3

Everything runs red at the intersection, like something giant and not-quite-human bled out in the street. The traffic signal, AutoZone and Texaco, a liquor store with its Budweiser sign hemorrhaging neon. Brake lights burn ahead in a crimson chain all the way to the 110.

Second To A Tragedy plays through the van’s shitty speakers. Morphicide, their one real album, thirteen tracks of her voice and all he’s got left. He’s listened to it maybe six times total before the funeral. Now he can’t stop.

The album’s midway through on “Gets Cold,” track five.

It gets cold when you’re not breathing
Cold in rooms that won’t stop freezing
Cold until I can’t remember
What it felt like, pulse and pressure
It just gets cold

Chiara shifts in the passenger seat, staring out the window beaded with rain catching vermillion. Earbuds in with Twenty One Pilots or whatever emo bullshit she’s into this week.

Until she tugs one free. Cortney braces for the usual performative suffering—but she instead reaches over and turns it down. Not off, just... under. Her hand hovers there, holding Connie low.

“You listen to this literally every single day now.”

He keeps his eyes forward, because the only answer is the most pathetic thing he could say.

For a moment, she watches a group of gulls rip something apart in the gutter. “You know she wouldn’t want you doing this, right? Like... this weird shit you’re doing.”

Green blooms through the spattered glass, and he accelerates. “What, listening to the album she gave me?”

“Oh my God, don’t! You know what I mean.”

“No I don’t, Kia. What the fuck are you trying to say?”

“I mean you’re literally obsessed, like, to the point it’s lowkey scary.” She breathes fog against her window. “You play this shit every single day in the van, in your room, probably even when you’re downstairs with the bodies for all I—”

“Are you serious? She was family.”

“She was like seven years older than you, Cort! She had an actual boyfriend too! She was basically an adult and you were, what, thirteen when she gave you that? Fourteen?”

“So I’m not allowed to mourn her because of an age difference?”

“I didn’t say that!” A small, mean smile twists her lips. “I’m saying maybe you cared in a weird way and now you’re being all... I don’t know, maybe you felt—”

“Don’t.”

“—things you shouldn’t have—”

“I said fucking don’t!”

“Come on. You seriously think nobody noticed, Cortney? How your whole vibe changed when she walked in?”

“Shut the fuck up, Kia. I swear to God.”

“Well, I did.” That smile’s digging in deeper. “I’m your sister, stupid. You think I wouldn’t notice? And honestly? I think Connie noticed too. She had to, the way she, like, let it happen—”

“Shut up!”

“—bringing you to shows when you were literally in middle school—”

“It wasn’t like that!”

“I didn’t say it was! But she wasn’t exactly... I don’t know, she wasn’t exactly discouraging it either—”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Rubber screams against wet pavement—eeeeeEEEEaaaah—and everything tilts left before he rips the wheel back. A horn blares behind them.

“Don’t you fucking talk about her like that. Don’t you dare—”

“I’m just saying—”

“You’re saying nothing.” He whips toward her, eyes on fire. “You wanna talk about age gaps? How about Cliff? How about your twenty-one-year-old Croatian boyfriend who buys you Fireball and picks you up from sophomore classes, you fucking idiot? Huh?”

Her face flushes even through the brake lights blazing up again, scalding everything. “That’s different!”

“How? How is that fucking different?!”

“Because—because we’re actually together, for one, and he’s a guy, so it’s not the same thing. Guys are supposed to be older—”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s worse.” Traffic shudders, starts to lurch just as the fresh green ahead flips to yellow. He guns it, punches through. “So maybe shut the fuck up about Connie before you start comparing shit you don’t understand.”

Nothing. She just stares out where the shipping cranes loom like gallows against the cyanotic dawn, then moves to plug the earbud back in. But mid-motion: “Whatever. At least I have someone who’s actually here.”

Fucking little ghoul.

His hand shoots to the volume, cranks it until the speakers distort. Till there’s nothing left but noise.

