Rain needles the van roof like a steady drumroll before a speech no one will remember for the right reasons. I breathe iodine air leaking through the window seal and taste the docks in it—salt, fried batter, wet metal. The hurricane barrier looms outside, arches ribbing the night, their blind CCTV zones as comforting as they are dangerous. The tide clock suctioned to June’s console insists on being three minutes fast, and I let it be our luck.
June slides a drive into its slot, jaw set, hair twisted into the knot that means she won’t notice pain until morning. “Ready for the dumbest cipher you’re going to respect,” she says.
“Respect is rented hourly,” I tell her, and press Lila’s photo flat against my thigh so it won’t curl. “What’ve you got?”
She pulls up a chat pane recovered from the model room’s debris, an ugly little file stamped CHAT_AUX_9—like the machine thought human whispers were expendable. On the screen, Lila’s bubbles bloom with emojis: umbrellas, shrimp, moons, a string of clocks, a repeated cat face with a monocle.
“She was joking about not writing things down,” I say. “So she didn’t.”
“She did,” June answers, fingers flicking. “She just did it in the language that gets moderation bots to yawn.” She taps an umbrella. “Storm icon equals hurricane barrier, public-park arches. Shrimp is Dockyard K food stall row. Moons are weeks; cat-with-monocle is the ‘watcher’—the concierge’s lurker emoji; and these clocks aren’t cute. They’re precise.” Clicks become a little percussion section. “Clock at eight means 8 p.m., and when she doubled the clock it meant ‘three minutes fast’—your sister built the tide clock right into the code.”
My chest tightens on a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Show me the decode.”
“Patience, Quill.” She drags a converter window up. The emojis pour through and render into columns: THU 19:58—Arches, K row. THU 20:11—Walk. THU 20:20—Meet @GullThread.
I mouth the handle before my throat permits sound. “GullThread.”
June’s eyes cut to mine. “That a ghost?”
“That’s the stringer,” I say, heat crawling under my taped ribs. “The tabloid’s seagull who trades photos for proximity. Same one who plugged a maintenance drone into a scandal feed.”
“She scheduled a meeting with them?” June’s voice lifts a centimeter between disbelief and contempt. “Your sister was smarter than the tide clock.”
“She was also funny,” I say, and the laugh that escapes me lands crooked. Lila once texted me a single shrimp emoji after I lectured her about digital hygiene; it meant, I’m tiny, but I pinch. I tuck the photo back into my jacket because my hand wants to shake and doesn’t deserve the dignity.
June scrolls. A message sits beneath the plan, a single line with no response attached, the bloodless font of a bad messenger app: Don’t be heroic. No handle. No timestamp. The program tags it “SYSTEM NOTE,” which means someone edited the thread.
I trace the letters with a knuckle against the glass of the screen, stopping before my body oils smear the evidence. “Who told her that.”
“Could be anyone,” June says, thumbs flying to pull metadata. “Could be the journalist—stringers love warnings that make them feel like grown-ups. Could be a lab tech who realized the fence was electric. Could be the concierge, back when she still believed partial mercy wouldn’t kill you.” June’s mouth thins. “Could be the model.”
“The model doesn’t speak in lowercase,” I say. “Sable does. Her people do. So do older sisters.”
June glances at me. “Not your brand. You do capital letters when you tell a person how not to die.”
I accept the hit. “Fine. Pull location stamps.”
She does. On the map, tiny dots ghost under the arches, a trail between the shrimp stalls and the blind camera seam. Then nothing. The GPS pings from Lila’s phone stop at 19:56—two minutes before the first decoded line. The screen looks like a cliff cut off by fog.
“Battery yank?” I ask.
“Not on that model. More like a jam.”
“Or a pocket,” I say, “with a different phone inside it.” Lila learned my tricks too fast. She also learned to defend the wrong people and call it kindness. I rub the edge of the table to ground myself in grit and cheap plastic.
