I push through the Orpheum’s balcony door and breathe dust I can chew. The air is stale velvet, old programs, rat musk, a breath of wet stone rising from the tide-creek-veined neighborhood where the sidewalks still glisten from last night’s swell. Somewhere outside, the factory’s burnt-sugar haze sneaks in and sweetens the rot. I sweep my phone’s light along the horseshoe curve of seats; moth-bitten upholstery drinks it whole.
“Booth’s up here,” I whisper, because theaters teach whisper even to apostates like me. The cherub frieze along the proscenium—hair curls cracked, cheeks too smooth to be kind—watches me cross the balcony. Those faces keep repeating in the Director’s puzzles like a lesson I refuse to learn.
Jonah’s boots creak behind me. “Signal’s clean. Van’s parked two blocks, bug quarantined, RF scanner on.” He clinks his backpack down, the sound neat as a snare hit. “If he piggybacks again, we’ll hear the footstep before the door.”
I nod and lay my palm on the usher’s booth window. Cold. Filmy. Inside: a silhouette of a cash drawer and a toppled tin of mints fossilized into one mint. I shoulder the warped door until the latch sighs. A small universe collapses—dust blooms in my light like plankton in the Glassbox glow.
“Gloves,” Elena says from the aisle. She sounds off-duty, but the badge at her belt is a metronome of its own. She hands me nitrile, then snaps her own. “Our warrant covers the house and public areas. Booth qualifies.”
I slide my hands in, talc crackling. In a cubby under the counter, something flat thuds my knuckle. I pull a rectangle out by its cloth spine: a ledger wrapped in theater sweat and gum wrapper halos. “Hello,” I say to the book, to the night, to the old habit of paper telling truth when microphones lie.
Jonah leans close enough that I smell peppermint gum under solder on him. “Getting B-roll,” he says, lifting the camera he swore he wouldn’t bring, then stopping halfway when he meets my look. “For chain-of-custody notes only.”
“Notes,” I say, and set the ledger on the counter as though it might spook and sprint. The cover protests when I unfold it. Inside, neat ruled columns: date, venue, item, initials. The ink changes across years—ballpoint bruises, felt-tip generosity. Dust has protected the pages like a nervous parent.
“Start at the back,” Elena says. “Recent on top.”
I flip to the last written page and the beam of my phone snags on something faint but wrong: a partial oval crushed into the margin. Not ink—pressure. Like someone signed with weight instead of pen. The oval’s interior carries tiny ridges, not smooth; a design pressed in, then lifted.
“Ring,” I say.
“Ring,” Jonah echoes, already unzipping a sleeve of tools. “Want me to pull a photo at a shallow rake?”
“Please,” I say, and step aside so he can angle the LED bar he loves. He paints the page with light until the imprint rises—shy at first, then proud. A notch at eleven o’clock, a hairline crack at four, a halo scraped thin across the top as if the ring once caught on stone.
Micro-hook: In the silence that follows, I taste the studio’s aquarium hum—not real, a phantom memory winding through my ribs—and wonder what parts of me I’m auditioning without knowing it.
I move down the columns, reading out loud to keep my hands from shaking: “March—prop masks, two; ‘angel wing,’ resin; fog machine rental.” I run through venues I know from Night Choir meetups and from the kind of fringe where ideas grow teeth: The Dryline, The Hatchery, Stairwell 9, The Little Ante. Initials sit at the far right like a stamp. I start to see repeats I don’t want to see.
“L.C.,” I say. “Another L.C. A month later—L.C.”
“Whoever L.C. is had range,” Elena says, jotting in her pocket log. “Multiple addresses. Cash notes.”
“The Director loves churches of black paint,” I say. “He buys his sermons wholesale.”
Jonah crouches, shoots, resets. “I need a clean, then a macro of the ring.” He speaks softer now, the way he did the night he found the bug. “We should not broadcast any of this yet. We’ll spook him, or worse—paint a target on the wrong face.”
I hear my own rules calling back to me—no doxxing victims, no live location—and tuck the urge to light the world under my tongue where it burns less.
