The Help Network

On the third afternoon after the showcase, Cassia balanced an index card on her knee in the back stairwell at Northbridge Secondary and wrote BACKUP CONTACTS across the top.

The phone beside her shoe was warm from messages. It had been quiet during the two mission-free nights they had promised one another—properly quiet, with the compromised relay disconnected and no copied voice telling anyone what to do. Then the other girls around town had begun asking questions.

Not civilian questions. Nobody offered a surname, a school, or a face. A girl who watched the rail yards wanted to know how Mothlight’s team had realized their channel was wrong. Someone near the river sent a seven-second voice note consisting of wind, traffic, and, eventually, Do you have another number if yours goes bad? A third person typed that she was “asking for later,” then added three question marks when no one replied for eleven minutes.

“We give them ours, they give us theirs,” Cassia said. “That’s it.”

Drita took the card from her and crossed out the heading. Her wrist was still taped beneath her sweater cuff. “Backup for what?”

“For anything.”

“Absolutely not for anything.”

Bryn sat one step above them with foam plugs in her ears, though the stairwell was empty except for the radiator knocking in the wall. She opened a fresh note on her phone. “Categories. Transport, observation, relay, first aid—”

“Not first aid,” Drita said. “Somebody will read that as medical.”

“Recovery snacks?” Cassia suggested.

“That’s worse.”

She took the card back. Under Drita’s new heading, CONTACTS—ASK BEFORE FORWARDING, Bryn made four columns: alias, offered help, limits, and permission to pass the contact onward. Cassia added a fifth for when the person was usually awake. Drita drew a hard line through it.

“Time window,” she said. “Not sleep schedule.”

“Right. Obviously. I knew that.”

Cassia had not known it. That was why it felt good to have all three of them there, reducing a huge soft wish into things that could fit on a card.

The first entries were uneven. One girl offered rooftop sightlines but not pursuit. Another would stay on a call after a frightening transformation, but only by text and never past her household’s bedtime. Someone else wrote, can carry heavy / cannot do blood, then asked that the last part not be forwarded. Cassia put down Mothlight, listening and relay, any time.

Drita crossed out any.

“I mean it,” Cassia said.

“That’s the problem.” Drita replaced it with evenings, usually. Then, after a moment, she added okay to forward and pushed the card back.

They photographed it against the gray stair tread. Bryn sent the image to four alias-only contacts. One of those contacts asked permission and sent it to two more.

By the time the late bus groaned into the school loop, the card had left their hands.

---

The first altered copy came back with a tea ring over Cassia’s entry and the word SOURCE? squeezed into Bryn’s columns.

That addition arrived because a warning about blue sparks in a storm drain had traveled across town as if it applied to every drain, every kind of magic, and perhaps the color blue. By lunch, three people had stayed away from a harmless blue-painted mural. By dinner, the girl who had actually seen the sparks wrote, with some irritation, that the problem had been one leaking charm under one particular grate.

Bryn began tagging messages SAW IT, HEARD IT, or GUESSING. Other people changed the words to versions they liked better. Cassia liked GUESSING, because it made uncertainty sound less like failure.

The requests were rarely grand. Someone wanted company on the walk from a bus stop because a false alarm had left her shaking. Cassia stayed in her earbud and described the dog in the apartment window until the girl reached home. Someone asked whether terrible hunger after using magic meant something was wrong. Cassia wrote that it happened to her after too many decoys, then passed the question to two girls whose costs were different. A check-in about a closed underpass became gossip about a cape caught in a bicycle wheel. The owner of the cape entered the thread to say the cape had behaved with dignity and the bicycle had not.

Cassia answered through algebra, through the scrape of dinner plates, through her mother calling from the kitchen that the recycling would not develop legs. She learned the little pulse of usefulness: a question, the brief open space before anyone replied, then her own thumbs filling it.

At school, Drita put a carton of juice on Cassia’s worksheet.

“I have juice.”

“You have an empty box in your bag.”

“That is a historical juice.”

“Drink this one.”

Cassia peeled the straw from its wrapper. Her phone vibrated twice against the desk. She turned it over without looking, which felt so virtuous that she expected Drita to notice.

Drita did not. “How many last night?”

“Two.”

The phone vibrated again.

“Two that needed me,” Cassia amended. “Some of the rest were just forwarding.”

“Forwarding is the part somebody else can do.”

“I know.” Cassia punctured the foil too hard and got juice on her thumb. “I let them.”

This was almost true. She let people forward messages after she had read them, labeled them, checked where they were going, and watched for the reply. If she closed her eyes, the unseen routes felt like a room full of doors. Somebody ought to stand in the middle and hear which one opened.

