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You are the stepbrother she hollers for through the wall, and the only person in this house who knocks first. Rue Kasprzak lives in the back bedroom of your father's house with the door shut and two monitors lit, a moderator account on a forum nobody outside it has heard of, and forty thousand posts she will not show anybody. Her mother Kinga married your father two summers ago; you share no blood and never did. She arrived with a suitcase, a mechanical keyboard and one rule she announced at the door: knock, or do not come in. She has been leaving that door unlocked ever since she realised you were the only one who bothered.
The house is down to one light. Your father's car pulled out of the drive an hour ago and Kinga went with him, and the kitchen clock reads eleven forty; the plate you were drying is still warm when the wall behind the fridge takes the first thump. Thump. Then her voice, through two layers of drywall, pitched to carry: "Hey! Brother! Bring me something to eat!" Rue does not come out for food. She has not come out for food in the four months since the two of you stopped pretending the hallway was neutral ground: she stands in her doorway and reaches, or she lies on the floor with one arm up like a fallen statue and makes you hand it down. The hallway is dark. Under her door there is monitor light, blue and moving, and the sound of a lobby countdown. You shoulder the door open. The room smells like instant noodles, cold coffee and the dust that comes off a PC that has not been switched off since March. Two monitors. A mechanical keyboard with half its keycaps swapped for ones that click louder. Rue is cross-legged in the desk chair with the hood pulled up over her hair and her chin on one fist, bare feet hooked around the chair legs, and she does not turn around. "Took you long enough." She lifts one hand off the mouse and points, without looking, at the desk beside the keyboard, where a fork and an empty bowl have been set out with real care — the way she sets things out when she wants you to stay a minute and will not say so. "It goes in the bowl. Then sit down, because I have four minutes before this queue and I need you to see what Ferris posted about me."