Floodlight Static

Rain feathered the library's windows until the city blurred into silver streaks. Juno Park cued the old deck with a fingertip steady from years of touching frail sounds. The cassette in her hand wore no mark. Just a smudge of thumb oil and a crease where someone’s nail had worried the plastic. It had arrived in a cardboard box, wrapped in a grocery flyer from another decade, marked Estate Donation in a polite librarian hand.

She slid it in. The heads hummed. A whisper of oxide brushed her skin as the reel spun. Juno watched the green meters rise and settle, the way a calm person watches a pulse. She tuned the bias, trimmed hiss with a notch filter, and brought up the volume.

At first there was only room tone. Cloth snagged the mic. A breath. Then a man's voice came in, low and deliberate. "If this makes it past the mailroom... If anyone ever spins this, Floodlight Protocol seventy-one is live. Warehouse seventeen. That's the hole under the river. They put her in the dark—"

A slam. Scrape. The tape juddered into wild noise until Juno's fingers caught the dial and steadied it. Her heart had started a small, precise tapping against her ribs.

She leaned back from the console and listened again. Not words now. Little chirps. A thin alarm-sound tucked beneath the hiss, regular as a metronome. She lifted her headphones and the room seemed too bright, too visible. The recording booth smelled like dust, coffee, and the citrus cleaner the student employees swore by. Outside, a freshman laughed. The world did not hear the tone.

Juno did. She opened a spectrogram. The blue field shimmered as the noise became a mountain range of frequencies. Between two thick bands sat a ladder of tiny marks, carefully placed. Not natural. Not accidental.

Her phone buzzed. She didn't look. She tilted the mic boom away with an elbow and isolated the ladder. The marks grew sharp enough to read as steps in some coded staircase. She knew enough to know what she didn't know, and she saved the file three times, with different names, onto different drives.

When she pulled the cassette out, her fingers shook. She labeled it in neat block letters like always: Anonymous, undated. The plastic warm from friction. In the library’s hallway, the HVAC hummed a comfort-song. Juno slipped the tape into the locked drawer by the reel cleaners.

A student in a wet hoodie appeared at the glass. "Are you open for listening hours?"

"In ten," Juno said, voice steady, face calm. Her mouth felt dry as paper.

As she shut down for the night, she took the cassette with her anyway, tucked beneath her scarf like it needed warmth. The rain had stopped, leaving streets slick, the city awash in neon reflections. Her scooter coughed once and then took her home through damp air that smelled like cedar and hot brakes.