Chapter 471 | oh

Chloe snorted into her tea.

“I mean it, Chloe-chan.” Kumiko scooted closer until their hips touched. “I stood in his hallway two weeks ago and heard you singing to the eggs. I didn’t know anybody was home. I cried so hard I had to sit on the floor next to the snickerdoodles. Miss Valentine opened her door and gave me a tissue and didn’t say anything.”

Chloe’s jaw worked. She set the mug down.

Kumiko lifted her hand and put it on top of Chloe’s head, right where Jordan put his on her. Chloe’s hair was cool and heavy. Kumiko patted twice.

“You don’t have the trait,” Chloe said. Her voice wobbled on the last word.

“I have love. It’s a separate stat, and mine is maxed.”

Chloe laughed, and it came out wet. She tipped sideways until her temple landed on Kumiko’s shoulder. Kumiko kept her hand there and made small circles with her thumb the way he did. Chloe’s breathing went long and slow against her collarbone.

“Don’t tell him I was down here,” Chloe said into her shirt.

“I tell him everything. It’s rule five, no lying.”

“This isn’t lying. This is a closed loop between the two of us.”

Kumiko thought about it. She thought about the notebook upstairs and the seven pages about his freckles and the empty page thirty-six waiting for tomorrow. Then she nodded against Chloe’s hair.

“Okay, it’s a closed loop. I’ll write it down, but nobody gets to read that page, not even me.”

“How are you going to write a page you can’t read?”

“I’ll close my eyes. You taught me that today.”

Chloe pinched her thigh hard. Kumiko squeaked. Upstairs, Jordan’s voice drifted down sleepy and annoyed, asking who was murdering whom. Both of them pressed their hands over their mouths and shook until the mug rattled on the quartz.

Friday went by in pieces.

Kumiko remembered toast at seven. She remembered Jordan making three omelets and tilting the pan for each one while Chloe sat at the island in silence. She remembered Brooke texting the group chat at 11:02 with a graph titled CONFIDENCE INTERVAL, REVISED, and a single line under it that said she would be watching with a candle lit for ambiance. Lila sent a voice memo at four that was eleven seconds of silence followed by “practice that, nerd.”

By 7:52 that night, Unit 403 smelled like hot electronics and Kumiko’s setting spray.

Kumiko sat at the side desk in full Sally. She had finished the last patch on the dress at three in the morning on Tuesday, and every stitch was hers. Red yarn hair fell past her shoulders over the blue patchwork. Painted seams ran down her arms and across her collarbone, and she had drawn one over the bite mark on purpose. Her laptop showed the mod panel and Lila’s stream side by side.

Lila’s channel read 4,208 viewers. Lila sat in her cracked gaming chair under purple string lights, wearing a black mesh top over a bra the color of a bruise. Her violet contacts glowed in the ring light. She was farming pumpkins and insulting a subscriber named TaterTom for his crop rotation.

Chloe stood in front of the acoustic panels and did not move.

She wore a black knit top that slid off one shoulder and showed the gold chain at her throat. Her hair hung down, and the blue streak curled across her cheekbone where Yuna had painted it on the overlay. She had left the contacts out. Her eyes were her own dark brown, and in the ring light they looked enormous.

Jordan sat on a folding chair behind the far panel, out of frame. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. Chloe could see him from her mark, and nobody else could. Kumiko had checked the angle four times with a ruler.

“Seven minutes,” Kumiko said.

“I can read the clock, Kumiko.”

“I know you can, Chloe-chan, I’m just saying it out loud for the room, so the room knows.”

Chloe closed her eyes. She breathed in through her nose, and Kumiko watched her ribs expand all the way down into her stomach, low and wide, the breath Jordan had given her back last night with his hands. She held it. She let it out.

Kumiko’s phone lit up. It was Jordan, texting from eight feet away.

Is she okay

Kumiko typed back with her thumbs shaking. She’s doing the breath. Don’t you dare look at her with your face.

What face

The one that makes people forget their own names. Turn it off.

He sent a single thumbs-up. Kumiko glanced over the desk. He was already looking at Chloe, and his face was doing it anyway.

At 7:58, Lila’s voice came through Discord into Kumiko’s headphones.

“Yamanaka, you there?”

“I’m here, Lila-san, I’m in Sally, I’m ready, I’ve been ready since Tuesday.”

“Tell Kim I’m not doing a speech. I’m saying three words and hitting the button. If she talks first, I’m unfollowing her live on my own stream.”

“She won’t talk first. She practiced silence for forty minutes.”

A pause. “Good. That’s the only thing she’s ever practiced that I respect.”

On the screen, Lila set down her controller. She leaned toward the camera until her black lipstick filled half the frame. Her chat was scrolling so fast the words smeared.

“Okay, idiots, listen. I’m sending you somewhere, and you’re going to shut up when you get there. If anybody spams emotes in her chat for the first minute, I’ll find out who you are. Go.”

The raid button flashed.

Kumiko’s mod panel exploded. The viewer count on StellarNote jumped from 13 to 1,140 to 3,612 in the space of two breaths. Usernames flooded the chat, and half of them were Lila’s purple badge.

KhaosKitten raid incoming

who is this

lila said shut up so im shutting up

why is she not talking

Kumiko’s hands hovered over the keyboard. She typed one word in the mod channel and pinned it.

listen

Second four. Second five. Chloe stood with her eyes closed under the ring light and didn’t move at all. The chat started to slow. A few question marks trickled through and then stopped.

Second eight. Behind the panel, Jordan unclasped his hands and set them flat on his knees. Kumiko saw Chloe’s eyelids flicker once toward that corner, and then go still.

Second ten. The chat went completely empty for the first time in a minute. Three thousand six hundred people were waiting.

Second eleven.

Chloe opened her mouth and sang.

The first line came out low and full, from somewhere under her ribs, and it filled the acoustic foam until the room rang. It wasn’t apologizing. It didn’t pull back on the big note. It went straight into the second line and climbed, warm and huge, and Kumiko’s whole body broke out in goosebumps under the Sally dress.

The chat sat frozen for three seconds. Then one line came through from a Lila subscriber called gravestonegrl.

oh

The follower counter in the corner of Kumiko’s screen ticked. 13. Then 41. Then 108.