The email lands with the metallic thunk of a dropped wrench. Subject line: Account suspended—urgent policy matter. I don’t click right away. The studio hums like an aquarium and the creek behind the glass tests the curb in patient fingers, rising a knuckle higher with each moon-pulled breath. Burnt sugar drifts in from the factory and coats my mouth like a bad promise.
I click.
“Harmful coordination,” I read aloud. The phrase tastes bureaucratic and bruised. “Effective immediately. Temporary pending review. Do not attempt to evade.”
Jonah’s chair stops squeaking. He stands so fast his headphones slither to the floor and stay there like molted skin. “They brigaded us,” he says. “He warned you—mute yourself. He meant this.”
“Header info,” I say, because if I name the wound I’ll bleed more. I forward the notice to Elena and open the raw headers. Volunteer tags flicker where bots shouldn’t: triage_cherub, mask_mod, angelwatch. I don’t need a legend to read the motif. Cherubs again—plaster, pins, now policies. The Director doesn’t just stage scenes; he curates people.
Elena’s reply pings before my second breath: Do not go live. Wait for me. Also: do not delete anything. I can hear her jaw in the text.
“They took the archive links,” I say. “Old episodes still list, but anything with Alina’s name is grayed out like a dead channel.”
Jonah presses his palm to the glass. Outside, the Night Choir’s regulars shuffle in the floodlight, their vinyl pins glinting—moon slivers, tiny black cherubs—wary fish circling our tank. “We can’t go dark,” he says. “If we go dark, he writes the story alone.”
My phone vibrates: sponsors “pausing pending clarity,” a PR euphemism that means you’re a bonfire. Another ping: a DM from a listener—we’re with you; where do we hear truth?—and my throat closes on the word.
“We pivot,” I say. “We build our own stage that he doesn’t own.”
Jonah’s grin shows all the years before fear. “Peer-to-peer. No central server to nuke. We burn a swarm.”
“I heard ‘burn’ and my stomach objected,” I say, but I’m already scooping cables into my arms. The van waits curbside, our ungainly ark, ladders of gear and peppermint gum rattling in the glovebox. The creek sighs, touches the first stair, and holds—rehearsing restraint none of us have.
We run.
Micro-hook #1: The account is dead; the audience is not.
The van greets me with the comforting stink of solder, coffee, damp canvas. I yank the side door; it sticks, then gives. Lights blink awake across the console like small cities seen from above. Jonah slides into the pilot seat and flicks switches in muscle memory. The roof dish whirs; a cable brushes my cheek, cold as fish.
“We can’t stream the way we used to,” I say. “We need to flatten the signature—no platform handshake.”
“I’ll seed,” he says. “They’ll seed. Old-school. WebRTC mesh over a TURN fallback I’ll borrow from a friend who thinks everything should be free. Terms-of-service can take a number.”
Elena climbs into the doorway like a storm warning in plainclothes. Rain dots her hairline; her radio mutters a distant arrest that isn’t ours. She takes in the coils, the roof hardware, my hands already typing.
“No,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
We hold the word like a baton and take turns not dropping it.
“You want me to keep the city off your back,” she says, low and exact, “don’t make me defend a felony stream.”
“It’s not a felony,” Jonah says, half into a command line. “It’s frowned upon. Frowned upon is my mother’s default stance.”
“He’s flooding policy volunteers with bespoke panic,” I say, tapping the header aliases on my screen. “Cherub, mask, angelwatch—he’s theming moderation. He has influence there. If we wait, he writes the script: ‘violent mob podcast evades responsibility.’”
Elena’s nostrils flare; it’s the smallest tell I’ve ever learned to read like a lighthouse. “No live location, no doxxing, no calls to action,” she says. “You violate any of that and I pull this van into evidence so fast your pins spin.”
“Deal,” I say, because I love this woman like a metronome that saves songs from themselves. “We go voice-only at first. No chat. We’ll record and mirror to an offline drive. If the swarm misbehaves, we cut.”
