Dance at the Edge
Emma forgot Viola Knight altogether. So fiercely did she concentrate on extrapolating the rhythm from the dance that she heard nothing but it. And peering into a scene of night, she forgot that though dim, the forest in which she stood lay in full—albeit cloudy—daylight.
Viola Knight turned and paced back toward the vertex of the Edge. And since she, too, never took her eyes off the entrancing scene, she ran smack into Emma.
Yanked out of their common dream, they stared at one another in shock. Viola’s eyes blazed; she grabbed Emma’s arm. “You’re the girl who’s always following me into the bathroom!”
Emma Persimmon’s heart beat violently hard; her breath caught in her throat. The moment seemed lifted out of a traditional romance, for Viola’s grip on her arm was steely enough to leave a substantial bruise afterwards. She realized that Viola had, indeed, noticed her existence. “Yes,” Emma said breathily. “I live across the hall from you. Emma Persimmon.”
“Emma Persimmon,” Viola Knight repeated with near-disbelief. “What kind of name is that?”
Emma’s body oozed and throbbed with sexual excitement. Their dialogue was going exactly the way it should! What more could a girl in love ask for?
A quicksilver flash of color—torchlight catching the sequins powdering the fat white towers of curls topping the dancers’ heads as they all bowed in unison—distracted Emma, reminding her of what she had momentarily forgotten. Her heart lifted in wildest exultation. “You see it, you actually see it!”
Viola Knight looked puzzled. “See what?”
Emma’s heart sank. She jerked her head at the dancers. “You aren’t going to claim you don’t see the Edge, are you? You’ve been walking alongside it and staring in on all those strange people dancing. I know you have, I saw you do it!” Emma swallowed; heat scoured her face. Since coming to town she had not been mocked even once for her sin of Edge-watching. The very thought that Viola Knight, of all people, might now be mocking her was devastating.
Viola Knight’s eyebrows shot high in her elegant broad forehead. “The Seam, you mean? You called it what—an edge?”
“Seam!” Emma said, shivering with more excitement than she could hold quietly inside her.
Viola looked at her curiously. “Oh,” she said. “Did you run a little too forcefully into the denial all the people in town profess?” She shook her head. “Really, it’s so childish. I must say I’ll be happy when I’ve finished my studies and can return to my village, where no one plays such silly, jejune games.”
Emma Persimmon was stunned. “Your village—you’re saying that all the people there see the Edge, too?”
“You mean the people in your own village act like those in town?” Viola shook her head. “But that figures, I suppose. Apparently all the guilds but mine follow the same silly line on Seams.”
Emma’s eyes shone more brightly than any of the torches lighting the world beyond the Edge. She wanted to dance for joy, or, rather, drop to her knees and kiss the toe of her adored one’s soft leather boot, the only gesture she could imagine capable of giving full expression to the power of her feelings. She touched Viola’s arm timidly (not daring, of course, even to approach her wrist). “So the people in your village and guild call them Seams? Do you know what they are, and where they come from? Or why most people don’t seem to see them at all?”
5.
Viola Knight and Emma Persimmon walked out of the forest side by side. They walked as separate individuals, without touching, but listening to Viola expound on “Seams,” Emma took pleasure simply in hearing the sound of Viola’s voice and feeling the heat of Viola’s body.
“Oh,” Viola Knight said. She frowned sidelong at Emma. “I’ve just realized. My parents warned me that a prerequisite of certification is taking an oath to preserve the guild’s secrets, which include everything we know or have theorized about Seams, even their very existence.”
Emma halted to face Viola. “Which would mean that after certification you couldn’t, for instance, let me know that you saw what I was seeing back there in the forest?” Her excitement in finding another person in the world who saw the Edge, her pleasure in finally sharing company with this most wonderful of persons, drained out of Emma. Her body went stone, dread cold. The implications of Viola’s words struck her like a blow to the solar plexus. She saw it all too clearly: that everything—the very world she lived in—was false—and wrong, terribly, terribly wrong.
Viola Knight put her hand to her throat, under the thick black scarf protecting it. “Oh shit,” she said. “What a fuck-up.” Her eyes searched Emma’s face. “I could be thrown out of the program for having this conversation with you. I’m not under an oath yet, no, but if the masters ever found out, I’d never make it to certification.” She blinked. “We have all these rules for apprentices, you know. Like not using a hand-held calculator for the first two years, to make sure that we all get to be proficient in using slide-rules. But because I hardly know anyone who isn’t an engineer, I never much thought about the Silence-About-Seams rule.”
