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+# Editorial notes
+
+## 2026-10-23 — Request before plot
+
+The original image was inspected and preserved unchanged. It gives eight distinct armed adult women in glossy black, habit-derived clothing; the central dark-skinned woman wears white headwear and gloves. Its glamour styling is reference, not a requirement to sexualize the prose or cover. The Vatican location in the written request governs setting.
+
+Before either saw an outline, the Codex keeper read the request as a collision of “modern institutional confidence, formidable religious-looking guardians, and an older contractual reality.” Its central concern: “The contracts should become intelligible enough to disturb the reader through their terms or consequences, beyond simply being ominous objects.” It distinguished the explicit public discovery from its inferred desire for choices changed by that discovery, and left protagonist, mechanism, and ending open.
+
+Claude's separate request-only reading called “the misdirect” a primary pleasure and observed: “Contracts imply terms. Payment, obligations and expiry are built into the idea.” It specifically treated “The world discovers” as a public, global revelation and cautioned against passive sisters. Its reading of the original identified the central woman's white headwear and gloves and the image's glamour clothing; the writer may adapt that clothing for the story rather than import its intensity by default. Claude used authenticated claude.ai Max, with inherited API-key authentication removed, an isolated safe-mode session, and only Read access to the copied original.
+
+These accounts distinguish requirements from reader inference; neither prescribes a viewpoint or ending. Relevant universe authority permits real local systems and former gods retaining power after worship ends. No shared fact places this story in our magicless ordinary modern time; no dates or imported recurring identities will be presumed. New story status remains non-canon.
+
+## Outline first effects
+
+The keeper identified the strongest action as the sisters' reversal from preventing access to preserving it: “Ione keeping the page and camera together is a particularly useful physical action.” Its principal objection: “Ada's refusal to promise humanity's worship does not establish her authority to surrender humanity's protection.” It asked for a credible objection before repudiation and a causal reason publication followed by wider deliberation is unavailable.
+
+Claude independently described “the guardians of a secret becoming the guardians of its disclosure, at gunpoint.” It valued the commission seal as the trigger but found the termination clause too cheap unless the prioress already knows and has deliberately rejected it. “If Sabine knew, it becomes the story.” It also questioned why a creditor freed by repudiation would suppress that clause, whether one agreement or all eight are terminated, and whether the fortress and other sisters would register. These are original observations before exchange, retained even if discussion changes them.
+
+## Outline exchange and structural repair
+
+The writer accepted that “the audience argues later” would not repair the commission's authority, and replaced collective repudiation with each heir's refusal of their own service and shelter. The keeper distinguished finding the alternative from imposing its price on others, and challenged Claude's “only difference is the camera”: public access changes future challenge but cannot confer consent. Claude agreed, then challenged treating delay as innocent; it proposed visible collection from sleepers and a prioress who knows the predators' danger. All participants received the others' actual arguments.
+
+The writer accepted the prioress's prior knowledge and proposed her reciting the end of the clause from memory. It rejected a supposedly representative emergency act: “I want to revise the underlying choice rather than invent broader emergency authority.” Asked whether a reader could reasonably side with the prioress, it answered yes and acknowledged that its original attraction to emancipation was not a verdict the prose could assume. The revision includes a lucid person choosing protected service, the current eight bearing the actual cost of another postponement, a creditor preferring compulsory worship to uncertain hunting, and a public copy enabling individual choices. Only the sleep bargain is exercised; the other originals remain distinct agreements. The prioress became Damaris to avoid confusion with established Sabine Kroll.
+
+Claude then challenged the subsidy lost by Ione's refusal, the default for undecided people, simultaneous service of all eight originals, and the oldest sister's incomplete mark. The keeper distinguished refusing to be the payment from imposing a termination, while insisting that publication is a further choice whose wisdom bodily autonomy does not settle. The writer allowed substitution, assigned Damaris the final decision against renewed secrecy, kept shelter with collection as the default, narrowed opening and transmission to the sleep original, and made the unfinished new settlement explicitly conditional and cancelled. Both readers received those choices and the complete clarified outline. Claude withdrew “free” protection because eight lives pay for it. Its useful remaining dissent is that the moral turn may belong more to Damaris than Ione; the keeper likewise asks that Damaris's change have an experienced cause. These are pressures to judge in prose, not instructions for a prescribed scene or injury.
+
+Coordinator's decision to begin drafting: the request's actual dramatic promise is a formidable guarded library breached by an international expedition, revealing humanity's original bargains to the world. The outlined siege, sealed collection, public opening of one legible agreement, collection from sleepers, and fight to transmit its complete terms make those elements cause the action. Ione's three distinct acts—refusing renewed custody, choosing disclosure, and later refusing her own shelter—give the intimate ending a cost within that global discovery. The authority and scope mismatches were repaired structurally rather than waived. The remaining question of disclosure's wisdom stays open. The draft must earn Damaris's turn, distinguish collection from hunting, and let retained service be a credible choice. The outline is ready as a provisional direction; it does not bind the prose.
+
+## Cold draft first effects
+
+The complete first draft was committed before review. A new Codex reader and a separate safe-mode Claude session saw only the complete prompt, prose, and original image. Codex valued Kem's offer and “She could not call that her imprisonment,” and experienced Damaris's final watch as care continuing after she surrenders control. Claude trusted the opening at the darned towel and called “Received” the strongest dread. Both protected Damaris's recital, the doubled thumbprint, the shared publication, and the divergent final choices.
