Chapter 1 – Ellie
“You realize this isn’t organization anymore,” Samantha says, leaning over the back of my chair. “This is a cry for help.”
I don’t look up from the monitor.
Adrian snorts from the other desk. “No, no. Let’s call it what it is. Pathological orderliness.”
I drag the cursor across the spectrogram timeline, isolating a narrow slice of the waveform. The screen glows in bands of blue and amber where vowel stress spikes against the background noise.
“Ellie,” Samantha continues, tapping the edge of one of my notebooks, “why do you have three separate tabs labeled ‘potential idiomatic markers’?”
“Because there are three categories,” I say absently.
“Of course there are.”
Adrian swivels his chair toward us. “Please tell me the categories.”
I keep my eyes on the screen. “Regional idioms. Occupational idioms. And culturally adaptive idioms.”
There’s a pause.
Then Adrian lets out a slow whistle. “God help the man who ever tries to lie to you.”
I underline a phrase in the transcript displayed beside the waveform:You’ll regret this mistake soon enough.
My stylus moves automatically across my tablet, marking the sentence in orange.
Threat marker.
Samantha crosses her arms. “You know what the real problem is?”
“Hmm.”
“You enjoy this.”
I drag another segment of the audio file into the analysis window. The spectrogram redraws itself—dense bands where the vowels stretch, jagged spikes where consonants break.
“Enjoy what?”
“This.” She gestures around the lab. “The color coding. The graphs. The terrifying notebooks.”
Adrian leans forward, squinting at my screen. “Wait. Is that a vowel stress anomaly?”
“Yes.”
“How can you even see that?”
“It’s obvious.”
“It’s not obvious,” he says. “It looks like modern art.”
I adjust the frequency filter, and the waveform sharpens.
There.
A faint compression pattern right before the stressed syllable.
My pulse lifts slightly.
