I time my steps to the buoy bell because clocks feel too loyal to other people. The bay coughs its fog inland until the marina becomes a corridor of breath. Drones hiccup above the wind tunnel between masts, blink confused, reroute with embarrassed beeps. Gulls slice the air where the fog thins; their cries are thin knives. The boards under my shoes sweat salt and old fish. I keep the Faraday pouch pressed to my ribs like a second heart.
Jonas peels off at the last working lamp. We agreed on a loose triangle—his line of sight covering the blind approach, my line on the water, the meeting point a pocket of white that erases depth and names. He murmurs into the bone-mic, “Three silhouettes east; one is a piling,” and I let the joke land where it can.
An encrypted ping to my recorder vibrates my palm: arrived. I answer with the code we agreed on: two slow taps on the rail. A figure condenses out of the fog like a bad photograph printing itself. They stop where the boardwalk softens, and a small device on their collar wakes. The voice that comes through is metal and river-smooth.
“You brought ears worth the risk.”
“I brought silence where you want it,” I say. I hold out my empty hands so the fog can print their outlines too. Salt sticks to my knuckles.
The modulator coughs and settles into a lower register. “Two minutes. Then I change tides.”
“Two minutes,” I say, though I can already feel the talk needing more.
They circle once, listening harder than looking, and I follow the way their head cocks toward gaps in the sound—the gossip stall downshore shutting its gate, the blimp’s tiny correction thrumming overhead, the wind pushing a flag into the face of a camera I hope is pointed elsewhere.
“I extracted your red,” the voice says. “I’m not here to be your friend.”
I taste the sentence like a mouthful of battery and wind. “I’m here for the pipeline.”
A gloved hand lifts. Between fingers: a wafer drive sealed in shrink that smells faintly of hot sugar from the vendor stalls. The gulls rip a new line in the air, and the modulator adds: “Partial manifest. Asset names, local paths, hash stubs. Not enough to burn me if you lose it, enough to map a lie.”
I don’t reach, not yet. “Terms,” I say.
“Anonymity,” they say. “Not just on-air. Through court. Through the platforms. Through your sister’s rage when she learns what I did.” The last sentence slants softer, like a confession the machine can’t correct.
“You watch my sister?” I ask.
“Everyone watches everyone,” they say, which is the loneliest sentence a city ever built.
I take out my recorder, let them see the red light is off. “I don’t publish a frequency without your consent. I don’t triangulate you with scenery. I scrub room tone. I decoy with false ambiences if a frame risks your shape.”
“Say it with your band on,” they say. “Let it log who you are when you promise.”
The wristband warms under my sleeve like a small animal waking to an owner I don’t respect. I slide it out. The halo icon blinks two neat rings. “With this on,” I say, and I repeat the terms, each clause a step down a long pier with water on both sides.
Jonas hums in my ear, barely air: “One on the promenade, pacing north. No camera up.”
The figure flicks their fingers once—heard—and the modulator softens. “You’ll see the folder ColorOverrides, but it’s a decoy. The real toggle lives under anxiety_assets/soothe/pivot. Look for JSON with ‘sibling’ in notes.”
The fog presses cold into my lungs. “So the halo color isn’t a readout,” I say. “It’s a scene partner.”
“It’s a costume change,” they say. “Sometimes earned. Sometimes cued.”
I reach for the drive. Their glove grazes my skin, salt damp, and for a second my mother’s linen scratch rides up my arm. I lock breath to keep from flinching. The drive is warm where their pulse lived.
“Is this from Lab Seven?” I ask.
“From a mirror of a mirror,” they say. “But the paths are true. I scrubbed user IDs. If you want the smoking keyboard, look to the pivot board in the sublevel. ‘Authorized’ users only.”
“Authorized what,” I ask, slotting the shrink-wrapped rectangle into the Faraday’s zip mouth like feeding a fish you hope won’t bite you.
The gulls rip the sky again, so close their feathers hiss. The modulator drops a note. “Benevolence,” they say.
“Authorized benevolence,” I say, because phrases want their full mask.
“Say it again,” they say, and the fog eats the echo.
“Authorized benevolence,” I repeat, and it tastes like citrus disinfectant over old blood.
