Reference

Act One at a Glance

One page to have open while you run it.

The shape

Light, light, then the hardest night of their life. Two social beats and one short successful crossing, so they know what the job feels like when it works. Then a door starts taking measurably longer to open, and the time it takes rises.

The facts of the crisis

• Gliese 65 is the only door in the Causeway at a tight binary of flare stars.
• The twins are an eccentric pair, period twenty-six and a half years.
• The door does not close. It moves — and the Nine’s end never moves; it is the far mouth that leaves the refinery.
• It settles at Ladder: a survey post a hundred and ninety million kilometres out, with a ring in a shed that has never opened in two hundred years, sitting at the refinery corridor’s exact depth because the first crew put it there on purpose.
• Sixty-one people at Ladder: nineteen children and forty-two adults.
• Ladder has a welded roof and no hardened shelter, and the twins are closing.
• The refinery keeps its twelve thousand, its shelter and its food, and loses its only link to the rest of the species. It will be fine and it will be gone.

The disaster and the rescue are the same event.

The turn

Not how many carries can I make (four). How many of you are there (four hundred and six). The player must reach it unaided.

The numbers that do the work

Say these out loud, exactly, and never round them.

The guard

If nobody has rolled in two exchanges, the scene has stopped. Put something in front of them that only hands can fix.