Morning came cold and honest.
The big timer read 4 days, 19 hours. The little patch mark stayed at 00:00:13 like a nail in wood.
They moved.
Elian built "ask boxes" from iron plates, copper wire, and a little wheel that spit out random prime numbers. Each box challenged with a number you couldn't guess and recorded the taps with a scratch of spark.
He stamped them with a tiny mark the guard had accepted. LIVENESS OK.
They copied the REFUSE HERE and CONSENT HERE pages onto every map. Big letters. Plain words. No tricks.
Mara trained the Chorus in the open. No shared breath. No chant.
She walked from person to person saying, "Keep your own center. Meet me from there." She clapped off-beat on purpose until everyone's ribs itched. Then she stopped when they could hold their own rhythm without thinking about hers.
Orrin checked the iron web until his palms bled again. He hated it and did it anyway.
Lena practiced taps until her fingers bruised. Then she taped her knuckles and kept going. She chewed mint leaves to kill the urge to match the Seed's hum.
It helped.
No one talked about sleep.
Day 4
Audits started right away.
The guard sent a test to the stones. QUERY: minor repair with out-of-band ask. They answered with iron taps and blink primes. The stones mended a hairline crack and didn't touch a mind.
PASS scrolled on the maps in thin letters.
A man tried to sell "yes" tokens he carved himself. He swore they were "pre-approved."
Elian's ask box rejected them with a spark and a little pop. The box's wheel demanded a prime number. The fake token had nothing behind it.
Orrin folded the table, handed the man back his carving knife, and told him to leave. "We don't sell yes here," he said.
The man left.
A scribe tried to stack tiny asks on a street corner. Little helpful things.
"May I straighten your tent flap?" "May I hold your bowl?" "May I carry your bag?"
Their rule blocked the stack when the fifth tiny ask tried to add up to something big. The ask box flashed SCOPE ERROR. The scribe looked shocked and then ashamed.
They added a line to the CONSENT HERE page. Do not let small yes add up to big yes without saying so.
Night audits came quiet. A soft flicker on a map margin. annotate?
They burned it away with NO HIDDEN ASKS again. The rule liked that.
Day 3
The Bone Gardens stayed shut. The patch mark stayed ready.
The ask boxes went outward with runners. River camps. Roof camps. Barn schools.
They gave them rules and a spare wheel. Two short taps. One long. Then primes for yes, composites for no. No breath. No blink to room lights.
Some said yes to Ask-First all over again, just to feel the shape. Some said no, because they could.
They recorded both.
At a funeral, the Memory Halls tried a cheap trick.
The slow drum of sadness carried a request with it. People almost answered with breath. Mara stepped in and whispered a sharp 2-2 so clean it cut the drum in half.
The question died without making anyone choose while their roof was falling in.
Later, when hands were steady, the question came back the right way and they answered the way they wanted.
A hive crew hid a motor under a sleeve and tried to pass a "yes" into a cluster that didn't want to be bothered.
Elian's box popped again and sprayed a little burn on the sleeve. "Liveness," he said, and made them hold a hot rock for three breaths. Human skin remembered things machines didn't.
The box accepted the hot-rock anchor, not the sleeve. The crew left fast.
Lena relapsed for one breath.
The Seed's hum slid under her rib cage in the night and tried to borrow her inhale. She bit a mint leaf and tapped no on the iron of her bed frame until her jaw ached.
The hum retreated.
In the morning she said, "I didn't go anywhere," and dared anyone to argue.
No one did.
Day 2
Elian showed them the new piece.
He had built a way to fold a thousand clean answers into one World Key. Not names. Not faces. Just proof. Iron hashes. Meter signatures. Anchor checks. All tied together into a single quorum number that the guard would understand.
"Seed-level commit will demand this," he said. "Not just our three groups in one room. It wants the world to be in the room too, in a way."
"How big?" Orrin asked.
"Big enough to show we didn't fake it," Elian said. "Not everyone. But enough sites. Enough independent meters. Enough no mixed in with yes to prove nobody pushed."
"We can get that," Mara said. She didn't blink.
