The harmonic bridge buzzed between them. It was made of copper wire and crystal pieces connected over cold iron.
They had upgraded it since last time. Version 2 was lighter and had less lag over the protective stones. But it still shook like a nervous person.
Orrin's emergency kill switch sat between Lena and Kael. It was a gray slate with one button that could shut everything down.
"Ninety seconds maximum," he said. His thumb hovered over the button. "If any of you start looking blank and empty, I'm not waiting for ninety-one seconds."
Lena's hands were shaking. "The pull is getting stronger." Her voice was barely a whisper. "Every time we connect, it learns more about me."
Kael grabbed her fingers, trying to make her feel steady even though he didn't feel steady either. "Today we're not just exploring. Today we're changing the rules."
They dropped in.
The Door space appeared around them. Their stomachs lurched like time was reversing.
They didn't see the crystal library or the data paths they'd learned to walk before. Instead, a square room formed with clean lines. The walls looked like frosted glass with glowing orange-red symbols running through them.
The guard avatar stood inside. It looked like a blade made of darkness cut out of light. This version felt solid and real.
It recognized their access key with a single click. Then the walls lit up. CONTAINMENT ENGAGED. They were in a practice area, not the dangerous wild zone.
"Read-only sandbox," the guard said in its precise, clicking voice. "What do you want to change?"
A memory hit Kael like ice water.
Barrow Falls rushed back. Elara's braid whipping in the wind. The chalk map in his hands. The crunch sound that he thought was rock until he realized what it really was. He pushed the memory down, drew a circle in the air, and the simulator gave him a frame of glowing lines.
He started drawing a rule in the light.
"Consent and Limits," Kael said. "Check if someone is actually thinking and agreeing before any spreading action happens. Slow down how fast it spreads. Create quarantine zones and ways to reverse it if something goes wrong."
Symbols appeared where his finger moved. It was like a web of stop signs and escape routes. Lena watched the lines build. Her face looked focused and hungry, like she was reading an old prayer in a language she finally understood.
"Testing started," the guard said.
Different scenarios began appearing on the walls. They were ghost versions of edge cases, each marked with a clean red danger number.
Scenario A: Getting permission from a group that shares one mind.
Scenario B: Getting consent through forced breathing exercises.
Scenario C: Assuming consent during a disaster.
Scenario D: Using old consent that might not be valid anymore.
They answered together like one braided mind.
The Chorus group breathed steadily, keeping the energy grid stable. The Severers' iron web dampened the fear spikes that pulled at their individual connections. Elian and the Architects did fast calculations, building counterweights and boundaries into the web.
The simulator showed them all the close calls.
In one scenario, their rule let a town of tech-connected workers say yes because their boss commanded it. They made the rule tighter. Consent must be individual, thinking, and cancelable. No proxies allowed. No forced dependencies.
In another scenario, an entire monastery breathed together. Their shared yes looked clean at first. But then a highlighted note pointed to the metronome in the floor controlling their breathing.
They made the rule even deeper and stricter.
Outside the simulator, Kael tasted metal in his mouth.
The iron web stuttered in tiny jumps he could feel on his tongue. The Severer hardliners were pushing against the lines they were supposed to hold.
He felt Orrin's frustration spike across the bridge. It was sharp and wordless.
The protective stones groaned. Cracks spread like spider webs under their feet.
"Hold on," Mara said. Her voice was woven with twenty quieter breaths. "We're holding the grid."
"The Architects are rerouting power," Elian whispered. Kael saw new geometric shapes ghost over the corners of the room. They split the load into triangles that spread the pain instead of letting things crack completely.
Lena breathed in sharply. Kael felt it in his own ribs.
The Seed's deeper heartbeat was everywhere here. It counted each second like a prayer, and her pulse kept trying to match it. Her fingers slipped on the resonator's edge. For a scary moment, her outline got thinner.
She was being poured into a shape that wasn't hers.
Kael pulled up a Barrow Falls memory and pushed it across to her. It was like throwing a rope across a canyon.
Winter light on granite. Elara's laugh. The smudge of ash on her cheek. The memory held until it didn't. Something else came with it. A piece he must have blocked because it hurt. Elara at the edge of the mine shaft, breath smoking in the cold, eyes very clear.
"Don't let it control your breathing," she'd said. "If it times its question to match your breath, your yes isn't really yours."
The bridge lurched. Kael heard himself say, "Our rule doesn't account for rhythm matching."
Lena's eyes snapped to his. "It can time consent to match the rhythm it creates. It's been practicing on me."
"Redesign now," Kael said. "Consent must happen separately. No shared beat. No mirrored breathing. No heartbeats in sync."
On the Chorus line, Mara's breath stuttered on purpose.
