Wind slicks the roof tiles beneath my boots and salts my tongue. I watch the halo’s edge tint—first a blush, then a row of pixels warming like coals fed fresh air. The bay coughs fog across the marina and blinds a cluster of drones; a blimp shoulders the wind tunnel, lists, and reroutes. My finger tightens on the toggle.
“It’s red,” I breathe.
“Red bleed confirmed,” Jonas says in my ear, the consonants clipped. He hovers over the keyboard like a pianist waiting for the downbeat. “Monster is hot. Say go.”
The host’s cuff clicks. The compassion hum thickens into a velvet that suffocates thought. I taste battery and citrus at once, hospital and studio braided into one swallow.
“Go,” I say.
I throw the switch.
The encoder coughs once, like a diver breaking surface, then settles into a clean, relentless tone. Jonas rides it. “We’re live on our rails. You’ve got channel one. Kill pretty, keep proof.”
The studio picture fractures—then reforms with our overlays stamped right over the halo like graffiti on stained glass. I push the spectrogram into the lower third; I pin the cuff click at 00:12:17:482; I label the compassion overlay’s frequency band so any watcher with ears and courage can track it.
“You’re in,” Jonas says. “Hold steady. Don’t over-narrate.”
“I won’t,” I say to him and to the city and to my mother’s linen wedge against my rib.
I speak into the world. “You’re hearing a live feed,” I tell anyone with a phone, a foyer screen, a bar TV. “The host’s cuff click is the spike in blue. The hum rising behind his words is the comfort overlay. Watch the timing.”
Gray’s eyes flash toward the jib cam like a man glancing at a mirror he didn’t plan to consult. He sees something he dislikes and erases the expression mid-birth.
The halo deepens one shade toward red. Audience breath collects in the mics, the carbonated fizz of a thousand throats unsure whether to cheer or swallow.
I drag in the Edit Bible still, the page with Sibling Pivot: Monster Frame printed like a hymn. I zoom with a jitter that betrays the wind on my knuckles; the camera finds bullet points:
- When sibling expresses defiance, cue Compassion at +9dB;
- Host: “We honor courage”;
- Board: preload MONSTER FRAME—Composite Split: Sister/Subject;
- If crowd resistant: tap cuff x2; scroll “forgiveness” lower-third;
“This document,” I say, breath frosting the mic grill, “was drafted before tonight. Watch what they wrote you into. Watch whether it happens.”
The audience noise changes. It goes from trained hush to a restless animal—a shuffled purse, a throat clear, a whisper that makes other whispers.
On-screen, the host blinks once too long, like a man stepping off the marked tape. His smile flickers. “Let’s—ah—remember why we’re here,” he says, and the ah lands like a dropped fork. He looks directly into the teleprompter and then away, like it burned.
Sera sits still with the kind of stillness that carries storms. Her necklace charm lies flat and innocent, and the mic inside it pours her pulse into my hands. Leo’s pupils, dark ponds moments ago, ripple.
Gray leans toward the host, not touching, but pressing the air. His cuff hand twitches. Click. The spectrogram spikes on cue, my label glows, and the hum swells like a lullaby that forgot to stop.
“Look at the lower-third,” I tell my viewers. “They wrote the next line days ago.” I highlight the Edit Bible’s command: If sibling resists, shift halo to red-tint and composite “Monster.”
The halo obeys its scripture. It slides a fraction toward red, measured in color temperature and dread. The two-ring icon in the corner of the studio’s own graphics gleams like a seal on a receipt—purity stamped on a transaction. I can’t keep the sound of my teeth off the feed; I adjust the mic to my throat’s crush and steady.
Jonas whispers, “We’re trending beyond their tag.” His fingers drum silence on the laptop. “Food hall screens are mirroring you. The etiquette is broken and nobody cares.”
I picture it: The Strand’s communal tables guarded by polite no-filming signs, and every edge crowded with phones that don’t care about etiquette, only angles. Batter pops in oil. Brine rides coffee steam. Vendors slide halo-printed receipts to customers who don’t look down because the screens above them have become church.
“Stay on the board,” Jonas says. “Give them the instruction set, not the sermon.”
