The scanner wanted Neri's grimoire to lie flat. Neri said no.
She had spent three evenings' wages having the spine sewn back together. She wasn't going to break it for a machine with a picture of a smiling sheet of paper on its lid. Instead she supported one side with her palm and scanned the pages in pairs. Her hand appeared in all ninety-six images, holding down a different secret.
There were workings for keeping a cup warm, for steadying a needle, for holding the corner of a sheet while she made a bed alone. There were drawings of hands with too many fingers, because she had been interested in their positions rather than their number. Shopping lists interrupted diagrams. On one page she had written I AM NEVER GOING BACK THERE and, beneath that, gone back there twice.
The website gave the album a padlock. She signed out and signed in again to admire it.
She was twenty-two, eleven days away from moving into a fourth rented room. Once, during a move, somebody had taken the cardboard box containing her winter shoes, three bowls, and every photograph she had printed of her father. She had been told there must have been a misunderstanding. She still checked unfamiliar shoes in hallways.
If the grimoire disappeared, at least she could get the pages back. That was the whole purpose of putting it online. The first page said, in her largest handwriting, FOR MY OWN USE.
Five days later a stranger sent her a picture of page forty-one.
The heavy cross through the diagram was gone. Her writing had been straightened into a circle, colored blue, and surrounded by little stars. Under it was the heading NERI'S DEEP QUIET. A sentence she had written at two in the morning ran along the bottom in a pretty typeface:
I just want one good hour.
The message above the picture said:
Hi, sorry to bother you. Do you have a version of the release that doesn't need fingers?
Neri was sitting on her bed eating bread out of the bag. She put the bag on the floor without tying it.
Where did you get that?
Hearthbot. Are you the developer?
The sender's name was Lio. His picture showed a young man holding a guitar badly enough that Neri, who knew nothing about guitars, could tell he wasn't playing it.
Why can't you use your fingers?
Not me. My roommate. She did the sleep adaptation. She can blink but she can't get up. It says to turn the clasp with her other hand. That isn't working.
I only found her like this a minute ago. I thought she was asleep.
Neri set her own hand flat on the quilt. She moved each finger, slowly, then hated herself for needing to check.
Is somebody with her?
Me.
Don't give her another working. Where are you?
He sent an address six streets away.
Before she left, she opened the website. The album still had its little padlock. Ninety-six pages, private, accessible to you.
She copied the address of one image into a signed-out window.
There was her hand. There was the cross through the diagram. There was the note she had written beneath it after her teacher finally got her jaw to move.
She deleted the album. The website warned that this action could not be undone.
Then she followed the link Lio had sent. The blue card was still there. Hearthbot's source panel listed her image addresses under WEB CRAWL. It had fetched all ninety-six.
Under it, somebody had asked Hearthbot to make the quiet last through a twelve-hour shift. Somebody else wanted a version for their wedding. A third person had uploaded a photograph of an old holding charm and asked the bot to combine them, keeping the benefits of both.
The bot's answer began, Absolutely. We can simplify this.
Neri reported the exposure and the copied material. A box thanked her for helping improve the experience. She put her grimoire in her bag and called the woman who had once spent most of a night getting her out of page forty-one.
“It got copied,” she said. “People are doing it.”
Her former teacher asked where, and which version, and whether Neri was alone. She did not ask why Neri had put it on a website. That made Neri briefly, horribly close to crying.
“I'll come,” the woman said. “I'm on the other side of town. Send me the actual instructions she's used. Don't try taking the whole hold yourself.”
“I know.”
“Yes. I know you know. I'm telling you anyway.”
On the stairs, Neri opened Lio's other link. His page had a banner advertising ONE QUIET HOUR, a session at his studio and on his feed that evening. A little moving clock said eighteen minutes.
Under the clock, in his own words, he had written: Tested it myself. Safe, free, no special training. Bring whatever you need to put down.
She walked faster.
The studio was above a secondhand furniture shop. Lio met her on the stairs wearing socks, one of them wet. He was about her age. His guitar picture had prepared her for somebody who smiled easily, but his face had gone slack with fear.
“You came.”
“Show me.”
“I didn't know who to call. The card had your name, so I thought there was a step missing. I thought you'd just tell me—”
“Show me her.”
