The call drills through the dark like a thin nail.
I don’t say hello. I put the phone to my mouth and breathe once into the mic, the way we used to signal when we were kids hiding under the thrift-store counter—breath first, words second, so a hunter would only hear wind.
“Mira?” Leo whispers. His consonants wobble but they’re his.
“I’m here,” I say, and my voice goes low enough to hide in the seam of the night. “You’re on my line, not the building’s.”
Air moves behind him—vent breath, sterile and citrus-sour—and then I hear a chime: three notes, soft, spaced like a reminder that wants to be polite while it wins. My heart steps into a sprint.
“Say what you can,” I tell him. “You set the pace.”
He sighs, and the exhale carries the smallest burr, a tiny sandgrain I know lives at the edge of his left molar from when he cracked it on a rock candy at six. The burr is a compass point. “What’s the word?” he asks, and I hear him testing ropes.
“Count,” I say, because we started there. “Cradle.”
He catches the end like a lifeline. “Low,” he whispers, and the syllable drops below his throat where the storm lives safe.
I grip the edge of the counter until the wood prints into my palm. “Copy,” I say. “You’re intact.”
“Not intact,” he says, a quick dart of humor, my brother peeking around the curtain. “But not gone.”
The chime repeats—ding…ding…ding—regular enough to clock, not gentle enough to ignore. Then a second sound taps in from farther away, metallic and mean: a door sensor priming. Moist antiseptic scent blooms through the speaker like citrus cut with bleach.
“Listen,” he whispers, and he tilts the phone toward the room so I can drink it all—footfalls with clinic soles, a shift of sheet on vinyl, the faint tick of a ceiling camera track like a sand crab. I close my eyes to make room for hearing. I mouth the intervals: one…two…three…pause…one.
“Is Sera—” he begins.
“On deck,” I say. “She’s ready to run.”
“Okay,” he says, and I hear the old careful Leo who checked doors twice and reminded us to salt the pasta water. “Tell her I said—” He stops. The metallic beep returns, closer, impatient.
“What do they call the room?” I ask.
“A… maintenance suite,” he says, and I hear air quotes in his breath. “But the sign says Seven.” Soft scrape; I imagine his eyes flicking to a plate beside a door.
“Seven what?” I push, knowing the risk in pushing and pushing anyway.
He tries to answer and swallows it; I hear his swallow in my own throat. The chime shifts—now two notes followed by one, a cadence I’ve only heard once, echoing down a white hall when I followed ShoreWitness at midnight. My shoulders climb my ears. “Stay with me,” I say. “Name a color.”
“Green,” he says instantly. “Circle inside a circle on the cart.” The halo icon blooms in my head—two rings pretending to be mercy.
“We’re coming,” I say.
“No,” he whispers, scared of being brave. “Not now.”
The door beep spikes. The call drops.
——
I keep the phone at my ear for a breath longer than sane, listening to the absence as if absence might cough up an answer. The kitchen’s small noises swagger in to take up space: the fridge click; the neighbor’s pipes throat-clearing; the kettle’s metal shell reflecting a faint headline from the elevator screen in my building’s hall. Repair is available. I want to punch the sentence until it leaks.
I stab voice memo, hit the red circle on the cassette deck I’ve left tethered under the counter, and talk to future-me like I’m a paramedic sending vitals. “Time zero three oh two,” I say. “Leo lucid for sixty seconds. Confirmed storm key: ‘low.’ Chime pattern: three single dings, pause, one. Secondary cadence: two-plus-one with door beep overlay.” I slide the phone onto the cutting board and let the room record itself; the bay is in the background tonight, coughing fog along the marina wind tunnel so the drones have to blink wider. I pull a window open to gift the tape that fog, the taste of salt stepping onto my tongue as if it paid rent.
I text Sera: 3:02 call. He said low. Seven on the sign.
Three dots sprint, vanish, sprint again. Then: I’m awake. What else.
Chimes. I type the rhythm in punctuation: ding . ding . ding — ding | ding-ding…ding and feel ridiculous and right. The typing bubble pauses, then: That’s the old induction wing. I heard it once. Then a second message: 7A has the “comfort injection” carts. Green halo ring on the side.
I taste hot metal—adrenaline and the memory of that lab’s lighting. I press call; she picks up before the first ring finishes, already walking, breath doing double duty as metronome and prayer.
“He called you,” she says, and her voice softens just on the you, a private amnesty.
“Lucid,” I say. “Funniest thing—he made a joke and then the door took the punchline.” I let the laugh through my nose so she can hear I’m not crying. “He saw two rings on a cart. Chimes like a library with an agenda.”
“7A,” she says, grim like weather. “They do the long sessions there. He only calls from bathrooms or halls. If he called from 7A, someone let him carry his pocket a little too far.” I can hear her turning keys on a hook, the soft scrape of a sneaker heel catching the threshold—sneakers again, thank God. “You recording?”
“Recording everything,” I say, and I tilt the phone so the chime I captured can play back into her ear. “Listen.”
I hit the memo. Chime, chime, chime…pause…chime. Then the second sequence—ding-ding…ding—arrives like a shrug that knows you’ll obey.
“That’s the session-on-deck notice,” she says. “Two-plus-one means staffing is thin. They make the machines ask nicely when they’re understaffed.”
“Understaffed is our wedge,” I say. My knuckles are white, and when I release the counter, the wood has printed little rivers into my skin. “We can map the cadence to a wing. ShoreWitness told me 7A had a different door sensor—the beep with a nasal edge.”
“Like a goat,” Sera says dryly, and the levity lands exactly where it needs to, center chest. “Get me audio. Clean.”
