I built the battlefield out of cells.
The spreadsheet stared back with its honeycomb grid, each box a cell in the hive I wanted to turn into a refuge instead of a trap. I titled it Buyback and let the letters sit there, plain and defiant. Columns clicked into place under my fingers: Original Link, Mirror Redirect, Processor, Status, Proof Doc, Volunteer, Timestamp, Notes (Risk/Pushback). The ring light above the counter sang its thin ozone and the harbor fog pressed against the glass, smearing neon into watercolor. From the street below, a QR mural blinked to a new skin; somewhere a phone snapped it, little click of worship.
“Okay,” I said into my mic. “We’re going to starve the clock.”
Nessa’s avatar pulsed on my phone, bright, steady. “Say the plan clean so I can pin it,” she said. Her voice carried that Tide Market salt—warm, cutting when needed.
“We redirect,” I said. “We take every affiliate and tip link the reactors post, and we flood replies with mirrors that route to a verified victims’ fund instead. No shaming. No insults. Just better plumbing.”
She laughed softly. “Plumbing is content now.”
“Only if it converts,” I said, and the bitterness burned like old coffee. I typed while I spoke so the cells didn’t have to wait on my mood. “We’ll need mirrors that avoid filter blocks. That means clean domains and consistent naming.” I created a naming convention and pasted it to the top row: buyback.lark/v1/slug. The slug would echo the original product code so search wouldn’t tip Cass that we stole his pipes; it would just look like another funnel—his favorite language.
“I can get twenty-five volunteers in ten minutes,” Nessa said. “Fifty in thirty.” She paused like she was tasting the idea. “We’ll tell them: no callouts, only link-ups. Reply with the mirror, pin it, report the original if it makes a false claim, then mute the thread. Guard your heartbeat.”
“Add a fifth instruction,” I said. “Screenshot your change and drop it into the ledger. We’re going to need proof for the processors.”
The word processors made the air colder. I dragged a finger across my own goosebumps and pulled the bakery sweater tighter. “Every redirect triggers a receipt,” I said. “We compile a public dossier: itemized claims, time stamps, pseudo-legal posturing; then we mail it to Risk at Stripe, PayPal, TipPal, whoever he’s using. They’re allergic to documented liability.”
Nessa exhaled into the mic. “And if he pivots to crypto?”
“Then he loses credit-card whales,” I said. “You don’t buy dish towels with Bitcoin at school pickup.” I added Processor: TBD (likely Stripe / Alt) on half a dozen rows and left the rest blank; I’d fill them as we scraped. The honeycomb tiles under my elbows felt cool; the ring light hummed pale; the counter smelled faintly of citrus wipe, beneath it a whisper of caramel from the pier shops.
Micro-hook: A new line blinked into the spreadsheet on its own: rnr.studio/apron_drop?aff=HIVE—someone from the mod room was already pasting leads faster than I could assign them.
I tagged the line HIGH and typed, Mirror: buyback.lark/v1/apron. My pulse went drummer-fast, not from fear—agency has its own percussion. “We train first,” I said. “No free-for-alls. We move like a school of fish that learned how to invoice.”
“I’m opening a training channel,” Nessa said. “Join on desktop so I can screenshare.”
I slid onto the stool, lined my shoulders square with the camera, and pressed join. Faces budded in circles—teens in bedrooms, moms in cars, a grandpa in a wood-paneled den with a stubborn fern behind him that looked both alive and fake. The Honeycomb neon reflected in my laptop bezel and turned my hands pink.
“Hey, hive,” Nessa said, smiling with that meme-calm that kept people from shredding each other. “We’re doing a re-tag action. This is not a war. This is re-plumbing. Mara will demo scripts. We do not harass. We do not dogpile. We replace bad links with good ones and leave cookies for payment processors.”
I raised a hand, because theater works. “I’m Mara,” I said. “I’m going to teach you to be boring on purpose. Boring is how we win.”
A few cameras chuckled. Someone typed a bee emoji storm into the chat. I dragged a sample reactor post onto the screen and zoomed until the white apron filled the slide—the teaser image Cass had seeded everywhere: gentle pleats, kitchen porn, the word HUSH embossed on the tie in shy letters only nerds would catch. The scent of the ring light and the faint dust of the loft made my tongue dry.
“Script one, for reply,” I said, and I read it slow so they could hear cadence. “‘Hey! This product link is misdirecting during an ongoing safety incident. Please use this verified resource: [mirror]. Proceeds go to an independent victims’ fund audited monthly. Receipts attached. No pressure—just info.’”
