The Orpheum breathes like a sleeping animal when we unlock the side door. Dust swirls in my headlamp and turns the air grainy; it tastes faintly of wet plaster and the burnt sugar that coats this block after dark. The auditorium is a dark bowl, cherubs peeling along the balcony like children who never learned to blink. My palms sweat on the blueprint tube. I remind myself: electricians, not directors.
“Power run is clean,” Jonah says, half inside a junction box under the stage. His tool kit spreads around him—gaffer tape, pocket meter, USB-to-serial dongles, a candy bar he hasn’t touched. He’s clipped, all business, the way he gets when the music is logic. “I’m mirroring his last hijack lag—five hundred milliseconds between cues. Familiar. Comforting.”
“Comfort lures,” I say, kneeling beside him. The concrete presses through my jeans. “Then the broken pattern.”
He grins without looking up. “Then the broken pattern.”
I uncap the tube and lay the copied service map on the deck. We found the hatch. We charted the crosshatch of catwalks. We confirmed the sealed corridor that dead-ends behind a rusted door Elena’s people can hold. He trusted the Orpheum’s bones; he trusted me to play conductor. Tonight I need him to trust his own rig.
Jonah keys a sequence and the first strip of bulbs winks on along the backstage wall—warm, theatrical, not harsh. The second follows, a beat late. The third holds, then blinks twice. The rhythm hits my chest like a metronome I once hated. I picture Lyle’s fingers in the dark, counting to his favorite flourish.
“When do we introduce the step he doesn’t know?” I ask.
“Right before the elbow,” he says, pointing at the blueprint’s tight corner where the corridor hooks toward the hatch. “He expects a long hold there. I’ll give him a short one, then a double blink on the wrong side. He’ll correct toward the sealed door. His own hubris will do the last ten feet.”
“He trusts patterns,” I say. “We break them to corral him.”
Jonah nods and pulls his laptop closer. “He learned our lag by hijacking our stream and listening for echo. I’m banking he’s feeding off that same latency. To him, this will smell right.”
I take a breath and taste cold metal and cinnamon from a thermos memory. I shift to the edge of the stage and peer into the orchestra pit where dust has settled into a fine lake. The house ghosts my reflection back to me in the gloss of the seats. Exposure heals and harms; pace is medicine. I place the thought next to the junction box, like another tool.
“Run it again,” I say. “I’ll walk it.”
Jonah taps. The lights ripple forward. I step into the sequence, counting under my breath. Left, hold, left-left, right. At the elbow, the new break kicks: a hiccup in the flow, a wrong-foot invitation. Even knowing it’s coming, my body follows the mislead toward the sealed corridor. I stop with my palm an inch from the cold metal door and exhale through my teeth.
“That’s the trap,” I say. “That miscount is sticky.”
“Sticky is good,” Jonah says. He sits back on his heels and watches the bulbs fade to black. “Now we add the decoy broadcast, and your mic does the rest.”
I straighten and shake the dust from my pants. The Night Choir will be out there, some of them no matter what we say, trading pins like communion. The creek is already at the curb—moon big tonight. I roll my shoulders and stretch my jaw. This next piece is my only art allowed: an on-air distraction that looks like show and functions like shield.
“Let’s rehearse,” I say.
We climb to the booth Elena’s team has cleared—no cameras, no extra bodies. The Switchboard Van’s portable mixer sits on a rolling cart, patched to the theater system via Jonah’s snakes. The studio hum in my head returns when my fingers touch faders; the glassbox lives under my skin now, a phantom aquarium.
Jonah cues the decoy loop: City bus brakes, low traffic, the gentle murmur of chat he pre-recorded and detuned. “We’ll stream this from the van parked two blocks away,” he says. “Geo-scrubbed, timestamped, but no location. You’ll be live to the Night Choir with nothing they can use. You’ll say the words. You won’t say the place.”
I lean to the mic and press my tongue to my molars to ground my mouth. “Good evening,” I say, voice low, not syrupy. “Tonight is not a finale. If you are near the Orpheum, go home. If you are near any theater, go home. Our team is working with Elena Park’s unit on something quiet and verified. You will not get a show.”
