Chapter 472 | Emotional Stability Isn’t in the Costume

Chapter 472: 472 | Emotional Stability Isn’t in the Costume

Jordan had heard Chloe sing in a karaoke booth with soju sweating on the table, and once in his kitchen over eggs she swore she hadn’t burned. He thought he had a read on her range. He was wrong, and he had never been happier to lose a bet he didn’t know he’d placed.

The second verse came up out of her ribs and filled the foam panels until the plastic fig in the corner deserved a noise complaint. She stood on her mark with her eyes shut and her palms open at her sides. The blue streak lay across her cheekbone, and the ring light turned her throat gold above the black knit. She didn’t flinch on the climb. She leaned into it, and the note went up and up and stayed there.

Jordan sat on a folding chair from Target behind the far panel. That made it the best seat in Southern California, and it had cost him eleven dollars. He kept his hands flat on his knees. Kumiko had threatened his life twice about his face, so he tried to keep that flat too.

His phone vibrated against his thigh. It went again, and then it gave up on manners and ran continuous in his pocket. He didn’t touch it. Whatever the golden app had to say about percentages and multipliers could wait in line behind the girl in front of him.

Across the room, Kumiko sat at the side desk in full Sally. Red yarn hair spilled over the blue patchwork, and painted stitches ran down both of her arms. Her mascara had already lost the war. She typed with one hand and pressed the other over her mouth, and her shoulders shook so hard the cat ears on her headset wobbled.

Jordan tilted his phone up far enough to see the stream with the sound off. The chat had found its voice again.

what the actual hell

lila was right for once

who IS this girl

im crying in a wendys parking lot rn

someone clip the bridge before i die

The follower counter in the corner of Yuna’s overlay read 287. Jordan blinked, and the number had jumped to 341.

Chloe reached the bridge, and her eyes came open.

They skipped the camera. They went past the lens and the panel edge, and they found the strip of shadow where he sat. For one line she sang straight at him, and her voice dropped into something so raw that Jordan felt it land in his chest right on top of Kumiko’s bite mark. He stayed still. He didn’t nod or lift a hand. He let her look, because that was the deal, and because six weeks had taught him that sometimes the most useful thing he could do was occupy a chair and keep his mouth shut.

Then her gaze slid back to the lens, and she gave the last chorus to three thousand strangers like it cost her nothing. Jordan knew that was a lie. It was the best lie she had ever told.

She held the final note long enough that Kumiko made a sound like a kettle with a grudge. Then Chloe let the note go.

The foam ate the last of it. The ring light ticked as it cooled, and Chloe stood there with her chest rising under the knit. For a second she was twelve and terrified, and then she was herself again.

"Hi, chat, I’m StellarNote." She cleared her throat and laughed at nothing. "Give me one second, because I forgot I have legs."

The chat lost its entire mind. Jordan watched the counter hit 512. No trait had touched that number, and he would have bet the onsen on it.

A text crawled across the top of his screen. Brooke had written it in full sentences, because Brooke would rather die than abbreviate.

Revised confidence interval: you are outside it, on the upper side. I have lit a second candle.

Lila followed thirty seconds later.

tell her she can talk now

i’m not watching btw

ok i’m watching. don’t tell her

Jordan grinned at the screen. Lila Martinez drove a car held together by spite and kept her heart in a lockbox labeled TOXIC WASTE. Right now she was refreshing Chloe’s stream like a soccer mom at a recital.

Chloe talked for twenty minutes. She told the chat she was a Communications major paying forty-five thousand dollars a year to learn how to say hello. She told them her mod was dressed as a rag doll and was not okay. Kumiko typed i am FINE in the chat in all caps, and four hundred people replied that she was clearly not.

Then Chloe picked up the water bottle and set it down without drinking. Jordan knew that move. It was the same tell she had when she reached the bottom line on a spreadsheet and didn’t like the total.

"This one isn’t in English," she told the camera. "My dad used to sing it in the car on Sundays, and he missed every high note. He’d sing them louder the second time, like volume was a fix for being wrong."

She closed her eyes and sang it.

Jordan didn’t understand a word of the Korean. He didn’t need to. He understood a dry cleaner in Koreatown with solvent on his hands and a daughter in the passenger seat, and he understood the promise a dying man made about the radio. When Chloe reached the high note, she hit it clean the first time. Then she sang it again, louder, on purpose.

Kumiko put her forehead down on the desk. Her headset slid sideways, and one red yarn pigtail fell into her keyboard and typed a row of letters into the mod chat.

At 9:14, the counter rolled over to 1,000.

Kumiko came off her chair like someone had plugged her into a wall. She screamed, and eight acoustic panels rated for professional vocal isolation failed to hold it in. Down the hall, a door opened and closed. Jordan was pretty sure he heard Miss Valentine say oh my word through two layers of drywall.

Chloe glanced at the side desk and back at the lens. "That was my mod, and she’s fine. She’s Sally tonight, so emotional stability isn’t in the costume."

Jordan’s phone finally stopped vibrating long enough to show him the gold.

?? QUEST COMPLETED ??

StellarNote: First Light

Followers: 1,000 / 1,000

Reward: 25 Quest Tickets

Reward: Legendary Music Production Suite (added to Inventory)

(Note: You sat in a chair while she did the work. Please do not take credit at dinner.)