The Mouth of the Tower
The floor doesn’t vanish; it flexes, peels, and I drop into a throat of iron. The headset clamps my skull and pours glass into my ears. Sound becomes weight. I land wrong on a rib of steel and the world spits white. Paper dust explodes up like ash. The hum is no longer beneath things; it owns the room, a second pulse under mine.
I tear the crown off. No quieter—just different. The static grinds, then steadies, as if I’ve tuned to the frequency of my fear. Above me, floodlights sway. A shadow leans across the grating. The Broadcaster’s voice slides down through the ruin, too close.
“You’re tuned perfectly, Rae.”
“Come down and say that.”
Chains knock behind the presses, a soft applause. I push to my knees. Shoulder’s wrong, wrist’s worse, but under his whisper is a signature I know: a turbine’s cough, a cable’s faint sing in crosswind. I heard that breath on a tape labeled Final Week. Hargrove Hill. The tower is calling.
The stairs are half-torn, but they hold. I climb out of the hole. The rack is dark now, guts ripped. He unplugged the present to make sure I chase the past. Rain needles the roof. Outside, a car door slams. Danner moves into the press hall, gun up, coat dark.
“Mercer.” His eyes go to the pit, then the dead rack. “You alive or stubborn?”
“Both.” I gesture at the cables. “He pulled power. Left a trail on purpose.”
“To where?”
I point toward the hill that gnaws the north edge. “Where my father stopped.”
Danner doesn’t ask how I know. He hears the certainty and hates it. “Then we don’t go alone.”
“We already did.” I brush past him. “You coming?”
The road to Hargrove is a stitched scar. Houses slump, windows punched out. The tower stands above it all, ribs lost in cloud, humming. My scanner, clipped to the dash, warms without touch. The hiss turns friendly. That’s how you know you’re in a trap: it makes room for you.
We park below the fence. The padlock is new, the cut older. Rain comes slant and cold. Danner checks his corners. I don’t. I’m listening. The hum is alive here, a wire under wet earth.
Halfway up the path the speakers kick on, vertebrae of sound. My father’s voice arrives weak, then sharp. “Rae, don’t follow.” It staggers me. Danner’s hand braces my back, pressure against freefall.
“It’s bait,” he says.
“I know.” Knowing isn’t moving. I climb anyway.
The ladder to the service platform is slick. We rise into cloud, into noise, into the sense the steel is thinking about us. The second speaker coughs awake. My voice this time, stolen from the dock, chopped, looped. “Good… girl.” If I had a free hand I’d rip the speaker down and throw it into the dark.
The door to the top room hangs crooked. Inside: cables braided, transmitters in shrines, monitors washed in snow. At center, a bolted chair. The crown waits where a head should be. Above it a screen flickers from static to a face I know.
My father, mid-breath, eyes turned to where I stand like he timed it. He looks tired in the way last looks tired. I step without meaning to. Danner slides to my side, gun steady.
“Projection,” he says. “Don’t let him pick the frame.”
The Broadcaster breathes into the speakers, amused. “Sit, Rae. Or I’ll let him finish.”
Danner’s fingers bite my arm. “Don’t.”
The screen skips. My father’s lips shape a word. Not stitched. The syllable lands clean as a blade.
“Run.”
The tower hum deepens until it becomes pressure in the bones. Under the chair, relays chatter like teeth. The crown vibrates on its cradle. Every monitor catches frames of the city: the dock, the press hall, the stairwell where the floor peeled. All threaded with that carrier, his voice a parasite wearing skins.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“To finish the edit,” the whisper says. “Your father was a rough draft. You’re the revision.”
I move. Not toward the chair—around it. The cables make a map. Power snakes left, signal right, a third line slouches through a cut toward the exterior ladder. Danner tracks my look, covers the door. He’s thinking charges. I’m thinking rhythms.
“Cole,” I say, first time I use his name. “If he forces a broadcast, jam the feed.”
“With what gear?”
“Your body,” I say. “Stand in the way.”
He swears. “We’re not dying for a metaphor.”
“Then we’re dying for dead air.” I drop to a knee and peel tape from a junction where three lines kiss. The adhesive is fresh. Under it, a coil thin as hair waits for a tremor. Trip. I lower the blade until it touches home. The hum wavers.
“Careful,” the Broadcaster croons. “Deadlines kill.”
“Only if you print,” I answer, and sever the coil.
The room inhales. The lights don’t die. Instead the monitors pour from snow into an image stitched from too many angles: the press pit, the storage unit, my apartment’s dark kitchen. He’s been watching since before I knew to look back. A fourth frame catches Danner’s Bureau screen—loops of my voice dragging across a waveform like a cracked bell.
Danner says nothing. It’s the kind of silence people use when truth shows its teeth.
The chair bolts tick. The crown walks an inch toward the edge of the cradle as if by invisible hands. The door behind us slams. Locks grind. The tower groans like an old god waking.
Cole Danner in the third person: he has seen rooms like this, not in steel but in code. You step into a logic bomb and every action is a line you didn’t write. He looks for the exit that isn’t a door. There: a maintenance hatch half-buried under coax. He kicks the cable aside, peels the panel with his knife. A ladder drops into black throat. He looks at Mercer. Her face is cut by reflection—monitors, storm, a ghost telling her to flee a place she’ll never leave.
“Mercer,” he says, low. “We have a hole.”
I stare at the hatch, at the dark, at the fact the tower is the only thing that ever told me truth without blinking. My father’s pixel face shakes. The word on his mouth might be my name. Might be nothing. The crown shivers closer to where I’d be if I listened to warnings.
“Run,” the screen mouths again.
I take one step. The room answers with a sound like a spine snapping. The platform jerks. Bolts scream. Outside, lightning sews a seam through cloud and for one bright breath I see him: a shape on the exterior ladder, hooded, patient. He pauses level with our room and lays a palm against the glass.
He doesn’t speak into the speakers now. He speaks through the wall, palm to pane, voice in the steel. “Too late, Rae.”
The crown leaps from the cradle as if thrown by a hand you can’t see and clamps over my head. The world contracts to a tunnel of white.
The floor tilts. The tower begins to fall.