Sirens braided the street into a single shriek, and strollers lined the curb like small, stubborn barricades. I smelled brake pads and caramelized sugar drifting from the pier, a dissonant duet with the metallic taste of fear. Neon fog pressed the block flat, reflecting red and blue across the daycare’s honeycomb window decals until every hex looked like a wound pulsing.
Parents were already arguing with cameras. “Turn that off,” a dad shouted, palm up against a phone on a gimbal. A teen reactor in a hoodie kept narrating. “Live from the abduction—” He didn’t finish because the dad’s palm filled his frame, and the chat filled with popcorn emojis.
I stepped between a lens and a crying child and held my hand steady, palm out. “Back up,” I said, voice low enough to sound like a floor. “You’re scaring kids.”
The reactor aimed past me. “Who are you to—”
“Family,” I said, and let the word do the math for him.
A mother pushed a stroller against my shins with a quick apology that was really a plea. “They said the suspect came here,” she said. “They said the van—” Her eyes flicked to a beige delivery van double-parked at the end of the block. The driver sat smoking, bewildered. Someone had already scraped the license onto a story; the comments were writing a chase script.
“There’s no Amber Alert,” I said. “It’s fake.” I kept my voice even as I threaded toward the daycare door. “Official alerts don’t ask you to click a cash link.”
The daycare director cracked the door and showed me a thin slice of her face. Flour dusted her sweater—playdough flour, not bakery—and a toddler clung to her hip, hiccuping. “We’re on lockdown,” she whispered. “They’re filming the windows.”
“I’m going to move them,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”
Nessa pinged me with three question marks and a location pin already on top of me. I tapped call. The ozone prickle of a dozen ring lights grazed my skin; the ghost-click of phantom notifications marched up my arm.
I didn’t have five minutes. A woman pointed a selfie stick at the daycare and narrated tears into the mic. “Moms, I’m shaking—”
“Hey!” I said, not at her, but at the street. I lifted my phone and switched to live with Nessa because the only way to drain a flood here was to redirect it. “Joint stream,” I said when her face appeared, framed by apartment lamplight. “Caption ‘Fake Alert—Go Home.’”
“On it,” she said, already typing. “Slow mode. Screenshare ready. You want the checklist or the lullaby voice?”
“Both,” I said, and held the camera just below my eyes so the shape of my face looked less like a threat. “I need you to repeat after me and make it boring.”
I toggled to split-screen and raised my free hand. “Hi,” I said to twenty, then two thousand, then ten thousand. “I’m Mara. I’m standing outside a daycare where a falsified alert routed people to congregate. Children are inside. If you’re here, take three steps back from any window. If you’re online, log off and report the alert link to your state’s emergency management office and the platform—it uses a botnet. We’re going to stop giving it oxygen.”
The chat threw knives and hearts, then words, most of them loud. Nessa pasted a link tree of reporting forms and a bulleted list that started with Do not approach. Do not film minors. Do not block exits. She met my eyes through the screen. “You’re doing great,” she said, and I cracked a smile small enough to not look like permission.
“Parents first,” I said, lowering the phone so the crowd couldn’t read their faces. “We clear a lane. We let officers in. We trust that the safety of children is not a community theater exercise.”
A gimbal swung toward me. “But the alert—”
“Is counterfeit,” I said. “You can spot it by the link header and the wrong timestamp. Official alerts push from government servers, not ad stacks. You’re being used to make someone money.”
That word hit. Money rearranged faces. The crowd pivoted the way schools of fish pivot, ninety degrees of conscience all at once. Not enough.
A young man in a varsity jacket lifted his hands. “I drove forty minutes,” he said. “I want to help.”
“Then help like this,” I said, and handed him a simple job. “Form a line at the red cone and face out. Start telling people quietly to give the window five feet. No filming.”
He nodded, grateful to have something that wasn’t content. He started talking to people in the tone men use to guide parking at Thanksgiving, and the crowd obeyed him because kindness gave them something to do.