Jonah makes the stretch gesture with both hands. I keep going:
“If you usually record your heart rate during our streams, please don’t. If you usually post theories, please don’t. If you have a lead, text it to the tip line and then put your phone down. Someone you don’t know needs you to be boring.”
He slices his palm horizontally: cut. He points to the cue sheet. “Then we take thirty seconds of room tone,” he says. “Then we play the resource scroll. Then the consent pledge. Then nothing.”
I nod and pull back from the mic. The emptiness after my own voice is the hardest drug I’ve quit. I check my pocket for the file Tessa gave me—For_Mara_only.m4a—and feel its weight like a stone on a string. I don’t press play. Not yet.
Elena’s steps announce her before her voice does: clipped heels, no nonsense. She enters with a folded map and a thermos that smells like plain coffee, no sweet. An officer in plain clothes hovers by the door, then leaves at her nod.
“Walk me through the lights,” she says.
Jonah defaults to diagram mode. “We mimic his known lag for two thirds of the route. At the elbow, we break pattern. He corrects right into your sealed corridor. We lock this hatch from the outside with your people on both ends. No choke points we can’t access, no loose catwalks.”
Elena pins a finger on the elbow. “This is where he gets clever or stupid,” she says. “Either way, we’re there.”
“Nonlethal capture,” I say, catching her eye. “That’s the agreement.”
“Nonlethal unless he forces lethal,” she says, tone dry, not theatrical. “Beanbag launcher positioned at the far end. Tasers staged, but we prefer hands. EMTs waiting. Body cams on. No press within line of sight.”
“No Night Choir inside,” I add. “We’ve pushed the message all day. We’ll push again before we roll.”
“Your crowd listens when it believes you mean it,” she says. There’s no accusation in it, only the problem set. “If they show anyway, I have barricades. My team will keep them off the doors. Your decoy stream keeps them entertained enough to hold.”
“Not entertained,” I say, too fast. “Informed then dismissed.”
Elena’s mouth twitches the ghost of a half smile. “Fine. Dismissed.”
Jonah squints at his laptop. “I can trigger a low-frequency buzz if he tries to backtrack on the catwalk,” he says. “Not high enough to injure, just annoying. He hates annoyance. He moves forward to escape it.”
“Patterns and aversions,” I say. “We draw a fence with both.”
Elena taps the blueprint again. “We own the exit hatch,” she says. “We hold this corridor. We seed an officer at the decoy corridor with a dummy light so he can’t hide there. If he bolts into the pit, we kill house lights to zero and go night-vision.”
“If he speaks?” I ask. “If he tries to turn it into a performance?”
She looks at me. “You cut his mic.”
I nod. My hand lifts unconsciously toward an invisible fader. “I cut his mic.”
We walk the route together. Dust muffles our steps. The cue bulbs warm the walls in waves; the plaster throws gentle shadows, cherub cheeks glowing like fruit beginning to spoil. At the elbow I watch Elena measure the angle with her eyes. She doesn’t need her tape to know distances. She knows how long a body takes to cover ten feet when adrenaline turns legs to wire.
“He’ll smell cops,” she says quietly. “He will still come because he craves the beat drop. He trusts that the last light is for him.”
“Then we make the last light ours,” I say.
We circle back to the booth. Outside, the creek gurgles through a storm grate, a private audience with perfect attendance. The factory pumps its sugar breath; I sip water and it tastes like melted cotton candy. My stomach doesn’t want it.
“Again from the top,” I say. “Sequence. Decoy. Brief.”
Jonah runs the chase. I rehearse my warning. Elena radios a check with her team. Their replies are clean—no chatter, just call signs and confirmations. The radios scratch in short bursts, like someone scratching at the back of a curtain.
“One concern,” Jonah says, swiveling the laptop toward us. “His last hijack used a metronome layered under room tone to get inside our timing. If he tries to sync with me, this little drift”—he shows a sine wave walking minutely out of phase—“will shake him off. It’s not random. It’s wrong in the same way every time.”