Connie sings them on until Machado rises through the rain like a shipwreck. A compound of stucco gone gray and salt-stained and netted in chain-link, fan palms whipping themselves raw in the winter squall.

He pulls to the same curbside spot as always, and Chiara’s out before he fully stops, hood up and not looking back.

Cortney watches her cut slick pavement toward the crowd by the auto shop bays, where vape shears through snapbacks and streetwear, someone deeply tanned and tall in Cliff’s Obey. She welds herself to him without reservation.

The rest is ritual as he navigates the lot’s maze of speed bumps and arrows to the end near the corrugated maintainance shed, where he reverses into his usual spot. The mortuary black Econoline might as well be invisible, and that’s exactly how Rocco wants it—not that it stopped some mouth-breather from keying ‘DEATH MOBILE’ into the sliding door back in October. The van still wears it.

Messenger bag anchored with textbooks he’s barely touched, Cortney steps into the wind and slams the door behind him. The rain’s let up, but the air still reeks of kelp and diesel as the storm rolls in off the harbor. That’s January in Pedro: washed-out and sea-soaked, waiting out the weather.

Halfway across the lot, someone shouts. “Ey! Yo, Serpieri!”

He looks up, sees Ricky Batiz slouched against a blue Civic sitting low enough to catch the speed bumps. Next to him is Omar something, who’s busy thumb-flicking through his phone.

Ricky’s got a shit-eating grin. “Yo, for real, why don’t you guys roll up in the hearse? That’d be badass.”

Cortney breezes past without slowing. “Because it’s for services, not going to Vons.”

Ricky laughs, cracks something to Omar that Cortney doesn’t catch.

He’s almost through the next row of cars when he hears the chud-chud-chud-chud of an engine choking on its own oil. He glances over.

Trawling down the lane is a dark gray Silverado with a toolbox bolted to the bed rail. Or maybe it used to be black—it’s hard to tell with how flat the paint’s gone. The thing’s imposing in that way old work trucks are, with its monstered-out suspension and battered steel bumper.

Still another beater in a city full of them. Cortney’s just about to turn away—when he catches the driver’s door. Oxide red and mismatched like it was pried from a junkyard, which it probably was.

And there, hanging upside-down from the trailer hitch to drag so low along the asphalt it’s probably illegal… is a busted blow-mold Madonna the size of a license plate, her painted face ground to gray plastic.

Wait.

That’s Maurizio Sanzone’s truck.

A centipede of dread skitters up Cortney’s spine. Everyone knows what Sanzone is. Twenty-three and dropped out yet still here. Still orbiting Machado, prowling the lot for kids desperate enough to climb in.

The wreck of a Chevy rolls on, Madonna trailing with a sound like rebar over concrete.

He’s cruising for buyers. Or maybe worse.

Cortney lingers at the lane’s edge, bag strap biting into the meat of his shoulder, and watches the truck grind slow down the far end of the lot. Brake lights flare before it hooks left and starts its slow circuit back, vanishing behind the buses lined along the loading curb. That haunting scrape is somehow audible even this far away.

He should move. Should just get inside, because it’s got nothing to do with him.

Sanzone is a certified parasite. Greasy gavone trash from a family that’s a stain on Pedro’s paesani. But Cortney’s not desperate, and he’s definitely not the prick’s clientele.

So he crosses the lane.

The rain’s just a sprinkle now, enough to keep a wet skin on the walkway as it winds him toward the school’s glassed-in mouth. The moment he slips under the admin awning, the noise hits him.

It’s the usual crush. Voices layering into chum, some girl’s laugh like teeth on glass, skater bros plastered in Vans and Volcom logos slouching at half-speed, Samoan guy with his own gravity well posted by the bulletin, cholos trading Spanish by the turn at the stairs.

Cortney puts his headphones on before he’s three steps inside. Track seven, “Level Orange” fills his skull, Connie’s voice climbing that corroded bridge where the guitars drop out and it’s just her, suspended over arctic synth stabs.

