They rolled past the crooked sign and into Emmett like trespassers in a museum that still remembered the living. The truck's lights stayed low. Storefronts leaned together over Main like tired men trading secrets—barbershop, diner, hardware, a church whose steeple had a bandage of plywood where the bell should be. Every window wore netting or gauze; every porch had a chair turned on its side, as if someone had stood up fast and never sat again.
The hand-painted warning hung from the first light pole inside town: DON'T STOP in smeared red, and beneath it, neat black letters no bigger than a thumbnail: WE LISTEN.
Madison read it aloud and snorted softly. "Who's 'we'?"
"Either neighbors or a church," Riley said from the back. "Either way, they wrote it for us."
"What's the play?" Madison asked.
Gavin kept the truck gliding at idle. "Keep moving until someone who owns the night tells us to do otherwise."
They passed a pharmacy with a paper sign taped inside: QUIET HOURS SUNSET TO DAWN — NO CASH — NO DRUGS. Across the street, a realtor's office had turned its display window into a wall of handwritten notices—MISSING over smiling faces, then FOUND over a few with an X slashed through the word, then STAY in block letters taped crooked at the bottom. The tape ends fluttered in the truck's wind, making small gestures that felt like breath.
Riley leaned between the seats, hair shadowing her cheek in the low dash glow. "Look," she whispered.
A length of red string crossed Main at chest height, tied to a lamppost on one side and a mailbox on the other. Eight feet past it, another. Then another, a web of faint lines from pole to pole, porch to porch, a child's cat's cradle scaled for a street. In each line, someone had clipped tiny foil flags—not enough to flash, just enough to shiver if anything touched them.
"Tripwires," Madison said. "But for eyes."
"For hands," Riley murmured. "For reaching."
Gavin angled the truck around the first string, eased between a parked Suburban with two flat tires and a newspaper box that said TUESDAY and meant Forever Ago. More strings glowed ahead, faint as veins.
A green dot appeared on the diner's dark window—a laser point, low, then high, then low again. Three pulses. The dot slid to the mouth of an alley and waited there like a held breath.
"Guide," Riley whispered.
"Or a barrel," Madison said.
"Choice is the only thing we've got," Gavin said, and nosed the truck down the alley.
The alley's brick walls sweated a damp chill. Dumpsters formed a slalom of anonymous bulk. Farther in, someone had stretched sheets of black netting overhead, as if the town wanted to dress the night instead of letting it walk around naked. The laser bobbed once on the concrete, then vanished beneath a rolling door with a rectangle of chalk at its base.
Gavin braked. The chalk rectangle was scored with a diagonal slash—closed—then a second smaller box beside it held a charcoal dot—someone out there—and an arrow that pointed down. Under the door, a sliver of darkness and the scent of cut wood.
Madison muttered, "Feels like we're sending in a check we can't cash."
"Feels like somebody made rules and stuck to them," Gavin said.
He turned the ignition and let the engine die on its own volition, slow and reluctant. The cab settled into silence so complete it had weight.
A knuckle rapped the glass of his window—soft, quick, precise: tap—tap, tap—tap. Not a knock. A measure.
Gavin did not turn his head fast. He let it turn like a minute hand. A face waited there, inches away in the dark: a woman's, late forties, crow's feet like fine cracks around eyes that had refused to close when the world did. Her hair was scraped back, her jaw set like an opinion that had been tested and tempered.
She held up a palm. On it, in black marker, the shape of a tiny ear, a spiral of line. Under it: LISTEN. Then she touched a finger to her own lips and pointed down at the chalk box.
Gavin nodded once. He opened the door like a man opening a baby's bedroom. The woman stepped back. Two shadows behind her pulled the rolling door up by hand a foot at a time, silent. A slice of a workshop appeared: pegboard with tools hung in outlines, sawhorses, stacks of lumber cut clean and squared, a rack of mason jars filled with screws and nails arranged by size like a choir sorted by voice.
The woman signed with two fingers: IN. She didn't use her mouth. She used her eyes and hands. She had practiced.
They walked the truck in—Madison guiding the mirrors past the door, Riley watching the rear tires clear the lip. Once inside, the door rattled back down, slats meeting slats, and the room exhaled.
Light came on in segments—shielded lamps that filled corners without falling on the windows. The woman drew a breath and used her voice for the first time, low enough that the words felt like felt. "I'm Margo. You're late."
"By what clock?" Gavin asked.
