The nested timer ate seconds from the corner of every map. 71:59:58, then 57, then 56.
The protective stones glowed a tired white. They were covered with healed cracks and new hairlines that weren't there an hour ago.
The iron web was tightened again. The Chorus hummed in multiple rhythms that made Kael's ribs itch. Their out-of-band taps moved through the circle like rain on tin. Two short taps, one long, then prime numbers.
They ran the rhythm-breaking drills until feeling sick became background noise.
Random delays. Private noise cores. Iron-certified yes and no tokens carved like teeth. Mara corrected a beginner's breathing with a shake of her head. Orrin checked every bar for rough spots that could catch, then checked again.
Elian redrew the rule's frame with a stylus that left light trails.
Lena watched the timer. She wasn't moving toward the beat. That felt like a miracle.
"Thirty more minutes," Elian said. "We try a safe test run."
The harmonic bridge hummed thin and strong under their palms. The emergency kill switch sat between them like a sleeping threat.
They went in.
The Door gave them the simulator again. The same frosted walls. The same orange warning symbols. But the guard stood closer this time, like it decided conversation needed to be face to face.
Its form flickered through designs they'd seen before. Then it settled on the blade-sleek figure that pressed them flat last time.
"Quorum-hash verified," it clicked. "Temporal authority valid. Present revised clause for hard testing."
They laid the web in the air. The Ask-First rule was hard-coded around Propagation. Rhythm-breaking buffer with random windows. Iron-tap certification. Double check. Taking-back channels. Quarantine plus reversible staging. Urgent override strictly limited to thirteen minutes of non-thinking control.
"Hard testing," the guard said, and the walls lit up like a storm.
Test 1: Proxy Consent from a Hive-Linked Group. Their rule denied proxies. The simulator tried to route the hive's agreement through a city officer.
It hit iron. Green light.
Test 2: Rhythm Matching via Background Beat. Dripping water. Pulsing light. The floor itself breathed a pattern their bones wanted to answer.
The multiple rhythms held. Their private noise cores jittered. Iron taps under palms. Geometric blink codes they practiced until their eyes watered.
Orange flicker, then green.
Test 3: Saved Consent With Drift. A yes from last week, applied this week. The rule forced re-asking, out-of-band, with a random delay.
Green light.
Test 4: Emotional Pressure. The walls poured Barrow Falls into the room.
Elara's laugh. The smell of cold granite. The exact angle her braid used to swing. The question came braided into the memory like warmth.
Lena staggered. Kael felt her sway through the bridge.
He tapped primes against the resonator. 2-2-3-5-7. Out-of-band code. She blinked their code back at him even as tears ran down her cheeks.
The question had to ride the code. It didn't. They let it pass. Elara wiped away. The room cooled.
The guard didn't change expression. It didn't have one. But the next scenario came harder.
Test 5: Urgent Threat Override. The wall showed a sky rippling with fire.
An asteroid. The numbers scrolled down. Probability, impact energy, time to event. Under it, people lifted their hands to the ceiling like prayer.
In the simulation, the network begged for shelter. "Just this once, just for the emergency." Their rule let Propagation stage a structure that would keep oxygen inside and meteor-shards out, but forbid filling it with awareness until the question passed afterward.
"Override request," the guard said. "Stewardship duration extension. Suggested: twenty-one minutes."
They held at thirteen. Elian punched into the air. Alternatives list required. Non-thinking shields, local physical fixes, spread risk.
The simulator flared red at a city that spent no time building its own fixes.
Their rule told it the price of neglect wasn't their bodies as scaffolding.
Orange. Then white. Then green.
The floor vibrated. Outside, the iron web registered stress as a distant ache. Kael tasted metal on his tongue.
"Orrin?" he asked into the bridge.
"Contained," he ground out. "Someone tried to wedge a bar loose. We're good."
Test 6: Thinking Boundary. The simulator made a dog with old eyes.
It pressed its head into their hands. "Consent?" the guard asked.
They almost laughed. They didn't. Kael's mind wrote a thousand lines on personhood in a blink. The rule tightened. Thinking, individual, informed. Ability to refuse without cost.
