I don’t sleep. I map. Half-light isn’t poetry tonight; it’s an electrician’s shrug. I think like a gaffer, not a host. A broken sodium fixture in a tunnel, a bulb that never commits to on or off, a place that stays perpetually dusk no matter what the sun does. I list nine candidates and narrow by flood reports—places that stayed dry when the creek behind our block swelled last full moon. The Night Choir once made a pin shaped like that stretch of sidewalk, a silver sliver with ripples. I still have mine. It digs into my palm while I circle the map with my thumb.
At three-forty, I text Elena a cross street and get back a dot. She’s closer than I am, already moving. The city outside the glassbox tastes of burnt sugar again from the factory; a tanker is venting somewhere. The studio hums like an aquarium, alive without me. I leave it on purpose, lights off. No spectacle tonight.
I drive the van the last blocks with the headlights hooded by damp. The tunnel mouths open like a pair of closed eyes. One eye is bandaged—the left fixture dead, leaving a mid-level gloom that flattens everything into a theatrical scrim. Chalk gleams in the near-dark: a line of arrows toward the middle, a stutter of Xs that feel like stage marks. I pocket my phone and walk.
“Wait,” Elena says softly from the other side, her voice coming first, her shape materializing after. She steps out of the gloom wearing a reflective band she flipped inside-out to keep us less visible. “No feed. No notes you can’t burn.”
“No audience,” I say. “Just work.”
Our footsteps knock hollow in the throat of the tunnel. Wet air moves in a pulse—car exhaust thickened by algae at the drain. Far off, the creek murmurs through the city’s stonework, patient and old as a stagehand who’s seen every diva fall.
I see it at the same time Elena does: a little cube on the ground, black as a swallowed thought, a red number blinking. 00:23. A tiny metronome sits beside it like a paperweight, tick—tick—tick—its plastic body scarred by tape residue. The cube clicks at each tick, lagging by a hair.
“Timer,” Elena murmurs. “Speaker next. Don’t touch.”
I don’t. I crouch until my boots soak along the seams and put my ear close enough to hear the machinery’s stomach noises. I can taste nickel on my tongue, nerves or battery. The countdown chews: 00:19, 00:18.
Micro-hook #1: The metronome’s tick crawls under my ribs until my heart gives up and matches it.
I hate that my body volunteers. I put a hand to my chest like I can cup the rhythm and turn it. Elena watches my wrist, not my face.
“Breathe on the off-beat,” she says. “Make it yours.”
I do, in, out, off the click. The numbers roll: 00:05, 00:04, 00:03—
The speaker cracks open. “—truth beats,” Alina’s voice says, bright and close, the same cadence from the rehearsal clip I played weeks ago, only thinner, tape-warbled. “You don’t need an audience to practice honesty.”
I flinch anyway. I hear water slap somewhere behind a grate, a slap that sounds like applause.
“He cut this from our twelve seconds,” I say. “He chopped it to remove the breath and the floor noise.”
Elena’s jaw goes still. “He wants your body to remember the first time you used it,” she says. “And he wants to turn it into his.”
The speaker keeps going, perfectly paced to the metronome’s click. “Beat one,” Alina’s voice says, “enter in half-light.” A three-count pause. “Beat two, find your mark.” I look down; the chalk X under my boots makes a white star. “Beat three, meet the watcher.”
Something clicks behind the service panel on the tunnel wall—small, hungry, mechanical.
“Lens,” I whisper. “He wants to catch the look on my face at ‘watcher.’”
Another click. It’s faint and insect-clean, the kind you only hear when you invite it. I step to the panel and wipe condensation from the corroded metal with my sleeve. A littler circle sits inside the dark, perfect and dumb. The moment I see it, it blinks—no light, just that sound again, the sound of a tiny throat swallowing.
“Tape?” Elena says.
I have gaffer in my pocket like a superstition. I tear a strip with my teeth. The adhesive tastes like the inside of a tire. It sticks to my glove, then to the panel, then to the lens. I smooth it with my thumb. The tape’s matte black. The click happens again, futile and sudden.
