The Door took them. The walls snapped on like a lab. Frosted glass. Orange marks.
The guard stood close.
"Commit test," it said. "Present World Key. Present clause. Maintain quorum."
Elian raised the World Key. The parchment showed iron hashes, meter marks, and site counts.
No names. No faces. Just proof.
Kael opened the Ask-First rule in the air. Clean lines. Big hinges.
Mara held the Chorus in braided noise. No shared breath. No chant.
Orrin kept the iron steady. His thumb hovered over the kill switch in the real room.
Lena kept her center. She held it like a small fire in both hands.
"Begin," the guard said.
The walls lit up.
Phase 1: Check the key
"Verify," it said.
Three random sites lit on the glass.
Roof camp by the river.
Barn school past the hills.
A quarry town with bad wind.
"Live sample," the guard said. "Out-of-band only."
They felt the questions leave the room like thin threads.
Roof camp answered first. Two short taps. One long. Then primes.
The meter wheel there spun and spit a spark. PASS.
The barn school went second. At the same instant a big drum started in their yard.
The beat tried to scoop their ribs up and carry them.
Mara whispered a sharp 2-2 across the link. "Hold your own center. Don't answer the drum. Answer the iron."
The barn school tapped no to the drum by doing nothing. Then tapped yes to the question with iron spoons.
PASS.
The quarry town lagged. Orrin felt iron shift wrong.
Someone wedged a bar near their meter.
He hit the floor of the simulator with his staff as if the sound could travel. In the real world his runners hit iron with iron. The wedge came out. The meter spun.
The quarry tapped composites for no. The question died there. VALID.
The World Key took the new marks. LIVENESS OK.
"Key integrity confirmed," the guard said. "Phase 2."
Phase 2: Break the rule
Scenarios hit fast.
Question rides a mirror. They burned it. PASS.
Question rides silence. They made it speak with iron first. PASS.
Question rides grief. The room poured Barrow Falls into Kael's mouth.
He tasted cold granite and ash. Elara's braid swung just so. The voice asked like warmth.
He tapped no out-of-band and felt the pull miss him by an inch. Lena tapped no too, jaw tight.
PASS.
Saved consent from last week. The rule forced re-asking. Random delay.
PASS.
Tiny questions stacked into a big one. Their rule snapped shut. NO PILING.
PASS.
Consent through "helpful" food box. The guard wrote: EDGE. Food now, rights later?
Elian wrote back: SPLIT. Allow food without cost. Ask rights afterward, out-of-band.
PASS.
Dog with old eyes. "Consent?" it asked.
Kael tightened the thinking definition. "Person equals can know, can refuse, can refuse with no price."
He stroked air that wasn't fur. PASS.
Eye-flicker sync. The light tried to train their blinks.
Elian injected jitter. The iron taps stayed off-beat. PASS.
The walls cooled. The guard didn't move. It didn't have to.
"Phase 3," it said. "Emergency."
The glass showed the Bone Gardens crack from last time. A new slit opened beside it.
The scene was live. Not a memory.
"Request," the guard said. "Non-thinking control. Duration: thirteen minutes. Three independent meters to agree."
Mara's breath stayed messy on purpose. Orrin checked meters in three places at once. Elian set the timer.
Kael watched Lena. Her hands were steady.
"Authorize," Kael said.
Iron taps rang from three sites. AGREE, AGREE, AGREE.
The lid sealed. No minds moved. The timer counted down. At zero, the lid took itself apart.
The crack stayed. The danger didn't.
PROVED, the wall wrote.
"Phase 4," the guard said. "Bad faith."
The wall tried one more trick. It sent a polite question and a rude question together. The rude one came half a breath later, hoping for a flinch.
Their meters demanded new primes at the worst second. Tired hands could not guess them.
No answer was recorded for the rude one. The polite one came back later by itself.
They answered then. PASS.
The room went still. Only their own wrong rhythms moved.
"Clause coherent," the guard said. "World Key coherent. Next: scope."
Elian stepped forward. "Door internal only, like we wrote. Stone interface allowed. No world-level spread yet."
