The gull bites on the first toss.
I’m hunched in June’s van under the hurricane barrier, the arches laddering the sky like a ribcage, when my phone vibrates hard enough to skitter in the cup holder. I’ve fed him a crumb—story clock is three minutes fast; check the votes, check the river—and he’s turned it into meat. The headline barks from the small screen in teeth-sized font: VANCE HEIR HIDES “CONSENT” CRISIS AS STORM NEARS. No names, no documents, just noise tuned to Harbor Eleven’s favorite key: scandal-as-hurricane.
“There it is,” I say, and the iodine wind slipping through the cracked window threads my tongue with salt. Outside, the resilience festival’s rehearsal cheer lifts again from inland, a chorus for people who want to celebrate surviving before they do. Drones hover in the mist with cicada patience; their rotors thrum against my jawbone like a warning I promised to ignore.
June leans across me, bracing a palm on the bench, eyes already scanning the gull’s copy. “Harmless enough,” she says. “He splashed words but not facts. You gave him air; he made weather.”
“That’s the job,” I say. “Make the barometer twitch.”
“He tagged you?” she asks.
“No. He tagged the tide clock.” I pull the tide-clock magnet off the console and twist it, letting it tick its three-minute lie. “He thinks he’s a poet.”
We let the page autoscroll. The gull stuffed the piece with filler—anonymous sources, a grainy marina shot from two months ago, a reference to “blind spots under the arches” framed like urban myth. He misquotes old PR about “risk-tolerant trials” and stirs in my client’s name without an accusatory verb. There’s no mention of ledgers, no mention of the barge, no mention of Lila.
“Good,” June says. “He doesn’t know the hook yet.”
“He knows enough to be dangerous to himself,” I answer. “Now watch Sable panic.”
—micro-hook—
The social noise rises like the river in a squall. Comments flood with dock sarcasm and biotech pearl-clutching. Dock workers barter takes for drink vouchers; elites ping their NDAs and hide behind them. The algae-lit glass of the Vance Spire two miles away throws a low green into the rain, pretending calm. I can almost hear the boardrooms counting risks and splitting hairs.
My phone pings again—different vibration, the one I mapped to corporate blasts. June and I share a look that says don’t jinx it and jinx it at the same time. I open the mail.
Subject: Proactive Statement Regarding Misleading Online Rumors. Sender: Kincaid Institute Public Affairs; cc: a dozen “reputation partners.” The body is the usual lacquer: commitment to safety, commitment to community, commitment to “evidence-based narratives.” But the second paragraph exposes a vein:
Our Institute does not operate, sponsor, or employ any predictive compliance lab; no such facility exists on any vessel under our research umbrella.
June exhales a note that could be a laugh if it didn’t have teeth. “She named it,” she says. “You didn’t.”
I scroll to the footer and swallow. The timestamp says 20:08, three minutes before the gull hit publish. The storm pounds the van roof in a satisfied rhythm, like the city knocked twice and we opened in time.
“There’s your fatal stamp,” I whisper. “She denied a thing that didn’t exist publicly yet.”
“And she called it the exact thing we found on the floor,” June says, already reaching for the keyboard. “The model room labeled predictive compliance. That phrase isn’t a coincidence; it’s a boulder falling down the same hill.”
“Get me headers,” I tell her, and she’s already scraping. The PR blast bounced through three servers—a boutique firm with a sea-glass logo, a crisis outfit known for shipping NDAs with fruit baskets, and an internal mailer that never learned subtlety. The Received chain is a spine of times.
June’s finger taps the screen gently, like a doctor testing for pain. “Look. Internal mailer fired at 20:02. Boutique firm queued at 20:06. Public send at 20:08. Gull posted at 20:11.”
The van tastes like solder and rain and a cheap coffee we forgot to finish. I feel slick with victory and wary of it. “She knew what to deny before the story existed,” I say. “Foreknowledge implies leak, surveillance, or panic. Or all three.”
“And under storm pressure,” June says, “jumpy hands hit send too soon.” She flicks to another window. “Now watch me sew her denial to her own bones.”
—micro-hook—
The contradiction needs a second leg or it walks funny in court. June drags the internal logs we cloned—Lab C access, barge maintenance notes, the ledger mapping trial IDs to board votes. She snaps the PR timestamp to a vertical line on her timeline tool; it slices the screen neat as a scalpel.
“At 19:57,” she narrates, “security triggered an anomaly around Lab C—‘compliance suite’ noted, my favorite euphemism. At 20:00, an automated alert with the phrase predictive compliance hit liaison@narrowgate”—Sable’s fixer’s address—“because I left a polite tripwire in their keyword monitor. At 20:02, the internal mailer sends the denial to the crisis partners. At 20:08, they go public.”
“While at 20:11, the gull barks,” I say, throat tight with the odd joy of math working in a dirty world.
“And,” June adds, flipping to the ledger, “your hidden ledger puts a scheduled board item at 20:30—‘Program realignment,’ with three votes pre-committed. They were going to bury a lab they say doesn’t exist. We’ve got pre-commit logs. Exact phrasing.”
I watch rain toddle down the glass in fat lines. Drone rotors buzz a little closer, then swing away toward the festival, bored. The hurricane barrier’s arches keep their blind zones like old secrets; tonight, I am grateful for anything that stays blind.
“Sable’s crisis team is jumpy and sloppy,” I say. “Storm pressure shakes smart hands.”
June grins without humor. “And you knew she’d panic. Sly as a dock cat.”
“Don’t make me a cat,” I tell her. “Make me a calendar.”
