Chapter 5 Kaia
Kaia
The lights hit like a confession.
For a second, I can’t see anything beyond the stage lip—just white blaze, the haze of fog machines, the glitter of pyrotechnic dust still hanging in the air from the last number. The arena is a living thing around us, roaring, chanting, swallowing sound and spitting it back louder.
MID-NIGHT!
HA-LO!
MID-NIGHT!
HA-LO!
My skin hums with it.
Makeup tightens on my cheekbones when I smile. Sweat slicks the back of my neck under the collar of my costume. The outfit is all deep blue, especially designed for Harbor’s Edge, with each of our signature colors woven into the details. For me, that’s a deep purple.
This is the version of me Eon sells in posters and promo clips.
I stretch out my hands, and the crowd surges again, like they’re physically leaning towards me.
“Harbor’s Edge,” I say, breathless on purpose, like I’m moved. “Are you still with us?”
The scream that answers could crack concrete.
Jules is to my left, glitter-smeared and feral.
She bounces on her toes like she’s plugged into the arena itself.
Mina stands a step back, shoulders lifted in that poised way of hers, eyes bright and steady.
Remy is calm on the other side, chin tilted like she’s listening to something under the noise no one else can hear.
In my in-ear, Blaire’s voice is a low thread. “Encore in sixty. We’re running ‘Firefly Night.’ You’re clean. You’re perfect. Breathe.”
Breathe.
I swallow down a laugh that would sound like a sob.
Jules steps forward, voice all heat. “Y’all want one more?”
The arena answers like it’s a single creature.
Remy’s lips quirk. Mina’s smile turns shy for half a second, like she’s startled to be adored this hard.
I watch them and feel the familiar ache: this is my family. This is what I protect. Even when my heart is full of old ghosts.
We regroup at center stage. The screen behind us cycles through Harbor Lights visuals—lanterns, ocean spray, a stylized lighthouse, our faces superimposed in shimmering gold. The festival branding makes it look like we’re not just performers, but part of the town’s mythology.
But the encore is one of our ballads.
The one that makes people cry in stadiums and swear it changed their lives. The one that Eon calls “transformative” because it spikes engagement and keeps fans looping it at night.
The first chord strikes through the air, and the arena quiets, almost obediently, like the crowd knows they’re about to be allowed to feel.
The intro is soft. Piano, a slow swell of notes like tidewater. The lights drop into blues and purples. Phones and glowsticks rise like fireflies. The audience becomes a field of tiny stars.
I breathe in.
On the inhale, I feel the wards.
This is the last clean shot we get tonight. Our last chance to lure in the Chorus. So far, it hasn’t taken any of the bait.
This song has to count, which is probably why they chose the most regret-filled, longing song we have for the encore.
Let’s give the Chorus something tasty to feed on.
My voice slides out smooth, practiced, and still real enough that it hurts.
“We were wildfire in a paper town, chasing summer down the pier…”
The crowd sighs, a collective exhale. Somewhere someone starts crying immediately, which is impressive.
Jules takes the second line, voice brightened with sweetness for once.
“You said, don’t look back, like that fixes it, like love can disappear…”
Mina harmonizes, her tone clear as glass. Remy’s lower line anchors us like gravity.
My chest tightens as the song builds. This one always builds slow, like a bruise blooming. My eyes sweep the front rows out of habit—security, barricade, hands reaching, faces upturned.
And for half a heartbeat, my mind betrays me.
I see her.
Evie, the same girl I remember… Except, she’s standing there in the crowd with her arms crossed, unimpressed, like she’s only here to prove she doesn’t care.
The image is so vivid it steals my breath.
Then it’s gone, because she’s not here.
She would never be here.
I keep singing anyway, voice steady, because that’s what I do when my heart tries to fall out of my ribs.
The song’s chorus hits, and the arena rises with it, people singing words like they’ve lived them too.
“If I could split the sky in two, I’d pull you through, I’d pull you through, but I’m just a song on somebody’s lips, a light that leaves too soon…”
The crowd’s emotion spikes like a wave cresting. It hits the wards. The wards hold. The sound becomes pressure. Heat.
The Chorus likes pressure.
Blaire’s voice brushes my ear. “Kaia, eyes up. Rafters.”
I don’t move my head. I don’t let the crowd see anything change in my posture. I keep my face soft, my voice warm.
But my attention snaps upward like a leash pulled tight. The rafters are a lattice of steel and shadow above the stage lights. And in that darkness… something starts to move.
