The halo breathes above me—two rings, notched with sensor windows—rising and falling like a sleeping animal that dreams in light. Cold air spills from the vents and the studio smells like disinfectant and warm cables. I can taste it on my tongue: metal, citrus, and the cotton mouth I used to get during finals. A red tally light blinks to green. The audience’s hush tightens into a single, held breath.
“Tonight,” the host says, voice feathered to reach through screens, “we witnessed a courageous woman answer the hardest questions a family can ask. The data is in. Pattern concordance is high, variance within benign range.” He turns his tablet, letting its screen glow on my cheekbones. “Mira Vale, your scan reads—”
The halo pulses emerald. LED stems along the floor do an obedient ripple toward my shoes.
“Non-Deceptive.”
The audience detonates. Hands slap, bracelets clatter, someone whistles too sharp for the sound engineer to catch it before it ricochets off the catwalks. I don’t cry. I don’t trust water under these lights. My mouth remembers my mother’s habit of biting the inside of her cheek when she tried not to smile, and I let my lips reach a safe half-curve.
“Thank you,” I say. My voice bounces back from the set’s white sweep like it prefers the room to any person in it. “Thank you.”
The host slides closer, a choreography I watched in a dozen episodes while wondering whether certainty always needed a presenter. He keeps his hand politely off my shoulder but offers it to the camera.
“Mira,” he says, “what does this feel like? To know the halo agrees with you? To have the truth—” he lets the word hang like a glass ornament “—declare itself.”
I hear my mother’s voice answering in a thrift store, I hear Sera’s clipped yes at Christmas, I hear the bay barges groaning under fog, but what comes out is what keeps me employed.
“It feels like my family can stop living inside a courtroom,” I say. “And I can go back to recording other people’s stories.”
The halo hum lowers a note, as if pleased. I study the hum, because sound tells me what faces don’t. There’s a faint chorus of fans, the whoosh of the HVAC, and a tight stitch of applause looped under live clapping—a safety net in case the audience forgets how to feel.
The host pivots to the audience. “Sera, would you join us?”
The camera wings tilt; their red eyes blink. Sera rises from the front row like a person volunteering to stand inside weather. She looks beautiful and brittle: a blue dress like the bay on a cold day, hair smoothed into something the halo will respect. When she gets to me, she gives the kind of hug where only our shoulders touch.
“Congratulations,” she says into my ear. The mic catches nothing; she’s learned to throw sound where microphones can’t eat it. “Use this well.”
“I will,” I say. My breath grazes her hairline. “Come over after? I’ll make tea.” I don’t say, we’ll check on Leo. I don’t say, is this enough.
She steps back and faces the camera. The host beams. He knows how to shoot reconciliation: three-quarter angles, green wash, a lingering cut that lets viewers exhale on cue.
“It takes courage to submit to the halo,” he tells the room. “To let science adjudicate what memory distorts.”
Healing demands remembering, I think. The market sells forgetting as cure. I nod on camera anyway.
A producer hand flicks from the dark like a moth against a window: cue walk-off. I move where I am told, toward the sponsor wall that repeats the halo icon in soft grays. Two rings. Purity pretending not to be a trap. A woman in a white suit intercepts me with a hug that’s all forearms and perfume.
“We’re so proud,” she says. Her nametag reads PURELINE WELLNESS. “You are a beacon tonight.” She slides a card into my palm, glossy and warm from her pocket. “A year of ‘Calm+’ on us. Spa, guided recalibration, grief reset if you want it.”
“I already did the grief,” I say, and my voice tries to be friendly. “Twice.”
“Then this will help you keep your gains.” She curls my fingers around the card. “People slip after big releases.”
Sera drifts closer, a magnet tugged by etiquette. The sponsor woman turns to her, eyes softening in the way of women who sell care professionally.
“We have a family plan,” she tells Sera. “So you all can align.”
