I parked two bends down the gravel lane and walked the rest, shoes whispering frost off weeds. The farmhouse waited the way a showroom waits—posed, breath held for applause. The barn’s fresh white paint glowed like teeth in the dark. Fog had wandered inland from the harbor and lay in ridges over the field, couching every step in cold milk.
“You know the rules,” Sloane said when she met me at the fence. Her voice stayed pitched for moths, not people. “You wait here. I text when I clear each zone.”
“I’m not trying to be a hero,” I whispered. I tucked my hands under my armpits to keep them from auditioning tremors. The night smelled like hay-dust and diluted bleach; someone had scrubbed their conscience in circles.
Sloane lifted the warrant just enough for the moon to read it. “Narrow and recent,” she said. “Hayloft and any contiguous space reasonably necessary to secure it.”
“Contiguous,” I repeated, because words matter when walls don’t. “He’s a man who builds meanings with corridors.”
She almost smiled. “Then walk nowhere.” She palmed a small thermal camera and nodded to her partner, who ghosted across the yard to kill the exterior motion light. Darkness settled, honest and whole.
“Text me.” I stepped back into the shadow of a honey-buckled fence post with hexagon wire stapled to it, the pattern repeating like a warning I could read in any language. My phone vibrated with false life—ghost-clicks of notifications that weren’t there. Across town, neon pressed itself into fog and tried to invent a sunrise. Here, the only light was the soft rectangle from Sloane’s thermal rig as she entered the barn.
I watched that rectangle through the cracks in the slats, the view a film strip of cold and warm. The ladder bloomed on-screen in fat oranges. Sloane raised the camera. The rungs sang with heat ghost—long ovals where feet had pressed not long ago.
“Residuals,” her whisper carried on the open comm. “Less than an hour? Maybe two. Hard to say with this humidity.”
“Then he’s rehearsing tonight,” I said to the fence, because it would hold my secrets.
“Or clearing,” she said. “Either way, recently.”
The hayloft ladder gave up a creak I felt in my teeth. Dust drifted, a slow confetti that put me back in Lyla’s kitchen for a second—the ring-light ozone, the salted caramel steam from the pier rolling through cracked windows, the way fog in Larkspur Bay funnels into downtown and tints mornings gauzy and evenings neon. I blinked, hauled myself out of memory’s sticky sweetness, and counted breaths.
Sloane reached the loft. The thermal screen painted the floor in cool blues except for a gentle smear near a trap square. “Warm seam,” she breathed. “Door’s been opened.”
“Stairs under the hay,” I said, trying to keep my voice as flat as the field.
She knelt and ran a gloved hand along the lip. “Latch is wiped. Fresh solvent.” I could hear the latex squeak on wood—quiet, clinical. “Going down.”
Micro-hook: I stared at the farmhouse windows while she descended, daring a face to appear. Nothing moved but the barn owl’s float and a moth batting against my cheek like a bad thought.
“Sublevel clear of people,” Sloane said after a long count that pulled the night tight around my ribs. “Lights on. Smells like lemons and raincoat plastic.”
“He cleaned,” I said. The word slid out like a judgment I had no right to hand down and every right to speak.
“He sterilized,” she corrected, because precision is a kind of mercy. “Bring me your eyes. Loft only.”
I slipped through the side gap she’d left, a polite wedge of door. The barn’s air tasted like wood shavings and the faint mint of electricity. My shoes landed soft on the boards. I felt the heat of Sloane’s thermal camera long after she’d gone below; the afterimage burned in me, a reverse sun.
“Stay put,” she said, surfacing just enough to pass me a spare viewing tablet tethered to her feed. “You can see what I see. Don’t touch what you can’t bear losing.”
“Everything qualifies,” I said. I hooked the strap around my neck like a penitent’s cord and watched the sublevel through borrowed sight.
