Tide Market woke like a stage set—container doors yawning up, LEDs strobing from soft blush to honey gold, gulls arguing over some fry-corpse behind the dumpsters. Fog rolled down the cliff in a slow pour that made the morning gauzy; by evening it would calcify into neon. A line had already formed outside the pop-up labeled with Lyla’s palette: terracotta planters, blush velvet mats, and a honeycomb screen that threw hex-shadows across everyone’s ankles.
“They’ve been here since five,” Nessa said, sliding next to me with a paper cup that smelled like burnt sugar and cheap cinnamon. “Caretakers up front, Sleuths in the middle, Rage Donors circling like scooters.”
“And brand reps smiling like their teeth are performance metrics,” I said.
The reps had perfected that retail grin—upper face still, lower face gleaming. They wore aprons from the capsule: cream canvas with honeycomb stitching on the bib and a tiny, almost shy chain of black squares stitched into the hem. The squares weren’t printed; they were thread—QR in cloth.
“We keep the forum calm,” Nessa said. “No raids, no calls, no coordinates unless confirmed by law. You do the receipts.”
“I’ll do the receipts,” I said, and stepped closer to the merch table.
Salted caramel steam drifted from the pier kiosks; someone torched an orange peel and the air lifted. On my tongue, it tasted like optimism with a singe. The reps handed out numbered tokens, ring-light glow diffusing off a portable panel meant to make faces buy.
One rep caught my eye and doubled the wattage. “Welcome! Limited run. Every sale supports a community kitchen.”
I nodded, paid for an apron with cash—receipts as shield and key—and moved to the end of the table to examine the hem under the excuse of checking stitches. The honeycomb pattern felt deliberate under my fingers, a fine grit of thread. The hem QR looked complete at first glance, but the black squares were split across a double fold: scan it flat, it said one thing; scan it while worn, it said another.
“Ready?” Nessa asked, phone already angled.
“Three… two…” I lifted my own phone. The scan grabbed instantly and loaded a clean charity page with smiling volunteers ladling soup. Paragraphs read like a bedtime story for brand safety. I tapped through the “About” tab and kept the camera square active on a second phone. The page’s favicon winked; the URL segment after the slash jittered half a character.
Mid-scan, the charity page folded like a magic trick. A white screen flashed, then a stark page loaded with a single line: SYNC TO CLOCK: 65:14:32, and below it, a hex-grid image with six highlighted cells and a micro-caption: hex→lat: columns=A, rows=1, offset=stitch_count÷2.
“Got it,” I said, thumb hammering screenshots.
“They hid the flip behind a timing gate,” Nessa breathed. “Probably a debounce tied to the phone’s scanning delay. God, that’s so—”
“—expensive,” I finished. “This isn’t a fan stunt.”
The brand reps kept smiling. The line shuffled forward; phones rose like a quiet forest at dawn. Behind us, a small circle formed around a person in a hoodie and a glossy black half-mask with an anodized sheen. The mask covered nose and mouth, chin sculpted to a comic-book jaw. A gimbal and phone perched in their hand like a hawk.
“Live in five,” the masked voice said, voice-filter on, beach-sand smooth. “We’ll react together, chat. We care so much.”
My phone buzzed with the forum’s heartbeat. Nessa shot me a look I’d already learned to read: we do not feed. I turned my back enough to keep the reactor out of frame while I zoomed into the hex-grid on my screen.
The highlighted cells formed a crooked N. Columns labeled A through L, rows 1 to 12, a legend tucked into a corner like a shamed footnote: lat degrees = (A-index × 3) + (row/2); lon degrees = (stitch irregularities in honeycomb seams); tiny text I had to squint for: ignore seam allowances.
“Irregularities?” Nessa said, catching my line of sight. “You mean the off-kilter hexes?”
“Count the slightly longer stitches,” I said. “Every sixth thread over/under, there’s a micro-stutter. I saw the same signature on the neon mount in the loft. Someone’s handwriting in thread.”
We moved to a quieter pocket by the sea wall where the QR mural glowed in sherbet gradients and gulls pecked at an abandoned onion ring. I laid the apron across my forearm, ironed it smooth with the heel of my palm, and photographed the hem in sections. The phone’s haptic tick kept time with the countdown in my head. The ocean breathed in cold and breathed out salt; my fingertips went numb.
“Talk me through it,” Nessa said, and kept her voice low enough to avoid the reactor’s mic.
“Columns A through L,” I said, tracing the hex image. “Highlighted cells: A4, B5, E3, F7, H2, L9. If I apply the caption’s ‘offset=stitch_count÷2,’ I divide the number of long stitches by two and shift the row index forward that many units. That maps to lat degrees when multiplied by three, plus row halves. It’s cute.”
