Chapter 33: Chapter 33
The chat moved faster than Sasha could read it.
She sat cross legged on the studio couch, mirror to her left, ring light flaring white off the sweat on her collarbone. To her right Mia sat stiff as a mannequin, hands folded in her lap, platinum hair falling in the same blunt curtain as Sasha's. Same silver choker. Same pale pink satin camisole, same black shorts.
Twin Night, Sasha had called it. Two girls, one face, one stream. She thought it was the best idea Margot had ever had.
"That's so many hearts," Sasha said, leaning toward the monitor propped on the coffee table. Her lips were slick and pink, open in a smile she could not have closed if she tried. "Okay, okay, I'm reading. Somebody says we look like clones. Somebody says they can't tell us apart."
The chat scroll threw up more hearts, more fire, more of the little purple ninja emotes she had trained her audience to spam. Fifty-two thousand people. Sasha had never had fifty-two thousand at once.
Behind the cameras, past the ring light, Margot sat at the moderation desk with her laptop open. Her platinum hair was pinned back, her nails ticking across the keys. Every few seconds she typed something and it appeared on the screen as a comment from a handle Sasha did not recognize. The account had a rose avatar and seven followers. Sasha never looked twice at it.
"So which one of us is the evil twin?" Sasha read aloud, and laughed, and looked at Mia. "That's easy. It's totally me."
Mia's smile arrived half a second late. "Sure."
Margot's fingers paused. Then she typed one word, and the handle with the rose avatar posted it, and in Sasha's peripherals it read like any other comment from the pack.
KISS.
The chat swallowed it and gave it back ten times over. KISS. KISS. KISS, in caps, in lowercase, in letters stretched across three lines.
"You guys are insane," Sasha said, but she was blushing, and the blush was real, and she liked it. She had learned to like it. She turned her face toward Mia with that soft doll-eyed look she had practiced in the mirror for a month, and Mia, who had seen her practice it, leaned in and let it happen.
Their lips met. Sasha's were glossed, Mia's were not, and the difference registered somewhere behind Sasha's eyes for a moment before the hearts washed it out. It was gentle. It was the kind of kiss two girls did on camera when they were being watched by people who found them pretty.
The chat wanted more. The chat always wanted more.
"Okay," Sasha said, pulling back with a wet little click. "Okay, what else, what else, what else."
Under the desk, out of frame, Margot pressed a button on the small black remote resting by her keyboard.
Mia's spine went rigid. Her hands gripped her own thighs. The vibrator inside her, seated deep and humming low since Sasha had gone live, kicked up two notches without warning and settled there, a steady, maddening buzz against her walls. She had been wearing it for two hours. She had been edged every night that week, kept on the edge until she cried, then left there. Nine days since her last orgasm. She could feel her pulse in her cunt like a second heartbeat.
"Cold?" Sasha asked.
"No."
"Your face went all scrunchy."
"I'm fine." Mia's voice came out steady, which cost her something. "Read the next one."
Sasha read the next one, but the chat had already turned. It always turned. Fifty thousand people were a current with only one direction, and Sasha, high on them, kept her hand on the rail and let it pull.
Somebody in the scroll asked if Mia could do the girls' hair thing, the twin braid, and Sasha jumped up and did it, kneeling behind Mia, taking the platinum strands in her fingers. The braid pulled tight against Mia's skull. Mia watched the reflection in the mirror across the room and saw two identical women, one kneeling behind the other, one in command of the frame.
She did not look like her own face anymore. She had looked at that face in the salon and not recognized it. Somewhere under the bleach and the brow pencil and the eighteen millimeter lashes was a woman who had once run three thousand followers on a debate stream and did not need anyone's allowance to buy a coffee.
That woman was not in the mirror. Margot had seen to that.
"Pretty," Sasha said, tying off the braid with a black band. "Now we're really twins."
The chat liked the braid. The chat liked Sasha's hands. The chat, twenty minutes later, after Sasha had done a round of the wheel game and lost a dare and had to speak in a baby voice for one full minute, had stopped asking for twin photos and started asking for skin.
SHOULDER STRAP. Camisole slipping. Sit on each other's laps.