The space below looked like a show kitchen stripped for a reset—counter outlines without counters, bolt holes where mounts had lived, the faint honeycomb stencil of old shelf anchors blooming on a far wall. The thermal camera gave me history as color: a table rectangle in warmer teal, the ghost of a body’s lean at the edge, a line of eight warm dots near the floor like someone had knelt and pressed knees there.
“He moved things hours ago,” Sloane said. “Air’s still different where they were.”
“What about the stairs?” I asked.
“Footprints everywhere,” she said. “Fresh, overlapping. Small and medium.”
“Small?” My throat tightened. “She’s a six in boots.”
“Could be. Could also be an intern with high arches,” Sloane said. Her caution pressed against my sternum until my breath behaved.
She panned left to a low beam that had seen better years. A cable tie hung like a black hyphen, cut clean. The thermal didn’t care about plastic. My own eyes did.
“Freeze,” I murmured. “That tie.”
“I have it.” Sloane leaned in. Dust trembled along the beam where her breath moved air. A single thread clung to the tie’s mouth. It looked like hair that had been kissed by glitter and then washed a dozen times; the glue mended it into a translucent ridge that flashed when the headlamp crossed.
“Bag,” I whispered, and she didn’t need me to tell her. She slid a paper envelope from her kit, then reconsidered and swapped it for plastic. “Static,” I added. “We can’t lose lift.”
“I know,” she said, not unkindly. She used a microforceps to pluck the strand, hand steady the way surgeons practice grief. The glitter caught one last wink and the forceps clicked shut.
“Evidence number?” I asked because I knew I’d remember it better if I said it.
“Seven,” she said. “Cable tie fiber, possible adhesive contam.”
“Not possible,” I said. “That’s Lyla’s glue.”
“You’ll forgive me if I let the lab tell me that.” Sloane smoothed air into the bag and sealed it. The plastic made a soft sound—promise or threat, take your pick.
I exhaled so slowly it hurt. My knees wanted to sit. I didn’t let them. “She was here.”
“Someone with her materials was here,” Sloane said. “And recently.”
I swallowed the correction like medicine and tucked the pill in my cheek. The thermal panned on. A square of floor read warm; a wheel rut etched in Lupe-blue; a shelf bracket held a memory of friction.
“He rehearsed and he cleared,” I said. “In that order.”
“Or he cleared, then rehearsed leaving,” she said. I liked that about her—the way she knotted my certainty to the nearest available doubt so it couldn’t run off and embarrass us both.
She kept filming. The sublevel’s silence grew a personality—proud of its cleanliness, smug about its emptiness, brittle with the odor of lemon in a place that should smell like hay and oil. My tongue tasted like a penny. I thought of the city’s social compact—don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable—and knew the barn had earned.
“We got what we came for,” Sloane said quietly. “We don’t tempt the law by looking for what the law didn’t give us.”
“I want to tempt it,” I admitted, and my hands flexed, empty.
“I know.”
The tablet flared white for a blink, then returned to gradient. “What was that?” I asked.
“Power blip,” she said. “Maybe the well pump kicking on.”
The cameras in the rafters woke like animals remembering hunger. I heard the faint servo purr. Two units rotated in choreographed grace toward the loft opening, then widened their gaze to the yard. I held my breath and pressed flat to the post.
“Hold,” Sloane said over comm, voice sharpened to a line. “We may have tripped a silent.”
“We were so careful,” I whispered. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. The barn felt suddenly humid, wet with attention.
“Careful isn’t the same as unmonitored,” she said. I watched her hand on the screen—steady, gloved—reach up to cover the nearest lens with black tape she’d brought for exactly this contingency. Another lens angled. She moved, swift and surgical, and blinded that one too.
From somewhere in the farmhouse, a relay clicked. Then another. The sound wasn’t loud. It was worse. It sounded like the clearing of a throat before a monologue.
“We’re done,” Sloane said. “Up and out.”
“He knows we’re here,” I said. I pictured Cass’s smile, that low-pulse patience. I pictured him writing Engagement Multiplier in a margin the way other men write shopping lists. My chest went hot, then cold.