“It’s a trap for crowds,” she said.
“It’s a clue-delivery system,” I said. “Distributed like communion.”
“That’s worse,” she said.
The masked reactor’s voice floated over the hum, syruped with empathy. “We are all investigators today,” they cooed. “Scan with me.”
Their chat scrolled on their screen like locusts. SCAN NOW! OMG CARE SO MUCH. BUY TWO TO SUPPORT. Tips pinged with little chimes. Every time the QR flipped, the reactor’s feed posted the screenshot within seconds, an overlay arrow pointing at the same hex-grid I’d just captured, but with a merch link tucked underneath like a buzzing tick.
“Notice their timing,” I said. “Either they’re standing on the same latency, or someone is feeding them the flips a breath early.”
“I’ll log response delta,” Nessa said. “I’ll start a sheet—time of QR flip versus reactor post. If they’re within a second, it’s pipeline. If they’re within two, it’s proximity with a fast finger.”
A woman in a yellow beanie brushed past, hem crinkling. “Do you think it’s real?” she whispered to no one in particular. “Like, danger real?”
I kept my mouth shut. The city’s social compact hovered over us like a theater curtain: don’t make a scene unless it’s profitable. Right now, profit and panic were learning to harmonize.
A brand rep offered me a sticker sheet: hexagons and the word HIVE in looping script. I took it as camouflage and turned back to the hem.
“I need thread counts,” I said. “Hold the edge.”
Nessa pinned the apron to the sea-wall bench with her thumbs, their nail polish a chipped galaxy. I counted each longer stitch aloud, a metronome in numbers. “One, two, three, four, five, long… one, two, three, four, five, long…”
“You’re at thirty,” she said. “That’s fifteen if we divide by two.”
“Offset of fifteen,” I repeated, and plugged it into the highlighted cell math. “A4 becomes A19, which wraps around the grid to row seven plus something… They’re using modulo like a toy maker.”
“Fine,” Nessa said. “Toy math I can do if it gets us to a road with a name.”
Micro-hook: If the apron told the crowd where to run, I had to hear the echo first—or the city would bleed on the wrong curb.
The masked reactor pivoted nearer, the gimbal’s motor whining faint as a mosquito. “We respect law enforcement,” they intoned, “but we move faster, together.” Their viewers spammed heart emojis like confetti cannons. In the corner of their stream, a tiny clock mirrored the master countdown, synchronized to the second. “At sixty-four hours,” they promised, “we act.”
“We act now,” I said under my breath, and kept counting.
The QR subpage refreshed with a hiccup and displayed a second image: the hex grid rotated ninety degrees with a new caption: lat/long swap at seam break. Below that, a line of text pretended to be altruism and read like a dare: If you care, share. The brand rep’s smile didn’t flicker. A wave slapped the sea wall like applause in a bad room.
I stitched the math in my notes. “Hex columns A through L map to longitude degrees once we hit the seam break,” I said. “We’re building a pair: lat from the first hint, long from the second.”
“Give me a preliminary,” Nessa said, thumbs flying across her phone, face tilted to avoid the reactor’s camera. “I’ll shade the forum with ‘we’re on it; don’t run.’”
“North thirty-seven-ish,” I said, roughing the numbers, “West one twenty-two-ish. Shockingly not Mars.”
“So, here,” she said dryly, eyes flicking toward the cliffs above the harbor. “But ‘here’ is a lot of places.”
“We’re not giving them a place,” I said. “We’re giving Sloane evidence.”
The reactor’s chat spiked as their overlay flashed a blurred map preview with a circle over the wrong side of the marina. I felt the crowd inhale.
“Nope,” I said to Nessa, fast and low. “If they push east, they’ll spill into the daycare lot. That’s not happening on my watch.”
“Language?” she asked.
“Gentle,” I said, and typed a forum post with fingers that wanted to stab. Heads up: We’re analyzing the QR flips; please hold on location guesses until we validate with law. Scanning in crowd can introduce errors. Report suspicious activity; don’t swarm. Care is patient. I hit post. My chest unclenched a millimeter.
“You just told a city trained to sprint to breathe,” Nessa said.
“Someone has to,” I said.
A third flip fired. This time, the subpage showed a photo of the apron’s interior tag with a stitched row of tiny Xs and a whisper of text barely inked into the weave: hex→lat rounding rules: 0.5 up at cliff, down at tide. I took slow, perfect screenshots, then photographed the tag itself under my phone light to confirm the ghost text existed in thread, not just in JPEG.
“Cliff versus tide,” Nessa said. “They’re using our geography as a coin flip.”
