Chapter 1: Waking

The first thing Neiman noticed was that he could not tell whether his eyes were open.

It was a reasonable difficulty. With them open there was white; with them shut there was a slightly dimmer white, which he took to be the lids; and when he opened them again the white was exactly as it had been. No ceiling. No horizon. No line where the floor made up its mind to become a wall. He lay on his back and looked at nothing, and the nothing looked back with great tidiness.

A white room, he thought. Novices loved a white room. It saved them the labor of furnishing anything, and it let the reader assume that something enormous was about to be explained. A man wakes in a place with no features, the author has not yet decided what the place is for, and so the place is described as clean. He would have cut it in the second draft. He would have cut most of his first drafts in the second, and most of the second in the third, and it had never once been enough, which was the difficulty with being the person who did the cutting.

He waited for fear, courteously, as one waits for a late guest. It did not arrive. He noted this as well, with the mild interest of a man checking a pocket for keys he already knew were gone.

Somewhere to his left, someone was humming.

It was a poor sound. It began tuneless, then found a note and held it, and the note did not travel anywhere; it left the mouth and simply stopped, flat and close, like a voice in a wardrobe. Neiman sat up.

There were others. He counted them, because there was nothing else to do with them: eleven. Some still lay where they had been put, on their backs, on their sides, one with an arm flung across her face. Some had sat up already and wore the stunned, upright look of people at the end of a long flight. A man in shirtsleeves knelt with both palms flat against the floor and his head bowed, and Neiman, who was too far off to hear him, saw the shape of the word sorry on his mouth more than once. A woman with cropped hair was on her feet and had been for some time. She stood like someone waiting for a starting signal, weight forward on her toes, and then she was walking, ten steps, twenty, out into the white, and turning, and walking back.

The floor was neither warm nor cool. It gave under his hand in the way that nothing gives. He looked for his shadow and did not find it, and looked for the light that ought to have made one and did not find that either.

"Okay," said a girl nearby, sitting up fast with both hands in her hair. "Okay, okay, okay, okay. That's — okay. Is this a hospital? It's not a hospital, hospitals have corners, hospitals have that one terrible painting of a boat, and anyway I don't hurt, do I hurt? I don't hurt. Does anyone hurt?"

"Any pain?" said a gentle voice, as if answering a question asked in another room. A man in a rumpled dark coat was moving among the seated, two fingers already extended toward the nearest wrist. "Any dizziness? Any nausea? Look at me, please. Follow my finger. Good. Good."

"I don't hurt," said the girl, to him, delighted. "I said that. I said it to myself, I just said it out loud, is that allowed, are we allowed to —"

"Breathe out for me," said the man in the coat, who had found her wrist. "Longer than in."

"— and I'm not even out of breath, that's weird, isn't that weird? Anyway. Hi."

"Hello," said the man in the coat, and moved on.

Someone else was speaking, a few yards away, in a voice pitched too high and too carefully, the voice of a person holding a full cup. A woman sat with her hands pressed over her eyes.

"There's too much of it," she was saying. "Doesn't anyone — it isn't one white. It's forty whites, fifty. It's the inside of a shell and the inside of an eggshell and a tooth and a sheet, the sheet they pull over — and that one, that one, that one is the color of a held breath, and none of them are agreeing, they're all shouting at once —"

"Down," said the woman with the cropped hair, suddenly beside her. "Going down. Three, two —"

The seated woman swayed sideways like a tree deciding, and the woman with the cropped hair was already there, one arm under her shoulders before the fall had finished starting. "There. There. Not — you're fine. Somebody say something useful."

"Give her a moment," said a calm voice.

It belonged to a woman with dark hair pinned tightly back, sitting cross-legged a few feet from Neiman, who had not moved since he first noticed her. She had been watching all of them in turn, with something like an inventory in her face, and when her eyes reached Neiman they rested there one beat longer than on the others, and then moved on.

The woman who had been caught took her hands from her eyes. Her fingernails were blue underneath, ground in, an old stain that no scrubbing had reached, and it was the only color Neiman had seen since he woke. He found he had been looking at it for some time.

"Breathe out for me," said the man in the coat, arriving. "Longer than in."

"I am breathing out," said the woman with the blue nails, faintly, and with tremendous dignity. "I am exhaling at it."

