I turned my kitchen into a crime lab because it already knew how to hold heat without burning. The ring-light I borrowed from Lyla’s storage closet buzzed faintly, ozone threading the steam from my kettle. I spread the aprons across the table like flayed evidence and taped my screenshots in a neat grid above the honeycomb stitching. Outside, the harbor exhaled fog down the hill, softening neon into a bruise against the window.
“Count with me,” I said, phone camera hovering over the hem. “Long, short, short—long.”
Nessa perched on the counter, knees tucked, thumbs flying on her laptop. “I’m logging thread variance in a sheet and cross-labeling with QR flip timestamps.” She sniffed my tea and made a face. “Why does your lemon smell like grief?”
“Because grief pays attention,” I said. “And we need attention on the right lines.”
I opened the spreadsheet we’d labeled in the Receipts drive: hex_to_latlong_v2. In cell A1, I typed A4. I added the offset we’d derived at the market—the stitch_count divided by two—and the seam-break rule when the grid rotated. My formula looked like nonsense to anyone not raised on both spreadsheets and Lyla’s aesthetics: =MOD(ROW()+offset,12) nested into a VLOOKUP of columns A through L. I hated that my hands moved through it with fluency; I loved that it meant I could keep the crowd from running off a cliff.
“Okay,” Nessa said. “Pattern recognition run one: reactor latency versus QR flip is averaging 0.9 seconds. That’s pipeline tight, not proximity fast.”
“Fed by a hand with access,” I said.
“Or a hand who likes to watch things catch,” she said. “I’m also seeing stitch irregularities repeat every twenty-seven units. The repeat is too neat for a glitch. It’s handwriting.”
“Aesthetic literacy meets math,” I said, and dragged the formula down. The cells populated into letters via a mapping tab I’d built from the hex legend: O… V… E… R… The room felt smaller.
Nessa leaned closer, ponytail brushing my shoulder. “Two more columns,” she murmured.
“L,” I said, watching the grid snap. “O. O. K.”
We stared at the sheet where column C spelled OVERLOOK in green-highlighted cells. The kettle clicked into its afterlife. From the street, a scooter chirped like a gull that had learned to love venture capital.
“There it is,” Nessa whispered.
I didn’t whoop. I didn’t fist-pump. I took a slow sip of tea that had gone bitter and let the satisfaction register in the smallest way: my shoulders dropped a centimeter. The city’s moral fog didn’t clear; it just lifted enough to show a path.
“I’ll loop Sloane,” I said.
“Before the reactor does,” Nessa said.
I snapped a photo of the finished sheet and typed a message: Decode confirms word ‘OVERLOOK.’ Using seam rule + grid index, coordinates refine to trail above bay; rounding per ‘cliff/tide’ puts it west of the lower lot. Request quiet deployment; evidence preservation risk high. I sent it with the apron photos, the stitched tag, and the math tab to Sloane’s encrypted thread.
While the phone thought about that, I pulled a paper map from the drawer under the junk drawer—the one our mother still used to give directions when tourists asked for the pier. The paper smelled like dust and citrus oil from a spill forgotten by everyone but paper. I spread it flat beside the aprons and traced the switchbacks that climbed from the Tide Market up the cliff to the overlook platform. Neon from the street smeared across the window, a slow heartbeat.
“Analog, huh?” Nessa said, hopping down. “You going to triangulate with a compass too?”
“Yes,” I said, and tossed her a wax pencil. “Because paper doesn’t leak.”
I cross-referenced our coordinates against the trail map and circled a point twenty meters north of the official platform where the cliff edge gently kinked. The wax bled a thick red circle around a place that felt like a throat.
“Here,” I said. “Sightlines for a reveal. Close to the platform for crowd containment if you’re cynical.”
“They’re always cynical,” Nessa said. “We’re just catching up.”
My phone buzzed with Sloane’s reply. Copy. Quiet team en route. No public location posts. You two stay off the ridge until I clear it. A second bubble after a beat: Appreciate the math.
“We’re benched,” I told Nessa. “She’s moving.”
“Good,” Nessa said, and then made the face people make when the internet crawls into their pocket. “Hold on.”
