Chapter Nine — An Unnamed Muse Returns (continued)

At 7:25 p.m., Luna Reyes finally made it into the library's staff alcove, closed the door, and put both hands flat on the counter as though she were preparing to negotiate with a dangerous animal.

The dangerous animal was her phone.

On the other side of the door, the oral-history exhibition was still full of ordinary life. Priya was helping two visitors find their grandfather in a neighborhood photograph. Someone had brought a stack of old bus transfers to donate to the archive. Luna had spent the evening protecting those stories from faulty equipment, awkward sightlines and, most recently, her own badly wounded pride.

Now VESPER had returned to the internet after four days of silence and admitted that a real woman had made him smile through an entire recording session.

Luna had played Stuck on You so often she could predict the instant it would make her stomach somersault. His new post had managed the same thing without a note of music.

It was obscene. It was wonderful. It was unfair to women attempting to remain employed in public institutions.

Her civilian phone conversation with Asher was still a sore, unfinished thing. He had let her down, defended himself badly, and promised to call at eight. She did not want to forgive him just because somebody else had been eloquent on the internet. She did, however, intend to be utterly ridiculous about VESPER while she still had a moment alone.

She opened @orbitafterdark. The first draft was too dignified. She deleted it. The second had six exclamation points and a threat to summon celestial witnesses. That was closer.

At 7:26, Orbit submitted her amended complaint to the universe.

At 7:32, Luna's notification screen stopped behaving like a device and began behaving like a weather system.

Her first thought was that someone had fabricated a screenshot. Then she saw the blue verification mark, the reply attached directly to her own post, the public timestamps, and the words sitting there without a single intermediary.

You wanted my attention? You have it.

VESPER had answered her. Not a publicist, not a parody account, not a fan pretending to know him. The man whose work she'd followed for years had found her courtroom nonsense among thousands of messages and replied to her by name.

Her knees, she discovered, had been gravely underestimated in her original complaint.

She sat on the staff-alcove stool because the alternative was to test whether the library's polished floor would catch her. She typed the first sentence of her answer four times before managing to submit the one the entire internet was already gleefully repeating.

By 7:38, Junia was calling her.

Luna stepped farther from the door, accepted the call, and heard her friend say, in a voice stripped of every pretense of composure, "You impossible woman. He answered you."

"I know."

"He addressed you by your ridiculous celestial name."

"I know."

"You are going to spend the entire concert on Tuesday acting like his reply is a marriage license, aren't you?"

"Junia, the universe has been awarded to me by a competent authority. I'm considering what to do with the property taxes."

"Consider wearing the earplugs I bought you. Your new empire apparently has no functioning internal organs."

Luna put a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing loudly enough to reach the visitors. Junia gave her three more seconds of breathless celebration before the tone changed.

"How did your exhibition go?"

"It was good," Luna said. "The cabinetmaker's daughter heard her dad. I got through the introduction. I almost cried in front of everybody, but I didn't."

"I'm proud of you. I wish I could've made it before the family portion was over."

For a moment Luna was grateful for a question that had nothing to do with a masked superstar or a man who'd disappointed her. She told Junia about the photograph beside the listening station, and how one of the children had asked whether old recordings could remember people. Then she heard herself saying, "Asher didn't come."

Junia went quiet.

"He called late," Luna continued. "We fought again afterward. He made it sound like my work was something cute he could drop into when he had time. And he brought up VESPER because I checked a rumor yesterday."

"That's lousy," Junia said. "The warning and the remark, I mean. I don't know what his rehearsal needed, but he knew he promised you something."

"He says he'll call at eight."

"Do you want to speak to him?"

"I don't know. I'm still angry." Luna watched a new flood of fan notifications bloom across her screen. "And I'm so happy about this, which makes me feel like a truly spectacular hypocrite."

"You're allowed to be happy about one thing and angry about another. Just don't make the two men pay each other's bills."

Luna nearly laughed again. "That sounded suspiciously wise. Did you hit your head on a radio?"

"I have a screwdriver in one hand and a half-dead receiver on the table. Wisdom is the cheapest service I offer."

They hung up before Luna had to return to the exhibition. The public thread kept running without them. Some fans praised VESPER's theatrical flirtation; others thought he was baiting a highly visible fan for engagement. A few rivals called it unfair celebrity gravity, and several people simply enjoyed watching Orbit collapse under a compliment she had publicly demanded.

Nobody connected her library badge or the family recordings to the girl behind @orbitafterdark. Nobody connected the beautifully masked celebrity to the civilian man she was furious with. Even Asher, having seen Orbit's cleverness on his account for years, knew only the public woman represented by the handle.

At 7:53 Luna put her phone facedown on the alcove counter and went out to help Priya close a listening station. She had won the universe, according to the evidence she was perfectly happy to present in court.

She still had an unresolved conversation waiting at eight.

And somewhere across the city, Asher was looking at that same approaching hour without knowing he had just made the woman he owed an apology to briefly forget how to stand.