Luna Park's Arc

Chapter 2 of 14

Luna pushed into the crowd with a rolled bundle under her arm. It was an old red banner her sister had stitched for her years ago, the letters spelling her name in crooked thread. She had grabbed it from her closet before walking out. Tonight every frozen panel above the plaza played the rival's audition on loop, the dancer's spin syncing across four ice screens at once. Fans below filmed the screens and reposted the clips to every channel Luna had been counting on. She needed one channel that the wave had not swallowed yet. She found it at the far edge of the plaza. A tall broadcast tower stood there, its metal lattice crusted in ice, a single antenna pushing above the rooftops. A small knot of fans gathered at its base, phones up, streaming to the one feed the rival had not flooded. Luna pushed to the front. She unrolled the banner and shook it open so the stitched letters faced the cameras. Then she started the 'Butter' choreography on the frozen pavement, no music, counting under her breath. The first eight counts were stiff. By the second run, a girl in the front lifted her phone higher and shouted Luna's name off the banner. Two more phones swung toward her. Luna hit the chorus break clean, snapped the banner across her shoulders like a cape, and kept dancing. The small feed picked her up. A clip went out. Comments began stacking faster than she could see. Someone tied a corner of the banner to the tower's lowest rail so it hung behind her as a backdrop, her name reading straight into every lens. She finished the full routine without a cut, the same way she had filmed the portal video, and the fans around the tower were chanting the count with her by the end. When she stopped, her lungs burned and her hands shook. She checked her phone. The portal number had not moved, but the small channel's clip of her dance was climbing, shared out to feeds she did not recognize. A message sat at the top of her notifications from an account she did not know, asking if she was the girl from the tower and whether she could be at the broadcast grounds tomorrow morning for a scout walk-through. Luna read it twice. She had won the channel. She had also just been pulled out from behind her screen and named in public, and a stranger with the power to advance her now expected her to show up in person, alone, with no plan for what to do when she got there.