I start the countdown with a clean studio and a dirty plan. The glassbox hums like an aquarium, pumps and bubbles and a glow that makes skin look honest. Outside, the tidal creek has shouldered over its curb. Water in the gutter holds the streetlights and feeds them back brighter. The air tastes like burnt sugar from the factory down the block, sweet climbing over metal, the way carnival cotton candy clings to teeth.
I lay the cue map from the Orpheum under the console glass—just the shape of it, no labels—and tape a new card beside the fader: SILENCE—30 SEC in block letters. Jonah watches me write and spins a pen between his fingers until it clacks onto the desk. He catches it before it rolls.
“You really want thirty,” he says low, like we’re in church.
“Thirty,” I say. “A whole half-minute so the crowd can hear their own breath.”
He nods once and adds a soft-switch macro to the board, fingers moving with the old intimacy of our early nights. “I built you a dead-air bed,” he says. “No ticks, no fans, no room tone. Pure nothing.”
“That’s the point,” I say, and my thumb rubs the cheap paint off a Night Choir pin stuck to my headphone arm—a crescent moon with a tiny microphone for a pupil. “He can’t drown anyone if I hold the air.”
We check the family statement file one more time, timecode trimmed, names confirmed for consent. I feel the words in my mouth before they play. The speaker’s voice lives right behind my heart now; it has for two days, since the call over dumplings where she said she wanted to speak and not be made into a clue. I promised. We shook over soup.
I text Elena a single word: Live. She sends back the thumbs-up and a tiny chain link emoji, her dry version of optimism. The creek outside slaps the curb again, the sound sneaking through the glass, a slow metronome.
I roll faders up, red light hot. “Night Choir,” I say, mouth close to the pop filter, “we’re here. Professionals in the backchannel, listeners in the room, trolls in the timeout. Tonight is a test of attention.” I keep my voice at room temperature. “We have an update we can share and a boundary we will keep. If the broadcast is interrupted by unverified theater, we will cut to thirty seconds of silence. Then you’ll hear a short statement from a family who asked to be heard. That’s the format.”
The comments spit grit and then smooth. A row of vinyl pin emojis dots the side panel. Someone types, we can hold, and another, we’ll be quiet with you. My shoulders loosen a notch and I feel the weight of that tiny hot stone inside become something steadier.
“Housekeeping done,” I say. “Let’s talk about corridors.” I lay out the controlled-access hatch, the mismatched screws Jonah spotted, the radio scratch that tells the truth about brick. I avoid bluster. I avoid poetry. I let the facts stand in their own clothes.
Jonah slides me a sticky note: chat holding steady. He mouths, “You’re good.” I answer with that small nod we invented on tour vans and borrowed studios, the one that means trust the work.
Then the metronome appears.
It blooms on the upper-right monitor, a circle beating a white pulse, then text overlay: THIRD-ACT RESCUES ARE FOR COWARDS. The line lands like a hand on my neck. My throat pulls hot and then cold. He chooses typography now—different mask, same mouth. The old hijack path used to shudder the switcher. This slips like a whisper under the video layer, elegant and toxic.
I look at Jonah. I don’t say the name. I press my palm flat, fingers spread, the signal we rehearsed by not saying we rehearsed. He registers it before the metronome ticks a third time. He leans in and toggles the macro.
The room stops.
No hiss, no fan, no cable pig squeal. The studio lights don’t change, but the sound does. The absence is a presence that walks in and sits straight-backed on the table between us. I count with my pulse because I refuse the on-screen timer. One, two, three, let the lungs relearn.
The chat goes feral, then thin. Muted?? scrolls, then buffering? then a stack of question marks dissolving into a slow stream of quiet hand emojis. Someone posts a candle. Someone else types, I’ll stay.
At eight seconds my fingers want the slider. At twelve, my tongue tries to click. I push my hands flat and let the silence do its job. Jonah doesn’t look at me; he stares at the waveform, a flat sea broken only by the little cursor advancing without noise. He has set his jaw in that way that makes his cheek jump, a tiny metronome under skin.
The city presses at the glass. The creek laps a bar of water over the curb with a wet consonant I can almost taste. Burnt sugar rises from the factory vent and sweetens nothing. I smell dust where the foam panel meets the window and remember my mother’s night shifts, the way her silence walked in ahead of her at dawn.
At nineteen seconds, the overlay tries again—white text snapping onto our feed then blinking out when it hits the null we built. No grip. No oxygen.
My eyes sting. I blink and force the air in slow. On the chat, a username I know from the early days writes, We’ll be here when you come back.
Jonah lifts two fingers, a silent five. I nod, once. He holds them there and drops one. Four. Then three. My mind inventories my body: feet planted, shoulders back, breath low. Two. One. He taps the macro again with a respectful firmness, and the world returns in a soft inhale.
I don’t say we’re back. I don’t claim victory. I hit play on the statement.
A woman’s voice steps into the room. It carries no script. It doesn’t gesture. It doesn’t ask for decoding. “My brother liked to repair radios,” she says, voice roughened by long use. “He would sit on the floor with the back off and listen to the nothing, and he said he could hear stations that weren’t there yet. When he went missing, your listeners searched, and when the wrong answer took hold, I stopped leaving the house. Today I want one thing on your tape. Say his name and say that we don’t want a finale. We want sleep.”