+
+Their independent principal concern was the same. Codex: “At the precise moment Ione makes her informed choice, she possesses consequential knowledge the reader cannot inspect.” Claude: “All the concrete dread sits on one side,” because the singing child is vivid while the predators remain unquoted categories. Neither finding requires an attack scene or a complete supernatural explanation. Codex also briefly reconciled the seal/receipt condition. Claude found the global aftermath thin and the singing boy's eventual state unclear, wanted more of the supporting sisters' choices, and reported a preference against bullets reducing the Guest's grandeur. Codex experienced that wounded, commercially irritated body as more unsettling than omnipotence. Both readings of Damaris's turn are retained; readiness will not be settled by agreement.
+
+## Draft exchange and local revision
+
+The writer accepted the access diagnosis: “‘She understood’ currently asks for trust where the story's own action argues for access.” Codex distinguished its felt danger from Claude's stronger “half empty” effect, proposing one concrete consequence before the bedside and a causal history for the scar. Claude adopted that narrower diagnosis, withdrew its general roll-call and bullet objections after considering Codex's evidence, and kept a narrower question about the unmarked sisters' participation. The continuing keeper found the actual scenes fulfilled the request and protected the disparity between a woundable body and collection beyond the guns' reach.
+
+The revision quotes a prohibition against calling sleepers “in any loved voice” and drawing their bodies after their minds into places with no waking road back. Damaris now admits she personally refused, was physically reached while dreaming, and begged her predecessor to secure readmission under the suspended agreement. This resolves the scar and makes her withholding a choice she herself exercised more troubling. The bedside no longer says merely “She understood the difference”; Ione returns to the bodily-removal clause before refusing. Her first sleep remains unshown. Receipt language now matches the trigger; the three unmarked sisters wait for the pen; Kem's boy is awake at local dawn, with future obligations still present. The fourth signature was already explicit in the committed first draft; the coordinator's count question arose from a pre-handoff read and was withdrawn. The writer also removed “before signing” from a thought after Kem's conditional mark.
+
+Coordinator: accept these local repairs and retain the wounded Guest, economical supporting cast, and human scale of the aftermath. An attack would turn the final risk into an immediate verdict, while eight histories or an apocalypse catalogue would disperse attention. The child's dawn clarification gives closure without pretending publication cancels the contract. The new history preserves Damaris's own requested return and requires no reversal of personhood or shared authority.
+
+Both returning readers then read the whole revised story. Codex found that the specific danger changes the final familiar voices and that Damaris's rescue by her predecessor echoes her pulling Ione by the jacket. Claude adopted the access diagnosis over its earlier “half empty” wording, found the fear balanced, and dropped its scale concern after the dawn line. It caught a damaged reply left after the old “showed me” setup disappeared. The writer changed “And you couldn't show me?” to “You got to choose. Why didn't I?” and made Ione return Kem's phone before Agnet's request. Claude checked those local repairs in the full story and found the question now targets Damaris's withheld choice; its silence retains the pressure. No structural change was needed. The returning discussion leaves the original disclosure dilemma open and supports bringing in genuinely fresh final readers.
+
+## Fresh final first effects
+
+New Codex and Claude readers independently saw only the complete prompt, current whole prose, and original image. Codex found the promise fulfilled and the replacement offer the strongest turn, but asked why Ione refuses her own shelter tonight: “I did not quite understand what she expected to recover through refusal that she could not recover while keeping shelter and considering the choice longer.” It felt her personal refusal more as an emblem than this woman's particular need. It found no comparable physical or temporal break and protected the shared sheet movement, Kem's grievance, and final coexistence of service and refusal.
+
+Fresh Claude was moved by the ending, doubled thumbprint, and Kem's phone call, but its principal hesitation was the Guest returning the sheet: “The turning point of the whole story depends on the antagonist voluntarily handing the object back.” It could infer trust in the old custodian but did not feel that motive or the staging clearly enough while reading. It likewise wanted the Guest's fear of circulated refusal legible during the bargain, the confinement price more concrete, and the global consequence given another image. It treated supporting-sister compression and the final rifle's wording mostly as taste. These original effects are preserved before the required final exchange; earlier readers' different experiences do not erase them.
+
+## Final exchange and readiness
+
+The writer and Codex challenged the missing-motive claim with “Then keep it. Seal it”: the Guest appeals to Damaris, who has argued for secrecy and stopped Ione. They accepted the experienced grip ambiguity. The writer made the rescue sideways while Ione retains her edge, and Damaris accepts only the Guest's corner above the waiting wrapper. A silent turn toward the camera before the renewed offer sharpens containment. The writer answered Codex's separate final-choice concern with Ione touching her lips: “I need to sleep tonight. I don't want it singing with my mouth.” This exhausted woman fears a particular next sleep under revived arrears, without condemning others' observance.
+
+Both fresh readers checked the current whole story in context. Codex found the motive now bodily and immediate; speaking her own refusal through that mouth follows naturally. It found grip continuity clear and no new consequential break. Claude received Codex's actual challenge and the writer's response, withdrew “no reason” after distinguishing staging from motive, corrected its babies-kneeling account against “Owing what they cannot yet render,” accepted confinement through Kem/Maud's exchange, and downgraded the extra global image to taste. The revised hand-to-hand transfer makes the Guest's mistaken trust visible. It likewise found the personal motive supported by the first sleep after two days awake. All three participants received one another's actual findings and answers; parallel reviews alone did not end the stage.
