His thumb hit the button and the warehouse exhaled a gut-sick hiccup—ring lights pulsing, audio thin as thread. Screens blinked to charcoal and back to gray, then to a jagged mosaic of our faces sliced by static. Ozone rushed the air, sharp as cut pennies. Somewhere beyond the roll-up door, the harbor threw a cold blue sheet of fog against neon, and the gulls stalled their chatter like the city itself held its breath.
“We just lost A,” Sloane’s tech called from the catwalk, voice tight. “Primary uplink dead.”
The chat froze mid-scroll, then bled into buffering, nooo, mirror?, and a hundred record!! replies, ghost-clicks of phantom notifications crawling my skin. Cass’s smile twitched at the edges like paint in sun. He leaned into the outage as if he’d planned for light to love him even without a lens.
I tasted metal and counted four in. I looked straight into Camera Two’s half-life and said, “Nessa.”
“Copy,” Nessa breathed into my monitor earpiece. “Mirrors propagating. Captions pre-baked. Volunteers go.”
Screens flickered; mirror links propagated like phosphorescence in a dark tide. Across the corner monitor, a new window bloomed clean and bright, our caption overlay intact: Redundant stream online. Tap the pinned link. No donations. Refunds and hotlines remain. I watched usernames fracture into migratory lines: to mirror, got it, audio good, tell my mom how, the hive becoming a school of fish.
Cass tried to talk over the static. “This is why we run rehearsals,” he said, tone warm, guardian practiced. “Tech fails, but care—”
“Stay still,” I told the room, not loud, not a command so much as an anchor. My palm hovered, flat and patient, between us and the cameras. “Don’t feed the cut. Breathe. We’re steady.”
Lyla’s fingers pressed the hive jar’s rim, a click-click I felt in my teeth. She didn’t move otherwise; neither did I. Sloane remained a composed geometry near the edge of frame, her profile a metronome; her left hand rested on the pouch with the slate like a promise. I let my shoulders drop a hair so everyone could copy my posture without thinking. The city’s social compact—don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable—met my rule: don’t give a handler new scenes for free.
The main screen guttered again, then caved to black. A heartbeat later, the mirror stream filled the side monitors in full color; our captions were the same hand on the same shoulder. The volunteers posted links like lanterns through fog. Chat hooked itself to the ropes: mirror works, captions still here, refund link pinned, reporting sponsor.
“He tripped a hard cut,” the tech on the catwalk murmured. “Trying to reroute.”
Sloane didn’t take her eyes off the junction box overhead. “Grant,” she said into her mic, “spoof the studio switch and push a soft return. Keep the hash continuous.”
“On it,” came the reply, a whisper threaded with keystrokes. The catwalk glimmered with emergency LEDs, tiny red stars along the metal. The honeycomb shadows on the wall shifted, then steadied, honeyed geometry holding.
Cass shrank his smile a size. He shot a glance to the relay box near the ceiling—the same glance I’d caught in rehearsal on an empty room, the same one Nessa had annotated with a sticker of a finger and the caption do not. He masked the movement with a shrug. “We’re back,” he told a camera that wasn’t listening, then cut his eyes to me. “See? Nothing to fear.”
“Nothing to sell,” I said, not moving my feet.
Micro-hook:
The mirror stream showed a fraction of a second delay—enough for me to watch our stillness prove a point to a past version of us. In that sliver, my jaw looked calmer than my heart felt. Behind that, the chat began to breathe with us: four in, four out, my hands stopped shaking. Someone wrote, “I’m watching on my kid’s tablet in the kitchen. Thank you for the captions.” Nessa pinned it beside refund portal open and don’t drive to locations. The hive jar reflected the caption bar in its curve, a small river of text running on glass.
“What you’re seeing,” I said to the mirror lens—because the mirror now held more eyes than the primary ever did—“is redundancy.”
“What you’re seeing,” Cass overlapped, keeping his voice honeyed, “is teamwork. My team will get us stable.”
“Your team cut it,” I said, and left it there. Sloane didn’t smile, but the corner of the slate glinted like a dry laugh.
The catwalk tech called, “Spoof engaged. We’re emulating the switch’s heartbeat.” A stutter of light ran down the cable snake toward the rack, then the rack sighed. The main screen throbbed once, twice, and color returned. Audio fattened, deepened, like we’d drawn breath together. Device IDs lined up on Sloane’s tablet in neat orthopedic rows.
“Hash continuous,” Grant murmured. “All chains writing. Mirror holds. Main holds. Cass’s box thinks it’s off.”
Calm triumph warmed the ring of my ears. I still didn’t move. Lyla laced and unlaced her fingers near the jar without lifting them. Outside, a gull laughed like it had been paid to puncture drama. Caramel steam from the pier slipped in with the fog, sweet and unhelpful.
“So,” I said, letting air reach my vocal cords like a small favor, “we’re live.”
Chat poured back through the gate like a river remembering gravity: we’re back, holy crap redundancy, mods you’re a gift, refund confirmed, keep receipts, pin that phrase. Nessa turned keep receipts into a soft banner that tucked itself beneath our lower thirds.
Cass tilted his head, that brand of patient disdain reserved for people who decline to applaud a magician’s reset. “Technical difficulties are the price of innovation,” he told the viewers, turning toward his better angle. “We’ll trim this out for the archive so you get a smooth—”
“No trimming,” I said, still not raising my voice. “Archivists, mirror the downbeat.” I glanced once toward the catwalk. “Sloane?”
Sloane lifted the slate and clicked it clean. “Timecode 19:55:01. Chain A, B, C continuous through attempted switch cut. Note: studio switch spoofed, cameras rolling.” Her delivery stayed bone-dry for the record but not for me; in that dryness I heard her silent you got your stillness.
