Infinite Cashback System

Chloe blinked. "Okay what?"

"Okay, I’ll talk to her. When she wakes up. When we get home. Somewhere private where I can actually think without operating heavy machinery." He exhaled and some of the pressure that had been building in his chest since the gas station vented like steam from a pipe. "But I need you there. I’m not having that conversation without you."

"Obviously."

"And I’m not registering anyone until I know she actually wants this and isn’t just going along with it because she thinks it’ll make you happy."

Chloe’s eyebrows rose a fraction. The word "registering" had slipped out naturally, System terminology bleeding into normal conversation, and Jordan watched her file it away without comment. She would ask about that word later. She always asked later.

"Deal," Chloe said.

The Cooper Garment Lofts appeared on the right, the five-story converted factory building with its original 1920s brickwork and new steel-framed windows reflecting the afternoon sun. Jordan turned into the parking structure and wound up the ramp to the fourth level, finding his usual spot two spaces from the elevator. He killed the engine. The lo-fi playlist stopped. The car was quiet except for Kumiko’s gentle breathing in the backseat and the tick of the cooling engine.

Chloe unbuckled her seatbelt and turned around to look at Kumiko.

Kumiko was out cold. Her head had created a small fog circle on the window where her breath condensed against the glass. Both of her platform sneakers had come untied during the drive. The Pocky box sat in her lap, empty, with the wrapper crinkled into a ball shape that suggested she had been squeezing it unconsciously while she slept. Her twin tails had shifted during the drive so that one pointed roughly northeast and the other pointed due south, giving her the appearance of a broken compass needle that had given up on finding north.

Jordan reached over the headrest and placed his hand on Kumiko’s shoulder. Gentle. Careful. Just enough pressure to reach her through whatever dream she had been living in.

"Hey. Kumiko. We’re home."

No response.

He squeezed slightly. The fabric of her crop hoodie was soft under his palm, and he could feel the warmth of her skin through it, the narrow ridge of her collarbone and the small curve where her shoulder met her neck. She was so small. Not fragile, because Kumiko possessed an intensity that made her take up three times her actual physical space, but compact. Built at a different scale than Chloe, who was five-six and lean, or Alexis, who matched Jordan in height with heels. Kumiko was five-four in platform sneakers and weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds, and Jordan’s hand covered her entire shoulder with room to spare.

"Mmmhh..."

Kumiko’s eyelids fluttered. Her brow creased. Then her eyes opened.

Brown eyes. Big, round, anime-protagonist brown eyes that caught the afternoon light filtering through the parking structure and reflected it back with a warmth that had nothing to do with optics. They focused on Jordan’s hand on her shoulder first. Then they traveled up his arm to his face.

Kumiko smiled.

It was a sleepy, disoriented, unguarded smile. The kind of smile that happened before the brain fully booted and remembered to install its social filters. Her lips parted, showing the edge of her front teeth, and her cheeks bunched upward, pushing her eyes into crescent shapes that made her look impossibly young and impossibly open.

"Jordan-kun," she murmured. "Good morning."

"It’s four in the afternoon."

"Mm." She stretched her arms overhead, her fists bumping the Civic’s low ceiling, and her crop hoodie rode up to expose a strip of stomach that Jordan noticed and then forcefully un-noticed. The stretch ended with a yawn that was eighty percent sound effect, a high-pitched "Fuaaahh" that no person over the age of twenty could produce without irony. She rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands.

Then she realized where she was. Who she was with. What had been said in this car before she fell asleep.

The color returned to her face in stages, like watching a sunset in reverse. First her ears. Then her cheeks. Then her neck, where the flush disappeared beneath the collar of her hoodie and presumably continued downward to parts of her anatomy that Jordan was not currently thinking about.

"I fell asleep."

"You fell asleep," Chloe confirmed from the passenger seat.

"Oh no. How long was I out?"

"About twenty-five minutes."

Kumiko covered her mouth with both hands. Above her fingers, her eyes were enormous, two dark pools of mortification that bounced between Jordan and Chloe with the frantic energy of a pinball. "Was I snoring? I snore sometimes. My roommate in high school said I snore. She recorded it once and sent it to me and it was really loud and kind of nasal and—"

"You drooled a little," Jordan said.

Kumiko’s hands flew from her mouth to her chin, where her fingers found the thin trail of moisture and wiped it away with a noise that could only be described as a whimper. She looked at the dampness on her fingertips and then at Jordan and then at the car window and then at the ceiling of the Civic as though calculating whether it was structurally possible to phase through the roof and escape into the atmosphere.

Chloe opened her door and stepped out into the parking structure. She stretched her arms overhead and rolled her neck, the vertebrae popping audibly. Then she leaned down and looked through the car at Kumiko.

"Kumi. Come upstairs. We need to set up the equipment." A pause. "And we need to talk."

Kumiko stopped breathing.

Jordan watched her in the rearview. Her brown eyes, which had been bouncing around the interior of the car like rubber balls, went completely still. Kumiko locked eyes with Chloe through the open car door. Chloe’s expression, which had been amused, softened. She gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. All the frantic energy drained from Kumiko, replaced by a quiet stillness.

Kumiko’s throat moved as she swallowed.

"Okay," she said.