“Wrong the same way,” I repeat. “So it feels like a pattern in a pattern.”
“Exactly,” he says. He taps the keyboard. “He will trust it because it flatters his ear.”
Elena caps her thermos. “I’m deploying now,” she says. “Officers in position at the hatch and the decoy door. EMS two blocks north. Patrol cars on silent. If you call red, I go heavy; otherwise this stays boring.”
“Boring is holy,” I say, and it doesn’t even taste like a joke anymore.
She pauses at the door. “Keene,” she says, not unkind. “Don’t narrate a trap while I’m running it.”
“Understood,” I say. “I’ll narrate nothing.”
She leaves. The door closes on a clean click that sounds like a cue. Jonah exhales long and pulls a fresh indicator strip from his bag. He labels the elbow switch WRONG-RIGHT in thick marker and sticks it where his hand can’t miss.
“You good?” he asks.
“I’m many things,” I say, and smile without teeth. “Good is one.”
He laughs, short. “Play the memo,” he adds, softer.
I take out my phone and find For_Mara_only. I pop one earbud in and let Alina speak into the part of me that used to crave cliffhangers more than oxygen.
“Mara,” her voice says, steady, lake-flat. “If you feel the drum, put it down. Someone taught you to carry too many drums. Tonight you are not the rhythm. You are the stagehand who turns the lights and goes home.”
I stop the file. I put the earbud away. I look at Jonah, at the blueprint, at the little labeled switch that will lie to a liar in the most useful way.
“Lights to standby,” I say.
“Lights to standby,” he echoes.
I open the decoy stream and watch the countdown begin: ninety seconds of a soft gradient and the words ETHICS NOTE pulsing in time with my breathing. I flip the fader that sends only room tone. The studio that isn’t a studio hums back: a rack fan, a cable sigh, the faintest pop in the line like a joint in a finger.
“Fifty,” Jonah says.
I key the radio. “Park, we’re at fifty.”
“Copy,” comes Elena’s reply, close enough to feel in my sternum. “Units set. Hatch held. Keep it boring.”
“Forty.”
I steady my hands on the console edge. I rehearse, silently, the only lines I’m allowed to speak. No poetry. No cliff. Just consent and dismissal. The tide outside nudges the street into a soft mirror. Somewhere the Night Choir is pinning cartoons of cherubs to their jackets and deciding whether to listen.
“Ten,” Jonah says.
I nod. I tap the mic on. Air moves over the mesh. My throat lines up with what we wrote on our kitchen table. “Good evening—” I begin, and I do not mention the Orpheum.
The script runs like a good fuse. Warning, resources, pledge. Thirty seconds of tone that rolls through me like the creek when the moon is boss. I watch the chat hold steady—few words, mostly hearts, a few moon emojis. It’s working. Boring is working.
A soft glow flares under the stage: the first cue light. Then the second, a breath late. Then the third, double blink.
Jonah whispers, “He’s on the line.”
I keep my face still. I move no air besides what my lungs demand. Elena’s radio scratches once, then holds. The pattern walks toward the elbow. The wrong-right switch waits like a trapdoor disguised as a welcome mat.
“Park,” I whisper into the mic I’ve routed to her only. “We’re at the elbow.”
“Copy,” Elena says. “Eyes on hatch.”
The break in the pattern winks. For a beat, the wall looks undecided, like a coin set spinning. Then the next bulb pops to life along the sealed corridor, confident, hungry.
Jonah doesn’t look at me. He keeps his finger hovering over WRONG-RIGHT the way a heart hovers over a vow. I taste sugar and dust and the ragged edge of my fear. I touch the fader with one fingertip, ready to cut sound if he speaks.
The final cue light blinks at the far end by the hatch, bright and certain. I hear nothing yet—no footfall, no breath—only the building shifting its weight.
“Do you see him?” I whisper.
Elena’s answer comes quiet, steady, surgical. “Negative—wait.”
The radio cuts. The lights hold their invitation. The creek outside taps a drum I refuse to carry.
I lean into the silent mic and let my next breath hover, suspended on a question I can’t swallow or spit out:
Will he trust our pattern more than his own?