I track back a few pages. The initials shift—T.M., R.V.—then return to L.C. across two consecutive weeks and one note that makes my stomach pitch: Cherub mask—refit, cash, 2 a.m. door.
“Two a.m.,” I say.
Elena’s pencil pauses. “After hours. No receipt?”
“None,” I say. “Just the initials.” I force myself to read the item and not the story I want to stitch. “Prop head rig. Volunteer ringer. Gaffer tape.” I can still feel the adhesion of gaff under the van console, slick and theatrical as a wink.
Jonah finishes the rake shot and slides his tablet out. “Let’s see if the ring wants to introduce itself,” he says. He pulls up a simple overlay tool we use for matching tape tears and stamped footprints—the kind of hack artists trade backstage. He imports the photo of the imprint, traces the oval, saves the notch and crack as vector.
“What database are you pulling?” Elena asks.
“Nothing police,” he says quick, glancing at her. “Public press photos, panels, bylines—the usual gossip archives. Consultants love leaning on their hands for headshots. Rings show up.”
I go back to the ledger. I don’t want to get seduced by the overlay before I’ve finished the pages. I read dates like prayers. Theaters stack like a constellation I didn’t earn. I keep my breath slow even when I turn a page and a smear of gold glitter puffs out, catching the light like the feed’s glitch the night he wrote sister at dusk.
“You okay?” Elena asks, light just enough to be there.
“Fine,” I say, and my mouth proves me with a swallow that clicks. “Just remembering that the city keeps turning our sins into sequins.”
Jonah’s tablet chirps. He flicks through images—blurry wedding candids, microphone-holding promos, a panel photo with a dais sign half-cropped: CONSULTANT:— “I’m building a ring shape library,” he says. “Give me a few.”
I keep reading. Tally marks crawl across one margin, five in each pen grouping. After the last, a curved line like a smile has been pressed and lifted, pressed and lifted. I picture someone bored and smug, rolling a ring in the quiet like it’s a coin they’ve already spent.
“I have a candidate,” Jonah says, and the way he doesn’t smile tells me he hates it.
I look up. On the tablet: a conference photo from three years ago. The panel’s title line reads Immersive Truth: Ethics and Engagement. My throat dries to paper. In the center sits a man younger than I remember, jaw fine, eyes bright with certainty. His name placard is perfect black type: Lyle Corcoran — Strategy Consultant.
In the photo, he leans forward with his hands folded. On his index finger: a ring with a flattened oval face. At eleven o’clock, a tiny notch. At four, a hairline crack. The angle Jonah rotates snaps the overlay into place, the imprint kissing the photograph in a coincidence I do not trust because it’s so easy to love.
“L.C.,” I say. It’s not a sentence; it’s a dare.
Jonah’s thumb hovers over the screen, unwilling to push this into being. “I can’t call a match. I can call a strong rhyme,” he says. “We need angle compensation, a second photo, a measurement.”
“We’ll get more,” Elena says, voice all ballast. She takes out a bag, slides the ledger in like an organ to be transplanted. She seals it. “Chain of custody starts now. I’m logging a probable cause addendum for the initials. ‘L.C.’ gets tagged for follow-up.”
The staples of my heart decide to misfire. “We can’t read the ledger on air,” I say, the words like a bite I have to take, “and we can’t triangulate him with gossip.”
“You can hold your tongue and still do journalism,” she says. “You can build a case quietly.”
“Exposure hurts and heals,” I say, because I need to say it aloud or it evaporates. “I keep turning the megaphone and convincing myself the angle is medicine. He turned it into a weapon. I don’t want to become his understudy just because my hands fit the props.”
Elena’s face softens a centimeter. “Then don’t,” she says. “Let me be the cop and you be the person who listens.”
Micro-hook: From the stage below, the building coughs—a rehearsal ghost, a pipe knocking, or a very human shoe catching the catwalk—and the sound lifts the hair along my arms. We freeze. The beam of my phone finds dust in the aisle and nothing else.
“House speaks,” Jonah says under his breath, already scanning the balcony rail for a fresh lens. “No live feeds. I swept.”
