The voicemail waits for me like a bruise I haven’t discovered yet. The studio hums like an aquarium, filters pushing night through the glass. I slide into the producer chair because habit is a religion I don’t believe in but still practice, and I hit play.
“If this is a play,” Juniper says, voice rasped thin, “I don’t want the lead.”
I stop the message with my thumb and press my tongue against my teeth until the urge to answer a recording passes. I hit play again. I let her sentence unspool over the quiet hiss of our boards, over the sugar-sweet air that rides in from the factory every morning, over the low slap of water in the tidal creek behind the block. I wait for more words that aren’t there.
I call back. It goes straight to voicemail. I call again. I don’t leave a message because I’ve learned the hard way that my voice can turn a scared person into a symbol.
I text Elena: Juniper—gone quiet. VM says “I don’t want the lead.”
Elena bubbles back: On my way. No posts.
I pace, counting beats with the tip of my thumbnail on my Night Choir pin. I flip it so the cherub face looks at me, not the street. The enamel is warm from my skin, then cool when I turn it. I open our intake inbox, our tipline, our encrypted folder with the polite lock icon that makes false promises, and I look for anything that looks like an invitation. I find it on the third screen, tucked under a newsletter reply: Supportive Debrief for Witnesses — RSVP for a small, off-record group. The tone is careful, rounded. The sender domain is a throwaway. The signature reads “Stage Door Care.” I copy the headers and breathe in through my teeth.
I whisper to the glass, because I’ve made so many people whisper to mics. “You wrote her a door shaped like help.”
Footsteps on the hallway tile—Elena, quick but not running. She opens the studio door with two knuckles, not the handle, a habit she never explains. “Play it,” she says.
I play the line again. “If this is a play, I don’t want the lead.”
“Timestamp?”
“1:13 a.m.”
“Then we have a window.” She drops her bag on the chair and slides into the console like it’s a desk at the precinct. “Pull her last location share.”
“She turned it off after the grief room,” I say, hating the accuracy.
“Rideshare history?” Elena asks.
I open the beta we’ve begged our dev to keep alive. I search Juniper’s anonymized handle in the database we shouldn’t have, a skeleton of hashes we built to match voice prints to call windows. My hands shake just enough that the keyboard sounds like rain. I get a hit: a driver ID cross-referenced with a ping. I click, and the map blossoms cool and indifferent. A blue pin blinks at the edge of a warehouse district near the river, three blocks from the sugar stacks, where the smell makes sweetness metallic.
“Map pings at the warehouse edge,” I say, breath thinner than I want it to be. “Drop-off at 11:42 p.m.—she could’ve walked inside before she called me.”
Elena takes the tablet and zooms. “No residences,” she says. “Just storage, small outfits that hire off the books, and a seafood wholesaler that swears it doesn’t use the creek.”
“He loves stages with doors no one watches,” I say. “He calls it rehearsal when he wants confession without witnesses.”
She looks at me over the tablet, face unreadable. “And you call it content when you cut to the chase.”
I accept the hit. “Not tonight.”
“Good.” She points the tablet at the city like she can stab distance with it. “Anybody else know about this?”
“Just you,” I say. “And Juniper’s voicemail.”
“Not your Choir, not your burner audience, not the kid mod with the keyboard tattoo.”
“Not them,” I say. “They’ll turn it into a scavenger hunt in ten seconds.”
“Keep it that way,” she says, and her hand is already on her phone. “I’m calling the nine-to-five judge who owes me a favor for that charnel storage case. I’ll need the ride log, the email headers, the voicemail, and the fact that we found a camera lens in a tunnel yesterday.”
“I taped it,” I say. “He turned it back on.”
“Of course he did.” She steps into the hall to make the call. Her voice works down the corridor in lean slices: affidavit, exigent, narrow scope, time-bound, cameras, entrance logs, no phones seized without persons present, medical exigency if a person is inside and nonresponsive. She comes back in, a little color in her face, the kind you get after doing something surgical without shaking.
“Judge Lin will be at her kitchen table in twenty minutes,” she says. “She needs me on video to swear. I’ll have the warrant signed on a scanned page and the hard copy in an hour.”
“One hour,” I repeat. The Boards hum at 60Hz, a dull, familiar church. The creek outside gurgles like someone talking in their sleep. The smell of sugar leans into the room and gets caught in the foam of the panels. I want to run out the door and plow through doors until I find a chair with tape on the floor and a woman I promised to keep small because staying small kept her alive.
Elena watches me bounce a heel. “Say the thing you don’t want to say.”
“I made her visible,” I say, and my jaw ticks like a clock I want to smash. “I told the Choir we were changing the rules and I still lit her up.”
“He invited her, not you,” Elena says. “He used your grammar. That’s different than guilt and more useful than shame.”
“More useful how?”
“It gives you something to look for,” she says. “It means his doors look like yours. We’re not looking for a dungeon; we’re looking for a lobby.”