June opens a second window: dock cameras in a four-square mosaic. Water beads on each lens, drones skating the sky in lazy loops. “Watch K-3,” she says. A figure in a yellow slicker moves between stalls at 19:58, hood up. The person pauses near the arches, looks toward the tide clock, then away, then raises a hand without signaling anyone.
“That’s not Lila,” I say, quiet because my throat is lined with needles. “Wrong height. Wrong walk.”
“Decoy,” June says. “Your sister trained a whole city to be misdirection for her.”
“She trained me first.” I lean in. The decoy waits. No one arrives. At 20:05, a police patrol buzzes through the park and the decoy melts into a maintenance corridor, leaving only the rain to prove a body was present.
“The meeting never happened,” I say.
“Confirmed.” June collapses the feeds and snaps an elastic startle over her wrist. “Which means one of three things: she got spooked; she got intercepted; or she got smarter and moved the meet.”
My fingers press crescents into my palm. I try Lila’s handle in the recovered chat and hit a login wall. June smirks. “You’re adorable when you pretend you don’t need me for keys.” Her hands dance; the wall dissolves into a list of contacts, all idiot usernames and cover-emojis. GullThread has two alternate handles connected by reputation score—the tabloid’s internal system of favors and penalties. The other alias blinks at me with the smugness of rightness: mktgull.
“That’s our bird,” I say. “He wanted scandal pics of Elias, not safety. He might be sitting on corroboration without knowing it.”
“Or knowing it and waiting until the price goes up.” June snorts. “Tabloid economy is math with bruises.”
The van smell shifts toward solder when the inverter kicks. I unzip my jacket an inch to breathe and the grazed skin under the gauze throbs a little, a borrowed heartbeat. The algae-lit panel to my left hums green and pleasant, a lie I grew up admiring.
“She was funny,” I say again, because the emoji calendar is a punchline and a prayer. “She joked about teaching the machine to lie and it laughed too hard.”
June keeps her eyes on the screen when she answers. “You want to sit with that for a second, or you want to turn it into a task?”
I rest my forehead against the cool metal panel, the rib of the storm wall vibrating faintly through the van frame. Drone rotors thrum beyond like lazy cicadas with private security budgets. “I want to be useful,” I say, and the words taste like salt and apology.
“Then watch me be useful.” June brings up a crude timewheel she built when we started this mess. “The emojis give us THU 20:20 for the meet, but the GPS dies at 19:56. That gap is designed. Now—” she overlays a tapped text from the liaison’s office about “post-vote asset redeployment.” “—Sable’s liaison planned to move people right after the vote. Your sister’s appointment with our gull would have put the journalist at the arches near the exact window. Two birds, one cleanse.”
“You think the warning—‘Don’t be heroic’—came from the journalist?” I ask.
“He’s not brave. He’s hungry,” June says. “But he knows when a story will get him hit with a legal bat. He could have flinched and told her to stay home.”
I open the tiny cooler under the bench and take the last bottle of water. The cold hits my teeth and reminds me my mouth existed before missions. “Or he was told to flinch,” I say. “Tabloid takes defense money. We tracked it.”
“Either way,” June says, “we have a handle that ties Lila to a planned pre-press meet. That’s motive for interference and a breadcrumb to a second source. The tabloid might have copy, or a voicemail, or just proof she reached out at all. That corroboration cracks the ‘disgruntled sister’ narrative you hate.”
Melancholy sits down beside me and folds her hands, patient and infuriating. I watch the little yellow slicker freeze-frame, then look away. “She wanted to go public,” I say softly. “And somebody told her not to be the hero. I need to know whether that somebody saved her for five minutes or sold her for a favor.”
“Then we talk to GullThread,” June says. “But we do it on our terms.” She swivels, face sharpening with the delight she saves for righteous mischief. “We bait him with the least dangerous truth.”
