I start the day with dust in my mouth and coffee on my papers. The municipal archive keeps its air on “basement,” the kind of cool that carries paper history in it, the way lake water carries minnows. I lay the tube from Nessa’s shop across a long wooden table and unroll the Orpheum plan under two empty legal binders and my own elbow. The pages groan. Ink lines bloom like veins. Coffee stains from some other hunt ring the corners; I add one of my own, involuntary, when the lid on the Styrofoam slips.
“Mask up,” the clerk had said when she handed me the gloves and a little folded dust mask. “Spring cleaning forgot this floor.”
I tuck the mask under my chin and keep it there like a superstitious bib. The city smells like burnt sugar again—factory exhale slipping even down here—but the archive has its own scent, cellulose and staples. I trace the tiny ladder icons with a capped pen and feel a pulse under the table, the archive elevator throbbing like a heart two rooms away.
“No livestream,” Elena had said when we split up: me to paper, her to the precinct printer queue for the warrant addendum, Jonah to the van for lighting and spare headlamps. “Not even a tease.”
“Professionals only,” I’d said back, because last night’s vote still rested in my chest like a small hot stone. I promised a slower show. I promised no trailers made of blueprints.
I set the Orpheum sheet beside a later renovation plan someone paperclipped on top in the seventies: the architect’s tidy handwriting, a note about “non-load-bearing utility corridor sealed per code.” The newer sheet stutters where the old shows flow. My finger walks a line on the original labeled Service Conn.—East Annex, and then finds it amputated on the later copy, replaced by crosshatch and a thick X. Old catwalks link to a brick rectangle with no entrance on modern drawings.
Micro-hook: I take a photo for memory and guilt, then I call Jonah.
“Say you found me a ghost hallway,” he answers, the van hum behind him like an aquarium pump.
“I found you a service connection to a building that shouldn’t connect,” I say. “Sealed on paper, not necessarily in brick. East wall, upstage, behind the fly system. It routes under a mezz door into the annex next door.”
“Where the donor plaque is,” he says, quick. “LC Arts. Lyle’s alibi to architecture.”
I snap the mask up and breathe my own bread-pudding breath. “Bring headlamps and a gentle screwdriver. Get Elena to meet us at stage door with the updated warrant. I want eyes before we tip off facilities.”
“Copy,” he says, and the affection in his voice is a steadying beam I hadn’t known I’d missed this week. “Hey—dumb question—what are we if we pull this off?”
“We’re quieter than the crowd and heavier than a rumor,” I say.
“I missed your metaphors,” he says. “On route.”
I roll the maps and return them like a penitent. The clerk stamps my copy request and slides me a manila envelope fat with legal-size photocopies. “Bring the mask back,” she says. “We wash them.”
“I owe this city new lungs,” I say, tucking the envelope like contraband. Outside, the creek behind the studio has overreached its curb again—the moon is fat tonight—and the sidewalk makes the world reflective. I hop the slick and head toward the Orpheum, the Night Choir pins at the bottom of my bag thudding lightly with every step like tiny, hopeful cymbals.
We rendezvous at the stage door in a cold draft of sugar and dust. Elena arrives with a clipboard and two patrol officers whose patience reads in the way they lean. Jonah slides out of the van with a headlamp crown, a coil of gaffer tape around his wrist, and a screwdriver set like a roll of cutlery ready for a picnic.
“Backstage only,” Elena says, brisk. “No house. No balcony.”
“Understudy would hate that,” I say.
She gives me the look that says: you’re not wrong, you’re not helpful. “We map, not myth-make.”
Inside, the Orpheum keeps its breath cold. Dust dims the gilt and the cherubs’ cheeks wear a gray blush. I feel their blind gaze and feel nothing in return. We follow Elena’s beam along the wing wall, past coils of old rope like molted snakes, to the upstage corner where a square of drywall interrupts brick.
Jonah crouches, headlamp bobbing. “These are siblings that don’t speak,” he says, tapping one screw head with a nail. The screws along the left seam are Phillips, bright new; the right seam shows two flatheads rusted to the metal’s color like they grew there a century ago. “Panel swapped in. Somebody didn’t own a matching set.”
“Could be routine patching,” Elena says, but she steps closer. Her radio crackles in unkind static when she stands between brick and panel. The signal hates tunnels. I think of how many times I lost Lyle’s voice to the same hiss.
I drop to a knee next to Jonah. I can smell the metal. It has the tang of pennies and ghosts. “Top first,” I say, because gravity is a teacher.
He grins sideways. “Maestro says.” He turns the bright screws with a care that reads as reverence. I hold a bag for each, because chain of custody is downstream from common sense. Elena logs the first as evidence, the second as spare, the third as “why not.”
