We made our way through a corridor littered with rubble, debris and derelict machine parts. I stopped for a moment and bent down to take a closer look – one of the objects at my feet looked like a piece from a battle suit. I wondered how it had gotten here.

"So do you come here often?" I asked Blaze.

"You mean, other than for parties? No," he said as he waited up for me.

Only after he had answered, it occurred to me that my question had sounded awfully like bad small talk. He didn't seem to mind though, and only cast me a slight smile as I caught up with him.

"There's no regular power supply here. We have to draw power from the nearest node whenever we want to do something, and it's a bit risky. If we do it too much, somebody might notice."

"This place is really off the grid, huh? No network, no power..."

"Like a secret hideout," he agreed.

He led me through another door into a room, about ten by ten meters, with blank walls and no windows. After the messy corridor we had walked through, it seemed almost glaringly empty. The only feature inside was an old terminal embedded in the wall near the door, and a box on the floor nearby that contained a few pairs of VR goggles. Not the ones we used in the rigs, but a hodgepodge of older models most of which looked more like the interface glasses the library had.

I watched with curiosity as Blaze plugged the memory module into the terminal and booted the old thing up. The OS looked positively ancient, but he seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Once he had finished, he grabbed two pairs of glasses and came over to me. Wordlessly, he looked at me for a moment, and then tenderly put the glasses on me. Then he took my shoulders and gently turned me around so I faced the center of the room again, just as the simulation flared to life.

My jaw almost dropped as all around us, it seemed like a dark curtain was lifted and the room transformed from an empty concrete cell into a vibrant, warmly lit salon, filled with people in fancy gowns, mingling, dancing and celebrating. A lavish buffet was set up at one end of the room, and I could almost imagine a mixture of appetizing scents fill the air. In the corner, I spotted a string quartet, which played an inaudible tune.

I took a step forward, regarding the scene around me with wonder. It was rendered down to impeccable detail, from the sparkling crystal chandeliers above us, along the walls, which were draped with golden tapestry and oak wood paneling, down to the intricately patterned parquet floor that had appeared underneath my feet.

Decades ago, people had developed dozens of such entertainment simulations – displaying or at least inspired by Old World events and locations. For a while, they had been very popular at parties, but just like so many other trends, they had fallen out of favor eventually, and been replaced with better sims that required fancier hardware. I had a couple of those old Old World VR sims myself, mostly concerts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. They were hard to find on the network, and even harder to actually get to run on today's VR systems. Perhaps whatever this room was equipped with was better suited to run them because this place was just as old.

Even after I had overcome the speechlessness of my initial surprise, I didn't quite know what to say. I was deeply impressed.

"This is..."

"A party on the legendary RMS Titanic, the night before she sank," Blaze explained. "...or at least that's what it was marketed as."

"No way!"

The scene certainly fit the style of that era and was definitely stunningly beautiful in its level of detail. The virtual partygoers wore opulent but elegant clothes, with the ladies clad in floor-length gowns and sparkling jewelry, and the men in black tuxedos. And when I looked down at myself, I realized that the program had dressed even me in a dress as well. Its fabric fell in soft folds down from my hips, lustrously shimmering between warm white and dark amber. It looked real enough to touch, but I knew that my hand would pass right through it if I tried to. Instead, I took a step forward to spin around, causing the dress to twirl around me in a flowing motion, and I couldn't stop myself from laughing with delight.

When I came to a halt again, I found myself facing Blaze, who had stepped forward to close the distance between us. I looked up at his face – part real, part virtual, I saw a superimposed image derived from his real features, scanned by the hardware that must have been hidden somewhere in this room, and rendered back to be displayed on the screen of my VR glasses. The program had given him a black tuxedo that would have blended him into the crowd perfectly, if it wasn't for his wild, crimson red hair, that didn't exactly match the fashion of that time. But his wide grin was definitely real.

"Did I promise too much?" he asked.

"Not at all! It's amazing!"

"And that's not even the best part. It has matching audio," he announced, and in the same instant, the room was suddenly filled with the sounds of music, chatter and laughter.

For my own VR sims, I had always used headphones to properly convey the binaureal sound of these environments, but in here, the system was taking care of that somehow. The music of the quartet was clearly coming from over where they played, and when a chatting pair of dancers passed me, I could hear fragments of their conversation, until they danced away again.

