Page 59 of I Fell for an Alien Popstar

“Welcome back,” she said. Her gaze flicked over the others, then landed on me. “I need a word with our cultural guest.”

Zhari’s hand tightened around mine.

“Now?” she asked. “We’ve been walking all afternoon, Sira. She’s tired. We were going to lie down.”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Sira said. Her tone was calm, almost mild, but there was no give in it. “I won’t keep her long.”

For a heartbeat, it felt like the air shifted. Zhari’s jaw worked as if she were biting back something sharp.

“She can barely feel her feet,” she said. “Can it not wait until tomorrow?”

Sira’s mouth softened ever so slightly.

“No. But I promise it will be brief.”

Zhari looked at me then, the annoyance fading from her face.

“I’ll go up and run the water,” she said quietly, mostly for me. Her thumb swept once across the back of my knuckles before she let go. “Our room is open. Come straight there when you’re done, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, even though my stomach had sunk somewhere around my boots.

She squeezed my hand one more time and headed up the ramp alone, her hood still up and her lavender track pants slouching softly around her ankles.

I watched her until the bus door slid shut behind her.

Then I turned back to Sira.

She tipped her head toward the side of the ramp, away from the flow of crew members coming and going.

“Walk with me, Vada,” she said.

The gravity charm bounced lightly above my wrist as I followed, feeling very much like a student being called into the principal’s office.

The bus hummed behind us. The suns hung low and stubborn over Orin’s hills. Somewhere inside, the woman whose name I wore on my shirt was running our shower and trusting that whatever this was, I’d come back.

I swallowed, squared my shoulders, and kept walking.

Sira led me a few steps away from the ramp, just far enough that the crew flowing on and off the bus turned into moving shapes instead of people I knew.

She flicked open her chrome flip phone. A small holo blinked to life above it.

My own face stared back at me.

It was that ramp shot from earlier—the one she’d snapped closed before I could really see it. Me on the edge of the frame, mouth open mid-laugh, bus lights catching the glitter in my hair.

A little blurry. Not flattering. But definitely me.

"Ah, I know. I have seen it many many times."

“That went up last night,” Sira said. “It has already been shared enough times that I saw it again in this morning’s media digest. I needed to figure out how much damage control had been done regarding who people thought you were. It seems they do not truly know… yet.”

“So… congratulations. You’ve officially seen my bad side.” I tried for a joke and didn’t quite stick the landing.

Her mouth didn’t move, but the line of her shoulders was softer than I expected.

“It’s not the image itself that concerns me,” she said.

With a swipe, more clips flickered into the air: a side-stage crowd video from the last show, my silhouette cut against a speaker stack, a grainy loading-dock shot of me perched on a crate with a bottle in hand, and a blurred glimpse of my shoulder and bun caught at the edge of someone’s market selfie.