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By night the city is threaded with municipal speakers and private shells. Cass Arden, a tuner who prefers solder to small talk, finds deliberate muting spreading through neighborhoods. At the midsummer festival she must climb, splice, and play the Chorus to coax a single minute of shared listening.
Cass had mastered two things before most people learned to make small talk: how to listen for a failing diaphragm and how to climb without announcing an embarrassing squeak. On the van's roof she balanced like a conductor with a toolbox for an orchestra, palms smelling of solder and lemon oil, and the city's background song folded into the rhythm of her hands. The Chorus nodes were old enough that each had a voice; some whistled like tired kettles, others purred like contented cats. When one went wrong, the neighborhood noticed in a dozen petty grievances at once—dog walkers, late-shift bakers, a busker who tuned by memory. Today Lark Street's speaker had decided to burp.
The call came at eight thirty: a groggy woman at the laundromat reported pigeons gathering before the speaker every time it hiccupped, which in the city's taxonomy meant the device was broadcasting a low, repetitive harmonic that, for reasons no PR campaign could entirely explain, delighted pigeons. Cass folded her jacket, clicked the van's hatch shut, and shouldered the kit. Maya was already waiting with two thermoses and a grin that said she had found something funny and refused to keep it private.
"You brought solder?" Maya asked.
"Of course. You keep thinking I'm an extremist about adhesives and you're almost right. Also I brought tea," Cass said, and handed over a thermos. The tea smelled faintly of citrus and seaweed—street vendors had married the harbor's tang into everything edible, and the combination had turned into a local superstition: any sound repair was improved by salted tea.
They moved down the avenue. A cart selling flaky sea-scallion pastries banged a brass lid rhythmically, not to be confused with the Chorus but persistent enough to create a counterpoint. An old woman near the corner adjusted her hearing shell, a ribbon of matte black that hugged the ear like a modest hat. Some residents had started customizing filters as aggressively as wardrobes; the city looked quieter and somehow more curated for people who preferred playlists to public unpredictability.
Cass set up under the pole. She listened, tuning her head like an instrument. The hum wasn't just wrong; it was honest in a way that implied deliberate tampering. She squinted at the casing, feeling the hair at the back of her neck stand up the way a violin string might when overstressed.