The wall turned into a contract, and the contract turned into a wall. Lines of clauses climbed from baseboard to ceiling in tidy black rows, a polite avalanche. The projector hummed like a trapped hornet; the racks breathed warm against my shins; stale coffee wrote a bitter edge across my tongue.
“First return from the subpoena,” Sloane said, shoulders squared, laser pointer steady. “Master Services Agreement between Lyla Chen and Rainer Narrative Studio, with partner schedules.”
“Schedules,” I repeated, tasting the word like a threat disguised as a calendar. “Show me the money.”
She clicked. The PDF jumped to a table of payouts: base fee, performance adjustments, engagement thresholds, crisis activation bonus. The last line made my jaw tighten.
“Read,” she said.
I read aloud so the room had to hear me. “Crisis Activation Bonus: tiered by audience retention at T+15, T+60, T+360 minutes; multipliers escalate on verified ‘community intervention’ events.” I tapped the screen with a knuckle I didn’t trust. “They paid extra to keep panic parked.”
“Incentive to stretch an arc,” Sloane said. “We’ll argue inducement.”
Paper rustled behind us—an analyst swapping evidence gloves—and I caught the faint powder scent that cling-wrap leaves when you peel it wrong. The city above us might be selling salted caramel and neon, but down here the flavor was old cardboard and fluorescent honesty.
“Next,” I said.
She advanced to a section with commercial warmth curdled into legalese. Red tracked changes glowed like small wounds.
“Here,” Sloane said, and ringed a phrase with the laser: Temporary Persona Transfer (TPT).
I stepped closer until the wall’s microtexture pushed back on my eyes. “Clause 9.3: Talent agrees to grant Sponsor and Producer a non-exclusive, revocable license to utilize Talent Persona, including voice, image, likeness, trade dress, characterization, and associated goodwill, for the purposes of narrative continuity during designated Event Windows.” I swallowed. “Nine point three point d: Talent may be temporarily represented by stand-in performer, conversation proxy, or scripted simulation when absence is deemed essential to arc integrity.”
“Say it plain,” Sloane said, voice even.
“They can borrow her—everything that makes her her—and puppeteer a replacement while she’s contractually absent.” I pressed my thumb into my palm until the small bones protested. “She could be legally silenced and visually present.”
Sloane toggled a sidebar: Remedies and Confidentiality. A second red box blinked: Liquidated Damages. The number beside it didn’t whisper; it shouted.
“If she speaks off-script,” I said, “they auto-bill her into ruin.”
“Or seek injunctive relief,” Sloane said. “It’s there. Emergency. Ex parte if they claim irreparable harm to the campaign.”
The room shrank. I needed air I couldn’t disinfect. I pictured Lyla’s tidy handwriting in our childhood chore ledger, the way she drew little crowns over the letter i. I pictured a grown man editing that crown into a watermark and charging her for it.
“Who signed?” I asked.
“Lyla,” Sloane said softly. “And Rainer. Witness is an assistant producer.”
“No counsel signature on her side?” I asked.
“A docu-sign line marked ‘Independent Counsel Acknowledgment’ is blank,” she said.
Anger burned fast and clean and left a steadier heat. “He saw the gap and drove a truck through it.”
“We can’t swing at paper,” Sloane warned. “We document, then swing.”
I nodded because I know the spine she guards and the cameras waiting to turn our motion into theater. The projector fan ticked. The hex pattern on the acoustic tiles caught one corner of the red box and made Persona look like honey trapped in wax.
“Page down,” I said.
She paged. The exhibit spelled out Event Windows: Prep, Crisis, Recovery, Rescue, Reintegration. Each window linked to metrics—impressions, conversion, shares. A note in six-point gray: ‘Community care activations’ count double when creator’s family participates authentically.
“Family as multiplier,” I said. “I hate being right.”
Sloane’s mouth thinned. “I’ll copy stills for the affidavit,” she said. “We’ll anchor to 9.3 and the bonus schedule, argue coercive structure.”
The room’s door sighed, and the hallway’s cooler air pushed in, smelling faintly of printer ozone and the ghost-click of phantom notifications no one had actually received. I thumbed the honeycomb button in my pocket through the envelope until the ridges imprinted my fingertip.
“I need five minutes,” I said.
“Take ten,” Sloane said. “Call your person.”
I stepped out into the corridor, then climbed the concrete stairs two at a time until I hit the street. Night sharpened into neon. Fog funneled downhill, turning storefronts into float tanks for color. Tide Market’s QR mural across the way rotated, new sponsor washing over old in one confident swipe.
My breath wore the bay’s salt. I dialed the number I’d kept after the whistleblower case—a voice that had pulled me through when a funder called accountability “brand damage.”
“Counsel,” she answered, same brisk music in her vowels.
“I need you back,” I said. “It’s Mara.”
“I read your thread last year,” she said, then caught herself and cut the compliment. “Talk.”
“I’m looking at a contract that pays crisis bonuses by the minute and lets a studio borrow a creator’s persona during ‘event windows.’” I paced under a streetlamp that hummed like a ring light. “There’s a liquidated-damages clause that would vaporize her if she speaks off-script.”
“Is the creator alive?” she asked.
“I think yes,” I said, and watched my own breath wrestle the fog. “I think she’s bound. Clause 9.3—Temporary Persona Transfer. It reads like a body lease dressed in IP law.”
“Send me the pages,” she said. Paper flipped in her background—her own files waking up. “And answer two questions: Was there independent counsel? And what’s the damages schedule?”
