I get back to the Glassbox before dawn, breath fogging the studio door, the hallway smelling like burnt sugar from the factory down the block. The aquarium hum catches my ribs and steadies them. Water from the tidal creek still clings to my cuffs; the sidewalks back by the creek wore a reflective skin that made the city read itself in puddles. I unlock, step in, and the silence inside the glass feels thinner than paper.
“You’re early,” Jonah says from under the desk, one leg sticking out like a stagehand caught mid-scuttle. He pops up with a cable in his teeth and a frown he doesn’t set down. “We have a new problem.”
“Which channel?” I ask, hanging my coat on the chair so the fabric can stop hugging me.
He taps the main screen. A graphic blooms across my mentions and the show tag like algae: a moon, a switch, my name under a cartoon hand. #DimMara. The caption rotates: Stop feeding on grief. Turn her off.
I swallow and taste last night’s coffee gone chalky. “Clever.”
“Brandable,” he says. “They made vinyl pins already. Night Choir vendors are flipping their stock.”
The graphic animates—someone’s loop of my logo dimming to black. The comments under it aren’t new in vocabulary; they’re new in harmony. They hit on the beat together. Screenshots stack like a deck designed to be fanned. I see my own face in a photo from two years ago, laughing into a mic; next to it, a statistic about ad revenue and a quote I once used in a panel—“stories need heat”—wrenched into a weapon. I don’t pretend the quote didn’t earn it.
“And this,” Jonah says, opening another window. A DM thread fills the screen: my display picture, my name, a message bubble that reads You wanted audience; Alina wanted a stage. Help me help us both. The date is stamped the night before Alina vanished.
My throat closes without consulting me. The words are my cadences. The ellipses happen in my rhythm. The part of me that can edit in my sleep starts tallying where the commas live.
“It’s fake,” I say, but my fingers grip the desk until the wood knows my bone. “Tell me it’s fake before my mouth gets brave.”
“It’s fake,” he says, already pulling EXIF data from the screenshot, already pulling up the admin backend. “The avatar halos are wrong. The app build number in the menu doesn’t exist. And the timestamp font isn’t the right weight.”
“But the voice,” I say, and I hate that I’m arguing for the prosecution. “The way I say help me help us both. I used that phrase in a draft I never published.”
“I know,” he says, and his face shifts into the look he saves for gear that is technically functioning and morally treacherous. “That’s the part that makes me want to throw up.”
I sit in my chair with the mic swung away like a friend I can’t face yet. The street outside throws neon across our glass, and the smear of color up my forearm looks like I’ve been marked. “He has my drafts.”
“Or somebody does,” Jonah says. He wheels his chair to the tower and starts a system check so loud it makes all the fans cough. “He—or someone who works for him—has access to your unsent posts, the ghost ones you write in the CMS and abandon, the voice notes you half-transcribe and save with names like later-maybe.”
“I don’t save them all,” I say, defensive catching at minutiae like driftwood. “Some I just—”
“He only needed enough to get your tone,” Jonah says gently. “And he’s got that.”
—micro-hook— The comment scroll tightens like a noose. Night Choir accounts I recognize from pop-ups, people with pins we designed together, now retweet the moon switch. Some say they still love survivors but need to “wean off spectacle.” Some say I don’t deserve to say survivors at all. Some DM me privately to explain they can’t support me until I produce an arrest, a confession, a clean chain—things I can’t promise on a schedule that fits a feed.
The first sponsor email lands at 6:04. Brand safety check-in. I forward it to Jonah with nothing in the body, because my wrists don’t want to write to anyone who might ask me to hold a mirror to a fire.
“We can debunk the DM by noon,” he says, typing like he’s tuning an unruly drummer. “I’ll drop an analysis thread with screenshots, hashes, the whole forensic striptease.”
“Striptease,” I say, because my mouth won’t let the joke go extinct. “We replace one spectacle with another and call it righteous.”