He moves through the main hall at a starched clip, stare set nowhere, wool coat drawing eyes because it’s too Sunday, too funeral, like he raided a dead man’s closet. Which, in a house like his, isn’t far off.

“—the fuck is Titanic—” Some asshole with a comb-over fade to his left. It’s muted through the headphones, but the shape of the douchebag’s mouth is enough.

Then more of it, scattered through the crowd static. Hyenas by the water fountain, factory-interchangeable with flat-ironed hair, laughing loud enough to saw through S2AT.

“—name is actually Courtney?”

“—Cortney Love!”

Right then the music betrays him. Connie’s voice is suddenly gone, the synth pads and guitars are gone, and there’s nothing left but the naked click of the sequencer. Machado floods in.

“No, seriously, like Kourtney Kardashian but dressed like a Mormon missionary.”

The girls crack up behind him—and Cortney turns so hard the mailbag strap jerks across his coat.

They catch it at once. The bitch who said it makes her mouth small, like “what?,” like poor little angel her didn’t do a thing. Another shapes both hands into a heart against her chest.

Cortney just stares. Lets them have the full, empty ice of his eyes.

Heart girl drops her hands first. “Okay, psycho.”

They peel away from the fountain, too close together, already loud again before they hit the corner.

One of them looks back just long enough to make a megaphone of her hands. “Bye, altar boy!”

That one’s not even original, but he scowls all the same. He’s heard it since freshman year, when some attention-seeking brat found out about the family business and decided he was basically a character from an exorcism movie. Doesn’t help that he’s got the blond fringe of a choirboy and the frame of a candelabra.

He turns, keeps walking. Lets the distance fill with what it always does.

His locker’s off the main hall, B-wing. Combination by feel, yank, open. Swaps the calc binder he should’ve studied last night for a paperback Frankenstein.

A peripheral glance down the row shows that Shane Segarra’s locker is shut. No Shane.

That’s unusual, because he’s the type who’s already at his locker well before first bell, briefcase out and doing whatever it is he does. Cortney’s seen it enough times that the absence registers.

It’s not like he’s worried, though. Worry would require the kind of attachment Cortney doesn’t really do—not anymore, anyways. He doesn’t have friends; rather people he tolerates, and people who tolerate him. Though Shane is probably the nearest exception. They’ve shared enough margins that the silence between them stopped being awkward, at least.

The bell rings. Cortney closes his locker, shoulders his bag, and heads for Kleinman’s AP Lit in room 214.

Shane’s probably just late. Nothing to worry about.

2

The last thing Connie wears is wrong.

Black polyester slacks still holding the crease from the Macy’s hanger. White Confirmation blouse buttoned one button too high. Borrowed funeral blazer from some other cousin’s closet, pinned with the silver Miraculous Medal that stays tucked away in the jewelry box until something like this happens.

She’d have made a bonfire of it all. She always hated looking like somebody’s modest daughter.

Back against the tile, Cortney keeps trying to make the body on the table match the singer he’d seen at Captive Eye. Whose long, lank strands were always in her face ‘til she whipped them back between songs. Who made Second To A Tragedy sound like an actual band. Who looked impossible to kill up on that stage.

His father steps to her head. “Comb.”

Cortney pulls it from the drawer in the prep island cabinet, hands it to him.

It passes between them, and Rocco starts at the part with a surgeon’s precision. He doesn’t pull and doesn’t force, but lifts, separates, smooths. Lifts, separates, smooths.

The hair—brown verging on black—stays where he puts it, stripped of every habit it used to have.

“Cotton,” his father says.

Cortney returns to the island. Cotton jar, second from the left, cap already loose from earlier prep. It and everything else is labeled in Rocco’s block printing.

Cortney crosses back with the jar.

His father pulls a tuft, rolls it into a tight wad, and works the corner of Connie’s mouth like he’s cleaning la Madonna before Mass.

