The studio hums steady as an aquarium, a low comfort that crawls under my skin now that the angels have names again. Rain taps the glass in quick triplets. The tidal creek behind the building pushes a thin tongue over the curb, laying a mirror across the sidewalk. I taste the city’s burnt sugar on the back of my tongue. My board lights climb and fall—a breath monitor for a room pretending to be alive.
I’m wiping condensation from the window with the sleeve of my hoodie when the buzzer rattles. Three short, one long. Not Night Choir. Not a courier. My chest tightens anyway.
I hit the intercom. “Yeah?”
“Detective Park,” a calm voice says. Paper rustles under the words, like she’s already rearranging my life. “Let me in, Mara.”
I buzz her up and slide the copper coin from the console into my palm. It’s cold and honest. Jonah’s out grabbing noodles and tape; his jacket hangs on the chair, wet cuffs dripping into a small halo on the floor. I pull the fader down, not because we’re live, but because silence is a habit I use like a shield.
Elena enters in a rain-dark coat, shakes it once, and sets a manila folder on my desk as if it belongs there. Her hair is pinned tight; her shoes leave neat half-moons of water that I will step in later. She doesn’t look at the board first. She looks at me.
“Congratulations on your anniversary episode,” she says, and the line lands without a smile.
“We cut it short,” I say. “For safety.”
“You opened the lines without a screener.”
“We warned the Choir about boundaries. We have a pledge pinned.”
She taps the folder with one finger. “Pledges don’t hold up when attorneys ask why you published a confession in real time.”
“We didn’t publish a confession,” I say, feeling my shoulders rise on their own. “We published questions. We cut the stunt and moved to verification.”
“You don’t control what you publish once you invite a crowd,” she says. “You know that better than most.”
I set the coin down and it clicks like punctuation. “Are we arguing philosophy, Detective, or are you here for something I can actually help with?”
She opens the folder. Inside: a subpoena draft, crisp and official, my studio’s legal name floated at the top like a dare. My mouth goes dry. She slides another page free—a timeline printed from some police dashboard that prefers gray to grace.
“Both,” she says. “I’m here to keep you from losing your equipment by morning, and I’m here to tell you where you stand.”
“On a wet floor,” I say. My voice doesn’t shake. I let my knee bounce under the table instead.
“On a line you keep widening,” she counters. She taps the second page. “Alina Brooks’s phone pinged a tower a block and a half from your studio at 12:41 a.m. yesterday. Your show ended at 12:23. She didn’t go home.”
My teeth find my lower lip and bite. I taste copper, rain, and caffeine. “You have a specific tower?”
“Sector and azimuth,” she says. “I’m not going to pretend it’s precise. But when I see that, and I see your show inviting confessions about her, I come here instead of the precinct. That’s me being merciful.”
I steady my breath. “If you want my call logs, you’ll need a signed subpoena.” I tap the draft gently. “This looks like draft.”
“It is,” she says. “If we can agree tonight, I don’t have to file it tomorrow.”
“Agree to what?”
“Three things,” she says, lifting one finger at a time. “One, no more live confessions that mention current missing persons without a delay and a dump that you actually use. Two, every tip—every DM, voicemail, anonymous note—comes to me or my desk within an hour. Three, you do not show up first anywhere that the caller says to go.”
I open my mouth. She raises her eyebrows like a metronome upstairs just ticked.
“Say the line you want to say,” she invites.
“If I don’t show up first, a hundred amateurs will,” I say. “You’ll get a crime scene salted with Night Choir pins and conscience and footprints. We manage the crowd better than strangers do.”
“You are the crowd,” she says. “That’s the problem.”
We look at each other through rain-smeared glass. Outside, the flood catches the streetlight and throws a shaky halo onto the sidewalk. I hear the hiss of a bus, the clack of an umbrella from someone who doesn’t trust the sky. The studio smells like warm plastic and noodle broth seeped from Jonah’s empty cup, and under it the marshy tang from the creek that never learned the city.
Elena slides a phone from her coat and unlocks it. “There’s more,” she says. “Alina Brooks DM’d your show two nights ago from a private account. She wrote, ‘I think some calls are staged and I have notes. Can you meet where it’s quiet?’ She attached a voice memo. You didn’t reply.”
