Nikki Vale, twenty-two, was four floors up doing a try-on haul livestream for a hundred and fifty viewers, and she had felt the algorithm abandon her in real time.
It was the crowd noise that told her first, the whole atrium tilting toward the fountain like water finding a drain, and then her own chat, all hundred and fifty of them, typed some variation of OMG ECLIPSE IS THERE and left. All of them.
Even WerewolfAssLicker_44, and WerewolfAssLicker_44 had been in her chat since she'd started.
Nikki stood on the fourth-floor mezzanine with her ring light and her stabilizer gimbal and looked down at the fountain, where a red monster in a sundress had a little girl sitting on her shoulders.
The kid had both hands around the horns like handlebars. Her mother was down at ground level apologizing with both palms up and doing it continuously, and the demoness was laughing far too hard to accept any of it.
The old bitterness came up Nikki's throat with the reliability of heartburn.
