The forensics unit hummed like a throat clearing between arguments. I carried the daycare in on my clothes—the sugar stick of spilled latte, the salt damp from the harbor—and fed it to the airless room. Servers exhaled, ring lights from old evidence piles clicked their phantom clicks, and Sloane rolled a whiteboard toward the cork wall like she was wheeling in a witness.
“Old-school,” she said, tapping a box of pushpins with a fingernail. “Because juries understand string.”
“And reactors fear it,” I said. “They can’t clip a wall.”
Nessa arrived with a backpack that looked heavier than her, cheeks flushed from a scooter ride through neon fog. She unzipped, pulled out printed dashboards, and fanned them like tarot. “I brought the receipts,” she said. “Sorry they smell like salted caramel steam. The pier was weaponized pastry tonight.”
“Leave the smell,” I said. “Let the room remember the city we’re protecting.”
We started pinning. Brand emails with toothy clauses. Burners with midnight pings. Processor payouts nicknamed like scenes: STAGE2/DUSK, REVEAL/MERINGUE, WHITE APRON/SEED. I threaded white string through timestamps and red through money because I needed color to do the thinking my body couldn’t do yet.
“Say when the rage becomes useful,” Sloane said, eyes scanning down a subpoena return.
“I’m working on it,” I said, and cinched a knot so tight the pin squealed. “He used a fake Amber Alert to route a crowd to a daycare. Then he sold the empathy back to them in tips and gear.”
“He or they,” Sloane said.
“He,” I said, my jaw doing the math my heart already had.
We built the hive. Honeycomb-pattern sticky notes made the board into something that looked too on-brand for comfort, a cruel mirror of an aesthetic that had once been home. HIVE: everyone safe, everyone seen. Lyla’s handwriting ghosted over my shoulder from the bakery box. I reached up and stuck a note titled HIVE—ORIGINAL in the upper-left corner, a reminder that the symbol didn’t belong to him.
Nessa leaned close, reading the board out loud like a poem with bad line breaks. “Panic spike, reactor tip jar, affiliate bump, brand apology draft, second spike.” She glanced at me. “You hear the meter?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s marching band cruel.”
The unit smelled like ink and old coffee. The only sound, besides the servers and our breath, was the soft tack of pins puncturing cork and the occasional ghost notification clicking from nowhere. Sloane set her phone face down so the alerts wouldn’t yank her by the collar. I didn’t; I needed the leash.
“Move that payout descriptor south by two,” Sloane said. “Let me see the alignment with the reactor mirror times.”
I slid it. I felt heat in my cheeks—not embarrassment, an engine warming. “We map drop times across platform clocks,” I said. “We adjust for drift. We plot conversions as nodes, not bars.”
“Say it simpler,” Sloane said, not unkind.
“We make a star map,” I said.
We did. Nessa exported the transactions as dots and let the program scatter them by hour as if they were sky, then layered burner SIM activations. At this angle, it looked like disease spread. I hated that angle. I wanted something that said hand instead of plague.
“Rotate the dashboard ten degrees,” I said. “No, more.”
Nessa spun the wheel. The dots slid, then settled in a pattern that was definitely deliberate but told me nothing yet. Elegance has a smell; it’s the ozone of a ring light heating up—a clean, smug scent. I tasted it.
“He’s taunting us,” I said. “He wants us to admire the craft.”
Sloane capped and uncapped a pen like a metronome. “He wants a reaction he can farm,” she said. “Don’t give him your awe for free.”
“He’s not getting awe,” I said. “He’s getting an invoice.”
I pinned the botnet ASN list beside the mirror network nodes. The red strings crossed in an X that stabbed a single sticky note: VENDOR/RS, a shell I hated for being so neat. The corkboard looked like a chest X-ray. I smelled the burnt-dust tang of an overworked power strip and the sweet paper smell of sticky notes peeled too fast.
“Walk me through the burner sequence,” Sloane said.