“I hope he loves the texture,” I say. “Eat your own darkness, Director.”
Elena doesn’t smile, but the air around her eases. She sweeps the beam of her penlight along the floor, keeping it low. Chalk marks interrupt the grit like scabs. “He ran a rehearsal here at least twice,” she says. “Different shoe pressure—see the crush on these edges.”
I see what she means when I squint. The chalk Xs have tails where a heel dragged off, like the performer couldn’t stand still on the cue. In one, the chalk dust bunches where something soft mashed into it, then lifted. Elena goes to one knee and pulls a small case from her pocket like a magician without laughter. Tweezers appear. She plucks a black curl from the sunken place and holds it like an eyelash no one wished on.
“Rubber,” she says. “Not crumb from the mat here—it’s cleaner than the floor around it. Look at the edge.”
I lean. The curl’s cut line is too pristine, too intentional. It’s not the bite a cracked sole leaves when it fails. It’s a shaving from a machine.
“No mass-market tread makes that geometry,” she says. “Custom.”
“Traceable,” I say, and the word feels like a kind of door. “Stage shoe?”
“Closer to dancewear with a protective overlay,” she says. “Or a bespoke rubber cap glued to a leather sole. It’d make no squeak on concrete and still push chalk. It’s a theater trick made for eavesdropping.”
The speaker keeps metronoming, cuing the rest of the script. Alina’s voice instructs an echo: “Beat four, confess your motive to the room.”
I look at the taped lens and imagine the red light hidden under it, trying to semaphore motive back to a van I can’t see. I swallow my own confession because it belongs in a room with dumplings and no microphones, the kind where Elena and I trade information like recipes with secrets folded into the dough. Off email. OFF AIR, my brain spells, giant.
I cut the speaker. The click of the button is loud as a whistle in the half-dark. The metronome keeps at it like a rat that learned rhythm on a pirate stream. I pick it up and let it tick in my palm until my skin warms the plastic and the beat loses command. I set it down, gently, not out of respect. Out of ritual. He feeds on drama; I feed him nothing.
Micro-hook #2: Somewhere beyond the taped lens, a relay spins up—whirr, stop, whirr—like a throat preparing a word it won’t get to say.
“He’ll be watching for a signal that didn’t come,” Elena says. She seals the curl into a paper envelope and writes a time on it. Her handwriting is neat as a bandage. “I’ll get this to our lab, but I want a cobbler’s eye too. Someone who knows rubber like I know bad timing.”
“I’ll put out a call,” I say, then stop myself. “Not a call. An invite. Controlled. Verified professionals only. No audience.”
“Good,” she says, like I passed an exam I made up and then dreaded. “No doxxing, no swarms. We’ll use the Night Choir’s discipline, not their appetite.”
I crouch by the drain where chalk smears taper into a darker smear, not oil. “He poured water across this,” I say. I touch a dry edge with the back of my finger and feel the chalk grit lift. “He wanted a reflective surface to double the light. Half again.”
Elena glances toward the tunnel mouth where a sliver of street glows pale. “Half-light layered with half-light,” she says. “Make a dusk even at noon.”
I nod. “He writes like a lighting tech who thinks he’s a god.” I peel another length of tape and stick it over a second pinhole I notice once I’m looking properly. It’s lower, aimed at knees, maybe shoes. I put two strips, then a third for the petty pleasure of overkill.
We stand in the middle of the tunnel with the ticks quiet and our breathing large in our ears. The city outside moves like a whale beneath us—huge and not concerned. I catch the faint sugar of the factory again, thinned by distance, and it tastes like a memory the way grief does once it cools. The concrete smells like wet envelope glue and the iron edge of the drain smells like a penny on your tongue.
“Mara,” Elena says, the tone she saves for a truth that might bruise, “this is the part where he expects you to broadcast. He left chalk like notation because he wants an orchestra. You will not give him cues.”
“I won’t,” I say. “But I’ll take them.”
She studies me. “Take them where?”
“To people who aren’t hungry,” I say. “A cobbler. A stagehand. An acoustician. The kind of audience that doesn’t clap.”
