The promo drops at 6 a.m., right when the fog hugs the bay tight enough to smother sound. My phone shivers on the kitchen table, then again, then with the steady hum of a hive. I don’t open it yet. I stand at the window and watch a line of drones wobble down the marina’s wind tunnel, their lights blinking confused Morse. A blimp tries to swing inland, catches the edge of the gust, and peels off, gossip rerouted.
I brew coffee with hands that remember my mother’s morning rhythm. The city smells like salt and disinfectant through the cracked window; the cart at the corner throws hot sugar into the air, same as always. The elevator screen in the tower across the street whispers the day’s first headline between floors. I can’t hear the words, but I can read a posture: reassurance wrapped in a leash.
I sit, open the laptop, and start the compilation before courage has time to reconsider. The first message is gentle in the way a leash is gentle. “You were forgiven,” a stranger writes. “Now forgive properly.” The second is not gentle. “Monster sister, take the halo like an adult.” A third adds a GIF of a ring lowering over a cartoon skull, twin circles bright with mercy.
I drag each into a timeline with time stamps, usernames, and the halo icon wherever it shows up—on their avatars, their receipts, their hospital wristbands they’ve posted for clout. My wrists rest on the wood; the wood records the tremor I refuse to narrate. A voice memo pings from an aunt I haven’t seen in three winters: “Baby, let the show heal you. People need to see it.” I drop it into the compilation, label it family not enemy because categories matter more than comfort right now.
My inbox floods faster than I can sort. “We will tune in if you stop being stubborn.” “Rep score drop incoming.” “Do the absolution ritual; refusal is a trauma symptom.” “Forgive properly.” The command repeats until it loses syntax and becomes drumbeat.
I record my own breath on the pen for ten seconds to anchor the room and insert the clip as a baseline in the project file. Then I set the laptop mic to capture room tone: kettle hiss, street cart clatter, elevator whispers, my radiators counting age. I want the city in the track, so later nobody can say the hate lived only inside my head.
“You can surrender,” one message says, blue heart, prayer hands, halo emoji. “Let the doctor guide the reconciliation.” The halo icon appears on the ad attached to the message, two concentric rings promising purity while hiding capture. Gray’s face blooms on the sidebar in a teaser for a podcast about modern healing. I mute the clip and throw it into the growing stack.
My thumb finds the linen note in my pocket and scratches the corner across skin until the trolling clicks soften into dull percussion. Five-day countdown, I tell the coffee, the fog, the drone beacons. Five days and a backdoor I might not trust.
The door buzzes. I check the camera: Sera, hair damp, eyes dry. She holds up pastry bags like a peace offering. I open.
“Do not say ‘You look tired,’” I tell her, because siblings are the only ones I can ask that from without being sent to a wellness app.
“I brought cinnamon knots,” she says. “And a request.”
“If you want me to forgive properly, turn around.”
“Please,” she says, and the word holds. “Let me talk.”
We eat sugar with burnt tongues and watch the promo together on my laptop because the city will play it to us anyway. The cut is clean: my televised smile, Sera’s old tears, Leo’s blankness, and the host’s trained hush. The lower-third reads: Forgiven, Ungrateful? The question mark is a weapon, thin as a needle.
I queue my compilation on the second screen. “I’m not releasing this yet,” I say. “Not until I can overlay it with contract pages.” I don’t tell her how much I want to scream. I cut another slice of silence and lay it between us.
Sera taps the spacebar and freezes the frame on my old green halo. “They made this to starve us,” she says. “If we feed it refusal, it eats that too.”
I nod.
“I made a statement,” she says. “At school. In the stairwell where the cameras don’t get reception. I need you to listen before I post it.”
“Play it.”
She pulls out her phone and sets it on the table between the cinnamon knots and the halo-stamped receipt I use as a bookmark. The video opens on cinderblock and safety signs. She stands centered, not lit like a hero, not framed like a victim. Her voice is low but threaded with steel I remember from childhood when she’d talk a storm into giving us one more minute on the pier.
“I am Sera Vale,” she says in the video. “I love my brother. I love my sister. We won’t perform grief for an audience. We won’t submit to a ritual engineered to soothe strangers while it rearranges our memory. We will take care of each other off-script. If that breaks your show, the show was broken.”
She stops. The clip ends on a breath, not a speech.
I realize my hand has squeezed the linen note hard enough to crease the paper. I smooth it against my thigh and look at Sera, not the phone. “Post it,” I say.
“There’s more,” she says, chewing a corner of pastry like it betrayed her. “I added links: the red deposition page, a list of questions to ask your clinic before you sign ‘curated guidance,’ and a placeholder for our counterstream link. I didn’t name Leo because I promised him, but I said ‘families.’ You approve?”
“I approve,” I say. “And I will protect you if it goes feral.”
She laughs once. “You can’t protect me from a weather system. But you can stand in the doorway with me.”
“Then I will.”