Micro-hook: The words snap into place like a lid, and I hear a future deposition trying to decide whether a lid keeping poison from spilling is mercy or plan.
“He uses it in meetings,” they say. “When a producer asks where the ethics line sits. When a lawyer clears the next trick. When a tech hesitates over a human they know. He smiles and calls harm a permission.”
“He’ll call you a saboteur,” I say.
“He’ll call me unwell,” they answer, and the modulator glints with a laugh I don’t trust. “You’ll call me ShoreWitness. That’s the only name I want to hear in your files.”
“ShoreWitness,” I say. “Conditions besides anonymity?”
“Delay publication until you validate hashes with a second source. Redact personal health data unrelated to your claim. If you endanger someone else to save your brother, I cut you loose.” The last condition lands like a weight in my pocket.
“You know about Leo,” I say.
“I know about the appointment your band took for you,” they say. “Lab Seven, Thursday. The chair hums when the building’s empty. The mesh smells like citrus and hands.”
“I’m not going alone,” I say, thinking of Jonas’s triangle, Sera’s ledger, my ocean heat rule, the lawyer’s fluorescent commas. “Do you have an exit?”
“Do you have one?” they counter.
Jonas whispers, “Two minutes,” and I feel time herd me like a dockhand. I nod into the fog, and the witness nods back, not at me but at the idea that nods still mean anything here.
“Walk me through the pipeline,” I say. “High level, no details that dox you.”
The modulator clicks, resets, and a different pitch washes through the fog—same person, new mask. “Intake flags a ‘family case’—higher audience stickiness. The band ID is loaded as the primary key. A script preloads anxiety_assets with ‘comfort’ tracks tied to your history—sonic twins of the place where you broke. During the scan, the board operator rides the threshold. If the answers drift from the storyboard, the board calls an ‘alignment.’ That’s the euphemism the lawyer in the glass uses. The color follows.”
“Who writes the storyboard,” I ask.
“The sponsor suite approves the beats,” they say. “The lab composes the sensory glue. Gray chooses where to pretend the river bends.”
“And you pulled my red off the board,” I say, letting the truth wash up between us.
“Off the aired sidecar feed,” they say. “I wanted the world to hear the thing running under the pretty thing. I didn’t touch your words. I only drowned theirs.”
The relief that hits my knees arrives like heat in winter—too big, too soon, dangerous if I let it linger. I grip the rail until splinters think about me. “I can protect you,” I say, and that is the truest line I can offer and still be able to sleep.
“You can protect the story,” they correct. “The person is luck.”
Micro-hook: Out on the water, a buoy bell miscounts; the fog steals one toll, and I understand that what’s missing is sometimes the only proof that anything was there.
“If the pivot board lives in the sublevel,” I say, “I’ll need a way in.”
“You’ll need a way out more,” they say. “Watch the freight elevator; its screen whispers headlines as if no one programmed it that way. The halo icon appears on the manifest receipts; if you see double rings with a slash, you’re in the wrong drawer.”
“A slash,” I say. “Someone’s already rebelling inside the labeling.”
“Or someone wants you to think so,” they say. “Paranoia is a cottage industry in this town.”
Jonas breathes, “One minute.”
The figure shifts, fog taking their outline and giving it back half a shoe-width to the left. “Two more terms,” they say quickly. “If I vanish, you don’t martyr me. You don’t make me a segment. You use what I gave you and bury the name.”
“Agreed,” I say.
“And if Gray invites you to let the halo hold you,” they add, voice soft as rain on vinyl, “don’t let it. The chair remembers everyone who sits in it. The mesh learns the contour of a skull like a lover.”
My hands find my sleeves and roll them down. I smell disinfectant before it exists. “He booked me with a chime,” I say. “The band pretended my silence meant yes.”
“Silence is consent in systems that want you quiet,” they say. “Make a noise.”
I tap the rail twice, hard enough to sting bone. “I’m loud.”
They point to the drive in my pouch. “Validate hashes with someone who hates me,” they say. “Compete stories. Not just allies.”
“I brought a skeptic,” I say, letting my eyes cut through the white toward Jonas’s lamp. “He used to build the machine. Now he builds the map out.”
“Map out,” they repeat, as if trying on shoes. “Good. Then listen: ‘authorized benevolence’ is a keyphrase inside email that looks like prayer. Search for it with quotes. Someone hid the door in a sermon.”