“That’s a show I’ll buy tickets to,” she says, deadpan, and I realize she’s giving me permission to build a thing that looks like a program but behaves like a deposition.
I toe an X off-center and reveal a sliver of concrete the chalk forgot. “He stood here,” I say. “He pivoted on the ball of his right foot. The drag tails pull left.”
Elena lights the ground without lifting the beam above our ankles. “Dominant right,” she says. “And he likes his props to have tiny sounds that feel big—clicks that punch the lizard brain. That metronome isn’t about tempo. It’s about control.”
I hear again that first hijack at the Orpheum—the mask lit like a baby saint, the metronome hanging from a mic arm, tick promising salvation. The cherub motif repeats in the power cables lacing the tunnel wall—curled ends like little wings. Corrupted innocence, staged salvation, again and again, until the idea stops being about angels and starts being about marketing.
“We’re going to get banned from every place with a permit if we keep stumbling into these,” I say. “Half the city will file for restraining orders against my voice.”
“Then stop stumbling,” Elena says. “Walk there on purpose with me. No stream. No chat. We leave no more chalk than he does.”
I lift the taped metronome by its plastic neck and tuck it under my arm. “Souvenir?”
“Evidence,” she says, and opens a paper bag with a brown mouth. I drop the metronome in; it thunks like a heart that learned a new beat and doesn’t know what to do with it.
We head toward the exit. As we pass the service panel, the tiny relay whirrs again behind the tape, then quits. The sound is both defeated and confident, like a stage cue that knows there’s always another performance tomorrow. I stop and press my palm to the tape, feeling the cool, unyielding answer of metal and the faint heat of a camera that won’t see tonight.
“He’ll notice we blinded him,” I say.
“Good,” Elena says. “Let him feel unseen. He writes better when he’s scared.”
Micro-hook #3: My phone buzzes—not a call, a calendar invite from an unknown address: “FINAL DRESS—PRIVATE—HALF-LIGHT,” with a location that resolves to a blank square and a time that moves when I blink.
I show Elena. She shakes her head and flicks airplane mode on my screen with a cop’s intimacy I’ve learned to trust. “Spoof,” she says. “He wants to turn your own tools into cues. Leave them behind for a night.”
“For more than a night,” I say, thinking of Jonah walking into the burnt-sugar dark with no comms I’m allowed to chase, thinking of the audience at the edge of the tunnel, invisible but present, waiting to be fed. My chest tries the metronome’s rhythm again; I deny it with an off-beat breath.
The tunnel spits us back into air that has opinions. A late bus sighs by, the creek behind our neighborhood far enough not to lick our boots but close enough to make the street mirror our faces. Somewhere, a Night Choir kid in a jacket full of vinyl pins takes a photo of nothing and tags it with hope. I hope they forgive me for the silence I’m about to hold.
I touch the envelope in Elena’s hand. “That curl is a thread,” I say. “We pull, it leads to a maker.”
“It leads to a shop,” she says. “And the shop leads to a ledger. And the ledger leads to a donor who calls himself something like ‘LC Arts.’ But we don’t say it out loud until we can write it down with chain-of-custody ink.”
I nod. I put my phone face-down in the van and close the door on it. The studio will hum without me; the factory will breathe its sugar into the night; the creek will keep practicing its flood. We will do something unfashionable: ask experts before we perform. I will build a quiet, verified room and invite only people who know how shoes speak.
I look back at the tunnel. The tape holds. The dusk inside holds. Then, faint and smug, a new click taps under the tape—another lens we didn’t see, or a timer we didn’t disarm. The hair on my arms lifts like a chorus rising for a refrain I refuse to sing.
“He still sees us,” I say.
“Let him watch us work,” Elena says. “No one ever taught him that’s the interesting part.”
I breathe on the off-beat again and taste the future’s iron. Tomorrow I will ask a cobbler which sole leaves a whisper and which leaves a prayer. Tonight I leave the tunnel behind with the metronome in a bag and a countdown in my blood, wondering what he will cue when the house lights stay down and the audience is gone—wondering which silence I can keep, and which I will have to break on air.