The lights finally came down on the club, and as they did, a spotlight, positioned stage center, took shape, a blindingly white oval. Every single person in the place gazed into the brightness, our breaths all held together, in anticipation of what was coming next.
Then came a sound, a thin, heartbreakingly fragile warble. It seemed to be coming from inside that small pool of light. As the warble grew in volume and intensity—never losing any of its beautiful fragility—the disc of the spotlight began to bend and twist, as if willing itself to break.
Where was Devektra? It sounded like she was somewhere inside that orb of light.
The light kept rising off the stage floor, and the voice contained inside it rose in pitch. It stopped, hovering in the exact center of the club, only yards away from where I stood at the edge of the mezzanine. It was so bright it hurt to look at, but I couldn’t pull away.
The volume and pitch rose and rose. Some members of the crowd plugged their ears from Devektra’s sonic drill. But still no one dared to look away from the ball of light.
Then it exploded.
Suddenly light was everywhere. There wasn’t a single shadow left anywhere in the usually shadowy club. People spun around, dazed, staring at their fellow concertgoers with new eyes. Every pore on every face was exposed, illuminated. The sound of Devektra’s voice had shattered too, into tiny cascading tinkles, equal in volume at any point with the club’s space.
“There she is,” said a voice in the crowd.
Devektra stood above the crowd. Her crowd. Not on the stage but on top of the bar near the entrance. The tinkling sounds evaporated from the air like smoke.
She had been throwing her voice—and shaping it into that orb of light—the entire time. All the while, no one had noticed she’d been somewhere else.
It was amazing. And she was only getting started.
Devektra stepped forward off the bar and walked through the crowd towards the stage. Under normal circumstances, people would have been clamoring and elbowing each other, rushing forward to get closer to the performer. But they stepped back to let her through, still in awe of what they’d just seen.
She began to sing. No microphone, no amplification, no Legacy-assisted manipulation. She just sang. No one in the audience made a sound. Her voice came through as clear as a bell.
This wasn’t one of her usual dance numbers. It was a simple song, and a sad one. I barely understood the words, but I knew that it was a song of love and loss. She stepped onto the stage without missing a beat, and then turned back to her audience, her eyes sparkling with tears.
I was rapt. I wondered what she was singing about. I couldn’t help wondering if she was singing about me.
I didn’t have to wonder, really. I knew. It was about me but it wasn’t. She was singing for me. The sadness at the heart of this song was bigger than any one or any two Loric: it was as big as the planet itself. It was a song for Lorien.
As entranced as I was, I jumped when I felt something vibrating at my wrist. I looked down in surprise, forgetting that I still wore Daxin’s ID band. It was rattling, buzzing urgently. I silenced it and turned back to the stage.
Devektra was still singing, her eyes closed.
The band vibrated again.
I pulled the ID band off to inspect it, to figure out why it was rattling so insistently. As I held it in both hands, the vibrating band tickling the bones of my fingers, I inspected the digital interface. The small rectangular screen was blinking, as was the single word, “Alert.”
Panic began to rise in my chest. Maybe Daxin had woken up, seen his missing ID band and triggered some kind of alarm. Maybe I’d been caught.
No. I knew somehow that the alert signaled something far worse than that. I thought of the control panel outside the club just weeks before, about the sorry state of the grid. I thought of Daxin in the Egg, behaving as if something was seriously wrong. I thought of the unexplained column of light. And I thought of the Elder Prophecy I’d been ignoring my whole life.
One day, a great threat will come …
And I thought of Devektra: “Something terrible is about to happen.” My knees went weak. I looked up to hear her finishing her beautiful song.
Devektra closed her mouth. The song ended. The crowd held its applause, fearful of breaking the spell.
And then the roof came down.
CHAPTER 10
Returning to consciousness, I took inventory.
Blackness.
Silence.
And—there it was—pain.
I forced myself up through the blackness, clutching blindly forward with my hands. I felt smashed stone, the wetness of my own blood in my palms, the acrid tang of smoke against my still sightless eyes.
Sound returned faster than vision. It was a ringing in my ears, the exact opposite of the hypnotic, unfettered emotion of Devektra’s music. This was concussive, earsplitting.
In agony, I clutched my head to force it out but the pain kept rising.
The club had been bombed.
Then more sound emerged through the tinnitus-like buzz.
Moaning. Screaming. Crying.
I turned my head left and right, trying to find a source of light, anything to help me figure out what had just happened.
That’s when I saw the fire, rising up the entrance wall, small but getting bigger.
It wasn’t until I tried to stand that I realized I was on the ground floor of the club, not on the mezzanine. I turned around and saw that the entire balcony had been knocked from its struts, smashed like a dropped dinner plate on the floor of the club.
No, I thought. No.
Not just on the floor of the club. On top of a mass of crushed concertgoers. They were already dead.