"Care for a dance, madame?" Blaze asked me, with his hand outstretched.

I looked at him in confusion. "To this music? But that's... a three quarter rhythm? A waltz?"

He just grinned and grabbed my hand, pulled me closer and put his other hand on my back.

"Don't tell me you're into all this Old World stuff but never learned how to dance?"

Without waiting for my response he began to move through the room at a staggering pace. At first, it was difficult to follow his movements, but as soon as I committed myself to his lead, it became easier. He wasn't just pulling me along - he somehow understood it to make me feel the steps and turns he was about to take next, so instead of stumbling around clumsily alongside him, it felt like I was actually dancing with him. It was an elating feeling.

While I had seen him perform in the sims, the grace and fluidity of his motions surprised me nonetheless. I sometimes thought that our training battles were reminiscent of dancing – just like a dance, movement in a sim rig had to follow certain rules, or you would get yourself all tangled up in your cables. But the skill Blaze displayed was far more than a coincidental result of rigorous Keres training.

"How come you know how to dance like that?" I asked him, while we continued to spin through the empty room, and the virtual couples made way for us as the simulation adapted itself to our movements.

"Do you want the corny answer, or the brutally honest one?" he asked.

"Huh, now I want to hear both," I admitted with a grin.

"Well, the corny answer is, I wanted to do something to impress you," he said, grinning back and involving me in another complex dance figure that comprised lots of tiny steps and quick turns.

"Impress me? Well done," I commented breathlessly. I was starting to feel slightly dizzy from all the turns.

"So what's the honest answer?"

He stopped so abruptly that I almost continued to spin out of his reach automatically, but he held me back and pulled me close again. As if on an invisible command, the music and noise around us became muffled, while my heart continued to beat loud and fast, and I couldn't quite believe that the only reason was the dance. My left hand, clothed by the simulation in a delicate lace glove and adorned with a ridiculously big diamond ring, had come to rest on his chest, and in the real world, I could feel his equally rapid heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt. All the senses in my body seemed to tingle with excitement, but not in the adrenaline-inducing way that I felt before sim missions and training. This was very different, and very pleasant.

"The honest answer..." he started somewhat hesitantly, "is actually quite petty. For once in my life I just wanted to find something that I could be better at than you."

"You... what?"

I burst into laughter. It was incredibly silly, but also somehow incredibly cute.

"That's no joke, Sky," he said, his face stoic, "I doubted I could find anything in the world that you weren't absolutely amazing at. Turns out, you're even great at dancing!"

"Your toes probably have a different opinion on that matter," I put forward drily.

"Still, you're a quick learner," he said. "Almost frighteningly quick..."

His voice dropped to a low whisper, and he slowly moved his hand from my shoulder blade to my hips to pull me closer against him. My top had ridden up to my waist once again, and so I felt his touch on my bare skin, and despite his hands feeling warm, I felt a pleasant shiver ascend along my spine. It spread throughout my chest as a tingling sensation that left my heart quivering erratically in its wake.

From up close, I noticed tiny flaws in the simulation as I looked up at him – flickering voxels and rendering errors that danced across his face like fleeting shadows. I pushed up my glasses to see his real face. He followed suit and took his off as well. The room around us was plunged into dimness and tinted concrete grey again, but I barely noticed. I was captivated by the warmth of his golden gaze that remained fixed on me.

Where I had felt like a mouse before a cat before, I now found that he was looking at me as if I was the most interesting thing in the world. He searched my face for something, with an ever so slightly mystified expression. He looked at me as if he was trying to take in all of me at once, in a fear that just the smallest detail might elude him.

"You're just a good lead. I'd say you can count this as your win," I acknowledged in a quiet voice.

"So now that I won," he said softly, "do I get some kind of prize?"

"What do you have in mind?"

A look of amusement crossed his features, and he lowered his gaze down to my lips for a moment.

"Oh, I think you know exactly what I have in mind," he replied, and leaned in to kiss me.

_____
A.N.
Check out the chapter soundtrack for the waltz that Blaze has picked to impress Sky :)
I know, I know, it's for string orchestra and not a quartet... but it's beautiful and it has inspired that scene. I have also learned that the Titanic had no ballrooms/dancing venues, as I found out after some research. Seems like even 2Xth century VR sims are subject to false advertisement....