She snorts. “Already did.” She drags a rectangle around the stack of times—19:57 anomaly, 20:00 internal alert, 20:02 internal draft, 20:08 public denial, 20:11 headline, 20:30 vote. She colors the rectangle algae-green, then puts three tick marks against it that read LEDGER, LOGS, PR.
“Contradiction secured,” she says. “She denied a lab before the rumor named the lab, and the denial uses the lab’s own label. Cross-ref against the ledger and we have a neat little noose.”
I let myself smile, a small private thing that tastes like rain and battery acid. Then I pull it back into my pocket. “The gull will want more,” I say. “He’ll think he started this wave.”
June taps the tide clock magnet, setting it deliberately three minutes fast again. “Then let him surf air. We gave him a harmless breadcrumb. He got his headline. He won’t get our clock.”
My phone buzzes with a DM. The gull: you stirred the nests. got more? we can protect your name. The lie of protection from a person who sells names for rent money lands in my stomach like bad coffee.
I type with two fingers. Time is the only name I need protected. Watch their PR. I stop, then add, Send me the first draft you didn’t publish. I hit send and stare at the little typing dots bobbing like a baited float.
“Risky,” June murmurs.
“I want to see who wrote his first sentences,” I say. “If he got warned off by a partner, we learn who’s paying attention.”
The dots vanish. He doesn’t send the draft. He sends an emoji—umbrella, then shrimp, then a clock. I close my eyes against the sudden flare of memory. Lila’s joke-language boomerangs through my ribs.
“He doesn’t know,” I say. “He thinks he’s clever. He’s replaying a code he never learned the key to.”
“Good,” June says. “Ignorance is safer than malice right now.”
—micro-hook—
The van shudders when a gust slaps it broadside. The arches hum; the festival cheer bleeds into a siren test and then cuts out. I wipe a circle clear on the fogged window and watch two dock workers trade a chain of favors—cigarettes for a gasket, a gasket for a promise to look the other way when the storm shutters need a bolt. Harbor Eleven barters survival the way elites barter narratives.
“You’re worried,” June says, not asking.
I flex my bandaged side. “I’m wary,” I correct. “The gull will circle. If I don’t throw another crumb, he’ll pick at us. If I do, he’ll fly straight into the engine.”
“Then we ground him,” June says. “Mute, do not block. Feed him post-fact crumbs we can afford. Use him to time-stamp their reflexes and nothing else.”
“Agreed.” I scroll the PR blast again and taste the vanilla they use to launder harm. The denial’s third paragraph mentions “proprietary algorithms that anticipate safety risks before they occur,” wrapped in words about “wellness” and “care.” The euphemism knots with the logs under my finger. “They wanted a machine to predict betrayal,” I say. “It predicted us.”
“But it didn’t predict its boss’s panic,” June says. “Humans are where models go to drown.”
She threads our contradiction into the packet scheduled for the vote: screenshots, raw headers, a little explainer with tiny words and big timestamps. She spikes it to auto-drop to three legal clinics, two unions, and a public defender’s office the moment a board member says the word “adjourn.” Insurance against a locked door.
“I’ll put a tiny feed-only version on the resilience stage’s backline account,” she adds, teeth bared. “They won’t use it, but if they do, it reads as civic pride content with a nasty center.”
I laugh once, hearing a younger me in the sound, the one who thought duct tape and good aim fixed most things. The van lights blink when the inverter toggles; algae-glass throws us in green again. The color softens nothing.
The gull pings again: they’re saying your ledger is a hoax. confirm? off-record. He attaches a screenshot of Sable’s partner’s partner quoting the denial like scripture. The reply’s timestamp reads 20:12—they’re fast, but not precise.
“Perfect,” June says, beaming like a thief who found the diamond under the ice. “Their quote machine is slower than their panic machine. That lag is going to hang them.”
I type back: I can’t confirm what I didn’t send you. Keep your receipts. Then I put the phone face down on the dash because I’m not made of unbreakable things.
“You okay?” June asks, quiet in the places that matter.
I nod. “Sly satisfaction wears off quick,” I say. “Now I’m sharpened.”
“Good,” she says. “We’re headed into glass.”
—micro-hook—
We run one more pass. June cross-references the PR headers with the internal anomaly times, then overlays the ledger’s vote language. The graph looks like a heart monitor that learned how to indict. The contradiction holds from every angle.
“If this backfires,” I say, eyes on the arches, “the tabloid turns and paints me as a manipulator with a fake romance and a fake ledger.”
June’s hand finds my shoulder, squeezes once. “Then we don’t backfire. We document. We time-stamp. We make it harder to lie faster than we can prove.”
I picture Elias—his speech notes spread across a table, knuckles white from honest words. Protection demands closeness; closeness destroys cover. I press my palm to the algae-lit dash, a secular oath.
“We drop this at adjournment,” I say. “And if Sable tries to sweep the barge, we already set the hooks.”
Rain hardens. The drones drift. The tide clock winks its three-minute joke. I angle the van’s mirror to catch my face and see someone I trained for this exact storm—a person who uses intimacy as a tool and truth as a blade, and still wants a different ending than the ones her work usually buys.
The gull sends one last message: hearing chatter about a “temporary relocation” after the vote. tip? The word relocation wears a euphemism like cologne.
I let the message sit. I listen to the rotors, the siren test, the festival’s stubborn cheer. Finally I type: Here’s your tip—when they tell you there’s nothing to see, look for the door they’re already locking. Time is the story.
I don’t hit send.
I lift my eyes to the arches and ask the storm my next, meaner question:
“When the vote starts and the river rises, who drowns first—the gull on the noise, or the scalpel in the lie?”