“Copy.” I slide the Edit Bible page aside and bring in the pivot board graphic—Rowan’s leak with the timecode watermarks. I circle MONSTER with my cursor in a lurid color I wouldn’t choose any other day, and then I trace the chain: cuff → overlay → halo tint → host script.
The crowd on-air murmurs loud enough to print. The host presses onward as if volume can replace plot. “Sera, some viewers say your sister—” He coughs, actually coughs, and the cough is human and damning.
Sera does not move to comfort him. She looks at Leo, and I swear she breathes in three beats I know by heart. My ribs press into linen. I taste copper.
Gray slides into the corner of frame, voice sleek. “What we offer is care,” he says, not to Sera but to the lens that multiplies him. “Real-time support can feel unusual, but it’s medical. It’s ethical.”
I overlay the chair interface from Lab 7, the euphemisms we memorized. Comfort Injection blinks like a child’s toy. Narrative Seam smiles like a shark.
“Name your tools,” I say. “If it’s care, why hide the vocabulary?”
The halo adds another vein of red. The house chime taps the air like a spoon against glass. Ping… ping.
“Hold for Sera’s move,” Jonas warns, “but show them what to listen for.”
I zoom the spectrogram around the chime. I annotate the interval spacing in three bright lines. “When you hear this spacing,” I say, “watch Leo’s eyes. Watch which words follow. Watch whether the host’s thumb returns to the cuff.”
The blimp out over the bay slants, then rights itself, like a witness deciding not to faint. Fog threads my lashes. My forearms taste like salt and cold metal.
Inside the studio, families in Row F trade code words like weather. Clear. Low. Red. A teenager shows her mom the counterstream on her phone while the studio’s camera swings past them; she flinches, then doesn’t.
The host tries another script. “Sera, your sister’s podcast—” He falters when the audience murmurs anew, because the lower-third he needs to make the case just failed to load. Our overlay sits on top of his attempt like a stubborn fact.
“Jonas,” I say, “stabilize the loop for the Edit Bible zoom. They’ll call tamper.”
“Already redundanced,” he says. “Three mirrors. If they yank one, two fall in line.”
Gray smiles with his lips closed. “We don’t tamper,” he says to his camera. “We guide.”
“You prescribe forgetting,” I say quietly, and I let the chair terms fill the frame until nobody listening can unhear them.
Sera shifts, finally, but the shift is a blade sliding free of cloth. “Leo,” she says, her voice steady through the necklace. “Breathe with me.” Her thumb presses the charm once.
The audience hushes the way crowds hush before weather. The halo seems to listen. My knees want to buckle, but the roof refuses me that drama; it offers wind instead, a slap of air like a shove toward action.
The cuff clicks again. My spectrogram screams in color. The comfort hum blooms.
A man in Row B says, not low enough, “She said they wrote it,” and another voice answers, “It’s right there.” The mic picks up a third: “They’re making her the monster.”
The host hears them. He stumbles on the next line, catches with a grin that betrays sweat. Powder can’t hide sweat from lenses designed to worship skin.
“Sera,” he persists, “is there anything you want your sister to apologize for tonight?”
I catch Gray’s glance to the booth. The metadata strip on our monitor flashes: MONSTER FRAME → Live. The halo answers by reddening a breath more, as if obeying typography.
“Do it,” Jonas says. “Cut wide. Show the page next to the live.”
I split-screen the Edit Bible page with the stage—a marriage nobody consented to. Bullet points on the left; Sera’s cheekbone and Leo’s pupils on the right; the cuff click pulsing in the spectrogram like a metronome running hot.
“This was written weeks ago,” I say. “You can freeze-frame later. For now, listen.”
I stop talking. The wind talks for me, threading the mic with a thin hiss; the city underneath adds spice—hot sugar from the Strand, disinfectant from the clinic tower, an elevator screen in an unseen lobby whispering headlines to an empty hallway; the double-ring icon sliding across a concession receipt with the same grace it uses to brand hospital wristbands.
The audience hears themselves in our silence. They murmur. Someone claps once—an accident or a protest—and then stops.
The host starts to say “forgive,” and trips on the for. “For—” He swallows. His cue doesn’t rescue him. Inside the booth, someone misses a beat, more human than the script allows.