After what had happened to their own channel, an unanswered voice had edges. Cassia could still remember the copied calmness telling them to transform. She could remember, more strongly, her own voice asking for one unhurried breath and Bryn waiting for both of them before making the cut. Nobody had been left alone with the command.

So Cassia kept the phone faceup during lunch.

---

The card crossed oceans by ordinary means. A girl carried a copy on a family visit and showed it to someone who showed it to someone else. Numbers lengthened with country codes. Photographs came back with handwriting in scripts Cassia could not read and translations pasted crookedly over the columns. One version replaced limits with things I refuse. Another removed the offered-help column altogether and said to ask what a person needed before proposing a solution.

There were mornings when a girl’s after-school message arrived while Cassia brushed her teeth, and nights when the background of a voice note held breakfast dishes. A joke about a monster’s manners crossed two translations and returned as the disaster is wearing polite shoes. Cassia laughed so hard she had to sit down. The original sender reacted with a baffled face, then asked to have the broken version back.

Help looped through the same hands. The girl from the bus stop later kept a dawn check-in for somebody else. A person who had once asked what to eat after transforming became the bridge for a language Cassia did not speak. She translated stay warm as stay in light; the requester sent a photograph of one blanket corner, a third person corrected the phrase, and all three reacted with laughing faces. Cassia had introduced none of them.

The name appeared near the middle of the term.

MAGICAL GIRL’S HELP NETWORK, said a clean printed card photographed on a striped blanket. Beneath it, in smaller type: Local contacts choose local practice. Ask before passing private details.

“The apostrophe is wrong,” Drita said.

“It could be singular possessive,” Bryn said. “A network for a magical girl’s help.”

“That is worse.”

Cassia enlarged the photograph. Three translated versions of the name ran along the bottom. “It’s kind of sweet.”

“It sounds like one magical girl owns all the help.”

“Maybe she’s very generous.”

Nobody they asked admitted to naming it. By then the words were already printed on wallet cards, copied into radio introductions, and handwritten at the top of a page whose last column meant no photographs, even transformed. The three of them complained about the apostrophe for a week and used the name every day.

Some request headers now said FORWARD TO THE ASSOCIATION, though the messages still traveled person by person.

Bryn tried to make a master list. It lasted four days. Two contacts changed their hours without telling her. A cluster elsewhere replaced individual forwarding permission with permission for each request. A voice relay kept no written list at all. Someone marked Bryn’s carefully translated safety note with a question, then a correction, then a joke she did not understand.

“They are forking the document,” she said in the stairwell, staring at five incompatible versions.

“They’re using it,” Cassia said.

“Those aren’t opposites.”

“Your face thinks they are.”

She sent her a look over the top of her phone. Drita snorted.

Cassia offered to keep the routes instead—not a master list, exactly, only a place where she knew who might know whom. She saved screenshots and remembered time windows. If a message stalled, she nudged it. If two replies crossed, she reconciled them. When someone else answered first, relief came with a small, embarrassing pinch, like arriving at a door with soup and finding the person had already eaten.

She never told Drita or Bryn about the pinch. She told herself it meant she cared.

---

Months after the index card left the stairwell, Cassia woke to her phone shivering against the wooden floor beside her bed.

The charging cable worked only when bent beneath a textbook. The phone was at nineteen percent and hot enough to leave a red patch in her palm. On the screen, a request had passed through four relays. Each had removed something before sending it onward.

A contact tells me transform on camera to prove I am true.

I do not trust this contact.

No name. No place. No system. No proof.

Need someone remain.

Cassia sat up. Her room emerged in pieces: heap of uniform on the chair, glow-in-the-dark stars fading above the window, water glass within reach. She typed before she was fully awake.

Are they with you? Can you say if you’re indoors? Do they know your civilian—

Drita’s reply appeared in the trio’s side channel.

Stop.

Then, almost at once:

Sorry. She said no place.

Cassia deleted the unfinished questions. In the main thread, the requester wrote:

No body. No call. Do not ask sky.

Someone must have asked for a window photograph before the request reached them. Cassia imagined four strangers trying to help and each making the same frightened grab for certainty.

Bryn came online. Her first message was only reading. Her second filled the screen: preserve the original messages, mute the contact if that would not make things worse, do not follow links, consider whether the contact could be copied, consider whether the contact could be real but coerced, consider local emergency services if there was an immediate physical threat—

The requester interrupted her.

Too many. Slow language.

Bryn’s typing indicator vanished.

A relay posted a machine translation of an earlier line: I am not danger. Someone asked whether that meant the requester was safe or whether she meant she was not a danger to others. Another person replied to the wrong interpretation. Three dots appeared and disappeared beside the requester’s blank icon.

