The Strand smells like brine, burnt espresso, and frying batter, all braided together by the cold draft that sneaks in each time the marina doors slide open. Fog presses its face to the glass, leaving damp breath marks while drones blink and back off along the wind tunnel. A news blimp tries the corridor, wobbles, and gives up, rerouting like gossip that finds a shorter street.
I pick a table near a pillar—good sight lines, bad acoustics. The food hall has polite signs about no filming at communal tables; three people at the next one are liveblogging anyway from the edges, thumbs moving like minnows. I watch a barista staple paper receipts stamped with the halo icon—two concentric rings, purity posing as hospitality.
“Mira?” a voice says, uncertain enough to be respectful.
I look up. Jonas Reed is taller than I expected and less certain about where to put his elbows. He carries a messenger bag that’s seen rain and a guilt he thinks he hides. His hair is a negotiation with order, the way producers wear their conscience: tidy where it shows, messy where it matters.
“You reached out,” I say, standing. “You heard the hum.”
“I heard the hum,” he says. “And the fan gliss. And a splice that’s arrogant about its own invisibility.”
We shake. His hand is dry and cool. He glances at the table, then the pillar, then the camera dome above the noodle stand. “Okay if we stay here?”
“It’s loud enough to be honest,” I say. “Sit.”
He orders a coffee with the impatient gratitude of someone who’s been awake too long. When the cup lands, he fishes napkins from the dispenser and a pen from behind his ear.
“I do this with napkins because whiteboards make people lie,” he says, already drawing rectangles. “Chain of custody. Who touched what, when, and how dirty their hands were.”
“Start at my head,” I say. “Then studio. Then whatever pit it fell into.”
“Head,” he repeats, and writes SUBJECT in a box. “HaloStage capture: cranial mesh, sixteen nodes, two redundant. Live board split: A is the show mix, B is the raw multitrack. C is the audience stems, D is effects—score, comfort beds.”
“Comfort beds,” I echo, and sip. My mouth tastes like coins and sugar. “Therapeutic reframing’s playlist.”
He draws arrows. “From there—ingest to storage under sponsor stewardship.” He doesn’t look up when he says sponsor, which tells me he expects me to flinch. “Editors see A and D. Engineers see A through C. Very few see B. B is where microphones go to confess their real names.”
“The leak speaks B,” I say.
“That’s my ear.” He taps the napkin. “Not proof yet. First: we authenticate the room. Then: we authenticate the seam.”
“I already isolated the room tone.” I pull out my notebook, flip to sketches of spectra like weather maps. “Fifty-eight hertz plus harmonic at one-sixteen; ceiling fans singing their little slide. LEDs bump at one-eighty.”
“You work like a producer’s conscience,” he says, half-smiling. “I used to be one.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Producer,” he clarifies. “Conscience optional. HaloStage, five seasons. I got very good at telling stories that were tidy enough to sell.”
“You worked for them,” I say. I let the syllables take up space between us. “And now you want to help me pick the lock you helped install.”
He takes that hit without flinching. “I was fired for refusing a staged segment. I’ve been freelancing as a media forensics guy ever since. I don’t need you to trust me. I need you to verify me.”
“Verification I can do.”
He pulls a small laptop from his bag, stickers peeled off to keep it anonymous. He boots to a blank geometry of icons and opens his spectrogram tool. “I pulled your leaked clip and the morning show split-screen feed. Watch this.”
He drops both files into the window. The screen blooms with heat: oranges for consonants, desert reds for sudden applause peaks, blue seabeds where the room hum lives like a whale.
“Top is leak,” he says. “Bottom is broadcast recap. I’m going to band-pass low and mid, cut everything above 500 hertz. See the hum line.”
He drags sliders like a surgeon cutting through tissue. The spectrogram sheds its voice and keeps its bones. The hum line glows thin and resolute, doubled at the harmonic like a vein traveling under skin.
“Now—look at applause,” he says, and zooms to the region where my life supposedly turned red. “Loops leave fingerprints. They repeat every two-point-eight seconds on the show mix. On the leak—there are no loops during the question. We’re hearing raw audience mics. No sweetening yet.”
