I sit on the precinct’s vinyl chair with the router bag under my elbow and watch the tech pull the boat’s GPS unit apart like a careful librarian. The fluorescent light turns his gloves into masks. The room smells like coffee warmed too long and wet wool from our jackets. My brain tries to launch a new show about relief; my body refuses to subscribe.
“Cache imaged,” the tech says, eyes on the terminal. “Encrypted. Not by the manufacturer.”
“He likes to stage the audience,” I say. “He staged his navigation, too.”
Elena leans on the doorframe with her notebook open and her pen still. “Can you beat it tonight?”
“Depends what he used,” the tech answers. “If it’s a password with a salt—”
Jonah nudges my arm and slides a thumb drive onto the table like he’s feeding a shy bird. “Try this list,” he says. “All the titles from his scene cards, their mirror versions, plus ring-imprint dates. He recycles phrases.”
The tech raises an eyebrow. “Fan of musical theater?”
“Fan of patterns,” Jonah says. “And I listen for living.”
I watch the terminal as characters scroll. The fan rattles the ceiling tile; the studio’s aquarium hum lives in my head, so even here the air throbs with it. The cursor pauses, thinks, and then the map window blooms into dots like constellations I can read. Coordinates populate a list. One line blinks green.
“We’re in,” the tech says.
Elena steps forward. “Give me the three most recent.”
He reads, “Orpheum, earlier tonight. East River mooring. And… boathouse on the Saltkill off the Hudson feeder. Two days ago.”
The word boathouse peels heat from my face. “Two days,” I say. “He checked his stage.”
Jonah pulls a stool beside the monitor. “Zoom radials. Look at the drift.”
On the satellite pane, the last point sits on a narrow inlet with a sliver of dock shadow. A tin-roof rectangle perches like a held breath. He visited, and he didn’t visit by accident.
“No radios,” Elena says. “No posts, no hints, no ‘we’re on our way.’ I’ll take two cars. You bring the van, but you park out of sight.”
“Copy,” Jonah says, already texting our off-channel thread: leaving cold; seats locked; silent mode.
I text one line to the Night Choir on the delay queue I now live by: We’re off air. We keep the lights low. I watch the hearts pulse in the moderation dashboard without letting the notification sound breathe.
The tech packages the unit in a fresh bag. “You want the raw export on a drive?”
“Yes,” Elena says. “Tag it with time and hash. If he runs an ‘it-wasn’t-me’ defense, I’ll drink this file like water.”
I take a photo of the screen with the coordinate string and press it between my thoughts like a leaf I can later name. A numbness spreads behind my ribs that’s useful; it keeps the panic from putting on a cape. The numbness isn’t denial. It’s a workbench.
Micro-hook: The dots on the map say we have a door; the green blink says it’s still warm. But a warm door can open into weather that eats you.
We step into the night. The city has washed its face but kept the eyeliner; rain polishes the streetlights until they glow like ripe fruit. Burnt sugar rides the air from the factory, sweet cutting through diesel like a hymn sewn over static. The creek behind the station—fed by the same body that laps our studio—has swelled again, turning the gutter into a ribbon mirror. I think of the Orpheum cherubs, their plaster eyes chipped to moons, and I make my only prayer tonight honest.
“Keep her alive,” I whisper to the rain. “And keep us quiet.”
Elena climbs into the unmarked; I take the van with Jonah, the smell of solder and peppermint a familiar nervous system. He hands me a napkin-wrapped bundle. “Cold dumplings,” he says. “Détente rules.”
“Unwritten, un-emailed,” I say, breaking one in half and handing it back. “We’re not sharing clues with anybody who wants a show.”
He watches the windshield while the wipers thud. “You know,” he says, mouth full in the polite way he uses when he doesn’t want to be rude to danger, “if Alina’s there, we cut our mics. Not a syllable.”
“We cut them,” I say. “We cut them and we hand her our coats and a thousand years.”
