The clock coughed at twelve hours and replaced the countdown with balloons that did not pop. A poll unrolled like a placemat: Where should the finale be? Four options, coded in sugary fonts that matched Cass’s previous sets. Harbor Loft, Farmhouse Overlook, Tide Market Night, Old Freeway Warehouse. He didn’t write “old”; the fans did. The name had already stuck to the metal like gum.
I tasted the harbor in the air—salt and diesel braided with caramel from the pier kiosk downstairs. The fog was thinning; neon was waking. My phone lit with a ghost-click that wasn’t a notification, just a phantom habit. I opened my laptop anyway and pulled up the poll’s network tab. The inflow stuttered, then smoothed into a coil, traffic resolving into clusters by ASN and timestamp.
“You’re doing it with bots,” I said to the screen, keeping my voice low, not to scare anything away. “Of course you are.”
The Tide Market Night option jumped first—three percent in a blink, then seven. The IPs bloomed from a handful of cheap VPS ranges, then forked across residential proxies. I watched the headers like they were raindrops on glass, already mapping the fingerprint: same headless combination, same referer string that pointed to a “fan toolkit” page I knew Cass seeded with badges. The Old Freeway Warehouse bar followed more slowly, rising in a rhythmic sawtooth, human votes pacing the machine drips, lending “authenticity” with their own desire.
I called Sloane before the chart could finish its pretty lie. She picked up on the second buzz.
“Talk,” she said.
“The poll’s live,” I said. “He’s letting the crowd ‘direct’ the finale. Two options are rising unnaturally—Tide and the warehouse. The headless requests are old friends.”
“We knew he’d prime the stage,” she said. “What’s your read on where he actually wants us?”
“He wants police to perform at Tide Market,” I said. “Gulls, murals, neon. Honeycomb shelves in the pop-ups. It photographs like accountability.”
“But?”
“But the warehouse is where the kits are,” I said. “It’s where the ghost inventory cycles money. He can pivot to Tide if he has to, but the gear is cabled for the warehouse—power strips labeled, camera marks taped down. I tasted dust on the air there. It’s ready.”
I heard her thumb drum once against the phone casing. “We tag the warehouse and prep for Tide. Not a raid. Quiet positions.”
“Lawful boring,” I said. “We hold the warrant in frame, not the guns.”
“We hold the warrant in frame,” she repeated, as if she was teaching herself to like the taste. “Send me the latest on the poll traffic. If he argues crowd will, we answer with integrity, not force.”
“Copy,” I said. “I’ll package the network graph.”
I could have stared at the bars until my pupils shaped themselves like rectangles. Instead, I opened my secure notes and pasted in a short paragraph for the reporter who’d agreed to standards last time. I put the warehouse address in the body, not the subject, not the attachment. I wrote what we had, not what I wanted: quiet trackers on pallets; storyboard recovered; bots tilting poll toward prebuilt sets; lawful plan pending verification. I added two cropped images—one of the storyboard’s “rescue fail → resurrection” arrow, one of a plug strip with hex stickers and a tiny grease thumbprint that wasn’t mine.
I called her. Distance static filled the space before she spoke.
“I can’t run a map without a second source,” she said. “You know that.”
“You can run an embargo with a verification plan,” I said. “I need you to be ready when we say ‘go.’ I don’t want Cass to control the frame. Not again.”
“What’s the clock?”
I looked at the site again. The poll glowed like a vending machine. “Twelve hours,” I said. “Less, if he speeds it up to ride the night. He’s testing the elasticity of desire.”
She exhaled into her mic. I could hear typing—the quick, precise kind you only learn in newsrooms where you might be sued. “I’ll take the address under embargo,” she said. “I’ll hold until I verify on the ground or with a second source.”
“Sloane will not confirm,” I said. “She can’t. But she’ll go lawful.”
“Then I’ll verify via lights and rigs,” she said. “If I can see his stage marks through a window, I can call it ready. You’ll feed me the bot analysis for context.”
“I’ll feed you only what’s verifiable,” I said. “No adjectives. Just dates and headers.”
“Embargo holds until sunrise unless it’s broken by Cass or a public action,” she said, reciting it like a vow. “If he turns the poll into a pin, I’m moving.”
“I don’t want him to martyr out,” I said. “I want him in daylight with a warrant next to the lens.”
“Then make sure your detective doesn’t trip a fire alarm for drama,” she said. “You told me boring is stronger.”
“It is,” I said, and hung up before I could let gratitude soften my edges.
I packaged the bot log: ASN lists, referer strings, UA fingerprints pinned to their midline. I noted the time each spike corresponded to chat prompts from reactors who were “analyzing” the poll in real time. The smell of ring-light ozone drifted up through the floorboards from someone rehearsing upstairs; I recognized the high note of it now, like a battery exhaling. Honeycomb shadows from my blinds fell across my notepad and trapped my bullet points in neat little cells.
The Tide Market Night option took a theatrical lead, but the warehouse bar stubbornly chased it, a shadow that refused to be edited out. I copied the chart to Sloane with a single sentence: Bots tilt Tide; money loves the warehouse. She answered with a location pin that wasn’t the warehouse, wasn’t Tide, but a gravel lot two blocks east: a place for staging where no one would stage.
I left my apartment with the laptop in my backpack and the manila folder flat against my spine, its paper stiffness a kind of spine for my body too. The stairwell air tasted like caramel and fog; the rail held the imprint of a hundred hands. Down at street level, the QR mural on the container-shop changed frames as I passed, offering discounts to anyone who promised to “care louder.” A gull laughed at the copy and then at me.
