The leak hit like a flare.
My phone yowled itself awake, and every porch camera in the building snapped to attention, white LEDs turning the landing into an operating room. The peephole became a lighthouse. Through it I watched the empty hallway drip neon from the street mural, the QR grid across the way pulsing slow like a sleeping animal. The ghost-click of phantom notifications popped in my ears even when I silenced everything. A message pinned itself to the top of my mentions: “We know where you live, rescue profiteer.”
I stepped back from the door, counted four tiles on the honeycomb mat we’d used to catch toe dirt, and breathed through the ozone tang leaking from the ring light on my desk. The city’s social compact—don’t make a scene unless it pays—felt like the wrong law to rely on when the internet decided my address was content.
“I’m here,” Nessa said in my ear, her voice clipped, efficient. “We flagged the doxx threads. I’m pulling mirrors. And—okay—one reactor just published a ‘walk-by’ teaser. Ten minutes old. You’re trending on a Discord where the admin’s handle matches a Cass intern I’ve seen on LinkedIn.”
“Send me the hash,” I said. “Screens, chat log, anything that connects.”
A doorbell ping, syrupy and obscene in the bright-white porch light. I watched the camera feed: a bouquet of nothing, filmed for menace. Comments spooled under the clip as if a street could be bullied into confessing. Someone typed, “She milked fake danger for clicks; let’s give her some real.” My knuckles went cold.
I texted Sloane: Address leaked. Discord link in our drive. Doorbell press but no person. Then I slid the bookcase—the honeycomb shelves my mother once called “too cute to trust”—two inches to the left to give the inner door more swing. I hated myself for checking the plant in the corner, the one still wearing a leaf dusted with Lyla’s glitter glue under plastic, like proof of memory could stop velocity.
“Incoming call pattern on my parents’ landline,” Nessa said. “They’re getting spoofed numbers every thirty seconds. My mom picked up once—breathing and a whisper: ‘Shame.’”
The word stung at the root. “Put me on with your dad,” I said. “Speaker if he’ll tolerate it.”
I heard her feet move, rubber sole on tile, a kitchen sound I recognized in my bones. Then Mr. Park’s polite exhaustion: “Ms. Chen, we’re fine. We’ve lived through worse than brats.”
“They’re not brats,” I said. “They’re a system. Hang up on every unknown. We’re going to break the phone tree at the branch.”
“I’m on it,” Nessa said, voice already typing. “I’m pinging my compsci group; Jin’s awake on East Coast time. We can rate-limit their Twilio burst if it’s amateur hour.”
Another doorbell ping. My porch camera tagged a shadow slipping past the downstairs window—no face, a hoodie comet trailing clout. Neon painted their sleeve a gummy green; the harbor fog drifted into the stairwell and made the air taste damp and sweet, like a mistake. My shoulders folded, then I forced them wide again. Fear lives in small bones; steadiness lives in stance.
“Sloane,” I said when she picked up, “we’re live.”
“I’ve got your address on the radio,” she said. I heard the patrol room behind her—radios, shoe scrape, coffee stale enough to be a weapon. “Unit two is swinging by to sit on the block. You stay inside. You keep that camera on. Send me what you have on the Discord.”
I dragged the folder onto our shared drive: reactor_discord_cass_crosswalk/. Inside: usernames, cross-referenced intern portfolio shots, a spreadsheet of shared emojis and time stamps like a fingerprint. I wrote my notes in present tense, because judges like verbs that touch ground.
“Key thing,” I said. “Threats escalate when conversions drop. We cut Cass’s pipeline this afternoon, processors started investigating, and the reactor chat spiked with ‘make noise, punish narrative thieves.’ They want the community to pay attention again.”
“Copy,” Sloane said, voice gone granite. “That’s motive. Don’t respond to them. Don’t quote-tweet. I’ll park a cruiser at the corner, lights off. Keeps the looky-loos honest.”
I went to the kitchen and grabbed three ice cubes, rolling them across my wrists like the old crisis coach taught me—cold skin, slow brain, clear mouth. The ring light hummed, a mosquito lodged in a tin can. I pulled it closer, set it to low, and angled the camera toward the bookcase so my front door didn’t become a backdrop for a threat audition.
“I’m going to record a statement,” I told Nessa and Sloane on the thread. “Calm, boundaries-forward, no dunking. If we don’t feed the beast, it has to forage elsewhere.”
