Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
“Come on up!” I shout. “That’s right! Front row! I want you on stage with me now!”
The crowd surges forward, and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop the momentum of people coming up onto the stage. That’s the real secret of crowds. They’re like animals, staying behind fences they could easily clear out of habit.
At first, just a few girls and guys clamber up onto the stage with me. Yeah, there’s security down below, but of course there’s no real way for even the most powerful alien bouncers to keep them all back, not now that I’ve put this idea in their heads.
“Lyric! No!”
I see a flash of dragon skin heading for me. Of course he’s coming for me again. Zayne has to kill every buzz he encounters. It’s basically a compulsion at this point. I see him come rushing out, but there are more and more people coming up onto the stage now, like waves of them.
But he’s not catching me as quickly as usual. And that’s because I am moving away from him. Running away, you could say. In addition to my scampering attempt at avoiding his justice, I notice that the very front of the stage is starting to bow down, which makes it easy for the audience to climb up. More and more come, faster and faster.
I start to get the feeling I might have made a mistake, but it’s too late. They’re all around me, and the stage is starting to go down like a ship on a brutal sea.
I hear screams. So many screams. And not the good kind. Some of them are mine, being played over the sound system so the concert hall now sounds like the depths of hell. I am being grabbed and dragged down. I am falling, and not in the fun way. Bits of stage are breaking off into the crowd and moving through it like ice floes through an arctic sea.
Suddenly, I want more than anything to be saved.
8
Zayne
“Scenes of absolute chaos at the Lyric Walker concert today,” the news reporter chirps brightly. “After the starlet was spanked on stage by a hunky Thrakin, she called for fans to join her on stage, only to start a stampede which resulted in the collapse of the stage, and injuries to many.”
I look over at Lyric, who is lying in the infirmary with an actually broken leg, an injury so bad that we have to detour to a space station where she can be treated by doctors capable of doing surgery.
I will never forget having to slide into a crowd of people and drag her out, screaming at the top of her lungs. I will never forget the other people, the ones I was not paid to save, and the ones I could not save. People were hurt, badly, because of her reckless call and the human mob instinct that followed.
“You did well,” Scowl says. He has been on the open call for a while now. For a change, he is being something other than a complete asshole. “She’s alive, and the leg can be pinned. This is the most controversial tour I’ve ever run. We’ll be postponing and extending tour dates for possibly years. I’ll have to activate the More More More clause in the contract.”
I am barely listening, because I am too busy wondering how I am going to keep her safe when at every turn she chooses the most chaotic and destructive of impulses.
“She’s a rock star,” Scowl says. “They’re hard to keep in one piece. You’re doing fine, buddy.”
He’s so pleased, she’s generating so much publicity on her own he hasn’t had to plan any mass casualty events of his own, because evidently Lyric is happily causing them organically.
“I gotta go, Zayne. Keep up the good work!”
Like that, he’s gone. I turn my attention back to the television, still reporting on the Lyric Walker concert.
“You're mad at me, aren’t you?”
She hasn’t spoken since we got her on the ship. She cried and she shook and she was sick when medic Sukar set her leg, but she hasn’t put a sentence together. I thought she was asleep.
I look down at her now. She is pale, pathetic, and probably sorry. She does not look like a rock star. She looks like an exhausted woman who should know better. It’s as if whatever charisma and energy that made her seem untouchable on stage has deserted her completely.
“Yes,” I say. I will not lie. I will not pretend that what she did was in any way okay, or an accident, or understandable. What she did was absolutely unconscionable.
“I knew it.”
“I knew you were reckless. But I thought you at least had some empathy for your fans. You put so many people in danger tonight. You got people hurt. All because you seem to have some kind of death wish.”