That is all. Less than twenty seconds. The file ends with breath and space and the faintest clatter of a spoon in a sink somewhere far from drama. I let the room hold it, then I say his name. I say nothing else. I watch the chat change shape. The puzzle-hunters stop drawing maps. The vinyl pin rows slow. A wave of thank you replaces the arrows.
Jonah looks at me. “You good?” he mouths.
“I’m fine,” I whisper, not on mic, and my mouth lies a little to keep the courage upright. I bring in a short, clean segment about the building permit for controlled access at the annex and the safety officer who will be present. I invite anyone with historic rigging experience to email a specific address instead of calling in. I do not read the number he tries to superimpose in the lower third. The macro blocks him again.
He hates being eclipsed. I can feel his temper smack against the panels like a trapped bird. We give him nothing to land on. Another overlay flickers in a corner of the screen: a cherub face, grainy, the cracked wreath like a halo from a gas station shelf. It blinks off and leaves us alone with our plan.
Micro-hook: The viewer count holds. It doesn’t spike. It doesn’t crater. It sits where real attention lives.
“A reminder,” I say, voice steady, “we’re not doing live location reveals. We are documenting a safe approach with law enforcement and building staff for the Orpheum annex. When we have verified updates that help, you’ll hear them at a humane pace.”
The chat replies with a line that makes my throat click: Humane pace—copied, pasted, then pinned by the mods. I can breathe again. I can feel my shoulders drop the armor an inch.
Jonah leans into his mic. “Tech note for the Choir,” he says. “If your app tried to fill the silence with a track, check that autoplay setting and let it be quiet next time. That gap was on purpose.”
I grin at him off-mic and get back a small smile that lands where I live. I think of the creek outside, licking metal. I think of the dumpling shop where the detective’s friends and the producers we pretend we’re not walked in ten minutes apart and shared information we won’t put in email. I think of the Night Choir pins trading like rosaries at pop-ups, tiny prayers for a solution that doesn’t devour.
The overlay doesn’t return. The metronome stays dead. I keep my hands in my lap to stop them from celebrating.
“We’ll close with the family’s phrase,” I say. “Not a finale. Just sleep.”
I point to Jonah. He rolls the credits we wrote for a quieter show: no music, no montage, just a list of resources for families and a form where professionals can volunteer. The chat keeps talking to itself in a kinder syntax. A cobbler from Chapter 30 posts, Still here. Willing to help with safe rigging audit. A stagehand adds, I know that annex ladder. It bites at rung six. Someone else drops a screenshot of our silence with the caption, the only good hijack is none.
I kill the stream. The red light dies to a dull cherry in the reflection. The studio settles. The hum resumes its role as room tone. I pull the headphones off and hang them on the hook I drilled into the desk the year we thought buying better gear would fix our ethics.
Jonah exhales like he’d been holding his breath, which he had. “You did it,” he says, voice shy of saying we.
“We did it,” I say, correcting the grammar of fear. “Did you see the count?”
“It stayed,” he says. “Even went up by a sliver. No churn. The trolls hate silence more than they hate us.”
I rub my sternum where the hot stone used to sit and find it cooler now. “We can use absence,” I say. “Not as a gimmick. As a doorstop.”
He leans in, elbows on knees. “He’ll retaliate,” he says. “He’ll build a louder room.”
“Then we dim it,” I say. I picture the tunnel hatch, the cold breath, the brittle weld. I picture light run backwards along a catwalk until it dies at a dead end, and officers waiting where he doesn’t look. I taste metal again and know it’s adrenaline, not fear.
My phone buzzes against the console. The screen lights the glass with a little gold square—Tessa’s contact photo from a summer where we ate peaches over the sink. A notification banner rolls up: File shared: “dock_notes-final.zip” with a timestamp and her name. My mouth goes dry. I don’t open it. The creek outside claps the curb like a cue we didn’t schedule.
Jonah watches my eyes and asks, “Everything okay?”
“My sister sent a file,” I say, each word heavier than the last. “She never uses ‘final’ unless she’s bracing.”
He chews the inside of his cheek, an old tell. “Do you want me to step out?”
“No,” I say. I stare at the little envelope icon until it stops bouncing. My finger hovers and doesn’t land. “We just taught the room to hold quiet. Maybe I should learn from my own show.”
We sit in the aquarium hum and let the sugar air lay a coat on our throats. The cherub sticker on my keyboard shines where my thumb rubbed it bald, its innocence fake and useful. I hear water in the gutter like a long applause that refuses to swell.
I pocket the phone without opening the file. “Tomorrow,” I say, which is a lie I can live with for an hour. “Tonight we rewatch the tunnel footage and diagram the light.”
Jonah nods. “And we buy that lock tech dumplings.”
“Off email,” I say.
The studio lights warm the glass. The red “on air” square sleeps for once. I look at my taped card—SILENCE—30 SEC—and then at the unread notification that pulses like a heartbeat in my pocket. The Director lost a breath tonight. I don’t know whose breath will pay for the next one.
I ask the empty room the question I don’t want to answer yet, the one waiting inside the unopened zip:
What did Tessa put on my stage?