I hear the news before I read it—elevator screens in the building whisper between floors and the rhythm changes. The crawl has that drumbeat they save for holidays and elections. By the time I hit refresh on the studio site, the art is already everywhere: TruthScan: Family Edition—Live. Fourteen Days. Real-Time Reconciliations. The words “real-time” pulse neon, the way a wound does when you touch it.
“They’re going live-switch,” I say to the empty kitchen.
Jonas calls before my tea boils. “You saw it.”
“I heard it,” I answer. “They’re promising on-the-fly reconciliations. That’s the pivot board on broadcast.”
“We put a clock on the wall,” he says. “We run the clock.”
I drag the whiteboard from behind the fridge and park it under the good bulb. Dry-erase markers rattle like dice in my throat. The city outside smells like salt and disinfectant pushed by fog; somewhere a neighbor is burning sugar for caramel and the sweetness sneaks under my door.
“Three objectives,” I say, uncapping black and writing big so my hands have a job. 1) Expose the implant pipeline. 2) Pull Leo out. 3) Seed public doubt before air. I underline each until my wrist protests. “We do all three or we lose him and the record.”
“Milestones,” Jonas says. I hear his keyboard like rain. “Give me dates.”
I write Day 14 in the corner and backfill the boxes with sharp little teeth. Day 12—chair proof. Day 10—anchor segment planted. Day 8—legal cover. Day 7—counterstream rehearsal. Day 5—family prep. Day 3—failsafes. I know the rhythm of production; I used to breathe it. The calendar squares begin to look like a ribcage we can crawl through.
“Define chair proof,” Jonas says.
“Interface capture,” I answer. “Terms on-screen—comfort injection, narrative seam. Audio bed raw. Room tone before the hum.”
“And pipeline?”
“We tie my segment’s soundscape to Lab 7,” I say. “We show the wristband triggers feeding edit macros. We publish the spreadsheet photos with Leo’s ID redacted except for pattern.”
I add deliverables in green because it’s the only marker that still smells new and I need a clean scent in this kitchen. Screenshots. Spectrograms. Chain-of-custody video. I draw arrows until the board feels like a map instead of a trap. My body stops trying to run.
“Doubt seeding,” Jonas prompts.
“Local first,” I say. “A segment that’s not national enough to trigger the machine immediately but credible enough for viewers to feel the shiver. Anchor who doesn’t need network permission.”
“I have a name,” he says, and doesn’t say it out loud, because I taught him to let names live with fewer witnesses. “Sympathetic. She hates stunt therapy. She’ll test the package if we give her verifiable chunks.”
“We give her verifiable chunks,” I repeat, and I draw a little lock next to anchor feed.
Micro-hook: I stand in front of a wall that keeps becoming either a plan or a confession, and I can’t tell which saves us.
The wristband on my counter blinks with the halo icon I didn’t ask for. Two concentric rings insist on purity while hiding capture. I flip it under a potholder and keep writing.
Jonas arrives ten minutes later with fingers stained by printer ink and a paper bag from the Strand. The bag sweats fried-batter heat into the room; the smell pushes back the hospital citrus in my head. We eat standing up, checking the network announcement for edits. Blimps reroute over the bay, drones blinking dumb in the fog over the wind tunnel at the marina.
“Look at the phrasing,” he says, tapping the site on his phone. “‘Real-time reconciliations’ means the board can rewrite on air and sell it as healing.”
“On-the-fly absolution,” I say. “A mercy with a scalpel.”
He studies my boxes. “Order matters. Pipeline exposure before Leo, or they bolt the doors.”
“We can’t let him marinate in engineered comfort,” I say, and my knuckles forget they’re allowed to relax. “We move both, staggered. Proof at Day 12, withdrawal at Day 11.”
“We need legal smoke,” he says. “A letter we wave at a camera.”
I write counsel letter in the Day 13 box. “Patients’ rights lawyer owes me one more highlight pass.”
He nods toward Seed Doubt. “I’ll secure the anchor. Three deliverables: one minute of spectrograms, ten seconds of chair interface, twenty seconds of contract language with halo logos and the phrase ‘curated recall guidance.’ No red meat, just fiber.”
“She’ll want me on camera,” I say.
“She won’t get you—yet,” he says. “Voice note, waveform on screen, my guarantee.”
“You don’t have a guarantee to spend,” I say, softer than I feel.
He points at Day 7—counterstream rehearsal. “I’m buying one.”
I place magnets on the board like we used to place lavs under collars. Red over expose. Blue over pull Leo. Yellow over doubt. The colors make my hands steady again. The halo under the potholder ticks once with its quiet LED. I resist the urge to hurl it into the sink.
“We need backups,” I say. “I send raw to a safe box today. If they grab the house, the spine lives somewhere they can’t spin.”
“Two destinations,” he says, catching up. “Locker by the marina and a postal vault in another borough. Diversify risk.”
“I heard the lockers are flagged,” I say. “News blimps hover on fog days and pick off couriers.”
“Then we use the postal vault,” he says, already texting. “And a school mailroom run by a woman who hates sponsors.”
I laugh for the first time today and it tastes like coffee we forgot to finish. “You’re useful.”
“Pass it on,” he says, and dials. He steps into the hall to make the anchor call while I lay out the drives.
I stack my raw on the table: silver bricks labeled in thick marker—M-SEGMENT_RAW, LAB7_AMBIENT, ASSET_ROOM_PHOTO, FAMILY_THREAD_EXPORT, HOSP_MON_BEEPS. Each case clicks shut like a prayer box. I wrap them in the linen I keep from my mother’s drawer—the one with the stitched violets—because I need my hands to remember folding and not just fighting.