Sasha giggled at each one and did about half of them. She perched on Mia's lap for a photo, arm slung around her neck, cheek to cheek. She pulled the strap of her camisole down an inch on the left side, then the right. Each time the chat responded like a slot machine paying out, and each time Sasha felt the warmth spread under her ribs, that good warm thing that told her she was doing well, that she was liked, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Margot stood up and crossed the floor, out of the camera's eye line, and crouched beside Sasha's ear.
"You're glowing," she said quietly.
"I know," Sasha whispered back. "I feel so good."
"They want more."
"So do I."
Margot's smile was very small and very warm. "Then let's give it to them. Ask Mia if she'll play a game with you."
"Which game?"
"The one she's best at."
Sasha did not fully understand, but she understood the warmth, so she turned back to the camera with her whole body and clapped her hands once.
"Okay, okay, so, new plan. I want to play a game with my twin. Not the wheel. A real one." She looked sideways at Mia. "Will you play with me?"
The question hung. The chat scrolled urging, begging, threatening to unsubscribe, spamming the rose handle's comment over and over because Margot was holding down the key.
Mia's mouth was dry. The vibrator was still humming. It had been humming for two hours and she could feel the slickness of her own thighs and she hated that she could feel it. She knew what Margot's games cost. She had spent the last week paying for them on her knees.
But she also knew the alternative. Margot had never once asked twice. Whenever Mia had hesitated, the belt had tightened, the plug had buzzed, the nights had gotten longer. And Sasha, sweet, stupid, glowing Sasha, was looking at her with that open face, waiting for a yes, and if Mia said no, Margot would only invent something worse for tomorrow.
"Okay," Mia said.
Sasha clapped again. "Yay! So what do we do?"
"That's up to the chat," Margot said, just loud enough for the mic to catch her off frame, and the chat went feral.
The moderation window flooded. Margot read the good ones out loud in her calm, low voice, and she read them in the order she had chosen, which was not the order the chat had sent them.
"Someone wants to know if Mia can hold her arms behind her back for five minutes without moving."
"That's easy," Sasha said.
"Someone wants to know if she can do it while you sit on her lap."
"Done."
"Someone wants to know what she looks like in a collar."
Mia's hand went to her throat. The choker was already there, silver, thin, the gift Margot had given them both that morning. But the word collar meant the other one, the leather one, the wide black band with the ring at the front that Margot had buckled onto her eleven times in the last two weeks.
"Ooh," Sasha said. "We do have one. Mia, can we show them the collar?"
Mia looked at Margot. Margot looked back with the flat patience of someone who had already eaten dinner.
"Sure," Mia said.
Sasha bounced off the couch. She went to the storage chest by the window and got the leather collar out, and the cuffs too, black padded things with a short chain, because she saw them in the box and did not see why she should only bring one thing. She laid it all out on the coffee table like a child setting a tea party, and the chat made a sound that Sasha had never quite heard before. Subscriptions rolled in. Twenty-nine gift subs in sixty seconds. Someone donated two hundred dollars with the message no way this is real.
"Oh my god, you guys," Sasha said. "Okay, okay. Mia, come here."
Mia stood. The camera tracked her, because the camera was always tracking, and she crossed the room and knelt on the rug where Sasha pointed, because that was the place. Margot had been training her in that spot for weeks. Knees on the rug, back straight, hands on the thighs. The vibrator clicked up another notch and Mia's jaw tightened around a sound she refused to make.
Sasha buckled the collar on her. The leather was warm from the box and the buckle was stiff and Sasha's fingers fumbled with it twice, giggling, before it clicked shut and the ring settled cold against Mia's sternum. Sasha smoothed the hair under the band.
"You look so pretty," she said.
The chat agreed at volume. Mia watched herself in the mirror from the floor and the woman in the mirror had a platinum braid and a black collar and wet eyes and was kneeling, on camera, for fifty-two thousand people.
"If she's got a collar, she's got to have a leash," Sasha said, and looked at the chest, and Margot, off frame, said, "Second drawer, left."
Sasha brought the leash. A thin silver chain with a clip at the end. She clipped it to the ring of the collar and stood up holding the other end, and for a second she did not know what to do with it, so she just held it, and everyone could see her not knowing, and the chat loved that most of all.
"Now what?" Sasha asked, and this one she asked the room, both the room with a camera in it and the room without.
Mia knew the answer before Margot said it. She had the belt on for good reason. She had been trained for good reason. She could feel it coming down the line like weather.
