Morning arrived on its careful feet. The LED made a thin stripe across the table like a quiet appointment. Kael woke to the ledger and to the small noises of a room that was beginning, reluctantly, to be a house. Mira slept on her side with the knife tucked under the fold of blanket as if that were a normal pillow. Nox was already up, rolling his shoulders like doors roll on hinges that have learned manners. Renn guarded the corridor angle and pretended he did not enjoy the job.
"We do not need to be brave," Kael said.
"We need to be correct," Mira answered, voice sleep - rough and certain.
Nox: "And sturdy."
Renn: "And on the dots."
[System: Day Plan] - Mission A: write House Rules v0.1; teach the Dot Game to the child; assign watch rotations with Isa and Tom. - Mission B: build Periscope Mk I (mirror tube) for peephole viewing from offset; reduce A1 exposure. - Mission C: install Pebble Curtain microtrap at A1 jamb; audible only to us inside. - Mission D: plan silent haul of water from rooftop tank via siphon during hymn shoulder. - Observation: Blue has added TAX language and small crowns near stair mailboxes. - Reward: +1 PC for House Rules adoption; +1 PC per device (periscope, curtain) if installed; +1 PC for water haul if successful; +0.5 PC for rotation discipline.
PC available: 34.0.
Kael did not spend. He would spend discipline instead. - - - House Rules v0.1
He wrote the header in block letters and felt silly and then correct.
HOUSE RULES v0.1
1) Silence near doors and windows. No talking at thresholds. No lights to seams.
2) Dot Game: children move only on chalk dots; stop on squares; prize = story.
3) Food ritual: count out loud, then eat. No crumbs near hall. Rinse dishes mandatory.
4) Waste path: sealed bags to stairwell chute at hymn minute 3; Bar carries.
5) Proof - of - life: no entry without two details + one gesture. No exceptions.
6) Blue: do not touch, do not trace, do not name. Containment only.
7) Watch: two at hymn - one at A2 quiet square, one at RN - 4 alley mouth. Cloth tag flip.
8) Tools: return to hooks; labels face forward. If label is blank, the tool is lost.
9) Court: disputes wait until Quiet Court. No fighting inside sentences.
10) Doctrine: we repeat morning and night. We correct instead of cry.
He read the rules aloud with the same voice he used for hinge torque. He did not ask for votes. Houses are not democracies when the ceiling is tired.
Mira listened without flinching. "Add: Thread rules children," she said.
"Sub - rule 2a," Kael wrote. "Thread decides when dots move."
Nox pointed at waste path. "Add a second route if stair sings wrong."
"2b," Kael wrote. "Alternate chute at down - two."
Renn lifted a hand. "Proof - of - life gesture: two taps, half, two taps, then a breath."
"5a," Kael wrote. "Gesture codified."
Isa and Tom arrived as the ink dried. They stood inside the line with their hands visible. Isa read without moving her lips; Tom read with his lips and looked proud of remembering the numbers shaped like other numbers.
"A house is a machine," Isa said.
"It is a ledger with curtains," Kael said.
[System: House Rules]
v0.1 adopted and posted (interior). Roles acknowledged.
+1 PC. - - - Dot Game
The child arrived with Aunt Mara, who moved like steps were expensive. Mira knelt and drew five dots in a small circle on the kitchen floor. "Game," she said. "You step only on dots. When I make a square, you freeze until I say the word. The word is door."
The child nodded and began with the earnestness of people who have never needed to lie. He stepped dot to dot, knees soft, arms out like a wire - walker. Mira added a square at his third step. He froze, eyes wide and delighted by the power of stopping. Renn timed his stillness as a joke and then realized the number mattered. "Three seconds," he murmured. "We can train to five."
"Prize," Mira said. She told him a story about a rope that held a door shut and a wind that wanted to learn grammar. The rope won by being boring. The child clapped because boring had never looked so heroic.
Aunt Mara exhaled like a person who finally believed the air was a place. "Thank you," she said to any noun that would take gratitude. Kael accepted on behalf of structure.
