I reached the ridge before the sun could decide what it wanted, the fog working the cliff like a slow eraser. The overlook’s metal rail tasted wet against the air; salt crawled into my mouth with each breath. Sloane’s unmarked sedans crouched low along the lower lot, and a small team moved like they had practiced this walk in their sleep—steady, quiet, efficient. My phone vibrated with the ghost-click that keeps you honest. I pocketed it and stepped to the tape.
“Mara,” Sloane said, voice laid flat to keep oxygen in the moment. “You stand here, you don’t cross the chalk, and you don’t narrate to anyone.”
“I’m here to watch,” I said, hands visible, palms cold. “And to remember.”
The evidence techs wore nitrile and patience. One knelt where the boardwalk boards broke toward gravel and laid a clear gel lifter the size of a dinner plate over a shallow imprint. The tech smoothed the pad with a roller, slow and even. The imprint sharpened like a negative taken into focus: deep hex clusters, exaggerated edges, segmented islands across the sole.
“You seeing that?” Sloane asked without looking at me.
“Foam tread,” I said. “Stunt shoe. Lightweight, quiet. The kind used to fake fights and falls.”
The tech lifted the gel, trapped grit sparkling inside like cheap stars. He slid it into a sleeve, labeled without drama, and set an evidence marker. The number clinked on the board as the wind found it. From below, the harbor sent up a rush of salted air and faint sugar from the morning bakeries along the pier. My stomach answered with old muscle memory; I told it no.
“We’ve got another,” a second tech called softly. “Under the rail.”
I inched along the boundary line, tracking faces, hands, bags. The tech reached two fingers beneath the metal and coaxed out a small black hedgehog of foam—an audio windscreen with a slit for a lav mic. He held it open-mouthed toward Sloane like a sea creature he didn’t want to commit to.
“Log as found,” Sloane said. “Wide shots, then bag. Check for gaffer residue.”
He turned the windscreen in his gloved hands. The foam brushed the light and flashed a thin stripe of adhesive, the kind that lives on rented gear and refuses to die. The smell, even through the fog, hit me: warmed plastic, old breath, and a synthetic trace that stuck to the back of the throat.
I looked past the rail to where the cliff dropped to a rough shelf of rock. Sea spray spat up with the regular indignation of a tide that didn’t care about our story. No blood. No torn fabric. No panic thrashed into the scrub. Production, not pain. Hope took a first step inside my ribcage and then tripped on anger.
“They choreographed fear,” I said.
“I don’t say that yet,” Sloane replied, eyes on the scene. “But I write it in pencil.”
A dull click came from somewhere on the platform. I went still. The nearest tech froze too, then pointed with his chin to my feet. A button lay at the seam where board met board, caught in a splinter like a coin arrested mid-fall. Honeycomb pattern stamped into its face, the same double-ring stitch as the limited capsule, a film of salt in the grooves turning it into a tiny tidal pool.
“I’ve got a small,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Not in your track path.”
Sloane looked, then tipped her chin. “Photograph, timestamp. You’re a lawful observer; you handle it clean and you log it with me by end of day. No Instagram souvenir.”
I crouched, the damp soaking through my knees, and set my phone to macro. I snapped three angles with the GPS burned into the EXIF, then slid a coin envelope from my jacket pocket—the kind my mother used for small change and good luck. I turned the envelope inside out to avoid unknown fibers, coaxed the button free with a business card, and let it fall into the paper mouth with a satisfying tick. The metal felt warmer than the air when it tapped the cardboard. I sealed the flap and labeled it in tidy block letters: Honeycomb button—Overlook—M. Chen—Time/Date.
“Chain of custody later,” I told Sloane.
“Later is today,” she said, and the corner of her mouth moved a millimeter. “Thank you.”
A gull set down on the rail and barked at us, offended we’d turned its stage into a lab. The wind shifted, and with it came another smell: sunscreen, energy drink, and the dry electric bite of ring lights. I followed it with my eyes down the switchbacks. Figures stitched themselves into the fog—hoodies, hats, hands clutching phones. Distant voices worked up a rhythm that had not yet settled into words. I felt anger pull a chair up beside me and sit, elbows on knees.
Micro-hook: The masked reactor’s notification lit my lock screen: LIVE: OVERLOOK UPDATE—WE’RE DOING THIS TOGETHER. Heart emojis floated on a promise of care like cheap buoys.
“They’re coming,” I said.
“Ten minutes, maybe less,” Sloane answered. “I’ve got two at the lot, one halfway, and us.”
“Do I go down and stall?” I asked.
“You don’t,” she said. “You’re family and you have a face. Faces make crowds worse or better in ways I can’t predict without a table and a whiteboard.”
“I have a voice that knows how to lower temperature,” I said, hating that she wasn’t wrong.
“And I have officers whose voices don’t carry brand narrative,” she said. She didn’t look at me when she added, “I need you neutral when the cameras point.”
One of the techs cleared his throat. “Lieutenant, we’ve got tape marks.”
I followed their gaze to the underside of the rail where the windscreen had lurked. Strips of gaffer tape clung in two parallel lines, residue framing an absence the size of a beltpouch. The tape edges held dust like shadow. I put my hands behind my back so I didn’t reach; need is a habit I keep.