My stomach flips over a hand I can’t see. “We never saw that.”
She angles the screen. I see my show’s inbox, the request tab I hate because it sifts hope through an algorithm. The DM sits there, unopened. The timestamp grows teeth.
“We’re not lying,” I say, and my voice is softer than I mean it to be. I lift my hands, show her my empty palms, then plant them flat so she can watch them stay. “A filter buried it. We disabled the filter last month. The platform re-enabled it after an update, and we didn’t notice. That’s on me.”
“It’s on her now,” Elena says, not stabbing, just placing the knife on the cutting board and pointing to it. “I need the memo.”
“You’ll have it in ten minutes,” I say.
“I’ll need your acknowledgement that you aired a call that named a current missing person,” she adds. “And I’ll need to know whether that choice was made for ratings or by mistake.”
I stand. My knee knocks the desk; empty mugs clink. “It was not for ratings.”
“Everything is for ratings with you,” she says, and the pity in it cuts cleaner than anger. “Maybe not in your mouth. But in outcome.”
I sit again because standing makes my heartbeat too loud in my ears. I force my foot flat against the floor. “We did not solicit a name,” I say. “We pressed for verifiable, non-identifying detail. The caller chose to say Alina. I corrected them. I re-stated the pledge. We cut the segment. We did not post location. We went to the Orpheum to document a hidden camera pointed at a door so that you could pull it before a crowd got recorded like a cast list.”
Her eyes click to my face. “You went where the caller’s riddle pointed. Tonight.”
“We didn’t cross the threshold,” I say. “We filmed the exterior. We found a pirated livestream aimed at the doors. We texted you stills and the stream ID. Check your messages.”
Her phone buzzes her wrist. She glances down, opens the link I sent, and watches ten seconds of rain glinting on the Orpheum glass. The tiny red dot is gone in the still; the overlay line No curtain call without a lead is not. The skin at the corner of her jaw tightens.
“You should have waited,” she says.
“If we’d waited, the camera would have kept collecting faces,” I say.
She tucks that away with a small nod. “Next time, you call first, then you go. Or maybe you don’t go.”
“There isn’t a next time unless you make one,” I say, and take the draft subpoena from its folder. Paper rasp catches my fingertips—a dry sound in a wet room. “This says you intend to seize the consoles, servers, backups, and personal devices if I don’t agree.”
“It says I can,” she says. “And if you flinch in front of your audience and decide to wrestle this yourself on air, I will.”
“You like dumplings,” I say, because the only way I know to uncurl a fist is to put chopsticks in it. “We do this at King of Sichuan. Back table. No email.”
“That’s for swaps, not for rules,” she says. “But I’ll take the memo and the stills and your logs for the last forty-eight hours as a start.”
I pull the laptop toward me. The trackpad bites where my nail is too short. I forward the Alina DM from the request tab to her desk address, attach the voice memo, and tag the subject line with URGENT—CONSENT TO FORWARD because my body needs to say consent even when paper doesn’t ask. I export the server logs—the scrubbed version we offer by default—then pause and add the raw file too. It feels like stripping in a cold room.
She watches me type, not invasive, just patient. “Jonah with you at the Orpheum?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“He touched anything?”
“He documented,” I say. “We left a warning sign by the crosswalk.”
“A sign,” she repeats. “What did it say?”
“‘No filming. This area monitored. Do not approach.’” I can hear how absurd that sounds: a podcaster telling the city not to film.
“You know that gives the Director a better shot,” she says. “He wants to write stage directions. Your sign is a prop.”
“I’m not the only one who can be used,” I say. I close the laptop and let my hands go still. It takes effort. They want to perform. “We’re changing our on-air rules. We’ll delay longer. We’ll cut more. We’ll move to verification before broadcast.”
“Good,” she says, without warmth. She slides the draft back into the folder but leaves it open, as if air should read too. “I also need you to acknowledge something else.”
“What?” I ask.
“Your proximity puts you in the text,” she says, tapping the timeline again. “Alina’s phone pinged near your studio. She DM’d your show. Your platform is the stage. That makes you a person of interest until I rule you out.”
