The names on the spreadsheet refuse to be people until I hear the air in their syllables. I read them aloud anyway, keeping my mouth close to the mic on my desk so the consonants land hard.
“Lab 7, after-hours access,” I say, scrolling. “Badge 24-1138, 02:12 to 03:41. Badge 24-1107, 03:43 to 04:09. Badge 24-1172, 04:13 to 04:56.”
Jonas leans over my shoulder, coffee steam brushing my cheek. “Payroll codes next,” he says. “Make them argue.”
The room smells like salt pushed through screen gaps and the disinfectant I used on the keyboard earlier, a ritual against panic masquerading as hygiene. Elevator screens whisper headlines two buildings over, their glow Morse-coding my wall. A receipt with the twin-ring halo icon holds my place in the stack of contracts, the symbol grinning like a saint with its hand out.
I drag the folder marked Seams/Logs onto the other monitor. “Swipe logs left, payroll right,” I narrate, for the recorder and for my own spine. “Curalis night differential column A—‘on-call technologist.’ Shell company disbursements column D—‘biometric services.’”
Jonas taps the trackpad, gentle as a nurse waking someone without frightening them. “Try the deposition fragment,” he says. “Paragraph twenty-eight. The one that redacted names but forgot to black out the initials in the footnote.”
I slide the PDF on top of the logs. In the margin, a ghost of letters floats where the censor bar failed: R.P. Then chair operative. Then comfort board.
“R.P.,” I say. “Room 7. Comfort board.”
I pivot to the audio from the pen and scrub to the soft click before Gray’s voice. Jonas marks the micro-chime pattern in spectral view—three high beads and a low bell signature he labeled CB-Loop days ago. I overlay the pen’s timestamp on the swipe log time column the way I overlay breath on linen. The numbers kiss.
“Badge 24-1138 enters at 02:12,” I say. “CB-Loop begins at 02:14. ‘Comfort injection’ at 02:15.” I don’t say Gray’s “good, Leo,” out loud. The vowels live in my teeth already, warming for a fight.
Jonas opens payroll. “Look for whoever logs out at 04:56 and goes home to nobody,” he says, and then he corrects himself with a wince. “To fewer distractions.”
“To silence,” I say, and I filter the roster by night shifts. Three names collapse into one line because two are vendors rotating weekly. The survivor is a salary with an overtime slope that spikes any time the show has a rehearsal or a tribunal hearing.
“Rowan Pike,” I say, and the room finally gives me a face I can’t see yet. “R.P.”
I pull up a vendor insurance certificate and find the emergency contact: a number that pings to a diner on the edge of the marina district, a place that gives out punch cards and free coffee refills to night shift staff so long as they never record in the booth. I know the etiquette; the food hall forbids filming at communal tables, but the edges liveblog anyway. The diner doesn’t forbid anything; it just watches and refills when asked by those who tip well.
“I can hear the neon there from three blocks,” I say. “It hums in D.”
“We bring cash,” Jonas says, already pulling bills from the coffee tin we use for fines and bribes. “Phones to airplane; one burner on. You carry the pen. I carry the redacted deposition.”
I slide my mother’s envelope into my jacket pocket, left side. The scratch at my thumb wakes like a small, loyal animal. “We’re not publishing tonight,” I say to the room, in case someone is listening. “We’re listening.”
Micro-hook: I print the swipe logs and the payroll page where the name Rowan Pike repeats like a drumline. Two concentric rings stare up from the printer’s own test page, because nothing in this city forgets to sell virtue. I slip the pages into a folder with masking tape that reads door.
We walk fast along the marina wind tunnel, fog lashing our cheeks like soaked thread. Drones cough and veer, their navigation cameras no match for weather that refuses metrics. A news blimp tries the corridor and gives up, listing east to chase a gossip stall staging a panel on “therapeutic discretion.” I taste hot sugar in the air from the Strand’s late funnel cakes and coffee from everywhere else, two odors arguing about comfort.
