Morning crouched outside the blackout cloth and did not knock. Kael woke to the power box's soft hum and the ledger already open inside his head. Mira sat up with the knife and the headlamp resting on her knees, eyes tracking the stripe of light across the table like a cat tracks sun. Nox stood and rolled his shoulders until his back remembered how to be useful. Renn slept lighter than anyone should and woke as soon as Kael breathed in to speak.
"We do not need to be brave," Kael said.
"We need to be correct," Mira answered.
Nox: "And heavy where it matters."
Renn: "And on the dots."
[System: Day Plan] - Mission A: install pendulum stop and crawl - trip below chest arc at A2; rehearse resets blindfolded. - Mission B: unlock Signal Analysis to read the building hymn and write a time - intensity map. - Mission C: construct Hymn Ear Mk I (microphone - > amp - > LED bar) to visualize choir events. - Mission D: draft Parley Protocol for outsiders at corridor edge; test with controlled contact only. - Observation: Blue frames proliferating near A2; arrows now include dot - in - circle marks. - Reward: +1 PC for trap upgrade complete; +2 PC for Hymn Map creation; +1 PC for successful parley without breach.
PC available: 30.0.
Tier - 1 options noted yesterday.
"Today we stop guessing at songs," Kael said. "We count them."
He selected the node he had been refusing out of discipline and now granted out of duty.
[System: Knowledge Acquired]
Information T1: Signal Analysis installed.
Effects: +frequency discernment, +pattern logging, +noise filtering on improvised sensors.
PC remaining: 27.0.
Mira tilted her head. "You look like you can hear numbers."
"I can see sound," Kael said, and did not apologize for liking the sentence. - - - Pins, strap, and a line for knees
At A2 the pendulum hung like patience on a rope. Kael screwed a cleat into the wall and stitched a leather strap from a belt scrap to catch the brick bundle at the end of its arc and keep it from rebounding into friendly ribs. He tested by letting the mass swing and thump into the strap. The leather took offense and then agreed to its role.
Below the chest arc he set a second trip line at ankle minus two fingers, for crawlers and cowards. He chalked the knot and scuffed dust across the line until it was a rumor. He adjusted the interlock pins: long, short, in; long, short, out. He closed his eyes and rehearsed until his hands told him what they were holding.
Nox practiced blindfold. Once with Kael whispering sequence. Once with Mira tapping the correct pin with the back of a knife. Once with nobody saying anything and only the reed tin to tell him if the door breathed wrong. He passed all three and grinned like a man who likes being heavy in the right place.
Renn timed the resets and called them out. "Six seconds. Five. Four and a half. Good."
[System: Trap Upgrade]
Pendulum stop installed; crawl - trip added; interlock tuned; blind resets rehearsed.
Effect: friendly fire reduced; coverage improved.
+1 PC. - - - What sound looks like
Kael built the Hymn Ear from patient trash. He dissected a cheap earbud to steal its tiny microphone, soldered it to a pocket amplifier board pried from a toy, and fed the output to a strip of scavenged LEDs through resistors that were chosen not because the book said so but because the light did not shout when he used them. He taped the assembly to a meter stick so it could read air without leaning too close to mouths. He powered it from Power Box Mk I and added a small dial made from a screw and stubbornness.
The first test turned the LED bar into a shy river when he spoke. "Good," he said. "Now the building."
They carried the stick to the stairwell landing at the hour, and when the pipes began their vowel, the LEDs woke in order, slow, then faster, then holding in a band that Kael wrote down as if he could pin music to paper. He did it again at midday. He did it again at nineteen. He watched the shape change with temperature and with wind and with the distant success or failure of fires they could not see.
He drew the shapes in the ledger and labeled them with a plain name: hymn envelopes. He wrote timings. He wrote peaks. He wrote the second harmonic that hid in the pipe like a secret and told him when the vent stacks farther away cooperated.
Mira watched the lights crawl and said, "It looks like breathing that forgot it was breathing."
"Or a lung for a city," Nox said.
"Or a metronome telling us when to hide sins," Renn added, eyes bright with the joy of playing with the safe dots in any language.
[System: Hymn Map]
Signal envelopes captured at 07:00, 12:00, 19:00; harmonics tagged; variance logged.
Effects: +cover prediction, +decoy timing.
Kael drew a small calendar and marked the places where the hymn's shoulders were tallest. "These are the minutes when we move heavy things," he said. "These are the minutes when the wall is allowed to bite loud." - - - Blue makes a road
At A2, a path of blue dots had assembled itself since yesterday, knee height, every two hand spans, marching from the stair throat down the corridor past their devices and toward the far fire door that almost nobody used. At each dot a small circle with a point in the center had been added, as if to say: go here, be here, be counted here.
