The studio hums like an aquarium, filters hissing, fans breathing, my own voice looping in the cans with just enough delay to remind me that control is a performance. I taste burnt sugar drifting from the factory down the block, which means the wind is wrong for clean audio and right for nostalgia. Beyond the glass, rain pebbles the sidewalk where the tidal creek has crept over the curb, turning the street into a dark mirror. The Night Choir gathers there on big nights—pins on denim, phones lifted—but tonight they’re mostly at home, tapping hearts and knives into the chat.
I drag the fader up and smile into the pop filter. “Night Choir, it’s our anniversary. One year of confessions, one year of quiet bones waking up to names. I promised a victory lap, so we cut together a few minutes from cases you helped crack. Then we’ll do something reckless I’ll deny later.”
Jonah slides into the producer chair, hoodie damp at the cuffs, a crescent of sleep pressed into his cheek from a nap he swears he didn’t take. He points at the clock, points at me, taps the air twice. Our language is finger drumming and eyebrows.
“Roll montage,” I whisper, and he hits play.
Voices pour through my headphones—stuttered admissions, a cousin’s sob, the scrape of a shovel. I smell my coffee cooling into bitterness. The chat floods with dove emojis and purple hearts, Night Choir calling the names: Zadie, Marco, K. L., the ones who came home to a truth, raw or rare. I keep my mouth shut and let results do the bragging. The board lights make my knuckles look candid.
“We owe you quiet victories,” I say when the tape clicks off, “and also, guilty pleasure. To celebrate, we’re opening the lines. No screeners. I know. Breathe with me.”
“You’re really doing this?” Jonah murmurs, half grin, half warning.
“It’s a party,” I say. “We’ll keep it short.”
I feel the city’s breath through the glass—sirens threading the rain, tires whispering in the shallow flood. I taste the metallic penny of adrenaline. The rulebook, laminated and coffee-stained, sits under my elbow: no doxxing, no live locations for the living, no names until verified, no guns on air. We made those rules, and we break them one inch at a time.
“Line one,” I announce. “You’re live with me. Tell me something true.”
A woman laughs and thanks us for helping her aunt. A man wants to propose on air before changing his mind mid-sentence. The chat spools gently; I toss back encouragement, keep it moving, the way a bartender keeps a room upright with nothing but tone. The headphones warm around my ears. This is my church, my carnival, my proof.
Micro-hook: I think I can ride this wave forever—until the ocean stands up.
“Line three,” I say. “You’ve got me. You’re live.”
Static threads the line, then a voice that sounds like an elevator groaning. The modulator on their end warps vowels into iron. “I took somebody,” the caller says. “No one believed me before, Mara.”
I don’t flinch, because flinching is a choice that lives forever on replay. “You’re addressing me by name,” I say. “We keep things careful here. You’re using a voice changer. What would you like to report?”
Jonah’s hand hovers over the dump button. He’s not touching it; he’s touching the idea of it. I smell the ozone of equipment that ran too hot at soundcheck.
“Eight years ago,” the voice says, “I called another show. I told them where to dig. They laughed. You didn’t exist then. You do now.”
The chat’s tone shifts midstream—heart eyes swallowed by siren emojis and a thousand rocket ship arrows. The Night Choir likes a ghost who reads the instructions.
I lift a finger to Jonah: hold. I keep my voice low enough that the mic barely catches it. “If you’re talking about a disappearance from eight years back, you must know I can’t let you name any minors or share live coordinates. We have listeners who will act faster than anyone should.”
The voice exhale scrapes. “I know your rules.”
“Then help me follow them,” I say. I touch the copper coin I keep taped to the console, a talisman against greed I picked up the week we found K. L.’s jacket in a drainage ditch. The coin is cold. I need it to be cold.
“I took her,” the caller says again, and the modulator catches, a mechanical hiccup that lets something human leak through—warm, mid-range, rehearsed. “I took her, and no one noticed because I made it look like the others. I’m calling to confess because confession gets results on your show.”
Jonah flashes me a line on the monitor: Delay up +2. He’s putting a thicker cushion between live and broadcast. He can buy me two seconds. He can’t buy me judgment.
“We refer callers like you to an attorney,” I say, and my mouth tastes like copper foil. “But if there’s a victim from the past who lost a name, and you can restore that, we’re listening.”