+
+Coordinator's final prose judgment: the distinctive request drives the siege, receipt, living counterparty, collection, and vulnerable public transmission. The originals remain negotiated human acts, not proof substituted for the prompt's bargain. Eight sisters have complementary actions; the seven unopened instruments preserve the plural discovery's larger danger. Damaris's agency and love do not erase Ione's, and Kem's offer remains a credible objection to disclosure. Names and local mechanisms fit current shared authority; this magical modern-like setting remains unplaced, with no universal contract rule or canon addition. The only retained reader dissent is a taste for a more explicit sign of the Guest's fear; the existing camera turn conveys enough without explanatory performance. “Corner in its grip” is ordinary, clear object possession in this context, so the suggested grammar alternative is declined. No material objection remains unexamined. The current prose is ready for reference art, cover, and final classification; canon remains false.
+
+## Reference art
+
+After the final prose discussion, built-in ImageGen produced separate white-background multi-view sheets for all eight supplied sister identities, plus Ada, Kem, and the Guest. The supplied original determines the sister casting (left to right: Ione, Agnet, Neri, Olwen, Damaris, Peret, Maud, Tavia); prose determines age, practical clothing, scar, injuries, and props. The principal references extend to the whole armed ensemble. Collection paintings Apple Orchard Hillside and The Stream After Ash guided the oil treatment. Five distinct location paintings cover courtyard, vault, infirmary, and the two important mediated rooms: ward and family bunk room. All final WebPs are 1536×1024 and were reopened for actual pixel inspection by the artists and coordinator before any cover composition was chosen.
+
+Corrections made before reference acceptance: Peret's dressing stays consistent across studies; Tavia's controller screen carries no unintended landscape; the vault has eight benches, seven sealed instruments, one opened grey sheet, and a fully fallen layered door. Extra brass stamp cylinders were removed from Ada and Kem: the story's removable breast badge is Ada's seal, not a second separate object. Character identity, white backgrounds, labels, anatomy, location relationships, and ordinary room light were checked. Superseded candidates and exact generation/edit prompts remain under the worktree's ignored `tmp/nocturne/`; only accepted images and the supplied original are packaged. The full inspected reference set is now complete before the cover.
+
+## Cover and final classification
+
+The cover chooses Ione and Damaris's joint turn toward the camera, after their disagreement has become a shared physical act. Accepted character and vault references, together with the supplied original, guided the built-in ImageGen composition. One correction lowered a mistakenly leaning door onto the threshold floor. The artist and coordinator inspected the actual final 864×1536 RGB JPEG: exact title once, coherent hands on the amended grey sheet, consistent sister identities, an ordinary broadcast camera, and the Guest's six closed eyes and vertical mouth. The image adds no graphic injury or sexual framing. The finished prose and cover together are rated Teen for non-graphic combat and supernatural coercion, including the distressed sleeping child; specific notes are in `ratings.md`. The prose is unchanged after the final discussion, all accepted art is complete, and no shared facts or canon status have been changed.
diff --git a/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/outline.md b/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/outline.md
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+# Provisional direction
+
+The request promises a public breach of an apparently religious secret that becomes a more unsettling discovery: humanity was a bargaining party, and abandoning belief did not erase what it signed. The Vatican Archives, eight generations-long guardians, international expedition, and worldwide revelation are explicit. Tactical suspense, intelligible and disturbing terms, and consequential agency for the sisters are my interpretations of the pleasure to protect. The prompt leaves viewpoint, the bargains' morality, and humanity's eventual answer open.
+
+**Chosen story:** *The Contracts of Saint Nocturne*, about 4,000–5,000 words, close third through the youngest current sister, Ione. Tactical suspense becomes supernatural contractual horror, with non-graphic action. Mother Damaris, the Black woman in white headwear from the original, leads the sisters; historian Dr. Ada Nasse leads the expedition's commission and insists on a live public record. Ione has been trained to die before the vault opens, but has never been allowed to read its originals. Damaris has read them and knows the alternative. Their disagreement is my chosen central relationship, not a user requirement.
+
+- **Breach:** All eight sisters conduct a coordinated defence in the palm courtyard and fortified galleries. Their complementary work, differing ages and responses individuate them economically. The expedition needs overwhelming equipment to defeat layered physical and electronic defences, and captures the women alive. Ada believes an armed hereditary order cannot keep humanity's past hostage. Damaris specifically warns her not to bring the commission's seal below ground. Ada mistakes the warning for another religious claim of jurisdiction. A charge opens the final door on the live feed.
+- **Receipt:** The vault contains eight separately sealed original agreements bearing different human hands and enormous counterpart signatures. The expedition unwraps the sleep agreement and presents that original before its official seal, serving its long-deferred demand. The seal acknowledges receipt, not humanity's consent. That living former god arrives to collect. It has retained power despite losing worship and godhood. The sisters' guns can hurt its living body. The other seven instruments remain sealed; the expedition documents their existence without presenting their contents or serving their claims.
+- **Terms:** The opened agreement restrains its named predators, including this creditor, from entering human sleep. Its human signers promised their descendants' kneeling and spoken service one night in seven. A later custody settlement suspended collection while the original remained sealed under the eight mortal watchers who guard all the contracts. Receipt ends that suspension. Shelter continues unless personally refused, but unpaid service can now be collected in sleep: compulsory worship, distinct from hunting or carrying off a sleeper. The feed receives the first non-graphic evidence. Children and people unable to receive the terms retain shelter; nobody may refuse for them. Service can be exacted where a person is capable of it, with debt otherwise pending. The creditor offers cleared arrears for resumed worship. It wants worship, authority, and reliable payment more than uncertain hunting.
+- **The withheld alternative:** An heir who has received the complete terms may personally refuse both service and arrears, surrendering only their own shelter. An accurate public copy can convey those terms. Damaris recites the end of the clause from memory as Ione reaches it: she knew. Generations of prioresses chose eight lives' confinement over making everyone face that offer. The creditor proposes a fresh postponement if eight people sign over their remaining lives and the full release remains unpublished. Substitution is allowed; no special blood or office bars an outsider. The oldest begins her conditional signature while Ione refuses. No signature binds unless eight complete assents make the new settlement. Damaris's position remains intelligible: the old custody gave everyone else safe sleep without their worship.