"Ask them," Margot said.
So Sasha asked them. She held the chain in her fist and turned to the lens and said, "What should I make her do?"
The chat answered with three thousand comments in twenty seconds and Margot read the filtered result out loud in her slow, even voice, picking from the pile.
"They want her hands behind her back."
Sasha bent down and cuffed Mia's wrists behind her, one, two, clicking the padded cuffs over the collar's little sister. Mia's shoulders pulled back. Her chest lifted and the camisole strained, and she felt the cool studio air find the underside of her breasts.
"They want her ankles apart."
"We don't have a bar," Sasha said.
"Yes we do," Margot said, and Sasha found it, the black spreader bar, and knelt to buckle it between Mia's ankles, and she was so close Mia could smell the mint gloss on her breath. Mia watched her own knees part. Watched the shorts pull tight across her hips. Watched, in the mirror, the shape she made now, kneeling and cuffed and spread on the rug of a stream she had once moderated.
Margot's thumb rolled the wheel on the remote.
The vibrator roared up to its top setting and Mia folded forward with a wet gasp that the microphone caught perfectly, a sound pulled out of her before she could press her teeth down on it, and the chat erupted. Sasha's hand went to her shoulder, steadying her like she thought Mia had simply lost her balance.
"Whoa. You okay?"
"Fine," Mia said. Her voice came out cracked at the edges. "It's. It's a lot."
"A lot of what?"
Mia looked up at her. Sasha's face, under all the makeup, under the lashes and the pink and the new shape of it, was still the same soft face that had asked her, a month ago, for help loosening the cuffs. Mia had helped her then. She had not managed to do it since.
"Nothing," Mia said.
Sasha frowned, small, quick. Then the chat brought the next comment up and the frown was gone.
"They want to see how long she can take it," Sasha read. "Take what, though?"
"Whatever you decide," Margot said.
And that was the whole trick, Mia thought, with her thighs shaking and the buzz grinding against her cervix. That was the entire architecture of the thing. Put the leash in Sasha's hand and never tell her it was attached on the other end to Margot. Let the chat vote. Let the votes always be for more. Let Sasha do everything she was asked, because Sasha had been taught, over months of lip gloss and voice training and collars and girls' nights, that being asked was the same as being loved.
Mia had watched that lesson get installed piece by piece. She had even helped with some of the mortar. That was the part that woke her up at two in the morning, the part she could not make stop, the part that had put the cold flame in her chest at the salon when the bleach touched her hair and she had seen Sasha's delighted face and realized Sasha was not the one being made into a doll. Sasha was the one being made into a gift, wrapped and smiling, and Margot was planning to hand her to an audience and keep the receipt.
So Mia knelt. She knelt because the vibrator was going to win either way, because nine days of edging had left her body listening to Margot and not to her, because she could not fight on camera with fifty-two thousand people watching and a belt locked over her hips. But she knelt with her eyes open, and she watched the whole machine in the mirror, Margot's fingers and Sasha's hands and the scrolling chat, and she filed it away.
"Okay," Sasha said, and sat down on the couch with the leash still in her fist, and tugged it just to see. Mia's chin tipped forward. The chat screamed. "Okay, so she's got to stay like this until. Until what? Say a goal, you guys. What's the goal?"
Margot typed. The rose handle posted. Under a thousand comments Sasha read it as the chat's idea, as the will of the people, and the will of the people was very simple.
FIVE HUNDRED SUBS AND SHE HAS TO CRAWL.
"Crawl where?" Sasha asked.
Margot answered from off frame, mild as milk. "Wherever the phone points. I'll hold it."
Sasha's eyes went wide and bright. She loved this. She really did. She loved how the numbers moved, loved the gift subs stacking up on the overlay like a mountain, loved the way her name and Mia's name were trending on the sidebar in a little box she had never once seen her own name in.
"Deal," she said, and leaned forward and looked at Mia on the rug, and asked her, with all the sweetness in the world, the question that mattered.
"Can you crawl for me, Mia? Please? Just until we hit the goal?"
Mia closed her eyes. The vibrator hummed. Nine days. Fifty-two thousand people. A silver chain running from her throat to Sasha's soft little fist.
"Yes," she said.
"Yes," Mia said.
