“I like a little magic,” said Brenna, and turned to Clint. “All right, Mr. Goldfein. Sprinkle some of your magic dust on us, and let’s get this show on the road, shall we?”

Next to me, Lyra snorted. I whapped her on the arm as a signal to be still. Out of the three judges currently seated at the podium, Clint was the least likely to go shoving foreign substances up his nose for fun. He wasn’t an angel—he worked in Hollywood for a reason—but he’d always struck me as someone who genuinely enjoyed being alive, and didn’t see any cause to complicate life with illegal pharmaceuticals. My kind of man, in other words, even if he was way too old for me and my particular code of ethics wouldn’t have allowed me to sleep with a judge even if I hadn’t been married.

“I don’t have anything fancy to say about any of this,” said Clint, grinning his wide, disarming grin. “I’m just thrilled to have everybody back with us.”

“And so am I,” said Brenna. “Let’s bring them out now, shall we?” She turned to beckon us forward.

That was our cue. In a carefully rehearsed mob, we surged forward and took our places on the stage, settling with our butts on the pieces of tape staged for our benefit. We were supposed to sit, so that we’d look like the eager, earnest students of dance we were meant to be. Some of us knelt; others settled cross-legged, or tucked their ankles like they were posing for a pinup calendar. I was in the front row between a dancer I didn’t recognize and a dancer I vaguely thought had been on the season after mine. Lyra and Anders were somewhere behind me. They’d only been back in my life for a few minutes, and I already missed their presence desperately.

“Well, well, well, look at you all,” said Adrian, beaming a toothy smile in our direction. “I can’t believe we were able to get all twenty of you back again.”

I tensed. I wasn’t the only one. The show normally opened each season with auditions, milking them for every bit of artificial tension they possibly could. If you auditioned with a best friend or a sibling, for example, you’d both make it as far as the producers could justify, before one of you would be eliminated in the most vicious way possible. This season, by bringing back the twenty of us, they were missing out on all that drama . . . unless, of course, they were planning to eliminate one or more of us right now, when we were completely off guard.

Adrian’s smile remained fixed and unmoving for a few seconds, giving us plenty of time to work ourselves into a low-grade panic. The dancers around me began to shift nervously, their chins dipping and their shoulders tensing. I forced myself to remain still, looking relaxed and content in my position. If someone was getting eliminated today, it wasn’t going to be me. Why, they couldn’t do the show without me! It was easier to look like I believed it than it would have been to actually start believing, but I hadn’t been a dancer for most of my life without learning how to control my face.

Then he relaxed, moving into his patented sympathetic look, and said, “Come on, my darlings, you can’t really believe we’d do that to America, can you?” The fact that he didn’t need to say what “that” was should have been proof enough. Wisely, no one said anything. “None of you are getting eliminated today. We brought back our twenty top dancers because we wanted to show what you could do if you didn’t have to go through the early stages of getting used to our format and learning how to work with our choreographers. We wanted to take all the stops off, and let you run. So no, there is not going to be a surprise elimination today: all twenty of you will be taking the stage in one week.”

The mass visibly relaxed. Someone murmured, “Oh, thank God,” and the dancers around them giggled, nervous and relieved.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not gonna put you to work,” said Lindy, not to be left out. She fixed us with a stern look, only slightly diluted by the fact that she was still smiling. “You thought the choreography in your seasons was hard? Now we know what you’re capable of, we’re not going to be pulling any punches. You’re going to work harder than you’ve ever worked before, and you’re going to love every second of it.”

The dancers broke into “spontaneous” applause. There was an element of honesty to what she was saying: we probably would love whatever we were told to do. We hadn’t become dancers because we wanted to avoid challenges. I’d always been happiest when I was bruised, aching, and on the verge of collapse, and the same held true for most of the people around me.

Clint just beamed. “I’m so happy you’re all back with us. I can’t—you know eliminations are almost as hard on us as they are on you. You’re the ones who have to leave, but we’re the ones who have to watch you go. You’re our best and brightest, and every time one of you walked away, you took a little bit of my heart with you. It’s so nice to have my heart back.” Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded utterly cheesy. Coming from Clint, it sounded sincere. He really did love each and every one of us, which was why he was everybody’s favorite judge. No matter how badly you screwed up, Clint would be there to say you were wonderful.