“He knows someone is here,” she said. “And he designed that knowledge to be content, not cause. Move.”
I backed to the side door, palms slicking the wood. Outside, the field had condensed into beads that slid along my coat sleeves and left itchy cold trails. I breathed the night like it was rationed. A distant highway murmured; a frog determined to be heard undercut the human scale of our worry.
Sloane emerged, sealing the evidence bag inside a tin that thunked when it closed. She handed me nothing except her eyes.
“Say it,” she said.
“Lyla was here,” I said, not bothering to soften for doubt this time. “And he knew you’d look.”
“And he built a camera ballet to capture the looking,” she added. “Which means he’s already rehearsed the cut-in for when he needs it. You don’t get to give him a preview.”
“I’m not feeding him,” I said. My jaw unclenched so slowly I heard the sand in my molars shift. “I’m starving him.”
“Then go starve him somewhere not framed by his lenses,” she said. She tipped her chin at the evidence tin. “This goes to the lab. You go home under the cruiser’s eye. You do not talk about glitter online until I have a chain-of-custody that can weather his lawyers.”
“I can do that,” I said. I could. My fingers, traitors, reached for the tin and stopped mid-air like birds remembering glass.
We stepped into the yard. The servo purr followed us—another camera pivoting to keep us centered. I lifted my collar and tried to feel bigger than the red dots that might be blooming somewhere behind the lenses. The fog accepted me, damp and unamazed.
“Vega,” I said, half a whisper, half a dare. “What happens if he reads our care as content and escalates because too many people didn’t buy the apron?”
“Then he proves what he is faster,” she said. “But he also risks the wrong audience. He loves control more than he loves speed.”
“So he’ll stage patience,” I said. “He’ll let the hay dry.”
“And he’ll make the next move where the lighting’s better,” she said. “Back to town, probably. Where neon loves a face.”
The barn’s door drifted shut behind us with a sigh too practiced to be accidental. The click that followed was not a lock; it was punctuation. I felt the sentence it ended in my bones: We see you seeing.
We were halfway to the fence when the farmhouse porch light snapped on and painted the yard with flattering warmth. A speaker somewhere high on the eaves gave a tiny pop, like a microphone checking itself.
“Don’t run,” Sloane said. “Running participates.”
“Walking participates,” I said. “Breathing participates.”
“Then be boring,” she said, and I loved her for the instruction. We were boring. We crossed the yard with the grace of two people leaving a party early because the party’s idea of fun was breakable.
At the fence, I put my hand on the wood and felt the hex wire under my palm, the metal biting back small honeycomb dents. I carried the pattern with me toward the road—cells built for sharing, cells built for keeping in. The night tasted like lemons again, then like nickel, then like nothing.
“Text me when you’re at the cruiser,” Sloane said. “And do one thing I know you’ll hate.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Sleep,” she said. She lifted the tin. “I’ll watch this until the handoff.”
“Vega,” I said, because I needed her to hear the thing I couldn’t fit into any procedural box. “If the glitter strand is hers, if it’s not transfer, if it’s her and recent—”
“Then we’re not rescuing a story,” she said. “We’re rescuing a person from a story. Good night, Chen.”
I walked. Gravel complained and then forgave me. Down the lane, the cruiser waited, a quiet pulse behind tinted glass. My phone buzzed with a new push: Countdown update—Community Challenge Coming. I didn’t tap. I pictured Cass shifting the pieces because he’d felt the pressure; I pictured a warehouse or a container row lit for a finale.
I reached the cruiser door and rested my forehead against the cool window, a brief benediction. In my pocket, the evidence number 7 dug into my palm where I’d been pressing it into a crescent. I liked the ache. It made me less politely disappointed and more usefully angry.
The barn cameras pivoted again, tiny servos whining through the fog like insects tuning for a chorus. I pulled back from the glass and asked the question I’d carry into the next hour, next warrant, next trap: if he sensed us tonight and staged nothing, what was he saving for the moment the clock hit forty and the hive leaned in to help?