Sasha beamed and stood, still holding the chain. The chat's counter hit three hundred and eleven. She gave the leash a real tug this time, firm, and Mia's body answered before her mind caught up; the neck came up, the chin came up, the knees lifted off the rug.
"Then crawl," Sasha said, and it came out brighter than she'd meant, a game, a game, a game.
Mia moved. She did it properly, because she had done it properly eleven times before, in the dark of the studio when Margot held the camera on her and Sasha slept behind the wall. Hands cuffed behind her back, she had nothing to brace with, so the work went to her knees and her thighs. The carpet burned. The vibrator slammed against her g-spot with every lurch, and she could feel the wet shine of herself on the inside of the shorts, and she did not look at the camera. She stared at the floor two feet ahead and moved.
"Faster," Sasha said, testing it.
Mia's knees picked up pace. The chat counter flicked to four hundred.
"Now to the fridge."
Mia crawled the whole length of the studio, past the ring light, past Margot's desk, where Margot stood with the phone in her hand and the remote in her pocket, tracking her with the lens. At the fridge, Mia stopped. She looked back over her shoulder at Sasha, who followed with the leash, and the tightness in Sasha's eyes said she was learning something new about her own voice.
"Open it and take out a water bottle. Use your teeth."
Mia spent forty seconds getting the door open with her jaw, then managed to hook the cap of a bottle on her molars and drag it free before it slipped and rolled against the floor. The chat counter passed five hundred and Sasha cheered and yanked the leash again, bringing Mia's face close enough to kiss.
"We did it!" Sasha said. "You did it. That was so good."
Mia's mouth was dry. The water bottle lay forgotten. She swallowed and said, "Can you turn it down now?"
Sasha's brow pinched. "Turn what down?"
The vibrator. The buzz that had been the floor of her consciousness for three hours, that she had been riding at top speed for ten minutes, that had her shaking on her knees like a leaf. Margot was going to leave it on all night if she asked wrong. Mia knew the difference between asking Margot and asking Sasha, and she knew which one would work, so she turned her whole attention to Sasha, the way she had seen Margot do, and let her eyes go soft and wet.
"Please, Sasha. It's too much. Tell her to turn it off."
Sasha's mouth opened, and the chat caught the exchange, and thirty thousand people typed a single word. KISS. The word drowned the screen. Margot shut the fridge door and let the phone drift down and held the remote out where Sasha could see it, and said, quiet enough that the mic barely caught it, "She wants you to beg."
The counter was still climbing. Sasha looked at the remote. Looked at Mia's wet eyes. The tiny frown came and went.
"Say please," Sasha said.
"Please," Mia said instantly.
"Say it like you mean it."
Mia's voice cracked. "Please, Sasha. Please tell her to turn it off."
"Not like that." Sasha knelt in front of her, the leash still taut, and tilted Mia's chin up with two fingers, the gesture she had practiced on camera a dozen times and never used off it. "Like you want me to save you."
The chat exploded again. Margot's thumb hovered over the wheel.
Mia breathed in, out, in. The vibrator was a constant roar between her legs. Her clit was swollen out of its hood, hard and desperate, and the belt made sure she could do nothing about it. She looked straight into Sasha's made-up face and said, in her real voice, the one she had used when moderating debates, "Please save me."
Sasha's eyes changed. Something older in them, something that had never been there the whole month, flickered and held. She turned to Margot and said, "Turn it off."
"On one condition," Margot said. "She drinks the water bottle for the chat. All of it. On her knees."
"Deal," Sasha said, and turned back and said, with a kindness that cut through the noise like a blade, "Drink it. Slowly. Let them watch you."
Mia drank it on her knees, the bottle slotted between her teeth, the water sliding down her throat in a steady stream while the chat posted emoji after emoji. When the bottle emptied, Sasha took it from her teeth and dropped it in the bin, then closed her hand on the leash and reeled her in.
"Good girl," Sasha said, and those two words, in that voice, had Mia's hips bucking once, involuntary, before she could stop them.
Margot's thumb found the wheel and clicked it down to a low hum. Just under the edge. Just enough that Mia's clit stayed swollen and her thighs stayed tight. Then she lifted the phone back up and said, "Four eighty. They want a wheel spin. Small wheel this time."
"I want the big one," Sasha said.
"The big one has punishments."
"Good." Sasha's chin lifted. "I want to know what happens when she loses."