[System: Child Protocol]
Dot Game taught. Effect: - random sprints, +stillness on command. - - - Periscope Mk I
Kael disliked that the peephole forced a face near the seam. So he built an offset eye. He cut a cardboard tube from a roll that had once been generous with aluminum foil. He glued two square mirrors at 45 - degree angles inside the tube and taped the ends with painter's tape to kill glare. He mounted the tube on a bracket made from a shelf scrap, so that the lower mirror could see the peephole from a right angle and the upper mirror returned the view to someone standing a pace back and left.
He tested by having Nox raise three fingers at the far end of the hall. Through the periscope, the fingers looked like compliance.
"Offset eye," Kael said. "We no longer offer our face to the seam."
Mira peered and smiled. "We teach the door to bend sight."
[System: Craft]
Periscope Mk I installed. Effect: - exposure at A1; +angle awareness.
+1 PC.
He drew a little diagram in the ledger, labeled MIRROR HERE, MIRROR THERE, and wrote: do not clean mirrors with bleach, idiot. - - - Pebble Curtain
He threaded a string of small washers and pebbles behind the door jamb on invisible tacks, low and close, so that any interior draft from a sudden open would tickle them and whisper a sound only the house would hear. He tuned the spacing until the whisper sounded different from all previous whispers.
Mira closed the door a hair and listened. "I can hear the wrongness," she said. "Good."
[System: Microtrap]
Pebble Curtain installed (interior - only indicator).
Effect: +interior alert on forced entry.
+1 PC. - - - Blue TAX
On the stair mailboxes below, crude blue letters had appeared beside three apartment numbers: TAX. Underneath, a line of crowns like a border on a bad poster. Someone had taped a square of paper to one box with two beans glued to it, like a sacrament of hunger.
Tom spat sideways, angry for once. "They are trying to collect from ghosts," he said.
Isa's face went flat. "It is a protection racket for a god that does not exist," she said.
"We do not tithe to paint," Kael said. "We pay only to physics." He drew the message in the ledger because ledgers record sins too. He added a note: do not remove yet - removing is conversation.
Renn frowned. "What if people pay because they want to be left alone?"
"Then they will be alone while they pay," Kael said. "We will not bless it."
[System: Observation]
Blue TAX markings. Classification: coercive. Action: observe; counter later with receipts of a different kind (water, pins). - - - Water from the sky
The rooftop still had a tank, horizontal and dented, the kind that believed in gravity as a job. Kael sketched a plan: siphon to fill bottles with minimum sound. He measured hose from the corner store stockroom: one length, plastic, kinked but honest. He tested with a bucket inside first because stupidity is expensive on roofs.
"Thread," he said. "You count steps. Scout, you watch the door and blue. Bar, you carry hose and muscles. Latch, you make water obey."
They moved at the hymn's nineteen shoulder. The hymn ear showed a wide envelope like a door God had propped with their foot. The roof smelled of tar and apology. Blue arrows had been painted near the hatch, pointing to the sky like a child had decided heaven needed signage. Kael ignored them.
He primed the hose with a mouthful of water, spat, grimaced, cursed the taste of old plastic, then dropped the far end into the tank and the near end into a crate of bottles. The siphon took, gurgled, settled. The bottles filled with a sound like a careful brook.
Nox watched the hatch. Mira watched the ladder. Renn watched the horizon and saw a line of smoke learning to be a column far to the south. Isa and Tom stood at the stair square below, cloth tag flipping if anything learned to climb.
They took only what hands could carry without making shoulders hate them.
[System: Haul]
Water siphoned silently during hymn shoulder. RN - 5 (roof hatch trip) added: loop of thread across hinge.
+1 PC (haul), +0.5 PC (new node).
Back inside, Aunt Mara cried again because the bottles looked like a week she could understand. The child tried to name the bottles and failed and then asked if he could draw faces on them. "Later," Mira said. "When we invent a safe pen." - - - Rumor with a stripe
Isa brought a rumor like a sparrow in her pocket. "Down - four says a crew with yellow stripes on their sleeves is making lists at the old clinic two blocks west," she said. "They take names and arms. They talk about ration lines that exist only if you do the thing their voices want. They hit people with logic until logic makes bruises."
Nox's mouth went hard. "Brass Street Crew," he said. "They used to run a scrap yard. Now they run nouns."