“Write,” Nessa said. “I’ll get Jin and Sumi inside the phone tree. I also found the Discord’s webhook; the admin forgot to obfuscate their IP in a test post. Let me try a soft choke.”
Micro-hook: The porch light flared again without a press. My camera tagged “motion” and showed me nothing but fog. In the comments somewhere out there, someone typed, “Ring for the ringleader.” I swallowed copper.
I hit record. “I’m Mara Chen,” I said, voice flat as glass. “I’m Lyla’s sister. Tonight, my home address was posted across several channels. I’m not sharing it. I’m not sharing yours if you disagree with me. I won’t amplify the posts targeting us. Here’s what I will do.” I lifted the legal pad I’d scrawled on while the porch turned to day. “I’ll continue to work with law enforcement and with community moderators to keep people safe—not perform safety, keep it. Don’t show up at anyone’s house. Don’t call their parents. Don’t give your money to fear. If you’re worried, log off, drink water, and choose not to be content. We’ll publish our documentation, clean, so platforms and processors do their jobs. Our boundaries are not bait. Our neighbors deserve quiet.”
I clipped the video at ninety seconds, added no music, no caption emojis, just a link to the victims’ fund and the documentation index Nessa and I had built. I stared at the “post” button until my finger steadied, then tapped. I left comments off.
“Good,” Sloane said. “You gave the people who want to be decent an exit ramp. Cruiser’s on your corner in two.”
“We just broke the phone tree,” Nessa said in my ear, her breath a soft rush. “Jin traced the Twilio subaccount; Sumi hit it with a compliance report, and I cross-filed the numbers for TOS violations. Calls to my parents dropped from sixty per hour to zero in the last three minutes.” Her voice shook once, then smoothed. “Thank you for making me call them. I wanted to be cool.”
“Cool is cold,” I said. “We need warm and quiet.”
A soft chirp at my window drew me. The cruiser slid into the street like an apology, lights off, engine a low purr. A gull perched on the streetlight above it, bored, preening the neon out of its wing. The fog thickened and turned distant signs into watercolor. Somewhere between the pier and my block, the salted caramel steam that usually flirted with the evening had gone to bed. The city knew when to sugar you and when to keep you sharp.
My phone spiked. “Reactor raid is pivoting,” Nessa said. “They’re in the Discord planning a ‘community audit’ of your clients. And listen to this—an intern handle we matched to Cass just dropped a Google doc titled ‘Mara Clout Math’ with your past cases and a red column that says VALUES DRAMA.”
My laugh came out dry. “They think I like this?” I said. “I like outcomes. I like calling my mother without checking the street first.”
“I’m grabbing the doc,” she said. “Screens done. Also, conversion trackers on affiliate links took a nosedive after your video and the mirror surge. Threats went up to compensate, exactly like you said. They’re not content managers, they’re tantrum managers.”
The doorbell chimed again. The camera caught a hand this time—ringless, pale in the LED wash—drawing a generic heart on my mailbox with a fingertip like I would be charmed. I watched the finger drag, leaving no mark, and I felt something under my ribs ignite.
“Unit two to Chen,” the cruiser radio crackled faintly, filtered through my thin windows. “We’ve got two pedestrians looping the block and filming the stoop. They’re staying on the sidewalk. We’ll keep eyes.”
“Copy,” I said to no one in particular, then messaged Sloane: Two filming loops; sidewalk compliant. Thanks. The social compact’s loophole. Don’t make a scene—unless it’s profitable. Sidewalks are free stages.
I opened our drive and added another tab to the ledger: harassment_escalation_vs_conversion. Time stamps, screen grabs, conversion deltas from public trackers, a column labeled threat index that felt like a sin to quantify, and therefore necessary. If the platforms wanted numbers, I’d feed them numbers that counted harm.
“Chen,” Sloane said, voice now in person from the hallway. She tapped the door with three knuckles, our prearranged knock. I checked the peephole, saw her square outline, opened.
She stepped in, bringing clean night air and leather and a hint of peppermint that made my throat loosen. “You did right,” she said. “Statement was clean. We’re logging the porch pings as a pattern. If anyone crosses property lines, we have a hook.” She set a pamphlet on my table—Security Checklist—and a small sensor. “Window alarm,” she said. “Loaner from a retired sergeant who hoards gadgets.”