“Already on tape,” I say. I pull the cassette, mark the spine with a grease pencil—7A?? chimes 03:02—and feed it back into the deck to make a copy onto the mini SD the counterstream rig will accept without sulking. Plastic grinds politely; the smell of warm circuitry joins salt and citrus in my little kitchen cloud.
“He said low,” she says again, quieter now.
“He did,” I say. “He knew where to find us.”
“So do they,” she says.
We hold the line in silence for three beats that hurt.
——
I carry the recorder into the front hall, where the elevator screen whispers a headline between floors about my lawsuit like a bedtime story with teeth. I jab the mute patch I stuck over its tiny speaker last month, a blank sticker with a halo drawn on it in pen and a single slash. The paper breathes with the building. I set the recorder on the stair and hit play again, listening for the music underneath the chimes—HVAC thrum, the low-frequency grit that lives in walls. Every room has its bruise color. 7A, if I remember, hums a half-step flatter than 7B because the return vent runs longer. I whistle the note I think it is—somewhere between F and a wound—and match it against the recorder’s playback. My mouth gets it wrong once, then lands.
“That’s A-flat pretending to be G,” I say into the note app, nerd voice engaged because humor is oxygen. “Return vent lengthening the pitch. 7A signature.”
“You’re sure?” Sera asks, and I hear keys, the zip of a tote, her palm smoothing a receipt with the halo icon that never loosens its jaw.
“As sure as I am about Mom’s sheets being cotton, not poly,” I say. “As sure as salt on tongue.”
“Then we have the room,” she says. “We don’t have the door.”
The door. The beep. The goat-nasal nag.
“We can time it,” I say. “Three dings—prep. Two-plus-one—staff thin, session imminent. The door beep rides the second cadence.” My knee bounces; the house ticks. “We need eyes on that corridor when the show starts rehearsals.”
“I can be a mother with paperwork at five p.m.,” she says. “I can be a mother with paperwork at any hour.”
“No heel clicks,” I say, and the old joke warms our bones a degree.
Hook: My phone buzzes with a new notification—a citywide alert that drones are rerouting along the marina wind tunnel due to visibility constraints. The bay’s cough just bought us darker corners and longer delays. I text Jonas the drone map without context and add, fog gives us cover for ground, not glass.
Sera clears her throat. “Say the words,” she says. “For me.”
I close my eyes and say them into the phone and the tape and the ceiling: “Count. Cradle. Low.” The last one goes where it needs to, down.
“Copy,” she says, steadier. “I’ll meet you downstairs in ten. Coffee and a plan.”
“Plan first,” I say. “Coffee is a plan.”
She laughs in a small, contained way, a laugh that belongs to women who have stared down intake at 2 a.m. and won. The call ends with a click that manages to be affectionate.
——
I lay the phone on the counter and line up the tools like cutlery: recorder, grease pencil, a folded print of the basement floor plan ShoreWitness sketched on a napkin, the Edit Bible photos with their gummy edges curling. I print a still from the pivot board—Sibling Pivot: Monster Frame circled—and write 7A? chime in the margin because my future terror will need present breadcrumbs.
The city wakes in whispers. In the alley, someone drags a bin; the sound has the wet scrape of reputation being recalculated. Families trade numbers at the curb like weather—you’re amber? we’re green until after the show—and I swallow the taste the numbers leave in my mouth: coins, battery, guilt. I look at the snapped wristband still looped on a hook near the door, its two concentric rings split and not dead enough. I touch it and get a static kiss that makes me think of Leo’s hair standing up when storms came through.
I move to the sink and splash water over my cheeks; it smells like disinfectant tonight, a ghost of the clinic piping through old pipes. I brace my hands on cold metal and speak to my reflection the way I do into a mic when I’m trying to get a witness to unfreeze. “We’re not performing repair,” I say. “We’re performing search.”
The kettle hisses. I click it off so the tape stays clean. The chime pattern loops on the recorder, and the repetition threads itself into me until I feel like a room with a door that could open if pressed right. I lean close and mark times: 0:07 ding…0:09 ding…0:11 ding…0:14 ding. Then: 0:20 ding-ding…0:22 ding with the goat-beep snouting at 0:22.4. I write: 7A cadence w/ thin staff and underline thin so hard the paper bruises.
Sera texts a photo of her sneakers by the door and the tote bulging with file folders. No clicks. I send her back a pic of the cassette labeled like a crime, and she replies with a single ring emoji, then, correcting herself, two rings with a slash through them.
“We go at the change of shift,” I narrate onto the tape. “We use fog for the walk, etiquette at the desk, receipts like shields. We ask for the itemized ledger of halo-dependent adjustments until time pulls its own fire alarm.”
I stop the tape and listen to the silence I’ve made. It’s not silent. It’s waiting.
Hook: The recorder jerks back to life—my fat thumb must have grazed the play button—and Leo’s one word drops into the kitchen again with surgical accuracy: “Low.” The sound hits me in the knees.
“Okay,” I say aloud, to him across the wires and to the map on my counter and to the drone lights smudging the fog outside. “Message received.”
In my palm, the phone buzzes a calendar whisper; the elevator screen in the hall pushes a new Gray headline—Rituals of Repair Can’t Wait—and the letters reflect on my kettle like a bruise. I pull the plug on the under-cabinet light so the words lose their mirror.
I slide the recorder into the inside pocket of my jacket where it will thud against my ribs like a small animal. I tuck the snapped halo wristband into the other pocket so the rings touch only lining, not skin. I take the floor plan and crease it along 7A’s corridor until the paper remembers the bend.
“Question,” I say to the fog, to the kitchen that holds secrets like warm sugar, and to the machine that erases in the name of care: “Now that I can name the room by its music, will I get to the door in time to change the song—or will the board drag Leo under at rehearsal and make his ‘low’ the last true word he’s allowed to say?”