Jonah pivots the screen to me. A gray grid now blooms tiny blue nodes. He points. “Each dot is a listener who becomes a relay. You speak; they repeat. We’re ants building a bridge with our bodies.”
“Hot,” I say, then hear myself and add, “In a civic-responsibility way.”
Elena pinches the bridge of her nose. “Why do I have this job.”
“Because you like rules,” I say. “And because someone has to watch me not break them.”
She grits her teeth, then leans past me to look at the blue constellation. “If anyone posts a location,” she says, “you mute them. If anyone names a civilian, you cut. You keep a written list of what you don’t air. And you do not read any message that starts with ‘tip:’ out loud without calling me first.”
“Yes, Detective,” I say, the words a small life raft.
Micro-hook #2: The swarm is ready; the knife is, too.
I open a new doc: “Community Pledge—Pirate Edition.” My fingers go cold, then sure. Exposure heals and harms. Confession liberates and implicates. The same megaphone that gives voice can drown it. Justice needs a dimmer switch; tonight I will try to find the knob without snapping it. I arrange the lines like promise and guardrail. I taste the burnt sugar in the back of my throat and wash it with water that has learned the flavor of the creek.
“Invite codes,” Jonah says. “We’ll seed a hundred by DM to the veteran Choir and let them carry it hand-to-hand. No public link.”
I ping the MODS-not-email list we keep on literal paper because paranoia didn’t used to be a personality trait; it was survival. I text Tessa: Don’t watch live. I’ll send you a file later. She replies with a single moon emoji, then: Be boring. I want to tell her boring is a luxury we rent by the hour.
Outside, three fans in rain jackets exchange pins and a folded index card that looks like contraband. Handwritten codes. Analog saves us; analog made him.
I pull the mic closer. It smells like the last late night. I press my hand flat on the desk and feel the van’s low thrum under my palms and the water’s distant slap like a stagehand testing a rope.
“We’re live to the swarm in five,” Jonah says. He’s sweating in that focused way that makes him beautiful and a problem. “Four. Three.”
Elena lifts a finger—the one that means I’m not your boss but try me. “Read the warning first.”
I nod.
I go.
“Night Choir,” I say, my voice filling the van and then, according to the little blue stars, the blocks, the boroughs, and borrowed living rooms, “I’m coming to you on a mesh the platforms can’t mute. We were suspended for ‘harmful coordination.’ That phrase can cover a multitude of sins. We don’t intend to commit any. Here’s the deal.”
I read the pledge. I keep it short, because promises that ramble don’t hold. I tell them we will not name civilians, we will not call for action, we will verify before we air. I ask them to choose truth over spectacle and remind them that listening is also doing.
The node-map doubles.
Jonah’s eyes flick sideways. “They’re here,” he mouths. “They’re bringing their friends.”
“I have new info,” I say, “and a request that is not a call to do anything but think.” I introduce the locker cache, the firmware match, the ring mold, the tapes labeled Orpheum. I do not say anything I can’t file. I do not read the index card telling me to mute; I hold it like a hot coal in my pocket.
A new DM chimes on the side screen—silent, but intrusive: angelwatch: this stream violates TOS; screenshotting and reporting. The handle wears wings. A second message pops from mask_mod: remember your victims and shut up. I taste copper, then swallow it and keep talking.
Elena’s eyebrow climbs a micrometer. She has seen the names too. “Influence,” I murmur into my mug. “He’s got friends in the volunteer rosters.”
“Not friends,” she says. “Devotees.”
I pivot to the ask. “If you studied under Coach Mara Lafferty or took any workshop marketed as ‘truth beats,’ I want you to sit with your memories tonight and not call. Not yet. Tomorrow we open an offline form, no names, only dates and phrases. I don’t want stories used as alibis—I want patterns used as maps. We will route leads securely to Detective Park’s team. Share only what you can stand to share, and nothing live.”
The map swells. The chat—off by design—stays blessedly blank. I feel, for ten seconds, the joy that made me chase radio in the first place: a city breathing together without having to agree about where to exhale.
