Chapter Six — Before the World Hears (continued)

A minute before midnight Eastern, VESPER was already being discussed in three dozen languages.

In Los Angeles, Monday evening had barely finished. In London, it was five in the morning; in Tokyo, lunchtime was approaching. Everywhere, listeners waited for the same digital switch. The master that Asher Quinn had approved the previous afternoon was safely delivered, and the song's distribution window was finally about to open.

Gravity Thief had been the sound of a man holding an entire audience in his fist. Nobody expected the next single to sound like that same man losing an argument with a woman sitting one inch away.

At exactly midnight, Stuck on You became available worldwide. Its brisk pulse pushed forward while the words drew closer and closer to one private, imagined room. The singer who seemed invincible on a stadium stage couldn't keep his attention on anything but another person's smile. By the last refrain, the assurance that he had the upper hand had become a joke both characters were in on.

VESPER's verified account lit up once. The rest of the world supplied the noise.

The first complete listens were already provoking revisions to other people's expectations. A live chat devoted to VESPER's older, more theatrical songs tried to decide whether a teasing love song counted as a betrayal of scale. A moderator deleted the same all-caps demand for the muse's name six times. Someone else began making an annotated diagram of an imaginary restaurant table. Nobody had bothered to ask whether the glass in the song had ever existed.

Behind the unverified Orbit account, Luna Reyes listened for a second time with her earphones pressed firmly into place. Her little Boston fern stood outside the bathroom, immune to the cultural earthquake taking place across her phone. Her own first kiss with Asher was barely two days old, an ordinary moment at an ordinary doorway that had left her happy in ways she still didn't entirely know how to name.

And now VESPER was singing about the torment of a doorway, a stolen drink, a dangerously small gap between hands. The words made heat climb her neck. Some of those details felt painfully familiar to anyone who had ever wanted to kiss someone. Others, especially the lipstick and the stolen sip, were vivid enough to make the imaginary woman seem infuriatingly real.

Luna didn't mistake a pop song for a police report. She knew artists constructed scenes. That did not remotely prevent her from feeling jealous of a woman she could not identify, possibly did not exist in the form described, and would almost certainly have defended against anybody else's criticism.

She could be tender about the civilian man whose overshirt she'd caught at her doorway and catastrophically unhinged about the masked artist she'd admired for years. Both feelings existed. Neither gave her a clue that they belonged to the same man.

She read her own first reply again and felt the prickle of being both sincere and absurd. She genuinely wanted VESPER to be happy. She also wanted to argue with whoever had managed to make him sing as though a casual glance could knock the air from his lungs. In the privacy of her apartment, she could admit to being delighted that Asher had looked at her with something like that expression on Sunday. On her public account, she could not help making the imaginary competition vastly more dramatic than it deserved.

So Orbit went back to work.

By one in the morning Eastern, the same refrain was traveling through kitchens, night shifts, train platforms and crowded group chats. Reviewers heard a sharp reinvention of VESPER's old commanding persona; fans heard seduction, self-mockery, a confession, or simply a very good chorus. Some insisted the details proved somebody had finally broken his heart in advance. Others pointed out that fictional scenes were what songwriters did for a living. Neither camp had access to Asher's notebook, Nico's advice or the woman who had actually kissed him on Sunday.

At the center of it all was one verified post at midnight. VESPER's account offered no follow-up, no approving like, no teasing correction to the muse theories. For the moment, the silence was drowned out by everybody else's excitement.

Orbit replayed the song yet again, muttered that its mysterious heroine ought to be prosecuted for excessive charm, then grudgingly saved it to the playlist she reserved for songs she loved too much to behave around.

Somewhere beneath the noise, Gravity Thief was still playing. This new song hadn't replaced the superstar's earlier music; it had given the world a new reason to go back and argue about all of it.

A few accounts began composing identity theories before the first hour was over, carefully marking where the singer sounded astonished by his own boldness. Others ignored the hunt entirely and praised a chorus that could fill a concert hall without pretending intimacy was weakness. The theories disagreed about almost everything. One thing united them: none of their screens contained the name of the woman the artist had really met.

The unknown woman remained unknown. The song was no longer private. And the mask, for the first time that night, had nothing more to say.