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ALEXIS
Alexis Clare tightened her torso and pulled up from her belly, willing her spine to lengthen slightly so she could add speed to her spin.
The music began to swell, the beats coming faster and faster as it built to a crescendo.
She extended her leg and quickly swept it in again. The movement was rhythmic and mesmerizing, but its real job was to speed up the turn and maintain her momentum for the next one, giving her audience the impression that she was in effortless, perpetual motion.
In reality, there was a whole lot of effort involved. But onstage, it was the dancer’s job to make it look easy.
Her arms opened and tightened with perfect timing to add to her speed. Even her eyes had to remain on a precise spot at the back of the theater, her head whipping around crisply to find it again at the end of each turn, so that she wouldn’t become disoriented and lose her place on the stage.
The Black Swan included thirty-two of the dizzying fouetté turns in a row. The secret, though, was that dizziness was the least of your problems, as long as you spotted properly with your eyes.
The real danger was the difficulty of staying upen pointewhile keeping the hips perfectly level through every single whip-quick spin, all while pulling up, and employing the arms for speed and beauty, and spotting, and, of course, smiling like it was all effortless, thirty-two times.
Alexis was almost there. She could taste that last turn, hear the sweet sound of the applause already breaking in her mind.
But the ghost of a twinge in her ankle pulled her instantly out of the fantasy.
Distracted by the expectation of pain, she let one hip lift slightly as she extended her leg and immediately lost her balance, nearly crashing to the floor on her twenty-seventh turn.
So much for that applause.
“Stop simulation,” she called out.
The stage, the velvet curtains, and the auditorium beyond disappeared, leaving her back in the plain gymnasium of the Midsummer Fertility Center on Maltaffia.
Alexis had been here for a week now, waiting for her match to arrive.
It was good in many ways to have a little time to lick her wounds before she got back on the horse.
It seemed like over the last two years, her charmed life had swiftly lost a lot of its charm.
She had grown up in the city on Terra-58, a beautiful planet with every modern convenience, as well as gorgeous green spaces planned and planted generously during terraforming.
When she fell in love with ballet, her father had signed her up for training in the ancient Terran art. She quickly abandoned everything else in her life to follow the dream.
She left school and took courses online in the corridors of the Great Theater. Her only friends were dancers. She lived to push herself harder, to make wild demands of her mind and body.
Growing up in the darkened theater, she learned about the world from the stories of the old ballets, which described a life so different from the world of Terra-58 that it hardly bore comparison.
Love would be the same in any circumstance, though, or so it seemed.
Her father lost his job, but by then she had a position in the company and trained for free. She even received a salary that was just enough to share an apartment with three other dancers and pay for the healthy food she needed to keep up with the demands of her art. It wasn’t much. But it was all she needed.
Then came the ankle injury.
It happened onstage, when she was dancing a soloist’s role in a performance of Cinderella.
She wrapped the ankle and danced the rest of the performance, then went to the company doctor.
It took months for the ankle to heal enough for her to dance on. And it was so tender, she could hardly stand it.
The doc assured her it would heal just fine with time. But the kiss of death to a dance career was to beinjury prone,so she got back to the barre the day she was allowed, and worked through the pain.
Late at night, icing the swollen joint, she researched how to reduce the pain. Weight loss was highly recommended for overweight patients.
