The padlock gives way with a scream and a cough. Chains slither to the floor, steel on tile, and a brown plume lifts from the seam of the Orpheum’s doors like breath from a sleeper woken hard. I step back under the lintel as dust pollenizes the light, tasting gypsum and old velvet. The city’s burnt-sugar air pushes in behind us, sweet over the stale rot of curtains, and the inspectors shoulder through with flashlights that slice the lobby into proofs.
Elena flicks her wrist for the log time. “Zero six forty-one. Building entry.”
“Copy,” I say, because my voice wants a job and the little red dot in my pocket recorder comforts me. I’m off-air. I’m still documenting. That’s my bargain with the megaphone: use it to hold the line, not whip it.
The inspectors’ keys chatter on hips as they fan out. Dust sifts from the chandelier in a slow, glittering fall. I brush grit off the cherub carved into the nearest sconce; its grin is cracked, innocence corrupted into a smirk by age and design. “Angels awake,” I murmur, and the word doesn’t make me flinch.
“Eyes up, Keene,” Elena says. Not unkind, not soft. “We do the checklist, then the improvising.”
We push through the lobby into the house. Rows unspool into the dark, seat numbers like muted metronomes. The stage yawns open—warped deck, scabbed tape, a proscenium hung with plaster babies that have witnessed more than any audience should. The inspectors confer over load ratings and egress. One kneels to prod the aisle runner with a moisture meter, grunts, and thumbs-up.
Jonah nudges me with his bum shoulder, a peace-offering habit he fell back into after the fight. “I’ll set a baseline,” he says, holding up a palm-sized scanner. “Wideband sweep, then close-in. You want to hear it sing?”
“Sing me clean,” I answer. “Then we can wire the lies.”
He grins without showing teeth and starts at the lobby, humming to himself—some old load-in ritual he swore kept ghosts and union reps from lurking. The detector chirps at the security desk, then settles. He moves down the aisle, little LEDs showing bandwidth like a heartbeat. Behind him, Elena’s team hauls a steel plate on a dolly: the lid for the tunnel mouth we found on the blueprints.
“Hatch,” Elena calls. “Let’s tuck the dragon.”
We follow. The service door grinds open under a pry bar, and a draft rises from the depths with ancient wet and iron. The tidal creek is a rumor even here; I can hear it somewhere in the sewer geometry, a patient lick against the city’s heel. Two officers climb down a short ladder and light the tunnel’s first bend with diffuse cones. No rats, no cameras, no chalk marks this time—just water-stained concrete leading toward the building next door.
“Plate goes in,” Elena says. “Bolts every eight inches. Sealant after.”
The plate drops into place with a declarative clang that makes me blink. My mind supplies Lyle’s ring tapping metal, savoring vantage points; I shake it out. “You’ll weld it?”
“Bonded. Reversible when forensics needs it,” Elena says. “But not reversible by a bored conductor with a screwdriver.”
“Which is his favorite instrument,” I say, and she pretends not to smirk.
Micro-hook: I picture him outside the perimeter, listening for our bolts like he listened for applause. If he’s listening, he’ll hear this: the rehearsal he doesn’t control.
Jonah returns to us as the ratchet guns start their staccato. He holds up the scanner; the bars are low, steady. “Baseline’s boring,” he says. “No covert carriers, no piggyback. I’ll sweep the booth and the grid next; if I find a bug, it’ll be his vanity, not his caution.”
“You always said he likes his own sound,” I say.
“He likes your sound.” Jonah doesn’t touch me. He looks at my shoulder where a hand would go. “That’s the point. But he can’t leak what isn’t in the air.”
I nod and climb the apron. Work lights bloom in the wings, peeling shadow from ropes that smell of hemp and hand oil. I test the cue patch on the downstage left wall; the old bay still holds the color-coded cap Jonah soldered last night. He jogs up with a spool over his shoulder, gaffer taped into loops that look like the Night Choir’s pins when they swap them at pop-ups—rituals of belonging built from adhesive and attention.
