Chapter 18 - When the Music Caught Fire
Onstage, Giata smelled smoke before the alarms began.
The first row stood. Then the lights went out, and hundreds of people surged toward the main doors. A metal chain had been drawn across the outside handles.
“Stop pushing!” Giata shouted into the microphone. “There's another way out.”
Nobody heard her until she struck the piano's highest keys together. The violent chord cut through the shouting. Heads turned.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Follow the ushers to the side aisles. Do not crowd the front doors. There's a loading exit behind this stage.”
Constance helped a boy who had fallen beside the orchestra pit. Nia kept the livestream running long enough to show the chained doors, then joined the evacuation. Price's officers inside the building worked to open an emergency exit from the stairs.
The smoke thickened. Giata pushed toward the backstage ramp, but a fallen lighting rig blocked it. Constance dragged the boy past the debris, then turned back.
“Go!” Giata told her.
“Not without you.”
“Then help me find another route.”
Giata remembered the floor plan she had insisted on seeing when she booked the venue. Behind the costume room was a service corridor to an exterior loading bay. It was narrow, but wide enough for her chair.
She guided Constance and the boy through it, feeling along the wall when the emergency lights failed. At the end stood a steel door with a jammed push bar.
“It's stuck,” Constance coughed.
“Then we make noise.”
Giata struck the door with the metal arm of her wheelchair. Three bangs. A pause. Four more. The rhythm of Lena's song.
Outside, Marisol heard it through the roar of the fire trucks.
“There!” she shouted.
Elias and two firefighters forced the door with a pry bar. Fresh air swept into the corridor. The little boy scrambled through, followed by Constance. Elias reached for Giata's chair, but she slapped his hand away.
“Let me,” she said.
He stepped back. She pushed herself across the threshold and into the cool night.
For one second he just stared at her, alive, soot on her face, furious as ever. Then he knelt and hugged her. She hugged him back.
Dominic appeared beyond the ambulance line, trying to slip into a waiting car. Marisol pointed him out. Price sprinted toward him. He drew his gun, but Elias stepped into his path.
“Don't,” Dominic snarled. “You know what I can tell them about you.”
“Everything,” Elias said. “Tell them everything.”
Dominic hesitated. It gave Price time to knock the gun from his hand and pin him against the hood. The silver ring scraped across the paint as she cuffed him.
May you like
The crowd cheered. Giata didn't. She watched her brother walk toward Price, holding out both wrists.
“There's one more arrest you need to make,” Elias said. “Mine.”