The diner’s neon sign stutters above glass like a heart with a skipped beat. Inside, cups clink; the steam from the espresso wand knits itself into the pink-blue light and unknits again. The counter woman recognizes night faces and nods us to a corner booth without questions. The vinyl sticks to my palm. I like the honest tug.
“Split the angles,” Jonas says, sliding into the far side so he can watch the door and the reflection in the pie case. “We don’t talk first.”
I set the folder on the table and hide the word door under a napkin. The halo icon on the receipt for two coffees looks cleaner than the Formica. I turn it face down.
“If Rowan walks,” I say, “we follow until the fog eats us or the door opens.”
Jonas stirs nothing into his coffee and makes a clock with his spoon. “If Rowan sits,” he says, “we let silence do the work. People who run machines like to be asked the right small question.”
The right small question burns a shape in my mouth: What do your hands do when you press the comfort board? I rewrite it without accusation: How heavy is the rig? My mother would have told me to ask for directions to the bathrooms first so the person can refuse something safe and then say yes to what matters.
The bell over the door makes a sound I want in my archive—metal, grease, brief joy. A figure in a Curalis utility jacket shuffles in, shoulders forward like walking under rain that hasn’t fallen yet. Short hair, dark undercut growing out. A satchel that doesn’t want to scream engineer but does. Their eyes flick ceiling-camera, counter, pie case, door. They smell like citrus cleanser caught in hoodie cotton.
“Rowan,” Jonas says without moving his lips.
I keep my face down a half-inch and watch in the window reflection, the neon writing nervous hieroglyphs on the glass. Rowan takes the booth two down from us, back to the wall, view of the door. They order by pointing. The counter woman brings coffee. Rowan wraps both hands around the cup and doesn’t drink. Steam fogs their glasses; they blink into a private climate.
We let four minutes pass. In four minutes you can decide to lie three times, then choose to tell one thing true from exhaustion. I reread Pike, Rowan in the payroll printout until the letters become roof beams, something that holds weight.
“Now,” Jonas says, as a foghorn bleats outside. The sound comes through the glass and through my sternum. It makes me brave inside my pocket.
I stand with my mug and cross into Rowan’s sight line. “Rowan Pike?” I keep my voice like the spoon clock—gentle, exact. “I’m Mira Vale. This is Jonas Reed. I brought you the part of the story that got redacted.”
Rowan’s eyes ricochet through four emotions I catalogue without naming, and land on a flatness I recognize from people who keep systems from failing: don’t take on more input than you can regulate in the next ten minutes. They don’t reach for the paper when I set it on the table. They do look at the corner, where the censor bar failed and R.P. breathes like a fish.
“Off the record,” I say, because half the city believes those words still exist somewhere.
Rowan’s mouth lifts in a shape that isn’t a smile. “There’s no such thing,” they say. Their voice scratches like linen against a healing cut. “How did you find me?”
“Numbers asked for a name,” I say. “Your badge answered. And the part of the deposition that forgot who it was protecting.” I slide the pen recorder next to the mug and click it to life so it looks like what it is. “I can leave this off. Or I can make a record that could keep someone safe.”
Jonas stays three paces back, hands open on the back of the booth. “We’re not cops,” he says. “We know what the comfort board does. We know when it’s triggered. We need one answer and then we’ll pay the check and leave you to your coffee.”
Rowan’s fingers play the cup sleeve like a fretboard. “What one answer.”
I keep it small. “Who signs into the pivot interface when Gray is on the floor.”
Rowan looks past me to the neon. It flickers, alive/dead/alive, a lie detector with a bad sense of humor. “There’s redundancy,” they say finally, the words slow, careful. “Two factors. Board seat. Chair seat. Board seat moves fast. Chair seat stays. If I tell you names, you’ll die in a nondisclosure.”
“I already died there,” I say, and the heat of the coffee makes my throat soft. “I want the mechanics. Not names. Where does the signal stop if somebody pulls one plug.”