“Unprocessed studio audio,” I say. “That’s hard to fake.”
“Expensive to fake,” he corrects. “And for what? A spite edit? No. This is someone with keys. Maybe someone inside. Maybe a contractor with more cabin access than sense.”
I hear the words someone with keys and feel my wristband like a guilty thing under my sleeve. I pull out my phone, tap open the photo of the consent addendum, and lay it next to his napkins.
“Sponsors own raw,” I say. “They call it Sponsored Output. Summaries for me. Proprietary for them.”
He reads quickly, mouth tightening at my WBID. “They preauth’ed your wristband.”
“Like I’m a vending machine.”
He doesn’t pretend comfort. “Okay. Chain of custody says the leak either came off the raw pool or it came off a shadow dump before the sweetening. Either way, it speaks the room we both heard.”
“Proof,” I say.
“Not in court yet,” he says. “But proof in the court of people who still keep their brains attached to their ears. We can get you further.”
Micro-hook: he drags a line tool across the spectrogram and stops on a hairline I didn’t spot—an incision inside the S of Yes.
“There’s your seam,” he says. “Look at the consonant tail. Your S rides ragged because of your incisor catch.”
“I know that catch,” I say. “Audio engineers tease me about it.”
“Leak S is smoothed,” he says. “Then it clicks here—” he taps, zooms, taps “—like someone hard-cut and feathered just enough to fool everyone who sees but doesn’t listen. The words in your mouth are a collage.”
“Who taught you to hear like that?” I ask.
“A woman who mixed church choirs for free and pop for rent,” he says. “My mom. And ten years of lying to myself about what a television segment is.” He leans back and breathes into his coffee like it needs warming. “You’re not crazy.”
I let that sentence land and sink. People have been sending me upgrades of the word crazy since last night—provocateur, click-chaser, ungrateful sister. This is the only one that doesn’t try to sell me something.
“So what do we do,” I say, “that doesn’t get me sued into ash?”
He flips to a fresh napkin. Boxes reappear, this time with timestamps and hashes. “Workflow. First, we build a local chain: we hash your files—the leak, the morning recap, your applause glitch from last night. We write a witness note to each hash, signed with PGP. We store in three places that are not your station’s cloud and not your personal drive. Then we pull public sync points—on-air clock, audience coughs, camera jibs—and make a map any layperson can follow.”
“And then we publish,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Then we go secret in one direction, public in another. Secret: we approach someone inside who can confirm multitrack access without triggering the sponsor kill switch. Public: we publish a how-to so anyone can check the hum in their own living room. You don’t need the network to certify you if the city can.”
“The city’s busy trading reputation scores like weather,” I say. “But it might still like a good forecast.”
“Let them watch it work,” he says. “If you put that spectrogram next to the grocery receipt with the halo logo, half the town will read it between elevator dings.”
“They’ll also read lawsuits.” I tap his napkin with two fingers. “If you’re wrong or compromised, I’m a national liar with no income.”
He meets my eyes. “Then set rules. I’ll sign them. You publish them. We make our own NDAs with teeth pointed at me.”
“Ground rules,” I say, already listing. “One: Nothing leaves my possession without a hash. Two: You show me every step you take on my files. Screensharing, mirrors, or we sit shoulder to shoulder like piano students. Three: You disclose every conflict, including people who owe you favors at HaloStage.”
“Four,” he adds. “I keep my contacts but route all approach language through you. Five: If I get a legal threat, I forward immediately. Six: If either of us senses a pivot to personal—flirtation, guilt, anger—we call it out and park it. Feelings are how the machine eats us.”
“You just put flirtation on an evidence list,” I say.
“I used to produce apology segments about redemption arcs,” he says, dry enough to cut paper. “I know where stories go to rot.”
“Fine.” I pull a pen from my bag and write the rules on a napkin like a treaty no nation would honor. “Sign.”
He signs with a blocky J. Reed that looks like someone teaching their hand to be square. Then he digs in his messenger bag and produces a matte-black USB drive sealed in antistatic plastic.
“Burner drive,” he says. “New. Never met the internet. Never will. Format it yourself.”