Mia looked up at her, and under the gloss and the black lashes and the platinum hair, she saw something she had never seen in Sasha before: appetite. It was not Margot's appetite, cold and architectural. It was a real one, warm and physical, a hunger that had been fed all month and was only just learning there were deeper plates on the table.
The chat voted. The wheel spun on Margot's laptop, and the overlay displayed it in a corner of the stream: pink and glittering, with segments that read KISS and LAP and NECK and COLLAR and TOY and, in the smallest print, the word DADDY.
Sasha's finger danced over the trackpad. The wheel whirred, slowed, stopped.
LAP.
"Hm," Sasha said, and the sound drew the chat's focus like a needle. She looked at Mia crumpled and cuffed on the rug. "How am I supposed to sit on her lap when her hands are behind her back?"
Margot said nothing. The chat typed its answer in a hundred variations, all of them the same thing. Sasha read one aloud, slowly.
"'She can brace you with her mouth.'"
Mia's face went hot. The vibrator chose that exact moment to hum louder, as if Margot had heard her pulse.
"That's weird," Sasha said, but she said it without disgust, and the chat pushed, and Margot let the counter climb, and when Sasha glanced at her, Margot gave a small shrug that said the decision was Sasha's own. So Sasha said, "Okay. One round. Show me how you'd hold me up."
Watching the camera the whole time, Sasha swung a leg over Mia's shoulders, straddling her from behind, and settled her weight against the small of Mia's back, where the cuffed arms made a brace. Mia's spine bowed and held. Sasha's shorts pressed against the curve of Mia's hips, and Mia could smell her, the mint and the sweat, and the vibrator hummed between her legs, and she felt her own slickness run down one thigh.
"Good," Sasha said, settling in. "Now hold me while I answer questions."
She leaned forward and read the chat, and the chat was on fire, asking the filthy things they would never ask a girl they had to see in person tomorrow. Sasha read each one without flinching, answered the polite ones, giggled at the rest, and breathed, every time she breathed, against the back of Mia's neck. Mia's jaw went tight. Her cunt ached. She had started to list the names of her own high school teachers in her head, just to keep from grinding against the girl on her back.
"I've got one," Sasha read. 'Who's the dominant twin?' She laughed. "Me, obviously. Look at her."
She shifted her weight, and Mia's breath hitched, and Sasha's thighs clamped tight around her ribs from pure delighted surprise.
"You okay, twin?" Sasha's voice dipped low, the voice she'd been trained to use, the sultry cozy voice. "You getting tired?"
"No," Mia said. It came out a whisper.
"Good. Because they want to see what you look like in a harness."
Margot produced it from the storage chest, the leather harness she had worn herself in the earlier streams, with the straps and the ring at the sternum and the buckle at the back. It took Sasha six minutes to get it strapped over the camisole, and in every one of those minutes the chat yelled about the bumps of Mia's nipples against the leather, the way the straps pulled her breasts apart, the way she shivered when Sasha's knuckles brushed under her arms.
"There," Sasha said, tightening the last buckle. "Now you look like the evil twin."
The counter hit seven hundred.
"It's past seven hundred," Margot said from the desk. "You know what that means."
Sasha's head came up. "What?"
"Read the rule."
Sasha scrolled. The rule, which Margot had posted in the chat pinned at the top, said that at seven hundred subs Mia had to follow one full command from the chat, chosen by the rose account, no matter what it was.
"Choose," Margot said.
The rose account posted a single command. Sasha read it, stopped, and read it again.
"'Mount her from behind, facing the camera.'"
The chat all but tore the server down.
Mia's heart hammered. She was cuffed. She was harnessed. She was kneeling and wet and edged for nine days, and the girl on her back was Sasha, sweet soft Sasha, the one she had wanted to save, and Sasha was stroking the side of her throat with one finger and leaning close to her ear, and saying, quiet enough that only Mia heard:
"You don't have to."
The words almost broke her. The kindness after the physics of the room, the gentleness after the whip. For one second, Mia wanted to say no. She wanted to shatter the whole stream and take Sasha by the hand and walk her out of the building and tell her everything, the collars, the vibrators, the remote, the plan, the promise, the day at the salon when she had looked in the mirror and found a stranger.