Suddenly Connie’s sixteen and alive again. Cortney’s halfway down the stairs when he has to squint, late-afternoon sun hitting him before she does, streaming through the glass brick windows and bleaching every steel surface rose-gold.

She’s sitting cross-legged on the same prep table in grey sweatpants and her tee with the owl made of violet and teal triangles, eating cereal straight from the box. That s’mores cereal with the blue packaging, but only the marshmallows.

“You can’t sit on that,” he tells her. “That’s where Dad preps them and everything.”

“Yeah? Not right now it’s not.”

“I’m serious. He’s gonna get so mad at you.”

“Cor, your dad’s mad at pretty much everyone who’s not dead yet.”

He’s ten, and this seems somehow both false and probably true.

She surveys the room—the cabinets with their glass doors, the center drain, the subway tiles that go halfway up the wall. The anatomy posters where the human form becomes a blueprint. “This place is insane.”

“He says it has to be this way because the bodies leak.”

“That’s sort of how you know, though.”

“What?”

“When you’ve got a downstairs nobody’s supposed to talk about.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that.

She waits, like maybe he’ll answer. When he doesn’t, she just looks at him. Like he hasn’t figured it out yet.

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re just…” She plucks another marshmallow from the box, turns it over in her fingers. The sunset catches it and suddenly it looks toasted, like it’s browning on a skewer. “You’re different than other kids.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know. That’s why you are.”

Now she’s twenty-four and dead again, the fluorescents flattening everything as his father sets the swab aside and steps back.

“Applicator.”

He means the cosmetic kind, since the trocar button’s already in. Cortney reaches for the farthest jar.

His fingers catch the rim wrong, and for one stupid second the whole container tips toward the edge, makeup brushes shifting inside as bristles slide forward in a small sable avalan—

Tink! His other palm slaps down on pure reflex, barely stops it. Glass kisses counter.

The sound is nothing, yet still enough to turn his father’s head.

Cortney’s shoulders lock before he can stop them, fists and jaw clenching hard. Some trained, pathetic part of him immediately scans the distance to the sink, the cabinet, the biohazard bin, the stairs.

“Cortney,” Rocco’s about to say, in that mid-century monotone that completely scrubs out Staten Island and his Sicilian father’s father.

Or: “What are you doing?”

Or maybe: “There’s no such thing as almost dropped.”

Any of them would do, really, when Ciriaco Serpieri has a hundred ways to express your inadequacy.

So Cortney stands there with his palm pressed down on the jar and, for one second, hates himself so completely it erases words. Hates being skinny and five foot eight. Hates looking like prey, and especially hates that every fucking predator like his father knows it. Most of all, he hates that his cousin and only friend is dead, and Rocco still has to be Rocco. Hates that even here, beside her, with her body barely back from the coroner, the mighty Mr. Serpieri still needs someone smaller to crush.

The want is instant and all-consuming—to smash the jar into his father’s face so badly he can feel the impact. To rip the trocar from the instrument tray and drive it into his temple. To hit him with the hammer from the garage. Then the iron skillet. Then the matched mannaie Aunt Sabina used for splitting pork shoulder. To hit him and hit him and hit him until there’s nothing left of the motherfucker that resembles a—

That’s when Connie’s mouth slips open. Just a crack.

Maybe the lip suture loosens, or the cotton subsides, or the old man’s meticulous work just falls apart. Whatever the cause, it brings down Rocco’s backhand.

“Give it here.”

Cortney passes him the jar. Or his hands do.

Rocco sets it safely on the counter himself, then takes a lip brush and a tin of flesh-toned cream. “Hold the light.”

The overhead lamp swings down, angled into place.

Its beam catches Connie’s face. She’s so obviously dead under the brightness that the fire climbing Cortney’s throat sinks back down, goes cold, becomes something else. Something that pools in his gut like cold mud.

It’s shame, sick and sudden. How could he think that here, with her like this?

He steadies the lamp. Doesn’t look away.

Then Connie’s alive for the second time. Twenty and beautiful.

No. Nineteen.