The man in the coat reached Neiman last, or nearly last. He knelt, and two fingers settled on Neiman's wrist with a physician's impersonal tenderness, and his eyes went somewhere unfocused while he counted.

"Any pain?"

"No."

"Sleeping well?"

"Well enough."

"Hm," said the man in the coat. He held on a few seconds more than he needed to. "Fifty-four. That's slow, for a room like this."

"Is that bad?"

"It's unhurried," said the man, and looked at him a moment with a blank, professional kindness, waiting for a reason. Neiman had none to give. He offered a small, apologetic smile, which was the correct thing, and the man in the coat nodded and stood and went to find his next wrist.

Fifty-four. Neiman looked at his own hand, lying on his knee. It was perfectly still. He had the impression, faint and unwelcome, that this was information.

There was one person left who had not stirred: a thin man some way off, on his back, arms at his sides like a figure on a tomb. As the man in the coat approached him he sat bolt upright, and said, with total clarity, before he had opened his eyes:

"Seventy percent that I'm dreaming."

"Good morning," said the man in the coat.

"Sixty-five. I'd hedge it down. I've never once woken up inside a dream, so I lack the prior." His eyes opened. He looked at the white with the flat despair of an accountant looking at a spreadsheet. "Ah," he said. "That's not encouraging."

"Twelve," said a voice, flat and precise, from the other side of the group. "Twelve of us. Nobody has left and nobody has arrived since I woke."

"Twelve," said the woman with the pinned-back hair. "Thank you."

"It wasn't a kindness. It was a count."

And that was when the humming stopped.

It stopped mid-note, and the silence it left was of a peculiar quality, not the silence of a quiet room but of a room with the acoustics taken out: no give, no shimmer, no small return of sound off some far surface. Neiman had not known how much of silence is echo until the echo was gone. A young man on Neiman's left, who had been humming all this while with his knees drawn up and his eyes shut, opened his eyes and said in a hurt, dreamy voice:

"It doesn't ring. It doesn't — nothing rings. I hum and it doesn't come back. Do you hear it? It doesn't come back —"

And someone laughed.

It did not come through the ears. Neiman would remember that afterward, in the imprecise way one remembers a dream. It had no direction. He could not have said whether it came from in front or above or inside; it simply occurred, whole, in the place where his own thoughts went on, like a sentence he had not written appearing in the middle of his manuscript. It was a delighted laugh. It was the laugh of a child who has kept a secret all day and has, at last, at last, been asked.

Twelve heads snapped toward nothing.

_Welcome to my game._

Nobody moved. The woman with the cropped hair had gone perfectly rigid. The girl who did not hurt had a hand over her mouth.

_Oh, don't be frightened. Well, a little frightened. It's more fun. Here's how it goes._

_In a while I'm going to send you somewhere. Not yet, though. You'll have a day first, twenty-four hours, to sit about and get acquainted, because I'm not a monster. I won't be providing a clock. Clocks are your own affair. After that, ten stories. You will be sent into each of them, all of you, together. You'll talk to the people who live there. You'll find out what's wrong. And then you'll solve it._

_That's all. Pretty simple._

The voice seemed to consider whether it had been clear, and to conclude, with satisfaction, that it had been.

"What —" said the woman with the cropped hair, and stopped, and began again, hoarse. "What are you? Where's — who the hell —"

_The host._

"And if we don't," said the thin man, quickly, flatly, as if he had been holding the question in his mouth. "Solve it. Any of it. What then."

_Ah._

There was a pause. It was a good pause; Neiman, whatever else he thought, could tell a pause that had been rehearsed.

_There's a punishment. Naturally. What kind of game has none?_

"What is it?" That was the girl, muffled through her hand.

_Now, where would the fun be in telling you?_

And the laugh again, brief, bright, and then, without any fading, without any of the ceremony of a departure, it was not there. The change was not in the silence, which was no different. The change was in the room. It was like the moment after a person has left a room the two of you were sharing: a sudden, small fact of more space.

For a while nobody spoke, and the not-speaking had weight, a single held breath shared out among twelve.

Pretty simple, Neiman thought. It was the phrase of a bad editor, or a good con man. One said pretty simple to make a thing sound smaller than the person, and one had to have a very high opinion of oneself to say it about a white room. He thought, with some detachment, that the voice was not a bad villain. It had a good laugh. Whoever wrote it had understood that the laugh was most of the character.

