The Carrier’s Teeth
The dark takes the dock like a mouth closing. I keep my hand on the scanner, thumb over record, and count beats in the hum. It’s steadier than my pulse. Danner says something behind me—calm, procedural—but the words smear under the hiss. What I hear is breath at my ear, shaping my name like a warning.
Follow the hum.
I don’t argue with orders in my bones. Lights stutter back. I hand the recorder to an evidence tech and keep a mirrored copy in my pocket because trust is a luxury and tonight we’re broke. Danner falls in beside me as we walk off the pier.
“Don’t disappear,” he says.
“I’m not a magic trick.”
I take the long way home, radio dial under my fingers. When the hum shifts, I shift with it. It points like a compass you tilt to catch truth.
My father’s apartment is gone to landlords and dust. The important things live elsewhere: a storage unit by the rail spur, C-17. The roll-up door groans. Boxes labeled in his hand: Logs 1999–2007. Dispatch Anomalies. Misc. Hums. The reel-to-reel waits.
I thread a tape marked Final Week and press play. Static inhales. Beneath it, a rhythm like a machine under a floor. Then my father’s voice, tired but precise. “Rae, if you’re hearing this, listen to more than words.” A knock twice, far on the tape. “This city has a second language.”
The hum swells. Over it, soft, a second voice—a whisper turning consonants to smoke. Numbers tease through: “Seven… three… five.” A beat. “South Plant.”
South Plant was the paper’s printing house, wired to the tower on Hargrove Hill. If the tape ends here, his road probably did too.
I write the numbers on my wrist out of superstition, kill the light, turn it back on to be sure it dies. It does.
South Plant sits with windows punched out. The chain on the side door is new. My picks work. Inside, paper dust rides air. My beam swims across presses frozen mid-sentence, pallets of unsent news.
The hum is stronger. It comes through ducts, metal bones, my teeth. In the mezzanine, a small server rack purrs, cables braided with care. A narrowband transmitter nests in aluminum, antenna parasitic in old conduit. Power steals from a breaker labeled Press Two.
The receiver ticks. I tune by hairlines. The whisper pours in like smoke under a door.
“Good girl,” it says. “You didn’t make me wait.”
I give him silence.
“Numbers on your wrist,” he purrs. “You always wrote on yourself when you were little. Your father told me that.”
The world tilts. He was close to my father. Radio is intimacy without touch; he’s using it like a hand.
“I want you to see what he saw,” the whisper says. “Go to the press pit.”
The stairs down are slick with paper dust. The pit is a mouth. Floodlights blink on as if waiting. At center, a metal chair. On it: a headset, a disposable phone, and a photograph of a little girl asleep on a couch, headphones askew. Me at eight, radio murmuring.
“Private collection,” the whisper says. “No one loves you like an archivist.”
The phone buzzes. One message. An audio file called LAST EDIT. I don’t press play. The headset padding’s been replaced. Under the foam, a thin metal mesh gleams like a crown of thorns.
“Don’t be shy,” he says. “We’re almost done with the rough draft.”
“If you knew my father,” I say, “tell me his last words.”
Silence. Not dead air—thinking. When the whisper returns, it’s different. “He said he wished he’d taught you to run slower. That you outpaced the rest of us.”
That’s him. A fact shaped like love. My throat burns. The mesh could be an induction coil. Could be nothing. Could be the trick.
I reach for it anyway.
Across the city, Cole Danner stares at a screen that wants to sell him certainty. The hijack logs look clean, every bounce too symmetrical. Ghost routes are fake alibis: polished until you press. He presses. Repeater traffic doesn’t match field complaints. Someone is inserting latency like a surgeon packs gauze.
He freezes a dock still: Mercer, head tilted, listening to something no one else heard. He used to be that, before mistakes and offices.
His phone vibrates. New message from a carrier ghost. Attachment: a storage unit still, a reel-to-reel, a scarred hand on a lever—Mercer’s ring-finger nick. He hits play. The room fills with a hum that warms the air. Under it, an older male voice: steady. “Rae, if you’re hearing this—” The file ends, cut mid-breath.
Whoever sent it wants him late. He grabs his coat and does the thing he hates: calls for backup. The line rings once. Then, impossibly, the person who answers is him, recorded and played back with a half-second lag. “Cole. Stand down.”
He kills the call. This isn’t a city problem or a precinct problem. It’s a perimeter problem—the perimeter around one detective stepping into jaws and calling it listening. He drives toward South Plant.
In the press pit, my fingertips touch the mesh. A feather of heat. The hum deepens, catches. My teeth ache. Across the pit something clicks, small and final, like a camera shutter, like a safety coming off, like the last change mark on a page before print.
“Sit,” the whisper says, gentle as a razor. “He did.”
I don’t sit. I lower the headset toward the chair to map whatever field it’s throwing. The floodlights sharpen. The disposable phone chimes; the screen flashes a countdown: 03:00. 02:59. The audio file opens itself. My father’s voice floods the room.
“Rae. If you’re hearing this, I didn’t finish teaching you the quiet parts.” Paper rustles. A pen taps twice—his tick before a hard truth. “Someone is rewriting the city. They brand edits with a Y. They make the noise carry the blade.”
The whisper overlays him. “He never learned to leave a sentence alone.”
I set the headset down. The countdown eats seconds. The transmitter above hums higher, drawing breath for the next broadcast. If this place is the throat, the tower is the mouth.
“Why me?” I ask, walking, mapping, feeling the hum with bone.
“Because you don’t sleep,” he says. “Because you hear the carrier, not the speech. Because he raised you to finish what he couldn’t.” A smile I can’t see drags across the line. “And because you came.”
The building warms. The smell of hot dust and ink rises. I walk the pit’s edge and find the cable run feeding the rack. Fresh tape. Fresh staples. A bulge where there shouldn’t be one. I pull my knife and slice the wrap. Inside, a filament thin as hair gleams once.
Tripwire. Old school. I’ve already broken it or I haven’t yet; either answer is a punchline.
“Careful,” the whisper croons. “Deadlines kill.”
“Only if you still print,” I say, and cut the line.
The countdown skips. The lights flutter, catch. The transmitter whines, high and hungry. The room tightens like a throat. Above me, a relay snaps.
The headset seals over my ears.
And the floor drops.