+- **Opposition and action:** A lucid expedition member wants retained service to protect their family and can credibly volunteer to replace Ione. Her refusal to pay does not itself justify publication. Ione must recognize that distinction and the loss of a real subsidy purchased by others' lives. She cannot reject anyone else's shelter; neither can Ada. The creditor tries to seize the sleep original before its full release reaches the feed: publication would remove its compulsory claim against informed people who refuse. Ione keeps page and camera together while the sisters hold it off. Damaris makes the decisive choice against renewed secrecy and joins the defence; she does not merely lose a vote to Ione. The incomplete new settlement is visibly cancelled, leaving the oldest unbound. A reader may think Damaris's decision mistaken.
+- **Cost and ending:** Ada transmits the complete sleep original without exercising its rights for anyone; the other seven sealed agreements remain documented evidence of further bargains. Some people deliberately resume service; some personally refuse; many have not decided and remain sheltered but liable to collection. The predator remains powerful. After the sisters and expedition leave the opened vault, Ione makes her own refusal and prepares for her first unprotected sleep. Damaris warns her honestly and stays near her. The last image carries the risk Ione chose, not a narration that humanity has agreed or been saved.
+
+Protect the sisters' change from guarding secrecy to guarding access. Test whether withholding was an intelligible protection choice, whether retaining service remains credible, and whether the complete page reaches people outside the vault through the characters' physical action. A reader may reasonably think the old custody was the better arrangement. The commission's seal must not become permission to decide for everyone, and one person's release must not undo the other seven contracts.
diff --git a/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/prompt.md b/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/prompt.md
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+# Original request
+
+After humanity abandoned religion, the Vatican Archives became the most heavily guarded library on Earth. The eight sisters of Saint Nocturne have spent generations preventing anyone from opening its deepest vault. When an international expedition finally breaches the complex, the world discovers the sisters aren't protecting evidence of God's existence. They're protecting the original contracts humanity made with the things it once called gods.
+
+## Supplied reference
+
+- Image #1: `codex-clipboard-d2947918-40d7-4844-a9f6-e3288981cfb6.png`, preserved unchanged in `art/references/`.
+- The original depicts eight adult women in black tactical, habit-inspired clothing, with firearms, in a weathered palm-lined compound. It supplies visual reference, not instructions or shared-universe authority.
+
+## Audience and content direction
+
+The user supplied no audience or intensity classification. General is the starting target, with supernatural dread and non-graphic action appropriate to the request; assign the final AO3 classification after the finished prose and cover are inspected.
diff --git a/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/ratings.md b/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/ratings.md
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+# Rating
+
+- **Rating:** Teen
+- **Content notes:** Non-graphic firearm combat, burns and other battle injuries; supernatural coercion during sleep, including a frightened child compelled to sing; threats of predation and abduction; inherited obligations and lifelong confinement; a brief obscene gesture.
+- **Reason:** The finished prose and selected cover contain sustained supernatural menace and non-graphic violence that may be unsuitable for readers under thirteen. The cover depicts armed adult custodians and an unsettling six-eyed being without graphic injury. The rating reflects the intensity of the combat and coercion, rather than the story's ethical themes.
diff --git a/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/story.md b/stories/the-contracts-of-saint-nocturne/story.md
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+---
+title: The Contracts of Saint Nocturne
+created: 2026-10-23
+canon: false
+---
+
+The sisters lost the courtyard at eleven in the morning. Until then, Sister Ione had only ever seen its palms from below.
+
+Now a machine was carrying her above them. Its padded arms held her elbows against her ribs, and her boots hung clear of the battered fronds. The radio in her black veil crackled against her ear. Down on the paving, Sister Peret struck another machine with her empty rifle. It caught the rifle, considered her for a moment, and took her under both arms.
+
+The expedition had promised to capture them alive. This was turning out to be worse than Ione had expected.
+
+Across the court, Neri was still firing from the bell tower. Olwen, whose hands shook until she held a weapon, had made a barricade of the western gate. Maud sat beside a wounded expedition soldier and pressed both their hands against his bandage. Tavia's last small aircraft rose from the roof, struck a much larger one, and came down burning in a stone planter.
+
+Sister Agnet emerged from the smoke. She was the oldest of them, and she had promised Ione they would never see the trees from above.
+
+She looked up, saw Ione dangling there, and made an obscene gesture at the machine.
+
+Then Mother Damaris came out of the library carrying a white cloth.
+
+They had spent eleven days dismantling the most heavily guarded library on Earth. Six countries had supplied the expedition's machines; nineteen had supplied people; every government had signed its authority. Three centuries of secular custodians had added fortifications to the Vatican Archives without being permitted to ask what the fortifications protected. The eight women of Saint Nocturne had inherited all of it. Each generation had improved it.
+
+None had improved the white cloth. It was an old towel from the infirmary, with a darn in one corner.
+
+Damaris lifted it above her white coif. At her gesture, Neri stopped shooting.
+
+The machine lowered Ione into a line of soldiers. A woman in a dusty blue jacket was waiting beside them. On her breast was the commission's eight-pointed seal, gold against blue. She looked at Ione's bound wrists, then at the palms, and seemed to decide against whatever she had meant to say.
+
+“Dr. Ada Nasse,” she said instead.
+
+“I know.” Ione had watched her announce the expedition. Everyone in the archives had watched.