Yes—he is thirteen, so she is nineteen, and they are in her room at her parents’ place, where the mini-fridge and windowsill are lined with Red Bull cans, and the whole room smells like Japanese Cherry Blossom and cigarettes she smoked out the window.

Living, breathing Connie sits with her left leg folded under her, coaxing the record back into its sleeve with a softness that shames even Rocco’s renowned hands.

“Okay, so, rule one: you hold it by the rim, see? Just the edges.”

He knows.

“I mean it. Not the grooves, because your hands are… I mean, you’re a kid, so you probably ate Doritos or something before you came up here.”

He didn’t.

“Sure you didn’t. Either way, your hands are still gross, promise.”

On the bed beside them is a stack of CD-Rs in paper sleeves, ‘S2AT - DEMO’ slashed across each in silver Sharpie. Three flyer proofs from the Staples in Carson, all slightly different because the guitarist keeps insisting the font is “too dentist,” and a Google Maps printout for a Torrance show with ‘CANCELLED???’ scribbled across the top.

Cortney picks up one of the flyer proofs, sees March dates. The inevitable Captive Eye. Distortion Hall, too, and some spot in Echo Park he’s never heard of. It’s jarring how professional their logo looks when it’s not hand-drawn.

“Are you famous, Connie?”

She snorts without looking up. “No.”

“Think you’re going to be?”

“I don’t think about it like that.”

She rakes her hair back with both hands, twists it once so the ponytail sits low and loose at the back of her neck. Gets up, steps over him, drops the needle on another record.

This one’s not hers, but something cleaner and colder. There’s a woman’s voice, serrated synthesizers underneath, guitars crashing in without being masturbatory.

“This is closer,” she murmurs, sitting back down.

“To what?”

“What we’re trying to do.”

“You mean your band?”

“Yeah. Those guys.”

He listens because she is listening, and because when Connie listens, the room rearranges itself around her.

The music itself moves like digital ice. Later, he’ll learn terms like ‘industrial’ and ‘darkwave’ and none of them will be as accurate.

“It’s not like your band.”

“No. My band sounds like we’re still figuring out what the fuck we’re doing.”

“But you want it like this?”

“This, but… ours. You can’t just copy shit, Cor.” Her eyes find his. “You have to take it somewhere else or it’s pointless, you know?”

“Right. Like how Scream was just ripping off every slasher but now it’s like… the one.”

“See, you get it.”

She lifts the needle and pulls another disc from the milk crate beside the bed. This one’s a CD-R tagged ‘PRE-HISTORY.’

“What’s that?”

“Stuff I probably shouldn’t play for you.” She flips the sleeve, finds only a sloppy phone number scrawled across the back, and frowns. “Old industrial. RevCo, some Thrill Kill probably, whatever else this creep from the show thought would earn him a phone call.”

“What’s RevCo?”

“Revolting Cocks.” A smirk, unapologetic. “Yeah, I know.”

“I mostly listen to Slipknot, actually.” He expects her to be impressed.

“Oof. Okay. Yeah, you need this immediately.”

“Hey, why’d you say it like that? And wait—shouldn’t play for me how? Because my mom’s super Catholic, and Uncle Enzu’s literally a deacon.”

“Then don’t tell your mom.” She slides the disc into her scratched-up Sony shelf stereo. “Easy.”

He goes still beside her, trying not to look too grateful, because he’d listen to Kidz Bop if it meant he got to stay, God help him.

She skips around, and the music gets meaner. There’s men’s voices now, predatory, like they’re talking dirty at a bar. Techno is in there too, and guitars that sound like beach movie soundtracks, mixed with something like old detective music—saxophone and everything. Some tracks sound like the metal he’s used to, but inexplicably more sinister than Slipknot without trying as hard. The combination’s wrong and somehow right.

After enough of it, Connie ejects the disc and slides it back into the paper sleeve. Holds it out to him.

“Here.”

Cortney just looks at it. “What?”

“It’s yours.”

