The gasp hooks me by the sternum. I slip past the hatch lip and taste dust and metal on the back of my tongue. The cue bulb over the door shivers, making a halo of everything wrong here—peeling plaster cherubs, bubbled paint, and a boy pressed against the wall with a black rectangle taped to his hand.
I lift both palms. “Hands,” I say, letting my voice ride the low register that doesn’t spook people. “See my hands.”
Elena eases in beside me with that cop stillness that reads like air. She opens her fingers too and angles her body so her holster stays invisible. “We’re here,” she says, the radio quiet in her shoulder. “Eyes on us.”
He flinches anyway. Sweat slicks his hair to his temples. The remote clings to his left palm, strangled by a bracelet of duct tape that bites his skin. Every few seconds a red LED whispers a blink. His breath catches and stutters and I can smell the adhesive—hot, bitter, synthetic—over the theater’s slow rot and the sweetness that drifts all the way in from the factory.
“Please,” he blurts, accent dragging the word into a plea with corners. “I didn’t—he said—don’t send me out.”
“We’re not sending you anywhere,” I say. “You pick where you stand with us, and we keep you there.”
He shakes his head hard, back thudding brick. The cherubs above him grin the way painted angels do when they’ve seen too much. I hate them for it and love the map they’ve given me.
Elena tips her chin at the tape. “May I cut that?” she asks. “No surprises. No pain.”
“He said it has a—” The kid swallows and squeezes his eyes shut. “A deadman. If I took it off wrong, it would—there’s a light—”
“No boom,” Elena says evenly. “I’ve got the frequency. Jonah?” Her voice taps my earpiece like a spoon to a glass.
“I’m here,” Jonah says in my ear. “I can cage anything it pings. Feed is dead as long as it stays in that hand.”
“Copy,” Elena answers. She looks to me. “You or me?”
“Me,” I say, and I slide closer.
I kneel so we’re eye level. I lower the mic on my chest until the red tally light hides in the fold of my jacket. I want a record, and I want him not to feel recorded. Those two wants shred at each other; I pick the person.
“I’m Mara,” I say. “I host the thing you hate right now. I am not broadcasting your face. I need to touch your wrist.”
He nods once, jittery, like the nod had to travel across a field of static. I reach for the tape and put two fingers under the edge where it has lifted with sweat. The glue resists, then gives with a sticky cry. He tenses and makes a sound I only hear from people who have held breath too long.
“Easy,” Elena says. “Slow peel.”
I keep the tape moving at the speed of trust. It unspools in a long silver ribbon and the remote stays in his palm by habit alone. When the last loop drops onto the floor with a soft kiss of garbage, he stares at his hand like it belongs to someone else. Then his shoulders cave and he folds into a sob that doesn’t make a headline, just a human sound in a corridor.
I don’t put a hand on him. I let the cry run. Elena isn’t a toucher either; she sets a bottled water down within reach and steps back a half foot to grant him air that isn’t ours.
“He said visas are stories,” the kid gets out, voice wrecked. “He said he writes the stories and if I—if I missed the beat, mine stops. My mother—”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He blinks at me, wiped clean for a second, then remembers. “Ravi,” he says. “Ravi Singh. Third-year. Tech theater. I do sound. He found me at practicum and said he liked my timing.”
“Of course he liked your timing,” I say, keeping bitterness inside my molars. “You’re good at what you do. What did he make you do?”
“Carry this,” Ravi whispers, opening his fingers a fraction. “Push it when he taps. Three taps to start the mirror, two to cut it. I hold it so his feeds line up on balcony, on wall, so people look away from where he goes. I mark with chalk where he… where he wanted the cue to be. He said the angels would forgive it.”
I look up at the chipped cherub and keep my face plain. “He likes angels,” I say. “He’s wrong about forgiveness.”
Elena crouches now, knees like hinges, voice like a doctor with a needle she won’t lie about. “Ravi, I can offer you something real. Not theater. You did a criminal thing under threat. We can document coercion and get you counsel tonight. I’m not promising you every dream, but I can put a roof on your head that isn’t his.”
His eyes dart past us like there might be cameras hungry to eat him. The corridor gives nothing back except our breath and the bulb’s insect hum. Outside, the creek licks the curb in a rhythm that wants to be a song. I hear the Night Choir without hearing them—headphones turned to the ground, the hush like a patience learned.
“He said,” Ravi says, mouth tightening around the pronoun like it hurt, “if I told a cop, he would put a video on a paper’s site and call me a plant. He said he could make a crowd eat me.”
I pull the bottle’s cap halfway and hand it to him. “I’ve fed crowds,” I say. “I’m done with that menu.”
He takes the bottle, gulps twice, then presses the cool to his eyes. The LED on the remote blinks again. Jonah hisses in my ear.
“That’s not a deadman,” Jonah says. “It’s a charm. He taped it to induce fear, not explosion.”
“Can you zero it?” I murmur, keeping my lips barely moving.
“I already did,” Jonah says, smug not because he deserves to be, but because I need him to be. “He can mash that button until the creek takes the theater and the only thing he’ll trigger is my boredom.”
“Ravi,” I say, “this is taped because he wanted you scared. We’ve dampened it. You can open your hand.”
He looks at me like he wants to believe more than anything else. Then he pries his fingers open and drops the remote into my palm like it’s a sin he can quit. It’s lighter than I want it to be—cheap plastic, too much story for so little mass.
He breaks again, not as loud. “He said my I-—my status—” He can’t get the letters out. The tape has left red rings on his skin. “He has a copy of my passport photo. He said he knows where my mother works, that he can—he can stage anything.”
