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)
I have been singing for three hours straight by the time I come off the stage, covered in sweat and swigging great gulps of isotonic liquid from a bottle. After shows like these, water is the most delicious fluid I have ever encountered. I’m amped up, but I’m also exhausted. I’m in almost an altered state, not quite with general reality anymore. These shows take everything out of me, and whatever’s left is more animal than animal, more crazy than crazy.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I hear bass emanating behind us, and the crowd seems to get really loud all of a sudden. Do they want an encore? I start to turn around, planning on heading back to the stage. I could do with another dose of the adoration of thousands, why not?
But Zayne, as usual, has other ideas. He picks me up and starts running back toward the dock. Our transport ship is nestled not far away from the stage in order to make logistics easier. I let out a little shriek of excitement as he carries me off like the big, brutish hulk he is. I don’t know what the hurry is, but I’m certainly in no position to change direction.
Our ship is a star cruiser, a luxury bus with swift movement that allows us to leap between major planetary systems in less than an Earth day. I know it is fast, and I know it’s super well appointed. Think of a first class steampunk hotel room stocked with everything a performer could possibly need.
When we get back to the ship my team is waiting for me. Hair, makeup, vocal coaching, interpreters, a good dozen people who are here for the sole purpose of enabling this tour to go well. They all look a little stunned. I guess they’re absolutely blown away by my performance.
“That was awesome!” I shout, unintentionally loud.
“Let’s get her to sleep,” Zayne says. He’s talking to the medic who helps me sleep after every single concert. I don’t think I’d be able to sleep on my own, but they like to give me a little something that makes it easy.
Zayne
We’re traveling in the equivalent of a crumpled up foil ball when it comes to defense capacity, but a good retreat makes defensive and offensive capabilities irrelevant. I want to put as much cold space between us and that last performance as mechanically possible.
Lyric has no idea what just happened back in that arena, but I saw everything, the way explosions began to emanate from the very back of the audience and then roll forward through it. Something unspeakably awful and catastrophically violent unfolded there, and I cannot begin to explain why.
My human charge didn’t seem to register the explosions at all. She’s lolling about in my arms in the weak-limbed way she tends to when she’s almost completely out of energy. Her eyes have the bright, glazed appearance she gets when she’s on the point of collapse. We need to calm her down and get her to sleep, because the tour won’t stop just because she was brutally attacked. On previous starlet tours we’ve performed in war zones, taking entire space marine platoons with us to guarantee our safety. Today we need nothing but speed.
The tour captain sets the ship into motion the minute we’re aboard, the entire vessel slipping out of common space and entering a quantum slipstream in which we’re moving so fast we are technically not moving at all. Space wraps around us to convenience our goals.
The rest of us follow the procedures of Lyric’s cooldown routine without interruption. It’s important to not let her get stressed out. Nothing is her problem. We are here to take care of her, worry about what needs to be worried about, and allow her to just do her job.
The ship’s doctor sets an IV in her arm. It’s supposed to rehydrate, replace minerals, and has a little something to help her sleep. It works. Lyric is down and out within sixty seconds of getting aboard the ship.
One way of describing what we’re doing is to say we’re drugging her out between every single show, rousing her just in time to perform again, but it’s the only way for her human frame to handle this schedule. Past experience tells us humans start to break down physically and mentally if they don’t get their rest.
We tuck her into a specially prepared pod, temperature and humidity controlled to help her throat recover. Every single part of this tour has been planned to the absolute second. And that is how I know that what happened today might not be an accident. Because we are still on time.
I sit in a chair next to Lyric’s sleeping pod and turn the news on the main screen. Images of the stadium we were just in appear immediately, smoky and charred and still on fire in places.