He takes the CD-R like it might change its mind. “Why?”

“Because you actually give a shit. Most people just fake it.”

He stares.

She’s bent into the crate again, hair loose and falling, tank top slipping at one shoulder, anatomical heart printed on the front with flytraps blooming from the ventricles. The concentration on her face when she’s rifling through discs, and how her hands move through them. The intensity she brings to everything, even this.

It happens then. The crushing, idiotic certainty that he would do anything she asked. Absolutely anything she wanted. The kind of pathetic he used to think only happened to other people.

She catches him staring. “What?”

His father returns to her face, to the small architecture of closing a mouth that wants to open.

There’s no force in it, and Rocco never fights her body, but persuades it. A little pressure to the chin; more cotton tucked where the living will never see it. Then, once it holds again, cream where the skin has dried beside the lip.

“Less light.”

Cortney turns the dial.

“There.” Rocco picks out a detail brush, presses it to the palette. “Just the lips now. Little warmth.” He turns it toward Cortney, handle-first. “You.”

Cortney steps up and takes the brush, taps away the excess in a beige cascade.

“Right here.” Rocco points with his pinky, not crossing the last inch. “Feather. Don’t paint.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. I’m telling your hand.”

So Cortney tells his hand, and brings the brush to Connie’s lip, coaxing color along the bow first, then the curve beneath.

“Enough.”

Cortney stops. Lifts the brush, steps back. Stays there.

“Your aunt wanted more.”

Cortney looks at him.

His father’s focus doesn’t leave her. “I said no.”

Cortney doesn’t know what to do with that, so he does nothing.

For a while neither speaks. Just the two of them standing over her in the humming fluorescence, like she’s something wooden they shellacked in the driveway. His father breathes slow; Cortney holds his.

He’s done this before. Many times. Not this… but this. Mrs. Sobol, who was floating off the Point for three days before anyone found her. The Caselli kid after he put the shotgun in his mouth. Even a baby once, though Rocco wouldn’t let him touch that one. Only watch and pass tools.

Meaning: he knows you pack the mouth with cotton soaked in cavity fluid, and wire the jaw through the maxilla and mandible. Knows the trocar goes in two inches above and to the left of the umbilicus, and that you pierce the heart first, then both lungs moving right to left, then the stomach, liver, right kidney, left kidney, bladder, intestines—in that exact sequence. That the heart gives a wet pop, the lungs hiss like punctured pool toys, the stomach a low gurgle, the intestines next to nothing at all.

He knows all of this.

That doesn’t mean he can make Connie belong to it.

He could believe almost anything else first. That this isn’t her, even. That Concetta Lupino isn’t lying still before him while she looks like someone her mother could actually stand to see.

“She was a beautiful girl.” Rocco. His voice is very low now. “That’s what Loretta needs to see, Cortney.”

Was. The grammar does what even that piece of shit couldn’t strangle out of him.

“The pills, they…” Rocco clears his throat once. Arranges her hands, one over the other. “We brought her back from that. I couldn’t help her when she needed it. I didn’t see—none of us saw. But this I can do. I can make sure her mother doesn’t see what I saw. That’s what I can do.”

For that moment Cortney hates him much less, and that is almost worse.

His father turns from the table and begins gathering the used cotton, the brushes, the little tubes and caps and folded towels. “Go get Chiara. And your mother.”

Nothing in him answers the instruction.

Rocco raises his eyes, but there’s only exhaustion in them now. “Cortney.”

He nods, and the instinct to comply drags him to the stairs. At the bottom step he looks back.

Connie is still on the table.

She never knew.

1

Somewhere beneath the Ore Mountains, German Democratic Republic, November 1983.

The tape is rolling.

Kubisch is in the cage. Headphones on, eyes closed, pencil to the protocol log. She threw the bolt herself half an hour ago and hasn’t said a word since.

