The insects take the first line. The buzz is thin and ceaseless, like a crowd trying to whisper and failing. My breath prints the air in short, white commas. I pull the scarf higher, keep my teeth off its wool. The dock is an outline; the lake holds light and refuses it back. I smell algae, damp wood, and the ghost of our city’s burnt sugar that rode my van north and refuses to vacate the vents.
Elena’s shoulder touches mine just once—enough to tell me I’m not the only heat source here. “Decoys are up,” she murmurs, and I watch the little tape flags tremble on our dummy cameras. We built them fat and obvious, tourist style, then hid the real eyes at ankle height, tucked into knot holes where the beam is crooked. The metronome we bagged; this one on the step is a hollow twin, dead inside, set to be nothing but bait.
“He wanted house lights down,” I whisper. “I left one on in the mudroom anyway. I want whoever’s coming to feel watched.”
“They’ll feel measured,” Elena says. “He trains people to believe time is a leash.”
I think about the overlays, the lines of script that tried to put my mouth on rails. I tighten the scarf again and scan the path. Breath fog lifts from me and tries to join the lake.
“Tessa?” I ask into the pinned call we kept open.
“Still on the Beattie sofa,” she answers. “We’re watching a baking show where everyone cries over layer cakes. I’m fine.”
I want to be a cake with nothing to cry over. I settle for being a fence. “If anything knocks, you don’t.”
“Copy,” she says, and I hear the whisper of a blanket and Mrs. Beattie’s deliberate spoon in deliberate tea.
We wait. The night insects rehearse the same bar. A boat knocks a distant dock like a loose thought. My kneecaps tell me the temperature better than the app.
“Positions,” Elena breathes. One syllable; no theater in it, all math. She slips her gloved finger along my forearm, a quiet pathfinding, and points with her chin. On the far end of the dock, a pinprick of red blinks, slow and narcotic.
“That isn’t ours,” I say.
“Good,” she says. “Then we get to keep it.”
We’ve wired the decoys to look greedy: red lamps, big eyes, fat cables. The real cameras sip the dark and send it down a fiber that looks like a vine. I breathe again and let the fog out. Night presses its palm down. The insects modulate a little, a chorus learning to listen.
Micro-hook #1: The red light shifts from steady to heartbeat—two quick blinks, pause. A taught cue. He’s trained them to announce themselves to his tempo.
Footfalls enter the scene wrong for a man who owns the stage. No swagger, no intent to own sound. These are small feet folding themselves, apologizing with every step. I don’t relax; apology is a trick with teeth. The shape resolves between the pines, slightly hunched, one hand higher than the other the way you carry something you don’t trust to stay whole.
“Hands where I can see them,” Elena calls, voice flat, not loud. No threat, no invitation.
The figure stops and lifts both arms into the thin cone of our least helpful decoy. The red light kisses a wrist bracelet and turns it into a wound. When she speaks, I recognize the cadence and the swallow: the acting coach’s assistant, the one whose trembling hands folded receipts in a tidy office that smelled like new boxes.
“Don’t arrest me,” she whispers, and the apology lands fully. “Please. He said to bring it. If I didn’t—” Her voice frays. She swallows the fray back down. “He knows where my mother sleeps.”
“Step forward,” Elena says. “One at a time. Keep your hands high.”
I step out of shadow, palms empty, and let her see me before she sees the badge. “It’s me,” I say. “Mara Keene.” I make my voice low and regular. “I promised you redaction.”
She shivers at my name, and I can’t tell if it’s loyalty to the Director’s script of me or fear of the glow I carry around. “He said you’d say that,” she murmurs. “He said you’d cast me as a victim and turn me into a plot.” Her breath slips out white, then white again. “I didn’t want to come.”
“Then you need an exit,” Elena says, moving closer into the decoy’s silly light, letting the badge flare and die. “You’re not under arrest. You are under our wing. Give us your hands down. Slowly. Good. What are you carrying?”
“A page,” she says, and the word is both paper and sentence. She lowers one hand and pulls a waterproof sleeve from her jacket, a cheap one that wrinkles when you bend it. She holds it like a student holds shame. “He texted me. He used the old number but with one digit different. He said—he said if I did this he would erase the footage of me taking cash from the studio petty box for a pill I—” She cuts herself off, discipline returning by force. “He has everything.”
“He has threats,” I say. “He doesn’t have you. Not if we do this clean.” I look to Elena. She nods and takes the sleeve with both hands, then doesn’t move, presenting stillness like a law.
“Walk,” Elena says to her, voice still not raised. “Up the slope. To the car. We’ll talk where the audio is ours. Don’t run. Running makes you prey.”
The assistant nods so many times it hurts to watch. She steps where Elena points and disappears into pine and breath fog. The insects shift to a thinner octave; I hear vehicle doors open and close in a choreography of permission.
I’m left with the page and the red LED licking the dock’s end. I want to pluck the light like an eye and drop-kick it into the lake. I hand impulse to the part of me trained to read things I hate.
Elena returns, breath visible, shoulder steady. “She’s seat-belted,” she says. “Deputy with her. She gave consent to record. She says he told her the phrase she had to say if she saw you: ‘I’m sorry I ever turned on a light in your direction.’”
“He wrote an apology into her mouth,” I say. “He likes women to be his soundboard.”
“He likes control,” Elena says. “We interrupt it.” She nods at the sleeve. “Go on.”
I slit the top with my glove and slide the paper out. Stage font. Thick margins. A cherub doodle in the corner, cruel little mouth open wide—his signature brand of corrupted innocence. The title reads “ Dockside Feint—Interlude.” The directions are sparse: Lights low. Breath visible. Buzz like a crowd. Deliver prop to Host. Whisper apology. Exit.
