"This is a lifestyle, not a costume." Lila gestured at herself, corset and chains and the purple streak. "But yeah. Fine. Saturday. I’ll clear it with my regulars, do a couple hype posts this week, get them primed." She pointed the soju bottle at Chloe. "But if you try to make me do a cutesy intro I’m leaving. No ’hi guys welcome to the stream.’ I’d rather die."

"Deal," Chloe said.

"And I want editorial control over anything with my face on it. I’ve had brands try to make me look approachable. It’s a nightmare. My whole appeal is that I hate everyone."

"That’s in Brooke’s operating agreement already," Jordan said. "Talent has final approval on their own likeness. Section six."

Lila blinked at him. "You have a section six."

"We have a section thirty-four. Brooke wrote a novel."

"It’s thirty-four pages," Brooke said. "A novel is substantially longer. The average novel is between seventy and ninety thousand words. My document is nine thousand four hundred."

"See," Lila said, delighted, "she does it every time. She just corrects you into the dirt and doesn’t even know she’s doing it."

"I’m aware I’m doing it."

"That’s so much worse."

Jordan let out a breath he’d been holding since Alexis rounded the corner and his brain caught fire. It leaked out of him slow, all the tension of the last four hours, the boxing bruises and the Eliza quest and the way Alexis’s eyes had gone glassy right before she walked back to a lifetime of container throughput. The stream was happening. The plan was real. His girls were sitting in a booth planning the thing he’d been paid a quarter-million-dollar fantasy to build, and they didn’t need him to do a single thing except keep flipping meat and stay out of the way.

The quest tracker in his pocket hadn’t buzzed once. He’d checked, obviously. Old habit. But for the first time in weeks the score didn’t matter. The score was the thing that happened while he wasn’t looking, and he’d finally stopped looking.

"You just sighed like you finished a marathon," Lila said.

"Long day."

"Mm." She dragged the O-ring on her choker back and forth on its chain, watching him over the rim of the soju bottle with those violet contacts that made her look like something that ate people. "Boxing bruises, business dinner, ex-girlfriend homework, whatever that henley-stealing blonde thing was that just walked out. Busy man." She took a slow sip. "So which one you banging tonight."

The table detonated.

Kumiko choked on her water. Chloe’s wineglass stopped halfway to her mouth. Brooke’s pen scratched a jagged line across whatever she’d been writing, and her whole face went the exact red of her eyes, which Jordan hadn’t known was possible.

"Lila," Chloe said.

"What." Lila spread her hands, entirely unbothered, boots back up on the bench. "It’s a reasonable question. He’s got two girlfriends who’ve documented his breathing patterns in a shared file, which by the way is deranged and I need to see it. He’s clearly the kind of guy who’s got a whole rotation. I’m just asking about logistics." She turned to Jordan. "Is it a schedule? Do you have a schedule? Do they alternate? God, tell me they alternate, that’s so funny."

"We don’t have a schedule," Jordan said.

"That’s a schedule waiting to happen."

Kumiko had recovered enough to speak, which was its own kind of disaster. "It’s not, like, a rotation, it’s more of a, um, an organic thing, we don’t, I mean sometimes I stay over but I have to text Chloe-chan first, that’s a rule, rule two, and last time I stayed over Miss Valentine thought someone was being murdered because I was very-"

"Kumiko," Chloe said.

"-loud," Kumiko finished, and then clapped both hands over her mouth like she could shove the word back in.

Lila stared at her.

Then she threw her head back and howled, a sound that turned two heads at the neighboring table and made Brooke shrink so far into the corner she was practically inside the wall.

"Oh, this is the best day of my life," Lila wheezed. "You’re loud. You. The pastel one with the ribbons. That’s incredible. That’s genuinely the funniest thing anyone has ever told me."

"I have a very responsive nervous system," Kumiko said, muffled behind her hands, ears glowing.

"I bet you do."

"Can we please," Brooke said, from inside the wall, "discuss literally any other topic. There are children in this restaurant. There is a child directly behind me. I can hear it eating."

"The child’s fine, robot girl."

"The child is being exposed to explicit content."

"The child is four and eating a spring roll. It doesn’t know what banging is."

"Statistically some four-year-olds have surprising vocabularies," Brooke said, and then immediately looked like she wanted to walk into the ocean Lila had threatened earlier, because everyone at the table turned to look at her, and she’d done it again, contributed a fact that made everything worse instead of better, the way she apparently could not stop doing. Her pen had stopped. Her hands were flat on the table. She stared at the laminated menu like it might save her.

Jordan took pity.

He reached over and set the tongs down, and he looked at Lila, and he let his voice do the thing it did now, the thing the System had installed in his throat that made rooms go quiet whether he wanted them to or not.

"Nobody’s banging anybody tonight," Jordan said. "I got a body shot to the ribs from a professional fighter three hours ago and I can barely lift my arm. I’m going home. I’m icing my side. I’m going to sleep like a person who got assaulted for exercise, and tomorrow I’m going to do it again because apparently that’s who I am now."

The Alluring Whisper landed on the whole table at once. Kumiko’s shoulders dropped. Chloe’s jaw unclenched. Even Lila, crude undentable Lila, went still for half a second, her sharp face softening around the edges before she caught herself and scowled at him.

"That’s not fair," Lila said.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."