The Faraday cage itself sits at the center of the cavern. Twelve two-meter field coils ring it like a Soviet Stonehenge, cables spooling across the concrete to the receiver racks and a Robotron K-1600 cabinet. Somewhere behind coil seven, Meckling is on his knees with a multimeter. Exactly where he isn’t supposed to be.

Under the fluorescent drone of it all, Dr. Jost Meuker is running the checklist he’s run forty-six times before, wondering when this stopped being science and started being the most expensive way the Deutsche Demokratische Republik has ever found to achieve absolutely fuck-all.

“Coil channels, one through twelve.”

“Nominal, Herr Doktor.” Meckling’s voice comes muffled from somewhere inside the ring.

“Control computer.”

“Online. Still lagging but that’s just what it does.”

Meuker checkmarks the clipboard. His cigarette has burned to the filter without him noticing, scorching the web of his thumb. Wonderful. He doesn’t break stride; already has another f6 between his lips from his lab coat pocket—always f6, always that same socialist cardboard taste—and lights it with his second-to-last match. Even the small things are running out.

Schriefer is at his shoulder, colorless and hairless and quiet, better suited for life in this bunker than anyone who built it. “The Ministry called again this morning.”

“I know.”

“They want results, Jost.”

“They’ll have them.”

“You understand that means right now, the report I file tonight. With things the way they are.”

Nothing else needs saying. Whatever NATO is doing has half the Warsaw Pact convinced the Americans are about to make good on what they’ve been promising since Hiroshima, and everyone from the Politburo down is scrambling for an edge—any edge, really. Any secret, any miracle. Because seventeen years of telling Berlin exactly what they needed to hear to keep the funding coming without technically lying had been tolerable in peacetime. But now—in what’s starting to genuinely look like the last month of human civilization—there isn’t much tolerance left to go around.

“If I could manufacture a breakthrough, Heiko, I’d have done so before my wife stopped expecting me home.”

Schriefer says nothing, and that nothing says: “Then you should start thinking about what happens to physicists who spend seventeen years of state funding on recording static in a disused mine.”

Meuker pinches the bridge of his nose, holds it for a second, then lets go. “Kubisch, we’re activating in sixty seconds. Meckling, clear the floor.”

“Almost done!” the pup of a technician shouts.

“Now, Junge.”

Meckling backs out crab-style, multimeter swinging from his neck by the strap, and puts himself behind the yellow line.

Through the Faraday’s copper mesh, Kubisch sits motionless in the chair. She’s been like this lately. Withdrawing into whatever private ritual she won’t explain. Meuker doesn’t understand it, and doesn’t need to. The good Doktor just needs her ears.

“Activating in three, two—”

He throws the switch. The diesel generator in G-2 deepens with a cough—and the mountain starts to breathe. Not literally, but after forty-six prior sessions Meuker can’t describe it any other way. It’s like the rock taking a long, slow inhale that doesn’t end until he ends the power.

All the while, the twelve coils catch the signal and feed it back through the receiver racks, where Meuker watches the familiar green waveforms dance across the oscilloscope screens.

Nothing. It’s the same ambient noise floor.

He lets it run for forty minutes, to which Kubisch reports nothing, and the tape records nothing. The printer produces six meters of paper that say as much.

“Shutting down,” Meuker finally breathes.

The silence afterward is worse than the routine. Meckling sits against the wall nursing a thermos of muckefuck while Schriefer scratches something in his notebook. That notebook, the one that goes to the Ministry in Berlin. The one that is slowly but surely becoming Meuker’s obituary.

“Herr Doktor,” ventures Meckling, hesitant. “I went over coil seven’s coupling by hand. The readout said nominal because it’s still passing a signal, but the connector’s actually loose, I think.”

“Is it? By how much?”

“Enough that it might be throwing off the whole array. Which, I mean, if your paper’s right about needing all twelve, and I think it is, then we’ve been running on eleven for... I don’t know how long.”

Meuker stares at him. The kid is only twenty-two and was sent here to run cables. “You’ve read my paper.”

“Not—not all of it. I mean, there’s not a lot to do here.”