I crossed to my car and drove the long curl around the harbor, cliffs pressing the road into a ribbon. Downtown wore its neon like costume jewelry. Even at night, the pop-up row looked ready for its close-up—lit edges, ring lights blooming like sea anemones, honeycomb shelving cut into silhouettes. The city’s social compact vibrated under everything: don’t make a scene unless it pays.
Sloane texted: park behind the print shop; walk light.
I slid the car into shadow and told my breath to be useful: keep me moving, keep me quiet. The freeway hummed above, a tenor line under the gulls’ unruly soprano. When I reached the gravel lot, Sloane materialized from the dark with a nod, her jacket zipped up to her throat, hair braided tight, no shine.
“Positions?” I asked.
She pointed with two fingers, not the whole hand: across the road, behind the billboard, near the storm drain where the pole camera could see but not glare. “No lights. No bark. We’ll look like the night.”
“If he goes Tide?” I asked.
“We use our feet and our radios,” she said. “But the bots are lying us into a brand moment there. The warehouse feels sticky.”
We stood in the damp for a beat and listened to the freeway breathe. Somewhere, a forklift coughed awake, then went quiet, like a throat reconsidering a lie.
“You good?” she asked.
“I’m a jar of bees,” I said. “But the lid’s on.”
She smiled with one corner of her mouth; it looked like a paper cut healing. “I put in another warrant affidavit,” she said. “Broker accounts tied to the ghost inventory shell. Judge will read it at five. If I get it, we walk in with paper on two fronts.”
“Twice the boring,” I said. “He’ll choke on it.”
“He’ll try to chew it into content,” she said. “We’ll keep it dry.”
My phone vibrated with the reporter’s text: Embargo accepted. On site in 40. Will verify via lens tape + rig swing. She added a photo from her car window: dull metal, a door seam, a strip of light thinned to a thread. I could smell dust she hadn’t sent me. I could taste it anyway.
We moved like a piece of punctuation across the lot and hugged the back wall of the print shop. Sloane checked in with hand signals and brief whispers. “Two on the east corner. One at the rail cut. One at the cross-street with eyes on fan traffic.”
“And me?” I asked.
“You’re the line between story and spin,” she said. “You stand where the frame can hold you and you don’t move unless there’s a reason that survives replay.”
“Copy,” I said, taking my hands out of my pockets to prove I’d keep them still.
The poll pulsed on my phone, bars inching like ants. Chatters were exhorting followers to “vote with your heart,” which everyone knows means “vote with your fear.” The bots obliged. The humans followed the bots. The bots followed Cass. I stared long enough to make a decision that felt like stepping off a curb into traffic.
I sent the warehouse address to my reporter again, this time with a line I’d rehearsed in my head for months and never believed I’d use: You have our receipts. You have our clock. Keep your eye on the stage marks, not the faces.
She wrote back, Understood.
Fog thinned further and the honeycomb pattern in the print shop’s tile showed itself, hexes holding dirt in perfect geometry. I pressed my fingertip into a grout line and felt grit stick to my skin. People will always love shapes, I thought. We love to feel held by edges. Cass cut his edges out of us.
A car eased past, bass low, headlights off. It didn’t slow. Sloane’s team breathed without sound. Across the road, a light strip inside the warehouse brightened by a hair, then dimmed. My teeth touched gently and stayed there.
“If he flips to Tide at the last minute?” I asked.
“Then he reveals where he’s weakest,” Sloane said. “He moves toward applause when his math breaks.” She looked at my phone. “What’s the poll say now?”
I showed her. Tide Market Night had taken a “lead” that looked heroic. Old Freeway Warehouse had never left the lane.
“He wants cops under murals,” she said.
“He wants cops performing a loss,” I said. “He wants me to run and chase and collide with his lens.”
“Then don’t,” she said. “Let him choose. We choose procedure.”
The reporter called. I put her on speaker and kept the phone low.
“I can see rigging tape inside,” she whispered. “White gaffer marks at two meters, a slate leaning on a crate. I can smell sawdust and something like glycerin. The door has a drop lock, but someone rolled cables under it and sanded the edge. This place is live.”
Sloane tapped my shoulder to show she was listening. “Embargo holds,” the reporter added. “If he pins the location with the poll, I’m pushing.”
“Hold until dawn or pin, whichever comes first,” I said. “We don’t spook him into Tide.”
“Copy,” she said. “Be careful.”
I nodded into the dark like the phone could see me and ended the call.
The freeway muttered to itself. A gull stitched a ragged arc against the pale smear of cliff. The ring-light ozone sharpened for a heartbeat, then faded, like someone testing a dimmer on the other side of metal.
“We’re in it,” Sloane said, so quiet the words felt like warmth more than sound.
“We’re in it,” I repeated. I rolled my shoulders back until my scapulae found the wall and stayed.
I watched the poll for one more minute. Then I closed it and opened my sister’s last whispered text to me, a week old: safe-ish. wait. please. I held the phone with both hands and let the words warm my skin.
The countdown site refreshed and flashed a new prompt: Final votes lock in one hour. A timer blinked. The bars vibrated, more noise than signal. Somewhere inside the warehouse, something clinked against metal, a small, decisive sound.
I took a breath and kept it shallow, the way I do when I balance a tray in my mother’s bakery past a crowd. I let the scent of caramel and salt draw a line through the moment. I let the honeycomb shadows on my knuckles remind me that community is a shape you build, not a net you throw.
“We’re ready,” Sloane said into her sleeve.
I didn’t ask ready for what. I asked myself the only question I trusted in that electric quiet: when his crowd crowns a stage and his bots try to sanctify it, will our boring be strong enough to hold him still—or will he sprint for the mural and make his martyr out of the neon?