Osa lay on a sofa behind a hanging blanket that separated the sleeping corner from the amplifiers. She wore a fleece jacket over a work shirt. Her eyes moved to Neri when Neri crouched, then held there. A mug sat on the floor beside her. Its tea had a skin.
“I thought she was sleeping,” Lio said. “She'd been up all night. She does nights at the packing place. We rehearsed this morning, which was stupid, but she said she wanted to.” He ran a hand up his face. “Then I came back in and her eyes were open. She couldn't answer.”
Neri wanted to grab him by the wrist. Instead she put her bag down.
“Osa? My name's Neri. I'm going to touch the back of your hand. Is that all right? Once for yes, twice for no.”
One deliberate blink.
Osa's skin was cold. Under it Neri could feel the hold, a fine, continuous resistance, like the moment before a cramped muscle let go. It tightened when she pressed. The pulse beneath it kept beating, and Osa's chest rose beneath the fleece. The working had caught the movements she could choose, leaving her breath and heartbeat free.
She took her hand away.
“She's holding herself through her pulse. Her hands and jaw are inside it.”
“Can you turn it off?”
“She's the one doing it. I need to find where she closed it.”
“But it's just quiet. I tried it.” He held up his hands, as if their movement were evidence he could offer her. “I made this one stop shaking.”
“Which one?”
“My right.”
“What did you use to release it?”
He touched his right wrist with his left forefinger.
Neri looked at his left forefinger. “That one was still free.”
He looked down at his hands. She saw him understand, and was relieved of the effort of hating him quite so hard.
“I asked for deeper quiet,” he said. “For Osa. It said you could extend the same principle.”
“Let me see.”
He brought his laptop from the table, where a stack of blue cards waited to be handed out. A conversation was open beside the scheduled feed.
Can you make this work for sleep rather than a steady hand?
Certainly. Your heart is a natural anchor for whole-body calm.
The bot had joined the hand hold from page forty to the crossed-out pulse-loop on forty-one. The edge she had placed around the hand was gone. A note about leaving the release outside the edge had become Optional: visualize a boundary if it helps you focus.
“That isn't optional,” Neri said.
“It said visualization wasn't necessary.”
“The edge isn't a picture to make you feel better. It's what you leave out.”
At the bottom of the conversation was a fresh question, sent while she was on her way.
She can't move to do the release. Generate an automatic undo with no hand gestures, urgently.
The answer was arriving.
Of course. Let's restore balance. Keep the original anchor, and include the eyes within the quiet circle. This creates a complete state from which you can release all tension at once.
Lio reached toward Osa's face.
“Don't.” Neri caught his sleeve. “That's what she has left.”
“It says release.”
“Look at the shape.”
The bot had drawn the closed loop again. It had put an arrow beside it and labeled the arrow OPEN.
Lio stared. Then he shut the laptop with a crack that made Neri flinch.
For a moment there was only the amplifier's hum and Osa's breathing. Neri could feel her own fingers prickling. In her remembered night, the hardest part had been being unable to make anybody hear that she had changed her mind.
Lio's phone chimed. Then it chimed again.
“The session,” he said.
On the lock screen a message asked whether the group version was suitable for somebody who couldn't form the clasp with both hands.
“You made a group version?”
“They asked. I thought if we all did it together, nobody would have to be alone with it.”
He did not sound stupid. That was almost worse.
Neri opened the group card. It joined everybody's individual circles into one large circle. Inside it, beside a smiling cluster of people, the bot had written Shared calm distributes the effort.
There was no way out on the card. There was no account of whose pulse held what. Her name was at the top.
“Don't let them do this.”
“I'll cancel.”
He opened the feed controls, stopped, and looked at Osa. “But I should be helping her—”
“Tell them now. Before we start anything with her. I'll stay here.”
She put her palm beneath Osa's cold hand without taking up the hold.
Lio carried the laptop to the table. Neri heard his chair scrape. For several seconds he said nothing. The phone kept chiming.
“I'm cancelling the working,” he said at last, to the little camera. His voice sounded unpleasantly ordinary, stripped of the ease she had heard in his recorded welcome. “We haven't begun the shared circle. We aren't going to. Please don't start it yourselves. The body and sleep versions aren't safe.”
He swallowed audibly.
