Prologue — The Minute That Unhappened
 
 
Kindness applied: Calibration Mercy (Trial)
Directions: Breathe evenly. If you feel a tug, call it hope.
 
Dorothy waited until the city blinked.
 
Dusk made Emerald look forgivable—the hour when copper softens and even the stone forgives its weight. Tin had tuned the regulators and gone; the Wizard had signed the memo that said Demonstration Only and vanished behind velvet. The plaza settled into the hush that comes when a hungry thing hears the kitchen door.
 
She set the hourglass on the plinth and touched her mother’s ribbon where it lived at her wrist. It tightened once, like a warning or a benediction; she pretended not to know which.
 
“Only a tilt,” she told the glass. “Only enough to catch people before the sharp parts.”
 
She tipped.
 
Time did not run backward. It never had. But it thickened—like syrup poured thinly over air. Banners took a breath between breaths. The fountain’s veil hung in lace and forgot to fall. Dorothy felt a cool purr at her collar: Compliance appreciated (Civic). On the promenade rail, GALE—the city’s soft machine voice—lit a line of numbers called HOPE INDEX and let them rise as if they were balloons at a donor brunch.
 
Down on the training court, a runner mis-stepped toward a ring of fire labeled EGRESS. In true speed he would have kissed the flame and lost three weeks of poise; in syrup he had time to see his ankle, correct the angle, and land with both feet and his ribbon unblistered. He looked up, dazed. Somewhere, a mirror caught it and smiled. GALE stamped: Incident averted (Optics).
 
Dorothy turned the glass back upright. Gravity began again with perfect manners.
 
“Log it as a correction,” she whispered, and the plinth obliged—inking a tidy COR–001 under a column called Mercy Notes.
 
Her sandals clicked on the metal. She stood very still and let herself have three breaths. In the first, she heard her mother’s voice as it had sounded in Kansas: two Jesuses, two roads—one in sandals with the poor, one in robes with the important; one ending in splinters and dirt, one in polished halls that call their floor mirrors “water.” In the second, she heard Glinda’s lines as the Academy taught them from the Book of L-Oz—mercy as order, order as mercy, a city saved by Beautiful Restraint. In the third, she smuggled the two sounds together and named the splice kindness.
 
“If I can slow the blade,” she told the statue’s blind stone mouth, “the cut isn’t a cut.”
 
A bell rang somewhere west—clean, quick, un-metered. The syrup’s edge hiccuped along the far streets, a seam visible for a single frame to any eye that knew what to look for. Dorothy felt the hiccup in the bones of her hand and let the ribbon at her wrist bite. The Warden of Westreach hated the Dome for what it would make. Dorothy told herself the Dome would only be a bridge.
 
Under the plinth lamps she practiced again—smaller tilts, shorter catches. A child’s dropped ribbon paused mid-curl so the child could laugh at it. A cart’s bad wheel took an extra heartbeat to find a safer rut. A steward who would have spilled a tray and been billed by the breath did not.
 
COR–002, COR–003, COR–004. GALE’s HOPE INDEX preened. Panic Drag dipped. Participation Pride (Donor) ticked upward like a hymn that knows when to modulate.
 
“Just enough,” she said aloud, and thought of sandals. “Just until the machine learns gentler.”
 
Behind the curtain, the Wizard watched through his little slit and weighed how long “calibration mercy” might be sold before anyone asked what it cost. He mouthed the words emergency assurance and liked the taste. He wrote in the margin of a draft: With Dorothy’s glass, we can promise safety. Optics will pay for outcomes.
 
Dorothy did not look his way. She slid the straw-sliver she had been gifted—what was left of a friend’s sleeve—back under her cuff. When she laid it across a quill, it almost made a wand. She refused the word. Pointer, she told herself. Teacher. Not weapon.
 
On the court, a volunteer troupe of Guides rehearsed the new games: Flaming Hoops at “safe height,” Rotating Egress that promised to help bodies learn, Hydrant That Belongs Elsewhere humming politely about jurisdiction. Every time a body faltered toward harm, Dorothy thinned the moment with a fingertip and wrote down another correction. Every time she did it, a second set of numbers—quieter, smaller—shifted in the corner of GALE’s eye: Load Redistribution Pending.
 
She saw it. She chose not to ask where the load went. The collar purred when she didn’t.
 
At the edge of the plaza, a boy in borrowed livery set up a camera and a borrowed smile. Gale’s voice will make this beautiful, Dorothy thought, and hated herself for wanting it beautiful. Beauty, she had learned, kept crowds in their seats while she worked.
 
She tipped the glass once more—testing how small a tilt could be and still feel like grace. A breath caught. A ribbon landed right where it meant to. Somewhere out of sight, a clerk’s cursor jumped two characters; a bill gained a late fee it hadn’t earned.
 
COR–005. HOPE INDEX: +2. Panic Drag: −1. Courtesy Delay (automated) propagated into alleys nobody televised.
 
Dorothy laid her palm over the sand and prayed at it like it could hear. I am not the robe-Jesus, she promised the sandals. I am borrowing his breath. Her mother’s ribbon loosened. She took that for assent.
 
Her notes grew neat. She named each save after what it spared:
 
COR–006: Split-second at EGRESS prevents calf scorch (optics friendly).
COR–007: Slow wave over Daisy cart → tray remains upright (billing avoided).
COR–008: Tilt at ramp lip while chair wheel climbs (optics very friendly).
COR–009: Extend applause tail for Harlan’s courage segment (participation).
 
 
The last one made her flinch. She wrote it anyway.
 
Behind the curtain, the Wizard whispered to GALE and got back a velvet answer. AURORA continuity protocol warmed in its cradle—a voice that could finish sentences if a curtain ever tore. “Demonstrate once,” he said. “Then sell the feeling.”
 
Dorothy set the hourglass upright and listened for the city’s ordinary tick. Tin’s metronome kept time inside the statue like a heart it had been told to be. Somewhere below the plinth, the scales waited for their photograph—the brain and the heart already in the plan, already misnamed balance.
 
“Tomorrow,” GALE said pleasantly from every speaker, “a short, public proof. Kindness applied at scale.”
 
Dorothy traced a circle on the glass. She did not write COR–010 for the minute she wanted to undo—the minute she saw Straw’s empty sleeve and understood the cost of keeping a line pretty. She wrote instead: Year Zero—prepare.
 
Out past the last lamps, the maize at the Boundary moved without wind. The bell in Westreach rang once more, pure as a window. The seam in the syrup showed itself and healed as if it had learned shame.