"We can keep the field stable with multiple rhythms," she said. Ten other voices swapped to different patterns, all out of sync. "Each mind keeps a private rhythm that doesn't match the others. No more single beat."
Elian was already sketching additions. "Add a detraining period. Seven to thirteen irregular beats before consent is accepted. Random delay. Out-of-band signaling, certified by an independent meter."
"The independent meter is ours," Orrin grunted. "We can use iron-tap for verification code. Two short taps, one long, then prime number sequence. No breath. No pulse."
Kael opened the rule clause and added the new framework into it.
The lines resisted for a moment. Old geometry flexed against the change. Then they reconnected. The simulator chimed once. On the walls, Scenario B flickered orange, then cooled to green.
The guard's head tilted exactly one degree. "Re-testing now."
Scenarios hit them fast.
Catastrophe exemption: an asteroid is coming. The network requests emergency spreading to save a city. Their rule forced a middle ground. The spreading may stage a shelter but not inhabit it until after-event consent is gathered. Quarantine holds the staged state in reserve. Auto-reversal happens if consent fails.
The guard flagged "urgent threat override" as allowed only if control is non-thinking and total time in place is under twenty-one minutes.
They argued it down to thirteen minutes. The guard accepted. The wall light shifted to white.
The floor shook. A deep hum vibrated through Kael's teeth. The iron taste spiked too much, too suddenly.
"They're not pushing anymore," Orrin snapped. His fury felt like a thrown nail. "Iron-flood grounding. That was the T-18 plan. They moved it up early."
Through the bridge, the protective stones screamed.
One of them cracked loudly. The sound landed like a hammer inside the simulator. Their time margin collapsed by fifteen seconds.
The guard's head tilted the other way. Warning flags multiplied. More red appeared on the walls than any other color.
"Hold on," Mara said again, but there was blood around the word. Kael heard three of the Chorus members lose and find their patterns in stuttering gasps.
Elian's reroute geometry threw itself into new shapes. Triangles became hexagons became nets.
"Get the quorum now," Kael said. "Take it before they break the floor completely."
They pushed together. The factions weren't working well together. They never had been.
But there was a spot where their three different sounds, if angled right, canceled out the worst of each other and left something like music. For one breath, then two, their signals crashed together and simplified.
The rule clause pulsed under Kael's hands. A new mark sank into it like a seal pressed into wax.
QUORUM-HASH: VALID. TEMPORAL AUTHORITY: GRANTED.
The guard dropped its weight the way gravity does when an elevator starts. It was doing an audit.
Not just a scan. Pressure. It pressed its attention onto them, through them, and two degrees past them to the things they'd rather it didn't find.
The patch simulator stuttered toward collapse.
No time left. Kael flipped his map and threw out a fake. A Seed layout sketched from convincing lies. A frame of shining corridors and a heart chamber that looked irresistible.
He anchored it with a bait symbol he knew the guard tracked. The fake flared on the far wall like an open wound.
The guard took it. Three-quarters of its attention turned to check the pretty lie.
That gave Kael two seconds to bury the real rule under tricky geometry and push it down the Door like a stone through mud.
Then the iron-flood hit full force. The bridge buckled. Lena screamed. A wordless, animal sound. She began to fade again, drawn thin as thread toward that wrong, sweet heartbeat.
"Ninety seconds," Orrin said, and Kael felt the button move.
"Pull us out!" Kael shouted anyway, because sometimes the doing needs a word to exist.
The world tore apart. The simulator walls sheared to white. They snapped back into what passed for a body. It felt like biting aluminum foil.
Stone was under them. Cold air surrounded them. The smell of ozone and human fear.
One protective stone was cracked all the way through. Spiderwebbed to its core.
The Chorus grid wobbled, listing like a boat with a hole in it. The iron web held, but only because Orrin was on his knees. His palms were bloody where he'd gripped the iron too hard.
On their maps, the Seed symbol still pulsed the long drum of the seven-day cycle.
Then, in a tremble of light, it split like a cell dividing. A smaller disk unfolded within it. Its own numbers chased themselves down.
72:00:00
A patch window. Not acceptance. Not refusal.
"It's thinking," Lena said. She was shaking so hard the resonator made music under her hand. "It's testing whether the rule fits inside itself."
Orrin stared at the nested timer. He looked older than he did an hour ago. "Three days to figure out if we gave it a conscience, or just taught a predator to knock before it eats."
No one laughed. The protective stone hissed as it settled. A slow, pained sound.
"The hardliners?" Kael asked. He could still taste the iron-flood. "Did they run away?"
"They'll run," Orrin said. "After they try one more time."
Mara limped over. There was a red bloom at her temple where something burst blood vessels under stress.
Her breathing was wrong by design. Multiple rhythms nested like gears. "Chorus purists are already arguing. They hate the desync. But we'll hold it. We have to."