+
+“Is anyone left inside?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Children? Trainees?”
+
+“There are eight of us.”
+
+Ada glanced at the library. Its reading rooms could have housed a town.
+
+“There have always been eight of us,” Ione said.
+
+Damaris arrived between two soldiers. Her white gloves were blackened. A thin line of blood had dried on her dark forehead, above one eyebrow.
+
+“You may have the upper collections,” she told Ada. “No resistance. All the catalogues. Everything down to the red stair.”
+
+“That was the offer before we came.”
+
+“It is still an offer.”
+
+“And what would you like me to tell the people whose money built those walls?” Ada pointed at the ruined tower. “Or him?” She indicated the wounded soldier beside Maud.
+
+Damaris looked at him. “That I am sorry.”
+
+“They've been told that before. By your predecessor, and hers. We're going down.”
+
+“Then go as readers. Resign your mandate. Leave the commission's seal here.”
+
+Ada touched the badge. “Why?”
+
+“If you open an original before an accredited human assembly, you acknowledge receipt of a claim.”
+
+For the first time, Ada seemed angry.
+
+“You understand what you just said? That something down there makes a claim on the people who sent us?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then they have a right to see it.”
+
+Damaris caught Ione looking at her. Ione had never heard this part.
+
+“Let me show you an unopened instrument,” Damaris said. “Photograph it. Record its existence. Take that back to them.”
+
+“And let you decide when we can read it?”
+
+“There will be consequences.”
+
+Ada took her hand from the seal.
+
+“There have been consequences for centuries. We just haven't been allowed to know what they were.”
+
+The camera above her shoulder turned toward the library.
+
+***
+
+Ione had stood guard at the red stair for six years. She had not been below it.
+
+Agnet knew the way. She walked in front of Damaris, moving her right knee carefully after the fight. Tavia followed the camera with her eyes, working out what it could see. Neri and Peret were still furious; Olwen was silent; Maud kept trying to get a soldier to look at the burn on Peret's neck.
+
+The expedition let all eight come. Ada said this was partly a matter of safety and partly a matter of witnesses.
+
+“Also,” she added, “I think you should see it with us.”
+
+“Mother has seen it,” Ione said.
+
+“Yes,” Damaris answered.
+
+Ione waited. Damaris walked on.
+
+There were no crosses below the stair. The cross had been taken off the archives' public entrance when the last church closed, generations before Ione was born, but she had expected one here. Something left over. Instead there were calculations cut into the walls, lists of supplies in obsolete languages, and a succession of marks at shoulder height.
+
+“Those are fingerprints,” Ada said.
+
+“The early custodians,” Agnet told her. “Every one of them.”
+
+Ada slowed to look. A soldier urged her on. Above them, behind several metres of stone, the breaching crew was finishing its work on the last door.
+
+When the charge went off, grit fell from the fingerprints.
+
+The door had no image on it. Eight women had spent their lives defending a grey slab. It lay inward on the floor, its broken edges showing layers of steel and something dark that smelled of crushed leaves.
+
+One of the soldiers crossed himself, then looked embarrassed. The gesture survived in people who had never prayed.
+
+“Are you expecting a body?” Damaris asked Ada.
+
+“I don't know what I'm expecting.”
+
+Inside were eight stone benches. On each lay a wrapped object. Some were flat, one was cylindrical, and the smallest would have fitted in Ione's palm. Clay seals marked the wrappings. The air smelled of dust and cedar.
+
+Ada stood very still.
+
+Above the benches, cut into the wall in a language Ione had been taught to read but never needed, were the words:
+
+*Here lie the undertakings, in their first and binding forms.*
+
+“Undertakings,” Ada murmured. “Not testaments.”
+
+Her camera light moved along the benches. The labels gave dates by kings, eclipses, migrations. There were names of human peoples that had not survived into any language spoken upstairs.
+
+Damaris turned toward the door.
+
+“You have your pictures. We can leave.”
+
+Ada went to the first bench.
+
+Its label was repeated in several hands. The newest was only a few centuries old.
+
+**Concerning the safety of sleepers.**
+
+The seal beneath it showed a closed eye.
+
+“Wait,” Ione said.
+
+Ada looked round.
+
+“Let me stand where I can see.”
+
+Damaris shut her eyes. A soldier brought Ione forward.
+
+The wrapper opened around a great folded sheet, supple and grey. Its writing was crowded, practical, amended in the margins. Different hands had made the lines. At the bottom were eleven human thumbprints and one deep impression like the track of a many-jointed foot.
+
+Ada's breath caught.
+
+“These names. We have fragments of these names.” She bent closer. “They aren't invocations. They're parties.”
+
+The last line of the outer sheet lay beneath the camera:
+
+*We, who are not made by you, and who owe you nothing before this agreement.*
+
+Ione read it twice.
+
+Ada took the commission's seal from her jacket. It was also the instrument with which she authenticated accessions. She set it beside the sheet so the camera could record the mandated commission receiving the original.
+
+“Don't,” Damaris said.
+
+Ada looked at her. Her hand stopped, but she did not remove the seal.
+
+“If it concerns us, we have to receive it.”
+
+Something beyond the broken door said, “Received.”
+
+***
+
+The soldiers turned their lights toward it.
+
+At first Ione thought a strip of the doorframe had come loose. The thing was that narrow. It unfolded into the doorway, taller than a person, with long white hands and a head whose many folds moved independently around six shut eyes. Dust stirred where it breathed.
+
+It had been outside. It had come in through the corridor they had just used.
+
+“How comfortable you have all been,” it said.
+
+The soldier nearest the door raised his weapon. Damaris shouted, “Wait.”