“You want me to say the old name.”
“Not yet.”
Rain beads down the window. Outside, the creek licks at the curb, swallowing the reflection of the streetlamp until the bulb looks drowned. A gust lifts a paper bag; it swims away. I see, in the glass, my own face doubled—one clean, one spectral—as if the studio decided to remind me which side of the glass is the performance.
“Eight years,” the voice repeats, soft. “She had a sister.”
I go still. My sister’s face flashes—Tessa at twelve, raccoon-eyed from lake water, daring me to dive at dusk. I keep that off the mic. I keep everything off the mic that isn’t usable.
“We keep families safe,” I say. “We don’t name survivors.”
“Then listen.” The modulator clicks again, a strobe of naked voice. I hear theater breath: the inhale before a line lands. “You think you keep them safe with rules. Your rules are curtains.”
“Line three,” I say, steadier, “we have limited time. If you want to help, talk to me about verifiable details you’ve never shared publicly. Tell me about the past case without identifying the wrong person.” I glance at Jonah and mouth record. He already is.
“Okay,” the caller says. “A parking ticket with a wrong digit. A missing scarf that wasn’t missing. A stage with sleeping angels.”
My stomach makes its own small decision. The phrase presses a fingerprint onto a memory of plaster cherubs, dusty wings tilting over a warped stage in a shuttered neighborhood theater. The Orpheum. The cherubs, chipped and watchful, part of the set of my adult life without consent. The motif has threaded my nightmares since a season-one caller mentioned the balcony where pigeons nested in angel mouths. I steady my breath and examine the words, not the fear.
Jonah’s eyebrows jump in a way that says do you know that? I do, and I don’t want to show it.
“Explain ‘sleeping angels,’” I say. “In your own words.”
“They watch from above the proscenium,” the caller says, and the modulator dips so their voice rings tinny and human for a note. “They sleep in plaster dust. They watch bad actors and good intentions.”
The chat detonates. Lines of text sprint. ANGELS = ORPHEUM? don’t dox cherubs!!! i have a pic from 2019 NO LOCS NO mods?? The Night Choir loves a symbol they can wear, and half of them already have the cherub pin, white enamel with a hairline crack through one wing. I hear the ping of our mod channel; the volunteer team is caps-locking rules at the tide.
My mouth dries. I drink lukewarm coffee and taste cardboard. “Line three, that sounds like a specific place, and we can’t go there live.”
“You will,” the voice says, almost pleased. “But I didn’t call for that. I called because you like anniversaries. You like giving bones a birthday.”
“We don’t give them birthdays,” I say. “We give them context.”
The modulator glitches again. I catch a breath that isn’t mine—a hungry inhale near the mic. The voice lowers. “Alina Brooks.”
My hand finds the fader without permission and holds. I feel the fact before I understand it. Alina Brooks. The name carries a new-paper smell, ink still wet. I read every missing-person alert in a geographic radius each morning, an ache of habit I can’t quit. This morning’s scroll included an Alina who didn’t make it to work. Twenty-nine. Dark hair, a scar on the right wrist shaped like a comma. The alert was careful: no foul play suspected at this time. I hear that phrase now like a joke that hurts.
“Line three,” I say, and my voice is lower than I meant, “that is a name reported missing this morning. We do not jeopardize living people.”
“She’s not living,” the caller says, and the tone flattens into bad theater, like an actor convinced darkness is the same as depth. “She’s part of my confession.”
Jonah’s hand lands on my forearm—a warm weight, a soft alarm. His lips shape, dump? I shake my head once. If I cut now, the Night Choir will dig without us. If I keep this line, I risk turning oxygen into an accelerant. The studio smells like wet dust and heated plastic. I hear water shiver against curb.
“You don’t get to declare someone dead on my show,” I say. “What you can do is tell me what you know that isn’t guesswork. Something that could help police, something that doesn’t put any living person in the crosshairs.”
“You always split ethics like hair,” the caller murmurs.
“It’s better than cutting throats,” I say. My tongue goes dry at my own words. I lick my lower lip and taste coffee and fear.
“I can prove I’m telling you about Alina because I finished a story that began before her,” the voice continues. “I built a pattern you all clapped for. I tuned the Night Choir like a violin.”
