Getting ready for a gig in a few weeks was a lot less stressful than getting ready for the same gig in like, three days, as you may have already guessed. We recorded the new song I’d started writing on the beach, added some shorter instrumental transitions to smooth the flow between different songs, and polished up other old works in progress. We decided to do the cover song too, since it had turned out surprisingly well and got a bit of traction online. Although we weren’t in complete agreement about that one.

  “It sounds so different from the rest of our setlist,” Naya said, frowning as we listened to a rough cut of our tracks in order. “No matter where we put it in the list it’ll stick out.”

  “We could just do it at the end, then. It’ll be fine.”

  I told Cierra her cousin got me another gig at the Quarter Cup the next time we worked together. “Have you been there before?”

  “Not since it opened last year. I remember it being pretty small and dark, but it’s next to a really nice vintage shop if you come early enough to check that out,” she said. “And Congrats! Wish Jax would slide me job opportunities every once in a while.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know how the world of stage lighting worked. Maybe the supply just happened to be outpacing demand for that particular profession right now. “He said there’s a lot more Syren fans over there?”

  “Of course.” She rolled her eyes, the bitterness in her voice becoming even more pronounced. “Syren fans will listen to anything if a Syren’s singing it. They see a plastic face moving and go crazy.”

  I turned away from Cierra and started refolding some sweatshirts to give my hands something to do besides starting a fistfight. “Well, my Syren performs behind a curtain, so they’re going crazy for her without even seeing the plastic face move.”

  “The robotic voice then, whatever.” Cierra counted in the register with unnecessary force. “Isn’t that why so many people start making music with a Syren instead of singing their own stuff? Because there’s that built-in audience already? Smart move, tapping into that.”

  “Thanks!” I said in an aggressively bright voice. I didn’t want to let her get to me.

  So I took a deep breath, and continued, in that same bright voice, “I’m so sorry your cousin didn’t give you the hookup for a random one-off job in the single worst part of the city to commute to from here, truly. And like, I get it, it’s frustrating to see someone else get opportunities you don’t.” I looked up from the sweatshirt display directly into Cierra’s emerald-green colored contacts. “But don’t take that out on me. We have to work together twice a week. At least pretend to be chill for a day.”

  “...Jeez, overreact much?” Cierra muttered, before following up with a louder “You’re right, sorry.” She finished with the register and shoved the drawer back in with a clang. “I’ll message Jax myself and see if he can find me anything. I didn’t want to pester him too much before now, but it’s probably as good a time as any to start pestering.”

  “By all means, pester away.”

  I still felt annoyed, though. I could tell Cierra did too. The rest of the workday passed in an uneasy truce, with Rhonda acting as an unwitting buffer between the two of us.

  On my way home that day, I kept thinking about what she’d said. It was true, the Syren fandom could get obsessive. Most people found the artificial voices uncanny and repulsive, which made the people who did like the sound double down, which made the anti-fans louder in turn. But maybe Cierra was right. With a Syren, at most I could become a big fish in a small pond, or transition to producing for human singers and mainstream pop stars if I got lucky.

  If I could sing my own songs, I’d stand a shot at becoming actually, legitimately famous.

  So when I got into my apartment, I went straight to my recording closet and instructed Naya and Angie to keep out while I worked.

  I put on my headphones and cued up the backing track for Ocean. Hit record. Just to see what I could do.

  It didn’t go well, obviously. I wasn’t warmed up— I worried doing warm-up routines would make me chicken out. I ran out of stamina before the bridge. My pitch and volume control were all over the place. I had no idea how to breathe properly. I was not trained as a singer and it was painfully, pathetically obvious as I played my own song back to myself.

  My immediate instinct was to delete the recording and hide all evidence of my shame forever. But part of me wanted to save it, just in case. Maybe someday I’d spend some time learning how to sing properly and be able to look back on it and laugh. I gave the file an innocuous-looking name and hid it three folders down in the back of my work-in-progress folder.

  I opened the door back into my bedroom, blinking into the suddenly blinding light of the setting sun. Naya was standing facing the window, doing something with her arm.

  “I’m back,” I said quietly.

  She froze for a second, statue-motionless in a way humans can’t quite manage, before spinning around on her toes like a ballerina. “Welcome back!”

  “What’re you up to?” I asked.

  She froze again. “Just some self-maintenance. Self-care? I think that’s what you usually call it, right? My solar panels haven’t been... Well, in any case, I think I’ve fixed it now, so.” She smiled. “No more of that.”

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  “Uh...huh...” Okay, that was super weird. I’d have to follow up on it later. But right now, I was too depressed about my singing to give it much notice. I had no idea how I was ever going to get the time or money to take real singing classes, or even watch tutorials online on how to project cleanly. And I was clearly behind the door when the naturally good singing voices were being handed out.

  “How do you do it?” I asked her suddenly. “How do you sing everything perfectly on the first try?”

  “I don’t, though. We do a lot of tweaking after the first try, don’t we?” Naya pointed out. “And I was programmed to always be in tune. So that part, at least, is effortless for me. It’s like breathing for humans. I don’t have to think about it, and I’m doing it at all times.”

