Infinite Cashback System

The hum sat behind his ribs, warm, insistent, a pressure that had nothing to do with his sister as a person and everything to do with the System deciding proximity plus family plus physical contact equaled a data point it wanted to log. He knew the difference.

He’d told Chloe he knew the difference, had built a whole theory about enhancement versus creation, about the trait amplifying a foundation instead of pouring a new one, and standing here with Cassie’s thumb on his jaw he found out he was right and also found out that being right about the mechanics didn’t do a single thing about the mechanics.

The foundation was sisterly. It stayed sisterly. It just came in louder.

Which meant the annoyance came in louder too. The specific, ancient, teeth-grinding annoyance of being the little brother, the underperforming asset, the one Cassie had written off and was now, apparently, reclaiming. That amplified fine. That amplified great.

"You can let go of my face now," he said.

"Can I." Her hand didn’t move. Her smile did, a millimeter, into something that was almost playful, which was worse than the placid version because the placid version he understood. "You’ve gotten touchy. You used to let me do this. You used to let me fix your collar and check your teeth and drag you around by the ear. Now you flinch."

"I don’t flinch."

"You flinched." She finally dropped her hand, but she didn’t step back, and she was close enough that he could smell the perfume, the expensive one, the one that cost more per ounce than his monthly grocery budget used to. She reached out again, casual, and straightened the collar of the henley Chloe had picked out, two fingers running along the seam. "This is nice. Someone dressed you. Mom said you had a girlfriend."

"I do."

"The one from the FaceTime." Her fingers were still on his collar. "Chloe. The one who called herself your girlfriend before you could open your mouth. I liked her. She had a spine." A beat. Her eyes flicked down, back up, and there was something evaluative in it now, something that tracked the changes in him the way a woman tracks a stock she used to hold and sold too early. "Where is she."

The shower shut off upstairs.

Of course it did. Of course the universe waited until his sister was standing eight inches away with her hand on his collar to schedule the exact moment Chloe would come down the stairs in a towel with her hair dripping and her natural brown eyes and the bite mark on her throat that no collar was going to cover.

Cassie heard it too. Her eyebrow moved. Just the one.

"She’s here," Cassie said. Not a question. She stepped back finally, one deliberate half-step, and her smile widened into the dazzling one, the warm one, the one that meant absolutely nothing and disarmed absolutely everyone. She looked entertained. She looked like she’d been handed a variable she hadn’t expected and was already recalculating the whole model around it. "Well. This is going to be a much more interesting dinner than I planned."

"Cass."

"Little brother." She picked up the bakery bag again, turned it in her hands, set it down. Whatever she’d found in his face, she wasn’t done with it. "You dodged Mom for three weeks. You dodged me. You changed your whole body and your whole face and you got a girlfriend who claims you fast and lives close enough that she’s showering in your apartment at nine in the morning on a Saturday."

She tilted her head, and the bob swung and settled back into place like it was afraid of her too. "I flew down early because I thought something was wrong with you. And now I’m standing here and I can’t figure out what it is."

"Nothing’s wrong with me."

"That’s what worries me." Light. Almost singsong. She reached out one more time, quick, and tapped him twice on the sternum with one manicured nail, directly over where the henley hid the bite mark Kumiko had left three days ago, and he felt the tap land on the bruise and had to keep his face flat through it. "Something’s right with you. That’s new. I don’t have a file on the version of you where something’s right."

Footsteps on the stairs.

"Jordan, did you eat the ginger candy, I swear if you—" Chloe came around the landing, towel knotted at her chest, hair loose and dark and dripping onto her collarbones, one hand still adjusting the tuck of the towel, and stopped.

Four things happened on her face in the space of one breath. Recognition. Calculation. The specific flat stillness she wore when she didn’t want anyone to know what she was thinking. And then, last, deliberate, a smile she chose to put on rather than one that happened to her.

"You must be Cassie," Chloe said, and didn’t apologize for the towel, didn’t cover the bite mark, didn’t do anything except walk down the last three steps like she’d been expecting company. "Jordan didn’t tell me you were coming early."

"He didn’t know." Cassie’s smile met Chloe’s smile and something passed between them, some fast bright dangerous thing, two predators recognizing that the other was also a predator and deciding, provisionally, not to eat each other. "I like surprising people. You learn more."

"You do," Chloe agreed. "So do I."

Cassie’s eyebrow moved again.

Jordan stood between them in the henley his girlfriend had picked out, with the trait still humming warm behind his ribs, with a bakery bag on the island and a bite mark under his collar and a sister who’d flown down a day early because something was right with him for the first time in eighteen years and she didn’t have a file for it.

His phone buzzed once in his pocket. He knew what it was. He didn’t look.

"Coffee?" Chloe said, already moving toward the machine, towel and all, like the most normal thing in the world was hosting her boyfriend’s terrifying sister in a bath towel at nine in the morning. "Jordan takes cream, one sugar. I’m guessing you take yours black and slightly threatening."