“No counsel sign-off,” I said. “Damages are indexed to revenue plus a punitive lump that climbs with ‘community care activations’—they literally call stampedes care.”
“Then here’s the landscape,” she said. “NDAs with liquidated damages are enforceable when reasonable, but a court frowns at punitive dressing. Still, they can threaten her into silence long enough to win the story. If she speaks, they move for a TRO and freeze her accounts. If you speak for her with inside info, they try to drag you into tortious interference.”
“So I shut up?” I asked, and tasted iron in the question.
“You don’t shut up,” she said, quick. “You route. You speak facts in the public interest with receipts and without confidential content. You let law enforcement say the rest. You protect Lyla’s agency by not forcing her into breach unless we can argue duress.”
“Duress,” I repeated. “Count the ways.”
“Staged crisis that endangers a community to extract performance,” she said. “Inducement to violate safety norms, economic pressure, misrepresentation. But we need more than a tweet and your excellent outrage. We need copies, timestamps, and the money rail you already found.”
“I have the processor descriptor,” I said. “RNR mirrored on a reactor jar. Payout batch queued to dusk.”
“Good,” she said. “Document the timing delta between panic clip and conversion spike; a judge likes a clock. On persona transfer—there’s a line of cases around the commodification of identity. If the stand-in imitates her in a way that implies endorsement during a gag, I can argue right of publicity misuse.”
“They’ll claim license,” I said. “She signed.”
“Then I attack unconscionability and unequal bargaining power,” she said. “And if a stand-in says anything about safety that deters reporting—hello, public policy.”
A scooter scraped the curb; a gull heckled a fish truck; the city kept making noise like it might drown us both if we stopped moving.
“Give me one thing I can do this hour,” I said.
“Three,” she said. “One: Don’t post the PDF. Post the table of contents with page numbers blocked, and say we’re reviewing for safety implications. Two: If Lyla contacts you, do not coach her to break NDA by content—coach her to say she’s safe to speak. Those words matter. Three: Record a contemporaneous memo of what you saw tonight. I’ll mark it attorney work product the second it hits my inbox.”
“And if the handler calls again?” I asked.
“Let him monologue,” she said. “Consent to record only in your state, but document the cadence: when he called, when payouts hit, when fans were steered. Pattern beats flourish. And Mara—don’t let him make love a lane he controls.”
“He tried,” I said, and felt my voice calm to a line I could hold. “He admired my ‘operational elegance.’”
“Then be elegant,” she said. “Elegance is restraint in the service of a sharper cut.”
I exhaled into the fog, watched it take my breath and make theater of it until the wind tore it down.
“Send me the pages,” she said, softer. “I’ll be up.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I hung up and walked back down the stairs into the forensics bunker where the projector still poured contract daylight over synthetic night. Sloane hadn’t moved; she held the laser on Persona Transfer like a surgeon pinning a tumor.
“Counsel?” she asked.
“On board,” I said. “She wants me careful. No leaks of the full doc, no coaching Lyla into breach. We build pattern and let a judge see the clock work.”
“That matches my spine,” Sloane said. “We’ll carve out a bigger warrant angle—coercive structure, public safety risk.”
“I’ll prep a memo,” I said. “Work product.”
She nodded and clicked to a page titled Community Safety Briefing—Talent Collaboration. The language offered ‘mechanisms to reduce bystander injury during heightened engagement’ and I felt heat lick my knuckles.
“They admit risk,” I said. “They sell mitigation as another feature.”
“And mitigation is cheaper than ethics,” Sloane said.
“Not when you set the bill,” I said. “We’ll set it.”
The analyst at the corner station lifted a hand. “Sergeant, we got metadata on the PDF,” she said. “Last edit from a machine labeled BARNCTRL-02.”
I looked at Sloane; she looked back; we didn’t smile.
“Log it,” she said. “Chain it.”
I pulled my notebook from my pocket, slid the honeycomb button onto the open page, and traced its hexes with my pen while I recorded times—call, clause, counsel, barn. The ridges left faint wells in the paper I could feel with my nail. Lyla used to do this when nerves made her hands useless; I had learned it from her. I pressed until the hexes darkened.
“I’m going to the bakery,” I said, capping the pen. “My mother texted. She found something of Lyla’s.”
“Send me a photo before you touch it,” Sloane said. “Then bring it in.”
“Copy,” I said.
I stepped back into neon. The harbor threw damp up the cliff and into my throat. Tide Market had gone sullen and bright at once, murals shifting to tomorrow’s promises while tonight’s promises took their payments. The payout clock on my mental dashboard ticked toward dusk with the indifference of a metronome.
I typed to Nessa on the walk: “Contract has crisis bonuses + persona transfer. Lawyer says proceed with spine. Prep the forum for ‘no leaks, we log.’”
She replied fast: “on it. i’ll write a ‘care ≠ content’ header. pizza bribe for mods.”
“No pizza,” I wrote, and allowed a tiny smile. “Tea and boundaries.”
My mother’s text flashed again when I reached the corner: “Come now.” The streetlight buzzed, the fog made halos, and the bakery’s window threw warm gold across the sidewalk like a promise I wasn’t sure I deserved.
I stopped with my hand on the door and looked back down the block toward the bay. Somewhere, a control wall waited for dusk. Between us, a contract tried to own a person the way a logo owns a color.
“Not this time,” I told the clause hanging in my head.
The bell over the bakery door chimed once—bright, unafraid—and the smell of sugar and sesame wrapped my lungs. I walked in to find out what my mother had kept safe, and whether it would cut the right way when I held it to the light.