Free The Last Days of Lorien by Pittacus Lore Page A

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,