I drafted the bait with my jaw tight and my shoulders lowered the way a runner lowers arms at the line. The burner account wore a beige suit and a portfolio grid I’d mocked up from stock kitchens. Bio: “Brand systems consultant. Opex + aesthetics.” I kept the avatar forgettable on purpose. The DM I composed to the apron shop’s public account read like praise polished to a sales sheen.
“Admire the hem engineering,” I typed. “Curious about stitch density and stain-wick under stress. Flip demo?”
I let my fingers hover over send. The pier behind me breathed sugar and salt in equal measure, the salted caramel steam curling off the morning vendor while Tide Market unlatched its honeycomb cages. The ghost-click of phantom notifications brushed my skin even with my phone on Do Not Disturb. I pressed send and laid the burner face down.
“You’re sure this is the move?” Nessa asked through my earbuds, her voice low, half caffeine, half calculation. She was standing a block away under a QR mural already shifting its colors like a fish. I could picture her holding her laptop near a coffee cup that would go cold.
“He can’t resist being admired,” I said. “And he can’t resist teaching when he thinks it shores up the mystique. If he flips, we get the hem. If he preens, we get the angle.”
“And if he smells a trap?”
“We don’t give him scent,” I said. “We smell like money.”
My screen blinked. The shop story updated: LIVE IN 5 — product tour + Q&A. A yellow countdown ring tightened over a photo of white aprons folded neat on honeycomb shelving. My stomach gave the unlovely lurch of elevator physics.
“We’re on,” I said.
“Recording,” Nessa answered. “I’ll mirror to the drive and run the spectro when I can.”
I slid into the edge of the crowd that had already begun to coagulate around the container stall. No one looked at me because I didn’t make a scene, and the city rewards that. Neon from last night’s bar sign ghosted the wet pavement; a ring light on a clamp sizzled ozone into the air with an electrical whisper. In the stall window, a chrome mixer waited like a polished witness.
The live blinked open to a medium shot: aprons, a cutting board, the corner of a closed laptop. A set of hands slid into frame and smoothed an apron like it was a pet. They were elegant hands, long-knuckled, with a tiny pale line at the base of the thumb—scar tissue I recognized from a farmhouse handshake over tea too sweet for the truth spilling out behind it.
“Good morning, makers,” a voice said, warmed into affability by a compressor. He kept himself off-camera, of course; the talent architect loved to narrate from the wings. “You’ve asked for more behind-the-seams, so let’s look at what makes this garment sing.”
“That’s him,” I whispered, though I didn’t need to. The cadence tuned to a familiar pitch: TED Talk meets kitchen-counter sermon. Nessa murmured, “Got the waveform,” and I pictured her meters dancing.
I typed into the live chat on the burner, keeping the punctuation smooth. “Love the clean finish. Can you show underside of hem? Curious about wicking channel.”
He paused. His fingers pinched the edge of cloth and then stopped, like a man savoring dessert by waiting an extra beat. “Great question, @HollowaySystems,” he said, reading the name I’d stitched to the burner. “We care a lot about how this behaves on-camera and, importantly, off-camera.”
He flipped the apron.
The hem flashed: immaculate stitching, the repeating ghost of HUSH/USH I’d cataloged, and a subtle piping that made the fold sing to the lens. The chrome mixer rocked a centimeter when the fabric brushed it, and the bowl caught his reflection, small and round as a moon in a cup.
His face lived there, reversed and crisp enough to catalog—the sweep of hair he paid to look unstudied, the thin mouth, the dimple that conned sincerity. He leaned in a fraction to admire his own engineering. Proof arrived as light.
“There it is,” I breathed.
“Freeze,” Nessa hissed. “Hold position. Don’t chat. I’m capping.”
The crowd at the container stall shifted uneasily with the energy of a reveal without knowing why. The ring light haloed the mixer so the reflection wore a crown. I curled my fingers inward so my nails wouldn’t drum the counter.
Cass kept talking. “We use a double fold with a stay stitch to keep the face clean for close-ups,” he said. “Notice the inner channel—we do that so spills wash away from the camera.” He laughed softly. “Magic is management.”
I wanted to break the phone in my hand and also to frame it. Instead, I made my breath deliberate, in and out, so the microphone in my earbuds wouldn’t pick up the body’s urge to announce itself.
“Okay,” Nessa said. “We have reflection at twelve seconds, again at twenty-three. The second is cleaner—he turns his head toward the clamp mic.”
“You’re sure the bowl isn’t a plant?” I asked, not because I doubted, but because doubt keeps the blade sharp.
“The bowl is not a plant,” she said. “It’s a standard ProLine mixer, 6-quart, off-the-shelf. The distortion is predictable. I can pull a negative exposure and punch the mids. That’s his face.”
Cass angled the apron again. “Some of you asked about stain resistance. We tested with coffee, turmeric, and beet juice,” he said. “And yes, we got a chef to throw a little simulated blood at it on Halloween because we know how you are.”
The chat poured hearts and question marks. I kept my burner quiet and watched the Rube Goldberg inside my chest tumble from nerves toward exhilaration. He had put his face on the record; he had flipped the thing my sister told me he would; the world had turned the bowl into a mirror and him into a man, not a puppet master behind a curtain.
Micro-hook: A gust dragged the fog inland in a single white breath and my skin goose-pimpled. In the hiss of the live, a click ticked—sharp, mechanical, faint—the polite throat-clear of a relay I’d heard in a sublevel under a hayloft.
“Did you hear that?” I whispered.
“Say the time,” Nessa said.
