I step into morning with the stream finally off and my hands shaking in the shape of silence. The city has that rinsed look it gets after spectacle, when a million hot takes cool to damp paper and the fog decides what stays visible. I keep my head down and my hood up, and I walk the marina because my legs only understand forward.
The newsstands bloom like wet origami. One tabloid coughs red type: MONSTER SISTER EXPOSES ‘CARE’. The rival flips it: THERAPY OR THEFT? REGULATOR MOVES AT MIDNIGHT. A third just prints the halo icon lost in static, two rings smudged, the caption: “technical difficulties.” The vendor flips a receipt toward me; the rings sit in the corner like they always do—purity stamped beside price. His fingers are sugared; he’s been eating fried dough for breakfast.
“You that audio girl?” he asks without looking up.
“I’m the one who records,” I answer, which is both true and not enough.
He tears off the receipt and slides it across. “Two papers. On the house. Tell whoever’s listening we’re tired.”
“They’re always listening,” I say, and I fold the paper around my mother’s linen note so the ink won’t bleed.
The elevator up from the pier whispers a headline between floors—REVIEW OPENED—UPLOADS ACCEPTED—SECURE CHANNEL—and then clears its throat with an apology screen for sponsors whose bumper slots vanished. I ride one floor just to hear it say it again. The voice is genderless, almost kind, like someone reading weather over bad news.
Outside, the bay exhales. The fog coughs through the wind tunnel by the stairs, a thick-lunged sound that makes the drones wobble and retreat to the lee of the food hall. The air tastes like salt and disinfectant at once, a trick the city plays to convince you cleanliness can outswallow the ocean. I lick my lips and get both flavors, salt first, then lemon sting.
“One, two,” I say to nobody, matching the breath that steadied Leo last night. “Three.” I tuck the linen note deeper into my coat. The weave is coarse, same scratch I memorized when storms kept Mom awake and we folded and refolded the softest things we owned.
The food hall door slides open; the etiquette sign still announces no filming at communal tables, but the corners are a bouquet of phones. People whisper at the edges, spoons tapping bowls like metronomes. A vendor recognizes me and holds up a dumpling to the glass with a QR taped beside it—REGULATOR LINK. I point to my ear to say heard, and I move on because I don’t want anyone else on my camera today, even if it’s off.
A blimp pushes through the fog overhead, nose tilted, lights blinking that slow, embarrassed rhythm that means reroute. It carries no ad today, only the network’s neutral banner. The spectacle ended when proof got retail; this morning the city wants paperwork and posture. Families huddle under awnings trading reputation scores like weather reports—green until review, amber because of last night, red but disputing—and I hear code words for scan outcomes tucked inside grocery lists.
“You filing a complaint or building a case?” a father asks a mother, juggling a toddler and a stack of muffins.
“Both,” she says. “And I’m saving this thread three places.”
I smile into my scarf and let the phrase wrap around my ribs. Three places. I can make that a prayer.
A vending kiosk flickers with a split screen: my counterstream frozen on the morph—the two logos kissing into the halo icon—and the network’s apology loop promising “independent councils” and “listening tours.” The kiosk’s speaker gives a little cough, then dies to a hiss. The fog clings to the screen in beads that look like Braille. I trace a sentence on the glass with one finger: pattern not truth. The print squeaks, a small animal noise.
My phone vibrates in the coat pocket over my heart. The name is a number. The transcription preview is short: Safe. For now. I stop walking without meaning to. The planks creak under my boots; the bay makes that slurp where waves chew at algae on the pilings.
“ShoreWitness,” I say aloud, just to let the name live outside my mouth. “You breathing?”
The voicemail waits like a bird in the hand. I don’t hit play yet. I feel the fog on my cheekbones and I breathe in—salt, metal, coffee from the cafe at the corner of the pier, and some ghost of citrus from a disinfectant crew mopping a stairwell. I breathe out slow until the world narrows to the size of a waveform.
“Okay,” I tell the tiny red dot. “We do this right.”
I walk to a bench that’s dry enough for the seat of my jeans and put the phone on my thigh, speaker down. I pull my field kit from the backpack—two thumb drives in tamper envelopes, a pocket recorder with a battered windscreen that smells like old rain, and a paper notebook because ink is a virtue stubbornly immune to software updates. My hands still tremble, but now it’s the tremble of precision.
I press play with the volume barely above a whisper. ShoreWitness’s voice is breath and grit. “Safe. For now.” There’s a hollow echo underneath like the space under a dock. A train horn threads the background—distant, low. Then a scrape. Then the click that means a call cut short by caution.
I close my eyes so my ears can own it. The horn pitches down a half-step as if a hand pressed on it. I mark the time with the second hand of my watch and make a note in the margin: 06:42—freight horn—two longs. I smell hot sugar again—someone carries a paper bag past me and the sweetness hits like childhood and rot.
“Thank you,” I whisper to the nothing where ShoreWitness stood. “I hear you.”
I copy the voicemail to the pocket recorder through the cable I keep in my coat lining. The recorder hums that soft electrical purr I love. I label the file SW—morning-after—safe-for-now—raw. Then I drag the same message into my encrypted drive on the laptop, the one that needs two passphrases and my left thumb. The fog kisses the keyboard; droplets bead under the space bar like dew. The drive’s light blinks steady—first place.
I tether to my hotspot and push a second copy to the offsite mirror Jonas set up with a university lab that owes him a favor. The upload bar crawls like a patient animal. I circle the antenna with my hand to warm it. A gull laughs over my head and drops a shell that cracks like punctuation. The bar fills—second place.
