Jonas arrives with two laptops, a travel monitor, and the tired smile of someone who hasn’t told the truth out loud in a while. I clear space on my kitchen table by pushing microphones and Sera’s binder to the side, promising the ledger under my breath that I’m not cheating on it with pixels. The room smells like coffee and the hot sugar drift that leaks up from the bakery on the corner. Outside my window the bay coughs fog toward the marina, and drone beacons blink in and out like eyes learning to close.
“Chain-of-custody,” I say, tapping the burner drive. “You read it, I read it.”
“I read it,” he says, lifting a palm. “No copy leaves this table. We log every export. We don’t upload; we don’t ‘airdrop.’ We’re monks with adapters.”
“We’re reporters with hands,” I say, and I set my recorder down, off, face up. I want the room to hear itself, even if I’m the only one who listens back later.
We sync start points: the network’s gleaming official feed on the left monitor, the leak on the right. He aligns the claps from the studio audience, then nudges waveforms until the breaths match, micro-hitches folding into each other like mirrored wings. The floor LEDs under the halo breathe in that theatrical way, all soft authority and branded mercy.
“Normal speed,” he says. “You watch color; I watch luminance values.”
I play both. At full speed there’s only green. The host’s voice is syruped for forgiveness, the mix so clean I can feel where it wants me to exhale. The leak rides a hair lower in polish, with the rawness the public calls truth even when that truth is curated. The longer I listen, the more the tiny differences sharpen—like hearing two versions of the ocean, one recorded through glass.
“Quarter speed,” he says. “Count the floor LEDs.”
I slow both feeds. The halo remains green. The air in Studio B hums in that particular key that lives behind my eyes. I can’t not hear it now. I think of Sera’s binder and the way paper sounds when it breathes.
“Frame,” he says. “By. Frame.”
I let the arrow key walk us forward, one step at a time. On my stove a pot ticks as it cools. My shoulders rise; I shoved my worry under them earlier and forgot. The city’s elevator screens might be whispering headlines somewhere, but here it’s just finger-taps and microflashes.
Green. Green. Green.
My finger taps again and the leak stutters for a blink you could sleep through and miss. The official feed stays green. The leak’s next frame returns red. I back up three frames and walk again. There—between the green and the red, a single tile, less than breath, that isn’t either feed so much as a splice scar.
I freeze both windows and point.
Jonas leans in, eyes narrowed. “There,” he echoes, not with surprise but with relief. He breathes once—countable, careful. “One frame. A true insert.”
The halo’s ring in that ghost frame is misaligned by a handful of pixels, almost imperceptible. The floor LED grid stutters. The audience blur is one wash less saturated, like a copy of a copy. The leak’s audio doesn’t jump here, not enough to betray anything to an untrained ear—only a vinyl-thin tick, the kind you can blame on the internet.
“You hear that?” I ask.
“I hear it,” he says. “And I can show it.”
He opens his analysis tool and pulls that single frame out like a tick from skin—careful, pinched at the head, no twisting. On another monitor he lays the frame beside the official green neighbor and the red that follows. He splits the luminance channels and subtracts one from the other. The difference image reveals a faint pattern of dots in the upper right, not quite art, too regular for noise.
“Watermark,” he says. “Not the public kind. That’s a plant.”
“Plant me where,” I say, and my voice makes it an order even though I mean it as a prayer.
He toggles to waveform view for the one-frame audio. At 48 kHz there’s barely room for intention, but in the high endings of the spectrum he finds a wobble—an ultrasonic signature that looks like a tooth combed wrong. He isolates, slows, and maps the beating against the frame lines.
“That’s a timecode,” he murmurs, scribbling on an index card. He breaks the dots into a grid and starts writing numbers, then letters, not romantic, just precise. My kettle sighs to itself and I ignore it. Fog thickens against the glass. Somewhere near the marina, a news blimp reroutes, the gossip stalls on the boardwalk turning their screens toward speculation.
“Talk while you math,” I say. “Keep my brain honest.”
“I used to build these,” he says. “HaloStage hired me to design watermarks that survive compression. We seeded them in show assets so we could prove when fan edits ‘misrepresented’ context.” He keeps writing. “The lab side needed their own. They didn’t tell us the syntax, but pattern is pattern.”
“You worked for them,” I say, not a question.
“And I quit,” he says, not defensive. “Before Curalis bought the clinic’s naming rights and started calling therapy a feature.”
His pen stops. He circles a cluster of dots and underlines two letters. L7.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I say. Heat rises from my chest like a bad memory pretending it’s a sauna. “Lab Seven. They signed their own crime.”
“Not crime,” he says, automatic instinct as if lawyers might be hiding in my pantry. “Not yet. But it’s their namespace. Probably internal. Look—there’s a prefix, a date, a clip code.”
He reads it off and I type it into my notes: L7_CUR-0421A_SEG-RED_1F. He shrugs. “Could be coincidence. Could be a joke.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences that also smell of citrus,” I say, and the word lands heavier than I want.
Micro-hook: The single frame stares back with that off-kilter ring, and my wristband—on the table as a paperweight—responds by lighting a soft gray eye as if it recognizes home.
