I let the loft door shut behind me with a hush that felt trained. The Honeycomb neon washed the room in a syrupy blush, and the ring light hummed with that faint ozone that stings the back of my throat. Outside, a wedge of fog had funneled in from the cliff-backed harbor, turning morning into gauze. Traffic ghosts below clicked through QR murals that changed more often than the truth. I breathed once, twice, then lifted the camera bag and said to the empty air, “I’m not here to clean you; I’m here to listen.”
The soil called to me first.
In Lyla’s shots, that planter sat frame-left, Irish ivy draped like a casual thought. The pot matched the brand palette—gloss white, honeycomb deboss along the rim. I’d seen it a hundred times in Lyla’s grid: next to the apricot stand mixer, in front of the terracotta plant wall, occasionally wearing a seasonal ribbon for affiliate links. Today, the ivy leaves looked rinsed, too neat, and the topsoil held a subtle relief—tiny peaks and short lines pressed into damp. I crouched. My knees cracked. I tasted last night’s coffee and the bakery’s salted caramel steam that still clung to my coat.
“Talk to me,” I whispered, and I meant the dirt.
I swapped my normal lens for the macro and thumbed focus. The glass snapped the room into a tunnel, blur falling away until only soil remained—a low country of dots and dashes. Not random. Not aesthetic. Paused between ridges, I muttered, “Short, long,” and my throat tightened because my hands already knew this language. Mom’s old radio club nights flashed across my knuckles: paper, pencil, a potato chip grease stain on the cheat sheet. I swallowed. I adjusted the light with my phone torch and the ring’s kelvin cooler by a few hundred. The punctuation sharpened.
I spoke to steady myself. “Dot dot dot, dash dash dash—no, that’s SOS; this isn’t that. It’s… here, this first cluster.” I traced with the tip of a cotton swab, careful not to drag. “Dash dash, space, dot—G then E? No. Calm down, Mara.”
The room clicked—phantom notifications under my skin. I twisted the dial, dropped ISO, and captured stills from four angles. The smell of damp potting mix did a small miracle to my chest; it smelled like Saturdays before we had followers, when the only audience for our disasters was a sink.
I set the camera down and lifted my phone. “Okay,” I said to the device. “Translation time.” I opened the app that had saved me once in Manila and again in a school board meeting when a board member decided to go bilingual for optics. I selected Morse. The microphone icon glowed.
“One press for dot,” I said, tapping with the cotton swab. “Long press for dash.” I moved across the soil world like a careful god, making the phone echo what Lyla had written. The app chirped letters, cheap-sounding, but I let it talk. N-O-T. I stopped breathing.
“Again,” I said, because I needed redundancy. The ring light warmed my face until sweat gathered under my hairline. I wiped it away with my sleeve and returned to the line of small hills.
Dot dot—I, dash dot dot dot—B, silence and then my thumb hesitated. I shook it out. “Focus,” I told my hands. “No celebratory laps.” The next cluster resolved with painful patience: S-A-F-E.
I read it through closed teeth. “NOT SAFE.”
I ran the lens closer to the soil, chasing the path she’d threaded. Who had given her time? Who had watched the cameras long enough to be bored? Who had believed dirt was decorative, never communicative? I tracked to the final rise and tapped in the last marks. The app said TO SPEAK in the flat voice of a speaker that doesn’t understand consequence.
I sat back hard on my heels. The ring light hummed. Outside, gulls made their petty arguments. In me, relief rose hot, then curdled on contact with the sentence’s tail. “You’re alive,” I said to the planter, then quieter, “and gagged.”
I angled the phone to capture a clean overlay. For the record, for the chain, for the war I had to wage without turning her into a weapon. The translation app displayed the line in two tidy rows, and I photographed screen plus soil for a tidy, prosecutable mirror. I added a note in the metadata: Impressions consistent with manual stylus; pattern appears intentional; see images 16–44. I felt like spitting. Instead, I breathed and counted the breaths like a box: four in, four hold, four out, four hold.
Micro-hook: A faint glitter winked where the ivy stem met the rim—one particle, then two—as the ring light drifted across it like a second thought.
Glitter glue. Lyla’s dumb signature. We used to seal our childhood “hive jar” IOU slips with a smear of it, pretending we were serious about paying each other back for stolen hair ties. I moved the lens and found a tiny comet tail of glitter dried along a leaf tip. Cass liked things pristine. Lyla liked them with a joke. The glue dried lumpy. It always had.
“You left me a second breadcrumb,” I said, voice pitched to the room. “Thank you. I see you.”
My knees protested when I stood. I paced once down the length of the hex-shelf wall, touching nothing, because the room was both a haven and a hive—cells for keeping sweetness and cells for keeping people. The neon script hummed old comfort, wired to new fear. On the counter, the stand mixer gleamed its product-slick grin, and the ghost-click of a notification grazed my ear even though my phone was on airplane. My body held a social contract I didn’t sign: don’t make a scene—unless it converts.
I pulled the stool to the planter and sat so our eyes were level, me and the speaking dirt. “You’re alive,” I said again, like I could staple that fact to the wall. “You can push set dressing. You can’t speak.” I looked at the camera rails. The bathroom pinhole I’d found at the farmhouse had taught me—privacy was a prop to them, too. I craned up at the ceiling track now and traced its swivel with my finger. “Where are your blind spots, Cass?”