The chat chokes on its own backlog. BAN competes with mod pls competes with tell us WHERE competes with a flood of candle emojis. Outside the glass, a couple in black raincoats stop in the floodlight, hands knotted together, listening through the window. The aquarium effect reverses: I am a fish; they are watchers.
“Describe the wrong digit on the parking ticket,” I say, because details are a net and I need one. “Tell me which borough issued it, what color the ink was, what the officer wrote in the margins.”
“Queens,” the caller says, without beat. “Green ink, left-handed slant. Margin says ‘meter offline.’ The scarf wasn’t missing; it was tied under the passenger seat of a maroon Civic, forgotten in spring and stiff in winter.”
Jonah is already searching the archive; I see it in the slant of his attention, the way his pupils sprint left-right. He flashes me a message: cold case ‘17—scarf detail exists, not public. He gives me a tiny nod. For a moment, my ribs expand.
“Those are details we can check,” I say. “And we will check them. Regarding Alina—if you’re lying, you’re hurting a living woman’s people. If you’re not, you’re choosing a stage over a life.”
“Stage,” the caller repeats, savoring the word. “You of all people know stages make truth visible.”
“Stages make truth louder,” I say. “Loud isn’t the same as true.”
My chest tightens and releases with each syllable. A trick I learned early: if my sentences climb a staircase, listeners climb it too. I watch the levels, keep them a hair under clipping. The coin under my fingers presses a cold circle into my palm like a reminder—a moon, a rule.
“Angels asleep above the stage,” the voice says, softer. “Mar—”
The modulator stutters into raw voice for half a beat. The timbre is gentle, trained. Theater breath again. Then a blast of static needles my ear. The waveform leaps. The line drops.
“We lost three,” Jonah says into my left ear, low. “They hung up or someone cut it. No call-back ID. Masked and spoofed from the jump.”
The chat becomes weather. CALL BACK NOOOO cherubs cherubs ALINA BROOKS stop saying her name respect where are the angels orpheum? DON’T POST LOCS Night Choir pledge we need a plan. I feel the room tilt on a fulcrum that isn’t physical.
I take a breath and hold it at my soft palate until my head lightens, then let it go through my nose to smooth what I say next. I have a choice that isn’t a choice.
“We’re not naming a location,” I say, and I let a little iron into the sentence. “We’re not crowdsourcing a crime scene. We are collecting details about an eight-year-old case and passing them to the appropriate desk. Regarding today’s report of a missing woman named by a caller, we are not amplifying unverified claims about her status. If you know Alina personally, you can send us verifiable information through the tip portal only. Mods, pin the pledge.”
Jonah nods. A notice appears on the stream: No live locations. No harassment. No vigilante actions. The window fogs a small circle where I exhale too close to the glass. Outside, the flood shines like a stage. In the reflection, the cherubs I remember from the Orpheum hover behind me, cracked smiles cropped into the marquee’s ghost. I blink and they stay.
Micro-hook: I thought the angels were a dead motif; tonight they open their eyes.
“We’re going to take a short break,” I tell the Night Choir, though my hand doesn’t move toward the music bank. “When we come back, we’ll talk about the difference between confession and performance.”
“Mara,” Jonah says quietly, hand over his mic, “if you want to dump the last sixty seconds of mention—”
“We can’t unscramble eggs,” I say. “We can keep them off the floor.”
He purses his lips, then cracks one knuckle against the console and winces. He hates the sound of his own bones. “Police will call,” he says. “You know that.”
“They always do,” I say. “We’ll have a neat folder waiting.”
Inside my mouth, the copper taste deepens. I swallow air dry enough to scrape. The studio smells like the moment before a storm, even though the storm is already happening. I lay my palm flat on the wooden desk. It’s scarred where I once dug in a thumbnail during a call that ended with a map and a field and a pair of boots left under a spruce. I still buff that scar when I’m nervous, then stop, because scars aren’t for polishing.
I bring the mic close again. “Night Choir,” I say, “stay with me.”
The tide knocks against the curb outside, a small slap each time a car passes. The aquarium hum swells; the LEDs climb. The coin cools my hand.
“Who called us?” I ask the room, the glass, the water, the thousands of listeners who answer before I do. “And what do they gain if we point the spotlight where they want?”
I don’t hit the music. I let the dead air open its mouth.
On my screen, the chat slows for the first time all hour, then flares again with a single word repeated by a hundred avatars: ANGELS?