There is no virtue in Paradise Alley. It’s exactly why Jas likes it. She has sheltered here while meteors plummet and sought refuge here while the fae collect teeth. She has celebrated the Night of Spores here, and sweat out blood fever here. And she has lied here, to herself and everyone else.

     It’s inevitable. A Paradise night starts with pretence. This is really fun. Then laughter. Mocking the heavenheaded girls who wander in to find Hell is empty and the devils are here. Then thirst. Buying hellebores shots of poison. Kissing them. Every intimacy projected a thousandfold from the mirrorball. More lies. I don’t usually do this. A crescendo in confetti and bile.

     The beat is slow and heavy. It ripples across the room visibly, like a stone through the glassy surface of a lake.

     Moonbeams bruise her face: stains of pale green, nightbloom, and lilac. Dashed with glitter, Jas steps towards the throng, already snaking her arms to the music. The mirrored discs on her dress skirt catch light from around the room. She’s colourless and every colour.

     A boy eyes her up and down—neither predatory nor kind. The shape of his head is exaggerated with gel. His hair swerves harshly around two short, twisted horns, and there is a glaring highlight in his dark fringe; under the strobe, Jas can’t tell what colour it is. Jas makes out a smattering of pale shapes on his forehead. A clan brand.

     Her fathers warned her against clan people, and she’s never forsaken their warning.

     She shakes her head at him, her hips still swaying, “Not interested.”

     “No one is,” he calls back, flashing a sly smile before disappearing into the pulsing dark.

     When Jas leans against the bar counter, signalling for another drink, a girl with blackhole eyes and gold hoops in her locs leans into her. Jas’s gaze flickers away in a last-minute flare of self-preservation.

     In the corner of her eye, the girl smiles. Fanged, “What time do you think it is?”

     No. Her heart stutters. Not time.

     She hesitates before reaching for the phone in her clutch, but the girl snatches Jas’s wrist before she can get there. “Don’t look. Guess.”

     There are no windows. There are no clocks. There is no such thing as last call. Without the moon’s wax and wane, without the tick of the great bell tower, there is no conceivable answer. Another thing Jas loves about Paradise Alley.

     Jas’s answer is prickly, “Do you have somewhere to be?” A typical brusqueness for her, someone who has never been nice enough for the heavenheads. Anyone who finds her charming only wants to swallow her. She glares at the girl’s chin and watches as her sharp canines disappear behind her lipstick.

     “No, I’m right where I’m supposed to be.”

     Jas shoots back her drink, and the poison burns. Coils in her stomach like a sun-warmed snake. Can someone really waste their time in a timeless place? Unsmiling, she steps closer. The girl’s skin smells like smoke.

     “Dance with me,” Jas commands.

     When they’re sweat-damp from dancing and have fairy dust in hard-to-reach places, the girl invites her home. Jas doesn’t go. She doesn’t hook up with blackhole girls. Too risky. Besides, if she goes to bed with someone, she will be closer to waking up, closer to tomorrow. To—

     “Goodnight, then,” the blackhole girl says.

     “Must be,” Jas answers, already turning away.

     She jolts awake, shocked by the sudden onslaught of dreaming, dizzy at its abrupt end. In the bathroom, the lights are still and bright white. Elbows against marble, the counter supports her entire weight. She must have blacked out for a split second. The automatic sink in front of her is still running.

     What time is it?

     Vision swimming, her reflection shows snow on her cheek. Her silver eye makeup has blurred into her temple. Her lips are naked. She stripped them bare in someone’s mouth. Her hair is a wild animal, feral curls spangled with shimmering dust and pastel shrapnel. Her dress’s mirrors mirror the mirror and trap her in endless tunnels.

     Sick from trying to focus, she stumbles back into the nonsense.

     Her hips sway back and forth, and it’s the clan boy from earlier, watching her again. His gaze sweeps her lazily.

     “Still not interested,” she slurs, brushes past.

     At the bar, she drinks her poison, a single shot down the gullet. Behind her, a voice: “What time do you think it is?”

Jas is too drunk for quirkiness, neediness, verbal foreplay, or irony.

     “I thought you went home,” Jas crosses her arms as she turns. Her dress cuts into her warm, sticky skin. Again—drunk, not yet stupid—she doesn’t meet the blackhole girl’s gaze, but she can make out the downturned corners of her frown.

     “I’m not whoever you think I am,” the girl answers. One corner of her mouth lifts into a fanged smirk. “But I could be.”

     It plants a seed of wrongness under her skin.

     Another thing Jas doesn’t have interest in: faux-cutesy mind games.

     “No thanks,” she knocks the blackhole girl dismissively with her shoulder as she passes.

     She dissolves into the organic muss of the dancefloor. Hands flit over her body, brief and sleek as eels. Someone tugs her into their hips and she answers by leaning into their bones. She thinks about turning around. Decides against it, embraces the seduction of not knowing. Jas winds her arms backwards, sussing out the shape of her companion by touch alone. Curvy. Sturdy. Against her palms a skintight dress that feels like the slippery shell of an olive. In answer, a touch climbs the rungs of her ribs, cupping her breasts. She casts a passive glance down.

     Soft, ivory wrists attached to stubby fingers, haired with short quills.

     She bites her lip. She wants to touch them badly. She loves nothing more than something that can hurt her.

     I should wear white.

     The world fades around her ‘til she sees nothing but the blur of sharp points through her lashes.

