In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

THE LABYRINTH
The elevator door opened and just as Penny was about to step
in, her neighbor, the downtown performance sensation Ula Nova, slid
in beside her. The box inched down with the two women inside.
Nova was a professional narcissist teetering gracefully on the
edge. Tall, glacially telegenic and on the nether side of forty, she
invariably made a point of giving Penny the cold shoulder whenever
their paths crossed. This time she added a little twist to her mouth.
That obtuse shard of smile was no surprise to Penny. More than
other types, artsy people never took Penny seriously. A gangly five
footer with a buzzed red crop and celadon eyes that could pin you
down like a bug on a cork, she was hard to miss in a crowd but sent
mixed signals at close range. A year had passed since she dropped out
of MIT at sixteen after winning an obscure MacArthur type grant for
her work with E.L.F. waves and difference tones, creating musical
hallucinations in the audience, then putting on the fatal concert and
becoming the sacred monster of academia in the process. When the
men in black turned up, she could have ignored them and gone to a
shrink, but she knew this wasn't paranoia and that somebody wanted
something from her, something she wasn't about to hand over, and
couldn't have if she wanted to. After skipping Beantown with the
dough she decided on New York, the perfect hiding place for her and
her grant booty, down here in the belly of the beast. Then 9/11 hit - a
disaster for humanity, but a godsend for her. She figured they had
better things to do now than chase after errant teenage prodigies, and
Penny did look more like a schoolboy than a world famous, or
infamous, avant-garde composer. Her uniform of ragged jeans and acid
green Converse high-tops definitely lacked academic gravitas and were
the perfect camouflage for city streets.
As for academic gravitas, La Nova's multimedia spectacles had
plenty of that. Her exaggerated theater relied on backdrops of scrolling
text over grainy video montages of bleak landscapes, either ancient or
industrial. The one Penny found on the web had a Venetian theme.
Canals drained and showing their arteries and struts. A canal flowing
through a half submerged palazzo doorway. Reflected in the tarnished
rococo mirror of a dim room somewhere inside, the masked La Nova
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