I stack the cards on the table in a grid: routes, code words, failsafes, timed cues. Each card smells like felt-tip grapes and the oil from my hands. The kitchen air holds salt from the bay, disinfectant from the wiped counters, and the sweet scorch from the caramel I burned reheating coffee. The halo-stamped wristband lies cracked beside the sink, its two concentric rings like a calm face that never learned what pain is for.
“Checklist, top to bottom,” I say. My voice hits the refrigerator and comes back smaller, which is how fear shrinks without leaving.
Jonas sets his laptop to mirror mode so both screens show our dashboard. “Counterstream rig: power, backup power, cell-bonded uplink, satellite failover, two mirror encoders. All green.” He swipes once. The bay fog flashes in the window, a white pulse. “Alert words?”
“Three storm words on my mark,” I say. “And the decoy phrase if we’re in public.”
Sera spins the charm at her sternum and lets it settle. The silver disc makes a quiet tick against her nails that I log because I can’t not. “Decoy is ‘follow-up appointment,’” she says. “Storm words are private until they aren’t.”
“Confirm your route from stage to 7A,” Jonas says. He’s calm in the mouth and tight around the eyes. He keeps the map on the screen and a finger on the zoom like he can pinch the hallway wider if he has to.
“Left at vending,” Sera recites, tapping the counter with each turn. “Right at the Alignment Is Love poster. Service corridor. Side door to 7A. Lo twice, the backyard way. Bathroom if intercepted. I keep walking.”
“If the host rides your breath with the cuff?” I ask.
“I hold,” she says. “You taught me how to make a pause do labor.”
I breathe through my nose and taste metal and lemon. “Code words for outcomes,” I say. “Say them.”
“Low means storm near,” Sera says. “Clear means safe exit path. Stack means extra bodies by the door. Suture means they tried to reframe and I need your cut.”
Jonas looks at me. “And Monster Frame?”
“Instant switch,” I answer. “No think time, no votes.”
He nods. “I wired a listener for that exact metadata. The second the board cues it, our encoder drops pre-roll and slams to live.”
“We can’t miss,” I say.
“We won’t,” he says, and he reaches for my wrist without looking like a man reaching for anything.
Hook: The elevator screen down the hall exhales another headline—soothing voice pitched for captivity—and the door seam leaks it into the apartment: “Healing demands courage. Tune in tomorrow for reconciliations that change lives.” The words slide under the smell of hot sugar and stick like spun glass.
We move to the living room where cables breed. I lay the “Linen” drive on the coffee table like a communion wafer. “Deadman switch check,” I say. “If I fail to ping hourly after call-time, the drive pushes to the list, the anchor, the interest group, and the families. Jonas mirrors to the cloud locker. Sera’s attorney-of-record gets the Edit Bible dump with the clause summary.”
“I hate that we can name this,” Sera says.
“I hate that we have to,” I say.
Jonas slides the mixer faders up and makes the apartment breathe in stereo. “Say your three.”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
He knows my tells, so he pivots. “Charm check.”
Sera tilts her chin. I fit the headphones over my ears and thumb the transmitter. Heat brushes my palm like a moth again. Her heart hums under the silver. “Count and cradle,” she says, and the breath on that line carries apple shampoo and chalk from her day. She pauses, then lets one word crest low in the channel. I cut before it lands because if I let it finish now I’ll spend it, and I need full charge for tomorrow.
“Green,” I say. “We’re green.”
Jonas sets a tablet by the window. On it, the counterstream shows our splash: the chair interface, the Edit Bible page that names the Sibling Pivot: Monster Frame, a spectrogram ready to unfurl like a flag. “When they hit it,” he says, “I hit this.”
“I hit it,” I say.
He smirks. “You hit it. I already scripted the macro to ignore my hesitation.”
Sera watches us banter and then cuts in, voice quiet enough to thread the noise. “No one hesitates.”
I nod and feel my jaw unlock. “No one.”
We rehearse handoffs until the words lose language and become muscle. I tap, Sera taps back. Jonas names timestamp deltas and I name scent cues from past sessions; we’re ridiculous and superstitious and engineered all at once. My phone hums every fifteen minutes per the schedule we forced on ourselves like a school bell. The city outside runs its own bells—drones blinded by fog, a blimp rerouted by the marina’s wind tunnel, scooters whirring below like bees drunk on battery.
“Food hall etiquette says no filming at communal tables,” Jonas says, half to break tension, half to log a truth.
“Yet everyone liveblogs from the edges,” I answer. “We will use that. If they shove Sera out a side door, the edges become our cameras.”
Sera’s mouth tightens. “If they shove me, you publish everything. Do not wait for me to look brave.”
“You already look brave,” I say, and then I look at the cracked wristband so I don’t make her carry my face.
We move upstairs. The roof is cold and slick as if someone smeared the sky with oil and dragged it over our heads. The bay and the city exhale together: salt, diesel, wet concrete, and the strange carnival heat from a vendor cart we can’t see, baking sugar into the night. Drones blink once and disappear in fog like fireflies who forgot how to be alive. The news blimp makes a slow arc and then aborts; its rotors thrum against the crosswind like a heartbeat out of rhythm.
Jonas drops the pelican case and opens it. The inside smells like foam and new plastic, the scent of unused things that hope not to stay that way. He pulls out the encoder, the bonded modem, the little red-armed toggle I labeled with tape: MONSTER = LIVE. “Hands,” he says.
