I didn’t hit the music; I hit archive. The glass still held my reflection—double, ghosted by the rain—while the chat cooled from wildfire to coals. The studio hummed, steady as aquarium pumps. Burnt sugar braided the air from the factory, sweet over the scent of damp felt and hot plastic. I closed the live board and opened the folder I don’t show on camera: Orpheum-era.
“You’re not sleeping tonight, huh,” Jonah said, peeling his hoodie sleeve away from his wrist where the fabric had glued to sweat.
“Sleep is for people who don’t have angels in their mouths,” I said. My knuckles were tight around the mouse, a small white animal I didn’t deserve. “I want to be sure the riddle means what I think it means before the Choir decides for us.”
“Which is in—” He checked the stream delay clock, then my face. “—six minutes.”
I scrubbed old photos from season one, the ones we never aired because they were atmosphere and not evidence: a balcony curve like a scythe; a row of plaster cherubs with lips pressed shut under soot; the warped stage where pigeons left commas. My breath shortened. I widened a frame until plaster pores showed. The cherubs’ eyelids wore a glaze of dust that caught the flash and turned the gaze into sleep. Angels asleep above the stage.
“There,” I whispered, and the whisper was for a room that contained more ears than the two we owned.
Jonah leaned so close his breath warmed my cheek. “You’re thinking Orpheum.”
“I’m thinking some of our listeners were there for last year’s protest screening,” I said. “They took selfies with those cherubs. If the caller wants a pilgrimage, the Choir will march.”
My phone buzzed like a trapped bluebottle. The Night Choir knows when I’m about to jump; they throw a net. DMs stacked: theory threads, receipts, warnings, heart knives. Then one message sat forward from the pile: a selfie of a woman under a cracked cherub wing, flash bouncing off the plaster, hashtag #NightChoirPinDrop. Her caption: angels totally asleep lol. The pin on her lapel was a white enamel cherub with a hairline fracture through one wing—the design someone started selling at pop-ups after our first Orpheum segment. The geotag sat cocky at the top: The Orpheum (Shuttered).
I thumbed a reply. “When was this taken? Any staff?”
She pinged back immediately. “2019—before it closed for good. Doors were chained. Smelled like damp rope. Pigeons in the balcony. I’m a stagehand. Also the creek flooded that night—mirror sidewalk! You can use the pic.”
The creek again. The silica-black overflow behind our studio has cousins all over the neighborhood; water remembers the old map better than we do. I looked out at our own street where the curb wore a thin mouth of tide. It lapped at the base of the streetlight and turned the bulb into a candle stitched into wet glass.
“We’re going,” I said.
Jonah rolled his chair back until it clipped the wall. “We should call Elena first.”
“And tell her what? An anonymous confession about a current missing person referenced a venue connected to a past case and I want to look at the façade?” I shook my head. “I’ll send her the archived cherub shots and the fan selfie from 2019. We won’t cross a threshold.”
“You say that like thresholds don’t move under your feet.”
“I’ll staple them down,” I said, and grabbed the Switchboard Van keys from their hook. The fob chattered against my ring. I hadn’t realized my hand was shaking until the metal told on me.
Micro-hook: I thought the angels were memories frozen in plaster; the red light waiting at the Orpheum had other plans.
The night bit my cheeks the second we stepped outside. The rain shifted from lace to pinprick. The studio’s glass reflected us at first—two smudges with gear bags—then flipped to a view of the street when the interior lights dimmed behind us. The van smelled like solder and peppermint gum the way it always does; the corkboard with red thread rustled when I shut the door. Jonah slid into the passenger seat with the tablet and the spectrum analyzer already booting.
“We promised no live locations,” he said as I started the engine. “Pledge is pinned.”
“This isn’t live,” I said. “This is scaffolding.”
He snorted. “Scaffolding is just stairs without a destination.” But he plugged in the tablet to the dash and drew an invisible square in the air, his gesture for bubble up the good sense. “If we see fans, we pull around the block.”
“If we see anything that looks like a plant, we call it in,” I said. I tasted copper under my tongue again. Ethics feel like pennies when I press them too hard.
We rolled through Brooklyn’s late-night spine where the factories sleep and the bodegas don’t. The air carried frying oil and wet cardboard. Sirens stitched a distant hem to the sky. I had the old Orpheum route in my muscles: left on a street that lost its name halfway down, right at a mural of a woman whose eyes had been buffed by a decade of weather, two blocks that have never agreed on their potholes. When I saw the marquee’s shadow throw its lip across the road, my shoulders rose without command.
“You okay?” Jonah asked.
“I don’t like being told where to point my spotlight,” I said.
“That’s rich,” he said, not unkind.