Under that, one line in his neat, hateful hand: Final dress at half-light.
The words reach down my spine and set each vertebra in deliberate order. “Half-light,” I say, and memory immediately noodles through my visual library: a pedestrian tunnel with a bad bulb; a stairwell near the Orpheum that never found the budget for full wattage; a riverside underpass where the city’s aquarium hum is replaced by water traffic; a dozen real shadows that look like metaphors.
“You know a place,” Elena says, reading the flicker in me.
“I know a few,” I say. “He wants dawn-but-not-dawn, dusk-but-not-dusk. A place that makes your pupils lie. He wants the camera to forgive him and the audience to think their eyes are old. He wants a dress rehearsal for a confession he still refuses to actually give.”
“Then we start pulling permits and quietly owning those spaces,” Elena says. “But first we finish this one.”
She bends and gestures toward the red blink at the dock’s end. “You want to do the honors?”
“No,” I say, and the word surprises me with how easy it walks out. “I want chain of custody. I want this to be evidence and not a trophy.”
Elena smiles with one corner of her mouth—gone in an instant. “Good. Growth. Alvarez!”
The trooper emerges with a small case, breath fog pistol-quick. He photographs the red light from angles we mapped earlier, then pats it gently into a tin and tapes the lid with the neat violence of a man who respects time.
I hold the script page away from my chest so my heat won’t warp it. The cherub’s tiny plaster face sneers at me from the margin, same wide mouth as the Orpheum ceiling, same fake salvation. He loves stealing halos.
Micro-hook #2: The assistant knocks once at the car window and mouths a new word—“boat”—and taps her wrist, a clock. The story widens by water even as we stand in trees.
“He gave her a time?” I ask when Elena returns from the car.
“He gave her a deadline,” she says. “He told her to deliver by ‘two-to-four of the beat,’ which she interpreted as two to four a.m. She missed by minutes. He expects her to call him from a burner. We have the handset now. He threatened to post a clip of her taking cash if she didn’t perform.”
“Threats. Not love,” I say, and the confirmation steadies me in a way I didn’t know I needed. “He runs his network on fear.”
“Fear and myth,” Elena says. “Myth breaks under weight. We provide weight.”
The insects swerve down a register again, like a DJ crossfading night. I hear the creek in my head, the way it taps the curb outside the studio when the moon fattens and the sidewalks flood. The studio hums like an aquarium all the time, even when quiet; I picture the glass walls, the way they reflect me back until I become two people—one I can keep, one I promised to change.
“You okay?” Elena asks, not making it a couch.
“I’m coiled,” I say. “But not to strike. To hold.”
“Good,” she says. “Hold the page. Read the back.”
I flip. A smaller note is taped to the reverse in a strip of translucent medical tape that smells like a clinic. Three words, printed, no flourish: Mute or drown.
I taste metal. Not fear, not yet; just salt from a memory of falling off this dock once and coming up laughing with lake in my sinuses. “He’s still running Act II,” I say. “He wants me quiet enough to make space for his monologue.”
“We’ll decide when to mute,” Elena says. “Not him.”
A deputy signals from the path: one more sweep and then we pull up stakes. The assistant sits small in the back seat, hands tucked under thighs like she’s been twelve for twenty years. I walk over and crouch, my knees protesting the cold, and bring my face to the glass so she sees only me and not the machinery.
“I’m sorry,” she says through the crack Elena allows, breath fogging the line between us. “For the receipts. For turning the lamp toward your show when he told me to. For this. He said if I didn’t place the metronome he’d—” She clamps down hard, jaw flexing like it’s chewing shame. “My mother doesn’t need to know about me.”
“We don’t let him decide what she knows,” I say. “We take that tool away. You’re going to tell a version you choose, in a room with people who know how not to burn you for heat.”
Tears stand and do not fall. She nods once, the way a person agrees with gravity. “He said ‘half-light,’” she adds, “like everyone knows what that means.”
“We’ll know,” I say. “Soon.”
Elena touches my shoulder and I rise. We walk back to the dock. The red blink is gone, boxed. The decoys look embarrassed now that the real thing is caged. My breath fogs again and I let it. The insects recover the melody they never lost.
“We leave the decoys?” I ask.
“One,” she says. “Let him think he still directs. We write the next scene anyway.”
I slide the script into an evidence sleeve and seal it. The cherub stares through plastic like a kid behind aquarium glass, longing mistaken for devotion. I pocket the note where I can feel its rectangular threat against my hip, a small rectangle with big ideas about my mouth.
Micro-hook #3: My phone vibrates, a city pulse invading trees. A new anonymous post pings the mesh—the headline uses Jonah’s last name and the word ‘vandalism.’ The timing is not mercy.
“What?” Elena asks, already reading my face.
“He’s moving another piece,” I say. “A leak about Jonah. Juvenile record. Framed to rhyme with tonight.”
“We triage,” she says. “We protect Tessa and the assistant; we lock this page; then we put your house in order before the next cue.”
“Final dress at half-light,” I repeat, tasting the phrase until it loses glamour and turns into a location problem. “Tomorrow, maybe sooner.”
“We’ll be there,” she says. “With the lights we choose.”
The insects buzz like a restless audience. My breath fogs one more time and then thins to nothing. We break down a decoy and leave one blinking lie. The lake absorbs our noise, stingless. I pocket the story he wanted to force and walk up the slope, coiled into something useful, compassion still burning hot enough to see by, and a new fear forming a plan-shaped shadow around Jonah’s name.