The stage was intact, as was the other half of the dance floor that hadn’t gotten buried by the collapsing mezzanine. But the people there hadn’t been spared. The sheer force of the blast, in combination with the shrapnel from the shattered roof, had killed most of the audience members who hadn’t been crushed. Bodies littered the floor, while bloody and dazed survivors struggled to their feet from out of the sea of corpses.
My leg was stuck, wedged between two crushed stones. I feared it was broken, or worse. But I needed to get up.
Devektra, I thought. I needed to know she was okay.
I strained against the rubble, but it wouldn’t give. I looked around for something I could use to pull myself out.
That’s when I saw the guy I’d been talking to only minutes ago, the one who didn’t like Deloon this time of year. He was flat on the ground, the balcony a broken jigsaw beneath him. His eyes were wide open, his body eerily intact except for his jaw, which had been sheered clean off by shrapnel.
I turned away from the grisly sight, and felt a hand on my shoulder. Mirkl stood above me, a shocked look on his face and caked in dust but apparently unharmed by the explosion.
“Help?” he said.
In my confusion I froze, unable to decide if he was asking for help or offering it.
Mirkl didn’t wait for me to figure it out. He crouched down by my side and looked around, determining which rock to lift in order to free me. His slender arms looked weak, but when they found the chunk of rubble that trapped my leg, he pulled it away like it was nothing at all.
I stared down at my knee. It was bloody and bruised, but not broken. I was going to be okay.
Without knowing where I found the strength to do it, I stood up, first on my strong leg and then on my tingly weak one, wobbling on the uneven rubble beneath me. I turned to thank Mirkl. He had already disappeared into the mass of wailing, screaming and silent shell-shocked survivors.
I looked towards the entrance. There was no entrance anymore. The doors and entire front wall of the club were now nothing more than an orange, raging inferno. My forehead prickled with sweat.
The fire exit. It was the only way out. Or, it would have been. The fire exit had only been accessible from the balcony.
I felt all hope slip out of me like a vapor.
Then I saw a few survivors crowding at the base of the wall below the escape. Despite the balcony’s collapse, the struts, a few chunks of concrete and some girders remained at the base of the exit. It was enough. Barely. The survivors were hurriedly scrambling against the wall, grabbing on to whatever handholds they could manage and hoisting themselves out of the burning club.
I was torn. I knew I had to run, to save myself, and still I couldn’t. I wanted to find Devektra.
I was still trying to make a choice when I saw her shiny red pants sliding up the wall and out of the exit. After all that, she hadn’t thought twice about taking her first chance to safety. Had it even occurred to her to look for me?
There was nothing keeping me here now. I ran to the crowd at the base of the wall. I tried to resist casting one glance back at the smoky, bloody, ruined club. Don’t look back.
But I looked back and my eyes went straight to him.
It was Paxton. He was alive but he was just crouched on the ground in despair, rocking back and forth.
I knew I was being an idiot, but I didn’t care: without thinking twice, I gave up my place at the back of the line and rushed over to help him. As I got closer, I understood why he had given up. At his feet, crushed by concrete, was Teev.
I grabbed his hand and tried urging him on towards the exit, but he wouldn’t budge.
His eyes met mine. “She’s stuck,” he said. “Teev. We have to get her out.”
I didn’t need to look down to know that Teev was dead. Paxton didn’t get it, though.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But there’s no time. We have to go now.”
Slowly, he began to move away from the corpse of the girl I’d once had a crush on, the girl he had loved. I pushed him forward over the balcony’s rubble, trying not to imagine all the Loric bodies mangled and bloody beneath the stone.
We were the last two up the wall. As I pushed Paxton up and out of the exit, I spotted Daxin’s band poking out of the rubble a few yards away. I must’ve dropped it when the roof caved in and the balcony collapsed. The smoke was overwhelming, and the flames had nearly reached the exit but I took one last risk anyway.
I lunged for it.
I put the band back on my wrist, leapt up the wall, and crawled out into the night.
On the street, a bloody woman in tattered clothes milled among the survivors. “Devektra tried to kill us!” she screamed. “Devektra did it!”
She was clearly hysterical, and most of the people gathered around her were far too shocked by the explosion to pay her much heed. But a few people seemed to be nodding in agreement.
The shock was only just now hitting me. There was something about the stillness—the ordinariness—of the street outside the club that truly made me understand the horror of what I’d just escaped.
The band was vibrating on my wrist again. ALERT ALERT ALERT.
Devektra was nowhere to be seen among the survivors. She hadn’t hesitated for a second, or stopped to help anyone. She’d gotten her sparkly red ass out of there.
Still, despite the screaming woman and the hushed murmurs of the crowd, I knew Devektra hadn’t been the cause of the explosion. She had even tried to warn me about it, sort of. In her own way, she had tried to warn us all. With that song. She just hadn’t known she was doing it, I don’t think.
It hadn’t been her. They were right all along, I thought.