“Mount point,” I said. “Battery pack or transmitter. Maybe a small POV camera run backward to catch hands.”
“We’ll lift the adhesive,” the tech said. “Microfibers, maybe a hair.”
The chant down the slope found a word. “LY-LA,” they tried, the syllables bouncing off scrub and board. My skin tightened. I thought of the honeycomb shelves in her loft, of hands that placed props with care and called it love. I thought of the cashier at the pop-up telling a crying girl that buying two aprons was “support.”
“No blood,” I said, to the fog, to Sloane, to the part of me that holds time. “No drag. No spatter. No hair caught in the screws.”
“I’m hearing that,” Sloane said, soft. “And I’m hearing the word no in other ways too.”
“No honesty,” I said. “No permission.”
A radio hissed at Sloane’s shoulder. “Vega,” a voice said, hushed. “Trailhead inflow increasing. Twenty? Thirty? Hard to see through the soup. Reactor is in the middle, talking like a guide.”
“Hold the bottom,” Sloane said. “No arrests unless they cross the tape. Tell them the boards are slick. Tell them we’re verifying safety. Use the word verify.”
The word tasted like paperwork and mercy. I took out my phone and typed to Nessa with my thumb: At site. Foam treads, lav windscreen, tape stripe. No blood. Crowd climbing. Push ‘verify safety’ line. No coordinates. A second later she reply-reacted with a honey emoji and a lock. I tucked the phone away and listened to the crowd add claps to the chant.
Micro-hook: One of the techs pointed out a shallow scuff on a board that matched a foam island on the lifted print. The scuff carried glitter, fine and stubborn, caught in the wood grain like pollen.
“Glitter,” I said. “Brand glitter. The good kind that sticks through three washes.”
“Same glitter from the confetti cannon,” Sloane murmured.
The wind pinned the caution tape against a post with a muffled snap. A cold bead of fog slid down my neck. I closed my eyes for a heartbeat and let the sounds separate: crowd, gull, radio, ocean. When I opened them, the scene had gained nothing and lost nothing except time.
“Talk to me,” Sloane said, not looking away from the rail. “Not as a witness. As a strategist.”
“Staged,” I said. “Designed for a camera angle from the corner, low, to catch feet skimming the board instead of gripping. Foam treads for the ghost of speed. Mic windscreen for clean audio. Tape mount for a small pack that records even if the live goes down. The button connects merch to site emotionally, so the hive can feel present and obligated.”
“Obligated,” she echoed.
“To keep buying,” I said. “To keep showing up. To keep acting like love is a coupon code.”
She took that in with the weird stillness she uses when everyone else twitches. “And her safety?”
I let my eyes live inside the empty air where a person might have been, where a person might still be rehearsing in a different room. “I think she’s not bleeding on this wood,” I said. “I think someone is profiting on the idea that she might.”
A cheer rolled up the trail like a wave hitting a wall. The reactor had pushed them into a call-and-response cadence; the words wobbled but the rhythm stayed loyal. I tasted copper, not from a cut, but from the old brain preparing for impact.
“We need to reset before they arrive,” Sloane said. “I’ll widen the tape by five feet, put markers where they can see them, say ‘we’re working’ like a lullaby. You—”
“I hold the line with Nessa,” I said. “I echo verify. I post zero about this rail.”
She nodded once. “We finish the lift, we photograph, we bag, then we negotiate with a cliff.”
I took a breath that hurt my teeth. I slid the coin envelope deeper into my jacket and felt its small weight. The honeycomb pressed a pattern through the paper, dimples of community and trap. “I’ll log the button at the precinct,” I said.
“You’ll log it with me,” she said. “And you’ll eat something on the way, because your mother will blame me if you faint on camera.”
“I don’t faint,” I said.
She gave me the millimeter again. “You don’t.”
The chant pushed closer, and the fog parted to reveal faces—young, earnest, tight. A girl on the edge wore the limited apron over a hoodie, honeycomb stitching flashing when she lifted her arm high to film the tape. Her phone had a bee charm. The charm rang against the case each time she clapped. I wanted to beg the ocean to rise and send everyone home washed and tired.
My screen flashed with a new DM from the throwaway that had tipped the rail: Stage two at dusk. No emoji. No flourish. It read like a production note.
I showed Sloane without words. She nodded without words. We stood on wood that had been built for tourists to gaze and turned into a market stall for fear. The wind brought up one last scent from the city—the salted caramel steam drifting from the pier kiosks, sweet and warm and designed to make you believe you deserved a treat for showing up.
“We expose it clean,” I said, keeping my voice under the chant. “We don’t feed the appetite for the scare.”
“We expose it lawfully,” Sloane said. “And we don’t get pushed off this deck.”
The first chant turned into a hundred camera shutters imitating rain. The fog lifted just enough to show the bay blinking through like a nervous eye. I slipped my hand over the coin envelope in my jacket and felt the honeycomb ridges under the paper, every cell a promise and a cage, and I waited for the next note from the person who thought they were directing us.