Micro-hook #1: The voicemail pings again, a duplicate notification from a cloud backup. The waveform thumbnail jitters on my screen like a trapped moth, and I picture a door that reads SUPPORTIVE DEBRIEF in nice sans-serif, lit like a makeup mirror, leading to a room that teaches people to talk as if microphones equal mercy.
“Pull her email,” Elena says. “Headers only.”
I bring up the packet and copy what I know she needs: Received: hops, Message-ID, the SPF pass from a spoofed domain that borrowed trust from a real counseling center, then routed the RSVP to stage.door.care@proton plus a string that reeks of burner. “He used a subject line that sounds like a committee,” I say. “He knows how to bait careful people.”
“He also sent it to four others,” Elena says, tapping a Bcc drip. “We’ll have to find them without giving him new names to cast.”
“I can ask the grief facilitator off-record,” I say. “Dumplings, not email.”
“Do that after we put a uniform on the warehouse,” she says. “Lin’s back.”
Elena angles her camera to show her badge and her kitchen-table judge. Her oath is a litany that feels like water on stones. I slide the ride log under her phone as she talks. I slide the headers. I slide Juniper’s line. I keep my mouth still.
“Narrow warrant granted,” the judge says in a voice I can only hear on speaker. “Search of the specific unit at 38-12 Riverside, outbuildings, and any recording devices on-premises. Exigent entry permitted for safety. No press.” Elena hangs up and looks at me in a way that asks me to hear the last line twice.
“No press,” I echo. “No stream, no stingers, no Choir.”
“This is not a show,” she says. “This is a door we open, and maybe a girl who wants to be small for a while.”
I put my phone facedown. “I go quiet,” I say. “I keep quiet.”
We take the van because it’s what I know and because its dents look like innocence. The creek floods the sidewalk at the corner where the curb dips; water glints like a second city under the first one, all the lights upside down. I steer around reflected streetlamps that look like cue lights someone forgot to switch off.
On the way, my texts buzz with the Night Choir’s sixth sense: anything? You okay? We’re with you, no matter what, but do you have SCOOP — that last word in all caps like hunger. I mute the chat and set the phone in the cup holder. I keep both hands on the wheel.
“You don’t owe them,” Elena says, eyes ahead. “Not tonight.”
“I owe Juniper,” I say. “And I owe you a case you can carry.”
“Carryable would be nice,” she says, and a corner of her mouth shifts, the closest she comes to a joke when the river’s involved.
The warehouse district changes the air as we enter it. The burnt-sugar note gets tinny, less bakery and more chemical memory. The pavement slicks into a skin of mist. We pass metal doors with numbers that look like jokes, missing digits making a puzzle out of addresses. I park two blocks from the blue pin because distance makes sanity and cover.
Elena keys the address into the radio, the one that uses a network I don’t understand. “Two units rolling,” the dispatcher says. “ETA four.”
We sit in the van while the city clicks. I can hear my own breath. I can hear the last few words of Juniper’s message even though the phone is dark. I cup my hands to warm them, ginger tea ghosting my skin from memory. I want a dumpling to put in my mouth to keep words in. I want a rule book that makes the next five minutes legal and holy.
“Tell me about the door,” Elena says. “What do I see if I’m him and I’m making comfort look like control?”
“I see a runner rug to soften industrial concrete,” I say. “I see a clipboard with intake forms that ask for consent without detailing uses. I see a bowl of hard candy. I see a small speaker that can play a tone if he needs to pull focus. I see tape on the floor that looks like safety but marks the frame.”
Elena nods, hands on her knees. “What do I hear?”
“A hum. An aquarium. A metronome if he’s lazy. A voice that praises ‘bravery’ with the rhythm of a script. And shoes with rubber caps so feet don’t squeak on record.”
“Good.” She cracks her neck, then stills. “You’re not going in first.”
“I figured,” I say, and I don’t fight her. “But if she calls my name—”
“You answer from the door,” she says. “You don’t cross the tape unless I tell you.”
Micro-hook #2: In the sodium light, I notice a smear on the dock’s edge—black, like tire burn or melted cap. I step closer and the smell shifts: rubber singed, salt damp, the faint vanilla of someone’s cheap candle trapped in a box too long. My heart climbs the back of my mouth.
Squad lights paint the wet asphalt with traffic-cop colors. Two uniforms step out, faces unshowy, ready to be boring. Elena briefs them with the shape of the warrant and the word exigent where it belongs. She hands me the paper copy without looking away from the building, and I fold it once and slide it under my shirt, close to the skin that keeps my cowardice honest.
“Park,” one officer says, and she doesn’t flinch at the name.
“We go slow, we go wide,” Elena says. “We treat this like there’s a person who wants to be small behind that metal. Cameras first. If I nod, we cut. If I shake, we knock. No chatter.”
We move. Boots on damp concrete make a tight chorus. I trail the choreography like an understudy forbidden to speak, hands open, Night Choir pin pressing a crescent into my palm. The building hums in low A, power lines singing a song I can feel through my ribs.
At the door, there’s a taped sign: SUPPORTIVE DEBRIEF — Ring bell with a drawn arrow that points nowhere. Elena points to a dot above the bell recess. “Lens,” she says. I reach into my pocket and pass her a strip of gaffer taped to an index card. She presses the tape over the dot with the pad of her ring finger and then lays her ear to the seam.
