Chapter 442 | The Second Take

Chapter 442: 442 | The Second Take

"That’s not—"

"Don’t." Her voice came out flat and pleasant, which was the register she used on brand deals she intended to decline. "I want you to actually answer it. I stood in front of a hundred-and-twelve-dollar webcam and I couldn’t get through four words, twice. Then you crouched down and used the voice you promised me you wouldn’t use in public, and I sang like my father was standing in the room. And now your phone is telling you that the difference was a buff."

"The phone said I’m a room."

"The phone says a lot of things."

"It says it scaled off your number." Jordan kept his hands open on his knees. "Chloe. It grades me. It has graded every single thing I’ve done since January, including the stuff I lied about and the stuff I hated myself for. It gave me two percent for a boba. It gave me nothing for the three thousand dollars. It docked me when I was a coward."

Her eyes flickered at that.

"It offered me a button in this apartment," he said. "Eight days ago. A link that would have pinned you at eighty-five percent forever, so you could never drop below it no matter what I did to you. And I said no and it gave me an achievement for saying no, because it can tell the difference between a thing that’s real and a thing I forced."

"I know what you said no to."

"Then you know what I’m telling you." He let it sit. "It cannot write a voice into your throat. It doesn’t have that button. If it did, I’d have used it on myself in February and I’d be a working musician by now instead of somebody who watches you and gets stupid."

Kumiko made a small sound and pressed her knuckles against her mouth.

Chloe looked at the frozen frame on the monitor. Her own closed eyes. Her own exposed throat.

"I need to test it," she said.

"Okay."

"I need to record it with you out of the building." She was already moving, pulling her hair back off her face, all business, the fear converted into a task list because that was the only engine she had ever been given. "Not down the hall. Not in 404 through a wall. Out. Parking structure, third level, in your car, minimum eighty feet of concrete and distance, and you don’t come back up until Kumiko sends you the file."

"Chloe-chan," Kumiko said carefully, "you don’t have to prove anything to—"

"I’m not proving it to you." Chloe pulled her sleeves back down over her hands. "I’ve got two hundred and eleven thousand dollars in an account I can’t explain to my own mother because I made all of it pretending to be somebody else. I built a whole person out of a ring light and a mask, and she was good, and she wasn’t me, and I am so tired of not knowing which parts of me are load-bearing."

The room went quiet except for the fan on the tower.

Jordan stood up and put his hand on top of her head, at the part, and left it there for four seconds without saying anything. Then he took his keys off the desk.

"Send me the file the second it exports," he told Kumiko.

"Sixty-second render. Maybe ninety."

"Text me if she gets in her head."

"I’m right here," Chloe said.

"I know."

The elevator took fourteen seconds. Jordan crossed the lobby, went out through the side door into February, and climbed the concrete ramp to the third level because his hip had loosened enough this week to allow it.

His Civic was in its spot, clean because Chloe made him vacuum it twice a week now. He got in, shut the door, and sat there in the dark with the engine off and the harbor lights smeared across the windshield.

He did not open the app.

He thought about the warning instead. Significant attention. Three months ago he’d been a person nobody in a lecture hall could have named, and now he had a shirtless photograph in mouse ears that had pulled sixty-two likes and a woman in Newport who’d called him at eleven-thirty at night about foam on a plate. He knew what a small amount of attention had already done to his life.

He tried to picture a thousand strangers deciding something about Chloe Kim’s voice in two hours on a Friday night, and his stomach did not enjoy the exercise.

His phone lit at 9:07.

Kumiko: file sending

Kumiko: i didn’t say anything to her. i just hit record. she did it in one take.

Kumiko: jordan-kun

Kumiko: please listen to the whole thing before you text her

He plugged the phone into the aux, because the Civic was a 2019 and he had never bothered with Bluetooth, and turned the volume to nine.

The first note came out of four factory speakers in a parking structure and filled the car up.

It was different. He could hear that immediately, and he had been braced to hear it, so he made himself stay honest about what the difference actually was. There was less air around her. The bridge came in a half-step cooler, less like she was being cracked open and more like she had decided to open. On the high note she didn’t flinch and she didn’t pull, and it went up clean and stayed there, and something at the end of the phrase caught and roughened in a way that had nothing to do with technique.

It was not the take from an hour ago.

It was good enough that Jordan sat in his own car with his hands on the wheel and forgot to breathe on schedule.

When the file ran out, the silence in the car had texture to it.

He listened again. Then he opened his messages.

Jordan: you don’t need me in the room

Jordan: you need me out of the way of yourself. that’s a different problem and you already solved it

The reply took two minutes, which for Chloe meant she had typed something, deleted it, and typed the true thing instead.

Chloe: kumiko is crying into a fabric swatch

Chloe: she says the second one is better and she hates that it’s better

Chloe: i listened to both eleven times

Chloe: the one with you in the room is warmer. the one without you is stronger

Chloe: i don’t know what to do with that yet

Jordan: you don’t have to know tonight

Chloe: come back up

He was out of the car before he finished reading it.

She met him at the door of 403 with her arms crossed, and she’d taken her contacts out at some point in the last twenty minutes, so her eyes were brown and small and unguarded. Behind her, Kumiko had the two waveforms stacked on one monitor and was scrubbing between them with the mouse, muttering numbers.

"You’re in the room on Friday," Chloe said. "Off camera. Behind the panel, where the frame ends. I want you where I can see you and nobody else can."

"Okay."

"Not because I need the buff." She said it fast, ahead of him. "Because I want you there. Those are different things and I’m choosing the second one, and I need you to know I checked."

"I know you checked."

"I’m going to keep checking."

"I’d be worried if you stopped."

Kumiko spun around in the chair with her laptop already turned toward them, and the thumbnail was done. Chloe’s face, eyes closed, blue streak across her cheekbone, the serif type clean along the bottom edge.

DEBUT. VALENTINE’S DAY. 8PM PST.

"Yuna-san said yes and she’s doing the overlay for free," Kumiko said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "She said she listened to the clip twice and she’s not charging us."

Chloe looked at her own face on the screen for a long moment.

Then she pulled the desk chair around, sat down beside Kumiko, and reached for her own laptop.

"Open a doc," she said. "We’re building a promo schedule and I want every post timed to the minute."