The maintenance window lands like a dare in my palm: 22:00–23:00. I leave the linen note against my skin and slide the second keycard into the inner pocket I stitched with extra thread, the way my mother reinforced elbows before winter. Fog from the bay pushes up the avenues, coughing drones into confusion along the marina’s wind tunnel; above me, a news blimp drifts, reconsiders, and reroutes. Jonas meets me two blocks from the studio, hood up, breath steam-soft in the cold.
“Once we’re in,” he says, “no speeches.”
“Just pictures,” I say. “Just proof.”
“And no heroics,” he adds, and the corner of my mouth twitches because that word always arrives when the simple thing is already impossible.
We cut down the alley where the loading bays exhale disinfectant. The city wears three perfumes tonight—salt from the water, citrus from the clinic vents, hot sugar from a vendor staying open to feed the crews who swear they’re not working. A service door blinks a single green LED, bored and unthreatened. I press the keycard, shoulder to steel. The reader sighs and turns the lock.
Inside, the corridor is all tile and echo. A poster at eye level reminds staff to smile when speaking with “guests,” a halo icon ghosted into the corner to suggest virtue without naming control. Elevator screens whisper headlines between floors nearby; words like forgiveness and repair ripple through the seams. Jonas keeps his voice low in my earpiece.
“Stairwell D is left, then right, then down,” he says. “Camera dead zones for the next three minutes.”
I move like I’m following a melody I only half remember. The stairwell door sticks at first, then gives with a grunt; metal on metal sings a tiny alarm in my bones. I descend past floor labels in that neat sponsor font, pictograms promising ease. The air cools and dries. Somewhere above us, laughter rolls—the kind that empties the face right after.
“Basement corridor,” Jonas says. “Second door on the left. If Rowan was straight with us, your card fits.”
The reader accepts me with a cheerful chirp that feels obscene this close to secrets. I slip into a windowless room dressed to look like a nobody’s office: standard desk, ergonomic chair, a plant too shiny to be alive. Citrus stings the nose. A thin layer of dust on the baseboard says no one cleans here with love. On the desk sits a thick flipbook binder, laminated, color-tabbed—red, amber, blue. The cover reads OPERATIONS: CONTINGENCY LIVE-SWITCH, and in smaller print, Edit Bible.
My hands settle themselves before my mind catches up. I set my phone to silent, launch the camera, and open to the first tab.
Red: MORAL BREACH / HOST PIVOT. Bullet points map to lower-third graphics, crowd cutaways, a pre-cleared anecdote from a sponsor’s ambassador. A note in the margin: “Use comfort dose channel 3 at -8 dB for subjects with documented panic history. Time to tear < 11 sec.” My throat clicks dry.
Amber: RELUCTANCE / FAMILY PIVOT. Flowcharts descend like polite guillotines: If Subject denies → cut to B-Roll “Caregiver Sacrifices.” If Caregiver refuses alliance → trigger “Professional Testimony” with halo ring at +12% luminosity to connote medical authority. Each move sits inside a colored box, a false mercy telling the switcher where to move next.
Blue: RECONCILIATION / BRAND LIFT. Confetti made of words: closure, community, evidence-based. I flip. The pages thud their own metronome. I flip again.
“Talk to me,” Jonas whispers. “Do we have it?”
“We have a skeleton with labels,” I say. “We have nerves you can plug in.”
I reach a tab I don’t want but know I came for: SIBLING PIVOT: MONSTER FRAME. The page anchors the center of the book, as if the whole apparatus balances on this shame. There’s a photo reference for my face from last year—the green-lit absolution shot that Gray just reposted—and a shot list to shift the angel light to accusation. At the bottom, a grid labeled FAMILY SLOTS. My finger lands on a star sticker next to “L-VALE.” The star glitters cheap, a classroom reward for weaponized tenderness.
“Leo,” I breathe. The word floats up and hits the ceiling.
“What?” Jonas asks.
“They marked him. A star. Slot locked.” I point my phone and take the shot, then another, then a sweep across the whole spread so no one can argue context later. The camera’s soft shutter thups, a heartbeat I can control.
Micro-hook: A low tone rolls through the vent, like a rehearsal foghorn. Not a full alarm, but a throat clearing. I keep shooting.
The next page drills into hand signals for the floor manager when “Subject sibling grows combative.” It instructs to pause half a second before cutting audience, to harvest a face “hungry for justice,” and to cue “Comfort Chair Walkback”—the segment where they shepherd the person to a softer seat with promises of care. Footnotes cite “curated recall guidance,” the phrase the tribunal smoothed into nothing for them. I photograph until the camera app protests storage. Jonas breathes in my ear.
“Two minutes on the maintenance window,” he says. “You need a way out that isn’t the way you came in.”
I sweep back through the pages for anything I missed, and my eye catches a line of tiny text along the spine: REV 7: inserted ‘Monster Frame’ rider per sponsor request; see wristband mapping sheet. I flip the final plastic pocket. A printed grid lists wristband IDs, pivot preferences, and a column titled SEAM with numbers I know now are timestamps. Leo’s ID sits next to SEAM 09:22, dose 2. My hand trembles in a way the instrument can use.
“I have wristbands,” I say. “I have timestamps.”
“Then we have predestination,” Jonas answers, words compressed to fit the channel we’re stealing.
