I tapped the honey drop and let the map bloom. The geotag perched on the industrial fringe where the harbor’s fog thins into freeway breath—a storage facility with a brand that promised climate control and discretion. I stared long enough to feel the risk slide along my gums like a copper coin. Then I slid my phone into airplane mode, wrote the address on a receipt with a dull pencil, and closed the app without saving.
“Alone,” I said into the room, a word that landed like a lock clicking. “In and out. No calls.”
I left through the stairwell to avoid the elevator camera and stepped into air that tasted like salt and cold steel. Downtown’s QR murals pulsed down the hill, updating to new campaigns that pretended to care. I walked past them without raising my camera, past neon that painted the fog in expensive bruise colors, past a pop-up with honeycomb shelving stacked with jars that promised calm in exchange for a card swipe. The city kept its compact: don’t make a scene unless you can monetize it.
My car carried the smell of bakery steam and ring-light ozone, a stale cocktail from nights I didn’t want to count. I drove with the radio off, counting turns with my tongue pressed to the back of my teeth. The freeway lifted me over the harbor and set me down by yards of corrugated metal and chain link. The storage sign hummed like a sleep-deprived bee.
I parked two rows over and walked the last stretch, hood up, not to disappear but to not be cast. Fluorescent tubes buzzed above the corridor, that thin electric whine that drills the skull. The air tasted like dust and solvent; the concrete floor held the memory of a mop. Each door ribbed the light into stripes, and together they read like an industrial honeycomb—the hive geometry repeating, sweetness long gone.
“Left, left, right,” I said under my breath, echoing the screenshot I’d sketched from the map tiles. “Unit B-17.”
The rows multiplied; my eyes adjusted to the artificial day. I kept my hands in my pockets so the cameras would read me as bored. When I reached B-17, I found a keypad rub-worn to the numbers 1, 4, 0, 7—someone else’s tell—then a tiny sticker near the hinge: a drop of amber no larger than a freckle. I exhaled into the buzz.
The DM had included four numbers buried in a caption, spaced like an accident. I entered them and paused. Nothing. I looked at the thin strip of LED on the lock and saw a dot blinking every second, then a fast pulse at the twentieth. A time lock. I waited for the breath of the building to sync with it.
“Now,” I whispered, and pressed again on the pulse.
The lock clicked with a subdued dignity. I lifted the corrugated door slowly, teeth of metal sliding over concrete with a sound like someone dragging a zipper across a bruise. Inside, a single fluorescent bar made everything flat and honest. Dust puffed dry and tasted like old flour. The unit was the size of a small bathroom, empty except for a low plastic bin with a folded hoodie on top.
I crouched. My knees cracked loud, a gunshot in the quiet, and I held still until the ring in my ear subsided. The hoodie was unbranded, soft with detergent, and warm at the cuffs the way fabric remembers hands. Under it I found a packet of makeup wipes, two used ones sealed into a snack baggie like small ghosts, a torn script page printed in 14-point with stage directions in gray, and a prepaid phone in its blister pack, price tag peeled, the sticky rectangle of residue catching lint.
“Lyla,” I said to the air, and the word knocked the corners off the box of my chest.
The wipes smelled faintly of cucumber and commercial kindness. The baggie had initials scribbled at the corner—L.C.—and a date three days earlier. I held the wipes to the light and saw the shimmering residue that glitter glue leaves after a long day on skin. She had prepped for an exit, not a finale.
Micro-hook: My tongue found that copper again. “How many kits did you seed?” I asked the locker, and the fluorescent tube made no promises.
I eased the script page free and smoothed it across my thigh. The paper rasped. At the top, a block title: SCENE: HANDLER MONOLOGUE (ALT B). Under it, beat lines Cass would have loved: Hold wide. Smile without showing teeth. Touch counter with one finger. Use “we” to soften. Then the speech in bold:
“To be seen is to be saved. I’ve seen it. The audience is not a crowd; it’s a family that finally pays attention. We let them help, and help makes them whole. The countdown is a cattle prod only to those who refuse urgency. We offer urgency as a gift.”
In the margin, a small handwriting I knew from school permission slips and grocery lists: NO. Then underlined twice: “gift” and a circle around “cattle prod.” My throat tightened, not with tears but with a clean heat that brooked no audience.
“You were leaving a trail I could follow without paying him,” I said. “You prepped me a way to touch the story without becoming the story.”
The prepaid phone felt heavy with silenced possibility. I turned it over and read the sticker: Charge before first use. A folded paper taped beneath gave a code: four numbers and an hour—05:30—written in that same quick hand, no heart dots, no flourish. Dawn, then. Not now. I set the phone down like it could bruise.
I scanned the corners of the unit for hidden stickers or a second cache: nothing but a scuffed mark where something square had sat for a while, and a line of glitter dust in the seam where wall met floor, bright as fish scales.
“You made an exit, not a rescue reel,” I said to the smear of light.
