The station smells like metal and rain, with a whisper of bleach that can’t quite erase last night. Fluorescents fizz. Aboveground, the creek has padded onto the steps again, leaving a sheen that turns every commuter into a cautious dancer. Elena and I count stairs like beats as we descend—four in, hold, two, release—the breath count the actor described, the one the ring tap caged.
“Arm B,” she says. Her voice is a metronome. “Third bay.”
I rub the key’s teeth with my thumb until my skin complains. My heart insists on syncopation. Along the corridor, a guy in a denim jacket flashes Night Choir pins—moon, cassette, tiny black cherub—like he’s collecting weather. He doesn’t look at me. That’s the kindest thing anyone does tonight.
Locker 318 waits with its little mouth closed. The metal is colder than it should be. I slide the brass home and twist; the cylinder turns, but a fat brass padlock sits beneath the built-in latch like a second opinion.
Elena lifts the canvas duffel from her shoulder and pulls out bolt cutters that look too heavy for stealth. She keeps one hand on the hinge like she’s holding a wild animal’s chin.
“Last chance to call a tech,” I say.
“I am the tech,” she says. “Step left.”
I step left. She leans into the handles. The first bite squeals, the second takes, the third snaps and rings down the row—metal singing a wrong note. My heartbeat climbs to match the vibration. The cut padlock thuds, skittering into my shoe. I pick it up; the body is tacky with residue, a chemical tang that reminds me of hardware aisles and stage rigging rooms. Tape.
“Smell that?” I ask.
“Adhesive and solvent,” she says. “He taped it shut when he didn’t use the key. Habit or paranoia.”
“Both,” I say, and the word grates.
Elena eases the door open like she’s disarming a greeting. Inside: two gaffer rolls wrapped in clear tape that off-gasses sharp and sour; a padded pouch; a plastic travel router, white, its antennae folded like praying fingers; and a velvet ring box the color of theater curtains after the house has gone to seed.
My stomach performs a small fall. “Let’s inventory,” I say, already reaching.
“Hands,” Elena warns, and snaps on nitriles. She passes me a pair and an evidence kit. We move in a choreography we’ve learned over dumplings, never on email: she photographs, I narrate, she bags, I seal. The station hum turns into an aquarium drone—steady, low, nearly kind. Somewhere a busker’s amp coughs, then goes quiet.
I crack the padded pouch first. Inside, old-school MiniDV tapes, labels printed with block caps: SCENE—ALIBI VAR A, SCENE—SILENCE TEST, ORPHEUM—CHERUB ALT. The word “Orpheum” hits my throat like a dry pill. I turn one cassette over and find a tiny sticker, cherub silhouette in black on white, grinning where a mouth should be. Corrupted innocence in thumbnail size.
“Photograph,” I say. My voice is steadier than my hands.
Elena clicks. “Chain-of-pose,” she murmurs, the kind of joke only a tired detective makes, and I let my mouth twitch once.
The ring box opens with a hush that sounds indecent. Inside: not a gem, not a ring, but a silicone mold—oval seat, flat top—perfect for pressing metal into. The surface holds a faint ridge impression. A half-cherub? A laurel curve?
“That fits our ledger imprint,” I say. “Balcony papers had an oval ring flatten.”
Elena nods. “It ties L.C. to physical costume. We can cast and compare.”
I set the box into a bag and breathe out, four, hold, two, release. “Router next.”
She lifts it with tongs, holds for a photograph, then places it on the Mylar mat. I can see the ports: WAN, LAN, USB, a reset pinhole with a sticker over it that reads DO NOT TOUCH in block letters. The back bears a scratched-off serial number. The tape smell sharpens. The casing’s seams have a faint line of epoxy like someone ironed a secret.
“Jonah,” I say, already texting. The word tastes like last night’s fight and tonight’s necessity.
He answers on the second buzz: “Here.”
“Arm B lockers. Router needs hands.”
Three minutes later the station doors open again and he pushes through, hoodie damp, curls lit with the wet the city applies when it wants you malleable. He stops a meter from me, like there’s a glass wall he remembers, then steps around it.
“No touching without supervision,” Elena says.
He lifts his palms. “Supervise away.”
The three of us form a triangle around the router. I watch his eyes go from tactical to tender to blank work. He pulls a field kit from his backpack: write-blocker, battery, micro-to-USB, a tiny screen that might have been salvaged from a synth.
“Factory SSID?” he asks.
“Scratched,” I say. “Serial, too.”
He smiles without showing teeth. “Cute.” He clips in and powers the thing. The LEDs blink hard, pause, then settle into an off-brand rhythm that makes my skin prick. He taps the screen. Numbers scroll. He mouths them, not trusting his voice to join us yet.
“Talk to me,” I say, because work is our only fluent language tonight.
“It’s flashed,” he says. “Stock shell, custom overlay. Here.” He turns the screen so Elena and I can read—hash strings like long prayers. “Pulling the firmware hash now.”
Elena holds the evidence bag open, waiting like the bag has ears.
“Compare to the van bug,” I say. My voice goes small then recovers, remembering aluminum, solder, peppermint gum, and a hidden broadcast that made our home a stage.
Jonah thumbs a hotkey and a second set of characters populates. He doesn’t look at me when he says, “Match. One-to-one. Same signature, same compile date, down to the commented typos.”
Satisfaction strikes like a clean downbeat I didn’t expect to hear. Proof. It has weight and a shape and an angle of light it prefers. I almost say yes and clamp it into a breath. Elena’s pen slides across her log, careful, precise. Evidence before victory.