“Fan,” she says. “And a speaker tick, like a heartbeat out of time.” She nods at the officer with the pry. “Let’s do it.”
The metal gives with a sound that feels like a swallowed scream. Air breathes out, stale with dust and something too sweet, the same bad vanilla. We step into a foyer that looks exactly like the sentence I wrote in the van: runner rug, clipboard, bowl of hard candy that tastes like hospital when you imagine it. A poster on the wall shows a cherub mask next to the words You Are Safe Here, the serif small and proud.
Elena’s gloved hand hovers over the clipboard. “Name for the donation,” she murmurs, not touching. “LC Arts, welcoming you to heal.” Her jaw tightens. “Stay with me,” she says, and I don’t argue.
The inner door is cracked. We hear water, not the river but a small machine trickle, a countertop fountain that wants to make the belly loosen. We hear the tick I hate, the one that made my body learn a wrong tempo.
“Police,” Elena calls, low and steady. “We’re here under a warrant. Announcing ourselves.”
Silence answers like a practiced line.
We sweep the first room: chairs in a semicircle, cups set mouth-down on a tray, a small speaker on a shelf blinking a red light that wants to be a pulse. I pick up the closest cup and sniff—peppermint ghosts, the exact note from dumpling tea, and I want to throw it against the wall because he keeps turning my small comforts into props.
“Back room,” Elena says.
We turn the corner and find a desk, a rack of headsets, a mixer like mine but meaner, knobs taped with labels that say Levels—Confession A/B/C. A camera eye stares blind under my tape. A wire snuggles under a rug and into the wall like a secret telling itself. Elena points to a cabinet. “Cut it,” she says to the officer. He kills the power to the rack with a satisfying clunk. The tick stops. The room isn’t safer; it’s quieter.
“Juni?” I call, once, because I have to, because her voicemail burns like the sugar that makes the air hard. “It’s Mara. You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to be brave. I just want to walk you out.”
No answer. The officers check the washroom and the storage. Empty. No person, only preparation, a rehearsal space for confessions he hasn’t earned.
Elena’s jaw pulses once. “We have cameras and a list,” she says. “We’ll take the drives, image the mixers, and get the building’s exterior feeds from the seafood dock. He left a door. He’ll come back to see if we kept it open.”
“He lured her,” I say, showing the printout of the debrief invitation with my knuckles so I don’t touch anything I shouldn’t. “The email masked itself with a counseling center’s template. He told her she could talk to people who wouldn’t make her famous.”
“We confirm with logs,” Elena says. “We don’t time-travel.”
Micro-hook #3: On the desk, under the headset rack, a Post-it curls at the edge. I read the hand-lettered words without picking it up: Dress rehearsal 7 p.m.—half-light. The letters lean left, neat, indifferent to fear. My heart finds the bad tempo again and tries to live there.
Elena photographs the Post-it, then slides it into an evidence sleeve. “We’ve got the phrase,” she says. “He recycled it. Good for court, bad for my blood pressure.”
“Where’s Juniper?” I ask, useless and human.
“Either he moved her fast,” Elena says, “or he scared her into staying small somewhere I can’t see yet. Either way, we keep the room intact and make the exit loud.”
The officers step outside to call in the tech team. I stand alone with the mixer that looks like mine, the one that has never loved me back, and I listen to the city outside—a gull arguing with the river, a truck cough, a far-off siren that could be ours or someone else’s. I pull my pin out again and press the cherub’s face into my palm until the lines hurt. I flip it so the blank back shows. I stick it into the foam of the wall for a second, a tiny act of vandalism that no one will see.
Elena returns, shaking raindrops from her hair that I didn’t register starting. “Uniform stays,” she says. “Tech’s five out. We’ll pull exterior cams with a friendly order. We’ll map every minute.”
“And Juniper?” I ask.
“We widen the circle,” she says. “We call the facilitator. We ask for names in person, at that dumpling table where nobody writes anything down. We make the ask small and safe. We don’t blast a BOLO on the Choir.”
I swallow a thousand apologies and pick one that helps. “I’ll keep the mic cold.”
“Good,” she says.
We stand in the doorway listening to the rain sculpt the river into a low drum. Warehouse light turns the wet street into a long, mean mirror. The city smells like sugar and rubber and metal, a recipe for a headache. My phone buzzes once—unknown number, no text, just a ping to let me know I’m not done.
I don’t answer. I look at the sign on the wall—You Are Safe Here—and I ask it a question I can’t print anywhere: what does safety sound like when the megaphone is mine?
Elena folds the warrant copy and tucks it into my hand. “Grip it,” she says. “You’ll need it when he tells you this is theater.”
I close my fingers on the paper until the edge bites, and I nod at the rain, at the river, at the door we opened that had no person behind it. I set my jaw around the shape of resolve and taste copper.
“We find her,” I say.
“We find her,” Elena answers, and we step back into the wet light where the city keeps its answers on delay.