Alexis’s chair scraped once as she settled across from Harrison, and then the gap in the sliding screen swallowed her whole. Gone. Back to her merger and her water for skin quality and a man who cataloged her like inventory.

Jordan pocketed his phone and turned back to the booth.

Four girls stared at him.

"What," he said.

"You texted her," Kumiko said. Her eyes were the size of the plates. "You texted her under the table like a spy. Chloe-chan, he texted her."

"I know," Chloe said. She hadn’t stopped watching him. Her expression sat somewhere between amused and something with teeth. "I was sitting right here."

"It’s not a thing." Jordan reached for the tongs and flipped a strip of bulgogi that didn’t need flipping. Gave his hands a job so they’d stop giving away his brain. "She looked like she was drowning. I threw a rope."

"You threw a rope to a girl who called your family’s convenience stores a joke," Lila said. She had her boots up on the bench now, soju bottle balanced on her knee, black lipstick smudged at one corner from too much meat. "That’s either the dumbest or the hottest thing I’ve seen all week. I genuinely can’t decide."

"Both," Brooke said, without looking up from her notebook. "Statistically, altruism directed at someone who insulted you correlates with elevated attachment. The rope-throwing is the tell."

Jordan pointed the tongs at her. "You’re supposed to be on my side."

"I’m on the side of the data."

"The data can eat my ass."

Brooke’s pen stopped. Her crimson eyes flicked up, went pink at the edges, dropped back down. "That’s anatomically impractical and I’d prefer you not weaponize me in your denial."

Kumiko made a strangled sound into her hand.

Lila cackled, the real one, the ugly one that scrunched her whole face and knocked ten years off it. "Okay. Okay, I love her. Robot girl, you’re mine now, we’re friends, it’s not up for debate."

"I did not consent to friendship."

"Nobody consents to friendship. It just happens to you like a car accident."

The grill hissed. Kumiko stole a piece of pork belly off Jordan’s side of the plate with the reflexes of a raccoon, and he let her, because watching her cheeks puff out around the meat did something stupid to his chest that he’d stopped fighting three days ago.

He let himself breathe.

Alexis was gone. The Eliza thing was a quest he’d accepted in a gym bathroom stall like a lunatic. The onsen was a million dollars he refused to touch. Somewhere in his pocket a golden app kept score of every heartbeat and every lie and every girl who’d looked at him like he mattered.

And right here, in this booth, with grill smoke curling toward the exposed brick and four ridiculous women arguing about whether char was a flavor or a war crime, none of that weighed anything.

That was the part that scared him. Not the System. The peace.

"So," Chloe said, and the table quieted, because Chloe’s voice did that. "Are we going to talk about the actual plan or are we going to keep pretending this is a hangout and not a business dinner I’ve been trying to run for forty minutes."

"It’s a hangout," Lila said.

"It’s a business dinner."

"It’s a business hangout," Kumiko offered, radiant, sauce on her cheek that Jordan reached over and thumbed away without thinking. She froze. Went crimson. Her whole body listed toward him like a plant toward a window.

"The plan," Chloe said again, sharper, and Jordan pulled his hand back before Kumiko’s spine gave out entirely.

Chloe set her wineglass down and pulled out her phone, and there it was, the thing Jordan had watched her do a dozen times now, the switch from girlfriend to whatever the hell she’d built herself into over six months of running a six-figure empire alone in a closet with a ring light. The blue contacts caught the pendant lights. Her jaw set. She scrolled.

"Next Saturday," Chloe said. "Collab stream. All three of us. Me, Kumiko, Lila."

Lila’s boots came off the bench. "Doing what, exactly? Because if you say a game I’m bad at in front of my chat I’ll walk into the ocean."

"Just Chatting for the first hour. Then a party game. Something dumb and low-stakes where the fun is watching us fail, not watching us win." Chloe turned the phone so Lila could see. "Kumiko cosplays. You do your goblin thing. I sit in the middle and keep you both from committing crimes on camera. We start on your channel, because you’ve got the numbers, then you raid to me, then Kumiko goes live an hour later and raids the tail end of it."

"Cascade the audiences," Brooke said. "Lila’s seventeen thousand feed into StellarNote’s twelve. Even at three percent conversion that’s five hundred new eyes on a channel currently averaging four. That’s not growth. That’s a hundredfold jump in a single evening."

Lila squinted at Brooke. "Did you just do that math in your head."

"Yes."

"That’s disgusting. Do it again."

"No."

Jordan leaned back and let it happen. This was the thing about assembling people smarter than you and then getting out of the way. He’d spent a month learning that lesson. The old Jordan would’ve talked over all of them, tried to prove he belonged, sweated through his shirt performing competence he didn’t have. This Jordan flipped meat and watched his business build itself out of four voices that fit together like they’d been cut from the same board.

"I have a Nightmare Before Christmas cosplay half-finished," Kumiko said, bouncing. "Sally. I could finish the stitching by Thursday if I don’t sleep. Chloe-chan, you’d match it, you could be a little jack-o’-lantern, no, that’s too much, but the aesthetic, oh my god, the aesthetic."

"I’m not dressing up."

"You don’t have to dress up. You just have to sit there and be pretty and mean to the chat when they get weird." Kumiko turned to Lila. "You’re already dressed up. You dress up every day. That’s your whole thing."