“I’ll find the sermon,” I say. “I’ll find the door.”
“Find the hinge,” they say. “Doors are for cameras.”
Jonas: “Time.” His voice tightens to a wire.
The witness angles their head, and for a second I think they’re cataloging my breath pattern. Then the modulator powers down. The first voice—human, small, careful—edges through the machine’s dying fan. “I liked your mother’s storm tape,” they say. “I’m sorry for what they sold you.”
The apology hits where the ocean heat lives, under sternum, between ribs that never forgave certain nights. I don’t reach—touch is a contract too. “I’m sorry you have to live in a place where the truth needs a password,” I say.
The device clicks off. Footsteps ghost the boards, then the fog takes them and makes the pier sound like a pier again. Down the line, the gossip stall reopens to sell candied air to late stragglers; etiquette says no filming at the communal tables in the Strand, but out here in wet planks everyone liveblogs because the rules never imagined fog.
I exhale the promise I made with my band on and feel the outline of its rings under wool, a brand pretending to be jewelry. I turn my head toward Jonas’s lamp and raise a hand. He joins me, boots slow, hands visible.
“All good?” he asks.
“All dangerous,” I answer. “Partial manifest, pipeline confirmed, a phrase we can subpoena.”
“Let me guess. Something that makes harm sound like charity,” he says.
“Authorized benevolence,” I say, and his mouth goes hard like a freezer.
“He used that years ago in notes I saw,” Jonas says quietly. “Back when I thought I could out-clever the sermon. We’ll find the emails.”
“We’ll validate with someone who hates our witness,” I say. “No hero stories.”
He nods toward the dark water. “I heard ‘map out.’ I like it.”
“I heard, ‘the chair remembers skulls,’” I say, and the air turns colder against my scalp.
We walk the boards slowly because speed looks like fear to cameras and we have enough of that as it is. Overhead, the blimp corrects again, its fan wash nudging the fog into new rooms. The wind tunnel along the masts moans like an elevator screen whispering headlines; I swear I hear my name under a layer of velvet and citrus.
“You’ll publish?” Jonas asks.
“After hashes,” I say. I pat the pouch. “After a second source, after I scrub the room tone until the gulls are anonymous.”
The gulls answer with a complaint that sounds like a promise. The drone above us decides it knows where we are and then decides it doesn’t; it veers, reroutes, blinks an apology. I smell hot sugar from the stall turning closing time into dessert. I taste salt, taste battery, taste my own tongue considering a name I won’t write.
We reach the end of the pier where the lights pretend to be moons. I stop there and open the notebook to a dry page. My pen hangs between words that want to look brave and words that want to look true. I write both in a single line:
Rule: Protect the witness like a lung. Publish the pipeline like a weather report.
Jonas reads over my shoulder and breathes the kind of laugh that doesn’t show teeth. “No pressure.”
“Only fog,” I say, and then I let the wind take the page’s smell to somewhere it can be less lonely.
The bone-mic pops once; a system nearby wakes. My wristband vibrates with a calendar nudge I didn’t consent to. Reframing Consult—Twenty-Four Hours. The halo icon blinks like a metronome teaching a child to lie on beat.
I zip the pouch, pull my sleeve down, and feel the Faraday fabric bite my wrist. “They booked me,” I say. “We’ll book them.”
“With what,” he asks.
I look back at the white pocket where a person dissolved and left proof that could vanish the moment light hits it wrong. “With benevolence,” I say, and I let the word sit on my tongue until it dissolves into the taste of disinfectant. “The authorized kind.”
I close the notebook and pocket the pen my mother would have liked. The fog presses my face like a cold hand. Somewhere under the pier, the water knocks a rhythm only worn wood knows. I hear the buoy bell miscount again and look at Jonas.
“You hear that?” I ask.
“Missed a beat,” he says.
“Or someone took it,” I say, and my whole body decides to protect the missing piece as if it were a person.
We walk inland where headlines whisper between floors and families trade scores like weather, and the halo on my wrist, trapped and glowing, asks a question I choose not to answer yet.
I carry the witness in my lungs and the drive against my heart, and I can’t tell which is heavier, which will drown first if I trip.