Infinite Cashback System

Saturday started the way every good day started, which was Chloe standing in his kitchen critiquing his life choices before nine in the morning.

"You slept in the henley," she said. She was cracking eggs into a bowl with the efficiency of someone who’d done it four hundred times, blue streak tied back, wearing his black shirt because the henley was gone, claimed sometime around Wednesday and never returned. "That’s a laundry situation now. You have a nice one hanging on the closet door. Wear the nice one."

"You picked out my whole outfit."

"I picked out your whole outfit because the last time I let you dress yourself you showed up to a coffee date in a volleyball shirt from a team you never joined." She whisked. "Shower. Cassie’s making the reservation for seven. We leave at six-fifteen. You know how she is about lateness."

He did not, actually, know how Cassie was about lateness, but he knew Chloe had somehow constructed a full psychological profile of his sister from two FaceTimes and secondhand intel, and he’d learned not to argue with the woman who’d already run the numbers.

He showered. He came down in the nice henley, the dark one, the one that fit across the shoulders in a way the old Jordan’s shoulders had never earned. Chloe looked at him for exactly one second, mouth twitching, and went back to the eggs.

"Acceptable," she said.

"That’s your top rating."

"It’s my second top rating. Top rating I don’t give out before noon." She slid the eggs onto a plate and set them in front of him. "Eat. I’m going to shower and put my face on. If Kumiko texts, tell her I said the answer is still no about tonight but she can come to the debrief tomorrow."

"The debrief."

"The debrief." She kissed the corner of his mouth, tasted like coffee and the ginger candy she’d started keeping in the fridge, and disappeared up the stairs.

The water ran. He ate the eggs, which were good, obviously, because Chloe did not produce mediocre work, and he scrolled his phone with the specific numbness of a man who had approximately nine hours before he had to explain seventeen pounds of missing bodyweight to a woman who read spreadsheets for a living.

Kumiko had sent four messages. A drawing of him in a suit with hearts around it. A note that she’d finish the Sally cosplay by Tuesday. A photo of a stuffed dragon wearing a tiny party hat, no caption. And then, quietly, at the bottom, I know I can’t come tonight. I’m okay. I just wanted to say I hope your family loves Chloe-chan as much as I do.

He typed something back. Deleted it. Typed something else.

The knock came before he finished.

Three raps, sharp, evenly spaced, and then a fourth that wasn’t Kumiko’s fourth because Kumiko’s fourth was always too loud, always the collapse of politeness into whatever she actually felt. This fourth was measured. Intentional. The knock of someone who knew exactly how much force a door required and applied precisely that amount.

His stomach did something unpleasant.

He got up. Crossed the concrete. Told himself it was Miss Valentine with snickerdoodles, told himself it was a delivery, told himself it was anyone in the world except who it was, and opened the door on Cassandra McKnight standing in the fourth-floor hallway of the Cooper Garment Lofts in a charcoal blazer over a silk blouse, hair in the severe black bob that had never once in his life had a strand out of place, holding a paper bag from a bakery he didn’t recognize and looking at him with the placid, dazzling, completely empty smile that had ended more careers than a recession.

"Little brother," she said.

He forgot how to speak. Impressive, given how much practice he’d gotten lately.

"You’re," he managed. "You’re not supposed to be here until seven."

"Dinner’s at seven." She stepped past him into the apartment without being asked, because Cassie did not wait to be asked, because waiting to be asked implied the possibility of no, and Cassie’s entire architecture was built on the premise that no was a thing that happened to other people. Her heels clicked twice on the concrete. Her eyes moved across the space in one clean sweep, the clean floors, the gleaming kitchen, the couch with the throw pillows Chloe had fluffed that morning, the fake fig in the corner. Cataloguing. Pricing. "I wanted to see you first. Mom’s convinced you’re either in a cult or dying and I told her cults recruit better-looking men, so."

"Great to see you too."

"You cleaned." She set the bakery bag on the island and pulled off her gloves one finger at a time. "You actually cleaned. The last time I saw this apartment there was a pizza box fused to the coffee table and something under the bed I refused to identify. And now." She turned. Looked at him fully. The smile didn’t move but something behind it did, something bright and quick, gone before he could name it. "Now look at you."

The trait woke up.

He felt it the way he always felt it, a low hum that started somewhere behind his sternum, except this time it didn’t start behind his sternum, this time it started in the six feet of air between him and his sister and he had exactly enough time to think oh no before the System, silent all morning, decided this was the moment.

BEAUTY DETECTED. PROXIMITY ALERT.

He did not look at his phone. Looking at his phone was how you told a woman like Cassie that something was wrong, and Cassie could smell wrong from a trading floor forty stories up.

"You lost weight," she said. She crossed the distance he’d been so carefully maintaining for three weeks, and she reached up, and her fingers found his jaw, tilted his face toward the light from the factory windows the way she used to do when he was eight and she was fifteen and checking whether he’d been crying. Except her thumb dragged across his cheekbone slower than that. "And this happened. When did your face get like this."

"Genetics."

"Bullshit." Fond. She’d always cursed at him fond, the only softness she allowed herself. Her thumb was still on his cheekbone. "Grandpa looked like a bag of walnuts by twenty-five. Dad looks like a mailbox. This isn’t genetics, this is." She tilted his chin the other way. Studied him like a chart that had done something it wasn’t supposed to. "This is a whole different person, Jordan."