“Five numbers, staggered by exactly nineteen minutes, all bouncing through creator tools licensed to a reseller attached to the same payment processor,” I said. “They only light up before drops, but we have a wildcard—this one spiked during the fake alert.”
“And this one sleeps until the charity page flips to the clock,” Nessa added, tapping a dot labeled HEM-QR/FLIP. “That’s when the affiliate cookies refresh.”
“Cookies,” I said. “Trapped sweetness.”
“Haven and hive,” she said, half-smiling, half-tired. “Both. Always both.”
We stared at the wall until it stared back. The city pressed against the basement windows—gauzy morning trying to be born while the neon of the night refused to leave. The cliff-backed harbor funneled fog into downtown with the stubborn grace of weather that didn’t care about our deadlines. Somewhere above us, a janitor pushed a mop, the slow shoosh like a metronome for human cleanup.
I said what I didn’t want to say. “I’m missing something.”
“No,” Sloane said. “You’re on the edge of it. Keep going.”
I pulled out the honeycomb button from the coin envelope and set it on the table between us the way people set prayer beads before a storm. “He stole our hive. That’s the insult under the injury.”
“We’re stealing it back,” Nessa said. “He doesn’t own hexes.”
The tablet on the far desk blinked gray, then white, then black in a rhythm that made my molars ache. I looked over and saw the countdown’s shadow wait under the screen saver like a shark under a dock.
“Time?” I asked.
“Forty-eight hours, fifty-two minutes,” Sloane said without looking. “Give or take drift.”
The number lived in my throat. I didn’t swallow it. I pinned T–48 above the board and underlined it twice. The red string hummed.
“Okay,” I said. “I want the brands mapped by the exact minute their legal teams sent the ‘brand safety’ emails. Put their timestamps in the star map.”
Nessa typed, frowned, then brightened. “They cluster,” she said. “See? Midpoint between our panic spikes, delayed by…thirty-seven minutes.”
“Crisis arcs,” I said. “Prewritten. We just watched the stage manager throw to intermission.”
Sloane clicked her pen. “What does that give me for court?”
“Pattern plus profit,” I said. “We show timing not as coincidence but as choreography. Then we give you the hand pulling wires.”
“Which is?”
I exhaled. “I think you know my mouth wants to say his name without proof.”
“Make it say it with proof,” she said.
I paced to the monitor and stared at the constellation of dots like they were a language I ought to speak by blood. I heard the pier again in my head, the kettle-pour hush of caramel, the sizzle of a sugar crust sealing. The unit’s fluorescents buzzed and turned the room into a dull beehive. The honeycomb shelves in evidence storage caught the light and threw it back in little prisons.
“It’s not just a map,” I said. “It’s typography.”
Nessa tilted her head. “Typography?”
“He loves the mirror,” I said. “He loves the reveal. He would hide his thesis inside the pattern so the moment of comprehension becomes content.”
“Then we need to watch it wrong,” she said.
She stood, gripped the big monitor by its metal arm, and turned it ninety degrees with a groan like a door in an old house. The dots slid, not like stars anymore but like letters planning an ambush. The room held its breath.
“Say when,” she said.
“Now,” I said.
The nodes aligned. The white links between burners, brands, and payout times arranged themselves into a clean diagonal spine with crossbars like a smug signature. I read the letters the way you read a billboard when the highway finally coughs up the punchline.
R.
A.
I.
N.
E.
R.
The name sat there like it had been waiting for our mouths the entire time. The elegance made my skin want to climb off my bones.
“Nessa,” I said. “Screenshot. Hash it. Print to PDF.”
“Already did,” she said, voice small and fierce at once.
Sloane didn’t move. She let the room feel the heat. Then she uncapped her pen and wrote at the bottom of the whiteboard in block letters that wouldn’t be mistaken for anything but what they were: RAINER.
“Say it,” she said to me.
“Cass Rainer,” I said. The words scraped my throat on the way out like a dry pill. “You want me to write it for you too?”
“No,” she said. “I wanted to know if you could.”
