Performance and Resonance
The performance was scheduled for the morning, but as soon as daylight broke, Jingxing climbed up to a breach in the city wall.
Looking down through his binoculars, he saw a dense mass of people already gathered beneath the stage in the central square. They filled the space all the way to the intersection, and still more could be seen spilling out along the streets.
Some held children in their arms, while others supported elderly people. Three days ago, the square had been so empty that echoes could be heard; now, it seemed people wanted to squeeze themselves into even the cracks between the bricks.
The stage stood in the center of the square, assembled from steel frames and wooden planks and covered with dark red velvet. At Robin's request, the government security soldiers at the venue looked fairly relaxed, but a closer look revealed that their eyes were full of wariness.
They too had received word that the opposition planned to sabotage the performance. Their guns pointed down, but their eyes, like Jingxing's, searched the crowd inch by inch.
Jingxing soon picked out a few familiar faces in the crowd. Old Zhou's people wore work clothes and stood scattered around its edges, like a few inconspicuous nails. Old Zhou himself crouched in the shadows beside the stage, a cigarette between his fingers. It had nearly burned down to his fingertips, but he still hadn't taken a puff.
Everyone was waiting—for a song, or for a gunshot.
Jingxing's gaze passed over the crowd to the rooftops of several buildings around the square. They were empty, while a government sentry post occupied the clock tower to the east. But the opposition was unlikely to launch an attack from the most conspicuous spot. He tried counting the windows that overlooked the stage and found that he simply couldn't count them all.
The city was full of breaches and broken walls, with angles for a surprise attack everywhere.
He looked away and squeezed the sachet Robin had pressed into his hand, its coolness against his palm. "Please stay safe... Robin."
The loudspeakers in the streets switched from announcements to a final notice, static crackling across the city. Then even the static stopped.
It was as if someone had gripped Rovini by the throat. Even the footsteps on the street beyond the square grew quieter. But behind a sealed window, a board was quietly pried loose.
By the time Robin took the stage, the morning mist had cleared, and the sun had just climbed above the rooftops of the buildings to the east.
She had changed into a long, silver-white fringed dress that matched her hair, and she stepped onto the stage.
There were no lights, no dancers, no band. She stood alone on the dark red velvet, letting the wind lift her silver hair and let it fall again.
Jingxing watched Robin from afar. The person who had decided to take him in at the refugee camp a few days ago, the person who had shared hardships with him in the wild over the past few days, the name repeated countless times on posters and over loudspeakers during those days—all had now shrunk to a quiet point at the center of the stage.
Tens of thousands of gazes in the square were fixed on that point, as though they had placed all their trust there too.
The voices below the stage gradually died down, until the entire square fell silent and only the wind remained.
Jingxing heard an old man at the foot of the city wall say hoarsely to someone beside him, "The last time I saw this many people gathered in the square was when they announced we'd signed a mineral development agreement with the corporation, and everyone was going to have money. But life didn't get better. It got worse. Who knows what it'll be like after today?"
The other person shook their head. "Could it get any worse? Vesna IV can't get any worse than it is now."
"Yeah..." The old man sighed faintly.
The next second, Robin began to sing.
There was no prelude, no greeting. The first note fell directly into the silence, like a drop of water into a still pool.
At the same time, Jingxing lowered his eyelids. Robin had begun using her ability, and unlike the audience below the stage, he could no longer look directly at her exquisite face.
Robin's voice was not piercing, and she wasn't singing at the top of her lungs. Yet even from so far away, it sounded as though she were singing right beside his ear.
It wasn't that the sound equipment here was particularly good. Robin's singing carried the Imaginary Energy of harmony. It was as though her voice had reached into the world around them and, using the air as strings, plucked them again and again to carry her song farther.
Jingxing heard the faint chatter below the stage disappear entirely. He heard women holding children hum a tuneless note, then hastily stop.
He opened his eyes a sliver to observe the soldiers nearby. Some had already loosened their grip on their guns. Face after upturned face shone in the morning light, like a field of wheat brushed by the same wind.
"Mother of a myriad homes, nations, and worlds! Your arms wield great power, making hatred let go and injustice repent, bringing the good into the home, where family dwells in peace and harmony, without sorrow or hatred, without worry or suffering." As a hymn offered by The Family to Xipe, the Aeon of Harmony, the first movement of the "Hymn of Harmony" naturally expressed their hopes as well.
Just as Robin now wished to draw everyone's hearts gradually together through her song.
The song flowed out of the square and down the streets. Jingxing heard the wind carry it into every alley, heard hospital ward windows being pushed open in the direction of the hospital, and heard even the shouted commands at the government sentry posts farther away fall silent.
At that moment, there was only one sound in all of Rovini.
At the same time, thirty kilometers outside Rovini.
Kafka stood on a bare ridge, the wind whipping her long hair about. Her eyes were closed, and her fingertips lifted gently, as though catching something in the void.
"Here it comes," she murmured.
The next second, a very faint purple glow had gathered between her fingers. Guided by her wrist, the light sank into the rock beneath her feet and flowed outward in every direction along invisible channels—those were the veins of sounding ore Silver Wolf had buried well in advance at Elio's request. Now, like plucked strings, they began to resonate one by one.
While burying the ore, Silver Wolf had complained that instead of spending money on a pile of bizarre rocks, Elio might as well have given her the cash to spend on games.
But now, across tens or hundreds of kilometers of rock, those stones were casting the same melody into the sky, over and over again.
Before it reached the ridge, the song could only cover the area around Rovini. But now, as the sounding ore resonated with Robin's harmony energy with all its might, her song began to echo across the entirety of Vesna IV—over ridges and rivers, and across the rebels' defensive lines.
In a mining camp bunkhouse, someone put down the wrench in their hand; in a trench across the river, some soldiers covered their faces, trying to stop their tears from falling.
Kafka opened her eyes and looked at the light spreading across her palm.
Whether as a "devil hunter" in the past or as a "Stellaron Hunter" now, Kafka's record consisted of a string of assassinations, robberies, and bombings, accompanied by a long string of digits on the Interastral Peace Corporation's wanted notice.
She glanced down at the golden light between her fingers, which was bringing peace to the entire planet, and the corners of her mouth twitched. "Doing a good deed in such a pure sense really does take some getting used to."
In the square, Robin finished the first chorus.
Jingxing heard her take a small breath. No one below the stage applauded or cheered—everyone simply looked up in silence, as though rooted to the spot.
Smiling, Robin was just about to sing the first note of the second verse.
At that moment, Jingxing heard a sound utterly out of place amid his surroundings.
It was extremely faint, almost drowned out by the wind—a "pfft."
A silencer.
Jingxing's blood ran cold. He jerked his head up, and at the same time, the red-hot needle stabbed deep into his eye socket—but he had no time to care about the searing, agonizing pain.
"Robin!"