“What?”
She didn’t answer, just angled her screen. Our private mod chat—the one we’d made for the small, trusted circle—had a new notification. Someone had screenshotted my paper map with the red circle and posted it with a caption: Internal only. No shares. I felt my jaw flex.
“Who had access to that photo?” I asked. “I never sent—”
“I did,” Nessa said, voice small and furious. “I sent the circled map to the three senior mods so we could prepare messaging if things broke. I watermarked it in the corner with a single pixel shift so I’d know if it moved. The pixel just moved to a burner channel.”
She switched apps, fingers staccato. The masked reactor’s feed already had the screenshot in the corner with my wax circle crudely blurred and a big red arrow pointing anyway. The chat howled into motion. GO NOW OVERLOOK CREW BRING WATER. Tips chimed.
“We lock,” I said. “Slow mode, no coordinates, ban for leaks.”
“On it,” she said, pupils pinpricks. “I’m shuttering the inner room, making a public statement about not crowding any potential law activity, and opening a reporting form instead.”
My phone vibrated again. Sloane: I’m seeing chatter. Do not post. I’ll divert units to control. You two stay put. A third message: Someone leaked?
“I’ll own it,” Nessa said, already typing. “I shared to three and one cracked. I’ll find which one. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “We planned to keep a circle small. Sometimes small is porous.”
I typed back to Sloane: Leak originated inside a trusted mod micro-chat. We’re locking it down. Reactor is redirecting. We haven’t posted publicly. I added: We’ll hold unless you ask.
Fog pressed against the window like a held breath. From the bakery downstairs, the smell of sesame and sugar drifted up through the floorboards—the ghost of buns cooling on racks we used to swipe hot from the pan with burnt fingers. I stood and flexed my hands as if heat could return me to a responsible world.
“They’re moving,” Nessa said, watching a heatmap bloom in her dashboard—a tool she’d built to monitor forum activity without feeding it. “New accounts, all posting the same arrow-to-map screenshot, same typo. That’s a farm.”
“The audio bed,” I said. “Same creator network we traced yesterday. They’re not just echoing; they’re orchestrating.”
“Clues require taste and data,” she said, bitter pride sneaking under the anger. “We brought both. They brought amplification.”
“We brought Sloane,” I said, and my phone buzzed like a promise.
Sloane: Quiet car is on the ridge. Secondary team will hold the lot. I’ll ping if I need crowd messaging from you. Do not come yet. Do not post the map.
“Copy,” I said aloud to nobody, then to Nessa, “We wait.”
“I hate waiting,” she said.
“I left a career because I hate bad waiting,” I said. “This is good waiting.”
“Tell that to the masked empathy vacuum,” she said, flicking the stream where the reactor now webbed a smile with their fingers. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t need permission to care.’”
I felt my molars threaten to crack. “Permission isn’t the point,” I said. “Precision is.”
We worked anyway, because waiting is a verb if you do it right. I refined the lat/long with the cliff/tide rounding rule, adjusted for the trail’s angle by overlaying the paper map with a transparent grid I’d taped to the table, and marked possible camera placements. Nessa ran a cross-check of every user who had read access to the mod micro-chat—timestamps, device fingerprints, an innocuous wallpaper pattern reflected in a screenshot’s status bar. Her mouth tightened.
“I think I have the leak,” she said quietly. “One of the seniors used their work phone when they swore they didn’t. The employer is—you’re not going to like this.”
“Brand-adjacent?” I asked.
“Housewares parent company,” she said. “Same domain as the ‘crisis arcs’ email.”
I swallowed hard. The taste of lemon came back, metal-edged. “Brand circle, not just fandom.”
“Siphoning,” she said. “They want to manage the ‘care.’”
On the street, a group of teenagers jogged past shouting in good spirits, their voices braided with the gulls. I pictured them on the ridge, elbows and phones and nothing malicious in their hearts—just the normal hunger to be useful where the story was hot. A misstep, a loose path, and our first physical lead would become an ambulance route.
My phone lit again. Sloane: At the overlook. No blood. Foam-tread impressions. Mic windscreen. Evidence markers going down. Crowd forming at the trailhead; holding for now. Stay off comms.
