The little timer froze at 00:00:13. It felt like a knife lying on the table.
"The world has to answer," Elian said. "Thirteen minutes, real time."
"We already wrote the procedure," Mara said. "We just do it. No rhythm questions. Out-of-band only."
Orrin dropped a cloth bag at Kael's feet. Inside were iron tokens carved like teeth, each stamped with a notch. "Certified yes and no markers. Give them to runners. Record the answers on the meter as they come in."
Lena didn't look at the timer. She watched her own hands so she wouldn't watch the beat.
"It's listening."
Kael nodded. "Then let's make the question clean."
They split up fast.
Mara took the Chorus group and turned the protective stones into communication towers. No singing. No shared breath. Just instructions spoken slow and off-rhythm until every safe camp and half-safe street knew the code. Two short taps, one long, then primes. No breath, no drum, no blinking to the room.
Elian seeded randomness from the non-network metronome. The seed changed every few seconds.
Only the iron meter knew the challenge. Only a human hand could answer it.
Orrin sent Severers with iron tokens to known clusters. "You bring me fakes, I break your tools," he told them.
Nobody laughed.
The harmonic bridge was idle. The kill switch sat quiet.
The question would happen on maps and stones, not in the Door.
Kael wrote the prompt in plain words. He wrote it where any tired mind could see it without falling into a pattern.
Request: Do you consent to adding "Ask-First" to Vaetheris? No propagation, no mind contact, no map writes without out-of-band consent.
How to answer: Tap the iron. Two short taps, one long. Then primes for yes, composites for no. Blink primes if you cannot tap. Do not breathe to a beat. Do not answer in chorus.
He pushed it to the stones, to the maps, to the stale air above the circle.
The world answered back in seconds.
13:00 turned to 11:59
A fisher camp by the old bridge. A kid with a bent nail tapped 2-2-3-5-7, slow and messy. The iron meter threw its challenge back. 11? The boy tapped 11.
Yes logged. Out-of-band. Clean.
A temple where the floor used to teach people to breathe as one. An elder blinked primes while staring at the corner of the room so she wouldn't match the light.
Yes logged. Clean.
A quarry camp where no one trusted anyone. Five no tokens tapped composites. The meter recorded them the same as the yes. No penalty. No rhythm.
Clean.
The question kept moving. It felt like rain on tin.
11:58 turned to 10:20
The hardliners rolled out a drum.
They hit a marching beat that wanted to climb into ribs. People on the edge of the circle flinched. The protective stones hummed wrong.
Orrin walked straight at the drum with an iron staff. He didn't swing. He tapped 2-2, loud enough to cut the air, then let the meter spit a new prime he couldn't have guessed.
His staff answered it anyway. The drummers' feet tried to follow and couldn't.
The drum stopped on its own echo.
"Your beat makes your breath easy to take," Orrin told them. His voice was flat. "Mine makes it hard."
They stood down without admitting it.
On the map, a different sabotage popped up. A hive crew tried a fake iron tap using a little motor under a sleeve.
Elian's meter rejected it. "Liveness check. Anchor, now."
The sleeve couldn't remember the weight of a winter coat or the taste of too-hot tea.
Denied. Log kept.
10:19 turned to 8:40
The question reached places Kael never mapped. A street of market tents. A roof where someone dried fish. A barn that had turned into a school because there weren't enough barns and too many children.
A woman with a cracked thumbnail tapped no and held the token up like a shield.
The meter marked it and flashed a tiny square of copper back at her. Logged.
She breathed out like that mattered more than the answer.
A man cried while he tapped yes. He didn't look at the sky or a wall.
He looked at his own hand.
Lena stood still and counted her own uneven breaths. When the Seed's low hum brushed her, she tapped no to nothing. Just to practice not being stolen.
Her hand steadied for the first time in days.
8:39 turned to 7:01
The guard tested them in the middle of their own question.
Letters tried to hide in the margins of three maps. "annotate?" in tiny type, soft as dust.
Kael burned the letters off with a bright NO HIDDEN ASKS block. He felt the rule approve.