"It's gone," said the young man who had been humming, softly. "Did you feel it go? It didn't fade. The room got bigger. By one."

"It had no direction," said the man in shirtsleeves. He was on his feet now, one hand raised as if to test the air, his eyes closed. "Forgive me. Every sound comes from somewhere. It has a distance, a wall it's near, a floor it's been thrown along. That one had — I can't find its edges. I can't find any edges." He opened his eyes, and looked guiltily around at the white. "I'd like it noted that I'm not being rude to whatever this is."

"Noted," said someone dryly, on the far side. "It will be."

"And no accent," she went on. She was a tall woman with a wide, amused mouth that did not seem presently amused, and she had the air of someone who had been personally insulted by a locked door. "None. Nothing. Give me a vowel and I'll give you a town, a street, the year you left it. That was English the way glass is a color. I couldn't get purchase. C'est vexant. C'est vraiment vexant."

"You went into French," said the woman with the cropped hair.

"I go into everything. Give me a minute, I'll do German."

"Nothing smells," said the woman sitting nearest the blue-nailed one, with her forearms across her knees. They were strong forearms, scarred pale over the backs with what looked like a career of small burns. She had lifted her chin and was sniffing, slowly, at the white, the way one tests a pan. "Nothing. Not dust. Not — you'd think a room smells of something, even a bad one. This smells like a plate nobody's eaten off." She lowered her chin and looked around the circle, unhurried. "You lot do. Twelve of you and nothing between you. Nobody's been here before us. There isn't a trace."

"Is that — a good thing?" said the girl.

"It's a thing."

"Statistically," said the thin man, and stopped, and put a hand to his forehead. "No. I don't have a statistic. I'm sorry. I'm — very sorry. I don't have anything to put a number to."

"That," said the woman with the pinned-back hair, "is the first useful thing anyone has said, and it's an honest one. Thank you."

Neiman looked at her. She had not raised her voice. She had, he saw, not raised it once since she began, and yet the whole circle had turned to her like plants.

"We have a day," she said. "Whatever this is, it has given us a day and nothing else. I would like to spend the first part of it not frightened. It will not be possible for everyone. It is still worth trying. I would like us to sit close enough to hear one another without raising our voices. Anyone who prefers to stand, please stand. Nobody here is in any danger at this moment."

"Crouching's fine?" said the woman with the cropped hair.

"Crouching is fine."

"Because I'm not — I can't just sit. I'll go mad. If I sit I'll —"

"Then crouch."

They arranged themselves, slowly, in an irregular ring. Nobody chose their places; there was nothing to choose them by. The woman with the blue nails had been helped to a sitting position and then, after a moment's thought, folded down to lie on her back, one forearm across her eyes, in the posture of someone visiting a beach. The man in shirtsleeves sat very straight, his hands on his knees, as though at a formal dinner in a house whose owner had not yet come down. The young man who hummed sat next to the girl who did not hurt, and the girl, without asking, began to talk to him, and the young man, without noticing, began to hum in the same tempo as her sentences.

Neiman found himself sitting beside the girl. He had not chosen this either. Things had simply stopped moving, and there he was.

"Names," said the girl. "Okay, names, sorry, I know, I know, everyone's had a terrible morning, but I think names help, I think it's a thing where — do you know that when they train people for hostage stuff, not that it's — not that this is hostage stuff, is it hostage stuff? I don't think it's hostage stuff — but they say the first thing is names. Because then you're a person. Right? And anyway I would just really like to know what to call everybody, because I've started calling you all things in my head, and I really don't want to keep calling the guy in the coat 'the guy in the coat', it feels ungrateful. Sophia. It's Sophia. I'm Sophia. That's me. Hi."

"Sophia," said the woman with the pinned-back hair. "Thank you. Vivienne Hale."

"Vivienne! That's such a good name. That's like a name in a book."

"It is a name in a number of books," said Vivienne. "I don't mind."

"Margo," said the woman with the scarred forearms, not bothering to look up. "Delacroix. Margo's fine."