Kael wrote the rumor but did not let the rumor become law. "We prepare a policy," he said. "If stripes come, we parley at the edge with rules and store names for later. We teach them we are a wall, not a door."
Mira added, "And we listen to their hymn. Every crew sings."
[System: Threat Forecast]
External faction (Brass Street Crew) rumored nearby. Action: draft outside parley addendum; do not reveal nodes. - - - Blue frames multiply
Near A2, the blank blue frames had multiplied like mold after shower steam. Some now contained stick figures kneeling. Some contained a handprint. One showed a rectangle over small figures again. Someone had added a smear of food where a mouth would be. The smell was old fish. Kael experienced a brief and powerful wish to set the wall on fire and did not obey it.
Mira gagged once, then set her jaw. "Containment box?" she asked.
"Not all," Kael said. "We box only the one near our quiet square. The rest we mark with X that looks ashamed." He did it, fast and precise, then left. He did not want the frames to think they were in a conversation.
[System: Counter - mark]
Selective containment; ashamed X for others. Effect: morale protected; message minimized. - - - Periscope earns its keep
At dusk the double blink came on the LED without the click. Mira and Kael slid to the periscope. Through mirrors, the hall gave them a gift: a man crouched by A1, face near the seam, paint brush in his teeth as he worked at something on the doorjamb with his hands. Blue stained his fingers. He was humming off key, which is a language too.
Kael did not open. He did not shout. He unhooked the Noise Pot line and pulled a sharp tug toward the stairwell mouth. The can rattled. The man flinched, paint brush falling, and scuttled away on hands and feet with the speed of someone who had rehearsed cowardice. He vanished toward the stairs. The periscope returned the stilled hall.
Mira whispered, "I hate that I wanted to stab him."
"We stab habits, not men," Kael said.
[System: Device Use]
Periscope observation prevented direct contact; decoy diverted threat. +discipline.
He wiped the jamb with the bleach ritual and the water after. He wrote BLEACH/WATER/VEIL++ in the margin again because repetition is one of the ways you tell the world to sit in the right chair. - - - Quiet Court: machines and people
They convened later with the LED stripe thinner to save cells. Kael read the day in sentences that tried to be modest and failed, a little, because he liked when machines obeyed. - House Rules v0.1 adopted; Dot Game taught; watch rotations written (A2 quiet square, RN - 4). - Periscope Mk I built; face no longer offered to seam. - Pebble Curtain installed; interior - only indicator added. - Water haul via siphon succeeded; RN - 5 at hatch added. - Blue TAX observed; no contact; frames multiplied; selective containment executed; jamb tamper repelled via periscope + decoy. - External rumor: Brass Street Crew; parley addendum drafted. - Doctrine: repeated.
[System: Audit Complete]
+1 PC (rules), +1 PC (periscope), +1 PC (curtain), +1.5 PC (haul + RN - 5), +1 PC (discipline), +1 PC (doctrine).
Total PC: 39.5.
Advisory: approach 40 PC. Consider Energy T1: Battery Banks soon for stable power; or Engineering T1: Springs & Cams for compact traps; or Bio/Chem T1: Antiseptic Gel if supplies appear. For now: sleep.
"Permission to add a rule," Mira said, already flipping to a clean line.
"Granted," Kael said.
"Rule eleven," she said. "When we want to write on walls, we write in the ledger instead."
Kael wrote it, smiling with his mouth shut.
The child, who had listened like children listen to important lies, raised a hand small as a dot. "Rule twelve," he said solemnly. "We win when we are boring."
Nox laughed once, a quiet bark that did not bother the hall. "He is not wrong."
Renn leaned his head against the wall and spoke to it like a dog he wished to befriend. "We are going to make you very bored," he said. "You are going to hate how safe you make us."
Kael set his palm on the ledger. "We do not need to be brave."
"We need to be correct," they answered.
Outside, TAX letters tried to invent a tithe. Frames tried to invent a church. A man with blue fingers tried to invent a ritual and failed to impress a periscope. The hymn map waited for tomorrow. The siphon slept in a coil like a promise. The house kept its rules, and the rules kept the house.