I toggled to a second slide. “Script two, for DMs when you’re invited to affiliate: ‘Thanks for including me. I can’t participate while crisis is monetized. If you’d like to reroute to a vetted fund, here’s a mirror; happy to help track impact.’”
A teen unmuted. “What if they call us clout leeches?”
“You mute,” I said. “You do not feed reactors asking for a spectacle. No jokes about jail, no threats, no ‘ratio.’ Just mirrors and logs.” I motioned toward the spreadsheet. “Everyone will get a row; paste your screenshots and note the time. That row is a receipt. Receipts move processors.”
“Receipts move hearts too,” Nessa added. “But we’re not aiming for hearts. Hearts get tired. Policies don’t.” She winked at the camera. “That’s a Mara line.”
I grinned at the counter. “I’ll take the credit if we get the outcome.”
We broke into practice. Volunteers pasted mirrors into mock threads, then muted themselves and breathed on camera—an exercise in not arguing. I set a timer for sixty seconds and watched them sit their hands, eyes twitching with the ghost-click of replies they refused to open. Discipline looked like devotion without the cult. In the chat, I dropped a downloadable De-escalation Kit: a PDF with scripts, a one-page explainer for processors, and a flowchart choosing report categories that wouldn’t get buried.
The loft’s window fogged gently as if the city was exhaling on the glass. I could taste sea salt in the air, just a hint, like the pier had decided to send sympathy. In the kitchen island’s reflection, hex-shelves framed me like a net.
“We can do this,” a volunteer said into their mic, small voice, big courage. “We don’t have to be loud to be many.”
“Exactly,” Nessa said. “Bees don’t roar. They swarm.”
We kept going until the scripts sounded like ordinary talk. I pinged the spreadsheet and saw it fill with names, each volunteer claiming a row the way people claim a seat in church. Volunteer: Jaz, Volunteer: Sue/alt, Volunteer: GrandpaFerns. I assigned processors where our earlier scrapes had confirmed what Cass ran through: Stripe for the merch, TipPal for the donations, CreatorCoin as backup. I felt a mean joy aligning them like pins on a map.
I didn’t hear Sloane’s knock; I heard her throat clear behind me, three soft notes that meant don’t jump. I turned. She stood at the loft door in plain clothes, hair in a low knot, eyes scanning without heat. She smelled like precinct coffee and rain-damp wool.
“You’re building something ambitious,” she said. “I don’t hate it.”
I motioned her in and pointed to the spreadsheet. “We’re not hacking,” I said quickly. “We’re rerouting attention. All public-facing. No back-end breakage.”
She nodded and leaned on the counter, reading down the columns with the focus of a person who knows the difference between clever and admissible. “Here’s where you’ll get in trouble if you’re sloppy,” she said, tapping the Mirror Redirect column. “No impersonation. No logos that could imply partnership. No ‘official’ language. And don’t DM anyone pretending to be law enforcement or a processor rep.”
“We trained for that,” I said. “We’re boring.”
“Good.” She pointed to Proof Doc. “This is your leverage. Keep it clean. Ideally, publish the whole ledger in read-only with a time-stamped changelog. Payment processors don’t move because you’re right; they move because they can justify the move to their compliance teams.”
I slid the laptop so she could see the Publish dialog I was already filling. “Public, immutable snapshots every hour,” I said. “We’ll mirror the ledger to a static page with hash verification. I’ll email Risk with three bullets: false claims, deceptive urgency, and pre-visualized harm from the deck.”
Sloane’s eyes flicked to mine at the word deck. “You keep that chained,” she said. “It’s gasoline. Use the ledger to press the processors; let me use warrants to press the studio. If you dump the deck too early, his lawyers will make it about your leak, not his conduct.”
“I know,” I said, and the leaf in my pocket felt heavier, glitter grit against the fabric. “We respond to Lyla’s signal by starving the monetization, not by shouting.”
“Good,” Sloane said. She looked at the volunteers on-screen, at the chat marching in clean, useful lines. “One more pitfall. If one of your volunteers provokes a creator into saying something actionable, that’s entrapment-lite. I can’t use it. Teach them not to bait. Teach them to be… what did you say?”
“Boring,” I said. “We weaponize dullness.”
She smiled, brief, like a crease in paper. “You’re going to get baited anyway,” she said. “When you do, record your refusal like you’d record a confession. And hydrate.” She slid a water bottle toward me she’d somehow conjured from her jacket. “I appreciate that you’re not trying to be the hero on camera.”