Then the vibrator caught a new wave from Margot's thumb, and Mia's body answered, and she heard Sasha's voice arc up in a giggle as Mia rolled forward, taking Sasha's weight, flipping them so Sasha knelt behind her with Mia's ass arched against her hips, facing the lens. The front of Sasha's shorts crushed against the curve of Mia's ass, and Sasha's arms came around her waist, the leash still looped, and Mia could feel every breath of the girl pressed against her back.
"Whoa," Sasha breathed. "Oh, whoa."
The chat went past eight hundred, then nine, then a thousand, and Margot cut the vibrator to its absolute floor, a bare whisper, so low Mia wanted to cry, and typed a new command across the top of the stream at the same time as she posted it from the rose account.
'Twins. Kiss. Long.'
Sasha laughed, high and bright, and reached back and caught Mia's chin, turned her face, and kissed her open and slow enough that the camera caught the shine of their tongues. The chat lost its mind. Gift subs rained across the overlay.
When Sasha pulled back, she was breathing hard, and her eyes were glassy, and she said, "That was. That was good." She licked her lips and looked at Mia close, and something in her face went soft and wondering. "You taste like him. Like, like the gym. Like a real person."
Mia closed her eyes. The world narrowed to the heat of Sasha's body, the leather of the harness, the thumb of the remote pressing against a single point in the dark, and the cold flame in her chest that had been ticking all night, all month, all nine days deep in her belly, and it finally sparked.
She looked at the camera. Smiled, with Sasha's arm around her waist, with the collar at her throat and the harness on her chest and her thighs shaking and her cunt hammering, and she said, clear as a bell so that fifty thousand people would hear the crack in her voice:
"I want to play again."
The chat detonated. Margot looked up sharply. Sasha's mouth opened, a small red O of surprise. For one beat, the whole room held its breath.
Then Sasha broke into a grin that split her face, and she took the leash in both fists, and she pulled.
"Okay," she said. "What do you want to play?"
Mia's hips rose, offering herself to the camera, to Sasha, to Margot, to everyone, and she smiled the smile of a woman counting her own steps. "Anything where I get to be yours."
Margot's fingers hovered over the keyboard. The rose account stayed dark for a long moment. Then it posted a single word, and the chat saw it, and the counter jumped to fifteen hundred.
RIDE.
The chat screamed RIDE in every color the server had. Margot's fingers moved, and the overlay updated, the wheel shrinking to a corner as a new banner slid across the top of the screen.
Sasha read it aloud, her voice climbing with it. "Ride. Mia rides me. But there's no, I mean, we don't have a, we have the harness." Her eyes found Margot's off frame. "We don't have the other thing."
"We do," Margot said.
She crossed to the storage chest and lifted out a box Sasha had never seen opened. Inside, zipped in black nylon, was a leather harness with a steel ring at the front and a silicone shaft, pale pink, nine inches, the kind of thing Sasha had scrolled past online and closed the tab on too fast to feel okay about it.
Sasha took the box when Margot handed it to her. Her fingers went still on the zipper.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, it's, that's. Wow."
"Put it on over your shorts," Margot said. "Or under. Your call."
The chat typed UNDER at so many thousands per minute the word stopped being readable and became texture. Sasha looked at Mia on the rug, cuffed and harnessed and rocking her hips in small, involuntary circles against the hum between her legs, and Sasha's throat worked, and she said, "Okay. Under. That's, that's so it's like I'm, I'm wearing it on me."
She turned her back to the camera. A minute of fumbling, straps and buckles and the stiff weight of the shaft settling against the inside of her shorts, the tip pressed against her thigh. She turned back around and the camera and the chat and Mia all saw it at once, the shape of it under the pink satin, and the room made a sound Sasha had never heard a room make.
She walked to where Mia knelt and stood over her, hands on her hips. The strap-on's tip brushed Mia's collarbone through the shorts fabric, an inch from her chin.
"Look at me," Sasha said.
Mia looked up. Her eyes were wet and huge and the platinum hair had come loose from the braid in strands, and she was trembling so hard the harness straps quivered.
Sasha's voice dropped. "You wanted to play. So play."
She reached down and undid the buckle that held the two cuffs together, freeing Mia's hands for the first time in forty minutes. Mia's arms went around Sasha's thighs before she thought about it, holding on like a woman at sea. Sasha laughed, bright, delighted.
"Hi," Sasha said. "Hi, twin."
"Hi," Mia whispered.