The studio hushes when I mute the stream, but my headphones keep a stubborn phantom of me talking. I lift one earcup and it’s still there—my own voice, half a syllable late, cotton packed into its teeth.
“Bridge is live,” I had told Elena. Now the room answers with live, live, liv— like the building wants to keep the word.
The Glassbox hums like an aquarium; a bass throb from the HVAC kisses the mic stand. Outside, the tidal creek slaps the curb in complicated applause. Burnt sugar leaks from the factory vents and coats the back of my throat. I kill every bus but the board still twitches its needles.
“Jonah,” I say into our private channel, not trusting the room. “I’ve got a stowaway.”
He texts back two minutes. I stare at the underside of my console and the tiny red bead glaring like a bad decision.
He blows in with damp hair and peppermint on his breath. “Talk to me,” he says, and I can hear the old band-van rhythms in his voice—the triage tempo you use when the crowd is already chanting your name.
“I’m hearing me,” I say. “A relay. Half-step lag. Under there.” I point with my toe instead of my hand; my fingers don’t want to bless it by touching it yet.
He drops to his knees, shoulders wedged under the desk like he’s proposing to an altar. “Headlamp,” he says, and I hand him the elastic band, my pulse tallying out quarter notes. He squints. “That’s not our hardware.”
“I know my own ghosts,” I say.
He peels a rectangle of black tape back. It lifts like skin on hot asphalt. Under it: a disc no bigger than a quarter, matte, with a mesh kiss of a mic and a printed mask—cherub cheeks abstracted to geometry. My stomach swings.
“Whoever stuck it knew our cable path,” he says. “They chose the shadow pocket.”
“Camera?” I ask.
“No glass,” he says. “Transmitter and mic. Maybe a bandpass to keep out FM mush.”
He works a spudger into the seam and the disc sighs free of its adhesive like it’s been waiting to exhale. He cups it in his palm. The red LED blinks. Once. Twice. Then a steady coil of light.
The room gives me back a whisper. I can’t parse words, just the shape of speech—breath on metal. I swallow air that tastes like pennies.
“Kill the board,” I say. “We talk with our mouths, not the microphones.”
He nods, snaps off master power. The aquarium sound dies. The city takes a long, wet breath outside the glass.
“You think he planted it at the Orpheum?” Jonah asks, voice low. “Or at the diner?”
“The diner was neon and eggs,” I say. “The Orpheum had hands everywhere and a fandom high. He could have had a chorus to cover him.”
I reach for the disc. It’s warm, not from our hands but from working. “Don’t smash it,” Jonah says quickly, reading the swing of my shoulder the way he reads waveforms. “We need to know where it sings.”
“I feel like I need gloves just to think near it,” I say, and then I put it on a coaster like a sacred object that isn’t allowed to kiss wood.
Micro-hook: The creep of red across the disc face pulses in time with a sound I can’t hear yet; my skin decides it can.
We move to the van because the van is where I think; the van is where the show breathes without the city’s glass. The Switchboard smells like solder and gum, lemon wipes in a losing battle with cable dust. We park by the creek because that’s where the dish clears the sky. The flood has made mirrors of the potholes; streetlights shimmer upside down, and my van wears them like borrowed jewelry.
“Okay,” Jonah says, scrubbing his hands on his jeans. “We set up a clean island. No studio bus. No cell handshakes. Just the SDR and a Faraday pouch for this little sinner when we’re not listening.”
He unspools the soft case of tools: Torx bits, tweezers, a USB software-defined radio he loves like a pet, a roll of gaff tape printed with theater company names that always made me laugh. Not tonight. The gaff on his roll matches the backing we peeled off the bug.
“This is theater tape,” I say. “He left his calling card in the glue.”
“Theatrical tape is half the city,” he says. “But the way it’s trimmed? That’s a flyman’s mouth-bite. Not scissors. Teeth.”
He slides under the console and I stay in the captain’s chair doing what I do: talking to quiet objects. “You heard our meeting,” I say to the coaster where the bug rests. “You heard the Bridge and the clauses and Elena’s math. You’re not hearing this part.”
Jonah tucks the bug into the Faraday pouch and the light dies the way a stage goes black: decisively, with shoulders pressed back. “We listen from the SDR first. If it’s re-transmitting us, we’ll catch the carrier. If it’s beaconing, we’ll catch that, too.”
He plugs the radio into his laptop, and the screen fills with a waterfall speckled like cold rain across a river. He sweeps frequency. Noise. Taxi chatter. An AM blowtorch arguing about sports. Ham operators handing each other the world one call sign at a time. Then a narrower spike stands like a nail in the spectrum, steady, but with the faintest tremble.
“There,” he says.
He clicks to center it. The audio opens like a curtain: a low room sound, faint HVAC, a mic twenty feet away from a wall. And under it, a metronome. Tick. Tick. Tick. Slow, patient, the pace of someone who wants to live inside your nerves.
“He’s a theater kid,” Jonah says quietly. “Who mic’s a metronome unless you’re rehearsing cues?”
I look at the waterfall and at our reflection in the laptop: two faces pulled too tight over bones of a long night. “Record and time-stamp,” I say. “We match it to anything he airs later. Chain of custody, even for ghosts.”
He records. The ticks keep time with the creek slapping the curb. Then the metronome drops out and a whisper climbs in, syllables sanded down, theatrical breath control hiding in the gaps.
Places, the whisper says. Then nothing.
Jonah’s eyes jump to mine. We don’t talk for three breaths.
“Band?” I ask, pointing at the spike.