"Emeric Voss." The man in shirtsleeves half rose to say it, and then evidently thought better of it and sat down again. "It's — a great pleasure. I'm sorry. Under the circumstances. It's a great pleasure to be introduced, and I'm sorry that's what the circumstances are."

"Adaeze," said the tall woman. "Okonkwo. Say it right or I'll know. Ah-DAY-zeh. You'd be surprised how few try."

"Idris," said the thin man. "Halloran. There's a sixty percent chance you won't retain the second one, but I'd hedge that. I've been introduced to a great many people who —" He stopped. "Sixty. Call it sixty."

"Rafaela." That was the woman with the cropped hair, crouched on her heels at the edge of the ring, weight forward. "Cruz. Rafa. Can we — is there — can we get to the part where we —"

"In a moment," said Vivienne, gently.

"Lucian," said the young man, and hummed the end of it, like a sung period. "Park. Lucian Park. Lucian. It's — it's Lucian."

"I can do it in a moment," said a voice, "if you'll wait for it."

It was a small, precise woman with plain brown hair and a plain grey cardigan and a face so entirely without decoration that Neiman, who could read faces with no particular skill, found himself looking at it as at a very clean page. She sat with her ankles crossed. She had not been looking at any of them; she had been looking at the space in front of her with the fixed, gentle concentration of a woman doing sums.

"You've all said your names," she said. "I heard them. I heard every one. I'll have them for a few minutes, and then they'll go. It's not you. It's a thing I have with names. They don't stay. Everything else does." She looked around the ring, and began to speak, evenly, quickly, without pause: "The one who talks. The one who is not upset. The coat, the one who worries. The one who hums. The one with paint under her nails, who is lying down. The one who apologizes to the floor. The one who is already leaving. The one who adds. The one with the burned arms. The one who changes languages. The one with the level voice. Twelve, if I count myself."

There was a small silence.

"She did it in the order we're sitting," said Idris slowly. "Clockwise from her."

"It's not a party trick," said the woman. "I'm sorry. It came out as one. Beatrix. Novak. If you need it, it's Beatrix. I won't be using yours."

"Is that what I am?" said Neiman. "The one who is not upset?"

He had not meant to speak. It was out and in the air before he had thought to stop it, and every face turned to him. Beatrix regarded him with perfect, unbothered clarity.

"Yes."

"I see."

"Are you? Upset."

"I'd imagine that I will be," Neiman said. "I think I'm behind."

"Oh my gosh," said Sophia, and clutched his sleeve. "That's so — okay, wait, I said Sophia, you didn't say — you have to say a name, everyone does, it's the thing."

"Neiman."

"Neiman what?"

"Just Neiman."

"Just Neiman," said Vivienne, from across the ring. It was not a question. She had a way of turning a thing into a statement and setting it down on the floor between them, where it lay until someone picked it up. Nobody picked it up. She looked at him a moment longer, without any particular expression, and then to the others.

"That leaves the doctor," said Adaeze, "and the girl in the sand."

"The girl in the sand," said the woman with the blue nails, from under her arm, "would like it recorded that she can hear you. Saoirse. Quill. It's a Gaelic name; don't worry, nobody says it right. It means freedom. I've always felt it was a very optimistic name, for the color of the place I'm in."

"Kenji Arata," said the man in the dark coat. He had been sitting on his heels a little back from the ring, hands folded, and now he reached out across the space between him and Neiman, quite naturally, as one extends a hand to a new colleague. "Doctor. I'm sorry. I'm afraid I cannot stop doing this."

Neiman shook it. Kenji's grip was warm, dry, and long; he did not let go at the usual moment. His eyes went vague again. His thumb rested against the inside of Neiman's wrist, just where the pulse was, without pressure, as though by accident.

"You're entirely well," said Kenji at last. He sounded, if anything, faintly surprised. "There is nothing. There's — nothing at all. No old breaks. No scarring. A little tension in the neck, that's all, that's everybody. You have very steady hands. I'd say it was a good sign, but it rather depends what you're using them for."

"Writing, mostly."

"Writing what?" said Sophia.

"Novels."

"You're a novelist?"

"Oh, please," said Neiman, "don't. It's a small career. I promise. It's the kind of career where the other novelists know your name and no one else does."

"That's not true," said Sophia, thrilled. "Nobody says that if it's true."