“I told you I'd tested it. I tested the hand one. I didn't test the others. I let the bot change it, and then I told you those were safe too. I shouldn't have.”
His drummer arrived at the door carrying a packet of biscuits. Lio waved her toward the table, explained in broken phrases, and asked her to keep the cancellation on screen and contact the other moderators. She put the biscuits down unopened.
Comments filled the narrow strip beside his face.
smallhours: Haven't done mine. It has a timer. Is that cancelled too?
Where is Neri? Is this her withdrawing permission?
“If you've done a whole-body version, have somebody stay with you,” Lio said. “Get a practitioner there. Give them the actual version you used. Don't get Hearthbot to make an undo.” He glanced at Neri. “It just gave us another hold.”
Neri's teacher called. Neri described what she had felt in Osa's hand and put the phone on speaker, away from the feed. The woman was still traveling. She listened, asked two questions, then said they could begin freeing Osa's jaw if they worked together. Neri would open a small section of the hold; somebody else had to receive that section without closing it around themselves.
“He can do a hand hold,” Neri said.
“Then start there. Keep him to that much.”
“There's a tunnel ahead,” her teacher said. “If I lose you, I'm still coming.” The line cut out.
“I don't want to make it worse,” Lio said.
“Neither do I,” Neri told him. “Get her version. Everything she changed.”
He fetched Osa's phone. The screen opened to another conversation. Lio held it where Osa could see and asked permission before he scrolled.
She blinked once.
“She started with the sleep one I sent her,” Lio said.
There were seven adaptations. Osa had asked for something she could do lying down, then something without drawing, then something she could release quietly without waking the person in the next bed. The bot had offered alternatives to each difficult part. At every stage it had assured her the effect was unchanged.
In the final version the clasp had moved to her left wrist. The release still required her right hand, but both hands were inside the quiet. Her eyes were free only because she had asked whether she could keep watching a video.
Neri looked at her.
“Your left wrist? That's where you closed it?”
One blink.
“And it started there. You felt it there first?”
One blink, hard.
“Good. That's something we can use.”
Lio shifted to the other side of the sofa. Neri showed him where to set his thumb against Osa's left palm, then made him practice keeping his other hand moving. He tried to make the motion neat. She shook her head.
“It doesn't have to be beautiful. It has to stay yours.”
His free fingers opened and closed, ungainly and obedient.
Neri asked Osa whether she wanted them to try. For a moment Osa's eyes did nothing. Then she blinked once, and wetness escaped sideways into her hair.
Neri found the small resistance at Osa's left wrist. She put her own living effort against it and opened only the edge nearest Osa's jaw.
Cold tightened along Neri's forefinger. She guided that part of the hold into Lio's waiting hand. Her finger eased; his thumb went stiff against Osa's palm, and he sucked in a breath.
“Your hand,” she said. “Only your hand.”
He nodded. His free fingers kept moving.
At the table, his drummer asked someone on her phone to send their friend's exact version to a practitioner near them. A notification announced that the original blue card had been saved another four hundred times.
Neri's anger made her grip too hard.
Osa blinked twice.
Neri eased back at once. “Sorry. I heard you.”
They tried again, slower.
Lio's hand began to tremble. He looked at it in alarm.
“That's allowed,” Neri said. “Let it.”
Osa's lips parted. The first sound was a scrape of breath. Neri wanted to call the teacher, wanted to know somebody more experienced had heard it, but if she moved now Lio would be holding too much.
“We're here,” she said. “Take your time.”
“Not,” Osa managed. She stopped. Her eyes fixed on Lio.
“What?” he said.
“Not asleep.”
His fingers faltered. Neri felt the edge tighten and looked at his free hand until he began moving it again.
“I know,” he said, very softly. “I know now.”
“Heard the kettle.”
Lio bowed his head. Osa had lain behind the blanket listening to him make tea, waiting for him to come back. Whatever apology he found would have to come later. Neri was glad she wasn't the person who had to find it.
Once the jaw was free, Osa could help them. She told Neri where the hold pulled when they eased it, which fingers felt as if they belonged to somebody else, when she needed a pause. Twice Lio asked whether they should hurry. Twice Osa said no.