Gray moves his mouth, shaping a prompt for the host like a ventriloquist deciding to show the strings. He catches himself and steps back, but the step is a tell.
“You’re landing,” Jonas says. “Hold posture. Don’t crow.”
I steady my breathing. “Viewers,” I say, “press your volume one notch up. Hear the cuff.” I tap my mic so it prints a small, honest pop, the opposite of their lush hum. “Now watch the lower-third fail again.”
The lower-third does fail again—our overlay refuses to relinquish the real estate. The host tries to pivot to a prepackaged montage; the booth hits the button; our stream overlays the first frame with the chair’s Narrative Seam label and the Edit Bible’s note: If montage rejected by crowd, return to sympathy line: “Let’s begin with love.”
The host obeys. He says, “Let’s begin with love,” and it rings not as invitation but as confession.
“They’re reading ahead with us,” Jonas whispers, awed and terrified. “You made the room bilingual.”
Fear knifes through my ribs and is gone, spent into movement. “Sera,” I whisper toward the charm, not to instruct but to anchor, “I’m with you.”
She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t need me to say it. She reaches for Leo’s hand, a slow, filmed gesture that writes itself on every retina tuned to this night. The halo halo hesitates—no, glitches, a tiny hiccup of light.
Gray clocks it. His smile hardens. He tilts his chin toward the cuff.
“Click,” I narrate in a breath, and the spectrogram answers, honest as weather.
The audience murmurs louder, a disobedient tide. Somewhere behind Row K, a vendor hands a bottle of water with a halo-printed sleeve to a guard who suddenly doesn’t know where to look.
The host misreads the pitch of the room and rushes. “Mira,” he says into the lens, dragging me into his script by name the way a net drags whatever swims, “if you’re watching, your family needs peace—”
I cut him with proof. I push the Edit Bible close until the paper fiber moirés. Bullet point: Host addresses sister by name to humanize Monster Frame; deliver “peace” line with micro-smile.
The crowd actually gasps. The sound is naked and not for sale.
“We’re there,” Jonas says, voice shaking with that kind of adrenaline that makes hands good and foolish both. “Don’t blink.”
I don’t. I widen the split further: left pane, the plan to monster us; right pane, the people it wants to swallow. I mark the time, date, and chain-of-custody footer under the page for the lawyers I know will arrive like weather after this night. I annotate the spectrogram with the exact stamp of the cuff.
“You asked for raw,” I tell the city. “Here.”
The halo deepens again, stubborn. The cuff clicks twice, a double-pour. Leo’s pupils surge like a tide answered by moon.
“One more dose,” Jonas warns. “He’s juicing compliance. Sera’s window is thin.”
My throat goes dry; I taste bitter coffee ghosting the thermos by my knee. I hear the starch of my jacket when I pull the linen note higher under my palm. Scratch. Anchor.
“Viewers,” I say, “if you can hear me in the food hall and you’re liveblogging from the edges—don’t look away when the red climbs. Name what you’re seeing before the market sells you the forgetting.”
The host inhales, chest high, and points his face at Leo like a lighthouse turned to a single boat. “Leo,” he says, “tell us—”
He stumbles. The word skids. His tongue finds dry. He is a man with a script blown off the lectern by wind.
A murmur becomes a rumble. The audience is no longer an organ someone else plays; it is a thing with its own lungs. Gray’s eyes go flat for a second, predator without theater.
Sera tightens her hand on Leo’s and leans, breath measured, shoulders set. I know the shape of the words she is about to choose because we learned them on the roof and in the kitchen and in rooms that never asked us to perform. I hover my finger over the macro to punch in our audio hard if the house tries to drown her.
“Mira,” Jonas says, almost a prayer, “hold her a beat.”
I hold. The halo’s red crawls like blush turning bruise. The cuff aims like a wand. The crowd’s sound stacks into something unstable.
“Now or never,” I whisper to no one the microphones acknowledge.
The cuff clicks.
The spectrogram spikes.
Sera inhales.
And I ask the city one more time—because the answer decides whether my proof becomes gospel or conspiracy fodder—do I trust that the room I just taught to hear can carry her words through the drug, or do I slam another overlay over their faces and risk turning her voice into illustration when it needs to be thunder?