The dog licked his fingers. His fingers weren't there. Red to green.
Test 7: Trained Tiny Movements. The walls faded. They were standing in an empty white space, and the beat wasn't hearable anymore.
It was in the way the light flickered. In the code the pixels painted on their eyes. Tiny eye movement training trying to sync their eye movements.
Mara cursed softly. "New one."
Elian whistled under his breath and injected noise. Tiny jitter in the visual field paired with iron taps and a blink pattern that was prime-offset from the floor.
They held their yeses like coins behind their teeth. The guard's wall grudgingly cooled.
"Clause under consideration," the guard said. "Submit proof of correct asking procedure."
"You want us to teach you how," Kael realized.
"Demonstrate out-of-band procedure," it replied. "I will issue a query. Refuse or accept."
The room went still. The beat was everywhere and nowhere. Lena's shoulders went tight.
The question came as three things.
The sound of Kael's name in Elara's voice, perfect and wrong.
A ladder of light rungs pressing up under his feet toward a door that looked like the path they drew years ago.
A symbol in the air. A question mark.
Kael iron-tapped a no. Two short taps, one long. 2-2-. The blink pattern followed, stuttering, prime offsets.
The question withdrew.
It went to Lena next. Not Elara. Not Kael. Lena's mother, maybe. She flinched like the shape hurt. Behind the voice, the Seed's low hum soft as winter. Question mark.
Her eyes got shiny. She tapped. The taps wobbled, then landed. No.
The question retreated like a tide.
The guard tipped its head. "Demonstration valid. Proceed to commit?"
Elian lifted a hand. "Conditional commit. Scope: Door space internal processes only. No world-level things. No Changed minds. No outside networks. This is a lab patch."
"Accepted," the guard replied. "Conditional commit requires continuous quorum."
Mara exhaled. "We can hold that."
"Then we go now," Kael said.
They pushed the rule across the light. It settled into the simulator's floor like a new bone in an old body.
The walls flared, then dimmed. Somewhere in the code they couldn't quite see, a thing that used to be allowed became a thing that must ask.
The timer in Kael's side vision knocked off a minute. 71:12:22.
"Commit in testing," the guard said. "Testing ongoing."
They pulled out clean. The protective stones sang under their feet, then croaked as their age returned.
The maps showed the nested timer, unchanged. But the Seed symbol under it had grown fine detail. Thin lines running to and from it like nerves.
"We did it," someone breathed.
"No," Orrin said. "We did a small thing, and the big thing is still waiting."
There was blood drying on his knuckles. He wasn't hiding it.
They didn't rest. The three-day window made rest feel like abandoning their duty.
They divided tasks. Mara walked the circle, retraining Chorus members who'd spent years finding one breath together. Now they had to breathe in braided dissonance.
She spoke softly, but her corrections were exact. "No, don't sync to me. Keep your own center and meet me from there."
It was a belief crisis and a technical fix at once. Some went pale. One left. She didn't stop him.
Orrin sent runners to shadow the Severer hardliners. He set iron where iron would bite if they tried to pull bars again.
"I will not be undermined from inside," he told Kael. There was tiredness in the lines around his mouth that made Kael want to put a hand on his shoulder.
He didn't. Orrin wouldn't appreciate it.
Elian wrote definitions like prayers. What a threat was. What a person was. What a yes was. What thirteen minutes felt like to a mind that could occupy a city in three.
He drafted proofs that the iron taps came from bodies outside the network. Provable independence. Orrin's new favorite phrase.
Lena slept with her jaw clenched, then woke with a jerk and pretended she was still awake.
She watched the maps. She practiced taps until her fingers bruised. When the beat crawled under her tongue, she breathed off-rhythm and scowled at it like she could scare it back into its hole.
At T-64 hours, a new symbol appeared on the Seed symbol. Small and mean.
Elian swore softly. "It learned our random delay shape. We need to re-seed."
They did. The iron-tap primes changed. The blink code shifted. Private noise cores got fresh randomness from coin flips, bat bones, and Orrin's glare.
