I start before the countdown because the countdown belongs to him. I take a breath that tastes like old coffee and studio dust, press my thumb to the cough button without pushing it, and feel the red ON AIR light heat my cheek. The glassbox hums like an aquarium—the soft panels soaking up whatever I leak. Outside the panes, the street’s reflection sits on a slick sheet of water; the tidal creek has crept over the curb again, turning the sidewalk into a rehearsal of mirrors. A siren smears by and the sound softens under the seal of the door.
“Tonight,” I say, voice low enough to disarm the adrenaline still flaring from the panel, “we choose how we choose. No cliffhangers, no bait. Two options, cleanly framed. I will read them twice and then we vote.”
I slide the cue cards I found at the warehouse facedown and out of my way. The stack leaves a pale rectangle on the desk, a phantom of rehearsed empathy. I set my palms on either side of the console like I’m bracing a bridge.
“Option A,” I say. “Quiet corroboration. That means delayed releases, professionals in first, victims’ families consulted, no location reveals until cleared, and full chain-of-custody summaries. It will be slower. It will make fewer fireworks. It will protect living people.”
I wait for the chat to twitch; it does. The screen in my peripheral vision fills with the Night Choir’s avatars—cherub pins, theater masks, koi, cartoon cats—surging like schooling fish when a shadow passes.
“Option B,” I say. “Live stings. That means coordinated on-air confrontations, surprise appearances, moving faster than the legal process, and letting risk ride shotgun. It could force breaks. It could get someone hurt. It will feed the Director’s need for an audience.”
I let silence sit, the kind I owe them more of. I can hear the tiny electronics in the board ticking as they cool. The city breathes its burnt sugar through the ducts; the factory downriver does its midnight exhale and it sneaks into the mix like a memory of carnival.
“Ground rules,” I add. “No doxxing, no names of nonpublic figures, and if you type grief like a weapon I will mute you mid-sentence. This is a professional-only line tonight. If you’re not calling as a professional or a directly affected person, sit with yourself and vote.”
The moderation panel lights up. Two accounts try the word coward and a knife emoji; I hit MUTE with a finger flick clean as card magic. A troll tosses a link promising backstage access; I cut it. Another writes rescue us live; I set their handle to read-only. The aquarium hum steadies me.
“I know what heat can buy,” I say. “It bought me a studio and a legal fund and a thousand fake friends. It also bought people I love some harm they didn’t ask to carry. I need you to choose the method, not the show.”
A chime rings. The poll goes live—two bars, one gray, one white, climbing. At the bottom right, a counter ticks: votes sliding in like tide over the curb. I swallow, throat sand-dry, and reach for the cold cup. The coffee is bitter and sweet, like it’s been taking notes from the river.
Micro-hook: The gray bar jumps early—Live Sting surges and steals my breath. I grip the Night Choir pin I keep on the console, the tiny cherub face cold against my palm, and wait for the room to remember itself.
“Let’s hear you,” I say, and I open the first call.
“I’m Priya,” a woman says, breath shaky but trained. “Hospital PR. Three years ago a teen got swarmed by creators outside our ER doors. Someone streamed his sobbing mother. We had to walk her through a gauntlet of phones to identify him. I still hear the live comments in my sleep. Don’t make me do that again.”
“Thank you,” I say. “What would help?”
“Silence until the family is ready,” she answers. “And someone to say on air, ‘We are not owed this.’”
I add a line to the board, typing with my knuckles so the mic doesn’t pick up the keys: Family readiness required. Not owed. The gray bar falters; the white steadies.
I take a second call. “Logan here,” a dad says. He clears his throat against something heavy. “My son got misidentified in a missing-persons rumor that went viral. We got threats. He’s fine—he just turned his phone off at a cabin. We can laugh now, sometimes. But for a week my wife didn’t go outside.”
“What delayed the correction?” I ask.
“No one wanted to be the one who killed the buzz,” he says, and I hear him half-laugh, half-swallow. “I’ll take a slower buzz.”
“I hear you,” I say. I write another line: Buzz doesn’t beat accuracy. The board looks like a pledge trying to be born.
I let the river of chat wash while I breathe through my nose. The scent of the studio is a blend of foam, dust, citrus cleaner, and the faint sugar-ash from the factory—sweetness charred at the edges. I remember dumplings with Elena, the don’t-email rule like a grace we keep teaching ourselves, and I feel the space between appetite and discipline stretch and then hold.
“I’m Liana,” the next caller says. “Stage manager. Theater code is: check your cues, check them again. Directors love to skip to ‘places’ and then blame props when blocking falls apart.”
“What’s the cue we keep skipping?” I ask.
“Consent,” she says. “Also risk assessment. If you must go live, build a deadman switch—someone with authority to cut power without asking you.”
“I’ll find our deadman,” I say, and I write: Deadman switch authority.
The gray bar slips beneath the white by a finger width. I don’t celebrate it out loud. The Director would. I lock my shoulders and keep my voice clear.
“I’m Corinne,” a teacher says. “One of my students went viral for crying at a vigil. She’s tough. She jokes about it now, but the school changed around her. Kids started asking what to perform to be seen. That’s a climate problem. Please stop feeding it.”
“We built a climate,” I say. “We can build a code.” I flip a clean page in my notebook and title it with a pen that skips: Reporting Rubric.
Micro-hook: A private number flashes on the board, flagged probable spoof. The system is smarter than my heart. I watch it pulse—ring, ring, ring—and I let it die. If that was him, I hope the refusal stung. If it wasn’t, I just taught myself a boundary.
