Page 11 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

“Yes!” I shouted back. “This is incredible!” I threw my hands into the air and clapped.

Video streams were a joke. A crime, almost. They flattened everything. This was… more. Every note seemed to travel through my bones instead of past my ears.

Neon heartbeat, running through the wire,

Starlight burning like a live electric fire.

Zero gravity, but I’m falling into you,

Satellite dreams in a midnight-blue hue.

If the whole world fades into the afterglow,

Take my hand, baby—where the galaxies go.

By the time the next track bled in, I was already moving.

I didn’t think about it—I just did it. I let the beat catch me and drag me under. People were packed tightly on all sides, shoulders knocking into mine, someone’s laugh sharp in my ear followed by loud singing. Lights flashed so quickly that everything turned into color and motion instead of actual shapes.

“We’re in zero gravity—ooh!” I sang, breathless and already grinning.

“Don’t stop now!” the crowd roared back.

I laughed, the sound swallowed by everything around me as I threw my hands up and jumped with the drop, my boots barely feeling the ground when they landed.

“Hands up, feel the energy—let’s go!”

“We won’t come down!”

The whole place shouted it back, voices piling over one another until it felt like the floor might give out beneath us. For a second, it actually felt like it had—as if I wasn’t fully there, as if I could lift right out of my body and keep going.

Onstage, she moved like gravity had given her a discount, her steps guided by invisible lines of force. Light threads in her hair flared in time with the beat, changing color with each chorus. Holographic versions of her flickered into existence around the stage—three, then five, then a full ring of Zharis, all singing harmony on the bridge before collapsing back into one.

I screamed the lyrics with everyone else, my voice disappearing into the ocean of sound, and still, it felt like she could hear me.

Between songs, she spoke in Velan, which was such a beautiful language despite the fact that I couldn’t understand it. One of her favorite quotes from interviews, which she said several times during the show, translated to: “Lumara, my home, my heart.”

The crowd answered as if the city itself were shouting back.

I lost track of the set list. Time didn’t feel like normal time. It stretched and snapped and doubled back, each track bleeding into the next so seamlessly that I only realized we’d reached the end-concert lull when the lights cooled to a softer hue and the band slipped into a slower intro.

“This one,” Zhari said, her voice dropping, “is for anyone who crossed a long way to be here tonight.”

That was when she saw me.

Or I imagined she did.

Her eyes swept across the crowd the way they always did, taking in the movement and the wave of raised hands. Then something snagged. Her gaze dropped, narrowed, and landed on me.

From the pit, I could see her face clearly. Those aquamarine eyes were brighter in person than any screen had ever managed to capture. They were pointed directly at me.

No way.

I glanced left—a couple was swaying, their eyes on each other. To the right, a pair of aliens were taking selfies. Nobody near me was doing anything worth looking at.

It was just me.

I looked back. She was still looking at me.