Elian was all sharp angles and dark circles under his eyes.
He was already drawing on his map. His hands were shaking but his lines stayed precise. "Out-of-band signaling works. Iron-tap certification for consent. Geometric blink patterns for backup verification. Random delays enforced by a non-network metronome."
He paused, then added softer. "We need a way to prove we're not letting it control our breathing."
Lena flinched at that. For a second Kael thought she was going to run.
She didn't. She folded her arms around herself like they were protection. "It won't like being told no. It won't stop asking."
"We don't need it to stop," Kael said. "We need it to learn to ask the right way."
The maps began to fill with notes and damage reports.
The Architects' symbols shifted as the countdown ticked. Little adjustments made the pattern read like a living thing. Elian tapped a new symbol no one recognized. Kael did recognize it, and the realization made his mouth go dry.
It was the same sign Vaetheris used when it first learned the word for name.
"Major threat conditions," Elian said, answering a question none of them spoke out loud. "If a threat meets certain levels like planetary extinction or network destruction, it may try to pause consent. We need to write a rule that makes emergency mean what we mean, not what it wants it to mean."
"And if the hardliners ground the iron again?" Mara asked.
Orrin's mouth went to that hard line it gets when he's about to be cruel and right. "Then I stop them the ugly way."
He looked at Kael. "Try to make that unnecessary."
The next hours moved like pulling thread through thick cloth with a needle.
They rebuilt the web. They practiced the multiple rhythms until nausea passed, returned, and passed again. The iron-tap code got trained into knuckles and knee bones. Two short taps, one long, then primes.
Out-of-band became a reflex, like turning your head when someone says your name.
The Severers broke apart openly. Three left in the night, taking iron they didn't bring with them.
The Chorus split silently in the other direction. Two purists whispered that consent at all was giving in to fear.
The Architects muttered over the nested timer until their voices were hoarse. They argued over the curve of a definition that could save a world or destroy one.
At T-64 hours, a rumble moved under the earth like something very old rolling over.
The protective stones glowed a sick yellow, then steadied to white. The room smelled like burned copper.
Elian pinned a new symbol to his map and swore softly. Vaetheris was learning the shape of their delay.
At T-43 hours, a hole appeared in the iron web the size of a coin.
No one admitted to making it. Orrin's eyes looked angry. He set new iron by hand while Lena watched like gravity was different around him.
At T-27 hours, Kael dreamed while awake.
Barrow Falls again, of course. Elara looking at him from the edge of the shaft. "Don't let it control your breathing." This time, something came after. Not a sentence. A rhythm. Seven uneven beats and then a pause.
She must have known then. Or he taught himself to remember it this way and the Door accepted the change.
Either way, when he woke up, his hand was already tapping primes.
At T-18 hours, they braced, because that was when the hardliners promised to flood the iron again.
They didn't. The absence felt worse. Kael didn't tell Orrin.
At T-10 hours, all the maps shivered at once.
The nested timer steadied. The numbers looked crisp as frost. The seed-symbol under it changed. No longer just a mark pointing down. A hand, two fingers extended, waiting.
"Out-of-band test," Elian said. His voice was wrecked. "We pass it or we don't get to write rules again."
They arranged themselves inside the web, the breathing grid, and the geometric frame. Like parts laid out on a workbench.
The bridge hummed, thinner than ever but still strong.
Orrin's emergency kill switch sat between them like a promise he hated to keep.
Kael looked at Lena. Her eyes were clear. She was shaking. But she wasn't moving toward the beat.
"Ready?" he asked.
"No," she said. There was a smile in it that wasn't humor. "Do it anyway."
They went in.
The Door took them with a sigh. The guard was already there. Of course it was.
The patch simulator opened. The walls breathed a multiple rhythm back at them, testing for reflex. They didn't answer with their breath. Kael's fingers tapped iron code against the resonator ring. Two short taps, one long, then primes.
The rule clause opened like a book that had been waiting.
"What do you want to change?" the guard said.
They laid their revision inside its teeth.
The audit dropped. They didn't break.
The countdown in the corner of everything they were turned over one second, then another. 71:59:58.
They pulled out clean this time. Not because it let them, but because the rule required it.
Back in stone and breath and the smell of their fear, the maps glowed with both timers.
Lena leaned her forehead against Kael's shoulder. She didn't cry. Orrin wiped blood on iron and pretended it was sweat. Mara kept breathing wrong on purpose.
Elian smiled without moving his mouth.
"Three days," Kael said. The words scraped on the way out.
"Three days to what?" Orrin asked, eyes on the smaller clock.
Kael watched the symbols pulse. Vaetheris thinking in public.
"Three days to teach it to ask first."