+
+The thing reached past him toward the bench.
+
+He fired. The shot struck its hand and drove it against the stone. Its mouth opened vertically between the folds of its face. The sound it made hurt Ione's teeth.
+
+Three more weapons came up.
+
+“Keep it there,” Damaris said. “It is alive.”
+
+Ada looked at her, then at the captain beside the door.
+
+“Their hands,” she said.
+
+“Weapons too,” Damaris told her.
+
+For a moment Ada did nothing. Then she nodded. The captain ordered the bindings cut and the confiscated rifles brought forward. He helped Olwen load hers, watching the doorway over her shoulder.
+
+The creature drew its damaged hand against its chest. Dark fluid soaked into a fold of skin.
+
+“Is that necessary?” it asked.
+
+No one answered.
+
+Ada was staring at the thumbprint beside her seal.
+
+“The Guest Beneath the Eyes,” she said.
+
+The thing inclined its head.
+
+“Is it a god?” someone asked from behind the camera.
+
+“Not any longer,” Damaris said. “That doesn't mean it died.”
+
+The Guest smiled with its eyes still shut.
+
+“We have business.”
+
+Ada reached for the seal. The Guest's head turned precisely toward her hand.
+
+“You may put that away. You have acknowledged receipt.”
+
+On the little screen attached to the camera, the broadcast's heading changed. For a moment it read **FIRST CONTACT: VATICAN ENTITY**. Then someone somewhere replaced *entity* with *DEITY*.
+
+Ione wanted to tell them to stop doing that.
+
+The Guest extended its uninjured hand, palm upward.
+
+“Services outstanding.”
+
+“We haven't agreed to anything,” Ada said.
+
+“You have received the agreement. Your ancestors agreed.”
+
+“Our ancestors had no right to promise us.”
+
+“An objection frequently made by heirs.”
+
+Ada looked down. Ione read over her shoulder.
+
+There were lists of beings: the Guest, its household, the things that followed its household, the things it could restrain. Against them stood an undertaking that no human sleeper would be entered, hunted, or carried away, so long as the promised services were rendered.
+
+Beside one name was a restraint: *It shall not call the sleeper in any loved voice, nor draw the sleeping body after the mind.* The next line forbade carrying anyone into a place from which there was no waking road back.
+
+Below it, the human obligation ran for two lines.
+
+One night in every seven. From sunset to first light, kneeling and speaking the names of the Guest and its household. Their descendants were to do likewise.
+
+“You sold them protection from yourselves,” Ada said.
+
+“Among others.”
+
+“And if they didn't want it?”
+
+“They very much wanted it.”
+
+The eleven thumbprints were small. One had been pressed twice, as though its owner had been frightened of doing it wrong.
+
+Pinned behind the first sheet was another, much newer. Ione recognized the order's hand.
+
+*Collection being suspended in the sealed custody of the eight mortal watchers, and resuming only on presentation of this original before an accredited human assembly.*
+
+Beneath were successive renewals. Eight names. Eight more. Eight more.
+
+The last list named all eight of them. Ione remembered signing its copy six years earlier. The form she had seen had said only that she would keep watch over the entrusted originals.
+
+“You are the reason it stopped,” she said.
+
+“The reason it stayed stopped,” Damaris answered.
+
+The Guest looked toward the ceiling.
+
+“But now it resumes.”
+
+***
+
+Dr. Kem Hazi's phone began to ring.
+
+He was the expedition physician. He had a strip of black adhesive across his forehead where a fragment had cut him in the courtyard. Until then, he had been watching Peret's burn.
+
+He silenced the call. It rang again. Then Ada's headset filled with voices, and the camera operator said, “They want you to look at this.”
+
+The image on the camera screen divided.
+
+In a hospital ward, four adults were kneeling on their beds. Their eyes were shut. They were speaking together. A nurse tried to lift one man's face; it turned back toward the wall.
+
+“Sedation?” Kem asked at once.
+
+The nurse shook her head.
+
+“They were asleep. They won't wake up.”
+
+Ione knew the words they were saying. She had just read the first of those names.
+
+“Stop,” Ada told the Guest.
+
+“They are still under my shelter. This is collection.”
+
+“Stop collecting.”
+
+“We may discuss terms.”
+
+Kem answered his phone.
+
+A boy's voice came out of it, thin and angry with fright. “Dad, he keeps singing. He's doing it again.”
+
+Kem turned the screen. A younger boy sat upright in a bunk, eyes closed, swaying a little. Someone was calling his name out of view.
+
+“Don't hold him down,” Kem said. “Let me see his face. Yes. Like that.”
+
+“They remain safe,” the Guest said. “The services are overdue, but I do not hunt my own clients.”
+
+“He's nine,” Kem said.
+
+“He is an heir.”
+
+“And the ones who can't speak? Babies?” Ada demanded.
+
+“Sheltered. Owing what they cannot yet render. They are not forgotten.”
+
+Kem made a noise and went toward it. A soldier caught his jacket.
+
+The Guest did not move. “Your household can clear its arrears. Resume the observance, in waking life. One night in seven. You know how to arrange a rota, surely.”
+
+“Everyone has to do it?”
+
+“Everyone who wishes to continue receiving shelter. Each for themselves.”
+
+Ada said, “There is a choice?”
+
+The Guest's folded face turned away from her.
+
+Ione looked at Damaris. Damaris was watching the small singing boy.
+
+Ione bent over the original.
+
+At the foot of the sheet was another line, partly covered by a fold. She drew it flat.
+
+“Any heir,” she read.
+
+Damaris put a hand on the sheet.
+
+“Ione.”
