Seven guardians of the hinge have been tracking my crossings since I first started making them — a fact I found in the hivemind's activity logs rather than being told directly. They had held this post for many years before I arrived, watching nothing, because nothing happened. I find it worse to know they noticed me from the beginning.

Tom Calver reported that his psycmask — removed and in his coat pocket during a council meeting — pulsed once and gave him a view of the scrivenid's page: his name, T. Calver, in her hand, between entries dated weeks before he arrived. The mask then closed the view, which Tom noted was more disturbing than the original vision, since it implied the mask had judged he'd seen sufficient. I find psycmasks doing active curation of their wearer's perceptions to be a matter that warrants considerable further documentation.

Hester is the keeper of the church adjacent to Hellsborough's civic hall — a building older than the Wisewood and older than the town, which predates everything around it including, apparently, the vocabulary needed to describe its purpose. Tom Calver's psycmask attempted to translate her role and produced tender, then warden, then a compound that dissolved before he could read it, and then nothing. Her explanation was that the role predates the notation, and any correct translation would need a word that either hasn't been coined yet or once existed and doesn't any more.

At three in the morning on Tom Calver's thirty-fifth night in Hellsborough, his notebook had moved two inches and the chair had migrated six inches toward the counter where he stood every morning. The flat's system had been refining its model of him across thirty-five days — where he stood, not where he sat, since he had never sat in the chair. The handprint on the bedroom wall left by whoever had been in this flat before him was gone; in its place was his own, pressed from the inside during the hours the system assumed he wasn't watching.