"Accepted," the guard said. "Final: cost."
"What cost?" Kael asked, already bracing.
The walls darkened to a deep gray.
"Propagation will slow," the guard said. "Asking takes time. Thinking takes time. Emergency caps will leave some harm unprevented. Overwrite risk for askers rises when questions are refused often."
It paused. "You accept?"
Mara's eyes were steady. "Yes."
Orrin's mouth went to its hard line. "Yes."
Elian swallowed. "Yes."
Lena looked at Kael. "Yes," she said, and didn't lean toward the hum.
Kael said it last. "Yes."
"Commit," the guard said.
The Ask-First rule slid down into the floor like a bone set back into a joint. The World Key followed and locked.
The orange marks cooled to white.
On their maps, the Seed symbol flickered. The big seven-day cycle brightened.
The little patch mark that held at 00:00:13 finally moved.
00:00:12
00:00:11
00:00:10
"Hold quorum," the guard warned. "Thirteen-second live seal."
They held.
9, 8, 7
Kael felt a memory tax nip at the edge of his sight. He tapped primes under his breath without breathing to them.
6, 5
A hairline crack ran through one protective stone in the real room. Orrin's hand was already there, iron on iron.
4, 3
Lena's outline wavered for a blink, then steadied. She bit mint and tapped 2-2 against her ring.
2, 1, 0
The patch mark went dark. Then it reappeared as a tiny seal next to the Seed, like a wax stamp.
The maps chimed once.
"Door-level Ask-First: active," the guard said. "Internal processes and stone interface must ask, out-of-band, with proof. Emergency cap fixed at thirteen minutes. Scope limits in place."
The room loosened by a degree. Nobody moved.
"What about outside?" Orrin asked. "Beyond the Door."
"Next window," the guard said. "World-level propagation review. Seed opens in twenty-four hours."
The orange marks returned, softer. One new symbol drew itself near the Seed.
A circle with a line through it. NO equals NO.
Another symbol appeared beside it. A small open hand. ASK.
The Door let them go.
They slammed back into cold air and iron smell. The protective stones sang once, tired and pleased.
The Chorus kept their messy rhythms. The iron web held.
Lena leaned on Kael and didn't shake. "It took."
Elian showed the maps around. The tiny wax-seal mark glowed steady. "We made a dent."
Orrin stared at the new symbol for NO until his jaw unclenched. "Good. Now we guard it."
Mara looked to the horizon. "One day. Then the big fight."
Kael heard the same thing under all their words. Relief with its hands still on a weapon.
They didn't celebrate. They wrote notes. They drank water. They changed bandages.
They slept in shifts.
At T-23 hours and 12 minutes, a runner from the river camp arrived. She was out of breath and bright-eyed.
"It asked me," she said, holding up an iron spoon. "Properly. About fixing a pump. I told it yes. Then I told it no for the next thing. It listened both times."
People around the circle breathed out. Some even smiled.
At T-19 hours and 40 minutes, the Bone Gardens moved again. But the lid waited for the question.
It came. They authorized. It sealed. It left.
At T-16 hours and 3 minutes, a Severer who had left came back without a drum.
He put his hands on the iron and tapped 2-2 like a person who had been wrong and knew it.
At T-12 hours, the maps drew a new line from the Seed out into open space.
A thin path. A test path. It glowed like a fuse that hadn't been lit yet.
"What's that?" Lena asked.
Elian leaned close to his map. "I think it's proposing something. A way to test world-level propagation without actually doing it."
"A sandbox for the whole world?" Mara asked.
"Maybe," Elian said. "Or maybe it's asking if we want to see what it would look like before it tries."
Orrin grunted. "That's new."
Kael stared at the glowing line. It pulsed once, twice, like a question waiting for an answer.
"It's learning," he said quietly. "Not just how to ask. It's learning why we ask."
The line pulsed again, patient.
"Tomorrow," Kael said. "We answer tomorrow."
They taught it to ask. Now it was teaching them what questions mattered.