I parked across from the theater and cut the engine. The Orpheum exhaled rot and rain and old velvet through the seams of its doors. The plaster cherubs watched from their throne above the proscenium, visible through the glass like saints in a reliquary. Their mouths were fuller than I remembered. Dust gave them sleep masks. Water pinged on metal somewhere back in the alley, the sound of a leaky pipe counting by twos.
Jonah bent over the tablet. Lines of spectrum lit up in blues and red spikes. “I’m getting RF chatter,” he said. “Low-power, intermittent.”
“We’re not the only ones out late.”
“This looks… stage-cam chatter. Could be an old wireless mic stuck on a loop. Or a new one waiting to hear a cue.”
I cracked the van door to breathe outside air and got wet rope and rat musk for my trouble. Across the street, a lamppost hummed and threw a moth-shadow that jerked like an injured bird. The Night Choir wasn’t physically here—no enamel pins, no hoods decorated with cassette patches—but I could feel their stare in my skin, the way a sunburn remembers light.
I took my phone and angled it through the glass to shoot a zoom on the cherubs. The camera struggled, the autofocus yo-yoing on scratchy panes. I lowered it. “We’re not streaming,” I said, to remind myself.
“We’re not,” Jonah said. “We’re shielding.”
He tipped the tablet toward me. “Open Wi-Fi names nearby: PROP_LX, Angel_1, WardrobeDown, stream-guest. That last one is password protected, but the SSID screams community theater nerd or villain who has fun with labels.”
“Or both,” I said.
He shoved his sleeves up. “I’m going to do a passive scan for MAC addresses, see who’s talking to who. No intrusion.”
“Repeat it for the record,” I said.
He rolled his eyes and repeated it for the record. He tapped the screen lightly, a pianist who respects city ordinances. I felt the creek water in my socks even though my socks were dry. The flood had left a thin skin over the curb here too, silvering the street, copying the Orpheum onto the ground. The building had a double: one upright, one drowned.
“There’s something pointing outward,” Jonah said. “Not a mic. A camera. Very small bitrate, piggybacking off a shared uplink. It’s not meant to produce pretty pictures. It’s meant to prove an event happened.”
“Where.”
He lifted a finger toward the ticket booth. Between the framed movie-times that hadn’t changed in years and the glass pocked with coin scratches, a black dot rested where no gum should rest. Old theaters swallow dots. This one winked red.
My scalp tightened. “Tell me that’s a reflection.”
“It’s a status LED,” he said. “Cheap board-cam. They didn’t even electrical-tape the light. That’s arrogance or haste.”
“Or both,” I said, and I heard my own voice register higher in my ears. The aquarium hum in my head split into harmonics. “Can you see where it’s sending?”
“I can see the destination domain is a content-delivery thing through a throwaway. The account name is garbage—thirty-two characters I won’t memorize. But—” He angled the screen. A thumbnail stuttered into view: the Orpheum’s doors framed in sickly yellow, rain glittering on the stone. The stream was live and aimed outward, not inward, the way you aim a security cam at a vault you plan to break, so the recording shows the vault unopened until the hero arrives.
“We’re not the heroes when we trip their cue,” I said.
“We’re also not the audience,” he said. “Not tonight.”
I could hear my mother’s voice then, tinny with phone distance from the night shift she worked my whole childhood. If you’re going to knock, baby, know whose door it is. I pinched the bridge of my nose and swallowed the memory back where it fuels me but doesn’t drive.
“Look at the bitrate,” Jonah said. “They’re throttling. This is not meant for prime time. It’s meant to catch arrivals. Then the real feed kicks in.”
“Control the entrance, control the story,” I said. “If I point the Choir here, the camera shows the Choir coming, not the person who set the bait.”
“Exposure heals and harms,” Jonah said, and it wasn’t a slogan; it was hydraulic pressure in his throat. “You said that on-air.”
“I believed it then,” I said. “I believe it more looking at that dot.”
Across the street, a bus hissed at the curb and left a hot-breath gust. The scent changed—exhaust overrotted velvet—then settled. I licked rain off my lip. It tasted like metal and sugar. On the marquee, three letters remained from the last title: ANG. The rest had tumbled in storms and hadn’t been replaced. Angels asleep above the stage, and below them three stubborn syllables.
“You want to call Elena now?” Jonah asked.
“We aren’t trespassing,” I said. “We’re documenting a camera pointed at a sidewalk where our listeners might stand if they decide to hunt angels. If we publish the camera, the puppeteer moves it. If we wait, it records everyone who gets curious.”
“We could tape over it,” he said. He reached into the glove box and pulled a coil. Gaffer’s tape, matte, the theater kid’s bandage.
I took the roll and felt its gummy edge tack to my skin. “If we tape, we tip.”
“If we don’t tape,” he said, “we let them collect faces.”
We sat with that in the van while the rain stitched tiny X’s across the windshield. The spectrum analyzer emitted a soft tick each time the camera pinged home. Tick. Tick. Tick. The sound mapped my pulse, then pulled ahead.
