The roof breathes with me. The bay coughs fog that turns the drone beacons into weak stars and pushes a horn tone through my bones every thirty-count. I point the shotgun mic toward the water and watch condensation bead along the shock mount. The laptop hums. The halo icon on the router’s warranty sticker catches a drop and splits it into two rings. I wipe it with my sleeve and hit Go Live (Test).
“Check, check,” I say. My voice rides out across the bit-rate like a skiff. “Roof feed alpha. Pattern Concordance overlay armed, contracts deck on key two, chair interface on key three, spectrograms tiled. Jonas, what’s the round-trip?”
His voice arrives in my ear with a half-syllable lag. “One-point-nine to servers, two-point-six to mirror. Count with the horn.”
I count with the horn. The fog answers with a moan that tastes like metal and brine. I mark the timestamp and swallow disinfectant air rising from the hospital wing across the boulevard. Somewhere below, the food hall vents hot sugar; the smell climbs the fire escape like a childhood I can’t have back.
“Audio’s clean,” I say. “Room tone’s fog plus neighbor’s dryer plus my heart.”
“I can’t normalize your heart,” Jonas says, “but I can teach the limiter to be kind.”
“Teach the limiter kindness,” I say. I smile without forgetting the clock in my ribs.
Sera pushes the roof door open with her shoulder and a tote bag, face pink from the four-flight climb and from deciding not to be managed today. The tote scrapes the railing; metal sings. “Tell me where,” she says by way of hello. “I’ll say it, but not the way they want.”
I point her to the milk crate stool we’ve been pretending is a chair. “Edge of frame here,” I say. “Sky and city behind you, but keep your breath near the mic. We’ll roll your statement before my explainer if they hit the Monster Frame. Or simultaneously, picture-in-picture.”
“Not monster,” she says, already angry at the word they planted in our mouths. “Sibling Pivot: Monster Frame. I won’t let them make it a folk tale.”
“Say it like that,” I answer. I hand her my handheld recorder—the one with the tiny dent from the marina locker panics. “You’re rolling whenever you press the red ring.”
She fits the headphones, exhales, and presses the ring. Her spine grows an inch. “I’m Sera Vale,” she says, and her voice is school-assembly steady with a crack hidden at the edges. “I refuse scripted closure. I refuse phrases placed in my mouth by a lab or a host. I will not perform forgiveness for ratings. I will not condemn my sister on a count I didn’t choose. If a halo shows red, it shows a program, not a person.”
A fog horn punctuates the last word. The horn lands inside the waveform like percussion, like agreement. I look at Jonas; he’s looking at me in the monitor window from his apartment two blocks away, cables around his neck like a stole.
“Run it again,” he says softly. “Same words. Breathe between sentences the way you tell your kids. Let the fog do what the string section would.”
“I don’t want a string section,” Sera says, but she nods once and then again, and the second take carries her anger like a candle with a short, hot flame. She refuses their adjectives one at a time. She refuses their cutaways. She refuses the way the halo learned to frame our mother’s silence as grace.
I press stop and listen back through one earcup. The city lays an under-track—the elevator screens whisper headlines even up here, a neighbor’s door slams, a delivery drone hiccups in the wind tunnel and corrects with a stutter that makes me grip the rail. The halo icon is printed on the delivery crate like a permission slip for the sky.
“For the record,” I say into the stream, “we air Sera’s statement only when HaloStage triggers the Monster Frame. If they don’t, we hold. If they do, we mirror.”
Jonas marks a note on our shared doc. “Mirror plan checklist,” he says. “One: real-time capture of the special, sixty-second rolling buffer. Two: overlay contracts—addendum highlights: ‘curated recall guidance,’ ‘therapeutic discretion.’ Three: pen audio stems—comfort injection count-in, Gray’s cadence. Four: chair interface slides—the euphemisms. Five: memory ritual.”
The ritual sits folded on the crate: a square of our mother’s linen, stitched with a thread I pulled from a sheet that spent too many nights against her skin. I touch it with two fingers and the scratch wakes the storm words in my tongue. “We’ll sound them if they make Leo read theirs,” I say. “We’ll speak ours on top of theirs.”
“That’s the anchor,” Sera says, and she sets her hand on mine without looking like she meant to. She smells like coffee and stubbornness, and the city’s sugar heat warms the side of my face into a sensation I file under alive.
The chat on the test stream pops with our handful of mods. Audio minty, one writes. Lag good. Horizon haunting. Watching rehearsals? Another: Receipt overlay with halo icon tight. Maybe blur the account number. I drag a box over the numbers with my trackpad and save the masking. The fog licks the laptop lid; droplets collect on the hinge like punctuation.
“We need redundancy,” I say, and flip up the Pelican case. Three drives rest inside, foam-cut like a photograph of safety. I hold them like fruit I can’t bruise. “Drive A gets the full chain: contracts, spectrograms, tribunal motion, Seams manifest. Drive B is the mirror encoder: auto-push if I go silent. Drive C is just the ritual and the family archive for when none of this matters to anyone but us.”
“Three hides,” Jonas says. His voice picks up the horn and somehow sets it down gently. “Say where.”
I’ve known since I counted the elevator screens between floors and the halo logos between receipts. “First, the marina locker,” I say. “Not the one ShoreWitness used; the one two banks over with the bolt that has never loosened for anyone. I’ll wedge A behind the back plate. The fog’s our friend there; drones go blind in that wind tunnel.”
Sera nods. “Second?”
“The Strand food hall,” I say. “Under the communal tables is off-limits to filming, but everyone liveblogs from the edges. I’ll tape B inside the vendor buzzer rack, behind the metal slat where the batter heat keeps phones sleepy. Folks won’t film under a rack while they’re hungry.”
