Akane held both of Ranko’s hands. The poor redhead couldn’t stand still for a second. “Hey! Relax. You’ve done this a thousand times. You’re gonna do great.”

Ranko shook her head. “I’ve done this exactly zero times. Akane, this isn’t some hit I’m covering. This is…”

Akane smiled. “A hit someone else will be covering soon enough. Yours.”

“I’m not ready, Akane.” She watched nervously as Jacob and his friend Ariel adjusted the lighting surrounding the stage. Crash had banished Mei from her sound booth for the evening. He had told her that tonight, she needed to just enjoy the show, and so Ariel would be running the mixer and lights for the evening.

Akane leaned forward, putting her hand behind Ranko’s head, pulling her behind the black curtain Ariel had set up to shield the sound mixing station from the view of the crowd. 

Ranko teetered on her black chunky heels. “Akane, I…”

Her hand still on the back of Ranko’s head, Akane pulled her forward, meeting Ranko’s open lips with her own. She could feel Ranko’s body quiver from the neck down, but did not let her go until she had enjoyed her fill of her girlfriend’s lips. 

Ranko blushed furiously, trying to regain some semblance of composure. She had goosebumps all down her legs, clearly visible under the black pleated miniskirt she wore. She’d paired it with a black denim jacket over her red Phoenix staff tee shirt. 

“You… I…”

Akane laid her finger across Ranko’s lips. “Save it, girl. Whatever you have to say, you say it up there.” 

Ranko turned to face the steps of the stage. She’d bounded up them a thousand times before, but today the three stairs looked like a million, stretching halfway to Mars from the floor of this little bar in the Minato district of Tokyo. 

“I can do this. I can do this.”

Mei, who was already on the stage helping Ariel finish wiring the equipment, picked up a microphone. “Hey, everybody! Welcome to the Phoenix!” 

The crowd erupted.

“Are you ready for a band you’ve never seen before?!”

Ranko could no longer hear her own self-affirmations over the roar of the anticipatory mob.

“Are you ready for the girl we all know and love?”

The cacophony of cheering organized itself into the repetition of a single word.

“RAN-KO! RAN-KO!”

Mei grinned. “Alright then! Introducing, for the first time ever , Ranko and the Dapper Dragons! ” 

Ranko stood transfixed, listening to the crowd chant her name. Waiting to hear her sing. Waiting to hear her song. Try though she might, her feet would not move.

With a devious smirk, Akane took a step forward, getting right behind her. 

Ranko blinked. “Akane, what are you…”

Looking around to ensure no one could see them behind the curtain, Akane swung her right hand forward, smacking her girlfriend hard on her backside. 

Ranko whirled, blushing furiously. “Wha!?”

Akane grinned. “Get going, superstar.”

Silently mouthing I’m gonna get you as she walked, Ranko slowly emerged from behind the curtain and began to ascend the stairs. With each step, the building itself shook a little harder.

Mei met her at the steps, handing her sister the microphone and wrapping her arms around her. “We’re so proud of you.” She flitted off of the stage, making her way to the back of the room to join Hana and her sisters behind the bar. 

Ranko turned to face her four bandmates. She read her name spray painted across the front of Ken’s drum. She kept wondering when she would wake up. 

Crash made eye contact with her, and she smiled brightly. He had done so much to make this moment happen for her. He tapped his chest right above his heart twice, then tapped his still-inactive microphone twice as well. She blushed, remembering his advice the night he’d forced her to get back on the stage. “Take everything in here, and put it in here.”

She turned to face the crowd. Her mouth felt like she’d eaten an ashtray. Half of the cells in her body wanted to jump for joy, and the other half wanted to run for cover, and she was having a hard time getting the two factions to negotiate for control of each of her limbs.

Every light facing the stage blinked off, save the row of small white floor-level bulbs that indicated the edge of the platform. They barely illuminated the mist coming from the fog machine Shinji had set up. The four members of the band waited in darkness at the back of the stage, leaving Ranko alone at the front center. 