“We never swept the past,” I answer, and I’m not trying to be poetic; the sentence lands anyway and makes me angrier at the ease.
Elena tucks the sealed ledger into her tote like it might bite. “Lyle Corcoran,” she says, tasting it professionally. “He’s the guy who pitched that immersive crime theater wool to your old network, right? The one marketing loved until legal woke up.”
My mouth goes metallic. “He cornered me after a panel about consent,” I say. “He called what I do ‘participatory catharsis’ and told me I was leaving money on the table by holding back facts. He said the audience would forgive anything if I gave them a good ritual.”
“He was right about the audience forgiving too much,” Jonah murmurs, not looking at me. “He wasn’t right about what it does to the living.”
Elena flips her notebook to a clean page. “He has initials, a ring, a philosophy,” she says. “That’s more than smoke. It’s not fire, yet.”
“We still have to worry about bias,” I say. “I’ve been narrativizing him since the first cherub. My brain loves arcs. My conscience hates them. If I make him the story too soon, I could break the piece that actually frees Alina.”
“Then put weights on your brain,” Elena says. “We’ll handle warrants and surveillance, not you. I’ll canvass the venues in the ledger. Quietly. Dumplings for receipts, not emails.”
“Meet me at Red Lantern,” I say automatically, because detectives and creators barter over soup when paper would betray both. “We keep our détente warm.”
Jonah’s tablet pings again, and he swipes through more images—press junkets, a holiday party. Two more shots catch the ring in casual light. The overlay doesn’t land perfectly, but the notch never moves. “The crack’s persistent,” he says. “He’s been wearing the same band for years, or he wants us to see it.”
“He wants staging,” I say. “He wants a sermon with house lights.” I inhale, and the theater’s cold reaches into my chest. “I can’t give him that. Not tonight.”
Elena zips the tote closed. “I’m flagging Lyle Corcoran for formal follow-up,” she says. “No leaks. No hints. If he twitches, I want him to twitch at us, not at you.”
“And not at Tessa,” I add before I can stop the name. Saying my sister aloud in this place feels like stepping on a broken bulb.
Elena meets my eyes and nods once, the kind of promise that costs more than words. “Especially not at her.”
We descend the balcony stairs single-file, every step a small apology to wood that carried better plays. At the landing, I stop and look back at the booth: a square of dark, an emptied mouth. The cherub over the arch has a hairline crack that mirrors the ring’s. It might be coincidence. It might be choreography. I hate that those are the same shape in my head.
Outside, the night breaks over me with wet air and neon reflecting in the leftover tide. The creek has backed down the curb, but the sidewalk still mirrors our shoes like it wants to sell us a better version of ourselves. The city presses burnt sugar into the back of my tongue. A kid in a Night Choir jacket passes—pin glinting, tiny enamel microphone with wings—and doesn’t look up.
“We don’t say a word,” I remind myself, and I’m not sure if I’m promising Elena, Jonah, or the part of me that loves the red tally light like a drug.
“We don’t,” Jonah says. “We make tea, we scan the coin again, we cross-check venues against cash withdrawals.”
“And we sleep?” I say, letting the joke be a rope I can hold for two seconds.
“Eventually,” he says, not smiling.
Elena keys her radio and kills it before speaking. “I’ll run the names behind the ledger’s venues. If ‘L.C.’ rented space, somebody took green for it.” She looks at me over the roof of the van. “You keep your megaphone pointed at safety. No heroics. No bows.”
“No bows,” I say. I open the passenger door and stop with one foot in the van. The creek’s hush lifts and falls like a crowd holding breath. I feel the ledger’s weight even though it’s not in my hands anymore, like a prop I’m still responsible for.
Hope hums in my sternum—evidence at last, not performance—and then wariness floods it with cold. The overlay matched too easily. The initials sang too sweet. I have the shape of a villain and the ache of a story begging to be fed.
I look at the theater one more time, at the cracked cherub pretending joy, and ask the night the only question I can afford.
Did I just uncover the Director—or did I hand the city a mask and call it a face?