I angled the camera back to my face. “Nessa, show the botnet map.”
She pulled up a heat blotch of IPs crawling across the country like a rash. “These are compromised routers and cheap sim-farms,” she said. “And look at this label at the top right.” She zoomed. Merchant descriptors I recognized from our artifact chapter glowed in small gray type. “Shared payment processor with reactor networks.”
“Translation,” I said, concise. “The panic and the analysis are funded by the same pipes.”
The chat bloomed with “unfollow” and “refund” and also “clout cop,” because balance is a math few people pass. I didn’t argue with strangers; I spoke to the one person I knew was listening.
“Lyla,” I said, soft enough that it registered as intimacy, not theater. “If you can hear me, we’re not feeding this.”
Police cruisers slid into place, calm for once. Sloane’s voice hummed through my earpiece from the night I still wore—wired in, three steps away, not on camera. “I’m here,” she said. “We’ve got officers at the back door to escort out anyone who needs to leave. That alert source is ugly.”
“Talk to me,” I said, angling away from the mic.
“Spoofed from a compromised emergency notification vendor,” she said. “Traffic originated from a cluster tied to reactor mirrors and a shell registered last month. Same payment processor we flagged yesterday.”
“You can say it,” I said. “Shared rails.”
“Shared rails,” she said. “I’m pulling the ASN owners now. Record everything.”
“Already live,” I said, and brought the stream closer to my face so the fog wouldn’t steal my edges. “Okay, people. We have confirmation from law enforcement that the alert is not official. If you’re on my stream because you care, the most caring thing is to leave. Log off. Give this block back to families.”
A mother edged forward, phone clutched white. “They called my kid’s name in a comment,” she said. The words shook like a pan on a burner. “They typed it. How did they know her name?”
“From your public posts,” I said, softening my shoulders and lowering my head so she wouldn’t feel condescended to. “Not your fault. That’s the design. You’re not wrong to be terrified.”
“Should I delete?” she asked.
“Archive,” I said. “Document, then archive. Then breathe. I’ll walk you through it after we clear.”
She nodded, swallowing too hard. She had glitter on her cheekbone from a birthday craft; the light found it and made it into punctuation.
Nessa read the chat and flinched once before her training caught her. “Someone’s dropping more fake locations,” she said, voice steady. “I’m tagging them and feeding the list to Sloane.”
“Copy,” Sloane said in my ear. “We’re setting up a rule to sinkhole the domains.”
I pivoted back to the lens. “Retreat is not cowardice,” I said. “Retreat is how you keep kids safe.”
An older woman wearing a honeycomb-knit cardigan stepped between two reactors and lifted the DIY tape they’d strung across the sidewalk like they were stage managers of reality. “Go home,” she said. She didn’t yell. She repeated it. “Go home.”
I felt the day’s earlier outrage burn cleaner into something colder, something that could carry weight. Protective authority is a tone a city either accepts or punishes. Larkspur Bay tolerates spectacle and punishes loss of control; I made my voice a clean line between both.
“Here’s your script,” I said to the stream. “Mute the reactors baiting you. Report the alert screenshots. Turn your cameras away from families. If you want to help, go stand in line for the parents who can’t right now—groceries, meds, pick-ups. Do not tag the daycare. Do not tag the block. Do not make a scene unless it saves a life.”
A boy of maybe thirteen tugged my sleeve, eyes wide over a mask with cartoon bees. “Can I hold your phone?” he asked. “My mom’s hands are busy.”
“You can hold my elbow,” I said, and he did, grounding me.
Sloane breathed in my ear. “Traceroute completed. Botnet operator leased capacity from a reseller that hosts…yeah.” Papers rustled. “Two reactor mirrors, three affiliate scrapers, one ‘community rescue’ tip jar.”
“Shared infrastructure,” I said into the stream, letting the words land like pebbles. “This is not care. This is commerce wearing care’s sweater.”
The teen reactor in the hoodie tried again. “But the community—”
“Isn’t a cudgel,” I said. “And you know it.”