"It's true. I'm a well-known novelist to a very limited number of people, who all work in the same building."

"That's so funny. That's — you're funny. I knew you were funny. You have a funny face."

"Thank you."

"It's a compliment! It's a face that has a joke behind it. Anyway." She sat back, and looked at him with such uncomplicated delight that he felt something turn over, small and sour, and set itself back down. "I do computers. Sorry. I'm a — I'm the person who does things with computers. Anything with a chip in it, anything you can put a wire to. Does anyone have a paperclip? Nobody has a paperclip. Why would anyone have a paperclip, it's a white void. If someone had a paperclip I could probably do something."

"Do what?" said Rafaela, low.

"I don't know, that's what I'm saying, I'd think of something. That's the whole job. There's always something you can do with a paperclip."

"There is no signal," said Beatrix. "No one has a device. No one has a watch. I checked all eleven of you before you woke."

"That's — a little sinister?" said Sophia.

"It was a count."

"That's what I'm saying! It's a very sinister count!"

"She sounds like a witness statement," said Margo.

"I'm sorry," said Beatrix, without heat. "It's how it comes out."

"Nnọọ," said Adaeze, all at once, to the ceiling that was not there. "Nnọọ. Bienvenue. Willkommen. Welcome. It said welcome, in all the ways they say it, in every language you've got, you notice. Everybody welcomes you to the thing they're about to do to you." She had, Neiman saw, changed languages three times inside a sentence, and had done so with the reckless grace of someone changing lanes. "It always goes: come in, sit down, mind the step. And then the door."

"She doesn't speak the same one twice," said Margo, to no one.

"It keeps me honest," said Adaeze, in a quick, quiet, rattling something that Neiman did not have; and then, in English: "Someone say something. I'm starting to enjoy this, and that's not a good sign."

"There is nothing to be gained," said Vivienne, "by guessing at intent."

"It's a game," said Idris. "It said so. It said it's a game."

"It said its game," said Emeric, with great precision. "'My game.' That's a possessive. One does not say 'my game' of something one's found lying about. One says it of something one has built. The rules are therefore — the rules are the important — there are rules. It stated rules. It stated them clearly. Ten stories. We're to speak with the people in them. We're to solve what is wrong. And we've been given a day to —" He glanced toward the sky that was not there, respectfully. "I should think that the first instruction, the one we can obey at present, is the day. 'Get acquainted.' That was an instruction."

"It was a suggestion," said Rafaela.

"It was said in an imperative mood."

"It was a leash. It's telling us — nobody says 'go sit and talk' unless they want you to — unless they need you to sit still. Sit still and wait. And —" She was up on her feet again. She couldn't seem to stay down. "I'm not — look, I'm going to see how far it goes. Ten minutes. There's got to be an edge. There's got to be something. Nobody builds a room with no walls unless it's got — unless there's somewhere to be, out there —"

"Ten minutes," said Idris, "is roughly a thirty-five percent chance you don't come back. I'd hedge it. Twenty-five. It's the not knowing that's — I can't give you a real figure. There's no reference class for this."

"Then it's a coin flip."

"It's not a coin flip. It's worse than a coin flip, but I don't have the — a coin flip would be fifty. Which is better. I'm saying it's better."

"Then I'll flip it."

"Rafaela," said Vivienne. "Please."

"It's ten minutes —"

"It is not a rule. It's a request. Nobody here is in charge of you." Vivienne let a breath go by. "I would ask you to consider that you're the one of us who can catch things. If you don't come back, we have no one else who can."

Rafaela stood there, breathing, one hand opening and closing at her side. For a moment nothing at all showed on her face; then it did, and it was very young.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. Ten steps. Twenty. I'll count them. Somebody count them for me."

"I will," said Beatrix.

She went. It took her less than a minute to be a smudge, and then not that. Beatrix, in her flat voice, counted the steps aloud until the voice grew strange and then stopped altogether. Emeric had shut his eyes, and his lips moved, his head very slightly following something. "Forty meters," he murmured. "Fifty. She's — she's going in a straight line. Sixty. Seventy. It — no. I've lost her. Forgive me. I've lost her at seventy-two. I can't find any further. There isn't a further. There's simply — there's nothing to be measured against."

"She counted a hundred and four paces," said Beatrix.