I showed Nessa. She exhaled a tiny laugh of relief that tasted like fear. “Foam treads,” she said. “Production toys.”
“Receipts,” I said, and I felt that same centimeter of shoulder drop from earlier, the one you only earn when you’re right and you wish you weren’t.
The masked reactor pivoted their feed: “We’re almost there,” they purred. “Our love gets results.” A pinwheel of hearts burst across my screen. I thought of Lyla’s plant wall and the neon word off by three degrees—the poetry of a person who knew perfection needed a bruise to look real.
“We have to say something,” Nessa said. “If we don’t, the crowd will default to the loudest.”
“We will,” I said, “but only what Sloane asks.”
As if conjured, her name popped up again. Sloane: If you can get the forum to hold the trailhead, do it. Say you’re verifying, emphasize safety, no coordinates. Five minutes of calm would help. No map. No pin.
“On your script,” I told Nessa.
She nodded and typed, voice low as she read aloud: “We’re in touch with authorities. Please do not head uphill. Stay off the switchbacks for now—trail is narrow and slippery. If you’re at Tide Market, hydrate and wait for an update. Care is patient.” She hit post, toggled slow mode to thirty seconds, and pinned the message. “I’ll set auto-mod to nuke coordinates and phone numbers.”
I nodded and circled the wax ring on the paper map again, heavy enough to shine. Evidence, not spectacle. Honey, not hunger.
Micro-hook: My phone buzzed with a DM from a throwaway account I didn’t recognize—no avatar, no posts. You’re close. Check the underside of the overlook rail. He leaves treats. I didn’t like the pronoun or the confidence.
“We’ve got a whisper,” I said, showing Nessa.
“Cass?” she asked.
“Or someone who wants me to think of Cass,” I said. “Either way, Sloane first.”
I forwarded the DM to Sloane with a simple FYI. Her read receipt appeared almost immediately. The next message took longer, which told me she’d moved from her phone to her gloves.
The kettle, long forgotten, ticked as it cooled. The harbor fog kissed the window and left a damp print that blurred the neon bruise into watercolor. I capped the wax pencil and slid it along the map’s edge, smearing red across a line that had already been crossed.
Sloane: Noted. We’ll check the rail. Crowd’s getting louder. Stay put. If your chat leaks anything else, I pull the plug and go loud. No heroes online.
“Copy,” I whispered, to myself and the room and the city that promised care if it could profit.
Nessa’s dashboard pinged again. “The leak account just posted a new screenshot,” she said, color draining from her face. “They grabbed the spreadsheet—our ‘OVERLOOK’ sheet—watermark intact. It’s all over a private reactor Discord.”
I felt the jolt like a pulled rug. Satisfaction collapsed into a clean, cold line of caution. We’d built the answer with taste and data; someone had turned it into fuel.
“Lock it all,” I said. “We migrate the working file offline. We move to paper and photographs.”
I pulled the laptop’s power cable, killed Wi-Fi, and printed the mapping tabs while the printer coughed its hot-paper breath into the room. I slid the fresh pages into a folder with the aprons, stuck the red-pin map on top, and looked at the door.
“She said to stay,” Nessa reminded me, catching my eyes because that’s what you do when you keep people from running.
“I know,” I said, hand already on the folder. “I’m staying within the parameter of good waiting. Which includes being ready to move.”
My phone vibrated one more time. Unknown: Crowds move faster than warrants. See you at the rail.
I stared at the words until they doubled, then slid the phone face-down and picked up the map. “We just got invited to our own evidence,” I said. “And I don’t think the sender cares who gets there first.”
I killed the ring-light and let the kitchen fall into the natural dark of an evening with fog and neon and the ghost-click of phantom notifications. The paper map rustled in my grip like a living thing.
“We hold,” I told Nessa, truth and order in two syllables. “Until Sloane calls.”
The harbor answered with a low horn from a boat I couldn’t see, and the city’s swarm rose a notch toward the cliff. I circled the red pin again with my thumb until the wax warmed under my skin and left my print inside the ring, and I listened for a second buzz that would either tighten the leash or cut it.