Dancing the Hollow

Junie dances for a living. Her family dances to keep things in. Both jobs are going badly. Rehearsals have never looked better and the harbor wards have never failed faster, and the new choreographer is the reason. Silas is too elegant, too precise, and not entirely alive. He's been hollowing the ward-lines dance by dance, keeping a promise to his mother, who buried something under the docks and asked him to let it out. Junie catches him mid-routine and they fight with the lights on. Nobody wins. So they shake hands instead: her wards, his choreography, one season, no lying. The trouble with a deal like that is how good the rehearsals get. Opening night is coming. Silas has one dance left. Junie has one counter-move, taught to her by a woman who never got to use it.