The panel doesn’t pop; it sighs. The seam unseals like a mouth unclenching, a little powder of gypsum sneezing down to my jeans. Jonah leans his shoulder and eases the panel aside. Behind it: brick, yes, but not flush—brick with a lip, brick with a door-sized outline in relief. Mortar at the seams has a different sheen, greener, and the bottom edge shows scuff arcs like something heavy kissed it often.
“He didn’t need magic,” I whisper. “He had maintenance history.”
Elena runs gloved fingers along a shallow cut where the brick has been chipped to fit a hinge long gone. “There was a door here,” she says. “Then someone bricked it over, and later someone cut the brick again and put only drywall over the cut.”
Jonah’s headlamp throws a hard shadow down the line. “There’s a draft,” he says. “Cold. Smells like pennies and wet leaves.”
“Radio check,” Elena says into her chest. The answer is a scratch that reads like weather.
I press my ear to the brick and hear a tiny wind and, under it, the sound of a building exhaling. “He used a panel like this near the green room,” I say, mind time-traveling through his vanishes. “When I chased down the service corridor after the panel Q&A, I hit a dead-end door and a gray panel that felt wrong under my hand. I thought I’d missed the turn.”
“He taught you to think in acts,” Jonah says. “We’re switching genres.”
Elena shines her light on the floor. The chalk marks Lyle left weeks ago at the half-light tunnel flicker in memory; here, a different palette remains—old carpenter pencil lines, faint arrows toward the wall, a chalk X scrubbed but not erased. She pulls a multi-tool and pries at a lower brick lip. Mortar flakes. “Watch your faces,” she says. She doesn’t look at me when she adds, “You can back out any time.”
“We promised slower,” I say. “Not stiller.”
She finds purchase and a small brick plugs loose with a sound like a throat clearing. Cold air knifes out through the gap. It carries damp metal and a waft of mildew that coats my tongue. My stomach drops in that roller way that’s half fear, half remembered thrill.
Micro-hook: Jonah slides two fingers into the gap and fishes; he grunts, then pulls free a steel loop that lies flush in the brick—painted over, ignored. A hatch ring. He wipes grime with gaffer and it shines, a coin unearthed.
“That’s not decorative,” he says.
Elena angles light. “We do this measured,” she says. She radios the officers to hold position at the stage door, to log our entry into the tunnel if we find one. The reply arrives shredded by static; I catch only the cop’s call sign and the words “copy” and “careful.”
We plant our feet wide. Elena and Jonah take the ring; I brace the panel to keep it from sliding back and cutting off our return. The first pull fights us, the second complains; the third gives with a hair-raising metallic shriek like a soprano warming up badly. The brick slab pivots inward on hidden pins. Beyond, darkness opens like a note held beyond breath.
I lean into the gap and my lamp finds narrow brick interval, then pipe, then beam. The passage doglegs right and slides down in a shallow run like an old service ramp. At the turn, a ladder disappears into a well where my light can’t land. The wall hums with the city’s vascular noise—steam, far traffic, the river metronome.
Elena takes a half step inside and tests the first rung with her baton. It answers with a tired metallic thunk but holds. “I’ll check the first bend,” she says. “You two stay at the mouth. If I stop speaking, you drag me and we pretend we never met.”
“That’s not funny,” Jonah says.
“That’s why I said it flat,” she says. She clicks her radio twice, the agreed code for I’m going in, keep your head. The static hugs the sound and drags it thin.
She moves like a person who has learned how to distribute weight so floors forgive her. Her lamp stutters down the ramp, then tugs right out of view. I inch forward and discover the floor is dusted with a fine gray like unbaked bread. My footprints write a story I can’t erase. I hate that.
“Talk to me,” Jonah calls down softly.
“Dry for now,” Elena answers. Her voice wraps around a hollow in the brick and comes back with an extra. “I see an old flush panel and a—yes—another hatch ring. This one’s grated. There’s airflow. And—” She breaks off, then, “—there’s a drop. Watch that step.”
My palms sweat. The taste in my mouth is copper and clay. “Catwalks?” I ask.
“Understage rails,” she corrects. “Then a crossover. I can see a shaft toward the annex. It looks like someone cleaned this recently. The dust tells on the parts he touches.”
Jonah squeezes my forearm once, and his fingers tremble hard enough to make the headlamp’s halo jitter. “We could wire cue lights,” he whispers. “Run them backwards. Lead him into a box.”