She looked across the bar at Hana and her sisters, all holding hands as they stood behind the bar. Akane sat at her VIP table off to her left, joined by Ayako and Kaito. All of these people who had believed in her, invested in her, trusted her, and loved her when she could not find the strength to do any of those things for herself. This night was for Ranko, but the song had always been for them. 

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. 

No music came from the speakers, but she raised the microphone to her lips, singing in a quietly haunting tone, letting her voice drip with emptiness, thinking about the nights sleeping out under the stars, without a yen in her pocket or a friend to give her the time of day.

“Alone, with no place left that you call home, nobody waiting by the phone, no one to care that you’re not there, no one to defend you...” 

She looked back to the front door of the Phoenix, remembering how she’d stumbled through it for the first time, bruised and broken, hopeless and hungry. The day she’d hit rock bottom and, against all odds, bounced. The day she’d come begging for a job, and found a home and a family instead.

“Somehow, the shadow always tracks you down, ‘til you’ve got one knee on the ground, and the next mistake is all it’ll take for it to end you.”

As she took a breath to sing the next line, Crash’s guitar began to join her in a simple chord progression, and he stepped forward to join her in the mist. The white lights faded out, replaced by red ones that made the floor of the stage look as if it were smoldering.

A tear running down her cheek, she thought back to the days she spent at Takao’s studio. All the self-doubt. The shame. The absolute certainty she’d had that tonight would never come. Believing with every fiber of her being that her choosing to retain her last shred of dignity had cost her everything she’d ever wanted. Her voice quavered as she delivered the line.

“It tries. It breaks your heart and tells you lies. Wrings angry tears out of your eyes, until the pain drives you half-insane and terror blinds you.”

She looked across the room at Hana, touching her heart with her empty right hand. She thought about the first night, when Hana had dragged out of her that she had nowhere to go and forced her to stay. The night Ranko Tendo was truly born.

“And then, something stirs in you again. You don’t know how, you don’t know when, but a quiet voice offers you a choice to leave it all behind you.”

Accompanied by a riff from Shinji’s bass guitar and a swelling of notes from Jacob’s synthesizer, the lights came up to reveal the rest of the band. The sadness in Ranko’s voice faded, replaced with a tenor of resolve. Of drive. Of hope in the face of impossible obstacles and unreachable dreams.

“Dust off your hands, take a breath, take a stand, and admit that you might have been wrong. Your heart still remembers the smoldering embers; the fire was in you all along!” 

The tone of determination in her voice became one of defiance. The stage lights flickered red, yellow and orange, giving the effect that the whole of the stage was burning beneath her feet. The chorus became an almost angry rhythmic chant, summoning power from some unknown place and pouring it out on the ghosts and the shame she’d spent her whole life running from.

“RISE like a dragon and RISE from the agony! RISE and rekindle the flame! When life turns to ashes, you go get the matches and sear away all of the shame! Burn like a demon and earn what you’re dreaming!” 

Each time she roared the name of the song, all four of the band members joined her, and a white light on either side of the stage briefly flashed on the wall. A transparent overlay on the lamps filtered the light so that instead of round spotlights, the word RISE was projected against the back wall on each side of the stage. 

Ranko extended her arm, pointing at the back bar where her adoptive mother and her three youngest sisters stood, still holding hands. If anyone outside this room ever heard the chorus, they’d understand its meaning, to be sure. But, to the five girls whose lives had been rebuilt in this place, the inclusion of one word made it mean something else entirely – something much more tangible, visceral, personal and real.

“The Phoenix inside never dies!”

She looked down at the first row of standing revelers, delivering her five-word imperative at the top of her lungs. 

“You ignite, and you RISE!”

Ranko’s eyes turned to Mei, remembering how her youngest sister had fought for her the day she’d beaten Kuno and nearly lost herself in the process. How tough their shared experience with Mikado had been.

“You might have almost given up the fight, forgotten how to be alright. Hey, but it’s okay to not know your way when you first get going.” 