"The one we still believe in," she said. "Set by sunrise and what we've learned since the noise stopped making sense." She glanced at Riley, then Madison, then back to Gavin. "Keys on the dash. Hands where I can see them. If any of you twitches when the floor speaks, you go back outside. That's rule one."
"The floor speaks?" Madison said.
Margo flicked her eyes toward the concrete. Now that he was listening, Gavin heard it—a faint, almost imaginary tremble that came and went in a slow swell, as if the building itself had a pulse. He followed the feeling under his boots to a corner where the workbench legs sat in shallow ceramic bowls filled with a thin sheen of water. A row of such bowls ran under the racks and shelves, tiny mirrors breathing the room.
"Footfalls from the street," Margo said. "We keep the legs in water. The bowls talk when the ground does. It buys us knowing—when something approaches, if it's many or one, if it runs or stands. 'We listen' isn't philosophy. It's plumbing."
Madison looked impressed against his will. "You used to be what, a drummer?"
"911 dispatch." The answer carried neither pride nor apology. "We learned to hear information inside panic. Now we hear it under doors."
Riley shifted her weight. Margo's eyes ticked to the movement, then away, filing it under caution and not under threat. "You brought the county with you?" she asked.
"White noise of trouble, yeah," Gavin said. "We cut engines when you asked."
Margo nodded. "Good. If you'd kept them hot, the air would carry the heat through the door and into the alley. Heat shivers ruin the way the netting reads. The ones out there don't parse heat yet, not like we do, but they like movement," she said, and glanced at Riley again, as if Riley had written the rule. "They like practice even more."
"We saw that," Gavin said. "Keypads. Bridges. The way they set things down and watch them."
Margo's mouth pinched—not disapproval; a mouth considering a wound it couldn't cover. "They're the worst students and the most faithful. They don't understand the trick, but they rehearse the hands." She held out her palm again, the ear scribble dark. "We listen, so we see when the performance changes."
Madison found the edge of the workbench and leaned, careful not to make the bowls sing. "You alone here?"
"No. Just the one you get first," Margo said. "We've got others. Not all indoors. Some of us like it better where the listening's clean." Her gaze shifted to the truck. "What's in the bed?"
"Jerky," Madison said. "Tools. A jack. Bad dreams."
"You keep the jack. We'll take two bags of bad dreams, we're short," she said without looking away. It was a joke and a test. Madison huffed out something like a laugh. Riley tried not to smile, and failed, briefly.
Margo saw the smile and let it happen. Then she pointed at the far door, a man-sized steel fire exit with a slit for a peephole. "We'll move you before dawn. You can't stay here past that. The alley breathes wrong when the sun hits it—you get glitter off the netting, and the glitter's just motion with a pretty dress on."
"Where to?" Gavin asked.
"Church basement. We killed the bell and turned the tower into a mast. Static plays all night. The static isn't for them," she added before they could ask. "It's for us. Humans panic into chatter. The hiss reminds us to drown our own noise."
"Rules?" Gavin asked.
She raised three fingers. "One: if the floor speaks, you don't. Two: you do not run under streetlamps—shadows strobe and they hunt the flicker. Three: if somebody you love calls your name from behind a door and you didn't watch them walk to that door, you don't answer it. We are past voices and into ventriloquism."
Riley's breath hitched, barely. Margo clocked it, tucked the information away.
"What do you want for the sleep?" Gavin asked. "Food? Fuel?"
Margo's eyes returned to Riley. "Answers," she said. "She's got a facility lanyard in her pocket."
Riley stiffened by a degree. "You're very observant."
"Dispatch makes magpies," Margo said. "We collect bright bits and arrange them until the story stops lying. Where did you get it?"
"North loop annex," Riley said. "I wasn't staff."
"No," Margo said. "You brought yourself in on a gurney and then rolled off when nobody looked, or you took it from somebody who didn't need identification anymore." She said it without heat. "Either way, you were inside when their road ended."
"Your sign told us it ended," Riley said. "The radio told us not to approach."
"The radio told you to avoid the main gate," Margo said. "They kept the side open for a while and called that 'ethics'." She looked at Gavin. "So here's my price: she tells the truth—what she did there, what she saw, how they failed. You back her story with what you've learned since you met her. We trade information for a place to keep your bones horizontal for three hours."
Gavin didn't look back at Riley. He held Margo's eyes. "We can pay that."
Riley's voice was flat as a level. "Do I get a veto?"
"You get a choice," Margo said. "Tell it to me or tell it to the room upstairs when I bring the others down. Either way, you tell it clean."