"Road," Renn said quietly.
"Trap," Mira corrected.
Kael crouched and measured distances because distances do not lie even when stories do. "Two hand spans is human when you are not thinking," he said. "We think when we walk."
Nox grunted. "If they make the dumb walk one way, we will make the careful walk another."
Mira set two faint wait squares that intersected the blue path at bad angles, so any rushing feet would be asked polite impossible questions.
[System: Observation]
Blue pathing: dot - in - circle repeated every 45 to 55 cm at knee height.
Classification: shepherding marks.
Action: ignore; overlay quiet counter - grammar. - - - Parley Protocol, drafted
Kael wrote PARLEY at the top of a page and left room around the letters to breathe. He felt silly making a ritual for talking. Then he did not feel silly because talking without a ritual makes people bleed.
Rules: - Parley position: corridor edge within sight of RN - 3; never on our thresholds. - Proof - of - life mandatory: two details from earlier encounter or one detail from our language (dots, squares) that only a taught person would know. - Arms down but present. Pipe visible. Knife sheathed. - No gifts through doors. Leave objects at the line; step back two paces. - Vocabulary: We, not I. Doctrine repeats if asked who we are. - Exit trigger: if blue is within three paces of the talker or if blink tells a lie, parley ends.
He wrote a small script not of words but beats. Introduce constraint. Offer time, not food. Offer rules, not trust. Offer a job, not safety. He labeled the job: Watcher at the stair mouth during hymn. Payment: a cup of boiled water after audit. It felt like a bad wage in a bad world and also like the right wage in the only world available.
[System: Protocol]
Parley v0.9 written. Effect: +consistency in contact; reduces impulse decisions. - - - The neighbors from down - two
Late afternoon, two figures appeared at the far end, holding a white T - shirt on a broom handle like a flag of someone else's idea. They stopped at the blue path and did not step on it. They had learned. Or they had been lucky. One was a woman in her forties with cheekbones too sharp for comfort and hair cut by necessity. The other was a man in his twenties with a bandage that had decided his head was a hill it needed to hold.
Mira lifted her hand. Two fingers. Wait. Then she made the small gesture for move to square. They did not understand the square gesture but they did not move either. Good. Kael respected correct ignorance more than busy comprehension.
"Parley," the woman said, voice low but firm. "We talk at your line. We do not enter. We do not ask to. We ask for time."
Kael walked to the edge of RN - 3 with Nox a step behind and left and Mira three steps back and right. Renn stayed deep in the angle with the hymn ear stick like a spear of light that never lit.
"Proof - of - life," Kael said.
The woman nodded at the paperclip bell. "You move the clip two centimeters every time blue touches it," she said. "You wiped the knob with bleach yesterday and water after. It smelled like tired laundry on the floor."
Good. He did not smile. "Acceptable," he said. "You are?"
"Isa," she said, then pointed to the man. "Tom."
"We are," Kael said. "We are Thread, Bar, Latch, and Scout. We will be Choir later. We can be We without names."
Isa's mouth twitched. She did not like being refused the grammar she preferred. She accepted the grammar she got. "We are from down - two," she said. "We keep doors closed. We want to keep them closed better. We saw your shelf teach a fast man how to be slow. We approve."
Tom blinked a lot. "We approve," he repeated, testing the word and keeping it because it did not cut him.
"We can teach hands to hold pins and feet to step on dots," Kael said. "We do not teach for free. Payment is time at the stair during hymn. Watchers. Two minutes. We need eyes like fences."
Isa nodded without pretending indignation at the price. "We can fence. We bring no blue. We do not touch blue. We left a child with Aunt Mara behind a double lock. We want to return to a child who has learned to breathe still." Her voice almost cracked on child. It did not. It learned a different vowel instead.
"Proof - of - life detail," Kael said. "Square." He tapped a chalk square near his foot.
Isa looked down, considered, then lifted her foot and hovered over the square without stepping into it. "Square is a verb," she said, testing his language. "It means wait until the room agrees you are part of it."
Kael nodded. "Acceptable."
He set the payment on the line: a cup with boiled water and a strip of cloth taped to the handle that read WATCH on one side and DONE on the other. He gestured to a point seven meters away. "You stand there during hymn. You flip the cloth when the landing is clear. You go home. Tomorrow we teach pins."
Isa exhaled like a person who had been holding a word in her mouth too long. "Deal," she said. She left the white shirt on the floor as if shedding an unnecessary grammar and backed away with her hands visible and her pride intact.
