Dead Air
The crown bites and the world narrows to a white tunnel. I wrench sideways. Hair tears. The seal breaks. Danner crashes into me, fists on the clamp, boot braced on the chair. The band snaps, the crown spits sparks, and the tower answers with a long, low moan like steel remembering gravity.
“Hole,” Danner says. The maintenance hatch yawns. We drop into the shaft as screws cut past like angry bees. The ladder shivers. The room above unthreads itself. We crawl through a duct that tastes of wet dust and mouse nests until the hum stops acting like a voice and starts acting like a clock.
“Two minutes,” I say.
“Until what?”
“Proof.”
A service cage opens to rain and night. The city is a wet map below. On the exterior ladder a hooded figure moves with unbothered balance, messenger bag tight to his ribs. The Broadcaster. I thumb my recorder on. Not proof. Memory.
“He wired the crown to trigger a burn,” Danner says, reading welds and scorch. “If you’d sat—”
“I didn’t.” A speaker on the rib coughs my father’s rasp: Run. Then silence, then my own breath, chopped and rearranged into a sob. He is editing me live.
“He records, selects, excises,” Danner says.
“He revises. The Y on the dock wasn’t a fork. It’s an edit mark.”
“Copy change,” he says. “He thinks the city is a page.”
“And we’re his margin notes.”
The tower leans another degree. Lights in the housing estate flicker together, a single body shuddering. “Backfeeding the grid,” Danner mutters.
“Or priming something else.”
We cross a listing catwalk and shoulder through a locked door into a relay room humming with old life. In the center sits a metal crate with a fresh pad on the latch. Warm.
“He built his own timing,” Danner says. He doesn’t say bomb.
“Kill it?”
“Change its mind.”
He locates a junction where the tower’s spine talks to this room; fresh solder glints like a signature. “Noise,” he says. “More than he expects, in the wrong place.”
I unclip my scanner, lay it across the bus, and twist the gain until it groans. He ties it in with a jumper. The hum warps and flattens; for a second it sounds like a modem drowning.
The ticking inside the crate stutters. The padlock clicks, uncertain.
“Again.”
I detune and widen. The relays protest. Lights brown and catch. In the wobble the hum shows its bones: a carrier walking, a subharmonic heartbeat, a modulation I’ve heard on my father’s last tapes and under my own name. Not a voice. A breathing pattern.
“Cole,” I say. “That’s him.”
“Later.”
He kills an alarm loop with a pinch, drops the pad, and lifts the lid. Coils and capacitors. A ceramic block inked with pencil math. At the heart, a handshake bridged by a hair of fused metal.
“He wanted the crown to pull this,” Danner says. “Then the tower becomes a siren.”
“For who?”
A tone rises out of the ceiling speakers, splits into my voice. “This is Detective Rae Mercer. Evacuate Hargrove Hill. Repeat—”
He was going to make me burn the hill with my mouth.
I jam a screwdriver into the relay. Danner severs two feeds. The tone dies mid-plea. I can still hear the sentence finishing in my head. We are not safe; we are between catastrophes.
“Hold it,” he says.
“Not long.”
He redraws lines with wire and stubbornness. Sweat runs. Rain snakes through a cracked panel. The tower shivers to its base. Then the hum drops half a step. The crate cools.
“Go,” he says. “Down the service spine. He’s not here to die with us.”
We run. The Broadcaster stays one rung ahead, a breath in the steel. At the fence, blue strobes smear the rain. City and fed. Radios spit my name. Someone has pushed that clipped warning onto a local channel with my tag attached.
I raise empty hands. Danner shows badge and breath. Officers shout positions like training videos. Then the streetlights go dark in a rolling wave, drawing a black curtain outward from the hill. The only light left is a white rectangle from the relay room door above us.
The hum returns full and carries a second voice, buried deep. My father. Not a loop. New. Calm.
“Rae. Below the tower,” he says. “Red cabinet. Last tape.”
Danner’s head turns. “You—”
“No,” I say. “He did.”
A van idles beyond the cruisers, no plates. The hooded driver glances once at the tower like he’s checking time. Headlights flare. The engine climbs. He points the nose at the fence.
I run.
The van hits the gate and tears it loose. Officers scatter. Metal screams. The van fishtails toward the base of the tower, toward the red cabinet bolted to concrete where the manuals used to live. Something my father left is in there. The van does not brake.
I draw. The sights hang for a heartbeat on the windshield. Rain turns the line to a shake. The driver lifts a hand from the wheel and touches two fingers to the glass where my name would be if names were written in heat.
The Broadcaster’s voice breaks over every channel at once, clean and confident. “Cut to black.”
The van surges.
Danner hits me hard from the side. My shot takes the mirror. The van muscles past and slams the cabinet dead center. The door explodes outward. A pile of reels spills onto wet concrete, cardboard bellies splitting, brown tape looping across the ground like veins looking for a body.
I lunge for the nearest reel. A cruiser skids between me and the wreck and throws open a door that becomes a wall. Hands grab. Voices stack. The scanner on my belt shrieks with a new carrier, tighter, faster. A countdown.
“Rae!” Danner shouts. His face is white in the strobe. “Listen.”
I listen. Under sirens and orders and rain, a tiny speaker in the cracked cabinet whispers the code my father taught me when I was too young for anything but secrets: long, long, short, pause. The pattern points not at the spilled reels, but at the concrete seam behind the cabinet’s bolts. A hollow spot. A hide.
“Move the base,” I say.
“Mercer—”
“Now.”
Three officers drag the twisted cabinet aside. The seam shows a cut circle filled with tar. Danner jams his knife in and pries. The plug lifts, heavy and perfect. Inside is a weatherproof tin the color of dried blood.
I reach in.
The scanner goes dead.
Every radio dies with it.
And from inside the tin, something begins to tick.
I hold the tin; letters stamped LAST EDIT. Danner mouths Wait. I break the wax and lift the lid. Inside: a reel sealed in plastic, a note in my father’s block print—If found, let the city speak—and a coin-sized device glued beneath, red LED dead. The ticking lives in the coin, not the reel. I look up. The van’s driver is gone. The tower shudders as if listening. Rain hammers the tin. I slide a fingernail under the device to pry it free—and feel it click from safe to armed hard.