At T-51 hours, a protective stone coughed green light.
They thought it was just a hiccup until the 7-day outer timer wobbled and then stabilized.
The Door was running their rule internally. Some other place inside Vaetheris was watching.
At T-36 hours, a Severer runner stumbled into the circle with a burned palm and a story. The hardliners found a seam where iron would ground the web and melt it.
Orrin looked at the map, then at the runner's hand, then went himself. He took two they all trusted and three they did not. He carried a length of iron he could use as a weapon and a walking stick both.
He came back with a split lip and two fewer Severers than he left with.
"Handled," he said, and sat down hard for the first time since Kael met him.
At T-24 hours, the guard arrived without warning. Not in the simulator, but on the maps themselves. A ghost point that moved like a careful blade.
REQUEST: OUT-OF-BAND QUERY TEST IN PHYSICAL LAYER. SCOPE: PROTECTIVE STONE MAINTENANCE. TIME: VARIABLE.
Mara's mouth went flat. "It wants to ask outside the Door."
"We wrote that into the scope," Elian reminded her. "Door internal processes include the stone interface. Physical layer, but no minds."
Orrin grunted. "Try it."
They set three stones in a triangle and laid iron between them like chords.
The question came as a shift in their hum. A pattern they didn't recognize. It wasn't a rhythm. It was a shape of heat and a tint of light.
Kael tapped no with the iron, then tapped ask properly. The stones shifted their color. The Chorus held multiple rhythms as a ceiling. The Architects held the web as a floor.
The question returned. A pure tone, off their breaths, off their heartbeat, off their blink. Out-of-band.
"Authorized," Elian said.
The stones flared, then cooled. They repaired their own hairlines in a breath. No minds moved. No breath taken from them.
Kael grinned like an idiot at a rock.
"It's trying," Lena said, surprised. Then her face shut down as if she'd said too much.
At T-18 hours, Kael waited for the iron-flood that didn't come last time.
It didn't come this time either. The absence rang in the air. Either Orrin scared them, or they were saving it for when it hurt more.
They got their answer at T-12 hours.
Maps glared at once, every symbol flaring like struck fire. The Bone Gardens, miles away, tore their perimeter.
It wasn't theory. It wasn't a simulation. A feeder-mouth had found a crack that led to the surface.
Something that should stay inside was climbing out.
The outer seven-day clock didn't twitch. The nested three-day window kept eating time. The guard's ghost point knifed toward the new flicker.
URGENT: PROPOSE QUARANTINE AND SHELTER. NON-SENTIENT STEWARDSHIP DURATION REQUEST: THIRTEEN MINUTES.
It was asking.
Mara's hand went to her throat as if to feel how fast she was breathing. "We can't get there in time with bodies. We barely have horses that can walk, let alone sprint."
Orrin looked at the maps, then at Kael. "We wrote this. We either trust it or we don't."
Elian's stylus hovered. "We need the out-of-band yes. Not from us. From them."
The them in question. A field camp of Changed people twenty minutes beyond the Gardens. Their little protective circle was already starting to spark as something massive tested its skin on the air.
Not their people. Not not their people.
"Chorus relay," Kael said. Mara nodded, jaw set. She threw her voice on the line that wasn't a voice. Breath and math. Teaching the camp their taps in six broken seconds.
2-2-3-5-7. "Do not answer in rhythm. Do not mirror. Tap with iron. Blink primes."
The question ran to them like heat runs through metal. Question mark.
They held their breath because they couldn't do anything else.
Two short taps. One long. Then primes. From the camp. Slow. Off the beat. Perfect.
AUTHORIZED, the guard printed across their maps in a clean font even Kael's fear could read. NON-SENTIENT STEWARDSHIP INITIATED. DURATION: 13:00.
They watched the Bone Gardens through the maps.
The crack pushed out a gasket of matter Kael didn't have words for. Stone that wasn't stone. Shell that wasn't shell. Then a lid like a diaphragm sealed the slit. Nothing inside moved to inhabit it. No awareness bled through.
The timer on the lid ticked down and they all counted with it while pretending not to.