Sera grimaces and smiles at once. “The smell will make you miss Mom’s fritters,” she says, and it already does. The memory hits in texture first—oil crackle, powdered sugar damp in fog, the way she sang to the pan to keep the batter brave.
“Third?” Jonas asks.
“The thrift shop,” I say. “Our mother’s cash box is still in the back office under a pile of tax binders. The halo icon is on the bank’s envelopes now, which is rude, but nobody bothers the box because whoever cleans there believes ghosts handle the dust. I’ll tape C under the drawer liner.”
“I’ll do the thrift,” Sera says. “I need to see the box.” She doesn’t ask if I trust her; she holds out her hand for Drive C. I place it against her palm and for a second neither of us moves.
“You’re on Strand,” Jonas tells me. “I’m on marina—no camera, hoodie, head down. I’ll cough once if I see their security rotation.”
“You don’t have to go alone,” I say.
“I am not alone,” he says, and the fact that he answers without banter makes something in me steady.
We rehearse the hotkeys. I assign One to the contract clause about “curated recall guidance,” Two to the chair’s “comfort injection” screen with the yellowed euphemisms, Three to the spectrogram of Gray’s coaching cadence under chimes, Four to the Seams manifest with the wristband IDs, Five to Sera’s statement, Six to the ritual card where the storm words live—blank on stream until the moment matters, hidden in my throat.
“If the board cues Monster Frame,” I say, “I hit Five, then One, then Three. Jonas, you mirror the feed with the rolling buffer and pin our timecode. Sera, you watch Leo. If he repeats the prompt language, you text me the first storm word. I’ll speak it back.”
Sera swallows once. “He’ll hear me if I’m not in the room?”
“Sometimes hearing is not ears,” I say. “Sometimes it’s rhythm.” The fog horn obliges with a new bar, and we all let it count us.
I film an explainer for the test stream: “We’re preparing a contingency broadcast that mirrors the special and disrupts scripted pivots with documentation. We aren’t anti-therapy. We’re anti-theater pretending to be medicine. If the special stays clean, we stay quiet. If it runs the Monster Frame, we show our work. You can print our chain. Do not harass clinic staff. Do not dox families. Ask better questions than the show will allow. Pattern Concordance, Not Truth.”
The chat blooms. Watching, they say. We’ll mirror your mirror. Someone posts a link to elevator cams, someone else to blimp paths. I screenshot the most useful, not because the tribunal will be impressed, but because I owe future me a map of how strangers tried to help.
“I have one more thing,” Sera says, and she pulls a small card from her pocket. The hospital’s wristband printers use them to test ink: a pair of halo rings and a strip of calibration squares. She’s written a sentence under the rings. She hands me the card without touching my fingers.
I read: If they say ‘alignment brings ease,’ I will stand up and say, ‘We are not a show.’ Her handwriting wobbles at the not; she underlined it twice and then once more, lighter.
“That’s not how they keep you in the audience,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “But I’m not a prop.”
“Then it’s in,” I say. I photograph the card and drop it in the deck between the contract clause and the interface slide. “We don’t lead with it. We hold it like a match.”
Jonas clears his throat. “Speaking of matches,” he says. “Legal tinder. If we go live, expect a takedown within minutes. I rerouted the encoder through a donation platform that thinks we’re a choir. If they cut us, the mirror instance picks up from a server in a college that thinks we’re a seminar on sound. Last fallback: audio-only phone bridge to the mods with instructions to describe what they see. Theater of the ear.”
“If they cut the net?” Sera asks.
I tap Drive A. “Then the drives become our lungs.”
We break to hide them before the fog thins. The marina wind tunnel tries to eat Jonas’s hoodie on the way down the stairs; he laughs without a sound and vanishes into the block like he rehearsed disappearing. Sera hugs me, quick and stiff. “If they make Leo say it,” she says into the wool of my sweater, “let me be the one to interrupt.”
“We’ll write a thing they can’t read over,” I say, and the promise lands between us with less elegance than I want and more truth than either of us can afford.
I take the Strand run. The food hall doors exhale brine and fryer hiss; my glasses fog immediately, then clear under a ceiling fan that turns rumor into weather. Etiquette forbids filming at the communal tables, but everyone on the edges wears a phone like a face. I drift to the buzzer rack, slide a strip of gaffer under the metal slat, and tuck Drive B into the pocket of heat where batteries go to nap. A vendor calls an order with a bell that rings the same interval as Lab 7’s chime; I hate the coincidence and write it down anyway because audiology has never cared what I like.
At the thrift, Sera texts a photo of the cash box drawer liner lifted like a tongue. C landed, she types. Dust didn’t mind. I send back a heart because there isn’t an emoji for thank you for carrying the bank of our ghosts.
Jonas pings ten minutes later from the marina with a blurry close-up of chipped paint and a bolt head. A fed to the back plate. Drones blind. Wind singing.
I climb back to the roof for the last check. The fog is thicker now; the blimp reroutes again and vanishes into milk. I re-arm the hotkeys and tuck the linen square into my pocket where my pulse can learn its edges. Jonas’s face returns to my monitor; Sera’s audio joins, a rustle and then stillness.
“Roll call,” I say.
“Here,” Jonas says.
“Here,” Sera says. “And ready to say no.”
“Then we’re a team,” I say. “Anxious, collaborative, empowered—terrible brand name, excellent state.”
The horn tolls. I schedule the counterstream with a hidden hotkey: M for Monster. I hover my finger over the key and pull it back like a dare I intend to win.
“Question,” I say to the edge of the roof, to the warm laptop, to the fog that has never once asked me for a release. “When the show pulls the cue and the halo leans toward red, will this roof become a tower the signal can leap from—or will the city swallow our words before they reach my brother’s ear?”