I return the grid to its pocket the exact way I found it and close the binder a quarter of an inch, enough to read Edit Bible again and remember that books can be both gospel and con. My phone heats against my skin. I tuck it inside my jacket with the linen note to insulate it from panic and smudge. The room’s air feels thinner, as if the pages inhaled the oxygen when I exposed them.
The first chirp comes from the ceiling panel—curious, not afraid. A second chirp answers from the hall. Somewhere, a log notes an open door in an hour when no doors should open.
“We’re done,” Jonas says. “Mop closet to your right.”
I hadn’t clocked it as a closet because the door is too proud for brooms, but the handle yields to my keycard like it’s been waiting for this play. Inside: a custodian’s cart, a yellow bucket, a bottle of citrus concentrate that could clean guilt off a priest. I yank the trash bag, toss it on the cart, and pour a cap of concentrate into the bucket with a splash that burns my eyes watering. The smell becomes a mask—a chemical halo.
I wheel into the hall with my head down. The chirp has graduated to a polite ping, the kind of sound designed to embarrass more than alarm. A pair of interns appears at the far end, laughing about a blimp that couldn’t make its cue because the fog misbehaved. One of them holds a bag with a halo-stamped receipt crumpled inside, proof they bought faith between tasks. I keep rolling.
“Left,” Jonas says. “Service elevator. If the panel asks for a badge, give it your card and a cough.”
The door slides open with effort, like an old mouth. I push the cart inside and press B → L to mean basement to loading, fingers careful not to touch any more of this building than I must. The panel screen wakes and whispers today’s curated line: Rituals of Repair heal communities. The twin-ring icon animates in the corner, light riding the circumference like a finger on a glass rim. I tilt the mop handle so it blocks my face from the camera bubble. The elevator jolts.
Halfway up, the polite ping becomes a more insistent chirp. The car slows, thinks, continues. I suck a breath through my teeth until the citrus cuts it back out.
“If they stop you,” Jonas says, “spill the bucket.”
“That was your plan?”
“Chaos is honest.”
The door opens on the loading corridor with its painted lines and its apathy. I push the cart into the lane, trying to look like a person whose job isn’t history. Footsteps echo two turns away. Voices pass through the wall like radio bleed—calm, practiced, walking toward a problem that is me. I wet the mop and let it thwap across the floor. The sound is a sponsorship approved rhythm, and still it belongs to me.
A coordinator rounds the corner with a tablet and a cardigan that says no one here is dangerous. She glances at me, at the bucket, at the yellow triangle sign I’ve wedged into legitimacy.
“Drip from B corridor?” she asks, bored.
I nod and put weight into the mop. The coordinator’s eyes slide off me like oil. She passes, notes something on the tablet, and continues toward a smaller chirp.
Micro-hook: My phone taps my ribs with a notification I didn’t ask for. I keep mopping until she’s gone, then park the cart by the service door, lean the mop, and wipe my hands clean of citrus with my jeans. The fog air outside carries salt like a confession waiting its turn.
“You’re clear,” Jonas says, and I hear in his exhale the percentage he didn’t believe. “Did you get the Bible?”
“We got the gospel and the heresy,” I say. “We got the star next to Leo’s name.”
“Then we have a path to rip the ribbon.”
I push into the alley and let the fog jacket my face. The drones above us blink in slow apology. From the street, an elevator screen across the way shows Gray’s tweet again, that halo pulsing a soft command. Food hall etiquette forbids filming at the communal tables, but the edges of the feed tonight will cut us anyway if we give them a crease.
Jonas’s shadow joins mine at the mouth of the alley, and we walk without touching because touch would broadcast too much.
“We publish some now,” he says. “Not everything.”
“We seed doubt,” I say. “We save detonation for live.”
“Exactly.” He hands me a folded napkin. Inside, a small SD card sleeps. “Camera two caught a rehearsal cue I think matches your seam numbers.”
“You love me,” I say, and the words leave my mouth like they were folded in there with the napkin.
“I love your process,” he answers, too fast to be anything but shy truth. “And yes, the rest.”
We stop under a streetlight that makes the fog glow like milk. I check the photos one more time, not scrolling too long on Leo’s star because I need a functioning body to carry this. The pictures are crisp: headers, flowcharts, the pivot phrases that made my skin go cold when the tribunal called them therapy, the wristband grid with Leo’s ID beside SEAM 09:22. Proof that they choreograph our apologies and our collapses and call it healing.
From the tower nearby, a new whisper trickles down the elevator shaft: Live in five days—join us for community repair. The halo icon rotates in polite triumph. I tuck phone and card deep, closer to the linen note, close enough that the scratch remembers me back.
The final chime hits just as we cut across the service lot—the tone the building uses when it wants to remind you it is a body with nerves. The door behind us clicks to locked, and the little green LED that let me in goes red. Somewhere, a log adds an entry: Door access variance / mop closet movement / janitorial route mismatch.
“They know a mop danced where it shouldn’t,” I say.
“They don’t know you led,” Jonas says. “Not yet.”
I look up into the fog, where the blimp has given up and the drones hover like gnats denied sugar. My fingers press the shape of the phone through my jacket, the photos inside bright and waiting.
“Question,” I say to the bay that can’t see me, to the elevator screens that keep selling comfort, to the office we left breathing behind us. “When I put these pages in front of the city, will the choreographed mercy crack where the star sits—or will the alarms I woke tonight arrive at my door before the proof does?”