The headline burns through the mesh like a flare tossed into dry brush: Producer’s Past of Stage Rage. Chat stamps the words at impossible speeds until the letters melt into a block of pressure. The glassbox hums around me, filtered air and the low aquarium throb of old compressors. Outside, the tidal creek has crept up the curb again, a slick tongue making the sidewalk reflective; neon smears in the puddles like someone tried to rinse the night and gave up halfway.
I click the link and feel my knuckles tighten around the mouse. A tab opens on a paste mirror with a veneer of faux-ethics commentary. The screenshot shows Jonah’s yearbook photo at sixteen—fresh haircut, grin too bright—and a police report with black boxes that still manage to shout. “Damage to a community theater lobby display—cherub statue cracked at the mouth.” The write-up weds it to a breakup. It stitches in a quote from an anonymous “classmate” who remembers aspirin bottles in drum cases. It tastes like old gum stretched to the breaking point and stuck back again.
“No,” I say, small and vicious, like I could bite the word into a different shape. “No, we’re not doing this.”
The pirate stream comment column coughs up our fandom’s split-screen conscience. The Night Choir sings two songs at once: protect him, purge him; due process, dopamine. Vinyl pin avatars multiply like algae blooms. Somewhere in that flood are people who sent me their dead uncle’s fingerprints and people who DMed me a photo of my own door. The same crowd, on different nights.
Jonah stands behind me, arms folded, duffel slumped by his ankle. He wears the face he puts on before a code deploy—the one that says he’ll do triage faster than heartbreak. He watches the same screen I watch and doesn’t move.
“I can thread this,” I say, already underlining sentences in my head. “I can contextualize. I can say what you told me—divorce at home, a fight with the director about unpaid performers, a bottle and a wall and a bad imitation of power. I can put it next to Lyle’s theater damage and show the difference. I can keep the story from eating you.”
He shakes his head once, hard enough that his hair throws a shadow against the glass. “You’re not my public defender, Mara.”
“I’m your partner,” I say. “And I’m a microphone. Let me aim it where the truth lives.”
“You mean let you aim it at me,” he says, the softness gone from his voice. He doesn’t raise it; he slices it. “I know what this looks like. Half the crowd will say ‘pattern,’ and you’ll be using me to prove your evolved ethics. No.”
I swallow and find the copper taste of the lake still in my mouth from last night, the metronome’s tick still counting somewhere behind my ear. “Then let me at least name the leak. It came down the same pipe as my forged DM—look at this.” I scroll to the footer, to the smudgy little string most eyes skip. “The short-URL service is identical, same two-letter prefix. The relay node is our familiar ghost: ‘angel-lobby-east.’ That signature hash? It matches the one on the DM that said I baited Alina.”
He leans in. For a second we’re our best selves again, shoulder to shoulder, working a pattern like music. Then he steps back. “You can’t make this about your redemption arc either,” he says. “I broke something when I was a kid. That’s mine. He’s using it. That belongs to him right now too.”
“It belongs to neither of you,” I say, and my voice threatens to wobble. I clamp it down with a breath that fogs the inside of the glass panel for a second and vanishes. “It belongs to the way the audience metabolizes pain for entertainment. I am done feeding them.”
“We live off them,” he says. “Even now, when we’re supposedly off-platform, we’re still in their jaws.”
Micro-hook #1: The mesh chat spits a new clip—grainy nighttime security footage. A hoodie, a lobby, a plaster cherub. A hand reaching up. The mouth breaks. Someone types: SAME MOVE.
I refuse the clip my eyes. “We don’t click it,” I say to both of us, the way you don’t touch a hot pan because you like your palms. “We don’t let him remix us into his moodboard.”
The studio smells like damp winter coats and coffee that turned cold while we were on the road. I hear the creek tap the curb twice, a tiny bell. My phone buzzes. Elena texts: On my way. Don’t post. Then: We need to look at this quiet.