The room took that cue. The volunteers stilled. A uniform at the warehouse door kept his gaze on the crowd control map. Lyla breathed four in, four out, in the rhythm the captions taught strangers earlier this hour. I felt my hands loosen around air I hadn’t realized I was gripping.
Micro-hook:
A DM from Nessa flashed on my wrist monitor: two more mirrors lit, captions preserved. He planned for erasure. We planned for boring. I let the line coast into my bloodstream, cool salt.
Cass swiveled toward a side console with the lazy entitlement of a man born to walk past velvet ropes. The relay hummed again, a nervous insect trapped behind glass. “We’ll scrub the lag,” he assured chat. “You deserve clean.”
“They deserve truth,” I said. “Lag lives in the truth.” I didn’t look at him; I looked at the lens, and because I didn’t blink, the viewers didn’t either. “You’re watching a choice: keep the record, or sell the rescue.”
The chat answered for itself: keep the record, mirrors > myth, do not scrub, archivists here. Someone pasted a block of raw timecodes like a prayer.
“He tried to erase,” another wrote. “We watched you outrun that.” The sentence moved me more than I wanted, because I had once lost a record and buried that year where my ledger lives. I let the memory pass without knocking anything over.
Sloane’s tech called down, “He wired two redundancies of his own—kill on power and kill on signal. We cut the power loop with our spoof. Signal loop still hot if he hard yanks.”
“Thank you,” I said, then shifted my attention a half degree toward Cass. “If you pull a cable, every angle shows it.”
He laughed, performing magnanimity, palms up. “Why would I do that?”
“Because edits are profit,” I said. “And live is risk.”
He angled his head like a crow. “Risk is courage.”
“Risk is something you priced,” I said, and gave the lens a small half-smile so the chat wouldn’t boil over. The overlay softened its tone to match: Breathe. We’re steady. A QR mural outside the roll-up door pulsed through the fog, this week’s art a rotating honeycomb that changed masks every ten seconds. On the concrete near my foot, its reflection crawled like a living grid.
The city’s rule—don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable—kept flirting with our moment, but we declined the date. We kept our bodies boring. We let the story do the work.
Micro-hook:
Nessa’s voice threaded in again, quick and calm: “White hats confirm: mirrors are on public nodes, not yours. He can’t DMCA the captions; fair use locked. Also, chat is self-policing doxxing attempts. You bought us quiet.”
“We bought us quiet,” I said, not into comms now but into the mic. “Thank you.” I let my eyes find Lyla’s and hold a count. Her shoulders had dropped that second millimeter that means a human animal trusts gravity again.
“Audience,” Cass said, climbing into his Guardian posture with the persistence of ivy, “let’s stay open-hearted. These folks are doing their jobs. I do mine. The innovation here—mirror farms, police collaboration—this is historic.”
“Historic would be letting a woman speak without monetizing her breath,” I answered, and I didn’t have to look at Lyla to know she had heard me frame the next act.
The mirror-stream’s chat flared a new color—cheers in text form, little parties of punctuation. we’re with you, captions are a lifeline, refund done, report sent, sponsor muted, keep going.
Sloane’s voice was a thread pulled taut without snapping. “Mara, we have stable recording across three chains. When you’re ready, we can move to the document phase.”
“In one minute,” I said. I wanted the quiet to teach the room a last thing. I looked past the cameras to the open roll-up, to the cliff-backed harbor channeling fog like a cathedral nave. Evening neon smeared the wet street outside, and the salted caramel steam from the pier swam against the sterile ring-light ozone. Larkspur Bay had always sold scenes; tonight it lent us a stage for stillness.
Cass tried one more angle, reaching toward a lower panel with a casual knuckle. A soft tch clicked; somewhere, a tiny red LED winked. The main screen didn’t budge. The mirror didn’t blink. Sloane’s tech murmured, “Dummy switch. He’s pressing a placebo.”
“Redundancy outmaneuvers you,” I said, and let the sentence float directly to the people who’d DMed their grocery-list worries to a woman on a screen, who’d paid premiums for a proximity no one should sell. “We’re not here to whip your care into labor. We’re here to keep a record.”
The chat cheered—blunt and unfancy—because they knew a plain sentence when they heard one. keep a record, they echoed, laddering the words into the scroll like a railing we could all grab.
“Then,” I said, turning a degree so the hive jar glowed in the angle, “we’ll read aloud.”
Cass’s smile went thin—just enough that the camera could measure it if a judge ever asked. The ring lights stopped humming. The warehouse found a stillness I’d only ever felt at dawn above the bakery, steam mixing with soy and sugar while my mother counted buns and numbers. I thought about the ledger I kept there, and the empty lines I wanted never to fill again.
“Stay still,” I told the room one last time, gentler now, because stillness had turned into cooperation and I needed it to turn into listening. The word traveled along concrete and up the catwalk and slid out the door into neon and fog.
Sloane lifted the slate like a temple bell. “Timecode 19:58:33,” she said. “All systems green.”
I nodded once at Lyla, then back at the lens. The captions tucked themselves into place with the lightest touch.
“We’re going to read some contracts,” I said.
The chat brightened, then steadied on a line I hadn’t expected to see and needed desperately: we’ll hear it.
Calm triumph didn’t flare; it settled. I drew the jar an inch closer to my sister—haven and hive, sweetness without trap—and glanced, just once, at Cass’s hands.
They were empty for now.
The silence held, rich and watchful, and I let it hold me while I shaped the first clause in my mouth, already tasting the iron of the fight ahead and the sugar of keeping the record true.