Elena’s taillights wink in the rain and then settle into a steady red metronome for us to follow. I let that rhythm borrow my breath. The Night Choir’s enamel pin on our dash—tiny cherub overlaid with a microphone—glints in each sweep of the wipers. Corrupted innocence and staged salvation; tonight I refuse to let that symbol eat us. The road narrows to two lanes, then to one when construction squeezes our path into a tunnel of cones holding puddles like cupped hands.
“Why two days?” Jonah asks.
“He checked his blocking,” I answer. “He wanted to be sure the audience could see him, even if there was no audience. He wanted the window light right.”
“Or he brought supplies,” Jonah says.
I taste metal. “Or both.”
The highway shoulders fall away into wet dark. We leave Brooklyn’s aquarium hum behind; the new soundscape is wiper heartbeat, tire hiss, and the occasional truck that roars by carrying someone else’s future. I watch exit signs scroll like draft chapters and keep my voice in the lines.
Elena comes on the secure channel once, a whisper clipped clean. “No chatter unless you need the world,” she says.
“Copy,” I say. “We need the world only if it’s dying.”
We pass a flooded stretch where the tidal creek has broken its edge and made a mirror of the sidewalk. A streetlight lies down in it like a person who lost the argument. I think about exposure that heals and harms, and I measure the light we have left. The same megaphone that gives voice can drown. I lock my jaw and choose small sound.
Micro-hook: The rain writes white lines on the windshield; the road erases them immediately. We chase a vanishing ink toward a pin that could be a door or a maw.
The turnoff arrives without flourish—a county road that pretends it isn’t leading anywhere important. Ten minutes later the GPS voice, muted but awake, vibrates the map. Jonah puts a finger to his lips out of habit anyway. He kills the display. “We walk the last bit,” he says.
Elena parks with the lights cut. We nose the van into a cluster of trees and kill ours too. The world shrugs and takes its sound back: frogs clicking like bad cables, wind pressing the reeds to shush, distant water flaring and settling. Rain moves from sheet to needle.
“Flashlights on low,” Elena says at my shoulder. “Park radio on vibrate. No names.”
“No show,” I say. “Only doors.”
We take a path that used to be a path and now is a series of persuasive mud arguments. My boots take on weight and gift it back with each pull. The boathouse reveals itself in pieces: first the angle of the roof, then the pilings, then a rectangle of window stained a dull warmth like a cigarette cupped in a hand. I hear the river’s feeder talk to the house in a throat language—glug, slap, the occasional plunk of something dropped long ago finding a new place to rest.
Elena holds a palm up. We stop. She points two fingers at her eyes and then toward the waterline. On the edge of the dock, a line of small reflective stickers winks. Cue marks. He had tried to conduct the darkness.
“He staged the ingress,” I breathe.
“We ruin his score,” Elena says.
Jonah shifts the backpack on his shoulders and uses his elbow to bump me, a ritual that says I’m here even if I’m scared of everything you’re brave enough to name. “Battery check,” he whispers. “Camera off. Recorder off. Flashlight low.”
“Low,” I echo. “Everything low until we hit breath.”
A duck startles from under the dock and my heart tries to sprint. I catch it by the collar and make it walk.
And then I hear it—faint but exact, a click, click, click on a measured line. My skin knows the cadence before my brain spells it. Metronome. The sound carries across the water in threads and knots itself in my ear.
“You hear that?” Jonah asks.
“I do,” I say. “He loves a timekeeper.”
Elena’s mouth goes tight. “He left us a clock.”
“Or she left us a signal,” I say, hope stepping forward without my permission. I let it stand; it can keep its coat.
We crouch at the dock’s hinge where the boards go from stubborn to slick. The metronome ticks again. It’s faint enough that wind steals every fourth beat; that absence makes me want to run, because omission is a crueler instrument than noise.
“Two days ago,” Elena whispers, returning to the only date that matters inside my head. “He visited then. If she was here then, she could be here now.”
“Two days is a long time,” I say, because truth is a brittle thing that still deserves to be held right. “But it’s not forever.”
Jonah touches my sleeve. “Listen to the resting beats.”