Elena doesn’t flinch. “He stages,” she says. “We document. I’m calling the DA’s office and an immigrant-rights attorney. You can sit with a lawyer before you say another word on tape. You can also hear what we can file: threats, coercion, conspiracy. I can’t fix your whole life tonight, but I can start your safety.”
“How?” Ravi asks, small, a technician suddenly at the mercy of a system with switches he doesn’t know.
“We do what your world does when something breaks,” I say. “We isolate power, we label every cable, we remove the bad actor from the board.”
His laugh is a chipped plate. “He is the board.”
Elena leans closer. “No. He’s a user. We build boards.”
He looks at the cherub again, then back at us. “He used the angels because he lost one,” he says, almost to himself. “He told me that. Like it justifies a… a machine.”
“Grief is the oldest prop,” I say, and the bitter slips out this time. I catch it and set it down where it can’t cut him. “We won’t make yours into one.”
He nods, a short bow to the floor. “Protection,” he says, tasting the word to see if it’s real. “Then I can tell you where he goes when he swaps gear.”
Elena doesn’t smile. She doesn’t sell. “You can tell me, and then you can meet counsel. That order.”
He takes another sip and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “There’s a building north of here with a red water tower on the roof,” he says. “He calls it the Intermission. He meets a runner there. Swaps remotes for bags. He likes high sightlines and low cameras.”
My stomach tightens in a way that is not fear and not joy—just a click of something sliding into place on the board we’re building. “Red water tower,” I say. “North how far?”
“Three blocks or five, depending on how he wants the walk,” Ravi says. “He varies approach to cut patterns. He says patterns are scripture and traps at once. He reads your… your timing. The tower is painted old-barn red, not new-red. There’s a ladder up the south side and a pigeon nest under the catwalk. He says the pigeons forgive more than angels.”
Elena’s radio utters a breath and she mutes it with two fingers. “Time?”
“Tonight,” Ravi says. “If he likes the house. If he doesn’t, he waits a day. He texts me only the word water when he wants me to set a mirror there for him—project on brick from the opposite roof and catch anyone tailing him looking the wrong way. I didn’t set it tonight because he said… he said I didn’t need to. He said the crowd would be enough.”
The crowd outside holds their hush like a net. I picture their pins catching stray light, the creek making the curb into a shallow tray where reflections collect and tremble. I picture Tessa’s zipped folder and Alina’s voice inside it, asking me to avoid spectacle. And in that picture I see the tower, red with old weather, patient like a prop that knows its cue.
“Ravi,” I say, “thank you.” I hand him the silver ribbon of tape, still warm with his skin. “This part’s over.”
He stares at the tape like it used to be a handcuff and now it’s just trash. “Can I—” He gestures at the corner where a custodian’s bin sulks under dust. “I want to throw it away.”
“Please,” I say.
He stands on stiff legs, walks to the bin, and drops the tape with such ceremony that the corridor feels briefly holy. He comes back lighter by ounces and miles.
Elena keys her radio, voice steady enough to make gravity jealous. “We have a witness, safe, willing. Send counsel to the south entrance. EMS for evaluation, no lights.” She meets Ravi’s eyes again. “You’re not under arrest. You are under protection. You don’t leave with strangers. You leave with us and a lawyer.”
“Okay,” he says, and when his shoulders fall this time, they fall into a place that looks like a chair after standing too long.
I text Jonah: Red water tower. Nearby. Intermission. Prep the gaffer rolls. He’ll know that means the trackers disguised as tape. He’s been itching to use them since we headed here.
“Mara,” Elena says, not unkind. “Your stream?”
I look at the little tally light and flip it off like dousing a candle. “No statement,” I say. “No names. We’ll debrief in quiet. Night Choir can keep their hush.”
“We can do a written later,” she says. “No audio.”
“Deal,” I say, and I mean it.
Outside the hatch, a siren far away remembers it has lungs and then thinks better of it. The burnt-sugar air has cooled into something that smells like rain on metal. Footsteps pad in the corridor behind us as two officers take our place—not to claim the moment, but to hold it open while we move.
“He’ll test the roof,” Elena says, half to me, half to herself. “He’ll want to read whether we learned from tonight or only performed it.”
“Then we stop performing,” I say, and it feels like I’ve been rehearsing that line since I learned how to plug a mic in.
Ravi tugs at the cuff of his sleeve, then looks up with new, nervous calculation. “There are three red water towers within six blocks,” he says, apologetic like it’s his fault a city can repeat itself. “He likes the one with a ladder you can lock with a bike cable. He keeps the cable in a planter on the roof—a dead basil plant.”
“That’s better than a cross street,” Elena says. “We can grid-search.”
I open the door back to the alley and the creek’s breath comes at me cool and quick. The Night Choir doesn’t surge. A kid with a glow pin sees Ravi behind us and looks not curious but concerned, which might be the first time I’ve seen the audience choose that face.
I tuck the dead remote into an evidence bag and pass it to Elena. “He’ll switch hardware,” I say. “He’ll want a new toy to feel clean.”
“Then we meet him at the toy box,” she says.
I text Jonah again: How many red water towers live between us and the river? Can you get eyes without waking the crowd?
His reply pings fast: Three candidates. Gaffer eggs ready. I’ll need ten minutes and two gentle liars.
I glance at Elena. She nods once, already calling for rooftop teams with the kind of calm that keeps people from tripping on their own fear.
Above us, brick drinks the night. Somewhere north, a red cylinder waits on spindly legs, patient, theatrical, and very pleased with its color. I adjust my headset and let the creek’s small percussion set my cadence.
“Intermission,” I whisper to the street, to the stream I refused to feed, to the kid who chose to throw away his tape. “Then we see if the next act belongs to him.”
The radio crackles with a street name I don’t recognize and then another that I do, and the question lodges where breath meets bone:
Which red tower will hold him—and which one is already holding us?