Tom stared at the blue path on the wall and spat carefully away from it. Mira almost smiled.
[System: Parley]
Contact: Isa, Tom (down - two). Trade: watch duty for instruction. Door discipline preserved.
+1 PC.
"People," Nox said after they were gone, like he was not sure if the word annoyed or pleased him.
"Numbers," Kael corrected gently. "We add them or we do not." - - - Choir reveals a second key
The hymn at nineteen came with a surprise. The LED bar on the Hymn Ear wrote a broader shoulder than at noon, like the pipe was holding notes it had never held. Kael stepped closer and the bar doubled in amplitude for a breath and then settled. He held his own breath and watched again. When he backed up three paces, the amplitude changed again, not with distance but with position relative to the elbow of the stair rail.
He realized it at once and hated that it was elegant. The geometry of the stair amplified a narrow frequency when you stood in the place a person would stand to look down. A watcher at the rail became a tuning fork, their chest cavity and the metal combining to make a little local choir. The listener variant might be listening for people making the stair sing wrong.
"Squares matter more," Kael said softly. "If we stand on the square, we do not make the wrong note."
Mira marked a faint square at the place where the amplitude stayed flat. She underlined it with dust until the square felt like a seat.
[System: Discovery]
Resonant position at stair elbow increases hymn amplitude.
Action: add square at neutral node; teach watchers to stand there only.
He wrote HYMN MAP v0.2 and drew a little stair, a little person, and a shaded zone labeled QUIET NODE. He did not like calling it quiet. He liked calling it correct. - - - Blue replies to the map
In the hour after they drew the quiet square, a new blue mark sprouted just above it: a dot inside a circle. It glowed ugly in the headlamp beam. The mark was even placed so if a watcher stood wrong, their shoulder would smear it.
Mira hissed. "It is trying to pull people out of the quiet square."
Kael drew a rectangle around the dot and wrote NO in tiny letters at the bottom edge, not to argue with blue but to remind their own hands. "We teach our watchers to feel where the square is even if someone fingerpaints lies."
Nox murmured, "Fingerpaint lies. I like that."
Renn grinned, sudden and young. "My teacher used to say that about essays."
Kael almost smiled. "Good teacher." - - - Quiet Court: maps and mouths
They ate in the stripe of the LED and read the day. Isa and Tom had stood their watch during hymn, cloth flipped from WATCH to DONE with a neat little confidence that Kael admired against his will. The pendulum had not needed to speak. The shelf had not needed to drop. The wall bite had not needed to argue. Quiet had worked.
Kael read the audit. - Pendulum stop installed; crawl - trip added; blind reset rehearsed (pass). - Signal Analysis unlocked; Hymn Ear built; hymn envelopes logged at three hours; quiet node discovered at stair elbow. - Parley Protocol drafted and executed with Isa and Tom (down - two); watch trade accepted; proof - of - life used. - Blue pathing escalated in A2; counter grammar overlaid; box around new dot at quiet square. - Light Discipline maintained; Bell - Light blinked once on tamper, hardware rotated. - Doctrine: repeated.
[System: Audit Complete]
+1 PC (trap upgrade), +2 PC (hymn map), +1 PC (parley executed), +1 PC (discipline), +1 PC (doctrine).
Total PC: 32.0.
Advisory: With 32 PC, consider Energy T1: Battery Banks or Engineering T1: Materials Fatigue. Risk: scope creep. Suggest: consolidate - teach Isa/Tom pins under Thread supervision before expanding domain.
Mira lifted a hand. "Permission to be Choir," she said, shy and not shy.
Kael looked at her, then at the LED bar, then at the drawing of the quiet square. "Choir listens to rooms," he said. "Thread sees lines. You can be both when you are not tired."
"I am always tired," she said.
"So is the city," Nox offered. "We are learning to make it sing on our sides."
Renn yawned and tried to hide it and failed. "We do not need to be brave," he said, almost to the table.
"We need to be correct," Mira answered, and the light flickered once as if applauding.
Kael closed the ledger with his palm on its cover and felt the pressure of the day pass into the wood. Outside, the blue dots waited for shoes that would learn the wrong pace. Down the hall, a square waited for a watcher who would obey its silence. In the stair, the pipe planned its next vowel. The pendulum rested. The shelf pretended to be a shelf. The wall kept its teeth hidden like a polite predator.
Inside, four people and two future neighbors counted themselves and did not spill. The hymn map on the page looked like a city that wanted to be understood. They would make it be understood.