Fire laced through all of the delicate bones and muscles from toe to knee and upward.

NO! You can’t do this.

“I will do this. The dance is not complete without pointe shoes. The lines of my body are asymmetrical unless I continue the line of my feet into a full point.” I dropped down to flat. The fire went away.

I tried again.

The pain increased and rose up to my hips and into my heart and lungs.

Gasping for breath, I bent double.

The moment my heels touched the ground the pain reduced to a burning ache. Air rushed back into my lungs.

“Let’s try something else.” I marched over to the portable CD player in the corner and shoved in a disc. By the time I returned to the barre, the nanos had begun to hum along.

Hoping I’d lulled them into submission, I tried again.

They reacted more violently. I collapsed onto the floor, straining to breathe through the pain.

We cannot allow you to damage yourself beyond our ability to repair you.

“Then get busy and replicate a bunch more of you. I will do this. The dance is not complete unless I go on pointe. My career is finished if I can’t dance on pointe. Without my career, I am nothing.”

Silence.

When I could bear to stand up again, I tried one more time to rise up on pointe.

This time the nanos reduced me to puddle of pain and tears. I had to crawl back to the dressing room.

Inside the studio the music continued its lonesome routine, playing for the dance without a dancer.

Alone in the dead of night, I sat on the bed of my furnished flat and stared at the bottle of pain pills Dr. Bertrand had given me. Sixty of the big green caplets with the unpronounceable name. Heavy-duty medication, barely legal in the U.S., and certainly not in the dosage and numbers in that bottle. Enough to last me an entire month if I took the prescribed amount of one with breakfast and another when I went to bed.

Was it enough?

I arched my feet one more time.

No reaction from the nanos.

I stood up and stretched into a long arabesque.

Still no reaction.

I reached for my pointe shoes.

The nanos collapsed every muscle in my body.

Crying for all my lost hopes and dreams, crying for the end of my art and dance, crying for the end of me, I crawled back onto the bed.

The bottle of pills still stood on the nightstand. A big glass of water sat beside it.

Choking on my tears I shook six pills into my hand and reached for the water.

What are you doing? the nanos asked in alarm.

“The only thing I can do. You won’t let me dance. Without my art my life is reduced to mere existence. There is no hope, no joy, no beauty.”

You may dance; just not with those torture devices.

“That is the only way I can perform ballet. The dance is not complete without an audience.”

Then invent a new form of dance, a less destructive form that does not require turnout or pointe shoes.

“They call that modern dance. I find it ugly.”

I swallowed one pill.

It went down sideways and stuck in my throat. I gagged and drank more water until it cleared.

Damn. Now I’d have to get more water to take the rest of the pills.

One is enough.

“No, it isn’t. Not to end the pain in here.” I slammed my fist onto my heart. A new spate of tears blurred my vision as I refilled the glass of water.

You will damage yourself. We cannot allow that.

“You have damaged my identity, my very soul to the point of no return.” I tried to put another pill into my mouth and found my hand shaking so badly I dropped them all.

Cursing, I crawled around on the floor seeking them out.

You will end your existence if you take all those pills.

“And your point would be?” I found four. That should do the job. And there were others in the bottle. If my hands stopped shaking long enough to open the childproof cap.

You cannot mean to end your existence! they cried in alarm.

“I mean precisely to do that.” I managed to get a second pill into my mouth.

But, but…

I’d never known the nanos to sputter.

It didn’t matter any longer. I had to do this. I grasped the glass of water firmly.

“Without the dance, I am nothing. All the pain, and agony, cutting myself off from friends, denying myself the pleasure of a movie, or an art museum, or a loving relationship… I endured all of that because it interfered with my dancing. Now I have nothing. I am nothing.”

If you kill yourself, then we will die, too.

“So? What good are you if you won’t let me dance?” I got the glass as far as my mouth.

Then my hand clenched so tightly the glass shattered. Water sprayed all over me. The precious pill dropped to the floor once more.

Blood ran down my hand and dripped on the floor from half-a-dozen glass cuts.

“Now look what you made me do.”

We cannot allow you to terminate yourself or us.

“I’ll find a way.” I picked up one of the larger pieces of glass. Big enough and sharp enough. I aimed it over the big artery in my wrist. I remembered reading somewhere that those who were more serious about their suicide slashed lengthwise, along the artery. Cutting crosswise was only a gesture by those who cried for help.

I watched my blood pulse in my wrist and poised it to slash lengthwise.

Is destroying your body with pointe shoes more important than living?

“Dancing on pointe is an essential part of the dance… of living.” I brought the glass shard closer to my wrist, bracing myself against the pain I knew would come. The final pain I must endure.

If we let you dance on pointe will you continue to live?

“Dancing on pointe is life to me. Without the pointe shoes I cannot perform; I cannot complete the art of dance without an audience.”

A huge sigh of resignation ran through my body.

Clean up the broken glass, then sleep. We must replicate ourselves one hundred times over to accommodate your art. For the stake of beauty.

Crying in relief I obeyed and flushed the last of the pills down the toilet. The nanos had given me another chance to live.

“Donna, you’ve never looked more radiant!” Lucien, the company director, gushed as he gathered me in a hug tight enough to disrupt the layers of blue chiffon that constituted my costume.

“It’s all that time I spent in bed recuperating from surgery,” I lied by way of explanation. He’d never understand the sentient nanobots in my system that kept my body looking and performing like a twenty-year-old.

“I watched the rehearsal this afternoon. ‘Rhapsody’ was positively poignant. You’ve added new dimension to your work.” He held me at arm’s length, inspecting my new costume, complete with a crown of flowers, wisps of green leaves about the chiffon, and fluttery wings on a flexible wire. My fairy costume.

“Your knees working okay?” Lucien had known me to dance through excruciating pain without admitting it.

“Better than new. The procedure worked miracles.”

“How long will it last? This company needs you dancing. Our receipts were way down during your absence. Audiences just do not react to your understudy the same way they love you.”

He’d recommended conventional surgical techniques when the tendonitis first hit me three years ago. Those procedures were really only temporary pain relief. Joints never were the same afterward.

“My knees will outlive you.” I smiled graciously at the white-haired gentleman of a certain age. He’d been around so long no one dared ask how old he was, and yet he had more energy and stamina than a dozen dancers put together.

In fact he’d pointed me toward Dr. Bertrand and his controversial techniques when my pain became so acute I could not walk.