This time she plays only deep jazz, women with their mournful songs, and Maeve’s body purposefully wild, operating not in time but its opposite. Defining herself in contrast to the long-held notes and low voices: spin-out-lift, lift-go-farther, reach and pull in, contract, release, contract, release, a high jump just to show off, just to show what she can do. She tips the bowl of her pelvis up, a twinge at the old scar whenever she forgets—God, she wants to forget—swing out and back, arch, lift up. There is nothing careless now to the way she’s moving; each moment of flight, each landing meant to look visceral, meant to look lush, and she’s sticking it with a precision that makes her head spin. Turn, turn, sweep out, slide, and contract, she can hear her own breath, the sweep of her soles against the floor and the music coming even slower now, push up, roll-to-push, roll-to-push, and up now for good—extend-extend—wide into the turn, high leg, hold-it-hold-it and around—

She hits the floorboards. Lands it.

This is the aesthetic: she’s almost giddy with it, operating at the intersection of recklessness and control, taming herself and breaking free in return. This. This. The way her body moves now, post-age and -injury, is the thing; it’s the hook. Directing young, ballet-trained female dancers to mimic it will show up as both experimental and political.

Raging or joyful, depending who’s watching, Maeve thinks. Depending on the eye. She’s got a burning in her shoulders, forearms, thighs, down her back, and she walks it off in circles. Less a muscle pain than a fire under her skin. She pushes out from the wall, breathing hard—

Who said you’re done?

She’s not done yet. Not by a long shot.

It’s night by the time Maeve wants to leave the studio, or it’s dark, anyway, and she has to fight her way out; the door is blocked with new snow. She arrived before dawn, carrying a piece of pie on a plate wrapped in cellophane—pie! The plate selected with purpose from the kitchen pantry, the sugar going straight to her head—and an entire urn of black coffee she brewed herself, pinched from the empty dining hall, while everyone else slept on.

Verboten, she thinks now, swinging the empty urn in one hand as she cuts along the path in her high boots. Maeve is sure coffee urns are not meant to be taken to the forest.

The wind picks up, but she can hear it more than feel it, the sound of it building somewhere far away, down in the river valley, or along the ridge. In the woods she feels shielded. Safe.