Read Online Illuminate by Aimee Agresti - Free Book Online

clipboard in hand, along with another perfect male Outfit specimen by her side. Before today, I hadn’t known that people like this existed outside of movie screens and magazine pages. It took so much less to be special at school. I now felt that if I were forced back into a room with the classmates who had seemed so perfect, I would no longer be nearly as intimidated. These people here were absolutely otherworldly.
    “Hi there. Dante, and my fellow interns,” he started to introduce us. The woman’s smoky, black-smudged eyes showed no trace of understanding. But she and the man—as chiseled as Lucian, but a hollow brunette version—just nodded at us, looking not quite at us but rather through us. Dante was unconcerned; his eyes bulged at something else: “Wow, man, nice kicks!” He pointed to the man’s shoes, a shiny black patent leather–looking sneaker, which looked completely unremarkable to me. “Those are totally the limited edition Palindromes, right? Only fifty in existence?!” He crouched down to get a closer look. “Whoa.” The man nodded again, but said nothing. Dante pointed toward the door. “So it’s cool if we check the place out?” The woman didn’t say a word but the man grabbed hold of a steering-wheel-size dial at the center of the black-painted steel door and pulled it open for us. “Thanks, man,” Dante said. We all exchanged jubilant looks, quietly shocked that this was so easy. We were in! I smiled shyly at the man as I passed.
    Absorbed into a narrow tube-like corridor of more black-painted steel, we walked slowly toward the riot of flashing lights ahead. Bodies gyrated in the distance. Music wrapped itself around us, flowing into our pores.
    “Wow, so many people out on a school night,” I said, but my voice came out wispy soft. My companions, whether they heard me or not, were both too captivated to form a response anyway. As we neared the arched end of the walkway, the curved mouth that would lead us out into the club itself, a black light spun, sending its beam speeding around the whole hallway, lighting up scribbles on the walls. Finally, it landed on a patch of the wall to our right. In a luscious script that looked like cake icing, this four-foot-long swatch had been painted with the word Lust, which glowed iridescent and alive.
    “Nice,” Dante said, pointing at it.
    Aurelia had explained on our tour that the seven deadly sins were on a shuffle here, and each night a different one would be celebrated. She said it was about branding—a gimmick people would go for, an excuse to serve expensive, signature drinks.
    “That’s definitely the best of the seven,” I said. What did I know, really? But lust is surely more fun to think about than sloth or gluttony. I bet it was lust night often here. Lust was probably good for business.
    The light went out as fast as it had flared up and within a few steps we emptied out into the expanse of the club. It was like landing on another planet. For a moment, we were rooted in place, taking it all in as the action swam and spun around us in all directions. The place was easily the same sprawling size of the ballroom but without any of the stuffy formality. Down here, it looked like a cavern and gave the impression of something wildly, alluringly primitive, carved out by nature, yet all with the surface of shiny black licorice. Everything, floor to ceiling, was bathed in this oozing black, but given an infusion of shimmer by the undulating lights in a palette of reds and oranges that danced off everyone’s skin and reflected a distinctly devilish, sinister glow. The walls bulged out, lumpy as though riddled with rock formations. A smoky dance area, packed tight with bodies, was cordoned off toward the back. Behind it, a flame roared, running floor to ceiling like a waterfall. From here it looked to be a screen projecting this giant fire, but who could tell?
    Horseshoed around the dance floor were layers of seating and places for