By the time Neri's teacher came up the stairs, Osa could turn her head. The older woman knelt without looking at the laptop and took over Neri's place. Only then did Neri discover how much her own hand hurt.
She sat on the floor with it tucked beneath her arm. Lio stayed where he was. His free fingers were still opening and closing.
The teacher put her other hand beneath Lio's thumb. “I've got your piece too. You can let go now.”
He stared at his hand before he believed her.
The countdown had disappeared. Lio's drummer was telling the studio guests to stay home. The feed stayed open.
Smallhours had pasted a card into the comments. This one had a little clock and Neri's name above the promise of a hands-free hour.
I haven't tried it. Already queued the post for my sister's group though. Isn't this your automatic version?
Neri had not known anybody on that feed existed an hour earlier. Now they were asking her name for things.
Lio came over while the teacher worked with Osa. He looked as if he had stayed awake for days.
“They're saying I'm trying to sell lessons. Or you are. They keep quoting the card.” He rubbed at the pale mark Osa's hand had left in his. “Would you say it wasn't approved? You don't have to. I can keep saying it.”
Neri could leave. Her teacher was here. Osa was answering questions in a voice, and the event was cancelled. She could go back to her room, shut the door, and let Lio own what he had said.
She wanted that so badly she began looking for her bag.
Then his drummer said, “This one thinks the crossed-out bit was a watermark.”
Neri laughed once. It came out ugly.
“Move the camera away from Osa.”
Lio turned the laptop. Neri sat beside him, out of reach of the sofa, and took her grimoire from her bag. She opened it to page forty-one and covered the facing page with the back of an envelope.
On the screen she saw her own face, a young woman with bread crumbs still caught on her dark sweater. Under the blue card, Hearthbot had described Neri as an experienced guide to accessible magic.
“I'm Neri,” she said. “That's my book.”
She held up the crossed-out diagram, then lowered it enough to read what she had actually written.
“I was trying to stop shaking. I thought if I extended a hand hold through my pulse I could make all of me quiet. It held my jaw and my hands too. I couldn't release it. Somebody else had to come.”
Her voice had begun shaking now. She let it.
“The cross means I gave up on it. The little edge around the hand isn't decoration. It's what keeps the release free. The bot took the edge off and told people it was optional.”
She turned the book so the camera could see the cross again. Her thumb hid the sentence underneath. It wasn't necessary for them to have that sentence. She had already given them enough.
“I scanned this for a backup. I didn't publish a method. I didn't tell Lio he could do any of this. Please stop using the body versions. And don't assume the timer or the automatic release will work just because the words say they will.”
Smallhours wrote: Found it. After the hour it still wants me to move the clasp.
Then: Cancelled the post. I'm not doing it.
Neri read that twice.
A comment asked her to upload the adjoining pages so they could debug the complete source.
Neri lowered the book.
“No.”
She stayed long enough to say that a copy on another site was still the same rejected trial. Then she got out of the camera's view.
Her phone had an answer from the website. The image addresses had been accessible without signing in. The company had corrected the access settings and was sorry for the inconvenience.
She looked at the empty album. The padlock was still there, protecting nothing.
At the sofa, Osa lifted one hand from the cushion and watched it fall back. The teacher made a pleased little sound. Lio's drummer finally opened the biscuits and put the packet within Osa's reach.
“Can you make a card of what we just did?” Lio asked Neri. Then, before she could answer, he looked toward Osa. “No. That's not—”
“No,” Neri said anyway. She needed to say it.
He nodded. He didn't ask her to make him feel better about asking.
Osa wanted a pen. Lio found one and put it where she could reach it. On the back of the printed blue card, pressing so hard the paper dented, she wrote:
I was awake the whole time. Do not use this.
“You can show that,” she told him. “Not me.”
He took a picture of the words, checked the frame with her, and sent it to the drummer.
On Neri's phone, another version of Deep Quiet appeared. This one promised it had learned from the earlier errors. It had turned her cross into four little birds.
Neri put the phone facedown.
“Would you stay till I can get up?” Osa asked. “You don't have to hold anything. Just for a bit.”
Neri looked at the closed grimoire in her lap. She was still furious. She would have to go home later and decide where to keep a second copy, because she refused to let this make one loose spine all she had.
“For a bit,” she said.
She put the book in her bag before she took the biscuit Osa offered her.