She posts. We wait. The phone digests for a beat and then erupts. Comments pile like tide foam. “Thank you.” “This.” “Refusal isn’t hate.” “My partner was ‘guided’ into confessing a memory she didn’t have.” “I watched the special and felt clean until I wasn’t.” “We won’t perform grief.”
The feed tracks on the map the way distress calls used to: dots lighting up in apartment towers where elevator screens whisper headlines while laundry hums, in clinics where receipts carry halos, in food halls where filming at tables is frowned on but edges swarm with cameras anyway. Families share reputation scores in the replies like weather. “Green for now,” one says. “Drift predicted.” Code words appear, unbidden: storm watch, amber window, comfort dose. I copy a few into my notebook; language builds archives.
Sera watches the numbers stretch. “I didn’t know people would answer.”
“Of course they would,” I say. “You used a door no one else sees.”
“Which door?”
“The one that isn’t a camera.”
Micro-hook: A push alert slices the room: Dr. Gray: A Note of Concern. My neck tightens in the exact place the halo’s cool air branded me. The tweet loads with a timid blue heart and a halo emoji.
I’m hearing the pain in our community tonight. Refusal can be a symptom of harm. My team and I invite any family struggling to consider our rituals of repair—gentle, evidence-based, live on Sunday so no one suffers in silence. We hold you in benevolence.
He threads it with a clip of himself in a soft sweater saying the word gentle twice. The twin-ring icon glows in the corner like a certification he wrote for himself. Replies bloom in three directions: worship, fury, and the particular kind of shame that mutates into evangelism.
The elevator screen across the street switches to his tweet and cycles the words between floors, a cascade of concerned and repair and benevolence raining down the glass shaft. The city copies him into corners that never asked.
Sera leans back and rolls her eyes so far I expect the ceiling to flinch. “He called us sick in one sentence and saved us in the next.”
“Authorized benevolence,” I say, hearing his line inside my walls from yesterday, the film crew still haunting my floorboards. “He gets to diagnose my refusal and sell the cure.”
I cut a clip of his tweet and staple it to my timeline next to the “forgive properly” drumbeat. I pull the pen recorder close and capture the radiator’s tick, my own swallow, Sera’s exhale. I want this room to contradict his sweater.
“We can’t keep answering,” Sera says. “Not every time he changes key. We answer once, anchored.”
“You already did,” I say. “And people heard you.”
The comments keep breathing. A school counselor I don’t know posts: “Performing grief taught my students to hide it.” A nurse writes: “The halo on our wristbands makes families act brave for my chart, not for their bodies.” The hot sugar smell from the corner cart thickens as they load another tray; the sweetness nauseates and steadies me in equal measure.
I pour more coffee and set a mug in front of Sera. “He’ll respond again,” I say. “He’ll quote your video, call it brave, and invite you to the ritual on-air.”
“He won’t get my face,” she says, lifting the mug with both hands like a pledge. “He got it once. That’s all he gets.”
“He’ll try Leo.”
“Then we train for the storm.”
We sit in the window glow as the bay breathes. Drones limp off their routes; the blimp gives up and points out to sea. In the wind tunnel, fog gathers power, and for a second I imagine it as a bodyguard—no halo, no hashtags, only density.
My phone vibrates again—different pattern. Not social; system. A facility alert, the kind that piggybacks internal schedules onto anyone with an old staff badge or, apparently, a keycard that used to belong to a night engineer. The notification is bare: Service Corridor B—Access Window: 22:00-23:00. Stairwell D reader in maintenance mode.
Sera watches my face read the message. “What is it?” she asks.
“A door,” I say.
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
She sets the mug down with the care of a person not breaking anything else today. “You’ll need a runner,” she says. “Not Jonas. He’s already on a thousand lists.”
“You volunteering?” I ask, half-dare, half-hope.
“I’m volunteering to keep the house warm and the feed alive,” she says. “And to call every minute you don’t answer.”
I nod, because she’s right and because my body likes the idea of someone whispering time into my ear while I walk under cameras. I cut the Gray tweet into smaller bites and lay them on the timeline like teeth. “He told the city refusal is sickness,” I say. “I’ll show them what the cure costs.”
She stands, pockets her phone, and touches the pocket where my linen note lives. “Breathe,” she says.
“Fold, press, breathe,” I answer, and the words feel like a door that opens inward.
Micro-hook: Gray posts again before she reaches the stairs. He tags me by name, a velvet pin through a butterfly: My DMs are open, Mira. Let’s model repair together. Under it, a photo from years ago—the halo above me, green and merciful, my smile split wide like a person who didn’t know yet what mercy buys.
I close the laptop before the room can flood. I tuck the second keycard in my inner pocket, the one stitched by my own hands, and hold the linen note against it. The city outside whispers headlines between floors. The fog thickens like a promise nobody can bill.
“Question,” I say to the bay, to the drones that can’t see me, to the new door that might. “If I walk through the maintenance window and find the archive Rowan meant me to find, will the city listen before the show names me sick again—or will Gray’s concern swallow my voice before it reaches the stairwell camera?”