I memorize the angle of the brick lip, the way the drywall panel leans, the distance from ring to rung to my boot. I sketch it in my head like a cheap map. Between the ladder and the draft, I can smell old rain. “We can control this,” I say. Saying it makes the shape more real. “We can set an entrance and an exit, only one of which opens.”
Elena reappears at the bend, her lamp clipping my vision, her face a white crescent under the brim. She’s breathing faster but clean. “There’s a rusted service hatch halfway to the annex,” she says, eyes on me now because the next thing is a decision. “It still opens. There’s a padlock that looks recent on the annex side, not this one. My guess: he keeps it oiled. On our side, someone welded it bad decades ago and then gave up. The weld is brittle.”
“We have our backstage routes,” I say. I can almost hear the Director’s ring tap echoing along the brick, a rehearsal metronome. “He’s not vanishing. He’s stage-managing load-in and load-out.”
The radio coughs spooky. “—Park—copy—backup—fif—” Then it dissolves into bees. Elena rests the radio against the wall where the signal holds better and says, “We don’t go through today. We map. We block. We come back with tools and with the building department so nobody dies because a century-old rung had an opinion.”
My jaw tightens, fight and appetite wrestling. My last livestream still glows under my skin—a pledge to move at the speed of safety—and I hear Tessa’s text again: Don’t trade me for a headline. I look at Jonah and see him swallow his own need to charge. He sets the screwdriver down, a tiny surrender.
“We put eyes on both ends,” he says. “We leave nothing but a thumbprint on the dust.”
Elena nods. “We photograph the dust instead,” she says. She shoots the angles, the screws, the ring, the scuffs on the brick. She takes an evidence swab along a smoother hand-height stripe where, I realize, someone has been sliding a palm over years. I picture Lyle’s hand there, ring tapping the brick when he’s pleased with his own storyboard.
We ease the brick hatch closed until only a finger’s width of air remains, enough to keep it from fusing with its own stubbornness when we return. Jonah rehung the drywall panel with two screws only, the bright unmatched ones, so we can slip it quick when it matters. He marks one screw head with a tiny dot of gaffer tape the color of dust—a silent cue light for us.
“We circle the annex,” Elena says when we’re back in the wing, voices recalibrating to big room instead of small throat. “We find the other side and log the lock. No heroics.”
“My new rubric loves that sentence,” I say. I tuck the blueprint copy under my arm so hard the paper laminates to sweat. The cherubs above the proscenium hold their chipped wreaths and say nothing, which is better than what they said in my nightmares.
In the alley, the sugar smell rides the damp, and the creek has sent a finger of water exploring the stage door threshold. We walk the long brick to the annex. A rusted metal hatch squats low on the wall behind trash cans and a poster for a pop-up dumpling night that makes me smile despite the nerves—we still have our détente, city. The hatch’s padlock gleams recent. Somebody has been feeding it oil the way you feed a pet.
Elena photographs it and logs the make and number; Jonah kneels to listen at the seam like a kid at a shell. “Airflow,” he says. “It talks.”
“We’ll make it sing,” I say, and the words leave my mouth not sharp but smooth, a predatory calm that surprises me with its clarity. Not a thirst to corner him for applause, but a hunger to end his script.
Elena tucks her pen away. “We file for controlled access. We draft a safety plan. We put officers at the crossover. And when we move, we move with more people than he has tricks.”
“And when he hijacks the feed,” Jonah says, “you throw a different kind of light.”
“I throw silence,” I answer, the next chapter writing itself in my mouth. I imagine cutting the show to thirty seconds of nothing so the city can hear its own breath and guilt, then playing a voice he can’t dramaturg: a family’s statement.
We stand in the alley with the hatch whispering cold against our shins and the creek licking at the curb like a metronome set too slow. My phone buzzes with a calendar reminder I don’t remember making: Draft cue map. I look at Elena and at Jonah and at the hatch.
“We know the exits now,” I say. “We can choose where the spotlight lands.”
Elena nods once. “Then we choose.”
The radio scratches, finally catching a bar. A voice breaks through, thin but whole: “—Park? Status.”
Elena presses transmit. “Mapped. Tunnel confirmed. Annex hatch present and oiled. No entry today. Requesting building liaison for controlled access. Send a lock tech who doesn’t narrate.”
The reply: “Copy. Send pin-drop.”
I drop the pin. The map renders the block in gray and river-blue, the Orpheum a humble square with a gilded ghost. I drag two fingers and trace the service line in my head, from our drywall mouth to the annex throat. For the first time since he vanished into those catwalks, I feel the stage tilt toward us.
The hatch breathes cold. The creek glints. The cherubs keep their plastic halos. I slide the blueprint deeper under my arm and ask the air the only question worth the paper it’s printed on:
What happens when I cut the sound?