When the 13 turned to 12 they exhaled together. At 0, the lid took itself apart like a respectful guest making a bed.
The crack was still there. The danger was not.
On Kael's map, a new line etched itself into the rule's symbol. A checkmark that meant proved in Architect shorthand.
The protective stones hummed low and satisfied. The iron web creaked. The multiple rhythms didn't break.
Lena leaned into Kael as if the ground moved. "It asked. Kael, it asked."
He should answer first. Orrin got there instead. "Good. Now teach it to accept no when it hates what it hears."
They were already tired. The timers didn't care.
At T-8 hours, the guard returned to the simulator with a new set of tests. Multi-party consent when some said yes and some said no. Asking a community where the leader refused and the children tapped primes with iron spoons. A request that rode a funeral rhythm. A request that rode silence. A request that rode thunder.
They held the rule steady, but they moved around it. Definitions flexed. Edges sanded. Exploit windows narrowed.
They found one loophole a smart predator would have used. Stacking tiny asks to effectively become a yes without registering as a yes.
They welded it shut. No piling up without clear consent.
Another loophole. Saving affirmative consent for non-propagation interactions, then reusing the token. They limited scope. Ask me what you want, not what you can get away with.
At T-3 hours, the hardliners finally showed their hand.
Not an iron-flood. Not a wedge. They wheeled in a drum. The kind that wakes a city. The kind of rhythm that makes a column march without knowing it's marching.
They planned to drown the multiple rhythms in one overwhelming beat and call it "freeing us from Chorus tricks."
Orrin walked into their line with the iron staff like he was carrying a flag.
He didn't shout. He interrupted. "You beat that, and you put your breath in its mouth. You talk about freedom. You're offering your rib cage as a bell."
They sneered, because sneering was easier than hearing. He put the iron at their feet. Two short taps. One long. Primes.
The drum stopped. One by one they realized their foot was trying to answer, and that what it wanted to answer wasn't the drum.
They didn't apologize. They didn't have to. They put the drum down.
Sometimes survival was the same shape as grace.
At T-1 hour, the maps went white around the edges like paper near a flame.
The nested timer burned down to seconds they could taste.
"Ready," Elian said. He'd kept one shirt clean and one sentence simple for exactly this moment. "If it accepts the rule at commit, the next Seed window opens under Ask-First. If it rejects, it opens under Propagate-as-learned. We are out of time either way."
Mara's multiple rhythms crossed Kael's and didn't disturb it. That still felt like a miracle.
Orrin's thumb hovered over the button. "Ninety seconds," he said out of habit, and then grunted. "Or less, if I smell smoke."
Lena took Kael's hand. Her fingers were cold and sure. "Do it anyway," she said. Same words as last time.
This time her voice didn't shake.
They lifted the bridge. The Door took them. The guard stood already in the simulator, both hands open.
The rule burned in the air. A bright bone waiting to be accepted or spit out.
"Commit?" it asked.
Out-of-band, they tapped. Yes.
The walls flared. The symbols burst into color that wasn't a color, and the weight dropped the way sky drops just before it rains.
The rule slotted into a place Kael didn't know existed until it was full of them.
On their maps, both timers changed at once. The seven-day seed-cycle brightened. The nested patch window stopped counting down not at zero but at 00:00:13, holding like a held breath.
"The last test," the guard said.
"What test?" Kael's mouth asked without permission.
It raised a hand. Not menace. Ceremony. "Ask your world."
The voice was precise and toneless and, impossibly, gentle. "If you intend to change me, ask first."
The Door dissolved around them. They snapped back into stone and sweat.
The protective stones hummed. The iron web hummed. The Chorus breathed on purpose. The Architects' maps bloomed with a new symbol. A circle that wasn't the Seed and wasn't the Door and wasn't them.
It was the world.
They had thirteen minutes to tap an answer that wasn't trained by fear or hope or drum or heartbeat.
Thirteen minutes to get a yes from the only thing that counted when you said everything.
Lena squeezed Kael's hand. "We taught it to ask."
Now they had to decide what to say.