Elena’s phone buzzes. She angles it so I can read: a trust-and-safety contact she respects, texting “You’re on the radar. Coordinated complaints coming in with matching phrasing. Someone on the volunteer side is whipping up policy language.” The word whipping flashes like a cue.
Jonah slides me a hand-written note: I can rotate swarm hashes every ten minutes; he’ll have to chase, not catch. He taps the mixer; the hiss tightens into a controlled sibilance. “Say ‘Orpheum cherubs’ again,” he whispers. “I want to notch the consonants.”
“Orpheum cherubs,” I say, tasting dust and plaster. “Masks with mouths where mercy should be.”
Micro-hook #3: We’re louder than before; so is the knife at the curtain.
A knock on the van door makes all three of us flinch. I mute and motion. Elena peeks; a Night Choir regular holds up a cardboard sleeve like it’s the Eucharist. Dumplings, grease soaking the bottom, steam fogging the plastic window. The détente ritual. We never email; we barter warmth.
“Later,” Elena says through the crack, and the fan nods, curls damp, pin bright, then melts into the small crowd collecting at a distance like respectful ghosts.
I unmute. “We’ll play anonymized comparisons tomorrow,” I say, the hoax montage already assembling in my head: scripts versus aired calls, cadence against cadence. “For now, we log quietly. We move carefully. We remember that compassion cannot become complicity.”
Two blue nodes on the map wink off at the same time. Jonah frowns. “He’s testing the mesh,” he says. “Reporting nodes to get them throttled. We can route around.”
“Do it,” Elena says. Her jaw is a line carved into granite, but her eyes soften a degree when she adds, “And breathe on a normal count.”
Four in, hold, two, release. I breathe.
I close with the simplest thing I can stand to say. “Under every mask is a person. That includes the person you think you hate. We will not feed him with panic. We will not starve ourselves of truth. We will get our own hands dirty only with the dust of the Orpheum and the ink of the affidavits.”
The node-map peaks, then trembles. A system message scrolls across Jonah’s terminal—anonymous, automated, somewhere between threat and theater: “Act II acknowledged.” He shows it to me without speaking.
I don’t flinch on the mic. I do clench my left hand until the index card corners dent my palm through my pocket.
“Tonight,” I say, “we dim. Tomorrow, we document.”
I kill the feed before the joy can tip into applause. The van’s quiet returns so abruptly my ears pulse. Outside, the creek nudges the curb like a cat asking to be let in. The factory exhales another sugar-burnt ribbon. The dumplings steam in their box like the city’s breath.
Elena exhales. “You’re not arrested.”
“High bar,” Jonah says, grinning like we just robbed a bank for a library.
I open the suspension email again and stare at the volunteer handles until the letters separate from meaning. “He’s inside the moderation choir,” I say. “He built himself a safety board with cherub masks.”
“Then we file a parallel record,” Elena says. “Screenshots, headers, timestamps. Admins hate being gamed. We give them what they need to see it.”
Jonah rotates the swarm hashes and watches the blue constellations re-form. “They’ll follow,” he says. “They always do.”
“That’s what scares me,” I answer, and tuck the index card deeper into my pocket, the paper a small, stiff heart. “When the Choir sings, I need to make sure we’re not drowning anyone.”
The van lights flicker once when the generator hiccups, and I swear I hear the Director’s metronome hiding inside the engine’s tick. I press my palm to the console and feel the live wire of the next episode crackle under my skin.
I look at Jonah. “Tomorrow,” I say, “we cut a montage the lawyers can bless.”
“Tomorrow,” he echoes.
Elena points at the inbox. “Tonight,” she says, “you send me every header. And you sleep with your phone on Do Not Disturb and my number starred.”
I nod. The creek taps the curb twice, a ring on metal, the city’s cue. I stare at the word suspended until it blurs into sustained, and I can’t tell if that’s hope or a trick of light.
The email window reflects my face back at me—tired, sharp, hungry. The show is officially quiet; the Choir is anything but. I close the laptop halfway and leave it there like a curtain we might raise or drop, listening for the moment the Director decides which act we’re in, and whether he’s already holding the house lights.