She smiled down at Akane. How different had things been when first they met? How far had they had to come to get back to where they had always wanted to be from the beginning? How far did they still have to go, together?

“It’s not fair that most of us don’t start off there, but everyone belongs somewhere, and the hardest part is guessing where to start, but never really knowing.” 

She looked to her side at Crash, giving him an appreciative smile. This dream could never have come true without him and his friends. 

“The pain ends when you don’t have to make amends. When chosen family, loyal friends, all have got your back, help you stay on track, ‘cause they’re all behind you.” 

With a smile back at Yui, she tapped the silver dragon coiled around her left wrist. Her constant metallic guardian that concealed the scar left by the origin of her feminine rebirth, the battle on the mountaintop and the destruction of the Phoenix Pill. How ironic it had been that the loss of the Phoenix Pill had destroyed her, but the discovery of the Phoenix Bar had been what saved her.

“You have grown, but no one gets there on their own, and when you think that you’re alone, it’s the ones you love that are thinking of new ways to remind you.”

Ranko waved to Izumi, thinking of all the times her sister took her under her wing, whether it was shopping for bras, styling her hair or preparing her to stand at her wedding. Jusenkyo had made her a girl, but Izzi had made her a woman.

“You were lonely and scared and nowhere near prepared. There were lessons you needed to learn. But now, it’s your mission to start reignition! Your heart is just waiting to burn!” 

Crash and Shinji both hopped into the air, landing as the first word of the chorus did. Again, all five members of the band belted the song’s title, this time joined by most of the crowd.

“RISE like a dragon and RISE from the agony, RISE and rekindle the flame! When life turns to ashes, you go get the matches and sear away all of the shame! Burn like a demon to earn what you’re dreaming! The Phoenix inside never dies!” 

At this line, the crowd of the bar roared in appreciation of the temple of revelry and healing in which they now stood. 

“You ignite and you RISE!”

As her band played through the short bridge, Ranko ran to the very front of the stage, this time with a defiant message for Mikado, and Takao, her father, and Ryoga and Kuno, too. She pointed outward with her empty right hand, panning the crowd, as if admonishing them how to avoid the dark places that had almost swallowed her whole. As she sang, a cascade of red and orange lights flickered from the ceiling, giving the illusion that a torrent of flame was rising behind the vocalist. 

“No shadow can claim you. No challenge can tame you. You’re stronger than you realize! There isn’t a thing which could ever extinguish the inferno that burns in your eyes! ”

The synthesizer reached a crescendo before cutting out entirely, along with all three other instruments, leaving only the voices of Ranko, her bandmates, and nearly four hundred ebullient fans for the following chorus. 

“RISE like a dragon and RISE from the agony, RISE and rekindle the flame! When life turns to ashes, you go get the matches and sear away all of the shame! Burn like a demon to earn what you’re dreaming! The Phoenix inside never dies!” 

The last line was conspicuously missing, but the rest of it repeated, all four instruments rejoining the chorus for the final refrain.

“RISE like a dragon and RISE from the agony, RISE and rekindle the flame! When life turns to ashes, you go get the matches and sear away all of the shame! Burn like a demon to earn what you’re dreaming! The Phoenix inside never dies!” 

Crash stepped into his microphone, singing a half-step above Ranko’s words. “Never dies!” 

Shinji followed suit, adding another half-step. “Never dies!” 

Jacob sang in his Aussie accent into the microphone above his keyboard, higher still in pitch from Shinji’s line. “Never dies!”

Ken leaned over his kit and belted at a full octave above Ranko’s line, punctuating it with a thundering run from the bass drum that bore her name. “Never dies!”

Ranko spun her wireless microphone in her hand, balling her right hand into a fist and thrusting it into the air. “YOU IGNITE, AND YOU RISE!” 

Every light facing the stage blinked out at once, and in the darkness, no one saw her start to cry.

~~~ END BOOK FOUR ~~~