Behind them Beetle bumped the tire once, like a friend asking if they needed one more thing before she went home. The dock answered with a tired clank and gave them to the block—warehouse windows dusty as old eyes, a mural flaking into shapes that used to be heroes. Sirens stitched and unstitched the far avenues. The tower's smoke lay over the rooftops like someone had pulled a gray blanket up to the city's nose.
"Cut south," Madison said, voice gone sandpaper. He tested his knee and the knee answered with committee language: we regret to inform you. "Three blocks to Hush House."
"Hush House?" Riley asked.
"Old rehearsal space," Margo said. "Walls that learned manners. We used it back when the curfew still had training wheels."
Gavin put two fingers to his lips and pointed. A patrol drone skimmed the river's edge, red eye unblinking, sound like an electric mosquito that had read too many rules. They hugged the underside of a catwalk as it passed. Riley held her breath: not superstition, just an honest tax to pay to luck.
The alley behind the bait shop held a handcart, the kind restaurants use to move kegs. It leaned against the dumpster like it had been told to wait and inevitably had. Madison shrugged once, an apology to pride, and let them steer him onto it.
"I'm not cargo," he said, and then he was. His hands found the cart's sides, fingers whitening as the next wave of pain came dressed in policy: non-negotiable.
They rolled. Rubber squeaked over grit. A cat announced itself and then walked the other way, unimpressed by larger tragedies. At the end of the alley a convenience store squinted at the night. Its owner had locked the door but left the radio on; tinny announcer voice listed closures and warnings like birthdays in a small town paper.
"Lights," Riley said, pointing. Down the cross-street a convoy slid past—two Humvees and a truck full of men in borrowed authority. They didn't look down the street because the city had taught them to look only where orders pointed. The group went still until the sound thinned to a rumor.
"Move," Gavin said softly.
They took the curb cut like a boat takes a small chop. A jog, then another. Hush House lived above a shuttered pawn shop; its stairwell was a spine with arthritis. Margo fished the key from under the outer lintel, exactly where no one clever would hide it. Her fingers came back black with dust and old nights.
"Up?" Riley asked, eyeing Madison.
"Up," Madison said. "You two haul. I'll hate you later."
They did it in three pulls and one swearing break. On the landing, a metal door wore a sticker that said NO DRUMS AFTER MIDNIGHT and another that said BE KIND, REWIND because some jokes keep their habits. Gavin knocked once, just to keep the superstition fed, and slid them inside.
The room held them like a hand. Sound fell into the foam on the walls and calmed down. Someone's old set list ghosted the whiteboard: songs for a show that didn't happen, notes in a handwriting that had decided to leave town and never write.
"Door," Margo said. Riley swung the deadbolt and turned the thumb latch on the second. The room made the small satisfied click of a place that likes being a place again.
Madison grunted onto the couch. Margo cut his pant leg open with trauma shears, emptied a cold pack onto the swollen joint, and packed her voice with simple instruction. "Heel here. Breathe there. Don't argue with physics." He obeyed like a man who has no better religion handy.
The radio on the floor spat static and a name—"King"—before dissolving into codes. Gavin looked at it like the plastic had personally betrayed him. The announcer found more certainty: advisory, curfew grid, contact numbers that would route to dead air until dawn.
"They know you were near the tower," Riley said.
"They know I'm alive," Gavin said. "That's useful to them until it isn't."
Margo taped Madison's knee with something that might as well have been prayer. "We have forty minutes before the net tightens," she said. "Tell her here. You promised the room."
Riley stopped moving. The room had the right kind of quiet—the structural kind. No echo meant guilt couldn't bounce and grow bigger. She sat cross-legged on the carpet like a student who wanted to pass on the first try. "Okay," she said. "But if the truth wants to cut, we let it."
"It will," Gavin said. He felt the confession crowd his ribs. It wanted to come out shaped like absolution; he refused to let it. "When the door seals."
Riley stood, checked the hallway, then the closet with the scrambled amps, then the small bathroom window. She came back and threw the deadbolt, then climbed onto the couch arm by Madison's bad knee and waited without fidgeting.
The radio coughed. A different voice now, field mic, looser. "…shepherd figure—no identification—possible cult—tower arson likely—"
Margo turned the knob until the voice found itself too embarrassed to continue. "Room's sealed," she said.
Gavin opened his mouth.
The knock that followed was the kind of knock only people who don't want to get shot knock with: two taps, pause, one more, quick. Margo's jaw tightened. Madison's hand found the crowbar under the couch and made it a promise.
Riley ghosted to the peephole and looked with one eye like the other didn't trust the news. "Kid," she breathed. "Benji from the drum store."
Gavin cracked the door on the chain. Benji's face filled the gap—fifteen going on forty, cheeks smudged, skateboard under one arm like a weapon he believed in. "You owe me five bucks," he whispered with the gravity of a messenger god. "Ledger Man paid me ten to tell you he sold a sentence to the wrong guy. Your sentence. Mercy credit card. He thought you'd want the head start."
Riley swore, creative and precise.
"Who'd he sell to?" Gavin asked.
Benji scratched his ear. "Cart guys. The ones that push doctrine on wheels." He pantomimed a hand-lettered sandwich board. "They're telling it like you endorsed it. Like—like you and the shepherd practiced lines."
Margo's mouth went thin. "We go now."
"Backstairs," Benji added, proud to be useful. "Smoke detector in the front hall's on a camera now. They borrowed power from the hair salon below. If you cook toast you'll be on television."
"Show us the back," Gavin said.
Benji grinned, then remembered to be scared and cut the grin in half. "Follow me."
