This wasn’t what I’d signed up for. I leaped into the air with the rest of the winter wind girls, and Pax snatched me before I could hit the floor, wrapping his spring-draped arms around me and lowering me to tangle around his ankles. The summer girls fell into the boys of fall, and the stage was an unending maze of motion. We were dancers. We risked our lives every day. Everyone I knew had a story about someone who’d never dance again thanks to a bad fall or a blown knee, and half of us had a story we wouldn’t tell unless it was late and we were drunk, about someone who’d misjudged their partner during a trust fall and ended up with a broken neck. Nothing was forever, nothing was real except for this moment on the stage, all of us spinning and falling and leaping and alive.

Why was it on me to keep us that way? Why did I have to be the one who’d been born into a family with so many ancestral debts to pay that we might never stop fighting? It wasn’t fair. Even though I’d already chosen the world I belonged to—more than once—part of me just wanted to dance, and always would. And that was the part of me I’d never be able to satisfy.

The music ended. The seasons froze, fourteen dancers holding ourselves rigid in improbable positions, backs bent, hips twisted, and limbs akimbo.

Then the show’s theme music began, and Brenna Kelly strutted onto the stage, walking through the mass of dancers. We straightened and bowed to her as she passed us. She rewarded us with smiles and blown kisses, chirping, “Hello, my darlings! Wasn’t that amazing? Hurry now, go and get yourselves ready.”

That was our cue. We scattered, running back to the dressing rooms, where the wardrobe assistants were waiting to scrape the makeup off of our faces and brush enough of the hairspray out of our hair to render it malleable. We had eight minutes—only four of which would actually be broadcast—to get into our costumes for the intro. The unlucky couple that would be dancing first tonight would also have to get into their hair and makeup before they could go back out, and so the assistants swarmed over them first, giving me time to slip into the bathroom and trade my teased-up wig for one that had already been styled in victory rolls and delicate waves.

(None of my fellow dancers seemed to realize I wore a wig, except for Lyra, who’d caught me, and Pax and Malena, who’d been told. I was reasonably sure everyone from the wardrobe department knew, and just didn’t care. It made me easier to style than the other dancers, since they had one less dancer yelping every time they hit a snarl, and so they were happy to keep my secret, if only out of enlightened self-interest.)

I got out of the bathroom and plopped down in a seat, where a makeup assistant appeared and used a cloth soaked in a chemical-smelling fluid to remove the rhinestones and makeup from my face. It burned, and I wondered if I was also losing half of my epidermis. Oh, well. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art. They were finished in record time. I yanked my simple black practice dress on and strapped my shoes to my feet just as the bell rang again and the whole group of dancers stampeded for the door. The show was going on.

Since we were still in the couples phase of the show, introductions consisted of one male dancer and one female dancer running onstage and performing roughly eight seconds of steps between them. Anders and I were the first to be introduced this week, courtesy of his name’s place in the alphabet. He tapped. I grabbed his hand and used it to steady myself as I performed an impressive-looking flip that would have gotten me disqualified from any formal competition. Then we fell back, swaying rhythmically as we watched the other dancers go through their paces.

None of them looked calmer or more anxious than I expected. If any of my fellow competitors had been involved in the deaths of Poppy and Chaz, they were good at not showing it. I switched my attention to the judges as much as I could without losing my place in the rhythm. Adrian had his usual expression of faint disapproval. Lindy was smiling—although with as much Botox as she’d had, I wasn’t sure she could do anything else. The third spot at the judges’ table was occupied by a grinning Clint, clapping his hands in time to the intro music. He saw me looking and winked. I winked back, still grooving, and felt better about the show, if nothing else.

Clint genuinely liked the dancers on Dance or Die. Adrian viewed us as a path to better ratings, and Lindy seemed to hate everyone equally, but Clint was second only to Brenna in showing affection and fondness for the dancers. If he was here, the judging would be even-handed and constructive, even if everything else went horribly wrong.

“It’s your fourteen remaining dancers, America!” crowed Brenna, and we walked forward, the boys strutting, the girls sashaying, to strike our pose at the middle of the stage. The crowd cheered like so many supersized Aeslin mice. The lights beat down, hot as a summer sun, and I was home.