I slide the deadbolt twice and rest my ear against it until the metal stops talking. The drives from the chair press against my ribs, stubborn as a promise I can’t unmake. I breathe in disinfectant that clings to my jacket, and salt from the open window, and the faint ghost of hot sugar drifting up from the food carts closing down at the end of the block.
Jonas stands in my kitchen with his sleeves rolled, loosening a knot of string between his fingers. “You look like the chair used you for target practice,” he says. “You okay?”
“I filmed the menus,” I answer, stripping the jacket like it’s a skin I can return to a closet. “Comfort injection. Narrative seam. Empathy gain. Compliance fade. Halo sync. I need them all on the board.”
His face tightens, not with shock but with the quickened focus he saves for clean leads. “Then we start the tree.” He taps the cork wall I pretended wasn’t taking over my house. “Gray in the middle. Old study on the left. Sponsors on the right. Shells in the dark.”
We print fast. He scrapes logos from filings, I tear headers from contracts, and the elevator screen in the hallway keeps whispering headlines between floors: COUNTDOWN: FOURTEEN DAYS—HEAL NEW HALCYON LIVE. The whisper catches on a beat inside my chest and makes the scissors stutter.
I thumb a pin into the board under a scanned article: VERITY CENTER—HRAST, 9 YEARS AGO. A photo captures Gray younger but already rehearsed, flanked by benefactors who smell like boardrooms even on paper. I loop string from that edge to a Delaware LLC, then to a payroll service with a mailbox at the marina, then to the sponsor suite’s parent company that served choux pastry dusted with powdered brag.
“Authorized Benevolence,” Jonas reads from a settlement blurb we pulled from an overseas docket. He underlines the phrase until the paper scuffs. “God, he never recycles names—he recycles sacraments.”
“He built a church with buttons,” I say. My mouth tastes like the chair’s vinyl, that petroleumed gloss that holds onto skin the way arguments hold onto nights. “Help me trace who paid for the hymnals.”
He threads string to SeamWell Media, a content arm with no staff page and yearly invoices that look like a magician’s sleeve. Another line to Tethys Behavioral, where the halo icon has been laundered into teal waves. Another to Northlight Therapeutics, the land-banked shell that happens to own a chunk of my clinic’s roof.
“Here,” Jonas says, palming a stack of shipping manifests that smell faintly of toner and sea salt. “Cases labeled ‘orthotic wearables’ routed through the marina wind tunnel to avoid street cameras. Same serial ranges as wristbands I saw on stage.”
I pin the manifests under the drone beacons we plotted on an old transit map. The bay coughs fog even in my memory; the beacons blink red dots around our strings like they’re auditing us. “ShoreWitness said the chute unlocked during laundry,” I murmur, mostly to remind my muscles that they already did the scariest thing tonight. “This is just paper.”
“Paper is where power forgets it’s being watched,” Jonas says. He reaches for the kettle, but I hear the tremor in the spoon when it taps porcelain. He’s running hot too.
Micro-hook: The board begins to look like a net; I can’t tell if I’m the trawler or the catch.
My phone thumps with a soft bass I reserve for encrypted couriers. DROP: BOX 27—CONFIRM CUSTODY. I glance at the clock: after midnight, but from the bay the gossip stalls never entirely go silent. I throw on my hoodie and we move—no words, just the common choreography of people who have run out of patience separately and learned to ration it together.
The sidewalk is sugared with fryer dust; the food hall’s doors yawn on cleaning crews, and etiquette signs wag their fingers—no filming at communal tables—while ring lights glow at the edges where everyone liveblogs anyway. Families drift by and trade reputation scores like weather, hands sketching storm signs for red, amber, clean. The halo icon flashes on wrists and receipts, purity sold by the hour.
The safe box kiosk sits beside the elevators that whisper headlines. I slide the key and palm a fat envelope into my jacket. It is heavier than an email and warm like it grew in my pocket all along. We don’t read it under cameras. We carry it home like contraband bread.
At the table, I slit the flap with the edge of a recorder card. The smell is courthouse and machine oil, lawyer’s office carpet. Black bars zipper the pages; ink hides names with a maternal zeal that makes my molars grind. A heading shows through: Deposition—Closed Session—Settlement Confidential. I skim to the highlighted portion and feel the hair on my arms rise.
“Read it,” Jonas says, quiet as if we need to keep the room from waking.
I do.
“Question: Describe the intervention applied without express consent.”
“Answer: The protocol described as ‘authorized benevolence’ was engaged at 0.9 soothe; narrative seam set to stitch back; empathy gain to audience at plus one; compliance fade minimal…”
I point at the stack with an index finger that won’t quite stop humming. “That’s the same language. The same units. This was nine years ago.”
Jonas leans over my shoulder, breath cooling the hot sugar still clotting the air. “Scroll.”
“Question: Who configured the rig?”
“Answer: The engineer on duty—Rowan Pike—confirmed settings on the board.”
The name sits in the white space like a live wire. I steady the page with both hands.
“Again,” Jonas says.
I read it again. It still says Rowan Pike. Not redacted. Not merciful. The old clerk who did this scanning either missed a name or meant to leave a breadcrumb. I press my thumb to the margin where no ink bleeds so I won’t smudge the part that matters.