I place it on the table but keep a finger on it, letting the cold plastic tell me what it isn’t. I reach into my jacket and pull out my own drive—a little brushed metal thing with tape over the brand. I set it beside his, two neutral objects in a city that loves symbols.
“Ground rules apply to both,” I say.
“Agreed. We exchange only after hash checks.”
“And after one more thing,” I say. “What do you want out of this? Redemption? Work? Me as a client? Me at your table because you once knew my ex’s friend and this feels like tidy narrative?”
He blinks at the speed of that run, then exhales. “I want to be useful,” he says. “I want the machine I helped build to stop pretending it’s the priest and the police and the parent in the same room. And I want to sleep without hearing a crowd track I laid over somebody’s regret.”
“You worked in Studio B,” I say.
“I worked under it,” he says. “In the rooms where the applause loop is labeled comfort. Where we badge into edits like confessions. I’m not innocent here.”
“Good,” I say. “I don’t need innocent. I need competent.”
He lifts his cup in a small salute. “To competence.”
“To chain of custody,” I counter, and we both drink like it’s medicine.
Micro-hook: he rotates the laptop and opens the leak’s audio again, then switches to a tool I haven’t used—one that maps phase alignment between channels. A lattice appears, pulsing gently.
“Live boards leave micro-misalignment,” he says. “Physical distance between mics, humidity, the way people shift in their seats. Post-mix often flattens it. The leak keeps the live board’s jitter. Another tick for authenticity.”
“So the leak isn’t a synthetic fake,” I say. “It’s a theft.”
“It’s a theft,” he confirms. “Someone voted against the official cut with a different timeline.”
“Then we need their ballot,” I say. @ShoreWitness flickers across my mind like a gull shadow. “I have a contact who might be closer to the board than we are.”
“Bring them the workflow,” he says. “Don’t bring them your heart. Not yet.”
I glance at the windows, where fog smears the water to milk. A kid chases a runaway napkin under a sign that forbids filming while his mother pretends not to be filming him. The pendant lights buzz their tiny hum at the edge of hearing; the food hall air smells like hot sugar and sanitizer.
“Okay,” I say. “Hash the files. Publish the method. Quiet outreach in parallel. Ground rules hold.”
“And burner drives?” he asks.
“After hashes,” I say. “We do it here. Now.”
We run the hashing tool. Numbers scroll in orderly lines, giving me a fleeting sense that the world can still be counted. I write the hashes in my notebook, then copy them to a slip of paper I tuck under my phone case, old-school redundancy that makes my bones feel seen.
We exchange the drives without ceremony, palm to palm and then hand to pocket. The metal warms fast against my leg.
“One more thing,” I say, stopping him as he starts to close the laptop. “If HaloStage comes for you, do you run or do you post?”
He chews his lower lip, then smiles like a person resigned to his own answer. “Post,” he says. “If they push me to run, I’ll post while my feet move.”
“Good,” I say. “Then we’re aligned.”
A server drops a receipt next to our cups. The halo icon is there, tiny and gray, two rings I can’t stop seeing in every object the city uses to count us. I draw a line through it with my pen—a soft, private slash that no algorithm will index.
“You know they’ll watch us now,” Jonas says, standing.
“They already were,” I say. I gather the napkins, layer them like thin armor, and tuck them into a zip bag. “Meet me on my roof tonight. We’ll test redundancy.”
“Fog will make the drones drunk,” he says, glancing toward the harbor.
“That’s why I like the roof.”
He slings the bag over his shoulder. “Text me the time.”
“I will.” I pause, then add, “If you ever worked on my family’s segment—tell me now.”
He squares his shoulders and shakes his head. “I didn’t touch yours,” he says. “But I know the hands that did.”
The words hang over our table like steam over coffee, vanishing and staying at once. He leaves. I watch the blimp choose a safer sky and the fog close the door behind it.
My phone buzzes in my pocket—a new message from an account with no name. 5 p.m. Fog hour. Wind tunnel. No cameras. Bring your ears. I read it twice, taste salt on my tongue, and let the halo on the receipt stare up with its clean gray eyes.
If I follow a stranger into the fog, will I meet the person who stole my red—or the person who can give it back?