Soren was still holding Celia's question when Dani found him, which meant he'd been holding it most of a day, because Dani only came looking with a screen in her hands when the screen was worse than whatever he was already carrying.
"The line's still climbing," she said.
She didn't sit. She turned the terminal around on the desk so the curve faced him.
Same slope. The one from the fall, the unnatural one, the fan-club number going up on a grade that no organic thing climbed.
"It never came down," Soren said.
"It never even flattened."
◆◆◆◆
He'd stopped treating the too-convenient timing as noise a week ago and here was the noise, still going, on a graph in his own room.
"That's the old problem," Soren said. "Show me the new one. You didn't turn the screen around for a curve I already knew about."
Dani almost smiled. She didn't, but the corner of it was there and then it was gone.