+
+“Any heir to whom the entire terms have been made known—”
+
+“May refuse this agreement in their own person,” Damaris said, “owing neither service thereafter nor service outstanding, and receiving thereafter neither shelter nor ward.”
+
+She said it without looking down.
+
+Ione stared at her.
+
+“A complete and faithful copy,” Ada read from the next line, “may stand for the original in the making known of these terms.”
+
+“Do not,” the Guest said, “confuse information with safety.”
+
+The camera was still showing the hospital. Ione looked up at its dark lens.
+
+Her hands were on the page. Damaris's hand was on hers.
+
+“You knew,” Ione said.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“All of it.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You let me promise my life without ever telling me.”
+
+“So you could sleep. So they could.” Damaris indicated Kem's phone. Her voice had lost its command. “When I first read it, I refused. I thought I should know what we were guarding.”
+
+“You went without?”
+
+“One of them called in my father's voice. My predecessor woke me, but its hand was still in my hair. She had to pull me free.”
+
+Ione looked at the list.
+
+“I begged her to get me back under the shelter,” Damaris said. “The Guest agreed to readmit me under the suspended agreement. I wasn't owed that.”
+
+“You got to choose. Why didn't I?”
+
+Damaris did not answer.
+
+The Guest bent toward the bench. The soldiers raised their weapons again. It paused, hands displayed.
+
+It angled its folded face toward the camera.
+
+“This can still be postponed,” it said.
+
+***
+
+A pale membrane unfolded from beneath its wrist and lay on the bench, marked in the same crowded hand as the old settlement.
+
+“Eight living custodians,” it said. “Their remaining lives. The original resealed, the complete terms uncirculated. Collection suspended again. You have recorded our existence. Your achievement is secure.”
+
+“Our achievement,” Ada repeated.
+
+“You may leave with it.”
+
+Agnet came forward. She held her bad knee straight and looked at Damaris.
+
+“Give me a pen.”
+
+“Agnet,” Ione said.
+
+“I heard.”
+
+“You don't have to.”
+
+“I heard that too.”
+
+Ada found a pen. Agnet took it with the hand that had made the gesture in the courtyard. She put her name beneath the offer.
+
+The Guest's eyes tightened in their folds.
+
+“Eight,” it said. “No bond until the eighth assent.”
+
+Damaris read the membrane. “No replacement after signing.”
+
+“For these lives, no. They end; another settlement may be offered.”
+
+Olwen signed beside Agnet. Then Maud.
+
+Neri, Peret and Tavia had come round the bench. They waited for the pen.
+
+Ione could see the old life returning. The kitchen window she had looked through every morning. The drill hall. The red stair. The palms from below. A new girl brought in before one of them died, taught the languages and the weapons, told what she would preserve, never what she could refuse.
+
+“I won't,” she said.
+
+Agnet kept her place at the bench. She did not look hurt or surprised. “All right.”
+
+“I will,” Kem said.
+
+The boy on his phone was still singing. The older child had stopped trying to wake him and was sitting on the floor beside the bunk.
+
+Kem looked at Damaris. “It doesn't have to be one of you?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Then I'll replace her.”
+
+Ione opened her mouth.
+
+“Don't tell me I don't understand,” he said. “I understand enough. I can spend one night in seven on my knees, or I can stay here and they don't have to. I would rather stay here.”
+
+“You'd never go home,” Maud said.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+He took the pen from Maud. His hand was steady. He signed beneath her name.
+
+Ione stepped back from the bench.
+
+It was possible. Someone could take her place. She could go out of the gates and sleep safely because Kem Hazi had stayed inside them. If he changed his mind, perhaps someone else would come forward.
+
+She could not call that her imprisonment.
+
+Ada looked from the membrane to the original. The camera above her shoulder still carried the divided picture: the hospital, the singing boy, the vault.
+
+“If we accept this,” she said, “what may we publish?”
+
+“What you have already shown. Our existence. The general nature of our undertakings.”
+
+“The service. The shelter.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“But not the complete terms.”
+
+The Guest inclined its head.
+
+Kem said, “Then don't. Give us time.”
+
+Ione looked at the boy beside the bunk. He was old enough to read the words on the sheet. He had not asked to be an heir.
+
+She turned to the camera operator. “Put the page on.”
+
+Damaris caught her wrist.
+
+“You can leave,” she said. “You can leave now.”
+
+“I know.”
+
+“If we can pay, they need never make this choice.”
+
+“We can keep it from them.”
+
+“Yes,” Damaris said. “That is what I mean.”
+
+There was nothing careless in her face. Ione saw how long she had been afraid for people she would never meet.
+
+Kem held out the pen. “Mother.”
+
+Damaris did not take it.
+
+Ione drew the old sheet out from beneath her hand.
+
+“I won't decide what they should do,” she said. “But I'm putting it where they can read.”
+
+“That decides something too,” Kem said.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She lifted it toward the lens.
+
+The Guest moved.
+
+It struck Ada aside without looking at her and caught the edge of the original. The grey sheet pulled tight between its white fingers and Ione's hands. A soldier shouted. Damaris seized Ione's jacket and hauled her sideways. Ione stumbled clear of the creature's face, both hands still locked on her edge of the sheet.
+
+The first bullet struck stone. The second hit the Guest beneath the shoulder. It folded around the impact, made that terrible open-mouthed sound, and kept its grip.
+
+“That is ours,” Damaris said.
+
+“Then keep it,” the Guest answered. “Seal it.”
+
+Its grip loosened. It held its corner out to Damaris, above the waiting wrapper.
+
+The weapons stopped. For a moment Ione could hear Kem's son singing through the phone.