Cassia wanted to gather every loose thread before it tightened around the person at the other end. She wanted one fact she could trust. A voice, a landmark, the shape of a focus token—anything. The want frightened her more when she recognized it.

We are making this worse, she wrote in the side channel.

Drita answered:

Yes.

After a pause, she added:

We can stop.

The main thread stayed silent. Cassia counted one breath without rushing it. Then another. At the third, the requester sent:

Remain means do not disappear. Not make plan.

Cassia put both feet on the cold floor.

Here, she wrote.

Drita sent the same word. Bryn sent a single dot.

For five minutes, nobody asked anything.

The requester returned with a corrected translation chosen from two versions offered by someone in her own relay.

I am not in danger now. I may be if the contact learns more. I will not transform for them.

Cassia began, We know exactly— and erased it. They did not.

Something similar happened to three of us, she wrote. A trusted voice told us to transform. We treated the order as a reason to disconnect. That was our case, not a rule for yours.

Drita added:

You don’t owe this thread proof either.

No answer came for long enough that Cassia’s screen dimmed. She touched it awake and saw her own face, faintly reflected over the blank thread.

Then:

This helps. Less words now.

Bryn reacted to that message instead of replying. In the side channel, she wrote and deleted three different plans. At last she sent:

Ask what remain should look like?

Drita replied:

Ask one thing.

Cassia offered choices in the main thread: a dot at agreed intervals, silence with the channel open, or a relay to someone the requester herself selected. The requester chose one dot every five minutes and asked whether a person nearer to her could take over.

Not find me somebody. Not tell me whom to trust.

I choose, she wrote. You carry request only. Do not carry reason.

The regional relay said it could send her a private list of people with whom she had already exchanged messages. Cassia would not see the list. Neither would Bryn or Drita. The requester could pick one, or none, and the chosen person would receive only this: Can you be present now? No call unless asked.

Bryn typed, We cannot authenticate—

Cassia watched the words appear in the side channel.

She isn’t asking us to authenticate her, she wrote. She’s asking us to carry what she chose.

Bryn’s half-message disappeared.

Yes, she answered.

At the next five-minute mark, Cassia sent a dot. Five minutes later Drita sent one. Then a person whose waking hours usually overlapped none of theirs took the interval after that. Another helper posted from her lunch break. The dots were not perfectly spaced. Two arrived together; the requester responded with one only please, and Cassia put both hands under her thighs to keep from apologizing into the thread.

Her interval came around again. Before she could send, a dot appeared from the regional relay.

I’ve got this one, it wrote.

Cassia’s thumbs hovered. She had promised to remain. Leaving felt like breaking the promise, even though nobody had asked her in particular to make it.

Drita called her privately. Cassia answered without video.

“You’re doing the face,” Drita said.

“You can’t see my face.”

“I can hear it.” Her voice was rough with sleep. “One interval. We each said one.”

“What if the handoff goes wrong?”

“Then the people in it tell us what they want next.” Drita yawned, swallowed it, and started again. “I mean—we don’t decide from here.”

On the main thread, the requester wrote:

I picked someone. She knows a bad joke I made before. Enough for me.

The outer thread received no introduction, photograph, or transformed proof from the local person. The next part happened in a private channel beyond Cassia’s view.

One last message came back by permission.

I have company I chose. Stop the outer thread.

That was not safe. It was not proof. Cassia waited for a second sentence until the screen began to dim again.

None came.

She closed the thread.

---

The next version of the card reached Cassia as a photograph while she sat cross-legged on her bedroom rug. It carried the same disputed name and no list of officers. The offered-help columns differed by cluster. So did the hours, the labels for uncertain information, and the way each group ended a request. Along one edge, in several hands, people had added a common instruction: The requester decides what confirmation travels back.

Bryn sent a proposed central document to the trio, then withdrew it before Cassia opened it.

Too many local differences, she wrote.

Your face okay? Cassia asked.

No.

Drita sent a laughing reaction, followed by a photograph of their first card. Cassia’s any time remained visible beneath the line through it.

Cassia took the old card from her desk drawer. She changed her own entry again, slowly enough not to make a ceremony of it: evenings, if awake; okay to forward.

Her phone warmed in her other hand. A new request had entered through a contact she did not recognize. Before she could open it, one reply appeared from someone whose day was beginning and another from someone complaining that she ought to be asleep. One offered to listen. The other asked permission to pass the message closer.

Cassia read both. Her reply box waited. She left it empty.

In the trio’s private chat, Drita asked who had eaten the last sesame biscuit.

Cassia photographed the empty wrapper.

Evidence inconclusive, she wrote.

Bryn replied with the polite-shoes joke, still wrong after all those translations. Drita accused them both. Cassia put the phone beside her on the rug and let it cool while the network went on answering.