“Dead-end path?” he asks.
“Dead-end path.” I hold the coil while he strips a lead. “Half-second lag, then the novel break.”
“I like our cruel little surprise,” he says, voice more pride than cruelty, emphasis on our. “I’ll run it like a dance floor—west wing to corridor to nowhere. He’ll follow the blink like a moth, and then… wall.”
I picture the cherubs watching a moth press itself into plaster until the wings stop. “We set the light low,” I say. “Not a trap to hurt him. A trap to keep everyone else from being an audience.”
He nods, and we lay the line. The cue heads blink in sequence when he taps his tablet—tick, tick, tick, pause, tick—and then they lead into a storage room we emptied at dawn. The far door is locked from our side, the window frosted. If Lyle runs that sequence, he’ll read it as safe egress until he meets our new ending: a fire door that doesn’t open, an exit sign that points back to a waiting team.
Elena strides up the center aisle with a clipboard and a roll of green painter’s tape hanging from two fingers. “Positions,” she says, and the word hums the way a theatre word should. “We’ll bite the perimeter with plainclothes.”
“How plain?” I ask, because the Night Choir knows a cop haircut from a block away.
“Dads in hoodies. A grandma with binoculars. My cousin who looks like he’s here to sell vape juice,” she says. “We’ll blend. We’re not playing cops and robbers; we’re doing crowd geometry. Jonah, you got comms?”
He taps his headset. “Encrypted, short-burst. No open mics. We’re pinned on a separate network, air-gapped from the streaming rig. If he tries to jam, he’ll just knock himself out.”
“Sweep the booth,” she says, and he peels away.
I stand in the aisle breathing dust and old perfume. The inspectors argue softly about the balcony load, then sign off: no bodies allowed up there beyond our own. Elena slaps a tiny X of tape on the back of an aisle seat six rows from the stage, then another two seats left. “These are ours,” she says.
“Marked for who?”
“Teachers, social workers, nurses.” She grins at my confusion. “In plainclothes. Trained to move toward a crisis without making it a show. The Night Choir won’t know, but they’ll feel the floor steady.”
“And cops?”
“Also in plainclothes. But the badge isn’t the only tool today.” She hands me a roll of yellow chalk. “Put a dot on the underside of the armrests we claim. Discreet. And none near the aisles where a camera could catch an odd pattern.”
I work down the row, crouching, chalking, rising. In the wood I find old carvings—initials, dates, a crude heart that forgot one hump. I press chalk into the grain and think about my pledge taped to the studio glass. Seek consent, not content. Today the dots consent to a plan: witness first, arrests later if needed.
The house lights thrum when Jonah tests a dimmer; he calls down, “No buzz on sixty percent. We can keep it at half, like you like it.”
“Low is the look,” I answer. “No spotlight on me. No stage for him.”
He leans over the rail. “Booth is clean. No bugs. Just dust. I found a styrofoam cup with ‘Director’ written in Sharpie. I took a photo and then I threw it away.”
“Blessed be the trash,” I say, and he laughs once.
Micro-hook: If I don’t spot the vanity angle, he will. Lyle’s control always left a signature, like a watermark in paper. Somewhere in these walls there’s still a mark meant for me, waiting to glow when the lights change.
We huddle center stage for the safety brief. The inspectors tick boxes: emergency lights, illuminated exits, extinguishers recharged. Elena’s sergeant demonstrates the magnetic door stops we’ll kill from backstage if the choreography turns. I run my hands along the proscenium where plaster cherubs cluster, curls dusty, lips pursed. One has a hairline crack through the eye; in the work light it looks like a tear that was sanded down.
“Talk me through the flow,” Elena says.
I point with two fingers, the way a stage manager taught me to never look like I’m accusing. “We bring in no audience except our own. We keep the doors closed, cleared by Fire. We set the cue lights to a false corridor here, here, end. We keep the balcony closed, but we seed officers and neighbors on the floor—scattered seats, no patterns. We cut the tunnel. We control the booth. We leave only one path to the stage door: the one we watch.”