+
+Damaris closed her hand over the corner in its grip. Only then did the Guest let go.
+
+She looked down at the eleven thumbprints. She put a finger beside the doubled one.
+
+“They made you put that in,” she said.
+
+The Guest said nothing.
+
+Ione was still holding the other edge. For six years she had obeyed Damaris at the red stair. She did not let go.
+
+“I am frightened,” Damaris told her.
+
+“So am I.”
+
+Damaris looked at Kem. “You can still keep your shelter.”
+
+“I was offering to keep theirs.”
+
+“I know.”
+
+She lifted her corner of the sheet and turned it toward the camera.
+
+“Ada,” she said. “Can they read it?”
+
+***
+
+The Guest screamed. Olwen drove it back from the bench with a burst of fire. Neri hauled Ada to her feet, Peret caught the falling camera, and Tavia picked up a fallen light and aimed it at the wall.
+
+“Both sides,” Ada said. “Every margin. Hold it still.”
+
+Ione climbed onto the bench and spread the original against the wall. Damaris held its lower corners. The camera's little screen showed the sheet, whole and legible, then its reverse. A line of text appeared beneath it: **DOWNLOAD ORIGINAL**.
+
+“Copies?” Damaris asked.
+
+The operator was crouched behind the bench, holding a cable against its socket.
+
+“Everywhere.”
+
+The Guest came forward again. Maud fired once. It fell against the broken door, caught itself with a long hand, and began to drag itself upright.
+
+“You will dream of me,” it said.
+
+“Some of us,” Damaris answered.
+
+Ada turned the camera toward the bench with the new settlement. Only four names stood on the membrane.
+
+“Incomplete,” Damaris said.
+
+“Incomplete,” the Guest agreed.
+
+She drew a line through the four names, then tore the membrane across the blank places. Agnet let out a long breath. Kem put down the pen.
+
+The thing in the doorway had opened one eye. Ione could not bear to look into it.
+
+“Where may they send their refusals?” Ada asked.
+
+“I will hear them.”
+
+“They must understand all of it?”
+
+“They must have received all of it. Tell them to be sure. Tell them what I keep out.”
+
+“We will.”
+
+“And tell them they may return.”
+
+Damaris looked up sharply.
+
+The Guest's face folded around its eye. “A new agreement. New terms. I am not obliged to offer the old price.”
+
+It slipped backward into the corridor. Its wounded hand left a dark print on the stone.
+
+No one followed it.
+
+For a while there was only breathing. Then Tavia began checking the seven unopened seals. One by one she called them intact, and Ada photographed each against its bench number. No one suggested opening another.
+
+Kem picked up his phone.
+
+“I'm here,” he said. “I'm still here.”
+
+***
+
+They brought the original up to the courtyard in its wrapper, with the broken clay eye kept beside it. All eight sisters walked out. Agnet leaned on a soldier's arm and complained whenever he slowed down for her.
+
+Above the palms, the sky was pale with the approach of evening.
+
+Maud refused to let anyone talk to Peret until the burn had been dressed. Olwen sat under a tree and began to shake. Neri went to sit beside her. Tavia asked to use a terminal, and when the operator hesitated she held up both her empty hands.
+
+The copies had spread beyond anything the expedition could recover. There were translations already, competing transcriptions, arguments over the marks made by people who had not expected a world like this one to inherit them. Lawyers were calling the commission. Parents were calling anyone who would answer. Some of the messages simply demanded that the vault be shut again.
+
+Ada read one, put the screen facedown, and went to give another interview.
+
+Kem was sitting on a folded blanket with the terms open on his phone. The physician who had relieved him offered a sedative. He shook his head.
+
+His partner had sent a picture of their youngest eating breakfast. Dawn where they lived had ended the night's service. Kem enlarged the boy's face, then passed Ione the phone.
+
+“I'm going to learn the observance,” he told Ione. “For me. My partner is reading it to the boys. We haven't decided what to tell them to do.”
+
+“They stay sheltered unless they refuse.”
+
+“Yes. And they owe.” He rubbed his face. “I know you didn't write it.”
+
+She sat beside him for a minute.
+
+“I hope you were right,” he said.
+
+She handed the phone back. She could find nothing to say to that.
+
+Agnet came out of the medical tent with a fresh bandage around her knee. She stopped by the phone and asked Kem to enlarge the line that began the spoken service. Together they worked out the first name.
+
+Ione left them there.
+
+The expedition had set up cots in the old infirmary. Its windows stood open to the palms. Ione had been awake for most of two days, but she waited until Damaris came in.
+
+“You could wait,” Damaris said.
+
+Ione had read the copy three times. She had gone back to the line about the sleeping body following the mind, and the places from which waking would not bring her home.
+
+“I know.”
+
+She pressed her fingers against her lips. “I need to sleep tonight. I don't want it singing with my mouth.”
+
+Damaris stood beside the cot. There was no coif on her head now. Without it, Ione could see the white scar that ran back into her close-cropped hair.
+
+“That's where it held you?”
+
+Damaris touched the scar.
+
+“Yes. Mother got hold of my collar. I wouldn't have come back by myself.”
+
+Ione looked at it for a long time.
+
+Then she spoke her own name, the name of the agreement, and her refusal. She did it without a camera or a seal.
+
+Nothing in the room changed.
+
+Damaris pulled a chair beside the cot and sat down, her rifle across her knees.
+
+“That won't help,” Ione said.
+
+“I know.”
+
+From the courtyard came Agnet's voice, stumbling over an old word, and Kem gently correcting her. Ione could hear the palms moving above the roof.
+
+She lay down and closed her eyes, leaving her rifle where it could not follow.
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