     “Shit!” She teeters back from the bathroom counter, the fluorescent lights overhead blinding. Her ankle caves in from the surprise, and she cries out again. The automatic sink in front of her is still running. She attempts to wipe the coke off her cheek. It lingers, a streak against her blush. Blacked out twice in a night.

     Time to go. The thought is a distant echo, a suggestion whispered from the other end of a long tunnel.

     No, she can’t.

     Jas wonders what happened to the person with the quills. No sight of them here.

     When she steps back into the chaos, the clan boy is there. She can see, in the limbo between the bathroom bright and disco lights, that the streak in his hair is absinthe green.

     She scowls, “Are you following me or something?”

     “No. I just wanted to check in.”

     “Get lost,” acid tosses in her belly as she charges into the fray.

     Spurred by anger, when she dances, she dances ferociously. She hopes he sees her, and she hopes he thinks she doesn’t care that he’s watching. At the bar, she orders two arsenics, and the second goes down as foul as the first. Her stomach turns, and she suppresses a burp, afraid she might puke if anything comes up.

     “What time do you think it is?”

     She whips around. Her eyes catch the blackhole girl’s, and she drifts powerlessly into the spin. The room grows quiet. Pressure builds between her ears. Summoning the last of her drunken will, Jas wretches her gaze free.

     Shaking her head, she scoffs, “Leave me alone.”

     “Wow, fuck you too?”

     Stumbling a little as she huffs away, she ping-pongs off-kilter from person to person on the dancefloor. Just when the dizziness is about to overwhelm her, she’s caught in the snow-white arms of a dancer with red eyes, their scalp hairless but quilled.

     “Hi again,” Jas says breathlessly. She has a feeling she knows what comes next.

     “Do I know you?” they ask, their smile forgiving.

     Summer in her bones. Wrongness in full bloom.

     “SHIT!” Her hands miss the counter that’s saved her before. Jas flails for balance, catching herself before she knocks all her teeth out. She grips the edge for salvation.

White powder on her cheek, silver eyeshadow, bare lips.

Not again.

     Have to go. It’s too much now. She staggers through the club, past the clan boy, the blackhole girl and porcupine dancer, and the queue. Away to the star-ravaged night. The alley is grubby with cigarette butts and empty hamburger wrappers. The rancid, cool air shocks her system. She gasps it in.

     Relief until she remembers what awaits her: a black dress hanging on her bedroom door.

     Jas steadies herself on the brick wall beside her, grime wedging into her heartline.

     His voice: I don’t want a funeral. None of those black outfits.

     How had she agreed to this?

     She slumps. Her dress mirrors deep shadows and grease.

     I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

     She wakes crashing to the floor, crying out as her tailbone cracks on tile. Wincing, she pulls herself up, and there she is under bright lights. Silver-stained and coke-smeared. Her pulse furious. Her pupils massive.

     Can’t show up like this—

     The clan boy outside the bathroom smirks while Jas sulks. “I thought you left.”

     Frustration prickles behind her eyes. She doesn’t want him to hear defeat in her voice, but it trickles in anyway. “I tried.”

     “Funny. I thought you’d be happier.”

     Her gut twists, “Why would I be?” The pale brands on his skin are clearer now: the loopings of infinity, the triangle of a pendulum. The doomsday clock. Her dads—dad—would kill her. Jas’s voice rises against the thunderous beat, “What did you do to me?”

     He answers almost tenderly, “Do you remember why you came out tonight?”

     She feels it then. A sifting, as if her memories are granular and drizzling through the waist of an hourglass. Slow. Fragmented.

     Morning breaking. Her hand reaching for the nightstand. Picking up her phone thinking, Gary never calls me.

     His greeting: It’s over, my dear.

     Knowing it would be eventually. Knowing he was sick for a long time. Knowing that a blackhound was nipping at his heels. Knowing angels were visiting his bedside to take his wishes down. Knowing he’d been coached on last words.

     Jas shakes the memory, “Get out,” venom rises in her throat and burns. Her voice gains the growly edge of her people and other beasts, “If they found out you’re weaselling in heads—”

     He shows her his palms, barricading himself behind raised hands, “Whoa, whoa. Nothing like that.”

     Jas remembers hanging up and not crying. Because she’d cried herself dry at the airport, watching a raunchy comedy movie, making a sandwich. Waiting.

     “You’ve trapped me.”

     The clan boy barks out an incredulous laugh, “No I fucking didn’t.”

     “I know you did. I…” I have somewhere to be.

     “Babygirl, I didn’t trap you. You trapped you.”

     Panic flushes Jas pink; the strobe lights wash it away. “I can’t do that. That’s your—” the words are thick with derision, “—Clan shit.”

     She catches a flash of eyeshine above his sneer. “Time’s taking cues from you. I can’t help that you’ve set it off.”

     Her gaoler is mocking her. Her throat thickens with begging, “Don’t you have other things to do?”

     “Oh, I’m not stuck here. I’m timeless. It’s complicated,” he shrugs, “This is all you.”

     Not believing him, Jas summons her firmest conviction, “Stop messing with my head.” Even though it tempts her to stay here beneath the swaying lights and hard beats. To never put on that dress and to never read her eulogy and it’s horrible, isn’t it, to bury your hero? “You’re keeping me from saying goodbye. It’s torture.” Tears catch in her lashes. “Please. I need to go.”

     “You don’t want to.”

     “I do.”

     Her own lie can’t fool her.

     She jolts awake.