Sera’s smile is the bare minimum allowed on television. “We’ll talk,” she says.
I scratch my wrist where the studio band digs in. It’s white and sterile, embossed with the halo icon in pearly ink. The adhesive whispers when I tug. I picture it on hospital wrists across the city, where elevator screens whisper headlines between floors and families pass around reputation scores like weather reports. “Sunny at 92. Uncle Nate’s up to an 81. Mom’s scan came back green.” People use code words—Clear, Clouded, Storm—to keep themselves from saying what we just said in front of cameras.
The host returns to set center for outro. The floor marks glow, and the audience warms their hands in applause again. I stand in the sponsor pen and listen to the loop. A thickened cheer pours through the ceiling like syrup. The house mix sits perfectly on the edge of too loud. I’ve been in enough rooms with hidden microphones to know where sound is honest and where it’s grafted.
“That’s our show,” the host announces. “Remember: pattern concordance is not opinion—it’s science. Good night, New Halcyon.”
He lifts a hand. The audience lifts theirs. The clapping plants itself on my skin. There: a static pop in the track, too clean to be knuckles, too clipped to be a squeak. I glance at the speaker array. Another pop nicks the loop a beat later, half a measure off, a swallow trying to pretend it’s a shout.
I slide my phone from the mute pocket in my dress. The case has a strip of gaffer tape to dampen its vanity ping. I open my recorder app with my thumb’s muscle memory—half the city does podcasts, but only a few of us treat room tone like a lie detector. I tilt the mic toward the nearest speaker. The applause keeps shining. The pop arrives again, a hiccup in a cheer that should be seamless.
Beside me, the sponsor woman tilts her head. “Enjoying your moment?”
“I’m listening,” I tell her. “It’s what I’m good at.”
She laughs prettily and vanishes into the sponsor eddy, back where the halo icon repeats like a wallpaper of good behavior.
“Mira.” Sera’s voice lands on my name flat and solid, a cutting board set down on a counter. She tucks a strand of hair that doesn’t need tucking. “You did it.”
“We did it,” I say, because I know how to share a scene. “Do you want to get out of the air-conditioning? The bay’s warm tonight.”
“Warm fog.” She looks up at the catwalk lights, then at the exit doors. “The drones will be blind. Blimps will reroute.”
“So gossip stalls and we can walk,” I say.
“So the cameras follow people with umbrellas,” she answers, a half-smile that might be humor. “Come on. I need to check on Leo.”
Her hand finds the underside of my wrist for the lightest squeeze. She used to grab me like she meant to pull me out of the ocean; now she touches me like the ocean might press charges.
We move toward the doors in a trail of bouquets and congratulations that smell faintly of hot sugar from the concessions and the floor grips burning a little underfoot. Audience members extend phones. “Clean!” one girl mouths to me, tapping two circles in the air with her fingers. Code for green. People love a code that admits them to a club. I nod, a polite bobbing creature under glass.
Near the exit, a production assistant steps into our path with a smile that has too many teeth for a non-carnivore.
“Quick photo?” she chirps. “For our socials.”
Sera’s chin ticks. “One,” she says.
I stand under a wall of pastel leaves that exist nowhere in nature. The assistant arranges our shoulders, then pulls my wrist forward so the halo band faces the camera.
“Perfect,” she says. “Scan proud.”
The flash punches white into my eyes. For a second, I see my mother’s thrift store counter reflected in a framed charity certificate. Two concentric rings printed on a receipt. A little girl blowing sugar dust off a donated donut machine. I blink the image away, but it sticks to my tongue: cinnamon and salt.
“Mira,” Sera says, stepping aside as a security guard opens the door. “Don’t fight them tonight.”
“Who is them?” I ask. “The show? The sponsors? The people who need a villain?”
“All of it,” she says. “Tonight, let it be what it is.”
