Infinite Cashback System

Chapter 367: 367 | Princesses Don’t Wear Their Crowns Crooked

Kumiko made a noise that Jordan interpreted as her heart physically breaking. "Mine too," Kumiko breathed, and this was a lie because Kumiko’s favorite Disney property was Tangled and she had committed this information to approximately forty-seven separate documents, but the lie was so perfectly delivered and so necessary that Jordan felt something behind his ribs crack a little.

Sofia took Detective Blueberry from Kumiko’s hand and pressed the plush against her face with both arms. Her sobs downgraded from desperate to merely sad, the kind of crying that comes when a child has decided that the adults around them might actually fix the problem but hasn’t fully committed to trusting the resolution.

Jordan looked up from the scene at his feet and scanned the crowd in a systematic grid pattern, left to right, near to far, the same way Maya had taught him to read a room. He was looking for a woman matching the description. Brown hair. Carrying a kid’s backpack.

Moving against the crowd flow with the specific kind of frantic energy that meant she’d turned around at some point in the last five minutes and discovered that the small human she’d been responsible for had vanished.

Twenty feet to the right, nothing. A group of teenagers. An elderly couple with matching fanny packs.

Forty feet to the left, a Cast Member in a blue polo talking into an earpiece.

Jordan walked toward the Cast Member with purpose in his stride, and the Cast Member, a woman in her thirties with a name tag reading MARIA, turned to face him before he’d covered half the distance.

"Lost child," Jordan said. "Four years old. Yellow Belle dress. Her name is Sofia. Mom has brown hair and a Rapunzel backpack. She’s sitting by the Partners statue with my girlfriends right now."

Maria’s hand went to her earpiece. "Copy, I have a guest reporting a separated child, female, approximately four years old, yellow princess dress, name Sofia, near the Partners statue on the hub. Mother described as brown hair, carrying a Rapunzel-themed backpack. Two guests are attending."

The response came within seconds, a crackle of radio traffic that Jordan couldn’t fully hear but that Maria nodded to. "We’ll have someone from Guest Relations here in about two minutes. Can you stay with her until then?"

"Already on it."

Jordan walked back to the statue where Kumiko sat cross-legged on the concrete with Sofia in her lap, the Belle gown spreading around both of them like a golden puddle. Kumiko had pulled a package of strawberry Pocky from her cat backpack and was feeding individual sticks to Sofia, who chewed with the mechanical focus of someone whose body had decided it needed sugar regardless of what her emotions were doing.

Detective Blueberry remained pressed against Sofia’s chest, his blue fur already collecting tear residue and face paint transfer.

Chloe stood beside them with her phone to her ear, speaking in rapid, clipped sentences to someone on the other end. "Guest Relations? Yes. Hub area near the Partners statue. Four-year-old female, Sofia, yellow Belle dress. Mother’s name unknown, brown hair, Rapunzel backpack. Child is calm and attended. We’ll wait."

She hung up and looked at Jordan with the specific expression of a woman who had just coordinated emergency logistics on zero sleep and one churro. When Jordan told her that a Cast Member named Maria had also called it in, Chloe nodded once, filing the redundancy as acceptable rather than wasteful.

Sofia tugged at Kumiko’s twin tail.

"Why is your hair in two ponies?"

"Because one pony would be lonely," Kumiko said with absolute seriousness.

Sofia considered this. She tugged the other twin tail. "Can I have two ponies?"

"When we find your mama, you can ask her. I bet she’ll say yes because your hair is very pretty and it would look amazing in two ponies."

Sofia’s face crumpled again, the word mama triggering a fresh wave that she fought against with visible four-year-old determination. Her chin wobbled. Her grip on Detective Blueberry tightened until the plush’s stuffing compressed.

Kumiko pulled Sofia closer without hesitation, tucking the girl against her chest and resting her chin on top of Sofia’s plastic tiara. "Hey. Hey, it’s okay. Mama is coming. She’s looking for you right now and she’s going to find you because mamas are very good at finding their babies. That’s literally their superpower."

The word superpower earned half a second of distracted interest. "Mama doesn’t have a superpower."

"All mamas do. It’s invisible."

Jordan crouched beside them, his knees protesting from six miles of concrete. Sofia’s dark eyes found him and went wide, her gaze tracking upward from his chest to the Mickey ears perched on top of his head, which at this range and angle must have looked enormous.

"You’re really big," Sofia said.

"Yeah." Jordan reached over and adjusted her tiara, which had slipped to a forty-five-degree angle during the crying. He straightened it with two fingers, centered the plastic crown on her forehead, and released it. His hands were large enough that the adjustment required no more effort than straightening a picture frame. "There. Princesses don’t wear their crowns crooked."

Sofia stared at him with the unblinking directness of a child who had decided to evaluate a stranger and would not look away until her evaluation was complete.

"Are you a prince?"

"No."

"Then why do you have ears?"

Jordan opened his mouth. He closed it. He looked at Kumiko, whose face had collapsed into the expression she made right before she cried about something beautiful.

He looked at Chloe, who stood three feet away with her phone in one hand and her other hand resting on her stomach, her blue contacts reflecting the late afternoon sun as she watched Jordan McKnight kneel on a theme park sidewalk and fix a stranger’s plastic tiara.

"Because my girlfriends made me wear them," Jordan said. "And I do what they tell me."

Sofia giggled. The sound was small and wet and still edged with residual fear, but it was a giggle, the first one she’d produced since they found her.

A voice cut through the crowd from thirty feet away, sharp and panicked and climbing in pitch with each syllable.

"SOFIA! SOFIA, BABY, WHERE ARE—"

A woman with brown hair and a Rapunzel backpack bouncing against her hip emerged from the crowd at a full sprint, her face wrecked and her mascara destroyed, and Sofia launched herself off Kumiko’s lap with the explosive force of a child who had just located the center of her universe.

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