Rowan’s eyes sharpen, as if relief is a thing you can rent briefly. “Pivot board middle relay,” they say. “Under the glass. Hard to reach during show. Easy to reach before. But you didn’t hear that.”
“I heard the hum,” I say. “I heard you breathe in Lab 7.”
The phone on the table glows. Rowan glances by reflex, and I catch the name in the light printed in cruelty: Gray. The message preview is short: Balance visit went well. Keep our engineer family tight. A second bubble appears: Where are you now?
Rowan’s spine finds a new angle—flight. Their hands leave the cup. Their knee bangs the table. Coffee leaps and lands on the deposition like a bruise. Jonas steps back to give them space, but the space becomes speed. Rowan slides out of the booth and toward the door with the grace of someone trained to carry delicate things fast.
“Rowan,” I say, not loud enough to humiliate, just enough to follow. “We can protect—”
The bell shrieks. The door inhales fog. Neon shatters on the wet. Rowan is gone into the hallway of weather between diner and night. A napkin holder tumbles. Something hard taps my boot and skitters under the next booth. Jonas looks at me; I look at the floor.
I crouch and find it with my fingertips: a keycard, heavy for its size, silver-and-blue with the Curalis logo smudged by thumb oil and citrus. The back is labeled in tiny print SECTOR B / ACCESS: L7-SVC / TTL: 02:00. My heart throws against my ribs like it’s trying to knock.
“Time-to-live two hours,” Jonas says, already calculating. “Shift window.”
I slide the card into the fabric cave of my jacket, directly over my mother’s envelope. Paper and plastic kiss. I feel both. “Rowan dropped it on purpose,” I say. It’s not a question because I need it not to be one.
The counter woman appears with a dishrag and a glance I can’t afford to translate. “You two paying?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, and I lay down cash, too much, because gratitude and guilt weigh the same here. The receipt prints with the halo icon, twin rings sanctifying a transaction I would rather be an oath. I flip it over and draw a circle on the blank side with my nail. It doesn’t leave a mark, but my hand knows it’s there.
We step into air that bites our cheeks and fills our ears. The bay coughs more fog down the wind tunnel, and drones on patrol blink confusion like tired sparrows. The blimp, wiser now, swings wide and vanishes.
“They’ll ping that card,” Jonas says. “They’ll know it left the building even if it didn’t.”
“Rowan knows that,” I say. The name lives better in my mouth now that I have a color to attach to it—silver-and-blue, citrus under hoodie, coffee steam cut by neon. “Rowan just told us where to pull a plug. And gave us two hours to learn the door.”
We move without speaking. I keep my left hand in my pocket, the envelope under the card, the scratch on my thumb a steady metronome that refuses to sync to Gray’s chimes.
At the corner, a family huddles under an awning, trading reputation scores in hushed weather-report code. “Green-leaning,” the father says. “No anomalies.” The mother nods toward the halo on their hospital wristband and then toward me without shame, a gentle warning not to cross the camera they pretend not to have. I drop my gaze and let their storm pass. Healing is for sale three doors down, in neon, by the ounce.
Jonas’s breath fogs. “We need a map of Sector B,” he says. “We need to test this card on a cheap lock before we try it where it counts.”
I turn the card in my pocket so the text faces my skin. The letters press a mirror image against my palm: L7-SVC. “We need to decide,” I say, “if we go now to Curalis or if we wait until morning and risk TTL gone.”
Fog pushes the question back into my mouth and makes it heavier. Above us, elevator screens in the tower whisper a headline about balance while the halo icon blooms in the corner like a season. I think about Rowan’s phone lighting with Gray’s name, about the way their body changed shape when instructions arrived.
I look down the street where Rowan vanished into the weather. The diner door swings on its hinge and settles. A neon blink rides the fog to my feet and dies there.
“Question,” I say to Jonas and to the wet air between us, because questions keep me from turning to stone. “If I trust that this card was meant for my hand, will the door it opens be the relay Rowan hinted at—or the kind of door Gray built to teach me a different lesson?”