She never got to ask.
Luna looked at the door. It was behind her, so she did it the short way, the way she always did at home. Her body stayed facing the desk. Her head turned past her shoulder and kept going, around the back, until she was looking straight down the hallway over her own spine.
Then it went back the same way, to Josh.
"Lebu. Get that."
He got up and went, still looking like a guy watching a car reverse into another car.
Who rang a doorbell on a Saturday night? She turned back to the screen to deal with the room thing before it ate the rest of the stream.
was that a doorbell
SHE JUST SENT HIM TO GET HER DOOR so it IS her house. he's at her HOUSE burn him burn him twice
Then the column changed.
WAIT
WHAT
WHAT WAS THAT
"What was what?" Luna said.
HER HEAD
HER HEAD WENT ROUND bigcatt: ok that is not a mesh that's not a mesh, that's not a mesh, meshes don't do that, the HAIR moved right
HOW DID THE HAIR MOVE RIGHT rewind it. REWIND IT krill: I've rewound it four times clip it
CLIPPED
Her head? She'd only looked at the door.
Then it caught up with her. Right. Humans couldn't do that. A human neck turned about as far as the shoulder and stopped there, and the body did the rest, and every single person in that chat knew it, because every single one of them had a neck.
Her thumb was still on the stick. On the screen, her character walked into a wall and kept walking into it.
This was bad.
She'd gotten comfortable, that was all. This was home. She turned her head like that in here every day, and nobody screamed about it, because nobody was here but Josh. She'd sat in this chair all night with her fingers two feet long and the chat loving every second, and somewhere along the way the bedroom had stopped feeling like it had a thousand people in it.
Then again, the fingers had been out for most of the night, and nothing had happened. A lot of screaming. One guy calling them the best mesh he'd ever seen. Maybe a head was the same as a finger? Maybe they'd scream for a bit and then ask for it again?
She just needed a reason that wasn't her.
The filters were right there. Everybody in that chat already hated the filters. They'd spent half the stream telling him to take them off.
"Oh, come on," Luna said. "That's the filter. It's been doing that all week. Hang on, let me see if it does it again."
She did it slowly, so the camera could keep up. Her chin went around to the left and kept going. Halfway around, the screen was gone and she was looking at the hallway, and she kept smiling anyway, for a lens she couldn't see.
Then the room came back around: the lights, the desk, the column moving so fast it was just light. She didn't stop at the front. She went around again, just as slowly, shoulders square to the desk the whole way.
She stopped facing the lens, exactly level, and gave them a second to look at her.
"Yep," Luna said. "That's the magic of the new filters."
For a second the chat didn't do anything at all.
Then the first pin went up.
5,000 Bits — DO IT AGAIN
She knew what that was. She'd watched a whole video about Bits. A Bit was a cent, so that was fifty dollars, and fifty dollars was a few steaks.
10,000 Bits — I have never given money to a stream in my life
That was a hundred. That was dinner for Josh.
7,500 Bits — whatever software this is I will pay for the licence personally
Software. They were paying for the software.
Luna's smile, which had been an act for the last minute, turned into a real one.
Then two guys in the chat started fighting about it. One of them gifted ten subs, which meant ten strangers in the chat got a month of Sable on him, and the other one saw it and gifted ten back, and then the first one did twenty. Every gift came up across the stream as a banner with a little fanfare, right over her face.
"Oh, are we doing this?" Luna said. She leaned in toward the camera. "Keep going. I'm counting."
They kept going.
THE WAR HAS BEGUN bro is NOT backing down krill: I'm not even in this and I'm sweating
She stopped counting steaks somewhere around the third banner and just watched the number in the corner climb.
SABLE · LIVE 1:51:07
Viewers: 1,063
Bits: 52,500
It was a lot. It kept being a lot. Somewhere under the smile her stomach did something she didn't like, and she ignored it.
Then the front door went, and Josh's feet came down the hallway, and the smile stayed exactly where it was while everything behind it turned over.
Josh. Josh, who knew what every number on that screen meant to the cent, and would look at the one in the corner and ask the only question that mattered, which was how.
"Okay, so that was—"
"Go get beer," Luna said.
She didn't know where it came from. Some part of her had wanted a drink very badly for the last minute, and that part had gotten to her mouth first.
"...What?"
"Beer." She didn't turn around. "From the store. Go get some."
"You don't drink beer." He was talking to the back of her head. "I don't drink beer. Neither of us—"
He was going to come closer. He was going to look over her shoulder.
"Lebu."
"We're literally in the middle of—"
"GO GET THE BEER."
It came out loud enough to make the mic crackle.
The chat treated it like Christmas.
SHE YELLED AT HIM mothbite: best stream I have ever watched and it's not close
Nothing behind her for a second. Then keys.
"...Okay," Josh said, from somewhere behind the lights. "Okay. I'm getting the beer."
The front door shut.
WAS THAT LEBU
THAT WAS LEBU'S VOICE ch1287: little guy voice. as predicted
So. Beer.
That was fine. People wanted beer all the time. It was a completely normal thing to want on a Saturday night, and if she'd said it a little loudly, that was because he'd been arguing.
She got about that far before she stopped lying to herself.
She'd sent him out because of the number. He'd have looked at it and known it was too much, and asked what she'd done to get it, and she'd have had to say it out loud. I looked at a door. And then he'd scold her. She could already hear exactly how.
As long as nobody said it out loud, it wasn't really a thing yet.
Then somebody in the chat linked the clip from somewhere else, and she opened it on the tablet with the end of one long finger.
Two seconds. Her, in the good chair, turning her head to look at a door until the back of it was facing the camera. Somebody had put a caption over it:
girl hears doorbell, forgets she's human
The likes were going up while she watched. Everybody under it was laughing.
