Thin beams of white light roamed across the floor, pausing on random crowd members for a second before moving on, except they weren’t random. The people illuminated through the thin haze wore white porcelain masks with deep hollows for eyes and painted red mouths.


Zenna grasped my hand, and I squeezed back, the shivery black fabric around her gloved wrist brushing at my skin.


Again, standing in the pitch black, I had the strange sensation that I’d forgotten something, but I’d forgotten many things. Why I’d come to the ball. What my purpose was in life. The year was rushing by, one teenage milestone after another, and I wasn’t ready.


The breathlessness of the room caught me. I wasn’t in the right place. I hadn’t stood by my conviction to stay home, and now something was going to happen. Fear unspooled from the base of my spine, climbing up, up, up.


Eerie music played, soft strings building as more instruments joined in. The roving lights moved faster, more of them, flashing and strobing in bright daggers through the darkness, at odds with the music, until they converged on a point in the middle of the dance floor.


A man in sleek white tie, tails and a top hat stood in the pooled light.


He leapt as the music dropped, lifting from the floor on a platform or something I couldn’t see.


‘We are in the first age of the universe,’ he said, turning as he hovered, and murmurs rippled through the crowd. There was no platform beneath his feet. People peered to see what invisible mechanism was drawing him into the air, but it was too dark to tell.


‘From doubt to belief,’ he continued, turning, rising, turning, rising, until the top of his hat brushed the drapes on the ceiling, ‘is the journey.’ His smile was electric, enigmatic.


He fell. Halfway to the floor, he vanished.


Bass thrummed, thumping my chest, and the lights went crazy.