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maybe this isn’t just a ‘fetch me a coffee while you’re in the café’ kind of request.” A note of steeliness had crept into his voice.
    Alice stared. “Are you’re trying to tell me this is something that, as my boss, you’re commanding me to do?”
    An unfamiliar awkwardness filled the room. The two of them warily regarded each other but then, as if on cue, they both shrugged and laughed.
    “Of course it’s not a command,” Gil said. “It’s a favor. What, you think I’d fire you if you said no?”
    “Well, I just didn’t know, that’s all.” She kept her tone light, friendly, the way you were supposed to address a strange, snarling dog. “So. It means that much to you?”
    “It does.”
    A knot of tension worked its way up between her shoulder blades. She looked at his hopeful face and sighed. “Fine. I’ll do it. Ten minutes, though, and that’s it.”
    “That would be great. I really appreciate it.”
    “You’d better,” she grumbled.
     
    Lana was the girl’s name. She was good. Alice saw that immediately, watching through the studio’s large picture window as the company members worked their way through an adagio. She had perfect turnout, a lovely upper-body port de bras, good pirouette preparation with her passé leg shooting up high and clean, right to the knee as she began turning. A double—no, wait, a triple—which she ended cleanly without hopping out of it. There was a naturalness to her, an innate musicality and attention to detail, the way she finished each movement down to the tips of her toes, her fingers, the proper angle of her head.
    Anders Gunst, artistic director, was teaching that day, and she assessed him as well. In the thirteen years since he’d hired her, the year of his arrival, he’d changed very little. Medium height, still the toned physique of an Olympic-level athlete, dressed casually in dark jeans and a pullover shirt, but nothing casual about his energy, his authority. He’d been a force of nature since the day he walked through the WCBT’s doors, and had remained so. He was now having Lana demonstrate the pirouette combination, poor girl. Likely it was intended to shake up the others, push them from their comfort zones, make them reconsider long-held notions of épaulement and placement, because there was indeed something in the way the new girl moved. Fresh, unaffected, but hungry as well. Usually it was what you saw in the Vaganova-trained dancers, those elite, envied little Russian girls absorbed into the craft at age ten and given a merciless training. The loneliness and discipline and absolute lack of coddling combined with sublime natural talent produced a perfect artistry with a razor edge.
    Apparently this Lana girl had trained and danced professionally in Kansas City alone. What on earth had she been doing there, hidden away for so long? She should have been shopped out to the coasts years earlier, in her training years. The WCBT would have snapped her up at any time. Alice knew what Anders loved: strong technique and artistry, complexity and a commanding presence, but purity as well, which this Lana had.
    Following petit allegro jumps in the center, the group took a thirty-two-count combination across the floor. Alice recognized some of the senior members and noted that both Katrina and Delores from her own days were there. They, like Alice, were in their mid-thirties, and they looked it, all sinew and bones and haggard morning faces. Ballet did not wear well on the female body, particularly for lifelong corps members like Delores, whose body took on double the workload of the principals with a fraction of the glory. The younger girls appeared dewy and fresh in comparison, and none more so than the new girl.
    Lana was in the penultimate trio of dancers to go across the floor. She took off with a sauté arabesque and proceeded to dance without reserve, as if her career depended on this very combination, this moment. It was mesmerizing to watch