“Elena says—”
“I know what Elena says,” Jonah answers, already bending for his duffel. The zippers sigh open, and a tangle of cable and small tools appears like viscera, meticulous and filthy with use. He starts coiling with the loose elegance he always has in his hands. “She also told me last week to patch the mesh auth when I wanted to keep latency under two hundred milliseconds. She was right. I was wrong. This is me taking a different kind of advice.”
I circle to face him. “Don’t do this here, in the aquarium.”
“Exactly here,” he says, and lifts the duffel, then drops it again because he forgot the blue Pelican case with the packet sniffers. “Here, where the glass gives everybody the illusion they’re watching the honest thing.” He looks up at me with a smile that has nothing kind in it. Not unkind, just scraped. “And no, you don’t get to cut to a midroll ad about therapy between your plea for my soul and your plea for patience.”
“I haven’t done an ad read since the ban,” I say, and it lands between us like a sad, ugly badge.
The door clicks and Elena enters, shoulders dusted with street damp, hair pulled tight as authoritarian clocks. She takes in the screen, the packed bag, my face with one sweep. “No feeds,” she says gently. “No episodes. Not tonight.”
“I wasn’t—” I start.
“I know,” she says. “He was.” She nods at Jonah’s duffel. “Is that you leaving?”
Jonah shrugs, a movement that says this isn’t flounce, this is firebreak. “It’s me not making it easier to paint me as the saboteur who stuck around to finish the job.”
“Right now optics don’t want your nuance,” Elena says. “They want a silhouette. They’ll hold it against the light and see horns.” She shifts to me. “He needs counsel, not comments. You need to resist the urge to clarify. Clarification is gasoline.”
“So I do nothing while they eat him?” I ask, and the hot part of my chest tries to sprint.
“You do things that aren’t talking,” Elena says. “Pull metadata. Hand me what you saw on that URL shortener. Let me get a warrant to pry the relay. Let me take this off the stage you built and into a room without an audience.”
Jonah laughs, low and worn. “Rooms without audiences don’t exist,” he says. “They just have different tickets.”
Elena’s eyes soften, a rare gift. “This is not about guilt,” she says to him. “This is about appetite. Let me starve it.”
I step between them and hold up my screen, zooming on the footer. “Same pipe,” I say. “Same alias. Same weird serif on the timestamp—that fake newsroom template he loves. He’s trying to make us chase the resemblance to his theater stunts and miss the infrastructure.”
“Good,” Elena says. “Now don’t tweet that sentence.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I say, although earlier I drafted a thread in my head without my fingers moving. “I was going to talk to the Night Choir.”
“In your living room, off air, maybe,” she says. “At a dumpling place over you-know-what. Not on the mesh. Not tonight.”
Jonah hoists the duffel onto his shoulder, the muscles in his neck drawing lines I’ve memorized from easier shifts. “I’m not going to be your case study,” he says, and there’s no music left in it. “You’re doing the right thing tonight, Mara. I’m doing the right thing for me.”
“The right thing for me is you here,” I say, softer than I planned. “Not because you make me sound good. Because you remind me who I promised to be.”
He looks broke open for a breath, then shuts the lid. “Remind yourself,” he says.
He walks to the door and stops with his hand on the bar like a man trying to choose which universe he can stand. The creek outside licks the curb. The factory’s burnt-sugar note drifts in, faint syrup, city’s weird lullaby. He looks back at the board, at the LEDs winking idiot life, and then at me.
“Don’t chase me,” he says. “If you follow, it’ll be content.”
I put my hands up in the air by reflex, surrendering to a rule I hate. “Then tell me where you’re going,” I say.
“A couch,” he says. “A roof. Not yours. Not hers.” He nods at Elena. “I’ll text a lawyer’s card.”
“Don’t let him make you the bad rhyme,” I blurt, and I mean Lyle, the way he pairs our worst nights with his.
Jonah smiles for real just once, tired, sweet. “I already rhymed,” he says. “A long time ago. I learned better meter. That’s the only statement I’m making.”
He pushes the bar and exits into night. The door breathes after him. The creek’s reflection quivers as a rideshare hisses past; the puddle keeps the secret of the license plate.