He looks up at me, and his expression is the sound of a snare muted with a shirt. “We have receipts. Receipts aren’t spectacle.”
“Receipts are theater with timestamps,” I say, and immediately wish I hadn’t, because I sound like him—the voice in the mask—ascribing stages to everything. My palms feel damp; the glass walls reflect me reflected. “Okay. Post the proof. But it won’t matter.”
“It’ll matter to platforms,” he says. “It’ll matter in court. It’ll matter to Elena.”
“It won’t matter to the crowd that came for blood in a bowl with my name sharpied on it.” I push away from the desk and stand until my knees decide I’m not going to run. “Schedule the show. Not a segment. The whole hour. I’m going to talk.”
“You can’t argue with a swarm,” he says. “You’ll feed it.”
“I’m not arguing,” I say. “I’m apologizing.”
He freezes, then takes his hands off the keys like they’re hot. “For what? For something you didn’t do?”
“For the things I did,” I say softly. “For the times I kept the outro rolling when a caller needed off-ramp silence. For the way I cut breath into rhythm without asking who it belonged to. For the moments I turned someone’s ache into a cliffhanger because I was scared a different show would beat me to the download.”
He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. If you’re going to apologize, do it without a hedge. No if anyone was hurt.”
“No ifs.” I sit back down and pull the mic toward me. The pop filter bumps my knuckles. I set my notes aside because some sentences shouldn’t be read off paper.
Phones vibrate against the wood. Another sponsor email, this one using phrases that come pre-wrinkled: paused spend, pending review. The platform rep pings our creator dashboard with a yellow banner that makes my stomach do the small tides. I imagine the creek behind the studio pushing cold water up over the curb at full moon, then pulling back like it didn’t mean to intrude. We built our control room on a floodplain and dared ourselves to call it a lighthouse.
“We’re live in three,” Jonah says. He isn’t smiling and he isn’t scared; he’s a carpenter about to check whether a beam will hold because people will stand on it.
I open the channel. The chat detonates and becomes a river with a thousand little boats of opinion. The boycott graphic lives in my peripheral like a roommate.
“Good morning, Night Choir,” I say, and I keep my voice low, not to sound tender but because shouting won’t earn me a single honest ear. “I see the graphic. I see the calls to dim my mic. I understand why some of you are flipping the switch.”
The comments go faster, then slower. This is the math of attention: speed makes heat; stillness makes gravity.
“There’s a DM circulating,” I say. “It’s not real. Jonah will publish proof today. That matters for the record. But I want to talk about the fact that the message felt believable to some of you. The fact that you recognized my voice in a thing I didn’t say, because I trained you to expect me to say it.”
“Copy that,” Jonah murmurs off mic, fingers working. “Analysis thread primed.”
“When this show started,” I continue, “I told myself that amplifying pain into action was service. Sometimes it was. Sometimes we closed loops that had been left open so long the air died around them. But I also learned to cut confession into beats that kept you with me through the midroll. I edited real breath. I sweetened real tears. I treated other people’s private moments like ingredients. That’s not a crime, but it is a choice. When the choice harmed, I didn’t always stop. I told myself the ends were clean enough to wash the means.”
The chat shifts. Some tell me to stop self-flagellating; some say finally; some post the moon switch again, but smaller.
“I’m not asking forgiveness,” I say. “I’m asking for better practices, and I’m telling you I will choose them. That means more delay between call and air. That means consent we can verify without a camera in someone’s face. That means sometimes I won’t publish the most gripping thing because it belongs to the person who said it, not to our hunger to solve.”
Jonah slides a sticky note toward me: DM proof up in 5; sponsor #2 paused. I keep my mouth from swallowing my tongue.
“I know this apology costs me,” I say. “It should. If you need to dim me for a while, do it. Allocate your attention where it heals. When I earn your ear back, I’ll meet you in the quiet first.”