Luna wasn't. She could think of a whole building of people, standing around a take-a-number machine, who wouldn't think that caption was funny at all.
On her own stream, the viewer count, which had been sitting still all night, started to climb. New names she'd never seen.
just got here from the clip. is this the head girl do the head
DO THE HEAD
They weren't Josh's readers. They didn't know who Lebu was or what the filter was supposed to be, and there were going to be a lot more of them.
It had to stop. Now, before the rest of the internet got here, and before Josh got back.
She smiled at the strangers.
"Okay, so," Luna said. "Bad news. I've got to cut this short tonight."
NO it's been two hours!!
you can't leave during a war
"I know, I know. There's a technical thing, and my tech guy's at the store." She held up both hands, still two feet long at the fingers. "Next time. I promise. A proper one."
is lebu ok we're sorry about the burning thing
"He's fine," Luna said. "He's getting beer."
She ended the stream at eight minutes past ten.
The room went quiet, and then Josh's phone started buzzing on the desk.
It was in her hand most days. It ran his X account and his Patreon and everything else of his she'd taken over that week, and now every one of them was going off at once: mentions, follows, people tagging him in the clip. She turned it face down. It buzzed against the wood. She put it in the drawer with the tablet. It buzzed in the drawer.
She turned the lights off and went to wait in the hallway, where she couldn't hear it.
✦ ✦ ✦
He got back at twenty past ten with a six-pack he'd obviously picked by the color of the box.
He stopped just inside the front door. The bedroom was dark. The hallway was dark. She was standing in the middle of it.
"Why are all the lights off?" He looked past her at the bedroom door. "Did you end it? What happened? Because that got really loud, and then you screamed at me in front of a thousand—"
She'd had eleven minutes to come up with something to tell him, and she'd come up with nothing. She cracked a can instead.
"We're drinking."
"...What?"
"We're drinking." She held it out. "Here."
Josh looked at the can like it might go off.
"I don't drink."
"Tonight you do."
"No, I mean I've never. Not once. Not in college, not at anything." He still had his keys in his hand. "It's not a whole thing, I just never got into it, and I'm not starting at ten at night because you—"
He stepped around her toward the bedroom.
"Let me just see what—"
Luna put her hand on the back of his head.
She didn't push. Her hand just arrived there and stopped being a thing he could move, and she tipped the can against his mouth. He swallowed, because the other choice was wearing it. Then he swallowed again. Then she let go, and he came off it coughing, with beer down his shirt, his eyes streaming, and the face of a guy who'd just been mugged in his own hallway.
She knew it was a shitty thing to do while she was doing it. She did it anyway. He'd been two steps from the bedroom.
"What the fuck," Josh said, when he could.
"Have another one."
"Why?"
"It's better after the first one."
That was true, as far as she knew. It was about the only true thing she said to him all night.
✦ ✦ ✦
They ended up on the couch. He had three.
Three was a lot of beer for a guy who was five-foot-six and had never had one. She watched it happen in stages. First he went pink. Then he got chatty. Somewhere in the third can he went soft around the edges and stayed there.
And drunk, it turned out, Josh was polite.
He thanked her for the stream. Then he thanked her again, in case the first one hadn't counted. He told her the fingers were the best thing anybody had ever done on a webcam, and then said sorry for interrupting her, though she hadn't said anything. He explained the color curve to her at length. Then he apologized for the color curve.
Then he turned on the couch and looked at her very seriously, the way he looked at a page he was proud of.
"You're gonna be really good at this," he said. "You know that? You're gonna be so good. I'm sorry the picture's so bad. You deserve a way better picture."
Luna drank about a third of her can in one go.
He nearly got there three times.
"Wait." He put a hand up. "The stream. What happened at the—"
"Drink."
"No, but at the end, you got really—"
"Drink."
"...Okay."
He drank. A while later he patted his pockets, slowly, one after another.
"Where's my phone?"
"Drink," Luna said.
He did, and after that he lost the thread completely and started telling her what Mr. Winsow thought of the neighbors, which he had never once brought up sober.
Every time he lost the question, something in her loosened a little. She didn't look at that too closely either.
She kept pace with him, which for her meant the rest of the six-pack and then the two dusty bottles at the back of the cupboard that had come with the apartment. It took work. Her body could undo anything she put in it, and it kept wanting to. She didn't let it, and eventually she got there.
She could have been sober in a second. She always could. But sober, she'd have had to think about it.
✦ ✦ ✦
They ran out eventually.
There was nothing left to open and nothing left to talk about, and he was listing sideways into the cushions halfway through a sentence about Mr. Winsow. So she got both arms around him and pulled him in against her, and he was asleep almost at once.
She didn't let go.
It was very quiet without him talking. Without the beer and his voice there was room for the rest of it to come back, and it came back all at once: the clip, the caption, the count climbing with names she didn't know, the phone buzzing itself across the bottom of a drawer. The building with the take-a-number machine.
She held on.
As long as he was asleep and she was holding him, it was still tonight. Nobody had looked at the number. Nobody had said anything out loud.
She lay in the dark with him and kept it that way for a few hours, until she fell asleep too.
✦ ✦ ✦
A phone woke her.
It was light out. Josh was still asleep on her, breathing beer into her collarbone, and somewhere in the apartment a phone was ringing.
His phone was in the drawer, and it buzzed. This one rang: a real ringtone, one she hadn't heard in so long it took her a second to place. It was hers. The phone she never used, the one she'd almost forgotten she had.
She could only think of one place that had the number.
She got out from under Josh an arm at a time. He made a noise and didn't wake. The ringing was coming from the kitchen, and she followed it to a drawer she never opened and found the phone at the back of it, face down, still going.
She turned it over.
INCOMING CALL
Solaris (Embassy)
It rang again in her hand.