," a woman's voice calls through my door, and I recognize it well.

Lounging at my breakfast table with a bowl of cereal the next morning, I toss my newspaper to the side. "Come in."

A moment later, Ann unlocks my door, leaving her cart outside. Her grin's as big as her face, and it cancels out the shabbiness of her uniform and the weariness written in her eyes. If what she said is true about getting her shifts in early, Ann must be hours into cleaning already.

Still, she says, "I'm impressed, Barrow. Should've skipped right to the dancing part though."

"I would've liked to skip the fall, too."

Laughing, Ann throws her head back. Though she bears no cleaning supplies, Ann comes farther into the room until she's at my side, close enough for me to spoon-feed her cereal if I was so inclined.

"I meant to see you sooner, but you're always downstairs whenever I'm up here," she explains, pulling something out of her back pocket and depositing it in the shadow of my bowl.

"It's okay," I say. But my eyes are on the parcel of scarlet paper atop the table.

"Would you like me to change the sheets? Do you need new towels or toilet paper?" Ann asks, emploring.

"No. That will be all." I say it loudly, sure that's what Ann wants of me when she herself talks at a strangely high volume.

"Excellent."

And then she's gone, the door locking with a click behind her.

My hand thinks faster than my mind. It flips over the paper for my eyes to read. Shade Barrow's handwriting reads sloppily.

Tonight, seven o'clock. 163 Mulberry Street, Apt 6.