June sets the fan to low to keep the windows from fogging and kills the cabin light until only the screens breathe. The van tastes like solder and citrus; the iodine wind finds its way through the weather stripping anyway. I wrap my jacket tighter and pretend the shiver is just salt touching skin.
“Cache is rotten,” she says, fingers flicking up hex like a magician palming coins. “Header’s mauled, CRCs are bored of being wrong, and somebody thought renaming an M4A to a PDF would make me shy.”
“You’re not shy,” I say. I watch her shoulders, not the code. When we hunted the orchard I kept my heart on a leash; tonight I loop it twice. If I let it bolt at the first syllable, I won’t hear the data inside my sister.
The hurricane barrier looms outside, arches shouldering the sky, a public park pretending to be a kindness. Joggers cut through the blind CCTV pockets, resilient by habit. Drone rotors click a dusk chorus like cicadas; rain needles the steel, patient and small. Across the water, the algae wall on the Spire hums a low green—biometric calm for executives who need a bedtime story from a building.
June nudges her tablet toward me. A waveform crawls, jagged and gray. “I rebuilt the container,” she says. “Still stutters. We’ll get gaps.”
“I only need one voice,” I answer, and I make my face into the mask I use in rooms where men measure themselves by whose hand reaches the glass first. Numb professionalism. The part of me that’s a clipboard with a heartbeat.
She taps play.
Static sharpens to breath, to fabric brushing a mic, to a soft laugh that breaks on its own weight, like a wave hitting a wall at the wrong angle. Lila.
I put my thumb on the workbench edge to keep it from lifting off the earth. The laugh stitches itself to a voice I know better than mine when I was eighteen. “—okay,” she says, breathy, playful, brave in the way she always was when a room got weird. “Note to self: algae wall hums at a lower frequency when the board—”
Click. A hiccup. The waveform stutters.
“—shows up,” she continues, half a second later, as if a seam didn’t just split. “Like it’s trying to sing them calm. Good luck, wall.”
June glances at me without turning her head. I nod once. Keep going.
Lila inhales, then lets it out on a soft chuckle. “If the building reads stress, it should be blinding. I swear the glass went from mint to ocean when Kincaid passed the lobby. Maybe it hates her perfume.”
In the background, a door hisses—pressurized seal, clean gasket, lab-grade. My brain timestamps it by reflex: sublevel or clinic-adjacent corridor. Half a second later, a male cough pops like punctuation, not phlegmy or sick, just the polite clear of someone who wants the air back.
I raise a finger; June pauses, scrolls back two seconds, plays again. Hiss. Cough. I close my eyes and map the echo—narrow hall, hard surfaces, vents overhead. I file the cough with a label I can’t print yet.
Lila giggles, stops, swallows. The swallow is the part that empties me. She bulldozed rooms, but she always swallowed before she made them hers. “Okay, serious,” she says, voice dipping. “Biofeedback lighting tuned to executive profiles. I love that a wall gets a better mental-health plan than the night shift.”
Paper rustles near the mic, then a whisper I can’t fully grab. June captures spectrogram slices with two fingers, isolating s’s and t’s like they’re tagged fish. I drink the sound without blinking.
“Don’t write that down,” a man says, not loud, not friendly. The cough’s cousin. Somewhere metal ticks—HVAC settling. A shoe squeaks. I imagine Lila’s mouth doing that sideways press that meant she found a game worth playing.
“I’m not writing,” she says, lying with a smile I can hear, because I taught her that smile when we were kids swapping answers across a church aisle with our eyes. “I’m thinking about paint samples.”
She snorts softly. “Colors for when the board walks by: seafoam for ‘benevolent,’ kelp for ‘metrics over lives,’ and dead jellyfish for ‘don’t ask about the barge.’”
The static nibbles a syllable; June mends the hole, not perfectly, but enough to keep the joke intact. I catch it, hold it, press it to the inside of my jaw. Ache folds around it like a mouth around a coin.
June stops the playhead. “You want the rest or a breath?” she asks, voice turned down so it won’t bruise.
“I’m good,” I say, and my hands move to prove it, palms up, fingers loose. “Roll.”
Lila again, softer now. “Reality check, future me: algae hum dropped ten Hertz when the chief counsel hit the turnstile. The wall thinks it’s a spa. It isn’t. There’s a draft near the elevator with the broken floor light; maintenance says it’s nothing. Hey—”
The laugh fractures. “—hey, elevator joke: I pretended to be cool holding a box of pipette tips like a toddler carries a cat. Guy in a navy suit tried to help and nearly dislocated his reputation.”
I can see her—elbow, wrist, the way she made objects look like they belonged to her until you tried to take them and realized they didn’t. I blink slow so the picture doesn’t drag me out of the van and throw me into a synapse where time is stuck.
Door hiss, farther away. The cough again, closer. A pen taps a clipboard. The algae wall’s bassline sneaks into the mic—a barely-there purr, more felt than heard, like the Spire is doing breathwork for a nervous donor.
“Okay,” Lila says, brightening herself by biting it. “Executives as weather. When CEO Mom walks through, LEDs go coastal-sun-lit-harbor. When Kincaid passes, they do deepwater calm but the edges sharpen. When Rourke from Finance—hi, Rourke—shows up, they flick to hospital hallway. Makes me want to throw confetti.”
“Don’t write that down,” the man repeats, closer now, the patience of someone who thinks he’s owed obedience. The mic scratches fabric; Lila’s hand probably goes to her pocket.
“I’m practicing my wellness,” she says lightly. “Color therapy.”
“Not on company devices,” he says. The cough is a period again, measured.