Riley glanced at Gavin's profile and then away, as if realizing she'd been waiting to see whether his jaw would move before her mouth did. "I hid in a freezer," she said. "At a fundraiser when everything went to teeth. I got out when I thought frostbite beats bleeding." She touched her pocket where the lanyard might have been, then let her hand fall. "At the annex, I followed a woman with keys through a loading dock that said NO ENTRY and meant Unless You Know Where We Hid The Sign. Inside, I saw three things: a room full of monitors watching roads like rosary beads; a board that said LEARNING VECTOR with dates and arrows; and a boy—my guess nineteen—tapping a rhythm on a plexi wall while a man in a lab coat stood next to him and wrote down the parts the boy got wrong." She swallowed. "The boy changed the rhythm to match the man's tapping. He smiled when he heard himself get it right."
Margo didn't blink. "Who taught who?"
"The man changed to match the boy when he got impatient," Riley said. "Then they switched back. I don't think either of them remembered who started it."
Madison had gone still enough that the bowls stopped their faint ripples. "Jesus."
Margo looked at Gavin, not at the ceiling, not at a God who might be listening. "And you?"
"Keypad line," he said. "We saw what looks like mimicry—no understanding, then sudden commitment. We watched one set a bolt on a rail like an offering after he moved it from the asphalt."
Margo nodded once. "They have a talent for liturgy."
A faint tremor touched the bowls by the bench—barely a stitch in the water, then another. Margo's head tilted. The tremor became a steady pulse: step, step, step, slow, measured, not many.
"Floor," she said, a breath, not a shout.
No one spoke. They listened.
The steps drew near, then paused. Something brushed the alley's outer netting, not enough to flash, enough to make it breathe. The bowls sang a skin's-width higher. The steps resumed, then stopped exactly behind the rolling door as if reading the chalk. Silence stood on the other side and thought about them.
Margo moved to the peephole, lifted the steel slide, and didn't put her eye to it. She put her ear to the gap and closed her eyes. Listening looked like prayer. Her hand raised in a small circle: one.
The door breathed—a pressure pushed in, then a release, like a chest working through the fact of lungs.
From the far side came the softest sound Gavin had heard all night: a fingertip drawing a little circle on metal, then another, then three in a row like a code learned from a child's game.
Tap—tap—tap. The same measure that had brought them inside.
Riley's hand found Gavin's sleeve and gripped once. Margo's mouth flattened. "We don't knock that way at this door," she whispered.
The fingertip circled again. Then the sound changed: a slide, as if someone were pressing their cheek to the seam. A breath misted the lower edge and faded.
Margo laid her palm flat to the door, as if to feel a heartbeat through steel. Her other hand bent two fingers: Back.
Gavin shook his head minutely. "If they learned that knock from us," he mouthed, "we brought it."
Margo's eyes told him maybe and no at once. She kept her ear to the gap. The fingertip returned—tap, tap, tap—then, horribly, a voice: "Open," it said.
Not a shout. A whisper at the exact volume Margo had used when she first gave her name. It had shaped the word correctly, the n and the p and the vowel caught between teeth and lip. It sounded like a recording of her played on bad speakers in a room with carpet.
Riley stopped breathing. Madison's hand found the hilt of his knife and didn't close on it, because closing would be movement and movement was food.
Margo's eyes were wet suddenly and not from fear. It looked like anger on her face, the bitter kind—at herself, at a world that gave mirrors to hunger. She moved her ear away from the seam, lifted her hand from the metal, and straightened.
"We leave," she said, barely air. "Through the church path. The alley's burned."
"Won't they smell us?" Madison breathed.
"I don't gamble on what they haven't learned yet," Margo said, and cut the lights. The room's outlines rose up out of black with the soft stubbornness of things that refuse to disappear.
She put Gavin's palm on a rope fixed to the back wall and Riley's on a second. "Pull, count twelve, step. Don't let the ropes go slack or the bells will kiss." Her voice turned a shade softer. "Welcome to Emmett. We don't stop. We listen. We never open for a word we taught them."
The fingertip on the other side of the door moved—slower, savoring the circle, patient as rain. Then the voice again, Margo's thin and exact in pitch: "Please."
Riley's grip tightened. Gavin felt Madison's shoulder touch his in the dark, the kind of touch men use in huddles when nothing on the chalkboard will survive first contact and you need something that isn't language. They pulled the ropes, counted with their feet, and stepped into a hallway so narrow the night had to turn sideways to get through it. Behind them, at the seam of the door, something that had practiced their manners waited without hurry, listening to the room they had just left and learning the shape of silence.