“Tell him I’ll wipe it when I return it,” I said, which made her smile.
“We’re also running the Discord crosswalk,” she added, eyes on the honeycomb shelves as if they were a map. “If Cass’s interns are cozy with reactors, we’ve got conspiracy to harass layered over business interference. That’s paper I like to serve.”
My shoulders dropped a fraction. “I don’t want to be the story.”
“You’re not,” she said. “You’re the record. Stories flail. Records stand.”
Nessa’s voice rode into the room through my phone, now on speaker. “We just got a DM from a reactor’s mod who’s had enough. They sent a screenshot of the channel where the intern handle posts ‘boss notes.’ It includes a line: ‘Threat index spikes when merch conversion dips—pressure the doubters.’ Time stamp is twenty minutes after your fund link started outrunning their codes.”
Sloane’s face sharpened. “We get that into our packets and it’s Christmas in a judge’s chamber,” she said. “Redact the handle; I can subpoena the rest.”
My porch light did its artificial sunrise again. I looked and saw only fog and a single moth head-butting the lens in staccato taps, body a powdery comma. Something in me softened at its stupidity and its stubbornness.
“I’m sending the DM,” Nessa said. “Also: my classmates rigged a script that tags known doxxers’ posts with automated resource replies—legal links, platform policy, reminders about terms. It’s boring on purpose. Engagement drops when boredom rises.”
“Weaponized boredom,” I said. “My favorite tool.”
Sloane checked her watch. “We’ll hold the cruiser for another hour. Then I’ll loop the block in an unmarked. You text me if anything crosses your line, not the internet’s.”
“I will,” I said, and meant it. The protective fierceness that had been crouched in my spine all night stood up. I pictured Lyla somewhere under hay or light, watching comment storms like weather, a contract using her silence as a leash. I could not punch a contract. I could starve it.
Micro-hook: A notification blinked with the specific ugliness of marketing optimism. “House call stream: ‘Checking on the clout vulture—live in 30.’” The thumbnail was my block, shot earlier, my building front blurred just enough to pretend to be ethical. The overlay used the countdown font.
“They’re coming back,” I said.
Nessa sucked in a breath. “The Discord says ‘don’t engage the cop car; film from across the street; chant softly.’ They’re writing a play about restraint.”
Sloane’s jaw worked once. “I’ll reposition the cruiser half a block down. Visibility without provocation. This is what they want—your fear on camera. Give them locks instead.”
I walked to the camera shelf and turned the ring light off. The room exhaled. Neon seeped in as a weaker replacement, the harbor fog taking edges off everything. I slid the honeycomb shelf fully against the wall and set the window alarm on the sash. The small plastic bite clicked, a sound that scratched a line through the night and called it mine.
“I’ll push an update to the fund page,” I said. “No quote tweets. Just receipts. Then I’m going to stand in my kitchen and eat a bun like a person who lives here.”
“I recommend the custard,” Nessa said, a little laugh hiding under the word.
Sloane nodded toward the plastic-sleeved leaf near the plant. “Keep that tucked,” she said softly. “It’s a talisman. Not evidence yet. Don’t mix the two.”
I slid the leaf deeper into its sleeve and stowed it in a drawer. “I know,” I said. “I want that to be a kitchen story, not a courtroom story.”
Outside, a small cluster formed at the corner, phones up, voices low to avoid looking unkind on camera. The city’s stage was set for their profitable restraint. The cruiser idled half a block down, quiet steel at the curb. The salted caramel steam returned on a late-night breeze, sweet climbing into my throat like a dare to be gentle with myself.
My phone pulsed again with a new schedule tile: “Dawn tour in six hours—Behind the Stitch.” The barn would preen while my block played vigil theatre. I set the phone face-down, spine straight, mouth calm.
“We hold,” Sloane said, hand on the doorknob. “We log. We don’t give them a clip.”
“We hold,” I echoed.
And then the stream announcement flipped from scheduled to live, the thumbnail resolving into my own building number, centered in tasteful cream. The chat counter jumped. Somebody in the cluster cleared their throat for the microphone.
I looked at the red “recording” dot on my porch cam and asked the night a question I couldn’t un-ask: would the record protect us before the show swallowed it?