Chapter 138: Every New Fan Is Another Line in a File Somebody Upstairs Is Keeping

Celia had handed him the word review in the yard and watched to see if it landed.

It hadn’t. Not the shape of it.

He’d carried it up the stairs that night and set it down next to everything else he wasn’t saying, and it sat there while the pack slept, a docket with his name on it somewhere he couldn’t see.

Dani found out about it two nights later.

She read the parts of the world other people scrolled past, and one of them didn’t add up.

Not bonded to him the loud way.

The moth sat quietly at the base of her skull and fed her patterns, and the pattern that woke her at the terminal was a growth curve that had no business existing.

"This isn’t real," she said.

Soren looked over.

She’d turned the screen toward him without being asked, which for Dani was the same as grabbing his collar.

A forum. Plain header. The Soren Kane Fan Club.

"People like people," Soren said.

"People don’t like people on this slope." She dragged a finger up the curve.

"Organic fame is lumpy. A win here, a rumor there, but this is a line. Somebody’s drawing a line."

◆◆◆◆

Selah came off her bunk and folded onto the arm of Dani’s chair, cold coming off her bare feet, chin on Dani’s shoulder to read.

"He does have a fan club," Selah said, delighted, wrong-delighted. "My tamer’s famous."

"Your tamer’s being made famous," Dani said. "Different verbs."

Selah’s frost ticked up a degree along the chair arm and stopped there, held, the smile not moving.

"Who’s making him?" she said.

The room’s temperature was doing the thing it did when Selah stopped finding something funny and hadn’t decided what to find instead.

Across the room Mona lifted her head off the mattress, reading the shift in the air before she read the words, the homing tuned to the pack’s mood before anyone said anything out loud.

Dani kept scrolling.

"The accounts posting the loudest praise are three weeks old," she said.

"All of them. Made the same week. They quote incident details that weren’t public. They know things only somebody with a report would know."

"Somebody with a report," Soren said.

"Somebody who files them." Dani pulled a second window.

"The posts spike between one and three in the morning. Every night. Consistent. That’s not a fan who can’t sleep, that’s a shift."

Soren already knew whose shift.

The monitor’s rounds ran through the same window.

He’d felt her light come on down the corridor the night Yara walked out. Night machinery, turning over.

He didn’t say the role out loud.

Naming her in the room made her a person the pack could go looking for, and he needed the pack pointed at the pattern, not at a woman in gray with a clipboard.

"So a fan club’s fake," Selah said. "Who cares. Let them draw their line."

"Because of what the line is for."

Dani turned the chair, dislodging Selah, who resettled against Soren’s side instead without a word, cold pressing through his sleeve, one hand closing loose around his forearm.

Claiming the spot. Making a point at the exact moment the conversation stopped being safe.

"Profile," Dani said. "Every fan is a data point. Every post is an engagement. Engagement is a number, and a number is what you put in front of a classification board when you want a case bumped up a tier."

The room went quiet in a new way.

"The review?" Soren asked.

"Yes, " Dani nodded. "Somebody flagged your aggregate months back. A flag by itself is nothing, it sits in a queue, it ages out. Unless the profile keeps climbing. Unless there’s a visible, documented, rising public interest that a board can point at and say, this one’s too big to leave in Z."

Selah’s grip on his arm tightened by one increment.

"They’re not celebrating you," Dani said.

"They’re building a file. Every person who joins that club adds a line to it, and the line is the argument, and the argument is: promote him, watch him, classify the girls around him. Holt came and took your temperature. This."

She tapped the screen. "This is who she was reporting to."

Dani had it almost whole. Holt, the file, the shift, the review.

She was missing one wall.

She didn’t know about the girl in the yard with the dead socket, the one who wasn’t reporting anything to anyone, who’d come only to watch.

Soren had that alone, and Yara had it through the channel, and he found he didn’t want to set it on the table next to the rest.

The pack could fight a file.

He didn’t have the words yet for a girl who wanted to see how long he lasted.

He kept it.

◆◆◆◆

Yara had come in at some point.

Nobody heard the door.

She was just against the far wall where the dark was thickest, red eyes open on the screen, and she’d heard enough of it to have done the math on the part that mattered to her.

"So the closeness feeds the thinning," Yara said, flat, to the room. "And the popularity feeds the file. Both of them run on the same thing."

She crossed the room.

She didn’t hurry.

She stopped at Soren’s other side, opposite Selah, and she didn’t touch him the way Selah was touching him.

She put herself between him and the door instead, which was the older, worse kind of possession, the kind that didn’t need a hand on an arm to say mine.

Two of them bracketed him now.

Mona had come off the mattress and closed the distance without being called, sitting against his shins, a third point, the homing settling the pack into a shape around the one thing all of them were built to keep.

◆◆◆◆

"So we found the shift," Maren said from the doorway.

She’d come in on the tail of it, heat already up, reading the room’s temperature off Selah’s frost and Yara’s stillness.

"One to three. Somebody’s awake up there every night. I can be awake too."

"You go up there and put heat on a monitor," Dani said, "you hand them the exact incident they need. Beast-class Z-tamer’s fox assaults a Council officer. That’s the file writing itself."

She didn’t have an answer for it, which was the worst kind of answer, and the heat came off her anyway with nowhere to go.

Soren looked at the three of them bracketed around him, Selah’s hand on his arm, Yara at the door, Mona at his shins, Maren burning in the frame with no target.

Every one of them built to defend him from a thing walking through the door.

None of them built for a thing that came as a rising line on a screen.

◆◆◆◆

"Take it down," Selah said. "The forum. Can you take it down."

"I can take down a mirror," Dani said.

"They’ll build ten. It’s not a fan club I’d be fighting. It’s whoever’s paying the accounts, and they’ve got a budget and a reason and a shift that runs one to three every night."

Soren looked at the curve on the screen.

A line somebody was drawing one sleepless hour at a time, and every tick of it was a reader out there deciding they loved a boy they’d never met, not knowing they were ink in an argument built to take him apart.

"You didn’t get famous,"

Dani said, and shut the terminal, the room going dark except for the red of Yara’s eyes and the pale of the frost creeping off Selah’s hand where it still hadn’t let go of his arm.

"You got made famous."