My body did the tells I pretend I don’t have: fingers flexed, gaze hardened, shoulder blades rose like shields. Nessa watched me the way friends watch brakes on a steep hill—ready to jump in, ready to respect the machine.
“He knows we can read,” I said. “This is an invitation to admire.”
“It’s also a confession,” Sloane said. “People who confess with style still confess.”
The tablet pulsed and rolled to 48:00:00 like a drum landing on the downbeat. The digital tick cut the air. The servers’ fan noise swelled as if the machines were preparing to breathe our next twelve decisions for us.
“We have to assume retaliation,” I said. “Doxx, swarms, legal throat-clearing, the whole play.”
“I’m calling the watch commander and the DA,” Sloane said. “And we keep this room boring. No leaks.” She looked at me over the uncapped pen. “I know your bent toward useful truth. Use it later.”
“Later,” I said, nodding. “But not never.”
Nessa handed me a roll of tape and a stack of printed screenshots. “You get the letters,” she said. “I want you to put them up. Ritual matters.”
I taped the six pages along the edge of the board, RAINER running like a railing beside our hive. The ink smelled like hot plastic and urgency. Dust motes in the beam of a desk lamp turned slow in the almost-morning, and somewhere down the hall, a vending machine thunked stale chocolate into a spiral.
“What do you need from me?” Nessa asked, voice low enough that it didn’t set off any alarms inside me.
“Two things,” I said. “Wrap a protocol for mods—how to freeze a thread the second his name enters it, how to hand off docs without getting burned. And draft a public version of this map that says everything without saying it.”
“Coded caption?” she asked. “Honey-jargon for the faithful?”
“Plain language,” I said. “We don’t feed the riddle.”
She cracked a knuckle, then stopped herself, then smiled at the habit catching itself. “On it,” she said.
I took out Lyla’s childhood journal page I’d slipped into my pocket—HIVE: everyone safe, everyone seen—and tucked it under the corner of the R. Paper against paper, memory under revelation. The corner lifted and fell in the AC’s whisper, a tiny nod, like the page approved.
“Listen,” Sloane said, hand to her earpiece. She clicked speaker. A dispatch voice rolled through: reports of a small “vigil” forming at the Tide Market QR mural, people scanning, voting, waiting. The city’s social compact—don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable—had found its midnight Mass.
“He’s moving his audience like sheepdogs move clouds,” I said. “We have to get ahead without becoming the weather.”
“You’re mixing metaphors,” Nessa said, not unkind. “It means you care.”
“It means I’m tired,” I said. “Caring is a second language at this hour.”
The board looked back at me, a hive that held a name like a wasp. I tasted metal under my tongue. My phone buzzed with a short text from the unlisted number: Elegance recognized. I didn’t answer. I screenshot, forwarded to Sloane, and held my breath until the urge to perform fury passed.
“He wants to turn us into characters,” I said. “He wants me to be the righteous sister, you the cop with a heart, Nessa the good fan. He wants archetypes he can storyboard.”
“Then we’ll be boring,” Sloane said. “Until we’re not.”
I nodded. “At forty-eight, we stop admiring the lattice.”
“At forty-eight,” she said. “We cut it.”
The servers hummed like a tired choir. Outside, the cliff-backed harbor was trying on morning again, gauze over neon, a costume change with no applause. I stood between string and screen, between old-school and dashboard, and rested my finger against the R like I could press his name back into pulp.
“Cass Rainer,” I said again, quieter. The room listened. The letters didn’t move. The countdown did.
48:00:00.
We all looked up at the same moment, as if the number could hear us.
“What’s the play, Mara?” Nessa asked.
I kept my eyes on the timer and felt the wary fear settle where my fury had been, a steadier weight. “We stitch the map to his door,” I said. “Then we make sure the door opens on record.”
The tablet ticked down one second and the unit’s lights flickered once, a blink I didn’t like. I didn’t say so. I let the unresolved hang in the hum, an unanswered question with teeth, and I started typing the memo that would make the next move real.