“We have him tied,” I say. “Old clinic to Lab 7. Same vocabulary. Same hand on hardware.”
Jonas doesn’t answer right away. He rocks on his heels, eyes tracking my strings, linking the name to the nodes with a kind of respectful dread. “It’s the spine,” he finally says. “Gray’s study, the settlement, tonight’s interface. But before you say ‘publish,’ I need to say ‘don’t.’”
“We said we’d make people safer by telling them what the chair does. The menus alone—”
He puts his palm on the table with that soft-meets-hard sound wood makes when it remembers trees. “Listen to the part of me that got fired for impatience. If you put this up now, he files an emergency injunction. He paints you as a thief, claims proprietary secrets, claims you’re jeopardizing clinical trials. We lose ShoreWitness. We lose the clerk who leaked this. We lose the anchor I lined up. All doors slam, and he quotes the halo until the city sings along.”
The kettle clicks without having been turned on. Habit has its own electricity. I pour water I don’t remember boiling over tea I don’t remember measuring. The steam kisses my face with a hospital’s humid lie. “So we sit on a match while he stacks tinder.”
“We sequence,” he says. “We lock Rowan to the present with a second source. We place ‘authorized benevolence’ into a sponsor filing. We craft a path a judge can’t pretend not to see.”
He talks like he’s threading a needle in wind. I rest my face in my hands until the smell of my own palms—metal, citrus, linen—grounds me. I lift my head and set the deposition on the board, pinning it with two brass tacks like a pinned moth that deserves a museum label, not a child’s jar.
“We need the settlement’s front page,” I say. “The where and when. And the family who signed it. Without names, Gray calls this rumor.”
“I’ll work the docket angle,” Jonas says. He’s already moving, already pulling state abbreviations from memory, already muttering, “Hrast was Croatia-adjacent but the filing came through a London shell—Northlight? No, that’s ours. Different vintage. Try Parados Clinic GmbH.”
He writes the corporate family like a genealogy of ghosts. I find the ship that carried the old rig stateside in a liner manifest, tuck it under Tethys with a red line that looks like a vein. I want the board to bleed, to confess. It only accepts pins and string.
Micro-hook: The phrase ‘authorized benevolence’ winks from two centuries on my wall—the past settlement and tonight’s interface—like a private joke only villains laugh at.
“What about sponsors,” I say. “The brands with the teeth.”
Jonas grins without humor. “They don’t use their own mouths. They hire mouths.” He circles SeamWell Media and draws lines to ad-tech brokers whose names sound like vitamins. “Find me a creative brief that mentions reconciliation theater, anything nodding to empathy metrics.”
I open my email and sift expense attachments that smell like deli wax paper and negotiation sweat. A PDF coughs up a Brand Safety Framework—their words—promising “alignment with real-time reconciliation content.” I pin the phrase to the board, a cousin to the deposition’s line that dressed assault as a sacrament.
“Mira,” Jonas says, softer. I turn.
He isn’t looking at the board; he’s looking at me. “You keep putting your mother’s linen in your pocket before breaking into places. I recognize the ritual. I don’t want to watch you turn it into a dare.”
“You want me to be cautious,” I say, dry.
“I want you to be alive when this airs.” He traces the deposition’s margin with a fingertip that stops before the name. “And I want Leo able to walk out.”
The tea goes lukewarm on my tongue; bitter knows how to wait. I nod and take my hands off the publish key that exists even when the laptop is closed. “Then we make a list,” I say. “Second source on Rowan. Sponsor tie using their words. Family contact from the settlement. And we prep a package for the anchor that would make my mother proud.”
“She liked when you labeled the jars,” he says. “You don’t have to label the monsters to make them real. But it helps.”
We work until the fog slips its fingers under my windowsill and the drones blink like tired saints above the marina. The news blimp reroutes around the wind tunnel, a silent whale that refuses the current. The city smells of salt, disinfectant, and hot sugar, a trinity that keeps trying to pass for comfort.
At three, I print the phrase AUTHORIZED BENEVOLENCE in 48-point type and tape it between Gray and the sponsors. The halo icon on a hospital wristband I saved from my scan watches the words like a ring that never meant marriage, only property.
Jonas zips his bag and checks the alley through the curtain’s seam. “No tails. Window in the morning for court records. Sleep two hours, annotate at dawn.”
“You sound like a person,” I say.
“I’m rehearsing,” he answers, and his smile reaches the part of his face that knows how much rehearsals cost.
He leaves through the back so my front camera can pretend I was alone. I wipe the table twice, then a third time, because citrus can be a spell and I want it to fail. The deposition sits on the board humming a frequency I can hear in my teeth.
My phone buzzes with a tone I hate: Family. I expect nothing. I open everything.
Sera: Dinner tomorrow? Come early. A friend wants to help with Leo. Bring your ‘evidence.’ A halo icon blooms next to her signature, two rings like a target pretending to be a promise.
I hover over the keypad and taste detergent. The elevator screens in my building whisper THIRTEEN DAYS even when they’re off. I look at the board and at the taped words that already tried to erase us a decade ago.
I type: I’ll come. Then I put the phone face down and ask the room the question that keeps surviving edits: “If I walk in prepared, what will they say we agreed to as kids, and who wrote the script?”