For the third, I split the difference between private and public. I encrypt the voicemail as a sealed exhibit, hash it, and queue it to the regulator’s secure channel with a note: provenance available in person; background noise suggests marina east stairs—request protective protocol. I don’t press send yet. I let the cursor hover so my pulse doesn’t run the show.
“Three places,” I say to the linen note in my pocket. “See? I can learn.”
A couple pauses five feet away, arguing softly about whether to wipe their reputation history before filing a statement. “If we erase,” the woman says, “it looks like we’re hiding.” The man shakes his head. “If we leave it, it weights the outcome.” Their child points at the elevator screen where the regulator’s seal sits like a sober moon and asks, “What’s a review?” The mother bends and answers, “It’s when someone in charge pretends to listen and then we keep speaking until they do.”
I stand and stretch my spine until pops stitch along it like tiny zippers. The motion makes me dizzy and clears the dizziness in the same instant. Exhaustion is an animal I can name; I offer it a seat and keep walking. The drones stay high and skittish in the wind tunnel, their rotors a faraway mosquito whine swallowed by fog. The wind coughs; I cough back.
I pass the spot under the stairs where last night I heard Rowan whisper my name. The concrete glistens dark where the fog condensed and ran in threads; a lemony tang still clings to the rail where a crew wiped prints or conscience. I lay my palm on cold metal and feel the morning settling around it like a weight.
“We started a ledger,” I tell the rail. “Now we balance it.”
My phone pings—not alarm, not crisis. A cluster of messages from teachers, nurses, line cooks, night-shift IT. “Filed my upload.” “Mirrored your deck on the soda cooler.” “Buddy’s mom found halo icon on her dental estimate.” “How do I redact a minor’s name?” I answer with canned instructions I built at 3 a.m., edited to sound like a person. “Breathe. Salt. Then file.” “Box names in black; don’t just highlight.” “Keep originals; send copies.” “I’ll hold the line.”
I watch a jogger stop at the edge of the food hall, read the etiquette sign, and put the phone down at the communal table like a guilty offering. He mouths to himself: “edges only,” and carries his camera to the perimeter. Rules mutated, but they haven’t died; they’re learning their new shape alongside us.
I sit on the seawall and fold the linen note open with two fingers. The thread scratches my skin, and I read the words we used to pull storms through the house. I don’t say them aloud; I let the bay remember. The texture steadies my hands better than coffee. The halo icon on a crushed wristband under the bench catches a sliver of light and winks. I pick it up with the corner of a paper napkin and drop it into my bag. Souvenirs are dangerous; records are necessary. This can be both.
“We’re in the accountability phase,” I tell the gulls, because they don’t interrupt. “No more grand gestures. Tiny precise ones, stacked until they weigh more than the show.”
My stomach reminds me I’ve only eaten adrenaline. A cart around the corner hisses oil; hot sugar and batter say come home in a dialect that still makes me twelve. I buy one, and the vendor refuses my money with a crooked smile. When the receipt prints, the halo rings are gone. In their place, empty square brackets: [ ]. The paper is warm on my fingers; the absence is a presence.
“You replaced it?” I ask.
“We peeled it,” she says. “Or it peeled itself.” She hands me a spare napkin. “Either way, you keep going.”
I take a bite. The sugar dissolves to syrup on my tongue and the steam fogs my glasses for a blink; my world goes pearly and private. When it clears, the elevator across the pier whispers again—HEARING DOCKET UPDATE—REOPENING CONSIDERED—and the word considered lands on my sternum like a cold coin. Considered isn’t promised. Considered is a stalling tactic dressed in robes.
“Okay,” I tell the coin, “then we make considering cost more than deciding.”
I flip my notebook to a clean page and list tasks: triage uploads; route hospital wristband scans; schedule witness clinic; prep tribunal filing; teach redaction basics; check on Leo’s meds; call Sera; call Jonas; bring tea. I add a box beside each item and draw a tiny halo next to the last, then slash it with a pencil line. The page looks like a protest sign built for one.
The voice in my head that wants theater tries to clear its throat. I put a hand on my chest and say, “Not today.” Today is paperwork and breath, salt and ink. I open the regulator’s upload portal and drop the sealed voicemail in—third place—and the progress ring spins once, twice, accepts the file with a small chime I never want to hear in a commercial.
“Safe. For now,” I say again, and I tuck the linen note back where my pulse lives.
The fog shifts; the wind breaks into sunlight that isn’t strong enough to warm but is honest about trying. Screens around me continue to split themselves—half apology, half archive. Somewhere in the distance a church bell and a ship horn collide and argue about who tells time better. My phone’s battery settles at a number I don’t like; I pocket the charger and look for an outlet that doesn’t judge.
I start walking home along the rail, shoes thudding a rhythm I can remember later when I need to splice this morning into a chapter the tribunal won’t be able to ignore. A drone dips low, curious or lost; the fog coughs and smacks it away. I smile despite the day.
Before the stairs, I stop and look back at the newsstand. The top row now carries a late edition: “COUNCIL ANNOUNCES ‘LISTENING TOUR.’” The subheadline shrugs: “Details pending.” The vendor catches my eye and raises his chin.
“You going to keep talking?” he says.
“Yes,” I answer. “And I’m going to keep saving.”
I take one step up, then another. The elevator whispers behind me; the bay answers; my phone is heavier by three copies of a small survival. The spectacle is over; the ledger remains. At the landing, I pause because my voicemail pings again—same blocked ID, new preview: “reporters sniffing.” I don’t press play. I walk into the fog with my questions intact and my pockets noisy, counting on my fingers: one, two, three.
Between the second and the third, I ask the morning the only thing it can’t answer: who will keep counting with me when the screens go quiet?