Even Sky let herself forget, for a moment, who she was holding hands with. Life was not a fairy tale. No one was going to rescue her. She'd been a soldier long enough to know she might not survive tonight. This would be a beautiful image to hold onto, she thought, as her world fell apart. Circling the dance floor was a forest of tall green wooden cut-out trees from a previous ball. They'd interspersed them with a dozen fir trees the Christmas Tree farm donated. The donation was all thanks to some smooth talking by Rickey, who was not above playing the disabled card and even cried a little, he said, to get them. The forest was draped with pretend spider web and covered in fairy lights. White cloth stapled around the bases looked like snow drifts. Sorting through the boxes in storage from previous Balls, someone discovered several dozen black and green striped, bendable spiders about two-feet across. They hung them from the trees or entwined them in the branches.