We layer mine over his on the toggle, then place Sera’s on top so her knuckles whiten at the edges. “Say it,” he murmurs.
“Monster Frame,” we say in a three-person chord.
I flip the arm down and back up. The preview screen flashes white, then renders our slate. Latency reads 190 milliseconds. Jonas grimaces. “I can shave twenty. Maybe thirty.”
“How?” Sera asks.
“Drop the extra watermark and choose danger over polish,” I say before he does.
He grins at me with half of his mouth. “She knows me.”
He dials and dials until the delay sits at 152 milliseconds on one path, 168 on the other. “It’ll wobble under load,” he warns.
“We’ll brace,” I say. “We’ve rehearsed brace.”
Hook: The roof door bumps behind us—just the building settling, I tell my nerves—and we all flinch anyway. I feel for my pocket like a child for a talisman. The linen note crinkles back. I take it out: a piece of our mother’s pillowcase hem, three words penciled small in her neat hand like she was trying not to wake anyone. The cotton scratches my skin. The words scratch somewhere I can’t name.
“Put it in your left pocket,” Jonas says softly. “Closer to the toggle.”
I do. “Counterstream armed,” I say, to the devices and to the part of me that needs declarations to make the world hold.
“Armed,” Jonas echoes.
Sera blows into her hands. “Time check.”
“Twenty-three hours, fourteen minutes,” Jonas says. “And change.”
We sit on milk crates and talk in short lines because long ones would tip us over. Jonas runs through the buttonology. Sera runs through the route again. I run through audio triage—mic loss, cuff noise, the reverb of a chair we haven’t fully mapped. We name what we can, we leave the rest to the place where choice becomes reflex, and I wish that were a room I could diagram.
“You know the paradox,” I say, looking at the city’s smudged lights. “To be believed tomorrow, I have to submit to the same machine that erases me. We’re using its frame to burn its frame.”
“Then we make the frame flinch,” Sera says.
Jonas leans back so the fog beads in his hair, making him look newly baptized or just damp. “We make the frame flinch, then we shove the truth through the gap.”
I hold up the cracked wristband like a cheap crown. “The halo appears on receipts, contracts, hospital bands. Purity on paper, capture in practice.” I toss it onto the pelican case and the rings flash out a small moon. “Tomorrow we peel it off on camera.”
Sera nods and touches the charm with two fingers. “And we show our own rings.”
“Speaking of,” Jonas says, pointedly not romantic. He taps a line of code on the tablet. “I patched the listener to a redundant trigger. If their metadata tag changes spelling—‘MonsterFrame’ without space—we still fire.”
“They would,” I say. “They always rename harm to keep it fresh.”
“I also set a human failsafe,” he adds. “If you see it and both automations fail, you hit spacebar and the world gets us, warts and all.”
“Spacebar is a terrible name for a god,” I say, and that gets us laughing, which is what we needed.
We pack the gear like we’ll unpack it in the exact same order tomorrow. Back downstairs, the building smells warmer—someone broiling fish, someone melting sugar again, someone opening bleach. The elevator screen whispers a final scroll: “Two rings. One truth.” I want to hurl the cracked band at it and record the shatter, but I keep my hands, because the machine loves tantrums in the people it labels unreliable.
On the kitchen table, I lay out three things: the “Linen” drive, my mother’s note, and a thin strip of gaffer tape. I tape the note inside my jacket along the seam so it scratches when I move, a reminder that the body carries records the halo can’t read. Jonas sets three alarms for before dawn, then sets three more. Sera practices unclasping the wristband with one hand without looking down. We don’t talk about sleep. We talk about breaths: four counts in, four hold, four out, a mantra old as any storm.
“One last test,” I say. “Call-and-response.”
Jonas raises his eyebrows. “At your command.”
I point to him. “If I say suture?”
“I cut the video to the interface and full-screen the clause where consent collapses,” he says. “I pin the spectrogram next to it. I mute the house music.”
I point to Sera. “If I say stack?”
“I abort the nice-walk tone and use cafeteria voice,” she says. “I pull Leo’s hand and say Lo twice over the charm.”
I point to myself. “If I say clear?”
Sera smiles with half her mouth. “You let us be out without narrating our escape.”
“Hardest cue of the night,” Jonas mutters.
We clean the table in silence. The grape marker smell fades under lemon and coffee and the colder scent of fog pressing the window seams. I kill the overhead and let device light sketch our faces in pixels. The city outside keeps murmuring like we’re already part of its story, and maybe we are.
I step onto the fire escape for the last beat. Air slides cold into my lungs and tastes like metal and brine. Fog beaded on the railing speckles my fingers. I hold the recorder against my throat and let it feel the vibration there because tomorrow strangers will try to own it.
I whisper the three words into the night.
The recorder warms in my hand, a live thing. The bay answers with a low horn that might be a ship or might be my own blood in my ears. I wait for quiet to return so I can call that quiet mine, but my phone vibrates against my hip—an unfamiliar chime, three notes I don’t recognize. Not the building, not the encoder, not our schedule.
I freeze between breath and voice, thumb over the screen, and ask the dark: is this rehearsal noise bleeding through the walls—or the first tug of the net that will try to pull the switch from my hand before I can make Monster Frame our cue to flood the city?