“They’re trying to recruit the audience to solve it in public,” I said. “Each flip is a new job to keep touch-time up and carts open.”
“Safety becomes content,” she said, dry enough to cut paper. “Rescue becomes ransom.”
The masked reactor posted the tag within a second of my screenshot. Their overlay placed a pulsing dot not on the daycare this time, but at the edge of a cliff overlook trailhead.
“They’re following you,” Nessa said.
“Or they’re fed by the same hand,” I said. “Either way, we’re not pointing a single civilian to any trail.”
I pinged Sloane a clean trio of images with a one-line summary: Merch drop carries QR flips: charity → clock sync → hex-grid → seam rule; appears to encode local coordinates via thread irregularities; reactor channel posts within seconds. I added: We’ll compute privately; can you place a quiet eye on the overlook, not public.
A kid in a puffy jacket tugged her mom’s sleeve and pointed at the masked streamer. “Look, a hero,” she said. My teeth pressed together hard enough to taste metal.
Nessa tapped my wrist, a steadying metronome. “Focus,” she said. “Thread counts.”
I breathed back to the hem. Counting is prayer when chaos wants purchase. “Long, long, long,” I murmured, then, “short,” then “long” again. The pattern locked under my eyes. I adjusted for the seam break rule and converted the hex indices into numbers: one string for north, one for west. The numbers smelled like something real.
“Prelim?” Nessa asked.
“Thirty-seven point eight, minus one twenty-two point five,” I said, low. “That puts us near the overlook above the bay. But that’s within a half-kilometer; the rounding rule could shift it.”
She swallowed. “If we push that publicly, we’ll trigger a pilgrimage. Someone will trip a toddler with a gimbal.”
“We don’t push it,” I said. “We hand it to Sloane and go ourselves with eyes, not wheels.”
The masked reactor spun to face the crowd, gimbal high. “Our community cares,” they purred. “We’ll meet at the viewpoints when we hit the engagement threshold. Bring a friend.”
“There it is,” Nessa whispered. “Participation tax.”
Micro-hook: If he could summon a crowd with a sentence, I needed a sentence that could disperse one.
I ordered two more aprons and paid again, because some evidence deserves redundancy. The brand rep slipped a honeycomb sticker into my bag with a smile that hadn’t cracked once. “Thank you for supporting safety,” she said.
“I’m supporting thread,” I said, and she blinked, not sure if that was a joke.
We stepped away from the line into the alley where the generators hummed like content servers and the air smelled like ozone and t-shirt ink. I typed Sloane a fuller decode, added the seam-break logic, and flagged the reactor’s latency. Nessa drafted a calm forum post: We’re analyzing. Please do not go to any overlook. Wait for a verified update. Her thumb hovered and then landed.
“Think it’ll hold?” she asked.
“People want to be useful,” I said. “We’ve got to give them a job that isn’t stampede.”
My phone vibrated. Sloane: Quiet units will check the overlook. Do not publish coordinates. Your rounding note helps. Keep your circle small.
“Circle’s two people,” I murmured. “And a city that thinks it’s family.”
The reactor’s stream pinged with a new overlay: BREAKING: PRIVATE TIP CONFIRMS BLUFFS. The chat howled. I closed my eyes for a breath of cold salt and cheap generator fumes and let the anger skate through me without nesting.
“We move,” I said. “We do it without feeding him.”
“You think it’s him?” Nessa asked.
“I think the mask isn’t the only layer,” I said. “Let’s finish the conversion at my place; I’ll pull grid tiles and adjust for tide.”
“I’ll keep the hive gentle,” she said, echoing herself from a lifetime ago—yesterday. “No raids. No phone calls.”
We threaded back through the crowd. The cliff above the market wore its fog like a crown; the QR mural winked in the corner of my eye, colors changing to keep the photos fresh. Someone dropped a cone and a gull claimed it like a blessing. At the stall’s edge, I pinned the hem with my thumb one last time and felt the bump of a long stitch—a human hand inside a machine.
I tucked the apron into my bag, and the masked reactor turned their face toward the camera, voice syrup-smooth. “Sixty-five hours,” they said. “We’re on the right path.”
I didn’t answer them. I answered the math.
I lifted my phone and opened a blank grid, lat on one axis, long on the other, and drew six cells in a crooked N. I thought of the neon bruise on Lyla’s plant wall, the off-angle sign, the adhesive on the ring arm. The same handwriting, everywhere.
“We read this right,” I told Nessa, voice even. “Or we let the crowd write it for us.”
The ocean clapped once against the wall, a precise, cold sound. I took it as the only applause I wanted. Then I turned toward the path that would take me above the bay, where math met cliff, and kept the coordinates locked behind my teeth.