“Twenty-eight point six,” I said. “Again at forty. That’s the same relay.”
“I’m folding the frequency,” she said. Keys chattered in my ear. “Hum at 60Hz plus a little 120 harmonic. There’s a cycling at sixteen seconds—HVAC. Background room tone matches our farmhouse annex sample within tolerance.”
My mouth went dry like I’d licked craft paper. “He’s in the annex.”
“He’s in a room that hums like the annex,” she said, careful. “Also—listen.” She looped the audio back to me with the highs heightened. Under Cass’s contented murmur, a low, lazy beat rose and fell. “That’s the down-converted fan profile from the same Trane unit we logged by your pen bug. And I’m getting a null at 1300 Hz where a rack would eat sound—same as the annex.”
“Call it aligned,” I said. “We don’t need poetry. We need a warrant that doesn’t spook him.”
“Agreed,” she said. “I’ll package the spectro with the screen caps and the reflection composites. Sloane can route for the next motion.”
On-screen, Cass began quoting a philosophy of labor dressed as care. “When creators feel safe,” he said, “they can risk. Risk makes art, art makes community, community makes rescue.”
“He wrote that on the farmhouse whiteboard,” I said. “Danger equals devotion.”
“Pull back,” Nessa said. “You’re spiraling. Breathe.”
I breathed. The ozone bite from the ring light found the back of my throat and tasted like pennies. I lifted my eyes and met my own reflection in the mixer. My face didn’t look like a hero; it looked like someone who learned to keep the camera bored.
Cass finished the hem lecture with a flourish. “And because you asked,” he said, “I’ll show the underside again. We’re proud of the truth in our stitches.”
He lifted the edge, grazed the mixer, and gave us a second, longer look in steel.
“Got him,” Nessa whispered. “Frame twenty-nine to forty-one. Three stills, one slow clip. I can clean the highlight on his cheek and still keep it honest.”
My burner buzzed with a DM. The shop auto-responder had sent a thank-you and a coupon code. My thumb twitched with the urge to answer with teeth. I pocketed the phone instead.
“Don’t you dare post,” I told myself.
“Say that again so the universe hears it,” Nessa said.
“I won’t post,” I said. “Not today.”
The chat swelled with viewers begging for more behind-the-scenes. Cass obliged, pivoting the camera to the marble counter. The shot caught a corner of a wall-mounted panel with a honeycomb texture—acoustic foam I’d already logged. The glue pattern on one hex was off by a millimeter. The same flaw lived in a still from the steganographic barn blueprint. He had moved pieces, not the stage.
“We’re set,” Nessa said. “I’m rendering the audio signature against the sublevel scrape. That relay click frequency is a match. The location aligns.”
“Wrap it and save it,” I said. “No shares. No leaks. Sloane first.”
“Copy,” she said. “And Mara—nice bait.”
The compliment rolled off me and sank. I couldn’t afford to let the body learn to crave applause.
Cass closed the live by resting his palm on the apron stack like a priest at a lectern. “We care,” he said, warm as a blanket you didn’t ask for. “We always care.”
I ended the stream and leaned against the stall’s cold steel. The ring light buzzed, the neon argued with daylight, and the harbor’s breath pressed a palm to the city’s mouth. People around me resumed treating pavement like a stage, scanning QR codes with their coffees, smiling at each other in the way that records well.
“Sloane?” I said into my phone.
“Working,” Nessa answered. “I’ll ping her once the composite’s clean.”
“Tell her the mixer gave us a face,” I said. “Tell her the hum gave us a room.”
“And you?” she asked.
“I’m going to message our hive without feeding it,” I said. “I’ll draft a line for later: We value safety over spectacle. Don’t tip; don’t clip; document privately.”
Micro-hook: In the corner of my screen, the burner received a new DM from a blank account: a single honey drop. Not Lyla; wrong channel. A plant? A fan? A test? I ignored it and breathed through the urge to touch anything that loved the glow.
I crossed the walkway to the far rail where the wind carried less caramel and more brine. Below, water slapped the pylons with patient hands. I pulled the notebook from my bag and wrote in block letters: VISUAL CONFIRMATION: CASS. LOCATION: ANNEX ALIGNMENT. Then I added smaller, meaner words I would never say into a camera: You put your face in a bowl, man.
My phone buzzed again—Nessa this time. “Sending first composite,” she said. “Also, I isolated a click pattern you mentioned from the raid night. It’s the same cycle—the PTZ sweep. He never changed the habit.”
“Habits are how we hang him,” I said. “But only when we choose the hook.”
“You okay?”
“Exhilarated and nauseated,” I said. “Goldilocks zone.”
“Discipline, Mara,” she reminded me, and in her voice I heard every poster in every crisis room I’d ever run. “We sit on it. We call the detective. We let the processors learn it from us, not the timeline.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
I lifted my head. Across the row, an employee hung a new apron on a display hook, smooth hands smoothing smoother cloth. The hem glinted under the ring light and the mixer watched everything without judgment.
I messaged Sloane a single sentence in our secure channel: We have Cass’s reflection + audio match to annex; need to brief in person.
Then I closed both phones, slid them into the inner pocket of my jacket, and pressed the fabric flat with my palm until the want quieted. I would not make a scene. I would not give him a purge as a pretext.
The tide pressed in like a decision postponing itself.
I took one last look at the chrome bowl—at the warped memory of a man who believed in risk he never had to carry—and asked the next question under my breath so the ocean could keep it for me: when the processors freeze his accounts tomorrow, will he run to move Lyla before we can get there, or will the mirror keep him one beat too proud?