The letters curled like hair in fire.
A memory wave hit him. Barrow Falls. The sound he once thought was rock. He didn't answer with breath. He touched iron. 2-2, then waited for the meter's challenge like it was a friend who wouldn't lie.
The prime came back. He answered. The wave broke without taking him.
7:00 turned to 5:12
"Regions?" Kael asked, eyes on Elian.
"Independent meters checked in eleven clusters," Elian said. "Three groups active in each. Chorus anchors verified. Iron hashes match. We're past minimum quorum for a world-ask demo."
"We still keep asking," Mara said.
They did.
A river town said yes with spoons on the table. A mountain camp said no with knuckles on the floor. A child blinked primes because his hands were busy holding his sister.
All of it logged. All of it clean.
5:11 turned to 3:00
The hardliners tried one more play. Not a flood. A cut.
A graycoat leaned on a weak bar to open a gap in the web so the meter seed would leak into the network and become dirty.
Orrin was there before the squeal finished. He pried the bar out, flipped it, set it again.
The graycoat looked at him like hate and fear were cousins. Orrin didn't blink.
"Walk," he said. The graycoat walked.
2:59 turned to 1:01
Elian started building the packet. Every yes and no hashed by iron. Every log signed by the meter and stamped by breath that refused to match.
He kept the names out and the proof in.
"Make the summary simple," Kael said. "The guard doesn't care about poetry."
Elian wrote: Out-of-band ask delivered across multiple sites. Independent meters verified. No proxies. Mixed answers accepted.
He added the Anchor Rule. Private sensation proved at time of ask. He added the Emergency Rule. No suspension without three-meter quorum.
"Done," he said.
1:00 turned to 0:13
"World packet ready," Mara said. Her voice stayed wrong on purpose.
Lena swallowed. She tapped a small yes into the iron just for her. Not for the world. For herself.
The meter didn't need it. She did.
Kael lifted the packet on his map like a tray. He didn't let himself think about Elara's braid or her voice or any door he'd been drawing for years.
He put the packet in the waiting symbol that stood for world and now.
"Send," he said.
The maps flared, then cooled. The protective stones hummed. The iron held.
The timer ate its last seconds down to a thin line.
00:00:01.
00:00:00.
The line vanished.
For one empty beat, nothing moved.
Then every map lit up with four words.
ASK-FIRST: ACCEPTED (LIMITED).
Under it, smaller text scrolled in a clean font.
Scope On: Door space. Map-writes. Emergency staging.
Scope Off (for now): Full world propagation. Direct mind-to-mind outside interfaces.
Next Gate: Seed window. Commit test at open.
The seven-day Seed timer brightened. It didn't reset. It adjusted by a sliver, like a muscle flexing.
4 days, 19 hours.
The little patch timer reappeared at 00:00:13. But this time it didn't count down. It stayed as a marker. Reserve.
A reminder that emergency control had rules now.
Lena let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it wasn't so small. "It took it."
"It took part of it," Orrin said. He showed his hands. No fresh blood. New scrapes. "The big test is the Seed itself."
Mara touched a protective stone. It answered with a tone that didn't match anything.
Good. "We'll keep the grid dirty. Private centers. No rhythm matching."
Elian sagged against his pack and still wrote with his stylus. "We need registries. Local meters. People trained to refuse cleanly."
Kael nodded. "We'll make a page on every map that says exactly how to say no, and a page that says exactly how to say yes. Big letters. No tricks."
On cue, the maps added a new icon. A hand, palm out. Refuse Here.
Next to it, a hand turned, fingers curled. Consent Here.
Both tied to iron and blink and anchor. Both tied to logs you could read later.
The guard's ghost point slid across their maps like a careful blade. It stopped next to Kael's and drew a tiny circle on the edge of the Ask-First rule.
Live audits will continue.
Exploit tests will continue.
Teach me better asks.
No tone. No face. Still, somehow, a promise.
Night came like a door closing.
They didn't sleep much. When they did, the question knocked once, politely, and left when no one answered.
---
The world tapped back, and the Door listened.