I keep taking calls. A former intern talks about the rush of sitting near a live red light and how it ruined her sense of normal for a year. A tech worker explains how a “find my phone” brigade nearly swarmed the wrong apartment because someone misread a map corner. A paramedic tells me he once had to block a tripod with his body while kneeling over a woman who had asked not to be filmed.
I mute three more handles that keep typing BORING in caps, the letters like little flags of the old war. The white bar—Quiet Corroboration—stretches past halfway.
“I owe you the costs too,” I say into the mic. “If we choose A, we will lose clicks. Sponsors may flinch. That means fewer lawyers and fewer nights I can pay for quiet. It also means fewer families chased down sidewalks. I can work on money; I can’t unring a bell I sold you.”
The chat slows for a breath, and in the slack I can hear the faint electrical hiss of the board and the city rinsing itself with tires. The creek outside has shouldered higher; a car pushes through and the sound comes in as a soft waterfall whenever the vestibule opens for a smoker downstairs.
“I’ll add one more truth,” I say. My knuckles are white on the desk edge; I lower my hands. “The Director wants a No that looks like a Yes in lighting. He wants me to sprint so he can say I chose theater over people. I would like to choose people where he can’t steal it.”
I open the last round of calls.
“This is Ayo,” a social worker says. “I sit with families who are soft targets for strangers’ myths. When you delay, you buy us time to do our jobs. Time is dignity.”
“Then I’ll buy time,” I say quietly, and my throat scalds in a way that isn’t hurt.
A final voice lands like a balancing stone. “Juniper,” she says, and my chest tightens until sound threatens to turn to static. “I’m okay. I’m not calling to be content. I’m calling to say: I would have run faster from the warehouse if I hadn’t believed you would slow down for me.”
I rest my forehead briefly against my forearm, eyes open to keep tears from pooling. “You aren’t content,” I say. “You set the agenda.”
“Then set it,” she says, and she clicks off before the Choir can turn her into something consumable.
The poll clock expires with a mild chime. The white bar settles at sixty-eight percent. Not unanimous—nothing worth doing is—but firm enough to stand on without wobble.
“We have a mandate,” I say. “Quiet corroboration wins.”
The studio air changes—lighter, maybe, or simply steadier. I feel my shoulders unclench one vertebra at a time. I can hear the creek testing the building’s threshold, the city’s low organ note under it all.
“Here’s what I’m promising on record,” I say, and I read from the notebook I’ve been building in public, letting the scratch of the pen be part of the soundscape. “One: No live locations without law enforcement clearance and consent from directly affected parties. Two: Verified professionals first—cobblers, stagehands, acousticians, trauma-informed advocates—before any community speculation. Three: Family readiness checks with opt-out honored, no questions asked.”
I glance at the chat: hearts, nods, a row of dumpling emojis from the old détente joke. I keep going.
“Four: A deadman switch with an outside authority—named in the show notes—empowered to cut any live feed if we veer into harm. Five: Evidence logs published with redactions, including chains of custody and methods, so the case can stand without our theatrics. Six: No imagery of victims’ bodies or personal spaces unless necessary to public safety, and then only with consent.”
I take a breath. The list could keep lengthening until it becomes a wall; walls can be useful if you know where the door is. I choose a door.
“Seven,” I say, “the headline test: if the most hurt person in the story read our episode title, would they feel used? If yes, we change it.”
The chat accelerates in a pattern I know: not frenzy, but relief. The Choir is writing themselves into the rulebook.
“I’ll publish this rubric tonight,” I add. “It will live on our site and be linked in the feed. You can hold me to it. If I break it, I say so on air and we fix the harm before we chase another lead.”
A soft ping taps my screen—a calendar reminder I forgot I’d set: Full moon high tide. The creek will spill out even more in an hour, polishing every light into two. I watch the reflection of the red ON AIR cube shimmer across the pooled water on the street and think about doubles: show and truth, rush and care, confession and consent.
“We can still act,” I say. “But we act without feeding the Director’s diet.” I raise my hand toward the glass the way divers salute each other before they drop—the gesture more habit than theater. “Thank you for choosing how we choose.”
The phone lights blink in sequence like cue lights at the Orpheum, but gentler. I close the lines. I thank the moderators. I keep the stream open long enough to read one more message: we can wait. I don’t know if they all mean it yet. I will try to earn it night by night, rule by rule.
I end the broadcast with no music. The room settles into the quiet between sounds, the hush that tastes like copper from adrenaline and like sugar from the city’s lungs. My fingers hover over the POST POLL RESULTS button. I press it. Results pin to the top of the chat.
I lean back and let the chair creak—a human sound in a night of signals. I scribble deliverables under my rubric: publish notes, list the switch-holder, design the evidence log template, call Elena with the new boundaries, write sponsors a letter that asks them to value process over spectacle.
Micro-hook: My phone buzzes on the desk, face down. I flip it and see a subject line from a funder: Programming Momentum & Expectations. The preview is a sentence that lives like a threat: We’d love to discuss pacing.
I turn off the on-air light and the glass throws my pale reflection back at me, overlaid on the creek’s mirror. Doubt leaves a ring in my mouth. Hope sets a small, steady glow in my sternum. Responsibility climbs into the chair with me and does not ask to share the mic.
“We can wait,” I say to the empty studio, to the Night Choir’s pins cooling on cork, to the cherub on my palm with its paint rubbed off from worry. “We’ll see if they can.”