Chapter 21 Kaia #2
The mass convulses and the air fills with broken sound—feedback without speakers, memory without mercy. Tendrils lash toward the crowd in thin, desperate threads, searching for something that will stitch the loop back together.
And then it does the cruelest possible thing.
A melody slips into the static.
Not a jingle. Not a chant.
A soft, familiar sequence of notes—one I’ve never sung on stage, never handed to the world, never let Eon polish into a product.
Because it was never for them.
It was for her.
Evie goes rigid.
Her eyes widen, horrified in a way that has nothing to do with monsters.
The Chorus sings it wrong, half a beat off, the harmony warped, the vowels pulled too long like a mouth that doesn’t know how to hold tenderness. But the words are the same. The phrasing is the same.
Breathe with me, breathe with me—
Evie makes a sound—small and broken—and slaps her hands over her ears like she can keep it out. Like she can stop memory from crawling into her skull.
“No,” she gasps, voice cracking. “No, no—That’s mine.”
The word hits like a blade.
Not ours. Not the town’s. Not something you can chant in a crowd and pretend it belongs to everyone.
Mine.
My throat tightens. “Evie—”
“You wrote that,” she spits, almost furious through the terror. “After the storm—after the pier got flooded and we were soaked and you were shaking—”
I flinch, because the memory is too sharp: saltwater in our hair, lantern frames rattling, Evie giving me her hoodie because I wouldn’t stop shivering, my hands numb around a cheap pen as I scribbled lyrics on a napkin like if I didn’t get them out I’d drown.
“It was for me,” Evie says, voice breaking on the last word. “You said it was—you said you weren’t going to play it for anyone. You said it was just… for me. So how can it know it?”
“It tastes us,” I say. “It tastes what we’re thinking. What we’re carrying. It’s not singing your song because it found a recording.” My jaw locks. “It’s singing it because it felt it in me, because it felt you in me.”
The Chorus drags the line out again, mangling it into something sweet and rotten, like it’s tasting her grief and my fear and deciding it likes the flavor. The demon isn’t just trying to eat her. It’s trying to wrap her in the softest thing I ever made and turn it into a leash.
I lift Aurora slightly. The blade hums, eager.
“I wrote that for you,” I whisper, fierce and certain. “It doesn’t get to use it against us.”
Evie swallows, eyes shining.
I hold her gaze. “One minute. Cover your ears. Don’t listen to it. Look at me.”
Her hands tremble, but she nods once.
I feel my eyes flare purple—hot, violent, steadying—because rage is clean and easy compared to panic.
Aurora hums in my grip, hungry for an ending.
The thought in my head turns razor-sharp. The thing that keeps trying to hurt Evie dies here.
Not “save the town.” Not “protect Eon’s image.” Not “contain the incident.”
This is personal now.
The Chorus convulses overhead, trying to find another hook—panic, grief, nostalgia. It dips toward the paramedics like it can smell Evie’s fear. Like it knows exactly where to bite next.
I step in front of her again, blade raised.
Her shoulders shake. She swallows hard. And she steps behind me.
The gesture is small, but it feels like trust.
“Girls,” I say into the comm, voice steady. “We end it.”
Jules’ laugh is bright and vicious. “Finally.”
Remy’s voice is calm as a blade. “Pattern is exposed.”
Mina’s breath steadies. “Tell us where.”
I lift Aurora, feeling it link to my throat like a second spine.
The Chorus’s faces ripple overhead, mouths opening in silent hunger.
I taste the edge of its song in the air—old jingles, old love, old regret.
It reaches for Evie again like a reflex. Like it thinks her heart is a lever it can pull.
I bare my teeth.
“No,” I whisper. “Not her.”
Then I sing.
Not into a mic.
Not for a crowd.
For war.
One note—pure, amplified through Aurora—slams upward into the sky like a spear of light.
The wards flare in response, catching the note and turning it into a containment dome, tightening around the Chorus’s mass.
It shrieks, trapped.
Jules darts in with Voltstep, blades charging with every step, carving through the demon’s edges.
Remy’s runes snap into a circle, glowing script sealing gaps, forcing the Chorus’s fragments back toward center.
Mina raises Heartglass, reflection flaring, and in it, the Chorus’s true shape shows: a knot of longing and hunger wrapped around the festival’s jingle like a noose.
Mina’s voice is soft and deadly. “There.”
I see it: the core, the hook it keeps returning to.
I draw a breath so deep it hurts, and I think of Evie.
Evie’s mouth on mine in the Ferris wheel.
Evie breaking the power to save strangers.
Evie always choosing other people over safety.
Evie, fierce and furious and alive.
The Chorus tries to whisper at me.
Come back. Stay. Never move on.
I lift Aurora. My voice drops into a note so low it vibrates the stage. Then I swing.
Aurora’s arc is bright and final, cutting through the demon’s core with a soundless shock that makes the air explode.
The Chorus shatters. Faces splinter into static. Mouths collapse into nothing. Old jingles fragment into harmless noise that scatters like ash.
The pressure in my skull releases all at once.
The crowd screams—human screams now, real, panicked, alive.
The sky clears. Lanterns bob, suddenly just lanterns again. I stand there breathing hard, blade humming in my hand, sweat cold under my makeup.
For a heartbeat, the world is quiet.
Then Evie’s voice cuts through it, raw and shaking. “Grandma.”