At first it looks like haze. Like smoke catching wrong light. Then it swirls, thickens, and the air itself becomes a knot of sound and memory as it drops into the warded area.
The Chorus.
Not one body. Not one mouth.
A mass.
A rotating storm of half-heard melodies—Harbor Lights jingles, fairground keyboard loops, old radio hooks that have lived in this town for decades. It doesn’t speak; it sings in fragments, trying to find our rhythm.
Trying to join.
Trying to harmonize with us like a parasite slipping into a choir.
The screen behind us flickers, lantern visuals glitching in quick bursts. For half a second, the lighthouse graphic becomes something else: a mouth. A spiral. A tunnel.
My stomach drops.
The wards hum louder. The Chorus presses against the net like it wants to break it.
“Here we go,” Jules murmurs into her mic, still smiling for the crowd. To human ears it’s a playful aside, part of the performance.
The second verse begins, and Remy takes lead. The one that always catches in my throat when we rehearse, even when I pretend it doesn’t.
“I left a girl behind in salt-air light, and I told myself she’d be fine…”
The line lands like a punch to the ribs. Remy wrote it, but it still finds the soft part of me like it was written with my blood.
For a breath, my voice almost falters.
The crowd feels it—because the crowd always feels the crack—and their emotion spikes again, eager and hungry for something true.
The Chorus shudders in the rafters like it’s being fed.
I force my next line out smooth, my smile intact, my body still in performance posture.
“But the truth is, love doesn’t die, it just learns to hide…”
Above us, the Chorus swells, and the jingles twist into something sweeter, trying to wrap itself around our melody. It mimics us badly at first—off-key, too tinny—then it adjusts, learning fast, trying to slide into our harmony like it belongs there.
It doesn’t.
It never will.
Blaire’s voice is a calm knife. “Halo protocol. On my mark.”
Behind the stage lights, the illusion layer activates. To the crowd, the lantern visuals intensify—gold light spilling across the stage like magic. A pyro rig fires in a controlled bloom at stage left, a harmless flourish timed to the bridge.
To us, it’s cover.
I shift one step back on the next beat, exactly as the choreography calls for.
Jules mirrors me. Mina glides to the opposite diagonal. Remy pivots into her mark.
We look like we’re dancing.
We are.
But it’s the kind of dance that kills.
“Mark,” Blaire says.
We draw.
To human eyes, there’s nothing in our hands until there is, until the lights hit just right and the movement is so clean it reads as choreography flourish, not summoning.
Jules reaches down mid-spin like she’s grabbing the air by the ankles.
Voltstep snaps into her grip, twin short swords sparking bright with kinetic charge. She’s already moving, and the movement feeds the weapons; each step loads them hotter, brighter.
Mina turns her wrist outward like she’s presenting her palm to the crowd.
Heartglass forms—translucent, merciless, catching the stage lights and reflecting the world back sharper. In its surface, the Chorus stops looking like “cool smoke.” It becomes what it is: threads trying to latch onto every screaming mouth in the audience.
Remy lifts her hand as if tracing a lyric in the air.
Inkthorn arrives like a sentence finishing itself—black blade, script-etched, leaving glowing runes trailing behind it when she moves.
I step forward into the bridge, still singing, and reach as if catching light.
Aurora blooms into my grip. It’s prismatic under the stage lights, like dawn trapped in metal. It hums in resonance with my throat, an amplifier tuned to my voice.
The bridge swells. The crowd is drowning in feeling.
“If you hear me in the dark, if my echo finds your name—”
Just like in the sim, Mina’s Heartglass flashes, and she cuts.
Jules launches into a charged combo, feet striking the stage in time with the beat.
Every step pumps Voltstep brighter. She slashes in twin arcs that crackle like lightning, carving the Chorus’s mass into smaller pieces the wards can contain.
“Follow every flicker, baby, I’m still the same,” Jules breathes into her mic.
Remy moves like she’s writing on the air. Inkthorn leaves glowing runes behind each strike, glittering sigils that hang for a second, then sink into the ward lines painted on the stage, reinforcing them.
I sing one low note threaded under the music, hidden inside the performance. Aurora drinks it and throws it forward as a sound-shock, invisible to the crowd but felt in the bones of the Chorus.
The mass buckles.
The arena lights strobe—planned. The pyro pops—planned.
Our violence disappears inside the spectacle.
To the audience, it looks like an insane, perfect dance break in the middle of a power ballad. They scream louder, thinking we’re giving them art.
We are.
Just not the kind they think.