Meuker glances to the oscilloscopes, at the fanfold pooled on the concrete like an infinite receipt. At the end of his usefulness to men who measure usefulness in nuclear warheads. “Fix it.”

Four minutes later, Meckling wipes his hands on his coveralls and nods.

Meuker goes back and checks the rack himself. He reads seven straight off the oscilloscope, overlays its green trace atop coil one’s, sees them slide together and lock. All twelve, finally in phase.

Such a small thing. Such a stupid, small thing that could’ve been caught at any point in the last eight months had anyone been paying attention, had the equipment budget covered proper diagnostic tools, had the DDR ever manufactured a single reliable coaxial cable without stealing from Siemens…

No countdown this time. “Activating.”

Same switch, same thumb. The mountain inhales again. Twelve coils, now. Not eleven.

And… nothing.

He gives it the full forty. Kubisch once more reports nothing; the oscilloscopes draw the same green lines they always draw.

Meuker shuts it down. Maybe for good.

He sets his clipboard on the desk, removes his glasses and presses his fingers into his eyes until he summons floaters. The technician’s fix had been clean and correct and it still hasn’t made a damned bit of difference. Seventeen years and forty-seven sessions and the anomalous signal was either not interested or not there. Probably the latter.

Inevitably, Meuker thinks about what the Stasi will write tonight, and about the men in Berlin who’ll read it. He thinks about Dr. Detlef Fahrenkrog, who’d run a psychotronics program just like this one in Dresden and is now teaching secondary school physics in a village outside Schwerin, stripped of his post, clearance, and pension.

He thinks about Franziska three weeks ago, spooning jam onto a semmel at seven in the morning, not looking at him. “Your suits, Jost. Do you want them here still, or… I mean you’re not here, Jost, you’re not, so should I just pack them? Send them to wherever? Because I could use that half of the wardrobe. It’s just sitting there.”

Meuker sighs, sets his glasses back on. As if any of it matters under a mushroom cloud.

He rolls his neck. And picks up the pencil the way a man picks up a shovel at his own grave.

Experimental Protocol No. 47.

Date: 8 November 1983.

Result: No deviation from established baselin—

Pencil pierces paper when Kubisch screams. Every head snaps to the Faraday.

The door is still sealed, still bolted from Kubisch’s side.

Kubisch herself is standing, headphones on the floor and chair knocked over, back pressed to the mesh with her hands behind her.

She’s no longer alone.

With her is a woman. Gray turtleneck and steel-rimmed spectacles, blonde hair pinned in an institutional bun. She’s got the face of someone who has stamped ten thousand documents and will stamp ten thousand more. Over the turtleneck hangs a similarly gray overcoat that’s far too long for her, trailing like a bridal train.

She holds a file folder against her chest the way a nun holds a hymnal.

But the strangest part—and it takes a full three seconds to register—isn’t the woman. It’s the desk she’s seated at. A standard-issue schreibtisch with one drawer bank, the same model in every Ministry office from Berlin to Rostock, is sitting in the cage across from the kicked-over chair. It wasn’t before.

“Stay where you are!” Schriefer’s Makarov is up and level. “Stay there. Stay right there.”

Her attention stays on the folder. As though a man with a pistol is simply not on her schedule.

Kubisch, meanwhile, is fighting the bolt. It sticks, shrieks, then slams back before the door flies open, Kubisch half-falling through it. Then she’s behind Meuker, fingers knotted in his lab coat, face crushed to his shoulder blade.

“I am Major Schriefer, Ministry for State Security. You will identify yourself!” The Stasi man is at the mesh now, Makarov sighted at the intruder’s center mass. “How did you get in? How did you get past the checkpoint? Answer me!”

She lays the folder on the desk and squares its edges with both hands, aligning it perfectly with the corner. Only then does she look up, lenses flaring white under the fluorescents. “Your Ministry watches sixteen million people, Heiko Hartmut Schriefer. How strange that neither you nor anyone above you thought to ask what watches the Ministry.”