Nobody made a gutterball on purpose — that is the official position of the nascenti, and it is, as with most official positions, technically accurate and substantially misleading. Spherical, approximately head-sized, rolling through drainage systems and derelict spaces with a vibration you feel before you hear it, each one feeds the hive mind: sound, temperature, dark matter density, the chemical signature of fear. If one finds you — which is materially different from you finding one — Van will want to know.

Somewhere in Hellsborough's library system there is a record titled *Threshold Effects: Case Histories (Surviving Witnesses Only)*. The title is, as the librarians will not confirm, half a sentence — the other half implied by the volumes missing from the shelf alongside it. Crossings are logged by the Office of Threshold Assessment, which has since been decommissioned; nobody in the library will say when, or why.

Fishermen who work the Damflask after murk-fall have a name for the shadows that settle at the reservoir's centre: the Shivering Grounds. Roger Robinson drowned there with six hands aboard his lugger, and has since been known to haul himself uninvited into passing boats — soaking, unhurried, the hook still in his cheek, asking after his wife. Whether this constitutes death in Hellsborough, or merely a change of circumstance, is a question none of Wisewood's elders have yet settled.

Crossing The Hinge repeatedly degrades it — each transit weakens the boundary until dark matter bleeds through into the off-world, where it meets matter and that is, by all accounts, that. My own early crossings caused measurable damage; I have stopped. Dispatches now travel from the hivemind through means I cannot explain to my contact on the Middlewood Road, who posts them and has asked not to be named.