“And if he shows with press?” she asks.
“He won’t,” I say, and I hear the arrogance in it and chew it down. “If he does, I’ll give them coffee outside and a speech about victim-first. I’ll bore them to death with policy. They’ll leave. Or they’ll film an empty door until they understand how boring patience looks.”
Elena’s mouth twitches. “I could listen to you bore reporters all day.”
“It’s a hobby,” I say. “My other is not being murdered on a stage.”
Jonah clears his throat. “Comms check.” He taps his earpiece. “Keene, count.”
“One, two, three, four,” I say into my lapel mic. The return ticks in my ear half a second later, the buffer I now trust like a seatbelt.
“Park?”
“Five, six, seven,” Elena says, rhythm steady as a metronome. “Eight.”
“Channel two for runners, channel three for building,” Jonah says. “No cross-talk. If anyone says ‘cut,’ we cut. No debate.”
“Copy,” we answer together, and I like the way we sound when we do that—a small choir that knows the song without needing to be loud.
Outside, the tidal creek overflows again and licks around the curb, sending a reflected glow into the house through the gap under the doors. The Night Choir promised to stay away, but I know some of them are out there, watching the water pool like a stage puddle, trading pins for patience. Exposure heals and harms; today we keep the curtains shut until the wound isn’t a show.
We move to the storage room that will end the cue path. Jonah checks the latch twice and applies a tamper strip that will break into a confetti of red if pried. “One bread crumb too many,” he mutters, affixing it. “Let him follow crumbs to cardboard.”
I tape a paper sign inside the room where only he would see it if he gets there: This is not an audience. A petty flourish. A reminder to myself that we pick the words now.
Elena radios the outside team. “Perimeter lights to low. No sirens. Let him come bored.”
“Copy,” comes the reply, city traffic murmuring behind it.
Jonah powers the cue string and we watch the blink walk the wall: one, two, three, break, four—then the dead end glows a soft, traitorous green. He kills it and restarts. “We’re good,” he says.
“We’re good,” I echo, because saying it twice makes the room believe it.
Micro-hook: Are we good enough for a man who built a career out of breaking patterns? If he wrote a new score overnight, we’ll hear the wrong note too late.
We finish chalking the underside dots. Elena caps her pen and scratches her shoulder under the strap of her vest. “One last pass,” she says. “Then we lock it until go-time.”
Jonah raises the scanner for a final sweep. It stays quiet. He tucks it away, then reaches for my hand and stops an inch short. “You ready to stand here without putting yourself on a pedestal?”
“I’ve been practicing,” I say, and I put the air between our hands to use by flattening the cue tape under my boot.
Elena watches the doorway like a cat. “He’ll try something,” she says. “But space can be made safe. We proved it today.”
“If he doesn’t have a new trick,” I add, because naming the monster keeps it from growing antlers in my head.
The house answers with a settling creak. Dust drifts in a lazy angelic snow and lands on my tongue when I open my mouth to say nothing. I close it and listen: the far-off wash of the creek, the tick of cooling work lights, the soft adhesive peel of tape somewhere in the wings.
“Lock it,” Elena says.
We back out through the lobby. The inspectors rehang the chains without a padlock, just for show, and slide a coded bar behind the door. Outside, the air is sharp and candied. Reflections jitter on the flooded sidewalk; the studio a few blocks away will be humming, empty, like a seashell with my voice trapped in it.
“We’re tight,” Jonah says, tugging the van keys from his pocket. “No bugs, dead-end cues, friendly seats. We built a room that refuses spectacle.”
I test the bar on the door and feel it hold. “Then the only danger is the script we didn’t read.”
Elena pockets the clipboard, eyes on the blank marquee where cherubs want their names in light. “He’ll bring a page. He always does.”
I look at the stage door reflected in the water at my feet, the words mirrored into nonsense by current and tire ripples, and I ask the city the question I have earned by making the house safe and mean:
When he opens his mouth and the new trick drops, where does it land—on our dead end, or on something I missed that will turn us into the show again?