Serendipity (Book 1 of the Dana Halliday series)

BEAT IT. DANCE OF BEAUTY. ENDANGERED PENCILS.

The magistrate listed several options for the first contest of the challenge. Lonavat had explained that these competitions had to involve skills that both participants were known to possess. Mostly, he said, people chose common activities such as those taught in childhood.

While I imagined a spirited game of Clue or perhaps some one-on-one basketball, Vatya chose what my Earwig rendered as "the Dance of Beauty."

Adrian escorted Novi and me onto a platform at the edge of the floor. She took a chair, and I stood close to her. For the first time, I searched the crowd more thoroughly with my eyes, spotting first Kleathanna and then the Qir. The Cennett woman was a few dozen rows up, by herself except for her protection drones. Gabriel must not be in attendance, then.

Klea raised a hand in my direction, and I returned the wave. Flynt had parked himself in a chair close behind the platform—he had displaced a number of Sturv in the process, and ignored the inquisitive stares of the Bruttar nearby—and was gazing casually up toward the ceiling.

Adrian said something to him in Fenn. Flynt didn't respond other than showing him the middle finger of his left hand.  It was a particularly effective gesture with the extra digit. 

"Can we talk to the spectators?" I asked Adrian.

"I think it's okay, yeah.  As long as I'm keeping an eye on things, you know, in case Novi decides to fly the coop."

I didn't blink. "That's my job."

"Well, sure, but you're just a girl." He was still rocking his poker face.

I decided it wouldn't look good if I slugged my counterpart in the nose. I leaned against the railing separating the seats from the platform, and we watched as the participants prepared.

Vatya and Ullo faced each other, standing about twenty feet apart on the open floor. The judges were conferring amongst themselves, then, at a signal from Denalar Barra, the recorded music started again. It had a low thud of a beat and a choppy, piercing melody from what sounded like a deranged flute.

I wasn't sure what I'd been expecting from the Dance of Beauty, but it turned out to be a literal dance off. It was like the star-crossed hybrid of a 1970's line dance and an avian courtship display, and it wasn't done halfway. Oh no, there was hopping, and writhing, and posturing. The two men went back and forth, circling each other and mirroring moves, their feathers crested, their arms raised, stomping and kicking in time to the music.

It was absurd.

It was so ungodly comical I had to bite the inside of my cheek, almost hard enough to draw blood, to keep from bursting out in laughter. I heard Adrian humming the chorus to Michael Jackson's "Beat It"—he'd beaten me to a music reference, dammit—and I mentally bludgeoned myself to not look at him. We'd once given our drunken selves the giggles during the extremely serious and very long wedding of some shirttail Travers relation, shortly after our grandfather's funeral; since then, it didn't take much to break us if we were supposed to be behaving ourselves.

Something about the dance, though, made me see the echo of the sophisticated dinosaur—velociraptor maybe—somewhere in the Bruttar's ancestry. The range of motion of the arms reminded me of bony wings, the set of the hips and knees that of a running lizard as they wove their way up and down the floor. Perhaps that was what Vatya found attractive in a Cennett woman, I thought—Klea could move in the same way.

I wondered about Bruttar mammals, if they existed.

These musings quieted my inner hyena. I was able to glance at Adrian without succumbing to the wide-eyed, innocent stare he directed at me.