"That's a hundred and four paces and seventy-two meters," said Idris, "if the stride is —"

"It's a hundred and four paces. I only counted paces."

"Well," said Adaeze, "that's the most comforting argument I've heard all day."

Rafaela came back four minutes later, from a slightly different direction than she had left. She was not out of breath. She had her hands on her hips. Her face said what the rest of her wouldn't, and what it said was that she had reached nothing, and nothing had reached her.

"Same," she said. "It's the same. It's — all of it. Same. No edge. No, I turned around, I counted, I — it's the same everywhere." She looked at Emeric. "Which way'd you say?"

"To your left, near the — " He stopped and put a hand over his eyes. "There's no threshold. I do apologize. To your left."

"To my left it is," said Rafaela, and dropped into a crouch at the edge of the ring, as if that had been the plan.

"Did you find anything?" said Sophia.

"Nothing."

"That's so weird. That's, like, actively weird. I'd have found something. That's the whole — anyway, you tried. That's a real thing, you tried. Isn't that good, that she tried? Neiman? Doesn't that count for something?"

"It counts for a great deal," said Neiman. "It's the correct first move. You'd have thought the answer would be somewhere out there, and it would've been rather a waste of a story to go on looking in here."

"That's what I said," said Rafaela, sharply, with a first look at him, not unfriendly.

"I know," said Neiman. "I was agreeing."

"So what do we do?" said Sophia. "We sit? We just — sit here, for twenty-three hours, and talk?"

"We may as well," said Idris. He had drawn his knees up and was speaking to them. "I'd put the odds of anything productive being found by wandering at perhaps five percent. I'd hedge it. I'd say five to ten. But the cost of wandering is not zero. Each person who leaves the group reduces our ability to — I don't have the words for it. We'd be spending ourselves. I'd say sit. It's the sensible option. It's the — if anyone's asking me. It's the one that keeps the most of us."

"It's waiting," said Rafaela. "You wait, it wins. You sit — I've been — you sit and you wait and then it's too late, you don't get to go back —"

She stopped. Neiman, who had not been watching her, found that he had been watching her.

"— you just don't," she said, to the white. "That's all."

"I'd say," said Neiman, into the small quiet afterward, "that Idris is right, in a sense. Wandering is a poor use of a limited number of people. It's only that if nobody moves at all, there's a kind of story in which that's the mistake. I think it's better that someone look, and that we agree who, and how far, and for how long. Rafaela has already looked. It may be that she should look again. Not to be reckless. To be — thorough."

"Thank you," said Rafaela, sitting back on her heels.

"On the other hand," said Neiman, turning slightly, "I do think Idris has the better of it for the present. Anything we can learn, we're likelier to learn from one another, sitting still, than from the dark. It would be foolish to burn the whole afternoon on a straight line."

"Yes," said Idris, and for the first time seemed to relax. "Yes. Thank you. That's — yes."

Across the ring, Vivienne Hale said nothing.

She did not look at Rafaela, and she did not look at Idris. She looked at Neiman, in the manner of someone reading a line of small print at the bottom of a contract, and her expression did not change. It was not disapproving. It was not anything. She simply put the observation somewhere and left it there. Neiman, who had spent a good part of his life being looked at by people who wanted something, knew the difference between that and this, and found that he was more interested than he wished to be.

He looked away first. He did it easily, with a small smile at nothing, as one turns from a mirror in a shop.

"I'm not sure I'm following the argument," said Lucian. "Both of you — you both said — the one thing, and — and — the other thing. I could hear it. It wasn't wrong. I thought it was, like, a round. A round in two —" He hummed a phrase, pale and lovely, and dropped it. "It felt like a round."

"It was very balanced," said Adaeze, with great sweetness. "Ausgewogen. That's the German. Balanced. Or hedged. I've never been sure that they're different things."

"I don't think you were meant to say that out loud," said Margo.

"I'm learning."

"Anyway," said Sophia, into the little pause, and then she took his sleeve again and pulled him a few inches around, so that the two of them sat almost shoulder to shoulder, a small private country. "Okay, so, here's my thing. Here's what I think, I think it's really nice, actually, that we're all — I know it's a terrible situation, obviously, it's the worst, I'm not saying it isn't. But I think it's nice that when it happened, the first thing was: names. Even the girl who counts! Even the doctor! And I was so scared, before, that everyone would be — you know how you can be in a room with people and you all just sit there and don't say a word, like a waiting room — but nobody did that. Did you notice? Nobody just — you're not a waiting-room person. I can tell. Are you? Neiman? Are you a waiting-room person?"