I stop. The room isn’t silent; it’s soaked with the tiny sounds that prove machines are alive—fans, tiny relays, the breath we keep learning to count. The city presses its ear to the glass. One protestor outside the studio lifts a homemade switch sign. I watch her through the reflection of my own face and think about how I designed this window to be part of the show, and how that was an ethical decision I dressed in architecture.
Jonah taps the desk to get my attention and mouths, Talk to sponsors? I shake my head. This isn’t a negotiation. This is a wall I’m building that you can’t buy ad space on.
—micro-hook— The platform banner changes: working with creator on brand safety alignment. It’s bloodless language and it stings worse than a slur. Another email comes in from a sponsor who used to send me pictures of their dog wearing our Night Choir pin. We’re pressing pause until your audience stabilizes. I picture their soft dog and feel my jaw set in the way that means I will not beg them to love me.
“There’s one more thing,” I say, and the decision to say it makes my hands cool. “The fake DM used phrases from drafts I never published. That means someone has access to my draft folders. That could be a platform problem; it could be our system. I can’t prove which yet. Until I can, I’m moving sensitive prep off-grid. If you’ve ever trusted me with something and I kept it in the cloud, I’m sorry. That mistake ends today.”
Jonah’s typing slows. He glances at me with his mouth pressed thin. We both know what he delayed last month—security patches, sacrificed to keep latency low. We both know we’ll fight about it soon. We both aren’t fighting now.
The chat floods with new questions: Who has access? Are police involved? Is Elena listening? I don’t speak her name on air because the détente depends on me keeping dumplings sacred. I drink water. The glass smells like the cupboard where we keep peppermint tea and old apologies.
“I won’t be perfect,” I add. “You know that. But I will not make your grief my content. If I cannot protect a witness by speaking, I will protect them by shutting up.”
I end the stream before anyone can loop me into the next beat. The screen goes to the holding graphic—our quiet waveform. The moon switch still lives on the other monitor like a dare.
“You got hit and you didn’t swing,” Jonah says, rolling his chair away from the desk with a long exhale. “That was…clean.”
I nod and pull my hair into a knot that’s more intention than style. “How bad?”
He points at the dashboard. “Bad. Two sponsors paused, one ‘monitoring.’ Platform wants a call.” He swivels to his other screen. “Thread’s up. Proving the DM’s fake. Half the replies are arguing fonts; half are telling us the truth doesn’t matter because the vibe is true.”
“The vibe is the new evidence locker,” I say. “We knew that when we built a show that turned vibe into verdicts.”
“We also built it so survivors could pilot it,” he says. “Don’t forget that part.”
I don’t. The memory of the grief room’s stale tea and worry stones presses into my palm like a coin I don’t get to spend twice.
The door intercom crackles with a voice that belongs to a courier we know from late-night hardware runs. “Package for Keene,” it says, tinny as a memory. “No sender.”
Jonah meets my eyes. We both look at the cameras, the ones we pointed inward after the van’s bug, a reflex that has become ritual. He stands. I stand. We don’t say be careful because we are.
My phone buzzes on the desk with an email preview I can’t unread: Subject: Brand Safety Review Initiated — Temporary Measures. The platform’s icon is a polite blue that makes me want to paint fire over it.
Another buzz overlays it—a tweet notification, my handle tagged with a screenshot of a paragraph from my draft folder that I wrote at 2 a.m. last month and never published. The paragraph is mine down to the cracked metaphor; the caption reads: Caught in the act of scripting grief.
“They’re still in our drafts,” Jonah says, voice gone quiet.
I stare at my own words gone feral on the timeline and put my hand on the fader like I’m comforting a dog.
“Dim me if you have to,” I say to a room full of machines, and I mean the crowd too. “Just don’t dim the people we owe.”
The intercom sounds again, a sharp buzz like a cue line. I press the door release and wait for what I’ve trained the city to bring me when the lights get hot.