He dropped his camera. For a second, he looked like a kid at a door he couldn’t knock on. “I needed the tips,” he said, almost to himself.
I didn’t fix him. I didn’t absolve him. “Log off,” I said. “You can apologize later.”
He did. I watched the red light on his rig go dark and felt the street gain an inch of space. A micro-win is still a win.
Nessa filled the split-screen with a diagram that turned panic into plumbing. “Here’s the funnel,” she said. “Fake alert spikes search. Reactor streams harvest fear to tips. Affiliate links pulse under ‘resources’ to pivot you to merch and donations. Same processor.”
“Which means,” I said, “panic pays out across platforms.”
The chat slowed, then steadied, and my notifications crawled from knives to requests for instructions. “Scripts in the bio,” I said. “Copy them. Don’t credit us. Just use them.”
A patrol officer lifted tape across the daycare door and waved the director out with two staffers and a cluster of kids still blinking from indoor light. The smallest of them wore a paper crown dabbed with gold paint. She stared at the ring lights like they might bite, then pressed her face into the director’s neck to make the world smaller.
“We’re clear on this side,” Sloane said. “Mara, I need you five steps back.”
“Copy,” I said, and moved. My heel slid on a puddle of spilled latte and sugar stuck my sole to the asphalt for a beat. The city makes even retreat sticky.
A father I’d guided earlier stopped beside me. “Thank you,” he said, voice shocked by gentleness. “I thought I was supposed to be part of this. I thought that’s what caring meant now.”
“Caring is sometimes refusing to perform it,” I said. “Go hug your kid.”
He did, in a way that rearranged the air.
The crowd’s sound dropped from scream to murmur. The sodium lights hummed like tired insects. The cliff-backed harbor sent a new draft of fog down the block and turned the sirens into distant memory. The QR mural on the corner swapped to a charity ad with a honeycomb background and I wanted to punch the algorithm in the mouth, but I didn’t. I kept the lens on my face, not on the kids.
“We’re going to end this stream in sixty seconds,” I said. “Before you go, do two things: archive your panic posts, then report the alert. When you feel the urge to ‘raise awareness,’ ask who gets paid when your heart rate spikes.”
Nessa nodded in my pocket screen. “Mods are locking threads for the night,” she said. “We’ll reopen with verified updates.”
“Good,” I said. “We set the pace.”
Sloane exhaled, a sound like a page turned. “We got a name on the shell,” she said quietly. “It’s a nothing company, but the last registered contact used a burner that overlaps with Rainer’s vendor roster.”
The name hit like a cold spoon in the back of my mouth. “We’re spelling him with money now,” I said.
“I need a clean memo,” she said. “No live, off the record.”
“You’ll have it,” I said. “We’re closing.”
I looked into the camera one last time and dropped my voice into the calm that used to win grants and now had to win exits. “Log off. Touch grass, touch bread, touch the shoulder of someone you love with consent. We’ll report in the morning.”
I ended the stream and the street snapped back to sound—the actual kind, not the kind that performs itself. The daycare director mouthed thank you through the glass. I pressed my palm to my chest where I had stuck Lyla’s rules earlier and felt the paper’s edge bite me: No danger for sale.
My phone buzzed before my hand fell. New push: Finale vote at midnight—choose the site. The link pulsed with that same cheap confidence.
I texted Nessa: We need to map those options against sets and typed to Sloane: Processor + botnet memo in twenty.
A boy’s paper crown lay crushed near my shoe, gold paint cracked like a dry riverbed. I picked it up, turned it once under the neon, and set it on the daycare’s steps where the morning could find it without a camera, if the morning still remembered how.
The fog licked my face with salt. From the pier, the sweet steam of caramel drifted up like a promise that ordinary is still legal. I checked the midnight link again, saw the options scroll, and felt the street tighten.
“We bought ourselves an hour,” I told the empty air, then pocketed my phone and started walking toward the precinct lights. “Time to spend it.”