“Bag it,” she says. “We’ll do a second read under lab conditions, but this is a line.”
Jonah doesn’t move the router until she nods. When he unplugs, the LEDs make one last blink, like a wink meant only for the person who wired them. He cocks his head. “There’s also a MAC address bound to a whitelist. One device, trusted. It’s masked, but the pattern looks like a theater Wi-Fi AP I logged when we canvassed. Orpheum’s router naming scheme had that trailing 3F. He loves leaving his initials in negative space.”
“He wants us to see him,” I say. “Wants to prove we can’t act without him.”
Elena seals the bag. The Mylar crackles like a stage gel. The creek outside knocks once on the stairwell glass.
I reach back into the locker and feel under the top lip. My glove comes away sticky with tape. Hidden ridge. I peel and find a thin white card, index-size, corners clean, handwriting like a prop master’s—crisp, theatrical block.
I read it aloud because that’s the price of words in my life: “Act II begins when you learn to mute yourself.”
Jonah exhales a laugh with no humor in it. “He’s going to brute-force your platforms,” he says. “Flood reports, coordinated strikes, DMCA fakes. He’ll cut your mic and call it ethics.”
Elena leans in to photograph the card where it sits on my palm. “Or something more analog,” she says. “Mute buttons can be on doors. On throats.”
I slide the card into a shielded sleeve and hate how it fits there, like it’s been waiting. “He already punished us for latency,” I say, looking at Jonah. “You trimmed patches to keep us live and got us leaked.”
Jonah flinches. He doesn’t deflect; the triangle holds. “I know,” he says. “I’m fixing it. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“You are,” I say, and leave it scaffolded there—something we’ll climb later or walk away from.
Elena taps her radio twice and murmurs to a unit topside to sweep for eyes. Then she crouches and checks the locker floor. A smear of gray dust lines the back edge like the ghost of a postcard. She wets a swab. “Plaster,” she says after a beat, sniffing it fast and frowning. “Lime-heavy. Not commuter dust.”
“Cherub dust,” I say. “He’s been in the Orpheum recently.”
“Or he wants you to think so,” she says, but the corner of her mouth twitches. We both catalog the repeat motif: corrupted innocence and staged salvation, the mask he keeps pushing me to wear.
I pull the gaffer rolls. The tape is chemical-sour, edges stiffened by solvent. Beneath, a flat square of adhesive dots—the kind that stick remotes to hands like the actor described. I think of a palm forced to hold a cue and my own hand clenches.
“Bag those,” Elena says. “We’ll pull prints from the nonadhesive side.”
Through the stairwell glass, the city exhales a steam plume that smudges the neon into watercolor. A woman clatters down in boots, pauses at the sight of cops and boxes, veers at the last second into a different arm. Her perfume leaves a citrus hook that can’t compete with tape and rain. The station loudspeaker barks a delay, the word signal dragged long by feedback like an afterthought.
“He wants to teach me silence,” I say, and the word scrapes in my throat.
“We teach him procedure,” Elena counters. “That router gives me probable cause to knock on the Orpheum’s management again with a different tone. The mold gives me a path to cast and compare. The tapes give me titles to ask for in warrants.”
“And the note gives me a choice,” I say. “Which I hate.”
Jonah rocks back on his heels, hands tucked into his hoodie like he’s guarding warmth from me or for me. “We can pre-record,” he says. “Delay release. Run clean. Make the Night Choir help without giving them a live edge. We can build a pirate path if he gets the platforms to nuke us.”
“Exposure heals and harms,” I say. “Confession liberates and implicates. The same megaphone that gives voice can drown it. I know the speech. He knows I know it. He wants me to mute before I can decide where to point the light.”
Elena shuts the locker with a firm, quiet hand. The cut padlock sits on the floor like a dead idea. She looks at me, not unkindly. “Your voice is evidence,” she says. “Don’t contaminate it.”
We climb the wet stairs, evidence packed, router sealed, card sleeping in its thin armor. Outside, the creek has risen a thumb-width higher, slicking the first landing in a clear gloss. Headlights drag white ropes through the water. The air is sugar-burnt, the factory’s night breath sweetening what doesn’t deserve it.
“We route the actor to safety,” I say. “We don’t name him. We redact until we have chains.”
“Already in motion,” Elena says. “He’ll get a call that doesn’t feel like police.”
Jonah walks a pace behind, making himself a shadow I can use. “The hash match is a kill shot,” he says softly. “But he’s going to make you deaf to your own audience before you can fire it.”
I stop at the curb where the flood makes a mirror. My face looks tired and loud and small. The van—our aquarium—waits at the corner with a blink I know better than my own pulse. I picture its consoles, the peppermint gum box rattling, the cable ties, the place where that first bug hid and learned our rhythms. I picture a spinning app wheel and a grayed-out “Go Live.”
I unfold the index card again, because I’m a creature of repetition and wounds. The letters haven’t moved. “Act II begins when you learn to mute yourself.”
“I won’t,” I say to the card, to the water, to the city that keeps rehearsing harm. “I’ll learn when to dim. Not to mute.”
Elena tucks her chin toward her radio. “Say that again on the air,” she says. “After we lay the chain. After we file.”
“After he tries to cut the feed,” Jonah adds.
I slip the card back into its sleeve and feel the quiet press against my palm. Satisfied sits next to foreboding in my chest like two instruments trying to tune. The creek taps the curb twice, and I hear it as a ring on metal. We step toward the van and into the next beat I don’t control.