At the threshold, cooler air reaches in and palms my face. It smells like rain that hasn’t committed yet. Beyond the awning, the bay coughs fog. Streetlights burn their halos and smear across the wet pavement. A news blimp crawls sideways and then gives up, skating its own detour toward the stadium.
“I’ll come by,” Sera says. “But I might be late.”
“Bring Leo if you can.” I scan her face. “Is he—”
“He’s fine,” she cuts in. The word is a lid. “He texted a storm emoji earlier. Not tonight.”
Storm means inconvenient, not catastrophic. We grew up on codes. I nod and let her go, because some doors close slow enough to watch, and some close fast enough to clip your fingers.
Back in the studio, the host floats through the audience like a benevolent island. Someone laughs the way a person laughs when a job could be lost for not laughing. I tuck my phone deeper into my palm and edge toward a quieter corner near a speaker stack. The applause loop resumes for the post-show promos. I lift the mic again and hold.
The glitch pops. It sounds like a fish’s mouth breaking the surface for an insect, quick and absolute. Then an odd texture rides under the applause, like a blanket of white noise that doesn’t belong to the room. I know the room’s breath by now. This is a blanket from somewhere else, laid on top.
“One more for the gram?” a man says, sidling up with a ring light clipped to his phone. He wears a lanyard printed with the halo icon and a tie the exact green of our verdict. “Could you say something about healing?”
“I can say something about remembering,” I answer.
“Close enough.” He grins. “Look straight into the light.”
I do. The ring burns a circle into my vision, smaller inside the larger halo’s afterimage, like the city’s double moons on humid nights. “We owe the truth our attention,” I say. “Not just our applause.”
“Beautiful,” he says, not hearing me. “We’ll tag you.”
I step away and press the recorder button again. The meter jumps in pleasing rectangles. I get five seconds of clean loop, three of glitch, then an engineer somewhere finds the seam and irons it. The pop vanishes. The cloth lays flat.
The sponsor woman reappears with a small white envelope. “I forgot the physical,” she says. “Some people like paper.” Inside, I find a voucher printed on soft stock: PURELINE CALM+, A YEAR OF ALIGNMENT, embossed with two circles that catch the light and make my stomach think of hospital bracelets. At the bottom: TERMS AND CONDITIONS ON REVERSE. I run my nail along the perforation and feel how carefully it is cut.
“Do people keep these?” I ask.
“Some frame them,” she says. “Your episode will make a lot of people feel better.”
“Better than what?” I pocket the envelope before my face can telegraph an answer. “Thanks.”
I head for the service corridor to avoid a line of strangers waiting for selfies. The hallway switches to industrial beige. A faint scent of oranges leaks from a cleaning cart. My heels find the rhythm of cable guards: raised, flattened, raised, a metronome of getting out.
Sera’s text lands while I walk: got leo. later. proud.
I stop, one foot on a rubber ramp, and let pride touch me in a small, safe place between ribs. The recorder app whispers that it has saved the last clip. I play it back at half speed, the way I would stretch a voice to catch the shape of a lie.
Clapclapclap—pop—clapclapclap—pop. The pop carries a room tone under it that doesn’t match Studio B. It has a thinner air, a higher fan whine, a click like a badge reader. It’s not from this room.
My stomach tightens, heat blooming where the halo’s cold had been.
“Don’t fight them tonight,” Sera said.
I slip the wristband off and study the pearly circles. The adhesive peels with a sound so soft it could be a hush. I fold the band and slide it into my pocket with the voucher, and for a moment all I can feel is the seam where paper meets plastic and how both pretend to be proof.
The host’s laugh echoes down the corridor, then fades. Somewhere above, a blimp changes plans. Somewhere outside, the food hall is closing with its no-filming-at-tables rule that no one honors. Somewhere at the marina, drones blink into the fog, blind and confident.
In my hand, my phone screen shows the waveform. In my ear, the pop repeats, small and obstinate.
The halo declared me clean. Why did the applause come with a foreign heartbeat?