"I'm fine," said Neiman. "I was admiring the wall."

"There isn't a wall!"

"That's what I was admiring."

"See, that's a joke! I knew you had one." She was delighted again, quite entirely, with her whole face, a face that did nothing by halves. "You're just — I don't know. You seem like a person who's going to be all right. You've got that, like, thing. Where you're going to be fine. Right? We're going to be fine, aren't we? You seem so calm. It's so calming. It's making me calm, and I'm really not, I'm not at all, I'm just very good at seeming — anyway. Are we? Going to be fine?"

Neiman opened his mouth.

He had been about to say something else. He was aware of it, briefly, waiting where the sentence was meant to be: a smaller sentence, older, quite unlike what he'd say to a girl who had known him for twenty minutes and was looking at him as if he were a fixed point. It had a shape. It had, in fact, a name in it. He looked at it a moment, the way one looks at a step that is not where one's foot expects it, and then he set it down, gently, and stepped over.

"I expect so," he said.

"Good."

He let it stand.

It was the sort of lie that costs a person nothing to tell and a great deal, later, to have told. He knew that, in a small way, in the back of his mind, where he kept most of his knowledge about himself. He filed it there now, briefly, among the others. She was still holding his sleeve.

She thinks I'm calm, he thought. She thinks it's a quality. He could have told her the truth: it was only that, at some point, he had stopped expecting to be surprised, and had mistaken the stopping for a temperament. The realization was not new. It never got any more interesting. He observed it, with the same courteous interest he'd brought to the missing fear, and let it go by. He was very good at letting things go by. It was, in the end, the only thing he was very good at, and even that, on the evidence of his novels, he did only moderately well.

Across the circle, Saoirse had taken her arm from her eyes, and was squinting up at the white, and appeared to be conducting a private tally.

"Twelve," she said, to nobody. "Twelve of us. Isn't it odd that it's twelve? It's such an ordinary number. One would have expected a prime. Or a ten, honestly."

"How long has it been?" said Kenji, from behind them.

It was the sort of question that seems to come from nowhere and turns out to have been asked in every mind at once. There was a brief scramble. Neiman felt it pass through the ring like wind through wheat: the small, stupid, animal need to be told what time it was.

"Fifty-one minutes," said Beatrix, without hesitation, "and some seconds. I began at the first sound. The humming."

"Forty-five," said Idris. "Roughly. Give or take. The interval's very wide — call it thirty-five to seventy, and I'd say the middle's a little heavy, I'm sorry, I've no confidence in my own —"

"Fifty," said Lucian. He had been staring at the middle distance and tapping one finger against his knee. "Fifty-five? I've been thinking in tempo. I started at sixty-six, I think, I hum at sixty-six when I'm — when I'm scared. But it drifted. When the girl talked, it went up. So it's — it's, um. Fifty. A long andante."

"Sixty-three," said Kenji. He had two fingers on his own wrist and looked faintly embarrassed. "By my pulse. Though I ought to say that my pulse is a poor guide. It ran fast, at the beginning. I would put it at somewhat less."

"So that's forty-five, fifty, fifty-one, and sixty-three," said Vivienne. "We have a range. We don't have a time."

"We have twenty-three hours, eight minutes and forty seconds," said Beatrix.

"Nobody asked for the seconds."

"I don't offer them for the asking."

"Twenty-three hours," said Sophia, and let go of Neiman's sleeve to throw both arms up, with a happy despair, as though it were a great weight and a great gift. "That's so long! That's such a long time! That's a whole day of just talking, and I'm so good at that. I'm so, so good at that. Isn't that funny? Neiman, isn't it funny? It's like it knew."

"Yes," said Neiman. "That should be plenty."

The white went on, uninterrupted, in every direction, without a shadow to divide it. Nothing in it kept time. Nothing in it kept anything. Only the twelve of them sat there, in an irregular ring, arguing gently about how long they had been, in a place where there was, for the moment, no way to be wrong.