June pokes the waveform. “Different vent noise here,” she mutters. “She moved.”
“Copy rooms hum higher,” I say. “She’s near the print bay, not far from the lobby. That cough likes to live between legal and human resources.”
June’s mouth tics. “You map people by ventilation?”
“I map people by what they don’t think is talking,” I say. I pull my phone, open a note, and type: Cough cadence: two ticks post-hiss. Board-adjacent. I add algae wall frequency drop around counsel and edge sharpen near Kincaid. I underline broken floor light—draft because a draft means a seam, and seams are promises.
The fragment carries on in little stitches.
“Lunch at the resilience festival after the storm,” Lila says, and I can hear her chewing a bite she probably didn’t want. “The city calls it healing when it asks you to dance in a poncho. Kincaid called it public-private synergy. The wall turned too green.”
A laugh from someone else, female, short, never mind. The cough again, drifting. The door hiss, a softer sister down the hall. Shoes on tile. The algae hum rises in a swell and then smooths.
“I’m done,” Lila says on the recording, voice suddenly practical, like she just looked at the time and remembered she has a body that gets tired. “Uploading, encrypting, deleting. Future me, stop talking out loud. Present me, stop thinking you’re invisible.”
The file dies there. A hard click. The waveform flatlines.
I don’t realize my hand is still palm-up until June touches it and lays an orange there like a coin for a ferryman I refuse to pay. “Breathe,” she says.
I bite the peel, taste acidity burst over metal. The ache is clean. It doesn’t ask permission; it does its job. I let it.
“Run me the metadata,” I say. Numb professionalism again, but thinner now, like a bandage that knows it’ll have to come off.
June flips to the backend. “Timestamp twenty-two minutes after noon. Day of a Palmetto donor lunch. Origin: sublevel lobby uplink, bounced through a copier because someone thinks paper deserves Ethernet.”
“She used the bay as her tunnel,” I say. “She joked because she knew she was being watched. She wrote anyway.”
“She recorded,” June corrects, one eyebrow quiet. “She didn’t leave text on a company device.”
“And someone told her not to,” I say. “Twice.”
The van rocks under a gust; rain pencils down the glass in diagonal lines that look like ghosts changing their minds. Outside, the tide clock says six-oh-three while my watch says six exactly. Harbor Eleven times its lies for people who need a plan more than a truth.
Micro-hook: I replay the cough in my head and hear the boardroom’s acoustics I haven’t yet infiltrated. Tomorrow has a shape. It looks like air I’ll have to steal.
“Biofeedback lighting,” I say, looking past the van’s wall into a lobby I can smell—lemoned stone, filtered air doing a spa impression, algae wall whispering it can hold a secret. “If the wall shifts for stress, then I can read the executives without touching them.”
“You’ll need baselines,” June says. “And a reason to loiter where loitering looks expensive.”
“Girlfriend duty,” I say, and my mouth clips the word into a tool. “I’ll walk him through at voting hour and watch the glass lie.”
June pulls up a frequency map. “If the hum dropped ten Hertz for counsel, I can put a recorder under a planter. We correlate color channels against audio bands. If the building breathes for powerful men, I want to hear it wheeze.”
I’m already drawing a path in my head: security desk sightlines, reflective surfaces that won’t out me, the way Elias’s hand fits at my elbow like a key he doesn’t know he carries. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. I can use both and call it rescue later.
June taps the screen where Lila’s voice broke on that laugh. “You okay?”
I don’t answer the part that can’t be answered. I inventory instead. “Hiss. Cough. Two iterations. Counsel enjoyed being useful. Lighting shifts around Kincaid and Rourke. Broken floor light with a draft—possible service seam.”
“I can pull maintenance tickets,” June says. “See if anyone closed ‘draft’ with a lie.”
I nod. “I’ll take the algae wall.”
“Green is your color,” she says, deadpan, and the joke makes room for air to move through me again.
We sit with the van’s fan and the rain and a voice that stopped talking because it thought it would have more time. I press the orange peel into the little bin by my knee and smell my hands, bitter and bright. Across the water, the Spire glows like a patient being told to imagine a meadow.
“She noticed what the wall did around the board,” I say, softer now because the van has decided to be a chapel. “She left me a ruler where I thought there was only glass.”
June tilts her head, studying the spectrogram like it’s a weather chart for an incoming confession. “You’ll need to hear the cough live,” she says. “Tie the man to the frequency.”
“Boardroom without windows tomorrow,” I say. “Decision time. I’ll be there, invisible and unreasonable.”
June grins into her sleeve. “My favorite kind of you.”
I gather the pieces: the hiss, the cough, the algae hum, the color that went too green for courage and too blue for mercy. I let the ache settle into the place in me that keeps promises. Renewed resolve isn’t fireworks; it’s a switch I flip and lock with a thumb.
“Queue the shard for Elias,” I say, and I hear the small wrong inside my own instruction. “No. Not yet. I’ll bring him the pattern, not the voice. He gets to keep what he thinks of me one more night.”
June doesn’t argue. She labels the file SHARD_01 and tucks it behind a wall of noise she wrote when she still believed companies could be forgiven. The van’s fan whirs. The arches outside hold their shadows like a cupped hand.
I open the door a crack. The iodine wind lifts the hair at my temple and cools the citrus on my skin. The tide clock lies three minutes into the future, the city nodding along so it won’t be late to its own excuses.
“Don’t write that down,” the cough man said.
I smile into the rain where no one can see it.
“I won’t,” I whisper. “I’ll bring it to the room and watch the wall change color when you vote.”