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Night-shift dispatcher Mira answers a whisper no system can trace: a child warning of something in the vents of a condemned tower across the harbor. Defying protocol, she enters the building with a lineman’s test set and an old man’s advice—keep talking. In the hush that feeds on silence, her voice becomes the weapon.
By midnight the call center had the taste of stale coffee and copper in the air. Fluorescents trembled in their housings like bees. Monitors cast planes of cold light across stacks of incident forms, a row of headset cradles, the scatter of pens that rolled and never got found. Outside the plate glass, Grayport’s harbor was a smear of fog and sodium lamps, buoys winking out there in the wet as if ships were dozing with their eyes half open.
Mira Kowan tugged her hoodie’s sleeves over her hands and clicked to the next dispatch screen. Her headset was warm from the last call, a domestic that dissolved after thirty seconds of apologetic silence and a dropped line. The screen clock pulsed 00:03. The thin green bars of the audio meter crept and held like someone holding a breath.
“Don’t pour another,” Janelle said, pushing a chipped mug toward her with a finger. “You’ll go tachy again and the supervisor will love that.”
“I’m fine.” Mira sniffed the coffee and thought better of it. “I’m trying to be fine.”
“You look tired-fine. The special kind.” Janelle leaned back so her chair squeaked. Her hair was pulled into a top knot with a pencil stuck through it; her nails were little moons of chipped black polish. “Got your six going,” she added, nodding at the console. “Sea fog does things. People hear garbage disposals as strangers.”
A ping. Line Three lit, then died. The hum returned. Mira rubbed the notch at the base of her skull where the headset settled, feeling the old tightness down her shoulders. The building made a faint long low tone as the HVAC kicked a dust smell down from the vents. She could taste the metal in it.
Beyond the parking lot and a chain-link fence the Harborview Tower rose out of its own reflection. Even through fog it had edges, a tired block of concrete and boarded windows, like a piano missing keys. A lightning strike years back, a blaze that ran the corridors like a hunting dog, sprinklers that failed. Condemned and protesting with a high sheet of plywood across the lobby doors.
“What’d Ephraim say at briefing?” Mira asked, more to fill the room than from interest.
“That we’re not heroes, we’re funnels.” Janelle’s grin made it not as bitter as it could have been. “Also that Harborview is off-limits for PD unless there’s verified life. Kids breaking in there, he said, not our story unless they call. He loves saying ‘not our story.’”
Mira made a soft sound. The word story snagged. Her fingers drifted to the tiny chip in her desk where, months ago, she had kept tapping during a fire call until her nail broke. The burned house had been near the marshes. A boy tried to whisper from a bathroom tile floor. The line turned to air. You go home after, and the dishwasher sounds like a suck of flames.
Janelle swiveled to take a call, “911, what is your emergency?” in a voice that had comfort folded into authority. Mira worked the open incidents, looked up a street closure, pushed and pulled data. The night pressed both her and the glass; the building sang its low single note. She told herself it felt like nesting, everything in reach, her console a cockpit, a wide bay of instruments and habits. The harbor behind her breathed fog against the wet windows as if it wanted in.