He extracts embedded metadata from the frame’s header—breadcrumbs people forget are even there. Manufacturer strings, export tools, a dangling comment field like a purse a careless engineer left open. It doesn’t name a person. It does name a library: Curalis_Cog_Lab7/ASSETS/ColorOverrides/HALO_RED_TEMP.
He sits back. I don’t move. The kettle stops pretending it matters.
“Say it,” I tell him.
“We have a pointer,” he says. “The insert references a Curalis cognitive lab asset library, number seven. That’s not a fan cut. That’s an internal hand.”
The vindication hits like a burn and I have no time to enjoy it. I feel my shoulders drop even as my hands curl. I watch the single frame again and then again, a finger tapping a bruise because hurt proves touch is real.
“Timecode string looks like creation date, then a segment code,” he adds. “If I had naming patterns from other labs, I could triangulate who authored it.”
I slide Sera’s folded receipt out of the ledger pocket and place it beside the keyboard, the one with Rowan—Lab 7—after-hours? scrawled on the back. The halo icon glares from the co-pay corner like a saint who lost patience.
“I have a name,” I say. “Rowan. I don’t know if it’s first or last. Sera caught it on a voicemail from a liaison who forgot to hang up.”
“Then we go hunting,” he says, and he means metadata and not people. His voice softens. “You okay?”
“I’m not a monster. I’m not a saint either.” I flick the wristband; its halo dims. “I’m a witness, and that’s expensive.”
He nods, and for once he doesn’t try to make it cheaper.
Micro-hook: Outside, a drone slaps into a gust along the marina’s wind tunnel and vanishes into fog, and I imagine the little machine going blind midflight, inventorying its last known good data because belief won’t land it.
I copy our working files to the burner, narrating time, hash, and order. My voice is dry and bureaucratic. It keeps me from saying other things. When I finish, I open two browser windows on my offline machine and search my cache for Curalis_Cog_Lab7. I don’t expect a hit. I get a ghost: a 404’d reference scraped months ago when I archived HaloStage’s public CDN directory tree for future fishing.
“Got you,” I whisper. The cached index lists folders that used to exist. The one we need is there, parented by /curalis-static/clinic_media/, with a child named ColorOverrides. The word sits on the screen like a smirk.
“Show me,” Jonas says, coming to my side. He’s close but careful; heat blooms where his coat sleeve almost touches my arm.
“It’s gone live,” I say. “But the index knew it once. See? The folder structure matches the metadata string. And here—look—file naming convention dumps a breadcrumb: HALO_RED_TEMP became HALO_RED_LOCKED two days after my taping.”
“Two days,” he repeats. He lights up his own notes. “Your taping was on the seventeenth.”
“Sera’s ledger says Mom’s insurance appeal pinged the clinic on the nineteenth.” I feel the old heat of summer thunder crawl up my arms. “Two days is how long it takes to decide a color shouldn’t be temporary.”
“Or to test,” he says. He glances at me. “Or to normalize an override so your red is nobody’s accident.”
“Normalize,” I spit. “They’re selling forgetting as cure and color as truth.”
He exhales. “We can’t publish this yet. We need a lawyer and two more corroborations. But this is a vein.”
“Veins bring blood to faces on TV,” I say. “I want an artery.”
I take photos of the screen with my separate dumbphone—no cloud, no sync—then write the filenames backwards into a notebook because I’ve learned to confuse any lens watching me. I add the rule from the roof to the new page: real memory resists tidy scoring. I underline it and then write another: proof that survives the edit lives outside their servers.
“One more thing,” Jonas says. He stretches, joints clicking like old film. “Watch the halo ring distortion on that insert. It’s not just red—it’s phase-shifted. They didn’t render a fresh frame; they warped a mask. That’s sloppy. Sloppy means rushed. Rushed means nervous.”
“Nervous means vulnerable,” I say, and the word warms me in a way coffee can’t.
We rerun the sequence at full speed. Green, green, green—then my breath catches, knowing what I know, and the red blooms like an accusation taught to speak softly so it can go farther. At normal speed the single frame is a phantom, a surgeon’s glove tucked into a bride’s sleeve.
“What do we do next?” he asks.
“We document,” I say. “Then we call a lawyer who knows how to translate mercy-marketing into contracts. After that, we listen for anyone named Rowan.”
My phone, face down, buzzes on the table. I glance; the notification says Legal Hold: Preserve Evidence from the network. Another buzz: Unknown—Curalis Intake on caller ID, which is not a person but a system trying out a voice.
I let both sit in a small universe of wood grain and fog.
“You going to answer?” Jonas asks.
I pick up the wristband instead. The halo icon’s two rings shine a quiet gray, purity while hiding capture. I clip it into a Faraday pouch and slide the pouch into the freezer between peas and a chipped tray of ice.
“I already did,” I say.
The phone buzzes again. I put it on the far counter, face down, and we watch the single frame one more time—because repetition turns nerves into muscle and muscle into plan—and I ask a question to the room that pretends to be empty: “If Lab Seven painted me red, what color did they sell my mother?”