Micro-hook: I came for a riddle; I found a lens waiting to catch me solving it.
“I’m going to do this clean,” I said at last. “I’m going to document it, submit to Elena, and hold our stream for the night. We can’t be the ones to walk our Choir into a shotlist.”
Jonah nodded once, a quick percussion of agreement. “Let me grab the long lens. I want angle and distance, no reflections.”
He slid out into the rain and moved the way he moves when he’s in soundcheck mode: quiet feet, shoulders down, breathing through his nose. He raised the camera and took fast, shallow shots. The shutter sounded like a moth hitting a lampshade. I watched the tiny red dot in the ticket booth and thought about audience appetites. We train them. They train us back. We like to pretend the megaphone belongs to one person; it never does.
“Got it,” he said, ducking back in, shaking rain out of his curls. Drops freckled the tablet; he wiped them with the hem of his hoodie. “Angle shows the LED. Another shows the glass, so you can see anyone who’d stand in frame.”
“Send me stills,” I said. “Then I’m calling Elena. I’ll offer a quiet handoff and a note that we are not airing location. We can meet over dumplings. No email.”
“I’ll order the scallion pancakes,” he said, half a smile, relief loosening his jaw. Our détente with the detectives lives in sesame oil and small plates, never in documents. The last time I slipped and sent an attachment, a sponsor called five minutes later with gentle threats.
The tablet chimed. A new notification slid in from our burner tip portal: new media uploaded. I opened it. A vertical video shot from across the street, shaky but weirdly framed, as if the filmer had rehearsed the wobble. The camera captured the Orpheum’s doors. A caption scrolled over the bottom: angels asleep above the stage—where’s the choir? The username was nonsense masked by more nonsense. The upload time stamp read two minutes ago. The stream’s thumbnail—a match to Jonah’s—sat pinned under it. The angle was close to ours.
I swallowed. “We’re not first watchers.”
Jonah’s fingers hovered again over the tape roll. “We do this now or never.”
I grabbed his wrist before he could move. My own grip surprised me: hot, tight. “Wait. He wants us on his stage. He wants footage of me fixing his camera. He wants to switch the roles—host becoming performer, confession becoming act one. We let Elena own the first entrance.”
“And if a kid with a pin shows up here because you said ‘angels’ on air?” His voice didn’t spike. It dropped into the register he saves for stage managers and paramedics.
I looked at the sidewalk and the flood’s thin tongue licking the curb. I looked at the black dot that blinked like a heartbeat and remembered my own rule: do no live harm. “We could leave a note,” I said, thinking as I spoke. “A generic one. No credit. No filming. This area monitored. Do not approach. People respect warnings more than pleas.”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“I need sometimes.”
He tore a strip of tape and a sheet from the legal pad, wrapped the edges so rain wouldn’t kill the ink, and we taped it to a traffic cone by the crosswalk, not the doors—public property, not trespass. The sign looked ridiculous and earnest and maybe enough. We climbed back into the van, rain ticking the roof hard, and the camera kept winking like a distant buoy.
I drafted the text to Elena on my phone: Orpheum exterior. Hidden outward-facing cam, see attached stills. Likely streaming to throwaway. We’re not broadcasting. Suggest quiet removal before crowd arrives. Dumplings? I hovered over send and watched my reflection in the phone glass narrow to a blade.
“Do it,” Jonah said.
I hit send.
The tablet chimed again. The pirated stream’s viewer count jumped from 3 to 58 to 113 in a minute. Comments scrolled in tiny gray type: where r u, go inside, angels!!!, open the doors, MARA??? I tasted the salt of rain that had cooled on my upper lip and realized my mouth had been open.
“He’s warmed the room,” I said. “He’s ready for us to play the part.”
Across the street, the red dot blinked. Once. Twice. Then it went dark.
Jonah and I looked at each other. Neither of us breathed.
The camera was still there. The stream was still live. But the light was gone.
“He knows,” I said, voice barely above the van’s idle. “Or he thinks I’ll come when the angels wake.”
The thumbnail on the tablet flickered, then sharpened. The angle hadn’t changed. The doors hadn’t moved. Only one thing was new: a text overlay appeared across the bottom of the frame, white and clean, the font of a theater program.
No curtain call without a lead.
“You just volunteered?” Jonah asked, his words a cough of air.
“I haven’t stepped on his stage,” I said, feeling the coin in my pocket go cold and certain. “But he knows I’m in the house.”
I stared at the dark LED and the silent plaster smiles and pressed the phone to my thigh until the case left a rectangle on my skin. The creek water lapped the curb. The Night Choir’s pledge sat pinned at the top of our feed. The question that hung at the end of the last chapter didn’t go anywhere; it settled in my lungs.
Who benefits if I point the spotlight at sleeping angels—and who’s behind the light switch?