“How should I know?” She takes a step back, her brow knit. “I don’t know why you have those things in the first place. Or even what they are.” She shakes her head, looking wounded. “You and Bee are all about your secrets, aren’t you?”

This hits me dead center. She’s only known us three days, and she’s already figured that out.

A giggle ricochets through the air, and up ahead, I spot them again. Those five girls, darting across the street. They’re rushing toward a towering stone building, slipping between a group of people on the sidewalk and disappearing inside.

“What is that place?” I ask, and Daisy peers over the bobbing heads of the endless crowd.

“That’s the Fillmore,” she says. “A music hall.”

I exhale a ragged sigh. Of course it is. Somewhere loud and crowded and hard to find them.

We dodge across the street, everyone following my lead. There’s a line beneath the marquee, but Daisy cuts to the front and sweet-talks the bouncer, some guy she apparently knows from a house over on Van Ness. I can’t hear what she says, but it must be the right thing, because with a grin, he waves us on, and we all slide right through the front door like a knife in butter.

“Have fun, Daisy,” he calls after her, and she tosses her head back and laughs.

Inside, it’s dark and cramped, the air unbearably moist, the ceiling cloud-high. There’s a band onstage, a group I think I’ve heard before, and a liquid light show behind them. The whole wall’s immersed in splotches of color, like we’re standing inside a giant lava lamp.

Daisy bops back and forth, trying to get Michael to dance with her, trying to get me to dance too. Even when we shrug her off, she doesn’t stop, nothing cracking that smile of hers.

She’s the only one having a good time, though. Behind us, Bee and Jane are still going at it.

“He only told us you two were imprisoning somebody,” Jane’s saying. “That you’d been holding him hostage for years.”

“Because we had no other choice.”

“I didn’t know that.”

A long moment, the crowd pulsing closer, before Bee finally asks it, the question that’s been haunting her. “Is that the only reason you came to L.A.?”

Jane doesn’t miss a beat. “You know it’s not.”

They fall back now, Bee overwhelmed at the throng, at how claustrophobic a ballroom can feel. But I keep going. The speakers crackle with static, and onstage, a singer with a fringe of dark hair over her eyes croons about pills and rabbits and a girl named Alice. With everyone pushing nearer, my hunger gnaws at me again, raw and cruel, and I glance around at the anonymous faces, their bodies swaying, all loose limbs and relentless heartbeats.