I touched the bottle and nodded once. “I don’t need to be seen,” I said. “I need the machines to blink.”
Micro-hook: On the training call, a volunteer’s screen shared a live reactor chat scrolling at speed—then slowed, then filled with our mirror links like someone had switched the tide with a thumb.
“That’s a test,” Nessa said, delighted. “Nobody fight. Let the mirrors sit.”
I watched the mirrors stick, each one a small redirect from adrenaline to accountability. In the spreadsheet, Status cells turned from gray to green: Pinned, Pinned, Pinned. I added a new tab: Processors—Contacts & Templates and pasted the boilerplate I’d used in a past life to move mountains with three paragraphs and an attachment. “Sloane,” I said, “if I send these, am I stepping on chain-of-custody?”
“Send them,” she said. “Copy me and Legal Aid if you can stomach it. The more eyes who can say ‘We were warned,’ the better.” She gestured at the honeycomb shelves. “This city punishes mess, not spectacle. Make his money flow look messy.”
I set up a Press Kit—Cold folder with only the ledger index and a one-sentence summary: ‘Public documentation of deceptive monetization practices connected to an ongoing safety incident.’ No adjectives. No claims beyond what the ledger could prove. I could feel the bakery’s discipline in my wrists, the habit of labeling buns so no one grabbed what they didn’t order.
“Ready?” Nessa asked. “We drop in five.”
“One more thing,” I said into the call. “The scripts are a boundary, not a weapon. If a thread spirals, you mute and go drink water. We’re building a culture, not a spectacle. Safety is not content.”
Heads nodded in their little circles. Someone clinked a mug. In the alley, a small truck beeped backing up like a metronome. The ring light hummed. The fog outside thinned to a neon halo that made the window look like an altar.
We counted down together—five, four, three—and then the chat lit with deployed, live, mirror in, pinned, muted. I watched little green lights pop across the ledger like a slow constellation. I hit Publish Snapshot 01 and copied the hash to a sticky note, then taped it to the edge of the monitor like a talisman.
“We’re swarming the TipPal notes,” Nessa called out. “Remember, attach the ledger link. Don’t editorialize.”
Sloane stood behind me, arms folded, the calm spine inside our storm. “You’ll get a reaction within the hour,” she said. “When you do, call me before you clap back.”
“Copy,” I said. The word tasted like civilian procedure, and I liked it.
The spreadsheet chimed—new entry—a volunteer had logged a reaction from a reactor mid-tier: ‘lol nice try, nice grift’ followed by our mirror—Pinned by creator. Green bubble. I screenshotted, pasted the image in the Proof Doc cell, and appended Note: Pinned by creator; audience donating to fund; counts rising. I felt the faintest fizz under my sternum; agency and solidarity share a bloodstream.
The smell of caramel from the pier drifted up like a memory of something kinder. I let the sweetness sit on my tongue. “We keep moving,” I said. “No victory speeches.”
“Agreed,” Nessa said. “We’ve got a long night.”
The door buzzed with a delivery I didn’t order. I froze, looked at Sloane. She nodded and answered with her badge out, casual authority wrapped in knit. A messenger handed over a flat mailer and left without a word. Sloane opened it, gloved because she’s never off-duty, and slid out a glossy one-sheet: “Participatory Rescue—Tomorrow.” White fabric photographed like a confession. No sender. Just a QR in the corner winking hunger.
“He feels you,” Sloane said. “Good. Make him work for his meal.”
I flipped the one-sheet over with my knuckle and kept my hands off the QR like it was a burner plate. “We’ll be ready,” I said, mostly to my own lungs.
My phone lit up on the counter—push alert, branded gentle, the tone he used to tuck dread into people’s pockets. SECOND DROP TEASER: WHITE APRON / MIDNIGHT. COUNTDOWN SYNCED.
I looked at the ledger, at the rows filling with boring miracles, at Nessa’s grin locked in concentration, at Sloane’s steady hands. “Stay with the plan,” I told everyone and myself. “We buy back the narrative, one receipt at a time.”
The push alert pulsed again, brighter, and a thumbnail of the apron materialized inside the banner—clean, calm, and threaded with a stitched word I couldn’t yet read from the preview.
I didn’t tap. I let anticipation tighten the room like a drumhead and asked the only question that mattered for the next move: what’s the stitch trying to monetize, and how do I cut it without cutting her?