Micro-hook #2: The studio monitor flashes a new anonymous upload—“HALF-LIGHT LOCATION: YOU’RE SO CLOSE.” A still of a tunnel, light sickly, a chalk X near a drain. The caption: “Final dress waits.”
Elena angles the screen away with the heel of her hand. “We’ll pivot to that when we have a plan,” she says. “Right now I need you to send that shortener trail to my secure inbox. And I need you to promise not to go live to ‘clear air.’”
I close the laptop halfway and leave it there like a lid on boiling water. “He used the same channel,” I say, because I need the sentence to sit between us with weight. “He wants the audience to believe everything matches: vandalism, cherubs, mood. He wants to make Jonah my understudy in monstrosity.”
“Then we ruin his blocking,” Elena says. “We don’t feed the compare-and-contrast montage. We put this in a box with a chain-of-custody ribbon on it. We get the record pulled back behind the line it crossed.”
“Sealed juvenile records don’t leak without help,” I say. “Do you have eyes on his volunteer friend in trust-and-safety?”
“She’s not my jurisdiction,” Elena says. “But she’s not invisible. Off-email conversations, right?” A small, rueful smile edges her mouth. “I prefer dumplings.”
I let myself laugh and it feels like a cough. “He wants silence or spectacle,” I say. “He doesn’t know what to do with work.”
“Then we work,” she says. “And you sleep no less than three hours before dawn. Half-light isn’t a suggestion.”
I promise without meaning it. The glass reflects me two ways: one version with a mic; one with a mug, hands wrapped so the heat has somewhere to go. I rub a thumb over the edge where a listener once pressed his forehead during a tour and fogged it with hope.
“What if he’s right,” I ask, “and the only way the crowd learns is through a stage?”
Elena zips her jacket and lets the question hang long enough to earn its own echo. “Then we build a different stage,” she says. “One that doesn’t eat your people.”
My phone pings again. A Night Choir mod—one I trust—sends a screenshot of the leak’s admin backend, half-obscured by black bar humor, but one corner intact: a cherub watermark in the negative space near a timestamp. I swear under my breath. He’s playing it like a brand launch.
“Send me that,” Elena says. “And send Jonah that lawyer’s card anyway.”
I type with fingers that don’t want to spell. My ears catch a drip in the ceiling, a new metronome tick the building adds when the weather hunches. Final dress at half-light. I picture the tunnel I know, the defective lamp, the way chalk makes a wound on concrete.
Micro-hook #3: A new message pips from Jonah: a single pin-drop emoji and a street name truncated by the phone’s banner. Then the notification dismisses itself, and the preview history refuses to resurrect it.
“He changed his mind?” Elena asks, watching my face again like a lie detector that loves me.
“He sent something,” I say, tapping to open—too late. The banner is gone; the lock-screen history shows nothing but the earlier lawyer contact. Phantom. “He may be telling me where not to go.”
“Or where he went,” Elena says. “Either way: you don’t follow. You tell me. You let me be the one who breaks the rule you wrote about not making it a show.”
I nod and the motion doesn’t reach my ribs. The hum of the studio grows larger to fill the space Jonah left. Outside, the creek recedes a little, satisfied with its rehearsal. The factory’s sugar breath thins until it’s only a memory I can taste if I try. I press my palm to the glass and watch my handprint fade on the pane, a heat-stain turning into nothing.
“You okay?” Elena asks, not sweet, just present.
“I’m hollow,” I say. “Which is good for sound. Bad for people.”
She lets that sit. “You’ll fill with the right things,” she says finally. “Not tonight. But you will.”
I close the laptop all the way. The room dimly shows me myself without overlays, without chat. There is work to hand off and a half-light to map. There is a partner in the dark who won’t let me broadcast my grief into a mythology he can weaponize. There is a boy I love somewhere under a new headline that tastes like copper.
The tunnel waits. The crowd waits. I stand still long enough to hear the building’s tick, count the beats, and try to decide which silence to keep—and which I’ll have to break.