I thumbed open Voice Memos and recorded my notes, keeping the phrasing clean in case I needed to produce them in a hearing. “Description: planter, white ceramic with honeycomb deboss, frame-left in standard kit shot of Honeycomb Loft. Soil pattern—dots and dashes—read via manual input to Morse app. Message reads, quote, ‘NOT SAFE TO SPEAK.’ Confidence high; photographed overlay; chain-of-custody tags added. Additional clue: glitter glue residue on leaf tip; consistent with subject’s personal craft materials.”
Saying subject twisted my tongue. I stopped the recording and started a fresh one. “Personal note,” I said. “Hey, Ly, I’m not going to force your mouth open with my strategy. I won’t turn you into a campaign for my righteousness. Blink again, in dirt or sparkle or seams. I’m listening.”
I ended it and didn’t label it because labeling is a way to make something a product.
The Ivy leaf with the glitter touched my wrist when the HVAC drifted. I pinched the petiole and felt the plant argue—a small tug, a resistance that reminded me plants are slower than narratives and better for it. I whispered an apology to nothing anyone could subpoena and eased the leaf free, quick and neat. The glitter caught the ring light and flashed one stubborn dot, a dot that didn’t need a dash to make sense.
I slid the leaf into an evidence sleeve. The crinkle sounded loud in the quiet kitchen. I dated it, initialed it, and slipped it into my inner pocket where my heart would keep it warm. “I’m not selling you,” I told the leaf. “I’m keeping you alive.”
The tilt-shift between hope and sorrow made me stand too fast. My head went light; the room blurred. I pressed my palm to the cool counter and focused on one tile grout, one exact line. On the terrace, the fog thinned and a slab of neon from the Tide Market QR mural below floated up like a jellyfish. The city stayed on brand even when we didn’t.
I went back to the dirt. I took an extra pass, looking for secondary messages—a second line tucked under ivy shadow, a trick we’d use when mom’s friends were playing mahjong too loud for secrets. I found nothing. I did find the edge of the soil flattened in the exact rhythm of Lyla’s thumb pad; she always pressed rhythm into mess when she was fighting panic. The urge to smooth it with my thumb screamed up my arm. I let it pass. Evidence does not want tenderness; it wants temperature and time.
“Okay,” I said. “Next step.” I lifted the phone and opened a fresh note I didn’t sync anywhere: Respond without replying. Then bullet points: Secure, don’t show. Teach the hive to idle. Punch the business model, not Lyla’s contract. I underlined the last one by dragging my fingertip across the screen until the long-press menu popped and asked me to paste. I didn’t.
The countdown on the wall tablet blinked at T-44:08. The digit flip sounded like an eye blink. I pulled the plug, counted five, plugged it back in. The clock rejoined with no complaint. “Fine,” I told it. “Watch me work.”
I filmed one minute of B-roll of the planter—neutral angles, no narration, no app overlay—then powered down the camera and stowed the card in a tin mint box. If I decided to publish, I’d do it with captions that refused the adrenaline. I would not give Cass a spike.
From the ivy came a faint plant smell—green, damp, a little bitter. It cut the ring-light ozone and the bakery sugar still hitchhiking on my clothes. My mouth watered, a body confused, wanting to eat sweetness and rip out weeds at once. I leaned toward the shelf and watched the neon script blink the word HONEY in a loop too smooth. The honeycomb motif repeated everywhere: shelves, tiles, stitch on a dish towel folded exact. Haven and hive. Sweetness and trap. Lyla had wanted both: be unmissable and safe. The system offered her only one if she paid with the other.
“I got your signal,” I said to the room. “I’ll answer by starving the trap.”
Micro-hook: Something creaked above—the ceiling rail? the landlord?—and the sound made me measure every step back to the door like I was walking on eggshell algorithms.
I wrote a short text and saved it in drafts, not sent: “Acknowledged. No direct contact. Stay with small signals. We’ll move money, not mouths.” If anyone forced my phone across a desk, the sent folder would be bare, my intentions trapped in limbo like a breath held for a count of four. I set a reminder to burn the draft later.
At the door, I paused. The planter sat innocent under its ring halo, a student who had done the assignment too well. I wanted to pick it up and carry it like a baby, like a bomb. I didn’t. I pulled a sticky note from my notebook and wrote WATER—SAT in my block letters, then stuck it behind the pot where a careless camera wouldn’t catch. Maintenance, the safest language. If Lyla saw it, she’d know I’d been here. If Cass saw it, he’d think I’d been tidy.
The hallway smelled like paint and printing toner from the live-in’s label maker. Down on the street, a pop-up was building another stage out of pallets and branded hope. The city’s social compact pulsed—you can make a scene if it sells. I glanced at the neon fog, listened to the ghost-click in my head, and felt my hands steady the way they do when I’m about to violate a platform’s unspoken terms in favor of a human’s.
I touched the pocket where the glitter leaf warmed. “I hear you,” I said into the stairwell. “I’ll talk where your contract can’t bite.”
The question waited at the curb with the rideshare hum and the salt in the air: How do I answer a message that punishes her if I reply? I tucked the question behind my teeth the way we used to tuck gum in class, sweet and forbidden. Then I started walking toward downtown, where QR murals peeled and re-pasted and the hive worked for free, rehearsing the only answer I trusted: change the system so silence quits paying.