“Narrow. VHF, tucked between theater intercom and wireless mic ranges,” he says. “Custom crystal or a clever SDR sending. The bug probably takes our room and rides this carrier out.”
“Out to where?” I ask.
He pulls up a program he built because I demanded maps of things that don’t want to be mapped. “We war-drive without moving,” he says. “We confess to the city where the signal’s loudest by asking the city what it’s listening to. Hello, cheap spectrum analyzers, my troubled friends.”
He hooks a second antenna to the van roof, motor humming the way a cat purrs when you pretend you didn’t hear it knock the plant off the shelf. The waterfall now includes our street’s eavesdroppers: elevators, traffic lights, someone’s ridiculous smart fridge. Jonah isolates our nail of a carrier and sends quiet pings, listening to pings that bounce back where receivers sit waiting.
Dots bloom on his map like a rash.
“Those addresses,” I say. “Name them.”
“Little Vic,” he says, tapping a dot in the Lower East Side. “Fifty seats, bad sightlines, excellent acoustics if you like secrets.”
“Pin Factory,” I say, touching a dot in Williamsburg. “Twelve stools, no stage—but they host pop-up monologues and the Choir trades pins in the alley on Thursdays.”
“Third Rail,” he says, sliding to a dot in Bushwick. “Black room, no windows, rentable by the hour.”
The dots are small theaters, black rooms, fringe stages with cash boxes and hand-cut tickets that get left in coat pockets until the wash. I know them the way I know my own season one credits, places that promised meaning to broke kids with ambition.
“He’s using theaters as nodes,” I say. “He’s built a city of stages inside the city.”
“Cheaper than cell, quieter than Wi-Fi, and no one cares if a pack whispers backstage while they style wigs,” Jonah says. “It’s hiding in the etiquette.”
Micro-hook: The map clusters draw a shape I tell myself is random. If I squint, it makes cherub cheeks and a crooked little mouth.
The bug in its pouch ticks a single, spiteful blink like it misses us. I reach without thinking; my hand stops in the air like it hit glass. I flex my fingers as if I can shake off someone else’s fingertips.
“I need out of the van for a second,” I say, and the confession is to oxygen more than to Jonah. I slide the door and the night presses wet hands on both sides of my face. The creek’s overflow licks the curb and paints my boots with reflected streetlight. Across the block, our dumpling place hums like a hive; the owner keeps late hours for cops and creators who trade gossip for soup and never leave footprints on email. I picture Elena at a corner table, not yet, but soon.
“We can brick it,” Jonah says from inside. “We can send a kill tone.”
“We resist the urge to perform a kill on air,” I say. “We harvest first.”
He grins, that quick sideways flash that used to mean encores and now means I’m with you even when I worry about you. “Harvest it is.”
I climb back in. “Okay. We assume he’s hearing our van when we heat the board. From now on, we treat this cabin like a street-stage. We rehearse in the diner or in my head. When we must, we whisper in the creek.”
“I can move the critical chains to the laptop with headset mics that never touch the rack,” he says. “We run a split: one mix for show, one for us, and the bug hears neither unless I want it to.”
“You’re building dimmers,” I say. “Good.”
He pulls the dash faceplate with a careful pop that sounds like knuckles cracking. A second rectangle of tape lives under the vent, and under that, a cavity where the transmitter’s partner hid until someone with teeth trimmed its leash. He snorts. “He took time. He wanted permanence.”
“He got an interval,” I say. “We’re between cues now.”
I text Elena a three-line gospel: Found transmitter. VHF stage-band. Mapping shows receivers at fringe theaters. Evidence bag soon, but letting it breathe first. Three dots appear then vanish. Good. She’s thinking before she blesses or curses.
Jonah pulls up a stronger signal on the map. “Look,” he says. “This node just spiked.”
The strongest dot sits two blocks away, a basement black box I’ve used once for a live show about unsolved theater fires—god, the irony. Its name on the map looks harmless in sans-serif. In my chest, it reads as trap.
“He’s in there?” I ask.
“Or a receiver is hot and hearing something from someone in there,” Jonah says. He clicks to expand the waterfall for that node. The metronome returns—louder, closer. Then a soft inhale. Then the whisper again, same vowels sanded to bone.
Five minutes, it says. Show me you can share the light.
The van’s interior shrinks around the words. I taste copper.
“He’s daring you,” Jonah says softly. “He’s routing us into his house.”
“He’s routing us into all his houses,” I say, stabbing the map with my eyes so I don’t stab the projector with my hands. “He thinks he can cast me wherever he hangs a light.”
I look at the clock. Five minutes is an insult and an invitation. We can notify Elena and let her walk with us. We can sit and record and pretend we never saw the dot swell like a bruise. We can choose the dimmer instead of the spotlight and see if he comes to us when we don’t bow.
“One move,” I say. “We ghost-walk the block. We don’t let the van breathe a word. You keep the bug in the pouch and the radio listening from here. If he wants an audience, he can watch us refuse to clap.”
Jonah nods. He hands me a knit cap and my gloves, rehearsed motions of winter and worry. “You’re sure,” he says.
“I’m furious,” I say, which is the nearest I can get to yes without telling a lie. “And I’m done letting him call the tempo.”
We slide the van door and the night folds us in. The creek keeps time against the curb. I look back once, and the laptop map throws a faint aurora across the van ceiling.
The dot at the basement theater brightens, then shifts half an inch, then another, crawling along the street grid with a patient, deliberate glide.
“Jonah,” I say, my voice scoring a new groove in the air. “That node just moved.”
We stand halfway between light and water, listening to a metronome we didn’t buy, and I count the steps we’ve got left before the cue hits us whether we bow or not.