I slipped the script page into a manila envelope I’d brought, slid the hoodie on over my jacket to change my outline for any bored lens, and pocketed the phone and wipes. I peeled on nitrile gloves to lift the bin and found nothing beneath except a single cable tie, uncut. I resisted the thousand impulses that wanted to take it. I took a photo instead—angle, scale, date—and left it for Sloane with the unit number in my head. Later. Not now. Tonight, evidence could still be a trap.
The fluorescent hum intensified for a heartbeat; a motion sensor somewhere registered breath. I knelt by the threshold and listened. The facility’s air cycled with a sigh; a compressor coughed far down the corridor and settled. No feet. No throat clearing. Just electricity pretending to be river water.
I closed the door enough to cut the light to a thin blade and sat with my back against it, letting my eyes reset to the seam of brightness. With the script page ink ghosting up at me from memory, I recorded a whisper into my pocket recorder without naming names.
“Note: kit includes de-glam, script alt, and burner. Implication: she plans to remove the persona—wipe face, ditch cadence—and speak as a person, not a product. Risk: if I’m followed, this becomes possession of stolen material or conspiracy. Counter: gloves, no prints, no video. Action: exit on a diagonal. Vary gait. Check reflection surfaces, not direct glass.”
The city had trained me to use windows like periscopes; I stood and used the faint shine of the corrugation to read my silhouette. My shoulders had widened with the hoodie, and the honeycomb ribs doubled the deception—my outline fractured, not famous to any lens.
“You were always better at hiding in plain sight,” I said into the stripe of light. “I learned stealth from watching you do your makeup like armor.”
I eased the door back up to seal the unit and let it fall to rest without slamming. The lock blinked its satisfied dot. I wiped the keypad with a sleeve and walked the long corridor with a rhythm I’d borrowed from night shifts in the bakery—steady, unremarkable, a body solving for flour dust and hot trays.
At the mouth of the corridor, the night tasted colder. A freight horn sighed somewhere under the cliff, and the harbor pushed a salted caramel exhale even this far inland, sweetness gone thin and distant. I paused where the neon could paint my cheek and watched the lot through the skeletal break in a hedge. Two cars idled across the way, but they smelled like someone’s impatience, not a tail—citrus air freshener and cheap coffee.
I took the long route back to my car, tracing a loop past an art wall where a new mural advertised a charity collab in looping script. The QR code glittered with a fresh lacquer; I didn’t scan it. The air around it carried the small static of ring lights from late-night content. I kept my steps on gravel to give myself a soundtrack in case anyone padded behind me in soft shoes. No syncopation arrived.
Micro-hook: At the edge of the lot, my phone buzzed once—a phantom click with no notification, a ghost memory of a message past. I let the adrenaline move through me like a tide, crest and leave. Then I placed my phone—still in airplane mode—deep in the glove box beside a first-aid kit and a metal water bottle that made a satisfying dull sound when tapped.
I didn’t start the engine. I sat with my hands on the wheel and the prepaid phone in my lap, cardboard box still intact, corners digging into my thighs with a square promise. I read the taped code again—05:30—and felt the calculus load like a spreadsheet. If I powered it now, any watcher could triangulate me with a lazy warrant or a contractor who sold pings for pizza money. If I waited till dawn, I risked missing her window, risked telling her I didn’t trust her plan.
“You trusted me to read the seam,” I said into the dark windshield, voice no louder than the facility’s hum. “I trust your clock.”
I cracked the blister just enough to slide the phone out and tucked the cardboard into my tote. I peeled the plastic off the screen with a slow hiss that scratched some part of my brain built to love fresh starts. I didn’t press power. I pressed my thumb to the cool glass, counting heartbeats. The glass reflected my face as a pale outline, anonymous under the hoodie, cheekbones rendered in neon runoff.
I opened the packet of makeup wipes with a soft pop and swiped the back of my hands, the collarbone exposed by the hoodie, the jawline that livestreams want to own. The wipe smelled like a hotel. The grit came away gray, proof I’d been under lights too long. I sealed the used wipe into the baggie with Lyla’s two ghosts, layered our small resurrections together, and stowed them in a pocket I never used for anything I could lose.
“No persona, no prod,” I said to the empty passenger seat. “We won’t give him the gift.”
I cracked the car door and tasted the air again—metal, mint from a weed someone crushed in the gravel, a faint diesel thread. The freeway sang a lullaby for insomniacs. In the rearview, my silhouette housed itself in darkness, a shadow with good posture and better boundaries.
I set the prepaid phone on the dashboard and lined it up with the clock on the car stereo, syncing seconds by breath until my lungs hurt in the right way. Then I slid the phone back into my pocket, feeling the rectangle anchor me to the next hour.
“Dawn,” I told the steering wheel. “At dawn I press the button.”
The corrugated rows held their fluorescent breath, and the city beyond them held its neon tongue. Somewhere inside the facility, a timer counted down to nothing; somewhere inland, a handler rehearsed words that called exploitation a gift. I pressed my forearms to the wheel and felt my pulse settle to a calm metronome, not for the crowd, not for the views, just for the path between us.
Micro-hook: A moth hurled itself at the windshield and left a powder kiss, a tiny, foolish devotion to false light. I watched it fall and asked the question that mattered more than the glow: if the next ring is actually her, how do I answer without letting anyone else hear?