  “Ironically, breathing is something that has to be added in with the song data if you want it to sound like I am taking breaths while singing,” she added after some thought. “Breathing and feeling. The things humans can do without thinking, I need to be told how to do.”

  Breathing and feeling. I reached for my purple notebook and wrote that down. I wasn’t sure what I would do with that phrase yet, but it seemed to have some potential.

  “I gues that’s how we work together, right?” I said. “I do the feeling, you do the in-tune singing.”

  “Exactly. If you could sing, you wouldn’t need me anymore. And then where we would be?” She grinned.

  I tried to imagine it. If I could sing (just good enough, not like some miraculously golden-voiced angel that would sweep every talent show competition and pass every audition on the first note), I might be performing in clubs as a singer-songwriter by myself, struggling to break out and get famous entirely on my own. I would come home to a quiet and empty apartment every day, with only my talking cat-planner robot for company. Always running on empty as I tried to balance work and music. Always alone.

  “Yeah,” was all I ended up saying.

  There was a sudden pressure around my shoulders, and I looked up. Naya was hugging me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Humans do this to comfort each other, don’t they? I thought you might like it. And it might be a good idea for me to practice. For when I need to pretend to be a Cupid.”

  She felt warm, dense, solid, and hard, like a very strangely-shaped plastic weighted blanket had wrapped itself around me. Her ventilators whirred softly, somewhere under her dermal coverings. I, awkwardly, tried wrapping my arms around her in return.

  “Is this comforting you?”

  “I didn’t realize I looked like I needed to be comforted.” I didn’t realize a Syren could pick up on human feelings like that.

  “You do,” Naya insisted. “You look like the sad characters in the movies and music videos of sad songs you told me to watch for inspiration. And sad people need to be comforted.”

  “Fair enough.”

  And we stayed like that for what felt like forever, but was probably just a few moments. Or minutes. A while.

  It did feel nice, even if it reminded me how long it had been since I’d had this kind of contact with an actual human. I wondered if a hug from a Cupid would be more or less effective. The fact that Naya wasn’t programmed to make me feel better, specifically, did make me feel a bit more touched that she’d go out of her way to try.

  “I’m gonna get better at singing,” I muttered into her stiff shoulder. “And then maybe we can do duets. Like Neil and Beth or whatever.”

  “Dessie and Naya. Sounds cute,” Naya said.

  “Yeah.”

  A little after that, Angie hopped down from the bed to remind me to eat dinner.

  After I’d pulled together some frozen vegetables and pasta into a reasonably balanced meal, I started to feel a little better about myself and my musical career trajectory.

  I checked my follower counts on my phone while I ate: finally passed 500 subscribers on MusicShare, that was something. My account unlocked the tip jar function, so I enabled it and made a post letting everyone know they could send me money if they wanted to support my activities. Which was almost certainly not a quit-your-job amount of money yet, but would still be more money than I had previously. Thanks to The Sparkplug and Glitch Princess and Mixera promoting me to various degrees, my name was starting to get out there, little by little. The Quarter Cup put me and Naya on their list of shows for next month. Things were happening! Things would be happening.

  A few weeks ago, I was budgeting like crazy trying to save up for a retail-rate Syren before I hit my thirties. Then I got lucky with that one Marketplace listing, and everything after that happened so fast I’ve barely managed to catch my breath. Who knew what tomorrow would bring now?

  Thinking back to when Naya arrived reminded me of the weirdness surrounding it. The incredibly low price. The dead-of-night delivery. Naya’s strange behavior for a Syren, her unusual intelligence, her evasiveness on why she wanted to perform as a shadow behind a curtain. Whatever she was doing with her arm just now.

  “Naya, can you come over here?” I called, trying to sound casual as I put my dishes in the sink.

  “What’s up?”

  I stared into her artificial blue eyes. “You said you’d tell me later, and, well, it’s later. So. Why do you want to perform behind a curtain?”

  Naya stared back at me.

  “What are you hiding from? Who are you hiding from?”

  Naya looked around, as if whatever she was afraid of had infiltrated my eleventh-floor apartment without us noticing. “It’s... I... Look, you really don’t have to worry about anything right now. I overreacted. We have this cool mystery-Syren gimmick going, so we can keep performing with my appearance hidden, and it’s all going to work out and everything’s going to be—”

  “Naya!”

  She looked at the ceiling. Then back at me. “I can promise you this much: You’re not going to get in trouble for anything. No matter what.”

  The way she said it, so slowly and deliberately, made dread pool at the bottom of my stomach. “But—”

  She nodded. “The less you know, the better for you. The rest... I’ll handle on my own.”

  “That definitely makes it sound like something I should I know about.”

  “It’s fine! Nothing’s happened so far! Everything’s going to be fine and you won’t have to worry about anything.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as me.

  I frowned. Naya looked around again. “Oh! I just remembered. I spent the day practicing your new song. Here, listen to this.”

  She sang it with more inflection and vibrato than the last practice I’d heard her do, and added a flourish at the end of the last chorus I didn’t remember writing. It was leagues better than the last version I’d heard. She’d added a few dance moves too, big gestures that would telegraph clearly through a curtain.

  I opened the door to my recording studio and pulled out my headphones for her. My questions and doubts could wait for now. There was music to be made.