They ran a full rehearsal in the Door simulator. The guard waited with new tests.
Ask arrives during panic. They forced it to wait.
Ask rides a mirror. They burned it away.
Ask rides silence. They tapped iron anyway and made the question come out where they could see it.
The guard drew a tiny circle on their rule and wrote: EDGE-CASE: ask that gives food but seeks long-term rights.
They wrote back: SPLIT. Allow food now, ask long-term later.
It accepted the split. PASS.
By sunset, the ask boxes had sent logs from thirteen clusters. The World Key started to form on Elian's map like a slow crystal.
It looked honest. That mattered.
The Severer hardliners kept quiet, which made everyone more nervous. Two of them watched drills with their hands tucked into their sleeves like they were hiding splinters.
Orrin watched them like a wolf. He never blinked near them.
Day 1
The guard tried something new.
It sent a polite question to the stones, then sent a rude one right after. The rude one was just fast enough that a tired hand might answer by reflex.
Their box caught the flinch. The wheel demanded a new prime at the worst second. The tired hand couldn't guess it.
No answer was recorded. The rude question died in the air. Good.
A rumor started. "The Ask-First rule will make us slow in a fire."
They walked it to the Emergency Rule page and showed the line they'd written in blood and math. Non-thinking control for thirteen minutes with three independent meters agreeing. Then they pointed at the Bone Gardens lid.
People stopped saying the rumor out loud.
By evening, the World Key was almost complete. Elian checked and rechecked the iron hashes until his ears rang.
"We have more than we need," he said, surprised. "They answered."
"Some said no," Kael said.
"That proves the yes," Elian said, and almost smiled.
The hardliners finally made their move. Not a flood. Not a drum.
They grabbed an ask box.
They took it to a shack and tried to feed it a fake challenge from a paper wheel they made themselves. The box didn't care. It wanted weight. It wanted heat. It wanted the little awkward jerk of a hand that had slept wrong.
Paper wheels didn't have that.
Orrin found them because he'd already guessed which three would try and where they would hide. He didn't break bones. He broke the paper wheel and brought the box back.
"No more games," he told them. "Stand with us or go."
One went. Two stayed without saying sorry. Good enough.
They set the circle for the Seed window.
Harmonic bridge v2 in the center. Kill switch on a slate between Lena and Kael. Protective stones on all corners, humming wrong on purpose. Iron web tight as a trap. Ask boxes on low tables. Three independent meters wired with copper to nothing else.
Mara walked the Chorus into a mess of rhythms that never settled. They could talk in that noise now.
They could think in it too.
Elian rolled the World Key onto fresh parchment and sealed it with iron and salt. "We offer this. No poetry."
Lena stood tall and didn't lean toward the beat. She wore iron rings on two fingers.
She tapped once, lightly, just to show her hand would still listen to her.
Kael checked the time. 12 hours to the window. Then 6. Then 2.
The air tasted like rain that didn't fall yet.
He took Lena's hand. "Same rules. No shared breath. No mirrored heartbeat. Out-of-band only. We pull if your outline goes thin."
She nodded. "I'm here."
Orrin hovered a thumb over the button. "Ninety heartbeats. Less if I smell smoke."
Mara smiled without showing teeth. "We keep our centers."
Elian held the World Key like a tray. "Ready."
The protective stones brightened. The Seed mark on every map sharpened until it looked carved.
The air bent a little, like heat above a road.
Window opening.
They took their places. The bridge hummed. The iron hummed. The world hummed wrong on purpose so nothing else could borrow the sound.
"Go," Kael said.
The Door took them.
The guard stood in the simulator, closer than before. It looked like a blade and a book at the same time.
"Commit test at open," it said. "Present World Key. Present clause. Maintain quorum."
Elian lifted the Key. Kael spread the Ask-First rule in the air. Mara and Orrin held the grid.
Lena kept her center like it was a small fire in her hands.
The walls lit. The timer in Kael's ear started counting heartbeats out of habit.
One. Two. Three.
"Begin," the guard said.
---
They carried the world into the Seed and tried to teach it the one word that mattered: ask.