Shay snorted and headed toward the nearest door. "Anything to get out of this bogus pile of rocks."

The party was spilling outside, anyway, expanding beyond the ancient stone walls. Shay led them toward a party spire at random, through a cluster of Hairdos with beehive wigs, each with its own swarm of bumblebees, which were really micro-lifters painted yellow and black in holding patterns around their heads.

"They didn't get the buzzing sound right," Fausto said, but Tally could tell he was impressed by the costumes. The sparklers in his hair were sputtering out, and people were looking at him like, huh?

From inside the party tower, Peris called Zane, who said the Crims were all right upstairs. "Good guess, Shay."

The four of them crammed into the elevator with a surgeon, a trilobite, and two drunken hockey players struggling to stay upright on hoverskates.

"Get that nervous look off your face, Tally-wa," said Shay, squeezing her shoulder. "You'll be in, no problem. Zane likes you."

Tally managed a smile, wondering if that was really true. Zane was always asking her about ugly days, but he did that with everyone, sucking up the Crims' stories with his gold-flecked eyes. Did he really think that Tally Youngblood was anything special?

It was clear that someone did — as the elevator doors closed, Tally glimpsed gray silk slipping gracefully through the crowd.

Most of the other Crims had come as lumberjacks, dressed in plaid and grotesquely muscle-padded, holding big fake chainsaws and glasses of champagne. There were also butchers, a few smokers who'd made their own fake cigarettes, and a hangman with a long noose draped over her shoulder. Zane, who knew a lot about history, had come as some dictator's assistant who wasn't totally fashion-missing, all in tight black with a bubbly red armband. He'd done costume surge to make his lips thin and cheeks sunken, which made him look kind of like a Special.