I swallow and feel the motion all the way down. “I’m not offended,” I say, and surprise myself by meaning it. “I know the math. Tell me what you need to rule me out.”
“I need your movements from midnight to two, corroborated,” she says. “Video, receipts, a neighbor who hates your late-night voice and will swear they heard it. I need the van’s GPS for the last twenty-four hours.”
“You’ll have it,” I say. “We were here until thirty minutes after the stream. Then we drove to the Orpheum for twenty. Then back.”
“Send me the times,” she says. “And Mara—don’t go live tonight.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I say, and then I ruin it by adding, “unless there’s a safety reason to speak.”
“Everything is a reason to speak for you,” she says. “Sometimes the reason is to be quiet.”
Micro-hook: I know how to sell silence; I don’t yet know how to live with it.
She flips the folder closed. The rain softens. Outside, a kid’s laughter skids across the flooded curb, quick and bright, then disappears into the hiss of a passing car. I feel the plaster cherubs in my periphery—from a building we’re not in—like a pressure point behind the eye.
“One more thing,” she says. She scrolls through her phone until a map appears, blue dot, red path, timestamps. “We have traffic cam footage that puts a woman matching Alina’s build walking south two blocks from here at 12:44. Hood up. Can’t make the face. She looks at your window and keeps moving.”
My hand finds the glass without asking me first. My fingertip leaves a circle that fogs at the edges and then runs with a water drop. “There’s a reflection at this hour,” I say. “If she looked, she saw herself.”
“Maybe,” Elena says. “Or maybe she saw you.”
We stand with that between us. The studio smells suddenly like rubbing alcohol and citrus; my brain is trying to clean something I can’t reach. I sit to keep from swaying and nudge the copper coin back into my palm where it presses a cold disk onto my skin—the moon heavy in a pocket world.
My phone vibrates against the console—one buzz, then four. The notification bar fills with messages from mods, from the fan who sent the 2019 selfie, from a number I don’t have saved that labels itself stagehand. Jonah’s name flashes: they’re moving. A link follows to our mod channel where a map populates with pings shaped like tiny choir notes drifting toward the Orpheum.
“What is it?” Elena asks, already knowing.
“The pirated stream picked up steam,” I say. My voice feels like it belongs to a smaller person. “People are heading to the theater.”
She checks her own phone; her pupils narrow. “I’m getting the same alert. Someone pushed the stream to a forum I won’t name. We’re dispatching a unit to hold the perimeter.”
I taste the bitterness of noodles gone cold. “If I go live now, I can tell them to go home.”
“If you go live now, you make it bigger,” she says. “Text your mods. Tweet a line from the official. No angles, no poetry. Plain language: do not gather.”
“They like poetry,” I say, and then shut my mouth on the rest. I type the ugly, useful sentence: Do not approach the Orpheum. There is active police activity. No live locations. I pin it and physically feel the pin drop—my shoulders lose half an inch of false height.
Elena watches the updates populate. Her jaw softens a fraction. “We’ll set barricades. Stay here. Send tips. If you step a toe on that block tonight, I will take your boards.”
“You’ll bring dumplings when this is over,” I say.
“If you’re useful,” she says. “If you’re careful.”
She lifts the folder, tucks it under her arm, and leaves a business card on the desk weighted with my coin. The card’s edges are too sharp for this room. She turns at the door. “Mara—”
“Yes.”
“If Alina’s memo includes anything about meeting with you, I need to know whether she came to this glass and left without knocking.”
“You’ll be first to know,” I say, and my throat tightens around the shape of the sentence before it can fly.
The door clicks shut. The aquarium hum swells to fill her absence. Outside, the creek water wrinkles in a breeze and erases my reflection from the glass. The coin is still warm from her card; when I lift it, a circle of dryness remains on the desk like a moonprint.
My phone vibrates again—hard, insistent. The mod channel climbs into caps: crowd gathering cherub pins spotted someone with a mask live feeds multiplying. My screen blinks with a new DM addressed to me by name.
I open it with my breath trapped high in my chest and read one line: Start your show, Mara. We’re ready for Act One.