I count. Tick, tick, tick, breath of wind, tick. I recognize the tempo—the same beating he used when he hung the mask on camera, the same line he wanted us to march to. I pull my phone out long enough to check the compass; I don’t photograph, I don’t record. I refuse to take more than I can carry ethically in the dark. I pocket the phone and reach for the gaffer tape Jonah tucked into the pack.
“Door seams?” he asks.
“Later,” Elena answers. “First, perimeter. Then we knock.”
“If knocking will get us hurt?” I ask.
“Then we pick,” she says. “Quietly.”
We split without losing eye contact. Jonah ghosts left to check for a secondary walkway. I take three soft steps toward the boathouse’s land side and catalog what sound gives me: a generator cough that never catches, a line clacking against a cleat, the metronome inside keeping a discipline I have learned to hate and respect. The window glow doesn’t change.
My mouth goes dry. I swallow and re-wet it with rain, the taste metallic and clean. “Elena,” I whisper, “I want to try a word. Not a name. A word that says: I’m not here for a show.”
“One word,” she says.
I cup my hands and angle my voice toward the foundation gap. “Water,” I say, low and steady. “Water.”
The metronome doesn’t falter. No footstep. No answer.
Jonah returns and shakes his head. “No other door,” he breathes. “But there’s a vent with tape residue. He sealed and unsealed it.”
“He tested the air,” I say. “Two days ago.”
Elena takes out her lock kit. “On me,” she says. “When the door opens, lights up twelve percent. No more. No talking unless it’s to a doctor.”
I put my palm on the wood. It’s damp and honest. I think of the Night Choir praying in chat without typing, of the pledge they signed with hearts instead of signatures, of exposure that heals and harms, of how the same megaphone that saved us tonight could ruin this room. I lower my head and whisper a second prayer, not to be heard by anything louder than rain.
“Alina,” I say, the name a private key, “if you’re inside, we’re here to make it quiet.”
Elena works the pick with a patience that makes me believe locks can be persuaded the way people can—by steady attention. The metronome keeps time, steady, rude, defiant. My focus tightens to a point fine enough to cut silk. The numbness has melted into precision. I can feel the space between ticks like a throat that wants to swallow a sob and refuses.
The cylinder gives a tiny shrug. Elena breathes once. “On three,” she whispers. “One.”
The metronome clicks.
“Two.”
Rain beads on my lashes and turns the light into stars no one else deserves.
“Three.”
The latch yields. A ribbon of warm air slides through the seam, carrying the smell of damp wood and something sharp, like rubbed copper.
Micro-hook: The door knows our hands now; the room doesn’t know our names yet. The metronome keeps counting. What will it count out—mercy or a line timed to go off?
We widen the gap enough for a flashlight’s edge. I aim it low, toward floorboards, and let the beam walk instead of run. The metronome sits on a nail keg by an interior door, its arm wagging like a finger trying to scold water. Electrical tape snakes from the base toward a power strip. The strip’s second outlet holds a plug that disappears under the inner threshold.
“Trap?” Jonah mouths.
I shake my head once. “Power to something,” I whisper. “Or to nothing, to make us afraid.”
Elena points to the inner door. On it, a cherub sticker—sun-faded, face scratched—watches us with the stupid serenity of a thing that never had to be brave. I let my anger harden into care.
“We go in,” Elena says. “We go in slow.”
I rest my fingers on the inner knob. “Alina,” I say again, this time just air, no sound. I look at the metronome and decide that his timekeeper can’t own this minute.
I touch the pendulum and stop it.
The room inhales. The sudden quiet is not empty; it is attention stripped of performance. I hear a whisper then—maybe wind, maybe a thread of voice beyond the inner door, shaped into a single syllable that could be plea or breath.
I meet Elena’s eyes. She nods once.
“Ready,” I whisper back to both of us, and to the dark that may yet answer.
When we push through this next door, will the air that meets my face carry a living girl’s warmth—or the leftovers of a story he tried to make immortal?