The service corridor smelled like mop water and old coffee. Flyers curled on a bulletin board—bands, karate, piano lessons—each with tabs torn off in hope. Benji hopped the last two steps of the back stairs and landed quiet on the mezzanine. Across the alley, the lights in the hair salon's break room burned like a dare.
Sirens crossed somewhere to the east, then stitched west, the net tugging tighter. A bullhorn made a speech no one on their block needed.
"Down," Madison said. He'd stood and discovered the leg was willing to be lied to for half a block. "We run it ugly. Carter Street to the freight bay at Bruno's. From there the tunnels."
"The tunnels?" Benji said, delighted and horrified.
"The ones with rats that mind their business," Riley said. "Thanks, kid." She pressed two folded bills into his palm—the kind that look like lunch and prove to be dinner. He stuffed them under his cap like a secret and vanished down the stairwell in a salute of skateboard wheels.
They hit the alley. The air had found a fresh edge. From the river side, a pack of voices washed up—a call-and-response chant grafted on bad news, salesmen making a product out of pain. The words rolled up the brick and broke ugly on the rehearsal room wall: Mercy is a credit card.
"Move," Margo said, and they did, backs low, mouths closed.
Bruno's Freight had a bay door that stuck open two feet, as if the building intended to leave at midnight and never did. Inside, pallets crouched like animals. The tunnel hatch hid under a rubber mat printed with a cartoon forklift. Madison lifted it with stubborn hands. Cold air rose from below, tired and useful.
They dropped into a corridor poured in the seventies when planners believed concrete could love people if you spoke sweetly to it. The fluorescents hummed. A maintenance map sulked in a plexiglass frame; someone had drawn a penis on it in dry-erase, which felt like the city reminding them humor hadn't been outlawed.
"Left," Madison said. "Then the old soundstage. It's still padded. If any room won't echo, it's that one."
They walked crooked, listening for feet and hearing their own. The soundstage door was a slab with a porthole. Inside, the walls wore acoustic foam like scales; the floor gave a little underfoot, forgiving footsteps crimes they hadn't confessed yet. Margo threw the bolt. The room swallowed the click.
Riley stood by the center mark, chin up, eyes steady. "Now," she said. "Say it the way he said it."
Gavin took the breath he'd queued and let it out as words. "He didn't ask for help," he said. "He asked for the opposite. Not rescue. Not witness. He said—" The voice caught, then slid free. "He said if kindness keeps a lie alive, let it burn. He said my job was to make sure the lie didn't get a sermon at the end."
Riley's face didn't move, but her hands opened like she'd put something down and suddenly wasn't sure it would stay. "And the credit card line?"
"He said it to me first," Gavin answered. "Not to sell—he thought it was clever. He wanted me to carry it where it would buy people's anger. He wanted the city to pick a side that would end quickly, even if it ended wrong."
Margo's mouth made a small shape. "He wanted a clean fire."
"He wanted a short one," Gavin said. "He thought that was mercy. He asked me to repeat him if I got out. To call grace a debt. To put the match inside policy."
"And you?" Riley asked.
Gavin looked at the foam on the wall—little pyramids that exist to keep sound from bouncing and hurting itself. He let the quiet hold him to account. "I told him no," he said. "I told him I would carry what I saw, not what he wanted sold."
Riley breathed once, twice. "He begged you to pick the easy harm," she said, half to herself. "Because it feels like action."
Gavin nodded. "He asked me to become the fuse. I told him I wasn't a wire."
Madison leaned against the door like it might ask him for papers. "So we tell the truth," he said. "Not the tidy one. Not the one that earns nods."
"Not yet," Gavin said, the words heavy and chosen. "We make a room outside this room that won't echo. Not a crowd. Not a feed. Someone who won't spend it wrong."
"First listener," Margo said quietly. "You pick them, you lose the excuse that no one knew."
Riley swallowed and then stepped in closer until her shoulder touched Gavin's. "Pick me," she said. "Not because I want it. Because I'll hold it. And because you promised."
He looked at her and saw the kid on the ramp who caught water like a job, the flare against the ash-snow, the rope coiled neat while men with guns argued with the river. He nodded. "Okay," he said. "It's yours first."
"Then let it land," she said. "All of it. No varnish."
He did. He told her the way the Shepherd's eyes had cleared when the flames chose a path and made it quick. He told her the last joke, the bad one, about mercy spending like a card because it makes hurt feel like a reward later. He told her the two names the Shepherd had asked him to say in gratitude—the one he loved and the one he hated—and how both sounded like a dare in the smoke. He told her he had wanted, for a second that was a sin, to agree.
Riley listened without blinking hard to perform empathy. She let the words sit where they wanted to sit and didn't move them into meaning before they were ready. When he was done, she nodded once, precise. "Good," she said. "Now don't tell anyone else until I'm standing next to you. If it's going to cut, I'll take the edge with you."
Madison exhaled through his teeth. The room ate the sound as if it were candy. "Net's still moving," he said. "We pick our path out while they're busy arguing about slogans."
Margo checked her watch, the old kind with hands. "We have twenty minutes before the tunnels fill with other people's decisions."
"Then we move," Gavin said. He touched the foam, the stupid little pyramids, and let the room's quiet make a promise back. "We keep this here until we build a bigger quiet." He looked at Riley. "You hold me to it."
"I will," she said. "And if you try to spend it early, I'll knock it out of your mouth."
Gavin smiled, brief and unhandsome. "Deal."
They unbolted the door. The corridor sighed. Above, sirens tried new harmonies. The city tasted the dawn and wasn't sure it liked it.