Jonas returns, eyes bright behind his smudged lenses. “She’s in,” he says. “She wants a package day ten. She’ll air it in her six o’clock—no sponsor veto on local, she claims.”
“Claims,” I echo, but my shoulders drop a centimeter. “Conditions?”
“Verifiability and on-record for documents,” he says. “She’ll blur identifiers. She asked if you’ll consider a sit-down closer to the special. I said maybe once we secure Leo.”
I nod. The word maybe gives me room to breathe. “We need a preview for her—spectrograms that show the clinic pad over the ad bell. The overlay that proves comfort is a product.”
“I’ll slice tonight,” he says. “You go mail the spine.”
I take the drives and the linen and the coil of gaffer tape that feels like armor. I put the envelope together slow, careful, ceremony instead of panic. The paper smells like warm dust. I seal it and address it to a code name I used five cities ago when I learned to keep a copy off-site: WETKITE BOX 138.
Micro-hook: I lick a gum line on an envelope and realize the taste is the same as every apology I’ve mailed to the future me I keep failing.
The post office three stops away hums with fluorescent fatigue. A family ahead of me murmurs about their aunt’s scan results: “greenhold with caveats,” a code phrase I learned in a bathroom line. The clerk’s nails match the halo on the counter; two rings glow faintly where the logo is embedded in the acrylic. A sign reads: Security cameras in use for your safety and I count lenses the way other people count blessings.
“Registered to vault,” I say when it’s my turn. “Signature on release. No forwarding. No third-party scans.”
“That last bit’s not a thing,” the clerk says without malice.
“Make it a thing,” I answer, and slide the fee across with a smile that asks the machine to misfile me as polite.
The receipt prints with a tiny halo icon on the corner, purity notarized. I tuck it into my wallet between a library card and a photo strip of me and Leo making faces in a ferry terminal. The photo smells like nothing now; I press my nail into the edge until the paper dents.
Outside, fog drags itself down the block, quieting cars and sharpening footsteps. News blimps reroute, their belly screens flickering like fish. The bay coughs down the avenue; gulls carve the air thin. My phone buzzes with a push alert from the studio: COUNTDOWN: 14 DAYS—WATCH FAMILIES MOVE TOWARD PEACE. The video loop shows strangers hugging under the halo. No sound, only captions and confetti.
“We run our own parade,” I tell my phone, and walk home.
Jonas has taken over the kitchen like a triage nurse. He has my whiteboard on a tilt, the magnets rearranged to reflect the anchor commitment. He’s sketched a three-column grid: Proof / Person / Platform.
“You’re a spreadsheet with skin,” I say.
“Compliment accepted,” he replies. “We got ten days to make the anchor’s floor strong enough that when national tries to call her irresponsible, the city laughs.”
“She’ll get pressure,” I say. “We need a second anchor lined up as a decoy.”
“Already texting two,” he says. “One will bite for the aftershock.”
We run the clock aloud, each day a square we press. Day 14 becomes today and I letter NOW in the corner because I want to bully time into obeying. We bolster the pull Leo track: Sera looped for Day 11, legal letter draft Day 13, clinic intake protocol printout Day 12. I draw a tiny camera next to intake, because everything becomes a lens.
“Contingencies,” Jonas says, and taps Day 8—legal cover. “If they move the date up?”
“We publish raw sooner and skip the anchor,” I say. “We go straight to counterstream. The risk doubles. The integrity holds.”
He nods. His mouth flattens the way it does when he’s scared and stubborn at the same time. He points at safe box and I flash the receipt.
“Good,” he says. “Now you copy the copy to a second envelope for the school mailroom. In case the vault gets convenience-sealed.”
“Why would a vault get convenience-sealed?” I ask.
“Because the halo sits on every contract in this city,” he answers, and gestures at the little icon stamped on my receipt. “And purity is the best excuse for a lock.”
I slide a second set of drives into a padded mailer and address it to a building with a mural of an osprey that glares when you pass. The kitchen smells like coffee, marker solvent, and fryer oil cooling into fatigue. I can taste the coming night on my teeth.
“One more thing,” Jonas says, voice quiet, like we’ve reached the edge of what planning can do. “You called it a mercy with a scalpel. They’re going to point that scalpel at you on-air.”
“I won’t be under their lights,” I say, and I believe it only by speaking it.
He walks to the window and cracks it. Fog fingers the sill and taps a drop onto my wrist. We both watch the marina’s drone beacons blink and go blind, then blink again. Somewhere in the wind tunnel the metal sings its hollow song. My recorder on the table keeps its small red eye on us, proof we are trying to be brave.
The whiteboard glows in the cheap bulb’s circle. Expose / Pull / Seed stare back like commandments I wrote to save us.
My phone buzzes with the low tone I reserved for encrypted threads. The handle is the one I breathe through my teeth: ShoreWitness.
I read the line twice, then again because my body needs a job.
chair access confirmed. tonight 02:10–02:22. motion sensor reboot. bring silent light.
I hand Jonas the phone and watch his pupils widen. The clock we built stops being theoretical and starts being air.
“Fourteen days,” he says, and blows the word like a candle he refuses to let go dark. “But also eight minutes.”
I set the magnets harder into the board until they thock. The kitchen shrinks to a tunnel. My palms remember the cold metal of vents, the scent of citrus, the linen’s scratch. I push my thumb into the stitched violet and find the thread.
“Then we make proof tonight,” I say. “And we make doubt tomorrow.”
Outside, a blimp mutters through fog. The elevator screen in the hall whispers the headline between floors. I flick off the halo under the potholder so its pulse doesn’t tell the room how fast my heart is going, and I picture Leo’s face steady inside a chair we haven’t yet met.
Micro-hook: The door between planning and breaking-and-entering swings, and my hand is already on the knob when the city breathes—In, out, fourteen.