“A breadcrumb.” I let anger prick up, a field of nettles under the skin giving me posture again. “He used my client once. I can use him back.”
“We can stage it under the arches,” June says, “because irony is efficient and the CCTV gaps are ours. I’ll route his messages through a dead drop that keeps him from triangulating you to Elias.”
I shake my head. “Not under the arches. The model eats my arches now. We’ll move him next to visibility and call it protection.”
“The Palmetto House staircase?” she asks, wicked. “Phones sleep, but cameras don’t.”
I snort. “He won’t get past the door.” I pull up a mental map of Harbor Eleven’s ego spots. “The marina café, tide clock wall. It’s always three minutes fast; everyone plans and no one is ready. He’ll read it as poetry and think himself profound.”
June laughs once. “I hate how right you are.”
Outside, police sirens test their throats and then die away, redirected by the decoy convoy I watched earlier. The resilience stage on the inland side of the barrier throws a rehearsal cheer again. Harbor Eleven loves a festival about surviving the storm while the storm is still deciding who to pick up and drop.
“Mishandling media poisons the record,” I say, mostly to anchor the anger to something responsible. “I can’t afford a sloppy narrative. We need his corroboration without his fingerprints all over our timing.”
“So we feed him a harmless line,” June says. “Something the machine can’t turn into a vector.”
“I’ll give him a choice,” I say. “He can be the first to know there’s a ledger tying trials to votes, or he can be the last to explain why his outlet tried to bury it. Either way, he’ll talk.”
June’s eyebrows inch up. “You’re going to threaten him with eventually being irrelevant.”
“Pride is cheaper than money,” I say. “And no one hates missing a wave more than a gull.”
—micro-hook— June unwraps a piece of tape from her finger and flicks it into the trash, then sets a new routine to monitor the stringer’s handles for movement. “When do you want to ping him,” she asks, “before or mid-vote?”
“Neither.” I shake the van’s condensation off my sleeve. “After his editors think they’ve won distraction, before the liaison sweeps the barge. In the worst possible weather for bad choices.”
“So—” June points at the tide clock. “—three minutes before anyone is ready.”
We sit in the humming green for ten breaths. Rain fattens on the windshield, distorting the glow of the park lamps into alien coins. A drone passes low enough that its rotor wash tickles the van like a cat tail. My body is a list of aches I’ll pay later.
I open Lila’s decoded chat again and scroll to the line I hate most. Don’t be heroic. The words aren’t mine. I never told her that. I taught her to move quietly, to choose hard exits, to count to twelve underwater. I didn’t teach her how not to be brave.
“I want the voice behind that line,” I say. “I want the person who thought heroism was our biggest risk.”
June nods once. “Then we triangulate with the gull. He’s a coward, but he’s a coward with caches.”
I snap the photo of Lila and the sea against the dash and let the algae-glass light bathe it. My thumb covers the corner of her grin so I don’t break. Protection demands closeness, and closeness destroys cover; the only way I’ve found to survive is to make the cover the weapon.
“We do this without burning the case,” I say. “We do it without burning him unless I have to.”
“We,” June echoes. She opens a fresh compose window and writes a draft to mktgull that reads like flirtation and threat had a well-behaved child.
“Let me take it,” I tell her. “I’m the one he tried to use.”
She looks at me, then hands me the keyboard. “Keep your sentences short,” she says. “Tabloids get rashes from semicolons.”
I type: Story clock is three minutes fast. You want the first bell or the last apology? Meet where the city pretends time can be fixed. I stop. I don’t hit send.
June watches my thumb hover. “You sure?”
I taste rain that isn’t inside my mouth. “No,” I say. “But I’m tired of letting other people translate my sister.”
I breathe once, then twice, and leave the cursor blinking like a warning light on a boat that left too early. I lift my eyes to the arches and ask the storm a softer question than I usually permit:
“If I give the gull a crumb, will he fly toward proof—or circle the water until something drowns?”